Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, it is a fireside, and I thought, since it was just recently May the Fourth, we might talk some Star Wars (and history). So this is going to be a bit silly this week.
For this week’s musing, over the last week, as part of my May the Fourth celebration (and some enforced post-semester relaxation), I went and built the Lego Star Destroyer my better half bought for me (about a year ago – the space for building it got consumed by other things in the intervening time). This is not the very old (2002) Star Destroyer kit, nor the very newest (2024) kit, but the finely aged (2019) ‘Ultimate Collector’ set, coming in at a massive 4,700 pieces. It was fun to build and there’s actually a lot of kind of neat engineering and design that clearly went in to making it work. With so many pieces, the set is so heavy that it needs a whole reinforcing frame (also made of legos) to hold it together internally.
But that got me thinking about Star Destroyers (not the first time) and Star Wars, so I figured I’d muse a bit at you both about the odd place of Star Destroyers in imperial military doctrine and also the nature of the Old Republic and the Empire as polities.
So let’s star with the obvious about the design of the Imperial Star Destroyer (ISD), which is that it was designed (for the screen) to look a certain way, rather than as a function fighting machine. And as that sort of design, the ISD is brilliant. The lower hull seems to have been planned out for that massive opening shot: the long, flat sections make it feel like the ship goes on forever, while the three breaks in the shape (the two docking hangers and the bulge over the reactor) break up the monotony. The two docking bays, a smaller one first and then a much larger one, also stress the ship’s gargantuan size: the viewer see’s what they think is the primary hanger, and then, wait, no, there’s another, much bigger one and then the ship doesn’t end. The rear of the ship, with its massive brace of engines, also manages to communicate that this behemoth might also be fast as well as large. And then when we see the thing from the front, the presence of its raised superstructure immediately communicates its primary role as a battleship, because it has a similar sort of superstructure to WWII-era battleships, with that raised command tower looming over a superstructure above the main structure. It is simultaneously different enough from any real vehicle to be immediately memorable – not merely a battleship stuck in space – but at the same time, shares enough design language for the audience to intuit its role immediately.
As an aside, I think this is something the ISD design does a lot better than many more recent similar efforts. Both new Star Wars (particularly the sequel films) and new Star Trek (particularly Discovery and Picard) have a problem with villain ships which are wildly out of scale with the existing designs in the setting, but which are essentially just blown-up versions of existing visual language (Discovery‘s Dreadnought and The Rise of Skywalker‘s Xyston-class both come to mind). Even the First Order Star Destroyers often felt like they had to be massively bigger than the ISD because they otherwise lacked new ideas. But the ISD itself was pretty fresh as a concept and delivers on it extremely well (and the SSD is a better, “that, but bigger, scarier and in Vadar’s theme colors” variant than anything in the sequel trilogy).
Of course, the ISD initially existed without any context – it is the second thing we see on screen after the crawl (not counting planets) – but it eventually got one, a design lineage from the Republic-era Venator. 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, while it is the Rebellion that eventually adopts a fast-carrier kind of doctrine.
Now, the out-of-universe reason for this is that George Lucas thinks it is cool to have the protagonists flying fighters against big enemy battleships and so that is the doctrine he gives to the ‘good guys’ in each films. I wonder if that is itself an influence from the Second World War (and the war films Lucas studied to block out his space battle sequences), where the early phases (particularly 1942) in the Pacific were the plucky efforts of a few American fast carriers and cruisers against fleets loaded with imposing-looking battleships. It also, of course, makes storytelling sense: the characters we care about can be in the fighters, while the bad guys in their big Death Stars and Star Destroyers are distant, powerful and imposing.
But it creates a lore problem, which is, ‘why did the Galactic Empire entirely change its doctrine after winning the Clone Wars?’ ‘Legends’ canon – that is, the pre-Disney canon – had its answer, which is that ‘it didn’t.’ Instead, there was a longer progression of ship designs late in the Clone Wars, from the carrier-oriented Venator and Accalamator to the up-gunned version, the Victory-class Star Destroyer (VSD), which was supposed to be a late-Clone Wars design which serves as the bridge from to the ISD. With the VSD in the design lineage, the ISD makes sense: the Empire deployed, late in the war, a more gun-based platform, then won the war and continued development along that ‘successful’ design lineage, producing an extreme version of the VSD in the ISD.
The Canon (‘Disney-Canon’) technically has the same narrative (the VSD is technically still canon, according to Wookiepedia), but has never put the VSD on screen. In the scenes where we ought to see a transitional VSD, we instead see an ISD, and the new canon has also removed one of the main ‘Legends’ advantages the VSD had: in legends, the VSD was capable of atmospheric flight, but the ISD was not, but in canon, the ISD now can do that. The reason here, I have to assume is that brand new models are expensive and Disney would rather keep reusing and modifying Rogue One‘s very high-quality ISD-I model forever if necessary, even in places where it makes no sense, like for the Xyston-class or in games set after the Battle of Endor. If Disney can’t be bothered to make a high-detail ISD-II model, they surely can’t be bothered to work up a new VSD model.
But I think I can actually puzzle out a ‘history of the Galactic Empire’ which makes a bit of sense and into which the ISD has an understandable – if not sound – doctrinal place. First, we need to understand what kind of polity the Old Republic – and thus the Empire – is. And here, the phrasing I go to (somewhat imprecise) is that the Republic was a ‘Republic of Princes’ in the same sense that the Holy Roman Empire was an empire of ‘princes’ or more technically ‘imperial states.’2 I promise we will get back to Star Destroyers here eventually.
In short, the Republic was not a democracy of people but a republic of states, the ‘princes’ which in turn governed their own territory internally. These ‘princes’ could be any form of government. And indeed, the imperial states of the Holy Roman Empire could be noble rulers, but also bishops ruling cities (the ‘prince-archbishops’), monks running abbeys (Imperial prelates), grandmasters running holy orders, and even cities governing themselves (free and imperial cities). So too with the Republic, which is why the Trade Federation can sit on the Senate alongside democratic Naboo and monarchic Alderaan.
Crucially, each of these ‘princes’ is internally self-governing, but also has its own military, some large and some small, and its own resource base with which to develop such a military.
Given that, what I think a historian of this period, looking back would conclude about the Star Wars story would be this: the Clone Wars were essentially a civil war between the princes of the Rim territories against the princes of the core regions (as the later effectively ruled the senate). That civil war produced political momentum among some of the core princes towards centralization, which fuels the career of Palpatine. Palpatine’s reign and the Empire in general is thus understood as a reaction to the Clone Wars primarily aimed at centralizing power at the expense of the princes.
That in turn produced two related reactions. On the one hand, it produces obvious discontent among the ‘princes’ themselves – the ruling classes of these planets. The Bail Organas and Mon Mothmas. But the centralization also begins to disintermediate the princely governments themselves, suddenly exposing their citizens to direct rule by the empire (we see this quite clearly in Andor) and it turns out, they don’t like it. After all, you have to imagine generations of local government means all of these planets have different assumptions about their rights and customs, and now here comes the Stormtroopers attempting to institute one law and one custom. That creates a separate but symbiotic popular movement against the empire, which the princes are able to co-opt into their rebel alliance, promising that a return to princely government will mean a return to the traditional liberties and customs.
As this is happening, the Imperial Navy is in a state of change. During the Clone Wars, it was fighting a peer adversary using a fast-carrier doctrine aiming to win a war that was already raging. But now there are simmering tensions which the Imperial Navy is supposed to tamp down. As a result, imperial designers reach for escalation dominance in their designs, aiming to build ships which can, on their own, intimidate the militaries of the princes – because remember, the ‘princes’ (planetary governments of whatever form) all have their own small navies – in order to avoid a conflict. The ISD is the end result of that design philosophy: a gun-platform powerful enough to be effectively beyond the ability of any planetary princely navy to fight effectively.
Those same designers are also, of course, dealing with a bubbling hit-and-run insurgency, which manifests as popular insurgents whose weapons and resources clearly suggest they are being funded and supplied, in secret, by some of the princes. Those same imperial designers respond by emphasizing force protection, to try to keep the key imperial assets well-enough armored and defended so as to limit the damage of ambush and hit-and-run. In this sense, an ISD is a gigantic MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle; a kind of vehicle designed for the Global War on Terror). Sure, it’s less practical than the more Humvee-like Venators, but its size and firepower places it beyond the capability of rebel hit-and-run attacks, allowing it to deliver its troops and firepower in safety.
Of course, it risks exactly the same problem that MRAPs do: troops buttoned up on their force-protection-oriented vehicles may be safe (though they may not be), but they’re not accomplishing the mission. But what the ISD avoids is getting weekly reports about losing a few ships here and there as these irritatingly well-funded rebels pick off this or that small force. Instead, imperial force is concentrated in a handful of mega-platforms that are effectively beyond attack.
The immediate problem, though, is that building a huge navy of brand new massive Space-MRAP-Battleships is probably really expensive, with the massive cost increasing dissatisfaction among the princes and the people, fueling the discontent already simmering in frustrations about this centralizing government. Finally in 0BBY, the Empire makes its disastrous move: deciding that the best course of action would be to intimidate the princes by beheading one of them (Alderaan) as an example to the others, while disbanding the senate and essentially abolishing princely rule. But like Ferdinand II marching into Bohemia and the Palatinate in 1618-9, this assertion of direct imperial power ends up triggering a more general revolt of the princes (intensified, of course, by the fact that the Empire loses the Death Star almost immediately, meaning the threat meant to keep the princes in line while their administrations were dismantled had vanished).
From that point, the Empire actually unravels quite quickly: slow, grinding centralization had taken two decades from the end of the Clone Wars to the Battle of Yavin, but from the Battle of Yavin to Endor is just five years. The problem is a classic feature of military-tributary empires: an army can intimidate many enemies, but it can only fight one, so once the state has to turn potential force into deployed violence, the intimidation value of those armies collapses in the absence of bedrock legitimacy to keep people in line without force, as every actor in the systems’ interests suddenly recalculate against hegemony and towards balancing.
The Rebel Alliance, constructing a navy from scratch, builds one to the doctrine of the last peer-conflict, the Clone Wars, thus a fast-carrier oriented force, while the Empire, saddled with high costs is stuck with the ships it has: giant Space-MRAPs designed to intimidation and counter-insurgency. But with the princes broadly in revolt, what the Empire increasingly has on its hands is actually a peer, conventional conflict. The issue comes to a head at Endor, where the Emperor tries a Dien Bien Phu-gambit with the same historical results: thinking he can lure the rebels into a conventional battle and win, he does so but finds to his dismay that the balance of conventional forces is not so lopsided as he hoped.
Naturally a later historian is going to be unaware of the personal elements of the story, but “the emperor, having clearly bungled the strategy and unwilling to change course – I mean, he built a second Death Star – is assassinated by his close associates (Darth Vader) who remain loyal to the empire, just not the emperor and hope to change strategy” is a pretty standard way for dynasties to end. And what we get after Endor is a pretty standard way that gambit often plays out, with imperial forces fragmenting instead of congealing around a new strategy. Unable to coalesce around a new strategy or a new leader, the remains of the emperor’s half-built centralized government are dismantled by the princes who then reestablish the old Republic of Princes, albeit with some more centralized components (a central military, for instance) kept. Restoring the intermediate layer between the Galactic government and the regular people perhaps does calm popular anger as well, as local rulers are better able to handle local issues (in a cuius regio, eius religio sort of way).
As a coda, one of the things I liked in the old Legends canon that we haven’t seen on-screen, at least, in the new Disney-canon was that the New Republic’s centralized military – something they keep from the Clone Wars experience, evidently – ended up having lots of imperial ships, including ISDs and even SSDs. Which makes a lot of sense: having reasserted control, one of the things the princes want both for themselves and to deliver to their newly-quite-well-armed populations is lower taxes and thus less naval spending. But less naval spending doesn’t mean that you build smaller, cheaper ships: it means you keep the old ships. So the New Republic isn’t going to build a new, cheaper navy, but look for ways to repurpose this pile of giant Space-MRAPs they’ve inherited from the defunct empire, alongside their Ferix-Junkyard collection of ships from the war. I’d absolutely expect, then, to see some newly blue-trimmed Star Destroyers, employed as the flagships for Republic Navy task forces, even as New Republic officers complain about how poorly suited they are for the role and New Republic designers draw up endless new plans for high-tech, highly capable fast-carrier designs that they can never get funding to build at scale.
And then, of course, fortunately, the story just sort of trails off, because the notion that some insurgent power in the outer rim would conjure into existence not one but two fleets of Star Destroyers out of nothing with no one noticing and casually overthrow this entire system off-screen between movies is the daft sort of thing which would only have been excusable if paired with really good character work, if anyone had bothered to do any.
On to recommendations!
Excavations in Pompeii turned up some remarkable new frescoes of mythological scenes earlier this month, which you can see in this BBC report. I am always struck by the focus in domestic Greek and Roman artwork on mythological scenes which are often, at least to my mind, deeply fraught; Apollo and Cassandra (where the former is about the curse the latter for her chastity) is hardly what I would want in my dining room, but the ancients seem to have preferred scenes of high emotional and moral tension, even if it was unpleasant tension. CUNY Professor in Classics and History Liv Yarrow offers some additional thoughts on the frescoes on her blog, which I’ll also recommend generally for her musings about ancient material culture objects, their mysteries and what we can understand from them.
Meanwhile, Cardiff University’s Flint Dibble wrote in The Guardian about his experiences as an actual archaeology taking on pseudo-archaeological nonsense. I agree with Dibble that the actual past that archaeology reveals to us is more interesting and wondrous than the wild fantasies that pseudo-archaeologists project on it, in no small part because the real past can surprise and challenge us in a way that psuedo-archaeology cannot, as it is always just a distorted mirror of our own biases and assumptions. It is, however, profoundly frustrating how major outlets, like Netflix, continue to present nonsense peddlers as if they are asking unanswered questions, rather than asking extensively answered questions, the answers of which they steadfastly refuse to read.
Over at the Partial Historians, I want to pick out a really neat special guest episode from about a month ago on the Mausoleum of Augustus, with Dr. Victoria Austen. The mausoleum is one of those monuments in Rome that gets a bit less attention from tourists, and has been undergoing preservation work (and thus not open to the public) for quite a while now. But the conversation between Drs. Radform, Greenfield and Austen, I think, is a really useful way to think about how the mausoleum fits in with Augustus’ building program, but also his use of space generally on the Campus Martius (the area of Rome it was in), as well as discussing the way that monuments like that get reused, repurposed and re-imagined by subsequent generations.
Finally, on a gaming note, I just wanted to point out game-analysis YouTuber Rosencreutz has a long video-essay putting the cult-classic Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines in the context of the broader genre of ‘vampire games’ that I found quite interesting. Rosencreutz videos are an interesting sort because they tend to be ruminations on a theme rather than focused deep-dives of a single game (the more common format), but they are often insightful. I’ll also shout out his take a few months ago on “Valkyria Chronicles, Persecution, and Atrocity” for making an argument I’ve thought for some time: that it is strange and also quite interesting that one of the more serious takes on the holocaust in gaming is to be found in an alternate-universe anime-WWII tactics game. His channel is well worth if you are interested in thoughtful analysis of the themes and ideas in video games.
For this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend J. Lyall, Divided Armies: Inequality & Battlefield Performance in Modern War (2020), a book I am legitimately surprised I have not already recommended and which is well on its way to becoming one of those modern classics of military history scholarship. The central argument of the book is actually quite easy to state and fairly intuitive: armies with a high degree of inequality – specifically inequality of membership in the political community – suffer recognizable pathologies that cause them to perform more poorly than they might otherwise have done on the battlefield. Alert readers will pick up from our series on Hellenistic and Roman armies that I have been noodling around my own version of this argument for those ancient armies (indeed, since before this book was published; you can see the foundations of my ideas on this back in my 2018 dissertation), so Lyall’s book came like a bolt of deliverance: here was a sustained, focused study of the modern instantiation of a phenomenon I thought I could detect in ancient armies.
Of course it is easy to make the observation that it seems like high levels of inequality negatively impact combat performance, but it is another thing to prove it. Lyall comes at this problem with a political science methodology, which is to say that the foundation of the book is a quantitative approach which seeks to measure – in numbers – inequality (a ‘military inequality coefficient’) and battlefield performance (a ‘battlefield performance index’) and then compare the two. These sorts of quantitative approaches almost invariably lead historians to cry foul and I will admit I have some concerns about the quite subjective foundations of these apparently objective, quantitative coefficients and indexes. If that was all there was, I’d be concerned. But that isn’t all there is. Indeed, Lyall spends relatively few of his pages on the quantitative aspects of the study and instead buttresses the validity of his figures with a series of detailed, well-developed case studies running from 1800 to 1942. That said, I also think Lyall’s definition of inequality is actually a really good one, focusing in not on economic inequality or even political representation but on inequality of membership in a political community: who is considered a full member of the polity, who belongs even in polities where belonging doesn’t bring a certain economic standard of living or set of political rights. As Lyall, I think, demonstrates well, when it comes to military effectiveness, this is the question that matters.
Lyall makes a strong effort (noted in a forward) to try to make the book approachable and consequently confined much of the technical matter to appendices available online. But I think for the reader looking for the general insight of the negative impact of inequality within armies (rather than the particular, quantitative relationship), the case studies carry the necessary weight. These are delivered in plain language and with enough context for the reader to follow, and with a historian’s granularity in following the course of specific key moments. The result is a book that, as long as one kind of skims the quantitative sections (or, as one of my mentors once quipped, of a different political science work’s quantitative chapter, “don’t read it, but don’t skip it”), is very readable and even quite engaging. More to the point, its a very valuable working, taking something I think many of us kind of knew in a general sense (‘inequality damages army performance’) and providing a focused, in-depth study of the phenomenon in both particular cases and in general that puts substance behind that general sense.
- As an aside, one of the silliest things in the sequel trilogy lore was bringing back not just a CR90, but insisting that the Resistance’s CR90 was a recovered Tantive IV. The ‘Legends’ canon has Vader do the obvious thing to complete the ruse of sending a distress signal and then reporting the ship destroyed in an accident, which was, of course, to destroy the ship and kill the crew, thereby leaving no evidence behind, a thing Darth Vader is obviously ruthless enough to do.
- As I understand it in technical terms, a ‘prince’ of the HRE was a direct vassal of the emperor; many imperial states were ‘princes’ – including some archbishoprics – but not all were. However, I find when explaining this to folks, the idea of a ‘government of princes’ makes a lot more sense than ‘a government of states.’
Personally, I always thought the pathology of the Imperial designs was a fundamental disbelief that individuals were important. The ISD is gun-heavy, but it has a lot of TIE fighters in terms of sheer numbers, and we see specifically in the Death Star battle that Tarkin does not believe unsupported snubfighters can be a genuine threat to a large battlestation, and that his masterpiece is designed to resist only capital ship attacks. The rebels, meanwhile, actually deploy a smaller number of superior fighters, which are also designed for interstellar jumps without carrier support.
The disaster at Yavin seems to have prompted a rethink, as we see the superior TIE interceptor take the field, and in Legends projects like the TIE defender*. while in the meantime the Rebellion has managed to secure the support of the Mon Calamari shipyards and deploy capital ships of their own.
*It appears in the new canon in Rebels with a different timeline, in which it’s clearly the pet project of Admiral Thrawn, and I think we’re supposed to take this as another sign he’s one of the smartest imperials around, building an X-wing counter before Yavin.
They think that, but it is mostly true. When do we see Star Destroyers taken out by smaller ships? Even many smaller ships? They aren’t invulnerable as we can see, but they are genuinely capable, though perhaps not cost-effective. I also think there is a strong terror component to their deployment. There may not be many of them but if one show up at my planet I can’t do anything about it except try and run the blockade, and in return it can probably impose a blockade reasonably well (Han states it as a point of pride than he was able to get though in the past) and effectively bombard the planet at will (as we see on Hoth). It’s the Death Star writ small.
Admittedly we mostly see them lost in Legends, and it’s a big lift for the Rebels whenever they do until they get their own capital ships. The main flaw I see with them is that their fighter screen is made of inferior fighters because they think having a lot of bad fighters is good enough.
Granted, in Legends they apparently attempted to correct that by creating the X-wing, only for the designers to defect and take the plans and prototypes with them.
We might also ask “what is the TIE fighter for,” and I suspect the answer is not, primarily, “taking out X-wings.” They need swarms of them because part of the mission is that an ISD needs to be able to project power over an entire planet, and Stormtroopers aren’t exactly gonna manage that unsupported. So they need air support, and there’s your TIE fighter. And you need to extend that blockade past line-of-sight, and again, TIE fighter. Maybe there’s a moon you need to blockade or patrol as well, and once more, TIE fighter.
Although, counterpoint, we routinely see TIE fighters die to minimally modified Q-ships they fail to interdict, which is a failure of their primary mission. If they can’t project enough power to even intimidate paramilitaries or civilians they’re just a failed platform. Plus maybe they’re dirt cheap, but pilots probably aren’t.
In contrast X wings actually serve as fantastic ships for this purpose; they’re independently deployable, fast *enough* to catch or interdict most civvies, and can even be loaded with precision bombs while TIEs can’t. They’re better ground attack craft, better blockades, and they can even temporarily operate independent of their hanger.
Remember, TIEs can’t hyperjump. If their carrier isn’t in system you’ve put the pilots in a death clock, assuming they can’t get to a ground base. X wings can simply jump to another system if their rendezvous doesn’t clock in, letting you setup much more robust operating procedures.
Now, we do see TIEs shot down by armed blockade runners. But notably, performances of this kind usually revolve around particularly exceptional or heroic individuals, often with exceptionally souped-up ships.
It’s reasonable to assume that TIEs’ performance parameters are scaled to what they would need to be in order to reliably catch some reference target, or to catch 95% of known outlaws when deployed in squadrons of eight, or something like that. But it’s a big galaxy, and there’s always some high-powered mutant that can outrun and outgun the TIEs.
The trouble with trying to build a fighter so high-performing that not even the worst and wildest of galactic outlaws and aces can handle it is that you’re probably going to have to push the envelope of technological possibility, which gets really, really expensive to build and maintain when you’re planning on the assumption that you’ll have to build millions of these things.
The X-Wing, as a multirole hyperspace-capable strike fighter so complex it requires an AI co-pilot to function, is almost certainly a full order of magnitude more expensive than a TIE. It might well be prohibitively expensive to mass-produce X-Wings or something like them on the required scale.
Then build less of them. One x wing is probably worth ten tie fighters for interdiction and it is generally a safe bet that smaller, more elite forces are more cost efficient for the nation as a whole. Have nine would be pilots build craft so the best one can fly it. That way instead of having nine pilots die to intercept the Falcon you have one pilot maybe die and nine living workers.
Yes, the empire doesn’t value it’s workforce and probably views them as a liability if anything, Sideous at least is idealogically misanthropic and Vadar and the other commanders effectively so, but we need not make the same mistakes. The TIE can have good in universe reasons to be the way it is and still be bad.
And while there is selection bias in the movies, we see so many instances of them failing it’s a trend.
The superiority of the X-wing is actually somewhat debatable. During the battle of Yavin, they don’t trade especially favorably against TIE fighters (which are less shielded but more maneuverable and similarly armed). Similarly at Scarif and Endor.
The primary advantage of the X-wing from the POV of the perpetually hull-strapped Rebel Alliance is that they don’t need a proper carrier. Any rock you can land a supply transport on will suffice as a base when the strike package can fly itself to the target. It also ducks the need for dedicated bombers. The Empire doesn’t care about these attributes.
