This is amazing work! I can’t wait to see the finished model!
Ethan
5 years ago
I am just curious if you had thought about doing the Venator class star destroyer and it’s Mandalorian inspiration which I believe was called the Akaan Galaar and a few non official sources state as being 2.5 km in length?
Would you please be patient the Imperator redux will be his main priority.
Plus there is already an updated Assertor although it is only one picture and what better is that it is not 4K but 8K! Fractal said it himself here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/evkaY
StellarMagic
5 years ago
Huh… I thought the ISD2 dropped the axial laser battery. Then again, I get the feeling there was a lot more variation with the ISD then anyone really admitted too.
I believe the correct term is “centreline.”
“Axial laser battery” implies laser cannons firing along the ship’s centre axis/axis of thrust. Centreline turrets, however, are turrets mounted on the vessel’s centreline.
As for the ISD2 armament change, Rogue One changed the ISD1 – including Devastator herself – by adding the four new ventral turrets (two near the hangar and two under the bow). If R1 was allowed to change the first Star Destroyer ever seen on the movie screen, then I see no reason why Fractal can’t make similar changes to the ISD2.
@keb
actually, the devastator already had two turrets under the bow. Even thought they practically couldn’t put them on the model, you can distinctively see bolts coming from those places.
No it’s not. It’s an ISDII. I think that the turret positions across all variants are available, but some ships mount guns there and some don’t for various reasons.
If the movies/games/rebels were more consistent on ISD detailing, there might be enough footage to begin classifying all the shown ISD IIs into subcategories of ISD II Flight 1-4 to denote major refits.
Refits and specialized loadouts are a thing too… We see either a heavily modified ISD1 or heavily modified ISD2 in Battlefront 2… Garrick Versio’s command ship, the Eviscerator, has an ISD2 style command bridge and ISD1 style main gun turrets (6 dual heavy turbolaser turrets and 2 dual ion cannon turrets… the inexplicably fire turbolaser blasts in the game).
We also see ISDs with ISD1 command towers and ISD2 style main gun batteries in Star Wars: Rebels. I’m guessing there are a lot of transitional field modifications and refits in the Imperial fleet.
Regarding the asymmetrical bridge tower (one side of the tower is flat, the other side has a slight kink in it, visible in the “Falcon on the back of Avenger” shot) – shouldn’t it be the port side that has the “not completely straight up and down” trait?
This one, shows the starboard side of the tower that way.
I’ve been comparing this one to the one on the Exhibitions: Avenger page of Star Wars Technical Commentaries – and it caught my attention.
Also, you know the Falcon scene uses a detail model and that is closer to the Executor tower than the actual Avenger model right?
The Avenger model is asymmetrical but not always in a good way – the starboard side is not nearly up to the same standard of detail as the port side. So I go with port side detailing mirrored over unless there’s a region where you can see both sides, and then I make sure the starboard side general arrangement is detailed up to the port-side standard.
Plus… the filming model only had full detailing on one side to keep the costs down. Some allowances can, and should be made.
It is known
5 years ago
Concerning the Resurgent class which is supposed to have 1500 guns. Well really we havent seen this one much in Action lately and the last movie was an disappointment in that regard. So far i can remember there werent anywhere near as many weapons to be seen. If that figures a correct which i doubt then most of ist weaponry is to small to be seen and possibly to small to be of any threat to anything in similar size. Considering that i would guess the impstar could pose a serious threat and the allegiance fractal made would definitely obliterate this one.
It is twice the size of an ISD so the weapons would be harder to see than on the Imp Star which in the movies all you ever see are the primary 8 turrets anyway except for Rogue One ISD that added more visible firepower. The Resurgent in ep VII showed plenty of larger turrets, like twelve alone on the bow, and there never was a close up in ep 8. ISD wouldn’t be much of a threat at all and I bet even the Allegiance would lose though that one does have more firepower for its size compared to the ISD. Resurgent per the description uses kyber crystals to power its weapons though and I like that someone gave it some thought for an upgrade over the older ISD’s. I wish instead of adding two new dreadnaughts, both of which I didn’t care much for the design, we got to see the Resurgents in action instead. Those first three would have easily handled the Resistance fleet on their own but instead they did nothing. Still liked the movie just wish there was some ship vs ship fighting and instead I don’t think Leia’s ship fired one shot back. Wouldn’t have done much but still. Hoping for a proper fleet battle in IX like we had in III. Not as large but cap ships duking it out on screen.
