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TheEpicDude
TheEpicDude
4 years ago

Hey look I found your page on wookieepedia.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Ansel_Hsiao

TheEpicDude
TheEpicDude
4 years ago

aw RIP the rebellion

Daib
Daib
4 years ago
Reply to  TheEpicDude

The whole point of Rebel fleet doctrine is to not fight these things in a head to head engagement until they are the New Republic and have things like Viscounts.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
4 years ago
Reply to  Daib

Based on screencaps the fleet we see in ROTJ probably had enough Home One-tonnage Mon Cals to contend with ~2-3 Bellators, but that more/less represents *every* heavy asset the Alliance could muster at the time. Direct engagement would’ve been suicide until the post-Palpydeath power vacuum & resulting Imp civil war reduced fleets, sector groups, etc. to sundry splinter factions which the budding NR could take on piecemeal.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
4 years ago
Reply to  gorkmalork

Would they? Home One type cruisers are fairly big, but they have poor gun arcs and by some sources they weren’t even designed as warships. The Executor’s battle group only performed as poorly as they did because they were ordered to hold position and do nothing rather than fight a maneuver engagement in deep space. A Bellator seems fast enough to outpace any variation of an MC80 while having the firepower to engage from a much longer effective range, which is a pretty nice winning combination, although it might be vulnerable to thousands of Alliance fighters making mass attacks.

In a pure gun duel, a Bellator against a few squadrons of MC80 seems like HMS Hood versus large numbers of Blucher class armored cruisers. It’ll take a lot of time for a well handled Hood to kill them all, but she has the tools to do it.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

Fair counterpoints re: Endor’s massively mitigating Imp rules of engagement & Bellator’s footwork potential (which might also complicate the kriff outta mass bomber strikes). I mainly brought up ROTJ because at least one pre-A-wing-collision cap on an SDN debate thread seemed to show *eight* Home One-style ships within Piett & Lieut. Too-Late’s field of view.

TheEpicDude
TheEpicDude
4 years ago
Reply to  Daib

Ya i know. Not trying to sound like a jerk but i was just trying to make a joke.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
4 years ago
Reply to  TheEpicDude

Fair ’nuff-sorry for slapping up another apparently-redundant textbrick.

Steve
Steve
4 years ago

She’s coming along beautifully, she may ‘only’ be a battlecruiser or ‘light dreadnought’ but she’s still immensely well armed. Even a CIS Subjugator (aka Malevolence) does not come close to this things firepower.

Ryadra777
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve

Unless it get hit by a Ion disk from the Subjugator which could possibly completely disable the Bellator (Which I think is a Heavy Battlecruiser) and leave it vulnerable to the Subjugator’s guns but if the Bellator could tank it and still operate just as fine then yeah the Subjugator is done.

Spaceman 28
Spaceman 28
4 years ago
Reply to  Ryadra777

As Long as the Bellator outproduces the Subjugator in terms of power, and the Bellator’s Shield Power is Greater than the Ion Cannon’s output, the Bellator should be able to Tank an Ion Shot.
And if the Ion Cannon Misses, Then It’s Over Anyway.

Ryadra777
4 years ago
Reply to  Spaceman 28

True, also the Subjugator is 4.8km in length which I personally think is too small because in the clones war animation the ion disk was big enough to hit 3 Venators (which they are 1,155 meters in length) which doesn’t make sense for the ship to be 4.8 km because then the ion disk would only effect 1 Venator. If the Subjugator was like around 10km in length then it would make much more sense. (It would also be a Dreadnought at that length.)

Spaceman 28
Spaceman 28
4 years ago
Reply to  Ryadra777

That was because the Ion Disk Grew as it traveled away from the Subjugator. It weakened in power as it got bigger and farther away from the cannon, but it did grow.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Spaceman 28

So, more like an ion shotgun blast; the greater the range to the target, the greater the shot dispersion, and thus less damage.

Daib
Daib
4 years ago
Reply to  CRMcNeill

You would need excellent jump precision to capitalize on that kind of primary battery. In order to make this ion shotgun a better use of ship mass and reactor output than conventional HTL batteries, the CIS would require the navicomputer data in order to emerge only a few kilometers or less from whatever Venator squadron that is about to have a bad day.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
4 years ago
Reply to  Daib

Yeah, the more I ponder this, the less I like Subjugator’s chances of alpha-striking an alert Bellator 1v1-and if each ship brings commensurate support screens, guess which one needs to be even more careful with its only hope in hell of victory?

