Planetoids attack the Empire ...

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2002-09-23 11:58am

The Emperor has made a grave mistake. By some act of Q, a Planetoid crossing the SW galaxy was intercepted by a Death Star and destroyed. The Emperor, however, failed to account for the other 2,000 Planetoids that were passing through Imperial Space, and now they are after revenge for their lost ship.

The Planetoids are spread equally over the Imperial Galaxy. They may rendevouz to fight if need be, but single-planetoid fleets are prefered.

Can the Empire repel these 2,000 ships, or do the Planetoids gain their revenge by destroying the entire Imperial Fleet?

Imperial Fleets:

1 Death Star
1 Sun Crusher
1 ESSD
2 SSSD
5 SSD
25000 ISD II
Hundreds of thousands of smaller crafts.

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2002-09-23 12:00pm

I'm guessing these are Dahakverse planetoids. What class are they? Asgerd? Imperial Terra?

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2002-09-23 12:39pm

Hmm ... Utu class.

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2002-09-23 12:40pm

Actually lets add some varierty. 990 Utu, 1000 Asgerd and 10 Imperial Terra.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-09-23 12:54pm

The Empire bits the big one. Nothing they have can stop a planetoid. A few hypermissle will destroy all of the ships mentioned with a single hit. The Empire will run out a warships before the planetoids run out of ammo. And with all the shielding concentrated in one band they'll be impeneterable to anything less than a superlaser. And none of superlaser platforms are numerous to overwhelm the planetoid.

And once a planetoid gets a hold of a hyperdrive it'll be all over for the Empire. They have the engineering capacity to reverse engineer the hyper drives. Once you get that the Imprium forces will be able to deliver overwhelming force to any part of the galaxy.

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2002-09-23 01:51pm

Hmmm. Let's say that an Utu is equivalent to...one thousand ISDs, an Asgerd is ~ 20 times more powerful than an Utu, and an IT is twice as powerful as an Asgerd. Their hypermissiles should have a range of 40 lightminutes against ships the size of an ISD and further for the larger ships. The hypermissiles can emerge inside another mass, and the Empire has no defense against them, so the planetoids should be able to get one-shot kills. Considering how closely we see Imperial ships bunch up, several could be destroyed with a single gravitonic warhead. One of their biggest advantages is sublight speed. They have effectively inertialess drives capable of reaching .6 c (Utu) and .7 c (Asgerd and IT) in ~ 11 seconds. Their biggest problem would be FTL: Utus top out at 720 c with their Enchanach drives: Imperial Terras can reach 850 c with their Enchanachs and 3200 c in hyper. I don't have any solid numbers on Asgerd speed, but we can assume they are roughly equivalent to ITs in that regard. However, Enchanach drives can be used for tactical maneuvers, can supernova a star if activated in large numbers close to said star, and can serve as Interdictors.

Going by this, an Utu should be able to hold it's own against virtually any fleet the Empire can amass, and a single Imperial Terra should be able to defeat every ISD in existance in just one or two salvoes. Unless the Empire sends all it's ships at them, it would take them years to destroy them all. Now, if they manage to outfit their sublight parasites with SW hyperdrives...

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2002-09-23 03:19pm

Don't ISD's have 60TT low end shielding though?

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2002-09-23 03:26pm

ALI_G wrote:Don't ISD's have 60TT low end shielding though?

Maybe. But what good would it do against weapons which can bypass them?

HRogge · Post by **HRogge** » 2002-09-23 03:46pm

ALI_G wrote:Don't ISD's have 60TT low end shielding though?

The problem with the ships of the 4th/5th Imperium is that they use "cheats"...

they have hypermissiles which strike a ship from hyperspace. If you don't have specific shields to block 50+ dimensions of hyperspace they will just pop into existance INSIDE your ship/shield/armor.

They use graviton warheads which produce a nice shortllived black hole to kill the ship. The largest warhead has a total destruction radius ( spelled event horizon ) of 400000 km and can make a sun go nova !

