Command, rank and organisation (pet theory)

[Batman]

Problem being while WE can speculate what WOULD have been the smart thing to do in the Star Wars universe, Wookiepedia appears to work only with what actually HAPPENED in the Star Wars universe, and given a lot of what DID happen in it doesn't make a iota's worth of sense, any way anybody tries to come up with to try and EXPLAIN it probably isn't going to either

[Simon_Jester]

It could be, and it would make sense. But I'm curious as to why Wookieepedia says that the Empire took the specifications/blueprints for Mon Cal warships, if the Mon Cal simply built every ship structured as a warship anyways. Wouldn't the empire have been better served to simply eliminate the Mon Cal shipyards? And thus, at least in theory, all the designers, etc.

I'm going to go with "well placed bribe" or "inbred cretin officer appointed to chair a board of engineers underestimates the Mon Cal" or "Someone reads "will be less efficient ton for ton than Imperial warships" and forgets that the MC-80 series have way more tonnage than their own line destroyers."

[recon20011]

Problem being while WE can speculate what WOULD have been the smart thing to do in the Star Wars universe, Wookiepedia appears to work only with what actually HAPPENED in the Star Wars universe, and given a lot of what DID happen in it doesn't make a iota's worth of sense, any way anybody tries to come up with to try and EXPLAIN it probably isn't going to either

Makes sense. Unluckily for me, thats where most of my EU knowledge comes from.

And yes, I wholeheartedly agree that, just as in Earth's past, much of what actually happened wasnt exactly logical...

[Simon_Jester]

The thing is, in Earth's history, most of the things that happened make sense. If you know who was involved, what they knew, what they could accomplish, the result logically follows. Sometimes the explanation is "the guy who did this had the tactical sense of a retarded chimpanzee," but that's still a logical explanation.

In Star Wars, there is no guarantee that any logical explanation for in-universe events even exists. Trying to come up with such is nothing more than an amusing intellectual exercise and never can be... because it's a universe defined by authorial fiat among dozens of different authors.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Strict historical analogies don't make much sense; I'm lucky enough to be reading at the moment an interwar (1930~) history of the Royal Navy's Tenth Cruiser Squadron- the armed merchant cruisers that enforced the northern blockade in WW I.

I find it fascinating and I'm almost certainly going to ramble far off topic if I go into detail, so to keep it abstract- the ships were required for that job after regular warships had failed at the task largely due to insufficient seakeeping qualities, with details that would require deliberate mimicry and a great deal of hyperdrive- related technobabble to make apply in space.

They were very vulnerable because of their construction, and in fact operated behind the shield of regular warships- which they were able to do for geographic reasons that, without deliberate and extreme scene- building, do not apply in space.

In fact, I'm not convinced the concept of the armed merchant cruiser applies. What does, though, is the disguised merchant raider- they still make sense.

[recon20011]

The thing is, in Earth's history, most of the things that happened make sense. If you know who was involved, what they knew, what they could accomplish, the result logically follows. Sometimes the explanation is "the guy who did this had the tactical sense of a retarded chimpanzee," but that's still a logical explanation.

If you look at it that way then yes, it is still a logical explanation. I suppose a better word would have been "rational".

In Star Wars, there is no guarantee that any logical explanation for in-universe events even exists. Trying to come up with such is nothing more than an amusing intellectual exercise and never can be... because it's a universe defined by authorial fiat among dozens of different authors.

Very true, and part of the reason I don't have much EU literature hanging around.

Strict historical analogies don't make much sense; I'm lucky enough to be reading at the moment an interwar (1930~) history of the Royal Navy's Tenth Cruiser Squadron- the armed merchant cruisers that enforced the northern blockade in WW I.

I find it fascinating and I'm almost certainly going to ramble far off topic if I go into detail, so to keep it abstract- the ships were required for that job after regular warships had failed at the task largely due to insufficient seakeeping qualities, with details that would require deliberate mimicry and a great deal of hyperdrive- related technobabble to make apply in space.

