I had a thought about the proton torpedoes. It would be a relatively minor change, but I think it would be really cool.

In the current version, when Luke fires the fateful shot, we see two glowing pink things with glowing tails fly down the trench until they are above the exhaust port and then drop in. It looks like a pair of guided missiles. During the briefing a whiny pilot complains about the difficulty of the shot, but we have to take his word for it. There’s nothing in the visuals that conveys the difficulty of the shot.

Now imagine that proton torpedoes are neither guided nor powered, so their trajectories are purely ballistic. Then we’re talking about shooting a ball into a two-meter basketball hoop from half a mile out at a hundred miles an hour — a feat that would be humanly impossible without the aid of a targeting computer.

I think it would be neat to change the visual effect so that Luke’s shot (and Red Leader’s shot earlier in the battle) appears as a single spherical object following a parabolic trajectory. Could that be done?