Not entirely sure how fair of a comparison that is… during the Battle of Yavin, the X-Wings are significantly more constrained than the TIEs. They aren’t operating in an even battlespace, and they aren’t operating in a space-superiority mission.
– The battle space is exceedingly hostile, filled with enemy defensive cannon fire, to which we see several fighters succumb to.
– They have a mixed role between SEAD, escort, diversion, and bombing.
– They are drastically outnumbered
– Many of their number fall while making the “Trench Run” itself after Gold Squadron fails to make the shot. Most of the X-Wings that go down on screen do so in the trench, which is literal “fish in a barrel” type situation**.
– A lot, if not most, of the on-screen losses, are at the hands of the enemy Ace, Darth Vader, who is noted as being one of – if not the – most talented fighter-pilots of his generation. Who is also flying an extremely advanced, custom built, non-standard TIE (and knowing Vader, you know his personal TIE had the best of the best the Empire had to offer).
I think the final point about Vader making most of the kills is both fair and unfair at the same time. The reason his kill count is so high is because the narrative demands it, but there are many stories from history about high-scoring virtuosos… and I think Star Wars actually fairly faithfully follows history’s example: the Rebellion rotates their aces to the rear to train and cultivate their forces, while the Empire moves their (Canon: 1, Legends, 2?( Vader and Baron Fel…))*** Aces around hot spot after hot spot. The rebellion has a number of Aces, particularly Rogue Squadron, but even within Rogue Squadron (in Legends Canon) we see an emphasis on team work and wing fighting over individual performance.
** The idea of weather interceptors from the rear does however make me think of the stories of P-47s just absorbing fire from interceptors on their return trips, using their armor, redundancy, and speed to tank the hits until they reached friendly skies. Some of this may be embellished, but a lot of “Jugs” came home shot full of holes in the rear so it’s quite plausible.
*** Zahn tried to establish a second clone army of sorts in his Legends book, namely his Hand of Thrawn duology follow up, where-in the Emperor mass cloned their greatest TIE Ace Baron Fel, but I don’t think the project actually got to the point that they were able to field Wings of Fel-Clones before the Emperor’s demise. Given it was one of Palpatines many secret projects, the Imperial Remnants were unable to use that which they had no knowledge of.
Then again, we never see what would happen if an ISD ran into 300 or so starfighters, 50 of them Y-Wing strike fighters. What we usually see are strike packages of about a dozen fighters, going where the ISD isn’t to strike at planetary targets.
If Dr. Devereaux is right, an individual ISD is scaled to overawe a typical light to medium planetary defense force. For proportionately stronger planetary “princes” who rule stronger planets, you would send multiple ISDs, or one of the relative handful of Executor-class or other comparable supercapital ships.
If this is the case, then there is a practical upper limit on the scale of attack a lone ISD should be expected to withstand. I think (I only saw Episode VII, not VIII or IX), that we never really get a good sense in movie canon of what the limit is. Because we don’t actually see massed fighter attacks destroying a starship by conventional means in the prequel and original trilogies. Nothing like a swarm of fighters bombarding a capital ship with hundreds of torpedoes until it’s a smoldering wreck.
Instead, the good guys are always evading those ships, or they get taken out by a single lucky shot such as a crashing A-Wing or a single proton torpedo down a thermal exhaust shaft.
It should be remembered that Tarkin being perfectly Fair, is an idiot.
Man Served as what a Lieutenant During the Clone wars? lets be charitable and assume he did ok at that, but even using the 2008 clone wars he got defeated and captured.
Possibly a Palpatine stress testing the guy, see if he has the stuff he likes.
but from there he is almost removed entirely from the active battlefield, moved to administration and politics.
he becomes Palpatine favorite Administrator and Govenor, practically 3rd of the Empire at this time, and he has less war experience then nearly all the top tiers do, even the new recruits that got promoted the regular way.
not even getting into what the Huge purging of Jedi General, and then phasing out of war experienced Clone Troopers, losing Captain and Commanders would have been horrific for the Empire Military, they did have time to phase them out and replace people.
Still.
Vader is almost the only one person left in the Empire to have the sheer experience suitable for his actual rank among the upper Levels. and this is a man who distained the Death Star.
Tarkin was probably literally decades away from the last time he was in charge of a battle if he was EVER the Highest Officer on the Scene.
He should NOT be giving orders to ANYONE in a combat setting.
The ISDs exist almost entirely in a post-peer conflict time though, so the lopsided actions Tarkin is in charge of right before the start of ANH are as much a battle as anyone in the Empire has done up until that point, excepting the tail end of the Clone Wars a generation prior.
Vader is a aging street fascist, someone for whom the appeal of totalitarianism is simply that he will get the freedom to engage in personal direct violence; he doesn’t care for any command more complicated than “Go!” Tarkin is a philosophical fascist; he has broad interests in aesthetics and the re-ordering of societies, and he wants to effect complex outcomes through complex directions. Both therefore have deep flaws as military commanders, but Tarkin is the one that has some utility above the tactical level.
Both men have experience as officers in the Clone Wars, and not just the tail end. I wouldn’t call Vader street-level; he was a general. And Tarkin is an old man in the first film; he had military experience even before the Clone Wars, in his family’s navy, if you read his novel.
Sorry; not street-level in terms of prestige or rank, street-level in terms of philosophical sophistication.
I actually think there might be an interesting question in all of this. What happened to the clones? The Old Republic functionally created a warrior caste of enslaved soldiers, relied on the extensively to fight a brutal peer conflict, and then what?
If you are Palpatine, you have two major problems. The first problem is that with the collapse of the CIS, you have a massive population of highly trained, highly effective war veterans entering society, in a period of extreme political upheaval. Order 66 is all well and good, but those orders were reliant on microchips surgically installed in the clones, and doesn’t appear to have the kind of subtlety required to keep the secret from getting out. Using Order 66 means that everyone in the galaxy knows that the clones turned en masse, with functionally zero defectors, and executed their superior officers rather than taking them into custody, and the excuse given is coming directly from Palpatine’s mouth, meaning that everyone knows that he has some absolute method of giving them orders.
The one leads to the other. There is no government that we know of that could enable one man to give an order to it’s army to functionally mutilate itself and rebel against superior officers, and have it carried out with 100% efficiency and no defectors. Which means something else is up.
As these warrior slaves are starting to ask uncomfortable questions about veterans benefits and healthcare, you realize you have a powerful, highly experienced military which is capable of wiping the floor with any contending force you try to raise out of the blue, who you only have shaky control over, considering countermeasures to the chips can be enacted. Moreover, military skills don’t always transfer over to civilian life, but a sideways transfer, into mercenary bands of clones is entirely possible if you fail to address the clone loyalty problem, and yet still freeze them out of political power and dodge a potential military coup. And considering Palpatine is trying to centralize power via coercion, the threat of clone defections to disaffected planets must have kept him up at night.
The second problem, is that they are dying. The clones were engineered to grow and mature at double the rate, with a correspondingly shorter lifespan. Your first problem may dodged by deliberately working to keep the loyalty of the soldiers, and will cease to be a problem by simple mortality rates in the near future. However, when your military structure is entirely built around these slave soldiers sourced from a single planet, with training and logistics all handled by the Kaminoans, new issues arise. Kamino becomes a liability, in that they now can press their monopoly of mass cloning as a political lever, and they become a target for someone keen on destroying the Imperial military. So you can’t order any more clones, and you have to prepare to downsize a military which is going to quickly attrition to age, and will need to be entirely replaced, with a brand new recruitment pipeline.
And here, we can speculate that this is how Palpatine threaded the needle. The clones were reorganized into the first generation of the stormtroopers, which kept them under his thumb, preventing notable resistance to the chips, which suppressed a lot of that pesky individuality and maintained a degree of loyalty. Meanwhile, the recruitment of regular humans into those ranks helped bolster the millions aging out, but all the while, the renewed emphasis on gunships as opposed to carriers likely helped cut down on the number of personnel needed to actually maintain a military. At least until they could build back up to the strength they had during the Clone Wars, prompted in no small part by the Rebel Alliance becoming a real threat.
And of course, this all ties back into your original note. Of course the Imperial culture has a disbelief that individuals are important. The Old Republic had somehow come to terms with the morality of cloning identical humans en masse and sending them to the slaughter, having been raised from birth for war. That cultural legacy was inherited by the Empire, who was clearly not in the business of caring overly much about individuals as humans, as opposed to as statistics, and the stormtroopers maintaining the cold, impersonal armor of the clone troopers only reinforced that perception.
An excellent question that Bad Batch addresses. Bad Batch is set just after the Clone Wars and we see the side lining of the clones. Kamino is destroyed, preventing anymore from being made, clone soldiers are moved to garrison posts and there is a process of quietly killing those that develop “opinions” or those trying to create networks amongst the clones where they could form some power structure. Ultimately the clone politics problem is one that will resolve itself as the clones have rapid aging and will age out of active participation in warfare soon enough. The Empire also has the ability to simply move clones wherever they like. If one battalion is developing some politic will and desire for clone rights, simply ship them off to Ice World Hell IV for a decade of garrison duty.
Bad Batch also shows experienced clones being used to train the first stormtrooper detachments and the gradual replacement of active clone soldiers by stormtroopers, with the remaining clones moving into more specialised and elite positions where one imagines they stay until they age out of active service.
The Clone Army was really made for a single purpose, to fight the Clone Wars. Estimates vary but the peak number of troopers was supposedly around 1.7 billion. When the Clone Wars end, the Emperor has this massively, highly skilled military designed for fighting a peer power. But their loyalty was to the Republic and to each other. What he really needs is a even more massive army that is loyal to the Empire and to him personally. But in the absence of any real peers, they don’t need to be that elite or effective. They aren’t going to be fighting any wars that they aren’t certain to win because there is no other polity out there of any comparable size or power. So we get stormtroopers, who are doctrinally pure and highly loyal, look scary and anonymous (good for policing repressed people) and can solve all military issues mostly by throwing vast numbers at the problem.
Well to be fair just taken alone. In the First Movie the rebel attack was practically a failure. Only the shot of Future Jedi made the kill shot and even with almost almost no Tie fighters actually flying (inexplicably given how many we later see even one star destroyer launce). the rebel fleet is more or destroyed. The point of attack is know only by an intel failure and than in rouge one expanded to a true fault of sabotage… And sans Han Ex machina Luke does not get the shot.
This reminds me of my own Star Wars historical thesis; the idea that the Tarkin Doctrine and the Death Star were not military strategies aimed at the Rebel Alliance but instead an internal political maneuver by Vader and the Moffs to try and undercut the centralized security apparatus that Palpatine had created.
In this interpretation, we can see the pivotal event as not being the Destruction of Alderaan or the Battle of Gavin, but actually the dissolution of the Imperial Senate. This had functioned as a legitimizing insituation and conduit for patronage to the planetary elites, which in turn undercut the autonomy of the Moffs and sector administrations.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/45500191
I don’t know how canonical you consider it, but at least the old Legends Heir to the Empire series had a slightly different but still similar notion: that the Death Star was primarily to counterbalance the Imperial Navy itself.
I see them as closely related! You basically have two main factions, ISB, II, COMPNOR, and the Imperial Navy on one side, pushing to consolidate authority on Corruscant, and the Moffs, Grand Moffs, and Darth Vader on the other, pushing for regional devolution and feudal privileges. With Palpatine playing them off against each other, of course.
The game “Star Wars: TIE Fighter” obliquely makes this point. Spoiler alert for that game with regards to what follows.
Once the Death Star is destroyed and the Imperial Senate is disbanded, what reason do Imperial admirals and generals have to follow the Emperor? He is not a great war leader, and they don’t respect his cult (or “ancient religion”). Some leaders, such as Crix Madine, will defect to the rebels once the legitimacy of senatorial approval is gone. Others will try to take over the Empire and rule it themselves.
Given the difficult strategic situation the in which the Emperor found himself, it is not surprising the Rebels had time to regroup and that the Emperor’s only hope was a second Death Star.
It’s been ages and ages since I played TIE fighter as a kid, but wasn’t Timothy Zahn writing the plot for it? Considering he also wrote Heir to the Empire, it doesn’t exactly surprise me.
Vice-Admiral Thawn (as he ten was) appears frequently in the game. I cannot find any reference to Timothy Zahn writing the plot, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
My other favorite history-blog-that-updates-on-fridays claims that the writing staff were fan’s of Zahn’s books but he was not directly on the staff.
I particularly love this because it brings to mind Leia’s outrage over the act; it was such a destructive damn fool thing, such a boisterous power grab for the Emperor’s elites, that it requires reaction by the rest of the galaxy. In that context it’s exactly the kind of insane, reckless, and stupid act we see from real life authoritarians, like Hitler starting a ground war in the western Soviet Union or…Putin starting a ground war in the *former* western Soviet Union. These actions were shocking precisely because they were so audaciously dumb.
I think it’s called “Insane Regime Hypothesis”. It states more or less, that to everyone on the outside of an violent autocratic regime, it looks like most people on the inside behave completely unhinged.
This is because foreign policy becomes less and less important to the people on the inside of the regime, as there is only one source of personal security, and that is the autocrat at the center.
So everything they do revolves around looking strong enough to stay close to the autocrat, but not looking so strong, that they are a thread to the autocrat, or possible successors. Emphasis on the “looking” as you do not actually need to be strong, as long as the autocrat and their inner circle percive you as such.
think it’s called “Insane Regime Hypothesis”. It states more or less, that to everyone on the outside of an violent autocratic regime, it looks like most people on the inside behave completely unhinged.
This is because foreign policy becomes less and less important to the people on the inside of the regime, as there is only one source of personal security, and that is the autocrat at the center.
Isn’t that the same with most government types, though? E.g., most voters in democracy vote mainly on domestic policy, so you can end up with a situation where, say, an ardent interventionist gets replaced with an equally ardent isolationist, for reasons that have nothing to do with foreign policy.
The difference is that in a democracy, the politicians are openly campaigning and are generally telling you what they’re thinking in real time, or at least leaving a paper trail that makes it easy to deduce what they were thinking.
Thus, they only look crazy from the outside in rare cases. Sometimes a ranting senile loony really does get elected, but usually, both contemporary analysts and future historians will be able to trace a reasonably coherent chain of reasoning that explains everything the democracy is doing. The chain will sometimes contain “and then the voters got replaced this guy for reasons that have nothing to do with the issue we’re talking about,” but there will always be a detectable reason.
With autocracies, most of the jockeying for power is hidden, often hidden behind multiple layers of obfuscation. Furthermore, there is usually much less pressure on any given political figure in an autocracy to avoid doing things that (from an outside view) will seem humiliating, so long as the loss of internal respect is not fatal.
So the autocracy will look crazier from the outside.
That makes sense. Though, thinking about it, I’m not sure that autocracies really do seem “crazy” from the outside. With countries like China, Russia, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Imperial China, Ancient Rome, etc., etc., there’s pretty much always some explicable reason, in terms of either ideology or strategic considerations, for what they do in terms of foreign policy.
Ah, but the idealogy motivating fascist regimes involves anti empiricism and hence their reasons are insane even if they’re predictable.
Hitler thought a war between communism and the West was inevitable (debatable) because of Jewish plots (not so much) and that communists were weak and undisciplined, racially and idealogical inferiors (nope). Further he believed that the will of a people mattered more than the material conditions, and that German volk had the strongest will.
Because all of that was various levels of insane it doesn’t matter that it was consistent in his idealogy or that it made rational sense from those principles.
In contrast monarchs are pushed to prove their authority through performing kingship in their culture, which almost universally involves war. But while this can drive then to bad decisions, the foundational principle, that success in war indicates power, has only been irrational since industrialization. Prior to that war paid, so the domestic system of incentives synergized with the foreign policy to create a coherent motive set.
And, because the motives aren’t based in institutional madness, as these conditions change the behaviors can change. Momentum might be a thingz but the evolving role of monarchies is fascinating and clear. (Without being a value statement: we’re talking about motives in a system of power, not if that system makes sense).
Basically, even if it is the wrong thing to do, the system itself made sense. Fascism… doesn’t. On purpose.
Other autocratic systems have institutional flaws in other ways, but none are so directly suicidally insane in terms of foreign policy.
Ah, but the idealogy motivating fascist regimes involves anti empiricism and hence their reasons are insane even if they’re predictable.
This doesn’t seem to fit with how the term was being used above. If “crazy” = “it’s hard or impossible for outsiders to see why a state does something” (as implied by “they only look crazy from the outside in rare cases… both contemporary analysts and future historians will be able to trace a reasonably coherent chain of reasoning that explains everything the democracy is doing… there will always be a detectable reason”), then if fascist reasons are predictable, they’re not crazy in this sense. Conversely, if “crazy” just = “operating on premises which don’t reflect objective reality”, then non-autocratic states can and do make crazy decisions all the time.
Well, not as often as autocracies maybe, but fair enough.
Even given the institutional forces involved fascistic regimes are uniquely bad at
Even accounting for the institutional forces involved fascistic regimes are uniquely prone to irrational behavior. Monarchies and even “communist” or military dictatorships tend to be more rational, even accounting for the idealogical blending between nominally communist and openly fascist regimes.
I can think of maybe six examples of a regime intentionally and willingly engaging in adventurous war that they have no business being in and which posed an existential threat to them.
1. Nazi Germany invading Russia and declaring on America.
2. Italy…being involved in world war 2.
3. Japan invading China and attacking Hawaii.
4. Argentina invading the Falklands.
5. Cambodia invading Vietnam.
6. North Korea invading South Korea.
I honestly can’t think of any other major examples of a regime attacking another when it was in a position of clear weakness. Sure, other bad wars happen, but most nations don’t attack nations that can destroy them and which they know can destroy them without need. The Arab Israeli war was not a clear war of aggression, the various failed colonial wars post ww2 weren’t threats to the European powers, Afghanistan isn’t going to occupy Russia or land in LA, etc.
Of the non WW2 wars the Falklands was only an existential threat on paper; the Junta was right that Britain didn’t have the appetite to invade the mainland and wrong that they’d accept the islands being seized as Fait Accompli. Korea was debatably voluntary given the political and international issues, but given that the North was basically completely occupied let’s call it an example. Cambodia invading Vietnam was unquestionably regime suicide, and while I think Cambodia was Fascist most people don’t really agree.
So that’s the three axis powers to two non fascist suicidal wars. I think it’s clear that fascism is uniquely suicidal even among autocratic regimes.
I honestly can’t think of any other major examples of a regime attacking another when it was in a position of clear weakness
You could maybe add Pakistan’s starting the 1965 war with India, but there are a couple differences. Pakistan wasn’t trying to assault India proper (they were trying to start a limited uprising in Kashmir, which they saw as rightfully theirs on grounds of demography), and although they were the weaker party, I think both sides knew that neither country was actually capable of invading and occupying the other in any reasonable scenario.
The Ugandan invasion of Tanzania in 1979 might also qualify.
Well that was a fun clusterfuck to learn about. Libyan and Palestinian support alongside a Ugandan regime waging a seemingly pointless war against a neighbor whose main consequences were the dissolution of that regime and regional chaos. Yeah, that probably counts.
I agree the Pakistani Indian war is an edge case. I think there’s an argument to be made that a full occupation could have happened, given the complexity of the political and ethnic situations there; with hindsight we see the ossification of those boundaries, but things can change rapidly during eras of revolution. Some real fear of an occupation and/or annexation in the event if a catastrophic loss was probably warranted, and in that context the war was stupidity risky.
Well that was a fun clusterfuck to learn about. Libyan and Palestinian support alongside a Ugandan regime waging a seemingly pointless war against a neighbor whose main consequences were the dissolution of that regime and regional chaos. Yeah, that probably counts.
OK to be clear, I might have overestimated how dumb / lopsided Idi Amin’s invasion of Tanzania was. Tanzania is much bigger geographically, but Uganda is more densely populated. I don’t know the figures in 1979, but if the war had happened today Uganda would have been at about a 5 to 4 disadvantage in population, not as huge as the discrepancy in land area might suggest. They were also run by the military at the time, whereas Tanzania was run by a civilian single-party socialist government, so the Ugandan military spending might have been higher.
In the event, yea, it was a massive failure for Uganda, leading to Tanzania occupying the capital and reinstating the former president.
I really don’t think India could have occupied and annexed Pakistan, not without killing truly stupendous numbers of people, and I don’t think they had the interest or stomach to do so, certainly not in 1965. (You do hear occasional rhetoric from the more nutty people on both sides, that “Pakistan/India shouldn’t exist”, but those people are far away from ever making their dreams a reality).
I certainly agree that Pakistan and (especially) India are very complex countries in terms of ethnic and political makeup, and I’m not one of those people who believes that religion is the only or even the most important line of division all over the subcontinent. Nevertheless it’s certainly *one* line of division, and by 1965 I’m pretty confident that neither most Indians nor Pakistanis wanted to be ruled over by the other country (even if they weren’t happy about being ruled over by their own country either).
Bret’s discussion of the Empire as a HRE-type polity makes sense. The beginning of “New Hope” where Leia Organa makes a claim of “diplomatic” immunity makes very little sense in conventional political systems: a member of legislature might claim parliamentary immunity, but not hardly after fighting in open rebellion against the government. Organa is, however, depicted as a sensible person, and the claim should be reasonable in-universe.
In the politics of medieval Europe, this would make sense. The claim for dignity and dignified treatment after losing a skirmish with the emperor would be brash, but not quite hopeless. A strong emperor, like Henry the Fowler or Frederick Barbarossa might execute you anyhow, but even they would need to provide some kind of process for legitimacy, and usually accepted the submission of the loser. A weaker emperor would surely pardon you, and anyhow, you would be treated reasonably nicely before your eventual execution with all due pomp and circumstance regardless. Cases like Rudolf I hanging robber knights (instead of beheading) were so rare that they lived in memory for centuries.
My history professor this past semester made the same point, from a different perspective: that Star Wars is a retelling of the Thirty Years War from the Protestant perspective which shaped our culture. The evil (read: Catholic) Empire attempts to overthrow the traditional political-religious structure (read: Peace of Augsburg), but the gallant (read: Protestant) rebels rally popular support and rout the imperial forces.
That isn’t, of course, a particularly accurate summary of Prussian/Austrian conflict in the 17th and 18th century, but it is a good reflection of the popular Anglo-American perception of that history.
Thank you for sharing this, I’m very fond of in-universe academic takes on Star Wars.
In case you’re interested, here’s maybe my favorite-ever example of the genre:
https://mobunited.wordpress.com/2017/12/15/the-dark-side-of-capital-economics-ideology-and-palpatines-empire/
Interesting thought for the doctrinal development of the Imperial Navy. But some of it I think doesn’t quite work. In particular, there’s an embedded assumption that the big gunship is more suited for escalation dominance and intimidation than a big carrier ship. Is that really the case? And everything we see about the Empire suggests it is not particularly casualty averse, at least not for little ships and fighters; the TIE fighter seems to be built along the lines of “I don’t care how many of my fighters I lose as long as I take yours down with me” I guess I don’t see why with those same sets of incentives, the Empire would have gone with ‘gigantic gunship’ instead of a gigantic megacarrier that’s way more powerful and fields more strike craft than the carriers that the various component states can put together.
