On Manned Turrets

[Commander 598]

By now we all know that SW sometimes takes a little flak for having manually operated turrets. Actual and believable in-universe reasons for this have, to my knowledge, been rarely debated.

So I'm going to throw out my theory:



Given that most vessels in SW can fling around more firepower than the Earth's entire nuclear arsenal and thus can likely blow utterly ENORMOUS holes in each other after they get past the shields and external armor, it is my belief that manned turrets could be considered an entirely purposeful decentralization. If a single hit could turn your fire control center into a gaping hole despite the shot impacting as much as a hundred meters away wouldn't it be preferable to have less centralized fire controls so that half of your ship isn't suddenly rendered completely useless dead weight by the aforementioned shot? Some of these ships mount dozens and some possibly hundreds of gun turrets, in some cases I could picture a ship being utterly ravaged and full of holes yet still returning fire like this...of course then we get into the issue of severed power lines and damaged power plants.

Also there is ample evidence that turrets are not completely reliant on manual operation nor is there much indication that they are solely targeted by the Mk1 Eyeball. In Republic Commando we see an Acclamator's guns being operated from a set of consoles about midway along the ship and I'm sure there numerous occasions of warships being operated by a much less than ideal number of crew, like the Katana Fleet for isntance. The supposedly ECM heavy environment of SW fleet combat likely won't render all sensors useless so I wouldn't be surprised to see plenty of eyes boring a hole into a control screen not unlike today.

Basically, on vessels whose length can be measured in kilometers that are armed with weapons capable of blasting extinction craters into a planet, or each other, not having all your eggs in one basket might be a good idea.

[Thanas]

That problem is easily solved with having the firecontrol located behind thick shielding or within the center of the ship.

The usually accepted reason is iirc that jamming and EW is so prevalent in the SW galaxy that computer fire control might be next-to-useless without a human correcting it.

[Big Phil]

Is there evidence that turret operators actually aim and fire the weapons (or reload them, for that matter?)? Just because a weapon has operators doesn't mean that they're doing anything other than monitoring systems for problems.

[Thanas]

The Imperial Sourcebook states that gunners have to have fast reflexes, good eye-to-eye coordination and are usually composed of TIE-pilot washouts.

Therefore, it stands to reason they actually aim the things.

[Ritterin Sophia]

The Imperial Sourcebook states that gunners have to have fast reflexes, good eye-to-eye coordination and are usually composed of TIE-pilot washouts.

Therefore, it stands to reason they actually aim the things.

Didn't we also see them doing just that in ANH?

[Thanas]

^Yeah, we do.

[Seydlitz_k]

Is it worth mentioning that in X-Wing: Alliance, you can set your turrets to fire automatically when you are piloting the ship? (An awfully good tactic if you need incoming missiles shot down)

Perhaps in a society where artificial intelligence isn't held in very high regard or trusted much, most people opt to have it so that they can target things manually?

Maybe it's not even legal to have AI control the more high powered guns?

Or perhaps in a galaxy of billions upon billions of beings, manpower is much cheaper?

[hunter5]

I have heard from many EU sources that AI just isn't as good in combat as a biological operator. This seem to be a good enough explanation on why they don't use auto turrents

[Thanas]

Is it worth mentioning that in X-Wing: Alliance, you can set your turrets to fire automatically when you are piloting the ship? (An awfully good tactic if you need incoming missiles shot down)

You do have gunners in XWA.

[Shroom Man 777]

Perhaps they are trained to work with advanced SW-verse computers. But, yeah, in a verse that probably has all sorts of ECM and ECCM, relying on purely automatic means might not be so wise if accidental discharges or friendly fire incidents can end up being measured in the gigatons at least.

But I think fully automating ships, or extensively automating them to the point of having deficient crew numbers, is bad. I think those mil-guys have said repeatedly that the minimal crew of recent US Navy vessels is a bad thing, since if a ship is hit you are going to need more personnel for damage control and to manage all sorts of redundant systems.

[Ugolino]

Something that comes up repeatedly in Clone Wars stories. The highly automated CIS ships don't fare too well...

[lord Martiya]

Part of that depends from not-so-great leaders, and Grevious was normally able to utterly defeat the Republic. Don't know if he would have done better if he had organic crew.

