The Star Destroyer and Imperial Military Doctrine
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
Btw, the total absolute amount of new good blog content is probably not any lower than during the golden age you harken back to. (And of course all the old material is mostly still there, thanks also to various archives.) The relative amount might have gone down, but for your and my individual content consumption absolute amounts matter more.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2023/06/16/collections-how-to-raise-a-rom...
Fun fact: the date the US holds their federal elections used to have the opposite intent [1] - placing it in November was because by then harvest should be over and placing it on a Tuesday allowed for farmers to observe Sunday for church-going, a day of travel and for them to be back on their farm by Wednesday for market day. But today, with way fewer people observing church, new methods of transportation and polling places everywhere, it's more of a hindrance especially for low-income workers or workers who fear they might get fired for taking time off to vote.
[1] https://www.britannica.com/story/why-are-us-elections-held-o...
This was our 3am conversations.
If you write your fiction like a couple of 6-year-olds making up stories with toys in a sandbox, where there’s far less grounding in real world events and context, and plot beats or world-building elements are more likely to occur solely for the script-writer’s convenience than because they seem plausible and appropriate… well. You get what the author alludes to at the tail end of the piece.
We don’t see the rebel fleet in action until Jedi, and it does seem to be carrier-heavy.
As for the independently-operating fighters: they have to land somewhere, the pilots can’t just live in them and they need to fuel, receive maintenance, and re-arm. That’s either planetary (or equivalent) bases, or carriers, much like pacific WWII air operations were a mix of island airstrips and carriers (lots, and lots, of carriers).
That’s all for the original trilogy. What we have in addition, however, is a limited look at the inter-trilogy insurgencies and nascent rebel alliance, in a variety of movies and TV shows (e.g. Rebels). Those do seem fairly heavy on carriers, from what we get to see, plus light gunships.
I definitely remember gunships and troop transports, but my memory is just failing me when I try to think of carriers. I guess this is left over in the legends canon now, but much of the rebellion's fleet having been repurposed from civilian transports/cruise liners also serves as a good explanation as to why they wouldn't have many carriers as well.
[edit] though, I do think that line of argument’s a bit weak. I could see going either way on the question of whether the Mon Cals slot better into the “fast carrier” paradigm or are better regarded as filling the role of heavy cruisers or battlecruisers. Not a lot of Star Wars ship designs slot quite so clearly into a fast carrier designation as the Republic’s primary Clone Wars warships.
While the Empire can afford to throw away pilots, the Rebels need to give their pilots every chance to escape from a failed battle.
To be fair Luke did "bullseye womprats in his T16", and his friend and rebel pilot Biggs could've vouched for him.
My impression was that Luke's X-Wing was his reward for saving Leia - in the same scene we see Han leave the Rebels while carrying a sizeable amount of money.
And this creates a bit of an oddity, because in the Clone Wars, the Republic fleet is essentially built around fast carriers – the Venators – and their fighters, whereas it is the CIS fleet which has specialized gunboats (along with the slower Lucrehulks that function as carriers), but by the time we get to the Empire, the doctrine has switched: the ISD is clearly a gun platform first and foremost, which carries its own fighter screen, but expects to win with its primary battery, not its (flimsy) TIE-Fighters
>how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books.
My understanding is that Sci-Fi writing for established franchises during the 80s - 90s was kind of a small circle of people. The influence would have been unavoidable. And they also often wrote for multiple franchises too.
Many of the authors didn’t seem to understand Star Wars at all, and got the feel all wrong—in fact, in a lot of cases I wonder whether they’d just touched up a failed manuscript or partially-finished-but-not-promising draft with Star Wars colored markers, and sent that to the publisher. Stackpole was a rare exception, and Zahn kinda.
But even those relatively bright points suffered terribly from Star Wars being almost intrinsically a visual beast. It’s so tied into pastiche of other visual media that it’s remarkably difficult to get it right in print, while the formula for making a decent Star Wars film or show is easier than damn near any other franchise ever: pick one or two things, at least one of “genre” fiction, rip them off completely, and put Star Wars lipstick on it. That’s the whole deal for making a pretty good Star Wars thing. It’s all The Mandalorian did and it worked better than nearly any other efforts at Star Wars since the original trilogy. Frankly, it’s incredible that so many screenwriters and directors seem to to struggle with this (hell, even Lucas).
Star Wars books, though? That’s hard mode.
The simplest explanation is that the Empire's military doctrine doesn't make any strategic sense, and Imperial decision-makers all want the biggest, scariest ships possible for selfish reasons, and everything else flows from that. They rationalize it with speeches about how fear will totally keep the rebels at bay (unlike the last ten times they tried it), but at their core they just want the biggest toys.
