SW Fleet Logistics (Rebellion, GE)

[Jedi Master Spock]

I'd like to highlight and emphasize several things that have already been said, before I move onto some new material. I've split the thread because while we could watch the rehashing going on SB.com, there's definitely a lot to talk about.

• The D6 RASB says the Mon Calamari are straining their shipyards' capacity. Not their budget, their very yard capacity.
• We have newer T level material that puts some major CIS shipyards in the hands of the Quarren.
• The game mechanics and economy have a lot of problems. One is that all ships are too cheap - an X-Wing costs thousands of credits when a RL fighter costs millions of dollars, and yet most of the equipment in the RPG books has credits being a fairly small amount of money.
• There's something very odd in the EU and in core Star Wars about ship sizes, fleet deployments, and economics that is very consistent, and yet seems to completely escape the traditional Saxtonite view. And yet it's actually something I've talked about before.
• We have a lot of examples of what constitutes a major fleet deployment in Star Wars.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I recently reviewed the most recent SotG book here. I'd like to post a few lists.

Cost modifiers:

Colossal (station): x5000
Colossal (cruiser): x500
Colossal (frigate): x50
Colossal: x5
Gargantuan: x2
Huge: x1

Stock ship base costs:

Battlecruiser (Colossal: Cruiser): 20,000,000
Cruiser (Colossal: Cruiser): 10,000,000
Frigate (Colossal: Frigate): 2,000,000
Corvette (Colossal: Frigate): 1,000,000
Heavy Freighter (Colossal: Frigate): 500,000
Gunship (Colossal): 200,000
Shuttle (Colossal): 50,000
Light Freighter (Colossal): 20,000
Bomber (Gargantuan): 50,000
Superiority fighter (Gargantuan): 50,000
Interceptor (Huge): 100,000
Light fighter (Huge): 30,000

In general, the prices in SotG 2007 are in line with this scale, except for the ones that say they aren't for sale. I'm underlining a couple things. One, these ships are all ridiculously cheap. The RPG treats credits a lot like dollars when it comes to personal purchases, the scale is simply silly. Two, the largest ships are disproportionately cheap. A Banking Clan Frigate runs to 57,000,000. In general, we're talking giant battlecruisers being on the order of a thousand times more expensive than fighters - when they're on the order of a million times the volume.

But that's how the fluff works in them as well, not just the mechanics.

The Death Star Project is an example of a priority sector into which the Empire poured resources enough to have formed perhaps a score of Sector Groups

A score of sector groups. What's in a sector group? Well, according to that same ISB, between 1-3 Armies (usually 1) of 130,000 troops form a Systems Army, and 2-4 Systems Armies form a Sector Army, so there are about 300,000-1,600,000 ground troops per sector - most likely, about 500,000. It says 8% of sectors are below baseline, 15% above baseline. It then actually gives a specific number:

A surface marshal commands the sector army, although more often than not this is merely an additional title bestowed onto the Moff or Grand Moff who commands the Sector Group. The sector army includes every single army trooper in an assault fleet. This is 774,576 troops and 1,180,309 personnel in total. 66,640 repulsorcraft are in service with the sector army, as well as 13,992 heavy tanks.

The sector group includes 24 Star Destroyers and "at least 2400 ships" total, 1,600 of which are combat warships. It sounds like the leeway is in how big the support train is, really:

A Sector Group can be expected to contain at least 2,400 ships, 24 of which are Star Destroyers, and another 1,600 combat starships. Thousands of Sector Groups are at the Emperor's Group HQ. command as he seeks to bring the galaxy firmly under his control.

The Thrawn Trilogy sets the number of total Star Destroyers at circa 25,000, so here "thousands" either includes a lot of understrength Sector Groups or refers to something barely over 1,000.

So according to the ISB, the Death Star costs 480 ISDs, 32,000 smaller combat ships, 16,000+ support ships, and a ground army with 20-30 million troops in it and several million transport vehicles. And yet a 160 km Death Star has 16 million times the volume of an ISD. 20 sector groups shouldn't cost more than a few thousand times the cost of an ISD. Maybe tens of thousands, at the absolute most.

What about that ship production in the 2001 SotG again? Something about 640 weeks for an ISD, 2109 for the Executor (in a book that gives the length of the Executor as 8,000 meters, which would make the Executor 22 times the size with 4.4 times the surface area). Yet it can be built for only 7.6 times the price and takes only 3.3 times as long.

The Strike-class is designed from the ground up to be a flexible, efficient, modular starship with half the functionality of a Victory Star Destroyer for 25% of the cost.

Strike: 450m. VSD: 900m. Size ratio: ~8. Cost ratio: 4. Power ratio: 2.

Actually, that's probably the most explicit example of the phenomenon we're going to see. I'm going to use it as a benchmark from here on out. Obviously, in-universe, it wouldn't hold as an exact rule, but I think this is the approximate relationship we're seeing.

Two equally advanced ships built by the same people have a power ratio roughly equal to their ratio of lengths and a cost ratio roughly equal to their ratio of surface areas. And if we take that rule, and drag it back over all the previous examples in the EU and in the movies, it makes a lot of sense. Trade Federation Battleships still are very inefficient warships, but not by nearly as dramatic a margin.

Bigger starships are cheaper per unit volume to build in Star Wars. They're also less effective. We see it in everything from the very low level of game mechanics to the very high level of Endor, where the Executor outmassed the rest of the Imperial conventional fleet and the Rebel fleet combined, and yet was not overwhelmingly powerful. Maybe constructing the outer hull and handling the shields is the most expensive part. Maybe hyperdrives have great economy scaling. Whatever the in-universe reason, it's a hard and fast fact whether you're dealing with the high canon (MCCs fighting with ISDs on near-even terms at Endor, SSD not being overwhelming, fighters attacking larger ships) or the lowest continuities (game mechanics).

So how much should a Death Star cost? Well, if we use the ISB figures, and adjust for the fact that smaller capital ships are generally 1-10% of the cost of a SD, a 160 km Death Star should cost between 1500-6000 Star Destroyers to put together if it's built like a Star Wars ship. If we use the ratio between its surface area and an ISD, we come up with the figure of 10,000.

A couple dozen assorted really large ships (say, 19 km) would cost as much as several thousand more ISDs. I could easily see the Imperial military budget divided into four comparable sections: Star Destroyers, smaller ships (mainly used for law enforcement rather than military purposes, land warfare stuff and all the transports needed to move them around, and Emperor Palpatine's special super-projects.

Now, I don't see this strange and curious pattern being deliberate. I think it's quite unconscious.

