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

Why hello there?

 

(BSsmith7174) Hmm, how big was First Light, also? In the updated Millennium Falcon Haynes Guide, it looked around 170 metres tall or less, on the chart, at the back.
And yeah, I wish Pablo or Jason would give some more detail on the Hosnian Prime ships (including the oval cruisers, and the more triangular ship - maybe similar to the Nebula-class?)

And Hynestian corvette, huh? I did quite enjoy Lando's Luck, as short novellas go. I assume Hynestia is also way out in the Western Reaches, and not too far from Terminus, and Batuu?

 

So to dock to another ship you have to fly backward at a weird angle??

 

As opposed to flying sideways? Maneuvering thrusters and computers handle the docking process, it doesn't matter much where they are or what direction they're facing so long as there's enough clearance.

 

On the side you would just match speed, line up docking rings and ease over. With this it adds a whole other level of complexity.

 

Whatever happened with this? https://www.ea.com/news/star-wars-rise-to-power-closed-pre-alpha

 

It’s currently in closed alpha, I think.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Replying to this in an approximate order...

I'm sorry I missed the discussion on MGLT and TIE Defenders. Good points from everyone on how the names for TIEs got all kinds of more baroque - I suspect that the TIE Advanced may have been the start of that, so that goes back quite a way.

The straight-wing TIE Fighter (with shields added) remains in use as a picket by the New Republic and the Empire into the NJO era (Jag's Chiss squadron source their spares for their cockpit pods from NRDF ships in Destiny's Way). The TIE Interceptor is used by the Empire as their high-performance superiority type, while the TIE Defender occupies the niche of the hyperdrive-capable plane.

Nebulon-B hangar discussions make me nostalgic.

The Arquitens holds TIE Interceptors in the bow notch, turned on their side - there are are three TIEs shown here; I'm guessing they can be accessed through airlock hatches (if you watch the scene very carefully, the top hatches of all three TIEs seem to be oriented to the port-side bow mandible)... I don't think there's really much space in the hull interior, though Thrawn implies some sort of small shuttle hangar. I definitely go for them being small ships, though my preferred metric is bridge scaling.

The Venator is a hot mess in terms of scaling. That is all.

On the subject of Star Trek ships, I feel like pointing out that the K't'inga is about 200 m long and can stand against any TNG Federation ship. That's what you get when you omit all the random stuff and just have an engine and a deflector weapon. As a Klingon once said, "We just keep the Drell design because it works!" (kudos if you know the source of this hillariously prescient remark without the use of Google)...

Oooh... that Victor-wing is purty.

I like the up-gunned YT-2400 too.

Clearly, Ren never left Endor, and was just Force-projecting the TIE Fighter as a joke.

In reply to @The Raddinator - the Black Fleet novels are actually trickier to straighten out than they seem, and the DSD/NSD confusion has long been recognized (that was actually the topic that started this whole thread, way back); the NJO novels actually introduced a whole suite of new class-designations - Rejuvenator-class Star Destroyers, Republic-class cruisers, Ranger-class gunships... I think the aim was mainly to emphasise "movie recognizability" for the average reader, but there may have also been a desire to avoid overcomplicated continuity as well...

In WARFARE, the explanation was given (building on earlier sources) that the DSD name was taken over from an earlier "Defender project", and was simply an alternative for the NSD (the lead ship of the class has been the Obi-Wan since the Essential Chronology); my own headcanon, which I don't think got onto the page in WARFARE, was that the Republic and Ranger were simply new weapons/sensor fits for the BFC Majestic-class cruiser and Warrior-class gunship hulls, but the NRDF found the 1040m type too small, and wanted a "carrier" with more turbolasers, so - as hinted in TUF - the Rejuvenator is a return to the ISD-hull...



- The Imperial Ewok

 

No it doesn't, you covered it right there. All you have to do is turn the ship 30 degrees in the process of lining up the docking rings, like I said maneuvering thrusters will take it from there regardless. There's no such thing as "easing over" in space in that respect. Docking ports tend to be at 90 degree angles simply because it's often convenient with the rest of the ship's design, but weird angles don't make much difference with the docking process given there's clearance. Might complicate things a bit in a high-stakes situation, but I'm sure these weren't built for military or rescue operations or anything like that.

