I’m not sure that last part’s true. The Death Star’s beam is pretty wide, and it manages to track a planet, which if we take Earth’s travel around the Sun as an example could be moving around 30 km/s. Voyager 1, by contrast, travels around 17 km/s. The main thing it would depend on is your distance from the Death Star. The laser seems to be able to travel a very long distance, and so if you’re far enough away, that only requires a very small angular correction by the station, although they’d have to lead the shot more and would give the ship more chances to make unpredictable maneuvers after they’ve already fired. Collimation means that the beam would stay at basically the same width when it reaches you as it was at the station, so I don’t think that would be a factor. If you’re really close, though, then yeah, even just lazily moving out of the way is probably enough. I don’t think it’s ever quite explained how the Death Star tracks Alderaan, but based on the fact that the laser is facing like 150 degrees away from the planet as Princess Leia is brought in for interrogation, I think it can be surmised that it can orbit itself about its own axis pretty quickly.
Doesn’t even need to go faster than light. It takes over 10 seconds to fire the Death Star’s laser based on this footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g77WN6obk4
You could probably get out of the way if you were traveling at 20th century Earth probe speeds.
I’m not sure that last part’s true. The Death Star’s beam is pretty wide, and it manages to track a planet, which if we take Earth’s travel around the Sun as an example could be moving around 30 km/s. Voyager 1, by contrast, travels around 17 km/s. The main thing it would depend on is your distance from the Death Star. The laser seems to be able to travel a very long distance, and so if you’re far enough away, that only requires a very small angular correction by the station, although they’d have to lead the shot more and would give the ship more chances to make unpredictable maneuvers after they’ve already fired. Collimation means that the beam would stay at basically the same width when it reaches you as it was at the station, so I don’t think that would be a factor. If you’re really close, though, then yeah, even just lazily moving out of the way is probably enough. I don’t think it’s ever quite explained how the Death Star tracks Alderaan, but based on the fact that the laser is facing like 150 degrees away from the planet as Princess Leia is brought in for interrogation, I think it can be surmised that it can orbit itself about its own axis pretty quickly.