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

canon for Legends you mean?

I think that fan made version is nice but I prefer the original. It is too blocky and the wings too horizontal and don't have the obtuse triangle shape of the original. I also think that the vertical fronted box cockpit canopy gives the ship a bit of character, and the fan made version loses that.

 

The Incom Howlrunner has never been the most consistent of fighters - as originally depicted in Dark Empire, the cockpit is clearly raised above the fuselage, rising to a peak of sorts, though we don't see the front clearly, and I'm not sure whether the overall shape is meant to be more like the X-wing or the A-9 (interestingly, though, the rear view reveals a second set of downward-pointed "tailfins" concealed beneath the wing).

The ship got more page-time as the "hero ship", if that's the right word, for the Dark Side Elite in Dark Empire II, but my copy of that's a set of comic-books from '94-'95, and I'm not quite sure where they are, and the only pic I can find online from there or Empire's End is a thumbnail on this webpage, which confirms the "peaked" cockpit design.

A version much more like the fan-made CGI, in contrast, shows up on a trading-card pic which you can see here. The pic of the prototype in Coruscant and the Core Worlds is similarly curvy, but has a gap above the cockpit which looks designed to accommodate a very different canopy with a single wide, flat, streamlined panel.

Rereading Dark Empire quickly - starting from the back and flicking forward until I found the Howlrunner in the opening sequence, which meant I went through the whole thing in reverse... I really enjoyed that; the whole thing felt even more STAR WARS now than ever.

Also, Salla - Han's ex-girlfriend who was in Lando's crew when the Falcon did the Kessel Run? I love how STAR WARS fits together sometimes.

And while that's wildly off-topic for the page, this is less so - the wook claims that Slave II was actually supposed to be an INT-4 mini-rig. I can see the resemblance, but the only way I can make sense of the assertion is that Tom Veitch asked for an INT-4 in the script in some way, and Cam Kennedy drew something else. Thoughts, opinions, insider knowledge?

And on a completely different topic that has nothing directly to do with the Howlrunner...

The "thirty Rebel ships" at Yavin is something Jason and I did a lot of thinking about for WARFARE - I can't remember immediately what we decided, but we tried to cover absolutely everything, and I can look my notes up if anyone's really interested. They're, if nothing else, slightly easier to find than Dark Empire II.

The shift from Green and Blue in the script to Red and Yellow in the movie was, I think, because the original colours didn't bluescreen well (Artoo's dome is black in some space shots).

I've always liked, personally, the narrative in the X-wing computer game and the Farlander Papers tie-in story, where there were several waves of snubfighters which seemed to be just nuisance-raiding that embarrassed the TIEs, and discouraged Tarkin from using the TIEs against the actual trench run. Omitted in WARFARE for reasons of clarity, though, as such a revisionist take on Yavin would be more likely to confuse people than anything else...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

How about the Battle of Endor? How far did you get with the Red Squadron roster? Would've been nice if it had been included and a possible explanation why there was a Y-wing pilot (Red Two) and an A-wing pilot (Sila Kott, Red Three) present in a unit of X-wings. And you guys had plenty of pilots to fill in the cracks: Kin Kian, Karie Neth, Dorovio Bold, Randi, Wes Janson, Lak Sivrak, Will Scotian, Gayla Riemann, Olin Garn, Snoke Loroan...

 

I still have trouble with this kind of squad definition. Xwing books did it right in my opinion. Tycho zipping around in an Awing whenever possible.

I never visualised the Endor squads by types. For an organisation such as the Rebellion to be that rigid never made much sense. Versatility and guerilla attacks should be key. Using the Xwing for that did make sense however, since it was a veratile multipurpose craft.

Explaining that there were multiple craft types in the squads...useless.
Ask about the squad purposes instead. Were Gold and Red meant to be the main assault and Blue and Green defense? Or were there other designated purposes?

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Actually I now realise from looking at other angles of this fan-cg model, that the wings are angled down and obtuse in shape, only the model has incorrect angled panel lines along the leading edge of the wing that make the wing look horizontal from that angle.

 

You know, I had forgot for a second that you co-wrote that!

