NEW Starships Of The Galaxy ?

Sorry, I missed this one.

We won't be doing the full-page entries for starships, just because they take up so much space (and in a book like KOTOR where you have dozens of ships we can't devote that much space to one topic). However, as I mentioned before, I'm trying to get about the same amount of information and an illustration for each ship.

 

Thanks for clearing that up - that the NSotG is to be used for a game and not as a resource for tachnical facts. While that little fact should be obvious (and I also don't doubt, that it is pointed out on the introduction-page), too many participants of the discussion don't (want to) know this.

However as one of the "who writes this dreck"-crowd I have to admit, that I find quotes like

"A Star Destroyer is named after the idea of a ship that has the power needed to destroy entire star systems" (not even in the good old, bad old days of WEG was an ISD capable of that)

or that

Jerec's needle of doom should be capable of the same performance as a much larger vessel of the Executor-Class (the obvioius differences between the two kinds of vessels are simply to large, even if it is "just a game"),

are very irritating to say the last. It is not about missing lenghts or different stats for numbers of weapons or damage-points, but background-information, that contradicts earlier works - and this is especially annoying if it is in regards to publications by the same company.

 

They should have said "devastate". Oh, and thanks for the info Moridin!

 

I have no idea where that first quote is coming from; I suspect it might be either a mis-quote or a misinterpretation of a Star Destroyer's ability to use Base Delta Zero on a planet. As for the Vengeance, the various cinematics from Jedi Knight seem to give no clear angle for comparison. In some shots, the surrounding Star Destroyers look much bigger than in others. It's clearly intended to be comparable to the Super Star Destroyer, and I don't think it's that much of a stretch to consider it a reconfiguration of the standard SSD, especially given that the resources would likely be more readily available to build a modified SSD than a whole new starship design.

 

Found the relevant quote. Yes, it's clearly referring to devastating entire star systems, and destroying their population centers. It says so just a few lines before.

 

One, whose name shall not be spoken calculated its length at around 10 kilometers.

Concerning the resources, why waste money on designing a modified version, if there exists an already working design, that can do the same job?
Something I find highly unlikely, cosidering that Executor would be an " A " and the Vengenace of Jerec an " I " with wings at the bottom. Even with the same lenght as an Executor Jerec's NoD would be to Executor, what Executor is to the Eclipse.

 

Saxton, Brown, etc., are not canon, so SOTG contradicting their calculations is not contradicting est. canon.

 

Perhaps the Vengeance was constructed from the salvageable remains of one SSDs that was destroyed or critically damaged during the Galactic Civil War. Like, say, the SSD Vengeance. Though messy, it could explain the differences in superstructure: the Vengeance is just the stripped-down "backbone" of an Executor-class.

Plus, it would certainly suit the name...

 

As an avid role player using the saga system (for a KOTOR campaign in this case, but have played from D6 through saga) the lack of dimensions is a problem. (this little puppy will be causing some havoc shortly http://warlords.swrebellion.com/g2/main.php/v/Development/mandnew2.jpg.html
(for anyone that doesn't know that is the Mandalorian dreadnaught from kotor and based off some very good ref material)


For GM's having a vague scale is fine until you actually want to have a meta scale map, I want to set up a hanger bay, how big are the ships, the freighters, we play on a on a large table (8x4) and sometimes use the same thing for miniatures battles at 1/5th scale with vehicles. How long does it take to walk to the other end of the ship? I need to know how many encounters to throw in to make it seem like a short or long journey on a derilect ship. Dimensioning also helps with simple things like how tight the maintenance passageways are etc.

In space combat it is fine to tie it to the starship miniatures scales, but when you add RP to the mix it is useful to know that a large ship can simply ram a smaller ship (both colossal argh I hate that there isn't more granularity)

what happens if my gaming party wants to take control of a field secured container ship and ram it into a star destroyer, it is useful to tell them that the container ship is a 2km long tug with 1 km shielded spheres trailing behind it, it is really f;n huge and will have lots of momentum, just saying colossal is not going to help them, they ask questions.

Another example would be a campaign where I had the party on a cruise liner (a retired MC80) the The dark jedi had a ship similar to the Allegiance seen in Dark Empire that showed up. The mon cal still had its shields. But I pointed out that the Star destroyer was definitely bigger than a standard destroyer, but no where near the size of a super star destroyer, so I said 2.2 Km because that was the estimate I had made, everyone at the table knows that an ISD is 1600m because we've been playing that long, but some hadn't read Dark Empire, and the players weren't supposed to recognize the vessel, but they were definatly supposed to realize that it was bigger and badder.

for the most part a knowledgeable GM can cheat, but it requires other research outside of the book or simply making things up on the fly which means then it is on the GM to be consistent and have good notes, rather than having a solid reference.

for players its important to say things like ' A half mile long ship comes out of hyperspace, what do you do?' or the platform is about 1 km in diameter' some of our campaigns use this information for descriptive purposes and others for more practical gameplay purposes (can my carg0 ship fit in that docking bay? I don't know? it's colossal? and the station is colossal? OMG) Some of the players are pretty knowledgeable about the universe and vehicles and ships in particular and it would cause arguments on the table if the GM planned something that "wouldn't work" with a particular ship because of its size (flying a gap, docking etc) I'd expect the convention environment will cause issues as well

If nothing else, the WEG RPG introduced tons of new ships, the only representations of those vessels in many cases. I can't expect there to be a large technical manual that would detail the 500 odd ships that have shown up in the past to an acceptable level of detail, I doubt it would be even considered for publishing. So reprinting old ships with new less defined stats is a big problem for anyone with a technical interest.


