Is there a way to have Star Wars space combat make sense?

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Mechalich
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Post by Mechalich »

FatR wrote: Shields can absorb fuck huge amounts of firepower, that swiftly scales with shielding generator size, so planetary shielding makes kinetic attacks virtually useless, and missile swarms accomplish next to nothing in space combat.
Canonically, shields absolutely do absorb metric fucktons of firepower, but they are vulnerable to stacked missile attacks - if you use the correct, ship-killing missiles. On of the things about the Galactic Civil War period - the portion of the timeline where the movies take place, is that it occurred during a period in which missiles where powerful and missile technology had advanced to the point where missile barrages by starfighters could actually overwhelm the shields and subsequently crater the hull plating of capital ships. This is not always the case. In TOR you can spam literally hundreds of missiles at a modest capital ship and all you'll do is peel the turrets off, and very few of that era's starfighters are carry missile launchers anyway.
In case of ship-to-ship combat this also means that fighters on their own rarely can overcome a capital ship, and even corvettes and frigates can effortlessly tank anything smaller than a whole squadron attacking with perfect coordination. However, presence of fighters on the space battlefield means than enemy ships cannot divert all power to parts of their shielding directly facing the enemy, and whenever a lucky blast from a friendly capital ship short-circuits generators for just one or two shield plates, fighters around can exploit that chance and strike the weak spot for massive damage.
EU canon supports exactly this. Starfighters, even those armed only with laser cannons, can do serious damage to capital ships. While unlikely to penetrate the hull and crush the internal systems, they can destroy surface batteries, cripple engines and sensors, and vent the first layer of compartments to space. That means starfighter presence forces a ship to keep a full bubble of shielding up as opposed to concentrating it in just the direction an opposing capital ship. I believe the relevant example is in the novel Solo Command.
Strength of planetary shields, at least on planets that actually are major industrial and political centers, also means that you cannot just alpha strike the enemy capital as your opening act of war, and outcome of conflicts does not boil down to a single decisive fleet battle. Battering down a first-rate planet may take days or weeks, and is likely to result in severe casualties if the planet also has surface-to-space batteries worth mentioning. So even if you rout your enemy's fleet, you may be left with insufficient combat strength to conquer a major world, or siege may take enough time for the enemy fleet to recover/receive reinforcements.
In the Thrawn Trilogy (which is the most important source because it was the one that first took movie elements and codified how this stuff actually worked), Thrawn launches a surprise raid of Coruscant with a star destroyer battle group (six Imperial-class star destroyers and several dozen support ships). The New Republic briefly skirmishes in orbit before Garm Bel Iblis takes command, points out that's stupid, and they just hole up behind their planetary shield, against which the entire combined firepower of the battlegroup is useless. Thrawn uses a trick to put a bunch of cloaked asteroids in decaying orbits around the planet as an interdiction tactic designed to demoralize the New Republic and as a result Coruscant keeps their planetary shields up for what is apparently in-universe weeks.

So yeah, taking a planet is hard. It's also notable that, despite the incredibly large crew requirements of Imperial Star Destroyers, the number of troops they carry when it comes to the needs of planetary conquest is small. Ten thousand men and their support equipment is basically two brigades. So a full battlegroup is mustering maybe 3-4 divisions worth of ground troops unless they have dedicated troop carrying support. That's only enough to assault a combat zone around the size of the UK on a planet with an Earth-size population.
First, no, you cannot hyperdrive out of/into the atmosphere, or under a shield. That will kill you.
So much yes. Fuck you Abrams, fuck you so much for letting that into Force Awakens, you destroyed space combat in Star Wars forever you moron.

