Starfleet Jedi

ne problem with heat is that it is hard to get rid of when you are in space which is mostly a vacuum.

Well first off you have the rotary blasters. They point to an over heating problem for blaster type weapons. If they fire too quickly for to long they will melt the barrel. This is a problem real world fire arms have hence the modern multi barreled guns, but the rate of fire has to be much higher then what we see in Star Wars.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Z-6_rota ... ter_cannon
Here are some examples of real world mini-guns overheating while firing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8rNNXkOCi0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFEafMjr ... re=related

Then you have the quad guns on the Millennium Falcon. You'll notice the way one set of barrels fire, and then the other? This is evidence of over heating problems like above as I understand it.
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/AG-2G_quad_laser_cannon


You then have all the footage of Turbolaser fire. It seems to always have the same amount of time between each shot?

We know that they don't normally use full power shot from the Malevolence trilogy. Obi Won had to order full power.

Then there is the Death Star's thermal exhaust port.

The ICS shows large heat sinks and radiators on spaceships
For example the Naboo Cruiser's wings are basically fuel storage, heat sinks, and radiators.
http://www.phombo.com/technology/star-w ... l/popular/#

Again you have large heat sinks and radiators on fighters.
http://www.phombo.com/technology/star-w ... l/popular/

Here you have an example of heavy turbolasers having two cooling systems.
http://www.phombo.com/technology/star-w ... l/popular/


As far as I can tell, the Star Wars ships only the "Commerce Guild Destroyer" and "Banking Clan Frigate" have the magical neutrino radiators, but these are far from the most powerful vessels in Star Wars.
http://www.phombo.com/technology/star-w ... l/popular/
_____
Have I missed anything of importance?

What kind of conclusions can we draw from these peaces of information?

Is is possible to figure out the limits of materials used in Star Wars?

Are Star Wars engineers too incompetent to use their technologies intelligently?

If I remember correctly, prequels do show burst-fire mode for Clone weapons. Destroyer droids use multi-barreled blasters, though.

Personally, at least, I can draw few conclusions about the properties of the heat sinks and radiators and their capabilities without knowing what kind of energies they're supposed to deal with in the first place.

That perhaps not all ships will employ the neutrino radiators isn't necessarily surprising or indicative of poor engineering, though, IMO. We have no idea how the technology is supposed to work or how expensive it might be. There might be enough significant drawbacks with such things that they aren't desirable in every design. (eg, maybe the tech require heavy maintenance or exotic components or materials for construction?)

Or, it might also be that Saxton wants it to be implicitly understood that all ships use them. (They certainly need some kind of pretty hefty magic to deal with even a minuscule inefficiency in the power generation he'll assign to capital ships, nevermind a DET Death Star.) If so, explicit mention might not be needed for every single ship.


It's interesting to note that unlike his predecessors, Saxton assigns considerable room for fuel tanks in his ICS designs. Previously, the ICS writers/concept artists allotted only utterly minuscule amounts of space to those, but with his more "hard scifi" approach Saxton changed that somewhat.

Yeah, hard sci-fi that ignores a lot of "magic" technology when it suits his numbers... :)

Praeothmin wrote:Yeah, hard sci-fi that ignores a lot of "magic" technology when it suits his numbers... :)

Not so much ignored them as ignored the possibility of them, IMO. We must bear in mind that there are literally hundreds of SW books, comics and etc etc. Stuff like mass-lightening is found only in a few comparatively obscure EU books (and some of those were written after his ICS contributions). It's not that hard for Saxton to have been perfectly honest and yet missed them. Especially as he apparently relied on fellow fans to gather quotes for him -- and a lot of those people were the familiar ASVS/SDN crowd, who, shall we say, might have exhibited some selection bias in what they presented him with.

(He does list one quote mentioning it on his novel quotes pages, but there's appended a comment which says the system used there is exceptional, which is backed up by other fluff.)

When I said 'more "hard scifi"' I of course meant it in very relative terms. Nothing will make the anti-relativity technology, tensorial fields, complex-mass hypermatter and whatever that Saxton incorporates anything but magic. But "harder" in the sense that unlike the vast majority of SW authors (EU and films alike), he does bother to concern himself with such matters as conservation of energy, fuel/propellant issues, realistic relationships between stars and planets, etc.

