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

My first thought was "oh huh, it's a ringworld like in Halo". Then I see on Wookieepedia which says it encompasses a star. I think to myself, "there's no way that can be right" but then I looked back at the shot and it did look like it encompassed the star. Then I read @MercenaryAce's posts, and I went back and looked at it again, and I guess looks just ambiguous enough that the star could be far off in the distance rather than at the center of the ring. But then if the Databank says it does encompass the star...then that's that, right?

 

It occurs to me that we do have a canonical source that points to the possibility of extremely small stars in the GFFA - The Force Awakens, where we see a small planet (Starkiller Base, aka Ilum) explode and immediately turn into a star not much larger than the original planet. Obviously there were some highly extenuating circumstances there (the Starkiller weapon had already absorbed at least two other stars prior to its explosion, and the planet itself was Kyber-rich), but it does open a path to the possibility of "tiny stars" that a megastructure could encircle without necessarily being significantly larger than other artificial rings. Food for thought.

 

Do more massive stars actually have significantly greater diameters? Or does having more mass just compress it all into a denser package, and therefore you couldn't really have any such thing as a "small" star?

 

Some massive stars have enormous diameters, others mostly, white dwarfs and neutron stars, are tiny yet much more massive than the sun. I don't think that there is a main sequence star that is more massive than our sun yet possess a smaller diameter.

 

I was reading a conversation from much earlier in this thread (page 23) regarding the origin of the Leviathan and other interdictor cruisers in KOTOR 1.

Other users pointed out rightly that it is explicitly referred to as former Republic ship and that Carth Onasi is familiar with its layout.

But it is also true that no other interdictor cruisers are seen in the Republic fleet, that the Sith fleet created by the Star Forge is composed of these cruisers, and that the Jedi Council said that many of the ships in Revan’s fleet were of alien design unknown to the Republic.

Is the game suggesting then that the alien designs are actually just the Sith starfighters (and possibly other support craft) and Star Forge copied the template of the Leviathan and replicated a fleet of them?

Or is it more likely that the game designers messed up here, that perhaps at one point the Sith fleet was all meant to be of Rakatan origin but that they has to change that so that Carth would know his way around the Leviathan?

For some reason I think this is more likely. It didn’t seem like the Sith had full control of the Star Forge, and it makes more sense for it to simply create Rakatan ships as it would have in ancient times once it is reactivated.

 

I'm assuming the game designers just got lazy towards the end and made the Sith fleet all Leviathans. Or there just wasn't enough coordination between the writers and the graphics people.

 

Aesthetically, the spindly-with-a-central-core Sith fighters look much more Rakatan than the Leviathan with its Star Destroyer ancestral traits. I think this is more likely to just be that the "Imperial" looking ships are used by the bad guys regardless of their in-universe origin. The Star Forge, IIRC, is explicitly described as being able to make copies of new designs introduced to it.

(It's also probable that we're meant to infer that there are, indeed, more of the 'alien' designs simply not appearing on screen to save the effort - and possibly for that Imperial influence again.)

 

Speaking on Rakatan designs, would any records of Rakatan ships be left even in the Star Forge? Their empire collapsing before their eyes, they implemented a scorched Earth strategy, with few exceptions no data or technology was left behind, could they have done the same to the Star Forge? If they could no longer use their own technology then wiping the data banks makes sense if someone else finds it, it forces the invaders to go through the whole process themselves. It would not suprise me to find that the 'alien' designs were of Sith origin, new ships created from scratch to face their old enemy in a new war.

 

Thank you, I had forgotten about that, and checked the entry in my copy of the guide and in wookiepedia. As a fan (and minority at least when I last posted here) of the old TOTJ and Hyperspace War spaceship designs, with a few exceptions like the ones taking ocean naval designs too far, I love the fact that Revan and Malak used those designs.

I am curious how they would have looked in game. The Basilisk War Droid in Kotor 2 look nothing like how they were depicted in the comics or as Canderous Ordo described them in Kotor.

 

Thank you for the clarifications. It does seem like either the design team ran out of time and couldn't design other ships for the final battle or they originally meant for Leviathan and its sister ships to be Rakatan designs but that changed as the game developed. I say this mainly because they do seem to visually fit well with the Star Forge design itself. It's all part of that cool proto-Imperial look for the dark side. But the final game leaves us only with a minor contradiction pointed out earlier.



I know that later reference books and other media made this hypothesis untenable. And Lucasfilm was able to retcon things to eliminate the contradiction. But I was more interested in what we knew based on KOTOR 1 alone. The reason is that I've been wondering whether Obsidian may have been planning to retcon the Infinite Empire in KOTOR 3 to have actually been part of the ancient Sith Empire. It's not totally out of the question based on how things looked in the EU around 2005.

If that had been the case, then the Sith fleet created by the Star Forge in KOTOR 1 would've been revealed to be ancient Sith in design rather than Rakatan or Republic. It's interesting that the campaign guide later added mention of other ancient Sith ships as being part of Revan's fleet, but that's probably just a coincidence. Either way, I find the idea interesting even if it was later made impossible. No offense to the Rakata intended, of course.

 

Latest Star Wars comic issue gave us

Spoiler

A Golan defence platform

I don't recall one ever showing up before in Canon, but I couldn't be wrong.

 

Now that Fractal's finished the Mandator III:

https://fractalsponge.net/?p=6464

I'd have to say it does a good job of bridging the design gap between the Bellator and the Assertor. With proportions very similar to those of the Super Star Destroyer Prototype too:

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Super_Star_Destroyer_prototype


Its underbelly hangar and dorsal superstructure - the "city sprawl" bit in the middle - are a bit more Executor-ish than the Assertor's are - making it work quite well as an "Executor-ancestor".

 

Golan-I, II and III all exist in canon, according to Wookieepedia.

 

I've always headcanoned the prototype as a Mandator-III, anyway. Now I have visuals to use if I ever decide to run a Dawn of Defiance campaign again...

 

So...

Spoiler

these unknown NR ships have a full fighter complement, and seem to be the core workhorses of a battlegroup. Those make them far likelier to be warships, possibly the less crew-intensive MC85 replacements mentioned in TLJ's VD. MC90 would be my guess.
[SPOILER/]

 

Spoiler

Also better shots of the E-Wing, including a new Astromech design

Edit: Old design, based off the Kenner R2-D2.

 

Spoiler

According to Mel Miniatures these things are around 1~1.5km, which would put Home One closer to 3km. IIRC estimates using the ROTJ model were closer to that length as well, so the 1.3km stat will probably be retconned.

[SPOILER/]

 

It's about kriffing time. I'm not too passionate on sizes normally but that always struck me as a particular egregious error.

 

I will say this for Ahsoka...looks to be much more "space flight" oriented then any other show we've gotten thus far.

Or they are cherry picking the whole season for space fights to stick in the credits.

I choose to remain hopeful.

 

About damn time, last new cap ship was back in 2019. 2017 for anything shown onscreen. E-wings are long overdue as well.

 

Would you consider the Cantwell-class Solo (2018) even though it was minor background and deleted scene or Andor (2022) with such a big appearance?

As for the E-Wing...it is not that I am a huge fan of it...I am just glad they are not rehashing something we have seen so often before with a new skin. And it looks like they are removing the top cannon which I never liked.

 

Personally I don't consider anything smaller than a VSD to be a capital ship, so not really. But there's definitely a case for it.

Even as a huge E-wing fan the roof blaster is odd, and the whole thing can look goofy with the wrong proportions. I absolutely love how the one in Ahsoka turned out.

 

Where’s my live-action T-85 dangit!


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