Imperial forces When Grand Admiral Thrawn Appears-A question

[xerex]

Thank you all for the contributions:) However I'm still a bit lost in the replys. Ok The core fleets were available to Thrawn? I assumed placed at his command. They had super Star Destroyers in their order of battle-is there a figure? I have seen so many debates on SSDs I do need some sense of finality to a figure-I have seen 12 as an upper figure or even 16.
Apparently Stackpole had calculated a figure based on a production rate of 4 SSD's a year?

I have not fully read Dark Empire, but accept as part of EU its all there-When did the Reborn Emperor assume power in relation to Thrawns Arrival?

Ok besides the few SDs under Thrawns control can I assume 1000's were operational?

Thank you its good reading:)

havent read it myself BUT

IIRC

1. Dark Empire was written before the Thrawn Trilogy and so makes no reference to him. Fans theefore assume that the Byss Fleets were completely unknown to Thrawn.
2.Thrawn forces appear to be very weak. The largest attacks use at most 15 SD's (the three system attack in HTTE) and NO SSD's are used. Additionally 200 outdated Dreadnaught class heavy cruiers are seen as militarily decisisve.

[NRS Guardian]

Actually, DE was written after TTT, and takes place one year after TLC. The reason Thrawn didn't know about the ships in the deep core was he was out in the unknown regions, and didn't have precise numbers on how many ships were destroyed in the past 5 years. Thrawn didn't have access to the deep core fleets because he didn't know about them, and the Emperor wasn't sharing.
The reason 200 dreadnaughts were decisive was because the Empire and NR were militarily even at that moment and the dreadnaughts gave him a slight edge he could use against them till he could break up the NR. Hopefully, getting support from planets sympathetic to the Empire such as Kuat, or planets that felt the Empire's security was worth joining them for such as the Mid-Rim. Thrawn's 15+ ISDs and hundreds of escorts was his offensive force, he also had enough ships to defend the quarter of the Empire that was still in Imperial hands.
Thrawn did weaken the NR enough that the various warlords left after his death, united by the threat that the NR posed after they took out the Ciutric Hegemony, took Coruscant and turned the NR into guerilla fighters again.

[Vicious]

I'm going to concede the points I argued and back out of this discussion, due to time constraints on my end. Term just started, and it's put a major hold on my computer activities.

I realise that I jumped in feet-first, so to speak, and I would like to extend my apologies to Chris.