Versus Series: Ship Combat in Star Wars (Revived)

[Galvatron]

It would have been interesting to see a new bent-wing version of the original TIE with an elongated bomber-style cockpit pod for the two-seat variant.

Maybe the First Order just had a shitload of old Imperial fighters and gave them all refits instead of manufacturing completely new designs.

[fractalsponge1]

My point was that even though we see them listed in the ICS, we never actually see them used at any point in any continuity other than the Battlefront games, which to me indicates they are not considered useful outside of Jedi, and that the theoretical capability to carry them was almost never used in service.

This isn't just a number difference, in that we can say that yields are dialed down. This is the fact that we never actually see those fighters in use by non-Jedi.

My point is that this is a silly distinction. Is it unflyable by non-Jedi? Is it restricted from use by non-Jedi? There are supposed to be hundreds of the things per squadron of Venators in the standard order of battle.

A Jedi flying it also does not make them immune to physics and statistics. Jedi get splattered in fighters by enough fire, by non-Jedi even (Munificent ICS entry, Plo Koon getting blown up in ROTS). If shields were a universal good in fighter design, why did they discard them, especially given Jedi flew fighters with shields previously? Hubris? Stupidity?

The Venator also had a proportionally smaller marine contingent, as they still relied on the Acclamator as an assault ship at that point. It does also make sense for the Empire to have something of a jack of all trades ship, given their need to police the entire galaxy at once.

I'm not sure if this is agreement with me or argument. ISDs have to support a larger ground component with a huge increase in volume requirement due to AT-ATs being that much bigger than AT-TEs, and compounded by the need for large dropships to move the large walkers because ISDs don't just land and extend ramps for their ground vehicles to deploy. Hence, much less internal volume for fighters, on top of a much reduced proportional volume for hangars in general. Completely consistent.

I actually wonder if most X-wing pilots tend to virtually drop their shields in favor of greater performance. Which Luke, being a novice, failed to do.

Though at Endor the indication is that Rebel Alliance fighters actually do win against a numbers imbalance to that degree.

Or the Imperial fighters attacked unsupported and fire from Rebel capital ships actually thinned them out. Or not even all the fighters that could be launched were deployed. The fleet wasn't supposed to kill the Rebel fleet, and given how many fighters could conceivably been at Endor that might have actually been a problem if they all sortied at once.

I don't doubt Rebel fighter forces are generally shown to be higher quality (for a wide variety of reasons) - I'm saying that shields aren't the end all and be all for that, and incorporating shields has other costs that it may not have been an unambiguous boost. Certainly both the Republic and the Empire agreed on that point as fighter shields started getting dropped from light fighter designs as the Clone Wars progressed.

[Rhadamantus]

Hmmm... TIEs were built to be fielded with ISDs so in their calculations, "being cornered and surrounded by enemy defenses" probably wasn't really factored since that's something the ISDs would handle. ISDs are used for patrolling and occupying territories and suppressing insurgencies, the TIEs work in this context. Whereas if it was a slugfest between other capships and peer-competitors, the heavy hitting would be for the ISDs and not the fighters, that would be busy defending the ISDs.

In themselves, TIEs are cheaper to make than a lot of other designs. But TIEs are just extensions of ISDs, so normal accounting for TIEs should account for the ISDs. And when you think of it that way, TIEs no longer seem as cheap. They are pretty much "disembodied" point defense and anti-fighter light weapons batteries for the ISDs.

Well, the thing is, TIEs can also operate off of other, smaller spaceship platforms, or off of modified freighters for 'escort carrier' missions, or off a big damn concrete pad in the middle of a temperate rainforest.

I've heard it speculated that the TIE fighter's original design concept dates back to the Clone Wars (even if no TIEs actually served in that war), thus explaining why they were designed to be fielded in great numbers, with survivability demoted to a secondary concern. Clone pilots are expendable, some losses are inevitable when fighting huge hordes of droid fighters, and ultimately you just need sheer mass of defensive fighter cover to push back the droids, because a handful of heavily shielded super-fighters can't hold off all the possible threats at once.

