Hull 721, plot arc the second

[Vianca]

How did the DS-I die?

Wasn't that a torpedo trickshot?
I would have made that whole pipe zagging around the entire sphere before even going inside.
Did you guys ever seen a picture of a Torpedo Sphere?
You could possibly use a torpedo launcher it's spike launcher to bounch a shot of, into another spike launcher it's overlapping armor it's cracks.

[Simon_Jester]

The problem is that planetary defence artillery isn't going to be nice to you, and they have the luxury of being able to wait for you, so to speak. If you're going to have a full salvo in the tubes at any one time, then it's going to be a major liability, especially if the ground operators recognize the signs of an impending launch. From what's depicted, it seems that surface petaton-range SHTL would be able to penetrate well enough to cause burn-through to the tubes at any time, and if a heavy emplacement waited until the right time, they could easily kill the sphere.

To be fair, petaton-range turbolasers aren't actually that common, except on dedicated "fortress worlds," like, say, Ord Corban or some of the better defended Rrasfenoni worlds from the first story arc.

Torpedo volatility would still be a problem even if the torpedoes are kept in deep storage when not in use, sure. But it wouldn't be a constant problem, it would at least mean that the thing is vulnerable only for a relatively limited window while it's actually firing, during which time it can be covered by a variety of means (i.e. jamming).

Of course, I'm envisioning it as possible to run the torpedoes along dedicated tracks, conveyors, or freight elevators to get them quickly from the heavily armored magazines tucked into the core of the ship, up to the ready magazines just below the launchers.

These systems never work anything like as well as the designers said they would. I'd say that 5-10% of them would never get there, for a really wide range of quite surprising problems.

Given ten years to work the bugs out, I'm pretty sure engineers in freaking Star Wars can design a reasonably reliable set of conveyor belts to load torpedo tubes. It's not like that's remotely the most mechanically complex thing they deal with.

It would be very difficult to put a thousand-plus small craft in racetrack orbits above a weak spot in the shield, have the bombers identify the shield, and get all four thousand pieces of ordnance to launch and strike in synchronized patterns exactly on schedule. The reason the torpedo sphere exists is because firing all the torpedoes from one launch platform greatly simplifies the problem of actually hitting the target at the right instant.

SW ships don't have to use orbits, remember, as they have more than enough fuel and acceleration to cancel gravity's influence.

Apparently I also need to explain what a "racetrack orbit" is.

It is NOT necessarily a free ballistic orbit around a planetary body. It can be any roughly loop-like shape that an aircraft (or spacecraft) zooms around while waiting for something to happen. For example, aircraft might be placed in a holding pattern while waiting to land. This can be described as a "racetrack orbit," with the plane(s) literally flying circles or rectangles or whatever in the sky.

They have enough spare propulsion to maintain powered positions, allowing bomber swarms to congregate in a powered position, then maintain the swarm until launch.

You would need very complicated coordination; I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it could be tricky. Especially if the enemy starts futzing with your communications- there are advantages to having sensors, shooters, and analysts all located in one place.

The swarm would require a additional SIGINT ship to allow shield analysis and swarm coordination. However, you could have redundant control vessels, and they're much harder to hit, so the swarm would be less vulnerable.

The swarm would be vastly more vulnerable to, say, being shot down by 2000 TIE Interceptors, which is a realistic threat when attacking a defended planet, but which would have very little effect on a torpedo sphere (which is shielded against fighter-weight weapons) and its escorts.

This was an inarguably insane use of the torpedo sphere, and one that the designers wouldn't have ever really designed for. When faced with peer capital ships, torpedo spheres should run away and let support elements handle the threat.

Well, the torpedo sphere at least has enough armament that it SHOULD be able to threaten a capital ship- the real problem was the excess volatility of having way more torpedoes than needed in a place exposed to enemy fire.

Now consider this: this swarm of 4000 torpedoes has just been launched from the sphere. What happens if the defenders fire a SHTL flack burst into it?

This exact problem is why the Emperor decided to vastly scale up the torpedo sphere into something called... the Death Star!

Yeah Aldrem's good but the trickshot is ridiculous. We've never heard of bouncing shots off shields before. We've never heard of this new super duper trick shot gun in story before.

Ah, no, actually, these are the axial battery of 320-teraton turbolasers that Our Heroes looted off of some ships (some kind of Separatist design as I recall) that they encountered and overcame in the first story arc. Mirannon managed to get them installed during the refit at Coruscant; we've just never seen them in action before.

I'd imagine, then, that the PD on the sphere must be pretty extensive, as all of these situations provide miniscule engagement windows (as the attackers are protected by the shield for the majority of their onset), while requiring the infliction of massive attrition on large numbers of targets (in the anticap torpedo on rocket scenario). I'd guess that the sphere solves this problem like the (wait for it) Lancer does, with large numbers of fighter scale PD armament. I'd also suggest that the area that they would be the most concentrated would be around the launcher area.

Alternatively, the torpedo sphere is so ludicrously well armored and shielded that it is normally effectively immune to low-end HTL fire, let alone fighter weaponry. Relatively heavy HTL weapons like the 175s and 320s are, however, effective.

[macfanpro]

The problem is that planetary defence artillery isn't going to be nice to you, and they have the luxury of being able to wait for you, so to speak. If you're going to have a full salvo in the tubes at any one time, then it's going to be a major liability, especially if the ground operators recognize the signs of an impending launch. From what's depicted, it seems that surface petaton-range SHTL would be able to penetrate well enough to cause burn-through to the tubes at any time, and if a heavy emplacement waited until the right time, they could easily kill the sphere.

To be fair, petaton-range turbolasers aren't actually that common, except on dedicated "fortress worlds," like, say, Ord Corban or some of the better defended Rrasfenoni worlds from the first story arc.

Worlds which would be essentially the only ones that would require the specialist services of a torpedo sphere.

Torpedo volatility would still be a problem even if the torpedoes are kept in deep storage when not in use, sure. But it wouldn't be a constant problem, it would at least mean that the thing is vulnerable only for a relatively limited window while it's actually firing, during which time it can be covered by a variety of means (i.e. jamming).

The window would be pretty sizable - you mentioned something like 30 minutes, though I won't hold you to that - as physical components take time to fiddle around with. In addition, at the point just before launch, the sphere is in the perfect place for the defenders, sitting right above the planetary shield, right above SIGINT, COMINT, and IMINT satellites protected by the shield. I think it would be more or less impossible to prevent the defenders from noticing where you were and what you were doing, and the reaction time of turbolasers is such that if the PDA fires when the sphere begins launching, then a substantial number of torpedoes would still be either in their tubes or within the blast radius of the explosion.

Of course, I'm envisioning it as possible to run the torpedoes along dedicated tracks, conveyors, or freight elevators to get them quickly from the heavily armored magazines tucked into the core of the ship, up to the ready magazines just below the launchers.

These systems never work anything like as well as the designers said they would. I'd say that 5-10% of them would never get there, for a really wide range of quite surprising problems.

Given ten years to work the bugs out, I'm pretty sure engineers in freaking Star Wars can design a reasonably reliable set of conveyor belts to load torpedo tubes. It's not like that's remotely the most mechanically complex thing they deal with.

It isn't mechanically complex, it's logistically complex. The system needs a lot of elevators and moving parts to work, and moving parts have this annoying tendency to break. It'll work great weeks out of the shipyard, but after 6 months of use I'd say that the system would have rapidly degrading response times as mechanics degraded.

They have enough spare propulsion to maintain powered positions, allowing bomber swarms to congregate in a powered position, then maintain the swarm until launch.

You would need very complicated coordination; I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying that it could be tricky. Especially if the enemy starts futzing with your communications- there are advantages to having sensors, shooters, and analysts all located in one place.

Which is why I added the qualifier might in my original response.

The swarm would require a additional SIGINT ship to allow shield analysis and swarm coordination. However, you could have redundant control vessels, and they're much harder to hit, so the swarm would be less vulnerable.

The swarm would be vastly more vulnerable to, say, being shot down by 2000 TIE Interceptors, which is a realistic threat when attacking a defended planet, but which would have very little effect on a torpedo sphere (which is shielded against fighter-weight weapons) and its escorts.

It would be a lot less vulnerable to PDA, though, which would serve as a larger attrition threat. In general, interceptors and fighters have difficulty inflicting substantial casualties on swarms, for a very wide range of reasons.

This was an inarguably insane use of the torpedo sphere, and one that the designers wouldn't have ever really designed for. When faced with peer capital ships, torpedo spheres should run away and let support elements handle the threat.

Well, the torpedo sphere at least has enough armament that it SHOULD be able to threaten a capital ship- the real problem was the excess volatility of having way more torpedoes than needed in a place exposed to enemy fire.

I think that the design is really quite fundamentally stupid. In this situation, the torpedoes were located in the comparatively best position, directly away from the agressor ship. However, in the nominally designed role for the ship, those tubes are oriented such that they're facing the threat itself, and the defenders know exactly where the sphere will end up, even, as they presumably have done the same analysis that the crew on the sphere did.

I'd imagine, then, that the PD on the sphere must be pretty extensive, as all of these situations provide miniscule engagement windows (as the attackers are protected by the shield for the majority of their onset), while requiring the infliction of massive attrition on large numbers of targets (in the anticap torpedo on rocket scenario). I'd guess that the sphere solves this problem like the (wait for it) Lancer does, with large numbers of fighter scale PD armament. I'd also suggest that the area that they would be the most concentrated would be around the launcher area.

Alternatively, the torpedo sphere is so ludicrously well armored and shielded that it is normally effectively immune to low-end HTL fire, let alone fighter weaponry. Relatively heavy HTL weapons like the 175s and 320s are, however, effective.

