How much can SW starship armor take with shields down?

[Srelex]

What is the lower and upper limits of the durability of SW starship armor in general, when shields are removed from the equation? For example, in the recent CG Clone Wars series, I believe that even with its shields down the Malevolance still shrugs off incoming fire from Venators, indicating extreme structural integrity. The Executor too, I think, doesn't appear to suffer much external damage from rebel fire at Endor even with shields disabled. Now, I know armor is going to vary, which is why I'm asking for both the low and the high extremes here.

[Bakustra]

What is the lower and upper limits of the durability of SW starship armor in general, when shields are removed from the equation? For example, in the recent CG Clone Wars series, I believe that even with its shields down the Malevolance still shrugs off incoming fire from Venators, indicating extreme structural integrity. The Executor too, I think, doesn't appear to suffer much external damage from rebel fire at Endor even with shields disabled. Now, I know armor is going to vary, which is why I'm asking for both the low and the high extremes here.

The AOTC: ICS, on page 23, indicates that "enemy fusion rockets barely score the super-dispersive neutronium-impregnated hull cladding" of the Acclamator. This is unfortunately unindicative of the actual power of the rockets. Potentially, they are at least 100kT in yield, but that presumes that the missiles are akin to modern thermonuclear warheads, which have a lower limit on their yield. Other sources indicate that proton torpedo warheads are pure fusion bombs, which suggests that they aren't modern thermonuclear devices, and thus may be <100 kT in yield. The Return of the Jedi novel has something similar happen with the Home One's bridge windows and a TIE Bomber-launched "thermonuclear explosive". (No page numbers right now, I'll try to get them later).

[Boeing 757]

What is the lower and upper limits of the durability of SW starship armor in general, when shields are removed from the equation? For example, in the recent CG Clone Wars series, I believe that even with its shields down the Malevolance still shrugs off incoming fire from Venators, indicating extreme structural integrity. The Executor too, I think, doesn't appear to suffer much external damage from rebel fire at Endor even with shields disabled. Now, I know armor is going to vary, which is why I'm asking for both the low and the high extremes here.

I suggest that you take a glance at the X-wing novels. There are several battles thereby in which both Imperator- and Executor-class ships lose shields and continue to fight for some duration of time until surrender or destruction had resulted. Several key battles which come to mind right now are the ones where Rogue Squadron captures the Lusankya and where Mon Remonda confronts two SSDs. Also, Isaard's Revenge has a scene therein where two ISDs exchange broadsides with one another. Perhaps if some one has the books on hand, they could post a few of those passages for us.

Other sources indicate that proton torpedo warheads are pure fusion bombs, which suggests that they aren't modern thermonuclear devices, and thus may be <100 kT in yield. The Return of the Jedi novel has something similar happen with the Home One's bridge windows and a TIE Bomber-launched "thermonuclear explosive". (No page numbers right now, I'll try to get them later).

Here is that passage in question:

"We've added power to the forward shields, Admiral."
"Good. Double power on the main battery, and--"
Suddenly the Star Cruiser was rocked by thermonuclear fireworks outside the observation window.

[Captain Seafort]

I suggest that you take a glance at the X-wing novels. There are several battles thereby in which both Imperator- and Executor-class ships lose shields and continue to fight for some duration of time until surrender or destruction had resulted. Several key battles which come to mind right now are the ones where Rogue Squadron captures the Lusankya and where Mon Remonda confronts two SSDs. Also, Isaard's Revenge has a scene therein where two ISDs exchange broadsides with one another. Perhaps if some one has the books on hand, they could post a few of those passages for us.

I'm afraid I can't quote passages, but I do recall specific incidents - at the Battle of Alderaan, Wedge expected a full squadron volley to knock out the shields of a VicStar, and a second to kill it. This suggests that the ship's hull is roughly equivalent to its shields, at least in terms of surge capacity against torpedoes.

[BLACKSUN2000]

In ROTS you see the Invisible Hand take a broadside from a Venator, both their shields are down in the scene.

Although I remember reading that their shields were down (I think it was the novelization) the visuals confirm it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMCcIWvwf8E

I really hope that came out alright...anyway it should help.

I know I'm going to get flak for this, but one of KT's novels has a chapter where a ship loses it's shields at is getting bombed o all hell and it keeps fighting(unfortunately I can't remember the title) I think it's "hard contact", but don't quote me.

[Crazedwraith]

I'm afraid I can't quote passages, but I do recall specific incidents - at the Battle of Alderaan, Wedge expected a full squadron volley to knock out the shields of a VicStar, and a second to kill it. This suggests that the ship's hull is roughly equivalent to its shields, at least in terms of surge capacity against torpedoes.

That's a Vicstar though and they are considerably smaller and shittier than even Impstar's much less Executors.

We also see in the Final Confrontation of Wraith Squadron what a torpedeo barrage does to an unshielded Impstar. Wraith Squadron fires off an volley from ambush at the belly of Implacable. The result is a massive hole in the belly armour but she keeps on fighting quite effectively for most of the battle. Even, shieldless and under constant fire from a corvette and the squadron. They only manage to subdue when a fighter actually flies into the hole and takes out its fuels cells from the inside and even them Implacable lasts long for Trigit to set the auto destruct and escape.

[Captain Seafort]

That's a Vicstar though and they are considerably smaller and shittier than even Impstar's much less Executors.

Oh certainly - I wasn't trying to make a point in absolute terms, but to use it to describe the relative strength of the shields and hull. The unshielded Implacable certainly suffered a lot less damage than Wedge expected the Corrupter to take, but I very much doubt that a volley would knock out her shields in the way the Corrupter's were.

[Connor MacLeod]

Durability varies depending on how the ship is built/how expensive it is (IE what kind of hull materials and armour they use - they have a large variety to choose from), how it's built (alot of SW ships are mass produced or even modular, which IIRC can cost something in quality in return for quantitiy) as well as the kinds of weapons and attacks they take (projectile vs beam is just the tip of the iceberg.)

I really dont think SW ships neccesarily do or need to conform to any one "standard' of design or durability, alot of it depends on the purpose the ship is built for or even who builds it. Some ISDs arguably may even be cheaper or less durable than others (ease of maintenance and repair, such as in a low quality sector that doesnt expect to receive frontline combat.)

[Sea Skimmer]

Durability varies depending on how the ship is built/how expensive it is (IE what kind of hull materials and armour they use - they have a large variety to choose from), how it's built (alot of SW ships are mass produced or even modular, which IIRC can cost something in quality in return for quantitiy) as well as the kinds of weapons and attacks they take (projectile vs beam is just the tip of the iceberg.)

Modular construction gives up nothing inherently in quality. Far from it, it’s in fact the only economical way to build a high quality warship anymore because it allows you to work on more pieces of the ship at once within an acceptable timeframe. If you build a ship from the keel up in the traditional manner, then obviously you can’t be doing work on the superstructure while the hull is still being built ect…. This is a huge limitation. Modular construction is the only sane way to build those really big star wars warships. The best thing is, you don’t necessarily have to build all the modals at even the same shipyard. You can farm out work to many yards and bring it all together at one spot. This would be even easier to do in space since you don’t have to worry about cranes and dry-docks capable of lifting each module. You can just tow the chunks around.

Early on modular construction in the world wars was used mainly to make cheap simple ships, but that was because speed was of the essence and the techniques were new. I agree that it’s likely the Empire has many standards of quality. Some ships would be cheap mass mobilization designs for escort and guard duties, others would be the highest end of standards for use by the top mobile fleets.

[Ritterin Sophia]

In ROTS you see the Invisible Hand take a broadside from a Venator, both their shields are down in the scene.

Although I remember reading that their shields were down (I think it was the novelization) the visuals confirm it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMCcIWvwf8E

I really hope that came out alright...anyway it should help.

I really don't think it does. Engagements like the one at Coruscant and Endor are stated by IIRC Ackbar to be rare incidents, unlikely enough that (again, IIRC according to Ackbar) most navies don't even train their personnel to fight in such a manner. Not to mention we can see the shielding on both the Invisible Hand and the VenStar are out, so it stands to reason they aren't going to be engaging in full power shots at that kind of distance. Those guns are located in the side of the Venator which means at best they're medium turbolasers and more probable, light turbolasers set to low. Taking all of it into account I don't think it helps us conclude anything about the effectiveness of armor on capital ships in Star Wars.