This concept then turned out to make a surprisingly versatile light fighter and garrison fighter for other purposes. Cheap, easy mass production means you can spam millions of them and put them all over the galaxy in all the little individual outposts and bases. This is critical for the Empire, which needs presence. It isn't enough to have a big badass hyper-capable fleet that can crush individual star systems; someone has to fly around collecting the taxes and stopping smugglers and so on. Short-range, sublight light fighters help do that job, and I suspect they cost a lot less than FTL-capable heavy fighters.

This may help to explain why the Empire, in the years prior to the Rebellion, doubled down on TIE production, and largely ignored shielded, hyperdrive-equipped heavy fighters. At least until they found themselves needing fighters that could match the performance envelope of some of the more exotic designs used by the Rebels.

Unless TIEs are 20 times better than V-Wings, I don't think the precise ratio between the two would matter much. The Venators have plenty of fighters, enough for the TIEs to change the outcome barely at all.

[Batman]

Except we never actually see Venators deploy that many fighters, which brings us back to the idea that while they have the room for them, they may not actually carry that many all that often.

[Adam Reynolds]

My point is that this is a silly distinction. Is it unflyable by non-Jedi? Is it restricted from use by non-Jedi? There are supposed to be hundreds of the things per squadron of Venators in the standard order of battle.

That we never actually see in a single source besides the ICS in either Legends or Canon, which is odd. Which is why I would chalk it up to theoretical capability as opposed to in service capability.

A Jedi flying it also does not make them immune to physics and statistics. Jedi get splattered in fighters by enough fire, by non-Jedi even (Munificent ICS entry, Plo Koon getting blown up in ROTS). If shields were a universal good in fighter design, why did they discard them, especially given Jedi flew fighters with shields previously? Hubris? Stupidity?

Jedi die sure, but they are better able to take advantage of the acceleration benefits one gets by dropping shields than the average pilot, which was probably learned during the Clone Wars. Jedi probably asked for more responsive fighters after being outmaneuvered by the newer classes of droid starfighters like the tri-fighter.

I see it as a marginal benefit in either direction. Either you have a slightly more responsive vessel with extremely low mass or you have a a slightly more sluggish and survivable vessel with shields. Though I also suspect that TIE fighters in general seem to have slightly better armor as a substitute for shields, as shown by TFA. When Poe is in his X-wing on Jakku, he is disabled by small arms fire. When he and Finn are in a stolen TIE fighter, they shrug it off with their hull plating while inside the hanger bay.

I'm not sure if this is agreement with me or argument. ISDs have to support a larger ground component with a huge increase in volume requirement due to AT-ATs being that much bigger than AT-TEs, and compounded by the need for large dropships to move the large walkers because ISDs don't just land and extend ramps for their ground vehicles to deploy. Hence, much less internal volume for fighters, on top of a much reduced proportional volume for hangars in general. Completely consistent.

If that wasn't clear I was agreeing. Though on the issue of the AT-AT I wonder if the legs are often removed to reduce transportation size, in the same way that jeeps or artillery pieces in WW2 would have their wheels removed for boxed loading. With SW tech reassembly shouldn't take too long, and I doubt they have the transports to carry all of them at once anyway.

Or the Imperial fighters attacked unsupported and fire from Rebel capital ships actually thinned them out. Or not even all the fighters that could be launched were deployed. The fleet wasn't supposed to kill the Rebel fleet, and given how many fighters could conceivably been at Endor that might have actually been a problem if they all sortied at once.

That is certainly probable. While the Alliance launched everything from the start the Empire tried to launch in waves and largely failed, because the subsequent waves arrived disorganized after the Rebels had already gained the initiative at the fighter level.

This is in addition to the superior coordination between fighters and capital ships from the Alliance fleet.

I don't doubt Rebel fighter forces are generally shown to be higher quality (for a wide variety of reasons) - I'm saying that shields aren't the end all and be all for that, and incorporating shields has other costs that it may not have been an unambiguous boost. Certainly both the Republic and the Empire agreed on that point as fighter shields started getting dropped from light fighter designs as the Clone Wars progressed.

I think the real problem is that this is most true for highly responsive pilots, which the Empire doesn't have enough of.

This is a big question about TIEs in any theory.

And also where the Two-Seater version keeps anything that should be inside it.

What is it with the designers of SW ships not leaving room for actual systems? This is a problem shared with the Actis used in ROTS and I believe the Millennium Falcon, with floor plans generally making the engines tiny.

