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

I was assuming an exact duplicate of real world practice. If that's how things work in the real world, then I stand corrected, and now that's my personal headcannon.

I'd imagine refueling an ISD is still at least a day-long process, which the ship immobile, and there's no reason resupply shuttles can't go to the ship. And a sitting duck attached to a very big potential boom. That's likely how the Rebellion refuels their fleet. But a month is too little. Since the last thing a warship wants to do is run low on fuel during urgent combat operations. If it's fuel lasted for a month it'd be would topping off it's takes every week and a half. And a within-sector hyperspace trip could be 2-3 days. Put another way, it'd be unable to operate any distance away from it's fuel source. Maximum in practice mission duration is 6-8 days, lasting up to 12 if it's known with certainty a safe opportunity to refuel will available then. With two months it could go a month between refueling; effective mission duration is 3-5 weeks. Three months of fuel is better, even if it is a design tradeoff, enabling 6-8 weeks of operation, with another week if need be and fuel supply is assured. (Earth weeks there.) And also meaning it doesn't need to refuel after every assignment. It also would divide the number of fleet tankers needed by at least 3. A ship with a year of fuel would generally refuel about every 6-7 months. You do not want those tanks to be anywhere close to empty.

I thought Flight Officer was O-0 (effectively an "officer enlisted"), and Cadet is O-nothing. Either way a wing commander is a Major.

Essentially that's how thing would work in real life, and redundant power circuits are warships are nothing new, so I'd say it's quite plausible.

They're there to create drama, stakes, and since pre-GCI they couldn't really visibly damage their filming prop. I might add one to a scene of a heavy pummeled ship, likely followed by said display failing. And a fire extinguisher as a precaution.

Isn't the vast majority of the Neblulon-B production by the Empire as a convoy escort? And the early 2010's is also the last three years of the EU. Is it bad that the "ideal picket line" is entirely composed of ships that I'd never heard of? I'd say that the release of Episode III marks an EU era dividing line. It's not just the ships; the biggest single problem is the Empire having lasted 35 years changed to 19. Which really screws up a surprisingly large amount of backstory. That and the whole "Clone Wars" thing; much of the 90's stuff simply can't be fully reconciled with the PT, and I even have to give the "old backstory" when introducing new readers to the EU.

@CaptainPeabody - I think there's a factor that got overlooked in your analysis. While much of it would indeed to be correct for a real-world insurgency - we're not dealing with one insurgency that has to win once. There a million worlds all with their own set of circumstances, and while pretty much exactly what you said would lead to an insurgent victory on a single world, it has essentially no ability to spread off-planet to any of the others - which would be in a completely different state, with a different government, different opinions of the population and indeed different things they're concerned about. To quote an example above, the Mantooine Liberators have won by any practical standard. One it's certain the Empire won't be showing up with big pointies, the existing Imperial-backed government will be gone in a month. The Mantooine Liberators can simply march on the capital, while the local "Imperial" troops will dissolve without fighting.

Sort of like the Warsaw Pact, in a sense - the only reason they stayed under Soivet-backed governments is after the example the Red Army made when they intervened in Hungary to keep their preferred government in power. Once it was clear that the Red Army wouldn't be showing up, the Soviet-backed governments were gone within a year.

 

This is a lot of reply, but that's a reflection of a great discussion - hope I'm not lowering the tone...

One thing I forgot to pick up on in earlier replies, based on The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook...

* Alliance fleet "lines" are defined as mustering between two and ten "ships of the line" each, plus escorts
* Ackbar is authorised to deploy "up to four ships from the line" from detached duty, that is to say no more than two roving lines at any given time, though escorts can be detached in larger numbers up to 25% of total fleet strength.
* If the main fleet is (or can be) deployed as a single line, this would imply that the Alliance fleet had no more than fourteen cruiser-sized hulls in total in the ANH-ESB period, though that isn't really explicit, and a reference to lines commanded by their senior captains suggests there may be multiple manoeuvre elements...
* An Alliance line will have a minimum of just one wing of fighters; the unspoken implication is that quite a lot of Alliance "ships of the line" will have no starfighters on board, assault frigates being the obvious example, and some will really only be command ships with no carrier or combat capability, such as unmodified bulk cruisers, which have decent sensors and flak and perhaps a storeship/troopship role...
* But other Alliance ships of the line will have no real combat role except being carriers, such as refitted bulk cruisers and perhaps even some Mon Cal conversions...
* The upshot is that a minimal fleet line would thus have only a carrier and a flak ship, plus escorts...

Obviously, everyone's free to ignore or retcon this to taste, and even if we do accept it as personal canon it's possible that it only represents a snapshot of arrangements that were later revised, but I think it's an interesting framework...

Wait, you're not longtime fan Chris "Shaven Wookie" Hawkins, are you?

What's maddening about the troop transport is that they do refer the reader back to a source, but it isn't listed there...

Oh, I've known plenty of academics with thin skins, vicious streaks, and an existential dread of pushback, and even when they're not they can be quarrelsome...

You do that "it doesn't count if it's just sketched up in the preview-box of a website" thing too?

To me, this still seems dangerous for the Alliance - simply encouraging the garrison to concede the hinterland works best with insurgents who can blend into the population or the terrain, whose very unobtrusiveness makes it easier for the Empire to "not see them" in the sense of viewing the problem as contained; but to move beyond that requires a density of activity that can be counterproductive; to deploy even a small team of fighters who can't readily blend in, or to establish a comms network for rapid coordination, invites detection and destruction - the more you move against meaningful bases and population-centres involved, the harder it is; and such actions also invite, and perhaps require, the brutal application of the triangular Imperial steamiron, while if you succeed, you're really asking for it, and simultaneously exposing your agents and proxies in captured power structures and making the Empire's job easier; and you may also start to lose the goodwill of a local population who decide that you're not achieving anything good - sometimes a rebellion does work, but I am not as optimistic as you that it should be central to Alliance theory...

The key, to reiterate my earlier point, is in redefining the limits of the hinterland - but not in terms of population centres - IN SPACE! Redefining where big pointy can manoeuvre, disrupting convoys and preventing troop transports from deploying reinforcements. Lightsabers and X-wings. STAR WARS.

That said, it's an interesting topic, and I admit that the difference may in part be one of temperament, so I hope you'll excuse the pushback?

I think this is a very sharp point. The Empire isn't particularly interested in the sort of "pacification" that involves internment and population-concentration (and it's interesting to ask why - they'd be shy of the political risks, decisionmakers would feel it was a waste of resources regardless of whether their idea of the right use of Imperial resources was efficiency or embezzlement, the duality implied doesn't really suit their totalitarianism; if they did something along these lines, they'd be more likely to conscript people). Either they'll step back to contain an insurgency in an area of hinterland, or they'll simply kill everything (and hope nobody notices).

I think there's also a distinction to be made between two styles of containment - either you can simply accept reduced control over the area (and try and disguise it with continuing "campaigns against the terrorists"), or you can negotiate them back into the system...

(Add José I of Spain to the "large light cruiser" in the list of unfashionable causes that I'll champion...)

The idea of the Core as a colonialist metropole has been latent for a while (it's implicit in the Prequels, and fairly explicit in Path of Destruction, for example), though I think classic imperial colonialism can be a misleading paradigm here - the key is really to do with patterns of trade, and those can function in all sorts of power structures; the Clone Wars are ultimately an argument between elements of the same "imperial" power-structure (within a democratic republic), which presumably cooperated more easily with each other in the pre-Prequel era...

Hold that thought...

THIS.

I think you've hit the point, though I'm not sure if you would actually agree - I'd say the New Republic's apparent weaknessis its real strength. Tolerance, a refusal to do too much, unless that suits the territory of ex-Imperial political infrastructure, and even there I suspect less activity will be more effective... so I ultimately think it isn't "complicated" as a controlled process, it's just complicated because it's not controlled, not easy to synthesise into an algorithm or a five-year plan or a mercantilist cartel; it's diverse and - importantly - self-regulating...

I think this depends on what we mean by "Galaxy-spanning government". I have a fairly strong conviction that all the New Republuc really needs is Leia and some X-wings. The rest (including instances of bad handling of Leia and those X-wings) was just broken Imperial patterns of one sort or another...

They're still fascinating questions, though... and you've provided a lot to think about, as well (and some good fun)...

