Death Star and the Eclipse SSD

[Connor MacLeod]

My guess is Mike is referring to the volumetric nature of shields, and the fact that the splintering effect is meant to go over the surface of said shield (and quite possibly the volume) Given that, some bleedthrough would be inevitable (nevermind inefficiencies WRT to any other parrt of the energy absorption process.) This may be why armour is such a big deal still despite shields and why there are armour/shield interactions, for all we know.)

Regardles of what Mike meant though I doubt any defense could conceivably have totally safeguarded a planet against the DS (or any attack of similar magnitude.) Even if the shields perfectly radiated the energy away, there's the force/momentum behind the impact. Assuming that the impact somehow did not deform the planet in any significant way (near perfectly efficient tensor fields I imagine) over the scale of the entire planet) there are still the problems I already mentioned - the planet would simply be accelerated (intact) in the direction opposite the blast, which would kill the inhabitants rather messily if they did not have some sort of inertial dampers throughout the entire planet's surface. And even if they had THAT, then there's the fact you've p+retty much changed the orbit (and that's simply at the LOW END for mass scattering. At the higher ends you're pushing the planet to a small perceentage of the speed of light. It no longer has an orbit to speak of.) And that WILL be inevitably fatal unless the planet has engines. So even if you don't have some part of the planet buckling under the impact (or melting) or have a shield generator wrenched off its mountings and slammed into something in the planet at trmeendous velocity, the planet is still going to be displaced and kill its populace either very quickly or very slowly.)

Besides, not only is the sorts of defenses needed to overcome those sorts of things needlessly and ludicrously complex and pointless (If you're capable of moving plaents around you can build artificial planets quite easily.) but it doesnt even need a DS to render those defenses null and void. It should be trivial to construct some sort of sublight or hyperspaital projectile you could slam into a planet and fuck it over, shields or no shields (it should be easy to find enough metal to construct some sort of giant ramship, which just needs to be a big hunk of metal with engines and computers on it.)

[Ender]

Couple points

1) Do we know that GG missiles actually penetrate shields? I honestly don't recall if it says anything about that, but it may not be necessary. It takes time to bring up shields over a planet, and in that time the missile could slip through. Particularly if it is at a high velocity. You appear to emerge from hyperspace at about the same velocity you were at before you you initiated the runup. The only possible reason I can think of for the "gun" itself would be to accelerate the missile to a very high velocity before it jumps to lightspeed.

2) IIRC there is a source that indicates that the actual output of the DS superlaser is 10^40 joules. Which lends credence to the idea that there are shield systems out there even more powerful then that of Alderaan.

3) From my RSS feed an estimate on the cost of the first DS. 15 septillion dollars. Obviously in and of itself not relevant, but could serve as a baseline for comparing costs of various things and evaluation ROI for superweapon systems.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Another possibility Erik and I discussed is once they were developing a siege weapon so much larger than anything before, they might as well make is suitably large that it could crack any foreseeable fortification, even contrived and purpose-built ones. Artificial planetoids or space stations; dedicated "space bunkers" if you will could overcome a lot of these constraints and we know they could field some very impressive level of energy-management given the fact the Death Star could handle generated, storing, releasing its own shots (just countering the recoil is absurd). So if you're going to build a grandiose super siege gun with that much expense and bother, might as well do it right the first time and build it to such scales that all foreseeable fortifications could be destroyed with confidence. In that way, Alderaan is just an unlucky victim of a massively oversized demonstration.

[Illuminatus Primus]

1) Do we know that GG missiles actually penetrate shields? I honestly don't recall if it says anything about that, but it may not be necessary. It takes time to bring up shields over a planet, and in that time the missile could slip through. Particularly if it is at a high velocity. You appear to emerge from hyperspace at about the same velocity you were at before you you initiated the runup. The only possible reason I can think of for the "gun" itself would be to accelerate the missile to a very high velocity before it jumps to lightspeed.

I am positive it says that it can penetrate all-known security shields, but I lack the citation.

