You do not have to build a physical wall or sphere of units around an enemy to surround them, assuming you are armed with effective ranged weapons. A competently executed 3D pincer movement in a situation like this won't block every angle of approach with a wall of ships, but it will force the fleet to retreat towards one or more enemy battlegroups no matter which direction it tries to run. Imagine, say, four Imperial groups, forming the corners of a cube along with Endor and the Death Star. Or, if that isn't enough, an octahedron or some other shape with many vertices.TC Pilot wrote:Who said they're surrounded? You yourself provided quotes saying that it was a pincer. That only leaves about.... an infintie number of directions for the Rebel fleet to go.NoogDeNoog wrote:How exactly do you escape a superior force that has you surrounded?
To escape in any direction, the Rebels would have to come close to one of the Imperial task forces, allowing the Imperials to drop massive petatonnage on them as they try to get away. So the Rebels would still be screwed even though there are patches of sky they can run towards that do not have an Imperial ship in them, because that still requires them to close with an Imperial force and take the beating from, say, two dozen star destroyers. Especially since the Imperial forces are just as mobile as they are and are quite capable of moving to block their retreat.
The situation is even worse if the Imperials have interdiction ships in-system, and it is implied in the EU that they did. In that case, it is physically impossible for them to escape into hyperspace, and they will have to run a gauntlet of Imperial fire to get away from the Death Star in any direction.
Question: what is the radius of hyperspace denial projected by an Immobilizer? In fleet actions, the 418-series may be relying on staying out of effective turbolaser range, to the point where enemy capital ships would have to put out a truly unreasonable effort to get enough power on target to knock the shields down.Eleventh Century Remnant wrote:If accurate, that loops back to Simon_Jester's point about the difference between convoy and fleet interdictors. I really do not see a ship as small (600m long, narrow, 1.7 million m3 at a wild ass guess- smaller than an Acclamator) as a Sienar-418 lasting very long in fleet action- a single alpha strike from a Mon Cal starcruiser or a few seconds sustained fire against a manoeuvring target should be enough to remove it as a problem.
Of course, it seems like the Imperial fleet figured out the problem with the design in short order, and commissioned the Interdictor Star Destroyers built on an Imperator hull. The gravity well generators still obscure the main battery, but with full destroyer-grade shielding and power supply, that design would be much better suited for fleet interdictor duty.
If you want the interdictor itself to be a multirole design, of course, there's a lot to be said for compromising the effectiveness of the interdiction in favor of a more effective main battery. But the power consumption of the gravity well generators is high enough that no interdictor design is going to be a full match for other ships in its own tonnage range anyway; high alpha arc throw weight can sanely take second place to other considerations (like maximizing the radius of interdiction, and systems redundancy to prevent the interdictor being unable to carry out its primary function after taking one lucky shot to a single exposed dome).
My impression is that each of the Imperial task forces pincering the Rebel fleet was individually large enough to handle Imperial intelligence's best guess as to the upper bound of the strength they could deploy for this encounter. And the Imperials seem to have been more or less right about that, too.Think about it; you're trying to stop them escaping- so you divide your forces and scatter them across a wide area, rendering them susceptible to defeat in detail, a thin screen that a concerted Alliance move could achieve local superiority to, blast their way past and escape...eh? How does the original battle plan even make sense, never mind interpretations of it?
Ackbar's retreat would have been such a concerted move, and would not have been bloodless- the starfleet would have reacted to stop them.
Is the outer casing (the physical shell that a YT cannot fly through) a necessary condition for the reactor to be online? My impression is that the reactor itself is that (relatively) small installation in the center, and that the large spherical cavity is just a case of distance being the most efficient form of radiation shielding: there's no point in putting anything within three or four kilometers of the reactor housing if you're committed to making the battlestation 900 km across anyway, and making the cavity physically larger reduces the flux of [insert particle of the week here] experienced by each square meter of the chamber.Romulan Republic, the motivation is obvious- you are stating the facts as I understand them- but I'm just boggled by the fact that the death star's main reactor was able to power superlaser shots with a YT- sized hole in the shielding; that it even could be capable of generating that much power in the partially completed state it was in. Still, it obviously was.