Possibly because big carriers tend to be less well able to be armored (needing lots of openings and areas for the craft they’re carrying) — so you’d want to hold it back, with escorts, where you can maintain a defensive bubble around it. (And where hit and run attacks might chip away at those escorts — or jump its CAP)
You wouldn’t want a mega carrier looming ominously in low orbit over a planet to intimidate the rulers and any ships approaching or leaving — it’s be too vulnerable to anti-space weapons or a surprise bomber launch. The Empire seems to be going for a very in your face form of intimidation; rather than a hovering over the horizon menace and that would lean towards the big gun heavily armored behemoths rather than mega carriers
Two things I might bring up as counterpoints: Firstly, ships in Star Wars are protected somewhat by energy shields, which would limit the open space for launching fighters vulnerability. Secondly, I think you could be quite intimidating by having a swarm of small fighters darken the skies while the carrier remains safely out of reach.
It has been a while but I recalled that you had to lower shields to launch fighters and also lower shields to fire (depending on the type of shield and the type of weapon being fired). For instance consider Operation Hammerblow.
With a properly tuned system, the lowering of shields to fire would only occur during active combat on high alert, and the small gap would only appear concurrently with the projectile (i.e. the laser is barreling down the same hole in the shield. To get your enemy to lower shields, you need to risk some bait and there is no certainty which gun battery will be firing as well.
For a carrier, the duration of vulnerability is longer and over a greater area as the fighter is both larger and slower and hangers are fixed spots. It also presents vulnerabilites throughout flight operations which during a blockade scenario, would be continuous. There is no need to have any bait in order to have fighters launch as you can just time attacks with patrol launch/recovery schedules. Consider Episode I or Rogue One.
I don’t think they really work for intimidation. Swarm of enemy fighters in the sky is a nasty reminder that we are losing the war badly, but they aren’t a personal threat. The fighters may be shooting their machine guns all they want but they are very unlikely to hit me. At worst I need to hide behind buildings.
A bomber force on the sky in much more ominous, you will never no where the bombs will land and with a bit of bad luck it may be near me. Buildings aren’t much of a protection since they can topple over because of the blasts.
A Star Destroyer on the sky is akin to ICBMs floating over you. At any moment any random city may be vaporized by a laser beam, and it may just be my city.
The point of intimidation isn’t necessarily to intimidate the population but to intimidate the “prince” – for which the ISD performs a function similar to gunboats in gunboat diplomacy like the Anglo-Zanzibar War; it hovers above your palace, aims the guns at it, and asks whether you are an obedient member of the Empire or not.
The TIE is, in light of the prequels, very clearly developed from the carrier fighters of the Clone Wars, which got called “V-wing” and “eta-2 Actis” in the reference books, and which are similar slimline, unarmored and lightly protected starfighters with a focus on gunpower. These are supplemented by larger craft, called the “ARC-170”, a clear design relative of the X-wing, and in the television series’, Y-wings. (And the “Jedi Starfighter” is an ancestor to the A-wing in design, very clearly.)
So the Empire is continuing the lineage of high-performance carrier fighters, but no longer equips them with hyperdrive rings, etc., because they have to save money somewhere. (TIEs in the original trilogy have a fairly mixed record- they manage to kill about half of the Rebel force that attacks the first Death Star offscreen. The novelization suggests two more squadrons flew top cover and got shot down almost completely. At Endor, though, they seem at a disadvantage, even with the Interceptor model the kitbash team gave ten guns. The Rebel victories are costly in both cases.) The Rebels pick up the lineage of the more rugged, long-range planetary-based fighters of the Clone Wars and integrate some of the high-performance ones as well, which also makes sense for a force that aims for guerrilla-style strikes.
The thing that’s different about weapon design in totalitarian polities is that the weapons also serve as a form of public art, and the intimidation function of the ISD comes from that function as much as it comes from its utility as a weapon. It is designed to look dangerous, sometimes in ways that actually undercut its dangerousness…as is an MRAP, actually.
Would you mind expanding on the features of the MRAP that give it this characteristic?
Yes, I would say the Imperial Navy is building gunships for **presence** missions, diplomacy and intimidation, rather than actual warfighting.
Presence (I’m using the definition from Dr Alexander Clarke) is about appearing big and scary, “don’t even think about it”, to potential enemies and rebels. Not fighting a war is cheaper and brings fewer casualties, even for an Empire that doesn’t value individuals.
Modern day example is the US Navy massive fleet of nuclear attack submarines. Those would be terrifying opponents in an actual war. But in peacetime we hardly ever see them, and if they do make an appearance they’re just small metal tubes floating on the surface.
Carriers are big and impressive, but they’re also rather vulnerable. They’re designed to rain death on the enemy from hundreds of kilometres away, so are not very well protected for their size. In the current day, if say the US navy has a carrier battlegroup in the Med, it’s mostly sailing around somewhere over the horizon. You don’t want to give anyone the chance to put a missile into the carrier, even something small like an anti-tank guided missile.
What really works for presence is a battleship, and that’s what the US navy did with the Iowas in the previous century. Big enough and well armoured enough that you can sail one into a not very friendly harbour, effectively daring the locals to start something. The Russians still have one of their nuclear powered battlecruisers, Pyotr Velikiy, and every so often they sail her through the English channel or somewhere. The local navy sends out one of their own destroyers as an “escort”, and this often is reported with photos of what is actually a big powerful modern warship looking small and insignificant in comparison.
Not saying that a big gunship is useless in actual warfare, but definitely more useful in the presence role. And for an Empire that at least nominally starts out as a somewhat democratic and peaceful confederation, presence ships would be worth building.
So the thing is, if Bret’s theory about the HRE-like makeup of the Old Republic is correct, there are a lot of planets with a local military. Any of those planets could, with a little luck and a clever diversion, manage to divide a carrier’s fighter force and wipe out half of it, and then go after the other half. Or just work them by attrition, having “bandits” and “smugglers” take out a fighter here and a fighter there until the carrier itself is vulnerable. Given that those strategies are viable, some proportion of the unhappy “princes” will try their luck, and some will win, at least in the short term, and there’s “the mighty Empire, retreating from Alderaan with the plucky militia hot on their heels” on all the news services.
On the other hand, having one fuck-off big ship that nobody can really touch is just a different kind of threat. There’s the mighty Empire, reducing your capital city to rubble from orbit because the plucky militia shot down too many TIE fighters and made them mad. It’s just a different sort of optics, y’know?
An element missing from the discussion, though that I think Brett hit accurately by comparing ISDs to MRAPs, is the the ISD is more than just a Gun Platform.
The ISD also carries ground troops, ground armor, landing craft, and supplies. The ISD was meant as a fully autonomous, self-contained fighting force. I think this plays well into it’s Role as a peace keeper and counter-insurgency vehicle. A single ISD was intended to be capable of operating on it’s own without a support train or logistics ships. It is supply freighter, troop carrier, strikecraft carrier, and gunship all rolled up into one. They’re effectively flying military bases.
The ISD design (at least from my ’90s era Technical Diagram book.. sorry i’m not sure where it is so I don’t remember the exact name) was designed kind of like a hybrid of a US Carrier Battlegroup and a Marine Expeditionary Force rolled up into a single ship. They formed general purpose, fast-reaction forces that could move from hot-spot to hot-spot without needing to deal with coordinating a flotilla of tenders, colliers, and transports.
It greatly simplifies operations, at the expense of putting all the eggs in one basket. The logistics and troop support ship is safely armored and protected by big guns, but these same supplies are also put at risk during fleet actions and weigh the warships down, so to speak… but the Empire was not worried about peer-adversary naval combat so much as having to rapidly and ruthlessly crush brush fire after brushfire.
The ISD was right-sized for it’s job, namely bullying Q-Ships, landing armies, and waving the flag to remind the rabble of who their betters are.
On the topic of Star Wars, I think the things that bothered me the most about the Sequel Trilogy were a) the almost total lack of worldbuilding, and b) what little there was being just plain bad. The idea of the main antagonists being an Imperial rump state wasn’t a bad one, but none of the movies ever did anything interesting with it, nor was there any sort of elaboration on what the New Republic actually looked like. I think they saw the criticism that the Prequel trilogy got for going TOO in-depth with the worldbuilding, but pivoted too far in the other direction, which, in what essentially amounts to a series of fantasy movies, was a mistake.
They also put some critical stuff in the novelizations, like that apparently the entire fleet was at that system that got blown up, which is itself kinda dumb.
It’s slightly less dumb because they blew up like, five planets….that were within line if sight of each other…. somehow….but it’s still quite stupid. There are a handful of examples of a navies main anchorage being successfully obliterated, but even in the dreadnaught era a lot of the fleet was off *doing ship things*, not that I think anyone needs that explained.
Honestly I’d expect a galactic power to have distributed anchorages just for rapid reaction purposes, even if they have the infastructure to support the whole thing in a single system’s dockyards. Maybe especially if they aren’t facing peer competitors, because then there’s no call to assemble the entire fleet for a single engagement.
Realistically I’d expect rapid, even psychotic turnover of ships to active duty given the insanity of the states security mission anyway. A galaxy? The majority of the galaxy? And you have ships, what, sitting at port? I’d be running that old imperial stockpile into the grinder trying to keep pirates, bandits, and warlords in check.
The only way the stated events make sense is if the fleet was actively massing to force an engagement and got spectacularly screwed by timing and or spies, and that’s just not the movie we saw.
Honestly, partially based off the New Republic’s portrayal in Legends, I find it quite plausible they’d have a large reserve fleet.
The Old Republic apparently had no fleet, as everything we see in Clone Wars media shows the main republic military to consist entirely of Jedi and the clones and their new warship designs. This strikes me as likely to be viewed as a major flaw in the system, since it allowed for incidents like Naboo and left them precariously vulnerable to the CIS if not for the convenient appearance of an army they weren’t in a position to ask too many questions about. So the New Republic is going to want to retain a centralized battlefleet the Senate can order around.
However, when it comes time to actually use that fleet, all the senators and major politicians remember the legacy of the Empire and don’t want to repeat that, so they’re going to be reluctant to deploy it for pirate hunting and smashing warlords and leave that to planetary fleets when they can. So the main battlefleet winds up gathering dust in its anchorages.
Except then they open themselves up to criticism by everyone that the fleet they’re paying for isn’t defending them. Federated powers which face diffuse security threats have a tendency to spread themselves thin, trying to defend everything, rather than concentrate power. It’s not impossible, but I wouldn’t expect it.
They were not in sight of each other. The projectile a Death Star or whatever fires is just like a blaster bolt, a lump of plasma wrapped in a magnetic field, scaled up to the size of the gun of course.
The Death Star warps to the vicinity of a target and fires, but the planet-based version can’t. It stays put and fires into [UNEXPLAINED THING] that transports the projectile into the vicinity of the target and also opens a window above every other potential target so they can see the flash and know they could be next.
I mean, no one explains it that way ever but it’s right on the screen in front of you when you watch the movie; I don’t understand why everyone going to a movie theater these days complains that they need a strategy guide. The fact that the characters in the film don’t express surprise that they can see stuff just means it’s not novel to them.
Because if you can fire weapons through, presumably, hyperspace, it opens up all sorts of questions. Like why isn’t every polity pointing hyperspace cannons at each other and twitching. It doesn’t even need to be a planet killer, if it can just *disable* planet killers it works. Or snipe shipyards. Or terrorize planets. Or….
The issue here is that it tears believability out of the movie by the roots. If you want to make it make sense you have to dedicate the time to explain why this thing is new or limited; maybe starkiller bases planet has a weird hyperspace juju, that’s fine, it’s a strategic location that the Republic didn’t know about. Fine. But that all needs to be explained or at least acknowledged. Just say “of course only starkiller system can support such a weapon, so destroying it will cripple the first order” or something.
I think that actually might have been stated in The Force Awakens film itself. But, basically, the First Order tried the same strategy Japan tried in WWII at Pearl Harbor – gut the superior fleet with a surprise attack, then press your short-term advantage before the enemy can rebuild – except that in the Star Wars universe, it actually worked.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think there was real potential in something where there are imperial rump states at the fringes of the galactic political order. The New Republic is massively more powerful than these rump states, but after decades of war and possibly internal divisions, there isn’t the stomach to openly squish them. However, a few covert ops to fund dissidents against these rump states is a lot more politically palatable, especially if you say have the resurgent Jedi helping out here and there.
Bam, you’ve created a coherent setup for why you can have the Rebellion from the original trilogy win but still do plucky rebels vs oppressive evil dictators. I’ll admit though it makes it hard to do something with true galactic scope.
You could also have the old rebels become the bad guys as the internal fault lines in the galactic Republic, as shown to exist in the clone wars, come to a head. Combined with peoples impression of how galactic government is supposed to work-poisoned as it is by imperial misrule-authoritarian tendencies in the new Senate are even likely.
You could even have the new republic leadership working with imperial remnants to communicate an even more pertinent message; that it doesn’t matter what flag tyranny flys, it can still be tyrannical, while still making it understandable by the general audience.
There could be some arc where this kindly old war hero senator slowly pushes for further centralization of power in the face of “threats” until we get a shot of him shaking hands with imperial stormtroopers and pardoning a moff in exchange for service.
That’s obviously the way to go if the end goal is plucky rebels again; show the corrupting nature of institutional power and governmental authority. Of course that’d require some actual idealogical/political literacy from Disney, so…dead on arrival.
One might fairly doubt the almighty, politically connected entertainment behemoth’s willingness to do a subversive story about institutional power corrupting.
All the more reason it’s such a big shame that Disney was allowed to buy Star Wars (and nearly every other prominent US cultural product) in the first place.
IIRC, this is exactly what the Legends timeline does, with Han and Leia’s children ending up running different factions of the security apparatus and their parents being none too amused by any of it.
(and since we can’t have *peace* in this galaxy far, far away, the parents decide to start a new rebellion on Corellia because they think the New Republic is betraying the values of the Rebellion)
In the distant future didn’t the empire become the good guys too, via some remnants eventually taking control of the government after a period of chaos? I distinctly remember a synthesis of the Sith and Jedi into the Imperial Knights being in there, which was actually a really cool idea.
Another neat version would push the tensions Palpatine rode to power even further. In that story, the New Republic would be struggling to keep systems and sectors from leaving the galactic government without resorting to Imperial tactics. And space those departures create could easily be filled with raiders, pirates, and other unpleasantness. That gives our heroes something to do, moves the story forward, and lets us see a new sort of war.
Meanwhile, the Imperial rump can be mixing in and trying to convince people that only their approach to strength is capable of stopping the expanding chaos.
And, of course, the Jedi are being thoroughly unhelpful because Luke is more concerned with developing his order and being righteous than wielding political power; hell he’s probably idealogically opposed to the idea. In that context we can see the philosophy of the Jedi and the development of a more robust syncretic or divergent order as different pupils advocate different directions or interface with other force sensitive cultures. All of this was explored in the legends canon, and it’s manifestly what should happen next.
The really bold option would be to copy the plot of the first series but the other way round. Something like, the New Republic decides that keeping the government tucked away on Coruscant meant they were out of touch with what was going on, so they shift the Senate on to a mobile space station , the idea being that it’ll move from sector to sector like a mediaeval royal court on progress. No one will be forgotten about; every sector gets a turn.
Have a discussion about isn’t it risky to do that, and Leia or someone echoing the Tilbury speech and saying she can’t think of a better protection for the government than the people it depends on. That sets the scene for the New Republic – idealistic, but occasionally over-optimistic.
(“The Republic has restored the Senate and abolished the local governors. The last vestiges of the Empire have been swept away.”
“But without the governors, how will the local systems avoid neglect?”
“They will have hope in the central government. Hope as embodied by this space station.”)
You have the Imperial dead-enders in the background (the First Order) as the continuing threat.
Then a First Order spy steals the plans for the mobile Senate. Plans which reveal that there is a flaw in its defences, which could be penetrated by a well-flown TIE fighter…
Neither of the directors for the sequel trilogy were known for worldbuilding. Pretty much the opposite in fact.
We had the Heir to the Empire series by Timothy Zahn which they could have borrowed so much more from.
A rump imperial state made sense.
The lack of a Republic fleet and instead there being a resistance made a little bit of sense if they had tried to explain it. Basically, the First Order is being aggressive and taking over star systems but the New Republic doesn’t want to restart a galactic war. So instead they are offering military aid and covert assistance to local forces resisting the First Order. (None of this is said, but it would have fit)
Everything else was bad.
1. Starkiller base is introduced in the last third of the movie and destroyed 30 minutes later. That just doesn’t work from a cinematic standpoint.
2. Kylo Ren is a petulant child when they started him out in the movie as a fearsome and competent antagonist.
3. Kylo Ren being a dark Jedi should have been used more. We saw it at the start when he stops the laser blast. The Republic not having its own force users while a rogue dark jedi captures people and causes chaos would have put more impetus on the hunt for Luke.
4. Rey should have had less force powers and more use of her experience as a scavenger of old imperial tech. Her breaking out of her restraints could have been so much better had they had her use less of the Force and being more about exploiting a mechanical defect.
5. Kylo’s superior in the First Order is Percy Weasely. Someone his age yelling about loss and fascism just came off as whiny. They left such an easy win on the table by not choosing an older actor. Admiral Pellaeon was one of the best characters in the Heir to the Empire series. A dedicated imperial naval officer who had seen his decades long career go up in smoke with the second death star. He added pathos and gravitas. Maybe get an actor from the orginal trilogy… or maybe just someone a bit older than Mark Hamill. That would have added a lot to the First Order as antagonists
6. The final confrontation on Starkiller Base has Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Finn sent over to disable the base… and they happen to be right next to Rey’s cell… on an object the size of Mercury.
7. We see about 80 commandos with Leia… it would have been nice to send some of those guys along with the rescue mission. In Return of the Jedi, Han and Leia + 30 commandos go down to Endor, it doesn’t make them look less heroic, just competent.
8. The entire rescue mission and space battle and terrestrial battle could have happened nearly the same way… just with the final venue being Kylo’s ship. It would solve problems #1 and #5.
9. Starkiller base could then have been teased at the end, leaving it as a problem for the next movie to solve.
I don’t mind so much about the leader of the First Order being a young, charismatic speaker. I interpreted that as the First Order having its origins in a popular reactionary Far Right youth movement in response to the collapse of Imperial power, which I rather liked. Hints that ‘old conservative guy taking control for personal gain’ isn’t the only route to fascism. It can be a grass-roots movement as well.
Agreed on everything else though.
A young, charismatic speaker could work, but then you need to make sure he’s actually charismatic, which the movie didn’t.
To be fair in this universe you can also control people through literal mind control and raw personal power/magic, so it’s not completely unquestionable that it’d still work. Homelander as a more grounded example comes to mind; his power isn’t wealth, media control, or social engineering like real modern fascists, it’s the ability to literally just kill people to force compliance. I wouldn’t actually call them charismatic, but the power makes up for it.
To be fair in this universe you can also control people through literal mind control and raw personal power/magic, so it’s not completely unquestionable that it’d still work.
I was thinking more about the effect on the audience. A whiny brat yelling about fascism just doesn’t come across as impressive, even if there’s some in-universe explanation about how he can control people’s minds.
Ah. On that note, from a story perspective it’s fascinating to compare Dune to TLJ. Fundementally Paul and Kylo are actually incredibly similar characters, both being brooding, troubled, authoritarian bad boys with familial baggage, mind control powers, and messianic themes. To be honest both are even whiny, at times, and certainly highly grievance driven.
But Paul is written well and the cinematography, acting, and plot are top notch. Plus he’s just in a better movie with better contrast; no one puts up with Paul’s occasional entitlement and he has a lot more to actually be bitter over. Plus, Paul had charisma. And talent.
Hence despite the obvious parallels in how they achieve power, audiences *like* Paul, even those fully aware of the stories themes and his flaws, whereas Kylo sucks.
I’m not deeply I to Star Wars, but one problem for me in the (non-military) part of the narrative is that a trade federation should naturally be the project of the centralising core, not of the outer states. Lucy’s wants to have his cake and eat it, so his heroes are simultaneously in favour of the grand old republic and independent state action. In my version of part one, Naboo is a freedom loving parasite, helping the wealthy dodge galactic taxes and conplaining that the republic doesn’t come for free.
The Trade Federation is an allegory for the Republican Party (Nute Gunray is famously named after Ronald Reagan): full of wealthy people who do not merely dodge taxes, but subvert democracy behind the scenes since otherwise it provides too much for ordinary people. The Confederacy of Independent Systems which they create is an obvious allusion to the Confederacy of yore, which has many Republican strongholds. I agree with your criticism though, and in our age of woke capital where most billionaires are progressives the sequel villains are not so greedy, but more like literally Hitler (a la General Hux).
The lead CIS senator is also named “Lott Dod”, as if there weren’t enough references to 90s congressional dysfunction. (back before we knew how much worse it could get…)
Yeah, Lucas really embraced the “ew money grubbing capitalists” angle there, despite its implausibility as the source of an armed secessionist movement (hint: stable participatory governments are good for business, civil wars aren’t). The “Lucrehulk” designation for their battleships was new to me– pretty on-the-nose even for Star Wars. To say nothing of the racial overtones of how they’re portrayed…
“Yeah, Lucas really embraced the “ew money grubbing capitalists” angle there, despite its implausibility as the source of an armed secessionist movement (hint: stable participatory governments are good for business, civil wars aren’t).”
That’s an irrational source but it’s anything but an implausible one.
There was a right-wing, capitalist movement of the mineral-rich provinces to secede from Bolivia a few years back, although it didn’t get anywhere and it didn’t make it to the level of armed resistance.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/90213646
The Katanga/Shaba secession from Zaire / DRC in the 1960s was also a broadly right wing / capitalist movement of a mineral rich area to break away from a left leaning (for a while) central government.
Capitalists do things bad for the economy all the time. Their game isn’t wealth creation, it’s determining ownership of wealth. This naturally inclines itself to political power and the exercise of this power through force to remove rivals.
The Nazis privatized government businesses, killed Jewish capital holders, and gave those contracts to their benefactors. Of course if I remember right it didn’t work out for many if those benefactors even before their fascist government destroyed the entire nation, but there was strong support for the Nazis by the owning class. They were an opportunity. One that made a lot of people very rich even as it hurled the country to oblivion.
Basically, what’s good for a section of the elite doesn’t need to be good for either the country. If the economy crashes but three men end up owning what remains, they “won”. Yes it’s irrational, that’s not actually better, but you don’t become a billionaire without having some pathological drive and it’s very common for narcissist mix pathology to manifest.
As noted by others, there are a few real examples of a mineral-rich province trying to secede from a bigger country. It’s also the plot of Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo”. So that doesn’t seem completely unlikely.
I don’t think it works in this case because the secessionists are if I remember correctly not mineral barons or something, but the *Trade Federation*, and while wars may or may not be bad for the mining business, they’re definitely going to be bad for trade.
I suppose the way you square this is to rewrite your story so that the secessionists are trying to achieve a peaceful secession, and it turns into a war because of the Sith machinations.
I suspect that’s even textual to the story, albeit buried in supplemental material. The trade federation was, if I remember, explicitly manipulated by the sith and were merely trying to force a political change before things escalated; one interpretation of the first movie is that without Maul the federation could have been brought to heel, but because it wasn’t Anakin got a taste for blood (er….oil?) and the trade federation was made even more bitter towards the Jedi.
(As an aside, if the Jedi had cut Anakin loose he’d likely have been picked up by Sideous at some point, embittered after being rejected, assuming he knew if the boy, which is likely)
Then, come the second movie, everyone has clearly just become a pawn of Sideous as he manipulates events to force the Jedi to become soldiers and militarized police to maintain order, a choice which then opens them to destruction first of ideology, then body. The trade federation is merely the most notable component of the separatist movement, and one can see this as an escalation of prior events.
