I’m honestly unsure, but have the impression those wingroot launchers crank out anti-fighter rounds, while the big rectangular pods are packed with corvette/frigate-yield projectiles. 10 teraton per antiship warhead, perhaps?
10 teraton seems a little too much. Even assuming a 100% matter to energy conversion, you would need the explosive charge in the missile to be 450 ton.
I don’t think warheads (at least for the massive ones) are chemical. As you say the mass conversion would be huge and the warhead bodies are tiny. But the key thing is that they need to store pre-generated energy. I’m not sure how it happens but for missiles to be at all competitive they need to have some ability to contend with turbolaser energy density, which is already pretty crazy. It’s clearly something much more exotic than a chemical explosive.
Perhaps warheads are basically a turbolaser output frozen in stasis? That was one interesting theory I’ve seen.
What make energy massless is that it travel at c, so even if you found a way to freeze that energy in place, it would just become similar in mass to its equivalent in matter. I’m not really knowledgeable in physics, but I think the only way we could have to circumvent this problem would be for the particles to somehow be able to move at c inside the missile, but without impacting its outer shell which would inevitably make it lose energy.
OK we are rapidly approaching the limits of my physics here, but I’m pretty sure energy and mass conversions are not because of how fast anything moves, except that it uses c as a conversion factor. E=mc2, so anything with energy E has a very very small amount of mass – we’re talking 9e16 fold here. Anything with mass has intrinsically a high amount of energy if it is all converted, but we don’t know how SW reactors convert that mass. Much of that mass is complex mass anyway, so it doesn’t interact with realspace as much.
That could presumably be how capacitors work. Maybe if you could curve space to make light speed particles go in a continuous circle without impacting their velocity…?
I have exactly no capacity for the physics-musing side of this exchange, but will concede that 1/4 of an Impstar Deuce’s main HTL barrel yield (40TT) might be a little much for single missile boat/TIE/alphabet fighter-scale warheads. Would 4-55TT per antiship round sound a little saner?
Jason
5 years ago
So do the covers on the missile tubes open or do they just fire through a thin cover like some naval missiles?
There doesn’t seem to be a cover opening mechanism (not something Fractal would forget, if it’s meant to be there), so it looks like they punch through the cover. I guess they only arm when they’re clear of the missile boat.
Well the TIE Interdictor is the closest one we got.
For usefulness I think they are especially when launching all missiles at the same time at many fighters and against the capital ship. (Although for the latter it would most likely be replaced with proton torpedoes.)
How much do you believe game mechanics? According to that they were developed to counter TIE Defenders, not really as strike assets but they certainly could.
I gotta wonder how much missilespam becomes *too* much when trying to swamp a fast fighter *and* retain the ability to catch one. Even factoring in this thing’s Space Afterburner(R), I’d be tempted to slap on the bulk launchers for strike gigs & leave ’em off for interceptor duty. At least your update makes that laser look usefully heavy.
Missiles are probably fairly dangerous but only in an envelope and not universally – a superagile fighter may be able to outpace or at least outlast one in a long chase, or the missile will get jammed hopelessly when out of near distance from targeting data, for instance. If they had the same margin of efficacy over manned vehicles like modern missiles do over manned fighters then fighter combat in SW would look very different.
Your point’s amply corroborated by the Fett/Kenobi Prolonged Cinematic Missile Tail-Chase(R) in AOTC. Projectiles with an AMRAAM-on-current-jet performance edge would’ve cut that much shorter. Suppose that much-reduced performance gap explains the XM-1’s bulk-launcher approach, though I wonder how many frontal-arc fighter targets its sensors could engage simultaneously.
Targeting might be the biggest bottleneck in strikefighter operations. Whenever we see fighters/bombers launching torpedoes of any sort against capital ships, it’s only in volleys of two missiles per salvo, which might suggest two represents an upper limit in the number of missiles that can be effectively targeted onto a capital ship and reasonably expect to penetrate jamming.
