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

I'm going to topload some general responses to questions in the wider discussion, and follow up with some specifics below...

On the question of real-world influence in ship design, one thing I'd emphasise is that there's a level of abstraction involved in many of the best Star Wars designs. The ISD incorporates real-world warship influences from the Great White Fleet onwards - bow, turrets, superstructure, a row of big round engine exhausts - but reinterprets them into a "flying" design, and maybe also adds in extra levels of influence from other sources, if we imagine the flank turrets being a galleon's broadside abstracted into the design-language of a steam-and-steel battleship IN SPACE...

But it's also worth adding that quite a lot of real-world warships do place all the weapons forwards of the bridge/sensor superstructure - these days, it's to leave the other half of the ship clear for aircraft handling, which you might imagine as being abstracted into the underside of an ISD (and hey, that explains the odd design of Fulminatrix, which has no flak underneath to avoid crossfire with deploying TIEs!), but in trying to explain why I'd made a grimace-inducing gaffe in a real-world reference (discussed below), I discovered that the original turrets-forward scheme of the British treaty battleships of the 1920s wasn't, as is normally said, a device to navigate the weight limits of the Washington Treaty, but an idea carried over from the earlier G3 battle cruiser design - Tennyson d'Eyncourt, who seems to have been doing a lot of thinking about armour schemes, was concerned about the weak-points in the deck above the enginerooms, so he opted to isolate the gun magazines within a self-contained citadel ahead of the superstructure.

But because the result's already been ilustrated by @Iron_lord, I'll add a picture of one of the French turrets-forward capital ships instead, because they looked better...



On the question of whether torpedoes are any use against capital ships, I'm in the group who think they can do damage - thanks to @SheaHublin for that reference to the expected effect of three hundred torpedoes against the Lusankya, specifically they're enough to completely overload the front deflector and start inflicting hits on the hull, which will be followed by a massive number of of hits from subsequent salvos - this explained why Wedge and Tycho gamed twelve squadrons as the number needed to knock out an SSD in a straight fight, meaning three salvos of around 288 torps each...

As to why we don't see this happen more often, I think a lot of it has to do with something that's already been raised - defending fighters; at Yavin, Tarkin and Motti were too busy being ideological to deploy fighters, so Vader had to scramble his personal escort (or if you prefer the version in The Farlander Papers, the rest of the TIEs had been pulled back because of embarrassing dogfighting attrition caused by the earlier waves of Rebel X-wings we don't see in the film); and right back at the start of Heir, Thrawn attributed the destruction of Executor to "last-minute TIE incompetence" caused by the psychic shock of a Sith Lord exploding...

Normally, TIEs probably do better than their reputation suggests. A fixed attack formation like a real-world torpedo run presents a nice group of targets, and adding escorts behind them in the style of the trench run is just giving the bad guys more things to kill; the attack pattern that Rogue Squadron favour is much better in this regard, with small formations manoeuvring for opportunity and coming in unexpectedly, like a dive-bomber, but we don't see them doing it against opponents with heavy fighter cover, and there's probably a reason for that...

At Thyferra, as has been discussed, Drysso simply didn't have any TIEs under his direct command at all, and even on his earlier sortie, I don't think he had more than two or three squadrons on board - I crunched the numbers in some detail a few pages back, and I'd add that, although his POV doesn't really let it slip, I think close-reading shows that he was aware of the problem...

The next specific reply is also sort-of relevant to all that, but I drafted it before the thread got out of hand, so I'll leave it in place...

Honestly, the movies suggest that ordinary fighters are a good platform to knock out the biggest oppositon with some regularity, and I'm of the view that unsupported X-wings can do practically anything you'd want to do in Star Wars (though I tend to think the B-wing is "too much ship" - as fighters go they're big and slow and high-maintenance and don't manouevre quickly, and while their rapid disappearance at Endor in Jedi was really due to real-world VFX issues... well, would you want to be in a B-wing if you had to do a tight turn at high MGLT to avoid ramming a deflector, and then get intensively tail-chased by TIE Interceptors?)...

As to why Star Destroyers remain relevant, I'd suggest it's because they're not "battleships" in the literal sense of linear formations of gun-armed warships designed to control the sea-lane invasion route to England and fight decisive battles in the style of Alfred Thayer Mahan... they're fighter-carriers, deployment decks for troops, trains of siege-artillery, command and sensor platforms, patrol cars to stop-and-search civilian traffic on the hyperlanes, and a big flag on the front porch, all wrapped up in an armoured hull with guns, which means that almost by coincidence they can also fight other Star Destroyers, or less versatile guns-and-armour space-warships which have their own niche roles in reconnaissance and raiding or convoy escort; the sheer distances involved in the GFFA make having ships rather useful, and when the Rebels use their main fleet to create a perimiter around their fighter attack, and the Imperials use their main fleet to create a perimiter around their fighter attack, Lando turns the whole thing into accidental Mahan anyway...

The gaming isn't shown directly, but is something Tycho thinks back to from the cockpit during his attack run - the torpedo numbers are my own extrapolation (three salvos of two torpedoes each), though as @SheaHublin pointed out, the numbers are echoed in another scene in the novel...

But as you've probably seen, the topic has evolved into a wider discussion, which I've picked up in a general response above...

The novel or the computer game? Fair enough, regardless.

I think the question I want to ask is whether there's any source that shows clearly that automatic reversion to realspace is a simple physical result of switching off the hyperdrive, rather than a built-in safety feature - it would mean the most specific individual statement in pre-reboot lore might be misleading, but I have no huge problem with that, and (for those who get the reference) I'm amused by the thought that Major Soranan didn't dispose of the Viceroy as effectively as he thought...

I've still not made this clear - I'm not talking about design overloads or maintenance requirements, but whether, if the main generator is as powerful as some lore claims, the mechanical hardware of power lines, turbolasers and projectors can plausibly handle any meaningful fraction of that power...