Personally, I still think there's something awesome in how he found entirely new ship classes in the Imperial Navy by taking comic book imagery literally and judging every badly drawn ISD with wrong proportions to be a different type. And I say that in an entirely non-sarcastic and non-VS-debate-related way. The Navy he produced with such simple means became so much more impressively vast, nuanced and interesting than the uniform (and minuscule, for the most part) ISD fleets of most of the standard EU. Going through those pages felt almost like watching old WWII photos and comparing tank or aircraft variants.

General Donner wrote:Personally, I still think there's something awesome in how he found entirely new ship classes in the Imperial Navy by taking comic book imagery literally and judging every badly drawn ISD with wrong proportions to be a different type. And I say that in an entirely non-sarcastic and non-VS-debate-related way. The Navy he produced with such simple means became so much more impressively vast, nuanced and interesting than the uniform (and minuscule, for the most part) ISD fleets of most of the standard EU. Going through those pages felt almost like watching old WWII photos and comparing tank or aircraft variants.

Well I think all of us here enjoy way too much over analysing things and props in ways the creators of which never intended but to me it chaffs that he explictly all but discounts the Imperial Sourcebook and the fleet it fleshed out to focus on a bunch of triangular prisms with different bits smudged or elongated.

One can not escape the odurous implication it isn't fleshing out the Imperial navy or "finding" new subclasses/refits he's interested in but supporting his preconcieved notions of what Star Wars "is". Such colors his assumptions and conclusions he draws from his work.

sonofccn wrote:Well I think all of us here enjoy way too much over analysing things and props in ways the creators of which never intended but to me it chaffs that he explictly all but discounts the Imperial Sourcebook and the fleet it fleshed out to focus on a bunch of triangular prisms with different bits smudged or elongated.

You mean this?

It's sort of surprising to find, actually. To my best knowledge, he doesn't refer to the ISB anywhere else. And it seems this page isn't listed in his site index, either. Nor with the site update history.

Certainly a perfunctory treatment. Though many of his criticisms appear quite valid. Much as I personally like the ISB, I can easily see why someone with Saxton's "scientific" methodology would take offense at some of its errors.

One can not escape the odurous implication it isn't fleshing out the Imperial navy or "finding" new subclasses/refits he's interested in but supporting his preconcieved notions of what Star Wars "is". Such colors his assumptions and conclusions he draws from his work.

Oh, to be sure one's perspective will always affect one's conclusions. I'm fairly positive few if any of the comic artists he draws upon put any great amount of thought into their work, or even thought they were drawing anything but a plain ISD in most cases. Giving them the benefit of doubt, one might agree, even if the ships aren't "anatomically correct" in their proportions, so to speak.

Still, his site on warship designs is impressive work, and his speculations far more interesting and readable than much of the official fluff, IMO. The detail and thought he puts into his work is one thing that makes me still think quite highly of his ICS books, even though the firepower figures are inflated.

General Donner wrote:You mean this?

Actually I was thinking of this:

Some non-dagger designs dominate the warship descriptions reported in Rebel Alliance historian Arhul Hextrophon's Imperial Sourcebook however it must be remembered that his original stolen source documents were addressed to the Emperor's Advisors for Budgetary Affairs, and had the tone of special pleading for supplementary low-budget ship-building. Indeed it should be remembered that Hextrophon's entire report disclaimed completeness and comprehensivity; it even omitted common walker and repulsortank models in favour of marginal and irregular ground vehicle technologies; and it failed to discuss any starfighters. The non-dagger ships are peripheral, non-optimal designs. They may have been used by local system and sector forces in the most marginal and remote regions of the galaxy where resources are diffuse and rebels and pirates take refuge and operate with impunity, but not as major components of the mainstream Imperial Starfleet.

There is nothing in the ISB to suggest its focusing on peripheral starships used in marginal or remote regions of the galaxy.

General Donner wrote:Though many of his criticisms appear quite valid. Much as I personally like the ISB, I can easily see why someone with Saxton's "scientific" methodology would take offense at some of its errors.

Considering some of the "mistakes" are things merely disagreeing with his view of Star Wars such as "concentration on small and outdated vehicles and ships used for sectorial (rather than strategic) defence" or "assumption that star destroyers are exceptionally large warships". Hard knocks for what is one of the more explicit protrayals of the Imperial Navy.

