StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The following is a re-do of a Class of SD I initially came up with years ago. Recently found it again, dusted it off, and tried to make it as "Plausible" as possible. Considering the original version was created purely under the application of "I bet this would look AWESOME!" I spent some time trying to justify certain aspects of the ship

Also I am fully aware that all of the detail I have put into this to make it seem more "plausible" may in fact be seen as "Wank" to others.
I Hope to have balanced things out enough for the stringent expectations of the bored

With that said, I humbly offer for your consideration...
The New ISD "War Galleon Class"



WHATS IN A NAME?
The term “War Galleon” was picked for this new class to evoke a similarity to the English 16th century galleons. Basically a purpose built warship that sacrificed the troop carrying capacity for higher speed and gunfire capability. The ship is designed with the philosophy of taking the basic ISD, which was created as a “Jack of all trades” and streamlining it into a long duration Anti-Capital ship ISD.
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TRADING GROUND FORCES FOR SPACE SUPREMACY
Traditional ISD always have had vast amounts of internal space devoted to carrying ground forces, for the purpose of pacifying Imperial worlds or supporting planetary invasion. The amount of space and additional resources that these troops and their equipment take up, have been devoted instead to changing the new ISD into a more resilient and lethal dedicated warship.
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The “War Galleon” class is designed for long-term patrol and heavy capital ship engagements. It sacrifices almost the entirety of the 10,000 Imperial ground troops and their support forces to make room for extra fuel, power, supply’s, droids, engines, and shield generators to fulfill its new role.
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Heavy automation is also utilized to reduce non-essential functions ((this may seem contrary to normal Imperial doctrine, but my thinking is Changing times require changing philosophies. The “In universe” thinking behind this is that the Remnant can no longer afford to resupply ships as massively crewed as an older ISD.)) Therefore the new War-Galleon is designed to be far more self-sufficient and efficient, trimming the original crew of 37,000 has been reduced to a ‘mere’ 25,000 people.
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FOCUS ON BIG GUNS
In keeping with the stated purpose of being designed for Anti-Capital ship duty, the “Big Guns” of the ship are layered out in a way so all guns may fire forward upon a single target.*
The 8 turrets on each side along the back are constructed on “stairs” so that each turret may fire over the one in front.
Each “Heavy” turret has four barrels to be fired in a linked blast, or alternating to allow for continuous bombardment.
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With the focus on “Big Guns” the question may be asked, “Why bother with medium turbo lasers?
The thinking behind the 12 medium guns are purely as a “back up” in the case of a smaller craft that may pose some sort of threat that has moved too closely to be properly tracked by the larger heavier turrets. Likewise most of the few Ion cannons the ship has are close to the medium turrets for those situations when the ISD wishes to disable a smaller ship for capture or investigation.
((This justification is predicated upon the assumption that Big Turrets do not move fast enough to track such targets, which may turn out to be completely incorrect.))
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Another addition to the design, are the inclusion of three “super heavy” turbo laser cannons, two on the War-Galleons “winglets” and one on the bottom of the ship.
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These have been added with the intent of maximizing a “First Punch Knockout” against similarly sized or smaller sized threats to shorten engagements or prevent a ship from even returning fire at all.
As one of the stated goals of the ship is maximizing durability and lifespan, keeping it from engaging in a fire fight period is something that is seen as further extending it’s life span.
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Such large Turbo lasers may seem an obvious target for smaller craft and fighters to try and disable. With this in mind, the largest, and most vulnerable turbo lasers are also the most heavily defended. Each of the “Super” heavy turbo lasers on the ‘Winglets’ is guarded by three sets of two high-speed Quad Anti Fighter turrets. Two turrets above, two below, and two along the trench. Working together in tandem with targeting computers they can focus to pick off any threats to the “Big Guns” the ISD.

BIG GUNS = BIG POWER
With the addition of so much more armament as well as size and caliber of armament, appropriate considerations must of course be made to account for additional power consumption as well as distribution.
To begin, in both of the "Winglets" added to the new class, Ancillary reactors have been embedded to help power the massive wing mounted turbo lasers, as well as ease energy distribution between the main reactor and additional shield generators. Each of these smaller "wing reactors" are estimated to supply an additional 10% Output of the main reactor.
Another larger 'secondary' reactor has been added in the area where the main hanger used to be and is able to provide an additional 25% Output of the main reactor.

