Re: Stormtroopers

I've seen that supplement as well, and WEG's explanation is about the
only
one that really makes sense.  Tarkin, in the movie, clearly did not
believe
that the Rebels had any serious prayer of destroying the station. 
Vader,
obviously, reasoned that the Rebels wouldn't be bothering with a fighter
attack rather than a general evacuation of their base unless they
thought
they had an idea for attacking the station in that fashion that would
work.
Given that Vader was most painfully aware that the Rebels had a complete
blueprint of every facet of the station (since he'd been spending most
of
the movie to that point failing to recover it), he obviously had good
reason
to know that if the Rebels believed they could destroy the station by
that
means, they were most probably correct in that belief.

In George Lucas' own novelization of the movie, he goes into a little
more
detail about how Leia arrived at the conclusion, expressed but not
explained
in the movie itself, that the Death Star commanders let them go when
they
escaped in the Millenium Falcon:  they only sent four TIE fighters after
them.  In Leia's own words in that novel, "They could just as easily
have
sent a hundred."  If sending four or a hundred fighters is all the same
to
the Death Star commanders, it bears out, to a great degree, the WEG spec
that said that the Death Star possessed literally THOUSANDS of TIE
fighters.
And it stands to strong reason that no amount of plot device can explain
how
thirty fighters can successfully make their way through thousands of
defenders... IF those thousands of defenders have, in fact, been
deployed to
stop them.

So yeah... I tend to believe WEG's postulation that Tarkin simply
ignored
the fighter attack out of overconfidence, and that if he had taken it
seriously enough to really use the station's resources to stop them, he
could've done so quite easily.	He willfully refused to do so, or to
take
any other real precautions, even when the aide walks up to him at some
point
during the final sequence, informs him that they have analyzed the
Rebels'
attack and determined that there is, in fact, a danger, and asks him if
they
should have his ship standing by to get him off the station in case the
worst should occur.  The movie bears out quite clearly that Tarkin
simply
didn't take the Rebel attack seriously.  The movie goes so far as to
show
him just seconds before his doom, calmly watching a viewscreen expecting
the
Rebel moon to go bye-bye any moment, and in the very next clip, the
station
explodes.  Most probably, Tarkin never knew what hit him.

So yeah... when WEG's supplement postulates that Vader's own squadron
was
the only part of the Death Star's fighter complement that actually was
deployed to stop the Rebels, I tend to believe that this is most or all
of
the actual case.

E
(aka Stilt Man)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Pipinou" <cpip@juno.com>
To: <gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu>
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 4:25 PM
Subject: Re: Stormtroopers

> Well, as an aside, according to the Star Wars Death Star Technical
> Companion (for whatever that's worth), most TIEs didn't launch because
> Tarkin said no; only Vader and his personal, elite, squadron launched.
>
> 'Course, that may just be WEG's way of explaining why there weren't
more
> fighters either.
>
> Best,