The problem here is that we aren't talking about low-end HTL yields. We're talking about dedicated anticap torpedoes, which can have yields into high HTL territory, operating with the support of planetary ECCM and launched from dedicated vessels under planetary ECM, or from surface anticap batteries, which could remain hidden up until the moment they salvo a hundred missiles. It'd be essentially impossible to armor against this kind of attack, and this attack isn't even that expensive to set up if you already have the shield.

[Crazedwraith]

I think you said this Simon. It was in a quote box but i could find it anywhere e;se.

Yeah Aldrem's good but the trickshot is ridiculous. We've never heard of bouncing shots off shields before. We've never heard of this new super duper trick shot gun in story before.

Ah, no, actually, these are the axial battery of 320-teraton turbolasers that Our Heroes looted off of some ships (some kind of Separatist design as I recall) that they encountered and overcame in the first story arc. Mirannon managed to get them installed during the refit at Coruscant; we've just never seen them in action before.

You could be right. But I thought those guns were accounted for in battery at the bow of the ship? Again I remember ECR totting up all the guns included the new ones in the axial battery and they numbered 73. Which ECR thought was a silly number of guns for a ship and resolved to add another in the hanger mount to make it a 74 gun ship. ISDs are obviously third rates.

Anyway, ECR I hope I'm not coming off as too much of a dick with these comments. I do truly enjoy the detail and perspective of these fics. But you've built up Swiftsure as a ship and crew that's Lennart's equal and they have substantial backup. I know its only the opening gambits at the moment but we do need to see Black Prince be pressed hard for Swiftsure to live up to its record.

[Simon_Jester]

I think Black Prince will actually be in a lot more trouble once the proper star destroyers arrive, between Swiftsure being able to duel her*, and the other ships limiting her movements, closing off options, and firing on her from other directions so that she can't reliably dodge all the incoming fire.

Think about the battle of Ord Corban, with Black Prince up against Admonisher. While these two 'crack ships' could more or less match each other in a one on one duel, Black Prince would have had a very serious problem if Mon Evarra or Reaver had jumped in to help Admonisher out. Especially Mon Evarra.

Now, Olghaan doesn't have any single destroyer supporting him as good as Mon Evarra... but his own ship is probably as good or even better than Admonisher. You see the problem.

By the nature of Star Wars combat, especially in the ECR-verse version, if you don't land enough fire on target to overcome their shield dispersion, you're not accomplishing anything. That makes it very difficult to engage two comparable-sized targets at once, even if only one of them is offensively or defensively your equal.

If you focus your efforts on fighting your equal, the lesser ships will have cleaner shots at you and you risk being overwhelmed, because it's hard enough keeping Swiftsure's hit rate down below shield dispersion without some other bunch of clowns landing occasional bolts on you from behind.

If you focus your efforts on fighting your lesser, all they have to do is evade and concentrate power on their shields long enough, and your peer-competitor will have every chance they need to take a piece out of you.
_____________

*I imagine Swiftsure has a main battery gunner right around Aldrem's skill level; if I were Palpatine putting staff on my personal hit-ship, I know I'd make sure of it.

Worlds which would be essentially the only ones that would require the specialist services of a torpedo sphere.

Well no, there's a wide range of reasons why a planet might have large theater or light planetary shields, which cannot be cracked by conventional turbolaser bombardment, and yet NOT have the kind of superheavy turbolasers that would (theoretically, in the ECR-verse version of Star Wars) make blowing up a torpedo sphere easy.

And honestly, I think it shouldn't be this easy, unless we're missing something, because yes this is a pretty fundamental design issue for the sphere, that if one bank shot with a 320-teraton bolt will blow it away, it's really a bit inadequate for its intended role. Not hopeless, but not satisfactory.

The swarm would be vastly more vulnerable to, say, being shot down by 2000 TIE Interceptors, which is a realistic threat when attacking a defended planet, but which would have very little effect on a torpedo sphere (which is shielded against fighter-weight weapons) and its escorts.

It would be a lot less vulnerable to PDA, though, which would serve as a larger attrition threat. In general, interceptors and fighters have difficulty inflicting substantial casualties on swarms, for a very wide range of reasons.

I wouldn't stake the success of my planetary siege operation on it.

Also, can we avoid the arbitrary acronyms like "FCS" and "PDA?" It doesn't take that long to type something like "fire control," and to actually type it is often more grammatically appropriate, especially in cases where you're referring to multiple fire control systems, or to 'fire control' in general rather than to a single specific system for controlling fire. And PDA is an acronym you just made up, one which applies to quite a few other things. Try "surface fire" or something like that; you'll find it makes your writing a lot clearer.

For my own part I'll try to avoid "HTL" and so on.

Anyway, fighter attrition. The problem isn't that the fighters will kill all your bombers, it's that they'll make it bloody impossible to coordinate the massed salvo you need to do the job of breaching the planetary shield. Just having the enemy launch a squadron or two and try to pick off a few of the stragglers could cause that much disruption, and they can keep it up all day. The same fighters are also vulnerable to ground fire, including ground fire much lighter than what it would take to threaten a torpedo sphere.

Well, the torpedo sphere at least has enough armament that it SHOULD be able to threaten a capital ship- the real problem was the excess volatility of having way more torpedoes than needed in a place exposed to enemy fire.

I think that the design is really quite fundamentally stupid. In this situation, the torpedoes were located in the comparatively best position, directly away from the agressor ship. However, in the nominally designed role for the ship, those tubes are oriented such that they're facing the threat itself, and the defenders know exactly where the sphere will end up, even, as they presumably have done the same analysis that the crew on the sphere did.

It is strongly implied in all descriptions of the torpedo sphere that the analysis is in fact hard, and even the defenders may not know the exact positions of the weaknesses the torpedo sphere tries to exploit.

That said, the fundamental issue here is the idea that the volatility of the torpedoes means the sphere can be utterly destroyed by a single well-placed turbolaser bolt. That, I'm afraid, is something I'd like to see taken up with ECR; it represents a severe design flaw, but not one that was originally written into torpedo spheres in the EU material where they appear.

Because the flaw is so severe, it makes it very questionable whether the torpedo sphere as ECR presents it could actually carry out its intended mission at all, yes... and that's something I think ECR has a right to weigh in on, rather than us just see-sawing back and forth about it in his absence.

The problem here is that we aren't talking about low-end HTL yields. We're talking about dedicated anticap torpedoes, which can have yields into high HTL territory, operating with the support of planetary ECCM and launched from dedicated vessels under planetary ECM, or from surface anticap batteries, which could remain hidden up until the moment they salvo a hundred missiles. It'd be essentially impossible to armor against this kind of attack, and this attack isn't even that expensive to set up if you already have the shield.

In that case, your argument reduces to "ground fire makes it suicide to bring a bombardment platform of any kind anywhere near a fortified world, unless the platform has shielding and weapons the size of a planet in its own right." That isn't necessarily wrong. Indeed, it's a pretty good explanation for the Death Star, which does have shields and weapons the size of a planet.

But we also need to work backwards here. Your argument is:

"The torpedo sphere appears unable to carry out its intended mission, therefore it is a stupid design."

But you could equally well argue:

"The torpedo sphere was designed and remains in use for some mission, therefore some sane human being thinks it can carry out that mission, and it doesn't invariably die horribly every time it tries. Somehow, some way, it must be capable of doing most of the jobs it's actually assigned to do. It can't be as stupid as it looks, because it works. What are we missing here?"

There are obvious things we might be missing. For example, it might be 'harder than it looks' to score a hit on the sphere's torpedo batteries and blow the thing out of space.

Or it might actually be that most planets, even most shielded planets, simply don't have anticapital weapons in sufficient quantity or quality to threaten a torpedo sphere. In which case the sphere's ability to crack a planetary shield matters, but its (theoretical) vulnerability to superheavy turbolasers doesn't; in the unlikely event that the enemy planet actually HAS such turbolasers, you don't use a torpedo sphere, you use, say, a squadron of ten-kilometer star dreadnoughts.

Unlike the Death Star, torpedo spheres are relatively modest in size and expense; they don't have to be the weapon of last resort against a too-dangerous target.

[Vianca]

Mmm, what part was hit?
The launchers or a engine bell on the inside?
If it's the last, then the explosion could come from raptured fuel lines.
Basicaly, they would have hit the main reactor, with a reverse flow.

[Crazedwraith]

I think Black Prince will actually be in a lot more trouble once the proper star destroyers arrive, between Swiftsure being able to duel her*, and the other ships limiting her movements, closing off options, and firing on her from other directions so that she can't reliably dodge all the incoming fire.

Think about the battle of Ord Corban, with Black Prince up against Admonisher. While these two 'crack ships' could more or less match each other in a one on one duel, Black Prince would have had a very serious problem if Mon Evarra or Reaver had jumped in to help Admonisher out. Especially Mon Evarra.

Now, Olghaan doesn't have any single destroyer supporting him as good as Mon Evarra... but his own ship is probably as good or even better than Admonisher. You see the problem.

By the nature of Star Wars combat, especially in the ECR-verse version, if you don't land enough fire on target to overcome their shield dispersion, you're not accomplishing anything. That makes it very difficult to engage two comparable-sized targets at once, even if only one of them is offensively or defensively your equal.

If you focus your efforts on fighting your equal, the lesser ships will have cleaner shots at you and you risk being overwhelmed, because it's hard enough keeping Swiftsure's hit rate down below shield dispersion without some other bunch of clowns landing occasional bolts on you from behind.

