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

Drifting gently into hypothetical headcanon here a bit.

But the lack of Jedi doesn't immediately necessitate some expensive map and thus some grand monster ship to make the investment worthwhile.

Imagine the American Old West...and the idea of the wagon train.

These convoys of settlers, prospectors and such would gather in assembly towns on the fringe of the frontier, and decide to pool their resources to a point. Did they make a giant wagon pulled by 100 horses and surrounded by 50 guns? No. They realized that some may be lost along the way. Some may break down, some may get sick, some may change their minds, some may switch trains. So while they were stronger as a collective, they maintained the strengths afforded by traveling side by side, rather then wrapped up together.

Navigation is also part of this reference. Often these wagon trains would hire a guide. Now this guide was not usually one of the mountain men of legend. Nor did Louis and Clark return to the west to guide settlers up the Missouri. Most often, these guides were people who had been out to the west at least once, and "knew the way", or at least part of it. Now just like the galaxy, the wilderness changes dramatically as well, especially between seasons. So a good guide had to know more then where, but when, and what challenges may be faced, even if they didn't face them the last time through.

Even in the GFFA, I doubt very much a fleet of colonials would just pick a star to point at and say "hey, lets see if there is a world there" and jump to lightspeed. They had to know something about where they wanted to go. So someone had been there and someone can get them back there, Jedi or no.

So while having a Jedi would be an immense benefit to any journey, there were likely multitudes more "guides" who were merely people who followed in the footsteps of pathfinders, saw worlds with potential, came back to the core and sold their services as a guide to get people out there. And, just like in the old west, you would have plenty of people in the profession on a scale from professional to inept to charlatan.

And that may be another good reason to travel as a fleet. When you decide the shady guide is leading into a den of thieves, you can leave the convoy before it is too late.

 

It is true we have seen hyperdrives on small ships even 5,000 years before the movies...but that is, in turn, over 20,000 years after the formation of the Republic...and presumably the Republic wasn't formed the instant hyperdrives were invented, so who knows how long they were in use before that.

And even in the time frame we did see, the technology has changed. The routes used to be more dangerous, it took longer to jump, and there was a greater reliance on the infrastructure of nav beacons and space cities for ships to stop and resupply at. In that case, surely the earliest hyperspace travel must have been even more different.

 

I always thought that hyperspace technology development was historical prime cause for the Republic to be formed.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Galactic_Republic/Legends#Formation
Somebody on the wook thought so too, but the citation is lacking, so it could be fanon.

Indeed...you could extend my analogy of wagon trains in the past to interstate highways of today. The methods and technologies progressed.

But coming back around to the original point though was the question of whether large scale of vessels was a necessity of primitive hyperspace tech. In certain hypothetical circumstances, I could certainly agree it could be an asset. However, when it came to rudimentary hyperdrives in the GFFA, it doesn't appear (so far, anyway) to be how the universe was crafted.

Maybe when we get that "Formation of the Republic/Jedi" series on Disney+ that will be full of committee meetings and constitutional conventions, we'll get a peak at primitive hyperdrive ships that work completely different then we suspect. Expectations successfully subverted!

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Now, that sad, I have had a recurring Sith sleeper ship appear in a couple of RPG campaigns. Cranky Sith Lords disturbed unexpectedly from millennia at rest makes for amusing antagonists.

 

Ok Fleet Junkies...

Does this work for a CR-90 specs? It is clever, for sure.

I honestly don't know how big/small that ship is anymore...40 years of scaling to plot.

 

This is actually a CR110, a design by EC Henry who looks at all the tiny background ships in the movies and tries to create high-definition renders, art, and backstories. He noticed that there were actually two different and visually distinct Rebel blockade runner models being used at Endor, with the CR110 spawned from the "beefier" version he identified. I recommend looking him up on YouTube. His content is really interesting.

 

Personally I was less arguing that it had to be a certain way so much as that since we have very little information about early hyperspace travel in general, I would expect that pretty much anything is possible.

Personally, I just like the idea of the technology changing a lot over time - particularly that the "hyperspace cannons" mentioned in a few sources work like mass relays from mass effect - but it is also possible that the technology worked more or less the same from the get go and only efficiency changed over time.

As for the republic - well, I am sure hypserspace tech facilitated the formation of the Republic, but...I dunno, it is just hard to imagine people giving up their sovereignty to form a unified government with other cultures they just met.

