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

@Thrawn McEwok

Indeed, Tarkin and I have a very different idea of what a "heavy hitter" is.

For me personally, capital ships that are between 1-4km range, pack a good armament, and carry multiple squadrons of fighters quality as heavy hitters. So, unsurprisingly for folks that know me, that means everything from MC80's to MC85's to Star Destroyers. These multirole warships as the powerful "core" of a navy, but most of the day to day ops and therefore number of hulls being smaller cruisers, frigates, and corvettes. Backed by powerful, multi-role fighter squadrons.

--Adm. Nick

 

@Thrawn McEwok I 100% believe that missing scene would happen that way. I mean could anyone, no matter how professional of a soldier they are, say no to Oscar Isaac's smile?

 

That's a good definition, but I think there's an argument that can be made that you can get an impact from more compact platforms like fighters and gunships and 600m-900m cruisers, and that there's also a question about how (and emphatically, when you're a good-guy like the NR/Alliance, if) to hit.

I'm really not sure I can make a smart comment in response.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

So...a Venator carries 192 V-Wings, 192 Eta-2s, 36 ARC-170s, 40 LAAT/is,...that is 460 aircraft....with additional shuttles. Seems to me like that might be a little much for it's fighter complement. And aren't Eta-2s pretty much a Jedi thing?? Are they carrying a bunch of back up ships for the Jedi that just sit around taking up hanger space?

 

lol, I'd like to see that retconned. I mean, just watching the opening battle in ROTS...we're supposed to think these things are carriers? And even is a Venator is primarily a carrier, I don't think you can physically fit that many fighters into it.

 

Eta-2s and V-Wings take up very little hangar space, perhaps these are the "official stats" advertised by Kuat to make it seem like can hold more fighters than it actually can? Or maybe a proposed configuration, having them loaded with more than 400 Kuati fighters and gunships and 36 Incom ones would surely go to their advantage..

I also think the statistics downplay the amount of support vehicles the Venators would usually carry. Realistically, I would expect more walkers (the cross sections book only lists 24), plus LAAT/c dropships, Nu-class shuttles and the occasional juggernauts and HAET-221 gunboats. Given that V-Wings weren't that much common even by the last days of the clone wars (do they even show up on Coruscant?) I'd they'd usually be loaded with more than 36 ARC-170s (each one taking the space of 3 or more of them) and less of than 192 V-Wings. Replacing many of these small fighters with larger vehicles would bring down the starfighter count by a lot.

 

I’ve always taken that with a pinch of salt, particular the Eta-2s, which we’ve only ever seen flown by Jedi - they’re designed for Force-sensitive pilots.

It would be nice to see an updated canon cross sections book that referred to Z-95s, Y-Wings or V-19s instead.

 

Speaking of Z-95s, were they being phased out as of episode III? Interestingly they were introduced in the show quite later than ARC-170s, and ARCs were kept in service for some time even under the Empire. Perhaps they were produced in limited numbers until the Navy decided that smaller and lighter designs such as the V-Wing (and then TIE/lns) were more fit as the main line starfighter?
The same would go for Y-Wings, which disappeared completely by the time of ROTS and the beginning of the dark times. The TIE Fighter Owner's Workshop Manual seems to imply that there was no dedicated bomber serving the navy before TIE/sa had been introduced.

 

I would say 2 wings/144 fighters would be more realistic...in addition to shuttles.

Which I find disappointing as it means no TIE/gt.

 

Why would you even want your Venators to act as troop carriers anyway? The more troops, walkers, and shuttles you put into it, the less it's able to carry out its main battleship role. Any large freighter or ship with a large interior space can act as a troop carrier or starfighter carrier, like the Quasar Fire...but a battleship should be devoting everything to weapons, shields and armor. Maybe in the Imperial era a multi-purpose ship might be more justified, but during the Clone Wars not so much.

 

Keep the ground pounders on the Acclamators. Venators for space combat and carrier duty.

 

Because they are used as troop carriers:
https://starwarsblog.starwars.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2016/10/kashyyyk-bio-1_e5db7349.jpeg
I count as many as 9 Juggernauts being disembarked from the Venator, plus the ISPs, AT-RTs, AT-APs and infantry. Assuming the cross sections book meant 24 "AT-TE sized" walkers, it's safe to say that in this ship much more space was reserved for ground vehicles. In ROTS Venators are also used as assault ships on Utapau, and you can see many of them landed in a staging area on Coruscant to be loaded with ground vehicles.

