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

Replying in reverse order because one of my replies became a riduculous longpost...

Oh, I like this. You can fly some small capital ships, the Arquitens and the Yuuzhan Vong frigate being the obvious example, and we might suspect that Corellian corvettes and gunships do it to - but that's not how it's meant to work... and this also explains the difference between the diminutive "police" types designated as a frigate or cruiser and a freighter or a shuttle of the same size - the "police" types have a bridge, not a cockpit, and are commanded like something larger...

I care!

Hah! Saves me saying anything at all, but I'm enjoying the discussion...

Exactly - I'd say it's more choice than strict "need", but my inference is that the ISD uses a lot of hands to "work the ship"... not only are there three sets of maintenance personnel, but each set contains an optimally large number of maintenance teams, each with limited-scope specialised training on a specific area of the ship's tech; a more "lean-manned" ship wouldn't just carry one set of techs, they'd try to minimize the number of personnel through multitasking, too...

Interesting. I tend to think that a lot of the useful parts of the ship - hangars, weapons and sensor mountings, viewports, thrusters, etc. - create vulnerable areas that are intrinsically not worth armouring, though they'll often be screened by a deflector, while the solid hull planes are the armour round the most vulnerable systems.

As to armour, I think we're really only disagreeing on its location. Contrast the the ISD, where the hull planes angle over the three big ion-drives, enclosing them completely except at the rear, with the Corellian corvette, where the engines are arranged around a central "box" structure that might be the "main reactor" of the dialogue - to my thinking, the blockade runner's "engine box" looks like exactly the sort of armoured core you're thinking of, but the ISD is essentially a "Corellian" design with the engines enclosed in the armoured arrowhead...





(Sources here and here - that second page is a wonderful set of pics of the ANH studio model, which ties into some earlier exchanges involving @Grevious_Coward too... I don't think I've ever seen that hangar door in the aft end of the smaller forward bay before!! And stars, are those rows of flak guns along the sides of the hangar bay and two control-room gondolas for them at the aft end...?! "There goes another one!")

But I say all this simply because it's a fun discussion, and I'm enjoying seeing what other people say, having your opinions strike off mine...

I broadly agree - there's a huge difference between training and conversion training - but I always liked the idea in Rebel Assault that there was an Alliance agent in Anchorhead wrangling those kids flying Skyhoppers in Beggar's Canyon into a clandestine training program to produce pilots for the X-wing and A-wing...

This!

The proportions are different, the angularity has been increased, but I see it as simply the XWRS artist's interpretation of the WEG design, with the same basic layout, wedged-out bow, flared midsection, bulky rear around the engines with the bridge podded forward at the top... and as I said a few replies back, I have no problem explaining the difference in terms of simplifying the design by removing curves and unnecessarily complex assemblies for an easier and faster build, something that has strong real-world antecedents...

Then again, there's a part of me that thinks all Strike Cruisers ought to look like Gideon's Moffship in The Mandalorian...

Which reminds me... the original Moffship in Glove of Vader was a Strike Cruiser, too... and shows just the range of interpretations you can get...

Well, yes - but this raises a question! Across the Galaxy, how many of those local groups amount to anything?

As I said at the start, this got long, and in my usual style, it's become a journey through old lore that's designed for everyone to attack with their opinions, themed as part of a discussion of how we think about Star Wars in general...

The majority of Rebel activity will be low-level, contained or suppressed by local Imperial patrols or simply by the sort of local security force we see in Preox-Morlana in Andor, for the simple reason that if they become enough of a nuisance to challenge that level of control, they will invite the application of a big triangular Imperial steamiron stomping on their face, forever...

The innately marginal nature of effective Rebel activity means that sizeable formations of ground troops and meaningful capital ships will be unusual, and limited in their application; how many areas of the Galaxy does the Alliance deny the Empire control of? Only as many as the Empire does not choose to fight in...

Some interesting numbers from the old WEG material, which I still think did a whole lot of good thinking about this (and apologies that this got long)...

* The classic example of a large-scale Alliance presence is on Mantooine in Atrivis sector, described in the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, where a lightly-equipped insurgent army of "several thousand" personnell, organized in at least two divisions with component regiments, are able to deny control of the hinterland of that planet to a larger Imperial force, confining them to an uneasy control of the major population centres; but there's a paradox here - backstory in earlier chapters shows that the Mantooine Liberators originally overthrew the planet's Imperial garrison and captured their base, before some large triangular things jumped in to stomp them and destroyed most of their original force; the Empire then secured the cities and raised a large force of low-morale local conscripts under regular officers, who they use to campaign against the Rebels in the hinterland - in short, while from the Alliance perspective the Imperials appear to be under semi-siege, the Empire's POV is probably that the Mantooine insurgency is being contained using limited local resources, and if the Mantooine Liberators were able to gain more success again, the Empire would no doubt respond with much more force, just like they did previously... in short, apparent Alliance success is conditional on an Imperial perception that it is not success.

* The Mantooine Liberators are part of the Atrivis Sector Force, the other main component of which is the underground on Fest, consisting of an unspecified number of sabotage/assassination cells, each mustering some 5-20 members, who are assigned separate zones of the urban sprawl. The claim that there are "few wilderness areas available" for insurgent activity is somewhat diminished by later lore which insists that Fest, while industrially important, is an ice world with proportionally compact setted zones - the wilderness areas simply don't present targets to the saboteurs. The total size of the network is not clear, and need not be larger than a few dozen people - it's mentioned that the Fest insurgents have sent agents to other systems in the sector, but beyond helping the Mantooine Liberators rebuild, they don't seem to have been able to create useful networks on any of them.

* The Atrivis Sector Force headquarters - essentially the off-world coordination HQ of the Fest underground - is a secret base on Generis. This also has a notional allocation of thirty-six fighters, and also houses a key Alliance hypercomm hub - but these rather go together, the fighters being deployed by the central Alliance command primarily to protect their communications station rather than to act aggressively in the sector, and these defensive priorities, compounded by maintenance difficulties, a lack of pilots, and a tendency to rotate the base's spare fighters to missions in other sectors, mean that they're barely mission-capable as a component of the Atrivis Sector Force.

* When a large attack with five "wings" of X-wings and Y-wings was staged against an orbital base at Mantooine, the fighters were all pulled from other places rather than from Generis. Two wings from the main Alliance base, one from the main Alliance fleet, one from Ghorman, which was recovering from some rough handlings by Imperials near Tierfon, and a composite wing from Tierfon itself and nearby bases Farstey and Homon; this becomes even more of a logistical whirl when later continuity is applied - the fleet is presumably near Mon Cal, while the Tierfon-Farstey-Homon group covers a sweep of sectors either side of the Hydian Way, all of which is at least in the spinward part of the Galactic Rim... but Ghorman is round on the other side of the Core, from where fighters are jumping first to Tierfon and then to Mantooine, and the main Alliance base must be Hoth, on the far side of the Outer Rim! Hold that thought...

