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Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar
Star Wars space battles were remarkably consistent before the hyperspace kamikaze.

Shields protected from energy weapons, but not physical objects. Ion cannon knocked out shields which let you unleash hell. There was probably some sort of protection against ion blasts, but I don't think they were in any of the movies. Otherwise, why wouldn't every big ship have half its firepower dedicated to ion weapons?

There's even a scene in the Force Awakens (I think) when they're doing the bombing run on the star destroyer with the huge gun and you see some lasers splash on its shields while the ships fly right through.

If big ships wanted to shoot each other, they had to get in really close and we got that great shot from inside one of the capital ships as it fired broadsides at another one. I think it was in Revenge of the Sith.


To further the shields stop blasters, not objects idea - in the prequels I'm pretty sure the Gunguns used their slingshots to go right through the big shields they put up, while the blasters impacted harmlessly.


But then we got the (cinematically gorgeous) scene where the leader of the rebellion hyperdrove into another ship and all that went to hell.

Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Jul 3, 2020

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MA-Horus
Dec 3, 2006

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.

That's why the Expanse is fun. It's all relativistic physics except when it comes to the big bad alien thing.

On looking at a massive Martian battleship. "One of those things can kill a planet"
the best character: "Any ship can kill a planet. Just drop anvils from orbit."

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Star Wars space battles were remarkably consistent before the hyperspace kamikaze.

Shields protected from energy weapons, but not physical objects. Ion cannon knocked out shields which let you unleash hell. There was probably some sort of protection against ion blasts, but I don't think they were in any of the movies. Otherwise, why wouldn't every big ship have half its firepower dedicated to ion weapons?

There's even a scene in the Force Awakens (I think) when they're doing the bombing run on the star destroyer with the huge gun and you see some lasers splash on its shields while the ships fly right through.

If big ships wanted to shoot each other, they had to get in really close and we got that great shot from inside one of the capital ships as it fired broadsides at another one. I think it was in Revenge of the Sith.


To further the shields stop blasters, not objects idea - in the prequels I'm pretty sure the Gunguns used their slingshots to go right through the big shields they put up, while the blasters impacted harmlessly.


But then we got the (cinematically gorgeous) scene where the leader of the rebellion hyperdrove into another ship and all that went to hell.

TLJ is completely consistent with all of this. The hyperspace ramming isn't even hard to explain away with some :techno:. I did a Star Wars story for a charity anthology recently and thought about dropping in an explanation but couldn't really find the wordcount. Plus it's dumb when the EU fixes stuff that doesn't need fixing!

MA-Horus posted:

That's why the Expanse is fun. It's all relativistic physics except when it comes to the big bad alien thing.

On looking at a massive Martian battleship. "One of those things can kill a planet"
the best character: "Any ship can kill a planet. Just drop anvils from orbit."

Like most of the Expanse, a quote that's superficially realistic but missing a few critical details.

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Ion cannon knocked out shields which let you unleash hell. There was probably some sort of protection against ion blasts, but I don't think they were in any of the movies. Otherwise, why wouldn't every big ship have half its firepower dedicated to ion weapons?

Some of them did. Republic ships during the Clone Wars fired blue lasers, which had previously been established as ion weapons in the games. Eventually they retconned it so that Clone weapons were ionized to be more effective against droids.

fartknocker
Oct 28, 2012


Damn it, this always happens. I think I'm gonna score, and then I never score. It's not fair.



Wedge Regret

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Shields protected from energy weapons, but not physical objects. Ion cannon knocked out shields which let you unleash hell. There was probably some sort of protection against ion blasts, but I don't think they were in any of the movies. Otherwise, why wouldn't every big ship have half its firepower dedicated to ion weapons?

The old EU shields protected against physical objects as well. It’s regularly mentioned that a big part of Rebel starfighter tactics (And combat between ships in general) is to hammer a capital ship shield with torpedos or missiles until it drops, usually allowing some of the barrage to break through.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
I figure ion cannons have to be really really big before they have any meaningful effect on capital ships.

