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

I think there's something to be said for these little bits of "background noise" - in this case, literal radio chatter; that said, some "throwaway" types, like the Imperial customs frigate, were picked up quicker than others (and even if it got a very nice pic in 1990, it took until 1998 to settle its hull size!) - it took until Rogue One to get a pic of the Zeta shuttle from SWAJ #11 (those wings are going to be fun to fit into a VSD! ) and we still don't know what the Evakmar-KDY looks like...

But speaking of things that may or may not fit into the hangars of a Star Destroyer, I don't know how I'd missed that the Empire uses Action-series transports to drop AT-ATs... so are these the twelve big "landing barges" that The Star Wars Sourcebook assigned the ISD?

Well, the Action VI is a little over 30m tall based on the schematics in the old EGtVV, but the basic cargo-box hull is probably only about 18m tall, which makes it low enough to fit into an ISD hangar and carry crouching AT-ATs (or WEG-scaled ones! ), and with a hull width of roughly 20m it's well-sized to carry pairs of them side-by-side, and at a length of roughly 100m, you're just going to be able to pack five or six (enough of them to carry the ISD's twenty AT-ATs) into the space between the main hangars and the forward bay, twice that if you double-height your storage bays - the only problem is that getting 100m barges out of the 60m forward bay is going to involve some fairly insane diagonal tip-downs... moving them aft to deep storage would make more sense, because then you can launch them from the main hangar, but then you start getting in the way of other things, and getting them into the main hangar may be equally challenging...

One reason I do like this, and it's pleasingly ludicrous, is that as an Action-series transport is technically a capital ship, and variously a "bulk cruiser" or a "frigate", twelve of them technically gives you the two six-frigate attack lines of the ISD's battle squadron, requiring just four pickets of some sort to make up the numbers...

In this case, I think it's the commando teams who're the main punch, assisted by impersonators like the Martinette and its crew... a handful of teams conducting well-timed raids - and they can board Imperial cargo ships as easily as they can hit bases - can give the impression of a major sector-wide insurgency being moved around in hot-rod freighters, especially if other people start claiming to be involved.

Though I do get the sense that the Empire didn't take the bait to expend much energy, and given the various later references, it seems that one way or another, the Alliance raiding force moved out of the sector relatively promptly (and all that looks at least semi-deliberate as a set of narrative choices)...

*encourages people to speak up*

The one person we do know played it is Pablo Hidalgo, who homaged that fact extensively in Rookies (though I only caught up with that fact yesterday, when I was finishing off my pass on that post, having not looked at Rookies since long before I first looked at the Campaign Pack), but I don't think he pays attention around here any more...

Yes - I got my trailwards and spinwards confused ( ); it's spinwards of the Hydian Way, i.e. on the upper left side of the map, but it sits along the Namadi Corridor, which is the only hyperlane out of the Core in that whole area, and is excluded from strict definitions of "the Negs"...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

The starboard side seem reasonably accurate, and isn't just the port side mirrored over. It does suffer a bit from being a game model and some parts aren't quite right, but amusingly some parts of it are more accurate than the 3d model used in the newer movies - The movie 3d model appears to be close in proportions to the studio model but there's a lot of things that aren't quite the right shape or size; like most of the pods, the tower on the rear and possibly the length of the engines. Interestingly enough the Star Wars Squadrons model appears to be based off the movie 3d model, as it shares a lot of the same features as the movie 3d model.

There are some quite nice pictures in the Japanese Chronicles book, it's just a shame it was never published outside of Japan, otherwise I might have had a chance of picking it up.

On the Star Destroyer horizontal axis, the ESB model looks to be mounted so that the trench is along the horizontal axis. There's also quite a few shots in ESB where the ISD is moving along the trench plane (opening shot, a few of the shots throughout the Falcon chase; including the one with the avenger facing full forward as it chases the Falcon). Also the ISD at the start of ROTJ appears to be orientated along the top hull slope but I'm pretty sure it's just the low angle of the camera giving that impression, as the bridge looks to be leaning forward, which would indicate it's orientated along the trench.