* Tierfon Base, introduced in the Star Wars Sourcebook, is also covered in some detail - it houses a modest force of just eight X-wings, assigned "to patrol the outer Sumita sector" (is the "inner" sector too heavily patrolled by the Empire?) and provide an escort for Rebel freighters, while the base has an additional stopover/refuelling role for long-range missions (possibly these are the same freighters, and if so, they're more like the Falcon than a Galofree or an Action IV); as well as the eight pilots and 32 ground-crew, there are about 100 base personnel, with five T-47s and a few fixed laser-turrets for defence. Later sources confirm that the the Tierfon squadron participated regularly in hit-and-fades, but state that it was intended primarily as a training unit - hence the number of personnel in the main Alliance base who had served there; in short, like Generis, it is really an outpost supporting the central Alliance base and its activities.

* The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook also says the Alliance has between 1,000 and 5,000 bases capable of supporting starfighters, but the vast majority of them are fallback positions, concealed landing areas with attached stores caches and presumably some provision for personnel quarters, designed to be left empty and undetected until required. And while the numbers are impressive, they are also telling - if 1,000 bases represents a meaningful multiplier of total fighter units, the Alliance does not have so much as a single starfighter squadron in each sector. True, they will have additional fighters deployed on cruisers and frigates and carriers, and more loosely-affiliated local allies, which may drastically increase the overall number of squadrons, but their overall planetary "footprint" is slight, for the simple reason that a larger deployment would get more quickly caught.

* Honestly, I think there's a lot less than a single active squadron per sector - there are a few genuine wings with two or three squadrons, at places like Hoth, Ghorman and Atrivis, and smaller groups of bases like the Tierfon-Farstey-Homom trio, which might not have a couple of dozen fighters between them, all of which are dependent on the high command. Large missions are created by the Alliance high comand creatively deploying these limited resources. They appear to come from nowhere, cause havoc, and disappear, and the Rebels seem to be attacking in strength all over the Galaxy at once. If the Empire finds anything, it's a well-prepared base that seems to have recently been abandoned...

* There's also probably a large number of fighters with the Alliance fleet, where there seems to be a policy of organizing them into properly-constituted wings of three squadrons each, placed on every large ship that has suitable hangar space, but they're largely used to defend the fleet, or perhaps for fleet reconnaissance, with a few squadrons being loaned for other missions as required. And the fleet is depicted as essentially a single force - according to The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, no more than four cruisers and carriers and a quarter of the escorts are to be detached for other missions at any given time.

* So, now for the Ortolan in the room - Mon Cal. Why did the Empire not attack Mon Cal, or at least blockade the system? WARFARE says that the Alliance deployed massive minefields to limit hyperspace access to a few secret routes (it's a nice touch, prefiguring the NJO, and echoing the reason that the Empire never gets near Hapes, but I think that was entirely Jason, not me). But part of the answer has to be that the Empire chose not to fight there - presumably they reckoned that the risks outweighed the advantage, and that they had better things to do with their big pointy. A single shipyard capable of producing two cruisers and a dozen smaller capital ships in a standard year isn't really that significant - not compared with the hidden refitting facilities for older ships (Disney-era material has co-located these with the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook's secret fleet base at Telaris, a few sectors away) and the all-important X-wing production lines....

* A number of other Rimward alien groups with their own fleets and systems do throw in with the Rebellion just before Endor, notably the Sullustans and Bothans, who had been at least notionally subject to the Empire, and also in a more limited way Dornea. Each of these has a fleet, but while the Dorneans outfought a larger Imperial force in a sustained campaign, I doubt the others would have risked longer-term confrontation.

* Another newcomer at this point was the Virgillian Free Alignment, an insurgency in oppressed settlements on the fringes of Virgilian space (which seems to be just a single system); they had assembled a force of low-end snubfighters, and perhaps a few small capital ships, but their real success came when the Alliance arranged for the supply of eight Quasar Fire-class bulk cruisers from Sullust, which allowed them to attack Virgilia directly, capture several smaller capital ships, and secure some kind of "truce" with the autorities - again, the important thing was the dramatic application of resources controlled by the central Alliance command. Their carriers seem to have facilitated the direct attack (few if any of their fighters having hyperdrive), but while people who like large numbers are welcome to focus on their notional ability to deploy around 400 fighters, that number seems very large to me - I would hazard that most of them were used to carry troops. Two carriers and twenty escorts went to Endor, one carrier was retained as guardship, the rest being damaged and requiring extensive repair.

* But before Endor, how many sector forces contesting against an active Imperial presence have fighter squadrons or raiding commandos? A few dozen? A few hundred? And how many of them are actually significant to the Rebellion's success, or at least psychological perceptions of their success, in the way that Tierfon and Generis and Free Virgillia are...?

There is always room for another story - Lothal is very much the proof of this, which effortlessly added a Twi'lek A-wing ace to the roster of big Rebel heroes, too - but it has to be constrained somewhat by the practicality of the setting...

There will probably be hundreds of Mantooines, maybe even thousands, but they aren't effective challenges to the Empire, and are indistinguishable from other background noise...

Good question. And the Sith Dreadnought is a fantastic design. Looks great, has a nice combination of fighters and well-positioned armament (I like the way the standard in-game type has no heavy turrets, just the mid-calibre quads), and has a really well-thought-out set of interior spaces in the game that seem to fit properly into the hull - bridge / command corridor, hangar complex, engineroom, and partial crew quarters in one of the forward prongs.

As to the Republic Valor, I'm not sure I can voice my opinion aloud in polite company...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Oh yeah, and just for fun...the USS Enterprise-D is a little over 600 meters long, the length of a Dreadnaught-class cruiser. I always assumed it was the length of a Nebulon-B, but it's actually twice as long. Also, a Borg cube is 3,000 m long on each side, making it much bigger than a ISD.

 

Ah, Yuuzhan Vong ships. NJO Sourcebook and the novels seem to have a slight issue with sizes. Then again, the Wook isn't that great at matching descriptions from the novels to the Sourcebook materials.

 

I do too. Aligns with my classifications well. Command pilot vs commanding officer, cockpit vs bridge, support ship vs independant action, combat craft vs capital ship. Well done!

 

I would argue there are real limits to the Empire’s ability to impose its will as well. I figure there’s about 5000 Star destroyers and 25,000 Imperial warships - but the Empire has a million member worlds.

My personal breakdown… The Empire has firm control of almost all of the 50,000 worlds that contain ~70 percent of the population within Imperial space, can easily impose their will on the 50,000 that contain the next ~20 percent of the population, a “limited” presence of greater or lesser degree (which includes actual combat troops at all) on 150,000, 250,000 it maintains a couple of officials and enough of a presence to ensure the world is generally following Imperial directives and more or less loyal - but if the planet isn’t, actually doing something about it requires forces from off-world, and it is very much “pick your battles.”

