A couple of weeks ago I brought this game out of storage… I really like it but the spcae battles part doesn’t get good until both side have ships with the massive gravity generators in order to prevent retreats.
If you put Threepio or the Imp Drid in charge of everything but the shipyards you can focus on missions and fleet building.
One of the things about the Star Wars movies that I’ve really liked, esp. 4-6, is that they do a very good job of showing the kind of wealth and power that would exist in a galaxy-wide interstellar trade empire with ships that can travel many, many times the speed of light (“making the Kessel run in 3 parsecs” y’know). The societies in Star Wars are wealthy beyond our ability to comprehend, even though some on the room live in poverty, and as slaves.
What’s more, construction of spaceships might be relatively easy, if you do it in space. You just set up a big mylar lens near enough to your sun to get some really ferocious heat going at the focal point, then boost a few nickel iron asteroids. You run the asteroid through the focal point, and everything melts. If you spin it as you melt it, stuff centrifuges out by weight, meaning you get your nickel and your iron and your other elements separated out for you very easily. You let it cool, take it to another giant lens where you combine the various elements to produce Super Steel, Endurium IV or whatever kind of substance you like to build with. Finally, you take a big blob of the Endurium to another giant lens, where you melt it down again, but this time you inject an inert gas into its center, producing a giant bubble of Endurium (remember, there’s no gravity to make it take a particular shape, so liquids tend to become spheres. It would probably be possible to construct the giant shell with a series of concentric shells inside it. Now you just let it cool, pump it full of breathable atmosphere, and send your finishing crew in to hang the drywall and such.
Fast, easy cheap giant spaceships.
Oh I was going to mention…since someone asked… The Nebulon B Frigates (the ship they are on at the end of TESB, atleast in the Rebellion game is supposed to be a fighter killer.
NIX! NEIN! NYET! NO! Bad Evil Captor!
Think!
Lens Operator has wife. Wifey tells Lens Op she’s leaving him. Lens Op comes to work drunk, decides to get even. Finds co-ordinates of city where Wifey & new boyfriend live, & then…POOF! Who needs a Death Star? :eek:
Makes sense from a Rebel standpoint. SURE they could build a big space carrier and launch swarms of small, cheap fighters (ala TIEs) to attack their enemies, but all it takes is one Star Destroyer where you don’t want it to be when you jump out of Hyperspace (or, goodness forbid, when you have the hyperdrive pulled for repairs) to totally ruin your ability to strike anywhere, or even for your fighters to escape to fight another day. (You ever wonder why they don’t seem to have dedicated spacecraft carriers in the SW movies?)
With hyperdrive-capable fighters, you can just put them on any freighter or frigate or cruiser that has a shuttle bay, or even a based hidden away among some old temples on a moon somewhere, load them up with fuel, proton torpedos, Chewie Tobacco and Yoda Pops, and send your pilots off to strike targets dozens of lightyears away.
And since you gotta make these fighters bigger and with a better power generator anyways, you might as well put some extra guns on them, maybe a lil bit of cargo room or some torpedo launchers, and you have yourself a fairly nifty strike fighter. Not as fast or maneuverable as those cockpits with engines strapped to them, but with the armament to make up for it. Use some good tactics (like the ol’ Thatch Weave that Wedge used in EpIV) and you can even take down the faster more agile fighters on favorable terms.
Also, in the prequels, it’s worth noting that the smaller, more agile fighters prevalent in that era are incapable of hyperdrive without external support (such as Obi-Wan’s Hyper-Sled ring thingymadohickey) and the hyper-drive capable fighters (such as one vaguely familiar looking one in EpIII) are big, heavily armed, multi-crewmembered beasts.
On the subject of the Mon-Cal cruisers, IIRC, the Return of the Jedi novelization described the cruisers as having been built under the guise of civilian starliners, with all the necessary structural and power supply needs for quickly refitting them for combat built-in. Their bulbous hull design also implies a design where components (such as turbolaser emplacements or even sensor domes/sheild generators like those prominently featured on the superstructures of star destroyers) might have been added on in a post-factory modification. For a similar example, look at the nose section of a modern-day B-52 bomber, where they have all sorts of interesting blisters and bulges where they added various enhancements that wouldn’t fit inside the body that the plane was built with in the early 60’s.
