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

I would say that unlike Trek, where the drive also provides power, in SW the ion engines and the hyperdrive need power to operate, just like just about every other system.

In SW, power for a ship has to come from a reactor. There seems to be at least a small reactor per engine in most cases - in a fighter that’s likely it. Sending more info power to the shields —then normal— might recharge them faster or restore damage, but it would have to come at the expense of something else. For a capital ship a few large reactors makes far more engineering sense then one to per battery (as in scale effects if you don’t would halve you weapon at best, and probably more.) Of course, you can’t put more power to the engines then their design output, which the ship is already capable of producing along with all the other needs anyway. There’s enough power for everything at design levels at once, redistribution is mostly about stealing power from thing A (such as the port shields) to give to thing B (such as the starboard guns.) And the guns do have capacitors, they have to in order to take the steady power they’re being feed and turn it into one big burst of energy. And there’s a lot of other big stuff that goes into a heavy turbo laser mount.

I think we can assume the basic laws of engineering apply in SW, unless proven otherwise or sufficiently ignored to assume they don’t. Not technology - but concepts like “square/cube,” “tension and compression” “structural cross section,” and “unsupported length” would still hold true. Waste heat disposal in a vacuum, on the other hand, is so clearly ignored (like most universes) that it can safely be assumed to be “not a thing/not an issue.)
Post talking about the defeat of the Lysankia coming tomorrow sometime.

 

Mass Effect has a good explanation for how starships deal with waste heat. We could just headcanon that this happens with Star Wars ships as well.

 

Short answer - as I mentioned in a previous post, the light cruiser Gorath in the Black Fleet novels is implied to be a shorter variant of the Strike-class hull no more than 300m in length, but it's not clear if that's a deliberate piece of carefully backgrounded detail, or just a continuity flub.

That said, I'd imagined that the hull was normally used as a fixed-size frame into which the various combinations of modules could be inserted - in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina we see a variant that's used to transport skyscraper-sized megastructures, the interior being simply "a vast cavern of open space" with the engines taking up about fifty meters at the stern - but there's no particular reason why they shouldn't have always planned to build variants of different lengths...

Additionally, I'd imagine that the fairly blatant discrepancy between the "rounded" and "angular" hull-types might be retconned as a design change, removing time-consuming curves to further simplify and speed up production, a more extreme version of what happened with Japanese frigates between 1941 and 1945...

That's a model-kit version of a twin 5.9-inch side-turret from a German battleship of the early 1940s - at a guess, going by the little rangefinder at the back, I think it might be the 1:700 Tamiya Gneisnau rather than a Bismarck...

At least the reboot is preventing me from insisting that Liberty is canonically 500m...

Do I remember something about the original intention in ANH being to distinguish Vader's TIE with a different paint scheme, which hadn't really worked effectively on screen? That might have discouraged them from trying again...

That's true - but it would also make sense if both the new models were initially conceived as significantly bigger Star Destroyers, displacing the existing, physically smaller, model to the background...

Oh, I like the sound of this...

Well, it's an entirely valid question!!

Absolutely - I mean, that's the actual design sketch of the ship, the rest are just redrawings of it...

I'd be absolutely fascinated to get some proper hull measurements of the Devastator and Avenger, to work out whether there are any important differences of shape, and what the intended axis of the hull is...

Interesting! Which of the several different Nebulon-B internal schematics do you mean...?

As to the main point, the quick answer is that I don't see any advantage to a big, complex, centralised system here, but I've rearranged things to bring together two more replies where I cover it...

Short version? Relying on having spare engine power in the first place, and then relying on moving it through the hull using a complicated network of high-energy power lines is just creating a chain of things that can go wrong. And why does a drive system that works by "cheating" classical physics require particularly high input-energy, anyway?

I don't think Piett's line implies anything more than a need to fire the guns to prevent attack runs, and doesn't really define the power system...

Long version...

While this makes mathematical sense (and, also, if it's not automatically clear, I think you argue your case well and do not expect you or anyone else to agree with what follows), there are two obvious caveats that I think people often miss - firstly you're assuming that both drives and weapons work through raw power rather than through manipulation of the known laws of energy (a counter-posit that seems fundamentally necessary for hyperdrive), and secondly, I'm not convinced that hooking all the ship's systems to a single overbuilt main generator is the most robust solution - if the engine gets switched off, you lose everything, which is a very Star Trek plotline.