[Connor MacLeod]

Modular construction gives up nothing inherently in quality. Far from it, it’s in fact the only economical way to build a high quality warship anymore because it allows you to work on more pieces of the ship at once within an acceptable timeframe. If you build a ship from the keel up in the traditional manner, then obviously you can’t be doing work on the superstructure while the hull is still being built ect…. This is a huge limitation. Modular construction is the only sane way to build those really big star wars warships. The best thing is, you don’t necessarily have to build all the modals at even the same shipyard. You can farm out work to many yards and bring it all together at one spot. This would be even easier to do in space since you don’t have to worry about cranes and dry-docks capable of lifting each module. You can just tow the chunks around.

Huh. Isn't there going to be some sort of tradeoff in modular construction for the speed? I know its faster and broadly why, but I'm not quite sure what it was giving up. I'd figure putting the ship togetehr would sacrifice something in terms of hull strength or toughness, but maybe not.

Alternately, maybe its just a matter of speed vs quality in general, and not just with modular construction.

Early on modular construction in the world wars was used mainly to make cheap simple ships, but that was because speed was of the essence and the techniques were new. I agree that it’s likely the Empire has many standards of quality. Some ships would be cheap mass mobilization designs for escort and guard duties, others would be the highest end of standards for use by the top mobile fleets.

Another reason I think is that SW simply wouldn't want to let alot of their high end capabilities to be "generally accessible" to the public, or even neccearily private/corporate interests. You don't want some random corporation being able to build a Death Star (even though in theory they could.) I would likewise doubt you would want anyone building Executors or Star Destroyers with (rapid and easy) planetkilling firepower and intergalactic range. They'd be pushing that limitation as it was with what we know their civilian capabilities ought to provide.

[Sea Skimmer]

Huh. Isn't there going to be some sort of tradeoff in modular construction for the speed? I know its faster and broadly why, but I'm not quite sure what it was giving up. I'd figure putting the ship togetehr would sacrifice something in terms of hull strength or toughness, but maybe not.

Not if you designed the ship for that method of construction. If you design a ship poorly, then it doesn’t matter how you build it. See all the German warships in WW2 which had the sterns break off. They got built to spec and built conventionally from the keel up, but the specs were flawed. Nimitz class aircraft carriers meanwhile are built in 161 modular pieces, the largest of which is close to 1,000 tons. They are probably the strongest ships ever built, and the only warships in the world still incorporating real armor.

The spread of modular shipbuilding went hand in hand with the gradual replacement of riveting with welding, and the replacement of inclined building ways with building docks. Its much easier to do modular (or any other) work if the ship is built on a level surface. You also need really big cranes as these place a strict upper limit on how big the upper pieces can be, though some very large ships are now assembled with the largest modules already floating and are then moved into a dry-dock afterwards to add smaller superstructure pieces.

Welding, if properly done is inherently cheaper, faster, stronger and lighter then riveting which is why you don’t see many large industrial items with rivets anymore. Welding also allows for robots to do some of the assembly work, and robots can make welds that are physically impossible for humans to replicate. You can also do a lot of work indoors, without requiring a building barn big enough to hold the entire ship, which improves quality all the more.

So this does mean a lot of new facilities and space and money upfront to convert to modular work, which is the only reason modular building didn’t come to dominate in shipbuilding even earlier. You are giving up use of many old facilities. In the US the only shipyard built since WW2, Ingalls, was built specifically to introduce fully modular shipbuilding. The yard does nothing else, and just builds the ships on a big concrete pad. They roll them onto a floating dry dock for launch. It did take some time to work out new techniques for mating up the different modular’s, failure to properly account for thermal expansion made that absurdly hard to do early on, but these issues are long solved.

Alternately, maybe its just a matter of speed vs quality in general, and not just with modular construction.

Like I was saying, modular work is faster because you can work on more parts of the ship at once. Quality has to do with the quality of the materials you build with, how much workmanship you put into assembling, and how well you designed the ship. Its perfectly possible to design higher or lower quality ships which are built generally the same way, until you get up close and look at the details. A lot of the quality of a ship, especially a warship is in the detail fittings and design work, not the mass structure of the hull anyway.

So an Empire spec Star Destroyer might have three levels of redundant computerized fire control with manned consoles at each level and at each firing battery as local control, while the Economy Class Star Destroyer variant has just one central computer to do everything. If it breaks, nothing works. But that’s how you save money.

Another reason I think is that SW simply wouldn't want to let alot of their high end capabilities to be "generally accessible" to the public, or even neccearily private/corporate interests. You don't want some random corporation being able to build a Death Star (even though in theory they could.) I would likewise doubt you would want anyone building Executors or Star Destroyers with (rapid and easy) planetkilling firepower and intergalactic range. They'd be pushing that limitation as it was with what we know their civilian capabilities ought to provide.

Last I checked, Imperial warships are built by private companies, if absurdly large ones like Kuat Drive Yards, not Imperial Naval Shipyards. The secret construction of the Death Star is not typical, but that'd be kind of like pointing to Area 51 to say the USAF doesn't have civilian companies designing and building and testing its aircraft. Star Wars gives every impression that technology is merely a matter of money given how many times warships and starfighters owned by private citizens and not even corporations show up. A private company building Star Destroyers seems perfectly in line with what we see, which is why planets just have to have planetary shields and massive weapons for defense. Its not very supportable to belief that any real technology controls could exist in a galaxy that big with such stagnant technology anyway . Its just a matter of putting up the money for engineering work to utilize it, then building what you designed. Of course the Empire might try to curb this, but they could only do so within limits and it'd be artificial.

[BLACKSUN2000]

I don't think it helps us conclude anything about the effectiveness of armor on capital ships in Star Wars.

You're absolutely right

But that was the only piece of film evidence I could think of at the moment.


A quick search of the word "durasteel" and I came up with this on wikipedia:

Durasteel was an incredibly strong and versatile metal alloy, created from carvanium, lommite, carbon, meleenium, neutronium, and zersium. It was capable of withstanding blistering heat, frigid cold, and monumental physical stress, even when very thin. It has buun calculated to be approximately 300,000 times stronger than steel. Because of these properties, durasteel was used for almost everything, from smelting pots for other less hearty metals, to spacecraft hulls.

Could we do anything with that?

[Connor MacLeod]

Not if you designed the ship for that method of construction. If you design a ship poorly, then it doesn’t matter how you build it. See all the German warships in WW2 which had the sterns break off. They got built to spec and built conventionally from the keel up, but the specs were flawed. Nimitz class aircraft carriers meanwhile are built in 161 modular pieces, the largest of which is close to 1,000 tons. They are probably the strongest ships ever built, and the only warships in the world still incorporating real armor.

The spread of modular shipbuilding went hand in hand with the gradual replacement of riveting with welding, and the replacement of inclined building ways with building docks. Its much easier to do modular (or any other) work if the ship is built on a level surface. You also need really big cranes as these place a strict upper limit on how big the upper pieces can be, though some very large ships are now assembled with the largest modules already floating and are then moved into a dry-dock afterwards to add smaller superstructure pieces.

So the main problem/drawback of modular building is you need big machines and lots of room (in aggregate - I imagine you can "spread out" the construction in different spots if you needed to and hauled the componets to another location if you had to.)

[quote[
Welding, if properly done is inherently cheaper, faster, stronger and lighter then riveting which is why you don’t see many large industrial items with rivets anymore. Welding also allows for robots to do some of the assembly work, and robots can make welds that are physically impossible for humans to replicate. You can also do a lot of work indoors, without requiring a building barn big enough to hold the entire ship, which improves quality all the more. [/quote]

We still use riveting? for what?

So this does mean a lot of new facilities and space and money upfront to convert to modular work, which is the only reason modular building didn’t come to dominate in shipbuilding even earlier. You are giving up use of many old facilities. In the US the only shipyard built since WW2, Ingalls, was built specifically to introduce fully modular shipbuilding. The yard does nothing else, and just builds the ships on a big concrete pad. They roll them onto a floating dry dock for launch. It did take some time to work out new techniques for mating up the different modular’s, failure to properly account for thermal expansion made that absurdly hard to do early on, but these issues are long solved.

Is there any benefits inherent to using the older method over modular construction?

Like I was saying, modular work is faster because you can work on more parts of the ship at once. Quality has to do with the quality of the materials you build with, how much workmanship you put into assembling, and how well you designed the ship. Its perfectly possible to design higher or lower quality ships which are built generally the same way, until you get up close and look at the details. A lot of the quality of a ship, especially a warship is in the detail fittings and design work, not the mass structure of the hull anyway.

