/sw/ - Star Wars

>>31569

>Bombers

<Realism

There would be even fewer bombers than fighters in a realistic space war. Nobody wants to pay for a slow-ass bomber that's going to get destroyed by any competent opponent with anti-fighter measures long before it reaches the target. The gunboats are the closest thing to a bomber that would ever see any real use.

<Coolness

I actually like the Naboo Bomber from Battle for Naboo for its trademark Naboo aesthetic. No bombers jump out at me besides that.

>Ace

Anakin is probably the best flying ace all told. Of those without the Force to aid them, the best pilot with the largest variety of craft who isn't known to have any Force powers is the aptly-named Ace Azzameen.

>Capital ship

Star Destroyers, because their shape has excellent heat dissipation and good focus fire characteristics as mentioned above. But the ships of the naval forces of the Star Wars universe and many other works of science fiction are excessively large. Anything larger than an Acclamator would probably never see the light of day. Mon Calamari ships from the movies are designed with the inferior emphasis on broadsides, though they were converted from luxury liners and not purpose-built warships. Later ships from the Mon Calamari which were designed for war, like the MC90, have almost a cone-like design that gives much the same effect plus the "living ship" appearance I like. The MC80B has an amazingly slick flying wing design that mimics a manta ray, which is unique among Mon Calamari ships and also allows for good firing arcs. These are also the coolest capital ships because they look sweet.

>Fleet

No fleets in the Star Wars universe are depicted realistically, so I have to give it to the New Republic/Galactic Alliance for using both the Mon Calamari cruisers and Star Destroyers.

>Company

Cygnus Spaceworks for building the Assault Gunboat and Missile Boat.

>>31570

>Other

I wonder if it would be good to have a gunship category for ships like the LAAT which can bring the hammer down on most things smaller than capitals and outrun anything it can't outfight, and maybe take the big ships on in groups. The LAAT is the Star Wars version of a Hind. But there aren't that many ships of this class. There's also another issue here. The depictions of a space war in most science fiction stories really don't give planetary shields and planetary defense guns enough credit. Major planets would have so many planetary guns far stronger than anything that could fit on any ship short of a Death Star that no fleet could ever hope to assault the planet unless it had the combined resources of hundreds or thousands of other worlds. The only reason to have a space navy is to take over space stations that don't have a planet's worth of foodstuffs to wait out a siege and all the land they want to build planetary defense installations. The only way to realistically attack a planet is by doing what Admiral Holdo did in TLJ and launching cruisers at the planet at super-lightspeed. Much like most of the other things in nu-Wars, this was already a part of the old EU in some form. Holdo's tactic resembles the Galaxy Gun, except for the very important difference that using the Galaxy Gun didn't rob its side of its last major space asset.

>>29185

My person of African-Corellian descent.

That ended up as a really long triple post. I hope I got everything.

Oh wait, I missed a thing I was supposed to say after all. I was going to say to anyone who wants to write a somewhat realistic story set in the Star Wars universe that the best way to avoid having to deal with the problem of set piece battles between space fleets not being realistic is to just discard them and have over 9000 more lightsaber duels or come up with an excuse that allows you to believably shift the military landscape in whatever direction you want.

>>31573

Focusing on a planetary battle is possible if we're talking sane tactics realistic. Worth noting one of the Living Force modules (Hunting the Wyrd I think. It was one of the Wyrd modules.) makes explicit bombers are accurate enough to avoid hitting a central command building with hostages while razing everything else if requested and given data on it, while one of the Saga Edition books (Galaxy at War) mentions orbital bombardment is very inaccurate.

fug, i can never make solid decisions on these types of things since they all look cool as fuck.

