Lit The Essential Guide to Warfare by Jason Fry and a pseudonymous Scotsman

Bah. There is only one true option - The Essential Guide to Xim the Despots Campaigns.

Only if we get a whole chapter on how he styles his beard.

I'd like to see a book which delves into the nitty-gritty of SW warfare a bit more deeply- starship tactics, ground tactics- and so forth.

You might want to pick up the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook by West End Games, it has very nice sections on starfighter, capital ships and ground combat tactics.

True- but it might end up hard to find after a while.

A book that isn't a game splatbook- that is fairly up to date- would be nice.

It could even allude to the tactics of using war droids- going all the way back to Xim the Despot

Tion raider pirate tactics and pictures of Xim and Hutts troops (Xim after all employed numerous living warriors), vehicles and vessels would actually be more interesting, as Xim War bot tactics seem to be pretty much the same as Sepi droid tactics - march at the foe whilst shooting.

PS: No WEG book is a simple Splatbook

Jello: The reason I was suggesting a "sector" designation for the "Praetorian fleet" is because Palpatine calls it "our sector starfleet" in the RJRD. Apart from that, I was mostly using "sector" terminology for conceptual purposes, based on the ways that sectors and oversectors define the Navy's deployment zones. I'm neutral on whether it's the right terminology, and even if there were such a designation, it could be largely notional, especially if Death Squadron serves as its main fighting force.

And, using that as a neat segue to the general topic (this bit's for everyone in the thread) of whether Death Squadron should be seen as a catch-all term for "the main force of the Praetorian fleet in action", I'm personally pretty neutral: my main concern would be that there might be some obscure source contradicting the idea, so you can consider this a bit of random crowdsourcing that may never go anywhere?

I don't, however, see the idea being mitigated against by the fact that a squadron command is subordinate to a fleet one (see WARFARE on the relationship! ), nor by the fact that there are other, generally less offensive, components of PRAECOM (Grand Admirals' flagships, Task Force Vengeance, the formation led by Chimaera)...

I'm not sure that the rosters of the "Praetorian fleet" are necessarily that fixed - for example, both Stalker and Thunderflare seem to be reassigned from the Elrood Sector Group around the time of ESB when Vader's in the area. I was thinking more that it's a command hierarchy, with certain ships in it effectively by default (the "standing" core of Death Squadron, i.e. Executor, Avenger, Devastator, and the Grand Admirals' flagships), certain things in it effectively for the long-term too (the task force led by Chimaera, perhaps also Harrsk and Trigit), and certain things pulled from local duty as reinforcement (Thunderflare, Stalker)...

I'm not actually that fond of the "Praetorian" analogy, for pedantic reasons that would upset Jello, but that's irrelevant. It's a fun and convenient idea for the purposes of the conversation. It's like everyone knows what a Super Star Destroyer is.

My answer to Admiral's question on the Independence / Home One issue is quite like my answer on the "Death Squadron" designation (only a bit more informed): I have absolutely nothing against the idea (in fact, I quite like it), but I remember expressing a worry that there might be some obscure canon source that differentiates the two ships, even though I couldn't find one.

Aside from that, it's more-or-less as Jason says. There were one or two details like this where we never quite worked out if we should make a change (Jason asked me that one, I asked him if we should increase the size of the Bilbringi fleets)...

I like that point. As I've mentioned already, there's some obscure source (a game, I think) that shows that the Chimaera group was together in the Core before Endor....

Shields and Yavin: One thing I want to crowdsource is whether there's actually that much canon evidence to show that shields can keep out shielded starfighters. For most ships, it's not an issue, because anyone flying through would crash into the hull and have a flak quad firing at them point-blank, but for an Ex or a Death Star, it's an amusing vulnerability, if it works that way....

It was something we avoided really confronting in WARFARE, but that doesn't mean I'm not interested in it.

-- The Imperial Ewok

Well, SWAJ #12 actually defines Death Squadron - "... Admiral Ozzel's newly formed Death Squadron, a task force charged with locating Rebel military forces."

Just to ask - was it ever confirmed that Prittick was actually at Endor, as opposed to simply being a regional commander based out of Annaj? That would still put him in command over the remnants of the Endor fleet arriving in his area of operational responsibility, but would make Pellaeon's assumption of command at Endor more plausible. With Vader, Piett, and Strage dead, Teshik surrounded and captured, Harrsk critically injured, and the other surviving Grand Admirals running like scared little *****es Pellaeon may well have been the most senior officer able to give out orders.

