Yeah did you really think this is a RPG Dan? (Excluding the board game Star Wars Armada)
As for more guns however. I’m willing to bet that Fractal might add some duel anti-personal guns and maybe missiles launchers but that might be a low chance for the latter.
It wouldn’t take much to get this going again and get stats worked out to meet your own needs for whatever endeavour you’ve got cooking. (Hint: They’re whatever you need them to be.)
I was not aware. However, I recall at the time thinking that the Vigil bore a striking resemblance to “anonymous star frigate #1” from the Star Wars Technical Commentaries. Of course, so does the Fulgor, but you hadn’t published the Fulgor at that time. It was an easy leap to make, and IMO, not a completely unwarranted one.
Turretless casemate tank destroyers kind of suck in the real world because you need to rotate the whole tank to shoot at things, but Star Wars repulsorlifts should solve that problem by allowing for blistering fast rates of hull rotation. That being said, it would be interesting to see a variant based upon this chassis that dispenses with the dual light LTL turret for a single heavier turbolaser in a frontal mount backed up by a wall of armor
.
I always thought that the T-95 or Jagdpanther looked very Star Warsy, and it might have a tactical niche in responding to walker breakthroughs in your theater shield.
Yeah, vehicles like this would be exactly the reason that AT-SPs exist. You could easily go up to Ratte relative size on repulsorlifts. They’d almost one-shot AT-ATs depending on how much capacitor you want to tote around so you wouldn’t risk infantry like that until a perimeter is cleared.
High-end ground combat in the Star Wars setting is no joke.
You probably couldn’t fit a SPHA-T type turbolaser on this particular tank chassis, but even a slightly scaled down version would be a terrifying direct-fire vehicle killer.
Speaking of the SPHA-T, I always thought it kind of nullified the argument that deploying HTL in atmosphere would roast all noncombatants within kilometers. The SPHA-T has to be around HTL yield if it is capable of knocking down shielded Lucrehulk Core ships and shattering Munificents, but no one on Geonosis really seemed to be affected if there was really a massive shockwave/thermal bloom from the employment of such a blast yield. You could argue that Clone Armor is designed to fight in such an environment, but the robe-wearing Jedi and Natalie Portman also were unaffected.
well that depends how much energy is radiated in the environment as opposed to directed right into the target. The SPHA-Ts probably fried everything inside that core ship for its repulsorlifts to fail like they did. Maybe the outer armor contained most of the expanding heatwaves ?
Btw, I have a one of those SPHA-T-scale repulsortank in the making.
Well, it would be nice to see your interpretation of that kind of tank.
Another odd thing about the employment of the SPHA-T at Geonosis was the willingness of Republic command to take the risk of the Core Ship’s reactor going supercritical and detonating either upon being hit or the impact with the surface of the planet. That kind of blast surely would have wiped out significant numbers of Republic forces fighting nearby, including the SPHA batteries themselves and several senior Jedi. Perhaps reactors are just more stable than we usually suspect, although we have seen capital ships explode spectacularly from superstructure HTL hits like that destroyer at Endor.
The core ship might not actually be all that much relatively speaking. It docks into a ring with a huge engineering section that is much much larger in volume even if you exclude the hangars. So the core ship has a reactor and shields in proportion to itself, so like a frigate maybe? Even so, that’s still potentially teratons going off. But that’s also at full operating power – at Endor presumably the ships are redlining their reactors to maintain fire and shields, but the Geonosis launch was a crash launch under fire – many of the core ships might not have been developing anywhere near to full power, and those were the ones approached and targeted in preference by the SPHA-Ts. That and you don’t see any fire from the core ships at all, and we know they were supposed to have fairly numerous starfighter grade point defense guns that should have been pretty lethal to walkers and definitely infantry.
Well this all depends on where the consensus is on how fast it takes to ramp a frigate-scale reactor up to full power. Something like the Falcon can go to max output from a cold start in seconds, but you can’t scale that directly to a capital ship.
