So many Star Wars fans have forgotten how to just enjoy cool shit on screen without having reddit moment freakouts about it. Imagine watching Godzilla vs Kong and going "bro this is unrealistic an ape could never get that big that doesnt make sense"
@@ZetaPrime9699 The difference in your analogy is that in TLJ, they use ships that are significantly worse than ships that are decades older than them, which doesn't make sense in-universe. Kong makes sense because it's nothing new, Kong is big, that's what makes him Kong. And yes, some Star Wars fans, myself included, like to over-analyze things, but that's why we liked earlier stuff, because we could enjoy it in a way other than going "hurr durr flashy lights, fiery explosions, cooooool." If we want to watch a fight without thinking about whether or not the plot makes remotely feasible sense.
One easy fix would've added a scene where Poe simply says "We're using these things? We're facing a dreadnaught, not a bunker" and one of the pilots reply "It's all we have left, sir"
Pretty much this; we had to find out from sources *OUTSIDE* the movie to understand that it was an orbital bomber (bombing the shit out of imperial bunkers on ground from orbit) and it was a pure desperate move pressing them with the orbital bombing bay modules into attacking a warship. Funny enough, B-17s IRL were used to try to bomb the hell out of enemy fleets (Pacific Campaign WW2) but warships moving at sea dodged the bombs easily because the B-17s had to fly high to avoid the AA guns on the warships.
@@alexhurlbut Disney needed me to do bloody *homework* before watching your movie? How about "No."? It just made the sequels look much, much worse than they should have to people who like Star Wars, but aren't obsessive freaks who seek out every scrap of info before going to watch a movie.
If the battle had happened in atmosphere, I’m fairly certain that the B-17 would have outperformed the SF-17… You certainly would have been able to field a lot more of them and they could drop their ordinance more easily.
I'm fairly certain that the B-17 would have outperformed the SF-17 in Space! Hell they manage to land without a crew and all they'd need to do is bump into one enemy and make them all go BOOM!
The real question is, why did they have to fly over their target vs. just aiming their bomb chutes at the target and cutting loose like a really slow cannon? You'd think even if most missed, a huge, confusing, moving minefield would be way more useful than a wing of bombers that you lose most of.
Wow, I didn't even think of that. That's actually a good idea! Because the artificial gravity is only pointing in one direction, the bombs will only go in one direction.
I play space engineers and did just that, strap some warheads with a mass block on it and have a couple grav gens with a bottom facing camera and boom, instant bomber. ... then there are Klang guns
To be honest the bombs would be moving a whole lot quicker than the actual bomber from the gravity of the bomber and would far harder to hit and spot because of how small they are.
@@guillermoelnino I don't know if you look at it like a phallic object then it being destroyed is somewhat feminist because why else would you fit the bombs vertically and not alongside the ship to give the enemy a smaller head on target
And they only worked because the bad guys were incompetent... their target was defenceless... and no one bothered to destroy the fighter which took out the point-defence turrets because they wanted to talk... instead of following Supreme Leader Snokes order and annihilate them all.. (Should have launched fighters, moved to engage the Rebel Ships, and totally ignored Poe's attempt to distract them by blasting his fighter apart).
@@SacredCowShipyards Maybe those abominations are not most stupid bombers ever but kind of small minelayers? Just deploying 1000 warheads in front of capital ship and waiting for it to collide? It is still stupid and wasteful but less so...
@@aralornwolf3140 Or get one of the 4 star destroyer escort ships to *actually* escort and defend the Dreadnaught, or get the dreadnaut to reverse and easily outrun the bombers
That thing makes the TIE Bomber like a super effective bomber, because at least it isn't so goddamn slow and doesn't have the ironic name "fortress" attached to it.
@@seanheath4492 I was gonna say, the Orks could make this shit work. If they believe hard enough they'll make it to the target, they'll make it too the target.
Needs some red & blue stripes added to it. Red bc obviously it can go fastuh, and blue so stray hits from half-damaged fighters won’t immediately tear it (or its neighbors) to shreds.
Depressed Waffengeist with PTSD. Watched her whole crew die or bail out and flew back to base out of duty, knowing she was either going to be scrapped for parts or sent back up with a new crew to watch die.
Imagine if instead of this, they had Y wings with jury-rigged super bombs hanging between the engines. That way, the pilots had to dive bomb the destroyer and release the bomb at the right moment so the destroyer couldn’t move out of the way or shoot the incoming bomb. They could still have their strong and brave sacrifice of that one character who, upon attempting to release the bomb, finds the mechanism is jammed! Then she flies the whole y wing into the enemy ship.
One stray laser cannon blast from a Point-Defense weapon or Starfighter renders that idea dead in the water. It seems they could benefit from modern combat aviation experts. The WW2 callbacks were cool when they were first used. It doesn't make sense given the technology and pivoting to more intelligent and modern aerial battles would be better. If anything the "scrappy 12 rebel fighters vs horde of enemy fighters" concept is stale and boring.
My observation is that these "bombers" existed solely to provide spectacular explosions, I've mostly purged them from my memory but I have a lingering recollection that they were remarkably ineffective death traps.
I'm thinking the same thing. And no amount of Rian Johnson's goons trying to BS us into thinking that the B-17 is the source of inspiration is gonna convince me. They clearly took cues from the He 111 and G4M instead given how easily they get torn to shreds by any moderately-powerful weapon.
My headcanon is that these things are actually minelayers pressed into the bomber-role. Flying perpendicular to an imperial fleet, ejecting a curtain of warheads into it's path.
The thing that bugs me about this craft, is that just aesthetically, it fits the kooky Starwars vibe perfectly. But when it comes to both functional design and scene writing, it was murdered. Like seriously? You have this huge military craft named and built around being a "fortress", and half of a damaged tie fighter spinning into it destroys it? That tie should have bounced off it's shields and armour. And if the ones shown in the movie apparently have bugger all armour, then why are they so embarrassingly slow!? In the scene where they drop their bombs, they were already above the ship. Which the bombs then soon land on, strongly implying that the _unpowered_ bombs were travelling faster than the _thruster powered_ ship was going forwards. Realistically, whilst a strange design, shunting ordnance out the side/bottom of your craft isn't entirely as nonsensical as it might seem. They'd still inherit the momentum of your craft, with only as much extra push as you gave them elsewhere, so would still be incredibly simple to line up a run. Having unguided/unpowered bombs would dramatically cut down on production costs whilst very dramatically increasingly your payload, just at the cost of only being capable of targeting large/stationary targets. Not exposing the bomb bay forward during an attack run, would also help remove a major weakness against incoming fire. But the bombs would still be "dropped" at a distance, and still be travelling 98% forward. They would NOT need to be dropped whilst "over" the target, and would not hit it if they were. >_< With a few sensible design revisions and writers that weren't hired by Disney, I honestly feel like the StarFortress could have been a fan favourite (one of those awkward ones held hostage inside the crappy Disney movies, but oh well). It's right there next to the popular B-Wing in quirky unconventional design, and thematically loads of fun, since who doesn't want a flying fortress inspired heavy bomber in Starwars? With all the silly dog fighting style of the franchise, it was a perfect pick. But they freaking cocked it up!
Star Wars RPG 3.5e Wizards of the Coast D&D style. book came out around 20 years ago, " Star Ships of the Galaxy," they revise in during 4e calling it Saga Edition and Saga sucked. Point being an Xwing traveling at full ramming speed hitting a target does as much dmg as a proton torpedo. Wiki says Xwing weight in at 10 tons in mass. So we set up foundry ships to mine asteroids to smelt down and compress high density iron rods to Mac ISD with or magnetic attach to a ships hull by the dozens to do deatachments during ramming speed flybys. Over all a lot cheap than stander warheads cost to make or by. Now if you create a ceramic cover for those rods they can survive being fired from orbit passing through a given planet's atmosphere. Instead of a solid rod, make a tube and fill it with another compound. My game shop was a bunch of snarky smart azzes, we ion a IDS shield till they drop then figure out how much thermite it will take to cover one square mile of surface area. Our modern thermite will be to low grade to damage their view ports but it will be like covering a persons wind shield with metallic spray paint. Leaving them blind in the darkness of space till they pull out a paint scrapper. Wiki hold a lot of pages covering Cold War Era Russian EMP missile tech. Our own solar system asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter hold a hell of a lot of minerals to built EMP weapons.
Not only should it have the tie bounce off the shields and armor but it would have been better to show it getting beaten to pieces, shrugging off turbolaser fire and strike craft fire, TIEs resorting to ramming but the bomber. Just. Keeps. Going. but getting a beating to give the story beat of "Against all odds, complete the mission."
@@Somtaaw7 This this this. Rather than showing loads of them going down like flies, emphasis should have been on a smaller number, probably just three, enduring hell to make it to the target. The escorts around them should have been steadily going down under the overwhelming odds, whilst the bombers should have looked like they'd lost half their hull by the time they reached the end, yet still going regardless. In the end only one would make it still, but every bomber crew would have fought to make that possible. It should also have been made clear that they were heavy bombers, carrying a very dramatically higher payload compared to the Y-Wings everyone mentions regarding this scene. "Why would you use a heavy bomber when you could use a fighter bomber with a 40th of the payload?" The fact a question that obvious even comes up is a testament to how much the scene failed. It should have been a squadron of Y-Wings designated role in the mission, to pull ahead as they closed on the target to take out the turbo lasers, something that directly suits their role as a strike craft, and something that Poe's X-Wing should have significantly struggled to accomplish against heavily armoured turbo-lasers with it's cannons alone.
@@ShadowtheRenamon Cut the front off? The part with the main body and protruding lower section? I'm guessing you mean cut the back off. The section with the stalk and main thrusters? Regardless, I'm not sure how saying that it looks similar another star wars ship would be an argument that it doesn't fit the design. Seems to fit the Slayn & Korpil aesthetic perfectly far as I'm concerned (The shipyard that manufactured the B-Wing and V-19 Torrent). Starwars has a crazy range of diverse and eccentric ship designs. To pick this specific ship out of hundreds and claim it looks bad or doesn't fit the aesthetic, I've got to argue again that you're only disliking it for it's association to the crappy Disney movies and the awful scene writing it was featured it. I strongly believe that had it been featured in Episode six, replacing the token B-Wings that were shown but not detailed, then everyone would have wanted to know more about it and it would have easily become a fan favourite. And that if the fan favourite B-Wings had instead been introduced in the Episode 8 assault on the Dreadnaught, getting gunned down en-mass like a joke, the fanbase would have trashed and hated on the B-Wing just as badly. It's not the ship at fault. It's the scene.
Literally the only thing this would be good for would be bombing a ground target from orbit, and even then you’re better off just using a full on space ship’s main guns. Going from fast Y-wings to this is a massive step back.
yeah, Y-wings were known for being relatively slow, unmanueverable, and out of date starfighter/bombers that ties would obliterate just by being on the same battlefield and this thing make them look absolutely nimble. Y-wings could take more of a pounding too, without the fratricidal exploding when they did go down.
I've always felt like the entire scene with the SF-17s would have played out much better if they just added two lines from Leia and some officer. "General Organa, are you sure this is a good idea? Those are in-atmosphere bombers!" "They're all we have left."
That scene would have been far more effective if they'd used old bombers like Y-Wings charging at the dreadnought against impossible odds. The pilots knowing it was suicidal, but doing it anyway would have allowed for a more believable emotional impact. The old outdated Y-Wings could have landed a few hits disabling the dreadnought allowing the resistance to escape.
@@AshanBhatoa The Y-wing, puny and fragile? the same Y wing that had some of the best shielding a fighter/bomber could have until after the Galactic civil war ended in the EU? For its class it was a beast. it's main draw back being it was slow in comparison to the more modern fighters and fell to concentrated fire. that said, they were F1 cars compared to that travesty of a bomber. if the resistance bomber could even dent something, a Y wing probably would have completely destroyed it, and with a proper fighter screen, made off with minimal losses.
George Lucas had nothing to do with it anymore by this time it was rushed out the door as soon as possible to get a return on the 4 billion dollar buyout of George Lucas
And even if he based the Death Star trench run off of the dambusters operation he knew instead of level bombers he used multirole fighters and strike bombers.
For all the dogfight style combat of star wars... Lucas era star wars pretty much always followed the rule of "If it don't have propulsion, it still has inertia" these things seem to have to literally use conveyer belts to drop their payloads... At which point you better be pulling up hard or you've got live bombs spewing forward into the bomber... Better question... Why not just modify Y-wings into even more dedicated bombers since they were otherwise being phased out it seems. Strap wings on them and cover both sides with missiles, they're already hit and run bombers that would be terrifying.
@@aralornwolf3140 that looked so stupid when I first saw it. Sure, super star destroyer sank, but that's cause it was inside the gravity well of a moon size station, same with corusant. Actual battles in space though, things just floated, the in TLJ things stop making sense... Still wondering what idiot wrote the resistance inside a mon cal, a ship that has long been established to be functionally a shield tank so overly layered that being pelted by artillery should have been a non-factor especially since iirc every single generator is on its own power supply separate from the rest of the ship.
I remember reading some guide or another that had Poe (well the writer speaking as Poe) saying that many resistance pilots would rather fly one of these than an X-wing. So resistance pilots were suicidal, stupid and felt the need for slow? Suicidal would explain these though. If they wanted to die, at the very least one of these things would kill five crewmen rather then just one. Maybe more if it manages to blow up the other ships in formation.
@@efxnews4776 How dare you! That sir, is an insult to fan fiction! I've seen better plot consistentcy in most SpongeBob episodes. Not to mention more logical story lines in a breakfast ceral commercial.
Denial is a horrible yet sometimes humorous thing. Writers: ”It doesn't need to make sense. The powers of plot armor will protect us!" Directors: ”This will look great!" Hard Core Fans: "That's so cool!!" The rest of us: (pause, blink, pause) "And what were you smoking/taking when you had this idea?"
At least they could've given it shield and maybe it would've been a bit better. I'm a fan of Star wars I liked (not loved) aspects of the sequel trilogy but yes, this bomber is down bad. It's a TIE bomber with more bombs and even less durability. Just like every other ship in the sequels.
Yeah, felt the whole scene with these things could've been much better if they used Y-Wings instead (especially as those appeared in the next film). Would've helped reinforce the thing that the Resistance was meant to be scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to craft, would've been recognisable to long time fans and they could've done an Independence Day style missile hang-up and kamikaze to achieve a dramatic effect.
I mean they had updated X-wings, and some of the pilots were using A-wings. So why this godawful abortion was used, befuddles me. Maybe if it was as durable as the craft from which it was inspired....
I mean, these things bad as they are, clearly carried 40 times the amount of ordnance that a Y-Wing carries. The Y-Wing is a strike/tactical bomber, not a strategic bomber. Really they just needed to redesign the ships to be less stupid, and re-write the scene to not have them suck so massively. Namely as Hella mentions, it should have been durable and endured a beating from Ties on the way in. Y-Wings would then pull out ahead of the formation to take out the turrets on the dreadnought (which is much more fitting to their role. Poe's X-wing should have severely struggled to do such with it's cannons alone against heavily armoured turbo lasers), clearing the path for the heavy bombers to get in.
@UnknownSquid They just don't work. Y-wings are equivalent to fighter bombers yes, but Star Wars is much more like modern fighter combat, where conventional bombers are very much obsolete. Fighters couldn't really fight with the B-17, which would fly really high. The scene in the movie is pretty much B-17s against fighter jets.
@@JonatasAdoM Eh? I struggle to see how you say that. Star wars combat was literally based on WW2 dogfighting by Lucas own admission, and every scene shows it. Up close and personal evasive dog fighting primarily using guns, with missiles rarely shown or highlighted. Modern fighter combat takes place at multiple, often tens of kilometres apart from each other, using only missiles. It's the furthest thing from starwars fighter combat. There's nothing about the StarFortress that wouldn't work in the StarWars universe, if it just had a few design tweeks and wasn't scene written to be a snail made of tissue paper. It's really all down to how it's presented. The Millennium Falcon was capable of putting up ten times the fight despite being a civilian freighter with less weaponry. The SF17 as a well shielded single purpose military ship should by all means have been just as if not far more durable, and far more defensible. Other than the old prototype B wing, we'd not really seen much in the rebel arsenal that could credibly take down capital ships like star destroyers without a protracted and dangerous battle. The existence and use of a heavy bomber like the SF17 makes perfect sense in the setting. IF it were portrayed right.
The dumbest thing about these ships was that what they were trying to achieve (from an out of universe/production perspective) was redundant The Millennium Falcon itself already tapped the B-17 vibe during its flee from the Death Star, while Han and Luke were manning the turrets
Yeah, they could've just upscalled the falcon and designed to to fire forward torpedoes (or like those bombs). Instead they sent oil-soaked tankers to fight an aircraft carrier... with expected results more or less.
No. The defining characteristics of the B-17 were: 1. Only capable of performing attacks on warships using attack profiles that ended up proving either useless or suicidal (level bombing and skip bombing respectively). 2. Well suited for bombing large ground targets. 3. Better defended against fighters than other contemporary heavy bombers. 4. Still nowhere near well-defended enough to resist determined fighter attacks without taking catastrophic losses. That fits these things perfectly. They are the type of craft you'd only use against a ship with fighter escort if you had no other choice, and that was exactly the role they fulfilled in the story. They make sense as a dedicated ground-attack platform, and nothing more.
@@goofball3056 "better defended against fighters than other heavy bombers" If you think that statement applies to the SF-17, I'd like to have some of whatever you've been smoking The reason the B-17 is well defended is because it has lots of turrets, including but not limited to ball turrets The Falcon has turrets The LAAT, has actual ball turrets It's probably worth noting that when I say "the vibe" of a vehicle, I'm talking about aesthetics and subjective feel, and not its exact role or strengths and weaknesses in war This is why I chose a very non-technical term like "vibe" rather than "design" or "role" ;) The particular vibe I'm referring to is that of our heroes keeping their fellow crew members alive by manning turrets and shooting down enemy fighters The Falcon's escape scene (in my opinion) had the same feeling to it as many such scenes in Memphis Belle The SF-17 not only didn't have that feeling about it, it didn't even try to
@@347Jimmy The SF-17 has more guns than an early model B-17, and does about as well when outnumbered by enemy fighters. The attack run on the First Order Dreadnought was the perfect example of what happens when you try and pull off a low-level attack run with heavy bombers against a target with more fighters than you have guns in the air. While I do agree that the Falcon better captured the myth of the B-17, the SF-17 was a better representation of their actual performance, and the literally suicidal loss rate they suffered.