[Sea Skimmer]

I have to wonder how many people who think the manned turrets make no sense realize that modern warships still have optical gun sighting equipment, and manned fire control stations? They still usually have turret crews too even in supposedly 'automatic' gunmounts. That’s besides the multiple layers of local control capability the heavy gun warships of WW2 had besides the main fire control system and its plotting rooms and directors, all of which required men even though they did have ballistics computers and gyro stabilizers.

It'd be silly NOT to have elaborate local control capabilities on such massive gunnery platforms as a Star Destroyer or the Death Star when you should have more then enough volume in the ship to allow the survival of massive damage that might easily destroy any single central fire control space.

[hunter5]

I have to wonder how many people who think the manned turrets make no sense realize that modern warships still have optical gun sighting equipment, and manned fire control stations? They still usually have turret crews too even in supposedly 'automatic' gunmounts. That’s besides the multiple layers of local control capability the heavy gun warships of WW2 had besides the main fire control system and its plotting rooms and directors, all of which required men even though they did have ballistics computers and gyro stabilizers.

It'd be silly NOT to have elaborate local control capabilities on such massive gunnery platforms as a Star Destroyer or the Death Star when you should have more then enough volume in the ship to allow the survival of massive damage that might easily destroy any single central fire control space.

This is true if the Imperial Navy operates anything like real life navies then redundancies are in every critical system with main power( which includes propulsion and life support), shields, and weapons control being the top three in importance.

[Sea Skimmer]

This is true if the Imperial Navy operates anything like real life navies then redundancies are in every critical system with main power( which includes propulsion and life support), shields, and weapons control being the top three in importance.

The original Star Wars ICS book shows the big flank turbolaser turret battery on the Star Destroyers as being powered by a rather large ‘subsidiary reactor’ located at the end of the battery. It also has a separate ‘backup engine reactor’, the location of which suggests a second one might be on the other ship of the ship in an area which isn’t shown, and a small ‘auxiliary reactor’ is in the bow. So it’s established that they do have redundant sources of power, indeed we could reasonably speculate that the bow reactor is for life support. So then they’d have mobility, offensive, and life support each covered by its own large backup system independent of the main reactor.

This is probably useful not just for emergencies or in combat, but also so you can turn off the main reactor for maintenance without completely crippling the ship. Its impossible to know if the energy requirements for shields are low enough that anything but the main reactor can power them, but the ship does have armor, which is a backup kind of protection in its own right.

So redundant fire control fits the bill. My speculation would be that the large gun crews allow each weapons battery to not only provide local control for its own weapons, but also to control other weapons on the ship nearby in a manner which is still somewhat coordinated. That’s how WW2 battleships worked. You had central fire control. Then you had one turret designated as a master local control turret (usually the bow raised superfiring turret, because it could see furthest with its own turret rangefinders). Then beyond that each turret could function independently if the master turret was taken out too.

[Connor MacLeod]

Alot of SW ships have "secondary" reactors (like fusion reactors, possibly antimatter) - these often are intermediate steps in powering the hypermatter reactor so they probably also serve a backup function (IE still having some measure of offensive capability even if crippled) as well as the extensive use of capacitors with guns (Mind you this depends on the "capability" you build intot he ships as well. Higher end hypermatter reactors will easily outstrip whatever a mere fusion reactor can output, so a crippled ship wouldn't be much offensively even with fusion reactors against a warship of equal standing, but might threaten smaller ships, or simply get out of the way. It also likely helps when the hypermatter reactors run out of fuel. Fusion fuel is likelier to be more common and plentiful.) The large crew sizes in general also point to "crew redundancY" being a funtion, as I recall they have dedicate fire control both of a computerized and non-computerized nature (Visions of the Future had some triangulation room for targeting purposes I beleive in the Chimera's bridge) - we knew ISD guns were automated in ANH (its mentioned in the novelization) but that doesnt mean manual gunnery is useless either.

