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Missiles are great for adding tension and drama to a high-speed vehicular combat. With their relentless ability to seek the target and keep coming despite all the dodging in the world, you need to come up with some other method to deal with them. A handy table!:
- Shoot them down. They move fast though, good luck!
- Jam the homing sensor.
- Release chaff to distract the missile.
- If you don't have any chaff, release unnecessary parts of your vehicle. Like landing gear.
- Fly dangerously close to an obstacle and dodge at the last second, so the missile hits the obstacle.
- Fly through a building, James Bond style, so the missile destroys the building and not your vehicle. For bonus points, make it the villain's lair.
- Turn your engines off so the missile has no heat signature to track. This is good in space; slightly less good if you're flying a plane. Or a helicopter.
- As the missile flies past on a close miss, jump from your vehicle to the missile, and then rip wiring out to disable it.
- If it's a sufficiently smart missile, inflict it with ennui, and so convince it not to bother hitting you.
- Shunt the missile into another dimension; let them deal with it.
- Command the missile to compute the square root of 2 to the last decimal place.
- Get rid of whatever it is that the missile is homing in on. Your exhaust. Your engine. Your chassis.
- Go into your vehicle's otherwise never-used turbo-speed mode so you fly faster than the missile.
- Swap vehicles in a dark alley, so it can't trace you.
- Hack the offices of the people who fired the missile with social engineering and steal their IFF codes so you can imitate them.
- Go back in time and kill the father of the person who made the missile.
- Change the local laws of physics so that the missile is no longer aerodynamic and cannot fly.
- Zeno's defence: Do nothing; motion is inherently impossible, so the missile cannot reach you. (Be careful, this is vulnerable to Galileo's counter-attack: Eppur si muove.)
Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)
There's definitely a problem if a single fighter is able to take out multiple weapon emplacements on a larger ship. Narratively of course, it's almost a guaranteed thing, otherwise we wouldn't have a story where it happens. Realistically though, unless the Finalizer has staffing issues or design problems, a single fighter should be easily dispatched by even a semi-competently run flagship.
Well, if Finn and Poe get shot down, there's no need to worry about landing then. Just bailing out, or shooting down the missiles, or something else to survive getting to the planet. Hang on, this is Star Wars. Why do they have missiles? Sure, missiles rarely showed up before, but only in the prequel movies, and only those two times from what I remember. Star Wars is all about the flashy lasers and improbable space dogfights. I wonder why we suddenly have missiles again that couldn't have been fulfilled narratively by something else.
Hardly surprising that Kylo doesn't mind if Finn and Poe do end up dying though. If Poe is really one of the best pilots the Resistance has, then there doesn't seem to be much of a problem in straight up fights. Maybe Kylo and the First Order are interested in finding out where Luke is to kill him to crush any future potential uprisings or remnants that would oppose them.
Commentary by Keybounce (who has not seen the movie)
So...?!?
The Brass in charge know about the plan to fake an escape. And...
Well, nothing was set up to inform anyone. Nothing was set up for any sort of "let them go". Phasma and Hux just took the view of "Let them fight their way out".
... Well, this is a PvP campaign. And if they die trying to get away? Well, that's just PvP for you. So, relentless missiles? Right, a PvP campaign. And if they die? Well, either way, they are no longer our concern :-).
How did things go from "Looks like they are escaping, Sir" to "They could have gotten away but didn't."? I'm wondering who's the meddling kid in this? ("They could have gotten away with it, except for the meddling kid desire to come back and hurt us more.")
Possible title: Scooby, do the missile. Assume the gunner's name is Scooby.
Transcript
GM: Meanwhile, on the Finalizer’s bridge:
Status Officer: Sir, they’ve taken out our turbolasers.
General Hux: What on Earth are they doing?
Lieutenant Mitaka: Looks like they’re escaping, sir.
Kylo Ren: General Hux! How’s the plan going?
General Hux: Well... they could have gotten away, but they keep coming back to shoot at us.
Kylo Ren: Clearly they require further motivation. Fire Relentless Persecution missiles.
General Hux: But... those are relentless. They won't stand a chance.
Lieutenant Mitaka: Missiles away!
Kylo Ren: Which should prove very motivating.