I think this was something GL or Joe Johnston figured out way back while making the first film, but yes to all of the above.

And speaking for myself, I honestly think the panels are just the conventional satellite-wing power-panels they resemble and are identified as in lore, with the hyperphysics happening somewhere else in the design, but you don't have to agree with me on that...

I think some other Star Wars "ion engines" might be the other type of real-world design, coupled to an on-board power generator - and again improved by similar superscience; I think there are one or two references to ionised emission trails, and the "Hoersch-Kessel" system that's sometimes characterised as the most popular design might be an example of this...

But that said, I definitely like the idea that we have some "soft" terminology going on, much as energy weapons are called "lasers", or fusil, literally "flintlock", has a much wider range of meaning in French...

Ugh. I thought this was one of those things that I knew, picked up by reading some big Friedmanesque book like U.S. Aircraft Carriers quite a few years ago, and I had a very clear mental image of an engineering diagram showing small turbines distributed through the hull, but...

... there were, in fact, a single row of four big engine spaces down the centre of the hull, I've found clear references to a corresponding set of four generators, and I can't find anything that says there was more that one turbine coupled to each generator; I assume that I'm getting confused with some other turbo-electric ship, but it doesn't seem to be any of the obvious ones (the US Navy dreadnoughts, the Normandie, and the NDL liners SS Potsdam and SS Scharnhorst, no relation to the battlecruiser, though she did end up as a Japanese aircraft carrier)...

Yes, turbo-electric drive did allow a more versatile layout - compare a conventional ship like Bismarck, where the turbines had to be coupled mechanically to the individual propeller shafts (three of them in this case), and thus had to be physically lined up on them...




... with the Lexington's turbo-electric layout, where the turbines were connected to the propellor shafts by power cables and a switchboard, so the machinery spaces could be arranged in a simple row along the keel (click here if the image doesn't work)...





... but at least in the case of Lexington and Saratoga, this flexibility seems to have have been used to install bigger individual units, not lots of less-powerful ones...

Oh, I understand that internal volume increases several times faster than linear dimensions or surface area - what I'd missed was that the thickness of the shell wouldn't necessarily have to scale up in the process - maybe it's just showing my lack of expertise that I'd wonder if heat-loading demands and power-line hardware would reduce the advantage to some extent...?

Just the right size for some mid-sized, off-the-shelf power generators?

That's what the old Technical Manual plan, which seems to have introduced the idea of a spherical DS2-style power core for the ISD, showed an odd set of circular spaces underneath, with the external dome being a dished "deck" beneath them that imitated the shape of the "ceiling" formed by the base of the sphere.

I'll be honest, though, the hull dome seems more like a "sonar dome IN SPACE", covering something like a sensor or communications array...

... and what's arguably the highest-canon depiction of an ISD's power-core is the horizontal, angular space in REBELS (carried over, I think, from the older pointy in the Clone Wars cartoon)...

As someone else already said, it's on both - while the overall proportions may not be exactly the same, the ESB model's layout copies the ANH one fairly carefully at this level of detail...

Well, yes, but I wanted to make it clear...

Could be, though I"d been thinking that any difference in proportions could be accounted for by changing the proportions of the plating units rather than just simplifying their shape - see how the engines now seem to project further at the stern?

Both stories sound vaguely familiar, honestly - but I'd need to check to find out...

I certainly got the sense from existing orthogonals that the proportions differed, with Devastator being wider IIRC, but that could have just been a result of the way they were photographed... and I've wondered for a while if the widening trench was a design feature or a result of hull damage...

One other thing I noticed recently was that the added shuttle-arrival scene in ESB, which inexplicably uses the hangar bay of Avenger (was it originally intended for Needa's shuttle or the start of RotJ?), depicts the same sort of hangar interior we see on the DS2 for Vader's arrival there, which has slightly angular corners when seen from the inside...

You mean ICS?

I quite understand this...

What I'm suggesting is mainly that weapons should have their own dedicated generators, the equivalent of the specialised ammo magazine substructures under battleship turrets, and that sensors and deflectors, or even ion engines, might have their own power systems as well (loosely the equivalents of diesel generators used to power systems like radar, and the secondary cruising engines that some ships had), though I'm less clear-cut about those...

All this is partially based on the fact these are systems that aren't analogies for the engines, and partially it's shaped by old lore that gave each turbolaser a dedicated generator, and partially I'm thinking that odd angles of the ship make useful spaces for extra power systems; but more practically it serves to ensure that the designed power for each system is always avaliable locally, isolates the various key systems from damage to each other, and means that the power system isn't a weak-point in itself - the equivalent of the ludicrous lines of men passing ammo along the open deck to work the secondary guns of capital ships and cruisers down to the 1940s (I think the first big ships that avoided this were the USS St Louis and USS Honolulu and the refitted HMS Renown, in 1939)...

My thinking is that any shipwide power grid might br essentially a secondary backup system, used sparingly to reallocate energy in situations where that is actually necessary (at Thyferra, either Wedge or Tycho thinks that the Lusankya is having to distribute energy to the aft deflectors, weakening the others, which implies something of this sort, whether it involves power from the main engines or, pun intended, a separate deflector grid); a unified energy network that powers the whole ship is an idea I very much associate with Star Trek, my doubts here being reinforced by the suspicion that if the main drive generates such tremendous energy levels that it would, in theory, give a huge advantage, then a meaningful proportion of that power might be impractically large for power lines and weapons hardware to handle anyway...

I'm not going to try and think too hard about how they proposed to run the blasters off the wing panels... Raith Sienar being Space Kurt Tank again?

That's brilliant.

You, sir, get a Special Golden Ewok™ No-Prize!!

