Hull 721, plot arc the second

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Shortish update-

On board the target, they were able to catch the first winds of what was happening. Partly because they were expecting something like it, although the timing and schedule were unfortunate. There was still much to be done.

The ship was at least partly functional, had left the Corellian system at least in a fit state to manoeuvre and launch small craft, but not much else. Perhaps it would have been easier with a world's resources, but with only the bit juggling capablities of themselves (and the droids), a tender and a heavy frigate, they were slowly coming back to life as an effective warship.

If the enemy would only give them time- which they really ought not to do, but the ship's reputation was acting as their shield, helping create the illusion that she was closer to fighting efficiency than was actually the case. A straight attack, hard and heavy, might have got results.

Well, apart from the secret location, the mines and the fireships. Thin defences, that Lennart had no desire to see put to the test, but they were there just in case. The tender's crew were the least happy about it all, but they were behaving for the time being. The group was under emission control, which they were suffering from.

How they were keeping in contact with the galaxy at large was the small craft, which could in theory be tracked if there was anything nearby with the sensors to do it. Which there were probe droids out to detect anyway. The fighters dumping data packets into the system all flew dog- leg courses that were more tentacle in practise, accompanied by scouting and sanitation sweeps that helped sweat the Corellian ale out of them.

The one relevant and most common asked question, though, was why continue to prosecute the siege at all. Good question, the captain thought looking at the map tank display of the sector. The answer being that if we cut and run, we have nowhere to go and nothing to do but join the rebellion, which would be missing the point of getting this far.


I keep going over and over it looking for another option, some kind of way out, and keep digging deeper and deeper. Entirely apart from what blood we have drawn, and bad blood generated as a result, every move we made trying to clear our names dragged us further into the mess.

The worst of it is that I may be the least radical person on board. The crew have been with me, or ahead of me, every step of the way, especially the ones that I now see lead over the cliff. I can't tell them that we've gone too far, at least not without a better alternative. They're ready to spit in the Empire's eye, and are going to get all of that and more, if the rumbles are true.

The blue one must be laughing himself silly. He has been given every available option to play us for fools and use me as a bloodhound, and all he had to do was swallow a little bile to do it. He's reaping the harvest of this and letting me take the controversy, and I have been played for such a sucker. I still think I could take him in a ship to ship duel, though.

What the crew want to do is to improve the situation by shooting something, but who? There are lots of people we could have a go at, given the little things like shielding and power distribution to the guns working properly, but to what effect, to do what in the way of good?

Successful defensive engagements, like vaporising an Inquisitor, are not enough- that much I will agree to- but the people trying to kill us, their instructions come from Imperial Centre. Come to think of it, given a certain string of practical jokes in my youth, I probably am a credible candidate to commit regicide.


Well, that's their motivations taken care of- although the crew of the Swiftsure had taken a calculated risk, which was that the crew of Black Prince would have their priorities out of joint to the extent that the sensor and signal gear would be left to last as the most difficult and intricate job, and that there would be no-one willing to inform them of the preparations against them.

In fact there were three separate sources, in the nearby sectors- people who had heard the news conference and had chosen to stick their necks out. Again, the course of action to be followed as a result of the intel was the hard part. They couldn't really code faster without cracking civil computers and starting their own botnet. Which had been considered, but it clashed with emcon.

The tender had been sorted out, the robopsychology labs had produced some answers and sufficient fear in the droid ranks, everyone was back to their proper name who wanted to be with some interesting and potentially beneficial things done to pension plans, but normal still meant sixteen, eighteen hour days.

At that rate, they only had to buy a little more time. They would soon regain the ability to act, if they could find something sensible to do. The prospects for going vigilante were excellent- but with a capital ship? With the crew, and the crew's families, hostage?


Many ships had an Association, a club of sorts that included ex crew, crew's families, starship spotters, enthusiasts and usually the odd rebel spy; they were very much a holdover from the republic fleet, and discouraged if not outright banned under the Empire.

Although supposed to be a support group and mutual aid association for the families mainly, under the malign neglect they usually received they were usually a source of grumbles, unhappiness, misinformation, occasional far too accurate information, and general getting in the way. Managed properly they could be a very useful asset to secure and reassure, but that seldom happened.

Black Prince didn't have much of one, as a third recruitment tier unit with crewmen from all over the galaxy it would be difficult to look after any of them really, and the bulk of the association would probably consist of lawyers and naval provosts chasing them for various offences civil and military, real and hypothetical; would have been useful at the moment, though.

Pass the word, to such as would get it- include that in the next data packet run, things were happening and it was time to up and move for your own safety? Where to? Not here, that was certain, not Corellia the trail was too hot there, what about Vineland? The sector they had last operated in- that might work. Hopefully it wasn't too late.


At least they knew there was an assassination squadron being assembled. It seemed at times- such as this- that very few of those who fought for the Empire were actually on the same side. Their rival in the elite certainly had no qualms about fratricide.

Let them plan and recruit, and consider covert curveballs that could delay and frustrate the improvised squadron, and buy time to organise, code, and be ready to meet them. Then, how to turn that- there was much to be done in terms of planning to avoid defeat, no sense in planning for it; how to turn what would hopefully be a victory into long term survival?

Thanks to Nerveless, they did actually have a copy of the ops order. Swiftsure hadn't tried to nal-hutta them, that would have been too easy, but the truth wasn't far off- their own sector group had tried to substitute them in place of the ship actually being asked for, as being much more expendable.

That had had a useful political effect; the people of the Nerveless had become very grumpy and usefully disloyal, and had gone along with their captain's schemes, and he remembered quite a lot about the spying trade. They were willing at least, and perhaps competence could be slowly built on that.


There's another equaliser to be had, Lennart thought. If Olghaan brings his friends, and I bring mine. Who else is there who would be willing to stick their neck out on the strength of this, for the cause of reform?

Trapped between actually counter- revolutionary Rebels and degenerate revolutionary Imperialists, who's going to hold a middle ground whose only advantage is that it is more civilised and humane? Who are the fanatic moderates?

Certainly not the blue man, and we must try to corrupt his files soon, that may be essential if my parents and sister ever want to see natural daylight again. Use the droids' intrusion routine? He has no sense of humour- which makes it perfect. Now here is a frightening thought, what are Lord Vader's politics?

He's the dark side apprentice. An evil bastard- literally considering his rumoured parentage- in his own right, but is he really so much of a fool that he doesn't care whether he inherits a going concern or not? He has to have noticed that Palpatine's government is, of late, spiralled down into a backstabbers' charter and guarantee of chaos.

If that is true, he may be the closest thing I have to top cover. Galactic Spirit, we're truly doomed- either way.

The only other credible alternative I can think of, Convarrian- now he is old money, and also old politics. He's no natural believer in the old order, although he won't say or do anything until he has a better chance of victory. Using one of his most undisciplined and unpredictable subordinates as a catspaw? It would be nice if the catspaw really was attached to the cat.


There was a beep at his door. It was about time, he thought- the trick with total monitoring systems was, as ever, to know when not to act on the information received. He knew com-scan were closing on it.

The door slid open, and there were his daughter and one of the signal interpretation section leaders, Lieutenant Ervel Orbiac. Rafaella was looking as she must have done when she was a student, active and energetic, switched on in a way that he had only hoped he would see.

She was dressed in local garb, something that had largely gone to pot- not over Corellia, but much earlier; the fact was, Imperial dress and deportment regulations were damn hard to come up with a sensible excuse for; it was plain the only thing the maternity jacket could possibly have in its' favour was 'Because'.


There were really very few possible arguments why the crew of a spaceship, in space, should have a uniform that was so perversely unsuitable for work and survival in cold, vacuum, radiation conditions.

If the idea was confidence in the ships' systems, then why was the uniform the thing of absurd itchiness and palaeolithic fabric that it was? If it is possible to operate in shirtsleeve comfort, why not do so? In practise Black Prince's crew tended to wear whatever worked for them, as long as nobody officious was looking.

There were versions of the Stormtrooper bodyglove that were intended to fit under the more specialist armour sets, rad, nova and dungeon trooper suits, that had the performance needed for comfortable day wear shading to emergency survival suit;

but the most common users were regular troopers surreptitiously upgrading who at least had the physical shape not to look blobby in something where the clue was in the name bodyglove.


Lennart had had a fun argument with Severian about that, he had said (feeling embarrassedly patriarchal) that it would not be a good idea for Rafaella, already drawing enough attention from being the captain's daughter, to go sashaying about the ship in curve- tight, provocative gloss black.

Severian knew exactly what he meant and actually agreed, practically speaking, having been the lone woman in a barracks of two hundred men, but she couldn't just let that one pass by.

In the end they had compromised that were practical issues involved, that Rafe was young, troubled and didn't need her abilities to cope that heavily tested yet, that there was a balance to be struck, and that she, Severian, was indeed highly provocative. It probably wasn't the right time to be working on brothers and sisters for Rafaella, but what the heck.


