ST The Ships and Vehicles of Episode IX

It's only three decades later.

The ships looking so different from the PT to the OT is the weird bit, not the ships looking like natural evolutions in the ST from the OT.


Fourth generation US fighter:




Fifth generation US fighter:





That's what 30 years of difference looks like within the same faction/organization. Evolution, not revolution.

 

The PT may have given us lots more vehicles but when they are infeasible (just how does an astromech droid fit in there?) or downright ugly (V-wings, GG's ship) then perhaps less is more?

 

Yes, because realism is somehow important when the final order can create a huge fleet of SSD out of thin air.

If the ST actually respected realism, they would have made the world-building more grounded in reality instead of allowing things to happen by an act of plot. Instead they outright burn world-building consistency into the ground and you expect us to care about realism?

 

I don't know what I'm looking at. All I see are Starscream and whatever it is in a Bayformers film.

 

Basically the real-life western equivalents of X-Wings. First one's what the US had since the late-70s through to now (still operating), the second's the replacement - basically the same design with tinkering, and incorporating all the new tech since.

So pretty much an ST X-Wing compared to the OT ones.

Yep, decades (ostensibly this stuff goes back to the OT, maybe even earlier) without anyone knowing about you/trying to stop you, and with virtual unlimited funds & resources put aside from the Imperial wallet.

That's "out of thin air" alright.

How incredibly vague & unsubstantiated of you. What's less grounded in reality among the ST than the prior trilogies?

 

What's funny is you think the people behind these movies care about realism. Realism has NOTHING to do with any of this.

It's laziness, pure and simple. JJ Abrams and his merry band couldn't come up with anything creative of worth to add to Star Wars to save their lives.

It's the same reason they brought back all those ships for the Free World Fleet at Exegol instead of giving us any actual new ships, because their brain capacities don't allow for anything new or something that doesn't look beyond god-awful like the Treadspeeders or the skimmers or those useless Starfortress bombers.

The PT demonstrated a wide variety and utter creativity in the span of a mere 3 years between Ep. II and III alone.

Plus we're talking about a universe where a little frog man with pointed ears can lift a ship that can go into outer space and go into lightspeed with an unseen Force, and you're defending the realism of it all.

Even during the OT we were given TIE Interceptors, B-Wings and A-Wings and an actual onscreen Rebel FLEET in Ep. VI after Ep. V.

We don't even SEE the Free World Fleet in Ep. IX actually duking it out with the Sith Fleet. Why? Because we've SEEN all those ships fighting Star Destroyers onscreen once before in Ep. VI and Abrams and his crew knew this.

The Final Order was unknown to even the First Order and Kylo Ren, the money put aside should have been going to the First Order, never mind Starkiller Base or the FO Siege Dreadnaughts. (ANOTHER design hampered by the lack of zest for Star Wars)

Yes, yes, yes the PT offended delicate sensibilities all around...."Too much CGI, too cartoony, too impossible for a sci-fi fantasy film series...."

Like the Dreadnaught, the skimmers and the Starfortresses from TLJ, even the TIE Triangles were the pinnacle of Star Wars creativity. Talk to me about ugly...

Plus you wanna talk about things that don't make sense? Treadspeeders in a desert when you have speeder bikes. Again I'll direct you to the skimmers on sand or water.

What's new about those Sith Star Destroyers? An ugly big turret on their underbellies and some red highlighting.

Part of the point behind the Resurgent SDs designs was because of the A-Wing kamikaze attack, so the fact that they used the ISD design for the Sith SDs makes even less sense. Also the only Resurgent present during Exegol is taken out when its bridge is destroyed even though it's supposed to have a secondary bridge.

Pure genius. Very feasible and very beautiful indeed.

 

Technical evolution is not constant by any means. As the F-15 and F-22 show, there has not been any dramatic changes in the last 30 years of military aviation. OTOH, if we choose a different 30 years, let's say from 1917 to 1947, we go from biplane Sopwith Camels to jet-powered Shooting Stars.

So we could interpret the evidence on film to mean that the Empire pushed hard for military R&D during the decades between the PT and the OT, but then after the Empire fell there was little support for developing new weapon systems, hence minimal changes in ship designs between the OT and the ST.

 

Where's the significant tech jump between the PT and OT, though? They can all do the same stuff, from what we see. The difference is randomly nonsensically cosmetic. Art-deco gone full-on brutalist.

Which makes sense in a Naboo or Imperial Coruscant sense. Not a Imperial-era Nazis to First Order-era Nazis situation though, they're gonna keep what works and keep running with all the utilitarian-looking shiz.

 

Lucasfilm needs new creative Concept Art developers.
Uncreative Guys like Doug Chiang should be fired immediately.

 

...Chiang, uncreative?

Chiang created half of the crazy out-there awesome **** from the prequels. You can't have it both ways.

 

Doug Chiang was also responsible for most of the worst designs from the PT as well. He could never get the balance right between the visuals and ergonomics.

 

The Death Star is the obvious significant tech jump.

