Minimalism part two

[Captain Seafort]

From the DESB, the Empire had one or multiple SSDs or torpedo spheres available to the "average sector commander or moff" throughout the Galactic Civil War. We don't know whether some of these refers to the centuries- or decades-old warships that were built under the Republic, or if it was brand new designs built at each sector deep dock. With the decentralization at the Empire's height, individual moffs could just commission whatever naval project they felt would advance their forces, after all.

And "SSD" could, after all, refer to Allegiances just as easily as Executors. Indeed, given a couple of dozen ISDs you'd expect them to have a few cruisers.

[Junghalli]

Does anybody have the context of the "Executor bankrupted the Empire" thing? I'm wondering if we couldn't rationalize it by it referring to the entire class of ships, rather than a single ship. That would make a lot more sense, and would fit with the "there's a lot of command ships" line in the movie.

[Captain Seafort]

Does anybody have the context of the "Executor bankrupted the Empire" thing? I'm wondering if we couldn't rationalize it by it referring to the entire class of ships, rather than a single ship.

He was reacting to the presence of the Night Hammer, an SSD (presumably Executor-class given that he described as "only the Executor was that big) built by one of the warlords Daala had handily disposed of.

It could be rationalised if Pellaeon were talking about the Ex in terms of the development costs of the class, and referring to the naval budget rather than the Empire as a whole, but there's no way something that small could have bankrupted the galactic economy.

[Publius]

Even taking VADM Pellaeon's statement vis-à-vis Executor's cost in context, it cannot possibly be interpreted at face value. For one thing, the rogue warlords murdered by Daala were only able to muster a paltry fleet of a single Super Star Destroyer, 45 Imperial Star Destroyers, and 112 Victory Star Destroyers -- that is to say, the equivalent of only three or four average Sector Groups (or less than the Sector Group of a single particularly influential potentate like Moff Carlinson or Grand Moff Tarkin, whose ilk were able to command as many as 63 Star Destroyers in a single SectGru, according to the Imperial Sourcbook). This is, if nothing else, an indication of the decidedly narrow economic and military base of the warlord microstates in the Deep Core. Nevertheless a single one of these warlords was able to manufacture an Executor class battleship through careful husbanding of his resources.

[The Romulan Republic]

Does anybody have the context of the "Executor bankrupted the Empire" thing? I'm wondering if we couldn't rationalize it by it referring to the entire class of ships, rather than a single ship. That would make a lot more sense, and would fit with the "there's a lot of command ships" line in the movie.

Something I've always wondered myself. If the Executor class consisted of hundreds or thousands of ships, and especially if its size required developement of new and larger space docks, etc, then I could see it being a significant drain on the budget. (Especially on top of existing projects like the Death Stars. Sort of a "final straw" for the budget. )

If this kind of rationalization doesn't work, though, it should probably just be ignored.

[Batman]

DS2 was built IN SECRET, in a matter of MONTHS, without anybody noticing. An economy that can not only absorb but apparently flat out IGNORE that kind of resource drain isn't likely to be bothered by the construction cost of a couple thousand comparatively tiny Executors.

[The Romulan Republic]

DS2 was built IN SECRET, in a matter of MONTHS, without anybody noticing. An economy that can not only absorb but apparently flat out IGNORE that kind of resource drain isn't likely to be bothered by the construction cost of a couple thousand comparatively tiny Executors.

As a matter of curiosity, has anyone here tried to do calcs on how many times the Executor's volume one Death Star 2 equals?

[Batman]

As a matter of fact, yes, but don't ask me who or where. Anyway the DS2 is the volumetric equivalent of not quite one million CUBE-SHAPED SSDs 19 km a side. I'll leave determining how many ACTUAL SSDs that makes to somebody else but I think we can safely assume that unless there was a ludicrous number of Executors built that somehow disappeared into the Great Beyond the program was nowhere NEARLY enough to bankrupt the naval budget, leave alone the Empire as a whole.

[Anguirus]

So hey, I hear that characters who think that there are 3 million clone troopers because Karen Traviss put her idiot words into their mouths are also irretrievably tainted as stupid madmen.

[The Romulan Republic]

So hey, I hear that characters who think that there are 3 million clone troopers because Karen Traviss put her idiot words into their mouths are also irretrievably tainted as stupid madmen.

Yeah, I tried pointing that out as well. I guess by that standard the Senate, Jedi Order, and the media are all utter retards in Star Wars.

[Ghost Rider]

Wow, behold the stupidity that is cherry picking. The whole thought of SoD aside, people can make stupid statements, but if they continue to do stupid actions and do not prove otherwise...then logically they are *gasp* stupid.

Again, one note comments just make this more of farce then it usually is.

[VT-16]

What's funny is the recent CW Campaign Guide actually makes the 3 million GAR out to be like the Katana Fleet, a roving force, while most clones are doing policing duty on Republic territory, crew starships, work in support services etc. and are not counted among the GAR.

