Fighters & Capital ships in the films

[Mr. Oragahn]

Ah, but this was said earlier:

There is much excitement on the bridge as the attack begins.

The Millennium Falcon and several squads of Rebel fighters head
into an armada of TIE fighters. The sky explodes as a fierce
dogfight ensues in and around the giant Rebel cruisers.

REBEL PILOT
There's too many of them!

LANDO
Accelerate to attack speed! Draw their fire
away from the cruisers.

And since TIE bombers were quite a rare sight, this mostly leaves the fire from Fighters and Interceptors.
Although we know proton warheads can be used against fighters, why would they be wasted against them? Perhaps for some cheap and easy kills?
But we didn't see any of that. Rebel fighters were only engaged by the TIE Fighters and Interceptors, and none have guided projectiles.
Yet in all logic, there's no reason such crafts could be a problem to warships with massive power cores. It just doesn't fit.
I'll come back to that later in this post.

In the novel, the "thermonuclear fireworks" line comes before Lando notes that the Star Destroyers haven't attacked yet, along with this:

Within a matter of minutes, the battlefield was a diffuse red glow, spotted with puffs of smoke, blazing fireballs, whirling spark showers, spinning debris, rumbling implosions, shafts of light, tumbling machinery, space-frozen corpses, wells of blackness, electron storms. It was a grim and dazzling spectacle. And it was only beginning.

So there's quite some room to argue that the smaller crafts actually fired fusion warheads at the cruisers.

Also, before the Star Destroyers actually engage - by which we mean, the Rebel fleet charges into their midst - this:

It was a scene of pandemonium. Silent, crystalline explosions surrounded by green, violent, or magenta auras. Wildly vicious dogfights. Gracefully floating crags of melted steel; icicle sprays that might have been blood.

A "crag" refers to an upthrust cliff or small mountain, and would not be a very apt choice of words to describe a destroyed fighter.

So there would have already been some larger debris floating around. That said, let's remember that the Death Star was already firing at the capital ships, and did it twice before the rebel cruisers engaged the star destroyers.
So we don't have to argue that the fighters are responsible of the presence of those crags; the Death Star covers all that by itself rather neatly.
It doesn't mean some of the smaller crafts, like those cargo ships filled with explosives, weren't seriously damaged by TIE fire.

There are several cases where fighters are attacking capital ships, and at least pieces of those ships are exploding.

Actually -and that's very interesting- this happens only once: we see, quite late in the battle, a X-wing firing not too far from the bridge of an ISD. However the damage done to the hull is quite minimal.
This happens while a massive rebel cruiser looms above the ISD' bridge tower btw, which just gives more ammo to the idea that the IDS' defenses were softened.

And that is all. I have not spotted any other occurrence of a snubfighter doing anything to a capital ship.

The earlier sequence that sees an ISD losing its port side globe isn't conclusive at all about what caused its loss. Well, on my copy at least, perhaps someone added some bits of red from a X-wing on the DVDs.

It wouldn't change much though, as it would still be possible to argue that, somehow, the shields were weakened there by greater firepower, or flickering or something.
Turbolasers can be charged. Which means that it does leave targets of opportunity for fighters that actually fly in the vicinity. There's no reason they wouldn't try to fire some of their weapons through the gaps while capital ships recharge their guns.

Well, you'll have to forgive me for not having managed to track down the finale to the saga of the dish. I went looking for it, but I couldn't find much.

However, leaving a scorch mark is sufficient.

No problem.
Notice that I didn't spot any scorch mark whatsoever. The battleship is pretty much pristine up until the point it explodes from within.

Except, again, we don't actually see much torpedo-firing by fighters in this sort of action. They're firing laser bolts.

As pointed out above, this happens only once, and is rather impotent in its magnitude.
The A-wings fired concussion missiles.

One possibility is that fighters are able to take advantage of small temporary holes in the shields;

That's generally the one I'd go with, and it's largely supported by the X-wing series (which is funny because it goes against what you could do in games on laser bolts alone - I think the author used the games mostly for the choreography of the battles).
Shields work by patches. Besides, nuclear warheads have the advantage of being much more powerful than bolts, not just because of their yield, but because how fast they release their energy.
If the intensity is of any relevance, warheads would be a prime candidate against shields.

another possibility is that the shields have depth, or layering, and the fighters are flying beneath the main ray-shielding.

Could be but all bolts seem to vanish only once they come almost at hull contact with a warship, so I'd discount that one. It would also not fit with the idea that such shields would merely be upscaled versions of the ray shields found on fighters, which we know are tightly hull hugging.

However, every one of these cases leaves a substantial flaw in the defenses of Star Wars capital ships.

Well, isn't it normal, since they're being fired at?

I notice that particle shielding doesn't need to be put on full unless dealing with considerable momentum: the particle shielding will detonate any warhead, and the ray shielding will take care of absorbing the radiation.
The problems rise with concussion warheads and anything that tries to slam a dart into the hull of a ship.
Some forms of missiles, like concussion missiles, might require stronger particle shield settings, but they could be problematic to keep up, and would draw on the resources that captains would prefer to divert to ray shields, weapons and sensors.

The simplest explanation - and this also fits neatly with game mechanics in the computer and role-playing games, so EU authors writing novels that tie in to RPGs or computer games will have this in mind as they write - is that there's just not that huge of a firepower difference.

Well I simply cannot go with that one, because there is just a vast gap, if only in the size of the guns, and the fact that cruisers have huge reactors.
I mean, we do see for example how a huge power generator coupled to a shield generator can do on Hoth: even a fleet of warships can't do anything against it.

So here's what I'll suggest.
In a way, it's inspired by what took place in "Downfall of a Droid".

The rebel cruisers only had one enemy in mind: the imperial fleet straight ahead. So they'd put all their shields on the forward arc, explaining while they could also hold on so long while closing the distance, but that left them completely open to the fire of TIE Fighters, Interceptors and eventually some TIE bombers in the mix.

That would explain why the Rebel fighters had to draw any fire away from the cruisers and Lando's line.
Perhaps a bit later, when they see that the enemy doesn't attack and that they surrounded by TIEs, they decide to spread their shields evenly, thus reducing the TIE menace.

That's practically the one main advantage of fighers and bombers in this setting: harassing uncovered flanks while cruiser captains divert most of the power towards certain arcs of their shields, when the enemy's main ships are attacking from a clear angle.

That, with the holes in shields and guns on capital ships needing to recharge, conveniently explains the great advantage that snubfighters provide against the behemoths, especially if carrying warheads (otherwise, unless special conditions or unilateral orientation of shield arcs, they wouldn't matter much with their laser bolts).