Imagine designing something with casualty rates even the Soviets would cringe at. Then passing it off as sci-fi. Then glorifying the idiots that said: “Yeah, I’ll fly something slower than any other Star fighter, a bigger target, with less armor, apparently no shields, and a payload requiring level flying bombing in space.” What, you couldn’t have grabbed some 1000 year old star fighters out of the bargain bin? Literally would have been a more cost effective purchase lore wise. I suppose you could make an argument for improvised resistance gear, but any other bomber in Star Wars could have done the same job with less crew required and less casualties. Especially since the First Order seemed to think the exhaust port on the first Death Star was a design FEATURE. I was cheering for Poe, first time I saw it, like jeez you give this guy crap and he still scraps a victory, kind of. Then he gets yelled at, like it’s his fault the flying coffins were easier to destroy than the average civilian freighter.
@@EustaBAracer unless you’re stupid enough to think that the Americans made T-34s, KV tanks, 76mm Russian divisional guns, 120mm mortars, ISU and IS tanks and assault guns, IL-2 and other IL planes as well as Yak planes, as wel as Mosin-Nagant rifles, PPSH-41, PPSH-43, SVT rifles, Maxim machine guns or the myriad of other equipment that made the vast, vast majority of the Soviet Army up, then no, you’re wrong. They DID churn out their stuff. The main American contribution was in foodstuffs and trucks, the latter of which the Soviets had plenty of GAZ trucks before and after still. They weren’t some burnt out agricultural nation, otherwise the British wouldn’t shied from the idea of having to fight them with the Americans on their side in the potential operation Unthinkable. Edit: and if you get your information from that trashy Enemyat the Gates film, then go read some actual history books.
@@ivanivanovitchivanovsky7123 Even before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, America sent arms and equipment to the Soviet Union to help it defeat the Nazi invasion. Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in today’s currency, the Lend-Lease Act of the United States supplied needed goods to the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 in support of what Stalin described to Roosevelt as the “enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy - bloodthirsty Hitlerism.” 400,000 jeeps & trucks 14,000 airplanes 8,000 tractors 13,000 tanks 1.5 million blankets 15 million pairs of army boots 107,000 tons of cotton 2.7 million tons of petrol products 4.5 million tons of food $180 billion worth of offensive fighting equipment, troop transports, firearms, clothing, BOOTS, even food, everything a country would need to fight and WIN a war. Russia WAS an agricultural nation with delusions of grandeur going into WWII, a nation which handily got slapped by Finns and Japanese just decades prior. Russia couldn't be arsed to provide BOOTS to their soldiers, let alone enough functional equipment to successfully repel the Germans. No single country "won" WWII. It was equal parts American steel, Russian blood, and British intelligence, with the help of many other contributing nations. Hate all you want, but without the US, Russia would've become Hitler's vacation spot.
@@EustaBAracer and the one thing your revisionist horseshit is missing out is the fact that most of that arrived after Kursk and Stalingrad when the soviets were already pushing back the Germans. And f*cking lmao at human waves, you know who outnumbered who in Barbarossa? The axis outnumbered the soviets by at least one million men. In fact, they outnumbered them all the way until Stalingrad. You can find all this sh*t on Wikipedia and many other sites. “Muh 13,000 tanks” en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_combat_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II The soviets produced a total of 64,000+ medium armoured vehicles (tanks) alone throughout the war. 29,000+ light AFVs including SU-76s that could kill tanks throughout the war. 13,000+ heavy vehicles throughout the war. And the Soviets PAID for all that sh*t they bought from America on loans. They paid for it with gold, the Americans were profiting off a war when they should’ve helped kill the Nazis off. “Muh agricultural lazy sh*thole”, that “agricultural lazy sh*thole” produced more tanks and SPGs than the Americans did despite losing a majority of its industrial lands and being forced to move factories during the initial stages for at least a year. “1.5 million blankets” There were more than 11 million Soviet troops in the red army alone by 1945. That’s pittance compared to the amount the soviets did produce. “15 million army boots”, an actual contribution which can’t be ignored for sure, but i didn’t say America did nothing. And your casual racism has been noted. No, they weren’t too lazy to make food trucks and such for men. In fact, they did their best to do so. They didn’t even use human wave attacks in the f*cking Winter War, why would you be so stupid as to think they used them in WW2? Or are you getting your information from f*cking Enemy at the Gates? They had plenty of bullets and equipment, even vehicles to the point hey vastly outnumbered the Germans in tanks in the Battle of Brody. Food? They couldn’t f*cking produce it because they lost that land which is all in the west. Those areas were literally the first areas to be invaded you brainless dolt. Bullets? If they didn’t have enough bullets before the bulk of LL arrived, which was around 1943, then they would’ve folded even easier with no resistance. But that clearly didn’t happen what with Svestapol and all the other battles that took placeo. Trucks? The soviets produced over 1 million trucks you brainless dolt. www.google.com.au/amp/s/weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/09/08/motor-vehicle-manufacturing-in-soviet-wwii-russia/amp/ All the cr*p you’ve said is ignoring the facts of the war, and I say this as someone who’s actually studied this and read about it from historians like Orlando Figes, Sheila Fitzpatrick and you tubers like TIK, Military History Visualised who all cite their shit or have had access to archives and records. “Muh Muh gigantic frozen farm”, you clearly haven’t seen what the western parts of Russia is like, the USSR comprised of Ukraine as well as the Baltic’s at the time which were warm like Europe. In fact, the western section of Russia is basically the same sh*t as Europe, but go on, keep showing me how little you know about the USSR much less the Second World War. Sh*t slapped by the Finns? Only because of pure incompetence from the general in charge, after Timoshenko was put in charge they made advancements and forced Finland to listen to the demands. Japan? They only fought the Tsarist Russia which was the agricultural shithole that the USSR wasn’t. If you even studied the USSR, which I have, in Australia where we have no love for communists, you’d see the industry skyrocketed under the Soviets at great cost of lives. If you still wish to be wilfully ignorant and spew that garbage, then you’d better bring some f*cking cites and references, but if you wish to be stupid without sources, I’ll drown you in actual sources from historians and history channels. Edit: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_armored_fighting_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II The f*cking soviets outproduced *Germany’s* entire AFV production with just their medium AFVs. Unless you’re r*tarded enough to call *Germany* an unindustrialised sh*thole, your “arguments” are moot. www.statista.com/chart/8269/industrial-production-tanks-second-world-war/ Aww, would you look at this, the soviets out produced the Americans and everyone else individually in vehicles.
Actually, these bombers getting torn up on approach like they did in the movie is not only a realistic outcome, but the expected one. B-17s took significant losses in unescorted day raids before the higher ups figured out that that was a terrible idea (the idea was that bomber formations would have enough overlapping fields of fire to handle enemy interceptors by themselves, which didn't pan out). B-17s also attacked from extreme heights to bring them out of the range of most AA and significantly reduce the accuracy of flak. Such high altitude attacks were attempted against capital ships during the war, to little effect. Anything that wasn't a stationary target could dodge such attacks. The issue isn't that they didn't learn anything from the B-17, it's the opposite. The designers followed its design too closely and got an atmospheric heavy level bomber in a zero-gravity space war. And while the Resistance is no stranger to having to make do with what they've got, they completely mishandled these bombers and threw them headfirst into the enemy without nearly enough escorts to cover them. The whole affair was a massive blunder that only succeeded because the First Order was even dumber.
Good points. IMO, the wasted screen time showing the woman struggling to launch the bombs. Had they instead spent that screen time showing them shooting back at tie fighters and their armor/shields taking hits from dozens of tie fighters before they got destroyed, it might have made them look more sensible. ..or maybe not. Better may have been to include forward bomb launchers. The star destroyer could take out the bombs so they had to disarm it first. Still weak.
@@mechag9488 The whole idea of the bombs "falling" in space was just silly, unless there just happened to be a large planet on the other side of the target to attract them. There is an obvious reason why torpedoes or missiles of some sort are fired (either with internal propulsion or from a gun of some sort) at targets in most space-based scifi, because there is no gravity (or no ship could possibly be massive enough to have a noticable gravitational field) and it looks ridiculous to have things "falling" in zero-g, ruining suspension of disbelief.
I say this every time I see this mess of a design: The idea of a big bulky bomber with the crew scrambling around inside as the ship is being pummeled by enemy fire, is VERY appropriate for Star wars. There are lots of films set in ww2 bombers that you could borrow some scenes from and Star-wars-ify the way they did the trench run. But the ship should be sturdy as hell, with physical damage to the hull being patched with shields, so the ship is literally conning appart in a hell storm of fire but still on target. And the ship needed to have a somewhat sensible design (especially turret placement). So make it a wing of big, but not ridiculously slow, anti capital ship torpeado boats rather than a conventional bomber. Give the target heavy shields they need to fly under before they can attack (a recurring trope in SW), to force that long drawn out attack run scene. Have the attack come as a suprise from a debris field or something to justify why there isn't already a massive fighter screen in the way (but you can be damn sure those tie swarms are being rerouted). And basically just don't have them pop like balloons in a pin factory.
I think part of the problem is that these are very much a coded-WW2 design, which certainly fits the original Star Wars aesthetic, but the Disney trilogy has turned most of their designs into either generic near future versions of Star Wars ships or just geometric shapes that are so lacking in detail they don't project any particular era. Because of this, these WW2 style vehicles that would have looked appropriate in the original trilogy end up looking very outdated in the films they actually appear in.
I like to imagine the Resistance going to an arms dealer to buy some K-wings (a Legends ship that was pretty much this concept done- if not right, then certainly a lot better than the SF-17) and the following conversation going down. Holdo: "We'd like to buy a squadron of 12 K-wings." Dealer: "12 K-wings? That'll be 5 million credits." Holdo: "Shit! After buying all that purple hair dye, I've only got 1 million credits left! What can I get for that?" Dealer: *Points to squadron of SF-17s*
The bombs aren't even all launched at once. In fact, by the time the first one hits, the others will have made a nice line from the blast to chain back up and destroy the "bomb"-er.
I think it's just a misclassification. These things aren't bombers. They're bombs. You're supposed to launch them unmanned/with a simple droid crew from capital ships.
you're still giving it too much credit, when the first ones are out the door and lose gravitic acceleration, the ones on top of it are still getting faster. by the time the last bomb drops, the mid bombs have colided with the first bombs.
I just realized that even the proton bombs don't work. The proton torpedo's intended to fire a directed blast of nuclear energy, kind of like a nuclear HEAT warhead. This means that the warhead has to be, like a HEAT warhead, pointed in a particular direction to have a useful effect, hence why previously it had always been fitted to guided munitions such as the anti-ship missile they call a torpedo for some reason. You know what isn't reliably going to hit on the same direction every time? A ball you chuck at something hoping it will hit.
My headcanon is that the Resistance had set up in an abandoned Imperial base and were caught completely by surprise by the New Order Star Destroyers suddenly on their doorstep. Besides a couple squadrons of X-Wings, all they had were these old decrepit Empire terror weapons that WERE just atmospheric bombers intended only to drop masses of indiscriminate proton bombs over a large area. They weren't supposed to make tactical sense, they weren't supposed to be accurate, they were just supposed to drop lots and lots of awfulness over large (probably mostly civilian) area. In my head-scenario, these bombers get used only as an act of absolute desperation, Resistance doesn't have anywhere near enough fighters to protect the escaping transports, so Leia asks for some volunteers to fly the bombers knowing it's probably a futile suicide mission. That HAS to be the story because as-written none of that godawful movie makes a lick of fucking sense, fuck Rian Johnson
Yeah I think the bombers were mainly for on planet bombing runs and nothing else. But like you said, desperate times call for desperate measures. My thought is the fact that the warheads have to be directly dropped on target or the warheads risk getting shot down or possibly stopped by the Dreadnought's shield
Well Leia actually said no on the bombers it was Poe that for some reason as a highgly skilled combat ace thought that using slow moving flying pinjatas even the "feared" Tie fighter pilots could hit was a good idea. . . but then again he is busy drifting in space like he just saw the first episode of Intial D anime on his little X-wing hud while shooting down turrets that can't aim for shit on a large dreadnaught absolutley covered in the damn things and should have made him holier than freaking cheesus. Leia in all her great wisdom was the Person involved in the concept that these so called bombers where actually anywhere usefull in any conceivable way for a mobile resistance unit rather than focusing on getting more Y-wings or other similar models for fast attack bombers instead with EMP weapon capabilites just like the Y-wing used to have. . . WTF was she doing during the rebel era did she learn anything?? It would have been smarter to autopilot them and just send them trough hyperspace trough the damn dreadnaught. THAT would have made sense atleast. ..well for a short moment. But alas we go this....err shit show instead. Not to mention with their speed and poor manuevarbility and quite retarded shape would never be usefull in any other situation than total air superiority with minimal AA and bunched upo enemies to drop concentrated clusters of bombs on. . . I mean why in the seven hells would you make the bomb compartment a piece of area that others can single out and aim for especially in a ship that is space capable?? I actually walked out of the movie when i saw those bombers. Went back in saw the "your mom" joke and just had to leave again. It took me 5 attempts to finish this damn thing. XD
@@kenji214245 Y-Wings would be so outdated by this time and keep in mind the Resistance doesn't have the R&D to try and get more of those things or updated versions of it. And we even learn these bombers along with some of their ships were converted Civi ships. As dumb as the idea of using these things were, there was probably no Y-Wings left around and had to use what they could get their hands on
@@MST545 True the Ywings are kind of old and worn even when they were ordered during the Clone wars their tech had become a bit outdated. But you mean to tell me that they can afford giant capital ships and fuel. But not to get some proper attack bomber craft??
"Flying Fortress" was used as a name, early in development, before the war, possibly with the Model 299 prototypes. It did not refer to the defensive weapons, which were much more few. It referred to the "selling point". This was the period of Isolationism in the US. The bombers were to be an extension of the Coast Artillery fortresses, by defending the country's borders, in depth. Later, the name was taken to refer to the defensive armament, but the Isolationist name was first. (Ref. Martin Caiden's history of B-17)
Actually, its name was indeed made because of all those guns around it. It was made up by some press guys writing about new bomber after first (or some very early) presentation and guys in Boeing liked it so much that they took it as official name. This aircraft was result of a concept made by one guy I cant remember name of, who thought bombers should be armed so well that they would not use fighter escort. And it didn't sound that stupid (although it was) at time, when bombers could fly a lot farther than fighters. Unfortunately, after these entered the war it became obvious that bombers, even with lots of guns and flying in tight formations are basically sitting ducks for fighters, but then Mustangs came, and Lightnings and Thunderbolts and rest is a history. Oh, btw, Brits werent as stupid as USAmen and flew their bombers at night, granted that they had to aim at whole city to damage that one factory, but at least enemy had more problems with intercepting them :)
@@IShyper The 8 Air Force aimed at destroying the German Air assets. Hard to do it at night, when the German Fighters can't attack your bomber formations. The Brits wheren't smarter, they simply, contrary to the Yanks, lacked the capacity and intestinal fortitude to take on, and grind down the Luftwaffe over Germany.
@@apgmk1970 To say nothing about the comparatively high amount of collateral damage with area bombing at night (not that there was anything precise about "daylight precision bombing" in practice with the tech of the time).
@@apgmk1970 8th Air Force didn't aim at one consistent goal throughout the war. That really was one of the biggest mistakes of the entire strategic bombing campaign: They constantly changed targets, often too quickly to really tell wether their latest approach was going to be effective. In several cases they genuinely brought the german war industry to the brink of collapse by concentrating on one singular part of it... and then switched targets and allowed it to recover again. "The real goal was destroying the Luftwaffe!" is basically an excuse made up by USAAF brass to get out of having to admit their consistent fuckups at strategic planning.
I love that today, we have almost 100 year old air frames loaded and ready to just delete a god damn city. Humanity will never know peace because we build too much cool shit that kills everything.
Ship Designer: You know what we need in space combat where speed and maneuverability is everything? Super slow and vulnerable bombers to replace our fast and great Y-Wings! Ship Builder: Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! I see no flaw in this whatsoever.
I have watched and commented on other reviews of this. . . craft. And in general I have to claim they are too forgiving or generous. You sir have managed to hit all but one of my personal points about this travesty of design. And that point was it also had to fly so close when dropping its ordinance it was in the blast zone of its own ordinance. Thank you for keeping it honest.
The sad thing is that they allready had functional Bombers. Granted the Y and K wings aren't Strategic Bombers, but they'd still have done a better job than this supposedly newer monstrosity.
@@nonyabisness6306 now the k wing....theres a ship i would love to see live action...or hell, ill settle for animated. Talk about punching above your weight. And i loved this vid just because i had never seen a reviewer that actually hated that ship as much as i do. Well done sir😁👍
The thing I absolutely hated about that scene was that it was both a good scene and a terrible scene at the same time. The crews pushing forward against terrible odds. The last survivor on a doomed ship straining to finish the mission as she died. The acting, the cinematography was all good. But the frame, the setting, the "logic" were so very, very stupid. How did this go through the number of different hands over number of stages needed to bring it to the screen with no one saying, "Even our fans aren't this stupid." (But some of the fans are that stupid. In the immediate aftermath of the movie's release, I saw people explaining on the internet that the bomber used gravity technology to propel the bombs out of the ship until they fell into the influence of the gravity of the target ship, so it didn't matter there is no 'down' in space.)
One possible contributing factor is the SW game that came out where the heroine finds the plans to the dreadnaught that identified the dreadnaughts weak spot... Add RJ to the mix who refused to be beholden to what came before and we don't learn of these plans... If we had we would have learned that Leia would have had to have authorised the bombing mission... If she had then the mission would have been on her authority, meaning that she wouldn't have been able to blame Poe for carrying on the mission she would have had to have authorised as the person in command at the time. Looking at the film, knowing the plans existed, got to Leia who authorised the bombing mission, only to see her seemingly forget the plan and abort the mission half way through does not do Leia any favours. Now had Leia indicated the dreadnaught's destruction was an exercise to carry out if they still had people on the ground, and that once the base was evacuated the dreadnaughts destruction was a second priority to escape, that would be different... but like is said... the framing of this scene fails to justify the actions taken... and the wider narrative that encompasses the video game pushes the actions taken into 'wtf' territory. The opening of TLJ was pure spectacle and technically accomplished... but it was not handled by someone with story telling skills... That said, Ivan Ortega's recut of the scene shows how it could have been drastically improved from a beat by beat story perspective.