At 2nd Coruscant, a Vulture droid fired and guided 4 missiles simultaneously at two Actis interceptors, which couldn’t possibly have much ECM on their tiny spaceframes. When the vulture was guiding 4 missiles, individual missile targeting was bad enough that two missiles collided with each other when Vader performed his barrel roll. Noticeably the targeting seemed to significantly improve after the first two missiles are lost, and Kenobi is unable to shake the survivors off, even if the payloads are questionable.
Perhaps the real innovation of the XM-1 missile boat isn’t the SLAM engine, but rather a useful real-time networked tactical battlefield datalink that can aggregate targeting data, counter-ECM jamming, and computing power between the missile boats and other fighters/capital ships/ISTAR drones/ground bases. That kind of innovation might allow far larger effectively guided salvos to be thrown from individual starfighters.
If canonically Thrawn is still the guy to have came up with the missile boat, network-centric warfare seems much more up his alley than “hurr durr, put more rockets on it and make it faster” .
Hm, so you figure SW fire-and-forget weaponry still needs all the help its launch platform and/or target designators can spare? Seems plausible, though I’m still skeptical about figures like Ackbar or Thrawn designing bombers as a sidebar. At least I *hope* the former didn’t sign off on those clunkers from TLJ.
I thought the edge of the missile boat was to have a tractor beam to slow the more agile fighters to make it easier to break them with multiple missiles or a heavier torpedo that wouldn’t normally have an easy time locking on and firing on a maneuverable target. A one ship hammer and anvil method if you will.
@ Dredd: I’ve always been fairly skeptical of tractor beam deployment on snubfighters due to the difficulty of getting a manual lock and the lack of advantage over a comparative power-cost laser that will just eliminate the target. A tractor beam might give a slight advantage in a dense furball, but something like the missile boat is designed to stand-off and engage at range, rather than get mixed up at point blank.
@ Gork: Launch platform guidance from the launch platform seems pretty self evident from the missile engagement ranges we see in Star Wars. At Yavin, Red Squadron closed to within hundreds of meters of Galen’s treason tube before releasing ordnance, and their best pilots still couldn’t engage the target without the help of a precognitive superhuman, which suggests that launching a torpedo at even medium range without the aid of the X-Wing’s own sensors/computer is a hopeless proposition due to the Death Star’s immense jamming capabilities. Similarly, that might be what “Fleet Support Range” meant in TLJ to Kylo’s strike group and their ability to target an MC85 with torpedoes.
I don’t think Ackbar and Thrawn are sitting down with AutoCAD, but their status would probably let them funnel funding and resources to the defense acquisition programs they find to be most promising, and then take credit for the results.
Questionable if anyone’s designing things rather than babysitting algorithms, by my way of thinking. Short of flash learning-type processes it’s hard to imagine any human can learn enough during a normal standard training period to be able to integrate all the tech properly.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t see how this could counter a TIE Defender, and Game Mechanics, at least in my experience, rarely match up with how it actually works. While it may have been a counter in the game, but I doubt that is how it would actually work.
Of course game mechanics are not fully valid. They relied on tractor beam/concussion missile spam. But you need to accept some element of the backstory or the whole thing falls apart a bit. I think it’s more of strike platform, but can dogfight because of it’s missile spam and maneuverability (if not straight line acceleration). Best that can be done with the story I think. But it does look cool.
I can buy the XM-1 as a Starwing complement/successor attempting to trade energy weapons (and shielding?) for thrust & stored ordnance. Might even be amply competitive with the top-end alphabet birds sans box launchers, and retain enough thrust to spray off a diversionary torp/CM volley & run if jumped on an attack gig. Still not sure how workable mini-tractors would be in a furball, though I like the option for things like damaged-wingmate salvage or ejected-pilot recovery.
Again based on game relative performance, a missile boat basically paces an A-W (in some versions). The imperial high end fighters in general are incredibly powerful compared to the usual alphabet fighters, which is about what you’d expect given the relative R&D and manufacturing bases involved when the Empire wanted to make a true superiority fighter over a mass produced fighter like the /ln (which is still plenty dangerous when plot shields aren’t around, given relative performance in the only near-number engagement we have – ANH)
Anonymous
5 years ago
You know with these many launcher tubes how many Missile Boats would you need to be a threat to the Imperator?