They were very vulnerable because of their construction, and in fact operated behind the shield of regular warships- which they were able to do for geographic reasons that, without deliberate and extreme scene- building, do not apply in space.

In fact, I'm not convinced the concept of the armed merchant cruiser applies. What does, though, is the disguised merchant raider- they still make sense.

Agreed, as we discussed above, refitting a merchantman into anything resembling a decent warship would be almost worthless, you may as well build a whole new ship. However, if a government mandates that merchantmen be equipped with weapons mounts, even if there are no weapons, and they offer subsidies to the shipowner to keep these merchantmen as a sort of last-ditch reserve, or as commerce raiders, that might make sense. The Germans did so during WW1 I believe. And when war broke out they kept the Royal Navy busy all over the world chasing them down. These auxiliary cruisers wouldn't be expected to fight against anything but a disguised merchant raider, or maybe a corvette or handful of starfighters.

How many merchant ships are completely unarmed anyways? There can't be that many... there is a lot of piracy after all.

[Simon_Jester]

Today, the vast majority of merchant ships are completely unarmed, and the vast majority of pirates are counting on this fact.

One historical reason for this is that when you get to the seamier side of the maritime economy, the difference between an armed merchantman and a pirate is often one of convenience (and look at the early career of Sir Francis Drake if you don't believe me). Or of political alignment. So once fleets got powerful enough to reliably police the whole ocean, people started politely asking the merchantmen to take the guns off their ships.

Which today allows for amusing scenes with pirates in Zodiacs swarming aboard ten thousand ton freighters, but what can you do aside from send out patrol helicopters?...

I recognize that exact historical parallels rarely work perfectly in a futuristic setting, but there's still a lot you can do with the underlying politics, things like that. Drake pushes it about to the limit of what can be done, and sometimes a little beyond, but he does damn good work for all that, in my opinion.

Though as I said to ECR in my uberpost above, if you're going to do astrographic mapping of all the dead star systems in between inhabited worlds, it really does make sense to use small hyperspace-capable ships (shuttles or light freighters) with a decent sensor fit for most of the actual sweeping. The "web" lines are barely armed at all; it's the "spiders" that stay in position to hyperjump over to reinforce the web that actually contain the corvettes and frigates.

Seriously, light freighter patrol lines are so much smaller and cheaper than fully armed corvettes that the economics would be irresistible, especially in the late Republic era. And going into the Imperial era, most of the modern light combatant construction is vitally needed to provide escorts for the modern heavy combatant construction, so a lot of sectors will still be making do with effectively unarmed patrol craft. Or mass use of probe droids.

[recon20011]

How many merchant ships are completely unarmed anyways? There can't be that many... there is a lot of piracy after all.

I was referring to the EU, not modern day. But you are absolutely correct about modern day merchantmen and pirates. That, plus the potential costs of fighting back. How many families want their son to get killed fighting pirates overseas if he's in the merchant marine? He's not in the navy after, so why is he fighting? So the shipping companies are going to be paying for the additional training and equipment, and probably paying pretty high indemnities to the families of merchant mariners who die as well. In addition, a 10-15 man crew, even with modern assault rifles, wouldn't be able to effectively defend the entire perimeter of a large merchantman for any more time than it takes for darkness to fall. And I highly doubt any marine insurance company is going to want the liability for a ship's crew fighting back on its books.

Seriously, light freighter patrol lines are so much smaller and cheaper than fully armed corvettes that the economics would be irresistible, especially in the late Republic era. And going into the Imperial era, most of the modern light combatant construction is vitally needed to provide escorts for the modern heavy combatant construction, so a lot of sectors will still be making do with effectively unarmed patrol craft. Or mass use of probe droids.