Exactly my thought about this underarmed overrated dreadnought. they did not need it at all those SDs would have been more than capable of destroying the ground facility and interrupting any evacuation attempt. Well ok the ISD II is an bad example to fight an resurgent but i do still think an allegiance would have been capable of standing its ground (in space) fighting an resurgence. Cause the allegiance is only 700m shorter than the resurgence but very well armed for its size like you said. Best example the Executor 19km vs Assertor 15km my money would be on the Assertor though im a little biased to be honest. And for the lack of space battle in ep 8 im fully with you i hoped at least something like in Rogue one. Having said that i could still be wrong in the end im no astrophysicist nor ship designer im just some random fan dude.
Anonymous
5 years ago
So Fractal between the Venator, the Imperator and the Resurgent how would you rank them from top to bottom by designs?
Man that is just beautiful. Well done and the axial triples are the same caliber as the octuples correct? Hope you’ll model some XX-9’s and NK-7 ion cannons to put somewhere on the ship.
Soren
5 years ago
First: Welcome back Fractal! I hope you had a happy new year and a merry Christmas!
Second: She’s going along beautifully! I can’t wait to see the finished product!
cScott
5 years ago
Does barrel length for TLs have any effect on weapon performance (e.g., accuracy, recoil, energy output) in the disney canon? The barrel on the at-m6 TL is pretty short compared to the ones on this ImpStar. And do the octuples in picture 6 look like sextuples to anyone else?
Don’t you know that Canon weaponry are powered by Disney Magic? But all (heavy hearted) joking aside, the “megacaliber” (which I am disappointed to learn that it’s just another turbolaser and not a more sensible mass driver based on its nomenclature) have their own independent reactor from the rest of the walker, granting it more power. As for your original question, I do believe barrel length is tied into the weapon’s effective range.
I don’t really know what weapon range would mean in the context of space combat since their’s nothing to impede the beam’s movement. Range, as the distance to which a weapon would still be effective would be virtually infinite in that case. The only limiting factors would be the rate of propagation of the beam/projectile and the efficiency of the targeting systems. Maybe longer canons produce more stable beams and therefore possess more penetrating power, or accelerate bolts at a faster rate, making them more effective at longer ranges, particularly on moving targets…?
Star Wars turbolasers seem to have ludicrously short ranges, fo an example this (KX-series?) boxy Death Star turbolasers have the range of only 100 km, but as for this means, I believe it has to do with the distance until magnetic field holding the bolt together weaken enough to reduce the bolt’s destructive potential.
Ah, this makes sense. But on that note, is there any indication on SW’s sensor range? If its far longer than the TL’s effective range, shouldn’t it be possible to have your cannons point int the said direction of hostiles an unleash saturated fire to cripple their capablities?
The problem with the 100 km range figure is that it would make any orbital strike exceedingly hard to execute or even downright impossible, since an atmosphere would add resistance, potentially shortening the range even more. As fractal said, for me it was always more a case of limited effective range, which would explain why they can hit immobile targets (like cities) or objects moving in a predictable pattern (like asteroids) just fine.
The XX-9 on the death star are around 10 m long/wide/high. in term of volume, in our universe, they’re easily in the WWII battleship main turret-ballpark.
Well, this has the potential to bring back the old magnetic-containment field theory versus the ramping-up lightspeed beam theory debate.
If you subscribe to the magnetic containment field idea, it does support a exponential increase in range based on the size of the beam emitter, regardless of what exotic particles are actually being fired if the containment field expires on a timeframe corresponding to the size of the emitter.
That might why Han’s poorly maintained Falcon couldn’t target a TIE only a few hundred meters ahead of it while the Death Star could hit Alderaan.
It also could explain why the Imperator-I was given such a heavy main HTL battery, in order to pound on Lucrehulks from outside of their own effective range, given how unmaneuverable the Lucrehulk is.
The XX-9 in such a case would be more akin to the Mark 12 5″/38 caliber gun of WW2 fame, capable of engaging both fighters and corvettes, but with much less effectiveness against destroyers at typical capital-ship engagement ranges.
The containment field theory was thrown around when turbolasers were considered plasma weapons. When your projectile is composed of super-agitated gas, an invisible « something » preventing it to just desintegrate as soon as it leave the barrel make sense. It was also created to explain the flak effect that some bolts seem to have.
The problem with this interpretation is that it suppose the existence of a « field » both self-sustaining and strong enough to maintain the beam’s unity for a long period of time, and you can probably already see the problem with that idea.
Personally, I would lean more toward the « lightspeed particles travelling in helix » idea, where the particles (?) composing the beam are made to travel around it’s central axis at lightspeed, via some unknown exotic effect. In that case, the flak effect could be caused by the programmed decay of that effect over a distance calculated by the targeting computer. Also, when the superlaser is fired at Alderaan, we can see a closeup of one of the tributary beam and it seem to consist of green concentric circles moving around a central red beam…
For the Falcon, I really have no idea since we see it at Endor destroy fighters farther than that.