The Rebels at Hoth seemed to be able to bring their theater shield and V-150 online using a Star Battlecruiser scale Praetor reactor within minutes, which suggests fairly rapid ramp-up rates even for a heavy capital ship. Perhaps the Lucrehulk Core Ship reactors were built to commercial standards which weren’t designed for a crash-start. However, the CIS crews should have had quite a bit more time to prepare in the time it would take the Acclamators to blast through the orbital defenses, de-orbit, and disgorge several divisions right on their doorstep. A simpler explanation might be that the Core Ships were simply unfueled while docked planetside, and just didn’t have enough reactant for a more rapid takeoff and sufficient shielding to deflect SPHA-T fire.
The lack of return fire could be explained by the Core Ship crews prioritizing repulsorlift functionality and shielding over sending any output to guns, but even relatively light starfighter grade weapons should have been able to credibly threaten or suppress a SPHA-T. The only thing that I can put forward to explain that is if the Acclamator motherships were using their own reactor output to project a theater shield of their own to protect the SPHA-Ts, which could explain why they weren’t using their MTL batteries to shoot at the fleeing Separtists.
Fractal, have you ever played the old PC RTS Supreme Commander? It had the best implementation of mobile shielding for large field armies I’ve seen in a game.
We’d love to see a mobile shield generator on an A6 Chassis, although maybe the A9 Floating Fortress would also make sense for that kind of kit.
An A9 is AT-AT body sized, while an A6 is much, much, bigger. Plus an A6 has ground contact so it can force a shield, and then project a theater shield underneath. So if I had to pick, I’d go with an A6, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a smaller, more mobile version on an A9 chassis as well.
well, fractal said it better than I could have. Just adding that it didn’t need to explode for it to be a potential danger. we’re still talking about 200 million tons worth of metal falling (freely ?) from almost a km high. Goes to show they probably didn’t think much of it in the heat of the moment.
also is it ok for me to put an image ?
Surely the potential damage a core ship could inflict with it’s own weapons and droid complement would would far exceed the amount of damage caused by knocking it out of the sky.
Better knock out the ship above the surface of a planet that you don’t mind making a mess of then leave it be and have it invading planets with its 100,000s or millions of droids. Not to mention energy weapons with yields far exceeding that of its kinetic energy.
On a side note, does anyone find the yields of SW weapons to be stupidly high? I know weapon yields come from various canon sources but it would seem to me that shield, weapon, and reactor yields could all be dropped several orders of magnitude lower and remain equivalently powerful to one another but all of a sudden one turbolaser isn’t hitting with the yield of 1,000 Tsar Bombes. It would certainly make capital ship weapons in atmosphere more practical.
Have you examined the methodology that folks like Dr. Curtis Saxon used to come up with these numbers? Whether you’re scaling up from asteroid vaporization or scaling down from the Death Star, we end up in roughly the same range for capital ship capabilities.
I think Bannon’s argument was that if the Core Ship detonated on surface impact, a huge segment of the Grand Army of the Republic fighting nearby would be wiped out. Perhaps the Clones were judged expendable, but also within the blast radius are several legendary Jedi, including Grand Master Yoda, Mace, Obi-Wan, and the Chosen One himself, plus Senator Amidala. The damage the Core Ship’s payload of battle droids could inflict doesn’t outweigh the losses in VIPs that could occur if the Core Ship’s reactor and hypermatter (Coaxium?) fuel errupted.
Too powerful, perhaps? Maybe energy bleed off from the weapon discharge causes interference with the repulsors and complex drive systems. Otherwise you have a half squadron of these strafe-skating around the battle field almost indescrimenantly. Even with an AT-SP or several, that’s a power to mobility ratio/scale that’s closer to a star fighter than a tank
This is the key issue with SW power density – it should make ground combat very different looking from the terrestrial analogues used as visual templates for these battles. I like to resolve this by making “space” scale very different from “surface” scale. It would almost have to be for the numbers to work out – you’d need a lot more AT-ATs for instance than ISDs, and making them mostly metal and not a lot of the expensive stuff like fighter-grade power-density reactors and weapons is one way to get those numbers.
But it leaves high-end SW planetary combat something largely unexplored. I mean like seriously high-end, not infantry shootouts or special ops situations like what we typically see. This could be as extreme that ISD at Jedha deciding to say “fuck this” and enter direct action against ground forces with its main battery.