Wasn't Echo Base discovered by an Imperial probe droid? What if you had far more widespread use of probe droids for surveying? Wouldn't that cut down on the costs immensely? Especially if the crew isn't simply eyeballing the system, they are actually just scanning then jumping away. They could either drop into a system, or a point equidistant from several systems, and release a probe droid or ten then jump away and either the probe droids send the data back in a secured message or it gets picked up the next time an Imperial ship passes that way or (I don't know if probe droids are hyper capable or not) the probe droids all return to a centralized sector HQ to report. Even if probe droids were only capable of making on jump, they could get dropped off easily enough, it would take no more than 2 hours at the most I would imagine. Then they scan the system, then jump back to HQ and report.

[PainRack]

Is it "logical" however that an armed cruiser be decomissioned/rebuilt as a passenger liner?

I know the last time I stated this, it got shot down on the board but it simply makes much more...... sense that the Mon Cal re-engineered a cruiser as a passenger liner, and when they needed warships, they rebuilt the liner as a cruiser.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The EU suggests- and in the days of the Old Republic it seems sensible enough- that major routes are well enough patrolled and policed, even by what little battle fleet the Republic Starfleet had, that within the Core and Inner Rim there was litlle requirement for a vessel to be armed. Small independents, tramp freighters, prospecting and mining ships, freighters and liners which operated in the Mid- Rim and outwards- they did tend to be armed, but not heavily.

The expensive part probably isn't the weapon; a large liner- well, the estimate I was using on the fleet list was one megawatt of power per newton of thrust, which has the benefit of being a nice round number that can have more accurate figures substituted for it once anybody works out what they are, and also of giving sensible results for small and medium warships.

It does have the interesting consequence that firepower and power generation to support it rise much faster than absolute size- meaning if the figure is consistent, not necessarily my round number but anything that makes sense, small ships run much hotter on a routine basis, developing much higher proportions of their power output- and with their power systems under greater strain- than large ships.

Unless large drives are much less efficient, an Imperator, say, can develop full thrust on less than a percent of her reactor output. Weapon power (and possibly hyperdrive) is the determining factor in a large warships' requirements, and there is no reason for a comparably sized civil craft to be within two orders of magnitude of reactor output.

By that round guesstimate, a hundred thousand metric ton small liner intended to accelerate at 1000 'g' would require, unless I have this hopelesly wrong, a mere 1E12 Newtons of thrust, so 1E18 W. An LTL mount throwing 6 bolts per second at 6 megatons each would take just over 1.5E17 W at perfect efficiency.

Liners are likely to be quite fast, cutting down journey time will pay for itself in more frequent sailings and higher sales, if the real world is a guide- up to the point of diminishing returns, where the cost of building the ship to that standard outweights the benefits. The example that pops into my head here is actually Concorde.

The costs of the weapon mount may be quite low, the cost of the power management systems to run it higher; it's the combat information and fire control systems to actually defend the ship efectively that are likely to add costs. Legally, it's an interesting question. Would the ability to look like the passengers are being protected add more than the worries about 'why do they think they need this?' and the potential liability take away?

Oh, yes, probe droids. That would make inspections and area control easier, and the patrol squadrons could do wiht being sized down to accomodate that. There's no suitable design detailed, but with the influence of the CIS, I have no doubt one could be made to exist. I wsn't thinking laterally enough when I wrote that bit- thinking about the existing designs of droid vessel.

[recon20011]

Is it "logical" however that an armed cruiser be decomissioned/rebuilt as a passenger liner?

I know the last time I stated this, it got shot down on the board but it simply makes much more...... sense that the Mon Cal re-engineered a cruiser as a passenger liner, and when they needed warships, they rebuilt the liner as a cruiser.

