The Death Star Exhaust Port and Why You're Wrong About It

The second most mocked element of the first Star Wars trilogy stems from the Death Star, or more specifically how it was beaten. Having a single fighter fly to a space station the size of a moon and defeat seems ridiculous, and sadly that seems to have overshadowed the accomplishment itself. People see this less as an astounding David vs. Goliath moment than a "lol easily blown up lol" accomplishment. As we previously tackled the myth of Stormtroopers being horribly ineffective, so now we're going onto this one.

Now let's just focus on the big bit brought up first and foremost: The exhaust port was two meters wide. Only two meters wide. The film even makes a major point of this with pilots deriding the idea of hitting a target that small, leading to the famous (or infamous) bit of Luke citing how he has shot womp rats from the air despite their small size.

The "two meter" statistic tends to get overlooked in most people's heads, so let's put this into perspective.

This plane's wings are two meters wide:

In fact, the very fighter which shot it down was 12.5 meters long. The tip of the canopy to R2-D2's position is more or less that length. This wasn't simply a small target, this was an obscenely small target, one so minute that it's just wider than some species were tall. Even a Ford Ka is 3.6 meters long, and that is the roller skate of cars. Hell, proton torpedoes themselves were 0.5 meters wide, meaning that even being slightly off while shooting at this target would have left them clipping the side and then detonating.

Shooting at such a small exhaust port would be difficult to hit at the best of times, but then you need to account for the situation in question. To start with, said fighter was moving at speeds of well over 1,000 kph, in a flat out attack run. This is why every pilot was using a targeting computer in their attack, because without computer assistance it would miss entirely. In fact, even with computer assistance and with homing torpedoes, multiple attempts did end up missing each time. People seem to keep treating this as if Luke blew up the thing without any difficulty, seemingly forgetting Red Leader's failed effort or Luke almost making the same error. 

If you re-watch the entire briefing scene from A New Hope, you might notice that General Dodona emphasizes that a "precise hit" is required to strike it. This requires each pilot to effectively be on top of it when firing, meaning that they cannot simply try to eyeball it and hope for the best. So, you already have an insanely small target, which needs to be fired upon while a fighter is moving at full speed, and also in a state where even targeting computers cannot effectively pinpoint them. 

You might be wondering just why they needed to fly down the trench in the first place, and there's an easy reason for that: Guns. The Death Star was riddled with them, to the point where the fighters were having to continually dodge around the various tower emplacements just to reach the start of their attack run. While most were designed to oppose larger ships, the sheer volume of guns alone would be enough to cause the X-Wings serious problems.

If the squadrons did try to approach the exhaust port from above, not only would they be required to hit an insanely small target while dodging gunfire, but they run the risk of making mistakes. The big one would be to fire from a far greater range, at which point the fighters run the risk of blocking the very flaw that the Rebels hope to exploit. At least while flying up the trench itself they benefitted from some basic cover, and a near-miss has a better chance of simply skimming the surface rather than striking the hole and wrecking the entire mission.

The cover of the trench also works to benefit the fighters in other ways, namely preventing the Imperials from using all of their military might against them. The additional cover means that even if they did send the majority of their TIE fighters against the X-Wings they wouldn't be able to so freely target them at once. The trench's angle means that they are largely limited to attacking them from above, in front or behind. Hitting them from the front means that the X-Wings would have a major advantage over the TIEs due to their shields, as each would be shooting at the other from a forward angle. Above is possible, but behind is notably more beneficial due to the X-Wings' limited movement within the trench. Once they do that, however, the gun emplacements cannot fire at them without the risk of overshooting and hitting the fighters behind them.

The risk of engagements from fighters are also a whole new ball-game unto themselves, and it should be notable that most of the Rebels' losses stemmed from fighter attacks. Well, Vader mostly, but I would say that the use of fighters is worthy of mention. The TIEs were better equipped to take down the enemy ships than the guns, after all.

Even if they managed to overcome all of that, there were still a thousand thing which could go wrong. For one thing, the torpedoes themselves still need to travel down an incredibly small exhaust port and reach the main reactor without skimming the sides, detonating prematurely or being blown off course by the thermal exhausts that port was made to vent. This was even the subject of Star Wars: Infinites, where one alternate timeline featured the torpedoes failing to hit their intended target despite entering the port.

Keep in mind, by the end, while hitting the port required no small amount of skill and luck on Luke's part, only his connection to the Force gave him the edge in the end. You know, the closest thing there is to Star Wars' version of God. It not only took a good pilot but divine intervention to overcome this.

Oh, and to even reach that point, all of the following had to be accomplished in a series of actions in months leading up to the attack itself:

Then, even before this, there was a much more direct attempt to attack the Death Star while it was still under construction. Rather than a single wing of fighters, the Rebellion used two hundred X-Wings supported by capital ships in a massed battle. Aside from some superficial damage to a capital ship and the less of less than one hundred TIE fighters, the battle was a complete rout.

This sort of thing is part of why I keep raising an eyebrow at Rogue One's depiction of the exhaust port as a flaw. Were this intended as a flaw to allow the Death Star to be destroyed, it required the Rebels taking such a staggering number of risks and so many deaths that it could barely be accomplished. That's not a mark against the film as a whole, simply the execution of events there. Well, that and Disney's reliance on using memes over the actual information present in the very films they adapt.

To call this an easy victory by exploiting a weakness added by a moron is simply something that you could only do by ignoring everything presented to the audience.