Rafaella had come aboard with virtually nothing except the prison overall she stood up in, and needed to be equipped out of ship's stores; there was a corner of her mind, the one her father worried about, that wanted to be dark and sleek and seductively deadly-

but the rest of her thought of wallscreens cracking over skulls, and decided best not. She had ended up in an engineering fire and shock proof coverall, one of the middle layers of damage control gear.

Orbiac, who was his usual scruffy self, began by splurting out words so rapidly they tripped over each other, 'We've found it, we've got it, the originator, the exchange codes, ten to the forty- seventh my fnording glunt, none of the possible alternatives make sense, they even gundeck their randomness reports, we caught an echo beacon, it just popped itself to logic elements, we've got it.'

Lennart looked at him, motioned him to one of the office chairs, to him 'Breathe.' And to his daughter 'interpret.'


'We intercepted a copy of the operations order from Imperial Centre to Swiftsure.' Rafaella said, and her father was very happy about that 'we.' 'It makes no sense, it almost looks as if it's them that are being set up-'

'Extract first, interpret later. The text, including the headers and routers?' Lennart asked for and got it, put it up on the holotank. Hm. 'It appears to be from 1030 Glittanai all right, and I'm about to do what I told you not to, because look at the originator.'

The two naval officers could make sense of the garble of code and abbreviations, Rafaella couldn't and concentrated on finding what islets of sense she could discover in the sea of acronyms. 'What's a Mox Slosin, PIOIB?'

'Messenger boy from the Palace, basically. Where's Shandon? Call him,' He asked Orbiac, and prodded at his desk com, 'Brenn? We've got something, a com intercept that just might be too good to be true. Ready room three.'


Brenn acknowledged sounding as if he had just got out of bed, which he had, and Lennart turned back to the holotable, trying to put himself in the head of Swiftsure's commander. Were they expecting us to intercept and crack this, or not? Where was the message frame, how did we come by this? Are our com-runner droids better streetfighters than their com droids?

This isn't enough, it's barely a figleaf of a go code. They must have been privately briefed, which is a window of opportunity to exploit perhaps. Slosin is a dark sider and, now let me recall- we had him down as one of the dogs.

A loyal Inquisitor who famously described himself, to people who ought to at least have had the grace to laugh, as a hammer to beat the galaxy into the shape Palpatine wants of it.

A more brutal and obvious example of the basic divide here it would be hard to find. The naval ops order is signed by, oh now, that's interesting, a Vice-Admiral might mean something out at the coal face but at Ultimate Headquarters is barely a clerk typist.

It's entirely possible what's his name, Olghaan on the Swiftsure doesn't have sufficient paper authority to put a task group together at all. I wish I could smell if that was a message or an opportunity.


Brenn and Rythanor aren't here yet, may as well go from square one. 'All right, now that I'm up to speed you can start telling me how you see this.'

'Logic filter.' Orbiac said. 'It doesn't justify the actions Swiftsure has already taken, not formally.' Shovel Orbiac was one step above a clown most of the time, but was tolerated for it because he saved all his common sense and mother wit for his job.

'The people who accept this as the word of authority are, hm, the well conditioned? We can't crack messages that are only written between the lines.

This is enough for the captain of the Swiftsure, and for the local forces who- we think there are indications- have decided to go along with it, because of the Emperor's writ they think is behind it.' They were probably right to think so, of course.


'In other words, I've screwed this up.' Lennart said, as Shandon Rythanor and Iel Brenn came into the ready room, heard him, a raised eyebrow from the nav and a look of bafflement from the com scan chief. 'What I should have done is pretend we were operating under secret instructions from Centre, and we could have got away with incredible things.'

'I thought we already had, and the current stangstorm was the result of Coruscant finally realising it and deciding to get us for it.' Brenn pointed out. 'What have we got, the original operations order?'

Lennart brought that back to the projector, and Brenn looked through it, said 'They must have been privately briefed, it's hardly enough otherwise. Is it just me or is this us out of options?

We can't exactly be pretending to save the empire from itself and from a regicidal conspiracy when the emperor has just decided conspiracy and fratricide is actually business as usual, and he'd rather have us dead?'


'I'm still not joining the Alliance, certainly not without a written contract and a chance to finally use that whoopee cushion.' Lennart said. 'Have you considered that we may be the last people the authorities want investigating any of this- assume there are authorities, for the moment- because we're prime candidates for joining it? That they suspect we actually have, and are playing at least a double game?

Authority's man, the blue one, we've fed him some information but not much, and I've stopped talking to him since that business with my sister. We need to spike him, I think, the next thing we do say to him I want laden and layered with all the worms, tionese equines, virii, bugs and assorted nasties you can physically fit in- and think of some good disinformation to nest them in, at that. We're never going to get a clear hearing- never mind fair for now- through him.'

Rafaella was horrified, said 'Alrika, your sister, you can't just-'

'I'll never get them out, or free, by playing along the way he seems to want me to. Telling him and the official investigation to go shove it and dumping it all to Vader instead has more possibility about it, especially in what we hope the aftermath will be.

What does this give us tactically?' He changed the subject. 'We're not going to be able to avoid a fight, so what advantages can we take from this- can we feed them misinformation, contradictory orders? Predict flight paths to join and ambush?'


With what, Brenn wondered until he remembered the two fireships. 'Either way-' meaning to say more, but the time for grumbling was over and the time to act was almost upon them.

Shook his head, added 'We're running too many probes for my taste, I think the odds are against us getting the information we need to set up a well aimed deception without giving our own position away.

Swifsure's picked a group of seconds because they think some of them are loyal to Palpatine, some of them are crazy and some of them are desperate, but all of them willing to fight us. In detail they might be wrong, but timing and aiming subversion- that is going to take more detail than we have to be sure.

At the moment, we could wing it. If we can pick someone who we're sure is loyal to the cause of tyranny and whom the universe would be better without,' he added that bit heavily, squeezing the words out, 'we could use the shuttles to set an ambush, torpedoes and an asteroid.

What a situation, though. I can't think of any way it could have avoided being like this, short of rolling over and waving our legs in the air, and if they're right to read between the lines the way they do the Empire's beyond reform, but it's still a drakh sandwich.'


'Unless we survive we'll never figure it out. Shandon, you look like the singularity got your tongue, nothing to add?'

Quite a dangerous thing to ask, in view of the com scan chief's last known frame of mind. 'Three problems- they know us, will expect it and will try it themselves, one on one even with Swiftsure we have an EW/IW edge but not in a concerted action.

We have a graffitti incident that our only defence against is that it is so much like what we would do we couldn't possibly have been stupid enough to be that obvious, and the nearby sector groups are starting to position themselves according to how they think it's going to play out. We haven't got many friends.'

'Tell me more about this graffitti incident.' Lennart said.

'It seems that, under the influence of program or programs unknown, a work division of the Executor's astromechs went a little bit mad, and decided to paint the emblem of the Open Circle Fleet two kilometres tall on the starboard hull glacis.' Rythanor said.

'It's obviously made your day. You're right, that's so totally and obviously us we'd have to have been completely insane to have done it, I'd prefer to avoid offending Lord Vader, that's absurdly counterproductive- which I presume means we did?'

'Not deliberately, but...given the sleazebaggano incident, I'm taking no bets. This was a fleet circular, mandating inceased droid security measures- we recieved by remote commo droid. We need something to cannibalise because we are running out of those.' Rythanor said.


'The fleet tender in companion orbit?' Lennart suggested. 'Has something changed, by the way- you took a hard hit and it's a pleasant surprise you've bounced back so soon, but still a surprise. What's up?'

'The weight of uncertainty has gone, things have finally fallen into shape. I know what I'm doing, now; we're here, we're in shit, and we're going to fight.'

'That's the situation at it's essentials, all right.' Lennart said, thinking, well, he is the com scan chief, perhaps when you take all the crud away that really is all it boils down to... 'Swiftsure and her group won't go banging about space at random, probably won't do a deep search because of the ambush possibilities it gives us;

unless they're wildly optimistic they'll use the one place they know we have assets, the wing elements over Veren Porphyr, as the beginning of the battle- play. Do we have enough intrusion to tell where they're assembling?'


'Scouts and probes, maybe, not information relayed; I wonder how deceptive they think they need to be- how far out of the loop we are? Do any of the locals have the authority to stop this happening?'

'Does Lord Vader?' Rafaella suggested.

'I'm not about to ask him and find out, because you only know what he's like from the news and a much manipulated reputation. The fact that he hasn't taken against us already is a positive sign,' Lennart said with his fingers crossed, 'but he certainly has no respect for complainers or losers.

He won't stop it before, unless to blow both sides to bits- defensively weak that thing may be be but galactic spirit, the firepower the Executor can dish out- I think as much as it is realistic to hope for is that he gets involved after the shooting is done. If fortune is with us, maybe during. In the meantime- torpedoes and a handy asteroid, you say?'

[Andras]

Ok, I have a terrifying proposal. Put the hyperdrive back to the 'explosive' settings, find out where the enemy squadron is assembling and hyper in.

<Kaboom>

"Oops, did I do that?"

[Vianca]

One way could be to let the rebels do it for you.
But I'm wondering about certain units their paper trails, how legaly correct are they?
You know that fake papers are usealy a bit too correct, right?

