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

I see it as the Vesper and Dawnbringer having differing loadouts while of the same class. No visual differences from budgetary constraints.

 

Maybe the Vesper and Dawnbringer are MC90s, since those don’t have a canon design yet


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I mean the Rogue One ISD model is used for everything. Which isn't really a problem. Back in Legends we've had traces of ESB ISDs (IIs, allegedly) used for Devastator, and ANH ISDs (Is) for the Chimaera.

 

What is it people are even seeing as contradictory, anyway? Yeah it says the Vesper was built for "exploration not war" while the Dawnbringer was built for "defense", but it also calls them sister ships.

I do like the idea of having individualized loadouts with the same basic hull type - one of the few things I ever agreed with the Saxtonites on was that the old notion of "all Mon Cal ships are unique" didn't match with the several distinct classes identifiable at Endor, but I liked the idea itself. This could be a way to bridge the gap.

 

Some cruisers have grey hull panels in front of the NR logo, while the Vesper doesn't. Perhaps that may be a visual distinction between the two variants.

 

It strikes me they could be the canon version of the Belarus-class medium cruiser - "...one of the earliest starship designs approved by the New Republic,...The Belarus-class was originally designed by the Loronar Corporation as an improvement over the corporation's successful Strike-class cruiser and was rushed into production by the New Republic.The design was implemented by reducing the turbolaser emplacements and settling on a single design for modular construction. It was moderately more efficient in terms of its crew complement but less adaptable in terms of modularity."

Admittedly, it looks completely different from the design from the Threat Dossier, though that was never a popular design anyway and this looks a bit more like a NR-ified version of a strike cruiser.

 

Why did they name a ship class after a real country.

 

"Belarus-class" sounds cool

 

Honestly, yeah, that was my first thought.

 

Isn't it sad that in current canon we literally have no sourcebooks naming any rebel ships at Scarif, Hoth and Endor beyond a select few?

Scarif:

• Consonance, Hammerhead Corvette (escaped)
• Deviant, class unknown (status unknown)
• Heartbound, class unknown (status unknown)
• Profundity, MC75 Star Cruiser (disabled and boarded)
• Lightmaker, Hammerhead Corvette (destroyed)

Hoth:

• Bright Hope, GR-75 medium transport (escaped)
• Dutyfree, GR-75 medium transport (escaped)
• Freedom Fighter, GR-75 medium transport (escaped)
• Quantum Storm, GR-75 medium transport (escaped)
• Thon's Orchard, GR-75 medium transport (escaped)

Endor:

• Defiance, MC80A Home One Type Heavy Star Cruiser (survived)
• Ghost, VCX-100 light freighter (survived)
• Home One, MC80A Home One Type Heavy Star Cruiser (survived)
• Independence, MC80A Home One Type Heavy Star Cruiser (survived)
• Liberty, MC80 winged Liberty Type Heavy Star Cruiser (destroyed)
• Luminous, GR-75 medium transport (survived)
• Mighty Oak Apocalypse, YT-2400 light freighter (survived)
• Millennium Falcon, YT-1300 light freighter (survived)
• Nautilian, MC80A Home One Type Heavy Star Cruiser (destroyed)
• Redemption, EF76 Nebulon-B escort frigate (survived)

 

Dear Lord..."Mighty Oak Apocalypse". 7 syllables...

 

Thank Lost Stars by Claudia Gray for that unique name. And the captain is a Wookiee.

 

Fall of the Republic's take on the Procurator Class
https://www.moddb.com/mods/star-wars-thrawns-revenge-iii/images/procurator

 

Nice - but where are the gun turrets?

 

Wartime tech advancement allowed for the Republic to develop localized cloaking fields on just their turrets to bait the enemy into thinking they were attacking a defenseless ship


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I like how it draws from both the Acclamator with the general shape of the hull and the KotOR-era Interdictor with that bridge tower.

 

[Admins, feel free to move this to its own thread if you think it belongs there?]

Last November, on what was then called twitter, @TheRedBlade went and liveblogged his thoughts about The Bacta War, an excellent, thought-provoking and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny look at one of the highlights of the excellent X-wing storyline - I thoroughly recommend it; TRB's thread also inspired a lot of fleet-junk thoughts from me, some of which became a twelve-part tweetchain about the weaknesses of Super Star Destroyers...



