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 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 01:28am 

Oh geez, I remember McEwok. Yeah, we'll get an earful on The Mighty 3 Million, because everything written down in an official book is gospel no matter how stupid, but filmed imagery is error-ridden and useless.

Call me petty, but you may have just saved me money. I don't want to flame the guy or suggest he's dumb or anything, and he's certainly written a billion times more on the subject of Star Wars than I have, but I don't actually like any of the shit I've seen travel from his brain to his keyboard.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 02:02am 

Actually, it seems the three million number has been retconed as the initial order, with the army size vastly expanded during the war. And the quintillions of droids were kept for the separatists, so the book isn't that bad on the ground.

The biggest problem I've seen is the fleet numbers: 6 mandator IIs during the clone wars total along with dozens of battle cruisers in the core and colonies. And a rebel intel estimate of 20+ executors built in all.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 02:11am 

There's a small section on that subject. During the Clone War, the galaxy is divided into 20 sectors of operation. The GAR of 3 million is divided into 20 operational groups of 150k per sector. There are clone and non-clone units involved on the Republic side. The way in how it is written, there's a small wiggle room for striking down the 3 million number: 3 million is the number of clones available in the early phase of the war and that many more clones were subsequently grown.

There's a small section on Pellaeon's war with the New Republic. He had 3 Executor-class SSDs to work with (if memory serves), two of them were salvaged from secret abandoned shipyards owned by Harrask (?). The area of operation for Pellaeon was quite large, operating in an area of roughly 50 sectors (all of which have been given names, amazingly). His initial success at capturing the politically important world of Orinda meant that the moffs pushed him to be even more bold, resulting in a massive New Republic counterattack.

Other tidbits that I remember:

-Zsinj was Grand Moff of a certain oversector and his success at quelling pirates etc. resulted in his acquisition of an SSD and 100 VSDs to supplement his Crimson Command.
-There's a pretty sweet picture of a Bellator (now officially part of Star Wars ) performing a BDZ. I believe the Assertor-class SD is now also officially a part of SW (I may be misremembering).
-Vader's Death Squadron has quite flexible in size, being able to acquire ships from local sectors whenever it needed. They intercepted a smuggler's ship transporting materials to Echo base. This tipped Death Squadron into blanketing the sector where Hoth was located with probe droids.
-The remnant of the Imperial fleet at Endor makes up a sizable fraction of the forces under Thrawn's direct command. I forget how many ships the book says were lost at Endor. I think the communications ship now has a class.

Again, lots of interesting tidbits. I may buy the book when it is cheaper but as it stands, there's not enough novelty to warrant me shelling out $20 to $30 for it at this moment.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 01:16pm 

That just sounds like the old Spaarti retcon. I guess with the way Star Wars canon works they are well and truly stuck with it by now (c'mon, he said UNITS not troops!) They are also stuck with quintillions of battle droids (thanks Saxton). As long as there is none of that "Odds" bullshit maybe I'll live.

It also sounds like the book is thoroughly over the "Impstars are big and impressive" fallacy. I like me some dagger ships. There was never evidence to support tons of Mandators, and while 20 Executors is a small number is kind of fits with the idea that it's a very new ship class when we see it (less than five years old since the class ship was built after ANH).

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 01:31pm 

That's what people also said about the length of the Executor and the size of DSII.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 02:39pm 

DSI: equal to ~1 million executors, built in under two years
DSII: equal to several million executors, more than half built and operational in ~6 months

And the Battle of Coruscant, where one thousand venators survive the initial separatist ambush and thousands more rush back to the capital, including about a thousand from the fifth fleet of the open circle. So the equivalent of three executors (or over 4.5 mandators) is only a small part of Coruscant's home defense fleet or a part of a single fleet in a single armada.

The empire clearly can build far more than 20 executors, if .1% of the resources devoted to the death star project were used to build executors there would be thousands of them built in the four years between Yavin and Endor. And from the destroyer fleets built during the Clone Wars there doesn't seem to be any reason why only six mandators would be built.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 03:33pm 

I like that they reveal some details about the Pius Dea Crusades (After 1000 years of war and misery the Jedi stepped in and overthrew the guy, before temporarily seizing power to ensure a stable transaction.) In this case the Jedi had legit reasons (the pius dea where zealotic fuckbags who had caused 1000 years of war and misery and they had tried peaceful means to get them removed.) It also explains why the jedi were willing to move against palpatine

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 04:44pm 

It seems obvious to me that the Star Wars universe is structured on narrativium rather than mathematical sense. They build lots of little Star Destroyers and only a few big "I'm important don't mess with me" ships. This can be explained in part by the ability of hyperspace to vastly increase the patrol range/influence of a ship. An Executor could presumably wipe out hundreds of planets during its operational lifetime, but this simply isn't done in the SWU. Why would they build ships that there is no call for? Hell, the Emperor probably laughs at Moffs' letters hitting his desk begging for an Executor.