Good point. Another thing to consider is "honesty" of the builder I supposed, which relates to quality. I imagine it would be quite possible to have a ship builder who deliberately cuts corners in design and construction so as to save money on a project and pocket a bigger profit.

So an Empire spec Star Destroyer might have three levels of redundant computerized fire control with manned consoles at each level and at each firing battery as local control, while the Economy Class Star Destroyer variant has just one central computer to do everything. If it breaks, nothing works. But that’s how you save money.

Or a single computer and a partly droid crew, although there seem to be inherent biases against the degree of automation they will allow. And I suppose it would be worth mentioning that they might sacrifice redundancy in fire control for other reasons (expanding hangar capacity, or more guns or fuel capacity, or whatever.)

Last I checked, Imperial warships are built by private companies, if absurdly large ones like Kuat Drive Yards, not Imperial Naval Shipyards.

A bit of both I gather from teh sources. They maintain shipyards on their own (Imperial shipyards that is) and have their own R&D firms, but a great deal of the work does come from private companies like KDY. Actually the odd thing is is that its often implied other companies will be building the designs of other companies (Fondor building KDY style warships, for example) which seems incredibly odd, but I guess licensing the designs and meeting the demands of the governement dictate that (EG "we want Executors, we'll have Executors!"). Likely the Navy-owned yards work on licenses as well.

The secret construction of the Death Star is not typical, but that'd be kind of like pointing to Area 51 to say the USAF doesn't have civilian companies designing and building and testing its aircraft. Star Wars gives every impression that technology is merely a matter of money given how many times warships and starfighters owned by private citizens and not even corporations show up.

The stuff you see in "private/corporate" use isnt neccesarily high end or "large" (at leats not legitimately or perhaps not without government permission) and if it is it probably has some limitation (Eg short hyperdrive range - the KDY defense fleet in the prequels). One example would be Xizor's private navy, which was mostly corvettes and frigates. We could also point to the Confederacy forces naval assets (like the trade fed) whose designs were frankly crap and inferior to military stuff. Or anything the Rebels got a hold of, or pirate,s or whatever. Generlaly small stuff. In fact the only large ships in "private" use I can recall was with KDY and maybe Corellia and the other large shipbuilders, and I suspect they had to make concessions to allow that (one thing that was constantly held over the heads of corporations is that if they pissed Palpy off he'd come in and take them over.)

A private company building Star Destroyers seems perfectly in line with what we see, which is why planets just have to have planetary shields and massive weapons for defense. Its not very supportable to belief that any real technology controls could exist in a galaxy that big with such stagnant technology anyway . Its just a matter of putting up the money for engineering work to utilize it, then building what you designed. Of course the Empire might try to curb this, but they could only do so within limits and it'd be artificial.

Actually they did try exercising restraint in technological access - the empire IIRC tried outlawing blasters (one reason stormy armor isnt as durable against blasters IIRC) and turbolaser tech and munitions were heavily restricted. admittedly the "controls" will largely amount to a Dune-like "Spice" type excuse (IE some single factor that is relatively easy to control) but I'm frankly at a loss to explain it otherwise. And even then there's limits (since even at lower yields they can still conceivably pose a threat - it just takes longer.)

I mean, if oyu really think about it, the speed of hyperdrive and the implied power generation capabilities of even a supposedly "civiilian" craft could easily dictate that any random wacko could conceivably destroy any planet he chose - and SW has not elevated its society passed greedy, selfish, insane, or sadistic people. If you can build ISDs, you can probably build some sort of massive hunk of metal with a hyperdrive on it designed to slam into the planet at insane velocity, shield or no shield.

[Sea Skimmer]

So the main problem/drawback of modular building is you need big machines and lots of room (in aggregate - I imagine you can "spread out" the construction in different spots if you needed to and hauled the componets to another location if you had to.)

Yup. That’s done quite a bit in the modern day in Europe too, as its a way to keep several shipyards alive working on just one class of ship. Only one shipyard does the assembly, but large modules are barged in from other areas. The Type 45 destroyer is a good example of this, three different shipyards build blocks for it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... ss_D33.jpg

You can see a couple blocks for a Type 45 destroyer being worked on above. Notice how some girders extend past the end of the block. Each block has a portion of girders which it ‘sends’ and a portion which it will receive from other blocks. Once assembled all the girder ends are welded together, and all the plating of the decks and hull are also welded together. The blocks shown are still at a fairly early phase of work, they’ll be stuffed with piping and wiring and partly painted before they are assembled together. Doing that piping/wiring/equipment fitting job is MUCH easier with blocks because access is so much better vs. having to carry everything down the hatches if you built from the keel up.

We still use riveting? for what?

I don’t know if anyone still uses hot riveting for anything because bolts can do the same job now when you don’t want welding or can’t make the kind of weld you want for one reason or another, but pop rivits are still used to assemble a lot of stuff like luggage.

The main reason to keep using them is that a rivet can attach parts which can not be welded like wood onto metals, and it can be used to bind dissimilar metals that don’t like to weld cheaply (warships use rather expensive explosive welding to attach pieces of aluminum and steel together, then weld normally from each end of that). Bolts can do this too, but sometimes you don’t want a bolt which could come undone or leave exposed threads. Rivet heads can be nice and rounded off on both ends which is about the only advantage they have.

Is there any benefits inherent to using the older method over modular construction?

None that I’m aware of given current technology and equally skilled workforces. Since the old methods can still work out fairly economically for smaller ships, nearly everything big is modules now, some shipyards have not converted yet. Some can’t convert for lack of space for the proper arrangement of the yard. But odds are many of those shipyards will just die out in the future as the industry continues to contract.

Good point. Another thing to consider is "honesty" of the builder I supposed, which relates to quality. I imagine it would be quite possible to have a ship builder who deliberately cuts corners in design and construction so as to save money on a project and pocket a bigger profit.

That was an enormous problem, and still is. A shipyard can also merely be careless and actually use too much material. It used to be a huge problem that ships would be built overweight because shipyards didn’t bother manufacturing each plate to the minimal thickness and threw on too many thick ones. As a result navies took to sending representatives to measure the weight of every item that went on the ship in person. A lot of battleships built before WW1, particularly from French and Russian yards completed so overweight that the armor belt was left below the waterline.

You can also have problems like insufficient supervision for workers. On some of the new San Antonio class LPDs two thirds of the watertight doors were hung incorrectly and not watertight on inspection, because the same couple people had done all the work, and done it the exact same wrong way every single time. But that’s why we inspect ships before accepting them.

Its typical for a ship to go out on sea trials and inspection, and then come back needing 3-6 weeks of work to fix everything that wasn’t done right, but sometimes it takes much longer. Imagine if someone installed a 10 meter diameter mounting bolt on an ISD reactor wrong washer… and you didn’t know it until you powered up the reactor the first time when it vibrated to badly you had to shutdown. Trouble like that might not ruin a ship, but it has to be corrected or else you will have a problem.

Or a single computer and a partly droid crew, although there seem to be inherent biases against the degree of automation they will allow. And I suppose it would be worth mentioning that they might sacrifice redundancy in fire control for other reasons (expanding hangar capacity, or more guns or fuel capacity, or whatever.)

That is possible. Redundancy adds weight, and it eats into volume. If you have a fixed hull design, but you want to change what the ship does then you might have no choice but to remove existing equipment to make way for it.

This was done on an epic scale in WW2, because ships gained so much unforeseen radar, radio and anti aircraft gear during the war, and so many more people to man it all. One of the first things they did was remove ships boats, seaplanes and catapults to make way. But when that wasn’t enough things got more radical, and you saw armored conning towers being removed from battleships, destroyer funnels being cut down in height. Mess rooms had to turn into workshops (we still keep losing more hanger volume on carriers to ever bigger workshops) and everything just got a lot more cramped. In the case of a number of British light cruisers, an entire main battery turret, 1/4th the main armament was ultimately scarified as weight compensation.

A space warship has a big advantage though, that it can’t capsize, and so top weight and stability are no longer an overriding concern when you make additions or subtractions of weights. You’ll be mainly volume limited in what you can do, though adding weapons would be limited by recoil considerations too.

A bit of both I gather from teh sources. They maintain shipyards on their own (Imperial shipyards that is) and have their own R&D firms, but a great deal of the work does come from private companies like KDY. Actually the odd thing is is that its often implied other companies will be building the designs of other companies (Fondor building KDY style warships, for example) which seems incredibly odd, but I guess licensing the designs and meeting the demands of the governement dictate that (EG "we want Executors, we'll have Executors!"). Likely the Navy-owned yards work on licenses as well.

