I quite like all the firepower we’re seeing her and this is only a small portion of the ship lol.
Can’t wait to see the rest this was always one of my favorite designs from you.
Ragnrok
5 years ago
I can now understand the depth of its weaponized capabilities in even more glorious detail!
Steve
5 years ago
A quick question. In the 6th image, there’s a row of dark along the hull section at the start of the superstructure, I couldn’t zoom in close enough but it looks like a big cluster of blaster mounts with lots of turrets next to each other in a row, am I right?
Also Fractal, she looks AMAZING! and all these guns make sense too for point defence. SW guns are not lasers, they are a form of plasma canon and plasma don’t last long in space, whilst the bigger guns, the anti-ship weapons would probably have a far greater range, the short range anti-fighter weapons wouldn’t, so having hundreds of them all over the place along her hull makes sense as guns wouldn’t be able to cover her entire 7.2km bulk from fighters if they were not spread out.
I know we’re all used to game mechanics shooting at 2km, because after all firing beyond visual range isn’t very fun for a dogfighting game, but the notion that there are defense guns that don’t cover the length of a normal capital ship is ridiculous on its face. HTL are supposed to have interplanetary range. Light turbolasers might lose beam cohesion before that, but not that many orders of magnitude below that.
Totally agree, I was thinking partially in game terms, but you could kind of ‘explain’ that by saying that the light and heavy blasters used by fighters shots dissipate after a short range (Say a few km as you said 🙂 ) because the magnetic bottle holding the shot together basically dissipates and the shot ‘falls apart’ for lack of a better word.
A longer ranged shot would require more energy, more tabana gas and assorted stuff that goes with the weapons to energise that amount of energy.
And even on a ship like this, you don’t wanna fill the interior up with all the equipment for those long ranged shots, it could be damaged etc. So short ranged point defence weapons with a limited range mean you need more weapons if you have shots petering out at about 2 – 5km to cover her hull.
I’m just spitballing ideas here 🙂
It’s not worth trying to reconcile game mechanics to such things as logic. They exist to make the game fun and balanced (sometimes not both) for players, not to actually resemble anything real. One is reminded of Mechwarrior long range missiles being limited to 1.2km range, or, you know, all of Warhammer 40k.
Star Wars guns turbolasers at least anyway do incorporate plasma but they aren’t full on plasma weapons they’re part particle beam part plasma.
And naval guns in star wars actually have incredibly range in the EA at least, the DBY-827 Dual Heavy Turbolaser Turrets of the Venator had a range of 10 light minutes.
Not counting the other dozen or more types of naval weaponry.
PhantomFury
5 years ago
Hey, Fractal (and everyone who’s interested) I recently had a headcanon that I think would serve as a better explanation as to how the Holdo Maneuver works (aside from the Canon’s “it’s the interaction with its experimental shield” gimmick) that lead to reasons why Rebels didn’t ram their X-wings to the Death Star and also happens to solve the question I saw on here on why the Empire don’t produce warships with faster hyperdrive when a “hotrod” like the Falcon can have one. Here’s my little explanation “diagram” I made and critiques/improvements/discussions welcome! https://bit.ly/2JaftNF
Very curious. So there must be a logarithmic curve for a ship’s kinetic energy that progresses from a stop towards hyperspace (speed?). If your goal is to turn your ship into a weapon, being too close to the target your kinetic energy is too low and you spat on their shields (or just have a normal-space collision). Too far away and your effective mass is too low (although it has high kinetic energy) and you scatter against the target’s ‘ray’ shields (or whatever protects a ship from energy weapons and the natural environment). This makes me wonder if part of the ‘calculations for the jump to lightspeed’ involve observations of the run-up (truemotion) zone to verify you won’t hit something. Hondo must have disabled whatever prevents a hyperspace jump when there is something in the run-up (truemotion) zone.
Interesting addition on the aspect of the logarithmic curve of kinetic energy! Shields defending against a point blank rammer never actually occured to me since I just take the absurd acceleration into hyperspace simply making them immediatly deadly once they start moving. (Of course, this is avoided in the original idea by the notion that ships (specifically starfighters) would have been plucked off long before they could get to proper position)
Still doesn’t really address the problem the Holdo maneuver has, contradicting conservation of energy. If a ship can muster the kinetic energy necessary to split apart a ship a 100 time its size, then where does the energy necessary to achieve that come from ? If it comes from the ships reactor, then why couldn’t this energy be used in some sort of weapon that would make modern star wars shields, turbolasers obsolete and mega-battleship an liability ?
The kinetic energy comes from the acceleration to hyperspace, whose methodology varies from ideology to ideology. One idea I’ve heard is the energy released when atomic particles of a substance (hypermatter?) are released and are sent at FTL speeds. My ideology doesn’t really cover this, however, but just raise the mechanics of the galaxy at large that Holdo just happen to weaponize, as well how it’s relatively (pun not intended) weak.
An alternate possibility is that there wasn’t actually a physical impact, but rather an intersection of the ships’ respective mass shadows. Per the EU understanding of hyperspace, gravity is the only form of energy that carries over the boundary between realspace and hyperspace (which is key to the functioning of things like the hyperdrive safety cut-out and gravity well projectors). The Raddus/Supremacy collision was sufficiently unique in appearance alone to suggest it was something other than just a standard kinetic impact; what if that’s what a graviton collision at several hundred times the speed of light looks like?
Mass shadow collision is an interesting idea, though it would suggest that Raddus’ entire mass had slammed into Supremacy while in hyperspace, but somehow only produced a mild fraction of the potential energy released from such an impact. Additionally this would mean every ship has a mass shadow so such an impact would be commonplace in a more heavily trafficked airspace like Coruscant? If this is only relevant for massive ships on the scale of Supremacy, I guess I can accept it though it doesn’t quite solve why the Rebels didn’t ram X-wing onto a clear mass shadow that is the Death Star. (Perhaps it’d be proportional to Raddus’ explosion and would produce only an explosion no better than a proton torpedo?)
For one thing, there’s a much greater mass disparity between an X-Wing and the Death Star than there is between the Raddus and the Supremacy. And even then, note that quite a lot of the Supremacy actually survived the impact, even though the ship itself was effectively destroyed. There’s no guarantee that, even if a ship the size of the Raddus was used to ram the Death Star at hyper-c velocities, it would’ve done enough damage to even mission kill the Death Star. What if it just blew a hole straight through it, yet didn’t damage enough critical systems to render the Death Star inoperable?
As to why it doesn’t happen more often? I think we lose track of exactly how big space is. It’s not that collisions don’t occur, it’s just that there’s so much available space out there that it’s vanishingly rare. Heavily traveled worlds like Coruscant likely have designated traffic patterns, jump points, etc, to offset the increased likelihood of it happening in much more crowded space.
Add to that the likelihood that a mass shadow collision may only impart a fraction of the energy of a physical collision. A lot of this stuff is purely theoretical, so we have no idea how hyperspace works or how the effects of a collision would carry across the dimensional barrier. Something like an X-Wing crashing into a planet might do little more than make an impromptu fireworks show in the upper atmosphere.
There’s also anecdotal evidence in the EU to suggest than anything with a sufficiently large mass shadow can affect the trajectory of objects in hyperspace that travel through it (note that, even at such close range, the Raddus still hit the Supremacy off-center). In addition, it’s noted that it’s very difficult to plot “micro-jumps,” even more so when the target is a specific ship; in the Thrawn trilogy, micro-jumps with that sort of precision were only possible because of Thrawn’s innovative use of gravity well projectors.
There’s a lot of things that I hate about TLJ, but oddly enough, this isn’t one of them. I see a combination of different factors that render this tactic all but useless outside of certain, highly specific circumstances. There’s the difficulty of plotting a sufficiently precise course, which limits its use to all but the largest targets (even an Executor might not be big enough), compounded by the fact that the mass shadow of a sufficiently large target must also be accounted for when plotting the course. Also, the ship being used for the ram must be of sufficient mass to actually have an effect (only the largest and most expensive ships), plus the likelihood of a graviton collision imparting much less energy than a physical ram. Also, most ships that size are going to be extremely valuable, and unlikely to be something expended in a one-off kamikaze run unless there is no other alternative (or it was going to be lost either way).
So, my theory is:
-Only the largest of targets can be successfully targeted by this technique (even an Executor might not be big enough).
-By their very nature, viable targets are actually harder to target because of the effects of gravity on hyperspace travel.
-Because of the nature of mass shadow collisions, the amount of energy delivered is actually much less than would be imparted by a physical collision at such velocities.
-As such, the ship actually performing the ram must be of sufficient size that its mass shadow will have an appreciable effect.
-Ships of sufficient size are extremely expensive and of such relative rarity that they would never simply be thrown away for one-off attacks except as a last resort.
The size restriction is only daunting when you’re contemplating throwing away your precious capital ships. If hyperspace ramming was at all viable, major powers would construct dirt cheap expendable droid ramships by attaching hyperdrives to massive asteroids or derelict wrecks, and sling them en-masse at targets in large salvoes to generate higher kill chances. Non-Death Star battlestations or macro-scale infrastructure like the Kuat shipyard ring would seem exceptionally vulnerable to this sort of attack, but it doesn’t seem to happen. Besides, we’ve already had the discussion as to how accurate Rogue One has retconned hyperspace jumps to be.
I prefer Bannon’s force-assisted theory for the TLJ incident, which avoids all of these complications.
Agreed. Star Wars is space-opera, not hard sci-fi, and is centered around individuals doing heroic things at the appropriate moment. This was Holdo’s “hero moment,” and the Force was with her. Using this as an excuse to introduce expendable droid ram ships dehumanizes and cheapens the core of Star Wars itself.
According to the novel for ANH, there is actually significant overlap between how far from a gravity well repulsorlifts function and how close to a gravity well a hyperdrive functions. Per the novel, in the scene where the Falcon arrives at the Alderaan system, the ship should’ve been ~1 planetary diameter from the planet’s surface (page 125 in my version). That’d put the “zone” for entering and leaving hyperspace between 1-2 planetary diameters, not the 6 where repulsorlifts hit their limit.
From a sheer consistency standpoint, it doesn’t explain why the rebels didn’t try hyperramming either DS2 or the executor at the battle of endor, using one of own capital ships.
I wonder where people get the idea that, just because a tactic was used in a certain set of circumstances, it must be the go-to tactic in all other similar circumstances. Maybe it /was/ on the table, but only as Plan B or Plan C if the starfighter strike at Yavin didn’t work out. Why waste a valuable asset like a star cruiser if you can get the same result by throwing some starfighters at the target instead?
