Lit Super Star Destroyer Loose Ends (Legends)

"I care." - Luke Skywalker.

In my mind, they can be both. The term "Star Destroyer" indicates a general design trend (in this case a triangular hull). Whereas a particular class of Star Destroyer will belong to a certain category of traditional ship descriptions based on its size, power, speed, and armament.

To relate it back to earth. A double-ended warship describes a type of design (in this case near identical weapons fore and aft of the superstructure); but it may be a frigate, destroyer, or cruiser (or other) depending on the size of the warship.

And not that anyone cares, but my descriptions for capital warships in the GFFA have always gone patrol ship, gunship, frigate, destroyer, cruiser, battlecruiser, battleship, dreadnought. Okay, maybe not always, but certainly recently!

 

I'm inclined to think the Star Destroyers were Dreadnoughts before they created the Super Star Destroyers because they were the largest ships of their type before Lira Wessex went nuts in her designs.

 

Could we minimize the number if some are the same by a different name after a refit and owner/command change?

PS: I wish we would see more types like the Arc Hammer, superlarge vessels that serve as construction, mobile factory or else instead of just supersized warship. Or the mission specific DE modular cruisers for science etc.

 

The Megador’s was never specified in canon and I’ve seen it classified as so many different types of SSD’s across various fan works.

HandofThrawn44’s excellent fanfiction had it as a Vengeance-class minus the jet-black hull paint. That certainly justifed the terror factor at Shedu Maad.

Thrawn’s Revenge initially had both it and Dominion as Bellators, though this was later changed to have Megador as a Mandator-III.

I’ve also seen it classified as a more mainstream Executor-class in other works, though I think that’s unlikely. For it to have survived that long and be abandoned by Harrsk at Deep Three, both Megador and Dominion had to be less impressive and more obscure dreadnoughts.

Surprisingly enough, the class of Dominion is consistent as a Bellator in the two fan works I consider pseudo-canon-HandofThrawn45 and Thrawn’s Revenge. This makes a lot of sense to me, as Bellators are around 8 km in length and Dominion was likely the SSD sighted at Bastion during the Yuuzhan Vong War.​

 

Perhaps another SSD related loose end is what exactly were the ships Palpatine used as his flagship in the decades before the Eclipse class came into service. There's a very old and often overlooked bit from WEG where then-Governor Tarkin specifically mentions "His Majesty's command ship":


...and that in turn also made me think what vessel, if any, was the flagship not just of the Navy prior to the Executor (which did become the flagship of the Imperial Navy), but also what was the flagship of the Republic Navy during the Clone Wars, if any? We know that the late Republic had several Mandators and we never got any close look at how they were organized as part of the Naval structure.

 

I'd totally forgotten about that hidden Coruscant fleet from Order 66 as well as all the actual official Republic fleets, but yeah, those have to be accounted for, too. The Empire does seem to have eventually broken up the huge Republic era fleets into more manageable (and in the event of treason less threatening) Oversector and more local Sector Groups. Besides the ones above that you mention there are also the secret fleets like the Byss Fleet and temporary formations like Admiral Giel's armada.

Around the time of Yavin there were additional Oversectors being created, along with more Grand Moffs, per the Imperial Sourcebook:


...I'd like to assume that a lot of the new SSDs and other larger ships that came into service post-Yavin were assigned to and organized as part of these newer commands, as they certainly qualify as being the "equivalent in other military resources" that were never specified by WEG.

 

All evidence suggests that the number of Sector Groups within an Oversector Group were variable, and/or had per the Imperial Sourcebook "the equivalent in other military resources", which is a very useful quote that allows for a lot of flexibility and leeway for those of us that like analyzing such things.

Per the Death Star Technical Companion, the Tarkin Doctrine proposal originally called for 3 Sector Groups per Oversector, 4 Sector Groups were assigned to the Death Star Project, which was itself a Priority Sector not affixed to any astrographical boundaries (a Priority Sector that was might be the Deep Core Security Zone), and in practice the known Oversectors received a wide range of forces. Presumably, the command hierarchy of every Sector Group in an Oversector Group would have a High Admiral and each Sector Army in an Oversector Group (if any) would have a Surface Marshal.

The example of Scourge Squadron of Oversector Outer comes to mind: it has (and it can't be a coincidence) 24 Star Destroyers AND the SSD Reaper. So, the 24 ISDs are the one Sector Group, and Reaper is indeed "the equivalent in other military resources" assigned to that Oversector.

Black Sword received 3 SSDs and 40-some Star Destroyers; Azure Hammer got Whelm and around 57 ISDs; the Imperial Center Oversector got Guardian and multiple Grand Moffs (seriously- Kadir, in charge of planetary security, is specifically not just a mere Moff but is called a Grand Moff in the story notes in the Empire TPB!), etc.

All of this in turn is before the Imperial practice of "augmentation" of Sector Groups is taken into consideration...

Publius' classic overview of the subject might be worth a look:

https://web.archive.org/web/20080908102418/http://www.domuspublica.net/rattling_the_saber.html