Space Battleship Yamato VS. Executor class Star Destroyer

[avatarxprime]

The Executor does like nothing this entire fight and dies. Spinning A-wing is impossible to stop with all our lasers. What an awesome sight.

I know it's been said before (but not in this thread) the Executor and every other Imperial ship were under orders to not go and slag the Rebel fleet. From the way the battle plays out it looks like they could only just defend themselves and not risk ticking off Palpatine. As to the A-Wing, watching the battle again in your link, at earlier points in the battle both the Rebel and Imperial fleets seem to have no problem with fighters crashing into their ships so long as the shields are up. The Executor was unluckly to have the shields fail right when an A-Wing came barreling through.

Aren't there flames coming out of the executor in the shot of it hitting the death star? It's possible that the combined rebel fleet bombardment inflicted additional damage as well, but it was the A-wing crashing into the bridge that delivered the final blow needed to make it crash. Perhaps SW ship control systems are vulnerable to damage. Grevious' ship did the same thing when it got fucked up in ROTS didn't it?

Grevious's ship was flying around Coruscant, so it could be that part of SW ship control systems include some technology to keep them from turning into a meteorite when they are not moving fast enough to maintain a stable orbit or some bs like that.

I think that's the reasoning behind the Executor crashing.

Shields taken down -> A-wing crashes -> ship controls damaged -> Executor is not moving fast enough to maintain an orbit purely through momentum -> Executor gets sucked into Death Star's gravity well and crashes.

That seems likely, IIRC when SW ships are near/in a gravity well they're supposed to be using repulsors so that the energies of their actual main drives don't go and fry whatever planet or other massive object they happen to be nearby. With the bridge destroyed they probably didn't have enough time to have other areas take control before plowing into the Death Star.

[Skywalker_T-65]

^Incidentally I said that the Imps couldn't destroy the Rebel fleet themselves back in the first page. But you expalined it better so I'll leave it at that.

[PeZook]

Aren't there flames coming out of the executor in the shot of it hitting the death star? It's possible that the combined rebel fleet bombardment inflicted additional damage as well, but it was the A-wing crashing into the bridge that delivered the final blow needed to make it crash. Perhaps SW ship control systems are vulnerable to damage. Grevious' ship did the same thing when it got fucked up in ROTS didn't it?

Dudes, it's not like "ship receives a minor hit and loses all steerage" never happened in the history of warfare. When that same ship happens to be dangerously close to a huge-ass metal moon and the minor hit sets it on fire and oh by the way kills the entire command crew, it happens to die easily.

It doesn't mean that, say, the Akagi, which died to just one bomb, or the HMS Hood which blew the fuck up from a lucky shell hit, would be unable to defend themselves against ships 10 times smaller and lighter than themselves

[VF5SS]

I know it's been said before (but not in this thread) the Executor and every other Imperial ship were under orders to not go and slag the Rebel fleet. From the way the battle plays out it looks like they could only just defend themselves and not risk ticking off Palpatine. As to the A-Wing, watching the battle again in your link, at earlier points in the battle both the Rebel and Imperial fleets seem to have no problem with fighters crashing into their ships so long as the shields are up. The Executor was unluckly to have the shields fail right when an A-Wing came barreling through.

Was Palpatine scanning everyone's mind to make sure they didn't pull the triggers on their guns or does battle meditation or whatever shroud the darkside of the mind that has good judgement and self preservation :v

Cuz the Empire being handcuffed by baffling megalomanical orders isn't a pretty tired argument.

Also is the Executor just criminally undermanned and/or undergunned? Something the size of a city should be terrifyingly unapproachable in terms of AA defense even in its death throes. Instead it's just this big knife that got done in once again because of some Imperial designer's penchant for adding handy fighter friendly trenches to everything.

I think even the Star Wars Arcade game figured out that a couple of walls makes a trench run much more difficult :3

[PeZook]

To figure out what kills a ship, the first step should, instead of looking at weapon power levels and number of hits, be taking as big a sample as possible and seeing if we can make some kind of probability chart. A ship might die in one hit, but that's a lucky one. The other side of the bell curve may be 100 hits. The majority might die in ~70 hits. Just made up numbers but I think medians and standard deviations are more apporpriate tools than joules and watts.