[Khaat]

If that wasn't clear I was agreeing. Though on the issue of the AT-AT I wonder if the legs are often removed to reduce transportation size, in the same way that jeeps or artillery pieces in WW2 would have their wheels removed for boxed loading. With SW tech reassembly shouldn't take too long, and I doubt they have the transports to carry all of them at once anyway.

A Gozanti cruiser (above, carrying) is listed as 41.8m long, the Tantive IV was 150m long and fit in the forward (smaller) ventral docking bay of an ISD.

AT-DPs (?), "are early models and larger than Empire version AT-ATs."

[Q99]

Except we never actually see Venators deploy that many fighters, which brings us back to the idea that while they have the room for them, they may not actually carry that many all that often.

Even with that, they don't need a full load to have fairly gross levels of superiority in a 3v1 ship contest.

[Simon_Jester]

Unless TIEs are 20 times better than V-Wings, I don't think the precise ratio between the two would matter much. The Venators have plenty of fighters, enough for the TIEs to change the outcome barely at all.

I don't actually understand what your point is. Among other things because TIEs weren't designed to fight V-wings. They would have been designed to fight droid fighters (in the Clone War era) or random 'third galaxy country' opponents in the post-Clone War era.

[Esquire]

To extrapolate, if we posit that a) TIEs are slightly better than V-wings, etc; and b) the three Venators carry anything like their Legends complement, then it really doesn't matter if TIEs are each worth two, three, or a whole squadron of Clone Wars craft, because they'll be facing many, many more than that; additionally, they'll be doing so when their enemies have a lot more flight-control personnel supporting them all with more large-scale combat experience (because a single Venator carries enough fighters for a fleet action in the OT) than the single ISD can muster.

[Eternal_Freedom]

This is exactly what I said a page ago. Assuming full complements (from Legends canon at least) the TIEs are outnumbered 17.5 to 1. Unless every TIE is a Defender and they're all piloted by perfect clones of Turr Phennir (basically the Imperial version of Wedge Antilles in Legends-canon) they will lose.

If the ratio were more like 2 or 3, maybe even 5 to 1, then arguing about individual quality and so forther might be relevant. But 17.5 to 1? No sir, those TIEs are dead.

And hell, the fighter complements are largely secondary anyway - we're meant to discuss whether one lone ISD can engage three Venators and see who wins. I'm giving it to the Venators, as best I can recall a Venator, while being less powerful than an ISD, is still better than 1/3rd as powerful, and hence with three ships the Venator squadron will win.

[Q99]

Even 5:1 is rather overwhelmingly decisive with fighters. 2-3:1 is pretty definitive, if a lot slower and with close support maybe turning things.

Though going by the numbers, an ISD *does* have more than three times the gun of the Venators. Though I doubt 3x the shield, and certainly being three ships has some advantage on it's own.

[Esquire]

On that point - now that there's more people in the thread, are there any modifications needed to make the N-square law work for space combat?

[fractalsponge1]

Doesn't n-squared law assume equal vulnerability?

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, the thing is, TIEs can also operate off of other, smaller spaceship platforms, or off of modified freighters for 'escort carrier' missions, or off a big damn concrete pad in the middle of a temperate rainforest.

Most or all other fighters can do those too... but I think the "unnecessaries" were shaved off of TIEs because unlike those other fighters, when it came to actual assbeating (and not just local patrols), they were meant to be with ISDs instead on their own?

I've heard it speculated that the TIE fighter's original design concept dates back to the Clone Wars (even if no TIEs actually served in that war), thus explaining why they were designed to be fielded in great numbers, with survivability demoted to a secondary concern. Clone pilots are expendable, some losses are inevitable when fighting huge hordes of droid fighters, and ultimately you just need sheer mass of defensive fighter cover to push back the droids, because a handful of heavily shielded super-fighters can't hold off all the possible threats at once.

I like this. The theory works, it's the opposite of the ARC-170s and a refinement of the Actis and the previous "Jedi fighter." Those fighters are better off defending the capital ship from droid fighters (instead of zooming around fucking with buzzdroids and saving Palpatine lol) while the actual murdering gets done by the capships, or in sub-capital situations the frigates or corvettes or freighters do the job while being protected by the fighter screen.

