Death from the Heavens (RAR)

[KraytKing]

You are christened Emperor of a new Galactic Empire based out of a single Star Destroyer in orbit of Earth. You get a Star Destroyer. Said vehicle is fully crewed and carries a full complement of ground forces, starfighters, shuttles, and other vehicles. This follows the ideas laid out by WEG, subject to my own creative interpretation. This means the Star Destroyer carries

37,085 crewmembers.
A legion of 14,410 stormtroopers, with sufficient unarmored repulsorlift vehicles to transport every man. 30 AT-ST and 20 AT-AT walkers as armor.
An army Reinforced Battlegroup of 10,210 combat soldiers, accompanied by some internal artillery support, sufficient repulsorcraft for transportation, and roughly 200 repulsortanks. Plus about four thousand support men and twice as many droids.
48 TIE fighters, 12 TIE Interceptors, and 12 TIE Bombers.
Heavy landing craft for moving whole battalions of Army and Stormtroopers to the ground quickly, and for moving heavy armor.
Light landing craft such as Assault Shuttles, Lambda-, Sentinel-, and Zeta-class shuttles (the four winged shuttles in Rogue One). A dozen or so of each. Assault Shuttles and Zetas are capable of carrying a tank or two, with modification.
A prefabricated garrison base with its own complement already attached.
A company (152 men) of Storm Commandos.
A platoon (32 men) of the Death Troopers from Rogue One.
Eight Red Guards.
A shit ton of Probe Droids.

The stormtroopers and all stormtrooper-based units are utterly loyal to you personally and totally incorruptible. If you ordered one to shoot his sergeant, neither one of the two would question the order. They can't be bribed to betray you. Whatever sci-fi thing you want to make this happen is true. Drugs, genetic engineering, implants, whatever. Army troopers and the ship's crew are less fanatical, more in keeping with modern soldiers.

Army troopers and Star Destroyer crew are as skilled as a modern Earth army, while not being outstanding. Stormtroopers are very skilled, comparable to the Ranger Corps. Storm Commandos are expert soldiers on all aspects of insurgency and siege breaking tactics, combining the skills of FBI HRT teams with the long term operation ability of Green Berets. Death Troopers are bodyguards and soldiers of the highest order, with technologically advanced weapons and armor. They are not trained in insurgency, however, but stick to conventional bodyguard and breaching tactics. Red Guards don't really have an analogue on Earth; they are experts in martial arts, sharpshooting, heavy weapons use, and virtually anything else a soldier could be called on to perform. They could reliably take on four or five times their number of stormtroopers and take only light casualties.

Stormtrooper armor is impervious to all but the heaviest caliber bullets. Nothing short of .50 BMG has a prayer of penetrating the plates, and even then it's iffy. The bodysuit in between is impervious to pistol caliber ammunition, but rifle rounds will punch through. Army troopers wear breast and thigh plates and partial helmets (see Han in Solo) that protect against rifle caliber rounds and lower, but isn't totally reliable against LMG fire and will fail against HMG fire. Both provide pretty complete protection against fragmentation. Both also have inertial compensators effective enough to keep rounds that don't penetrate from breaking bones or really doing anything worse than bruise.

For bombardment purposes, assume the Star Destroyer turbolasers have a probability radius of a hundred meters and a blast radius of sixty meters. Anything, and I mean anything, within this radius is destroyed. Doesn't matter if it's a block of tissue paper or a block of lead, blast radius is the same. Other weapons are similar: ridiculous overpenetration. Tanks can punch through our tanks no problem, but have a small area of effect. TIE fighters can shoot straight through battleships, but don't have ridiculous kill radii against infantry.

Obviously, you have a tremendous military advantage over any terrestrial nation. How are you going to use this? What is your course of action? If you do decide to unify the Earth under a single government, how do you go about that to minimize (or maximize--whatever floats your boat) loss of life and personal danger?