- The Imperial Ewok

 

They do? The Executor going down seems kinda ambiguous, because Ackbar gives that order for the fleet to concentrate fire on it. There's only one other Star Destroyer we see destroyed, and that's from a Calamari cruiser zapping it in the background. Rogue One seems kinda ambiguous as well, because the Rebel capital ships have most likely been firing on the Star Destroyers and weakening their shields before the Y-wings hit it. And the last one is TPM, which shouldn't count because normally a fighter isn't going to get into your ship where it can torpedo your main reactor.

I don't really like this explanation either. If Star Destroyers and Calamari cruisers are the equivalent of aircraft carriers, then there's no reason to spend money putting heavy guns, shields and armor on them. And there's no reason to bring them into battle either. Instead you'd have them sitting at stand-off ranges and sending fighters into battle. The real-life analogy would be the U.S. Lexington-class carriers, which had some 8-inch guns for use against surface targets before the Navy decided they were pointless, they were never going to be used, and just removed them so they could hold more planes instead.

 

I've gone with the opinion that more TIEs launched to support Black Squadron without direct authorisation, particularly when it comes to Sigma 3 aka Iden Versio and the idea that 6-8 TIE fighters vs. 30 rebel fighters seems a bit one-sided (no matter how elite Black Squadron was).

 

General reply time again:
It seems that each thruster needs a small dedicated reactor, generally built right into the front of it. Some ships may draw most or all of their everything else power from it; fighters normally do. When you get to the size of a star destroyer - a hypothetical single main reactor's output would only be equal to the combined output of a distributed system. But then it seems half the ships have more then one main reactor or another smaller one; in that case they would probably be powering different sections of the ship in "normal" battle conditions, with cross connections for damage control. Alternately they may each power alternating weapons and shield generators. As far as that amount of power, once you leave the reactor compartment it's probably going through a couple dozen different power feeds, none of which could handle more then perhaps 10 percent of the total reactor output, and even redistributed each weapon or shield generator itself is only a small portion of the ship's power generation.

@Grevious_Coward - got either a bow or stern view to go with those? It looks like the 'wings' might not be nearly as much displacement as I'd assumed. Wondering if that's something that could have been fitted to one of Home One's sisters during a massive rebuild in the yards, resulting in missing Thrawn's offensives entirely. Particularly if you're spitting it in two and adding a few hundred meters in the middle anyway...

I would figure starfighters are a use against capital ships in either the "burst of firepower" or "general attrition" role, knocking out various weapon emplacements, damaging engines and the like. A big advantage to the side that can do that, but that's in addition to their capital ships. Capital ships and turbolasers are the prime arbiter of major naval battles - torpedo armed fighters and the chance to use them can counteract inferior firepower in capital ships, but only so much. Perhaps boosting a fleet's effective power by a third on average. As for Yavin - I assuming that "of course the main Rebel Base has more then two squadrons," and that there was a massive dogfight going on at the "mid-latitudes" to keep the Death Star's fighters from interfering with the trench run, which the Rebels succeeded in holding them off long enough at the cost of massive casualties. Say a dozen squadrons.

Also... When Tarken blew up Alderaan that was the first time the superlaser had been fired - not earlier against some random asteroid to make sure it worked. The Death Star may not have actually been in operating status or even delivered yet. Meaning it never went to pick up and embark it's thousand fighters and vast legions of stormtroopers, and may even have only had 2-3 walkers aboard (for fit and function tests).

 

Two fighters against a Star Destroyer?

I might be somewhere in the middle. It feels to me like three attacking X-Wing squadrons might risk an Imperial-class without its fighter complement, while a Star Destroyer with all its support craft would not be at risk unless at least eight squadrons were attacking.

I don’t think there is a real life analogy. A Star Destroyer is equal parts assault ship, fleet carrier, and battleship. Even a Mon Cal, which I don't think had a significant ground assault capability, doesn't have many comparables, maybe the Ise-class battlecarrier.

 

This is mostly a quick, all-round reply, trying to not bulk out the discussion too much (though I've enjoyed all the replies above).

One point that's probably important, but which I'd lost track of in trying to edit the order of my previous into comprehensibility, is the question of what sort of damage starfighters can actually do - @JohnLydiaParker did a very good exposition of his take on this, but mine's, perhaps inevitably, somewhat different and more fighter-positive...

I tend to think that there are a lot of surface structures that can be damaged by torpedo impacts or even blaster strafing, i.e. sensor mounts and hangar openings and engine exhaust ports and gun positions (even a well-protected turret can have substructures that are vulnerable), and of course deflector hardware itself, and (if such things exist) power-distribution networks. Hit some of those hard enough, and they'll cause knock-on damage.

Perhaps it's unusual for fighters to make a reasonably large pointy spaceship explode (more age-of-sail than Jutland in terms of typical damage, though Jutland, and San Carlos Water, perhaps do figure more strongly in what I bring to Star Wars than for most of you), but I certainly think X-wings can turn big pointy into crashing scrap...

Defending against that challenge takes a competent interplay of manoeuvres, deflectors, flank, and above all, opposing fighters...

Another point which is connected to that is the purpose of the guns on Star Destroyers, where I agree with the point raised by @Alpha-Red about the 8-inch guns on Lexington being practically useless and rightly discarded, but I'd say that analogy isn't exact - most aircraft carriers have carried armament, designed to defend them against attack by smaller surface ships and aircraft, initially mid-calibre guns and now usually missiles and CIWS. You can have carriers in Star Wars with limited self-defence potential, like the Quasar Fire or the Endurance, which need to rely on their fighters or their escorts to fight off opponents, but the ISD is designed to drive off attacks without escorts, and to swing-role as siege-artillery and a galleon, so it carries more armament, and that in turn allows it to fight more toe-to-toe...

There's a side-topic here about types of armament - why do ISDs favour things that look like guns - but that's partly tonal, and I'm not sure I want to add another sidetrack...