I have a vague idea that the RN has the standing bridge watch down to an officer, a helmsman with a radar screen and a comms "lookout" these days, though there may be more people in the sensor room. Lean-manning is largely motivated by the fact that crew rations cost more than destroyers, though '82 probably rather focused their minds. No point in heroically doing damage-control for a ship that then sinks anyway.

Another reason for reducing crew numbers is that modern ships simply don't have the moving parts that they used to - automated mid-calibre guns seem mature, and in any case are one per ship, and a VLS box has a whole lot less moving parts than swingarm launchers, never mind the ludicrous car factory assembly-lines they had inside the ship for contraptions like the Talos and Sea Slug, with crewmen building reloads in real time - connecting parts together, and then shoving the completed chassis out a gunport in the end of the superstructure and onto the rail.

One other question that comes to mind is what the crewing/readiness requirement for a turbolaser actually is. I'd assumed that they're like a modern mid-calibre gun that's fully automated except the aiming, so manpower is a local-control sensor team who largely act as backup for the main tower, and maintenance/repair guys. I mean, you could have crewmen physically slotting tibanna rounds into the gun, and maybe it's actually useful sometimes because it means less machinery to fit into the relevant armoured box, but I doubt you'd find that except maybe on a few ships with batteries of light flak/DP guns like the Nebulon-B.

Now I'm imagining the turbolaser decks of Mon Cal cruisers looking like pirate ships, though.

I've forgotten the scene you mean here... remind me?

Not sure why you're thinking Wedge sticks at O-3 - there are several O-3 captains in Rogue Squadron in the novels; but there is a question of what Luke and Wedge's "commander" rank means for X-wing personnel - is it an informal title for a senior pilot, or the O-4 equivalent of a French commandant (fairly consistent in pre-reboot lore for TIE Fighter pilots), or is it the equivalent of a wingco or naval commander in the British tradition, so an O-5 position (sources dealing with Alliance ranks are neither clear nor consistent, and fanon often assumes this)...?

Regardless of our views on that specific question, though, I'd say the wider answer is to be found in having squadron-command positions being held across a relatively wide range of ranks, and the senior-officer ranks absent from the chain of command used for non-command roles (this is pure Battle of Britain tonality, but with regard to squadron command at least, it's also exactly what's portrayed in the narrative)...

As to why that system gets combined with the classic American system of generals commanding wings (well, again, that's what the narrative gives us, but), I'd suggest it's a matter of ensuring the autonomy, and perhaps recognizing the complexity, of the associated base command - Salm's Y-wing unit is a very obvious example of this (conversely, one wing leader who's not clearly a general, Wing Commander Varth on Generis, doesn't really command a full-strength wing, and is co-located with General Kryll, an ex-Imperial officer who has the "base commander" role)...

That said, it's an interesting question whether fighter wings assigned to the fleet have lower-ranking commanders to subordinate them to their ship's captains, or if in fact they're not subordinate, but function in practice as additional flag officers - in the OT-era, a significant proportion the relevant Alliance capital ships will be the flagship of a fleet line, in which case it makes sense to have an admiral, a general and a captain on board, while others are essentially carriers with negligible weaponry, where the fighter-command role is more important than the ship-command one, and carrying a general and a captain would certainly make sense - other ships in the battle line, like assault frigates and unmodified bulk cruisers, simply don't carry fighters, which sidesteps the problem entirely; the rule implied in the Rebel Alliance Sourcebook is that a fleet line or roving line will have, at minimum, two significant capital ships, but just one carrier wing, and thus only one carrier...

Thus, it's only in situations where carrier wings are paired with ordinary cruisers and their captains that there starts to be a problem having generals in charge of them...

Even the well-thought-out Black Fleet novels seem evasive about who actually commands fleet wings - the "fleet air boss" is a colonel, but his area is really personnel, and though he's said to have effective control over the appointment of the "combat wing commanders", that may mean a senior-squadron-leader role with purely tactical command; possibly the carriers' captains, in practice often commodores by this date, the equivalent of a real-world one-star O-7, might simply double-hat as titular wing commanders...?

I'd say it's the other way up - the only way to "rule" the Galaxy is by allowing the Galaxy to be itself...

Personal decision, but an interesting suggestion. My one-size-fits-all explanation is reality-warping by Palpatine.

Raises an interesting question - we know droids can do a lot of roles, but are there roles they're not really adaptable enough for, or where human crewers are simply preferred... and how many humans do you need to do maintenance on droids...?

Perhaps, but how regularly? Back in the age of sail, the Royal Navy liked to have every ship carry supplies for 3-4 months for their heavy-manned crews, and some could do longer - in the steam-and-steel era, endurance abruptly dropped because you burned through all your fuel in a month...

A neat illustration of how varied these sorts of metrics might be. Again, we're back to the question of "does everything run off the hyperdrive?", and whether there's some additional "fuel" for the engines (they're meant to be ion drives, so they ought to be using ionized gas for propulsion, not just generating a spacetime distortion like that thing at the back of the typical Star Trek saucer)...

There was a fun story in the Dark Horse comic-book run that had ISDs lined up at a space station to refuel like it was a truck stop...

That seems like the sort of thing the Empire would do, though I stress again, it's a "maximalist" position emphasising optimal manning at all times and also, as you say, damage control and crew replacements... the downside is that the crew requirements and the supply requirements are several times heavier than they strictly need to be...

We know this becomes a thing in the New Class project, with the New Republic's frigate hull being used for a "fleet tender"... though a part of me is wondering if the Alliance had used larger hulls like bulk cruisers to carry cargo for frigates and gunships...

I honestly think you can do it with a smaller hierarchy, and indeed with a smaller one than we're used to in the Anglo-Saxon tradition - the French have always refused to have more than two substantive general/admiral ranks, using temporary grades and positional assignments for the necessary structure...

My sense of the wider fighter-style rank hierarchy is, also, based on the French system (the use of major for the equivalent of a lieutenant-colonel is specifically Napoleonic)...

Lieutenant
Captain
Commander
Major
Colonel
General

(Real French practice has two lieutenant grades and two general grades - Star Wars also has a rank of "Flight Officer" for junior pilots, which I think was introduced by Stackpole, but I'm not sure if he intended this to be the equivalent of sous-lieutenant, which was how I handled it in WARFARE, or a warrant-officer pilot rank)...

This is pretty much explicit for the Empire in pre-reboot canon, and fits with most of what we see in terms of specific examples for both Imperial and Alliance personnell going right back to the OT - existing tabulations of Alliance ranks are a contradictory mess, but anomalous Alliance ranks can at least be explained in terms of ranks inherited from other militaries...

Alliance naval ranks are less defined, but the hierarchy we're given in The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, with ships' captains, line admirals (only apparently commanding roving lines), and Ackbar as fleet commander, suggests a similarly minimal structure of high ranks.

The New Republic, however, switches to something more Anglo-American - the key indicator of this is the appearance of commodore and brigadier by the Black Fleet Crisis. This suggests that the New Republic have added at least one additional grade to their higher ranks, and now I think about it, that would explain why Han is appointed to command the Fifth Fleet in the rank of commodore rather than general - he's locked into the old arrangement where there's one "general" rank above colonel, and retains his title accordingly, but reactivation requires that he be given the new equivalent rank, and he's encouraged to use the navy version.

There's still very little evidence for separate general and admiral grades in the New Republic, though - the ground forces and the fleet appear to use British-style "brigadier" and "commodore" for the lower rank, though starfighter command may have two general grades, echoing US practice. The few examples of more specific high-ranks I can think of, like Bothan rear-admirals, may not be strictly "New Republic" ranks...

But then, I'm typing this quite quickly, and I may have forgotten something I knew fifteen years ago. Correct me if required?!

In looking at the stuff on Alliance fleet lines, I came across a remark that MC80s have multi-year endurance for fuel and supplies...

Oh, I like that... a very oddly-drawn Quasar Fire, but it explains those big hangars as a badly-drawn version of the rear bay. Also, it could be attached to a logistics arm like Imperial Supply, hence Biggs' and Hobbie's positions of "first mate" and "second mate", and the fact that they double-hat with flying a TIE Fighter...

And it explains why it's both a freighter and a frigate, and heck, even the "freighter" version in the X-wing comics looks like a goofy Glove of Vader drawing of a Quasar Fire...





