The resurgent has like 20 times the weapons are bigger over 500 meters fixes some of the design issues of the starship. it is much faster more agile and maneuverable. It has much more powerful weapons sensors shields communications and hyperspace systems. It also carries more point defense and smaller weapons emplacements. Weapons bost faster recharge rates better anti-armor and shield capabilities longer range. It has a faster longer range and better hyperdrive. And it is superior because of its technology tactics and training.
I’ve never seen a weapon larger than a point defense mount on a Resurgent. Do you have any pictures that show the heavy weapons on a resurgent? I’ve never seen them modeled.
I think each of the twin turrets visible next to the dorsal superstructure in this image is supposed to be roughly equivalent to one of an Imperial-1’s main turrets.
There are also 4 of these turrets on the leading edge of the superstructure, and another 3 pairs of them on either side in the forward trench cutout, though they’re difficult to make out.
The ICS fairly clearly shows that those are twin turrets, not octuple batteries.
ICS also states “more than 3,000 turbolasers and ion cannons” as its weapons stat, it does not say “heavy turbolasers,” just “turbolasers,” meaning that the vast majority of them could be twin light turbolaser turrets for point defence. This would make sense of (spoilers?) the suborned PD turret on the Steadfast having the firepower to destroy the bridge.
Reading 3,000 turbolaser for this ship makes me think where do they put them. Granted this ship is close to double the length of an ISD but almost the amount of weapons of an Executor class by just an sixth of the length seems odd. The only way they can achieve that imo is by downscaling. Imagine you put every crewmen of an aircraft carrier on the flight deck armed with whatever sidearm they use. It would be correct to state that ship hast 5 to 6k weapons. Its maybe an abstract thought i hope you get what im up to.
I think people assume the armament count on these vessels refers to all the big, heavy turrets/batteries, and forget about the light-turbolaser and heavy laser cannon emplacements. Look at how many houses/flats you can place in a town with the same surface area as a Resurgent-Class, and you will realise it can easily accommodate them. 🙂
The Resurgent class has 8 massive turbolaser batteries per side just the Imperial-class. and Multiple forward-facing heavy turbolaser batteries in front of the starship. But they can be hard to spot because of how the ship is molded the lore works and how the books and secondary source materials can be with all three of those things. They are much faster charging longer range and deliver much greater firepower per shot the much older Imperial era weapons emplacements of the old warships. You are more than welcome to stay and talk with the rest of us if you want to we or at the very least I would really love that and I enjoyed your words today. Thank You for your time
The Resurgent-class seems like an evolution more from the Allegiance-class instead of the Imperial-class. The size, gradual staggered structure, firepower, and overall role of a battlecruiser seems to make more sense. Both are still great ships, but I thing the allegiance one-ups the resurgent in terms of aesthetics.
Then come up with a better design. It’s no absolute trash just because it’s Disney. It looks like a star wars starship design along with the supremacy of the silencer and the TIE line in general from Disney and more. And stop necroposting from old shit from months ago.
I’m pretty sure they did spell their username the right way. If it’s meant to be pronounced anony-mouse, spelling it anonymous would be incorrect. I believe it’s supposed to be punny.
Also, they’re new here. If they posted on something from four years ago it would be fine because it’s their first time seeing and reacting to it.
The fact that they happen to hate your favourite ship does not automatically make them a troll, even if they’re saying so on a year-old post.
@TheIcthala I did not know they were new and really thought they were trolling. I can not judge whether someone is new here regardless of my thoughts on them or not. I just think I was overreacting. Really well that would explain why there are reacting to a post that is well over a year old at this point and it would still be necroposting on the portion of the thread just not the entire portion of the thread.
Plus the ad Hominem did not help my first reactions and really did piss me off. I think that is why I overreacted the Way I did. But I think they have their rights on their opinions and I just so happen to be the reverse of them and feel an extremely strong point of view and I should have acted in another way.
Pls people, enough arguing. Go do that on Twitter or Facebook. Not here, regardless of opinions or who makes what, it takes time and effort to make these 3-Dimensional models, pls respect that. Thank you.
I respectfully disagree with the characterisation of the Resurgent as absolutely trash. I consider it to be an attempt at something new and interesting which didn’t quite work as well as the team had hoped.
Heck, at least it’s not the lazy-ass Xyston, or the virtually point-defenceless siege pizza.
Also, the ad-hominem fallacy doesn’t tend to help arguments here. We dislike Disney because of what they’ve done, we don’t dislike their work because they did it.
That is an extremely mature point of view and ligament viewpoint that I have. It’s new and interesting for sure and Disney’s TIE variants are really nice and do fit into star wars lore. It’s their piss ass storytelling plot and character development and arc their identity politics their attacking and stealing from their fan. Them spending fake news. About Raylo The Last Jedi and their defenders are what pisses us off.
In all fairness, and this is NOT meant to be a defense, condoning, or any positive view of Disney’s mishandling of the franchise, stealing from fans also occurred under LucasArts LONG before the Disney sale. Let’s not forget that Force Unleashed’s debut trailer literally stole FractalSponge’s Death Head Star Destroyer.
In any case, I might keep the broad strokes of the Resurgent-class, but give it somewhat different details (no Kyber crystals, for starters, and I’d probably have it as well as the First Order as a whole (Final Order as well) be depicted differently in my fanfic/AU since the Empire would still be around). I’ll probably also keep the Xyston, but with a radically different role that actually has their ISD-cloned nature actually WORK (namely, they’d deliberately be modeled after ISDs as a way for the First Order to approach an Imperial fleet, briefly unveil their guns to shoot at ISDs, and then trigger a shooting war among the Imperial Fleet. Yeah, let’s just say the First Order and the Empire will NOT be allies in this fanfic of mine).
mandator 4 does not even look like a mandatory line at all. They should make Xyston 2 a story about the Rebels stealing the death star two plans with fractal sponges artwork and it would make money. I am assuming he downvoted the comment because he disagreed with it. Which is fine but I think he just wants a safe space and that might turn really toxic. Nor is Nceoposting mature and it is trolling in general regardless. I think he disliked that part for some reason. He should spell his username better. opt to pick a new one in the first place.
I know I am a year late and a dollar short but to be fair the Resurgent is the most unbalanced ship ever created to the extent not even the hardcore fans believe it’s utter garbage stats.
But it’s beautiful and an attempt at something new and intriguing and I cannot argue facts
But what we should be hating on in all actuality is the Mandatory IV…
The Allegiance is a far more “realistic” (believable) ship than the resurgent class, simply because the resurgent class has three THOUSAND turbo lasers and ion cannons, which is more (numerically) than a flipping SSD. The Allegiance, however, is designed by someone with a sense of respect for legends and EU material sources and limitations, meaning it is not just made to make the bad guys look invincible and not just a worthless knock-off of the Chad Galactic Empire.
This is only my opinion, and it doesn’t take into account things like power-generation and other necessary ship functions in-universe, so don’t expect anything on the level of an article fit for the journal, Science. Also, my argument is not against Ansel, who I believe is an absolute phenom when it comes to designing ships using SW design philosophies. It’s against SW starship design philosophy overall from an IN-UNIVERSE perspective.
TL;DR: I actually personally believe the Resurgent is MORE believable than the ISD itself, and by extension the Executor and Allegiance. Also, Executor has 2k turbos, 2k heavy turbos, and 250 ions. 4250 > 3000. It’s not MORE than an Executor, but I get your frustration with how similar the numbers are.
From an in-universe perspective, it’s a big leap from the norms of ship armament, so I agree with you there that it’s kind of unbelievable that a ship around 5 times the surface area of the ISD can have over 25 times the firepower in numbers alone. But that’s only using the ISD as a reference, and my argument is that the ISD itself is an extremely unreliable as a reference in terms of believability.
I love star destroyers, but I always felt the utilization of space was really bad. I just feel that a ship that is almost six times as long and five times as tall as an Iowa Class, and almost 15.5 times as wide as a Yamato-class, should have far more than just 60 turbolaser batteries.
Assuming all batteries are 50x50x50m, (the whole thing, not just the turret cap) which is around the size of a Quad Heavy Turbolaser Battery, and a bit smaller than an octuple barbette, they should be able to fit far more than just 60 on a ship that’s around 600 times the size of a Yamato. 60 is the TOTAL number of Turbolaser emplacements, not just the heavy ones, so there are far less than 60 of those quad heavies, and in the case of the octuple barbettes, a measly 8.
The ISD has around 75 times the dorsal deck space (the ISD is a triangle, so half the area of the dimensions, but also since a battleship is somewhat of a rounded diamond, I brought that ratio to somewhere between 1/2 (triangle vs rectangle) and pi/4 (ellipse vs rectangle)).
This does not include the ventral deck space that understandably goes unused in maritime vessels, but is entirely free real estate for space vessels. So at around 150 times the deck space, I would hope that they have around 50 times the number of primary weapons. There’s just so much empty space on the hull of she ship that just isn’t used. I say 50x rather than directly translating the 150x because the Quad Heavies take up around three times the deck space of a Mark 7 or Type 94.
Considering the three primary weapons on Iowa and Yamato class battleships, and the numerous emplacements of secondary and tertiary weaponry found on those ships, I would hope to see at least 150 HEAVY turbolaser batteries. Given how much space is taken up by the main guns of WWII battleships, the 60 Ion cannons, hell maybe even 150, can probably still fit.
I only talked about the main guns of the battleships I used for reference, so at 50 times the number of the heaviest armament I believe should also translate to secondaries and tertiaries. The ISD has a pitiful amount of point-defense weaponry, and the intermediate weaponry is put in the same blanket category of “turbolaser” as the main guns, so that number 60 makes me flaccid thinking about just what fraction of it are main guns, secondaries, or just puny single-barreled emplacements. There should not only be far more than 60 guns overall, and even far more than 60 MAIN guns, there should be at least order of magnitude more secondaries, tertiaries, and point defenses. 60 is a tragic misuse of space, and is a miserable miscarriage of justice for the ISD.
At almost twelve times the length, and what I can only assume also the width of an ISD, the Executor is also flawed in this regard. The big exposed cityscape superstructure that lets starfighters close in on it so easily aside, the number of guns is also a painfully low.
2000 turbos and 2000 heavy turbos sounds like an impressive amount at first, but at around 140 times the deck space of the ISD, 4000 emplacements is far less than half the number it should, even when scaled up using the already pitiful 60 number. If it scaled up directly with the numbers I believe are more appropriate, it should be almost 15000 quad heavy turbolaser batteries, and even more than that number of regular turbolasers, not an egregious 2000 each. This also extends to the fact that it only has 250 ion cannons, making up around only 10% of the armament rather than the 50% on the ISD, and the unacceptably sparse 500 point-defense cannons.
Now, speaking about the Resurgent, at around 5 times the deck space of an ISD, It should have around 750 main guns. There’s a lot of room for interpretation based on the cross-section book saying there are 3000 turbolasers and ion cannons, and Wookiepedia saying 1500 Turbos, Ions, and Point Defenses. If the ISD had the numbers I proposed, 150 turbos and 150 ions, this pretty much immediately saturates the number given by Wookiepedia, not even counting the point defense weapons it included in its number, and in my opinion, point defense should be at least a third of the total armament in a universe where starfighters are so dangerous. This would mean that 1500 is actually a pretty conservative number. I would hope that with 750 main guns and 750 ion cannons, there’d be more than 1500 point defense cannons.
The cross-section number does not include PD, so 3000 is just counting turbos and ions. This is huge at first, but I feel it is actually possible given the 30 years of technological development in power generation and for how much space each emplacement needs on the hull in order to produce the same power output.
In conclusion, while the number given by the cross-section is a bit of a stretch, it’s actually pretty possible in my opinion. At the least, the Wookiepedia number is actually pretty restrained, and the density of weaponry is in not even too high when using the 60-turbolaser number on the ISD as reference.
Respectfully, I disagree. While you make a fair point that the available space is significantly greater, the amount of usable space is far less. Many places that would be perfect for weapons emplacements can’t take advantage because of the internal geometry of the ship. A vessel in space, regardless of its purpose, is a self contained city.
You have to store food, water, fuel, reserve air, supplies, and house everyone. Not to mention the engines, and reactor which take up like a quarter of the ship alone. The barracks and training areas, commons, mess halls, etc. take up another quarter at least. Storage is about the same, and then you have all of the workstations, hangers, and sensor suites which you can’t place weapons emplacement next to because of extremely sensitive components.
While a Resurgent-class Battlewhatever can certainly field more emplacement than a smaller vessel, it would make more sense to up the size and power of each emplacement than to keep adding more. A thousand paper cuts are still just paper cuts; annoying in number and lack thereof, but not much more than that.
Last edited 1 year ago by IRanOutOfIdeasForMyUsername
So continuing on from my post about making the multi-role variant of the Allegiance here my ideas of that variant which could be called Castigator.
1. Change all quad 175 teratons heavy turbolasers (Both turret and ball) and single ball 720 teratons heavy turbolasers into quad 70 teratons heavy turbolasers. (Although for the quad flanks turrets it would be that or Octuple 40 teratons)
Keep the heavy ion cannons the same though.
2. Add the hanger bay similar to the Imperator’s bay but longer, a bit wider and a bit deeper.
The sides will be one medium fighter bay each which let the ship carry 2 wings of fighters. (Probably angled upwards by 15° instead of straight.)
The front will have 1-2 shuttle bays that carry Lamba/escort shuttles and the back will be vehicles and dropships. (Would be big enough to carry a few A6 Juggernauts/SPHAs.)
3. Reduce the reactor by half so it will be 3e25W. (3 ISD equivalent)
I could halfway see switching to more rapid-firing main guns if engaging multiple capital targets at once became a priority, but the tradeoff to restore small-craft & ground vehicle capacity seems redundant unless (a) Allegiances are the heaviest asset a given naval faction/sector group/whatever fields and (b) you have at least a handful to spare.
Well the main role of the Allegiance is well as Fractal said a fleet combatant so this variant will not do great at it.
So I think this variant’s main role will be a flagship for a small destroyer squadron (like around 3-5 ships) that don’t need a light cruiser a.k.a the Urbanus.
If anyone ask yes I am aware of the Secutor having that role as well, but I can see some commodores using this ship over the Secutor if the enemy ship squadron they facing don’t require so many fighters to destroy them, need some heavier weaponry to destroy ships that are tough but not too tough to the point of needing to use capital weaponry. (like the 720 teratons cannons) and/or Want to use this ship so that it can tank a bit better than the Secutor. (Because I think the Secutor due to being a carrier hybrid ship would be a glass cannon.)
As for ground vehicles Fractal did say that the ISD cannot reliably carry A6 Juggernauts/SPAHs because if it did then the ISD would also need dropships to carry them so there will not be any room for them.
The Secutor does also carry A6 Juggernauts/SPAHs, in fact it carry twice as much, but like I said the Secutor is a carrier hybrid ship so it is a bit more frail than this variant.
I hope this helps you to understand of making this variant Gorkmalork.
New change for the variant:
I’m now thinking of changing the axial single ball 720 teratons heavy turbolasers into quad ball 175 teratons heavy turbolasers just to give it more punch.
The only gaming stats I ever saw for the Allegiance made it multi-purpose (essentially an up-sized Imperator), so your description fits with the way I always pictured the Allegiance to be up until I saw the Fractal version.
That being said, I’ve somewhat warmed to the idea of the Allegiance as a “battleship” counterpart to the Secutor’s “carrier” so I could go either way. I’m interested to see where this goes, as my own conception of the SWU has long been toward big multi-purpose platforms once a certain size is reached.
I’d agree that everything can be multi-purpose to a certain past a certain size, but not by intent. After a threshhold a ship is big enough that it can carry huge complements of troops and small craft almost by accident. But proportionately, they carry nothing like what a specialized carrier can do. Conversely, a carrier big enough will almost generate enough power to energize a large weapons battery, even if ship-to-ship combat is not its specialization. If a ship carries a thousand fighters, but it’s hangar volume is proportionately 100x than a same-size carrier’s, is it still a carrier? Such things fuel endless (largely awful) online debates about scifi warship roles. Since you like Soviet analogues, what is a Kiev? Just a carrier, or an actual TAKR, as in a cruiser that just happens to carry aircraft?
My concept for the Allegiance comes from the initial observations of the comic illustrations, which have no serious hangar bays whatsoever (sort of like the Tector). That and the huge reactor tended towards making the design a specialized ship killer. In a fleet scenario, that’s fine, because as you said there are other ships like Secutors, or full-on fleet carriers, to carry fighters.
My initial impression of the source illustrations was that the Dark Horse artwork was as cheese-ridden as their plot lines, and just assumed that the absence of visible hangars was an oversight or laziness on the part of artists whose attention to detail w/r/t canon ships wasn’t exactly spot-on. The only fan-made attempt of stats for the Allegiance (that I’ve seen, at any rate) assumed the Allegiance was 3,200 meters long, that the escorting ships were standard Imperials, and that both ships had launch bays which had been accidentally omitted by whoever drew up the panel for Dark Horse. It wasn’t until I saw your version that I even considered alternate possibilities.
I should clarify that I’m not a fan of Soviet analogues in general, just the ones that happen to fit well in-universe. I’m a fan of the Soviet Army model because of the authoritarian government that spawned it and its use of overwhelming numbers, which IMO is a good fit for the Empire. The Soviet Navy, on the other hand, is not a good match, as it was intended to operate on a sea-denial model in opposition to the superiority / control model of the US Navy.
There is no decent real-world equivalent to how I view an ISD, but the Kiev comes the closest (although if we’re sticking to the Soviet model, it would need to be mashed up with their Ivan Rogov-Class Large Landing Ship). In an SWU where the nearest available reinforcements are days or weeks away, the workhorse of the Imperial Navy out in the fringe areas where navigation is less certain will need to be able to deal with the widest possible variety of threats, whether ship-to-ship, space superiority with fighter craft or engaging in troop deployments. The carrier battle group of the US Navy of the ’80’s is probably the closest mission analogue, but with an aircraft carrier, a battleship and an amphibious ready group all crammed into the same hull.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my view of the SWU is shaped largely by the WEG game, and that, of the published “official” stats, every Star Destroyer ISD-sized and above is multi-purpose (in that it is a combination of big guns, starfighters and troop capacity). My view for the longest time was that the larger ships which never received WEG stats (such as the Allegiance) were simply ISDs writ large, serving as taskforce or sector fleet flagships with a single large vessel accompanied by several “standard” ISDs. Most fan attempts to make stats for new Star Destroyers have followed this pattern.