While the Republic had certain incentives to not burn planets and protect civilian populations, the CIS didn’t really have any reason to pull its punches. We can explain their initial armies as agglomerations of relatively scaled down corporate security forces and loan-enforcement vehicles, but by Episode III they really should have had some heavier kit. All of their droids and vehicles seemed so low on the energy density scale that I would believe it if you told me that they ran on gasoline. The Clone Wars should have brought extraordinarily high-end planetary combat, but all we got was more WW2 analogues.
I generally agree, but super-high-end planetary warfare would make for some pretty bad cinema. Stuff is too easily killed and too confusing because a lot of it should happen unseen from local perspective, and it depends too much on fleet action, rather than being something independent in its own right. After all, it doesn’t matter how many walkers you have in the field if a star destroyer sheltering under the planetary shield comes by to say hello. Mobile theater shields can sort of fix this but then you have the difficulty of conveying the nuances on the screen.
The best cinematic interpretation of ground-based shielding we’ve gotten so far has been Gungan, so there’s definitely room for improvement.
Solo did a decent job with the chaos and grit of Mimban, but the side that controls orbit can’t really lose. All the defenders on the ground can hope for is to stall until their own ships show up.
Well, I’d reckon that for arguments sake we can, at least passably, do some hand-waving with regards to reactor size, mass, and surface area functions for heat transfer/exhaust; schmeer on the insulating factors of atmospheric environments; sandwich it all with a couple layers of sheer inefficiency related to the necessities of surface warfare; and stick a cinematically acceptable lens flare olive on top that all makes for a tasty sammich.
Such that, just as the sun is setting behind the stark and shattered ruins of the rebel base, we get a sweet shot of of one of these heavies with its puffed-up artillery commander gloating at whoever’s going to look powering out (at its ridiculously slow max speed) from behind a ridge with a set of three flanking AT-SW’s giving sass and side-eye to whatever’s left.
So Fractal for the weapons this heavy repulsor tank have so far (duel LTLs and two duel heavy laser cannons) will there be any more or this is all it have?
Well this is a interesting design although I was expecting something bulkier then this (Like the Mammoth Tank from Command and Conquer.)
Also I’m willing to bet those duel LTLs could one shot the AT-AT.
I’m not saying it is a bad thing I don’t mind you creating them the way you want them to be. I just wondering on where do you get the ideas on these unusual designs like this one Fractal.
Except perhaps TIEs, at least TIE/LNs, TIE/INs (standard versions anyway), Light Duties, TIE Starfighters (aka the first upgraded version of the T.I.E.), TIE/RCs, TIE/SRs, TIE/SAs, TIE/AGs, TIE/D automated starfighter, pretty much all of the TIE Experimental line save for M3, aka TIE Warhead, TIE/rpt (kind of, most lack it, though some do have the shields), and the TIE ap-1.
I think all TIEs have shields, at least navigational shields with some secondary combat function. There are potential shield flashes on TIEs in the OT, and TIEs that don’t immediately take serious damage on hit, which doesn’t make sense unless they have some shielding.
For a high performance starfighter regardless of the model, some light shielding makes a lot of sense against debris strike if nothing else.
Oh I do think the same, the battle on Hoth makes only sense with shielded AT-ATs.
First the rebels can´t do any damage to them, after one goes down a pair of snowspeeders blows it up so easily. I assume that the shielgenerator got damaged from the fall. And the snowspeeders cable attack and Lukes makes sense too, because slow moving objects can bypass most shields.
Can I have a list of all its specs and guns, and it seems like it needs more guns.
Seriously, I am not an RPG book.
Yeah did you really think this is a RPG Dan? (Excluding the board game Star Wars Armada)
As for more guns however. I’m willing to bet that Fractal might add some duel anti-personal guns and maybe missiles launchers but that might be a low chance for the latter.
There’s an entire thread dedicated to stat’ing out Ansel’s designs if you’re interested:
https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/243600-ship-stats-fractalsponges-imperial-capital-ships/
It wouldn’t take much to get this going again and get stats worked out to meet your own needs for whatever endeavour you’ve got cooking. (Hint: They’re whatever you need them to be.)
If the D6 system is more you’re style, here’s the Rancor Pit’s thread on fractalsponge stat write-ups.
http://www.rancorpit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4954&start=0
The Vigil is only from my brain, you know that right?
