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

As for Free Virgillia-class ships, I assume it's more a standardised heavy corvette/light frigate, and only one SUBTYPE of them is specifically Virgillian? Perhaps many early ships of the class were named for worlds that supported the Alliance early on?
Am also shocked, shocked, that Virgillia has had NO real development even in Legends lore, and not been used by say, Rebels, in place of Ibaar, Mykapo or some other world...

 

I kind of prefer the 'ad hoc regroupings idea thus far to a Gold Wing within a Gold Attack Group that includes Red, I guess - but who can say?

 

The Clone Wars finale spoilers:

Spoiler

Did we ever see that lower hangar deck for the Venator before? Might be easier to explain the insanely high starfighter count we had got in the past.
Also, I find it ironic that in 4 years of Rebels we never got a proper Lambda model but we ended up getting one for The Clone Wars

 

Spoiler

Did the clones like destroy all the other operational starfighters, gunships, and shuttles? because the hanger was entirely empty besides the one shuttle? And the repair hanger seemed to be all starfighters being reparied
Also, I spied the backside of a V-wing in one of the shots in the lower hanger.

Didn't we have a lambda class shuttle in only one episode of rebels for like 5 seconds? I don't remember it being any good though.

 

There's this this model that's actually made of Sentinel assets; I think the main reason it looks so weird is that the Sentinel's interior is too big to fit inside a Lamdba so they had to stretch the hull downwards. Funnily enough the cockpit is also a reused asset, but a spot has been painted black to make it look like it's part of the window.

 

I don't need a complete list of ships there, of course, but even just a general description of where those ships came from would be nice, especially since apparently there's galaxy-wide uprisings going on at about the same, and we see Resurgent-class Star Destroyers being taken out quickly. Its hard to tell the First Order's strength, since they lost Starkiller Base and the Supremacy but with the New Republic fleet lost at Hosnian Prime (and basically no surviving T-85 and probably not much New Republic warships either) hard to tell how many non-First Order warships were left. Some in the First Order were eager for the Final Order fleet but not sure if there were any open fleet battles until Exegol. Although I haven't been keeping up with much recent Star Wars novels, so no idea if that's been covered elsewhere.

Like whether they were remnants of the New Republic fleet, or were they all planetary/sector militia forces that had decided to finally fight back against the First Order or had been hiding out earlier, whether Corellia had found its spine or Mon Cala had an opportunity to help out. I gotta check Wookieepedia later to see what state Mon Cala is in in post-TLJ (I think the Allegiance comic focused on that but didn't have a happy ending I think).

Freighters like the Falcon and Ghost are probably just regular people jumping in to help the battle, probably individual starfighters too, but the bigger warships had to come from somewhere.

Hm, sorry if this comes off as complaining. A really detailed look at that sudden fleet probably isn't that important, but rather I'd like to know more about the state of the galaxy pre-IX. Like the Resistance Reborn novel preview had Corellia basically conquered already (sounds like they had given up without much of a fight), and leading up to the big battle the Resistance weren't sure they had any allies left aside from those on the latest jungle planet they were hiding out on (as no one answered their call for help from Crait). Even the supposed Trevorrow draft had uniting the galaxy against the First Order as a plot point. And then in a few hours (as that was the explicit countdown until the launch of the Final Order fleet) Lando gathers a huge fleet. Well, it is Lando but even his charisma has some limits.

Maybe a look at how precarious the First Order's grip on the galaxy was, or how the threat of the Final Order's superlasers drove everyone into open rebellion, or maybe Resistance agents had been laying the groundwork for a coordinated assault and then that opportunity came with the assault on Exegol. I'm just rambling mostly, and its probably too much to expect the novelization to go into detail much (its only based on the movie and the movie didn't bother with details or explanations much) but I hope someday a guidebook or RPG supplement or something can go into detail on the state of the galaxy leading up to the Battle of Exegol. I'm probably hoping for too much but watching TCW and TRoS on Disney+ reminded me of how much detail one era had and the other doesn't (and I had been expecting a bigger media blitz leading up to December 2019 but not sure that ever materialized).

 

With the Endor roster... a lot depends on the "rules" you start with, and my view is that we're unlikely to reach any sort of consensus, though that doesn't bother me at all - I'm very interested in refining what the canon (in the broad sense) actually says, as well as just knowing what other people's POVs are.