I have one backwater world in a WIP novel of mine in that last category where there only important settlement is the one with the starport, the imperial “garrison” is just 20 ISB agents, and they’re on the weaker side of a power conflict with the powerful local starport authority. “Status quo” is that if starport police find a lone or pair of ISB on the starport grounds, they arrest them, hold them for the legally allowed there 12 hours without charge, then release them without filling any charges! The local ISB can’t simply arrest the head of the local starport authority, since the aftermath of that would require bringing in two battalions to pacify the world. Now obviously allowing the rebellion to operate openly would bring in the troops, and the planet follows imperial law, save perhaps for one or two minor things they really don’t like, and pay their taxes, and so things continue this way.

400,000 worlds are so unimportant and low population that the Imperial means of control is having agents randomly and secretly show up to make sure the planet hasn’t throw in with the rebellion. The locals won’t allow a Rebel X-wing to publicly refuel at the landing pads, or somebody to make anti-Imperial formal speeches in the town square (But nobody’s going to go looking for somebody doing it more discreetly either), since “The Empire will find out about it within a few weeks, and then they’ll send troops in and the Empire will actually enforce Imperial law here.” (As opposed to their local laws, which may be pretty different.) That, and these worlds usually don’t bother paying Imperial taxes, and the sum is so small the Empire will never notice, but the locals sure would mind.

100,000 are tiny backwaters where the Empire is “that big government-ish thing other places care about.” Most of the residents would be surprised to find they’re a member of the Empire at all. They probably decided to join the Old Republic at some point in their history then quickly stopped caring, and probably don’t even belong on the list of Imperial member worlds in the first place, simply being carried over when the New Order was imposed. Any attempt by the Empire to actually impose some measure of control would be met with an active bushwhacking campaign.
Another group of worlds of unknown size is the same, except not a member of the Empire. The last group is tiny mining outposts and such the Empire doesn’t even known exist.

A few thousand no longer are even settled, the settlement either having failed and the settlers died, or having been abandoned; they may have been this way for centuries (having decided to be part of the Old Republic at first colonization), but nobody at Corescant ever discovered that.
A couple hundred in theory became part of the Empire by (highly misguided) Imperial Decree, but the locals would rather violently disagree with that and nobody actually considers them part of the Empire, Empire included.

A couple thousand worlds in Hutt space some treaty once said were part of the Empire. The Empire doesn’t even include them on their list of member worlds.


Finally, by the time of Endor somewhere around 3% of the Imperial population lives on a planet that’s secretly paying taxes to the Rebel Alliance as well as the Empire, while outwardly pretending to be loyal Imperial worlds.

Af for the ability of the Empire to retain control, after Endor, despite the Empire having only lost a tiny amount of its forces, about 1 in 5 worlds quickly declared themselves openly for the Rebel Alliance - and against that many worlds at once there was nothing the Empire could really do about it.

 

To pop into this (more in my field than technical warship stuff) conversation: the above conversation is why I'm really looking forward to Andor Season 2: because Tony Gilroy is one of the first people to write for Star Wars who really gets how popular insurgencies work historically. And I think what he gets and what we will hopefully see more of is how flexible and fluid and all-or-nothing such insurgencies can really be.

Played right, the Rebel Alliance versus Empire struggle is a very very interesting example of almost totally asymmetric forces opposing each other with a purity that we've never precisely seen in the real world. Both are essentially playing push-pull with an asymmetric set of resources, but have potential access to virtually unlimited resources that could deliver them victories very quickly.

I tend to strongly agree with @Thrawn McEwok's basic idea of the Rebel Alliance's central networks as a highly limited and centralized fleet force loosely lending and overseeing a much vaster network; and I even more agree with the basic dynamic whereby most Rebel military actions are designed precisely to run enough under the radar to avoid overwhelming Imperial military force.

But I think even here it's important to note that in my conception what the Rebellion should primarily lack relative to the Empire isn't so much personnel as it is trained personnel and military-grade equipment. Or really, more accurate, as people have pointed out, would be training capacity and industrial capacity. From ANH, it's clear that the Rebellion is imagined as a specifically post-World-War era insurgency, which is to say, a group that operates on the basis of a Galaxy totally awash with ex-military hardware and ex-military personnel. (This is why the Clone Wars are an important part of the backstory even without us knowing anything about them: we need to know there was a huge massive Galaxy-scale war in the near-past not primarily to explain the rise of the Empire but to explain why the Rebellion is feasible; this would have been more immediate to audiences in 1977 closer to the World Wars and Vietnam).

So really the Rebellion should have ready and perhaps even excessive access to certain kinds of (pseudo-)military hardware and certain kinds of (pseudo-)military personnel. What this should mean, though, as it was post-WW1 and WW2, is primarily people with some kind of basic conscript training and/or familiarity with military or military-adjacent hardware and organization, and vast amounts of cheap mostly infantry weaponry to play with. What they should profoundly lack is the industrial capacity to build things like tanks and fighters and warships that require technical knowledge and specific maintenance, and likewise the highly trained personnel able to actually build and maintain and run these things once created.

Hence, I think, the dynamic we see in the films and elsewhere, where the core of the Rebellion is an absolutely tiny, highly-professionalized, well-trained, extremely elite group with state-of-the-art military hardware and accompanied by what I imagine would be an equally elite and arguably even more important core of engineers and technicians able to run and maintain these machines. This group is actually vastly more elite and effective pound-for-pound than most of the industrialized Imperial forces they encounter--but also perilously vulnerable for precisely the same reason.

What the Rebellion stands to lose at Yavin and Hoth, in other words, isn't personnel or hardware in the generic sense, or even just the High Command or the government, but a large proportion of their elite military and engineering hardware and personnel, and even there the value of these resources isn't even so much their military effectiveness pound for pound as the fact that they are totally irreplaceable. It would thus make perfect sense that the High Command would be terrified of gathering these resources anywhere the Imperial hammer could conceivably be brought down, and instead would primarily lend out its hardware and personnel in small numbers to carry out missions in tandem with larger, more irregular groups.

That being said, what I think the Rebellion should have in great numbers, always potentially but often in reality, is access to vast numbers of relatively untrained personnel with access to cheap infantry weapons. These people, to be effective, need to be directed by the trained core Alliance personnel; but even more importantly, they need to be inspired, ideologized into the Alliance cause or at least the anti-Empire cause to the point where they're willing to go up directly against the Empire's industrialized forces. The key to doing this, though, paradoxically, is to show them that the Rebellion does in fact have a good enough elite military to actually beat the Empire, first by running the central Alliance as basically a propaganda outfit, taking every opportunity to show off shiny powerful Star Cruisers with shiny better-than-TIE-Fighter X-wings crewed by heroic better-than-Stormtrooper professional soldiers, and then by using those extremely scare resources to win battles whose propaganda value is vastly more impactful than their military effect. If they can do that, they can relatively quickly raise vast untrained armies and even fleets (made up of cheap ex-military or even civilian hardware) that could overwhelm the Empire's military, which compared to the general population of the Galaxy is even smaller proportionally than the Rebel military is to the Imperial.