[Mr. Oragahn]

One of the RPG sources, probably a D20 one, says that a Star Destroyer is basically a star cruiser with a wedge shape that can destroy worlds of a system (namely, bombard them back to Dark Ages). It's coming with a complicated explanation about ship classes and nomenclature.
Well, anyway, we know from one of the last X-wing games video games that there's a frigate, which is not very big, seen defending the Fondor shipyards. It has all the elements that would make it a SD, unless a ship of that size, a frigate, can't count as a star destroyer.

With Acclamators, Venators, Victories and other stuff, that's a lot of potential ships not to be ISDs. That said, one of the EU books actually "insisted" that those 24 SDs were ISDs. I don't know how well it fits with the ISB, since the ISB already acknowledged the existence of Victories as Star Destroyers. So that other EU source would be in contradiction with the ISB and other sources putting 24 Star Destroyers per sector on the average.
Notice that some sectors didn't have more than two ISDs tops. The RPG Supernova has such an example.
The Supers also muddy the tables. How do they count? They're rare, but are they counted as representing X Star Destroyers, or one Star Destroyer?
It's hard, since the 24-thing figure is an average, an ideal number.
The new nomenclature doesn't even recognize them as Star Destroyers anymore, and Supers are the larger ships. They're actually Star Dreadnaughts, but we have to be careful because some books still speak about Super-class Star Destroyers.
Let's note that before the change of nomenclature, which obviously was influenced by Saxton's positions if you look at his pages on this topic, the Executor was a Star Destroyer of a given class; that is true for the ISB.

[Jedi Master Spock]

One of the RPG sources, probably a D20 one, says that a Star Destroyer is basically a star cruiser with a wedge shape that can destroy worlds of a system (namely, bombard them back to Dark Ages). It's coming with a complicated explanation about ship classes and nomenclature.

I saw that line, too, in my skims. Having a little trouble tracking it back down, but several of them talk about the nomenclature issue.

The latest edition uses Colossal (Frigate) and Colossal (Cruiser) as its two big ship sizes, but the core issues are this:

1.) The lesser ships of Vader's fleet are "battleships" in the novelization.
2.) We see a lot of cruisers in the films and in the EU, and most of them are smaller than Star Destroyers, Saxton's ramblings aside.
3.) We know what the balance of ship sizes are pretty well. I.e., almost everything is smaller than a SD.

Well, anyway, we know from one of the last X-wing games video games that there's a frigate, which is not very big, seen defending the Fondor shipyards. It has all the elements that would make it a SD, unless a ship of that size, a frigate, can't count as a star destroyer.

With Acclamators, Venators, Victories and other stuff, that's a lot of potential ships not to be ISDs. That said, one of the EU books actually "insisted" that those 24 SDs were ISDs. I don't know how well it fits with the ISB, since the ISB already acknowledged the existence of Victories as Star Destroyers. So that other EU source would be in contradiction with the ISB and other sources putting 24 Star Destroyers per sector on the average.
Notice that some sectors didn't have more than two ISDs tops. The RPG Supernova has such an example.

The ISB says that the Imperial Army is generally overstrength compared to its official mandated order of battle in each sector; however, I get the impression the Navy is generally understrength.

The Supers also muddy the tables. How do they count? They're rare, but are they counted as representing X Star Destroyers, or one Star Destroyer?
It's hard, since the 24-thing figure is an average, an ideal number.

IMO, the Supers are few enough not to make a big dent in the figures. Now, they are potentially large and expensive enough to make a dent in the budget if there are enough of them, but it's still going to be a small slice of the pie compared to the regular SDs and smaller ships.

The new nomenclature doesn't even recognize them as Star Destroyers anymore, and Supers are the larger ships. They're actually Star Dreadnaughts, but we have to be careful because some books still speak about Super-class Star Destroyers.
Let's note that before the change of nomenclature, which obviously was influenced by Saxton's positions if you look at his pages on this topic, the Executor was a Star Destroyer of a given class; that is true for the ISB.

SotG 2007 (which I reviewed, remember) is more recent than anything Saxton got into the EU. And mostly uses Star Destroyer, although Star Dreadnought turns up a couple times.

Anyway, the Thrawn trilogy sourcebook talks about the logistical situation a little bit. It's the sort of background you'd expect to see from reading the Thrawn trilogy:

p219: No new Star Destroyers have been constructed since the death of the Emperor.

p222: As capital ship shortages plague the Empire, the Strike cruiser remains one vessel it can still turn out on a semi-regular basis from one of its remaining manufacturing centers.

Later on that page: During the height of the galactic civil war, the Empire was occupied chasing the Rebellion across the galaxy, the Empire had to come up with a means of protecting cargo transports. Without unhindered trade, the Empire would literally grind to a halt. It could not, however, afford to waste Star Destroyers on such assignments.

And on speaking of the size of fleets deployed:
p66: "The centerpieces of this armada were five Star Destroyers." (The book then goes on to name six SDs, including Thrawn's flagship, then goes on for a while.) "For the major assault on Sluis Van, Thrawn added the following vessels to his armada: twelve Strike-class cruisers, twenty two Carrack class light cruisers, and thirty full squadrons of TIE fighters."

So, recall, we have:

• 1 ISD-II, 1600m
• 5 ISD-I, 1600m
• 12 Strike, 450m
• 22 Carrack, 350m
• 360 extra TIE fighters

I'll note if we had the full EU load of fighters on each of those ships, that's 1,024 TIEs in all.

Now, suppose we have the ratios of size and power given above - power by length, cost by surface area, and use an "average" length of 8m for the TIEs (which were a mix of different types). In that case, ISDs represent 31% of the tactical strength - and 75% of the economic investment - of Thrawn's fleet (estimated 19.3 ISD-equivalents). The highly disposable TIE fighter makes a lot of sense in that regard, provided you have the human resources to fuel them (and the Empire does).

The next largest portion of the estimated strength comes from the TIEs (27%), something reflected in the actual Thrawn trilogy; in this battle, Thrawn used a large number of TIEs to ambush the Rebel fleet, and it was a deadly trap. If we counted the TIEs in with their parent ships, the ISDs go up to 42% of the share, since they have most of the TIEs.

For comparison, if we took full listed EU TIE escorts for Death Squadron's six ISDs + 1 SSD in TESB using the currently favored length of 19 km for the Executor, we'd get a total length of 20.8 metric miles of starship - 11.9 from the SSD and 2.9 from the associated TIEs. This estimation technique is about to make a lot of sense out of something normally quite puzzling that comes from further down the page:

p66: It was an awesome task force, worthy of those put together by the Empire before Palpatine's death.

Let me underline that. The WEG books give some of the most dramatic numbers for the Empire in its fervently pro-Imperial ISB. Zahn himself is the one who says that the Empire had 25,000 SDs at its peak. And yet:

p66: It was an awesome task force, worthy of those put together by the Empire before Palpatine's death.