My own view is that the Groups, Wings and Squadrons are three separate layers of fighter organization - I laid out my own (long, and fairly theoretical) interpretation here...

Free Virgilia - I hadn't actually thought about them in ages, until the question of the class-name (courtesy of Jason, IIRC) sent me back to remember just how well-worked-out the Virgilian narrative and fleet was.

I feel to an extent, as with Bakura, that they're very much Kathy Tyers' area of the Galaxy, so perhaps that's why people haven't used them so much?

My view is that the Free Virgilia looks so suspiciously like a massively hot-rodded Pelta that I'd suspect they were produced by someone during the GCW, with decent fleet resources but outside the Rebel mainstream, and the name makes the Virgilian Free Alignment the obvious source of the design (reinforced by the fact that in the old canon, they managed to outfit an impressive number of off-camera, gun-armed capital ships)...

Spoiler

Hah, that scene was so perfect that I never clicked about the Lambda being seen here for the first time. You'd actually expect them to be early, because Lambda comes in the Greek alphabet before Nu...

The Sentinel - as seen in RotJ:SE and REBELS is made of the same component modules as the Lambda, so there's not a huge problem with the kitbash at all (I'd go as far as to say that the Sentinel is essentially a "long-hull" Lambda variant). I think the added holdspace is a really neat variant, too - there's implied to be a big hold space there on the standard type, underneath the unseen passenger compartment, but on this version, they've just dropped the deck down a meter or so to create the necessary headroom.

I have a huge ultra-completist analysis - which I drafted but never quite kicked together when we were discussing dropships a while back - that tries to summarise everything known about all the Greek letter shuttle types, if anybody's interested...?

No, this is good - detail for dicussion, topics and observations. You posted while I was replying to the previous posts, so I'm going to have to think of what I think before I can reply coherently.

- The Imperial Ewok

 

That sadly isn't the ugliest rebels redesign...I really dislike their Tie Fighters...But this this...they couldn't even get right

 

Was there any official talk about the Second Sister's TIE Interceptor? I'm assuming it's a prototype and not an actual TIE Interceptor.

 

Does anyone have some screenshots of the Venator from the new episode?

 

That seems to be the implication (also because she sometimes travels on her own so it's fair to assume it might be equipped with an hyperdrive) but it's worth noting you can actually see a TIE interceptor shoot down a LAAT/i gunship when you get to Kashyyyk, and that one's not related to the Inquisitorious in any way. For now I just assume that's a mistake and it's not meant to be there.
On that note I like to think the TIE reaper we see in the game is one of the very first produced, being tested by the Inquisitorious (just like the interceptor and later the advanced v1) before it would be used by other special branches of the Empire's military.

 

Also, what scale do we get for the Rebels Sentinel-class, from this?

 

IIRC the First Order hadn't reached the Colonies, Inner Rim, and Core by the time of Episode IX, so the fleet is mainly made up of planetary defense forces and third parties like space pirates and smugglers. I assume they were motivated to come out and defend themselves for once due to Space Sauron coming back with a fleet of planet killers, which would make sense. I also can imagine that Lando is much more well-respected in the galaxy, Bloodline tells us that Leia was considered a crazy old warmonger by the time of the Sequel Trilogy, which would make sense to why nobody answered the call on Crait.

 

I hereby request we dedicated at least three pages to this beauty.

 

Like why some of the laser cannons are so frinking small? ( :

 

Or why we have next to nothing on it except three pilots getting named flying it including Aftab Ackbar.

 

I don't think it was even in the Rebel Starfighters Manual, right? At least not according to Wookieepedia. The wiki says that book covered the Resistance Y-wing but not the B-wing? Oh well, maybe not enough time or space, and not like they would have come up with an interesting backstory anyway ("here's another new ship based on a Rebel Alliance fighter that looks almost exactly the same but updated with modern tech").

Not that I blame the writers, they're not the ones who chose which fighters to use for the movies (and with how New Republic military production was minimized in the years leading up to the sequels).

 

We see the same thing with both the Second Sister and Moff Gideon - are they flying specially uprated TIEs with hyperdrives? Or do they have some sort of carrier that we don't see on-screen...?