Quite apart from that, as you say yourself, hooking everything up to one big generator complex means that you can't distribute energy through the grid without losing power somewhere else, which is not what you want to do in a crisis. For similar reasons, navies in the first half of the twentieth century discovered that systems they'd initially expected to run off the ship's engine needed separate generators - radar systems and powered weapons-mounts, cabin lights and air conditioning...

And then there are the mechanical limits of the system to think of. What are the practical overload levels for the gun-barrels of your turbo-weapons and the emitters of your deflectors? Or what about the overload levels of the power lines you want to run through the ship? Is relying on a massive, integrated power grid to move energy around to all the important systems really a good idea, or are you better to isolate separate generators for individual systems? And what about the maintenance requirements?

Of course, a smaller spacecraft like a fighter is more likely to run its blasters off the drive, simply for reasons of hull space and mechanical simplicity (though this might not hold for something like a TIE Fighter), and for a larger ship, linking all the generators into a single distribution grid with a system for switching between them is probably a useful power-management technique, but I'd argue that it should be thought of as a secondary backup technique, not something that it's sensible to rely on...

So, I'd envisage a system where turbolasers have dedicated power generators scaled to their requirements and the overload level of their parts, and drives similarly have dedicated power generators scaled to their requirements. Deflectors I'm less certain of, but in terms of pre-reboot lore, Before the Storm is pretty clear that the Resolve's ability to throw full power from the main engines through the deflectors is a very specialised design feature, and involves multiple layers of deflectors, each apparently projected through several generators...

This is true in mathematical terms, but Newtonian limits may be surprisingly easy to circumvent - this is a Galaxy where energy-cheap circumvention of the classical physical-force laws is so easy and ubiquitous it has literally made the wheel obsolete...

One of my favourite things in Star Wars is the scene in one of the novels where a scout ship is disguised as an asteroid, and a teenage girl with a non-technical mindset correctly recognises that the deep crevasse across the surface is the disguised heat sink... ships that are less self-conscious about heat management will probably just dump energy through hull armour, or energy-discharge systems like repulsors and deflectors, but we do see some nice vanes on the blockade runner, and one imagines that a similar role might be played by things like X-wing strike-foils and Y-wing rudder booms...



- The Imperial Ewok

 

Edge of Victory II, right? Although considering it's a Yuuzhan Vong ship that is alive, maybe it'd be more concerned with keeping heat in rather rather than dissipating it out into space?

 

I do love that they consulted the cross section when building the ISD model, I realized right away they did because your can see the reactor in the ILM BTS video



Though it's sad, in the final shot you can barely see any of the interior work they did because of all the debris and smoke.

 

Anyway, the promised post about the Lusankya's defeat.
First, even though the A-wing's showed up with 216 concussion missiles, that sounds about right for what's needed to knock down a shield arc. Even opyimaly delivered once the shields are down, it wouldn't have crippled the ship. And 24 torps and 56 (presumably much heavier then starfighter) concussion missiles shouldn't have knocked down the bow shields, let alone done extensive damage.
Wide pic alert:



Damage from time spent in a damp, polluted cavern could explain the weak shields and higher then expected damage. The following draws heavily from USN War Damage Reports, and couple of NIST reports, and this has happened in real life. (I probably should shift everything on the pic forward a bit. though.) The blue outlined area is mostly hangers, which have wide, unobstructed decks. And high clearance between them to accommodate Theta-class AT-AT barges. This makes the hanger decks (and any light framing under them) (Think of the ship as a skyscraper pointing to the side) important for providing stiffness to the to main longitudinal structural members under the deck floors, even through they decks and light frames don't actually carry much of the load themselves.
The yellow ball is roughly where the TIE fighter fuel tanks are. When they exploded the blast not only damaged the decks, but caused them to buckle upward (anything from bulged even a bit to simply creased), although the large main longitudinals themselves were big enough to have minimal damage.
However, those damaged decks, as one report drives home, would lose the vast majority of their actual structural strength even if still largely intact. This drastically drove up (by a couple times) the effective (to flip a skyscraper back upright for a moment) the unsupported 'height' of the 'columns' holding the bow 'up.' (In realty the forward thrust loads of the longitudinals.) (Think of sticking a steel beam in the ground, pointing upward, 10 feet high with a big concrete block on top. New take the same beam and the same block and make it 30 feet tall - you can see how it's a lot more likely to bend or break.) The pink outline around the yellow dot is roughly the area that lost it's strength, even if not much other important damage was done. The structural flaw discovered after a year or two in service, and more bracing (and more decks) were added in the area - but by that point the Lusankya was buried. For the moment though, the Lusankya still structurally sound.
Until later in, when heavy turbolasers either breached a small reactor or detonated a fuel silo (the "blinding flash" mentioned (red dot)), whose location toward the side was important. The "depth" of the hull at any point is important for it's strength, and the full height parts on each side of the ventral cutout make up a substantial portion of the ship's structural cross section (indeed most, even). The pink area around the red dot is more of the "outright blown up" area, destroying one side of the ship's 'flange' along with a creating a substantial shock load, partly lateral as well.

