Yes, the Empire post Marek is probably the worst. It now has the Death Star to play around, which although it's a good tool, got lost in what? A couple weeks?
Pre-Marek, the Empire doesn't have that thing. It doesn't even have super star destroyers, afaik. And it still has a bit of the senate that still exists, and would logically count more traditional war veterans and naval captains than the same Empire did after ANH.
Even the EU is clear on that, regarding the entrance of the Dak (Mon Cal) into the war. It was a late affair. So in fact, picking the Empire from ANH and beyond has appeared to actually be the worst period. It's really decrepit and falling apart.
Before that, it's largely uncontested.
Mith, I didn't ignore the importance of Mon Cal, but I cannot ignore the fact that the Emperor kept 10% of the overall fleet mothballed. He could do that, and the fleet he had at Byss was still large.
My rationalization was that he lacked crews for them, and that changed when he produced clones again.
The Empire pre-ANH really goes into a great expansion phase, growing from 100,000 worlds under its jurisdiction to more than a million.
We also both covered the question of the Empire trying to get into UFP territory. The UFP knows its own space better, and has much more support from the population. It doesn't suffer from guerilla raids as far as I can tell. It did have its own enemies though, so at some times, the UFP really was weakened, and those times would be the best moments when the Empire could, by act of plot, be connected to the UFP's territories.
We also learned more about the hyperspace routes, and contrary to what people like Lord Vespasian would pretend, it's a more complex affair than merely sending probes or brute forcing their way into unknown space. If anything, in the EU, the utter lack of major colonization and advancement into the Unknown Regions should really tell something to those ignorant warsies about that 800 pound elephant in the room.
Mith wrote:
First off, I would disagree with you here Oragahn. The problem with SW is that their weapons design is behind modern ship designs. The whole 'cover your ship with guns and broadside the shit out of each other' was old hat after WWII. SW should have converted into more modern styles of using missiles and torpedoes to hit their targets rather than spamming the enemy with plasma bolts. Anyone outside their immediate threat range is going to have little trouble evading fire.
Yeah but we see that there's rarely anyone outside of their firing range. If you use visuals, all of TCWS shows ships coming out of hyperspace ontop of enemy crafts, and it seems they just prefer put shields at full and close the distance, and once the gap is closed, they power up the guns.
It's nuBattlestars with shields. Plus SW also uses jamming, and the guiding systems don't strike me at particularly that advanced. If the missiles used artificial eye globes, blinding them would be kinda easy in such an advanced society: plenty of flashes and plasma and that's it. And it's precisely what they can do. We see plenty of nuclear-like flashes in ROTJ, and the bolts have been shown to flak if needed. They could easily make their rains of terajoule bolts flak and blow all those missiles out of the sky.
However, they have nothing to intercept bolts other than shields.
Now, spamming with missiles insn't an alien concept to the Empire, and it actually happens to be efficient at times when the imperial ships are taken by surprise. Guri blew one wby firing an aft volley at the bridge of an ISD with her craft; the empire has gunboats relying on more missiles; torpedo spheres combine TLs with missiles; spacetrooper suits have missiles launchers as their prime weaponry; and all sides use bombers to close the distance armed with missiles.
By virtue of the EU, the Empire also had at some point some small ships with huge spinal plasma cannons, which I think had longer ranges.
Again, while I respect the fact that this would be a possible solution, it's worth noting that the torpedoes are fairly well shielded.
Yep. However, the question is what it takes for their fuses to detonate. It may just require sending guided dense metal scraps that mass several tonnes.
Although they don't have such a design ready, it's not rocket science either. ISDs crap metal periodically, and it would take a design of smaller ships to cover that part: ships largely dedicated to the purpose of casting shields and lobbing iron balls at the torps, and why not, balls with explosives, just in case.
That's also not getting into the fact that they have poor aim in regards to small fighters and such--let alone something as small as a torpedo.
Torpedoes hardly adopt any complicated trajectories, so that's not a problem much. At best they make long curves. The best we saw in that spread from the E-D were a group of torps suddenly split into several torps... something that the VFX team seems to have pulled right out of their hole since there's no way with the E-D launching tube design that it could achiieve something like that: it would need to fire special MIRV-like torpedoes.
The problem is that this is actually true. The Empire's fleet is composed of mostly smaller, older ships. The ISDs are really just their flagships and are the Empire's way of projecting a great deal of power without requiring the whole fleet.
