Lit Dreadnaughts in Thrawn Trilogy

Like they do in TCW?

 

Considering we know they are pawns in a false war and destined to death, betrayal and corruption, any victory in the Clone Wars sounds hollow.

...I don't really think that but I liked how it sounded.

 

Yep and we also saw how "very well" those worked.

 

Oddly enough, that leads to a fun idea that fits with canon-
"As part of the corruption and cronyism of the Republic as it approached the Clone Wars, not even the Navy/Judicials were immune. While many developments were available to make ships more efficient, service with the Judicials was a particularly favored job, with the main-line cruisers like Dreadnoughts seen as prime positions. Commissions and even enlisted positions on a dreadnought were often handed out to loyal followers and subjects, and while budgets limited the addition of new ships to the fleet, crew sizes were increased in the name of "redundancy" and "flexability." Before long, the massive crew complements became institutionalized, though a backlash grew from from some of the Generationals who still remembered the times when their Navy was efficient and deadly, rather than floating jobs programs. Many of them threw their support behind the Katana Fleet project, knowing that the slave circuit system was generally unnecessary, but the conceit would reduce the crew complements down to reasonable numbers. They were humiliated when the Fleet vanished on it's inaugural cruise, while many senior officials were quietly relieved, and rumors that the hive virus had not infected the crew accidentally surfaced from time to time. Meanwhile, private companies like KDY and their subsidiaries quietly designed and built ships using the new technologies, waiting for the next arms race or war to push demand for more ships and more money into their coffers. As for the Republic, the one benefit of the Dreadnought was that the massively overcrewed design did provide a large core of trained spacers who could be transferred over to crew larger numbers of efficient designs if necessary."

 

I always liked the Dreadnoughts because they added a lot to the Star Wars canon even if there were some serious issues with them.

1. They illustrated why we didn't see more things like computers doing the majority of the work in Star Wars or even droids. If you can reprogram a ship to all go to the same place, you can have an entire fleet lost. It happened with the Nostril of Palpatine (I mean Eye of Palpatine) after all too.

2. It shows actual technological progression in Star Wars, particularly if you known that Assault Frigates are actually modified Dreadnoughts that went from 16,000 people to 5,000 people with no loss in productivity.

3. I love the whole idea of finding a "Lost Fleet" of ships. It's very pulpy and effective.

4. I also love that this is one of the few conclusive defeats by our heroes even if they manage to take down a Star Destroyer in the process (before "ramming speed" became overused in the setting).

Mind you, there is an issue of Sci-Fi Universes and Scale. 2000 Dreadnoughts should not be enough to turn the tide in a galactic scale conflict. I mean, it's NICE that Thrawn has acquired 1800 Dreadnoughts for his fleet but it shouldn't be more than a few battles worth of auxillary forces.

 

Aren't hyperspace jumps calculated completely by computers anyway? There's no way you can just point your ship in a general direction and hope you'll arrive at the right destination.

 

To lose one ship is an accident. To lose an entire fleet seems like carelessness.

 

How is slaving the ships and having them jump together any different than just giving the same coordinates to every ship in your fleet and having them do the same thing? I mean, if Admiral Ackbar had gone insane and given the wrong coordinates to the Rebel fleet before Endor, then the result would've been the same.

 

I think my point was that each individual ship does its own individual navigation and is supervised by a Navigator. So, the above scenario is impossible because it's not done automatically. Mind you, there's positions of Navigators and while the Navicomputer does the grunt work, we've also seen that the ships in Star Wars have people overseeing them for errors.

We also have all of the star navigation overseen by BOSS at Coruscant as well. Which means if you did want to be the ultimate terrorist then thjat would be the place to strike.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Bureau_of_Ships_and_Services/Legends

There's a lot of redundancies that rely on physical people in SW. Slave rigging means that's all done, essentially, by Dummy AI and not even Droid Intelligence.