From the horse's mouth itself, the WEG books that give you a large Imperial fleet also give a logistically troubled Imperial fleet, one in which a handful of ISDs, put together, can form the core of a mighty armada. One in which SDs have difficulty covering the vast distances separating the systems of the Empire, one in which the Empire was spread so incredibly thin that they were struggling to protect their own freighters in their own territory.

One in which Thrawn's piecemeal armada with an extra-heavy fighter escort could compare to Vader's far more expensive Death Squadron.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Those are interesting finds, indeed.
Which would mean the large fleet -- or group of fleets -- assembled at Besh was clearly a massive gamble on the Empire's part (if you take a look at the last pages of the thread at SBC).

This also largely ties in the topics about the Holonet's partial destruction and cannibalization, notably outside the Core Worlds, and the construction of the Death Stars.
Since the DSII was nearly twice as big as the first one, and would be built in four years (the superlaser for the DSII was already in construction right after ANH, from one of the books) while the first one was built over 20 years, you have an increase of the production by 10.
Obviously, there would be more of that random stuffing in the DSII, made from those standard modules that would serve no real purpose, but since they'd pick a new design -- you cannot arbitrarily scale an entire moon wide design by x and assume that the construction production will scale up linearly by x either, since it's an entire modification of the whole structure -- my pet theory there would be that the Emperor had increased the drain on the Empire's resources to accelerate the construction of the second battle station.
Obviously the greater requirement for standard modules built in shipyards all across the Empire, and then assembled at Endor, would reduce the shipyards' production of typical ships of the line.

This would obviously impact the sector forces and reduce the capacity to rebuild them after the losses due to Rebel raids.

I suggest we keep the fleet logistics here, and start a Death Star production thread at some in the days or weeks to come.

[Mr. Oragahn]

A couple of additional quotes, relevant to the fleet logistics and the kind of order the Empire to maintain over its territories, would probably be best suited here:

Two examples of typical impressive fleets:

Task Force Vengeance and Death Squadron. The second being said, twice, both in WEG and WOTC books, to be the largest fleet ever assembled. Therefore any other larger gathering of ships could only be a short lived fleet meant to be dismantled right after the operation it's been assembled for, or is nothing more than the sum of several isolated ships and small fleets.

The visible ships, at Besh:

_________________________________

It was a two fold trap. The rebel fleet was supposed to jump to precalculated coordinates, but over there were waiting a group of ships larger than the fleet that defended Endor.

One of the major problems of this debate was the whole reserve fleet thing, described as being a full tenth of the whole navy.
The best I could think of was that Palpatine was piling up ships for the invasion against the Yuuzhan Vong (that would happen decades later still, ahem), but somehow this does not explain why they were not in use. It's possible that these ships were available, but simply not manned; i.e. there were no crews available.

After Yavin

The Rebel victory at Yavin was a tremendous boost to the Alliance. More and more beings rallied to the cause of freedom and joined the Alliance, and the fires of the Rebellion spread across the galaxy. The Empire wasn't willing to allow this threat to go unanswered. The Imperial fleet mobilized, charged with locating the Rebels and their leaders by any means possible. So began three years of bitter fighting as the Rebels conducted wave upon wave of hit-and-run attacks against the Empire. For a while, these quick surgical attacks had the Empire reeling as it tried to develop a strategy for dealing with a foe that never stayed in one place for more than a few weeks at a time. Then the Emperor ordered his troops to attack anyone who might be aiding the Rebels, whether the Imperials had substantial proof or not. Unruly crowds were obliterated. Spaceports were bombarded from above. Extreme fear and excessive force became the foundation for Imperial strategy, and the galaxy shook with war.

The Empire, however, suffered in its own right in the wake of the destruction of the Death Star. Confusion and upheaval caused by the loss of so many key military officers led to a major shakeup in the Imperial hierarchy. Lord Darth Vader was placed in command of the mightiest task force ever assembled in recorded history, a fleet built around the new Super-class Star Destroyer Executor and charged with hunting down and exterminating the Rebel Alliance.

[...]

At the same time, the Empire was not above endangering its own citizens while on its quest to crush the Rebellion. Rebel sympathizers and supporters, whether suspected or condemned by actual proof, were routinely harassed, questioned, arrested, and even killed to flush out the true agitators. More often that not, these tyrannical and barbaric actions only served to harden the resolve of the Alliance and add more support to its cause. Meanwhile, planets were quarantined, whole species and civilizations were enslaved, and more and more prominent citizens were placed on the Empire's "most wanted" list.

Rebel ships were dispatched to protect the sector.

Meanwhile the shipyards began turning out warships at dizzying speed...

Imperial forces harried the fringes of the Calamari Sector but shied away from a showdown, wary of committing too many forces to such a remote region with the Rebels causing trouble across the galaxy. Following the battle of Yavin, the Calamarian Council reversed itself and agreed to become part of the Rebellion. Nearly four years later, Admiral Ackbar led Mon Calamari's finest warships to victory at the Battle of Endor.

Unfortunately for the Empire, the bulk of Mon Calamari fleet—including its MC80 Star Cruisers—has joined the Rebellion. Crewed by some of the most worthy spacefarers in the galaxy, Mon Calamari ships are a real threat to the Imperial Navy. Under its revolutionary government, the Mon Calamari homeworld itself is devoting great efforts to the production of additional warships, and as Calamari engineers learn more of Imperial technology and adapt it to their own purposes, the quality and striking power of their ships improve. The Imperial Navy has not seen fit to divert a fleet from other duties to crush these traitors; until they do, the MC80 Star Cruiser in Alliance service will continue to be instrumental in Imperial defeats.

Though there are many systems which are generally sympathetic to the Alliance, only a few are willing to openly support it, the others effectively cowed by fear of Imperial retribution. This is not unjustified—if the Empire discovers that a planet has been actively assisting the Alliance, it uses the harshest means at its disposal to punish the planet –witness again Alderaan.
Still, it takes time and effort to find and properly chastise Rebel-friendly planets, particularly if they possess space-going fleets which could mount any kind of effective resistance. Though the Imperial Navy is incredibly strong, it cannot be everywhere at once. The Empire is fully aware of the help which the Alliance receives from the planet Calamari, but the Calamarians maintain a formidable defensive fleet in the system. The Empire has yet to be able to spare the ships from other, more important duties to breakthrough the Cal’s defenses and reduce the annoying planet to rubble.

