Those pesky Rebels. How they love causing reactor overloads! According to last week’s issue of Star Wars, the Rebels’ battle plan—maybe their only battle plan—can be applied to anything, whether it’s blowing up space stations or stealing a capital ship.
Star Wars #22, by Jason Aaron, Jorge Molina, Matt Milla, and Joe Caramagna, is essentially one big love letter to the Death Star assaults in A New Hope and Return of the Jedi—but instead of blowing up moon-sized, fully armed and operational battlestations, the Rebels are attempting to hijack a Star Destroyer, by causing a reactor overload that makes the Imperial crew abandon ship so they can swoop in, repair the overload, and run off with a free capital ship.
Although, unlike the Death Star assault, this is not meant to end in an explosion, it turns out the methods for accomplishing both are remarkably similar. First, your plucky group of starfighters runs the hellish trench run that is swarms of TIE Fighters and gun emplacements:
After the Falcon blows a hole in the back of the Star Destroyer to open up access to the reactor, you’ve got your traditional first attempt of failure (sorry Wedge):
Which is when we get all Return of the Jedi and decide to just fly straight into the damn thing anyway:
Make your one-in-a-million shot:
And then, if you were a Death Star, this would happen:
But, if you were a Star Destroyer the Rebels wanted intact but free of it’s Imperial crew, you instead want to board the ship after it’s been evacuated, so you can re-stabilize the reactor core and be on your merry way as the owner of your very own Star Destroyer. Really, you should do that, to avoid this happening:
Oh dear. So turns out trying to hijack a Star Destroy is a lot like blowing up a Death Star, explosions and all.
Or, it would be, if you weren’t Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, and Han Solo, and the entire audience knows you live to appear in Empire Strikes Back. Turns out the explosion was a cover for them to jump the Star Destroyer to lightspeed, meaning that for now (and presumably for a limited period of time, since we don’t hear about the Rebels getting their hands on Star Destroyers until after the Battle of Endor), the Rebel Alliance has its hands on one of the biggest ships in the Imperial fleet.
What could possibly go wrong? Everything. The answer is almost definitely everything.