>fighter

interceptor, v-19, jedi starfighter

>bomber

idk, i don't care much for this class

>ace

has to be wedge or anakin

>capital ship

probably isd

>fleet

the sith empire

>company

kuat or tie

>>31604

>holdo potentially had a point under any scenario

I'm really not a very big fan of the idea of Holdo being right myself, but it seems to agree with the consensus on the matter from those who have experience studying hard sci-fi worldbuilding, regardless of its deleterious effect on the established SW setting. One of the worst things about dealing with SJWs is that they have a squad of soyboy sycophants with actual scientific knowledge and technical skills doing their dirty work. Remember that TLJ incorporated Newtonian physics into space battles for the first time in SW history. The greater community of hard sci-fi space warfare discussion has a surplus of people who have backgrounds in academia. This is why the community has always been full of the worst kind of RationalWiki-reading SJW cancer. I may be off base on this, but I think the goal of having Holdo use the Rebels' last heavy cruiser as a missile is an attempt by one of these people who consulted with the production team to make their headcanon real without any regard for how it affects anyone else trying to work in the setting. Even if this conspiratorial outlook isn't true, they still have an event which lines up remarkably with this community's views.

This isn't to say that there aren't people who have different views on how realistic space combat would work, but the missile mafia seems to have a firm grip on the discussion and has for quite a few years now, and they actually have some good points. The problem with it is that the obsession with making everything into what they view as realistic can eliminate fun and embarrass them if reality turns out not to be what they think it is. I think we should have a discussion of how to give SW space combat a bit more realism without discarding its essence.

>>31666

>satanic trips cursing the attempt at semi-hard SF space battles

Well fuck. I really have no idea how to go about this anyway, though.

>>31679

Yes. The Lego one is literally less of a brick.

>>31666

>TLJ is the first sw movie to have somewhat realistic physics

>torpedo lasers magically arc as if gravity were there to push them down

yeah nah fuck outta here, these are all armchair scientists you're talking about, the kind of faggot who writes about their degree on social media and never backs it up with any evidence. all that shit is theoretical, nothing proven. it's the same kind of retard that thinks interstellar was realistic, despite literally the only feasible thing they had was the ice cloud planet. these are the same morons that decided to put a star destroyer in a planet's atmosphere, or that a tie fighter could land on its wings and fly around on a planet no problem (inb4 bespin). the first six films had far more realistic space battles, everyone just gave them shit because you had sounds and explosions as opposed to a silent and less-flashy battle, despite never even being sold on realism (oy vey god forbid someone use the rule of cool to entertain the audience for a bit). this is something in general the nu-wars films do btw. they pride themselves on being more realistic but in fact are further away from reality.

>>31677

Benis wing

>>31678

The Torrent's always been a cheap ugly ass ship anyway. The V-Wing and ARC-170 couldn't enter service soon enough.

>>32588

>calamari turd

Blech

>>31666

>Remember that TLJ incorporated Newtonian physics into space battles for the first time in SW history.

Literally what nigger?

https://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/04/permanent-and-perfect-stealth-in-space.html

This blog is from an individual who's been making posts over the last few years questioning a lot of the classic rules of hard SF space warfare. The biggest rule that they tell people when they first get interested in the subject is that stealth in space is impossible. We should note for the purposes of this board the existence of stealth starfighters such as the StealthX X-wings as well as cloaking devices. Cloaking devices are so costly and bulky that they're traditionally only installed on capital ships. But I'm surprised that we didn't see more of them in the later eras with the advent of more advanced and compact cloaking devices.

>>31619

>they pride themselves on being more realistic but in fact are further away from reality.

This is basically the MO of most popular "nerd" media in 2007 and later.

>>32590

Yeah, the scene with the X-wing turning to face the opposite direction while continuing on course.

>>32607

>No matter how many times he explained that the giant robots were the central conceit of the setting…all he ever got was people bitching that giant robots are unrealistic and that he should just use tanks instead.

I'm familiar with this brand of faggotry. This isn't even the case anymore with Ghost in the Shell's spider tanks, which have been around long enough that people really should have reconsidered their views by now. It's not that difficult to think of scenarios where traditional tanks fare worse than something from GitS would. Anti-tank mines, tank traps and uneven terrain are the worst enemies of a treads-only tank and are very easy to create while being much less threatening to a spider tank. But these worldbuilders just blanket dismiss an entire concept without even trying to figure out a situation where it can work.