And finally they have hyper-weapons... which don't damage their target but just project it ( or parts of it ) into hyperspace and leave it their. A very unhealthy thing without the protection of a drive field. ( they have both ship sized and personal weapon sized hyper weapons... even hyper-grenades. )

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-09-23 05:16pm

You forgot their "energy weapons." They mount gravitonic disruptors, they tear the targets apart at the moleculer (Utu) or atomic (Asgard, Imperial Terra) level. They work by creating a gravitation shear of black hole level.

HRogge · Post by **HRogge** » 2002-09-23 05:29pm

Stormbringer wrote:You forgot their "energy weapons." They mount gravitonic disruptors, they tear the targets apart at the moleculer (Utu) or atomic (Asgard, Imperial Terra) level. They work by creating a gravitation shear of black hole level.

And maybe we should mention that their point defense range is more than 10 lightseconds for an Utu class... against missiles with an inertialess engine and 70% c speed ! So their weapons are FTL too !

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2002-09-23 06:42pm

Maybe we should also mention that the civilian built quarantine system above Pardal was capable of tracking and hitting the sublight battleship Israel with hypermissiles from 40 lightminutes away, while it was maneuvering at .7 c.

SylasGaunt · Post by **SylasGaunt** » 2002-09-23 10:58pm

Or maybe that when they first found the 4th E they estimated that using the tech they'd seen (which was a civilian attempt to make a military weapon) a planetoid the same size as Dahak would have over 20 times his combat ability.

Now think of how strong the actual military tech would be.

Now think of how an Asgerd is 20% more massive than an Utu (and less of its room is taken up by FTL systems).

You also forgot to mention that every one of those planetoid carries a fleet of sublight ships inside it with the same kind of weapons (a battleship from an Utu class had gravitonic disruptors that were capable of shredding more than a kilometer of starship in a single hit.. and weapon power/size scales up, and that's ignoring how much better the weapons on the 4th and 5th Empire's planetoids are gonna be).

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-09-23 11:51pm

SylasGaunt wrote:5th Empire's planetoids

There is no Fifth Empire, there is only the Fifth Imperium.

Colin decided to call it the Imperium even though it would techincally be an empire. It's more of a traditional name than fact. Ther have in fact been quite a few more than five Imperiums but it's become a symbol of human unity more than anything.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2002-09-24 01:06am

The Galactic Empire is very fucked.

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2002-09-24 01:28am

Sea Skimmer wrote:The Galactic Empire is very fucked.

Slowly and painfully.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2002-09-24 01:49am

XaLEv wrote:
Sea Skimmer wrote:The Galactic Empire is very fucked.
Slowly and painfully.

Up the ass with a rusty chainsaw

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2002-09-24 03:27am

AGGGGHHH!!!!. A planetoid can destroy any conceivable fleet?!?!?
A planetoid would run out of ammunition before destroting the sort of fleet the Empire could field if it felt threatened.
A commonly agreed upon trait of vs. arguments is that reverse engineering of enemy technology should be impossible in the scale of the argument, are we just going to throw that out the window when it comes to the dahakverse?
Fact: Imperial materials technology is vastly inferior to Star Wars, shown in the favt that 10 gigaton warheads carved 20 kilometer craters in planetoid hulls, while Star Wars ships have taken far greater magnitudes of fire to unshielded hulls smaller in size than the aforementioned craters, without the complete destruction of the affected hull.
Fact: Star Wars has shown the capability to act within close distance of full scale permanent black holes, with no ill effects.
Fact: Star Wars shield technology has taken collisions from mile long ships coming out of their hyperspace, without damage to the vessel hit.
Opinion: there is no reason to believe that Star Wars shields will be completely ineffective against hyper missile fire, and signifigant reason to believe it is capable of stopping planetoid energy weapon firepower. That is, unless you consider the destuction of 60 km of Deathdealer, constructed with the aforementioned inferior materials technology, to be a much greater release of energy than 100 gigatons, which is not supported by the available evidence.
Fact: The planetoids will have no idea of where to attack, and will have to perform signifigant reconnaissance before even knowing where to hit.
Fact: Dahakverse shield technology has been shown to be inferior to Star Wars technology in one important respect; they are incapable of generating hull-conforming shields, and are forced to project a bubble some distance away from the hull.
The empire would still be fucked by the tactical manuevrability and speed of planetoids, but the long term campaign wouldn't be nearly as one sided as you are suggesting.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-09-24 07:34am

consequences wrote:AGGGGHHH!!!!. A planetoid can destroy any conceivable fleet?!?!?
A planetoid would run out of ammunition before destroting the sort of fleet the Empire could field if it felt threatened.

