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

The Jedi Temple is also Krayt's Palace of the Sith in Legacy, but turned edgy, as One Sith do. There is a regular Imperial Palace in existence, as well, though.

 

Not that far in - the Jedi Temple was confirmed to have been converted into the Imperial Palace in Tarkin, the second novel of the rebooted continuity, in November 2014. There is one stray reference to the Jedi Temple being burned down in one of the early young-reader Rebels novels - I forget which but possibly The Rebellion Begins, Michael Kogge's adaptation of the first Rebels episode, so there was a little bit of very early uncertainty about it. But overall that aspect of the new continuity was established fairly quickly (and IIRC expanded upon the idea from an unreleased TCW story arc of there being a Sith shrine beneath the Jedi Temple - said shrine implied to be another reason Palpatine would decide to hang his hat there).

 

At least it didn't take 5 years to confirm like Ilum being Starkiller base lmao

 

I think the one other 'contradiction' that might be throwing people off is that according to Tarkin the temple was extensively rebuilt to become the palace, implicitly so that it wound up looking like the Ralph McQuarrie concept art palace as seen in Tie Fighter. I still prefer that idea but it seems to have been jettisoned (possibly because of one of the ROTJ edits?) in favor of it just being the unaltered Jedi Temple.

 

Yeah, the temple was added to the 2004 DVD release.

 

Just imagine that the temple got rebuild and its complex expanded heavily to account for any Imperial Palace design ever in its neighborhood..
Or Palpatine constantly redesigns when he gets sick of its looks and tries something new with fastbuilding construction droids.

In his Less is more phase he went back to Jedi Temple ziggurat looks.

Another retcon I had in mind once is more complicated.. reconstruction opened up the shell of the Jedi Temple revealing the old Jedi City around the mountain top.. and THAT included a few of the building designs we saw in other old sources before being re-covered up again in a new, probably larger ziggurat shell to encase the expanded temple grounds and newly added buildings beneath it. Something like that we see in the Legacy era when in UNION comic Luke is rebuilding the Jedi Temple in ruins and covering it in a new shiny hull and when later with more transparisteel pyramids added over and around the Templegrounds for the Legacy comics.

Both retcons though do not work with the wild chronology of the temples depictions across the EU and need some cringe mindbending to accept them, but I like them. Worst still is Borsk blowing that thing up to smithereens and Jacen returning to it's Force Nexus with Vergere in the NJO...



But back to fleeting Fleet things...

How would a Nadiri Starhawk fare against the Yuuzhan Vong ships and tech in OneCanon @Sinrebirth @Thrawn McEwok ?

It's powerful tractor beam may crack these asteroid ships like eggs, no? Could it overpower the Vong blackhole-shield tech? Or merely move them around like toys to have these work against themselves? I am looking for Thrawn level reuse of this technology against the Vong...

Also, what is so different about the giant tractor beams? Arn't they quite like Interdictor technology? gravity based, directable like gravity well cones, yet more focussed into a beam and able to pull/push instead of just creating a gravity sector to block hyperjumps?

Could a Nadiri Starhawk then just use it like an invisible hammer to push through enemy blockades/fleets? Pulling them apart we already know of. Could it turn its gravity tractor beam into an interdictor cone field and double as an interdictor? Could the empire modify an Interdictor/Immobilizer into a Tractorbeam weapon vessel with minor additions to focus the cones into beams? Akin to the smaller Arrestor-class Tractor Beam vessels?
Could a Nadiri Starhawk use its tractor beams to hold how many or large objects? It could carry a minor asteroid field like a protective shieldship in front of it to hammer through enemy fleets... unleash a meteor bombardment through them to enemy worlds.

That thing is a beast if thought to the end... pray Thrawn gets none ever. No wonder the NR scrapped its larger vessels.. but did it keep enough around to in ONECANON maybe face the Vong? Still pity there were NONE depicted at Exegol...

 

Spoiler: The Acolyte episode 6

https://www.starwars.com/databank/cantaros

 

Sorry for the delayed reply - busy week!!

Well, you'd think they'd notice Palpatine parking a Super Star Destroyer under Imperial City, too...

The idea that a hundred-square-kilometer area of the planet had been razed and rebuilt to hide a Super Star Destroyer seemed beyond belief, especially with no one noticing the ship's insertion into the hole. Could the Emperor's power through the dark side of the Force have been sufficient to compel thousands or millions of people to forget having seen the Lusankya being buried?

(That's Wedge's POV in The Krytos Trap, if it's not obvious...)

I suspect the Temple/Palace is itself the reality-warping Force-nexus Palpatine was using to do this stuff.

After Borsk blows it up in Star by Star, suddenly people are aware again of where the Jedi Temple used to be, and there's a whole plotline about them trying to claim control of the underlying Force-nexus, followed by a line from Luke's POV in The Unifying Force (which annoyingly I can't find immediately) where he seems casually aware that the YV will be able to use their control of the site to rewrite at least perceptions of the past...

... but what I've not yet done is trace the exact page-by-page evolution of the site forward from empty stance through replacement glass pyramid to exact replica of the original, and then finally the exact same building that was there in the Prequels...

Good catch! Yes, it is... I guess the Infinities setting allowed the Prequel connection to bend around the "it's always been the Imperial Palace" perception...

See above. Once you realise that it's a reality-warping Force nexus, everything makes sense...

Short answer - the YV would take them down with kamikaze coralskippers...

Honestly, I really don't like the Stawk - they don't really communicate anything except "trying too hard not to be an ISD", and they seem like toys for people who want to be the Empire at its worst, but think that they can hide it (or worse, excuse it) by sticking a big Alliance badge on their actions...

On-topic! Broadly speaking, yes, because with the Nebulon-B, for once in STAR WARS, all the depictions of the interior layout are more-or-less in harmony - the labelling of the Technical Journal's diagramatic cross-section was followed closely in the old EGtVV, and both the labelling and the detailed deck-structure was used by both the Far Orbit deckplans and the much more recent ICS cutaway (except for a few deliberate changes to details aft, where Far Orbit moves the fuel tanks and hyperdrive motivator upwards between the engines, where there's more width for them, and ICS moves the motivator upwards again to the top of the aft hull!), and the relabelling of the ICS image in Age of Rebellion restores some terminology from Far Orbit too (though it designates a "docking bay" just under the main hull, a little lower than we'd expect)...

So... if you mean berthing as in bunks, and by the "fin" you mean the keel below the forward hull, then yes - specifically the the "passenger quarters" and "officers' quarters" are consistently indicated in the same place there in every version.

The problem is, as @Grevious_Coward has emphasised, that the actual VFX model has considerably different proportions, with a lot less room for decks. The only version that really works with the movie proportions is the Far Orbit deckplans, precisely because they're not a complete depiction of every deck in sequence, and you can just about fit in the decks it actually shows. I can't quite believe they did that deliberately, but they may have taken a look at the broadisde photograph in Chronicles and realised it didn't match in terms of proportions, so opted to do something that tracked to both versions.

There are some nice touches as a result, which I suspect weren't planned by anyone - the mess hall has to be roofed by the curve of the hull's topsides, making it more spacious - but it makes it overall a very tight and awkward ship...

And that makes a useful segue back to the final part (phewh!) of my deconstruction of the Nebulon-B as presented in the Far Orbit deckplans (and remember, if you want to disagree, you're welcome!)...

Most of this is a top-to-bottom survey of the forward hull, to count the number of personnel positions we can identify, and to think about the practicalities of crewing the ship...