For the XX-9, I was just making a comparison in term of sheer volume.
I can affirm the fact that 100km range does make orbital bombardment far more difficult as mentioned even by the magical whammy that is the Canon, which raises something along the lines of atmospheric disturbances yadda yadda make turbolaser far weaker when it finally reaches the ground. But on the note of turbolaser mechanics, the idea of a helix of photons does sound rather intriguing, though I am from the plasma bolt school of thought.
@Steve I doubt XX-9 made for starfighters, however, as Ep. 4 made it clear that starfighters are “too small, they’re evading […] turbolasers.”
(Btw, I got my Canon technicalities from the wiki, though it got its sources from the Thrawn book. Here’s the entry: “A turbolaser’s effectiveness was weakened drastically as the bolt moved through layers of a planet’s atmosphere making them largely ineffective even against unshielded targets, however this can be negated by moving the ships deeper into the planet’s stratosphere.” So one could say that orbital bombardment is massively nerfed in Canon.
I smell horseshit. Energy is energy. Either it is expended directly at the target or by heating the atmosphere, but punch enough energy into the system at one time and it doesn’t matter how much air does to refract/disperse it. Air is not that efficient a conductor. Either the thing on the ground gets hit or the atmosphere boils off around the bolt and things around it get fried, or the bolt tumbles, loses cohesion and explodes. Look at the Tunguska meteor – it had a huge amount of KE, the atmosphere dispersed some of it via heat, but then the thing melted and exploded. Ok, it did less damage than it would have to the one tree it might have hit if it had stayed solid, but it still added 15 megatons of energy into the area. That’s megatons. Turbolasers fire bolts potentially into petaton range.
Technobabble is the dark side of scifi writing. Use it at your peril. There’s some of it that is necessary, but you have to titrate it or it turns everything into crap.
As fractal said, energy cannot simply disappear. If a bolt lose megatons upon megatons worth of energy due to air resistance, it’s just going to heat the atmosphere around it like a nuclear bomb would.
Another big problem the plasma bolt theory (and plasma weapons in general) is that, as stated previously, without a containment field, the projectile constantly wants to kill itself on it’s way to the target, which mean that when it eventually does and the CF is ruptured, the beam’s particles will just fly randomly in all directions and most of them won’t hit anything. Plus, plasma, being basically superheated gas, possess mass and would therefore be subjected to gravity.
Between TLJ’s implied (H?)TL-bolt attenuation (seriously, at a certain well-within-visual range Mon Cals can indefinitely tank fire from a ship half DS1’s width??) and that nu-novel atmospheric degradation, I’m less than thrilled with the Disneyboot’s technical turns re: capital craft. Hell, now we have the odd SDN pundit taking Rebels + said novel as proof positive Impstars need strike birds to do anything besides sit there & sic walkers on hardened surface targets. And come to think of it, where’s this Atmo Diffusion Factor(R) re: ESB’s ion cannon? Or are we supposed to figure that V-150 would’ve sufficed to wipe out Death Squadron if the Rebels could’ve come by a proper spaceframe?
If I remember correctly (I probably don’t but I can’t check right now), the atmospheric degradation was mentioned in the context of a shielded rebel compound just outside a planetary capital. I believe that, in that instance, Thrawn’s worry was about the very effect which Fractal and Valoren mentioned.
If memory serves, every operation (in that book), which Thrawn considered to be a success, resulted in very few/no civilian casualties, so it’s not really a stretch to think that he would be reluctant to effectively set of a series of 100Mt+ explosions with millions of civilians within the blast radius.
Anonymous
5 years ago
So Fractal If you done this redux will it replace the old model on the front in your website?
Anonymous
5 years ago
Awesome details, I love your work some much!
Shaun
5 years ago
The tertiary floozle hub on the upper outer main reactor flange is backwards. It’s supposed to face maintenance observation port A3-12958230, not the manifold intake recirculation valve.
I’m about 89% sure that was asspulled. Current official technowidgets tend to demand some kind of super-scarce crystal power amplifier shaved off the Fortress of Solitude.
Well now you’re just being silly. Everyone knows the crystals from that fortress are the wrong colour for this season. And that Byson-Hansi fusion splicer can take a long walk off your 7H-ductal flange and eat it into a black hole at a moment’s notice. No, no you need a crystal in silvery white, not that crappy ‘Chantilly’ white like that cape wearing hack makes his house out of. What you ‘really’ need is the scradlow de compleszh/Kuati 6-R8 hyper thyroidal produced sodium based hyper matter crystals. Though I will confess they’re hard to come by this time of year, being as they’re so popular? Yeah, and I’ll see you a nerf steak and raise you a bantha half-rack. Comprende?
