Has Star Wars always made no sense?

[Elok]

Something unseen or concealed, yet threatening. There's a feeling that something is really wrong, but nobody actually understands the real danger yet. I grant you that it's a pretty dumb title and, like the movie itself, the worst of the series. TFA sounds cooler than TPM even if the TPM is closer to accurately representing the situation within the film. Note that I explicitly referred to the original trilogy in the OP, as even Rogue One was better than I-III. Rogue One was a profoundly dumb action movie with laugh-inducing sad scenes. It happened to be Star Wars flavored, but it wasn't bad in the characteristically bad way the prequels were bad so I can accept that. I'm just puzzled as to why the story seemed to go out of its way to make holes in itself.

[ZEE]

Elok is a nerd.

[Lorizael]

Re:OP, I don't think that was actually a plot hole. I understood it as... dad had built this weakness into the reactor, but he didn't actually know how to exploit the weakness. He didn't, after all, build the whole Death Star; he was only responsible for the parts that involved its energy production via kyber crystals. That's why they needed to get the actual plans for the Death Star so that they could figure out a way to hit the reactor.

[Elok]

But . . . he didn't have access to the plans himself? He couldn't have looked it up at some point? If somebody that critical to the overall project didn't have access to the master plans, one wonders how the thing didn't blow up the first time they fired it.

[Lorizael]

Agree with that part. I don't know why the only place for the Death Star plans was Empire Central Archives or whatever the location of the big finale was. A possible explanation is that the plans were like a yottabyte file and couldn't easily be smuggled out.

[Elok]

Well, it's not like the X-wings need to know about the detention centers, dormitories, armories, mess halls, docking bays, and whatever else occupied the inside. A simple map with "go down trench, shoot missiles down hole" and the rest blank would have sufficed. The locations of nearby gun emplacements would also have been helpful, but not strictly necessary.

[Lorizael]

Well yes, but remember that the Death Star plans had to be analyzed to find the weakness. They had to get the full plans back to Yavin to be looked at by Rebel engineers (I guess) so that they could find a way to exploit the reactor vulnerability.

[Elok]

He's the galaxy's foremost expert on that damn reactor. Does he really need outside help to figure out which tubes leading to it will cause its inherent instabilities to go kablooie?

[Elok]

My general experience with machines is that it's much easier to make them stop working correctly than to keep them at it.

[Lorizael]

Well, we're talking about a guy who thought the best way to defeat the Empire was to help them build a weapon that could destroy an entire planet. Maybe not so smart he was.

[Lorizael]

Are there other cases of This Makes No Damn Narrative Sense, say in ANH or ESB?

But in answer to that question:

https://www.wired.com/2013/02/battle-of-hoth/

How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.

(My favorite part about this article is the "illustrations.")

[Proteus_MST]

He's the galaxy's foremost expert on that damn reactor. Does he really need outside help to figure out which tubes leading to it will cause its inherent instabilities to go kablooie?

Perhaps he didn't know, for example, how well everything would be defended.
The main weakness of the death star was, that the empire only employed "high calibre" Turbolasers ... good for shooting down large capital ships ... but not so good for shotng at small maneuverable spacefighters.
Considerng that the Defensive Towers are the last to be built (as they are the "buildings on the surface of the death star") their exact location might not have been known at the time when he designed the reactor (together with its flaw), nor would he know, at this time, what type of defenses they use (after all it is not as if the empire couldn't have used Laser/Blastr towers that would be better suited against spacefighters).

Aside from locating the exhaust port, one of the main points of anaysis (of the rebels in ANH) seems to have been the weapons layout/coverage on the surface of the DS ... and an imporrtant reason to fly along the polar trenchfor such a length (instead of just flying directly to the exhaust port from above) seems to have been, that there was only a small number of Turbolaser towers within the trench (and so the rebels would be protected from a lot of weapons fire that they would be exposed to at other approaches)

[BeBMan]

https://www.wired.com/2013/02/battle-of-hoth/

Nice one. Not only was the empire incompetent militarily, the rebels were too!

What a bunch of amateurs....

[giblets]

Darth Vader didn't want to kill Luke Skywalker when he assaulted the rebel base on Hoth.

[Lorizael]

Darth Vader didn't want to kill Luke Skywalker when he assaulted the rebel base on Hoth.

If that's the case, he didn't tell the AT-AT commanders.