OF BRIDGES AND BACKUPS
*((like the justification for the medium turrets, the following “Fix” may be for a problem that is in fact already dealt with and not an issue))
*Another aspect of the new design is a heavy focus Redundancies and Backups. In keeping with the new push toward making ships last as long as possible and to be as resilient as possible, backup shield generators have been installed throughout the ship. Most of these are set up to be used at times when the primary shields are under heavy strain so as to reduce risk of collapse.
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The computer system of the new class is also designed to avoid collapse or failure by utilizing a largely decentralized net work of computers so that the destruction or failure of one or two of the nodes will allow the whole network to continue to function.
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Another Backup is to the primary command bridge itself. A Secondary bridge is located deep within the ship and is able to coordinate every function of the primary bridge. Before going into combat, the secondary bridge is activated and fully staffed so that in the event of the destruction of the primary bridge command can be transferred almost instantly to the secondary.
Also, in the event of an unanticipated attack, the crew quarters of the Backup Bridge are located very close to the area. So even in the event of a "sneak attack" the secondary bridge can be activated within moments.
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HANGER CHANGES
The final addition of the new ISD is the extreme make over to the underside. Because there is no longer a need for massive landing barges and the 10,000 troops that go with them, the hanger’s new purpose is to launch fighters as quick as possible.
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As such instead of one massive hanger, it has been split into six smaller, but highly efficient hangers. Each one can carry 18 TIEs in 2 rows of 9, with the fighters launching straight down, dropping out of the hanger for maximum launch speed and deployment.
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The six smaller hangers can carry a total of 108 TIE’s or a mix of TIE’s and other support craft. In the example ship used in the picture, the front two hangers have a group of six “Skipray BlastBoats” each to compliment the TIE’s with heavier firepower.



COST AND CONCLUSIONS
While the proposed new class has a great many advantages, detractors may point two notable drawbacks.
Firstly, some might say that the purpose for which the new “War Galleon” class out has been designed is already adequately fulfilled by the “Allegiance” Class star destroyer.
Second, the cost of such a ship would be considerably more than that of a traditional ISD.

While both of these stamens are true, the cost of a “War Galleon” while more than an ISD, would still be significantly less than the cost of an “Allegiance” class SD. Further, because the new class is utilizing the traditional ISD Hull design, construction of the new vessels can take place in far more numerous manufacturing centers than an “Allegiance” class, which requires larger hanger and production facilities. Also while not only costing less than an “Allegiance", the new class will require significantly less food, supplies, and crew to man than a larger Star Destroyer.

In summary, the usefulness of such a ship in the context of the New Imperial Remnant we are an extremely advantageous vessel to put into production.

I'm unsure that simple cutting out the ground forces is going to give that much more mass to play with. Especially not the power, what seems to be a ridiculous increased number of HTLs. Seriously doesn't a Standard ISD just have the two batteries either side of the super structure? Just staggering them so they can all fire forward would be an improvement. You've got more HTLs scattered over there than the original model as guns as far as I can tell.

The hangers seem another weak point. Yes, it sounds like deploying the fighters would be a lot quicker. But what about returning them to the racks? What if they're damaged, what about just standard maintenance for them? It does remind me of the Wraiths in Wraith Squadron replacing a Corvette's escape pods with TIEs for quick release, but that didn't really address the maintenance aspects either and landing was stated to be very difficult.

Also is isn't an Action IV about the size of a corvette? Do they really need that?

It's a cool idea, but its already been done, semi-canonically with the 'Tector' Class. The Bayless design that's seen in RotJ for a few split seconds. But seriously fractalsponge or Eleventh Century Remanment are probably the best people to weigh in on this.

Batch 1 ISD had 6 heavy batteries (4 TL, 2 Ion) with 2 barrels each IIRC, and Batch 2 had 6 batteries with 2 smaller 2 barrel turrets each, batch 3 we don't know and it's existance is under debate also.