I was not aware. However, I recall at the time thinking that the Vigil bore a striking resemblance to “anonymous star frigate #1” from the Star Wars Technical Commentaries. Of course, so does the Fulgor, but you hadn’t published the Fulgor at that time. It was an easy leap to make, and IMO, not a completely unwarranted one.
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/dagger.html#frigate1
Turretless casemate tank destroyers kind of suck in the real world because you need to rotate the whole tank to shoot at things, but Star Wars repulsorlifts should solve that problem by allowing for blistering fast rates of hull rotation. That being said, it would be interesting to see a variant based upon this chassis that dispenses with the dual light LTL turret for a single heavier turbolaser in a frontal mount backed up by a wall of armor
.
I always thought that the T-95 or Jagdpanther looked very Star Warsy, and it might have a tactical niche in responding to walker breakthroughs in your theater shield.
Yeah, vehicles like this would be exactly the reason that AT-SPs exist. You could easily go up to Ratte relative size on repulsorlifts. They’d almost one-shot AT-ATs depending on how much capacitor you want to tote around so you wouldn’t risk infantry like that until a perimeter is cleared.
High-end ground combat in the Star Wars setting is no joke.
You probably couldn’t fit a SPHA-T type turbolaser on this particular tank chassis, but even a slightly scaled down version would be a terrifying direct-fire vehicle killer.
Speaking of the SPHA-T, I always thought it kind of nullified the argument that deploying HTL in atmosphere would roast all noncombatants within kilometers. The SPHA-T has to be around HTL yield if it is capable of knocking down shielded Lucrehulk Core ships and shattering Munificents, but no one on Geonosis really seemed to be affected if there was really a massive shockwave/thermal bloom from the employment of such a blast yield. You could argue that Clone Armor is designed to fight in such an environment, but the robe-wearing Jedi and Natalie Portman also were unaffected.
well that depends how much energy is radiated in the environment as opposed to directed right into the target. The SPHA-Ts probably fried everything inside that core ship for its repulsorlifts to fail like they did. Maybe the outer armor contained most of the expanding heatwaves ?
Btw, I have a one of those SPHA-T-scale repulsortank in the making.
Well, it would be nice to see your interpretation of that kind of tank.
Another odd thing about the employment of the SPHA-T at Geonosis was the willingness of Republic command to take the risk of the Core Ship’s reactor going supercritical and detonating either upon being hit or the impact with the surface of the planet. That kind of blast surely would have wiped out significant numbers of Republic forces fighting nearby, including the SPHA batteries themselves and several senior Jedi. Perhaps reactors are just more stable than we usually suspect, although we have seen capital ships explode spectacularly from superstructure HTL hits like that destroyer at Endor.
The core ship might not actually be all that much relatively speaking. It docks into a ring with a huge engineering section that is much much larger in volume even if you exclude the hangars. So the core ship has a reactor and shields in proportion to itself, so like a frigate maybe? Even so, that’s still potentially teratons going off. But that’s also at full operating power – at Endor presumably the ships are redlining their reactors to maintain fire and shields, but the Geonosis launch was a crash launch under fire – many of the core ships might not have been developing anywhere near to full power, and those were the ones approached and targeted in preference by the SPHA-Ts. That and you don’t see any fire from the core ships at all, and we know they were supposed to have fairly numerous starfighter grade point defense guns that should have been pretty lethal to walkers and definitely infantry.
Well this all depends on where the consensus is on how fast it takes to ramp a frigate-scale reactor up to full power. Something like the Falcon can go to max output from a cold start in seconds, but you can’t scale that directly to a capital ship.
The Rebels at Hoth seemed to be able to bring their theater shield and V-150 online using a Star Battlecruiser scale Praetor reactor within minutes, which suggests fairly rapid ramp-up rates even for a heavy capital ship. Perhaps the Lucrehulk Core Ship reactors were built to commercial standards which weren’t designed for a crash-start. However, the CIS crews should have had quite a bit more time to prepare in the time it would take the Acclamators to blast through the orbital defenses, de-orbit, and disgorge several divisions right on their doorstep. A simpler explanation might be that the Core Ships were simply unfueled while docked planetside, and just didn’t have enough reactant for a more rapid takeoff and sufficient shielding to deflect SPHA-T fire.
