Krall's Fleet vs. an ISD

[NecronLord]

Nu-Trek ships are pretty seriously built. The USS Franklin hits crashes into a mountain, rin this film and is still flyable a hundred years later, and to take off they rattle it down the side of a cliff.

The enterprise saucer hits another mountain edge on and isn't even appreciably dented from its circular shape.

I imagine that's superior to modern sea craft, which still have to worry about hitting rocks at comparatively modest speed.

[Solauren]

Before anyone goes two nuts, remember a few things
#1- Krall and his allies were ex-Starfleet. Presumably, they can still read English
The 'damsel in distress' might have read the shield frequency, and transmitted it to them.

#2 -They were hacked into Yorktowns computers (and probably the rest of the Federation). They might have been able to get the Enterprises shield frequency that way, and set their own shields to match/bypass

#3 - With that many drones, you could presumably fire a shitload of low power shots at the Enterprise at different frequencies, until you find the one that 'works against them' (reverse Borg tactic). Then 'okay, everyone, they're using Frequency...', and off we go. And we saw that the drones had that level of data sharing and intercommunication.

You can't really use the success of what was essentially an 'inside job' on the Enterprise, to judge the effectiveness of Krall's fleet against an ISD.

[NecronLord]

Good thing the most supported and prevailing theory is that Star Wars shields don't stop small craft flying up and landing on or in them or do so selectively and this is even seen in several of the movies as well as both series? The counter-evidence exists but only in limited cases - EG Grievous' hangar.

[Crazedwraith]

You can't really use the success of what was essentially an 'inside job' on the Enterprise, to judge the effectiveness of Krall's fleet against an ISD.

Rubbish. There is no indication in the film the inside job was anything more than just getting the Enterprise to go where they wanted. No indication shield frequencies were used or stolen and no indication that nutrek ships even have frequency based shields that I recall.

[NecronLord]

Just another video for the point to get hammered home, this time featuring a small craft docking with an undamaged ISD against its will.

[Sidewinder]

I'm surprised no one mentioned a Star Destroyer's electronic warfare systems, and Krall's drones' demonstrated vulnerability to jamming.

Jamming

All Imperial starships, including the smallest one-man fighters, incorporate sensor jamming equipment. According to SWICS, advanced TIE fighters employ sophisticated sensor suites that "must overcome the extremely powerful jamming signals used by all combat craft". The DS also employed "hundreds of Kuat Drive Yards 220-SIG tactical jammers" that prevented the attacking X-Wings from being able to use their onboard sensors (ref. SWEGWT). And of course, the Imperial fleet broadcast so much sensor interference during the Battle of Endor that the Rebel fleet was unable to determine whether the DS2 shield was up or down until they destroyed the fleet's primary communications ship (ref. ROTJ novelization).

At very close range, high-powered sensor pulses can "burn through" jamming. This is why high-powered jammers inevitably reduce combat ranges to visual sighting ranges; it is impossible to target ships at long range through a blanket of white noise, but a combination of sensor targeting and manual control can be more effective at close range. Heavy starships and massive vessels like the Death Star can project such enormously powerful sensor pulses that they can increase their effective scanning range somewhat in spite of the jamming, but in a large battle the presence of literally thousands or tens of thousands of jamming sources (the fighters) can still make long-range targeting very difficult.

The Federation appears to avoid using jammers, most likely because they are reluctant to impede their own sensor arrays. This will confer another advantage upon us in battle; they are not accustomed to dealing with high-powered jamming.

Large, high-powered Imperial jammers are often coupled with distortion field generators which can actually affect the maneuverability of starships, in addition to interfering with their sensors, as described in the following quote from General Dodonna during the Yavin briefing in ANH:

"Also, their field generators will probably create a lot of distortion, especially in and around the trench. I figure that maneuverability in that sector will be less than point three."

This passage suggests that high-powered jammers actually perform a secondary function of distorting the space-time continuum itself, thus making starship maneuvering difficult at best. As an aside, this is the probable explanation for the slow X-wing speed in the trench runs (along with the fact that the heavy jamming would have made it impossible to accurately target the port at higher speeds). The X-wings were travelling much slower in the trench than they did during their trip around Yavin to attack the Death Star.

It begs the question whether or not Krall's drones will be more, equally, or less vulnerable to the electronic war systems a Star Wars capital ship has.