Edit: it didn't feel right posting a RAR in Star Wars, but if a mod feels like it belongs there, my apologies.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

BDZ the District Of Columbia, Norfolk, Pearl Harbor, Omaha, and Fort Benning, and take over the US Once in control, use US industry to introduce Imperial technology enough to maintain the gear I already have and to equip the newly absorbed Armed Forces with select bits of Imperial kit, mainly tanks, hoverscouts, airspeeders and a limited amount(at first) of TIE fighters.

Then, try and take over the world, Pinky.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I predict this thread to become Very Silly very quickly...

If the specifics are being in orbit of THIS earth at THIS time when things are already as Fucked up as they currently are...
Well I am not much of a dictator, and as a Historical Preservationist, annihilating parts of the planet is not my style.
In truth the most ETHICAL thing to does immediately GTF of earth orbit, hopefully before anyone notices you exist, and spend the next few months exploring the local seller cluster for habitable earth like worlds to colonize.

As is often the case in such RAR's in the past, we have NO resupply, NO source of Hyper mater, NO way to refuel. Each jump is precious and each resource on thew ship is irreplaceable. Mostly make use of the shuttles to scout for resources to build some sort of basic infrastructure. Between the Crew, Troopers and soldiers, you have over SIXTY THOUSAND people to look after. Mouths to feed, minds to occupy and individuals with needs, wants and desires. That is a big responsibility to consider and las thing I need is sending them to Earth to cause fear, panic, confusion and death

As far as Earth? The best you could hope for is NOT appearing as a World endangering threat for the Facicsts and Dictators of the world to band together and unify in hatred and Xenophobia. I would wait till I have some sort of colony/factory/ base of operations and then try and set up various Shell Companies to cash in on the Star Wars tech. Long term, set myself as a Mega Billionaire to influence world events while trying to utilize what tech I can to FIX earth, and not Blow the Shit out of it.

[Solauren]

I'm assuming the Star Destroyer has some sort of stealth tech to avoid notice, or is in a high enough orbit to avoid notice...
I'm assuming the Star Destroyer has the needed databases to start fabricating the needed infrastructure to keep this Star Destroyer going.

1 - Get out of Earth orbit.
2 - Toss an asteroid at the planet.
3 - Send a Powerful radio signal towards the planet from in front of the asteroid, then move out of the way. The idea is to let the world know it's coming.
4 - Intercept and destroy the asteroid in a very public manner. One that also shows this is a legitimately powerful starship, that just happens to match the specs of a fictional one.
5 - "Hello Earth, allow me to introduce myself...."
6 - Offer to exchange technological knowledge/ability for funds, raw materials, and other needed resources (food, water).
i.e A civilization like star wars has to have a way to deal with pollution.
7 - Build up infrastructure to keep the Star Destroyer going.


The alternate is...
1 - Build up the infrastructure without Earth, including stasis pods and the like.
2- Secretly pick up the people I want to keep for whatever reason.
3 - HIT the planet with an asteroid in it's highest populated area. (So I can deny any involvement). This means South-East Asia.
4 - Let global chaos reign for a bit. During that time, covertly assassinate government heads (see #6)
5 - Show up, offer to fix the problem in exchange for the world accepting me as their new Emperor.
6 - If need be, show evidence of attempting to communicate with the various governments about the asteroid, and them going 'we don't need your help'. While those government heads are mostly dead, it will outrage the citizens against their governments, making them more likely to accept my offer.


I can't think of any other approaches with just a Star Destroyer.

Now, give me a World Devestator on top of the Star Destroyer, and I can probably take over the world without a lot of violence.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Now, give me a World Devestator on top of the Star Destroyer, and I can probably take over the world without a lot of violence.

Ye gods forget about those, Talk about an underutilized plot device.
Applications on Earth?
Park it on any Land fill garbage heap in the world, come back a month later, and everything in the hap is separated into its component elements. Nice bars of Iron, Nickel, Aluminum etc. And anything "Organic" gets reduced down to Carbon bricks for the most part.
In a few years the majority of Earths Trash piles can be converted in raw materials.
In Space?
Well sure a Country might pay a Billion or two to have it sit on a few Asteroid and reduce them to raw materials.

Getting back to what we DO have available...
Lets look at our support craft for a moment.