...but this is where I'm going to unroll the really detailed part that can't be distilled into a reasonable number of 180-word paragraphs...

(And yes, I know this is tl;dr - I didn't realise it would be so long to write it out; I also didn't realise it would take a year and a bit to find the time to write it into shape...)

So...

Logistics and the loss of the Lusankya

Three years after the battle of Endor, the Imperial regent Ysanne Isard was overthrown by the New Republic, and dramatically blasted out of Imperial City aboard the Super Star Destroyer Lusankya, and then used the supership to seize control of the Thyferra system, capital of the bacta cartel, which she planned to use as her new powerbase to regain control of the Galaxy.

The story of how that Super Star Destroyer was defeated by the dozen X-wings of Rogue Squadron has always seemed dramatic, an iconic incident in the liberation of the Galaxy "one planet at a time" by the young New Republic; partially, that victory was a reflection of Wedge Antilles' ability to draw together colourful and heroic allies to support his fight - although the X-wing squadron shouldered the heaviest fighting, they were supported by a couple of flights of Gand and Twi'lek fighter pilots, an obsolete droid-crewed light cruiser, a rogues' gallery of smugglers, and eventually two captured Imperial-class ships, before an A-wing unit arrived just in time to deliver the final coup de grace - but what I want to argue here is that when examined in detail, the defeat of the Lusankya becomes a lot more comprehensible (and from an out-of-universe perspective, illustrates just how well Michael A. Stackpole constructed the whole storyline).

Let's start with the TIE Fighters.

1. Raiding The TIE Box

The standard complement for a Super-class Star Destroyer is twelve squadrons of twelve fighters each, and I will posit that this was the number which the Lusankya originally carried when it made its dramatic escape from Coruscant (i.e., in OOU terms, I think it's the number the novellist was working with). But the fighter screen launched to fend off New Republic fighter pursuit numbered just three squadrons, thirty-six TIEs, of which an unspecified proportion were Interceptors; of these, just six fighters survived, reducing the remaining total to nine and a half squadrons. Probably this force of thirty-six TIEs was the total number for which the ship actually had pilots available - if more personnel had been on hand, it seems likely that more would have been launched.

So Lusankya arrived at Thyferra with, give-or-take, a total TIE Fighter strength of about 114 spaceframes...

Isard then provided planes to Thyferra to create a TIE Fighter force for the local militia, and because we know they weren't possessed of any kind of TIE Fighter production facility, they presumably used TIEs from the Super Star Destroyer's remaining inventory to equip the Thyferrans.

The Thyferran militia thus required a force of TIEs that had to be subtracted from the total number of remaining fighters available to Lusankya. So how many did they get? Commander Erisi Dlarit was placed in charge of what Isard initially describes as the "fighter wing", with what Erisi herself thought of as "two squadrons". One of these, consisting of TIE Interceptors, was then deployed from the Victory-class Star Destroyer Corrupter in a punitive raid on the defenceless outpost at Halanit, where they lost three fighters.

So that leaves 90 fighters in reserve, and 21 with Erisi.

But additional Thyferran TIEs were also deployed to protect the off-planet infrastructure of the Thyferran bacta cartel - the first convoy attacked by the Rogues had a mercenary escort reinforced by two TIEs whose pilots Wedge recognized as rookies who had only been training in simulators; Isard responded by deploying her three Imperial cruisers to protect the convoys from additional Rogue Squadron raids, but this didn't completely remove the need for Thyferran pilots - in a subsequent dogfight at the refinery at Qretu, there was a force of eight TIE Fighters explicitly identified as a Thyferran militia unit, and it's possible that additional Thyferran fighters continued to be deployed to protect the freighters too. Flirry Vorry, the former Moff installed by Isard as the bacta cartel's Minister of Trade, reflected that subsequent convoy raids by the Rogues had been "costing the cartel" its TIEs by picking them off in ones and twos, forcing Isard to barter remounts on a one-for-one basis from other Imperial warlords - the phrasing suggests that these were additional Thyferran fighters attached to the freighters rather than Imperial ones from the escorting capital ships.

There are two implications here - although the total size of the force - with no more than eight TIEs being seen at once - might simply represent the second squadron of the original Thyferran wing, the overall numbers and the low quality of the pilots suggests that they belonged to a second component of the Thyferran militia which had been coming through training after Erisi's initial interview with Isard; and in addition, although individual TIE Fighter remounts were being obtained from other warlords, these were structly limited to replacements - these extra Thyferran units would need to take their initial allocation of fighters from Lusankya.