Maybe, if George is in a good mood, he'll have the CG boys spice up the ROTJ battle in the next re-release, and the B-Wings will get their air time.

His biggest addition was from the Special Edition, and even there he raped some stuff. What he did with the DVD editions was a complete rape.

Those fan edits made by Adywan are far more interesting. Even if at times the shooting of the CGI scenes he added might lack some punch and not be uber polished, he brought some very neat additions and corrections to ANH.
I've watched it and frankly, if he had some budget to back him up and eventually a professional director to tell him how to spice things up and make sequence more dynamic and energetic, he'd literally revolutionize the Star Wars movies.

Hey, let's actually open a thread about those flicks.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Then explain why the proton torpedos on the Naboo starfighters, which were just as large as those used by X wings, were unable to do jack against a converted transport ship. Surely even if Naboo has no army, their proton torpedos would not be several orders of magnitude behind torpeodos that can damage capital ships! The explanation is that proton torpedos have variable yields, just like modern missiles have variable yields.

A three kilometer wide transport ship. Attacked by proton torpedoes by rushed militia pilots, outnumbered severely by defending droid fighters, one occasional sniping shot at a time at various different locations on the ship, rather than in the concerted volleys used in the X-Wing novels. I think that's quite easy to explain.

And yet none of the capital ships were as much as scratched during the battle. Ackbar mentions in the novelization that if they can drop the ISDs' shields, their fighters might stand a chance. The fighters were doing jack all against shielded ISDs.

Debatable. You see, Ackbar is speaking of the fleet of ISDs, supported by a flotilla of TIE fighters. It's not just one particular ISD. He doesn't rule out the possibility that a dozen snubfighters might be able to take one out on their own; but in these particular circumstances, his fighters aren't going to be able to do much against their capital ships unless they can disable the shields.

What's not debatable is that with that supporting fire, the Rebel fighters were strong positive contributors against enemy capital ships.

[Jedi Master Spock]

So there's quite some room to argue that the smaller crafts actually fired fusion warheads at the cruisers.

If we believe the novelization's description is correct - and we could easily miss seeing a torpedo strike, we only see limited parts of the battle by necessity - fusion warheads were fired off right next to Home One, either at fighters or by fighters.

So there would have already been some larger debris floating around. That said, let's remember that the Death Star was already firing at the capital ships, and did it twice before the rebel cruisers engaged the star destroyers.
So we don't have to argue that the fighters are responsible of the presence of those crags; the Death Star covers all that by itself rather neatly.
It doesn't mean some of the smaller crafts, like those cargo ships filled with explosives, weren't seriously damaged by TIE fire.

No, I'm afraid it doesn't. The Death Star doesn't fire its first shot into the fray until half a page later.

Actually -and that's very interesting- this happens only once: we see, quite late in the battle, a X-wing firing not too far from the bridge of an ISD. However the damage done to the hull is quite minimal.
This happens while a massive rebel cruiser looms above the ISD' bridge tower btw, which just gives more ammo to the idea that the IDS' defenses were softened.

And that is all. I have not spotted any other occurrence of a snubfighter doing anything to a capital ship.

The earlier sequence that sees an ISD losing its port side globe isn't conclusive at all about what caused its loss. Well, on my copy at least, perhaps someone added some bits of red from a X-wing on the DVDs.

It wouldn't change much though, as it would still be possible to argue that, somehow, the shields were weakened there by greater firepower, or flickering or something.
Turbolasers can be charged. Which means that it does leave targets of opportunity for fighters that actually fly in the vicinity. There's no reason they wouldn't try to fire some of their weapons through the gaps while capital ships recharge their guns.

I'll review the battle. I could swear there were 3-4 clear cases, but we'll see.

There is, of course, the very famous A-Wing ramming incident.

No problem.
Notice that I didn't spot any scorch mark whatsoever. The battleship is pretty much pristine up until the point it explodes from within.

Well, that would mean they didn't do anything to it, then.

That's generally the one I'd go with, and it's largely supported by the X-wing series (which is funny because it goes against what you could do in games on laser bolts alone - I think the author used the games mostly for the choreography of the battles).
Shields work by patches. Besides, nuclear warheads have the advantage of being much more powerful than bolts, not just because of their yield, but because how fast they release their energy.
If the intensity is of any relevance, warheads would be a prime candidate against shields.

That's one thing I've heard suggested to attempt to reconcile lower proton torpedo yields with ICS-type power figures.

The big problem with that, though, is that in a VS debate scenario, an antimatter warhead is liable to release its energy in a similarly short timeframe. So if a kiloton proton torpedo, or a synchronized salvo of them, can crack an ISD shield by sheer intensity, guess what a multi-megaton photon torpedo will do?

Well I simply cannot go with that one, because there is just a vast gap, if only in the size of the guns, and the fact that cruisers have huge reactors.
I mean, we do see for example how a huge power generator coupled to a shield generator can do on Hoth: even a fleet of warships can't do anything against it.

So here's what I'll suggest.
In a way, it's inspired by what took place in "Downfall of a Droid".

The rebel cruisers only had one enemy in mind: the imperial fleet straight ahead. So they'd put all their shields on the forward arc, explaining while they could also hold on so long while closing the distance, but that left them completely open to the fire of TIE Fighters, Interceptors and eventually some TIE bombers in the mix.

That would explain why the Rebel fighters had to draw any fire away from the cruisers and Lando's line.
Perhaps a bit later, when they see that the enemy doesn't attack and that they surrounded by TIEs, they decide to spread their shields evenly, thus reducing the TIE menace.

That's practically the one main advantage of fighers and bombers in this setting: harassing uncovered flanks while cruiser captains divert most of the power towards certain arcs of their shields, when the enemy's main ships are attacking from a clear angle.

That, with the holes in shields and guns on capital ships needing to recharge, conveniently explains the great advantage that snubfighters provide against the behemoths, especially if carrying warheads (otherwise, unless special conditions or unilateral orientation of shield arcs, they wouldn't matter much with their laser bolts).

Well, I think mine's the simpler explanation. See, the reactor on a Star Destroyer isn't necessarily that tightly tied with firepower. It needs that reactor to move, not necessarily to shoot.

And as far as the size of the gun goes, let me show you a picture. Here's the size of an ISD-II's biggest guns, as scaled by Curtis Saxton, compared to an X-Wing (smaller given length).

It's not that many times larger. It's about four times the average diameter and twice as long. Or, in other words, in the general vicinity of 10-100 times as large. It also - clearly enough - has a much longer firing cycle for each individual barrel, as is typical for larger guns, which is probably why the ISD-II carries so many of them.