Personally, my take on it, in light of everything we now know, is that Red and Gold were standard 12-ship formations, and Green/Blue/whatever were the survivors of Blue Squadron and Hera's Green/Phoenix Squadron, plus whatever other warm bodies they could scrounge up at short notice. It doesn't hold up to really rigorous scrutiny, but it helps my "main character from my current X-Wing playthrough got called in to reinforce the Yavin cell" interpretation of those missions.

This is another place where I think that, if the original films were held to the same level of scrutiny as the prequels and sequels, people would spend a lot more time complaining about the OT.

 

Quick question: I noticed the ship that carries Vader's forces to the Profundity in Rogue One doesn't have a Wookieepedia entry (or not one I can find), though Pablo confirmed it as the good old TIE boarding shuttle a while back. Obviously there's some debate over how much Tweets count towards confirming this stuff, but has there been any other source to confirm it? The TIE Reaper got named pretty quickly, but the poor boarding shuttle seems to have been overlooked.

 

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/TIE/br_boarding_shuttle

Or are you talking canon page???

 

Yes, canon, sorry.

 

Wookieepedia is still behind on things.

 

It used to have a canon page, one I made. However, WP repelled the use of tweets as a source for canon names, and anyway all of Pablo's tweets have disappeared. Until the name appears in some official source (like a book, comic or an official website), this article won't be remade. Yes, it's frustrating.

 

True. I mean its clear from Star Wars 49 that Ackbar's ship was an MC30c frigate though since its not been confirmed as such by anything official (yet!), its not being linked.

 

Not very, if memory serves, for the simple reason that I think we decided pretty quickly that the risk of getting something wrong far outweighed the interest in producing coherent rosters, especially as there were a lot of basic uncertainties (what does a "group" or a "wing" mean here?).

Note - the rest of what follows is just me thinking out loud, fannishly.

Looking into this in more depth in hindsight has only made me more hesitant (the cockpit shots do not always match the fighters we expect, one pilot seems to swap helmets, and a mix of pre-planned flexibility and complicated VFX issues meant that the sequence was very much cut together improvisationally in the editing suite)...

One thing I will say - and here I need to nod to @Greybook as well - is that pairing up mismatched groups of fighters is quite unusual; close formations are normally made up of planes of the same type as their comparable performance allows them to manoeuvre together more easily - so either this means that the formation was thrown into chaos during the pull away from the shield and perhaps during the subsequent TIE attack, or else there was a deliberate plan to confuse the TIEs by having small formations of Rebel fighters with different performance qualities manoeuvring around each other.

Another thought that occurred to me recently, that seems appropriate to this thread - is a major blow dealt to the Empire at Endor the attrition of their fleet's TIE Fighters? Losing the DS2 doesn't actually reduce their effective numbers, and the Ex could have been a resource hog; six or ten ISDs out of forty or so isn't a catastrophic dent... but if their remaining thirty-or-so ISDs lack the TIE force needed to put up a picket screen against X-wings, provide torpedo punch beyond turbolaser range, or even do basic stuff like chasing down smugglers and pirates, inspecting outposts and escorting shuttles, they're basically useless as anything except the fleet-in-being that they act as until Thrawn shows up.

Ironically, this would mean that Palpatine, Vader and Piett destroyed the Empire with their smug "stand back at long range" attitude, because they literally threw away their TIE Fighter force as a gambit.... Even if they'd won the battle, they'd have broken their own power. Obviously, they'd have had more opportunity and logistical capacity to rebuild their fighter force if they'd come out of Endor intact, with a battlemoon, an SSD and the resources and recruitment base of a unified Galactic government, but the actual crippling short-term TIE losses would still be right there, and pirates and remaining Rebels would have open season on those same Imperial logistics... and no amount of technological terror can solve that problem.

I was mostly mentioning this because of all the work Jason did to get stuff right on this one, actually...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Thanks for the nod, managing to completely ruin my headcanon with a single paragraph is always appreciated xD

Did some head scratching to figure out why I always assumed rebel squads were made up of multiple types. Came up with an answer: Cheat codes in the Rogue Squadron game.

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On the Howlrunner, I actually think the Buck Rogers starfighter fits as a successor. And speaking of the TIE Shortage, I think its mentioned the Remnant for awhile had to rely on non-Sienar type designs. It actually would've been interesting to see a full visage of the Remnant Fleet, showing Star Destroyers but with fighters different from TIEs.

