Janskeet said:Yeah, they should've dispatched the fleet in groups so if one group started to get small, they could dispatch more to come in in for help.
Battles are won by whoever gets there fustest with the mostest. Once you're committed to a course of action, if you're not terribly worried about branches and sequelae, you don't hold back your reserves.
They sent them all in at once with little or not strategy. When the tie fighters were on their tail they should've had more pilots that could come from behind and ttake out the ties.
They did. Luke's group was covering for Red Leader's run. But they got bogged down in dogfights and couldn't disengage to handle Vader and his wingmen.
Whatever errors may have been made in vicinity of the exhaust port, the overall strategy worked fairly well. Only Vader and Bast realized what the real attack was, and only Vader's personal squadron mounted a counterattack at the real center of gravity. Had Vader not launched his squadron, the fighters making runs on the exhaust port would have been unmolested in the trench.
Also, the x-winfs could've tried to do 360s and rotate completely around the tuies and fire at them too.
If, during an attack run, the two trailing Rebel fighters had looped back to fire on the TIEs, that would've made it much easier for the TIEs to hit the remaining fighter. And the looping Rebel fighters would've been exposed to the surface guns, stuck in a fairly predictable maneuver. It wouldn't have been suicide, but it would be bad.
Starfuries would've owned the trench run, though. Assuming they can fire proton torpedoes.