Under 'normal' circumstances there would have been the potential for losing the tip of the bow, but coupled with the explosion in the hanger earlier that vastly reduced the strength of the longitudinals in the area, that left only the port edge of the hull as the main load path. Unsurprisingly, the vastly off center reaming part of the structure wasn't able to take the loads. This lead to the ship breaking apart (almost certainly a progressive failure, but that doesn't mean 'slow') in the area between the green lines. The ship there wasn't blown up or no longer there or anything, just warped, broken, crushed, bent of simply distorted. And certainly no longer holding pressure. The aft green line is actually the forwardmost most "solid" and intact part of the ship.
Which to be fair, the intact portion contained well above half the ship's mass, all of its engines, and most of it's power generation. It's also worth pointing out that the backup hyperdrive might have still been functional. But as a practical matter the breakup ended the Lusankya's value as a fighting unit. Getting it to a New Republic shipyard would have involved building temporary structure to attach the forward bow to the rest of it (which may well be a lot shorter), conducting minor repairs to the backup hyperdrive and the engines, and then proceeding very slowly under it's own power to a yard (to avoid overstressing the temporary structure.) Probably would have been done within a couple of months, actually, simply to avoid leaving an empty SSD laying around, although it may well have simply been left outside a slip in the yard until Thrawn showed up.





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To avoid a double post:

Cannon seems to suggest it takes a bunch of energy (and a lot of fuel - by a fighter's standards) to enter hyperspace, and continued but minor power afterward. Going from one dimension to another or whatever it does sounds like the type of thing that could use a lot of energy.

Thank you.

To be fair, if the ship's engines are oil fired boilers driving steam turbines, you're not getting electric power out of that. Historically the electrical generation as built (designed no later then about 1937 or so) was perfectly fine - it was the (unplanned) rapid increase in consumption by radars and other electronics that drove up the electrical demand, AC vs. DC power (which each had their own generators) and to be honest much of it was redundant and there for damage control. Which could still save the ship if it was there.

As a general rule, anything engineers have to do math over has a factor of safety built it. 1.5 is a common value. But after doing that, the inspection interval becomes 'now' and likely some parts are discovered to suddenly be at the end of their service lives....

Agreed on the fighters, and it seems clear enough the ion engines need a reactor "exhaust" to shove out the back to function, and a small dedicated reactor at the front of each thruster stands a good chance of being standard practice. And I agree a distributed system would have all the advantages you suggested, and there's probably some ships that do exactly that. However, I think it's rare for one main reason. For the same mass and displacement as distributed dedicated reactors, a single large reactor through scale economies and square-cube could produce at least 2-4+ times as much power. Or in practice slightly less mass and displacement, and doubling or tripling your non-missile firepower. Still, often there's two or sometimes three main reactors, and a smaller reactor here or there seems to be common enough, and a dedicated one per thruster seems to be standard.
Still, there's likely some ships that are built that way, and a merchant ship converted in a warship likely has the setup half the time (or more), since it's far easier to add a bunch of smaller reactors then take the ship apart to enlarge the main reactor. A certain droid control ship had additional reactors placed in far more exposed positions then a designer would want since it's a converted freighter, needed more power, and that was where they could fit, and paid the price.

 

Lusankya.

 

Corrosion aboard the Lusankya from its underground storage may well have compromised it. I wonder if its atmospheric flight (repulsir bed or not) could have compromised its structure as well, given that I doubt atmospheric flight was a design criteria for the class. Space-only flight would require minimum strength as there's no resistance to the movement, no?

 

That's the one! The short answer is that most YV ships have a thick exoskeleton of inert armour, either a duracrete-like ablative material extruded like a coral reef in an irrigated surface shipway (we see how coralskippers are created on Belkadan, and frigates use the same material), or in some cases probably just by forging space rock. Only a few types, like the carrier in The Unifying Force, seem to have a comparatively flimsy structure that might be purely organic, though it reminds me of the shell structures they use for buildings (and in that context, it's worth remembering that shells are similar in chemical structure to the solid part of coral reef)...