They wouldn’t necessarily use one big lens. You’d only need a lens big enough to melt the asteroids. They could base the melting near the star, and use blasters to break big asteroids into manageable chunks, further reducing the needed lens size. Nowhere near the frying power of a Death Star.
I always got the impression that the X-Wing was the equivalent of an F-14 Tomcan and the Tie Fighters were like crappy Russian Migs from Tom Gun (Y-Wings are like A-6 Intruders). The Migs(TIEs) are smaller and faster but the Tomcat (X-Wing) has better avionics, shields and pilots enhanced by sweet righteous awsomeness.
The Calimari cruisers realy do look like they were originally built for something non-military, unlike the Star Destroyer, which is obviously built for star destroyin’.
Also, I got the impression that it was more a civil war than an insurgency. I mean there wasn’t even an Imperial presence on Bespin until Solo showed up.
Of course, given that the entire rebellion could manage to get about 6 actual capital ships for their huge attack on the Emperor himself, one wonders about the actual power of the movement.
I keep wondering why they brought their transports into battle(Those bulbos ships you see in Empire). I understand bringing all their warships, but transports are basically just big fat targets. Maybe they wanted to distract the Tie Fighters?
Well, they probably did have solid shields. And they may have carried marines. Some books mentioned the Rebels capturing several Star Destroyers through (very costly) boarding actions.
Well, it’s possible they could have been fitted with at least defensive weaponry for support purposes. They could also be carrying some kind of special electronics suites (communications, sensors, ECM, whatever) in at least some of the cases. IIRC, in the RotJ novelization, there were mentions of freighters loaded with high-explosives being aimed at Star Destroyers with the crews of the transports taking to the escape pods at the last minute.
Other theories that I think of as I sit here: They could be intended as CSAR ships, grabbing escape pods and ejected pilots during the battle so they can be carried off to safety out of the line of fire. They could just be intended to induce sensor clutter, to maybe cause confusion amongst the Imperial officers as to just how large the fleet is.
And of course, you’ve gotta get that “Most ships on screen” record SOMEHOW.
I’m afraid it’s already on the table, Bosda. It’s not my idea. I got it from a book on how to build industries in space. It’s a fairly simple idea.
When you have everything but hulls, you use all the hulls you got. Not to Godwinize, but if you look at the German war effort in World War II, they put the biggest gun they could fit on every lame ass chassis they could find to produce delightfully mediocre fighting vehicles.
It’s not Godwinizing until somebody mentions Hitler.
…
:smack:
I read some histories of WWII which indicated that the German Panzers owned every tank in WWII except the Russians T34s.
Ugh, I hate this game and I’ve played to completion too many times. For me the big problem is that the space battles are usually one sided. Their side for the first third of the game, then I whoop them in every battle in the second third. The final third is either spent hunting down the Emp and Vader or hunting down the rebel base. It was virtually never that tactics won the battle.
As we see in SW1, the Trade Federation have their own fleet, so by extension others may have their own fleets. Thus I see the old Republic and then the Empire as more like the Imperium of Traveller - the Republic / Empire controls the space between leaving planets and systems to their own devices - with the Empire being very much more heavy-handed.
I’ve heard it said that American tanks were reliable and cheap but underpowered, while German tanks were mighty but expensive and prone to engine troubles.
The Panthers and Tigers sure, but they also created some really crappy tanks as well. The “Maus” comes to mind, which was huge, so much that it was too heavy for most bridges and No engines existed to drive it.
Heh, old German proverb: “A german tank can destroy ten American tanks easily. The eleventh American tank always gets you.”
Corolary to proverb: “There is always an eleventh American tank.”
Basically, the main tank built by the US during WWII, the M4 Sherman, was cheap, reliable, and easy to drive and build. IIRC, it was one of the first motor vehicles to feature automatic transmission. Downsides were that it wasn’t very thick skinned and it’s gun was kinda weak, but it was swift for a WWII tank. I think around 44 or so, they came up with the M26 Pershing, which was the first Heavy American tank and was a big improvement over the M4, but they decided it would be better to keep pumping out the M4s in volume than it would be to institute the kind of delay that would be involved in switching over entirely to the M26.