>>31698

>This is basically the MO of most popular "nerd" media in 2007 and later.

This was meant as a response to this post, but I'm having an acute case of sleep cycle disruption and can't into quoting the correct post or even the correct thread.

>>32618

> But I'm surprised that we didn't see more of them in the later eras with the advent of more advanced and compact cloaking devices.

You have to remember that tech progression in Star Wars is glacial. They actually had more cloaking devices available in the early days of the Old Republic, on account of stygium being more readily available, but the supply dwindled over the years on account of only being found on one planet. By the Empire era, only the "double blind" cloaking devices that Thrawn uses are readily available.

>>32729

This is a problem for a more realistic approach because stealth features on fighters are the best way to reduce detection distances and therefore reduce engagement distances until they resemble the space battles we're shown in the movies instead of being dominated by missile exchanges at light-minutes apart. Countermeasures like decoys and point defense have also been used effectively against missiles. But stealth comes at a price. Stealth craft must relinquish most of their weapons to reduce their profile. Most vehicles also require you to focus on either speed or agility and not both as is commonly depicted. Clawcraft/TIE defenders are better suited to the gunship role despite their maneuverability because their large profile makes them easier to both hit and detect but also allows them to mount many weapons. That only leaves the StealthX and a few others as potential fighters. Even if you had a cloaking device small enough to fit on a fighter, it would probably still take the majority of the fighter's power to operate, which further narrows the list.

I also thought about the possibility of creating a dedicated electronic warfare starfighter, maybe another variant of the X-wing, since there are no canon EW craft as far as I know. Some Imperial fighters such as the advanced TIEs, Assault Gunboat and Missile Boat can be equipped with jamming beams, and the Rebels have the scanner-jammer ground vehicle, but that's just about it, which is sparse for such an important function. Jamming is another way to lower detection distances, but jamming alerts the enemy that something's up even if they don't know exactly what it is. Slicing enemy computers also gives a huge advantage that can't be overlooked. EW ships would wreak havoc against droid ships through both jamming and computer intrusion, and can do the same to manned ships to a lesser extent. EW is the only reason anyone should have a fighter piloted by an organic unless they have the Force or some other form of supernormal enhancement, and even then, you can make the best use of their talents elsewhere. Fighters are meant as a supportive measure for capital ships, and EW is the best way for them to punch above their weight class in an environment full of AI-controlled ships and anti-fighter defenses that should by all rights have rendered manned fighters obsolete millennia ago. Stealth may overlap with EW somewhat, but EW equipment has a none-too-cheap weight cost and raises the ship's profile.

Something weird that just occurred to me is that tractor beams reduce missile hit rates to almost nothing if deployed in sufficient amounts, which would actually explain why ships predominantly use energy weapons and be another contributor towards short combat ranges because energy weapons are most useful at short range. Telekinesis can also get rid of projectile-related problems, but both TK and tractor beams can still fail against a very high-speed projectile launched at close enough range. I posted briefly about using railguns against lightsaber users in the lightsaber thread, which seems to contradict this at first glance, but combat ranges for ground troops are much shorter than in space. Very few groups or individuals have ever taken advantage of this vulnerability, though. This is probably due to cost reasons.

In a setting with more realism, kinetic weapons would have more power than energy weapons but would obviously have lower ammo supplies unless you have replicators. Even if you have replicators, you still have the problem of that pesky mass-energy equivalence formula making it massively inefficient to use them this way. Any ship that has mostly kinetic weapons would need to win any battle quickly to avoid running out of ammo, but they have the raw damage output to make it happen. Fighters would never have kinetics in any setting advanced enough to use something else because weight and space are at a premium on smaller ships. Only capital ships have the mass budget to afford the use of kinetics. Fighters can replace the main cannons with destructive ion pulse cannons to eliminate the need for separate ion cannons and use the weight savings from getting rid of missiles on better shields, bigger engines, or EW.

