CT Could Vader have ruled the Empire?

He definitely could have lead the military and maybe the navy, as he had experience with that during the Clone Wars. Remember from AotC, politics are something he doesn't seem to grasp. This also raises the question: Would Darth Vader be enough to hold the Empire together? Or would the moffs go out to make their own Empires?

 

I mention the concept of Luke overthrowing him because choice 2 is "would Vader be overthrown?" and I'm assuming that he would need Luke's help to defeat Palpatine, and from there he would train Luke as the apprentice

 

I can't see Vader shmoozing with pencil neck advisors and dignitaries in the way Palpy did. All that political hobnobbing and such would get old fast with the Darth. He'd get pissed off and strange them.

 

I didn't mean to imply he was an idiot, I just never thought of him as a political person, more of a warrior.

 

But isn't that the reason Sidious chose him? The dumb are very malleable. When it came time to trick him into the darkside, he didn't even have to continue the lie beyond the next sentence.

Join with me and I'll save that Padme chick you're into.
*Anakin joins*
Now that you've joined me, maybe together we can figure how to cure that wife of yours. Or not. Whatevs.
*Anakin stares into his yellow eyes and admires his new forehead butt crack*

If Anakin was smart, he would have noticed that obvious lie and killed Sidious right at that moment.

 

Anakin was always about Anakin.

 

I tend to agree. I think Vader is cunning and strong enough to rule by force if required, but ultimately I think he was simply tricked into service by Palpatine. Though I'm assuming that he didn't kill Palps because he still held hope that Palpatine actually had some knowledge that might be useful to him.

Having said that, let's all not forget that Palpatine was stupid enough to build not only one death star with an open exhaust port, but on the second he actually made it big enough to drive in! So when you consider, maybe Vader might have been a different type of leader but ultimately he could have kept things under control without too many blunders.

 

The second Death Star was specifically set up as a Trap - to bait the Rebels in, it needed to be vulnerable (while in the state of construction it was in.)

Had it been completed, it would have had millions of minuscule exhaust ports, rather than a few large ones.

 

"He's so overwhelming in that first film, but you get to the point where you say, "Wait a minute, if he's so powerful, why doesn't he run the universe?" He even gets pushed around by the governors! They know the Emperor is the final word, so what happens is the same thing that happens in any corporation: Everybody worries about the top man, they don't worry about his goon. And by the time the Death Star is finished, it gives them the sense that they have a bigger, better suit than Darth Vader. In a standoff between the Death Star and Darth Vader, they have no question about who would win, and it's not this mumbo-jumbo Sith guy. So it's even more tragic, because he's not even an all-powerful bad guy, he's kind of a flunky."

--George Lucas, Rolling Stones Interview 2005.

So Vader has the potential to be a leader, but he's not taken seriously unless he flexes his muscles such as choking people. As Anakin, he may have said that he was willing to follow someone wiser when it came to politics, but he never said that he wasn't interested in them. Likewise, when the Sith ruled before, they weren't political leaders.