One thing I'm starting to get very curious about now is does anyone know how long it supposedly took the Mon Calamari to refit their liners as cruisers? Because we could actually very easily be looking at them taking almost as much time as making a new vessel because they gutted the entire thing and rebuilt it in its entirety. Because it really isn't logical to retire one of the Mon Cal cruisers and refit her as a passenger liner, unless the Mon Cals knew the empire was going to take their warship designs away from them. Even then, the expense of refitting a cruiser as a passenger liner so she doesn't appear threatening at all, because we all know the Empire would probably impound the refitted cruisers on some pretext or another if they thought they posed a threat. Obviously the Mon Cals must have designed their liners with some eye towards refitting them to be cruisers in the future, or we could put it down to the Mon Cals skillfulness as shipbuilders that they were able to refit/rebuild their liners into cruisers.
A more logical line of reasoning would be that after the designs for warships were taken away by the Empire, and the warship design bureau (or whatever agencies designed warships) were shut down, the warship designers simply needed work elsewhere and turned to civilian shipbuilding. But the lessons they learned as warship designers were either hard to get rid of, or they were encouraged to continue to cultivate because the Mon Calamari wanted to maintain the ability to build purpose-built warships well into the future. Which would explain the presence of tougher hulls than normal, as well as other design features that are normally the domain of warships. The Mon Calamari may have furthermore intentionally designed the vessels so they could refit them as cruisers, but would have to undergo serious modification before they became cruisers because, again, they are trying to hide these vessels under the very nose of the Empire.

The EU suggests- and in the days of the Old Republic it seems sensible enough- that major routes are well enough patrolled and policed, even by what little battle fleet the Republic Starfleet had, that within the Core and Inner Rim there was litlle requirement for a vessel to be armed. Small independents, tramp freighters, prospecting and mining ships, freighters and liners which operated in the Mid- Rim and outwards- they did tend to be armed, but not heavily.

Okay, I was asking because it is important. A large merchantman being designed to carry weapons is not going to throw up as many red flags in the Outer Rim as it would in the Core and Inner Rim. Presumably a Mon Cal liner is going to be going mainly to the Outer Rim, for exploration and settlement, as well as some routes to the Inner Rim and Core. Do those routes sound feasible? Because on that basis, designing the liner to be hardier than your average merchantman in the Inner Rim/Core regions is going to be more acceptable, even to the Empire. But what is not going to be acceptable is a liner built along the lines of a cruiser, except minus the guns and electronics.

The expensive part probably isn't the weapon; a large liner- well, the estimate I was using on the fleet list was one megawatt of power per newton of thrust, which has the benefit of being a nice round number that can have more accurate figures substituted for it once anybody works out what they are, and also of giving sensible results for small and medium warships.

It does have the interesting consequence that firepower and power generation to support it rise much faster than absolute size- meaning if the figure is consistent, not necessarily my round number but anything that makes sense, small ships run much hotter on a routine basis, developing much higher proportions of their power output- and with their power systems under greater strain- than large ships.

Unless large drives are much less efficient, an Imperator, say, can develop full thrust on less than a percent of her reactor output. Weapon power (and possibly hyperdrive) is the determining factor in a large warships' requirements, and there is no reason for a comparably sized civil craft to be within two orders of magnitude of reactor output.

By that round guesstimate, a hundred thousand metric ton small liner intended to accelerate at 1000 'g' would require, unless I have this hopelesly wrong, a mere 1E12 Newtons of thrust, so 1E18 W. An LTL mount throwing 6 bolts per second at 6 megatons each would take just over 1.5E17 W at perfect efficiency.

Just wanted to clarify and see if I'm understanding this correctly (and remembering my scientific notation right), that means that if the liner is not sending any power to its engines, but all that power has been diverted to its LTLs, that it would not have enough juice to fire a single LTL?

Oh, yes, probe droids. That would make inspections and area control easier, and the patrol squadrons could do wiht being sized down to accomodate that. There's no suitable design detailed, but with the influence of the CIS, I have no doubt one could be made to exist. I wsn't thinking laterally enough when I wrote that bit- thinking about the existing designs of droid vessel.

Even without the CIS I presume there were droids capable of independent operation within the Old Republic? If I remember correctly, one of the New Republic "New Class" vessels is an automated reconnaissance drone.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

No, the other way around, but the ship in that example would have to sacrifice almost 4.2 'g' of acceleration for each megaton- equivalent of power routed to the energy weapons. Something the size of a Mon Cal starcruiser is so much heavier to begin with, by something like three orders of magnitude, that it could power a full area- defence grid of LTL without much difficulty.

