StarDestroyer.Net BBS

As others have mentioned, thanks very much for writing this. Personally, I think that it's one of (if not the) best SW fics out there, including canon ones.

Things to bear in mind; have you ever looked at a picture of the Torpedo Sphere? The thing really does appear as if it was designed on the back of an envelope. Going by the numbers in the sourcebook it was first depicted in (and which basically served as the writers' bible for quite a lot of the EU...

A torpedo sphere doesn't actually use its torpedoes to hit the shield generators directly. What a torpedo sphere does, is pound open a weak spot the planet's shields with massed salvos of torps, then uses its heavy turbolasers, not the torpedoes, to shoot through that momentary opening and take out...

I think that most times the TS doesn't face a planet with heavy TLs. I can't imagine the Empire is handing out HTL permits to planetary militias that often. I'm sure civilian grade shields are far, far, more common then military grade super heavy multi hundred teraton HTLs. Yes, I agree. I have two...

This shot isn't going to be anything like as hard as Aldrem's shot was. First, all the guns are on a planet, and had months to plan out the situation, allowing for a lot of eventualities to be considered before the enemy even shows up. The target is a lot bigger, as I suspect that the shields cover...

In this case, you don't need anything like a 320-teraton bolt to kill the sphere. You only need 2-4 50-teraton artillery pieces, or more smaller tubes, hooked together by some sort of simple fire control. A time-on-target strike could deliver similar amounts of energy (as the post-bounce 320-terato...

But that's assuming Lennart wants to escape. It seems to me he's in a lose/lose/lose scenario here. He either dies in the fight, blasts the whole squadron to bits and has a few million imperial personnel's blood on his hands, or he escapes and has abandoned his post in Death Squadron. And either if...

Worlds which would be essentially the only ones that would require the specialist services of a torpedo sphere. Well no, there's a wide range of reasons why a planet might have large theater or light planetary shields, which cannot be cracked by conventional turbolaser bombardment, and yet NOT have...

The problem is that planetary defence artillery isn't going to be nice to you, and they have the luxury of being able to wait for you, so to speak. If you're going to have a full salvo in the tubes at any one time, then it's going to be a major liability, especially if the ground operators recogniz...

Given that it was noted that particle-shielding that particular point would be counter productive, any sort of mass-based weapon or torpedo would have been a better choice for the shot than a bank-hit with a turbolaser. There's crazy-awesome, and then there's contradicting yourself. Even detaching ...

Ok I like the ending section, where we hear to a certain extent Olghaan's got things under control and this is him analysing/depleting Lennart's repertoire of tricks. but I still can't help but roll my eyes a bit at Lennart massacring the first wave with such ease. Especially the special turbolaser...

That's a good point, and it justifies the use of lots of ready tubes to store the torpedoes. I think, then, that the only response to planetary defence artillery would be reducing the volatility of the missiles themselves, which may or may not be possible at all. Because of what the sphere does, it...

I think that putting the torpedoes into deep storage makes the problem one of salvo frequency, since you have to move the torpedoes from storage to the launcher, and that takes time and is liable to break. Torpedo spheres are, doctrinally, not just bombardment platforms; they have a dedicated and s...

Hm. That really is a very conspicuous vulnerability for something like a torpedo sphere which is designed to hover menacingly over a fortified world. If they shoot it center mass with a heavy defense turbolaser, any single-mount weapon in the same general weight class as the V-150, there is a very ...

Hm. According to the Imperial Sourcebook writeup which I'm using, the Lancer was designed as a response to Rebel fighter actions, including the death star trench run. The idea that this is just a gloss, it was intended to face swarms of droid fighters, and it is a clone wars design reused in the ci...

1) To be able to defend the entire volume the convoy occupies from one place (i.e. AEGIS cruisers in the air defense role; they serve to control the entire airspace around a task force). Or... 2) To be able to rush around and protect the convoy at any point where it is threatened (i.e. WWII destroy...

I have no idea when the Lancer was designed or by whom, but it occurs to me that it would make a lot more sense as a Clone Wars ship than a Rebellion-era one. Cheap, mass-produced, designed to fill one particular role very well and no others even semi-competently, I could definitely see it having b...

1) To be able to defend the entire volume the convoy occupies from one place (i.e. AEGIS cruisers in the air defense role; they serve to control the entire airspace around a task force). Or... 2) To be able to rush around and protect the convoy at any point where it is threatened (i.e. WWII destroy...

The Lancer is, I reckon, a medium corvette for it's bulk and ability to take fire, certainly not to give it; it is seriously outclassed as a war vessel by almost anything. I don't think the design was rushed, or half- baked, or suffered severe teething troubles, as much as it was fundamentally misc...

regarding the hardware improvements in 5th gen aircraft, isn't the F119/F135 engine producing about an extra 50% thrust both wet and dry than then previous generation of comparable sized engines? Yes, the F119 for instance develops 22% more thrust, according to P&W. Note that my argument was re...

I think you kind of missed my point. Lancers aren't crap because of any fundamental problems with the design or intended deployment, they're crap because of problems stemming form their development process being cut short. For example, they are IIRC, slow and underpowered, having trouble keeping up...

Actually, why are Lancer's crap? They're designed to be dedicated antifighter frigates, and their design makes a lot of sense, but any highly specialized design is going to create some interesting trade-offs. They'll be utter rubbish against peer vessels, and against heavy fighters like the B-wing ...

Something ECR really played up in the Rebel chapters is how stereotyped a view of the Imperials the Rebels have. They actually think the Imps are borderline incompetent, their kit (except heavy metal) sucks and if it didn't they wouldn't know how to use it properly. Thinking a Lancer (which are cra...

However, consider the sophistication of other droid systems, like the ones in C3PO. I'd actually say that computers of that sort would be better at predicting targets than the humans, as they can incorporate much more sophisticated physical models for Kalman filtering. Kalman filtering is what you'...

Regarding the computer-controlled Lancer guns - ECR proposes at the bottom of this post that turrets are largely computer-compensated: three rings, the outer two of which compensate for the motion of the firing ship, and the base course of the target, and are computer-controlled. The inner ring, wh...