I'd definitely prefer the second option, but YMMV...?

I've not found a good orthogonal to scale from, but if there is one, the simple answer is to scale up from the length of the engine pod, which is about 10m long (the exact figure can be known precisely from the 1:1 blueprints for the Lambda from Jedi)....

Ballpark? I'm guessing about twice the length of a Lambda, which is about 20m, so very approximately ~40m...

Spoiler

I'd need to re-watch, but I'm pretty sure the hangar hatches were all locked-down (fairly natural response to having an angry Sith Lord tearing through the ship towards the flight section) and Ahsoka and the droids only managed to open the hatches of one section of side-bays on the port side of the hangar, which happened to only contain the Nu-class shuttle.

Possibly significant numbers of other transports were damaged in the Mandalore system, or left supporting a detachment on the surface. Possibly also the number of suitable hyperdrive-capable vehicles was limited? How many shuttles with independent navacomps and room for two adults and three droids are there aboard the ship anyway? The Y-wing was a very improvised alternative simply to escape - she didn't expect to have the option to obtain another astromech and navigation uploads from the wreck of the ship.

(That's for TCW, btw...)

I'm confused - what's not "right" about this, from your POV? That's a standard Lambda-class design (because the Sentinel is constructed from Lambda-class hull assets in the first place - in-universe modularity!) with one clever difference - the cargo hold beneath the passenger suite is modified into a full-height lower deck, using the same modular components seen on the Sentinel variant. The result is really neat, creating a much more spacious variant of the ship (the cockpit corridor floor no longer doubles as theboarding ramp, either) with minimal and plausible design changes.

As near as I can see, the only actual differences to the hull are a rectangular floor well dropped down into the free space between the wing roots, and neatly repositioned hatch and landing units.

Interesting, if true - what's that based on?

And in general - which also counts I suppose as a nod to @Nobody145... I suppose the place to start with the Wall of Ship is to make a list of canonically known assets and units here: we seem to have General Syndulla, who's an ex-Alliance/NR commander, but possibly now back to being a smuggler; we apparently have Inferno - who may be bringing Starhawks, as they were tasked to do before TLJ - and we have the Guuvian Gang, we have the Spice Runners... anyone else been confirmed explicitly?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

The First Order blocked anyone from the Outer and Mid Rims from going to the colonies- probably because they didn't control them/didn't have a strong grip on them. Also, why else would Lando and Chewie go to the Core Worlds to gather a fleet if they weren't free systems?

 

I would prefer 2nd as well..but with Gideon just make it a Gladiator....not anything bigger.

 

Looking at what little we can make out of its shape in A New Hope the Sentinel seems to be made out of unique "pieces", with a flatter and more angular head, a slimmer dorsal wing and of course an engine unit that's separated from the passenger hold. As far as I'm aware we never got a better look at the model used in the movie but the one seen in Rebels seems to be the closest in shape (in particular it's one of the very few which features wings that go straight down and then angle outwards and the distinctive "neck") but it takes some creative liberties like the turrets underneath the cockpit:



By the way I'd love to read your analysis on dropships

Presumably there must have seen some sort of carrier or large shuttle that dropped his stormtrooper guard and Imperial Troop Transport to Nevarro, but his "outland TIE fighter" is meant to operate away from imperial bases so who knows. It's a shame the TIE owner's workshop manual was released too early to include this particular model.

 

So, maybe the (quite arbitrarily picked) X-Wing Alliance length of 38 metres was not that far off? Still, the boarding ramps and the Stormtroopers seen ranked outside the Sentinels in Rebels, all point to a design barely longer than a Lambda, from what I could tell of it. And the interior is roughly the same as a Lambda passenger compartment.

 

The Rebels Sentinel seems to have a slightly smaller cockpit module compared to ROTJ's Lambda (which seats two) and it's definitively far smaller than the "thin" Sentinel Legends model, but I'd still say it's fairly larger than the Lambda. The "passenger module" is at the very least as long as the "cargo hold+engines module" of the Lambda, with space for more seats in each row and both front and rear loading ramps; when you add the additional lenght given by the rear module you'd probably get an overall lenght of at least 28-35 meters compared to the Lambda's 20.

 

You also have to consider that the designs in Rebels are also stylized, the art style will throw off measurements.