The clone wars series establish the Republic as corrupt, something in good evidence via background details in the movies. Combine this corruption with a penchant for Human supremacy (how many nonhuman leaders do we see?), statism over corporatism, a disregard for synthetic life or organisms, and an apparent willingness to use superhuman psychic police as a cudgel, and you get a host of grievances and a militarizing trigger. Reform obviously doesn’t work, look at what the Republic did to stop the federation! Sent Jedi enforcers to seize a head of state and then kill hundreds in cold blood!
It’s not that the separatist are right, it’s that there’s an undercurrent of real institutional flaws. Hence you get cyborgs, traders, aggrieved aliens, and antijedi activists and defectors united against the status quo by a fascist demagogue.
Ahhh yes, democratic Naboo, where they… uh.. legitimately elect a queen for a certain period of time? And then after a brief time, they elect another queen? Ok Naboo
Honestly, I was rather disappointed when they revealed that. Naboo in the first film seems like this fun, exotic world, and then in the second we learn that it’s just like the United States, except they call their President “Queen” and make her wear lots of makeup. Really, George? That’s the best you could come up with?
Well, we don’t have 14-year-old presidents. I’d call that a pretty big difference.
Also, we don’t get enough detail on Naboo’s constitution to say how much they resemble the United States. We don’t even know *who* elects the queen; for all we know she’s elected by a handful of VIPs like the Holy Roman Emperor.
It’s also not clear to me what the role of the Queen is. They apparently do not serve for life. Imagine if the King of England were still selected by the Witan. She could be the Sr. member of a house that customarily produces entirely ceremonial monarchs.
She’s a celebrity beauty queen, in practice mostly acting in the PR/spokesman role, with the understanding that her acting as Naboo’s
ambassadorrepresentative is an extension of this, i.e. that her on-paper powers to independently make decisions are not to be actually exercised.It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The various infrastructures that keep everyone alive and the planet beautiful, and the process of doing seamless in-place upgrades to them, are simply too complex and thus slow-moving to be compatible with the timescales on which spacefaring monkeys’ evolved sense of drama expects changes (“results”). Therefore you have a hypothetically powerful ceremonial head of state (though perhaps highly active in the field of sumptuary laws?) and producing occasional scandals, occupying the shallow popular interest. Very occasionally, the two parallel lines meet, with the teen queen shouting “how dare you” at the Serious People. Naturally, this happens when/because it fits both parties’ interests. It increases the perceived power/legitimacy of the queen. And it frees the Serious People from having to look like they have power and make decisions. Namely, when they realize they need to change a high-level strategy, they don’t have to themselves announce this, inviting stupid “so you admit you were wrong!” and “but look at the sunk costs!”, instead they can give the tagline of the new strategy to the queen and invite her to shout it at them.
She lobbies the Chancellor directly, addresses the Senate to try and make them send help to Naboo, tables a motion of no confidence, and negotiates an alliance with the Gungans, so she doesn’t seem to be entirely ceremonial. Granted the state of emergency might have disrupted normal constitutional functioning somewhat, but on the other hand there’s no suggestion that Padme’s doing anything particularly surprising or unprecedented, so it seems that these sorts of actions are within a Naboo monarch’s remit.
Also, we don’t get enough detail on Naboo’s constitution to say how much they resemble the United States.
Sure, it’s theoretically possible that the parts we don’t see are nothing like the United States’.
But what we do see, both of the way their head of state is chosen and of Padme’s private life and childhood, strongly resemble the late-20th century United States.
“The Rebel Alliance, constructing a navy from scratch, builds one to the doctrine of the last peer-conflict, the Clone Wars, thus a fast-carrier oriented force…”
I look at this a little bit differently. The Rebel Alliance might be building a navy from scratch, but they are building that navy mostly from ships already in the hands of whichever princes will supply them. And those ships are not going to be what the centralized imperial government has, but rather what the princes had, mostly Clone War era designs with a handful of surviving older ships plus whatever they can construct or retrofit now that there is the need.
Plus its easier to source replacement fighters and bombers than it is replacement capital ships; or even than repairing damaged capital ships. And carriers fighting battleships are going to avoid getting themselves shot up much — so you don’t even often have to find yards capable of patching up your capital ship. (Especially when Rebel fighters and bombers are hyper capable and the Imperial TIEs mostly aren’t — so as long as the carriers aren’t detected and don’t have a ISD jump them — they probably get through most battles without any damage.
Also its easier to convert civilian designs into moderately useful carriers than it is to convert them into proper gun armed warships — so as the rebellion grows it can rely on conversions to carry some of its fighter and bomber wings.
So a carrier based Rebellion fits well into one that likely has issues with funding for, and acquisition of, major capital units.
When bases on Dantooine, Yavin, and Hoth were a going concern, I don’t think they were even really using carriers. They just launched from land bases and hypered out to wherever. (And for actually practical logistics, they probably had some variety of drop tank, but I don’t think we we ever saw that.)
“they probably had some variety of drop tank, but I don’t think we we ever saw that”
There is that hyperdrive ring that Obi-Wan has in the second prequel. That thing appearing once and then appearing to be completely unnecessary a generation later would be a fascinating look into the technological evolution of star ships if all this stuff was real. Obi Wan is in a tiny craft so presumably his trip can’t be that long. He’s going to the outer rim but then so is Luke when he goes to Dagobah later in a ship that doesn’t need that. It seems most likely it’s a transitory technology but hyperspace travel is thousands if not tens of thousands of years old at this point so why is there a transitory technology? Or maybe such rings are many thousands of years old but they were finally rendered obsolete, did the Clone Wars break the galaxy out of technological stagnation?
Star Wars is a mash-up of science fiction and fantasy, and the mash doesn’t always make sense. From science fiction you get the assumption that technology is advancing, and that military forces sometimes have new designs that they’re keeping secret. From fantasy you get the assumption that technology thousands of years ago was comparable to today, or perhaps even more advanced.
I personally figured the Jedi Starfighter itself was stripped down to the minimum to allow the Jedi to get maximum performance out of it. Thus, no integrated hyperdrive.
I saw it suggested that the hyperspace rings were another component of Order 66. A Jedi fights their way to their starfighter after being betrayed, takes off searching for their only ticket out of system, only to find it was leisurely blasted to atoms by the nearby Venator. Now they’re trapped in a short-range starfighter in the vicinity of hundreds of carrier-launched starfighters.
““The Rebel Alliance, constructing a navy from scratch, builds one to the doctrine of the last peer-conflict, the Clone Wars, thus a fast-carrier oriented force…”
I look at this a little bit differently. The Rebel Alliance might be building a navy from scratch, but they are building that navy mostly from ships already in the hands of whichever princes will supply them. ”
The question is, where are the Rebel shipyards in actuality, and where are they allegedly?
Because through the existence of the Empire (some 25 years), looks like there are relevant Rebel allies who are not openly on Rebel side.
Why doesn´t the Empire simply shut down all rebel shipyards?
Princes who are supportive to revolt but look to avoid open conflict – OR people of principalities who support the revolt behind the back of their prince – would look to support Rebel ships in deniable ways.
What we see the rebel alliance use are in, in-universe parlance, *snubfighters*, meaning they have shields, hyperdrives, and the ability to use missiles more powerful than the lasers they carry.
These have obvious uses for a planetary paramilitary force in things like anti-piracy, VIP escort, or just waiving around, and we can expect princes to be able to order some for their own use and then skim them off to provide rebels with, plus they likely have the ability to grant access to things like training academies and spare parts that are harder to explain for capital ships. In contrast a fleet built around capital ships doesn’t need them; fighters are for screening against snubfighters in the imperial fleet, and to a lesser extent for very nearby operations to allow things like star destroyers doing convoy escort solo. That doctrine makes cost-savings the rational decision vs snubfighters. Whereas rebel alliance doctrine is designed around being stuck with a snubfighter-heavy navy, and in legends we see a lot of tactical and technological development towards making snubfighters more useful in a fleet battle and imperial tactical and technological developments making it clear that these developments increase the threat profile.
“What we see the rebel alliance use are in, in-universe parlance, *snubfighters*, meaning they have shields, hyperdrives, and the ability to use missiles more powerful than the lasers they carry.
These have obvious uses for a planetary paramilitary force in things like anti-piracy, VIP escort, or just waiving around, and we can expect princes to be able to order some for their own use and then skim them off to provide rebels with, plus they likely have the ability to grant access to things like training academies and spare parts that are harder to explain for capital ships. In contrast a fleet built around capital ships doesn’t need them;”
If there is “anti-piracy”, what was the background of pre-war common criminal piracy like, and how did the common criminal pirates get their ships? How did the Rebels differ from pirates?
Looking at the Millenium Falcon, which is a smuggler ship, it would seem that the “piracy” in the SW galaxy is widespread enough to affect the structure of the galactic economy. The Millenium Falcon is a trader, but it seems that its cargo facilities are quite limited in comparison to its size. Thus, it is designed to ferry very expensive cargo through a very non-permissive enviroinment.
This is the situation that occurred in the medieval and early modern Mediterranean: a constant threat of Christian or Muslim pirates (depending on your side) meant your ships would need to be fast and capable of defending themselves. Thus, you would carry only spices, expensive textiles, jewels, slaves and similar luxury items. (Hansa with its koggs could trade in grain and similar bulk materials, because the Baltic and the North Sea were more peaceful.)
To have such level of “piracy”, you need to have rather stable amount of cultures which consider attacks on others’ ships to be legitimate and normal.
Finnish reader was the last level of reply, so it is a reply to that…
“Looking at the Millenium Falcon, which is a smuggler ship, it would seem that the “piracy” in the SW galaxy is widespread enough to affect the structure of the galactic economy. The Millenium Falcon is a trader, but it seems that its cargo facilities are quite limited in comparison to its size. Thus, it is designed to ferry very expensive cargo through a very non-permissive environment.”
Yes, but it is not clear to me that the non-permissive environment is “piracy”.
“To have such level of “piracy”, you need to have rather stable amount of cultures which consider attacks on others’ ships to be legitimate and normal.”
Attacks by whom, on whose ships, though?
Compare, like, 18th century Great Britain. Alcoholic beverages and a great number of other things were heavily taxed. There was a quite significant trade by large, slow ships into major ports – because large ports and large ships delivering large amounts of expensive goods into a few limited checkpoints was an efficient way for the government to get cash. There also were commercial beer brewers – again, the government liked dealing with a small number of large producers and large sums of cash from a few payers.
And the high price of vice drove smuggling. Not beer. Beer was too bulky and cheap to smuggle profitably – beer smuggling was never significant. Beer excise evasion was in other channels – one was homebrewing, and another was commercial brewers cheating to produce and sell more beer than they declared and paid tax for.
But wines, tobacco, many others… they were massively smuggled. One major route was small and often fast ships landing quietly outside the official ports.
Suppose Han Solo takes off from a planet completely unauthorized. What is a most likely response of the planetary authorities to detecting an UFO takeoff? Try to find the bush airfield that the UFO came from, and catch and prosecute the accomplices Han Solo left on ground? (That may be hard if before climbing into space, the starship was part of civil air traffic – and the planet normally does not track civil air traffic between bush airfields. Then you don´t know where the UFO came from, over a large area.) Or scramble a revenue cutter to intercept the UFO in space?
Is Han Solo more likely to be challenged, in space, by a revenue cutter or by a pirate?
The lasers come stock on the YT-1300; they’re not a smuggler modification like the hidden compartments. That’s true in both cannons, and implied in the movie by the fact that no one is surprised by their obvious presence. That implies an age-of-sail level of piracy, to have guns come standard on merchant ships. And there’s plenty of pirates in Legends, mostly in the Outer Rim. Their stuff is mostly cast-offs, decommissioned ships from planetary or sector navies that got sold on the black market, and sometimes cobbled together from multiple scrapped ships. There were also some with hidden manufacturing bases building outdated designs.
As for differences with the rebels, the main one is that the rebels had a lot more sympathizers. Notably including Mon Cala, one of the planets capable of producing full-sized capital ships. They got their hands on the designs for the most advanced starfighters and were able to produce them in hidden bases provided by sympathizers. Evidently the industrial base required to make a starfighter is, by galactic standards, pretty minimal.
Ah, I hear that the pirates can get their hands at used secondhand warships, rebuild civil ships into warships, sometimes (though a minority of pirates) have hidden manufacturing bases building “outdated designs”.
It seems to me that it would be absurd to build an “outdated design” in a hidden manufacturing base! The hidden manufacturing base should build custom designs, designed around the restrictions of the base and its available supplies and the tools, and the requirements of the task.
Consider J-327. It is 76 m long. This is actually the length of a Boeing 747. Roughly similar shape, too, though 327 has shorter wings.
J-327-s crew is quoted as 8. 5 of them make sense: 1) pilot 2) copilot 3) flight engineer 4) navigator 5) communications officer. The other 3 are problematic: diplomatic aide, security officer and boatswain. Especially the diplomatic aide: why should the diplomatic aide be classified as ship´s crew, rather than a passenger in the Queen´s retinue? On the other hand, who´s conspicuously missing from crew is steward/ess/es. Sure, Queen has handmaidens and is served by them when aboard; but when not, the handmaids are with her. There would be practical need of people who are the cabin crew – people who are on board when Queen is not, who are familiar with galleys, heads and closets and can point them out, people who check up the state of supplies and resupply them when the ship is at port…
327 is quoted at 8 crew and 10 passengers. VC-25 at 26 crew (incl. cabin crew, security and some maintenance) and 76 passengers. Then again, 327 has longer endurance.
The last newbuilt 747s (the previous year) sold for something like US$ 370M. A good quality used 747 (Japan´s imperial one) was offered for US$ 28M in 2019. A worn out but still flyable (in practice) 747, like one which might be flown by a sanctioned Third World country, would probably cost less.
Brand new 747 engines are quoted at around US$ 10M. They weigh about 4500 kg apiece.
When 327 made an emergency landing on Tatooine, with a broken down T-14 hyperdrive, Watto´s Junkyard happened to carry a spare. It was expensive – 20 000 credits, and Qui-Gon had problems exchanging the currency. However, Watto was willing to gamble a race result on the drive plus a slave.
Somehow, winning the drive helped. How did Watto´s junkyard get the specialized tools, correctly fitted cranes and skilled workers to actually lift the old drive out of its place in J-327 and the new one into place, and not break anything? Watto´s junkyard was not a big organization – Watto, one flunky and two slaves, neither of them a man. Do we see Shmi physically manhandling engines at the junkyard?
If you consider an undertaking that might actually do major maintenance of a worn out 747 in a Third World airport, how many skilled workers would it have?
If Watto can carry and install a hyperdrive for a J-327, could an informal but rather bigger junkyard manage converting a passenger or merchant ship into a pirate ship, or building a flyable pirate starship from scratch/spares of multiple starships?
As mentioned, the Alliance primarily sourced their capital ships from Mon Calamari, which was known for making cruise ships. This meant that they already had the facilities in place for making large ships-their signature cruisers being 33% longer than a Victory and 75% the length of an Imperial-and after they openly rebelled in 1 BBY the Rebellion left a significant proportion of their fleet in orbit to defend it.
Typo (doubtless left in by treacherous proofreader because you killed his wife while conscripting him):
“experiences as an actual archaeology taking on pseudo-archaeological nonsense.”
ITYM “experiences as an actual archaeologist taking on pseudo-archaeological nonsense.”
I feel like the AT-AT is a perfect “Space MRAP”. Just look at it. Compared with the wheeled and short-legged vehicles of the Clone Wars, it’s gigantic. The goal is to look scary, deter/crush inferior opponents, and not take losses doing so.
Fighting a peer opponent is NOT something its designed for.
Brief aside, I do wonder if walker style vehicles make more sense in low gravity. The main issue is instability and hence extreme vulnerability to mobility kills, but if falling over is orders of magnitude less damaging you might be able to justify the assemblage, at least in a more coherent design with some redundancy. It’d give you a fantastic sight vantage after all.
I love Star Wars, but I don’t think there’s any realistic justification for walking vehicles. They’re just so much slower, and more complicated, than wheeled vehicles.
And even if it survives falling over, it can’t *move* for the duration of the battle, or even point its guns in a different direction.
Outside of the frame of the movie, for Lucasfilm, the design of Imperial gear is as much an act of art as it is an act of functional design. But also, inside the frame of the movie, for the Empire, the design of their weapons is an act of art as much as an act of functional design.
One of the nifty bits of the movies (the first 6 anyway) is that there’s almost no use of wheeled vehicles. Most stuff floats, some stuff walks, and very occasionally there’s something on treads. The general explanation people come up with is that repulsors are simply cheaper and more reliable than wheels.
IIRC, the original Zahn books mentioned that someone had developed a type of land mine that was set off by repulsors, shortly before the original trilogy, leading to the development of military walkers., and that military ground assault technology would go through a cycle and eventually wind up back at repulsors.
A booby trap that causes a short circuit in any repulsor field it occupies sounds like the sort of thing that could be way cheaper then a repuslor engine and extremely hard to detect. It’s much easier to make a metal sheet to block a microwave beam then it is to make a microwave transmitter.
AiryW, that would depend heavily on how repulsors work. It may well be that there is no simple way to reliably sabotage them without very convenient circumstances. Jet engines are expensive and delicate and throwing a wrench into one will usually ruin it, but you can’t “counter” enemy jet aircraft by exploiting their engines’ vulnerability to wrenches.
Moon Moth, I suspect that repulsors are not more reliable than wheels, but are cheap enough that it’s more practical to use them. Especially if people have largely stopped maintaining smooth roads from point to point because repulsors don’t need them. By analogy, adding an internal combustion engine to your cart is not cheaper than just having no independent means of propulsion. But the engine works so much better than towing the cart by hand that everyone does it anyway.
I also think that the “anti-repulsor land mine” explanation is not one of Zahn’s finest moments, if true. The fallacy there is that it requires whoever designed the walkers to be fools, because they didn’t foresee what would happen after their walkers were deployed.
Because the development cycle for designing a type of mine to be pressure-detonated rather than radiation-sensitive is probably a lot shorter than the development cycle for designing an entirely novel vehicle propulsion train.
No, the biggest problem of walkers is that they are very tall. This sight vantange is great until you remember, that everything you see, can also see you.
And some grunts with an towed anti tank gun can be far easier camouflaged, than your giant walker. At best it’s a pure parade ground design.
From Mechs to AT-ATs the only reason for Walker on SciFi battlefields is the rule of cool. Which obviously is a good reason to put them in a SciFi franchise.
This is giving me a vision of a realistic mecha series in which the mechas are sixty foot tall piloted humanoid robots, as normal, but they spend most of their time either lying flat on their stomachs, crouching behind buildings or small hills, frantically digging themselves enormous foxholes with enormous folding shovels, or sticking entire uprooted trees in their heads and shoulders to break up their outlines.
Of course, we see the Rebels open up on a series of AT-ATs with what appear to be the equivalent of towed antitank guns or some broadly equivalent type of fixed-mount crew-served heavy weapons at Hoth. The antitank guns fail to do meaningful damage before being destroyed by direct fire.
To be fair, this may be because they weren’t camouflaged well enough, but the point remains: The attempt to build a superheavy armored platform too hardened to kill with conventional firepower is not so far-fetched in Star Wars, perhaps!
Then tanks wouldn’t have turrets. Yes, at a certain point something is unreasonably tall, but at that point it’s probably unreasonable from a force concentration perspective anyway; tanks like the Maus were just bad ideas because there’s always a way to bypass the invulnerability of armor and at that point it’s just a massive expense when you could have a dozen vehicles instead. Their unwieldy nature just made that, well, incredibly obvious.
(Brief aside, this is a small part as to why nuclear airplanes and such were never seriously pursued. Ignoring the civilian impacts of downed flights they’d just be too expensive and too vulnerable, despite the massive advantage never having to refuel would give).
In other words, I think your mistaking a flaw with the at-at being hilariously big with it being hilariously tall. The chicken might make more sense, size wise.
The problem is that even in very low gravity where falling over is not damaging to the walker, it still effectively immobilizes the walker and makes it an extremely vulnerable target. Not only is it stationary in full view of the enemy, but the enemy gunners can immediately see that it will not move, and having fallen over means its own weapon firing arcs and best armor protection arcs are likely no longer pointing in the direction intended, so it won’t be able to shoot back very well. This makes a perfect target.
A tracked or wheeled vehicle in a low-gravity environment might actually run into problems due to lack of friction with the ground, of course, but Star Wars relies so heavily on floating repulsorlift vehicles that this seems unlikely to be the problem they were thinking of when they went to walkers.
Honestly, I think walkers only make any sense whatsoever if you posit them as being designed to give long lines of sight to direct fire weapons that would otherwise have to be mounted on a repulsorlift flying gun platform that might well be much more expensive.
One point I might suggest is that the ISD is the perfect weapon – for a completely different war. (But the Super Star Destroyers were complete madness built as vanity projects.) “Normal” ISD’s are expensive to operate but probably pretty useful as command-ships and would be liked once refurbished to New Republic Standard. I say this because they make sense as a well-protected all-role vessel. They’ve got ample firepower and protection, can carry substantial cargo/supplies/mission assets. And they have fighter facilities equal or exceeding any Rebel ship. The problem was never the ship but the doctrine.
The Death Star 2 makes a certain odd sense if you see not as a military structure, but essentially a new, artificial capital that also happens to be a fortress. Granted, it can move, making it sci-fi. But the concept is not quite as crazy as it sounds to most people since it allows Palpatine to quickly arrive anywhere he pleases with overwhelming firepower. It’s a sort of deliberately-invoked notion of Machiavelli that the Price needs to go and live in a newly-conquered territory to secure it permanently.
However! Palpatine made a massive blunder and it didn’t involve some all-encompassing mystic Force. The DS2 still required a very large escort, and escorts for the escorts, and escorts for those escorts simply because it was just *that* big. It was too large to effectively support by anything short of the Imperial Star Fleet itself, or at least a good half of it. It concentrated too much to control anything else. This may have been the point: keep everyone nearby and under Palptine’s thumb. But turning his powerbase into a singular cloud of death necessarily meant stripping his control everywhere else. From this perspective, the Rebellion wasn’t necessarily winning because it was so brilliant and clever, but because Palpatine had no resources left to expend fighting them. But he wouldn’t have expended them that way because he couldn’t/wouldn’t risk creating any threats to himself. The power he handed over to Darth alone was almost more than he (Palpatine) could handle, and some of the Moffs were not far behind. Palpatine was in a difficult position in that sense, because while his masterful political game kept things in hand, he had to keep the loyalty of the selfish, ruthless, evil men he’d placed into power (because of course he did).
“pretty useful as command-ships”
It brings to mind how Spraunce made his flagship the 10 kTon Indianapolis and not the 50 kTon Iowa or one of the carriers. Admirals dont take up that much space, once you can reliably coordinate ships without having them follow the flagship, there’s no need for the flagship to be in a critical position.
“I say this because they make sense as a well-protected all-role vessel. They’ve got ample firepower and protection, can carry substantial cargo/supplies/mission assets.”
Well the engineering concerns might be different in the Star Wars universe, but that would be a really bad idea for historical earth naval doctrine. Warships are very expensive and you have to make tradeoffs between speed, offensive capability, defensive capability and range, all of which help you defeat other optimized warships. Support ships to handle stuff like cargo are extremely cheap, you can use obsolete ships or even civilian ships with a few guns most of the time. For instance most of the actual enforcement of the blockade of Germany during the world wars was being conducted by a bunch of civilian ships with guns added, the British Grand Fleet was needed to keep the German High Seas Fleet far away not to send crews to search tramp freighter cargo’s.
