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

Mashing the two continuities together to save the best parts of each. I did so at some length here, if anyone cares to indulge me.

I go the other way on this. The pre-reboot chain of command at Endor was a weird nightmare. Nu-canon streamlined it massively by dumping all the Grand Admirals and making Rae an admiral capable of actually giving the order, unlike Pellaeon. Maybe Harrsk was a grumpy rival who claimed seniority or superiority over Sloane and left in a huff after the retreat.

 

So since the EU was brought up, what are your thoughts on the Dragon Ships and Annihilator Fighters? How did they achieve that amount of firepower to literally, I quote, 'rip Star Destroyer hulls into shreds'? My theory is it could've been some ancient Naga Sadow era Sith Empire technique. I also believe Krayt would've eventually phased out the Imperial stuff for a full on One Sith aesthetic which would be the Dragon Ships, the Annihilators and those Sith Troopers. If Legacy had gone on for longer, I suspect that's what we would've gotten.


Also I disagree on any Resurgent-Pellaeon similarities, but I can actually see a similarity between this and the Snokemobile, especially the frontal hull. Might just be me though.

 

I think the Rebels Interdictor is a bit Pellaeon-class-ish. More so than the "regular" Immobilizer-418 interdictor, at least.

Pellaeon-class:

Rebels Interdictor

Immobilizer 418

Both the Rebels Interdictor and the Pellaeon-class have a short bit of sloping underside at the back, with the rest of the underside forward of it, being completely flat.

 

Yeah I agree, reminded me of it the first time I saw it.

 

This is an excellent question. Let's dive back into the past.

I always thought that the Sith Annihilator Starfighters utilized highly volatile but unstable antimatter torpedoes and high-yield plasma cannons that were prone to dangerous overloads. Basically extremely deadly weapons that go far beyond normal starfighter capabilities but have major drawbacks that prevent them from being used by normal pilots.

The Sith Troopers would use the Force and their special implants to wire directly into their fighters. This would allow them to use these overpowering weapons without succumbing to the lethal drawbacks.

That's how I would see the Annihilators wiping out capital ships on their own and puncturing conventional shielding. Use of such weapons is not unprecedented. The Sith Meditation Sphere Ship possessed such guns and could penetrate shield with ease.

This explanation seems likely for a Sith Lord of Krayt's mentality. Fighter and pilot become one and ride a deadly storm of power to become unstoppable. The only downside was that the Sith Troopers were linked to Krayt's will. When he died, they all went berserk.

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What about the Dragon Ships? Were the crewmembers linked up to them, or was it that they were primarily carriers?

 

The wrecked Intimidator, was that from the original Essential Chronology? I'm not sure my memory is accurate, but I think that book tried to clean up some loose ends from that era (while still leaving a lot of potential plots open). Still one of my favorite Essential Guides, I think I liked that one better than the second (since the second had to cover a lot more eras by the second edition).

I like that idea, maybe add that those overpowered weapons also killed normal pilots pretty fast due to not enough radiation shielding, but the Sith troopers were strong enough to last (a little while at least) and fanatical to climb into flying death traps.

The old EU had an experimental TIE that had a turbolaser mounted, that was flown by remote control too so maybe that didn't have enough room to keep a normal pilot alive either.

While the dragon ship design is ok (I'm also a bit reminded of the Inexpugnable, in terms of a large flat body with a tail behind it) I'm more curious about where those ships came from (Kuat, Unknown Regions shipyards, etc?). Though Legacy was becoming pretty silly by then- not just that Krayt had come back from the dead, but that he had a second secret Sith army that was even more fanatical than his first one. SWTOR would kind of do the same thing later on too. Like before the Clone Wars Sidious and Tyrannus secretly contracted Kuat/Rothana and Kamino for the Republic's forces, and later on Palpatine had multiple projects moved to the Deep Core. I remember a line in the opening of Dark Empire about Palpatine bypassing his own supply chains when Balmorra encountered a new fighter.

The Legacy era didn't last long enough, but I did wonder sometimes if core world Kuat had stayed with the Galactic Alliance or had rejoined the Empire (despite their distance from Bastion), since they had built the newer Pellaeon-class Star Destroyers that made up the Legacy-era Imperial Navy. Well, since officially the Remnant was a GA ally Kuat could probably just sell to both sides. Ironically, the bulk of the Galactic Alliance fleet was probably constructed at the more distant Dac.

And of course new canon hasn't bothered with many details on where the First Order built all their stuff (there hasn't been any news on what Kuat-Entralla is, has there?).

 

I'm assuming that the Dragon Ships were built somewhere around the abandoned Sith Space, maybe some Lost Tribe infrastructure was reused to make them. Probably Krayt only got a few out and intended to mass produce them at places like KDY and Dac once he had assumed full power. Like I said, as part of his 'turn everything into One Sith' program, I'd have expected the intent would have been for the Dragon Ships to entirely replace Star Destroyers, with those Sith-Imperial TIEs becoming the standard fighters and Annihilators as the heavy hitters while the Sith Trooper armor is adopted as standard armor, though possibly changed up a bit.

@Iron_lord I also notice the Rebels Interdictor has a bit of a 'cathedral-ish' look and a line going through the center of the hull which further complements its Pellaeon features. I could see it as some sort of Interdictor in the Legacy era, if the Pellaeons didn't already come with Interdiction Fields.