This is supported more explicitly when we look at Thyferran units allocated to support the Imperial cruisers. When the Rogues destroyed the VSD Corrupter in the Alderaan system, at least one of the two squadrons on the ship was Thyferran, and this was also the case for the single squadron aboard the accompanying Interdictor - the squadron on the Corrupter consisted predominantly of "trainees", with a minority of more experienced pilots who'd previously been "in" Erisi's two-squadron command, but had implicitly been moved out of it to provide a cadre for this separate new unit.

So Erisi's initial two-squadron command of Thyferran pilots was being supplemented by a larger force of raw recruits, and her command, reduced by attrition from 24 pilots to 21, was further diminished because some pilots from it were being detached to lead the raw recruits. But there simply wasn't enough time to transform these recruits into capable pilots. The timeframe of Isard's control of Thyferra was only a matter of weeks.

Finally, in the liberation of Thyferra, we see five squadrons of straight-wing TIEs and Erisi's Interceptor unit, a total of six squadrons. They aren't well-handled, with the five TIE Fighter squadrons being sent into space from the planet in succession in an attempt to inflict progressive attrition on the Rogues that doesn't really work at all. They're simply shot up in succession and the Interceptors who're supposed to finish off the X-wings, and whose pilots are the only ones in the Thyferran force who might cause the Rogues some problems in a head-to-head free-for-all, are eventually squandered flying tail cover on Isard's fleeing shuttle, where they're picked off from behind by three pursuing X-wings.

So we see a total of at least nine squadrons' worth of TIEs handed over to the Thyferrans - in terms of whole squadrons, we can count one of Interceptors, and seven of straight-wing TIEs, two eliminated at Alderaan, and five more squadrons destroyed at Thyferra, and on top of those we have ten more straight-wing TIEs, the two convoy escorts destroyed early on and the eight taken out at Qretu, and the three Interceptor remounts that might have been sourced from the surplus created by surviving planes from the Coruscant escape. 12 + 24 + 60 + 10 + 3 = 109 TIEs given to Thyferra. The numbers might not be absolutely precise, but the overall impression seems reasonably robust. Lusankya brought 114 TIEs to Thyferra, and the Thyferrans got at least 109 TIEs. I don't think a significant distortion can have been created by the grudging trades which Isard indulged in to replace her convoy losses. Those only attempted to replace the TIEs lost in ones and twos on convoy duty, not these heavier losses. If anything, this additional attrition implies that the total number of TIEs was originally slightly higher than the working total, and the working total is only five TIEs less than the total available to Isard.

There's an important implication here - all the TIEs that arrived aboard the Lusankya appear to have been taken off the ship and given to Thyferran pilots, and almost all of them were handed to inexperienced trainees. The small corps of capable flyers, which never amounted to more than two squadrons, was attrited between the three Interceptors vaped at Halanit, the pilots redistributed to lead other units such as the two squadrons routed in the Alderaan system, and the single consolidated Interceptor squadron sacrificed to protect Isard's shuttle at Thyferra. The nearest any of these Thyferran-piloted TIEs come to actually providing cover for the Lusankya is the succession of poorly-trained squadrons deployed from the surface, intermittently distracting the X-wings away from the completely unescorted Super Star Destroyer, no more than two rookie TIE squadrons being comitted at any given moment of the fight.

In short, although Lusankya's own complement of TIE Fighters was initially twelve squadrons strong, these were reduced by thirty planes during the escape from Coruscant, and after this the Super Star Destroyer's remaining inventory of one-hundred-and-fourteen TIEs provided no effective cover for the ship whatsoever. The lack of available Imperial pilots, the need to provide Thyferra with a showpiece Interceptor unit, and the need to recruit additional flyers from the planet's volunteer militia, seem to have resulted in the fighters all being reassigned.

In short, out of the 144 fighters the Lusankya had started with, the number of them that remained available to support it directly was nil.

Next, we need to consider the other TIE resources which Isard has access to. The two Imperial-class ships, Avarice and Virulence, had a capacity of six squadrons each, and the VSD Corrupter should have carried two squadrons - there was a unit of bombers on the Halanit mission, which probably came from Corrupter's own wing, and the squadron of straight-wing TIE Fighters that's completely obliterated along with the ship at Alderaan seems likely to be the other squadron which that ship regularly carried - they're really surplus to the numbers that the Thyferrans should be getting from Lusankya.