MA-Horus
Dec 3, 2006

I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.

General Battuta posted:

TLJ is completely consistent with all of this. The hyperspace ramming isn't even hard to explain away with some :techno:. I did a Star Wars story for a charity anthology recently and thought about dropping in an explanation but couldn't really find the wordcount. Plus it's dumb when the EU fixes stuff that doesn't need fixing!


Like most of the Expanse, a quote that's superficially realistic but missing a few critical details.

Yup. For thread content, the Epstein drive. Just realistic enough to be feasible, but with absolutely no idea on how the drat thing actually works.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Even Star Trek is consistent about how shields and the general gist of starship combat work. You don't have to figure out or even explain exactly how things work, just make it consistent enough that people get comfortable with it and understand the stakes. (of course, part of the problem with the sequels is the writers can't decide on what the stakes are)

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

MA-Horus posted:

On looking at a massive Martian battleship. "One of those things can kill a planet"
the best character: "Any ship can kill a planet. Just drop anvils from orbit."

Because bombing campaigns have solved every war they were involved with on their own.

General Battuta posted:

TLJ is completely consistent with all of this. The hyperspace ramming isn't even hard to explain away with some :techno:. I did a Star Wars story for a charity anthology recently and thought about dropping in an explanation but couldn't really find the wordcount. Plus it's dumb when the EU fixes stuff that doesn't need fixing!

I don't think the EU spends that much time "fixing" things, I think what they end up doing most is taking things from the movies and wiggling them around until they can be applied to whatever story they're writing, because a lot of licensed works outside the main body of work of an IP need to constantly reference and repurpose elements from the original story instead of coming up with something new. You wind up getting the feeling that the story is more being written through rules-lawyering of the setting, and the setting feels smaller for just being a bunch of remixes of a small amount of elements.

Which honestly Last Jedi felt it was doing a lot of the time.

Robot Style
Jul 5, 2009

fartknocker posted:

The old EU shields protected against physical objects as well. It’s regularly mentioned that a big part of Rebel starfighter tactics (And combat between ships in general) is to hammer a capital ship shield with torpedos or missiles until it drops, usually allowing some of the barrage to break through.

There's also distinctions between different kinds of shields. Ray shields only protect against lasers and blasters, but allow physical objects through. Though that's not even consistent within the movies, since ray shields will allow a torpedo through to blow up the Death Star, but also trap Anakin and Obi-Wan in ROTS.

SidneyIsTheKiller
Jul 16, 2019

I did fall asleep reading a particularly erotic chapter
in my grandmother's journal.

She wrote very detailed descriptions of her experiences...

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Even Star Trek is consistent about how shields and the general gist of starship combat work. You don't have to figure out or even explain exactly how things work, just make it consistent enough that people get comfortable with it and understand the stakes. (of course, part of the problem with the sequels is the writers can't decide on what the stakes are)

Yeah, Star Trek II for instance has a ton of examples of tech and science that you could nitpick to DEATH but you'd have to seriously hate your life to really let it get in the way of enjoying the movie:

  • So by entering a "prefix code" the Enterprise controls can tap into another starfleet vessels' system and lower its shields... and while that doesn't really make any sense whatsoever when you think about it (if they've hacked into the other ship's controls, why stop at just lowering the shields? Are they seriously suggesting that lowering the shields is the ONLY thing they can do with the prefix code? Maybe every little function has its own prefix code, except they're always referring to "THE prefix code", which is a five-digit number that would be trivial to brute-force btw, and why's it even called a prefix code, what is it a prefix for?, etc.) it would only bother me if in other Treks they used "the prefix code" to make another ship do loop-de-loops or whatever.

  • I can think of no reason why you wouldn't be able to raise shields inside a nebula, (they almost get away this by saying they'd be "useless", like the nebula somehow disrupts the shield and allows things to get through, but then they make it clear they just straight up can't be raised at all), but Saavik blames it on "static discharge and gas" and as long as there isn't some other incident that proves her a liar then that's good enough for me!

