The battle of Yavin.

The point was this giant war machine was coming to destroy the planet they were hiding on, which would have been a massive loss to the Rebel cause. And once the Empire had a weapon of mass destruction with the ability to destroy entire systems, their would be no stopping them. The glimmer of hope were the Death Star plans hidden in Artoo. By examining these plans, they discovered that the weak spot, this was their only hope.

The Battle of Yavin was a final stand, they could either retreat by evacuating the planet, or they could fight back and try to end this huge threat on the galaxy. They choose to do the later. They sent in all their fighters and pilots, on what was essentially a suicide mission. They were throwing everything they had at the Death Star in desperate hopes of being able to get some torpedoes into that exhaust port. Of course the pilots were suppose to protect one another and shoot down as many Ties and they could. The Y-Wings, which are bombers, were the ones intended to give the blow to the Death Star, and the X-Wings were really their to give the bombers cover fire, but in the end the job was left to the last fighter left standing, Luke and his X-Wing.

 Luke is the only one who could do it since he used the force to guide the torpedo straight down the exhaust port into the main reactor.

Had the rebels had no one who was a jedi or someone who could potentially be a jedi, Yavin 4 would have been destroyed by the death star's prime weapon.

Who could have accomplished this one in a million shot except for the son of Darth Vader or Vader himself.

skyjedi2005 said:

 Luke is the only one who could do it since he used the force to guide the torpedo straight down the exhaust port into the main reactor....

 

Really!?

I always thought Luke used The Force to anticipate or feel when best to fire the torpedos (which was a fraction of a second) which the computer had/would have failed to do.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

If you have not already, pick up the novelization. It expands on things a bit. (It's also a good read.) C3PX covered the strategic side of things pretty well, what follows is pretty much my own impression from the films and EU, combined with a little invention.

The battle was not so much a hasty defense of Yavin, as it was an attempt to take out a high value target. The Alliance command cell with which the Organa family was associated, as we learned in ESB, was highly mobile and capable of dismantling and moving even top echelon command posts in a matter of hours. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the Rebel leaders had evacuated Yavin before the Death Star even arrived, leaving only a skeleton crew to take out the fighters. (Some sources indicate the Death Star arrived the day after the Falcon, giving Dodonna's staff time to analyze the DS plans while, perhaps, the rest of the leadership disappeared into the highly-dispersed fleet.)

Strategically, of course, the destruction or survival of the Death Star would shape the Rebellion's diplomatic, informational, military, and economic efforts throughout the galaxy. Its destruction was paramount if the Rebellion was going to succeed. If it had been allowed to run loose, the Rebels must have feared, Palpatine would have thrown off the last vestiges of benevolence--and the Rebels would have seen the dissolution of the Senate as a precursor to this--and revealed himself as the tyrant he was. Without the Death Star, the Empire had been forced to put on a friendly face in many of its dealings with its subjects. But with a Death Star, it would not need to. And as the galaxy came to know of the Death Star's atrocities, it would not be able to maintain that facade. Without the facade of civility, the Empire would rapidly devolve into utter brutality.

Operationally, the Rebels were probably limited by time and an imperfect command structure. A cell-based organization, pieced together from disparate resistance groups and dispersed throughout the galaxy, cannot possibly concentrate a large amount of combat power at one location based on a plan conceived by a handful of officers, overnight. So the only fighters and ships available to Dodonna would have been those under his headquarters. The capital ships would have been useless against the Death Star, and were probably used in the evacuation of the base. That leaves a few squads of X-wings and Y-wings.

Tactically, of course, we all know what happened. One group attempted to "draw their fire," probably by attacking soft targets of opportunity like hangars. The other group went into the longitudinal trench that led to the exhaust port. When the latter had been nearly destroyed, Luke was given command of a small group to make the last attack run. I understand why a green pilot like Luke was not on the first string, but why was he put in charge of Biggs, an Academy graduate, and Wedge, who had been in space most of his life? There's probably an interesting story there.

Anyway, Luke's group was forced to go in. Flying above the surface of the DS, they would have been in range of a great many guns. Flying through the trench, they only had to worry about one tower, apparently mounted just beyond the exhaust port. The trench would have confined their flight profile to almost a straight line, but they would be flying in a straight line anyway, to let the targeting computer lock on to the exhaust port. (Star Wars was written before things like laser-guided munitions were commonplace, so this scenario seems kind of odd today, but work with it.) Luke directed his flight to transit the trench at full throttle, hoping to put distance between themselves and the TIEs. In deep space a few kilometers wouldn't have mattered, but the jamming fields over the Death Star made a shot of even a few klicks difficult.

The remaining Rebel fighters were slowly picked off. Biggs was killed, and Wedge took damage to his fighter's engines. When he reported to Luke that he couldn't match Luke's speed, Luke ordered him to leave. (Remember that the Death Star's surface is curved, requiring constant acceleration to maintain the same speed and altitude.) When Luke's fighter was hit, it should've all been over. The Rebels' plan had failed. But the unplanned arrival of the Millennium Falcon, along with the stunning incompetence of the Death Star's gunners, saved the day. And the rest is history.

Hmm, I wondered that, too, but having played a lot of the Rogue Squadron games makes me have another theory.  Based on that and Biggs's line, "We'll stay back far enough to cover you," makes me think that they were assuming the fighters would go after the leader, and they could provide cover fire when that happened.  Other than that, yeah, they probably were meat shields, trying to stay evasive enough to give the leader enough time to pop off a shot.

Well, if you need any more clarification, here's a quote from EU (yeah, I know, right?), specifically X-Wing Rogue Squadron by Michael Stackpole:

Wedge folded his arms across his chest.  "I was there when Biggs died.  I got hit and pulled up out of the trench on Luke's orders.  Your cousin and I both knew we were really there as an added set of shields to keep Luke safe, but we didn't regret that.  We knew he'd have done the same thing for us and we also knew he had to blow the Death Star.  Biggs stayed there, keeping the TIEs back, and died there.  And even though he died, he bought Luke the time he needed to destroy the Death Star."

So, yeah, that pretty much confirms what Scruffy said.

see you auntie said:

skyjedi2005 said:

 Luke is the only one who could do it since he used the force to guide the torpedo straight down the exhaust port into the main reactor....

 

Really!?

I always thought Luke used The Force to anticipate or feel when best to fire the torpedos (which was a fraction of a second) which the computer had/would have failed to do.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

 

This is what I always thought as well.  Luke "felt" when the right time to fire was.  Beyond that, the torpedos went in on their own.  Like Wedge said "That's impossible, even for a computer".

Small groups would have been suicide, strength in numbers. They were clearly out numbered by the TIEs, wouldn't take long for them to pick off small groups. Also would have been futile for them to turn around and engage the fighters, they would have endless scores of TIEs to deal with, they could never take them all out, it would just be a matter of time before each X-Wing bit the dust while wasting time looping around and chasing down and dodging TIEs.

The point was to get to the exhust port and shove some torpedoes down its throat. It wasn't that they were just letting themselves get picked off, they were fighting back, but they had to stay on their course or they would be going nowhere only to die in the process.

The stratedgy was very clear, get to the exhust port, stay low and avoid the turbo lasers, they knew it was likely they would have to deal with fighters, the stratedgy was evade, not engage. X-Wings and Y-Wings both have excellent shields, but when you are looking at one Rebel fighter for every ten or so Imperial fighters, there is just really no way to fight back. Evasion was the only hope to make it to the target intact.

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.

Playing Star Wars analyst isn't homework, it's relaxing.