[Darth Hoth]

That was an orchestrated demonstration for the ambassadors he was receiving. It could be that they were a very important quasi-independent power bloc, on the scale of the large warlords like Zsinj or Kaine or a special people like the Hapans.

It was a single system, and from the entire sequence it does not appear as though he considered it very important (he was not really very keen on gaining the Gama-Senn's loyalty, or he would not have thrown a hissy fit at the ambassador). Not to mention, a demonstration would have been more impressive if he had actually demonstrated the weapon's ability to destroy a shielded planet, as opposed to an obsolete transport.

True enough, but the only constraint is feeding the power requirements of the weapon. The actual projectiles might be sophisticated (as I stated before, they could resemble a Sun Crusher-esque economic profile, rather than a conventional warship).

The Galaxy Gun's rather frivolous use with regard to target discrimination indicates that the projectiles are not enormously expensive. As noted, the technology requirements for them are nowhere near as high as for the Crusher.

There's no evidence in DE2 how long it took to build. We just see it and it is near completion and then Palpatine goes to review it. That's it. It could've been under construction during DE for all we know, or built elsewhere in secret (like the DS) and towed or moved under its own power to Byss for completion and deployment.

I could swear it was stated somewhere. I will look through the appropriate sources. Can anyone who has the DESB available check from that end?

What part of "it was a million times more powerful than it needed to be" do you not understand? Why do you feel that the recharge time would remain the same if you dropped the power level to 0.0001% of the Alderaan blast?

No, actually I agreed with you here; perhaps I chose my words poorly, and if so I apologise. Given how much energy the DS-I charged up in twenty-four hours, it obviously has the energy to produce a high rate of fire with lower-powered shots; the limiting factors on its performance are the required proximity to the target (close, which necessitates travel time) and its sustained rate of fire (which is unknown; we do not know how much use will wear down the mechanism, the required "cooldown" time between each, and so on).

Was there any evidence that they even tried? I thought they were all banking on simply destroying the launch platform and missile production facilities instead.

At the least, they appeared to think attacking the most heavily fortified system in known space, surrounded by hyperspace anomalies that bogged down space travel to a few chokepoints, would be easier than countering it. Now, as noted, given their canonical stupidity this proves little.

The Galaxy Gun is, after all, relatively vulnerable compared to a Death Star, although the writers of Dark Empire simply decided to conveniently give Palpatine a gigantic fleet to protect it.

In a straight-out battle, yes, but it also has the benefit that it does not require proximity to the target, allowing you to keep it in a heavily guarded location. Or, instead, you could hide it somewhere remote and the enemy would have no idea where the missiles that were reducing their planets were coming from.

[Darth Hoth]

1) Do we know that GG missiles actually penetrate shields? I honestly don't recall if it says anything about that, but it may not be necessary. It takes time to bring up shields over a planet, and in that time the missile could slip through. Particularly if it is at a high velocity. You appear to emerge from hyperspace at about the same velocity you were at before you you initiated the runup. The only possible reason I can think of for the "gun" itself would be to accelerate the missile to a very high velocity before it jumps to lightspeed.

It is stated numerous times; Empire's End (in the omniscient narrator's voice) describes a warhead thus:

The projectile supports a fully armed particle disintegrator that can neutralize all known security shields. . . and demolish a planet!

Most of the various sourcebooks, encyclopaedias and Essential Guides essentially repeat that.

[Darth Wong]

EU literature is notoriously rife with fanboy writing where the authors don't think before committing ideas to paper. In this case, nobody thought to ask why the fuck such a magic "neutralize all shields" technology was not simply installed on a smaller scale in every warship in the fleet, thus allowing them to brush aside planetary shields and bombard any planet at will. Or why nobody ever bothered researching this technology in subsequent decades.

Are you still so sure that the Galaxy Gun was a more meaningful and well-written idea than the Suncrusher?