If you focus your efforts on fighting your lesser, all they have to do is evade and concentrate power on their shields long enough, and your peer-competitor will have every chance they need to take a piece out of you.
_____________

*I imagine Swiftsure has a main battery gunner right around Aldrem's skill level; if I were Palpatine putting staff on my personal hit-ship, I know I'd make sure of it.

A good summation of course this is why Lennart's always emphasised maneuvering in FTL and STL a long with firepower. The aim being to try and fight opponents one at a time rather than all at once.

Of course Olghaan has the problem of countering this. Presumably what he'd like to do is pin the Black Prince and mob Lennart with tonnage which is why the Interdictor was so crucial. Now he faces a problem; he can concentrate his forces so they can take on Lennart or he can break them down into small enough groups to catch Lennart in a net. But in either case they have to worry about Lennart either escaping or massacring a single weak elelment of his force and then escaping.

But that's assuming Lennart wants to escape. It seems to me he's in a lose/lose/lose scenario here. He either dies in the fight, blasts the whole squadron to bits and has a few million imperial personnel's blood on his hands, or he escapes and has abandoned his post in Death Squadron. And either if the two lattermost options that's grounds for whoever's after them to declare them renegades for realsies throughout the Empire rather than just covertly to the kill squad.

[Vianca]

They are being attacked by SD's while Vader is hitting the rebel main base, they MUST be rebels, nea?

[macfanpro]

Worlds which would be essentially the only ones that would require the specialist services of a torpedo sphere.

Well no, there's a wide range of reasons why a planet might have large theater or light planetary shields, which cannot be cracked by conventional turbolaser bombardment, and yet NOT have the kind of superheavy turbolasers that would (theoretically, in the ECR-verse version of Star Wars) make blowing up a torpedo sphere easy.

In this case, you don't need anything like a 320-teraton bolt to kill the sphere. You only need 2-4 50-teraton artillery pieces, or more smaller tubes, hooked together by some sort of simple fire control. A time-on-target strike could deliver similar amounts of energy (as the post-bounce 320-teraton shot) with lower costs.

The swarm would be vastly more vulnerable to, say, being shot down by 2000 TIE Interceptors, which is a realistic threat when attacking a defended planet, but which would have very little effect on a torpedo sphere (which is shielded against fighter-weight weapons) and its escorts.

It would be a lot less vulnerable to PDA, though, which would serve as a larger attrition threat. In general, interceptors and fighters have difficulty inflicting substantial casualties on swarms, for a very wide range of reasons.

I wouldn't stake the success of my planetary siege operation on it.

Anyway, fighter attrition. The problem isn't that the fighters will kill all your bombers, it's that they'll make it bloody impossible to coordinate the massed salvo you need to do the job of breaching the planetary shield. Just having the enemy launch a squadron or two and try to pick off a few of the stragglers could cause that much disruption, and they can keep it up all day. The same fighters are also vulnerable to ground fire, including ground fire much lighter than what it would take to threaten a torpedo sphere.

I don't dispute that it's very, very hard, but I would say it's very vaguely possible. At this point, I don't care much about this point, so can we move on?

Well, the torpedo sphere at least has enough armament that it SHOULD be able to threaten a capital ship- the real problem was the excess volatility of having way more torpedoes than needed in a place exposed to enemy fire.

I think that the design is really quite fundamentally stupid. In this situation, the torpedoes were located in the comparatively best position, directly away from the agressor ship. However, in the nominally designed role for the ship, those tubes are oriented such that they're facing the threat itself, and the defenders know exactly where the sphere will end up, even, as they presumably have done the same analysis that the crew on the sphere did.

It is strongly implied in all descriptions of the torpedo sphere that the analysis is in fact hard, and even the defenders may not know the exact positions of the weaknesses the torpedo sphere tries to exploit.

Let me remind you of the relevant paragraph from Wookiepedia:

Ostensibly, Torpedo Spheres were useful only for the specific purpose of bringing down planetary shields. They took advantage of the fact that planetary shields were not uniform, and experienced anomalies and fluctuations. Using thousands of Dedicated Energy Receptors (DERs), a Torpedo Sphere could find a shield's weak spots.

(you thought I was bad with making up acronyms) and

... It took hundreds of technicians to properly coordinate the torpedo tubes. ...

This means that it doesn't take lots of people to analyze the shields. Instead, it takes that many people to arrange the armament (which doesn't make much sense to me with even modern missiles), and that the shield analysis is only dependent on computers and sensors. The ground operators have both of these available, as they have access to ground based sensors combined with the generator's telemetry, and they also have substantial computing resources. It wouldn't be hard for the people on the ground to do the same analysis that the torpedo sphere does, and they might even be able to precompute the problem in many situations.

The problem here is that we aren't talking about low-end HTL yields. We're talking about dedicated anticap torpedoes, which can have yields into high HTL territory, operating with the support of planetary ECCM and launched from dedicated vessels under planetary ECM, or from surface anticap batteries, which could remain hidden up until the moment they salvo a hundred missiles. It'd be essentially impossible to armor against this kind of attack, and this attack isn't even that expensive to set up if you already have the shield.

In that case, your argument reduces to "ground fire makes it suicide to bring a bombardment platform of any kind anywhere near a fortified world, unless the platform has shielding and weapons the size of a planet in its own right." That isn't necessarily wrong. Indeed, it's a pretty good explanation for the Death Star, which does have shields and weapons the size of a planet.

I think that the Death Star is the inevitable result of Star Wars thinking combined with advancing planetary defence technology. It's a reasonable (if extremely expensive) solution.

"The torpedo sphere was designed and remains in use for some mission, therefore some sane human being thinks it can carry out that mission, and it doesn't invariably die horribly every time it tries. Somehow, some way, it must be capable of doing most of the jobs it's actually assigned to do. It can't be as stupid as it looks, because it works. What are we missing here?"

I can see two possibilities:

• The torpedo sphere is designed for sieging planets undefended against capships. This is a high bar, as computerized fire control can push medium turbolaser fire into heavy turbolaser energy territory, and with a vulnerability as obvious as the sphere's, it's the obvious solution. Even carefully controlled fighter proton torpedoes could reach into the energy class needed.
• Somebody really messed up in the design of the spheres, and they aren't heavily used.

I think that both are possible, but I wouldn't assign probabilities. The Empire seems rife with really stupid designs that cost a lot of money, however, so I think that #2 is more likely than one would first think.

There are obvious things we might be missing. For example, it might be 'harder than it looks' to score a hit on the sphere's torpedo batteries and blow the thing out of space.

Black Prince did it, from a really disadvantageous perspective as well. It seems that standard operating practice is for the tubes to face the planet during the approach, even, and only a very bad gunner would have trouble it seems, especially from the very stable platform that planets provide.

Or it might actually be that most planets, even most shielded planets, simply don't have anticapital weapons in sufficient quantity or quality to threaten a torpedo sphere. In which case the sphere's ability to crack a planetary shield matters, but its (theoretical) vulnerability to superheavy turbolasers doesn't; in the unlikely event that the enemy planet actually HAS such turbolasers, you don't use a torpedo sphere, you use, say, a squadron of ten-kilometer star dreadnoughts.

The dreadnoughts are the obvious solution to the "gods that's a lot of gun" problem in general, and look like the only real way to kill a very heavily defended planet.

I'd say that it's possible to make trick shots of super heavy turbolaser equivalent yields if you have a mediocre software industry and several heavy turbolaser mounts, allowing time-on-target strikes against critical points, like the torpedo bays. It is also conceivable with capital torpedoes and corvette-class launching vessels operating with planetary support, also enabling time-on-target precision attacks against the sphere.

Unlike the Death Star, torpedo spheres are relatively modest in size and expense; they don't have to be the weapon of last resort against a too-dangerous target.

The problem is the question of "what else do they do?" You can't use them against organized enemies, as it's too easy to find and destroy their weak spot. They aren't good against capships, since they have a screamingly huge vulnerability that we've discussed to death, and are underarmed for their size. They can't take fighters, since they only have anticap torpedoes and little PD. They're too expensive (and slow) to use as interdictors, and they really can't escort or act as part of a quick reaction force. They devote too much space to torpedoes to act as landing support. I can't really think of anything else that you could use a capital ship for.

Harking back to our earlier discussion, I think that the best alternative to the torpedo sphere is the hypermissile. Instead of working by pounding down the shield, the hypermissiles job is to outreact the shield operators, destroying the generators before they are able to create the bubble. The bubble can't be online forever, for cost reasons alone, and the missiles are much cheaper. They also leave the planet mostly intact, unlike the Death Star does. Planets also have problems moving in unpredictable ways, eliminating the targeting problems inherent to the hypermissile.

The main issue with this is what happens when the attack is found out, and the missiles aren't able to reach their targets before the shields go up. This might be a case for the battlecrusers, but we're back were we started again, fighting an enemy with shields up and planetary artillery aiming for you.

[macfanpro]

But that's assuming Lennart wants to escape. It seems to me he's in a lose/lose/lose scenario here. He either dies in the fight, blasts the whole squadron to bits and has a few million imperial personnel's blood on his hands, or he escapes and has abandoned his post in Death Squadron. And either if the two lattermost options that's grounds for whoever's after them to declare them renegades for realsies throughout the Empire rather than just covertly to the kill squad.

Something that hasn't been made adequately clear yet is where exactly Swiftsure's orders came from. One obvious source is from the Prophets of the Dark Side (under similar authority to Adanan's), and if that's true, then a good case may be made for Olghaan being the rebel. However, without more clarity about where Olghaan's orders came from it's hard to say for certain.