There are a couple notable examples of destroyers being used for cargo, Operation Dynamo and the Tokyo Express, but these were emergency measures. They were also situations where they didn’t just need cargo vessels, they needed ships much faster then most cargo vessels because of the danger. The destroyer itself is definitely not an all-role vessel, it’s doing without armor or guns to meaningfully threaten capital ship in order to make a small and cheap screening vessel. But even destroyers were overkill for most support missions, hence why you had cheaper vessels called corvettes or destroyer-escorts which sacrificed the high speed engines to cut costs on vessels for patrol duties.
I think the easy explanation is that the combination of being in space, with no horizon to be over, and the convenience of hyper-drive make it really difficult to protect transport ships, hence the military transports also being warships, and carriers bearing heavier weaponry than ours.
The ISD doesn’t need to be the formal flagship necessarily. Although, because it is tough and evidently have good comms gear, they make good candidates already. But from the New Republics POV they would have several good attributes:
(1) They can do many missions.
(2) They don’t make nearly as large a proportion of the fleet as in the Imperial era.
(3) They are effectively “free” to the new political order. The New Republic didn’t “pay” for them, and only needs to consider how best to use them presently.
When you combine those attributes, you don’t get huge “battle lines” of ISD’s. But you do get fleet leaders that would logically form the foundation of task forces, to which the NR can assign other vessels more efficient for a specific purpose.
The original role of the destroyer was to be a “torpedo-boat destroyer”, a cheap escort vessel that could reach a speed high enough to intercept a torpedo boat squadron making their attack run, and to destroy them with a light automatic gun. In addition, the destroyer typically also had torpedoes as secondary armament, giving them a possibility to operate like large torpedo boats.
Of course, mission creep and the need to win a fight against another destroyer meant that the size of destroyers grew by orders of magnitude. Today’s destroyer has about the same roles as a pre-WWI cruiser. And even corvettes are pretty large today. The Pohjanmaa class, under construction for Finnish Navy, is a corvette of 4,000 metric tonnes, with rather wide a range of capabilities.
There’s definitely mission creep in warship engineering but there is also a Red Queen Race where spending just a little bit more might result in a wildly unbalanced matchup. It can sometimes be quite tricky to untangle the two.
Today’s destroyer has about the same roles as a pre-WWI cruiser.
That’s not quite true. The design rationale for a pre-WW1 cruiser was to be able to operate independently ones own battlefleet (i.e. be fast enough to run away from an enemy battlefleet) as a scout, raider, convoy escort etc. Destroyers were built to screen the important ships from attack by mines, torpedoes etc (and aircraft, when they turned up).
Modern destroyers are bigger than old ones, but that is just the way every generation is a bit bigger and more powerful than the previous one. They are still screening ships, although what they screen against has changed. The scout role of cruisers has been transferred to aircraft, and aircraft carriers of various types.
ISDs do operate away from the fleet, so they are more like light cruisers.
The cruiser was also doctrinally purposed for screening duties, if it operated with a fleet. However, in real life, they were used in the battle line.
And modern destroyers do operate independently: for example, the USS Roosevelt was deployed in the Baltic last year, where it joined an allied task force of much smaller ships. Such mission in secondary direction would have been a typical pre-WWI cruiser task.
“he does so but finds to his dismay that the balance of conventional forces is not so lopsided as he hoped.”
I’m going to disagree with this, it was as lopsided as Palpatine thought.
The rebels won, because they once again got super lucky and managed to destroy the Empires super weapon which led to a catastrophic collapse in morale that resulted in the superior force falling apart.
Now, if Thrawn had been in command…
If we’re accepting Thrawn’s takes on the Battle of Endor, the overuse of the Emperor linking his people to force ‘enhancement’ and suddenly taking that away left them fighting “like cadets”. I’m not so sure he could turn that around just with tactical brilliance if the personnel element has been so suddenly and overwhelmingly compromised.
Something which I believe strengthens your argument is the use – in now-decanonized books, mostly – of Star Destroyers for planetary bombardment. A fast carrier is designed to make devastating torpedo strikes against enemy capital ships, and in a pinch could easily transition to precision bombing of high-value ground targets, assuming the fighters are atmosphere-capable, but it is ill-suited for mass reprisal against civilians. Whereas a big-guns ship, like the ISD and later designs, is able to remain safely in orbit, and shoot lasers at population centers until they are no longer population centers. (There was a rather good scene in the NJO series where now-General Antilles surprises the Yuuzhan Vong with exactly that sort of bombardment, from a still-in-Republic-service Super Star Destroyer.)
This fits very well with your proposed political headcanon. The Old Republic used fast carriers because conflicts were limited to small conflicts between peer states, the goal being to destroy the opposing navy so you could capture their production centers intact. When the civil war flared up, it remained a peer-state conflict, and fast carriers remained dominant, but gunships grew in use as carrier-killers. With the transition to the Empire and counter-insurgency, creating the need for orbital fire support for ground troops and the occasional atrocity against civilians, those gunships rose to primacy, and then remained in use post-Empire for lack of need for anything else.
I think it makes sense to start by looking at the politics of the TIE-fighter. TIE-fighters are just a horrible weapon. Luke’s X-wing is capable of making an interstellar trip from a backwater without support staff after he crashes it into a swamp but TIE fighters not only can’t make interstellar flight, they can’t even land without specialized hangers. X-wings can charge at a TIE-fighter head on and fly through the debris after turning it to dust. On repeated occasion, TIE-fighters spend minutes blasting away at the Millennium Falcon, an antiquated civilian freighter, to little effect. The Naboo fighters, a product of a demilitarized society decades before, have effective shields while the TIE-fighters are shielded. There’s some expanded universe stuff about the TIE-fighters being fast but that’s not nearly as worthwhile in space combat where you don’t have gravity influencing the tactics. Vader has a shielded fighter with better guns and his fighter can keep pace with TIE-fighters. As a weapon of war, these things are utter crap.
The TIE-fighter is however the perfect vehicle if you want to make sure that star fighter pilots can’t go rogue on you. A pilot absconding with a TIE-fighter can’t go very far. They lack the heavy armament to damage your capital ships if they mutiny mid battle. The coup that created the Empire was partly done by a fighter pilot. So they made the perfect vehicle to protect against your own pilots going rogue.
If for political reasons your fighters are ineffective against anything bigger then a minivan, you need capital ships to do that job. Hence you have the Star Destroyers. The real world offers countless examples of dictators who buy a small number of extremely expensive military weapons because they don’t trust most of their army. And there’s plenty of precedent for such forces getting torn to shreds by a determined opponent who can trust their troops and display low level initiative.
Personally I figure the idea with TIE fighters is “quantity has a quality all of its own”. Cutting the hyperdrive and shields and life support makes them cheap and easily produced, and they regularly outnumber the rebels.
Unless TIE fighters are really easy to use, or you never fight anyone who’s actually good, you would fairly quickly run out of pilots.
What we’ve learned from both propeller and jet fighter combat is that number of pilots is a limiting factor.
I’ve flown one myself. They’re really easy to use. You can learn in like 30 minutes.
When we’re first introduced to the stormtroopers it’s made clear that the Empire has, somehow, an infinite supply of manpower; the limiting factor in their military is equipment procurement, and TIEs are made to such low standards that it’s easy to believe they have a nearly infinite supply of them too.
The Empire isn’t in a knock-down, drag-out war against a peer competitor. They’re not really fighting anyone who would be capable of taking them down by attrition when their theoretical manpower recruitment pool is “literally the whole galaxy.”
In an attritional war with another entire galaxy of enemies who had broadly similar technological capability but different doctrine, the idea of using massed mediocre TIE fighters would probably cause them to get worn down by attrition.
In the conflict the Empire actually faces, they have almost the opposite problem. The Rebels never make a meaningful dent in the Empire’s TIE force or pilot strength, but having superior fighters and a small cadre of aces at the immediate point of contact over and over means that they win a handful of critical battles, thus allowing them to survive and eventually prevail in an attempted decapitation attack on the Emperor himself.
Almost the exact opposite of what we’d expect, which would be their forces getting ground down by attrition against a peer competitor until pilot training became unmanageable.
…Another thing that may be helping the Empire is that in Star Wars, flying vehicles are ubiquitous, so basic pilot skill may be more common. Note that not only Luke but at least a few of his friends fly some kind of aerial vehicle on Tatooine, and Tatooine is a poor, remote world. Multiply that out by the galactic population and you have a BIG potential pilot pool, much bigger than in real life.
TBH, I’m not sure I agree.
First of all, hyperdrives. Yeah, TIE Fighters don’t have hyperdrives. There are some missions where hyperdrives are really good. But are they actually necessary for the Empire? The Empire has local garrisons all over the place. They have battleships that incidentally carry 6 squadrons of fighters moving about the galaxy to various hotspots, and sometimes forming into task forces. The Star Destroyers will deliver the fighters most of the time; they don’t need to deliver themselves, or they’ll already be there from deployment to a space station or local fort. They can’t exactly chase rebels jumping away using hyperdrives of their own without knowing where the hidden rebel bases are, so it’s not exactly analogous to range and speed either. For the Rebellion, hyperdrives are a must since they enable them to strike a wide area from their hidden bases; to not need to risk one of their limited carriers for every sortie. For the Empire, they’re kind of luxury – they would certainly benefit from some models with their own drives (and they may have them, I believe there’s talk of a long range scout when flying through the wreckage of Alderaan), or those clone war era hyper drive booster rings. But most of their missions will be in the same system as their base or mothership.
Second, durability. Yeah, in the X-Wing video game, the X-wing can ram Tie Fighter, destroy it and keep flying, or potentially head on trade against a flight of 3 without evading and win. OTOH, look at ANH itself. Both X-Wings and TIEs seem like they can die in a single well aimed burst. Colliding with stuff is bad for both of them. The X-wing is tougher, between its shields and astromech doing repairs. It can also take a hit and survive, some of the time – especially if it’s a main characters in there. But none of those X-Wings or Y-Wings seem to display the massive durability that you get in the video games (especially with transferring energy to shields from guns). The X-Wing is tougher than the TIE – but it’s the kind of tougher that’s like better armor plate and self sealing fuel tanks to use a WW2 analogue, and not the kind of tougher that just ignores head on collisions. Sometimes, it avoids critical damage. Sometimes it survives to limp home. These are huge advantages in terms of keeping ships active and pilots alive, even if sometimes it still dies to that burst. But those aren’t “safe until X” either. The video games are an exaggeration of what we actually see in Star Wars movies, where shields on fighters seem nice but not astounding, and getting hit is probably bad even if the shield was up.
Similarly, TIE fighters do benefit from special support hangers. But the Empire can afford them – it has way more bases, more carriers, and can operate openly. They have more fully equipped bases than the rebels have crappy field and cave ones. That rough field capacity is kind of nice, but it’s not actually a mission requirement for the Empire. Would the Empire rather have that ability, or would it rather just have more TIE fighters? I don’t think just having more stuff seems like an unreasonable strategic choice in this regard.
Third Offense: The Millennium Falcon ends up getting shot by Star Destroyers a few times in Empire IIRC. It’s very tough and well armed for an ostensibly antiquated civilian ship (almost like it has a bunch of janky black market modifications underneath the hood), so it doesn’t seem like that big of an issue that the TIEs strafing runs don’t easily defeat it (it also has the plot armor of all the main characters on board too :)) Also, IIRC, the scene of the Falcon versus the 4 TIEs is based on turret camera footage from a WW2 bomber. It’s kind of WW2-ish in SPACE!!! and fighter guns are clearly not a laughable threat even to armored bombers. OTOH, the TIEs do lose points on armament. They are a single weapon system platform – shooting only lasers. A fighter bomber or heavy fighter like the X-Wing has some proton torpedoes as well, Naboo fighters have torps, etc. OTOH, again, does the TIE actually actually need them as much as Rebel X-Wing does? Probably not, right? The Empire isn’t planning on using its fighters to punch up most of the time – the big ships that rebels need to engage with X-wings, the Empire can send a battleship at.
The TIE fighter is clearly not as good as the X-wing. But that doesn’t mean it’s a horrible fighter that is a laughable threat (also, if its joke, then it’s not really a heroic feat to shoot down several, now is it?). And even if Incom doesn’t defect with the designs, it makes sense for the Empire to still field a lot of TIE Fighters (or successor, I think the basic TIE was 10+ years older than the X-Wing) to go along with X-Wings in a high low force mix. The TIEs do a lot of interception, get garrisoned all over the place because they’re cheaper, do short patrols, etc. The Empire has a ton of stuff to try and sit on, so they actually do need lots of fighters. The X-Wings or shielded super TIE with hyperdrive equivalents would still end up less numerous, but are deployed for some of the more dangerous missions, long range stuff, etc. The Empire was supposed to have both kinds of fighters, so it shouldn’t have needed all that capability on every single fighter. It’s a design that at least was adequate for their needs, and if the updates came a little slow, well, losing their winning spendy fighter program and most of the staff to defection seems like a set back.
> I believe there’s talk of a long range scout when flying through the wreckage of Alderaan
You’re misremembering. The heroes spot a TIE Fighter in the wreckage of Alderaan, recognize that it isn’t a long range craft, and conclude that there must be something bigger nearby, which turns out to be the Death Star.
That said, the Empire sends probe droids to Hoth, and it would make sense that they were delivered by a long range scout.
They don’t. In the opening part of ESB, you see the probe droids leaving a star destroyer.
Either the ISD is making quick jumps from system to system and dropping a swarm of probe droids around every likely-seeming planet, or the probe droids are supposed to be independently hyperspace-capable. From what I remember seeing, I’m not sure which…
@Simon_Jester: I think they’re supposed to be independently hyperspace-capable–when the droid transmission gets back to Vader, I’m pretty sure someone says that it’s from the droid they sent to the Hoth system, and they actually have to make a hyperspace jump to get there.
If you are trying to hold territory, mobility is all the more important. If you have twelve star systems with immobile forces of tie fighters they can be defeated in detail. If you have a force half the size it’s not vulnerable.
The Falcon taking sustained hits from TIE-fighters is not an isolated incident. They do it again in the next two movies. It ends up being the walls of the second death star that do more damage then the blasters on the TIE fighters.
“[torpedoes] does the TIE actually actually need them as much as Rebel X-Wing does? Probably not, right?”
You dont need anything for the military more then a sharp stick. The question is just how effective you will be. If they had torpedoes they would be vastly more effective.
“The Empire was supposed to have both kinds of fighters”
There’s expanded universe stuff about that but I dont think that narrative holds much water given 1) the rebel starfighters dont appear to be very different from commercial off the shelf technology 2) industrial supply chains just dont defect
Even if you had an amazing designer who defected to the side with the vastly inferior industry, you would just have a very brief “X-wing shock” akin to the WWII Zero shock. Japanese designs caught America flat footed for a generation but it took less then a year for America to start flexing that industrial muscle and churning out stuff like the F6F which Japan lacked the industry to replicate no matter how good their designers were. Designers are just the tip of the industrial supply chain spear.
I feel like you’re kind of skipping some questions and next steps in some of the reasoning here. First, the Empire isn’t really designed around the premise of keeping its forces in a single star system and delivering them via hyperspace jump to each and every other star system in the general vicinity. They actually are trying to, metaphorically speaking, have a little castle in every village (actually, probably several garrison bases on every planet), rather than having a few big mega-fortresses that each control an entire galactic sector.
I can think of several reasons for them to do this, not least that planets are big and space is bigger. And having no forces anywhere around one’s orbital space makes it a bit hard to maintain effective presence and control.
On top of that, Imperial doctrine is that you send fighters in large groups- and where a large group of fighters goes, a warship or multiple warships go with them. If the Empire wanted to keep its forces at a central sector reserve base, it would just put the short-ranged fighters aboard carriers and send the carriers.
…
With respect to “if they had torpedoes they would be vastly more effective,” the question is “would they be more effective at their intended mission? Which requires analysis of what the TIE’s mission is. And, if ordnance-based strike is part of that mission, the question becomes, is it better to have one type of multirole fighter, or two types of specialized fighters? A mix of TIE ‘fighters’ that perform as dedicated interceptors and ‘bomber’ that act as dedicated ordnance-carriers might well be more effective. It means you don’t have to cross-train pilots for multiple different types of combat, and the specialized bomber may not have to make as many compromises on payload or types of armament it can carry.
All of this discussion is overlooking the TIE fighter’s most impressive technological feat: the ability to create a terrifying noise for psychological warfare, and *project that noise through the vacuum of space* to intimidate opponents. 🙂
Given the way starfighters move, I’m comfortable saying that the Star Wars galaxy has ether.
From a history-to-cinema standpoint, as you referenced a bit with armor plate and self-sealing fuel tanks, the US aircraft in WWII tended to be flying bricks, and the X-Wing embodies this: It’s a fighter-bomber (much like how the P-40 and P-47 were used) with absurd durability and (after some development time) a gigantic amount of power packed into the engine in order to deal with all that weight and inertia. The US carrier fighters were similar, AIUI, but that may have just been in comparison to the Zero. Meanwhile, the TIE is, of course, squarely a Zero analogue: It’s fast, maneuverable, and it lacks a lot of the pilot survivability features that the X-Wing has, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a threat, especially with a good pilot behind the controls.
I have made this exact comparison. The analogy breaks down at the second level, inasmuch as the Imperial Fleet Space Arm is sitting at the output end of a massive and high-velocity training pipeline, and the Alliance is NOT.
But, that makes the analogy better for a work of fiction, because “of course the side with the shortage of pilots has the doctrine of crew protection at all costs”
We know as early as the Battle of Yavin that the Alliance has more spaceframes than they do pilots to put in them; they put a kid with experience plinking coyotes out the window of his cropduster into a bomber-escort mission (Rogue One will later tell us that the previous Red Five was shot down over Scarif shortly before, but in circumstances that absolutely ruled out recovering the ship). The design of the Y-Wing (even without reference to sources outside of ANH) show what ought to be at least a 2-crew craft (turret, extended cockpit) but only one crew per.
So of course their space combat doctrine emphasized crew protection ahead of other considerations. Also, they don’t have to be everywhere, and in fact they don’t WANT to be everywhere. They want to be Where The Empire Is Not. They can’t afford to get into a fair fight, or even too many unfair ones.
The Star Wars section of this post is quite well done; only being a one-parter separates it from collections material, and I’d love to read a broader series regarding the rise and fall of the Galactic Empire…
(not to knock the links portion, I always appreciate further reading)
While we’re ranting about the Newquels. The narrative didn’t seem to realize the implications of one-upping the Death Star (always a dangerous gambit, given that the Death Star is *iconic*). If you absolutely had to come up with an excuse for why the First Order did so inexplicably well and just had to write a story about how they conquered the galaxy, they sorta had one in Starkiller Base. The ability to annihilate a planet FROM ANOTHER STAR SYSTEM is bonkers, stupid powerful. (Side rant: When dealing with soft fiction, it’s always easier to justify random restrictions than random power-ups. Why does the Death Star take so long to get into firing position in OG Star Wars? Because it’s very dramatic and because it gives Our Heroes a chance to stop it, and any number of technical excuses. Why would they make the comparatively unrestricted Starkiller Base?!)
If the First Order establishes themselves as psychotic enough to use this, I could see the original promise of the Death Star actually working. Which is anti-thematic, but still: submit or die. The FO announced that their big secret Starkiller base will destroy one star system a week, going down this published list, and the only way to get off the list is to surrender to the First Order. Then don’t let the heroes blow it up right away. You could have all sorts of dramatic conversations about how brave the people of Doomed System X were, but it didn’t matter, and that’s why we’re working with the First Order now because we’d rather be alive and oppressed than dead.
Instead, the FO lose their superweapon but still conquer everyone anyway becuz. Sigh.
I won’t claim that the sequels make a lot of sense, but I disagree with this:
> Instead, the FO lose their superweapon but still conquer everyone anyway becuz. Sigh.
The First Order use their superweapon to obliterate their enemy (the New Republic), and only lose it after it has fulfilled that purpose.
They lose it after obliterating a single star system, though. It strikes me as implausible that destroying one system, even the capital by surprise, would actually destroy a galactic republic. At best it’ll take out a chunk of the fleet (though I’d highly doubt all of it) and the entire legislature and formal line of succession. That’s a devastating opening move, but there’s going to be some form of distributed government; either it’s a republic of “princes” (which seems a plausible read to me) or there are going to be sector governors.
Just because it’s implausible doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen in the Sequel Trilogy. There is no Republic left in the next two movies.
Here’s the thing; this isn’t backstory where we don’t need to know many details. This is the culmination of events we
see onscreen, as it were. So we need some explanation or setup to show how these events happened. The films didn’t explain a logical cause/effect sequence. The Nu!Empire destroys one star system out of thousands or millions, whose importance is entirely unknown, and loses their superweapon, but instantly* attains galactic control? And then loses their fleet, but this seemingly has no impact?
There’s an entire trope of “Sc-Fi Writers Have NO Sense of Scale” and even some of the worst offenders are not that bad. There’s no way to understand these events logically, and yet they are made central to the story. And in the third movie, central to the resolution of the plot.
*In a timespan of literal hours at most, according to the films.
There’s a difference between destroying the New Republic, and taking control of the galaxy yourself. Even if we accept that the New Republic is effectively gone after the destruction of the Hosnian system (and frankly, I’m not sure I want to grant that, given how it mirrors authoritarian rhetoric about democracies being pushovers), occupying the thousands of New Republic planets would be a massive undertaking, and would be a huge pain if the local populations put up any amount of resistance. The idea that the First Order somehow managed this in the approximately ten minutes between movies is absurd. And that’s even before accounting for the fact that, pretty much every time we see them on screen, the First Order is extremely incompetent.
Indeed; it’s about as plausible as Russia managing to drop a surprise nuke on Washington DC and immediately taking over the entire United States.
It appears Kylo Ren isn’t the only member of the First Order who has somehow learned the exact opposite lesson they should have from the original trilogy – Starkiller Base seemed to double down on the Empire’s mistakes with the Death Stars. Add more offensive capability, to guarantee your enemies will be convinced this is an existential threat. But then failing to come up with a good plan to defend it. The Death Stars at least had heavy armor, point defenses, and antiship weapons, and the second Death Star could even use its primary weapon against capitol ships without the risk of blowing itself up.
So a Starkiller Base might compel your enemies to unconditionally surrender. But the flip side is that any enemy who doesn’t react with surrender is going to throw every resource they have into destroying the base – which could be capitol ships, could be a flight of X-wings, could be a commando raid, and could be covert sabotage. Paranoia should reign supreme on Starkiller Base. This is the sort of project you’d imagine the stormtroopers, in a bit of gallows humor, probably put up fake turbolaser targets over vital systems when Captain Phasma isn’t looking (Perhaps they’re targets from the stormtrooper marksmanship academy after they survive a dozen live fire exercises without a scratch).
If the First Order can’t shake their obsession with bigger and crazier superweapons, they could have at least waited to activate it until they have enough other assets in place to defend it at every level, from a fleet that can shoot down any incoming threats to heavy patrols around vital areas in case the New Republic or some other faction already has someone aboard the base.
They did have heavy planetary shielding that was only breached by Han Solo and the Falcon being particularly awesome and able to emerge from hyperspace within the shield but not within the planet.
