What are we paying by the laser now?
Sure laugh but its not like they’re in a highly advanced society where robots, recording devices and automation are common…
The command was dumb, but the action wasn’t.
It was implied that the plans were unable to be copied, otherwise the rebels would have sent a copy instead of the original. Vader would have been handed the original and the copy (or several) would have made it back to the leadership.
The empire needs to find the original to know it’s no longer in rebel hands, so destroying it would have been losing that evidence.
The stormtroopers were on planet looking for the escape pod contents, so they’re actions (mostly) make sense.
Implied because the rebels are also badly written? There’s nothing in-world explaining why a basic digital file can’t be copied, I guess it’s metachlorians, right?