Illuminatus Primus wrote:You're assuming a per-unit cost-benefit despite the fact that (unlike the Death Star) it deploys rare and apparently proprietary technology. The innovative warheads, projectile, or firing mechanism may be difficult to construct or replicate compared to off-the-shelf hardware and Death Star technology which is, frankly, unique only insofar as its scale, and it does have several analogues and production lines available off the shelf (large space stations, enormous freighters, the artificial worlds, the supposedly purchased hardware for Zonama Sekot). Given the fact it was not duplicated whereas the World Devestators were and the Death Stars and superlaser platforms were suggest to me that it resembles the Sun Crusher in deploying cutting-edge, difficultly-replicated, difficultly-mass-produced, extremely rare/expensive/sophisticated equipment, even if its sheer mass is low.
The Galaxy Gun was operational for weeks or so at the most, and was the first prototype of its run; the lack of replication might simply be due to time constraints. Development times for most superweapons in the Imperial arsenal are not very long as compared to real-world research (which is probably in part due to the Empire's great familiarity with their technology, given the apparent technological quasi-stasis of the setting), but they are still longer than that; the Death Stars, which as noted used little to no truly "new" technology, still required several years of research and various prototypes and test beds before a model suitable to field deployment could be built (if we assume that the Empire had full access to the Republic and Confederate research on superlaser platforms and made use of it, the full development period could be decades). It is possible that Palpatine rushed the Galaxy Gun's development, since by then he would know that he was inhabiting a failing body, and we know from sources such as
A Guide to the Star Wars Universe that he was directly involved in its development process as a designer; certainly, as compared to weapons such as the Death Stars, it took much less time to make it from the drawing board to the field. This remarkably short development and service period would explain why it was not replicated or mass-produced.
I don't suppose you have the quote from Shadows of the Empire on hand.
Unfortunately not; the only edition of the comic I have presently available is a translation, and I have had problems with such before.
In any case, as you pointed out, the starlift and logistical capacity to handle Death Star-size jobs is not unprecedented or even portrayed as particularly rare or difficult in SW, as per your numerous examples.
Of course; I was merely pointing out that the specific example lacked canonical support.
Of course. But there is a qualitative and quantitative difference in the widespread availability, public access, industry experience, and off-the-shelf expertise and equipment between one-time wunderwaffe like the Sun Crusher and the Death Star. The Death Star, in essence, is just an exceptionally large warship based around a unitary artillery weapon. It uses a distributed constellation of visually undistinguished sublight drives, which allows for the possibility they were adaptions or off-the-shelf equipment for smaller vessels. The superlaser itself is just a large version of a weapon form routinely deployed in many roles and scales throughout the Clone Wars. Very large hyperdrives may been available, given Connor's example of Zonama Sekot. The main innovations seems to be the scale of the power generation, storage, and transmission equipment, which given that it follows the pattern set between existing conventional starships' reactors allows for it to be an evolutionary development, rather than a revolutionary one. Contrastingly, the Sun Crusher is a weapon almost in complete extreme from the Death Star. It employs magitech ultra-dense armor previously unrealized in performance and largely in form. It is stupendously stronger than any previous forms, and accordingly requires a total revolution in acceleration compensator capacity and efficiency, repulsorlift drives, sublight drives, and that's just the delivery system. It also fires magitech missiles with completely unprecedented technology function and efficacy.
Of course, the sheer stupidity of having "quantum-crystalline armour" many orders of magnitude denser than neutron-degenerate matter that behaves like an extremely durable metal and can be safely landed on ordinary planetary surfaces is too mindbogglingly ignorant to give comment on. From the books it is painfully obvious that KJA ignored mass completely and imagined an uberduper unobtainium crystal matrix that was both lighter and immensely more durable than ordinary starship-grade "dura-armour" (in the likeness of my currently most hated made-up metal, "trinium" from
Stargate, only many orders of magnitude worse); he would simply think that you could slap this onto an X-wing chassis and it would work, business as usual. The Sun Crusher is indeed an epically unprecedented construction.
The Sun Crusher, despite being on the scale of a shuttle or transport or large starfighter, cost comparably to the Death Star or its major components (I believe it was compared to the Death Star, or the armor alone was compared to the superlaser, or some variation thereof). The Galaxy Gun seems to lie somewhat between these two extremes. But there is no evidence that it could be as easily replicable as the Death Star.
Out of curiosity, do you have a quote? Is that from the original KJA books?