KDY may not own many of its designs in the first place. It may only own a right to build them. This is how a lot of real military designs work. A private company might design it, and it might build it, but the government owns the actual design in the end since it paid to developed it. The hummve is like that. US government owns the design, AM General owns rights to produce it and can collect royalties from anyone else who builds them.

The Empire… being well an Empire, could also simply declare a war emergency due to the rebellion and order other shipyards into action, seizing the design work and engineering plans.

In the US the construction of Ticonderoga class cruisers, and now the Arleigh Burke destroyers we are still building between two private yards, Bath Iron Works and Ingalls. This is was and is being done to ensure we retain a significant shipbuilding industrial base, since we don’t build many different classes anymore.

But back in WW2 we had as many as eight different private yards and government naval shipyards building the same destroyer design, because we just needed numbers fast.

The stuff you see in "private/corporate" use isnt neccesarily high end or "large" (at leats not legitimately or perhaps not without government permission) and if it is it probably has some limitation (Eg short hyperdrive range - the KDY defense fleet in the prequels). One example would be Xizor's private navy, which was mostly corvettes and frigates. We could also point to the Confederacy forces naval assets (like the trade fed) whose designs were frankly crap and inferior to military stuff.

The Trade Federation was pretty clearly all mobilization designs, and it must have been good enough given that they sustained a war for several years with them.

Or anything the Rebels got a hold of, or pirate,s or whatever. Generlaly small stuff. In fact the only large ships in "private" use I can recall was with KDY and maybe Corellia and the other large shipbuilders, and I suspect they had to make concessions to allow that (one thing that was constantly held over the heads of corporations is that if they pissed Palpy off he'd come in and take them over.)

The Mon Calamari managed to turn luxury liners into warships able to tackle Imperial star destroyers. I think that alone says a lot about how profile military technology is, and how generally large and strong Star Wars ships are.

Actually they did try exercising restraint in technological access - the empire IIRC tried outlawing blasters (one reason stormy armor isnt as durable against blasters IIRC) and turbolaser tech and munitions were heavily restricted. admittedly the "controls" will largely amount to a Dune-like "Spice" type excuse (IE some single factor that is relatively easy to control) but I'm frankly at a loss to explain it otherwise. And even then there's limits (since even at lower yields they can still conceivably pose a threat - it just takes longer.)

I never heard of any such blaster ban, that sounds like a particularly retarded piece of the EU no one gave any thought too.

I mean, if oyu really think about it, the speed of hyperdrive and the implied power generation capabilities of even a supposedly "civiilian" craft could easily dictate that any random wacko could conceivably destroy any planet he chose - and SW has not elevated its society passed greedy, selfish, insane, or sadistic people. If you can build ISDs, you can probably build some sort of massive hunk of metal with a hyperdrive on it designed to slam into the planet at insane velocity, shield or no shield.

You probably can, which is probably a major factor in why the Emperor was able to take power and have it take 20 years for a rebellion to form against him which accomplish anything. Everyone was getting mighty concerned about a lack of stability because so much firepower was in so many peoples hands, and the Republic had nothing but a few Jedi to do anything about it in an offensive preemptive role.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Side question, what sort of armor do Nimitz ships have? I know they have kevlar, but I thought all the face hardened armor plate for warships was long ago gone.

Unless the Kirov battlecruisers have some that is.

[Sea Skimmer]

Side question, what sort of armor do Nimitz ships have? I know they have kevlar, but I thought all the face hardened armor plate for warships was long ago gone.

Face hardened armor was only used for vertical armor thicker then about 7-8 inches. All deck armor, and most of the thinner vertical armor on cruisers and carriers was homogenous armor. A Nimitz has a couple of 2in thick armor decks on the flightdeck, hanger deck and one lower deck levels, plus 1in on the gallery deck. A large portion of the ships side is also thickened up to the tune of around 2-3 inches but the exact details are all classified. The earlier USN supercarriers have a similar scale of protection. A lot of this material is necessary for hull strength so we couldn’t build the things unarmored if we wanted too.

Unless the Kirov battlecruisers have some that is.

Kirov has quite a bit of armor up to 70mm thick including armored boxes on the CIC and P-700 missile battery, and an armored belt and deck. She was meant to withstand Harpoon missiles and 1000lb GP bomb strikes.

[Connor MacLeod]

Yup. That’s done quite a bit in the modern day in Europe too, as its a way to keep several shipyards alive working on just one class of ship. Only one shipyard does the assembly, but large modules are barged in from other areas. The Type 45 destroyer is a good example of this, three different shipyards build blocks for it.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... ss_D33.jpg

You can see a couple blocks for a Type 45 destroyer being worked on above. Notice how some girders extend past the end of the block. Each block has a portion of girders which it ‘sends’ and a portion which it will receive from other blocks. Once assembled all the girder ends are welded together, and all the plating of the decks and hull are also welded together. The blocks shown are still at a fairly early phase of work, they’ll be stuffed with piping and wiring and partly painted before they are assembled together. Doing that piping/wiring/equipment fitting job is MUCH easier with blocks because access is so much better vs. having to carry everything down the hatches if you built from the keel up.

Easier to make modifications and repairs too, I imagine.

I don’t know if anyone still uses hot riveting for anything because bolts can do the same job now when you don’t want welding or can’t make the kind of weld you want for one reason or another, but pop rivits are still used to assemble a lot of stuff like luggage.

The main reason to keep using them is that a rivet can attach parts which can not be welded like wood onto metals, and it can be used to bind dissimilar metals that don’t like to weld cheaply (warships use rather expensive explosive welding to attach pieces of aluminum and steel together, then weld normally from each end of that). Bolts can do this too, but sometimes you don’t want a bolt which could come undone or leave exposed threads. Rivet heads can be nice and rounded off on both ends which is about the only advantage they have.

Interesting.

None that I’m aware of given current technology and equally skilled workforces. Since the old methods can still work out fairly economically for smaller ships, nearly everything big is modules now, some shipyards have not converted yet. Some can’t convert for lack of space for the proper arrangement of the yard. But odds are many of those shipyards will just die out in the future as the industry continues to contract.

So its a matter of technology dictating cost? That is the older method is more mature and well established, which has lower costs, whereas Modular tech is still fairly new, and not everyone has adopted it (or is able to).

That was an enormous problem, and still is. A shipyard can also merely be careless and actually use too much material. It used to be a huge problem that ships would be built overweight because shipyards didn’t bother manufacturing each plate to the minimal thickness and threw on too many thick ones. As a result navies took to sending representatives to measure the weight of every item that went on the ship in person. A lot of battleships built before WW1, particularly from French and Russian yards completed so overweight that the armor belt was left below the waterline.

You can also have problems like insufficient supervision for workers. On some of the new San Antonio class LPDs two thirds of the watertight doors were hung incorrectly and not watertight on inspection, because the same couple people had done all the work, and done it the exact same wrong way every single time. But that’s why we inspect ships before accepting them.

I imagine that the automation and robotic elements to SW construction could make things both easier or worse, depending on how it goes and how its used. I mean an automated construciton largely does what its told to in SW I think, so if you program it incorrectly, fuckups could happen on a truly colossal scale. But if you do it right, it probably can cut down on those problems too.

Its typical for a ship to go out on sea trials and inspection, and then come back needing 3-6 weeks of work to fix everything that wasn’t done right, but sometimes it takes much longer. Imagine if someone installed a 10 meter diameter mounting bolt on an ISD reactor wrong washer… and you didn’t know it until you powered up the reactor the first time when it vibrated to badly you had to shutdown. Trouble like that might not ruin a ship, but it has to be corrected or else you will have a problem.

Out of curiosity, are there ever times (EG in wartime) they might have cut down on sea trials or inspection or deliberately cut corners because speed was crucial? (IE replacing losses.) I'd imagine so, but I dont know enough for any ideas to spring out at me.

That is possible. Redundancy adds weight, and it eats into volume. If you have a fixed hull design, but you want to change what the ship does then you might have no choice but to remove existing equipment to make way for it.

This was done on an epic scale in WW2, because ships gained so much unforeseen radar, radio and anti aircraft gear during the war, and so many more people to man it all. One of the first things they did was remove ships boats, seaplanes and catapults to make way. But when that wasn’t enough things got more radical, and you saw armored conning towers being removed from battleships, destroyer funnels being cut down in height. Mess rooms had to turn into workshops (we still keep losing more hanger volume on carriers to ever bigger workshops) and everything just got a lot more cramped. In the case of a number of British light cruisers, an entire main battery turret, 1/4th the main armament was ultimately scarified as weight compensation.