Well, the now-Legendized ROTJ novel does mention munition-loaded transports (GR75?) coming into play once things go spitting-distance, but even there it seems like those were sublight approaches which gave crews time to evacuate. As for why hyper-rams weren’t tried earlier with a Mon Cal or three, lining up said impact(s) might’ve tipped off either big target (and their screen) to respond with tractor beams, Intensified Forward Firepower(C) and/or the dialed-down superlaser. I’ll also admit to serious doubt WRT even Home One-tonnage cruisers boasting enough impact yield to make DS2’s planetary-grade shield flicker.
My explaination for that is pretty simple: limited resources. As far as the Rebels knew, the Emperor wasn’t on the DS2 and to so freely lob away your valuable warships on a something a galactic power can just rebuilt, you are now in a disadvantage by one (or so) ships if the Empire chose to pursue.
Problem is, they DID in fact know the Emperor was on the DS2 (heck, that was part of the reason why they even BOTHERED to risk everything to blow the whole thing up, kill two birds with one stone in other words), so that doesn’t really make much sense as an explanation. And besides, they were pretty much using the near totality of their forces if the now Legends novelization is to be believed, so it’s not like they had anything to gain either way.
Did they? I might have to double check the sources, but I was pretty sure the Endor attack was just meant to disrupt the construction of the “incomplete” battlestation.
Yup. “We’ve learned the Emperor himself is personally overseeing the final stages of the construction of this Death Star. Many Bothans died to bring us this information.”
So yeah, that might’ve been worth the ram, but as I pointed out above, there are all kinds of reasons why it might not be as viable a tactic as people think, and certainly far more costly than sending a squadron or so of elite starfighters into the construction access points to attack the reactor directly.
Come to think of it, Ackbar & friends would’ve likely loved to put a couple dozen volleys into DS2’s least-constructed hemisphere. That pesky detail WRT the working superlaser and resultant evasive glomming onto Death Squadron just didn’t put ’em in any immediate position to do so (or line up any hypercollisions) once the damn shield was finally sabotaged. Although now I recall some SDN discussion WRT Ackbar’s cruiser perimeter mainly being intended to stop Palpy’s escape when he Foresaw(C) what was up (“Still failing miserably to cloak your thoughts, young Sky…’shoot here’? Oh sithspew.”)
Clarification appreciated. I suppose punching through that much artificial-moon materiel, even unshielded, would’ve been at least a bit time-consuming even for HTLs. Plus, not like Lando & Wedge wound up short on conflagrations to outpace.
Her maneuver had nothing to do with energy it had to do with the prototype shields that the Raddus had, without those shields a hyperspace ram would be impossible so it was literally a one time move that can never be used again according to the novelization of the movie.
Though I think it was stupid to even let it go that far, in the EU I think it was 3 imperial star destroyers collided with a executor super star destroyer via a hyperspace ram and it did absolutely nothing to it’s shields. And the hyperspace ram wasn’t even on purpose but accidental.
Even the EU didn’t want to mess with hyperspace ramming because of the can of worms it could have opened.
Sheesh, one-off experimental (particle?) shields that muck with hyperspace/mass shadows/whatnot? That’s only marginally better than ‘lightsaber-crystal superturbos which totes make all ur old ships swiss cheese but will never scratch a Hero Vessel’. I’m sorely tempted to handwave said novel tidbit as ‘secondary material expansion’ ala the ROTS adaptation’s extra dialogue/context for Palpy & Mace’s saber duel.
As for that 80s newsprint comic’s Executor impact thing…sad to say I distinctly recall Ex suffering temporary shield loss (though no direct damage). A few stardestroyer.net posters claimed the crashing Impstars had already reverted to realspace (and average-to-low sublight velocity) before impact (I sure as hell couldn’t tell based on one panel), and the comic (reprinted by Dark Horse as ‘Classic Star Wars’ if anyone’s curious) later has Ex briefly lose power ’cause the Falcon strafed its fantail while shields were disrupted by yet *another* one-shot macguffin (a shield-breaking ‘power gem’ on its last legs, if anyone cares). So offhand, I’d take any technical anecdotes from that EU corner with fifty bulk freighters’ worth of salt.
Anyhow, fourthed with gusto WRT ‘relativistic deathspam at any eyeblink’ throwing a pall on this particular setting.
Indeed. This is the same story group that said the MC75 was a converted building (never mind the vast difference in structural tolerances involved) and that Chirrut Emwe could only see because of a special crystal fitted into his staff (never mind how that was supposed to help him shoot down a TIE fighter with a bowcaster). I view anything that comes from Darth Maus with extreme skepticism until someone can provide a plausible explanation as to why.
No one said that the MC-75 was designed to be a town hall and not a destroyer. If (lazy) Imperial authorities are preventing the squids from putting together proper warships, it would make a neat story if they responded by disguising their naval buildup with various cover stories like this particular town hall gimmick, and building them with warship-grade reactors, structural tolerances, and lots of pleasant balconies that have conveniently good turbolaser arcs.
Per the Rogue One Visual Guide, the Profundity was literally the Central Governance Tower of the city of Nystullum on Mon Cal (of which Admiral Raddus was the mayor). Not “disguised as,” or “officially listed as,” but “was.” Considering that it looks a lot like Clone Wars-era Free Dac Volunteers Engineering Corps (mostly Quarren) products like the Prosperity and the Malevolence, and nothing at all like the later MC80 and MC85 ships from RotJ (which were converted space liners), a safer approach would’ve been to make it a Clone Wars era ship pressed into service with the Alliance. It’s hard enough to picture converted space liners serving as warships because of the structural issues; a planetary habitat is far worse.
I double-checked. Specifically, his staff has a sliver of kyber crystal in the end-cap, and that the sound of the crystal in motion allows him to better gauge where the end of the staff is in a fight. But yeah, in a galaxy with the Force, it would’ve been just as easy to make him a mystic of some type from a non-Jedi Force using tradition.
Your last line is…pretty much what I figured Chirrut & Baze were (they had a real Believer/Agnostic Couple(C) dynamic). Just enough mojo to move the script along, not *nearly* enough to bend it around peoples’ ears Darth Stellarbodypunter(C)-style.
That”s been the general approach of the gaming community for quite a while. In the early days of fandom discussion on the Internet, there would be all-out brawls over what preempted what when there was a conflict in canon. After a while, there was so much contradictory stuff that it just couldn’t be papered over any more, so most people just resorted to picking and choosing what parts of the EU they wished to include in their own personal version of the SWU. The phrase “my SWU” pops up quite a bit.
Would anyone be down with putting together a Fractalsponge discord? It would make a neat community hub for having and archiving these sorts of discussions.
As someone who likes a stable background the likes of official narratives (ironic, I know, as I am the one that started this discussion that leads to this tangent), the level of lore flexibility presented in 40k isn’t too viable for me. I like Legends approach to it though, where things are concrete enough to have continuity but if a better/contradicting idea came by, relevant details are retconned/altered to fit in with the newer sources for better flow. This method is far more favorable to the likes of current procedure in Canon that runs through the “Story Group” (can you feel those air quotes?) and every element is rigidly in place. Especially when they churn out movies and TV shows with high canon, making it even harder for creativity to blossom.
Sad thing is, I could totally see ex-CIS Quarren shipwrights winding up with the brunt of Imp sanctions while their currently-‘civilian’ Mon Cal counterparts tried to slip suspicion as long as possible. Plus, a reactivated auto-facility or six out in the reaches makes markedly more sense than seed fleet assembly in the increasingly-monitored depths of Dac.
I know the ram had to do with the shields, which is why I made thid headcanon. The shield reasoning is like the testament I dislike about Disney’s canon, with every explaination of the impossible being waved away with some new tech when you could try to rationalize it. Let this asspull go on some more next thing you know, the Inquisitor were able to fly because their lightsaber crystal were special or something.
I recently read some head canon about how it could be the Hyperspace tracking tech that allowed the Holdo maneuver to work that doesn’t break all the years of canon. Now even though you won’t hit things in real space while in hyperspace, so no worrying about the small stuff. But if something is big enough to create a gravity well and you intersect that grav-well while in hyperspace you are pulled into real space, this is where your problems begin. It’s how Interdictors work. (Head Canon here) So the Supremacy was using a new hyperspace tracking technology, to do its job it gave the Supremacy a hyperspace shadow, similar to a gravity well. But where a grav-well has a smooth exponential of escalating gravity coefficient that pulls ships into real-space. When the Supremacy is using the hyperspace tracker it has a hyperspace shadow, not a grav-well, when a ship in hyperspace hits this hyper-shadow it instantly translates back into real-space. The energy of that much mass trying to reoccupy real-space at a high PLS that was already occupied by the Supremacy caused an effect that was similar to a shaped charge. The blast tore forward through real-space, destroying Star destroyers and damaging the Supremacy, with the majority of the energy being released into hyper-space. The reason you don’t see hyperspace ramming over the 50,000 years of hyper-space history is that it will only work on ships with hyper-shadows because they are equipped with Hyperspace trackers.
I have seen this theory before when Eckharts covered it but can’t agree to it for some reasons. For one, the hyperspace tracker – from official definition (I know the hypocrisy here for we are debunking another official response) – is merely a supercomputer that presumably use machine learning to take in all the galactic history’s worth of hyperspace jumps to output the most probable destination for the First Order to follow. Another thing to note is that it isn’t the gravity well that drags ship into realspace, but rather the ship’s own navicomputer as a safety measure against mass shadows. Otherwise, the Falcon would have been forced to return into Realspace as Han attempts to drop out below the shield of the Starkiller Base well beyond of what he pulled off – indicating him turning off the safety beforehand (as a side note, that ludicrous maneuver defeats my theory too, as the deceleration phase, part of the Falcon’s mass would have slammed into the shield. Unless…he were to use the very slow back up hyperdrive for the shield penetrating jump. This would also buy him “a lot” of time to have his reflex kick in.)
Homing beacons obviously worked fine in the first film, and other experimental technologies have been suggested over the years. The mass shadow concept doesn’t hold water that well since technically all ships in hyperspace would have a mass shadow to some degree or another.
Could I get a reword of that please? I can’t seem to grasp what you mean. Did you mean you need some form of barrier for tracking to work? Or barrier to be present for hyperspace ram, which the tracking provides? I can’t quite wrap my head around why a tracker of sort would have a hyperspace presence. Aside from the Falcon being tracked like CRMcNeill pointed out, (though the delay in Imperial response could point that it is a more conventional realspace tracking device for the Death Star to follow when it dropped out of hyperspace…or just that the Falcon is just that much faster than the battlestation), there’s also the tracking of the Slave I in AotC, where Obi-Wan’s near-instantaneous tailing of Jango could be attributed to hyperspace tracking on its own. Of course, the FO’s tech didn’t rely on an actual tracking device…which is why I am pretty okay with the supercomputer idea (even if it really isn’t anything new in terms of Imperial tactic…guess it’s just automated now?)