Heck we can imagine that instead of getting into furballs with droid swarms, which the heavily shielded and multi-cannoned ARC-170s sucked at (who knows how X-Wings would fare), the TIE doctrine of coming in WWRRRROOOOOAAAAAHHHHH-ing at high speeds in larger formations might've been better at "zoom and boom"-ing droid swarms. Swoop in, blast em to bits and then swoop out and repeat the process!

This concept then turned out to make a surprisingly versatile light fighter and garrison fighter for other purposes. Cheap, easy mass production means you can spam millions of them and put them all over the galaxy in all the little individual outposts and bases. This is critical for the Empire, which needs presence. It isn't enough to have a big badass hyper-capable fleet that can crush individual star systems; someone has to fly around collecting the taxes and stopping smugglers and so on. Short-range, sublight light fighters help do that job, and I suspect they cost a lot less than FTL-capable heavy fighters.

This may help to explain why the Empire, in the years prior to the Rebellion, doubled down on TIE production, and largely ignored shielded, hyperdrive-equipped heavy fighters. At least until they found themselves needing fighters that could match the performance envelope of some of the more exotic designs used by the Rebels.

Uh huh. Aside from the "operating non-independently but as an element of the ISD's defense screen" this could be the other side of the TIE. For low-intensity patrols, TIEs can operate fine without ISDs, they are fast and in sufficient numbers they can kill any fringe world yokel illegally smuggling Saarlac mother of pearl or something.

It's reminiscent of Soviet MiG philosophies, at least the non-MiG-25/31 ones, the ground controlled intercept-reliant MiG-21s and even MiG-29s that were rather short-legged. Except in this case, the base happens to be an FTL-ing turbolaser-festooned killship.

The Imperial philosophy probably emphasized total combined arms collective action, especially in assbeating near-peer competitors, and was perhaps subconsciously averse to putting too much capabilities on a single platform operated by a handful of people... their most "independent" unit would be an ISD and that's like a moving base.

[Q99]

And if a Droid fighter gets on your tail, a TIE can get it off better!

[Shroom Man 777]

And if a Droid fighter gets on your tail, a TIE can get it off better!

A TIE would laugh at those buzzdroid missiles.

And TIE formations, while still numerically inferior to the droid fighter swarms... would nonetheless be able to execute mass maneuvers that would - hopefully - fuck up with the dumber droids' brains. One TIE group zooms and booms and another TIE group like cuts through the droid swarm diagonally or from another angle... and since the droids are unshielded, the TIE will pretty much have a turkey shoot since the droids won't have any advantage enjoyed by Rebel-style shielded fighters.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, the thing is, TIEs can also operate off of other, smaller spaceship platforms, or off of modified freighters for 'escort carrier' missions, or off a big damn concrete pad in the middle of a temperate rainforest.

Most or all other fighters can do those too... but I think the "unnecessaries" were shaved off of TIEs because unlike those other fighters, when it came to actual assbeating (and not just local patrols), they were meant to be with ISDs instead on their own?

Hm. To be clear, I think what you're implying is that the TIE was originally intended as a light garrison fighter to fly off concrete pads and stuff, BUT was also cleared for fleet use in the face of heavy combat and big badass shielded superfighters, BECAUSE of the expectation that in such battles, TIEs would have heavy starship support?

I've heard it speculated that the TIE fighter's original design concept dates back to the Clone Wars (even if no TIEs actually served in that war), thus explaining why they were designed to be fielded in great numbers, with survivability demoted to a secondary concern. Clone pilots are expendable, some losses are inevitable when fighting huge hordes of droid fighters, and ultimately you just need sheer mass of defensive fighter cover to push back the droids, because a handful of heavily shielded super-fighters can't hold off all the possible threats at once.

I like this. The theory works, it's the opposite of the ARC-170s and a refinement of the Actis and the previous "Jedi fighter." Those fighters are better off defending the capital ship from droid fighters (instead of zooming around fucking with buzzdroids and saving Palpatine lol) while the actual murdering gets done by the capships, or in sub-capital situations the frigates or corvettes or freighters do the job while being protected by the fighter screen.

Heck we can imagine that instead of getting into furballs with droid swarms, which the heavily shielded and multi-cannoned ARC-170s sucked at (who knows how X-Wings would fare), the TIE doctrine of coming in WWRRRROOOOOAAAAAHHHHH-ing at high speeds in larger formations might've been better at "zoom and boom"-ing droid swarms. Swoop in, blast em to bits and then swoop out and repeat the process!