[Samuel]

EU literature is notoriously rife with fanboy writing where the authors don't think before committing ideas to paper. In this case, nobody thought to ask why the fuck such a magic "neutralize all shields" technology was not simply installed on a smaller scale in every warship in the fleet, thus allowing them to brush aside planetary shields and bombard any planet at will. Or why nobody ever bothered researching this technology in subsequent decades.

Are you still so sure that the Galaxy Gun was a more meaningful and well-written idea than the Suncrusher?

There could be trade offs- high power requirements that burn out the systems or something. No, the real question is why they didn't do that with torpedos so they could just take out the shield generators and let the fleet in. Why do you need the Galaxy Gun when you can just use the bombs with your fleet?

[Illuminatus Primus]

That was an orchestrated demonstration for the ambassadors he was receiving. It could be that they were a very important quasi-independent power bloc, on the scale of the large warlords like Zsinj or Kaine or a special people like the Hapans.

It was a single system, and from the entire sequence it does not appear as though he considered it very important (he was not really very keen on gaining the Gama-Senn's loyalty, or he would not have thrown a hissy fit at the ambassador). Not to mention, a demonstration would have been more impressive if he had actually demonstrated the weapon's ability to destroy a shielded planet, as opposed to an obsolete transport.

It does not say system, does it? The ambassador claims he is representing the Gama-Senn's people. And at this point Palpatine is generally acting out of character; the clone madness and his desperation for survival appears to be taking hold. In any case, regardless of how well-handled it was, a demonstration is an important operation, and is the only outlier in the use of the weapon.

True enough, but the only constraint is feeding the power requirements of the weapon. The actual projectiles might be sophisticated (as I stated before, they could resemble a Sun Crusher-esque economic profile, rather than a conventional warship).

The Galaxy Gun's rather frivolous use with regard to target discrimination indicates that the projectiles are not enormously expensive. As noted, the technology requirements for them are nowhere near as high as for the Crusher.

It was used once against a non-critical target as part of a demonstration. And if you're considering the use of a projectile "frivolous", you're at least at some level conceding that they have a high value which should be reflected in their use. If they were easily replicable and cheap, shooting NRS Pelagia would be no less wasteful than anything else. As I said before, the shield penetration aids and the particle disintegrator warhead (and perhaps their shield capability) are completely proprietary technologies and highly-destabilizing. They're never seen before or since (otherwise they would've more noticeably affected SW strategy), and therefore they are quite similar to the Sun Crusher in character. I doubt each projectile is as expensive as the Sun Crusher, but I do suspect they're much more difficult to manufacture and much more costly than many times their mass in conventional warship.

There's no evidence in DE2 how long it took to build. We just see it and it is near completion and then Palpatine goes to review it. That's it. It could've been under construction during DE for all we know, or built elsewhere in secret (like the DS) and towed or moved under its own power to Byss for completion and deployment.

I could swear it was stated somewhere. I will look through the appropriate sources. Can anyone who has the DESB available check from that end?

The Dark Empire Sourcebook was written before Dark Empire II was published and has only minute references to it. Subsequently WEG lost the SW RPG contract.

In a straight-out battle, yes, but it also has the benefit that it does not require proximity to the target, allowing you to keep it in a heavily guarded location. Or, instead, you could hide it somewhere remote and the enemy would have no idea where the missiles that were reducing their planets were coming from.

NRI was able to figure it out pretty quickly, as missions targeting it for destruction were commenced by the interim between DE2 and EE.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Apologies if I'm going over old ground, but I don't think this has been mentioned yet;
it's possible that the Galaxy Gun is actually extremely old technology. The New Essential Chronology makes reference to 'Hyperspace Cannon', around the time of the birth of the Republic.

These were, it seems, the human race's first attempts to re- invent Rakata hyperdrive, were in use for several centuries before the problem was cracked, and were used for essentially one way trips- they could project an object, usually a ship, into hyperspace, but it was up to the ship to bring itself out at the far end. It doesn't go into enough detail to tell me whether or not the launched ship could manoeuvre, or how it was actually supposed to do that, but I see an ancestor of the galaxy gun in this.

