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

It has just been confirmed by the original designer that the Arrestor cruiser will not physically appear in the final cut of the movie, but it's likely that it will be at least mentioned in the visual guide (just like the GAVr in Rogue One and the AT-HS in TLJ).
While I'm a fan of the original design, I must admit that it may not have fit too well with the way ships aesthetics have deepely evolved since the original ANH concepts have been scrapped. It may have looked great on a Rebels episode, but felt out of place in a movie.

 

Frankly, I'm glad. Colin Cantwell's designs do not mesh with Star Wars aesthetics as they matured through McQuarrie, Johnston, Rodis-Jamero, and Chiang, and there's really no way to reconcile them. It would be as obviously inconsistent and out of place as a Star Destroyer in The Wrath of Khan or the real-world feathered, dog-sized Velociraptor in Jurassic Park.

 

So, moving on to the general topic of aftermarket additions to big pointy space battleships...

Bow guns - are these ones in Rogue One using the same triple-turret CGI-greebly as the ones we see in large numbers on the underside of the Finalizer in TFA?

I always figured that the torpedoes on Chimaera in Specter of the Past were the equivalent of the new equipment added to old capital ships to keep them relevant in the age of the dive-bomber. Hold that thought a moment.

As to the torpedoes on Errant Venture... well, Booster has a whole lot of aftermarket torpedo tubes lying around the Thyferra system at the end of the Bacta War when Cracken makes him take most of the guns off Errant Venture, so there's no real surprise that Errant Venture later has a whole lot of aftermarket torpedo tubes, plus during the NJO and later an axial superlaser (which cooks repeated shiploads of vong shwarma at Yavin 4, Borleias, Ebaq 9, and Second Cour., in case you weren't reading between the lines), and sensor masks to make look like he only has a limited number of poorly-repaired turbolaser positions. Oh, and a really, really, really good lawyer, who's also his captain.

But while Booster is a shameless pirate doing a Space Battleship Yamato homage (as someone once said, there is canon and cannon) the additions and modifications we see to most other big pointy ships seem to belong more in the same "refit/update" context as the Chimaera's torpedo tubes - I suppose the starting point is the change between the weapons and sensor tops on the ANH and ESB designs (which I'm still not convinced ILM intended to be the same class of ship ), and we definitely see this with cloaking devices, and also with the additional shield towers on Big Tim, plus whatever the Yevetha did to Redoubtable - so in that context, the interdictor equipment which the ISD variants in the NJO have is nothing particularly new, the main surprise being that the generators are housed internally - in contrast, the big tractor-beam turret on the Acky and the Black Annie's various pods go back to external housings, which may indicate a preference for freeing up internal volume, or possibly a hurried pimping job performed on a new hull that was already close to completion - although this could simply be to do with the fact that the NJO ISDs have the much wider and thus more spacious "ANH" hullform rather than the narrower "ESB" design of Caedus' pimped ride...

Some specific responses to people, in no particular order (but starting with what's basically a continued excursus on SSD length, so some of you might want to read that for the retro effect)...

@Star_Desperado - no, the Ravager's engine configuration is completely different. All the boosters are the same size, and the wing-mounted trios are directly beneath the rear edge, leaving no space for the Ex's intermediate pairs (a point emphasised if you continue the lines of the fantail and the rear edge of the wing); this is a much smaller nine-engined SSD.

I'm not sure what you mean by JJ Abrams getting "facts straight" though...

And @Iron_lord - I'm not seeing any specific remarks on Ravager being a 19km SSD there - just people immediately recognizing Ravager as a very big pointy Imperial ship of an iconically familiar sort, and proving my longstanding argument that in that situation, most people don't really notice the difference between the 19km version and the 8km version...

I should add that I have no idea what ILM actually intended here - they did a great job of capturing the details of the stern engine trio, which must have been based on the studio model or high-resolution photos. My interpretation of the rest is based purely on what showed on screen being different from the Ex, whether that was "impressionism" or a genuine WEG homage...

@Noash_Retrac - I actually thought First Coruscant was handled really well, though a lot of the "characterization" of the fleet mix was brought in earlier at the Black Bantha, but I've not yet got round to pulling everything together in response...

@Vialco - impressive work with Invincible. Going to have to re-read the novel to think about what you said...

@NCISliar - thanks for the XWA reference to the DS2 shooting the Rebel fleet. The idea that Jerjerrod was working through the smaller ships makes sense.

@Long Snoot and @Star_Desperado - going to have to disagree; I'm pretty sure that the Arrestor would fit just fine in a movie full of ISDs, myself.

@DarthCane and @King of Alsakan - I actually compared the Mandy in TLJ to the modernized BBs on the gun-line at Surago a few pages back, though I still think Megador is something more obnoxiously top-end...

I'm temped to go wildly off-topic and start actually talking about Surago... but I'm not sure what the mods would think (or if anyone else really cares).

EDIT: whoops. Ignore the half-formed waffling on Leyte which I forgot to delete in the first draft.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Is this new to anybody

 

Just read that, and was eagerly awaiting the Mon Cal fans here having a go at ID'ing those bad boys.