[recon20011]

No, the other way around, but the ship in that example would have to sacrifice almost 4.2 'g' of acceleration for each megaton- equivalent of power routed to the energy weapons. Something the size of a Mon Cal starcruiser is so much heavier to begin with, by something like three orders of magnitude, that it could power a full area- defence grid of LTL without much difficulty.

Okay... so maybe my first impression was correct... with 1E18W (I had seen that number then missed it the second and 3rd times I looked) available versus 1.5E17W needed for an LTL, that means you could have 6.6 LTLs firing, did I get it right this time? (I apologize, math and science have never been my strong points).
So if you wanted to have that liner with an acceleration of, say, 3,000Gs, you could cut back on the speed requirement to allow the emplacement of 13 LTLs?

[Simon_Jester]

Oh, yes, probe droids. That would make inspections and area control easier, and the patrol squadrons could do wiht being sized down to accomodate that. There's no suitable design detailed, but with the influence of the CIS, I have no doubt one could be made to exist. I wsn't thinking laterally enough when I wrote that bit- thinking about the existing designs of droid vessel.

Or use existing small ships: a YT-series stuffed to the gills with sensors, or a shuttlecraft stuffed with same. The point being that you don't do the job with corvettes.

I was referring to the EU, not modern day.

In the EU, conditions are tricky. I would expect that the vast majority of interstellar traffic travels in unarmed ships (or ships that carry nothing more than a couple of point defense mounts that couldn't see off anything worth mentioning). Fire control and ECCM for what they do have is liable to be sub-par too. Then you get the fast, heavily armed ships, most of which run in dangerous space... and many of which are, as I noted, liable to turn pirate if it's convenient. That's one of the hazards of working on the fringe, after all.

Wasn't Echo Base discovered by an Imperial probe droid? What if you had far more widespread use of probe droids for surveying? Wouldn't that cut down on the costs immensely? Especially if the crew isn't simply eyeballing the system, they are actually just scanning then jumping away. They could either drop into a system, or a point equidistant from several systems, and release a probe droid or ten then jump away and either the probe droids send the data back in a secured message or it gets picked up the next time an Imperial ship passes that way or (I don't know if probe droids are hyper capable or not) the probe droids all return to a centralized sector HQ to report. Even if probe droids were only capable of making on jump, they could get dropped off easily enough, it would take no more than 2 hours at the most I would imagine. Then they scan the system, then jump back to HQ and report.

The probes almost have to be hyper capable, given how Empire Strikes Back plays out. But yes, that's exactly what I'm getting at. It makes so much more sense for the job of routine survey to be handled by lightly manned, lightly armed ships that really just serve as dispenser racks for probe droids, than to use full-up corvettes with crews in the dozens and operating expenses in the millions per month.

[Sheridan]

<snip>

Wasn't Echo Base discovered by an Imperial probe droid? What if you had far more widespread use of probe droids for surveying? Wouldn't that cut down on the costs immensely? Especially if the crew isn't simply eyeballing the system, they are actually just scanning then jumping away. They could either drop into a system, or a point equidistant from several systems, and release a probe droid or ten then jump away and either the probe droids send the data back in a secured message or it gets picked up the next time an Imperial ship passes that way or (I don't know if probe droids are hyper capable or not) the probe droids all return to a centralized sector HQ to report. Even if probe droids were only capable of making on jump, they could get dropped off easily enough, it would take no more than 2 hours at the most I would imagine. Then they scan the system, then jump back to HQ and report.

The probes almost have to be hyper capable, given how Empire Strikes Back plays out. But yes, that's exactly what I'm getting at. It makes so much more sense for the job of routine survey to be handled by lightly manned, lightly armed ships that really just serve as dispenser racks for probe droids, than to use full-up corvettes with crews in the dozens and operating expenses in the millions per month.

But, here we get back into the problem of not knowing what it actually costs to purchase these items. Are figures given anywhere for the cost of a probe droid (and, if there are, do they make any frelling sense)?