I mean, how many are inserts by third parties like Vader, Palpatine, Trawn, ISB, the rebels, ect, ect.
Now, i do think that what happend to Vaders ride might be a good thing to use as inspiration, but more along data gathering & later sabotage.
Bet Mirrannon will want to steal certain blueprint.
Or should that be hull parts?

[macfanpro]

One thing I've always wondered about the Star Wars armory is the lack of long-range missiles (yes, this is tangentially related to the plot). The general idea would be to build a one-shot starfighter with a computerized pilot and no safety margins, like this courier system. That platform in particular would be a good starting off point, but you'd have to make a few changes, such as improved sensors and a hyperwave relay.

Tactically, they would work like modern AShMs do. Most likely, a spotter ship would be near the target, providing mid-course updates via hyperwave to the missile guidance systems. The capital ship carrying the missiles would then fire them in a lock on after launch profile, using the sensor data received from the forward observer to produce a general fire plan. The missiles would then accelerate to attack velocity in uncontested space near the launching vessel, and jump to the location provided by the forward observer. Once the missiles arrive in the vicinity of the target, they deploy either munitions, like anticapital proton torpedos, or expend themselves against the target.

There are a few problems with this. For one, it'd be jolly expensive, since starfighter tech isn't exactly cheap. It might not be quite as accurate as the launcher would actually like, since a trivial hyperspace jump by the target may put it out of the zone of lethality of the missiles. However, this last problem may be solvable by improving the hyperdrive on the missiles to enable either course-correction based on observer data, or pre-planned course correction points that allow the missile to choose different courses through hyperspace.

Another potential problem is attrition. The big missiles would be liable to interception by PD at a higher rate than the small, more maneuverable missiles would be. This is mitigated somewhat by the surprise of emergence, but it is still an issue. One solution would be to load the weapons bay with submunitions, like class D proton torpedoes. One could probably fit 8-10 in one missile, providing a pretty reasonable punch.

It seems that missiles could provide substantial tactical flexibility. Take the situation that Swiftsure is in, for instance. They know the rough position of Black Prince, but not her exact position. In addition also don't want to expose themselves to danger. One solution afforded by missiles is to launch a hyperspace enabled sensor drone into the region as an observer, then following it with a large salvo of missiles. This doesn't even have to be launched from the ISD, as it seems reasonable that you could fully containerize the missiles allowing general placement and use, even off of civilian craft.

On the other side, the missiles could be used as mines with very, very large areas of effectiveness. Since the transport container is sealed and has sufficient electronics to preform a launch, a communications package could be made to command the launch of the missile to a given target, allowing longer wait times, as well as reducing discoverability. Then, transports could release containerized missiles into strategically important areas. Combined with sensor satellites, and sufficient computing power to enable high-precision microjumps, the missiles could act to deny a large volume of space to capital ships, far more effectively than area-of-effect munitions could.

Planetary defence is another tempting application. Once detections are made, the missiles could be launched to the vicinity of the aggressor from within planetary shielding. While this is a second-best solution, it is far less expensive than ion or turbolaser equivalents, while providing far greater range. It seems that a lot of planetary governments are able to afford low-end starfighters, making the market pretty clear.

More novel things are also possible. For instance, "catching" a enemy ship in hyperspace itself would be a very useful feature of a mine, preventing targets from preforming high-precision maneuvers via hyperspace through the mine array. This functionality could also be used in pursuit situations, as the missile's hyperdrive is presumably able to outrun any reusable unit. Another possibility is deploying the missiles in hyperspace itself, watching for transitions through the array. Missiles could be launched into pursuit trajectories, exiting at almost the same instant and location the transgressor did.

What are the issues with this, other than simple price? Hyperspace enabled ship killing missiles seem like a obvious and potentially very useful idea, so what are the problems with them, that prevent their being deployed?

[fractalsponge1]

Despite everything, i'm taking a great liking to Swiftsure, and will be very put out if you snuff her out ECR

[Vianca]

Besides the fact that it could make every possible fleet force old-dated, including the Death Stars?
You think a Sith would like that?
What do you think his back-up plan is?
Look up the: "Galaxy Gun".

But it shows a nice use for a possible modular bay, right Remnant?
Drop & play.

[macfanpro]

Besides the fact that it could make every possible fleet force old-dated, including the Death Stars?
You think a Sith would like that?
What do you think his back-up plan is?
Look up the: "Galaxy Gun".

But it shows a nice use for a possible modular bay, right Remnant?
Drop & play.

This would actually be both worse and better than the galaxy gun. On the worse side, they're way, way, way easier to make. It seems that a lot of places have the ability to make starfighters, and the only different thing about these is the electronics.

On the better side, they don't have the ability to easily crack planets. You'd have to throw a lot of them, and it would end up being more cost effective to use the missiles to break the defences, then follow with bombardment vessels. Now, this goes both ways, since you can put a missile on a truck, and use it to interdict local space (sensor limitations, etc)

Now, ships are a much harder target than planets. Even I can predict the location of a planet at time t. However, you can't do that for vessels, especially military ones that know they're in a hostile environment. You really do need the forward observer and course correction.

[macfanpro]

Besides the fact that it could make every possible fleet force old-dated, including the Death Stars?
You think a Sith would like that?
What do you think his back-up plan is?
Look up the: "Galaxy Gun".

I am aware of the Galaxy Gun, and I think that it is making the wrong tradeoff. In designing a munition of this sort, you can either have an expensive launcher, and a cheap round, or a cheap launcher and an expensive round. The Galaxy Gun was really, really expensive, and the rounds it fired weren't that cheap either. This was due to the custom nature of the system, and the inherent lack of economy of scale. The gun and its munitions had to be large and complicated to accelerate a projectile to hyperspace and have it hit its target.

In contrast, my proposal is making the launcher cheap as dirt (I'm thinking something like modern intermodal containers, 20'x8' steel boxes) that act as expendable self-contained launchers. This is similar to the approach taken with the 46N6 missile complex as part of the S-300 surface-to-air missile system; the missiles are sealed into launch tubes at the factory, and have 10 year shelf lives without maintenance. The ideal hyperspace missile system is analogous, with the simple launcher containing a complicated missile.

The next question is how complicated the missile actually is. The Galaxy Gun (and its ammunition) was hard to make since it was unique. In contrast, hyperspace missiles are a simple extension of existing droid and starfighter technology, and a rather simple one at that. Any facility capable of manufacturing a Z-95 should be able to make the physicals of the missile with ease. This makes it pretty obvious that once the design is assembled and the software is developed, there's no going back, since the metaphorical monkey with a rock can manufacture a highly effective anti-capital weapons system.

But it shows a nice use for a possible modular bay, right Remnant?
Drop & play.

You don't even need to go that far. The packaging of the missiles lets you put them anywhere, even on civilian ships not designed for missile launching. On Black Prince, they could store them on racks in the docking bays, or even externally. This is the beauty of the idea, that literally anything can carry these. With turbolasers, energy generation puts constraints on minimum size needed to perform anticapital duties. However, hyperspace enabled missiles enable the use of ships as light as (dedicated) corvettes or stock destroyers as missile launch platforms.

The obvious counter to these missiles is something like an evolved Lancer. The lasers would be replaced with either LTL or small missile, and left on fully automatic control. EW electronics would automatically attempt to identify and track targets, whose extraction predictions would be pre-emptively flooded by flak LTL. Terminal interception could be provided by fast-reacting missile systems, to enable hard-kill intercepts on highly dangerous targets.

Moving away from the hard-kill concept, destroyers would shrink a lot, and everything that couldn't preform extremely rapid maneuvers would also be rendered obsolete. The easiest way to kill the missile is to not be in the way, and microjumps and violent realspace maneuvers would become essential to avoid interception. These combined would metaphorically sink crusiers+, since they aren't able to keep up with starfighter hyperspace or subspace maneuvering.

The missiles aren't hard to make in the SW universe, and the concept already exists in the form of droid starfighters as well as courier pods, in addition to the obvious concussion missiles and proton torpedoes. The next question is why hasn't some smart person, in the Alliance, say, put something like this together? It'd be a very good, no, amazing weapons platform for the Alliance, since it allows smaller vessels to collaborate or even act independently to preform low-rick engagements that have a high probability of destroying a much more valuable target. The Alliance has the technical ability, clearly, so there must be a technical reason these haven't caught on.

(Note: I have a previous similar comment in moderation. This may be a doubleish post)

[Simon_Jester]

I can't help but think that there's a plotline planned here that doesn't involve a fight with Swiftsure.

Tactically, they would work like modern AShMs do. Most likely, a spotter ship would be near the target, providing mid-course updates via hyperwave to the missile guidance systems. The capital ship carrying the missiles would then fire them in a lock on after launch profile, using the sensor data received from the forward observer to produce a general fire plan. The missiles would then accelerate to attack velocity in uncontested space near the launching vessel, and jump to the location provided by the forward observer. Once the missiles arrive in the vicinity of the target, they deploy either munitions, like anticapital proton torpedos, or expend themselves against the target.