As I said above, though, I’m gradually coming around to your version, although possibly not in all particulars.
The comic depiction was fairly crisp actually, in terms of the profile allowing for a size scaling to ~2-2.5km. The first proper fan depiction of Allegiance was from the Warlords mod for Homeworld 2, which set it up as 2.2km without a real hangar. The escorting ships in the Mon Calamari shot were clearly not ISDs either, given the proportions and profile. Obviously, out of universe, I think you’re right – the artist was not likely doing all this intentionally. There’s some personal extrapolation involved, and I certainly have made my own changes, but it’s a bit more parsimonious to the source than 3.2km and assuming a big hangar.
I had meant the Kiev example to sort of rib you :). I find the ISD classification argument incredibly tiresome. But, I do stand by my earlier statement – ships of a certain size are multirole almost by default. Fighters and troops take up so little space relative to multi-kilometer ships that if they have any sort of hangar complex, they could conceivably carry ISD-level complements of small craft and ground forces easily. But the degree to which they do this vary dramatically compared to actual multirole ships, or to specialized carriers of small craft and troops. Even at the destroyer level, there are clearly ships that dedicate far more and far less of their volume to carrying troops (in film terms alone, Venator >>> ISD >>>>> Tector), and that makes me pretty hostile to the idea often floated that “Star Destroyer” is some special marker that automatically connotes multi-role lack of specialization rather than just a broad size category. Allegiance is big enough that you could easily fit an ISD’s worth of fighters crammed in with minimal support facilities. I don’t think it does this, but the hull could easily carry them (especially if you blister out the hangar area a little, assuming as I do that the interior is pretty tightly packed with other equipment).
I wouldn’t classify “destroyer” so much as a lack of specialization, but more the combination of different capacities into a single hull, such that some can have greater or lesser relative emphasis while still being considered “in-class.” The three basic criteria would be 1) big gun armament, with appreciable secondary and defensive armament, 2) starfighter complement in sufficient numbers to perform system superiority missions (enough fighters to perform an effective strike against a planetary or space-borne target, not merely provide air defense for the ship itself) and 3) sufficient troop transport capacity to deploy a minimum of 1 battalion of combined arms troops to a planet’s surface (as opposed to light infantry with crew-served weapons and maybe some light vehicle support). A secondary criteria would be sufficient endurance for extended deployment away from support and logistics if needed. Under that definition, a Venator and an Imperator would both still be Star Destroyers despite the fact that one placed much more emphasis on #2, while the other shifted focus more to #1 and #3.
So how does your classification deal with Allegiance and Tector? They fulfill #1 handily, but miserably fail at #2 and #3. Tector is supposedly a direct modification on an ISD frame, so would you really say it’s not a destroyer? What counts as a suitable superiority mission for fighters? Fighters in numbers to threaten a peer size/powered ship? I think the cutoffs are too vague and don’t actually incorporate the use of the ship, and so does actually enshrine a lack of specialization.
I’d propose a classification by power/volume (correlated) and by role (which is a doctrinal and thus malleable thing) together rather than any arbitrary cutoffs for what is essentially cargo carriage. The basic roles are 1) combat against ships/stations/planetary targets as a primary role (whether attack in the battleline or independently) regardless of carriage of anything else, which are extras, 2) primary fighter operations ships (where the ship’s weapons, no matter how big, are doctrinally used for self defense and the ship is primarily designed around deploying and supporting its fighters), and 3) similarly for ships where surface force transport and landing are primary concerns. Everything else is some flavor of auxiliary.
The combat ship classifications like Dreadnought, Battleship, Battlecruiser, Cruiser, Destroyer, etc. are by power/size, to deal with the fact that any ship can be anything relative to a small enough other ship so a single classification group like “Star Destroyer” becomes meaningless across 5 orders of magnitude…
My personal headcanon is based more on mission than power/size, with the three “pure” ship types being:
-Dreadnought: Pure big gun combatant with little or no starfighter capacity (defensive only) and light troops (naval infantry with crew-served heavy weapons and some light vehicle support).
-Fleet Carrier: Pure starfighter carrier with defensive armament and light troops only.
-Assault Carrier: Pure troop transport, but designed for rapid-reaction spearhead units rather than heavy armor ala the Consolidator.
The next step is the combo units, combining two elements at the expense of the third:
-Star Cruiser: Space superiority platform combining Dreadnought and Fleet Carrier, but light troops only.
-Star Monitor: Big gun ship combined with an assault carrier’s troop capacity, able to provide its carried assault troops with organic fire support (I picture the Victory I as this).
-Star Carrier: Combined fleet & assault carriers, with starfighter and troop capacity combined at the expense of heavy weaponry.
Finally, the Star Destroyer is the most balanced, incorporating all three, although some variation within type remains.
From there, anything with a Super designator would be something significantly larger than the standard model, although as you mentioned, Super Star Anything-Other-Than-Destroyer becomes exceedingly rare simply dint of sheer size allowing the ship to meet the required criteria. Something like the Allegiance or Tector would be considered a Star Dreadnought. I wrote up the Tector as a bombard platform, with the launch and hangar bays being deleted in favor of armored magazines and launchers for a variety of different specialized anti-surface warheads, so it would very nearly qualify as a Star Monitor, but it lacks the troop capacity.
I’d like to think that, if I had, WEG’s SWU would’ve been much more internally consistent. I was actually in high school when WEG first published their Star Wars RPG, but I’ve always loved the system. Unfortunately, when you’re passionate about something, you get close enough to see all of its faults in extreme detail, too…
When you get down to it, a gravity well projector is basically a big gun that prevents anything it hits from jumping into hyperspace. For the purposes of my headcanon, I’d fold it into the Dreadnought category.
If you’re replying to me (the formating makes it difficult to tell), I wasn’t talking about AIR superiority doctrine; I was talking about Soviet NAVAL doctrine in the North Atlantic. That’s not the same thing.
That’s definitely up there.
I suppose it depends how we define convoluted nonsense. If, for instance, it can still be about SW ship design but strays off topic from the ship on the page, I’d nominate the extended resistance bomber debate from last year.
Well, unless he’s thinking of the thread on the Modified Imperial Customs Corvette page involving the potential use of mission-specific modular components…
Quick question…Is it ok to make a print out and frame one of your awesome renders for person viewing? I recently saw someone use it in a Youtube video and was wondering if I would need permission to have someone print one for me or if it is strictly off limits. I respect your work too much to just take it and if it was allowed I would like permission 🙂 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCCvUB5n74 @ 13min if interested).
For personal use at home? No problem. Thanks for checking.
StormCommando
4 years ago
How would this stack up against the Resurgent?
All kyber crystal shenanigans aside, I think that this would win – it’s a lot bulkier. And the ICS for the Resurgent doesn’t do it any good – the reactor in that image is tiny…
Which makes you wonder – how do ‘compact hypermatter reactors’ stack up against normal hypermatter reactors in output to volume ratio? It can’t be that much better or all warships would have compact reactors.
I suspect that ‘compact hypermatter reactors’ were developed by the First Order/Kuat Entralla Engineering and their technology is a jealously guarded secret. I have nothing to base this on, but if it’s true, it would explain why no one else uses them. I don’t have the ICS with me, so I can’t check anything tight now.
Regarding Resurgent vs Allegiance, I guess it depends on how well the reactors match up.
If the Finalizer is about twice the size for easy scale it should be 64 times heavier and the cube of that more power generation. The fuel is likely far denser on the scale of at least a preon star. Likely hundreds of quintillions times denser than water or something like that. Preon stars are hundreds of millions of times denser than neutron stars anyway so something at least that dense. And has 2 secondary reactors.
Naradus
4 years ago
How long did this take, and in what software did you model this? I’d be interested in knowing.
Ok Fractal since you may didn’t saw the question that I have posted i’l ask again.
What the polygon count for the new Allegiance?
DarthKarnage
4 years ago
I would love it if you had a shot from the bridge viewport area , just so we could see what it would be a little like commanding this ship…
Just a thought.
wusolja
4 years ago
@Jonathan C
41 dual defense turrets pointing aft
53 dual defense turrets each, pointing left and right
17 dual defense turrets pointing forward
6 quad turrets ventral
16 quad turrets each, pointing left and right
3 quad turrets pointing forward
12 quad turrets pointing aft
9 ball turrets total (ion guns?)
6 Heavy quad guns each, pointing left and right
seems like the total armament for this ship!/?
Ragnrok
4 years ago
That 14th shot is so epic!
PhantomFury
4 years ago
Oh man what a beautiful ship…
OmegaS
4 years ago
‘Lets shoe horn a star cruiser into as small a hull as possible’, the ship. Beyond the lack of flexibility, I imagine that it has well above average maintenance and logistical requirements for something its volume. If you have a fleet large enough to justify a relative specialist like this, it can work well, but only if you have an actual need for it.
Generally, the Empire needed coverage above all else, which its obsession with big ships didn’t help with. Rather than the ISDs, a far lesser number of Allegiances supported by a far larger fleet of sub-capitals would have been far more effective. However, this runs into the problem that the Empire’s leadership (ie Palpy) didn’t exactly care about effectiveness, only about how much it stoked his dark side boner, so the whole thing was basically doomed from the start.
Believe it or not, the Allegiance-Class needed support of fighters. They would rip and tear through anything larger than a corvette. It operated basically as a cheaper Bellator SSD in hunting down ships and blowing them to smithereens.
Hecatomb
4 years ago
I personally think this is what the First Order destroyer should have been. Not a completely new design, but late-generation Imperial warships that eluded the New Republic following the battle of Endor. It would have made much more sense for the First Order to build its fleet from the Imperial Remnant, and perhaps we could have then seen the Bellator and Assertor on screen.
I mean, we get enough (justified, in my opinion) complaints about First Order assets resembling Imperial gear too much and if this showed up on the big screen, I’ll rant even harder. However, I love this design and I wouldn’t mind seeing it from an expanded universe source, though.
Really, that was a major strand of criticism? I’m firmly in the camp that there should’ve been closer visual design with Imperial ships. I think where they went that route (Supremacy and Resurgent) the results looked good, great even, but when they tried something new (the doompizza) the design looked like shit, however good the technical execution of the models were (and they were very pretty at a detail level).
I think one of the biggest lines of criticism what that the First Order TIEs looked virtually indistinguishable from Imperial TIEs with white trim, especially when the Empire was already in the process of upgrading to Interceptors at Endor. There was some slick concept art for TFA with what looked to be a TIE Hunter inspired FO fighter, but instead we got a reskinned TIE/ln.
I mean, I have now seen both sides of the argument and I was originally expecting them to further develop the design into something that have virtues in their own right, such as the in-lore design development that went from Venator-class to Imperial-class in about a decade, so I want to scrutinize the design team for only adding another terrace while squatting the bridge as the only noticeable defining features from Imperial to Resurgent class in 20+years. Now, I’ve heard people defending it, saying it makes sense from the ideological and training perspective, but visually, I kinda wish they did more…heck, maybe something like the Pellaeon-class, for an example. And as Diab mentioned, reeling back to TIE/ln in inverted colors and command version with antenna and nigh-useless ventral turret is pretty uncreative. That said, I’m with you on loving the Supremacy and disliking the Doompizza. (And Resurgent did steal my breath away when I saw it in 3D, it’s just afterwards when I look at various images that I find it too ISD)
I like the Resurgent in general, apart from the weird skeletal negative space at the prow that doesn’t really make any sense to me. Also bridge asymmetry was a little bit odd, not bad necessarily, but not enough impact – too odd but in a subtle way. But the way they blended the terraces and the overall profile I do actually like.
I’ll agree with you there. I personally love the Resurgent-Class destroyers. There’s a number of other FO capital ships that have showed up in the comics that I hope to see in more detail on the screen someday… or here…
Fair enough, and from a design standpoint, it isn’t bad really; it’s just that it doesn’t have it’s own…feel, and more like it’s hitchhiking on the Imperial designs a bit much (which is, again, justified in some view points) which (outside of lore) is fine if it isn’t a high canon source with people putting large sums of money into designing.
The bridge sensors communications reactor dome and engines need to put inside the starship. Capital grade missile launchers would be really nice a double superstructure design with a spinal ridge would be nice for the large weapons batteries. Killing that open superstructure and flight deck would be really nice. No troops or ground vehicles and drone starfighters. pure combat Really massive long-range weapons emplacements. a Bit bigger like at least 600-800 meters longer with an armored engine nacelle like the Bellator. And other design changes would be nices looks a little to imperial for me much superior to the stupid has hell Xytson class whatever
Supremacy looks nothing like any dreadnought in star wars history it is only 13.3 kilometers shorter the assertor 15 and Sovereign and Eclipses 35-40 Kilometers. The executor was 8 kilometers not is 19 kilometers. Both of those ships were listed has 15 and 17.5 Kilometers long. The viscount also needs to be 35-40 kilometers to fit the eclipse scale it is the same length after all.
Except Disney blatantly rejected anything of the Expanded Universe with common sense out the waste-chute of their dumb-ass corporate empire. They refused to look at what could have been salvaged and made up their usual mickey mouse crap.
Jonathan C
4 years ago
Can’t wait for some committed soul to count all the guns on this one. (particularly the medium quads and pd combos)
Don’t forget that larger MTL and even HTL batteries can engage fighters with those flak bursts we always see, even if their efficacy at hitting named characters is in the toilet.
I’m not sure what one might expect necessarily. If it weren’t for me, there wouldn’t be any visible Imperial point defense at all :p
For some very vague numbers, a 3km+ lucrehulk with much higher surface area had fewer point defense mounts (about 200 light quad laser batteries between the ring and the core ship). It’s also equivalent in mounting positions to 9 Venators (I assume 26 twins based on the cross sections), and it’s got on the order of 8x the surface area of that ship. 234 point defense mounts is also the equivalent of 12 Lancers.
Well we would expect the Lucrehulk as a converted freighter rather than a dedicated warship to be proportionally under-armed and poorly optimized for combat. Besides, an Allegiance without a fighter complement is far more vulnerable to fighter attack and thus reliant on PD than a Lucrehulk with ten thousand vultures.
First of all, there’s purely geometric and aesthetic concerns – there’s only so much space and mounting as many light guns as the chassis allows will not end well – you could hypothetically power millions of kiloton-scale light lasers on a star destroyer-sized and -powered ship.
More in universe, if you don’t like the Lucrehulk, look at the Venator. Or on smaller antifighter escorts. It boils down to “what do you actually think the appropriate PD complement for a given warship by size is?” Lucrehulks, Venators, Acclamators and Lancers provide the best quantitative baseline I can think of, role differences or not. If you have something better, go for it.
In case it’s not obvious: this is not an argument I am interested in having. If you really do want to discuss more, bring data.
I wanted to say that the Star Wars aesthetic is supposed to be WW2 in Space, not Cold War gone Hot in Space, but then I remembered that the Unrotated Projectile and the Henschel Hs 297 Föhn were a thing. Carry on.
rodney
4 years ago
Sir, do you have any plans or are you working on the executor? I like this ship very much
TheEpicDude
4 years ago
this is truly amazing, love it
Steven Cross
4 years ago
whilst I know the Alliegiance class is a real thing in canon, this is my headcanon take on Fractal’s version.
Thoughts and comments are most welcome!
Allegiance class Battlecruiser
The so called ‘Heavy Star Destroyer Project’ came about due to a doctrinal holdover from the Clone Wars. In the Clone Wars the Republic navy used the Venator class as its general purpose craft and deployed the Victory class Star Destroyer as a pure anti-ship vessel. The Victory’s greater firepower and durability let it outlast and outgun CIS Warships, even larger ships like the Lucrehulk and Providence class ships were outgunned by a Victory and would be protected from other ships fighters by the Venator’s fighter complements.
The preliminary stages of the Imperial II refit called for the class to feature more powerful anti-ship weapons at the expense of its point defence battery but the loss of three Imperial class ships to Rebel fighters in a short space of time indicated that this was folly. This meant that plans also for the ‘Tector’ variant of the Imperator were also shelved and instead the Imperator II refit would focus on improving the ships anti-fighter defence as well as increasing the arcs of fire for the heavy turbolasers and other weapons as well as reinforcing the hull plating.
Still this left some Admirals, mostly those of the ‘big gun’ school of thought that the fleet could well be undergunned against certain opponents. And, whilst the Imperial I was good, and the Flight II refit was better, they wanted something more.
Following the destruction of the Death Star and the massed relocation of funding away from super-weapons and towards the fleet with the NEP (Naval Expansion Program) which saw the authorization of the Imperial II design for mass production as well as the Bellator class Super Star Destroyer and a host of smaller craft to diversify the fleet the ‘Black Shoes’ felt it was the right time to push for their own project.
Backroom discussions with various executives at KDY were fruitful, mainly through many of the Admirals who were of the ‘Black Shoes’ ideology having deep political connections and deeper pockets. And the temptation of more orders for KDY was just too much to ignore, especially with funding for the navy being at an all time high.
KDY began looking at a heavy gun version of the Imperial class but developments based on the Imperial II refit showed that more powerful weapons would need to be carried to make any new development actually worthwhile. Instead of the newer Octuple mounts a heavy quadruple mount was developed that would force a greater amount of energy into the bolts, despite having less guns the new weapon would hit far harder than even the octuple mounts on Star Destroyers. But these weapons required huge mountings and housings and could not be installed on the standard Imperial frame.
This was the beginning of what would become the Allegiance class, whilst the heavy quad turbolaser was mounted on ships like the Bellator and Executor classes, KDY was looking at a smaller frame to carry the weapons and it was this design the Admiralty pushed for.
