stardestroyer.net forums

[Brian Young 11,994]

Enterprise fired an antimatter spread against the Borg cube in Best of Both Worlds part 2.

I can confirm that not many people have watched the video. I watch the website stats carefully. Traffic has been down significantly the past week, not up. That video was viewed something like 5 times this week IIRC.

S made an argument that if this was a viable tactic, there would be no capital ships. Well, the counter is if starfighters were not effective, there would be no starfighters. I pointed out in the video that starfighters take out unarmored targets, giving their mother ship an advantage in the battle. It's combined arms tactics, not all or none.

You know, it's not like the ship would just sit there while this happens. An ISD, for instance, has perhaps over a hundred guns, which would be firing on the small ship in question. Note the sloped sides allows concentrated fire at virtually any angle. And I seem to recall they have starfighters of their own. Recall Ahsoka told Anakin during a similar attack on Malevolence "Master, you can make it, but everyone else is getting shot down." Let's imagine a 5% success rate with such attacks, which seems reasonable to me. That explains why they carry and launch waves of starfighters, because it is required. On average, one fighter out of every two squadrons would get it done, given such numbers. Note the Rebels launched 30 fighters, and they took out a tower, a hidden turret, and the main target, but two of these involved use of the Force. So minus Luke, they took out a tower with 30 fighters.

So combined arms tactics are best, with fighters taking out shield generators, bridges, dishes, etc., giving the mother ship a decisive advantage. Pawns help the Queen.

Runabouts are not as fast or maneuverable as starfighters, neither do they have the firepower of Xwings (I can prove that), but they may be powerful enough to do the job. They can combat Jem'Hadar vessels.

And has no one argued that Starfleet could program their torpedoes to penetrate at the right velocity?

[Brian Young 11,994]

By the way, the attack on Malevolence did not involve a ship without sufficient time to raise shields.

The attack on the TradeFed ship in TPM didn't either. By the way, I'm about to solve the dish problem if I can talk long enough (allergies).

Neither involved friendly turbolaser fire, fighters alone. Note that Anakin and his pilots felt they could accomplish this mission. Plo Koon said it would be a daring raid and asked if they could do it. Anakin asked his troops. They offered an enthusiastic yes.

And don't forget Lando ordering to draw their fire away from the cruisers.

[scvn2812 504]

Two things, I didn't say fighters weren't viable only that if fighters alone were effective for battling ships, the tactics would have shifted to fighters being the major combatants instead of both ships and fighters operating together.

 

Secondly, how do we know how long it takes a capital ship to raise shields? In space they are largely invisible so we can only infer the presence of shields by the effects on ships and even that is iffy.

[Brian Young 11,994]

We don't know, but in both instances, it was minutes. If we suggest it takes longer than that, I've got a whole new weakness for you.

But really, note the Spider commander ordering shields up just a couple seconds before missile impact.

 

I've covered the "dish is still visible" thing, 3 minutes: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20522425/ScreenFlow1.mp4

[Afishymeadow 534]

 

"I like this thread.

 

It's exciting!"

[Captain Seafort 17]

Well, the counter is if starfighters were not effective, there would be no starfighters.

 

By that token either a) modern rifles are effective against tanks, or modern soldiers don't carry rifles. A more logical conclusion would be that fighters are used, ergo fighters must be able to do something useful. This might be reconnaissance, ground attack, destroying enemy reconnaissance ships, or something else.

 

I pointed out in the video that starfighters take out unarmored targets, giving their mother ship an advantage in the battle.

 

During the Clone Wars, possibly, depending on whether those fighters were able to go in before the shields went up. Against ISDs, I've repeatedly pointed out Ackbar's explicit statement that fighters might stand a chance against them if the capships knocked out their shields first. If fighters were capable of inflicting severe damage on enemy ships, as they did with the Ex, without such assistance.

