Why couldn't the shield protecting the Death Star be penetrated at the Battle of Endor?

Question

In The Force Awakens...

Han Solo gets Finn aboard the Star Killer base by effecting a light speed jump to within its shields, which succeeds completely - they seem to be undetected and able to carry on with their mission.

However, in the Battle of Endor there is an elaborate plan to eliminate the Death Star II's shields by attacking the shield generator on Endor before Lando can fly the Falcon into the heart of the Death Star II to lead the attack on the central reactor.

Why couldn't they have just used the same approach as Solo does in TFA?

I am unconvinced its an enhancement to the Falcon since none is mentioned, and indeed Solo just comments "you won't like it" when asked how he is going to accomplish the feat in TFA, so I assume its a simple technique. Some mention of "fractional shields" is mentioned, whereby the Star Killer base is protected against anything slower than light speed, but this just opens up the question of why not use a light speed weapon aimed at the right spot?

Answer 1

Canon doesn't have an answer, but I can think of three things:

• At that point, Han didn't know that he could penetrate a shield at lightspeed. Thirty years is a long time to learn new reckless things. Maybe, Han learned about this by accident or by studying shield, or his reckless mind suddenly popped an idea based on what he knew.

• Shield of the Death Star doesn't fluctuate. Han said this:

  No planetary defense system can be sustained at a constant rate. It would take too much power. The shields fluctuate at a predetermined rate. It keeps anything traveling less than lightspeed from getting through.

So, it's a possibility that the shield of Death Star doesn't need to fluctuate because of less power requirement (Death Star was much, much smaller).

• There wasn't adequate space under the shield of the Death Star for maneuvering. Starkiller was a planet with an atmosphere, and people walked on its surface, and there were surface buildings and trees. So, the shield needed to be built in the sky, leaving much space in the atmosphere below for maneuvering. On the other hand, people don't need to stand on the surface of the Death Star, and turrets etc., don't require lots of space. Even if one targets a bay or hole for entry, it'd be suicide because, again, you won't be able to slow down before crashing.

Answer 2

Accodring to the Foster novelization, the Starkiller base had special kind of planetary shields.

They were - if i may use my own term instead of canon's far wordier description - flickering.

This meant that the Falcon didn't just magically teleport through the shield - Han planned - and managed - to get inside the shield by really-really quickly dropping through the shield while it was down.

The lightspeed approach was merely to get enough speed, so that the Falcon doesn't get caught by the shield while traversing it too slow.

Since Death Star was not on planetary scale (they showed size comparison in the film and it was far smaller), presumably they had the ability to deploy a permanent shield that wasn't flickering just to lower their electric bill conserve energy. (plus, as another answer wisely noted, it was far less dangerous to go to Endor and turn off the shield - which wasn't an option on Starkiller, a convinient forest moon housing the shield generator not having been included in the LEGO set)

To address "why not use light speed weapon":

1. Since Han explicitly has to time their passage, the assumption is that this isn't something that can be automated

2. And even if it could, Resistance has nothing like that at the drop of a hat. All they got is a Falcon, Leia's new weird transport, 30 or less X-Wings, and a lot of grit.

Answer 3

You do recall that the whole Endor operation was a trap set by The Empire? It was designed to attract and destroy the entire rebel fleet, and to bring Luke Skywalker to the Emperor. Nothing was what it seemed. Pointing out flaws, like putting the shield generator on Endor, is missing the point. The "flaws" were designed in. The shield generator was bait.

They are under no such pretense at Star Killer base. They are not trying to encourage any attention from the resistance, and their defenses reflect that.

Answer 4

Starkiller Base was very much bigger then the second Death Star, being the size of a planet instead of a small moon, so it's possible that there wasn't enough space inside the Death Star's shield for the manoeuvre to work. If the shield was 10,000 kilometres across instead of 1,000km then at the speed of light you have 1/30th of a second instead of 1/300th of a second to drop out of hyperspace at the exact right time.

