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

That's no pulley, ships use 'Blocks'. That's part of a Block termed a 'Sheave'.

 

Which is far better known as a Palpatine

 

I have a question about freighters & transports.....

Given the size and scope of the galactic economy and the comparative size of capital ships, why is it that most cargo freighters & transports max out at corvette-sized ships? Why don't we see more Lucrehulk-class ships and their size equivalent servicing planets like Courscant & Alderaan....maybe even Tatooine & Nar Shadaa?

Enough cargo vans.....where are the freight trains & container ships?

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Old EU and all but the explanation back then was that major worlds are catered to by Superfreighter like the Lucrehulk or the Super Series, which will generally only travel along major lanes, being owned by gigantic shipping companies that are either Imperial backers (Xizor Transport System, Red Star, Santhe Passanger and Freight are the major ones during the Empire) or actually things like the Trade Federation or in some cases the government itself, the Imperial fleet for example also uses Super Freighters for supply purposes.

Now these interest groups of course have major lobbying power and enough capital to actually get their Super Freighter in bulk and also keep the large crews they need running at a profit (economies of scale and all). Whilst the smaller shipping companies will usually only have the budget for smaller ships, are sometimes actually prevented from even buying bigger ships do to certain regulations, or simply don´t actually have the clients to make it pay, since they are stuck flying stuff for lesser worlds in more remote locations that will simply not have anything worth exporting or certainly not in the giant quantises that would require a Superfreighter.


So their options are to either stick to the small worlds that the big companies will not bother with, specialise in luxury cargo that is certainly not shipping around in giant amounts, smuggle (again small quantity, high value), or cater to speed delivery needs and/or mix in some passenger traffic along with their freight.

Superfreighter can´t land, so either they transfer cargo to a orbital plattform that then elevators it down or to smaller tug ships that will drop it off.

 

As idiotic as it seems, the EU was reluctant to get over the hype over the Star Destroyers back in the day. After the prequels, we actually saw more references to big cargo ships. Even the Confederate Supply ship is more massive than an ISD. WEG had the FSCV, but that was the odd man out. They never focused on industrial-scale stuff, like Cloud City, while also forgetting it was a "small outpost". They certainly never touched Mining Guild vessels, the organization that mined billions of worlds throughout the galaxy. Who knows what they do in the post-purge canon, but it can't be any worse than Cloud City, so there's that to use as a yardstick.

 

IIRC, the FSCV - FieldSecuredContainerVessel -, which could be up to 20 km long must have been widespread, since a quarter of each support-element (500 ships) within a Sectorgroup consisted of those ships, while another quarter was corvette-sized and the remaining half everything in between.

One of the major shipping-companies during Palpatine's rule was probably also a subsidiary of the TaggeCompany, considering that subsidiaries of TaggeCo. tended to successfully compete with the market-leaders of any given field.

 

Though the whole fleet composition thing from the Imperial Sourcebook, as the book explains, was more "we hope to have this eventually, but don´t really currently"

 

Could it not be both? Industrial-scale administration and tourism (gambling, etc.) hub, with only a minor Tibanna Gas extraction and refining capability?

 

Problem is, nothing in TESB suggests, that Cloud City is important or remarkable as a tourist-attraction or gambler's paradise (it isn't even mentioned as such). Leia would have certainly commented on Han bringing her to the GFFA-equivalent of Las Vegas or Dubai.

 

The way Lando is clearly lying in the movie, it always came across as the whole thing being more of a semi fly by night arms market that he is somehow trying to get recognized by the Empire. Gambling and some tourism would certainly pale compared to the whole illegal mining and selling munitions thing.

 

Makes sense.....but why stay with ships under 200 meters? The Acclimator-class ships could haul a lot of cargo, yet still land on a planet. Even the Venators could do planetary landings.

I'm just surprised that we don't see many cargo haulers in that 300-1000 meter gap.....

Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Funny enough the Clone Wars Invasion Transport indeed got converted to Supply Transports and Slave Ships by the Empire. Though there are some 300-1000 Meter commercial designs as well, passenger liners for example are often in that range, as are things like Asteroid Miners, Bacta Haulers, or the Kuat Drive Yards Super Transport series, probably just has to do with the nature of bulk hauling in the SW Galaxy, where there are seem to be two distinct markets for “lighter” freighters (YT-1300er, Actions, and the like) with a few hundred to about 100 thousand metric tons and bigger ships like the B-12 Bacta Transport (0,6 million metric tons) Lucrehulk or Super Transporter XI (with 25 million tons in cargo), to truly gigantic stuff like the Field Secured Container Vessel ( billions of tons of capacity). The later properly actually becoming even more economical by not even landing, since it Is enough to just drop the cargo in the target system and have it picked up by other means, whilst these giant ship can already be off to another system to pick up more cargo.

 

That has nothing to do with the movie, which only talks about it being a small mining outpost, not very self-sufficient, clients that like going under the radar of both the Empire and the Mining Guild. Nor does it gel with the majority of matte paintings and models, where most of the city was focused around its industrial setting. Only the top portion had high-rises and they were fairly plain looking compared to actual artistic cities like Theed, Sundari or Coruscant. Everything suggests canon Cloud City is in the middle of nowhere and isn't well-known for anything.

Disney(TM)'s StarWars.com has this to say: "Suspended high among the pastel clouds of Bespin is a floating metropolis of sophisticated beauty and political freedom. Cloud City exists not only as a mining colony, extracting valuable Tibanna gas from the depths of the giant planet, but also as a sanctuary for those trying to escape the turmoil gripping the galaxy. Though profitable, Cloud City is small enough not to be noticed by larger authorities such as the Mining Guild. It prospered under the capable stewardship of Baron-Administrator Lando Calrissian. Calrissian, assisted by his aide Lobot, contended with self-sufficiency issues and labor difficulties throughout his brief term."

 

I'm curious as to whether it was West End Games, or the Jedi Academy Trilogy, that came up with the association between Bespin and sabacc gaming (rules variations like Cloud City Casino, Bespin Standard, Ecclessis Figg Variation, etc).

 

The Wook doesn't credit Sabacc with an appearance in JAT. Might be in the Lando adventures, first appeared in 'Mindharp', I see.

 

Han & Lando play "Random Sabacc" in Dark Apprentice (with rules changes at random intervals).

 

Galaxy Guide 2 properly brought it up first.

 

One thing I remembered.....in TTT, the New Republic was converting a lot of capital ships into cargo haulers to stimulate trade. I could see a bunch of Battle Horns and Dreadnoughts pressed into service as such. I just didn't understand why CEC or Rendilli never made dedicated cargo ships in that size range.


Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk

 

Rendili was still Imperial-loyal at the time, IIRC. CEC... more neutral? Corellia certainly wasn't a member, even if the large Corellian expatriate population (and presumably large number of Corellian settlements throughout the galaxy aligned with the NR) were.

But I get your point - I think it was simply an alternative to scrapping obsolete capital ships, and finding productive use of them - which also was a handy cost-saving measure as well (the NR economy always seemed weak in the early years)

 

The Battle Horn actually is a armed freighter though. Though easy possible answers #1 we have just not seen them #2 they are rare to do a lack of a real market for them.

 

I thought the Battle Horns were just cheap capital ships that used a transport as a base, sort of following the philosophy of the Lucrehulks. The reference to them being used as armed transports in FUCG seems to be that "after three decades" of service, the only remaining ones were used in such a capacity because they weren't worth much as capital ships anymore (plus, the whole NR converting old capital ships to transports, which would be easier for a ship that was based on a transport hull to begin with).

 

The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook also explains them as a mix of a bulk hauler and a combat vessel, so yep pretty much like a Lucrehulk or similar designs like the Star Galleon.

 

So I saw you guys talk about Battle Horn and the first thing in my mind was "Wait, Corran Horn counts as a battleship these days?"

 

CEC might not have contributed much to the overall ship-production of the galaxy during RotJ and HoT since Corellia and its ruling Diktat followed a policy of isolation for most of that time (see Corellia-trilogy).

Rendili on the other hand was probably busy with producing Rebublic-class SDs, while its lack of larger facilities in favour of lots of small and medium shipyards was probably an impedement to the design and construction of larger freighters. Rendili was however active in the freighter-business by being the other company to build FSCVs aside from Loronar.

 

And I've always thought the Star Galleon should be at least similar in size to a Acclimator. Seemed like a waste to put that much armament on a ship with that limited cargo capacity.


Sent from my HTC One using Tapatalk