* As noted above, the 186 bunks shown on deck 5 would accommodate the bulk of the crew on a four-watch hot-bunk system. This looks quite thought-out, given the way the modified numbers for the "patrol frigate" refit break down in Cracken's Threat Dossier. Each quarter of the crew will rotate in six-hour sections, two duty shifts separated by an off-watch and followed by a sleep-shift, which allows half the crew to be on duty at any given time - in effect, there are two duty watches, each divided into two half-watches which alternate their sleep-shift, and when paired, total 372 crewers each.

* The 194-seat mess hall in the galley can accommodate an entire crew-shift from deck 5 with a little extra space, but each shift will want two meals at the start and end of their off-watch (they sleep, go on duty, do whatever else they need to do, go on duty again, and back to sleep, so there's no other time for them to eat). Engineers, gunners and troopers, if they don't eat elsewhere, would have to eat in the middle of each shift, but there's probably just enough room for all their rankers and ratings at once. There's also a shift of galley personnel on duty here at any given time - numbers are unknown, but they form an adjunct of Quarters, the "small" component of the crew who do things like empty the officers' trash-compactors and change the corridor glow-panels, so perhaps not very large.

* The communications areas on deck 1 and deck 2 handles hypercomm, holocomm and ordinary realspace signals, and also oversees the use and maintenance of the ship's intercomm, plus additional cypher rooms and secure terminals, and several "offices" of unspecified function - the obvious callbacks to Star Destroyer comm scenes in The Empire Strikes Back are somewhat hidden within a complex layout of spaces. A minimum comms shift would be about fourteen or fifteen seated crew, manning about half the stations in the main hypercomm and realspace/intercomm rooms and the cypher rooms - with the inference that the full seating allocation is designed to accommodate all the relevant personnel when the whole crew is at action stations, and allocating the offices to allow the off-watch to do desk work (they have a higher total seat count of 18, but that might be designed to accommodate officers and/or facilitate various working-group sizes). That gives a minimum count of 30 crewers.

* Flight and Vehicle has a TIE Fighter hangar, two small shuttle bays, and three docking hardpoints.

• Each of the two shuttle is shown on the deck plans with a four-seat control-room, and each is said to need a three-man crew for the associated docking-beam; presumably the fourth seat is for someone with other duties, such as communications.
• One of the two docking hardpoints on the narrow connecting strut between the two hulls is shown with a two-seat control station, and the other is likely similar.
• Three-man beam-crews are indicated in the text for the TIE Fighter hangar and the adjacent primary-hull docking hardpoint, but these can perhaps be shared by the single control room in the hangar, which has no seats shown on plan; a minimum of four personnel would be expected here.

All this probably needs to be double-manned, with a set of personnel for each watch, suggesting a minimum of 32 crewers.

* The Nebulon-B's sick bay has a "small" team of human "technicians", and with three two-seat desks on the deckplan and two duty watches, that makes a minimum of 12 crewers.

* The 75 troops carried as passengers include both stormtroopers and black-uniformed Navy troopers (this is an important observation for understanding troop numbers on other Imperial ships). They bunk somewhere on deck 9 and/or deck 10, not shown in the deckplans, but they also get a troop deck on the forward part of deck 8, with two firing ranges, a 48-seat auditorium and a smaller 12-seat one (both scaled plausibly), three "trooper offices" (neatly corresponding to the three personnel above the rank of squad sergeant) and several training rooms, including one large enough to draw up a platoon on parade; the adjacent brig has accommodation for 36 prisoners in twin and triple bunks, or twice that "if the prisoners are crowded in" (i.e., if you force them to hot-bunk; yes, that's in the text ).

* There's also a group of security station positions through the ship - the deckplan depicts three-seat areas outside the main bridge and the main armory, and two-seat areas controlling the docking hatch and the brig, and there might be more that aren't seen in the partial deckplan. These might be manned but by additional security personnel from the crew watch, corresponding to the desk personnel in black coveralls in Empire and Jedi. On a two-watch rotation, the positions shown in the plans need 20 crewers, which provides a minimum number.

* As already noted, the officers' quarters on deck 11 have room for 44 personnel, interpreted here as 24 TIE Fighter pilots, 8 shuttle crew, and just 12 shipboard officers.

* The bridge on deck 17 is shown on the plan with twelve consoles, eleven of which are named. I'm not going to get into speculation to explain the differences between the plan, which depicts a Star Trek-style layout with a central seat for the captain, and the other illustrations which show Far Orbit with a typical Imperial gangway-and-crew-pit layout, except to note that this may play to a wider tonal ambiguity - it's possible that senior officers occupy the bridge positions in Star Trek style, and the consoles are certainly ascribed an override functionality accessed by the relevant "section head's rank cylinder"; but Star Wars tonality would suggest that these consoles are instead occupied by ratings, typically overseen by a few officers standing behind them, and in keeping with that interpretation, it's explicit that most positions primarily perform a "relay" and/or "monitoring" role, which is to say they communicate instructions from the bridge and report on actvity elsewhere in the ship, in proper Imperial style.

• There's an override station where the first officer is said to enter "commands", showing that he's directly present at the console.
• The security console is said to be the "coordination center" not only for internal security but also for boarding actions on other ships. The security chief might sit here, but it's not really clear - and it's not clear that the security chief is an officer rather than a senior NCO, either.
  
• The helm and astrogation consoles are directly responsible for the ship's movements, but there's no indication that these are officer positions.
• The other positions - sensors, communications, gunnery, deflector, engineering, astrogation, power, and life-support - are essentially relay/monitoring desks, and it's clear that the crewers here generally send orders from more senior bridge personnel and communicate information back to them; the specific details that are given are largely a mix of movie tonality and game-mechanics, though in a nice touch (and one of the few examples of giving a console crewer much initiative), life-support's ability to lock-out areas of the ship from the on-board water mains and atmospheric cycling is extended to a general damage-control role isolating compromised hull sections.
• I'm pretty sure the role of the other console can be inferred by a process of elimination, but I'm not going to speculate.

I would, however, infer that most bridge positions are not manned by officers, because that's not the way the Empire does things. In fact, I would infer that even where an officer is directly present, they stand and oversee a seated crewer. Two watches of twelve bridge personnel gives 24 crewers.

* Down in the keel on deck 21, power has ten seats - distrubuted symmetrically in three pairs of separate port and starboard control rooms, this could be explained on a two-shift system, with only the rooms on one side usually manned. On deck 26, life has four seats in a single control room - these aren't entirely symmetrical, with two seats on the centreline, and nor are the equipment units symmetrical, with atmospheric scrubbers to starboard and water filtration to port, perhaps indicating that the desks accommodate a single watch, so that when the ship goes to quarters the off-watch form a maintenance crew; but in Alliance service, we're told this section "doesn't have enough" personnel, which might indicate it's undermanned at the best of times. Regardless, the minimum number of personnel in these two decks is 14 crewers.

* Below these decks is the sensor array, with adjacent spaces for the associated computer and crew. Nothing is specified about personnel numbers or layout this section of the ship.

* The primary weapons section is located at the base of the keel, beneath the sensor array. There are 66 gunners divided between this and the various other weapons emplacements. In addition to these, and back on deck 17 there's a separate tactical room just behind the bridge with five seats and a holoprojector. Assuming it's manned by a separate shift on each watch, that adds another 10 crewers.

So...

* Adding up the various personnel, we get 535 identifiable personnel between officers (12), fighter pilots and shuttle crew (32) deflectors (16), engineering (50), stormtroopers and Navy troopers (75), gunners (66), and two shifts of console crewers in the forward hull (284). This leaves 360 personnel unaccounted for, presumably divided into two watches so that 180 of them are on duty at any time. Even assuming additional crewers so that all the consoles are fully manned on both watches would only reduce this number by 22 in each watch.

