So I’ve been thinking about a 3-4km star battlecruiser. I wanted an old-timey comics feel to the design, so I started messing about, then realized that I had a hull that would work – my old Victory-class concept, which obviously wouldn’t be a destroyer now. That had a deliberate mix of PT and OT elements (makes sense, right, late Old Republic/early Imperial design). So I started scaling, then grafting on superstructure bits. I tried making the bridge a little different (in my mind this design is definitively Old Republic KDY, maybe even older than the standard hexagonal bridge module, but refitted for the Clone Wars and Imperial era). Here’s what I got.
I love this battlecruiser design. It is sort of reminiscent of the Tagge Battlecruiser design from the Marvel comics. It definitely has the correct aesthetics for that time period.Thank you for sharing this Fractal.
It seems to have a bit of Pellaeon-class Star Destroyer as well (the general geometry of the hull)
Thus far this puppy seems very Praetor-I/newspaper/80’s Marvel evocative, so good call on the greebling density & extra command-tower distribution of same. I’d be sorely tempted to halve those aft command-module winglets, though shaving ’em too far might mitigate that whole silhouette efect. Color me very curious about that octagonal module near the bow-backup sensor station?
Beautiful ship! What sort of role would a ship like this have? It looks very command ship-y…
I’m thinking it’s an Old Republic battlewagon. Older than Mandator and Legator, refitted into Imperial service. I’m strongly tempted to call it a Procurator.
Well, it’s certainly leagues above any previous attempt to model the Procurator. 8e25w on the main reactor perhaps?
Thinking probably on the order of 1.2-1.5e26. Double Allegiance power on way more than double volume, but then the Allegiance is a highly specialized ship-killer.
Unless you believe that there’s a significant technology gap in power generation between this bruiser and the next generation, why wouldn’t this one also be a specialized ship killer?
Old Republic KDY designs are primarily focused around sector defense of static targets, which removes the need for endurance, intervention troops, extensive command & control, and arguably even fighter bays.
The only thing left to do with volume is cram it with reactor/capacitor, which should make it very deadly for its size.
If Old Republic KDY designs are one note, then you wouldn’t have Legator (yes I know that’s my design but it’s based off a comic book ship in profile with those massive sensors).
For purely fortress/area defense roles then yes, everything would be a specialized ship killer. However, I think a case can be made for more intervention and fighter during the Old Republic. Endurance seems to be arbitrary –
fuel tanks aren’t large anyway. Anyway, it’s a time of relative peace, so specialist designs shouldn’t be required because high-end war with massed fleets isn’t required. That militates against ship killer designs, which after all are going to be very expensive per ton. What is required for peacetime? Well, deterrence is needed, but you’re going to have firepower with size anyway. The rest? Gunboat diplomacy. Endurance might not be trans-galactic by statute, but local powers will want the potential to overawe their near space, even if it never comes to open war. And I certainly doubt the big players are just one planet to begin with. Something like an Allegiance showing up means it can basically leave and accomplish little, or kill everyone and bring the Senate down on its owners. There’s not any gradation of options available.
So, in my read, relative to the overall average ship size, big Old Republic ships are ALL inflated compared to Imperial ships, which can and do operate in task forces where specialist ships act as a force multiplier, and efficiency and lethality are required because they actually get used against peer ships in the Great Power fleets (or threatened to be used against peers). Old Republic battleships all are generalists at some level (except maybe the extreme bleeding edge like Mandator), with some intervention troops and fighters. The really big last ditch deterrence ships *may* just be glorified monitors (ugh how distasteful :P), but the stuff in between those and customs ships probably sees a lot of showing the flag and brushfire short-of-war use in addition to their inherent deterrence value against major attack. And Procurator is explicitly going to be smaller than Mandator, which takes that apex ship predator role.
All that said, it’s less efficient in power for hull volume terms than an Allegiance, but not tooo far off. It’s something like 3.5km. It’s going to be 2-3x more power than an Allegiance, but an Allegiance directly scaled up would generate 4x more power. So it pays a 33-50% efficiency cost for versatility (and just being older). I think that’s reasonable. Happy to continue discussing it case I’ve gotten something wrong/should be convinced otherwise!
The problem with figuring out what’s actually going on in Old Republic astropolitics and their relation to fleet dispositions is how inconsistent legends information seems to be.
