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

Good point there, another strike against it.

Honestly I square away the two (written) depictions of the A-wing, first "fast, highly maneuverable, no torps" and "fast, two concussion missile launchers" as the Rebellion quickly added the two concussion missiles to the design, and while it kept its speed, it lost its high maneuverability (now closer to Y-wing then X-wing.)

The Bacta War explicitly states he left them there. Didn't know he'd done that before though.

Well, that's something that's never been addressed. That's certainly true for merchants, but not necessarily warships. There's two main possibilities: A warship with a crew of 100,000 needs all of them to properly fight the ship, but just as in real life, outside of combat 33,000 is enough for the day to day operations. (Of course the bridge is fully manned at all times, and there's perhaps a skeleton crew at some of the batteries in case they need to open fire quickly.) This also means it takes a few minutes for a warship to "go to quarters" and be able to fight properly. Or, a ship with a crew of 100,000 only needs 33,000 to fight the ship properly. This means the ship is almost always very quick to be able to fight. But it also means you could simply run things like the first case with a crew of 33,000, and free up 66,000 for manning other ships.
Also two watch systems exist and (by all historical experience) work long-term. That would save 33,000 crewers in the second case.
Although the Lusankya was probably short either way.

 

Fair enough. I'd always thought of it as a VSD based on the projecting side-wedges; as I said above, VSDs don't seem to be particularly consistent in appearance, with wildly varying configurations being depicted for the side-wedges themselves, and different ships having completely different ion-engines (though I flubbed slightly when I said that was done as a refit program, as The Imperial Sourcebook introduces it as a modification of the design towards the end of the production run)...

But that's just my POV, and I'm replying directly mostly because this spins off in a few directions that are probably worth highlighting...

* The fact that the VSD-I has lumberingly slow ion-engines and a ridiculously fast hyperdrive flank speed suggests that hyperdrive speed isn't mediated directly by "push" from the ion engines.

* With regard to the turret greeblies @Grevious_Coward noticed on that XWRS cover, they might be either the grab-beams, which the early WEG material says were in armoured housings on "stubby towers", or a very deep-cut reference to the original appearance of the Victory-class in Han Solo's Revenge, where there's a "a turbolaser turret in the warship's side"...

The Complete Encyclopedia reference is soured on a single line of dialogue during the Yag'Dhul raid, where Drysso says Colonel Arl is "free to deploy his fighters" - after subtracting all the TIEs that were given to the Thyferrans, I don't think this can mean anything except a couple of squadrons swapped over from the complement of Virulence specifically for the raid, and it may be that Arl had come on board with them; but he might have been senior officer of the Lusankya's TIE Fighter compliment, which would mean that he would have commanded the three squadrons deployed in the escape from Coruscant at the end of The Krytos Trap, then assumed a more administrative role, perhaps assisting Erisi in wrangling the local idiots, until the TIEs from Virulence were provided for the Yag'Dhul raid...

I can't find the source for the statement that Drysso abandoned his TIE Fighters at Endor, but it's an interesting thought - if a lot of Imperial captains did that, it would have seriously weakened their ships going forward...

I agree emphatically with this analysis, which was something I was thinking about already in terms of ISD crew size. An Imperial crew usually has every role in triplicate - the question is, what are all those crewers for?

But again, a couple of tangents that other people might turn into interesting reactions...

* This isn't the only way it can be done, as it's perfectly possible to run a ship with a smaller crew, using minimal bridge/engineroom shifts for the few tasks that actually need 24/7 monitoring, and a single shift of specialists for each task beyond that - you just have to get them from their quarters whenever you need them, rather than have a shift on duty at all times...

* I suspect the Lusankya was fully manned at Thyferra - my explanation for the disappearance of the Imperial fleet under Isard over the course of the earlier Rogue Squadron novels is that she was decommissioning a large number of Star Destroyers to provide the vast number of mid-level officers necessary to coordinate an SSD (and the disproportionately large number personnel that an SSD seems to need in these specific areas means that the total number of personnel she'd need to take off other duties to strip them out would be much larger than a simple piece of mathematical addition might suggest)...

