Lit Fleet Junkie Flagship- The technical discussions of the GFFA (Capital Ships thread Mk. II)

X-Wings as the 'General Purpose' Fighter,
A-Wings as the Interceptor,
B-Wings as the specialist anti-Capital Ship platform,
K-Wings as the specialist anti-Fortification platform (that can thicken up a B-Wing action when required)

Should (IMHO) be the Fleet's equipment.

E-Wings (again IMHO) would make a pretty good Convoy Escort Fighter.

 

While it's probably been said before- are we going to try putting together the info for another fleet-centric book, in the hope that when Lucasfilm Licencing commissions one, we have the data all set and ready to go?

 

As you're talking about starfighters - has there ever been any information on how the Hapans got X-wings by the Time of COPL? I doubt the Alliance/New Republic would just allow Incom to sell their primary fighter to other governments, or were they allowed to do this? Could the Hapans have copied the design, or is this a sign that their seclusion was not as total as I thought it was?

 

As you're talking about starfighters - has there ever been any information on how the Hapans got X-wings by the Time of COPL? I doubt the Alliance/New Republic would just allow Incom to sell their primary fighter to other governments, or were they allowed to do this? Could the Hapans have copied the design, or is this a sign that their seclusion was not as total as I thought it was?

 

They could have salvaged them from Rebel vs Imperial battles that occurred close to their borders.

Kessel managed to get X-wings as well, under Doole.

 

ThrawnMcEwok has a good theory/retcon that the reason we see so many more X-wings in Tyrant's Test is that the new E-wings were not holding up well in combat and that the NRDF realized that the X-wing performed better against the Yevethan Type-D fighters.

RE: New Class, I think that part of KMac's problem was his decision to basically jettison the entire known (at the time) catalouge of NR warships and fighters and introduce nearly 100% new designs. This was one of those things that caused more casual fans to shun the series because it was not "Star Warsy" enough. Obviously, we Fleet Junkies love the series, but in hindsight the series might off been a bit less jarring if KMac had better balance between his awesome new groundbreakling stuff and the more standard/well known stuff.

--Adm. Nick

 

The K-Wing's lack of hyperdrive always seemed a little odd to me. Considering it looks to be comparable to a Skipray blastboat in size.

 

That's why I think it probably would have worked better if we had X-Wing and B-Wing's so you have that 'ooohhh...OT stuff!' feeling, while still introducing new stuff. Of course, as a bit of a pessimist, I know that even if they had done that, the NJO-on still would have used mostly OT designs, just for the nostalgia/recognizable factor

 

Yep, I mean I get the smaller designs, which are always pretty throw together be it Empire, Republic or any other force we have seen so far, but why he did not go for using MC 90es as main line warships for the Black Fleet crisis always struck me was strange, as they pretty much have the function of his Nebula/Defender/Endurance ships and had already been show to be around at the time. Especially since I always found it jarring that the New Republic would actually build ships they call Star Destroyers. Using and refitting captured Star Destroyers and all is understandable, but if your star building you own ships in that range, one should hope they would go for calling them something else.

 

Well, the Vic and Venator were called Star Destroyers, and they were Old Republic ships. That could be the in-universe justification (20 years of Imperial use of the name aside)

 

Maybe he was an early study of Saxton's theory that "star destroyer" was simply a space equivalent of "destroyer".

 

That too

 

That said, going by Saxton's page on Coruscant, he and Kube-McDowell did have a rather heated debate over the planet's population- with McDowell going with a much lower figure.

 

Oh there are tons of alternate explanations of what Star Destroyer stands for; the usual and most common is that it’s a tag for super heavy cruisers. Thing is that they still are very present symbols of Imperial repression (which the Black Fleet novels even acknowledge), so even if the Rebels build their own ships off similar kind it would just seem fitting that they call them something else.

 

Yes- Vector Prime was when we first started seeing "Star Defenders".

 

Well, IIRC, the whole basis of CoPL was that the NR was trying to enlist the Hapans' aid (and/or resources) against the Warlords, particularly Zsinj. Some relaxation of the rules (if only for under-the-counter-deals) would seem to be a logical part of the process.

 

Seems logical.

 

As per Far Orbit you could actually buy Black Market X-Wings by the Battle of Yavin, so it is likely not that hard to get your hands on them. Also it has been mentioned that the Hapans would regularly send our spies and raiders to acquire new technology. Their Miytil fighters for example are actually designed by Separatist engineers that fled to Hapes when the Clone Wars ended, the Hapan Battle Dragon hyperspace mines are in fact stolen and adapted Imperial Interdictor technology and the Nova battlecruiser was designed using stolen Kuati design plans and some models got outfitted with Mon Calamari shield technology the Hapans also “acquired”.