Give or take ten wings, and of course assuming a full loadout of Sun Crusher-vintage resonance torps (if they kill stars, they’ll kill a Star Destroyer, rite?).
Yeah, the second poster was being a wiseacre, so I figured I’d get some ribbing in too. Reminder appreciated re: resonance torps functioning more on insane technobabble than raw yield, though the SC itself was so stupidly armored it could just FLY through any conventional ship. Granted, you’d think someone would tractor-beam the damn thing eventually, and nobody ever mentions whether it’s susceptible to ion fire…still, that’s one superweapon which can damn well stay in Legends.
Oh, right, number of XM-1s you’d need to gank an Impstar. Absent extra capital or fighter support for either party, I’d bet on a wing doing the trick.
A wing might do it for a Star Destroyer parked in low orbit à la Scarif garrison, but I suspect the relative speeds and acceleration of the XM-1 strike wing and ISD have a lot to do with any perspective missile strike.
In open space, a well-handled maneuvering ISD accelerating at 3000g with an active ECM suite is going to be a much harder target, even without fighter support. Against that kind of platform, I’d wager that you’d need 10+ wings and substantial AWACS(SWACS?) support to herd our destroyer into a vector where it can be hit and killed.
Suppose missile strikers would also have the thorny issues of (a) landing *enough* hits to punch through a likely-enhanced deflector facing, (b) ensuring enough rounds remain after (a) to wreck something crucial (like, say, the reactor bulb), and (c) doing so before their target can hit lightspeed & nullify all that effort toward (a)/(b). XM-1s would have the edge on anything else in their scale range re: saturation, though now I’m pondering how each ship’s total antiship loadout would compare to a capital (i.e. Victory+)-scale warhead (yeah, lighter, but how much?).
…although speaking of maneuvering & lightspeed, I’ve seen at least one SDN board theory that Ep 8-style kamikazes are the main in-universe reason for all those point-blank and/or gravity-well-distance shenanigans onscreen. Color me skeptical about whether less gimongous capital craft present anything like the target Supremacy did, though you’d think something with that much surface area would have enough unoccupied guns to mission-kill your average Mon Cal *while* slaughtering stealth buses.
Against an aware and powered-up ISD with nothing to defend in deep space, my money has always been on the capital ship’s ability to disengage at light speed against any arbitrary number of fighters, but Star Wars fleet engagements usually involve planetary populations to defend/attack. In Hull 721 ECR did a bit of speculation and gave the highest yield fighter torpedoes low teraton yields, which is pretty scary for an ISD which I find to be reasonably plausible.
XM-1s seem like the fighters with best ordnance/mass ratio for anything that flies. The absurdly large ARC-170 only has 6 torps, while the B-Wing has 12. My speculation is that those low loads are based on their inability to reliably guide saturation attacks numbers of warheads past ECM screens which maybe the XM-1 changes, but your guess is as good as mine’s.
When trying to rationalize the lightspeed kamikaze, my own reaction is that it was a force-assisted maneuver. If hyperspeed is a sort of transition to a tachyonic state, a hit at conventional speed would bounce off shielding, while a hit at hyperspeed would just drag the Raddus right out of hyperspeed. The only answer that might lead to a damaging hit would be a hit at the precise picosecond the Raddus transitions to a tachyonic state while retaining baryonic mass. Such a maneuver may be impossible even for a computer, but we’ve got a daughter of Skywalker on the stealth bus with some impressive force power focusing on her friend’s heroic sacrifice. Perhaps Leia guides Holdo to hit the lever at the exact correct distance from Snoke’s doomerang to yield an unprecedented hit orders of magnitude more effective than a normal ram.
Figuring out how the Supremacy wasn’t able to successfully engage is tougher, but if we make the assumption that it wasn’t as much as a warship as a moving capital world/shipyard/troop transport/hypermatter refinery/strategic HQ/drydock/warehouse, perhaps even pacing the Raddus in acceleration required 95%+ of reactor output to engines, with shielding taking the rest, leaving nearly none for weapons output.