A space warship has a big advantage though, that it can’t capsize, and so top weight and stability are no longer an overriding concern when you make additions or subtractions of weights. You’ll be mainly volume limited in what you can do, though adding weapons would be limited by recoil considerations too.

True, although in SW force field tech can compensate somewhat for recoil considerations (it probably almost has to I doubt they can rely on physical structural members alone for truly powerful stuff. The DS is almost certainly an example, but I know its been mentioned that the fact we see SW capital ships landing on planets invariably requires repulsors because the landing gear can't support its mass alone.

That said, SW seems to have few internal problems when it comes to internal components and technology. Star Destroyers and such to me always seem incredibly incredibly roomier than you might expect. I'd imagine a more specialized design (hangerless ISDs) with a smaller crew and greater automation could be made alot nastier.

KDY may not own many of its designs in the first place. It may only own a right to build them. This is how a lot of real military designs work. A private company might design it, and it might build it, but the government owns the actual design in the end since it paid to developed it. The hummve is like that. US government owns the design, AM General owns rights to produce it and can collect royalties from anyone else who builds them.

The Empire… being well an Empire, could also simply declare a war emergency due to the rebellion and order other shipyards into action, seizing the design work and engineering plans.

In the US the construction of Ticonderoga class cruisers, and now the Arleigh Burke destroyers we are still building between two private yards, Bath Iron Works and Ingalls. This is was and is being done to ensure we retain a significant shipbuilding industrial base, since we don’t build many different classes anymore.

But back in WW2 we had as many as eight different private yards and government naval shipyards building the same destroyer design, because we just needed numbers fast.

That's possible too. Part of me has wondered maybe if the reason the EU ISD numbers (IE the 25,000 figure) was so low is because they have different builders building their own model. (EG we've never seen the "Big Corellian Ships" Han talks about) but then again that could cause problems with standardization and logistics if they are too disimilar too.

The Trade Federation was pretty clearly all mobilization designs, and it must have been good enough given that they sustained a war for several years with them.

Well it was good enough in numbers (The ROTS ICS goes into this. it takes like 4-6 separatist destroyers to equal one Venator.) but they generally had greater numbers near as we can tell (they also had a decade of lead time in preparing for war.) But they sucked at military designs at all and the fact they managed to do well is more because of numbers and ase of building than anything else (well that and Palpy engineered things that way..)

Of course the Trade Federation and other Separatist gorups held significantly more power in the waning days of the REpublic before Palpy took over. Things like that changed after the rise of the Empire, I believe.

The Mon Calamari managed to turn luxury liners into warships able to tackle Imperial star destroyers. I think that alone says a lot about how profile military technology is, and how generally large and strong Star Wars ships are.

To an extent. the ROTJ novel still mentions that the ISDs were better armed and protected. Alot of what supposedly gave the Mon Cals an advantage is that their crews were (supposedly) Better on average (better gunnery, better helmsmen, etc.) their ships were more agile (allowing them to get behind the Imperial ships or in vulnerable positions), and that they had an insane level of redundancy (which made them hard to maintain but alot tougher.)

I never heard of any such blaster ban, that sounds like a particularly retarded piece of the EU no one gave any thought too.

It might have only been in certain places (trouble spots) for example, and possibly not totally effective (black market), but its not that inconceivable. Alot of blasters are pretty damn powerful (more powerful than oyu plausibly need) and moreso than slugthrowers, which would also be available, so why would you want civilians to have weapons that could (in theory) rival the output of a grenade for example? Besides there were non blaster energy weapons that existed too.

Admittedly now that I think about it there were "civiilan" blaster models, but they weren't quite the same in terms of design and are functionally different weapons anyhow. So maybe its accurate to say they restricted the kinds of "blasters" allowed,

You probably can, which is probably a major factor in why the Emperor was able to take power and have it take 20 years for a rebellion to form against him which accomplish anything. Everyone was getting mighty concerned about a lack of stability because so much firepower was in so many peoples hands, and the Republic had nothing but a few Jedi to do anything about it in an offensive preemptive role.

Yeah but short of mass robotic armies or garriosing every planet with its own army and fleet, I dont see how you could guarantee stability. We knew tons of local conflicts erupted, and terrorism never quite subsided, or piracy. I'd think that the risks or dangers of such "attacks" would be significant, and the ywould be hard to protect against without some heavy form of restriction in place.

[Sea Skimmer]

Easier to make modifications and repairs too, I imagine.

Not so much, once the ship is all welded together its really not practical to take the blocks apart. You’ve still got to fix it and make modifications the old fashion way, either the new stuff fits down a hatch or else you start cutting through decks and the hull. Over key areas like the engine rooms, the structure of a ship will be designed with patch areas meant to be cut out so you can lift in large replacement parts. Some submarines are designed be cut back in half for certain kinds of work like engine replacement, but they are something of a special case because of the long narrow shape.

And of course, some damage just can’t be repaired. Under the keel torpedoes and bottom mine explosions in particular can warp a hull in ways which can’t be undone. You’d need to physically straighten back out every girder and plate on the ship… not too realistic. This type of damage is probably a lot less likely to occur in space warfare, because you have nothing like the water to transmit a wide-ranging shock into the hull, but it could still happen. Asymmetric engine thrust after taking combined engine and structural damage for example could warp a bunch of stuff.

So its a matter of technology dictating cost? That is the older method is more mature and well established, which has lower costs, whereas Modular tech is still fairly new, and not everyone has adopted it (or is able to).

Exactly.

I imagine that the automation and robotic elements to SW construction could make things both easier or worse, depending on how it goes and how its used. I mean an automated construciton largely does what its told to in SW I think, so if you program it incorrectly, fuckups could happen on a truly colossal scale. But if you do it right, it probably can cut down on those problems too.

Droids would certainly help avoid human error. They’d also be really useful for is doing inspection work since assuming a certain quality of programming, they just wouldn’t miss inspecting every last nut, bolt, weld and wire the ship is supposed to have.

Out of curiosity, are there ever times (EG in wartime) they might have cut down on sea trials or inspection or deliberately cut corners because speed was crucial? (IE replacing losses.) I'd imagine so, but I dont know enough for any ideas to spring out at me.

Sea trials would still be conducted in wartime, but what was usually cut out was the performance trials phase of this. It used to be that every ship was run back and forth on a measured mile to determine its true speed. Since a ship running a straight line between the measured mile buoys would be a shooting gallery for submarines, no one did this in wartime. Indeed the USN stopped doing it in 1942, and never started up again. Now we just run a four hour full power trial in the open sea, and estimate speeds. This is more realistic then performance on a single mile anyway (though they ran the mile in both directions to account for wind and currents). The introduction of GPS made this a lot less relevant anyway.

Inspections would be relaxed, usually because of a shortage of trained personal to conduct them. It was extremely common to cut corners of all types with the standards and polish of fittings, but it varied. Some standards would actually rise, often because of increased levels of manning forcing improvements like more water taps and bathrooms. On the other hand materials like armor plate became very hard to acquire, and the British provided a kind of plastic splinter proof armor to a number of ships which was made out of gravel mixed into a resin. They had tried concrete before that, but found thin layers of concrete splintered so badly it was worse then no armor at all.

True, although in SW force field tech can compensate somewhat for recoil considerations (it probably almost has to I doubt they can rely on physical structural members alone for truly powerful stuff. The DS is almost certainly an example, but I know its been mentioned that the fact we see SW capital ships landing on planets invariably requires repulsors because the landing gear can't support its mass alone.

Even if you had landing gear strong enough, the real problem would be having the ground be strong enough. Even supposedly solid rock formations can have trouble supporting really large buildings and dams. Now imagine how deep you’d bog down if a Victory class was to touchdown on mere earth or clay…..

That said, SW seems to have few internal problems when it comes to internal components and technology. Star Destroyers and such to me always seem incredibly incredibly roomier than you might expect. I'd imagine a more specialized design (hangerless ISDs) with a smaller crew and greater automation could be made alot nastier

The roomy passageways we see might be related to a need to move heavy equipment and repair parts throughout such colossal ships. An ISD already has what, over 100 decks? Many real ships have certain passageways (often called broadway) much larger then others, and even equipped with an overhead monorail crane system to move stuff around. On battleships and large cruisers this had the added purpose of allowing the crew to shift heavy rounds of ammunition from the bow turrets to the stern turrets and visa versa.