For example, the author mentions that in Legends the New Republic retained the Imperial fleet (or at least what survived of it), and claims that the Canon New Republic is not shown to have done so on-screen. The reality is established in the various shows (particularly The Mandalorian and Ahsoka) with about as much subtlety as a lightsaber to the face: Star Destroyers and other Imperial hardware are strongly associated with oppression and tyranny, and while it would indeed be cheaper for the New Republic to retain them than to replace them, it'd be not only even cheaper but also much more politically expedient to dismantle them and sell the scrap.
It's also readily apparent in said shows that Imperial loyalists are still prevalent; Ahsoka in particular shows the shipbuilding/scrapping supply chain to be no exception. Disbanding the Empire's old vendors in favor of shifting production to the Rebellion's vendors is another easy political win and a matter of national security.
By the time of the events of The Force Awakens, a lot of this attitude of "reject the political baggage of anything to do with the Empire" has escaped the Republic's military-industrial complex and now inhabits every facet of New Republic politics. Even the capital moved from Coruscant to Hosnian Prime - and while it ain't explicitly stated why people voted that way, it doesn't take much of a leap in logic to recognize Coruscant's association with the Empire (and its abundant population of Imperial elites) as being a driving factor.
And all this is stuff the article even directly supports and vice versa - but instead the author chose to dunk on all this, doing the otherwise-excellent analysis a considerable disservice.
In star wars ships travel through hyperspace. This allows them to quickly, though not instantaneously, traverse the galaxy, generally without impediment. This means that an attacker can suddenly show up with a massive fleet nearly anywhere, and the defender needs to hold out for some time for reinforcements to arrive. Whoever controls orbit around a planet can potentially bombard the planet to subjugate the population, or land troops to occupy the planet, or at least interdict trade, which many worlds are highly reliant upon.
At the same time, the galaxy is massive. Millions of inhabited worlds, many thousands with significant industrial and political power. In the clone wars there is a roughly even split - both the CIS and the Republic need to defend a huge number of systems. While each can field large fleets, those fleets need to be mostly dispersed so that they can resist attacks. Every victory adds a new system to defend, further limiting their capability to launch more attacks. One would expect eventual stalemate, even if the two sides weren't being run by the same guy to produce exactly that result.
For the Empire, the situation is different. The empire controls basically every system, whereas the Rebellion doesn't have to defend anyone. It is free to use all of its forces to attack anywhere, and it does not need to subjugate the planets it liberates. The Empire, therefore, must maintain a force everywhere which is strong enough to take on the entire rebellion (or at least the entirety of any one rebel faction). But this creates two problems for the Empire.
First, any increase in the Rebels' strength dramatically increases the costs for the Empire to field its military. One capital ship might double the strength of a rebel cell, which means the Empire needs to essentially double its whole navy. And second, lots of ships means lots of captains which is the real threat to the Empire. The empire is an extremely centralized government, representing a compromise for the galaxy between their freedom and security. Some portion of the people innevitably are going to be unhappy with that compromise, and the more ships you have, the more likely one of those captains will be among the discontents willing to defect (or sufficiently incompetent that discontents under their command will mutiny). On its own, it doesn't seem like that big a deal, what's it matter if one imperial capital ship in tens of thousands defects? But recall, a rebel cell adding one capital ship doubles the cost of the navy. A defecting imperial ship could be that capital ship.
Thus for the empire to survive, it needs to defend a huge number of planets with as few ships as possible. This logically leads to a focus on large capital ships which can feasibly stand up to a small fleet single-handedly, with fighters that can't act independently and support ships with minimal armament, presenting little threat if they were to defect.
Of course the Empire would be best off if they didn't need to defend their worlds. If they could sufficiently intimidate member worlds, who obviously can't get up and run the way a hidden rebel cell can, then they can tell them "tough titties, endure the rebel attack until we arrive" and avoid parking a Star Destroyer over a world. This would allow for a much smaller navy in terms of both ships and manpower, meaning those ships could be made more capable and all be placed under the command of loyal and competent officers.
The natural progression of this are the super star destroyers and ultimately the Death Star, which could concievably keep the whole galaxy in line. These superweapons serve an additional purpose though. Because they can potentially invalidate the Rebel's strategy and ensure permanent imperial hegemony, the Rebels have to attack these targets. Thus instead of millions of potential targets, the empire now knows to focus their efforts on a handful, and when the rebels come out of the woodwork to make these strikes, the empire can make them especially costly. The Yavin cell risked everything to take out the first Death Star, and came within seconds of total destruction. Likewise Endor was a trap that would have been the end of the Rebellion were it not for those meddling kids and their stupid teddy bears.
It's worth noting that the Empire's playbook worked. They consistently won victories; it was only when their power structure imploded and they descended into infighting that the New Republic was able to make serious gains, and they ultimately had to compromise with the imperial remnant rather than subjugate them by force of arms.
There is also the fact that they are fighting with shields and energy weapons. Shields mean the first damage a unit takes doesn't happen, energy weapons mean no heavy hits from small units. An ISD comes through unscathed when attacked by reasonably light forces and can't meaningfully be ambushed. That's a major psychological factor.