In contrast, what the Empire has in spades isn't really numbers or hardware in the generic sense, but the industrial and training capacity to constantly churn out state-of-the-art machines and weapons and sufficiently trained personnel to run and maintain them. This capacity, though, is, in the face of a Galaxy of people and hardware, totally insufficient and negligible and infinitesimal.

Hence, to win the Empire needs to use its industrial-scientific-training capacity to churn out pilots and machines and make them better and better not even primarily to defeat the Rebellion militarily or police the Galaxy, but rather to constantly demonstrate their overwhelming might and keep the general population in fear of them and find and wipe out the tiny core of the Rebellion. A key part of this set of tactics would be actively avoiding ever bringing anything but overwhelming force to bear on any one point. Hence, I think, we have a Galaxy mostly like the locations we see in Andor, where Imperial presence is extremely low-key if not non-existent and farmed out to local groups: but when the Empire is there, they're there in shiny overwhelming force, Star Destroyers and TIEs and Stormtroopers on patrol constantly and publicly. (Actually I quite like the idea that the reason we see Star Destroyers so often compared to other Imperial hardware is that a large proportion of the total number of Star Destroyers are basically just tasked with perpetual intimidation duty, popping around from trouble zone to trouble zone to briefly show overwhelming force and then popping out again).

Or to sum up, the pivot on which the Galactic Civil War turns, like real-world insurgencies, is "hearts and minds." Both sides are ultimately playing a dangerous game where the propaganda value of their military is more important than the hardware value. The small trained core of Rebels are running around creating brush-fires and winning set-piece victories while staying just enough under the radar to avoid bringing the Imperial hammer down on them; the Empire, meanwhile, is trying to show the flag everywhere they can without making themselves vulnerable to anything that could be construed as a public defeat and hence letting many many small brush-fires and even active popular insurgencies and system-wide secessions slide while occasionally bringing an overwhelming hammer down, while they try desperately to find the small core of Rebels and develop new and shinier and scarier technology to scare the Galaxy into submission. If at any time the Empire catches the Rebel fleet and/or core group and wipes them out, they have basically won; if at any time the Empire suffers an embarrassing and public and symbolic enough sequence of propaganda defeats, they have basically lost. This is the game.

Side Note: Based on the above, I would argue that the reason why Mon Cal was left alone wasn't because they weren't a problem (by giving the Rebellion even very limited industrial capacity to build and replace military hardware and trained personnel, they were an overwhelming force multiplier) or because they couldn't be directly conquered at any time if necessary but (1) because the whole population was pro-Rebellion and so the Empire couldn't easily or totally subdue the planet in the face of a popular resistance, or at least didn't want to perpetually commit the hardware to do so, and even more (2) because the Empire simply couldn't or wouldn't risk a situation where they brought their overwhelming might publicly to bear on the Rebellion and still suffered defeats or even visible setbacks along the way to eventual victory. Every single time a Star Cruiser or a wing of B-wings or mines or irregulars blew up a Star Destroyer would be a perpetual propaganda victory for the Rebellion and a potential spark to ignite resistance elsewhere.

Lots of the above could and should be disputed, but that's my basic sense of the dynamics involved!

 

I have that sourcebook too.WEG stuff is really good material whether you play it or not.

@CaptainPeabody

I wouldn't underestimate the size of the Mon Cal shipyards - from 1 BBY to about 1 ABY their yards are busy converting the existing Star Cruisers to warships, afterwards building about 6-8 Star Cruisers a year - and the yards are being rapidly expanded. By the time Thrawn comes around I'd say closer to 20+ Star Cruisers a year - simply in order for the New Republic to have the number it does then. That's only perhaps half the yard capacity, and much less in terms of slips though - there's also Assault Frigate conversions going on, general merchant-to-warship conversions, repair work, and slips left empty for incoming ships needing repair. Question - do we actually know that more then, say, half the Rebel fleet was present at Endor? The intended operation didn't call for more then about the 50 or so capital ships they actually fielded.

Another major problem pacifying Mon Calamari would have - it's a waterworld with underwater cities and water-breathing inhabitants. The only troops that the Empire could actually use would be Seatroopers and AT-AT Swimmers - and the Empire has pretty few of them. Quite possibly "not enough in the whole Empire."

To expanding on mining - command detonated mines are a thing in real life, and presumably would be in a GFFA. If you went all-out in system defense with mines, I can see a lot of delicious possibilities. Powerful sensor jammers to make the mines hard to detect. "Channels" left in (regular) minefields are more then big enough to allow capital ships to pass safely - at low speed in single file. Directly under heavy defensive guns and within range of planetary-class ion cannons. A turn in the "channel," with very dense collections of the heaviest mines awaiting ships that don't turn - such as if they've been disabled by said ion cannons. And would have to pass within range of a large number of command-detonated mines in the process.
Of course, the number of mines required for a complete 3d shell would be massive. And we don't see that in anywhere, so perhaps not. The waterworld nature also raises the potential of planetary ion cannons on submersible (and mobile) platforms, firing with only the barrel above the water. (And who's movements can't be tracked and locations are always unknowns. Even the number in existence would be an unknown.)

And the mined hyperspace routes might be an insolvable problem. Taking a page from an old sourcebook; tractoring asteroids into the even the "safe" lanes which would cause ships to drop out of hyperspace - surrounded by command-detonated mines. Not a problem unless facilities monitoring incoming traffic see an Imperial warship, in which case "they make go boom."

This could also add up to the Empire either having to commit more ships to the operation then they actually can afford to pull out of line, or risk loosing with heavy losses. Oh, and the planetary shield generations would require a Torpedo Sphere - and the mobile Planetary ion cannons platforms means it could suddenly be ambushed by 20 of them firing at it from close range. Which would likely result in it taking out the planetary shields for a period by falling from space and impacting them. If they commit Vader's Death Head fleet - let's just say the Exeuctor's survival is not a given, if Vader is present his survival is very much not a given, and without the Exeuctor the fleet lacks enough firepower for more then a coin flip - and victory there will resulting is losing a dozen or two Star Destroyers.
Other risks - just because the hyperlane is mine-free now, doesn't mean it won't be mined behind them during or after the battle. The fleet committed might be trapped, or be taking a high risk if it leaves quickly - and running into a brand new minefield risks the loss of the fleet. Also, the Empire lacks good intelligence on the strength of the Rebel Fleet, and has absolutely no idea if the Rebellion would commit it to Mon Cal's defense. Imperial Intelligence analysts warn that Mon Calamari might be a trap for the Death's Head Fleet, and Vader with it; that doesn't mean it is, and in the event it wasn't, but the Empire can't know that. And if the badly mauled remains of a fleet is trapped there, Intelligence warns that the Rebellion may decide to commit their fleet afterwards under such favorable circumstances if the balance of forces is overwhelmingly in their favor. If they do, the battered fleet in the system would likely be a complete loss. (And in the event, the Rebellion may actually have done so, if they have an effective 3 to 1 superiority - and they know the Empire can't reinforce them. The aftermath would be almost be that of "Endor but the Emperor escaped.")
Losing the biggest task force the Empire had fielded in at least a decade, and certainly loosing the Death's Head Fleet and Vader, is exactly the kind of defeat the Empire can't afford.