Unfortunately, the reason for that is that their firepower is stated to match dozens of their own ships. The firepower disparity is even larger than the admirals would admit--though not due to pride or anything as such, but greed as pretending that the ships weren't nearly as valuable as they were would mean that they'd get more of them.
So you see, while it's true that the Empire has many smaller and more agile ships, the problem is that they're vastly, vastly inferior to the ISDs...which are vastly, vastly inferior to to ST ships. It would be in essence, like Starfleet trying to fight the Borg by sending in more agile ships like the Constitution or the NX--yeah, they're harder to hit, but they're also incapable of doing little more than scratching the paint job.
Yes, I remember we did come across a quote explaining that one ISD had more firepower than several other smaller ships of a given class, but I don't remember it in detail.
Well it doesn't matter much though, you don't need to bring the firepower of an ISD.
Besides there's quite a problem with the ISD design. It's a jack of all trades, and if one was to do without the whole carrier part, there'd be far more room for weapons, fuel and cores.
Finally, outside of the ICS, antimatter is listed in Dark Empire and the Dark Empire Sourcebook.
Antimatter pods also exist outside of the ICS, and an occurance of an antimatter bomb already happened in an old EU comics.
Now that's for the EU. Although we could say the yields are nowhere close to those achieved by the UFP, we'd still have to consider the existence of knowledge of such devices.
Eh, I'm not so sure. Pre-Dominion War? Yeah. Post-Dominion War? Not so much. The Ferengi made a great deal of strides during DS9 and remained neutral between the Dominion and the Federation in the war. I have no doubt that a stray Ferengi arms dealer would happily make a deal with the Empire, but the Ferengi as a whole would not. And while that may seem strange at first, keep in mind that the Ferengi are business oriented. They're going to take a wait-and-see approach rather than side with any one power.
On the other hand, I would also think that the Ferengi would care less for the Empire than they do for even Starfleet. Quark, who does tend to represent many of the core ideals of the Ferengi people, is appalled at how the human race was. He was disgusted with their violence, their waste, and how they acted in general. The Empire embraces the absolute worst aspects of humanity.
A few arms dealders is still good enough to get the occasion to study tech. Why would the Empire even need to present itself as the Empire? It has humans, plenty of species, brain washing techniques and wide variety of voice modulators and translators.
It's not like the Ferengi are the be all and end all of ways to acquire technology, especially if as often protested by Trekkies, trade is possible within the UFP itself.
It also goes without saying that although the Empire is evil at its roots, there's no reason why it would open hostilities so frontally, safa plot fiat.
However, even this loss doesn't ensure that the Empire can somehow match the UFP playing field. It would require a massive refit of not only the weapon systems aboard the ship, but its power systems, sensors, shield generators, and the entire conceptual design of their ships. On an ISD, it would simply be patch and pray, while older ships are going to be too small and too incapable to even begin properly arming them to fight against the UFP.
It doesn't need to do all that. It can largely focus on makeing torpedo boats: low tech ships (all relative) carrying antimatter pods, torpedoes and a large array of launching tubes; contrary to the UFP, the Empire doesn't seem to know avarice when it comes to weapon banks on its ships.
Surprinsinly enough, putting such AM tanks and torpedo stacks and tubes on ISDs would hardly be a burden, considering the small volume they'd represent. You could literally go with a jurry rigged class of ISDs with minimal craft carriage, most of the room used to store AM, torps and specialized sensor suits, which they'd also be able to acquire.
I totally agree that building AM based warships would be hard from feasible in a short time for the Empire without breaking its spine again, as it was clarly explained in one of the largest sourcebooks when they started the ISD program. Going by the revolution we're talking about and what happened with the ISD, perhaps a full decade or more would be necesary for the basics to begin to sink in.
Plus the Empire is no China: it has a fuckton of logistics.
But then, again, the Empire's holdings also represent an inertia protecting itself from an invasion. It's such a huge thing to take on. The UFP's best chance is to act when the Rebellion gains power.
Before that, the Rebellion wouldn't have spread enough HQs, outposts and cells here and there, and wouldn't have enough spies and support to be of any importance.