I think your second paragraph is right but your first one is kind of turned around.

It's like, the shielded fighters make good "strike fighters." Because they have more options for carrying missiles and bombs and whatnot. And because they can potentially survive hits from starship defense guns, or just blow right through a defending droid fighter swarm and tank hits on their shields. And because their heavy weaponry is best used against targets larger and tougher than individual droid fighters- you don't need the bigass wing guns on the ARC-170 to pot a droid fighter, as demonstrated by how many fighters with smaller guns can one-shot them. Plus, with strike fighters numbers matter a bit less, as long as each individual fighter carries plenty of munitions and bombrockets and megalassiters and whatnot. Two N-wings that fire a total of 12 photoprotoneutron torpedoes aren't quite as good as having six TOE fighters that fire two torpeodes each, but it's pretty close.

By contrast, the unshielded TIEs are pretty good for the role of intercepting and defending your fleet. For that role, you need just enough firepower to shoot down enemy bombers and heavy fighters, and no more, which fits well with the relatively tiny guns mounted on the TIE compared to the X-wing or ARC-170. You don't really need munitions capability unless missiles are your main method of shooting down the enemy. You do need relatively high mobility and straight-line speed so that enemies can't slip past your defenses, and behold, the TIE is a pretty fast fighter that never seems to have trouble catching up with things like X-wings. Furthermore, with interceptors you DO need raw numbers, because realistically no one fighter can engage multiple targets in quick succession. So if the enemy uses droid fighter swarms and they start dumping munitions at you, you have to have huge numbers of fighters to blunt the effect of the strike. Sending in one or two elite X-wings or whatever isn't going to have much effect, just because while your WARAZGRIZDOG ace of aces guys are out killing 20 droid fighters with a teaspoon and their manly squinting, the other 20 are firing torpedoes at your spaceships.

So the TIEs do indeed get a great design for using WWWRRROOOAAAHHHH-ing zoom and boom tactics on enemy fighters, but that's precisely because they're trying to charge out there and meet droid fighters and chew up their attack waves until they're incapable of harming the ships those TIEs defend.

And a design like that is kind of out of its depth against an opponent that uses heavy strike fighters almost exclusively, and routinely uses hyperdrive to concentrate way more forces than the sublight interceptors can engage at a time.

It's reminiscent of Soviet MiG philosophies, at least the non-MiG-25/31 ones, the ground controlled intercept-reliant MiG-21s and even MiG-29s that were rather short-legged. Except in this case, the base happens to be an FTL-ing turbolaser-festooned killship.

The Imperial philosophy probably emphasized total combined arms collective action, especially in assbeating near-peer competitors, and was perhaps subconsciously averse to putting too much capabilities on a single platform operated by a handful of people... their most "independent" unit would be an ISD and that's like a moving base.

Agreed. The same cool guy (Eleventh Century Remnant, who comes here no more, so far as I know) suggested that one of the big limiting factors on the Imperial fleet is reliable people. That is to say, people who are willing to burn a planet for Emperor Palpatine, but who are also NOT going to burn a planet for any reason other than "Emperor Palpatine said so." The clonetroopers had that kind of mindless, unshakable loyalty, but the womb-born officers of the regular navy mostly don't. So each officer in charge of a ship capable of burning worlds has to be vetted very carefully for any sign that they will fail to comply with orders, either by not committing atrocities, or by committing too many atrocities and wiping out a target that was actually important.

[Shroom Man 777]

Well, the thing is, TIEs can also operate off of other, smaller spaceship platforms, or off of modified freighters for 'escort carrier' missions, or off a big damn concrete pad in the middle of a temperate rainforest.

Most or all other fighters can do those too... but I think the "unnecessaries" were shaved off of TIEs because unlike those other fighters, when it came to actual assbeating (and not just local patrols), they were meant to be with ISDs instead on their own?

Hm. To be clear, I think what you're implying is that the TIE was originally intended as a light garrison fighter to fly off concrete pads and stuff, BUT was also cleared for fleet use in the face of heavy combat and big badass shielded superfighters, BECAUSE of the expectation that in such battles, TIEs would have heavy starship support?