The initial design was 2.2km long, 600 metes longer than an Imperial class and would feature 12 of the mountings for the heavy quad turbolaser. The broadside arcs were also covered by three massive mountings for triple heavy turbolasers in ball turret mountings, and taking notes Procursator design that was starting to enter service, the ship also featured 3 heavy ion cannons on her dorsal hull moving up the superstructure. Two octuple heavy turbo lasers were also mounted on the ships belly whilst the hull, trenches and superstructure were liberally covered with anti-fighter weapons, ranging from single heavy blasters, quad laser mounts, dual laser mounts and dual light turbolasers, augmenting the firepower of the Imperial II refit and having considerably more point defence than any Imperial ship designed at the time.
Indeed, the Bellator design would be altered to include more point defences based on the still unnamed ‘heavy Star Destroyer’.
Unfortunately though the power requirements for the new weapons, especially the heavy quad turbolasers and ion cannons consumed a huge amount of power, needing a larger hypermatter reactor and the considerable increase in crew for the point defence battery also ate into available hull space. The re-routing of power conduits and systems as well as larger data centres for the fire control systems which linked the point defence battery together also required more crew and more power and despite the great size of the ship the KDY designers were running out of space and something had to go.
Rationing that the new design would be accompanied by Imperial I and II class ships and other escorts, it was instead decided to sacrifice the ships fighter capacity, reduced to a mere 24 craft which were almost always TIE Interceptors and who’s sole duty was point defence and fighter interception roles.
Whilst the new design could house 3,600 Stormtroopers aboard these were mostly for anti-boarding duties and shipboard defence and room for things like AT-AT’s or AT-STs was very limited with none carried although the ship could dock pre-loaded Theta class landing barges its hangar bay was still limited with the capacity for a maximum of 36 shuttles or landing craft at the very most.
This rather tiny hangar also eliminated what some designers and Admirals saw as a flaw with the Imperial design, its large, open hangar was quite vulnerable to attack once the ships shields were down. The new ‘Heavy Star Destroyer’ eliminated this potential weakness and her hull was also heavily reinforced and the armour considerably thickened around vital areas like the bridge tower and reactor dome.
The lack of a heavy fighter complement wasn’t seen as a bad thing as it was intended that these larger vessels would be the ‘big stick’ of a battle line and could rely on friendly fighters and their own huge point defence battery to ward off any fighter attack or destroy any incoming ordinance. Its heavy guns would allow it to destroy a hostile capital ship or group of capital ships in short order and simulations against a Venator and Lucrehulk class showed that the new ships heavy firepower would allow it to easily destroy a target before they even got their fighters fully launched, and there would not be enough to overwhelm the point defences.
What followed was months of doctrinal and political wrangling within the halls of the Imperial Admiralty when the design was presented, with various committees approving and then cancelling the construction of the class. But, with growing numbers of Mon Calamari ships coming into Rebel service and the path to Dac heavily fortified, it was felt that these large ships as well as other elements of the Imperial fleet like the Bellator class and the Imperial II refit would be more than enough to batter through the defences of the Mon Cal system and destroy the Rebels primary shipyards.
Finally designated the Allegiance class, six were authorised and laid down at Kuat with other yards at Fondor also beginning construction of the class.
The final hurdle for the class was their designation, whilst Heavy Star Destroyer did match their capabilities, it just didn’t sound ‘right’ to the ear of the Admirals on the naming board. Instead the ancient term of ‘Battlecruiser’ was resurrected. They were too small to be true dreadnoughts and instead the Battlecruiser designation was a more suitable middleground.
Excellent headcanon! I just thought that perhaps instead of dating the origin back to the days of the Clone Wars, perhaps the origin should have its roots in the Tarkin Doctrine? After all inciting fear and the concept of capital ship superiority is a result of such ideology.
Ahh very nice. I thought I remembered the three center ball cannons mentioned as superheavy 600-700 TT turbolasers though. If that is the case, than the 4 (2 on each side) ball mounts perhaps have triple ions in them, with the center side ball mounts having quad 150-250 TT turbos in them.
Because of the difference in naming conventions, I would think an Allegiance would be a Rendili project. All of the KDY ships are agent nouns (as in, an entity that performs an action) – Imperator, Venator, Acclamator, Tector, Executor, etc. – whereas Victory and Allegiance are both abstract nouns (as in, referring to an idea, quality or condition).
So we’re just discounting the Eclipse, Nebulon-B, Vigil, Star Galleon, Pelta, Ton-Falk, Arquitens, Broadside, Vengeance, and whatever the Arc Hammer was? KDY makes plenty of ships that don’t follow that convention.
Naming conventions shift based on size/mission of craft. A Navy could easily feature both large capital ships classified by agency nouns and dinky convoy escorts classified by numeric designators, like the Royal Navy’s alphabet series. The Allegiance is close enough in size to things like the Imperator, Venator, Secutor, etc, to be part of the same “type” insofar as naming convention.
And the backstory of the Pelta / Arquitens stem from the same story group that made the MC75 from Rogue One a converted building, so again, it’s up to you how much chaotic schizophrenia you want to accept.
Things can just be random too. Sort of like Gvozdika/Akatsiya/Giatsint/Pion -> Msta?! Thanks guys for fucking with the pattern.
Or perhaps the faux-Latin names are Kuati products, largely initiated and designed by the in house team, but Allegiance was something imposed from on high, and perhaps named accordingly?
TBH, the Arc Hammer was a specialist factory ship. It only existed to be a mobile space-borne factory for the DT program. I refer to it as the term used by Command and Conquer; M.C.V. (Mobile Construction Vehicle.) But more of a specialized mobile droid barracks for specific autonomous non-organic infantry.
Allegiance is just first ship we see named, and it’s become entrenched in the absence of any other information, so there’s no better class name. This developed well before the fashion of naming stuff with pseudo-Latin.
Would it fit better maybe with a pseudo-Latin name? Sure. Am I going to stick my neck out there and pick one when the existing name is cool? No. If I had to? Castigator.
Fair enough. Still, it would be nice to see Rendili get /some/ business thrown their way. Instead, every EU fluff-writer seems to automatically assume that anything resembling a Star Destroyer has to be a KDY project, even though the Victory pretty clearly breaks that mold.
P.S. In the back of my mind, I keep hoping you’ll make some ridiculously oversized super star dreadnought and call it the Overcompensator-Class.
There’s probably more of a political than technical reason for the KDY monopoly under the New Order. The Separatist coup on Rendili and subsequent battle during the Clone Wars painted a huge political target on Rendili’s back, which would leave it devoid of Imperial contracts even if it could deliver quality ships. Perhaps some divisions were nationalized, and the engineers were forcibly transferred to KDY in a sort of a Sharashka Gulag manner.
By the time of the original trilogy, Rendili is so marginalized by the Empire that they’re refitting Assault Frigates for the Alliance. No wonder Palpatine didn’t give them the Allegiance contract.
The source for that is the Empire at War video game guide, and video games are of debatable use as canon sources. It’s far more likely that the “Alliance engineers” mentioned in the original write-up for the Assault Frigate included a high percentage of former Rendili engineering personnel who had defected to the Alliance. It’s highly improbable that a major ship-building company (which Rendili still was, even if nowhere near the scale of KDY) would take the chance of accepting a “commission from the Rebel Alliance” any time before Endor. The word for that is treason.
Why wouldn’t Rendili get work anyway? We’ve seen companies don’t need to design the stuff they end up building. At the very least, ISDs are built of Corellia, and I’m pretty sure KDY doesn’t own CEC, or have much production infrastructure in CEC’s back yard.
There’s quite a gap between being a secondary contractor responsible for assembling prefabricated components of someone else’s design and being the primary contractor that’s responsible for moving the entire project forward, and taking the lion’s share of profit and publicity.
Also, I thought it was clear that Rendili would never publicly declare their allegiance (pun intended) to the Alliance, but if substantial numbers of malcontent engineers are defecting and bringing their hardware with them, then the Empire was probably smart to not trust Rendili with anything crucial. Besides, when a regime changes, a major defense contractor can shrivel up very quickly if the new power doesn’t like them that much. Just look at what happened to Messerschmidt or Supermarine.
That a nice class name for the Allegiance if it is not named Allegiance in the first place. But you could use that name for a possible Multi-role heavy destroyer variant of the Allegiance.
Dunno how much demand there would be for a de-specialized Allegiance variant, though I could see a bow-cutout fast carrier ala our host’s Impellor class.
Theoretically, at what point does it become counter-productive to go with specialized platforms over multi-role ones? As near as I can tell, the emphasis on large, multi-role ships in the SWU is heavily influenced by the RPG; past a certain size/power level, capital ships can no longer be seriously threatened by a half-dozen PCs with a modded light freighter or a handful of starfighters, so there isn’t much need for nuance in big ship design. You’re obviously operating several orders of magnitude above that, but what are your thoughts on the point of diminishing returns for the various mission designs?
I really don’t think this has much to do specifically with any RPG. Not many people have played the game or thought about it at that level. Not many people have thought about it at all. Which is why we always get to see people go on about ventral turrets and constantly trying to cram fighters in because fighters are cool.
The specialized vs multirole argument has no answer, in real life or otherwise, and I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to set any hard breakpoints. Specialized designs will always win as long as you get to use them in their role. The whole point is that you shed stuff that you don’t need, but if you press those specialized designs into general contingency service then they will suffer for it on a cost-effectiveness basis. So, what do you actually use your navy for? Always doing high-end peer warfare? Go specialized. Mostly stuck with COIN? Do generalized. Have ships so large it doesn’t really matter? Do whatever is more convenient.
Historically, though, a lot of the early EU has its roots in the WEG game. Multiple sources have stated that Timothy Zahn was given a box of WEG books to use as source material for the original Thrawn trilogy, and even the ships from Dark Empire have come to be defined by their WEG stats. People may not think much about it, but a lot of the things we fans “know” to be true have their roots in the WEG game. Of the seven official SD and SSD types featured in WEG material, only the two smallest (Victory I/II) are “specialized”; the other four (Imperial I/II, Super/Executor, Sovereign and Eclipse) are all Swiss Army Ships. Generally, the likelihood of a ship’s game stats being a specialized design decreased the larger it was. Apart from you, I haven’t encountered anyone who is putting effort into designing specialized craft larger than ISDs, and I think a big part of that is because a lot of people’s view of the SWU is shaped by the smaller scale view presented in the RPG. Your COIN remark, is dead-on, I think, because that’s exactly what a small group of PCs would resemble: a group of insurgents / freedom fighters running around being a nuisance entirely out of proportion to their size. And that mindset has carried over into the EU, excepting people such as yourself who can think outside of the lines.
Oh, no doubt the game has been very influential in general terms, sometimes to my great dismay 🙂 But in terms of generalist vs specialized ships, I don’t think so. The game laid out some extra ship classes because there weren’t enough in the movies to support very much of an RPG universe, but a lot about specialized vs generalized usage was added later. The VSD series were just baby ISDs, almost literally in some depictions. And on the face of it, they have almost exactly the troop and fighter complements you’d expect from an uncritical reading of the initial ISD stats. They’re about a quarter the volume of an ISD (depending on what proportions for the length you are going with), so…1-2 fighter squadrons and a 1-2 regiments. But, as we go outwards from there, Venators are fairly specialized carrier ships in comparison to an ISD at highest level of canon (which just doesn’t have that many different kinds of large ships, let’s be honest). We know almost nothing about Sovereign. Eclipse I’d argue is ridiculously specialized – it’s a siege weapon. It doesn’t have the visible conventional armament you’d expect of a ship that size, and in the same vein seems to have a VERY limited hangar capacity in comparison to the (much smaller) Executor. Almost all of it must be dedicated to supporting that giant axial superlaser. If anything, it’s a mini Death Star, or a super-monitor (and in some sense so was the Death Star, and the pizza from Episode 8 for that matter).
Really, once you reach a certain size, you have to go massively out of your way to “specialize” – it’s a relative thing at best. A hangar bay that is structurally obvious on an 8km ship is going to be able to carry many hundreds of SW sized fighters. So you basically have to visually write a bay out completely to prevent the ship being hypothetically capable of carrying large troop and fighter complements on its volume. I did close to that with Assertor in relative size terms, and that design probably still is packing almost a thousand fighters and an Army sized ground detachment; the bay looks small, but is still huge because the ship itself is huge. A ship that big will also have an absolutely if not relatively potent main gun battery as well, unless you say somehow that it’s unarmed or only has point defense, which is sort of silly if it’s still warship shaped and not a sort of floating dock.
Going by their own descriptions, though, the VSDs were specialized to a degree, with the Victory I leaning more toward planetary bombardment and assault, and the Victory II being more a space combat counterpart to it. The main distinction is the II trading in the I’s concussion missiles for ion cannon, as well as having a somewhat more modern energy weapons loadout. I left out the Venator because RotS was released 12 years after WEG’s Dark Empire Sourcebook, as that gap left a big window of time for WEG-centric views of the SWU to establish (metastasize?) themselves. There was a LOT of retconning going on in the gaming community once the prequels hit, and part of that retconning was justifying the Imperator as a doctrinal shift away from relatively specialized designs like the Victories and the Venator and more toward generalist dreadnought/carrier/troop transport platforms, as demonstrated in the larger, more modern platforms of the classic trilogy.
As far as the armament on the Eclipse (the Sovereign was actually just a WEG invention that never appeared in DE), WEG’s approach there was pretty much just to equip it with the same general type of cannon (with some variations for damage and accuracy), but tack on a LOT more of them. The write-up for the Eclipse gives it roughly the same number of big-gun turbolasers as an Executor, but doesn’t really distinguish between big and little, mostly trusting in the game’s coordinated fire mechanic to boost accuracy or damage based on the number of guns firing at a given target. So, the guns are there, but really small compared to the scale of the ship. And yeah, the Eclipse’s actual size is a dumpster fire on top of the dumpster fire that is the Executor’s length. That being said, though, it and the Sovereign still have the same generalist approach as the ISD, but on a much larger scale. The main difference between the Eclipse / Sovereign and the Executor is the Executor gets concussion missile launchers and the Eclipse / Sovereigns get a superlaser, point defense weaponry and gravity well projectors.
IIRC, the only pre-prequel EU author to put forward the idea of a non-specialist capital ship in the SWU was Michael P. Kube-McDowell, putting fleet carriers alongside star destroyers in the fifth fleet. The stats for those were published in one of WEG’s very last published books.
Setting aside whether WEG’s stats would make any sense outside game-mechanic convenience (I err toward ‘nope’), I’ve tripped over two threads (on FFG & SDN respectively) & a Wookie page which quote Eclipse as packing 500 TLs, 550 heavy lasers & 75 ions of unspecified scale. Even compared to the ‘8-klick fallacy’ weapon stats for Executor (1000 turbos/ions/launchers), that doesn’t strike me as a conventional weapon count even vaguely commensurate with the thing’s surface area. Feel free to thwack me if none of this introduced anything new, of course.
Not much here I can disagree with, and I’m the last person to defend WEG game stats as some paragon of infallibility. The /really/ amusing thing about those stats is that the Heavy Lasers are the anti-capital ship weapons, while the Turbolasers are the anti-starfighter weapons; errors like this are not uncommon in the game stats.
However, the deeper argument is that the further removed a game stat gets from the smaller-scale forms of combat or pursuit (starfighters and light freighters, pretty much), the less important accurate stats become as a practical matter. The reason for that is, past roughly the Victory / Imperator level, capital ships are just something PCs run from, and not something they try and fight it out with. From a casual gaming standpoint, what matters most is not so much that the stats are accurate, but that the stats as written will blow pretty much any starship a gaming group might have access to out of space in a single volley.
In the game, ships the size of the Executor or Eclipse are essentially space-going Anti-MacGuffins; they drive the plot by redirecting the plot /away/ from them. If something on that scale shows up in a star system, the best approach for a handful of gamers is to go somewhere else as expeditiously as possible. Fans have made attempts to re-stat both ships, but it very quickly becomes an exercise in ridiculousness.
Did the WEG writers ever even see ANH? I distinctly remember some Imperial gunnery crew complain that the Alliance snubfighters were too small to be effectively targeted by the Death Star’s turbolasers.
From a pure RPG standpoint, it probably doesn’t matter if something like an Allegiance or Eclipse isn’t properly statted, but they damn well should have put some thought into the capital ships before turning the books over to Tim Zahn and telling him to use them as reference.
It’s a complicated question. Certainly, the WEG writers had to have seen Star Wars, but their interpretation of Star Wars did not stand the test of time. The biggest collective error I can see is that WEG kept making changes to their rules over time without fully analyzing the ways in which those changes had unintended consequences for other aspects of the game. The basis is there for a good, coherent gaming system and universe, but it needs a lot more playtesting to iron out the wrinkles. The Death Star battle is a case in point; to make it work, you basically have to ignore the official WEG Death Star stats and treat it like the surface of a planet with individual weapons emplacements and targets for strafing and bombing runs.
As far as Zahn, I think he very wisely stayed away from quoting WEG /stats/ as established fact, and instead went with more general usage based on the WEG fluff write-ups that accompanied the stats.
I’m glad that Zahn didn’t take all the gun counts at face value, but the legacy of WEG on the Thrawn books is one of relentless minimalism based on the fluff. We got a universe where 200 medium frigates is a game changer, major fleets have a handful of line destroyers, and the industrial base that put together two death stars seems to have evaporated overnight. That’s the disappointment.
I’d argue that Zahn’s minimalist approach actually fit with the scale of the universe as it was accepted at that time. By that measure, those frigates were actually heavy cruisers, and ships larger than ISDs were few and far between. It wasn’t until the prequels started introducing larger and larger ships, and Fractal started fleshing out some of the doodles that passed for ships in the various Dark Horse comics releases that the scale started to go up. This ties in, IMO, with one of the main things WEG got right, and that is the focus on the efforts of individuals and small groups against the backdrop of epic space and surface battles, just like the films. Even with epic-scale constructs like the Death Stars, there was always a plot hole machined in to allow an individual or small group to weaken and/or destroy it.
It’s not really fair to fault writers in the past for not being able to see the future.
