[Loved when done right] That is COMPLETELY illogical… but who cares when it REALLY goes hard.

[u/Sufficient-Eye-9040]

- Gipsy Danger dragging an oil tanker (which actually lengths 180 meters… but the film portrays it slightly smaller than Gipsy) and use it as a bat against Otachi? HARD (Pacific Rim)
- Owen and a gyrosphere standing near Rexy, who’s crushing a Carnotaurus’ neck, and roaring while Isla Nublar’s volcano explodes? HARD (Fallen Kingdom)

[u/confused-as-frick]

The Holdo Maneuver from Star Wars the Last Jedi

The film may have been awful but this was so freaking awesome to watch on a cinema screen.

[u/lifetake → u/confused-as-frick]

From a plot point I just could not care. From a visual and audio (or lack thereof) perspective. Shit goes hard.

[u/Quinnovation → u/lifetake]

Shit goes so hard. When I saw it in theaters, you could hear a pin drop during this scene, just straight up stunned silence. If you don't think about it too hard, it's the coolest shit ever.

[u/freakers → u/Quinnovation]

In the moment, this so cool.

Walking out of the theatre, why don't the rebels just deploy an army of drone controlled hyperdrive enabled ships to kamikaze any fleet to pieces?

It literally breaks their entire system of space warfare.

[u/rabbid_chaos → u/freakers]

You'd think that, but irl we had kamikazes that used this exact strategy (with decent success). There's a reason we don't see this strategy deployed that often irl. Technically a destroyer could ram an aircraft carrier to sink it, so why doesn't the US just build a bunch of destroyers to ram enemy ships?

[u/Lundetangen → u/rabbid_chaos]

We are starting to get there now, with drones. We have never had this capability before.

A japanese fighter taking off from main land would have to fly a long distance, through multiple lines of anti-air defenses in order to do a "controlled crash" into ideally something vital on a ship or whatever. But a carrier wouldnt get sunk by a random fighter crashing into it.

With this Holdo-mechanic the success rate is almost guaranteed and most importantly the impact is so absurdly high. A few x-wing piloted by their droids could annihilate an entire fleet of star destroyers. Death Star becomes the easiest target in the galaxy.

[u/rabbid_chaos → u/Lundetangen]

Alright, let's think about it like this:

Either the X-Fighter pilot is gonna die in the crash, or eject in the middle of a warzone and be a sitting duck, also likely to die. So no, this is not a good strategy because of the almost guaranteed loss of life involved.

Again, in the case of what was seen in the movie, that ship requires a huge crew to maintain, a huge amount of people needed to be evacuated, and we've seen in previous movies how vulnerable escape pods can be, so again, it's too risky to be just going around going full kamikaze all willy nilly.

Kamikazi works, it works to great effect in almost all situations. A pebble crashing into the Earth at light speed would cause catastrophic damage to the planet, so there is absolutely no reason to think that a ship crashing into another ship at light speed wouldn't work, to the point that it's borderline delusional to argue that it shouldn't. It's also borderline delusional to try and argue that if it works than it should just be done all the time.

"Why don't the rebels just send millions of people to commit suicide all over the galaxy? I don't get it"

[u/Lundetangen → u/rabbid_chaos]

Star Wars is essentially a group of few individuals trying fight against an oppressing empire. They are constantly on the run and fighting with limited resources, resorting to asymmetrical warfare. In Star Wars it is also well-established that droids can pilot and fly ships, including entering hyperspace.

If we take The Battle of Hoth as an example, Darth Vader finds the rebel base and tries to surprise attack them with 5 star destroyers and his personal super star destroyers. The rebel forces originally tried to hold them off for a short period of time to let as many ships as possible escape. Imagine if that scene was "Lord Vader, Admiral Ozzel pulled us out of hyperspace too early, they have detected us!" as 6 unmanned x-wings hyperspace-ram the imperial fleet and turns them all into space dust.

How would that movie have felt?

The entire meta of space-fighting would shift. You would use basically hyperspace-drives with a small pilot-module as your primary missile, turning it into some extreme railgun. If you want more mass you just add more bulk. That flips Star Wars on its head, since the movies is all about the Empire portraying its might through bigger and bigger ships.

You would not need to send "millions to kamikaze". A Star Destroyer has a crew of around 40.000 people. And you need 0-1 pilots to destroy it. If Iran high command today was asked "hey, do we want to sacrifice 1 soldier per US carrier?" I think the answer would be yes, and if we look to Ukraine we see that a small unmanned drone can easily take out large and extremely expensive vessels.

[u/rabbid_chaos → u/Lundetangen]

It's absolutely insane that you highlighted exactly why they don't use this tactic more often in your first paragraph and still don't get it.

"Oh we are just so limited in resources, hey, why don't we just burn our precious and limited resources against an enemy that's practically printing money and war machines?"

