Sea Skimmer wrote:
Well yeah sure 10 years is enough time to build past any bottleneck in real life too, but to humans with human scale evil plans it’s a while to wait. I’d imagine the early years of the project saw a lot of machinery ordered from all around the Core, big droid depot ships, 1 trillion ton forges ect.. while the design was finalized and prototyped.
Could be. That does assume they didnt just build the equipment they'd need themselves out in some isolated region. It's possible the DS needed at least some specialized equipment that may or may not be ready (which would tie into the design/prototype aspect.)
The DS2 would benefit enormously from being built with all the equipment they had built up from building the first one.
Maybe. The DS2 was something like 900 km as opposed to the 160 km - we're talking orders of magnitude difference in size/volume and I would expect the equipment/resource requirements to likewise be considerably greater even if it doesnt scale linearly, especially given roughly similar timeframes (with allowances for halts and delays and such)
Increasing working area is why modular is the way to go. Imperial ships are so huge and large masses so easy to move in space that you could do things a lot of ways. I think the DS2 was also just being built in a certain way to make it appear near competition, but unfinished in a manner that would make it unlikely to be operational. This could also be some of the reason for the colossal increase in scale, when the DS1 clearly already had ample firepower. Increasing the refire rate doesn’t seem likely to have required all of that volume alone.
well appearance is another possibility, but I'd be shocked if the Rebellion didn't have their own engineers and such who couldn't spot the trick - the surface area bit in that case could serve as further camoflage.
Darksaber may have been substantially less powerful but still able to blow up a planet. Afterall Alderaan wasn’t just destroyed, it was blown apart through a shield at a good sliver of the speed of light. For a big gun sometimes you will just need a minimal size mounting. The British even had a family of a 9.2in howitzer and a 12in howitzer each of which had a giant box on the front so you could add 9 tons of dirt by the shovelful to hold it down.
Darksaber as I recall was supposedly "more powerful" than the original - although that power may have come from efficiency less than raw energy. Perhaps there were inefficiency issues with teh design to compromise. After all they had other things than just the weapons platform for the Death star - the other combat necessities as well.
I think of the thing like a siege gun and a temperamental supercollosal one at that. All the big maintenance shafts on the ICS drawings and the generally huge scale of its auxiliaries make me think its not meant to work like a Maxim Gun. It may need a really big base, and a lot of repair via replacement of part to keep running.
I always thought of the Death Star as being the SW analogy to the atomic bomb, just a more reusable one. I suppose a Siege gun with nuclear ordnance.
You really have to wonder just how they’d go about making the main reactor.. It’d basically demand that they have some kind of welding that can put together huge pieces completely flawlessly. They could THINK about making a casting of that scale if they wanted, but it seems unlikely they need to do this.
Not so sure about that. I have a hard time believing that if the materials alone were that powerful then any ordancne the Falcon or an X-wing could carry could threaten the machinery inside the reactor. Part of me suspects that the reactor likely used a great deal of force fiedl technology to make it work. Any material components may simply have been there due to supporting/maintaining the fields (in the sense that we know that ships with repulsors still have landing gear.)
I remember some reference book or another had mention of a hyperspace container ship, but I got the impression the containers were being stacked inside some kind of framework IIRC. If you need proportional sized tugs, which seems logical, then recovering an ISD would be real fun. But it might take some major work to physically mate tug to cripple.
There's the black ice perhaps. It was a container train ship that used some force field cargo thingies to haul important stuff like fuel and such, as well as the various container ships in the games.
It is possible they'd require multiple tugs (or tug components who knows) to connect to the ship and allow it to be translated to hyperspace. It may not neccesarily be a "fast" transit, but it doesnt need to be to get them there in any reasonable timeframe (crossing a few dozen or a few hundred light years in a matter of days ought to be enough). Maintaining structural integrity and shielding against hyperspace may be an issue but again force field tech could cover that (tensor fields and such - think of the removable wings on the droid landing ship in the prequels)
Worse comes to worse I believe the Empire has mobile shipyards and repair docks as well (At least a couple per SEctor) and its possible they just go out to the crippled ship to repair it.