I'm not saying that gun size isn't proportional to the yield of the shot; that's actually about what I am saying. Something like an ISD hits about a hundred times as hard as an X-Wing.

[Picard]

Problem is that it is too low to be beliavable.

First, we have medium TL's vaporizing asteroids (and no, I don't think asteroids are made out of explodium; I would say that it is more due to on-board fusion generator of TIE going kablooie than anything else). Only thing that might make asteroids go kaboom at slightest tapping is if they were:
a) full of pockets of oxygen and hydrogen, which combine and explode when hit by DE weapon / electric discharge
b) made out of gunpowder
c) have their own ammo stockpiles
d) filled with lots of ice which vaporizes upon contact with electric discharges / DE weapon; however, that should fragment asteroids, not vaporize them
If you know any other option, fill me in.

Second, I don't think Star Wars uses standard rocket engines. If they use ion engines, then it means that they get much greater sublight range for same amount of fuel; but it also means that there IS direct relation between power of reactor and power of engines. ISD's reactor output might be up to 1200 TW.
http://picard578.hostoi.com/startrek-vs ... power.html

Third, it is possible that ISD's guns have greater energy density per shot; which means that there will be no direct relation between size of bolt and its energy.

Fourth, heavy bolt is around 800 meters long; diameter is 44 meters, giving volume of 1.2 million cubic meters.
http://picard578.hostoi.com/startrek-vs ... asers.html

Medium bolt is around 3.6 meters wide and 16 - 18 meters long. Maybe 20 meters long. That is volume of up to 203 cubic meters.

Light bolt is 30 - 40 cm in diameter, and maybe 3 - 5 meters long. Which is volume of 212 000 to 628 300 cubic centimeters. Less than one cubic meter in any case (0.2 to 0.6 cubic meters).

Which means that heavy bolt is 5 911 times larger in volume than medium one, and medium bolt is 338 to 1015 times larger in volume than light one. If bolt size was to scale with firepower, and we took heavy bolt as basis, it would result in 1.5 Mt heavy, 250-ton medium and 246 to 740 - kilogram light bolts. In short, medium turbolasers would be too weak for canon evidence and light turbolasers would be too strong.

If we took medium bolts as basis, we would have 92 megaton heavy turbolasers, and 15- to 46- -ton light turbolasers. In short, both heavy and light turbolasers would be too strong in face of canonical evidence. However, I am not sure how accurate is my ISD ROF estimate (6 heavy TL bolts per minute; 120 to 180 medium TL shots per minute); it would give 1.87 to 2.8 Mt/min for medium and 552 Mt/min for heavy TL; firepower disparity of 197:1 for heavy turbolasers, while current calculated values give 3.2 : 1 for heavy turbolasers. In order for medium TL's to deliver same punch as heavy ones, entire complement of ISD's heavy TL should give 1.2 shots per hour.

Summa sumarum: there CANNOT be any direct link between size of turbolaser bolt and its firepower. Otherwise it would be pointless to mount medium TL.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Good idea splitting that one!

No, I'm afraid it doesn't. The Death Star doesn't fire its first shot into the fray until half a page later.

Ha, so we're clearly back to fighters doing most of the damage.

There is, of course, the very famous A-Wing ramming incident.

Through the windows, at a time they had no shields anymore.
In fact, the shears in shields may be hard to predict. If we take the case of the X-wing firing at the "face" of the tower, we may ask why not directly fire at the protruding bridge ?
The pilot can't be that silly, so he probably went for the only area which would be worth shooting at (and that would be revealed by his sensors).
Yet, the area he shot at is quite... meaningless. So I'd say there can be fractures in shields, and it may be hard to predict where exactly.

Well, that would mean they didn't do anything to it, then.

Yep, they never ever dented it.

That's one thing I've heard suggested to attempt to reconcile lower proton torpedo yields with ICS-type power figures.

The big problem with that, though, is that in a VS debate scenario, an antimatter warhead is liable to release its energy in a similarly short timeframe. So if a kiloton proton torpedo, or a synchronized salvo of them, can crack an ISD shield by sheer intensity, guess what a multi-megaton photon torpedo will do?

Well this is purely about SW. If there's a faction which can fire nuclear level weapons (or light impactors at high c fractional speeds), then they'd would logically have a field day in Star Wars.

Well, I think mine's the simpler explanation. See, the reactor on a Star Destroyer isn't necessarily that tightly tied with firepower. It needs that reactor to move, not necessarily to shoot.

But we know that generators can be entirely linked to shields. Therefore they could in theory link weapons to such generators as well.
In fact, in order to hope bringing down shields, they'd have to. And there's no reason for a ship that's 1.6 km long not to carry at least a generator devoted to weapon systems, if they don't tax the excess heat from the main reactor used to push the craft.
Actually, the main reactor is located inside the ship. Yet they don't have problems with massive heat production. So they must have systems to channel thermal energy away. Why wouldn't they use that energy for other systems? In fact, radiating that energy would be very hard unless they attempted to shoot energized stuff to drain this heat out.

Even worse, why then not point the formidable nuclear exhaust at enemy ships? Those ion thrusters even accelerate the particles. They'd need to jacket them up, or funnel them through a magnetic field projected by a magnetic ring, a bit like it's done for the superlaser, which is also directly tied to the reactor.

Plus my suggestion isn't really a theory as it's pretty much verified throughout the whole EU, and films can fit with it: wherever there are shields, small crafts are next to useless.
It's totally proved in TPM, verified during the whole battle of ROTS where we don't see a single fighter attempting to shoot at the large warships, shown in ANH in that only smaller crafts flying underneath the force field could damage the crust of the battle station, and in ROTJ where effective small fire against capital ships is non existent (again, the unique X-wing shots did negligible damage).

Plus we do know that even small shields can already cope with multi-megajoules of firepower, as it happened with Obi-Wan's Delta 7 fighter (we saw that the next evolution of those fighters didn't have such invincible hulls in comparison, as buzz droids easily peeled them away). No doubt that enormous ships would have no issue to power shields thousands if not millions of times tougher.
And then, turbolasers have to be capable of bringing such shields down.

And as far as the size of the gun goes, let me show you a picture. Here's the size of an ISD-II's biggest guns, as scaled by Curtis Saxton, compared to an X-Wing (smaller given length).

It's not that many times larger. It's about four times the average diameter and twice as long. Or, in other words, in the general vicinity of 10-100 times as large. It also - clearly enough - has a much longer firing cycle for each individual barrel, as is typical for larger guns, which is probably why the ISD-II carries so many of them.