No idea on the gravity-arcing turbolasers though. That’s just dumb.
@Steve
I could see the ARC & B-wing packing heavier, higher-yield torps than their more dogfight-oriented successors/stablemates, but you might be onto something WRT launch platforms needing ECCM processing power to make a warhead barrage count. Suppose this also accounts for the extra-length aerials on missile-heavy capitals like the Vic family.
As for Raddus’ last jump being a Force-timed ANH-style golden BB, I can swallow that in place of this budding ‘capital craft are intrinsically inefficient & nobody thought of spamming ramships over how many centuries?’ undercurrent. At least it gives Leia something to do besides mitigating massive communication failures & watching 7/10ths of the Resistance die.
The ‘Supremacy as barely-pursuit-efficient mobile yard’ theory also sorta appeals, but has me wondering why none of its Resurgent screen do anything but keep pace. Would that imply similar power-budget issues on their part? Starting to seriously wonder where Kuat-Entralla began losing the plot (well, besides sticking with a jackbooted regime’s even more blatantly spike-cleated successor).
I’m reasonably certain that a Resurgent would be able to engage the Raddus or plot a combat microjump ahead, but I’d chalk their inaction up to politics. Hux was humiliated over D’Qar so he had to be worried about his job safety. Add that to his natural vanity, and he certainly isn’t going to let one of his junior destroyer captains or bomber wing commanders to steal the credit for the destruction of Leia, an MC85, and basically the entire Resistance.
He isn’t tactically imaginative enough to envision a scenario where they escape his battle group when he’s got hyperspace tracking, so he’s content to wait several hours for his own vessel to engage in order to boost his standings with Snoke. Doesn’t pay off that well, but from his point of view it seemed like a safe bet at the time.
On the gravity arcing turbolasers: I choose to abandon Canon on that, and consider them to be the most powerful torpedo launchers we have yet seen. The arcing could then be explained by Supremacy’s gunners trying to find a way round Raddus’ shields, and constantly failing.
I believe this fits with the ‘barely-pursuit-efficient-mobile-yard’ theory, in that you would much prefer the main weapons on your low sub-light mobility Capital/shipyard/etc. to be stand off, guided weapons, so that you don’t have any real blind spots at range, and don’t have to let enemy warships get close enough to fire on you before you can fire on them. The inability to penetrate Raddus’ shields could be because of ECM tying up so much targeting computer power at that range that Supremacy can’t accurately fire fast enough to get the job done.
I like the Leia’s (potentially accidental) combat meditation theory, it fits better than any other idea I’ve so far seen on that ram. It also explains why it wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as it would have been if Raddus was fully baryonic at that speed (see Because Science with Kyle Hill, for details on the catastrophe that impact would have been).
Also, “doomerang”, I like that.
gorkmalork
5 years ago
Can’t help pondering whether those big honkin’ (proton torp?) pods would flow (slightly) better if moved off the smaller (concussion?) missile boxes & directly onto this brute’s upper wingroot. But hey, such was 90s CD-ROM modelling. Incidentally, way to derive a fairly elegant nose & wing shape from said model.
For a non-TIE spaceframe, the key problem is maintenance and serviceability. Mounting those huge launch tubes might get in the way of access to the powerplant/engine from the top, which is where routine servicing would occur if these things were launched from TIE racks.
Fair point on the ergonomic issues WRT fuselage relocation-perhaps shifting ’em over flush with the smaller pods’ outer sides might be handier (and hey, extra room for paired radiator wings. Everyone loves those).
Anonymous
5 years ago
Always enjoy seeing those ships from the old X-Wing games given a fresh look!
What bothers me a little in this particular design is the small detail texture – it seems somewhat out-of-scale, more fitting to a large capital ship. Gives the ship the look of an old zinc bathtub also.
Modelling otherwise is great as always!
SLAM time
Can the payloads be switched between concussion missiles or proton torpedoes? 42 tubes?!
So we actually know the yield of those missiles?
I’m honestly unsure, but have the impression those wingroot launchers crank out anti-fighter rounds, while the big rectangular pods are packed with corvette/frigate-yield projectiles. 10 teraton per antiship warhead, perhaps?