I think a lot depends on the sources you accept as canon! The movie itself? The pre-reboot canon-completist approach that insists on prefixing The Farlander Papers (and maybe likes the added lore, too)? The whole grab-bag of current continuity (complete with a refusal to distil "Sigma Three" into Black Squadron)?

And within most of them, there's wiggle-room depending on your view of things like the relative effectiveness of TIEs and X-wings (my own take, if it's not obvious by now, is that both are very useful, when used right)...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Mmm, World War II carriers had 5-inch guns which could be fired at surface ships as a last-ditch defense, but its primary purpose was anti-air defense. That's basically the same as the Quasar Fire and Ton Falk...some minor defense, but it's not going to fight off a Dreadnaught-class cruiser.

Modern day carriers have some short-range AA missiles and the CIWS, but again these are anti-air and anti-missile defenses. The Russian Kuznetsov-class is the one exception that does have anti-ship missiles.

 

I don't think there's a real life analog either. I'd say the main role of an ISD (besides fleet combat) is planetary pacification. (And not in a friendly way.) It needs enough combat power, both itself and fighters, to render itself largely immune to attack by the planet's forces (for most planets anyway), firepower to batter down small shields, and the ability to land and support significant ground forces for either an assault on the planet or a ground campaign of up to a few months, and be able to establish a semi-permanent occupation force. Hence the landing craft, the walkers, and importantly the prefabricated garrison base. (That's why it's there. It's also why a prefabricated garrison bases exists in the first place.) It can carry six squadrons, but only four of them are front-line fighters - one of them is TIE/rc recon TIE's - which are probably meant to patrol the outer system and use their sensors for recon patrol of the planet, and a squadron of TIE bombers, which while apparently poor in the capital ship assault with torpedoes role, are much more useful for the wide variety of payloads, mostly for air to ground usage, that they can carry, where they're invaluable. (At least older Legends stuff has that as their makeup, along with four squadrons of fighters, initially all Starfighters, with Interceptors being introduced as available. Nominally one Interceptor squadron, in reality often only Starfighters, occasionally more.)

I'd rate them more effective then that; the heavy flank turrets on an Imperial-I would probably be disabled with a salvo of two direct torpedo hits if the shields are down. (And would be in bad shape after one.) Smaller weapons that aren't really viable in the move views (such as the vast majority of an Imperial-II's firepower, for example) that are single mounted in batteries could have a gun knocked out with a single near miss to it's emplacement. (Perhaps within ten meters.) When you're being worked over by multiple squadrons of fighters with plenty of torps and you don't have any fighters, that's the point at which a capital ship is withdrawing and hyping out of system. If you could get heavier laser cannon fire between the turret and the hull on a heavy turret you're probably going to both cause some decent damage and likely jam the mount. Heavily concentrated laser cannon fire (from larger cannons) on a smaller turbolaser emplacement is going to disable it eventually. Fire control on a laser cannon hit, (within perhaps two meters even), but there's little indication externally as to where they are, there's a lot of them, and they're small targets. I would budget an A-wing squadron as being able to disable the engines on an Interdicter Cruiser if they expend most of their missiles and target them exclusively, provided something else takes the shields down.

I'd say any capital ship exploding is rare, regardless of what it's fighting, and the Age of Sail damage model (pounded into wrecks) is the main one in play. Crashing scrap, probably not. Crippled, fleeing and needing a month in the yards certainly. Mostly disabled as well. An ISD with marginal sensors, it's fire control almost shot, only a dozen guns still firing, only capable of 10-20 percent of top speed and all it's large turrets knocked out, making for either a jump away or friendly forces nearby - that's what getting worked over by fighters will do to you. Would take about 6-7 squadrons to do that, assuming no defending fighters and full shields - but only 4 squadrons if it's shields are already down. And a lengthy engagement. A bomber wing (3 squadrons) could do that to a single shield arc on its own with enough time.


@Thrawn McEwok I was able to find where you went over fighter numbers. Probably correct, but ignoring the recon and bomber wings. I'd say it's pretty likely a SSD's compliment is simply two ISD compliments, which would replace four more squadrons. TIE/rc's still have one light laser cannon, and can still be used in direct combat - almost certainly they were all allocated to the Thyferran Home Defence Force squadrons in place of "regular" TIE's, which would make them perform even worse. And the bomber wings can be worked into the total.

Also read your analysis of Isard's long term plan; interesting theory, not without support. Personally I'd go with something simpler based on what often happens in the aftermath of revolutions in real life. Perhaps half the Rebellion's support was from alien species; she would eliminate several of them. The New Republic would suddenly be forced to actually govern, be utterly unable to deliver on the promises it had made, (and in her opinion would be unable to govern either), would discredit itself, and there would be a counter-revolution. And then anarchy. A pretty common outcome of real life revolutions. And historically, in those cases somebody comes to power to provide order. Which is exactly the Empire's governing premise - Isard and the Empire would be the ones to step in and provide it.
(It's worth pointing out that WEG did an excellent job of providing a governing ideology for the Empire (the New Order) the reasonable people could believe in, weaving together multiple real-life concepts into something that's dangerously seductive enough that "The Empire was Right" exists. (An "of course this is bad" disclaimer is needed here, sadly.) Of course, in the context of it's time divine right monarchs were also were something reasonable people could believe it; that alone doesn't mean an ideology is good.)
(Alternately if you consider the Dark Empire stuff cannon, the idea that Isard knew about the deep core, and assumed those events would be imminent, makes more sense then I'd like to admit.)

 

Yeah I was reading this on TVTropes:

It also doesn't make sense to continue firing at an enemy ship once you've crippled it. Both for humanitarian reasons and because if you're in a battle, you don't want to waste your firepower shooting at a dead wreck. The same was true in real life naval battles as well. So yeah, ships shouldn't explode into itty bitty pieces like we see in Homeworld, Empire at War, or other games.