Except of course the ability to nail those all-important systems is often a function of weapon power levels, and we don't exactly have access to the tremendous body of data and experience that actual ship designers use - and obviously, we have no idea how the Executor's critical systems are laid out, or how SW engagements usually go, unlike real life ship designers who can and do look at statistics like "how many hits on average does it take to knock out machinery on a Kidd-class"?

Check out how a battleship's armor plan is devised in real life: literally the first thing that's done is asking the question, "how powerful are enemy guns?", because that's what determines the thickness of armor (or power of shields, number of anti-air missiles etc.) that you will likely need for the ship to be survivable in the first place. So in the absence of reliable battle accounts, determinations based on relative weapon and shield power outputs are just fine.

Another thing is, of course, determining if a vessel has any critical weak spots that might be exploitable by weapons not normally capable of dealing damage to it - but all too often, these discussions don't actually address the chances of EXPLOITING those weak spots by the opponent, just say they're there. I mean, just how reliably could German heavy hitters one-shot battlecruisers with poorly laid out armor schemes?

[Darksider]

Also is the Executor just criminally undermanned and/or undergunned? Something the size of a city should be terrifyingly unapproachable in terms of AA defense even in its death throes. Instead it's just this big knife that got done in once again because of some Imperial designer's penchant for adding handy fighter friendly trenches to everything.

According to Wookiepedia the ship has only 500 point defense laser turrets and over 4,000 anti-capital weapons, so it looks like it's extremely under-gunned in the PD department. I guess imperial designers didn't learn from the death star.

[Batman]

The Death Star would have been fine if it hadn't been for Tarkin's arrogance. Launch a few wings of TIE fighters and the Rebels are mincemeat.

[avatarxprime]

I know it's been said before (but not in this thread) the Executor and every other Imperial ship were under orders to not go and slag the Rebel fleet. From the way the battle plays out it looks like they could only just defend themselves and not risk ticking off Palpatine. As to the A-Wing, watching the battle again in your link, at earlier points in the battle both the Rebel and Imperial fleets seem to have no problem with fighters crashing into their ships so long as the shields are up. The Executor was unluckly to have the shields fail right when an A-Wing came barreling through.

Was Palpatine scanning everyone's mind to make sure they didn't pull the triggers on their guns or does battle meditation or whatever shroud the darkside of the mind that has good judgement and self preservation :v


Cuz the Empire being handcuffed by baffling megalomanical orders isn't a pretty tired argument.

Probably not, but he was in a winning position as far as anyone in either fleet was concerned and given his chief lieutenant's penchant for killing people who "displeased" him, they likely didn't want to take any chances and end up getting a Superlaser to the face. I agree about the megalomanical orders thing, but if it happened it happened. Heck, look at late WW2 Hitler for a real life example.

Also is the Executor just criminally undermanned and/or undergunned? Something the size of a city should be terrifyingly unapproachable in terms of AA defense even in its death throes. Instead it's just this big knife that got done in once again because of some Imperial designer's penchant for adding handy fighter friendly trenches to everything.

Given Darksider's post, it's criminally undergunned. The Executor, from the description of its guns, seems designed to slag other fleets while relying on its fighters and shields to protect it from enemy fire and fighters. Also, gunners wise, it 1590 gunners for 5000 gun placements or ~ 1 gunner for every 3 guns.

[Simon_Jester]

Another thing is, of course, determining if a vessel has any critical weak spots that might be exploitable by weapons not normally capable of dealing damage to it - but all too often, these discussions don't actually address the chances of EXPLOITING those weak spots by the opponent, just say they're there. I mean, just how reliably could German heavy hitters one-shot battlecruisers with poorly laid out armor schemes?

I estimate a 300% probability of this happening in a climactic major fleet battle between British and German navies...

