wilcoxon wrote:
The two biggest continuity problems I saw with respect to the original movies were no Bothans ("many Bothan spies died to bring us these plans")
You're making a mistake that line is from Episode 6. It is referencing the plans for the second Death Star, not the first Death Star from Episode 4.
wilcoxon wrote:
and having ships, weapons, and tech in Rogue One (because they were cool) that did not appear anywhere in the original trilogy. Probably the biggest problematic one was the shield gate - if those existed, they certainly would have used them in other places in the "later" movies
I don't know about that. I feel they did things really well with the tech. I mean the rebellion had older model ships (ETA-2s) that were part of of Episode 3 as well as the newer ones that were part of Ep 4 (X-wings). If you notice they used the older models for the ill fated Blue Squadron, while Gold Squadron got the Y-Wings, and Red got the X-Wings. This is exactly the set up they had in Episode 4 except there was no Blue Squadron in Ep4 as they were all killed in R1.
They had AT-ATs from Ep 5 but before they were retrofitted to be mobile heavy artillery they were cargo transports (having hollow centres and removable panels on the sides in R1.) As for the gate that seems like an inferior version on the shield used on the Second Death Star in Ep 6. My understanding of R1 was that with the destruction of the gate the entire shield failed. If the gate was generating the shield and it went down the shield went down. If the gate was a plug that simply created a hole in the shield, when the gate goes, the hole closes, which wouldn't help them.
The empire learned from that attack, not to have the shield generator so exposed. And by EP 6 the put the generator on a planet, not in space, project the shield where they want, and guard the generator within the shield itself. If you recall in EP6 Han's team had to use a stolen shuttle with code to have the shield lowered, and land on the Endor. The code did not just let them pass the fleet. Much better tech in the future.
Even the tech new to us was inferior to future films. Baze's pulse laser rifle, where he had to carry the energy pack on his back and stop to reload, or perhaps prevent over heating, seemed dated when compared to other rapid fire lasers in EP 4-7.
I believe they actively tried to show tech that was replaced from EP3 and was the predecessor of future tech.