To be fair. Capital ships and especially SSD's would be fairly vulnerable to inertia weapons. Essentially targeted mines. The Ship is still terrible at deploying them and frankly, turning them into dumbfire rockets would be more effective....but hey the weapon itself at least could function in the way described....unless they can project gravity to repell them.
@@nonyabisness6306 Honestly, if the bombers could project gravity whats stopping them from getting to a standoff distance and just tilting upwards and tossing the load in the general direction of the dread. If each one has a thousand warheads and only a couple are needed to cripple the ship ya know, one of them is bound to hit the sweet spot.
NOTE: I'm not having a go at you. This is directed at the writers who thought up this awful mess. @@nonyabisness6306 Yes. Totally agree. It's not as if there were dedicated ships with gravity well generators in the Star Wars Universe that were specially made to drag ships out of hyperspace and who could probably reverse those generators to help disperse debris fields. Oh. What was that? There were 15 different versions of that ship made by several different factions of the Star Wars Universe?
@@meroddaglenholm7924 This is my thought as well. They have artificial gravity on every ship anyways, so they could conceivably even use non-specialised ships. Of course we don't know if the physics would work out like that, but then there's allready plents of established bombers and anti-ship weapons that could be used rather then this. not to mention that bombs in space would be very easy to shoot anyways due an inability to change course.
This ship was meant to be destroyed for the narrative rian was trying to write (which is just as good as the starfortress' design). I doubt anyone on the production team even considered making her try and logically fit into the universe.
Its a running theme these days of narrative/theme/payoff first, consistency/logic/believability last. Also known as "I want my fanfic to be acknowledged as canon, and fuck everything that was already established."
Sadly that was applied to every side, and I swear if I have to hear one more fraggin time about how this movie "subverted Expectations" NO! As soon as those big First Order ships I knew none of them were going to make it out of the movie, it's was the Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi Speedrun written by an idiot. "Hey let's reenact the Executor's entire life span in 5 minutes without any of the cool build up or pay off for the audience when the enemy super battleship gets the Kamikaze special."
Since, in my head canon, the House of Mouse films never happened, I find it interesting that the “Legends Continuity” New Republic (basically the Resistance but less moronic) actually had access to a pretty darn good bomber…and I don’t mean the K-Wing. I mean a craft called the Missile Boat, which was developed by the Empire, but which the New Republic captured the blueprints for. Now, this thing had one blaster cannon for defense in its prototype stage, mounted on the chin so it’s not impossible to target the cannon, but it also had an experimental engine booster that used ungodly amounts of energy. When the New Republic figured out “uh, we don’t need that; this thing is a bomber”, it could mount two turbocharged laser cannons under the chin, which is somewhere between a laser cannon and a turbolaser. It had no folding wings or other useless doodads, it was pretty heavily armored and had insane shield strength, and finally, it had two very large magazines that could carry up to ten guided proton bombs, twenty proton rockets, or thirty proton torpedoes (or forty advanced concussion missiles that were a left-over from its Imperial days when it was just supposed to spam guided missiles at enemy fighters). It was never really clarified, but I’m also fairly sure these things had a lever you could pull to jettison the magazine if your shields failed and it came under intense fire, which in turn gave you a better chance of surviving. Handling was great; it was just shy of being as fast as an A-Wing and was ridiculously maneuverable, meaning it could do a pretty good job taking evasive action to the point where it could actually lose an enemy fighter. It had no turrets, but only had a crew of one pilot; think the original Douglas BT2D-1 Skyraider before it was renamed the AD-1 (and then A-1) and you have a pretty good idea of what the Missile Boat was analogous to in a potential production form. Namely: being a torpedo bomber (kind of analogous to proton rockets) as well as a level bomber (analogous to proton torpedoes; I know they totally mixed the names up) that, while not a true fighter, could still stand a pretty good chance without much in the way of escort fighters. The in-universe explanation as to why the New Republic before the House of Mouse got its grubby, pro-Concentration Camp hands on Star Wars did not use this thing in a wider role was basically not wanting to award what their government saw as a pro-Imperial company (Cygnus Spaceworks of Greek Letter Shuttle infamy, but which also did the Alpha-class Xg-1 Assault Gunboat, which could fly and land with its folding wings shot off/they actually were meant for storage) and thus gave their bomber contract to Koensayr, the same company that made the Y-Wing, by giving them the K-Wing, which required more of a crew, but did not have a significant advantage in the ordnance it could carry (it did have an advantage, but not an enormous one and while it had two ball turrets for a 360 degree field of fire, one was way too vulnerable, plus you had a crew of four rather than one and evasive capabilities were MUCH worse, especially on the early models, plus the early K-Wing was literally too stable, requiring an entire extra engine to help it maneuver until they redesigned it rather radically). That kinda sucked which bomber got adopted, but it also made sense from an in-universe point of view since the K-Wing was still at least functional, had a 360-degree field of fire, and you had a bunch of politicians with axes to grind selecting it, rather than the actual pilots that test-flew the handful of captured and test example Missile Boats, which they thought was the better idea and even figured out a way to keep the cost down on by eliminating the booster system that crippled it within the Empire. Oh, and the Missile Boat had a pretty good hyperdrive and the K-Wing has no hyperdrive to cut on costs. I kinda hoped we’d see a Missile Boat or something like it when the Mouse-eared types decided to decanonize both the Missile Boat and the K-Wing, and we at least started to see a few ideas popping up from those from the books. Needless to say, the Resistance Bomber was NOT one of these ideas, though.
I've noticed that Disney hasn't made any TV shows based off the sequel era yet... It seems like they're trying to pretend it never happened. Which I'm fine with :)
Tail 666 has to be the most legendary b17 story. The things that plane went through, the things it’s crews had to go through. The fact it was tail number 666 makes the the story even more insane. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Equiping a Y wing with these warheads could almost work. The Y wing is relatively small and fast, and whatever version of big triangle they end up shooting at at are slow enough that they could just fly straight at them, then release the bombs to glide ballistically onto the target (Dropping them "down" is irredeemable). In Star Wars, the Y wings usually shoot their proton torpedo's from such short distance that the bombs would hit too, and if you leave off the engines of your proton torpedo's, you can carry more boom. Essentially, the Y wings would serve as dive bombers, keeping the theme going if that's what you want. But with any kind of heavy bomber, you don't want to do that, any more than you'd want to dive bomb with a B17.
Or build many more smaller faster ships who carry a few of them suckers and stick primitive chemical rockets on them, use them like rockets like the Mustang and so on on carried. But that would make sense. It is not so much that the rebell bombers where stupid, it is that the ww2 bad guys had the V weapons that where kinda higher tech than that... can we say embarrassing?
and thats how Tie Bombers and Y Wings conduct bombing runs. Both are able to be equipped with Proton Bombs, that can be "Dropped" (More like ejected with force) downwards. Those Warheads are significantly larger and more powerful than Proton Torpedoes, of wich both carry a larger payload than other Craft. So yeah Fighter Bombers or Dive/Torpedo Bombers is correct. You can see scenes of that in the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One, where Gold Squadron bombs the Shield Gate and in A New Hope, where Tie Bombers bomb the asteroid with the Exogorth, in wich the Falcon hides.
@@zhufortheimpaler4041 They quite simple tried just a little to hard to create an scenario for an desired outcome by having this stupid ships not worth there scrap metal. The survivability of theese things are so poor that building them as guided missles one way would make more sense. Then at least you have hope that a few more actual reach there target. Even todays primitive nuclear powered sea fahring ships have point defense turrets... and the people in star wars travel between planets like taking the subway to the other side of town. Poor design and poor writing if even an dunce like me notices
Have that giant vertical magazine feeding a launch system that can rotate 360, and it could be a standoff bomber just spamming torpedos at large capitol ships. Hell, just have it launch proton torpedoes foward in massive salvos. No, it has to get to point blank snd fly over the target....
If that giant bottom opened up in front and a all of proton torpedoes opened up with all of the massive purple trails arcing out it would be a much better ship, but would make the fixed guns make sense a little more. Hell retcon it to be a small defensive platform that had to be refitted mid construction which explains why they are so slow.
@@masonwilliams1345 they actually retconned it in the comics. They claimed they were built by the republic specifically for in-orbit humanitarian aid dispensal. Then got retrofited by the resistance with bombs. Which is something I love because as far as excuses go that's probably the worst one they could've used. I mean. It just opens up so many questions, all of which are answered with "because the writers didn't think of it"
Why not have a fast bomber that just uses a massive torpedo like the Gamilas dedicated torpedo bomber from Space Battleship Yamato. That thing carries a torpedo the size of the craft itself.
At least with the Davy Crockett if you ever had to use it death would’ve been a mercy. At least when you consider what kind of situation it was intended for
So, random thought: if they had set it with all turrets and explained it as a retrofit of a mine field layer that woulda been less egregious than 'oh it's a space bomber'
Honestly this bomber makes more sense as Imperial tech then Republic tech. Slow, ungainly, cripplingly inflexible,expensive to operate,and deadly to its operators is the hallmark of the TIE school of design.
Except that TIE fighters were quite small, exceptionally fast, nimble, cheap as hell to produce and operate, and heavily armed for their size. Granted, they weren't very survivable, but in large enough swarms, that didn't really matter. Hell, had Luke missed his shot, the Rebellion was essentially doomed even if the Death Star never fired on Yavin because the defensive TIE's were wiping the floor with the Rebel ships even before he managed to make it to the trench. If I recall correctly, the reason the T-65 X-wing wasn't accepted by the Imperial military is that it was too large and expensive to be seen as an adequate replacement for the TIE.
Things that could fix these things.... Shields, armor.... These things should have been stupidly durable, able to shrug off direct impacts from Tie Fighters crashing into them and able to keep going.... More forward facing turrets as you have suggested... and yes make the bombs launch out forward for a cloud of missiles flying forward.... I mean just imagine how much cooler that fight would have been if they launched a shitload of thousands of missiles forward at the dreadnaught with like half of them hitting the swarms of Tie Fighters coming in to take them out.... one has a malfunction that prevents it from firing its payload, the other payloads aren't quite enough to get through the enemy ships armor.... They are getting hammered hard and starting to take losses as the enemy is able to rotate the entire capital ship around to bring its remaining anti armor guns to bear on them.... It ends with the one with the undeployable payload suicide ramming into the enemy ship and manually detonating its payload..... (With its heavy armor being how it was able to penetrate the hull of the enemy vessel...)
Bonus points if the last scene we see of it is the bay doors opening and an FO trooper just ceasing to exist as a couple thousand tons of explosives squash his body flat before they detonate.
It would be doable if the main hull was a railgun, and the bomb area was just a clip to feed the railgun. This would enable the ship to hit a distant target with near lightspeed projectiles, instead of that lame ass bomb drop. I'd put the Magazine as a drum feed located within wings also, giving the ship a stingray look with millenium falcon weapon blisters all around it. And seeing the "bomb" discharge would be from the front of the craft, it would have a common center of mass loaded or not, as the Starfortress has a issue if one ever survived a mission.
I've got a bookshelf with almost every Star Wars novel ever written, and after suffering through this movie at a theater I decided I was done. Never have watched Solo, despite it being on Netflix for a bit. Never watched whatever they called the last one either. I saw the first maybe 5 minutes of it once, but noped right out of there around the time they showed a ship blinking in and out of hyperspace in atmosphere, instantaneously teleporting to other locations.. all the while being followed instantaneously by fighters that shouldn't even have hyperdrives.
@@eno2870 I pretty much noped out after the first movie. I gave "rogue one" a chance, but it was a pretty mediocre movie. "solo" never interested me. About the only thing that's even kept me from being completely apathetic to the brand is "The mandalorian". I only watched it because Jon Favreau(Iron man fame) was in charge. And Gina carrano, of course. I'm pretty much just apathetic towards the brand at this point.
This ship is what you get when you design and plan the scene you want first then create the ship that would be in it. It is clear they wanted the "overwhelmed bomber against terrible odds" shot so just had the design team make something that could deliver that mental plan. Instead of thinking how a logical attack would go, they created the end result first then worked backwards to make it happen
What's worse is that you could just flip the bomb section up to be fully below the crew block, and it is suddenly far more defendable, while still keeping the payload.
@@Sephiroth144 Even the TIE bombers make logical sense. As observed, the bombs from it weren’t dropped so much as fired down, with aiming variation meaning they were a guided bomb of sorts. Also, the entire TIE series was about quantity over quality, hence its very similar design to the originals - this was already established by the movies that TIEs were super expendable.
@@openthinker6562 The bombs in the star fortress are also "fired down" electromagnetically. The artificial gravity inside the star fortress is also naturally going to push the bombs down, as is implied visually during the scene when the bombs are releasing, moments after the female crew member got done falling through the bomb bay. The proton bombs are also be magnetically drawn towards a target. This is all according to the Visual Dictionary for Episode 8.
@@TheNobleFive Uh, sorry, but the star fortress makes very little sense compared to the TIE Bomber to the point where it is very hard to even compare them. The TIE Bomber has guidance systems to fire them down at different angles without having to tilt the ship. Also, we can assume that it would be similar to the Y-Wing and could be fitted with heavier ordinance like torpedos and others. However, the Star Fortress makes no sense within Star Wars. In space combat, those kinds of heavy bombers would only make sense if they are heavily armored/shielded (they aren't, one TIE breaks through 3 of them), have a ton of guns (only has 3) and has much more speed (It's slow as all heck). In WW2 (which is its inspiration), these bombers were only used on stationary targets on planets. But in Star Wars, such large bomber's aren't necessary due to the existence of Battleships and Starships. Ever heard of orbital bombardment? The Empire would just park a Star Destroyer above a planetary target and just fire down. No need for heavy bombers. Some things should exist logically within the Star Wars universe. And unfortunately, the Star Fortress doesn't - small and fast bombers like the TIE bomber and Y-Wing, AND star destroyers with orbital bombardments have made the concept of heavy bombers like the Star Fortress obsolete. Also, third party sources aren't really helpful, these things should stand by themselves in the movies without needing a visual dictionary.
@@TheNobleFive Using their artificial gravity reasoning, that also means that the bombs at the top of the chute would impact first (Since there is no gravity in space to act on them), instead of forming a helix of falling explosives, they would all arrive relatively simultaneously. Also, if you say the Star Destroyers have their own Gravity, that logic falls apart when they go to lightspeed, as if they could not *internalize* their artificial gravity, the ship would be torn apart when jumping to lightspeed. Furthermore, Even if these bombers were intended to be a form of bunker buster, they are still the most impractically and poorly designed ship ever showcased in Star Wars, yes even worse than the Eyeball ship from SWTOR.
Well assuming(just to make an ass out of U and I) that the bombs "fall" due to the artificial gravity, why don't they re-orient the said gravity so the pilot is facing "down" and just drop the bombs out the front... oh, right that idea requires a middle school level understanding of physics.
Yeah, the real counterargument to this ship isn't that "there's no gravity in space" but that the drop/launch system for the bombs isn't oriented in the direction of the attack. They should have struck from above the enemy ship and launch their bombs from quite a distance away. Didn't look like the big ship was that manoeuvrable to avoid them. And if anyone argues that they could have shot the bombs down, well, at least the bombs aren't manned.
To bring a middle school understanding of physics into it. The ships don't need artificial gravity to work. Ships in star wars don't orbit. They are stationery in space. The gravity of the planet below still effects the ships. Now I don't belive that's how they are planned to work. But that's how the real world physics would work if applied to these ships
@@TheWeeJet Sure, but gravity at that distance isn't all that strong. Besides, that still leaves them utterly useless in deep space and we certainly have deep space battles in Star Wars. Overall, the delivery system makes no sense for a space-borne platform since there are far better options already available in-universe.
@@Llortnerof oh ye completely agree it makes no sense the ships exist. Just really annoys me when people talk about how the scene is unrealistic because "gravity does not work like that" or so on. Because like I said it actually does work like that and all these people are wrong.
I LOVE the unbridled frustration in this one, but my favorite line has from the first 30 seconds: "... and that weird eight-legged thing you rode in on."
This is what happens when disney hires a new guy to make your movie that knows nothing about the franchise except lots of people liked it. Aside from all the obvious points you made, id like to point out this has NO precursor. The clone wars surplus Y-Wing light bombers used a modular magazine to feed 2 chin mounted launch tubes with various missiles, torpedoes, and freefall bombs (kicked out the front of the tube by a mechanism in the magazine). It also had the speed and agility to bring its 2 fixed cannons to bear against most hostile bombers and transports, akin to how SBDs were sometimes used in WWII. It was augmented by the B-wing which was slightly larger, but faster, better armed and about as agile with the launch tubes in the chest this time. The K-wing that replaced both (retconned by disney along with the rest of the extended universe) switched from internal magazines to external hardpoints that virtually any weapons pack imagineable can be fitted to. So we are to believe that after decades of proving the value of compact, fast, durable, and versatile, Rebellion 2.0 opted for a barge made of tissue paper that can only do 1 thing and very poorly?
Yep. The B-Wing is an engineering masterpiece compared to team killing champ. Both were made to take out capital ships but the B-Wing did it with a scaled down version of the Death Star converging laser system which would work in space where you are going to find the capital ships.
"We could design this... thing like a sea turtle with guns pointed at all directions with its biggest gun being a laser with 1/100th power compared to the Death Star." "No, make it shittier." "Convenient exploding red barrels from Half-Life?" "Yes."
Crewmate: "Would you like us to design bombers for the movie, perhaps add in those Y-wings?" Rian Johnson: "Sure, let's add in bombers, but no Y-wings." Crewmate: "So, what bombers would you like?" Rian Johnson: "You know when someone gives you the L gesture, let's make a ship shaped like that." Crewmate: "An L shaped bomber? And add turrets and a bunch of torpedoes?" Rian Johnson: "No torpedoes, just give it a bunch of round bombs for bombing runs, oh and give it some really shit armor." Crewmate: "Well uh, ok. I guess." Whoever thought this was a really great idea must be on something really good such as deathsticks...