Other way around! It was originally the "unnecessaries shaved off" fighter, with said shaved-offs because they're used with starship support (your Clone Wars droid fighter swarm connection means this makes even more sense), and THEN this economic style also made it an ideal light garrison fighter!

It's like, the shielded fighters make good "strike fighters." Because they have more options for carrying missiles and bombs and whatnot. And because they can potentially survive hits from starship defense guns, or just blow right through a defending droid fighter swarm and tank hits on their shields. And because their heavy weaponry is best used against targets larger and tougher than individual droid fighters- you don't need the bigass wing guns on the ARC-170 to pot a droid fighter, as demonstrated by how many fighters with smaller guns can one-shot them. Plus, with strike fighters numbers matter a bit less, as long as each individual fighter carries plenty of munitions and bombrockets and megalassiters and whatnot. Two N-wings that fire a total of 12 photoprotoneutron torpedoes aren't quite as good as having six TOE fighters that fire two torpeodes each, but it's pretty close.

I think you misread me.

I meant that the TIE is not like the ARC-170 (which is a good strike fighter as you explain), it is the opposite of the ARC-170 but the TIE is LIKE the Actis and Aethersprite which seem more suited to defense in being light and fast (Actis and Aethersprite don't have torpedos so it's not like they can actually hit capships!). The TIE seems to be a refinement of the Actis and Aethersprite. Of course, the Actis and Aethersprites are most known to be piloted by superhuman precognitive badasses utterly beyond the average sentient organism or even elite-trained clones...

By contrast, the unshielded TIEs are pretty good for the role of intercepting and defending your fleet. For that role, you need just enough firepower to shoot down enemy bombers and heavy fighters, and no more, which fits well with the relatively tiny guns mounted on the TIE compared to the X-wing or ARC-170. You don't really need munitions capability unless missiles are your main method of shooting down the enemy. You do need relatively high mobility and straight-line speed so that enemies can't slip past your defenses, and behold, the TIE is a pretty fast fighter that never seems to have trouble catching up with things like X-wings. Furthermore, with interceptors you DO need raw numbers, because realistically no one fighter can engage multiple targets in quick succession. So if the enemy uses droid fighter swarms and they start dumping munitions at you, you have to have huge numbers of fighters to blunt the effect of the strike. Sending in one or two elite X-wings or whatever isn't going to have much effect, just because while your WARAZGRIZDOG ace of aces guys are out killing 20 droid fighters with a teaspoon and their manly squinting, the other 20 are firing torpedoes at your spaceships.

Like the Actis and Aethersprite! And the opposite of the ARC-170 (that preceded the X-Wing)!

So the TIEs do indeed get a great design for using WWWRRROOOAAAHHHH-ing zoom and boom tactics on enemy fighters, but that's precisely because they're trying to charge out there and meet droid fighters and chew up their attack waves until they're incapable of harming the ships those TIEs defend.

And a design like that is kind of out of its depth against an opponent that uses heavy strike fighters almost exclusively, and routinely uses hyperdrive to concentrate way more forces than the sublight interceptors can engage at a time.

Da!

Agreed. The same cool guy (Eleventh Century Remnant, who comes here no more, so far as I know) suggested that one of the big limiting factors on the Imperial fleet is reliable people. That is to say, people who are willing to burn a planet for Emperor Palpatine, but who are also NOT going to burn a planet for any reason other than "Emperor Palpatine said so." The clonetroopers had that kind of mindless, unshakable loyalty, but the womb-born officers of the regular navy mostly don't. So each officer in charge of a ship capable of burning worlds has to be vetted very carefully for any sign that they will fail to comply with orders, either by not committing atrocities, or by committing too many atrocities and wiping out a target that was actually important.

With the utter redundancy of the warship staff and such. Reliability through groupthink!

[Coop D'etat]

My own head cannon on the Empire entire agrees with the notion that the Empire views its limiting factor as politically reliable officers. Thus strongly favours mass action centered around easily controlable Star Destroyers. Despite the uniforms, expect them to act like Soviets and not like Nazi's who believed in discretion by low and mid level officers.

On fighter doctrine, TIEs pretty much exist as point defense for capital ships and holding territory. They don't want individual quality, they want something they can mass produce to cover everywhere. Hyperspace capable craft that can act indepedently as fighter bombers are particularly bad for them as the biggest problem the Empire faces is their unreliable people defecting to the enemy and a hypercapable one-man craft is the easiest thing to defect with.