* Honestly, I'm surprised that the total number of unallocated crewers dials down anything like this low. Someone might want to check my numbers.

* A proportion of these unaccounted personnel belong to known groups - we don't know the numbers for the sensor control room, potentially there's an additional gunnery control room, and we know that quarters has galley personnel and maintenance teams. Nonetheless, there need to be upwards of a hundred more personnel on each shift. Some of these must be techs, going round the ship testing systems and doing maintenance, or doing repairs duirng combat.

* Others are probably simply deckhands, moving things around the ship - something like a hundred meals a hour need to be delivered from cargo areas to the galley, some maintenance work might require moving heavy modules from place to place, and during a battle, there's a need for people to move blaster-gas reloads around the ship; the turblasers all need reloaded after twenty rounds and the flak lasers every forty shots, and the recommended way to do this is to store the reloads in a well-protected central position, an armoured ready-use locker "in the cargo holds", and bring them to the guns as required; but each reload weighs about as much as a large man or an eight-inch naval round from WW2, so either each reload has to be pushed along the companionway on some sort of bogey or else it gets passed from person to person to prevent exhaustion; also, because there are only fifty cartridges on the ship, and 24 of them are locked into the gun mountings, every empty cartridge (which probably doesn't weigh that much less) has to be promptly taken down to the main "magazine" at the base of the keel, refilled and brought back through the ship. I really like this as tonality, a credibly low-tech system that creates a mix of age-of-sail and '39-'45 IN SPACE, but it will require some manpower.

* There is a notable lack of explicit references to droids, those that are mentioned functioning within restricted areas of the ship. Quarters has floor-swabbing droids and autochefs, sick bay has a group of five, and life-support uses droids to compensate for limited numbers of techs, though possibly these were only obtained from non-Imperial sources when the ship was in Alliance service. The TIE Fighters might rely on maintenance droids, though I don't think these were explicit canon at the time The Far Orbit Project appeared. I can think of several reasons why the Nebulon-B might not have a large a droid contingent, but I don't want to detour...

* With all that said, Heir to the Empire shows it's actually possible to work a Nebulon-B on non-combat duty with just fifteen people - presumably this works out as the captain, two small bridge/engineroom watches, and maybe a few techs (and possibly very few officers), though there's a passing reference to the crews being reinforced by "extra droids"; we see bridge consoles being patched directly into systems like sensors as required.

So, finally (finally!), some general conclusions...

* The escort frigate is very lightly-officered. There are just seven "line" officers - captain, first officer, three sensor/communications officers, quarters lieutenant and power chief - and three associated with gunnery - weapons officer, security chief and deflector chief - plus probably somewhere between three and six engineer officers (including the life support chief), and then the sick bay officer, COMPNOR agent and perhaps a stormtrooper commander. Additionally, a significant proportion of these may be warrant, NCO or auxiliary positions rather than conventionally-commissioned. The thirty-two pilots and the flight chief make up the bulk of the officer personnel. The way that the numbers work together do suggest that all this was thought out, perhaps including a little designed-in ambiguity around the edges. If not, it's a remarkable coincidence.

* Several of the officers group into obvious pairs which suggests watchkeeping arrangements with one or other being on duty at all times - captain and first officer, weapons officer and security chief, sensor/communications chief and one or other of his deputies, perhaps power and life-support, and the minimum officer allocation for the propulsion spaces indicated by the cabin plan would consist of the chief engineer and one other engineer officer. There's a lack of designated "pit lieutenant" positions, but perhaps the first officer and quarters lieutenant can take those roles when the ship is at full alert.

* The only way I can see to provide continuous officer supervision for each section of the crew is to place the sensor chief and the weapons officer on alternate watches, and give them combined oversight of the sensor suite and primary weapons section, while the weapons officer also alternates with the security chief to cover those duties - meanwhile, the sensor/communications chief and the subordinate communications officer alternate in the two-deck communications area. Does immediate oversight of the the off-watch in each section rely on a competent subordinate? Or do they just rely on crewers making reports to the bridge?

* The tonality of the design emphasises a hierarchy of console positions and a repertoire of expected actions. There are console crewers who monitor equipment directly, and other console crewers in more central groups, which oversee their activity. Even on a relatively small ship like a Nebulon-B, control of a gunnery position or propulsion unit is likely to have a chain or at least three separate consoles in different rooms. These consoles and their crewers communicate information to senior personnel, and send decisions back from them. Most of this is probably a relatively abstract process, which requires learning the expected response rather than understanding the technology. Out of a total non-offcer, non-soldier crew of around 875 people, over 400 do this sort of thing.

* The majority of other Imperial crewers are maintenance techs or unskilled deckhands. Even the techs probably don't need to understand what they're doing, simply replacing components when a mechanical check indicates that they should. There are, however, spaces to perform repair and maintenance on engineering components, TIE Fighter equipment, and the troopers' blasters. Do some crewers have software skills, or is the ship's programming largely designed to be unalterable, locked inside devices without coding access - "black box" code, to use a piece of obscure-but-useful Star Wars terminology - for security purposes?

* The droid pool on a Nebulon-B appears to be relatively small, with human techs being used instead. This is perhaps a reflection of the cramped design and minimal conception, which attempts to link together key systems - TIE Fighters, comms/sensor package, turbolasers, and propulsion - as simply as possible. The emphasis is on providing front-end functionality, with corners cut on the packaging.

* The ship is demanding on its crew - there's a large crew of conscripts on a cramped berth-deck, required to work a demanding watch schedule that leaves them little or no private time, a system which may also be designed to minimise their opportunity to think, discuss and organise, and thus to prevent mutiny; backing up this attitude, there's a force of soldiers physically interposed between the crew and the officers' quarters and control decks - and if all this seems very Imperial, it's worth emphasising it's pure age-of-sail tonality...

* All this has implications for how we think about other Imperial ships. There are some obvious contrasts - the ISD has a much heavier officer ratio, and maybe a lot more droids as well - but also some basic insights into structure - the escort frigate uses a two-watch system and, as we would expect, divides its crew between console crewers and maintenance techs, but probably adds unskilled deckhands to move things around the ship, and there's a high proportion of pilot personnel among the Academy-trained officers, a point that acquries extra significance when we consider the number of small types that are "piloted" rather than provided larger crews - and some important implications - the WEG numbers for troops include black-uniformed Navy troopers, so they can't be distilled into the crew count. There are also some questions - is four-shift hot-bunking widespread? (Probably not, IMHO - most Imperial ships have more room for crew and recreation space...) And are Imperial software systems regularly "black-boxed", preventing coding access for security reasons?

And to conclude, a little excursus on weapons layout (this is I think overlong, but I posted and I don't think it's worth the effort to edit)....

* Way back in The Star Wars Sourcebook in 1987, WEG assigned the escort frigate twelve turbolaser and twelve flak lasers - six turbolasers and six lasers firing forward, three turbolasers and two lasers on each flank, and just two flak lasers aft. In the "second edition" revisions around 1992, these weapons were assigned rather unequal crews, which I suspect is a game-mechanics thing, but it's exactly the sort of obscure little detail I want to overanalyse.

* The 1994 Technical Journal assigns the Alliance ship seen in ESB a reduced armament of just six turbolasers and eight flak lasers, and locates a "primary forward turbolaser" and "primary forward laser cannon" (singular or plural?) at the bottom of the keel, while more recently, ICS adds an additional identification of a gun on top of the hull as the "upper turbolaser turret"; but all this is strictly speaking only correct for this Alliance ship - armament in these positions may be heavier on the standard ship.