Why not? Wedge and Tycho initially gamed an attack as requiring a dozen X-wing squadrons, which can release 288 torpedoes in a single run and carry 864 in total, but we don't know the exact details of precisely why they thought that number was necessary - that might have been a number designed to knock down multiple deflectors and then batter the hull, with attrition (and a corresponding twelve squadrons of TIE support for the Lusankya) built into the plan; additionally, the slaving of the additional torpedoes from the smuggler ships onto telemetry from the X-wings may serve to maximise the punch against deflectors - the hangar deflector, which admittedly may be weakened by preceding damage, holds up against just four closely-spaced hits...

So I don't think there's anything that says eighty fighter-sized torpedoes is an implausibly small number against a tough deflector...

But I think this may be a topic where we will continue to disagree...

TIE Fighters have fuel?

I mean, I know that's Wedge's POV of the explosion in the novel, but that can be rationalised by him not really caring about how Imperial vape-bait works mechanically, and simply guessing what went boom - more on this below...

More seriously, I think this is a very good topic to discuss, and you've given me a lot to chew on... you're absolutely right that something went boom in the hangar, and I absolutely agree with you that structural damage is not simply modular but something that affects the larger structure of the ship, and that even where it's not going to break the bow off a big pointy it might still distort a spaceframe and dismount systems.

But that leads to interesting questions about design in general - I'm thinking in part about the fact that armour alone wasn't enough in the steam-and-steel era; tough hulls hit hard shattered - a problem that people who should have known better kept forgetting about and then being ambushed by; the structure needed to flex to absorb impacts, and even then, they might be left distorted by the impact.

And that leads onto another point - there were ways to design ironclads and dreadnoughts and fast battleships more flexibly (though many of the most straightforward involved a lot of wood, from the original oak-framed, iron-armoured French designs right down to the Bismarck's steel-and-mahogany composite main-belt)... so are choices comparable to these in play in Star Wars?

And looking at the SSDs, which have that huge opening around the hangar, those externally-mounted ion-drives and that rather open superstructure... do they have less comprehensive hull-armour than an ISD, and shift more of the emphasis onto their very tough deflectors...?

What examples are you thinking of here? I certainly have no problem with the idea that fighters have a relatively limited range, but I'd see that primarily as a factor of their design in general, emphasising compactness and performance over endurance...

A side-thought, too - is the "continued" power in hyperspace propulsive, or is there some requirement to keep the ship in hyperspace? The most detailed obscure-pre-reboot-lore reference suggests not, but it comes from an Imperial gunner, and they aren't known for their accuracy.

The turbine can drive a dynamo which converts mechanical work into electric current, just like it does in a power station - that was what Parsons originally intended it for, and the Lexington and Saratoga used it for the transmission on the propshafts...

... but, I concede I may have misunderstood or oversimplified; my understanding was that, at least in the RN, Dreadnought-era electric power had been taken directly off the turbine engines, with extra power being gained in Jutland-era ships by retrofitting an extra dynamo using boiler steam, before the addition of separate generators; but it seems clear that at least some dynamos (and probably all of them, though I'm not quite sure yet) were always separate small power units, either diesel or steam turbine (this is what happens when you don't opt to let yourself get distracted by reading in depth around an obscure tangential topic before posting)...

I don't think I made my point clear here - the point is that the limits on weapons and deflector power aren't so much how much you can generate from your generator, but the practicalities of carrying it through the hull on power lines and then converting it into useful form through the barrels of a a turbolaser mounting or a mechanical deflector generator...

I tend to think that TIE Fighter engines really are just a pair of big panels and an electrical accelerator like a real-world ion-drive, the trick being the addition of some hypertech device that reduces the effective mass of the fighter to near-zero and allows that very modest thrust to accelerate the thing up to ludicrous speed. As antigravs seem to be energy-cheap in Star Wars, I'd argue for a relatively modest power supply, functionally separate from the "ion engine" proper, which is probably the same thing that provides energy for the blasters and the avionics, the guns perhaps having the highest peak-consumption. While the TIE is "short-range" (no hyperdrive) it is long-endurance (it does not require engine fuel except a modest gas supply to ionize), and low-maintenance (limited moving parts, components being swapped out when they fall outside tolerances by a minimal maintenance unit of gantry droids), as well as being fast, and manoeuvrable.