It seems incongruous that the attack wasn't carried out administratively while Black Prince was under refit or militarily during its working up cruise, so sending Swiftsure against Black Prince would have been a recent decision. I can't think of what would have came up that quickly, however. One possibility is that they don't want Black Prince's forces to break the blockade on the planet proper and reveal what they find.

On another topic, I re-read one of the earlier chapters.

Siege platforms were a dubious and touchy subject. Many had been developed during the great reduction of the separatists, and very few had actually done anything useful. Widespread civilian shielding against navigational accident and astronomical incident set the bar high enough that most military attempts to break through failed, and the old traditional options of starvation, blackmail, sabotage and treachery saw much use.

Usual procedure was to park a platform or an amphibious flotilla nearby and keep up a slow bombardment, wait for the people under the shield to get tired or screw up. Starvation was usually of reactor fuel to power the shields, unless the world was particularly badly favoured or something strange happened. Which with the combination of tension and boredom that pervaded both sides, it frequently did.

The now vanished Death Star was the ultimate expression of frustration with the process, and there probably would be something like it again. The spheres which looked strangely like death star spawn were actually moderately effective shield breakers- when they were in good working order, which wasn't that often.

The specification had been ambitious and had been revised several times through the project- that had led to numerous production cockups and delays. They had originally been supposed to be produced widely enough to give one or two to each sector fleet, but they were actually about as rare as surfing space slugs, their place in the order of battle taken by the older platforms they had been supposed to supercede.

I think that this covers most of the territory that we've just talked about adequately. In short, siege vessels designed for shield-killing don't work that well, and not many of them were ever made. The best way to prosecute the attack is to blockade and starve the planet out.

[InsaneTD]

It might not be common knowledge outside imperial navy just how susceptible the shielding is over the launchers. A starship engineer might have some idea but how often do the higher ups listen to their engineers?

[Simon_Jester]

A good summation of course this is why Lennart's always emphasised maneuvering in FTL and STL a long with firepower. The aim being to try and fight opponents one at a time rather than all at once.

One thing Olghaan is probably hoping for and may be counting on; hyperdrives have technical limitations. It is entirely possible to beat your own hyperdrive to death trying too many microjumps too fast, and indeed Black Prince has narrowly avoided doing this- probably narrowly avoided it more than once so far in the writing, let alone outside it. Think about those times that Maximillian's Doughnut failed.

So sure, Lennart can try to lead him on a dance in hyperspace, but this is not without its costs and risks as well.

In this case, you don't need anything like a 320-teraton bolt to kill the sphere. You only need 2-4 50-teraton artillery pieces, or more smaller tubes, hooked together by some sort of simple fire control. A time-on-target strike could deliver similar amounts of energy (as the post-bounce 320-teraton shot) with lower costs.

The only place in the ECR-version of Star Wars where we see that kind of precisely timed barrage from turbolasers is... surprise, a freakishly effective trick-shot gunner, Pel Aldrem talking about taking down Kor Alric by flaring down the shielding over Black Prince's own Imperial suite, then using a very very stepped-down bolt to take out the compartment cleanly without overpenetration.

So no, that's not a very repeatable trick.

In general, I advise you to NOT assume that precisely synchronizing a large number of dispersed platforms is going to be as easy as just push the red button once. Theoretically it is, but in practice it's the software equivalent of a massive network of thousands of trolley/tramway/elevators, or even more complicated. Exactly the sort of plan which fails to survive contact with the enemy, for all kinds of different reasons.

Let me remind you of the relevant paragraph from Wookiepedia:

Ostensibly, Torpedo Spheres were useful only for the specific purpose of bringing down planetary shields. They took advantage of the fact that planetary shields were not uniform, and experienced anomalies and fluctuations. Using thousands of Dedicated Energy Receptors (DERs), a Torpedo Sphere could find a shield's weak spots.

(you thought I was bad with making up acronyms) and

... It took hundreds of technicians to properly coordinate the torpedo tubes. ...

This means that it doesn't take lots of people to analyze the shields. Instead, it takes that many people to arrange the armament (which doesn't make much sense to me with even modern missiles), and that the shield analysis is only dependent on computers and sensors. The ground operators have both of these available, as they have access to ground based sensors combined with the generator's telemetry, and they also have substantial computing resources. It wouldn't be hard for the people on the ground to do the same analysis that the torpedo sphere does, and they might even be able to precompute the problem in many situations.

I think it's relevant here to consider that, since all this is interpreted through the lens ECR uses to analyze Star Wars... note what the passage you quote says: "Widespread civilian shielding against navigational accident and astronomical incident set the bar high enough that most military attempts to break through failed." Thing is, that is civilian shielding- the physical hardware may not actually be designed with all the latest antitampering or telemetry or whatever equipment, it is not designed to resist analysis by military sensors. What it is designed to do is, for example, take "million-ton starship approaching the planet at relativistic speeds due to navigational brainfart or psychotic terrorist" and turn it into a minor inconvenience instead of a Chicxulub Event waiting to happen. Which unfortunately for the Imperial fleet, means the same shielding must also be able to laugh off fire from a line destroyer.

If the torpedo sphere is designed to penetrate the typical planetary shield, rather than the ideal planetary shield, it might actually be able to count on having a better (or more specialized) sensor network to analyze the shield than the defenders have. How would we know?

So then he goes on to state that "the old traditional options of starvation, blackmail, sabotage and treachery saw much use." This is a reference to pre-gunpowder siege warfare; despite all the attention we place on medieval siege engines, they were mostly rather ineffective at actually bringing down a well constructed wall, or allowing an attack to be pressed across same. So most sieges had to be resolved by means other than 'penetrate the nigh-impenetrable fortification.'

I think that the Death Star is the inevitable result of Star Wars thinking combined with advancing planetary defence technology. It's a reasonable (if extremely expensive) solution.

The idea of building a mobile battle platform the size of a moon, to mount generators and weapons capable of dealing with the large-scale installations that an entire planet can afford to mount, is not new in SF of course. So yes, the Death Star probably does owe a lot of its basic in-setting inspiration to the need to be as big as a planet to crack the defenses of the strongest planets.

On the other hand, no one ever said the torpedo sphere was specified to crack the defenses of the strongest planets, and planets with defenses capable of killing the sphere would almost HAVE to be unusual. Otherwise they wouldn't be built at all, or would have been destroyed about as fast as they could be commissioned once they started going into combat.

"The torpedo sphere was designed and remains in use for some mission, therefore some sane human being thinks it can carry out that mission, and it doesn't invariably die horribly every time it tries. Somehow, some way, it must be capable of doing most of the jobs it's actually assigned to do. It can't be as stupid as it looks, because it works. What are we missing here?"

I can see two possibilities:

• The torpedo sphere is designed for sieging planets undefended against capships. This is a high bar, as computerized fire control can push medium turbolaser fire into heavy turbolaser energy territory, and with a vulnerability as obvious as the sphere's, it's the obvious solution. Even carefully controlled fighter proton torpedoes could reach into the energy class needed.
• Somebody really messed up in the design of the spheres, and they aren't heavily used.

I think that both are possible, but I wouldn't assign probabilities. The Empire seems rife with really stupid designs that cost a lot of money, however, so I think that #2 is more likely than one would first think.[/qutoe]I think some of your reasons for being skeptical about (1) are overrated; see above. Trick shots that rely on large numbers of weapons all landing on the same point on the same target with timing precise to the millisecond are NOT a substitute for larger, heavier weapons, not against an enemy which is competent and well equipped.

In-story, we have good reasons why a typical planetary defense does want shields capable of stopping the equivalent of heavy turbolaser fire (since Star Wars ships can easily have that kind of kinetic energy and accidents/lunatic ramming attacks happen)... but would not need or have weapons rated for delivering the same kind of fire, because until the Clone Wars planets were unlikely to experience a military attack by anything much larger than a typical pirate, and after the Clone Wars the Empire is at least trying to keep some kind of arms control on superheavy turbolasers, even if that's not always effective.

It would not be atypical, the idea that "Alderaan is a peaceful planet, we have no weapons..." and yet Alderaan has a credible planetary shield designed to resist conventional bombardment. To the point where breaching it quickly would imply dumping a civilization-destroying if not planet-shattering amount of energy onto the surface below.

The problem is the question of "what else do they do?" You can't use them against organized enemies, as it's too easy to find and destroy their weak spot. They aren't good against capships, since they have a screamingly huge vulnerability that we've discussed to death, and are underarmed for their size. They can't take fighters, since they only have anticap torpedoes and little PD. They're too expensive (and slow) to use as interdictors, and they really can't escort or act as part of a quick reaction force. They devote too much space to torpedoes to act as landing support. I can't really think of anything else that you could use a capital ship for.

[/quote]What else does it need to do? The whole point is to have a dedicated platform capable of eventually cracking typical planetary defenses without requiring the exceptional ongoing cost and maintenance of an extremely large space dreadnought.

For Palpatine's overall strategy of trying to have effective power to subdue any planetary rebellion, without requiring him to put enough power to be a real threat into too many different pairs of hands, this works. For instance, a torpedo sphere is probably not a real threat to a well-defended and wealthy planet like his own capital, where he could whistle up naval support to drive it away long before it could penetrate Coruscant's planetary shields. He can afford to distribute them a bit more widely, since they are not a personal threat to him. But star dreadnoughts are if anything more powerful, far more expensive, and far harder to subdue because they're more mobile and better protected. He has to be careful with them.

The ultimate solution, if you are Palpatine, of course, is a single platform so powerful it can do anything, which can be controlled by one pair of hands, which are in turn very reliable, either because they're yours, because your apprentice is watching them, or because you have Sith mind-whammied that one person into submission.

