Rogue One Vehicles/Tech in Rogue One

Talk about nerding out, I've read most of that website already. LOL
The sensor globe is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine.

 

It was some time after creating that site, that Curtis Saxton collaborated with James Luceno in writing Complete Locations's immediate predecessor - Inside The Worlds of the Star Wars Trilogy. Presumably Luceno said something along the lines of:


"we can't take out the shield generator function entirely - too many works rely on it being the case - but we can downplay it, and emphasise the sensor function as primary and the shield function secondary"


and Saxton very reluctantly agreed.

 

Cinefex # 151, apparently reflecting the designations provided by John Knoll and/or ILM refers to the domes as "deflector-shield generators".

IMHO there is just [power] missing in the description as the original screenplay additions for Admiral Ackbar in ROJ (but ultimately deleted from the film) had him say:

Ackbar looks around then makes a decision
ACKBAR Move the fleet forward.
AIDE Yes sir.
Ackbar turns to a Star Captain. Stands next to him.
CAPTAIN Sir, we don’t stand much of a chance against those Star Destroyers. They out-gun us, and they’re more heavily armored.
ACKBAR I know.
An Aide approaches.
AIDE Forward ships have made contact with the Imperial fleet.
Ackbar points to a Star Destroyer in front of them.
ACKBAR Concentrate on their power generators. If we can knock out their shield our fighters might stand a chance against them.
The ship is rocked by an explosion.
CAPTAIN (yelling) Intensify forward shield! (Intensify auxiliary shields!)
(information from additional scene 113 A from February 15, 1982 in italic)

 

Domes = Deflector-shield generators.

 

Why?

 

Why not? One of the domes get destroyed & the ISD's have shield problems.

 

I believe the domes are only bridge and command tower deflector shields but I could be wrong

 

I liked the part towards the end when the small ship crashed into the big ship, causing the big ship to **** its pants and run away. Very metaphorical.

 

(SSD command bridge does NOT reflect correct size!!!)

Did the Star Destroyer in ANH originally feature radar domes. I'd say yes, the allusion is all too obvious.

Was there a premise change in ROJ: I'd say yes, the A-Wings (IMHO "ion") shots were absorbed by the dome (made the magnetic Containment field of the fusion reactor powering the deflector shields collapse) and resulted in a large explosion as if they had hit some energy source.

How did the Empire destroy the Hoth deflector shield in ESB? By destroying the shield projectors? No, they simply destroyed the "power generators" feeding the deflector shield to put the deflector shield out of operation.

To me that looks like the red thread in George Lucas thinking for the OT: You don't attack the object head-on but look for other ways how to cripple it and ultimately put it out of operation. YMMV

 

That could be right.

 

SWTC cites Richard Edlund as saying they're radar domes in a different CINEFEX issue:

This quote comes from the professional report of Richard Edlund about ILM's work on Return of the Jedi, in the journal CINEFEX in 1983. This is a primary, contemporary source. There is no more authoritative source on ROTJ.

We're also still working on the sequence where Mad Max crashes his A-wing into Vader's ship and causes the star destroyer to lose control and crash into the Deathstar. The penetration shot with the mushroom-cloud explosion we've had for some time, and we've got the shot where the ship's been hit and is starting to heel over. A very large explosion is coming out of the bridge area and it's causing several others to go as well; and one of the big radar domes up on top has been blown away, and that's spewing flames. It's pretty spectacular. Between that sort of closeup of the bridge section and the long-shot of the surface, we need two more cuts of the ship continuing to heel over and dropping towards the Deathstar like an arrow. We've shot a number of elements on those - explosions and things that have to be projected onto the miniatures - and so they're pretty much ready to go. Don Dow will be shooting those tomorrow.
CINEFEX #13, p.55, 3 February 1983
— Richard Edlund


but it's good to hear that, as of Rogue One, CINEFEX has called them shield generators as well.

"sensor globe with local area shield projector" is the term used in newcanon's Complete Locations, "communication and deflection domes" is the term used on the Super Star Destroyer's page on the Databank.

So, at the moment, the newcanon is fairly consistent on the dual-role for Super Star Destroyer domes, even if the sensor/communication role is downplayed a lot for ordinary Star Destroyers (Rebels Visual Guide, Ships of the Galaxy, and Rogue One Ultimate Visual Guide all only mention the shield generator role for domes).​

 

Iron_lord wrote

SWTC cites Richard Edlund as saying they're radar domes in a different CINEFEX issue

No offense, but Mr. Edlund also said that Death Star II was 500 miles in diameter and that Rebel fighters use "photon" torpedos. Somehow I can't help the feeling that he wasn't really such an expert in these matters.

 

If we can discard Edlund's opinion (and I generally do, when it comes to the second Death Star) - and let the newcanon supersede it, what other ILM people's opinions can we discard in favour of the newcanon's approach?

I'm pretty sure that the reason CINEFEX says the Rogue One Star Destroyer domes are shield generators - is because the EU said so.