How well can it cover the rear firing arc? While having all the heavy and super-heavy guns in the front will certainly give the ship a brutal alpha strike, it needs to have enough firepower to take care of more agile enemies that can sneak up behind it.

Starting from the top- Imperial class are horribly overmanned, which has a lot more to do with doctrine and politics than physical need, it seems- the Mon Cal MC80 cruisers are a reasonable match for them, if possibly actually larger due to the shape of their hull, and they get by with something around five thousand crew.

It seems most likely and fitting to me that the Empire has no faith in its' crews, and breaks what would be one crewbeing's job on a Rebel ship into seven or eight on an Imperial, trying to reduce the challenge of it all to the state where someone of probably below average intelligence and motivation can do it.

Fewer crew, more highly trained, can mean smaller crew facilities, which means you can lose the horrible shot trap that is the bridge tower almost entirely- keep the sensor platforms, but move primary command and control entirely within the main hull.

Speaking of which, it looks from the cross section that almost everything forward of the main reactor bulb is ground, logistics or small craft oriented in some way or other, which is only about a seventh of the ship's total volume admittedly but that's still a hell of a lot.


What it looks like is that heavy guns can track medium targets at medium range outwards, but do have difficulty with a small ship in a turning fight; it is aspect change that matters, and stingers- ships small enough to get in that close and move that fast, and still have weapons capable of doing damage to a Star Destroyer, are not all that common. Ordnance- carrying fighters are a different matter. Lots of point defence good.

Power; yes. Any armament upgrade needs to come with a power upgrade, and I suspect that even at 145% of original capacity this thing still doesn't have enough to power all it's weapons. Presumably prioritises between the superheavies and the standard heavies as the situation warrants? Not a great salvo size from the superheavies though.

As far as the hangar bays go, yes. Obviously the later models in the TIE series are preferable- reasonable enough. Forward hangar should be the retrieval/landing deck for damaged craft, maybe? The Action VI is shorter and fatter than the Corvette, and a reasonable transport.

There are actually six main variations on the Imperator design so far, the small number of heavy guns, paddle deflectors mark I, the larger number of smaller heavies, octuple turret, ring deflectors mark II, Interdictor variants based on each, the gunship Tector and a comic book glimpse of a very interesting carrier variant, in addition to the many individual modifications that were known to exist.

Firepower; as a rough fudge factor, call a Venator 1, that would put a standard Imperator at 2.2 or thereabouts- and a Tector or this thing (and try justifying "hadoken" within the GFFA...) at around 3, with an Allegiance around about 5. It's not quite a heavy destroyer, still basically falls into the same basket as the line destroyer classes.

Borgholio wrote:How well can it cover the rear firing arc? While having all the heavy and super-heavy guns in the front will certainly give the ship a brutal alpha strike, it needs to have enough firepower to take care of more agile enemies that can sneak up behind it.

The 'standard' ISDs aren't all that hot in that area either. Only the sternmost pair of HTL turrets can fire backwards unobstructed. Thing is they can bring all of them to bear on a large part of the rear firing arc by a reasonably minute lifting of the ship's nose relative to that backstabbing bastard attacking from behind so the turrets can superfire each other. Given that most of the War Galleon's weapons are on or close to the ship's centerline, you'd have to stand her on her tail and more to do the same thanks to the superstructure and the damn bridge turret being in the way.

What I don't quite understand is the plethora of HTL/HTL+ turrets. The reason for more turrets as I understand it can be one or a combination of the following:

1. They're the only way to get more firepower because bigger turrets just plain don't work (possible but unlikely in this case given there's two sizes of BIGGER than HTL weapons).
2. Increase your field of fire. Given the ship's geometry and the fact that HTL+ turrets are possible the same field of fire could easily be achieved by fewer but heavier turrets.
3. Be able to engage x number of targets simultaneously. Um-when you expect to be swarmed by that many targets that need HTLs to take out, maybe you should think about negotiating a truce.
4. Redundancy. Again, better achieved by fewer but heavier and more widely spaced turrets.

There's potentially a ton of reasons why just using capital HTL turrets across the board instead of the HTL/capital HTL mix (anything from structural concern to cost to they just plain can't build them fast enough) but I don't see that making sense tactically.