* I'm wondering if an ISD is surprisingly unautomated, with a huge number of crewers looking at screens in control rooms, each of them focused on a single metric; they don't understand the purpose of the readings, which might be anything from a sensor contact to the energy input in the deck twelve trash compactor, but they know that if the display hits specific parameters, they need to notify a supervisor, and the information is then communicated onwards as required, so that the crew makes the necessary responses and the command personnell get the important information?

I agree emphatically, again, but I think it's also important to distinguish between types of Rebel ship. A lot of them aren't going to be usefully aggressive against Imperial capital ships of any size and toughness, even if they're effective in other roles...

I think this speaks of our contrasting mindsets. Your natural inference from the discrepancy is progressive improvement and refinement of the design, albeit with performance tradeoffs, and there's nothing unlikely about that... but my instinctive explanation is to envisage weaknesses in the Alliance's A-wing program (which I tend to think of as the GFFA version of Allied resistance units in '40-'44 using bike-shops to make sub-machine-guns, in a context where teenagers ride turbojet hovercars), and a switch to installing improvised sensor jammers in the empty equipment spaces.

Of course, both can be right - the missiles were the design intention, then eventually became standard...

*insert 8km-not-19km joke here*

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Ahhhhhhh....noooo. The scenes of the Star Destroyers in ESB looking all intimidating don't work anymore if the Empire is all a bunch of bumbling incompetent morons.

 

Well the Empire is nothing if not a massive jobs program.

 

The side wedges are one thing...but the engine configuration, command tower, single hangar and maybe even the length/width. To me it looks longer...or maybe narrower. So all that is why I would say a different class as opposed to a VSD.

 

I was thinking of it as "Imperial" in a more neutral way, subdividing complex processes into abstract actions that are simple enough to be performed by low-grade recruits, but the individual can't understand the result - it's primarily practical, a way of retaining human control while preventing information overload and subtracting emotional responses, but you can certainly see it as dystopian/dehumanizing ...

The first source to give the VSD a smaller forward hangar seems to have been the schematic the old EGtVV, which only came out a few weeks before Battleground: Tatooine!, and plausibly there wasn't enough time between them to coordinate. Early depictions of the VSD rarely indicate one, and some (notably the reasonably detailed cross-section of the Subjugator, and the lineart in EGtVV itself) seem to indicate its absence, while there are some in Dark Empire which have no hangars at all.

Combining that and the reference to some ships in the class having a completely different ion-drive assembly from others, I don't think these are particularly significant details. VSDs just exist in different variants.

The sloped/stepped rear section of the command tower is more distinctive (it's usually vertical on VSDs), but that too could have been modified...

EDIT: None of which is to say I expect anyone to agree with me, just an attempt to explain why I think like I do...

And I'm amused to discover that recent FFG material has depicted the Harrow as a vanilla VSD...



- The Imperial Ewok

 

Hey, does this fleet junkie thread extend to shipyards/shipwrights/general ship building things? Got a few things that are suddenly floating around me noggin that need thrasing out!

 

Nope. I get it. We are coming at the same thing with different perspectives.

 

Just pointing out that the Emperor/Empire was smart enough to know that the people of the Galaxy may not mind the centralization of government if there were government/military jobs readily available for those who wanted them. In turn, the massive number of "employees" available may have yielded a way to simplify ship operations, likely decreasing the construction and maintenance costs of warships, while improving mission capability rates.

Didn't EGtVV have the main pictures (sketches) of the Imperial-class and Victory-class swapped?

Absolutely!