We know that the Rogue One designers used the EU:

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/john-knoll-rogue-one-star-wars/

Knoll’s job also requires painful, almost microscopic scrutiny. At one point he reviews a Star Destroyer torn in half in battle—the reflections, the textures, the realism of the bent metal. The model maker is working from the book Incredible Cross-Sections of Star Wars: The Ultimate Guide to Star Wars Vehicles and Spacecraft to make sure that what an audience sees inside the ship matches what’s known about Star Destroyers. No one wants to be the subject of a subreddit dedicated to power converters and the jerks who put them in the wrong place.

and we see that they aren't sure exactly what the domes are (the book doesn't actually label them on its picture of the Devastator - it only labels the tractor beam targeting array between them):

The X-wing pulls up as it approaches the battle cruiser’s conning tower. “So are we going to have him blow up that dome on his way over?” asks Vick Schutz, the CG supervisor, pointing to one of the Epcot-looking polyhedrons that for reasons no one in the room is quite sure of sit atop all Star Destroyers.


but that they think the domes might be shield-related - joking about them feeding into the generators that run the shield (other EU sources do call them shield generators):

BACK IN THE dark conference room at ILM, Knoll’s effects gang still has to decide whether to blow up those troublesome polyhedrons. Rogue One will be in theaters in a little over nine weeks. All Knoll’s team wants is for the boss to look at a shot and say the magic word: final. Then they can move on.
“So the reference from Jedi is, it’s just a giant fireball,” says Hal Hickel, the animation supervisor. “There’s nothing even in it.”
“Like it’s made of gasoline?” Knoll asks.
“Maybe it feeds into the generator that runs the shield,” someone else jokes.
Scripts often don’t answer issues like this, offering little more than an elaborate version of “spaceships fight.”

 

I'm going to have to install X-wing/Tie-Fighter/X-wing Alliance (GOG!!!) and Empire at War (mods!) as a result of this thread.
Might have to grab that Sins of a solar empire mod as well

 

How expensive is X-Wing/Tie Fighter? I've watched vidoes but never actually played it. Unfortunately, I hear multiplayer is dead.
p.s. Be sure to check out Phoenix Rising mod of FoC and Thrawn's Revenge when you get it.

 

I've played Thrawn's revenge (it's awesome... and the prequel mod republic at war is really good also). The old games are cheap. X-wing and Tie-fighter are the two best (especially tie fighter - great game) and X-wing Alliance is pretty good also (you get to fly the millenium falcon which is cool). They are all available on good old games (I think you need a joystick BTW). 10 bucks each right now.

https://www.gog.com/

X-wing alliance is the newest of the games and has the best graphics.... it's good, but X-wing and Tie-Fighter are IMO a bit better from the single player campaign point of view.

 

Going by this:

http://comicbook.com/starwars/2016/...-detailed-versions-of-x-wing-and-darth-vader/

to create the Rogue One Star Destroyers, they combined the 3 ft and 8 ft original Star Destroyers:

Much like the look of Darth Vader in Rogue One, which had to be tweaked slightly to fit that delicate balance, so did the Star Destroyers, the Empire's huge capital ships, including one in particular.
"I think the Star Destroyers look pretty authentic. It's not matching any one particular Star Destroyer because there were multiples for models that were built. There's the three footer for New Hope. There was an eight footer for Empire and then there were high detail close up sections that were built for when the Falcons hiding on the back of the tower," Knoll explained. "What we did is, because of the order of events when this takes place, philosophically I wanted to match the New Hope Star Destroyer, because that's Vader's Star Destroyer and maybe it shows up in this picture," he said with a laugh. "If you compare the three footer to the eight footer, they're kind of the same shape, but if you really look there's a lot of things that are different about them. Just the purist in me said, 'All right well we should be matching with three footer.' But then you couldn't really match the three footer because there's problems with that, that whole upper surface is essentially un-detailed."



Those porthole lights you remember on the Star Destroyers? They didn't exist on that 3-foot model. That presented a problem to Knoll and the ILM team, and so, like Vader, they went for a hybrid option.
"The lights all came with the eight-footer that was built for Empire. What we built was this kind of hybrid; it was the plan form from the three-footer and a lot of the things that you could see as differences between the two models were following the three-footer. But then a lot of the upper surface details curbed form the eight footer from Empire, and then it's got all of those midline lights and the portholes that the eight-footer had, because that's how you remembered it."

 

Vader had his ISD outfitted with better armor.

 

I thought that read as "LSD".

 

Do you have a citation for each of these quotes?

 

Hernalt

Yes, the "radar dome" and second Death Star's "500 mile Diameter" (more like approx. 300 km according to my examinations based on the actual height of the equator trench of the VFX model) come from the ROJ issue of Cinefex (I do have the copy and double checked).
IIRC, same applies for his "photon torpedo" remark, but this one has been quoted in Rinzler's Making of ROJ book as a genuine Richard Edlund statement where J.W. Rinzler added a "(sic)" after "photon torpedo".

 

I ordered Cinefex Number 13: "Return of the Jedi".

 

page 8, top left: "more like five hundred miles in diameter" (page 7: "In Star Wars [ANH], it was really difficult to establish the scale. It was supposed to be miles in diameter" - Well, ILM established the scale in the late 1970's as "100+" miles, Mr. Edlund was obviously not aware of that....)

For the other quotes I don't have the pages memorized.

 

The Darths & Droids comic noticed that the explosion was rather extreme:

http://www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/1493.html

 

This is just a little teaser for my upcoming in-depth Rebel Blockade Runner Tantive IV research article "Secrets of the Rebel Blockade Runner Tantive IV unveiled" in the CT (OT) section (because it'll eventually feature deck plans of Leia's ship first and foremost as seen in ANH but will also feature all the additions by Rogue One).

Suffice to say I'm happy and relieved that the Rogue One hallway film set (with the access to the cockpit) will barely (!) fit inside the Tantive IV hammerhead section at 148.8 meters (something that couldn't be said for the Tantive III, featured in ROTS, that has to be approx. 236 meters long to accomodate the ROTS hallway set inside the hammerhead).