Other ships, fighters and upwards, certainly have fuelled engines, perhaps sometimes just chemical rockets, but often the sort of ion-drive that's driven by an on-board power-source (the lore about the Y-wing being very explicit about its grunty, truck-like twin reactors, which also drive the powerful twin sensor domes on the front of them); I'd assume they likewise employ hypertech to reduce the ship's effective mass, and thus the energy that the thruster needs in order to obtain useful speed, but presumably do not have such effective systems as the TIE - perhaps less precisely-calibrated, or perhaps TIE-style systems don't work well with hyperdrives, or indeed deflectors?

Beyond referring again to the question of the mechanical energy-handling limits of the power lines and weapons hardware, I'd counter this by arguing that smaller units can be installed into smaller hull spaces, thus allowing greater combined power (and thus referring again to the Saratoga class, which did this and thereby managed to generate about 25% more power from its sixteen small turbines than the best conventional trios and quartets of big-ship engines of the same period)...

But, as a genuine question asked out of real interest, what are you basing your economies of scale on?

In addition, I do like the discussion, and the observation that "undergunned" ships converted from civilian purposes would need to retrofit additional power (though if Mon Cal cruise liners are anything like Japanese ones of the 1930s, they would no doubt have very oddly-designed modular cabin-blocks and hold space ), and while I have a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the fanon-derived idea that the dome on the underside of the ISD is a large spherical reactor that doesn't fit the hull, it's fairly embedded in the lore now (see the post by @Tuskin38 above!) and I suppose I could accept it as an overcentralised brute-force solution, which rather fits with the Imperial way of doing things...

Which is to say, even if we won't agree on what works best, we might be able to accept each other's preferences as valid alternatives?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

So, from playing Homeworld 2...the bombers in that game generally cannot kill the biggest capital ships in the game in any timely fashion. I feel like this would be the same for Star Wars as well, because if a swarm of B-wings can kill a Star Destroyer, then there's no reason for either side to ever build capital ships. Battleships in real life disappeared because they could be sunk by swarms of aircraft, but I don't think the equivalent is true in the GFFA.

 

I was right! There was a "y" in the name! (Even if it's at the other end.) Since I can't spell it to save my life and it's not in spellcheck, I took a guess with my terrible spelling.

I almost certain that gaming scene wasn't in The Bacta War. What did that scene take place in? I'd certainly love to read it. And honestly I pulled a number out of thin air to knock down an ISD shield arc that seemed to balance capital ship assault being a valid mission and a single fighter squadron not being much of a threat to an ISD. I'd downgrade to about 60 though for an ISD. Easy enough for a full-wing attack, but not for a squadron. Provided they're fired in salves in rapid succession.

Statements and plot points in X-Wing: Rouge Squadron essentially.

Role Playing game sources, at least, are universally of the view that ship in hyperspace+hyperdrive breaks = back to realspace. There's also Episode 1, where the Royal Yacht's hyperdrive functioned perfectly fine to get the ship into hyperspace, but was damaged and leaking, and couldn't keep the ship in it. If the hyperdrive has to be 'working,' it seems reasonable to assume that involves some minimal power draw. I'd put it about on a par with life support though, but a bit more then the interior lighting. AKA "if the ship's power plant is working at all, then you don't need to worry about it."

It seems there's a misunderstanding - the power lines, turbolaser barrels or deflector generators are what I meant there would be a factor of safety for. But shields can't be increased beyond their maximum strength, only restored faster or kept up longer, and in all honesty prioritizing energy to one shield arc over another is common enough capital ship tactics the ships are designed to allow doing it to begin with. But certainly a "probably some minor repairs needed soon after the battle ends" situation.

That's it! That's it! Regular starship engines (in RPG and reference sources anyway) are called ion engines since that's long been a 'soft' sci-fi term for some sort of super-advanced drive, right up until they suddenly appeared on real spacecraft. (The Soviets were considering using them in actual Mars missions all the way back in the 60's though.) The 'ion engines' term fis normally or regular engines, which seem to be some sort of fusion/hypermatter/god knows what reactor output run through some sort of superscience reaction-based thruster.
TIE Fighters, on the other hand, with their name of "Twin Ion Engine" which normally wouldn't be important enough to be in the name, use some sort of superscience-modified version of real life ion engines - and those black panels are part of what makes it work! Electrostatic baffles perhaps, ion accelerator panels or something else, like real ion engines it has no moving parts and uses practically no fuel, and almost no power.
We finally figured out what those black things are after all these years!

