OK, let’s get a few things out of the way:
- I’m a nerd. I mean a proper, hard-core nerd, who cares about reactor volumes and power to weight, internal consistency to long forgotten lore, armor grazing angles. Stuff like that, stuff that movie audiences don’t really care about. I get that I’m different, and that’s it’s absolutely ok not to pander to me or to people like me in making movies.
- I’ve been doing CGI SW ships for a long time now. I did a CGI Executor in 2001, and an ISD in 2003, the old version of which basically everyone uses (including for commerical projects…mumble mumble). I’ve done dozens of original designs, some of them for official sourcebooks (Essential Guide to Warfare). I think I have a decent grasp of what a star destroyer-type ship ought to look like, and where to go with it. Go to the rest of my website (https://fractalsponge.net) and see for yourself.
- The Force Awakens was fine. Sure it was a reshoot of ANH with nice CGI. Sure Rey’s character was a Mary Sue. Sure the villains didn’t stand up to Palpatine and Vader. Sure Starkiller Base was wanky. But it was visually beautiful and scratched a nostalgia itch and had a charming cast of heroes and just plain dared to make something cinematically new in Star Wars, however incrementally. The ship designs weren’t instant classics like in ANH but they were fine, some were even awesome (Kylo’s shuttle for instance). I have zero problems with not using original trilogy designs when making a new trilogy.
- I know it’s too late to change anything. By the time we’re seeing renders like this, the production process is going to be pretty locked in.
So, we’re here a few years after TFA and some designs from The Last Jedi are coming out. I’m going to focus on the New Order Dreadnought. It’s 8km long.
Here’s my art direction reaction to the design: it sucks. But rather than leave it at that, I’m going to go into a lot of detail as to why I think it sucks. I mean a LOT of detail. Turn back now if you think you can’t handle it.
——
You’ve been told to make a giant spaceship, a huge one, a city in space with engines. But no one’s ever built one in real life, so your sadly Earth-bound audience has no idea what it really should look like. There’s opportunity there because there aren’t a lot of pre-conceptions about what it ought to look like, right? But let’s be honest, this is Star Wars we are talking about. People absolutely DO have expectations regardless of how the actual future turns out. It’s McQuarrie and Cantwell and that classic “oh shit” moment when we all saw Devastator fly overhead chasing the Tantive IV for the first time. No, it doesn’t mean Imperial Star Destroyers and X-Wings forever. It categorically does not mean that, please Disney do not do it. But those old ships and many new designs in the prequels and EU had a shared design ethos about them, used and functional looking despite just being tons of Tamiya plastic model kits glued onto styrene and fibreglass. Complex, full of character and screaming that there was a history behind every little box and turret. Now we’ve all heard about how strong designs should be captured in a few strokes. Yeah, design integrity is good like that. But IT DOESN’T STOP THERE. You can’t draw 3 splines, extrude them, and call it a day when building ships for Star Wars.
Here’s a practical example. Assuming you know nothing about ships, what ship looks bigger?
Now if you knew something about ships, you’d know HIJMS Fuso (bottom) is bigger than USS Zumwalt (top). But you’d also know that Zumwalt is >90% of Fuso’s length. Does that surprise you? It should, because simple shapes look a lot smaller than bigger shapes. Turns out surface complexity, and obvious surface complexity, makes a ship look bigger. Take this ship, my design:
It looks very similar to the FO Dreadnought. Slab bridge module and a big simple triangular plan. But the fact that things jut outward from the model makes it look complicated. The ships might look about the same size. But this thing is 600m, and scaled for it, vs 8km for the FO ship. That ship is the size of a damn city, but does it look like one? No.
Big constructs, in most settings, are built. They are not carved from monolithic blocks of material (except for structures in universes where that is explicitly true). A bigger ship generally has structures on it from smaller ships and that helps to build the sense of scale. Like how Resurgent added more layers of terraces to the ISD, so that even without the bridge module as a direct comparison, it looked pretty big and looked plausibly like a design successor from the ISD. That wasn’t automatically bestowed upon it by being a triangle.
Here’s another example from my stuff:
It’s <4km. Still smaller than that ILM ship. Does it look bigger? I think so! The surface is broken up by obvious structures, and the profile is irregular. It looks like it may have been *built*, rather than just injection moulded and painted splotchy grey.
Now there’s a ton of random stuff hanging onto the top and brim of the ILM ship. Great. But it doesn’t matter. Because when you see the whole ship in an establishing shot, no one can count windows or see how many little turrets there are – they are just bumps. And when they are just bumps without any obvious granularity to them, their scale becomes impossible to guess at, and it melts into background noise. If it does that, why bother to model the little nurnies and surface bits at all then? It’s a waste of polygons and computational power.
I’ve made the exact same mistake before:
This ship is supposed to be big, and has some nice detail on it. But the problem is the profile wasn’t broken up enough. It’s plausibly any of a huge variety of sizes, because there aren’t enough scaling cues, and the complexity that is there doesn’t break up a fairly monotonous outline enough. But I am some schmuck on the internet. The people making The Last Jedi are the designated successors of Mcquarrie. They should be doing better.
I actually don’t think that your ship was a mistake. I do think it would benefit from re-working it, but it is WAY better than the slop ILM made. As far as that goes, ALL of your stuff is better than theirs.
This is an old thread, but I had a thought related to the power generation Fractal mentioned above. How in the world is Disney explaining the ‘Death Star Destroyers’ from TROS? There is no possible way a ship that size can generate enough power to destroy a planet. Reactors have limitations, which is why the Death Star was so big to begin with. Most of the infrastructure for that thing was power generation for the superlaser. The Eclipse in Legends continuity was also massive, and that could only produce a fraction of the power of the Death Star. But I guess logical power generation is a bit much to ask from the latest movies.
I dont know for sure, but I’ve always had the impression that “power generation” gang was but a tiny sect when compared to fandom overall. Mostly people couldn’t care less about numbers and when small proportion does – “feels fitting” approach reigns. Like 144 fighters on Secutor 
Yeah, I’m not sure where people came up with that number. The Venator can hold 2-3 times that many fighters, and it’s around 1/5 the volume of the Secutor, by my rough estimate. Even accounting for living space for pilots, the Secutor should easily hold over 500 fighters.
I agree that the FO dreadnought is poorly done. I like the idea of using modules for scaling, I hadn’t thought about that. I would also bring up that the two modules fixed to the hull under the bridge look misleading in the context of scaling modules. I think a lot of people (including myself) thought that those were turbolaser batteries, which leads me to believe that the vessel is far smaller than it actually is unless I have another ship nearby as a reference (my scale understanding of turbolaser batteries comes mostly from republic-era ships like the Venator and Arquintans classes).
Hey FS,
This is an old thread but I’d like to make a comment anyway.
I kind of agree and disagree with your theory concerning scale.
I agree the general complexity of the shape and irregularities can give some indication towards size but I don’t think it’s just the complexity itself. It matters what that detail is made of because that gives us the reference.