Agree with most of the rest of what you said. Hyperdrive equipped fighters let a small number of them be anywhere within a sector or so's radius, and a moderate operational pace would give the appearance of several times more then there actually are. Mostly due to the distance between strikes resulting in the natural impression they must be different forces. In all honesty the Core and Colonies likely have practically no Rebel bases. Never understood the value of Hoth and the fleet before - now I do. Also makes the Tarkin doctrine make at least some sense - the superweapons have little practical military value, but that's not the point...

But the Empire's frequent atrocities provide far more recruits then the Rebellion could get on it's own, mostly of the hatred-of-the-Empire-is-personal type. If you kill 20 Rebels, but as a result of what you did 30 sign up (those who've lost homes, relatives, family etc.), then you're defeating yourself.

Have to disagree at least some that every blown up Star Destroyer is a permanent defeat through. Every public on Earth, regardless of where or when, has or had short attention spans, the GFFA is likely no different. The Rebellion needs a steady stream of propaganda victories, Imperial failures and such. Embarrassing Imperial defeats, debacles or failures are even better. It's also quite likely, based on historical experience, that most Imperial officers haven't figured that out, and indeed much of the Imperial hierarchy.

 

The source for Drysso abandoning his TIEs at Endor is inferred if not implied by his actions at Yag'Dhul where he hastily fled without recovering his deployed fighter craft, and his own recollection of how he had previously prematurely fled Endor before the Death Star II was even destroyed. At least, that's the subtext that I read- that it wasn't the first time he had panicked and acted in haste.
@JohnLydiaParker @Thrawn McEwok

Having Drysso flee Endor without recovering his fighters (what ones hadn't already been destroyed) also helps provide a possible way that Grand Admiral Teshik was able to hold off the Rebels for so long after the departure of the rest of the Imperial fleet: he had a lot of extra support from stranded fighters. In addition to plenty of space radiation and wreckage from the DS2 and wrecked warships that he could have easily have used defensively (moving it with his tractor beams into defensive wreckage spheres that left only a few channels of approach that his working guns could clearly target), he surely had a lot of TIES that didn't make it back to their surviving ISDs in time, or which were left behind, or whose berth ships had been destroyed. He probably also had surviving TIES that had been stationed on the DS2, which had plenty of time to launch and get clear of the station. Drysso is known to have been the type of Captain to not recover his fighters, and he probably wasn't any better at Endor than at Yag'Dhul.

As for crew levels, it just makes sense that there has to be some sort of slack built in, at least for the very key positions and tasks. Even in the GFFA, Humans aren't able to stay away 24/7 without eventually falling apart and suffering from degraded cognition. They have to sleep some time. There logically must exist some minimal shift system, and I reckon that even skeleton crew numbers might have to account for the need for some small amount of rest time. It makes sense that an Empire at its height would have no problem properly staffing its ships, but a declining one would not be able to adequately staff its vessels, at least not all of them, and not all of the time.

Sure, some of the crew and embarked personnel won't always have much to do in that down time beyond training, sleep, and exercise, although I do assume that some crew had much less down time than others. The bridge crew shifts probably were "active" at their main responsibilities far more than the embarked Stormtroopers and ground vehicle crew, for example. Of course, I can't immediately recall if the Lusankya even still had the entire Corps of Stormtroopers and multiple prefabricated Imperial Garrisons normally assigned to SSDs.

 

It just occurred to me that the "if fully manning battlestations requires 10,000 crew, carry 10,000 crew" with outside of combat only 3,000 on duty is partly based on the assumption that combat will be infrequent, and only last several hours, after which the ship can go back to only 3,000 on duty. But if a ship would routinely need to be ready for combat for a day or days, then you would need to have multiple complete sets of crew so that crew can go off watch while keeping the ship ready to fight., so you would need 30,000. (Or 20,000 on a two watch. Wait - are the skeleton crew figures sometimes given for capital ships based on a three watch system? If so, you could cut it to 2/3rds of that with a two-watch system - attractive option for prize crews, which come out of your ship's compliment and only need to get the ship to the nearest friendly base.)

 

A two-shift crewing system would be the logical minimum for any ship. Three just makes things easier in general, but two should be the baseline for critical roles, like Engineering and Bridge shifts. The "efficiency obsessors" in real life directly cause longer term damage and burnout by taking all the slack out of a crew and working environment. A perfectly efficient system is the exact opposite of one that is redundant and resilient. The same situation would probably arise in-Universe, when the second anything goes wrong with any particular person or task the effects would be far worse than they would be in a normal crewing situation. Bare-minimum skeleton crews still have to sleep at some point, so perhaps even the skeleton numbers factor in some sort of shift system for key roles?

To further complicate matters, several EU works mention crew, Officers, and even embarked Troopers serving in a variety of roles aboard ship. The original Imperial Sourcebook, and very prominently in the Biggs Darklighter/Rand Ecliptic Issues of the Empire comic books. The question is how extensive that sort of "double duty" was within the Empire, and aboard ships in general. It could really have an effect on total crew numbers, and also basic ship functioning. Consider that a ship already operating on a skeleton crew loses just a few or even one key person doing double duty, like a Bridge Officer also serving as a TIE Pilot, which was a normal thing even at the height of the Empire. On a ship already short-staffed, the results would be far more pronounced and lead to much greater performance degradation.

As this all relates to the Lusankya going down too easily, it really helps with the suspension of disbelief if the ship has nowhere near the proper amount of crew and accordingly wasn't being maintained or functioning as nearly well as would a properly crewed SSD have operated, and what crew it had were almost completely burned out.

 

The volumetrics are interesting here, because the E-D is a lot less bulked-out within its length than the Dreadnaught Cruiser, and I suspect it will have a considerably smaller internal space. You also get a sense of how massive typical capital-ship ion-drives are compared with a Trek "impulse pack", and how much more "armoured" Star Wars hulls seem...

Do you have anything specific in mind? I suspect the sourcebook lengths were drafted independently before a lot of the length statements in the novels were made, and they ended up contradicting one another... and beyond that it doesn't always seem decisively certain which type from the novels is intended in the sourcebook (or indeed when the name used in one novel applies to the same type in another)!

Regardless, the frigate I'm thiking of is the one Jaina captures from Nom Anor, which is 150m long, and while it's designed for a decent-sized flight crew and quite a lot of infantry, it can be flown in combat by a single pilot...

The long replies I'm trimming for length, but I just want to emphasise that I'm really enjoying reading the discussion...

