The fact that HTLs can't track fighters is well established by the Death Star trench run in ANH.Mr. Oragahn wrote:I actually use higher canon to discredit lower canon material. That's why my position is superior to yours.
Not really, given that the novelization is probably referring to an earlier time in the battle than the movie is, or a different portion of the hemisphere.However, the whole text is so at odds with the film that it could very well be that the best option is to ignore all that doesn't fit.
This is impossible. The "small town" bit is attributed to the "hairlines" that you claim do not exist. It says (paraphrased) "the shining hairlines are light scatter from turbolasers powerful enough to vaporize small towns". If these hairlines don't exist, then obviously the turbolasers don't exist. And even if you were to disprove this notion, the fact that these hairlines were tracking fighters is not contradicted by the same line of reasoning that small, interconnected segments of a quote can be broken up.I couldn't care less about what the novelization says on the very topic of the aspect of bolts since it's completely contradicted. What isn't contradicted from that book, I prefer to keep if possible. Like the destruction of a small town bit.
Then we can use the description of the entire Rebel fleet as "stretching back farther than the eye can see" from the RotJ novel (again, paraphrased) as canon; the fleet did not actually show up at Endor much akin to how these hairlines (allegedly) didn't show up at Coruscant, but that does not mean that the quantification of them can't be true, by this reasoning.
If it's not enough to see small fighters, then how are they seen, as the novels quite clearly state and the movies don't explicitly contradict? Not to cross over threads, but your argument appears to be that the novel quote, in addition to being at odds with the movie, cannot be true because it does not make sense. Which may be true. But then why can one not dismiss a 4 million man army fighting a galactic war as not making any sense on the most basic mathematical level?
They're only a couple kilometers high. It's like standing at the top of some mountain. Not enough to see small fighters, unless they reflect sunlight like satellites do at times.
There's also the problem of air rarefaction up there, so people can't be that high either.
The battle was taking place some hundreds of km above the surface.
Again, the obvious rationalization is that the two sources are not referring to the same location and time of the battle.Even if they were, there weren't any long shiny hairlines in the movies aside from beams fired by SPHA-Ts from inside Venator bays.
1. They don't need to; "powerful enough to..." does not mean "accurate enough to..."Besides, anti-fighter weapons have never shown the range necessary to shoot towns from orbit.
2. Why not? A town is a stationary target. You could hit it with modern technology.
Circular reasoning, I'm not "thinking" that they'd pack megatons, the quote itself proves it.And thinking that they'd pack megatons of firepower even when the heavy weapons don't show any of that is purely ludicrous.
I don't care about TCW, as this is a G canon film-novelization. Although heavily disputed, the asteroid vaporization scenes at least suggest this, as do DET Death Star calculations, as do the alleged kiloton level fighter weapons (which would necessitate kiloton level fighter shields at the least).
I mean, is it too much to ask for you to think a moment about the idea of having point defense point-blank range weapons, meant to shoot down targets the size of cars, to have the firepower of hundred times Hiroshima?
Do you see anything like that in the movies or TCWS that even fits with that paradigm??