 

Or maybe the TIEs are boarded and then docked.

 

Running down the design history of what's now the Lothalian Corvette... it's really really close to the Crucible design in Canon. And both ships look super Corellian to me, like I very much assumed that in TCW the Crucible is meant to be read as a Consular/CR90 forerunner that's been in service forever. But for whatever reason the manufacturer of the Crucible is listed as Rendilli and apparently the only canon ship acribed to them. Seems a little odd, but okay! Lothal does have shipyards, no reason they can't be doing Corellian knockoff designs, I guess.

 

Not sure if I like the open canopy version, but some of the other variants are really nice!

It can also carry Tie Bombers (Ghosts of Geonosis part 2), Tie Fighters (Secret Cargo), or a Sentinel Shuttle.
There are definitely airlocks in the mandible, otherwise Sentinel shuttles would have trouble transferring personnel and equipment. Another possibility is that the pilots could EVA to their fighters, which is one advantage of having a fully sealed flightsuite. This possibly is the only way a pilot could enter a docked Tie Fighter, since they're to tall to dock with their hatch orientated to the mandibles side wall.

Funnily enough it was the bridge size which made me think that the Arquitens is likely smaller than its official size. Here's an example showing what I mean.

The 26m wide bridge is based on the battlefront 2 models bridge width (the model is 325m long). The 19m bridge is based on the size of people compared to the windows in interior shots, for example the middle window appears to be around the height of Agent Kallus in some shots.

Fits in with what we heard about the opening prologue of Squadrons

Spoiler

Where you board a Tie on a Stardestroyer, then fly and dock to a Gozanti, which then hyperspaces to the next area with you attached.

At some point I really should post my attempt at its hangar bay, and maybe the Venator too.

 

I wonder if/when we will learn more about Darth Vader's starfighter from the comics. (side note: is it ok that I post about starfighters in this thread or should I make a new one?)

Spoiler

P.S. I wish Mel Miniatures would model this ship. They do great work https://www.shapeways.com/shops/mel_miniatures

 

Interesting, I was wondering myself what the civilian T-47 looked like. Although, like I said in that post, the laser cannons look really permanently embedded into the structure and don't look like they're strapped-on extras. I also don't see what the use is for the harpoon and tow cable in civilian applications. I know we're probably all thinking towing, and he brings it up in the video, but that seems like a horribly dangerous way to transport cargo or passengers.

 

Here’s a good look at the Allanar N3 light freighter from the Uprising mobile game. Not sure if there’s been a good look at the back of it before.

 

Would be a bit limiting if the pilots had to stay in the cockpit all the while they were on patrol, no?

Fancy, and technically really impressive - I like the idea that the cockpit top we see in ESB is a Rebel addition of some sort, so there's definitely a question worth asking about what the civilian cockpit configuration was like (the backward-facing co-pilot with a "harpoon" would only really be useful for extreme sports fishing of the sort we see in The Glove of Darth Vader ); but I've always headcannoned (and here I gesture in the direction of @Alpha-Red...) that everything in the angular and blatantly unaerodynamic units attached above the wing is a Rebel addition (repositioned "flaps", weapons systems, maybe extra power, repulsor and thruster systems to compensate for the weight of armour and weaponry and the loss of aerodynamic sleekness) - the main ventral intake seems to be at the back of the fuselage, so the forward-motion propulsion systems are presumably located there, behind the vanes.

I knew there was at least one episode where we saw two TIEs racked rather than three. A little more digging produces examples deploying straight TIE Fighters (Legends of the Lasat) or even TIE Defenders (In The Name of the Rebellion, Part 1), with two planes each time.

The TIE Fighters seem to be racked vertically, so they would require some sort of fancy external boarding arm - a gantry of some sort running axially above the fighters? But the others are all racked sideways like the Interceptors, rolling vertical as they deploy, so they can be accessed sideways through a horizontal connection to the top hatch - the Bombers definitely have their cockpits aligned left like the Interceptors do, but one of the Defenders may be turned right (hard to say for sure whether they've finished spinning before they pass out of shot).