On the Death Star meanwhile… the thing is so damn big already they may have made the passageways all huge because they didn’t really have any other use of the space. The overall volume of the vessel was probably set by the diameter needed to accommodate the super laser system, leaving a lot of extra space in the gaps that had little function.

That's possible too. Part of me has wondered maybe if the reason the EU ISD numbers (IE the 25,000 figure) was so low is because they have different builders building their own model. (EG we've never seen the "Big Corellian Ships" Han talks about) but then again that could cause problems with standardization and logistics if they are too disimilar too.

With such a huge Empire to defend, and so many ships inherently tied down to static guard duty or convoying between closely spaced systems its very likely they have a wide range of warships. Standardization isn’t so important when you have such a huge empire, and yet a hyperspace transport can cross most or all of it in a single day. The ISDs are probably one of the reality few types which is actually designed for wide roving offensive search and destroy type operations to hunt down the rebels. Indeed the British Royal Navy in real life had the widest ranging fleet ever, and never saw standardization as very important because they simply had so many well equipped, well stocked naval bases. The USN on the other hand was very big on standardization because it had no overseas bases, and thus all supplies would have to come forward by slow transport ships in real time.

The Empire might well have quite a lot of ships which do not even have hyperdrives for planetary defense, basically a space version of a unseaworthy coastal defense ship. I can easily imagine that the Empire has a giant version of the fighter scale external hyperdrive we see in Attack of the Clones, which could be used to deliver ships like this to a planet, then taken back home to deliver another one.

Well it was good enough in numbers (The ROTS ICS goes into this. it takes like 4-6 separatist destroyers to equal one Venator.) but they generally had greater numbers near as we can tell (they also had a decade of lead time in preparing for war.) But they sucked at military designs at all and the fact they managed to do well is more because of numbers and ase of building than anything else (well that and Palpy engineered things that way..)

Yeah for all we know, the power of the DARK SIDE make separatist designers idiots… But the separatist ships seem a lot smaller in volume then a Venator and could be a whole lot cheaper to build. The fixed forward firing guns on some of them, IIRC it’s the banking clan frigate that has the big ones under the chin, especially struck me as being a mobilization driven feature. One fixed gun is much cheaper to build, and easier to mount then a turret of comparable firepower. I doubt the designs were very good overall, but I also doubt that’s related to actual inferior technology. The Separatists needed to build a fleet quickly, and without the resources and shipyards of the core worlds they may not have had a serious option of building 1 for 1 equivalents.

In the late 19th century a big trend for harbor defense was to build small monitor type warships with literally just one big gun, either in a turret or a disappearing mounting. Such a ship was pretty crappy in open combat, but working in conjunction with fixed defenses and other ships the idea wasn’t bad. Such ships could mount a heavy gun on about 40% as much tonnage as a full fledged battleship would require. Someone was defiantly thinking ‘monitor’ when they sketched that separatist ship.

It might have only been in certain places (trouble spots) for example, and possibly not totally effective (black market), but its not that inconceivable. Alot of blasters are pretty damn powerful (more powerful than oyu plausibly need) and moreso than slugthrowers, which would also be available, so why would you want civilians to have weapons that could (in theory) rival the output of a grenade for example? Besides there were non blaster energy weapons that existed too.

Very localized bans, sure, like on a planet by planet basis. The ease of smuggling weapons when you can cross the galaxy in a day would really make it foolish to try to enforce a wider ban. You’d just lose credibility through non enforcement… which is probably what was happening to the Empire in later years anyway as it tried to centralize more and more power and defensive responsibilities.

Admittedly now that I think about it there were "civiilan" blaster models, but they weren't quite the same in terms of design and are functionally different weapons anyhow. So maybe its accurate to say they restricted the kinds of "blasters" allowed,

That would make more sense. Ban military grades of blaster. Indeed since we don’t know much about how blasters work, it may well be that they can design two blasters of the same basic firepower rating with differing beam types, some of which are better at defeating armor and some are better at causing a wide wound channel for killing people easily. Just like the difference between an armor piercing bullet and a hollow point. Without knowing how the beam is formed we can only guess if this is possible or not.

Yeah but short of mass robotic armies or garriosing every planet with its own army and fleet, I dont see how you could guarantee stability. We knew tons of local conflicts erupted, and terrorism never quite subsided, or piracy. I'd think that the risks or dangers of such "attacks" would be significant, and the ywould be hard to protect against without some heavy form of restriction in place.

Well, no one said the Empire actually succeed in its goals or the goals people favored for supporting it for, clearly not…

[Sea Skimmer]

Thinking further on technology levels, and the differing standards we see from the Republic and Separatists, production of warships could be affected by more factors then just technology and raw material resources. In many cases construction of ships, particularly large ships would be held back by lack of certain key items. That’s what industrial bottlenecks are. Since we saw in Attack of the Clones that Star Wars manufacturing is more or less the same as modern earth, just highly automated no reason exists to assume they don’t still suffer from this. If they need a big piece of material made, they still have to cast it and forge it and machine it like we would.

For real warships one of the big bottlenecks was gear cutting to make reduction gears. In WW2 this placed a hard limit on the number of major warships which could be produced as new gear cutting plant equipment took years to make in its own right. This lead to some innovative solutions, but it didn’t solve the problem. For example a large number of US destroyer escorts were produced powered by diesel engines designed for railroad locomotives rather then geared steam turbines. The diesels used electric drive, bypassing the need for reduction gears. However performance was not as good; and destroyer escorts did not match the speed of full fledged destroyers. Production of heavy guns, and large gun turrets had similar bottlenecks, brought on by the large number of massive scale casting, forging and machining operations required to build them.

These bottlenecks existed because in the interwar period many arms and engine plants had shutdown for lack of war due to the Naval Arms Treaties limiting construction rates. Industrial emphasis had shifted towards aircraft, and this emphasis and investment in new equipment never reserved. Shipbuilding has been on a decline ever since.

Star Wars doesn’t need reduction gears, but the big warships certainly do need some items like very large hypermeter reactors you just can’t pull out of your ass at any old factory. Given that they went at least 1,000 years without a war, and perhaps as long as 25,000 years without a full fledged galactic War its logical to assume that military production was at a very low level. Not only would it be at a low level, but few or no excess facilities would exist for mobilization. It would just have been too long to have preserved them inactive. The Trade Federation and its allies likely grasped on this, and figured they could gain a short term but strategically decisive advantage in numbers by quickly rushing into war production using every shortcut they could. This failed, but it couldn’t have been completely out of reason or else they wouldn’t have followed the Sith in the first place. They of course were also undermined by secret advanced orders having been placed for the clone army and transport ships and other heavy equipment. So all and all the Trade Federation would not have to have been inferior in technology at all, the Death Star plans they had would suggest they were pretty damn capable, but they could have been greatly inferior in really heavy industry.

[Connor MacLeod]

Thinking further on technology levels, and the differing standards we see from the Republic and Separatists, production of warships could be affected by more factors then just technology and raw material resources. In many cases construction of ships, particularly large ships would be held back by lack of certain key items. That’s what industrial bottlenecks are. Since we saw in Attack of the Clones that Star Wars manufacturing is more or less the same as modern earth, just highly automated no reason exists to assume they don’t still suffer from this. If they need a big piece of material made, they still have to cast it and forge it and machine it like we would.

For real warships one of the big bottlenecks was gear cutting to make reduction gears. In WW2 this placed a hard limit on the number of major warships which could be produced as new gear cutting plant equipment took years to make in its own right. This lead to some innovative solutions, but it didn’t solve the problem. For example a large number of US destroyer escorts were produced powered by diesel engines designed for railroad locomotives rather then geared steam turbines. The diesels used electric drive, bypassing the need for reduction gears. However performance was not as good; and destroyer escorts did not match the speed of full fledged destroyers. Production of heavy guns, and large gun turrets had similar bottlenecks, brought on by the large number of massive scale casting, forging and machining operations required to build them.

These bottlenecks existed because in the interwar period many arms and engine plants had shutdown for lack of war due to the Naval Arms Treaties limiting construction rates. Industrial emphasis had shifted towards aircraft, and this emphasis and investment in new equipment never reserved. Shipbuilding has been on a decline ever since.