The fundamental problem here is whether or not a suitable automated system can do a precision jump out of hyperspace- and to what precision.

Assume you've essentially taken an astromech droid, tied a handkerchief around its head, and gotten it to shout 'BANZAI!' a few times to pilot this thing. Can R2-Baka-Bomb emerge reliably within, say, ten thousand kilometers of a target and on a heading that allows it to engage quickly without a time-consuming engine burn to match vectors? Twenty thousand? Fifty? What's the practical limit?

I'm not sure a simple, small scale navigation computer would be able to adjust its target on the fly well enough to be useful for this kind of thing.

It seems that missiles could provide substantial tactical flexibility. Take the situation that Swiftsure is in, for instance. They know the rough position of Black Prince, but not her exact position. In addition also don't want to expose themselves to danger. One solution afforded by missiles is to launch a hyperspace enabled sensor drone into the region as an observer, then following it with a large salvo of missiles. This doesn't even have to be launched from the ISD, as it seems reasonable that you could fully containerize the missiles allowing general placement and use, even off of civilian craft.

They could also launch the same sensor drone, then drop multiple ISDs on the target- which is the basic strategy being used at Hoth while this is going on. The only difference is that Hoth is a planetary base, so the ops plan is a little more complex...

Planetary defence is another tempting application. Once detections are made, the missiles could be launched to the vicinity of the aggressor from within planetary shielding. While this is a second-best solution, it is far less expensive than ion or turbolaser equivalents, while providing far greater range. It seems that a lot of planetary governments are able to afford low-end starfighters, making the market pretty clear.

The problem is that each of these is as expensive as a fighter, and buying enough hypermissiles to reliably overwhelm a capital ship's defenses may not actually be much cheaper than buying enough fighters to destroy that capital ship.

What are the issues with this, other than simple price? Hyperspace enabled ship killing missiles seem like a obvious and potentially very useful idea, so what are the problems with them, that prevent their being deployed?

Please note that in the 'real' Star Wars we don't have enough information to be sure this would work, although the obvious example of the Galaxy Gun exists. In the ECR-version of Star Wars, this tactic could probably be evaluated more rationally.

[macfanpro]

I can't help but think that there's a plotline planned here that doesn't involve a fight with Swiftsure.

Tactically, they would work like modern AShMs do. Most likely, a spotter ship would be near the target, providing mid-course updates via hyperwave to the missile guidance systems. The capital ship carrying the missiles would then fire them in a lock on after launch profile, using the sensor data received from the forward observer to produce a general fire plan. The missiles would then accelerate to attack velocity in uncontested space near the launching vessel, and jump to the location provided by the forward observer. Once the missiles arrive in the vicinity of the target, they deploy either munitions, like anticapital proton torpedos, or expend themselves against the target.

The fundamental problem here is whether or not a suitable automated system can do a precision jump out of hyperspace- and to what precision.

Assume you've essentially taken an astromech droid, tied a handkerchief around its head, and gotten it to shout 'BANZAI!' a few times to pilot this thing. Can R2-Baka-Bomb emerge reliably within, say, ten thousand kilometers of a target and on a heading that allows it to engage quickly without a time-consuming engine burn to match vectors? Twenty thousand? Fifty? What's the practical limit?

I'm not sure a simple, small scale navigation computer would be able to adjust its target on the fly well enough to be useful for this kind of thing.

This is the most important assumption that I made, and it's also the least founded one. Another important one I made is that one can make course corrections within hyperspace, which isn't well established. You really need even tighter emergence locations than that, in order to prevent PD interception.

I think that this part of the problem will have to remain up in the air, since we'd need a lot more information in order to work out how precise hyperdrive is with x FLOPS. It does seem like hyperspace can be used to very high precision, but it's hard to say exactly what did the calculations in many cases. Now, you could have a system where the launching ship developed a fire plan that included hyperspace routes, and continued to provide guidance via hyperwave comms and mid-course updates, but this is a patch, really.

It seems that missiles could provide substantial tactical flexibility. Take the situation that Swiftsure is in, for instance. They know the rough position of Black Prince, but not her exact position. In addition also don't want to expose themselves to danger. One solution afforded by missiles is to launch a hyperspace enabled sensor drone into the region as an observer, then following it with a large salvo of missiles. This doesn't even have to be launched from the ISD, as it seems reasonable that you could fully containerize the missiles allowing general placement and use, even off of civilian craft.

They could also launch the same sensor drone, then drop multiple ISDs on the target- which is the basic strategy being used at Hoth while this is going on. The only difference is that Hoth is a planetary base, so the ops plan is a little more complex...

The advantage here is that hyperspace-enabled missiles are a lot easier to make than ISD's. It takes a special shipyard and a lot of human capital to make an ISD, which isn't quite as true for a small starfighter. The missiles can act as force multipliers, making corvettes or civilian craft able to preform roles that would have previously required an ISD.

Planetary defence is another tempting application. Once detections are made, the missiles could be launched to the vicinity of the aggressor from within planetary shielding. While this is a second-best solution, it is far less expensive than ion or turbolaser equivalents, while providing far greater range. It seems that a lot of planetary governments are able to afford low-end starfighters, making the market pretty clear.

The problem is that each of these is as expensive as a fighter, and buying enough hypermissiles to reliably overwhelm a capital ship's defenses may not actually be much cheaper than buying enough fighters to destroy that capital ship.

Well, presumably the missile wouldn't cost anything like as much to make as a fighter, since it can go without a lot of stuff, like beam weaponry, life support, etc. In an ideal situation, the ratio would be similar to modern fighter vs cruise missile, where the missile is ~7% of the cost of the fighter. The best metric to go by would be the cost of the aforementioned courier droids, but we don't know anything about them at all.

Another factor is that many ships simply can't carry enough fighters to worry a capital ship, due to the complex hangarage required to store them. Hypermissiles don't have that problem, so you can easily carry a dozen on a frigate. The cost of the missiles may be justified by the additional flexibility that they provide to smaller vessels.

What are the issues with this, other than simple price? Hyperspace enabled ship killing missiles seem like a obvious and potentially very useful idea, so what are the problems with them, that prevent their being deployed?

Please note that in the 'real' Star Wars we don't have enough information to be sure this would work, although the obvious example of the Galaxy Gun exists. In the ECR-version of Star Wars, this tactic could probably be evaluated more rationally.

I have to agree. The most fundamental problem with the system is that we don't know the accuracy of hyperdrive, and what can be done to fiddle with that figure. It seems the most canon thing to do would be to say that it won't work, since we have no evidence that it would work.

[Vianca]

It depends on the rating of your FTL-system & thus on your pilot papers.
In one of the books, Luke went on a quest to find his mother.
His companion wasn't honest about that fact, but had a very slow starship.
These lead to the explaining of the whole system and why Han was so happy to finaly get a militiary nav-computer.

[Simon_Jester]

This is the most important assumption that I made, and it's also the least founded one. Another important one I made is that one can make course corrections within hyperspace, which isn't well established. You really need even tighter emergence locations than that, in order to prevent PD interception.

In that case you're screwed- if you're hoping the missile will emerge and impact with such precision that the enemy can't lock on with point defense and fire on it before it hits the ship, you're being very, very optimistic.

I think that this part of the problem will have to remain up in the air, since we'd need a lot more information in order to work out how precise hyperdrive is with x FLOPS. It does seem like hyperspace can be used to very high precision, but it's hard to say exactly what did the calculations in many cases. Now, you could have a system where the launching ship developed a fire plan that included hyperspace routes, and continued to provide guidance via hyperwave comms and mid-course updates, but this is a patch, really.

I haven't seen a lot of evidence of hyperspace emergence being precise to within, say, a thousand kilometers or less. Does it exist?

The advantage here is that hyperspace-enabled missiles are a lot easier to make than ISD's. It takes a special shipyard and a lot of human capital to make an ISD, which isn't quite as true for a small starfighter. The missiles can act as force multipliers, making corvettes or civilian craft able to preform roles that would have previously required an ISD.

On the other hand, if your spotter ship is relatively small, it is itself vulnerable to being destroyed by the enemy once their signals-intelligence unit figures out that it's "spotting targets for the long-gunner of the apocalypse," if I may wax Schlock Mercenarian.

Also, it can't do anything but spot targets for interstellar artillery bombardment, which means it lacks a lot of the features a larger, military starship would enjoy. Like being able to deploy troops, escort a convoy against raiders who present moving targets, fight effectively when interstellar comms are jammed by the enemy...

Well, presumably the missile wouldn't cost anything like as much to make as a fighter, since it can go without a lot of stuff, like beam weaponry, life support, etc. In an ideal situation, the ratio would be similar to modern fighter vs cruise missile, where the missile is ~7% of the cost of the fighter. The best metric to go by would be the cost of the aforementioned courier droids, but we don't know anything about them at all.

Except for RPG game statistics, which are absolutely useless for purposes of finding realistic cost estimates.

Another factor is that many ships simply can't carry enough fighters to worry a capital ship, due to the complex hangarage required to store them. Hypermissiles don't have that problem, so you can easily carry a dozen on a frigate. The cost of the missiles may be justified by the additional flexibility that they provide to smaller vessels.