Now to slightly contradict myself. The ANH model may be mounted with its nose angled up, as some of the photos I've got of it looks to have it at an angle, and because most of the shots of it in ANH are from a low angle, and I don't really have much behind the scene stuff on it, it's hard to tell for sure - The shot of it approaching the Death Star is one of the few in ANH where it looks like it may be orientate along the trench (or possibly the bottom hull).

Also, while I was getting distracted looking at one of the behind the scenes documentaries I noticed this shot of a bunch of Star Destroyer models from the movies.

It's possible that the deckplans might work (some rooms might need to be shrunk slightly to fit). The main things I think might have problems are the docking and hangar bays, and the pods - the pods on the studio model are likely not as wide as the ones on the deckplan, and of course once you transfer it to 3d things might just not fit within the shapes.

Yeah, that window is a problem, it's interior size doesn't really match well to the exterior's size, and just to make things more problematic there's some rows of windows in the aft which look like they would barely work at 300m, as they wouldn't have high enough decks if the ship was any smaller. Then there's the question of how well different sizes work with the Falcon and other ships in the scene
Oh, and of course this got me curious so I've done a quickish measurement of the window to see what size it makes the Nebulon-B.

Now there's an older and newer versions of the scene from the outside, so I've done both. Unfortunately the older version image I used isn't that good a quality, so it's probably slightly off.

The side view of the Nebulon-B I used could be better quality but it's one of the best full side on images I have of the studio model.

The Nebulon-B ends up being somewhere between 256.59m-344.91m. Now there's a good chance the lower figure is a bit off (possibly by 20m-30m) because of the low quality images, but it does show that the 300m length can work with the window.

I'll just leave this here...

Deck 5 should exist in the aft hull, since it's the deck with the access corridor through the neck that connects the two sections together.

Not sure how I feel about those twelve landing barges... Ones able to fit four AT-ATs would likely be close to 60m long, which would require a lot of space inside the ISD, especially when you've got twelve of them...

There's two different control rooms shown during the ramming sequence. The first one is in the brim trench where the hammerhead crashes, and the second one is somewhere in the superstructure near the main guns (you can see one of the turrets outside the windows) - also the main guns look like they have a smaller quad turret on top...

 

The Nebulon-B model in DiceFront 1 is a straight 3D scan of the/an ESB model iirc.

 

Battlefront 2 I think literally uses a lower poly version of the actual Rebels model of the Gozanti. I can't find a screenshot of the BF2 model right now, but I remember comparing it to the render of the Rebels show model on wookieepedia and the textures appeared to be 1:1

I don't think the model was meant to be seen up close, it's only used far away in the single player, and there's a crashed one out of bounds on Hoth.

 

They used a lot of photogrammetry in the Dice Battlefronts, I'm just not sure how much they used it for the ship models. Going of an answer to a question during their GDC talk, it sounds like that while they did scan a lot of props and models, they only used them as reference (for shape, proportions and volume), as the scans weren't of high enough quality to be used for hard surface models.

 

Dicefront ISD is also Rogue One's, but details changed so its the ESB/ROTJ version.

 

I'm not sure that it is based on the Rogue One model. It's not as wide and the position and size of the bridge, hangars, trench cutouts and reactor bulb are different. It may also have been built before the Rogue One model was complete as Battlefront started production in 2013 and was released November 2015. while Rogue One I believe entered production in 2015 - it's always possible the Rogue One model was in production before the movie was, in which case I could see them sharing it with Dice.

I do wonder though, how much access they had to the Avenger model, as at the time I believe it was on tour with Star Wars Identities.

 

Well, yes, it's not exactly Bormea or Brentaal, but it's still about the most important position for defence and trade-route control on 'that' side of the Core, forming the spine of Sector Seven between Borleias and Bilbringi... though maybe that means we should limit our idea of "important" to a few places like Bormea, Coruscant, Anaxes and Kuat...

I know how that feels, though in this case, having found what seems to be a low-res of the same broadside pic online suggest there's considerable perspective distortion and it might not be the best for scaling...

The exhibition pic you linked is very good, however.

