Orbital Lasers

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Honestly though, that only works when the secondary craft are much faster than the primary craft. When you can jump into hyperspace to avoid fighters, that makes it more ballistic submarine versus fighter jets. Ballistic submarines survive through stealth and by avoiding unnecessary combat, which is how the commanders of the Death Star should have treated it. It is not the combat abilities of ballistic submarines that are terrifying, it is the fact that they can pop up anywhere and use those combat abilities that is terrifying.

In the original Star Wars movie, nobody seemed to find it odd that the Death Star came out of hyperspace far from Yavin's Moon and had to travel through normal space to get a clear shot at it, which strongly suggests that large ships and super-large ships were quite constrained in how they could exit hyperspace. Han Solo's comments about plotting hyperspace courses also makes it clear that it's not trivial, and it's quite possible that the bigger the vessel, the trickier it is.

In normal space the Death Star was much slower than the small ships. Star destroyers and other cruisers were also much slower than ships like the Falcon and fighters. All this is intentional - Star Wars space combat was always intended to be "World War Two in Space".

As for using the Death Star to sneak around - as far as anyone knew, aside from the rebels at the end of the movie (and a few others in Rogue One, who all died), the Death Star had no particular vulnerabilities, and the rebels lacked anything with the firepower to threaten it. Sneaking around in the Death Star defeats half the reason to make the thing so big. Unlike a boomer, it's not intended to hide and retaliate. It's intended to show the flag, to scare people by its presence, and to shoot first.