Were you meaning 5,000 ISDs, or including some other types as well...?

For what it's worth - and here I'm just throwing out the number for discussion - there's a WEG-derived figure of 25,000 Star Destroyers that was then given more authority by being quoted by Pellaeon in Specter of the Past, though I tend to think that includes smaller hulls like the Acclamator, Vindicator and Gladiator.

I tend to think the Empire has a lot of ships, but the majority of them are patrol and reconnaissance designs rather than anything that can be expected to stand up to combat or usefully suppress an uprising, and others, like Star Galleons and Bulk Cruisers, are really only armed transports, or at best flak escorts - even the Nebulon-B probably falls into this category. I suppose the important question is not just what we mean by the number of Star Destroyers, but the proportion of other "useful" cruisers and frigates with a capability beyond convoy escort - the Strike Cruiser suddenly starts to seem much more important as a component of the fleet...

To illustrate the variety that's possible in fleet configuration, contrast the Royal Navy and the US Navy in the dreadnought era (between the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 and the signing of the Naval Treaty in 1922); both fleets were major world-power navies centred on a battle line of capital ships in keeping with the orthodoxy of the era, but outside that the USN seems to have focused construction more-or-less exclusively on destroyers, whereas the RN strongly emphasised cruisers and simple convoy escort/gunboat types as well... the result is a very different balance of ships!

Well, they could - but it's not really going to win them any arguments...

And it's a really good analysis...

This is where I think we differ - my view is that any large concentration of lightly-equipped forces will invite destruction by a swift application of heavier Imperial firepower, whether that means AT-ATs or Super Star Destroyers, so the Alliance cannot win this way...

I'd add a rider here, too - the Empire can apply tremendous firepower to flatten things, but this may achieve absolutely nothing if they're as clumsy and random as a blaster...

The firepower available is why I'm sceptical about the utility of large uprisings - say a planet has a rugged mountain hinterland where the Empire cannot stage a successful ground incursion due to a lack of secure access routes; if the Alliance uses its local control to create a large, conventional infantry concentration then it's inviting a prompt application of an orbital steamiron - it becomes immeasurably more worthwhile to drop a large force of stormtroopers on that location irrespective of attrition and easier to simply spam them at long range with turbolasers from an ISD...

But the Alliance can control that rugged mountain area with a much smaller force of light infantry, who the Empire lacks the precision to target properly - quite apart from the risk of a self-own in terms of attrition or PR, they might not manage to hit the target in the first place!

Emphatically agreed. This is exactly what we see in the OT, too - Devastator hurrying to Tatooine, then carrying Leia off, then two more ISDs being brought in as replacements, then several ships brought together so Vader can attack immediately if the probe droids identify a destination, then Executor races off to Bespin on its own, and in the Endor briefing we're told that the Imperial fleet is "spread throughout the galaxy in a vain effort to engage" the Rebels, but in fact Palpatine has quickly moved a significant force to the sanctuary moon for his ambush...

Yes, and no. This is the game that a lot of the leaders are playing, with both sides seeking psychological success, at the risk of psychological defeat - with the modifier that both sides will always be risking their key units and often squandering their low-grade troops, both sides can lose support because of this, and both sides can also parlay setbacks into favourable public-opinion reactions, thereby galvaizing their own support - but speaking personally, I don't think it actually amounts to as much as its practitioners think; the real game ("the only puzzle worth solving" in Thrawn's words) is something completely different, and is focused entirely on the clashes that really matter - Yavin, Derra, Hoth, Endor, Brentaal, Coruscant, Ukio, Generis, and a play of less high-profile raids against shipyards and lines of communication. A series of thrusts and parries with long reach and sharp points, often using the lightest of weapons.

A duel with lightsabers, in other words.

Those are both definitely part of what I was thinking. What I'd add is that the Empire has to justify not doing this anyway, by deciding that the real threat of Mon Cal is insufficiently imperative to risk the commitment that would be involved... whether that is simply an exercise in self-deception is, I suppose, a question of individual opinion?

I don't think we ever get an explicit statement of how much of the core Alliance fleet was committed at Endor - the impression has always been that they went all-in with their various affiliates, but I could see them leaving a reserve of cruisers and escorts from the main fleet that was designed to continue the fight if they were defeated...

Also, I thought new building at Mon Cal was two cruisers per year during the Yavin-Endor era? Am I misremembering what old lore like the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook says, or forgetting that the numbers were retconned higher in WARFARE (that would be me! ), or by someone in the reboot material?

Lots of very engaging thoughts on Mon Cal, though, most obviously the illustration of the risk of real defeat - if the Empire loses ships and fails to break through the defenses, then there's at best Jutland-level awkwardness going on (and I say this as someone who believes that Jutland was in real terms a decisive victory for the RN, permanently eliminating any practical threat from the Hochseeflotte). The only option has to be sabotage against the shipyards and perhaps the fixed defenses, but in this, the local nature of Mon Cal recruitment makes it much harder for saboteurs to sneak in unobserved than will be the case with the Empire's garrisons of miscellaneous humans and occasional random aliens...

Also, I wonder if the Imperial occupation erected first-rate planetary defences during their occupation, and the Mon Cals then simply captured them (much as we let the English rebuild Edinburgh Castle for us in the fourteenth century, then captured it using a cartfull of commandos disguised as a supply run of warm beer and mushy peas)...

That sort of thing might just embarrass the Empire into not attempting pacifications in the first place.

Arizona, the Somme, Dien Bien Phu. People remember their defeats. This works both ways, though - the loss of an ISD might motivate the Empire, and if the Alliance burns through regiments of troops to achieve its political-gain objectives, then that very much disincentivises continuing support...

That makes sense... Drysso wouldn't have waited to perform a proper recovery of his TIEs, which were in any case probably no longer under his direct control due to the Imperial tactics of throwing them all at the Rebel fighters...

We can tie this in, pun intended, to the catastrophic collapse in Imperial fighter coordination which Thrawn mentioned in Heir - that would have both spooked Drysso and made it harder for him to promptly recover his TIEs - but also to the underlying issue Thrawn identified, which was the psychic shock of Palpatine exploding...

That's actually a really interesting idea, though I'm not sure how effective it would be - you could certainly alternate shifts at battle stations, but the ship isn't going to be properly "cleared for action" if at least half of the crew are off-watch...

I agree with this in principle, but - while I'll concede my knowledge of the topic is entirely book-learnt - I think it is possible, and in some circumstances advantageous, to run a ship where there's only a single shift of personnel to do the roles that don't need ongoing attention, and that group can be further reduced by multi-tasking...

We're not talking about the second officer doubling as a TIE Fighter pilot, which only makes sense if you're a carrier, but consider Plourr Ilo, who was a repair tech on Home One before becoming an X-wing pilot, and seems to have both capital-ship and snubfighter maintenance skills...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

So what does this mean for the Nebulon-B, Recusant and Munificent?

