Lit Ships of Episode VII-Speculations on the design of the NR and (possible) Imperial ships

One of the better things to come out of a new canon (if done right) is a whole new batch of ships that will grace the silver screen and the pages of future novels yet to be written.

In this thread we will speculate on the design, direction, and look of the fleets we will see in Ep VII.

Categories:
- New Republic Fleets
- Imperial Ships (assuming the Empire will still be around)
- Independent ships (freighters, independent pilots, criminals, etc)
- Jedi ships

(Since we have no idea who the enemy is there will be no category for them as it is nearly impossible to guess what they will look like)

However based on the OT we can make reasonable assumptions on the general directions of that the fleets mentioned above may have taken in the 30-35 years post RotJ. How many types of capital ships and general design/ascetic. Instead of a star destroyer opening the films will it be a modern Mon Cal Cruiser?

 

I know it won't happen, but I really want at least one of the Endurance-class and Nebula-class ships. They were criminally underused in the EU and their EGTW designs were way beyond cool. I want them.

 

I want to see the Eclipse.

Well, not the Eclipse obviously, but a ship of that line.

 

Yes! I want to see a matte-black star destroyer that dwarfs the Republic ships and blasts them apart with it's superlaser. It'd be a nice callback to ROTJ where the Death Star was destroying the Rebel Fleet.

 

I hope there'll still be plenty of X-Wings and Y-Wings around (if looking their age), but I'd like to see the main NR military using the E-Wing.

It's always struck me as one of the best examples of something that looks like a logical "later model" of an original ship. It'd show that 30 years have gone by while distinguishing our heroes (in older-model modified Xs) from the NR enlisted pilots in the E.
Of course, the more diversity the better - my biggest hope is just that we get a wide array of distinct ships that look like they belong in the Star Wars galaxy.
Nothing inspired me more as a kid than the real-feeling, visually stunning ships of Star Wars; I hope we can get back to that kind of wonderful imagination-fuel.

I'll indulge myself in one little gripe I have with this model and a few others (thankfully much less in Star Wars than other franchises) that I hope will be revised and avoided by the VFX and concept teams for Episode 7:
Ships with the center of thrust COMPLETELY out-of-line with their center of mass. It's fine in atmo, where you get lift from your wings, but in space that's a recipe for either uncontrollability or horrendous inefficiency. Grr.
I know Star Wars space combat is hardly hard sci-fi, but that's Physics 101. It just looks so intuitively wrong.

 

These or another SD type ship are needed.
Heck a regular SD and the Venerator from ROTS are needed at least once.
Can't wait to see all of the new ships. Hope to see a Tie-Fighter at least once as well. I'm also assuming that we will see a X-wing as well.

 

Abadacus, I agree completely with lining up the thrust with the center of mass. That's such an elementary principle that even the rule-of-cool shouldn't grossly violate it. And, most movie SW ships do a decent job of complying, so we can argue that the principle is canon.

 

I would love it if the ship aesthetics went back to the curved lines of the prequel era. I'm not really that big a fan of OT ships because they're really clunky and blocky.

 

It's a JJA movie... so

 

Ships? Well, I was always fond of them revisiting Luke and Lei...

Oh, you mean those kind of ships.

 

Plugging my article from @CooperTFN's awesome site:

http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/2013/...designs-that-should-be-in-the-sequel-trilogy/

You guys already named three ships that I think would be fantastic...

--Adm. Nick

 

Another thing I've been hoping - on the note of OT ships appearing or not - would be to see the A-Wing (or a later production model) become popular among Jedi pilots.
Even before "Jedi Starfighters" with obvious connections to the A-Wing appeared in canon, it always seemed logical to me that a pilot with Jedi reflexes, precision, and foresight would choose the fastest, nimblest craft possible, rather than allow their advantages to be nullified by a more sluggish fighter.

Also: One of my favorite not-quite-canon PT/OT bridge designs, based on the "Eta-5 Interceptor" that Wedge's daughter flies for the New Republic (not sure why this one's imperial).

Its themes might be confusing to non-EU fans with the Imperial cockpit on a "good-guy" fighter, but it'd be cool to see it even as an enemy.

 

Incidentally, that thing still gets a crapload of hits for a nine-month-old article. You may have to do a follow-up on "five EU starship designs that should never be seen again".

And by "you may have to do it", I mean "go do it".

