The Death Star's fatal flaw is the focus of both A New Hope and Rogue One, a detail so insignificant that the overlords who built it ignored any chance that it would come back to haunt them. But visual effects artist Todd Vaziri just found some crucial information about the channel Luke so deftly flies through. It isn't the Death Star's obvious equator. It's a longitudinal line, going north-south.

The Death Star's equatorial line is one of its most defining features, along the divot out of which the planet-busting lasers fly. It draws your eyes to it, and it looks like the perfect place to zip through with your X-Wing.

And it is, of course, just not when you're trying to blow it up. As Vaziri says, "The equatorial trench is where the major hangar bays are located on the Death Star. The hangar bays are depicted in this sequence from Star Wars, when the tractor beam locks onto the Millennium Falcon. The equatorial trench is large enough to house multiple hangar bays stacked vertically." You could fly with room to spare in this trench.

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But Luke's trench is so narrow—it can't possible be that one. So how does Vaziri figure out the specific location of the exhaust port? Through an exhaustive look at what New Hope actually says. Describing the briefing room scene before the assault on the Death Star, Vaziri writes that while a general "describes the challenges ahead, the audience can see quite clearly that the trench that contains the exhaust port is perpendicular to the equator. It was there the whole time."

It's detailed post, worth reading in full for all Star Wars nerds, that shows how the film wanted to incorporate its visual effects into its philosophy. By hiding the exhaust port in plain sight, it makes it that much more remarkable that Luke can find it.

Source: FXRant via io9

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