Oh I can assure you it gets way sillier than even this video mentions. Checkout how they land on a planet - or rather don't as they can't they can only land on a carrier vessel or a pre-prepared landing racks. Also the whole ship is easily opened to space if it gets holed so any small hole in the ship suffocates the whole crew. The bombs are also "magnetic" no really - so how do they avoid magnetising to the wrong thing or each other ? sure they magnets are not activated until the clear the ship - but the bombs could clump and take each other out unless the bomber is moving forwards and dropping them out slowly. They have to be magnetised they said so they don't have to be launched - they simply fall out in the movie they are not magnettically impelled or anything by a force field curtain - they just fall out of the ships due to it's localised artificial gravity and leisurely carry on until the magnets are drawn to a metal object. Also if the bomber tries to point its belly and squirt them out at distance or get above it's target - then the ship its attacking can just MOVE OUT OF THE WAY or even flip on it's side and thrust away at 90 degree's so the bombs miss. & if they are dumb enough to shoot them from really far away then they can be shot down by fighters or by the capital ships point defense turrets. Note how Poe had to destroy all the point defense weapons on the Dreadnought before they could even initiate and attack run and if they darn First order had simply managed fighters better they'd never have got close since one shot seems to immediately blow them up anyway. In any normal battle the target vessel would just have shot them down - and likely ground defense would be able to do the same too if they were attacking a ground target too. They are not just stupid - they are EVERY KIND OF STUPID - but especially for lacking armour and decent shields - even without the payload deployment method being exceptionally silly. Making the turrets ridiculous - is just carrying on the design philosophy I guess, & remember these tissue Paper vessels are all externally mounted on their carrier vessel open to being shot at - and loaded with those bombs that are very volatile. if the carrier went up while the vessels are attached it might take out anything near it even worse than we already saw. I was kinda horrified at the level of stupidity on display when watching the movie for the 1st time.
Captain Kanady was the only legitimately intelligent person in the entire fleet on both sides, and he died about 5 minutes after he got there. The very best part of the series is when Hux gets executed.
@@vishnu79 Yes, nearly everyone behaved like they were 8 years old. They were not behaving like grown ups. And these bombers were not designed by adults. I don't understand how someone could have signed to pay hundreds of millions to make these movies.
Yeah, in Legends (Star Wars stories from before the Disney acquisition), nobody ever wrote about ships dropping bombs "on" other ships. They shot missiles and torpedoes "at" other ships. Plus, the SF-17 never existed. This is all Disney's "story group" and Rian Johnson here.
And this is why the K-Wing made a lot more sense as a bomber it was smaller (being almost half the length and considerably shorter) , probably faster (considering the glacial pace that these things seem to fly at), granted it can't carry 1000 bombs but it does carry 16 torpedoes, and probably won't being as susceptible to commiting fratricide when taken out
"I am the TIE Bomber, the biggest death trap in Star Wars! I'm slow af, have no shields and am big and bulky, heck I'm so big and bulky mixed with being slow af, that many times when Danny Duignan (me, the person typing this) was playing X-Wing Alliance, he many times took me out by dumbfiring one Proton Torpedo at me! You know Proton Torpedoes, warheads that aren't meant for dogfights, but rather bigger capital ships, Danny took me out with one because I the TIE Bomber without any shields am so bulky and slow af!" *MG-100 StarFortress SF-17:* "Hold my green-titty-milk" :3
I've said it to my friends before. This is not a bomber. This is a mine layer, repurposed as a bomber by the resistance. It is slow as molasses, weak as glass, and a single one carries enough munitions to destroy a vessel the scale of an SSD by itself.
that still does not make any sense. When in the complete history of mankind has any army or navy ever done anything as stupid as repurposing a mine layer to a fighting vessel? Even the Japanese who were desperate enough to have kamikaze pilots and sent the Yamato on a suicide mission never sent their mine layers against the US Navy. Even though those mine layers also have enough explosives to sink any battleship. The idea is just insane and there is no way to make it believable.
@@marcdevries9027 It sounds to me like you are caught up on not understanding that starwasrs doesn't follow two-dimensional maritime naval strategy at all.
@@LostInTheFarmersMarket No, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't even make sense as a mine layer, at least not with those bombs. And then it would not have a way to "drop the bombs" necessary for the delivery as seen in the movie. If it was a minelayer, it would not be able to propel its bombs towards its target. Mines are stationary. No way does this design make sense.
I always assumed these things were supposed to be mine laying vessels. Would have been great to deter the chase later in the movie with those fixed guns on the back as they ran away. The biggest error was calling them bombers in the first place.
I've thought of this for a while and there are such things as bombs that are just rocks, the concrete bomb. We know very well that just throwing a rock can be devastating due to mass, speed, all the fun physics. So with just the basic concept of rail/gauss tech, you could turn a metal ball into a Tunguska level meteor. In the Thrawn trilogy (which I'm sure no one on set even looked at) they specifically noted that they had launch catapults so this tech does exist to at least some extent. Further the final attack was just this idea with a warp drive.... So my question has always been.... Why in the ever loving heck aren't these things just long range mass driver cannons? They could bomb planets with ease and in space they would be the biggest possible gattling guns ever imagine. If they actually used torpedoes they would be giga bolters. But no, no one had better dare have a creative thought at Disney now. Keep that tight formation so you all explode for cheap thrills.... Idiots!
The TIE Bomber also drops bombs from below itself, but they're always escorted by TIE Fighters and Interceptors and are also far smaller and faster than the Resistance Bomber. Plus, they have front facing laser cannons.
Thank you. I really hate the whole idea of this ship, especially when all of them were killed by the end of the operation. Sure, a single one managed to be strong enough to destroy the dreadnought it was targeting... But if losing all of them to bring down one (sure, big) target is considered acceptable losses... One would figure this ship was designed by a mighty empire who doesn't give a damn how many bombers and crew it loses as long as the enemy is dead.
The way the artificial gravity is oriented is at least the right direction to launch the bombs. That's it. That's the only vaguely positive thing I have to say about this garbage. Launching them that way is _stupid,_ but at least it's consistent in it's overwhelming stupidity.
why not create artificial gravity propeller that would launch the payload to the front, like a unguided inertia bomb, that will travel on a fairly straight line in space to hit the target. Or better, we can use the proppeler strong enough, to launch it at sub light speeds, hidden behind a moon or planet curvature, and use gravity whell to change direction of the "bullet" to hit the target from safety. Virtually undetectible deth from nowhere, relativistic missle, it can be even a fist size rock pebbles to punch trough the ship. Star Wars is utter nosnece
Can't wait to hear you talk about the Death Egg. Or any of Robotnik's flying contraptions, for that matter. As for the "bomber" you're discussing. That's clearly a phaser. The very shape of it is a phaser.
The magic behind Eggman's robots and creations is that the Sonic universe operates on a more cartoony sense of logic. In that sense, his creations make a lot more sense than these "Bombers" any day.
That would be difficult to do, as the Death Egg doesn’t ever really do anything before it gets destroyed. I’d imagine it was basically meant to have the same capabilities as the Death Star, but then again, if that were the case the Eclipse Cannon wouldn’t have been such a big deal in Sonic Adventure 2. It’s hard to analyze something so nebulous.
When I first saw this scene, I thought the bombers were hastily converted freighters used in a time of desperation. But then the visual guide came out and confirmed that they were purpose built bombers. What's funny is these bombers would have been perfect for taking out Starkiller base, but they didn't use them there. They used X-Wings, which stood no chance of getting the job done.
"Hey, remember those programmable guided missiles that everything from Vulture Droids to Slave 1 to Y-wings carry?" "I remember them." "Yeah, how about we not do that?"
The only thing i can imagine was that the initial purpous of this craft was mine laying. Behind friendly lines you only have to flee from attackers so the turrets on the back would make sense and the drop chute would house the mines that get ejected via a magnetic field one by one.
You know what might fix the functionality if not the astehetic problems, mass drivers. Impart some momentum and direction to the ordnance and you're golden. Bomber, mine layer, and all kinds of useful stuff with that.
These things are indicative of that whole move, style over substance. They're supposed to look like cool bombers, not make sense. During this scene and many more throughout the movie I kept going, "That sure is pretty, and people are going to love this movie for it. I just wish it wasn't so dumb so that I could enjoy it too."
"You're gonna get attacked by Thais." A bunch of kicking dudes practicing Muay Thai flying through space while screaming. Would make a heck of alot more sense than what they went with in the movie.
When I first saw the bombs being dropped, I thought they were being shot from the ship by a sort of railgun. An explanation that makes far more sense than the magnets Disney thought up.
I think the concept could have worked a lot better in the movie with a couple changes. 1. Throw a scene explaining the dreadnaught was heavily shielded against ion weapons from below (makes sense so Hoth 2.0 doesn't happen, and this is a specialized ship to glass planets), however the point defense turrets are still vulnerable on top. 2. Have the rebels launch the Y-Wings first escorted by the X-Wings to soften up the point defenses and to try to protect the Starfortresses 3. Either have tie fighters already deployed, or have them launch almost immediately. None of the "That fighter is too small for the point defenses" line. This would be obvious to the person commanding said ship, because they should know all about their own ship and what its realistic capabilities are. 4. Have the Starfortresses not die from their own bombs in a normal attack run, and instead of having a single bomber outright destroying two others, have the one Starfortress explode, and heavily damage another one. This damaged one could lose altitude from the dreadnaught and they could make the conscious decision to drop their bombs instead of escaping, and this is the Starfortress that gets caught in its blast. Just by changing and adding some details, there are still the scenes few people like, but they are presented in a far more logical manner. It's just hard to be worried about the good guys if the bad guys have no sense of tactics. Hell, all disney needs to do is play a wargame with 2 actual people. Give each of them a list of resources, and the ability to request additional/different ones within reason, and tell them each what their objectives are and you will likely have a far better space battle scenes that make sense.
Forget the Tie fighters, these floating targets should have been taken out by the other Star Destroyers. There was literally nothing intelligent about this scene, or perhaps even the movie. I still have conniptions over the ballistic laser fire during their white Bronco style chase.
I pretty much agree with everything said here. I had thought that if they rejiggered the design into a Torpedo boat, maybe have a ship come in ahead and get Fire Control & Targeting data. And feed it to the SF-17's as they jump in, so they can rapid fire their payload and jump out, that would have made more sense
I think it was in novel or some other sources, the bomber's payload (the big ass clip) was reconfigurable with any kind of ordinance and they were equipped for orbital bombing of ground bases when the FO had dropped on them.
What sucks is that this tactic( X wing providing FC&T to other ships for stand off against capital ships) has been used in the Legends canon, multiple times! In the X wing novels, Rogue and Wraith squadron would use this as SOP when they had to go against capital ships unsupported in fighters. In one instance they had a bunch of freighters rigged as missile platforms with no individual targeting, snuck into orbital traffic and used them as remote platforms to missile swarm and take down a Super Star Destroyer! And it was all believable and had all the dramatic tension you could want a fight between a rag tag band against overwhelming odds you could want. When that sequence started in TLJ, I thought that was what they would be referencing, only to be floored by the udder farce that occurred instead.
Pretty realistic, seeing as B17 attacks on warships in the Pacific were notoriously ineffective as well. Gimme a couple TBF Avengers that miraculously work in space, and they'd do a better job. Dunno if I'd take a Swordfish, but they might still be faster.
It epitomizes everything wrong with the Disney SW universe: Look at this soulless reference to something you like! Now spend money on us! In all the right ways that the clone wars mimicked the Huey in the LAAT, this movie got wrong in this abomination. It demonstrates such a fundamental disregard for the franchise, the fans, and movie making in general that it’s staggering. It’s a disgrace to the B-17 for them to even refer offhand to it with this abomination.
The best part is that the only knon bomber of this typ to ever drop its payload onto an enemy vessele was destroyed in the explosin caused by its own bombs.
Went into TLJ with high hopes, these things dashed that hope and I left the theater glad I hadn't wasted any of my money on it (was there on another person's dime). You sir, have earned a sub.
There are VERY few things in star wars that piss me off as much as this thing does. The others being how disappointing of a villain kilo was with his temper tantrums subverting every expectation, and snoke apparently not mattering at all. (I mean seriously he just... Dies... And then everyone immediately moves on... It's like someone had a DnD character they didn't like and asked the DM to let them kill it off so they could play a new one)
The X-Wing Tabletop makes it astoundingly useful. Tough, lots of firing arcs, with lots of slots for support systems and bombs. It's still an easy target but not as *stupid* as on-screen.
The SF-17 performed flawlessly its intended tasks: to explode spectacularly and to generate controversy where none existed before.
The Jar Jar Binx of starships
@@McPlowed yup... the _other_ kind of War-hoe...
@@McPlowed hey Jar Jar has a much better kill count then the SF-17. Hell in the clone wars some clones actually weaponized Jar Jar's clumsiness
So many Star Wars fans have forgotten how to just enjoy cool shit on screen without having reddit moment freakouts about it. Imagine watching Godzilla vs Kong and going "bro this is unrealistic an ape could never get that big that doesnt make sense"
@@ZetaPrime9699 The difference in your analogy is that in TLJ, they use ships that are significantly worse than ships that are decades older than them, which doesn't make sense in-universe. Kong makes sense because it's nothing new, Kong is big, that's what makes him Kong. And yes, some Star Wars fans, myself included, like to over-analyze things, but that's why we liked earlier stuff, because we could enjoy it in a way other than going "hurr durr flashy lights, fiery explosions, cooooool." If we want to watch a fight without thinking about whether or not the plot makes remotely feasible sense.
One easy fix would've added a scene where Poe simply says
"We're using these things? We're facing a dreadnaught, not a bunker"
and one of the pilots reply
"It's all we have left, sir"
"Then program the stupid thing to run without a pilot!"
It wouldn't have saved the sequels, but it would have improved the scene SO much!
Pretty much this; we had to find out from sources *OUTSIDE* the movie to understand that it was an orbital bomber (bombing the shit out of imperial bunkers on ground from orbit) and it was a pure desperate move pressing them with the orbital bombing bay modules into attacking a warship. Funny enough, B-17s IRL were used to try to bomb the hell out of enemy fleets (Pacific Campaign WW2) but warships moving at sea dodged the bombs easily because the B-17s had to fly high to avoid the AA guns on the warships.
Only by all counts he planned this. Would/should have known what was available well beforehand.
@@alexhurlbut
Disney needed me to do bloody *homework* before watching your movie?
How about "No."?
It just made the sequels look much, much worse than they should have to people who like Star Wars, but aren't obsessive freaks who seek out every scrap of info before going to watch a movie.
If the battle had happened in atmosphere, I’m fairly certain that the B-17 would have outperformed the SF-17…
You certainly would have been able to field a lot more of them and they could drop their ordinance more easily.
I'm fairly certain that the B-17 would have outperformed the SF-17 in Space! Hell they manage to land without a crew and all they'd need to do is bump into one enemy and make them all go BOOM!
They also tried rc controlling them as a flying bomb I think a Kennedy died testing it
I’m not completely unconvinced that a Sopwith Camel wouldn’t of given it a beating!
@@psibug565 surface to air nerf dart would kill it
@@fredkk79 Nope, Joe Kennedy Jr died at the controls of a modified PB4Y-1, the naval patrol variant of the B-24 Liberator.
You fix half the problems with this “bomber” if you change its classification from bomber to “patrol boat” or “minelayer”
If you squint at it long enough, it kinda looks like a small nebulon-b
The real question is, why did they have to fly over their target vs. just aiming their bomb chutes at the target and cutting loose like a really slow cannon? You'd think even if most missed, a huge, confusing, moving minefield would be way more useful than a wing of bombers that you lose most of.
But then they wouldn't have lost most of them in a pointless heroic sacrifice.
Wow, I didn't even think of that. That's actually a good idea! Because the artificial gravity is only pointing in one direction, the bombs will only go in one direction.
@@starflame34 or, to be more specific, you're in space, no gravity. All you need is a little push.
I play space engineers and did just that, strap some warheads with a mass block on it and have a couple grav gens with a bottom facing camera and boom, instant bomber. ... then there are Klang guns
To be honest the bombs would be moving a whole lot quicker than the actual bomber from the gravity of the bomber and would far harder to hit and spot because of how small they are.
The resistance bomber: Everything wrong with episode 8, in a single ship.
No. Everything wrong with Disney Wars as a whole - in one ship.
@@ranekeisenkralle8265 Everything wrong with Disney demonstrated by using this ship as an example.
Oh not even close, it was just the most blatant example.
i don't think it had a feminist agenda. but i wouldn't be surprised if it was written with one.
@@guillermoelnino I don't know if you look at it like a phallic object then it being destroyed is somewhat feminist because why else would you fit the bombs vertically and not alongside the ship to give the enemy a smaller head on target
The Star Fortress, the only good guy ship that makes you feel like the bad guys have the plot armor
I dunno. I think all the Starfortresses got annihilated.
AS THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN.
One of them got killed by its own successful bombing run. If I were designed that poorly, I'd kill myself, too.
And they only worked because the bad guys were incompetent... their target was defenceless... and no one bothered to destroy the fighter which took out the point-defence turrets because they wanted to talk... instead of following Supreme Leader Snokes order and annihilate them all.. (Should have launched fighters, moved to engage the Rebel Ships, and totally ignored Poe's attempt to distract them by blasting his fighter apart).
@@SacredCowShipyards Maybe those abominations are not most stupid bombers ever but kind of small minelayers? Just deploying 1000 warheads in front of capital ship and waiting for it to collide? It is still stupid and wasteful but less so...
@@aralornwolf3140 Or get one of the 4 star destroyer escort ships to *actually* escort and defend the Dreadnaught, or get the dreadnaut to reverse and easily outrun the bombers
A bomber even 40k orks can point at and laugh how stupid it is.
That thing makes the TIE Bomber like a super effective bomber, because at least it isn't so goddamn slow and doesn't have the ironic name "fortress" attached to it.