 

Since a warship requires it's maximum compliment while in combat, and the rest of the time only needs perhaps a third of it's on watch at any given time on a day to day basis, with the bridge and engine room fully manned and a skeleton crew at or near the guns in the event of sudden combat, if a star destroyer needs, say, 30,000 crew to fully man every station while in combat, then it only needs 30,000 crew, of which outside of combat and "general quarters"/"battlestations" only about 10,000 need to be on duty at any given time, a third of which are asleep at all times. (Or 15,000 on a two watch system, while is a valid way to run a ship.) The downside is that is takes a couple minutes once "battlestations" are ordered for the ship to have significant combat effectiveness. Alternately, the ship can have a third (or half on a two watch) of the crew at "battlestations" at all times, be ready for combat in a few seconds - and need three (or twice) as many crew, quarters for them, and if you do have time to prepare for combat - all the extra crew don't have anything to do. All the stations on the ship would be manned already - that's the "needed for combat" number. You also need to provide quarters, provisions and life support for all those extra crew.
It's worth pointing out that real life warships always only carry the "full compliment to man every station in combat" number, not three times that. Considering that if you're not ready for battle a turbolaser battery with a crew of ten would have perhaps 3 people there, a ship could likely open fire in perhaps 30 seconds if it needed to - just at greatly reduced efficiency.

That might actually go a long way to explaining the lack of effectiveness star destroyers frequently have at stopping somebody in countless stories - they didn't have time to complete the process of going to general quarters.

 

Well alright then! My first point/question/pontification be this:

What is the "Hoersch" in Hoersch-Kessel Drives; and where may their primary ship yard may have been located (if they had one)

On the first part I have two current theories:

(a) Hoersch to Kessel was an important route, perhaps for the spice trade back in the day, and that's what made the company prominent, and what it is named after. That would suggest Hoersch could be a planet, or city, or busy port, now just lost to time

(b) Hoersch and Kessel are the names of the founder of the company, or creators of their fancy Ion drive. And perhaps Sir Kessel was so awesome they named the planet after then. Did a wee google and noticed Hoersch and Kessel both seem to be German surnames

Out of universe we know they were first mentioned all the way back in 1987 for the Star Wars Sourcebook, in terms of discussing their fancy Ion drive that seemed to revolutionise the industry a long, long, long time ago. As this is such an old part of the lore first mentioned at a time when the original trilogy was still fresh in people minds, I'm more inclined towards theory (a) as I think its more likely to be a reference to the spice mines of Kessel from ANH. And come to think of it, the whole thing seems like a nod towards Dune, with all the spice, space travel, alien merchants, etc. If that is the case, and if taken with the earlier sources which state the company was operated by Duros, then maybe Hoersch is one of their orbital cities above Duro, or perhaps a coloney planet? And perhaps this is also the location of the HKD primary shipyard? I appreciate later sources state HKD was "secretly" part of the Trade Federation before Naboo, and I am not sure what would be secret about it if the Shipyards were above floating above Neimoidia. Obviously, a Duro shipyard making CIS ships during the clone wars wouldn’t make any sense, but by then it was under ownership of a Nimbanel clan, and production probably moved.

That's my ramble over! Be a wrong, or be I... at least partly right?

The HKD history seems to change a lot from sources to source so I don't trust wookiepeida on this one; but I am guessing there is a chance the "Lords of Nal Hutta" Sourcebook may have clarified the matter, or at least what happened during the Nimbanel takeover.

 

The talk about the Harrow got me thinking about another Rogue Squadron comic ship...the Eidolon. I would say bring the design back in Nu-canon but as an original ship class.

 

I'd imagine that a duo by the names Hoersch and Kessel invented their drive, then formed a company named after themselves to build it.

To tell a bit of a story:
Hoersch and Kessel, after inventing their starship drive, formed a company with a relatively small amount of capital, then installed one of their drives on their personal yacht. Then, during a major naval review with the head of whatever government is was at the time, flew their yacht right into the middle of it unauthorized, far faster then the assembled warships. Two state-of-the-art fast picket ships went to chase them off, but with their inferior technology proved unable to catch them! After that demonstration, said navy ordered the drive for two ships as a test, then quickly adopted it as standard, and soon it was standard everywhere.