Why would they be substantially smaller than starfighters? I mean, they might not have big poofy wings like a TIE, or gratuitous S-foils like the X-wing, but they'd still take up space, require fueling and servicing to make sure they don't break down on the way to the target...

I have to agree. The most fundamental problem with the system is that we don't know the accuracy of hyperdrive, and what can be done to fiddle with that figure. It seems the most canon thing to do would be to say that it won't work, since we have no evidence that it would work.

Yes. And "it works but people fear retaliation" probably won't cut it. If that were true, then either the Empire would be using it as a cheap weapon to destroy the infrastructure of people it doesn't like (because it's too big for anyone to retaliate against effectively). Or the Rebels would be using it as a cheap weapon to strike blows against the Empire (because they're too dispersed for anyone to retaliate against effectively).

[macfanpro]

This is the most important assumption that I made, and it's also the least founded one. Another important one I made is that one can make course corrections within hyperspace, which isn't well established. You really need even tighter emergence locations than that, in order to prevent PD interception.

In that case you're screwed- if you're hoping the missile will emerge and impact with such precision that the enemy can't lock on with point defense and fire on it before it hits the ship, you're being very, very optimistic.

Well, I'm not saying that PD won't be able to lock on, just that it won't have substantial reaction time. Since we don't know the price (or size) of the missile, we can't say what the break-even point is, but I think that 30% losses would be around the tipping point where they become ineffective. Since the missiles are travelling at low-relativistic velocity, surprisingly large distances work for emergence. A 10s reaction window is going to be a nightmare for PD, and a missile travelling at .1 c means that it can emerge at distances of up to 300,000 km. The trick is getting the missile pointing in the right direction.

I think that this part of the problem will have to remain up in the air, since we'd need a lot more information in order to work out how precise hyperdrive is with x FLOPS. It does seem like hyperspace can be used to very high precision, but it's hard to say exactly what did the calculations in many cases. Now, you could have a system where the launching ship developed a fire plan that included hyperspace routes, and continued to provide guidance via hyperwave comms and mid-course updates, but this is a patch, really.

I haven't seen a lot of evidence of hyperspace emergence being precise to within, say, a thousand kilometers or less. Does it exist?

I don't know, but probably not. You probably don't need that close of a distance, though.

The advantage here is that hyperspace-enabled missiles are a lot easier to make than ISD's. It takes a special shipyard and a lot of human capital to make an ISD, which isn't quite as true for a small starfighter. The missiles can act as force multipliers, making corvettes or civilian craft able to preform roles that would have previously required an ISD.

On the other hand, if your spotter ship is relatively small, it is itself vulnerable to being destroyed by the enemy once their signals-intelligence unit figures out that it's "spotting targets for the long-gunner of the apocalypse," if I may wax Schlock Mercenarian.

Also, it can't do anything but spot targets for interstellar artillery bombardment, which means it lacks a lot of the features a larger, military starship would enjoy. Like being able to deploy troops, escort a convoy against raiders who present moving targets, fight effectively when interstellar comms are jammed by the enemy...

The spotter doesn't have to be very complicated, or even manned for that matter. It'd essentially be a space-only probe droid, which are pretty much expendable, it seems. It wouldn't be unreasonable to launch a lot of them, or to use already in-place sensors to acquire target location information.

Another factor is that many ships simply can't carry enough fighters to worry a capital ship, due to the complex hangarage required to store them. Hypermissiles don't have that problem, so you can easily carry a dozen on a frigate. The cost of the missiles may be justified by the additional flexibility that they provide to smaller vessels.

Why would they be substantially smaller than starfighters? I mean, they might not have big poofy wings like a TIE, or gratuitous S-foils like the X-wing, but they'd still take up space, require fueling and servicing to make sure they don't break down on the way to the target...

I'm not sure, since I haven't seen any evidence. However, it seems the majority of space devoted to starfighters exists for human reasons, rather than technical ones, for instance the whole launch rail system. By removing the constraint of human access, you can reduce the space needed by a substantial margin, which is true in a lot of real-world cases. The case to look at here is what kind of density the Trade Federation managed to get with their droid starfighters, which are actually harder to maintain than the missiles.

I think since the missiles are single-use, it wouldn't be that difficult to make them self-contained. The majority of the wear on multiuse vessels comes when they are in use, not when they are sitting on the ground. If you hermetically seal the missiles in and use long-shelf-life fuels that are kept cold before launch, you should be able to prevent most of the wear that is incurred by multiuse vessels.

I have to agree. The most fundamental problem with the system is that we don't know the accuracy of hyperdrive, and what can be done to fiddle with that figure. It seems the most canon thing to do would be to say that it won't work, since we have no evidence that it would work.

Yes. And "it works but people fear retaliation" probably won't cut it. If that were true, then either the Empire would be using it as a cheap weapon to destroy the infrastructure of people it doesn't like (because it's too big for anyone to retaliate against effectively). Or the Rebels would be using it as a cheap weapon to strike blows against the Empire (because they're too dispersed for anyone to retaliate against effectively).

Yes, can't agree with you more. I think that the biggest problem is not hyperspace accuracy, but rather course correction. Military targets are notoriously hard to hit, thanks to their annoying propensity to move in ways you didn't think of when you originally fired the missiles. If it's not possible to maneuver in hyperspace, then scoring hits on anything smaller than a dreadnought is more or less undoable. They'd still be viable ground-attack or antistation weapons, though.

[Lerryn]

One of the issues I can see with the hyper-missile idea is that you seem to think that missiles hyperjumping in cannot be detected until they revert to realspace. At least according to ECR, that is not true. (Significant references in the first Hull 721 thread about bow wakes, evasive/deceptive courses to warning of the target, etc.) So after the first couple uses, the (presumably) distinctive signature of the missiles would be shared around, and counters would be developed.

Also, check back to this post. It's where they discover a boom-on-exit hyperdrive mode when trying to develop a way to steer while in hyperspace. So no, hyperspace missiles are unlikely to be feasible.

[Vianca]

Do note that it was faster as well.

[macfanpro]

One of the issues I can see with the hyper-missile idea is that you seem to think that missiles hyperjumping in cannot be detected until they revert to realspace. At least according to ECR, that is not true. (Significant references in the first Hull 721 thread about bow wakes, evasive/deceptive courses to warning of the target, etc.) So after the first couple uses, the (presumably) distinctive signature of the missiles would be shared around, and counters would be developed.

Also, check back to this post. It's where they discover a boom-on-exit hyperdrive mode when trying to develop a way to steer while in hyperspace. So no, hyperspace missiles are unlikely to be feasible.

In order to be feasible, you don't have to have complete surprise, you only need enough to be able to catch PD and more accurately it's command structure by surprise. I can't find the source anymore, but when evaluating SHORAD systems, the Russians found that gun-based human operated systems had 30s reaction times. The majority of this time is spent by the humans being confused, which would still be present with the majority of SW PD and SHORAD systems (at least at the C&C level), or at least the ones in widespread use. If used against an unprepared enemy, the hyperspace shocks would almost certainly not provide enough early warning to allow full PD operation.

The lack of midcourse correction in hyperspace is crippling when targeting anything small (like cruisers or less) not stuck in a gravity well. You could schedule exits used to turn, but it'd be hard to pull off against a unpredictable target. It seems, then, that the system would only be effective against unprepared targets or against very predictable objects, like satellites of all sizes. While removing much of the tactical potential, they may still make useful strategic weapons, especially for a force like the Alliance, who practically enjoy making out-of-the-blue strikes. For instance, they'd make great Death Star killers, as the DS1&2 were unable to maneuver substantially, and were really quite large. Mine applications would also still be possible (thanks to short range providing more predictable targets at launch time).

The next question, then, is exactly how much warning does the target get? 5 minutes would be crippling, but 30s wouldn't be, especially if your targets were not expecting an attack.

[Vianca]

since you can´t receive updates while in hyperspace, not so much as you think.

[macfanpro]

since you can´t receive updates while in hyperspace, not so much as you think.

That's solvable in-universe. From this, hyperwave communication works to talk to ships in hyperspace. Even neglecting this, you can preform scheduled course correction extractions to allow for mediocre course updates. However, they're essentially relegated to hitting really quite big stuff (that's aware of the threat), thanks to the lack of ability to preform in-hyperspace corrections.

[RecklessPrudence]

Plus, there's obviously at least some not only accuracy, but also timing, issues in canon - Part of the Thrawn Trilogy, some of the oldest EU books out there, have Thrawn managing to get some ships in exactly the right place, at exactly the right time. The NR commander - whom I want to say is bel Iblis, but I'm not positive - was surprised and intimidated, before he realised that Thrawn had placed an Interdictor with spooled-up gravgenerators in a position that made it a lot easier to hit that target. That, plus the fact that for the really, really tough jumps, there's either been a mil-grade navicomputer and a prodigy making the calcs, or a Jedi (Jedi being confirmed as making better calcs by feel when they try than even the best navputer).