Yeah, the high speed communications are vital to this. But its one of those subject you really could draw several conclusions from given the evidence. The Empire may still be very heavily forward deployed even with its high speed transport and communications. We can’t really know since every book that involves an Imperial base inevitably portrays it as something pathetically weak for one X-wing squadron to defeat.
Alot of the novels took place outside the Core as a rule... the Rim especially, which tends to have alot of volume but not neccesarily the same level of support. Of course at that time the Empire was viewed as more "hands off" in terms of territory - its military forces seemed to be more "space based" in the sense of (I think) Marine Expedtionary forces and such. you basically just shuttle the troops where you need them. Nowadays we have explicit mention of tens of trillions of soldiers in the Imperial Army alone, and that can mean hundreds of thousands/millions of troops per world, handily.
Not being a military type though, could you explain the whole "forward deployed" bit? The context defeats my comrphension I am sorry to say
Well yeah the relationship may not be entirely linear, and a lot of the differences are going to be internal but still something has to give a reason for guns of larger sizes. Otherwise people would just stop at a certain size. They kind of seem to as it is with the heavy turbolaser turrets on the ISDs being not that huge, but we don’t see much detail on any much larger ships.
Most of the time we see "big guns" like that they seem to be involved as a bombardment weapon or a "terror/intimidation" weapon rather than a practical militry weapon - think of the Death STars, the Eclipse SSD, etc. I suppose bigger guns might be designed for planetary assault roles (to help overwhlem or punch through defense shields perhaps?) or attacks against battlestations where targeting is less of a concern compared to raw firepower.
Recoil control and redundancy could also be limitations - balancing number of guns vs power of guns (more power per shot vs having fewer guns to fight with.)
I don’t think it mentioned rate of fire, but I would expect it to be poor or limited by more then just aiming at full power. The max firepower is probably like a supercharge for a piece of magnum artillery. It must have been of some use though, otherwise they could have replaced it with a couple small scale turrets by several years into the war.
It didn't mention rate of fire, but the available information in the ICS gives us enough to extrapolate that data from. And its a bitch not just for aiming - think about center of mass or balance - firing that thing off axis could give the ship a huge push in the wrong direction (spinning it away, etc.) If it were poorly aimed/maintained or coordinated there could be all manner of problems.
Its also possible that those bigass guns were simply some crazy idea some weapons designer came up with but could never sell to the military, and then decided to foist them off on the corporations cheap - it would be entirely something the Separatists would buy into.
Frankly though if any ship did carry them as standard they'd have to be somehwere on the scale of an Executor I'd expect and even then stillb e fixed axis.
It could well, no machinery likes heat. Failure will become a lot more likely for all the components, and they may have some kind of limited time rating at peak power just like a computer power supply.
I mean you look at an engine, you run it to the redline and it should keep working fine, but your placing it into an extreme operating environment. At that point it wont take much to push it over the edge.
True. We're used to thinking of SW ships running at full power for combat purposes and not likely having any trouble besides running out of power sooner, but that seems largely short term thinking. For all we know it could wear out components to be maxing out the powerplant like that far more quickly than if oyu ran it at a lower level.) Hell we dont neccesarily know WHAT full power is expected to be used for. For example, it may be designed purposesly to be used against planets in a BDZ - sort of the equivalent of a naval ship carrying tactical or strategic nukes onboard - rather than a "standard" combat configuration. I mean the nukes you carry COULD also be used in combat if you wanted to or needed to, but that wouldnt neccesarily be what they were designed for.
Plus I'd want to run a starship with at least some practical level of safety margin in the equipment, just in case. Even in combat.
Heavier hits may be worse because they dump so much energy into the shield in a very short burst that it starts causing localized damage. Whatever radiator-wiring-heat pipe kind of setup they have going WILL have a hard limit to how much it can move. However exceeding that limit for a moment may not cause loss of shields, the first time. It might take a couple overloads and then the shield fails or automatically shuts down in the hope it can restart later to avoid being destroyed.