It is rare for a Mon Calamari cruiser to directly engage an Imperial Star Destroyer. There are so few MC80s that such tactics would quickly decimate the Rebel fleet. Even if losses were equal on either side, the Empire would still have vast numerical advantage over the Alliance. The one thing that often makes all the difference are the small, well-equipped starfighters that are so commonly employed by the Alliance. A single MC80 will sit at a safe distance and provide covering fire for its fighter wing and support ships.
Aside from its agility and the superior starfighters in its launch bay, the MC80 has one other benefit over the Imperial Star Destroyer: a series of highly advanced backup shield generators. These generators allow and MC80's deflector shields to recharge at twice the normal rate, adding to the ship's overall durability.

Me, at SBC:

It's chiefly a well shielded carrier that relies on superior starfighters and bombers.
The fact that we've seen X-wings, A-wings and B-wings blast whole ISDs out of the sky with no problem, or even Mara Jade, piloting a Z-95, who used the laser cannons of her craft to fire a salvo at the underdefended sensor array covering the low-aft-central sector of the ISD and turn the ship blind over that region, while the ISD was moving towards the Dreadnaught, is enough proof that even normal weapons can be dangerous to warships.
There's also that incident where her squadron of rag tag fighters brought down the shield arc over the ventral dome of an ISD by having them focus their energy weapons on that section.

That, and the Home One types are slightly tougher and more heavily armed, which with the complement of fighters, is more than enough to take care of an ISD.
Which is more than enough for most engagements since Imperial forces are stretched over all the galaxy to deal with Rebels.

Imperial Star Destroyers

Warship construction is a lengthy, complicated business. The pre-construction phase alone -- original inception, funding, design, creation of production facilities, training of personnel, requisition of materials -- can, for a large ship, take years; the actual construction of the vessel usually isn't much faster. The expenses were excessive, in both money and manpower.

As one might expect, the pressure on the ship designers and architexts is enormous; the bureaucratic infighting and political wheeling, dealing and budgetary battling is unbelievable. Once a project is approved and work on the vessel begun, the Empire is committing itself to that vessel for the next several decades. At that point, any changes -- even trivial ones -- in the vessel's design can cost literally billions of credits and thousands of extra manhours.

When Lira Wessex, daughter of the designer of the Victory-class Star Destroyer, proposed that the Empire produce the Imperial-class Star Destroyer, the angry debate between the Navy's military strategists, the Imperial Military Oversight Commission, the Corporate Sector, and the Senate Budgetary Committee (since disbanded) almost destroyed the Empire. Some believed the Imperial too expensive, some believed it too unwieldy, others quite simply thought it was an engineering impossibility. The Navy loved it, of course; and through a combination of bribes, political pressure and a rash of mysteriously-crushed tracheas, it slowly brought the others into line.

Years later, when the first Imperial-class ship lumbered out of drydock (only 50 million credits over budget) and assumed active duty, the Navy was proven correct in its belief.

[...]
There are whole star systems whose gross domestic product is less than the cost of a single Star Destroyer.

Again, my observations from SBC:

• Warship construction is a lengthy, complicated business. <- General statement, which covers all aspects of ship building, prototype AND series dev & construction phases. See Leo, you can't say it's a general statement and then say it's in fact specific to prototyping. So ship building is a lengthy process. Period.
• The pre-construction phase alone -- original inception, funding, design, creation of production facilities, training of personnel, requisition of materials -- can, for a large ship, take years; the actual construction of the vessel usually isn't much faster. The expenses were excessive, in both money and manpower. <- Note that even for the ISD, personnel would have to be specifically trained and production facilities constructed to fit the ship's production requirements, even for the prototype, instead of using already existing ones. That's rather telling when we're dealing with the design and construction of ships, and even more with the creation of a one shot ultimate weapon.
• At that point, any changes -- even trivial ones -- in the vessel's design can cost literally billions of credits and thousands of extra manhours. <- Any change in the design at any time, understood as any revision of the design. An ISD costs 3.88 billion credits. On page 30, we learn that a Rebel raid on some small convoy resulted "in loss of three freighters carrying several hundred metric tons of food and ammuniation valued at 18.2 million standard credits." Several hundred metric tons, that's not much at all. It's a rather small objective. Yet, let the Rebels accomplish that 20 times more, and they have literally made the Empire lose the equivalent of a tenth of the price of a new ISD, and just the same amount, if not more, of a star system's gross domestic product.
• When Lira Wessex, daughter of the designer of the Victory-class Star Destroyer, proposed that the Empire produce the Imperial-class Star Destroyer, the angry debate between the Navy's military strategists, the Imperial Military Oversight Commission, the Corporate Sector, and the Senate Budgetary Committee (since disbanded) almost destroyed the Empire. <- It is quite baffling that the long debates and bickering over the introduction of a new class of warship were that close of pulling down the whole Empire. This so flies in the face of the idea that the Empire was so overwhelmingly powerful and benefiting from a comfortable monetary and industrial margin. This also proves very interesting regarding how the entire Death Star project would burden the Empire. Note, by the way, that KDY shipyards, those that provided the vast majority of Star Destroyers, aside from Interdictors which were Sienar ships, was a private group, which did well to avoid nationalization. In other words, the Empire didn't even control KDY, and it's clearly told that Kuat of Kuat was, at some point, really tempted about the Rebellion, but he also played other political games, some lethal. Note that KDY wasn't only building Star Destroyers and other flavours of cruisers. KDY was also commissioned to build an entire line of 238 meters long space transports to carry the much precious bacta to Core Worlds, the B-12 series (Lords of the Expanse, Sector Guide). It also was known for building the following transports: the VT-49 Decimater and the Star Galleon-class frigate.
• Years later, when the first Imperial-class ship lumbered out of drydock <- Years later. That's for the first model though. However, from those quotes, there is no indication of how faster the serial production would become. And if we were to merge that with SotG, there's no reason they would have not used several of those slips to produce the different parts of the first ISD.
• only 50 million credits over budget <- that's a rather well controlled budget, considering the cost of a change, even trivial, rating in billions. In a way, it's only reinforcing the idea that the Empire wouldn't allow any hick up during the design and construction process.
• There are whole star systems whose gross domestic product is less than the cost of a single Star Destroyer. <- This alone proves interesting considering the production price of an ISD, in KDY shipyards, that mounts to 3.88 billions. A Nebulon-B would cost 194 million credits (Strike Force: Shantipole). It also highlights the importance of not losing one of those ships.

Republic Attack Cruiser
While the Venator Star Destroyer offered much for its developers to take pride in, the relentless taskmaster Blissex was not content. She had bigger plans in mind. She used her past successes to green-light the ultimate warship of her dreams, the Imperator-class Star Destroyer. Shortly after the end of the Clone Wars, the first test-bed models of this mighty warship were already functioning in classified Imperial shipyards accessible only to the New Order's elite.