On the flip side: a bomber *only* 40k orks could use effectively. :P
@@seanheath4492 I was gonna say, the Orks could make this shit work. If they believe hard enough they'll make it to the target, they'll make it too the target.
Needs some red & blue stripes added to it. Red bc obviously it can go fastuh, and blue so stray hits from half-damaged fighters won’t immediately tear it (or its neighbors) to shreds.
@@UGNAvalon maybe add some purple so they'll be harder to detect? :P
3:17 the plane coming back to base without a single crew member is clearly a proof of it's powerful machine spirit
Depressed Waffengeist with PTSD. Watched her whole crew die or bail out and flew back to base out of duty, knowing she was either going to be scrapped for parts or sent back up with a new crew to watch die.
Imagine if instead of this, they had Y wings with jury-rigged super bombs hanging between the engines. That way, the pilots had to dive bomb the destroyer and release the bomb at the right moment so the destroyer couldn’t move out of the way or shoot the incoming bomb. They could still have their strong and brave sacrifice of that one character who, upon attempting to release the bomb, finds the mechanism is jammed! Then she flies the whole y wing into the enemy ship.
Dive-bombing with Y-wings would have been so cool, and still call back to WW2 combat!
One stray laser cannon blast from a Point-Defense weapon or Starfighter renders that idea dead in the water. It seems they could benefit from modern combat aviation experts. The WW2 callbacks were cool when they were first used. It doesn't make sense given the technology and pivoting to more intelligent and modern aerial battles would be better. If anything the "scrappy 12 rebel fighters vs horde of enemy fighters" concept is stale and boring.
I call the "Resistance Bomber" the Flying Dumpster Fire. This abomination is the perfect flagship for everything wrong with Dizz-knee Stur Wurz.
I call them Rian Johnson's Millennium Wankers
Stur Wurst.
"Flying" is too generous.
@@darwinxavier3516 Falling is still too generous.
‘Hanging about in space the same way that bricks don’t’ is too generous.
My observation is that these "bombers" existed solely to provide spectacular explosions, I've mostly purged them from my memory but I have a lingering recollection that they were remarkably ineffective death traps.
I'm thinking the same thing. And no amount of Rian Johnson's goons trying to BS us into thinking that the B-17 is the source of inspiration is gonna convince me. They clearly took cues from the He 111 and G4M instead given how easily they get torn to shreds by any moderately-powerful weapon.
"... they were remarkably ineffective death traps."
I respectfully disagree. They were spectacularly effective at being death traps.
@@emanwe01 Argh! You're right, that's what I meant to say. Thanks for correcting me.
My headcanon is that these things are actually minelayers pressed into the bomber-role. Flying perpendicular to an imperial fleet, ejecting a curtain of warheads into it's path.
@@Skaldewolf this would have made a lot more sense, if it were the official canon.
The thing that bugs me about this craft, is that just aesthetically, it fits the kooky Starwars vibe perfectly. But when it comes to both functional design and scene writing, it was murdered. Like seriously? You have this huge military craft named and built around being a "fortress", and half of a damaged tie fighter spinning into it destroys it? That tie should have bounced off it's shields and armour. And if the ones shown in the movie apparently have bugger all armour, then why are they so embarrassingly slow!?
In the scene where they drop their bombs, they were already above the ship. Which the bombs then soon land on, strongly implying that the _unpowered_ bombs were travelling faster than the _thruster powered_ ship was going forwards. Realistically, whilst a strange design, shunting ordnance out the side/bottom of your craft isn't entirely as nonsensical as it might seem. They'd still inherit the momentum of your craft, with only as much extra push as you gave them elsewhere, so would still be incredibly simple to line up a run. Having unguided/unpowered bombs would dramatically cut down on production costs whilst very dramatically increasingly your payload, just at the cost of only being capable of targeting large/stationary targets. Not exposing the bomb bay forward during an attack run, would also help remove a major weakness against incoming fire. But the bombs would still be "dropped" at a distance, and still be travelling 98% forward. They would NOT need to be dropped whilst "over" the target, and would not hit it if they were. >_<
With a few sensible design revisions and writers that weren't hired by Disney, I honestly feel like the StarFortress could have been a fan favourite (one of those awkward ones held hostage inside the crappy Disney movies, but oh well). It's right there next to the popular B-Wing in quirky unconventional design, and thematically loads of fun, since who doesn't want a flying fortress inspired heavy bomber in Starwars? With all the silly dog fighting style of the franchise, it was a perfect pick. But they freaking cocked it up!
Star Wars RPG 3.5e Wizards of the Coast D&D style. book came out around 20 years ago, " Star Ships of the Galaxy," they revise in during 4e calling it Saga Edition and Saga sucked.
Point being an Xwing traveling at full ramming speed hitting a target does as much dmg as a proton torpedo. Wiki says Xwing weight in at 10 tons in mass. So we set up foundry ships to mine asteroids to smelt down and compress high density iron rods to Mac ISD with or magnetic attach to a ships hull by the dozens to do deatachments during ramming speed flybys. Over all a lot cheap than stander warheads cost to make or by. Now if you create a ceramic cover for those rods they can survive being fired from orbit passing through a given planet's atmosphere. Instead of a solid rod, make a tube and fill it with another compound.
My game shop was a bunch of snarky smart azzes, we ion a IDS shield till they drop then figure out how much thermite it will take to cover one square mile of surface area. Our modern thermite will be to low grade to damage their view ports but it will be like covering a persons wind shield with metallic spray paint. Leaving them blind in the darkness of space till they pull out a paint scrapper.
Wiki hold a lot of pages covering Cold War Era Russian EMP missile tech. Our own solar system asteroid belt and the moons of Jupiter hold a hell of a lot of minerals to built EMP weapons.
Not only should it have the tie bounce off the shields and armor but it would have been better to show it getting beaten to pieces, shrugging off turbolaser fire and strike craft fire, TIEs resorting to ramming but the bomber. Just. Keeps. Going. but getting a beating to give the story beat of "Against all odds, complete the mission."
@@Somtaaw7 This this this. Rather than showing loads of them going down like flies, emphasis should have been on a smaller number, probably just three, enduring hell to make it to the target. The escorts around them should have been steadily going down under the overwhelming odds, whilst the bombers should have looked like they'd lost half their hull by the time they reached the end, yet still going regardless. In the end only one would make it still, but every bomber crew would have fought to make that possible.
It should also have been made clear that they were heavy bombers, carrying a very dramatically higher payload compared to the Y-Wings everyone mentions regarding this scene. "Why would you use a heavy bomber when you could use a fighter bomber with a 40th of the payload?" The fact a question that obvious even comes up is a testament to how much the scene failed. It should have been a squadron of Y-Wings designated role in the mission, to pull ahead as they closed on the target to take out the turbo lasers, something that directly suits their role as a strike craft, and something that Poe's X-Wing should have significantly struggled to accomplish against heavily armoured turbo-lasers with it's cannons alone.
I don't even think they fit into Star Wars ship design. It looks like someone looked at the nebulon B, cut the front off then called it a day.
@@ShadowtheRenamon Cut the front off? The part with the main body and protruding lower section? I'm guessing you mean cut the back off. The section with the stalk and main thrusters? Regardless, I'm not sure how saying that it looks similar another star wars ship would be an argument that it doesn't fit the design.
Seems to fit the Slayn & Korpil aesthetic perfectly far as I'm concerned (The shipyard that manufactured the B-Wing and V-19 Torrent).
Starwars has a crazy range of diverse and eccentric ship designs. To pick this specific ship out of hundreds and claim it looks bad or doesn't fit the aesthetic, I've got to argue again that you're only disliking it for it's association to the crappy Disney movies and the awful scene writing it was featured it.
I strongly believe that had it been featured in Episode six, replacing the token B-Wings that were shown but not detailed, then everyone would have wanted to know more about it and it would have easily become a fan favourite. And that if the fan favourite B-Wings had instead been introduced in the Episode 8 assault on the Dreadnaught, getting gunned down en-mass like a joke, the fanbase would have trashed and hated on the B-Wing just as badly.
It's not the ship at fault. It's the scene.
Literally the only thing this would be good for would be bombing a ground target from orbit, and even then you’re better off just using a full on space ship’s main guns. Going from fast Y-wings to this is a massive step back.
yeah, Y-wings were known for being relatively slow, unmanueverable, and out of date starfighter/bombers that ties would obliterate just by being on the same battlefield and this thing make them look absolutely nimble. Y-wings could take more of a pounding too, without the fratricidal exploding when they did go down.
To be fair the Ys were outdated long before the Battle of Yavin IV. But they look like the latest in cutting tech compared to... that abomination.
@@RembanspellsongTake the basic design, replace all the components, and while you may not get a fast and nimble craft it wouldn't be outdated.
I've always felt like the entire scene with the SF-17s would have played out much better if they just added two lines from Leia and some officer.
"General Organa, are you sure this is a good idea? Those are in-atmosphere bombers!"
"They're all we have left."
That scene would have been far more effective if they'd used old bombers like Y-Wings charging at the dreadnought against impossible odds. The pilots knowing it was suicidal, but doing it anyway would have allowed for a more believable emotional impact. The old outdated Y-Wings could have landed a few hits disabling the dreadnought allowing the resistance to escape.
The Mandator IV-class siege dreadnought wouldn't have been disabled? Puny and fragile Y-wings against it?
@@AshanBhatoa The Y-wing, puny and fragile? the same Y wing that had some of the best shielding a fighter/bomber could have until after the Galactic civil war ended in the EU? For its class it was a beast. it's main draw back being it was slow in comparison to the more modern fighters and fell to concentrated fire.
that said, they were F1 cars compared to that travesty of a bomber.
if the resistance bomber could even dent something, a Y wing probably would have completely destroyed it, and with a proper fighter screen, made off with minimal losses.
And just like that, you're a better writer than anyone Disney hired for the sequel trilogy
@@logicaltips4107 They didn't write a tense escape scene, they wrote a bogus reason to demote one of the few interesting characters.
Tell me, can a Y-Wing carry over a thousand proton bombs?
George Lucas had nothing to do with it anymore by this time it was rushed out the door as soon as possible to get a return on the 4 billion dollar buyout of George Lucas
And even if he based the Death Star trench run off of the dambusters operation he knew instead of level bombers he used multirole fighters and strike bombers.
@@barrybend7189 ,
With precision guided munitions with stand off range...
For all the dogfight style combat of star wars... Lucas era star wars pretty much always followed the rule of "If it don't have propulsion, it still has inertia" these things seem to have to literally use conveyer belts to drop their payloads... At which point you better be pulling up hard or you've got live bombs spewing forward into the bomber... Better question... Why not just modify Y-wings into even more dedicated bombers since they were otherwise being phased out it seems. Strap wings on them and cover both sides with missiles, they're already hit and run bombers that would be terrifying.
@@rexex345 ,
Yes... you're correct... it seems that ships in TLJ tend to "sink" when they are out of power...
@@aralornwolf3140 that looked so stupid when I first saw it. Sure, super star destroyer sank, but that's cause it was inside the gravity well of a moon size station, same with corusant. Actual battles in space though, things just floated, the in TLJ things stop making sense... Still wondering what idiot wrote the resistance inside a mon cal, a ship that has long been established to be functionally a shield tank so overly layered that being pelted by artillery should have been a non-factor especially since iirc every single generator is on its own power supply separate from the rest of the ship.
I remember reading some guide or another that had Poe (well the writer speaking as Poe) saying that many resistance pilots would rather fly one of these than an X-wing. So resistance pilots were suicidal, stupid and felt the need for slow? Suicidal would explain these though. If they wanted to die, at the very least one of these things would kill five crewmen rather then just one. Maybe more if it manages to blow up the other ships in formation.
He clearly lied.
There is no way Poe thought these were better than Y Wings!
It's just disney garbage...
This stupidity called the sequels, are just an over priced fanfiction.
@@efxnews4776 Hey! That's not fair! There's much better fanfiction than Rise of Skywalker!
@@01taran i know...
@@efxnews4776 How dare you! That sir, is an insult to fan fiction! I've seen better plot consistentcy in most SpongeBob episodes. Not to mention more logical story lines in a breakfast ceral commercial.
Denial is a horrible yet sometimes humorous thing.
Writers: ”It doesn't need to make sense. The powers of plot armor will protect us!"
Directors: ”This will look great!"
Hard Core Fans: "That's so cool!!"
The rest of us:
(pause, blink, pause)
"And what were you smoking/taking when you had this idea?"
I disagree, the hardcore fans were ticked
@@Omega_1111 I'm one of them
The hardcore fans were the last ones to be considered happy about anything in that film
Hardcore fans was pissed about it.
Hardcore CONSUMERS tho, they loved it.
At least they could've given it shield and maybe it would've been a bit better. I'm a fan of Star wars I liked (not loved) aspects of the sequel trilogy but yes, this bomber is down bad. It's a TIE bomber with more bombs and even less durability. Just like every other ship in the sequels.
You would get better results just welding wings to a Hailfire Droid Tank.
Or just slapping the rocket pods from the Hailfires to sides, with some firing to a big red button in the cockpit.
Yeah, felt the whole scene with these things could've been much better if they used Y-Wings instead (especially as those appeared in the next film). Would've helped reinforce the thing that the Resistance was meant to be scraping the bottom of the barrel when it came to craft, would've been recognisable to long time fans and they could've done an Independence Day style missile hang-up and kamikaze to achieve a dramatic effect.
I mean they had updated X-wings, and some of the pilots were using A-wings. So why this godawful abortion was used, befuddles me.
Maybe if it was as durable as the craft from which it was inspired....
I mean, these things bad as they are, clearly carried 40 times the amount of ordnance that a Y-Wing carries. The Y-Wing is a strike/tactical bomber, not a strategic bomber. Really they just needed to redesign the ships to be less stupid, and re-write the scene to not have them suck so massively. Namely as Hella mentions, it should have been durable and endured a beating from Ties on the way in. Y-Wings would then pull out ahead of the formation to take out the turrets on the dreadnought (which is much more fitting to their role. Poe's X-wing should have severely struggled to do such with it's cannons alone against heavily armoured turbo lasers), clearing the path for the heavy bombers to get in.
@UnknownSquid They just don't work.
Y-wings are equivalent to fighter bombers yes, but Star Wars is much more like modern fighter combat, where conventional bombers are very much obsolete.
Fighters couldn't really fight with the B-17, which would fly really high.
The scene in the movie is pretty much B-17s against fighter jets.
@@JonatasAdoM Eh? I struggle to see how you say that. Star wars combat was literally based on WW2 dogfighting by Lucas own admission, and every scene shows it. Up close and personal evasive dog fighting primarily using guns, with missiles rarely shown or highlighted. Modern fighter combat takes place at multiple, often tens of kilometres apart from each other, using only missiles. It's the furthest thing from starwars fighter combat.
There's nothing about the StarFortress that wouldn't work in the StarWars universe, if it just had a few design tweeks and wasn't scene written to be a snail made of tissue paper. It's really all down to how it's presented. The Millennium Falcon was capable of putting up ten times the fight despite being a civilian freighter with less weaponry. The SF17 as a well shielded single purpose military ship should by all means have been just as if not far more durable, and far more defensible. Other than the old prototype B wing, we'd not really seen much in the rebel arsenal that could credibly take down capital ships like star destroyers without a protracted and dangerous battle. The existence and use of a heavy bomber like the SF17 makes perfect sense in the setting. IF it were portrayed right.
@@UnknownSquid not worth it if you loose all ot it reaching the target
The dumbest thing about these ships was that what they were trying to achieve (from an out of universe/production perspective) was redundant
The Millennium Falcon itself already tapped the B-17 vibe during its flee from the Death Star, while Han and Luke were manning the turrets
Yeah, they could've just upscalled the falcon and designed to to fire forward torpedoes (or like those bombs).
Instead they sent oil-soaked tankers to fight an aircraft carrier... with expected results more or less.
No. The defining characteristics of the B-17 were:
1. Only capable of performing attacks on warships using attack profiles that ended up proving either useless or suicidal (level bombing and skip bombing respectively).
2. Well suited for bombing large ground targets.
3. Better defended against fighters than other contemporary heavy bombers.
4. Still nowhere near well-defended enough to resist determined fighter attacks without taking catastrophic losses.
That fits these things perfectly. They are the type of craft you'd only use against a ship with fighter escort if you had no other choice, and that was exactly the role they fulfilled in the story. They make sense as a dedicated ground-attack platform, and nothing more.
@@goofball3056 "better defended against fighters than other heavy bombers"
If you think that statement applies to the SF-17, I'd like to have some of whatever you've been smoking
The reason the B-17 is well defended is because it has lots of turrets, including but not limited to ball turrets
The Falcon has turrets
The LAAT, has actual ball turrets
It's probably worth noting that when I say "the vibe" of a vehicle, I'm talking about aesthetics and subjective feel, and not its exact role or strengths and weaknesses in war
This is why I chose a very non-technical term like "vibe" rather than "design" or "role" ;)
The particular vibe I'm referring to is that of our heroes keeping their fellow crew members alive by manning turrets and shooting down enemy fighters
The Falcon's escape scene (in my opinion) had the same feeling to it as many such scenes in Memphis Belle
The SF-17 not only didn't have that feeling about it, it didn't even try to
@@347Jimmy The SF-17 has more guns than an early model B-17, and does about as well when outnumbered by enemy fighters.
The attack run on the First Order Dreadnought was the perfect example of what happens when you try and pull off a low-level attack run with heavy bombers against a target with more fighters than you have guns in the air.
While I do agree that the Falcon better captured the myth of the B-17, the SF-17 was a better representation of their actual performance, and the literally suicidal loss rate they suffered.
@@goofball3056 I think you're vastly understating the real life performance of the B-17 there, losing every single bomber was not a common occurrence
Imagine designing something with casualty rates even the Soviets would cringe at. Then passing it off as sci-fi. Then glorifying the idiots that said: “Yeah, I’ll fly something slower than any other Star fighter, a bigger target, with less armor, apparently no shields, and a payload requiring level flying bombing in space.” What, you couldn’t have grabbed some 1000 year old star fighters out of the bargain bin? Literally would have been a more cost effective purchase lore wise.