48 TIE fighters, 12 TIE Interceptors, and 12 TIE Bombers.
Assault Shuttles x12, Lambda-x12, Sentinel-x12, and Zeta-class shuttles x12
A shit ton of Probe Droids.

The Fighters do not have Hyperspace, but they are ARE trans-atmospheric and can go from space to planet and back in a mater of minutes. That is pretty darned useful.

As for the shuttles. Well that is 48 Hyperspace equipped craft. Send half of them to look for habitable planets based off of NASA's database of current confirmed Eco-Planets. If we find one that looks promising, then Fire off a few Probe droids to map it.
Once again thinking of earth applications... Well the US pays Russia about 100 million per Astronaught to get up to the space station. Pretty sure we could work out a better but still profitable deal with ships that can carry dozens of people PLUS lots of cargo.

Oh also.
QUESTION FOR THE RAR LEADER.
one of the other normal stand bys for these set ups. If this is OUR Earth, does it know Star Wars? Cause showing up in a Fictional ship that people know violates the laws of physics will naturally lead to questions.

[KraytKing]

Yes, Star Wars exists, and yes, it does violate known physics. Whatever processes the SD requires to function, work as necessary and pictured in Star Wars, but they don't work in other scenarios. For instance, hyperdrives work, but nothing except a hyperdrive can make those physics work. If you build a hyperdrive, it does what a hyperdrive does in Star Wars. If you take some component of a hyperdrive to try and build something else, that something else will not work.

You could drop the prefab garrison base for an instant moon colony, or Mars colony, or wherever else you like. People would pay through the nose to go there. Plus, if it's on the near side of the Moon, then that's a handful of turbolasers to keep pointed at Earth while your Star Destroyer is off doing something else.

[Solauren]

I'm tempted to, even without the World Devastator I want (actually, might be able to build a 'baby devastator' using the Star Destroyer, then let it grow to full size via eating asteroids), to try to get operatives to Earth to 'Flash imprint' scan elected officials, hack the scan and reprogram them, clone them, get a new scan, reprogram that, and then replace the real official with a clone now loyal to me.

Could be a bitch to pull off, however.

[KraytKing]

A bitch for sure, and hardly necessary. Remember, Imperial Intelligence has the technology to edit brains to make people do what they want -- reprogramming humans. I didn't mention it above, but Star Destroyers do carry intelligence agents and their equipment. Kidnapping enough heads of state to make it worthwhile could be troublesome, but that's where Storm Commandos come in. If you don't like being sneaky, drop half a dozen assault shuttles full of stormtroopers with a couple squadrons of TIEs for air screening on the White House, you'll be in and out in five minutes.

[Solauren]

Yeah, but that would be obvious. That would lead to the POTUS being declared compromised so quick.

I was thinking something more like international flight over the ocean, hit the airplane and escorts with ion fire, grab them with shuttles, do a board, reprogram, repair, and the flight lands without any sign of problem.

(Basically, pull an Inception).

[Batman]

Don't think that would work. You'd have to do it without a) various air traffic control agencies noticing anything unusual happening and b) in a short enough time nobody asks why the flight is late.

[Jub]

The first thing to do is get us out of orbit, there's no chance we won't be spotted leaving but that will be the same even if I stay. I'd probably pull back outside the Oort cloud where I'm out of reach. Let those back on Earth explain things away while I plan what to do.

Beyond that, I'll want a good situation report. What's our endurance like? Can we set up any sort of fueling stations, especially for hypermatter? What can we do to set up a sustainable situation in terms of food and living space beyond the confines of our vessel? How much technical data that might allow us to bootstrap Earth to the stars do our databanks hold?

Honestly knowing that is the only way I can make any plan that isn't doomed due to haste or incomplete information.

[Tribble]

Does the Star Destroyer have fusion reactors? That would still be a significant step up in energy production if they could be reverse-engineered.

[KraytKing]

Beyond that, I'll want a good situation report. What's our endurance like?

Six years of consumables, already under rationing. Fuel is pretty much a non-factor. I fall with the "tiny sun reactor" school of thought, so refueling is a once in a lifetime thing. The only way to really stretch those supplies would be to ditch crew or passengers.