All Star Wars makes sense of itself eventually...

Here, we can exploit the fact that The Truce at Bakura Sourcebook says "unmodified Quasar Fires have virtually utility in military fleets". Obviously "no" has been edited out, but that doesn't mean it's not been done deliberately. "Voren is an idiot."™

Heck, even the partitions between the aft bays in REBELS are old-canon as part of the original design - TTABSB refers to them being removed from the Virgillian ships to make deck handling of Rebel fighters easier (and to change the configuration from Imperial hangar bays to Home One flight deck).

Yes, they do - I'd have instinctively called the Decimator a blastboat, a type that's more of a "cockpit" design, but they've got a lot more deckspace than a Skipray, which means they're more independent and they're in that slightly larger size-bracket. They belong in this group - and while I hesitated because the Rendili frigate's 50 MGLT speed is really only good for overhauling lumbering freighters and not as fast as a cruiser in a hurry, the Guardian has a truly stupid 90 MGLT...

The Imperial Armored Transport can have a TIE rack too, so it seems to be fairly standard for the slightly larger ~40-50m types. Something like the Rendili "frigate" doesn't have the crew or deckspace, and the Decimator probably doesn't need them....

Yes.

Hold that thought?

The Nebulon-B was always characterised by WEG as an Imperial escort, to explain where it came from. My own headcanon is that it's really a Hutt design, Ubrikkian being an affiliate of KDY, in much the same way that the US Navy's DE and PG types in the Pacific were either designed for or by the British...

According to the Imperial Sourcebook, an ISD ought to have two attack lines and a pursuit line attached - an absolute minimum of ten ships, with the idea being that an accompanying attack line (three large cruisers, or as many as six "light cruisers or frigates") is used to keep opponents at a distance where the ISD overmatches their gunnery range, while the pursuit line (four light cruisers or smaller types "like corvettes") is designed for sensor scouting - the text seems to emphasise larger types, because only the Carrack and the Lancer are given as examples of small capital ships in the relevant section, but the roles are honestly pretty good for the Arquitens and Raider...

For a nostalgia trip, though, Thrawn's fleet shows up at Sluis Van with five ISDs, twelve strike cruisers and twenty-two Carracks, which gives an idea of the sort of ships that were expected back in the day, and which is still one of the clearest displays of a top-end Imperial fleet outside of game-mechanics (even if Pellaeon does think of the Carracks as "old"); the number isn't quite enough for two attack and one pursuit line for each ISD, but we know that there are some additional ships of less fleet utility, with the Star Galleon Draklor showing up as part of the "group" assigned to Death's Head, so perhaps the fleet has additional notional "attack lines" that actually serve more of a support role.

But when I went looking to see if there were more hints about the support ships of Thrawn's fleet... instead, I realised that something dramatic happens to the fighting formation in The Last Command. The supporting Strikes and Carracks are gone. Instead, at Qat Chrystac at the start of the novel, there's a force of "over twenty Star Destroyers and Dreadnaughts", plus a single Interdictor on drag-ship duty; the arrival of "two more" VSDs suggests that there may be more of them in the group, but it's not entirely clear; and when the main fleet attacks Coruscant, we see just two Victory-class ships again, along with the six ISDs, eight dreadnaughts and ten Interdictors.

I suspect those might be two different descriptions of exactly the same ships - Wedge's POV of "over twenty Star Destroyers and Dreadnaughts" is an eyeball of an impressive number of Imperial triangles supported by the big dark-hulled bricks of several Katanas, and that would fit a formation of six ISDs, nine Interdictors, and eight Dreadnaughts, which is what we need to make up the numbers for Coruscant...

There seems to have been a complete shift of emphasis in the support ships, with Thrawn swapping up from a stand-off combat style with screening Strikes and Carracks to reinforced formations of heavy hulls to use "at push of pike", and deploying his drag-trap tactic aggressively to push those pikes forwards into the faces of opponents. Two VSDs as a manoeuvre wing. Some networked Dreadnoughts as a heavy close-support formation. Interdictors, combining a powerful flak armament and TIE hangars with big-ship sensor and command capability, and a decent flank speed and tough deflectors that will let them stand in line with Star Destroyers, make much better anti-fighter escorts for the ISD than a Lancer.

Lancers do appear with the fleet at at Bilbringi, and Strike Cruisers show up again, as well as the inevitable Star Destroyers, Dreadnaughts, and Interdictors, but those may be part of additional forces from outside the main fleet....

And the really interesting thing is that you can make this exchange of ships without the use of new clone personnel - two VSDs need 12,000, ten Interdictors need 28,000, eight slave-rigged Dreadnoughts need about 16,000, for a rough total of 46,000; each Strike Cruiser had 2,000 crew, so losing twelve of them provides 24,000 and if the twenty-two Carrack Crusiers were discarded as well, that frees up another 22,000... which is exactly the same men...

The only clones you need to add to the fleet are probably the scarily good new TIE pilots, and there only need to be a few hundred of them...

Thrawn has transformed his fleet by building a few Interdictors, stealing the Katana Fleet, and refitting a couple of VSDs.

Did Zahn do that deliberately, or is Thrawn just that good?

(As an aside, if the formation at Sluis Van represents attack and pursuit lines, the reconfigured formation implies the deletion of the pursuit lines, but perhaps they can be replaced with blastboats or something like the 42m Guardian-class, which are unobtrusive ships with minimal crews, but even better speed than Carrack-class ships, and comparable sensor range...)

I know that feeling - it's a good analysis, though. Somewhere back up the thread I think there's some discussion of deckspace and personnel in terms of historical troopship and hammock spacing (I think specifically with relation to Dreadnought Cruisers), but I stopped trying to figure out the answer when I realised it would require engaging with the size of AT-ATs...

Appropriate crack which I just stumbled on - the Kessel flagship in Jedi Search is a Strike Cruiser... Hissa's old Moffship!

They definitely could.

I'm pretty sure you're every bit as qualified as I am...

Not necessarily. Photon torpedoes and concussion missiles certainly don't, and old lore had turbolasers having quite a lot to do with "blaster gas". Cannonballs aren't powered by the sails, and dreadnought turrets aren't powered by coal.

The idea of using the drive to power beam weapons really an idea derived from Star Trek TNG's phaser technobabble which was picked up by Star Wars fans in online debates in the early days of the internet...

Your point about Tarkin's technological terror showing us an example of what big Imperial power couplings look like is a good one - and it's also an example of a system "connected to the main reactor", but in that case, the power core is primarily there to power the superlaser, rather than the hyperdrive, so it's an essentially different sort of arrangement, designed specifically to power ludicrous combat systems, and it's also part of a dangerously overdesigned system that's prone to dramatic explosions when it breaks.

The question is really whether Star Wars ships are a smaller version of that craziness, or saner.

I'd prefer to explain the big "main longitudinal power line" on the Venator as something to do with the hyperdrive, or else simply as part of a very heavily insulated grid for basic shipboard things like glow-panels.

The problem isn't just that the systems lose power, it's that the energy needs to go somewhere else... that's precisely why you have Star Trek's stereotypically exploding consoles (and Star Trek's stereotypically exploding warp cores)...

Well, how large is an ISD anyway?

But is there enough space for an upper hangar between the forward bay and the topside armour? Aside from the physical opening on the ANH model, I'd interpret the roof greeblies as surface details rather than hatches, regardless. Though I'm simply amused by the thought that the Avenger doesn't have a hatch suitable for Vader's shuttle, or that we'd have to scale the ship up to fit the shuttle into whatever detail is there...

Aye, they seemed like a missed trick - we did get the Tantive IV redesigned to its WEG proportions, and apparently (at least as a retcon in TCW and possibly always by intent) a heavily-modified Dreadnaught Cruiser in the form of the Invisible Hand... which is another example of a much-longer hull variant, as well...

But that only happens if the Empire chooses to let it happen. Unless you can physically prevent them from getting big pointy overhead, the only way for it to work is if the Empire decides it doesn't need to be there, or it wants to negotiate a settlement with the insurgents.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Aren't there a bunch of illustrated cross section books that can give us an answer to that? I never took a really close look at them, but I'm pretty sure at least on the Venator there is not a separate fuel tank or reactor powering the sublight drives.