I suppose you could make an argument for improvised resistance gear, but any other bomber in Star Wars could have done the same job with less crew required and less casualties. Especially since the First Order seemed to think the exhaust port on the first Death Star was a design FEATURE. I was cheering for Poe, first time I saw it, like jeez you give this guy crap and he still scraps a victory, kind of. Then he gets yelled at, like it’s his fault the flying coffins were easier to destroy than the average civilian freighter.
@@ivanivanovitchivanovsky7123 Uhhh they didnt "churn out" stuff as much as "America gave them shit they should've already had."
@@EustaBAracer unless you’re stupid enough to think that the Americans made T-34s, KV tanks, 76mm Russian divisional guns, 120mm mortars, ISU and IS tanks and assault guns, IL-2 and other IL planes as well as Yak planes, as wel as Mosin-Nagant rifles, PPSH-41, PPSH-43, SVT rifles, Maxim machine guns or the myriad of other equipment that made the vast, vast majority of the Soviet Army up, then no, you’re wrong.
They DID churn out their stuff. The main American contribution was in foodstuffs and trucks, the latter of which the Soviets had plenty of GAZ trucks before and after still.
They weren’t some burnt out agricultural nation, otherwise the British wouldn’t shied from the idea of having to fight them with the Americans on their side in the potential operation Unthinkable.
Edit: and if you get your information from that trashy Enemyat the Gates film, then go read some actual history books.
@@ivanivanovitchivanovsky7123
Even before the United States entered World War II in December 1941, America sent arms and equipment to the Soviet Union to help it defeat the Nazi invasion. Totaling $11.3 billion, or $180 billion in today’s currency, the Lend-Lease Act of the United States supplied needed goods to the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1945 in support of what Stalin described to Roosevelt as the “enormous and difficult fight against the common enemy - bloodthirsty Hitlerism.”
400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food
$180 billion worth of offensive fighting equipment, troop transports, firearms, clothing, BOOTS, even food, everything a country would need to fight and WIN a war.
Russia WAS an agricultural nation with delusions of grandeur going into WWII, a nation which handily got slapped by Finns and Japanese just decades prior.
Russia couldn't be arsed to provide BOOTS to their soldiers, let alone enough functional equipment to successfully repel the Germans. No single country "won" WWII. It was equal parts American steel, Russian blood, and British intelligence, with the help of many other contributing nations. Hate all you want, but without the US, Russia would've become Hitler's vacation spot.
@@EustaBAracer and the one thing your revisionist horseshit is missing out is the fact that most of that arrived after Kursk and Stalingrad when the soviets were already pushing back the Germans.
And f*cking lmao at human waves, you know who outnumbered who in Barbarossa? The axis outnumbered the soviets by at least one million men. In fact, they outnumbered them all the way until Stalingrad. You can find all this sh*t on Wikipedia and many other sites.
“Muh 13,000 tanks”
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_combat_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II
The soviets produced a total of 64,000+ medium armoured vehicles (tanks) alone throughout the war.
29,000+ light AFVs including SU-76s that could kill tanks throughout the war.
13,000+ heavy vehicles throughout the war.
And the Soviets PAID for all that sh*t they bought from America on loans. They paid for it with gold, the Americans were profiting off a war when they should’ve helped kill the Nazis off.
“Muh agricultural lazy sh*thole”, that “agricultural lazy sh*thole” produced more tanks and SPGs than the Americans did despite losing a majority of its industrial lands and being forced to move factories during the initial stages for at least a year.
“1.5 million blankets”
There were more than 11 million Soviet troops in the red army alone by 1945. That’s pittance compared to the amount the soviets did produce.
“15 million army boots”, an actual contribution which can’t be ignored for sure, but i didn’t say America did nothing.
And your casual racism has been noted. No, they weren’t too lazy to make food trucks and such for men. In fact, they did their best to do so. They didn’t even use human wave attacks in the f*cking Winter War, why would you be so stupid as to think they used them in WW2? Or are you getting your information from f*cking Enemy at the Gates? They had plenty of bullets and equipment, even vehicles to the point hey vastly outnumbered the Germans in tanks in the Battle of Brody. Food? They couldn’t f*cking produce it because they lost that land which is all in the west. Those areas were literally the first areas to be invaded you brainless dolt.
Bullets? If they didn’t have enough bullets before the bulk of LL arrived, which was around 1943, then they would’ve folded even easier with no resistance. But that clearly didn’t happen what with Svestapol and all the other battles that took placeo.
Trucks? The soviets produced over 1 million trucks you brainless dolt.
www.google.com.au/amp/s/weaponsandwarfare.com/2019/09/08/motor-vehicle-manufacturing-in-soviet-wwii-russia/amp/
All the cr*p you’ve said is ignoring the facts of the war, and I say this as someone who’s actually studied this and read about it from historians like Orlando Figes, Sheila Fitzpatrick and you tubers like TIK, Military History Visualised who all cite their shit or have had access to archives and records.
“Muh Muh gigantic frozen farm”, you clearly haven’t seen what the western parts of Russia is like, the USSR comprised of Ukraine as well as the Baltic’s at the time which were warm like Europe. In fact, the western section of Russia is basically the same sh*t as Europe, but go on, keep showing me how little you know about the USSR much less the Second World War.
Sh*t slapped by the Finns? Only because of pure incompetence from the general in charge, after Timoshenko was put in charge they made advancements and forced Finland to listen to the demands. Japan? They only fought the Tsarist Russia which was the agricultural shithole that the USSR wasn’t. If you even studied the USSR, which I have, in Australia where we have no love for communists, you’d see the industry skyrocketed under the Soviets at great cost of lives.
If you still wish to be wilfully ignorant and spew that garbage, then you’d better bring some f*cking cites and references, but if you wish to be stupid without sources, I’ll drown you in actual sources from historians and history channels.
Edit:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_armored_fighting_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II
The f*cking soviets outproduced *Germany’s* entire AFV production with just their medium AFVs. Unless you’re r*tarded enough to call *Germany* an unindustrialised sh*thole, your “arguments” are moot.
www.statista.com/chart/8269/industrial-production-tanks-second-world-war/
Aww, would you look at this, the soviets out produced the Americans and everyone else individually in vehicles.
@@ivanivanovitchivanovsky7123 Good God you just killed a man, literally Tyrannosaurus-Rekt with facts and logic.
Actually, these bombers getting torn up on approach like they did in the movie is not only a realistic outcome, but the expected one.
B-17s took significant losses in unescorted day raids before the higher ups figured out that that was a terrible idea (the idea was that bomber formations would have enough overlapping fields of fire to handle enemy interceptors by themselves, which didn't pan out). B-17s also attacked from extreme heights to bring them out of the range of most AA and significantly reduce the accuracy of flak. Such high altitude attacks were attempted against capital ships during the war, to little effect. Anything that wasn't a stationary target could dodge such attacks.
The issue isn't that they didn't learn anything from the B-17, it's the opposite. The designers followed its design too closely and got an atmospheric heavy level bomber in a zero-gravity space war. And while the Resistance is no stranger to having to make do with what they've got, they completely mishandled these bombers and threw them headfirst into the enemy without nearly enough escorts to cover them. The whole affair was a massive blunder that only succeeded because the First Order was even dumber.
That makes a shit ton of sense
Good points. IMO, the wasted screen time showing the woman struggling to launch the bombs. Had they instead spent that screen time showing them shooting back at tie fighters and their armor/shields taking hits from dozens of tie fighters before they got destroyed, it might have made them look more sensible. ..or maybe not. Better may have been to include forward bomb launchers. The star destroyer could take out the bombs so they had to disarm it first. Still weak.
@@mechag9488 The whole idea of the bombs "falling" in space was just silly, unless there just happened to be a large planet on the other side of the target to attract them.
There is an obvious reason why torpedoes or missiles of some sort are fired (either with internal propulsion or from a gun of some sort) at targets in most space-based scifi, because there is no gravity (or no ship could possibly be massive enough to have a noticable gravitational field) and it looks ridiculous to have things "falling" in zero-g, ruining suspension of disbelief.
@@user-bk8dq4ys1u
The whole concept of this bomber is ridiculous, which it seems that both of us agree on.
You're talking about strategy and tactics at the very dawn of strategic bombing. This battle is happening after thousands of years of space battles.
Imagine 100 proton torps from a single ship against something like a ISD. Fired all at once and hitting all at once.
I say this every time I see this mess of a design:
The idea of a big bulky bomber with the crew scrambling around inside as the ship is being pummeled by enemy fire, is VERY appropriate for Star wars. There are lots of films set in ww2 bombers that you could borrow some scenes from and Star-wars-ify the way they did the trench run.
But the ship should be sturdy as hell, with physical damage to the hull being patched with shields, so the ship is literally conning appart in a hell storm of fire but still on target.
And the ship needed to have a somewhat sensible design (especially turret placement).
So make it a wing of big, but not ridiculously slow, anti capital ship torpeado boats rather than a conventional bomber. Give the target heavy shields they need to fly under before they can attack (a recurring trope in SW), to force that long drawn out attack run scene. Have the attack come as a suprise from a debris field or something to justify why there isn't already a massive fighter screen in the way (but you can be damn sure those tie swarms are being rerouted).
And basically just don't have them pop like balloons in a pin factory.
The notion for the scene was solid.
The execution was sacrilege.
I think part of the problem is that these are very much a coded-WW2 design, which certainly fits the original Star Wars aesthetic, but the Disney trilogy has turned most of their designs into either generic near future versions of Star Wars ships or just geometric shapes that are so lacking in detail they don't project any particular era. Because of this, these WW2 style vehicles that would have looked appropriate in the original trilogy end up looking very outdated in the films they actually appear in.
It's as if a million voices cried out in horror, and then threw up in their mouths. I fear something horrible has happened.
I like to imagine the Resistance going to an arms dealer to buy some K-wings (a Legends ship that was pretty much this concept done- if not right, then certainly a lot better than the SF-17) and the following conversation going down.
Holdo: "We'd like to buy a squadron of 12 K-wings."
Dealer: "12 K-wings? That'll be 5 million credits."
Holdo: "Shit! After buying all that purple hair dye, I've only got 1 million credits left! What can I get for that?"
Dealer: *Points to squadron of SF-17s*
I miss the K-Wing.
Now that'd be hilarious
Does the Kwing include a kitchen sink? (god i need to get into playing EAW remake again)
@@Wizzo_Prez_Armco it carries so many weapons the stock model lacks a hyperdrive.
Legends did a lot of things better when they did it. Mostly because Disney only stole various part of legends so they could do it worse.
The bombs aren't even all launched at once. In fact, by the time the first one hits, the others will have made a nice line from the blast to chain back up and destroy the "bomb"-er.
I think it's just a misclassification. These things aren't bombers. They're bombs. You're supposed to launch them unmanned/with a simple droid crew from capital ships.
you're still giving it too much credit, when the first ones are out the door and lose gravitic acceleration, the ones on top of it are still getting faster. by the time the last bomb drops, the mid bombs have colided with the first bombs.
I just realized that even the proton bombs don't work. The proton torpedo's intended to fire a directed blast of nuclear energy, kind of like a nuclear HEAT warhead. This means that the warhead has to be, like a HEAT warhead, pointed in a particular direction to have a useful effect, hence why previously it had always been fitted to guided munitions such as the anti-ship missile they call a torpedo for some reason. You know what isn't reliably going to hit on the same direction every time? A ball you chuck at something hoping it will hit.
My headcanon is that the Resistance had set up in an abandoned Imperial base and were caught completely by surprise by the New Order Star Destroyers suddenly on their doorstep. Besides a couple squadrons of X-Wings, all they had were these old decrepit Empire terror weapons that WERE just atmospheric bombers intended only to drop masses of indiscriminate proton bombs over a large area. They weren't supposed to make tactical sense, they weren't supposed to be accurate, they were just supposed to drop lots and lots of awfulness over large (probably mostly civilian) area. In my head-scenario, these bombers get used only as an act of absolute desperation, Resistance doesn't have anywhere near enough fighters to protect the escaping transports, so Leia asks for some volunteers to fly the bombers knowing it's probably a futile suicide mission.
That HAS to be the story because as-written none of that godawful movie makes a lick of fucking sense, fuck Rian Johnson
well done, you made that god awful bomber scene make atleast a little bit more sense
Yeah I think the bombers were mainly for on planet bombing runs and nothing else. But like you said, desperate times call for desperate measures. My thought is the fact that the warheads have to be directly dropped on target or the warheads risk getting shot down or possibly stopped by the Dreadnought's shield
Well Leia actually said no on the bombers it was Poe that for some reason as a highgly skilled combat ace thought that using slow moving flying pinjatas even the "feared" Tie fighter pilots could hit was a good idea. . . but then again he is busy drifting in space like he just saw the first episode of Intial D anime on his little X-wing hud while shooting down turrets that can't aim for shit on a large dreadnaught absolutley covered in the damn things and should have made him holier than freaking cheesus.
Leia in all her great wisdom was the Person involved in the concept that these so called bombers where actually anywhere usefull in any conceivable way for a mobile resistance unit rather than focusing on getting more Y-wings or other similar models for fast attack bombers instead with EMP weapon capabilites just like the Y-wing used to have. . . WTF was she doing during the rebel era did she learn anything?? It would have been smarter to autopilot them and just send them trough hyperspace trough the damn dreadnaught. THAT would have made sense atleast. ..well for a short moment.
But alas we go this....err shit show instead.
Not to mention with their speed and poor manuevarbility and quite retarded shape would never be usefull in any other situation than total air superiority with minimal AA and bunched upo enemies to drop concentrated clusters of bombs on. . .
I mean why in the seven hells would you make the bomb compartment a piece of area that others can single out and aim for especially in a ship that is space capable??
I actually walked out of the movie when i saw those bombers. Went back in saw the "your mom" joke and just had to leave again. It took me 5 attempts to finish this damn thing. XD
@@kenji214245 Y-Wings would be so outdated by this time and keep in mind the Resistance doesn't have the R&D to try and get more of those things or updated versions of it. And we even learn these bombers along with some of their ships were converted Civi ships.
As dumb as the idea of using these things were, there was probably no Y-Wings left around and had to use what they could get their hands on
@@MST545 True the Ywings are kind of old and worn even when they were ordered during the Clone wars their tech had become a bit outdated.
But you mean to tell me that they can afford giant capital ships and fuel. But not to get some proper attack bomber craft??
"Flying Fortress" was used as a name, early in development, before the war, possibly with the Model 299 prototypes. It did not refer to the defensive weapons, which were much more few. It referred to the "selling point". This was the period of Isolationism in the US. The bombers were to be an extension of the Coast Artillery fortresses, by defending the country's borders, in depth. Later, the name was taken to refer to the defensive armament, but the Isolationist name was first. (Ref. Martin Caiden's history of B-17)
Actually, its name was indeed made because of all those guns around it. It was made up by some press guys writing about new bomber after first (or some very early) presentation and guys in Boeing liked it so much that they took it as official name.
This aircraft was result of a concept made by one guy I cant remember name of, who thought bombers should be armed so well that they would not use fighter escort. And it didn't sound that stupid (although it was) at time, when bombers could fly a lot farther than fighters. Unfortunately, after these entered the war it became obvious that bombers, even with lots of guns and flying in tight formations are basically sitting ducks for fighters, but then Mustangs came, and Lightnings and Thunderbolts and rest is a history. Oh, btw, Brits werent as stupid as USAmen and flew their bombers at night, granted that they had to aim at whole city to damage that one factory, but at least enemy had more problems with intercepting them :)
@@IShyper The 8 Air Force aimed at destroying the German Air assets. Hard to do it at night, when the German Fighters can't attack your bomber formations. The Brits wheren't smarter, they simply, contrary to the Yanks, lacked the capacity and intestinal fortitude to take on, and grind down the Luftwaffe over Germany.
@@apgmk1970 To say nothing about the comparatively high amount of collateral damage with area bombing at night (not that there was anything precise about "daylight precision bombing" in practice with the tech of the time).
@@apgmk1970 8th Air Force didn't aim at one consistent goal throughout the war. That really was one of the biggest mistakes of the entire strategic bombing campaign: They constantly changed targets, often too quickly to really tell wether their latest approach was going to be effective. In several cases they genuinely brought the german war industry to the brink of collapse by concentrating on one singular part of it... and then switched targets and allowed it to recover again.
"The real goal was destroying the Luftwaffe!" is basically an excuse made up by USAAF brass to get out of having to admit their consistent fuckups at strategic planning.
I love that today, we have almost 100 year old air frames loaded and ready to just delete a god damn city. Humanity will never know peace because we build too much cool shit that kills everything.
I like the line about destryoing the audiences "I believe button"
It’s sad that Tie bombers most likely would have done better than these
Ship Designer: You know what we need in space combat where speed and maneuverability is everything? Super slow and vulnerable bombers to replace our fast and great Y-Wings!
Ship Builder: Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! I see no flaw in this whatsoever.
I have watched and commented on other reviews of this. . . craft. And in general I have to claim they are too forgiving or generous. You sir have managed to hit all but one of my personal points about this travesty of design. And that point was it also had to fly so close when dropping its ordinance it was in the blast zone of its own ordinance.
Thank you for keeping it honest.
We do what we can here at SCS.
MauLer in his comprehensive review of the Last Jedi *HATES* this bomber.
He sounds reasonable.
The sad thing is that they allready had functional Bombers. Granted the Y and K wings aren't Strategic Bombers, but they'd still have done a better job than this supposedly newer monstrosity.
@@nonyabisness6306 now the k wing....theres a ship i would love to see live action...or hell, ill settle for animated. Talk about punching above your weight.
And i loved this vid just because i had never seen a reviewer that actually hated that ship as much as i do. Well done sir😁👍
The thing I absolutely hated about that scene was that it was both a good scene and a terrible scene at the same time. The crews pushing forward against terrible odds. The last survivor on a doomed ship straining to finish the mission as she died. The acting, the cinematography was all good. But the frame, the setting, the "logic" were so very, very stupid. How did this go through the number of different hands over number of stages needed to bring it to the screen with no one saying, "Even our fans aren't this stupid."
(But some of the fans are that stupid. In the immediate aftermath of the movie's release, I saw people explaining on the internet that the bomber used gravity technology to propel the bombs out of the ship until they fell into the influence of the gravity of the target ship, so it didn't matter there is no 'down' in space.)