Imagine a cake with cherries on it. I can make the cake base larger and smaller with the same ratios but I will know very well how big it is because the cherries on the cake give me reference.
Now if I scale up the whole cake 5 times and replace the cherries with apples so that the general proportions remain the same it doesn’t just look like a cake with weird cherries. It looks absolutely massive because the difference between cherries and apples will still be somewhat recognizable and apples are usually a lot large than cherries and rarely on top of cakes as whole fruits.
I think your example proves this point pretty well too. At first I didn’t really know wich ship I thought would be bigger untill I started looking for reference. I saw “windows” on the blocky ship and turrets on the other ship. So from what I know about those I took the guess that you predicted but mostly because the windows are actually much larger than expected. I was confusing cherries with apples.
Looking at star wars designs it’s can be similar. The tiny grain on the death star tells me that if anything is one there the entire thing must be gigantic. I think you ship is fine btw. SD engines are always pretty large and your ship has engines inside it’s engines so that is definitely huge.
Now the TLJ design makes things very confusing. The reference we have is the bridge and the super turret. The bridge gives me a sense the largeness because the lack of distinguishable detail make me assume that it’s big. But the turret makes the whole thing look quite small because despite being supposed to be massive it looks pretty normal. There needs to be more indication in the design that it is extraordinarily huge because the turret is something recognizable that will give us the impression of scale.
Well and yeah the ship in looks ugly as hell in general. Must have been inspired by a dusty piece of pizza.
After reconnecting to the net, and Fractal’s wonderful site again, I’ve come across this thread again, (I’ve even seen my original comment posted 3 years ago). I’d like KDY to build me a Plate-Class Dreadnought so I can place this thing on it, smother it in honey-mustard dressing, chilli flakes and black pepper, with a side order of salad in a Bowl-Class Dreadnought and a Glass-Class Dreadnought filled with beer, then eat it bite by bite till it exists no more… 😉
So guys what yours thoughts on the Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker trailer?
I think I want to go home and rethink my life.
…that Silencer(?) variant seems to sport a much neater fuselage/viewport, so there’s a sliver of aesthetic improvement. Plus, Billy Dee’s back. As for the rest…what Neill said.
Have you noticed how the FO Dreadnought looks exactly like the Destiny from Stargate Universe? Even the main weapon is placed under the ship.
I think there’s a lack of proper art direction in the new Star Wars movies. It started with the new Tie (with its magical second seat) and the Starkiller Base (and its ability to hit several planets from different systems at the same time while being stationed at another place in the galaxy). Most of these new ships don’t look like they belong to the same faction. The landing craft is obviously based on the vehicle from WW2 but they didn’t even try to make it look like a “Star Wars” ship.
Funcional analog New Order Dreadnought from RW:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/HMS_Erebus_I02.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/HMS_Terror_%28I03%29.jpg
Stop picking on my beloved RN coastal monitors, dammit! Lol.😂
Well, The Last Jedi didn’t screw up on all their ship designs. The MC75 was appropriately scaled and named as a heavy cruiser, and the secondary resistance ship designs felt consistent in their roles as successors to original trilogy rebel vessels.
The Free Virgillia corvettes look great as uparmored/upgunned CR90s, the Vakbeor cargo frigates seem like speedier logical evolutions of the GR-75 transports. and the Nebulon-C definitely fits in with the Nebulon lineage.
ILM hasn’t lost its groove, its just Rian who shouldn’t be micromanaging.
that’s the issue “successor to the rebel ships.” This is the sequel trilogy where the New Republic has been victorious for 30 years. The ships should be of a New Republican style, not rebel influenced.
I could see the NR sticking with tried-and-true ship manufacturers (i.e. the Mon Cals) alongside whichever Core-world companies started offering their heavy metal, but they could’ve certainly commissioned sturdier-looking Nebulon & CR90 successors.
Keep in mind in current cannon Mon Mothma shortly after the capture of Coresant, which happens a lot more quickly than in the EU, pretty much immediately begins pushing a de-militarization and disarmament program. BTW, the “Cargo Frigate” in this last episode is a Kuat product, explained by the Empire allegedly “suggesting” KDY purchase the existing Gallofrey assets, and was allegedly a venture of theirs (failed), to push into CEC’s market combining some of Gallofrey’s designs with the frame of a Nebulon B to make a larger transport able to fight off pirates.
…so as far as the Disneyboot’s concerned, NR leadership were so eager to jump on the peace pipe (*without* accounting for Imp Remnant resources in any sane fashion) that naval requisitions was lucky to get new(ish) corvettes & frigates in the first place. You’ll have to excuse me if I’d much rather headcanon enough brains to fill a Jawa’s canteen from the people who kept a Rebellion running under Palpy/Vader/Tarkin’s nose.
The Alliance picked those ships to standardize on for a reason: they’re really useful. Besides, the Nebulon-B was a Kuati light warship built to Imperial specs, the CR90 is a ubiquitous utility corvette dating back to the Republic, and the GR-75 is a no-frills medium transport. All those roles still need to be filled for the New Republic fleet list, and I think the new interpretations aren’t bad.
30 years isn’t even that long in terms of warship life cycles. Baseline tech in Star Wars is relatively stagnant, and IRL Nimitz has been chugging around for 43 and counting.
The New Republic frigate is the Corona frigate which is basically an upgraded Nebulon B. NR ships ARE rebel influenced. Until of course you get to the new class project with the Endurance and Nebula.
The MC75 was in rogue one not TLJ, the mon calamari ship in TLJ was the MC85
I kind of like the concept and design behind it. The fact that it uses projectiles instead of laser weaponry like old death star tech for it’s big guns makes it unique. Projectile weapons are also something that we do not see a lot of in Star Wars so, much like the A-10 Warthog, this was a platform built around it’s weapon(s). It’s Orbital Bombardment Cannons in this case. It’s size is to accommodate the weaponry. The point defense turrets are a response to lessons learned fighting the resistance and rebellion. Smaller craft still kill big ships (RIP Executor … and now Fulminatrix). The flat surface allows the ship to have a smaller profile which in long range battles (And perhaps in Orbital Bombardment) is great. (Perhaps Ion Cannons or Hypervelocity Guns were thought of in it’s design?) Ship to ship who knows but those 2 guns on the bottom are sure to hit anything large and put holes in it. It is definitely unique and different but I am happy they added it and it has grown on me. From an EU fanboy perspective at least it is Disney giving a nod to the Mandator class… lol.
Color me rather skeptical about a skinny profile making much difference WRT detecting five miles of ship in vacuum. Point-defense turrets are well & good, but certainly not without precedent on Impstar-and-bigger craft…and let’s face it, two dozen light guns for something that size is flat-out anemic. Hell, if the ship were a little thicker it might have enough space & juice for the anti-theater-shield phalloturret *plus* enough defensive weaponry to fend off one X-wing ace & a barely-highway-speed bomber formation.
