>(and managing those who manage them)
>
>So, small spoiler for Rogue One:

I'm somewhat surprised there wasn't a thread here at the time.

>we finally find out
>why the Death Star (I) has that literal plot hole, in the form
>of an exhaust port leading directly to the main reactor, lacking only
>a sign in large friendly letters (INSERT TORPEDO HERE).

Sigh.

First of all, this wasn't a plot hole. This wasn't even bad plotting.

The Death Star had a secondary reactor exhaust port that is, quite literally, just barely wider than a torpedo. (You can see that in the movie itself; those torpedoes only barely fit.) It's shielded, and even if it weren't it is at the bottom of a trench surrounded by turbolaser batteries and part of a battlestation that can, if it chooses, throw hundreds if not thousands of starfighters into a CAP. When the Alliance pilots are told what they need to do, the instant reaction of one of their most daring combat veterans is "That's impossible, even for the computer!" and he was right about that, because the guy who tries to use his computer targeting fails completely. It is only because they have a dude with space magic flying with them that they manage to sink the shot.

Complaining about the exhaust port is a little bit like pointing at a tank and going "Look at the huge vulnerable spot! There's a hole right up front that leads down a shaft that ends in the very heart of the machine, which sometimes has highly explosive ordinance loaded into it. Madness! What idiot designed this?"

Second of all, Galen Erso didn't arrange for the exhaust port and shaft. Well, he did, I think, but that isn't the vulnerability he built in, and it is implied that the exhaust port and shaft would've been there anyway.

The vulnerability he built in was explicitly the fact that if you hit the main reactor, instead of just being crippled, or going to backup power, a chain reaction occurs that makes the entire thing blow up. My understanding is that he assumed the Alliance would send a commando team onto the station itself to blow it from the inside.

That was far more important than the exhaust port itself.

>Basically, he made sure that his supervisor - Director Orson Krennic,
>one of those archetypical Imperial administrators -

I did enjoy Galen's manipulation of the Imperial bureaucracy. That was pretty sweet.

I also kind of like... if, for some reason, you're really enamored of Bevel Lemelisk and a lot of the other lore around the construction and development of the Death Star, Rogue One doesn't actually explicitly retcon that.

-Merc
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