Barrier as in the transition between realspace and hyperspace. Some material says you can’t track or communicate or sense across it, but I think that interpretation has major issues for the setting as it’s displayed.
Ah I see what you mean now. I did hear about the impossibility of communicating between the two though, but various Canon sources, such as Rogue One, have already disproven that; at the very least, in the canon. Perhaps tracking objects through hyperspace might still be impossible (if reasoning is given for the aforementioned two examples) but with machine learning supercomputer that takes in millennia worth of entry and exit points, it doesn’t exactly track object through dimensions, but rather just a really good prediction algorithm.
It’s been a long-standing part of the EU that mass (in the form of gravity) is detectable across the FTL barrier, as it’s an essential component to the functioning of hyperdrives from early on in the WEG system. The issue there, however, is that most ships are too small to have a mass-shadow that’s detectable by existing gravity sensors in real space.
They need to decide if it is or it isn’t possible to detect ships. Small ships could carry enough firepower to devastate planets. Either you can generally get early warning of an approaching ship or you’re stuck with planets needing to have full shields raised all the time, among other issues with making the setting function properly.
I think generally, it’s not possible to have ships be detected while in hyperspace, but there are some form of radiation that is emitted in a particular axis when they drop out of hyperspace. I believe this mechanic is what alerted the Rebels of Echo Base of the approaching Imperial Fleet (though, other scanners could do that job too, to be fair) As for shielded planets, Imperial fortress worlds at strategic locations do have constant planetary shields, I’d think this is also true – perhaps to the lesser scale – with the Old and New Republic worlds of significance.
Yeah, Cronau burst I think is what Saxton referred to it as. But if a fleet jumps into near orbit and opens up, then that’s the end of the planet. Plenty of worlds don’t have full shielding. They might be individually unimportant but it’s intolerable for a galactic polity to sacrifice them to random raiding. It’s like not caring that Minneapolis gets nuked so long as Chicago is protected. So you either have early warning and thus gain the use of hyperspace speed for defense, or you have huge standing defense forces everywhere and that just doesn’t seem like it’s the norm. Or, I suppose, the attacker always wins, which also doesn’t seem all that normal. If there’s no constraint on the use of FTL, then the speed we see being used is a problem. You don’t need pinpoint tracking at huge ranges for this, but you need something more than first seeing an enemy fleet when it enters weapons range.
Well, the line was ” General, there’s a fleet of Star Destroyers coming out of hyperspace in sector four “. That leaves some ambiguity as to how early Echo Base detected Death Squadron, but if the technology is widespread, Alliance Strategic HQ should have had it available.
The other relevant line was “Reroute all power to the energy shield.”, not “Activate the energy shield.” My inclination is that anyone with shields entrusts their activation to a simple AI that can raise defenses the microsecond it detects a threat rather than relying on humans to do so, and so Rieekan was just allocating more output.
At the same time, open warfare is still relatively new to the galaxy after millennia of peace enforced by precognitive telepaths, and decision-makers are still adapting from a peacetime mindset. During the Clone Wars, neither the Republic or CIS had the inclination to glass civilian populations from orbit due to the public relations needs of both their own citizens and the desire to appeal to unaligned worlds. We don’t see widespread strategic bombardments during the Galactic Civil War either, as the Palpatinists can’t really find the enemy and the Rebels really want to take the moral high ground. Alderaan is the exception that proves the rule.
A more mature political equilibrium dominated by multiple warlike great powers prone to genocide would look very different. Perhaps civilian populations are evacuated to cloaked worldship habitats deep in the extragalactic void, or systems are enveloped in layers of gravity-well satellites that prevent anyone from entering realspace closer than the Termination Shock. MAD might just work too.
Who said it had to be great power genocide? A terrorist or a pirate gets an HTL or slaps a freighter drive and shield on an asteroid and that’s potentially a dead continent, and they don’t care about PR. Any government that lets that happen regularly doesn’t have its authority survive very long. So they either need to have some kind of early warning so that hyperspace-speed reinforcements can be summoned, or maintain sufficient force everywhere that needs to be protected. I know which one I’d prefer to have to justify.
My main concern was great powers with significant naval assets because a fairly mundane planetary shield controlled by a decent droid brain should cover the cases of extremist terrorism and extortion by some common criminal who jury-rigged a turbolaser. I’ve come to understand that planetary shields are far more effective per unit of output than pure starship equivalents, if our data point was Echo Base’s Praetor powerplant being capable of indefinitely holding off an Executor’s battlegroup while also fueling a V-150. I could speculate some technobabble about how a planet’s natural magnetic field and Van Allen Belts might facilitate that, but I’d rather not.
In the old days, perhaps there was some Old Republic senatorial mandate that all existing settlements and new colonies required the installation of a mandatory yet deeply subsidized basic theater shield unit that would require a dedicated warship/siege platform to crack. Maybe the bureaucracy for inspection of those shields stayed clean and competent for millennia? Then again, for most of recorded history, there were also Jedi around to go do yoga and detect and then neutralize that sort of extremist threat before it materialized. With them all purged, even with the largest arms buildup in recorded history and all the Clone Wars surplus still in service, the Imperial starfleet must be struggling to provide the same kind of security.
Besides, despite my screen-name I have a fundamentally positive view of human nature. Despite tens of millions of commercial flights around the the world annually, we’ve only had one (extremely tragic of course) case of a jumbo jet being used as a weapon. During the Golden Age of Piracy and the American Revolution, when privately owned warships abounded, we didn’t really see cases of wanton bombardments of populated areas for no good reason. I’m sure if people were a standard deviation or two more immoral that kind of stuff would happen all the time, but we are a remarkably well socialized subtype of primate.
My interpretation of planetary shields is that the heat management is far easier, so the endurance is very high – you have an entire planet to act as a heat sink and huge amount of space for radiator volume, but in vacuum you are restricted in space for heat sink and radiator. Sort of like on a power-to-weight basis marine powerplants can be amazing, but compared to what can be done with nigh-unlimited space on land, the peak throughput is minor.
My thing about early warning through hyperspace is an Occam’s Razor thing. It deals with a lot of issues with minimal adjustment to how the setting seems to be arranged. Ubiquitous area/planetary shielding doesn’t seem to be the case, and certainly not on an automated basis, and automated shielding without warning has major issues for the kinds of orbital traffic density we see in Core worlds. Jedi precog might have been enough in an era of general peace, but no *single* system has that high an effectiveness rate. But they weren’t ever all that numerous, and frankly we don’t see their precog being all THAT good in any media as to be used at the level of routine systemic interception of threats to 50 million+ planetary-equivalent polities. Sensors can be cheap, but the supply of Jedi is always going to be limited.
I tend to agree with you about human nature, but I think your analysis here is flawed. You don’t need a high proportion of crazy to get problems in the absence of really really tight access controls. Commercial flights are highly regulated. Hyperdrive-capable vessels do not seem to be. The relative societal impact (so to speak) of a hyperdrive capable asteroid or turbolaser-armed warship is a lot more than any kind of Earth warship until the advent of nuclear weapons (also tightly controlled). Even 20th century naval bombardments were not really all that destructive in the grand scheme of things, given inaccuracy and just the fact that cities are big and ships can only carry so much energy in their shells absent nukes. A privateer or pirate threatening to bombard a city with solid shot is not a serious threat. Someone threatening to jump an asteroid onto an impact vector absolutely is a serious threat to a planetary society as a whole.
Radiator volume is possible and is definitely an issue on fighter-scale craft, but neutrino radiators are so ludicrously magical that capitals don’t seem to ever really have issues with heat. As a proportion of internal volume from the ICS, destroyers only devote a pittance to radiators compared to reactor and never seem to have an issue with heat dissipation in any other media. The most common bottleneck for shielding or weapons fire always seems to be reactor output or emitter throughput.
Regarding the Jedi argument, I acknowledge that all systems are prone to flaws and that individual Jedi are subject to loss of competence or confidence, but precog allows for the system to compensate by having other Jedi internally intervene before the problem ever manifests. Jedi only seem to have problems with using precog when up against other force users in the novels, not common extremists. Besides, the Jedi don’t even need to fly out and deal with every individual terrorist/madman themselves with lightsabers and mind tricks, they just need to alert local or sector authorities of the Person of Interest’s position as of 3 hours from now. Even a handful of masters sitting in some sort of battle meditation trance in the middle of a call center might be able to handle the vast majority of problems.
Automated shielding appeals to me because it takes the human factor out of the equation, should be relatively affordable for most polities, and you don’t need to activate the entire planetary shield for most threats. A single kilometer-wide panel in front of the oncoming threat should suffice, giving plenty of time and room for local orbital traffic to run rather than be vaporized. There might be a single standardized, self-contained shield unit manufactured in the billions on some factory planet and then distributed to every settlement that needs it. Since it’s turned off for 99.9 percent of its lifespan and doesn’t need to withstand real bombardment from warships, it probably isn’t even that expensive. Given the industrial capacity of galactic civilization and Old Republic political values, that seems doable.
However, my point was that while hyperspace warning makes a lot of sense if we were designing a universe from scratch, I just don’t think cinematic evidence supports it.
If the Separatists were able to detect objects coming out of hyperspace at a fair distance away, they should get fair warning of a Republic task force entering the system before a LAAT gets close enough to Dooku to shoot him. Grevious at another CIS strategic HQ should have been alerted that Kenobi’s battlegroup was arriving long before Clones fast-roped onto his position. Coruscant and the Republic Home Fleet should have been at general quarters long before droids manage to get transports in the atmosphere. Scarif should have been ready for Raddus. Raddus should have have been ready (as much as you can) for the Death Star and then the Devastator. Ackbar expected complete tactical surprise at Endor as well, which shouldn’t be possible with ubiquitous hyperdrive warning. I hate to mention this last one, but the Resistance in TLJ also didn’t seem to be aware of the siege pizza and Snoke’s boomerang until both appeared right on top of them as well.
There’s also mention on Wookie for something first brought up in Dark Empire called the Imperial Hyperspace Security Net, which introduces early warning capability but only comes online for the Deep Core after Endor. That sort of fits your bill while not contradicting film, but it shows up far too late, and only for a few fortress worlds.
For shielding, heat is absolutely going to be a bottleneck. At the simplest read, whatever starships can do with dissipation, planetary systems will just be able to have MORE of it, regardless of what it is or how it works.
Automated shielding if it exists dies after the Clone Wars. Same reason in universe man-in-the loop is required for even point defense. Partial panel based shield system make sense though in general.