Can we set up any sort of fueling stations, especially for hypermatter?

You'll find Star Wars elements and minerals in relative abundance everywhere except Earth. Manufacturing fuel and other consumables is within your capabilities, if you have some time and space to establish yourself.

What can we do to set up a sustainable situation in terms of food and living space beyond the confines of our vessel?

Quickly, you can drop the prefab for three to eight thousand extra berths, depending on how tight you pack them. Army and stormtrooper detachments have engineering battalions, so you can build new structures fairly quickly, though measured in a timescale of weeks or months.

How much technical data that might allow us to bootstrap Earth to the stars do our databanks hold?

You have complete documentation on everything relevant to the ship. There are no blueprints for, say, World Devastators, but you do have documentation on hyperdrives and turbolasers. You don't have the proper tooling for building any of the advanced stuff, but you have the tooling to build the tooling, and you can manufacture simple things and do basic mining.

Does the Star Destroyer have fusion reactors? That would still be a significant step up in energy production if they could be reverse-engineered.

It does indeed have a fusion reactor. Reverse engineering it won't be too hard with technical documents, BUUUT building one will be another story. Something on the order of building the tooling required to build the infrastructure required to run the tooling that builds the tooling that builds the reactor.

[KraytKing]

Don't think that would work. You'd have to do it without a) various air traffic control agencies noticing anything unusual happening and b) in a short enough time nobody asks why the flight is late.

Yeah, and reprogramming takes a while. A few hours, at least. How could you do it? You do have ships capable of hypersonic speeds, so if you grab it early in the flight and move fast, you may be able to drop the plane off at the expected time or location. A trans Pacific flight, known to occur, offers a lot of time. Suppose an Assault Shuttle intercepts Air Force One, burns a hole in it in flight, and drops half a hundred Storm Commandos inside. Set for stun, capture everyone and put them aboard the shuttle while the plane keeps on flying. Shuttle goes to orbit, you do a bit of crash brain surgery and just get most of the crew to act complacent for a couple days, maybe resort to some kind of memory-loss drugs. Reprogram the Pres or VP to what you want, then fly them all back down to meet Air Force One, still flying. Drop them back off on the plane and pull out your Commandos, then let it land without incident.

THe difficult part would be erasing signs of entry and making sure the shuttle wasn't seen. The former, you'd need to act fast and send your best men, so I guess Red Guard and Death Troopers. Even then, it would be difficult bordering on impossible to prevent a single gun from discharging and leaving a hole or a burn, so you would need a couple engineers to cover things up. It gets much more difficult if you have to force entry to the plane.

Avoiding being seen. Hmm. I don't really know enough on this topic to say, so for someone who does, are there many large radar blind spots? If the shuttle moved really fucking fast and only lingered near the plane for the bare minimum amount of time, how likely is it that it would be seen? I would guess pretty likely. The thing is almost half the size of the target, and built like a brick.

President and VP are both too heavily guarded. How about the Speaker for the House, or president of the Senate? I imagine they go on trips from time to time. Grab one of them in a simpler version of the above, then kill everyone ahead of them in the line of succession by whatever means you choose.

I like how killing the President and Vice President of the United States of America is so easy as to be trivial in this scenario.

[LaCroix]

It most likely has spare fusion reactors for the fighters and shuttles (or even capabilities to make them) - even one of the TIE reactors (no matter how you try to explain the canon 'solar' wings, it needs something to power the guns, and they are rated in Giga- to Terajoules, depending on what you try to evaluate.) is probably going to make a huge difference in any state's energy budget, and their size makes it easier to build a distributed energy grid.

[Solauren]

World Devestator's backbone technology (molecular furnaces) was actually several centuries old before the Empire made a World Devestator. It was commonly found on mining ships.

In fact, it makes sense a STD would have a molecular furnace on board, if only for recycling.

I will admit, it would take alot of time to tool up to a World Devestator's capabilities, however. Would be well forth it.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Star Destroyers don't recycle. They replace systems wholesale, and eject the garbage into space(before going to hyperspace) for scavengers to pick through. At least according to the old EU.