I can respect mr. (or miss idk) Fractalsponge’s views enough to not argue
Just want to lay it out there, that the designs here on this site I believe, are just way WAY better than the MandatorIV of the last jedi
It certainly is no Bellator, assertor, legator, any star dreadnought seen here really
Little did we know that there were TWO dick guns on the bottom!
Phallocannons that can pop a (theater?) shield (and presumably sitting-duck Rebel flagships) with a single volley, but which conveniently aren’t part of the ludicrously plus-sized flagwing’s arsenal, ’cause…less food-court space?
nevermind the big ass turbolaser bolts that can arc the flagwing has…. like does it really needed those Dreadnought’s bombardment cannons? 😛
Since evidently the Resistance were sweating bullets WRT said phallocannons’ ability to one-shot Raddus, which went on to spend a good half-day tanking the flagwing’s fire…if nothing else, it’s a little funny that Snoke would be down with siege pizzas being that much deadlier than his personal ride.
So with all the destroyers surrounding Snoke’s cap ship, why exactly did it need big ass guns? It’s like wondering why a Nimitz class Aircraft carrier doesn’t have 14″ guns like the the USS Arizona…. Kinda dumb since the Nimitz class carrier travels in a carrier group of ships! Snoke’s ship was part of a battle group and clearly his ship was the carrier type ship. What it’s weaponry was, isn’t known yet.
Er, current carriers & their screens can generally see inbound threats with at least some margin of reaction time, as opposed to contending with attackers which can & do pop out of lightspeed well within mutual energy/projectile-weapon range. With an environment as potentially split-second hostile as SW, you’re kriffing right I want the punch to make said attackers (plus my sundry ‘fleet-killer’ commanders…Sith Lord, remember?) think twice.
I interpreted the Doomerang’s main battery as a heavy anti-capital ship system. Sure, the Resurgent screen can deal with MC80s, but if something like a Viscount shows up, the destroyers aren’t going to cut it. That being said, their on-screen performance against the Raddus was pretty terrible.
As near as I could tell, they never used their main battery against the Raddus. It looked more like they were trying to arc torpedoes or missiles around the aft shields (assuming auxiliary power was being directed to those shields and not the others) and hit it in the flanks or topside.
You’d think supplementing those attempts with main-gun fire (even if Supremacy isn’t packing anything heavier than HTLs) would at least make it *slightly* harder for Raddus to maintain aft-shield coverage. Given how uninterested Snoke (and then Ren) seemed to be in taking Resistance prisoners, doesn’t seem like anyone had ‘cripple but keep it intact enough to board’ orders.
You’d think. But this is TLJ we’re talking about.
“With TLJ, Rian Johnson wanted to subvert the fans’ expectations, and he succeeded. I walked into the theater expecting to see a good Star Wars film, and my expectations were subverted.”
I saw a really good redesign of the First Order Dreadnought. It looks much better than the ship they gave us.
Link?
They may have referred to this: https://www.moddb.com/groups/star-wars-fan-group/images/mandator-iv-dreadnought-bridge-redesign
Thanks
Here is the links to the original
https://youtu.be/VeFFhOC6wZI
https://youtu.be/Jyte9Lizcpw
I’d have shaved down the command module’s ‘hammerhead’ wings a little further, but that hull (and lighting scale thereof) is a marked upgrade.
Think about how many ISDs that could have been built instead of this ugly tactically inefficient thing!
Honestly, considering it’s armament, I think the Mandator IV is a « cheap dreadnought » meaning that it’s price wasn’t actually this big. A resurgent, especially with the Kyber-crystal equipped turbolasers, technological advancements an& weaponnery probably didn’t cost much less than one Mandator.
We can take in consideration the VERY BAD quality of the Mandator’s point defense cannons as a note (the XX-9s Heavy Turbolasers on the Death Star were about twice faster Godamnit) to prove that point, unless Kuat Entralla really are money-grabbing crooks
I remain deeply skeptical WRT the kyberlasers’ supposed advances (would’ve helped if the Resurgents accompanying Fulminatrix had done, well, *anything*), but the FO cutting corners *somewhere* in light of Snoke’s flagwing & especially Starkiller? Sorta plausible, as is KDY-cum-Kuat-Entralla going (even more) corrupt during the post-Endor clusterkriffery. You’d still think a 5-mile ship would fit more Falcon-scale turrets, and Darth Goldmember would insist on at *least* a fistful of those theater-shield-poppers for Supremacy.
even if it doesn’t necessarily brings advanced capabilities of note, the Kyber Crystal were not authorizedx to be installed on every Resurgent-class. Even if they were not necessarily major upgrades, they seemed quite rare (especially if we consider the number of Resurgent being of only 30) so even if they didn’t necessarily bring up quality, the fact that these kyber crystals were rather rare probably made them VERY expensive, which in fact can explain why the FO didn’t equip all their Resurgents (and other ships) with such weapons.
As for Snoke, let’s remember he gave command to really incompetenent pawns. Hux and Kylo Ren seem mostly inexperienced in terms of capital ship combat. Snoke himself, though we don’t know much about him, was probably as stupid as palpatine and was “more dark side superweapons with tons of destructive power” rather than someone thinking of an efficient fleet.
That said, I doubt Snoke was personally involved with much of the first Order’s operations (Hux seemed mostly in charge of the military while snoke probably remained hidden) so he probably didn’t supervise the construction of the FO dreadnought (and if he did, he probably didn’t even care)
Again, I can more/less buy the sequel trilogy’s High Lord of Dark-Side Muckety-Muckery(C) assuming most things Transpire As Foreseen(R) once he’s locked down the last of those pesky Jedi and their little trainees too; still, it’s not like Palpy didn’t keep a few eggs in the superweapon basket. The siege pizza’s main guns seem close enough for said purposes not to fly *completely* under Snoke’s radar.
I was never really a fan of the Mandator-IV’s design. It’s basically an underarmed, flat, metallic pizza slice with a ventral dick cannon; it looked so crude, unfinished and horribly toylike to the point that any bored 8-year old could draw. Also, that First Order Dreadnought was listed as being almost 8 km long. The first time when I said ‘underarmed’, I mean it had like only 24 cannons, which is far less armament compared to the Venator-class Star Destroyer’s 52 laser cannons, or 66 weapons if you count the turbolasers and proton torpedo tubes.
If the Mandator-IV’s whopping armament of 24 laser cannons was bad enough, the Resurgent-class battlecruiser’s armament of 1500 turbolasers is on a similar level of fanfic-grade bullshit. I never really liked the art direction Disney was taking; I’m way more familiar with Legends and Expanded Universe material, especially when I used to play Star Wars: Rogue Squadron on the N64, which is one of the first Star Wars games I ever played. With that aside, though I do liked most Legends ships’ designs, the Y-4 Raptor transport is where I had some doubts.
Though the Y-4 Raptor’s purpose of rapidly unloading troops or AT-ST’s onto planetary surfaces was cool enough, it looked terribly small when compared to the Sentinel-class landing craft in its flight configuration, even when listed as 28 meters long, according to some source books.