* This is reinforced by The Far Orbit Project, which indicates that the area at the base of the keel "is the primary weapons section, by virtue of having the most guns" - as well as being used for ranging shots, due to having the fastest feedback loop with the adjacent sensor array.

* Meanwhile, in Shield of Lies, Lando encounters the frigate Bloodprice and remarks that the type carries the "heavy stuff forward", and that "the gun ports are open", which does not seem to be a metaphor; in narrative prose, there's also a reference in the prose to "chin turrets", and the ship's weapons have been refitted with a "primary ion cannon battery" - we might expect this to correlate with what The Far Orbit Project calls the "primary weapons section", where the Technical Journal shows the "primary forward turbolaser" and "primary forward laser cannon", making them synonymous with the chin turrets, but the flash of ion-cannon fire comes from "the bow of the onrushing frigate", which may suggest these weapons are at the front of the main hull.

* Cracken's Threat Dossier says explicitly that this refit replaces three forward turbolasers and three forward flak lasers with ion cannons, and exchanges two aft flak lasers for a towed array. Something further can be extrapolated by comparing the normal Nebulon-B gun-crew stats with those of the refitted variant.

• two turbolasers on the standard model have four-man crews (both replaced on the refit, implying that they are forward emplacements)
• eight turbolasers have two-man crews (one of these is also replaced on the refit, implying that it is a forward emplacement)
• two turbolasers have individual gunners (both of these remain in place on the refit)
• four flak lasers have two-man crews (all of these disappear on the refit, showing that they are forward and aft positions)
• The other eight lasers have single gunners (one of these disappears on the refit, too)
• the two beam-projector crews each have a twelve-man crew.

* The only really certain conclusion is that on a standard Nebulon-B, the keel group should have "the most guns", and thus be a larger than any other single group of weapons - it might be replaced entirely by ion cannon on the "patrol frigate" refit, and it might therefore be as large as three turbolasers and three flak lasers, but we don't know any of this for sure - and I'm not going to speculate...

* The only thing that's clear is that the turbolasers and lasers replaced by ion cannon on the "patrol frigate" refit have a proportionally large number of gunners; but it's not clear if that means they're concentrated in the "primary weapons section" and are used to provide ranging telemetry for the other positions, or because they're divided between smaller groups that have a lower total number of gunners...

* There are probably some gun ports on an escort-frigate - age-of-sail tonality again, but something we've seen already in STAR WARS...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Sporadic High Republic-era ship thoughts, briefly...

Longbeam - looks to be maybe the size of a big airliner? Perhaps 80 metres. Some small internal docking space, perhaps.
Pacifer-class cruiser - in comics, looks at least five times longer than a Longbeam. Has some fairly large hangars.
Emissary-class - probably even larger, with a basic, almost Venator-like bridge-tower. Likely 700 metres long, at least.

And the Gaze Electric - probably pretty large? Maybe even a kilometre, nearly,

 

Not sure about other navies...but the US Navy is pretty much a 4 meal schedule...breakfast, lunch, dinner and mid-rats in the middle of the night for the night shift. And you pretty much just rotate your crew in through those times.

 

I feel the Longbeam ought to be longer than the Pacifier, though it obviously has a lot less crew - they're designed for different types of mission...

And I'm sure someone's said this before, but the Emissary - "tapering to a point, with towers and crenelations along its length, like a fortress turned on its side" - sounds like it's based on the Disney Castle, with the central tower as the hull and the outer towers as the engines...

The USN is using sensible arrangements which allows the crew square meals and a decent length of sleep ( ) - the Far Orbit arrangement is dictated by the very limited bunkspace available rather than any direct real-world analogy, but it seems like a combination of age-of-sail "watch on watch" where alternate shifts had to sling their hammocks in the same limited space, and a steam-and-steel "defence watch", where the two halves of the crew rotate at stations so the ship's on alert at all times.

Assigning both the meals to the off-watch is based on the Far Orbit Project's reference to the crew being served "in shifts", implicitly more regular and scheduled than the "buffet-style, help-yourself method" which is adopted when the ship defects to the Alliance - the alternatives would be to cut into the duty shift or sleep-shift, both of which seem out-of-character for the Empire, and somewhat impractical (at least one online source claims the RN did cut "defence watch" mess-time into the start of the sleep-shift at some point in the twentieth century, but I suspect that dates back to when the men still ate at their berths rather than on a mess-deck, and most of the crew had specific non-combat duties taking up their off-watch, neither of which really seems to apply here)...

And now to finally change the subject...

@Alpha-Red and @Grevious_Coward - looking in The Star Wars Sourcebook for the details of Grisserno's little manoeuvre at the Battle of Denab (more on that below), I stumbled on a passage two pages later, which gives the ISD an allocation of "eight Lambda-class shuttlecraft" and "12 landing barges", each with a maximum capacity of "four AT-ATs (or eight AT-STs), and 1,000 troops". That's obviously the basis of the capacity of four AT-ATs on the Telgorn Warlord and the Incom Theta, though both are deliberately made too big to fit inside an ISD. On the other hand... "Many Star Destroyers carry pre-fabricated ground bases", but not all of them...

But the bulk of this reply is another update on sector group sizes...

* Sluis sector, continuing past Kathol, Minos and Elrood up the Rimma Trade Route, was the scene of the Battle of Denab, when the "Imperial Fourth Attack Squadron, composed almost entirely of Victory-class ships", was routed by Y-wings; the Imperial squadron was deployed in two "wings", and because of the slow speed of VSD-Is, the Y-wings were able to fight one group and then the other in turn; the heaviest balance that can be constructed of VSDs to the exclusion of other ships involves a heavy squadron consisting of three heavy lines of four VSDs each, plus a skirmish line that might have been as light as four Skiprays, though it's possible to configure a light squadron with six VSDs, two corvettes and four blastboats, which might suit the "two wings" formation better. Either way, considering how small the sector groups on the outer Rimma are, this single squadron, attached to the Sector Group HQ, would qualify as a "large" fleet for the region, especially in the pre-Yavin period - though of course, Sluis could have been a fully integrated part of Oversector Outer...

Continuing up the Rimma a little more, and then pivoting to looking at a few places on the Mid-Rim...

* The Ado sector is located on the Rimma Trade Route between Eriadu and Yag'Dhul; Pirates and Privateers says the sector group contained the 3rd Ado Superiority Fleet, which implies six ISDs plus their associated battle squadrons, two light squadrons, and two substantial Force Escort commands of four squadrons each; one of these, 16th Escort Force, is assigned to protect a multi-system kingdom known as the Indupar Crown Worlds, and is an unusual example of an Imperial formation described as being objectively below "standard" strength, without its full muster of component formations - but it's possible that this simply repeats scenarios we've seen already, with component formations mustering the minimum number of ships at the minimum hull-size (when these are supposed to be either/or options), and others formed from non-Navy vessels.

Clearly a larger force than we find on the Outer Rim. The "3rd Ado Superiority Fleet" designation implies two other fleets ahead in sequence, but it's possible that this may be an Empire-wide numbering (compare "16th Escort Force", which isn't given any local designation)...