[macfanpro]

In this case, you don't need anything like a 320-teraton bolt to kill the sphere. You only need 2-4 50-teraton artillery pieces, or more smaller tubes, hooked together by some sort of simple fire control. A time-on-target strike could deliver similar amounts of energy (as the post-bounce 320-teraton shot) with lower costs.

The only place in the ECR-version of Star Wars where we see that kind of precisely timed barrage from turbolasers is... surprise, a freakishly effective trick-shot gunner, Pel Aldrem talking about taking down Kor Alric by flaring down the shielding over Black Prince's own Imperial suite, then using a very very stepped-down bolt to take out the compartment cleanly without overpenetration.
So no, that's not a very repeatable trick.

In general, I advise you to NOT assume that precisely synchronizing a large number of dispersed platforms is going to be as easy as just push the red button once. Theoretically it is, but in practice it's the software equivalent of a massive network of thousands of trolley/tramway/elevators, or even more complicated. Exactly the sort of plan which fails to survive contact with the enemy, for all kinds of different reasons.

This shot isn't going to be anything like as hard as Aldrem's shot was. First, all the guns are on a planet, and had months to plan out the situation, allowing for a lot of eventualities to be considered before the enemy even shows up. The target is a lot bigger, as I suspect that the shields covering the launcher area cover larger areas than the window of the Imperial suite. Mostly due to preplanning, though, I think that the attack is at least feasible, if not easy.

The software to do the coordination in this case is easy, since you only have to control a single action: shoot. Everything else can be done by on-mount humans or dedicated computers. The potential hard part would be the timing, but calibrated clocks and ECC make this relatively simple. Remember that the planetary defence artillery has a lot of chances to make this shot, so if 1 or 2 guns have trouble, the array can simply try again.

However, this still doesn't answer the problem of anticapital proton torpedoes. They're easy (and comparatively inexpensive) to get/make, and yet deliver heavy turbolaser yields. They're even designed for coordination, so attacks on targets like torpedo spheres can be done with large numbers of cooperating missiles, staying under the shield and using its sensor blocking properties to maximize surprise when they show up.

Let me remind you of the relevant paragraph from Wookiepedia:

Ostensibly, Torpedo Spheres were useful only for the specific purpose of bringing down planetary shields. They took advantage of the fact that planetary shields were not uniform, and experienced anomalies and fluctuations. Using thousands of Dedicated Energy Receptors (DERs), a Torpedo Sphere could find a shield's weak spots.

(you thought I was bad with making up acronyms) and

... It took hundreds of technicians to properly coordinate the torpedo tubes. ...

This means that it doesn't take lots of people to analyze the shields. Instead, it takes that many people to arrange the armament (which doesn't make much sense to me with even modern missiles), and that the shield analysis is only dependent on computers and sensors. The ground operators have both of these available, as they have access to ground based sensors combined with the generator's telemetry, and they also have substantial computing resources. It wouldn't be hard for the people on the ground to do the same analysis that the torpedo sphere does, and they might even be able to precompute the problem in many situations.

I think it's relevant here to consider that, since all this is interpreted through the lens ECR uses to analyze Star Wars... note what the passage you quote says: "Widespread civilian shielding against navigational accident and astronomical incident set the bar high enough that most military attempts to break through failed." Thing is, that is civilian shielding- the physical hardware may not actually be designed with all the latest antitampering or telemetry or whatever equipment, it is not designed to resist analysis by military sensors. What it is designed to do is, for example, take "million-ton starship approaching the planet at relativistic speeds due to navigational brainfart or psychotic terrorist" and turn it into a minor inconvenience instead of a Chicxulub Event waiting to happen. Which unfortunately for the Imperial fleet, means the same shielding must also be able to laugh off fire from a line destroyer.

If the torpedo sphere is designed to penetrate the typical planetary shield, rather than the ideal planetary shield, it might actually be able to count on having a better (or more specialized) sensor network to analyze the shield than the defenders have. How would we know?

The next question is why build a ship as complicated as a torpedo sphere for this? In the low-defence situation that you're describing, the bombers may actually work (only 50% attrition!), or, more realistically, you could use a bolt-on attachment to the Imperator or even an armed merchantman to do the job, at substantially reduced cost. Sensor drones can take on much of the role that the sensors on the torpedo sphere offers, and analysis doesn't even have to take place in-system.

I think that the Death Star is the inevitable result of Star Wars thinking combined with advancing planetary defence technology. It's a reasonable (if extremely expensive) solution.

The idea of building a mobile battle platform the size of a moon, to mount generators and weapons capable of dealing with the large-scale installations that an entire planet can afford to mount, is not new in SF of course. So yes, the Death Star probably does owe a lot of its basic in-setting inspiration to the need to be as big as a planet to crack the defenses of the strongest planets.

On the other hand, no one ever said the torpedo sphere was specified to crack the defenses of the strongest planets, and planets with defenses capable of killing the sphere would almost HAVE to be unusual. Otherwise they wouldn't be built at all, or would have been destroyed about as fast as they could be commissioned once they started going into combat.

I'm not sure that this really quite limited role justifies the cost of an entire new class, though.

"The torpedo sphere was designed and remains in use for some mission, therefore some sane human being thinks it can carry out that mission, and it doesn't invariably die horribly every time it tries. Somehow, some way, it must be capable of doing most of the jobs it's actually assigned to do. It can't be as stupid as it looks, because it works. What are we missing here?"

I can see two possibilities:

• The torpedo sphere is designed for sieging planets undefended against capships. This is a high bar, as computerized fire control can push medium turbolaser fire into heavy turbolaser energy territory, and with a vulnerability as obvious as the sphere's, it's the obvious solution. Even carefully controlled fighter proton torpedoes could reach into the energy class needed.
• Somebody really messed up in the design of the spheres, and they aren't heavily used.

I think that both are possible, but I wouldn't assign probabilities. The Empire seems rife with really stupid designs that cost a lot of money, however, so I think that #2 is more likely than one would first think.

I think some of your reasons for being skeptical about (1) are overrated; see above. Trick shots that rely on large numbers of weapons all landing on the same point on the same target with timing precise to the millisecond are NOT a substitute for larger, heavier weapons, not against an enemy which is competent and well equipped.

The important figure here is how fast the shields covering the tubes can regenerate, as the slower they recover, the longer the window planetary defence artillery has to punch through them. The surface artillery has the benefit of lots of time, as the sphere performs its analysis, and (with enough tubes) could simply burn its way though the local shields.

However, anticap torpedoes provide a much better (and cheaper!) response to torpedo spheres. They can be acquired easily, have yields reaching into the high heavy turbolaser class, have sophisticated guidance systems (to allow the shield systems to make a window), can be launched from a vast variety of places (concealed ground emplacements, merchantmen, ships, etc.), and can avoid much of the piddling PD that the sphere offers.

In-story, we have good reasons why a typical planetary defense does want shields capable of stopping the equivalent of heavy turbolaser fire (since Star Wars ships can easily have that kind of kinetic energy and accidents/lunatic ramming attacks happen)... but would not need or have weapons rated for delivering the same kind of fire, because until the Clone Wars planets were unlikely to experience a military attack by anything much larger than a typical pirate, and after the Clone Wars the Empire is at least trying to keep some kind of arms control on superheavy turbolasers, even if that's not always effective.

Anticapital proton torpedoes are much easier to get, though. The varying yield torpedoes share mechanics, so it appears that anyone with the right reactor would be able to alter the yield of one. I think it would be absolutely possible for even a small planetary government to keep 50 anticapital torpedoes around, just in case. They're even easy to store, and you can launch them from anywhere, with a few minor modifications.

It would not be atypical, the idea that "Alderaan is a peaceful planet, we have no weapons..." and yet Alderaan has a credible planetary shield designed to resist conventional bombardment. To the point where breaching it quickly would imply dumping a civilization-destroying if not planet-shattering amount of energy onto the surface below.

Alderaan had a substantially improved shield when compared to other planets, though. I can't find a source for this, but I do remember a reference to it.

The problem is the question of "what else do they do?" You can't use them against organized enemies, as it's too easy to find and destroy their weak spot. They aren't good against capships, since they have a screamingly huge vulnerability that we've discussed to death, and are underarmed for their size. They can't take fighters, since they only have anticap torpedoes and little PD. They're too expensive (and slow) to use as interdictors, and they really can't escort or act as part of a quick reaction force. They devote too much space to torpedoes to act as landing support. I can't really think of anything else that you could use a capital ship for.

What else does it need to do? The whole point is to have a dedicated platform capable of eventually cracking typical planetary defenses without requiring the exceptional ongoing cost and maintenance of an extremely large space dreadnought.

Why can't you do the same job with a destroyer with a hanger bay full of one-use tubes, though?

For Palpatine's overall strategy of trying to have effective power to subdue any planetary rebellion, without requiring him to put enough power to be a real threat into too many different pairs of hands, this works. For instance, a torpedo sphere is probably not a real threat to a well-defended and wealthy planet like his own capital, where he could whistle up naval support to drive it away long before it could penetrate Coruscant's planetary shields. He can afford to distribute them a bit more widely, since they are not a personal threat to him. But star dreadnoughts are if anything more powerful, far more expensive, and far harder to subdue because they're more mobile and better protected. He has to be careful with them.

The ultimate solution, if you are Palpatine, of course, is a single platform so powerful it can do anything, which can be controlled by one pair of hands, which are in turn very reliable, either because they're yours, because your apprentice is watching them, or because you have Sith mind-whammied that one person into submission.

That rules out the Death Star then - it needed a lot of people to operate and maintain, for obvious reasons. What platform are you thinking of?

