Army-ship or the Acclamator XXL

FTeik · Post by **FTeik** » 2006-04-21 06:08pm

Army-ship: The Acclamator upscaled.

Suppose after the battle for Muunilist and Hypori, where in the former hundreds of Acclamators were used to land troops and in the second the majority of transports was destroyed before they reached the surface the HighCommand of the GR or the later GalacticEmpire comes to the decision, that it needs a more powerful trooptransport to safely drop its troops on hostile worlds.

As a result KDY develops a 1.5 / 3.0 kilometer long version of the Acclamator. Assuming a linear increase in power and abilities the new ships would be able to transport 128,000 / 1,024,000 troops and their equipment.

Would the development and use of such a vessel in light of planetary artillery like the ion-cannon seen in TESB make sense or would it be to many eggs put into one basket?

We also learn from the ISB, that the imperial starfleet has KDY Evakmar-trooptransport, which are said to be able to transport an entire corps. Any idea how those look?

Admiral Johnason · Post by **Admiral Johnason** » 2006-04-21 06:22pm

The answer is no. Why would you make a landing ship the size of a star destroyer. The cost of using small craft and the chances of actually have most reaching the combat zone beat the fact that a massive ship would be tracked and targeted by fighters and AA guns exclusively, meaning that most of the fire would be concentrated on one or a few ships. Even if they made it, the ships could be supressed on the ground and surrounded, while many small transports over a wide area could not be so easily cut off.

Lord Revan · Post by **Lord Revan** » 2006-04-21 06:27pm

a dedicated trooptransport like Acclamator no chance, but among other things the Venators did have abilities to land on planets and carry large number of troops so a ship like that might be possible (VnSDs are 1.300m (IIRC)).

Post by **Surlethe** » 2006-04-21 06:31pm

The main issue with these huge wedge-shaped landing ships is that they have a surface area of something like three square kilometers, which means that they'll compress a lot of air on the way down, causing major shocks and frictional heating in the atmosphere, if I recall correctly from previous discussions.

Also, the power and capacity increase with the cube of the length, so an increase in three times the length results in twenty-seven times the number of troops and equipment, or 9,216,000 troops and their equipment.

VT-16 · Post by **VT-16** » 2006-04-21 06:48pm

This may be slightly OT, but I noticed an Imperial design in Entrenched (from SW:Visionaries) and Rebellion #1, which could fit the bill (or be somewhat similar to the Acc.

It could land more troops and vehicles than, say, an Y-85 (and is probably hyperspace-capable), looked KDY-ish, but more rectangular than wedge-shaped, with multiple levels of hangars and different kinds of elevators (with the largest being capable of lowering down 1 AT-AT, 1 A5 Juggernaut and a couple of AT-STs or 1 AT-TE at the same time). I think the Empire goes for variety rather than putting all their eggs in one basket.

Spartan · Post by **Spartan** » 2006-04-21 09:13pm

I don't think that the idea would be all that viable. If for instance this craft is intended for forced entry scenario's is would make more sense to use true combat ships such as star destroyers or star cruisers to take out those the ground batteries.

Assuming space superiority, theres really no need to force entry with something so large, assuming it can even land. If it can't land you could just use a 5 km military moded commercial freighter to transport your arbitrarily large ground army. Deploying from a smaller LCM fleet of 'small' 300-500 meter long drop ships. Oh the possibilities, imagine the kind of hardware you could pack into a basically empty 5 X 1 km cylinder: siege-scale walkers, disasembled golan battlestations...

Knife · Post by **Knife** » 2006-04-21 09:46pm

It would be tactically and probably economically cheaper to just have more escort/fire support vessels in orbit to surpress enemy fire as the Acclamators go down the well, rather than build a bigger, more powerful Acclamator to do it all.

I can see, perhaps, ditching the main armarment of the Acclamators, so the ship could dump all that energy into the shields instead of weapons. Even still, either task more Vic's or Ven's to the fleet for fire support.