[NecronLord]

Star Wars jamming is certainly present, but some claims about it approach the absurd. The last section of that quote is something I've always laughed at - the notion that Star Wars jamming bends spacetime, something that neither matches up with what we see in the show, nor requires such a notion to fit the quote. A briefing telling the pilots that they'll have reduced maneuverability equals bent spacetime - good gods, someone call the DVLA and let them know that drivers should be aware of bent spacetime in fog.

It could accomplish something, on the other hand, without being able to beam on board one of the ships, how would they find out about that weakness?

[Balrog]

Good thing the most supported and prevailing theory is that Star Wars shields don't stop small craft flying up and landing on or in them or do so selectively and this is even seen in several of the movies as well as both series? The counter-evidence exists but only in limited cases - EG Grievous' hangar.

At the same time it is a major plot point in the Lords of the Sith novel that the proto-Rebels had to disable an ISD's shields with trickery first before they launched their main attack of thousands of bomb-laden Vulture droids going kamikaze at maximum acceleration into it.

It could accomplish something, on the other hand, without being able to beam on board one of the ships, how would they find out about that weakness?

It could occur inadvertently if their jamming is over a wide enough spectrum.

[Adam Reynolds]

Good thing the most supported and prevailing theory is that Star Wars shields don't stop small craft flying up and landing on or in them or do so selectively and this is even seen in several of the movies as well as both series? The counter-evidence exists but only in limited cases - EG Grievous' hangar.

There is also the concern about casualties preventing Anakin's attack against Malvolence from having enough firepower. As well as the flak being too heavy for anyone other than Anakin to survive such an attack. Executor, while it featured a direct fighter attack, also presented concern when the bridge shields were dropped, which supports the idea they were blocking fighters from directly attacking the bridge.

My theory is that there are two layers of shields that are used. The first is the primary shields that block turbolaser fire and heavy torpedoes(explaining why capital ships don't use them. These shields are permeable to fighter attacks. The second layer of shields only blocks vital systems like hangers or the bridge but can also stop fighter attacks, which nicely explains all three instances. If these drones are boarding craft, they would obviously target weaker areas of the hull rather than shielded sections.

Though I would also suggest that an ISD hull is stronger than a Venator. Remember that the Venator class had its massive hanger bay, which likely limited the dorsal armor thickness. Notice that when Ashoka rolled the ship to absorb enemy fire(Storm Over Ryloth), she rolled the ventral surface towards the enemy. It was probably similar logic to the American Essex class carrier vs the British Illustrious class in WW2. The Americans went with unarmored flight decks that relied on their fighters for greater protection, the British went with the armored box design. Given the superior numbers possible with droids, the

Under the Empire, the cost of continual combat air patrol was likely seen as not worth the same benefit as during wartime, which allowed them to design tougher ships with smaller air groups. This was also likely tied to the fact that the Empire also used the ISD itself in a pursuit role, which likely requires running with only minimal shields to maximize power to the engines(notice that in both ANH and ESB, ISDs actually outrun the Millennium Falcon). It is thus likely that the ISD has somewhat tougher hull plating.

As for jamming, it is one of those things that pro-SW debators have thrown about in response to the lackluster combat speeds shown, relative to the insane transit speeds shown. In any case, there is a discrepancy there and jamming is a potential solution. Especially since we also see things like interdictor cruisers that explicitly do things like this(though that is an inverse case in which we should see them in the movies and don't).

That doesn't matter here, as what we are talking about is pure signal jamming, in which Star Wars will probably be fine. Though it is also the case that radio transmissions are not always jammed even when sensors are, those radio signals are instantaneous even when they shouldn't be(like the Battle of Yavin, we see no delay as occured even with the moon landings). So jamming SW comms is likely more complex than in reality. In thise case it is a simple radio signal, which SW jammers should have no problem doing given the feats we see them capable of, which are generally superior to their Star Trek equivalents.

At the same time it is a major plot point in the Lords of the Sith novel that the proto-Rebels had to disable an ISD's shields with trickery first before they launched their main attack of thousands of bomb-laden Vulture droids going kamikaze at maximum acceleration into it.

It is indeed the case that the novels don't buy into this theory, as it is fan created. They assume shields are either up or down. But Clone Wars shows plenty of cases of shields being breached when they should otherwise be up that are largrely why this theory was created

It could occur inadvertently if their jamming is over a wide enough spectrum.