My guess is that the original idea was that Acclamators (which never show up in ROTS) were more or less completely replaced by Venators at this point. This made sense in that pre-III material often portrayed the Acclamator as a multi-purpose ship, used in space combat as the main cruiser of the fleet as well as an assault ship. The Clone Wars has the ships used alongiside each other to fill different roles, with the Venator hardly (if ever) landing in a planet surface to disembark troops.

One possible way to explain their usage in III is that the Navy started to prefer mass-producing multi-role cruisers instead of specialised designs, a strategy that would be kept under the Empire with the ISD.

 

The fighter complement of a Venator was a topic of much debate back in the day.

Anyone want a longpost on what we actually see by way of deck-park in all five conflicting depictions of the hangar?

Technically speaking, you can think of the TIE/gt as more of an "attack helicopter" equivalent, given that they're specifically for a surface role, and are in theory a sort of fighter-bomber?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

What is there to debate? Canon is canon, right? I mean, I might think that 192 V-Wings, 192 Eta-2s, 36 ARC-170s, and 40 LAAT/is makes no sense...but at the end of the day there's nothing I can do about it.

 

Maybe it should have been 192 V-Wings or 192 A-Wings, 36s ARC-170s or 40 LAAT/is?

 

Which would have put them in a bomber roll until the TIE Bomber came along.

and the Encyclopedia of Starfighters etc...says the Sphyrnya-class/hammerhead is 300+ meters long. But Rebels shows it is comparable to the CR-90.

 

There's a TIE Boarding Craft in that new Vader VR, albeit low quality.

 

Probably, since we never saw clones using Eta's at a large scale and neither 200 Jedi piling up into each Venator, I tend to ignore the 192 Jedi starfighters number.

 

Oh, you're absolutely right - except that the canon is interestingly contradictory here in terms of how the Venator's hangar is portrayed, and this is just about the fandom bouncing around ideas and observations to see if anything shuffles out.

... but I'd never spotted that HAET-221 in the hangar of Kenobi's command ship in Episode III (back of the main deck), so I think the topic has the potential to be interesting.

Certainly plausible. Compatible with the movie, in which the deck-park slots for A-wings or V-wings are arranged in groups of twenty-four, but the bigger vehicles are pushed in however they can fit on top of the deck lines. Doesn't fit with the REBELS cartoon, which shows two completely different hangar configurations - the first one might only have room for about fifty vehicles (twelve Y-wings, twelve gunships, and a force of about a dozen V-19s can be seen), while the later revision has a very clear layout with just sixty slots in total.

I'm trying hard not to longpost.

They'd have been the nearest thing available, but they're apparently designed primarily for unguided surface strafing - the first throwaway reference to the TIE/gt in the Star Wars Sourcebook (1987!) actually emphasises that they weren't the "dedicated space bomber" that the later TIE/sa was designed as, which is presumably the ultimate source of the Haynes reference... and according to the more detailed write-up that eventually followed in Star Wars Adventure Journal #10 they're usually used against large fixed positons that are easy-to-hit without much aiming (buildings, fortifications, and by extension perhaps "area targets" like troop concentrations - they can also lay minefields and drop propaganda leaflets), as they need to rely on external sensor platforms such as the TIE/fc sensor picket for precision attack, and they also leave the gun-strafing role against vehicles and infantry positions to the standard TIE Fighter.

(I'm not sure if any source ever indicates that they were extensively used as space-mission bombers like the TIE Bomber was - that's not made clear in SWSB, ISB, SWAJ #10 or the Databank - yes, they were carried in shipboard wings before being pushed away to "outlying posts" and Army bases, but that's not quite the same thing; anyone able to dig out a copy of the old NEGtVV, which Wookieepedia cites as saying something about remaining naval units? My copy's somewhere at the bottom of a pile of junk...).

Another thing that's relevant - the bomb chute shared by the TIE/gt and TIE Bomber is a vertical chute, a point that's movie canon from ESB, and which is emphasised in the cutaway schematics in SWSB and SWAJ #10 by the fact that the one on the TIE/gt is rotated around through ninety degrees compared to the one on the Bomber - I doubt that either plane is set up for firing missiles sideways into the wing.

While that arrangement can certainly be used in minimal gravity (see ESB) and can also be used to drop ordnance which powers up once clear of the hull and then travels under guidance, the system is primarily a "drop the dumb bomb" one rather than a "shoot a torpedo" one, and also implicitly limits the size of the individual munitions that the TIE Bomber can carry. Was that aperture on the front of the port-side hull pod, now rebooted as a gun-position, ever officially described as a forward-firing launcher for larger "straight-running" torpedo/concussion rounds...?

