New Vehicles TLJ Official Info *Spoilers*

[SAAA]

The Mega is decisively a good step for the new trilogy capital ships design, beside the name, I find it as good as the resurgent class in evolutionary yet not over the top evolution over Imperial-era ships.

Totally opposite reaction on the dreadnought: it looks just too different from common concepts beside the triangle shape, and what's bad it's clearly forced so for plot reasons (but what's with the insane command tower??), also unless those orbital cannons can actually live up to their name I find it a bit childish as design... muh star destroyer sized guns!
Hopefully they punches through planetary shields or such.

TBH I did found the Finalizer bad at first too (that prow shot made it look fugly) but any other side view looks fine, almost better than common ISDs. The Supremacy follows closely the new "streamlined" looks and makes it bigger and more menacing, plus wider rather than longer is a interesting retake for star wars spaceships.

I hear complaints about how 60 km feels absurd, but it really isn't that much of a stretch: remember even the smallest Death Star interpretation is hundreds of times more massive than this, because it's a full sphere 120km in diameter while this is barely 15-20km long and maybe 2-3 km high, even making it a full box it's still 1/250th the volume!
Starkiller base was far more over the top as far as engineering goes on all fronts: size, weapon, engines and power source.

I wonder how the resistance will kill this tough, pls don't be a single fighter again (stay away from this thing Poe!) I want fleet on fleet action and maybe a sacrifice run of the Raddus!

[Galvatron]

Spoiler for those who haven't read the Aftermath novels...

Spoiler

Another thing to consider is the fact that the First Order probably has the SSD Eclipse. That means it's not just any SSD, it's Palpatine's SSD. Imagine the secrets it may carry in its databanks that may no longer exist anywhere else in the galaxy.

[The Romulan Republic]

I can't recall- is the Spoiler

Eclipse still the same as it was in the old continuity? Ie armed with a big superlaser?

[Galvatron]

Nope.

[CetaMan]

Eclipse in the new continuity is most likely an Executor, but I'm not sure if its actually specified anywhere.

[KraytKing]

On scale, it doesn't matter what science says. In Star Wars, a SSD eight kilometers long is a major expenditure for a galactic civilization of seventy million inhabited worlds.

Source for that please.

For one thing, an eight kilometer ship being a major expenditure for a galactic civilization ought to render the Death Stars utterly impossible.

Essential Atlas for the planets. Second page of the intro. To clarify, while 70 million are inhabited, only about two million are full members.

The SSD thing is FUBAR. I have my preferred sources, you have yours. Personally, I think Vader's flagship should not be longer than the superlaser-toting Eclipse, which carries hundreds more fighters and has many times the armament. Just my two cents.

[CetaMan]

Exec being longer than an Eclipse with the eclipse being more powerful is fine, its many times thicker than an exec, which is something like a flat arrowhead at only 500m thin.

[Galvatron]

The SSD thing is FUBAR. I have my preferred sources, you have yours. Personally, I think Vader's flagship should not be longer than the superlaser-toting Eclipse, which carries hundreds more fighters and has many times the armament. Just my two cents.

So Lucasfilm's revision of the Executor's size wasn't enough for you? You still believe it to be 8km just because the old EU said so?

[Lord Revan]

The SSD thing is FUBAR. I have my preferred sources, you have yours. Personally, I think Vader's flagship should not be longer than the superlaser-toting Eclipse, which carries hundreds more fighters and has many times the armament. Just my two cents.

So Lucasfilm's revision of the Executor's size wasn't enough for you? You still believe it to be 8km just because the old EU said so?

the funny thing is that even if we took the 19 km Excutor and the 16km Eclipse, the Eclipse would still be the more massive of the 2 due to having a side profile more akin to an ISD while the Excutor has a quite thing side profile (aka it's not that tall relative to it's height).

[Galvatron]

I prefer to believe that planet-killing superlasers require Death Star-sized platforms to accommodate their enormous power generators and tributary beam systems.

Hence, the bigger the Eclipse-class, the better. In fact, one of the reasons I have no objection to the size of the Supremacy is because it should be that large to carry planetary siege weapons (as is being speculated around here).