I'm not sure if fitting a Defender in that gap is really practical in terms of the size of the ship, though - we might have to imagine there's a bit of "blurring" in terms of the rack arrangements on that particular ship.

We see a docking corridor for the shuttle (a re-use of the docking-arm CGI) in at least one episode. From the way that the shuttle fits into the notch, I think we have to imagine a side airlock on that unseen top deck that I like to mention.

On present evidence (and speaking purely as a random fanboy), I'd speculate that there are three docking positions between the mandibles - two forward that are usually used for fighters, one further back that's usually used to dock a shuttle, but which can be used for a third fighter. I'd guess that the standard TIE Fighters use some sort of additional rack/gantry unit between the horizontal hatches, which may explain why the type is usually seen with fancier TIEs...

Brilliant.

But I'd say even 26m might be an underestimate here. The deck level is a little below the bottom of the pilots' windows - say, the level of the base of the horizontal bar underneath the central one. So even if the top of the central vertical window is 2m off the deck (and I'd wonder if might actually be less than that) the total width doesn't look more than 17m, so if your 1:12.5 ratio for bridge width to hull length is precise, the overall length is not much over 200m at best.

In other words, the same size as a Klingon battlecruiser.

I have no problem with the type being this small, incidentally, even if that makes them technically frigates rather than true cruisers. There have always been light cruisers of anomalously small size, like the Bayonet class.

Oh?

I'm now thinking that the easiest way for the Rebel frigate to carry two squadrons is to use external racks, like we see on the Rebel corvettes for A-wings, and on the smaller Imperial ships for TIE... but that's just random speculation, like all the rest of this!

Visual impressionism!!

More seriously, if we need to explain this, I'd go for the Dragonsnake being a hull variant with much deeper side notches and a taller command tower.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

So, dealing with Rebel Alliance Starfighter Squadrons at Endor, we have confirmed ones.

• Gold Squadron (Millennium Falcon, at least 2 A-wings, at least 1 Y-wing, 8 other starfighters [unknown types, likely X-wings and/or Y-wings])
• Red Squadron (10 X-wings, 1 Y-wing, 1 A-wing)
• Blue Squadron (At least 6 B-wings, 6 other starfighters [unknown types, likely B-wings and/or A-wings])
• Green Squadron (12 A-wings)
• Gray Squadron (12 Y-wings)
• Blade Squadron (12 B-wings)
• Riot Squadron (12 A-wings)
• Corona Squadron (11 or 12 X-wings, depending if Smikes was replaced after Hudalla)
• Yellow Squadron (12 starfighters [unknown types, likely X-wings and/or Y-wings)

Then we have these units that were at least active in the first three weeks or so after Endor according to Shattered Empire, Part 2 and Battlefront II:

• Danger Squadron (12 X-wings, likely)
• Feral Squadron (12 Y-wings, likely)
• Rampant Squadron (12 starfighters [unknown types, likely B-wings and/or Y-wings judging from Shara Bey flying escort])
• Cobalt Squadron (12 starfighters [unknown types])
• Exeter Squadron (12 starfighters [unknown types])

In Legends, Alliance starfighter squadrons were divided into fighter wings consisting of three squadrons of twelve fighters. So, this means that at least six wings (or groups in the film) were present and eighteen squadrons, though there could be more. So this means that groups would've been:

• Gold Group - Gold Squadron, two other unnamed squadrons
• Red Group - Red Squadron, Corona Squadron (likely), Danger Squadron (likely)
• Blue Group - Blue Squadron, Blade Squadron (likely), one other unnamed B-wing squadron
• Green Group - Green Squadron, Riot Squadron (likely), one other unnamed A-wing squadron
• Gray Group - Gray Squadron, Feral Squadron (likely), Rampant Squadron (likely)
• Yellow Group - Yellow Squadron, Cobalt Squadron (likely), Exeter Squadron (likely)

So Lando was leading a sizable fighter group at Endor with at least 215 starfighters, plus with Hera on the Ghost, the Mighty Oak Apocalypse and other modified freighters that could keep up with starfighter units and packed to hold off enemy ones. Sadly, we may never know more.

 

Here's a more comprehensive look of the Allanar N3 light freighter if anyone is interested.