  • What is Spock doing in the engineering room? He's fixing it, ya dummy! What else do you need to know?

  • It's not that McCoy's tricorder fails to pick up the parasites lurking within Chekov and his Captain's brains, he just for whatever reason neglects to scan them after Chekov tells him how Khan had put "crreeatuures.... in our bodies..." that brainwashed them into telling lies and committing crimes on Khan's behalf. So the tech is perfectly consistent here :)

  • That huge emergency door sure looks like it goes right through the warp core when it closes... and I tell ya if the Enterprise had gone to warp while that thing was down I would've called bullshit! But it doesn't, so we're good! :v:

  • Likewise in Star Trek VI it's not the tech that's inconsistent, it's just the whole crew happens to completely forget to even mention the starship flight recorders that not only capture everything that happens on the ship in audiovisual format, they're omniscient enough to do so from dramatic angles and cinematography, and would surely render any attempt to conduct a conspiracy on board completely futile. So I appreciate that they kept the tech consistent!

SidneyIsTheKiller fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jul 3, 2020

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Robot Style posted:

There's also distinctions between different kinds of shields. Ray shields only protect against lasers and blasters, but allow physical objects through. Though that's not even consistent within the movies, since ray shields will allow a torpedo through to blow up the Death Star, but also trap Anakin and Obi-Wan in ROTS.

Maybe Ray Shields are called "ray" shields b/c they go one way.

The funniest thing to me about Star Wars ships is that SDs don't seem to be built for any particular purpose. They're comically undergunned for their size, they have a fighter contingent but it doesn't seem primary, and they have a ton of AT-ATs but they're battleships. I think they're just converted from civilian ships.

Also according to Wookipedia they cost 150,000,000 credits. Han tries to charge Luke and Kenobi 10,000 credits for a one way trip to Alderaan. That's just...lmao

Musluk
May 23, 2011



SidneyIsTheKiller posted:

  • So by entering a "prefix code" the Enterprise controls can tap into another starfleet vessels' system and lower its shields... and while that doesn't really make any sense whatsoever when you think about it (if they've hacked into the other ship's controls, why stop at just lowering the shields? Are they seriously suggesting that lowering the shields is the ONLY thing they can do with the prefix code? Maybe every little function has its own prefix code, except they're always referring to "THE prefix code", which is a five-digit number that would be trivial to brute-force btw, and why's it even called a prefix code, what is it a prefix for?, etc.) it would only bother me if in other Treks they used "the prefix code" to make another ship do loop-de-loops or whatever.

Imagine turning the shields on and off again once a second. Twice a second. Ten times a second.

You can just overload the warp core by that and since we know they put rocks instead of surge protectors, it'd be a great way to remote kill a 'friendly' ship. Or just tie the computer down and then the holo-deck will implode.

Maybe it's a prefix to shut down the computer altogether, though. Still, 5 digits is indeed :lol:

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
You can't walk through ray shields because you would come out the far side without any rays.

Error 404
Jul 17, 2009


MAGE CURES PLOT

Musluk posted:

Imagine turning the shields on and off again once a second. Twice a second. Ten times a second.

You can just overload the warp core by that and since we know they put rocks instead of surge protectors, it'd be a great way to remote kill a 'friendly' ship. Or just tie the computer down and then the holo-deck will implode.

Maybe it's a prefix to shut down the computer altogether, though. Still, 5 digits is indeed :lol:

I'll preface this by saying maybe I'm just dumb but:

You can't transport through shields, thats star trek fact, an unbreakable rule (which has been broken but stay with me here)

You don't want full remote overrides because of all the hacks people itt have even come up with.

But a friendly backdoor code, for those times a starfleet ship comes across another, floating derelict, not responding to hails, but they have shields up. Sensors aren't giving you anything because of nebula fuckery or whatever. You're going to want a way to board that friendly vessel to investigate or render aid.