Hmmm, TOS was a long time ago and the prison wasn't exactly designed to resist the firepower from a full blown warship, though it provided an obstacle all the same. Logically you'd be right in saying that these weaknesses should exist within even modern Trek shields, but even then I'm hesitant to say that it would be enough. ST sensors are far superior to even sophisticated SW sensors and yet we rarely see Trek ever dropping an entire shield with a single shot save for technobabble. And even then it rarely lasts long.
They might be able to match the frequency modulation of course, that seems to be a possible window for them, but then the question would be if the torpedo spheres could keep up against the colony if they decided to modulate the shields.
Of course, a larger shield might pose larger anomalies than typical Trek shields...
The weak spot is not a "I WIN" button though. It's just a point where the shield is easier to put a hole into, and that was the case in both the TOS episode and for the SW planetary shields.
Now the shields on major UFP worlds like two centuries later would be more advanced by all logic, but there's no proof that such shields would have managed to circumvent the weak spot syndrome either.
500 proton torpedo tubes isn't something to laugh at either. That said, torpedo spheres aren't invincible at all. The largest ones are more than 8 km wide. They'd need a lot of support to be able to operate without being destroyed in short order by any UFP fleet counting more than ten large ships.
This is true. I don't think the Empire is so incapable that they can't see when they're horribly outgunned that they need to change tactics.
On the other hand, it would mean a massive revolution of their fleet, training tactics, and combat methods in order to come to anything close of making this into a battle rather than a one-sided slaughter house.
And this is time that I honestly don't think they'd have. The Federation would destabalize the Empire long before then--and if they didn't the Tal Shiar would. Or Section 31.
I disagree. The tactics here are nothing stellar. The real problem would be to have proper ships to achieve that. Now, we can look at how long it took the Empire to design and roll the Nebulon-B, when they really were sick of losing convoy afte convoy to the Rebels.
Now, with the old EU, it was clear that this happened fast, but it seems the newer EU fell that stretching the life of Nebulon-Bs and making their appearance an earlier affair.
However, it wasn't a revolution at all. It's more like having laser cannons and TLs suited to fend off starfighters.
It's hard to say how long it would take, even if the technology that's needed to provide a decent cover to photon torpedoes might not need to be very advanced. Dunno, it's hard to say.
Surely, the Empire wouldn't push its luck if it would keep losing ship after ship.
Still, the painting I'm drawing here is miles away from the usual über Empire that steamrolls the UFP with a fraction of its fleet or even one ISD and its teraton level light second range lazorz.
Agreed. The problem here though is that the obstacle of refitting all your old ships or replacing them with new ones. And before you an even build a new class of ships, you'll need to open dozens of projects in terms of engineering and scientific research. Just the antimatter engine alone would require a completely new concept of how they build warships. The closest thing they have to antimatter--hypermatter, requires massive reactors to properly contain them as ISDs will explode violently for trying to use them.
Yes, clearly an ST power could supply them with proper answers to these obstacles, but it still requires that hundreds of thousands of Imperial engineers have to basically relearn an entirely new concept of energy production.
Then you have weapons like phasers and disruptors--weapons similar to ones that we know the Empire knows exists but have yet to rearm their entire fleet with, despite the obvious tactical advantage a SW disruptor would provide for an ISD. Hell, even decades later, when the ISDs are considered old gals, we still have yet to see any revolutionary redesign in how their ships act. Their largest change to space warfare are long range turbolasers--basically the same thing as normal HTLs, but with a much longer range at a greater energy cost.
That's why I think that if the GE doesn't play stupid, it would go for a strappon technique, as described above with the anitmatter tanks torpedoes. It would know its defense technology would be completely outmatched, and thus wouldn't lose time trying to make its ships flying fortresses. It would know it would lose numbers, and therefore would throw numbers into the meat grinder. It wouldn't even need to rig all ships with those homemade launching tubes. The mere fact of having half of your ships of a same class would never let the UFP know if all the GE's ships were retrofitted to carry those AM racks.
In fact, the GE would suddenly find itself using its industrial might to run a sort of semi-guerilla where expandable numbers would help a great deal. I don't know if you have played C&C Generals, but this would be akin mixing China's might to the odd kitbash designs of the GLF.
Size yes, momentum no. The Empire was starting to crack under internal pressure, remember? The UFP could easily force a far greater amount of pressure simply due to their philosophy and what they have to offer. And we saw that in SW, that in the end, each planet looks out for numer one before it looks out for their galactic society as a whole.