For Legends evidence, Thrawn used exactly this idea against vulture droids once. He jammed the entire spectrum when he realized they relied on the droid control ship.

[NecronLord]

The difference is that Star Wars novels still owe a great deal to West End Games' RPG which codified some tropes like particle shields on starships, and was for a long time given out as a tech-bible for novellists - Tim Zhan mentions that the Katana fleet was dreadnoughts because they were the 'Republic Warship' in WEG's earlier books for instance - while the visual media doesn't have that legacy.

As mentioned, counter-evidence exists to suggest that low speed objects can't always dock. General Taranch's thermal shields for instance, clearly deflect projectiles at low speed.

But they do it more often than not.

[Q99]

Nu-Trek ships are pretty seriously built. The USS Franklin hits crashes into a mountain, rin this film and is still flyable a hundred years later, and to take off they rattle it down the side of a cliff.

The enterprise saucer hits another mountain edge on and isn't even appreciably dented from its circular shape.

I imagine that's superior to modern sea craft, which still have to worry about hitting rocks at comparatively modest speed.

That's not entirely new. TNG has had ships and shuttles have crash landings pretty intact too. Iirc in DS9 a Jem'haddar ship crashed, the internal dampeners failed so the crew was red paste, but the structural integrity field didn't so the ship didn't look too damaged.

Q I think could... but I also wouldn't classify what Q can do under "conventional warfare"- hence why I worded it in that manner.

Hey, we've seen them function as a standup army, flintlocks and everything

[Sea Skimmer]

So the ISD wouldn't simply run out full throttle on the sublight engines while taking pot shots over the stern with whatever, why? The battle might last weeks but that's not actually a problem. Trek sublight speed is high, Wars sublight speed and acceleration are absurdly high to the point we've had to debate before if it they must not be capable of non hyperdrive FTL. No sane ship commander is going to simply going to turn bow onto on a fight with a quarter million anything. A bunch of mining craft aren't going to do well in a tail chase.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Which begs the question, how well protected are the sublight engines on an ISD? When the ISD steps on the gas, the resulting glow coming out of the engine banks is going to be a giant neon "shoot me" sign for even the dumbest of drone commanders.

WRT WWII carriers, the problem the Americans had with placing the armour down on the flight deck was that it made them incredibly vulnerable to Kamikaze attacks- one hit would put them out of commission for weeks or months. With their armoured flight decks, the British carriers withstood Kamikazes far better than their American counterparts- often they were operational again within hours instead of weeks.

[Adam Reynolds]

Which begs the question, how well protected are the sublight engines on an ISD? When the ISD steps on the gas, the resulting glow coming out of the engine banks is going to be a giant neon "shoot me" sign for even the dumbest of drone commanders.

And how exactly are they going to catch said ISD in order to do this? In relative terms, SW sublight might as well be warp speed.

WRT WWII carriers, the problem the Americans had with placing the armour down on the flight deck was that it made them incredibly vulnerable to Kamikaze attacks- one hit would put them out of commission for weeks or months. With their armoured flight decks, the British carriers withstood Kamikazes far better than their American counterparts- often they were operational again within hours instead of weeks.

Except for the fact that American carriers could then feature larger air wings and be better protected by their fighters rather than by armor, being the first example of a vessel relying on offense as defense. Had the British sustained the sort of attacks Americans did, they would not have survived because their air wings were too small to cause the same level of attrition on opposing kamikaze attacks. Aircraft are better than armor. As were the incredible anti-aircraft suites of American warships relative to that carried by anyone else.

On top of this, American carriers suffered no structural damage when hit. This allowed the Essex class to last until the 1970s. Every British carrier that was hit was retired by the 1950s, never again being used in action. While the British were not wrong to armor their carriers given their strategic situation, namely that they could not rely on distance as a form of protection as American carriers operating in the Pacific could, the Americans were also not wrong to eliminate deck armor and treat the hanger as superstructure.

[Sea Skimmer]

Which begs the question, how well protected are the sublight engines on an ISD? When the ISD steps on the gas, the resulting glow coming out of the engine banks is going to be a giant neon "shoot me" sign for even the dumbest of drone commanders.

You would really hope drone commanders would be capable of tracking a hot 1 mile long object in the middle of open space in the first place! It's not really a consideration at this point when the ISD is probably going to trail away in a zig zag to fire alternating broadsides from its beam turrets.