That other new ship is just the USS Vengeance from Star Trek Into Darkness, morphed into a Star Warsy design and transplanted into another JJ Abrams production. For fuck's sake, it even has the same big swivel-mounted dorsal weapons.

[Lord Revan]

The main problem I have with those cannons is that they're both too big and not big enough, as in they seems the typical RPG/fan work style "just glue the guns where there's free spot in the hull" with no regards to the support structure for those guns which should be truly massive. Say what you will about the Eclipse or the Galatic Battleground air cruisers but least those were essentially guns with a bit of ship built around them for mobility and security.

The New Order dreadnaught doesn't seem to have any major support structure under the turret.

[CetaMan]

If those things recoil like a traditional turbolaser there is a soft limit for the fire arc of the ship to where the engines can actually push back.

[Mange]

The Jedi librarian telling Obi-wan (when he consults her in his investigation regarding Kamino) that if something isn't in the Jedi archives, it doesn't exist, and not being immediately dismissed/laughed at. Indeed, Yoda (who is probably one of the less prideful PT Jedi Masters) seems to agree that Kamino's absence can only mean someone deleted it from the archives, as I recall. That, to me, is very telling. Plus the age of galactic civilization and hyperdrive speeds in general.

Meh, her statement seems to smack more of Jedi arrogance than objective fact. There could be countless planets in the Jedi archives that are nothing more than some alphanumerical designation. Besides, our own scientists have recently revised their estimates of the number of planets in the Milky Way to be somewhere in the low trillions. If the GFFA is like the Milky Way, I have no problem believing that there are plenty of worlds that may have slipped through the cracks, despite what the Jedi believe.

Doing the math, we can then say that the Milky Way galaxy has – on average – between 800 billion and 3.2 trillion planets, with some estimates placing that number as high a 8 trillion!

Kamino would therefore be a suspicious oddity because it's a known planet with a known populace of reputedly advanced sapient beings. Any planet like that should be catalogued in the Jedi archives.

Well, that Madame Nu was arrogant doesn't have to mean that she was wrong... The screenplay, as well as the novelization, implies that the GFFA is eighty percent explored. That doesn't have to refer to the galactic disc only...

[Galvatron]

20% of unexplored is still a lot.

[The Romulan Republic]

On scale, it doesn't matter what science says. In Star Wars, a SSD eight kilometers long is a major expenditure for a galactic civilization of seventy million inhabited worlds.

Source for that please.

For one thing, an eight kilometer ship being a major expenditure for a galactic civilization ought to render the Death Stars utterly impossible.

Essential Atlas for the planets. Second page of the intro. To clarify, while 70 million are inhabited, only about two million are full members.

The SSD thing is FUBAR. I have my preferred sources, you have yours. Personally, I think Vader's flagship should not be longer than the superlaser-toting Eclipse, which carries hundreds more fighters and has many times the armament. Just my two cents.

The SSD length isn't what I was contesting. That's minor trivia either way, compared to the absurdity of any ship that is less than tens or hundreds of kilometres in length being a major expenditure for a civilization that built multiple death stars.

[Adam Reynolds]

The level of exploration was really illustrated for me by ESB. A space slug that potentially eats passing starships or critters that chew on power cables is hardly surprising to an experienced spacer like Han. To me that translates to there being very few things in the galaxy that are totally unknown.

With respect to the "uncharted settlements" comment, that specifically refereed to Rebels or other outlaws living on an otherwise uninhabited world. Not that there could be an entirely uncharted system to the Republic or Empire. The Rebel base was not known on Hoth but the system clearly was, enough to have a proper name rather than just a designation.

However, in the aftermath of the Empire, it would be relatively easy for the First Order to conceal their bases as the Rebel Alliance turned New Republic would hardly have the best access to hyperspace routes. Records were undoubtedly lost by the Jedi, and even more were possibly delibrately lost by the Empire. By the time of TFA, you could easily have entirely uncharted systems like what we see with Luke's location. You could even have a quasi- Stark Trek story taking place in that era in which the New Republic attempts to rebuild hyperlanes and hunt down uncharted settlements like those inhabited by what would become the First Order.