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
4 years ago
Reply to  gorkmalork

The best use of this “ion shotgun” I can think of is actually fleet point defense, not close range fisticuffs against peer dreadnoughts. If you lose fighter superiority when faced with large numbers of carriers, swiftly withdrawing your own fighters and then giving them the ion blast might help you regain space superiority.

Spaceman 28
Spaceman 28
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

Well, it was used before the Venators could launch their fighters, and again when more came in for a Bombing Run. The Subjugator was made in a time were anything bigger flat out didn’t exist, excluding Mandators. And Starfighters were heavily used. I can’t imagine any other effective way to use it besides fighter screening if it’s quite a ways away for the Ion Disk to spread.
Granted, the Subjugator was terribly armed due to its Ion Cannon, but those turbolasers could still take out multiple Venators once they were knocked out. Due to its size, I could see it being effective against Venators and similar Republic ships, but if they avoid it, it’s screwed

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Spaceman 28

The ion shotgun is one of those weapons that works well in a visually-spectacular-yet-intellectually-shallow space opera setting (like the Clone Wars cartoon), but quickly falls apart once you apply some thought to it. The most workable version of this idea that occurs to me is actually from one of the better Star Wars fan fictions I’ve ever read (as near as I can tell, the author is actually some sort of engineer for NASA, and honestly, I’d rather read his material than watch the new Darth Maus films). He used what he called a Dynamic Electromagnetic Pulse Generator to essentially create frequency-agile EM pulses that bypassed the electronic shielding on any ships within a targeted cone of effect. It was more of a finesse approach, as opposed to the Subjugator’s brute force approach.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Yeah, it’s kinda weak, but it serves its part to drive the plot without really being dwelt on.

The guy’s screenname on Fanfiction.net is blank101, and he mostly writes Luke alternate universe stuff. Here’s the link to his profile page: https://www.fanfiction.net/u/1584073/blank101

The DEMP features in his Son of Suns Trilogy: Into The Storm, In Shadows and Darkness, and At the Brink of the Dawn and the Darkness.

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

For best effect you’d probably want to hit said carriers *before* your own snubs, gunships, etc. are in the splash zone-once any light opposition’s gotten an eyeful of the ion spread’s AOE, good luck smoothly disengaging.

Bob
Bob
4 years ago
Reply to  Ryadra777

The volume of the ship is huge, which is probably more important than it’s overall length when factoring it’s overall firepower. It seems to be significantly larger in volume than the classic Star Wars wedge design of a comparable length.

Valoren
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve

Actually, I think the best use of the ion cannon would be against large, stationary targets like space stations.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
4 years ago
Reply to  Valoren

What we’re asking is which scenarios will an ion shotgun outperform large numbers of conventional HTL batteries drawing from the same battlecruiser reactor? At long range, engaging a battlestation with your ion shotty is going to have horrendous relative performance because most of your ion energy is wasted on empty space, while an HTL battery will be pretty efficient as all the energy is going into the target. Sure, you could probably drop the shields on a station if you waited until point-blank range to fire, but if the station has comparable armament, it will have been shooting at you the whole time during the approach phase, which doesn’t seem that healthy for the Subjugator.

The anti-fighter case makes sense to me because at medium/long range, HTL is ludicrously inaccurate against fighter swarms, but an ion shotgun might be able to disable the entire strike package before they get in close.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

It’s worth noting that, per the video link Fractal posted above, the Malevolence was actually outside the range of the Venator’s turbolasers, so stand-off range is a definite plus in the ion shotgun’s favor. I wonder if the blast could be focused down to maintain cohesion at longer ranges for use against point targets. That being said, though, something on the scale of the KDY v-150 would be just as effective against a single large target as the ion shotgun.

IMO, the most effective use of this thing is exactly what we see in the Clone Wars; disabling a group of ships simultaneously with a single shot before they get close enough to return fire, leaving them helpless to defend against the Malevolence’s conventional weaponry. Ships that are forewarned could disperse their formations widely enough to avoid getting caught in the blast together, perhaps approaching the Malevolence from multiple angles simultaneously.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
4 years ago
Reply to  CRMcNeill

C’mon, are we really going to believe that Star Destroyers can’t engage at only a few dozen kilometers away from targets? That would make orbital bombardments impossible without entering the stratosphere.