(3)Different sort of planets. Pretty much what mechalich wrote above. A lot of the Galaxy consists of shitholes which do various equivalents of subsistence farming and have no military or economic value to speak of. Then there are extremely important industrialized worlds, each of whom runs a ton of colonies and dependencies, from automated mining stations, to pastoral planets whose main "trades" are cool scenery and quality resorts. Because assaulting a major world directly is perilous, as described above, unless one side in war has a massive advantage (and perhaps even then), a war primarily consists of struggles for control of those lesser world which may have only token defensive forces on their own, with the end purpose of cutting imports to your adversary's major worlds and either force submission or weaken them for the final assault. Because the Galaxy is absolutely enormous, and significant conflicts unfold over tens of thousands systems at a time, even though armies and fleets of every faction worth mentioning are massively big too, with an equivalent of private security force fielding dozens of battleships/carriers, individual engagements and campaigns may therefore feature forces limited enough for PCs' heroics to leave a noticeable immediate impact.
Star Wars storytelling has traditionally featured as many superweapons as possible specifically to address the issue of overwhelming galactic scale. Ship-killing, planet-killing, star-killing, infinite factories, force-based weapons, biological weapons, zombies (multiple times), cyborgs, the list just goes on and on.
Chamomile wrote:That scene is a star destroyer picking on a Corellian corvette (I'm assuming you mean Episode IV, since no scene from Episode I fits at all). The Rebel fleet has Mon Calamari cruisers and Nebulon frigates in it. The exact same ship that gets swallowed up by a star destroyer in A New Hope is ejected from a Rebel cruiser in Rogue One. Rebels have ships of the exact same size as the Empire, and they have them by the midpoint of the civil war. That scene isn't the standard confrontation between Rebel and Imperial forces, it's an Imperial cruiser chasing down a routing Rebel corvette in the immediate aftermath of a major fleet confrontation.
While the Rebellion has capital ships, it doesn't have a lot of them and most of them - like essentially all Nebulon-B Frigates - they got by stealing them from the Empire. In fact the majority of New Republic materiel and personnel was Imperial in origin until perhaps as much as a decade after the Battle of Endor - which is something that's seen in sources such as Dark Empire.
angelfromanotherpin wrote:I think if the slapdash rebel base on Hoth can have an anti-bombardment shield sufficient to hold off the fucking Executor, then either bombardment tech sucks or the capital ships aren't actually designed for it.
It is far easier to build something on a planet than it is to build something into a ship that needs to move about in space. Planetary defenses and weaponry are therefore stronger than ship-based ones, even really big ship-based ones until you hit the superweapon zone.

Now, the shield protecting Echo Base did not encompass the entirety of Hoth and, if he had wanted to, Vader could have ordered Death Squadron to fire at the icy wastes until they boiled off and the atmospheric temperature hit the boiling point and killed everyone, but that would have taken a long time and wouldn't have prevented the Rebellion's forces from escaping.
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Post by Chamomile »

Mechalich wrote:While the Rebellion has capital ships, it doesn't have a lot of them and most of them - like essentially all Nebulon-B Frigates - they got by stealing them from the Empire.
Bullshit. I don't care what some dumbass EU author wrote into canon, in the movies that your average audience member actually knows (whether you're making an RPG for 3-6 friends or writing episode VIII) the Empire and the Rebellion clearly have completely different fleets. Wherever the Rebels are getting their ships, they are not stealing them from Imperial shipyards, otherwise they would have the same (or at least similar) ships as the Imperials.
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Post by Mechalich »

Chamomile wrote:
Mechalich wrote:While the Rebellion has capital ships, it doesn't have a lot of them and most of them - like essentially all Nebulon-B Frigates - they got by stealing them from the Empire.
Bullshit. I don't care what some dumbass EU author wrote into canon, in the movies that your average audience member actually knows (whether you're making an RPG for 3-6 friends or writing episode VIII) the Empire and the Rebellion clearly have completely different fleets. Wherever the Rebels are getting their ships, they are not stealing them from Imperial shipyards, otherwise they would have the same (or at least similar) ships as the Imperials.
As much of an incongruity as it may be, it's a factoid that has held up in both versions of EU canon. With the notable exception of Mon Calamari vessels, the Rebels and the Empire are both drawing from the same ship sources. Obviously the movies wouldn't show that because it would be visually confusing, but it makes sense from a logical perspective that a rebel movement would primarily utilize the equipment of their oppressors, especially since there's no foreign aid to be had.

The movies have some weird visual incongruities no matter what, given the nature of their production schedule. Notably, there are no capital ships in the original trilogy of Clone Wars vintage, even though the Clone Wars happened a mere twenty years earlier and it would make sense for much of that material to still be in service somewhere in the galaxy, and there are versions of Y-wings in both conflicts.

Ultimately, the Rebels and the Empire have different ships because additional models sell additional toys and toys are the biggest revenue generator Star Wars has, so even though red-painted triangle ships versus blue-painted triangle ships is what makes the most sense in universe, of course you aren't going to see that on-screen. My TOR main has a collection of over 150 in-game pets, all of which do nothing mechanically. Merchandizing is Star Wars' one true god.
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Post by czernebog »

Surgo, it sounded like you were asking about mechanics that would enforce correct "Star Wars feeling" in a game. Is there a game system that you're already using, or an adventure/Star Wars era/subsetting that you're planning to run? The degree of lampshade-hanging or fluff-saving crunch that you're going to need will depend a lot on what your game is going to consist of.
Mechalich wrote:Star Wars combat is weird, because a lot of authors have spilled a lot of ink about it and presented very different conclusions.