So none of them were available to support the command ship, either.

The two Imperial-class ships definitely had some TIEs of their own, presumably the usual allocation of six squadrons each (i.e., once again, I'm pretty sure this is the number the novellist was working with), though the number is never explicitly affirmed from any really well-informed perspective - the only explicit information we have access to is a reflection by Captain Yonka of the Avarice that his TIE pilots had proved a lot more efficient at scrambling from the hangar than those of Virulence under the overly methodical Captain Varrscha. But regardless of the precise numbers, there's an important conclusion to be dranw here - discounting the nine or more squadrons given to Thyferra and the two squadrons from the Corrupter (one of TIE Bombers, one of straight-wing TIE Fighters destroyed at Alderaan), these squadrons from the Avarice and Virulence were the only TIEs that were available to provide cover for the Lusankya.

And then the Avarice defected to join Rogue Squadron.

After the Avarice's defection, there was a telling moment of discussion between Isard and her officers, where Lusankya's commander Captain Drysso claimed "I have twelve squadrons of TIE Fighters at my disposal", and argued that he could thus use Lusankya to attack Yagh'Dul and handle any opposition without support from the Virulence; to the casual observer, this remark might be taken to mean that the Super Star Destroyer was carrying its full complement of fighters and personnel, but as argued above, the only TIEs actually available to Drysso were the six remaining Thyferran squadrons and the six squadrons of the Virulence - implicitly, therefore, Drysso wanted to take the Lusankya with all of the remaining TIE squadrons at Thyferra, and Isard simply refused.

We'll come back to the reason for this in a moment.

So when Drysso Was deployed to Yag'Dhul with both Lusankya and Virulence, the implication is that he did so with just six TIE squadrons in total, originally from Virulence, but now split between that ship and Lusankya. The fighter screen that Lusankya deployed at Yag'Dhul and then abandonned when Drysso hastily pulled back to Thyferra simply represented the proportion of Virulence's TIEs swapped aboard the Super Star Destroyer - and this explains why Drysso launched all his TIEs as a picket line, because he probably only has two or three squadrons on board, rather than the twelve the ship should theoretically carry. There's some additional implicit support for this, as when the Virulence returned from Yag'Dhul, Drysso declared "they have our TIE squadrons" - the six-squadron hangar space aboard the Virulence could easily recover all the TIEs launched by Lusankya in addition to what the ISD is carrying, for the simple reason that the six squadrons which Virulence had originally brought to Thyferra were all the TIEs the two ships had left between them.

Combining all these points, we can see a little more clearly why Rogue Squadron defeated and captured the Lusankya at Thyferra - a Super Star Destroyer with twelve TIE squadrons would have been a genuinely tough opponent, but that wasn't what Rogue Squadron were fighting, partially because Isard was apparently terrible at logistics and TIE tactics, but also, importantly, because she couldn't let any of her subordinates have a Super Star Destroyer with an adequate TIE Fighter force on board, because that ship would immediately become an independent powerbase for its commander, and she would have no way to control them. The Lusankya was stripped of its TIEs on arrival at Thyferra, and only grudgingly allocated an inadequate temporary force of two or three squadrons for the mission at Yag'Dhul; those TIEs were then left behind at Yag'Dhul, so it fought the Battle of Thyferra with none.

Isard's handling of her TIE resources, inept though it appears at first, was driven by a fundamental political requirement - she could not cede control of an effective picket line TIE Fighters to the naval commander of Lusankya, because that would give the big ship freedom of manoeuvre, effectively surrendering her control of the Super Star Destroyer and handing it over to a potential opponent.

This in itself leads on to another thought. Palpatine's Empire was notable for the seeming loyalty of its regional governors and fleet commanders, and I think Isard's tactics at Thyferra offer an explanation - he denied them remounts.

