LogFAQs > #909868452

Unbridled9 posted...

Ignoring how stupid them not having forces to spare is... so what? You traded a bunch of crappy bombers which would be useless in a fight and some X-wings... FOR A FUCKING CAPITOL SHIP! It doesn't get much better than that in terms of trades.

Rule #1 of warfare: always understand the terms of victory. You can be slaughtered to a man and still win; you can completely rout the enemy and still lose. It all depends on what you are trying to achieve and what your long term goals are.

The Resistance, being a military force of extremely limited means, simply cannot afford to make the sorts of sacrifices that Poe was making and hope to emerge victorious, especially against a foe as well-equipped as the First Order. The Resistance gets straight-up creamed in a war of attrition, even if they did manage to pull off the kind of "trades" that Poe was doing. It's the very definition of a Pyrrhic Victory.

Yes, Poe took out a big ship... but that's not exactly a crippling blow against the First Order. By contrast, Poe lost about 2/3 of the starfighters in the entire Resistance, including the entirety of their bomber wing. And he very nearly cost them a lot more - when it was destroyed, the Dreadnought was seconds away from firing on the Raddus, the Resistance's flagship and its only large cruiser/carrier (which also happened to be carrying all of its leadership and senior officers at the time). Had the (already damaged) last bomber failed to drop its payload or been taken out by a TIE Fighter before it got in range, the Raddus - which was only still there because it couldn't leave while its starfighters were still in combat - would have been destroyed and a good 3/4 of the Resistance would be dead. If that's not a deathblow, it's pretty close to it.

This is all not touching on the whole "disobeying a direct order" thing, which is probably the more pertinent issue (and Poe even doubles down on it by pretending the resultant demotion didn't happen when he introduces himself to the officer who takes over command)

Also, I ran out of space for a couple things in your last post:

Unbridled9 posted...

Plus let's not forget the stupid 'drop bombs in 0-G' bit

As mentioned above, Star Wars makes a bunch of dumb things with gravity in space (this one, by the way, is justified in lore as having the bombs be "magnetically charged" to "fall" towards their target). The absolute worst one is in Episode III - when the ship Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Palpatine are on in the opening battle tilts towards Coruscant, all the gravity in the ship for some reason tilts with it. This despite the fact that ships are clearly established to have their own gravity generators which ensures that "down" is always relative to the ship itself.

You can't even make the excuse that maybe the generator was destroyed or offline, because the ship was falling into the planet's gravity well, meaning that for people inside they would actually be pulled in the opposite direction because of inertia.

Unbridled9 posted...

Which is why I'm also not going to tell you about my super-secret plans despite having no reason to and doing so both actively hampering the plan and making you suspicious of me!'

Yeah, no reason to do so. After all, look at what Poe did when he DID know all the details to the plan.

Not to mention, Poe himself completely validates this approach when he learns of the new plan and, once again, launches his own instead. Worth noting that Holdo's plan would have been a complete success had Poe not fucked it up by blabbing details of it on an open comm within earshot of a slicer with no particular allegiance to the Resistance.
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