I'd have grouped the parasite craft by squadron mainly for personal preference but having a squadron split across multiple bays is a minor logistics hustle if different squadrons are to receive different loadouts.

What exactly (in your minds) is the weapons loadout for an ISD, anyway? There's no simple answer obviously, since the films certainly never focus on it; the cross-sections and model images only particularly detail the main battery, the trench quad guns, and centerline turrets, none of which are seen to be the source of any of the fire we see coming from them. Partly what I'm wondering is, f'rex, the point of the Lancer - it seems like it'd be trivial to fit at least twenty quite small turrets (I'm after all imagining a quad 23mm Shilka turret IN SPACE) on an ISD and make it death to approach in a starfighter, yet ISDs have commonly been depicted as being pretty much wholly reliant on their TIEs to protect them from enemy starfighters. The Age of Rebellion rulebook has me quite disappointed in this regard, since FFG had the chance to describe an ISD's armament more consistent with the higher levels of information about them, but instead tried to maintain the old "60 turbolasers, 60 ion cannons" BS, though at least in different calibers this time, without picking out the known weapons at all. Ah well.

The Venator comparatively is more clearly known, with its main battery, dual medium turbolasers, and the light guns in twin turrets mounted along the length of the trenches, which at a rough guess look like they could be comparable in size as well as in shape to an Iowa's 5"/38 twin turrets, so I guess light turbolasers- but then there are also the guns mounted internally, on the Age of Sail-esque gun decks firing through gunports, and the point defense stations seen in TCW, neither of which are called out in the ICS but give the Venator a comfortable range of energy weapons from very heavy to very light. Although the Venator has the problem whereby I'm still having a hard time telling, despite the ship's size, where one would actually keep 420 fighters aboard. Certainly TCW never bothered to show mass swarms of fighters launching from them, either.

Some thoughts on having more guns rather than bigger guns, esp. such as in the shift from twin turrets in the ISD-I to octuples, of all the damnedest things, in the ISD-II; I think it's mostly about engagements at range. Shooting at a range such that your hit probability starts to fall way off basically demands that you try to fill your target's cone of maneuver with fire in the hopes of getting at least one hit. Downgrading an individual shot's power somewhat in exchange for dramatically increasing the amount of shots you can send downrange - and thereby the probability of getting a hit in a given timeframe - may well be considered worth it for the Empire, especially facing Rebels who often prefer to run away rather than stand and fight a destroyer. I thought this out while considering an engagement with the destroyers of Death Squadron at extreme range; 22 ISD-IIs with eight octuple gun turrets in their main battery have between them just over 1400 guns; in TCW we see Venators firing their main guns about 2-3 times per second IIRC, which translates to somewhere between 120-180 rpm. So if the ISD-IIs can fire each gun at the same rate, Death Squadron together would be able to, in the course of a minute, send about two hundred thousand rounds downrange. A hit rate of 0.01% at a given (long) range will still generate around twenty hits in one minute. Getting a quarter as many hits means less pressure put on an enemy force before an engagement becomes decisive.

And since we're talking about energy weapons, against which energy shields are the primary defense, total energy tends to matter more than the energy of a given shot. The forces that drove battleship gun sizes up in the past century - range demanding heavier shells for better in-flight stability, armor demanding shells with enough kinetic energy to pierce it rather than bouncing off - don't really apply here, where the ranges of different-caliber weapons can be functionally identical, and concentrating fire on a given point can be equally as effective as hitting that point once with a single shot of equivalent energy. So more guns, with less individual power but equal combined power to a smaller number of heavier guns, can be fired in coordinated salvos when at close range to produce virtually identical effects as the fewer, heavier guns. Perhaps even greater effect, if say heavier turbolasers take more than proportionally longer to discharge and could therefore have less power though more energy than a lighter turbolaser; perhaps there's a point of diminishing returns whereby it makes little sense to continue scaling up turbolasers, which is why we don't see Executor with kilometer-long gun turrets, or even any readily identifiable weapons at all.

So after all that rambling I'll re-pose my original thought, which is why are a Star Destroyer's dorsal and ventral surfaces not just dotted with quad light laser turrets to fill nearby space with fountains of pretty green light?