As far as shield penetration goes, is it possible that the trick is no more than a heavily hardened backup hyperdrive, with all safeties removed? Think of it as happening like this; launched by hyperspace cannon, proceed to target, emerge into normal space for a more detailed sensor reading, identify the boundary of the shield, approach- and at point blank, activate the backup hyperdrive.

The hyper field's going to collapse back to real space almost immediately, and wreck the hyperdrive in the process- but if it can hold itself together long enough to pass over the outer boundary of the shield, it's enough. One or two missile lengths, no more.

I'm not saying that this is how it's done- there's no positive evidence, but it seems to fit the capabilities of the thing. And in a way, it is fitted to every ship in the fleet- all you have to do is destroy your own capability to go interstellar and probably tear the guts out of the ship to do it. Oh, and end up inside the shield bubble, on the wrong side of it from your comrades, with all planetary defence batteries that can bear pointing at you, with a damaged ship- not a particularly wise move. Not for a theoretically reusable ship. Makes sense for a missile, though.

Defence against galaxy gun missiles- point defence weapons, mine-satellites as seen in TIE Fighter, maybe. Jamming suites and interdictor domes, possibly, but who would think to put those on a planet- and are there enough to go around? This was the EU, I don't think the rebels had any shipyards on their side big enough to run up at least fifty million interdictor units in less time than it would take for lots of those planets to go 'foom'.

The particle disintegrator, I can't defend. That makes no sense. A warhead bus scattering seismic charges or proton warheads, that could put a fair dent in a target world's population, but that's not the way it was written. Something like it may be possible without massively proprietary technology, if a little less snazzy.

[Darth Hoth]

EU literature is notoriously rife with fanboy writing where the authors don't think before committing ideas to paper. In this case, nobody thought to ask why the fuck such a magic "neutralize all shields" technology was not simply installed on a smaller scale in every warship in the fleet, thus allowing them to brush aside planetary shields and bombard any planet at will. Or why nobody ever bothered researching this technology in subsequent decades.

Are you still so sure that the Galaxy Gun was a more meaningful and well-written idea than the Suncrusher?

I agreed with Illuminatus that it was an intrusive plot device, in that it has fiat abilities the wider in-universe ramifications of which are never considered or addressed. In that respect, they are similar. The Galaxy Gun is still much less obvious plot device and wank than the Sun Crusher, in that it is dependent on fiat to a much lesser extent, with most of its mechanism explainable within the set parameters of the Star Wars universe. The Sun Crusher needs one-shot magical technology to be able to do just about anything, given the absurd properties of its extremely dense wank-armour, in addition to its technobabble supwerweapon (heh . . . "quantum"); by contrast, the only wanktech strictly necessary for the Galaxy Gun is its shieldbreaker technobabble. The Galaxy Gun also makes much, much better sense as a weapon that a halfway competent military would authorise and build.

It does not say system, does it?

NARRATOR: The terrible event was designed to impress the rulers of far-flung star systems who came to Byss to bargain for freedom.

AMBASSADOR: Excellency, the Gama system gives full allegiance to the Empire. The Gama-Senn people accept your will as absolute, my Emperor.

PALPATINE: Why should I accept your slavish obeisances? I am well aware that your planet has withheld allegiance until now, when you have seen the power of my galaxy weapon.

PALPATINE: I can easily annihilate your world and all its inhabitants . . .

Italics mark original emphasis; mine added as bold.

The ambassador claims he is representing the Gama-Senn's people. And at this point Palpatine is generally acting out of character; the clone madness and his desperation for survival appears to be taking hold. In any case, regardless of how well-handled it was, a demonstration is an important operation, and is the only outlier in the use of the weapon.

Agreed that Palpatine is growing increasingly irrational as his clone decays (which has been noticeable for some time), but I find it hard to believe that such a target would have been chosen for the demonstration if the missiles had been very precious, or if he only had a very few available. Furthermore, this "demonstration" is of little value in that it does not show the missile's true destructive power; the same result could have been accomplished by a single Star Destroyer, and thus it is not particularly intimidating.

