CT What other ships did the rebels have at the time of ANH?

Lt. Hija I started out an excel spreadsheet using only the footage with the extras but ran into problems since all those extras got moved around inconsistently from shot to shot. So I abandoned that method and went with the full matte painting with live action:


On right hand side, on the lowest ground floor, counting from foreground to background: at the half way mark there are about 18 (mode) columns, that are 5 (mode) deep. So that population of the first 5 ranks, immediately along the procession, on the ground level, is 180.
Up the the fore ground stair level where the heroes first walk in, there is 6 columns of 5 deep rank. So there are 210 immediately along the procession, on the right side. Deeper than rank 5: The pixel width of the 5 ranks is 200 pixels (at the zoom I am using). The extent of the matte painting that clearly intends to indicate standing room only goes to 830 pixels. Because of perspective, the density of rank is increasing. The pillars behind the pilots (middle ground) stop after the pilots. That means it is implied that there is standing room behind that. To get that population, add 4 columns of silver-suit uniforms to the 18 columns of one half the ground level procession, for 22 columns. 800 pixels - 200 pixels means “more than” (due to perspective losses) 5 ranks x 3 blocks x column total of 22, or, “more than” 330. Or, 330 at the very minimum, just using the implications of the geometry of the matte painting. So on the right side, 210 + 330 = 540 “at the minimum”. So in the entire chamber, 1080, standing in rank and file, “at the minimum”. And this chamber is filled to capacity, standing room only, by any definition. That means, statistically, there must be more that are outside the field of view of the camera, outside the chamber on the same level, more listening over PA systems in other parts of the base, etc. What is shown is not likely the entirety of the population.

The middle ground pilot block (International Orange) is 4 columns x 5 deep = 20. Using an expectation of basic symmetry, that’s three such blocks per side. So 60 pilots per side. So ~120 pilots in the chamber. (Omitting math; will post if anyone cares.) I used a number from the F-22 to work out that a high-maintenance space superiority fighter like the X-Wing, and a relatively lower maintenance -but not by much- older bomber like the Y-Wing, given an assumed cadence of combat use of one two hour action per month, should eat up about 1 FTE. So, 60 ground crew minimum have to be attached to the fighters (the physical hardware if they exist).

1080 total minus 120 fighter pilots minus 60 ground crew leaves 900 as a potential population for vessels larger than snubfighters.

Some possible allocations using known buckets and modern analogues:

Modern cruiser: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticonderoga-class_cruiser ; length 173 meters ; crew 400

Modern destroyer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arleigh_Burke-class_destroyer ; 154 meters ; crew 300 - 320

GFFA Frigate: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/EF76_Nebulon-B_escort_frigate/Legends ; 300 meters; crew 300

GFFA Corvette: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/CR90_corvette/Legends ; 150 meters ; crew 30 - 165

Modern frigate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iver_Huitfeldt-class_frigate ; 139 meters ; crew 117

Modern corvette: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braunschweig-class_corvette ; 90 meters ; crew 65

GFFA Transport: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/GR-75_medium_transport/Legends ; 90 meters ; crew 6

Just from the non fighter population of 900, you could complement three frigates, no corvettes; two frigates, two full to ten skeleton corvettes; one frigate and four full to twenty skeleton corvettes. E.g. Two frigates, one full corvette, twenty-two cargo transports. Etc.

One consequence of that 120 pilots / 120 possible fighters is that the Battle of Yavin may have consumed “as little as” 1/5 or 20% of total pilot and fighter inventories. I assume many of the Intl Orange are replacement pilots / trainees, and they do not have as many combat-ready fighters.

Leia said ‘the more systems will slip through your fingers’. Alderaan’s Senator had access to one Corellian Corvette. It is reasonable to expect that any one system that slipped into the rebel cause could commit at least one such corvette. Tagge had said the rebellion would continue to gain a support in the Imperial Senate. Ergo, this was a widely discussed thing at that time, over open channels. Perhaps there was legislation that was, or was not, more or less supportive or sympathetic to the rebel cause. This is only to give a scale to the population the rebellion could draw from. Using the scaling factor between a GFFA Corvette and a GFFA Frigate, 1:2, it could be that two systems that slipped through Tarkin’s fingers could together support a single Frigate.