I'm not saying that gun size isn't proportional to the yield of the shot; that's actually about what I am saying. Something like an ISD hits about a hundred times as hard as an X-Wing.

I see that the tip of the laser cannon of the X-wing is 4 pixels wide, while the cylinder you used for the cannon is 38 pixels wide.

Respective bores' areas are:

12.566 m²
1,134.115 m²

That's more than 90 times superior. Of course, that won't bring our guns in the terajoule range, but it will also show that it would take more than 90 X-wing shots to bring that much equivalent firepower. Well, since X-wings can lock guns in quad mode, that would make 25 passes.

You may say that X-wings fire several times, but so do turbolasers. Why assume one TL shot would suffice? We see in ROTJ that at close range, ships can exchange large quantities of TL bolts.
The TL turrets of an ISD-II have eight bores each. I think the EU said that the change from heavier dual cannons to those lesser cannons was caused by the Rebels' heavy reliance on smaller crafts.
Once again, it could very well be from WEG books.

Based on bore alone, the dual (turbo?)laser cannons of the Munificent-class frigates should smoke any craft, up to the Republican Venators, out of the sky in one shot.
Although this is what happened in "Downfall of a Droid" at the beginning, nothing like that ever happened in the ROTS battle.
That said, visual from TCWS are so incoherent at times that I'm not feeling OK about using them.

Then, again, do we know for sure that the bore size is the only factor?

We can consider that pound for pound, a turbolaser bolt is an enhanced sister of the laser bolt, just like the laser bolt is an enhanced form of a blaster bolt.
Finally, length matters.
We do know that TL bolts can be very long, although most of the end of the battle in ROTJ shows short bursts (but then, they're fired at great rates).

Then there is the possibility that turbolaser cannons could be some form of nuclear flak, literally: when bolts impacts, their particles are compressed and that is the equivalent of a chemical trigger lightning up the nuclear particles.
We do know that turbolasers, in the EU, are radioactive. So a turbolaser bolt may not be that much more powerful than a laser bolt, but it may have the added capacity of carrying away the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

[sonofccn]

We know from the films that they don't, or usually don't. Where do we ever see starfighters taking out capital ships?

From the top:

TPM-Trade Federation cruiser blown up by fighter

ROTS-Obi and Annie blow open the hanger bay and board Grevious's ship.

ANH-DS1 destroyed by a fighter.

ROTJ-DS2 destroyed by fighter, Rebel fleet "harried" by Imperial fighters including the medical frigate.

I will gladly find the links to prove any of the above through I think most of this is self-evident. In conclusion it would be shorter to write a list of star wars movies which don't pivotly feature fighters.

[Admiral Breetai]

also an ISD explodes blasting into pieces from fighters during Endor

[Jedi Master Spock]

Some stray material from the other thread:

Hiroshima was not vaporized, and does not fit the definition of vaporization, not even a decent figurative one.

Sure it fits a decent figurative one. Which is why we actually see the phrase used.

Now, let me mention a word that there isn't a decent "figurative" definition for: Thermonuclear. As in thermonuclear fireworks rocked the largest ship in the Rebel fleet while only Imperial fighters were engaged with the Rebel fleet. But vaporize? That's misused, by sheer technical definition, more often than it is used.

Which is variable, but reasonable. We know that these shots can essentially one shot fighters, fighters of which a small, unshielded one was slightly harmed by a multi gigajoule direct hit.

Unfortunately, that's one of the various G canon contradictions of the ICS. There's no way a mere gigajoule shot should actually have any effect on an ICS-level fighter.

Really? Then explain why the tie fighters or X wing didn't launch the 24 proton torpedos that can allegedly take down a capital ship's shields. The Naboo starfighters probably had plenty more proton torpedos than that, and they were fighting a converted transport ship.

A synchronized volley of 24 proton torpedoes? When the N-1 fighters fire torpedoes one at a time and have to cope with swarms of enemy fighters? And are fighting a 3 kilometer wide ship?

[Jedi Master Spock]

Second, I don't think Star Wars uses standard rocket engines. If they use ion engines, then it means that they get much greater sublight range for same amount of fuel; but it also means that there IS direct relation between power of reactor and power of engines. ISD's reactor output might be up to 1200 TW.
http://picard578.hostoi.com/startrek-vs ... power.html

The use of ion engines is actually canonically established, so it's perfectly reasonable to proceed on that assumption.

Third, it is possible that ISD's guns have greater energy density per shot; which means that there will be no direct relation between size of bolt and its energy.

Fourth, heavy bolt is around 800 meters long; diameter is 44 meters, giving volume of 1.2 million cubic meters.
http://picard578.hostoi.com/startrek-vs ... asers.html

Medium bolt is around 3.6 meters wide and 16 - 18 meters long. Maybe 20 meters long. That is volume of up to 203 cubic meters.

Light bolt is 30 - 40 cm in diameter, and maybe 3 - 5 meters long. Which is volume of 212 000 to 628 300 cubic centimeters. Less than one cubic meter in any case (0.2 to 0.6 cubic meters).

Which means that heavy bolt is 5 911 times larger in volume than medium one, and medium bolt is 338 to 1015 times larger in volume than light one. If bolt size was to scale with firepower, and we took heavy bolt as basis, it would result in 1.5 Mt heavy, 250-ton medium and 246 to 740 - kilogram light bolts. In short, medium turbolasers would be too weak for canon evidence and light turbolasers would be too strong.

If we took medium bolts as basis, we would have 92 megaton heavy turbolasers, and 15- to 46- -ton light turbolasers. In short, both heavy and light turbolasers would be too strong in face of canonical evidence. However, I am not sure how accurate is my ISD ROF estimate (6 heavy TL bolts per minute; 120 to 180 medium TL shots per minute); it would give 1.87 to 2.8 Mt/min for medium and 552 Mt/min for heavy TL; firepower disparity of 197:1 for heavy turbolasers, while current calculated values give 3.2 : 1 for heavy turbolasers. In order for medium TL's to deliver same punch as heavy ones, entire complement of ISD's heavy TL should give 1.2 shots per hour.

Summa sumarum: there CANNOT be any direct link between size of turbolaser bolt and its firepower. Otherwise it would be pointless to mount medium TL.

Those scalings seem questionable, particularly in light of the fact that the heavy TL barrels are only around 1m in diameter. When the apparent diameter of a bolt is 1-3 pixels on screen, we can say very little about its actual diameter.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Ha, so we're clearly back to fighters doing most of the damage.