 

I actually asked myself this - the answer is that the Nebulon-B is a complicated shape, and the droid ships are so weirdly configured it's hard to make ready comparisons...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Does anybody have more pics of the Trailblazer from the Outlaws game?

 

There's a low-forward shot that's not used that often in promotional materials that's actually a really nice angle for the ship...



Also, in hindsight, I hope it was obvious to @CaptainPeabody that I really liked his post, and my quibbling is just enthusiastic havering rather than anything actually negative...?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I worked backwards to that figure from an approximation of the number of New Republic Star Crusers that seem to 'fit' during TTT, (probably in the 80-120, maybe 150 range. Or double that, maybe triple), and assuming the shipyards can only be expanded by "sounds about right for the max."

ISD's and Victory's, but not Vindicators.

The "typical" sector fleet commander would likely have at his disposal:
2-3 ISD and 1-2 Victory-class star destroyers - mix varies widely.
3-5 Vindicators
An Interdictor cruiser if you're lucky, or your sector is of higher priority.
4-6 Strike Crusers.
Some sectors have Escort Carriers, some don't.
3-8 Carrack-class light Crusers (depending on the amount of capital-class vessels expected to be encountered, and whether or not the Sector Fleet ships are expected to be used in combined task forces or singly; those expected to act in task forces get much more (fleet screen or pickets) then those that don't. Doesn't always match reality.
You might have a Lancer.
0-4 Star Galleons - how to use them efficiently is another problem.
Nebulon-B's depending on the amount of ship traffic and expected Rebel opposition; outside of the core the number is generally about 75% of the number needed to make everything run smoothly.
The Empire doesn't field Bulk Cruisers. Major trading houses do, but their priority is their own interests, not yours. And what you want is a "suggestion."

Imperial Customs does their own thing, without consulting you. They also don't take orders from you, although they're open to "suggestions" if they farther their goals or operations in the process. Unless you and the guy in charge of Sector Customs don’t like each other, in which case don’t bother.

The ISB will show up seemingly at the worst possible time and demand you detach a ship for their use. There's a fair chance they'll 'return' it to a different sector fleet.

The Grand Moff views your ships as something he can use whenever he wants. You don't.

This is probably typical for the Expansion Region, more developed or higher priority areas of the Mid Rim, and less developed, low priority parts of the Inner Rim

The Imperial Order of Battle for a Sector Fleet, meanwhile, is:
18 ISD’s
7 Victory’s
20 Vindicators
25 Strike Cruisers
12 Carracks
Three Lancers
Two Escort Carriers
Three?? Interdictor Cruisers
Nebulon-B’s and Star Galleons don’t appear on the list at all. Presumably no need?

Grand Admiral’s have their own Sector Fleet, and each Oversector does as well.. All Oversectors and each Grand Admiral also has a single SSD.

Rather obviously, that has little relationship with reality. (What a surprise.) The SSD's needed for that don't exist, Nebulon's and Star Galleons are there, and sectors near the core are perhaps 75% strength; Oversector and Grand Admiral fleets are similar.
The vast majority of sectors don't have anything near this, and are closer to the "average." Of course, half the sectors are weaker, and perhaps a third to a quarter of sectors are far less.
--------------------------------------
On the subject of "hearts and minds," I'd like to suggest the this is the ideal environment for Imperial officers/Moffs who show up, don't bother learning anything about what's going on the ground, assume they're always right, conduct some ham-fisted operation that leaves the Empire overall worse off in the aftermath, then leave while bragging about a successful operation.
-----------------------------------------
Another topic I've never seen brought up from the Rouge Squadron books - why is General Salm commanding a fighter wing? By all logic it would be the next rank up from squadron commander, which IIRC would make it Major Salm. It matters more then you think when you consider the Borelius operation - he ouranked the captain of the bulk cruiser they were on. That meant he got the best quarters on the ship, not the captain. It also meant that the moment that Bothan general died, he was the senior officer present and automatically assumed command of the entire task force! The loss of the Bulk Cruiser is his fault for not immediately ordering it to withdraw! I would have relieved him off command for his complete failure to issue any orders.
If this sounds absurd for a simple wing commander - that's since it is, if he has the rank of General. Making him and a wing commander a Major would fix the problem.

 

Arquitens? Raiders? Or this the old lineup?

 

Are those official numbers from somewhere?

Not to mention any number of other classes. Qaz-class, Quasar-Fire cruiser/carrier, Dreadnaughts, Cantwells, Carracks, Corellian CR90 corvettes, etc.... This would be without even bringing in the dubious canonicity of ships that only appear in games and not in canon movies, tv shows and books.

 

What I understand is that surface ships generally run two team watches, and each team will stand watch between two and four times a day. US submarines use a three watch system (now three eight hour shifts each day). Surface ships in a low-treat environment can go to a three or four watch system to increase crew rest or allow for shore time. Defense watch (think yellow alert) is different from actions stations (red alert). Defense watch can be maintained indefinitely (perhaps as simple as two 12-hour watches), while actions stations has everyone awake, hopefully alert, and at their battle station.

 

A perfectly respectable approach!!

This has me thinking, though - if, for the sake of the thought-experiment, we turn this the other way round, and start with the idea that Mon Calamari really did only build about six or eight new cruisers before Endor (two per year), plus refits of older hulls... just how much did they manage to increase their numbers by Heir?

But perhaps we can come at this sideways - the same metric in the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook implies that they also built 35-50 "frigates and corvettes" before Endor (one per month), and those numbers presumably mean MC30s, one of my very favourite capital-ship designs... and, well, that's more than enough raiding tonnage for most purposes, and shifting that sector of the resources to MC80 types would increase the number of cruisers even with no additional expansion or speeding-up of construction; taking a high number (based on the idea that the frigates take up a proportionally large percentage of manpower and manufacturing) it might potentially give them an extra four MC80s a year, thus increasing numbers after Endor to six per year, thus an extra thirty hulls...

And if we assume that the modularization of the MC80B speeds up build from six months to four, that increases production by another 50%, so we're getting nine or even ten 1.2km ships per year, so we might have nearly fifty hulls added between Endor and Heir...

I don't personally think these are obscenely small numbers considering the way that MC80s are front-loaded on a deployment that emphasises X-wings rather than ISDs, though I suspect many of you might disagree...

Thought so.

Where I differ most emphatically is that I tend to think that local Imperial forces will contain a large proportion of lower-end ships - remember the line in ANH about "the local bulk cruisers"...?

In the old pre-reboot lore, though, there's an enjoyable lack of consistency that we can juggle...

* The Imperial Sourcebook states a huge baseline for sector deployment of 24 ISDs and "another 1,600 combat starships", but if I've added this up right, the detailed figures indicate a minimum supporting force of only 160 light cruisers and frigates and 70 corvettes, and I suspect the total is calculated as including the ISDs' 1152 TIE Fighters and TIE Interceptors, plus 288 TIE Bombers but not the 288 TIE Recons = 1440 "combat" fighters and 160 light cruisers and frigates...