The economics of Star Wars are wonky as fuck.

(yeah, I know, the EU could be really stupid sometimes)
Chamomile wrote:Bullshit. I don't care what some dumbass EU author wrote into canon
Everyone has their own headcanon, so what's the game you want to run?
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Post by Chamomile »

You can't say "merchandising demands different fleets" on one end and then completely ignore that reality on the other to say "it makes most sense if a rebel movement were stealing their ships from the government," because it does not make the most sense that the rebel movement is stealing their ships from the government when everyone can plainly see that both sides use completely different kinds of ships. Yes, the fact that both sides use different ships is driven by merchandising, but all that means is that the idea that Rebels are stealing from the Empire will remain stupid in perpetuity.

It doesn't matter if the Complete Guide to Starships Built Between 9 and 4 BBY In The Core Systems has consistently stated that the Nebulon B was produced by Kuat Drive Yards, because the overlap between people who A) even know that bit of information, B) care whether or not it is contradicted in any given Star Wars story, and C) are actually people you would want to play with is vanishingly small.
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Post by codeGlaze »

Stealing Imperial ships has been the focus of at least one storyline for the early rebel fleet.

But SW:Rebels actually shows the early rebellion building up its own custom fleet as well.
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Post by Surgo »

czernebog wrote:Surgo, it sounded like you were asking about mechanics that would enforce correct "Star Wars feeling" in a game. Is there a game system that you're already using, or an adventure/Star Wars era/subsetting that you're planning to run? The degree of lampshade-hanging or fluff-saving crunch that you're going to need will depend a lot on what your game is going to consist of.
I have no system at the moment but was more interested in what mechanics one could come up with to make having both star destroyers and x-wings in the same battle make military and economic sense. I thought FatR's mindcaulk was altogether fairly reasonable. Putting big virtual armor plating on installations gives a lot of stuff to do to small craft (fighters/interceptors and dedicated bombers), which is important because that's what the players will most likely be in.

At that point it's a matter of giving Star Destroyers a role at all. Here's my idea, which may be incredibly stupid. If you're defending an installation, you want to be able to shoot down all of those annoying dudes getting through your shield plates to fuck your shit up. So you deploy what we'll call cruisers, which are really good at killing small starfighters. So then Star Destroyers are there to kill the cruisers, but their presence has the dual purpose of centralizing the metagame into requiring those shields in the first place.

You could also say that they carry some kind of hyperspace-denying field too to give them an embargo/siege role. That doesn't really fit the movies all that much but at least no longer lets you answer the question "A star destroyer shows up above your planet, what do?" with "go to the other hemisphere of orbit and leave lol"
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Post by maglag »

Mechalich wrote: Now, the shield protecting Echo Base did not encompass the entirety of Hoth and, if he had wanted to, Vader could have ordered Death Squadron to fire at the icy wastes until they boiled off and the atmospheric temperature hit the boiling point and killed everyone, but that would have taken a long time and wouldn't have prevented the Rebellion's forces from escaping.
How about simply shooting down the rebel ships as they went up?

Even Leia points out they could only afford two X-wings to escort each transport, yet I don't recall a single one of said transports being shot down, or at least a significant number. The imperial fleet fails at properly nuking the planet, fails at intercepting or pursuing the rebel ships, just what the fuck are star destroyers good for?
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Post by Lokathor »

They're sure good at getting hit by Ion Cannons and instantly falling out of orbit.
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Post by Mechalich »

maglag wrote: How about simply shooting down the rebel ships as they went up?

Even Leia points out they could only afford two X-wings to escort each transport, yet I don't recall a single one of said transports being shot down, or at least a significant number. The imperial fleet fails at properly nuking the planet, fails at intercepting or pursuing the rebel ships, just what the fuck are star destroyers good for?
The EU canon of the Battle of Hoth is that the Rebellion was trying to evacuate 30 GR-75 class transports with all their stuff. 17 of them were destroyed, and more might have been if Vader hadn't diverted the entire fleet to chase the Millennium Falcon as the battle concluded (which is part of the underlying theme of Palpatine's hubris about the Jedi blinding him to what ordinary rebels were doing that ultimately brought about his downfall in the form of around 5000 Ewoks). Also the Rebels lost all men and materiel that they were unable to load onto transports, which was a fair amount. Altogether, it was a huge loss for the Rebellion.