Apparently so.

There is, of course, the very famous A-Wing ramming incident.

Through the windows, at a time they had no shields anymore.
In fact, the shears in shields may be hard to predict. If we take the case of the X-wing firing at the "face" of the tower, we may ask why not directly fire at the protruding bridge ?
The pilot can't be that silly, so he probably went for the only area which would be worth shooting at (and that would be revealed by his sensors).
Yet, the area he shot at is quite... meaningless. So I'd say there can be fractures in shields, and it may be hard to predict where exactly.

Quite possibly. There's a lot left undetermined by the role of fighters in the film.

We know that fighters are powerful enough to be important; we also know that fighters aren't quite powerful enough to simply maim capital ships with ease.

Well this is purely about SW. If there's a faction which can fire nuclear level weapons (or light impactors at high c fractional speeds), then they'd would logically have a field day in Star Wars.

That's my point. If peak intensity is all that's needed to overwhelm SW shields, then ST ships can easily destroy, or even carefully disable and capture, ISDs. Pop a photon torpedo from outside of range and then go to town.

But we know that generators can be entirely linked to shields. Therefore they could in theory link weapons to such generators as well.

Source please?

In fact, in order to hope bringing down shields, they'd have to. And there's no reason for a ship that's 1.6 km long not to carry at least a generator devoted to weapon systems, if they don't tax the excess heat from the main reactor used to push the craft.
Actually, the main reactor is located inside the ship. Yet they don't have problems with massive heat production. So they must have systems to channel thermal energy away. Why wouldn't they use that energy for other systems? In fact, radiating that energy would be very hard unless they attempted to shoot energized stuff to drain this heat out.

In ROTS, we see a capital gun turret in intimate operation: It's being fed ammunition. It doesn't look like it's actually tied to the ship's main power systems.

There's also the odd practice, which we can supposedly pick out in the ROTS battle (I haven't had any luck finding it) of mounting SPHA artillery walkers in the cargo bay of Venators / Republic Attack Cruisers. Those certainly have their own power source, but they're supposed to be effective against enemy capital ships.

Even worse, why then not point the formidable nuclear exhaust at enemy ships? Those ion thrusters even accelerate the particles. They'd need to jacket them up, or funnel them through a magnetic field projected by a magnetic ring, a bit like it's done for the superlaser, which is also directly tied to the reactor.

Plus my suggestion isn't really a theory as it's pretty much verified throughout the whole EU, and films can fit with it: wherever there are shields, small crafts are next to useless.
It's totally proved in TPM, verified during the whole battle of ROTS where we don't see a single fighter attempting to shoot at the large warships, shown in ANH in that only smaller crafts flying underneath the force field could damage the crust of the battle station, and in ROTJ where effective small fire against capital ships is non existent (again, the unique X-wing shots did negligible damage).

Plus we do know that even small shields can already cope with multi-megajoules of firepower, as it happened with Obi-Wan's Delta 7 fighter (we saw that the next evolution of those fighters didn't have such invincible hulls in comparison, as buzz droids easily peeled them away). No doubt that enormous ships would have no issue to power shields thousands if not millions of times tougher.
And then, turbolasers have to be capable of bringing such shields down.

I'm not sure the small crafts are next to useless. If they were, why would they be deployed at all?

And as far as the size of the gun goes, let me show you a picture. Here's the size of an ISD-II's biggest guns, as scaled by Curtis Saxton, compared to an X-Wing (smaller given length).

It's not that many times larger. It's about four times the average diameter and twice as long. Or, in other words, in the general vicinity of 10-100 times as large. It also - clearly enough - has a much longer firing cycle for each individual barrel, as is typical for larger guns, which is probably why the ISD-II carries so many of them.

I'm not saying that gun size isn't proportional to the yield of the shot; that's actually about what I am saying. Something like an ISD hits about a hundred times as hard as an X-Wing.

I see that the tip of the laser cannon of the X-wing is 4 pixels wide, while the cylinder you used for the cannon is 38 pixels wide.

Respective bores' areas are:

12.566 m²
1,134.115 m²

That's more than 90 times superior. Of course, that won't bring our guns in the terajoule range, but it will also show that it would take more than 90 X-wing shots to bring that much equivalent firepower. Well, since X-wings can lock guns in quad mode, that would make 25 passes.

The tips and the average barrel diameter are quite different. We can see that for some reason, the X-Wing barrels narrow substantially and have that interesting "dish" construction near the tip. It's not clear why. The ISD barrels aren't visible in enough detail to see what's up with them. I was comparing overall volume.

You may say that X-wings fire several times, but so do turbolasers. Why assume one TL shot would suffice? We see in ROTJ that at close range, ships can exchange large quantities of TL bolts.
The TL turrets of an ISD-II have eight bores each. I think the EU said that the change from heavier dual cannons to those lesser cannons was caused by the Rebels' heavy reliance on smaller crafts.
Once again, it could very well be from WEG books.

Based on bore alone, the dual (turbo?)laser cannons of the Munificent-class frigates should smoke any craft, up to the Republican Venators, out of the sky in one shot.
Although this is what happened in "Downfall of a Droid" at the beginning, nothing like that ever happened in the ROTS battle.
That said, visual from TCWS are so incoherent at times that I'm not feeling OK about using them.

Then, again, do we know for sure that the bore size is the only factor?

We can consider that pound for pound, a turbolaser bolt is an enhanced sister of the laser bolt, just like the laser bolt is an enhanced form of a blaster bolt.
Finally, length matters.
We do know that TL bolts can be very long, although most of the end of the battle in ROTJ shows short bursts (but then, they're fired at great rates).

Then there is the possibility that turbolaser cannons could be some form of nuclear flak, literally: when bolts impacts, their particles are compressed and that is the equivalent of a chemical trigger lightning up the nuclear particles.
We do know that turbolasers, in the EU, are radioactive. So a turbolaser bolt may not be that much more powerful than a laser bolt, but it may have the added capacity of carrying away the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

I don't think that bore size is the only factor, but I do think that the total volume, of a laser/turbolaser barrel should correlated roughly linearly to its yield per unit shot. That's the way RL guns tend to work.

The guns on an ISD-II are about 30-40x the apparent size of the guns on an X-Wing. Maybe as much as 100x, since the turret housing should actually include a large fraction of the gun. There are 16x as many of those guns; however, the entire ship, in TESB and ROTJ, doesn't fire more than a couple of big bolts per second. I can't think of any case in which an ISD is firing a higher peak bolts/second rate than an X-Wing. Blame whatever you want - loading time, barrel cooling time, whatever - but that's what we see.