Yeah, there is a certain threshold you might have to break to generally damage at all, but that's more the difference between a 0% chance of important damage and say a 5% chance.

Nevertheless, the difference between thresholds and cumulative damage are important too.

Let's consider a ship going through an asteroid field. It is hit by asteroids once every minute, and is in the field for an hour. At the end of the hour, an asteroid hits it and it blows up suffers a temporary loss of communication.

Can we assume that if you throw 60 asteroids at it, the shields will fail?

Or is it that the first 59 asteroids were too small, so they just bounced off the armor, and #60 was a little bigger than the others and it crossed that threshold into actually doing damage?

Of course, this scenario is from here:
http://www.theforce.net/swtc/isd.html#shields

Where Saxton used the cumulative idea ("[...] which were already undermined by continual pummelling and whatever effects had earlier been suffered at the hands of the Hoth rebel ion cannon operators." and "shields [...] which was already seriously battered by asteroids and possibly an earlier collision with two other destroyers.") which is very likely not a good model at all.

This is interesting. On the other hand, there are cumulative effects in war sometimes- not so much direct physical damage to things like armor, as machinery damage.

Think about tanks. A tank regiment is a dangerous thing- but if you force it to drive thirty miles to get to the objective, it may experience a few mechanical breakdowns, bugs will start showing up, it turns out that Bob forgot to re-sight the gunsight on his tank, shit happens. But not a lot of shit, assuming people know what they're doing.

But put that same regiment through a two-day battle and a hundred mile route march, and all the shit going wrong will go wrong much more extensively. People start getting careless about ammo handling because of the need to fire it quickly. Engines and weapons start to suffer fatigue, and there's no time to repair them. Crews suffer fatigue.

So war machines that have been through a lot of fighting and abuse, even if none of it was really lethal (any more than having a track busted or one of the suspension bolts crack is lethal to a tank), can still be... weakened. Less resistant to some challenge they might otherwise overcome.

So, hard to say. I dunno.

With an enemy ship, it is likely that these guns do have a good chance of busting through though. The guns and the shields just nullify each other for the most part.

Rating "critical hit danger" is probably worthwhile, yeah. For example, this turned out to be a persistent bug in British battlecruisers against enemy naval gunfire, one that hit them over and over and killed thousands of British troops.

[Stark]

Has anyone in this thread seen the live action movie? Don't make me get screencaps.

[Darksider]

What kind of capabilities does the ship have in the live-action movie? are it's guns powerful enough to breach an SSD's shields, can it move fast enough to successfully keep up with the target? browsing over people's posts it seems like no one is entirely aware of the Yamato's abilities.

[Dass.Kapital]

Has anyone in this thread seen the live action movie? Don't make me get screencaps.

*Raises hand*

Yes...seen the live action movie. It's not bad.

The problem is they condense a however many episodic adventure into a 90 min motion picture. Things get changed and things get left out, while some new things get put in.

In the LAM the Gamilon's have been changed. The ships shown had been re-designed (Even then I think you only see them once at the very beginning.)

Might I suggest this as well?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU1lfl6xd-w

Another imagining of said tale.

Much cheers to you and yours.

[Stark]

From what I remember (I think I got rid of it when I moved, unfortunately) its nowhere near this crazy 'just like WW2 battleship armour' nonsense. The FTL seemed pretty fast given how far they were going.

It was a bit silly and the pace was fucked due to being a single movie, but it sure wasn't 'plastic spaceship goes slow and dies a lot'.

[Simon_Jester]

This is interesting. On the other hand, there are cumulative effects in war sometimes- not so much direct physical damage to things like armor, as machinery damage.

Aye. This is part of what leads to the failure - the combined W, Y, and Z thing. Suppose you have an airplane. If you knock out the autopilot, that's damage, but isn't fatal - there's still the human pilot to take over.

If he or she is taken out too, still not fatal, since there's a co-pilot. But, if both humans and the machine are knocked out at once, the plane is in a lot of trouble.

