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

I doubt the feelings of civilians would be considered. If the NR got hold of an ISD of course they would use it.

Look through our history and you will find equivalent occurrences. USA taking the V2 rocket to start their space program. USA copying Nazi soldier helmet shape (Because that design had the best functionality, looks were not important). USSR copying the USA B-29 bomber and the Rolls Royce Nene jet engine from UK for the Mig15. Iran continues to fly F-14s. Further back in history enemy ships were captured, renamed and used against its original owners, and continued in service after war ended.

The only reason the NR would discard an ISD would be if they did not know how to make it work or maintain it, and that kind of thing doesn't happen in Star Wars.

 

In Canon, a lot of Imperial ships were scrapped to make brand new NR designs, because Mon Mothma wanted a lot of distance between the NR and the Empire. She really cared about public appearances, hence a lot of demilitarization so the public was assured the NR wouldn't become another Empire.

 

Then why have a load of old Venators then, a ship that to me signifies the coming of the Empire. Only a idiot would scrap an ISD before a Venator (Is Mon Mothma an idiot in canon?). Paint the ISD a nice colour stripe, give it a new less aggressive name, and have it be a symbol of the Empires defeat. That is what realistically would happen.

 

I'm not so sure of that. By all accounts the Tiger was one hell of a tank, but I don't think armies were rushing to adopt it after WW2. A stigma lingers over some technology or, perhaps more accurately, some aesthetics. A Star Destroyer silhouette likely qualifies for this.

 

An Imperial Star Destroyer isn't obsolete in Star Wars. Tanks in those days became obsolete in months. By the end of WW2 the US, UK and USSR all had their own heavy tanks and were developing new Main battle tanks. While the remaining German tanks with their complicated engineering and terrible build quality, all broke down. And with the production plants bombed to the ground, no new parts available.

On the other hand, think about how popular Hitler's VW Beetle was after the war. It was so because it was reliable, simple to fix, affordable and fun to drive. The fact that it was designed by Nazis was insignificant.

 

We weren't rushing to adopt it because there was no need. Factories were not tooled to make Tigers and even if we captured a bunch, the tanks were finicky. They may have been superior tech but they took a lot of upkeep.

However, we pilfered a lot of German tech and experiments in other areas. The Allies had no problem using science garnered from bloody experiments of the Germans.

Ideology is never a barrier to taking the enemy's stuff. Practicality is.

The Rebels are facing a different situation than the Allies. The Allies had the industrial might; The Rebels don't have the industrial might of the Allies; in fact they are actually in the German position during the Galactic Civil War in that they can't hope to match the industrial output of the Empire.

No, the New Republic would not produce its own Star Destroyers (just like it did not in Legends) but seeing as it was at the industrial disadvantage it would make little sense to tear the ships apart and then make whole new ones. That would slow down the war effort. I thought that part in the Aftermath trilogy was a bit silly. Especially since they apparently managed to do this within a year.

Capture the ships, crew them, and send them back out to the frontlines.

 

If the victorious Allies actually had need of captured Tigers, I'm sure they would've used them. The New Republic is in a position where it needs more ships, and it's got some perfectly usable ones lying around...it only makes sense to use them.

 

Probably because the Empire, unlike the Republic, didn't use Venators as part of its propaganda art. The ISD became symbolic of the Empire in a way the Venator never was.

 

There are probably a lot of PSFs that would happily use an ISD if they got ahold of it. And not just worlds that were strongly pro-Imperial.

 

So, I just realized this today but the Secutor-class was apparently recanonized in Tarkin.

I didn't particularly like that book when I read it (mostly because of Vader's characterization) but if it did recanonize the Secutor that's awesome.

 

I really prefer to think the Secutor was a Clone-Wars ship. The split-bridge design was already outdated by the end of the Clone Wars with the Imperators coming out. The Secutor seems out of place being made after the Clone Wars.

 

A couple German tanks did wind up in Allied service during and after the war, although in general they were mostly kept as trophies or for testing. The Soviets only made use of Tiger and Panther tanks that were captured intact and basically ran them until they broke down; the more common Panzer IV tanks and StuG III assault guns on the other hand were repaired and kept in service. Generally speaking though the Soviets were not short on tanks, so those were more acquisitions of expediency during the war. The Western Allies occasionally made use of captured German tanks in small numbers.

France on the other hand put captured German tanks into service after WWII; they managed to put about 50 Panthers into service until the French-designed ARL-44 heavy tank entered service. They also refitted some Panzer IVs and eventually sold them to Syria; along with Panzer IVs obtained from Czechoslovakia and Spain some saw combat during the Six-Day War in 1967.

Funnily enough, the description of the Starhawk sounds like the Legends EU description of the Rebellion's assault frigate, except with an ISD as the starting point instead of a Dreadnaught-class heavy cruiser. As with the Dreadnaught, it could be that the ISD's crew requirements (37,000 versus ~5,000 for an MC80; you would need the crew for seven MC80s to man one captured ISD) made it easier for the NR to kitbash the ISD's weapons, reactor, and engines into a less manpower-intensive design. It's possible also that as in Legends the ISD was a very maintenance-intensive design that didn't do well without extensive support from KDY.

 

They wanted to design a Starhawk for Battlefront 2's SP, but it wasn't room in the budget.
SP reuses a lot of assets from BF1 and BF2's MP.

