As near as I can tell, it's been taken as gospel that the factor that most constrains a SW ship's combat effectiveness (defined however you choose) is reactor output. This makes a great deal of sense in terms of offensive worth, as well as maneuverability. Both require huge energies to be tossed idly about. On the other hand, we've latched onto the magic neutrino radiator explanation for shielding, almost so we don't need to think about such a scientifically-implausible phenomenon any further.
Anyway, I was inspired by the following from Norm Friedman's Modern Warships:
We know that magic neutrino radiators are behind SW shielding. But we also know intuitively that a larger radiator is necessary to dissipate more energy. I would also posit that it's not unreasonable to think that one radiator cannot sit "behind" another; neutrinos are highly uninteractive, but they definitely interact at least one-way with the radiators (by definition, really). Therefore, radiators would need to lie one-deep on a ship.Friedman wrote:Electronic components and missile systems are anything but dense. Electronic systems are light, and they require space around them for access. Missiles are far lighter, per unit volume, than were the guns and shells they have replaced and modern warships generally lack the single densest component of the ships of the past, armor. A ship can be thought of as the sum of its components: hull, machinery, armament, command-and-control (including sensors), and lesser items. Most modern surface combatants are volume- rather than weight-critical: there is not enough space in the hull to accommodate everything its displacement can (and must) carry, and so a great deal is packed into a bulky superstructure, which may sometimes appear as a forecastle almost the length of the hull itself. Volume criticality shows in the bulky superstructures of modern warships, and, indirectly, in the way in which essential weapon control systems such as computers have to be packed into these vulnerable spaces. Hull dimensions are often fixed by the need to support weights in the ship, and the excess volume requirement flows over into the superstructure. However, in some cases the ship is also length-critical: everything must be packed in along the centerline.
I believe this line of thinking is worthwhile, and that it could explain a number of things about SW ships that have never been well-explained. For instance, it makes little sense that the DS2 would need to be 180 times as voluminous as the DS1, especially since the reactor (based on blueprints) did not appear to grow by anything like the same proportion, more like 5x based on volume. Well, what if it's not the 180x volume increase, but the 32x surface area increase? This would fit well with a station that has to dissipate more energy (from a faster-firing weapon) and may have more powerful shields to protect the Emperor's precious hind end.
Likewise, why is the Executor so flat and skinny? We accept that it is not massively more offensively powerful than an ISD. Perhaps, though, as a command ship (compared to, again, a destroyer) the Executor has massively more staying power on the battlefield due to her greatly increased surface area. This would give shielding proportionate to the area increase - something like 60 km^2 (!) compared to 1.5 km^2 for an ISD. Ships that are more defensively-oriented could be expected to be thinner and flatter, and the converse would be true. We might then expect smaller, less expensive ships to be more volume-efficient shapes; this seems to fit in with our knowledge of smaller ships like the Carracks and Dreadnaughts. It also would explain long thin segments of heavily-shielded fighters like the B-wing, X-wing and even TIE Defender (which only appears to have 1.5x the engines of a standard TIE fighter but many more times the radiator area).
I do not mean to declare that this IS the way it must be, only that it seems to me to explain some things that were previously unexplained.