Three heavy cruisers defeated the Entire sector fleet of Oplovis. Three rebel heavy cruisers were involved in the second victory (RASB, 2nd Ed, p.40). On page 56, it's stated that after several direct engagement with cruisers, from which Rebel warships came out better than the Imperial ones, the Navy started to take those cruisers "very seriously indeed."
It's backed up by SotG literal's copycat of that section, although they point out that Imperial carelessness also played a large part in that.
As I highlighted in my post above, the MC80s were largely used as carriers, staying at a distance. The fact that their superior fighter wings all had hyperdrives even allowed them to park outside of a system and harass targets, from convoys and stations, to warships.

[...]

It is said that the Oplovis Fleet was drubbed by a line of battle from the Alliance Fleet (RASB, p.39, 2nd Ed.).
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Battle_of_Yuvern
Then many months later, the Oplovis Fleet came out of hyperspace and was attacked by a battle line of three Alliance cruisers, in the Atrivis system.

I had also posted a short list of other Rebel victories against Imperial forces earlier on in the thread, sometimes with the presence of Rebel cruisers.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Yes, things set during the Rebellion (such as the X-Wing games) hold fast to the idea of vastly larger Imperial ships getting taken down hard, and fairly "small" task groups used by all forces. This is one of the largest fleets mentioned for the Empire in the EU.

Here is an Imperial remnant engagement. The orders of battle:

• 1 SSD 8-19 km
• 1 ISD 1.6 km
• 1 VSD 0.9 km
• 2 DN 0.6 km
• 1 Carrack 0.35 km
• 1 Lancer 0.25 km
• 1 Quasar Fire bulk cruiser/carrier 0.34 km

Using the total current "official" lengths and TIE complements from the SotG 2007 book, that gives us about 320 TIEs and other Imperial fighters (averaging, say, 8m). Total length: 16.4 metric miles, most of it in Zsinj's flagship, and 1.6 in the TIE escort. If we used the "short" length, it goes down to 9.5 metric miles, with 5 from the Iron Fist.

Similarly, if we adjust for the fact that the SSD is about five times skinnier than almost everything from ISDs to X-Wings, and that we'd be better advised to use cube root of volume than length when we have good volume figures, we'd call the SSD worth 7 ISDs, for a total power of 11.5 ISD-equivalents.

The Republic:

• 3 ISDs 1.6 km
• 3 MCCs 1.2 km
• 1 Interdictor 0.6 km
• 1 Quasar Fire bulk cruiser/carrier 0.34 km
• 3 Nebbies 0.3 km
• 1 Marauder frigate 0.195 km
• 1 Corellian Corvette 0.15 km

Total length: 6.3 metric miles. The Republic clearly does not have the same capital ship strength.

We actually have a much better list of fighters; coupled with their "official" lengths, we have:

• 2 B-Wing squadrons 16.9m
• 10 Y-Wing squadrons 16m
• 5 X-Wing squadrons 12.5m
• 3 A-Wing squadrons 9.6m
• 3 TIE fighter squadrons 6.3m
• 7 mixed/unknown squadrons (using the average length of the above list of known starfighter squadrons gives 13.2m)

Total length of these is about 3 metric miles, bringing the Republic fleet to an estimated 9.3 ISD-equivalents using this technique.

Now, if we compare these in terms of displacement, the Imperials have a massive advantage tied up in their SSD, and the Imperial defeat (in which Iron Fist was damaged and fled, the ISD captured, and the VSD destroyed, with very light Republic losses) would be incomprehensible.

We would still estimate the Republic force to be at a slight disadvantage based on the simple size of the combatants - however, the Republic has better equipment and more skilled pilots, and was pulling off an ambush inside an asteroid field; Zsinj's forces were caught in a bad position.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Since this topic has been brought again to my attention, with Leo1 copying and pasting his prior "analysis" of the game mechanics, I thought I would do a quick analysis of a quote brought up in the thread, and point out that it does not mean what he seems to think it means.

His assertion is that this:

At Orbital Shipyard 1321, the Star Destroyer Amerce was nearing completion- one of thirty such massive warships being readied at Fondor, in addition to hundreds of smaller vessels.

Owing to having had to retrofit a flotilla of ships with hyperwave inertial momentum sustainers, several of the major yards had fallen behind schedule, but confidence was high at 1321 that work on the Amerce would conclude within a local month.

The launch would finally mean leave for the tens of thousands of shipfitters who had spent the better part of a standard year working on the great ship, shoulder to shoulder with droids and other machines, frequently for back-to-back shifts, and sometimes in zero-g for days on end.

Lends support to his claim that "KDY alone" can produce roughly a thousand ISDs a year, arrived at through game-mechanical analysis.

Now, let's speak a little about Fondor. Shall we proceed to Wookieepedia? It's a good thing for Leo1 that it's a standard year; the Fondor year is almost 1.5 standard years.

Regarding the production of the Executor during the Imperial era:

Fondor is one of many planets that specialize in starship construction and repair, and its orbital shipyards are some of the most extensive and sophisticated in the galaxy, perhaps second only to the yards at Corellia and Kuat.

Fondor is a major shipyard. It should have thousands of slips - more than Mon Calamari, at least, which has a thousand.

The Fondor executives were outraged that they could no longer serve their best clients, but the mammoth project took up nearly all their resources, and they knew better than to risk Vader's anger.

And yet this major shipyard was totally occupied with the single project of one SSD, which - according to SotG - represented the equivalent task to constructing 3.3 ISDs. Flatly, the game mechanics don't fit with what other sources have to say about Fondor.

Curiously, Leo1 put the final nail in the coffin himself:

Projects that had once been thought to large to be practical were now possible- shipyards that had once struggled to produce one Victory-class Star Destroyer on a tight schedule now produced two of the massive Imperial-class Star Destroyer in the same time.

.
This is what less important shipyards are like. Remember, from SotG 2001, we know there are only "hundreds" of shipyards in the galaxy, most of which are minor shipyards smaller than the ones on Alderaan.

Most of the shipyards would be lucky to turn out an ISD a year. A small minority can match Fondor's display of 30 ISDs being worked on at once - and only one, Kuat Drive Yards, which will substantially exceed it.

The source material suggests that not all of KDY's yard capacity is devoted to ISDs, but the game mechanics suggest that KDY is nevertheless the primary manufacturer, since they have much more yard capacity than minor shipyards.

Who else is there that could contribute a bigger slice than Fondor? Incom, Sorosuub, and Sienar Fleet Systems focus instead on smaller ships; Corellian Engineering Corporation does mainly civilian work. Actually, I'll quote again from the guide:

Though the stardocks at Kuat Drive Yards were the primary builders of the Empire's prestigious Star Destroyers, Fondor was unexpectedly handed the contract to manufacture the Super Star Destroyer Executor.