That’s still not a good defense. If Han was lucky/good, then you can mimic that by sending a bunch of unmanned vehicles that aren’t either and ensuring that one gets through. And that kind of engineering is both easily within the reach of stated tech (go digging through some separatist stockpiles if you really need to) and well within the stated engineering capabilities of a galactic government. I’m already imagining a whole barrage of hyperspace phase missiles attempting to appear *inside* their targets and exploding, relying on at least one getting through. Or a bunch of droid transports doing the same.
…and given that in the expanded lore a half dozen tyrants have made or used giant superweapons by this point it’s pretty clearly just a good tech to have.
As someone whose Star Wars journey actually started with the X-Wing/TIE-Fighter/etc. games back in the day I feel this kinda works.
One of the things is that it kinda gets the design lineage a bit better: The TIE fighter comes across as a bit less of a mook becuase it was designed to fight an earlier generation of fighters (the Z-95 and/or Y-wing) which they could outmanuever fairly easily, and it makes a bit more sense: The X-wing was in fact intended as the replacement, but the designers defected.
So then we get the Empire continously trying to upgrade their arsenal of starfighters to deal with the new game-changer (the X-wing being almost as manueverable as the TIE Fighter and way better armed, shielded and hyperspace capable) first with stopgaps like the Assault Gunboat (to have hyperspace capable fighters at least, even if they’re not great in a dogfight) the Interceptor (which is basically a “Take a TIE Fighter and make it EVEN FASTER”) before pivoting into the Advanced and finally the Defender. (which is by far the most effective starfighter in the Civil War period, but also costs about the same as a small capital ship and never gets more than a few produced before Endor)
The reveal in IX that Palpatine had an entire secret planet with an apparently enormous industrial base is silly, but I don’t think the basic setup in VII-VIII is quite as hard to make sense of as you make it out to be. One thing that would explain a lot is if the New Republic, being run by young revolutionaries like Leia who, as much as they try to *rhetorically* call back to the Old Republic, don’t really understand what made the Old Republic work, and therefore end up repeating a lot of the Empire’s mistakes.
In particular, they may have tried to keep much of the Empire’s structure in spite of the fact that the Star Wars galaxy doesn’t seem very friendly to centralized governments. Ships in hyperspace go *very* fast. The movies themselves are somewhat vague on exactly *how fast but it doesn’t seem to take very long at all to make it from one end of the galaxy to another. Plus, if a ship isn’t actively broadcasting its position, ships in hyperspace are more or less impossible to track (this is *starting* to change in VIII, but even then the New Order only has *one* ship with hyperspace tracking capability). This is a dream scenario for anyone hoping to make a central authority’s life hell through hit-and-run tactics.
This implies a couple things. First of all, we needn’t assume the First Order fleet in the sequels was built from scratch—it’s not just the designs but the individual ships that go back to the era of the Empire, because if a Star Destroyer crew full of imperial loyalists decided they’d rather run and hide rather than either surrender or go out in a blaze of glory, they could *absolutely* do that by jumping to hyperspace as often as necessary.
Furthermore, as impressive as the First Order’s fleet looked, it probably only represented a tiny fraction of the galaxy’s industrial output. If the New Republic could’ve forced a battle between its fleet and the First Order’s fleet at any point before Hosnian Cataclysm, they would’ve won easily—the problem was forcing a battle without the First Order untraceably jumping away to safety. So the New Republic fails to do anything until suddenly it was too late. This explanation requires a pretty dysfunctional New Republic, but I’m not sure that’s so implausible given everything leading up to that point.
You missed the part where the First Order built an insanely massive, incredibly powerful superweapon without the Republic doing anything about it or even apparently noticing. That’s not really something you can do with hit and run tactics and represents a colossal (in fact, existential) intelligence failure on the part of the New Republic.
The emperor is running Mao’s playbook. He is fighting a protracted war, the secret planet is his mountain bases. A galaxy is a pretty big place a hidden industrial base somewhere is not impossible. While the new republic is disarming or fighting between themselves, he is rebuilding his forces, building ships, recruiting stormtroopers, etc.
I keep a set of articles on Star Wars that I find interesting or provocative. This one just made the list.
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1507621/interesting-items-that-enhance-my-enjoyment-of-sta
For a counter to the folks on this thread arguing about the virtues of the X-Wing over the TIE fighter, I present the following Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/garius/status/1200137100198322177
“The Tie-Fighter is the Space Sherman of the Star Wars universe. I hate to break it to you, but X-Wings are Space Tigers.”
I developed this theory a few years ago and have not kept up with all the recent Disney stuff, but I imagine the governments of Star Wars (Republic and Empire alike) a little differently.
In my head, the Star Wars universe is one in which social anarchism or anarcho-syndicalism on a planetary scale has become the norm across the galaxy, and the doings of the Jedi or Sith are mostly just interesting news stories and gossip. Once individuals have the ability to move large amounts of mass in space at high speeds, then individuals can cause planet-sized disaster, meaning that governance requires the overwhelming consent of the governed. Galactic Republic, Empire, First Order–whatever. Planets paid some small sum and paper homage for convenience sake to whoever wanted to be in charge at the time, but everyone knows that if push comes to shove, nobody can actually enforce their will without ruining everything. There’s only two Sith at a time, and maybe a few dozen Jedi, so in a galaxy of thousands of star systems, you can just ignore the magic folks most of the time.
What we see in the Star Wars movies is the most marginal margins of the galaxy. Most average galactic citizens spend most of their time in leisure activities (since basic survival needs can be automated); a few help govern through workers’ councils.
Now, maybe you’re saying, But ah! Han Solo is a smuggler. How can you have a smuggler without having a shared system of laws and rules and tariffs? Well, I’d ask–what’s the last thing we need Han Solo smuggle? That’s right! Big space monsters. Han is not smuggling in violation of tax rules; he’s violating a (mostly) galaxy-wide shared belief in the immorality of buying and selling living beings.
There are places of great inequality–slavery, military dictatorships, that rich people casino planet–but these are the exceptions, not the rule. In the prequels, everyone is surprised to learn that the water-planet aliens are making a clone army, because Count Dooku is making a robot army. That’s because armies are a thing of the past! Planet-scale terrorism is still possible (poor Ewoks), but just because you can kill a lot of people, it doesn’t mean you can govern or have recognition as legitimate governance.
As Rosa Luxemburg might have said, militarism is the result of the galactic bourgeoisie. Once you remove them from positions of power and influence, the need for armies withers away.
This is vaguely similar to my theory that in “The Phantom Menace” the ground troops are so terrible because no one has fought ground wars in centuries, and perhaps never at the current tech level. Wars either didn’t happen or were settled by space battles. Fighting on planets was police versus bandits or guerillas, never reaching the level of mass warfare.
So the Trade Federation droid army and the later clone troopers were people trying invent ground war weapons and tactics from scratch, which mean a lot of mistakes and learning of painful lessons.
I would also suspect that part of why the Trade Federation ground troops are terrible is that they were made on the cheap. This is, after all, a money-making venture by merchants; they’re not going to want to spend so much they’re in the red on success, and they don’t have domain knowledge.
I think (although I wouldn’t swear to this) that that’s EU canon, that the Ep 1 battle droids are not-even-refurbished industrial droids given guns, and it’s not until the big battle in Ep 2 that we start seeing purpose-built war droids.
IIRC in Ep 1 the Trade Federation army is described as “battle hardened” which would seem to contradict this.
Maybe “battle hardened” means they’ve been in one battle, as opposed to the “none” of everyone else?
Battle hardened in the sense of they used historic battles in the training dataset for designing the droid software.
At least in Legends, the Trade Federation’s forces had originally been mostly flesh and blood before being replaced with droids to save costs. They originally created for military to protect their ships from pirates, which is likely where they got their reputation as “battle hardened”. Evidently, their new droid army hadn’t faced a threat large enough before Naboo for its weakness to be apparent.
Enjoyed this collision between Star Wars and the HRE, two subjects dear to my heart. Minor pedantic correction: being a ‘prince’ (Fürst) of the empire was not quite synonymous with being a direct vassal of the Emperor (i.e. possessing Reichsunmittelbarkeit, possibly my favourite word), as various lesser nobility (the Imperial counts and Imperial knights) held the latter status but not the former.
On a slightly more expansive note, while the HRE’s naval history is rather minimal, one episode from it is a bit parallel. Having previously relied on various city-states to defend the coasts, during the late 1620s the Emperor tried to coerce them and others into putting together a more centralised Imperial fleet under Wallenstein’s ‘Baltic Design’. The aim was to be able to decisively squash the Danes’ lingering attempts to support anti-Habsburg resistance, but the burden of finding resources and logistics bases for the new fleet so antagonised the northern territories that it allowed Gustavus Adolphus to reignite opposition to the Emperor on a much larger scale.
God Yes you talking bout Star Wars especially in such terms is great. I like the analysis.
like the heavy Hand of Palpatine making bad decisions is great but also how what they were doing is not working.
one of those meme things is that like for the Death star you could have made thousands of Star Destroyers, if not millions or billions of lesser weapon systems and just it gets taken out of the GATE. Love it.
but god analysis of the wars especially the clone wars ignoring the whole…. Sith Thing as much as you can would be so much fun, Legends or 2008 clone wars.
but yes a reason Vader is always in a foul mood and Tarkin wanted to Drink.
the empire getting done in because Palpatine was bored and wanted to play around is also great.
The hyperspace suicide attack in The Last Jedi – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2hM1tyEL0U&t=1s – should have set off a massive arms race to reliably reproduce the effect. First with old, sacrificial ships that were on their last legs anyway, programmed to do it on autopilot. Then, once the process was better understood, with specially designed ‘lightknife’ torpedoes. *Cue research montage*
There is a video about why this didn’t happen – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pLdjf2NSiU – and while it makes some good points, I don’t think it’s conclusive. While the ship used in the attack was massive, any claims about that is trying to extrapolate from a sample size of one. A much smaller vehicle may still be devastating. More significant is how expensive hyperdrives are. But they are small and cheap enough to be in every X-Wing. Any drives made for use in torpedoes could be cheaper still, because they would only have to work once, not last through decades of service. Something smaller and cheaper than an X-Wing (because it doesn’t need lasers, or a cockpit and life support for a pilot) with a likely 1-to-1 kill ratio against capital ships would be a game changer.
I think the “size” argument can’t hold because we see a Cruiser-sized vessel wipe a fleet – including a ship the size of an entire city. I am exactly nerdy enough to go calculate the size difference. But even assuming the Raddus had only damaged the Supremacy alone beyond repair*. Wookiepedia doesn’t list the mass, only the dimensions. Going by that, however, the Supremacy is nearly three thousand times the size of the Raddus. It’s the literal equivalent of using a Coast Guard patrol boat to destroy an aircraft carrier.
Basically, if you can throw together the equivalent of a Liberty Ship, and use that to potentially wipe an enemy fleet** you have a completely new paradigm of warfare, and that needs addressing or explanation.
*It also crippled or destroyed several other ships equal or greater to itself (the Raddus) in size.
**In such a way that doesn’t use something like a nuclear weapon that would inherently move towards unlimited civilian-targeting warfare.
The official explanation as presented briefly without details in the Rise of Skywalker is that it’s way harder to pull off than it looks. It seems to be a known tactic in The Last Jedi, given that right before the drive activates the captain of the Supremacy suddenly panics and orders all guns to fire on the Raddus after having disregarded it, seemingly realizing what’s about to happen. I figure it requires very precise positioning and timing.
I’ve seen this being guessed, but I don’t see how it could be possibly make sense. We see this supposedly nigh-impossible maneuver being carried out in a single cruiser that just did one turn, with a single pilot at the helm, with no special preparations or plans made, and which had been subjected to hours or even days of long-range fire.
On one hand, yes. On the other hand, given that if this tactic “worked” it should have been in use for millennia (and the fact nobody was using it before makes them look dumb, and it should render Big Huge Ships nearly unviable as weapons), I think it’s better for the setting-as-a-whole to declare that let’s just forget about this and it was a special one-time thing.
Kinda similar to how the setting of Star Trek, taken seriously, should have been upended by various godlike beings & devices from one episode, but everyone agrees to hand-wave it because we don’t really WANT this to be true. (There was one episode of TNG where it turns out warp speed was causing, like, galactic pollution or something, so there was a speed limit put on all ships. Which is a fine idea for its own setting, but not a good change to an existing setting about people flying starships around a lot!)
It’s frustrating to me that Valkyria Chronicles 1 engages with the holocaust thoughtfully, but in the next non-handheld iteration of the series, VC4, the main moral question is, “what if the atom bomb were actually a little girl?” It’s like they remembered which side of the War Japan was on or something.
Tell me, have you seen Symphogear?
I have not; it looks potentially interesting, though, as always, it comes down to the execution.
(don’t worry about spoiling me to make the point you seem to want to make)
I wouldn’t say that it’s a great work of art, although it has its emotional high points. I mentioned it because it eventually confronts the idea that the organization the heroes work for has been operating continuously since before WWII, and is a secret Japanese military research unit; and this has actual consequences in the story.
It’s mostly just five series of heroic j-pop and self sacrifice though, and more than worth the time for people who enjoy that.
Yeah, but let’s not forget that “What if the atomic bomb was a human being” was a thematic element in VC1, and the end of the game the heroes basically win by applying fighting spirit and the Power of Friendship against overwhelming industrial might.
Would there be any chance of a similar analysis of fleet composition and supporting doctrines for any of the political units in the Homeworld games?
Oh man Homeworld would be fun.
> Ferix-Junkyard
Ferrix has two Rs. I normally wouldn’t flyspeck this sort of thing, but I didn’t recognize the name (I’ve only read a little of the EU) and had trouble googling it because of the misspelling.
I think the origin story of the republic’s, empire’s, and rebel alliance’s militaries are important.
The republic starts the clone wars not having a military. It’s been at peace for thousands of years, after all. However, we can expect many republic member states to have small military or beefy paramilitary forces for things like piracy prevention, VIP escort, and other missions for which fighters are well suited. We’re shown explicitly in episode I that Naboo has fighters for VIP escort and ceremonial purposes, it stands to reason that other members do too. The republic, faced with a need to build a military suddenly, probably began assembling what they could out of loyalist systems, and the kaminoans could anticipate that the republic’s navy would therefore be built around fighters. As the clone wars dragged on, however, the superiority of capital ships for fleet battles led to a shift towards them fueled by wartime defense budgets, which eventually led into the imperial navy. The rebel alliance, in contrast, expects to virtually always be the lighter force- battle winning for them depends on being able to keep imperial fleets from concentrating their combat power, and fighters use their greater mobility to keep the star destroyers from all hitting the capital ships at once. In this scenario TIE fighters are more of a screening picket that keeps rebel fighters off the star destroyers. Fighters are also, fortunately for rebel backers, *much* easier to disguise as actually being for entirely normal local paramilitary purposes, with the legends explanation for rebel x-wings being that they were originally provided by corellia, a core world dictatorship that can be expected to chafe under imperial rule.
But fighters also have better operational mobility- they can operate from smaller facilities and have a simpler logistical tail. For a rebel alliance whose strategy consists in keeping imperial forces dispersed, this is well worth the trade off in firepower and range. As the rebel alliance picks up more capital ships the strategy shifts towards using fighters to keep imperial forces from being able to pin the rebel fleet down anywhere in particular; we know from the screen that fighters aren’t an even match with capital ships, but pose enough of a threat that they do demand attention from even star destroyer captains. Legends is even more explicit, with fighter squadrons having specialized anti-star destroyer tactics and a rebel alliance with bigger military budgets spending them on developing heavier fighters, and the empire building specialized anti-fighter platforms to counter the threat, as well as other countermeasures(eg interdictor cruisers) to superior rebel mobility to enable better use of imperial firepower to turn tactical victories into major losses.
We know that interplanetary crime is a major problem of galactic governance in-universe, and the imperial navy is shown to have a missing niche of ships small and independent enough for anti piracy and anti smuggling use. It seems obvious that this is because the bulk of the work was left to local paramilitaries under the control of existing planetary governments, and with these as the main basis of support for the rebel alliance the use of fighters- probably a mainstay of such paramilitaries- is an inevitability.
So, looking at it from strategic situations- capital ships are superior for facing peer adversaries in major fleet battles. Fighters are better at paramilitary type work and hit and run attacks. Rebel combat doctrine is designed around making up for this weakness; imperial combat doctrine shifts to counter the ways they make up for it.
How does industrial era military procurement work in a Republic of Princes?
One of the reasons the various “princes” in the HRE could raise their own military is because the equipment was cheap to produce, pikes and armour and muskets.
More modern weapon systems/platforms require massive capital expenditure to get started. So for example while the F-16 fighter is/was used in 20-30 countries around the world, every F-16 comes out of a giant factory in South Carolina now, previously Texas. (Yes there are agreements for components to be built by partner countries, but AFAIK every single F-16 is assembled in the Lockheed factory.)
I’m not very familiar with the Star Wars expanded universe / new canon, where do things like Imperial Star Destroyers and X-Wings get built? Does the Star Wars universe have the equivalent of current day ITAR restrictions on sales and transfer of armaments?
A lot of the ships are designed and manufactured by mega-corps. They also tend to be built on planets specialized for it, like Kuat.
Old EU:
There’s a limited number of shipyard planets capable of making capital ships, notably Kuat and Mon Calamari. Kuat had the military company Kuat Drive Yards, controllers of an orbital ring of dockyards which sold to the Empire but also made products for individual planets. There’s a number of other major military corporations responsible for arming the Empire, and a lot of civilian equipment.
Most of the individual planets without their own military manufacturing bases seem to have relied on previous-generation ships being decommissioned and sold off, so there’s a lot of the predecessor to the X-wing around in planetary fleets and pirate groups. There’s also a bit of a sliding scale between civilian and military; the Millennium Falcon has been upgraded but it’s not unusual in having defense turrets and shields, they’re just of a higher caliber than normal. A lot of rebel ships are also upgunned civilian ships.
The Confederacy of Independent Systems seemed to include a lot of the major manufacturing powers (although notably not Kuat Drive Yards) hence their ability to deploy a real fleet.
All of that’s pretty much true in current canon as well, for what it’s worth.
It probably helps that each local “prince” in Star Wars rules an entire planet. Even an out-of-the-way planet would have more resources than the entire Holy Roman Empire.
Not necessarily. Most planets in Star Wars are depicted with very low total populations, and people have freedom of movement to leave those planets far more easily than even a successful burgher could leave an HRE state. Combined with technology that enables subsistence farming on nearly any terrain, it’s going to be very common for a SW planet to have almost no surplus industrial capacity.
Yes. On the other hand, when it comes to military power these will be the planets whose military capacity is absolutely bottom-shelf and whose “princes” have effectively zero influence.
The scale starts at places like Tatooine at the bottom (hardscrabble economy, minimal productivity, the ‘prince’ is basically a big gang boss who gets no respect on the interstellar stage and is only important to his own citizens and individual travelers who cross him). Here, the local forces probably consist mainly of infantry and light vehicle units armed with a mix and match of what’s cheap, and the local aerospace force is probably a scattering of armed merchantmen that might well struggle to beat the Millennium Falcon in a straight fight.
Then you go up through places like Naboo. There’s a reasonably stable planetary government that has actual standing in the Senate- at least the right to stand up and be heard if not necessarily to sway anyone’s votes. There’s a local military that is credibly capable of chasing off any reasonable pack of interstellar bandits. They can probably manufacture basic military equipment themselves, but their aerospace force is buying stuff manufactured by one of the big consortiums- they have the clout to get the import/export licenses.
At the high end you have comparative powerhouses like “the entire Trade Federation,” who are quite capable of manufacturing ALL their military equipment in-house in principle, even if they choose not to do so in practice.
There are a ton of armed ships in Star Wars and both civillians and planetary militaries can buy ships that are effective in space combat.
But there are degrees of effectiveness. Armed freighters, fighter craft, and other more affordable ships carry weapons that can take out other small craft reasonably well. They may carry weapons that could take out capitol ships, but probably only with a LOT of hits.
Differrent planets or systems have different capabilities. Certainly most developed worlds – like Naboo – could afford a fleet of military fighters, probably larger craft too, but the fleet of one world would likely be badly outmatched by a star destroyer, and most individual worlds wouldn’t have even one capitol ship, even one smaller than a star destroyer. An alliance of worlds and their fleets might be able to muster enough fire power to be a threat.
Also, the resources of individual worlds varied. Mon Cala built capitol ships. Tatooine had whatever ships the local gangsters and warlords had and cared to use. Mandalore and assoicated worlds apparently had a signifcant navy for their size, albeit still far smaller than the Republic/CIS/Empire.
There are so many armed ships that presumably buying or building armed ships of some kind isn’t so hard and enough of those pose a real threat. And there are a LOT of planetary governments.
But getting the most effective ships is apparently difficult.
Getting capitol ships from the Mon Cala shipyards was a big deal for the rebellion. But also they were a threat before that.
In the Rebels show stealing decomissioned military bombers was a significant mission, even though hyperdrive capable ships with lasers weren’t so hard to come by.
So the autonomous states wouldn’t have been like shooting at F-16 with machine guns mounted to civillian planes, they’d have real military forces. But they’d have less capable ships and wepaons and depend on greater numbers through alliances to have any effect.
“The central argument of the book is actually quite easy to state and fairly intuitive: armies with a high degree of inequality – specifically inequality of membership in the political community – suffer recognizable pathologies that cause them to perform more poorly than they might otherwise have done on the battlefield.” Bret, you should note that this effect also applies to the various peoples you deal with in your Fremen Mirage series. Hard times may not produce hard people, but poor lands produce poor people, and a social pyramid with a low peak tends towards less inequality.
Not always. The inequality among the Gauls was actually worse than in most richer contemporary Mediterranean societies. The quality of the Gallic nobility’s equipment was exceptional, in both function and and ornamented. Meanwhile most of the infantry was unarmored, which was an oddity for the time.
“but poor lands produce poor people, and a social pyramid with a low peak tends towards less inequality.”
A poor society means a social pyramid with a low base, but not necessarily a low peak.
The average Russian is poorer than the average American: It does not follow that the richest Russian is poorer than the richest American.
OTOH, it the richest Russian is as rich as the richest American, wealth inequality in Russia must be higher than in America.
And this is apart from the fact that, as our host has observed, economic inequality is by no means the only, or necessarily the most important, form of inequality in society.
I’m told that economic inequality was less in 1850s America than 1850s Britain. But the people at the bottom of the heap in Britain could not be legally tortured and raped by their boss. That’s why the people at the bottom of the heap in the Confederacy were not that willing to fight for it.
And it may well be that any lower degree of social inequality present does protect them from the pathologies unequal armies have…just not enough to counteract the pathologies that an army comprised entirely out of poor people have (e.g. poor equipment/low armour, low specialisation, low population etc.).
Pedantic correction (though not that of a historian): Lyall’s “forward” is actually a “foreword.”
What about manpower shortages as a reason for switching from fast carriers to gun platforms? Yes there are a lot of stormtroopers, but the Imperial occupations we see (Mos Eisley, Jedha, Endor, etc.) tend to be surgical and aimed at some specific objective, and the proverbial marksmanship issues suggest that they’ve had to relax recruiting standards drastically since the Clone Wars. Well armored but badly trained stormtroopers, an unreliable air force, and massive faceless Star Destroyers and battle stations… this looks like an Empire with vast industrial (or at least financial) resources but relatively little manpower it can command directly. Rather like the British during the gunboat era and with much the same playbook.