----------------------------------------

If this sounds like interesting work of creative fiction, replace the name with Persons, set the year to 1899, the technology to the steam turbine and the location to the Royal Navy's Spithead Naval Review (with the queen watching!), and this actually happened, complete with Royal Navy destroyers unable to catch the interlopers!
Sometimes history is more interesting then what any writer could do.

 

Even back then WEG was perfectly fine with reusing names for otherwise unrelated planets, people, etc, so I wouldnt say that they necessarily meant to draw a connection between hoersch-kessel and Kessel.

They are the source that outright stated that Raymus Antilles and Wedge Antilles are unrelated iirc

As well as introduce a similarly unrelated "Correllia Antilles". Not to mention a smuggler and grand inquisitor named "torbin".

And of course the advisor named "Dangor" in the universe that already has a "Dengar".

WEG goes for a rather broad and maximalist interpretation of the setting, with great emphasis placed on how big the universe is in a way that future content kinda ignores ( WEG depicting multiple competing bounty hunter guilds with vastly different rules, operations, and morals while everything post Bounty Hunter Trilogy talking exclusively about a singular Bounty Hunter Guild comes to mind).

 

@Thrawn McEwok
Note that I figure a twin fire of proton torps is a sure breach of the pressure hull of an ISD, and getting mauled by fighters I would write off pressure integrity of most of the outermost 2-3 decks. I do have more faith in compartmentalization - blast doors exist for a reason, and even unarmored doors should work when they're well outside any damage area, although a few small deeper depressurizations from local failures are to be expected.
Also, I consider fighters, perhaps overly so in the context of the Rebellion, to be essentially expendable and cheaply replaced, less so for the pilot. I'm in the WWII framework where the US was building 700 aircraft a week - and loosing 500 aircraft a weak.

 

Actually I'd compare the Rebels' situation to the Japanese or the Germans...constantly struggling to produce more aircraft and train pilots. America would be more akin to the Empire, with its near limitless resources.

 

Though TBF, "Corellia Antilles" is specifically playing on the notion that "Antilles" is the GFFA version of Jones or Smith whether WEG originated it or not - because it's an obvious Indiana Jones reference.

 

Well, just so it's clear that I get it too?

And it's definitely worth thinking about...

That sounds vaguely familiar, but it may have been only a specific edition (maybe the first printing - and I have a vague idea the UK version of the old EGtVV was published separately by Titan Books, much like the graphic-novel version of Dark Empire was)...

Another question is what do the superfluous personnel do at action stations? One incentive for triple-manning on a warship is to provide spare personnel at action stations to serve as damage-control teams and casualty replacements, and while you're right that there aren't many real-world warships being assigned duplicate gun crews, I can see an advantage when weapons are largely automated (do the "turret crew" on an ISD purely consist of the ship's 300 or so gunners?) and you have triplicate maintenance crews...?

This is one thing I've always been careful about pontificating on, because I have no idea if there's some obscure lore that I might contradict, and as you say, there's not much sense that the backstory references have been terribly joined-up...

In terms of why the name was used by WEG, I'd hazard that Hoersch-Kessel should have something to do with Kessel, though exactly what that is I don't know... though thinking this over, I wonder whether "Hoersch-Kessel" should be read as a single hyphenated name - perhaps the idea was that the guy who adapted the alien design was called something like Donner Hörsch-Kessel (the Rudolf Diesel of STAR WARS, tonally suggesting the place that the HKD ion-drive occupies within the GFFA's range of propulsion tech, but also, in hindsight, the Raif Sienar of the ancient Republic?), or perhaps it's intended to denote a territorial area with which HKD is associated, a cross between BMW and Hesse-Kassel...?

Do we have Strike Cruisers yet in reboot material?

Insert Galactic Weekly News-Stack joke here.

