Battle of Hoth

[Jon]

Question: As the Millenium Falcon is escaping Hoth we see Luke and a bunch of goofy rebels taking their time getting into their X-Wings and Transports and yet I am wondering...did they blow up all the AT-AT's?? After Luke destroyed the one with his little grenade I thought there were like 2 or 3 more...what happened to them? Also how come Luke was able to get past the blockade but the Falcon wasn't able to?

[LTBasker]

Well if Rogue Leader reflects the movie then what happened is they were trying to trip all the AT-ATs but since that one was able to destroy the shield generator they gave up the fight because they had no shields to stop reinforcements from coming and so they retreated to their transports.

On the Luke part, he most likely took a different route away from the blockade which was to Dagobah of course but everyone else was going to regroup elsewhere and the Falcon had to go off course. I'll need to see ESB again to build on that, that was just from a distorted memory.

[JediTricks]

The blockade was meant to stop larger ships carrying lots of rebels, blockading small one-man fighters is clearly not how the Galactic Empire works (ever ). They don't want to deal with the little fish, they just want the big catch.

[Rollo Tomassi]

An analogy would be the invasion of Normandy. Germans wouldn't waste ammo on a solitary troop running across the beach. They would fire at clumps of soldiers to do the most damage. GONK!in' Nazis.

[Lobito]

I see your point Jon...its like the blockade in Episode I, for Luke to escape the blockade he would have to fly almost half Hoth and then fly up to Space. But if all the ships were surrounded there was no chance Luke had avoided them. Now the problem with the Falcon was that the hyperdrive wasnt working, thus they had no lightspeed.

[Rogue II]

Also, Luke took off after a 3 Star Destroyers were in pursuit of the Falcon. Luke's hyperdrive was functional (unlike the Falcon's).

How many Star Destroyers were in the blockade, anyway?

[CaptainSolo1138]

How many Star Destroyers were in the blockade, anyway?

I found this on TFN. It doesn't give an answer, but it gives an idea:

The number of star destroyers in service is immense. The hull number of the star destroyer Entor (CVS 1049) indicates either that in excess of a thousand star destroyers of this class have been built, or that this is the 1049th built by its particular shipyard. According to the reports of Rebel Alliance historian Arhul Hextrophon (in The Imperial Sourcebook) the Galactic Empire has a about three to five dozen or so destroyers in an average sector group fleet, of which there is at least one for each of the Empire's thousands of sectors. This indicates that the local territorial fleets alone account for tens of thousands of star destroyers galaxy-wide. It should be noted that though Hextrophon's reports have proven to be error-prone on many occasions; they consistently tend towards gross underestimates of Imperial naval and military strengths. The true number of star destroyers is probably much greater than the values he implies. In addition to the vessels assigned to particular sectors, there must be uncounted numbers attached to Imperial High Command and elite roving forces such as those of some Grand Moffs, and higher officials such as Lord Darth Vader.

And if a ficticious historian says this, it must be true!