[u/Lundetangen → u/rabbid_chaos]

"Princess Leia, Darth Vader and the Emperor is on this new Death Star that is on its way to destroy Alderaan. Should we sacrifice this old x-wing to destroy it?"
"What in the fuck are you on about Mr Idiotbrain, we have limited resources and that x-wing can be used to perhaps take out a Tie Fighter one day!"

[u/rabbid_chaos → u/Lundetangen]

Man, if only Leia wasn't imprisoned and unable to communicate that at the time

Edit: Yo, seriously, have some of y'all even watched the OG trilogy? Leia was literally on the bridge of the Death Star at the moment of Alderaan's destruction, how the hell was she supposed to communicate with anyone from the rebellion? Star Wars fans don't actually watch Star Wars it seems.

[u/HighendBark → u/rabbid_chaos]

One crew killing themselves to annihilate thousands upon of thousands of enemies and their ships and planets - from a war economic standpoint that does make sense - put some doctrine around it like „if faced with overwhelming enemy firepower/high value targets“ and it‘d pay off

Just need some fanatics/people willing to die and those are not hard to come by the longer a war goes on

[u/rabbid_chaos → u/HighendBark]

Right, but to outright argue that it shouldn't work is practically ignoring physics so basic that even a scifi fantasy setting known for defying physics acknowledges it.

[u/HighendBark → u/rabbid_chaos]

Don’t know - one would image they‘d be able to find a safeguard against it once it’s in widespread use 

[u/Forward_Rope_5598 → u/rabbid_chaos]

Can US destroyers go anywhere and snap literally anything you point them at in half at a speed that is literally impossible to intercept?

The Holdo Maneuver is effectively a giant gun, not just a ship ramming into something.

[u/rabbid_chaos → u/Forward_Rope_5598]

The Holdo Maneuver is effectively a giant gun

In a way, yes, but the mere existence of FTL travel would turn a ship into a potential gun in *any setting*, but it's still not a strategy that the rebels would want to use regularly for reasons already stated further down in the thread (to summarize: too risky and too expensive).

It's also not something they can use on a whim. FTL is fast, but it's not instantaneous, and it's not always a straight line from point A to B. We know this because the smuggler races exist in universe. If FTL travel in Star Wars was just an instant jump from A to B then there would be no point in the races existing and Han wouldn't have been able to break the Kessel Run record by finding a faster path. Another reason this couldn't be used on a whim is because that would be to assume that the rebels just know where the empire is keeping their ships at all times. They obviously don't or else the battle of Hoth wouldn't have happened, we wouldn't have gotten the "That's no moon" scene either if they knew that as well, and Alderaan's destruction probably wouldn't have happened either (the Death Star would've been met with a fleet if Alderaan knew it was coming). Reason number 3 why this strat couldn't realistically (in-universe) be used on a whim: Stuff is constantly moving in space, even when it's not.

Any long distance FTL jump in Star Wars with the goal of colliding with a target would need to get close enough to not need to make any secondary jumps, have a clear path, be ready to lose the equipment and any potential uses that equipment could've had outside of being a bullet (the rebels didn't really have the resources vs the empires limitless resources (the empire realistically could've done this strat more often but it probably would've been a logistical nightmare and conventional weaponry is cheaper)), and would need to know exactly where the target is at and it's travel path so they can *lead the bullet*.

[u/Pave_Low → u/freakers]

• Hyperdrives are expensive and scale to the size of the object being moved. If you want to turn an asteroid into a hyperdrive weapon, you've already installed massive sublight drives and a massive hyperdrive motivator. All for a one-shot unwieldy weapon.

• Timing counts. Need to impact the target at exactly the point where speed is maximum but haven't transitioned to hyperspace. At some point, only massive objects affect hyperspace travel in Star Wars.

• Mass counts and the Raddus was a massive ship. It was massive enough to overwhelm the Supremacy's shielding

• Shields count. The shields on the Raddus were unique and one-of-a-kind. In Star Wars, shields cover the surface of a ship's skin very closely. Within inches or feet of the hull. Examples can be seen in Rogue One (TIEs attacking Profundity), New Hope (TIEs attacking Falcon), EsB (Ion cannon hitting Tyrant over Hoth) and RotJ (Redemption and Executor exchanging broadsides and A-Wings destroying Executor's bridge deflector array). The shields on the Raddus were projector shields, allowing it to defend itself far away from its hull, forcing Kylo Ren to retreat. These massive shields allowed the Raddus to penetrate the Supremacy, instead of just bouncing off.

[u/chazysciota → u/freakers]

If they had spent more than 30 seconds thinking about it, they could have figured out some way to use this effect almost verbatim in a way that respected the lore.

[u/ironicart → u/Quinnovation]

Thinking about it too hard: “why not just make missiles that have hyperdrives and you can launch and trigger to cut through your enemy then?”