Echo Base is the Rebel Alliance base established after the Alliance evacuation of Yavin IV. The base, which was featured in the opening sequence of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, is composed of a series of tunnels and caverns cut from the icy mountainside of the planet Hoth.
Echo Base was not designed with the means to repel an Imperial assault, but instead relied on its shield generator and its hidden location on a desolate planet in an unoccupied system to protect it from the Empire. Because of this most of its equipment and machinery were able to be taken apart and evacuated at a moment's notice, if the base was discovered.
When the Empire's probe droids found the base, the Rebels fought a holding action to give the transports enough time to evacuate. They used the base's planetary defense shield to prevent an Imperial orbital bombardment, and then used small airspeeders modified for the cold climate of Hoth, called Snowspeeders, and a small contingent of soldiers, to slow the advance of the Empire's AT-AT walkers. This holding action allowed the Rebels time to use Echo Base's Planet Defender Ion Cannon to open holes in the Imperial blockade, allowing many transports and their X-wing escorts to escape.
Echo Base suffered a series of attacks by the shaggy and carnivorous wampas soon after Commander Skywalker's encounter with one of the creatures. This is not shown in Empire Strikes Back, but was described in the accompanying novelization.
Read more about this topic: Hoth
Famous quotes containing the words echo and/or base:
“The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“One does not jump, and spring, and shout hurrah! at hearing one has got a fortune, one begins to consider responsibilities, and to ponder business; on a base of steady satisfaction rise certain grave cares, and we contain ourselves, and brood over our bliss with a solemn brow.”
—Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855)