Saying "doing so is merely a matter of resources and opportunity cost," is certainly an arrogant statement from an engineering perspective. The merely important here is literally all that is of importance in most applications of human ingenuity, and the qualitative and quantitative scale of those costs is of paramount concern. One cannot simply heuristically wave them off.
Given how absolutely, absurdly extreme (and, frankly, utterly ridiculously wanky) the Sun Crusher is, I cannot see it as anything close to comparable to the Galaxy Gun, which uses mostly conventional technology. Its high-end hyperdrive, even projectile shields to some extent, are comparatively expensive, but not revolutionary; one might, for example, imagine that its shields can be stronger because they are required to project only for a very short time, as compared to a typical starfighter, therefore not requiring a larger than ordinary powerplant for greater effect. The "nucleonic chain reaction" technobabble may not be necessary; the only "magic" it strictly requires are shield penetrators, for which there is already theoretical groundwork (I believe some such is meantioned in
The Last Command, when the New Republic leadership theorises on what Thrawn's (hoaxical) shield penetrator might be, and Boba Fett supposedly had something that allowed him to break shields on a smaller scale).
Now, that doesn't mean that the Galaxy Gun's technology is something commonly available to the galactic means of production, it could just mean that Palpatine's private stable of savants had the capacity to come up with it decades prior. The same could ostensibly be true of the Sun Crusher. That doesn't mean they actually could be easily or cheaply replicated.
Point; dialogue is generally poor evidence. Still, as noted, the Galaxy Gun is not remotely as dependent on "magic" or illogical tech developments as is the Sun Crusher.
And further, is there any evidence they terminal velocity of Galaxy Gun projectiles are relativistic? Because I never recall that being stated, and its certainly in this context an important and unjustified claim.
The projectiles are independently powered in sublight and capable of manoeuvring to avoid starfighter and point-defence fire (as per the
Essential Guide, even if we do not see that demonstrated in the comics); given that fighters dogfight at relativistic velocities, and that the missiles were supposedly able to compete with that, I thought it a reasonable assumption.
I agree. Provided the Galaxy Gun's gimmicks cannot have countermeasures found for them, a suitably large fleet of operational GGs would be more useful in most cases than a fleet of DSes.
The main point remains that it is only effective till reliable counter-measures can be deployed. Of course, mass use of the weapon should probably win a conventional war before such time.
Conceded. However there is a non sequitur in trying to directly scale up from the tactical refire rate to the sustained refire rate over months or a long campaign. A M16 rifle has a 700-950 rpm cyclic rate of fire, but its operational limit to sustained fire (keeping it sufficiently cool continuously so as to not have failures) is only 15 rpm. Similarly, if one was to trace the fire-rate of an Ohio-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, it would fire 24 SLBMs in quick succession followed by months before additional refire. There are fundamental issues that cannot simply be waved off as irrelevent in the fire rate. You don't know, and its a no-limits fallacy to claim the capacity must exist and write it off as political will.
Since you and 18 were discussing the immediate rate of fire, as measured in hours between successive launches, that was what I commented on, here. We have only ever seen the Galaxy Gun fire two shots in rapid succession, so its sustained rate of fire cannot be accurately measured, nor do we have any idea of the maintenance it would require in the longer term (given its extraordinarily short term of service before its destruction). I would hazard a guess that since Palpatine saw fit to build only one platform, he expected it to last (if the launch platform was to be worn down by successive use in low frequencies, it would make little sense to construct a single prototype and immediately weaponise it), but I have no way of confirming that. Of course, planet-destroying weapons are not something that is likely to require very regular or frequent use in any case.
Its not a good sign.
Perhaps not, but it is too small a sample to build any statistical evaluation on. For all we know, that case was an absurd outlier, and in any case, it was not due to an inherent failing of the weapon, but to poor quality control of missile components.
Plainly unjustified assertion; there are no grounds to make such a declaration as the only logical possibility, and its not very conservative to assume its capacity is arbitrary. This reasoning would fail in most real world analogous cases.
Given how Palpatine saw fit to use the weapon on such low-level targets as single troop carriers (the
Pelagia), he does not appear to have considered its use dangerous or considerably attritive to itself (otherwise, one would think he would spare it for more important tasks). Neither he nor Umak Leth, the chief designers of the Galaxy Gun, ever expressed any doubts over its reliability during this period. Now, I am not assuming that it can fire entirely arbitrarily, without maintenance or other requirements, but the rate of fire seen in the comics (a single round fired in most cases, then once two in rapid succession when such was necessitated) was plainly dictated by political factors, rather than demonstrating any limit on its actual capacity. Which would be unknown, but most likely higher than single-digit uses per launcher.