The fact that any Rebel transports escaped at all is due to the presence of the planetary ion cannon used to fire upon blockading Star Destroyers to disable them while the transports fled (which is what happens in the one movie shot of the first transport escaping), which was a delicately timed maneuver. They had to use the ion cannon to clear the corridor and escape to hyperspace before any imperial units (with sufficiently heavy guns to down the transports, which means no TIE fighters) can reoccupy it. So if the transports were early or late by a matter of seconds, or the ion cannon failed to hit sufficiently critical systems to disable the star destroyers, they were dead.
You could also say that they carry some kind of hyperspace-denying field too to give them an embargo/siege role. That doesn't really fit the movies all that much but at least no longer lets you answer the question "A star destroyer shows up above your planet, what do?" with "go to the other hemisphere of orbit and leave lol"
The general idea is that the gravity well prohibition on hyperspace jumps extends some distance into orbit. Enough so that if you try this a Star Destroyer has a good chance of catching you before you can get away (Imperial Star Destroyers were actually very fast for heavy capital ships, a point Han makes in New Hope). There's also the issue that, while it's possible to evacuate a single Rebel base or maybe a barely populated resort world (hi Makeb!), you're not lifting hundreds of millions of people off worlds that actually matter. The universe's logistics don't really permit such a move.

And, if you're really trying to blockade a planet you need a lot of ships, at least initially. The Trade Federation fleet blockading Naboo at the beginning of Phantom Menace was many ships each of which was a massive fighter carrier. At the Battle of Hoth Vader wasn't trying to blockade the planet, at least initially - he wanted to arrive unnoticed and just blast Echo Base to bits from long range before the shield could be raised. Admiral Ozzel instead jumped Death Squadron in close, where they were detected by Rebel Sensors (which is what Han and Luke were putting in place before Luke got wampa ganked) and the shield was raised. Ozzel got Force Choked for screwing up.
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Post by maglag »

Mechalich wrote:
maglag wrote: How about simply shooting down the rebel ships as they went up?

Even Leia points out they could only afford two X-wings to escort each transport, yet I don't recall a single one of said transports being shot down, or at least a significant number. The imperial fleet fails at properly nuking the planet, fails at intercepting or pursuing the rebel ships, just what the fuck are star destroyers good for?
The EU canon of the Battle of Hoth is that the Rebellion was trying to evacuate 30 GR-75 class transports with all their stuff. 17 of them were destroyed, and more might have been if Vader hadn't diverted the entire fleet to chase the Millennium Falcon as the battle concluded (which is part of the underlying theme of Palpatine's hubris about the Jedi blinding him to what ordinary rebels were doing that ultimately brought about his downfall in the form of around 5000 Ewoks). Also the Rebels lost all men and materiel that they were unable to load onto transports, which was a fair amount. Altogether, it was a huge loss for the Rebellion.

The fact that any Rebel transports escaped at all is due to the presence of the planetary ion cannon used to fire upon blockading Star Destroyers to disable them while the transports fled (which is what happens in the one movie shot of the first transport escaping), which was a delicately timed maneuver. They had to use the ion cannon to clear the corridor and escape to hyperspace before any imperial units (with sufficiently heavy guns to down the transports, which means no TIE fighters) can reoccupy it. So if the transports were early or late by a matter of seconds, or the ion cannon failed to hit sufficiently critical systems to disable the star destroyers, they were dead.
Yet when all was said and done, whatever losses the rebels suffered at the battle of Hoth didn't stop them from, in the next movie, punching clean through a fully operational imperial legion with a zillion star destroyers to blow up the second death star, taking out the Executor along the way as bonus.
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Post by Chamomile »

Vader wanting to orbitally bombard Echo Base doesn't gel with the rest of Empire Strikes Back. Luke is in Echo Base, and Vader talks Emperor Palpatine into trying to convert, rather than destroy, Luke, then puts his own life at risk pursuing this strategy by repeatedly trying to talk Luke into surrendering rather than just finishing him off in the multiple times he has Luke at his mercy. And Vader is putting his life at risk here, because Luke is definitely fighting to kill and Vader's advantage isn't so enormous that Luke is unable to touch him. Vader is wounded in the fight.