Eh, I’d argue that the mere existence of Executor & especially both Death Stars (much less DS2 being a secret project) not-so-subtly hints at a vaster scale than the sorts who insisted on ten-Impstar fleets guarding Coruscant or Kuat wanted to acknowledge. Plus, niche as it might be Curt Saxton’s documentation of stuff from Dark Horse & Marvel material predated the prequels by at least a few years. I get the whole ‘players gotta feel relevant’ thing, but am still not sold on having this ‘verse’s, well, verisimilitude dictated *entirely* by script-handy golden-BB events. Can’t help thinking some sort of official compartmentalization between game & film/novel content would’ve helped matters somewhat.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but considering that Lucasfilm at that time had the final say as to what was “official” Star Wars, and that it was Lucasfilm referencing WEG material (and ultimately sending WEG books for reference) when talking to Zahn, it wasn’t like he had a lot of choice. WEG had, with Lucasfilm’s blessing, established a minimalist pattern which Lucasfilm themselves perpetuated by forwarding it to Zahn, who in turn set the standard for all of the EU before the prequels. An author writing in someone else’s IP universe has to walk a fine line, and Zahn did well within the confines of what he was given.
Honestly, it’s not like Lucasfilm – or Disney – have moved away from the relatively “small” feel, either. I see the logic of the argument that hundreds of thousands of Star Destroyers must exist, but the largest concentrations of them seen on screen at Endor and Coruscant are an infinitesimal fraction of that number. If anything, Disney has made it even worse; Abrams’ “I can see Hosnian Prime from my house” SFX shot completely ruined TFA for me, compounded by Ruin Johnson cramming the entire Resistance into one star cruiser and three escorts.
It’s a paradox; a realistic Star Wars universe requires a maximalist shipbuilding paradigm, but the cinematic universe as a story-telling vehicle seems to favor the minimalist approach, so as not to distract from the individual characters in the story.
I can understand Zahn rolling with the framework given him & keeping main-character challenges at a manageable scale, though the more I mull this over…hell, I’m just not sure the two paradigms necessarily had to clash in the first place. If anything, a maximalized galactic stage as backdrop seems good for accentuating character heroics by driving home just what’s been foiled/circumvented/averted through grit, courage, camaraderie & cunning (unless, of course, one cheeses out with force storm-tier powers). Plus, as you note with WEG’s original ‘leave fighting fleets to fleets, genius’ policy, cinematic central cast-size groups get ample mileage out of evasion, sabotage, speechifying & ganking the pompous moff *directing* Sector Doomfleet #45Z. Doesn’t mean half the Empire/CIS/First Order’s spaceborne assets have to be mashed into a shot for *personal* mission-killing by Perspective Character Crew.
Ah, and while I have to eyeroll at the thematic rehash + wank it represents, Starkiller Base’s mere existence sorta throws more fuel on the ‘resources are out there’ fire if Space Daesh can field that thing with a fraction of the Empire’s territory.
The most plausible explanation I’ve heard for Starkiller Base is that it was originally built by one of the SWU’s ancient races (the Rakata are a good candidate) who subsequently abandoned it for unknown reasons. Then, thousands of years later, the First Order discovered it out in the Unknown Regions, figured out how it functioned, then built their own facilities around and on top of the original works. Hux’s bloviating about “you built this” would’ve just been hyperbole and propaganda.
Ah, so like a less-hollow, nowhere-near-Corellia Centerpoint Station. I also dig the meta WRT First Order ‘breakthroughs’ mainly being coattail-riding + spittle-spraying bullroar. Makes sense for a rehash regime whose boss uncannily resembles a defective Palpaclone(R) himself.
No, the scale that Zahn’s stuff ignored wasn’t set by me. That scale was set by the production of several hundred thousand ISD equivalents twice over 3 years embodied by both death stars in highest and earliest SW canon. It’s a low bar to expect some consistency with the setting as it was originally laid out, and not expecting fortune-telling on the part of the worldbuilder.
P.S. I like Zahn’s stuff story wise, but the minimalism is AWFUL.
The official explanation at the time was that the Death Stars were of unprecedented scale, and only the direct command of the Emperor was able to gather that much time and effort and material into a single project. Realistic? Probably not, but it did fit with the minimalist official approach at the time. I think you’re right insofar as Star Wars viewed realistically, but is Star Wars supposed to be realistic? My understanding was always that it was more space opera than hard sci-fi
Personally, I was willing to write off most of the stuff on the Saxton compilation as “just not Star Wars enough” on the basis of poor quality alone. It wasn’t until you started transforming the unshapely blobs into ships that actually looked like they belonged that I started thinking in terms of larger ships being more common. Up to that point, it was easy to think of Imperator-Class Star Destroyers as TIE Fighters writ large; rather than specialist platforms, just build a whole bunch of multi-role platforms, then problem solve by throwing as many of them at a problem as you have to until the problem goes away.
Sure, the Death Stars are marvels of mega-engineering instituted from the top, and not something your typical Post-Endor Moff could put together, but they’re still THE benchmark of the galactic industrial base. Besides, they were built in almost complete secrecy, which suggests that they were a small fraction of total Imperial production capacity rather than something that every workshop and factory was mobilized for.
I’ll admit a fair chunk of the DE & 70s Marvel stuff could be handwaved as ‘artist with a deadline & limited aptitude for greebling’. Still, things like the concept-sketch designs, later PC/console-game creations and inspirations for stuff like Fulgor, Praetor, that modular ship, etc. have the potential for that much more setting variety than an all-Impstar-plus-fistful-of-smaller-craft fleet for Our Antagonists.
Right, the ‘why are you stopping to count all this, just RUN’ approach makes sense for player groups tooling around in Falcon or Lambda equivalents. It’s when peeps try to patch the fluff attached to said context into broader theories & trends WRT capital-scale combat, some of which seem to *contradict* its original intent (hello, Trench Run Disease) that the migraines & 80-page debate threads set in. Which is why I’ll confess to finding our host’s ‘pull back & look at the design sans game-balance lenses’ approach immensely refreshing.
Anyhow, having squinted at Eclipse I & II’s lack of fleet-slaughtering action in their source comics (I admittedly falls to Act of Forcetantrum, II gets flanked by an antique frigate analogue we never see it destroy before the Falcon’s crew slices helm control & sends it on a death ride), I can sorta see some support for Fractal’s ‘plus-sized siege monitor’ assessment.
Based on film evidence, the same could be said about the Executor. We never really get to see exactly what it could do in a gun duel against another capital ship. Mostly what it does is hover nearby looking ominous.
Ah, the annoyances of plot shielding, rules of engagement dictated by same & only tertiary characters helming SW heavies ’cause nobody wants to let go of the snubs or Falcon (well, besides Vader, but he’s more of a roving trouble-choker). Suppose I’m just nursing dead-horse annoyance with the way peeps have regurgitated the Fifteen-Panel Palpywagon’s hype every other time any given sci-fi page rolls around to SW capitals.
Just a thought, but why not make it the Tector-Class? Next to nothing is known about that ship, apart from the fact that it is “hangerless,” but I’ve always taken that to mean merely that it lacked the large launch bay of the Imperator-Class. From that perspective, both the Allegiance and the Procursator would be likely candidates. It’d be nice to have that gap in the EU filled in.
I think the traditional speculation was that Tector is supposed to be a hangarless ISD variant. Also it apparently does not have a bulb, which Allegiance most certainly does.
Other than removing the hangar and covering up the bulb, what else would we speculate the Tector of having? A couple more turrets or something more radical to differentiate it from a stock Imperator?
Those are already huge modifications. I’d expect a very different stern design, because if it’s a gunboat variant you’d want to keep reactor output, and you’ve reduced the ventral volume by internalizing the bulb, so the reactor volume has to be redistributed. If it has a similar ISD hull plan then there’s nowhere to add but further back. Possible shallow fantail to accommodate it all, and that suggests centerline engine rearrangements. Extra turrets in the flank batteries to use the extra juice.
The sole source for that appears to be the Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, so it would depend greatly on how much weight you place on it as a source. The idea of it not having a bulb is based on the ret-coning of one of the Imperial ships in the Battle of Endor based on a conflation of that scene in the films with how it’s described in the RotJ novel, and the connection made is a pretty tenuous one, IMO.
In my own headcanon, I made the Tector a planetary bombardment specialist variant of the Imperator, replacing the main hangar bay and most of the transport capacity with a mass of warhead storage bays and launchers, but a big gun specialist like the Allegiance would seem to fit, as well.
Cross sections also mentions the Tector, and I believe the Endor inverted ship is officially supposed to be a Tector (at least until it changes again). I’m pretty sure Saxton had it in mind when he did the first text mentions. The Endor ship is definitely a slightly modified ISD hull. A gunboat ISD variant certainly is well plausible.
Cross sections is the first time a Tector is mentioned, but it only ever says it’s hangarless. The quote from the Venator cross-section just says “construction of Venator-class vessels is already slowing in favor of more robust, mile-long Imperator-class (renamed Imperial-class after the Jedi Purge) and hangarless Tector-class Star Destroyers.” From that, it /could/ be inferred that the Tector is a “mile-long,” but it could just as easily be in the same size range as the Venator, except “more robust” ala the Procursator.
What I find too much of a reach is that the scene that’s supposed to be the belly of a Tector (where we see only a destroyer’s bow with a few features and no reactor bulb) is based solely on a line from the RotJ novel where Lando’s “and we just might take a few of them with us” line occurs as the Falcon “careened around the belly of an Imperial leviathan.” Since the scene in question occurs /after/ Lando’s line in the sequence of the film, the “Leviathan’s belly” he was avoiding could just as easily have been one of the ISD’s seen in the background of the camera shot, before he passed over the bow of this unidentified ship.
And while I would certainly trust your eye for the visual details with regard to the ship in question being the modified bow of an Imperial, IMO, the bow of the Allegiance bears a striking resemblance to the bow of an Imperator, too. Without a clear view of the superstructure of the ship in question, I would think it could go either way.
I’m getting the official status of the ROTJ ship as Tector from the Wookiepedia article for Tector. I’m assuming they’re sourcing the comment from Leland Chee correctly.
We know the ROTJ ship is a modified ISD because they didn’t make any other models that size. It’s not like some secret studio model for another big destroyer that never saw the light of day. It’s open for interpretation what the superstructure and stern of the ship looks like, but it’s got the same forward plan as an ISD, full stop. No need for arcane novel interpretations for that one.
I got it from the same source. I’m not disputing Leland Chee’s identification of the ship as a Tector, I’m just pointing out how thin the case is for the ship being inverted in the shot in question. If the idea is a different, more heavily armored star destroyer, couldn’t it just be repurposed footage, using the same model, but explained away as the dorsal bow hull of a design similar to that of the ventral bow of an Imperator?
It’s possible, but such a ship would need to have dorsal surface features that are awfully like an ISD’s main hangar bays with hatches applied. Occam’s Razor says to me it’s probably an ISD variant inverted.
But to be fair if it were the underside of a Tector that we saw in the flyby, if I did it it would need some extra work. I don’t think plating over otherwise obvious ISD apertures is the most aesthetic way to go, but it’d hardly be the first time in modifying real warships…
Great background, sounds very plausible. Bit of a mistake at the beginning though, imo: you say the Victory could go toe to toe with the Lucrehulk – did you mean 1 on 1? If so, this is underestimating the LH. Based on the size of all its reactors, its listed shield strength and its weapons, its power output is almost certainly around 7.7e25w – making it 8 times more powerful than an ISD-II (while 22 times bigger, it has a much lower overall:reactor volume ratio because it’s a carrier and its ‘mandibles’ are enormous, with none of that space dedicated to reactors), so about 20-25x more powerful than a Victory. It could also take on 1-2 Allegiance SDs.
Fair assessment WRT cruiser-refitted Lucrehulks being more than a single Vic (or even a Vic+-Venator 2-ship) should be expected to slug it out with, though I suspect a deftly-helmed Allegiance could just about solo one depending on who gets off the first telling volley.
Lucrehulks have sizable reactors, but commercial power plants optimized for cost-efficiency and long-haul reliability probably don’t stack up to military reactors designed for maximum surge output. Lucrehulks are also incredibly unmanueverable, and while an Allegiance can’t dance like a Victory, it sure as hell would be able to evade much more return fire than the Lucrehulk. To make things even more lopsided, the Lucrehulk’s firing arcs are pretty awful, while an Allegiance would be able to pound it with its full armament, making this not really a contest. A single well-handled Imperator might even be able to take on a Lucrehulk, if we ignore the thousands of fighters it would be carrying.
Zarrov
4 years ago
ISD version 2.0. Once presented next to each other this really looks like Allegiance class should be renamed ISD II. I never understood the lack of fighters on Allegiance. This is a huge ship, 2.2 km, it is unfathomable that they couldn’t squeeze in at least the same amount of fighters as ISD has. I get why lore-wise such decision was made but it seems not to make much sense.
Venators and ISDs are both middle-of-the road ships that are part battleship, part carrier.
The Venator steers more towards the carrier side, the ISD more towards the battleship side.
A dedicated carrier will always be more effective in that role than one that sacrifices hangar space for more firepower. A dedicated battleship will always be more effective in that role than one that sacrifices firepower for hangar space.
Take a Venator’s carrier side to the extreme and you get the Secutor.
Take the ISD’s battleship side to the extreme and you get the Allegiance.
Imperial combat doctrine (stemmed from Tarkin Doctrine) never paid much attention to the effectiveness of starfighter combat, as to them, the fighters isn’t the thing that win battles and conquer/hold systems, but rather the warships is the one with such a responsibility. Not to mention this ship is just full of anti-air batteries, additional hangar space is just a waste of interior that could be used for other things.
I think the allegiance actually has a small launch bay where the secondary shuttle bay would be on a standard ISD (which make sense really, there has to be a way for the crew to get in and out). No idea if it can accommodate fighters though…
It probably could fit a few fighters, just like you could potentially fit an AV-8B Harrier II in the hangar bay of a Burke destroyer IRL, but they don’t do that because fighter coverage for the fleet is better served by specialist vessels.
As 3D artist myself, I’ve never been able to get the sort of blue-gray material with the hull plates. Is it a bit too silly to ask for a hex value? 😛 I’ve gone all over google for hull plating textures etc, I’ve got a python script to generator plates and greebles, but where do you get these images from? Would you share them?
It’s not just the hex value – it’s more the lighting and color correction that happens afterwards. Won’t look the same depending on those settings. My stuff is procedural except for a few mild bitmaps.
I just use direct spotlights or very small area lights for relatively sharp shadows. I occasionally will use HDRI lighting for smaller ships, or if I desperately want specific kinds of reflections. On a big ship I’ve found it doesn’t matter too much. I guess if you wanted a “photoreal” light setup like as if it was a physical model, HDRI lighting would be the way to go.
Nice another redux done. There are 2 things I want to ask you about Fractal.
1. What the polygon count on this redux?
2. Will the Procursator get a redux as well?
Steven A Futrell
4 years ago
id love to see you do the Titan class Stealth Dreadnought.
Steve
4 years ago
Stunningly good! There’s definately a brutal power to her clean lines!
Arvenski
4 years ago
That is incredible. My god.
RhysT
4 years ago
Question. I know anything to do with the Sequel Trilogy is sorta a source of much controversy, but is there any chance we’ll eventually see ships from those movies depicted by you? Say the Resurgent class or something?
Daib
4 years ago
This thing has made it to 5+ EAW mods of varying caliber, and it’s laughably under-gunned in every single one of them.
Reactor volume is all that counts, and that’s 6x. The rest of the hull is proportionately stripped away. High power to weight, low overall size to make it a smaller and better shielded target.
That one it has 12 octuple barbette turbolasers, like 40-60 missile launchers as well as at least 20-50 minimum other light laser cannons, point defense or light turbolaser batteries.
SECONDED on the EAW Remake-Light version of the mod. Holy hell. That thing is a straight up beast. I’m late game right now, swapping ISD-II’s with them. Those missiles are definitely powerful.
The Allegiance-class is better than the Resurgent
Change my mind.
The resurgent has like 20 times the weapons are bigger over 500 meters fixes some of the design issues of the starship. it is much faster more agile and maneuverable. It has much more powerful weapons sensors shields communications and hyperspace systems. It also carries more point defense and smaller weapons emplacements. Weapons bost faster recharge rates better anti-armor and shield capabilities longer range. It has a faster longer range and better hyperdrive. And it is superior because of its technology tactics and training.
I’ve never seen a weapon larger than a point defense mount on a Resurgent. Do you have any pictures that show the heavy weapons on a resurgent? I’ve never seen them modeled.
I think each of the twin turrets visible next to the dorsal superstructure in this image is supposed to be roughly equivalent to one of an Imperial-1’s main turrets.
There are also 4 of these turrets on the leading edge of the superstructure, and another 3 pairs of them on either side in the forward trench cutout, though they’re difficult to make out.
They might be octuple just like with the imperial class this warship has like 3,000 heavy turbolaser and ion cannons. More than I think.
The ICS fairly clearly shows that those are twin turrets, not octuple batteries.
ICS also states “more than 3,000 turbolasers and ion cannons” as its weapons stat, it does not say “heavy turbolasers,” just “turbolasers,” meaning that the vast majority of them could be twin light turbolaser turrets for point defence. This would make sense of (spoilers?) the suborned PD turret on the Steadfast having the firepower to destroy the bridge.
Meant to put this in my previous:
http://www.myths.com/pub/movies/star-wars/exploded-section-books/SW_ships_007.jpg
Reading 3,000 turbolaser for this ship makes me think where do they put them. Granted this ship is close to double the length of an ISD but almost the amount of weapons of an Executor class by just an sixth of the length seems odd. The only way they can achieve that imo is by downscaling. Imagine you put every crewmen of an aircraft carrier on the flight deck armed with whatever sidearm they use. It would be correct to state that ship hast 5 to 6k weapons. Its maybe an abstract thought i hope you get what im up to.