We don't see the engine nozzles being vulnerable points in the canon. It stands to reason that being what they are, nozzles for immensely powerful engines, they'd be built incredibly strong in the first place. Probably strongly then anything else on the ship out of need and for long term durability. Trek beam weapons being some kind of particle weapon, it's also going to interact with whatever the engine exhaust is, but it's about impossible to know by how much without knowing what the engine is actually using for reaction mass.

WRT WWII carriers, the problem the Americans had with placing the armour down on the flight deck was that it made them incredibly vulnerable to Kamikaze attacks- one hit would put them out of commission for weeks or months. With their armoured flight decks, the British carriers withstood Kamikazes far better than their American counterparts- often they were operational again within hours instead of weeks.

Yeah that hearsay has been around ever since it's non empirical reporting in 1945. While armor decks were not a bad idea (its the total armor box that makes the Illustrious terrible) actual evidence says the RN flight deck armor actually only stopped one kamikaze, and when HMS Illustrious was bombed in 1941 of the seven bombs that hit her, only one hit the armor flight deck. It also penetrated said deck and exploded inside the hanger, which is no surprise being a 500kg. Her deck was only meant to stop 500lb weapons.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... rmat=2500w

This shows the problem with armoring a carrier...its still a big frail ship everywhere else. And it means...max planes on Illustrious was about 54, an Essex could do about 100, and with several times as much gasoline and bombs and ammo per plane. British style carriers simply could not have sustained operations off Okinawa shielding a huge area from mass suicide air raids like the American Essex class, with twice the planes and more then twice fuel and weapons on board could. It simply would not work. The British destroyed 99 suicide planes off Okinawa, the US fleet 1,900, they were stationed on a flank, and off station for long periods resupplying.

Midway had a heavy armor flight deck, but was a 45,000 ton ship. Both navies abandon thick armor decks for multiple thin decks in all postwar carriers, by about 1949 everyone had realized that no practical thickness was actually going to keep out enemy bombing. Not with supersonic weapons. So idea is all about localizing damage and avoiding a detonation in a magazine.

You'd really want to go this way on protection if you did have giant miles long spacecraft too, the idea at least of all armor on the hull is just bad when you start to get that huge.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Which begs the question, how well protected are the sublight engines on an ISD? When the ISD steps on the gas, the resulting glow coming out of the engine banks is going to be a giant neon "shoot me" sign for even the dumbest of drone commanders.

And how exactly are they going to catch said ISD in order to do this? In relative terms, SW sublight might as well be warp speed.

Since in space top speed is meaningless it all comes down to which has greater acceleration- are there any numbers for either the ISD or the drones?

WRT WWII carriers, the problem the Americans had with placing the armour down on the flight deck was that it made them incredibly vulnerable to Kamikaze attacks- one hit would put them out of commission for weeks or months. With their armoured flight decks, the British carriers withstood Kamikazes far better than their American counterparts- often they were operational again within hours instead of weeks.

Except for the fact that American carriers could then feature larger air wings and be better protected by their fighters rather than by armor, being the first example of a vessel relying on offense as defense. Had the British sustained the sort of attacks Americans did, they would not have survived because their air wings were too small to cause the same level of attrition on opposing kamikaze attacks. Aircraft are better than armor. As were the incredible anti-aircraft suites of American warships relative to that carried by anyone else.

On top of this, American carriers suffered no structural damage when hit. This allowed the Essex class to last until the 1970s. Every British carrier that was hit was retired by the 1950s, never again being used in action. While the British were not wrong to armor their carriers given their strategic situation, namely that they could not rely on distance as a form of protection as American carriers operating in the Pacific could, the Americans were also not wrong to eliminate deck armor and treat the hanger as superstructure.

The largest part of the disparity between RN and USN carriers in aircraft capacity was due to the use of a permanent deck park on USN carriers, as opposed to the positioning of the armour.
Actually, RN carriers such as Ark Royal or Illustrious had far heavier AA outfits than their USN counterparts, up to the introduction of the USN Essex class carriers. Late in the war when the USN operated many carriers together and had improved radar, their fighter and AA defence was reasonably effective, yet both conventional and kamikaze attacks were still able to penetrate USN defences.