Thanks everyone for the amazing Feed back! did not expect to get so much so soon!
also interesting that too MANY Guns was a criticism, didn't even consider that one.

Working on a seizable comprehensive response to comments listed that i'll have up later today... Until then however...

For anyone with a rudimentary graphics program, I offer the following:


A Blank "ISD" for you to post what YOU Feel would be an optimum gun placement for such a ship. Enjoy!

EDIT: one last thing, in regards to "why aren't there guns ALL Over an ISD...
Hasn't the reason simply been that, ISD's can "flip" within seconds? As in, if a ship attacks form the bottom, they can 'flip' the ship over guns 'down' in a matter of moments?

Well the ISD is, according to the films at least, the main-line capital ship of the Republic and Imperial Navies. Since it is intended to engage other large capital ships and planetary targets, it should be built around heavy guns. Light and medium guns should fill the spaces where heavy guns can't fit, but heavy turrets should take priority. It would make more sense to have smaller ships such as frigates escorting the ISD and providing the bulk of the light and medium covering fire, as well as the ISD's own fighter compliment.

ISDs may be very fast in a straight line but they have never been seen to maneuver or turn all that quickly. With that said, spinal mount weapons might not be a good idea. Placing the turrets on the wings (top and bottom) would allow all turrets to shoot forward in an alpha strike, while still allowing a full 360 degree field of fire (including aft).

As to what the ISD have, it depends on the source. The earliest books (TJ, WEG) give it 60 batteries of 5 guns each. Later books (Guide, WOTC RPG) give it 60 turbolasers. Few actually separate out the obvious heavy mounts from the more numerous lighter guns.

My old (pre-ICS) estimate had the following for the -1
6 twin heavy mounts
2 twin heavy ion cannon
2 quad heavies on the brim trenches
3 triple mediums on the dorsal centerline
2 single mediums at the front corners of the hangar
120 single light turbos
60 light ion cannon
60 light anti-fighter batteries

Scottish Ninja wrote: And since we're talking about energy weapons, against which energy shields are the primary defense, total energy tends to matter more than the energy of a given shot.

Why?

The forces that drove battleship gun sizes up in the past century - range demanding heavier shells for better in-flight stability, armor demanding shells with enough kinetic energy to pierce it rather than bouncing off - don't really apply here, where the ranges of different-caliber weapons can be functionally identical, and concentrating fire on a given point can be equally as effective as hitting that point once with a single shot of equivalent energy.

Presupposes you can make that happen.Given the hit-to-miss rate seen in the movies...

So more guns, with less individual power but equal combined power to a smaller number of heavier guns, can be fired in coordinated salvos when at close range to produce virtually identical effects as the fewer, heavier guns.

If they 'got' to close range you already did something seriously wrong (or were really unlucky).

So after all that rambling I'll re-pose my original thought, which is why are a Star Destroyer's dorsal and ventral surfaces not just dotted with quad light laser turrets to fill nearby space with fountains of pretty green light?

Because we don't know beans about how shields really work. You can fire 9mm Para at a battleship's armour belt until the cows come home and the only way you're ever going to get penetration is if most of it rusted away. The same may hold true for Wars capital ship shields and LTLs.

Crazedwraith wrote:The hangers seem another weak point. Yes, it sounds like deploying the fighters would be a lot quicker. But what about returning them to the racks? What if they're damaged, what about just standard maintenance for them? It does remind me of the Wraiths in Wraith Squadron replacing a Corvette's escape pods with TIEs for quick release, but that didn't really address the maintenance aspects either and landing was stated to be very difficult.

*Good Point on returning the fighters to their slots, especially damaged fighters.
Perhaps a slightly enlarged front hanger to allow fighters to enter if they are damage and cannot "slot" back into their lunch racks. As far as quick returns on top of quick deployments, that I am not sure how you would do without adding in another Huge hanger space...

Crazedwraith wrote: It's a cool idea, but its already been done, semi-canonically with the 'Tector' Class. The *Bayless design that's seen in RotJ for a few split seconds.