It was used once against a non-critical target as part of a demonstration. And if you're considering the use of a projectile "frivolous", you're at least at some level conceding that they have a high value which should be reflected in their use. If they were easily replicable and cheap, shooting NRS Pelagia would be no less wasteful than anything else.

Using munitions that can destroy a planet to blow up an obsolete transport would always constitute massive waste. There is no question that the missile was squandered; rather, of how big the loss is. If the cost of a single projectile is that of numerous major warships, it becomes ludicrous.

As I said before, the shield penetration aids and the particle disintegrator warhead (and perhaps their shield capability) are completely proprietary technologies and highly-destabilizing. They're never seen before or since (otherwise they would've more noticeably affected SW strategy), and therefore they are quite similar to the Sun Crusher in character. I doubt each projectile is as expensive as the Sun Crusher, but I do suspect they're much more difficult to manufacture and much more costly than many times their mass in conventional warship.

Broadly speaking, I agree, in that the torpedoes do use "special" technology and thus probably cost considerably more than their weight in conventional weapons. We cannot know how much so, however, and their use (the Imperial readiness to use them, as well as the targets they are used against) gives the only meaningful indicator as to the opportunity cost.

The Dark Empire Sourcebook was written before Dark Empire II was published and has only minute references to it. Subsequently WEG lost the SW RPG contract.

My mistake; I have been looking for the book for years, but never found it an any but exorbitant prices.

NRI was able to figure it out pretty quickly, as missions targeting it for destruction were commenced by the interim between DE2 and EE.

Yes, because it was plainly visible in high orbit over Byss where dregs and smugglers could see it. Palpatine did not attempt to hide it; apparently he was confident that Byss's security forces and the local naval detachments would be sufficient to protect it against any attack.

Whence does the mention of missions against it come, by the way? Or is this a reference to the hijacked Eclipse II?

[Darth Wong]

The thing that makes the Death Star a reasonable dramatic construct is the fact that we have a ready-made explanation for why they didn't make more: the things are enormously large and expensive. That's what makes World Devastators, Sun Crushers, Galaxy Guns, etc. really annoying EU writer wank: they're treated almost like magic, in the sense that they have fantastic abilities but then they're swept under the rug in future, as if the magic has been used up and nobody would ever bother trying to reconstruct it.

[Darth Hoth]

In certain cases, such as that of the World Devastators, you might find reasonable in-universe rationales for why they are not in wider use; I believe Connor suggested that the well-documented unwillingness of Wars factions to use automated militaries might be dependent on "MAD" thinking (if one side releases self-replicating 'droids, the other will as well, and then the end result will most likely be undesirable for all parties). The technology to do so is readily available (as per "construction 'droids", "duplicators" and what have you that works in a similar fashion as the Devastators), but the consequences of unleashing it are a powerful deterrent.

For one-shot "magic" technologies such as the Crusher or, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Galaxy Gun, no such reasoning can be readily discerned, so there I would agree.

[Illuminatus Primus]

God, SYSTEM? That so fucking stupid. There are hundreds of billions of systems, billion of industrialized ones, and probably tens of millions of populated ones.

The only way (IMHO) to make the Galaxy Gun slightly reasonable is to posit its technology is highly proprietary and sophisticated (Sun Crusher-leaning economics and productive profiles apply) and very expensive, and is dependent on gimmicks which can be countered (explaining the lack of broad application of its innovations).

[Connor MacLeod]

Palpatine was even more mad in Empire's End.. ranting like a bloody lunatic. He fired the Galaxy gun msisile at that rebel space station they used as a base.. and the missile failed to detonate (faulty bonadan timer.. *snicker*) It was positively hilarious how the entire Empire's End thing went.. the art was pretty bad, the story was rushed and even more lousy (Basically Palpy forgot he was running a war to go chasing after lil Anakin and ended up getting shot by Han and his psirit absorbed into a dying cyborg that looked like a X-mas tree ornament) and all other silliness.