I’ll say that in the movies people get surprised out of hyperspace all the time, and we don’t need a technical discussion to understand why. I’m not certain what the best way to square that circle in terms of world-building is, but Hull 721 had a decent model – detection, but limited and with various ways of circumventing it like unusual or unexpected hyperspace courses. I’m totally fine with it being a sectoral scanning thing and patrol or sensor density and or focus determines the overall effectiveness. That would explain most of the cinematic examples while giving decent security for areas that have some defenses. Utapau, Hoth, Endor – secret locations relying on said secrecy rather than patrol density that would be tip offs. Geonosis, Scarif – peacetime footing and complacency. Coruscant/Scarif – rear-area complacency and an uncovered approach that shouldn’t have been available to begin with. Raddus/Scarif – sensor focus on the shield gate, nothing to spare for recon screens beyond the primary battle zone because it was a scratch force assembled for an emergency deployment.
This is sort of on par with fighter effectiveness vs capitals for me. I don’t see how the setting works without an explanation. Capital ships are worthless if fighters ignore shields, and interstellar civilizations are indefensible in a reasonable way if hyperspace mobility is both undetectable, highly fast, and accurate.
I can meet you half way. Hyperspace detection that requires substantial investment in your own distant hyperspace sensor nodes or active patrols does sound fairly doable and not particularly contradicted by the films. I’m just a little opposed to easy and ubiquitous hyperspace detection that can be achieved by sticking a dish on a building. While the Imperial Navy deliberately threw automation out the window for anything more sophisticated than K2-S0, I wonder how much that culture permeated down to local planetary civil defense?
That said, you’d also think that the Geonosis planetary defense grid would go to high alert once you’ve abducted a Senator and 2 Jedi, and then butchered another few dozen that snuck in to save them. Eh.
The sensor in question is called the Hyperspace Signal Interceptor, which is a common sensor type for ships in the WEG EU. It can’t detect ships in hyperspace, but does detect the “splash” upon entry or exit. The Improved HSI could also calculate a ship’s base course, but had to be relatively close to get a good enough read on it.
The only other in-game method for tracking in hyperspace is a homing device called an S-Thread Tracker that effectively uses the Holo-Net as a trip-wire system. Per WEG, the Holonet is supported by a network of satellites maintaining tight-beam FTL communication links with the satellites around them, with the tight-beam links called S-Threads. Every time a ship tagged with an S-Thread Tracker crossed an S-Thread, it would send a signal through the Holo-Net back to whoever was doing the tracking. It wasn’t enough to provide a precise location, but was close enough to put a searcher in the ballpark.
Well, it’s out of their hands now, since the license is in its second set of hands since WEG. Based on the available material, it’s pretty conclusive that WEG made it so that ships in hyperspace couldn’t be detected. Of course, plenty of fans have come up with ways around that; I’ve proposed two different theories myself. One is a large mobile scan system mounted on an Interdictor, replacing the gravity well projectors with what I called a Hyperspace Flux-Net Transceiver that could detect passing ships in hyperspace within about a 10-minute radius (modified by the ship’s drive speed). The other was a Hyperspace Early Warning System, an immobile automated listening post parked in hyperspace near a system that could detect the “bow waves” of incoming ships (ala the use of the misappropriated Hyperspace Orbiting Scanner in Hull 721).
In Hull 721 detecting bow shock was a standard sensor ability. They could estimate roughly where the ship emerges, though a ship could fake out the prediction by “bouncing” off the transition and skipping out into realspace somewhere else, and they could get only an idea of how much energy the sensor target had and estimate what it was from that, not any specific tactical details about what it was. This seemed like a reasonable minimum sensor capability across the barrier.
I thought it was an ability specific to the Black Prince due to their acquisition and repurposing of a HOS (and hiding it in their hypermatter fuel tanks).
I distinctly remember other ships and parties than the Prince reporting bow shocks, but then again as much as we like it, 721 is fanon.
However, even in 721, Lennart was able to savagely maul a fortress world before all of its shielding and defenses came online, as well as a totally unprepared Lucrehulk above it, although his ludicrously elite crew had to plot quite the difficult and risky hyperspace corkscrew course to make that possible. That might be a good compromise. ECR thinks things through.
Yeah, definitely some great stuff in there, but he specifically said that he was taking certain liberties. In particular, his use of tactical micro-jumps was definitely outside the norm.
Then again, Disney has been increasingly playing fast and loose with the rules on hyperdrive as well. It used to take Kylo’s dad several minutes while on a steady course in high orbit to plot a course through lightspeed. Now, he’s just hitting the lever while still in a hangar. The U-Wing incident in Rogue One and everything about hyperspeed in TLJ just reinforce that.
Disney Wars needed a Kevin Feige to ride herd on wayward directors. Instead, it got Kathleen Kennedy. Oh well; we all draw our lines somewhere. I know one guy who gave up on Star Wars as far back as the Special Editions.
Too little, too late. They needed him – or someone like him, at any rate – to run the sequel trilogy, to be a show runner for Star Wars the way he was for the MCU. Bringing him in now to do one film is either a name-dropping publicity stunt or just trying to close the barn door after the horses have long since gotten out.
I’m fairly certain they’re ion. If you look at the guns muzzles, they seem to be similar to what fractal used for the ion variant of the scythe and some previous models.
I wonder how much plumbing an ion cannon requires. They seem to be really squeezed in there with other mounts surrounding them. Whatever the requirements there must be two sets. If the plumbing were shared, I’d think only one could fire at a time, which negates the benefit of having two in the same sector.
I don’t know why you’d assume the trunking would be particularly voluminous – on the cross sections they are much smaller than the turrets they serve. These mounts aren’t that much closer than the multi-turret batteries elsewhere on the ship, and much more separated than the ISD’s turret batteries (either major subtype).
Sorry, I don’t mean to second guess you or question your design. You’d know far better than I would. I just think it would be fun to layout the interiors. Or think about how they might look.
She is coming along nicely, very nicely! I can’t wait to see the finish product!
PzAce247
5 years ago
Fangasm has happend…. This one stays my alltime favorite. Just the right combination of dread inspiring aesthetics (read: Size) and utility.
Paul
5 years ago
I’m so glad you are upgrading this beautiful ship. By far this is my favorite Star Wars ship. Just everything about it looks right. Not to mention it fixes a lot of short comings of the regular ISDs.
Guest
5 years ago
Those ultra heavy TBLs are monstrous..
She has a real German pocket battleship vibe for a dreadnought. Quick enough to outrun anything that could out gun her (as if there is anything) and enough firepower to decimate anything she can catch or foolish enough to keep up with her.
Eh, the Kriegsmarine’s convoy raiders seem to have somehow accumulated a rep out of all proportion to their historical effectiveness v. peer-ballpark adversaries. Still, fair points WRT Bellator not being overmatched or outsped by much out there (especially much that wasn’t nominally on the same side). Closest CIS match I can think of would be a Subjugator cruiser, and they’d need to be *very* sharp about landing & capitalizing on those ion-pulse hits.
Daib
5 years ago
I’m curious why you went with ball mounts with fairly limited firing arcs instead of more turrets on the unused dorsal hull areas? Purely aesthetic, or is there some rationale behind this that I’m not getting? That being said, this fine lady is shaping up quite well.
Mostly aesthetic so that I could integrate a battery into that corner and use the structure around it to blend the terrace into the rest of the hull. I was never entirely happy with how that section was so blocky on the original.
Then they don’t remember it right. I think we are conditioned by shitty game engine renderings to think about them in terms of their basic blocking (and blocky) shapes. But if you look at an actual movie model, a good portion of those lines are obscured by greebles and details, making the overall result considerably more bumpy in line. Simple art doesn’t have the detail to show it, but the movies and movie-quality art absolutely do and should.
Fair enough. I sort of meant that Imp ships, even after all the detailing and greebles still were built out of recognizable geometric shapes with lots of straight lines compared to say Mon Cal vessels.
The aesthetics of ball turrets is ok – I’m just not convinced they could work mechanically, when I look at them. What mechanism is holding them in place? Just electromagnetism? What happens when the power is out, then?
No idea. Same as the v150 at Hoth. Probably some flavor of the same stuff that tensor fields and inertial compensation uses, or repulsorlift, which seems to be able to work largely unpowered. I doubt they are mechanically connected to the hull at all in the traditional sense.
A physical retainer would be attached to the ball at the opposite pole to the gun barrels and would pose a limit on the rotation (like an eyeball, I agree) very much limiting the arc of fire compared to a traditional gun mount.
(expanding on my previous post)
If the balls would be recessed halfway into the hull they would be able to rotate 90 degrees in every direction in theory (less because of hull thickness and diameter of the anchoring point). The ball turrets in the model protrude much further out – very much unlike my eyballs do, fortunately 😉 – limiting the fireing arc further.
An emergency clamp mechanism with otherwise unrestricted movement poses similar issues.
Guys, I’m not sure why you’re trying to overthink this. It’s a ball turret. We’ve never seen one before in Star W…oh wait, there’s the Hoth ion cannon. That mount protrudes even more from its socket than this mounting. Whatever mechanism allows for the power contacts and secure the mounting (presumably it’s primarily non-mechanical) allows these mounts a lot of freedom to rotate. Also, presumably whatever mechanism is at work also has a good deal of combat redundancy.
A physical clamp, if it existed, could just be an emergency mechanism to prevent the ball mount from flying free from the socket. That can engage only on some disruption of the primary (field-based) retention system. It could be as simple as a ring of magnetized clamps but is it really necessary to attempt the detail engineering on this?
A ball turret mounted at its equator wouldn’t have a 90 degree arc to each side – you still need to accommodate the actual gun barrel in the middle. So if you wanted that kind of arc, you’d need to extend the center of ball out, like this mount, to get the clearance required.
I quite like all the firepower we’re seeing her and this is only a small portion of the ship lol.
Can’t wait to see the rest this was always one of my favorite designs from you.
I can now understand the depth of its weaponized capabilities in even more glorious detail!
A quick question. In the 6th image, there’s a row of dark along the hull section at the start of the superstructure, I couldn’t zoom in close enough but it looks like a big cluster of blaster mounts with lots of turrets next to each other in a row, am I right?
Also Fractal, she looks AMAZING! and all these guns make sense too for point defence. SW guns are not lasers, they are a form of plasma canon and plasma don’t last long in space, whilst the bigger guns, the anti-ship weapons would probably have a far greater range, the short range anti-fighter weapons wouldn’t, so having hundreds of them all over the place along her hull makes sense as guns wouldn’t be able to cover her entire 7.2km bulk from fighters if they were not spread out.
I know we’re all used to game mechanics shooting at 2km, because after all firing beyond visual range isn’t very fun for a dogfighting game, but the notion that there are defense guns that don’t cover the length of a normal capital ship is ridiculous on its face. HTL are supposed to have interplanetary range. Light turbolasers might lose beam cohesion before that, but not that many orders of magnitude below that.