* In contrast, The Star Wars Sourcebook, written slightly earlier, gives a theoretical sector allocation of just six ISDs...

* And the actual Outer Rim fleets which WEG enumerated in detail are even more minimal - if we take the three adjacent sectors at the end of the Rimma Trade Route where the WEG material devoted a lot of attention...

* Elrood Sector has two or three ISDs, a single 200m light cruiser, twelve corvette-sized patrol vessels without hyperdrives, and some blastboats for reconnaissance.

* Minos Cluster has one Victory-class destroyer, one Nebulon-B, a large and reasonably well-armed troopship which can carry 15,000 soldiers, and a 300m light cruiser as a guardship in a prison system. There are also two Rendilli corvettes, which seem to be customs vessels, and also perhaps some diminutive 35m customs "frigates".

* Kathol is a bit more complicated - according to material in the early part of The DarkStryder Campaign, the "main Imperial force" in the sector mustered two escort carriers, two strike cruisers, two lancer frigates, and four corellian corvettes, with a shipyard scaled appropriately, plus additional blastboats and dozens of corvette-sized patrol vesels without hyperdrives, and the only other capital ship that shows up in the first half of the storyline is a Carrack which the Moff used as a concealed escape ship... but big pointy starts showing up in increasing numbers in the second half of the storyline, and a minimal count of the total number of capital ships under Moff Sarne's command over the course of the storyline spikes up to four ISDs, a VSD, an Interdictor, two dreadnought cruisers, two strike cruisers, two Carrack cruisers, two escort frigates, two lancer frigates, and four corvettes...

I suspect this change was a departure from the original intention to increase the drama and the Star Wars mood music, but there are several ways to explain the discrepancy. Was the "main Imperial force" simply a concentrated formation in contrast with larger capital ships patrolling individually? Or was it important because of a very strong TIE Fighter complement which increased its fighting punch? Or were larger ships recruited from elsewhere in the four years after Endor, in which Moff Sarne essentially became a warlord? In pursuit of all three possibilities, it's notable that one of the ISDs doesn't seem to carry TIES and and gets very easily scrapped in a single attack run by four Corellian gunships...

I'd imagine there'd be a wider pattern of careerism and reputational self-protection, which means that everyone will to try and ride on the perception of success... the blimps and blowhards are only set apart by conversational boasting, and may be less of a problem than the quiet, efficient officers...

There's also the fact that the Empire knocking a big clumsy hole in the ground might sometimes achieve the right results, even if they're run by idiots!

I'd always taken this to be this the other way up - within the Alliance / New Republic fighter structure, wings are supposed to be commanded by generals (inspired by old USAAF practice?), so squadron command ought to go to a colonel or someone a grade or two below that. However, in practice, there aren't enough senior officers to go around, so more junior officers step in - lore gives us examples of squadrons being commanded by lieutenants straight out of training.

TIE Fighter wings are depicted as larger formations, and tend to have colonels in command of them (though not always, as Pash Cracken was appointed directly from the Academy to command a wing composed of his classmates, and promptly led them to defect); an interesting question here would be whether the Empire has non-officer pilots, though I can't think of any specific examples immediately...

Alliteration all deliberately done?

This really illustrates the problem, though - however you configure it, when you're actually in combat, it's not practical to have a lot of personnel off-watch...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

You know, just speaking generically, it's definitely a very interesting question to consider the sizes and composition of individual sector/regional fleets in sci-fi in general (and one that's a lot much more up my own personal alley then the size and loadout of individual ships), in light of both the narrative requirements/details of a particular work and the actual population density of colonized space as it's portrayed in said work. It's something I've spent a lot of time working out for my own space opera project that I'll probably never actually write.

I haven't read any sourcebooks recently enough to contribute anything concrete to the conversation right now, but I just figured it was worth mentioning - since, as I said, this kind of logistical discussion interests me a lot more than the technical side of fleet junkieism.

 

How so? Are there a lot of instances where ship combat lasts more than a few hours? So much so that navies would start to design their ships to be able to function continuously in combat conditions, where shots are being fired?

 

Legends exclusively. My attitude toward the new cannon is "pretend it doesn't exist."

No, made them up, but figured to result in wind fleets about the sizes of the ones that actually are in the battles on screen (the Empire had about 50 ships at Endor, for example, which puts implied upper limits on the number of star destroyers in the Empire.) And an Empire that may have large numbers of ships, but is still badly overextended.

This is where I have to admit I haven't read nearly as many works as most of us, but I've heavily read wiki articles and RPG sources to make up for it. The problem is that the RPG sourcesbooks I've read don't date past around the time of Episode 3...
Dreadnoughts I figure are mostly removed from Imperial service by the time of Yavin; a backwater sector might have a single one. Carracks I put in that list (didn't I?). I'm not under the impression that the Empire bought any CR90's, but as likely as not I just haven't read the stuff where they have them. The Quasar-Fire cruiser/carrier I've barely heard of, (and thought was the name of a bulk cruiser) and the Qaz-class and Cantwells's I've never even heard of before. Could you fill me in a bit?

Which honestly is what I figure the weakest sector fleets would have. The "typical" was more of an average; about right for a "middling" importance sector about halfway between the Core and Outer Rim. And the thing is with an average, half are smaller. A lot of sectors I'd figure have pretty much exactly what you just gave.

I put them at 20 a year by the time of Heir, actually. (And 6-8 per year before Endor. Plus repair work, slips left open to receive ships in need of repair, Assault Frigate rebuilds and a whole lot of military conversions.) Shifting repair work and conversions out of the Mon Cal yards probably freed up a lot of slips for building Star Cruisers. Honestly to almost 20 a year; probably could scale it up to 30-35 a year by TTT, but about 40-60 of them would have been replacing losses. (Or more, see below.)

Which raises the question of how many ships both sides have by TTT. Several hundred ships a side sounds about right with what we see. The Empire would have to have lost something over 90% of their ships in five years though. Warlords and Imperial vs. Imperial infighting probably account for much of that. The pace of combat to account for the rest would have to have seen something like 50-80+ Star Cruisers destroyed during it through, even with a highly favorable "exchange rate." (We're talking about destroying several hundred star destroyers.)

That sounds surprising that the USAAF would make such a (relatively) small (by WWII standards) force the command of a general.

 

Oh, I took @JohnLydiaParker's original remark about a ship staying "ready for combat" in terms of keeping the ship at sustained action stations because it's sci-fi, rather than just the equivalent of issuing extra tea and cutlasses... can you tell these replies are being done in a lot more haste than I try to pretend?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Add a Lancer to the Minos Cluster. And accidental alliteration actually.

The Qaz has 2 mentions. In Catalyst and in a comic set after ANH. No on screen appearances. The cantwell was going to appear in Solo but got cut and shows up in a recruiting video in the bacground of the spaceport on Corellia. It was then used in Andor.

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Cantwell-class_Arrestor_Cruiser