Seriously though, the Galaxy Gun really wasn't JUST about rampant destruction as I recall. In fact, its major selling point was that it supposedly WASN'T brute force like the DS - it was something you could tailor the level of destruction to (You could precisely blow up a part of the planet, or the whole planet, depending on settings.) Yeah, it was still magic, but in a way it makes sense since it would be alot less indiscriminate than the Death Star.

Besides which, the DS rather obviously is meant to be a grandiose psychological weapon. Its not so much scary in terms of the resources put in, but rather that it was engineered as an incredibly over the top (and largely invulnerable) WMD. The research and development (an the ability to maintain such over the top firepower) would be staggering, and noone could hope to match it (since the designer had the edge in building, and as long a sthey kept up the R&D, ought to be able to stay ahead even if others could somehow build their own DSs.) Edit: Brute force has advantages over "tricks", but it can be harder to control too.

Basically I see it as being a big spherical versio nof an AT-AT - not neccecsarily about practicality, but definitely about image and psychological impact.

[Connor MacLeod]

EU literature is notoriously rife with fanboy writing where the authors don't think before committing ideas to paper. In this case, nobody thought to ask why the fuck such a magic "neutralize all shields" technology was not simply installed on a smaller scale in every warship in the fleet, thus allowing them to brush aside planetary shields and bombard any planet at will. Or why nobody ever bothered researching this technology in subsequent decades.

They may use it already. I can think of tons of examples of "sheild neutralizing/disrupting" tech in various iterations, so the technology seems pretty well established. Its quite likely that, as you said, they never last because once someone figures out how to do it, someone else probably comes up with a way to defeat it.

Mind you, we don't really know much about how any such tech works, or what the requirements are, so speculating about how it would or wouldn't work is probably pretty foolish too. We just know it exists in various forms and that it hasn't revolutionized warfare significantly. (For all we know, maybe the GG missile relies on some technobabble to weaken the shield coupled with high mass/velocity of the missile impact to break through a shield.)

That's what makes World Devastators, Sun Crushers, Galaxy Guns, etc. really annoying EU writer wank: they're treated almost like magic, in the sense that they have fantastic abilities but then they're swept under the rug in future, as if the magic has been used up and nobody would ever bother trying to reconstruct it.

We know World Devastator-like Tech has existed beofre. The coruscant Construction droids (which are ANCIENT, outdated tech) and I vaguely recall some recycling droids from some obscure source that used something similar to break down/recycle materials.) and didnt you note some sort of replicator-like tech from the old han Solo novels? I doubt you'd want to just let people have free and unrestricted acceess to that tech any more than you would want them having accesss to something that would allow them to slam multi-mile asteroids into planetary surfaces at high speed (or propel them via hyperspace.) at will.

The Galaxy Gun isn't really all that shocking either, since you could duplicate the feat with any suitable warship (either as a ramship, or pack it full of explosive, ro whatever.) The absurdity of its design (ie needing a "gun" ot fire) may be a result of its specialized technology for all we know (the gun may act like one of those Gree hypergates, meaning the projectile only needed a single-use hyperdrive to pull it out of hyperspace once it reaches the target. Perhaps the warhead or whatever "shield penetration" tech it uses is a volume hog.)

The Sun Crusher, though, is pretty much wank and there's no way about that. really tiny indestructible ship designed to blow up stars (or disintegrate significant portions of the DS prototype's mass.). At best you can really say is that a shadow of some of the tech got salvaged in some way (a much watered down version of the armour went into commercial usage I recall, and there were plans to put the sun crusher's torpedoes into a different non-starbusting application, IIRC.)

I still think the technobabble "metal crystal phase shifter" was worse though, especially since that got resurrected in LOTF.

