Adamskywalker007 wrote:
I meant that they engaged with fighters first before having their capital ships opening fire rather than immediately supporting them. In contrast in ROTJ, Rebel fighters only attacked the Imperial fleet when they had friendly capital ship support. In this video the Rebel fighters generally seemed to be used as expendable assets as well, but they were presumably operating on the assumption
In the short we clearly see a sensor operator's screen showing the capital ships move within range of the Rebel ships and they open fire as soon as this happens. There is nothing to point to that says they would have held their fire had they been in range from the get go. The opening combat sequence shows fighters meeting fighters, only several sequences later do we see the Imperial fighters go for the rebel capital ships (if you can call a Nebulon-B that) and they don't do with what I assume were purpose built anti ship weapons like we see the Rebels use on the Interdictor but rather their normal laser cannons.
What I think:
The initial Imperial fighter deployment was to disrupt the rebel fighters, not attack the rebel HVU's. This makes sense as in most media the Rebels invest their firepower in their fighters to make them more capable of engaging capital ships and indeed the first fighter on capital ship sequence we see is Rebel's attacking Imperials. Even the TIE bombers are not seen attacking Rebel capital ships which is presumably a primary mission for them, rather they are seem to use their significant payloads against fighter groups. So basically from observing this short the only purpose of every Imperial fighter deployed we see is to disrupt Rebel fighter activity and keep them away from the Star Destroyers. This might be because in this particular situation the Imperial forces were not strong enough to do both (superiority and strike), but even if just doing superiority they still would do so as far away from the targets they are protecting as they can.
For a real life contrast, the Soviet carrier/cruiser hybrids all had heavy missile armaments that would be fired immediately in support of their aircraft(that were generally weaker and more poorly armed than the US standard). Why would ISDs not do the same thing? I realize Endor was a trap and thus not indicative, but it seems odd they would have no support whatsoever.
This is not what Soviet doctrine was. There was never any expectation that the Soviet land based air attacks into the GUIK gap would be in concert with their surface action groups. The reason that soviet surface ships had such powerful ASMs is that the Soviet didn't have a choice. That was the only way they could make them relevant against US CSGs and they knew this was a likely losing proposition for them (hence their primary method was to use long range land based bomber aircraft). Where the Soviets did deploy carriers they gave have ASMs because they knew their CAGs are so underwhelming compared to US CSGs that while they may get a good punch with their aircraft once their carrier will essentially become just another surface cruiser in short order. They were never going to be available in numbers for the Russians to say they had comparable CSGs vice a SAG with a few aircraft available. And the Soviets knew this, there might have been a few dreamers in the Russian Navy of using carrier based aircraft to sink US CSGs but their primary purpose was SAG defense against those superior US CSGs, not offensive purposes. It was never intended that a Soviet carrier would use their ASMs and air wing as a combined strike package as a matter of course, it is ridiculous to throw away the range of your embarked fixed wing aircraft so that the carriers launched ASMs could strike the same target. It defeats the whole purpose.
EDIT: I just realized that I have been thinking of this from just the strike perspective, with the air wing and the carrier acting in unison against a target. Perhaps you meant that the carrier was the only strike asset and the aircraft were just there to fly CAP to allow the carrier to do that mission unmolested. If that was what you meant then yeah perhaps, ignore the above. That is exactly what we see the Imperials do here.
