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[Dorsidwarf]

Do star wars ships actually orbit? I always assumed they used their ability to casually fly anywhere surface-to-space with near-infinite delta-v to just... fly in space. In which case then yes, bombs totally would fall towards the planet when lobbed out the bottom of a ship

[Sirus]

I mean, if they're going to be hanging out in one location for a while they'll usually orbit to save on energy. Not to mention that some ships are just too big to enter an atmosphere.

[Starver]

That "door in the planetary shield" thing (totally stolen from Spaceballs!) seems to indicate zero practical movement w.r.t. the planetary surface (and looks too close to be a FOOsynchronous point, but does somewhat depending on Planet FOO's own spin and day-length).

I think they probably do tend to avoid the confusion of possible orbits (or pseudo-orbiting powered circuits of the planet) just to ensure that the multitude of potentially conflicting and intersecting loops don't happen, instead using practically unlimited thrust-control and grav/anti-grav effects to "hang in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" (to steal from H2G2), as we also saw in Rogue One, well within the atmosphere.

There's probably some convention/best-practices to adhere to (see also agreement over which direction is up, for entirely differently-commanded fleets even in space sufficiently far away from anywhere interesting) but within the presence of a planet you probably just have your nav-computers calculate a 'shell' of a convenient altitude above the planet and 'sit' you on it (probably on the equator, or above the surface feature of most interest) keel-to-planet so long as you've got no other good reason to maneuver or otherwise rotate yourself further.

There's a long history of spacefaring. People (and droid-brains) probably do these things without thinking, because they usually aren't needing to do anything cleverer.

(Even with the TLJ opening bomb-run, by being 'stationary' above the planet they not only had a constant firing solution to their target with their Dreadnought-thing guns (rather than only.a fraction of their orbit time being usefully 'on-station'), but attackers couldn't just launch a reverse-orbit attack on them and automatically double the closing speed. Though nothing quite explains how they managed to sneak the Space-B52s up there, even under the chaos of Po's prank-call/peddle-to-metal attack. Without scanner-jamming, as exhibited later, at least. Maybe it's consistent, in itself, then.)

PPE:

I mean, if they're going to be hanging out in one location for a while they'll usually orbit to save on energy. Not to mention that some ships are just too big to enter an atmosphere.

Rogue One (un)addresses both of these issues! I don't think we've seen any 'orbit' in use except for Yavin 4's natural orbit around Yavin Prime bringing it into view of where the DS1 had initially arrived in the system, or maybe the DS1 was sublighting itself round YP to see Y4. Or both. Not sure it's properly established, any which way.

[smjjames]

Considering it took only a half hour (or something) to get into line of sight of Y4 upon exiting hyperspace, they either positioned themselves where Y4 was just behind YP from DS1s perspective or they sublighted themselves towards Y4.

Alternatively they could have done a fast orbit close to YP.

In any case, having it be in range within many hours or a few days wouldn’t be nearly as dramatic as ‘OMGWTFBBQ 30 MINUTES! *FLAILS*’

[hector13]

I think you could argue artistic license and say hey skipped the bit between when they came out of hyperspace and then sublighting it to the moon.

Though I haven’t seen the movie for a while...

[Egan_BW]

...Huh. Why didn't the death star just laser up Yavin Prime? Even if the laser isn't strong enough to pop a gas giant the way it can a terrestrial world, fucking up the giant in such a way would still probably be enough to kill everyone on the moon.

[Reelya]

If you watch the video "how Star Wars was saved in the edit" (really worthwhile stuff btw) it explains that the "coming around the moon to shoot the base" plot line originally wasn't even in the film. e.g. originally, the rebels just fly out to open space, and have the big battle, and the Death Star wasn't anywhere near anything. But the finale lacked stakes so they completely edited-in the entire "shooting the moon" plot using stock interior scenes plus CGI and new voice overs to tell the story of how the Death Star was moments away from actually shooting at the base, which creates a time-pressure for the good guys.

Presumably, it takes a while to recharge the giant cannon so they'd want to be sure to take it out in one shot, e.g. to make sure the least amount of rebels escape. The Imperials didn't believe the Rebels could harm the Death Star so for them the main time-pressure was to take out as many rebels as possible in that one shot as they could. Hitting the planet and not the moon could give the rebels evacuation time.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

look up "Star Wars: Infinities", it's basically an alternate timeline where A.) Luke fails to blow up the Deathstar, and B.) Tarkin get's impatient and fires the laser prematurely, leading to many of the rebels escaping.

[EnigmaticHat]

You know, I love Rogue One but the Star Destroyer hovering over the holy city introduces so many problems.  Namely: in most iterations of Star Wars that I've seen, large imperial vehicles are immune to most weapons fire.  Like in Episode V the AT-ATs seemed unbothered by the base's defense turrets and the rebels seemed to have no faith at all that the turrets could fend them off.  So... barring a big ground cannon like the Ion cannon in V, why do the imperials bother using storm troopers as anything other than police?  Seeing as how Star Destroyers are bristling with guns and there's no way small arms would do anything to them.  And the Empire has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to bomb everyone and let the Force sort it out.