Meanwhile, the most important thing for Rebel fighters is the ability to create temporary local superiority. So investing in slightly better individual units pays big dividends, while TIEs are almost worthless for the kind of war they need to fight.

Similarly, the Empire doesn't invest much into frigate sized craft that might give them better coverage because those are big defection risks compared to large capital ships. Again equipting the enemy (that's basically the fluff behind all those Nebulon Bs the rebels had, either captured as isolated ships they could get local superiority on or straight defections).

Much like the fighters, the Mon Cal Cruisers are probably built with the idea of specifically going up against Star Destroyers a geared to specialize in that mission, while the Destroyers are built to provide presense and to be mass produced for generalist use against any conceivable foe. I would figure the Mon Cals are mostly geared to fight in space and survive a Destoyer's weapons, but doesn't bother to devote much space to being a mobile army base.


I'd expect the general trend of a space guerillia war like the Rebellion is the Empire builds mass production designs geared on holding territory everywhere possible. The Rebels stuff is all built to get temporary local space superiority and exploit the known weak points of Imperial mass production. The Empire has orders of magnitude more productive capacity, but has an ossified command and control structure and adapt doctrine and production slowly in the face of exploits.

[Sea Skimmer]

My own head cannon on the Empire entire agrees with the notion that the Empire views its limiting factor as politically reliable officers. Thus strongly favours mass action centered around easily controlable Star Destroyers. Despite the uniforms, expect them to act like Soviets and not like Nazi's who believed in discretion by low and mid level officers.

Yeah and that stands to reason, and encourages tactics that make sure they aren't all killed in action, frigates and smaller ships might or might not be a huge risk of desertion, but if nothing else they do present targets the rebels can easily destroy. So you'd expect to find them around highly populated areas where they aren't operating independently, while nothing smaller then a destroyer makes much sense for patrolling the Galatic rim. Merchant ships in wars can be huge and you may seriously need one just to hold equal.

The Empire though might have one heck of a supply of loyalists overall though, its just the galaxy is so absurd, and you need them for so many roles once the goal becomes 'the galaxy as one state'

[Shroom Man 777]

As for sub-capital craft, let's not forget...

[Q99]

A TIE would laugh at those buzzdroid missiles.

And TIE formations, while still numerically inferior to the droid fighter swarms... would nonetheless be able to execute mass maneuvers that would - hopefully - fuck up with the dumber droids' brains. One TIE group zooms and booms and another TIE group like cuts through the droid swarm diagonally or from another angle... and since the droids are unshielded, the TIE will pretty much have a turkey shoot since the droids won't have any advantage enjoyed by Rebel-style shielded fighters.

Right!

And in this equation, having another wingpilot or few in your formation increases your survivability far more than having shields does.

[The Romulan Republic]

On the "politically reliable troops" issue, isn't that a theory for how the "legion of Palpatine's best troops" failed so badly at Endor? That "best", in Palpatine's estimation, meant not "most competent" or even "best equipped" but "most politically reliable"?

Like, maybe, some polished parade ground unit from Coruscant that had never seen combat in such conditions before?

[Patroklos]

Obviously soldiers fighting a full scale war will take more casualties. And my source is Clone Wars, which is canon in either continuity. Jedi generals generally tend to treat their clones with mutual respect, and are willing to make sacrifices in order to protect them when they can. The only Jedi who doesn't care for the clones under him is Krell, who had actually fallen to the Dark Side.

Great, so neither generation of leader casually throws away their troops. That is irrelevant, however, to comparing the quality of those troops. Lots of great troops have been thrown away by stupid and/or capricious leadership (see the Wehrmacht at Stalingrad).

Without their own space wizard, the Empire would have also failed to defend the exhaust port.

Hardly. The point of the sequence is that ONLY a Jedi could make that shot. Red leader tried and failed. Luke explicitly eschewed human AND technological capabilities and did it via the force. Pretty obvious.

The Rebels were getting their asses handed to them before Vader showed up, and that includes in open space not just the trenches. Not only that, we don't actually see Vader use any force powers in the fight. We are told he is one of the best pilots in the galaxy after all. That doesn't have to be predicated solely on force powers (see Wedge). There is nothing inherently force related that buttresses the Empire's performance.