[KraytKing]

I prefer to believe that planet-killing superlasers require Death Star-sized platforms to accommodate their enormous power generators and tributary beam systems.

So Lucasfilm's revision wasn't enough for you? The old one made sense, so I believe it. Just like you with planet killers.


Also, on the subject of planetary bombardment: I like the Torpedo Sphere as dedicated shield-breaker, then other ships for the actual city-killing. The shape was dumb, though. Should've looked sort of like a backwards Corellian Corvette, huge proton torpedo banks at the front and tiny engines at the back.

[Galvatron]

So Lucasfilm's revision wasn't enough for you? The old one made sense, so I believe it. Just like you with planet killers.

Revision of what?

Also, on the subject of planetary bombardment: I like the Torpedo Sphere as dedicated shield-breaker, then other ships for the actual city-killing. The shape was dumb, though. Should've looked sort of like a backwards Corellian Corvette, huge proton torpedo banks at the front and tiny engines at the back.

I never liked the concept of stationary siege platforms like the torpedo spheres because they seemed to be predicated on the idea that heavily shielded planets would somehow lack defensive weaponry with which to retaliate. TESB showed us what a single planetary ion cannon could do to an Imperial warship.

[Joe Momma]

The SSD length isn't what I was contesting. That's minor trivia either way, compared to the absurdity of any ship that is less than tens or hundreds of kilometres in length being a major expenditure for a civilization that built multiple death stars.

IIRC, that was from Darksaber. Admiral Pellaeon was amazed that Admiral Daala had a Super Star Destroyer because the construction of the Executor had supposedly almost bankrupted the Empire (yes, that was the actual wording used). As you note, that's pretty ridiculous for a government that can construct Death Stars. It also flies in the face of Han off-handedly noting there are a lot of command ships when Luke is concerned that the SSD at Endor is Vader's, which suggests that vessels that size are not uncommon, at least in the Imperial fleet.

[Q99]

EU canon is there's 8 Executor class ships, plus a number of smaller but still significantly big one.

Even so, I think it's still pretty impressive for a small time operation like Daala had at that point.

[Galvatron]

New EU says there were 13.

[Lord Revan]

In regards to the 20% of unexplored space, "unexplored" doesn't have to mean "we have absolutely no idea what's out there", it could also mean "we got basic data of this region like the location of stars and other major 'landmarks' but that's it".

So while the jedi chief librarian was still arrogant she wasn't arrogant enough to ignore/forget the 1/5 of the map that read "here be dragons!", rather that 1/5 had basic info but details like cultures or settlements weren't charted hence so that part of the GFFA was for all intents and purposes unexplored, while the jedi archives essentially had an entry on every system it doesn't mean those entries had to be very detailed.

EDIT:I what mean is that arrogance of the chief librarian was "surely this 'Kamino' system cannot be *insert random achive code here*, if it was important enough for its name to be known by general public we'd must know about the name, so if there's no ' Kamino system' in records it must not exist".

[CetaMan]

EU canon is there's 8 Executor class ships, plus a number of smaller but still significantly big one.

Even so, I think it's still pretty impressive for a small time operation like Daala had at that point.

There were more then 8 executors, however as mentioned in the EGTW issues stem from the empire building ships off-budget for projects, budgeting ships but not building them as either revision or hiding other projects, etc. In other words they avoided saying how many execs there were.

Considering there are 15 known/mentioned named vessels, and 3 appearances + of unnamed/unidentified vessels...
Not including the sarlac project and other prototypes.

[KraytKing]

So Lucasfilm's revision wasn't enough for you? The old one made sense, so I believe it. Just like you with planet killers.

Revision of what?

How big a planet-killing superlaser has to be.

[Galvatron]

You do realize that there are no longer any canon planet-killing superlasers smaller than the one on the Death Star, right?

Besides, the old EU never showed us what level of damage the axial superlaser of the Eclipse and Sovereign classes could actually do.