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

It's a Resistance suspicion mentioned in Star Wars: The Last Jedi: The Visual Dictionary.

 

If that is the truth then you have better odds against them.

 

Of course, the Resistance isn't the most reliable source either. They try, but they're severely outmatched, I think the Supremacy caught them completely off-guard (as Snoke had kept it hidden in the Unknown Regions until TLJ). I think even the TFA Visual Dictionary (or Cross-section, forget which) already hinted that there were even bigger things than the Resugent-class hiding in the Unknown Regions. Of course back then just the Resurgent was already a blatant violation of the Galactic Concordance (and that was before the Mandator-IV even showed up), which is why the First Order kept it from making too many appearances before TFA.

I think the general idea is that the First Order didn't have the galaxy spanning resources of the Empire so they went for quality over quantity with their Resurgent battlecruisers (while incorporating lessons learned from before, like not having an A-wing crash into the bridge).

Its debatable if the First Order is actually short on resources (compared to the Empire) as their Unknown Regions territory is basically a complete mystery, yet they built an advanced brand new fleet. Not to mention they did build Starkiller Base, which was even more powerful than either Death Star (though they did convert it from a planet). And not like the movies prioritize continuity (or logic) that much.

I found it stranger that the siege dreadnought was so large yet it had so few normal guns, so few that Poe singlehandedly took out all the surface cannons in a few minutes. Well, a fighter screen would more than make up for that weakness, but that requires more competence than the First Order usually has.

I wonder whatever happened to the Eclipse, as well as whatever other Imperial fleet units made it to the Unknown Regions. Still in service or dismantled for newer ships?

 

Canady seemed to have some competence...he did make the comment that fighters should have already been scrambled. Unfortunately that moron Hux was in charge. So what if the enemy only has 4 capital ships...he should have had everything launched and either running strikes on the Resistance or flying CAP for his fleet.

 

More like they should've placed some point defense cannons on those ships. Even Legends seemed to be going the route towards point defense judging by the stats on some of the ships.

 

Pretty sure they did, hence Poe taking them all out. If he had not had the booster he would have been taken down already

 

I'm curious at the source... that seems to be based on either a misreading of the novelization or a scene from Battlefront II's DLC that shows the position of FO ships.

--Adm. Nick

 

The ICS book says "More than two dozen of these ships have joined the pursuit of the Resistance fleet" when speaking of the Resurgents specifically.
The Visual Dictionary says that "the Resistance counts at least thirty Star Destroyers" in pursuit of the fleet
The Jason Fry novelization says that the Supremacy, when it dropped out of hyperspace, was accompanied by "more than two dozen Star Destroyers"
And the Michael Kogge juvenile novelization says that thirty Star Destroyers dropped out of hyperspace, one of which dwarfed all the others, a thunderhead of a vessel (the Supremacy).

So - it appears to be 30, 29 of which are smaller than the Supremacy, and 25 or more of which, are Resurgents.

I'd say, based on the way special effects assets work, it's reasonable to presume that all the smaller Star Destroyers are Resurgents unless it's specifically proven otherwise.

I'd also say that we aren't given any reason to assume that the First Order deployed their entire Resurgent fleet in TLJ.

 

Exactly. Saying that the entire FO Navy only has a few dozen RSD's is as ridiculous as the minimalism that states the 30 ISD's at Endor were the entire Imperial Navy.

--Adm. Nick

 

It sounds suspiciously like when EU sources wrote that the Executor was 5 times the length of a Star Destroyer, which came from a misreading of the ESB novelization or the ESB script, where the Executor dwarfed the five Star Destroyers that accompanied it.

 

Are we even sure there were only 30 ISDs at Endor? Just because that's how many models you see composited onto the screen in a given frame, doesn't mean that that was literally it. I already discussed this relative to the Rebel fleet in the same film. For all we know there were several hundred ISD's and maybe even multiple SSD's; after all Han refers to dozens of commands ships.