You mean 73 barrels? There’s the possibility for more. If you take all the possible gun mount positions across Devastator and Avenger, there are still the heavy hangar guns (somewhere) and the brim trench quadruple turrets. Not yet sold on whether to build them here or not.
Oh forgot about the trench quad heavy turbolaser cannons. (by away please built them if the devastator have then I’m sure this should also have them)
But heavy hangers guns? I never knew they were there before unless you were talking about the ones on the devastator in R1 and if so then I bet they will be the same triple heavy turbolasers cannons on the axial right?
I wonder if the brim quads were part of an attempt to grant the Imp-I sufficient fire rate for fast-frigate targets (as opposed to Lucrehulks & other CIS heavies). Deuces might or might not have deleted those based on official whim and/or sector-group demands (I’d certainly want extra mains for the odd Home One cruiser run-in). Kinda doubt the hangar guns are especially heavy; quad or double 40s strike me as useful & compact.
They managed to add a couple of the 3 barrel medium turrets ahead of the tractor beam dishes in the Rogue One model. I can’t imagine anything larger.
PhantomFury
5 years ago
Ohohoho! The details! This bring tears to me eyes!
Anonymous
5 years ago
Damn, that’s an impressive amount of detail!
(On a sidenote: there seems to be a minor collision with hull geometry on the first of the four side-turrets – some box shaped greeble is intersecting with the base plate of the turret.)
Are you planning on doing a version with the new dual heavy TL turrets seen in Rogue One and the new Battlefront game? I can send some close-up reference screenshots if you’d like.
So awesome! Fractal, thank you for all your hard work!
beta_520
5 years ago
were the octuples superfiring before? or is this Fractal working magic and solving the 100,000 problems with the Imperial II (as already happened with the LTLs I see)
‘Superfiring’ basically refers to a turret arrangement where one or more emplacement(s) are placed *just* high enough to fire directly over the next in line, thus allowing a ship’s main guns wider field of fire than you’d get if they were all on the same level (several WWI & WWII battleship designs had that issue).
Noticed that too was wondering if i missed it on other models or had he just fixed this little problem. Anyhow it makes definitely more sense that way. Im so pumped to see the finished one.
Yeah I think they were slightly superfiring (stacked vertically so they can fire over each other) just because of the hull shape before, I think this is maybe a bit more pronounced.
It’s a little unclear. They may just have been able to do it because the hull is sloped down to allow it but it would have been a bit tight without dipping the bow down a bit. I just tweaked it a little so that it’s clear you wouldn’t HAVE to maneuver the ship to allow them to superfire dead ahead.
This raised another observation I noticed about the octuple: was it always perfectly flat on the hull’s sloped surface or was it always flushed with the slope and this is a design choice? If not, it’d make some unique advantages of them having a firing arc on things below the vessel’s trench if it was far away enough.
I believe on the model the gun mountings were fixed barbettes. They tracked along the slope of the hull lengthwise but their transverse axis was parallel to the ship – in other words, they’d have to depress their guns to fire “down” the slope of the hull along the flanks. I do think they could fire dead ahead relative to the motion of the ship, but it was closer than I’d like.
So to help with all this I went one step farther – for these guns I put the whole platform on a type of socket mount – the entire platform can rotate and has a few degrees freedom of motion on any other axis, this before gun elevation and depression are taken into account. I think this makes a lot more sense for a turret for space combat rather than a fixed ball race type mounting. This plus the slight modification to increase superfiring potential means the guns now are pretty much free to shoot wherever except where the main superstructure terraces block them aft and across the midline forward.
So a Imp 2 with the weapons power of the 2 but the variety of the 1?
Weird.
Anonymous
5 years ago
Awesome And some light turbolasers and heavy laser cannons which is neat but no medium turbolasers which is one of the thing I was expecting to be on the Imperator but I’m sure you got the good reason for not adding those.
Also love the oct heavy turbolasers details!
This is amazing work! I can’t wait to see the finished model!
I am just curious if you had thought about doing the Venator class star destroyer and it’s Mandalorian inspiration which I believe was called the Akaan Galaar and a few non official sources state as being 2.5 km in length?
Venator will get built eventually.
Hey, Fractal, could you do a 4K Assertor?
Would you please be patient the Imperator redux will be his main priority.
Plus there is already an updated Assertor although it is only one picture and what better is that it is not 4K but 8K! Fractal said it himself here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/evkaY
Huh… I thought the ISD2 dropped the axial laser battery. Then again, I get the feeling there was a lot more variation with the ISD then anyone really admitted too.
Huh… what do you mean with the axial laser battery?
he means the three axial triples
I believe the correct term is “centreline.”
“Axial laser battery” implies laser cannons firing along the ship’s centre axis/axis of thrust. Centreline turrets, however, are turrets mounted on the vessel’s centreline.