Sure, the bridge officer says they’re not in range, but he’s most likely talking about effective range where a light destroyer like a Venator could hope to land concentrated sheafs of fire on individual shield panels in order to hope to burn some damage through. After all, the Subjugator opens fire with its own HTL batteries at exactly the same range a few seconds later to devastating effect. A heavier warship, like for instance a Praetor might have an effective range against a Subjugator measured in tens of thousands of kilometers.

Using a Subjugator against a few light destroyers is viable, but what does the ion shotgun add over what a conventionally armed heavy cruiser could do already? Something like Fractal’s own Compellor wouldn’t even break a sweat against three Venators, but might have trouble against say a few thousand B-wings. That’s a scenario where an ion shotgun might have a little comparable advantage.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

Hey, I personally think anything from Clone Wars TV should be taken with an industrial-sized salt shaker. But if we take their words at face value, there is a definite advantage in a stand-off cannon that can disable an entire squadron of capital ships before they can themselves enter effective range. Even starfighters might not be fast enough to get out of the cannon’s fire arc if the range is long enough, and that makes the ion shotgun look a little more plausible, or at least somewhat less silly.

Valoren
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

Personally, I still don’t buy the anti-fighter argument. You have to keep in mind the sheer size of the weapon and the fact its line of fire is restricted by the ships orientation. The idea that enough smaller craft would just sit within the path of the ion blast, which could easily be dodge by just a second of straight acceleration in any direction is absurd. No matter the spread of the discharge, a fighter wing that could potentially span dozens of km is simply not going to be stopped or even fazed by it. Plus, when you add to that the time necessary to charge the weapon, it becomes completely unworkable as an AA weapon.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Valoren

That’s the advantage of an area effect weapon as opposed to a point effect; a simple turbolaser blast is essentially one-dimensional, while the ion shotgun is three-dimensional – height and width compounded by depth. If a point effect weapon misses, even only just, it has no effect on its target. An area-effect weapon, on the other hand, affects everything within its zone of effect, no matter how fast or nimble it is. The only way to not get hit is to not be in the line of fire. Dodging a shot from this thing would be several orders of magnitude more difficult than dodging, say, a shot from the Hoth Ion Cannon.

And sure, a starfighter squadron that was forewarned about what they were facing could split up into flights or elements and approach from multiple angles, but for whatever reason, starfighter squadrons in the films and TV appear to stick together when attacking larger targets. Possible advantages here would include combining their deflector shields to protect the formation from defensive fire, and making it easier to coordinate the timing of massed barrages of proton torpedoes.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the only person in the Clone Wars series to order its use against a starfighter squadron was General Grievous. Not too many people in the SWU with the rank and position to order him court-martialed…

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

True. But who wants to be the one to tell him?

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
4 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

So maybe the ion shottie’s edge (if any) on conventional firepower involves one-shotting unprepared destroyer/frigate formations, but heavier (i.e. Praetor-plus-yield) units that can focus shield facings against the pending voltage wind up tanking that hit and ripping into Subjugator before another blast can be charged. Or get off the first long-range volley(s) and wind up disabling the finicky thing (which takes up a non-tiny portion of this beast’s midsection). At any rate, Bellator strikes me as *much* too tough a nut to crack with one ion-disk, which is all any competent captain (I know, decades of Legends counterexamples) would allow from Darth Lee’s pet project.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  gorkmalork

Forewarned is forearmed. Once the ship’s secret is out, it wouldn’t be too hard for a properly handled Venator task force to stand off out of range, scout the Malevolence’s location in-system with light fighters, then launch a multi-deck alpha strike against the ion shottie (as opposed to the shoe-string, single squadron operation Anakin used to disable it in the tv series).

Based on the evidence, it would seem that every large construct must have at least one weakness that can be exploited by a sufficiently accurate torpedo shot fired by a pilot of sufficient skill. Even if that torpedo is actually an MC85 Star Cruiser…

That or a plucky astromech to sabotage some critical system so the construct destroys itself somehow…

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
4 years ago
Reply to  CRMcNeill

The Malevolence was only highly vulnerable to fighter attack because it sailed without escorts deep into Republic space. If Grevious brought along a few Lucrehulks to provide a heavy CAP, that “vulnerability” mostly disappears.