Totally agree, I was thinking partially in game terms, but you could kind of ‘explain’ that by saying that the light and heavy blasters used by fighters shots dissipate after a short range (Say a few km as you said 🙂 ) because the magnetic bottle holding the shot together basically dissipates and the shot ‘falls apart’ for lack of a better word.
A longer ranged shot would require more energy, more tabana gas and assorted stuff that goes with the weapons to energise that amount of energy.
And even on a ship like this, you don’t wanna fill the interior up with all the equipment for those long ranged shots, it could be damaged etc. So short ranged point defence weapons with a limited range mean you need more weapons if you have shots petering out at about 2 – 5km to cover her hull.
I’m just spitballing ideas here 🙂
It’s not worth trying to reconcile game mechanics to such things as logic. They exist to make the game fun and balanced (sometimes not both) for players, not to actually resemble anything real. One is reminded of Mechwarrior long range missiles being limited to 1.2km range, or, you know, all of Warhammer 40k.
Oh aye, as someone who’s an avid Battletech player the ranges are bonkers 😀
Sweet! Now I know what to bring up whenever I get powerplayed by a 40k fan!
You are partly right Steve
Star Wars guns turbolasers at least anyway do incorporate plasma but they aren’t full on plasma weapons they’re part particle beam part plasma.
And naval guns in star wars actually have incredibly range in the EA at least, the DBY-827 Dual Heavy Turbolaser Turrets of the Venator had a range of 10 light minutes.
Not counting the other dozen or more types of naval weaponry.
Hey, Fractal (and everyone who’s interested) I recently had a headcanon that I think would serve as a better explanation as to how the Holdo Maneuver works (aside from the Canon’s “it’s the interaction with its experimental shield” gimmick) that lead to reasons why Rebels didn’t ram their X-wings to the Death Star and also happens to solve the question I saw on here on why the Empire don’t produce warships with faster hyperdrive when a “hotrod” like the Falcon can have one. Here’s my little explanation “diagram” I made and critiques/improvements/discussions welcome! https://bit.ly/2JaftNF
Very curious. So there must be a logarithmic curve for a ship’s kinetic energy that progresses from a stop towards hyperspace (speed?). If your goal is to turn your ship into a weapon, being too close to the target your kinetic energy is too low and you spat on their shields (or just have a normal-space collision). Too far away and your effective mass is too low (although it has high kinetic energy) and you scatter against the target’s ‘ray’ shields (or whatever protects a ship from energy weapons and the natural environment). This makes me wonder if part of the ‘calculations for the jump to lightspeed’ involve observations of the run-up (truemotion) zone to verify you won’t hit something. Hondo must have disabled whatever prevents a hyperspace jump when there is something in the run-up (truemotion) zone.
Interesting addition on the aspect of the logarithmic curve of kinetic energy! Shields defending against a point blank rammer never actually occured to me since I just take the absurd acceleration into hyperspace simply making them immediatly deadly once they start moving. (Of course, this is avoided in the original idea by the notion that ships (specifically starfighters) would have been plucked off long before they could get to proper position)
Still doesn’t really address the problem the Holdo maneuver has, contradicting conservation of energy. If a ship can muster the kinetic energy necessary to split apart a ship a 100 time its size, then where does the energy necessary to achieve that come from ? If it comes from the ships reactor, then why couldn’t this energy be used in some sort of weapon that would make modern star wars shields, turbolasers obsolete and mega-battleship an liability ?
The kinetic energy comes from the acceleration to hyperspace, whose methodology varies from ideology to ideology. One idea I’ve heard is the energy released when atomic particles of a substance (hypermatter?) are released and are sent at FTL speeds. My ideology doesn’t really cover this, however, but just raise the mechanics of the galaxy at large that Holdo just happen to weaponize, as well how it’s relatively (pun not intended) weak.
An alternate possibility is that there wasn’t actually a physical impact, but rather an intersection of the ships’ respective mass shadows. Per the EU understanding of hyperspace, gravity is the only form of energy that carries over the boundary between realspace and hyperspace (which is key to the functioning of things like the hyperdrive safety cut-out and gravity well projectors). The Raddus/Supremacy collision was sufficiently unique in appearance alone to suggest it was something other than just a standard kinetic impact; what if that’s what a graviton collision at several hundred times the speed of light looks like?
Mass shadow collision is an interesting idea, though it would suggest that Raddus’ entire mass had slammed into Supremacy while in hyperspace, but somehow only produced a mild fraction of the potential energy released from such an impact. Additionally this would mean every ship has a mass shadow so such an impact would be commonplace in a more heavily trafficked airspace like Coruscant? If this is only relevant for massive ships on the scale of Supremacy, I guess I can accept it though it doesn’t quite solve why the Rebels didn’t ram X-wing onto a clear mass shadow that is the Death Star. (Perhaps it’d be proportional to Raddus’ explosion and would produce only an explosion no better than a proton torpedo?)
For one thing, there’s a much greater mass disparity between an X-Wing and the Death Star than there is between the Raddus and the Supremacy. And even then, note that quite a lot of the Supremacy actually survived the impact, even though the ship itself was effectively destroyed. There’s no guarantee that, even if a ship the size of the Raddus was used to ram the Death Star at hyper-c velocities, it would’ve done enough damage to even mission kill the Death Star. What if it just blew a hole straight through it, yet didn’t damage enough critical systems to render the Death Star inoperable?
As to why it doesn’t happen more often? I think we lose track of exactly how big space is. It’s not that collisions don’t occur, it’s just that there’s so much available space out there that it’s vanishingly rare. Heavily traveled worlds like Coruscant likely have designated traffic patterns, jump points, etc, to offset the increased likelihood of it happening in much more crowded space.
Add to that the likelihood that a mass shadow collision may only impart a fraction of the energy of a physical collision. A lot of this stuff is purely theoretical, so we have no idea how hyperspace works or how the effects of a collision would carry across the dimensional barrier. Something like an X-Wing crashing into a planet might do little more than make an impromptu fireworks show in the upper atmosphere.
There’s also anecdotal evidence in the EU to suggest than anything with a sufficiently large mass shadow can affect the trajectory of objects in hyperspace that travel through it (note that, even at such close range, the Raddus still hit the Supremacy off-center). In addition, it’s noted that it’s very difficult to plot “micro-jumps,” even more so when the target is a specific ship; in the Thrawn trilogy, micro-jumps with that sort of precision were only possible because of Thrawn’s innovative use of gravity well projectors.
There’s a lot of things that I hate about TLJ, but oddly enough, this isn’t one of them. I see a combination of different factors that render this tactic all but useless outside of certain, highly specific circumstances. There’s the difficulty of plotting a sufficiently precise course, which limits its use to all but the largest targets (even an Executor might not be big enough), compounded by the fact that the mass shadow of a sufficiently large target must also be accounted for when plotting the course. Also, the ship being used for the ram must be of sufficient mass to actually have an effect (only the largest and most expensive ships), plus the likelihood of a graviton collision imparting much less energy than a physical ram. Also, most ships that size are going to be extremely valuable, and unlikely to be something expended in a one-off kamikaze run unless there is no other alternative (or it was going to be lost either way).
So, my theory is:
-Only the largest of targets can be successfully targeted by this technique (even an Executor might not be big enough).
-By their very nature, viable targets are actually harder to target because of the effects of gravity on hyperspace travel.
-Because of the nature of mass shadow collisions, the amount of energy delivered is actually much less than would be imparted by a physical collision at such velocities.
-As such, the ship actually performing the ram must be of sufficient size that its mass shadow will have an appreciable effect.
-Ships of sufficient size are extremely expensive and of such relative rarity that they would never simply be thrown away for one-off attacks except as a last resort.
Hm, it’s sound! Still made more sense than shield gimmick so I’ll take it!
The size restriction is only daunting when you’re contemplating throwing away your precious capital ships. If hyperspace ramming was at all viable, major powers would construct dirt cheap expendable droid ramships by attaching hyperdrives to massive asteroids or derelict wrecks, and sling them en-masse at targets in large salvoes to generate higher kill chances. Non-Death Star battlestations or macro-scale infrastructure like the Kuat shipyard ring would seem exceptionally vulnerable to this sort of attack, but it doesn’t seem to happen. Besides, we’ve already had the discussion as to how accurate Rogue One has retconned hyperspace jumps to be.
I prefer Bannon’s force-assisted theory for the TLJ incident, which avoids all of these complications.
Agreed. Star Wars is space-opera, not hard sci-fi, and is centered around individuals doing heroic things at the appropriate moment. This was Holdo’s “hero moment,” and the Force was with her. Using this as an excuse to introduce expendable droid ram ships dehumanizes and cheapens the core of Star Wars itself.
Something else I noticed recently…
According to the novel for ANH, there is actually significant overlap between how far from a gravity well repulsorlifts function and how close to a gravity well a hyperdrive functions. Per the novel, in the scene where the Falcon arrives at the Alderaan system, the ship should’ve been ~1 planetary diameter from the planet’s surface (page 125 in my version). That’d put the “zone” for entering and leaving hyperspace between 1-2 planetary diameters, not the 6 where repulsorlifts hit their limit.
From a sheer consistency standpoint, it doesn’t explain why the rebels didn’t try hyperramming either DS2 or the executor at the battle of endor, using one of own capital ships.
I wonder where people get the idea that, just because a tactic was used in a certain set of circumstances, it must be the go-to tactic in all other similar circumstances. Maybe it /was/ on the table, but only as Plan B or Plan C if the starfighter strike at Yavin didn’t work out. Why waste a valuable asset like a star cruiser if you can get the same result by throwing some starfighters at the target instead?
Well, the now-Legendized ROTJ novel does mention munition-loaded transports (GR75?) coming into play once things go spitting-distance, but even there it seems like those were sublight approaches which gave crews time to evacuate. As for why hyper-rams weren’t tried earlier with a Mon Cal or three, lining up said impact(s) might’ve tipped off either big target (and their screen) to respond with tractor beams, Intensified Forward Firepower(C) and/or the dialed-down superlaser. I’ll also admit to serious doubt WRT even Home One-tonnage cruisers boasting enough impact yield to make DS2’s planetary-grade shield flicker.
I did a game stat version of the GR75, calling it an Alliance Bomb Ship, in the same vein as a Fire Ship from the Age of Sail.
My explaination for that is pretty simple: limited resources. As far as the Rebels knew, the Emperor wasn’t on the DS2 and to so freely lob away your valuable warships on a something a galactic power can just rebuilt, you are now in a disadvantage by one (or so) ships if the Empire chose to pursue.
Problem is, they DID in fact know the Emperor was on the DS2 (heck, that was part of the reason why they even BOTHERED to risk everything to blow the whole thing up, kill two birds with one stone in other words), so that doesn’t really make much sense as an explanation. And besides, they were pretty much using the near totality of their forces if the now Legends novelization is to be believed, so it’s not like they had anything to gain either way.