10 teraton seems a little too much. Even assuming a 100% matter to energy conversion, you would need the explosive charge in the missile to be 450 ton.
I don’t think warheads (at least for the massive ones) are chemical. As you say the mass conversion would be huge and the warhead bodies are tiny. But the key thing is that they need to store pre-generated energy. I’m not sure how it happens but for missiles to be at all competitive they need to have some ability to contend with turbolaser energy density, which is already pretty crazy. It’s clearly something much more exotic than a chemical explosive.
Perhaps warheads are basically a turbolaser output frozen in stasis? That was one interesting theory I’ve seen.
What make energy massless is that it travel at c, so even if you found a way to freeze that energy in place, it would just become similar in mass to its equivalent in matter. I’m not really knowledgeable in physics, but I think the only way we could have to circumvent this problem would be for the particles to somehow be able to move at c inside the missile, but without impacting its outer shell which would inevitably make it lose energy.
OK we are rapidly approaching the limits of my physics here, but I’m pretty sure energy and mass conversions are not because of how fast anything moves, except that it uses c as a conversion factor. E=mc2, so anything with energy E has a very very small amount of mass – we’re talking 9e16 fold here. Anything with mass has intrinsically a high amount of energy if it is all converted, but we don’t know how SW reactors convert that mass. Much of that mass is complex mass anyway, so it doesn’t interact with realspace as much.
That could presumably be how capacitors work. Maybe if you could curve space to make light speed particles go in a continuous circle without impacting their velocity…?
I have exactly no capacity for the physics-musing side of this exchange, but will concede that 1/4 of an Impstar Deuce’s main HTL barrel yield (40TT) might be a little much for single missile boat/TIE/alphabet fighter-scale warheads. Would 4-55TT per antiship round sound a little saner?
So do the covers on the missile tubes open or do they just fire through a thin cover like some naval missiles?
There doesn’t seem to be a cover opening mechanism (not something Fractal would forget, if it’s meant to be there), so it looks like they punch through the cover. I guess they only arm when they’re clear of the missile boat.
Yeah, “soft” covers – disintegrate or blow off on launch.
Where these actually useful or did they just not have a TIE Variant to shove that many missiles on?
Well the TIE Interdictor is the closest one we got.
For usefulness I think they are especially when launching all missiles at the same time at many fighters and against the capital ship. (Although for the latter it would most likely be replaced with proton torpedoes.)
Then again it would turn into a Torpedo boat.
In the games the launchers were modular, and they are here.
Oh so is both missiles and torpedos then right?
How much do you believe game mechanics? According to that they were developed to counter TIE Defenders, not really as strike assets but they certainly could.
I gotta wonder how much missilespam becomes *too* much when trying to swamp a fast fighter *and* retain the ability to catch one. Even factoring in this thing’s Space Afterburner(R), I’d be tempted to slap on the bulk launchers for strike gigs & leave ’em off for interceptor duty. At least your update makes that laser look usefully heavy.
Missiles are probably fairly dangerous but only in an envelope and not universally – a superagile fighter may be able to outpace or at least outlast one in a long chase, or the missile will get jammed hopelessly when out of near distance from targeting data, for instance. If they had the same margin of efficacy over manned vehicles like modern missiles do over manned fighters then fighter combat in SW would look very different.
Your point’s amply corroborated by the Fett/Kenobi Prolonged Cinematic Missile Tail-Chase(R) in AOTC. Projectiles with an AMRAAM-on-current-jet performance edge would’ve cut that much shorter. Suppose that much-reduced performance gap explains the XM-1’s bulk-launcher approach, though I wonder how many frontal-arc fighter targets its sensors could engage simultaneously.
Targeting might be the biggest bottleneck in strikefighter operations. Whenever we see fighters/bombers launching torpedoes of any sort against capital ships, it’s only in volleys of two missiles per salvo, which might suggest two represents an upper limit in the number of missiles that can be effectively targeted onto a capital ship and reasonably expect to penetrate jamming.
