Stofsk wrote:Calling Tim Zahn a minimalist is hardly fair, given he's the source of the 25K ISDs number and while the Katana fleet was a big plot point in the Thrawn trilogy, that was because the Empire and New Republic forces were more evenly balanced in forces, and 200 fresh ships crewed by clones would have tipped that balance.
When I think of retarded minimalism I think of Karen Traviss and '3 million clones'. Zahn's nowhere close to that level of idiocy.
Black and white fallacy? Just because Zahn is not quite so much an agenda-driven retarded arsehole as some other authors does not make him immune to criticism. People slam WEG for minimalism all the time, and they are extremely maximalist compared to Zahn (who in turn is "maximalist", highly relatively speaking, compared to Traviss or Allston/Stackpole). This is not necessarily a criticism of his writing style or plots - Stackpole and Allston are some of my favourite EU authors from a readability perspective, even though they are horribly minimalist - but the stuff he throws around is frankly retarded and makes no sense whatever when one considers a Galactic scale of events.
25,000 ISDs, while not quite as bad as some of his other bullshit (such as the idea that the entire cream of the Imperial Navy officer corps died on the
Executor in
Heir to the Empire, or the aforementioned Katana Fleet Fallacy), is minimalist and contradicts the previously established canon from WEG, nevermind the scale implied by the easily manufactured Death Stars in the highest-canon films.
Stofsk wrote:Not according to the narrative. One ISD seems to be countered by 3 Dreadnaughts. This was when General Bel Iblis entered the fight in 'Dark Force Rising' IIRC.
Which is totally unreasonable and further shows that Zahn is a no-numbers wanker who cannot do basic maths. Comparing volumetrics it is very generous to grant a Dreadnaught one tenth the power of an ISD assuming that all things are equal, nevermind that the WEG books specifically noted them as obsolete ships with "weak shielding, inefficient power generators, low firepower, and high crew needs" for their size. (The
Imperial Sourcebook, Second Edition, quote unquote.)
Which would make 200 Dreadnaughts worth 66 ISDs, or thereabouts. And it doesn't matter anyway, because like I said, the point wasn't that Dreadnaughts were supercool and p. rad, it was that the Empire and New Republic fleets were more evenly matched now than they had ever been, and a fresh injection of ships would have tipped the balance to whoever got to them first.
The entire "Dark Force" of 200 ships is not the equal of even the Star Destroyer complement of a single Sector Group, if one counts firepower estimated from volume. Even if one uses Zahn's wanked ratio of four Dreadnaughts to one ISD (three were said to have a very hard time standing up to one in
Dark Force Rising), that yields the equivalent of 50 ISDs - two Sector Groups' worth of ISDs. On the scale we are dealing with (thousands of Sector Groups, millions of ships - and that is not counting the Regional or federal Imperial commands), this is an utterly insignificant number no matter how "closely matched" Thrawn's warlord forces and the New Republic are; if two army brigades are evenly matched in the field, will the arrival of a single extra private, first class affect the outcome of the battle in any measurable way?
Well, yeah. There seems to be a perception on this point that numbers are the only thing that matter, where I'm going its the context that matters. If you call Zahn a minimalist you might as well call me a minimalist too. Big numbers don't impress me, not until there is context surrounding those numbers.
This is all well and good, but what context is there to excuse Zahn's extreme minimalism?