[Knife]

Does anybody have the context of the "Executor bankrupted the Empire" thing? I'm wondering if we couldn't rationalize it by it referring to the entire class of ships, rather than a single ship. That would make a lot more sense, and would fit with the "there's a lot of command ships" line in the movie.

Something I've always wondered myself. If the Executor class consisted of hundreds or thousands of ships, and especially if its size required developement of new and larger space docks, etc, then I could see it being a significant drain on the budget. (Especially on top of existing projects like the Death Stars. Sort of a "final straw" for the budget. )

If this kind of rationalization doesn't work, though, it should probably just be ignored.

Who knows, perhaps the Empire funneled money through the Executor program for the DSII project. lol, the SSD is the five thousand dollar hammer.

[Darth Hoth]

The standard Sector Command Ship? Since when? My knowledge of the EU is somewhat limited, but they hardly seemed that common.

One might start with looking at Han's dialogue from the films before one runs to Bantam. Remember what he said at Endor? An Executor-class ship was nothing much to be excited over.

The exact quote from Starships of the Galaxy is provided below:

Super Star Destroyers sometimes served as mobile repair bases, starfighter carriers, or communications ships (carrying dozens of Holonet transceivers), but most served the standard Super Star Destroyer role of sector command ship and mobile headquarters.

And several old WEG sources say the same thing; VT mentioned one, and I seem to recall others (Cracken's Threat Dossier or some other "Cracken's" book, foremost).

Also, weren't they only built starting around the Battle of Yavin?

Yes. The Empire churned out a lot of them in a couple of years. Which should not be at all surprising, given the industrial capacity they have demonstrated elsewhere. What, you think this is 40k where everything that flies has been around for millennia?

Also, we're not talking about him being stupid, we're talking about him being utterly retarded. How the fuck could someone miss the fact that SSDs were the standard command ship of every sector, if what you claim is true? As much as I would like to respect canon, this is one of those statements (like "3 million clones") that it might be wise to just disregard as incompatible with the rest of the universe. But no, we instead have to start with the extremely illogical statement and then justify it by portraying Pellaeon as unimaginably retarded, when his behavior elsewhere does not nessissarily justify it.

Except that it is not an isolated occurrence, he has made similar grievous errors before and after. Now, from an out-of-universe perspective this can be attributed to him being a pet character for Timothy Zahn, AKA "Captain Minimalism," but in-universe, the best explanation for such repeated stupidity, especially when concentrated to one character, is to merely conclude that he was wrong. We are supposed to harmonise the evidence where possible, not throw it out. The "3 million clones" problem is of another magnitude altogether.

It is like trying to justify the numbers for the Grand Army by concluding that most of the Jedi, Senate, and media were complete retards. Canon or not, at some point something is so stupid that you might just have to dismiss it to avoid concluding that the entire universe is composed of morons. Perhaps this is one of those points.

One can also simply conclude that there were multiple "Grand Armies" (per ICS), or that it was a special formation (as, evidently, a sourcebook has already done). We use the explanation that works best and causes the least disruption in the canon. Not all cases are equal.

In other words, I will not accept one extreem example as proof of Pellaeon's idiocy. Unless you can show from other examples that he really is that stupid, I feel it is wiser to disregard the one exception as evidence of his stupidity.

Except that I gave you three of them, and could probably find more - the Thrawn Trilogy for one should be rife with them, though I have not read through it systematically looking for them. He is a repeat offender; is there not some phrase going "Three strikes, you're out"? You also have the whole "confirmedly incompetent and/or dishonest" bit.

What's wrong with that? 25,000 Star Destroyers (especially if it aplies only to Imperator class SDs) is not exactly a tiny number.

It was very clearly implied that it was the sum total of the fleet, all classes that mattered, with the rest being basically irrelevant.

Yes, I know its a big galaxy, but throw in hyperdrive and all the far more numerous support ships, and that number seems fairly believable.

Have you run the maths? Going with a low-ball estimate for the Empire at 51 million planets, this means that there is less than one ISD for every two million planets. Take the full count of "billions" of worlds, and you are that much worse off. It also means that, with several thousands of Sectors, there are nearly as many SSDs as there are ISDs. Yes, the number is unreasonable.

Dismissing established canon is a rather drastic step, and I hardly think its justified here.

Yes, it is good to maintain consistency. We have canon proof of Pellaeon's idiocy (ignoring all character statements and judgments thereof, he was officially considered incompetent or dishonest, or both), but cannot keep that, but here we must keep a retarded number for the Imperial fleet count because it is "canon"? Doublethink much, there?