I think people assume the armament count on these vessels refers to all the big, heavy turrets/batteries, and forget about the light-turbolaser and heavy laser cannon emplacements. Look at how many houses/flats you can place in a town with the same surface area as a Resurgent-Class, and you will realise it can easily accommodate them. 🙂
The Resurgent class has 8 massive turbolaser batteries per side just the Imperial-class. and Multiple forward-facing heavy turbolaser batteries in front of the starship. But they can be hard to spot because of how the ship is molded the lore works and how the books and secondary source materials can be with all three of those things. They are much faster charging longer range and deliver much greater firepower per shot the much older Imperial era weapons emplacements of the old warships. You are more than welcome to stay and talk with the rest of us if you want to we or at the very least I would really love that and I enjoyed your words today. Thank You for your time
The Resurgent-class seems like an evolution more from the Allegiance-class instead of the Imperial-class. The size, gradual staggered structure, firepower, and overall role of a battlecruiser seems to make more sense. Both are still great ships, but I thing the allegiance one-ups the resurgent in terms of aesthetics.
The Resurgent is not an upscaled Imperial-class with a few things added.
Resurgent class is absolutely trash and it is an insult to star wars (mainly because it is disney)
Then come up with a better design. It’s no absolute trash just because it’s Disney. It looks like a star wars starship design along with the supremacy of the silencer and the TIE line in general from Disney and more. And stop necroposting from old shit from months ago.
And spell your username the right way and stop necroposting in general. It is just trolling in general.
I’m pretty sure they did spell their username the right way. If it’s meant to be pronounced anony-mouse, spelling it anonymous would be incorrect. I believe it’s supposed to be punny.
Also, they’re new here. If they posted on something from four years ago it would be fine because it’s their first time seeing and reacting to it.
The fact that they happen to hate your favourite ship does not automatically make them a troll, even if they’re saying so on a year-old post.
@TheIcthala I did not know they were new and really thought they were trolling. I can not judge whether someone is new here regardless of my thoughts on them or not. I just think I was overreacting. Really well that would explain why there are reacting to a post that is well over a year old at this point and it would still be necroposting on the portion of the thread just not the entire portion of the thread.
Plus the ad Hominem did not help my first reactions and really did piss me off. I think that is why I overreacted the Way I did. But I think they have their rights on their opinions and I just so happen to be the reverse of them and feel an extremely strong point of view and I should have acted in another way.
Pls people, enough arguing. Go do that on Twitter or Facebook. Not here, regardless of opinions or who makes what, it takes time and effort to make these 3-Dimensional models, pls respect that. Thank you.
I respectfully disagree with the characterisation of the Resurgent as absolutely trash. I consider it to be an attempt at something new and interesting which didn’t quite work as well as the team had hoped.
Heck, at least it’s not the lazy-ass Xyston, or the virtually point-defenceless siege pizza.
Also, the ad-hominem fallacy doesn’t tend to help arguments here. We dislike Disney because of what they’ve done, we don’t dislike their work because they did it.
That is an extremely mature point of view and ligament viewpoint that I have. It’s new and interesting for sure and Disney’s TIE variants are really nice and do fit into star wars lore. It’s their piss ass storytelling plot and character development and arc their identity politics their attacking and stealing from their fan. Them spending fake news. About Raylo The Last Jedi and their defenders are what pisses us off.
“stealing from their fan.”
In all fairness, and this is NOT meant to be a defense, condoning, or any positive view of Disney’s mishandling of the franchise, stealing from fans also occurred under LucasArts LONG before the Disney sale. Let’s not forget that Force Unleashed’s debut trailer literally stole FractalSponge’s Death Head Star Destroyer.
In any case, I might keep the broad strokes of the Resurgent-class, but give it somewhat different details (no Kyber crystals, for starters, and I’d probably have it as well as the First Order as a whole (Final Order as well) be depicted differently in my fanfic/AU since the Empire would still be around). I’ll probably also keep the Xyston, but with a radically different role that actually has their ISD-cloned nature actually WORK (namely, they’d deliberately be modeled after ISDs as a way for the First Order to approach an Imperial fleet, briefly unveil their guns to shoot at ISDs, and then trigger a shooting war among the Imperial Fleet. Yeah, let’s just say the First Order and the Empire will NOT be allies in this fanfic of mine).
mandator 4 does not even look like a mandatory line at all. They should make Xyston 2 a story about the Rebels stealing the death star two plans with fractal sponges artwork and it would make money. I am assuming he downvoted the comment because he disagreed with it. Which is fine but I think he just wants a safe space and that might turn really toxic. Nor is Nceoposting mature and it is trolling in general regardless. I think he disliked that part for some reason. He should spell his username better. opt to pick a new one in the first place.
I know I am a year late and a dollar short but to be fair the Resurgent is the most unbalanced ship ever created to the extent not even the hardcore fans believe it’s utter garbage stats.
But it’s beautiful and an attempt at something new and intriguing and I cannot argue facts
But what we should be hating on in all actuality is the Mandatory IV…
It’s Overpowered with force-based weapons it’s way too powerful
Noah, anything from Disney is inferior to the EU.
The Allegiance is a far more “realistic” (believable) ship than the resurgent class, simply because the resurgent class has three THOUSAND turbo lasers and ion cannons, which is more (numerically) than a flipping SSD. The Allegiance, however, is designed by someone with a sense of respect for legends and EU material sources and limitations, meaning it is not just made to make the bad guys look invincible and not just a worthless knock-off of the Chad Galactic Empire.
This is only my opinion, and it doesn’t take into account things like power-generation and other necessary ship functions in-universe, so don’t expect anything on the level of an article fit for the journal, Science. Also, my argument is not against Ansel, who I believe is an absolute phenom when it comes to designing ships using SW design philosophies. It’s against SW starship design philosophy overall from an IN-UNIVERSE perspective.
TL;DR: I actually personally believe the Resurgent is MORE believable than the ISD itself, and by extension the Executor and Allegiance. Also, Executor has 2k turbos, 2k heavy turbos, and 250 ions. 4250 > 3000. It’s not MORE than an Executor, but I get your frustration with how similar the numbers are.
From an in-universe perspective, it’s a big leap from the norms of ship armament, so I agree with you there that it’s kind of unbelievable that a ship around 5 times the surface area of the ISD can have over 25 times the firepower in numbers alone. But that’s only using the ISD as a reference, and my argument is that the ISD itself is an extremely unreliable as a reference in terms of believability.
I love star destroyers, but I always felt the utilization of space was really bad. I just feel that a ship that is almost six times as long and five times as tall as an Iowa Class, and almost 15.5 times as wide as a Yamato-class, should have far more than just 60 turbolaser batteries.
Assuming all batteries are 50x50x50m, (the whole thing, not just the turret cap) which is around the size of a Quad Heavy Turbolaser Battery, and a bit smaller than an octuple barbette, they should be able to fit far more than just 60 on a ship that’s around 600 times the size of a Yamato. 60 is the TOTAL number of Turbolaser emplacements, not just the heavy ones, so there are far less than 60 of those quad heavies, and in the case of the octuple barbettes, a measly 8.
The ISD has around 75 times the dorsal deck space (the ISD is a triangle, so half the area of the dimensions, but also since a battleship is somewhat of a rounded diamond, I brought that ratio to somewhere between 1/2 (triangle vs rectangle) and pi/4 (ellipse vs rectangle)).
This does not include the ventral deck space that understandably goes unused in maritime vessels, but is entirely free real estate for space vessels. So at around 150 times the deck space, I would hope that they have around 50 times the number of primary weapons. There’s just so much empty space on the hull of she ship that just isn’t used. I say 50x rather than directly translating the 150x because the Quad Heavies take up around three times the deck space of a Mark 7 or Type 94.
Considering the three primary weapons on Iowa and Yamato class battleships, and the numerous emplacements of secondary and tertiary weaponry found on those ships, I would hope to see at least 150 HEAVY turbolaser batteries. Given how much space is taken up by the main guns of WWII battleships, the 60 Ion cannons, hell maybe even 150, can probably still fit.
I only talked about the main guns of the battleships I used for reference, so at 50 times the number of the heaviest armament I believe should also translate to secondaries and tertiaries. The ISD has a pitiful amount of point-defense weaponry, and the intermediate weaponry is put in the same blanket category of “turbolaser” as the main guns, so that number 60 makes me flaccid thinking about just what fraction of it are main guns, secondaries, or just puny single-barreled emplacements. There should not only be far more than 60 guns overall, and even far more than 60 MAIN guns, there should be at least order of magnitude more secondaries, tertiaries, and point defenses. 60 is a tragic misuse of space, and is a miserable miscarriage of justice for the ISD.
At almost twelve times the length, and what I can only assume also the width of an ISD, the Executor is also flawed in this regard. The big exposed cityscape superstructure that lets starfighters close in on it so easily aside, the number of guns is also a painfully low.
2000 turbos and 2000 heavy turbos sounds like an impressive amount at first, but at around 140 times the deck space of the ISD, 4000 emplacements is far less than half the number it should, even when scaled up using the already pitiful 60 number. If it scaled up directly with the numbers I believe are more appropriate, it should be almost 15000 quad heavy turbolaser batteries, and even more than that number of regular turbolasers, not an egregious 2000 each. This also extends to the fact that it only has 250 ion cannons, making up around only 10% of the armament rather than the 50% on the ISD, and the unacceptably sparse 500 point-defense cannons.
Now, speaking about the Resurgent, at around 5 times the deck space of an ISD, It should have around 750 main guns. There’s a lot of room for interpretation based on the cross-section book saying there are 3000 turbolasers and ion cannons, and Wookiepedia saying 1500 Turbos, Ions, and Point Defenses. If the ISD had the numbers I proposed, 150 turbos and 150 ions, this pretty much immediately saturates the number given by Wookiepedia, not even counting the point defense weapons it included in its number, and in my opinion, point defense should be at least a third of the total armament in a universe where starfighters are so dangerous. This would mean that 1500 is actually a pretty conservative number. I would hope that with 750 main guns and 750 ion cannons, there’d be more than 1500 point defense cannons.
The cross-section number does not include PD, so 3000 is just counting turbos and ions. This is huge at first, but I feel it is actually possible given the 30 years of technological development in power generation and for how much space each emplacement needs on the hull in order to produce the same power output.
In conclusion, while the number given by the cross-section is a bit of a stretch, it’s actually pretty possible in my opinion. At the least, the Wookiepedia number is actually pretty restrained, and the density of weaponry is in not even too high when using the 60-turbolaser number on the ISD as reference.
Respectfully, I disagree. While you make a fair point that the available space is significantly greater, the amount of usable space is far less. Many places that would be perfect for weapons emplacements can’t take advantage because of the internal geometry of the ship. A vessel in space, regardless of its purpose, is a self contained city.
You have to store food, water, fuel, reserve air, supplies, and house everyone. Not to mention the engines, and reactor which take up like a quarter of the ship alone. The barracks and training areas, commons, mess halls, etc. take up another quarter at least. Storage is about the same, and then you have all of the workstations, hangers, and sensor suites which you can’t place weapons emplacement next to because of extremely sensitive components.
While a Resurgent-class Battlewhatever can certainly field more emplacement than a smaller vessel, it would make more sense to up the size and power of each emplacement than to keep adding more. A thousand paper cuts are still just paper cuts; annoying in number and lack thereof, but not much more than that.
So continuing on from my post about making the multi-role variant of the Allegiance here my ideas of that variant which could be called Castigator.
1. Change all quad 175 teratons heavy turbolasers (Both turret and ball) and single ball 720 teratons heavy turbolasers into quad 70 teratons heavy turbolasers. (Although for the quad flanks turrets it would be that or Octuple 40 teratons)
Keep the heavy ion cannons the same though.
2. Add the hanger bay similar to the Imperator’s bay but longer, a bit wider and a bit deeper.
The sides will be one medium fighter bay each which let the ship carry 2 wings of fighters. (Probably angled upwards by 15° instead of straight.)
The front will have 1-2 shuttle bays that carry Lamba/escort shuttles and the back will be vehicles and dropships. (Would be big enough to carry a few A6 Juggernauts/SPHAs.)
3. Reduce the reactor by half so it will be 3e25W. (3 ISD equivalent)
Any thoughts about this?
I could halfway see switching to more rapid-firing main guns if engaging multiple capital targets at once became a priority, but the tradeoff to restore small-craft & ground vehicle capacity seems redundant unless (a) Allegiances are the heaviest asset a given naval faction/sector group/whatever fields and (b) you have at least a handful to spare.
Well the main role of the Allegiance is well as Fractal said a fleet combatant so this variant will not do great at it.
So I think this variant’s main role will be a flagship for a small destroyer squadron (like around 3-5 ships) that don’t need a light cruiser a.k.a the Urbanus.
If anyone ask yes I am aware of the Secutor having that role as well, but I can see some commodores using this ship over the Secutor if the enemy ship squadron they facing don’t require so many fighters to destroy them, need some heavier weaponry to destroy ships that are tough but not too tough to the point of needing to use capital weaponry. (like the 720 teratons cannons) and/or Want to use this ship so that it can tank a bit better than the Secutor. (Because I think the Secutor due to being a carrier hybrid ship would be a glass cannon.)
As for ground vehicles Fractal did say that the ISD cannot reliably carry A6 Juggernauts/SPAHs because if it did then the ISD would also need dropships to carry them so there will not be any room for them.
The Secutor does also carry A6 Juggernauts/SPAHs, in fact it carry twice as much, but like I said the Secutor is a carrier hybrid ship so it is a bit more frail than this variant.
I hope this helps you to understand of making this variant Gorkmalork.
New change for the variant:
I’m now thinking of changing the axial single ball 720 teratons heavy turbolasers into quad ball 175 teratons heavy turbolasers just to give it more punch.
The only gaming stats I ever saw for the Allegiance made it multi-purpose (essentially an up-sized Imperator), so your description fits with the way I always pictured the Allegiance to be up until I saw the Fractal version.
That being said, I’ve somewhat warmed to the idea of the Allegiance as a “battleship” counterpart to the Secutor’s “carrier” so I could go either way. I’m interested to see where this goes, as my own conception of the SWU has long been toward big multi-purpose platforms once a certain size is reached.
I’d agree that everything can be multi-purpose to a certain past a certain size, but not by intent. After a threshhold a ship is big enough that it can carry huge complements of troops and small craft almost by accident. But proportionately, they carry nothing like what a specialized carrier can do. Conversely, a carrier big enough will almost generate enough power to energize a large weapons battery, even if ship-to-ship combat is not its specialization. If a ship carries a thousand fighters, but it’s hangar volume is proportionately 100x than a same-size carrier’s, is it still a carrier? Such things fuel endless (largely awful) online debates about scifi warship roles. Since you like Soviet analogues, what is a Kiev? Just a carrier, or an actual TAKR, as in a cruiser that just happens to carry aircraft?
My concept for the Allegiance comes from the initial observations of the comic illustrations, which have no serious hangar bays whatsoever (sort of like the Tector). That and the huge reactor tended towards making the design a specialized ship killer. In a fleet scenario, that’s fine, because as you said there are other ships like Secutors, or full-on fleet carriers, to carry fighters.
My initial impression of the source illustrations was that the Dark Horse artwork was as cheese-ridden as their plot lines, and just assumed that the absence of visible hangars was an oversight or laziness on the part of artists whose attention to detail w/r/t canon ships wasn’t exactly spot-on. The only fan-made attempt of stats for the Allegiance (that I’ve seen, at any rate) assumed the Allegiance was 3,200 meters long, that the escorting ships were standard Imperials, and that both ships had launch bays which had been accidentally omitted by whoever drew up the panel for Dark Horse. It wasn’t until I saw your version that I even considered alternate possibilities.
I should clarify that I’m not a fan of Soviet analogues in general, just the ones that happen to fit well in-universe. I’m a fan of the Soviet Army model because of the authoritarian government that spawned it and its use of overwhelming numbers, which IMO is a good fit for the Empire. The Soviet Navy, on the other hand, is not a good match, as it was intended to operate on a sea-denial model in opposition to the superiority / control model of the US Navy.
There is no decent real-world equivalent to how I view an ISD, but the Kiev comes the closest (although if we’re sticking to the Soviet model, it would need to be mashed up with their Ivan Rogov-Class Large Landing Ship). In an SWU where the nearest available reinforcements are days or weeks away, the workhorse of the Imperial Navy out in the fringe areas where navigation is less certain will need to be able to deal with the widest possible variety of threats, whether ship-to-ship, space superiority with fighter craft or engaging in troop deployments. The carrier battle group of the US Navy of the ’80’s is probably the closest mission analogue, but with an aircraft carrier, a battleship and an amphibious ready group all crammed into the same hull.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that my view of the SWU is shaped largely by the WEG game, and that, of the published “official” stats, every Star Destroyer ISD-sized and above is multi-purpose (in that it is a combination of big guns, starfighters and troop capacity). My view for the longest time was that the larger ships which never received WEG stats (such as the Allegiance) were simply ISDs writ large, serving as taskforce or sector fleet flagships with a single large vessel accompanied by several “standard” ISDs. Most fan attempts to make stats for new Star Destroyers have followed this pattern.
As I said above, though, I’m gradually coming around to your version, although possibly not in all particulars.
The comic depiction was fairly crisp actually, in terms of the profile allowing for a size scaling to ~2-2.5km. The first proper fan depiction of Allegiance was from the Warlords mod for Homeworld 2, which set it up as 2.2km without a real hangar. The escorting ships in the Mon Calamari shot were clearly not ISDs either, given the proportions and profile. Obviously, out of universe, I think you’re right – the artist was not likely doing all this intentionally. There’s some personal extrapolation involved, and I certainly have made my own changes, but it’s a bit more parsimonious to the source than 3.2km and assuming a big hangar.
I had meant the Kiev example to sort of rib you :). I find the ISD classification argument incredibly tiresome. But, I do stand by my earlier statement – ships of a certain size are multirole almost by default. Fighters and troops take up so little space relative to multi-kilometer ships that if they have any sort of hangar complex, they could conceivably carry ISD-level complements of small craft and ground forces easily. But the degree to which they do this vary dramatically compared to actual multirole ships, or to specialized carriers of small craft and troops. Even at the destroyer level, there are clearly ships that dedicate far more and far less of their volume to carrying troops (in film terms alone, Venator >>> ISD >>>>> Tector), and that makes me pretty hostile to the idea often floated that “Star Destroyer” is some special marker that automatically connotes multi-role lack of specialization rather than just a broad size category. Allegiance is big enough that you could easily fit an ISD’s worth of fighters crammed in with minimal support facilities. I don’t think it does this, but the hull could easily carry them (especially if you blister out the hangar area a little, assuming as I do that the interior is pretty tightly packed with other equipment).
