Given that last Thursday’s strip ended in a cliffhanger caused by/connected to Snuka being so much in shock that his eyes were visible… …it naturally behooves today’s strip to deal with some marginal issue first. Priorities are priorities. And that goes double for skewed priorities.
The marginal issue of the day is the further career…or, better, further careening of R2, the astromech droid with a wealth of experience in getting stuck in places he’d rather not be in without any fault of his own.
The list of places in question has contained the entry “Imperial Star Destroyer” several times before, but this is the first time he visits without his friends. Or even a spaceship. The Imperial officer has every reason to be confused by this lack of context. R2 himself sure is.
But it’s only confusing and disturbing for R2 – for the Star Destroyer, it’s fatal. These ships do seem to be unusually fragile for ships of such size and apparent cost…
More on Thursday.
The MO of the Imperials seems to be, “If it doesn’t have a GLARING weakness, engineering isn’t doing their job.” I can understand the Death Star’s weakness was intentional sabotage; but for them to do the same design TWICE and have other similar weaknesses across all their other designs? It makes it questionable how the rebels were struggling at all.
Well, I bet they were struggling because all of their equipment had similarly glaring engineering weaknesses. XD
But there is a degree of truth in fiction there, actually – one known issue in the design of WWII warships was the funnel. No matter how well you armored the protected space of a battleship, you had to find some way to let air in and smoke out – and while the funnels could be somewhat protected by armored gratings and zig-zag construction, this still left an inevitable weakness that could allow a shell striking at just the right spot and angle, or a bomb dropped from above, to bypass most of the armor protection and explode in the vulnerable engineering spaces. Without guidance by the force, this of course only happened by accident – nobody could consciously target those weaknesses. But by accident it still happened a couple of times during WWII.