I know it might seem low, but however we slice it, the basic fact remains that an ISD simply doesn't allocate anywhere near the same sort of fraction of its volume in guns, and doesn't have anywhere near the amount of surface area.

If you buy into the idea that TIE fighters are using their "solar panels" to radiate waste weapon heat, and are fully using that surface area, you shouldn't buy anything more than a 20,000:1 firepower ratio between ISDs and TIE fighters (the ratio between surface areas), since the ISD has to also dissipate heat, and only has 20,000 times the surface area to do that with.

[Admiral Breetai]

is it so hard to imagine? an ISD blew up on screen behind akbar..due specifically to fighters in the movie

[Picard]

There's also the odd practice, which we can supposedly pick out in the ROTS battle (I haven't had any luck finding it) of mounting SPHA artillery walkers in the cargo bay of Venators / Republic Attack Cruisers. Those certainly have their own power source, but they're supposed to be effective against enemy capital ships.

Actually, it was not clear if walker itself was in hangar bay, or gun was just removed from walker, strapped to Venator and linked into Venator's power core.

[Mr. Oragahn]

There is, of course, the very famous A-Wing ramming incident.

Through the windows, at a time they had no shields anymore.
In fact, the shears in shields may be hard to predict. If we take the case of the X-wing firing at the "face" of the tower, we may ask why not directly fire at the protruding bridge ?
The pilot can't be that silly, so he probably went for the only area which would be worth shooting at (and that would be revealed by his sensors).
Yet, the area he shot at is quite... meaningless. So I'd say there can be fractures in shields, and it may be hard to predict where exactly.

Quite possibly. There's a lot left undetermined by the role of fighters in the film.

We know that fighters are powerful enough to be important; we also know that fighters aren't quite powerful enough to simply maim capital ships with ease.

I think they're only relevant in two cases:

1. When they carry thermonuclear missiles or heavy weapons of the same kind.
2. When heavy ships have lost their shields over some sections.

Other than that, I reject the ideat that mere laser cannons as mounted on fighters stand any chance at denting shields.

Well this is purely about SW. If there's a faction which can fire nuclear level weapons (or light impactors at high c fractional speeds), then they'd would logically have a field day in Star Wars.

That's my point. If peak intensity is all that's needed to overwhelm SW shields, then ST ships can easily destroy, or even carefully disable and capture, ISDs. Pop a photon torpedo from outside of range and then go to town.

That's also why, along the more moderate yields, I claimed that even neo Battlestar Galactica ships would be a considerable menace.

But we know that generators can be entirely linked to shields. Therefore they could in theory link weapons to such generators as well.

Source please?

TESB. The power source they blew up was clearly identified as powering the shields, and as long those generators were up, nothing could be shot at the land from space.
The EU is probably rife with more or less portable shield generators.
I won't use the Gungan shield as a reference, but the one used by the Trade Federation on Christophsis is another case of a rather small construct capable of powering an ever expanding shield which prevent any bombardment. The device obviously had its own power source.
It is very similar to god knows how many weapons which also carry their own power cores.

In fact, in order to hope bringing down shields, they'd have to. And there's no reason for a ship that's 1.6 km long not to carry at least a generator devoted to weapon systems, if they don't tax the excess heat from the main reactor used to push the craft.
Actually, the main reactor is located inside the ship. Yet they don't have problems with massive heat production. So they must have systems to channel thermal energy away. Why wouldn't they use that energy for other systems? In fact, radiating that energy would be very hard unless they attempted to shoot energized stuff to drain this heat out.

In ROTS, we see a capital gun turret in intimate operation: It's being fed ammunition. It doesn't look like it's actually tied to the ship's main power systems.

This weapon is completely at odds with everything. Its design prevents its use in typical SW space warfare, especially if ranges increase considerably beyond one kilometer.
Honestly, no one has ever been able to provide a convincing explanation about what those weapons are supposed to do, really.
What they certainly are not is capital weapons. They simply don't fit the bill. If at least they had a modicum of mobility and were firing projectiles at several kilometers per second and making considerable damage! But they don't.

This also doesn't address what I pointed out.

There's also the odd practice, which we can supposedly pick out in the ROTS battle (I haven't had any luck finding it) of mounting SPHA artillery walkers in the cargo bay of Venators / Republic Attack Cruisers. Those certainly have their own power source, but they're supposed to be effective against enemy capital ships.

They're supposedly precharged turbolasers.

Even worse, why then not point the formidable nuclear exhaust at enemy ships? Those ion thrusters even accelerate the particles. They'd need to jacket them up, or funnel them through a magnetic field projected by a magnetic ring, a bit like it's done for the superlaser, which is also directly tied to the reactor.

Plus my suggestion isn't really a theory as it's pretty much verified throughout the whole EU, and films can fit with it: wherever there are shields, small crafts are next to useless.
It's totally proved in TPM, verified during the whole battle of ROTS where we don't see a single fighter attempting to shoot at the large warships, shown in ANH in that only smaller crafts flying underneath the force field could damage the crust of the battle station, and in ROTJ where effective small fire against capital ships is non existent (again, the unique X-wing shots did negligible damage).

Plus we do know that even small shields can already cope with multi-megajoules of firepower, as it happened with Obi-Wan's Delta 7 fighter (we saw that the next evolution of those fighters didn't have such invincible hulls in comparison, as buzz droids easily peeled them away). No doubt that enormous ships would have no issue to power shields thousands if not millions of times tougher.
And then, turbolasers have to be capable of bringing such shields down.

I'm not sure the small crafts are next to useless. If they were, why would they be deployed at all?

The Rebels can equip all their fighters with anticapital ship missiles which allow them to harass sides which are out of reach of the TLs of other cruisers.
Although there's a variation in the power of a Mon Calamari guns in contrast to an ISD, it was described in "Starships of the Galaxy" that the Mon Calamari used snubfighters to soften the defenses of the largest imperial cruisers before engaging them.

Imperials, on the other hand, counter that with defense wings and other interceptors, and somehow rely on their own bombers as well, forcing the rebel fighters to defend their motherships instead of going all offense.

I see that the tip of the laser cannon of the X-wing is 4 pixels wide, while the cylinder you used for the cannon is 38 pixels wide.

Respective bores' areas are:

12.566 m²
1,134.115 m²

That's more than 90 times superior. Of course, that won't bring our guns in the terajoule range, but it will also show that it would take more than 90 X-wing shots to bring that much equivalent firepower. Well, since X-wings can lock guns in quad mode, that would make 25 passes.