True. Any delays (however small) in moving the firepower the shields take from opposing ships is something that could be exploited if you exceed the requisite threshholds (in this case the amount of energy that could be moved and how quickly it was delievered.) Or it may just accumulate damage due to inefficiency (no matter how efficient, a large enough blsat could still cause nasty damage inside if that percentage "lost" in the transit is great enough.)
Hell this introduces a whole level of compelxity to shielding - there are lots of relevant factors the ICSes never accounted for, and in theory you could optimize shields to beneift certain traits over others (larger heat sinks but with weaker radiators for example.)
Angling is an interesting thing to think about. On the one hand it could mean it works like sloped armor, and tries to deflect the incoming fire away. On the other hand it could also mean that the shields are positioned in such a way as to angle the energy the impacts the shields into generators which are further away. That way the generators closest to the impact area aren’t overloaded as quickly. This would be advantageous if you are mostly being attacked from one direction.
True. We have seen bolts occasionally ricochet off intact, but more often than not we have the well-documented "splintering" effect of bolts hitting shields. I'd say that the shields are designed to break up the "bolts" (whatever they're composed of) and then try to reflect away as much of the energy as they can. Surface area seems to benefit here, as we soemtimes see bolts "spread" over a shield surface (which has an added benefit that even if it isn't reflected, then it suffers a substnatial loss of penetration and a reduced probability of mechanical/explosive damage being induced. You need to deliver energy rapidly and on a very small area to mimic an explosive, after all.)
The ability of the shield ot "manipulate" the bolt itself (and the interactions thereof) are just another aspect of the overall shield system that is apart from the heat sink/radiator setup.
We’ve also been told that shields lie right on the hull, which may be a different position from ‘angling’ or it may be more complicated then that and they can do both, with no actual ‘angle’s involved. Just an expression. Either way it does sound like the armor/hull is meant to absorb some of every impact. This makes sense, because a low intensity blow on steel type armor shouldn’t cause any permanent damage, even if its repeated many times. So you’ve got another energy sink at work.
Shields evidently have a definite volume which seems to benefit their protectiv qualities. Keeping the shields closer vs projecting them farther away seems to comrpise different sorts of tradeoffs (increase/decrease in surface area, interaction volume, energy usage, etc.)
Funny enough, what you're saying hints at an idea Brian Young once had - that the thick/dense armor SW ships seem to like may serve as a sort of "heat sink" ofr shields in and of itself (shields and hull can interact to some level).
Larger diameter shells hold a lot more high explosive, so they generate destructive blast overpressure a lot more readily. The fragmentation is much worse, because it can pierce a lot more materials from being heavier and faster. This all important because steel and similar materials have impact/blast resistances below which they just don’t take any real damage. Smaller artillery shells like 155mm and less tend to be mainly fragmentation weapons. On something like a ship when you have a lot of enclosed spaces, a small caliber round is going to riddle bulkheads with shrapnel, while a big shell is going to tear the bulkheads down. Bombs are worse still and can make actual big craters down into the decks.
So you move from damage that just causes personal and equipment damage, to damage which is seriously demolishing the strength of the target and which defeats light internal armor layers meant to localize damage. That can go a long way towards allowing flooding and fires to spread past the immediate damaged area.
Flooding wouldn't be an issue, but defeating intenral armor/compartmentalization probably would be a big one (I gather that given the reactor power and acceleration/recoil magintidues SW ships deal with, even some weakening in it could have nasty effects.)
As I said before, given observed effects of weapons and shield interactions, one of the big purposes of shields and armor (evne just stormtrooper armor) is to limit/nullify the possibility of explosive damage by controlling the rate and area/volume at which damage hits the ship.