This may be the case... However... I feel mine is waaaaay cooler looking

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote: Starting from the top- Imperial class are horribly overmanned, which has a lot more to do with doctrine and politics than physical need, it seems- the Mon Cal MC80 cruisers are a reasonable match for them, if possibly actually larger due to the shape of their hull, and they get by with something around five thousand crew.

It seems most likely and fitting to me that the Empire has no faith in its' crews, and breaks what would be one crewbeing's job on a Rebel ship into seven or eight on an Imperial, trying to reduce the challenge of it all to the state where someone of probably below average intelligence and motivation can do it.

Fewer crew, more highly trained, can mean smaller crew facilities, which means you can lose the horrible shot trap that is the bridge tower almost entirely- keep the sensor platforms, but move primary command and control entirely within the main hull.

*Yeah "fluff" aside, I never understood the reason for the old source books making crews for imperial ships so MASSIVE other than as a "Hur hur Imperial needs more people because they suck!" or something... Put some training and Faith in your crew, and the number drops dramatically. Even my current "reduced" numbers could come down even more most likely.
As far as the bridge tower goes... Is it sad I originally kept because it "looks cool?"
I"ll admit I'm already putting together a Redacted design and, yeah, time to finally loose the "Shoot Me" target.

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Speaking of which, it looks from the cross section that almost everything forward of the main reactor bulb is ground, logistics or small craft oriented in some way or other, which is only about a seventh of the ship's total volume admittedly but that's still a hell of a lot.

*Ok that is good to know, that makes me feel more secure about being able to free enough space for new Shields and Power Reactors with that space.

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:What it looks like is that heavy guns can track medium targets at medium range outwards, but do have difficulty with a small ship in a turning fight; it is aspect change that matters, and stingers- ships small enough to get in that close and move that fast, and still have weapons capable of doing damage to a Star Destroyer, are not all that common. Ordnance- carrying fighters are a different matter. Lots of point defence good.

Indeed good… So much of what we see in the movies or read in the books comes down to “Plot” In order for something to happen, or for hero’s to win, things you would normally think of as obvious are neglected. And lots of point defense tends to be high on that list.
The layout I have basically has at least two quad cannons near ever part I consider “sensitive” (hangers and such) and then six turrets protecting the super heavy guns. although as mentioned before I am already rethinking replacing those with something else…

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Power; yes. Any armament upgrade needs to come with a power upgrade, and I suspect that even at 145% of original capacity this thing still doesn't have enough to power all it's weapons. Presumably prioritises between the superheavies and the standard heavies as the situation warrants? Not a great salvo size from the superheavies though.

*Yeah I was imagining that power would go to where it's needed, as it's needed. Mostly because I figured I wouldn't be able to add enough extra power for ALL guns to go ALL the time.
As far as the Super heavies. Well again my thinking was if you made them super powerful, they could seriously reduce the length of an engagement even if you had just two facing forward. Although now I am wondering if that goal would be better served with two Super Heavy Ion cannons?

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:As far as the hangar bays go, yes. Obviously the later models in the TIE series are preferable- reasonable enough. Forward hangar should be the retrieval/landing deck for damaged craft, maybe? The Action VI is shorter and fatter than the Corvette, and a reasonable transport.

*Makes sense, and will probably make notes to that effect in my re-edited version I am thinking of. And yeah on the Action, my thinking is on a ship like this you would care more able moving goods in and out then 'capturing' small ships. If you need to dock with something like a Corvette I am sure there are plenty of docks along the outside that you could hull a ship up against.

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:Firepower; as a rough fudge factor, call a Venator 1, that would put a standard Imperator at 2.2 or thereabouts- and a Tector or this thing (and try justifying "hadoken" within the GFFA...) at around 3, with an Allegiance around about 5. It's not quite a heavy destroyer, still basically falls into the same basket as the line destroyer classes.

*I really like that scale in terms of a judge of fire power for existing ships.
Although if an Allegiance is a "5" I'd be hoping this could be more of a "3.5 or 4" as I was hoping to have a ship that could serve a similar role as an Allegiance for lower cost.
As far as the name, well, I DID say I originally came up with it purely as a "Wouldn't it be cool if.." ship Maybe I should just stick with the class name "War Galleon" for now and come up with a better, more 'Imperial' sounding name.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote: Starting from the top- Imperial class are horribly overmanned, which has a lot more to do with doctrine and politics than physical need, it seems- the Mon Cal MC80 cruisers are a reasonable match for them, if possibly actually larger due to the shape of their hull, and they get by with something around five thousand crew.