 

I've covered the "dish is still visible" thing, 3 minutes: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/20522425/ScreenFlow1.mp4

 

404

[Afishymeadow 534]

Wing Wong == DOUCHE SUPREME!:

[scvn2812 504]

Brian: just caught the notion of reconfiguring torpedoes for the right velocity. This is a tricky idea that depends on figuring out what that velocity is and getting past the point defense. The main issue I see is that we don't really know how fast torpedoes can decelerate. If they can go from a hundred thousand kps or so to a few hundred meters per second in the span of a few seconds it might work but longer deceleration makes the torpedoes easier targets. Although that might explain the A Wings getting through Ex's shields at significant distance better than getting in the shield perimeter. It's one of a range of possibilities I see that don't have a decisive edge over other paradigms.

 

I'm a foot in Cap's camp in that I don't think all that is filmed of Endor is all that is happening. I think it makes as much sense that Ex was under attack in quarters we didn't see for an undefined period of time between Ackbar's orders and the strike on the bridge domes. She need not have taken obvious physical damage for her shields to be compromised. We've seen ships without shield effects take fire and not take obvious damage like Yoda's ship in that ambush.

 

The ground battle clearly has cuts where time passes. Why not the space battle? This isn't like Dooku bailing from Geonosis where you'd have to be nuts not to see its basically real time. There is ambiguity in the presentation of the ground and space battle.

[Khas 12,158]

Wing Wong == DOUCHE SUPREME!:

 

Got that right. I've had the misfortune of actually talking to him. He's a total prick.

[Afishymeadow 534]

Got that right. I've had the misfortune of actually talking to him. He's a total prick.

 

I'd love to sic on him.

[scvn2812 504]

Okay so maybe it would be useful to summarize some of the data and some of the points of discussion:

 

Facts:

 

Fighters are sometimes able to close very close to the hull of a ship or battlestation and inflict significant damage using just their guns and without using brute force to penetrate the shields (Death Star I, one interpretation of numerous Clone Wars examples)

 

Fighters are not able to do this consistently. Anakin was the only one who was able to fly through the shields at Naboo, some crashing fighters at Endor left lasting damage, others did not.

 

Physical objects such as battle droids apparently do not always trigger obvious shield effects when a fighter runs them over.

 

Inanimate objects like asteroids sometimes do but sometimes do not manage to connect with ships and cause damage.

 

Sometimes energy weapons appear to be in the process of being dispersed well away from the hull and significantly further away from where we observe most beam impacts to hit. (Tantive IV vs Devastator)

 

Feel free to add to this list, perhaps if we can lay out what we KNOW we can get closer to stitching together all the facts into a cohesive whole.

[Vince 520]

Sometimes the shield effect is far out enough to allow fighters under and sometimes its right up on the hull. Both of these effects occur within the same trilogy/movie and is not consistent, so I don't think amnyone should try to be absolute in position or come up with some all encompassing hypothesis. This debate has shown there's evidence for multiple theories on how shields work however for the purposes of cross over debates I don't think its unreasonable to work under the assumption that fighters can pass through shields, based on qauntity of evidence, even though multiple points of view/hypothesis can be derived from the same franchise.

[scvn2812 504]

Perhaps ships can reconfigure the properties and geometry of their shields based on the nature of the attack.

 

It may be impractical to protect a large area such as the entire ship with the equipment that a ship can practically carry against all forms of attack. Shields may be concentrated into a very narrow area tight against the hull to protect against a physical impact or spread out, further from the hull to disrupt lighter gunfire from multiple sources and allow more space for the beam to spread or for the detonation of a torpedo to spread out such that in either case, what reaches the hull is insignificant. Alternatively this may only describe ray shields and shields against physical impact are a separate system.

 

This seems like a logical synthesis of the different properties of shields that we've seen.

[Brian Young 11,994]

The ground battle clearly has cuts where time passes. Why not the space battle? This isn't like Dooku bailing from Geonosis where you'd have to be nuts not to see its basically real time. There is ambiguity in the presentation of the ground and space battle.