TIE Fighters are by design expendable, replacable, attritional. If the Empire retained tight central control of the means of production and delivery, and thus denied the average Moff or admiral the ability to directly replenish their own TIE losses, they could instantly deny remounts to any rebel TIE units, which would quickly lose their combat effectiveness as a result - the more intensively they attempted to fight, the less effective they would become. Even Admiral Zaarin, who commanded the TIE skunkworks on Platform Research and was able to convert it into a shadow production line for the cutting-edge TIE Defender, miscalculated when he believed it would allow him to provide him with enough remounts to stage a successfuly coup; instead, what followed became an attritional race between Zaarin and Thrawn to destroy the centralised production facilities for the Empire's hyperdrive-equipped TIE variants and advanced blastboats, and Zaarin was forced to strengthen his forces with easily-obtainable fringe types such as Hoersch-Kessel T-wings and Muurian assault shuttles. In short, any conflict between Imperial warlords is a fight for the logistics to supply fighter remounts, or in their absence, simply a suicide-pact of mutial attrition.

(And suddenly, the Empire's TIE problem becomes Rommel burning through his fuel reserves at El Alamein, and the underlying pattern seems like it was always there...)

The limited access which Imperial commanders had to fighter remounts is reflected after Endor in the grudging high-level negotiations between the most powerful warlords over every single straight-wing TIE during the Bacta War, and the shift in character of the skirmishing between their factions towards turbolaser slugging-matches by unsupported capital ships. The threat posed by Warlord Zsinj and Moff Tavira was elevated by their control of TIE manufacturing facilities - if perhaps only for cockpit modules, which they coupled with redesigned engine/wing arrays, while the Imperial authorities on Corellia mated TIE wing arrays with X-wing fuselages - and the final decision of Admiral Pellaeon to make peace with the New Republic was precipitated when the Imperial Remnant lost its ability to sustain its TIE Fighter production. Ultimately, the Empire fell because it couldn't allow the sort of free-ranging fighter initiatives and associated production-line creativity that were the cornerstone of the Rebellion. The X-wing or the A-wing is, quite literally, a symbol of freedom.

2. How Many Imperial Star Destroyers Does It Take To Change A Lightbulb?

Another aspect of the logistics of the Bacta War that I think is worth considering is the manpower requirements for the Super Star Destroyer, and even moreso than the question of TIE Fighter production, this relates less to the loss of the Lusankya than to the loss of the Empire as a whole. At the start of the X-wing novels, Isard had a significant fleet. She could send a Super Star Destroyer to pick up a single officer who she wanted to relocate to work directly under her. Twelve Victory-class ships were deployed at Coruscant, reinforcing the fixed defenses of the Imperial capital. We see some storied Imperial-class ships under her command, the Aggressor and the Inexorable.

But gradually, and inexplicably, the numbers dwindle - the number of Victory ships at Imperial City drops to four, and finally to two. Only two ISDs and a single VSD follow Isard to Thyferra.

Now part of this might be down to defections to warlords, or the redistribution of fleet forces to the elements of the legitimate Imperial authorities that relocated off Coruscant, with or without Isard's input. She also retained one more Imperial-class ship, the Implacable, secretly supervising the parasite droid and hyperspace minelaying programs and perhaps some elements of her agent network, so possibly she had some other capital ships in reserve somewhere. But I think there's another possible explanation. Indeed, I think what I'm about to suggest has to be at least part of the answer...

A Super-class Star Destroyer needs an awful lot of crewers... 280,734 of them, in fact (Yes, I'm using the old Imperial Sourcebook numbers without further discussion, because those were accepted without question when the novels were written). The ten Victory ships that disappeared from Coruscant could provide 61,070, less than a quarter of the total. To man the Lusankya fully, you'd need another thirty-six VicStars, or six ISDs with their much larger complement of 37,085 men and women. And that's assuming you can simply rotate the crews aboard on a one-to-one basis. Reflections by Captain Pellaeon suggest that the Executor was particularly heavy on skilled junior officers, and that's a claim which is supported by simple arithmetic - coordinating the big ship's large arrays of weapons mountings and propulsion modules will place a particularly intense demand on mid-level supervision in the specialist gunnery and engineering divisions, and the smooth maintenance of associated control systems, while you can be comparatively more economical about command personnel and supernumeraries - bridge officers, sensor crews and navigation specialists, and those skilled personnell a ship needs to carry even if they're proportionally underused, such as a team of techs to keep the waste-disposal systems working, or a logistics detail to keep track of the ship's stores; in those departments, a Super Star Destroyer might not need to multiply the number of personnel beyond the manpower levels of a Victory ship, and while support elements such as TIE Fighters and AT-AT barges are comparatively large, the numbers do not scale up in direct proportion to the overall size of the hull. The actual manpower draw to the Lusankya is thus likely to be focused in specific cadres of key personnel, and removing those vital personnel from elsewhere thus require a much bigger reduction in capital-ship numbers than the simple addition of crew numbers suggests.