If we treat the Stark Hyperspace War from legends as a data point, a minor pirate skirmish in the outer rim was consequential enough to draw in the Trade Federation, the Jedi Order, the Eriadu sector, and the Senate itself. When Tarkin’s uncle Ranulph went in to kill to kill the pirates that had caused all this nonsense, his heaviest unit was a light corvette. Eriadu is recognized elsewhere in canon as a fairly substantial industrial and political power, and so if Tarkin had access to true destroyers and Star Battlecruisers, he wouldn’t and shouldn’t have rode to his death in an oversized Consular corvette.
That kind of rampant minimalism (Goddamn Katana Fleet) irks me too, but we just don’t really see anything post SWTOR and pre-Clone Wars regarding ship sizes/numbers to make informed guesses, other than the Legator/Mandator/Praetor/Procurator/Acclamator combat-refit? existing.
My best assumption is that within the Republic, the core industrialized systems are so federalized and interconnected that inter-sector conflict is beyond unthinkable, in the same way that Missouri would never threaten Iowa with the B-2 bombers of its Air National Guard. In this sort of extremely peaceful core/kinda dangerous periphery environment, you wouldn’t necessarily need divisions of ground troops on your heavy warships, as there isn’t really any evidence that those heavy warships would be doing anything beyond fleet exercises, Republic day parades, and sucking up budget.
Regarding endurance, ships seem to only blow through reserves during intensive combat situations with maximum shield replenishment, tactical sublight and hyperdrive maneuvering, and of course turbolaser salvos. If I recall correctly, standard Imperator-Is had 6 years worth of consumables, making extended patrols/blockades very feasible.
What’s weird is that the ICS proportion of ship mass dedicated to reactant storage is really inconsistent between classes. The Acclamator transport variant has at least four huge silos totaling at least 30% of the main reactor’s volume, as does the Munificent frigate, but the Venator, Imperator, and Resurgent (ugh) ICS diagrams show tiny (>10% of reactor volume) fuel tanks or none at all, when it should really be the other way around. Anyways, I think your Procurator model is shaping up really nicely, and that Old Republic Kuat being relatively inefficient in starship design is perfectly reasonable. Eager to see a finished model!
Eriadu may have been wealthy, but there’s no rule saying that wealth needs to be matched by proportional military power in an era of fairly profound general peace. Eriadu is also sorta out of the way – there may not have been a pressing need for much beyond corvettes and frigate sized stuff, but they could easily (and probably after Stark did) buy better. That may be quite different in the Core even during peace, if major powers are right next to each other and meddle in each others’ business at the periphery even if they don’t launch mass offensives. Look at…Belgium vs Poland say. Belgium is rich, but doesn’t need a large military. Poland is poorer, but absolutely does because of geography.
Fuel storage is sorta confusing, and I basically treat it like marginalia; there’s not enough hard data to guess. The Acclamator structures are not actually all that large though relative to total hull volume – it’s on the order of the volume of the bridge module.
Old Republic Kuat should definitely not be able to make the same sort of stuff PT/OT Kuat can make. I think Procurator is likely a century(ies) old design by the time of TPM. That said it’s more like Allegiance is the outlier. My head-canon for that design is that the navy went for a budget dodge, took a star cruiser and sliced away all the volume possible just to be sorta able to maintain a straight face when slotting them into a star destroyer appropriations request. That ship has a reactor 6x the size of an ISD, and did so with a gigantic bulb and filling the “terrace” space with reactor.
Procurator could manage up to 20x ISD power if I really cranked the reactor volume allocation. I’m going to think about it. Might happen.
What weapons does this have and what weapons does the legato have?
Shouldn’t Eriadu’s outer-rim status imply that it should need more, not less military spending than somewhere pleasant in the core? The gradient of Republic control seems to peter out around there, with Hutt-controlled planets only minutes away.
Regarding your Poland and Belgium point, Poland needs a large conventional military because there’s a far larger conventional military with a long history of trying to annex Poland minutes away, (If Lukashenko allows them to stage in Belarus) while something like Operation Reforger would take weeks. My point is that there isn’t really evidence of conventional forces outside of the Republic worth mentioning until the Trade Federation starts arming up. The coreward systems seem to all be Belgiums which aren’t really meddling with each other at all, unless I’ve missed or forgotten a source.