Honestly even in the battle of Endor, sometimes it feels like they come in different sizes.

This seems just about right, though those fighters would be a tight squeeze and I am not sure how one could land them, much less actually service them inside. And to have forward lasers that powerful, I bet they would have to sacrifice having any other weapons. But I am not expert on these things

 

I think the idea of the "CR110" design is that its actually longer than a CR90, so perhaps 180 to 200 meters in length.

 

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/M12-L_Kimogila_heavy_fighter

Yes, they're from Galaxies. They also made it into X-Wing Miniatures.

 

Still on your to-do list?

 

I too envisioned Hyperspace Cannons somewhat similar in appearance to Mass Effect.

However, in function, the main difference would be in how you exit the FTL rather then enter.

Mass Effect required the use of a Relay at both ends to allow you to enter and exit.

The Hyperspace Cannon launches you into Hyperspace, but your craft is capable of exiting on it's own.

The positive is the Cannon could send you to almost anywhere. The negative is it could send you where you could never get back.

As such I always imagined there would need to be a tremendous amount of care/redundancy/and emergency preparations in place before/during/and after a hyper cannon flight. This makes the whole enterprise horribly expensive.

I also imagine that if you could get the "stars to align" as it were, and you had a perfect flight..They would probably line up a string of ships to launch in quick succession while the conditions were optimal for the cannon to launch ships to a particular destination. This causes a very "if the winds are favorable" randomness to how you could use the technology. One cycle, you can't get from Corellia to Coruscant...the next, you can't get there because 50 ships are queued up before you.

All this helps to clearly establish why onboard hyperdrives were not only a major leap forward, but very VERY quickly adopted by anyone who could get it. It wasn't just the previous generation tech...it was an obstruction to developing everyday galactic travel and trade, and useless for galactic expansion, in the face of the new hyperdrive.

Even so, I would love to see it.

Ah, but there is the qualifier. The Republic was founded by those worlds who already knew each other via sleeper ships and Hyperspace Cannons...and the Rakata. I always saw the Republic not so much as a "hey, we just met, join our government" as a "hey, we are about to send billions of people out into the galaxy, and who knows what we are going to find...maybe we should team up to be prepared for it...and to keep from fighting over what we find."

At it's formation, the Republic wasn't thinking "Galactic" Government...They were thinking "The Core United". It just grew massively from there.

 

I kinda wonder if those companies that heavily invested into Hyperspace Cannons and other such concepts opposed the smaller hypdrdrives... kinda like current car companies are adverse to newer, cleaner travel methods and like back then people did not trust the "new" car and thought it to be only a temporary thrill unable to tople the established methods of the big players.

Likewise how many speeler ships arrived after centuries ONLY to find people already got there ahead of them despite leaving much later with the latest tech and newer better drives. Must have been a mega bummer to them!

Anyway, I love your ideas about the canons and the "space weather" and time windows of when travel is suiteable. Likewise the waggon train concepts.

Still I think large carrier vessels were a thing, given technology is not shared freely and only those able to afford it have access, or have others pay fees to carry them along. So even if shortlived, the carrier version has its place in the early travel history. Before miniaturization and massproduction though.

As for Hyperspace cannons dangers of no way back, I assume if scouts are shot someplace and message back it is safe, the company would launch a hyperspace cannon entire, or parts for reassembly into hyperspace to the destination to prepare for a return trip option with on site scouts and personnel.

The early Republic probably was united more by Force Astrogators than tech which quickly followed soon though. But that makes one wonder, given how much Gree and Kwa on celestial command cooperated to make Tython happen and the formation of the Jeedai into Jedi, how much were they indirectly involved in creating a galactic republic? As much as I want a natural grown, not forced creation of it, given the Jedi origin, it could be that the Republic too was an outgrowth of Tython and similiar cooperation projects that gestated for a long time with subtle celestial/servant races pushing it in the right direction.
Lets not forget the Corellian system is much like Tython a celestial project that brought many species together and was constructed by them with a purpose, not just relocated from the Maw before it was collapsed into blackholes. Was Corellia the political merger playground where Tython was the spiritual one? I can see post Rakata that emerging Tython Jeedai and non-Jeedai as well as Corellian expansions are the foundation for what became the Republic with each added world bringing something else vital to the table. Though Coruscant, with human superiortiy, ties to a dark goddess and a violent history of Zhell and Taung kinda... stole the lead position (as Alasak would complain about for millennia onwards!).