Whats wrong with the design?? Its a completely new and unique approach to a SD and the lack of sloping is what gives it a cooler look, definitely a great upgrade in the Mandator line.
You know being just looking new and unique doesn’t make it good by default it is the execution that matters and this execution was bad, Also great upgrade in the Mandator line my ass! The Mandator 3 was 12 km in length and it is very tough and powerful this however have way too little weapons it carried, it is the smallest of them all at 7.6 km in length (the first 2 was 8 km) but worst of them all is that’s all of it’s so called anti air cannons got destroyed by a fighter that was supposed to be WEAK against and the whole ship got taken down by ONE bomber!
So in short this ship have brought shame to all star dreadnoughts and Madators alike! It should have been called the Fulminatrix class because that’s the name of the lead ship.
I quite agree completely, This ship should not have been part of the Mandator line it really shows no upgrade going from the last one to this trash.
>Whats wrong with the design??
Geez Louise, you can’t be serious.
speaking from a practical engineering perspective, here. The flat pizza-wedge design would require maneuvering to keep all of it’s cannons (if it even has turbolaser cannons) firing on any given target. the flat plane of the dorsal/ventral sections prevent any turrets mounted there from firing at negative/positive elevations, respective to which side they’re on.
next, being so…thin… well, its sort of like snapping glass or plastic sheet, big, long and easier to snap. Sure you could make it thicker, but then, you’d have all that extra interior volume, you wouldn’t need to make it so big and long… The only reason a ship would need to go so long and thin is if it were housing something that was that long and thin- like, say a mass driver or something. Hux’s Phallic Compensation Cannons do not count. While spherical ships would have the most interior volume, not all of that volume is useful space. and round is bad for firing arcs, requiring either more turrets or risking a fighter being able to get inside your fire arcs and hanging out.
This then leads to the fact that being unnecessarily thin, leads to vital components like the main reactor, being exposed more, because, usually, in warship design you stuff things that aren’t ‘vital’ between the hull and things that are. Thus, things like water, air and food storage; munitions and spare parts for your ship and her subordinate craft; fuel; and if your a particularly callous bastard, all those storm troopers that are basically doing nothing but playing cards and singing whatever the TGFA’s equivalent to ‘God Save the Queen’ is.
You could compensate by adding armor, which is just going to make you even slower, which then leads into the next point- that being that skinny means you have to use more armor anyhow for a given reactor/engine/weapons payload.
Finally, It’s far too vulnerable to fighters and retarded-ass strategic bombers. one fighter took out all, or most all of it’s point defense. One fighter that, admittedly exploited human error and Imperial Ego (Urgent Message for Admiral Hugs. I’ll hold.) but still managed to evade anti-fighter fire like it wasn’t even there. Then, A single strategic bomber’s was enough to wipe it off the board.
Let me make this point another way. using the Wookiepedia figures, it has a length of 7.6 km, and at it’s widest of 4.1 km. Assuming it’s a basic triangle, that gives a dorsal/ventral surface area of 29.16 km^2. Also according to wookiepedia, it has 26 dorsal point defense turrets, which means that each turret is effectively responsible to protecting a little more than 1.1km^2 of area, which is asinine when you consider the agility of the fighter and the fact that not only is that fighter not where he was, he’s not even where you thought he was going by the several seconds for your fire to reach him. Also, Imperials can’t shoot, meaning they *have* to rely on area-saturation fire.
The only reason this ship is big, is because Abrams likes big ships. But lets be honest, the mandator iv is likely to snap itself just maneuvering to get a good shot on somebody smart enough to stay above the firing arc of the HPCC’s.
the strategic bombers weren’t all that great, either. I suspect something like a tie bomber or b-wing could have done that same kind of damage. Especially if it was that insane, dried-out calamari’s blade wing. (which… lets be honest. I want *that* laser cannon back… oh yeah, I do.)
If you’re interested and aren’t already aware of them, I think EVE Online’s citadels and space stations do an excellent job of conveying their scale.
For example: This flyby of an Astrahus-class Citadel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bswplOLP7ng
Or this one laying Manhattan down on the larger Fortizar-class Citadel.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn9mlk6u5zM
On the subject of EVE ships, the Chimera was always a favorite of mine, in particular because of it’s fairly unique and sensible launching off point for strike craft.
Definitely. EVE online’s Dreadnoughts LOOK like proper Dreadnoughts. This piece of hot garbage looks like someone saw and ISD and said “make this bigger and flatter!”, and that was that.
First of all, love your stuff Ansel! The Bellator is my favourite ship, ever. It was the first of your models I saw pictures of, and I fell in love with it! This is the kind of ship I want to be seeing on the big screen!
Second, that flying pizza wedge with ‘whale-tail’ spoiler and big d**k guns is awful!
Porgs, (come back Ewoks, all is forgiven! Lol), ape-walkers, pizza in space, honestly, I’m getting scared in what direction the sequel trilogy is taking the Star Wars universe. I was very dubious about TFA, but after seeing it, was not as disappointed as I thought I would be. Sure, it had it’s faults, enough to prevent it becoming the best Star Wars film of all time, but it was a good film. So far, TLJ is giving me far more trepidation than TFA managed!
I would also like to drop you an email, if that’s ok? Would love to chat further, if you have the time.
Many thanks, keep up the amazing work, and may the force be with you!
Sure, shoot me an email.
Many thanks. Will email at the weekend.
Hi Fractal!
Was just wondering if you received my email? 🙂
I have to thoroughly agree with your conclusions here. The design aesthetic for the sequels has, as a whole, been pretty bad. The Prequel designs were amazing, easily as good as the Original Trilogy designs. Although the Acclamator kind of suffers from the same problems you point to – lack of interrupting surfaces to guess scale.
That being said, my issue with the new Praetor-IV Class, as it is called, is that it defies Star Destroyer design logic.
1. It’s flat, like a slice of pizza, so it lacks the elevated gun turrets the ISD and the Venator/Acclamator (or any of the EU designs – the Centurion, Harrower, Pellaeon, etc.) have, which means it has very little offensive/defensive capability. All the ISD had to do was tip its nose slightly downwards and it could bear most of its firepower in a frontal assault.
2. The bottom is basically undefended as it has 24 anti-aircraft towers (on an 8 km long ship. That’s less than half of the firepower of a 1.2 Km long Venator which had 52 point defense anti-aircraft guns), but they’re only on the top side of the ship.
3. The giant cannons. The ship doesn’t have enough Girth to indicate it has the massive reactors of the Executor, ISD, Venator, etc. Where do they get the power? And what’s the point of having them? If you’re going to build a ship purely for siege like that, why not just make a cylindrical ship? The giant cannons can only aim forwards anyways by the looks of it, so why not just mount it into the hull like the Super Star Destroyer Eclipse?
4. The Bridge. It’s like it’s asking to be shot off (I mean in practicality external bridges are useless anyways in modern, let alone futuristic warfare.) It has a tiny spine that holds up a massive 2×4 basically.