The appropriations committee origin story for the Allegiance is amusingly realistic, but I always thought that limiting factor on the expansion of the Imperial Starfleet wasn’t money, industrial capacity, or hypermatter, but fanatically politically loyal and somewhat competent human personnel willing to burn planets for Palpatine, but not for any other reason. Feyadeen Saddam type guys.
I don’t think the galaxy is homogeneous by ring from Core… I can see the Core being largely rich but with some pockets of dirt poor, and some of the rich parts being highly contentious. My point is that I think the Republic isn’t a particularly strong federal structure. I’m thinking more Holy Roman Empire than United States. Individual states, individual militaries, individual national/species/economic imperatives leading to cold wars, gunboat diplomacy, and all-but-declared wars in the guise of peacekeeping/counterterror/whatever random pretext. All kept from boiling over by Senate mediation, threat of/active Jedi intervention, or the Senate empowering coalitions of local forces to deal with troublemakers (because apparently there was no serious standing central military until AOTC). So Rich =/= heavily armed, but Rich also =/= peaceful either. The sources of conventional threat are largely internal, and peace maintained via the above mechanisms, but with no standing central force capable of enforcing that peace on a large scale if those mechanisms fail, until the Imperial State establishes one after the Clone Wars.
There was Senate oversight to some extent before ANH martial law – it’s heavily implied in the movie and overtly documented in some of the EU (see Publius’ New Order in Power). But yeah, officers limiting vs metal I can get behind.
I thoroughly agree that that the galaxy isn’t absolutely homogeneous in terms of wealth and conflict, but perhaps the Holy Roman Empire isn’t the best comparison with the Republic. There isn’t a single century in the H.R.E in which some elector principality, breakaway Italian city-state, or independence minded low-countries county didn’t fight a fairly significant war within the empire. During the interregnum, they even suffered a mass proliferation of virtually independent pirate Raubritter, or literal robber barons.
The Republic on the other hand is extraordinarily stable and peaceful on the whole, a polity with a recognizable structure for 25,000 years, and unbroken galactic peace for at least 1000.
Even with psychic supermen enforcing the peace, no state with constant cold wars, massive internal rivalries, and decentralized control remains stable for that length of time. As a counterexample to the H.R.E, I’d like to suggest that the Old Republic is more akin to the 13 Cantons of the early modern Swiss Confederacy, different nationalities bound together by a mutual commitment to peace, commerce, and increasing federalization through the Tagsatzung Diet.
In the various Clone Wars content we get, Jedi, Senators, and Republic personnel repeatedly comment to the effect that this war on an inter-system level is the first we’ve gotten for millennia, showing that unless there are Sith pulling strings, the Republic is essentially peaceful and stable indefinitely.
Publius’s New Order in Power is fascinating, thanks for sending that to me. Keep up the good work with the Procurator.
The Republic as a whole was peaceful and stable over its history, but that’s only because it does have an enormously long history and it’s enormous. There are 1 million member “worlds” (everything from planets to enormous multi-stellar corporations and entire star clusters), and on the order of 50 million dependencies. On that scale, open multi-stellar war is not that big, unless it drags in polities that can structurally affect the whole Republic (for example, the Trade Federation). Two planets fighting each other for such a unit is like a street fight in the United States – common, unfortunate, and totally unremarkable unless the people involved are massively important somehow. Two major polities in the Galactic Republic fueding is probably like two American states suing each other, not even on the scale of Electors fighting each other.
From the old EU we have…Coruscant and Alsakan fighting each other, Republic vs Hutts, Republic crusades (Pius Dea), frigate-scale piracy at the very least. There won’t be many Ruusans and Malachors and such, but a “brushfire war” on interstellar scales can be enormous. To be a bit absurd, imagine a Cod War with Mandators bumping each other. The Clone Wars are a galactic conflagration by comparison, so of course it’s remarkable – hundreds of entire sectors’ worth of power on each side. But if 1,000 worlds fought each other within a sector and it doesn’t spill over, is that a structural threat to the continuation of the Republic? (remember Naboo’s backwater sector alone had 60,000 polities). The perpetuation of basic structure might be secure even if that federal structure is not strong (and it certainly doesn’t seem that strong), while acommodating continuous conflict on a scale that boggles the terrestial mind.