[Esquire]

You're presuming to know an awful lot about the in-universe technical and political limitations which must have gone into decisions on how to fortify worlds and how to take them, and I don't think you're thinking in the proper scale - defensive firing plans aren't easy to make when you have to cover every single degree of sky visible from every single degree of planet, because that's where an attacking fleet could be. The only problem with the torpedo sphere (since obviously it isn't hideously ineffective in its given role, because people keep using it) is the high maintenance requirement, and as we know from real life absolutely ridiculous maintenance hours/combat hours rations are quite workable -think of modern fighter jets. If the sphere for your sector fleet happens to be down for the day, well, the speed of hyperdrive lets you borrow one from the next sector over without too much trouble.

As to bolt-on or stored equivalents to a torpedo sphere, didn't we just see what happens when that many torpedoes cook off? Might it not be a good idea to keep that sort of thing on your line warships, especially given the sort of damage we've seen ships take in this series?

Also, it just occurred to me - could the existence of the torpedo sphere as opposed to a bunch of torpedo-armed ships have something to do with the nature of combat jamming? Suppose you fire five thousand torpedoes at a single square kilometer of shield, and that's what's needed to burn through. A well-timed burst of ECM could make lots of those miss, or even hesitate for a few seconds, which would be enough to waste the entire salvo, at no small cost to His Imperial Majesty's Navy. A single platform with massive sensor power might be more effective at keeping it's torpedoes on-target.

[Malivotti]

A few things to think about, the idea that a torpedo sphere can be hit by return fire depends on a few things, turbolaser shots on both sides cannot pass through the shields, no gunports unlike warships, or at least no small, fast opening ports. A torpedo sphere would only be used when it's safe to bring one to the planet, as in no enemy ships to shot at it, also no fighters or so few it makes no sense to send them out. Just having the damm thing in orbit means to have the planet's shields systems at full power, the defensive gunners IF they have any on planet, have been ready to fire at all times, no chance to stand down.

Just the constant pressure might be the best weapon, someone always screws the pooch, some piece of kit always fails. Then BOOM!

The idea of the whole torpedo sphere seems to be to create a breach to land forces on the planet to then seize the planet other defenses. Much like on Hoth, get someone on the ground, take the space defenses from land, to take the land defenses by space.

In the description of how the sphere operates it takes a full salvo of torpedoes fired at very carefully calculated point to open a gap just large enough to get a follow on turbolaser strike through on the surface shield generator. The chance of return fire coming back at just the right angel and time? About the same as someone shooting a shot up a gun barrel. It could happen, sure, but...depend on it?

Now the bank shot? Gimmicky, tricky even but not beyond Pel's skill, just at the edge maybe, but this is same guy who flak burst a shot inside a Venator's landing bay. The result? About the same as the Bismark vs. the Hood, or the sinking of the Taiho by one torpedo hit. Lucky, or the Force was with them.

[Simon_Jester]

To macfanpro: What Esquire said: you're making too many assumptions, including ones that are not in either Star Wars and its EU as published, or in Eleventh Century Remnant's fanfic version of it that we're discussing here.

This shot isn't going to be anything like as hard as Aldrem's shot was. First, all the guns are on a planet, and had months to plan out the situation, allowing for a lot of eventualities to be considered before the enemy even shows up. The target is a lot bigger, as I suspect that the shields covering the launcher area cover larger areas than the window of the Imperial suite. Mostly due to preplanning, though, I think that the attack is at least feasible, if not easy.

Are there many examples in the literature of using massed fire from smaller weapons to create an effect identical to that of a larger weapon? It doesn't work in real life with armor piercing shells; I'm not sure it would automatically work with turbolasers. Too much depends on detailed mechanics of the weapon and protective system, which we simply do not and cannot know.

Moreover, this does not address the key question of: when would planets actually have large numbers of weapons designed to shoot down a target the size of a destroyer or larger? Not just every planet would, because there's no demand for it. You're ignoring the strategic issue; the typical planet in Star Wars is NOT an independent agent trying to optimize its own defensive impenetrability. It's a local government buying infrastructure to protect it from certain realistic classes of threat. Having large numbers of teraton beam or torpedo weapons on the planet might let it resist modest-sized Imperial bombardment platforms, sure... but that's like saying that the average small town should emplace a couple of 6" guns to stop the Army from sending in a punitive expedition. In practice, that's a serious practical mistake right there, because doing so is suspicious, potentially illegal, and won't actually stop the national military from doing anything with the town in the long run.

It's not even like blowing up the Empire's torpedo sphere would cause them to give up and stop besieging your planet; if anything it'll make the situation worse.

I'm not sure that this really quite limited role justifies the cost of an entire new class, though.

It would depend on whether or not there are a lot of planets with good shields but limited defensive weapon installations.

It would not be atypical, the idea that "Alderaan is a peaceful planet, we have no weapons..." and yet Alderaan has a credible planetary shield designed to resist conventional bombardment. To the point where breaching it quickly would imply dumping a civilization-destroying if not planet-shattering amount of energy onto the surface below.

Alderaan had a substantially improved shield when compared to other planets, though. I can't find a source for this, but I do remember a reference to it.

My point is that Alderaan has a very strong planetary shield, and yet effectively no offensive weapons. Is that uncommon? Maybe not. Maybe there ARE a lot of planets with shields strong enough to stop destroyer or cruiser-weight bombardment, but that simply do not have weapons designed to blow up large military starships of any kind.

That rules out the Death Star then - it needed a lot of people to operate and maintain, for obvious reasons. What platform are you thinking of?

The Death Star needs a large crew to operate but can be controlled by one person, although various other Imperial superweapons apply.

The point is that Palpatine wants to limit the number of captains who have the power to smash the greatest threats, because to him such captains are themselves great threats. Limiting that number to "one," his most trusted Moff or himself personally, simplifies his life considerably.

[fractalsponge1]

I've been thinking this for a while, but I think it bears statement now for the sake of the overarching story arc and constructive criticism: Black Prince and company are treading dangerously close to HIMS Mary Sue at the moment. There, I said it.

This might not be entirely evident for a new reader of the Hull 721 arc, but some of us have been here for a long time now. One clean victory against the odds is good fun, and arc 1 was GREAT. Squelch was over the top, but almost predictably so given its WH40k connection. Still, it set a trend that has gotten worse over arc 2, in my opinion. There are two things that I think are dangerously flirting with bad-fanfic territory, and that I hope will be remedied for the sake of the story arc:

1) "Special toys"
I feel that arc2 has been one special trick after special trick. Mirannon's brainwave scanner thing I felt was over the top. All the special toys that have been added to Black Prince are fun to think about, but it seems unlikely in a ship with this much administrative scrutiny attached to it. Captain's force sensitive, with a hot force-sensitive stormtrooper sidekick - ok... Fighter wing is packed with rare superiority fighters - check. A flight of Defenders was one thing, PulsarWing was a cool one-off, but there's a lot of carte-blanche what-if tinkering lately that seems a bit odd for a ship barely being tolerated by the Throne, of all things. Too much thinking about what would be optimal and what would be cool, versus making do with what should be available. There's no challenge, no tension, if it seems like the protagonists can always draw on enough special resources from the plot to survive any threat. That leads into problem 2:

2) Lack of threat to protagonists
In arc 1, it all came together really well. Ord Corban felt like a FIGHT, and the prose made you feel like Admonisher was always *this* close to swatting Black Prince and company out of the sky. It helped that the sub-fights were so well fleshed out. At no point did it feel like victory was pre-ordained.

However, in arc 2, all of the manuevering on Corellia felt like there was no imminent threat about it. Finishing the individual subplots up felt like coda; too easy. Sure, there's this *overarching* Damocles' Sword of the Throne's personal attention hanging over Black Prince, but there's no threat about it. Olghaan's first wave, brushed aside like dust - and really, it has a damn planetcracker with it, so it shouldn't have been so quickly dealt with. At this point, it feels like even if Executor hurled itself against Lennart, he'd do some tricky time-on-target, disable the dreadnought, and then somehow trick his way into enough fuel and parts to do it all over again, and the story would continue with no repercussions.

With the interpersonal stuff, it's even worse. Inquisitor destroyed, no real problems. Thrawn's felt comprehensively outplayed (or at least terminally confused) in this arc. Some might argue that the character had it coming, but he comes with a reputation, like it or not, and he hasn't really done very much to deserve any attention that the text concentrates on. Make it feel like he might be one step ahead (maybe, maybe not in actuality). Have some of that uncertainty really affect the decision making and the actual capability of the protagonists' ship. I don't even really care for Thrawn's character, which has a huge Mary Sue component to it to begin with, but he's a good way to add some tension and menace to the proceedings. This chance is in danger of being squandered. There might be some big thing in the works in the background, but introduce it in pieces, so it's not forgotten. If there's no indication that things can go wrong, or enough things actually going wrong to worry the audience about the big things that CAN go wrong, why should the audience care about the plot?

Lennart and his crew are so unbelievably blase about the situation they're in that it seems a bit unreal. Arc 1 had some nice stuff about Lennart coming to terms with discovering his force-sensitivity. Here, it seems like there's not really a whole lot of stress that should come with all of the political (and even family) drama. He's potentially fighting the Empire, not a planet - make that come through a bit. And the crew - why would all his officers, let alone his crew, go along with something as personally dangerous as the political play in progress? Do they not know? Are they all idealists? Are there no opportunists about that wouldn't play along with the commander or try for something for themselves? 38000 people on an ISD.

---

Anyway, I'm putting this up here to help. Really. I really like the sub-world of the universe you've created, but I do think it's in danger of going off the rails a bit at this rate.