And Vader wanting to orbitally bombard Echo Base not only doesn't gel with his soon thereafter stated motivation to preserve Luke's life, it also doesn't gel with his actions in the battle itself where, after destroying the shield generator, his next move is to personally walk into Echo Base to chase fleeing rebels rather than have turbolasers blast it to powder. This might just be an oversight in the script completely, but it's also sensible that Vader might've wanted to just destroy the ion cannon and then secure the rest of Echo Base by invasion in order to capture Luke.
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Post by Mechalich »

Chamomile wrote:Vader wanting to orbitally bombard Echo Base doesn't gel with the rest of Empire Strikes Back. Luke is in Echo Base, and Vader talks Emperor Palpatine into trying to convert, rather than destroy, Luke, then puts his own life at risk pursuing this strategy by repeatedly trying to talk Luke into surrendering rather than just finishing him off in the multiple times he has Luke at his mercy. And Vader is putting his life at risk here, because Luke is definitely fighting to kill and Vader's advantage isn't so enormous that Luke is unable to touch him. Vader is wounded in the fight.

And Vader wanting to orbitally bombard Echo Base not only doesn't gel with his soon thereafter stated motivation to preserve Luke's life, it also doesn't gel with his actions in the battle itself where, after destroying the shield generator, his next move is to personally walk into Echo Base to chase fleeing rebels rather than have turbolasers blast it to powder. This might just be an oversight in the script completely, but it's also sensible that Vader might've wanted to just destroy the ion cannon and then secure the rest of Echo Base by invasion in order to capture Luke.
Certainly that's all true. Probably Vader intended a more limited bombardment. The ion cannon was supposedly protected and its power generator was under literally the entire rest of the base, but a quick turbolaser barrage to destroy the power generators would have prevented the shield from ever being raised and potentially allowed the fleet to destroy the transports on their launch pads while they were loading.

Presumably once the need for a surface attack is manifested, it makes sense to capture the base to try and secure any data files left behind, which would explain not leveling it once the shield comes down.

As for Vader himself walking into Echo Base, that seems to totally be him just showing off. Luke's not even there. Vader just has a tendency to march into engagement zones that are in the mop up stage but not properly secured. That's what he does in New Hope and arguably what he does in Rogue One as well. It's not like he was afraid of conventional ground troops at all (by this point in his career Vader's been in literally hundreds of engagements, the man's Wookieepedia page is a 100,000 word novel).
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Post by tussock »

The hyperdrives with instant communications are probably key to star wars combat.

1: You can't just jump. but you can in a few minutes, so ambush combats happen and they are close, brutal, and short because the losers will be gone if they get time. When reinforcements arrive, they will be completely overwhelming.

2: Very big ships carry tractor beams that block hyperspace access to small ships. A small number of jump-capable fighters can be forced to stick around if a big ship turns up.

3: The jump drive is extremely expensive, so things like B-wings and A-wings are awesome ships but also extremely specialised and very rare. If you want to destroy a large warship, B-wings are how you do it cheap, but that is the only thing they can do, and a couple A-wings turning up will explode them long before they can leave.

3a: Note that Tie Bombers and Tie Fighters are massively cheaper, so having a carrier with a good few of each is a pretty sweet deal too, and all the Star Destroyers are carriers.

4: The jump drive wears out, it needs fixed all the time, you get a few jumps and then you park for a long time. Damaged warp drives, from combat, well parts are very expensive, and quite rare for many particular drive units, like all the really good ones. Ships can be out of action for a very long time.

--

So everything is information. Bothan spies. Knowing what you need for the job at hand to warp it into place all at once and win that fight before your target can leave. One ship dropping out of hyperspace early gives you that much less time before the opposition can get their navigation systems synchronised and jump, or call in massive reinforcements.

Conversely, if you want to sit somewhere and be intimidating, run a blockade, you have to be able to handle anything and everything that might come your way. B-wings, A-wings, Frigates, whatever, you need a fighter compliment to wreck the B-wings, laser barrages to swat down the A-wings, big central guns and torpedoes to hit the Frigates, and very big shields to keep out multi-purpose killers like X-wings.

And that's the Empire vs the Alliance. The Empire has ground and wants to hold it, to dominate a piece of space, with a bit of everything just in case, even thousands of marines for surface objectives. While the Alliance just wants to wreck their big ships so the planets can rebel all on their own, so uses warp-capable tiny things that hit vulnerable targets across multiple jumps and then flee into hiding again to refit the warp drives for more of the same. No one really wants to fight a Star Destroyer, it hurts a lot even if you win, and they have a lot of them.

Even the capital ships of the Alliance are specialised fighter-killers or capital-ship-killers, no crew to speak of, maybe a couple dozen marines, no cheap fighter compliment, and if enough Star Destroyers turn up with enough turbo-laser batteries, they almost all go boom before they get a chance to configure the warp drives and leave, and there are a lot of Star Destroyers out there if they ever learn where the Alliance is congregating.