Why build a Death Star then? Well it's an instant win button for the galaxy that's why. If the Emperor really needed to blast tons of planets that were in open rebellion right then he would build ships, but planets aren't in open rebellion and the Rebel Alliance can barely knock off a Destroyer here and there.

As for the Mandators, probably Kuat didn't really manage to sell the Republic on them.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 06:17pm 

I suppose I can see the empire choosing to limit the number of executors, but why would the Republic field only a handful of dreadnoughts and battlecruisers during the Clone Wars? Unless they're significantly more expensive per ton than smaller warships they would be preferred over a group of star destroyer scale vessels.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-04-05 06:32pm 

Politics, most likely. If the Senate is squabbling about increasing the size of the army, then increasing the size of naval ships is going to be contentious as well.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-05 04:51pm 

Oh ninja'ed lol

I hope this isn't a necro...

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-21 10:17pm 

I'm severely disappointed there was no detailed map of the Black Fleet Crisis in it.

I personally emailed Jason Fry when the Essential Atlas came out, asking him if there was something in the works along those lines, and he said Michael P. Kube-McDowell had already made a really detailed map of it that was just waiting to be released, and since a lot of the Essential Guide to Warfare is filling in blanks in the Atlas, I assumed it would be there.

Otherwise, I think it kicks ass. Great artwork, clever retcons and decent prose. The Pius Dea Crusade stuff is kriffing aweXome.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-22 11:05pm 

I know you posted this a while ago, but yeah that's one thing that really bugs me about SW "canon". Every tiny tidbit is taken as canon and people get outraged if even the tiniest detail from an RPG supplement is contradicted. Not only does it make it harder to kill stupid things like...lots and lots of what Traviss wrote, but it also seems incredibly limiting to me, the fact that all minor tidbits are treated as incredibly important in certain parts of the fan base. Which also feeds into, as mentioned even earlier in the thread, the fact that every single thing about the movies needs to be fleshed out and explained ad infinitum. I shudder at the convoluted explanations they're gonna make up to establish a timeline that includes all Clone Wars-related material, when they could easily just say "Anakin's adventures as a Padawan are all pushed up to the first few months or weeks of the war, he's a Knight for the rest of it" or something like that.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-22 11:30pm 

I've had my own "battles" with McEwok, but it's been years since I've really cared about the EU. I haven't been keeping up with this book, or this thread, at all. Didn't realize that he had somehow gotten himself a job with LFL (seriously, WTF?). From the few excerpts that were posted though, it doesn't look that bad. The main writer even followed up on some things from Saxton's ICS.



Totally agree with this. And it's not just the SW fanbase, it's the EU itself. Everything is rationalized and retained, almost nothing is thrown out. Now rationalizing canon and coming up with good explanations that take everything into account is laudable, IMO. But it's lame when the dumbest parts of the EU are kept to the detriment of everything else.

Traviss's own writing is an example of that. She came up with stupid numbers in her clone army order of battle, and the fans complained. She could have come clean about the clone numbers being silly. She could have even brushed off the criticism by treating the numbers as the trivia that they are, and just moved on without saying anything more on the subject. But instead, she wrote entire stories like Odds which brought the clone numbers to the forefront, twisting and shaping canon into something else entirely. If we take an all-inclusionist stance on this, the Jedi were complete morons who didn't know the actual scale of the Clone Wars within several orders of magnitude, and they may have even been conspiring with Palpatine against the Republic...fat chance that LFL will ever acknowledge that, even though they never had the backbone to outright dismiss what she wrote.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-24 08:06pm 

There might have been a bottleneck in getting qualified crew onto it (people with enough heft/important missions to get Star Dreadnoughts might have higher expectations of crew competency and experience, though cloning could mitigate that issue, assuming said important people were willing to wait).

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-25 07:42pm 

Right on. I couldn't have said it better myself. I would love to see a Star Wars Galaxy where trillions of troops and millions of large capital ships battle one another, with some pretty epic weaponry involved. I know that will never happen at this pace, but maybe one day we could hope for a big retcon.