So that what this ship base off
sorry didn’t finish it “so this ship was base of the procurator class battlecruiser then like this one?
/revision/latest?cb=20150620043511 “
It is very old time comics in feel, I had a lot of them as a kid. Right now the only change I’d make on esthetics is either extending the squished/flattened octagonal section aft of the bridge forward, or dropping it altogether. It looks just added on right now. I’d stop it at the notch on the underside of the neck in your last picture. I’d consider doing a big recess in the bottom too, ala Executor. I think it would work as a compliment to the busyness of the dorsal side. It might seem odd to have more of the armored reactor ball exposed, but who are we kidding this is SW and everyone accepts Nebulon B’s and their skinny spars connecting the 2 ends. That’s not exactly sound warship design either.
The Nebulon thing kinda depends on *what* they’re accepted as, IMO-ships that have any business being the biggest thing in a fight with star destroyers (Rogue One and at least a single X-wing book strongly hint otherwise), or generally useful light support for small convoys & movements strapped for *any* large-ish craft. I find myself leaning toward the latter. As for big hangars on superdaggers, that does seem like much less of a compromise than Neb-style design, depending on your murderwedge’s role & how much attention from peer-tonnage foes you can expect.
In my head the Neb-B was never an Imperial design. Whose design, I really don’t care but it’s an Alliance vessel. With the big prow turbo laser it’s stand-off sniper, using range to deliver punches while starfighters get in close and mix things up.
But back to our current murder dagger, I just think it’d be cool to have a “mirrored” recess in the bottom roughly analogous to the superstructure above. It’s less about practical design, more on aesthetics. I also think the ventral plane of the ship should be flatter and not trapezoidal, again keeping with the old time comics. There were some really cool designs in the regular newspaper comics too. They were all a bit more Flash Gordon though.
I’d be very skeptical about that main gun’s capacity against Acclamator-tonnage targets or bigger with so little reactor space for that *and* shields/engines/whatnot, but perhaps it was originally intended for picking off pirate corvettes before the Rebels started commandeering ’em.
Those newspaper strips’ line work came c/o Al Williamson, a Flash Gordon regular, so talk about aesthetic continuity. The ventral stuff you suggest also neatly parallels some of those Executor concept-sketches from ESB.
Wow. I love where this is going. I love cluttered and “busy” aesthetics, especially with lots of gun batteries. Can’t wait to see how this turns out.
It’s cluttered. It’s industrial. It’s absurd.
It’s beautiful.
Wow and I though the first order star battlecruiser was ugly enough!
Uhm, thanks?
But i do like the look of it because it is ugly in the good unique way unlike the Resurgent which is also ugly but in the bad boring way just a squash ISD while this one look new and bizarre which really stand out among imperial warships in my honest opinion.
I kinda like the First Order’s battlecruiser, more so than the ISD. I find beauty practicality though, so having the ISD and its massively stand out bridge tower, which is just a big ol’ target, the Resurgent-class doesn’t have that problem (at least not a big as the ISD). And it is more flexible mission-wise since it also doubles as a carrier unlike the ISD.
Eh, Resurgent’s flat bridge doesn’t seem *that* much better when it’s in the same general area as OT-style towers & still seems to take up its share of hull surface. Certainly wouldn’t throw off your Plucky Resistance Snub Squad(R) or Stalwart Cruiser Gunners(TM) if they’re fighting at Coruscant/Endor-style spitting distance & exploit a Plot-Convenient Shield Breach(R). Might give the dorsal turrets a clearer field of fire directly ‘above’/behind the ship, though. As for its carrier functions, can’t help feeling that big hollow bow could use fewer random brim-trench support struts for pilots to thread through on ingress/egress.
Any capital fire leaking through the shields is going to wreck whatever is underneath it, and 33% less silhouette gets you what exactly at 300,000 kilometers? It’s probably not the most practical shape, I’ll give you that, but the survivability complaint often leveled against the hex-module I think is highly suspect.
Yeah, after a certain point it’s less “how exposed to fire are your components if shields fail?” as opposed to “how quickly can we bug out or stop whomever’s shooting?” That said, just once I’d like a fakeout scene where somebody’s main bridge takes a wreckin’…and then we switch to the command crew wincing from secondary control. “Well then. Jump plotted?”