 

Could be it is set up just to carry them and not worry about servicing them. Load up when the fighters are fueled and armed so they can be delivered then jump out on their own like happened in this short.

 

I would love to see the facility where that loading happens. Has to be a dock large enough to let the Corvette Land, and provide clearance to maneuver and park the A-Wings into the launch ports.

Unless, each port has a small tractor beam, and they rendezvous in space and the A-Wing just gets real close and shows the Corvette it's aft.

If they had that, they could even do recovery after combat...though the rate of recovery would be DOG slow, which can explain why the Corvette and A-Wings both jump away together. Once they are safe, pull them all in.

 

Excellent ideas, I would absolutely love it if that is how they worked back in the day.

That's true, excellent point. Especially since stars should be closer together in the galactic core, so even stl travel and communication should be easier, if still slow.

Also interesting ideas.

I particularly like the idea of jedi playing an important role as navigators before navicomputers improved and they could focus more on their other duties.

Come to think of it, it would be interesting if the various service branches of the jedi temple - exploration, agriculture, education, and medicine - used to be as important to the jedi as their roles as diplomats and warriors, but over the years they shrank as others filled those roles and focused more on the knights branch of the order.

That it is what I was thinking - that it mostly carried them for the element of surprise rather than servicing them as a full carrier.

 

Visions

Spoiler

A ship design from Star Wars 1313 shows up in one of the shorts

Source:
https://numidianprime.wordpress.com/2021/09/28/star-wars-visions-continuity-breakdown/#more-2189

 

Hyperspace musings:

How are the major hyperspace routes possible? With so many celestial objects in the galaxy, plus rotations and movements; such massive, clear, and constant major hyperspace routes seem unlikely to exist. Are these routes so routine that you do not need to use a navicomputer to travel them, so long as you enter and exit at predetermined safe locations? If not, what is the advantage of the routes? My preference: the major hyperspace routes are the routes to which navicomputer library updates are regular and free, promoting travel in them.

Star Wars media seems unclear if you can 'change course' within hyperspace. My preference is that you cannot.

In Light of the Jedi, hyperspace travel is described as "Hyperspace is not like realspace. Once a ship - or anything else - enters it, there's no way to encounter anything. You're in a bubble of space-time that nothing else can interact with, because each lane is, as far as we can tell, its own distinct plane of existence." If this is so, how is the new Canon allowing communications via hyperspace. I'm just getting into The High Republic, perhaps a change to the rules/laws/physics of hyperspace is one of the goals of the series? My preference is that communication is not possible in hyperspace.

 

IIRC....the sheer number of ships traveling the major hyperlanes are constantly downloading information on celestial bodies into databases and uploading new information from those same databases so that accidents are very few and far between. So yes...your Nav Computer needs to plot a course...but it has the most up to date information to plot the course with. Or something along those lines.

 

I don't recall reading about precisely that, but it does make sense. I bet Company A's navicomputers feed information back into A's database, which is available for free download to A's customers, and purchase to those with navicomputer's from other companies. I'm sure the Empire was soaking up all the data for its own use.

 

In Legends days, and possibly also in canon, that's part of what the Bureau of Ships and Services did - accumulate data that spacers would use to update their navicomputers, allowing them to better compensate for things like galactic rotation, drift, rogue celestial phenomena, etc. when traveling known hyperlanes.

 

If this is true, then why does it matter if you smack into a planet or a star while in hyperspace? For that matter, what happens when two ships "collide" with each other in hyperspace? Does a hyperspace lane need to be split in two lanes, one for travel in each direction? Do ships have to travel at the same speed in order to minimize collisions?

 

I think the intent of that passage in Light of the Jedi is that objects in hyperspace cannot interact with other objects in hyperspace. Two ships in hyperspace cannot collide with each other - they are in two different "bubbles" of hyperspace. Ships in hyperspace can collide with objects in realspace, however, via the mass shadows those objects cast.

 

Hrm, so then if a ship drops out of hyperspace somewhere in the middle of the lane, other ships can smack into it?

 

Essential Atlas, page 14 talks about the Space Ministry.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Space_Ministry/Legends