One possible contributing factor is the SW game that came out where the heroine finds the plans to the dreadnaught that identified the dreadnaughts weak spot...
Add RJ to the mix who refused to be beholden to what came before and we don't learn of these plans... If we had we would have learned that Leia would have had to have authorised the bombing mission... If she had then the mission would have been on her authority, meaning that she wouldn't have been able to blame Poe for carrying on the mission she would have had to have authorised as the person in command at the time.
Looking at the film, knowing the plans existed, got to Leia who authorised the bombing mission, only to see her seemingly forget the plan and abort the mission half way through does not do Leia any favours.
Now had Leia indicated the dreadnaught's destruction was an exercise to carry out if they still had people on the ground, and that once the base was evacuated the dreadnaughts destruction was a second priority to escape, that would be different... but like is said... the framing of this scene fails to justify the actions taken... and the wider narrative that encompasses the video game pushes the actions taken into 'wtf' territory. The opening of TLJ was pure spectacle and technically accomplished... but it was not handled by someone with story telling skills...
That said, Ivan Ortega's recut of the scene shows how it could have been drastically improved from a beat by beat story perspective.
To be fair. Capital ships and especially SSD's would be fairly vulnerable to inertia weapons. Essentially targeted mines. The Ship is still terrible at deploying them and frankly, turning them into dumbfire rockets would be more effective....but hey the weapon itself at least could function in the way described....unless they can project gravity to repell them.
@@nonyabisness6306 Honestly, if the bombers could project gravity whats stopping them from getting to a standoff distance and just tilting upwards and tossing the load in the general direction of the dread. If each one has a thousand warheads and only a couple are needed to cripple the ship ya know, one of them is bound to hit the sweet spot.
NOTE: I'm not having a go at you. This is directed at the writers who thought up this awful mess.
@@nonyabisness6306 Yes. Totally agree. It's not as if there were dedicated ships with gravity well generators in the Star Wars Universe that were specially made to drag ships out of hyperspace and who could probably reverse those generators to help disperse debris fields.
Oh. What was that? There were 15 different versions of that ship made by several different factions of the Star Wars Universe?
@@meroddaglenholm7924 This is my thought as well. They have artificial gravity on every ship anyways, so they could conceivably even use non-specialised ships. Of course we don't know if the physics would work out like that, but then there's allready plents of established bombers and anti-ship weapons that could be used rather then this. not to mention that bombs in space would be very easy to shoot anyways due an inability to change course.
This ship was meant to be destroyed for the narrative rian was trying to write (which is just as good as the starfortress' design). I doubt anyone on the production team even considered making her try and logically fit into the universe.
Would that the sequel trilogy as a whole could be so easily destroyed.
@@SacredCowShipyards It already did half of the job. If only Lucasfilm had higher-ups who'd finish the job. :/
There were other more logical designs shown in an official art book and online.
Its a running theme these days of narrative/theme/payoff first, consistency/logic/believability last. Also known as "I want my fanfic to be acknowledged as canon, and fuck everything that was already established."
Sadly that was applied to every side, and I swear if I have to hear one more fraggin time about how this movie "subverted Expectations" NO! As soon as those big First Order ships I knew none of them were going to make it out of the movie, it's was the Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi Speedrun written by an idiot. "Hey let's reenact the Executor's entire life span in 5 minutes without any of the cool build up or pay off for the audience when the enemy super battleship gets the Kamikaze special."
Since, in my head canon, the House of Mouse films never happened, I find it interesting that the “Legends Continuity” New Republic (basically the Resistance but less moronic) actually had access to a pretty darn good bomber…and I don’t mean the K-Wing. I mean a craft called the Missile Boat, which was developed by the Empire, but which the New Republic captured the blueprints for. Now, this thing had one blaster cannon for defense in its prototype stage, mounted on the chin so it’s not impossible to target the cannon, but it also had an experimental engine booster that used ungodly amounts of energy. When the New Republic figured out “uh, we don’t need that; this thing is a bomber”, it could mount two turbocharged laser cannons under the chin, which is somewhere between a laser cannon and a turbolaser. It had no folding wings or other useless doodads, it was pretty heavily armored and had insane shield strength, and finally, it had two very large magazines that could carry up to ten guided proton bombs, twenty proton rockets, or thirty proton torpedoes (or forty advanced concussion missiles that were a left-over from its Imperial days when it was just supposed to spam guided missiles at enemy fighters). It was never really clarified, but I’m also fairly sure these things had a lever you could pull to jettison the magazine if your shields failed and it came under intense fire, which in turn gave you a better chance of surviving. Handling was great; it was just shy of being as fast as an A-Wing and was ridiculously maneuverable, meaning it could do a pretty good job taking evasive action to the point where it could actually lose an enemy fighter.
It had no turrets, but only had a crew of one pilot; think the original Douglas BT2D-1 Skyraider before it was renamed the AD-1 (and then A-1) and you have a pretty good idea of what the Missile Boat was analogous to in a potential production form. Namely: being a torpedo bomber (kind of analogous to proton rockets) as well as a level bomber (analogous to proton torpedoes; I know they totally mixed the names up) that, while not a true fighter, could still stand a pretty good chance without much in the way of escort fighters.
The in-universe explanation as to why the New Republic before the House of Mouse got its grubby, pro-Concentration Camp hands on Star Wars did not use this thing in a wider role was basically not wanting to award what their government saw as a pro-Imperial company (Cygnus Spaceworks of Greek Letter Shuttle infamy, but which also did the Alpha-class Xg-1 Assault Gunboat, which could fly and land with its folding wings shot off/they actually were meant for storage) and thus gave their bomber contract to Koensayr, the same company that made the Y-Wing, by giving them the K-Wing, which required more of a crew, but did not have a significant advantage in the ordnance it could carry (it did have an advantage, but not an enormous one and while it had two ball turrets for a 360 degree field of fire, one was way too vulnerable, plus you had a crew of four rather than one and evasive capabilities were MUCH worse, especially on the early models, plus the early K-Wing was literally too stable, requiring an entire extra engine to help it maneuver until they redesigned it rather radically). That kinda sucked which bomber got adopted, but it also made sense from an in-universe point of view since the K-Wing was still at least functional, had a 360-degree field of fire, and you had a bunch of politicians with axes to grind selecting it, rather than the actual pilots that test-flew the handful of captured and test example Missile Boats, which they thought was the better idea and even figured out a way to keep the cost down on by eliminating the booster system that crippled it within the Empire. Oh, and the Missile Boat had a pretty good hyperdrive and the K-Wing has no hyperdrive to cut on costs.
I kinda hoped we’d see a Missile Boat or something like it when the Mouse-eared types decided to decanonize both the Missile Boat and the K-Wing, and we at least started to see a few ideas popping up from those from the books. Needless to say, the Resistance Bomber was NOT one of these ideas, though.
I've noticed that Disney hasn't made any TV shows based off the sequel era yet... It seems like they're trying to pretend it never happened.
Which I'm fine with :)
Tail 666 has to be the most legendary b17 story. The things that plane went through, the things it’s crews had to go through. The fact it was tail number 666 makes the the story even more insane. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Equiping a Y wing with these warheads could almost work. The Y wing is relatively small and fast, and whatever version of big triangle they end up shooting at at are slow enough that they could just fly straight at them, then release the bombs to glide ballistically onto the target (Dropping them "down" is irredeemable). In Star Wars, the Y wings usually shoot their proton torpedo's from such short distance that the bombs would hit too, and if you leave off the engines of your proton torpedo's, you can carry more boom. Essentially, the Y wings would serve as dive bombers, keeping the theme going if that's what you want.
But with any kind of heavy bomber, you don't want to do that, any more than you'd want to dive bomb with a B17.
Clone Wars basically used them like the Swordfish Torpedo bombers in the Malevolence arc.
Or build many more smaller faster ships who carry a few of them suckers and stick primitive chemical rockets on them, use them like rockets like the Mustang and so on on carried.
But that would make sense.
It is not so much that the rebell bombers where stupid, it is that the ww2 bad guys had the V weapons that where kinda higher tech than that... can we say embarrassing?
'down' sort of functions sense, given that the craft doing the dropping has artificial gravity, but it's still a stupid idea.
and thats how Tie Bombers and Y Wings conduct bombing runs.
Both are able to be equipped with Proton Bombs, that can be "Dropped" (More like ejected with force) downwards. Those Warheads are significantly larger and more powerful than Proton Torpedoes, of wich both carry a larger payload than other Craft.
So yeah Fighter Bombers or Dive/Torpedo Bombers is correct.
You can see scenes of that in the Battle of Scarif in Rogue One, where Gold Squadron bombs the Shield Gate and in A New Hope, where Tie Bombers bomb the asteroid with the Exogorth, in wich the Falcon hides.
@@zhufortheimpaler4041 They quite simple tried just a little to hard to create an scenario for an desired outcome by having this stupid ships not worth there scrap metal.
The survivability of theese things are so poor that building them as guided missles one way would make more sense.
Then at least you have hope that a few more actual reach there target.
Even todays primitive nuclear powered sea fahring ships have point defense turrets... and the people in star wars travel between planets like taking the subway to the other side of town.
Poor design and poor writing if even an dunce like me notices
Have that giant vertical magazine feeding a launch system that can rotate 360, and it could be a standoff bomber just spamming torpedos at large capitol ships.
Hell, just have it launch proton torpedoes foward in massive salvos.
No, it has to get to point blank snd fly over the target....
If that giant bottom opened up in front and a all of proton torpedoes opened up with all of the massive purple trails arcing out it would be a much better ship, but would make the fixed guns make sense a little more.
Hell retcon it to be a small defensive platform that had to be refitted mid construction which explains why they are so slow.
@@masonwilliams1345 they actually retconned it in the comics.
They claimed they were built by the republic specifically for in-orbit humanitarian aid dispensal. Then got retrofited by the resistance with bombs.
Which is something I love because as far as excuses go that's probably the worst one they could've used. I mean. It just opens up so many questions, all of which are answered with "because the writers didn't think of it"
Why not have a fast bomber that just uses a massive torpedo like the Gamilas dedicated torpedo bomber from Space Battleship Yamato. That thing carries a torpedo the size of the craft itself.
@@barrybend7189 a fast bomber could also reference the Mosquito, which was a very successful and iconic multirole fighter bomber in ww2
@@antonyono2257 well the Gamilas torpedo bomber was based around the Japanese dual purpose torpedo/ dive bomber from WW2.
And to top of this garbage scow, it suffers from “The Davy Crockett” syndrome, it can’t get out of its own blast radius.
At least with the Davy Crockett if you ever had to use it death would’ve been a mercy. At least when you consider what kind of situation it was intended for
Admittedly, the only one we saw suffering from that/actually dropping its payload had lost is cockpit and any way to steer our of said blast zone...
So, random thought: if they had set it with all turrets and explained it as a retrofit of a mine field layer that woulda been less egregious than 'oh it's a space bomber'
In Admiral Thrawn: "I expected you to fail, Governor Price. but I never thought you could fail so... spectacularly."
Honestly this bomber makes more sense as Imperial tech then Republic tech. Slow, ungainly, cripplingly inflexible,expensive to operate,and deadly to its operators is the hallmark of the TIE school of design.
Except that TIE fighters were quite small, exceptionally fast, nimble, cheap as hell to produce and operate, and heavily armed for their size. Granted, they weren't very survivable, but in large enough swarms, that didn't really matter. Hell, had Luke missed his shot, the Rebellion was essentially doomed even if the Death Star never fired on Yavin because the defensive TIE's were wiping the floor with the Rebel ships even before he managed to make it to the trench.
If I recall correctly, the reason the T-65 X-wing wasn't accepted by the Imperial military is that it was too large and expensive to be seen as an adequate replacement for the TIE.
If someone made a modern remaster of the Battle of Hoth and stuck a bunch of these things floating menacingly alongside the AT-AT’s, I’d believe it.
Things that could fix these things.... Shields, armor.... These things should have been stupidly durable, able to shrug off direct impacts from Tie Fighters crashing into them and able to keep going.... More forward facing turrets as you have suggested... and yes make the bombs launch out forward for a cloud of missiles flying forward.... I mean just imagine how much cooler that fight would have been if they launched a shitload of thousands of missiles forward at the dreadnaught with like half of them hitting the swarms of Tie Fighters coming in to take them out.... one has a malfunction that prevents it from firing its payload, the other payloads aren't quite enough to get through the enemy ships armor.... They are getting hammered hard and starting to take losses as the enemy is able to rotate the entire capital ship around to bring its remaining anti armor guns to bear on them.... It ends with the one with the undeployable payload suicide ramming into the enemy ship and manually detonating its payload..... (With its heavy armor being how it was able to penetrate the hull of the enemy vessel...)
Bonus points if the last scene we see of it is the bay doors opening and an FO trooper just ceasing to exist as a couple thousand tons of explosives squash his body flat before they detonate.
Also how about NOT flying your last bombers in such a close formation that shooting one doesn't mean insta-killing almost all of your forces
Id watch that.
Here is how you fix this ship, just use them as decoys (target practice for those poor tie fighters) so X-wing and Y-wing can do their job
It would be doable if the main hull was a railgun, and the bomb area was just a clip to feed the railgun. This would enable the ship to hit a distant target with near lightspeed projectiles, instead of that lame ass bomb drop. I'd put the Magazine as a drum feed located within wings also, giving the ship a stingray look with millenium falcon weapon blisters all around it. And seeing the "bomb" discharge would be from the front of the craft, it would have a common center of mass loaded or not, as the Starfortress has a issue if one ever survived a mission.
All these years later, i still haven't managed to make it past the droid playing whack a mole in this movie.
And then shorting the [deleted] out of itself because reasons.
@@SacredCowShipyards I didn't manage to get to that part.
The resistors on a breadboard he was playing whack a mole made my brain nope right out.
God this movie is terrible. Just pure 🤮🤮🤮
I've got a bookshelf with almost every Star Wars novel ever written, and after suffering through this movie at a theater I decided I was done. Never have watched Solo, despite it being on Netflix for a bit. Never watched whatever they called the last one either. I saw the first maybe 5 minutes of it once, but noped right out of there around the time they showed a ship blinking in and out of hyperspace in atmosphere, instantaneously teleporting to other locations.. all the while being followed instantaneously by fighters that shouldn't even have hyperdrives.
@@eno2870 I pretty much noped out after the first movie.
I gave "rogue one" a chance, but it was a pretty mediocre movie.
"solo" never interested me.
About the only thing that's even kept me from being completely apathetic to the brand is "The mandalorian".
I only watched it because Jon Favreau(Iron man fame) was in charge.
And Gina carrano, of course.
I'm pretty much just apathetic towards the brand at this point.
This ship is what you get when you design and plan the scene you want first then create the ship that would be in it. It is clear they wanted the "overwhelmed bomber against terrible odds" shot so just had the design team make something that could deliver that mental plan. Instead of thinking how a logical attack would go, they created the end result first then worked backwards to make it happen
What's worse is that you could just flip the bomb section up to be fully below the crew block, and it is suddenly far more defendable, while still keeping the payload.
This isn't Lucas's fault, he understood enough about space that he knew this wouldn't work. (hence why every bomber in REAL star wars uses torpedos)
WOW- didn't realize the TIE Bomber wasn't a bomber.
What? The only thing we see it do, in the movies, is drop bombs vertically across an asteroid.
@@Sephiroth144 Even the TIE bombers make logical sense. As observed, the bombs from it weren’t dropped so much as fired down, with aiming variation meaning they were a guided bomb of sorts.
Also, the entire TIE series was about quantity over quality, hence its very similar design to the originals - this was already established by the movies that TIEs were super expendable.
@@openthinker6562 The bombs in the star fortress are also "fired down" electromagnetically. The artificial gravity inside the star fortress is also naturally going to push the bombs down, as is implied visually during the scene when the bombs are releasing, moments after the female crew member got done falling through the bomb bay.
The proton bombs are also be magnetically drawn towards a target. This is all according to the Visual Dictionary for Episode 8.
@@TheNobleFive Uh, sorry, but the star fortress makes very little sense compared to the TIE Bomber to the point where it is very hard to even compare them.
The TIE Bomber has guidance systems to fire them down at different angles without having to tilt the ship. Also, we can assume that it would be similar to the Y-Wing and could be fitted with heavier ordinance like torpedos and others.
However, the Star Fortress makes no sense within Star Wars. In space combat, those kinds of heavy bombers would only make sense if they are heavily armored/shielded (they aren't, one TIE breaks through 3 of them), have a ton of guns (only has 3) and has much more speed (It's slow as all heck).
In WW2 (which is its inspiration), these bombers were only used on stationary targets on planets. But in Star Wars, such large bomber's aren't necessary due to the existence of Battleships and Starships.
Ever heard of orbital bombardment? The Empire would just park a Star Destroyer above a planetary target and just fire down. No need for heavy bombers.
Some things should exist logically within the Star Wars universe. And unfortunately, the Star Fortress doesn't - small and fast bombers like the TIE bomber and Y-Wing, AND star destroyers with orbital bombardments have made the concept of heavy bombers like the Star Fortress obsolete.
Also, third party sources aren't really helpful, these things should stand by themselves in the movies without needing a visual dictionary.
@@TheNobleFive Using their artificial gravity reasoning, that also means that the bombs at the top of the chute would impact first (Since there is no gravity in space to act on them), instead of forming a helix of falling explosives, they would all arrive relatively simultaneously.
Also, if you say the Star Destroyers have their own Gravity, that logic falls apart when they go to lightspeed, as if they could not *internalize* their artificial gravity, the ship would be torn apart when jumping to lightspeed.
Furthermore, Even if these bombers were intended to be a form of bunker buster, they are still the most impractically and poorly designed ship ever showcased in Star Wars, yes even worse than the Eyeball ship from SWTOR.
Well assuming(just to make an ass out of U and I) that the bombs "fall" due to the artificial gravity, why don't they re-orient the said gravity so the pilot is facing "down" and just drop the bombs out the front... oh, right that idea requires a middle school level understanding of physics.
