A New Hope 9.38
Mar21
AH! this’ll be the ‘primary’ Mission team Ben was talking about doing a force awakens and dropping out of hyperspace INSIDE a planets atmosphere.
Important Safety tip: Do NOT try this at home. There is an excellent chance you will kill yourself in a very nasty crash at relativistic speeds, and you will DEFINITELY void the warrantee on your hyperdrive..
Simply put, that is impossible going by old EU rules. The planet’s gravity well would have pulled him out of hyperspace before he got that close. That moment in TFA was not one of my favorite moments.
Oh boy… now you’ve done it. I’m going to have to explain why I did something
Here’s the thing. When I originally plotted all this out; Tarkin takes most of the fleet guarding Epimethius and goes to attack the rebels HQ (We’ll be seeing how THAT turns out a couple of weeks). He leaves the remaining forces blockading all known hyperspace routes in and out of the system. Meanwhile the rebels using Pathfinder station (The old republic mapping station where Wedge met the clones in the last chapter) have worked out a NEW hyperspace route into the system and use it to jump in and launch the surprise attack we see here (Not jumping into the planets atmosphere, but jumping in very close to the planet and catching the imperials unaware).
)
Epimethius can’t predict this because the analytical side of it doesn’t know about the hyperspace route or that the rebels have pathfinder station. The ‘force’ side of it is a little distracted by Ben, Kyle and Leia’s antics. (plus what’s cracking off with Luke, Mace and Ca’boath probably isn’t helping
So far so logical and that’s what ‘really’ happens. Where it all breaks down of course is trying to cover all that in a webcomic. It came off as INCREDIBLY clunky when I was scripting it so in the end, I nicked to trick from the force awakens (which probably nicked it from season 3 of Battlestar Galactica or season 7 of Stargate SG-1) as a kind of shorthand way of covering ALL that without needing to throw in heaps of exposition.
As an added justification (mostly to myself), under old EU rules it IS possible for a specially rigged ship to jump deep into a gravity well, but it does tend to burn out lot’s of hyperdrive components in the process. See the Corellian book trilogy for more details if you’re interested (but only if you’re desperate, it’s not that great a series). SO I’m imagining the Rebels prepped the X-wings first with this kind of jump in mind.
There. you might not agree, but at least you now know I do think about this stuff. (Probably a little TOO much actually)