[krapp]

> If we can just destroy entire enemy fleets by jumping to lightspeed with one ship, why are not all battles fought that way.

For the same reason naval battles in the real world weren't always fought by ramming ships into other ships. Ships are expensive, hyperdrives are expensive, and more valuable as ships than as ballistic mass. It would be a waste of resources for it to become a common tactic.

It was a lucky gamble that paid off.

>Maybe it's just that the original trilogy slipped in to me before I got old enough to where I think about such things

The OT is just as ridiculous. The trench run on the Death Star makes no sense outside of the context of the World War 2 film it was lifted from, no one in their right mind would design AT-ATs with such a high and vulnerable center of gravity, stormtrooper armor clearly does nothing against teddy bears and small rocks, spaceships bank and make noises in space, etc. Even lightsabers are just "cool laser swords" and metaphors for "space samurai" but don't make a lot of sense as weapons in a universe with telekinesis and blasters. Actual samurai weren't stupid enough to use their katanas if they had spears, bows and eventually guns available, yet I don't recall ever seeing a Jedi sniper, or the lightsaber version of a naginata.

Sound military tactics and plausible design were never really a thing in Star Wars.

[discoursism]

> For the same reason naval battles in the real world weren't always fought by ramming ships into other ships.

If a single ship could wipe out a whole enemy fleet via ramming in terrestrial naval battles, every real-world naval battle would be fought by ramming. Also we wouldn't have naval fleets, nor probably naval battles at all. The real reason we don't fight by ramming is that, at best, you get a 1:1 trade, and normally not even that much.

So, this explanation doesn't hold water for me.

All the inconsistencies you mentioned earlier are for sure cases where you have to suspend disbelief, but (most of them) at least seem internally consistent. That is, they don't reconcile well against reality, but they don't contradict other things we see in the story. I don't feel the same way about the end of the battle in TLJ.

[science4sail]

Ramming (or the threat thereof) is very much a real-world tactic:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ship

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellburners

[krapp]

It's a tactic, but it isn't used exclusively, and when it has been used regularly, it tends not to be more effective than conventional warfare.

The premise that because hyperspace ramming works, it should render all other forms of warfare in the Star Wars universe obsolete seems like nitpicking to me. Of course it works. It seems to be consistent with physics in the Star Wars universe - ships do travel through and interact with physical space while entering and exiting hyperspace, and collisions with realspace objects do occur (see Han Solo mentioning the dangers of flying "right through a star" in ANH.)

So if the tactic works in universe, but why isn't it used all the time? Because throwing starships at each other and risking the loss of your own personnel and equipment is a desperate and potentially suicidal tactic and not doing that is almost always a better idea. Far more things can possibly go wrong than can go right.

Plus, once it becomes a regular tactic, countermeasures will get developed to take it into account - the enemy will disperse their command and control capabilities into multiple smaller ships or attempt to engage from a greater distance or whatever. So despite being wasteful, it's also short-sighted.

Notwithstanding the real answer being that it wouldn't be as interesting to watch ships just kamikaze one another at lightspeed.