 

In the SW “what Newton laws” universe where ships can simply turn around, by deliberate choice by Lucas in order to make a more interesting universe. To be honest, from a world building perspective flat out ignoring it, it doesn’t exist, because the universe rules work that way, because I said so, without any attempt at scientific justification was genius. Part of the appeal of the SW universe was that the universe was created to be what quite a number of people want, throwing contradicting physics out the window and flat out ignoring that they did so. Fighters really do fly like airplanes in space! Capital ship weapon ranges are tens of kilometers, and they fight right alongside each other, which should mean they can’t bombard planets from space, but they can and don’t bring it up.
In the SW context where disabled capital ships have a tendency to crash on planets instead of staying in orbit, and where reactors can blow up the entire ship, using lifeboats to get from the crippled/doomed ship to get to a planatary surface below makes a lot of sense. Using SW physics of course.

In anything resembling real life, on the other hand, of course that’s correct. (I’d like to draw a distinction between your typical sci-fi “lifeboat” and carrying several Lambda sized or bigger “ship’s boats” that serve as general purpose utility craft (with considerable delta-V of their own); general space-ground and ship-to-ship ferrying, serving as boarding craft, landing craft for a landing party, that “could” be used to abandon ship over say, Mars and then more or less safely make it to Earth, enter orbit, contact any local traffic control, then land normally at their choice of starport. (And early send a radio message from Mars to Earth as well.) Those not only make sense but aren’t even there to act as lifeboats.)

Hit a SW capital ship reactor with a turbolaser and it the ship goes boom. It’s simply that they’re too well protected in most cases, largely from simple number of decks between it and the outside, with armor added as needed.

I’d like to point out that SW technology is actually very well understood, to the point of it being jarring with stories get it “wrong.” We don’t know how it works except that it can’t, but in world building it doesn’t matter, and we know everything about it that -does- matter. We can even sometimes say “that’s not how it works!” with a fair degree of confidence (ahem. Wrath Squadron ending. Solo Command some as well. ahem)

——————-

On the other hand, applying real world planetary science and space flight (practically unknown in the debate) puts me firmly in the “no Endor holocaust because in real life there wouldn’t be one” camp. Don’t know if anybody else is though. Everybody assumes it’s in low orbit (but not hovering under power, despite that it would have to be), and assume a blast big enough orbits don’t matter. Often people forget just like a ship it’s almost entirely hollow, and tend to calculate energy based on a single massive iron asteroid at interplanetary velocities.
Really, first it would have to be in geostationary orbit, second we’re effectively dealing with a rain of space junk. Which as it turns out, partly burns up in recently and will smash your house if it lands in it, but won’t do anything to your house if it lands in your yard. Imagine dropping scrap metal from an airplane traveling at 50,000 feet and Mach 2 and we’re talking what would actually happen. And in real life does happen. Second, most of the debris would be scattered into different orbits, and from an orbit that doesn’t requiring it to be hovering under its own power, would be anywhere from a few years to tends of thousands of years before it comes down.
It also the forest moon of Endor. The only thing it could be a moon of would be a gas giant. And from what’s known to happen in real life, the debris would… form a ring around Endor’s parent gas giant. Don’t know why nobody’s pointed that out.

Second - that just created the galaxy’s largest chunk of space-based, free for the taking scrap metal. Honestly within 5 years most of it had already been gathered, sold and melted down for profit. In Indonesia there’s a problem with war graves of lost warships 80 ft down being secretly cut up and sold for scrap - in a GFFA this stuff is much more accessible then that.

 

Honestly I wonder if the volume of a 1.6 km Star Destroyer can reasonably be expected to contain all the stuff it's reported to carry.

 

TBH, all this real-world science vs. SW stuff reminds me of someone I once saw who was earnestly arguing for the proposition that the Star Wars universe straight-up just has air in space - and it wasn't an entirely unreasonable argument.

 

The aether theory, yeah. I've seen that around.

 

I roughly measured the Eidolon's hangar width in the Battleground Tatooine comic, and I did get the impression the ship was comfortably 650 metres long or more. So it is probably bigger than the Lornar-built version.

Using the original model dimensions, if we assume both ISD models are 1.606 km long, more or less, then the Devastator should be about 1041 metres wide, and the Avenger should be about 893 metres. The Rogue One version of the ISD I (including the Tormentor, and the Executrix, Dominance) etc, is supposedly less wide, though, and below 980 metres.

The bridge towers are likely between 265 and 275 metres wide, meantime, on average.

Nebulon-B schematics include the Starlog Technical Manual cross-section, the Far Orbit Project RPG plans... and Complete Cross-Sections. I think the last at least, has a bow generator?

Whilst yes - I do mostly concur on the Mediator is the MC-100. Viscount may be a bit higher than MC-120? But probably not very, if at all.

 

On a different topic...
Is there any agreement how many cubic meters of cargo hold a ship has for each "ton" of listed cargo capacity? Currently drawing light freighter and yacht deckplans. And the Bando is tight, if it works at all, even upsized to 40 meters. Also, could really use someplace where somebody accurately calculated the volume of various light freighters and yachts, for whatever length they choose.

 

Double post since I can't edit mine -
Found the volume numbers I was looking for.

 

As far as I know, that's the case, and there's one photo of the wings being added to what looks like the fully painted wingless model. It's probably also part of the reason that wingless version gets forgotten about, as there isn't really any images of it outside of the films.

It's mainly the bridge that is giving me the impression of it being smaller, but honestly it's hard to get a firm grasp on it's size from the images on its wookieepedia page - it could be anything from corvette size to larger than the strike cruiser.

Also I just noticed the Victory Star Destroyer, on the Rogue Squadron comic cover, is a bit different from the usual depictions. I especially find the two turrets on the front of the wings interesting, as I had a similar idea, except it would have been the large trench turret from a Venator.