 

Several Resurgent-class Star Destroyers, including the Finalizer as well as the Harbinger and Conqueror, also proceeded to participate in the attack on the Resistance fleet over D'Qar.[10][5] The Resistance during that time suspected that at least 30 Resurgent-class Star Destroyers were present among the First Order forces.[11]
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Resurgent-class_Star_Destroyer
At least 30 existed at the retreat from D'Qar from resistance sources. I wouldn't suspect many more were needed to taken over all major systems with their firepower and troop detachments

 

Umm... what? The New Republic, even thought it was smaller than the Old Republic and Galactic Empire, is still canonically composed of thousands and thousands of member worlds, systems, or sectors. Even in a demilitarized Galaxy, the idea that a few dozen extra Star Destroyers could conquer the remaining systems is minimalism of the most ridiculous scale. Chandrila. Mon Cala. Corellia. Kuat. Sullust. Abednedo. Kashyyyk. Naboo. Contruum. Commenor. Taris. Ganthel. The list of major systems goes on and on... and are canon.

--Adm. Nick

 

Sounds like the plot to one of the shoddier post-ROTJ novels, tbh.
Reminds me of why I just feel the whole Disney post-ROTJ is a waste of time.

 

In canon it doesn't take much for a system to shudder in fear, fall, or surrender. A lone imperial star destroyer, republic venator, or trade federation battleship made many systems surrender their resistances. With what's left of the NRDF and local forces falling back to retreat to their home worlds Many many systems would go undefended.
And we only really know about their resurgence class SD's not about their support ships or other warships.
I didn't personally find the imperial fleet to be that big in my own head cannon and I expect the FO navy to be much much smaller focusing on quality over quantity.

 

On the one hand, in TLJ Leia expected (or rather hoped) she could rally New Republic forces, even at Crait she hoped that someone would show up to at least help evacuate the Resistance. Of course we saw what that got, nothing, so maybe everyone else was busy fighting the First Order already, they couldn't get there in time, or they had just given up already.

Bloodlines showed that at least some of the Centrist planets were already aligned with the First Order even before they were publicly known, with other planets nostalgic for the "good old days" of the Empire when they got to dominate the rest of the galaxy. Not to mention Kuat-Entralla built the First Order fleet (up to and including the Mega-class Supremacy) so I wouldn't count Kuat to be loyal (not to mention Sienar-Jaemus built Kylo Ren's TIE Silencer). And according to the Visual Guide, all the T-85 X-wings were "atomized" at Hosnian Prime, leaving the Resistance T-70 as the most advanced X-wing... and even those didn't last half the movie. So I'm not expecting much from the rest of the galaxy (especially if Chandrila followed Mon Mothma's lead in disarming).

The Resurgent-class is already probably more powerful than most normal systems could hope to resist, and the Mandator-IV was called a fleet killer so if the First Order has more of those (which wouldn't be unlikely) they could easily wipe out what New Republic fleets are left. And in a conventional battle the Supremacy would be unstoppable (if hyperspace ramming remains a one-off deus ex machina), depending on if it is repairable. Particularly if other fleet commanders are smart enough to deploy a fighter screen early and its unlikely other pilots would be skilled/daring/reckless enough to be able to take out another siege dreadnought.

I'd hope Mon Cala could resist, it'd be cool to see if Corellia has enough ships to hold out (and enough crazy pilots to take on the First Order), but until we learn more, I expect the First Order to take most of the galaxy pretty quickly, what with the New Republic chain of command shattered.

Is it too much to ask for something other than a one-sided war? Well, if the sequels ever stop being too lazy with ripping off the Empire vs. tiny Rebellion story. Well, when they copy the Battle of Endor, hopefully that should be epic.

 

Regarding multirole versus single-purpose warships, there's the whole "jack of all trades but master of none" argument. It's notable that the Resurgent-class has double the fighter capacity and has exponentially greater armament, but doesn't carry any more troops than an ISD. It's balanced more towards fleet engagements than supporting large-scale landing operations.