Another metric is that Tarkin’s policy with Alderaan, and the doctrine behind the DS, required a weapon of terror, and a visible effect, proportionate to some threat. It is a difficult thing to parse out where the DS is a function of the rebellion vs the rebellion being a function of the DS. The former is the tail wagging the dog. But the threat to be explained can be no more than systems who resist who are Not aligned -as yet- with a formal underground network of rebel operators. I.e., The DS may have been consciously designed against single system rebellions, and not necessarily against an as-then-yet unknown intensity of rebel activity and formal organization. (Or, it may have. But that would contradict some of the statements in SW77.)

 

Hernalt

I just sent you a PM, I already did an extensive, nitpicky analysis with a graphic ground plan of Rebel personnel positions during the Great Hall medal ceremony.

The greatest number of uniforms are these olive drab green ones they acquired last minute from an army surplus store prior to shooting, but I'd speculate that these are mostly Rebel infantry, waiting to be dispatched to fight ground battles elsewhere (at least that's what a McQuarrie painting from 1996 apparently suggests).



The DS may have been consciously designed against single system rebellions, and not necessarily against an as-then-yet unknown intensity of rebel activity and formal organization. (Or, it may have. But that would contradict some of the statements in SW77.)

I think Tarkin's statement leads the way.

TARKIN The regional governors now have direct control over territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

So any Imperial System with secessionist tendencies would have instantly invited the Death Star. Either these secessionist tendencies would have stopped instantly or the main planet of such a system would be obliterated.

Of course, the big problem remaining - IMHO - is that the Alliance was set up as a proxy to fight against the Empire so that no supporting system could be linked to it (any rebellious system didn't want to see the arrival of the Imperial Starfleet, either). So it was imperative to destroy the secret, hidden Rebel base, first, and thus the Alliance as a proxy.

With the Alliance as a proxy gone, any rebellion against the Empire would have become an individual one of each (or several) rebellious planets. But this is the moment the Tarkin Doctrine would have come into full effect.

 

I. Script SW1977: “Leia and several other senators get to one side of the giant readout.” Using a rule of thumb that one system (that slips through Tarkin’s fingers) can field one ~corvette class, or two systems together could field one frigate class, ‘and several other senators’ means >=seven + 1 = 8 corvettes, or 1 frigate 6 corvettes, or 2 f 4 c, or 3 f 2 c, or 4 frigates. Leia was a Senator and had access to a consular ship. The consular ship had defensive and evasive and diversionary capabilities. Even if Leia, Senator, had misplaced her Ambassador, she held the keys to this class of vehicle. By existence proof, other Senators, same class, could match this result. Because this reached four frigates, it allows me to go double check if a Mon Cal class can become relevant. Big ships have longer design, construction and active duty lifetimes than smaller ships. So barring special knowledge, say, that Leia’s adoptive father drove a corvette, it is probable, or statistically likely, that all the Mon Cal cruisers of ROTJ had physical existence in the GFFA year of SW77. So I see that a Mon Cal is 1200 meters with crew between 1200 and 5400. Omitting tedious numbers I posted elsewhere, there is not quite enough by this (one) metric, “several senators”, to complement a skeleton Mon Cal cruiser of Liberty or wingless Liberty type.

II. Script SW1977: Leia says, “You must use the information in this R-2 unit to plan the attack.” Leia doesn’t know anything particular about weaknesses of the battle station. Leia does not know that it has a critical design flaw that can be exploited solely by one-man fighters. She does not know that it has an anti-aircraft capability that is insufficient to take out a determined swarm of small attackers. She does not know that it has more firepower than half the Imperial fleet. She does not know that its defenses are designed around a large scale assault (think Maginot Line vs Blitzkrieg). What she does know is revealed by what she says, which means, what she is confident of, which is, There is a possibility in Leia’s mind to conduct *AN attack, at all, on the Death Star, without respect to what exact ship type it is. The solution that was discovered, that was outside her knowledge, was an outlier in a distribution of solutions. That means, just using a basic normal assumption of the *Ability to do anything against this target, that there was some number of ships capable of doing *Some amount of damage (in her estimation). I can add that Leia’s use of passive voice, ‘my ship has fallen under attack’, lends her some gravitas and possibly a prior experience in combat with authorities. I.e., she may have a rodeo or two of seeing what a Corellian Corvette does under pressure.

III. The invocation of a Mon Cal swiftly reaches a problem. If the rebellion had access to an analogue of an aircraft carrier, they would not be tied to attacking from a (land analogue) planetary base. Can I square this against the fact that Motti said that the Rebels were dangerous to Tagge’s star fleet, but not the battle station? What danger can a rebellion pose to the imperial fleet that does not rely on snubfighters, so as to have made that tactic obvious and expected, that is not dependent on a carrier based fighter force? It would mean some mixture of ships not too large, and not too few, that can concentrate fast enough and long enough to handle some minimum unit of difficult to replace Imperial hardware. So, dangerous to more than a TIE variant, which are eminently replaceable. What is a large Imperial vessel that is smaller than a Devastator class SD? There has to be some size class that the rebel fleet can handle when using flash mob guerrilla tactics.