This shows damage to USS Savannah after she was hit by a 3,100lb Fritz X guided bomb in 1943. This is the upper end of air weapons for WW2, excluding the super massive Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs. You can see how it just tore apart the structure around the burst, and even peeled up the ships armor deck. The ship was only saved from a major ammunition fire causing an explosion by flooding through a hole blown by the time.
yeah. Ouch.
Was this at a time still when torpedoes were meant to bypass armor protection by striking the hull from under water?
Now Star Wars ships have different damage mechanisms going on, but I think a lot of this will still hole true in general terms. Particularly since like you point out some ship to ship weapons are projectile based to start with.
True. But Its possible that what you said could hold true in some fashion even if its not a strict parallel (EG defeating compartmentalization, weakening structures that might pertain to the engines or heavy weapons or sields, etc.) Hell, its possible some shield failures can be attributed to internal damage fucking up the generator bracings.
Ships with damaged structure can have serious problems from the weight of water pouring in. This is why many torpedoed ships break in half when they sank, particularly smaller ones like destroyers. Torpedoes are the best thing you could ask for to blow holes in structure since the water tamps the blast.
Yeah, I've heard of that phenomenon. I think it concerns the differences in the speed of sound in different mediums and the times involved.
Yeah no one has used really thick armor since WW2. But modern carriers still do have major armoring, but its spread into a series of 2in and 1in thick decks and all across the hull side so that it can detonate projectiles high in the ship and try to localize the damage. Below is a diagram of the armor on a Forrestal Class carrier. Thicknesses in millimeters and all of the armor also serves as structure.
Actually trying to stop a heavy missile outright was futile as people can too easily design a bigger warhead, but several armor decks can ensure it explodes before it reaches the vital magazine and machinery spaces. Even in WW2 some navies including the USN were already moving to armor schemes like this, in which some certain damage was accepted in favor of reducing the chances of any catastrophic damage. Torpedo protection always had to work this way.
Is that because the carrier decks need to be supported (as does carrying the planes and stuff alone) or is it because Carriers are such big, expensive valuable targets thta they warrant at least some effort at preserving them?
Imperial ships seem to rely on a single massively thick outer armor hull, but they probably have a lot of thin armor layers behind that as part of the structure of the hull. Such huge ships would mean defeating heavy blows with armor more realistic, because the bigger the ship the more volume for the surface area. So armor thickness can go up.
There's also the acceleration and recoil issues - powerful engines and weapons would need some heavy bracing too, and I imagine building the ship to stand up to those tolerances would neccesistate something along the lines of what you say. (unless they used forcefields, like the Separatists seem likely to)
I don’t know how much long range they can really do if they have such relatively high times of flight for the bolt. I forget what turbo lasers have been clocked at, but its nothing you couldn’t think about evading by chasing salvos. Some shots would still hit, but you’d quickly have a high ratio of misses even at a few hundred kilometers. Even if they have no more then modern radar and telescope technology for targeting engagements at thousands of kilometers should be trivially easy in terms of fire control. But the guns may be more inaccurate then we know at a range, and enemy ships can move pretty fast. I suspect this is why so many battles come down to point blank range. Both sides have every incentive to close with each other and long range capability is only really relevant when one side has greatly superior speed but inferior position and wishes to fight an indecisive battle.
Ugh. This comes down to what you essentially think a turbolaser or blaster or laser weapon is. One camp (like Curtis Saxton) thinks they're mostly or all massless, lightspeed beams. THere are others who think they aren't but may be somethign else (particle beams, plasma bolts, projectiles, etc - they can't quite agree.) Me I threw my hands up in the air and said "they're all glowy bolts and may just use all kinds of weapons that just happen to look like glowy bolts" because its a fucking pain in the ass to reconcile it all.
I won't comment on at or near lightspeed weapons, but the "typcial" slow moving bolts we see probably are either short ranged warheads designed specifically for close range work or some sort of guided cannon shell (both of which could be justified from onscreen and EU evidence.)
Liar, wookiepedia says:"Durasteel was produced in various grades of heat treatment and alloy composition for different construction purposes. Some of these were:" 