I'd imagine that, yes, the probes would be less costly than maintenence and supply of a corvette or equivalent (given the prevalence of droids for menial tasks in the setting), but would they be cheap enough compared to the operational cost of a hyper-capable shuttle or small freighter--or, hell, even the Imperial equivalent of the recon variant X-Wing?

[Simon_Jester]

Well, that was my other suggestion.

My main criticism of ECR's old order of battle for system sweep is simply that he's using full-up warships for what really ought to be the job of tiny reconaissance craft, which requires a very large and costly fleet of corvettes to keep it all running.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

There's no evidence for this, but I wonder if the Hoth probe wasn't something like modern day probes going back to the Venera series up through Cassini; a two part device, the orbiter remaining over the planet and conducting long range recon, releasing the lander- the part that Han shot- if it spots anything interesting, far enough away from the point of interest to make a tactical approach.

Sending anything intended to roam around on a planetary surface by a one- way jump capsule can't be efficient, considerng how much of the area of the planet the lander alone could be expected to cover an how many of them would be needed.

The other droid vessel that comes immediately to mind is West End's extremely small, extremely fast (listed hyperdrive, although this is game statistic and therefore extremely dubious, is 0.5) Plexus Droid Vessel- basically a Ubiqtorate courier drone for information too dangerously sensitive to transmit in any form. Small, nine metres long, but it's probably overkill for the task- too sophisticated, too expensive ("unavailable for sale", but a 0.5 hyperdrive as designed- it just can't be cheap.) You'd send a recon drone with that kind of performance to confirm rebel presence, not trawl for it.

Interestingly, though, the writeup mentions that they are always at least low- observable, and often camouflaged as mining scouts or scavenger droids- confirmation that there are automated small craft existing, an some of them must be independent, hyper capable and sensor equipped- the mining scouts make little sense otherwise.

So, yes, automated droid recon looks like the way forward- and probably also for the Alliance, come to think of it. I'll have to work out a revised light- forces order of battle on that basis.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, you might use a lot of small manned spacecraft: recon fighter variants and shuttlecraft. It depends on how far you trust your little robot minions to operate unsupervised, and on whether automated ships are cheaper than manned ships of equivalent capability.

All I know is that you wouldn't use corvettes, because even those are much too big and expensive. They're what the scouts call in for backup, not the scouts themselves.

[Sheridan]

Assuming that the probe droids are the most economical solution for the problem, what would be used to launch them? I can't see destroyers or larger ships giving up enough internal volume to carry great enough numbers to use them constantly (despite what we see at the beginning of Episode V; it's implied in the opening crawl that this is not a usual set of circumstances). Would there be a purpose-built design, smaller or equal size to a bulk freighter? Or would it be more likely to just see old, beaten-up ships that have been converted to carry them?

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Bulk freighters can get very large, up to many millions of tons- the category is open- ended at the top. There's not really enough information about what the Old Republic survey corps actually used to even assume continuity- because, well, continuity of what?

What should a Survey Squadron consist of? Four multi- ship lines, three to search, and one to react in case they find anything, and to protect and escort the droid motherships; I'm actually tempted by the idea of a fairly large mothership, with space for droid maintenance and even possibly manufacture with appropriate raw materials- possibly an otherwise- surplus Acclamator.

They have huge bay space, excellent comms/command and control facilities, their crew is very small for such a large craft, they're actually pretty useful in a fight- what's not to like? They would be the flagships of the search lines, with groups of smaller and more efficient craft under them- the Acclamator would probably be responsble for their repair and refitting also.

One other substantial unit, primarily to support the Acclamator and the smaller ships of the line, probably a Carrack or a unit of the same weight class- actually, forget that; a sensor- heavy Strike variant, with CGTs if possible and other FTL sensors, to serve in case the squadron has to chase a moving target- and multiple, say four to eight, search groups-

each consisting of one floating signal interpretation lab, probably built out of a Corvette at that, one or two droid motherships, possibly Customs Corvettes with a probe launch pod in the capture bay, and anywhere up to a dozen droid support/retrieval ships- likely customs frigates, patrol boats, craft of the same class as Skiprays.