>>33372

They don't use projectile weapons mainly due to endurance and storage. You may fuck up one target but will not have anything left over for the next few targets. Also when you got ships like the Dreadnaught requiring crew compliments in the excess of 16,000 where the fuck are you going to store the ammo? Are the men going to wear the ammunition as hats?

>>33372

Well, there is the exception of the Missile Boat for fighters using kinetics. But the boat has to be substantially retooled in an environment with persistent EW, credible point defense and an excess of tractor beams. The boat could replace its missile bays with railguns or some similar weapon. Performing the same replacement of the cannons described above will help the boat out a great deal as well. You could even have Verpine shatter guns instead of railguns or coilguns to make it feel more whiz-bang awesome like the classic sci-fi stories and less "we hard sf now please take us seriously San Fran movie critics!" You can also make up for the loss of missiles on most fighters by employing the Bryar pistol's charge-up function on the cannons. The exception to the no-missile rule is that EW missiles are a thing now in real warfare. Ion pulse warheads were used by some fighters, but never missiles with a full EW setup built in. You can probably just replace the EW fighter idea with EW missiles, but EW missiles have the same vulnerability to anti-missile measures as any other missile.

>>33374

A battle against an enemy fleet large enough to run out a kinetics-using warship's ammo supplies will probably end with your death no matter what your ship has. Finding yourself against such an overpowering enemy fleet would mean a smart captain wouldn't engage to begin with. The only exception for this would be a last stand defensive action. You can't just go out looking for a fight and expect to win. You have to have an idea of what tactical doctrine your ship is best with before committing to a battle. Warships that exclusively have energy weapons are better for long-term defense and general use because of their greater endurance. Warships using kinetics have a better chance of being useful in ambushes or assaults on heavily fortified enemy locations intended to capture the location. IIRC the shatter gun is tractor beam tech repurposed to launch projectiles, meaning they have the ability to launch anything including the crew's hats at deadly speeds, so they can steal wreckage from destroyed enemy ships to launch at the next target.

>>33552

Tank fetishization probably comes from wannabe armchair generals who think they're being "scientific" by taking something that works in the contemporary era and throwing it into sci-fi. With that being said, allow me to play faggot's advocate for a moment. Sure, treads are also vulnerable to attack, but they present a much smaller, lower profile target to an attacker. What's more, it's much easier to field-repair a broken tread than it is a broken leg. Obviously it will still slow you down, but if a track snaps or falls off the wheels it can be put back on with tools that are already aboard the tank. But if a leg gets severed anywhere along its length the vehicle is immobilized. Legged vehicles can be exceedingly useful, especially in rougher terrain that would stop a tank in its tracks, and I don't mean to diminish that in any way. The AT-TE is a great example of a well-executed legged vehicle. However, the thing that irks me is that Hoth is one of the best environments to use treaded/wheeled vehicles over legged. The terrain advantage of legs doesn't really help over swaths of smooth icescapes. Without any hills, buildings, or treetops to look over the height doesn't confer all that much advantage either, while making the AT-AT much easier to target by the enemy.

>>33560

>I think the reason they deployed so many at Hoth, was because even though it would have been more practical to use repulsorlift tanks, the Empire didn't want to just crush the Rebellion strategically, but morally as well.

Without a doubt. As you say, the Tarkin Doctrine trumps expediency more often than not. Another reason why I wouldn't change the battle of Hoth despite it not being "realistic", as the Empire at the time was focusing on things besides pure tactics.

>>33557

I love the AAT, shame it doesn't really make an appearance in later movies. Clone Wars still gives it visibility.

Is OOM-9 surviving still canon?

>>33559

FoC expansion for Empire at War had repulsorlift jammers, which cause repulsorlift vehicles in its area of effect to beach and become immobilized. I believe EaW also has a planetary effect that makes repulsorlift completely useless I think it was a planets unstable gravity field. Coupled with the inability to pass through deflector shields you mentioned it pretty much means that their biggest advantage can quickly become their biggest weakness depending on the circumstances.