[macfanpro]

This shot isn't going to be anything like as hard as Aldrem's shot was. First, all the guns are on a planet, and had months to plan out the situation, allowing for a lot of eventualities to be considered before the enemy even shows up. The target is a lot bigger, as I suspect that the shields covering the launcher area cover larger areas than the window of the Imperial suite. Mostly due to preplanning, though, I think that the attack is at least feasible, if not easy.

Are there many examples in the literature of using massed fire from smaller weapons to create an effect identical to that of a larger weapon? It doesn't work in real life with armor piercing shells; I'm not sure it would automatically work with turbolasers. Too much depends on detailed mechanics of the weapon and protective system, which we simply do not and cannot know.

The big unknown is the specifics of the protection on the sphere against attacks of this nature. It's only reasonable to assume that the designers thought of attacks on this area, and shielded it heavily against the most likely competitors, but it's very difficult to say exactly what those competitors were, and that's our main point of argument, actually. I think it's possible to make coordinated attacks on a target, down to 10ths of a second, with reasonably cheap fire control systems (if this shot is their only role). If this will actually burn through is the bigger problem, and that falls into the totally unknown territory.

Moreover, this does not address the key question of: when would planets actually have large numbers of weapons designed to shoot down a target the size of a destroyer or larger? Not just every planet would, because there's no demand for it. You're ignoring the strategic issue; the typical planet in Star Wars is NOT an independent agent trying to optimize its own defensive impenetrability. It's a local government buying infrastructure to protect it from certain realistic classes of threat. Having large numbers of teraton beam or torpedo weapons on the planet might let it resist modest-sized Imperial bombardment platforms, sure... but that's like saying that the average small town should emplace a couple of 6" guns to stop the Army from sending in a punitive expedition. In practice, that's a serious practical mistake right there, because doing so is suspicious, potentially illegal, and won't actually stop the national military from doing anything with the town in the long run.

From what I've read of the EU, proton torpedoes are extremely common weapons systems, easily available to military forces for good reasons, and the bog-standard anti-fighter ones can provide yields into low medium turbolaser territory. I'd think that it would be far, far easier to get ahold of sufficiently large torpedoes in comparison to artillery with sufficient yields to hurt a torpedo sphere. They can serve in more roles, have lower maintenance costs, and you can even have a legitimate excuse to buy large ones (as they give fighters substantial killing power against corvettes and up, making them great anti-pirate weapons, and the larger the torpedo, the higher the single-missile kill probability is).

It's not even like blowing up the Empire's torpedo sphere would cause them to give up and stop besieging your planet; if anything it'll make the situation worse.

No, but we're working from the perspective of the designers of the sphere, not of the planet. They want the sphere to survive, and the question here is how much firepower does the average planetary government with a shield sufficiently strong to require the services of a sphere have? I don't know, but I'd argue that they could at least give it trouble.

I'm not sure that this really quite limited role justifies the cost of an entire new class, though.

It would depend on whether or not there are a lot of planets with good shields but limited defensive weapon installations.

The alternative is retrofit kits for existing ships (ISDs or merchantmen/tenders). Take a notional ISD design, where the torpedoes were housed in single-use tubes in the hangar bay. The ISD can use existing shielding equipment to keep the tubes safe from shore bombardment, and the tubes don't need anything like as much equipment behind them as in the sphere, as they're single-use and can't take reloads. The ISD is safe, as the planet can't even make a dent in its shields, and if the ISD can't take the weight the planet is throwing out, than it's unlikely that a torpedo sphere would be able to, either.

That rules out the Death Star then - it needed a lot of people to operate and maintain, for obvious reasons. What platform are you thinking of?

The Death Star needs a large crew to operate but can be controlled by one person, although various other Imperial superweapons apply.

The point is that Palpatine wants to limit the number of captains who have the power to smash the greatest threats, because to him such captains are themselves great threats. Limiting that number to "one," his most trusted Moff or himself personally, simplifies his life considerably.

That makes sense, from his perspective, it's only reasonable to try to centralize power to the greatest extent possible.

To sum up, I think that the torpedo sphere should either have 1) low-volatility torpedoes, or 2) really, really strong shielding over the torpedo tubes. I think a reasonable design objective would be to take a single 1 petaton shot (with no other attacks) and make it into hyperspace afterwards (e.g. the oh f*** that's a big gun problem). The current design clearly can't do that, yet it seems like many other ships in the same size class could.

[Simon_Jester]

Or, at least, the current design can't do it as ECR presents it, which is kind of our dilemma.

It's not unreasonable that Black Prince chew through the other ships of the first wave. And the idea that interdictors are too vulnerable to enemy fire to be really reliable in a true fleet battle is a recurring theme of the series and criticism of the class; this is simply a case of Chekov's gun finally being fired, and an interdictor failing to achieve its intended mission because it's too fragile to survive serious fire from a medium destroyer.

But having the torpedo sphere be one-shotted is... that presents more of a problem, in my opinion.

[Andras]

I think that most times the TS doesn't face a planet with heavy TLs. I can't imagine the Empire is handing out HTL permits to planetary militias that often. I'm sure civilian grade shields are far, far, more common then military grade super heavy multi hundred teraton HTLs.

It was deployed close to the planet and facing the shields so the weak spot was seemingly hidden from an arriving enemy ship.

TS are also supposed to be deployed under heavy cover by the Imperial Fleet.
From Imperial Sourcebook v2, pg 105 (paraphrased) A bombardment Squadron (with 4 TS!) is deployed to worlds that have rebelled under the cover of the escorting warships (4-10 Light cruisers or Frigates, 4-20 Corvettes). Any enemy heavy combat elements in the system would have been run off by the ImpFleet long before the BombSqd arrives.

The TS has a hull str of 9d, and it's own HTLs do 9d, so it's not especially armored against HTL fire either.

It's supposed to hang around in a lightly defended system while taking pot shots at the shield, not to resist heavy turbolaser fire from either the planet or enemy starships. This one got hung out to dry and paid the price.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

Something that was mentioned earlier, but apparently not picked up on, is that, to fire planetary turbolasers or ion cannons, you have to momentarily drop at least a section of your planetary shields, as you can't shoot through them. Now imagine you have a torpedo sphere hovering above your planet, just waiting to cause and/or exploit such a gap. Fire on the sphere, and maybe you can take it out, maybe not*, but in the process you'll likely lose your shield generator, at which point the siege is over, even if the torpedo sphere dies.

*The trick shot in the story didn't rely solely on Aldrem's 1337 gunnery skills, but also on an unusually variable and adjustable piece of kit. Your average planetary turbolaser may not be able to replicate this feat, despite being more powerful. It may, for example, simply lack the fine targeting to reliably put a shot down the throat of the sphere.


Also, on the subject of proton torpedoes. I wouldn't assume capital scale torpedoes are as common and easily available as the fighter scales ones, and I'd point out that fighter scale torpedoes aren't as common as you might think, the Rebel Alliance did suffer from a chronic shortage of them, after all.

[macfanpro]

I think that most times the TS doesn't face a planet with heavy TLs. I can't imagine the Empire is handing out HTL permits to planetary militias that often. I'm sure civilian grade shields are far, far, more common then military grade super heavy multi hundred teraton HTLs.

Yes, I agree. I have two counterarguments, though: 1) the sphere should be at least marginally survivable against a heavy turbolaser installation, which it patently isn't (in case that intel broke down and didn't notice it), and 2) that class C&D anticapital torpedoes aren't that hard to make (from A&B class)/come by if you're a planetary government, and these torpedoes would in a massed attack be likely to punch through the torpedo sphere's shields.

Both types of defensive engagement would be difficult to do right, but they're not hugely unlikely over the lifetime of a torpedo sphere, and either is a loss-of-hull situation for the sphere as designed. This makes the sphere really nasty to operate, and it isn't a platform that anyone in their right mind would want to take into combat (you can be killed at any instant, with full shields, as a result of a small screw up by intelligence). I think that the sphere either needs something much cleverer in terms of tube placement, new technology proton torpedoes with lower volatility, or much, much stronger shields (or even better, all three!).

Edit to add: I don't think that you need anything like 100 teratons to kill the sphere, as I doubt that the bounce's efficiency was very high. Rather, I think that you need about 10-50 teratons, and these are much easier to get. It also wouldn't be inconceivable to just pound your way though the shields covering the weak spot.

It was deployed close to the planet and facing the shields so the weak spot was seemingly hidden from an arriving enemy ship.

TS are also supposed to be deployed under heavy cover by the Imperial Fleet.
From Imperial Sourcebook v2, pg 105 (paraphrased) A bombardment Squadron (with 4 TS!) is deployed to worlds that have rebelled under the cover of the escorting warships (4-10 Light cruisers or Frigates, 4-20 Corvettes). Any enemy heavy combat elements in the system would have been run off by the ImpFleet long before the BombSqd arrives.

The TS has a hull str of 9d, and it's own HTLs do 9d, so it's not especially armored against HTL fire either.

The problem isn't what happened in this engagement - the torpedo sphere is a non-starter against peer warships - rather, the vulnerability that was exploited here with a trick shot would be easy pickings for anyone beneath the shield (like planetary defence artillery), and it wouldn't be hard whatsoever to realize that this was a problem with the design.

If we're to go with the sourcebook hull strength figures, it wouldn't be hard at all for surface medium turbolasers to simply pound down the sphere's shields - it's only a matter of time, and the defenders have that in spades.

It's supposed to hang around in a lightly defended system while taking pot shots at the shield, not to resist heavy turbolaser fire from either the planet or enemy starships. This one got hung out to dry and paid the price.