[Jub]

Star Destroyers don't recycle. They replace systems wholesale, and eject the garbage into space(before going to hyperspace) for scavengers to pick through. At least according to the old EU.

This one could be set up for long-term recon away from any support, though really it would make more sense to pick a different class rather than arbitrarily setting up a Star Destroyer that doesn't work like any SD from the EU does.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Like the Revenge-class heavy carrier from IMPS? Or, maybe a Mandator II from the EU.

[KraytKing]

Star Destroyers eject garbage when preparing for a jump from or to a base of resupply, as it's more time efficient to eject and replace than sit around recycling. This is described in the Imperial Sourcebook in a piece from the point of view of a scavenger. According to that same EU, Star Destroyers are designed along the doctrine of long operations without support, capable of six years independent operation. It would make no sense for them NOT to have recycling systems.

Furthermore, in the same book, it describes the Imperial Army operating completely self sufficient bases of manufacturing from the corps level (~40,000 men). A truly ridiculous number and variety of droids accompany these formations, giving them said capability. Drop companies of Army troopers are accompanied (heh) by a support staff trained in wilderness survival, realistically giving them a month of operation away from logistical support. The entire Stormtrooper force is insinuated to be able to live of the land, operating independently of the Army chain of resupply and with no readily apparent supply chain of their own. These examples all suggest that when pressed, the Imperial military is quite capable of long-term self-sustainability, and seems to prefer it doctrinally. Thus, it would follow that Star Destroyers carry recycling centers of their own.

What does not follow is that these centers can become World Devastators. A World Devastator requires massive processing capability, something that an ordinary shipboard system would lack, and also require tremendous output, which Star Destroyers lack. While the manufacturing capabilities of a Star Destroyer are no doubt diverse to support such a massive vessel with so many functions, it is extremely unlikely that it will be able to produce anything larger than blaster or large ingots. Most of the output for repair work is most likely in the form of computer chips and rivets, notoriously small devices.

[Crossroads Inc.]

LOL Yeah... THIS Is where these sort of RARs always end up getting bogged down. Is in the details, usually trying to argue what ship can and can't do based on worthless WEG Sourcebooks.

The thing I keep in mind is, at the end of the day, the books were largely created for Plucky Rebels to defeat 'Virtually' impossible odds. To do this the Empire is always simultaneously, Unstoppably powerful and Idiotically Stupid.
Their tanks are SUPER POWERFUL! But have this ONE little hatch in the back that if you hit it, the whole thing explodes.
They have a SUPER DEADLY ship that can destroy any fighters! But because of "Reasons" the Empire only made one which your heroes must destroy!
And of course, STAR DESTROYERS! They have SIXTY THOUSAND Soldiers all hungry for war! They can Occupy a whole planet! They can go for YEARS and never need to resupply cause they are THAT super awesome and powerful! But don't worry Rebels!
They are also built with 100,000 design flaws! And super wasteful! They just throw everything away! And you can just fly into this opening in the back and bypass ALLL Their security!

[ENDS RANT]
Sorry, I played the WEG Games back in the day, and as an Imperial got a pretty big Chip on my shoulder from how slanted everything was.
Long and short. When it comes to THIS set up, I really don't want to wast time on the tiny bits of what certain things MIGHT do. I am using what I KNOW I Have, which is chiefly finding an EXO planet that can support life, make sure it is free of any horrible world ending viruses, and setting up shop comfortable before dealing with Earth.

[KraytKing]

Those sound like flaws with your DM. The way the sourcebooks are written and the manner in which the original books is written, both portray Star Destroyers as unbeatable killing machines, the kind that takes the full focused resources of a planet to fight off, let alone destroy. I don't recall ever seeing any of those three books describe some sort of massive weakness with the Star Destroyers, not like with the Death Star, and given that I recited all those examples in my previous post from memory, I think my recall is pretty damn good (Naturally, if you have a counterexample, I'll concede). The one time I killed a Star Destroyer in any of my campaigns was when I fired a fucking star at it, and I ended up frying the planet we were trying to protect in the process.