The British playbook was actually to train its soldiers well, to get the most out of its limited manpower.
The stormtroopers don’t have marksmanship issues though, if they did they would still hit the heroes by accident sometimes. The troopers are missing on purpose because there is already a tracking probe ready to follow the Millennium Falcon.
That theory doesn’t quite gel with the fact that when stormtroopers found the Millenium Falcon just as it was about to leave Tattoine, 5 or 6 of them couldn’t land a single hit on Han Solo, despite the fact that he was standing out in the open.
I mean, ultimately the reason is because “If the Empire killed Han at that point there would be no movie.” But leaving that aside….
Han is shown to be a notoriously good survivor, marksman, and smuggler, with numerous tricks built into the Millennium Falcon. He’s survived worse scrapes, and it’s not unreasonable that he’d survive this one. Depending on how shields work, Han may not have even been in the open–if he was covered by the Falcon’s shields he had cover, just not concealment.
There’s also the fact that Han was a non-issue. They just wanted him out of the way. The real issue was the droids. Killing or scaring off Han would both be equally effective in that. The Empire is willing to kill, sure, but they have limits, especially in the Outer Rim where their power is weak at best. For that matter, they may have been told not to mess with Han, as he was (at the time) in the good graces of the local ruler (remember his conversation with Jabba)–or at least under the jurisdiction of that local ruler. Obviously once Han becomes involved in anti-Imperial plots that changes, but the Stormtroopers may not have known that. They may have just been trying to convince Han that this run wasn’t worth the cost.
Further, there’s a defense-in-depth aspect to this. The Stormtroopers were the first line. The ISDs and fighter screen are the second. The Stormtroopers shouldn’t have needed to capture or destroy the droids, because they had a backup plan. Combined with the above paragraph this makes sense. I can see the admiral on the phone with Jabba’s representative saying “Fine, okay, if we capture them on the ground your man is safe. But once he’s off planet he’s in our jurisdiction and we’ll deal with him ourselves.”
The tracking device doesn’t come into play until they land the Falcon on the Death Star. At that point, that they escaped at all is only justified by this being an Imperial plot. After all, a few thermal detonators and the Falcon isn’t going anywhere.
One factor I think bears discussion the next time Bret comes to the topic is strategic and tactical naivete due to the multi-thousand year peace before the Clone Wars. The Gungans and Trade Fed droids face each other like it’s the start of the American Civil War, and learning opportunities from that engagement are curtailed when the TF loses its whole fighting force to a single point of failure that would only be there when leadership is still more worried about litigation than combat.
It’s possible that Star Destroyers and AT-ATs aren’t multi-mission engineering boondoggles because in space that somehow makes sense, but instead because they sound like good ideas and no-one has yet proven them wrong. It’s an environment in which it’s possible for an officer to look like a genius by re-inventing or stumbling over basic good practice.
My read is that the Clone Wars were never truly a peer conflict, but a conflict in which the side with superior resources was politically unwilling to commit most of those resources – what I’ve heard of the CGI Clone Wars tv show strongly supports this theory. This means the Republic got away with a lot of suboptimal decisions, which could include bad hardware design. There’s a lot of ruin in a galaxy spanning state, The Empire continued that trend of getting away with bad decisions for a long time, until they at last ran out of ruin and suddenly did not get away with it.
You remind me of Walter Jon Williams’ Dread Empire series, in which the interstellar empire that has not ever faced a peer adversary suddenly faces a civil war and has to figure out how its weapons work.
If the series lasts long enough, I’m expecting a certain character to declare herself dictator. Or perhaps domina.
I think he has explicitly said Martinez and Sula are based on Marius and Sulla*.
The one thing about that series is how the Fleet did maintain a lot of military virtues despite thousands of years without peer conflict. I suppose it can be handwaved by the last Shaa kept stomping out rot and corruption, or at least keeping them under control.
* OTOH the Napoleon figure in David Weber’s Honorverse never got to take over due to a nuke in the basement trick.
> My read is that the Clone Wars were never truly a peer conflict, but a conflict in which the side with superior resources was politically unwilling to commit most of those resources
The Clone Wars are a weird conflict because neither side’s leader is actually trying to win the war, because both sides’ leaders are secretly the same guy. He keeps the war running long enough to get what he wants out of it, and then ends it.
Yes. Without Palpatine the Republic would likely have crushed the CIS.
Or even more likely negotiated something to avoid a destructive wide scale conflict after doing bunch of posturing with their respective militaries and maybe some limited engagements trying to get the best deal, like they’d done for the last thousand years.
Looking back it would turn out that there was no Republic civil war, but just some heated political disputes that led to some unfortunate instances of violence as people allowed themsleves to be carried away by their passions. Ultimately it was all settled peacefully by the Senate and the Jedi.
That’s probably what a lot of the CIS were actually expecting, except Palpatine wasn’t having it.
Actually, I think the implication is that without Palpatine, assuming the CIS managed to get itself assembled, it would have won the civil war in a hurry. It seems from the Clone Wars that the non-clone Republic military is roughly 10,000 Jedi and, uh, no one else. They’re assisted locally by planetary forces, but as far as I know we don’t see massive joint interstellar operations. No Palpatine plot, no pre-made Clone Army.
On the other hand, no Palpatine would mean no clouding Jedi precog, and the Jedi could’ve kept the CIS from forming by a combination of negotiating and aiding local partisans.
Okay, good point. I guess I was thinking in terms of once the war started and they both had built up armies the Republic would have a had a large advantage and would have won. But of course the CIS would know that as well and take it into consideration. So without Palpatine:
1) Assuming the CIS even got together in the first place, they would have tried for more shows of force like the Naboo blockade – before Palpatine told them to kill the Jedi negotiators – and been reluctant to start anything that would lead to a full scale war, and the Republic would also have been reluctant to do start a full scale war and they would have danced around for a while until they came to a negotiated agreement which included agreeing there was never a civil war in the first place.
2) If the CIS got together and launched a full scale war, but the Republic didn’t have it’s Palpatine provided clone army they would initially have great success against an unprepared Republic.
How much and how lasting a success it’s hard to say.
They would certainly try to deal a quick knock out blow to the Republic, but whether that would work I don’t know. Even without a centralized military the Republic worlds all had their own militaries and the capacity to raise more forces so their potential military power would be quite large, but the question is how well they’d be able to apply it.
One possibility is that the Republic was too dysfunctional to react quickly to such an attack and would break apart under the stress, possibly after the CIS takes a too lightly defendant Coruscant.
Alternatively, the Republic worlds wouldn’t have one central army or power center that could be taken and the Senate can meet anywhere. After sufferering intial setbacks the loyalist worlds would rally and be able to use their combined planetary fleets to at the least stall the advance of the CIS while they built up a larger Republic military force and ultimately crush them.
Maybe not exactly the same, but think of the initial successes of the CSA against the Union, but ultimately they couldn’t deal a knock out blow and the more powerful Union had much greater military capacity and prevailed.
3) If you take the starting point as sometime after Attack of the Clones let’s say maybe during the Clone Wars show so the war has been going on for a bit, but Palpatine has a heart attack, is beheaded by Darth Maul, uncovered as a Sith, falls down the stairs and breaks his neck, is magically erased from existence by hypothetical posing fans, gotten rid of in some way, then:
Palpatine was playing both sides against each other, but clearly he needed to sabotage the Republic and help the CIS a lot more often than the reverse to keep the war at a stalemate.
Also, we see some political scenes and the CIS is clearly putting everything they have into the war, and the Republic worlds are reluctant to put their economies on a true war footing. Even as major fighting is going on they’re debating about the costs and whether it’s worth it to buy more clone troopers and associated equipment. And while a legislature shouldn’t be a rubber stamp, from the context it sounds like they’re unhappy that increased taxes are pinching them, not worried about whether they have the capacity to pay for it at all, and that they don’t take the threat of the CIS seriously to fully mobilize the Republics resources.
Whether or not the clone troopers are the most cost effective way to fight, they are clearly happy to have them as a way they can avoid mass mobilization and just throw money at the problem. And also debate about exactly how much money it’s worth to deal with it.
They do have some non clone officers and planetary forces involved in the fighting, but obviously far, far from mass mobilization of people or industrial resources.
It seems very likely that if they saw the war as a big enough threat to try and maximize the number of ships, clone troopers, and other things they could purchase with money that they would seriously out gun the CIS. And if they did actual mass mobilization of the people and planetary militaries no doubt they would overwhelm them.
Of course, part of the knock against the Republic was that it was dysfunctional and corrupt, so maybe they simply couldn’t mobilize that much resources whether for clones, ships, or non-clone armed forces, and maybe if it was say a Palpatine-less Republic against a Dooku led CIS the Republic would have done even worse.
On the other hand, I get the impression that a Dooku-less CIS would have similar problems.
But then you get into, that they never even would have united into a rebel force in the first place without Dooku/Palpatine uniting and organizing them.
@dalbeni1 I wonder if there was more than just general ‘don’t want to raise taxes’ objections to mobilising planetary forces by the Republic. I wonder if one of the major ways to avoid civil war during the Republic was to prevent any one world developing a clear and obvious military advantage over another world, hence maintaining a balance and forcing any conflict resolution down a diplomatic route in the senate. 1000 years of peace is a really long time, and was likely to be a result of some pretty hefty structural and cultural checks and balances against planetary princes with a little too much ambition for their own good. So, we see a pooled effort to essentially purchase impartial shared mercenary forces.
I wonder how long it would have taken for the Republic to shake that cultural attitude in the face of losing the war. Would the CIS have been able to swallow up a good number of worlds to expand their production capacity, enough to match the Republic’s initially piecemeal deployment. A little like Nazi Germany’s rather prompt swallowing of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Netherlands and France at the onset of WW2.
Still a bit of a desperate gamble, and one likely forced upon them by the failure of their posturing to get the desired response, but not necessarily a hopeless one.
There’s no question that it wasn’t just taxes, they very clearly preferred having clones be the mobile fighting force taking the attack to the enemy, and leaving planetary forces to mostly fight in their own neighborhood if at all.
It was definitely a preferred policy to not mobilize planetary populations, and just use a relatively small number of non-clone officers to help the Jedi with leading the forces, they did not want to mobilize planetary forces beyond their planets or to mass mobilize planetary populations into a Republic military.
(Someone – I think Tarkin, but could be someone else – mentioned being in favor of a draft to replace the clones, but in context it was clearly not an idea with a chance of taking hold. Well not till after the war and the establisment of the Empire anyway.)
Planets are often mentioned as being important due to location and due to providing resources, but not for providing troops. Wookies fight on Kashykk, Twileks fight on Ryloth, Mon Calamari fight on Mon Cala, but generally not off it, even though they all have armed ships capable of hyperspace travel and the Mon Cala in particular are noted as ship builders.
Though also, as the debates over taxes show, many, probably most of the worlds weren’t really thinking of it as an existential threat, since not only weren’t they sending troops they also weren’t saying, ‘We want clone troopers and associated weapons and ship production maximized, tell everyone to gear up production as much as possible.’
If they *did* feel truly threatened presumably they would have a different attitude.
Though as you point out it’s hard to figure if the attitude change would come in time.
As a side note, various loyal planets were conquered or attacked but not fully conquered so presumably those ones would feel truly threatened, but also presumably they were in the minority of worlds. No doubt the representatives of Mon Cala and Kashykk and other directly attacked worlds were strongly in favor of maximizing military spending.
A society doesn’t necessarily need to have a large standing military to have a large effective military. Finland has one of the smallest standing armies in NATO but it’s military is designed to mobilize to 10 times that size in a few days.
You can have a lot of low level conflict without declared wars. If there isn’t central authority you can get a bunch of localized conflicts that never involve the whole state or need standing armies. Nobles and mercenaries raiding and pillaging can add up to lots of conflict.
Absolutely true, there were numerous, effective local militaries within the Republic.
The question is whether they could have organized themselves into a joint force quickly enough to prevent the CIS from dealing the Republic a blow from which it couldn’t recover.
Which also depends on what such a blow would entail.
Maybe the CIS could take Coruscant and a thousand other worlds and the Republic would just move the senate to Rodia and send the forces of ten thousand worlds to take them back.
Or maybe all the planets would keep their militaries at home, start the long, slow process of passing the bills to raise a Republic army, demand the Jedi fix everything, and when the CIS captures Coruscant the whole Republic breaks up with each planet or autonomous region looking to take care of itself first.
Finland on the other hand is organized to be ready to call up it’s population quickly with an existing national military and pre-made plans for mobilization of their civillians/reserves.
The Republic *could* organize a draft either of individuals or planetary militaries, but they had no plans or tradition of doing so.
@dalben1 Agreed. I wonder if that plays into the the HRE+ feudal aspect of the Republic. Each world is essentially expected to keep itself to itself (outside of debate in the senate), consume its own smoke, and not intervene in the troubles of the worlds around them. Perhaps think of them like local police forces, who are expected to sort out their own problems but don’t have jurisdiction just over the border in the next state. Anything bigger than a single state gets sorted by federal forces (the Jedi), who were generally effective when they could deploy their precognition, but fall apart when that is obfuscated.
So in this galaxy of thoroughly myopic worlds, they’re not actually all that wedded to ‘The Republic’ as a polity. Perhaps most of them don’t really even see the Republic as a polity at all, more a technical function for conducting foreign policy. Something more akin to the UN than a galaxy-wide state. Or the League of Nations might be a better parallel, with its general inability to mobilise its members in response to threats that weren’t personal to them (or their alliance networks).
The question then becomes ‘how on earth did this loose organisation produce 1000 years of peace?’. Perhaps that 1000 years of peace is a bit of a misnomer, and there were actually tons of minor conflicts happening all along (in the vein of the Trade Federation’s attempt to lever a political gain through conflict). What they mean is something a little more like we’d say ‘1000 years since a World War’. 1000 years since a mess of alliances between worlds has crystalised into two clear adversaries, and then erupted into a galaxy-spanning conflict.
That might explain a little why these individual myopic princes didn’t seem to have formal defence pacts between them. Wookies fight on Kashyyk. Mon Calamari fight on Mon Cala etc. All foreign policy goes through the senate, and any action results in the provision of aid and materiel rather than military intervention.
I’ve always thought of the Empire’s “design aesthetic,” including the star destroyers, as being more about *religion* than practicality. They’ve got the resources of an entire galaxy, controlled by a military dictatorship- they can build whatever they want. And for some reason they build everything full of giant, empty spaces and dangerous open pits: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RKM95QFvDQc?app=desktop
That’s mostly for the death star, but the destroyers have some of that design too.
It makes mores sense to think of those as symbols (or maybe an actual physical conduit?) of the dark side. The sith make it clear that they take their “force” stuff very seriously- it’s much more important to them than physical firepower (“The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force”). It makes sense for them to build their ships as being a sort of Sith temple first and foremost. And, canonically, the reason that the Empire lost the battle of Endor was not that their ships were bad or their fleet failed, but that the death of the Emperor triggered a spiritual crash in all of the ships’ crews.
Rough analogies from history: the Spanish/Portuguese exploration ships full of religious artifacts, the giant fleet of comically oversized ships of Zheng Hi, and the Nazi obsession with propaganda.
Bret brings up awareness of Vampire: the Masquerade, and has previously referred to gaming with a custom version of the Storyteller or Storytelling System (can’t remember which), and not for the first time do I wonder if he actually has knowledge of the game “Exalted”.
I should probably actually become a patron just for the sake of a line I might float that question directly to him along.
That would delight me. I love Exalted with a passion. Its very much not a game for everyone, I think it need the right kind of nerds, but its such a fun setting.
I ran a game of it for about a year before it collapsed due to real world events. Always wanted to revisit it.
What I love about this is that it’s a plausible alternative account that makes sense but massively undercuts the ‘great man’ narrative of the films. It’s a fun illustration of how many inevitable tides of history consist of bubbles of individually heroic actions, and how many heoric actions might naturally and almost inevitably nucleate out of the tides of economic and social changes.
The ISD always struck me primarily as a space-superiority ship. Consider the deployment options for a single ISD:
Outer Rim outpost. We see these a lot outside of the films. They’re either practically defenseless, or defended against pirate attack (a handful of fighters plus a small carrier-ship that might also be armed). That’s mainly going to be anti-fighter defenses. They’ll knock down TIEs but can’t do anything against imperial transports landing troops outside their effective range; useless against an ISD, which if necessary can just bombard the outpost and destroy it.
Outer/Mid colony. We saw at least one in Mandelorian. One or a few high-tech cities on a planet sustained by things like mining or farming outside the city. Pirates can’t approach the cities and raiding individual mines or farms is inefficient; the cities might have enough small ships to deal with any pirate raiders if they linger. The cities may have shield generators at Hoth-levels of effectiveness. An ISD can blockade the system, especially if there’s only one city of note on the planet, and if it’s locking down the system defenders in a city it can send troops and fighters on constant raids of the rest of the planet. The high-tech city is unlikely to have local infrastructure in place to hold on for long under siege. In extremis, the ISD lands troops to take out the shield generator (again, like Hoth) or bombards the planet long enough to cause atmospheric disruptions and other knock-on effects. Help isn’t coming, so the colony will surrender sooner or later.
Developed non-core system. These are the planets that aren’t themselves represented in the Senate, either independent systems or subject worlds under a larger principality. An independent system probably only has sufficient space defenses to deal with pirates; a subject world contributes forces to the larger principality but will rely upon them for defense. A single ISD can’t seize the planet, but again, it can halt regular interstellar trade, though individual ships may be able to slip past. An entire principality’s fleet may or may not suffice to post a threat to a single ISD; of course, the Empire will simply send two or three if that’s the case, or more likely it will send ISDs to every system within the prince’s sphere of influence; if their fleet hasn’t already been concentrated, it will prove difficult to do so once every individual system is blockaded. Based on what we see on-screen, an ISD is going to have trouble stopping small escaping ships, but anything much beyond a frigate is in trouble; a prince concentrating their fleet is going to be up against a concentrated Imperial fleet or a SSD/Death Star.
Developed Core System. A single ISD can probably disrupt trade with a single planet, but may have to be at stand-off range if the planet has fixed defenses. Again, a prince’s entire fleet might pose a threat to a single ISD, but the Empire can send several. The threat here is that an unjustified planetary blockade might lead other princes to join forces against the Empire. That’s a problem the Death Star was designed to stop: the Empire could employ a macro-scale version of the Endor strategy, locking the combined enemy fleet in combat with conventional forces while the Death Star waltzes into a system and blows up a planet or two. Outside a gravity well, the princes’ fleet can’t bring the Death Star to battle. If the princes respond by subdividing their fleet across their systems with enough force to potentially stop the Death Star before it can fire on a planet, then firstly, they’re not protecting all their systems (which could cause the alliance to collapse), and secondly, they’ve concentrated their fleet in places where the Imperial fleet can engage it, while dividing their forces so they can’t mutually protect each other. Worse, if one fleet gets jumped by a fleet of ISDs, the others can’t redeploy to assist without leaving their assigned systems open to Death Star attack. Having that tactic in mind might explain why the Empire made the otherwise inexplicable decision to send the Death Star out unescorted: it is tough enough to need a fleet to defeat and only to be deployed in systems where that large a fleet isn’t even present. With the Death Star in place, the Emperor is no longer concerned about alliances of princes and can “safely” dissolve the Senate.
Of course, that only works until advancement in weapons or shield technology provides a counter to the Death Star, at which point it becomes an extremely expensive liability. But if the Empire centralizes control over production and R&D, that’s no longer a concern. The Emperor might be the sort of man to think he can actually do that.
Alternatively, as a Sith, the Emperor may instead want to maximize the amount of fear and hatred within his holdings, and uses his forces to do that over more conventional imperial goals. As seen on screen, he seems irrationally delighted when he’s being personally threatened.
I would argue that the Death Star was intended to not require an escort; it’s got heavy arrays of anti-capital weaponry and massive stocks of TIE fighters, and at least the second one could engage warships with the superlaser. It’s basically a super-capital warship, and while it can’t chase down enemy ships the way an ISD could, planets can’t run away.
Its two design flaws are the thermal exhaust port (which is too small for accurate torpedo targeting) and that it lacks integrated anti-fighter defenses because the Empire explicitly doesn’t regard fighters as a threat to the battlestation.
It had integrated anti-fighter defenses, and highly effective ones. The combination of turbolaser batteries (which can take out even a shielded fighter in a single shot) and TIE fighters (which functioned extremely effectively in the trench, where the turbolasers couldn’t reach) came very, very close to winning. The Rebels only failed because Luke was a Jedi-in-training, being guided by a quasi-angelic post-mortem Jedi, AND Han had a change of heart and blasted Darth Vader out of the picture. That sort of thing isn’t exactly something you can plan for.
The real issue with the Death Star is Tarkin. He decided to use it to end the Rebellion, which is just obscenely stupid. Even if he succeeded in destroying their base on Yaven IV, he still would not have cut off their power base and thus a new rebellion would have sprung up. Even if he had won that fight, all he’d have done was make a bunch of martyrs.
The Death Star could have been effective, but it had to be used against the right targets: The princes, and more specifically their power base. Even if the ruler of a planet is okay with total obliteration in order to stop the Empire, how many of their underlings would be? Especially when the means of that destruction can appear suddenly. Imagine trying to negotiate with the Empire when the Death Star is orbiting your world; the psychological impact would be catastrophic. And remember, some infrastructure isn’t mobile even in the Star Wars universe. The Mon Cal shipyards simply could not have functioned with a Death Star running around, which would have effectively prevented the Battle of Endor.
I also kind of like the idea that the Empire was preparing for the Yusong Vong invasion (though to be honest that’s the point where I stopped in Legends, it just wasn’t fun anymore). Essentially the Emperor is prepping for a huge war, and Tarkin is using those preparations for something petty and below the Emperor’s notice. Either way, the Grand Moff wasn’t using the tool effectively.
No, what it had, as discussed when making the attack plan, is anti-capital defenses.
“The Empire doesn’t consider a small, one-man fighter to be any threat, or they’d have a tighter defense”
The turbolasers were powerful enough to take out a fighter easily, but had trouble tracking them.
“No, what it had, as discussed when making the attack plan, is anti-capital defenses.”
What we see, however, is a fairly high kill ratio. Again, the only reason that the Rebellion’s attack succeeded was that a Jedi-in-training used magic to make a shot AND was guided by the quasi-angelic ghost of a powerful wizard AND Han made a heal-face-turn. Remove any one of those and the Death Star assault fails. Thus it’s reasonable to believe that the Empire was right: Given the defensive structures on the Death Star, single fighters (when not guided by space-wizards who are themselves guided by magical ghosts AND protected by a highly-skilled smuggler at just the right moment) are not a threat.
The thing to remember is that the Death Star is unimaginably big. We’re talking about a space station that could very easily host multiple bases on its surface. The Empire could easily have multiple defensive measures, including fighters (which we see numerous times), turbolasers (which we see multiple times), tractor beams (which can hold even large ships in place, at which point tracking is trivial), and other defensive measures. IN THAT CONTEXT, no, single-man fighters are not a threat. It’s not that a single-man fighter can’t damage the space station, it’s that the odds of one getting through are so astronomically low that it’s not worth planning for.
“The turbolasers were powerful enough to take out a fighter easily, but had trouble tracking them.”
Once they got into a specific position (the equatorial trench). But they were never intended to be used in isolation–it’s obvious (since there is clear coordination) that the turbolasers were to be used in conjunction with the fighter screen. That combination was clearly effective, wiping out all of Gold Squadron and all but two of Red Squadron.