I know she had 16 boiler rooms, but I thought she only had four turbines in the two big machinery spaces between them. Being a battlecruiser designed to go much faster then battleships being designed at the same time her plant was designed to produce around twice the horsepower. And be twice the size of the turbo-electric drives the battleships would have used to get it. (The USN really liked turbo-electric drives at the time. The battleships were cancelled though.) Have a source, I'd honestly love to learn more about turbo-electric drives.

To be honest, that one big thing is more efficient on a space/weight basis then lots of small things is common engineering knowledge in general. Still, just went and did some math. Assuming that volume of a reactor scales with power output, pressure stays the same and wall thickness with it, and so weight is based on surface area (and that they're spherical), one that produces 20 times as much power only weighs 7 times as much. If dealing with something rectangular the difference could well be more. (Double the length, width and height and surface area goes up by four times and volume by eight.)

I imagine Mon Cal cruise ships would tend more toward plenty of oddly designed round places. As far as the reactor bulge, I'd view it more as adding more decks around an oversized central reactor to maintain what's considered adequate thickness of ship for enough protection. Not a vulnerability, in other words, don't bother hitting it with your torps!
(Is it present on the ESB model and not the ANH model? If so, that's where the extra power is coming from.)

I think we already have, and I'd go as far to say as we both think the other's preference is also used every now and then.

 

Oh yeah, is there some reason why starship battles in the GFFA use turbolasers instead of proton torpedoes? Like, instead of sending a Calamari cruiser to go fight that Star Destroyer, you send 12 CR90 corvettes retrofitted with several hundred proton torpedo launchers on the exterior of their hulls, and then just have them mass fire them all at once...

 

I spend a lot of time visiting the old novels to eventually fix Wook pages, particularly Vong battles (urgh!), so it's easy to remember the names easily. Not so much with the new novels (2014 onwards) since I haven't really felt inclined to read them again even for info check, except perhaps Lost Stars because Thane and Ciena are cool.

 

I can think of a couple reasons. First, proton torpedoes are actually really bad at killing capital ships. They explode on the surface, and can take out a weapon mount on either a direct hit for a turret, or a very near miss for single mounts in batteries, (each gun in the battery needing its own torpedo), or damage engines, or score a lucky hit on the bridge or sensors and… that’s about it. Short of getting to the back of the bridge and the control circuits -behind- the bridge (often with an up armored bulkhead meaning a hit on the front wall of the bridge won’t damage them), torpedoes can damage a ship, contribute to attrition of the ship and possibly score a mission kill, but you’ll be fighting the ship again in the future.

Turbolasers (in addition to that) punch deeper into the ship, to get at the ship’s "vitals." Main computer (without having to hit the bridge from dead ahead), the actual power sources for the thrusters rather then just the nozzles, the hyperdrive to prevent the ship from fleeing, important power feeds to an entire battery or major shield generators, the generators themselves. Fuel silos if you’re lucky (the blast from that would cripple a ship; if there’s a shipyard in-system you control it could be towed in for several months in the yard, otherwise a complete loss), the reactors are buried deep enough and deliberately provided with enough armor that they’re generally not going to get hit, but ancillary equipment might get hit if you’re lucky forcing it to be shut down, and depressurizing important and large areas of the ship’s interior.

Firing in large salvos is vital when dealing with shields. That's why defending starfighters are important for breaking up incoming attacks. And yah, the Lusankya suffered from having dumped its fighters in another system, and the Home Defense Corps both launching piecemeal and being horrifically bad pilots. Makes the Japanese at the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot look good...

Hum... The octuple barberettes on an ISD-II would take more then one torpedo to silence, and general removal of heavy turrets in favor of large numbers of batteries of single mount guns (which in all honesty the larger ones are almost as big, and unlike a turret a single hit would only take out one gun) may have been a reaction to torpedo attacks...


Also, the Providence class from the clone wars has 102 proton torpedo tubes, (I think we know why it's that number), at least in the Invisible Hand sized variant. (Which apparently actually was scaled out to around 1688 meters or so on screen. Anybody know the armament of the apparently existing 2km variant (or if it was even given?) (Or should I just scale directly based on length?))

 

Do any GFFA vessels have design cues similar to our own (Earth) warships?