[Darth Hoth]

God, SYSTEM? That so fucking stupid. There are hundreds of billions of systems, billion of industrialized ones, and probably tens of millions of populated ones.

At least. I suppose mad clone Palpy got some kicks out of bullying minor rulers like the crude warlords later did, much like sadistic whacko Darksaber Palpatine who used the soul-transference "spell" to torture engineers; his whole characterisation there is definitely slanted towards the "raving KJA strawman" side of the scale, rather than the manipulative and seemingly omniscient mastermind of the DESB. For all we know, they pulled in a primitive like those backwards Tionese Han Solo encountered in the Brian Daley books for him to humiliate.

The only way (IMHO) to make the Galaxy Gun slightly reasonable is to posit its technology is highly proprietary and sophisticated (Sun Crusher-leaning economics and productive profiles apply) and very expensive, and is dependent on gimmicks which can be countered (explaining the lack of broad application of its innovations).

Actually, that way its relatively small overall impact can be made to make sense: The New Republic did design reliable counter-measures to the shield disruptors in later years, explaining why the technology was not replicated. It simply became obsolete, much like Stuart argues that ICBMs would with a working ABM system. I like it.

Palpatine was even more mad in Empire's End.. ranting like a bloody lunatic. He fired the Galaxy gun msisile at that rebel space station they used as a base.. and the missile failed to detonate (faulty bonadan timer.. *snicker*) It was positively hilarious how the entire Empire's End thing went.. the art was pretty bad, the story was rushed and even more lousy (Basically Palpy forgot he was running a war to go chasing after lil Anakin and ended up getting shot by Han and his psirit absorbed into a dying cyborg that looked like a X-mas tree ornament) and all other silliness.

Hey, I liked that art! Luke looked like Flash Gordon, Han like Biggles, and Palpatine like Frankenstein with rabbit teeth . . .

More seriously, Empire's End was bad, full stop, no disagreement there. As I recall it, supposedly Veitch was promised an eighteen-issue run for the DEII/EE wrap-up, then had to make do with eight, which probably explains a lot of why it went to hell.

[Galvatron]

The most maddening thing about the Galaxy Gun, World Devastators and Sun Crusher, IMO, is not their gimmicky offensive capabilities, but that they're armored and/or shielded way beyond that of similarly sized (or far larger) Imperial warships of the day with no apparent explanation for it. For example, The GG's projectile would seem to be easily countered by orbital or surface defenses like the Hoth ion cannon if not for its magical armor and shields making it invulnerable to "even the most advanced ion cannons and turbolasers."

Why bother with superweapons at all? Just imagine a fleet of star destroyers employing Umak Leth's hamster-powered super deflector shields!

[Illuminatus Primus]

Right. For all we know it was just a shield with some more robust components and heat capacity, and it was expected that the missile would initiate before it shield components melted the thing, so it could be run continuously overloaded. But then all you need is some grav-mines around the immediate vicinity of your planet to drag it out further away, so it'd have less fuel for the terminal phase and you'd have more time to nail it with firepower. Its either ultrawank approaching but not quite at the Sun Crusher level, or its dependent on a house-of-cards of hopeful interdependent gimmicks.

[Darth Hoth]

The most maddening thing about the Galaxy Gun, World Devastators and Sun Crusher, IMO, is not their gimmicky offensive capabilities, but that they're armored and/or shielded way beyond that of similarly sized (or far larger) Imperial warships of the day with no apparent explanation for it. For example, The GG's projectile would seem to be easily countered by orbital or surface defenses like the Hoth ion cannon if not for its magical armor and shields making it invulnerable to "even the most advanced ion cannons and turbolasers."

Why bother with superweapons at all? Just imagine a fleet of star destroyers employing Umak Leth's hamster-powered super deflector shields!

Wookiee is prone to hyperbole; all we saw it shrugging off in the comic was starfighter and point-defence guns. It is not impossible that it was fast and shielded enough to avoid and/or withstand most light weapons, given its limited exposure, whereas heavier guns would have trouble hitting it. "Most advanced" does not mean "heaviest".

