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

Some random replies to keep some interesting conversations going.

On the subject of Saak'ak and Vuutun Palaa, Gorefiend has it: the ships are visibly different in appearance (the DCS has a huge stern comms array, and lots of transmitters all over the hull), and when the blockade fleet is sent back to hauling cargo, the Saak'ak goes with them, necessitating a shift....

So that's why the DCS gets a separate name!

Iron_lord: OBF and DFR are two interesting references that I definitely need to look into again: thanks for that!

AdmiralWes: thanks for that, too. Hmph. Now if only we could find some comparable "mistake" elsewhere in the CCG....

dewback: well, the ships were coming out of hyperspace, and we don't know how during that sort of transition would react to a massive hyperphyscial roadblock like an SSD's main deflector. Except that there are some indications elswhere that it's the objects that have jumped past lightspeed which get pasted in a contradiction, and reality doesn't even blink.

Again, as with the Endor and to an extent the Naboo stuff, it's suggestive, but not conclusive....

Gorefiend: it was a Praetor II-class battlecruiser, not an ordinary Star Destroyer, and they were specially modified TIE lasers that used the entire power-pack for a single shot, but yes.

Jello: to be useful, the missiles need shields, and by then you've started adding extra equipment; by the time you've got a truly functional shielded long-range missile that can avoid flak effectively, you've built a starfighter, and you might as well separate the missiles back out as short-range simple ones.

Tim battershell: I like that idea about fine sand. Not saying I think it's canon-compliant, just that I think it's fun!

Iron_lord: well, that covers Tarkin's technological terror - does it actually say that the shields were traded off, because I have a vague idea that in older canon, it was the hyperdrive that took the penalty (though that hardly fits well with the speed at which Tarkin bumbles about the Galaxy being villainous in his big round battlemoon)....

-- The Imperial Ewok

Thanks for that! Things I've read years ago keep popping into my head!

IIRC, an author who took up E E (Doc) Smith's 'Lensmen' Universe for a book or so used sand (first grains then bags) in an attempt to take down the shields of the Moon base/colony.

Isaac Asimov's "Lucky Starr" novels featured a personalised shield that the hero was given - ISTR that it could stop Blasters without effort, a bullet would knock him down, but it didn't offer any defence at all against someone swinging a sledgehammer!

Hey folks, since I don't have an A&A thread (do those even exist anymore?) forgive me for putting this here.

Star Wars Reads Day is Saturday, Oct. 6 and I'll be at Word in Greenpoint. (Which is a neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, for those of you whose sense of geography doesn't look like that famous New Yorker cover.) There'll be a costume parade, stormtroopers, prizes, giveaways and audiobook wizard Marc Thompson and I talking a bit about what we do. The primary goal is to get kids reading, but of course I'll be happy to sign books and would love to talk Warfare/Atlas/Darth Maul/Whatever's on your mind. So if you're local, come on out!

Details here, and here is more about Star Wars Reads Day. Even if you're not local to Brooklyn, there's probably an event that's local to you.

Didn’t Luke and fellows also first attack several ISDs escorting the Praetor using “normal” power lasers and cause impressive damage their as well? Don’t have the comic with me at the moment.

That happens sometimes. It's still a cool idea.

Anyone...?

I mean, considering the way that TIE pilots' helmets emote, I'm not sure we can take the art of that issue 100% seriously, but still, "let's hotwire a TIE's lasers to destroy a command ship's shields with a single shot" isn't IIRC an entirely visual point...



*mostly just poking the thread in the hope of crowdsourcing his question on shields into irrelevance*

-- The Imperial Ewok

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2nk2a795iqujyvj/starscream1.JPG
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8c75g7sd1xim1v2/starscream2.JPG
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yzh767i4mzkqos4/starscream3.JPG
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jhewr8nrbgfkgz0/starscream4.JPG

Though outside of the direct comment of blowing throw any shield that the Rebel tech mentions it could really just have been luck on the Rebels part as the fleet properly had not raised its battle shields when they where first attacked by the Rebel TIEs and the command ships shield might have been weakened when the fleet started to fire at each other.

*Sigh* Everytime this gets trotted out I have to remark on it. TIE pilot helmets are made of a plastic of sorts (plastoid, like the Stormtrooper armor, iirc), they can be bended with enough pressure. Wookiee arm strength is apparently strong enough to cause a visible dent.

"Each selecting a suitable, unsuspecting target." seems to be the key-sentence here. So the only shields up when the rebels attacked might have been the navigational shields as Gorefiend pointed out.