I mean this new ship looks like you could snap it in half over your knee like a piece of plywood.
Mandator-IV, not Praetor. Sorry.
It has never been that big of a problem for the acclamator in my opinion, because it’s not really a large-scale warship.
Theres nothing wrong with the shape of the bridge… Space remember? No gravity?
The problem with the bridge is that it’s very obvious and ludicrously large. This becomes an easy target for enemy star fighters as you’re practically painting a bull’s eye on your most important section and shouting “Shoot here to win!” at the top of your lungs. The Executor, a 19km long space knife, had this flaw as well. And that bridge was TINY in comparison to the rest of the space frame. This is why the Resurgent-class had no obvious bridge. Hell, it had two bridges. When you put your command center on a long stick jutting out from a pizza slice, then you’re going to have issues, shields or not.
Besides, the bridge also blocks the firing arcs of the turrets underneath it. That’s just dumb.
Hello there!
I’m a hardcore EU fan and therefore I despise Disney canon. But tbh I would be a lot more ok with Disney canon if they had been smart enough to hire you to make their capital ships.
Agreed!
Join the club. God I hate the Dis-verse. Right there with you on that one.
Well, if it’s of any consolation, they’ve just released the Supremacy, aka the Flying Wing-style Star Destroyer they alluded to. It’s hard to tell right now since the picture is pretty small, but it looks somewhat impressive, especially compared to the so-called Dreadnought they released. And it’s apparently a whopping 60 km as well, dwarfing even the Executor/Eclipse/Vengeance/Eye of Palpatine at this rate.
That ship is the width of the Death Star, if it is 60km LONG. I actually think the shape is cool, but the size and the name are just stupid. It’s like they turned the canon over to an 8 year old and told him to come up with some “new ideas”.
Though if they had used this for the dreadnought and made it 8km in some dimension, I wouldn’t have much of an issue with that. It actually looks like it could be large. Just not 60km large.
Actually, it’s not 60km long, it’s more like 60km WIDE. And to be fair, something needs to have enough size and space to maintain, repair, and create what is likely to be the entire First Order fleet AND be a mobile command center.
The Supremacy, brought to you by same kind of people that came up with names like Snoke and Maul for their villains and told us BB-8 the radio beachball was AWSUM.
Are these things being dumbed down as a troll on the fans or are these people serious?
Logistically, something like the Supremacy might make sense if the New Republic has a significant margin of fleet superiority over the First Order. In such a scenario, any static infrastructure parked in orbit of First Order worlds such as shipyards, fueling stations, deepdocks, hypermatter refineries, and C3I facilities would instantly become targets upon the beginning of open hostilities. Consolidating those facilities into a heavily armed mobile battle station might be their solution to the vulnerable industrial base problem. I guess the Supremacy would be more of a mobile Validusia than an actual Star Superdreadnaught, but that’s probably not the angle Rian is going with it.
Concept makes sense, design looks decent aesthetically. But the size is bonkers. Unless it’s 60km wide. I can get behind that. All my issues with the worldbuilding (or lack thereof) still stand though.
I am also certain some starfighter is going to go through the bridge windows. And this makes me indescribably sad for where the sequels are going to go.
*Expects a starfighter to go through the bridge*
*Star Cruiser goes through the bridge*
It’s been confirmed by Pablo Hildago that it’s 60km wide, not Death Star sized. Of course, how the First Order has the industrial infrastructure to put this stuff together is still unknown.
Given how they love scaling up from the original trilogy, my bet is that they’re going to crash an entire Mon Calamari cruiser into it, but regardless it’s not going to survive the 3rd sequel movie.
Calling it a Mega Star Destroyer has pushed all my buttons though. Welcome to the 2nd internet Imperial Starship nomenclature war.
@Steve
Can’t say I’d mind a lightspeed capital kamikaze (or confirmation that no, the entire NR fleet wasn’t ker-vaped with Hosnian Prime), and the Supermobilestardock’s official scale doesn’t sound *too* nuts (aside from the bit where Space North Korea has the budget for that, siege pizzas AND Starkiller in quick succession/concurrently), but frak me blind, that designation’s cornball even for a neofascist regime running on Past Glories(C) hype.
Hey, you guys called it.
Wow you guys guessed it or more likely Disney came here looking for ideas.!
yeah, instead of that ‘mega-class’ crap, shouldn’t it be called a ‘supremacy-class’ ,since it is, I suppose, the first ship of its kind. Also I’m sorry, but if they’re going to go beyond a 90° angle front tip, it’s not a star destroyer anymore, it’s a giant flying wing.
You get all sorts of naming conventions. Like is something Town-class or Southampton class? Or is something a ship name class or a family of products like the MEKO series? Or a project/number designator like SSN788 class. Kirov, for instance, can be Kirov-class or Project 1144 or Project 1144 Orlan.
Having the only example of a ship be different from the “class” name isn’t odd. Having that class name be Mega is odd. It’s dumb on it’s face, and it’s worse because it’s a clear rip off of the old Super Star Destroyer moniker (which was NEVER supposed to be a class name anyway). And all of the sequels so far are kinda ripoffs.
Yeah, but in-univers, the Executor-class was named after its first dreadnought to fly out of Fondor’s shipyards, so there’s clearly a precedent in the franchise. Which probably mean that the supremacy will at some point in the future follow the same path as the Executor. Drop the mega/giga/super/ultra star destroyer shtick, and use its name and its class the same way…… or not. Depend how focused the peoples who found this name are on their rip-off spree.
I agree and I do barely like any of the new designs they made so far.
The Designs from the OT are still top notch, nothing from the PT & ST era comes near.
The OT designs do look believable and thats why I love them.
This 8km long dreadnought has only 24 turrets, how the fuck did they manage to get only this few weapons on a ship, that is nearly 3times larger than the Resurgent SD that is listed with 1500 weapons.
Oh yeah, becouse of the two oversized cannons on the bottom…
Just look at the new Walker, I can`t believe that professions did this, it looks so goofy.
You can´t say for example, that the AT-AT looks like a dog, a horse, camel, or what ever animal… it´s just a war machine with 4 legs. It never resemble any animal for me and today they thougt why not make it look like a Gorilla cause it´s cool…. argghhhhh
Then what about this walker the MT-AT? (Mountain-Terrain Armored-Transport)
:http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mountain_Terrain_Armored_Transport
For me, that MT_AT makes the same mistake design wise as the gorilla walker: it takes its source material too literally. And I dislike both of them.
Right but which one of these both walkers do you hate more the spider one or the gorilla one or do you hate both of them equally?
If someone had put that design up on my studio wall for scrutiny, I would’ve asked them to take it down and try again. It’s boring and uninspired, with nothing of interest to suggest scale or pull the eye in. The ape walker design they showed today was a disaster, too. (did they guy just look at some Zoids or what?) Quite honestly, from Kylo Ren’s mask to these latest, the new trilogy has been a case study for art department failure.