--

So you are basically playing well funded guerrillas who are destroying vulnerable parts of the imperial network in lightning raids and then hiding somewhere behind sensor arrays, ready to make a quick exit if anything big turns up in response. Every now and then you try to knock out a lone star destroyer, only sometimes ten of them turn up in response and that sets you back years. There's rumours the Imperials guarding the local ship repair world have left, and maybe that's true and you can destroy it all, or maybe it's a trap.
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Post by Stahlseele »

maglag wrote:
Mechalich wrote:
maglag wrote: How about simply shooting down the rebel ships as they went up?

Even Leia points out they could only afford two X-wings to escort each transport, yet I don't recall a single one of said transports being shot down, or at least a significant number. The imperial fleet fails at properly nuking the planet, fails at intercepting or pursuing the rebel ships, just what the fuck are star destroyers good for?
The EU canon of the Battle of Hoth is that the Rebellion was trying to evacuate 30 GR-75 class transports with all their stuff. 17 of them were destroyed, and more might have been if Vader hadn't diverted the entire fleet to chase the Millennium Falcon as the battle concluded (which is part of the underlying theme of Palpatine's hubris about the Jedi blinding him to what ordinary rebels were doing that ultimately brought about his downfall in the form of around 5000 Ewoks). Also the Rebels lost all men and materiel that they were unable to load onto transports, which was a fair amount. Altogether, it was a huge loss for the Rebellion.

The fact that any Rebel transports escaped at all is due to the presence of the planetary ion cannon used to fire upon blockading Star Destroyers to disable them while the transports fled (which is what happens in the one movie shot of the first transport escaping), which was a delicately timed maneuver. They had to use the ion cannon to clear the corridor and escape to hyperspace before any imperial units (with sufficiently heavy guns to down the transports, which means no TIE fighters) can reoccupy it. So if the transports were early or late by a matter of seconds, or the ion cannon failed to hit sufficiently critical systems to disable the star destroyers, they were dead.
Yet when all was said and done, whatever losses the rebels suffered at the battle of Hoth didn't stop them from, in the next movie, punching clean through a fully operational imperial legion with a zillion star destroyers to blow up the second death star, taking out the Executor along the way as bonus.
That was a Trap. They did not really break through a line so much as the line was built behind them.
a.) they did not know the Death Star was already operational.
b.) the imperial fleet was in hiding behind a conveniently placed moon and waited for them.
c.) IT'S A TRAP!
Last edited by Stahlseele on Wed Jun 14, 2017 9:05 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by TheFlatline »

deaddmwalking wrote:I don't know why X-wings are capable of FTL travel and TIE-fighters aren't, but that's established in the first movie. Star Destroyers carry a contingent of fighters. Capital ships are also able to defend themselves. Against a dozen fighters, a Star Destroyer will win every time. Against 50? Those odds are probably not good. And considering the investment, that would be a bad trade - there are 40,000 people on a Star Destroyer.
Same reason why the Empire doesn't even put shields or life support in a TIE fighter: pilots are expendable, and imperial doctrine favors maneuverability to survivability. Standard Imperial tactics if I remember correctly is to outnumber the enemy 3-to-1. So while you're trying to shoot down one enemy, his two wingmen are trying to shoot *you* down.

Basically the Empire fighter tactics were the original zerg swarm.

The Empire is basically WW2 Germany at the same time. Their weapons are also symbols of Imperial might and power projections and thus are over the top. A Star Destroyer isn't *just* a carrier, though it does carry something like 72 fighters. It's also a floating government, a mobile outpost, and something you can, as we see in Rogue One, park over a city that is misbehaving to remind citizens that they could get glassed if they misbehave.
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Post by TheFlatline »

spongeknight wrote:
But if the X-Wing can reasonably damage the Star Destroyer then having a Star Destroyer feels a little bit like having a battleship in 1942 (or 2002 for that matter): an ineffectual waste of money.
One of the X-wing books (forgot which one, I read it in high school) solved this problem pretty neatly: Fighters can only realistically punch through capital ship shielding with a coordinated barrage of missiles or other heavy secondary weapons. This means that as long as the enemy has a screen of fighters on the field, any attempt of fighters damaging capital ships makes them sitting ducks in a dogfight. So basically, if your fighters kill the enemy fighters they can help out against capital ships, but when enemy fighters are on the field only capital ships can damage other capitals.
X-wing computer games make this point too. Bombers can destroy cap ships. Usually it is coordinated: Take out the shield generators then destroy the bridge.