Did they? I might have to double check the sources, but I was pretty sure the Endor attack was just meant to disrupt the construction of the “incomplete” battlestation.
Pretty sure Mothma said so during the briefing.
Yup. “We’ve learned the Emperor himself is personally overseeing the final stages of the construction of this Death Star. Many Bothans died to bring us this information.”
So yeah, that might’ve been worth the ram, but as I pointed out above, there are all kinds of reasons why it might not be as viable a tactic as people think, and certainly far more costly than sending a squadron or so of elite starfighters into the construction access points to attack the reactor directly.
Come to think of it, Ackbar & friends would’ve likely loved to put a couple dozen volleys into DS2’s least-constructed hemisphere. That pesky detail WRT the working superlaser and resultant evasive glomming onto Death Squadron just didn’t put ’em in any immediate position to do so (or line up any hypercollisions) once the damn shield was finally sabotaged. Although now I recall some SDN discussion WRT Ackbar’s cruiser perimeter mainly being intended to stop Palpy’s escape when he Foresaw(C) what was up (“Still failing miserably to cloak your thoughts, young Sky…’shoot here’? Oh sithspew.”)
Per the RotJ novel, the cruisers actually did just prior to Lando and Wedge hitting the reactor.
Clarification appreciated. I suppose punching through that much artificial-moon materiel, even unshielded, would’ve been at least a bit time-consuming even for HTLs. Plus, not like Lando & Wedge wound up short on conflagrations to outpace.
Her maneuver had nothing to do with energy it had to do with the prototype shields that the Raddus had, without those shields a hyperspace ram would be impossible so it was literally a one time move that can never be used again according to the novelization of the movie.
Though I think it was stupid to even let it go that far, in the EU I think it was 3 imperial star destroyers collided with a executor super star destroyer via a hyperspace ram and it did absolutely nothing to it’s shields. And the hyperspace ram wasn’t even on purpose but accidental.
Even the EU didn’t want to mess with hyperspace ramming because of the can of worms it could have opened.
Sheesh, one-off experimental (particle?) shields that muck with hyperspace/mass shadows/whatnot? That’s only marginally better than ‘lightsaber-crystal superturbos which totes make all ur old ships swiss cheese but will never scratch a Hero Vessel’. I’m sorely tempted to handwave said novel tidbit as ‘secondary material expansion’ ala the ROTS adaptation’s extra dialogue/context for Palpy & Mace’s saber duel.
As for that 80s newsprint comic’s Executor impact thing…sad to say I distinctly recall Ex suffering temporary shield loss (though no direct damage). A few stardestroyer.net posters claimed the crashing Impstars had already reverted to realspace (and average-to-low sublight velocity) before impact (I sure as hell couldn’t tell based on one panel), and the comic (reprinted by Dark Horse as ‘Classic Star Wars’ if anyone’s curious) later has Ex briefly lose power ’cause the Falcon strafed its fantail while shields were disrupted by yet *another* one-shot macguffin (a shield-breaking ‘power gem’ on its last legs, if anyone cares). So offhand, I’d take any technical anecdotes from that EU corner with fifty bulk freighters’ worth of salt.
Anyhow, fourthed with gusto WRT ‘relativistic deathspam at any eyeblink’ throwing a pall on this particular setting.
Indeed. This is the same story group that said the MC75 was a converted building (never mind the vast difference in structural tolerances involved) and that Chirrut Emwe could only see because of a special crystal fitted into his staff (never mind how that was supposed to help him shoot down a TIE fighter with a bowcaster). I view anything that comes from Darth Maus with extreme skepticism until someone can provide a plausible explanation as to why.
No one said that the MC-75 was designed to be a town hall and not a destroyer. If (lazy) Imperial authorities are preventing the squids from putting together proper warships, it would make a neat story if they responded by disguising their naval buildup with various cover stories like this particular town hall gimmick, and building them with warship-grade reactors, structural tolerances, and lots of pleasant balconies that have conveniently good turbolaser arcs.
Per the Rogue One Visual Guide, the Profundity was literally the Central Governance Tower of the city of Nystullum on Mon Cal (of which Admiral Raddus was the mayor). Not “disguised as,” or “officially listed as,” but “was.” Considering that it looks a lot like Clone Wars-era Free Dac Volunteers Engineering Corps (mostly Quarren) products like the Prosperity and the Malevolence, and nothing at all like the later MC80 and MC85 ships from RotJ (which were converted space liners), a safer approach would’ve been to make it a Clone Wars era ship pressed into service with the Alliance. It’s hard enough to picture converted space liners serving as warships because of the structural issues; a planetary habitat is far worse.
An off tangent here but wait, Chirrut needs some Disney magic crystal to aid his “vision”? Way to make an interesting potential all dumb…
I double-checked. Specifically, his staff has a sliver of kyber crystal in the end-cap, and that the sound of the crystal in motion allows him to better gauge where the end of the staff is in a fight. But yeah, in a galaxy with the Force, it would’ve been just as easy to make him a mystic of some type from a non-Jedi Force using tradition.
Your last line is…pretty much what I figured Chirrut & Baze were (they had a real Believer/Agnostic Couple(C) dynamic). Just enough mojo to move the script along, not *nearly* enough to bend it around peoples’ ears Darth Stellarbodypunter(C)-style.
Sometimes I wonder if a WH40k approach isn’t better – “everything is canon but not everything is true”. Pretty expansive for personal world-building.
That”s been the general approach of the gaming community for quite a while. In the early days of fandom discussion on the Internet, there would be all-out brawls over what preempted what when there was a conflict in canon. After a while, there was so much contradictory stuff that it just couldn’t be papered over any more, so most people just resorted to picking and choosing what parts of the EU they wished to include in their own personal version of the SWU. The phrase “my SWU” pops up quite a bit.
Would anyone be down with putting together a Fractalsponge discord? It would make a neat community hub for having and archiving these sorts of discussions.
That’d be cool. There’s a lot of interesting tidbits in the comments here that are hard to find unless you know exactly what you’re looking for.
As someone who likes a stable background the likes of official narratives (ironic, I know, as I am the one that started this discussion that leads to this tangent), the level of lore flexibility presented in 40k isn’t too viable for me. I like Legends approach to it though, where things are concrete enough to have continuity but if a better/contradicting idea came by, relevant details are retconned/altered to fit in with the newer sources for better flow. This method is far more favorable to the likes of current procedure in Canon that runs through the “Story Group” (can you feel those air quotes?) and every element is rigidly in place. Especially when they churn out movies and TV shows with high canon, making it even harder for creativity to blossom.
Sad thing is, I could totally see ex-CIS Quarren shipwrights winding up with the brunt of Imp sanctions while their currently-‘civilian’ Mon Cal counterparts tried to slip suspicion as long as possible. Plus, a reactivated auto-facility or six out in the reaches makes markedly more sense than seed fleet assembly in the increasingly-monitored depths of Dac.
I know the ram had to do with the shields, which is why I made thid headcanon. The shield reasoning is like the testament I dislike about Disney’s canon, with every explaination of the impossible being waved away with some new tech when you could try to rationalize it. Let this asspull go on some more next thing you know, the Inquisitor were able to fly because their lightsaber crystal were special or something.
There is a topic on the Star Destroyer. Net
Unfortunately, I don’t have an account there so I can’t really be a part of it.
I recently read some head canon about how it could be the Hyperspace tracking tech that allowed the Holdo maneuver to work that doesn’t break all the years of canon. Now even though you won’t hit things in real space while in hyperspace, so no worrying about the small stuff. But if something is big enough to create a gravity well and you intersect that grav-well while in hyperspace you are pulled into real space, this is where your problems begin. It’s how Interdictors work. (Head Canon here) So the Supremacy was using a new hyperspace tracking technology, to do its job it gave the Supremacy a hyperspace shadow, similar to a gravity well. But where a grav-well has a smooth exponential of escalating gravity coefficient that pulls ships into real-space. When the Supremacy is using the hyperspace tracker it has a hyperspace shadow, not a grav-well, when a ship in hyperspace hits this hyper-shadow it instantly translates back into real-space. The energy of that much mass trying to reoccupy real-space at a high PLS that was already occupied by the Supremacy caused an effect that was similar to a shaped charge. The blast tore forward through real-space, destroying Star destroyers and damaging the Supremacy, with the majority of the energy being released into hyper-space. The reason you don’t see hyperspace ramming over the 50,000 years of hyper-space history is that it will only work on ships with hyper-shadows because they are equipped with Hyperspace trackers.
I have seen this theory before when Eckharts covered it but can’t agree to it for some reasons. For one, the hyperspace tracker – from official definition (I know the hypocrisy here for we are debunking another official response) – is merely a supercomputer that presumably use machine learning to take in all the galactic history’s worth of hyperspace jumps to output the most probable destination for the First Order to follow. Another thing to note is that it isn’t the gravity well that drags ship into realspace, but rather the ship’s own navicomputer as a safety measure against mass shadows. Otherwise, the Falcon would have been forced to return into Realspace as Han attempts to drop out below the shield of the Starkiller Base well beyond of what he pulled off – indicating him turning off the safety beforehand (as a side note, that ludicrous maneuver defeats my theory too, as the deceleration phase, part of the Falcon’s mass would have slammed into the shield. Unless…he were to use the very slow back up hyperdrive for the shield penetrating jump. This would also buy him “a lot” of time to have his reflex kick in.)
I still maintain that some level of tracking (or at least detection) across the hyperspace barrier is required for the setting to work.
Homing beacons obviously worked fine in the first film, and other experimental technologies have been suggested over the years. The mass shadow concept doesn’t hold water that well since technically all ships in hyperspace would have a mass shadow to some degree or another.
Could I get a reword of that please? I can’t seem to grasp what you mean. Did you mean you need some form of barrier for tracking to work? Or barrier to be present for hyperspace ram, which the tracking provides? I can’t quite wrap my head around why a tracker of sort would have a hyperspace presence. Aside from the Falcon being tracked like CRMcNeill pointed out, (though the delay in Imperial response could point that it is a more conventional realspace tracking device for the Death Star to follow when it dropped out of hyperspace…or just that the Falcon is just that much faster than the battlestation), there’s also the tracking of the Slave I in AotC, where Obi-Wan’s near-instantaneous tailing of Jango could be attributed to hyperspace tracking on its own. Of course, the FO’s tech didn’t rely on an actual tracking device…which is why I am pretty okay with the supercomputer idea (even if it really isn’t anything new in terms of Imperial tactic…guess it’s just automated now?)
Barrier as in the transition between realspace and hyperspace. Some material says you can’t track or communicate or sense across it, but I think that interpretation has major issues for the setting as it’s displayed.