Eh, I’m not fond of the ape walker either, but at least there, it does avert to some degree the tow cable weakness, so it’s got some good regarding strategy there. There’s literally nothing good with this dreadnought design, being as bad as the Starkiller Base concept in… well, pretty much everything.
A spider/crab design would’ve averted the tow cable issue (and is a more stable firing platform, to boot) although to be honest an actual fighter could fire torpedoes at the things and blow them apart as well. The Rebels’ main issue in Empire was that they were using tiny speeders with blasters against that thick armor, not X- or Y-Wings with proper anti-armor ordinance.
I wasn’t a fan of the Finalizer either, TBH, but at least it wasn’t just a pizza wedge with a wing and two too-big cannons on it. That’s just bad design.
I’ll confess to giddily visualizing AT-ATs with toothy jaws, galloping animation & scaled-up rotating lightsaber ‘tusks’ in place of the chin & cheek guns, but agreed that blatant Animal Robo(C) aesthetic doesn’t quite jive with OT walker design. Again, Fractal hits closer to the mark with those Dark Empire-derived biped designs & the utterly monstrous AT-SP.
Two small attempts to put some sense into the design of this thing:
A) Ridiculously large gun.
Problems:
– Insufficient space in the ship’s bulk to accomodate an adequate reactor for the gun.
– Strong doubts that it scales (in a logical way) in destructive power for orbital bombardment with what Deathstar I can do on the one side (see Rogue One) and what a Star Destroyer can do on the other side (sources anyone?).
Possible solution:
One could argue that the size and length of the gun is mainly for purpose of extending range – not firepower. The extra wide bridge design could help in aiming (triangulation).
B) Ridiculously wide Bridge tower:
Problems:
– It’s ridiculous.
Possible solutions:
– See A)
– The circular recession in the ship’s center could be some kind of docking port – maybe for an auxiliary reactor or some kind of power storage, which would obstruct the middle section of the bridge. So sensors, emitters, fire command decks, etc. need to be located on an extreme lateral position.
All in all I don’t like the bigger-is-better approach that the new trilogy seems to take (Starkiller Base, hyperspace projectiles, …). This ship design seems to fit right into this philosophy and we haven’t begun to discuss that AT-AT/ape hybrid yet… My hopes are for the stand-alone movies.
What the Death Star did in rogue one was literally nothing compared to what it did in A new hope. Alderaan explosion was like 8/9 orders of magnitude stronger than The ones of Jehda and Scarif.
Completely true – but I would say the Alderaan event does not fall under the term ‘orbital bombardment’ anymore.
I just wonder where the new ship will fit in between Deathstar on lowest setting (=destruction of country size) and Star Destroyer orbital bombardment (=destruction of city size, I suppose).
To elaborate more:
Destructive power of this gun will have to be placed somewhere between DS and SD (and it should be much more on the SD side of the scale). Since we have not yet seen what a SD can do to a planet surface from a primary source, this new ship will be a definition factor for SD destructive power too.
In fact, I was a little mistaken. I obtained the 8 orders-of-magnitude figure assuming 4e+23 j for Jehda (roughly 100 teratons) and 2,4e+32 j for Alderaan, but realistically it could be up to 1e+38 j, so more like 14 orders-of-magnitude. Which logically mean that the superlaser was operating at less than a trillionth of a percent of it’s maximum capacity. I didn’t even think it could be used as anything less than pure planetary destruction.
Well, it just means that DS2’s ship killing feature wasn’t new, just previously unseen for DS1. Where’s the math for Jedha? I’m curious exactly how you got 100 teratons, which is like a heavy turbolaser shot.
To be frank, it was just a convenient figure to compare it to the chixculub impact, since both the superlaser and the asteroid left a crater relatively similar in size (superior to a 100 km in diameter). Obviously the means of those explosions are both completely different, so if anyone has a way to obtain a more precise figure, then please show me, but I doubt it would come very far above the power output of a single ISD (which should be around a petaton).
I have to agree. The first time I seen this designed I fully believed it to be a cruiser, an updated Vindicator specialized for heavy planetary bombardment, and anti-capital-ship operations, a long way from the 7 km long star dreadnought that it was stated to be right underneath it.
The giving designation as a Mandator IV class vessel set me off even more, as to seeing the significant contradiction the design had to the the previous 3 generations of vessels in that well covered and recognizable line of Republican and later Imperial capital ships, including the well beloved Bellator.
Overall, I like the design. Just make it 10 times shorter than it is now.
And I also agree about those guns, way to huge. If they were 1/3 the size and 4-6 of them it would make more sense, I mean they’re alsmost the size of a Providence destroyer (Invisible Hand for those who don’t know what that is).
Also the shape of the hull mean that it will have to increase the armor on its bow and bridge immensely.
Ok so besides looks I understand its build from a tactical view, the flat hull will allow it to minimize its profile, the weapons are very similar to WWII battleships, massive weaponry augmented with anti-fighter turrets, though by itself it’s very vulnerable as it has no turbolasers to defend itself, probably requireing a resurgent escort at all times. Personally I can just barley stand the pizza design, but the bridge just makes me cringe. The first order gets rid of the bridge in the resurgent battlecruiser due to the weakness in previous imperial ships, and then completely takes a step back with this monstrosity. The ship will not make the cut for me but I will want to see how it handles as a weapons platform.
Yeah, tactically, I could understand big guns, but not even World War II guns were as big as the guns there, where they seemed to take up more than half of the ship in sheer size alone.
We’ll see how it works as a weapons platform, though they definitely shouldn’t have called it a dreadnought.
I honestly don’t mind the flat profile that many people seem to dislike, or even the indent where there should really be a huge reactor bubble. (I’m willing to just believe the shit has several smaller reactors or something and go with it :\). In fact I would even say there’s some degree of freshness and ‘coolness’ to those features.
What really bugs me are the following:
1.) The totally uninspired and honestly ridiculous bridge construct – fractal did a great job lampooning that piece of trash. It’s too big and too blorg-like for the Star Wars look.
2.) The lack of distinguishing features (both to indicate size as fractal explained and to give the ship that ‘imperfect Star Wars aesthetic’ that is evident in every iconic SW craft).
3.) THE ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS OVERSIZED BELLY GUNS. I totally understand the need for an orbital siege weapon both militarily and for whatever potential story purposes Johnson has, and frankly I like the idea, but those things are ridiculous. They could just have easily been way smaller and greater in number and still accomplish the same goal. They don’t look threatening, they just look stupid.
I want to like this ship because I love Star Wars and I really struggle to hate on anything in-universe, but I don’t think I can. It’s dumb, lazy, and ugly. I cringe knowing it’ll likely be shown next to beautiful and well-designed ships like the Resurgent-class.
Fingers crossed it gets blown to bits by those L-shaped bombers and is never seen again in IX.