* In the Trans-Nebular sector, located spinward of the Corellian Run and not that far from Tatooine, Goroth, Slave of the Empire says the original Moff turned "warlord" and was deposed by "a task force of Imperial Star Destroyers", which left behind "a small force that would become the core of a new sector fleet"; one of these ships, an old Bayonet-class light cruiser, rediscovered the eponymous mining planet - after Yavin, the system was guarded by a "task force" of two ISDs, with the Valor, flagship of Admiral DeGroot, on permanent station in low orbit, and the second position taken by "various ships" on a two month rotation; the idea was probably that they came from a larger sector fleet, but there's strictly no requirement for it.

Saying anything specific about the battle squadrons that ought to be attached to ISDs seems too like speculation, but I'll observe that it ought to be possible to convert a battle squadron into a light squadron by withdrawing the ISD and dividing the pursuit line into a recon line and skirmish line, or vice versa...

* In what's now identified as the Vilonis sector, Twin Stars of Kira gives us a look at the 2391st battle squadron and 6783rd troop line, with a combined strength of one ISD, one VSD-I, one VSD-II, one Interdictor, eight "Strike and Light Cruisers", two transports, one escort carrier, four frigates and six corvettes; after Endor, they get mauled trying to reconquer the Kalinda system, and a reduced force consisting of the VSD-II and three cruisers is then reinforced by what looks like another squadron formation, to a combined strength of one VSD-II, six Strike-class cruisers, five "Light Cruisers", a star galleon, three frigates, and two corvettes (a subsequent narrative scene suggests Rendilli light corvettes from Imperial Customs, not proper Navy vessels).

The arrangement with two VSDs supporting ISD is unusually powerful, and the combination of Strike-class cruisers and light cruisers is a pattern associated with important formations. However, they get absolutely smashed by kamikaze tactics, which is why they're knocked down to one VSD and three cruisers - and the exact balance of cruisers within each formation is left frustratingly unclear; I'm going to use the SPOILER tag to hide my discussion of the precise organizational detail, and keep the main thread relatively short (I wish I'd thought of this for the Far Orbit stuff)...

Spoiler

In the first list, the transports and two of the other ships should belong to the troop line - typically this role goes to a pair of Strike-class cruisers, but it's not explicit, nor is it clear what the balance of crusier types is. Similarly, within the second list, it's not clear which of the cruisers come from the original formation and which are reinforcements. My best guess would be...

• 2391st battle squadron
  • 1 ISD
  • attack line - 1 VSD-I, 1 VSD-II, 1 Interdictor, 1 escort carrier
  • attack line - 2 light cruisers, 4 frigates
  • pursuit line - 4 light cruisers, 6 corvettes
• 6783rd troop line
  • 2 transports
  • 2 Strike-class cruisers
• Unidentified light squadron
  • attack line - 3 Strike-class cruisers
  • attack line - 3 Strike-class cruisers
  • skirmish line - 1 star galleon, 3 frigates, 2 Rendilli light corvettes
  • recon line - 2 light cruisers

The basic premises on which this is built are as follows - The Imperial Sourcebook says that Strike-class cruisers are the standard supports of a troop line; that the only place corvettes can go in a battle squadron is the pursuit line; that an attack line should only be as large as six vessels if it "consists of frigates or light cruisers", with nothing larger; and that there are "fewer if the line consists of heavy cruisers or larger ships", which is not quite as tight about reducing the total to three, but even so a formation with two VSDs and a 600m heavy cruiser should not have too many other ships - by way of retcon, it should be obvious that the carrier here is a Quasar Fire, to make that attack line consist entirely of triangles. The reinforcements are interrpeted as a light squadron because a star galleon and three frigates seem too slight for the an attack line in a heavy squadron, but an interesting alternative that sems to work is if the reinfocements are the parent formation of the 6783rd troop line...

• Unidentified troop squadron
  • 6783rd troop line
    • 2 transports (damaged and withdrawn in the first phase)
    • 2 Strike-class cruisers (destroyed in the first phase)
  • unidentified troop line
    • 2 transports (not present in the battle)
    • 2 Strike-class cruisers
  • attack line
    • 4 Strike-class cruisers
    • 2 light cruisers
  • skirmish line
    • 1 star galleon
    • 3 frigates
    • 2 Rendilli light corvette

... and/or we can mix the attack lines a little more if we swap at least one of the VSDs to the troop line - for example...

• 2391st battle squadron
  • 1 ISD (damaged and withdrawn)
  • attack line - 1 VSD-I, 1 Interdictor, 2 Strike-class cruisers (all destroyed)
  • attack line - 1 light cruiser, 1 escort carrier, 4 frigates (all destroyed)
  • pursuit line - 4 light cruisers, 6 corvettes (all but two light cruisers destroyed)

• Unidentified troop squadron
  • 6783rd troop line
    • 2 transports (damaged and withdrawn in the first phase)
    • 1 VSD-II (flagship, survives first phase)
    • 1 Strike-class cruiser (survives first phase)
  • unidentified troop line
    • 2 transports (not present in the battle)
    • 2 Strike-class cruisers (arrive in second phase)
  • attack line (arrives in second phase)
    • 3 Strike-class cruisers
    • 3 light cruisers
  • skirmish line (arrives in second phase)
    • 1 star galleon
    • 3 frigates
    • 2 Rendilli light corvette

...

More importantly, I'm sure that @Carib Diss and perhaps also @Chris0013 will be amsued that Twin Stars of Kira gives their opponents, the defenders of the Kalinda system, a pair of "heavy Strike Cruisers"...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

What does a Y-wing versus VSD fight look like anyway? Going by X-wing Alliance, I'd imagine the Y-wings just fly into torpedo range, fire off their entire payload, then turn around and get the hell out of dodge before getting eaten by TIE fighters. I also think these scenarios shouldn't be analogous to WWII carrier battles, because in WWII it took just maybe 3-4 bomb hits from a SBD Dauntless to kill a carrier (depending somewhat on circumstances) such that a squadron of 10-15 planes arriving over an enemy carrier probably means a dead carrier. I'm pretty sure 15 Y-wings won't kill a VSD...I'm not sure they'd even kill a Strike cruiser.

 

Might depend on the source. Some novels have the "fighter-grade torpedo" as a pretty powerful weapon when fired en-masse.

In the X-wing novels, a full squadron of 12 ships, firing off 24 torpedoes at a time, can get through full strength shields on one flank of a VSD and do minor damage.

 

Oh, I'm absolutely sure they will...



Star Wars ships don't have the massively vulnerable flight-decks that real-world flat-tops do - unless you catch a Venator during launch, or get inside a TFBB! - but they do have vulnerable points (drives, sensors, apertures, turrets), they have the same structural vulnerabilities as any real-world warship, and often (if not always) they also rely more heavily on centralised power systems to make everything work (the obvious analogy here is the Trek cliché of the warp core explosion, but it's enough to simply "shut down the main reactor", as Threepio noted right back at the start in 1977).

Some well-designed ships will take tremendous punishment and somehow get back in the game (Warspite, Marat, New Orleans and Minneapolis), but others, even if well-designed, will go down to one punch (at Midway, the Japanese carrier flagship Akagi seems to have been lost to a single 1,000lb hit from an SBD, and either her or Soryu was attacked by just three SBDs in total, while the cruiser HMS Exeter, with a well-designed armour scheme which stood up to the 11-inch of Graf Spee and shrugged off a Long Lance, was stopped by single 8-inch hits in the two successive Java Sea engagements, each of which reached her boiler rooms - and I wouldn't be completely surprised if the second "hit" was really just the damaged and overstressed machinery giving out - while her half-sister HMS York was sunk by something the Italians called an "exploding tourist speedboat"; even if the ship survives, a few hits can seriously deprecate her fighting capability - in successive engagements in November and December 1940, HMS Berwick had her two aft turrets knocked out by hits that seem to have sent shrapnel up inside the armoured structure, and another hit in the second fight flooded the magazine for the forward turrets too)...