As for aircraft vs armour, it was more complicated than that:

Carrier fighters were able to shoot down far more kamikaze aircraft than any amount of deck armour would have protected against showing the value of absolute numbers, but in the early war period IJN aircraft had little difficulty in penetrating USN CAPs; near the end of the war, veteran American fighter pilots in superior F6F Hellcat and F4U Corsair fighters were able to defeat the young, inexperienced and ill-trained kamikaze pilots with ease and run up huge kill scores but attackers were still able to get through. (In addition to larger aircraft complements, the US Navy had larger fleets and more resources, so they could establish destroyer pickets and develop dedicated AAW ships such as the Atlanta-class antiaircraft cruisers which would have also drawn attention away from the carriers.) On the surface, the record seems balanced.

The American carriers suffered far more crew casualties when hit compared to their British counterparts:

While not a kamikaze attack USS Franklin was attacked by a dive bomber and struck by two 250 kg(550 lbs) bombs, one semi-armour piercing (SAP) and one general purpose (GP), when she had 47 aircraft preparing for a strike on Honshu. Both bombs penetrated into her hangar and set off ordnance and fuel from ruptured aircraft tanks for a planned ground attack relying on GP bombs and Tiny Tim missiles, killing 724 personnel. USS Bunker Hill was severely damaged by pair of kamikaze hits during preparations for an attack on Okinawa which killed 346 men. Each of these USN carriers suffered more casualties than all the British RN armoured carriers combined, illustrating the life saving features of RN carrier design. Illustrious, which had the highest toll, suffered 126 fatal casualties and 84 wounded when hit by six 1100 lb bombs on 10 January 1941.

As for structural damage, only some of the British carriers were affected. The RN was in a state of continual contraction after WWII, and simply did not have the resources or inclination to repair ships that it could no longer man.

[Lord Revan]

We should also remember that Star Trek ships actually have a pretty decent linear impulse acceleration, it's only in turning that there's issues and even then they're faster then most people here assume.

[NecronLord]

So the ISD wouldn't simply run out full throttle on the sublight engines while taking pot shots over the stern with whatever, why? The battle might last weeks but that's not actually a problem.

It certainly is, at least if we're using ICS numbers; as they're built around the idea that an ISD carries reactor fuel and remass to operate at full power for days at most and hours more likely, and the numbers are worked back from acceleration - meaning flank speed is the same load as the ship's maximum output - they can skim to fire the weapons of course.

[Under 'Power Sources' heading]

The interiors of the mightiest war vessels are dominated by huge reactor cores and ultra-dense fuel silos, which enable them to perform massive planetary bombardments and sustain hours of thousand-G accelerations before refueling.

Even in Disney-canon, they're not like modern nuclear powered vessels, the alliance ships in Rebels including their stolen Imperial carrier have to take fuel on board regularly. If it takes weeks a flank speed, the ISD is dead in space after the first day - assuming it was fully tanked when it started the battle.

And of course, I for one wouldn't want to be navigating that "nebula" rock-soup at full speed as an ISD helmsman.


You can see the density of the field of rocks surrounding Altamid. When the Enterprise passes through it barely fits; and anything a star destroyer collides with at flank speed will be a collision releasing star-wars grade energies to say nothing of the momentum that'd be transferred to the shield generators. Same with hyperspace.

[Sea Skimmer]

If the ICS numbers are true and they have that much firepower onboard and on the embarked fighter group they'd just lay waste to everything. I kinda thought we'd all gotten done with those.

If I had a hull on my ship that stood up to 200 gigaton yield weapons that include some kind of mass-reacting componet, I would not be worried about space gravel until I hit an awful high relative velocity, which is avoidable. Think about how big a crater in the rock crust of the earth a 200 gigaton mass-reaction weapon would make with a single shot.

[Adam Reynolds]

Necronlord's(and I believe Saxton's or Brian Young's) position is that the level of firepower is a consequence of the high reactor output, which is necessary for the sort of acceleration observed in the films. Fuel inefficiency would also be a consequence of this as well, akin to running on afterburners.

Though it also could be the case that there is a layer of inefficiency in weapons that does not occur in propulsion. Perhaps that had something to do with why the Death Star took so long to build, that they needed to figure out a way to harness that sort of power output for a weapon system as opposed to drive cores.

[NecronLord]

The energy of an impact with the rock isn't provided by the rocks' relative velocity to say, the planet Altamid, in such a scenario, the energy is provided by the ship's drive; which is certainly operating in the same range as its guns in this scenario.

And; a raygun that destroys a ship a thousand times over still shoots one ship (or however many it can enfilade, in this scenario) at a time.