*the ship has several smaller reactors or something, lol it is a shit though
“3.) THE ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS OVERSIZED BELLY GUNS. I totally understand the need for an orbital siege weapon both militarily and for whatever potential story purposes Johnson has, and frankly I like the idea, but those things are ridiculous. They could just have easily been way smaller and greater in number and still accomplish the same goal. They don’t look threatening, they just look stupid.”
Agreed, they’re dumb. I’m afraid they’re going to be yet another superweapon, too. It’d be super silly if there was yet another Death Star/Starkiller Base in Episode VIII, so instead, we’ll have these things. I guess I’m afraid that the people making the new trilogy don’t know how to make the baddies bad without giving them superweapons.
Also, star destroyer dick.
I can roll with ovoid or cylindrical reactor shapes, mainly ’cause there’s no way Mon Cals or other Alliance/neutral shipbuilders were using KDY-regulation spheres…but you still need a certain volume of hull space for said machinery (especially if you’re powering superheavy guns), and this First Order siege-slice is notably lacking in that regard compared to virtually every official or Legends-consigned battlewagon design (well, besides the Vengeance, but that one’s ventral surface seems to be 70% hangar cutout). Thirded on points 1-3, though; I’m seriously starting to wonder if ‘villain tech=ugly=satisfying to watch ker-splode’ might be the name of Johnson’s game.
Wish granted sort of
It’s funny, I have some childhood drawings who look like this, in more complicated. Look where this habit of comparing imperial designs to pizza-slices has got us, we now have a star dreadnought quasi-literally shaped like one. And it look as big as one too.
Agreed, that FO dreadnought looks pretty bad. It’s similarity to the Vindicator, and to some extent the Arquitens, was probably the first thing I thought of when I saw it. Honestly, I don’t know why they thought it would be a good idea to take a frigate-like design and scale it up to be an 8km-long dreadnought. And what a boring design it is. The main wedge is flatter than a slice of pizza, except for that center well, and the command tower, while not totally flat, is very similar. I imagine it’ll be all right in the movie, with the story unfolding and ships battling around it, but by itself it ain’t much to look at.
So fractal how would this first order dreadnought fair against the Bellator? (I think the Bellator would most likely win against it)
I don’t know if you have read the article about the designs of this ship and the AT-M6, they sound extremelly childish about it. Saying things like “He wanted a triangle with turrents on top and big guns on the bottom”.
I don’t doubt Rian Johnson’s ability as a director, he is great, but I don’t think he is going to care that much about ship design the same way J.J. Abrams didn’t care that much about the physics established in the Star Wars universe.
At this point every single ship design that we have seen for the Last Jedi has been bad. The Resistance Bomber looks awful, the Dreadnaught, the AT-M6, the TIE Silencer… the A-Wing is extremelly unoriginal… the only ship that is worth something is the “Resistance Skimmer”.
What is surprising is that the talent is there though. If you see the Art of The Force Awakens there are some marvelous ship designs in there that didn’t go anywhere.
I’m sure the models are beautifully built, so it might well be the director’s fault. You’d think after seeing what Lucas did they’d have realized that delegation based on strengths might be better than giving the director total control. Lucas was pretty bad with acting direction and writing with the prequels, but the overarching artistic direction was pretty awesome.
But yeah, I’m really not impressed with what’s come out. New is great, but if it is going to look this uninspired then they might as well use classic OT designs.
I personally like your Praetor model; it’s one of my favorites and looks absolutely massive to me. As for the First Order dreadnought, I completely agree that it looks awful. The Finalizer teased new and bigger warships to come, and this is it? I really hope this thing is unfinished, or some concept that isn’t being used in the final film.
The bridge tower actually looks unfinished. I’m assuming it’s never going to be focused on in a close shot, but the difference in detail is apparent even with the low-res previews.
Same here, I’m a big fan of that Praetor. It’s big and imposing, without being as overly massive as a SSD. It’s surface is fairly smooth overall, giving it sleek lines and no exposed Executor-style cityscape on top to soak up damage. It has a relatively small, sheltered command tower (between the two wedges supporting the reactor, correct?), which I think is brilliant. Like the Finalizer, it’s a striking departure from earlier Imperial designs, but still recognizably Star Wars and recognizably Imperial. I really like it.
And I’ve gone off on a tangent, sorry…
Eh, I dunno how much component exposure/concealment matters once a given battlewagon’s shields have been briefly breached or hammered down-SW starship armor seems not to matter much against turbolaser volleys, and bridge modules/hangars/reactors are still easy to pick out at cinematic spitting-distance ranges. Most Imp murderwedges seem to concentrate their larger soft spots on the ventral surface, leaving the dorsal for sensors/helm & primary guns-Praetor contrasts in that respect with a rather ‘hardened’ belly & teeny-tiny bow launch bays, which adds to that distinctiveness you rightly noted.
Well spoken! (Disney/Lucasfilm should have used your input as part of their steering committee.)
What’s sad is that Kevin Jenkins is otherwise a solid art director, being the guy behind the whole X-Wings over a lake idea, and delivering a suitably fascist Starkiller Base aesthetic.
The real culprit behind this dereliction of duty that is the Mandator IV Siege Platform (I refuse to call this thing a Star Dreadnaught) is Rian Johnson, who may be a competent storyteller, but clearly is no equal to Lucas in artistic vision. Johnson demanded a completely flat surface from the art team with small turrets on it, removed the radar dishes, made it clear that the Mandator IV was supposed to be an orbital-bombardment platform rather than a true spacefaring warship, and rushed it out fairly late in post-production.
Of course, Jenkins does deliver some blame for the stupid bridge module/car-spoiler with Borg Cube style detailing, and rather than including a bulge to increase reactor volume, there’s actually a hexagonal indentation that DECREASES potential reactor volume. which is just colossally boneheaded . The Mandator II was said to be a match for 1,000 Recusant Light Destroyers. I wouldn’t take the Mandator IV’s side in a battle against a single Recusant. Oh how the mighty have fallen.
If the story is good, TLJ might be a fine movie. But the problem is that SW is the whole package, and from my end I’m actually in it for the aesthetics and the world-building rather than the Solo-Skywalker soap opera. Take that away and, for me at least, the new SW movies are basically like any other throw-away action flicks. The Prequels were in a lot of ways totally awful (mostly on the acting side, and mostly Lucas’ fault), but it built a grand world visually in a way TFA never even tried to. Now TFA was a better movie than the prequels, but because it basically aped ANH and had much more mature effects work on top, but the re-establishing the setting was a big missed opportunity.
It does feel damned bizarre to be faced with the prospect of watching SW’s final-trilogy installments for the actors alone, and falling back on ‘interquels’ like Rogue One for ship-design hits.
I totally agree. The Resurgent-class was different, but conceivably an evolutionary design. I could see some neofascist totalitarian state like the First Order deciding to build a few dozen/hundred Resurgents to replace their Impstars – they’re more expensive, but bigger, badder, and meaner-looking.
