but at the time? Hardly so easy. Besides, you make it sound like Palpatine had anything to do with the decision. From what I understand, the whole biff was totally on Tarkin's mistakes. Besides there were plenty of reasons not to blow Tantooine up.

1) Who knows how fast the Death star could have gotten there and whether it could even have shot Tantooine so soon after shooting Alderaan. What if there was a "cooldown" period, so to speak? What if it expended too much energy and they had to wait until the energy built up before they could fire again?

2) Why destroy a resource you don't have to? If Leia had known they knew Dantooine was deserted and given a better misdirection, then they may not have blown up Alderaan (at least, not before they themselves were blown up). They would simply have slotted her for execution and been done with it (or maybe kept her around in case she was lying). Anyway, point being. Tantooine. Yes, it was relatively uncontrolled, but it was still a trade hub and there were resources available in the forms of the mines on Tantooine and the plethora of hireable mercenaries and bounty hunters. Not to mention that you bet the empire was getting pay offs from the Hutts NOT to blow their butts into smithereens. Yes, the Empire would have done fine without Tantooine, but why remove a resource if you don't have to?

3) Why in all conceivable notions would Tarkin think that retrieving two little droids would be so difficult? It's not like he expected there to be Jedi sitting around to keep his stormtroopers from noticing the droids! Tarkin had a lack of information that we as movie-goers had ready access to...it's quite arguable that without the Lucas-written circumstances, he'd have captured the droids and that would be that.

I'm not saying that the Empire wasn't necessarily more efficient than the Republic (although we don't really have a good frame of reference to compare them), or would have lasted only a short time...but the possibility was still there. Also the transition back to a Republic was NOT wrought with chaos and bloodshed (which is what you originally said)...it just didn't become the improvement they hoped it would be. And again, that's just from the writers who wrote the gradual decline of the Republic's view To be honest, that all started happening with the New Jedi Order books...which I think quickly became a load of crock. But then, they killed off two of my favorite supporting characters, so I wasn't too pleased with them anyways. (In case you didn't know, they killed Chewbacca.) On the other hand, they DID bring one of my old expanded universe favorites back, so I won't totally hate them. That's what happens when you have 50 authors writing a series 9_9