He may have gotten it confused with “axial defense turret” which is the actual term used in the Star Destroyer ICS picture. http://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1367/58/1367587238082.jpg
As for the ISD2 armament change, Rogue One changed the ISD1 – including Devastator herself – by adding the four new ventral turrets (two near the hangar and two under the bow). If R1 was allowed to change the first Star Destroyer ever seen on the movie screen, then I see no reason why Fractal can’t make similar changes to the ISD2.
@keb
actually, the devastator already had two turrets under the bow. Even thought they practically couldn’t put them on the model, you can distinctively see bolts coming from those places.
This is the Imperial 1-Class that is why it has those axial batteries.
No it’s not. It’s an ISDII. I think that the turret positions across all variants are available, but some ships mount guns there and some don’t for various reasons.
If the movies/games/rebels were more consistent on ISD detailing, there might be enough footage to begin classifying all the shown ISD IIs into subcategories of ISD II Flight 1-4 to denote major refits.
Refits and specialized loadouts are a thing too… We see either a heavily modified ISD1 or heavily modified ISD2 in Battlefront 2… Garrick Versio’s command ship, the Eviscerator, has an ISD2 style command bridge and ISD1 style main gun turrets (6 dual heavy turbolaser turrets and 2 dual ion cannon turrets… the inexplicably fire turbolaser blasts in the game).
We also see ISDs with ISD1 command towers and ISD2 style main gun batteries in Star Wars: Rebels. I’m guessing there are a lot of transitional field modifications and refits in the Imperial fleet.
Regarding the asymmetrical bridge tower (one side of the tower is flat, the other side has a slight kink in it, visible in the “Falcon on the back of Avenger” shot) – shouldn’t it be the port side that has the “not completely straight up and down” trait?
This one, shows the starboard side of the tower that way.
I’ve been comparing this one to the one on the Exhibitions: Avenger page of Star Wars Technical Commentaries – and it caught my attention.
Not sure what you mean by straight up and down?
Also, you know the Falcon scene uses a detail model and that is closer to the Executor tower than the actual Avenger model right?
The Avenger model is asymmetrical but not always in a good way – the starboard side is not nearly up to the same standard of detail as the port side. So I go with port side detailing mirrored over unless there’s a region where you can see both sides, and then I make sure the starboard side general arrangement is detailed up to the port-side standard.
Plus… the filming model only had full detailing on one side to keep the costs down. Some allowances can, and should be made.
Concerning the Resurgent class which is supposed to have 1500 guns. Well really we havent seen this one much in Action lately and the last movie was an disappointment in that regard. So far i can remember there werent anywhere near as many weapons to be seen. If that figures a correct which i doubt then most of ist weaponry is to small to be seen and possibly to small to be of any threat to anything in similar size. Considering that i would guess the impstar could pose a serious threat and the allegiance fractal made would definitely obliterate this one.
It is twice the size of an ISD so the weapons would be harder to see than on the Imp Star which in the movies all you ever see are the primary 8 turrets anyway except for Rogue One ISD that added more visible firepower. The Resurgent in ep VII showed plenty of larger turrets, like twelve alone on the bow, and there never was a close up in ep 8. ISD wouldn’t be much of a threat at all and I bet even the Allegiance would lose though that one does have more firepower for its size compared to the ISD. Resurgent per the description uses kyber crystals to power its weapons though and I like that someone gave it some thought for an upgrade over the older ISD’s. I wish instead of adding two new dreadnaughts, both of which I didn’t care much for the design, we got to see the Resurgents in action instead. Those first three would have easily handled the Resistance fleet on their own but instead they did nothing. Still liked the movie just wish there was some ship vs ship fighting and instead I don’t think Leia’s ship fired one shot back. Wouldn’t have done much but still. Hoping for a proper fleet battle in IX like we had in III. Not as large but cap ships duking it out on screen.
Exactly my thought about this underarmed overrated dreadnought. they did not need it at all those SDs would have been more than capable of destroying the ground facility and interrupting any evacuation attempt. Well ok the ISD II is an bad example to fight an resurgent but i do still think an allegiance would have been capable of standing its ground (in space) fighting an resurgence. Cause the allegiance is only 700m shorter than the resurgence but very well armed for its size like you said. Best example the Executor 19km vs Assertor 15km my money would be on the Assertor though im a little biased to be honest. And for the lack of space battle in ep 8 im fully with you i hoped at least something like in Rogue one. Having said that i could still be wrong in the end im no astrophysicist nor ship designer im just some random fan dude.
So Fractal between the Venator, the Imperator and the Resurgent how would you rank them from top to bottom by designs?
Amazing work! When you finish this, are you going to upload the 3d file?
Absolutely not.
LMAO!