The problem is that this design is unsurvivable against a threat that wouldn't be that hard to miss in an intelligence analysis of the situation. In turn, this ensures that either a) the attrition rate of the spheres was incredible, or b) they weren't ever really used as siege ships, and got used for other purposes instead (I can think of a lot of ways to use a vessel with lots of missile tubes and the equipment to reload them, with relatively minor refits). Another option is c) they never made very many of them because they didn't work very well (one of the rulebooks say that only 6 were ever made).

Something that was mentioned earlier, but apparently not picked up on, is that, to fire planetary turbolasers or ion cannons, you have to momentarily drop at least a section of your planetary shields, as you can't shoot through them. Now imagine you have a torpedo sphere hovering above your planet, just waiting to cause and/or exploit such a gap. Fire on the sphere, and maybe you can take it out, maybe not*, but in the process you'll likely lose your shield generator, at which point the siege is over, even if the torpedo sphere dies.

The fire window doesn't have to be open for very long, and it's a torpedo sphere, so there won't be an immediate heavy response. To take advantage of the window, the sphere has to

• Be on the correct vector to have a clear shot on the generator
• Have a gun pointed in the exact right direction
• Be ready to shoot

Given that we're talking about a 100ms (on the outside) fire window, each one of these seems pretty unlikely to me.

*The trick shot in the story didn't rely solely on Aldrem's 1337 gunnery skills, but also on an unusually variable and adjustable piece of kit. Your average planetary turbolaser may not be able to replicate this feat, despite being more powerful. It may, for example, simply lack the fine targeting to reliably put a shot down the throat of the sphere.

The average planetary turbolaser doesn't have to do anything like as hard of a job as Black Prince's did. Black Prince needed to make a shot that was able to 1) bounce off a shield 2) into the right shape 3) going in the right direction. This is what required the fine control. In contrast, the planetary battery needs to fire 1) a shield penetrator (I'd be amazed if there wasn't a mode for this on every turbolaser ever made) 2) in the right direction (and these guns are made to hit targets 100x further away (in interplanetary space) than the sphere (~kms above the shield), making this shot comparatively easy).

Also, on the subject of proton torpedoes. I wouldn't assume capital scale torpedoes are as common and easily available as the fighter scales ones, and I'd point out that fighter scale torpedoes aren't as common as you might think, the Rebel Alliance did suffer from a chronic shortage of them, after all.

There's a great application for planets to have proton torpedoes issued to them: pirates. Some pirates have vessels as big as medium corvettes, and many planetary governments only operate vessels as big as X-wings or Z-95s. Fighter-class lasers won't help much against corvettes, so they need at the very least fighter class proton torpedoes to be effective interdictors. In addition, large merchantmen would take a lot of stopping with fighter lasers only, and torpedoes can solve this problem admirably. Moreover, they can even be deployed to bridge gaps in pilot skill in dogfights, etc.

I think that there's more than enough justification for planets to purchase fighter class proton torpedoes at the very least, and even low-capital class wouldn't be considered too paranoid. A sphere only needs a few bombers full of fighter-class torpedoes hiding under the shields to kill it, and for the defenders thats a great tradeoff.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

A torpedo sphere doesn't actually use its torpedoes to hit the shield generators directly. What a torpedo sphere does, is pound open a weak spot the planet's shields with massed salvos of torps, then uses its heavy turbolasers, not the torpedoes, to shoot through that momentary opening and take out the shield generators. If the torpedo sphere is being used properly, it will have your shield generator located and targeted before moving into bombardment position, planetary shield generators being huge, obvious, and immobile. So it will be on the correct vector, target locked, and ready to shoot on short notice.

More importantly than all of this, though, the sphere won't be alone, but rather working as part of a battle group. It doesn't have its own fighter screen? No problem, the destroyers and such escorting it do.

[macfanpro]

A torpedo sphere doesn't actually use its torpedoes to hit the shield generators directly. What a torpedo sphere does, is pound open a weak spot the planet's shields with massed salvos of torps, then uses its heavy turbolasers, not the torpedoes, to shoot through that momentary opening and take out the shield generators. If the torpedo sphere is being used properly, it will have your shield generator located and targeted before moving into bombardment position, planetary shield generators being huge, obvious, and immobile. So it will be on the correct vector, target locked, and ready to shoot on short notice.

I understand that we're talking about turbolasers here. Let me justify the three points I made:

• Be on the correct vector to have a clear shot on the generator

  The sphere is on a vector such that it can use a very specific hole in the shield to take the shot. The fire window is not this very specific hole, and therefore won't be in the perfect line from the sphere to the generator, unless the designers of the defence array were very stupid indeed and collocated the gun and shield generator.

• Have a gun pointed in the exact right direction

  My reasoning for this is as above. If the gun is pointing in the correct direction all the time, it's highly unlikely that the fire window will be on that exact vector.

• Be ready to shoot

  The window is very, very short as well as being small, on the order of 100ms. This means that no human can be involved in the decision to take the shot. This is fundamentally really scary, especially if you have escorts, as one of them might be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For additional clarity, here's an illustration of what I'm talking about:

__________________
SG is shield generator
TS is torpedo sphere
PDA is planetary defence artillery
X->Y is the label for the fire window required for X to attack Y.
This illustration is not to scale. The divergence between the two windows is worse with realistic scales and 3D space.

More importantly than all of this, though, the sphere won't be alone, but rather working as part of a battle group. It doesn't have its own fighter screen? No problem, the destroyers and such escorting it do.

There's a important problem with this for the sphere, and it comes back to reaction times again. The planetary shield acts as a highly effective ECM barrier, preventing accurate information about movements beneath it from getting out. This means that the defenders can have forces right on top of the sphere, and they can make a shield window, launch the attack, and close the window (the attack would either be suicide or drones) long before the screening forces can react. Remember that the sphere needs to be right on top of the shield, so the reaction times necessary to stop torpedoes from reaching the sphere are on the order of seconds.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Augh...to be honest I can barely keep up with the comments.

Things to bear in mind; have you ever looked at a picture of the Torpedo Sphere? The thing really does appear as if it was designed on the back of an envelope. Going by the numbers in the sourcebook it was first depicted in (and which basically served as the writers' bible for quite a lot of the EU) the thing suffers from an enormous amount of detail work being simply not done.

It has no, I repeat, no listed point defence whatsoever; nothing at all. No anti fighter or anti torpedo defence, very solid hull and half way, good enough or a light destroyer, decent shielding. It does have an absolutely gargantuan vulnerability, the 'eye' of torpedo tubes, which makes that of dubious protective efficiency considering it would likely be pointed downwards.

Unlike the Executor class, which was I'd say an eighty- five percent design success with only a few remaining serious flaws (for all the abysmal combat record, they are very fast and very, very well armed- it was quite hard to square how well they look with how poorly they turned out), the torpedo sphere does have that glaringly obvious terminal flaw, so much so that the most belief- beggaring thing about it is that they were ever built at all.

The torp sphere design must have been an extreme rush job, put into production before most of the draftsmanship had even been done, and the relatively enormous crew is there not so much to work the ship as to finish putting it together.

If they were using normal standard- issue torpedoes, they probably wouldn't have been so volatile; the sphere uses special shield disruptor warheads, which I am taking the liberty of assuming haven't been through the same process of technical and procedural refinement and hardening over years of service as the standard antiship head. Slightly more likely to go boom.

The gun used to take the shot, too, wasn't a borrowed relic, they were all replaced in the refit; it was a custom job- in my notes I have it as a "Mosgrove and Thung Main Model A continuously variable pulse heavy turbolaser"- not an ideal service weapon, too many gubbins, but for a handful of mountings, and under the command of a chief gunnery officer who is a more than fair trick shot artist himself, having three or four around the place does make sense. And a magnetohydrodynamic cookie to anyone who gets that obscure reference.

A direct shot would have the chief disadvantage of putting Black Prince in the torpedoes' own fire arc. That would have been quite dangerous- Edrossaia might have been combat unready in many respects, but not quite that unready as not to think of taking the shot. The torpedoes might actually have been launched and guided, steered round onto the renegade destroyer, if they had been given time for one of the gunners who almost certainly did think of it to get the idea accepted up the chain of command.

I strongly suspect that in after years, recieved doctrine is going to be to turn blind side on to the enemy, swim out launches and steer the torpedoes on target, use the vast sensor surface of the thing for EW purposes and keep the most heavily armoured aspect towards the enemy.

The issue of shot travel time occurs, too; later built torpedo spheres, after the first handful of really only vaguely service ready prototypes, may depend in their primary job on that- by the time the target realises they've launched, they could have raised armoured shutters- that if they don't exist in prototype, damn' well should in later construction- and at least partially turned blind side on. (Means they must be predicting gaps in the shields several seconds ahead, though.)

A quick, cheap trick shot was not just the best way to kill the thing, it was almost the only way.

How I would do it, if I was given the job; ditch the idea of a specialist platform entirely. Start with something like the TaggeCo Modular Taskforce Support Cruiser, and design a bombardment module composed- if possible- of three casaba- howitzer style versions of the shield disruptor warhead, giant ones, a network of deployable satellite sensors, and a relative handful of gun-mines like the Defender ion blockade mine. Never actually have to hazard the ship, it can jump in, lay and stand off to manage the sensor net.

The defenders can't see out much, either; the satellite sensors do the same job as the DR's on the sphere, chart and measure and identify weak points, the warheads are spaced around the planet, 120deg apart equatorial geostationary, covering it all, the nearest orients, fires and hopefully makes the gap that the gun- mines then exploit, blasting the generator, doing the same job for much less hazard. The defence could relatively easily be dismembered by a handful of strike fighters, but then with that weapons bay so could the torpedo sphere.

What's been forgotten here?