(The cutaway schematics used in SWSB and SWAJ #10 have always struck me as exceptionally nifty and very plausible - seemingly attributed in SWAJ #10 to Stephen Crane, best known as the inventor of the Aurebesh, and presumably original WEG work rather than borrowings from older ILM material?).

But when we're on the topic of exactly what sort of concussion missiles the TIE Bomber uses, this ties into something I noticed when thinking about AT-STs over in the ground-vehicle thread - the AT-ST's right-hand weapons mount carries a grenade mortar which according to the Wook can be alternatively loaded with "homing concussion missiles" - the source cited is the Rogue Squadron games for the GameCube, hardly top-tier canon, but where this gets interesting is that the game apparently applies the same terminology to the concussion weapons of the TIE Bomber and the A-wing...

A "homing concussion missile" that's fired from the tiny cheek-mounted grenade-mortar tubes on an armoured vehicle is presumably just an expensive mortar grenade, which we might (speculatively, I suppose) imagine being tricked out with a "smart bullet"-style course-correction system and some sort of compact booster on the rear; is this what's launched both by the TIE Bomber (whose concussion missile has to come out of a dumb-bomb launcher) and in a more rockety sort of way by the A-wing (whose spaceframe has very limited room for launcher aparatus). Are they basically using something that's far less potent than the big sort of torpedo/missile/bomb weapons we're used to from the X-wing, the Y-wing and the Falcon?

Is this purely a game mechanic elevated by Wookieepedia, or are there other references that are relevant?

Incidentally, this rather fun and thought-provoking trawl through the old days gave me the opportunity to confirm that the 6.3m length for the TIE Fighter and the 7.8m length for the TIE Bomber also date all the way back to the 1987 Star Wars Sourcebook. So the Bomber's length is from WEG, if not even earlier.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

[/QUOTE]

As far as the first TIEs having to launch before the ones behind can....IIRC...TIEs are not assigned...they are first come first serve. As pilots rush to them they go to the first ones first.

As far as what we did to deserve RO....we waited a long time for a great SW movie.[/QUOTE]


I know I'm late to this,l conversation, but having pilots just jump in random fighters is an extremely bad idea! I work in a hangar with F-18 Hornets, the amount of attention and time pilots spend on every factor of their birds down to the smallest thing and the hours they spend cataloging those issues are essential to keeping the jets flying. If a pilot took a jet they didn't know everything about into combat and the pilot didn't know about an issue with a simple fix or bypass etc the pilot could be forced to rtb or worse unknowingly let the problem continue leading to massive loss of control.

 

Has that always been the case throughout history? If it's WWII and an enemy bomber raid is inbound, and your ace pilot's plane is in the shop...wouldn't it be better to send him up in someone else's plane?

 

Yes, that kind of thing thing certainly happened in WW2.

 

As far as the first TIEs having to launch before the ones behind can....IIRC...TIEs are not assigned...they are first come first serve. As pilots rush to them they go to the first ones first.

As far as what we did to deserve RO....we waited a long time for a great SW movie.[/QUOTE]


I know I'm late to this,l conversation, but having pilots just jump in random fighters is an extremely bad idea! I work in a hangar with F-18 Hornets, the amount of attention and time pilots spend on every factor of their birds down to the smallest thing and the hours they spend cataloging those issues are essential to keeping the jets flying. If a pilot took a jet they didn't know everything about into combat and the pilot didn't know about an issue with a simple fix or bypass etc the pilot could be forced to rtb or worse unknowingly let the problem continue leading to massive loss of control.[/QUOTE]

That is real world though. TIEs are mass produced and all supposed to be identical. Once they are cycled thru the refurbishment, re-fuel and prep process they are put in the launch racks and ready to go.

 

My understanding of fast jet squadrons is that pilots are assigned aircraft that are available (in flying condition) on an as needed basis. So although a pilot will have his name and callsign painted on a specific jet within his squadrons, they won't fly that jet any more often than any of the other squadron jets (barring random chance) and pays no special/extra attention to that specific jet. Every pilot will perform a detailed pre-flight and post-flight routine whether for combat or training, to the tune of several hours, so I agree that they do not just jump in, start the engines and go. The maintenance requirements and funding levels for fast jets pretty well requires this method to get each pilot enough flight hours per month.

 

The manual addresses this by saying that technicians always make sure every TIE is identical inside and outside after each mission, and that the twin ion engine rarely malfunctioned since it had no moving parts.