 

There's actually a "subsidiary reactor" in each hull wing next to the ion drives, and "reactant" (some sort of fuel) stored in the front of the superstructure. There could also be components within the engine assemblies - the ISD cross-section has one podded on the front of each ion-drive...

I'm honestly impressed by how adaptable to contrasting POVs the cutaways are...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Huh, so I was looking at the sublight drive article on Wookieepedia just now, where it says the Hoersch-Kessel ion drive is the most common type. And apparently those can run off a whole variety of different fuels, from uranium to some unspecified "liquid reactants". Seems a little too convenient that such a drive could work with so many different types of fuel, but eh.

 

They have not really told the story of the Mutiny on The Rand Ecliptic in nu-canon yet. Just mentioned it as happening in a few sources. I would love to see them do it in animated form using the Rebels style. It would cut down on cost as they have all the Imperial assets from the series to work with.

As far as what type of ship the Rand Ecliptic is they could just modify the existing Nebulon B from Rebels and finally show where the hangar and hangar access is.

 

I prefer the Rebels re-design of the Quasar Fire having individual hangars instead of just one big opening like the original had.

IIRC in the current canon it is a purpose built carrier, not a repurposed bulk cruiser like in Legends.

Loved seeing them in the Squadrons game.

 

Ah, so this is why you're being so overly polite...you've actually known academics.

But yes, you're absolutely correct that on average academics tend to be much more hyper-sensitive and quarrelsome than the general population. But I once again plead that this is not at all true for me, though it likely has more to do with me having four brothers who constantly argue and discuss just about everything under the sun and have since we were small children. But I swear by Waru or Zorba the Hutt's beard or whatever it takes that I am not at all hyper-sensitive to abstract disagreement and that you don't have to keep apologizing for disagreeing with me.

In any case, I think we're closer to agreeing than it might at first appear. Though it might be helpful to at least vaguely sketch where I'm coming from and what I'm trying to do. In general with the New Canon, and especially with Andor, we've seen more attempts to integrate more real-world "Imperalist" and "colonialist" and "insurgency" models into how the Galactic Civil War is portrayed. These of course were present since the beginning with Lucas in the OT, even if other sources at times overlooked them in favor of other (real) influences, including the Civil War and the Allies in WW2. It simply broadly strikes me that, surface similarities aside, the insurgency model has to be closer to what's actually going on with the Rebellion than anything like any major industrial power of WW2 (especially the world-historical industrial powerhouse the USA, which is really far more like the Empire as Lucas' Vietnam inspirations indicate). And also that some elements from insurgency models are actually potentially quite helpful in reconciling the militarized, elite Alliance we see with what at first glance appears to be the ludicrously small scale of the forces and operations. But in all this, I'm not trying to run roughshod over the sources or completely alter any of the basic onscreen dynamics, just hopefully contextualize them a bit better. The Galactic Civil War isn't precisely equivalent to any real-world example, which is why it's interesting.

If I understand you correctly, it seems you're basically trying to do something similar, reinforcing and affirming the small-scale military Rebellion and understanding how that would actually operate viz a vis the dynamics of Imperial pacification.

Yeah I don't think we're actually at all far apart here. I agree that encouraging large-scale insurgencies that are trying to take over entire planets would be very dangerous from the organized Rebellion's perspective, and also that most of their strategy would involve getting the Empire to quietly "concede" hinterlands and population centers and even entire systems while staying under the radar enough to not invite military response.

If there's a difference between us here, perhaps it's just how frightening the "Imperial steamroller" would actually be viz a vis a decently widespread popular insurgency. The Imperial military as we see it onscreen and in the sources could certainly steamroll any comparable military force or bring a central government to heel easily, but it seems almost ludicrously unsuited to any kind of decentralized anti-insurgency activity at all. Every time we see the Imperial military go up against anything like a popular insurgency, whether on Endor or Ferrix or anywhere else, they're basically torn to pieces; which you can criticize as bias towards our heroes, but which actually strikes me as fairly realistic in broad terms (even if the details of those engagements don't always make sense). The Imperial military from head to toe, white stormtroopers and parade formations and AT-STs and AT-ATs is a (1) war machine for crushing other comparable war machines or military formations in open battle, that (2) is designed to be as visually terrifying as possible and relies on that terror and intimidation for just about everything else.

Actually here the ISB and the broader Imperial security apparatus would be much more important (which is another thing I think that Andor understands well). The real "cost" for the Rebellion getting too involved with local insurgencies (as you point out) would not be the loss of soldiers, but the threat that the Empire will use those contacts to track down the central Alliance.

So to be clear, I'm not arguing for a Rebellion that's actively and closely overseeing and directly piloting thousands of massive popular insurgencies engaged in taking over entire systems and flying the Rebel flag. It's more a Rebellion that's very loosely and distantly and carefully encouraging and distantly cooperating with and coordinating many popular insurgencies and resistance movements of very different scales. Most of these insurgencies, by design, don't accomplish much more than getting the Empire to quietly and partially withdraw from marginal spaces and systems and thus provide a little more "open space" for the organized Rebellion to operate within. Meanwhile the central Rebellion operates mostly in space to disrupt Imperial networks and win showpiece victories and distract and undercut the central Imperial military and government and act as a military-propaganda locus and focus for general anti-Imperial sentiment and activity everywhere.

I agree that for the organized Rebellion their main sphere of operation is actual space, but I guess perhaps an area where we perhaps disagree is how effective the organized Rebellion could actually be at disrupting the Empire's operations in space on a large enough scale to bring it down on their own, and apart from the background possibility and reality of widespread popular revolt. Certainly all Empires depend fundamentally on their networks of transport and communication, and certainly space would be a massive vulnerability for the Empire as a basically uncontrollable hinterland that it has to pass through to operate as a government at all: but it's also really big, and it's hard to imagine the Rebellion we see actually having the capacity to disrupt it enough in direct combat. The Rebellion can certainly make a real difference here, but I guess I see their propaganda and coordination value as greater than their actual systemic value.

Another area where we're (perhaps) disagreeing is my sense of the endgame of the Rebellion: that while most popular insurgencies would not be very impactful, a few at key points and in key moments could potentially be very impactful indeed, and that the spread of popular insurgency on any real scale viz a vis the Galaxy basically is an existential threat to the Empire as we see it. And that this helps explain the speed of the Empire's collapse (see below).

Yes, I think you're absolutely on the money here. The only things I would add are that we do see the Empire engage in this kind of thing occasionally both in the EU and the New Canon, and I suspect that they do it more than we've seen so far--though I also suspect that it's largely a matter of where unrest is happening. Where they have to hold territory they resort to more security-state and pacification tactics (managed, though, much more by the ISB and similar than by the Imperial military, which as I've said seems very poorly designed for such things), but otherwise they either withdraw or, as you say, just kill everyone.

Also, though, here is another area where I think Andor adds some real value, particularly with its portrayal of the Empire on Aldhani as a tiny marginal military outpost overseeing a vast area where the Empire is engaged in concentrating population--but not through military or security operations, but through economic processes of rapid industrialization and urbanization. This is an interesting and perceptive combination of both colonial and continental-European models, and a good takeway from the basic inspirations of the Empire in ANH, which include not only colonial regimes, but also European industrialization and the Soviet Union and America post-WW2.

In other words, the Imperial military is not equipped to engage in massive anti-insurgency operations--but everywhere the Empire is present, even very lightly, it uses its economic muscle to encourage population concentration and regimentation through rapid industrialization and urbanization and the discplacement and destruction of traditional cultures, creating a population that's easy to monitor security-state style and ideologically brainwash with propaganda and keep in line with displays of Imperial terror.

This, I would argue, is the real power of the Empire, and an opposite dynamic of the "hearts and minds" struggle with the Rebellion encouraging resistance and insurgency.

Yes, I mean, ironically the things that Lucas in the Prequels is most criticized for--focusing the political machinations around "trade routes" and taxation--are actually some of his more perceptive moves. Reading between the lines, what we see in the Prequels is, as you say, basically a conflict between two different aspects of a single elite trade and governance system: the central government and associated elites on the one hand, and more marginal and corporate elites on the other. What if the East India Company got pushed too hard by the Crown and decided to rebel? Et cetera.