On top of that, the number is not "canon" by any definition. WEG's own numbers indicate substantially higher counts, as do a large number of other things (including the sheer size of the Death Star itself . . . Yes, one would have thought that point had grown old, but . . . ). Fleets that can transport oceans, perhaps? Effectively, Zahn was pissed when he wrote those books because the rest of the Bantam authors were not adhering to the "True Way" he had set out, and used them to kill off their plot points; inserting extra minimalism was part of that (Woah, the Unknown Regions suddenly grew by a few orders of magnitude . . . ).

If you're going to use a canon statement as proof of a character's stupidity simply because you don't like it, then this discussion is pointless. Why don't you just go rewrite the entire Star Wars franchise the way you like it, and when you're done, we can debate that?

In my humble opinion, it is easier to assume that one character is wrong than to arbitrarily rewrite the scale of the entire franchise; you may, of course, feel otherwise.

The Rebels did it starting with less.

Do you know the difference between a war and an insurgency?

Besides, these were die-hard Imperial loyalists, so their was probably a certian level of propoganda induced blindness.

Perhaps, but the end result is the same. What do we call the die-hard loyalists who spent their last hours in the bunker with Hitler, assuming that ghost armies from nowhere would MUST come to save them from the much-superior Red Army because der Führer had said so? Exactly: Idiots . . .

And its not like the New Republic didn't turn into quite the pathetic government on deffense matters if the Yuzzan Vong war was any indication.

The Yuuzhan Vong did not think they could defeat all the New Republic with less than two hundred ships. Yes, they butchered defence, but not quite that bad.

[Darth Hoth]

Sorry, the examples you've given are hardly enough to persuade me that he's that stupid. No one's suggesting he was a military genius, and its possible that he was iggnorent of a lot of the scale and structure of the military, if that knowledge fell outside his responsibilities as an officer.

I am no military officer at all. Nor is my neighbour, let us call him Bob. Yet if Bob said, "IT CAN'T BE! That tank we bought last year nearly beankrupted the country, we cannot have two of those!" I can safely consider Bob an idiot who probably flunked his Secondary School mathematics class. If he followed up next year by saying "IT CAN'T BE! Our Army only ever had twenty IFVs!" or "IT CAN'T BE! A hundred guys with rifles could defeat the US military in a conventional war!" I would be dead certain of it.

I'll gladly concede that. But in trying to make that point, I think you have exaggerated the man's ignorance and incompetence beyond what is justified based on his character, dialog, and actions in the EU.

Subjective personal opinion clashes with objective fact, sometimes.

As for the specific examples you gave, I refuted them above, and will do so again further in this post.

No, you did not, you said that you personally would not accept them because. That is not "refuting" them. And you basically ignored at least one (about promotion and disonesty/incompetence).

Pellaeon (at least in The Thrawn Trilogy) is not so much stupid as he is average, and perhaps a bit cowardly (the latter could explain the lack of promotion just as well as stupidity or incompetence).

No, if it says explicitly, "dishonesty or incompetence," it means exactly that. Of course, extreme cowardice is likely to cause both, but that was not how I understood the man.

Those prove nothing. I haven't read the books relating to Daala beyond the Jedi Academy Trilogy, but from what's been posted in this thread it doesn't sound that unreasonable.

I will consider your opinion when you have read the book.

Daala's incompetance is in my opinion exaggerated,

Because . . . you say so.

and believing that she could win seems quite plausible

Because . . . you say so.

in the context of the New Republic's military ineptitude,

"Teh stoopid Bolshies have built a stack of cards, all we have to do is slam the door and it'll come a-tumbling!"

the fact that the Rebellion fought the Empire with less,

The Viet Cong drove the US out of Viet Nam, therefore the NVA can easily attack and occupy CONUS?

and the fact that these are people who would have spent most of their adult lives hearing (and preaching) Imperial propoganda.

"But this is impossible! That dirty, lousy Jew-Bolshie can't kill ME! I'm TEH MASTER RACE! (Oh, and I'm absolutely not stupid, I only believe in my own propaganda!)"

Please do provide those examples. I don't own the books given their relative suckiness, and I'm not going to do the work of proving your case for you regardless.

Be back in a couple of days, then, when I have dug them up. In the meantime, you may concede the Pellaeon debate.

Considering that their hadn't been a major war for a millenia when the Clone Wars began, it seems reasonable to believe that they might be reinventing a lot of military tactics and strategies.

Because . . . you say so? Evidence? And since the Clone Wars were over decades before . . .

Also, even if the basic technologies were largely the same, the scale appears to have increased. As far as I am aware, Death Star scale weaponry was pretty much unprecidented in recent history.

And since she was fighting an insurgency, not a war, this matters how? Or are you seriously claiming that ten years before, a hundred ships could have conquered the galaxy?

Again, the burden of proof is on you.

True.

[Captain Seafort]

Remember what he said at Endor? An Executor-class ship was nothing much to be excited over.