That makes me wonder about the First Order's blitz against the NR worlds - they might have the firepower to overcome defenses, but do they have enough troops to actually secure those worlds? Bear in mind that between the loss of Starkiller Base and Holdo's suicide run, they took some staggering losses in personnel as well as ships and equipment, likely greater than the Empire's losses at Endor. It's worth noting that the situation we see in Episode VIII is all within a matter of maybe a week or two of the Hosnian Cataclysm; go back to June 1940 in Britain or December 1941 in the US and the situation wouldn't look good either. I can see Episode IX picking up with an overextended First Order facing off against a vastly expanded Resistance once the "shock and awe" has worn off.

 

I found this line from Phasma interesting:

The ship in question is the Resurgent-class Star Destroyer Absolution. The thoughts come from a Resistance spy whose job was to collect intelligence on the First Order, so the credibility of the statement is high in my opinion.

 

We know for a fact the Resurgent has a crew of 19000 officers, 55000 enlisted, and 8000 stormtroopers, thanks to the canonical cross sections book. So either she's talking about the Supremacy or she's a very bad spy.

 

Or, to give the writer and character the benefit of the doubt, maybe she believes in the propaganda and the fact that she is compartmentalized on the destroyer few 21doesn't help.

Sent from my G8341 using Tapatalk

 

Replying to the general topics first...

On the topic of the ships from the Legacy comic, I took them to be the equivalent of Wunderwaffe - achieving their high-performance headline figures at the expense of all-round practicality...

The REBELS version of the Interdictor is, as people have noted, very much based on the sketch in the EGtVV, which has always been the classic Interdictor pic for me (and as a result, I suspect the intention was for this to be the reboot version of the same Immobilizer-class ship). There was quite a lot of inconsistency back then, though - the earliest depiction I know of (aside from the profile view way back in the Imperial Sourcebook), a depiction of Luke's covert shroud gambit in the Heir to the Empire sourcebook, actually depicts a ship with just two spheres on the centreline, each of the four generators implicitly being a hemisphere, and I think the EGtVV may have actually been the first visual source which defined the "classic" four-sphere look of the type...

As those of you who remember me from back when I was a regular around here will know, I'm with everyone who's said that naval ship-classes do not form a consistent hierarchy. I also want to emphasise that within the Edwardian scheme that the internet tends to fall back on for a hierarchy, battlecruisers are bigger than dreadnoughts. When the ANH script was written, destroyers were the big modern surface combatants in the English-language world, as with one exception they remain today (and the class in question, designed as destroyers, were retroactively redesignated as cruisers while ESB was in post-production, essentially as a PR stunt); to add to the confusion, however, the on-screen dialogue in ANH refers to all large spaceships consistently as "cruisers", while the usage of "stardestroyer" in the earlier drafts is clearly derived from Nazi German zerstorer in the sense of fighter-bomber / swing-role attack plane.

The Mandy in TLJ seems to me to be less of a pure "monitor" than the equivalent of the refitted dreadnoughts which were still active in the '43-'45 period - a lumbering platform for big, long-range guns that are primarily repurposed for attacking shore defences and backed up by an extensive retrofit of flak in an attempt to handle fighters, but can also be used in their original designed role against anyone retrograde enough to deploy an old-fashioned capital ship squadron (in this analogy, the Raddus is in danger of becoming the Southern Force at Leyte Gulf).

The question of the size of Snoke's navy is not something I'm going to get worked up about, but I will say that the "small" numbers seem plausible to me considering the essentially ludicrous size of the individual ships - a Resurgent-class ship is basically a small SSD (the distinction between a notional crew of 82,000 and a POV that the typical ship carries more than 200,000 could be explained by huge spare capacity for additional stormtrooper and TIE forces - ICS certainly suggests a capacity of well beyond 144 fighters) so throwing around a fleet of thirty of them, plus the ludicrously large Snokemobile and the occasional Mandy, is going to be enough to steamroller any large-scale opposition (though whether they'd hold up to concerted snubfighter attack is a different question). These are not designed to provide a local projection-of-power presence in the manner of the "25,000" sizeable capital ships which WEG attributed to the Empire - instead, they're specifically designed as a single force to overmatch any individual capital-ship force that can be roused into opposition, and withholding these big ships from other units would just intensify their impact...

And to reply to one remark specifically aimed in my general direction...