That's how I prefer to look at cumulative damage. Rather than "the shields were battered and lost 50% of their energy handling capabilities" (besides, shields regenerate with time!), it'd be the first damaging hit knocked out the autopilot, and the fatal one knocked out the cockpit too.

Alternatively- the shield gets nuked. The shield "holds" in that very little energy leaks through and causes material damage to the hull, but the strain of holding up a shield against nuking causes the generator to overheat, which burns service life off the components and makes systems failures later on more likely. The shield isn't just an arbitrary pool of "defense" that you can knock hit points off like they were dollars in a bank account, it's a pile of industrial machinery that needs maintenance and cooling and which has many parts that can break, and which might have backups but possibly less effective or versatile backups. Even if the shield can absorb X LOL GIGAWATTS all the time, a sudden pulse of energy from getting nuked or something, or a shot coming in at a funny angle, may have a lasting effect on the generator- stands to reason that if the shield generator interacts with enemy fire (through the intermediary of the shield itself), the enemy fire can interact with the shield (ditto).

[Darksider]

From what I remember (I think I got rid of it when I moved, unfortunately) its nowhere near this crazy 'just like WW2 battleship armour' nonsense. The FTL seemed pretty fast given how far they were going.

It was a bit silly and the pace was fucked due to being a single movie, but it sure wasn't 'plastic spaceship goes slow and dies a lot'.

Is there anything that might give us an idea of how much damage the ship could take under reasonable circumstances? I know most ships in the Yamato-verse die to single shots from each other's main guns, as in the beam cores right through them and blows them up or renders them combat ineffective, but the yamato seems capable of tanking multiple blasts for some reason. Whether that's due to writer fiat or a stronger hull I can't say.

The only thing I can think of right now that might give some idea of the firepower level they have is a scene from the Rebirth film I watched last night. The new bad guys launch several anti-ship missiles at the earth colony ships, and some of them miss and fragment asteroids that are several hundred meters in diameter at least.

[Stark]

There totally is. I'll move my box back into the study on the weekend and see what I can find. The andromedas being totally useless is a bit of a shame because they looked cool. I'm pretty sure in the movie they only have maybe half a dozen fighters tops, tho - they have many pilots but the same two always fly lol.

However, in the live action the ship is literally built from garbage bought into a bunker from a nuclear wasteland that is the devastated earth. :v

[lord Martiya]

Is there anything that might give us an idea of how much damage the ship could take under reasonable circumstances? I know most ships in the Yamato-verse die to single shots from each other's main guns, as in the beam cores right through them and blows them up or renders them combat ineffective, but the yamato seems capable of tanking multiple blasts for some reason. Whether that's due to writer fiat or a stronger hull I can't say.

The only thing I can think of right now that might give some idea of the firepower level they have is a scene from the Rebirth film I watched last night. The new bad guys launch several anti-ship missiles at the earth colony ships, and some of them miss and fragment asteroids that are several hundred meters in diameter at least.

I think I can help with both, thanks to a recent rewatching of the original series.

Firepower: the Yamato has sufficient firepower to shatter asteroids with her shock cannons (the weapons installed in place of the 457mm guns), but it's not clear if it's through brute force or some kind of technobabble (I'm leaning for the technobabble, given that the turrets fire three beams that combines in what appears to be a beam drill), while the Wave Motion Gun fires what is described as a tachion beam with sufficient power to shatter a flying continent.

Armor: the Yamato has survived multiple hits from weapons comparable to her own shock cannons, but has never taken more than three or four before the end of a battle. Bolar and Galmann (Deslar's second nation) have shown the ability to build similar-sized ships with comparable or superior durability (the Legendler comes to mind, having shown even more durability than the titular ship), but most of their ships are far easier to destroy, something that we can justify with them being built in haste during a galaxy-spanning war (in fact, such durable ships are more numerous in Bolar fleet, and could be the survivors of Bolar's pre-war fleet, while all of Galmann's ships have been built during the war).