I won't say WEG was complete or self-consistent, not even in the early books. But it was pretty good at not being downright stupid, the way you seem to describe.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

WoTC improved on the WEG material, so it wasn't quite as ridiculous. Even then, you had to have assault frigates or Mon Cal cruisers to have a hope in hell's chance of defeating an ISD I or II.

[Tribble]

First order of business: although the crew's decision to promote me to Emperor was a generous one, I would decline and remind them of their allegiance to the true Emperor and Empire. This way should reinforcements one day show up I'm not going to the first one on the firing line.

Second order of business: seizing control of this pitiful planet while using the minimum amount of resources (on my end) needed. And by that, I mean eventually taking total control for the glory of the Empire, not setting up Earth as some kind of happy-go-lucky utopian world democracy or something. Since these are likely the only humans in the universe, my long term goal is to mould Earth into the industrial-military complex needed to star seeding / conquering the stars. The fact that these people have existed in this level of squalor for so long is sickening even to may battle-heartened troops. No world government? No droids? No FTL? Slaves in my universe literally have better access to resources then these poor fools! They need the Empire, whether they like it or not. And I'm going to give it to them!

While other hypothetical leaders have contemplated things like kidnapping and/or killing world leaders, destroying valuable military assets, or cowardly retreating in spite of an easy conquest I am going to start off with a different approach, namely carrot and stick.

Take the USA for example. Fun as it may be to rush a tie fighter over to Air Force One and blow it out of the sky, or hit the White House with a turbolaser, why bother? The USA is already well on the way to the kind of totalitarian government that I would find useful, and it has a president (not to mention a significant portion of the population) that would no doubt wholeheartedly agree with my aims! May as well put them to use and have them purge the opposition, with the aid of the occasional turbolaser if needed.


Ditto for most other countries really, begin the build up of the industrial / technological / military complex needed for my war machine in areas which agree, Turbolaser those that don't. No need to land my precious troops since there will be more than enough dictators/ governments to support me already on the ground. Or there certainly will be after any opposing areas turn into a pile of ash.

Since this universe is aware of a "Star Wars" universe, propoganda may play an intersting role. I'd point out that the Star Wars universe exists more or less as described, except that the idea of the "heroes winning" is little more than Rebel propaganda. After all, I'm the one here with a Star Destroyer, not Luke or Leia. No, as far as the people of Earth are concerned all resistance in he SW has been crushed and I'm here to kickstart the Empire's glorious expansion into this galaxy, a new golden age which will make previous Earth accomplishments look like nothing in comparison.


Meanwhile I'll send scouts out to see if their are any viable resources that could be harvested, with Hypermatter being top priority.

Not sure what I would do in the (very unlikely) event I happen to run into another intelligent species; I guess my response would heavily depend on their tech level relative to mine. If they are FTL capable per the rules of this OP it would almost certainly have to be due to hyper-matter, and I may have to jump over there to trade / conquer them as well.

[Jub]

First things first, this scenario makes us untouchable. We have a superweapon, utterly loyal and competent soldiers and officers, supplies for at least 6 years and the means to create a base of operations virtually anywhere we like. Our sublight speed alone is miles better than anything NASA could dream of and hyperdrive makes surveying our entire local cluster and beyond trivial. Medical technology means I could easily live to my 200s most of it in amazing health and I could possibly even go fully immortal if the only thing stopping it is cultural taboos. This means I have effectively as much time as I could ever want or need to change the Earth for whatever I think is the better.

It also means I'll probably spend years in planning with my officers just setting up our new home wherever our probe droids and scout vessels suggest is a good spot. During this time I'd also bring my men up to speed on how things are back on Earth and ask for advice on how to improve things, what technologies we can reasonably expect to help them advance with, etc. It'll all likely come with a massively Imperial slant, but that's fine as long as it's honest and given their total loyalty I should be able to order them to speak honestly. I'll also have them fill me in properly on how things work, what our exact capabilities are, and what if any knowledge they have as to how they got here and why they are inexplicably loyal to me.

So my plan is basically to use my new resources to make a better plan than I ever could alone while setting up at least one permanent home base on another world around another star.