The lack of return fire could be explained by the Core Ship crews prioritizing repulsorlift functionality and shielding over sending any output to guns, but even relatively light starfighter grade weapons should have been able to credibly threaten or suppress a SPHA-T. The only thing that I can put forward to explain that is if the Acclamator motherships were using their own reactor output to project a theater shield of their own to protect the SPHA-Ts, which could explain why they weren’t using their MTL batteries to shoot at the fleeing Separtists.
All of that also makes sense. You can slice and dice the rationale for the visuals a lot of ways.
I think a mobile theater shield generator on an A6 chassis would make a lot of sense if you’re away from your assault ship as well. Hm…
Fractal, have you ever played the old PC RTS Supreme Commander? It had the best implementation of mobile shielding for large field armies I’ve seen in a game.
We’d love to see a mobile shield generator on an A6 Chassis, although maybe the A9 Floating Fortress would also make sense for that kind of kit.
An A9 is AT-AT body sized, while an A6 is much, much, bigger. Plus an A6 has ground contact so it can force a shield, and then project a theater shield underneath. So if I had to pick, I’d go with an A6, but there’s no reason you couldn’t have a smaller, more mobile version on an A9 chassis as well.
well, fractal said it better than I could have. Just adding that it didn’t need to explode for it to be a potential danger. we’re still talking about 200 million tons worth of metal falling (freely ?) from almost a km high. Goes to show they probably didn’t think much of it in the heat of the moment.
also is it ok for me to put an image ?
Surely the potential damage a core ship could inflict with it’s own weapons and droid complement would would far exceed the amount of damage caused by knocking it out of the sky.
Better knock out the ship above the surface of a planet that you don’t mind making a mess of then leave it be and have it invading planets with its 100,000s or millions of droids. Not to mention energy weapons with yields far exceeding that of its kinetic energy.
On a side note, does anyone find the yields of SW weapons to be stupidly high? I know weapon yields come from various canon sources but it would seem to me that shield, weapon, and reactor yields could all be dropped several orders of magnitude lower and remain equivalently powerful to one another but all of a sudden one turbolaser isn’t hitting with the yield of 1,000 Tsar Bombes. It would certainly make capital ship weapons in atmosphere more practical.
Have you examined the methodology that folks like Dr. Curtis Saxon used to come up with these numbers? Whether you’re scaling up from asteroid vaporization or scaling down from the Death Star, we end up in roughly the same range for capital ship capabilities.
I think Bannon’s argument was that if the Core Ship detonated on surface impact, a huge segment of the Grand Army of the Republic fighting nearby would be wiped out. Perhaps the Clones were judged expendable, but also within the blast radius are several legendary Jedi, including Grand Master Yoda, Mace, Obi-Wan, and the Chosen One himself, plus Senator Amidala. The damage the Core Ship’s payload of battle droids could inflict doesn’t outweigh the losses in VIPs that could occur if the Core Ship’s reactor and hypermatter (Coaxium?) fuel errupted.
Too powerful, perhaps? Maybe energy bleed off from the weapon discharge causes interference with the repulsors and complex drive systems. Otherwise you have a half squadron of these strafe-skating around the battle field almost indescrimenantly. Even with an AT-SP or several, that’s a power to mobility ratio/scale that’s closer to a star fighter than a tank
This is the key issue with SW power density – it should make ground combat very different looking from the terrestrial analogues used as visual templates for these battles. I like to resolve this by making “space” scale very different from “surface” scale. It would almost have to be for the numbers to work out – you’d need a lot more AT-ATs for instance than ISDs, and making them mostly metal and not a lot of the expensive stuff like fighter-grade power-density reactors and weapons is one way to get those numbers.
But it leaves high-end SW planetary combat something largely unexplored. I mean like seriously high-end, not infantry shootouts or special ops situations like what we typically see. This could be as extreme that ISD at Jedha deciding to say “fuck this” and enter direct action against ground forces with its main battery.