[Sheridan]

Are there figures anywhere for probe droid mass? Looking at the Wookiepedia entry for the Acclamators, it seems that they can normally carry about ten to eleven thousand tonnes of cargo.

I can't seem to find a mass figure for the Viper-class probe droid (assuming that the Viper is the most common model during the Empire years), but it looks like its spacefaring pod configuration takes up about seven cubic meters.

If the droid is significantly less than one tonne per cubic meter of volume (which I tend to believe), then the limit on the amount carried by the Acclamator would be volumetric rather than mass-related. Two hundred thousand cubic meters is what's given on Wookiepedia for a Mk. I, while there isn't a figure given for a Mk. II Acclamator.

So, an Acclamator could carry about twenty-eight thousand probe droids (a little more, but let's be conservative: they need to stack those suckers in there somehow). Assuming that we go back to the initial assumption of one to fifty thousand planets per sector...

<snip> Area; assuming a thousand sectors, Sector Group has to cover at least a thousand inhabited planets- members of the sector representation?- probably as many as fifty thousand; and how many stars? What’s the astrography of a sector? If it’s an even share of the galaxy, which we know it isn’t, that could be four hundred million stars. Some sectors will be much smaller, and some much larger to make up for that. <snip>

...we'd have enough to cover the sector with just two Acclamators. This makes the four-line approach a good one, given the numbers: you'd want redundancy in the system.


Edit: "Acclamator" spelled wrong. Damn it.

[recon20011]

Redundancy in the system, and a shock absorber: I'm certain that surveying star systems does not come without a cost. Surveying millions of systems every year, how many vessels are damaged beyond compare? How many miscalculate their hyperjumps? How many get hit by an asteroid, sucked in by a sun, or even destroyed by rebels or pirates?

But I agree that the Acclamators sound like the ideal vessel for the job, they may not be able to handle anything they come across, but they could probably hold their own against pirates for a short time, if they were requested to help provide support for a reconnaissance unit.

[Simon_Jester]

I honestly doubt that you're going to see many pirates that can cross swords with something in the heavy frigate/light destroyer weight class and come out on top...

[Batman]

Every once in a while, I hate being Batman.

Redundancy in the system, and a shock absorber:

That's going to be one hell of a shock absorber if you want it to compensate for (at the lowest of low ends) dropping from orbit speeds. Given Star Wars technology I'd prefer repulsorlifts

I'm certain that surveying star systems does not come without a cost. Surveying millions of systems every year, how many vessels are damaged beyond compare? How many miscalculate their hyperjumps?

I'd wager not many, and the vast majority of those which DO will essentially go 'Oh damn', recalculate and get back underway because they simply landed in empty space.

How many get hit by an asteroid, sucked in by a sun,

None whatsoever most likely, and an infinitesimally small number regardless.

[Simon_Jester]

Redundancy in the system, and a shock absorber:

That's going to be one hell of a shock absorber if you want it to compensate for (at the lowest of low ends) dropping from orbit speeds. Given Star Wars technology I'd prefer repulsorlifts

Snarkiness aside, are you sure you understood what he was saying?

It seems to me that he's talking about redundancy and the ability to absorb shocks in the patrol system- giving it the operational flexibility and strength to deal with complications. That's not nearly the same thing as dropping an individual ship from orbit.

I'm certain that surveying star systems does not come without a cost. Surveying millions of systems every year, how many vessels are damaged beyond compare? How many miscalculate their hyperjumps?

I'd wager not many, and the vast majority of those which DO will essentially go 'Oh damn', recalculate and get back underway because they simply landed in empty space.

How many get hit by an asteroid, sucked in by a sun,

None whatsoever most likely, and an infinitesimally small number regardless.

It's still a relevant consideration: engineering casualties happen to ships on routine patrol in real life, and will probably continue to happen in the future. Peacetime military service isn't necessarily risk-free.