General Donner wrote:Oh, to be sure one's perspective will always affect one's conclusions. I'm fairly positive few if any of the comic artists he draws upon put any great amount of thought into their work, or even thought they were drawing anything but a plain ISD in most cases. Giving them the benefit of doubt, one might agree, even if the ships aren't "anatomically correct" in their proportions, so to speak.

Ultimatly we all have our biases I don't deny that or that they do color our opinions and the conclusions we derive. Its the human condition. But, to me, his work goes beyond merely a prefrence to rewriting the Verse in question. Forgetting the debate for the moment I do believe his universe and the Star Wars universe are a poor fit at best.

General Donner wrote:Still, his site on warship designs is impressive work, and his speculations far more interesting and readable than much of the official fluff, IMO. The detail and thought he puts into his work is one thing that makes me still think quite highly of his ICS books, even though the firepower figures are inflated.

It is an impressive amount of content to be sure but in the end I disagree strongly with his base assumptions he uses in his speculation/conclusion. I simply prefer a more "bottom heavy" Imperial Navy rather than the "top heavy" one he prefers.

sonofccn wrote:Actually I was thinking of this:

Some non-dagger designs dominate the warship descriptions reported in Rebel Alliance historian Arhul Hextrophon's Imperial Sourcebook however it must be remembered that his original stolen source documents were addressed to the Emperor's Advisors for Budgetary Affairs, and had the tone of special pleading for supplementary low-budget ship-building. Indeed it should be remembered that Hextrophon's entire report disclaimed completeness and comprehensivity; it even omitted common walker and repulsortank models in favour of marginal and irregular ground vehicle technologies; and it failed to discuss any starfighters. The non-dagger ships are peripheral, non-optimal designs. They may have been used by local system and sector forces in the most marginal and remote regions of the galaxy where resources are diffuse and rebels and pirates take refuge and operate with impunity, but not as major components of the mainstream Imperial Starfleet.

There is nothing in the ISB to suggest its focusing on peripheral starships used in marginal or remote regions of the galaxy.

Not directly so, I'd agree, but it does focus on ships of ISD size or smaller. While not mentioning other larger designs besides the Executor-class. (Out of universe, that would of course be because few such ships had yet been introduced in the "official" EU at that point, besides one-off designs in the early comics.)

I think the ISB does speak of "star destroyers" more generally as a category of ship, rather than the ISD as a specific class, also, when it gives such numbers as there usually being at least 24 star destroyers in a Sector fleet. So it doesn't necessarily rule out other variants.

Considering some of the "mistakes" are things merely disagreeing with his view of Star Wars such as "concentration on small and outdated vehicles and ships used for sectorial (rather than strategic) defence" or "assumption that star destroyers are exceptionally large warships". Hard knocks for what is one of the more explicit protrayals of the Imperial Navy.

I do agree he's being a bit excessively dismissive in his treatment of it. On the other hand, the in-universe preamble gives him a good excuse for doing so. He's entirely right that it neither is nor claims to be complete or comprehensive; even an EU "fanatic" like I used to be would have to agree there's much it doesn't say about the Imperial Navy. (Though it's certainly one of the pre-eminent sources on it, still.)

Ultimatly we all have our biases I don't deny that or that they do color our opinions and the conclusions we derive. Its the human condition. But, to me, his work goes beyond merely a prefrence to rewriting the Verse in question. Forgetting the debate for the moment I do believe his universe and the Star Wars universe are a poor fit at best.

What do you define as "the Star Wars universe" in that context? The prequels/TCW version, or the official EU? Some subset of the latter? (Privately I was quite partial to the WEG books over above the mostly poorly written novels, for example.) There's a lot of SW materials, and while the continuity people do their best, it doesn't all fit together. (It doesn't, of course, help that Lucas and his TV people deliberately run roughshod over everything else, either.)

I'd agree Saxton's page does something of a "rewrite" of the 'verse by collating separate data and analyzing them in a fashion the original authors would never have intended. But at the same time, he stays remarkably true to the core premises of the setting. (If we ignore the nonsense about petatons and all that, obviously enough.) There's nothing in his work I can see which harms the setting as the WEG/Bantam/Dark Horse people originally fleshed it out in the 90s. Nor the (OT) film setting itself in that regard, besides perhaps some counter-intuitive interpretations. (And one or two pet peeves, like the Endorian Holocaust.)