Answer 5

Because Leia and the Rebel command shot the idea down

This is highly speculative, but Han's comment to Leia

That she isn't going to like it

suggests that he's offered this plan before, and they turned it down. Which they logically would have because:

There's no evidence that the Death Star II's shields work as Han describes in TFA, so we don't know if it even would work

And

The rebels have a far less risky alternative in the form of a stolen ship and codes for safe passage. It's safer and has a much higher chance of success without being detected until the shield comes down. Once the Falcon hits Endor atmosphere, it would likely have been detected and the gig would be up. And if they tried it with larger ships, they could easily lose the bulk of their force in a crash.

Answer 6

Assuming the Death Star on Endor had the same kind of shield, there was still 2 possible ways to do it. 1) destroy the generator, 2) jump inside the shield. They simply picked to destroy the generator. Solo's comment about them "not liking it" indicates the shield jump is a really dangerous idea...so it stands to reason that with both options available they'd choose to try to destroy the generator. With the Star Killer it was their only option...no external generator.

Another consideration is that the much larger Star Killer also may have had more space between object/shield to jump into...it may not have been viable at all for the smaller Death Star.

As far as just using a lightspeed weapon to destroy the Star Killer without the shields being an issue: they didn't have one that could do that sort of damage. Even once they got inside the shield they had trouble inflicting the amount of damage they needed to destroy it and had to add damage from the inside in order to bring it down.

Answer 7

One consideration might be that landing on a planet-sized structure coming out of light speed is an easier trick to pull off compared to coming to nearly a full stop on the surface of a death-star sized object.

The distance between the shield and the surface is key-- there's more of it over the planet than the death star.

It was a risky maneuver even for the Falcon; it may have been completely unfeasible for the other rebel ships.

Answer 8

I didn't read most of the answers so sorry if I duplicate any answers given. But in Episode 6, the rebel alliance had to disable the shields first before the death star was destroyed. Also, Thrawn had set up a strong umbrella shield that is vastly different from the Crapshooting base (starkiller? I mean really? New star wars guys you suck at naming as much as george lucas sucks at coming up with new ideas for star wars) which used some sort of pulse shielding which means there are gaps that occur for milliseconds. which leads to other issues with the movie...

Answer 9

The two situations had different goals, so different solutions were selected.

In the Return of the Jedi, the goal was to destroy the Death Star II by shooting it with the whole rebel fleet. The shield must be down for that to work.

In FTA, the goal was to get a small team through the shield and onto the surface.

There are other plot based reasons also:

• The military leaders were probably aware of the common shield limitation, but if it was exploitable, it would have been removed. As a smuggler, Han was probably one of the few people who knew how to exploit the limitation, so it might never have been considered. Otherwise they could have sent a few X-wings and Y-wings and taken out the core. It is also possible that they did not expect detonating the core to be active enough to destroy the space station because it was not fully operational. In this case, they would need the full fleet to destroy it.
• Han was going down to the planet with Leia. Rather then risking his ship and the fleet, Han might have kept the radical idea to himself. They had a good plan, no need for a crazy one.
• As has been stated in comments and other answers, DS2 might use a different type of shield (external satellite size shield vs internal planet size shield) which might not have been known to have this limitation.

Answer 10

The big difference - in RoTJ, the plot is actually thought through. In TFA, it's just a McGuffin to get them inside. Even if the Starkiller base shields do flicker at a predetermined rate, how does Han Solo, who's spent years running away from being a member of the Rebellion (sorry, Resistance), know anything about it? No-one knew any details in the film about Starkiller Base until Sanitation Stormtrooper Finn conveniently explains it all, and he didn't know about the shield fluctuations.

Also, as one of the earlier posters said, the reaction time needed to stop the MF from crashing into the base is a ridiculously small window. A very old Han Solo, as that's what he is, wouldn't have the reactions to do it.

Answer 11

The Starkiller Base likely had a common power source for both its super weapon and its deflector shields. That doesn't include the type of energy needed to keep the climate on Starkiller cool while the base sucks up matter from a Star, which is super hot plasma at thousands to millions of degrees Celsius.

Plus, the deflector shield extended further out from the planetary surface than the Death Star's did. With so much energy spent on operations (besides the massive planetary shield), it would likely have operated intermittently.