In any case, I agree that the classic Imperial-colonial model is only partially applicable to the Star Wars Galaxy. The dynamics between the cultural/nationalist metropole and the high-population, non-citizen, resource-rich colonies don't seem all that applicable other than in very broad details. The main similarity just seems to be a general sense that the Core is more urbanized and populated and cultured and that the people there have more political rights and have to be kept happy while the Empire can get away with being more directly brutal elsewhere. But there's nothing really comparable to actual colonization going on, and a lot of the "rest of the Galaxy" seems to be very sparsely populated and also not particularly essential resource-wise. Even aesthetically it's more like the "Western" dynamics of American expansion, the densely-populated center holding lots of territory lightly and a "what happens in the West stays in the West" model of politics. But there are a lot of other things going on in Lucas' imagination, including more general modernization paradigms and World-War era military-industrial con.

Ultimately, I would argue that the Empire resembles post-WW2 (even 1970s) America than it does a traditional colonial Empire. Particularly in the fact that due to the speed of hyperspace and the basic resource dynamics the Empire doesn't really seem to be that dependent on holding large amounts of territory intensively like a traditional empire. Arguably from everything we see the Empire could lose a lot of the Galaxy and still be just as effective militarily and industrially and governmentally. Here, though, the idea of the Empire as a or modernizing totalitarian government a la 20th century models that feels the need to control territory and dominate and transform societies everywhere for primarily ideological reasons comes in. But this overreach also leads to its fall for the same reason.

Yes, I would actually strongly agree with this. Ultimately the Empire is just a bad idea: a top-heavy (Sith) ideological construct that's high off the unprecedented power provided by its own rapid militarization and technologization and therefore trying to expand and militarize and industrialize and ideologize everywhere in every way at once for the lolz and aesthetics first and foremost, when that's obviously a really stupid idea from any reasonable systemic perspective. My basic head-canon has always been (as @JohnLydiaParker said), that the Empire basically "fell" mostly because it shot itself in the head by dissolving the Senate. The Senate and Republican institutions, even Imperialized, embodied actually proven and workable models of governing the Galaxy, and the Empire had been able to rely on them while gradually adding on its own military-industrial-ideological-totalitarian tools, but once they deliberately dismantled their own actual government and tried to rely solely on the power of "technological terror," it all predictably went to hell pretty quickly.

Of course, in history such ideological constructs and even such monumentally stupid moves are not uncommon: but if you want to actually govern the Galaxy in an actual meaningful and helpful way, having a light touch and allowing many different models of governance and cooperation and trade to co-exist just makes way more sense. As you say, "Leia and some X-Wings" plus some inspirational propaganda and a central government engaged mostly in coordination and light regulation is definitely the way to go--especially in the absence of the central cultural traditions and bureaucracy of the Old Republic.

The main issue for the New Republic, I suspect, is simply managing the expectations and desires of different groups throughout the Galaxy, some of whom will want the Old Republic back fully yesterday, some of whom will be very disappointed that they don't engage in revolutionary liberation everywhere, and others of which will react badly to any attempt to govern them at all. As I said, lots of room for fun stories there.

I think you're misunderstanding his point here, which is closer to what you're saying--and which I emphatically agree with and think is an excellent addition to what I've been saying.

The problem with the idea of the Rebellion at the height of the Galactic Civil War running huge insurgencies that take over the capitals of populated worlds and declare independence is that by doing this, the insurgency has traded away all their advantages and just become a weak local government with a small military, which is exactly the kind of thing the Imperial military is good at dealing with. The Empire can then just send in the big pointies and kill as many people as they have to or else, as you say, negotiate them back into the fold.

I'm sure this is something that did happen, especially during the early years of the Empire. But if the central Rebellion is smart, they'd be pushing very hard for just the opposite--for insurgencies that don't march on the capital or declare an independent government, but quietly kill off and harass local Imperial garrisons and governments and build up their own quietly anti-Imperial networks and even governments to the point where the Empire (1) practically can't control the area without significant losses, and (2) has no real direct military target to go up against, and so most of the time just backs off and lets the locals do their thing: which in many cases would mean that the organized Rebellion can start to operate in that space freely.

The endgame, though, is precisely what @JohnLydiaParker has said: if the Rebellion can build up enough local support and local insurgencies on enough planets and then the central Rebel military can win enough real or apparent victories over the Imperial military to the point where they're significantly distracted and weakened and on the run and so in the eyes of locals unlikely to quickly intervene with a big pointy, then you have a Warsaw Pact situation where many local governments already clandestinely sympathetic to the Rebellion openly declare their support and many popular insurgencies everywhere rise up and annihilate Imperial garrisons. And if that happens on a large enough scale and in the right places then the Empire effectively and quickly ceases to exist as a real government.

Here I think of the Mandalorian imagery of the shattered Stormtrooper helmets on sticks and dirty stormtroopers hiding in buildings on Tatooine: when news of Endor and other Rebel victories came in, the local insurgency came in and straight-up murdered the local garrison, and the central Empire never showed up to reassert control. This is how the Empire's fall would look in most of the Galaxy I suspect.

 

Quick mobile phone post - I should have been more clear that the reason big pointys aren’t showing up is “because it’s 6 ABY and the New Republic just took Corescant;” I meant that in a post-Endor context. Big post will have to wait for a computer.

 

Yep, that's basically how I've been brainstorming the power systems, taking real world examples (power grids, house circuits, naval ships, etc) and combining them with what we can see in the various cross-sections.

Fourteen cruisers is rather close to my minimum count of 13 unique Mon Cal cruisers seen in RotJ.

• 8 Wingless are visible in the hangarless star destroyer flyby scene, and at least six are visible in the surviving fleet.
  
• 3 separate Home One types are seen throughout the battle; Home One itself, the one destroyed by the Death Star, and another behind the Executor during its dive into the Death Star .
• 2 winged versions; Liberty, and another one visible after Liberty was destroyed - there could be more, but I don't think we ever see more than one Liberty type in the same shot.

Now there's also eight two engine ships, that look like Mon Cal ships, in the last shot of the fleet, but there's nothing that really gives a sense of their size, so they may or may not be cruisers - pretty sure they just took the frontal shot of the wingless Mon Cal cruiser, that are seen throughout the battle, and painted some engine glows over them.
This is just what is visible in the movie so other sources are going to bring this count up.

I've been thinking that the Quaser's flat triangular neck would make a great area to hang cargo off. There's a lot of space there and as long as the containers aren't too large the hangar won't be blocked by them.

Definitely understand this. It's why it took me a while to look a the Lambda shuttle's height, and why I try to stick to the canon lengths, where I can, and tend to only look deeper if something seems off, have conflicting sources, or we don't currently have their sizes(why do I feel like this end up covering a lot of ships).

I'm leaning more toward craziness, as there's a lot of examples of reactors blowing ships up - things like the destruction of the Droid Control ship in TMP, Tarkin's Star Destroyer in Rebels, Mandator in TLJ, Xystons in TROS, and possibly one Star Destroyer in ROTJ (I wonder if that was the Devastator).

Also interesting thought I had about the glow-panels, on something the size of a Star Destroyer, there's probably so many of them that they may end up being one of the most power hungry systems on the ship.

Yes the energy doesn't just disappear, but there should be safe guards in place to stop the flow of energy to the consoles. That and the consoles should probably be on a separate circuit to the more powerful systems.

Well those gondolas as control rooms would work best with a larger Star Destroyer, so 2.5 miles long

It varies between the different Star Destroyer models, as they all have slightly different dimensions and positions of the docking bays, but I'd say there's enough space for a 30m tall hangar above the secondary bay, and depending on how wide the hangar is, maybe even room for a 40m one.

 

That's essentially from The Star Wars Sourcebook The original 1987 "first edition" text says that the H-K drive "runs best on uranium or other heavy metal" but lists "liquid reactants, energy conversion cells and even ion-collector pods" as other options; but the 1994 second edition changed the text to say that "power cells or generators" are the "most efficient" power source, with the ability to "break down and draw power from uranium or other heavy metals" booted into the second list with the rest....