By internal pressure, You mean the defecting people and the growing Rebels, plus the whole Mon Cal conundrum?
Again, I would argue that this isn't true. Technological leaks go both ways and Starfleet has shown a much greater level of adaption to learning and applying new technology than the Empire ever has. Reaching a planet that has hyperdrive wouldn't be too hard and modifying a system to work for an ST ship also wouldn't be too hard for Starfleet given that Voyager built at least three different drives into their own ship with some success (Borg transwarp, Warp 10 transwarp, and the Quantum Slipstream), the largest problems they faced in those regards had to do with the limitations on their own systems to match that of the engines they mounted--which given how inferior SW ships manage to enter and use hyperspace, shouldn't be much of a problem for ST ships.
Oh yes, hyperdrive tech is so silly-easy to acquire that I don't have doubts that the UFP could get their hands on it and easily understand it. It's nothing weirder than all the stuff they already licked countless times in record times.
But they'd still need to use hyperroutes which need to be maintained and mapped, otherwise they wouldn't get anywhere very fast. The problem is that it would be very hard for the UFP to even do anything like that from a beachhead. The Rebellion would obviously give a hand, but the Empire can easily cut most civilian traffic anytime it wants and focus on its own routes.
Plus we know that said routes can be mined, most likely with hyperdrive mines (pet theory there, though). They could turtle key worlds, while having the mines only work against the enemy.
Still, the same has to be said about the UFP needing to build a whole new kind of ships to use those hyperdrives. It takes time, and the ship renewal rate at the most intensive time of the Dominion war doesn't evoke me anything like the UFP could tip the balance.
What those hyperdrives would give them, though, is the capacity to reach Alliance outposts faster, and eventually mount some attacks against prime targets, but then, again, with so few ships, I'm not sure how far they could go with that.
...We're talking about the same ground units right? The SW ones that are horribly designed, improperly used, and consist of mooks willing to run into automatic fire on a regular basis?
Still better than using primitive mortars and very little other mechanized ground support, eh?
The Empire can throw numbers. What's the best outpost the UFP achieved?
The Empire, in comparison, has ready to deploy HQs with its own TIEs, and a vast array of ground units with all forms of weaponry, even with some ballistic artillery down there.
The Empire uses a vast amount of vast and almost civilian cargo ships which dwarf the largest UFP ships, and they can be dedicated to the sole point of carrying vehicles, troops, food, fuel, ammo and else.
This advantage in logistics is considerable.
ANH would probably be the best time. Rebellion still in its infancy, they have a completed Death Star, and a larger momentum than the rest of the series.
I'd disagree. The Death Star is a certain plus, but the Rebellion barely needs a push to become a real pain in the A, and it's possible that the UFP could get rid of the Death Star by spamming it with shuttles and beaming a couple AM explosives into the core.
No no, the best time is definitely more than a decade before that.
The Old Republic already had designed the
Expeditionary Battle Planetoid 28 BBY and refined the design in 22 BBY. The EBP was a 90~100 km spherical battle station armed with heavy TLs but no superlaser, with two smaller spheres stacked at its poles, and capable of using ice for its hypermatter plasma core. Said core was 1 km wide.
We know that heavy turbolasers mounted on something the size of a small planetoid could easily be as powerful and wide as the planetary turbolasers.
The design was complete.
So if the plot puts the Galactic Empire several a dozen years before ANH, the Alliance isn't even there, the disrupting cells not even organized and not a menace at all.
At that time, if the Empire is faced with a new real enemy, it will need to focus on a real navy, and cut the Death Star project to focus on the EBP, which was verified and validated years ago already.
And I'd still disagree on ground combat since if the UFP obtains orbital supremacy, they could handily remove most Imperial military facilities and outposts with their ships and save their actual military for the entrenched forces using civilians as meat shields.
And even then, the Empire has never really fielded such a massive ground force that it would require a massive UFP military force to dig them out. Remember that in SW, they rarely tend to pay attention to anything but important cities or space ports for obvious reasons.
That they could, assuming the Empire doesn't have some EU device or tech I have missed that can turn an atmosphere into a real ionic mess. If this were true, the cruder but larger transport ships would give a large advantage to the troops stuck inside that crap, and we know that this kind of biohazard is enough to mess with sensors and transporters.