Ah I see what you mean now. I did hear about the impossibility of communicating between the two though, but various Canon sources, such as Rogue One, have already disproven that; at the very least, in the canon. Perhaps tracking objects through hyperspace might still be impossible (if reasoning is given for the aforementioned two examples) but with machine learning supercomputer that takes in millennia worth of entry and exit points, it doesn’t exactly track object through dimensions, but rather just a really good prediction algorithm.
It’s been a long-standing part of the EU that mass (in the form of gravity) is detectable across the FTL barrier, as it’s an essential component to the functioning of hyperdrives from early on in the WEG system. The issue there, however, is that most ships are too small to have a mass-shadow that’s detectable by existing gravity sensors in real space.
They need to decide if it is or it isn’t possible to detect ships. Small ships could carry enough firepower to devastate planets. Either you can generally get early warning of an approaching ship or you’re stuck with planets needing to have full shields raised all the time, among other issues with making the setting function properly.
I think generally, it’s not possible to have ships be detected while in hyperspace, but there are some form of radiation that is emitted in a particular axis when they drop out of hyperspace. I believe this mechanic is what alerted the Rebels of Echo Base of the approaching Imperial Fleet (though, other scanners could do that job too, to be fair) As for shielded planets, Imperial fortress worlds at strategic locations do have constant planetary shields, I’d think this is also true – perhaps to the lesser scale – with the Old and New Republic worlds of significance.
Yeah, Cronau burst I think is what Saxton referred to it as. But if a fleet jumps into near orbit and opens up, then that’s the end of the planet. Plenty of worlds don’t have full shielding. They might be individually unimportant but it’s intolerable for a galactic polity to sacrifice them to random raiding. It’s like not caring that Minneapolis gets nuked so long as Chicago is protected. So you either have early warning and thus gain the use of hyperspace speed for defense, or you have huge standing defense forces everywhere and that just doesn’t seem like it’s the norm. Or, I suppose, the attacker always wins, which also doesn’t seem all that normal. If there’s no constraint on the use of FTL, then the speed we see being used is a problem. You don’t need pinpoint tracking at huge ranges for this, but you need something more than first seeing an enemy fleet when it enters weapons range.
Well, the line was ” General, there’s a fleet of Star Destroyers coming out of hyperspace in sector four “. That leaves some ambiguity as to how early Echo Base detected Death Squadron, but if the technology is widespread, Alliance Strategic HQ should have had it available.
The other relevant line was “Reroute all power to the energy shield.”, not “Activate the energy shield.” My inclination is that anyone with shields entrusts their activation to a simple AI that can raise defenses the microsecond it detects a threat rather than relying on humans to do so, and so Rieekan was just allocating more output.
At the same time, open warfare is still relatively new to the galaxy after millennia of peace enforced by precognitive telepaths, and decision-makers are still adapting from a peacetime mindset. During the Clone Wars, neither the Republic or CIS had the inclination to glass civilian populations from orbit due to the public relations needs of both their own citizens and the desire to appeal to unaligned worlds. We don’t see widespread strategic bombardments during the Galactic Civil War either, as the Palpatinists can’t really find the enemy and the Rebels really want to take the moral high ground. Alderaan is the exception that proves the rule.
A more mature political equilibrium dominated by multiple warlike great powers prone to genocide would look very different. Perhaps civilian populations are evacuated to cloaked worldship habitats deep in the extragalactic void, or systems are enveloped in layers of gravity-well satellites that prevent anyone from entering realspace closer than the Termination Shock. MAD might just work too.
Who said it had to be great power genocide? A terrorist or a pirate gets an HTL or slaps a freighter drive and shield on an asteroid and that’s potentially a dead continent, and they don’t care about PR. Any government that lets that happen regularly doesn’t have its authority survive very long. So they either need to have some kind of early warning so that hyperspace-speed reinforcements can be summoned, or maintain sufficient force everywhere that needs to be protected. I know which one I’d prefer to have to justify.
My main concern was great powers with significant naval assets because a fairly mundane planetary shield controlled by a decent droid brain should cover the cases of extremist terrorism and extortion by some common criminal who jury-rigged a turbolaser. I’ve come to understand that planetary shields are far more effective per unit of output than pure starship equivalents, if our data point was Echo Base’s Praetor powerplant being capable of indefinitely holding off an Executor’s battlegroup while also fueling a V-150. I could speculate some technobabble about how a planet’s natural magnetic field and Van Allen Belts might facilitate that, but I’d rather not.
In the old days, perhaps there was some Old Republic senatorial mandate that all existing settlements and new colonies required the installation of a mandatory yet deeply subsidized basic theater shield unit that would require a dedicated warship/siege platform to crack. Maybe the bureaucracy for inspection of those shields stayed clean and competent for millennia? Then again, for most of recorded history, there were also Jedi around to go do yoga and detect and then neutralize that sort of extremist threat before it materialized. With them all purged, even with the largest arms buildup in recorded history and all the Clone Wars surplus still in service, the Imperial starfleet must be struggling to provide the same kind of security.
Besides, despite my screen-name I have a fundamentally positive view of human nature. Despite tens of millions of commercial flights around the the world annually, we’ve only had one (extremely tragic of course) case of a jumbo jet being used as a weapon. During the Golden Age of Piracy and the American Revolution, when privately owned warships abounded, we didn’t really see cases of wanton bombardments of populated areas for no good reason. I’m sure if people were a standard deviation or two more immoral that kind of stuff would happen all the time, but we are a remarkably well socialized subtype of primate.
My interpretation of planetary shields is that the heat management is far easier, so the endurance is very high – you have an entire planet to act as a heat sink and huge amount of space for radiator volume, but in vacuum you are restricted in space for heat sink and radiator. Sort of like on a power-to-weight basis marine powerplants can be amazing, but compared to what can be done with nigh-unlimited space on land, the peak throughput is minor.
My thing about early warning through hyperspace is an Occam’s Razor thing. It deals with a lot of issues with minimal adjustment to how the setting seems to be arranged. Ubiquitous area/planetary shielding doesn’t seem to be the case, and certainly not on an automated basis, and automated shielding without warning has major issues for the kinds of orbital traffic density we see in Core worlds. Jedi precog might have been enough in an era of general peace, but no *single* system has that high an effectiveness rate. But they weren’t ever all that numerous, and frankly we don’t see their precog being all THAT good in any media as to be used at the level of routine systemic interception of threats to 50 million+ planetary-equivalent polities. Sensors can be cheap, but the supply of Jedi is always going to be limited.
I tend to agree with you about human nature, but I think your analysis here is flawed. You don’t need a high proportion of crazy to get problems in the absence of really really tight access controls. Commercial flights are highly regulated. Hyperdrive-capable vessels do not seem to be. The relative societal impact (so to speak) of a hyperdrive capable asteroid or turbolaser-armed warship is a lot more than any kind of Earth warship until the advent of nuclear weapons (also tightly controlled). Even 20th century naval bombardments were not really all that destructive in the grand scheme of things, given inaccuracy and just the fact that cities are big and ships can only carry so much energy in their shells absent nukes. A privateer or pirate threatening to bombard a city with solid shot is not a serious threat. Someone threatening to jump an asteroid onto an impact vector absolutely is a serious threat to a planetary society as a whole.
Radiator volume is possible and is definitely an issue on fighter-scale craft, but neutrino radiators are so ludicrously magical that capitals don’t seem to ever really have issues with heat. As a proportion of internal volume from the ICS, destroyers only devote a pittance to radiators compared to reactor and never seem to have an issue with heat dissipation in any other media. The most common bottleneck for shielding or weapons fire always seems to be reactor output or emitter throughput.
Regarding the Jedi argument, I acknowledge that all systems are prone to flaws and that individual Jedi are subject to loss of competence or confidence, but precog allows for the system to compensate by having other Jedi internally intervene before the problem ever manifests. Jedi only seem to have problems with using precog when up against other force users in the novels, not common extremists. Besides, the Jedi don’t even need to fly out and deal with every individual terrorist/madman themselves with lightsabers and mind tricks, they just need to alert local or sector authorities of the Person of Interest’s position as of 3 hours from now. Even a handful of masters sitting in some sort of battle meditation trance in the middle of a call center might be able to handle the vast majority of problems.
Automated shielding appeals to me because it takes the human factor out of the equation, should be relatively affordable for most polities, and you don’t need to activate the entire planetary shield for most threats. A single kilometer-wide panel in front of the oncoming threat should suffice, giving plenty of time and room for local orbital traffic to run rather than be vaporized. There might be a single standardized, self-contained shield unit manufactured in the billions on some factory planet and then distributed to every settlement that needs it. Since it’s turned off for 99.9 percent of its lifespan and doesn’t need to withstand real bombardment from warships, it probably isn’t even that expensive. Given the industrial capacity of galactic civilization and Old Republic political values, that seems doable.
However, my point was that while hyperspace warning makes a lot of sense if we were designing a universe from scratch, I just don’t think cinematic evidence supports it.
If the Separatists were able to detect objects coming out of hyperspace at a fair distance away, they should get fair warning of a Republic task force entering the system before a LAAT gets close enough to Dooku to shoot him. Grevious at another CIS strategic HQ should have been alerted that Kenobi’s battlegroup was arriving long before Clones fast-roped onto his position. Coruscant and the Republic Home Fleet should have been at general quarters long before droids manage to get transports in the atmosphere. Scarif should have been ready for Raddus. Raddus should have have been ready (as much as you can) for the Death Star and then the Devastator. Ackbar expected complete tactical surprise at Endor as well, which shouldn’t be possible with ubiquitous hyperdrive warning. I hate to mention this last one, but the Resistance in TLJ also didn’t seem to be aware of the siege pizza and Snoke’s boomerang until both appeared right on top of them as well.
There’s also mention on Wookie for something first brought up in Dark Empire called the Imperial Hyperspace Security Net, which introduces early warning capability but only comes online for the Deep Core after Endor. That sort of fits your bill while not contradicting film, but it shows up far too late, and only for a few fortress worlds.
For shielding, heat is absolutely going to be a bottleneck. At the simplest read, whatever starships can do with dissipation, planetary systems will just be able to have MORE of it, regardless of what it is or how it works.
Automated shielding if it exists dies after the Clone Wars. Same reason in universe man-in-the loop is required for even point defense. Partial panel based shield system make sense though in general.
I’ll say that in the movies people get surprised out of hyperspace all the time, and we don’t need a technical discussion to understand why. I’m not certain what the best way to square that circle in terms of world-building is, but Hull 721 had a decent model – detection, but limited and with various ways of circumventing it like unusual or unexpected hyperspace courses. I’m totally fine with it being a sectoral scanning thing and patrol or sensor density and or focus determines the overall effectiveness. That would explain most of the cinematic examples while giving decent security for areas that have some defenses. Utapau, Hoth, Endor – secret locations relying on said secrecy rather than patrol density that would be tip offs. Geonosis, Scarif – peacetime footing and complacency. Coruscant/Scarif – rear-area complacency and an uncovered approach that shouldn’t have been available to begin with. Raddus/Scarif – sensor focus on the shield gate, nothing to spare for recon screens beyond the primary battle zone because it was a scratch force assembled for an emergency deployment.
