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

More big space stations would be a win, there would probably have to be a few smaller precursors to the Death Star out there

 

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Torpedo_Sphere

 

I had my heart set on something a little bigger

 

"http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Torpedo_Sphere"
He said big space stations. As in space stations that are actually big.

Unless we're talking about the TS at Fangol:

 

I like what they did with the HMP Predator; whilst it was shown space capable in the ambush on Obi-Wan's fleet in season 5, it was pretty much just coasting the whole way there without doing anything other than dropping off droids.

Here, it's a full up missile spewing and laser spamming killer (yeah, I know how they were in the Onderon arc, but that's similar to how they were show in in RotS).

 

Yes. I'd bet there are larger variants of the Lucrehulk- core ship/battlesphere out there in addition to peaceful spherical stations.

On structures, I thought the skyhook in season 4 episode was pretty impressive.

 

Just once, I'd like to see an artificial ring that's shown in actual perspective and scale, trailing away to invisibility, rather than staying the same apparent size thousands of miles in the distance. I'm sick of artists treating depictions of entire space systems as if they're a few marbles set a handful of inches in front of the camera. Space is BIIIIIIIIIIIIG.

 

The size and scope of space is something many terrestrial humans fail to grasp.

You could probably make millions of Star Destroyers alone with the resources of our solar system (and that's just using expendable moons, moonlets, planetoids and whatnot).

With several of our own planets colonized (Venus, Mars, Earth, and the larger moons), we could produce an army in the trillions with the most basic of Star Wars tech.

And that's just one solar system out of billions in our galaxy.

 

Something of a digression... Just a quick question.

In land battles, why not deploy fighters? In the EU, it states that infantry weapons were for the most part, ineffectual against starfighters, even unshielded units.
These are some possible reasons I can think of:
Anti-aircraft guns, that could be made for anti-fighter strikes
Blockades
Other Fighters

But we never see fighters in land battles, in the movies at least. Take Hoth for example. Why launch those wimpy T-47 speeders when they clearly had X-Wings in the base? Surely they weren't all being used to evacuate the transports?


Okay, I lied. I have one more quesiton.
Blockading a whole planet seems impractical. The escaping ships could entirely stay out of firing range of the blockaders, and even if they launched fighters, they probably couldn't get to the escapee in time. Wouldn't you need to have an Immobilzer 418 or an Interdictor for your fighters to get them?

 

*hands him a shovel and wishes him good luck with finding some Hollinium or Duralium*

Actually they were, like the rest of the Hoth Defenders the Snow Speeders were just a delaying action.

You should usually have enough time to "swoop" down on a ship, since it takes a while to leave orbit and your already up there, though yes I wish them good luck if they just go to the far side of the planet.

 

Yes, the one sitting at the top of the gravity well has quite an advantage against anything starting at the bottom. And they can move a lot faster outside of the atmosphere than in it.

 

Steel will work all the same (we can see that the hull materials of Star Wars vessels aren't extraordinarily strong; just look at the asteroid impact in ESD that takes off the bridge tower of an ISD).

 

I could not agree with you more. It is truly staggering what you could get out of a single solar system, especially with some advanced technology at your disposal. However, unless someone in Episode VII says there were millions and millions of Star Destroyers, countless stormtroopers, or Coruscant suddenly has a large population boom, I do not see things ever going that way, but then again I can hope and pray.

 

Yes, but everything in context. Just because societies have the capability to accomplish something does not necessarily mean does not necessarily mean that capability is exercised to the fullest.

Modern agriculture has the capability of feeding every human on Earth. The only thing that stops this from happening is politics. Yet if a truly alien civilization from another world knew only the technological capabilities of our most powerful nations, they might conclude that not a starving person exists on the entire planet.

International politics, economy, and culture all play a part in limiting the application of technological abilities.

I would think that that the more urbanized planets like Coruscant would have major concerns over population and would limit the influx of new permanent residents. Some planets might even have birth rate limits in place. Planets like Alderaan and Naboo, which are characterized as enjoying natural beauty, might limit the size of their populations in order to not create another Coruscant.

As for fleets of millions of Star Destroyers...well the Imperial Fleet may have millions of ships, and perhaps even millions of Star Destroyer type ships but the question is how many millions? Star Wars movies and the EU have depicted few planets that could withstand the might of even one Imperial Class Star Destroyer. One Star Destroyer can project its power over a lot of systems. (unless all those systems are in active Rebellion which most aren't) There's no need of a high number of millions of Star Destroyers.

