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Replying to Super Star Destroyers


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Kaleb Graff

Posted 17 December 2009 - 06:05 PM

My point about no difference was not that the naval staff would feel differently, but that the population would feel differently.
Take the following scenario:
You are a mildly important world with a decent navy, capable of seeing off a Star Destroyer or two. The imps send a battle squadron, which you drive off. Star Destroyers are no longer invincible warships, but just big ones. Then you see an 8 km ships that smashes your fleet. It's now invincible and a great symbol of the Empire's might. A 19 km one would work just as well, but not really better.

Edit: I spent an hour or so editing the Executor XML to make a rough Super. It's basicly an Executor rescaled, stats edited, and 7/8ths of the armament removed. Actually, I just cut 7 out of 8 hardpoints on the turbolasers, ions, and heavy turbos. It's far from perfect, but it seems to work fairly well.

The file is very incomplete, use at your own risk.

feld

Posted 17 December 2009 - 03:24 PM

Honestly, I think that it's likely that Executor and Lusankya were the only units of their class. The basic Imperial doctrine is one of terror, and if you have defenses that can see off a star destroyer or two, the level of terror won't be very different if you see an 8 km ship or a 19 km one. The Executor was built to intimidate the really heavily defended planets, like Kuat. The Lusankya actually clawed through Coruscant's planetary shield. I imagine this couldn't be done at Hoth because of the ion cannon. Torpedo spheres were probably cheaper, and used for less important planets. The imps may go for overkill, but there is such a thing as too much cost.

The canon is deliciously ambiguous on this point. While Executor and Lusankya may have been the only two of their class, I think that ships in the 8km and up size range were fairly common in the Imperial Navy. I also strongly disagree that there's not a big difference between an 8 and 19 km long ship. The level of terror will be very different to any opposing admiral who knows their job.

Assume Saxton's idea that an energy armed warship is one that can direct most of the power from it's reactors through its weapons at a target, then the effectiveness of such a warship can be estimated to scale with that ship's available power. A reactor's power output is more closely estimated by looking at volume vice its length. Assuming that the reactor dimensions scale the same way as the ship (which actually isn't a bad guess), the difference between an 8km ship and a 19km ship is:
(19/8)^3 = 13.4
All else being equal (it won't be but this is order of magnitude stuff) this means that a single 19km ship could defeat 13 of the smaller 8 km ships. Yes, I know that this is not the way that modern warships work. That's true - but we don't use directed energy weapons on modern naval vessels. The size of a Earth wet-navy ship's powerplant right now has no direct relationship to its destructive potential. In Star Wars, you can make the case that there is a very direct relationship.

Looking at the difference between Executor and an ISD is even more interesting. The difference between the 19 km ship and a 1.6 km long ISD is:
(19/1.6)^3 = 1674.6

So, this is the origin of Saxton's comment in the RotS ICS book that a single Mandator-II class could take on 1,000 Recusant-Class destroyers.

In the end, I think that practical considerations will bring that number down to a much lower figure (there were at most hundreds or tens of Rebel Mon-Cal at Endor after all). And I suspect that the limits have to do with shielding progressively larger and larger ships getting less effective past a certain size. But I still think that limiting the number of bigger ships takes something of the wonder out of the GFFA. To use a Tolkien analogy, I don't think of most star dreadnoughts or battlecruisers as Balrog level...they're more like Dragons and Oliphants. Executor maybe is one of the Ring Wraiths just because it is a ship designed to not just win fleet actions, but subjugate pretty high end star systems.

The Eclipse...The Death Star...now those are Balrogs...or Sauron himself.

v/r
feld

Kaleb Graff

Posted 17 December 2009 - 02:24 PM

Honestly, I think that it's likely that Executor and Lusankya were the only units of their class. The basic Imperial doctrine is one of terror, and if you have defenses that can see off a star destroyer or two, the level of terror won't be very different if you see an 8 km ship or a 19 km one. The Executor was built to intimidate the really heavily defended planets, like Kuat. The Lusankya actually clawed through Coruscant's planetary shield. I imagine this couldn't be done at Hoth because of the ion cannon. Torpedo spheres were probably cheaper, and used for less important planets. The imps may go for overkill, but there is such a thing as too much cost.

Tropical Bob

Posted 17 December 2009 - 07:39 AM

It's 8km because of the WEG error, but even if we retcon length, the entire NR fleet described in BFC couldn't take an Executor.

Let alone the one hunting down Zsinj, unless Iron Fist was running with a skeleton crew, which would probably still be enough. I'd imagine if you have to run a skeleton crew, you would slave multiple batteries together to keep at least some semblance of the strength of an Executor-class. And even slaved batteries are enough to defeat what General Solo had.

Phoenix Rising

Posted 17 December 2009 - 04:07 AM

I'd agree that there should be a medium-sized dreadnaught. My point of bringing up the topic, though, was that there's little consensus on what's one class or the other. That would likely have to be settled before we think of adding the 8 km.

Kaleb Graff

Posted 16 December 2009 - 11:30 PM

That was before I joined, so I didn't know about it. I saw a reference to the 12.8 km on Wookiepedia that said the 2001 SOG detailed that, but I was wrong. Still, I've voted in that poll. I just think that Executors are too expensive to be common, and that a bridge between Praetors and Exectors is needed. I'd be willing to work on it over Christmas break as well.
The problem with the SSDs is simple. An author wants a ship that is bigger than a star destroyer to threaten the heroes. He thinks back to the movies and says 'Super Star Destroyer.' He then makes it enough to challenge them, without killing them outright, so they are usually way underpowered. It's 8km because of the WEG error, but even if we retcon length, the entire NR fleet described in BFC couldn't take an Executor.

Phoenix Rising

Posted 16 December 2009 - 07:34 PM

Heh, I had a topic on this over two years ago. An 8-km Superior-class is probably a good idea, as that has a unique appearance from the Executor; however, the 12.8 one is just a poor effort by LFL to come to a compromise, and ought to be thought of as the made-up one for budgetary purposes. Also, I'm not sure you can come up with 16 engines on this to say the Megador is one and the same, so that'll probably have to be a yet-unknown novel class.

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Kaleb Graff

Posted 16 December 2009 - 05:55 PM

It's bothered me that Dreadnaughts skip straight from 3500m to 15000m. It's like going straight from a destroyer escort to a battleship in terms of size, or even farther. Also, the prevalence of 5-mile SSDs is confusing, even in recent works. To resolve this, I propose the addition of the Super-class Star Destroyer. This class would include most of the 15 or so known Executors, and would use the original WEG stats.
http://starwars.wiki..._Star_Destroyer
The 19-kilometer Executor was said (by Mara Jade, I believe) to have almost bankrupted the Empire, and having 15 would be incredibly expensive. While that was actually two ships, they were still very costly.
Retconned Background:
The Super-class Star Destroyers were commissioned shortly before the battle of Yavin. Originally, the Exector was to have been one, along with the Lusankya. However, it was decided to build both ships to a much larger design.
Most of the other ships that are currently Executors are actually supers. Of the ships listed as Exectors (http://starwars.wiki...tar_Dreadnought), the Aggressor, Annihilator, the Intimdator, the Iron Fist, the Knight Hammer, the Razor's Kiss, the Terror, and the Vengance are all likely Supers. The Guardian and Reaper are uncertain. There is support for this view, in the form of the Megador from Invincible. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Megador
Also, to farther bridge the gap, it might be possible to introduce the 12.8 km super-class.

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