So in that light, a remote override that only shuts off the shields makes sense to me idk.

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

Error 404 posted:

I'll preface this by saying maybe I'm just dumb but:

You can't transport through shields, thats star trek fact, an unbreakable rule (which has been broken but stay with me here)

You don't want full remote overrides because of all the hacks people itt have even come up with.

But a friendly backdoor code, for those times a starfleet ship comes across another, floating derelict, not responding to hails, but they have shields up. Sensors aren't giving you anything because of nebula fuckery or whatever. You're going to want a way to board that friendly vessel to investigate or render aid.

So in that light, a remote override that only shuts off the shields makes sense to me idk.

Why wouldnt this be weaponized by the Klingons or Romulans or whomever else?

McSpanky
Jan 16, 2005






I imagine a squishy fleshbag going through any kind of field so dense it's visible ain't healthy.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Schadenboner posted:

Why wouldnt this be weaponized by the Klingons or Romulans or whomever else?

The Federation are so staggeringly bad spycraft that this would never occur to them.

E: to defend against, that is

SidneyIsTheKiller
Jul 16, 2019

I did fall asleep reading a particularly erotic chapter
in my grandmother's journal.

She wrote very detailed descriptions of her experiences...

Error 404 posted:

I'll preface this by saying maybe I'm just dumb but:

You can't transport through shields, thats star trek fact, an unbreakable rule (which has been broken but stay with me here)

You don't want full remote overrides because of all the hacks people itt have even come up with.

But a friendly backdoor code, for those times a starfleet ship comes across another, floating derelict, not responding to hails, but they have shields up. Sensors aren't giving you anything because of nebula fuckery or whatever. You're going to want a way to board that friendly vessel to investigate or render aid.

So in that light, a remote override that only shuts off the shields makes sense to me idk.

That does sound like a simple and sensible explanation, though I suppose there are nearly as many scenarios where a friendly ship might need to remotely access any number of systems like airlock doors, life support, gravity, transporters, what have you, so there's still that sort of nagging "limit it to just the shields?" thing going on.

Which brings us full circle: the prefix code and all that doesn't actually bother me, because I can accept that there's likely some in-universe reason or context in which such a thing makes sense, and so long as its on-screen usage doesn't get too contradictory or confusing, I'm perfectly content to not know the specifics.

SidneyIsTheKiller
Jul 16, 2019

I did fall asleep reading a particularly erotic chapter
in my grandmother's journal.

She wrote very detailed descriptions of her experiences...

Tulip posted:

The Federation are so staggeringly bad spycraft that this would never occur to them.

E: to defend against, that is

To be fair, Saavik reacts like she's never heard of such a thing as a 'prefix code' before in her entire life and she's a lieutenant (so she's a real bridge officer rather than one of the cadets; I reckon she's in training to fulfill some requirements for promotion or some such), so it would appear they keep it hush hush pretty well.

MadDogMike
Apr 9, 2008

Cute but fanged

Error 404 posted:

I'll preface this by saying maybe I'm just dumb but:

You can't transport through shields, thats star trek fact, an unbreakable rule (which has been broken but stay with me here)

You don't want full remote overrides because of all the hacks people it have even come up with.

But a friendly backdoor code, for those times a starfleet ship comes across another, floating derelict, not responding to hails, but they have shields up. Sensors aren't giving you anything because of nebula fuckery or whatever. You're going to want a way to board that friendly vessel to investigate or render aid.

So in that light, a remote override that only shuts off the shields makes sense to me idk.