I wouldn’t classify “destroyer” so much as a lack of specialization, but more the combination of different capacities into a single hull, such that some can have greater or lesser relative emphasis while still being considered “in-class.” The three basic criteria would be 1) big gun armament, with appreciable secondary and defensive armament, 2) starfighter complement in sufficient numbers to perform system superiority missions (enough fighters to perform an effective strike against a planetary or space-borne target, not merely provide air defense for the ship itself) and 3) sufficient troop transport capacity to deploy a minimum of 1 battalion of combined arms troops to a planet’s surface (as opposed to light infantry with crew-served weapons and maybe some light vehicle support). A secondary criteria would be sufficient endurance for extended deployment away from support and logistics if needed. Under that definition, a Venator and an Imperator would both still be Star Destroyers despite the fact that one placed much more emphasis on #2, while the other shifted focus more to #1 and #3.
So how does your classification deal with Allegiance and Tector? They fulfill #1 handily, but miserably fail at #2 and #3. Tector is supposedly a direct modification on an ISD frame, so would you really say it’s not a destroyer? What counts as a suitable superiority mission for fighters? Fighters in numbers to threaten a peer size/powered ship? I think the cutoffs are too vague and don’t actually incorporate the use of the ship, and so does actually enshrine a lack of specialization.
I’d propose a classification by power/volume (correlated) and by role (which is a doctrinal and thus malleable thing) together rather than any arbitrary cutoffs for what is essentially cargo carriage. The basic roles are 1) combat against ships/stations/planetary targets as a primary role (whether attack in the battleline or independently) regardless of carriage of anything else, which are extras, 2) primary fighter operations ships (where the ship’s weapons, no matter how big, are doctrinally used for self defense and the ship is primarily designed around deploying and supporting its fighters), and 3) similarly for ships where surface force transport and landing are primary concerns. Everything else is some flavor of auxiliary.
The combat ship classifications like Dreadnought, Battleship, Battlecruiser, Cruiser, Destroyer, etc. are by power/size, to deal with the fact that any ship can be anything relative to a small enough other ship so a single classification group like “Star Destroyer” becomes meaningless across 5 orders of magnitude…
My personal headcanon is based more on mission than power/size, with the three “pure” ship types being:
-Dreadnought: Pure big gun combatant with little or no starfighter capacity (defensive only) and light troops (naval infantry with crew-served heavy weapons and some light vehicle support).
-Fleet Carrier: Pure starfighter carrier with defensive armament and light troops only.
-Assault Carrier: Pure troop transport, but designed for rapid-reaction spearhead units rather than heavy armor ala the Consolidator.
The next step is the combo units, combining two elements at the expense of the third:
-Star Cruiser: Space superiority platform combining Dreadnought and Fleet Carrier, but light troops only.
-Star Monitor: Big gun ship combined with an assault carrier’s troop capacity, able to provide its carried assault troops with organic fire support (I picture the Victory I as this).
-Star Carrier: Combined fleet & assault carriers, with starfighter and troop capacity combined at the expense of heavy weaponry.
Finally, the Star Destroyer is the most balanced, incorporating all three, although some variation within type remains.
From there, anything with a Super designator would be something significantly larger than the standard model, although as you mentioned, Super Star Anything-Other-Than-Destroyer becomes exceedingly rare simply dint of sheer size allowing the ship to meet the required criteria. Something like the Allegiance or Tector would be considered a Star Dreadnought. I wrote up the Tector as a bombard platform, with the launch and hangar bays being deleted in favor of armored magazines and launchers for a variety of different specialized anti-surface warheads, so it would very nearly qualify as a Star Monitor, but it lacks the troop capacity.
That’s…really different from anything out there, but it is internally consistent. Just don’t expect me to be using it :).
It’s all good. Honestly, I’d be shocked if you did.
Did you ACTUALLY write for WEG at some point?
I’d like to think that, if I had, WEG’s SWU would’ve been much more internally consistent. I was actually in high school when WEG first published their Star Wars RPG, but I’ve always loved the system. Unfortunately, when you’re passionate about something, you get close enough to see all of its faults in extreme detail, too…
That was the longest, most nerdy, Star Wars conversation I’ve ever seen . . .
And I LOVE IT.
LOL! You must be new here; this is barely more than a brief chat by the standards of some that happen here.
Yeah. No one even mentioned gravity well generators/projectors…
When you get down to it, a gravity well projector is basically a big gun that prevents anything it hits from jumping into hyperspace. For the purposes of my headcanon, I’d fold it into the Dreadnought category.
That doesn’t relate. AT. ALL. to Soviet air superiority doctrine over Eastern Europe in the fall of 1982!!
If you’re replying to me (the formating makes it difficult to tell), I wasn’t talking about AIR superiority doctrine; I was talking about Soviet NAVAL doctrine in the North Atlantic. That’s not the same thing.
I’m just messing.
Fair enough.
Oh my sweet summer child.
I wonder what the record holder for most convoluted nonsense on this board is? High Seas Fleet debate from last year maybe?
That’s definitely up there.
I suppose it depends how we define convoluted nonsense. If, for instance, it can still be about SW ship design but strays off topic from the ship on the page, I’d nominate the extended resistance bomber debate from last year.
I vote Lucas-intentions/Soviet/American ideological tangent on the surface forces order of battle post.
Seconded on the Order of Battle tangent, although seeing as I was one of the major players, I’m not sure my vote counts…
Use of Gravity Wells
That one wasn’t /that/ off topic. The ship in question was at least equipped with a gravity well projector.
Well, unless he’s thinking of the thread on the Modified Imperial Customs Corvette page involving the potential use of mission-specific modular components…
I thought that one was on one of the Bellator WIP pages, where Fractal confirmed that the Bellator had at least one gravity well projector.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apparently it was both…
Yes this one I was thinking of
I am new here, and now I’m so confused . . .
Idealogical tangents?
Soviet naval doctrines?
High seas fleet debates?
I think I’ll stay a spectator, because I’m not well versed enough in these kinds of things to add much to the conversation,
NVM, just read the order of battle tangent . . .
Just chime in when & if you find the energy. Force knows there are depths here where all I can do is *try* to absorb things.
Good to know!
Thirded, and I never commented on that one.
So Fractal looking at the underneath of the Allegiance’s bridge why didn’t it have complex greebles like the Imperator and the Bellator?
Like these for example:
Imperator: https://fractalsponge.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/isd2_16.jpg
Bellator: https://fractalsponge.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/bellator4.jpg
Quick question…Is it ok to make a print out and frame one of your awesome renders for person viewing? I recently saw someone use it in a Youtube video and was wondering if I would need permission to have someone print one for me or if it is strictly off limits. I respect your work too much to just take it and if it was allowed I would like permission 🙂 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCCvUB5n74 @ 13min if interested).
For personal use at home? No problem. Thanks for checking.
How would this stack up against the Resurgent?
All kyber crystal shenanigans aside, I think that this would win – it’s a lot bulkier. And the ICS for the Resurgent doesn’t do it any good – the reactor in that image is tiny…
Which makes you wonder – how do ‘compact hypermatter reactors’ stack up against normal hypermatter reactors in output to volume ratio? It can’t be that much better or all warships would have compact reactors.
I suspect that ‘compact hypermatter reactors’ were developed by the First Order/Kuat Entralla Engineering and their technology is a jealously guarded secret. I have nothing to base this on, but if it’s true, it would explain why no one else uses them. I don’t have the ICS with me, so I can’t check anything tight now.
Regarding Resurgent vs Allegiance, I guess it depends on how well the reactors match up.
If the Finalizer is about twice the size for easy scale it should be 64 times heavier and the cube of that more power generation. The fuel is likely far denser on the scale of at least a preon star. Likely hundreds of quintillions times denser than water or something like that. Preon stars are hundreds of millions of times denser than neutron stars anyway so something at least that dense. And has 2 secondary reactors.
How long did this take, and in what software did you model this? I’d be interested in knowing.
Fractal uses 3DS max. for how long it took, I really don’t know.
Ok Fractal since you may didn’t saw the question that I have posted i’l ask again.
What the polygon count for the new Allegiance?
I would love it if you had a shot from the bridge viewport area , just so we could see what it would be a little like commanding this ship…
Just a thought.
@Jonathan C
41 dual defense turrets pointing aft
53 dual defense turrets each, pointing left and right
17 dual defense turrets pointing forward
6 quad turrets ventral
16 quad turrets each, pointing left and right
3 quad turrets pointing forward
12 quad turrets pointing aft
9 ball turrets total (ion guns?)
6 Heavy quad guns each, pointing left and right
seems like the total armament for this ship!/?
That 14th shot is so epic!
Oh man what a beautiful ship…
‘Lets shoe horn a star cruiser into as small a hull as possible’, the ship. Beyond the lack of flexibility, I imagine that it has well above average maintenance and logistical requirements for something its volume. If you have a fleet large enough to justify a relative specialist like this, it can work well, but only if you have an actual need for it.
Generally, the Empire needed coverage above all else, which its obsession with big ships didn’t help with. Rather than the ISDs, a far lesser number of Allegiances supported by a far larger fleet of sub-capitals would have been far more effective. However, this runs into the problem that the Empire’s leadership (ie Palpy) didn’t exactly care about effectiveness, only about how much it stoked his dark side boner, so the whole thing was basically doomed from the start.
Believe it or not, the Allegiance-Class needed support of fighters. They would rip and tear through anything larger than a corvette. It operated basically as a cheaper Bellator SSD in hunting down ships and blowing them to smithereens.
I personally think this is what the First Order destroyer should have been. Not a completely new design, but late-generation Imperial warships that eluded the New Republic following the battle of Endor. It would have made much more sense for the First Order to build its fleet from the Imperial Remnant, and perhaps we could have then seen the Bellator and Assertor on screen.
I mean, we get enough (justified, in my opinion) complaints about First Order assets resembling Imperial gear too much and if this showed up on the big screen, I’ll rant even harder. However, I love this design and I wouldn’t mind seeing it from an expanded universe source, though.
Really, that was a major strand of criticism? I’m firmly in the camp that there should’ve been closer visual design with Imperial ships. I think where they went that route (Supremacy and Resurgent) the results looked good, great even, but when they tried something new (the doompizza) the design looked like shit, however good the technical execution of the models were (and they were very pretty at a detail level).
I think one of the biggest lines of criticism what that the First Order TIEs looked virtually indistinguishable from Imperial TIEs with white trim, especially when the Empire was already in the process of upgrading to Interceptors at Endor. There was some slick concept art for TFA with what looked to be a TIE Hunter inspired FO fighter, but instead we got a reskinned TIE/ln.
That’s actually just Merchandizing 101.
I mean, I have now seen both sides of the argument and I was originally expecting them to further develop the design into something that have virtues in their own right, such as the in-lore design development that went from Venator-class to Imperial-class in about a decade, so I want to scrutinize the design team for only adding another terrace while squatting the bridge as the only noticeable defining features from Imperial to Resurgent class in 20+years. Now, I’ve heard people defending it, saying it makes sense from the ideological and training perspective, but visually, I kinda wish they did more…heck, maybe something like the Pellaeon-class, for an example. And as Diab mentioned, reeling back to TIE/ln in inverted colors and command version with antenna and nigh-useless ventral turret is pretty uncreative. That said, I’m with you on loving the Supremacy and disliking the Doompizza. (And Resurgent did steal my breath away when I saw it in 3D, it’s just afterwards when I look at various images that I find it too ISD)
I like the Resurgent in general, apart from the weird skeletal negative space at the prow that doesn’t really make any sense to me. Also bridge asymmetry was a little bit odd, not bad necessarily, but not enough impact – too odd but in a subtle way. But the way they blended the terraces and the overall profile I do actually like.
I’ll agree with you there. I personally love the Resurgent-Class destroyers. There’s a number of other FO capital ships that have showed up in the comics that I hope to see in more detail on the screen someday… or here…
Fair enough, and from a design standpoint, it isn’t bad really; it’s just that it doesn’t have it’s own…feel, and more like it’s hitchhiking on the Imperial designs a bit much (which is, again, justified in some view points) which (outside of lore) is fine if it isn’t a high canon source with people putting large sums of money into designing.
The bridge sensors communications reactor dome and engines need to put inside the starship. Capital grade missile launchers would be really nice a double superstructure design with a spinal ridge would be nice for the large weapons batteries. Killing that open superstructure and flight deck would be really nice. No troops or ground vehicles and drone starfighters. pure combat Really massive long-range weapons emplacements. a Bit bigger like at least 600-800 meters longer with an armored engine nacelle like the Bellator. And other design changes would be nices looks a little to imperial for me much superior to the stupid has hell Xytson class whatever
Supremacy looks nothing like any dreadnought in star wars history it is only 13.3 kilometers shorter the assertor 15 and Sovereign and Eclipses 35-40 Kilometers. The executor was 8 kilometers not is 19 kilometers. Both of those ships were listed has 15 and 17.5 Kilometers long. The viscount also needs to be 35-40 kilometers to fit the eclipse scale it is the same length after all.
Well those massive autocannons would have done the first order well at the residence base with the need for a superlaser siege cannon
Except Disney blatantly rejected anything of the Expanded Universe with common sense out the waste-chute of their dumb-ass corporate empire. They refused to look at what could have been salvaged and made up their usual mickey mouse crap.
Can’t wait for some committed soul to count all the guns on this one. (particularly the medium quads and pd combos)
There are at least 20.
I’d say more than four *nods*
I mean, if we want to be accurate, greater than or equal to 1 is the number you want.
For once, I will save you guys some trouble. I count 58 quad MTL, 234 point defense mounts.
234 point-defense seems considerably less than what goes through my head for a ship nearly twice the size of ISD for some reason…
~2.5 times ISD volume. Don’t know how that translates to surface but his ISD redux has 83 point-defense turrets. So it seems considerably more.
Don’t forget that larger MTL and even HTL batteries can engage fighters with those flak bursts we always see, even if their efficacy at hitting named characters is in the toilet.
I always thought the flak bursts were from the laser bolts impacting their shields without punching through.
Or energy blasts impacting with debris.
I’m not sure what one might expect necessarily. If it weren’t for me, there wouldn’t be any visible Imperial point defense at all :p
For some very vague numbers, a 3km+ lucrehulk with much higher surface area had fewer point defense mounts (about 200 light quad laser batteries between the ring and the core ship). It’s also equivalent in mounting positions to 9 Venators (I assume 26 twins based on the cross sections), and it’s got on the order of 8x the surface area of that ship. 234 point defense mounts is also the equivalent of 12 Lancers.
Speaking of Cross-Sections, do you have any plans on making some on here for your more custom designs?
Well we would expect the Lucrehulk as a converted freighter rather than a dedicated warship to be proportionally under-armed and poorly optimized for combat. Besides, an Allegiance without a fighter complement is far more vulnerable to fighter attack and thus reliant on PD than a Lucrehulk with ten thousand vultures.
First of all, there’s purely geometric and aesthetic concerns – there’s only so much space and mounting as many light guns as the chassis allows will not end well – you could hypothetically power millions of kiloton-scale light lasers on a star destroyer-sized and -powered ship.
More in universe, if you don’t like the Lucrehulk, look at the Venator. Or on smaller antifighter escorts. It boils down to “what do you actually think the appropriate PD complement for a given warship by size is?” Lucrehulks, Venators, Acclamators and Lancers provide the best quantitative baseline I can think of, role differences or not. If you have something better, go for it.
In case it’s not obvious: this is not an argument I am interested in having. If you really do want to discuss more, bring data.
That’s true Fractal but it was only the pre-war variant that had only 42 quad turbolasers.
The actual war lucrehulk had about 700-800 weapons on it.
So a ship with >>2x the surface area has…about 2x the number of PD gun barrels?
Would we ever see you mount a missile-based PD system, like SeaRAM, or just pure gun fits?
I wanted to say that the Star Wars aesthetic is supposed to be WW2 in Space, not Cold War gone Hot in Space, but then I remembered that the Unrotated Projectile and the Henschel Hs 297 Föhn were a thing. Carry on.
Sir, do you have any plans or are you working on the executor? I like this ship very much
this is truly amazing, love it
whilst I know the Alliegiance class is a real thing in canon, this is my headcanon take on Fractal’s version.
Thoughts and comments are most welcome!
Allegiance class Battlecruiser
The so called ‘Heavy Star Destroyer Project’ came about due to a doctrinal holdover from the Clone Wars. In the Clone Wars the Republic navy used the Venator class as its general purpose craft and deployed the Victory class Star Destroyer as a pure anti-ship vessel. The Victory’s greater firepower and durability let it outlast and outgun CIS Warships, even larger ships like the Lucrehulk and Providence class ships were outgunned by a Victory and would be protected from other ships fighters by the Venator’s fighter complements.
The preliminary stages of the Imperial II refit called for the class to feature more powerful anti-ship weapons at the expense of its point defence battery but the loss of three Imperial class ships to Rebel fighters in a short space of time indicated that this was folly. This meant that plans also for the ‘Tector’ variant of the Imperator were also shelved and instead the Imperator II refit would focus on improving the ships anti-fighter defence as well as increasing the arcs of fire for the heavy turbolasers and other weapons as well as reinforcing the hull plating.
Still this left some Admirals, mostly those of the ‘big gun’ school of thought that the fleet could well be undergunned against certain opponents. And, whilst the Imperial I was good, and the Flight II refit was better, they wanted something more.
Following the destruction of the Death Star and the massed relocation of funding away from super-weapons and towards the fleet with the NEP (Naval Expansion Program) which saw the authorization of the Imperial II design for mass production as well as the Bellator class Super Star Destroyer and a host of smaller craft to diversify the fleet the ‘Black Shoes’ felt it was the right time to push for their own project.