Right. Take any ISD, look at the plaque in the corner, odds are it says Kuat.

Kuat Drive Yards, commonly known as KDY, was the primary producer of the Empire's fearsome Imperial- and Super-class Star Destroyers.

And what about the Executor?

... Kuat execs made sure all future Super Star Destroyers had their logo on the hull plating.

Right, now this goose that lays the golden eggs, how do you guard it?

After its shocking loss at Endor the Empire could not afford to surrender its most important manufacturing center. Palpatine's successors defended the Kuat system with fifteen Star Destroyers and rigged the stardocks with explosives in case it became necessary to scuttle them.

Fifteen. A quantity which Leo1 has blithely assumed are a week's work for KDY's diligent workers.

Now, I actually do think Imperial ship production should include on the order of a thousand Star Destroyers a year total if we're to include the popular EU figure of 25,000 Star Destroyers. These things can't have that long of a shelf life.

However, note as always that the reference to twenty five thousand is to Star Destroyers, including 900m Victory, 1,137m Venator, and 500m Gladiator Star Destroyers, all of which are much more common than the rare super-sized Star Destroyers (and cheaper to produce).

To hypothesize far greater levels of production is to ignore the fact that the Empire was pouring as much into the military as it could afford to, until it collapsed.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Since I recently linked another topic to this one, I took the liberty of reading it once more, and wanted to point out a few things.

From this message, first:

Strike: 450m. VSD: 900m. Size ratio: ~8. Cost ratio: 4. Power ratio: 2.

Actually, that's probably the most explicit example of the phenomenon we're going to see. I'm going to use it as a benchmark from here on out. Obviously, in-universe, it wouldn't hold as an exact rule, but I think this is the approximate relationship we're seeing.

Two equally advanced ships built by the same people have a power ratio roughly equal to their ratio of lengths and a cost ratio roughly equal to their ratio of surface areas. And if we take that rule, and drag it back over all the previous examples in the EU and in the movies, it makes a lot of sense. Trade Federation Battleships still are very inefficient warships, but not by nearly as dramatic a margin.

Bigger starships are cheaper per unit volume to build in Star Wars. They're also less effective. We see it in everything from the very low level of game mechanics to the very high level of Endor, where the Executor outmassed the rest of the Imperial conventional fleet and the Rebel fleet combined, and yet was not overwhelmingly powerful. Maybe constructing the outer hull and handling the shields is the most expensive part. Maybe hyperdrives have great economy scaling. Whatever the in-universe reason, it's a hard and fast fact whether you're dealing with the high canon (MCCs fighting with ISDs on near-even terms at Endor, SSD not being overwhelming, fighters attacking larger ships) or the lowest continuities (game mechanics).

So how much should a Death Star cost? Well, if we use the ISB figures, and adjust for the fact that smaller capital ships are generally 1-10% of the cost of a SD, a 160 km Death Star should cost between 1500-6000 Star Destroyers to put together if it's built like a Star Wars ship. If we use the ratio between its surface area and an ISD, we come up with the figure of 10,000.

1. Using the length ratio from the first line, isn't it amusing that with the same length thing, even if we're comparing a dagger to an orange here, a 160 km "long" Death Star would only have 100 times the firepower of an ISD?
Now there's a problem of transition here, since it's about comparing a battle station against a warship. I guess that according to the D20 system, what would be needed would be to go ISD -> Executor -> Death Star, since the Executor fits in the Space Station charts, like the Death Star, but is an elongated ISD.
Working with surface areas is obviously turning out to be different. But then again, the Death Star's surface appears to be quite underarmed, if you look at the density of weapons.
Yet it could repel any possible fleet of SDs.

2.a. If we think about ISDs sizes for a moment, their real price should be in the trillions (and that, outside of any inflation). The design and first prototype were very expensive. It almost got the better end of the Imperial structure itself. It really was a gargantuan project in itself. That could only be explained if they were looking at making a starship so new in its construction method, size and number that the construction of a single ship would only be a fraction of the entire problem.
It's often spoken that modularity was used for Imperial ships (and that partially helped mask the budget of the Death Star). This modularity was also found for other ships and even used for prefab ground bases. It's possible that it had the Empire rethink the entire chain, so much as to wedge a modular construction design into a traditional and rigid one, especially if the new Empire (ex Old Republic) wasn't yet used to build so many large warships.
We could easily imagine that among the many elements which had to be changed, entire industries, from ground factories to entire shipyards, had to be updated in order to account of the modular design. Considering that Palpatine would have insisted to have that type of design used - after all he insisted that ALL shipyards would build the ships the same way - you can bet that the largest contractors such as KDY didn't like the idea of having to spend a massive amount of money into updating their machines and tools for example, and I can only see KDY accepting not to raise prices only with the Empire ordering a shit ton of ships of various sizes to compensate.
It's even possible, following that reasoning, that building the Supers was part of that deal: they weren't necessary, they actually were less powerful volume wise, but they assuredly kept many shipyards active, while allowing Palpatine to distribute some impressive flagships to Moffs and Admirals in love with the idea of commanding such ships.
The Executor, for example, became a symbol of power and pride for many.

2.b. Even the WEG prices begs for an explanation. We have a Nebulon at 194 M and an ISD at 3.88 B credits. Those are incredibly cheap. Today, it takes billions to develop a new fighter (Eurofighter ended being 1 billion pounds overbudget), many millions to build just one. It takes countless billions to design a new heavy carrier, and still some billions to build one. And they're only 120~140 meters long, and probably have a lower cost density because a lot of their space is "just" steal beams and walls, and room for crafts. It's not like if every single cubic meter of the carrier is stuffed with high level technology. It's clear that if you had a similarly sized high tech destroyer/battleship, the costs would skyrocket.
Another prototyping example, for a Typhoon-class nuclear missile frigate this time, back in the early 60s, where cutting down the ship's length by 20 foot saved $7 millions.
Besides, that's without counting inflation. You'd need to spend $7.31 today (2010) to get what you had for $1 in 1961.
That makes the 50 M overbudget hickup for the ISD project stupefyingly low.

I would also cite this entire article:

DDG-1000:Defying Expectations or Reason?

August 18, 2010
by Mike Burleson


The US Navy has been on a downward spiral in terms of the number of ships it deploys, and things aren’t getting any better, except in some’s wildest fantasies. The expense of ships rises, while the budget shrinks. Is the future extinction of American naval power so hard to comprehend unless the trends are curbed? Writing in the Charleston Post and Courier, retired Navy commander R.L. Schreadley pins at least some of the blame on the Navy itself:

Where the Navy Department is particularly at fault is in its long-time mismanagement of shipbuilding and aircraft acquisition programs. Is it credible to spend a billion dollars for one destroyer? Fifteen billion (or more) for an aircraft carrier? Multi-millions for one fighter plane? No, it is not. Nor is it credible for the sea service to have two or more admirals for every ship in the fleet.