This is sort of on par with fighter effectiveness vs capitals for me. I don’t see how the setting works without an explanation. Capital ships are worthless if fighters ignore shields, and interstellar civilizations are indefensible in a reasonable way if hyperspace mobility is both undetectable, highly fast, and accurate.
I can meet you half way. Hyperspace detection that requires substantial investment in your own distant hyperspace sensor nodes or active patrols does sound fairly doable and not particularly contradicted by the films. I’m just a little opposed to easy and ubiquitous hyperspace detection that can be achieved by sticking a dish on a building. While the Imperial Navy deliberately threw automation out the window for anything more sophisticated than K2-S0, I wonder how much that culture permeated down to local planetary civil defense?
That said, you’d also think that the Geonosis planetary defense grid would go to high alert once you’ve abducted a Senator and 2 Jedi, and then butchered another few dozen that snuck in to save them. Eh.
The sensor in question is called the Hyperspace Signal Interceptor, which is a common sensor type for ships in the WEG EU. It can’t detect ships in hyperspace, but does detect the “splash” upon entry or exit. The Improved HSI could also calculate a ship’s base course, but had to be relatively close to get a good enough read on it.
The only other in-game method for tracking in hyperspace is a homing device called an S-Thread Tracker that effectively uses the Holo-Net as a trip-wire system. Per WEG, the Holonet is supported by a network of satellites maintaining tight-beam FTL communication links with the satellites around them, with the tight-beam links called S-Threads. Every time a ship tagged with an S-Thread Tracker crossed an S-Thread, it would send a signal through the Holo-Net back to whoever was doing the tracking. It wasn’t enough to provide a precise location, but was close enough to put a searcher in the ballpark.
Well, it’s out of their hands now, since the license is in its second set of hands since WEG. Based on the available material, it’s pretty conclusive that WEG made it so that ships in hyperspace couldn’t be detected. Of course, plenty of fans have come up with ways around that; I’ve proposed two different theories myself. One is a large mobile scan system mounted on an Interdictor, replacing the gravity well projectors with what I called a Hyperspace Flux-Net Transceiver that could detect passing ships in hyperspace within about a 10-minute radius (modified by the ship’s drive speed). The other was a Hyperspace Early Warning System, an immobile automated listening post parked in hyperspace near a system that could detect the “bow waves” of incoming ships (ala the use of the misappropriated Hyperspace Orbiting Scanner in Hull 721).
In Hull 721 detecting bow shock was a standard sensor ability. They could estimate roughly where the ship emerges, though a ship could fake out the prediction by “bouncing” off the transition and skipping out into realspace somewhere else, and they could get only an idea of how much energy the sensor target had and estimate what it was from that, not any specific tactical details about what it was. This seemed like a reasonable minimum sensor capability across the barrier.
I thought it was an ability specific to the Black Prince due to their acquisition and repurposing of a HOS (and hiding it in their hypermatter fuel tanks).
I distinctly remember other ships and parties than the Prince reporting bow shocks, but then again as much as we like it, 721 is fanon.
However, even in 721, Lennart was able to savagely maul a fortress world before all of its shielding and defenses came online, as well as a totally unprepared Lucrehulk above it, although his ludicrously elite crew had to plot quite the difficult and risky hyperspace corkscrew course to make that possible. That might be a good compromise. ECR thinks things through.
Yeah, definitely some great stuff in there, but he specifically said that he was taking certain liberties. In particular, his use of tactical micro-jumps was definitely outside the norm.
Then again, Disney has been increasingly playing fast and loose with the rules on hyperdrive as well. It used to take Kylo’s dad several minutes while on a steady course in high orbit to plot a course through lightspeed. Now, he’s just hitting the lever while still in a hangar. The U-Wing incident in Rogue One and everything about hyperspeed in TLJ just reinforce that.
They are basically treating it like “engage” Star Trek warp. And I don’t like how scifi is getting so generic…
We should have known from the moment they picked JJ.
Disney Wars needed a Kevin Feige to ride herd on wayward directors. Instead, it got Kathleen Kennedy. Oh well; we all draw our lines somewhere. I know one guy who gave up on Star Wars as far back as the Special Editions.
Isn’t Kevin Feige now doing Star Wars?
Too little, too late. They needed him – or someone like him, at any rate – to run the sequel trilogy, to be a show runner for Star Wars the way he was for the MCU. Bringing him in now to do one film is either a name-dropping publicity stunt or just trying to close the barn door after the horses have long since gotten out.
That’s not just a sci-fi problem…
Turret Count update:
PD turrets: 322
Quad Medium Turbolaser Turrets: 90
Octuple Heavy Turbolaser Barbettes: 12
Twin UltraHeavy Turbolaser Turrets: 9
Quad Heavy Ion Cannon Ball Turrets (assuming they’re ion cannons. Fractal, are they?): 4
I’m fairly certain they’re ion. If you look at the guns muzzles, they seem to be similar to what fractal used for the ion variant of the scythe and some previous models.
I wonder how much plumbing an ion cannon requires. They seem to be really squeezed in there with other mounts surrounding them. Whatever the requirements there must be two sets. If the plumbing were shared, I’d think only one could fire at a time, which negates the benefit of having two in the same sector.
I don’t know why you’d assume the trunking would be particularly voluminous – on the cross sections they are much smaller than the turrets they serve. These mounts aren’t that much closer than the multi-turret batteries elsewhere on the ship, and much more separated than the ISD’s turret batteries (either major subtype).
Sorry, I don’t mean to second guess you or question your design. You’d know far better than I would. I just think it would be fun to layout the interiors. Or think about how they might look.
Very much a case of
“Fire ze cannons!”
“What cannons Sir?”
“ALL!”
And this is only what about 1/4 of the ships hull thus far? Finally an Imperial ship that will justify their absurdly high crews!
I honestly like these new dual turrets better than the original. What’s their theoretical yield?
If you mean the heavy turbolasers: “The entire reactor budget of an Immobilizer is less than the single-shot output of one of those HTL.”
Doesn’t really give a good indicator. Are we looking at 540 teratons, 720, more? Fractal usually has a yield in mind when he creates these HTL’s.
720 teratons is right.
She is coming along nicely, very nicely! I can’t wait to see the finish product!
Fangasm has happend…. This one stays my alltime favorite. Just the right combination of dread inspiring aesthetics (read: Size) and utility.
I’m so glad you are upgrading this beautiful ship. By far this is my favorite Star Wars ship. Just everything about it looks right. Not to mention it fixes a lot of short comings of the regular ISDs.
Those ultra heavy TBLs are monstrous..
She has a real German pocket battleship vibe for a dreadnought. Quick enough to outrun anything that could out gun her (as if there is anything) and enough firepower to decimate anything she can catch or foolish enough to keep up with her.
Eh, the Kriegsmarine’s convoy raiders seem to have somehow accumulated a rep out of all proportion to their historical effectiveness v. peer-ballpark adversaries. Still, fair points WRT Bellator not being overmatched or outsped by much out there (especially much that wasn’t nominally on the same side). Closest CIS match I can think of would be a Subjugator cruiser, and they’d need to be *very* sharp about landing & capitalizing on those ion-pulse hits.
I’m curious why you went with ball mounts with fairly limited firing arcs instead of more turrets on the unused dorsal hull areas? Purely aesthetic, or is there some rationale behind this that I’m not getting? That being said, this fine lady is shaping up quite well.
Mostly aesthetic so that I could integrate a battery into that corner and use the structure around it to blend the terrace into the rest of the hull. I was never entirely happy with how that section was so blocky on the original.
I never minded the blocky terraces on the original. If anything, folks have come to expect blockiness out of Imperial hardware.
Then they don’t remember it right. I think we are conditioned by shitty game engine renderings to think about them in terms of their basic blocking (and blocky) shapes. But if you look at an actual movie model, a good portion of those lines are obscured by greebles and details, making the overall result considerably more bumpy in line. Simple art doesn’t have the detail to show it, but the movies and movie-quality art absolutely do and should.
Fair enough. I sort of meant that Imp ships, even after all the detailing and greebles still were built out of recognizable geometric shapes with lots of straight lines compared to say Mon Cal vessels.
Offhand, ball turrets just mesh better on vertical & steep surfaces. I keep wondering how well they’d work in a battlewagon’s brim trench.
You mean like in…Assertor, Bellator, Legator, Praetor, Procurator, or the Allegiance?
That’ll teach me to squint more often.
The aesthetics of ball turrets is ok – I’m just not convinced they could work mechanically, when I look at them. What mechanism is holding them in place? Just electromagnetism? What happens when the power is out, then?
No idea. Same as the v150 at Hoth. Probably some flavor of the same stuff that tensor fields and inertial compensation uses, or repulsorlift, which seems to be able to work largely unpowered. I doubt they are mechanically connected to the hull at all in the traditional sense.
Maybe some physical retainer to keep them restrained… just like with your eyeballs.
A physical retainer would be attached to the ball at the opposite pole to the gun barrels and would pose a limit on the rotation (like an eyeball, I agree) very much limiting the arc of fire compared to a traditional gun mount.
(expanding on my previous post)
If the balls would be recessed halfway into the hull they would be able to rotate 90 degrees in every direction in theory (less because of hull thickness and diameter of the anchoring point). The ball turrets in the model protrude much further out – very much unlike my eyballs do, fortunately 😉 – limiting the fireing arc further.
An emergency clamp mechanism with otherwise unrestricted movement poses similar issues.
Guys, I’m not sure why you’re trying to overthink this. It’s a ball turret. We’ve never seen one before in Star W…oh wait, there’s the Hoth ion cannon. That mount protrudes even more from its socket than this mounting. Whatever mechanism allows for the power contacts and secure the mounting (presumably it’s primarily non-mechanical) allows these mounts a lot of freedom to rotate. Also, presumably whatever mechanism is at work also has a good deal of combat redundancy.
A physical clamp, if it existed, could just be an emergency mechanism to prevent the ball mount from flying free from the socket. That can engage only on some disruption of the primary (field-based) retention system. It could be as simple as a ring of magnetized clamps but is it really necessary to attempt the detail engineering on this?
A ball turret mounted at its equator wouldn’t have a 90 degree arc to each side – you still need to accommodate the actual gun barrel in the middle. So if you wanted that kind of arc, you’d need to extend the center of ball out, like this mount, to get the clearance required.
They probably float away when hit by a ion blast.
There probably would be some mechanical clamps to prevent that from happening.