Extrapolate all that to Star Wars, and you get an idea of the way I think, and the things I think are important in warship design...

(I'll also add that, reminding myself of Midway, I'm struck by the fact that the Japanese CAP caught the main SBD formation at the end of the attack - they hit the leading sections as they recovered, and may have intercepted the rear sections on the way down... that's something I think is important, too!!)

You mean the VSD Corrupter, which was then completely defeated by a single strafing pass from a light cruiser and another volley of torps?

In both these scenarios - and at Yavin, and at Endor - the basic problem is that the TIE Fighters fail to keep the X-wings and Y-wings off the big targets. There are a lot of questions at Denab - what happened to the Imperial fighter cover, and what was the Y-wings' attack formation - but there's a reason I'm a fan of the two-seater S3 variant, and it has a lot to do with the fact that it can do more in a tail-chase than simply throw energy into the aft deflector...



- The Imperial Ewok

 

So a while ago we were discussing ion cannons and what use they have, right? And I speculated that the reason they're not used more often is because they'll only disable a ship (or parts of a ship) temporarily, maybe for a minute or even less. Otherwise, why not use them all the time, right? So I'm guessing if those Y-wings were firing proton torpedoes, most of them would just be absorbed by the shield, and then once the shield is depleted at that point, some will get through and deal some damage to the hull. It certainly wouldn't be fatal.

I think if you aim all your torpedoes at one subsystem, maybe you could knock it out. But that's far from the catastrophic damage that the SBDs inflicted on the Japanese carriers at Midway. Or alternately, a wing of Tu-22Ms unloading an their entire missile salvo onto a Nimitz-class carrier would certainly kill it. SW spaceships are these heavily armored and shielded juggernauts, compared to real-life water ships which are glass cannons.

 

Spoiler

Did any classic EU ships get featured? The Tarkin book alumni, like Secutor, Carrack, Lancer, etc.? Is there anything on the Imperial fleet lineup, does it basically confirm ISD-Arquitens-Raider lineup?

Anything on the Resurgent?

 

Something to think about is whether or not you really need to destroy a ship to take it out of a fight. Yes capital ships can be susceptible to massed torpedo/missile barrages that if hitting a vital area can destroy them. But there is also term for use against tanks in the real world. A mobility kill. You may not destroy the tank outright but if you can take out the treads or engine it is out of the fight as it can't maneuver. Kind of like the ISD that got hit with Ion Torpedoes at Scarif. It was not unitl Raddus pulled that Hammerhead push maneuver that the ISD was actually destroyed. So hitting a capital ship like a VSD from a open side...say you have your main attack come head on, but then you sneak a squadron of Y-Wings in from behind when it shields are diverting power to defend the front...could give you a chance of taking out it's engines so it can't maneuver.

That is something I think we should have seen more of. A captain that uses them more often...particularly against smaller ships. Say a MC80 drops out of hyperspace to attack an Imperial convoy protected by 2 Nebulon Bs. Hit them with ion cannons repeatedly and capture them in tractor beams. Don't give them a chance to get their systems back on line and force the enemy to abandon ship then board and take control of the frigates.

 

True, but with a mobility kill that's just temporary and it can be repaired fairly quickly. With tanks, just have some engineers patch it up with some spare parts. With a Star Destroyer, once the Rebels are gone, you can just send out some repair crews and astromech droids to repair the damage. That's very much not what happened with the Japanese carriers at Midway, where a single wave of bombers turned three capital ships into burning unsalvageable wrecks.

 

I get that...I am just making the point that you don't need to totally destroy a capital ship to take it out of a fight.

 

In the Rogue One scenario, I'd imagine the smart move would be to follow through on the ion attack with a torp attack, aiming for specific targets like the bridge, the main sensors, the hangar and the engines, if not to destroy the ship then to mission-kill its combat capability - but I'm obviously a lot more convinced than you are about the ability of torps to punch right through capital-ship deflectors in the first place, though I'd emphasise that it requires a particular tactical doctrine in terms of organising the attack run and the timing and aiming of the salvo; and on the other side, whether an attacker get the opportunity to do something like this depends on the competence of defending flak and fighter cover and sensor systems and the people using them.

In short, there are a lot of variables in play. And with all that in mind, in Rogue One, there's presumably a reason the Y-wing attack isn't followed through by X-wings, and without drawing any specific conclusions, we can note the absolutely massive scale of TIE Fighter cover, the snubs being focused on fleet defence and attacking the deflector, and their admiral specifically tasking the corvette for the role of attacking the ISD...

But speaking of Scarif (rewatching to make sure I'd not missed or forgotten anything), I just noticed that when the two ISDs collide, there's footage of what looks like a control room somewhere that isn't the main bridge, probably in the brim trench or forward superstructure, with consoles on the main deck rather than in crew pits... I suspect it's the same set that was used for the control room on the deflector station, but I'm not quite sure if this is repurposed footage that was originally intended to represent the destruction of the station itself...

One point that I was trying to make (and perhaps didn't communicate very well) is that even when you do make your ship a juggernaut, you can still have all kinds of weak points, whether they're accepted compromises or unintended consequences - I'm simply less convinced that juggernauts will be consistently well-designed than you...

In terms of tonality, I wonder if people are influenced in their ideas of the general ability of capital ships to shrug off damage by the relatively superficial hits that many USN/RN ships took from kamikazes in '44-'45 - as I think I've said before, I see this largely as a result of real-world kamikazes being very poorly-designed as delivery systems; a classic propeller airframe is not a very good way of achieving a heavy physical impact on the target or of transferring blast energy from an explosive charge inside it...

Agreed absolutely. There are a lot of real-world examples of major warships with good armour schemes that have been knocked out for months or years by damage...

This is an interesting idea - but it makes me realise that this is probably exactly why WEG made ship-mounted ion-cannons into such short-range weapons - you need to get in close to use them, which means they're best for capturing unarmed or lightly-armed targets... and in your specific scenario, it's interesting to realise that if two Nebulon-Bs can keep their heads turned to an MC80 they stand equal on turbolaser strength and they have four squadrons of TIEs vs three of snubs, while the bow-mounted ion cannon on the post-Endor "patrol frigate" refit outrange and out-punch the ones on an MC80, all of which would probably make an ion-cannon attack less attractive and more risky for the big pickle than it broadly-speaking "should" be...

Although, obviously, there's no obligation on anyone to to accept any of that as personal canon...

I think it's easy enough to envisage a result that's somewhere in-between - you can "mission-kill" a big pointy in ways that force it to retreat, and which will often require significant refitting - perhaps the most obvious example is also the most counterintuitive, defeating the TIE Fighters, but there are some obvious targets on the hull itself...

This also speaks to an interesting subtext in the pre-reboot - much like the French and English navies in the eighteenth century, the Alliance and the Empire seem to have different ideas of what constitutes success; the Alliance tends to have a binary of either avoiding battle altogether or going all-in trying to destroy the opposition; the Empire is more willing to experiment with combat, but they do retreat and regroup rather than risk a damaged Star Destroyer, and that makes them harder to actually defeat than the New Republic realises - "Imperials don't surrender", to quote a maxim Pellaeon reflects on sometimes. Une bataille gagnée, c'est une bataille dans laquelle on ne veut pas s'avouer vaincu...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

WE NEED AN EXORCIST!!! HE'S SPEAKING IN TONGUES!!!

 

Are you really that triggered by a little French?