The battle has other things going on that dictate it is not a long duration, and in fact, likely realtime. Akbar ordered "We've got to give those fighters more time. Concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer." In other words, the very nature of the order was to improve the problem of limited time. The fighters that need more time are the ones already inside the Death Star, barreling down the pipes toward the main reactor at high speed. If we assume for whatever reason Executor was bombarded for an extended duration, we'd have to explain therefore why Lando and accompanying fighters took so long to find the target, why the TIE fighters pursuing them could not take them out, and how the overmatched Rebel fleet held out so long against the Imperial fleet, especially since the other 20 ships were no longer taking return fire from the Rebels.

Also, note that Executor should outweigh and outsize the entire combined Rebel fleet, perhaps by a few times. It was larger than the accompanying 20-something ISDs by a wide margin. It is 11 miles long, and several miles wide, perhaps 200 cubic miles. Many of the Rebel ships were corvettes, transports, etc. So, in my opinion, the suggestion this comparatively puny Rebel fleet overpowered Executor in such short order is more far fetched than the adequately demonstrated semi-permeable idea.

[Brian Young 11,994]

The ground battle clearly has cuts where time passes. Why not the space battle? This isn't like Dooku bailing from Geonosis where you'd have to be nuts not to see its basically real time. There is ambiguity in the presentation of the ground and space battle.

The battle has other things going on that dictate it is not a long duration, and in fact, likely realtime. Akbar ordered "We've got to give those fighters more time. Concentrate all fire on that Super Star Destroyer." In other words, the very nature of the order was to improve the problem of limited time. The fighters that need more time are the ones already inside the Death Star, barreling down the pipes toward the main reactor at high speed. If we assume for whatever reason Executor was bombarded for an extended duration, we'd have to explain therefore why Lando and accompanying fighters took so long to find the target, why the TIE fighters pursuing them could not take them out, and how the overmatched Rebel fleet held out so long against the Imperial fleet, especially since the other 20 ships were no longer taking return fire from the Rebels.

Also, note that Executor should outweigh and outsize the entire combined Rebel fleet, perhaps by a few times. It was larger than the accompanying 20-something ISDs by a wide margin. It is 11 miles long, and several miles wide, perhaps 200 cubic miles. Many of the Rebel ships were corvettes, transports, etc. So, in my opinion, the suggestion this comparatively puny Rebel fleet overpowered Executor in such short order is more far fetched than the adequately demonstrated semi-permeable idea.

[scvn2812 504]

For one I think you're seriously underestimating the Rebel fleet. The two remaining Home One types would be able to bring a couple dozen ISDs worth of power to bare and that also ignores the fact that the A Wings pumped a dozen or so weapons similar if not identical to the munitions the Falcon was packing into the same few square meters of the same dome in a matter of seconds. In absolute terms, Ex might have a hundred or more ISDs worth of power but she's also got a good hundred times the surface area of an ISD to protect. Is it that infeasible that a concentrated bombardment to the same point might breach her shields? Especially if power had been diverted to other aspects to anticipate attacks from Rebel ships from multiple angles in a mixed brawl with no battle front to let her put all her power into defense from that angle?

 

Maybe there is no extended time in that specific cut but I don't see the issue with the A Wings doing the job on their own rather than ducking through the shields. Especially since not a single ship at that fight is showing signs of shields extending away from the hull except the Falcon. There may be circumstances where fighters can go through shields but I'm not buying it with that specific scene. I'm not so sure about Malevolence any more either given we didn't see the Y Wings bother with using lasers for collateral damage while they were flying to the ion cannon and used torpedoes on the cannon.

