I think people are missing my initial point, and I think that’s my fault because I didn’t really know what it was.

I’m not interested in a technobabble explanation for how communications work, or even ways to reconcile what happens in Rogue One with what happened in the OT. I think the essential point is that the ease of access the rebels had to long distance real-time communications felt instinctively un-star warsy to me. It doesn’t automatically make Rogue One a bad film, and is actually quite fitting for the ‘War Movie’ vibe they were trying to achieve.

I just found it interesting that something so simple instantly struck me as odd, and that’s what led me to thinking more about how things were represented in the OT, and the more I think about it the more I think it’s because of an underlying subtlety of the OT. So a better question to pose would be:

‘In the OT does the Empire restrict access to and/or routinely monitor long distance communications?’

This would be quite in keeping with the totalitarian regimes that the Empire is modelled on, controlling the flow of information and restricting who can talk to who is a really good way of preventing like minded people from forming an effective resistance. It is never out-right stated that this is the case, but it’s obviously something that I had picked up on and I thought it interesting enough to discuss.

Edit: Fixed typo Rouge to Rogue.