Now, against not just the Executor but a similar-sized SW warship the Yamato (and about any Leijiverse ship that is not the Arcadia, the Queen Emeraldas, the Karyu, the Hell Castle or the Mazone flagship) has a significant disadvantage in terms of firepower, as the shock cannons aren't guaranteed to penetrate the shields. The Yamato, and from the same era the Andromeda and some minor battleship classes, have the Wave Motion Gun that could easily annihilate similar-sized warships and possibly at least damage the Executor (I'm talking of the version of the first three anime series, that are the ones I watched).
Sadly for the Yamato, the WMG has its own issues. First and most famous, the long charging time: one minute of helplessness to charge (you can prevent the helplessness by charging for five minutes while keeping combat capabilities, as the Earth Defense Force tried to do in episode 21 of the second season, but you don't always have the time), and a few seconds after firing before the ships can fight again. Second, if you know what you're doing you can defend from a WMG rather easily: while the most blatant example is the Yamato crew using captured Gamilas technology to reflect a WMG shot back at Deslar (with Deslar going to great lengths to neutralize it in the second season), it's not the only one, and the only one you can neutralize (Deslar did it in two different ways, with the Yamato surviving the first time due to sheer luck and the second time by boarding his flagship before he could fire). Third, and definitely more pressing, the range: the ones embarked on the Andromeda-class (the immediately successive generation of weapons) have an effective range somewhat inferior to 25,000 km (S2E21: the EDF fleet was at that distance when the White Comet flagship started charging her main gun, that had a range estimated in twice the one of the WMGs).

All in all, I think the Yamato is screwed by the range more than anything else: SW capital ship weapons have a stated effective range of light-minutes, if they don't want to take chance even a puny CR-90 can destroy the SBY from well out of the range of enemy guns. Against the Executor, sheer size of the Imperial ship and the power of her shields mean that there's no guarantee a WMG shot would even scratch the paint on the hull (severely deplete the shields, sure. Penetrate them? Maybe...), while the Executor can return fire with enough firepower to deal with the whole White Comet Empire navy AND the White Comet at once.

[Simon_Jester]

When talking range, agility is the issue, as always. The question is- is Yamato agile enough to dodge enemy fire, and at what range? What about Executor? At what range will Executor reliably be able to move several times its own length before a Wave Motion Gun beam can reach it, making the WMG ineffective against Executor no matter how powerful the weapon might be?

Likewise, at what range can Yamato sidestep pattern fire from Executor's main battery?

Neither ship is pitched as being all that mobile in their own settings...

[Darksider]

Most Yamato-verse ships seem to just sit there and take pot shots at each other at extreme range, but as usual the Yamato itself differs from the rest. It actually makes some decent maneuvers in the rebirth movie. I'm entirely convinced that the Executor has enough of a firepower and shielding advantage to beat another EDF ship like the Andromeda, but the Yamato seems to take the physical laws of it's own universe and violate them like a drunken prom date, sot it may very well win despite any disadvantages it might have.

[Ariphaos]

Almost anything 'ship-sized' with perceptible (i.e. typical technobabble-base) in-space acceleration is nigh-unhittable at light-minute ranges by non-ftl weapons, or by ftl weapons fired with non-ftl sensors. If you have STL weapons, then fighting past a few light-seconds is stupid in that case.

When you try to make a hard sci-fi evasion drive, engaging at ~light-minute ranges seems to be about optimal for space combat (as long as neither side is sitting on a giant heat sink like an asteroid or planet, or has Sunshine and Happiness backing them, in which case the answer is "You don't."), but neither SW nor SBY are typically cited for their realism.

[Connor MacLeod]

From what I gathered the Yamato has virtually infinite 'fuel' supplies because of its drive system. An Executor does not. It may have all these vast high end firepowers or durabilities, but at those rates it also has an incredibly short endurance (IIRC a couple of hours tops). The kicker is tht that limit applies across the board - shields, weapons, engines, etc. all operating at 'max' will require that power draw, so that means that the ship will either have to accept reduced performance to increase endurance, or find some way to defeat the ship in the limited timeframe it has.