You do no that a planetoid carried hundreds of thousnds a missles and is capable of building more. If the Empire is forced to send several thousand ships per planetiod they'll loose, there are more planetoids than there would be fleets of that size. And a if the have the unmaned uber-warhead equipped they won't kill just a ship per shot, they'll kill a fleet per shot.

consequences wrote:A commonly agreed upon trait of vs. arguments is that reverse engineering of enemy technology should be impossible in the scale of the argument, are we just going to throw that out the window when it comes to the dahakverse?

I don't know that reverse engineering is ruled out. It's just in a lot of cases where it's debated the opponents are so far apart technologically they couldn't reverse engineer anything in a reasonable amount of time. I feel in this case that it would indeed be possible to capture and eventually reverse engineer a hyperdrive. Or much more easily, capture some Imp engineers of an ISD and have them do it. It's not impossible.

consequences wrote:Fact: Imperial materials technology is vastly inferior to Star Wars, shown in the favt that 10 gigaton warheads carved 20 kilometer craters in planetoid hulls, while Star Wars ships have taken far greater magnitudes of fire to unshielded hulls smaller in size than the aforementioned craters, without the complete destruction of the affected hull.

Yes, they have. I'll concede that Star Wars ships are better armored. However I don't think it carved a 20 km sphere out of Dahak. I believe it cratered the surface and failed to make much of a deep penertration. But I do see your point. However, in the Imperium-verse big thick armor is simply less of a priority due to things like hypermissiles. Plus they probably kept the weight of armor down to minimize gravitational disturbances to planets they were orbitting.

consequences wrote:Fact: Star Wars has shown the capability to act within close distance of full scale permanent black holes, with no ill effects.

But not within them. So what I ask is the point? A gravitonic warhead would still suck in everything within the event horizon of it's black hole.

consequences wrote:Fact: Star Wars shield technology has taken collisions from mile long ships coming out of their hyperspace, without damage to the vessel hit.

So? Sure, Wars has very impressive shield technology. Fortunately for the Imperium it's weapons could get around them.

consequences wrote:Opinion: there is no reason to believe that Star Wars shields will be completely ineffective against hyper missile fire, and signifigant reason to believe it is capable of stopping planetoid energy weapon firepower. That is, unless you consider the destuction of 60 km of Deathdealer, constructed with the aforementioned inferior materials technology, to be a much greater release of energy than 100 gigatons, which is not supported by the available evidence.

In the single band they cover, Wars shields would probably stop a hypermissle. However that still leaves the fifty plus other bands open. There is zero evidence that they protect all of those other bands. And a black hole a few meters off a ship is sufficient to damage or kill it, as has been shown with the Vong's fake "black holes."

Why don't have anything more than the low end numbers for Planetoid weaponary. Given they more or less obliterated the Acualtani fleet with a single salvo its entirely possible they can match wars firepower. To give an example Dahak could not attack Anu directly because he would have more or less BDZed Earth getting through his shields.

And planetiods are capables of engaging at ranges much greater than we've ever seen Wars ships fight at. They may (I don't concede that point) have lesser energy weapons but they have much greater ranges. All they have do is hold the range open and the Wars ships simply can't return fire.

consequences wrote:Fact: The planetoids will have no idea of where to attack, and will have to perform signifigant reconnaissance before even knowing where to hit.

That would be the case for anyone that was suddenly displaced. It's no real hinderance. The interogation of prisoners and capture of a ship should provide adaquete data for the beginnings of an invasion.

consequences wrote:Fact: Dahakverse shield technology has been shown to be inferior to Star Wars technology in one important respect; they are incapable of generating hull-conforming shields, and are forced to project a bubble some distance away from the hull.