Similar to either WWII era double ended warships:


Or modern warships, where missile launchers have replaced gun mounts, and stealthy slopes are evident:


All sort of have weapons at either end, with a superstructure in the middle. The closest I have come across to a space vessel looking like it shares design characteristics to our own surface vessels is probably the Concordia from Wing Commander:


But do any GFFA capital ships have a similar vibe?

I also wonder, in the GFFA, what are the pros and cons of having the bridge on an exposed superstructure (like an Imperial-class) versus having it within the main hull (Like a Corellian corvette). Obviously the view from an exposed bridge may be slightly better, but from a protection standpoint, wouldn't a bridge that is contained within a warship's main hull be better? Perhaps there's no difference in venerability (as either location is going to have windows, and be exposed), but it at least minimizes the structural shape and complexity of the warship, no?

Or take it one step further, do space warships have a need for a bridge (which I think can be argued are still needed on Earth for safe navigation), or can all ship operations be run out of a combat information center (CIC) that is deep within the hull?

 

The Allegiance-class has those turrets on the centerline, though still not that large in proportion to the overall ship. I'd assume the Broadside-class cruiser has missile tubes similar to a modern missile cruiser.

Not Star Wars, but in Homeworld 2 there's the Hiigaran destroyer that looks like a World War II cruiser and the Vaygr destroyer and battlecruiser which fire off missiles a lot like modern ships.

There's a game on Steam called Nebulous: Fleet Command which I hear has realistic space combat. I haven't played it, but I'd assume realistic space combat would basically be a lot like modern naval warfare. You'd have anti-ship missiles for long range attacks, a railgun for medium range, and then probably some interceptor missiles and a CIWS to deal with incoming missiles. And then you'd probably have fighter craft and bombers doing the same role as the F-14 and Tu-22M did in real life.

 

The Procursator-class's primary armament is all centreline turrets, three of them, and they're a bit larger proportionately than on the Allegiance class - possibly the best example.



At least one WWII battleship design had "all guns in front of the bridge" rather than at either end of the ship - the Nelson-class:

 

I think GFFA capital ships are more like 18th century ships of the line than World War II battleships...lots of smaller guns that fire rapidly, rather than a small number of giant cannons.

 

Just to note about the "288 torps, we later in the Bacta War see essentially the same number with the 300 torpedoes "locking on" to the Lusankya and Captain Drysso being shocked by the number and panicking that no ship could survive getting hit by 300 of them at once. Perhaps he recalled the in-Universe example of what Grand Admiral Pitta did to the SSD Aggressor with his Torpedo Sphere, and perhaps the Rogues also recalled the example. Overwhelming torpedo hits do seem to be one of the few reliable tactics to use against SSDs, besides TRD, or the suicide bomb ship used against the Vengeance, or attacking them in drydock like the fates of the Enforcer and the (Terror?) Fondor cloaked SSD, or internal sabotage like befell Terror and the Knight Hammer. It's not like they had a big Superlaser to one-shot it like what happened to the Annihilator.

Even though I like the Bacta War, the Lusankya really did seem to go down too easily. A lot of my own perception is informed by earlier stories, particularly the Classic comics where nothing the Rebels have can crack the shields of an Executor class, and they have to resort to a magical artifact to be able to slow it down.

 

I'm not sure how much being underground would have affected the Lusankya, but I don't think that the environment would be that much of a concern to it. It's more likely would have had to worry about creatures nesting on it or trying to eat it...

One thing I haven't seen mention is the damage it likely took when escaping from Coruscant. The ship would have had umpteen city blocks worth of debris fall on it as it broke out of its resting place, leaving tons of debris on it, and causing who knows how much damage to it. Damage Isard may not have had the resources to repair.

Never really noticed before but the Eidolon looks like it might be shorter than the normal Strike Cruiser. Maybe the light cruiser Gorath was a Eidolon Strike cruiser.

It does sound familiar. It might have been something about them wanting to distinguish Vader's TIE from the others(before they made his custom one), by painting it blue, but because of shooting with a blue screen, it didn't workout. Of course I might just be mixing up a couple of different stories, as it's rather similar to them thinking of painting his ISD(in ESB before they decided on the Executor) a bluish colour.

I'd love to have some proper measurements of the Devastator and Avenger, and some proper hi res orthographic photos. I now there is some difference between the two, for example the Devastator's trench get shorter as it goes toward the rear, while the Avenger's trench stays around the same height the entire length of the ship, and of course there is the already mentioned hangar depth. I also believe the Devastator is wider in proportions to the Avenger, and I wouldn't be surprised if the proportion of other things differ, like the superstructure, bridge tower, and hangars.

