Patroklos wrote:
The problem is that you present zero evidence to back this up. You can probably greatly eclipse the number of dead stormtroopers in all three OT movies with the death toll of clone troopers from just ATOC or RotS by themselves. If you watched the PT and thought anyone in any position of authority cared in the slightest about clone troopers I don't know what to say. In the OT, in the very first scenes we ever see storm troopers we get the image of one lifting the head of a fallen comrade. We get the same thing in the first scene of the new trilogy. The ONLY time any sort of care is given for a clone trooper is in at the beginning of AotCs, and the overall point of that sequence via Obi Wan's part in it is that they really REALLY don't care about clones. Lets not forget about the Padme death taxi scene from AOTC shall we...
Obviously soldiers fighting a full scale war will take more casualties. And my source is Clone Wars, which is canon in either continuity. Jedi generals generally tend to treat their clones with mutual respect, and are willing to make sacrifices in order to protect them when they can. The only Jedi who doesn't care for the clones under him is Krell, who had actually fallen to the Dark Side.
Zero defect fallacy. The fact is the TIEs completed their mission, the Mk1 human Rebels did not. Luke only made it because he is a space wizard. Again, plot armor. All of the mooks, both Rebel and Imperial, had a chance to go toe to toe and the Imperials won.
Without their own space wizard, the Empire would have also failed to defend the exhaust port.
What the hell are you talking about? TIEs were present contesting space superiority throughout the entire Endor sequence. Not only are there plenty left to follow the MC down to the reactor, there are TIEs left when they are ESCAPING the reactor as well. Sure we see more TIEs than Rebel fighters die on screen, but then again we are following the main characters of the film too.
What I mean is that Rebel fighters prevent TIE fighters from successfully doing any real damage to their capital ships, which is something TIE fighters are incapable of doing in return. We also see Rebel fighters chasing TIEs far more often than the inverse in the general space battle as time goes on, with the obvious exception of the Death Star run.
We don't see the Rebels gain space superiority at Endor (quite the opposite according to Ackbar AND Lando), the only damage we see a Rebel fighter inflict via normal means is one strafing run on a shield generator, The Executor was a fluke and how it was taken out by the A-wing tells us nothing about its normal capabilities whatsoever. What exactly do you see that tells you the Rebel fleet and the fighters were not being massacred or at best just holding their own before the Death Star blows up?
As badly as they are outgunned and outnumbered, the Rebel Alliance does amazingly well. After the destruction of the shield generator, the Alliance fleet massively gains the upper hand, both with the destruction of Executor as well as several other star destroyers.
Keep in mind the fleet was SUPPOSED to be massacred. More accurately they were expecting to be massacred. They were sacrificing themselves to get any chance at a run on the DS reactor. If everyone one of them died taking out the DS that was a win.
It wasn't supposed to be massacre in terms of planning, it was supposed to be a surprise attack. Han wasn't worried when he saw Executor, as it was largely expected that there would be a fleet around the Death Star. It was just assumed that the Rebels would be the ones with the advantage of surprise rather than the Empire. WIthout that on their side, getting in the sucker punch early on was impossible and they were left in a slugfest against superior firepower.
Edges are exactly what we need to take into account in vs. discussions.
But my point is that R&D is not all that significant at this point, as technology is at virtual stasis.
Sorry, this is not ST5. There is nothing in any movie that hints in the slightest there is any sort of downsizing or any military want going unfulfilled whatsoever. Quite the opposite. At every turn the Empire is portrayed as nothing other than a militaristic dictatorship. Thats the point, so our heros have a chance to be heroic. You have nothing to back up your wild speculation.
While they are a military dictatorship they still suffer from resource limitations, and building a much larger replacement Death Star likely would take a large percentage of the resources that could otherwise be thrown at new starfighter designs or new star destroyers.
fractalsponge1 wrote:1) If warfare was hitpoint based, 3 = 1+1+1. There are threshholds however. Small ships can either coordinate extremely well and divide the big ship's fire enough to survive and win, or they can be taken apart in detail without breaching a big ship's shields.
Sure, but the Venator is a dedicated warship that takes on much larger Separatist vessels on a regular basis, with a stronger emphasis on its heavy weapons that star destroyers usually show, so it presumably has firepower in the same general range as an ISD.
fractalsponge1 wrote:2) Hangars are a structural weakness or they are not. It doesn't matter if they are filled with fighters, and during combat they aren't anyway.
Obviously. What I meant is that if the hangers are not consistently able to be filled, then there is no net benefit to having one that large given the structural weakness it represents. It can then be reduced to the smaller ventral hanger as seen on the ISD.
fractalsponge1 wrote:3) Any evidence that either the Republic or Empire didn't have enough fighters for full complements?
The Empire presumably did not, but with complements that are roughly 1/6th the size of their Republic predecessors.
The source that seems to indicate mostly empty hangers is Clone Wars. For a case in which it is a plot point, in Storm Over Ryloth Anakin's fleet has enough spare room to combine the compliments of two vessels.
fractalsponge1 wrote:4) PT vs OT comparisons suggest fighter shields aren't really all they're cracked up to be. In game-mechanic terms yes shields are amazing, especially since they serve as an extra general energy resource and there is no absolute advantage for unshielded fighters in terms of performance. But the movies show that shields routinely cannot survive single bursts from opponents (Vader's fighter annhilating Y-Wings for instance, but this happens to X-W as well). And a fighter-heavy navy explicitly converts from shielded to unshielded fighters, even during the same war (there were likely a LOT more Actis than Jedi). Perhaps small craft shielding (past the obligatory navigational shielding) isn't always heavy enough to be worth the performance cost?
I tend to think of it as equivalent to the F4F vs the Zero. It won't always save you, but it will do so often enough that it will lead to a higher ratio of veteran Rebel pilots over time, while Imperial squadrons take greater losses to attrition. When you combine this with the fact that Rebel squadrons get more combat time in general, it leads to an overall increase in quality.
As for the Actis, we never actually see them in use by anyone other than Jedi, likely indicating that they are not all that well liked by clone pilots if they were used at all by them. The only source that I can think that depicts them being used by Clones is Battlefront 2. Personally I would consider that number a design possibility that is never used in service. I have no idea why that number was put there in the first place when Jedi fighters were never used by clones at any point.