At 2nd Coruscant, a Vulture droid fired and guided 4 missiles simultaneously at two Actis interceptors, which couldn’t possibly have much ECM on their tiny spaceframes. When the vulture was guiding 4 missiles, individual missile targeting was bad enough that two missiles collided with each other when Vader performed his barrel roll. Noticeably the targeting seemed to significantly improve after the first two missiles are lost, and Kenobi is unable to shake the survivors off, even if the payloads are questionable.
Perhaps the real innovation of the XM-1 missile boat isn’t the SLAM engine, but rather a useful real-time networked tactical battlefield datalink that can aggregate targeting data, counter-ECM jamming, and computing power between the missile boats and other fighters/capital ships/ISTAR drones/ground bases. That kind of innovation might allow far larger effectively guided salvos to be thrown from individual starfighters.
If canonically Thrawn is still the guy to have came up with the missile boat, network-centric warfare seems much more up his alley than “hurr durr, put more rockets on it and make it faster” .
Makes sense to me. Though damned if I know how SW datalinks work.
All I know is buzzwords.
Hm, so you figure SW fire-and-forget weaponry still needs all the help its launch platform and/or target designators can spare? Seems plausible, though I’m still skeptical about figures like Ackbar or Thrawn designing bombers as a sidebar. At least I *hope* the former didn’t sign off on those clunkers from TLJ.
I thought the edge of the missile boat was to have a tractor beam to slow the more agile fighters to make it easier to break them with multiple missiles or a heavier torpedo that wouldn’t normally have an easy time locking on and firing on a maneuverable target. A one ship hammer and anvil method if you will.
@ Dredd: I’ve always been fairly skeptical of tractor beam deployment on snubfighters due to the difficulty of getting a manual lock and the lack of advantage over a comparative power-cost laser that will just eliminate the target. A tractor beam might give a slight advantage in a dense furball, but something like the missile boat is designed to stand-off and engage at range, rather than get mixed up at point blank.
@ Gork: Launch platform guidance from the launch platform seems pretty self evident from the missile engagement ranges we see in Star Wars. At Yavin, Red Squadron closed to within hundreds of meters of Galen’s treason tube before releasing ordnance, and their best pilots still couldn’t engage the target without the help of a precognitive superhuman, which suggests that launching a torpedo at even medium range without the aid of the X-Wing’s own sensors/computer is a hopeless proposition due to the Death Star’s immense jamming capabilities. Similarly, that might be what “Fleet Support Range” meant in TLJ to Kylo’s strike group and their ability to target an MC85 with torpedoes.
I don’t think Ackbar and Thrawn are sitting down with AutoCAD, but their status would probably let them funnel funding and resources to the defense acquisition programs they find to be most promising, and then take credit for the results.
Questionable if anyone’s designing things rather than babysitting algorithms, by my way of thinking. Short of flash learning-type processes it’s hard to imagine any human can learn enough during a normal standard training period to be able to integrate all the tech properly.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t see how this could counter a TIE Defender, and Game Mechanics, at least in my experience, rarely match up with how it actually works. While it may have been a counter in the game, but I doubt that is how it would actually work.
Of course game mechanics are not fully valid. They relied on tractor beam/concussion missile spam. But you need to accept some element of the backstory or the whole thing falls apart a bit. I think it’s more of strike platform, but can dogfight because of it’s missile spam and maneuverability (if not straight line acceleration). Best that can be done with the story I think. But it does look cool.
I can buy the XM-1 as a Starwing complement/successor attempting to trade energy weapons (and shielding?) for thrust & stored ordnance. Might even be amply competitive with the top-end alphabet birds sans box launchers, and retain enough thrust to spray off a diversionary torp/CM volley & run if jumped on an attack gig. Still not sure how workable mini-tractors would be in a furball, though I like the option for things like damaged-wingmate salvage or ejected-pilot recovery.
Again based on game relative performance, a missile boat basically paces an A-W (in some versions). The imperial high end fighters in general are incredibly powerful compared to the usual alphabet fighters, which is about what you’d expect given the relative R&D and manufacturing bases involved when the Empire wanted to make a true superiority fighter over a mass produced fighter like the /ln (which is still plenty dangerous when plot shields aren’t around, given relative performance in the only near-number engagement we have – ANH)
You know with these many launcher tubes how many Missile Boats would you need to be a threat to the Imperator?