Bombers are easy prey to fighters. So you have interceptors that protect the bombers. You don't have to destroy all the fighters to initiate a bombing run, and to be honest one side would probably retreat once their fighter screen was depleted enough. However, if you can tie up the enemy fighters, you can probably sneak a bomber run through.

Basically this is WW2 carrier tactics. Instead of torpedoes you have... err... proton torpedoes.
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Post by OgreBattle »

I've been playing WWII Flight game War Thunder and the dynamics between fighters, heavy fighters, bombers, and naval ships are how I'd like Star Wars to play out.

Wish Star Wars movies had more Flying Fortress, Tu-4 style bombers, firing lasers in all directions while delivering a city-flattening payload is fun imagery
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Post by Mord »

I had geared up to post a lengthy screed on how Star Wars naval combat actually does make sense, but when I thought about it hard enough to write it, I realized it actually doesn't.

The typical justification for bomber-type craft to exist is that they are maneuverable enough to evade turbolasers while carrying proton torpedoes, concussion missiles, and other physical ordnance that has good penetration vs heavily-shielded targets.

However, if heavily-shielded targets are weak to missiles, you would expect large capital ships such as Star Destroyers to also use missiles as their primary weaponry. But we can see that Star Destroyers are bristling with turbolaser batteries rather than missile tubes.

If you introduce the ray/particle shield distinction to explain this, it only gets worse, because that negates the reason for missile weaponry to exist and thereby calls into question why you would need small craft in the first place.

So... fucked if I know.
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Post by Mechalich »

OgreBattle wrote: Wish Star Wars movies had more Flying Fortress, Tu-4 style bombers, firing lasers in all directions while delivering a city-flattening payload is fun imagery
There are ships like this. The LAAT gunship - that hulking thing that transports Clone Troopers around - can be re-purposed to fill this role. Additionally, gunned-up freighter classes - like the Millennium Falcon - serve this role in combat. This is also essentially the type of ship you fly in TOR space combat, albeit without mobile turrets.

The starfighter-type games also included dedicated vessels of this type, the Xg-1 star Wing probably being the most famous.
Mord wrote:However, if heavily-shielded targets are weak to missiles, you would expect large capital ships such as Star Destroyers to also use missiles as their primary weaponry. But we can see that Star Destroyers are bristling with turbolaser batteries rather than missile tubes.
Star Destroyers do have missile weaponry in at least some legends sources, but it seems imperial doctrine preferred lasers. there are possible reasons you can generate.

One is simply cost and endurance. Advanced missile technologies (proton torpedoes and concussion missiles) are expensive. Star Destroyers were expected to have long tours of duty with limited resupply and to potentially fire their weapons hundreds or thousands of times (in a heavy bombardment each turbolaser battery might fight for hours on end). You can do that with lasers but not with missiles - WWII battleships did a lot of shore bombardments, but modern missile-based cruisers can't do that anymore.

Another is instability. Star Destroyers are supposed to be almost incredibly durable - in the EU anyway - routinely taking massive quantities of damage and continuing to fight hard even after losing shields and taking significant quantities of hull damage. Filling them with missile tubes and ammo depots that could potentially explode catastrophically when hit might have been considered a bad idea.

Ultimately though, the missile issue is a problem and it seems that it is helpful to introduce, as an explanation, a major advance in missile technology occurring shortly before the start of the Rebellion in like 4 BBY or so that improved the viability of starfighter anti-capital ship tactics as opposed to the limited capabilities of the massive fighter swarms utilized during the Clone Wars.
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Post by Stahlseele »

For Ship VS Ship Combat the capital ships have medium sized stuff on board such as ion cannons appearantly. Those are there to mainly deal with enemy shields and then let the laser batteries rip them to shreds i assume.
For some reason, this is never ever actually really shown in anything star wars that actually has moving pictures . .
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Post by Chamomile »

The easy explanation is that turbolasers are better at penetrating shielded targets than bombing runs, but are too big to fit on a bomber. The problem with that, of course, is that it only takes a few well-targeted bombing runs to take down a capital ship, but capital ships don't seem to make any effort to target shield generators or the enemy bridge and could presumably down enemy vessels in a hurry if they did.
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Post by Judging__Eagle »

The reason SW's space combat makes no sense is that George based his settings physics from a wide range of pre-existing films focused on dramatic over documentary. In playing telephone with what was already soft science fiction; the setting's physics are always going to lean more towards soft science fiction over hard science fiction.