Star Wars doesn’t need reduction gears, but the big warships certainly do need some items like very large hypermeter reactors you just can’t pull out of your ass at any old factory. Given that they went at least 1,000 years without a war, and perhaps as long as 25,000 years without a full fledged galactic War its logical to assume that military production was at a very low level. Not only would it be at a low level, but few or no excess facilities would exist for mobilization. It would just have been too long to have preserved them inactive. The Trade Federation and its allies likely grasped on this, and figured they could gain a short term but strategically decisive advantage in numbers by quickly rushing into war production using every shortcut they could. This failed, but it couldn’t have been completely out of reason or else they wouldn’t have followed the Sith in the first place. They of course were also undermined by secret advanced orders having been placed for the clone army and transport ships and other heavy equipment. So all and all the Trade Federation would not have to have been inferior in technology at all, the Death Star plans they had would suggest they were pretty damn capable, but they could have been greatly inferior in really heavy industry.

The one thing I have to wonder about this is would bottlenecks be affected by heavily automated construction apart from yards like we saw with the DS's? The general idea there seemed to be that they basically did all the construction, fabrication, etc. "on site" - all you needed was the resources.

There's also stuff like the World Devastators and the Corusucant construction droids.

[Connor MacLeod]

Even if you had landing gear strong enough, the real problem would be having the ground be strong enough. Even supposedly solid rock formations can have trouble supporting really large buildings and dams. Now imagine how deep you’d bog down if a Victory class was to touchdown on mere earth or clay…..

That's the problems I can recall hearing when AOTC and ROTS came out (discussions about the Acclamator and Venator's landing capability to say nothing of the separatist landing ships in AOTC was a big topic of discussion as I recall.)

The roomy passageways we see might be related to a need to move heavy equipment and repair parts throughout such colossal ships. An ISD already has what, over 100 decks? Many real ships have certain passageways (often called broadway) much larger then others, and even equipped with an overhead monorail crane system to move stuff around. On battleships and large cruisers this had the added purpose of allowing the crew to shift heavy rounds of ammunition from the bow turrets to the stern turrets and visa versa.

On the Death Star meanwhile… the thing is so damn big already they may have made the passageways all huge because they didn’t really have any other use of the space. The overall volume of the vessel was probably set by the diameter needed to accommodate the super laser system, leaving a lot of extra space in the gaps that had little function.

I dunno. You could have added something. Munitions/warhead storage. Increased fighter capability? Extra redundancy? Better capacitors for the guns or improved heat sinks for the shieds (or more radiators perhaps.) etc. etc.

With such a huge Empire to defend, and so many ships inherently tied down to static guard duty or convoying between closely spaced systems its very likely they have a wide range of warships. Standardization isn’t so important when you have such a huge empire, and yet a hyperspace transport can cross most or all of it in a single day. The ISDs are probably one of the reality few types which is actually designed for wide roving offensive search and destroy type operations to hunt down the rebels. Indeed the British Royal Navy in real life had the widest ranging fleet ever, and never saw standardization as very important because they simply had so many well equipped, well stocked naval bases. The USN on the other hand was very big on standardization because it had no overseas bases, and thus all supplies would have to come forward by slow transport ships in real time.

Might be a mix of the two. One thing that always cropped up fromthe ISB and stuff was that the support elements attached to both the army and navy for the GE was rather.. low. Its always been my impression that part of this may just be automation (IE they use driods to do alot of grunt work, and the organics just oversee things) but the naval side of things (the relative scarcity of support vessels relative to combat ships - eg 1600 of a 2400 or so standard Sector Group force being combat ships) may simply be that speed of hyperdrive and lots of bases means they dont need a large support fleet. Some of the more independently roving forces (EG Deaht Squadron) may need more support from support fleets though.

The Empire might well have quite a lot of ships which do not even have hyperdrives for planetary defense, basically a space version of a unseaworthy coastal defense ship. I can easily imagine that the Empire has a giant version of the fighter scale external hyperdrive we see in Attack of the Clones, which could be used to deliver ships like this to a planet, then taken back home to deliver another one.

Could be, but I'd bet most of those would be local forces under planetary control, and it depends on if its a single or multi-system polity I suppose. Even then though, hyperdrives seem like they can get pretty compact so I dont think you could save that much from keeping one out. But who knows.

Yeah for all we know, the power of the DARK SIDE make separatist designers idiots… But the separatist ships seem a lot smaller in volume then a Venator and could be a whole lot cheaper to build.

They didnt need the help of the Dark side to be idiots, they already were, but its likely they went with "cheaper to build" rather than quality. That's pretty much in line with their philosophy (some were converted ships too as I recall)

The fixed forward firing guns on some of them, IIRC it’s the banking clan frigate that has the big ones under the chin, especially struck me as being a mobilization driven feature. One fixed gun is much cheaper to build, and easier to mount then a turret of comparable firepower. I doubt the designs were very good overall, but I also doubt that’s related to actual inferior technology. The Separatists needed to build a fleet quickly, and without the resources and shipyards of the core worlds they may not have had a serious option of building 1 for 1 equivalents.

I always figured fixed axis had certain advantages over turrets (aside from being bigger/longer, possibly easier to brace against recoil) but the bigass "main gun" type seemed a bit silly for me, since you have to literally steer the entire ship to turn it, and the recoil on the thing is insane It'd make more sense on a bigger ship (Executor or something of that scale.) On a smaller ship it just sounds like.. I dunno "intimidation."

In the late 19th century a big trend for harbor defense was to build small monitor type warships with literally just one big gun, either in a turret or a disappearing mounting. Such a ship was pretty crappy in open combat, but working in conjunction with fixed defenses and other ships the idea wasn’t bad. Such ships could mount a heavy gun on about 40% as much tonnage as a full fledged battleship would require. Someone was defiantly thinking ‘monitor’ when they sketched that separatist ship.

Sounds like something like the old oar-driven gunboats with the bigas gun in the bow from the Age of Sail days- I imagine this was the transitional period between Age of Sail and WW1 designs, since "Monitor" would also refer to the ironclad that got buillt in or around the civil war. As I recall turrets and braodside guns were still being experimented with equally at that time.

Very localized bans, sure, like on a planet by planet basis. The ease of smuggling weapons when you can cross the galaxy in a day would really make it foolish to try to enforce a wider ban. You’d just lose credibility through non enforcement… which is probably what was happening to the Empire in later years anyway as it tried to centralize more and more power and defensive responsibilities.

Depends on how its enforced. If you control certain key components that may be tied to power, (or if you control the corporations that control them) or control access to them, I think such a ban could be enforced. In this case the fictional "blaster gases" seem to be a big limiting factor - civilian models apparently made do with an incredibly low quality (cheap) one, or none at all.

Limits on power packs and cooling systems might also be dictated by this (blaster gases have been argued as both an ammo, a power booster, and a cooling element, depending on who you ask.)

That would make more sense. Ban military grades of blaster. Indeed since we don’t know much about how blasters work, it may well be that they can design two blasters of the same basic firepower rating with differing beam types, some of which are better at defeating armor and some are better at causing a wide wound channel for killing people easily. Just like the difference between an armor piercing bullet and a hollow point. Without knowing how the beam is formed we can only guess if this is possible or not.

we already know some types of blasters are projectile like (although I think its more appropriate to think of them as some sort of micro grenade rifle/pistol), as well as the supposed "beam" types (wether massless or particle beam, depending on your prefrence and the evidenc you choose to cite).

Yeah but short of mass robotic armies or garriosing every planet with its own army and fleet, I dont see how you could guarantee stability. We knew tons of local conflicts erupted, and terrorism never quite subsided, or piracy. I'd think that the risks or dangers of such "attacks" would be significant, and the ywould be hard to protect against without some heavy form of restriction in place.

Well, no one said the Empire actually succeed in its goals or the goals people favored for supporting it for, clearly not…[/quote]

[Sea Skimmer]

The one thing I have to wonder about this is would bottlenecks be affected by heavily automated construction apart from yards like we saw with the DS's? The general idea there seemed to be that they basically did all the construction, fabrication, etc. "on site" - all you needed was the resources.

Automation on its own does nothing to change the need for machine tools and industrial facilities. If you don’t have the giant tools you need to make other giant tools, then you can’t expand. Making machine tools is the ultimate industrial bottleneck, and usually just doesn’t happen in wartime. Its one thing to crank out more wrenches, quite another to make a 10 million ton force hydraulic press (in real life they go to around 50,000 tons) you need in ordered to forge new gun cradles for the latest 70 meter wide turbolaser turret. Well, you get the idea.

It’s probably a lot less of an issue then it is in real life because they are so advanced and have such huge scale industries, meaning that vast resources exist to be mobilized, but the problem would not just go away entirely. That’s why I suggest that an inability to make certain very large items like reactors might hold back the Separatists even with equal technology. You can have all the technology you can dream of, but it may just lead to lots of paper designs (see, the Nazis) if you don’t have enough machine tools to make all the crap you dream up.