 

Umm...are we sure they didn't 'acquire' the Nova design from the Klingons?


Sorry, bad joke...but that does have a very 'Bird of Prey' look to it, at least to me.

 

Well, to be fair to KMac, his "crime" is essentially the same one all other novel authors (save folks like Luceno) have committed- they focused on their own designs/favs. Also, at the time that the BFC was published, there wasn't a Holocron or Wookieepedia for him to use as a reference. KMac assumed that the NRDF only had old designs when he wrote his book, not realizing that the MC90 Star Cruiser was introduced in DE and the JAT. Hence why retcons are a beautiful thing. Jason Fry incorporated the MC90 cruiser as a vessel designed concurrent with the New Class.

At least the first edition of SOTG explained the relative lack of MC90 and NebStar appearances by retconning that these vessels were kept in the Core or assigned to important worlds for defense.

At the end of the day, while the generic descriptor of "Star Destroyer" or "Mon Cal cruiser" tend to irritate us Fleet Junkies, the hidden beauty is that it does leave room for any of those vessels to be retconned into classes that should be used.

--Adm. Nick

 

Somehow I just don't see it plus it is gigantic by comparison.

 

When the BoP has its wings down:



Like so. Again, I fully acknowledge I may be the only one who sees the similarity. And even then its only general, hardly a 'copy paste'

EDIT: And by general, I just mean the 'long neck/down-turned wings'. The BoP is much more bulky and far smaller after all.

 

Oh he doesn’t even use the New Class all the extensively, the designs in fact barely get described at all, other than the K-Wing which just somehow doesn’t seem to fit all that well, design wise. The Thrustships, the Blood Price and of course the Vagabond by contrast are much more intriguing and he also seems to be way fonder of describing them.

 

Skywalker_T-65, you're not the only one.

 

I think perhaps a more logical explanation is to look at how the US Navy in WWII fielded two primary fighters starting in 1943 - the Grumman F6F Hellcat and the Vought F4U Corsair. The Corsair was the better performer of the two, but it was also more expensive to produce (you could build 5 Hellcats for the price of 3 Corsairs) and a much harder aircraft to fly (the nickname "Bent-Wing Widowmaker" was applied for a good reason; the USN didn't even use them on carriers until late in the war and the early models had fun problems like splattering oil right on the windscreen). Between about 13 ABY and 16 ABY, it seems the NR was aiming towards phasing the T-65 out of front-line units and replacing it with the E-wing. It doesn't seem that the E-wing was inferior to the X-wing in any respect - at one point Plat Mallar notes that in sims he gets his arse handed to him every time when flying an X-wing, because it can't match the Yevethan D-type's agility. The E-wing by contrast is tougher, more agile, more heavily armed, and easier to maintain (the techs can strip down and rebuild one in half the time it takes for a T-65) than the X-wing, if perhaps a fraction slower than the latest upgraded T-65. It seems the teething problems that plagued the E-wing for its first two years of service had been ironed out by the time of the BFC.

Then along comes the Yevethan War, which results in fighter and warship losses and also scaring the NR badly enough that they not only repair and reactivate Lusankya, but go out and grab the still-crippled Guardian. Repairing two Executors is a big defense outlay for the New Republic. One can perhaps suppose that the T-65 was given a new lease on life to bulk up fighter numbers as a cheaper alternative to discarding them and buying new, pricier E-wings. That results in the T-65DA1 upgrade seen in The New Rebellion; theoretically even after Kueller's sabotage it was still economical to upgrade the fighters as the "Enhanced X-wings" (T-65Es?) seen in the Corellian Trilogy. There's also the factor that, unlike the X-wing, the E-wing is dependent on the specialized and expensive R7 astromech droid. The X-wing is also mentioned specifically as being very easy to transition into from a kriffing civvie cropduster like the T-16; I doubt the E-wing was that easy for nuggets right out of Biggs Field to get the hang of.

EDIT: As far as the Hapan X-wings, I assumed those were sold by the NR as sweeteners for the proposed alliance. It's not like the T-65B/CA2 were new or classified tech at that point, especially if FreiTek and Starfighter Command were already looking at replacing them with E-wings in another five years.

 

I would actually blame that more on his entire dog fighting career being in TIE fighters and actually not having all that much combat experience. He properly just lacks the experience to handle the X-Wing the way they should be used against faster opponents.