Spoiler plus there was a fair bit of time because in between they had the firefight in the city, got captured, taken to Saw's place, and had the discussion. So yes there was 'time' for them to leave assuming they were already leaving, but its a bit farfetched
Spoiler Skwisgaar is correct, the planet wasn't destroyed. However, the shot devastated most life on the entire moon. Much of the mantle was blown high into space from which it will rain back on the moon over several days and months leaving all sorts of fine crap lingering in the atmosphere for decades. This is within few seconds of the shot. This is like a minute or very few minutes after the shot. I don't have better screenshots that fully show the scale of destruction. The planet survived. Most likely no one on the planet survived, you would have several minutes of time to get to orbit from the moment of seeing the shock front approaching. The shock front's speed is quickly reduced to roughly speed of sound (in that surrounding). Earthquakes are noticed sooner due to shockwaves traveling faster in the denser liquids and bedrock beneath. That amount of evaporation and energy inserted to such a system as a habitable moon is enormous - and it well reflects just how powerful the full blast from Death Star really is. It inserts sufficient amount of energy to a planet to defeat the binding forces of the entire planet. It takes two orders of magnitude (guesstimate) less energy to wipe all life out. After the worst is over the moon could probably be somewhat habitable. Considering it was a relatively barren wasteland to begin with it's only going to be even hotter after the impact and this extra heat is going to be stuck on the surface easily for hundreds to thousands of years or even longer depending on how the climate plays out. I wonder if hitting a desert world somewhat dampened the effects of the shot - it probably should. On the other hand hitting Scarif with it had the exact opposite effect of the mass of water amplifying the weapon's effect and throwing a superheated tsunami that will travel over the entire surface of the planet possibly going several times round the planet and obliterating everything while evaporating shit tons of water vapors and other stuff into the atmosphere causing massive greenhouse effect in addition to the evaporated water heating up the planet significantly. Jedha, desert planet that became a worse desert planet. Scarif, a watery world that would come to resemble Venus with an ocean. Spoiler I saw some people complain about only one set of plans or something like that. #1 There's no indication that the plans exist solely in one place. Galen Erso merely says he managed to find out a place that definitely should contain a copy of the plans. #2 The Rebel fleet are getting smacked silly, beaten and pounded like a cheap whore, they're taking it everywhere from Vader's fleet. Meaning they're kinda busy getting killed and some X-wing pilot is not going to be focusing on the transmission while dogfighting with the enemy. Certainly were they imperial pilots they might be held culpable later. They lost the entire ground team, they lost almost all the fighters, they lost several ships including their flagship, huge number of their officers got killed while Vader almost managed to stop them from delivering the plans. From Vader's point of view, there were simply too many Rebels so even though he and his fleet cut through them as fast as they could it wasn't really his fault that top ranking saboteurs working with the finest Rebel infiltrators managed to steal the plans. He did slaughter the Rebel fleet and the garrison destroyed some of the finest forces the Rebels had. I think it was a fine story of how close the Rebels are to being utterly crushed despite all the help they're getting and how many special events they need to pull through. It merely highlights how strong the Empire really is and how futile the Rebellion seems and how crazy it looks like to risk one's life to oppose them.
If the wings were automated they would likely be controlled by various things such as density of atmosphere and so. Also they could be there to assist but not necessary for flight - so you could deploy them for more aerodynamic (cheaper?) flight and better maneuverability when you wanted but could also keep them retracted and out of the way if there are things like massive rock structures all over the place. Don't know, need to watch it again to see what the issue is. Plenty of Star Wars craft are just fine without any wings at all so any craft that have wings don't likely have them in order to rely on them but rather to take advantage of them when they feel like it. Alternatively - Spoiler the pilot was subjected to that horrid creature and it was said that he would likely suffer severe side effects. Maybe the pilot is all wonkers and ignoring or forgetting the toggler button. Personally, this reminds me of the other day we had fresh snow, the whole yard that we share with our neighbors was covered in untouched snow. Know what I did? I jumped and made 90, 120, 180 degrees etc. rotations between leaps of varying length so the shoe prints on the snow were all somewhat further apart than normal and were all aimed at random directions. It looked funny and I did it just so someone might ask about why they were like that. Maybe there's no other explanation than Kafka.
Also star wars isn't sci fi (not anymore at least) now it is mostly under the fanstasy genre. So i think they are going more with the "rule of cool" than physics.
Only at the very beginning when sci fi was kinda blurred and under fantasy. Now sci fi is its own genre.
Science Fiction was it's own genre for about a century prior to Star Wars. Fantasy as a genre didn't arise until much later, though mythological or supernatural elements have existed in literature since... Well, since they were actually accepted as true elements of active religious and cultural traditions.
if I was to classify Star Wars I'd call it a Science Arcana, however if I was forced to choose between Fantasy and Sci Fi I'd still classify it as Sci Fi, just leaning heavily more towards the fiction than the science aspect. It's simply that the fantasy aspect of the show, the Jedi and the Force is, while a driving force for the story, a relatively minor part of the universe as a whole, barring the whole force running everything which not everyone seems to agree with. The percentage of active people who can manipulate the force in the storyline is a staggeringly disproportionate amount compared to the rest of the galaxy, and while the Force and the Jedi are a major driving force for the story we view, the universe it takes place in, for the most part, runs on (questionable) science. It might also fall into the realm of cyberpunk, in the niche involving high technology and magic, but really it's mostly just another soap box opera set to the sound of blasters and the hum of the light saber.
saw it this afternoon for the 2nd time. actually liked it more this time around and the few little things that bugged me previously didn't bother me at all this time around. not sure if it was just because i was expecting the stuff that caught me off guard (CGI) or that i had time to think about the plot-points that bothered me. but yeah, goddamn that movie is fun.
Ted Raimi, a talking dolphin, and Rosalind Allen in a tight wetsuit. Really, what more do you need? Well, besides maybe one of those industrial size drums of lube...
Blasters and the vastly populated galaxy and many other things are straight from Asimov's Foundation and Empire series. In fact the Galactic Empire is it's own version of Asimov's Empire. This is mixed with what you said, magic and "scifi" deus ex machinae such as warp drives with contextual physics. In this regard it's the soft fantasy / soft scifi, or Arcana as you put it, rather than anything more serious. Serious does not good make they say. There's already plenty of really hard scifi out there and it's not always that good. Mere fact checking does not compelling story make. Sure, it takes fricking 15,000 years for this freighter to arrive at it's destination so we're going to be talking about how the wake shift is playing chess. No dad-son dynamics, nothing. Just lots of really accurate depictions of physics. It's the stories and characters that we go after, the rest is scenery. Scifi can make pretty awesome scenery. It's a measure of nerd penis on how many physics fallacies one can spot in a given show. "Oh, deuterium! That's silly, 200 liters of deuterium? Hahahhaaha, it's not actually deuterium that they'd need and it's more like 50 liters!" *You've gained a new level of Nerd!* *You picked Nerd Monocle trait, -2 charisma, +1 fact checking: With the Nerd Monocle you'll be able to better zoom in to find fallacies.*