The statement “a billion dollars for one destroyer” should actually read “$6 billion” concerning the latest and largest American surface combatant since the nuclear powered USS Long Beach of the 1950s, the DDG-1000 Zumwalt. Even the original price tag of $3 billion proved too much for budget cutters, who subsequently dropped the purchase number from 29, to 7, and today’s only 3. Meant to be a shallow water battleship supporting troops ashore, it was soon discovered with all its high tech stealth, advanced tumble-home hull, and powerful electric drive, the designers forgot what was most important about a warship, its weapons. The DDG-1000 while perfect for fighting land battles, could not defend itself from air and maritime threats.

Despite all logic, the 3 super-destroyers are going ahead, and some are touting this as a major success story. Here is Christopher Cavas writing in the Navy Times:

Devoid of much fanfare and defying the expectations of critics, production of the Navy’s DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class destroyer program is steadily moving forward.

We, the public then are at fault for criticizing this much misunderstand program, which admittedly will deploy many wonderful gadgets, on the 3 lone hulls:

With work now proceeding on all three ships, program manager Capt. James Syring turned over his duties Aug. 6 after nearly five years at the helm of what is arguably the most complex surface warship ever built.
The program, according to Syring, is still meeting most of its cost targets — a claim he first made a year ago. But he declined to cite a figure for cost growth on the first ship, projected to cost about $3.3 billion.

More than doubled in price. Thats success? Let’s move on:

In the spring, the Navy deleted the Volume Search Radar from the ship’s Dual Band Radar during the program review triggered by the Nunn-McCurdy process.

Although the radar works, Syring said, “producibility problems” with the radome material protecting the S-band radar persisted, and the Navy’s 2008 decision to base future missile defense on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer and its Aegis weapon system eliminated the needed growth path for the VSR on the Zumwalts.

Recalling that we have over 60 of the Burke destroyers, with production ongoing indefinitely, the question is what is there need for a $6 billion supership, but less effective?

Moreover, software modifications will someday give the X-band some volume search capability, although the development of that software is still some years off, he said.

Someday, maybe, perhaps…

Delivery is now scheduled for December 2013. Then comes combat system testing and other work, so Zumwalt won’t be ready to deploy until 2016.

No hurry, while the fleet shrinks…

Meanwhile, construction of various components for the 600-foot-long, 15,500-ton Zumwalt is moving right along, and the ship is about 20 percent complete. Syring detailed progress on a number of the ship’s systems.

20% complete, the plans for which have been ongoing since the 1990s! Oh yeah, break out the band.

The first of two 155mm Advanced Gun Systems for Zumwalt is complete, built by BAE at Fridley, Minn., and has been shipped for proof-firing to the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Testing continues for the Long Range Land Attack Projectile, the rocket-assisted bullet the AGS will fire. The shell has yet to reach its intended 87-mile full range, but the last test, in January, shot a LRLAP shell 63 nautical miles.

Why do I get the feeling the 14,000 ton battle cruiser is going to end up fitted with a standard 5 inch gun, as in all USN destroyers? Let’s not forget Navy promises of another wonder weapon, the NLOS rocket, supposed to be the primary armament for the littoral combat ship. Today we have another underarmed, overpriced wonder ship, and no main attack weapon other than a 57mm pea-shooter.

*****

The point of all this, is the Navy expects too much from too few ships. The much touted reduced manning in the Zumwalt, 140 compared to almost 300 in the smaller Burkes, makes one think they are transferring this false logic onto the over-worked Navy personnel. This mindset from the RMA debates of the 1990s claimed that fewer number of high tech wonders could perform the functions of the great many weapons required to win the Cold War. Warfare then would be cheaper yet more effective. That false hope has given us a $700 billion defense budget, yet they claim even this is not enough.

Numbers still count. Despite the spectacular success of stealth bombers, M-1 tanks, and cruise missiles in the First Gulf War, the backbone of the force was still the Vietnam Era weapons. Today, the overworked arms from the Reagan build-up are being replaced by ever fewer numbers of super planes, vehicles and ships, like the less than 200 F-22 Raptors replacing over 1000 F-15 fighters. A further case in point is the Zumwalt destroyer. The so-called savings are only possible by keeping ancient weapons in service long beyond their prime. It is deceptive and cruel to the sailors who must work harder with less.

The fleet is headed steadily toward the 200 number, in the midst of immense resources and funding. So today we have 9 amphibious ships replacing 41. Currently 30 old frigates are performing the missions of over 100 during the 1980s. About 10 aircraft carriers with reduced airwings are also performing the mission where once it was thought 15 or more were necessary.

Now we have 3 destroyers entering service replacing an order for 29. This larger number was derived from the need to replace the Spruance class destroyers, the last DD’s or general purpose tin cans built for the Fleet. Strategypage shows us what was lost amidst the false promises of the Zumwalt:

Only a decade ago, the navy was so sure about the new DDG-1000, that it accelerated the retirement of a dozen of the 31 Spruance class destroyers, in order to save the $28 million a year it cost to keep each of them in service. These ships were not just retired, they were all either broken up, or sunk in training exercises. The dozen that entered service between 1979-83 could have been refurbished and been available until 2019. That was a lost opportunity.

In order to afford Zumwalt, they shrank the fleet. Now after a decade and many billions wasted, the Navy will return to its venerable 1970s Arleigh Burke design for new destroyers:

But the navy can afford more Burkes because this is a design that is the culmination of over half a century of World War II and Cold War destroyer design experience. Even after the Burke was designed, in the 1980s, the design evolved. The first Burkes were 8,300 ton ships, while the latest ones, laden with more gear, and smaller crews, are 10,000 ton ships (what heavy cruisers weighed in World War II). With a top speed of nearly 50 kilometers an hour, their main armament is 90 vertical launch tubes flush with the deck, that can contain anti-aircraft, anti-ship, anti-missile or cruise missiles. There is also a 127mm (5 inch) gun, two 20mm anti-missile autocannon, six torpedo tubes and two helicopters. The Burkes were well thought out, sturdy and they got the job done. They became irreplaceable, and thus this class of warships will last more than half a century.

I agree that it is a great design, one we are lucky to have. Yet, the reason the Burke is irreplaceable is not because there is nothing better, but because the Navy has yet to grasp the implications of new technology that is making weapons cheaper and easier to use. If the microchip has allowed computers to gradually become smaller, once they filled a warehouse, now many are the size of cell phones, plus allow tiny UAVs the ability to perform missions once the domain of whole airwings, or allow a guided bomb to sail down a smoke stack, why do USN warships get larger and cost-prohibitive?