 

On the other hand, a couple minutes between Ackbar's order and Ex's demise is not unreasonable. It is, in my opinion,an equally valid interpretation of the scene that the A-Wing attack run is to demonstrate that the shields are down, not the cause of the shields coming down. It is entirely feasible that the Rebels could have hammered Ex hard enough that she had to play games with her shield intensity and left herself open to attack from unexpected angles, which the A-Wings exploited. In a clip that was posted previously, we saw three Munificents or at least three ships that look like Munis, hammer a Venator until she started diving out of control Executor style in just a few seconds of heavy bombardment. When they want to, it seems clear that ships can dramatically increase their combat power though this may cost them in other areas like shield resilience, propulsion and draining reserve power. Similarly, in the few minutes or so of on screen combat footage that we saw, a Mon Cal cruiser was able to get a kill on an ISD.

Edited March 28, 2013 by scvn2812

[Brian Young 11,994]

The Home One type cruisers are 2-3 miles long. Figure each one may be 2-3 times more powerful than an ISD, considering the volume. But 24 times??? I'll see about compositing some images in a while to drive the point home. Executor should easily overmatch the Rebel fleet by itself.

[scvn2812 504]

Okay, just did a back of the envelope comparing the cubes of the lengths of a Home One and an ISD. At 3.2 km they'd have about 8 times the volume of an ISD, assuming similar shape (which they don't really have but close enough for a guesstimate) Oops. I thought the volume accumulated faster or they were a bit bigger. Still, unless we assume that Executor's shields are a hundred times more resilient than an ISD's in every single spot rather than in absolute terms, I still maintain that concentrated fire from an inferior force can harm a single superior ship. We saw it in Clone Wars with three Munis who collectively shouldn't have even one Venator's worth of internal volume overpowering a single Venator and they do it fairly regularly. Size apparently isn't the advantage we think is.

[Afishymeadow 534]

I think Darth Wong is like General Tso.

 

He's CHICKEN!

[Captain Seafort 17]

Okay, just did a back of the envelope comparing the cubes of the lengths of a Home One and an ISD. At 3.2 km they'd have about 8 times the volume of an ISD, assuming similar shape (which they don't really have but close enough for a guesstimate)

 

A bit too rough I think. Very roughly, HO is a 4km long, 800m wide cylinder while an ISD is a 1.6km long, 800m wide, 400m tall pyramid. This would give HO a volume of two billion cubic metres and an ISD a volume of 85 million cubic metres. Your initial estimate of HO being a couple of dozen times the volume is almost bang on.

[Brian Young 11,994]

Here, the helpless Executor takes overwhelming fire from the two massive Mon Calamari ships. Or something.

[Brian Young 11,994]

The comparison to ISDs is a distraction, as the competition is massive Executor. However, given this scale image, I don't see how Home One could be more massive than a half dozen ISDs. These 5 almost cover it completely, and the ships have similar width. It is only a bit over twice the length. The reason it is significantly more massive than just 2 destroyers is their wedge shape.

If we assume it is as large and powerful as 6 ISDs, they would need at least 4 ships like this to match up to the destroyers alone on the Imperial side, not counting Executor. I believe they had 3, and one was destroyed before they engaged the Imperial fleet.

These are the only ships the Rebels had that were as much as a mile in any dimension. The other Mon Calamari ships were perhaps 2/3 and half the size of an ISD respectively.

So again, Executor itself is larger and more powerful than the entire Rebel fleet, probably by a few times (but less than 10).

The assertion that the ship is no more resilient than an ISD is simply ridiculous. I challenge that and demand burden of proof.

[Brian Young 11,994]

My bad, I meant these *4* destroyers almost cover it completely.

[Brian Young 11,994]

Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing here, S. You are saying that either of these small ships is every bit as tough as the big ship.

[Captain Seafort 17]

The other Mon Calamari ships were perhaps 2/3 and half the size of an ISD respectively.

 

It's a nitpick, but I think there's at least a possibility that the Mon Cals are bigger than an ISD. Their proportions are roughly the same as HO, and assuming the models are on the same scale they're 1500m long. Assuming the same ISD assumptions as above, this would make them about 25 per cent bigger than an ISD by volume.