Granted, the same effect could be achieved by having the storage system deposit the hard drive in a box, to be picked up by hand, but I can't come up with any explanation about that.
Watching the Death Star operating at low power was cool though, as well as knowing that it had undergone some "preliminary tests" before Episode IV.
Also, I had recently read this fanfiction [1] about a project manager working on the second Death Star, complaining about how much of the institutional knowledge from the first Death Star had been lost, making the second Death Star be quite rushed. The loss of the original plans made the fanfiction fit in even better.
[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11685932/1/Instruments-of-Destr...
Oh yeah the slomo nuke that's literally outran by the characters. ಠ_ಠ
Clearly, the stronghold is not 600 miles from the city, as the shockwave was traveling faster than the rockwave, but it gives a good sense of timing. Note that the characters were not able to outrun the rockwave without the jump to hyperspace.
If I were retcon-ing the data silo design they're worried about a terror attack methodically destroying trillions of dollars of stored design data, or being too easy and fast to use, resulting in the wrong people putting together the wrong collection of ideas and figuring out the overall plan. You can do a lot of interesting compartmentalized grunt work engineering. So here's the static and dynamic loads gimmie a minimal mass truss design for those loads with a factor of safety of 9 but you don't have to be told thats the death star's laser cannon support thingy and it would be bad if enough people put 2 and 2 together.
Nitpick, but this isn't what relativistic morality means; it means that there's no One True morality. Racial supremacism doesn't really have anything to do with it.
Relativistic morality? (Its ok to kill this race because we are better than them)
if you think of the self aware droids as cattle then its kind of a choie about what you like more. Cows are really nice animals in taste and temperament. Its about where you draw the line, and I guess in a way the jedi were being all realpolitik with how they deal with the galaxy.
In earth scale I would say they best examples is States Rights vs Human Rights. At what point do we get involved with a country for their human rights abuses? I'm Australian and I would happily see a few of my politicians dragged off to the Hague to be hung for their treatment of refugees. so what do we do with, American and its spying and DPRK, the philipines, burma, iran etc etc.
The interesting thing about the Star wars films is that the build up of arms by forces in the galaxy is allowed. I know in other series of sci fi (DUNE) there was a repression of technology past a point, if only to add some normal level to the battle field. If you start to develop capability eventually the end result is the use of it, Im supprised the empire could get away with the build up in secret.
Anyway. Rouge one was a lot like the thin red line. so tip of the hat to the star wars people for making a wholly depressing and sad war film.
-Also something i noticed, the UI and control systems engeneers in the empire a crap. its like a jobs for the boys kind of operation where everyone gets to do something. why is the antenna sighting control seperate from the transmission control. they are so tightly related. and also. The antenna is for space communications, visual sight of the dish isn't really needed as your not pointing at anything.
Other than that everything was super realistic with the fish people and faster that light travel etc. :P