This is tricky... looking at the imagery I can find, the upper ridge of the "ESB" ISD does seem to be sloped slightly forward, off-axis compared with the superstructure (see here - it seems frustratingly hard to get good imagery of this, becuase people taking pics of the model tend not to focus on the break between the bow ridge and the superstructure), but not I think to the point that the hull is going to be oriented anything like symmetrically along the direction of travel - and just to be confusing, it looks as though the tower maybe slopes slightly forward relative to the superstructrue, too (see the first pic here and this close-in here) so maybe it's the ridgeline of the superstructure that slopes upwards relative to the axis of the hull, and the tower and the bow ridge are in-line with the orientatiion of the ship (and either way, that may also explain why the bridge seems hunched forward in some shots); I don't see the brim-trench as being aligned on-axis in the same way you do, but that said... I suspect you may have a better "eye" for that than me...

The "ANH" model, in contrast, looks like it might be more straightforwardly aligned, with the bow ridge and superstructure all on the axis (good pics here and here)...

Also, tangentially, I'm amused to see that the "ESB" model has a bridge right in the bows (it's actually off a Tamiya 1:700 model of a King George V-class battleship). Perhaps that's where the big Executor-style bridge we see on Avenger really is, as opposed to the small bridge we see on Tyrant during the "first catch of the day" scene...

The TIE Fighter hangar is definitely tight in a screen-accurate hull - you probably need to add extra headroom with an inter-deck space between deck 4 and deck 5 - and the forward shuttle bay is tight even using the more generous Technical Journal deck-spacing - the aperture is only about 8m wide on the plan, though a TIE Shuttle scaled to the 4ft width of the cockpit viewport on the full-size pod interior would probably just fit - while the aft shuttle bay probably needs to be kicked onto the top of the boom...

But I don't have a problem with any of that.

The pods in the keel are another question, but I don't think I've seen the bow view yet to measure widths - the second pod down, shown as guest quarters on the deckplan, is certainly really narrow; but the inconsistency in the various depictions means I don't think we need to be entirely bound by this level of external details - the same observation applying to the shuttle bay placed at the back of the forward hull underneath the connecting strut to the engines, where the two models used in ESB are very different in their detailing, and if required, we can explain the absence of hangar openings with reference to an extensive Alliance refit for the ship we see on-screen...

And speaking of refitting, I suspect the extra antennae on the starboard side were added for RotJ - the reason they're omitted in the classic off-screen depictions is that they're absent in the ESB material... I've not spotted any other changes yet, but there might be some...

My problem with this is that these external views contradict the small size of the viewport in the interior set - so once we start to insist on the accuracy of these views (which are, in any case, inconsistent with each other) consistency becomes impossible. If we really try and construct a strict movie-led scaling I generally tend to prioritise 1:1 physical sets over relative scaling calculated from compositing of VFX elements, so I'd have to go with a radical downscale of the ship to keep the viewport interior at the right scale (also, I admit, I just liked the idea of using Leia as a 1.5m scaling metric). But again, like I said, the details are all really inconsistent, so we can probably ignore everything except (perhaps?) the basic hull-proportions...

Speaking of things that don't fit, it really came home to me recently, looking at the Millennium Falcon's mandibles and the way they seem designed for cargo loading, the ring corridor and forward hold don't belong on that ship at all... the interior is retrofited into the exterior, which means that the ANH version at least can be accommodated off-axis, with perhaps just a little squinting at the corners of the room...

Or we could just revert to the intended 15m scaling...

Well, it should, but it seems to have to arrive between deck 7 and deck 9, so I suspect it becomes deck 8 - perhaps the "deck 6" corridor continues to the engineering turbolifts, which would then act as a security/hull-integrity barrier (though that's admittedly a bit of Matt Jefferies tonality - it's based on how the Trek "ring corridor" was originally designed) as well as a way to disguise the mismatched numbering...

You missed the part where I suggested they're Action-series transports?

Short version - as I said before, there's plenty room to stack a sufficient number of 60m barges in between the forward drop-bay and the main docking complex...

Now this is interesting - there seems to have been some heavy post-production editing; in origin, it seems that there was a single ISD, which was in the middle of an engine overhaul - no Y-wing attack run, no two-ISD crash - and both "Get Admiral Gorin! Immediately!" and Admiral Gorin's own "Reverse engines! Full power!" seem to have been filmed as part of a single longer sequence on the main bridge; but as the action-sequence was radically changed and the shots were repurposed, the viewports were edited to place the first line on a control deck of the deflector station and the second line somewhere in the starboard superstructure of the second ISD...