I think between the accuracy and the timing issues, unless you've got all year to refine your calcs, or you have a Jedi missile officer, you're not going to get a torpedo large enough to mount all the required bits and an effective yield in place against anything smaller and more maneuverable than a middling-size station, at best.

Using a lot of missiles could ameliorate this effect, but then you're either throwing way more torps at a target than it strictly needs hoping to get one close enough, losing the economic advantage of the torps that lead your star polity to use them - and if you want to reuse them, they need to be more than one-shot drives, driving prices up further - or send them a few at a time, meaning you're losing the surprise advantage gained by hyper-capable torps in the first place, and such large target would be relatively easy pickings for an alerted warship's PD.

Really, they're only useful for a star polity with far more financial resources than manpower, and only in a limited fashion - plus, they're relatively poor at defense, or at striking at targets inside a grav well, natural or artificial - which is when you're going to get the best targeting data. As the first wave of a surprise attack, maybe - but the Alliance had more pressing needs for their cash, and the Imperial Starfleet was mainly more concerned with the sorts of things you want manned ships for - showing the flag, counter-insurgency, patrols, and internal policing.

The Imps' main problem was finding the Rebels, not crushing them - Hoth showed what they can do even under Rules of Engagement that frankly, probably didn't make sense to many but the Sith setting them - what do the common gunner care that Vader wants to capture Skywalker, or that Palpatine wants a new apprentice? If I was a HTL gunner on the Executor, I'd be wondering why we weren't melting that iceball - why mount a ground op when all you want to do is kill everyone inside? Yeah, yeah, strong shields and all - they're still only theater shields, and they can only protect against so much. The only reason the shields were described as "able to resist any bombardment" is because Vader wanted some of the people inside it alive. Hit it with everything we've got, and if nothing else, the ice their base is built out of and on will melt, which'll shut down the shield when the generator is suddenly underwater.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Right, where to start? On the precision of hyperspace navigation- it has to be fairly precise or it isn't possible at all; the main source of uncertainty is the residual power in the energy envelope, the Interaction Field- a sane navigator (which rules Mirannon out) will deliberately leave the precise transition point vague and allow the excess in the field to blow itself out;
the emergence flare- it's easier to let that, the terminal eddy, take the ship and just ride it out, and end up in a slightly unpredictable place, than it is to specify the point, make transition and have the energy field unravel releasing a major flare from or, in cases of extreme screwup, into the ship.

That descent explosion was a special and extreme case of a general principle, which is usually dealt with by allowing flutter in the final drop. Sublight drives are powerful enough that allowances can be made, but even at that a very well charted and calculated run will trend towards relatively little. Quality counts here, and with the usual caveats it's probable you get what you pay for. Higher spec gets you less error, less wasted energy and more precise drop points.


Hyperspace missiles are certainly technically possible from an early stage, but the reason they turn up very late in the Star Wars canon- after the defeat of the Empire- is probably that nobody was thinking along those lines, because from the point of view of the doctrine that already exists, they're basically pointless, a violation of the laws and customs of war, and possibly insane.

Plexus droids predate them by at least a couple of decades- Imperial Intelligence couriers for messages too sensitive to transmit in any form at all- but the idea of simply fitting a warhead to a plexus or probe droid does not make sense in a tradition where war is about taking and controlling, an extension of politics by other means.

There probably are and have been people who thought it was just crazy enough to work, and as a special operation, it would. As a routine operation of war, the damage done would be immense, counterproductively so in a single galactic society and economy- considering it was the Imperial Remnant under the reborn Palpatine that thought of it, that says a lot. Even the Droid Armies built fighters rather than missiles, although their sanity and wisdom may be questionable.

I really don't think it's that much of a saving over fighters, certainly, because life support is relatively cheap (certainly the crappy support offered to Imperial pilots, which surely must at this technical level have more to do with doctrine than capability), the really expensive bits- hyperdrive, sublight drive, reactor, nav computer, sensors, running shields- are going to be the same or actually more pricy. Plexus droids had performance on or beyond par with the TIE Defender, if the stats are anything to go by.

If you want to hit a stationary target, it's a credible terror weapon- at the very high cost of a reliable shield breaching warhead. The Galaxy Gun rounds were also not independently hyper capable- they had sustainers, but had to be accelerated into hyperspace by the gun, and they were light freighter sized. If you're aiming at a warship target, you're looking at the cost and footprint of a fairly high performance starfighter plus the cost of a torpedo warhead big enough to do anything useful, and those don't come cheap either.

(Also raises the question of TBF- a heavy fighter bomber, rebel style, carrying a single capital rather than multiple fighter torpedoes. Or light freighter class attack boats doing the same. Or an Imperial customs frigate which certainly has the excess payload capacity. Mirannon's variant on the idea had no physical projectile at all- use a hyperspace cannon, like the Corellian originals which inspired the Galaxy Gun, to throw a gravitic shockwave.)

Whether the tactical options it gives are worth the cost is the interesting part, and to be honest my head is saying no- they give little that couldn't be duplicated by more conventional means- but my gut is saying what the hell, it would be fun to write.


An aside- I'd put this in my sig if it wasn't too big a quote; [quote=Larry Niven wrote]When every page has been read and the book has been put down, is the story over? Some stories flow onwards through the reader's imagination. Some authors leave playgrounds for the reader's mind. [...] all the endings were wide open. I could close the book and continue moving further into the unknown. As I grew older, I began began demanding endings. As a writer, I learned that endings are not so easy. They do make better art, at least most critics say so. [...]but when the story is over, the playground remains. Something should be left behind. There are characters unkilled, and actors who never reached the stage. Esoteric technologies, alien ecologies. Worlds. The laws by which the universe behaves. The Playground.[/quote]

Star Wars has a huge and wonderful playground, which is why I do this. I do doubt whether it was actually supposed to be there, but while it is, I may as well play a little calvinball in it.

[macfanpro]

I think that you made a lot of good points, especially about the societal disposition against stand-off weapons. I only have one (comparatively minor) point to make.

I really don't think it's that much of a saving over fighters, certainly, because life support is relatively cheap (certainly the crappy support offered to Imperial pilots, which surely must at this technical level have more to do with doctrine than capability), the really expensive bits- hyperdrive, sublight drive, reactor, nav computer, sensors, running shields- are going to be the same or actually more pricy. Plexus droids had performance on or beyond par with the TIE Defender, if the stats are anything to go by.

I wonder, though, how much you can save if you make the whole system one-shot. IRL, things get a lot cheaper if they don't have to last very long, and since the missiles inherently blow themselves up you don't have to make their systems survive much wear. I think that for the same reason maintenance is a lower with one-shot systems (wear is drastically reduced when the system is turned off for the entirety of its service life), the equipment itself can be made smaller and cheaper. Going through the systems:

• Hyperdrive: Most of the cost seems to be inherent in the immense durability required to make a single jump. This means that you won't get much cost savings here (but also means that the Plexus's last jump would probably be kinda scary)
• Sublight Drive: A possibility is an ablative shielding system for the nozzles and vanes, so that the drive only will last for 50% longer than the predicted upper bound on drive activation. Since the drive will be running at low output (just after launch) for a while, and at maximum output for a short time, the drive could be made to survive continuous 10% power, and 1 minute of maximum power. I think that this would save both weight and cost in comparison to a normal starfighter (where people complain if they explode for no reason)
• Reactor: The limiting factor with the reactor is how fast can it be turned on, from a cold un-fuelled start. If you fuel it and start it very shortly before launch, you can avoid the majority of wear on the system, as well as being able to build it a lot more lightly
• Nav computer: Why put one on? It can't make dynamic course corrections, so why not just copy astromechs and pre-compute trajectories?
• Sensors & Running Shields: No savings whatsoever.

I don't know how much you could save from the one-use drive components, but one of the biggest problems with designing any sort of equipment is reliability, especially over time. If you only have to build your equipment to sit in a box for 10 years, then go up (after a short interlude) in a big ball of flame, I'd argue that you could save substantially in structural strength and multiple redundancy.

Now, while I admit that life support is cheap in how much you pay, I don't think it's cheap in terms of weight. Life support needs a lot of room, mostly thanks to the annoying pilot and his need to not have air blown in at 10000 PSI. This means that you need a lot of plumbing and general room, and in vacuum room doesn't come cheap in terms of weight and volume. It's hard to know for certain, as SW supermaterials can mitigate this, but it's still going to be pretty bulky.

Now, the bits that go beep on modern ships & weapons are undoubtedly the most expensive parts of the system (a modern FFG's cost is approx 20% hull, 80% beep). However, I wonder if that's changed in the SW universe, since the innovation seems to happen more due to mechanical advances rather than from software ones, so I'd propose that the costs of SW ships are the other way round (80% hull, 20% beep).

[Esquire]

Could you provide some support for technological progress being mostly mechanical in nature? I can only think of that stupid magic armor the Sun Crusher had off the top of my head, but my command of the EU is weaker than it used to be.

[macfanpro]

Could you provide some support for technological progress being mostly mechanical in nature? I can only think of that stupid magic armor the Sun Crusher had off the top of my head, but my command of the EU is weaker than it used to be.