Backroom discussions with various executives at KDY were fruitful, mainly through many of the Admirals who were of the ‘Black Shoes’ ideology having deep political connections and deeper pockets. And the temptation of more orders for KDY was just too much to ignore, especially with funding for the navy being at an all time high.
KDY began looking at a heavy gun version of the Imperial class but developments based on the Imperial II refit showed that more powerful weapons would need to be carried to make any new development actually worthwhile. Instead of the newer Octuple mounts a heavy quadruple mount was developed that would force a greater amount of energy into the bolts, despite having less guns the new weapon would hit far harder than even the octuple mounts on Star Destroyers. But these weapons required huge mountings and housings and could not be installed on the standard Imperial frame.
This was the beginning of what would become the Allegiance class, whilst the heavy quad turbolaser was mounted on ships like the Bellator and Executor classes, KDY was looking at a smaller frame to carry the weapons and it was this design the Admiralty pushed for.
The initial design was 2.2km long, 600 metes longer than an Imperial class and would feature 12 of the mountings for the heavy quad turbolaser. The broadside arcs were also covered by three massive mountings for triple heavy turbolasers in ball turret mountings, and taking notes Procursator design that was starting to enter service, the ship also featured 3 heavy ion cannons on her dorsal hull moving up the superstructure. Two octuple heavy turbo lasers were also mounted on the ships belly whilst the hull, trenches and superstructure were liberally covered with anti-fighter weapons, ranging from single heavy blasters, quad laser mounts, dual laser mounts and dual light turbolasers, augmenting the firepower of the Imperial II refit and having considerably more point defence than any Imperial ship designed at the time.
Indeed, the Bellator design would be altered to include more point defences based on the still unnamed ‘heavy Star Destroyer’.
Unfortunately though the power requirements for the new weapons, especially the heavy quad turbolasers and ion cannons consumed a huge amount of power, needing a larger hypermatter reactor and the considerable increase in crew for the point defence battery also ate into available hull space. The re-routing of power conduits and systems as well as larger data centres for the fire control systems which linked the point defence battery together also required more crew and more power and despite the great size of the ship the KDY designers were running out of space and something had to go.
Rationing that the new design would be accompanied by Imperial I and II class ships and other escorts, it was instead decided to sacrifice the ships fighter capacity, reduced to a mere 24 craft which were almost always TIE Interceptors and who’s sole duty was point defence and fighter interception roles.
Whilst the new design could house 3,600 Stormtroopers aboard these were mostly for anti-boarding duties and shipboard defence and room for things like AT-AT’s or AT-STs was very limited with none carried although the ship could dock pre-loaded Theta class landing barges its hangar bay was still limited with the capacity for a maximum of 36 shuttles or landing craft at the very most.
This rather tiny hangar also eliminated what some designers and Admirals saw as a flaw with the Imperial design, its large, open hangar was quite vulnerable to attack once the ships shields were down. The new ‘Heavy Star Destroyer’ eliminated this potential weakness and her hull was also heavily reinforced and the armour considerably thickened around vital areas like the bridge tower and reactor dome.
The lack of a heavy fighter complement wasn’t seen as a bad thing as it was intended that these larger vessels would be the ‘big stick’ of a battle line and could rely on friendly fighters and their own huge point defence battery to ward off any fighter attack or destroy any incoming ordinance. Its heavy guns would allow it to destroy a hostile capital ship or group of capital ships in short order and simulations against a Venator and Lucrehulk class showed that the new ships heavy firepower would allow it to easily destroy a target before they even got their fighters fully launched, and there would not be enough to overwhelm the point defences.
What followed was months of doctrinal and political wrangling within the halls of the Imperial Admiralty when the design was presented, with various committees approving and then cancelling the construction of the class. But, with growing numbers of Mon Calamari ships coming into Rebel service and the path to Dac heavily fortified, it was felt that these large ships as well as other elements of the Imperial fleet like the Bellator class and the Imperial II refit would be more than enough to batter through the defences of the Mon Cal system and destroy the Rebels primary shipyards.
Finally designated the Allegiance class, six were authorised and laid down at Kuat with other yards at Fondor also beginning construction of the class.
The final hurdle for the class was their designation, whilst Heavy Star Destroyer did match their capabilities, it just didn’t sound ‘right’ to the ear of the Admirals on the naming board. Instead the ancient term of ‘Battlecruiser’ was resurrected. They were too small to be true dreadnoughts and instead the Battlecruiser designation was a more suitable middleground.
Excellent headcanon! I just thought that perhaps instead of dating the origin back to the days of the Clone Wars, perhaps the origin should have its roots in the Tarkin Doctrine? After all inciting fear and the concept of capital ship superiority is a result of such ideology.
Oooh I like that idea Phantom 😀
Ahh very nice. I thought I remembered the three center ball cannons mentioned as superheavy 600-700 TT turbolasers though. If that is the case, than the 4 (2 on each side) ball mounts perhaps have triple ions in them, with the center side ball mounts having quad 150-250 TT turbos in them.
Because of the difference in naming conventions, I would think an Allegiance would be a Rendili project. All of the KDY ships are agent nouns (as in, an entity that performs an action) – Imperator, Venator, Acclamator, Tector, Executor, etc. – whereas Victory and Allegiance are both abstract nouns (as in, referring to an idea, quality or condition).
So we’re just discounting the Eclipse, Nebulon-B, Vigil, Star Galleon, Pelta, Ton-Falk, Arquitens, Broadside, Vengeance, and whatever the Arc Hammer was? KDY makes plenty of ships that don’t follow that convention.
I suppose it depends on what degree of chaotic schizophrenia you’re willing to accept from the EU.
I don’t think you can get more canon than the Nebulon B, and the Pelta/Arquitens come pretty close.
Naming conventions shift based on size/mission of craft. A Navy could easily feature both large capital ships classified by agency nouns and dinky convoy escorts classified by numeric designators, like the Royal Navy’s alphabet series. The Allegiance is close enough in size to things like the Imperator, Venator, Secutor, etc, to be part of the same “type” insofar as naming convention.
And the backstory of the Pelta / Arquitens stem from the same story group that made the MC75 from Rogue One a converted building, so again, it’s up to you how much chaotic schizophrenia you want to accept.
Things can just be random too. Sort of like Gvozdika/Akatsiya/Giatsint/Pion -> Msta?! Thanks guys for fucking with the pattern.
Or perhaps the faux-Latin names are Kuati products, largely initiated and designed by the in house team, but Allegiance was something imposed from on high, and perhaps named accordingly?
TBH, the Arc Hammer was a specialist factory ship. It only existed to be a mobile space-borne factory for the DT program. I refer to it as the term used by Command and Conquer; M.C.V. (Mobile Construction Vehicle.) But more of a specialized mobile droid barracks for specific autonomous non-organic infantry.
Allegiance is just first ship we see named, and it’s become entrenched in the absence of any other information, so there’s no better class name. This developed well before the fashion of naming stuff with pseudo-Latin.
Would it fit better maybe with a pseudo-Latin name? Sure. Am I going to stick my neck out there and pick one when the existing name is cool? No. If I had to? Castigator.
Fair enough. Still, it would be nice to see Rendili get /some/ business thrown their way. Instead, every EU fluff-writer seems to automatically assume that anything resembling a Star Destroyer has to be a KDY project, even though the Victory pretty clearly breaks that mold.
P.S. In the back of my mind, I keep hoping you’ll make some ridiculously oversized super star dreadnought and call it the Overcompensator-Class.
There’s probably more of a political than technical reason for the KDY monopoly under the New Order. The Separatist coup on Rendili and subsequent battle during the Clone Wars painted a huge political target on Rendili’s back, which would leave it devoid of Imperial contracts even if it could deliver quality ships. Perhaps some divisions were nationalized, and the engineers were forcibly transferred to KDY in a sort of a Sharashka Gulag manner.
By the time of the original trilogy, Rendili is so marginalized by the Empire that they’re refitting Assault Frigates for the Alliance. No wonder Palpatine didn’t give them the Allegiance contract.
The source for that is the Empire at War video game guide, and video games are of debatable use as canon sources. It’s far more likely that the “Alliance engineers” mentioned in the original write-up for the Assault Frigate included a high percentage of former Rendili engineering personnel who had defected to the Alliance. It’s highly improbable that a major ship-building company (which Rendili still was, even if nowhere near the scale of KDY) would take the chance of accepting a “commission from the Rebel Alliance” any time before Endor. The word for that is treason.
Why wouldn’t Rendili get work anyway? We’ve seen companies don’t need to design the stuff they end up building. At the very least, ISDs are built of Corellia, and I’m pretty sure KDY doesn’t own CEC, or have much production infrastructure in CEC’s back yard.
There’s quite a gap between being a secondary contractor responsible for assembling prefabricated components of someone else’s design and being the primary contractor that’s responsible for moving the entire project forward, and taking the lion’s share of profit and publicity.
Also, I thought it was clear that Rendili would never publicly declare their allegiance (pun intended) to the Alliance, but if substantial numbers of malcontent engineers are defecting and bringing their hardware with them, then the Empire was probably smart to not trust Rendili with anything crucial. Besides, when a regime changes, a major defense contractor can shrivel up very quickly if the new power doesn’t like them that much. Just look at what happened to Messerschmidt or Supermarine.
Its been done but mostly as a joke. The “Ultra-class star Destroyer” ‘The Imperium.’ 200 kilometers in length I think…
That a nice class name for the Allegiance if it is not named Allegiance in the first place. But you could use that name for a possible Multi-role heavy destroyer variant of the Allegiance.
Dunno how much demand there would be for a de-specialized Allegiance variant, though I could see a bow-cutout fast carrier ala our host’s Impellor class.
No volume for carrier functions without a totally different hull frame. And at that point, it’s a Compellor.
Theoretically, at what point does it become counter-productive to go with specialized platforms over multi-role ones? As near as I can tell, the emphasis on large, multi-role ships in the SWU is heavily influenced by the RPG; past a certain size/power level, capital ships can no longer be seriously threatened by a half-dozen PCs with a modded light freighter or a handful of starfighters, so there isn’t much need for nuance in big ship design. You’re obviously operating several orders of magnitude above that, but what are your thoughts on the point of diminishing returns for the various mission designs?
I really don’t think this has much to do specifically with any RPG. Not many people have played the game or thought about it at that level. Not many people have thought about it at all. Which is why we always get to see people go on about ventral turrets and constantly trying to cram fighters in because fighters are cool.
The specialized vs multirole argument has no answer, in real life or otherwise, and I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to set any hard breakpoints. Specialized designs will always win as long as you get to use them in their role. The whole point is that you shed stuff that you don’t need, but if you press those specialized designs into general contingency service then they will suffer for it on a cost-effectiveness basis. So, what do you actually use your navy for? Always doing high-end peer warfare? Go specialized. Mostly stuck with COIN? Do generalized. Have ships so large it doesn’t really matter? Do whatever is more convenient.
Historically, though, a lot of the early EU has its roots in the WEG game. Multiple sources have stated that Timothy Zahn was given a box of WEG books to use as source material for the original Thrawn trilogy, and even the ships from Dark Empire have come to be defined by their WEG stats. People may not think much about it, but a lot of the things we fans “know” to be true have their roots in the WEG game. Of the seven official SD and SSD types featured in WEG material, only the two smallest (Victory I/II) are “specialized”; the other four (Imperial I/II, Super/Executor, Sovereign and Eclipse) are all Swiss Army Ships. Generally, the likelihood of a ship’s game stats being a specialized design decreased the larger it was. Apart from you, I haven’t encountered anyone who is putting effort into designing specialized craft larger than ISDs, and I think a big part of that is because a lot of people’s view of the SWU is shaped by the smaller scale view presented in the RPG. Your COIN remark, is dead-on, I think, because that’s exactly what a small group of PCs would resemble: a group of insurgents / freedom fighters running around being a nuisance entirely out of proportion to their size. And that mindset has carried over into the EU, excepting people such as yourself who can think outside of the lines.
Oh, no doubt the game has been very influential in general terms, sometimes to my great dismay 🙂 But in terms of generalist vs specialized ships, I don’t think so. The game laid out some extra ship classes because there weren’t enough in the movies to support very much of an RPG universe, but a lot about specialized vs generalized usage was added later. The VSD series were just baby ISDs, almost literally in some depictions. And on the face of it, they have almost exactly the troop and fighter complements you’d expect from an uncritical reading of the initial ISD stats. They’re about a quarter the volume of an ISD (depending on what proportions for the length you are going with), so…1-2 fighter squadrons and a 1-2 regiments. But, as we go outwards from there, Venators are fairly specialized carrier ships in comparison to an ISD at highest level of canon (which just doesn’t have that many different kinds of large ships, let’s be honest). We know almost nothing about Sovereign. Eclipse I’d argue is ridiculously specialized – it’s a siege weapon. It doesn’t have the visible conventional armament you’d expect of a ship that size, and in the same vein seems to have a VERY limited hangar capacity in comparison to the (much smaller) Executor. Almost all of it must be dedicated to supporting that giant axial superlaser. If anything, it’s a mini Death Star, or a super-monitor (and in some sense so was the Death Star, and the pizza from Episode 8 for that matter).
Really, once you reach a certain size, you have to go massively out of your way to “specialize” – it’s a relative thing at best. A hangar bay that is structurally obvious on an 8km ship is going to be able to carry many hundreds of SW sized fighters. So you basically have to visually write a bay out completely to prevent the ship being hypothetically capable of carrying large troop and fighter complements on its volume. I did close to that with Assertor in relative size terms, and that design probably still is packing almost a thousand fighters and an Army sized ground detachment; the bay looks small, but is still huge because the ship itself is huge. A ship that big will also have an absolutely if not relatively potent main gun battery as well, unless you say somehow that it’s unarmed or only has point defense, which is sort of silly if it’s still warship shaped and not a sort of floating dock.
Going by their own descriptions, though, the VSDs were specialized to a degree, with the Victory I leaning more toward planetary bombardment and assault, and the Victory II being more a space combat counterpart to it. The main distinction is the II trading in the I’s concussion missiles for ion cannon, as well as having a somewhat more modern energy weapons loadout. I left out the Venator because RotS was released 12 years after WEG’s Dark Empire Sourcebook, as that gap left a big window of time for WEG-centric views of the SWU to establish (metastasize?) themselves. There was a LOT of retconning going on in the gaming community once the prequels hit, and part of that retconning was justifying the Imperator as a doctrinal shift away from relatively specialized designs like the Victories and the Venator and more toward generalist dreadnought/carrier/troop transport platforms, as demonstrated in the larger, more modern platforms of the classic trilogy.
As far as the armament on the Eclipse (the Sovereign was actually just a WEG invention that never appeared in DE), WEG’s approach there was pretty much just to equip it with the same general type of cannon (with some variations for damage and accuracy), but tack on a LOT more of them. The write-up for the Eclipse gives it roughly the same number of big-gun turbolasers as an Executor, but doesn’t really distinguish between big and little, mostly trusting in the game’s coordinated fire mechanic to boost accuracy or damage based on the number of guns firing at a given target. So, the guns are there, but really small compared to the scale of the ship. And yeah, the Eclipse’s actual size is a dumpster fire on top of the dumpster fire that is the Executor’s length. That being said, though, it and the Sovereign still have the same generalist approach as the ISD, but on a much larger scale. The main difference between the Eclipse / Sovereign and the Executor is the Executor gets concussion missile launchers and the Eclipse / Sovereigns get a superlaser, point defense weaponry and gravity well projectors.
IIRC, the only pre-prequel EU author to put forward the idea of a non-specialist capital ship in the SWU was Michael P. Kube-McDowell, putting fleet carriers alongside star destroyers in the fifth fleet. The stats for those were published in one of WEG’s very last published books.
Setting aside whether WEG’s stats would make any sense outside game-mechanic convenience (I err toward ‘nope’), I’ve tripped over two threads (on FFG & SDN respectively) & a Wookie page which quote Eclipse as packing 500 TLs, 550 heavy lasers & 75 ions of unspecified scale. Even compared to the ‘8-klick fallacy’ weapon stats for Executor (1000 turbos/ions/launchers), that doesn’t strike me as a conventional weapon count even vaguely commensurate with the thing’s surface area. Feel free to thwack me if none of this introduced anything new, of course.
Not much here I can disagree with, and I’m the last person to defend WEG game stats as some paragon of infallibility. The /really/ amusing thing about those stats is that the Heavy Lasers are the anti-capital ship weapons, while the Turbolasers are the anti-starfighter weapons; errors like this are not uncommon in the game stats.
However, the deeper argument is that the further removed a game stat gets from the smaller-scale forms of combat or pursuit (starfighters and light freighters, pretty much), the less important accurate stats become as a practical matter. The reason for that is, past roughly the Victory / Imperator level, capital ships are just something PCs run from, and not something they try and fight it out with. From a casual gaming standpoint, what matters most is not so much that the stats are accurate, but that the stats as written will blow pretty much any starship a gaming group might have access to out of space in a single volley.
In the game, ships the size of the Executor or Eclipse are essentially space-going Anti-MacGuffins; they drive the plot by redirecting the plot /away/ from them. If something on that scale shows up in a star system, the best approach for a handful of gamers is to go somewhere else as expeditiously as possible. Fans have made attempts to re-stat both ships, but it very quickly becomes an exercise in ridiculousness.
Did the WEG writers ever even see ANH? I distinctly remember some Imperial gunnery crew complain that the Alliance snubfighters were too small to be effectively targeted by the Death Star’s turbolasers.
From a pure RPG standpoint, it probably doesn’t matter if something like an Allegiance or Eclipse isn’t properly statted, but they damn well should have put some thought into the capital ships before turning the books over to Tim Zahn and telling him to use them as reference.