On a different type of shield, the 'Mount Tantiss cloaking shield' (used to good effect by Thrawn); couldn't an ESM/Periscope mast of some kind (extended through it) negate it's one appalling defect of leaving the ship it protects utterly blind and deaf? Just thinking!

I've wondered that myself - build the ship with extendable passive sensor masts that break through the cloak and you'd remove a lot of the issues. The masts themselves would have to be sensor-stealthed to prevent detection from scans, but it could work.

I wonder- if the cloak traps all energy emitted inside it (so, even when the guns are firing there's no energy discharge that can be sensed from the outside) might that cause problems?

A cloaked ship blazing away with its turbolasers might heat up very fast.

... or deform it into the shape of a person showing fear. Wookiees are nothing if not artistes.

Of course, a cynic might say that it was a cheap way for a comic book artist to convey emotion on a person whose face was hidden by a helmet.

Didn't seem to affect the Carrack-class cruisers in The Last Command or the Chimaera when testing out the Predictor system.

Well, given that turbolasers are more like plasma/particle bolts, the only energy that would be trapped inside would be the backscatter/diffusion off the bolts as they travel until they leave the cloaking field. Vacuum is a pretty good insulator, so not much heat would be dumped into the immediate area around the ship. I'd be more concerned by engine wash, as that does seem to be contained, or otherwise you could track a cloaked ship by the ion trail the engines leave.

True. It might be like the IES stealth system in the Mass Effect universe, where the Normandy can only run under power for a few hours before needing to drop stealth and vent emissions.

Although ... do we ever see cloaked warships operating under power? The Carracks are towed into position and the ISDs at Bothawui are moored to a comet. That makes me wonder if the hibridium cloaking device did in fact block drive emissions.

Being blind and deaf is a good excuse for not being under power (or even running on momentum), no telling what the ship might crash into!

Is Ion efflux high temperature, or does the chill of space rapidly sort that out?

Actually, space is an excellent insulator - loss of heat would only come through radiating heat and the natural expansion of the efflux.

Still a useful capability though, just coasting on momentum into optimum firing range - provided the navigators can see where the ship is going!

Absolutely - although any starship should be able to do something similar - accelerate, cut the engines off while still outside the range of enemy sensors, minimize power, and then fire up when ready.

Of course, the reliance of starships on sensors and the evolving state of a potential battleground would make a maneuver like that risky, and if it was done enough there would probably be countermeasures developed against that particular tactic.

True, but it would be interesting to see what kind of measures you could take to make a double-blind cloak combat-effective. The sensor mast idea is one, although it would have to be small, hard to detect, and equipped with only passive devices. Said masts would probably also be equipped with tightbeam communications equipment that might allow for offboard ships or recon drones to transmit targeting data if need be. NR ferret and prowler spyships also had baffling systems on the ion drives and chemical rocket "creep" engines for silent running.

TIEs vs ISDs: thanks for the images, Gorefiend! You're saying those are the half-dozen normal-power precursor shots from the TIE lasers that are shown making a sorry mess of ISDs? And am I right in remembering that there's a few pages of dogfight you've cut out before the one where Luke vapes the battlecruiser?

One would hope that the ISDs had their shields down. Or that the TIEs just flew straight through them. Still fairly embarrassing, even so, if those are normal TIE/ln bolts....

The "unsuspecting targets" line is interesting, though not conclusive - it could be that the Rebels just want to avoid flak and real TIEs....



Sensor masts: interesting question, no particular opinion. We do see the ISDs at Bothawui send out TIEs through the cloaking perimiter and back repeatedly, with no trouble....

I hope the retcon of the cloaking tech in WARFARE made sense to everyone (or, better, was unnoticable), though!

-- The Imperial Ewok

I still don't understand why the cloaking device from Mount Tantiss on Wayland isn't a hybridium cloaking device, because I am under the impression that they were both double blind.

As a maximalist, shouldn't you be embracing this as incontrovertible visual proof that even small blaster cannons fire 18 kabillion gigawatt blasts?

Even the most maximalist of maximalists aren't going to argue that TIE weapons are that powerful. Because then their arguing that the SD's are pitifully weak.

Well, in X-wing: Iron Fist we have TIEs firing from under the shields of Iron Fist and Razor's Kiss utterly slagging a good chunk of their shields, and one TIE Interceptor going so far as to demolish the bridge of the Razor's Kiss. That would support the idea of TIE lasers having the punch to tear up critical systems on a KDY command module if the shields are bypassed or inactive.