 

I'd love to see another Eta-class ship. Though in LOTF it was supposed to have an A-Wing body instead. This one is better though.

 

Granted I'm a biologist as opposed to a physicist or engineer ... but why is it such a horrendous feature for a spacebound snubfighter?

 

If the axis of thrust is not aligned through the center of mass, it will result in a rotational torque upon the fighter. In space, with no aerodynamic flow to keep the craft stable, this will result in the fighter spinning end-over-end at increasing speeds.
This effect could be compensated for by adding another thrust vector (from maneuvering jets, etc.), but that requires increasing energy output by an amount proportionate to the perpendicular component of the main engine's thrust. Just eyeballing, but I'd say that would be in the ballpark of a 30% inefficiency for a ship like the E-Wing model above. No matter how advanced the tech you have to play with, that's just bad design.
I would alter the above design by hugging the engines higher up the wing and adding a third engine on the upper rear fuselage.

As a contrasting example, having multiple engines spread away from the center of mass means you can change the relative thrust output to create a torque for maneuvering. This is why a ship like the Y-Wing has its two engines out on pylons (rudder yaw is important for strafing missions) and why the X-Wing, with an engine on each corner is considered to have excellent handling.
TIE fighters are the exception as their Twin Ion Engines have small-aperature nozzles that "aim" the propellant with magnetic fields, using thrust vectoring rather than throttle difference to achieve rapid turns with even greater efficiency. You can see similar thrust vectoring "rudders" on Y-Wing and A-Wing engines.

If those plates generate a field to push the propellant stream 10 degrees up off-axis, the line back from that axis will pass below the fighter, thus generating a torque and "pulling up". Presumably ships with less obvious structures generate these fields with rings in the nozzle structure of the engine. It's intuitively similar to ailerons and rudder flaps on an aeroplane when you think about it that way. A muddled explanation, I know, but I hope it helps.
Yeah, I've thought about this far too much.

 

Hmm. I wonder if that's why in some panels of Dark Empire and Crimson Empire we see E-wings with thrusters mounted at the rear of the fuselage in addition to the underwing pods?

 

To sum up: if you open up the throttle, it will just do loop-de-loops instead of moving forward.

 

There were E-Wings in Crimson Empire? I totally missed them

 

Maybe those hinges above the wings could pull the engines into alignment with the fuselage for spaceflight?

 

That's a good idea, but I've never seen a depiction of an E-Wing flying "hunched" like that. I figured the wings folded for more compact storage like some carrier-based fighters, "power of an X-wing, number of a TIE" being the concept, but I can't find any citations for that either.

My solution (since all depictions are non-canon now, anyways) would actually be mount the wings from the top of the fuselage instead of the bottom, with the wings coming down over side-mounted engines, like many modern jets.

I've always thought it odd that a fighter so much larger than the A-Wing was supposedly about as fast with such tiny engines anyways.
Anyone with some artistic talent care to draw this alternate E-Wing?

It's also a neat bit of the "rhyming" Lucas loves to go on about - just as many elements of OT fighters were taken from WWII military aviation (that would seem odd to modern audiences), the ST could hark back to classic cold war aviation (that seems downright nostalgic aesthetically to modern audiences compared to the hypermodern 'war on terror'). The enormous sense of realism and professionalism from the hangar scenes in the OT got me hooked for life, and I hope we're in for more of that rather than the gleaming hanger where a little kid can hop in and fly away of the PT and many sci-fi blockbusters.

If our heroes need an equivalent to and/or replacement for the Millennium Falcon - the ship I've always used in RPGs is the YB-300.

Perfect size for a diverse group (Firefly-sized?), and reminiscent of the Tantive IV without looking derivative. I don't know where this drawing's from, but it's brilliant.

 

It looks like one of the ships from Battlestar Galactica. Maybe that, SW-ized? Or a SW design was BSG-ized?

 

Part of the background given for the E-wing was that it omitted movable s-foils from the design; even though these would have enhanced performance they would have caused maintenance and reliability headaches in an already-ambitious design. They were trying to avoid a repeat of the finicky experience with the B-wing rollout (and still got it with the gun problems).

Unrealistic design quirks aside, yeah - I'd love to see the E-wing or something like it. The weapons load of a B-wing, the durability of a Y-wing, the speed and agility of a TIE Interceptor ... I would have loved it if some sourcebook had cribbed from one WWII pilot's glowing review of the F6F Hellcat. "If that fighter could cook, I'd marry it!"