They actually used the prefix code idea in TNG a few times; once it was a ship that had all the crew die of a disease that aged them to death (Picard used it to access the ship's computer for info remotely so they didn't go onboard and get killed the same way) and according to the wiki Picard actually handed prefix codes to the Cardassians to deal with the ship run by the guy O'Brian used to work with when he went rogue, though apparently that failed since the ship beat the Cardassians anyway and they had to have O'Brian talk the guy down. Suggests against a Starfleet crew able to actually respond it doesn't do much, but for ships too dangerous to board or hijacked by untrained people (even then Khan was yelling about finding the override in STII when the code was used, and obviously it couldn't be used the second time Enterprise and Reliant fought) it gives them an option to deal with it.

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

I always assumed the actual digits of the prefix code were kind of a formality, like how dumbly simple all of Starfleet's command passwords are (Code 1-1A-2B or Crusher 2-2-Beta-Charlie for example) and the real deal is the biometric voiceprint. I figured the actual way to bypass the firewall they used to keep their systems from being controlled remotely was less about the code numbers and more about the transmission frequency or something like that.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Tulip posted:

The funniest thing to me about Star Wars ships is that SDs don't seem to be built for any particular purpose. They're comically undergunned for their size, they have a fighter contingent but it doesn't seem primary, and they have a ton of AT-ATs but they're battleships. I think they're just converted from civilian ships.

Most of the interpretations I've seen of Star Destroyers have them totally covered in guns that aren't fully modelled and rendered. Like in Rogue Squadron, you fly across them, and there's an absolute forest of lasers coming out of little nubs that don't look much like guns at all.

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

SlothfulCobra posted:

Most of the interpretations I've seen of Star Destroyers have them totally covered in guns that aren't fully modelled and rendered. Like in Rogue Squadron, you fly across them, and there's an absolute forest of lasers coming out of little nubs that don't look much like guns at all.

The old legends specs for an Imperial II Star Destroyer say it's carrying about 75 Turbolaser Batteries, 50 Turbolaser Cannons and 20 Ion Cannons on top of those 8 big broadside mega-guns. So I'd say that's solid for the size.

Megillah Gorilla
Sep 22, 2003

If only all of life's problems could be solved by smoking a professor of ancient evil texts.



Bread Liar
It's only in the final trilogy that they started showing the guns on the star destroyers. But I'm having a real hard time finding decent shots of them which don't come from artists "reimagining" them on sites like artstation.

So have this lego one:




EDIT: Eh, this one is close enough to what we see in the final three

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Sanguinia posted:

The old legends specs for an Imperial II Star Destroyer say it's carrying about 75 Turbolaser Batteries, 50 Turbolaser Cannons and 20 Ion Cannons on top of those 8 big broadside mega-guns. So I'd say that's solid for the size.

That's...very small by warship standards.

So this is what I am aware of about the largest guns on an ISD




This is, generously, twice as big as a WW2 16" gun system, though I could understand how it could be smaller. Having 6 by this source or 8 by yours, the ISD has between 4 and 6 times as much total volume dedicated to its main cannons as an Iowa, while the total volume of an ISD is something like 2000 times (being extremely sloppy on this one, I'm treating the ISD as a pyramid of height 1600 and side 600, while the Iowa is treated as a rectangular prism of 262*33*11). So proportionally, the ISD is about 0.3% as dedicated to its main cannons as a USN Iowa. The secondary weapons don't really move the needle - 75x turbolaser batteries vs 80x 40mm cannons, 50x turbolaser cannons vs 49x 20mm cannons, 10x ion cannon vs 12x 5" guns, honestly a kind of fun parallelism.

Looking at Wookiepedia, I do find something pretty funny: the ISD has 37,000 crew (so, 10x as much as an Iowa, sure), but also is designed to hold 9,700 storm troopers and a similar number of passengers on top of that, with enough supplies to last for 2 years, including water. Which is bizarre - ISDs have extremely good strategic speed, they shouldn't need to operate independently for 2 years. The ship is ready to just gently caress around for 2 years with 1/3 of the people on board not actually manning engines or guns. This thing's a war-themed luxury cruise line.