*****

To be realistic, large ship building costs by WEG would need to be multiplied by a thousand, easily, and those of WotC by many millions.
That, all again based on the amount of credits your average Imperial citizen spends.
Also, very few systems couldn't reach a GDP of several billions. It's very hard to explain with such low numbers, when you look at the USA's.

3. Based on the quotes above, the Death Star production was only possible because large sections of it were stuffed with modules. And I suppose that it is THAT part of the project that was worth several sector groups: there's no way the core of the Death Star, all its new and exclusive oversized pieces, would cost the equivalent of a few fleets. It can only be far more than that.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Mosts interesting how the ground ship once called Burj Dubai, now Burj Kalifa, over 800 meters tall, cost $20 billions to develop.

The only possible reason why ships such a new type of star destroyer like the Imperator type would be absurdly cheaper despite being quite bigger, would solely be due to the galactic civilization having enjoyed the age of space flight for uncountable eons, and therefore, perhaps, building tools and knowledge being so well seasoned that "simply" coming up with a bigger class of ship would have risked bringing the Empire to its knees because it required a massive update of all shipyard's slips, no matter how segmented the construction of a single ISD would be over several slips, and as I said before, also because the Empire would enforce use of the new modular design, literally obligating industrials to massively redesign their building centers.
So although the budget of the new SD may have not been so colossal, it's probably the huge updating work on the whole infrastructure and labour experience needed to produce those new ships that would have proved considerably problematic for the Empire and its contractors. Massive amounts of money would need to be raised, threatening the galactic economy with the risk of hyperinflation, greater corruption and massive indebting while leaving to the low to midclass populations of all worlds the birden to pay for most of the newly raised taxation.

[Mike DiCenso]

640 weeks for an ISD, 2109 for the Executor (in a book that gives the length of the Executor as 8,000 meters, which would make the Executor 22 times the size with 4.4 times the surface area)

Wait... is this correct? Six-hundred and forty weeks to build an ISD? Let's see, there's 365 days in a year, which if divided by 7 days gives us 52 weeks. We then divide 640 weeks by 52 weeks = 12 years.

So it takes 12 years to build an ISD? I thought according to our esteemed Star Wars opposition that the Galactic Empire could turn out a single ISD in a couple of weeks at most.
-Mike

[SpacePaladin]

640 weeks for an ISD, 2109 for the Executor (in a book that gives the length of the Executor as 8,000 meters, which would make the Executor 22 times the size with 4.4 times the surface area)

Wait... is this correct? Six-hundred and forty weeks to build an ISD? Let's see, there's 365 days in a year, which if divided by 7 days gives us 52 weeks. We then divide 640 weeks by 52 weeks = 12 years.

So it takes 12 years to build an ISD? I thought according to our esteemed Star Wars opposition that the Galactic Empire could turn out a single ISD in a couple of weeks at most.
-Mike

Pretty sure this was mentioned earlier in the thread, but multiple slips can work together to speed up production and major shipyards would have hundreds, if not thousands of slips.

So yeah, a pissant shipyard who only has a single slip would need 12 years to build an ISD. Pretty sure they primarily contract Kuat Drive Yards, whose shipyards are pretty much the best the Empire has.

[Mike DiCenso]

Yes, I see that now. But this is a necroed thread from almost four years ago. Even still, the one thing I noted from back then and still applies now, is that even if you were right, Kuat Drive yards does not have hundreds of thousands of large starship slips, but rather has something like 1,200 or so. Which means that Kuat would have to pretty much be on a total war footing by dumping all other contracts and devoting it's resources to producing ISDs to get the ridiculous numbers many Warsies claim the Empire has. So let's say that Kuat is paid handsomely by the Empire to devote 10 slips to the construction of of each ISD for a maximum of 120 ISDs every 1.2 years. In 20 years, the Empire would have 2,400 ISDs, assuming that they started production virtually the very day after the Clone Wars ended. And that would mean that there was an immense amount of R&D well in advance to allow that kind of off and running production of ISD Type (which does actually fit in with some of the EU sources).
-Mike

[Jedi Master Spock]

Yes, I see that now. But this is a necroed thread from almost four years ago. Even still, the one thing I noted from back then and still applies now, is that even if you were right, Kuat Drive yards does not have hundreds of thousands of large starship slips, but rather has something like 1,200 or so. Which means that Kuat would have to pretty much be on a total war footing by dumping all other contracts and devoting it's resources to producing ISDs to get the ridiculous numbers many Warsies claim the Empire has. So let's say that Kuat is paid handsomely by the Empire to devote 10 slips to the construction of of each ISD for a maximum of 120 ISDs every 1.2 years. In 20 years, the Empire would have 2,400 ISDs, assuming that they started production virtually the very day after the Clone Wars ended. And that would mean that there was an immense amount of R&D well in advance to allow that kind of off and running production of ISD Type (which does actually fit in with some of the EU sources).
-Mike

According to how the SWRPG measures it, KDY has 5,781 standard "slips." And those slips, on top of it, have a 0.5 quality multiplier, so they work twice as fast. It's still not intractable from a completist perspective when we're talking about the famous 25,000 figure. Remember, in the EU, we have the following other Star Destroyers produced at Kuat:

• Gladiator Star Destroyer - 500m, produced about 10x as fast
• Interdictor cruiser, also called a Star Destroyer - 600m, produced 7x as fast.
• Victory Star Destroyer - 900m, produced about 3x as fast

As mentioned on right in my first post in this thread, Kuat (by the rules) can produce 18 ISDs/week, or 1265 per year when we use the 70 week Star Wars calendar used in the RPG. The Empire was around for about 23 years before Endor, so if you assume Kuat was running at full capacity the whole time, that's about 29,000 ISD-equivalents in terms of production - or, by my rough extrapolation, about 87,000 VSDs, or about 290,000 Gladiators.

Strictly by the book, according to the RPG rules, out of Kuat. (IIRC, the RPG book also had Rendili and Sienar listed, and their capacity was much smaller. I could go look up the figures, but it doesn't really matter.)

Since the quote referring to 25,000 Star Destroyers doesn't specify ISDs, and VSDs are (if anything) more common in the EU (not to mention the rapid proliferation of the prequel and Clone Wars ships into the more recent EU books), this really isn't a problem for the RPG mechanics.

[Enterprise E]

Not only that, but wouldn't the Venators (called Jedi Cruisers in TCW series) from the clone wars also be included in that 25,000 Star Destroyer number (assuming the VSD's you mentioned were the Victory-class Star Destroyers and not the Venator-class Star Destroyers)? That means that it should all fit quite nicely since there would be a good number of Venators left over from the Clone Wars.