3,002
Give or take ten wings, and of course assuming a full loadout of Sun Crusher-vintage resonance torps (if they kill stars, they’ll kill a Star Destroyer, rite?).
Actually, the torpedoes are said to be not all that powerful themselves, they can just blow up stars.
Yeah, the second poster was being a wiseacre, so I figured I’d get some ribbing in too. Reminder appreciated re: resonance torps functioning more on insane technobabble than raw yield, though the SC itself was so stupidly armored it could just FLY through any conventional ship. Granted, you’d think someone would tractor-beam the damn thing eventually, and nobody ever mentions whether it’s susceptible to ion fire…still, that’s one superweapon which can damn well stay in Legends.
Oh, right, number of XM-1s you’d need to gank an Impstar. Absent extra capital or fighter support for either party, I’d bet on a wing doing the trick.
A wing might do it for a Star Destroyer parked in low orbit à la Scarif garrison, but I suspect the relative speeds and acceleration of the XM-1 strike wing and ISD have a lot to do with any perspective missile strike.
In open space, a well-handled maneuvering ISD accelerating at 3000g with an active ECM suite is going to be a much harder target, even without fighter support. Against that kind of platform, I’d wager that you’d need 10+ wings and substantial AWACS(SWACS?) support to herd our destroyer into a vector where it can be hit and killed.
Suppose missile strikers would also have the thorny issues of (a) landing *enough* hits to punch through a likely-enhanced deflector facing, (b) ensuring enough rounds remain after (a) to wreck something crucial (like, say, the reactor bulb), and (c) doing so before their target can hit lightspeed & nullify all that effort toward (a)/(b). XM-1s would have the edge on anything else in their scale range re: saturation, though now I’m pondering how each ship’s total antiship loadout would compare to a capital (i.e. Victory+)-scale warhead (yeah, lighter, but how much?).
…although speaking of maneuvering & lightspeed, I’ve seen at least one SDN board theory that Ep 8-style kamikazes are the main in-universe reason for all those point-blank and/or gravity-well-distance shenanigans onscreen. Color me skeptical about whether less gimongous capital craft present anything like the target Supremacy did, though you’d think something with that much surface area would have enough unoccupied guns to mission-kill your average Mon Cal *while* slaughtering stealth buses.
Against an aware and powered-up ISD with nothing to defend in deep space, my money has always been on the capital ship’s ability to disengage at light speed against any arbitrary number of fighters, but Star Wars fleet engagements usually involve planetary populations to defend/attack. In Hull 721 ECR did a bit of speculation and gave the highest yield fighter torpedoes low teraton yields, which is pretty scary for an ISD which I find to be reasonably plausible.
XM-1s seem like the fighters with best ordnance/mass ratio for anything that flies. The absurdly large ARC-170 only has 6 torps, while the B-Wing has 12. My speculation is that those low loads are based on their inability to reliably guide saturation attacks numbers of warheads past ECM screens which maybe the XM-1 changes, but your guess is as good as mine’s.
When trying to rationalize the lightspeed kamikaze, my own reaction is that it was a force-assisted maneuver. If hyperspeed is a sort of transition to a tachyonic state, a hit at conventional speed would bounce off shielding, while a hit at hyperspeed would just drag the Raddus right out of hyperspeed. The only answer that might lead to a damaging hit would be a hit at the precise picosecond the Raddus transitions to a tachyonic state while retaining baryonic mass. Such a maneuver may be impossible even for a computer, but we’ve got a daughter of Skywalker on the stealth bus with some impressive force power focusing on her friend’s heroic sacrifice. Perhaps Leia guides Holdo to hit the lever at the exact correct distance from Snoke’s doomerang to yield an unprecedented hit orders of magnitude more effective than a normal ram.