Of course, that redundancy like al things comes at a cost, in that you have fewer crews to spare for manning more ships (And your crew requirements and the costs associated with training and paying them go up. Nevermind the logistical costs of training and paying the people to feed them.) Of course, since we know (From Domus Publica's analysis) Palpy was poaching the Merchant Marine for crews and that he'd basically utilized them as an impromptu training service as well as a emergency naval reserve (Armed merchant cruisers basically like the Rand Ecliptic), its likely the "huge crew numbers" is not just a redundancy function, but also just a useful way to gain large numbers of trained naval crewers that he can also draw on in an emergency. IF a war broke out, he could start reducing crew requirements (skeleton crews are far smaller, and I bet a good chunk of the crew on board an ISD is meant to run in shifts.) - automation (slave rigs or just what the Rebels did to Assault frigates) coudl also be used to reduce crew requirements from anywhere from a third to one eighth (the latter being slave rigged versions of the Katana Dreadnoughts.)

[SeaTrooper]

That problem is easily solved with having the firecontrol located behind thick shielding or within the center of the ship.

Ah, so that the cabling for sensor feeds to the fire control systems are equally vulnerable?
(End piss-take)

(Commence actual post )
Warships from DD to BB (beginning in WW1) possessed central fire control systems to allow concentrations of fire and enhanced accuracy. The larger classes, such as BBs and CAs, often had two independant fire control direction methods. Nonetheless, all guns still had to be able to continue in local control if/when your director tower was taken out. As an example, the 5" gun turrets of Australian DDGs (Charles F. Adams/Hobart-class) could be aimed and fired from a Primary controller (in the Ops Room directly behind the Bridge), from a Secondary Director (in the open air atop the Bridge ) or from within the mounts themselves. We see Primary Control being exercised in ANH, with an officer deciding not to fire on the escape pod, and crews at the guns in both ROTS and ESB. Frankly, I wouldn't be all surprised to learn that fire control could also be exercised for divisions of guns, though I haven't actually seen this.

Sorry, but when I see someone claiming that on-mount gunners shouldn't be necessary, it tends to piss me off. I'm also hoping that this post doesn't show my age.

[Connor MacLeod]

Well, on mount gunners ARE kind of irrelevant in Star Wars, since you do have automation (you can even have droids manning the guns) and there are examples of automated fire control as part of gunnery even on ISDs (In the ANH novelization, the Thrawn trilogy, various EU sources, etc.)

I suspect one reason why the SW universe insists on "manned" anything is probably bias/discrimination against AI. Automated gunnery may very well be classifed as a "battle droid" or "war robot" in the same way automated warships might, and post Clone Wars military robots of any kind seem to be highly restricted if not outlawed (or used in special, secret, or exceptional cases.) I mean hell, if they were really fighting practical they don't need manned warships (of if we really get down to it, starships at all. There are lots of different ways they could be living if we were thinking "practical"... think entire populations living on their own Death Stars and condiucting war via hyperdrive missiles.)

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

The way I more or less imagined it was that the automatics can and do perform the brute number- crunching, tracking the vector of the target and compensating for the ship's own motion; in and of themselves they can lay the guns close enough on target for some hits to be possible, and higher-quality systems in which more money and time has been invested can do more.

The point of the human or other life-form element in the gunnery control setup isn't really to do that, even if it is practical; the point is to anticipate and out-guess the human element in the other control loop, the target's command and helm crew. What evasive move is the target going to try next, what is that blanket of electronic warfare hiding, what are they really trying to achieve? Where are they going to go next? Pattern recognition, prediction by intention.

All of that essentially judgement based work could be done by artificial intelligence as well as by squishy wetware, but could it be done as cheaply and more to the point, would it be culturally viable?

Connor's on to something here, there is a big cultural element in the way war is conducted in the GFFA, it's not perfectly rational. And just as well, because if everyone was thinking purely practically, who would have joined the rebellion? It's obviously doomed.

Manned (and womanned and small-furry-thing-from-alpha-centauri'd) ships exist because given the wildly uneven levels of technology in-universe, a mixed economy and therefore ships exist, those ships can be armed and those people want to make a difference. I think.

[Simon_Jester]

Star Wars has had some nasty experiences with automated war economies- even forgetting the recent Clone Wars we have the crisis provoked by Darth Revan and the Star Forge (an ancient automated factory for military materiel) back in far-ancient times. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other examples too.

There are good arguments for placing humans in the fire control loop, as much so they have the ability to tell the system when not to shoot as anything else. Humans are at least as subvertible as droids, but the means by which they can be subverted are easier to check and predict, for other humans at least.

Relying on human gunners to pull triggers (and possibly to outguess their human counterparts on other ships as ECR suggests) may not be "rational" on the tactical level, but that doesn't make it irrational on the grand strategic level in a setting where allowing an AI to develop full general intelligence and independence of its controllers makes it bloody dangerous.