This image gives a comparison between classes in the OT.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9aZoEnqr6...rison-Chart-star-wars-24719414-640-480[1].png

We know from ROTJ that fighters can take out those conning tower domes, and that this is correlated with the eventual loss of function (or demise) of the ship. But there has to be a limit to the effectiveness -the quotient of danger- from small fighters, or, the DS1 would have had a different story, a different density of security net, thus mooting ‘any technical data they’ve obtained’. That means it cannot be fighters which have formed the majority of the “dangers” to the fleet that Motti casts at Tagge. The ‘dangerousness’ has to come from something larger than a fighter. I would prefer to see efforts at manufacturing new canon proceed by introducing new ship sizes that fill in these size gaps. An Imperial SD-like asset of value, that can be neutralized by some number of rebel-organized craft that are Nebulon size and up, but not at the size of a Mon Cal. The David and Goliath card gets to be played, once. It is played by a knight on a horse with a lance charging a golden ring, chased by a black knight. But this magical suspension of disbelief has limits.

This resource
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/MC80_Liberty_type_Star_Cruiser
Says that the Mon Cal cruiser can hold 36 fighters. Well if it can hold More than what was sent to the DS1, then why was there a need for a base. The sense of the movie was that the base launched every available fighter. What would reserve fighters be doing sitting around when the DS1 had come into range? Leia et al were waiting for good news or death. Now, if Yavin can hold 40-50 fighters as Lt Hija says he counts, but Mon Cals are available, then that means there is some reason to keep so many in some place. But they cannot be conducting so many raids largely by fighters because the Empire catches wind of their ‘dangerous’ effectiveness in asymmetric actions. That would make the Empire take notice of snubfighters and effect a counter. The very narrative and the porting of Operation Chastise requires that the fighters be an unlooked for, unexpected, Hobbit-like vehicle of long-shot victory. But the rebellion cannot have access to so large a class of cruiser, or capital ship, that it moots the landed-ness, the last-stand-ness, of a (non-carrier) Battle of Britain paradigm.

So right now, my expectation of a balanced appointment of a rebellion fleet (not thinking about RO, just the SW77 script, Tagge, Motti, Dodonna, Leia and some other excerpts) is a ‘healthy’ number of fighters, *some number of corvettes, *a smaller number of *something the size of a Nebulon B, a smaller yet number of a larger yet class size, that is still not a full *carrier Mon Cal cruiser. Their total combined power, in rapid concentration, is sensibly ‘dangerous’ to *some Imperial class size somewhat smaller than an ISD (or, maybe even an ISD, in rare acts of desperation and heroism).

IV. Amending my medal ceremony census: Lt. Hija elsewhere pointed out that there are uneven blocks of pilots in the live action. However, the matte painting has even blocks. So I stick with a pilot census of 120. I did not recognize that the ground crew in the hangar scenes are All the same light silver flight suit with large helmet. I had thought some of the ground crew were in tan khakis. So the blocks of silver ground crew now have an effect. Using some eye estimates and Hija counts, going L to R, fore to back, 20+15+20+20+30+35 = 140 deck crew / flight crew / crew chiefs. So 260 pilots and deck crew. So 1080 - 260 = 820 to complement larger ships. The deck crew could all be individual crew chiefs of one plane, so, ~140 fighters. That would preserve at least visually the principle that pilots are in shorter supply than the flight hardware.

V. I’ve been using a Salpeter initial mass function to get a quantitative basis for confidence whether or not the claims in RO will bend or break my suspended disbelief. I use length as proxy for mass, because mass scales with the length of a ship, and ships that aren’t death stars fill out a volume with a longest, then a shorter, then a shortest dimension. The business end of the equations looks as complicated in Excel as, e.g., “=$N5/1.35*( ( $O5/$P5 )^1.35 - ( $O5/$Q5 )^1.35 )”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_mass_function

SW77 presents fighters at certain a ratio of X-Wing to Y-Wing. 24 X-Wings of 11 feet length, 8 Y-Wings of 77 feet. An ‘average’ ‘Yavin fighter’ is then 32 ‘Yavins’ at 50 feet length. Then I break every classic rebel starship class I know of, and an ISD for reference, into buckets centered on the lengths of those starship classes, with buckets meeting at the average length between any two classes. So there’s a bucket for ships that are between falcon and corvette, and that represents cargo. One for ships between cargo and nebulon, and that represents corvette, etc. MF means MF-type/MF-class light cargo/freighter/transport type ships.