It's a funny thing with comic art -- depending on the style, sometimes various blobs can be inferred to be more or less anything either established or not, no way to really know... and then there's this kind of stuff where you can say, okay, that's exactly that, canonically, and that there is exactly a variant or new class that we can pretty much take measurements from.

 

Rogue One, may the Force be ...oh wait.



Sorry, I thought we were at Scarif for a second there.

 

Some pictures of the Solo Visual Dictionary leaked, not much vehicle stuff in the photos taken but it's not the whole book. There's multiple spreads of the Falcon, including a cross-sectional. Content of note germane to this thread is Moloch's Trast Heavy Transports A-A4B truckspeeder and the Cloud Riders' Caelli-Merced (Merced, Cali[fornia] lol) Skyblade-330 swoop bikes. Is it ok to post spoilered pictures?

 

It is a very interesting battle to read about and study, coincidentally had a conversation about it at work yesterday after discussing space combat in the Expanse.

Interesting thoughts on the adding torpedoes to ISD's. In my head at least, always thought that an ISD would have torpedo or concussion missile tubes from the start. Maybe for ship to ship combat, but definitely for either precision or high yield strikes against planetary targets, sort of like the Acclamator. I will always tend to to think a ISD should be able dole out a bit more firepower than is ever portrayed on screen, but again that is just me and my personal preferences.

 

While they eventually turned out to be fanon, the Geoffrey Mandel blueprints had missiles in its description of the ISD.

 

Just came out of the theater. Not gonna spoil anything, but the first thing I'm gonna do as soon as I get the blu-ray is trying to get a good look at all the ships on the Corellian sky.

 

Do we see Corellian ships - that are not star destroyers - larger than a CR90?

 

The Caelli-Merced Syndicate goes back a ways.

 

Eh, the Mandator-IV actually reminds me more of the heavy monitor classes the Royal Navy fielded during WWI and WWII - the Abercrombie, Lord Clive, Marshal Ney, and Erebus classes during the former and the Roberts class in the latter. All of them were shallow-draft, broad-beamed, cruiser-sized ships (that description sounds familiar) featuring a dual battleship-caliber (12 to 15-inch) gun turret; in the case of Lord Clive and General Wolfe the original dual 12-inch guns were replaced with a single 18-inch gun (which actually fired a heavier shell than the Yamatos twenty years later) in a mount aimed over the starboard beam with only 10 degrees of traverse.

"Fleet-killer" hyperbole aside, the Mandator-IV is termed a "Siege Dreadnought" and is equipped with two massive, fixed-traverse guns on her underside with limited elevation. The ship has a pitiful assortment of close-in weapons and has a fatal weak spot center-mass on the upper hull where its target profile is the largest and its main battery can't aim. A ship less than half her length such as a Resurgent-class or MC85 would probably shred her as long as it stayed out of that narrow arc directly in front of and below the Mandator-IV. The old WWI dreadnoughts were at least designed at the outset to hit moving targets and have 360-degree main battery coverage; the Mandator-IV is a brand-new design that's helpless against anything not directly in front of her. That's not so say she can't do a lot of damage in a fleet engagement, but she'd have to catch an enemy completely flatfooted at range (which Fulminatrix did at D'Qar) in order to do so.

 

Used by the Empire as Han says? No, not really. But I'm pretty sure that the strange new Corellian ship seen in a poster briefly appeared during the Moloch chase. Hopefully the visual guide has some good pictures of that and the tows lifting star destroyer parts.

 

Apparently, it appears on a recruitment video.

 

Indeed it does, but it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. I wonder if it will be in the Official Guide.

 

Ew, those crappy Aphra comics canonized some dumb deviantart fan design.
https://calamitysi.deviantart.com/art/Nebulon-K-Frigate-689695776
Traced it straight off DA. Doubt the artist got compensated. This isn't the first time this has happened.

 

Damn, missed that.

I'm wondering if that's still supposed to be a Nebulon-K given the fact that it's being used by the rebel alliance. I tought it was supposed to be newer than the Nebulon-C, which was introduced after the Battle of Endor.

 

Doubt it, just looks like the artist went to copy some design instead of making up his own. This wouldn't be so bad if they kept it in-house, like the Star Tours freighter that appears in Thrawn, but these marvel comics have an awful habit of stealing other people's work, even well outside the franchise. Remember the Battlestar Galactica colony ships in the 2015 Han Solo comic?

 

The latest issue of the SW ongoing comic shows us some cool Mon Cala merchant fleet ships:









The latter two are clearly just poorly drawn MC80's. The first two are MUCH more interesting and definitely aren't of the MC75 or MC80 types we know that the Rebels used.

--Adm. Nick

 

It's a reused design from Legacy. I think they used it a few issues ago as well. If they are mining that well than I want a Scythe class soon



Edit: went back and found the conversation, funnily enough turns out you were the one who pointed out the Legacy ship.

I wonder if they will use the unnamed clone wars era Mon Calamari cruiser

 

Oof, talk about tracing, Larocca's skills still haven't progressed. At least he's trying to get creative and we're getting more Mon Cal variation.

 

Oopsie daisy!

 

It could be classified as the canon Nebulon-B2


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Yeah, Aphra is WAY too early for a -K.

Someone check on Nick, make sure the poor boy's heart didn't give out upon seeing that.