First, to me, it doesn’t make sense that the FO would just decide to crank out some 8-kilometer dreadnoughts from scratch. Where do they get the funding, the materiel? When the Empire had, at most, two dozen Executors, and maybe a further hundred smaller ‘naughts (and had both the Clone Wars era designs and 20 years of aggressive shipbuilding), why does the FO, Star Wars’s equivalent to North Korea, need even more dreadnoughts?
Also, it looks like utter shit. And naming it the Mandator-IV (while pleasing, because it confirms my beloved Mandator-III and it’s predecessors) is a disgrace to the previous ships, which I had a totally different image of in my mind than something like…this
I suppose asteroid/sterile world-mining might get an interstellar micro-dictatorship further along the superweapon road than casual observers might expect, but Starkiller *plus* a fleet of glorified BDZ-monitors, from an organization tapping the Empire’s rump remnants? I could see one *or* the other, but not both in rapid “switch to Plan B” succession (much less simultaneously). Plus, agreed that the thing resembles a refugee from some mid-90s LucasArts first-person shooter.
I too wished Lucasfilm contacted you to work for them. Alas, we are stuck with what we got. I love your Assertor class vessel. That would have made for a great First Order dreadnaught with obvious design cues to the Executor without being a carbon copy.
I totally agree. I don’t know WTH is going on at Lucasfilm. The only good TFA designs, IMO, were the new Star Destroyer and the X-Wing, which was a McQuarrie design. People love to crap on Lucas over the Prequels, but he did have the vision to keep the concept artists on course. He told them what he needed, they designed, and he picked ships he liked or combined parts to make what he wanted.
Speaking of the HIJMS Fujo, what makes that sorry excuse of a Dreadnought for the First Order even MORE sad in its design is that according to Kevin Jenkins, the design supervisor for The Last Jedi, they actually TOOK cues from, among other things, the Yamato-class battleship (not to mention the lead ship of the class and most famous example, the Yamato), not to mention various naval vessels from World War II and the Korean War, heck, even all the way up to the sixties.
And what’s even worse is that they were planning to give a more Flash Gordon-style design to the ship, heck, even add some radars here and there, but they decided not to, just thinking adding more guns would have sufficed. I kid you not, they actually SAID that: http://www.starwars.com/news/inside-two-deadly-new-first-order-vehicles-from-the-last-jedi
And honestly, iterations? Well, I can sort of see how the AT-M6 would fit into the iteration philosophy due to it not only looking somewhat similar to the AT-AT, but also outright eliminating the whole tow-cable problem, but I fail to see how this… ship even comes CLOSE to the philosophy of iterations. The Resurgent-class battlecruiser comes far closer to actually following that philosophy than this sorry excuse of a ship. Heck, even the TIEs and X-Wings of The Force Awakens come far closer to meeting that philosophy than this does. And to top it all off, it doesn’t even LOOK like ILM would have even touched this with a ten yard pole, let alone make it, so it failed even regarding that inspiration.
The Bellator model, even at several years old now looks vastly superior. It’s even about the right size. Those huge turbolaser turrets would make for an awesome planetary bombardment. Or even better, use Wrath!
Is this a reply to my question..?
I think they tried, fairly poorly, to put the detail, the grainularity, and different sized shapes in the trenches leaving the dorsal and ventral sides barren in an attempt to be different. But it does create a ship that visually looks no bigger than a standard issue Impstar. Even at 8km, I’d doubt the depth of the hull is much more than the overall depth of an Impstar. They got the volume of the ship all wrong. Though the Executor was relatively thin, for a 19km ship, you still got a sense of scale and proportion because of both the dorsal and ventral brick a brak. The bridge module is asinine as I can’t see a reason for it to be so wide, plus it looks out of proportion. It’s like a a 19 year old who puts a huge spoiler on used Civic, it just looks stupid.
Regarding the planetary attack cannons, someone else made a joke that I can’t get out of my head now, “I wonder if there’s a window on the bottom where Londo Molari can look forlornly out of.” That’s a problem, yes a lot of viewers won’t get that, but this is SciFi many many people will know big cannons hung on the bottom of a big ship, attacking a planet has been done. Even with B5’s dated effects, I’ll bet that scene will be more emotionally impactful because the set up AND actors were better. If they were going to have big surface attack, city killing cannons why not just make them fixed? Why not put them on the dorsal side like all the primary armament of EVERY Imperial ship we’ve ever seen on screen?
I’m not trying to blow smoke up your ass, but honestly I think you’d have come up with something better given a piece of paper and 30 minutes to doodle. This smacks of an attempt to try something different. There are too many good designers at Lucasfilm, I’ve bought all the art books for every movie since Epi IV. They’ve got enough talent to not churn this out, yet here it is. I can’t see how they fumbled this, other than a directive to make it different.
Regarding your comment about jokes and the planetary attack cannons, I’ve heard very dirty jokes about the design and guns, stuff that wouldn’t be given in civilized company (let’s just say that people are jokingly “identifying” the dreadnought as male like they would a dog because of those guns).
And yeah, agreed full well about the overall design. It’s just downright bad. I just hope they aren’t too late with having to redesign it, because that design REALLY needs a good cleaning up to even be considered remotely acceptable. To paraphrase Myers Jr. from The Simpsons (you know, the head of Itchy & Scratchy International), “I could puke into a fountain pen and send it to the monkey house, and I’d get better ship designs.”
*Meyers, Jr., not Myers, Jr. Also, full name was Roger Meyers, Jr. The quote came from The Front when chewing out an employee (or rather, a soon-to-be-ex-employee).
In your defense, the Preator model you made was based of drawings and basic visuals of the ship from comics and such. (At least that would be my guess… Correct me if I am wrong please.) So it is not your fault it came out so… uhm… unpleasing to the eyes..
However, I completely agree with you, the FO Dreadnought is a stain on SD-like ship design and a stain on the Mandator line of dreadnoughts too. It doesn’t even look or sound practical, the flat design is very useless and ugly, the supposed “24 point defense laser cannons” that it has are pathetic for its size, and those 2 gigantic cannons on its lower hull are just massive, gigantic, enormous, HUGE targets, almost as much as that hideous command structure…
Also, if you had been asked to use one of your already existing designs to be used as a new FO capital ship, which would you pick?
Yeah, the Praetor is a pretty faithful model of Giel’s flagship, the Helmsman from Marvel Star Wars 60, so Fractal didn’t have a lot of leeway on it.
Even if the Praetor isn’t that good at showing off how large it is without anything to compare it to, ( Why KDY skipped the bridge tower on this model still irks me a bit), at least it makes sense within the internally consistent rules of Star Wars as a capital warship with excellent firing arcs, volume for a sizable main reactor, and enough engines to deserve the title of Battlecruiser. The awful thing about the Mandator IV is that it doesn’t look good or make sense.
Dunno if Fractal’s Praetor render is *that* tough to scale; seems to me all you’d need is the dimensions of that big ball turret (and possibly an Impstar’s octuple battery for extra reference). Mandator IV’s phallocannons are too damn disproportionate for easy comparison to anything but that ion emplacement from ESB.