 

You know there was concept art of an Interdictor from the 80s or 90s that showed it looking exactly like the flat-keeled Rebels version, I can't remember where I saw it. Maybe I posted it earlier in the thread somewhere.

 

Front cover of The Essential Guide to Vehicles & Vessels shows a stern that matches Rebels, even though the diagram within the book is different:

 

Good catch, it's there with the whole 'Pellaeon-ish' line going through the middle. The big balls could easily confuse someone that its a Legends Immobilizer 'MacQuarried', but at a second glance, it looks very different.

 

I think The Essential Guide to Vehicles & Vessels wasn't the first source to depict them - with them being drawn in WEG books prior to that one. I'm not sure if the same discrepancy in art was present though.

I would speculate that, when they were making the Stealth Strike episode, and decided "Our Interdictor needs to be bigger than the Legends one - able to hold a Blockade Runner in its hangar" somebody pointed out the Essential Guide to Vehicles & Vessels image and how it didn't match the interior diagram - and they said

"Let's use this image - it's different enough that we can make it work, and yet similar enough to invoke an immediate "Interdictor" reaction."

 

Other than concept art, I can't find it depicted in the Rebels style anywhere else. This is the only one I could find that's pretty much the exact same as the Rebels Interdictor.

 

If that image is only found in TEGTV&V, and all previous WEG images looked very different, it makes sense that TEGTV&V was their source.

 

We also know the Immobilizer 418 exists in the Disney Canon universe too, so they're clearly intended to be different ships. Likely the Rebels designers wanted something bigger than an Immobilizer, but also not just an ISD with big balls on it, so they did what they usually do and looked back to old concept art and made use of that.

 

@Havoc123
@Iron_lord
That's the one. Also those schematic diagrams are never accurate. Have you seen that disastrously disproportioned Nebulon B that looks nothing like any model or concept art ever made for the movies? It's like it was drawn from memory and nobody's double-checked to this day. And this is hardly the only one of these, remember the notoriously off-model illustrations for that "New" Essential Guide to Vehicles from like 2002-3?

 

Yeah but in all previous Legends media like me and Iron_Lord showed above, absolutely none of the depictions of the Immobilizer resemble the Rebels Interdictor. It resembles more the Legacy designs like @Iron_lord noted. And on that note, the Ecliptic off of Legends this time also just screams Legacy era design oddly enough.

 

I'd say both the Rand Ecliptic and the Imperious-class from Legacy, are drawing heavily from AOTC's Acclamator.

 

Rand Ecliptic was shown as early as 1977. Highly likely its the other way around, and AOTC's Acclamator and Legacy's Imperious are inspired by the original Ecliptic here.

 

What source showed it back then? I don't recall it appearing in Biggs's conversation with Luke in Marvel Star Wars.

 

Sorry my bad, I got my Marvel confused. I looked back again and it seems it wasn't introduced as an appearance until AFTER the Acclamator.

 

On the topic of the dragon ships and fighters, I do remember in the old marvel comics, it was possible to supercharge a tie fighter's lasers to the point that they could slice through a super star destroyer's shields and cause significant hull damage, with the disadvantage that they could only be fired three times*

It could be that they have some sort of improved or mitigated version of the technique, which when combined with the force and cybernetic pilot enhancing capabilities means they can reliably target weak points

(*Which, to me, would still be worth it I think - especially, if one used fleets of cheap droid fighters where combat longevity didn't matter, such weapons could really punch above their weight class - to say nothing of cost. So I tend to ignore this happening)

 

The Making of Baron Fel (1997) showed the earliest Rand Ecliptic images. It was kinda different:



The Rand Ecliptic "as we know it" was introduced in the Star Wars Empire comic in 2003.

 

Rand Ecliptic will probably be retconned into being an Arquitens.

 

Didn't the deleted scene (recanonized via being referenced in the Databank), where he's talking to Luke about his plans, have him referring to his ship as a frigate? (Arquitens is a light cruiser.) I know the 1977 comic did.

When I google it, the scene is given as:

BIGGS
Luke, I didn't come back just to say good-bye... I shouldn't tell you this, but you're the only one I can trust... and if I don't come back, I want somebody to know.

Luke's eyes are wide with Biggs' seriousness and loyalty.

LUKE
What are you talking about?

BIGGS
I made some friends at the Academy.
(he whispers)
...when our frigate goes to one of the central systems, we're going to jump ship and join the Alliance...

Luke, amazed and stunned, is almost speechless.

LUKE
Join the Rebellion?! Are you kidding! How?

BIGGS
Quiet down will ya! You got a mouth bigger than a meteor crater!

LUKE
I'm sorry. I'm quiet.
(he whispers)
Listen how quiet I am. You can barely hear me...

Biggs shakes his head angrily and then continues.

BIGGS
My friend has a friend on Bestine who might help us make contact.

LUKE
You're crazy! You could wander around forever trying to find them.

BIGGS
I know it's a long shot, but if I don't find them I'll do what I can on my own... It's what we always talked about. Luke, I'm not going to wait for the Empire to draft me into service. The Rebellion is spreading and I want to be on the right side -- the side I believe in.

LUKE
And I'm stuck here...

BIGGS
I thought you were going to the Academy next term. You'll get your chance to get off this rock.