While the Republic had certain incentives to not burn planets and protect civilian populations, the CIS didn’t really have any reason to pull its punches. We can explain their initial armies as agglomerations of relatively scaled down corporate security forces and loan-enforcement vehicles, but by Episode III they really should have had some heavier kit. All of their droids and vehicles seemed so low on the energy density scale that I would believe it if you told me that they ran on gasoline. The Clone Wars should have brought extraordinarily high-end planetary combat, but all we got was more WW2 analogues.
I generally agree, but super-high-end planetary warfare would make for some pretty bad cinema. Stuff is too easily killed and too confusing because a lot of it should happen unseen from local perspective, and it depends too much on fleet action, rather than being something independent in its own right. After all, it doesn’t matter how many walkers you have in the field if a star destroyer sheltering under the planetary shield comes by to say hello. Mobile theater shields can sort of fix this but then you have the difficulty of conveying the nuances on the screen.
The best cinematic interpretation of ground-based shielding we’ve gotten so far has been Gungan, so there’s definitely room for improvement.
Solo did a decent job with the chaos and grit of Mimban, but the side that controls orbit can’t really lose. All the defenders on the ground can hope for is to stall until their own ships show up.
Well, I’d reckon that for arguments sake we can, at least passably, do some hand-waving with regards to reactor size, mass, and surface area functions for heat transfer/exhaust; schmeer on the insulating factors of atmospheric environments; sandwich it all with a couple layers of sheer inefficiency related to the necessities of surface warfare; and stick a cinematically acceptable lens flare olive on top that all makes for a tasty sammich.
Such that, just as the sun is setting behind the stark and shattered ruins of the rebel base, we get a sweet shot of of one of these heavies with its puffed-up artillery commander gloating at whoever’s going to look powering out (at its ridiculously slow max speed) from behind a ridge with a set of three flanking AT-SW’s giving sass and side-eye to whatever’s left.
So Fractal for the weapons this heavy repulsor tank have so far (duel LTLs and two duel heavy laser cannons) will there be any more or this is all it have?
Are those the same LTL guns from the TIE Mangler?
I’m pretty sure those are smaller…
glad to see another repulsorlift tank from you. Outside the Broadsword, there wasn’t much of those in your gallery to this point.
Well this is a interesting design although I was expecting something bulkier then this (Like the Mammoth Tank from Command and Conquer.)
Also I’m willing to bet those duel LTLs could one shot the AT-AT.
Man, you guys. Too bulky! No too slim!
I’m not saying it is a bad thing I don’t mind you creating them the way you want them to be. I just wondering on where do you get the ideas on these unusual designs like this one Fractal.
That’s what she said?
That looks like it would mess some stuff up. Does it have shields? Turret looks kind of exposed.
My potentially unpopular opinion is that essentially everything in star wars has shields.
Eh, it makes sense really. I like it. I wish I had even a tenth of your talent, so keep going!
Except perhaps TIEs, at least TIE/LNs, TIE/INs (standard versions anyway), Light Duties, TIE Starfighters (aka the first upgraded version of the T.I.E.), TIE/RCs, TIE/SRs, TIE/SAs, TIE/AGs, TIE/D automated starfighter, pretty much all of the TIE Experimental line save for M3, aka TIE Warhead, TIE/rpt (kind of, most lack it, though some do have the shields), and the TIE ap-1.
I think all TIEs have shields, at least navigational shields with some secondary combat function. There are potential shield flashes on TIEs in the OT, and TIEs that don’t immediately take serious damage on hit, which doesn’t make sense unless they have some shielding.
For a high performance starfighter regardless of the model, some light shielding makes a lot of sense against debris strike if nothing else.
Agreed. I thought it was established somewhere that TIES did have navigational shielding. Combat shields is an entirely different animal.
Oh, well, in that case… forget I said anything regarding that. Didn’t know there was such a thing as navigational shields.
yeah I think they wouldn´t survive even a scpace to athmosphere flight without a shield, the heat would melt them.
Oh I do think the same, the battle on Hoth makes only sense with shielded AT-ATs.
First the rebels can´t do any damage to them, after one goes down a pair of snowspeeders blows it up so easily. I assume that the shielgenerator got damaged from the fall. And the snowspeeders cable attack and Lukes makes sense too, because slow moving objects can bypass most shields.