Overall, SW technological advancement is nonexistent. However, the main point of evidence I have is the nature of weapons in SW. You see a lot of changes in energy delivery (the Death Star is a good example, since it had to have a lot of novel engineering done to get it to work). However, the guidance systems and computers that sit behind those energy delivery systems are completely ignored.

There's a good illustration of this in the original 721 series, where the Lancer was engaging the two "defectors" with automatically controlled laser fire, and one of the reasons for concluding that the turrets were laser controlled was that they were firing lead-computation shots, rather than trying to fill a volume with fire. This is a good example of SW computers being silly. Our automated ADA systems can fill volumes without manual intervention (for instance this can or this, though mostly thanks to carefully designed large tolerances). We've known that it's vital to engage like this since flight was discovered, and real weapons designers have developed hardware to take advantage of this, yet the FCS on the Lancer, a ship dedicated to antifighter work building off of years of experience fighting rebel fighters, wasn't able to preform this basic tactic using automated systems.

Another example of this is missile guidance as seen in the movies, and especially in some of the animations. Most SW missiles use (shock-horror) pursuit guidance. We haven't ever used this guidance methodology, as it's categorically useless in terms of fuel and, in turn, missiles. Yet, SW missiles have used it instead of the very lead-computation or proportional navigation guidance systems that provide much better single-missile PK. You'd have to be completely ignorant of navigation to not get at least proportional navigation, yet SW missile software doesn't seem to implement it, at any time in the universe. While I'm a bit of a missile nut (as if you couldn't tell), I think that this basic FCS omission is crippling, preventing any intercept over than tail-chase ones with missiles, and that it's amazing that anyone at all scores hits with SW missile systems.

Now, look at the wunderwaffe projects undertaken by the DMR. These were the pinnacle of what was possible at the time, yet the DMR focused on the bang side of the problem. They make some very novel projects, using engineering that's really quite amazing, but they are entirely focused on the mechanical engineering part of the problem. This makes absolute sense, as they were told "make a superweapon", but, to me, they should have developed at least some FCS improvements. The only one I can think of (off the top of my head) is the DS2's shipkilling ability, but DS1 even had that to some extent.

Now, you might ask, the manufacturers of the weapons would be much more likely to have made the software improvements for this task, but they seem incapable of it. SW missiles are called the same names, use the same tactics, and are launched from the same platforms with the same amount of pilot overhead in the 200 year span we know much about. This doesn't say good things about the propensity of the missile and gun manufacturer's abilities to innovate, even in software.

IRL, software evolves along with the hardware it runs on (although at an exponentially greater pace). If the software isn't evolving, then I think that a logical conclusion is that the hardware isn't evolving either. I think that I've laid out why I don't think that software is changing very much, so I don't think that the hardware is changing very much.

We know next to nothing about how sensors work, exactly, so I can't say what's happened to them. However, it seems to be very much the same story as in software, and for the very good reason that software is an essential part of why sensors are useful.

I can't explain why everything software related that isn't a droid seems to be neglected, but there's just so much low-hanging fruit (from our comparatively primitive perspective) that they must not be working on it in any way whatsoever. Automation, even with the monumentally capable systems that are droids, is frowned upon, and ship and weapon designs really show it.

I am not a scholar of the EU, so I might have very well missed an important book. However, I think that the gist is clear: SW tech only changes in ways that make big things go boom. Very few changes are made to systems that would make little things go boom better, or make ships cheaper, etc, etc, and software and electronics very much fit into that category.

[Simon_Jester]

There's a good illustration of this in the original 721 series, where the Lancer was engaging the two "defectors" with automatically controlled laser fire, and one of the reasons for concluding that the turrets were laser controlled was that they were firing lead-computation shots, rather than trying to fill a volume with fire. This is a good example of SW computers being silly...

There are a variety of conditions where you might want a human gunner in the fire control loop before using pattern fire to saturate a volume. For example, if your fighters and the enemy's fighters are tangled up in close combat. Or if the enemy fighters were clever enough to maneuver so that you are stuck using a friendly ship or planet as a target practice backstop.

At the least you might want a human being pushing a button and saying "it's okay to spray this volume with fire."

Another example of this is missile guidance as seen in the movies, and especially in some of the animations. Most SW missiles use (shock-horror) pursuit guidance. We haven't ever used this guidance methodology, as it's categorically useless in terms of fuel and, in turn, missiles. Yet, SW missiles have used it instead of the very lead-computation or proportional navigation guidance systems that provide much better single-missile PK.

This is mostly because of the limits of movie special effects and drama on the screen. It ties into ECR's theory that what we see on the movies is sort of the 'Hollywood version' of real events.

Movies featuring theoretically 'real' Sidewinder missiles also have them using pursuit guidance, even though the Sidewinder has been designed to use proportional navigation since the early 1950s, learning from the mistakes made in the German Enzian. Pursuit guidance lends itself to awesome scenes where a desperate pilot jinks and dodges to avoid the pursuing missile and maneuvers it into blowing up against a terrain obstacle. Obviously, in real life people try to avoid giving an enemy the chances to pull this off.

Now, look at the wunderwaffe projects undertaken by the DMR. These were the pinnacle of what was possible at the time, yet the DMR focused on the bang side of the problem. They make some very novel projects, using engineering that's really quite amazing, but they are entirely focused on the mechanical engineering part of the problem. This makes absolute sense, as they were told "make a superweapon", but, to me, they should have developed at least some FCS improvements. The only one I can think of (off the top of my head) is the DS2's shipkilling ability, but DS1 even had that to some extent.

In this case it's not clear what you mean. The Death Star contains two types of weapons: the superlaser, which is literally designed to do nothing but blow up entire planets, and its surface turrets, which are bog standard Imperial Navy designs. The Death Star was also designed to be basically immune to conventional weapons by sheer defensive depth, in that you could use HTL fire to blow overlapping kilometer-deep craters across practically its entire surface without actually stopping it from being able to move and (possibly) fire the superlaser using components buried much deeper in the core. In what respect would improving the fire control be even helpful here?

IRL, software evolves along with the hardware it runs on (although at an exponentially greater pace). If the software isn't evolving, then I think that a logical conclusion is that the hardware isn't evolving either. I think that I've laid out why I don't think that software is changing very much, so I don't think that the hardware is changing very much.

Actually, this is not necessarily true. For example, take the F-35 fighter. The biggest single thing that makes it an advance over the F-somethingteens it replaces isn't stealth, it's software. The F-35 has the computers and software to take in more data on what the enemy is doing, track more targets, engage more targets, use a more complex network of sensors, than any fighter which has gone before.

Unfortunately, the software coding and systems integration is also the most complex part of the project, and certain very specific problems with how the software and hardware interact are delaying production even further.

As systems grow more capable and networked, the problem of making the software work gets exponentially harder. This is illustrated in the current plot, where Black Prince has been upgraded to new peaks of physical performance... but none of her systems work together yet because of software problems, so she cannot perform complicated combat tasks like "move" and "fire the guns." The only thing that still works without bugs is the ship's small craft complement and ability to control the small craft. Which is coincidentally the only thing for which the hardware/software hasn't been changed in the recent refit.

In real life, this is already a serious obstacle that adds years to the time taken to design weapon systems. The F-35 has been in development and testing since the mid-1990s and is still suffering massive teething problems before it becomes operational. By comparison, in World War II people could conceive, design, and build an entirely new warplane in about five years.

The main thing that's gotten more difficult and time-consuming is that we're pushing harder on the edge of the envelope of what a system is capable of... and using more software to help cover that gap.

In an environment like Star Wars, this problem may be so intensive that doing a systematic redesign of the software for new weapon systems takes generations if it's being done by human programmers. To speed up the process you can use droids (as is now being done on the Black Prince refit), but that has a lot of risks and problems, and runs smack into the fact that people in Star Wars don't really trust artificial intelligence, and try to limit its ability to dominate their society.

We know next to nothing about how sensors work, exactly, so I can't say what's happened to them. However, it seems to be very much the same story as in software, and for the very good reason that software is an essential part of why sensors are useful.

Here, it seems pretty clear that part of the problem is that ECM has decisively won its war with ECCM. For instance:

[Rebel fleet comes roaring out of hyperspace]

Lando looks worriedly at his alien copilot, Nien Nunb, who points to the control panel and talks to Lando.

LANDO
"We've got to be able to get some kind of a reading on that shield, up or down... [response from pilot] Well, how could they be jamming us if they don't know we're coming?"

Lando shoots a concerned look out at the approaching Death Star as the implications of what he's just said sink in. He hits a switch on his comlink.

LANDO
"Break off the attack! The shield is still up!"

Now, you have to wonder, how Imperial jamming could be that good. It's strongly implied (if not actively canon) that if Lando hadn't figured out the shield was still up, the rebel ships would have crashed into it like so many birds into windowpanes.

In other words, Star Wars ECM is at least sometimes better than its ECCM by a great margin. So great that you can literally make enemy craft so blind and confused that they will fly into walls without even knowing the wall is there.

Maybe that's just a software problem, but I suspect it's more significant than that.

