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Things I never noticed before

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Dan:
So watching A New Hope the other day...

The Death Star is making its orbit around Yavin, there are 20 ships attacking a base the size of a small moon, what then heck are all the stormtroopers running around with blasters for? Are they going to fire in to space through a window? Were there laser archery slits somewhere I hadn't noticed before? I found myself laughing, thinking those actors must have felt like dweebs, and no wonder they all thought it would flop. Imagine running down a hallway with wacky armor on (which is clearly completely useless) and a toy gun, slipping on the floors, and some guy yelling "fall over like your ship has been hit with a torpedo". Falling in that armor had to be painful.

Oh, and that stormtrooper hitting his head on the door makes me laugh out loud now too.

I'm afraid by the time they get to the OT, Bespin will be full of pit droids, and Hoth will have an igloo dwelling race of Gungans.

Jesse James:
I always thought about the troopers running about too...  One thought I had though, was they maybe weren't entirely sure what they were dealing with, and so they (like on Star Trek) were just going to their designated battle stations, as it were, and were basically on alert.  For all they knew, the Rebels were maybe going to try a full-on boarding operation or something, take the whole thing over and just abandon the planet or whatever.

At least that explains it well enough to suit me anyway. :)

Phrubruh:
Why would the rebels start their trench run so far away from the target? I guess to get ready to make the shot but why so long to adjust to make the shot?

Jesse James:
This one actually made sense to me...

The DS surface is littered with guns of course, and early in the battle Porkins seemingly is getting caught up int he crossfire of them because he's too close...  Luke too is going in pretty close to the surface and gets "a little cooked" in the process.  The guns are, in my view, a much more deadly threat to fighters the closer to the surface the fighter gets.  The further away, the better.

Some games have even put this into the game as a way to keep you in the trench and from drifting out and just flying up away from everything till you get to the port.

Now, one could reason that the guns are even worse at the exhaust port, and that a straight down dive to the exhaust port is a more difficult shot than the already difficult one from following the trench itself.  So I think it's a reasonable explanation to that question.  Luke zips out and starts maneuvering however he can to get away, something that if he's trying to take a difficult shot on the way in, he of course wouldn't have the ability to do. 

The trench maybe just offers up the safest road and easiest shot at the port.

I've always also maintained though, that other fighters at the battle were meant to do a "higher altitude" battle, hoping to draw Imperial fighters away from the trench and the teams making a run on the exhaust port.  Vader doesn't fall for this of course, but it actually can be seen sort of happening in the background at times, and it's another thing slipped into games too (and why more than 3 fighters probably returned from Yavin, we just don't see them).

warinthefloor:
remember the death star has gravity both from its immense mass and artificially generated, so due to the energies and velocities involved with that straffing run, you are going to want to have an approach vector that maximises the tangent vice normal component of your velocity vector WRT the center of the death stars mass.
Manned space craft have to re-enter earths atmosphere at a VERY VERY shallow angle, I cant remember it off hand but its like between 2.7 and 3.1 degrees angle from straight tangent component.
Then once down in the trench, it appears you only have a few wingspans clearence and you have to assume that the repulsers, sheilding and propulsion systems of these craft have an area of effect that extends at least slightly past their spaceframes. So in Earth terms imagine three AH-64s howling down a canyon thats barely wide enough for them, and their down draft or even hover in ground effects would interfere with one anothers control surfaces.
So you can only run a fe fighters down the Death star trench at a time and you have to do it at a shallow approach vector.

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