I say it's worth having a quick web supplement to get some dimensions

EDIT: another example, I want a lightsaber fight on the bridge of a strike cruiser, how many decks is it? I can take the length and a picture and make a guess that it is one deck and pretty narrow. If I just have (colossal) I have no information, no scale touchstone. Some may say

 

Considering that the Leviathan reduced the Taris to rubble almost 4000 years before the Clone Wars, I don't think the roots of "Star Destroyer" were off-base.
I had long pushed for the Vengeance to simply be a variant of the Executor-class... and also for the Eclipse to be restatted to be longer than the Executor. You win some, you lose some...

 

The Vengeance being an Exy variant is the thing here that makes the least sense to me. Though I like this:

 

Because an egomaniacal darksider used his ridiculous personal funds, wheedled out of numerous corporate investors, to give his egomania physical form by ensuring his flagship looked like nothing else in the skies?

 

I am pretty sure Abel already established Vengeance was one-of-a-kind and was made to Jerec's exact request as an "ego-trip." The dude was that rich.

 

Moridin posted

"So, for most capital ships, you can reverse engineer the number of weapons by the following process. Figure out the ship's INT bonus (Int score - 10 divided by 2), add that to its base attack bonus. Subtract that from a battery's attack bonus. You will always get an even number here if we've not made a mistake. Divide that number by 2 to get the number of additional gunners. Add one to that number. That tells you how many individual weapons are in a given battery, so you can multiply that by the number of batteries. Multiply that by 2 and you should get around the right number of weapons on the ship, though of course this is not going to be a perfect process as these stats are designed to facilitate gameplay.

As for starfighters, there is not a way to reverse engineer the exact number of weapons. However, you can always tell if there are fire-linked weapons on starfighters when the weapons are not double/triple/quad and still DO have an autofire attack roll listed.

Like I say, though we always start with the official number of weapons, they get whittled down to a manageable number of attacks for gameplay purposes"

Okay, so, um, could someone be so kind as to take the new ships not covered in other sources (primarily the KOTOR and Legacy ones and what have you) and do this reverse engineer process and come up with the tech readouts on these things? I'd like to see an example of this. You know it took me a while to figure out "INT" in this case meant Initiative. I honestly thought Moridin was trying to say ships had an Intelligence bonus. Alas, my weak little mind!

 

No, canon only gives them the details on which they base their calculations on. If anything the SOTG contradicts older canon.

 

Scaling by fans does not, however much fans may want it to, determine canon lengths.

Besides, note what Saxton actually says:

"Some newer images permit indirect scaling based on approximate size relative to Imperator-class star destroyers: current rough estimates are for a length of over ten kilometres."

Notice all those words like "indirect", "approximate", and "rought"--Saxton's calculation is just a plausibility, not a fact.

 

*Executor taps on your shoulder. Coughs loudly.*

 

Thank you for the feedback, Moridin.

 

Hello!;

First post, didn't know there were fellow Star Wars ship fanatics out there like me.

I just ran into your forum trying to do some research on the new book, and saw that someone requested a pic of the new Nebula. I'm not sure if this is against the terms of service, but there is a link to one here.

Thanks, have a great day! Loving the book so far!

 

Actually, no, he DID mean Intelligence, a score which ships do have in the new system, representing the quality of their computer systems. I can't find the relevant passage in the rulebook right now, but pg. 14 of the conversion guide has this to say:

 

Senator_Cilghal: Ships do have an intelligence bonus, it represents their targeting computers and fire control. Initiative is skill now I believe, not an attribute.

 

For anyone who's interested, having used the reverse engineering of the weapon batteries on the Pellaeon class, I can up with the following stats:

100 Heavy Turbolaser Batteries (of comparable size to ISD II)
50 Turbolaser Batteries (of comparable size to ISD II)
80 Ion Cannons
50 Proton Torpedo Launchers
15 Tractor Beam Projectors

Note that using these new rules, you can further break down the armament of an ISD-II into 400 individual Heavy Turbolasers & 200 regular Turbolasers. In terms of actual weapons, the Pellaeon class would have 800 Heavy Turbolasers & 200 regular Turbolasers.

I'm going to be doing quite a few more of these as time goes on, since I still play D6.

 

WHY did I ever wrap this thing.

Could we see how the calculations produce weapon stats for the Liberty and Home One, compared and contrasted with each other and with previous info.



*shrugs off Executor*

The 5,000 length was canon when it was published; Saxton's calculations as "published" on his site did NOT make the present dimension the canonical length; Leland's comments made it clear the previous length had been "overruled." Saxton's length is only canonical because he got it published in a licensed source. Canon is based on licensing, not fan calculations. Only the publication of the his length in LICENSED sources made that canonical. Saxton's calculations of Vengeance's length have not been published in a licensed work, so they have no more bearing on canon than anyone else's guess. Furthermore, IF SOTG SE actually states Vengeance is the same length as Executor (I have yet to confirm), that will be its canon length, and Saxton's estimate, no matter how careful and mathematically flawless his scaling comparisons, will be fanon and wrong unless he can once again prevail upon Leland (or whoever) to pull another "override." The Vengeance is no more canonically 10.1 km long than Yoda is canonically a Whill.

Perhaps the clearest way to put it: fan calculations do not DIRECTLY (nor INDEPENDENTLY) determine canon length, no matter how much canonical "evidence" is put into the investigation arriving at them. This is not the official canon policy, however much fans may wish it to be. The official policy is that CANONICITY is determined by PUBLISHED information in a LICENSED source; canon is no determined by laws of science, Earth dictionaries, fan calculations, Earth military tradition, etc., no matter how much fans may want it to be. Such an assumption is based on the reasoning that the creators of Star Wars have as firm a grasp of said rules, traditions, and definitions as do the fans making these extrapolations, an assumption very difficult to prove.