As for battling under a shield, the superior accuracy of phasers wouldn't be enough to offer protection against the heavy caliber of all those weapons mounted on hovering, walking and flying vehicles.
It's not going to be a question of 1000 redshirts against 1000 stormies because the GE definitely has much more ways to equip and land large quantitoes of gear, troops and vehicles than the UFP has.
And from what I could tell from said weapons dealers in Trek, they tend not to show the same kind of military firepower as capital ships do.
The Breen swiss knife would disagree with that.
I think the largest and most powerful ship belonged to a Ferengi arms merchant which matched the firepower of a GCS--but was so poorly rigged together and filled with so much weapons that upon what Riker ordered to be a 'warning shot to get their attention', Worf accidentally vaporized the entire ship.
And said ship was probably still superior to an ISD before the massive upgrades.
That's more than enough though. The Empire doesn't need much more than a couple blueprints on how to store and mix AM. The rest, they can easily build from there. They don't need to focus on shields and warp cores and other eccentric stuff. All they need is those torpedoes and eventually some sensors, just in case.
The rest is just a question of numbers, for which the GE has the clear superior hand.
While true, it's also worth noting that it might encourage the Empire to fracture even more. Especially when we see that even in the Old Republic era, entire planets were near the point of starving. I doubt the Empire was all that much more charitable once it had firmly established its power base and I'd dare say that with so much funds funneled into the military, it made things worse.
Now, look to the UFP; they have free food, water, shelter, and entertainment. Not only that, but they literally have the technology to build replicators capable of building factories to essentially rebuild a ruined planet. So while I sincerely believe that the Empire's grip on most of the inner worlds will strengthen, it will probably cost them the Outer Rim, save for maybe Hutt space.
Good points, but let's not forget that even in Hutt space, the Empire had bases. In fact, they had a base right at the doorstep of Jabba's kingdom.
It's going to be a difficult game for the UFP to root out the Empire without threatening civilians, and it's going to be even harder to prevent the Empire from trying to exploit that by making some attacks of the UFP or the enhanced Alliance" cause considerable collateral damage.
The amount of chaos and false flag operations that could go on would pretty much turn any planet into an Afghanistan or Iraq: too many weapons, too much division, no way to get proper support.
Surely, that civilian disorder with a pinch of scorched earth would be an obvious way to prevent the UFP from establishing itself too firmly.
Well, that would be less true around ANH, since the Empire was just counting on stupid brute force with the Death Star. A more pragmatic Empire from a dozen years earlier, still resting on the laurels of its victory and assured security against war, would be far more prone to pull such actions, random massacres on backwater worlds nonwithstanding.
Meh, that's not really anything new. The Empire already has them painted as galactic traitors. While certainly the richer, more powerful worlds would quickly fall in line, the poor worlds would not be so quick. Think about it; what do they have to lose by silently supporting the UFP and the Rebellion? The Empire has already proven it doesn't actually give two shits beyond their tax payment and sworn loyalty--so why not work with this new nation in return for what it claims is the ability to basically jump start their entire economy from a half dozen of machines?
As detailed above, it's easy: civilian peace. Even the poorest people hardly grow the balls to riot in a way that makes any difference, and without the local army support, no riot has a chance of surviving.
That said, the Empire seems to have not used much of that technique in the OT. It really grew stupid and complacent. Rebels on a backwater world that you'd like to squish annoy you? Mount a false flag operation on, say, Carida or Anaxes. Now you can have most of the imperial populace's support. Now have those "Rebels" become needlessly indistinct and put the whole world into chaos.
Or instead of being a cliché of your random evil government, let the rioters become dangerous. Have them infiltrated while you let the official government deal with those riots in a peaceful way, with minimal deaths (a handful tops).
Then have false rebels pull some rockets out of nowhere and fire on governmental buildings. Try to get a high rate of collateral damage here. Then you get a good excuse to strengthen the grip against rioters. Plus there's lots of poor people to bribe so they can betray the UFP and Rebels.
That said, that's a whole other kind of Galactic Empire which I'm not sure ever existed. Tarkin was a total dork. Instead of manipulating the populaces, he prefered to land his ships on rioters, killing hundreds in the process.
Mmm... I may give Breetai some points after all, regarding the stupidity of the higher hierarchy (j/k). :p
And yes, Section 31 will play a very interesting role in there, unfortunately there's not much I know about them.