[Connor MacLeod]

the World Devastator To my knowledge has no basis in that, even if it did,they tend to be considerably more massive vessels to begin with than your average ISD (the largest vessel we've seen engaging the WDs) so its not surprising if the WD comes out on top. The one that ate the ISD in DE must have had many times the volume of the ISD it consumed, for example.

The Galaxy gun projectiles are another story. Admittedly, there WAS a refernce that the projectiles were shielded/armoured against "hits from the most powerful turbolasers and ion cannons" - that came from the old EGW&T. How you look at that can probably vary. Some will argue it was overruled by the NEGW&T, where they omitted the "most powerful" part, but the two aren't neccesarily mutually exclusive. I personally don't consider it all that particular insofar as determining firepower. For one thing, it doesn't say how many hits it could take. The galaxy gun missiles never had (as I recall) a long window for targeting after emerging from Hyperspace, and they may onyl need protecting against glancing/single hits (their speed being too fast to allow concentrated fire on them.) Warships need to be able to stand up to minutes of punishment or more - there's no reason to assume the GG missiles must be similarily durable.

There's also the fact that there are (due to fuckups in artistry) different sizes of GG projectiles - some dwarf starfighters attacking them (as big as starships in their own right, in other words) while others aren't much bigger than a starfighter. We therefore don't know which projectiles the statement applies to: its silly to assume that the "smaller" projectilse are equally as durable as the larger ones. Hell, maybe the shield/armor strength has an influence on its ability to penetrate planetary shields - those suckers ARE supposed to be insanely powerful.

No real excuse for the Sun Crusher though, cept that it was never hit by heavy TLS (and probably too small/fast to be hit anyhow)

Edit: This still isn't as absurd as some of the stuff that does appear in DE: going to hyperdrive underneath a planetary shield IN ATMOSPHERE, Fett's ship bouncing off a planetary shield and not being vaporised, etc. I can think of plenty of things in those comics that were far goofier than the Galaxy gun OR World Devastators.

[Galvatron]

It makes even less sense when it comes to slow-moving targets like the World Devastators. They have Leth-shields too, which they apparently run full-time with no danger of overload. These things aren't even as large as the Executor, but we're supposed to believe that a flotilla of Mon Cal star cruisers couldn't just bombard the suckers from orbit and obliterate them as easily as they could a full-blown star dreadnaught?

[Connor MacLeod]

We never saw a flotilla of Mon Cal cruisers bombard them. We don't know ANY of the parameters of such an attack or how even most of the battle occured (how many ships, how logn they fought, e tc.) And even then Mon Cal cruisers are nowhere near the match of an ISD (Even the wanky MC-90s)

And that's also complicated by the fact we KNOW there were multiple World Devatsators at Mon Calamari (hell we dont even know how many of them there were.)

[Darth Hoth]

No real excuse for the Sun Crusher though, cept that it was never hit by heavy TLS (and probably too small/fast to be hit anyhow)

It was hit with a fucking DS-prototype superlaser blast in the last Jedi Academy book; it was a glancing hit, and presumably not a full Alderaan-scattering blast (given the mini-Death Star's inferior power generation/storage capabilities), but it was way worse than any turbolaser.

[Illuminatus Primus]

We know at least one was captured because its with the fleet in the beginning of DE2 when Luke and Kam return to meet with the leadership. However, one could assume that the NRDF was unwilling to use ground bombardment by heavy weapons on Dac for psychological and collateral damage reasons, so the WD were able to take the fight down into the troposphere against light weapons without fear of sufficient assault with high-collateral damage weapons to kill them. Keep in mind for a significant period of the battle the WDs rampaging on the surface were being guarded at the "rear" in space by Star Destroyers. The WDs hunkered down and mostly only suffered attacks by ground forces and starfighters, with the NRDF being apparently unwilling to engage them with full-power warship gunnery from space. The whole battle was much more a psychological/political showdown than a critical strategic turning point in the war.