Could be that other differences are more subtle, such as manufacturing techniques. Naboo N-1's look like hand-crafted works of art that take a lot of time and effort to turn out, while the X-wing with similar capabilities looks like it can roll off an assembly line without all the fussy attention to detail. For a real world comparison, one reason that the Spitfire was eventually eclipsed by the P-51 Mustang is that the Mustang took about half as many man-hours to build as the Spitfire.

 

The Death Star was being constructed by the end of EpIII. Ruh roh.

And of course the Naboo fighters are more artisan & such. That's sort of the point. That's not the same thing as the tech being that different, the PT ships can still pretty clearly do most-if-not-all of anything we see in the OT functionality-wise. Arms, hyperspace, blah blah.

It's just aesthetic. Which only makes sense that a little backwoods utopia like Naboo would take a different approach to their local defense than a gigantic galactic dictatorship-machine anyway.

 

Apparently the superlaser-armed ISDs are their own class. Would've been neat for a few distinguishing features from afar--perhaps even a nod to their weapons being powered by dark side energy itself, to set them apart from the other planetkillers we've seen...

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Xyston-class_Star_Destroyer

 

During my second viewing of the movie today, I'm pretty sure I saw the Ghost landing for a second or two on the jungle base at the end of the movie.

Anyone else notice this?

 

Yes, I saw it too.

 

There's at least 3 Ghost Appearances - once when the fleet arrives, at least once (or more) in the middle of the battle, and once landing at the end.

 

Here is a glimpse at just how large the Resistance fleet is in ROS:

 

At what points specifically were the following ships shown in the Battle of Exegol: the Ghost, the Fireball, Jarek Yeager's racer, Blue Ace (the first being the ship from Rebels, the last three being from Resistance)

 

Except those raptors have been accompanied by a new kind of flight tech: Drones.

Unmanned flight drones dominate the skies these days due to their size, cost and the fact they risk no human lives (on the operator's side that is). This Reaper in particular first took flight in 2001, approximately 30 years after the F-15 Eagle flew.

Surely, the idea of drones would have been appealing to both the Resistance and the First Order since they'll be risking less lives carrying out their dogfight operations. Heck, we could have seen the return of Vulture Droids re-modeled and re-fashioned as the main bulk of the army.

Honestly, the concept art of TFA showed a more interesting evolution. The TIE Fighters for example would have the Triangle Wings from the start rather than be some exclusive vehicle from the Emperor in TROS. It would have been a more distinct ST visual while not being too different. The actual FO TIE Fighter? Looks like a regular TIE fighter except someone sprayed it black. How creative.

Resistance X-Wings had a better evolution but the lack of any new vehicles accompanying them (save for those bombers in TLJ) didn't help them stand out from the old X-Wings. As far as the audience is concern, there was no advancement in technology. And that is poor visual storytelling.

 

It would be a mistake (IMHO) to ascribe any sense of logic to the development of ships/vehicles in the ST, other than that they (Disney/Lucasfilm) wanted to use the existing iconography of the OT. That TFA establishes the use of Tie Fighters and Star Destroyers, yet at the same time, wants the audience to believe the First Order are fundamentally 'different' (well until TROS anyway) to the Empire, only reflects the general confusion regarding the design/aesthetic approach to the ST. For example, there was no real logic in the Resistance using X-Wings, given that X-Wings were supposed to be outdated, cobbled together ships, at the time of the OT... That is unless the New Republic commissioned 'new' X-Wings to be manufactured... which would be a bit like the Defence Ministry/RAF commissioning the manufacture of Spitfires in 2020.

 

Very early tie-in material might have stated that, but not the movies themselves. And later tie-in material made the X-Wing a supership - but since the Imperials nationalised the corporation that made them - its designers fled to the Rebellion with the X-Wing prototypes and designs.

The newcanon seems to be taking the same approach as Legends - "X-Wings are superships" not "X-Wings are outdated antiques".

As it is, the Resistance are getting older-model X-wings - just not as old as the Rebellion's ones - T-70s, with the New Republic having already introduced T-85s.

 

It's implicit in the films that the Rebellion isn't that advanced in terms of its fleet. Why on Earth would a rag tag band of rebels, fighting out the back of make shift bases, be in receipt of "superships"??? It's illogical and it's not really what's presented in the films (the OT). One can make a case that, as the rebellion grew, they were able to supplement their fleet with better/more advanced ships, but it's not really logical to suggest (not you but the books you described) that X-Wings, at the time of the OT, were regarded as state of the art/cutting edge technology fighters. And any ancillary material that describes them as such warrants the same kind of criticism.

What is more logical is that it was the Empire that had the better technology, and that the New Republic probably would have utilised the Empire's fleet (what remained) as part of the spoils of the Galactic Civil war. So by the events of TFA, the Resistance should have been using ships closer in design (but more benign perhaps) to Tie Fighters etc... and the First Order should have had completely different designs.

 

Y-Wings fill the "rag-tag" niche for the Rebels pretty well. TCW shows that they're 20+ years old.

 

I loved seeing the fleet rise out of the ground.