(Long answer, it's a quote that seemed apposite, but I didn't want to overexplain...)

Actually on-topic for a moment, 1988's Strike Force: Shantipole says that the B-wing was specifically designed to mission-kill the Nebulon-B by targeting the engines and the TIE Fighter hangar...

And rounding out the reply with a few more examples of sector-level deployments from WEG, which I find rather fun, and I hope some of you will enjoy too...

Spoiler

(You may also be amused by the length of time it took me to rediscover the first two of these on my recent reread of the relevant material, and the fact that I forgot about them in the first place, and then forgot I had forgotten about them... )

* Darpa Sector, in The Far Orbit Project, has three superiority fleets, befitting its position as the main hyperspace gatetway of the Core. That means eighteen ISDs (all of them specified to be ISD-Is), with support to match - their eighteen attached battle squadrons muster over 100 ships of frigate size or larger, they'll have around 150 additional picket and scout vessels, maybe more, and there's a similarly large and largely separate force for anti-raiding duty, arranged in six Force Escort commands, which could contain ships up to VSD size.

"Of this, a full superiority force" (three ISDs, at least eighteen other sizeable capital ships, and a couple of dozen picket/scout ships) are supporting the occupation of Ralltiir - and as well as its three ISD-Is, this force also includes the VSD-I Scourge, commanded by Vice-Admiral Gredge, whose high rank and regular inspection tours through the sector make me suspect that he's the sector fleet commander; choice of a VSD-I as command ship would be explained by the fact it gets about much faster in hyperspace than an ISD-I.

Extensive sector infrastructure includes a shipyard capable of handling ISDs, and at least two sizeable space stations.

This is, I think, the biggest sector group in terms of ISD numbers that's ever been explicitly defined...

* Bormea Sector, in the same source, has what is described as a "fairly small" Imperial military presence in the context of the Core at the time of Yavin, with two superiority fleets. That means twelve ISD-Is, so I suspect those seven Star Destroyers which blockade Chandrilla are probably ISDs after all - or six of them are, anyway, with the seventh being a VSD flagship, like above. Between them, that dozen ISDs will have at least 72 support ships of frigate size or larger in their battle squadrons, plus around hundred additional scout vessels, maybe more, and a similarly large anti-raiding force, arranged in four Force Escort commands.

Bormea also has a support fleet, a massive group of Navy freight vessels, and a deepdock fleet with two hyperspace-mobile shipyard complexes that can handle ships up to ISD size and a lot of big repair vessels - and both these fleets have attached escorts of their own. The support fleet's presence can be explained by the fact that the sector contains the key Coreward hyperlane junction and will thus cover a considerable amount of Imperial cargo movement, while the deepdocks make sense alongside a large ISD formation in a sector that, unlike its neighbour, lacks any major shipways; but I would raise the possibility that both of these are unique, Empire-level assets that are "homeported" at the Empire's central lightspeed crossroads and temporarily rotated out to any sector group as required.

Somewhat surprisingly after this show of big pointy force and that remark about the Bormea sector fleet being "fairly small", another passage states that that "[t]here are few superiority forces in the Core in this era" - from the context, it's clear that this means the Imperial Sourcebook's Force Superiority formation of three ISDs and accompanying battle squadrons and light squadron, or any ISD-centric approximation of it.

We're told the big pointy is "kept concentrated" near key places like Coruscant and Kuat. Sounds familiar... these sound like the same ships we see redeployed to fortress systems after Endor in Journey to Coruscant in SWAJ #2 (which actually appeared four years earlier in 1994)...

In short, while the twelve ISD-Is at Bormea are a "fairly small" deployment of big pointy by the standards of the Core, that needs to be seen in the context of "few superiority forces", with just four fleets with ISDs being known for certain - Coruscant/Anaxes, Kuat, Bormea and Darpa. The first two are Azure Hammer and White Cuirass Command, while Bormea and Darpa have been created out of Steel Blade Command (there's probably just enough leeway to have the Rogue Squadron game take place before The Far Orbit Project, with Bormea being reorganized when Moff Caglio replaces Kohl Seerdon)...

Then comes a contrast. "The escort force is the primary anti-piracy task force, and makes up the bulk of a sector group. Escort forces are present in every fleet...." Now that's fair enough, but it's not clear what it means - does the Empire deploy an Assault Fleet (or perhaps a Supply Fleet!) to every sector in the Core, or create ad hoc standalone Force Escort commands by assigning the appropriate four squadrons directly to each Sector Group HQ? Or does this mean we can distinguish the formal Force Escort command from a looser use of "escort force", and similarly "superiority force" could be a generic, meaning anything ISD-centric, not necessarily a proper Force Superiority with its three ISDs, attached battle squadrons and additional light squadron?

The other problem is that although an orthodox Force Escort from The Imperial Sourcebook has two heavy and two light squadrons, these are quite protean forces - you can build up to two dozen VSDs and a dozen Lancer frigates plus a couple of large light cruisers for reconnaissance, or down to forty small light cruisers like the Arquitens and Bayonet, and some Skipray blastboats. Or you can build it sideways with up to forty-four Nebulon-B escort frigates in what are supposed to be the subordinate picket units, and round that out with small light cruisers in the low dozens in the attack and recon lines, which seems like it might be useful, but really isn't how it's designed to be constructed (swapping the light cruisers for eight corvettes and sixteen slow-but-sizeable ships like bulk cruisers, Dreadnaughts and even VSD-Is seems closer to the idea)...

That said, we know what these ships are doing. Navy activity in the Core around the time of Yavin, says The Far Orbit Project, is largely restricted to convoy escort, pirate-hunting, manoeuvres, and maintaining a presence in important systems, and the first two duties are assigned to the escort ships. That said, they're only escorting some larger convoys of big freighters with a pair of Nebulon-Bs, and not doing regular system-to-system patrol, which is in the hands of the same mix of Imperial agencies and local militias found on the Outer Rim. These might, of course, impact negatively on the actual Imperial fleet strength in these sectors, with their ships being attached to the Navy squadrons in the guise of skirmish, pursuit and reconnaissance lines.

Last but not least, we're told that a "high percentage" of the ships in both Darpa and Bormea have inexperienced crews with "a small ratio of experienced officers", working up for more demanding postings on the Rim - a point which might suggest that the number of ISDs deployed would actually reduce over time...

And now to finally move from the Ringali Shell, but not by too much distance...

* Fakir Sector is located just outside the Core, and although later material places it on the Namadii Corridor, the only significant Core-to-Rim hyperlane trailward of the Hydian Way, the 1988 Star Wars Campaign Pack described the sector as an "unimportant", and lacking a significant Navy presence. Shortly after Yavin, when the Moff "requested immediate reinforcements" to try and deal with the local Alliance presence, we're told he "ordered an entire battle-fleet", suggesting that he didn't have anything resembling a full superiority fleet, or probably an assault fleet either. The text then adds a sly implication that he didn't get one - instead, the main narrative involves a new governor arriving to take charge of Fakir sector, on a shuttle with no more protection than a few TIE Fighters to see it into hyperspace... and promptly getting shot down and captured.