It seems most likely and fitting to me that the Empire has no faith in its' crews, and breaks what would be one crewbeing's job on a Rebel ship into seven or eight on an Imperial, trying to reduce the challenge of it all to the state where someone of probably below average intelligence and motivation can do it.

Fewer crew, more highly trained, can mean smaller crew facilities, which means you can lose the horrible shot trap that is the bridge tower almost entirely- keep the sensor platforms, but move primary command and control entirely within the main hull.

*Yeah "fluff" aside, I never understood the reason for the old source books making crews for imperial ships so MASSIVE other than as a "Hur hur Imperial needs more people because they suck!" or something... Put some training and Faith in your crew, and the number drops dramatically. Even my current "reduced" numbers could come down even more most likely.
As far as the bridge tower goes... Is it sad I originally kept because it "looks cool?"
I"ll admit I'm already putting together a Redacted design and, yeah, time to finally loose the "Shoot Me" target.

The Death Star novel indicates that each station on a Star Destroyer has several shifts. So it could be a case that Imperial ships a) having the man power to do so, and b) having to be alert all the time for Rebel hit & run attacks and/or things like smugglers, are crewed so that each station is manned all the time at peak efficiency, say 3x 8 hours shifts if we are using 24hrs 'days'.

Rebel ships on the other hand could be manned less because they a) don't have the manpower to throw at it, and b) as they generally are choosing when and where to fight don't need to be manned at peak performance 24x7.

What makes you think, that the ISD is overcrewed instead of the Rebel-Alliance-ships being undercrewed? A modern nuclear aircraft carrier has a crew of 5,000-6,000 men and the closest thing size-wise in the GFFA is the Carrack Cruiser. Venator-SDs have a crew of 7,400 and they are a fifth the size of an ISD. You also have to keep in mind, that the crew of an ISD has - theorytically - to keep the ship operational and running for six years, while it is what for the rebels? - one year at most? Given, that the ISD is large enough to be an articifial world on its own, I wouldn't be surprised, if the crew contained a regiment of prostituets as part of the R&D-department.

we also have to remember that if the legends are true the Rebel Alliance inherited a signifigant portion of CIS hardware so it's not unlikely that the reason rebel ships have so low crew count is that they have old CIS systems running the ships to allow for fewer organic crew member as IIRC droids aren't generally counted among the crew.

and I dunno about protitutes but in the Death Star novel DS1 had bars and vanity item shops so and ISD might have as well though in smaller scale.

Modern Naval ships have small shops and stores on board where crew can buy small items, snacks, and little morale boosters such as that. The bigger ship the bigger the store. So it makes sense than an ISD or a space station such as the Death Star would have something similar.

I'm...not sure how that's supposed to figure into the (allegedly) bloated crew numbers for ISDs.Yes, they're likely to have bigger stores and probably even brothels (though given the available technology those may be virtual) but the people employed there aren't going to make up more than a tiny fraction of the crew (if they are counted as crew to begin with, they may be civilian subcontractors). That being said, even a measly line ISD is huge by modern standards. Using modern day Navy crew members per cubic meter of ship standards, they're practically unpopulated.

From another thread on SD.net where they talked about the volume of an ISD...they figured 44.6 million cubic meters. A google search on the volume of a Nimitz-class carrier got me 720 thousand cubic meters. I don't know how accurate that is but I'll run with it for now.

As far as the crew goes, I get about 45k crew total for an ISD and about 3k for a Nimitz.

So an ISD has about 62 times the internal volume but "only" 15 times the crew compliment. So each crewman has about 4 times more space on an ISD than on a Nimitz.

Now if any of these numbers are off, please correct me. The are the result of 5 minutes on Google, I don't know how accurate they are.