Specifically in "space combat", Lucas borrowed from WWII fighter plane, and bomber, films. The dogfighting fighters in SW could be replaced with WWII-era fighter planes, and their movements would make much more sense than they would in outer space. Additionally, the WWII-set bomber film "The Dambusters" plot line (a suicide run to bomb a dam critical to enemy industry) is very similar to that of SW:IV ANH.

With that said, either the goal should be to either: replicate source material (in which case find out the references used by your source material, so old war movies); aim for a whole new dynamic for how you want space combat to look like; or aim for a hard science angle.
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Post by Mord »

I've made another effort to think this through, and I think I've got a framework that justifies the existence of capital ships, small craft, lasers, and missiles in the relative blend we see in SW films and games:

Laser cannons are the premier weapon in space because they don't meaningfully expend ammunition and are powered off a ship's existing reactor core. They have recharge times based on the power of their shots and the power of the ship's reactor core. Laser blasts lose coherency over distance, so laser cannons are primarily short-range weapons. There is a broad diversity among laser cannons with respect to firepower, tracking ability, and charge time.

Ray shielding absorbs laser fire and is also powered by the ship's reactor core. A reactor core can only generate so much energy per unit time, and this energy must be allocated among engine power, shield regeneration, and laser charging.

Turbolasers are large, powerful, slow laser cannons hooked up to an equally large and powerful power generator. Turbolaser blasts, being laser blasts, lose coherency with distance, but at longer distances, so they can be used within medium range. Large and powerful turbolaser batteries, shield generators, and reactors must be mounted in a large frame, called a capital ship. Capital ships are necessarily big enough that they can also carry ground troops, supplies, etc., so capital ships are the main means by which militaries project power in the galaxy.

Turbolasers can steadily wear down heavy shields within their range, meaning capital ship duels within turbolaser range are optimization problems looking for the ideal balance of power allocation between shield regeneration and weapon fire rate (typically, the bigger power generator wins, which is why the Imperial Navy builds mile-long cheese wedges).
Capital ships tend to be expensive, and minimizing the risk of damage and destruction is important to any admiralty. Hence, there's a battlefield advantage to whoever can deliver capital ship-killing power without bringing their own capital ships within turbolaser range, or at least damage the enemy ships before engaging in turbolaser combat. There's also an economic advantage to killing really expensive ships without throwing equally expensive ships at them.

There is no effective shielding vs. physical explosives and they can fly a much longer distance than a laser burst can travel before it loses coherency, making ordnance like proton torpedoes a natural fit for this role. However, unguided missiles fired at long range can be targeted by even clumsy weapons like turbolasers because they are slaves to inertia. Guided missiles fired at long range can evade turbolaser fire but risk being scrambled by ECM if their flight time is long enough. Hence, there is a niche for a weapons system that delivers physical ordnance that can dodge turbolasers and brush off ECM while keeping the capital ships outside of enemy turbolaser range. This niche is filled by bomber-type vessels.

One tool with which a target capital ship can counter bombers is point-defense laser cannons. These compete with shields, engines, and turbolasers for power, and expose the ship to damage because of their short range - an enemy bomber flight that gets within laser range may be destroyed, but may deliver a payload before being destroyed.

Another tool for defense against bombers is small craft that can be deployed to bring the speed and accuracy of point-defense laser cannons to bear without leaving the capital ship vulnerable to bomber-delivered ordnance. These are interceptors and fighters. Bombers, fighters, and interceptors exist along a spectrum, and any given class of small craft might have any combination of maneuverability, ordnance, shielding, and laser firepower. Technically, interceptors are supposed to destroy incoming bombers, while fighters are supposed to escort bombers against defending interceptors.

The final common tool used to defend capital ships against bombers is the "anti-starfighter platform," which is a mid-size vessel that sports high-speed laser cannons and shields powerful enough to resist the laser weapons mounted on small craft. ASPs occupy an uncomfortable position in which they are vulnerable to turbolaser fire and bombers but are nonetheless deployed in the path of these things in order to screen larger ships. ASPs can range in size from a freighter (the Millennium Falcon) to a capital ship (the Imperial Lancer frigate).

Heavily shielded small craft (such as the Rebel B-Wing and the Imperial TIE Defender) present the same problems as shielded capital ships in miniature, so there is a small niche in the battlefield for concussion missiles, which are guided missiles with short range and low payload designed to seek and destroy small craft.

Diamond-Boron missiles are specialized guided missiles that are designed to evade turbolaser fire while defeating ECM. They are effective against capital ships and other hardened targets, however, defeating ECM is an expensive proposition, and these missiles are, like bombers, vulnerable to interceptors.
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Post by Stahlseele »

What about Ion-Cannons?
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Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
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