Man that is just beautiful. Well done and the axial triples are the same caliber as the octuples correct? Hope you’ll model some XX-9’s and NK-7 ion cannons to put somewhere on the ship.
First: Welcome back Fractal! I hope you had a happy new year and a merry Christmas!
Second: She’s going along beautifully! I can’t wait to see the finished product!
Does barrel length for TLs have any effect on weapon performance (e.g., accuracy, recoil, energy output) in the disney canon? The barrel on the at-m6 TL is pretty short compared to the ones on this ImpStar. And do the octuples in picture 6 look like sextuples to anyone else?
Don’t you know that Canon weaponry are powered by Disney Magic? But all (heavy hearted) joking aside, the “megacaliber” (which I am disappointed to learn that it’s just another turbolaser and not a more sensible mass driver based on its nomenclature) have their own independent reactor from the rest of the walker, granting it more power. As for your original question, I do believe barrel length is tied into the weapon’s effective range.
I don’t really know what weapon range would mean in the context of space combat since their’s nothing to impede the beam’s movement. Range, as the distance to which a weapon would still be effective would be virtually infinite in that case. The only limiting factors would be the rate of propagation of the beam/projectile and the efficiency of the targeting systems. Maybe longer canons produce more stable beams and therefore possess more penetrating power, or accelerate bolts at a faster rate, making them more effective at longer ranges, particularly on moving targets…?
Star Wars turbolasers seem to have ludicrously short ranges, fo an example this (KX-series?) boxy Death Star turbolasers have the range of only 100 km, but as for this means, I believe it has to do with the distance until magnetic field holding the bolt together weaken enough to reduce the bolt’s destructive potential.
The old EU had interplanetary ranges but much smaller effective range (due to issues of fire control and maneuverability).
Ah, this makes sense. But on that note, is there any indication on SW’s sensor range? If its far longer than the TL’s effective range, shouldn’t it be possible to have your cannons point int the said direction of hostiles an unleash saturated fire to cripple their capablities?
The problem with the 100 km range figure is that it would make any orbital strike exceedingly hard to execute or even downright impossible, since an atmosphere would add resistance, potentially shortening the range even more. As fractal said, for me it was always more a case of limited effective range, which would explain why they can hit immobile targets (like cities) or objects moving in a predictable pattern (like asteroids) just fine.
The XX-9 on the death star are around 10 m long/wide/high. in term of volume, in our universe, they’re easily in the WWII battleship main turret-ballpark.
Well, this has the potential to bring back the old magnetic-containment field theory versus the ramping-up lightspeed beam theory debate.
If you subscribe to the magnetic containment field idea, it does support a exponential increase in range based on the size of the beam emitter, regardless of what exotic particles are actually being fired if the containment field expires on a timeframe corresponding to the size of the emitter.
That might why Han’s poorly maintained Falcon couldn’t target a TIE only a few hundred meters ahead of it while the Death Star could hit Alderaan.
It also could explain why the Imperator-I was given such a heavy main HTL battery, in order to pound on Lucrehulks from outside of their own effective range, given how unmaneuverable the Lucrehulk is.
The XX-9 in such a case would be more akin to the Mark 12 5″/38 caliber gun of WW2 fame, capable of engaging both fighters and corvettes, but with much less effectiveness against destroyers at typical capital-ship engagement ranges.
The containment field theory was thrown around when turbolasers were considered plasma weapons. When your projectile is composed of super-agitated gas, an invisible « something » preventing it to just desintegrate as soon as it leave the barrel make sense. It was also created to explain the flak effect that some bolts seem to have.
The problem with this interpretation is that it suppose the existence of a « field » both self-sustaining and strong enough to maintain the beam’s unity for a long period of time, and you can probably already see the problem with that idea.
Personally, I would lean more toward the « lightspeed particles travelling in helix » idea, where the particles (?) composing the beam are made to travel around it’s central axis at lightspeed, via some unknown exotic effect. In that case, the flak effect could be caused by the programmed decay of that effect over a distance calculated by the targeting computer. Also, when the superlaser is fired at Alderaan, we can see a closeup of one of the tributary beam and it seem to consist of green concentric circles moving around a central red beam…
For the Falcon, I really have no idea since we see it at Endor destroy fighters farther than that.
For the XX-9, I was just making a comparison in term of sheer volume.
I can affirm the fact that 100km range does make orbital bombardment far more difficult as mentioned even by the magical whammy that is the Canon, which raises something along the lines of atmospheric disturbances yadda yadda make turbolaser far weaker when it finally reaches the ground. But on the note of turbolaser mechanics, the idea of a helix of photons does sound rather intriguing, though I am from the plasma bolt school of thought.