I think there's at least one card game that had the Home One, Independence and Defiance, all presented and with different roles in the Battle of Endor.

We also have Ackbar transferring off of Home One to his personal ship just after the battle in TaB.

When exactly Teshik's ship was finally disabled may have been a moot point. Either he was cut off from the remainder of the Endor fleet, already had boarding parties storming aboard, chose to play rearguard for some reason, or just decided he wasn't going down without a fight and to hell with the responsibilities of command. Pretty much all of those cases have him separated from the rest of the fleet and unable to effectively issue orders to other ships. Just because you're the highest-ranking officer on the field doesn't mean command devolves to you; if you're cut off from reliable communications and have the enemy knocking at the door you probably don't have the capability to command. In that case, the survival of your forces is likely decided by whether or not a junior officer down the chain has the gumption to take charge of the mess. If he doesn't, your troops or ships blunder about waiting for orders that aren't forthcoming.

X-wing Alliance is obscure? Me sad now

IIRC, the Otana misjumped to Carida and found itself in the middle of a live fire weapons exercise led by the Chimaera and including the ships from Thrawn's future core armada.[/quote]

Doesn't the RotJ novel have a fighter not turning fast enough and splatting against the DSII shield?

The Endor Planet shield actually. As DS 2 had no shield yet.

To be more pedantic:
1. Endor was a moon, not a planet
2. It was not a planetary shield, but a remote projected shield.
3. The DSII had a shield/ was shielded, as that qualification does not require that the DS II generate said shield itself.

Funny you should bring up X-wing, since one cutscene shows five of them in a fleet shot.

Really! I had never noticed that...

Well, to bring it up again - there's always the possibility that "Home One" is the designation for the Alliance Fleet commander's ship, just as "Rebel One" might be the designation for the official High Council main ship - in Ackbar's case he normally prefers the Independence, but he might use other ships as his command vessel at times. (Although it would have to be specifically used in the main Fleet Command, I don't think the bulk cruiser Adamant would ever earn that designation... )

I'm making some inferences here. If Teshik ignored Pellaeon's retreat "order," why then did the rest of the fleet follow the Chimaera? Why couldn't Teshik simply get on the comm, pull rank, and order the fleet to keep fighting? If Teshik was in communication with the remaining Imperial forces at Endor, was in nominal command, and intended to stay and fight, then the fault isn't just Pellaeon's - every Imperial officer on the field disobeyed a direct order from a clear superior. I'm also not sure the Eleemosynary was fighting the Rebels at full capacity when Pellaeon left - three hours alone versus Ackbar's entire remaining fleet before being subdued? More likely she was seriously disabled in some form within the first hour and the remaining fighting was in the form of fending off boarding parties.

As a historical reference, the Bismarck "fought on" for two hours before sinking, but in reality she was a sitting duck going in, her forward main batteries and bridge were wrecked fifteen minutes into the fight, and less than 45 minutes later her teeth were completely pulled. The remainder was just pumping shells and torpedoes into a blazing hulk. I imagine Eleemosynary likewise lost something critical like main propulsion, maneuvering, and/or communications early on that left her crippled, surrounded, and at the mercy of the Rebel Fleet. If Pellaeon truly believed that he had to order a retreat to preserve the remaining units of the fleet, he may well have decided that risking lives and hulls for a Grand Admiral on a crippled ship wasn't worth the cost.

I'm not going to get involved with the Endor details, but I'll share a random behind-the-scens titbit: I suggested that Admiral Prittick might be the previous Chimaera commander killed at Endor, and that the "Prittick" at Annaj was Pellaeon using the ship's comms priority (a concept, in itself, that I think we were both thinking about).

Jason promptly swapped that for something more interesting and considerably less confusing.

Tziz: do the cards describe them as separate ships, or are there just Home One and Independence cards that might refer to the same ship...?

That's the one! Thanks!

Can someone who has a more accessible copy of "Doom Mission!" than me say if the power gem was actually designed only to get the single fighter through the shields, or if it was designed more generally to strip the shields? If it's the second option, then even if the fighter "needs" it to slip the shields when Vrad throws himself Cryndwise at the Ex, that may relate to its own lack of shields or something....

Could conceivably be due to their speed and angle of approach, or relative shield strength - after all, we know that double-fronted X-wing shields were semi-necessary to get through the defenses of the original Death Star, with the implication that evened-out X-wing deflectors might not cut it, while Endor also involves a full-scale planetary-grounded shield (thus a very strong one) with a very fancy geometry....



-- The Imperial Ewok