[Parallax]

It'd take all of about fifteen seconds to reduce the Yamato to free floating micro sized chunks. I don't think, somehow, that power drain is going to be a terribly pressing issue.

Remember; the Yamato, effectively, has absolutely no shielding of any kind at all and it's construction materials are not known for it's damage absorption/reduction abilities. While it has taken a hell of a beating and kept on trucking on numerous occasions, that won't help it after a turbolaser salvo has obliterated it.

[Batman]

It'd take all of about fifteen seconds to reduce the Yamato to free floating micro sized chunks. I don't think, somehow, that power drain is going to be a terribly pressing issue.
Remember; the Yamato, effectively, has absolutely no shielding of any kind at all and it's construction materials are not known for it's damage absorption/reduction abilities. While it has taken a hell of a beating and kept on trucking on numerous occasions, that won't help it after a turbolaser salvo has obliterated it.

I really like how you present all the numbers and calculations that led you to this conclusion. Oh wait.

[Parallax]

Trying to apply hard (or even vague) numbers to Yamato-tech is impossible since ... well, some of the stuff in the series just doesn't make sense and changes from episode to episode.

Thus, you can only speak in generalisations. We know the energy output of a Star Destroyers' Turbolaser. We know how many turbolasers they can bring to bear on any particular target.

We saw throughout the various Yamato series that the ship can take a lot of damage and keep functioning but is NOT very good at deflecting/reducing damage. Enemy fighter craft can damage her easily enough, capital ship fire tears right through the Yamato like any other ship. Estimating (and yes, it has to be a very loose estimation due to the nature of the show and complete lack of consistency) the range of firepower that the Yamato-verse ships throw around...

Let's make a truly massive concession and say that one of the Yamato's shock cannons is equivalent in damage output to a Heavy Turbolaser (it's nowhere close but let's roll with it anyhow). That means Gamilon shock cannons is about the same - and we saw that damage the Yamato easily enough countless times. Now what we have now is a shielded ship that we know can absorb a LOT of a turbolaser fire and has a LOT of a guns vs a ship with half a dozen guns and no shields.

So even making the huge concession, just for the sake of simplicity, that firepower for individual guns is equal ... the Yamato still has no chance at all.

And yes, I'm ignoring the Wave Motion Gun simply because it takes so much time to charge up and fire that it's pretty much a null factor.

[Themightytom]

It'd take all of about fifteen seconds to reduce the Yamato to free floating micro sized chunks. I don't think, somehow, that power drain is going to be a terribly pressing issue.
Remember; the Yamato, effectively, has absolutely no shielding of any kind at all and it's construction materials are not known for it's damage absorption/reduction abilities. While it has taken a hell of a beating and kept on trucking on numerous occasions, that won't help it after a turbolaser salvo has obliterated it.

I really like how you present all the numbers and calculations that led you to this conclusion. Oh wait.

He calculated fifteen seconds, stipulated micro sized chunks, and cited what it's "construction materials" were "known for" he also conceded Yamato's capabilities to be somewhere between "Takes a hell of a beating and keeps on trucking" and "Was obliterated."

Verbal algebra Batman, it's still math.

I am not serious, I am just about to commit the same sin.

Why are the turbo laser ranges being shortened based on X and Y wing evasion, I understood their inability to hit the fighters to be the result of design and jamming. The Death Star was designed to fight of capitol ships and to ignore fighters. If nothing else, what about Executor's tractor beam? The one on DS1 had considerable range. It snagged the Millennium Falcon when the "small moon" sized space station was still a tiiiny disk visually.

I find it unlikely that they would purpose build some kind of massive supertractor beam, so if that was a standard hanger model, or even a larger sized one for space stations, wouldn't the Executor have a similar range for it's tractor beam? It's a pretty biiiiig ship.

Also how would the Yamato do against the kind of numbers of fighters an Executor can put out? Could they either disable the Wave motion gun, or even board the ship before it can fire? probably not with the one minute charge up, but if the fighters are swarming it, forcing it to do the five minute charge stated above, how would the Yamato handle that?