From what I've read(from third party sources) the widening trench was a perspective trick they built into the model. Possibly to make it appear larger.

Dawn of the Rebellion: Visual Guide lists the measurements of the Rogue One ISD as 1600.52m long, 985.17m wide and 455.40m high. It's not as wide as the original Devastator model, which may be because it doesn't have the perspective trick built into the trench - It does pay homage to it by having the nose trench get taller, but it seems to achieve this by bending the bottom hull.

Yeah, I meant ICS or I suppose more specifically the Star War Complete Vehicles version of it.

I sorta agree on there needing to be some sort of dedicated power source for the main weapons, but I don't think it necessarily has to be dedicated generators; it could be something like power cells that act as their ammo and can be recharged through the ships power systems. They would likely take up less space, may be less volatile , and at least with the ISD, there's already a bunch of powerful reactors nearby (main reactor and subsidiary reactors) that can be used to charge them and even could potentially be charged of smaller backup generators that normally wouldn't have enough power to the run one of the main guns.
That's not to say I'm against dedicated generators and with the wide variety of ships; sizes, shapes and manufactures; there's plenty of room for ships to have different power layouts - even with ISDs I could imagine different layouts, with ships being refitted over the years and different designs being trialed. It could even be the case that some turrets use smaller generators as backups or supplemental power.

On the power grid, I don't really see a problem with a ship wide one. Like modern electrical grids, it would be an interconnected power network, that would be mad up of sections connect through power lines/conduits. Each section can be isolated or powered from other parts if need be, and like modern grids losing a power line or generator won't knock out power to the entire grid, adding robustness to the ship systems. It could even work with dedicated generators for the main weapons, as it can be used to supply power from other generators, to any gun which has lost its generator, but otherwise is still operational.
I'd also be surprised if the power lines and hardware of the ship couldn't handle the output of the main reactor (if they couldn't handle the power from it, there would be no reason to have such a large reactor taking up space in the ship) and like electrical grids, all you would need is hardware to step down the power from the reactor.

My understanding of shields in the X-wing books is that they're made up of different sections and ships can basically shunt the energy from one section to the other; basically weakening one shield section to strengthen the other, without having to use extra power(it's very similar to how it works in the X-wing games)
The other thing from the books is that shields could have holes punched into them, by proton torpedoes, using coordinated pinpoint strikes on single point on the shield, overloading them, then quickly launching a second volley through the hole before the shields recover. While it has been a very long time since I read the book, from memory these coordinated strikes were what they used to punch through the Lusankya's shields, just with a lot more torpedoes than other instances.

Here's the stern view of Liberty.

It really depends how much space is devoted to storing that stuff, as the ship has more than enough space inside; to the extent that you can easily fit the entire hangar from a Venator in it and still have plenty of room.

 

Tracking back to @SheaHublin's comment on how unanswerably tough the Executor's deflector was presented in sources like the early comic-strips, which I forgot to acknowledge - that's absolutely true, and shouldn't be ignored; but I don't think it's a contradiction with The Bacta War, because I don't think the Rebels would have had the practical ability to get a dozen X-wing squadrons in one place in the Yavin/Hoth period, or however many Corellian gunships it would take, and even if they could, I suspect they'd have been reluctant to risk them in an all-out attack...

The 5"/38 Mark 12, like its British counterpart the 4.5-inch QF Mk. III, was a fully dual-purpose gun that also served as an anti-destroyer gun for capital ships and a main gun in destroyers and light cruisers. Perfectly effective against attacking destroyers and probably troublesome against six-inch cruisers - the RN carrier HMS Formidable was even placed in the last classic line-of-battle at Cape Matapan, though she was ordered to haul out just before the battleships actually opened fire; they were closing in to point-blank range (two miles), and I suppose someone on the flagship decided that was a risky place for the carrier if the Italians managed to fire back...

I'd say the guns of escort carriers are more akin to those of their real-world counterparts, which had maybe one or two mid-calibre guns in open mounts, but often just a lot of 40mm and 20mm autocannons... those are ships that really aren't designed to fight a surface warship...

Well, these days, real-world carriers are generally supposed to rely on their escorts, while a Star Destroyer packages the relevant systems onto its own hull... but some more modern carriers have retained classic dual-purpose "destroyer" armament - the Italian flagship Cavour has two 3-inch guns, and in the time when the OT was being made, there were the 4-inch guns on the French Clemenceau and Foch (the second ship only being retired by Brazil in 2017), and in a slightly different idiom, the Sea Dart launcher on the RN's Invincible class (state-of-the-art destroyer armament in the 1970s, removed in the 1990s)...

This is definitely a point worth emphasising - most of the really big things the ISD has on-board are tasked fairly inflexibly to the assault-landing / occupation role, though it's notable that they were only added to the lore by WEG, just like the 1.6km hull-length that accommodates them...

I do think that other elements of the package are more flexible, with the ship serving as a barracks from which troops can be shuttled on deployment as required, and the TIEs having a space-superiority and sensor-picket role, but I can't really disagree in more than relative point of emphasis...

I think this specific line is a point where we can broadly agree - but I'm proportionally more cynical about the innate robustness of capital-ship design than you, and thereby tend to lay more emphasis on what happens when smaller attack formations get through the defences and hit in the right place, whether that's as the end result of a large-scale attack or a well-handled small one.

Related to that is the question of how well hull-armour can stand up to hits, not just in terms of direct impacts, but in terms of the overall competence of the protection scheme - it's not just obvious vulnerabilities like the turret ring that can be hit, but the ship has to be designed in such a way that damage doesn't propigate into "magazine" substructures, power and computer systems, and the pressure-hull. Sometimes, utility will dictate a vulnerability, like a hangar bay. Build quality or design changes may also lead to variations in ruggedness within a class. And linked to that are questions of how well-coordinated the defensive tactics are - the interplay of fighters, deflectors, flak and manoeuvre. In short, there are potentially a lot of "gaps in the armour", both literal and figurative, and it seems important how well they're covered by the specifics of design and ship-handling...