The Nebulon-B was the one from ISC.

There's a lot of posts to go over so I might do a more general reply rather than a lot of quoting.

I feel there's some overlap with both of our views on the power systems, with the main difference being how we view the main reactor and how interconnected all the energy systems are.
So the way I view the main reactor is more like a nuclear ship. The reactor is the main power source in the ship, and can power everything on the ship, including the engines.
While I get the idea (please correct me if I got this wrong) that you're thinking it's more like the main engine on a conventional ship, where it mainly drives the engines, and needs additional generators to provide proper power to the rest of the ship.

Now I'm not saying that I think it should be purely centralised system with the main reactor as the only power source, there would be other sources such as, subsidiary and auxiliary reactors, reactors for the engines, backups generators, and some sort of batteries(energy cells). Most of these would be interconnected to add some redundancy, so if you lose the main reactor(or any other one) you can still supply power different systems and parts of the ship, but at a reduced capacity - There's evidence in the movies of ships having some sort of backup power source, with both the Tantive IV and the ISD in Rogue One having something power their lights after they were disabled.

All of this would require an extensive power network throughout the ship, with dedicated power channels running through the ship, connected together with some sort of power relay/substations, to control the amount of power going to different sections and systems, and to help isolate sections from things like power surges.

I also think a more isolated power scheme with individual reactors for each system, isn't really any less complex than a more centralised one. You still need to supply fuel to the reactors, but now you need more pipes and storage, as your reactors are likely more spread out. There would also be a lot of duplication but without the benefit of a connected system, where if one reactor fails the others can pick up some of the slack. You also have a lot more reactors to maintain and keep track of, but at the same time, they may have the benefit that their smaller size may make them easier to repair if something goes wrong.

The TIE fighter Owners' Workshop Manual does mention something about the TIE's lasers, and how they're powered, that I thought you might find interesting. The TIE's lasers were originally powered from the same source as the engines, but pilots found that firing the lasers for too long during a battle would divert power from the engines, reducing its maneuverability. To solve this they ended up adding a dedicated power generator for the laser cannons.

I wonder what was the earliest mention of the dome as a reactor? I know I've always thought of it as a reactor, and it was at least identified as one in the schematics from The Essential Guide to Vehicles; which according to wookieepedia was released in 1996.

My own thoughts on the dome is that it is basically extra thick armoured protection for the reactor and its systems (similar to @JohnLydiaParker thoughts on it).
The funny thing about the whole thing is that because of the superstructure on top, there's actually plenty of room to fit an oversized reactor inside the ship, without it sticking out, and possibly the only reasons it extrudes out of the hull is a combination of keeping it inline with the engines, and the hull being shallower on the bottom half - This might only be the case with the Rogue One model.

The bulb is on both models.

The Providence may be bigger than its canon length(I did a post about it a while back), but it likely wasn't 1688m long; that's closer to the size of the Clone Wars tv show model (which I tend not to think of as a larger variant, as all the Providences appear to be the same size in that show - same thing with the Recusant).

 

I mentioned in a previous post that I had noticed the studio models of Home One and Liberty appeared to be built of the same base vacuum formed hull shape, and that I wanted to do a stand alone post about it. Well here it is!

Both ships models were built around the same size, and if you look at the side view, the nose on both ships is the same shape. Unfortunately because of how the hull bump and bulges change the silhouettes of the ships, it's a bit harder to tell from the side what other features they share.

This is where looking at the top works better, as more of the common large shapes can be seen.

and to get a better idea of what the original vacuum formed top would have look liked, there is this image of what looks like the top half of Home One, before most of its bumps and bulges were added.

It shows that the vacuum formed hull was pretty simple and basically consisted of the the main hull, a large bulge that spans most of the top, and two large bulges at the rear - the bottom may have been even simpler, consisting only of the main hull, but I don't any early construction photos of it.
If you compare it to the top view of both ships, those same shapes are visible on both ships (Liberty wings obscure most of the main hull shape, but you can still sorta see the shape), with only minor differences; like Home One cutting out part of the two rear bulges for its engines, and Liberty having a slightly different and longer end for the cutout rear section(they either modified the vacuum mold or modified the part afterwards).

To show how close they match, if you overlay Home One on top of the Liberty model you get a rather cool winged version of it.

 

Wasn't the wingless Liberty class created/filmed first, and then wings added to make the Liberty-class?