And like a lot of Rogue One, the obvious editing and resulting inconsistency (why is the admiral giving engine orders in starboard fire control?) means I'm reluctant to use these fine details for extrapolation...

... but there's clearly some footage of a control room with consoles on the quarterdeck, more clearly seen in the fast-cut explosion scenes that follow the impact, which is implicitly different from the main bridge...

Looks like there are some interesting questions to be answered here...

(But I'm hardly keeping pace with my own obscuritanism, so I'll mostly just watch with popcorn!? )

The REBELS models are generally great, though...

(I've not yet tried to work out where the REBELS version of the Nebulon-B comes from - a repurposed Rogue One asset, I guess, though it would be the only one I'd have heard of going in that direction)...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Not sure if the following photo helps, but it does show how the superstructure and bridge matches the slope of the upper hull.

There's also this production sketch that gives an idea of the different angles of the ship, including the neck shape.

The hangar probably does need some extra headroom, especially if using the current canon TIE heights - three decks would be around 9m high, which is be a rather tight fit for a TIE. If it was something other than TIEs the hangar probably would be fine as things like X-wings really only need to take up two decks at most.

There's this image of the front that gives a bit of an idea of the pods widths. Going of the Battlefront model the bridge pod is around 11m wide, but how accurate that is I can't say - At some point in the future I want to go and remodel the pods on the Battlefront model, but that's going to require a ton time, research and reference material to do, so who knows if I'll ever get around to doing it.

Yeah, I believe the antennae and some other details were added for RotJ so they could show the starboard side. Unfortunately I don't think we really see it in the movie, as they tended to just use a flipped port side shot whenever the starboard side was shown.

From what I can tell the older version is actually rather close to the viewports interior set size. The viewport is around 2m on the exterior and I'm currently thinking the interior viewport is somewhere between 1.8m to 2m tal, so rather close to the exterior size - The interior set viewport tilts into the room and the walls next to it are angled, so it's not exactly the easiest thing to measure.

It would make it fit easier... Just not sure if the crew would enjoy bumping their heads every time they stand up in the cockpit Either way it being able to reduce it's height would still be useful, plus I like that folded versions.

I've gone and combined all the deck location silhouettes into one image. The decks seem to line up reasonably well, with room between them for the unlisted decks. I will note though, that the lengths of the decks shown don't really match up with the deckplans lengths.
Deck 5 is above deck 7 and is inline with the neck, there's also enough space between deck 5 and 7 for deck 6 to fit - I do think deck 5 could be a little higher in the hull, so there's a bit more room in the neck for deck 6 and it's more centred in the neck, but then the decks above it would also have to move up... Also the docking bay in deck 7 should probably be taking up 2 decks (like deck 8), as one deck isn't really tall enough.
The only part we see of deck 6 is the forward docking tube, which is positioned just below the docking tube machinery shown on deck 5 - I don't know why they put it on the deck 7 sheet as it makes it slightly confusing where it's located on the ship.

Saw it just after I did that post, and didn't have any more energy to reply then.
The Action series transports would be even worse as they are a lot longer and taller than a barge would hopefully be. I do like the look of that imperial version though, and as a separate transport I think they would work, and if they needed to transport AT-ATs from an ISD they could dock in the main docking bay and have them ferried across with CT-11 space tugs.

I'm thinking the REBELS version may be its own thing. Some of it details, like the pods and rear tower, are closer to the studio model than the Rogue One version. It's proportion and shapes are a bit different as well, with a slight curve on the forward hull plates (visible in the concept art for it), while the Rogue One hull plates appear flat - not sure if they taper in as they go back (like the studio model).

 

Really impressive (an intensive!) work on the Nebulon-B by the way. Worthy of the old 'Ship of Riddles' page on the Millennium Falcon (which was planning to cover the frigate as well)

My view is variations of the EF76 have been produced over the years, with varying bridges, bow modules, necks, weapons and antenna. This would explain certain differences, and even possible length variations over the years.