There's also stuff like the World Devastators and the Corusucant construction droids.

Constructing buildings tends to be a lot more straightforward then making other stuff. The capabilities of the World Devastators are not known to well, as I recall we didn’t see them build anything larger then starfighters. So given how big they are it might just have a bunch of conventional machine tools inside that can make small scale stuff for all we really know.

I dunno. You could have added something. Munitions/warhead storage. Increased fighter capability? Extra redundancy? Better capacitors for the guns or improved heat sinks for the shieds (or more radiators perhaps.) etc. etc.

But they may have seen no actual need for more features like that if the Death Star was already well enough armed to repel any likely fleet attack. Filling up all the space would increase the projects cost… but you already have a Death Star! The need for rapid construction might also dictate certain limitations. The thing is pretty damn good already; minus one design flaw so glaring it makes me suspect that Imperial designers inside the project had a conspiracy going on to have added it and kept it from being removed in design revisions.

Might be a mix of the two. One thing that always cropped up fromthe ISB and stuff was that the support elements attached to both the army and navy for the GE was rather.. low. Its always been my impression that part of this may just be automation (IE they use driods to do alot of grunt work, and the organics just oversee things) but the naval side of things (the relative scarcity of support vessels relative to combat ships - eg 1600 of a 2400 or so standard Sector Group force being combat ships) may simply be that speed of hyperdrive and lots of bases means they dont need a large support fleet. Some of the more independently roving forces (EG Deaht Squadron) may need more support from support fleets though.

Yes I would imagine most logistics is automated and run by droids and computerized conveyer belts and stuff like that. Also the Empire may rely to a significant degree on civilian shipping to move bulk supplies, and not count this shipping under the sector fleets. Many routes would be secure enough, or already covered by existing convoy systems that a dedicated military transport is just not necessary.

In real life the USN has certain combat support ships which are naval vessels, with navy crews and armament. These are what resupply ships at sea. Then it has military owned but civilian crewed ships in military sealift command with nothing more then machine guns which restock those combat support ships in port or at sea remote from the combat area. Then behind this you can have chartered civilian vessels which only move point to point between bases.

If the Empire worked like this, then having far more warships then support ships makes complete sense. That’s exactly how real navies are. A carrier battlegroup with six or eight escorts and a CVN only has one or two combat support ships attached.

They didnt need the help of the Dark side to be idiots, they already were, but its likely they went with "cheaper to build" rather than quality. That's pretty much in line with their philosophy (some were converted ships too as I recall)

Only the Trade Federation warfreighters are converted. The Banking Clan and Commerce Guild ships are dedicated warships.

I always figured fixed axis had certain advantages over turrets (aside from being bigger/longer, possibly easier to brace against recoil) but the bigass "main gun" type seemed a bit silly for me, since you have to literally steer the entire ship to turn it, and the recoil on the thing is insane It'd make more sense on a bigger ship (Executor or something of that scale.) On a smaller ship it just sounds like.. I dunno "intimidation."

They do have some elevation control. It’s described as being able to pierce the shields on a ‘grade III battlestation’ which is probably what it was for. Long range attacks on fixed defenses and planetary surfaces. In a fleet action it should still be useful against very large enemy ships which normal turbolaser turrets might be kind of worthless. While it varies, a lot about Star Wars shields suggest they act a lot more like armor plate then they do ‘be slowly drained by fire’ Star Trek shields. The Star Wars shields seem to offer complete protection for a while, but get battered and eventually just fail all at once. Kind of like how you had to batter certain kinds of early wrought iron armor plate, eventually cracking the armor and then shattering the plate, rather then piercing it at one point.

So a single heavy blow may be considerably more effective then the same energy expended by a large number of small turbolasers. Something like this would start to help explain why so many Star Wars ships have really big turrets and gun mounts in really shitty places.

Sounds like something like the old oar-driven gunboats with the bigas gun in the bow from the Age of Sail days-

Something very much like that. In fact the ship I had in mind was classified as an armored gunboat. The Acheron class from France. It’s the utter minimal amount of ship you could ask to mount one modern 10.8in gun that could put a hole in the armor of any battleship of the time.
http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/1019/acheron.jpg

I imagine this was the transitional period between Age of Sail and WW1 designs, since "Monitor" would also refer to the ironclad that got buillt in or around the civil war. As I recall turrets and braodside guns were still being experimented with equally at that time.

Monitor started out as one ship, then became a collective name for low freeboard craft with one or more gun turrets. Some monitors had as many as three turrets and six guns. A ship with broadside guns can’t be a monitor. The Confederate ships built like that were usually just called ‘rams’ or ‘casemate rams’ at the time. Ocean going broadside ships were known as broadside ironclads, and then central battery ships. However turret armed designs had proven clearly superior by the end of 1870s and the first battleship designs with turrets at each one of a superstructure we’d recognize as modern showed up earlier. The difference between a monitor and certain armored gunboats like Acheron was pretty much just a matter of opinion, though many armored gunboats lacked turrets and thus could not be monitors.

Depends on how its enforced. If you control certain key components that may be tied to power, (or if you control the corporations that control them) or control access to them, I think such a ban could be enforced. In this case the fictional "blaster gases" seem to be a big limiting factor - civilian models apparently made do with an incredibly low quality (cheap) one, or none at all.

Limits on power packs and cooling systems might also be dictated by this (blaster gases have been argued as both an ammo, a power booster, and a cooling element, depending on who you ask.)

Yeah that’s the trouble, we effectively have no idea how the things work or what might really be involved in making them. However we do know they have recoil that scales up with firepower, so making big ones had got to involve a lot of heavy engineering and probably a whole lot of heavy forging work. That’d mean big specialist tools to make them, not just any old machine shop. But this only makes sense. In real life any old machine shop could make rifles and machine guns, but even most large industrial plants could not make heavy artillery for lack of specialist tools. In Star Wars you could program driods to make heavy turbolasers with a memory stick, but they might need a long time to build up the scale of tooling they have to do the job.

[takemeout_totheblack]

A quick search of the word "durasteel" and I came up with this on wikipedia:

Durasteel was an incredibly strong and versatile metal alloy, created from carvanium, lommite, carbon, meleenium, neutronium, and zersium. It was capable of withstanding blistering heat, frigid cold, and monumental physical stress, even when very thin. It has been calculated to be approximately 300,000 times stronger than steel. Because of these properties, durasteel was used for almost everything, from smelting pots for other less hearty metals, to spacecraft hulls.

Could we do anything with that?

300,000 times stronger?
Huh! I guess that would make sense considering the energies at work in the star wars universe. The question now is how does that translate in terms of protective ability relative to the weapons available?
Strength is a fairly vague term, but I think it's safe to assume they meant x300,000 heat resistance, yield strength, tensile strength, etc. All of the things important in a defensive material. DW's website says that the vaporization energy for a cubic meter of iron is 60GJ, so that's, what, 18 PJ for armor grade durasteel? I'm no mathematician, I'm just working off of some online conversion calculators, but that's about a 4-megaton thermonuclear weapon, right? Again, I'm not claiming any sort of validity behind my numbers, feel free to correct me.
Considering explosions are inherently inefficient at delivering their full energy onto a target, I think it's safe to assume that a 'fusion rocket' isn't going to worry an armored warship with a proximity flash, but it possibly could if it's a multi-megaton warhead and a direct physical hit... which it could be... oh bother, so much gray area
That said, what kind of armor thickness are we looking at? >1m? I always thought of Star Destroyers as having anywhere from 1m to 4m or or more over key systems.
Of course, this info being from wikipedia the veracity is questionable... any ideas? Evidence either way?

[BLACKSUN2000]

Strength is a fairly vague term

When someone talks about steel they always say it's X times stronger than Iron.Steel is a lot more; durable,heat and corrosion resistant, so yeah strength is a vague term. But if it's used for space travel/combat it must also be more resistant to heat, radiation/energies and extreme cold.

18 PJ for armor grade durasteel?

If the calculation is correct, then that could be used as an extreme lower limit. BUT the AT-AT's in the empire strikes back shrugged off hits from snow speeder laser canons, if they're anything like tie fighter lasers, then their much thinner armor shrugged off 32000 tw.

ALSO the article on wookiepedia never said it was armor grade durasteel they were talking about.

I always thought of Star Destroyers as having anywhere from 1m to 4m or or more over key systems.

It was 3-4 meter last time I checked.