The tips and the average barrel diameter are quite different. We can see that for some reason, the X-Wing barrels narrow substantially and have that interesting "dish" construction near the tip. It's not clear why. The ISD barrels aren't visible in enough detail to see what's up with them. I was comparing overall volume.

You may say that X-wings fire several times, but so do turbolasers. Why assume one TL shot would suffice? We see in ROTJ that at close range, ships can exchange large quantities of TL bolts.
The TL turrets of an ISD-II have eight bores each. I think the EU said that the change from heavier dual cannons to those lesser cannons was caused by the Rebels' heavy reliance on smaller crafts.
Once again, it could very well be from WEG books.

Based on bore alone, the dual (turbo?)laser cannons of the Munificent-class frigates should smoke any craft, up to the Republican Venators, out of the sky in one shot.
Although this is what happened in "Downfall of a Droid" at the beginning, nothing like that ever happened in the ROTS battle.
That said, visual from TCWS are so incoherent at times that I'm not feeling OK about using them.

Then, again, do we know for sure that the bore size is the only factor?

We can consider that pound for pound, a turbolaser bolt is an enhanced sister of the laser bolt, just like the laser bolt is an enhanced form of a blaster bolt.
Finally, length matters.
We do know that TL bolts can be very long, although most of the end of the battle in ROTJ shows short bursts (but then, they're fired at great rates).

Then there is the possibility that turbolaser cannons could be some form of nuclear flak, literally: when bolts impacts, their particles are compressed and that is the equivalent of a chemical trigger lightning up the nuclear particles.
We do know that turbolasers, in the EU, are radioactive. So a turbolaser bolt may not be that much more powerful than a laser bolt, but it may have the added capacity of carrying away the equivalent of a nuclear bomb.

I don't think that bore size is the only factor, but I do think that the total volume, of a laser/turbolaser barrel should correlated roughly linearly to its yield per unit shot. That's the way RL guns tend to work.

The guns on an ISD-II are about 30-40x the apparent size of the guns on an X-Wing. Maybe as much as 100x, since the turret housing should actually include a large fraction of the gun. There are 16x as many of those guns; however, the entire ship, in TESB and ROTJ, doesn't fire more than a couple of big bolts per second. I can't think of any case in which an ISD is firing a higher peak bolts/second rate than an X-Wing. Blame whatever you want - loading time, barrel cooling time, whatever - but that's what we see.

I know it might seem low, but however we slice it, the basic fact remains that an ISD simply doesn't allocate anywhere near the same sort of fraction of its volume in guns, and doesn't have anywhere near the amount of surface area.

Which should tell us that the mere bore size shouldn't be so important in determining the power of guns. We must assume engineers are not that stupid.

If you buy into the idea that TIE fighters are using their "solar panels" to radiate waste weapon heat, and are fully using that surface area, you shouldn't buy anything more than a 20,000:1 firepower ratio between ISDs and TIE fighters (the ratio between surface areas), since the ISD has to also dissipate heat, and only has 20,000 times the surface area to do that with.

That seems a very low ratio.
SW guns may not follow the rules of RL guns. Their principles could differ. The cannons are largely part of the guiding process. As per the guide on weapons and tech, the cannons largely pack the bolt and eventually energize it even more. Contrary to real life guns, where the projectile has its own power because it is its own charge, and where said projectile is already launched from inside the tube, we see that it's not the case for the weapons in Star Wars. If we look at the HTL of an ISD-I (picture), the tubes represent a ridiculous amount of the entire turret's structure, and the gun controls aren't even part of the turret. Several weapons have the power core that is detached of the barrel, if not of the entire gun. That's the case from the E-web to the DF9 or even the planetary turbolaser. The housing in question is ought to hold more than the base of the bores, such as in the DF9.
It doesn't make much sense in the end that a ship as small as a Delta-7 could power two/three digits megajoule shields, yet an ISD would somehow be stuck with a ridiculous ratio allowing some weak sauce guns to take them down. There's obviously a completely disconnect here at some point.

[Jedi Master Spock]

I think they're only relevant in two cases:

1. When they carry thermonuclear missiles or heavy weapons of the same kind.
2. When heavy ships have lost their shields over some sections.

Other than that, I reject the ideat that mere laser cannons as mounted on fighters stand any chance at denting shields.

The Rebels can equip all their fighters with anticapital ship missiles which allow them to harass sides which are out of reach of the TLs of other cruisers.
Although there's a variation in the power of a Mon Calamari guns in contrast to an ISD, it was described in "Starships of the Galaxy" that the Mon Calamari used snubfighters to soften the defenses of the largest imperial cruisers before engaging them.

Imperials, on the other hand, counter that with defense wings and other interceptors, and somehow rely on their own bombers as well, forcing the rebel fighters to defend their motherships instead of going all offense.

I disagree, but there's not really enough evidence in the movies to sort things out. Not that I believe that it's easy for fighters to take out capital ships with laser weapons alone, or that you would necessarily be able to do so with a single fighter against a Star Destroyer. Such things do actually happen in the EU, of course, but typically it takes the concerted fire of multiple squadrons. Here's the famous Mara Jade Z-95 incident:

"All ahead," he ordered the helm.
"Shields at full strength; turbolaser batteries stand ready. And inform
the leader of the boarding party that I want that Dreadnaught in Imperial
hands now."
"Yes, sir." There was a dull roar through the deck as the sublight drive
came up to power And, without warning, the roar was joined by the hooting
of the ship's alarms. "Bandits coming out of lightspeed astern," the
sensor officer snapped. "Eighteen craft-freighter class and smaller.
They're attacking."
Brandei swore viciously as he punched for the appropriate display. They
weren't Rebel vessels, not this group, and he wondered who in the Empire
they could be. But no matter. "Come around to two-seven-one," he ordered
the helm. "Bring aft turbolasers to bear on the bandits. And launch
Squadron Six."
Whoever they were, he would soon teach them not to meddle in Imperial
business. As to their identity : well, Intelligence would be able to
ascertain that later from the wreckage.
"Watch it, Mara," Aves's voice warned over the comm. "They're trying to
come about. And we've got TIE fighters on the way."
"Right," Mara said, permitting herself a sardonic smile. For all the good
that would do. The bulk of the Star Destroyer's starfighters were already
engaged with the New Republic forces, which meant that all Karrde's
people were likely to get would be recon ships and bombers. Nothing they
couldn't handle. "Dankin, Torve-swing down to intercept.
The two pilots acknowledged, and she returned her attention to the
inconspicuous spot beneath the Star Destroyer's central sublight drive
nozzle where her Z-95's lasers were currently blasting away. Beneath the
shielding at that point was a critical part of the lower-aft sensor
package. If she could take it out, she and the others would have free run
of the relatively undefended underside of the huge ship.
With a sudden puff of vaporized metal and plastic, the lasers punched
through. "Got it," she told Aves. "Lower-aft-central sector is now
blind."