That's not to say that robust design is impossible, or that effective tactics can't mitigate weaknesses, just that I'm not sure where the average ISD fits into those spectra of competence...

But I'm perhaps a lot more inclined to see that as a meaningful set of variables than you, meaning this is largely a question of personal opinion - so while I might not headcanon your analysis, I don't want to argue with it, and I'm not sure I can!

Stepping aside from that, there are some questions that it might be worth identifying and trying to define the lore on. How easy it is to get through the deflector on something like an ISD or Assault Frigate? And is the deflector perimiter impervious to fighters themselves, or simply too close to the hull to fly through to without crashing? At what point does a damaged ship becomes unmanageable, in terms of basic hull-integrity, propulsion and navigation?

Any others I've forgotten?

As an aside based on your remark about A-wings, I'll add that, given their compact size and lack of conventional equipment like astromechs, I tend to doubt whether they have the same level of weapons punch and sensor sophistication that X-wings or Y-wings do - the earliest WEG lore just gave them guns, and the missile armament seems to have originated in the computer games around 1993, relating primarily to ships that have been retconned into older R-22s rather than the standard Rebel RZ-1, so although it's not something I particularly want to see defined officially, I tend to think their missile launchers work more more like rocket strafing than the dive bombers or torpedo fighters that are the obvious analogy for the classic ANH snubfighters, and I sometimes wonder how many RZ-1s are actually equipped with launchers at all...

This was something I sidestepped deliberately so as not to overwhelm the discussion with detail (but I'm glad you brought it up!); the numbers seem close enough to make me doubt whether there was even one TIE Bomber squadron on board - after all, because Lusankya was fitted out as an escape ship, the TIE deployment would likely emphasise screening fighters as much as possible; but there is wiggle room from the remount trade with the other warlords, and I definitely agree that there could be one or two TIE Recon squadrons in the mix, further weakening the competence of Isard's hastily-trained straight-wing TIE Fighter units...

I think Project Ambition very much worked like this - consider Krytos! - though I think in the first instance it was designed to influence the New Republic leadership with the threat of disorder, rather than creating the actual situation of system-collapse. Classic Tarkin-style rule-through-fear, combined with Isard's urge to maintain social control...?

I probably think "submission to the civil power" is a more rational and broad-based ideology than its critics represented it - I can't think of anyone except maybe Archbishop Cranmer who really believed in ordained kingship in the absolute sense, as more than a post facto gloss, a figleaf for weakness or an excuse for excessive strength...

This may, in fact, explain why I'm less existentially bothered by the Empire than some members of the fandom. The Empire is led by a crazy Scottish wizard and has a flawed totalitarian ideology, the New Republic is led by a Space Kennedy and has a well-intentioned democratic platform, but neither is a simple reflection of its ideology... both are, ultimately, "just people"...

Well, if it helps, my recollection is that Isard's Revenge is fairly explicit in its indication that she didn't know...

You're right.

Isn't that Star Trek...?

You're still right.

And your defence of Ewoks is appreciated. As well as being very cogent.

I'd just been working with the assumption that when the Rebel fleet placed themselves between the exploding technological terror and the sanctuary moon, they handled the worst of the explosion with deflectors, turbolasers, et cetera... and then there's that old gloss from the crazy Glove of Vader kids' storybooks that had most of the scrap swallowed into hyperspace by the explosion and ejected randomly at places like Mon Calamari...

Wait, I knew there was a prominent lore reference to things exiting hyperspace without a hyperdrive...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Another factor in The Bacta War concerning the status of the Lusankya: it was likely operating with a skeleton crew (perhaps less) and relying on automation. That's probably why Drysso was concerned, he didn't have the crew to man all the SSD's turbolasers and ion cannons plus the engineers likely hadn't been able to spend the past two months or so since escaping Coruscant ensuring the hull was reinforced.

I consider the Rebels A-wings as variant R-22 Spearheads due to their different designs to the films. The RZ-1s would enter service after Yavin per Dodonna and Blissex's redesign.

 

Could be. Power systems, engines, weapons, launch and maintenance spaces, 48 TIE/ln, 12 TIE/sa bombers, 12TIE/IN, 20 AT-AT, 30 AT-ST, 15 K79-S80 troop transports, 8 Lambda shuttles, 1 prefab garrison, 37,085 crew, and 9,700 Stormtroopers is a lot!

Modern supercarrier are roughly (1,100 ft x 200 ft x 50 ft) / 5,000 crew = 2,200 ft3/crew. Star Destroyer would be roughly (5,250 ft x 1,600 ft x 600 ft) / 46,785 crew = 107,727 ft3/crew, so seems plausible.

 

Replying in two parts partly because I was trying to work my replies around eating lunch, but mostly because it allowed me to frame up the earlier post with a punchline...

I'd thought that Eidolon Base only took over its automated TIE rack from the ship, not the actual hangar space, but it's not a bad idea...

Also, tangentially, this makes me think, a propos of the Empire centralising its provision of TIE Fighters, the base's automated maintenance/repair capability (and perhaps it's even adaptable to manufacturing) would make it a very, very useful powerbase for a warlord...

I assume this includes the CGI depiction of the Devastator too...?

IIRC, a small backup generator is depicted on the ICS version, but nothing particularly hefty... they are not particularly consistent among themselves?

Or a really oddly-drawn version of Gideon's Moffship?

VSDs have always been inconsistent, and even the earliest WEG lore referred to some massive engine-replacing rebuilds like the ones they gave old capital ships in the 1930s - but the Harrow in XWRs comics has long been my favourite depiction...

Which means the proportions are "wrong", it's a forced-perspective model?!