Figuring out how the Supremacy wasn’t able to successfully engage is tougher, but if we make the assumption that it wasn’t as much as a warship as a moving capital world/shipyard/troop transport/hypermatter refinery/strategic HQ/drydock/warehouse, perhaps even pacing the Raddus in acceleration required 95%+ of reactor output to engines, with shielding taking the rest, leaving nearly none for weapons output.
No idea on the gravity-arcing turbolasers though. That’s just dumb.
@Steve
I could see the ARC & B-wing packing heavier, higher-yield torps than their more dogfight-oriented successors/stablemates, but you might be onto something WRT launch platforms needing ECCM processing power to make a warhead barrage count. Suppose this also accounts for the extra-length aerials on missile-heavy capitals like the Vic family.
As for Raddus’ last jump being a Force-timed ANH-style golden BB, I can swallow that in place of this budding ‘capital craft are intrinsically inefficient & nobody thought of spamming ramships over how many centuries?’ undercurrent. At least it gives Leia something to do besides mitigating massive communication failures & watching 7/10ths of the Resistance die.
The ‘Supremacy as barely-pursuit-efficient mobile yard’ theory also sorta appeals, but has me wondering why none of its Resurgent screen do anything but keep pace. Would that imply similar power-budget issues on their part? Starting to seriously wonder where Kuat-Entralla began losing the plot (well, besides sticking with a jackbooted regime’s even more blatantly spike-cleated successor).
I’m reasonably certain that a Resurgent would be able to engage the Raddus or plot a combat microjump ahead, but I’d chalk their inaction up to politics. Hux was humiliated over D’Qar so he had to be worried about his job safety. Add that to his natural vanity, and he certainly isn’t going to let one of his junior destroyer captains or bomber wing commanders to steal the credit for the destruction of Leia, an MC85, and basically the entire Resistance.
He isn’t tactically imaginative enough to envision a scenario where they escape his battle group when he’s got hyperspace tracking, so he’s content to wait several hours for his own vessel to engage in order to boost his standings with Snoke. Doesn’t pay off that well, but from his point of view it seemed like a safe bet at the time.
On the gravity arcing turbolasers: I choose to abandon Canon on that, and consider them to be the most powerful torpedo launchers we have yet seen. The arcing could then be explained by Supremacy’s gunners trying to find a way round Raddus’ shields, and constantly failing.
I believe this fits with the ‘barely-pursuit-efficient-mobile-yard’ theory, in that you would much prefer the main weapons on your low sub-light mobility Capital/shipyard/etc. to be stand off, guided weapons, so that you don’t have any real blind spots at range, and don’t have to let enemy warships get close enough to fire on you before you can fire on them. The inability to penetrate Raddus’ shields could be because of ECM tying up so much targeting computer power at that range that Supremacy can’t accurately fire fast enough to get the job done.
I like the Leia’s (potentially accidental) combat meditation theory, it fits better than any other idea I’ve so far seen on that ram. It also explains why it wasn’t anywhere near as powerful as it would have been if Raddus was fully baryonic at that speed (see Because Science with Kyle Hill, for details on the catastrophe that impact would have been).
Also, “doomerang”, I like that.
Can’t help pondering whether those big honkin’ (proton torp?) pods would flow (slightly) better if moved off the smaller (concussion?) missile boxes & directly onto this brute’s upper wingroot. But hey, such was 90s CD-ROM modelling. Incidentally, way to derive a fairly elegant nose & wing shape from said model.
For a non-TIE spaceframe, the key problem is maintenance and serviceability. Mounting those huge launch tubes might get in the way of access to the powerplant/engine from the top, which is where routine servicing would occur if these things were launched from TIE racks.
That, and it looks cooler this way.
Fair point on the ergonomic issues WRT fuselage relocation-perhaps shifting ’em over flush with the smaller pods’ outer sides might be handier (and hey, extra room for paired radiator wings. Everyone loves those).
Always enjoy seeing those ships from the old X-Wing games given a fresh look!
What bothers me a little in this particular design is the small detail texture – it seems somewhat out-of-scale, more fitting to a large capital ship. Gives the ship the look of an old zinc bathtub also.
Modelling otherwise is great as always!