I'd plead insufficient data. We know courses can be changed but we do not know by how much. We know there are cases of single-jumps being traced and followed (X-Wing Alliance among other examples). But we don't know for sure if you can make u-turns in hyperspace as a matter of course.
Well, yes.
It can be moved, but its mobility is not known to be comparable. Not all hyperdrives are created equally.
The Death Star-I had a hyperdrive class 4; according to Wookiee (which I always view as suspect at best), the Galaxy Gun's hyperdrive was class 6.
Fair enough, as unrealistic as I find this, it is logically permissible from the data. I would prefer that it might not be as easy or whatever to make or use full-power shots; more reasonable engineering trade-offs.
What this indicates in-universe is that the lower-power blasts are a tremendous waste, since they essentially use planet-destroying ordnance for much lesser effect. Which is problematic by itself, though there is also a benefit in a single ammunition standard. Out-of-universe and logical considerations would also apply, of course.
It seems to have functioned suitably well as a surgical decapitation weapon, and a psychological and political weapon. And of course, you're still asserting on your own authority without evidence and contrary to real world experience and trade-offs, that the GG could be arbitrarily duplicated and deployed en masse without drawbacks.
As I have explained, my reasoning is that while the Galaxy Gun does use "novel" technology, it is far from as heavy on such as the Sun Crusher, which was supposedly as expensive as the Death Star. With much lesser mass, and probably lesser energy requirements (depending on the costs for making the technobabble warheads), the Galaxy Gun is reasonably cheaper. Economies of scale also apply, if it goes into mass production.
Thank you. I don't mean its so stupid it cannot maneuver around obstacles. I was making a case study for the purposes of argument for how the GG was much more sensitive to countermeasures on fundamental grounds than the DS ever could be.
That is a foregone conclusion, of course.
Unfortunately EU authors are extremely stupid. I wonder how it is that a lot of freighter traffic can persist in the close vicinity of a planet for thousands of years while never even accidentally scorching it with their drive wash. Recall that all starships appear to accelerate very quickly to high-relativistic velocity as a by-product of hyperspace jumps; if this is in any fashion a Newtonian reaction effect, it will generate some sort of equal but opposite relativistic wash. The absence of ANY shielding bodes poorly for an even sparingly visited planet. Recall that even small starfighters have the energy density comparable to mankind's entire nuclear arsenal. The rather tiny Eta interceptors could put out at full acceleration the equivalent of many megatons-per-second in well-collimated and directed thrust streams. The X-Wing and such ships had even greater presumable power footprints. A single one could cause mass extinction scale events on an unshielded world. And this of course, omits the drive intensities of large purely civilian transports and the like.
If I were the author, I'd make it clear that radiation and waste energy control, capture, and disposal mechanisms were de rigueur, and that shields of one degree or another were extremely common to avoid this enormous technologically-mandate plot hole.
No arguments there, though canon is as canon does. Though most authors are not really
stupid, mostly just ignorant.
This is of course incredibly stupid, but it is canon. I suppose it can be accepted. Why didn't they just freighter-ram the shield at glancing angles so debris would ricochet away from the surface?
Why do they ever do anything like they do? Author's fiat, most likely.
It's basically have a dedicated heavy gun platform, while other ships we see in canon are largely flying hangers, so there is going to be a difference in how much of the volume is actually dedicated to weapons.
) and are not the be-all, end-all of the argument. The logical premises of the established universe necessarily take precedence over obscure outlier claims; I believe Connor mentioned some old book (Lando Calrissian Trilogy, I think) in which hand blasters could fire a significant fraction of a starfighter laser cannon's output (i.e., low kilotons). In this example, it should be quite clear that either there was some qualifier to that argument that was not mentioned, or whoever said it was just plain wrong, for obvious reasons. The case of the Eclipse- and Sovereign-class ships and their power output is similar.
Do you have any reason to believe that the master of hidden plans and shadowy conspiracies had no Black Op preparations in place whatsoever until he suddenly came up with the idea on a whim? The thing was obviously designed long before he authorized its construction, and it's a pretty fair bet that a lot of other work was done previously as well.