It's more like 6k for a Nimitz but yes I absolutely exaggerated. My point (a point I not necessarily got across all that well) was that ISDs aren't exactly overcrowded.

it should be noted that even modern warships are "overcrewed" compared to automation would allow under ideal conditions even after you factor in the fact that they have multiple shifts, with positions that could be 100% automated under the same ideal conditions still crewed, since lets face you rarely if ever have ideal when in combat.

it could be the same for ISDs with rebel ships are bigger risks since they don't have as much personel to avaible.

Crossroads Inc. wrote:

Eleventh Century Remnant wrote: Starting from the top- Imperial class are horribly overmanned, which has a lot more to do with doctrine and politics than physical need, it seems- the Mon Cal MC80 cruisers are a reasonable match for them, if possibly actually larger due to the shape of their hull, and they get by with something around five thousand crew.

It seems most likely and fitting to me that the Empire has no faith in its' crews, and breaks what would be one crewbeing's job on a Rebel ship into seven or eight on an Imperial, trying to reduce the challenge of it all to the state where someone of probably below average intelligence and motivation can do it.

Fewer crew, more highly trained, can mean smaller crew facilities, which means you can lose the horrible shot trap that is the bridge tower almost entirely- keep the sensor platforms, but move primary command and control entirely within the main hull.

*Yeah "fluff" aside, I never understood the reason for the old source books making crews for imperial ships so MASSIVE other than as a "Hur hur Imperial needs more people because they suck!" or something... Put some training and Faith in your crew, and the number drops dramatically. Even my current "reduced" numbers could come down even more most likely.

Other points: the ISD may be designed with the intention that it can be operated effectively on a much smaller crew- for instance, suppose that a political purge results in 10% of the Starfleet being executed and a number of ships having to have their complements filled out with untrained (but politically reliable) stormtroopers or COMPNOR minions or whatever.

Or, more 'benignly,' suppose a major war breaks out and the ISDs are being mass-produced faster than crews can be fully trained to operate them; being able to draw manpower from two old ships to operate a third new one, and then be able to seamlessly integrate newbies into the crew of all three ships without serious loss of efficiency, is desirable.

Also, the ship may be designed to be able to detach large numbers of ratings for various duties while operating on independent command, over and above the large stormtrooper detachment. Whereas a leaner-manned rebel ship might be hard pressed to detach 100 or 200 crew without putting a big hole in any of its critical departments, say to man a captured warship.

In "The Last Command" when C'Boath had immobilized the crew of the Chimera to force Thrawn into attacking Coruscant they requested 500 additional men from the ISD Judicator until their crew was well again.
ISDs might also have "large" crews and long mission-times to keep the crews isolated from the "normal/ordinary" people of the galaxy and to better indoctrinate them. Makes them more willing to follow otherwise questionable orders and engage in atrocities.

all this ofc assumes that ISDs are overcrewed compared to the "standard" for GFFA ship crews, opposed to rebel ships being permanently undercrewed

I would take every published "official" number on crews with a large grain of salt. The Executor-class for example started with 250' men for an eight kilometer long ship. Then came the correction to 12.8 klicks and finally 19 km and guess how many crew the ship has now? Exactly, still 250'. Or the DS as a 160 km sphere with less than two million men aboard. 750 meter long Acclamator-Is have a crew of 700 men, while Acc-II are supposed to have some 20,000 (which is 4,000 more than the crew-intensive Dreadnought-class heavy cruisers with 600 m lenght carry and almost five times as much as the crew of a Victory-SD), while the Praetor-class BC (4.8 or 6.4 km long depending on source) has a crew of 400,000 (compare to Executor again). And the cost of those ships is a similar mess.

Honestly it makes a lot of sense for a regular SD to have more crew than either the Executor or various CW era warships. A SD is not primarily a line warship after all. It is basically what we would call a cruiser. It's job is to keep running 24/7 patrolling the space under its command and crushing anything it runs into. Thus it needs enough crew to keep all systems running and ready for action on a moments notice. Otherwise those rebels might jump away into hyperspace by the time your crew gets to their battle stations. A dedicated battleship or ship of the line if you prefer is designed to pick its battles and only get committed when it is ready. So it can afford to not have its weaponry and other combat systems running and staffed all the time.