I think ships the size of Dreadnaught Heavy Cruisers and Carracks are enough to take care of most of the galaxy.

 

You make excellent points, and it is just a matter of how you personally view the SW universe. You may see certain things as reasonable, but I see even the middle ground in some instances as being off by many orders of magnitude, even considering the potential limitations. In the end I have no argument against what is currently portrayed with respect to scope and numbers, it is still a great fictional setting and I have just accepted how things are no matter how much I may disagree with it.

I don't hold out much hope of that changing, though I never let C-3PO tell me the odds.

 

What materials are used in making ships in SW anyway and are they ever detailed regarding how they're extracted/formed/fashioned?

 

Something called Durasteel, which is an alloy of various materials like neutronium, seems to be the popular choice.The Star Wars universe makes use of both real world elements and fictional ones, or at least as far as we know. Some of these materials seemed to be manufactured and some found naturally. I believe baraduim, used for powerful weapons both large and small, has been mentioned as both.

Another thing to note is that early warships, that depended less on shields, had to have armor that was more robust to protect themselves from attack.

 

Much appreciated.

 

In a way, there is a fairly decent middleground as evidenced by TPM and RotS; massive battleships for a private company (that number in the hundreds to thousands), to the CIS with its millions of warships and the Republic with at least thousands of the same (and these numbers are for serious warships).

Crew issues seem to be the biggest problem here, which is why the CIS can field so many when most of the crew are droids.

One can actually look at the Empire as a drive to create patriotism to build up numbers to join the course.

As for materials, they shouldn't be much different to our own. Steel and variants of ("Durasteel") can simply be things such as the same strength but weight less, stronger and weighing actually more per pound, and so on. However, there's nothing in Star Wars that perfectly normal steel couldn't accomplish.

It's mainly the other tech. that they have which we lack. Repulsors, though even with that, it just makes flying cars possible; most vessels we see leaving the surface of a planet use basic ion thrusters powered by something at least equal to nuclear fusion. Gravity manipulation and hyperspace being the biggest ones we lack.

The Acclamators taking off at the end of AotC only really need a fusion reactor putting out terawatts of energy to achieve such, and that's not far from where we are technologically. We don't need reactors putting out terawatts of energy to push ships through water as it's not fighting gravity; you can bet the super carriers of the USN would be using such if it was required.

The reason why we're not building Hyperion-class Heavy Cruisers is because there's "nothing out there in the region of space that we can get to in a lifetime" that we can't get here on Earth.

 

Thank you. I was just curious because it seems with such numbers as everyone talks here it seems likely that you could strip planets of natural resources pretty quickly. In my case I will likely just make up my own alloys, metals and other materials but I find this thread interesting and informative.

 

There's other unrealistic points to consider - that resources on moons of Fondor, for instance, are still available after tens of thousands of years.

I'm always skeptical of treating space opera as hard sci-fi; in a lot of cases, you have to accept something that doesn't seem logical or scientifically accurate and make the justification, rather than say that it can't be. For instance, the production of spaceships is probably limited by a 'bottleneck' construction element - sort of a staple of soft sci-fi (as well as the 'one planet that has this one special substance'. Not that you can't do hard sci-fi with this - witness Dune).

 

What is a bottleneck element you speak of, please?

 

Something that is extremely rare/expensive/hard to produce/some other limiting factor. Basically, you can have as much (say) steel as you want, but it is hard to get enough (say) titanium to build what you want with said steel.

Using real materials there mind you.

 

Ah, thank you, Sky Guy.

I have the impression SW isn't that bothered with resources or numbers. It's a bit surprising.

 

An example of what Skywalker is referring to is Darth Maul's ship that appeared in TPM, the Scimitar. The Scimitar, also known as the Sith Infiltrator, was equipped with a cloaking device. This cloaking device used a rare crystal called stygium that could only be mined from two known planets in the galaxy, one of which being Aeten II. When stygium crystals became hard to find on Aeten II, stygium crystal based cloaking devices fell into obscurity. This led the Empire to resort to extraordinary measures to redevelop a cloaking device after the destruction of the Death Star, namely destroying the planet Aeten II with the Tarkin, a stripped-down battlestation equipped with a superlaser. This freed the remaining stygium crystals from the core of Aeten II, and ultimately allowed the Empire to develop a new starfighter equipped with a stygium crystal cloaking device, the TIE Phantom. The video game Star Wars: Rebel Assault II told the story of how the Alliance dealt with TIE Phantom Project.