9 Dumbest Things In Star Wars Original Trilogy

Early on in Episode IV - A New Hope, there's a moment when the Empire were shown to be able to scan for lifeforms on spacecraft as Threepio and Artoo crashed down to Tatooine in an escape pod.

The fact the Imperial officers chose to not destroy that vessel simply because it didn't contain a living being was already rather dumb, it must be said. But there was arguably an even more foolish scanning moment still to come.

You see, when the Millennium Falcon is pulled onto the Death Star via tractor beam later on, it's quickly reported that, according to its log, the ship's crew had apparently abandoned ship after take-off. Not fully satisfied with that report, Vader then orders a scanning team be sent onto the freighter to search every inch of it.

But rather than depend on a bunch of hopeless stormtroopers and officers here, wouldn't it have been easier to just use that same lifeform scanning tech that could detect beings from outside the ship seen earlier in the film?

Now sure, you could possibly argue that the smuggling compartments Han crammed the team into to hide from the Empire may have been able to keep lifeforms from being found on those sensors. But Solo's comments on never thinking he'd chuck himself into one of them seems to suggest he'd never tested whether that would even work.

Had Vader just ordered his squad to scan it from the outside upon the Falcon's arrival, the Empire could have got their hands on the Death Star plans there and then, the silly gooses.