It is an impressive amount of content to be sure but in the end I disagree strongly with his base assumptions he uses in his speculation/conclusion. I simply prefer a more "bottom heavy" Imperial Navy rather than the "top heavy" one he prefers.

While that's your right, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, or necessarily even hostile. The "top-heaviness" would refer to his plethora of designs, not the actual numbers or proportions of ships. Even in WEG, a Sector Fleet is supposed to have thousands of ships on average, and only a comparative few SDs. And several WEG books (such as the Dark Empire Sourcebook) agree somewhat with Saxton's ideas, by saying that the Emperor kept a large reserve of heavy ships sequestered in the core, outside the organization of the Sector Groups.

Put briefly, I don't think there's any reason why one couldn't fit the intriguing variety of ships he found into the numbers we obtain from WEG. It requires some rearrangement, but not actually breaking anything IMO. Then again, of course that's never going to happen.

General Donner wrote:Not directly so, I'd agree, but it does focus on ships of ISD size or smaller. While not mentioning other larger designs besides the Executor-class. (Out of universe, that would of course be because few such ships had yet been introduced in the "official" EU at that point, besides one-off designs in the early comics.)

I think the ISB does speak of "star destroyers" more generally as a category of ship, rather than the ISD as a specific class, also, when it gives such numbers as there usually being at least 24 star destroyers in a Sector fleet. So it doesn't necessarily rule out other variants.

I do agree that there is room for more Star Destroyers in the Imperial Navy. Varients and intermidiate designs and what have you. Don't misunderstand. I'm just saying in my opinion if your goal is to flesh out the Imperial Navy dumping the ISB seems counter-productive.

General Donner wrote:I do agree he's being a bit excessively dismissive in his treatment of it. On the other hand, the in-universe preamble gives him a good excuse for doing so. He's entirely right that it neither is nor claims to be complete or comprehensive; even an EU "fanatic" like I used to be would have to agree there's much it doesn't say about the Imperial Navy. (Though it's certainly one of the pre-eminent sources on it, still.)

I agree it has an in-universe "loop-hole" to try and explain descrepencies, the size of the Executor for one, nor do I have issue invoking that on segments which have become old/outdated. Just not completely disregarding it without just cause.

General Donner wrote:What do you define as "the Star Wars universe" in that context?

The movies and the EU. The clone wars show obviously came far later than the bulk of his work.

General Donner wrote:There's a lot of SW materials, and while the continuity people do their best, it doesn't all fit together. (It doesn't, of course, help that Lucas and his TV people deliberately run roughshod over everything else, either.)

I'd agree Saxton's page does something of a "rewrite" of the 'verse by collating separate data and analyzing them in a fashion the original authors would never have intended. But at the same time, he stays remarkably true to the core premises of the setting. (If we ignore the nonsense about petatons and all that, obviously enough.) There's nothing in his work I can see which harms the setting as the WEG/Bantam/Dark Horse people originally fleshed it out in the 90s. Nor the (OT) film setting itself in that regard, besides perhaps some counter-intuitive interpretations. (And one or two pet peeves, like the Endorian Holocaust.)

Well on a basic level his view of the Verse is one of virtually unlimited resources and material goverened solely by the will or desire to use it. Hence quintillion[sp?] of battledroids or an addmitedly optimal build of 1,000,000 Victory Star Destroyers. The rest of the Verse tends to turn on smaller numbers, billions or millions of soldiers and thousands to tens of thousands of "big" ships.

General Donner wrote:While that's your right, I don't think the two are mutually exclusive, or necessarily even hostile. The "top-heaviness" would refer to his plethora of designs, not the actual numbers or proportions of ships

Within the context of Curtis Saxton's Navy they are fairly exclusive. To him the ISD is a medium sized vessel, a Destroyer, of mudane stock.

General Donner wrote:Even in WEG, a Sector Fleet is supposed to have thousands of ships on average, and only a comparative few SDs. And several WEG books (such as the Dark Empire Sourcebook) agree somewhat with Saxton's ideas, by saying that the Emperor kept a large reserve of heavy ships sequestered in the core, outside the organization of the Sector Groups.

Put briefly, I don't think there's any reason why one couldn't fit the intriguing variety of ships he found into the numbers we obtain from WEG. It requires some rearrangement, but not actually breaking anything IMO. Then again, of course that's never going to happen.