If I use 32 ‘Yavin fighters’ strictly, I get a fleet distribution of (only)
0.07 Freedom class, 0.54 Nebulon class, 1.008 corvette class, 1.85 cargo class, 6.35 MF-type.

If I use 140 ‘Yavin fighters’ by proxy of medal ceremony silver suit crew chiefs, I get
0.3 Freedom, 2.4 Nebulon, 4.4 corvette, 8.3 cargo, 27.8 MF-type.

If I use the scaling factor of [‘and several other senators’ means >= 4 frigates ], I get
0.48 Freedom, 3.83 Nebulon (an output value), 7.04 corvette, 12.97 cargo, 44.36 MF-type, 111.8 ‘Yavin’-type. The drop from an input of 4.0 to an output of 3.83 Nebulon makes a case for being generous with rounding. But the Freedom class comes nowhere near to a number that can be rounded up to 1.

So under the most generous evidence available in SW77 itself, I do not see basis for a Mon Cal Freedom or Liberty attached or committed to the rebel cause. Perhaps RO won’t push one onto the screen. Perhaps RO will push one onto the screen and provide an exceedingly intriguing rationale. Maybe there are Mon Cals involved in some tentative, non-committal, trial basis. One can certainly make the argument that the commitment in ROTJ of as many cruisers as they did can be worked backwards to a heavy/heavier vested interest at the time of SW77. Maybe the reward is to see the prospect of Mon Cal participation (a Freedom class) at some higher intensity than the intensity displayed with the frigate-size shark-looking Mon Cal-esque ship in the RO trailer.

 

I wholeheartedly agree and like to present further evidence or hints:

The spiritual argument
When Dodonna send the Yavin IV fighters into battle he said "May the Force be with you", suggesting that the Alliance still had faith at this time. When Leia send the snowspeeder pilots into battle all we heard her say was "good luck" which I always interpreted that the Rebels had somewhat lost their faith and consequently were driven from their base. With the arrival of the Mon Calamari in ROJ (the "soul" of the Alliance according to the ROJ Kahn novelization) that faith returned, Ackbar said "May the Force be with us", suggesting that the newfound faith ultimately somewhat contributed to the Rebel victory.

The strategic argument
The protagonists in ANH, especially Tarkin and Vader, made it crystal clear that the destruction of the hidden Rebel base on Yavin IV would have meant the end of the rebellion, suggesting that they had no option to adopt a mobile base (I concur with the Mon Cal Star Cruiser = WWII aircraft carrier analogy). Instead the Alliance is forced to find another stationary planet base, i.e. Hoth. It's only after they had to abandon this base (following Dantooine and Yavin) and are apparently in despair, that the arrival of the Mon Calamari "aircraft carriers" finally provide a mobile base of operations. To invoke the Battle of Midway analogy: All the Alliance had in ANH and ESB was Midway, with the arrival of the Mon Cal they finally got a mobile platform from which to launch their fighters against the Empire.

The lack of retroactive change by George Lucas
As we all know, Lucas went to some rather great lengths to retroactively feature the Lambda-class shuttle design of Tydirium in his Special Edition of ESB, willing to slow the pace of the Falcon escape from Bespin and to interrupt the flow of the scene (and the "Hyperspace" score by John Williams). Had he wanted to retroactively suggest that the Mon Calamari star cruisers were already at the Alliance's disposal at the end of ESB, it would have been so much easier to add a couple of these ships in the background. The fact that he did not (although plenty of minor vehicles were added to the bakground, e.g. Mos Eisley) is something I find rather telling.

Considering that the Rebel 'Gallofree' transport ships not only feature a characteristic Mon Calamari star cruiser design (i.e. the exterior command pod near the stern) but also a rather organic shape, reminiscent of maritime life, it had always been my impression that these were Mon Calamari vehicles and the use of these by the Alliance and the Empire's expectations to stop providing the Alliance with these vessels led to drastic actions against the Mon Calamari which ultimately made these join the Alliance's cause ("the more you tighten the grip...")



Unfortunately, none of these considerations seem to have ever entered the minds of the people that made Rebels and now Rogue One.

 

^ Wow, you guys, now THAT is some exhaustive research. I love it!