What I think this is trying to do is reference the real-world ion drive. You can use a variety of power sources to generate energy for one, with reactors being regarded as a theoretically useful type for long-range spacecraft (and they're what the lore assigns to things like Y-wings and Z-95s); as to the other options, "liquid reactants" means chemical fuel (perhaps in a fuel cell rather than for combustion) and "energy conversion cells" are batteries of some sort; "ion-collector pods" and the added "power cells" and "generators" of the 1994 text are less clear and are perhaps deliberately vague - for reasons of length, I won't speculate...

But this text may not be a particularly technically coherent description ("Voren is an idiot."™) and it's important to emphasise that as well as their power source, true ion drives also need a supply of propellant which the power is used to ionize, in order to produce thrust...

That would be fun... Tales of the Alliance, anyone?

Well, that would give us something to discuss - but I definitely prefer the suggestion of a Quasar Fire, TIEs in one hangar and cargo in the rest...

This is a very obscure aside, but that's actually always been described as the original design - the Alliance removed the partitions to create a larger open deck...

I'm not sure there's a terribly strict division between the two roles; a bulk cruiser is a fairly flexible type, and while recent material has tended to follow REBELS' lead and depict the Quasar Fire specifically in the carrier role, I don't think that's binding on its overall range of uses...

You hadn't picked that up from my constant refrain of "Voren is an idiot"™?

More seriously, I have to read your new book...

Oh, I'm not apologising, I'm clarifying that it's not confrontational, both for you and the rest of the audience.

*sigh*

Ex-zactly!

If you mean I'm strongly emphasing the restrictions on what the Alliance can usefully do, then I agree - I think there are ways in which that is perhaps less-true tonally, and even literal points-of-reference like the Battle of Britain and the US Navy in the Pacific in '42-'43 aren't too far of the mark as literal terms-of-reference, but there are all kinds of reasons one should not give them the formation bombing capability of 8th Air Force in 1944...

I suspect where we disagree is how much we think the concession of anything significant is going to be practical, and how much this kind of effort actually strengthens the Alliance. By definition, the Empire will concede only what it decides it doesn't need.

I think this is somewhere we can work through our difference of opinion in more detail. I actually think the Empire's big clunking footprint is actually very useful for suppression - an AT-ST on every intersection, watching for movement, detecting comms. The challenge they face is separating insurgent activity from background noise, but that can be achieved either by the concession of control over the hinterland - creating checkpoints through which people have to move, glorified aiport-security processes - or by sufficient manpower and/or competence necessary to do the actual filtering of the information and searching of locations necessary to detect the real rebels, or simply by upscaling the footprint to AT-ATs indiscriminately stomping things and throwing that manpower into frontal assault....

I'd imagine that AT-STs also encourage people to keep indoors, and that's probably by design. "Be very, very quiet. We're hunting Rebels."

What we saw on Ferrix was, quite literally, not AT-STs, let alone AT-ATs, but the collapse of the threat of force, the failure of policing - what Dedra and the idiots on the ground are doing is more like what Pre-Mor security did than they realise, and while their comeuppance was viscerally satisfying for the audience, everyone involved knows that this is simply going to lead to a more brutal occupation and methodical suppression, which is why Bix and Brasso get out of there.

And here, I should probably call out the Ortolan in the band ("And Max Rebo, on red ball organ"). There's a possibility that some people in the Alliance might actually plan for that sort of failure to happen, because they see the resulting disorder as a political success... a logic that I'm not convinced by...

I think this is a very good expression of where we differ - I tend to think insurgencies offer limited utility and intense risk compared with the resources committed and realistic gains on offer, while I'm much more positive about the effectiveness of X-wings in contesting the space hinterland.

Ironic observation - the ISB is the response we see on Ferrix.

I'm glad you raised this, as I think it's an important point, and was one I couldn't quite find a place for, or a way to express this well, in my previous pass - the Empire is essentially totalitarian, committed to the integration of the people and resources it controls into a single system. That's both an ideological objective and, as you say, a means of acculturation, training people to internalise new moral priorities and modes of behaviour...

I'd actually think that process is largely separate from the conventional security tropes, and all the more dangerous for that reason...

But hold that thought?

Yes, very much this, except one quibble. I don't actually think the Separatists are "more marginal" - it's just that their legitimacy is based on a franchise jurisdiction given to them by the government, with their own internal "business" structures that contrast with the "public" institutions of government; those are constitutional questions rather than ones which are keyed to a specific balance of power (and in practice, these constitutionally-contrasted power-structures can in fact be closely integrated - in the period of its power c. 1750-1850, the HEIC wasn't in conflict with the London government)...

There's an interesting meditation here on what the Prequel conflict is really about - the agenda of the Separatists is to essentially dissolve the existing system of political sovereignty vested in the central federal aparatus, and reconstitute organizations like the Trade Federation as more autonomous political entities, essentially converting their privateized activity into governments...

Once one realises that, the contrastingly totalitarian nature of the Empire really becomes apparent, defined by a strong emphasis on the governmental power-structure, and (this is probably where I differ in my take) the fundamental Empire-lite flaw in the politics of Padmé, Skyguy, Bail, Mon, and so on, comes into sharper focus...

I think I'd respond with the suggestion that the "colonial" dynamic in Star Wars isn't specifically a product of the Empire or a construct of its ideology, but an underlying dynamic inherited from the Old Republic - and that Star Wars can reach for a lot of different metaphors, depending on the story?

Also, I'm going to make the suggestion that hyperspace correlates with the classic British "imperial" policy emphasis on seaborne trade and force-projection (or indeed its French or Danish or Dutch counterparts, where there was often more emphasis on productive outposts and lines-of-communication than volume of territory)... which is perhaps another reason why I emphasise X-wing and raiding frigates as the real problem/solution...?

I agree on the story potential and a lot of the practicalities, but not precisely on the paradigm.

Yes, obviously, the Empire is incredibly guilty of badguyism, and the more Tarkin tightens his grip, the more worlds will slip through his fingers, but I think it's still possible to mobilize Imperial aesthetics and identity constructively, by dissociating them from such dark incompetence - in-universe, I suspect a lot of people will try to distinguish the Empire "as a whole" from innately problematic Sith and superweapons, and even if that's objectively inaccurate, the subjective POV acquires an objectivity of its own...

Conversely, the New Republic has to be careful what it's seeking consent for by propagandizing Leia, because "light regulation" on the big economy is just another way of doing totalitarianism badly.

Where this gets so obvious that you can hang a lampshade on it is in the New Jedi Order novels, where Leia is persuaded to act as the figurehead of SELCORE, which is deliberately seeking to reorganize a massive dislocated population to fuel the industry and enlistment policies of the New Republic... place that in the context of your earlier comments about the character of Imperial totalitarianism?

Note that this is not a moral equivalence - one might say that Palpatine is more selfaware about the nature of state power than Padmé, but not selfaware enough to abandon her political position, whereas Padmé's very unselfawareness excuses her, and may allow her to escape the logic of her politics to some extent...

... well, this is, again, where we disagree. I don't think this is a terribly practical paradigm. Active harrassment of the sort that you envisage mandates an Imperial response, perhaps not well-aimed or competent but locally destructive. A well-fought denial-of-hinterland has to be kept low-level enough to avoid that. The Empire will only back off if it decides that aggression isn't worth the effort, that containment is an acceptable and broadly successful mode of containing the insurgency, one that does not allow the Alliance unacceptable freedom, and remains ready to apply the steamiron more accurately and emphatically if the need or opportunity arises. That is the really scary part, and the part that smart or instinctive Alliance leaders have to work around (Cracken is smart, Rieekan is smart, Wedge is smarter than he lets most people realise, Luke is a dork who does not articulate this sort of thing at all, but he's tremendously instinctive)...

I was actually trying to politely sidestep the real-world analogy, because I don't think it's really apposite - my understanding, very much inexpert, is that 1989 happened the way it did because people at the very top were pursuing detente and deconfliction and the dismantling of a disliked apparatus, in the context of broad recognition of an ideological need for change. This is not a close structural analogy for Star Wars, nor for that matter does the Empire's totalitarianism accommodate the same sort of political satellite constellation...

So, where are we? The situation we see in MANDO represents one in which Imperial garrisons have been overthrown and no reprisals have followed, but does not really bother explaining that collapse. Where has all the big pointy gone?