It was disappointing that this Essential Guide implied large capital ships were really rare throughout the history of the SW Galaxy. Didn't get much in the way of new superweapons either and the Clone Army numbers issue was not rectified. At least fractalsponge got a lot of his great designs canonized.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-26 12:15pm 

Yeah, the EU has really become a bloated corpse with the way they have to explain EVERYTHING and once it's explained, never go back on it ever. Even if it contradicts scripts and movies and so forth, as is the case with the "parsec" thing. I mean, I guess quality is subjective to an extent, but when people are defending terrible stuff because it's "canon" and arguing against well-written stuff because it contradicts RPG supplements, there's something wrong here.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-26 12:49pm 

Yeah- no military need for anything bigger than an an ISD, as you note, since no one in the galaxy can kill enough of them to make a real dent in the fleet. There's thousands of them, you'd have to blow up hundreds to really matter.

There's also this big political issue about who controls such superships, see below.

Palpatine's a big fan of concentrated power. This makes sense for a guy who bases his rule on the Dark Side and his own personal powers to mind-trick people and fry them with Force lightning. He can find or mind-control one trusted lieutenant easily enough to command a giant battle platform. Controlling ten thousand people to fly ten thousand ships, any one of which could kill him if someone decides to backstab him with a turbolaser... I suspect he'd be less comfortable with that.

The larger the number of individual powerful units (the Death Star is powerful, the Executors are powerful, individual ISDs are... kind of not powerful), the harder it is to control everything personally. We see this in real life with dictators- for example, Moammar Gaddafi had a huge army of tanks and artillery, but almost all of it was parked out in the desert and not used at any one time, because there were only a handful of troops he actually trusted with tanks and big guns. There were other things like a lack of money in play, but that was a big part of it- he didn't have enough loyal men to mobilize all his weapons at once.

And then on top of that is the control issue: who do you send if someone rebels? If a normal planet rebels you send an ISD. If an ISD goes rogue you send a big super-destroyer. If a super-destroyer rebels... I dunno, send the Death Star. Same as you would if a well defended planet that would laugh off an ISD rebels.

And if the Death Star rebels, you have a problem. A problem with two counters. One, Palpatine could just move his quarters to the Death Star and run the galaxy from there. Two, you could, oh... I dunno. You could cunningly engineer in a small exploitable flaw by which a Force-empowered pilot named Skywalker can slip a proton torpedo into the thing's power plant and blow it to bits. And then make sure Darth Vader has his personal, torpedo-capable fighter on hand to do the job.



(tip of the hat to Eleventh Century Remnant for all this)

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-26 04:26pm 

The Rebellion Era scourcebook stated the Imperial military Numbers in Trillions...


It was rectified, Traviss's number was just the initial Order. So it left the numbers thought the course of the war vague

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-26 07:57pm 

That was fleet crew though, I am referring to seeing 100's of trillions or more of Army troops from the combined planetary forces of the Republic or the Empire. For me the more troops and capital ships the better.



True, it is better than nothing, and I don't mind vague either. I did like that he made mention that many Clone War battles were fought by natural born troops. on both sides.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-05-29 08:06am 

No, it was for both naval crew and the army corps.

 Post subject: Re: Dammit, I'm going to have to buy this book, aren't I?

Posted: 2012-08-23 12:39am 

The naval ships mentioned (Mandators) are controlled by the sector fleets of the core worlds - not a central Republic military or even the Judicial forces. Two for Kuat, one for Humbarine, and I forgot the other locations but I think Rendili got one.



The fact that Separatist holdouts helf out for more than 10 years in some cases in the Outer Rim, as well as cases like the Dornean navy also shows a Death Star is amazongly useful. That, and the Outer Rim Sieges.



I'd think when the Core Worlds are getting ass-raped by Grievous and the Confederacy is building Subjugator-class battleships the Republic would be a lot more willing to build those.

Two of the old Mandators were upgraded to Mandator-IIs during the Clone Wars, and I'd think they'd still build more of them when Durge's Lance went on.



I'd assume the desperation from Grievous' terrorist attacks would render those sort of things very Moot though. Given the attacks on 26 strategic Loyalist worlds.



To be fair that is the purpose of stormtroopers being on Imperial warships. They are personally loyal to the Emperr somehow and have a separate command, so they would be able to (theoretically) prevent the Death Star from rebelling against the Emperor. Of course, again it's theoretically.