Also this is one of the funniest things I've read

https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Imperial_I-class_Star_Destroyer posted:

Like other Star Destroyers, a single Internal Affairs officer was stationed aboard the ship to scan the crew for signs of disloyalty and sedition, as well as interrogate any captured prisoner

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Tulip posted:

That's...very small by warship standards.

So this is what I am aware of about the largest guns on an ISD




This is, generously, twice as big as a WW2 16" gun system, though I could understand how it could be smaller. Having 6 by this source or 8 by yours, the ISD has between 4 and 6 times as much total volume dedicated to its main cannons as an Iowa, while the total volume of an ISD is something like 2000 times (being extremely sloppy on this one, I'm treating the ISD as a pyramid of height 1600 and side 600, while the Iowa is treated as a rectangular prism of 262*33*11). So proportionally, the ISD is about 0.3% as dedicated to its main cannons as a USN Iowa. The secondary weapons don't really move the needle - 75x turbolaser batteries vs 80x 40mm cannons, 50x turbolaser cannons vs 49x 20mm cannons, 10x ion cannon vs 12x 5" guns, honestly a kind of fun parallelism.

Looking at Wookiepedia, I do find something pretty funny: the ISD has 37,000 crew (so, 10x as much as an Iowa, sure), but also is designed to hold 9,700 storm troopers and a similar number of passengers on top of that, with enough supplies to last for 2 years, including water. Which is bizarre - ISDs have extremely good strategic speed, they shouldn't need to operate independently for 2 years. The ship is ready to just gently caress around for 2 years with 1/3 of the people on board not actually manning engines or guns. This thing's a war-themed luxury cruise line.

Also this is one of the funniest things I've read

I don't know how useful a 1:1 comparison between an ocean-going warship and an interstellar warship is, but I'm too tired to get into a big debate about it right now, so lets just call it "SciFi Writers Fail At Scale," Episode 202953.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

SidneyIsTheKiller posted:

  • Likewise in Star Trek VI it's not the tech that's inconsistent, it's just the whole crew happens to completely forget to even mention the starship flight recorders that not only capture everything that happens on the ship in audiovisual format, they're omniscient enough to do so from dramatic angles and cinematography, and would surely render any attempt to conduct a conspiracy on board completely futile. So I appreciate that they kept the tech consistent!

The starship's databanks were altered to phony up the photon torpedo launches, and presumably also to erase the transporter logs of Burke and Samno beaming onto Kronos One and assassinating Gorkon; it's trivial to assume that the flight recorder was tampered with as well.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

Yeah I don't think you can compare ballistics to lasers. Obviously bigger = more powerful, but how lasers scale is never established.

Ghost Leviathan
Mar 2, 2017

Exploration is ill-advised.
Sci-fi authors are always hilariously bad at numbers.

General Battuta
Feb 7, 2011

This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.
Apparently in the new canon the crew complement's down to about 10,000, don't know if that includes stormtroopers or not.

McSpanky
Jan 16, 2005






Sanguinia posted:

I don't know how useful a 1:1 comparison between an ocean-going warship and an interstellar warship is, but I'm too tired to get into a big debate about it right now, so lets just call it "SciFi Writers Fail At Scale," Episode 202953.

I prefer to think of it as a sign that the Imperial top-down fascist organization and its effects on operations and logistics resulted in a similar knock-on clusterfuck effect as it did for the Nazis, and what effectiveness in combat the ISDs did have was mostly due to superior numbers and their targets being a scrappy band of semi-organized rebels using whatever they could get their hands on.

Even putting aside the real-world parallels, the ISDs are clearly designed to enforce control over conquered peoples via terror and rapid deployment, their jack-of-all-trades carrier/troop transport/cruiser design is great for suppressive police actions but terrible for prosecuting actual war.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

Well there really isn't anyone fielding a proper army against them. The rebels have a limited supply of rag tag capital ships. As long as they can keep the planets within the empire pacified they don't need to handle capital ship warfare.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Tulip posted:

Looking at Wookiepedia, I do find something pretty funny: the ISD has 37,000 crew (so, 10x as much as an Iowa, sure), but also is designed to hold 9,700 storm troopers and a similar number of passengers on top of that, with enough supplies to last for 2 years, including water. Which is bizarre - ISDs have extremely good strategic speed, they shouldn't need to operate independently for 2 years. The ship is ready to just gently caress around for 2 years with 1/3 of the people on board not actually manning engines or guns. This thing's a war-themed luxury cruise line.