Honestly it seems like one of those scenes where its better to just hand wave it.  "The atmosphere on that planet was especially thin" or something and then never talk about it again. 

[Egan_BW]

Same reason you still need infantry even if you have total air superiority in real life. Because hovering over everyone's head and shooting at them is great and all, but sometimes you need to do things other than shooting.
What kinds of things do we see stormtroopers doing in the OT? Boarding a ship with the goal of capturing information and people intact, policing Tatooine, guarding their OWN battlestation, storming the entrenched base on Hoth before the rebels can escape from the the slow AT-AT walkers, strongarming the owner of a floating city, scouting a forest, and again defending their own installation. All of these have fairly plausible reasons to not just want to blow everything up.
In addition keeping a star destroyer hovering close to the ground probably uses a lot more fuel than having them in space, so simple expense can be an issue as well. For the less important places, it might not be worth paying the logistics cost of absurdly heavily armored overwatch, but it would be cost-effective to have a few stormtroopers keeping watch.
This would mean that the fact that there's one hovering over that city in much the same way that bricks don't implies that that city is a valuable asset to the imperials that they don't want to lose, which I personally think is exactly the impression that the movie made.

TL;DR: economics, not physics.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Yep. The Empire is slightly more competent than to angrily shake their fists at people (barely).

[MrRoboto75]

new Solo trailer

[EnigmaticHat]

Same reason you still need infantry even if you have total air superiority in real life. Because hovering over everyone's head and shooting at them is great and all, but sometimes you need to do things other than shooting.
What kinds of things do we see stormtroopers doing in the OT? Boarding a ship with the goal of capturing information and people intact, policing Tatooine, guarding their OWN battlestation, storming the entrenched base on Hoth before the rebels can escape from the the slow AT-AT walkers, strongarming the owner of a floating city, scouting a forest, and again defending their own installation. All of these have fairly plausible reasons to not just want to blow everything up.
In addition keeping a star destroyer hovering close to the ground probably uses a lot more fuel than having them in space, so simple expense can be an issue as well. For the less important places, it might not be worth paying the logistics cost of absurdly heavily armored overwatch, but it would be cost-effective to have a few stormtroopers keeping watch.
This would mean that the fact that there's one hovering over that city in much the same way that bricks don't implies that that city is a valuable asset to the imperials that they don't want to lose, which I personally think is exactly the impression that the movie made.

TL;DR: economics, not physics.

Okay but if they had just hovered over Mos Eisley with a star destroyer for two days they would have won the entire war with ease.  The only reason the Falcon could escape is because the at least two star destroyers they had were staying in orbit.

Star destroyers being able to enter atmosphere also pretty much trashes the entire first season of Rebels, if anyone cares.  I mean its a children's show but I thought it was pretty good...

was that a Hitchhiker's Guide reference?

[Reelya]

Rebels apparently has no problem showing star destroyers in atmosphere. Disclaimer: I haven't seen Rebels, just came across this in an answer to this post:
https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/147527/how-could-a-star-destroyer-hover-over-a-city-in-rogue-one

Also several points:

- Vader is shown as having to go meet the Death Star, and must have traveled there in his star destroyer, thus it wasn't at Tatooine anymore. He gives his men orders to find the plans, then rushes off for his important meeting.

- It's been a while but I don't recall Vader having an additional star destroyer at Tatooine in the first movie, unless Lucas decided to retcon one in for the Special Edition movies, and in that case it would have been to explain how the remaining storm troopers planned to get home after Vader's star destroyer already left, so they're still left with one ship, not two.

- Tatooine is a planet with apparent Earth gravity thus it's likely to be Earth-sized. Originally, the ground troops only suspect the plans may be in the escape pod, until one of the stormtroopers reveals droid parts. They then track the movement of the droids on the planet, and eventually this takes them to Mos Eisley. But they can't know ahead of time whether the droids are together or separate, which droid has the plans or that the droids met someone who even wanted to take them off the planet. There's too much viewer knowledge in all that.

- also, what if the droids met someone with an X-Wing fighter? Small, hyperspace capable ships are shown to exist and be capable of taking off from just about anywhere, not just spaceports. The imperials can't have known ahead of time that the droids must be headed to the spaceport, and we're not told that the planet has only one spaceport.

- Even if the star destroyer can enter atmosphere and knows for sure that it's going to be from Mos Eisley, they can't hyperspace from inside atmosphere, and small ships have been shown to be capable of out-maneuvering things as large as a Star Destroyer. Being in atmosphere might not be the cleverest tactic in a chase situation.

[Egan_BW]

I recall the falcon dodging multiple star destroyers before jumping into hyperspace in IV. Must be a special edition thing...
But yes, if the Imperials had perfect intel and always knew where something important was going to happen so they could hover a few starships over the problem they'd have won the war easily. Before the events of the movie.