Again, sorry for any confusion, I do agree there is room for more Star Destroyers. Even ones between the size of an ISD and a SSD. By what I meant by "top heavy" is a navy focused and composed primarly of Star Destroyers with anything smaller marignal and largely pherpherial to the galaxy at large. Which I argue was the focus and point of Saxton's work, there being 11 ships smaller than a Star Destroyer [900-1600] in his cataloge to 22 ships larger. Not all of which were taken from comics of course, the Executor first and formost, or "discovered" by him, Eclispe, but I think it helps establish the pattern of his work.

General Donner wrote:

Praeothmin wrote:Yeah, hard sci-fi that ignores a lot of "magic" technology when it suits his numbers... :)

Not so much ignored them as ignored the possibility of them, IMO. We must bear in mind that there are literally hundreds of SW books, comics and etc etc. Stuff like mass-lightening is found only in a few comparatively obscure EU books (and some of those were written after his ICS contributions). It's not that hard for Saxton to have been perfectly honest and yet missed them. Especially as he apparently relied on fellow fans to gather quotes for him -- and a lot of those people were the familiar ASVS/SDN crowd, who, shall we say, might have exhibited some selection bias in what they presented him with.

(He does list one quote mentioning it on his novel quotes pages, but there's appended a comment which says the system used there is exceptional, which is backed up by other fluff.)

When I said 'more "hard scifi"' I of course meant it in very relative terms. Nothing will make the anti-relativity technology, tensorial fields, complex-mass hypermatter and whatever that Saxton incorporates anything but magic. But "harder" in the sense that unlike the vast majority of SW authors (EU and films alike), he does bother to concern himself with such matters as conservation of energy, fuel/propellant issues, realistic relationships between stars and planets, etc.

Personally, I still think there's something awesome in how he found entirely new ship classes in the Imperial Navy by taking comic book imagery literally and judging every badly drawn ISD with wrong proportions to be a different type. And I say that in an entirely non-sarcastic and non-VS-debate-related way. The Navy he produced with such simple means became so much more impressively vast, nuanced and interesting than the uniform (and minuscule, for the most part) ISD fleets of most of the standard EU. Going through those pages felt almost like watching old WWII photos and comparing tank or aircraft variants.

No, he ignores the magic anti-grav drives, and the effects real trust drives of the power levels he provides would have on worlds where they were used...
Dooku's ship, if truly trust only and no magic anti-grav, would have killed Amidala, the clones, Yoda and everyone within a radius of a couple of km if it truly had exerted the power needed to make from surface to space within a few minutes...
Same thing for the X-Wings taking off from Yavin IV with the Rebel lookout less than a few dozen meters away not being incinerated by the jetwash from the leaving starfighters...

General Donner wrote:Personally, I still think there's something awesome in how he found entirely new ship classes in the Imperial Navy by taking comic book imagery literally and judging every badly drawn ISD with wrong proportions to be a different type. And I say that in an entirely non-sarcastic and non-VS-debate-related way. The Navy he produced with such simple means became so much more impressively vast, nuanced and interesting than the uniform (and minuscule, for the most part) ISD fleets of most of the standard EU. Going through those pages felt almost like watching old WWII photos and comparing tank or aircraft variants.

I think it's one of the most retarded things he ever did.
then LFL took his idiocies seriously, and had a fan make CGI renderings of some of these classes, where there's like more gun batteries than armour plating on star destroyers.

General Donner wrote:Personally, I still think there's something awesome in how he found entirely new ship classes in the Imperial Navy by taking comic book imagery literally and judging every badly drawn ISD with wrong proportions to be a different type. And I say that in an entirely non-sarcastic and non-VS-debate-related way. The Navy he produced with such simple means became so much more impressively vast, nuanced and interesting than the uniform (and minuscule, for the most part) ISD fleets of most of the standard EU. Going through those pages felt almost like watching old WWII photos and comparing tank or aircraft variants.

Mr. Oragahn wrote: I think it's one of the most retarded things he ever did.
then LFL took his idiocies seriously, and had a fan make CGI renderings of some of these classes, where there's like more gun batteries than armour plating on star destroyers.

In some of the cases it makes sense for the ship to be a new class, but with how badly the comics were often drawn you would need to assume that pretty much every ship was a one off.