Very soon, Star Wars fans will be filing into theaters to take in a different kind of movie set in the Galaxy Far Far Away. With the release of Rogue One, Disney is launching a spin-off series that promises to take fans to different corners of Lucas’ sandbox every other year. There are a lot of characters and settings to mine and fans are rightly excited to see everything the Lucasfilm Story Group and the various writers and directors have in mind.

Smartly, Lucasfilm is focusing their first spin-off film on a setting that is familiar to Star Wars fans, and is probably also the most accessible story for non-fans as possible, other than the upcoming Han Solo spinoff film (slated for 2018).

Rogue One will, without spoiling the particulars of the plot (since I don’t know them; I’ve stayed largely spoiler-free this time around), the basic gist of the movie explores the band of rebels who stole the plans for the Death Star…the very plans that Leia has in her possession (before passing them on to R2-D2) as the first Star Wars movie kicks off.

The film therefore promises to be fresh, with characters largely unseen in the Star Wars universe, while also familiar, tying in with the first mcguffin Lucas ever conceived as a storyteller. If the movie is a success—and all inside buzz is that it will be—it may make it so that we never watch the original Star Wars film the same way again.

That’s exciting, since the particulars of the Death Star attack at the end of the first Star Wars movie always intrigued me. It always seemed like there was a lot of subtext to it and a lot of things that went unsaid about it in the film.

Let’s dig into it a bit…

As everyone knows, the first Star Wars movie culminates in an ant vs elephant fight between the massive, planet-killing space-station and a small squadron of X-wings and Y-wings.

The plan is laid out in the pre-battle meeting. General Dodonna walks the fighter pilots through the mission, aided by a charming wire-frame video illustration: Rebel fighters will fly down a trench toward a thermal exhaust port that, if torpedoes (from X-Wings) or bombs (from Y-Wings) can precisely hit it, will cause a chain reaction, with explosions going from the point of the initial hit all the way to the Death Star’s main reactor core.

The plan involved Y-Wings as the first wave of attackers, since their bombs are “dropped” making it an easier shot, whereas X-Wings “fire” their missiles toward the port. I drew a highly detailed illustration to make it more comprehensible.

Nailed it.

Note how the Y-Wing flies over the port and drops its bomb straight down. The bomb then slides through it, like a kid in the Wild River Country Water Tube, reaching the main reactor leading to the big kaboom.

Unfortunately the Y-Wings were almost entirely wiped out during the battle.

That left the job to the X-Wings, whose missiles were technically capable of making the shot, but on a practical level it was nearly impossible:

The plan would require the missiles to hit the port at a hard angle and turn downward to enter the shaft and travel toward the reactors. Recall that John Q. Skeptical, who sat next to Luke at the debriefing shouted that making the two-meter wide shot was “impossible, even for a computer.”

He was right.

Red Leader made his trench run and took a shot—guided perfectly by the ship’s targeting computer—which seemed to be a direct hit. But instead of it ending with a spectacular explosion, the hit merely “impacted on the surface.”

and come away thinking the first one wasn’t that big, but here it is in relation to Florida:

Now imagine you are in Tampa looking for a princess who is being held in a prison cell somewhere between your location…and Orlando. That’s a lot of real estate to cover in order to find her. Yet Luke and Han manage, not only to track her down (which isn’t a big deal since they hacked the computer) but also physically get to her location in a matter of minutes.

Remember that Luke tries to bluff the security guard by saying that they were transferring Chewie from Cellblock 1138, which means there are at least over 1,000 cell “blocks” (hallways with multiple cells) on the station. How many jails are between Tampa and Orlando?

What are the odds that the Falcon is tractored-in and docked, out of the hundreds of docking bays (the Falcon was taken to Docking Bay 327), at the one that is even on the same hemisphere as Leia’s cell block, much less one that’s just a thirty second elevator away?! The whole thing is just

But I digress.