I don't think I'm surprising anyone if I express my long-established opinion that "best parts" are subjective, hence my absurdly completist attitude.

That said, I do agree with Abel Peña's observation that continuity is self-correcting, and now we realise that the Imperial Palace from HttE was always the Jedi Temple (with the bizarre result that the Grand Corridor where Palpatine planted those ch'hala trees in 1991 is the same the Grand Corridor that was first designed for AotC in 2002), we're faced with the thought that the place was surrounded by some sort of continuity-bending Force effect of the sort that Palpatine used to hide Lusankya, and actually retconned itself back into existence after Star by Star...

Also, just to be slightly more relevant to this discussion, the Ravager is 8km long on screen.

The chain of command at Endor was derailed by Vader chasing after Luke - he was supposed to be commanding the fleet from Executor, while Jerjerrod commanded the battle station and Palpatine and his courtiers (to whom later sources added a number of Grand Admirals) watched from the throne room; the plan was issued "personally" by Palpatine, with neither Vader nor Piett being privy to the actual planning (the whole thing is, incidentally, a riff on the Rebel plan at Yavin, designed around trapping an unwieldy opposition force in the complex gravity-well of a gas-giant - one thing which cut from WARFARE was Thrawn pointing out to Palpatine that this was a brilliant way to suckerpunch your opponents).

But even so, the disorderly complexity only comes in when the chain of command falls apart - with Palpatine, Vader, Piett, and the entire command crew aboard Executor out of the picture, the hierarchy of authority is shattered, and you have - realistically enough - various different officers trying to take control, and some captains and squadron commanders simply bugging out on their own initiative. We had a lot of discussions on WARFARE about how to fit everything together, and I recall a lot of the discussion being to do with perceptions - how do we square Pellaeon's actions with the presence of various admirals in a way that seems convincing for readers who aren't just looking for a neat continuity fix...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Which is fine! The Legends-ing of the EU and the discovery of the wonderful mixed bag of references in the X-Wing tabletop game freed me from the burden of worrying about what's canon and what isn't. I pick what I like out of both canons and weave it into my own story. I encourage others to do the same.

I still want to see more of the First Order fleet before I think too much about it, but having the Resurgent-class as their mainstay feels like the dream of the of old maximalist types from back in those days. If the Resurgents are the FO's ships-of-the-line, then they might actually use ISDs as...destroyers!

I loved the Mandator-IV because it didn't try to be every kind of ship at once (and, you know, because we actually got a named Mandator on-screen). It was a purpose-built (or refitted) gun barge, and was fine with that.

I certainly did not mean to belittle the good work you and Jason did in WARFARE (which remains my favorite thing Star Wars has published to this day). You two made the best of a very soupy situation, and came up with an answer that made some kind of sense. I find the new canon's solution to be cleaner, largely because they had the freedom to cut back some of the bloat the EU inflicted on Endor's order of battle - something you and Mr. Fry did not have. As I said above, I encourage each person to make their own version of what happened there.

 

We should read it as 30 ISDs. That's what we're seen, we see the Rebel fleet and the starfighter corps, and 30 ISDs is reasonable - narratively - for the battle we see on screen.

That's a fix for a problem that shouldn't have existed in the first place. It was clearly Palpatine commanding Piett commanding the fleet in the film, and retconning in Teshik and Declann and Grand Admiral whogivesa**** as present is unnecessarily confusing.

(Incidentally, if there is one thing that - no offense - we needed less of, it's the "Thrawn gives prescient warning or plans something from the movies" story. He was absent for years. That's the whole point of HOTE.)

 

We only ever actually see, at most, about 10-20 Rebel Starfighters (plus the Falcon) composited on screen at a given time (of which there are really only 4-6 distinct props used for filming). I cannot believe there were only a paltry one or two dozen starfighters across the entire Rebel Fleet at Endor, and consequently I really do not think we should take the limitations of cinematography and special effects literally.

 

There's 33 destroyers seen in one shot at Endor, iirc.

Well, Jason did classify the Resurgent-class as a battlecruiser in his personal notes, so...