I agree with Fractal’s assessment that a full Venator squadron-disabling shot from a Subjugator is far too much hypermatter to waste shooting down 12 Y-Wings (but might be worth it to kill 2 very high profile Jedi?), but why are we assuming that the Ion shotgun isn’t a scalable weapon?

Just like you can shrink down a converging beam laser to a LAAT door gun, would there be anything stopping someone from building an ion shotgun the size of an Imperator flank HTL turret? Sure, you lose the ability to one-shot destroyers at close range, but it seems like an interesting line of research to pursue for a more cost-effective point defense solution.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

If I were designing my own version of the Star Wars universe, my inclination would be to build in some sort of technological limitation to turn this into a one-off tech gimmick that didn’t catch on in general usage, mostly to avoid having to deal with the serious issues that have already been raised above.

And yes, a few Lucrehulks would be more than enough escort, but a major capital ship swanning about the galaxy unescorted is hardly a unique occurrence in the canon.

Chris Bradshaw
Chris Bradshaw
4 years ago
Reply to  CRMcNeill

Just don’t make your technological limitation crystals.

CRMcNeill
CRMcNeill
4 years ago
Reply to  Chris Bradshaw

Only if I happened to smoke some crystal first…

gorkmalork
gorkmalork
4 years ago
Reply to  CRMcNeill

Well, according to the EGtW’s take on Malevolence, the waste-heat recycling system enabling its ion shottie(s) was prone to power fluctuations which kriffed with standard widgets from shields to sensors; scaling said system down to fighter/shuttle-wiping yield *might* also reduce said issue, but between that and the recharge window it still seems like one tenuous tradeoff.

TheEpicDude
TheEpicDude
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve

I love how long this string of comments is.

PhantomFury
PhantomFury
4 years ago

Whoaa those battery emplacements scares me.

That chiss boi
That chiss boi
4 years ago

Hey fractal so i know its been a long time since you were an amateur but as an up an coming 3ds max star wars artist what tips would your give me?

Zorg56
Zorg56
4 years ago

Amazing art, as usual!

Hope to see mandator series once!

ferunii
ferunii
4 years ago

if the bellator was supposed to strip of fire oower for speed, that means a single mandator could take on a hundred or even more isd.

gejemica
gejemica
4 years ago
Reply to  ferunii

You only need a scale factor of 4.6 to get 100x the volume and power assuming you don’t change any proportions. The original Bellator is 4.5 times longer than an ISD so even it is already in the ballpark for being equivalent to 100 of them.

Kiran Ray
Kiran Ray
4 years ago
Reply to  Fractalsponge

Fractal are you factoring in the increase of technology between the Mandator and the ISD’s, its widely known that ISD turbolasers we’re far more potent than the mandators’ and to assume its x80 is quite pretentious as there’s no official number.

daib
daib
4 years ago
Reply to  Kiran Ray

Widely known? If you can find a good source as to Mandator firepower other than the 1000x Recusant figure, I’m all ears.

That chiss boi
That chiss boi
4 years ago

He uses 3ds max and hes been doing this for 20 years for those who want to know

JamesMCGR
JamesMCGR
4 years ago

I’ll place an order with KDY for 25 of these monsters.

TheIcthala
TheIcthala
4 years ago

Turret Count update:
PD Turrets: 414
Quad Medium Turbolaser Turrets: 106
Quad Heavy Turbolaser Turrets: 30
Octuple Heavy Turbolaser Barbettes: 12
Twin UltraHeavy Turbolaser Turrets: 9
Quad Heavy Ion Cannon Ball Turrets: 4

Oseritzel
Oseritzel
4 years ago
Reply to  TheIcthala

I think there are 11 Twin Ultra Heavy Turbolasers. On the last pic you can see a new one.

TheIcthala
TheIcthala
4 years ago
Reply to  Oseritzel

Good catch, I missed that.

Twin UltraHeavy Turbolaser Turrets: 11

Steve
Steve
4 years ago
Reply to  TheIcthala

How many guns? All!

TheEpicDude
TheEpicDude
4 years ago
Reply to  Steve

I cant believe it!! 577!!!!!!!!!

Bob
Bob
5 years ago

Holy St. Barbara, that’s a lot of gun tubes! What are the yields of the quadruple turrets as opposed to the centerline twin turrets?

Ryadra777
5 years ago
Reply to  Bob

Quads are 240 teratons, twins are 720 teratons.

Steven A Futrell
Steven A Futrell
5 years ago

damn you work so fast!