Darth Spock wrote:True, but Luke hoofing it back to his waiting X-wing from leading the charge against the AT-ATs certainly wasn't the result of putting the craft to better use, and only 1 transport and 2 X-wings were being launched at a time.
Luke would have wanted his ship ready to depart at any moment. He probably thought, or hoped at least, that the speeders could deal damage to the walkers. Otherwise they'd have attempted something different from the beginning.
I can see they wouldn't want to risk more valuable fighters in place of speeders they couldn't take anyway, but this still plays to the idea that they would likely have done no better against the walkers. If the X-wings were packing 10x or more firepower than the speeders, and could have smacked down the AT-ATs, the rebels could have better organized their retreat under the shield.
I don't think so. By the very moment they know they've been spotted, the reaction is almost automatic: leave now.
They were not going to try their chance in some kind of siege with limited supplies against an Empire that would just bring more and more assets, perhaps stay out of range of the ion cannon and launch ground forces on and on.
The Rebels could never, ever win that. The shield is permeable at ground level, so they would have been screwed. The shield and cannon were just tools to buy time and simply not get pounded the moment the Empire would be above them.
The situation was dramatically unfair but it seems Rebel HQ took the best decision.
The idea that they weren't optimized for the environment may have been a factor, but given the strains the craft are designed to endure in space, and the fact that the speeders had already been adapted, and absolutely everything else the rebels and Imperials had planet side seemed to work fine, I find it hard to swallow the idea that the rebel techs just didn't get around to adapting the star fighters if they could have made a considerable impact in battle.
Without knowing where those speeders come from, at least we can infer that space fighters are versatile enough to enter atmosphere and work in space, which also require more capacity to withstand dramatic thermal and mechanical stress. So yes, the X-wings would have probably worked well. But that doesn't change the fact that AT-ATs had enough firepower to blow up a whole generator over a very long range. Throwing the X-wings against that would be too much of a risk, especially since they're bigger crafts and not exactly built to work in atmosphere first. Speeders are built to hug the ground and the way they bobbed up and down, from the beginning of the movie straight to the battle when they approached AT-ATs, combined to their smaller profile, tells me that they had the best chances of survival against the imperial forces, rather than the starfighters.
The speeders really were considerably agile when you think of it, which was a net advantage in letting them home on the walkers and minimize risks of being taken down, while gaining as much time as possible.
We could always discuss about the lack of a more time consuming flanking approach, but then again why would the AT-ATs let themselves be flanked? We see one move into some weird position, four legs stretched, in little to no time just to shoot a fast moving speeder at extremely short range, in a very tight packed volley, which is actually a very high performance accuracy feat.
Veers' men wouldn't be blind, they'd see the curved trajectory of incoming speeder crafts.
The only other factor I can think of, was that Luke, and the rest of Rogue Squadron didn't seem to expect their guns to be so ineffectual.
That's what I go with.
Besides, perhaps I'm reading too much into the movie, but it almost looks like they're seriously disappointed when they realize their guns can't do anything.
One way or another, they clearly had planned them to be relevant and, as pointed out earlier in the thread, the sheer size of the cannons for such crafts tells me that, somehow, they should have been efficient.
It's even possible the guns mounted on those speeders weren't part of the original template.
They definitely were bigger than the E-web cannon the snowtroopers carried with them, and in the TESB novelization, it was clearly written that this large portable gun, which looked like a bazooka (the word bazooka is used in the book!) was going to punch through the Mill's hull effortlessly. Yet that's a hull that's been tanking quite a lot of stuff.
Either they have never battled AT-ATs before, or these were a new model. Even so, the only rationale I can find for the X-wings packing much more firepower, is to facilitate the idea that in space, everything is nuclear grade, but ground weapons are smaller "because." That works to a point, but I don't think cranking the X-wings guns to max would suddenly melt everyones face off, so that they couldn't risk it.
Actually, there's no real necessity for the X-wings to have superior firepower much.
Heck, thinking of it, since they're mainly space fighters, it's largely possible that their weapons wouldn't be as efficient in an atmosphere: whatever is used to produce a bolt, that weird mix of energy, matter, all wrapped (bottled) up in one linear and sustained fancy projectile, would probably be tuned to the zero friction of space, but logically be less potent at ground level, with so much friction and convection.