 

But if you're doing a closely coordinated jump like we saw in ROTJ, then do you want all your ships doing their own calculations?

 

I mean, wouldn't that be a basic safety precaution to avoid "not carrying the two leads to oblivion"?

 

After reading the first post, I'm not exactly sure what the issue is.

Yes, the Dreadnaught as originally designed required too many crewers for a ship of its size compared to modern designs.

The Katana Fleet Dreadnaughts were refits designed to address that issue. They rely on automation far more than non refitted dreadnaughts which means less crewers.

They were also all slave linked to the Katana meaning then navigators and crewers of the Katana could control the entire fleet from that ship if need be.

The whole purpose of Katana refit dreadnaughts was to address the issues you bring up.

 

Actually the opposite would make a lot of sense. With only one computer making the calculations for everybody, then any error in position at the other end will be equal for everybody, so you don't end up with two ships trying to occupy the same space. It's like how battleships fired in salvos - there's only one set of errors you need to worry about (the director).

Off the top of my head, the only major PopSciFi universe with reasonable crew numbers is Mass Effect, and maybe Battlestar Galactica. I'm sure there are others but I can't think of them right now.

 

It’s . . . fiction. It’s all reasonable in context. Battlestar Galactica has no more reasonable or realistic numbers then Flash Gordon - in context.

 

*irony*

FYI - Battlestar Galactica made sure that the ships weren't linked together because the Cylons used their slave-rigging equivalent to wipe them all out. The Galactica is the only ship to survive due to being off the grid and making its own calculations.

*irony*

 

Do you have a response to my actual argument?

 

I'm not quite sure what exactly the argument is, but I'll take a crack at it.

Jump calculations for ships are likely done on a ship by ship basis instead of by a single fleet coordinator because the actual course plotted is slightly dependent on the specific ships mass, speed, and any idiosyncrasies of its powerplant and hyperdrive. We know that hyperdrive can be modified to increase speed and efficiency, per the millennium falcon. A ships navicomputer or linked astromech can access and monitor each ships particulars mid travel and make adjustments as needed, while a centrally planned jump computer would not have communications with any other ships mid jump.

Fleet based jumps probably do have a flagship plot a course, and then relay it to each individual ship for it's own navicomputer to refine.

The katana fleet is likely one of the exceptions. 200 ships all built at the same time to the same design are likely near identical enough in profile that a slaves course would work just fine. To use the battleship example, they shifted from mixed armament loadouts to more uniform batteries because of fire directors. The performance differences between different types of guns made it far more difficult to get a proper concentrated salvo.

The katana fleet are all the same ship, while especially the rebel fleet is made up of a motley assembly of ships from different planets, cultures, times, with varying degrees of maintenance. The course plotted for home one would not work the same for a souped up yt1300 or battered kesselian gunship without those ships own navicomputer refining it.

 

One ship calculating everything is profoundly stupid and the Katana fleet is literally based on why this is a terrible idea. I thought that would be obvious.

What lunatic would?

Han Solo flat out says how dangerous calculating hyperspace jumps is.

 

I never addressed the particular issue concerning a massive catastrophic failure such as the Katana fleet. I was merely pointing about the problems that could arise in everyday operation when lots of computers operate in tandem, each with its own random error. Thank you AdmiralWesJanson for a well-reasoned rebuttal.

 

My apologies for not giving a good one and agreed with him.

 

Oh yeah, I think I posted in Fleet Junkies a while ago that it ought to make more sense for a fleet to spread itself out as much as possible before making a jump. And if you're travelling through a high-traffic hyperspace corridor, you should definitely want to keep your distance from everybody else.

 

Regarding Dreadnaughts vs Star Destroyers, The Last Command showed at least one advantage they had over Star Destroyers. They were able to take over and fly under the umbrella ships to attack Nkllon, whereas in Heir to the Empire a Star Destroyer was too big to be protected and had to make repairs after its raid.