He said there were a lot of command ships. I don't recall any statement about there being thousands of them, and if the Ex-class were intended as mere sector command ships then why exactly was Vader using one as his personal vessel? That would be the equivalent of Jellico commanding the Grand Fleet from a destroyer.

The exact quote from Starships of the Galaxy is provided below:

Super Star Destroyers sometimes served as mobile repair bases, starfighter carriers, or communications ships (carrying dozens of Holonet transceivers), but most served the standard Super Star Destroyer role of sector command ship and mobile headquarters.

And several old WEG sources say the same thing; VT mentioned one, and I seem to recall others (Cracken's Threat Dossier or some other "Cracken's" book, foremost).

So? It's talking about SSDs in general, not necessarily Star Dreadnoughts. As I commented above, this could just as easily be applied to the Allegiance as the Executor.

Have you run the maths? Going with a low-ball estimate for the Empire at 51 million planets, this means that there is less than one ISD for every two million planets. Take the full count of "billions" of worlds, and you are that much worse off. It also means that, with several thousands of Sectors, there are nearly as many SSDs as there are ISDs. Yes, the number is unreasonable.

I believe the most commonly stated rationalisation is that the figure applies strictly to the Imperial Starfleet - i.e. the strategic forces, not the local defences represented by sector fleets.

[VT-16]

For what it's worth, TCSWE says that over 25,000 ISDs were built, with half of them stationed in the Core as reserves. The first SWSB also says about 10% of the entire Imperial Navy was in the Core on reserve, so that means about 90% (about 12,500 ISDs and with plenty of non-ISD ships) are stationed elsewhere.

[Knife]

He said there were a lot of command ships. I don't recall any statement about there being thousands of them, and if the Ex-class were intended as mere sector command ships then why exactly was Vader using one as his personal vessel? That would be the equivalent of Jellico commanding the Grand Fleet from a destroyer.

What makes you think that?

CVN's are usually the core of a battlegroup, yet if more than one gets together in a task force, does the USN bust out some new humongous ship bigger than a CVN to command them?

[Coiler]

He said there were a lot of command ships. I don't recall any statement about there being thousands of them, and if the Ex-class were intended as mere sector command ships then why exactly was Vader using one as his personal vessel? That would be the equivalent of Jellico commanding the Grand Fleet from a destroyer.

For the record, admirals do not always use the biggest ship in their fleet as their flagships. There are many examples in WWII of admirals commanding fleets containing battleships and aircraft carriers from cruisers.

A command ship is a command ship.

[VT-16]

Aren't some of the largest ships in the navies today, command and control vessels that aren't really meant to get into the thick of things? In SW and other stories, they usually serve a dual role, as cruisers or battleships.

[Captain Seafort]

CVN's are usually the core of a battlegroup, yet if more than one gets together in a task force, does the USN bust out some new humongous ship bigger than a CVN to command them?

No, but CVBG's are the equivalent of the Imperial strategic forces, like Death Squadron. Imperial Sector Groups are the equivalent of a single frigate or destroyer chasing pirates around the Caribbean.

[Captain Seafort]

For the record, admirals do not always use the biggest ship in their fleet as their flagships. There are many examples in WWII of admirals commanding fleets containing battleships and aircraft carriers from cruisers.

True, but historically admirals tended to command from battleships, and the Ex was, IIRC, the largest ship of her day - a battleship as well as a command ship.

[Junghalli]

Who knows, perhaps the Empire funneled money through the Executor program for the DSII project. lol, the SSD is the five thousand dollar hammer.

Heh, that had occurred to me as well. I find it hard to imagine the Death Star program was cheap and, well, they had to hide the money going to it somewhere.

As for the 25,000 ISD thing, that seems reasonably easy to rationalize away: the vast majority of the Imperial Navy was made up of different kinds of ships. Or, as others have speculated, the 25,000 was some sort of rapid reaction force, while most of the ships were tied to local commands (sort of like the Comitatensis/Limitanae divide in the Roman Legions).

[Knife]

CVN's are usually the core of a battlegroup, yet if more than one gets together in a task force, does the USN bust out some new humongous ship bigger than a CVN to command them?

No, but CVBG's are the equivalent of the Imperial strategic forces, like Death Squadron. Imperial Sector Groups are the equivalent of a single frigate or destroyer chasing pirates around the Caribbean.

So why isn't the USCG using old Battleships to command and control their Cutters and Corevettes?

[Aaron]

Aren't some of the largest ships in the navies today, command and control vessels that aren't really meant to get into the thick of things? In SW and other stories, they usually serve a dual role, as cruisers or battleships.

Define "navies". The USN has a couple of large command ships whose crew (with embarked command staff) is around three times that of the RCN's largest vessel, we use a DDH or FFH as a "command ship". So it's by no means universal and other then the USN and the old Soviet Navy, I'm not aware of other navies that operate large command ships.