>>33561

>>33560

If you say the weather (which isn't consistent within the film itself, something the Rogue Squadron 2 commentary notes) prevents artillery fire (and orbital bombardment on the Imperial side) Hoth isn't actually that bad tactics wise for the Rebels. Since they're played by real reservists, they actually use basic ground tactics (cover ect.), there's air support/combined arms and, in every video game I remember, Echo Base is built into a valley surrounded by impassable mountains that funnel ground attackers into a single route.

>>33559

>the fact that multiple examples of wheeled and treaded tanks exist in-universe suggests there are legitimate reasons not to use repulsorlifts on a ground vehicle. Perhaps they're energy-intensive (especially when carrying heavy armor)

The Rebel attack tank from Force Commander is an example of a treaded vehicle that supports this theory. It's used alongside the Rebel hover tank and has significantly stronger armor, shielding and weapons than its much faster repulsorlift-equipped counterpart.

>redone in the name of realism

I worry about going overboard with this in all these walls of text I tend to post. I like a very detailed world that stands up under scrutiny and introduces new things so the fan authors have something fresh to use (if they ever actually decide to come back and finish their stuff). But this runs the risk of making the story about worldbuilding instead of about the characters if you get too obsessed with it, and creating something unrecognizable to the fans. Maybe realism is the wrong way to describe what the kind of tweaking I favor is going for. While it strives for enough realism to not insult the audience, it's less about strict realism and more about maximizing the potential of your lore by intelligently using what you already have regardless of whether it reflects what's currently considered realistic, and being consistent with it. I don't know what you'd call this.

>>33569

>fighter tank

Patrician. But discussion of the idiosyncrasies of ground vehicles probably needs its own thread unless we want to make this a general for all vehicles.

Anyone who has the overriding desire to see Admiral Tumblr sent back to cadet school should read this.

I was thinking of ways to recover some use for missiles since getting rid of them outright doesn't seem fitting. After all, both Death Stars were taken out by missiles. What I thought of went through everything from giving every fighter top and bottom turrets like YT-series freighters and making missiles even less useful to letting missiles be both EW-capable and highly damaging to cover for their flaws. Nothing was capable of making missiles the main part of an offensive again, though. Then I got the idea that we can afford the kind of missile swarms favored by the missile mafia by dispensing with large capital ships and using the resources saved to build masses of missiles equipped with hyperdrives, which will drop out of hyperspace too close to the target for point defenses to stop them.

But what does this have to do with Holdo? Her doctrine consisted of allahu akbaring with a heavy cruiser. But you can stop this with a method which is also useful for stopping a missile swarm. A similar method must have occurred to many people. It involves the use of interdictor ships. An Interdictor cruiser with the First Order fleet could have shut Holdo down, and could do the same to hyperspace-capable missiles. But the problem with this is that Interdictor cruisers are very rare even in the older material. This says that the Interdictor is disproportionately more expensive than anything else of its size, and Interdictor cruisers have poor armament and protection due to the power needs of their gravity well projector and are easily destroyed by enemies attempting escape or Holdo-style suicide attack. Dreadnoughts sometimes have enough room to fit a gravity well projector and still be powerful, and the FO had a dreadnought there which should have had a projector onboard, but you can't just make every ship a dreadnought. You need something with more scalability for flexible deployment. So instead of having a single interdictor, you should distribute the task of creating the gravity well by using smaller generators on every major ship in a fleet. Economies of scale will bring the cost down. Using this system of distributed mass shadow generation makes pulling a Holdo a total non-starter in any scenario. It also has the interesting side effect of making any sufficiently large fleet capable of duplicating Bao-Dur's mass shadow generator destructathon at Malachor V.

>>33570

>I don't know what you'd call this.

I call it "believability."

While realism describes how well something conforms to reality, I use believability to refer to how coherent and internally consistent a fiction is. If a setting has common sense internal logic and consistently applies it's own internal rules, I consider it believable. I greatly prefer this over realism.