Also this is one of the funniest things I've read

"War-themed luxury cruise line" is an interesting thing to call them, considering how the rebel Mon Calamari cruisers were originally cruise ships complete with elaborate artificial water features that were repurposed for warfare.

Designing the Star Destroyers to be able to work independently long-term was an odd decision, considering how there's so much about the Empire having been designed against people being able to operate independently, it's a literal inverse of the design ethos of the Tie Fighter. It sure came in handy for after Endor when Imperial remnants needed to be self-sufficient to carve out their own little dominions. Seems like it goes against the emperor's supposed paranoia about his own military turning against him.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

Star Destroyers are the Empires main projection. The longer they can operate without stopping the more force the empire can spread around.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Some Goon posted:

Star Destroyers are the Empires main projection. The longer they can operate without stopping the more force the empire can spread around.

So, two things. First, if there's anything we know about Star Wars, it's that everything is very, very close. Basically everything inside the Empire's territory seems to be like, a day trip. For example, Alderaan and Yavin are about 40kly apart, and supposedly that took the Death Star (which is canonically slow) about "a few hours." So really, it's like 12 hours go end-to-end on the galaxy (100-120kly, I'm seeing different numbers). A really narrowly purpose built reactive battleship probably doesn't even need toilets.

The other part is that warships are purpose-built, and the ISD is all over the place. It's simultaneously a battleship, a carrier, a troop transport, and an ultra-long-range endurance enforcer. Oh and of course has space for 9000 passengers even when fully laden which lmao.

SlothfulCobra posted:

"War-themed luxury cruise line" is an interesting thing to call them, considering how the rebel Mon Calamari cruisers were originally cruise ships complete with elaborate artificial water features that were repurposed for warfare.

"A top priority for Star Wars ships is that they be good for war tourists" would explain the gigantic viewports and extremely close range fighting.

Farmer Crack-Ass
Jan 2, 2001

this is me posting irl

Some Goon posted:

Well there really isn't anyone fielding a proper army against them. The rebels have a limited supply of rag tag capital ships. As long as they can keep the planets within the empire pacified they don't need to handle capital ship warfare.

I touched on this in another thread but I think something that may have varied over the decades is to what extent the Galactic Empire was able to consolidate/monopolize their grasp on military power. Like yeah the modern depiction is that they basically had total, unquestionable dominance, but I'm pretty sure at least some earlier sources suggested that local systems still controlled enough starships that if they all got organized and decided to fight back at once, they could definitely challenge the Imperial Starfleet.

Like, there's a reason that the first response to "the Senate has been abolished" is astonishment and trepidation. And there's that guy who spent the time before that announcement saying "uhh these guys are a serious threat and are well-equipped."


Tulip posted:

So, two things. First, if there's anything we know about Star Wars, it's that everything is very, very close. Basically everything inside the Empire's territory seems to be like, a day trip. For example, Alderaan and Yavin are about 40kly apart, and supposedly that took the Death Star (which is canonically slow) about "a few hours." So really, it's like 12 hours go end-to-end on the galaxy (100-120kly, I'm seeing different numbers). A really narrowly purpose built reactive battleship probably doesn't even need toilets.

Having extra-long endurance would be useless for interstellar travel, but would be very useful for planetary blockades.

SlothfulCobra
Mar 27, 2011

Tulip posted:

"A top priority for Star Wars ships is that they be good for war tourists" would explain the gigantic viewports and extremely close range fighting.

Star Tours

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Taintrunner
Apr 10, 2017

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS


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