 

It’s not so much that the Republic didn’t see the use of ISDs but that they would lose support if they employed such vessels in their fleet. An in-canon work around for this was Mothma’s commissioning of the Starhawk-class battleship, which boasted the firepower of an ISD 2 and then some.


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...debatable?

Agreed. I'm choosing to view Starhawks as something like capital ship versions of Uglies: ISDs put back into service by grafting parts of other ships grafted onto them.This will yield different hull outlines and differing capabilities from ship to ship, but this is the same navy that has Mon Cal cruisers as its mainline battleships.

I really don't get the decision to have the GCW wrap up a year after Endor. Sure, economies on a galactic scale have the ability to produce new designs with a speed and to a quantity umatchable by us, but keeping things so compressed really does not give stories set between Endor and Jakku time to breathe.

I don't think you're using eschew correctly there, but otherwise, yes, absolutely. Making cosmetic changes to an ISD hull so it looks less scary at the cost of millions of credits seems like a calamitous waste of public funds, not to mention taking up valuable berth space in the Rebellion/NR's limited construction and repair facilities.

Has anyone given a cogent explanation on how so many capital ships ended up inside Jakku's atmosphere while the space battle was still going, as seen in BF2? Or does the BF2 segement practically begin after the Ravager has crashed?

 

And, in turn, the Germans used some captured allied tanks:

http://www.theshermantank.com/category/captured-shermans/


http://www.achtungpanzer.com/panzerkampfwagen-t-34r-soviet-t-34-in-german-service.htm

And planes:

http://www.mustang.gaetanmarie.com/articles/germany/germany.htm

Though, it is interesting that in fiction people tend to capture enemy vehicles to use, whereas in reality it is more common to use captured enemy vehicles for testing purposes.

....Course, the situation in star wars is a bit more odd because of the sheer difference in numbers between the Empire and the New Republic. The only way I could see the NR winning a conventional war in a year is if massive numbers of imperials defected, and it would be a lot easier, logistically speaking, for them to keep using their same gear. I know there is an image problem, but one could just repaint them in rebel colors.

I mean, I could see phasing star destroyers out quickly after the war is over, but one would expect during the war they would take what they could get.

 

Given the fact that the Imperial fleet in Tarkin still heavily used V-Wings (if I remember correctly) I could see the Secutor in-canon being a ship built close to the end of the Clone War and transitioned into the Imperial fleet.

I wish I could remember more detaila about that book but I really didn't enjoy reading it.

 

IIRC...it is set in 5 ABY. So it could be a hold over from the Clone Wars.

 

That's the case now, but perhaps a better example for stellar warships would be ships during the Age of Sail, being that both are hard to completely sink and pretty much require a major explosion to do so. Sure, some ships would be deemed to much of a pain to repair and would be scrapped, but plenty (most) others were taken as prizes and put back into service.

 

I recall reading one description of the WWII Wehrmacht as "the most kleptocratic military in history" - captured French and Czechoslovakian tanks made up a large portion of their armored forces in the early war years, entire tank units were composed of captured T-34s, and they even pressed French FT-17 tankettes left over from WWI into service.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Renault_FT_der_Wehrmacht_in_Serbien.jpg

Post-Endor, the rapid collapse of the Imperial military could be attributed either to defections or desertions - rather than joining the New Republic, some Imperials may have either formed neutral planetary/sector defense forces or simply left their posts. Given the high crew requirements of an ISD and commentary in the Battlefront II single-player campaign (the statistician's comments that the Imperial Fleet was burning through its fuel supplies and Admiral Versio's forces needing to refuel at Bespin), it's possible that as the Empire started to fracture the ISDs became white elephants.

 

Or more precisely, German Cats.

 

Think you mean "kleptomaniac"

In the old canon large starships are powered by hypermatter...which looks to be the Star Wars analogue to nuclear power. Is this still the case in the new canon? In real life, nuclear powered ships get refueled about once every twenty years, or I think in the case of newer ships, the fuel is enough to last the whole service life of the ship. If Star Destroyers operate on the same idea, I would think that keeping them fueled would not be a problem.

 

That's a pretty good comparison; the Tiger II had unparalleled armor and firepower but was expensive, heavy, mechanically complex, and fuel-hungry (despite popular belief, it was actually pretty agile for its weight). The Panther was actually somewhat worse off; in order to speed up production there were a lot of shortcuts made in manufacturing which resulted in reduced reliability and breakdowns. The Germans needed to ship their "cats" to the front by rail to avoid breakdowns on long road marches; once there they ate up a lot of gas and were difficult to tow if immobilized. Those are big problems when everything is going well; when your opponent is bombing the crap out of your whole logistics chain and you're retreating it means most of your tanks are going to be lost to breakdowns and fuel shortages rather than enemy fire.

Whoops, slight misuse of vocabulary on my part. "Kleptomaniac" would be the correct term.

In both Legends and the current canon we've seen ISDs refueling (in both cases at large stations which got blown up and took a chunk of a fleet with them). Unless for some reason the NR's capital ships operate on an entirely different fuel source; as per TLJ starships can run out of fuel and be immobilized.

 

Kleptocratic is actually the correct term; it describes a system of government or organization founded primarily on graft and theft which fits the foraging German Heer to a T, to say nothing of the political ramifications and allusions.

For example look at Lothal - that is Imperial kleptocracy.