More seriously, you're right that there's some deliberately odd reuse of names (Children of the Jedi seems to have plundered The Imperial Sourcebook for Imperial-sounding names that it reuses in completely different contexts, for instance, and it works); but I can't think of that being done with names that come from the movies or associated novellizations and radio-dramas... we don't get the Lando system (even though it would have been a fun in-joke) or a character called Bren Ralltiir...

You may just be omitting it because it's obvious, but I'd be willing to imagine that the equivalent of "belt armour" ought to be able to hold off hits, though I'd be worried about whether the structure supporting it can absorb the impact, and I'd agree that unarmoured hull is a different issue (i.e. I'd wonder if the main hull planes of the ISD and SSD are "armour", but the trenches, superstructure, hangar, engines, and perhaps some external sensor panels, have to be left vulnerable).

You're right, though, that where we really differ is our level of confidence in compartmentalization - this is one reason why I'm sceptical of a "power grid" system, because even when you have a solid blast door, you have to take into account a bewildering maze of cabling that simply has to get through the bulkhead from A to B, and I vaguely recall significant '39-'45 sinkings being blamed on the way that this sort of thing compromised hull subdivison...

My point-of-reference for the Alliance is more the RAF in '39-'45, where the conventional aviation sector is inadequate and a lot of the high-level decisions are wrong, but production is being outsourced to all kinds of unlikely places - the system is broken, but that in itself allows initiative to fix it...

I do agree that pilot numbers are likely a more fundamental issue, though paradoxically perhaps more for the Empire, as the Alliance needs much more limited numbers - overstretch beyond whatever level the Academy system is geared to provide will create a medium-term crisis for the Empire, most keenly felt by the most intensely-engaged carriers, and the real limit for the Empire may be finding enough capable instructors to train extra cockpit personnel.

Perhaps that's part of why the Remnant proved so frustratingly hard to beat... they finally had the system in place to generate the desired TIE Pilot numbers (to the extent that pilot availability outstripped TIE availability, leading them to adopt the Preybird, though that may in turn have been a result of ramp-up, continuing Kaine's shipbuilding emphasis on flak-and-fighter Vindicator variants, and adding truly vast numbers of box-and-cockpit bulk cruisers and escort carriers)...

And what did Thrawn do with his Fel clones? Filled the Galaxy with them, so they'd get married and teach their kids how to TIE...

Or, as some bewildered aide might end up saying to Nas Choka, "... it's not a Navy, sir... it's just... TIE Fighters..."



- The Imperial Ewok

 

This! This! The galaxy is vast, and there's countless battles being fought and missions being launched all over galaxy we couldn't possibly ever see. The Rebellion we see on screen is merely the "central force" not tied to sector forces or specific bases, planets or missions; it's actually a minority of the entire Rebellion.

 

I do not believe we have Strike cruisers back yet...but this is so much different than the standard ones.

 

Honestly, if the "required only during combat" crew is only 20% of the total, that would throw the crew sizing requirements out the window - if you need 8000 men on duty at any give time for basic non-combat operations, and 10,000 during combat, then you would carry 30,000 crew. (I would carry 20,000 on a two-watch system instead to save on personal and used the saved displacement from housing them on something useful.) My earlier assumptions were that "combat requirement" is 10,000 on duty, and "basic daily operations" is something closer to 3,000 on duty at any one time. In this case carrying only 10,000 makes sense.

Honestly I would figure the entire outer hull save viewports, fire control, sensors etc. is armored to be proof against starfighter laser cannons and no more. There's heavy armor bulkheads around the fuel tanks, the main reactor, around the internal portions of the sublight drive and the hyperdrive - but those are all much deeper into the ship, closer to what they're meant to protect. Most of the time torpedoes (which explode against the outer hull) can't cause damage deep enough to reach them in the first place. If they could hit that armor it would easily stand up to it.

I think the Rebellion benefited from large numbers of already skilled or moderately skilled pilots joining - they might not have even had a "training pilots from the ground up" program until after Endor. Which is good, since they didn't have the resources for one anyway.

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On another note...

