Ever since playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, I couldn’t help but wonder, why didn’t Luke Skywalker pull a Cal Kestis on Hoth? You know what I’m talking about: hijacking an AT-AT, turning it around, and causing absolute chaos among the Imperial walkers. On paper, it seems like a perfect move. So why didn’t Luke try to hijack one himself?
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First Off: Hijacking an AT-AT Isn’t Easy
In Fallen Order, Cal Kestis spent literal years on Bracca, scrapping walkers and working closely with Imperial tech. He knew those machines inside and out.
If you’re not too familiar with Cal’s story, that’s understandable—the only way to experience it is by playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. The game takes place during the rise of the Empire, and Cal Kestis is one of the few Padawans who survived Order 66. After going into hiding, he took on a low-profile life as a scrapper and engineer on the junkyard planet Bracca.
Bracca is home to the Scrapper Guild, which tears apart warships from all over the galaxy and sells the parts back to the Empire. Cal worked with them for years, living in seclusion while dismantling old Republic and Separatist tech. He became intimately familiar with the systems, especially AT-ATs and other Imperial vehicles.
So yeah—when Cal Kestis hijacks an AT-AT in the game, it’s not just some lucky guesswork. Taking control of one isn’t like jumping into a speeder. These are highly specialized war machines built specifically to prevent hijacking. The Empire wouldn’t make it easy, but Cal’s years of experience gave him the knowledge to pull it off.
Luke Was a Pilot and a Jedi, Not an Engineer
Luke Skywalker isn’t the kind of character who ever had to get his hands dirty with mechanical work beyond basic piloting repairs. He’s a farm boy who became a Rebel pilot and then a Jedi. Yeah, he tinkered with droids back on Tatooine and could bullseye womp rats in a T-16, but that’s a far cry from dismantling military-grade Imperial walkers. Luke’s skillset leans toward flying X-wings, swinging lightsabers, and trusting the Force, not reverse-engineering armored vehicles in the middle of a battlefield.
When we see him on Hoth during The Empire Strikes Back, he doesn’t even try to hijack the AT-AT. And honestly, he probably didn’t know how. Those walkers are massive military machines, full of sealed compartments, encrypted systems, and redundancies designed specifically to prevent exactly that. You can’t just open a door and press “go.” Luke wouldn’t have known where to access the cockpit, how to power it up, or even how to bypass the security locks if the crew was still alive inside.
Too Many Troopers, Too Much Risk: Hijacking Wasn’t Worth It
There’s another very practical reason why Luke didn’t attempt to hijack the AT-AT: the Imperial soldiers stationed inside. AT-ATs aren’t just walking machines; they’re fully-staffed mobile fortresses.
If Luke managed to breach an AT-AT, he’d immediately face numerous Imperial troopers armed and ready. Fighting off multiple soldiers in a confined space, while simultaneously attempting to pilot a complex vehicle he wasn’t trained to handle, would be extremely risky.
Moreover, destroying an AT-AT outright was simply more effective. It eliminated both the walker and its crew immediately, rather than putting Luke through a complicated and dangerous takeover process that might fail or even backfire dramatically.