This has been interpreted as a case where a lowly Z-95 managed to blast through a critical weak point in the ISD's shields; however, it's possible that the ISD's shields were weakened from taking fire from heavier ships, such as the Wild Karrde.

I think it's important to note that there's a huge difference between different capital ships as well as between different fighters. For example, a Rebel medical frigate is about 1/400th the volume (less than 1/5th the length) of an Imperial Star Destroyer. A group of TIE fighters and interceptors having a chance at breaking through its shields with laser weapons alone is not quite the same as shooting through an ISD's shields with just a Z-95's guns. A squadron of B-Wings blowing up an ISD on their own isn't even quite the same as a squadron of A-Wings blowing up an ISD on their own; B-Wings are supposed to be heavy bombers.

Which should tell us that the mere bore size shouldn't be so important in determining the power of guns. We must assume engineers are not that stupid.

Bore size may not strictly determine power of a gun, but we can reasonably expect that how powerful a gun is correlated with something related to its dimensions - diameter, bore volume, radiative surface area, length, and cross-sectional area are all good places to start looking.

That seems a very low ratio.

To me, it seems very high. As I've said before, in the EU it becomes very clear that power correlates more with length than with surface area. The example of the Strike cruiser is perfect, I think - it has half the overall fighting ability of a powerful warship exactly twice as long and about eight times the volume.

I really expect any battle in the EU to progress more along the lines of showing an ISD equivalent to a couple hundred TIEs in a fight. I really think that the 72 TIE complement listed in EU sources represents a significant fraction of an ISD's ship-to-ship combat capabilities - not the majority, but a fairly significant fraction.

SW guns may not follow the rules of RL guns. Their principles could differ. The cannons are largely part of the guiding process. As per the guide on weapons and tech, the cannons largely pack the bolt and eventually energize it even more. Contrary to real life guns, where the projectile has its own power because it is its own charge, and where said projectile is already launched from inside the tube, we see that it's not the case for the weapons in Star Wars. If we look at the HTL of an ISD-I (picture), the tubes represent a ridiculous amount of the entire turret's structure, and the gun controls aren't even part of the turret. Several weapons have the power core that is detached of the barrel, if not of the entire gun. That's the case from the E-web to the DF9 or even the planetary turbolaser. The housing in question is ought to hold more than the base of the bores, such as in the DF9.
It doesn't make much sense in the end that a ship as small as a Delta-7 could power two/three digits megajoule shields, yet an ISD would somehow be stuck with a ridiculous ratio allowing some weak sauce guns to take them down. There's obviously a completely disconnect here at some point.

TESB. The power source they blew up was clearly identified as powering the shields, and as long those generators were up, nothing could be shot at the land from space.
The EU is probably rife with more or less portable shield generators.
I won't use the Gungan shield as a reference, but the one used by the Trade Federation on Christophsis is another case of a rather small construct capable of powering an ever expanding shield which prevent any bombardment. The device obviously had its own power source.
It is very similar to god knows how many weapons which also carry their own power cores.

This weapon is completely at odds with everything. Its design prevents its use in typical SW space warfare, especially if ranges increase considerably beyond one kilometer.
Honestly, no one has ever been able to provide a convincing explanation about what those weapons are supposed to do, really.
What they certainly are not is capital weapons. They simply don't fit the bill. If at least they had a modicum of mobility and were firing projectiles at several kilometers per second and making considerable damage! But they don't.

This also doesn't address what I pointed out.

They're supposedly precharged turbolasers.

Shields and guns do have to be powered by something - but why assume it's a central generator? Turbolasers have their own turbines according to the SW Databank. This is actually how Lucas decided to name them turbo-lasers; turbine-powered lasers. They have their own generators attached. They may get fuel or some propellant piped in to their station, but it really looks like they're supposed to generate the power on-site. Same thing with carrying around SPHA-Ts or loading ammunition into giant guns that are of the sort of scale we'd see on a RL battleship. (By the way, on the manually-loaded weapon - mechanically loaded and aimed weapons like that can be used at ranges greatly exceeding 1 kilometer. It mostly depends on bolt speed and target acceleration.)

Similarly, generators that power shields we've seen only power shields. It's like an ancient WWI or WWII era warship - the engine is fueled by a diesel motor or coal-fired steam engine, the guns are powered by gunpowder, and the electrical systems are powered by batteries or a separate generator. We don't hear about routing power from one common source around the ship, like you do in Star Trek, transferring power from shields to guns to warp engines and back; instead we have combat droids loading shells. Turbines attached to weapons turrets. Shield generators that are targets in their own rights.

ST ships do seem to act like that, but I don't see any reason why, from the movies alone, we would assume the same holds for Star Wars. There are obviously advantages and disadvantages to powering systems separately or through a single unified power system, although Federation ships address this by having a multi-tier power system with secondary multiple fusion plants in the event the warp core goes offline, and [ridiculously good] batteries in case those go offline as a tertiary power system. (At least, they had battery systems in TOS. Voyager might not have been equipped with these, given the sort of difficulties they seemed to go through keeping their ship powered.)

Now, what you're really suggesting is that a SW ship should be able to put some significant fraction of its total reactor power out through its weapons. My question is why? That's going another step beyond assuming they have an integrated power system in the first place, which I'm not even convinced of.

[2046]

While not a specific film example, the CGI show is replete with examples of fighters, especially Y-Wings, just savaging warships. In the case of Malevolence there was torpedo/missile usage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf-Xo1LvvnA&NR

But no such weapons appear to be used when savaging multiple previously-unmolested Munificents:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y34tzS2S7XU#t=01m40s

Indeed, that same Ryloth battle features droid fighters whipping Venators, literally destroying one and damaging another to the point it was more useful as a ram during the second battle, rather than a warship. That said, some kamikaze tactics appeared to be in play against Venators as visible earlier in the video (though the ship destruction from the first battle is missing).

It seems to me that fighters are a definite and major threat. While it's well-known that Lucas based a lot of his battle concepts on WW2 movies and such, it seems to me that the idea of the bombs/torpedoes of fighters being the threat hasn't always carried over, and so as a result we literally have fighter guns and ship-mounted guns both being capable of major hits against warships.