@Steve I doubt XX-9 made for starfighters, however, as Ep. 4 made it clear that starfighters are “too small, they’re evading […] turbolasers.”
(Btw, I got my Canon technicalities from the wiki, though it got its sources from the Thrawn book. Here’s the entry: “A turbolaser’s effectiveness was weakened drastically as the bolt moved through layers of a planet’s atmosphere making them largely ineffective even against unshielded targets, however this can be negated by moving the ships deeper into the planet’s stratosphere.” So one could say that orbital bombardment is massively nerfed in Canon.
I smell horseshit. Energy is energy. Either it is expended directly at the target or by heating the atmosphere, but punch enough energy into the system at one time and it doesn’t matter how much air does to refract/disperse it. Air is not that efficient a conductor. Either the thing on the ground gets hit or the atmosphere boils off around the bolt and things around it get fried, or the bolt tumbles, loses cohesion and explodes. Look at the Tunguska meteor – it had a huge amount of KE, the atmosphere dispersed some of it via heat, but then the thing melted and exploded. Ok, it did less damage than it would have to the one tree it might have hit if it had stayed solid, but it still added 15 megatons of energy into the area. That’s megatons. Turbolasers fire bolts potentially into petaton range.
Technobabble is the dark side of scifi writing. Use it at your peril. There’s some of it that is necessary, but you have to titrate it or it turns everything into crap.
As fractal said, energy cannot simply disappear. If a bolt lose megatons upon megatons worth of energy due to air resistance, it’s just going to heat the atmosphere around it like a nuclear bomb would.
Another big problem the plasma bolt theory (and plasma weapons in general) is that, as stated previously, without a containment field, the projectile constantly wants to kill itself on it’s way to the target, which mean that when it eventually does and the CF is ruptured, the beam’s particles will just fly randomly in all directions and most of them won’t hit anything. Plus, plasma, being basically superheated gas, possess mass and would therefore be subjected to gravity.
Between TLJ’s implied (H?)TL-bolt attenuation (seriously, at a certain well-within-visual range Mon Cals can indefinitely tank fire from a ship half DS1’s width??) and that nu-novel atmospheric degradation, I’m less than thrilled with the Disneyboot’s technical turns re: capital craft. Hell, now we have the odd SDN pundit taking Rebels + said novel as proof positive Impstars need strike birds to do anything besides sit there & sic walkers on hardened surface targets. And come to think of it, where’s this Atmo Diffusion Factor(R) re: ESB’s ion cannon? Or are we supposed to figure that V-150 would’ve sufficed to wipe out Death Squadron if the Rebels could’ve come by a proper spaceframe?
If I remember correctly (I probably don’t but I can’t check right now), the atmospheric degradation was mentioned in the context of a shielded rebel compound just outside a planetary capital. I believe that, in that instance, Thrawn’s worry was about the very effect which Fractal and Valoren mentioned.
If memory serves, every operation (in that book), which Thrawn considered to be a success, resulted in very few/no civilian casualties, so it’s not really a stretch to think that he would be reluctant to effectively set of a series of 100Mt+ explosions with millions of civilians within the blast radius.
So Fractal If you done this redux will it replace the old model on the front in your website?
Awesome details, I love your work some much!
The tertiary floozle hub on the upper outer main reactor flange is backwards. It’s supposed to face maintenance observation port A3-12958230, not the manifold intake recirculation valve.
Good eye, chief. We’ll get a team on that sometime this decade.
Don’t you mean, “We’ll get to work establishing an entirely new class of ships based on this variant of random modeler detailing”?
Who needs new classes when you have a 1400-character database’s worth of Basic-numeral variants to fill?
I confess I can’t tell if ‘tertiary floozle hub’ was made up…
I’m about 89% sure that was asspulled. Current official technowidgets tend to demand some kind of super-scarce crystal power amplifier shaved off the Fortress of Solitude.
Y’all wouldn’t know a graizle beam refractor from a Byson-Hansi fusion splicer if it lept up off a 7H-ductal flange and bit you in the ass.
Well now you’re just being silly. Everyone knows the crystals from that fortress are the wrong colour for this season. And that Byson-Hansi fusion splicer can take a long walk off your 7H-ductal flange and eat it into a black hole at a moment’s notice. No, no you need a crystal in silvery white, not that crappy ‘Chantilly’ white like that cape wearing hack makes his house out of. What you ‘really’ need is the scradlow de compleszh/Kuati 6-R8 hyper thyroidal produced sodium based hyper matter crystals. Though I will confess they’re hard to come by this time of year, being as they’re so popular? Yeah, and I’ll see you a nerf steak and raise you a bantha half-rack. Comprende?
Porg. Pellets.
Dang . . . staggering details. LOVE IT!! 🙂
So if this is all the heavy turbolasers you going to put (unless you put more which I bet is unlikely) then this all add up to 73 turrets.