What I mean is that Rebel fighters prevent TIE fighters from successfully doing any real damage to their capital ships, which is something TIE fighters are incapable of doing in return.

How do you know this? Once again neither Ackbar or Lando are as dismissive of the threat as you are, and I am more inclined to believe their expert canon statements on the matter. In fact EVERY rebel character who has something to say, from Fleet Admiral to fighter pilot, has nothing but bad things to say about their situation ("THERES TOO MANY OF THEM!")

We see exactly four capital ships destroyed in that sequence. Two Rebel and two Imperial. The two rebel casualties were DS kills. We see one ISD blowup through Ackbar's bridge window with no explanation. And then we see the Executor, a fate we know can't be laid at any normal or repeatable capability of any person or machine. That would be like claiming the entire WWII RN is useless against German surface ships because of the Hood.

There is just no evidence to back up your claim.

We also see Rebel fighters chasing TIEs far more often than the inverse in the general space battle as time goes on, with the obvious exception of the Death Star run.

This is just selection bias. You are following the main or major secondary characters of the film. And you will note that nearly every pilot followed that isn't Wedge or Lando DIES! Life is short for mooks in SW, no matter what side they are on.

As badly as they are outgunned and outnumbered, the Rebel Alliance does amazingly well. After the destruction of the shield generator, the Alliance fleet massively gains the upper hand, both with the destruction of Executor as well as several other star destroyers.

Relative grades of awesomeness /= fighter superiority, which is your claim. There is no point shown in the Endor where Imperial fighters are not actively contesting the battle space. Your idea that the Rebels had the upper hand after the shield went down is utterly ridiculous. For one, what the hell would the DS shield being down have to do with the balance of the space battle other than draw away most of the Rebel fighter forces? Secondly, we have overt scenes of TIES killing Rebel fighters just before the A-wing runs into the Executor's bridge AND they are killing Rebel fighters inside the DS run.

As for several other Star Destroyers you must be using some special math, because there is only one ISD destroyed in the entire movie.

It wasn't supposed to be massacre in terms of planning, it was supposed to be a surprise attack. Han wasn't worried when he saw Executor, as it was largely expected that there would be a fleet around the Death Star. It was just assumed that the Rebels would be the ones with the advantage of surprise rather than the Empire. WIthout that on their side, getting in the sucker punch early on was impossible and they were left in a slugfest against superior firepower.

Which is irrelevant to what I said. Surprise or not, the Rebel fleet expected to out gunned. Their entire mission, directly from the briefing scene, was to make a perimeter around the DS to keep whatever Imperials were there from disrupting their run. The mission of the fleet was to be bullet sponges for the fighter force. Its implicit that both forces will die in the attempt if needed. This is there ONLY chance to destroy the DS.

But my point is that R&D is not all that significant at this point, as technology is at virtual stasis.

Until onscreen reality supports this, the highest cannon says otherwise.

While they are a military dictatorship they still suffer from resource limitations, and building a much larger replacement Death Star likely would take a large percentage of the resources that could otherwise be thrown at new starfighter designs or new star destroyers.

Great theory, unfortunately it is not supported on screen. And even if the DS did tax resources, who says star fighters were what suffered the cuts? Or the military at all?

[Rhadamantus]

My own head cannon on the Empire entire agrees with the notion that the Empire views its limiting factor as politically reliable officers. Thus strongly favours mass action centered around easily controlable Star Destroyers. Despite the uniforms, expect them to act like Soviets and not like Nazi's who believed in discretion by low and mid level officers.

Yeah and that stands to reason, and encourages tactics that make sure they aren't all killed in action, frigates and smaller ships might or might not be a huge risk of desertion, but if nothing else they do present targets the rebels can easily destroy. So you'd expect to find them around highly populated areas where they aren't operating independently, while nothing smaller then a destroyer makes much sense for patrolling the Galatic rim. Merchant ships in wars can be huge and you may seriously need one just to hold equal.

The Empire though might have one heck of a supply of loyalists overall though, its just the galaxy is so absurd, and you need them for so many roles once the goal becomes 'the galaxy as one state'

That theory does have problems, though, given how many people there are in Star wars. If one in a million are true loyalists, that's still a trillion loyalists.