That said, there are some Imperial ships in Fakir in Campaign Pack - there's a reference to an ineffective "attempt to maintain a blockade" of the Sarnikken asteroid mines, for which they don't have enough hulls, and some capital ship described as "battleships" and/or "cruisers" circling in orbit around the planet Iyuta to guard the government offices and communications centre there (but the "battleships" are downgraded in the Classic Campaigns reprint to "large cruisers" and then both versions reduce the group to "the Imperial cruiser", singular); there's also a comm-chatter reference to "the addition of two new Thran-class vessels to the Fakir sector fleet", whatever those are, and an "Imperial scout ship" gets into a dogfight with an Alliance X-wing - this is of a type unspecified in the text, but represented in its game counter as a Firespray (ah, 1988, when you could casually have the Imperial Navy using some sister-ships of Slave One for deep patrol), while the new repair and refuelling outpost on the planet Mycroft is guarded by a squadron of TIE Fighters, apparently a hyperspace-capable variant like the TIE Advanced, and provdies surface-landing, servicing and basic shore-leave facilities for "six one-man scout ships or two corvette-class patrol boats".

Although all this is placed in the context of a general redeployment of Imperial forces from the Core towards the Rim after Yavin, the sense is that there was never a particularly heavy Imperial presence in Fakir, and the reprint edits out the clear geographical and chronological aspects of the original passage, and simply remarks that the Imperial presence is slighter in some areas of the Galaxy than others.

* In Roche sector in the Mid Rim, we find "District Commander Bane Nothos" who, we're told in Strike Force: Shantipole, "pulled escort craft out of his district's convoys to form a strike fleet"; the only capital ship depicted up-close is the Nebulon-B serving as his command ship, with a background mention of a second frigate that's presumably of the same class, and the punchy mix of forward-deployed TIE Fighters, shuttles and stormtroopers isn't quite too large for them - but a look back at the incident in Otherspace clarifies that he attacked impatiently, without waiting for "the rest of his blockade fleet"...

I'm not sure what a "District Commander" is, but the title's always capitalised, and Otherspace adds that he was then "demoted to commander of an Outer Rim Territories patrol fleet", where again he attacked too aggressively with his ship "without adequate support", and was captured (though according to Wookieepedia, Rebellion and the associated strategy guide upscale this to "the Imperial Outer Rim Territories Patrol Fleet" - anyone got anything on that?)....

And now to turn this around, and look at some more Alliance sector force bases.

* Continuing in Roche sector on the Mid Rim, the Alliance outpost in Strike Force: Shantipole consists of two asteroids, one a small command post, the other a larger base working on the design of the B-wing - the larger one has a deflector, but neither appears to be armed, nor do there seem to be any fighters beyond the B-wing prototypes, the other vessels present being a few stealthy Verpine asteroid-hoppers for local travel and a single Mon Cal freighter (reprsented on the base plan as a pickle-curved variant of a YV-1300!). What's not clear is what relationship, if any, this specialised outpost has to a conventional local Sector Force...

* The Alliance group causing all that trouble for successive governors of Fakir sector - known as "Reekeene's Roughnecks", which is a subtextual swipe at both Starship Troopers and Echo Base - consists of just six "outdated X-wings", plus a single light freighter, two ore haulers (one of them perhaps a Corellian HT-2200 provided by Alliance high command), and a yacht-like Lantillian Short-Hauler (which they acquired themselves), each of which is used as a clandestine insertion vehicle for a squad or two of commandos. Their headquarters is Home Base, or as it's styled in the original text, "Home base", a big old cargo hauler with its main hold converted into a hangar for the ships, hyperspace-mobile to evade detection but otherwise so lacking in capability that it doesn't merit a statblock; there are only about sixty Alliance personnel in total in the sector, avoiding serious contact with Imperial combat forces, though their X-wings have the important role of escorting convoys of Alliance transports carrying shipbuilding ore from the Sarnikken asteroid mines, reflecting the fact that are generally deployed where the high command wants them. Ironically, a major underlying aim of all this is to get the Empire to deploy more ships in Fakir, and thus keep them away from areas which the Alliance regards as more significant.

There's also the Martinette, a classic YT-1300 which says it's an Alliance privateer, but is just a pirate ship doing its own thing, with a crew of eight to allow a decent boarding-party and prize-crew. And there may be others, too. Imitation is the sincerest form of force-multiplier, as they say.

* Demophon sector is within the Core itself, on the stretch of the Hydian Way that thrusts south from Brentaal. The Alliance started out here with a single squad of commandos, who hired a local pilot to fly them around in his YT-1300; success gained support from the high command - in practice, all this really gave them was a choice of freighters, but the Alliance did build them the unimagniatively named Asteroid Base, on an uncharted deep-space planetoid just off the hyperlane - and apparently "just outside" the sector, covering a multi-sector region in this part of the Core. The hidden base was assigned a small snubfighter unit of two X-wings and two two-seater Y-wings, and a big Galofree transport, which is good STAR WARS tonality... but the ships were primarily to act as a little escape convoy if the base was discovered by the Empire, which is also good STAR WARS tonality. There were also three mining lasers and two mole-miners - at which point I have to tag @ColeFardreamer - though these were apparently for base construction, not for base defence.

All this is a nice reminder that one thing beyond X-wings that the Alliance can do without significant retaliation is orbit-drop or covert-insert commando raids, either using YT-series freighters or captured Imperial shuttles - though in a departure from movie tonality, WEG introduced the Telgorn series, a standard Imperial dropship line that's a cross between a Lambda, a real-world landing-craft and a large brick, an excellent example of the sort of "just-off-screen" design that was very much a concept back in the day.

The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook builds a running narrative around an attack on an Imperial orbital base at Mantooine, using a captured Imperial supply ship to seize control of a hangar bay, so an assault shuttle carrying three platoons of Marines can blaze in and storm the base, while the early Gamesmaster Kit similarly has a raid on an Imperial supply base in Trax Sector as its climax, featuring a hot-drop by three stolen Telgorns full of Alliance commandos, to clear the way for the transport group of seven Galofrees and six escorting X-wings (though the reprint in Classic Campaigns reprint changes the climax from the arrival of the first Telgorn to the arrival of the first Galofree, for added movie tonality).

This doesn't always work perfectly, though. The raid at Mantooine, though it achieves its objectives, takes punishing casualties; Gamesmaster Kit leaves the outcome of the raid in Trax ambiguous, and while the Classic Campaigns reprint makes it an explicit success, the Telgorns then decide to get involved in a space-battle on the way out; the Roughnecks apparently leave Fakir sector - in the Rookies web-comic, still within 1 ABY, they're "carrying out missions across the Empire" (in a pleasing cross-continuity paradox, one of their new recruits at this point was later retconned by Pablo into an alias for Jyn Erso), and in Otherspace we find their Short Hauler performing a mission directly for Alliance high command, but Stock Ships implies that they downsize to a single HT-2200, and relocate to Thuris sector on the Outer Rim, where the ship is refitted as a punchy assault lander, but is last heard of being boarded by stormtroopers during the retreat from a raid...

Nonetheless, to quote one of the cosplaying Affytechans in Children of the Jedi, "I've always liked the Beta-class Telgorn transport. Two or three of those, plus an escort of Blastboats, should take care of any minor trouble no matter what--"...

(... at which point, you need to imagine the dialogue being interrupted by the noises of a sudden Tusken Raider attack and Luke Skywalker's lightsaber igniting to block a gaffi stick...)

- The Imperial Ewok

 

That is one of the things that annoyed be about the early WEG days. Vague mentions or generic stats. Get some concept art!!! Create some original stats!!! Do something to show what it is and what it can do and what sets it apart from other things!!!!

They were right there at the start of the world building...at times literally creating worlds. Put in the effort to flesh it out a little more.

I would think that the Rebels would at least put in more than 6 starfighters to do something in the Sector. You want to draw forces away from other, more 'important' areas then you need to be able to show that there is a threat worth transferring ships.

Anyone playing the game...did they have their PCs capture the Martinette and use it as their own ship??