The issue here is, again, Tarkin. The Death Star has the equipment to handle any assault, but Tarkin failed to properly utilize it. What he should have done was have two fighter screens, one well in advance of the Death Star and one around the Death Star. The first would delay the Rebels (which is all he really needed according to his plan, which is stupid but that’s beside the point), the second, in conjunction with the turbolaser batteries, would effectively neutralize the threat (barring the space-wizard thing, which is an out-of-context problem for him, as he thinks the only space-wizard not on his side is dead).
The Star Wars stuff reminds me of two essays I saw on the topic. One of them just yesterday, an in-universe academic essay called Seven Days That Shook The Galaxy by EmperorNorton150 on Ao3, about the massive loss of legitimacy from the destruction of Alderaan, the abolition of the Senate followed by the loss of the Death Star that was intended to replace the Senate’s power.
The other was on a EU Retrospective thread on Sufficient Velocity by someone named Kylar. Touched on several of the same points about the mobile oppression palaces with more of a focus on the internal desires of the Navy for SDs (‘God, this is such a sexy beast of a machine and it’s all mine, mine, mine! I feel like such a man commanding one of these’)
I think the story told in this downplays a major factor in this: Space travel. The ISDs weren’t necessarily designed to keep the Imperial troops safe (though they do that), but to confine the enemy to the ground. If you control space travel you can gather FAR more resources (given the way hyperspace travel is discussed) than any individual planet can provide. Warlord Zsinj actually demonstrates this in the Wraith Squadron books, distributing his manufacturing on multiple planets.
We get a sense of Imperial doctrine in “Empire Strikes Back”. The fleet keeps the Rebels grounded, and then lands a bunch of forces. As long as the fleet can keep the Rebels in place they’re going to eventually win; anything that can bring to bear multiple star systems’ worth of power (or even a fraction thereof) is going to beat anything that can only bring to bear the resources of a frozen rock.
Basically, the Empire was setting itself up to be the Spacing Guild. You can do what you want on your planet (though not really), but when you want to go off-world you follow OUR rules. Once your in such a position, ground troops really become irrelevant. Sure, you can shoot my stormtroopers as much as you want–if you anger me sufficiently I will glass your city, possibly accepting the loss of high-profile targets. And in the X-wing series in particular we see this played around with (the strengths and weaknesses of this).
Maybe an Imperial Star Destroyer really is a “destroyer” as the classification is used in late 20th/early 21st C navies? And the Venator is an “amphib”?
I know Star Wars has a deliberate WW2 feel to it, but as someone who hasn’t absorbed a lot of Star Wars EU/canon the modern classifications make a little more sense.
The Venator in the prequels is mostly used for invading planets. The descriptions / specifications emphasise the docking bays, not just for fighters but for shuttles and landing craft. Not so much an aircraft carrier or fleet carrier, dedicated to small high performance combat craft. Closer to the “amphibs” that have a bewildering array of LPD/LHD/LSD acronyms but are all basically about the size and shape of a WW2 aircraft carrier, are capable of providing some combat airpower, but are mostly for shipping troops around.
The Imperial Star Destroyer is more like the US Arleigh Burke, or the Chinese Type 52. These “destroyers” are built in large numbers and are the backbone of the combat fleet. Anti-ship weapons, anti-air weapons, and a helicopter or two for longer range reconnaissance and some attack. Since everything in Star Wars is bigger the ISD can carry more TIE fighters, but it is still mostly relying on its own weapons.
The Super Star Destroyers are then the US reactivated Iowas, or the Russian Kirovs, a few very big very intimidating looking ships that don’t really add that much to the combat power of the fleet. (Even if they are great for presence in peacetime.)
The Imperial Star Destroyers and a Super Star Destroyer deployed heavy ground forces to in the Battle of Hoth, with enough large walkers (including the enormous AT-ATs) to overcome the Rebel’s anti-vehicle cannons and land speeder attacks and deliver the Stormtroopers into the main base. That’s far more than the token marine or military police forces you see on modern destroyers, more resembling amphibious warfare ships albeit with far less (star)fighter support than is wise.
If we look at the actual depictions of infantry fighting, we can deduce that these heavy forces are surprisingly small, though. The battle of Hoth has never more than a dozen AT-ATs visible (which is natural, both for cinematic and storytelling reasons, and for special effects and extras budget). This is a battalion-level operation, and the defending force is also pretty small. (After all, it uses fighter pilots as improvised cavalry scouts.)
The imperial base in Endor is also of the similar scale: the general shots of it depict a small base that might have a battalion securing it. This makes sense also otherwise: in SW IV, we see the imperials securing the space port of Tatooine only with a single, pretty lax layer of security, and in SW VI, the imperial force fighting with the ewoks is a reinforced platoon, and the patrol the rebels encounter in Endor forest is not even a squad. These are operations of a company or a battalion that has a far too wide an area of responsibility.
So, considering that the commander of any force wants to maintain an in-orbit reserve, and there are also other jobs to be done, the ships of the imperial fleet bring maybe a brigade or two of infantry to the orbit to the locations where the empire is focusing its might, which is pretty little. It is sufficent to secure a small outpost, but not anything for sustained occupation operations. Of course, it is much more than the normal marine complement of an LHD, but not that much for the behemoths we see on the screen of the movies. These are not ships that would move millions of troops that you would need to occupy a continent.
For a cinematic comparison, compare this with “Guns of Navarone” where the German garrison never seems to react with a unit smaller than a company. You might deduce that the Germans have at least a thousand men on the island, securing just a coastal fortress in a location vital for a minor theater. This would be a somewhat realistic amount of resources allocated during WWII. Thus, the imperial capability of putting boots on the ground is truly abysmal, compared to the size of their fleet. Apparently, ground operations have been more or less secondary both in prestige and significance for a long time now.
This shows also that Lando Calrissian would be playing rationally: an empire whose forces are this stretched would not be eager to leave even a platoon’s worth of troops on a desolate mine somewhere in the backwoods, if they could avoid it. And most likely, you could arrange, even then, a modus vivendi with the junior officer commanding it to the benefit of everyone.
It wasn’t a single ship at Hoth, though. It was a fleet. And we know from the Napoleonic Wars that fleets can land an astonishing number of land troops if necessary. The Marines alone constitute a substantial force. And ISDs are really, really big–more than big enough to carry a large number of land-based troops. A fleet that carries the Army into battle and contributes its own Marines to the combat, while covering them with heavy artillery, is a common enough thing throughout history, and often devastatingly effective, even against highly fortified positions. There are several examples in the Mauritius Campaign (1809-1811), for example (including examples of these sorts of campaigns succeed, and some spectacular disasters).
It’s unclear if this is a normal deployment. This fleet was tasked with the destruction of a rebel base and the capture of high-profile targets. It’s not unreasonable to assume that it included non-standard weaponry. I would argue that it’s fitting with the rest of what we see of Imperial doctrine that it would be. The Empire tended to attempt singular, crushing blows–see Yavin and Endor–and to design engagements such that they were confident this would be accomplished–see the Death Stars. It’s not unreasonable to think that the military advisers built a custom fleet specifically for this operation. I imagine they built mockups and did war games to determine exactly what they needed–and given the resources available to a galactic militarized dictatorship, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume they had multiple such mockups, allowing iterative improvements or parallel runs so they could determine the best options.
We also see Imperial actions on Tatooine that don’t include AT-ATs. This as no minor force; this was Darth Vader’s flagship attacking a Rebel leader, and Han mentions that the force arrayed is unexpected. Yet the Stormtroopers are seen riding local animals rather than utilizing Imperial military hardware. There may be a bunch of reasons for this (we know that the legs are weak in AT-ATs, and sand is notorious for causing mechanical issues [quartz has a hardness of 7]), but it also suggests that there’s at least a variety of compliments an ISD can carry.
I think we don’t really disagree here. The history has a lot of successful actions by regular marine complements of fleets, but my point here is the small size of these complements in the Star Wars universe: the movies show actions and behaviour that can be best explained if the imperial forces involved are pretty small, of the order of a battalion. That kind of force fits nicely inside a single modern LHD.
The ships that SW films show are star destroyers and super destroyers, ships with a characteristic length of kilometers. They could easily carry a division or even an army corps, based on internal space. And considering that the fleets in the SW movies are operating at the exact focus of the imperial war effort, the ships would be likely to carry a full complement of infantry. Then, the only reason why the empire is operating with so small forces on the surfaces must be that the imperial officers don’t care to have more. The infantry is culturally secondary, because if it weren’t, the force field base in Endor would be defended by a multi-layered network of defence positions, utilising a few regiments or divisions worth of troops.
because the notion that some insurgent power in the outer rim would conjure into existence not one but two fleets of Star Destroyers out of nothing with no one noticing and casually overthrow this entire system off-screen between movies is the daft sort of thing which would only have been excusable if paired with really good character work,
Side note here: if you jettison TLJ and just take TFA and Rise of Skywalker as canon, you can avoid this particular problem, and the worldbuilding sort of makes sense. Kind of. (Spoilers ahead)
At the end of TFA, both sides are in a pickle. The Republic still has a lot of warfighting capacity, but it’s lost most of its leadership and no one wants Leia in charge because she’s committed the cardinal sin of being right when everyone else was wrong, so it’s effectively paralyzed until it figures out who’s in charge. Meanwhile, the First Order has its leaders, so it can actually make decisions, but it doesn’t have a fleet because it poured all of its resources into building the Starkiller Base.
This makes the hunt for the Sith holocron that will lead the way to the secret base with the massive fleet make sense–if the First Order can get to the fleet before the Republic can get its act together, the latter is in deep kimchi, while if the Resistance can keep it out of their hands until the Republic gets its act together, the Republic will win.
This also makes the ending of ROS, where Lando and Chewie come in with the massive fleet to save the day, make a lot more sense, because in this version, they basically went back to the galactic core and provided leadership for people who were willing to do something but just had no direction, instead of having to whip up another rebellion.
This doesn’t fix all of the other problems, of course, but it does make the overarching plot actually coherent and less unrealistic.
I think its more about the logistics. The New Republic have the resources of a good chunk of the galaxy. The First Order have a powerful military that they spent 20 odd years creating from a massive splinter of the Imperial Navy at the end of the Empire. They have their own empire in the Unknown Regions (Presumably they refer to them as the “Known” Regions). So the starting position makes sense. The First Order clearly can’t fight the Republic on a conventional basis, so they create starkiller base to destroy the Republics fleet systems and political centres, decimating the Republic Fleets infrastructure and leadership and allowing them to engage with better chances of success with their, presumably superior, ships. The Dreadnought and Snoke’s ship are both singular entities, vast flagships, and in the case of Snoke’s ship, literally the capital of their empire. They aren’t replaceable in anything like a reasonable time frame.
What IS ridiculous is Palpatines fleet. He has somehow built a fleet that is not just much more advanced than every other fleet, with every ship having a scaled down deathstar laser, but also far larger than any other existing fleet with over a thousand Star Destroyers. He does this with just a single world and without anyone apparently noticing the vast resources that must have been sent to that world.
He manages to crew these ships, and the vast shipyards that they would have required, and provide all the food and resources that such a large workforce would need. And Exegol does not look suitable for farming. To say the least. And again, he manages to do all this without anyone noticing.
His world can only be accessed by the Sith wayfinders, except he would have had to have thousands of freighters regularly visiting to provide him with the resources he needed. Presumably they didn’t all have a Sith wayfinder.
And don’t get me started on the ridiculous “All the ships are currently grounded, can only leave the planet via this navigation device and can’t use their shields while in atmosphere nonsense. Exegol is a secret world, you could easily have launched the Star Destroyers as you made them and have them in orbit for defense and to prevent exactly this nonsense bottleneck situation. You could especially wait to unleash your galaxy spanning “Somehow I’ve returned” message until your fleet is actually ready to act, not while they are still vulnerable sitting ducks.
Just appalling writing.
So if the Galactic Republic is like the Holy Roman Empire, does this mean that the Jedi are Catholics and the Sith are Protestants? Or the other way around?
Jedi are Green and Sith are Orange (Yes, this is an anachronistic metaphor. I think); quite obviously. The Jedi are the Established Church, the Sith the Underground. The Sith have been repudiating the Jedi Doctrine (and getting executed for it) since the beginning.
I’m intrigued by the popularity of this idea of having aircraft carriers in space. Where there isn’t any air.
The point of aircraft carriers is that aircraft travel through air, and face less friction that watercraft that move through water. Consequently, they can move faster, giving the option to attack watercraft when they please, and disengage at will. Having aircraft-carrying watercraft means that the watercraft in your navy can be supported by aircraft.
Try to follow that logic in Star Wars, where Tie Fighters and Star Destroyers are flying through space, and you get the following paragraph:
“The point of spacecraft carriers is that spacecraft travel through space, and face less friction that spacecraft that move through space. Consequently, they can move faster, giving the option to attack spacecraft when they please, and disengage at will. Having spacecraft-carrying spacecraft means that the spacecraft in your navy can be supported by spacecraft.”
…and the argument no longer makes sense.
There is no reason for an X-wing to be any faster than a Star Destroyer, so carrying X-wings to attack Star Destroyers makes no more sense than carrying dinghies to attack a battleship.
In general, the principle of concentration of force suggests that fewer, bigger units will have the advantage over more, smaller units. So the imperial fleet should consist of a few of the most powerful ships they can build, supported by a vast horde of scouts.
If the Empire is thinking about war with a peer adversary, it should build as many it can of the biggest possible Death Stars.
And if the Emperor is thinking about internal politics, it should be easier for him to control one Death Star than tens of thousands of Star Destroyers. Of course, by the same argument, he should not allow it to be controlled by anyone except himself, personally.
Having said that, a realistic Space Force should probably bare a closer resemblance to the Star Wars project of Ronald Reagan than that of George Lucas. Fleets of interstellar missiles, with the worlds you care about surrounded by fields of defensive weapons.
“There is no reason for an X-wing to be any faster than a Star Destroyer”
Why not? Real-world fighters are faster than bombers, and torpedo boats are faster than battleships. A large, slow boat that carries small, agile boats has been historically used for whaling too.
It is possible to build a small fighter that moves faster than a large bomber, but it is not easy. The power available to an aircraft generally goes up with its volume and mass. The drag it has to overcome goes up with its surface area and speed. Double every dimension of an aircraft and it has four times as much drag to overcome at any given speed, but it has eight times the power to overcome it with. It has twice as much power available as it needs to go at the same speed as before. So it can use that extra power to go a bit faster than before.
Making a small aircraft fast enough to catch a large one requires great sacrifices of payload, range or some other property. For example, when Concorde was introduced the only fighter in NATO that could catch it was the English Electric Lightning – and they would run out of fuel in minutes, at a speed that Concorde could maintain for hours.
Fighters were not smaller than bombers so they could go faster. Fighters were smaller than bombers because they didn’t have to carry a lot of bombs for hundreds or thousands of miles. Similar logic applies to ships – torpedo boats were small because they only had to carry a few torpedoes, and being small made it easier to hide near the water surface. Being small made it harder, not easier, to go faster.
(Real spacecraft don’t have to worry about drag and small ones are in no meaningful sense slower than large ones – but they are not any faster either. But Star Wars in fantasy, and spacecraft in it behave much more like ships or planes than like real spacecraft.)
Real spacecraft don’t need to worry about drag, but they do need to worry about momentum. Volume (and thus mass requirement) goes up at the cube of surface area, so becomes a big problem with enormous vessels. This has additional issues in space where you have to use energy to decelerate as well as accelerate. That’s offset somewhat by turreted weaponry, but if you’re not just talking about raw speed but also manoeuvrability then there is an advantage to utilising smaller fighters.
In any hard (aiming for realism) science fiction setting there is little or no reason to have space fighters due to annoying real world physics. Short version: on our Earth fighters fly in air while boats sail on water, space is just space. Long version is explained in great detail at
https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fighter.php
For storytelling reasons space fighters are present or necessary due to the Rule of Cool, plus it is much easier for the story to be one person making a difference when that person is in control of their own fighter rather than being a 3rd rank junior ensign in a crew of 4000, battle station being watching the auxiliary heating/cooling pump temperature readouts.
“I’m intrigued by the popularity of this idea of having aircraft carriers in space. Where there isn’t any air.”
The Empire needs aircraft carriers because they need a way to bring the forces to the battlefield. TIE Fighters lack hyperdrives, and thus can only move from one battlefield to the next if something carries them. This is fine when you’re a galaxy-spanning empire with fortresses on most of the important worlds, but not so fine when your goal is to seek and destroy a force that’s engaging in hit-and-run tactics. (This also explains why the Rebels need hyperdrives–to avoid the superior Imperial forces and get out before the ISDs and TIE Fighters show up.)
This can make sense from an economic and military standpoint. To put it simply, it’s in the Empire’s best interest to make sure their subject worlds don’t have forces capable of long-range operation. If a rebellion does occur, this allows the Empire to bring its VASTLY superior forces to bear without too much risk. Once the local forces start utilizing hyperdrive-capable fighters, that equation changes dramatically. Further, TIE Fighters are cheap to build, since they lack shields and hyperdrives; this means local planetary governments can be made to provide them for the Empire. Having standardized ships also helps because the Empire can go to any subject world, say “Give me your fighters,” and be confident that everything will work together. The Wraith Squadron series (within the Rogue Squadron series) actually discusses this at some length, as it becomes an important tactical issue.
Finally, there’s the issue of range. An ISD can reasonably cross a significant portion of the galactic disk on its own. An X-Wing, not so much. (Though the movies, games, and authors all play VERY fast and loose with this.) If you want to bring a large number of fighters somewhere relatively quickly, you’re going to have to use carriers. (Whether you want small fighters or not is a whole other question.)
To be a bit clearer: There is no point in a spacecraft carrying aircraft to fly and fight in space, because there is no air in space for an aircraft to fly in. The carrier would have to carry spacecraft to fight in space instead.
But the carrier is a spacecraft itself, so it doesn’t really need to carry other spacecraft to fly in space on its behalf. It can fly and fight in space perfectly well by itself.
An ISD shouldn’t need Tie Fighters to fight for it any more than HMS Victory needed to carry sailboats to fight for it.
HMS Victory (Age of Sail) like other big warships did carry small sailboats on board, and those occasionally did fight on behalf of their carrying ship. Small boats were launched from the bigger ship to raid harbours or attack enemy ships in shallow water.
In the 1930s the US military experimented with airships, which fly, launching and recovering small fighter aircraft, also flying. The idea is being re-examined for drones being operated from something big like a B-52 or A-400.
Those small sailboats were not used to fight in a fleet action – they were cast adrift or towed to get them out of the way. They had their uses, but in a straight fight the big boat always has the advantage over a bunch of little ones.
The airplane-carrying airships did carry aircraft to be used in battle, precisely because airplanes flew very differently from airships. But the airships did not carry miniature airships. What would be the point? The airship already had an airship around – itself. Carrying airplanes only made sense because the airship was not an airplane already.
There are other examples of big craft carrying smaller, some of which saw actual combat. Torpedo boat tenders/carriers were a thing in the second half of the 19th C, where a warship launched smaller torpedo armed warships to attack the enemy.
In WW2 big Japanese submarines carried smaller “midget” submarines to attack enemy harbours.
I can’t find the reference, but the Australian and other navies are looking at their big LHD “amphibs” and thinking about launching and recovering small uncrewed autonomous surface vessels from them. Some of which are armed.
> “in a straight fight the big boat always has the advantage over a bunch of little ones”
Historically, that depends on the era and technology of naval combat.
In the age of galleys one big ship would defeat one small ship, but the losses in combat between fleets were generally linear. One big ship vs two small ships half its size, all else being equal, would be a draw (probably mutual destruction).
Gunnery, in the Age of Sail and the era of the battleship, dramatically changes the loss ratio. This is often called “Lanchester model” combat, after the guy who first came up with a reasonable mathematical simulation. Now yes one big ship will always beat up a bunch of smaller ones and more importantly will hardly be scratched in doing so. Since this is a very long period of history and also well documented and represented in popular media, it’s easy to think that one big ship being better will always be true.
Since the late 1940s naval combat has been dominated by aircraft carriers and now missiles, and the Lanchester model does not really apply. In this “salvo” combat model a bunch of small ships can be just as deadly as one big ship. WW2 Japanese battleships and cruisers were equally vulnerable to air attack whether it came from big fleet carriers, light carriers, or small escort carriers. (There are other advantages to big carriers, which is why they are still around.) The usually recommended book for the various models and changes over time is “Fleet Tactics” by Wayne P. Hughes.
Whether ship to ship combat in science fiction is linear, Lanchester, or salvo depends ultimately on what the creator wants, choosing the technological/scientific assumptions of the setting to get the desired result. However in Star Wars, even just the movies, does not seem to have had much thought behind it, other than Rule of Cool.
@ad9, the common usage is “aircraft carrier in space” meaning something performing the role of an aircraft carrier but with small space craft instead. Which, humans being humans and knowing the context, gets shortened to “aircraft carrier”. I admire your precision in language, but the convention is well established.
This is only VERY tangentially related to the topic of this post, but the discussion of sci-fi empire military doctrine and its relationship to ship design reminds me of Starsector, an indie game that’s been in development for some time now. Similarly to Star Wars, the basic aesthetics of its combat were heavily inspired by WW2-era naval warfare, but it’s clear the developers were also interested in constructing a plausible history of military doctrine for the setting’s primary empire (the Domain) and in fitting new ships into that history. In-universe, the empire has been dead for 200 years owing to the complete failure of vital infrastructure, and consequently many ship designs have been repurposed to other ends in the wake of the “Collapse”; although new ships are produced, there are very, very few new models. Those different designs then play differently in-game, matching different tech levels fielded by different factions with distinct combat styles.
Domain-era military doctrine is kept alive by the Hegemony, the attempted successor state to the Domain founded by a stranded battlegroup, which also fields some of the more venerable (but time-tested) hulls in sluggish fleets originally designed to put down rimworld rebellions. The more recent “cruiser school” of Domain design is typically fielded by the Persean League, a power that sprung up to counterbalance the Hegemony and as such is not affected by the conservative counter-swing that arrested the cruiser school in its opponent. Tri-Tachyon, a megacorporation lacking a solid base of localized control but wielding outsized power due to its technological edge, fields high-tech, high-upkeep fast-attack and ambush fleets.
Most amusingly, the Sindrian Diktat, a personalist military dictatorship (pretty much a fascist nightmare) has a military split between the state navy and the dictator’s personal guard, with ineffective and showy ship design owing to the whims of its ruler; if the player captures one of their ships, they’ll find it saddled with a minor debuff, ruinously expensive to remove, built into the ship from the start due to the desire of the manufacturers to display their loyalty to the Lion of Sindria.
When playing the game, I found the detail both impressive and engaging; it did a lot to make the world feel “real,” as its history felt tangible on the tactical level (which you spend quite a bit of time playing in). I adore when fictional settings aim to depict the form and function of a hypothetical society or culture. It adds to the weight of the narrative, of course, imbuing it with greater emotional resonance due to the enhanced ability of the reader to project themselves into the story, but it also adds a degree of philosophical and political depth, as the story is effectively arguing in favor of a certain way of looking at the world, an understanding of why the world is the way it is (If I have a way of bringing this back to Star Wars, it’s that the prequels attempt to do this but so utterly fail to tell an interesting story that the whole effort falls flat on its face).