It’s a complicated question. Certainly, the WEG writers had to have seen Star Wars, but their interpretation of Star Wars did not stand the test of time. The biggest collective error I can see is that WEG kept making changes to their rules over time without fully analyzing the ways in which those changes had unintended consequences for other aspects of the game. The basis is there for a good, coherent gaming system and universe, but it needs a lot more playtesting to iron out the wrinkles. The Death Star battle is a case in point; to make it work, you basically have to ignore the official WEG Death Star stats and treat it like the surface of a planet with individual weapons emplacements and targets for strafing and bombing runs.
As far as Zahn, I think he very wisely stayed away from quoting WEG /stats/ as established fact, and instead went with more general usage based on the WEG fluff write-ups that accompanied the stats.
I’m glad that Zahn didn’t take all the gun counts at face value, but the legacy of WEG on the Thrawn books is one of relentless minimalism based on the fluff. We got a universe where 200 medium frigates is a game changer, major fleets have a handful of line destroyers, and the industrial base that put together two death stars seems to have evaporated overnight. That’s the disappointment.
I’d argue that Zahn’s minimalist approach actually fit with the scale of the universe as it was accepted at that time. By that measure, those frigates were actually heavy cruisers, and ships larger than ISDs were few and far between. It wasn’t until the prequels started introducing larger and larger ships, and Fractal started fleshing out some of the doodles that passed for ships in the various Dark Horse comics releases that the scale started to go up. This ties in, IMO, with one of the main things WEG got right, and that is the focus on the efforts of individuals and small groups against the backdrop of epic space and surface battles, just like the films. Even with epic-scale constructs like the Death Stars, there was always a plot hole machined in to allow an individual or small group to weaken and/or destroy it.
It’s not really fair to fault writers in the past for not being able to see the future.
Eh, I’d argue that the mere existence of Executor & especially both Death Stars (much less DS2 being a secret project) not-so-subtly hints at a vaster scale than the sorts who insisted on ten-Impstar fleets guarding Coruscant or Kuat wanted to acknowledge. Plus, niche as it might be Curt Saxton’s documentation of stuff from Dark Horse & Marvel material predated the prequels by at least a few years. I get the whole ‘players gotta feel relevant’ thing, but am still not sold on having this ‘verse’s, well, verisimilitude dictated *entirely* by script-handy golden-BB events. Can’t help thinking some sort of official compartmentalization between game & film/novel content would’ve helped matters somewhat.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but considering that Lucasfilm at that time had the final say as to what was “official” Star Wars, and that it was Lucasfilm referencing WEG material (and ultimately sending WEG books for reference) when talking to Zahn, it wasn’t like he had a lot of choice. WEG had, with Lucasfilm’s blessing, established a minimalist pattern which Lucasfilm themselves perpetuated by forwarding it to Zahn, who in turn set the standard for all of the EU before the prequels. An author writing in someone else’s IP universe has to walk a fine line, and Zahn did well within the confines of what he was given.
Honestly, it’s not like Lucasfilm – or Disney – have moved away from the relatively “small” feel, either. I see the logic of the argument that hundreds of thousands of Star Destroyers must exist, but the largest concentrations of them seen on screen at Endor and Coruscant are an infinitesimal fraction of that number. If anything, Disney has made it even worse; Abrams’ “I can see Hosnian Prime from my house” SFX shot completely ruined TFA for me, compounded by Ruin Johnson cramming the entire Resistance into one star cruiser and three escorts.
It’s a paradox; a realistic Star Wars universe requires a maximalist shipbuilding paradigm, but the cinematic universe as a story-telling vehicle seems to favor the minimalist approach, so as not to distract from the individual characters in the story.
I can understand Zahn rolling with the framework given him & keeping main-character challenges at a manageable scale, though the more I mull this over…hell, I’m just not sure the two paradigms necessarily had to clash in the first place. If anything, a maximalized galactic stage as backdrop seems good for accentuating character heroics by driving home just what’s been foiled/circumvented/averted through grit, courage, camaraderie & cunning (unless, of course, one cheeses out with force storm-tier powers). Plus, as you note with WEG’s original ‘leave fighting fleets to fleets, genius’ policy, cinematic central cast-size groups get ample mileage out of evasion, sabotage, speechifying & ganking the pompous moff *directing* Sector Doomfleet #45Z. Doesn’t mean half the Empire/CIS/First Order’s spaceborne assets have to be mashed into a shot for *personal* mission-killing by Perspective Character Crew.
Ah, and while I have to eyeroll at the thematic rehash + wank it represents, Starkiller Base’s mere existence sorta throws more fuel on the ‘resources are out there’ fire if Space Daesh can field that thing with a fraction of the Empire’s territory.
The most plausible explanation I’ve heard for Starkiller Base is that it was originally built by one of the SWU’s ancient races (the Rakata are a good candidate) who subsequently abandoned it for unknown reasons. Then, thousands of years later, the First Order discovered it out in the Unknown Regions, figured out how it functioned, then built their own facilities around and on top of the original works. Hux’s bloviating about “you built this” would’ve just been hyperbole and propaganda.
Ah, so like a less-hollow, nowhere-near-Corellia Centerpoint Station. I also dig the meta WRT First Order ‘breakthroughs’ mainly being coattail-riding + spittle-spraying bullroar. Makes sense for a rehash regime whose boss uncannily resembles a defective Palpaclone(R) himself.
And that’s as good an explanation for Snoke as I’ve heard so far, too.
Hey, you kinda called it.
No, the scale that Zahn’s stuff ignored wasn’t set by me. That scale was set by the production of several hundred thousand ISD equivalents twice over 3 years embodied by both death stars in highest and earliest SW canon. It’s a low bar to expect some consistency with the setting as it was originally laid out, and not expecting fortune-telling on the part of the worldbuilder.
P.S. I like Zahn’s stuff story wise, but the minimalism is AWFUL.
The official explanation at the time was that the Death Stars were of unprecedented scale, and only the direct command of the Emperor was able to gather that much time and effort and material into a single project. Realistic? Probably not, but it did fit with the minimalist official approach at the time. I think you’re right insofar as Star Wars viewed realistically, but is Star Wars supposed to be realistic? My understanding was always that it was more space opera than hard sci-fi
Personally, I was willing to write off most of the stuff on the Saxton compilation as “just not Star Wars enough” on the basis of poor quality alone. It wasn’t until you started transforming the unshapely blobs into ships that actually looked like they belonged that I started thinking in terms of larger ships being more common. Up to that point, it was easy to think of Imperator-Class Star Destroyers as TIE Fighters writ large; rather than specialist platforms, just build a whole bunch of multi-role platforms, then problem solve by throwing as many of them at a problem as you have to until the problem goes away.
Sure, the Death Stars are marvels of mega-engineering instituted from the top, and not something your typical Post-Endor Moff could put together, but they’re still THE benchmark of the galactic industrial base. Besides, they were built in almost complete secrecy, which suggests that they were a small fraction of total Imperial production capacity rather than something that every workshop and factory was mobilized for.
I’ll admit a fair chunk of the DE & 70s Marvel stuff could be handwaved as ‘artist with a deadline & limited aptitude for greebling’. Still, things like the concept-sketch designs, later PC/console-game creations and inspirations for stuff like Fulgor, Praetor, that modular ship, etc. have the potential for that much more setting variety than an all-Impstar-plus-fistful-of-smaller-craft fleet for Our Antagonists.
Right, the ‘why are you stopping to count all this, just RUN’ approach makes sense for player groups tooling around in Falcon or Lambda equivalents. It’s when peeps try to patch the fluff attached to said context into broader theories & trends WRT capital-scale combat, some of which seem to *contradict* its original intent (hello, Trench Run Disease) that the migraines & 80-page debate threads set in. Which is why I’ll confess to finding our host’s ‘pull back & look at the design sans game-balance lenses’ approach immensely refreshing.
Anyhow, having squinted at Eclipse I & II’s lack of fleet-slaughtering action in their source comics (I admittedly falls to Act of Forcetantrum, II gets flanked by an antique frigate analogue we never see it destroy before the Falcon’s crew slices helm control & sends it on a death ride), I can sorta see some support for Fractal’s ‘plus-sized siege monitor’ assessment.
Based on film evidence, the same could be said about the Executor. We never really get to see exactly what it could do in a gun duel against another capital ship. Mostly what it does is hover nearby looking ominous.
Ah, the annoyances of plot shielding, rules of engagement dictated by same & only tertiary characters helming SW heavies ’cause nobody wants to let go of the snubs or Falcon (well, besides Vader, but he’s more of a roving trouble-choker). Suppose I’m just nursing dead-horse annoyance with the way peeps have regurgitated the Fifteen-Panel Palpywagon’s hype every other time any given sci-fi page rolls around to SW capitals.
Just a thought, but why not make it the Tector-Class? Next to nothing is known about that ship, apart from the fact that it is “hangerless,” but I’ve always taken that to mean merely that it lacked the large launch bay of the Imperator-Class. From that perspective, both the Allegiance and the Procursator would be likely candidates. It’d be nice to have that gap in the EU filled in.
I think the traditional speculation was that Tector is supposed to be a hangarless ISD variant. Also it apparently does not have a bulb, which Allegiance most certainly does.
Other than removing the hangar and covering up the bulb, what else would we speculate the Tector of having? A couple more turrets or something more radical to differentiate it from a stock Imperator?
Those are already huge modifications. I’d expect a very different stern design, because if it’s a gunboat variant you’d want to keep reactor output, and you’ve reduced the ventral volume by internalizing the bulb, so the reactor volume has to be redistributed. If it has a similar ISD hull plan then there’s nowhere to add but further back. Possible shallow fantail to accommodate it all, and that suggests centerline engine rearrangements. Extra turrets in the flank batteries to use the extra juice.
The sole source for that appears to be the Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia, so it would depend greatly on how much weight you place on it as a source. The idea of it not having a bulb is based on the ret-coning of one of the Imperial ships in the Battle of Endor based on a conflation of that scene in the films with how it’s described in the RotJ novel, and the connection made is a pretty tenuous one, IMO.
In my own headcanon, I made the Tector a planetary bombardment specialist variant of the Imperator, replacing the main hangar bay and most of the transport capacity with a mass of warhead storage bays and launchers, but a big gun specialist like the Allegiance would seem to fit, as well.
Cross sections also mentions the Tector, and I believe the Endor inverted ship is officially supposed to be a Tector (at least until it changes again). I’m pretty sure Saxton had it in mind when he did the first text mentions. The Endor ship is definitely a slightly modified ISD hull. A gunboat ISD variant certainly is well plausible.
Cross sections is the first time a Tector is mentioned, but it only ever says it’s hangarless. The quote from the Venator cross-section just says “construction of Venator-class vessels is already slowing in favor of more robust, mile-long Imperator-class (renamed Imperial-class after the Jedi Purge) and hangarless Tector-class Star Destroyers.” From that, it /could/ be inferred that the Tector is a “mile-long,” but it could just as easily be in the same size range as the Venator, except “more robust” ala the Procursator.
What I find too much of a reach is that the scene that’s supposed to be the belly of a Tector (where we see only a destroyer’s bow with a few features and no reactor bulb) is based solely on a line from the RotJ novel where Lando’s “and we just might take a few of them with us” line occurs as the Falcon “careened around the belly of an Imperial leviathan.” Since the scene in question occurs /after/ Lando’s line in the sequence of the film, the “Leviathan’s belly” he was avoiding could just as easily have been one of the ISD’s seen in the background of the camera shot, before he passed over the bow of this unidentified ship.
And while I would certainly trust your eye for the visual details with regard to the ship in question being the modified bow of an Imperial, IMO, the bow of the Allegiance bears a striking resemblance to the bow of an Imperator, too. Without a clear view of the superstructure of the ship in question, I would think it could go either way.
I’m getting the official status of the ROTJ ship as Tector from the Wookiepedia article for Tector. I’m assuming they’re sourcing the comment from Leland Chee correctly.
We know the ROTJ ship is a modified ISD because they didn’t make any other models that size. It’s not like some secret studio model for another big destroyer that never saw the light of day. It’s open for interpretation what the superstructure and stern of the ship looks like, but it’s got the same forward plan as an ISD, full stop. No need for arcane novel interpretations for that one.
I got it from the same source. I’m not disputing Leland Chee’s identification of the ship as a Tector, I’m just pointing out how thin the case is for the ship being inverted in the shot in question. If the idea is a different, more heavily armored star destroyer, couldn’t it just be repurposed footage, using the same model, but explained away as the dorsal bow hull of a design similar to that of the ventral bow of an Imperator?
It’s possible, but such a ship would need to have dorsal surface features that are awfully like an ISD’s main hangar bays with hatches applied. Occam’s Razor says to me it’s probably an ISD variant inverted.
But to be fair if it were the underside of a Tector that we saw in the flyby, if I did it it would need some extra work. I don’t think plating over otherwise obvious ISD apertures is the most aesthetic way to go, but it’d hardly be the first time in modifying real warships…
Great background, sounds very plausible. Bit of a mistake at the beginning though, imo: you say the Victory could go toe to toe with the Lucrehulk – did you mean 1 on 1? If so, this is underestimating the LH. Based on the size of all its reactors, its listed shield strength and its weapons, its power output is almost certainly around 7.7e25w – making it 8 times more powerful than an ISD-II (while 22 times bigger, it has a much lower overall:reactor volume ratio because it’s a carrier and its ‘mandibles’ are enormous, with none of that space dedicated to reactors), so about 20-25x more powerful than a Victory. It could also take on 1-2 Allegiance SDs.
Fair assessment WRT cruiser-refitted Lucrehulks being more than a single Vic (or even a Vic+-Venator 2-ship) should be expected to slug it out with, though I suspect a deftly-helmed Allegiance could just about solo one depending on who gets off the first telling volley.
Lucrehulks have sizable reactors, but commercial power plants optimized for cost-efficiency and long-haul reliability probably don’t stack up to military reactors designed for maximum surge output. Lucrehulks are also incredibly unmanueverable, and while an Allegiance can’t dance like a Victory, it sure as hell would be able to evade much more return fire than the Lucrehulk. To make things even more lopsided, the Lucrehulk’s firing arcs are pretty awful, while an Allegiance would be able to pound it with its full armament, making this not really a contest. A single well-handled Imperator might even be able to take on a Lucrehulk, if we ignore the thousands of fighters it would be carrying.
ISD version 2.0. Once presented next to each other this really looks like Allegiance class should be renamed ISD II. I never understood the lack of fighters on Allegiance. This is a huge ship, 2.2 km, it is unfathomable that they couldn’t squeeze in at least the same amount of fighters as ISD has. I get why lore-wise such decision was made but it seems not to make much sense.
Venators and ISDs are both middle-of-the road ships that are part battleship, part carrier.
The Venator steers more towards the carrier side, the ISD more towards the battleship side.
A dedicated carrier will always be more effective in that role than one that sacrifices hangar space for more firepower. A dedicated battleship will always be more effective in that role than one that sacrifices firepower for hangar space.
Take a Venator’s carrier side to the extreme and you get the Secutor.
Take the ISD’s battleship side to the extreme and you get the Allegiance.
Also Zarrov and gejemica you might wanna look at my post above your one with the headcanon idea for the Alliegiance.
Imperial combat doctrine (stemmed from Tarkin Doctrine) never paid much attention to the effectiveness of starfighter combat, as to them, the fighters isn’t the thing that win battles and conquer/hold systems, but rather the warships is the one with such a responsibility. Not to mention this ship is just full of anti-air batteries, additional hangar space is just a waste of interior that could be used for other things.
I think the allegiance actually has a small launch bay where the secondary shuttle bay would be on a standard ISD (which make sense really, there has to be a way for the crew to get in and out). No idea if it can accommodate fighters though…
It probably could fit a few fighters, just like you could potentially fit an AV-8B Harrier II in the hangar bay of a Burke destroyer IRL, but they don’t do that because fighter coverage for the fleet is better served by specialist vessels.
As 3D artist myself, I’ve never been able to get the sort of blue-gray material with the hull plates. Is it a bit too silly to ask for a hex value? 😛 I’ve gone all over google for hull plating textures etc, I’ve got a python script to generator plates and greebles, but where do you get these images from? Would you share them?
It’s not just the hex value – it’s more the lighting and color correction that happens afterwards. Won’t look the same depending on those settings. My stuff is procedural except for a few mild bitmaps.
Nice, procedural stuff is the best. What sort of lighting do you use? Is it custom setups or do you use HDRIs?
I just use direct spotlights or very small area lights for relatively sharp shadows. I occasionally will use HDRI lighting for smaller ships, or if I desperately want specific kinds of reflections. On a big ship I’ve found it doesn’t matter too much. I guess if you wanted a “photoreal” light setup like as if it was a physical model, HDRI lighting would be the way to go.
Ahh I see, Do you use Blender to make these?
3dsmax
Nice another redux done. There are 2 things I want to ask you about Fractal.
1. What the polygon count on this redux?
2. Will the Procursator get a redux as well?
id love to see you do the Titan class Stealth Dreadnought.
Stunningly good! There’s definately a brutal power to her clean lines!
That is incredible. My god.
Question. I know anything to do with the Sequel Trilogy is sorta a source of much controversy, but is there any chance we’ll eventually see ships from those movies depicted by you? Say the Resurgent class or something?
This thing has made it to 5+ EAW mods of varying caliber, and it’s laughably under-gunned in every single one of them.
Based on sheer volume it would be about 2 and a half times as powerful as an ISD, but the reactor is proportionally much bigger so who knows.
The important factor is that it looks pretty.
Reactor volume is all that counts, and that’s 6x. The rest of the hull is proportionately stripped away. High power to weight, low overall size to make it a smaller and better shielded target.
Look. At. That. Butt.
Yeah, she’s thick in all the places.
I’d say all except the EAW Remake-Light
That one it has 12 octuple barbette turbolasers, like 40-60 missile launchers as well as at least 20-50 minimum other light laser cannons, point defense or light turbolaser batteries.
SECONDED on the EAW Remake-Light version of the mod. Holy hell. That thing is a straight up beast. I’m late game right now, swapping ISD-II’s with them. Those missiles are definitely powerful.
Yeah easily one of the most cost effective and powerful ships in the mod and just a powerful ship in general.
And yeah it’s heavy missiles are no joke, still not as powerful as the super heavy ones the Kandosii has though.