So what I'm suggesting is that Isard basically disbanded the fleet to crew her supership. And I think that's less crazy than it sounds. As she made clear in a number of private moments, she actually regarded the Empire as unsustainable without Palpatine, so she planned to make herself and her security aparatus indispensible to the New Republic, thereby perpetuating Palpatine's legacy behind the facade of a popular uprising and a restoration of democratic government. That is the true meaning of what she called Project Ambition.

That's a far scarier and more dangerous plan than the conventional irredentist posturing in a bright-coloured admiral's uniform that she seemed to be performing. With that in mind, I suspect her seemingly target-fixated grandstanding at Thyferra about wanting to destroy Rogue Squadron was actually an act - her real aim was to discredit the Rogues' clandestine sponsor Airen Cracken, the sitting head of New Republic Intelligence, and thus her unofficial rival for the position of power-behind-the-Senate in the post-Imperial galaxy. But this plan carries a double-edged subtext.

Isard wanted to keep her command ship - partially vanity, partially symbolism, partially a very practical way of securing her independence from the civilian government she planned to puppeteer; she probably envisaged herself ruling the Galaxy by holocomm from the Lusankya in the shadows of deep space. But to get her supership in the first place, she had to secretly disband the Imperial fleet, gutting the crews of the skilled deck officers and senior ratings needed to make them into effective fighting ships. That wasn't a particular problem for her, considering that she was simultaneously choreographing the slow-motion collapse of the Empire, allowing the New Republic to take over the infrastructure of the Core Worlds intact as part of her plan to ultimately take over the New Republic herself - she wanted to preserve the underlying system of the Empire intact by passing it into the hands of her opponents, and she wanted to enmesh her opponents in the power-mechanisms and decision-making processes of the Empire in order to reduce them to a proxy for her own aparatus.

If anything, understanding the true nature of Ambition lends extra support to the idea that Isard was quite deliberately deactivating most or all of the major Imperial capital ships in the Core to crew her personal Super Star Destroyer. And she would have had no qualms about scuttling the ships and disposing of all the superfluous crewers to preserve the secrecy of the project.

(And I wouldn't be surprised if Stackpole did all that deliberately!)

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Well, I have no idea now where I got twelve from, but you're certanly right in that there are "approximately seven" VSDs in Cracken's briefing early in Wedge's Gamble, declining to four in the "last report" the Rebels had before the attack, but only two by the time they got there...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

So, Isard and Bretl Oxtroe were working together, and Daala essentially ended up inheriting Isard's master plan?

 

You know, considering the deft misdirection that Stackpole seems to have sustained across the course of four novels, I suspect you're meant to read them as ISDs, even though they're not.

Well, Daala is the unwitting proxy of people who insist on naming buildings after Isard's dad.

And that would certainly explain the Noghri, though I always felt that seemed like a plausible-deniable line provided in retrospect by the New Republic...

Also, a tangential thought (I'll leave you to speculate on how I arrived at it); you know that thing Palpatine did with Bevel Lemelisk - it would be hillarious if he did the same thing with Galen Erso...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Could deploying a few seismic charges into the tractor beam of a Cantwell disrupt it? Or would it destroy it's dish?

 

Well, yes, as opposed to Rebel Star Destroyers. They're also POV'd a little more obliquely as "the Victory-class destroyers" during the fight, and I suspect it's a deliberate authorial misdirection to make what happens to the Triumph seem a little less one-sided than two ISDs and an MC80B beating up a Victory ship (though in reality, a well-handled Victory is still going to feel like a threat to Rebel crews, and the two of them, if well handled, could use their numbers for manoeuvre advantage)...

I'd imagine so - isn't there a scene in the Thrawn Trilogy where Luke's X-wing escapes from the Chimaera's grab-beam by letting the projector snare a photon torpedo...?

The question of whether an energy-weapon discharge would serve to scramble a beam is an interesting one - I just noticed yesterday that it seems to be discussed as a tactic in the first Star Trek movie...

- The Imperial Ewok