The point is much the same even if you disagree with the ICS numbers (I don't, but I do think people forget their context) the ISD has fuel which it expends to do these things, and can't sustain top performance indefinitely.

[NecronLord]

Though it also could be the case that there is a layer of inefficiency in weapons that does not occur in propulsion. Perhaps that had something to do with why the Death Star took so long to build, that they needed to figure out a way to harness that sort of power output for a weapon system as opposed to drive cores.

That's actually built into in the ICS figures - the ICS firepower of guns is less than accelleration reactor derivations. For instance the infamous Acclamator has a reactor output by hte book of 2e23W, which by 48 turbolaser barrels would give 995 megatons per barrel second. This is even more obvious with the core ship, which has greater output of 3e24 W while its guns only fire 8 kt/shot.

SWTC has some remarks on this.

Many fighters demonstrate firepower much less than their engine (kinetic) power (considering their accelerations and likely estimates of ship's mass). For example a fighter that fires kiloton-scale laser cannon shots up to several times per second may actually exhibit engine power equivalent to a thousand of these shots per second. The reasons for this apparent discrepancy are due to the differences between the scales and internal structures of a tiny fighter and a flagrantly spacious naval vessel. In small-scale ships the reactors may really be inseparable from the engines, with tenuous plasma emerging from the reactor feeding into the ion drives. As such the reactor power and engine power are linked directly. However the power feeds to the weapons are indirect. They may carry lesser power fluxes than the conduits in a warship, due to inefficiencies of the compact scale. Heat dissipation is likely to be a crucial limiting factor in starfighter weaponry. Machinery and conduits that are only centimetres thick may be unable to pass power at multi-megaton-per-second rates. The tiniest inefficiencies would quickly lead to the accumulation of enough heat to melt the entire structure. The prevalence of radiators and unfolding wings in many starfighter designs demonstrates the critical importance of heat disposal. It is also possible that the energy weapons' recoil forces are a structural challenge on starfighter-scale craft (especially for guns mounted on thin wings).

Vast warships, on the other hand, distribute their energy through broad power trunks. They also have many active and passive heat-disposal systems, e.g. neutrino radiators, which may be unfeasible on fighter scales. A warship's thick cladding of exotic, thermally superconducting hull armour effectively turns the entire surface into a unitary heat sink. Such armour is equally good at dispersing internal waste heat or the heat of a turbolaser hit. Relatively heavy internal supports, both structurally and by tensor-field generators, cope with the recoil of heavier guns that compare to the ship's engine power.

Written after the AotC ICS.

[Sea Skimmer]

The energy of an impact with the rock isn't provided by the rocks' relative velocity to say, the planet Altamid, in such a scenario, the energy is provided by the ship's drive; which is certainly operating in the same range as its guns in this scenario.

And; a raygun that destroys a ship a thousand times over still shoots one ship (or however many it can enfilade, in this scenario) at a time.

Yeah but the ICSclad has that covered with the two dozen 6 megaton secondaries, and the constant relays of 2kt fighter guns it could bring into battle. 250,000 shots is high but not a problem if say the guns were good for 3,000 round service lifespans you'd be covered on paper. They are going against ships that appear vulnerable to conventional armament.

You'd also imagine they have some absurd amount of ordnance on board for the TIE bomber squadron which probably includes capital scale warheads because why on earth field bombers if it didn't and your default fighter cannon can already breach the Hoover dam, at the base, with strafing. Then they could increase the damage even further by using said warheads against large rocks to make shrapnel bombs.

I'm also pretty convinced the shear density of Trek robot targets will highly make up for the low capabilities of Imperial gunnery. Robots are always easier to kill in movies, unless its the Terminator.

The problem with all this is in yet another movie, the X-wing attack on the doom planet did not vaporize the entire forest around the action. Sadly the writers decided we needed main characters to be running around alive not converted into plasma directly on the objective.

[NecronLord]

Are we arguing from narrative tropes now?

[Sea Skimmer]

No I'm pointing out a well known problem with any of the damn movie evidence for high starship and fighter firepower, which has only become weaker with the force awakens. Also that pesky problem of do you want to assume Imperial gunners act like they do in the movies, or like you'd honestly just hope even a half trained crew real crew with simple WW2 visual director sighting could do at the ranges they fight? That specific point makes a bigger difference then the yield ranges in all reality.