The pre-reboot material offered no objective synthesis, but instead introduced a number of themes - Imperial retrenchment around key "fortress" systems, the psychic whiplash of Palpatine exploding, conflict with breakaway fleet commanders, an effective "island-hopping" campaign by the New Republic designed to secure the key hyperlanes and the Core, and central mismanagement of Imperial defense by Isard (though as I've said above, Stackpole indicated that she deliberately handed the Core to the New Republic as part of a plan to take over the New Republic by the back door, and I'm suspicious that she deliberately dismantled Imperial military, to further the same intended pivot from conflict to security-aparatus control, all of which which fits in with the previous discussion about social totalitarianism). The reboot material has emphasised a cynical move by a small cadre of Palpatinist extremists, seeking to cause anarchy as a planned precursor to the later reimposition of totalitarianism by the First Order, with the Imperial holdouts being presented as much more clandestine base network...

My own preferred explanation would, of course, emphasise X-wings.

Waiting enthusiastically - and this in itself leads to an interesting question, too. What, beyond X-wings, does limit the Empire's ability to strike back?

Oh, definitely. The initial count has to include Assault Frigates, bulk cruisers and potentially other Rebel ships like carriers and those Corellian interdictors from Rebellion. I'd posit that new-builds and additional conversions will bulk up the number of MC80S by Endor. For WARFARE I equated the wingless with the ships built specifically by Mon Cal as warships for the Alliance, but I don't think that still holds in the reboot continuity...

Makes sense. I do think the hangar acts as cargo space as well as fighter space, but that just means it's like a scaled-up version of the VCX-100, which can carry cargo both in the enclosed hold and externally (or indeed the layout of a modern superfreighter, with the cargo modules under the hull being the equivalent of the ones stacked in the open above the deck)...

I suspect I've spent enough time thinking about this that "is that the right size" has become a semi-automatic response...

What makes you think the Devastator?

I'd definitely allow occasional exploding ISDs, analogous to the fire/explosion losses in the age of sail, but the others are all unusual incidents - the Droid Control Ship is destroyed by some random torpedoes being fired inside the hangar getting through some blast doors into a power-generation space (the script describes the room they run into as the "reactor room", but the small modules shown in the film are portrayed in the cross-section as a separate set of "pilot" reactors), the Sovereign gets destroyed in REBELS by two lightsabers falling blade-first into something important in the engineroom, perhaps further accelerated by an exploding Dark Jedi self-immolating in the resulting energy fire (note, again, the power system is NOT a big round sphere), while the Sequel ships have hefty prime weapons that need to be hooked up to a big generator...

The opening of TLJ makes more sense if the Fulminatrix is obnoxiously and obviously vulnerable when hit in the right way...

True, but individually they don't need much power - I'm not an expert on this, but I'd imagine that having them on a circuit isn't going to require huge mains loads being carried through the ship in the way that centrally powering the individual sensor mountings and deflector generators and turbolaser turrets would...

The question is really whether the systems can be practically separated - my layman's understanding is that in space, the power surge has nowhere to ground itself, except the rest of the ship, so it's going to skip into the hull and other systems. Again, those who understand the science better than me should feel encouraged to speak up...

Interesting...

Though what do we make of the Devastator having a module with two small hangar hatches placed across what seems to be the sealed blast door of a much larger hangar at the front end of the main bay (depicted as such on Sovereign in REBELS)? I suppose it was done to give a better sense of scale in the opening shot of ANH, but if we're trying to explain it, does it mean an open deck has been replaced by an enclosed complex of smaller units (for TIE Fighters?) because it was too vulnerable?

I'm also thinking of the way that HMS Renown converted her seaplane hangars into a cinema and a laundrette when the aircraft were replaced with radar...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

There is also the detail that the top is not flat...that raised center just adds something to the design for me.

 

Ugh, missing markup ate a section of my reply to Captain P - it's actually visible if you quote the text to reply, but here's how it ought to read...

... et cetera...?

Yeah, it's a really nice design. The underside tracks right back to the original Doug Chiang illustration from the original EGtVV, though, with the main change being that the partitions between the hangar bays are restored...





EDIT: and then I thought of something... in The Hutt Gambit, the four bulk cruisers in the Imperial squadron at the Battle of Nar Shaddaa aren't specifically identified as the boxy Rendili type first introduced in The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook, so could easily be thought of as Quasar Fire class... they don't seem to be carrying TIEs, but they might be carrying troops for the assault on the Smugglers' Moon, or they might be acting as base ships for the sixteen Guardian-class "light cruisers" in the force...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

And then I thought of something else...

The fleet involved at Nar Shaddaa, that of Sarn Shild, "the local sector Moff" with responsibilty for Hutt space and the adjacent Imperial-controlled area, is another nice example of a low deployment...

* Three Dreadnaughts, each with a single TIE Fighter squadron.
* Four bulk cruisers, apparently without TIE Fighters.
* Two Carracks, each with four TIE Recons, specifically identified as a "recon line".
* Sixteen Guardian-class customs ships, specifically identified as a "skirmish line" - they're just 42m long, and at least some of them, probably all of them, are evidently not proper Imperial Navy vessels.

The arrangement seems to be that of a light squadron from The Imperial Sourcebook, implying that the Dreadnaughts and the bulk cruisers each form an attack line.

This seems to be the Moff's total force - Han's describes it as "his fleet", before explaining to Chewie that "each Imperial Moff has his own discretionary ‘peacekeeping’ squadron", and before he gets a good look at the ships, he speculates that the fleet might include a single VSD or ISD.

In terms of The Imperial Sourcebook, this corresponds to the "squadron under the personal command of the Moff... attached to their Sector Group HQ". The multi-squadron fleet formations that are supposed to form the backbone of the command seem to be simply absent.

That said, there is a possibility that the fleet should be larger - Han speculates that this is what the Moff is "stuck" with after "the newest, best stuff" went to suppress a revolt in the Rampa system, which The Essential Atlas places in the same sector...

There's just enough wiggle room to imagine a High Admiral in the sector with a more potent fleet acting largely detached from Sarn's authority, but alternatively, Rampa might have been taken out of Shild's control and placed in a Grand Moff's priority sector, and any redeployed ships might only have been an additional squadron or two attached to the HQ, not a larger fleet formation...

But even the idea that better ships went to Rampa is just guesswork by Han, and placing it in the same sector is pretty much a retcon. Overall, this single squadron seems to be characterised as typical of a local Moff's command on the Outer Rim in 4 BBY...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Oh yeah, I totally forgot about bulk cruisers. Just some cargo ship of an unspecified design, upgunned and upshieldded for combat. I'd headcanon that these are the most common warships in the galaxy.

So a typical battle during the GCW might be a Rebel attack force of R-41s, Z-95s, Y-wings, and a pair of CR90s, and on the Imperial side is a supply convoy guarded by two bulk cruisers, a bulk carrier of an unspecified type carrying one squadron of TIE fighters.

 

I would think more along the lines of a dedicated cargo/combat design from the shipyard. Is it supposed to stick around and slug it out? No. But it would be well armed enough that if it got hit it could defend itself until it was able to jump to hyperspace...even for an extended period.

Armed with both turbolasers like the CR90 or Quasar Fire has...but also point defense stuff like the Falcon's quads or even like the single barrel cannons Lando had on it.

--------------------------

Edit to add...

One of the ships from Acolyte apparently has some details already released...

https://www.starwars.com/databank/polan

 

Few days worth in here, sorry.

Yes, but remember, most real-world surface ships are operating a two team watch schedule. I found that only US subs were on a three team schedule during my research.

I mean, it depends, right? Are they loading up on supplies, fuel, or both? Are they transferring crew or taking aboard big replacement machinery to conduct repairs? Underway replenishment could take a lot of forms.

Never heard of officer enlisted. Officer and enlisted are basically two different rank structures. Agree that cadets are not yet commissioned officers (hence O-0).

Just listened to a podcast where they explained the very good reasons why US super carrier captains are always aviators.

In my head canon GA, Starfighter Command (SFC) retains unit command, which funnels up to a SFC component commander for a fleet task force. The task force commander can be from any branch.

Need is subjective, people need to eat and have some downtime. Not sure you can effectively get lower than a two team watch, which is likely what the Empire was running - as surely they didn't want they personnel to have too much downtime. The Rebels no doubt manned with what they had, and it would have been bare minimum, as at times they likely had more ships than crew.