...

No worries, I just didn't want to misunderstand...

Well, according to the old WEG lore the "ammo" is supposed to be tibanna gas, they're just turbo-boosted by a laser powered by a turbo-electric generator, hence "turbo-lasers"...

Seems logical, though with the ISD I'm caught between "the Empire centralises power", pun intended, and "this just doesn't track right as a layout to me"...

I tend to think that the main generator is primarily a "hyperdrive engine", the power source that provides the motive force... its essential purpose is to throw its energies through some sort of designated hardware to open what at least one character called the "magic door", and by definition the hardware can handle the relevant energies for that purpose, if perhaps only very briefly, and perhaps by using part of the power to generate containment energies as well...

But what I'm questioning is, if these generators really are as tremendously powerful as some sources say, would it be practical to transmit a significant portion of their peak through power lines to deflectors, sensors or turbolasers? The question that interests me is whether the hardware is going to be physically robust enough to handle the power levels involved without being impractically complex and high-tech...

And then there are additional questions about the practicality of a powerful ship-wide grid - not just about keeping the energy levels where they should be, or even the wider impact of damage effects like explosions or surges, but the mere presence of the hardware might have negative effects...

And in ANH!

The fifty-torpedo salvo seems to take down the front deflector totally, presumably by destroying or damaging the generators (in the same way, at the start of the Black Fleet trilogy, Resolve's hardware gets "slagged" by trying to route enough energy through to sustain the deflector), but you could be right that the four torpedo hits that deactivate the one protecting the main hangar only overloaded it for long enough to allow the rest of the salvo through...

Possibly, yes, though I think Drysso's real concern, unspoken but implied, is that he doesn't have enough TIEs to steal the SSD and overthrow Isard...

There's definitely a logic to distinguishing the very compact A-Wing from RotJ and the larger version introduced in WEG and retained in REBELS as two successive designs in a seqence, and the R-22 and RZ-1 are the obvious canddiates, though I've never quite decided which is which...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

... "the Harrow in the XWRS comics", I mean...



Small daft typos always annoy me, but this one gives me an excuse to post a favourite pic - and it's worth adding that this hangar-bay attack doesn't even try to make the whole ship explode...

Also, my hunt for the image reminded me that Battleground: Tatooine! has a really nice schematic and aft view of the Eidolon - the relationship of the TIE Fighter complex to what we see in the surface base isn't completely clear, but the engine arrangement consists of a spherical core, three main thrusters grouped in a triangle at its back, and a smaller one podded out on each side (to assist in manoeuvring?) and overall feels nicely Star Wars...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I have always felt the Harrow should be in a different class. It has enough distinct features. Maybe it is the Qaz. And comes from a company other than KDY and its subsidiaries. Learning from the designs of the Clone Wars era Republic ships they designed something comparable to try to get into the market...and when the Empire needed ships the other company was able to get a large contract fulfill that need.

 

@Thrawn McEwok @JohnLydiaParker

Just as a side note that might help with the Lusankya details, I noticed that Colonel Arl has an entry in the Complete Encyclopedia. He is explicitly said to be an officer in the Imperial Navy, under the command of Captain Drysso, and that he was in charge of the TIE squadrons (note the plural) on the Lusankya. Whatever more fighters it might have had at Thyferra, it still had at least two TIE squadrons, so 24 TIEs. His Wookieepedia entry is actually a bit in error when it says that he commanded two fighter Wings. It seems that Lusankya had only at least two squadrons, though another source might well confirm the presence of two full Wings

If Drysso deployed any at the Yag'Dhul Station immediately, he may or may not have recovered them before fleeing. His track record from Endor would suggest that he didn't recover them if he had deployed any, so there may have been more than 24 TIEs immediately prior to Yag'Dhul Station.

Arl's very Rank of Colonel is an indicator of the number of fighters (not all of them necessarily TIEs) under his command, but by itself isn't enough to draw a conclusion. It merely hints at the Lusankya having enough embarked fighters to justify the equivalent of a Wing Commander.

Part of my own head-canon, based on real life, is that any ship or workplace crew numbers should always be divided by three, for the number of shifts that the active crew rotate between. So, a ship with about 100,000 crew really only needs 33,000 or so at any one time. If the ship is badly short-staffed, or even operating with a skeleton crew, they might not even have enough to guarantee that one shift can sleep while the other works, and will inevitably get tired, unfocused, sleep deprived, and the ship will overall operate far less effectively than it would with alert and well rested crews. I assume that Antilles and the Rogues would have the relevant information about the crewing levels of Lusankya, and probably even time their attacks to align with whenever the crews would be at their most tired and overworked, but still on duty. Say, just an hour or so before their shifts switch.

@Thrawn McEwok
On the related matter of SSD shields, the evidence from the Classic comics has to be considered in light of what the Rebellion might have had available to throw at the Executor, at least what the Yavin faction had available. Multiple sources indicate that the Gordian Reach and the Bright Jewel were blockaded, which of course would take a huge amount of ships, but such a blockade would be as useful for keeping Rebel ships out and away from Yavin as it would be at keeping them in. The blockade would have prevented the Rebels from massing enough ships to seriously challenge the Executor. The Rebels merely couldn't get through the shields of the Executor with what they had on hand within the Gordian Reach, and the Rebel forces elsewhere in the Galaxy couldn't unite to seriously threaten the Executor. If the huge Rebel fleets shown around the same time in the Sixth Decant in Gambler's World and in the Rebellion comics are any indication, they certainly had those forces. The Yavin faction had probably already expended its forces against the Death Star and previously on the Fortressa at Despayre, and thus had nothing serious left over to throw at the Executor besides the one or two Nebulon-B frigates we see in the Classic comics.

 

I'm just reading this and I'm thinking "Captain Drysso??" in the same way Wedge goes "Captain Davip??" in Rebel Dream