Yeah, the real counterargument to this ship isn't that "there's no gravity in space" but that the drop/launch system for the bombs isn't oriented in the direction of the attack. They should have struck from above the enemy ship and launch their bombs from quite a distance away. Didn't look like the big ship was that manoeuvrable to avoid them. And if anyone argues that they could have shot the bombs down, well, at least the bombs aren't manned.
To bring a middle school understanding of physics into it.
The ships don't need artificial gravity to work.
Ships in star wars don't orbit. They are stationery in space. The gravity of the planet below still effects the ships.
Now I don't belive that's how they are planned to work. But that's how the real world physics would work if applied to these ships
@@TheWeeJet Sure, but gravity at that distance isn't all that strong. Besides, that still leaves them utterly useless in deep space and we certainly have deep space battles in Star Wars. Overall, the delivery system makes no sense for a space-borne platform since there are far better options already available in-universe.
@@Llortnerof oh ye completely agree it makes no sense the ships exist.
Just really annoys me when people talk about how the scene is unrealistic because "gravity does not work like that" or so on. Because like I said it actually does work like that and all these people are wrong.
@@Llortnerof as for not as strong ye it's not. But still more than strong enough. Gravity is still 90% of the strength at sea level at the ISS
One literal third of a tie fighter takes out two of them. Quite the “fortress.”
that resistance bomber would make an epic space mine layer.
I LOVE the unbridled frustration in this one, but my favorite line has from the first 30 seconds: "... and that weird eight-legged thing you rode in on."
This is what happens when disney hires a new guy to make your movie that knows nothing about the franchise except lots of people liked it.
Aside from all the obvious points you made, id like to point out this has NO precursor. The clone wars surplus Y-Wing light bombers used a modular magazine to feed 2 chin mounted launch tubes with various missiles, torpedoes, and freefall bombs (kicked out the front of the tube by a mechanism in the magazine). It also had the speed and agility to bring its 2 fixed cannons to bear against most hostile bombers and transports, akin to how SBDs were sometimes used in WWII. It was augmented by the B-wing which was slightly larger, but faster, better armed and about as agile with the launch tubes in the chest this time. The K-wing that replaced both (retconned by disney along with the rest of the extended universe) switched from internal magazines to external hardpoints that virtually any weapons pack imagineable can be fitted to.
So we are to believe that after decades of proving the value of compact, fast, durable, and versatile, Rebellion 2.0 opted for a barge made of tissue paper that can only do 1 thing and very poorly?
The Star Fortress makes the B-Wing look like a Y-Wing.
Yep. The B-Wing is an engineering masterpiece compared to team killing champ. Both were made to take out capital ships but the B-Wing did it with a scaled down version of the Death Star converging laser system which would work in space where you are going to find the capital ships.
"We could design this... thing like a sea turtle with guns pointed at all directions with its biggest gun being a laser with 1/100th power compared to the Death Star."
"No, make it shittier."
"Convenient exploding red barrels from Half-Life?"
"Yes."
I have been waiting for something like this for a very long time. Its pure joy for me to hear this.
Crewmate: "Would you like us to design bombers for the movie, perhaps add in those Y-wings?"
Rian Johnson: "Sure, let's add in bombers, but no Y-wings."
Crewmate: "So, what bombers would you like?"
Rian Johnson: "You know when someone gives you the L gesture, let's make a ship shaped like that."
Crewmate: "An L shaped bomber? And add turrets and a bunch of torpedoes?"
Rian Johnson: "No torpedoes, just give it a bunch of round bombs for bombing runs, oh and give it some really shit armor."
Crewmate: "Well uh, ok. I guess."
Whoever thought this was a really great idea must be on something really good such as deathsticks...
If they had used them as kamakasi attacks they would have lost fewer crews and been more effective
This would not work, the New Republic would run out of purple hair dye and the mission would fail.
Oh I can assure you it gets way sillier than even this video mentions.
Checkout how they land on a planet - or rather don't as they can't they can only land on a carrier vessel or a pre-prepared landing racks.
Also the whole ship is easily opened to space if it gets holed so any small hole in the ship suffocates the whole crew.
The bombs are also "magnetic" no really - so how do they avoid magnetising to the wrong thing or each other ? sure they magnets are not activated until the clear the ship - but the bombs could clump and take each other out unless the bomber is moving forwards and dropping them out slowly.
They have to be magnetised they said so they don't have to be launched - they simply fall out in the movie they are not magnettically impelled or anything by a force field curtain - they just fall out of the ships due to it's localised artificial gravity and leisurely carry on until the magnets are drawn to a metal object.
Also if the bomber tries to point its belly and squirt them out at distance or get above it's target - then the ship its attacking can just MOVE OUT OF THE WAY or even flip on it's side and thrust away at 90 degree's so the bombs miss. & if they are dumb enough to shoot them from really far away then they can be shot down by fighters or by the capital ships point defense turrets.
Note how Poe had to destroy all the point defense weapons on the Dreadnought before they could even initiate and attack run and if they darn First order had simply managed fighters better they'd never have got close since one shot seems to immediately blow them up anyway.
In any normal battle the target vessel would just have shot them down - and likely ground defense would be able to do the same too if they were attacking a ground target too.
They are not just stupid - they are EVERY KIND OF STUPID - but especially for lacking armour and decent shields - even without the payload deployment method being exceptionally silly. Making the turrets ridiculous - is just carrying on the design philosophy I guess, & remember these tissue Paper vessels are all externally mounted on their carrier vessel open to being shot at - and loaded with those bombs that are very volatile. if the carrier went up while the vessels are attached it might take out anything near it even worse than we already saw.
I was kinda horrified at the level of stupidity on display when watching the movie for the 1st time.
Captain Kanady was the only legitimately intelligent person in the entire fleet on both sides, and he died about 5 minutes after he got there. The very best part of the series is when Hux gets executed.
@@vishnu79 Yes, nearly everyone behaved like they were 8 years old.
They were not behaving like grown ups.
And these bombers were not designed by adults. I don't understand how someone could have signed to pay hundreds of millions to make these movies.
Yeah
Yeah, in Legends (Star Wars stories from before the Disney acquisition), nobody ever wrote about ships dropping bombs "on" other ships. They shot missiles and torpedoes "at" other ships. Plus, the SF-17 never existed. This is all Disney's "story group" and Rian Johnson here.
And this is why the K-Wing made a lot more sense as a bomber it was smaller (being almost half the length and considerably shorter) , probably faster (considering the glacial pace that these things seem to fly at), granted it can't carry 1000 bombs but it does carry 16 torpedoes, and probably won't being as susceptible to commiting fratricide when taken out
"I am the TIE Bomber, the biggest death trap in Star Wars! I'm slow af, have no shields and am big and bulky, heck I'm so big and bulky mixed with being slow af, that many times when Danny Duignan (me, the person typing this) was playing X-Wing Alliance, he many times took me out by dumbfiring one Proton Torpedo at me! You know Proton Torpedoes, warheads that aren't meant for dogfights, but rather bigger capital ships, Danny took me out with one because I the TIE Bomber without any shields am so bulky and slow af!"
*MG-100 StarFortress SF-17:* "Hold my green-titty-milk" :3
I've said it to my friends before. This is not a bomber. This is a mine layer, repurposed as a bomber by the resistance. It is slow as molasses, weak as glass, and a single one carries enough munitions to destroy a vessel the scale of an SSD by itself.
Thats pretty valid, I hadn't thought of it like that.
Well that makes sense. Explains a lot of the shite design as a bomber.
that still does not make any sense. When in the complete history of mankind has any army or navy ever done anything as stupid as repurposing a mine layer to a fighting vessel?
Even the Japanese who were desperate enough to have kamikaze pilots and sent the Yamato on a suicide mission never sent their mine layers against the US Navy. Even though those mine layers also have enough explosives to sink any battleship.
The idea is just insane and there is no way to make it believable.
@@marcdevries9027 It sounds to me like you are caught up on not understanding that starwasrs doesn't follow two-dimensional maritime naval strategy at all.
@@LostInTheFarmersMarket No, it doesn't make sense.
It doesn't even make sense as a mine layer, at least not with those bombs. And then it would not have a way to "drop the bombs" necessary for the delivery as seen in the movie. If it was a minelayer, it would not be able to propel its bombs towards its target. Mines are stationary.
No way does this design make sense.
I always assumed these things were supposed to be mine laying vessels. Would have been great to deter the chase later in the movie with those fixed guns on the back as they ran away. The biggest error was calling them bombers in the first place.
I've thought of this for a while and there are such things as bombs that are just rocks, the concrete bomb. We know very well that just throwing a rock can be devastating due to mass, speed, all the fun physics. So with just the basic concept of rail/gauss tech, you could turn a metal ball into a Tunguska level meteor. In the Thrawn trilogy (which I'm sure no one on set even looked at) they specifically noted that they had launch catapults so this tech does exist to at least some extent. Further the final attack was just this idea with a warp drive.... So my question has always been....
Why in the ever loving heck aren't these things just long range mass driver cannons? They could bomb planets with ease and in space they would be the biggest possible gattling guns ever imagine. If they actually used torpedoes they would be giga bolters. But no, no one had better dare have a creative thought at Disney now. Keep that tight formation so you all explode for cheap thrills.... Idiots!
So true, but Star Wars is always a exercise in looking backwards for inspiration, not being creative and forging new paths.
The TIE Bomber also drops bombs from below itself, but they're always escorted by TIE Fighters and Interceptors and are also far smaller and faster than the Resistance Bomber. Plus, they have front facing laser cannons.
Thank you. I really hate the whole idea of this ship, especially when all of them were killed by the end of the operation. Sure, a single one managed to be strong enough to destroy the dreadnought it was targeting... But if losing all of them to bring down one (sure, big) target is considered acceptable losses... One would figure this ship was designed by a mighty empire who doesn't give a damn how many bombers and crew it loses as long as the enemy is dead.
The way the artificial gravity is oriented is at least the right direction to launch the bombs.
That's it. That's the only vaguely positive thing I have to say about this garbage. Launching them that way is _stupid,_ but at least it's consistent in it's overwhelming stupidity.
why not create artificial gravity propeller that would launch the payload to the front, like a unguided inertia bomb, that will travel on a fairly straight line in space to hit the target.
Or better, we can use the proppeler strong enough, to launch it at sub light speeds, hidden behind a moon or planet curvature, and use gravity whell to change direction of the "bullet" to hit the target from safety. Virtually undetectible deth from nowhere, relativistic missle, it can be even a fist size rock pebbles to punch trough the ship. Star Wars is utter nosnece
@@randalldraco3822 I'll do one better. Why not a high speed bomber that launches frigate type Proton Torpedoes instead of tiny proton bombs.
@@barrybend7189 because that would work
Can't wait to hear you talk about the Death Egg. Or any of Robotnik's flying contraptions, for that matter.
As for the "bomber" you're discussing. That's clearly a phaser. The very shape of it is a phaser.
The magic behind Eggman's robots and creations is that the Sonic universe operates on a more cartoony sense of logic. In that sense, his creations make a lot more sense than these "Bombers" any day.
@@caffe4604 eggmans giant fish fleet in heros is what i remember wen i hear about robotniks fleet
That would be difficult to do, as the Death Egg doesn’t ever really do anything before it gets destroyed. I’d imagine it was basically meant to have the same capabilities as the Death Star, but then again, if that were the case the Eclipse Cannon wouldn’t have been such a big deal in Sonic Adventure 2. It’s hard to analyze something so nebulous.
The ship, the Nebula B from the Original Trilogy has the same shape, though the classic Phaser predates even that.
When I first saw this scene, I thought the bombers were hastily converted freighters used in a time of desperation. But then the visual guide came out and confirmed that they were purpose built bombers.
What's funny is these bombers would have been perfect for taking out Starkiller base, but they didn't use them there. They used X-Wings, which stood no chance of getting the job done.
The Resistance Bomber, not even plot armor can save it.
I 100 percent agree with the fact that this thing is an insult to the b-17 flying fortress to put it extremely lightly
"Hey, remember those programmable guided missiles that everything from Vulture Droids to Slave 1 to Y-wings carry?"
"I remember them."
"Yeah, how about we not do that?"
It was Ruin Johnson, not Lucas the one guilty for this one.
The only thing i can imagine was that the initial purpous of this craft was mine laying. Behind friendly lines you only have to flee from attackers so the turrets on the back would make sense and the drop chute would house the mines that get ejected via a magnetic field one by one.
The triangle is speed, health, power. The resistance bomber is off the charts on power and dropped the other two so hard to do that that it's useless.
whenever describing how bad something in disney starwars is is always like "But WAIT!... There's MORE!"
You know what might fix the functionality if not the astehetic problems, mass drivers. Impart some momentum and direction to the ordnance and you're golden. Bomber, mine layer, and all kinds of useful stuff with that.
These things are indicative of that whole move, style over substance. They're supposed to look like cool bombers, not make sense. During this scene and many more throughout the movie I kept going, "That sure is pretty, and people are going to love this movie for it. I just wish it wasn't so dumb so that I could enjoy it too."
"You're gonna get attacked by Thais."
A bunch of kicking dudes practicing Muay Thai flying through space while screaming.
Would make a heck of alot more sense than what they went with in the movie.
This video seems right...
th-cam.com/video/p-aZTGakEjg/w-d-xo.html
When I first saw the bombs being dropped, I thought they were being shot from the ship by a sort of railgun. An explanation that makes far more sense than the magnets Disney thought up.
I think the concept could have worked a lot better in the movie with a couple changes.
1. Throw a scene explaining the dreadnaught was heavily shielded against ion weapons from below (makes sense so Hoth 2.0 doesn't happen, and this is a specialized ship to glass planets), however the point defense turrets are still vulnerable on top.
2. Have the rebels launch the Y-Wings first escorted by the X-Wings to soften up the point defenses and to try to protect the Starfortresses
3. Either have tie fighters already deployed, or have them launch almost immediately. None of the "That fighter is too small for the point defenses" line. This would be obvious to the person commanding said ship, because they should know all about their own ship and what its realistic capabilities are.
4. Have the Starfortresses not die from their own bombs in a normal attack run, and instead of having a single bomber outright destroying two others, have the one Starfortress explode, and heavily damage another one. This damaged one could lose altitude from the dreadnaught and they could make the conscious decision to drop their bombs instead of escaping, and this is the Starfortress that gets caught in its blast.
Just by changing and adding some details, there are still the scenes few people like, but they are presented in a far more logical manner. It's just hard to be worried about the good guys if the bad guys have no sense of tactics. Hell, all disney needs to do is play a wargame with 2 actual people. Give each of them a list of resources, and the ability to request additional/different ones within reason, and tell them each what their objectives are and you will likely have a far better space battle scenes that make sense.
They would have better named this things "mine layers" and say that using them as "bombers" was a desperate measure...
Forget the Tie fighters, these floating targets should have been taken out by the other Star Destroyers. There was literally nothing intelligent about this scene, or perhaps even the movie.
I still have conniptions over the ballistic laser fire during their white Bronco style chase.
I pretty much agree with everything said here. I had thought that if they rejiggered the design into a Torpedo boat, maybe have a ship come in ahead and get Fire Control & Targeting data. And feed it to the SF-17's as they jump in, so they can rapid fire their payload and jump out, that would have made more sense
I think it was in novel or some other sources, the bomber's payload (the big ass clip) was reconfigurable with any kind of ordinance and they were equipped for orbital bombing of ground bases when the FO had dropped on them.
What sucks is that this tactic( X wing providing FC&T to other ships for stand off against capital ships) has been used in the Legends canon, multiple times! In the X wing novels, Rogue and Wraith squadron would use this as SOP when they had to go against capital ships unsupported in fighters. In one instance they had a bunch of freighters rigged as missile platforms with no individual targeting, snuck into orbital traffic and used them as remote platforms to missile swarm and take down a Super Star Destroyer! And it was all believable and had all the dramatic tension you could want a fight between a rag tag band against overwhelming odds you could want.
When that sequence started in TLJ, I thought that was what they would be referencing, only to be floored by the udder farce that occurred instead.
@@MandoWookie That would make a lot of sense. The scene was just nonsensical
50 years of Star-bomber evolution and it’s so bad the said 50 year old design could put do, not could, does.
Replace Put with out and a “it” after do and it will make more since
Pretty realistic, seeing as B17 attacks on warships in the Pacific were notoriously ineffective as well.
Gimme a couple TBF Avengers that miraculously work in space, and they'd do a better job.
Dunno if I'd take a Swordfish, but they might still be faster.
A friend and I were talking about this, craft and we came up with a novel idea for it mine layer.
Thats actually one of its uses in the canon.
It epitomizes everything wrong with the Disney SW universe: Look at this soulless reference to something you like! Now spend money on us!
In all the right ways that the clone wars mimicked the Huey in the LAAT, this movie got wrong in this abomination. It demonstrates such a fundamental disregard for the franchise, the fans, and movie making in general that it’s staggering.
It’s a disgrace to the B-17 for them to even refer offhand to it with this abomination.
This was a much gentler critique than I expected.
The best part is that the only knon bomber of this typ to ever drop its payload onto an enemy vessele was destroyed in the explosin caused by its own bombs.
I respect that you devoted any time to these awful things.
Went into TLJ with high hopes, these things dashed that hope and I left the theater glad I hadn't wasted any of my money on it (was there on another person's dime). You sir, have earned a sub.
There are VERY few things in star wars that piss me off as much as this thing does. The others being how disappointing of a villain kilo was with his temper tantrums subverting every expectation, and snoke apparently not mattering at all. (I mean seriously he just... Dies... And then everyone immediately moves on... It's like someone had a DnD character they didn't like and asked the DM to let them kill it off so they could play a new one)
The X-Wing Tabletop makes it astoundingly useful. Tough, lots of firing arcs, with lots of slots for support systems and bombs. It's still an easy target but not as *stupid* as on-screen.
Fun fact: The B17 flying fortress was made to bring its crew back safely
As opposed to the star fortress which is designed so badly it seems international
@@ChrisRC2008 So, the Star Fortress was in The Last Jedi...
@@Sephiroth144 I know and was talking from in universe
@@ChrisRC2008 Ah, the snark was not apparent; was going for the "if its from the Last Jedi, it's poorly designed" angle.
@@Sephiroth144 yes I was
The thing I don't get about the sf-17 is that guided missiles exist in the star wars universe.
Plus, the y wing already filled that niche.