I based mine on having a different rank for each type of unit commanded. And not having the jumps being too great. I believe studies show you can only effectively manage four to seven subordinates.

Check this out if you haven't: https://boards.theforce.net/threads/analysis-alliance-fighter-losses-at-battle-of-endor.50041652/

I accepted the sizes of the last shot, so I think my minimum is 20 Mon Cal cruisers.

It's been a long time since a looked up the Guardian-class. I think 40 meters might be a good minimum for self sustaining warships that aren't designed to regularly dock with other ships. I probably need a new ship category that extends from 40-75 meters. I think picket might be the best description, I like that better than patrol boat, gunboat, monitor, or cutter.

 

Non-commissioned officers are a thing in real life (warrant officer, for example). And of course some enlisted get commissioned - "mustangs"

 

I'd say he's a rather grand sector Moff, but that's a different thing...

Conversely, Territorial Governor Streeg in Secrets of the Sisar Run sounds like he might be a low-end Grand Moff (he does seem to have a multi-sector command, and "territorial governor" suggests that the Sisar Run Territories are organized on same model as the Outer Rim Territories and Metharian Nebula Territories), but he doesn't have more than a Strike Cruiser as his command ship (Moffship!) and a mix of Escort Carriers, Nebulon-Bs, IPVs and the odd Interdictor.

Apparently he can borrow two Star Destroyers, one from The Periphery and another which "skims the edges of Hutt space", which suggests they aren't that numerous even in the rimward sectors that do have them...

Overall, I'm left with the thought that if an area like the Sisar Run wasn't in Oversector Outer, then it suggests that Tarkin just subtracted the real problem areas from his command, and considering Governor Streeg's background, that Palpatine indulges in a lot of hit-and-hope gameplay when it comes to appointing high-level people...

This seems logical - a modern fleet carrier is basically an airfield on an island surrounded by ships - but I'd wonder if the Alliance has enough cross-qualified captains, and I'd also imagine that the relevant ship-commands will require a more distinctive skillset - either stay-out-of-danger ship-handling subordinate to the requirements of the X-wings, or cruiser-combat tactics largely separate from them...

I'd imagine that the NRDF likely do things more like this, and I really don't want to disagree with anyone's headcanon, but, at least as a principal, I would personally suspect that within the Star Wars space, starfighter generals are going to be more effective in flag-rank command of a fighter-led battlegroup than admirals with a big-ship background...

Flip this the other way up - the smaller the crew, the more rations you can carry for each crewer, the longer the ship can deploy without resupply, and the smaller the tranche of your naval resources you have to expend on rations and associated infrastructure (and intensively-manned ships require a lot), quite apart from the direct reduction in manning/training requirements and the increase in deckspace per crewer...

Not the way the US Navy does it, but my understanding - from the unprofessional perspective of a civilian bathtub - is that it's a route the Royal Navy has increasingly pursued...

Also, think of Thrawn's use of the Katana Fleet?

That's fine in theory - but alternatively, it might make sense to use some ranks as adjutant/XO positions, and in practice, there might be an imperative to give the most capable officers tactical command, or else there might not be enough qualified officers for every unit to be commanded by an officer of the correct grade...

I'd called them garda costas for discussion purposes, because the history of the term captures their emphasis on anti-pirate/anti-smuggling patrol and their slightly non-naval character, but that hardly works as a GFFA term.

So "picket" is pretty useful. And 40m is a pretty good boundary - the 35m Rendili "frigate" sort of skims the line, doesn't it?

And smaller ships, like the Skipray (or the Falcon, especially at its original ANH size) fundamentally are smaller - they need to do more deck-landing...

That said (and here I segue effortlessly into some stuff I was thinking about earlier), I'm wondering if "customs frigate" is useful as a generic term, if only because the handling of the designation is a hot mess, and it may have ended up being applied to more than one small patrol type, perhaps ranging from the 35m Rendili "frigate" design up to the 180m "light corvette", but checking a few the sourcebooks makes me realise I need to check through all of them to get everything in order...

Tagging @Havoc123 because of previous discussion, I'll add that pretty much every ship in this group gets the optional capacity for a small flight of externally-racked TIE Fighters that we see on the Gozanti in REBELS - they appear in groups of six as an option on the 50m KDY Imperial Armored Transport in Scavenger Hunt and the 42m Sienar type in Secrets of the Sisar Run, but they're also added in pairs to the patrol version of the 100m Corellian Action-series in Platt's Starport Guide, and the 35m Rendili type, which has a "TIE Modular Hangar" in Planets of the Galaxy, Volume Three...

All of which is to say that yes, REBELS really is as WEG-coded as @Tuskin38 and @The Positive Fan said...

Reorganising a couple of topics thematically...

There are two separate things here...

* Cockpit personnell below officer rank - e.g., the Luftwaffe had fighter pilots down to the approximate equivalent of an American private first class or British lance-corporal.

* "Warrant" personnell ranking in-between the sergeant / petty officer NCO grades on the one hand, and commissioned officers like lieutenants on the other - the classic example is in the Royal Navy, where alongside the lieutenants, etc., who commanded the guns in battle, there were "gunners" in charge of magazines and ammo handling, typically promoted upwards from the lower deck; gradually they were assimilated to commissioned officers, along with their more recently-created counterparts in other specialisations like comms, and in the 1950s they switched to being lieutenants.

Sometimes, you find situations where non-officer pilots are specifically placed in the narrower and higher "warrant" rank-bracket - the US Army has a lot of warrant officers flying helicopters, the role being regarded as a super-skilled vehicle driver rather than an academy-trained officer.

The specific question is whether a Star Wars "Flight Officer" is a warrant rank, corresponding to the historic USAAF usage of the term, or if it's been reinterpreted as another entry in the variety of junior-subaltern commissioned ranks equating to a modern O-1 (RAF Flying Officer, USAF 2nd Lieutenant, USN Lieutenant J.G., RN Sub-lieutenant, French air-force sous-lieutenant, French naval enseigne, etc.)...

The second of those was certainly the case for the Imperial rank in WARFARE.

You're all right. The classic Rendili bulk cruiser, which the computer games got from WEG, is a big 600m type that comes with thirty Falcon-style quad-lasers as standard, making it rather the equivalent of a galleon or East Indiaman, and rather a good flak ship, but the SoroSuub Quasar Fire class is 350m and has just two weapons positions, typically flak lasers but upgraded on the Free Virgilian ships with punchier turbolasers, while the Corellian Action-series like the Wild Karrde is a physically smaller 100m type that's primarily a freighter but can be converted for patrol or piracy...

Basically the "bulk cruiser" designation seems to cover any capital-ship design that combines armament and cargo, whether by design or as a matter of conversion, and they can often, but perhaps not always, trade cargo for a fighter deck as well...

Pellaeon's big-ship-bridge view in Heir is that a bulk cruiser is "old, slow, minimally armed, with very little going for it in a fight except its size", but he's thinking that a little ironically while being mobbed by three squadrons of A-wings (something he's apparently never encountered even reports about before, which says a lot about his background and the Empire's tactical approach), and simultaneously frowning in mild confusion because Thrawn's sitting there beside him reminiscing about Trade Federation battleships in a novel written in 1991 (thereby trolling him and Zahn and us)...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

At least 6...but I would say probably 10. We know 6 because in Homecoming Kanan, Ezra, Sabine, Zeb, Gobi and Numa all man a turret. With 10 there would be 2 on the sides of the bridge, and then 8 on the main body at the corners. 4 on the top and 4 on the bottom of the ship. This would give coverage at pretty much all angles for defense.

2 circled on the concept art.

 

Interesting. I'm not sure we're opposed here. I'm not saying that minimum crew requirements don't make sense and have advantages, only that it doesn't seem like a capable navy would go below a two-team watch rotation, although certainly the Rebels would have had to.

All I have read is that the Royal Navy is hoping to reduce crew requirements through reliability and automation, but this will not change the port and staboard two-team watch system. Have you seen otherwise?

Oh boy. I'm going to get around that by assuming the 35m "customs frigate" was not a true warship and typically remained in its assigned system, if not even in orbit.

I can't get onboard with picket, as it reminds me of an interdictor.

 

Are you talking about this one from Tramp Freighters?
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_Customs_Frigate

And Rebels would have us believe the heavy lifting is carried out by Arquitens and Gozantis.