No, they have to project them a distance from the hull. A hypermissle that detonates rightt next to the hull would cause damage even with a hull hugging shield. The gravitational effects go through their shields. They have to interdict the missles farther away than that or be destroyed.

consequences wrote:The empire would still be fucked by the tactical manuevrability and speed of planetoids, but the long term campaign wouldn't be nearly as one sided as you are suggesting.

They are indeed grim for the Empire. A planetoid is superior in most respects to Imperial ships. Against a force like that the Empire the can't win with the tech provided.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2002-09-24 08:58am

HRogge wrote:And finally they have hyper-weapons... which don't damage their target but just project it ( or parts of it ) into hyperspace and leave it their. A very unhealthy thing without the protection of a drive field.

That is soo like the SW universes hyperspace, they seem to correlate very closely in function

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2002-09-24 09:10am

consequences wrote:A planetoid would run out of ammunition before destroting the sort of fleet the Empire could field if it felt threatened.

A single planetoid yes, probably even all of the planetoids, but they also got energy weapons and the range of those is far beyond SW range too.

Fact: Imperial materials technology is vastly inferior to Star Wars, shown in the favt that 10 gigaton warheads carved 20 kilometer craters in planetoid hulls, while Star Wars ships have taken far greater magnitudes of fire to unshielded hulls smaller in size than the aforementioned craters, without the complete destruction of the affected hull.

It hardly matters if hyper-guns transport it into hyperspace and a 10GT missile explodes inside the ship.

Fact: Star Wars has shown the capability to act within close distance of full scale permanent black holes, with no ill effects.

That is true, but that requires them to know about it and use their IC's to compensate, plus we dunno if it can take the immediate sheer force or if it requires time to adjust against it.
Unknown I think, but I don't think they can take the immediate sheer force that will occur.

Fact: Star Wars shield technology has taken collisions from mile long ships coming out of their hyperspace, without damage to the vessel hit.

They come out of hyperspace inside the shield, though maybe not in this case, because SW shields are hullhugging, not spherical like the Empires, this is the best point, and it might make hypermissiles alot less effective, the same was true for the Aku'ultan ships, they had somewhat hullhugging ships, this made hypermissiles much much less likely to re-enter inside the shield, now SW shields are incredily hullhugging in comparison, this would help them a great deal, though not enough for them to actually win I think.

Though the odds are still against the Empire, ALOT, and I don't think they can take out 2000 planetoids, I would give them a chance to take out one planetoid with a bit of luck.

The Empire got lots of raw power, but the 4th Imperium has the ability to use it's power alot more effectively and in this case to a degree that makes them a helluva lot more dangerous than their SW opponents.

Ubiquitous · Post by **Ubiquitous** » 2002-09-24 12:31pm

So the Empire doesn't even have a chance? What about if the Empire uses it's 'millions' of support craft, can't they do anything? Most of them have 200GT?

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-09-24 01:03pm

ALI_G wrote:So the Empire doesn't even have a chance? What about if the Empire uses it's 'millions' of support craft, can't they do anything? Most of them have 200GT?

No, the Empire has no realistic chance. Even if they deploy millions of support craft most are simply too small to actually hurt a planetoid. And most don't have 200GT turbolasers. And those that have them will be destroyed long before they can get in range. All the firepower in the world won't matter if you can't bring it to bear.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2002-09-24 01:18pm

IF the empire can bring enough forces(like hundreds of thousands of ships) to attack a single planetoid and be able to jump within weapons range they could do it, if the Planetoid could not maneuver away.

I've seen that there are some techs that could be tied in with SW tech that could really help them, like intertialess drives and hypermissiles, or just the tech to get their ordinance in and out of hyperspace.

I believe hypershielding is not such a big point since SW shields are so very close to the hull, ofcourse that does not hold for planetary shields.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-09-24 01:22pm

His Divine Shadow wrote:IF the empire can bring enough forces(like hundreds of thousands of ships) to attack a single planetoid and be able to jump within weapons range they could do it, if the Planetoid could not maneuver away.

Simply plow through them with an Enachman drive. It'll smash all of them too close and let the planetoid go free.