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Only a single fighter during the whole thing was lost to the Turbo Lasers. As stated they were to small and to fast for the large cannon to track and hit.

Well, it would be like firing a battleship's main guns at a fighter. Do it because you've got nothing better to do with them but not because you really expect anything to happen.

And it's better to fire with almost no hope, on that off chance you do get a glancing hit, which due to the power of a turbolaser it would probably cause the destruction of the ship.

Ya know its interesting that they have guns in the trench itself. Its as if the designers knew about the vulnerability yet they still didn't do anything about it.

In fairness, it wasn't much of a vulnerability. The target was an impossible shot for any normal pilot. Luke only managed it due to the Force, which is hardly something the designers of a planet-busting battlestation are going to take into account.

Especially since force users were almost forgotten from the age old traditions of the Jedi. Only Vader, the emperor, and strange feral people on distant worlds were known to use the force, vader and the emperor probably less so.

And yet a simple redesign of the exhaust shaft could have made it so that even a force user would be up a creek.

Yeah, but come on, you can't hinder the plot, that would be heresy...

Tyyr wrote:And yet a simple redesign of the exhaust shaft could have made it so that even a force user would be up a creek.

Indeed, which is what they did with the second one. But you can't really fault them for not taking into account a "weakness" that was physicaly impossible to exploit.
It'd be like saying a nuclear reactor was built poorly because someone caused it to go up like Chernobyll by waving a magic wand.

Impossible for a guy in a starfighter running down the trench maybe, but if all you need is something like two proton torpedoes to blow up the reactor you've got no business leaving a shaft that's a direct shot to it. All it would have taken is a single offset in the shaft and that would have been the end of it. Logically in order to assure the shaft is inaccessible to anyone I'd have designed it very differently. Still, one single pair of 90 degree turns and it goes from incredibly difficult to actually impossible.

Wasnt it an exust of some sort? In which case putting a bend in it would seriously hamper performance. Better to put some sort of mesh across it.

Indeed. You'd want it straight.

In the second one I believe they fixed it by just having thousands of pencil-sized exhausts of the same design scattered across the vessel.

Which explains why they had to attack before they finished the DS2.

Teaos wrote:Wasnt it an exust of some sort? In which case putting a bend in it would seriously hamper performance. Better to put some sort of mesh across it.

The excess drag created by a pair of 90 degree bends is next to nothing when the duct is already a hundred kilometers long.

Rochey wrote:Indeed. You'd want it straight.

In the second one I believe they fixed it by just having thousands of pencil-sized exhausts of the same design scattered across the vessel.

Correct. Along with a massive amount of additional weapons and a superlaser that was more energy-efficient and could fire once a minute instead of once a day. If completed, it would've been nigh-invulnerable.