I am also heartened to see that the window can support a three hundred metre or longer scale, too - even likely as high as 338 metres (which is my derived upper limit from scaling the 247 cm miniature to a likely 25.4 cm docked Falcon, which may ameliorate certain internal volume issues, too)

And as for the Third Horizon and other High Republic ships - all my scaling data comes from the comics so far, especially in Shadows of Starlight.

There the Horizon is depicted for the first-time, looking broadly like some mash up of the Providence and Venator, with a hint of R-41 Starchaser. It does not very much resemble the novel description, so far though (but is only seen from head on) The Pacifier-class cruiser is also shown a few times, and definitely seems much bigger than the Longbeams often seen next to it (such as in the opening of Shadows of Starlight, where many are fleeing the fall of the Beacon)

The Longbeam seems comparable to a Consular-class also at times (a ship I also have some reason to estimate at around 80 metres, using the ICS picture, and docking inside a Venator as reference points) in many comic images. Finally, the Ataraxia is a bit ambiguous, but has a bay big enough to accommodate two or three Vector fighters (comparable in scale to V-19 Torrents maybe) So might be close to 90 metres or more?

 

Could the "crouched" position we see in Rebels work? The walker is then able to get up just fine.

Spoiler

Granted this is the 25 meters tall "prototype", but I imagine later versions would be able to do the same. Speaking of, I wonder if the production model wasn't downscaled exactly to allow an easier fit inside ISD hangars, as with the new juggernaut seen in Rogue One that looks smaller than the GAR model.

 

I'm going to say probably not as well, as there is a lot of limitations on how far some of the joints can rotate; with joints like the knees only able to rotate around 60 degrees. So even if it can crouch it wouldn't be able to reduce its height by too much.
Even the one in REBELS technically can't (the knee joint don't seem to be designed to bend that much) and they appear to cheat a bit in that scene, the geometry of the leg can be seen intersecting into itself.

It could be that it was downscaled to fit inside an ISD hangar, or to just make it easier to transport in general. It also possible it was to reduce it's weight slightly, or make it a slightly smaller target. The smaller Juggernaut definitely makes sense as a design for easier transports, as the larger GAR model is likely limited in what can carry it - it's actually not as bad as I originally thought, the height with the mast lowered looks to be around the same height as an AT-AT. So it's mainly the length, width and maybe weight which would be an issue.

I probably should do a revised image at some point, as I modified the battlefront rig to make it more accurate to how the movie versions moves, and as a consequence it caused the second stance to be around 2m taller. Of course, then I'll probably find more things wrong with the Battlefront AT-AT and have to revise it again

 

Well the Republic one has scale issues as well. The Juggernauts on Kashyyyk look huge, but are apparently supposed to be a lot smaller. But at some point it just became the actual size.

I think, like the Venators in the opening sequence of Episode 3, they were scaled up to look more impressive.

 

The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire

Spoiler

makes a reference to the inconsistent lengths for the Executor Class heh.
I don't own the book, but this is from Marv's continuity breakdown:

"It’s said that the planned size of the Super Star Destroyer seems to vary across records with no explanation, a wink to the old fan debates about the inconsistency of their true size."

 

Some more Outlaws ship footage

Spoiler

Shows off a new corvette used by pirates, called the B84-Viper. Despite being a small ship, it has a dedicated hanger.

 

Wow, that's, um... that's actually crossing a line for me as far as ascending fan nonsense goes.

If the next sourcebook has a reference to "Cad Bane does he contradict the EU" I'm not sure how I'm gonna take it.

 

What type of upgrades would a person need to modify their Quad-Jumper into a smuggling ship? If so, what parts are recommended for said modifications?

 

False IDs for broadcasting to customs ships.

 

Andor Season 2 Reel

Spoiler

There was a TIE Fighter shown briefly that looked an a lot like the TIE Avenger

 

In the Skeleton crew trailer, we get a nice view of ships docked at an asteroid base, notably including a very large ship decked out in the same dazzle cameo colors as Gorian Shard's ship.

 

Which raises the question...is this before Mando S3 or just another ship of the same class?

 

Hmm?

Oh, it is definitely a different class of ship, just painted the same way.