[macfanpro]

There's a good illustration of this in the original 721 series, where the Lancer was engaging the two "defectors" with automatically controlled laser fire, and one of the reasons for concluding that the turrets were laser controlled was that they were firing lead-computation shots, rather than trying to fill a volume with fire. This is a good example of SW computers being silly...

There are a variety of conditions where you might want a human gunner in the fire control loop before using pattern fire to saturate a volume. For example, if your fighters and the enemy's fighters are tangled up in close combat. Or if the enemy fighters were clever enough to maneuver so that you are stuck using a friendly ship or planet as a target practice backstop.

At the least you might want a human being pushing a button and saying "it's okay to spray this volume with fire."

A surprising number of systems have fully automated modes (like the Phalanx I linked) where the FCS does try to kill inbound targets using volume engagement without human intervention. The reason for this is what I was talking about earlier-humans are slow, especially in tight situations, and make pauses that computers don't. The threat timeline is still pretty short in SW, so I think that automated PD is still an important part of SW FCS.

Now, the Lancer may have disabled that fire mode, but would that have made sense? To the Rebels, they wanted to look like they were trying to kill the "defectors." The Lancer had no "friendlys" to worry about and clear ROE, so the most reasonable thing for Kondrake to do is to use the most effective FCS modes available to kill the "defectors," and if he hadn't, then it would look to the Rebels like he wasn't really trying.

Another example of this is missile guidance as seen in the movies, and especially in some of the animations. Most SW missiles use (shock-horror) pursuit guidance. We haven't ever used this guidance methodology, as it's categorically useless in terms of fuel and, in turn, missiles. Yet, SW missiles have used it instead of the very lead-computation or proportional navigation guidance systems that provide much better single-missile PK.

This is mostly because of the limits of movie special effects and drama on the screen. It ties into ECR's theory that what we see on the movies is sort of the 'Hollywood version' of real events.

Movies featuring theoretically 'real' Sidewinder missiles also have them using pursuit guidance, even though the Sidewinder has been designed to use proportional navigation since the early 1950s, learning from the mistakes made in the German Enzian. Pursuit guidance lends itself to awesome scenes where a desperate pilot jinks and dodges to avoid the pursuing missile and maneuvers it into blowing up against a terrain obstacle. Obviously, in real life people try to avoid giving an enemy the chances to pull this off.

I know that the movies aren't really "tech canon," but they're the only thing that we really have to tell us anything about the missile guidance laws. Some books even talk about missiles getting into tail-chase situations with fighters (I can't make any citations as to this, unfortunately), so I think it's a reasonable inference that SW missiles have tail-chase and preprogrammed trajectory guidance laws. They might have pro-nav guidance, or even ZEM, but I've never seen evidence that suggests that they do have those modes.

Now, look at the wunderwaffe projects undertaken by the DMR. These were the pinnacle of what was possible at the time, yet the DMR focused on the bang side of the problem. They make some very novel projects, using engineering that's really quite amazing, but they are entirely focused on the mechanical engineering part of the problem. This makes absolute sense, as they were told "make a superweapon", but, to me, they should have developed at least some FCS improvements. The only one I can think of (off the top of my head) is the DS2's shipkilling ability, but DS1 even had that to some extent.

In this case it's not clear what you mean. The Death Star contains two types of weapons: the superlaser, which is literally designed to do nothing but blow up entire planets, and its surface turrets, which are bog standard Imperial Navy designs. The Death Star was also designed to be basically immune to conventional weapons by sheer defensive depth, in that you could use HTL fire to blow overlapping kilometer-deep craters across practically its entire surface without actually stopping it from being able to move and (possibly) fire the superlaser using components buried much deeper in the core. In what respect would improving the fire control be even helpful here?

It wouldn't, and I'm not saying that FCS improvements would have made it any better (except for PD improvements with the trench turrets, which has been covered in detail). What I am saying is that they had a lot of money and smart people, and they used that to make the bits that go bang, rather than the software that backs it up. I'm trying to show that there is bang innovation happening in the DS systems, but not software innovation.

IRL, software evolves along with the hardware it runs on (although at an exponentially greater pace). If the software isn't evolving, then I think that a logical conclusion is that the hardware isn't evolving either. I think that I've laid out why I don't think that software is changing very much, so I don't think that the hardware is changing very much.

Actually, this is not necessarily true. For example, take the F-35 fighter. The biggest single thing that makes it an advance over the F-somethingteens it replaces isn't stealth, it's software. The F-35 has the computers and software to take in more data on what the enemy is doing, track more targets, engage more targets, use a more complex network of sensors, than any fighter which has gone before.

Unfortunately, the software coding and systems integration is also the most complex part of the project, and certain very specific problems with how the software and hardware interact are delaying production even further.

I think that we're violently agreeing here. The F-35 is a primarily software advance, where hardware didn't change much, and I don't dispute that. What I'm trying to say is that if the software doesn't change, the hardware probably doesn't change, either. This should be interpreted as a logical implication, so what I'm saying is that if the software does change, than the hardware may stay the same or do anything else - the implication stops saying anything about it's conclusion.

Looking at your F-35 example again, you're saying that software changed, hardware didn't change. I'm not saying that software changes iff hardware changes, I'm saying that no software changes => no hardware changes. I haven't been able to find a counterexample to that yet.

As systems grow more capable and networked, the problem of making the software work gets exponentially harder. This is illustrated in the current plot, where Black Prince has been upgraded to new peaks of physical performance... but none of her systems work together yet because of software problems, so she cannot perform complicated combat tasks like "move" and "fire the guns." The only thing that still works without bugs is the ship's small craft complement and ability to control the small craft. Which is coincidentally the only thing for which the hardware/software hasn't been changed in the recent refit.

I'm not talking about C&C software (on SW ships, they're really closer to SCADA systems, but I digress), which are giant, complicated, and necessarily mostly monolithic. Instead, I'm talking about the software on the smaller-scale systems, like the gun-local FCS on the Lancers, or the guidance laws on missiles. These systems aren't as monolithic as those found on capital ships and the like, and are (hopefully) reasonably modular.

In real life, this is already a serious obstacle that adds years to the time taken to design weapon systems. The F-35 has been in development and testing since the mid-1990s and is still suffering massive teething problems before it becomes operational. By comparison, in World War II people could conceive, design, and build an entirely new warplane in about five years.

The main thing that's gotten more difficult and time-consuming is that we're pushing harder on the edge of the envelope of what a system is capable of... and using more software to help cover that gap.

In an environment like Star Wars, this problem may be so intensive that doing a systematic redesign of the software for new weapon systems takes generations if it's being done by human programmers. To speed up the process you can use droids (as is now being done on the Black Prince refit), but that has a lot of risks and problems, and runs smack into the fact that people in Star Wars don't really trust artificial intelligence, and try to limit its ability to dominate their society.

Yes, and I don't dispute that. I'm only looking at much smaller scale projects here, like the missile systems. To use a real world example, look at the versions of AMRAAMS, where the onboard software has change substantially. These didn't take anything like as long to do as the F-35 did, but we don't see any changes in similarly sized systems in the SW universe. The same missiles with the same FCSs are being used in the Old Republic as in the New, and I think this is telling how fast software is changing.

Basically, what I'm saying is that the little things aren't changing much (if at all) in terms of software. If these small projects aren't changing, why would you think that the big ones are changing much, either? I don't dispute that a lot of maintenance goes on (see the Black Prince refit), because it must, but I also doubt that a lot of new work has been done in millennia, even for missiles and other low-delta systems.

We know next to nothing about how sensors work, exactly, so I can't say what's happened to them. However, it seems to be very much the same story as in software, and for the very good reason that software is an essential part of why sensors are useful.

Here, it seems pretty clear that part of the problem is that ECM has decisively won its war with ECCM. For instance:

[Rebel fleet comes roaring out of hyperspace]

Lando looks worriedly at his alien copilot, Nien Nunb, who points to the control panel and talks to Lando.

LANDO
"We've got to be able to get some kind of a reading on that shield, up or down... [response from pilot] Well, how could they be jamming us if they don't know we're coming?"

Lando shoots a concerned look out at the approaching Death Star as the implications of what he's just said sink in. He hits a switch on his comlink.

LANDO
"Break off the attack! The shield is still up!"

Now, you have to wonder, how Imperial jamming could be that good. It's strongly implied (if not actively canon) that if Lando hadn't figured out the shield was still up, the rebel ships would have crashed into it like so many birds into windowpanes.

In other words, Star Wars ECM is at least sometimes better than its ECCM by a great margin. So great that you can literally make enemy craft so blind and confused that they will fly into walls without even knowing the wall is there.

Maybe that's just a software problem, but I suspect it's more significant than that.

Yes, SW sensors are way behind ECM systems. However, what I meant there is that software not evolving could be part of the reason for that, but I don't have any evidence for that whatsoever. IRL, software was a critical component of the solution to the earlier forms of jamming, and it's gotten more important as time has gone on. If SW software hasn't changed substantially in centuries, and the basket of interesting physics is empty, then that would be a very reasonable answer for why SW ECCM is lagging behind ECM.