 

This reminds me of what happened to the Imperial Japanese Navy in WWII; in several engagements the IJN's carrier force either escaped major damage or managed to hit the US Navy's carriers harder, but at the cost of grievous losses in aircraft and more importantly, trained aircrews. The most relevant example is the Battle of the Philippine Sea, where the IJN's carrier fleet got off relatively lightly (two carriers sunk by submarines and only one by air attack, out of a total of nine fielded), but the aircraft and aircrew losses in the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot" were so lopsided (433 carrier aircraft out of a total of approximately 450, in addition to around 200 land-based aircraft) that the surviving carriers were rendered nearly useless for the remainder of the war. Most would be sacrificed as decoys four months later off the Philippines.

More important than the loss of the TIEs themselves, as in the above example, would have been the loss of trained pilots. One of the factors behind the ruinous Japanese losses in the Battle of the Philippine Sea was that the IJN's corps of naval aviators was badly mauled in 1942 and early 1943, taking serious losses at Coral Sea and Midway before being ground to a pulp during the Solomons Campaign. It took the IJN 18 months to rebuild their forces and training was rushed; by 1944 IJN squadrons were being led by pilots who had half the flying time of newly-minted USN ensigns. Given the rather unforgiving fragility of most TIE models, inadequately-trained Imperial replacement pilots would have taken heavy losses against Rebel/New Republic X-wings and A-wings.

 

so this is from the Rise of the Resistance preview they released for galaxy's edge but we may be looking at what the resistance fleet will look like in Episode IX.

 

Ha! I just posted this in the From Endor to Jakku thread. I didn't see that you posted it here.

 

OMG! That new fleet is amazing, I think I see 2 Mon Cala Ships, 2 Nebulon Cs, and 1 Free Virgillia in the upper right corner.

 

Something that the Heir to the empire and the Lost Stars (manga) novels illustrate quite effectively. Cadets straight from the academy, rushed through their training.

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The Nebulon-Cs appear to be flipped. Look at what side the horizontal fins are on.

 

The Neb-C isn’t mirrored though, the rear pylon/tail thing is still the same as it is on the Anodyne. The docking booms are just on the port side.


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I'm pretty sure @Tuskin38 is right, it is the Anodyne model mirrored. It was my understanding though that the Anodyne was a stripped wreck of a Neb-C and it's unlikely that the resistance would have more Neb-C with the exact same missing parts (or mirrored missing parts). That is why I would say this is just a placeholder.

 

Not exactly. It's just a decommissioned New Republic ship that the Resistance modified into a medical transport. It's not missing any parts at all, just didn't have any extra modules added onto it. They likely just made the same modifications to these ships, except these ones just have the modules on the other side.

 

Oh, I'm not saying your headcanon's wrong. The Rebels will have to work with what they have, and while I'd expect their mixed-design units to split into smaller manoeuvre formations according to type, I offered a rationale for the mixed flights at Endor as a deliberate tactic, designed to combine the advantages of different types and confuse the TIEs...

The type (engine/weapon prongs, hunched cockpit, stub wings, two engines aft) was one that McQuarrie had been trying to get into a movie from STAR WARS onwards - you can see in the production sketches how the design evolved successively into the Snowspeeder, the A-wing, the Viper from BSG, and the Thunder Fighter from Buck Rogers.

I'm sure I remember an early concept drawing from ANH, a precursor to both the Y-wing and X-wing, which was recognizably the original starting point for all of the above - I thought this was on kitbashed.com but I can't find the pic there now, which is why I didn't bring this up earlier - but if the Howlrunner was derived from this line of McQuarrie designs, that (or another SW sketch such as the early snowspeeder concepts) was presumably Cam Kennedy's reference-point...

Oh, that's freaking brilliant. That's absolutely what we see. And not like anyone planned that on any conscious level - the resonance is just there.

I could go off-topic in all kinds of ways here, but I don't really want to quibble when the basic STAR WARS point seems so well-made.

@mattman8907 and @TheAvengerButton - thanks for that link. Nice OT vibe to the FO in those cutscenes.

(... and I don't want @Blackhole E Snoke and @TheNerdyOne_ to feel left out, so I'll add that I have no opinion on NR frigate designs at all, except where Cracken's Threat Dossier is concerned)...

- The Imperial Ewok