[TialFiden]

I have a thought...being this is my first post I'll try not to upset anyone. I did 5 in the US navy, and I noticed something that seems somewhat applicable. The navy doesn't rely on the "big gun" analouges of SW any more, but they have more automation today than they did. For example, the CIWS 20mm cannons on all navy ships are fully automated, BUT can be fired by a human operator if need be. Most weapon control systems are automated, they almost always rely on a operator to push the button/ pull the trigger.(Especially nuclear missiles. There is an actual person that pulls the trigger. It enhances responsibility of the act, even though a computer programs trajectory, detonation, etc... this example is akin with the death star). All ships have mutiple small arms weapons, such as .50 cal BMG, Mini-guns, and 30mm Cannons. These are probably similiar to the cannons being fired in ROTS and ANH where you see operators firing "small" calibre weapons, while probably the main cannons of Star Destroyers and other Capital sized ships are most likely automated with independent power supply systems. Most real guns can be fired with a loss of power by switching to manual operations.
Just my thoughts.....

[Skgoa]

Has it been retconed or am I the only one who remembers a certain fleet of automated Dreadnaughts jumping through hyperspace on their own, creating a HUGE cultural backlash against automated ships? They were found and used by Grand Admiral Thrawn - in the trilogy named after him - many years later, meaning the in universe reason for maned warships has been CANON SINCE THE VERY BEGINING OF THE EU.

[Simon_Jester]

It's more complicated than that- the ships were manned, and carried surprisingly large crew complements: around 2200 men per ship.* What screwed them over was some kind of freakish virus they picked up that drove the crews crazy.

However, the ships' automation did make things worse, because they allowed what I assume was the flagship to order all the other ships to automatically follow them on a random hyperspace jump, throwing them off into deep space beyond easy recovery. More humans in the command loop might not have prevented that, but then again they might.

So you have a point, Skgoa. It's not unreasonable to suppose that during the Clone War era and later the Republic and Empire decided that increasing the manned crews and putting more humans in the decision loop would be a good counter to what had happened to Dark Force.

*Arguably this is still "not automated," because it still means there are probably more crewmen on board than there are gun mounts, engines, and other items for them to oversee. However, it does mean less redundancy in the crew, fewer situations where two or more pairs of human eyes are reviewing the same data at the same console.

[SeaTrooper]

Has it been retconed or am I the only one who remembers a certain fleet of automated Dreadnaughts jumping through hyperspace on their own, creating a HUGE cultural backlash against automated ships? They were found and used by Grand Admiral Thrawn - in the trilogy named after him - many years later, meaning the in universe reason for maned warships has been CANON SINCE THE VERY BEGINING OF THE EU.

Good point, but I'll quote from Wookiepedia:
By installing a full-rig slave circuitry system, the crew requirements could be reduced from 16,000 per ship to a more manageable 2,200.

Look at those numbers. 16,000 is an awful lot of bodies to scrape up for a ship that wasn't a DN, and hardly even a CA. By Imperial standards, they are Frigates; or light cruisers at best. Nonetheless, noone ever considered fully automating them, even with 'full-rig slave circuitry'. Thrawn wanted hull numbers, as did the Alliance, following the addage that quantity is a quality of its own. If he could have increased his fleet size effectively without needing such huge numbers of crewmen, I'd think he'd at least try it.

[SeaTrooper]

So you have a point, Skgoa. It's not unreasonable to suppose that during the Clone War era and later the Republic and Empire decided that increasing the manned crews and putting more humans in the decision loop would be a good counter to what had happened to Dark Force.

*Arguably this is still "not automated," because it still means there are probably more crewmen on board than there are gun mounts, engines, and other items for them to oversee. However, it does mean less redundancy in the crew, fewer situations where two or more pairs of human eyes are reviewing the same data at the same console.

Have we reached concensus here? Big ship gun-turrets are manned for reasons of cultural backlash and recent social history, reinforced by at least one known occasion of slave-rigged ships biting them in the arse. Plus, for the many senior commanders still alive who had fought in the Clone Wars, placing wetware sentients in the loop was a necessity rather than a nice to have.

I don't think I've seen another recent thread where everyone seemed so in agreement