You mean 73 barrels? There’s the possibility for more. If you take all the possible gun mount positions across Devastator and Avenger, there are still the heavy hangar guns (somewhere) and the brim trench quadruple turrets. Not yet sold on whether to build them here or not.
Oh forgot about the trench quad heavy turbolaser cannons. (by away please built them if the devastator have then I’m sure this should also have them)
But heavy hangers guns? I never knew they were there before unless you were talking about the ones on the devastator in R1 and if so then I bet they will be the same triple heavy turbolasers cannons on the axial right?
I wonder if the brim quads were part of an attempt to grant the Imp-I sufficient fire rate for fast-frigate targets (as opposed to Lucrehulks & other CIS heavies). Deuces might or might not have deleted those based on official whim and/or sector-group demands (I’d certainly want extra mains for the odd Home One cruiser run-in). Kinda doubt the hangar guns are especially heavy; quad or double 40s strike me as useful & compact.
They managed to add a couple of the 3 barrel medium turrets ahead of the tractor beam dishes in the Rogue One model. I can’t imagine anything larger.
Ohohoho! The details! This bring tears to me eyes!
Damn, that’s an impressive amount of detail!
(On a sidenote: there seems to be a minor collision with hull geometry on the first of the four side-turrets – some box shaped greeble is intersecting with the base plate of the turret.)
Good catch – fixed.
holy crap this is so detailed. I love it.
It’s beautiful…
Welcome back fractalsponge
Are you planning on doing a version with the new dual heavy TL turrets seen in Rogue One and the new Battlefront game? I can send some close-up reference screenshots if you’d like.
Wouldn’t mind seeing the references – I don’t have BF and I only have a few closeup angles from R1.
Wow… for such limited sources, this is amazing!
So awesome! Fractal, thank you for all your hard work!
were the octuples superfiring before? or is this Fractal working magic and solving the 100,000 problems with the Imperial II (as already happened with the LTLs I see)
What is superfiring?
‘Superfiring’ basically refers to a turret arrangement where one or more emplacement(s) are placed *just* high enough to fire directly over the next in line, thus allowing a ship’s main guns wider field of fire than you’d get if they were all on the same level (several WWI & WWII battleship designs had that issue).
Noticed that too was wondering if i missed it on other models or had he just fixed this little problem. Anyhow it makes definitely more sense that way. Im so pumped to see the finished one.
Yeah I think they were slightly superfiring (stacked vertically so they can fire over each other) just because of the hull shape before, I think this is maybe a bit more pronounced.
It’s a little unclear. They may just have been able to do it because the hull is sloped down to allow it but it would have been a bit tight without dipping the bow down a bit. I just tweaked it a little so that it’s clear you wouldn’t HAVE to maneuver the ship to allow them to superfire dead ahead.
This raised another observation I noticed about the octuple: was it always perfectly flat on the hull’s sloped surface or was it always flushed with the slope and this is a design choice? If not, it’d make some unique advantages of them having a firing arc on things below the vessel’s trench if it was far away enough.
I believe on the model the gun mountings were fixed barbettes. They tracked along the slope of the hull lengthwise but their transverse axis was parallel to the ship – in other words, they’d have to depress their guns to fire “down” the slope of the hull along the flanks. I do think they could fire dead ahead relative to the motion of the ship, but it was closer than I’d like.
So to help with all this I went one step farther – for these guns I put the whole platform on a type of socket mount – the entire platform can rotate and has a few degrees freedom of motion on any other axis, this before gun elevation and depression are taken into account. I think this makes a lot more sense for a turret for space combat rather than a fixed ball race type mounting. This plus the slight modification to increase superfiring potential means the guns now are pretty much free to shoot wherever except where the main superstructure terraces block them aft and across the midline forward.
I see, thanks for the detailed clearification!
Is this the IMP 1 or 2? I can’t tell yet.
IMP 2 with the detail of the Avenger.
I see it now with the bridge. And lack of smaller weapons so far.
Actually there are a lot of light turbolasers and heavy laser cannons around the layers if you look at it close enough.
So a Imp 2 with the weapons power of the 2 but the variety of the 1?
Weird.
Awesome And some light turbolasers and heavy laser cannons which is neat but no medium turbolasers which is one of the thing I was expecting to be on the Imperator but I’m sure you got the good reason for not adding those.
Also love the oct heavy turbolasers details!
When Fractal does the trench detailing, I think you’ll find your medium turbolaser batteries there.
Yes ! triple axial turbos FTW.
By the way, happy new year.
Gotta love those main-turret closeups, PD mounts & general luscious greebling. You remain a crucial bastion of unmitigated SW joy, Fractal.