Recently I came up with a semi-comprehensive, universal SW warship classification system recently, that also fits just about everything. Doesn't match real life systems, but then, why should it?

A light freighter is: Not a capital ship, not a starfighter, intended for cargo, not a shuttle, and "look at it, of course it's a light freighter."

A capital ship is something at least 80-100 meters long, commanded like a capital ship, and "is obviously a capital ship."

Capital ships are loosely divided into:

Corvette: something small not meant for front line combat, not exactly a pure cargo ship, not exactly a warship, generally fast, and that the builder calls are corvette and everybody else does too.

Frigate -Something small, only a couple hundred meters, that's a warship, not meant for slugging it out with enemy ships, and intended for some sort of escort or screening-type role. A Corellian gunship is a frigate, as is an escort frigate and a Lancer.

Carrier - something dedicated to carrying fighters.

Cruiser - something at least a few hundred meters, meant for slugging it out, is not a star destroyer, and no more then a few kilometers long. A Vindicator is a cruiser, as is a Carrack. As is a Dreadnaught. Also a catch-all for warships at least a couple hundred meters long that don't quite fit, such as a Strike Cruiser or an Interdictor Cruiser. An Assault Frigate is also technically a cruiser.

Star Destroyer - something at least several hundred meters long meant for pacifying a system, generally on it's own, with both guns, fighters and troops.

Star Cruiser - a Mon Cal warship at least several hundred meters long; overrides any other classification.

Battleship - something in the 1.6-2 to 4-5 kilometer range meant for fighting enemy ships.

Dreadnought - Something bigger then a battleship that's mainly for fighting enemy ships.

Super Star Destroyer - a really big star destroyer, perhaps 4 kilometers long or greater. Partly informal and ad-hoc classification, that didn't exist until the Empire started building them.


Overbidding all of the above for it's actual name is what the builders and those who first ordered it decided to call it!

 

Oh yeah, look at this post from a few years back.

 

Nice!

I don't think a Galactic-wide system is possible, and there would probably be many government/industry/company/military/regional specific classification systems. I also think the term "Star Destroyer" is specific to the Empire, it's allies, and remnants.

I currently go with (for my head cannon Galactic Alliance):

75-99m: patrol ship
100-129m: gunship
130-229m: corvette
230-499m: frigate
500-1,099m: destroyer
1,100-1,999m: cruiser
2,000-3,999m: battlecruiser
4,000-7,999m: battleship
8,000m+: dreadnaught

I'm not stuck on any of the lengths specifically, but you get the drift. Obviously length is a basic measurement that is substituting for mass/volume in spacecraft, which is decent gauge of combat capability.

For frigates through to cruisers, there's light and heavy prefixes for the lower and larger end of each classification (ie. 900-1099m = heavy destroyer).

Then there's starfighter carriers, assault transports (which land on planets), and transport docks (which use their own smaller landing craft to get troops, vehicles, and cargo to a planet's surface). They also have light and heavy prefixes based on size:

75-449m: light
450-1,299m: - (medium)
1,300m+: heavy

There's also prefixes for sub-class specialization. For instance, a 250m frigate specialized for long range and endurance would be a light patrol frigate.

There's further nuance, but likely no one cares! Haha.

I used to maintain that a capital ship was a warship over 100m in length. I've softened on this, as I believe there's a place for <100m patrol ships within navies. So my current definition is basically any warship that is self sustaining (ie. can deploy independently, conduct operations for weeks at a time, and isn't intended to be birthed in another warship) - so basically any warship >75m. However, this definition is SO broad, that I could have the discussion that a capital ship is any large combatant, such as battleships and dreadnaughts, like Earth navies of old.

 

I would argue that the dividing line between a small capital ship and something that isn't is that the latter is flown, while a capital ship is commanded. There's actually a very big difference between the two. (Briefly: flown works like an airplane, commanded has several people each responsible for their own part of operation with a commanding officer who's job is to coordinate them, and commands the ship by giving orders to them.)