Star Wars Star Wars Discussion Thread - LET THE PAST D-! Oh, wait, nevermind

[Bigking321]

You do realize that hyperspace ramming was in fact used in the EU books, in a way that demonstrated exactly why it isn't a viable general use tactic?

In the books? Where?

I think I've seen a panel from a comic or something dealing with hyperspace ramming but that was about the only thing I've heard of about it. And I consider that just a one off thing. Not really that serious.

Hyperspace ramming is just... a really bad idea to try and introduce. It throws every space battle in the past and future into question. Why build a death star if you can just ram a planet with Droid ships?

 

[Husky_Khan]

In the books? Where?

I think I've seen a panel from a comic or something dealing with hyperspace ramming but that was about the only thing I've heard of about it. And I consider that just a one off thing. Not really that serious.

Hyperspace ramming is just... a really bad idea to try and introduce. It throws every space battle in the past and future into question. Why build a death star if you can just ram a planet with Droid ships?

It happened in an old Marvel Star Wars comic. Three ISD-I's came out of hyperspace directly onto the Executor and rammed it. The Executor's shields held and the ship itself suffered no damage.

Also it wasn't even a "tactic." The Imperial Admiral tried to execute a microjump to catch the Rebel Fleet between two forces but instead due to stellar interference the Imperial Star Destroyers came out of hyperspace directly into the Executor.

Thus Admiral Purple Hair Holdo is the single greatest mind in the fifty or hundred thousand years or whatever of Star Wars space combat confirmed for discovering and executing the Hyperspace Ramming maneuever. It's called the Holdo Maneuver for a reason after all.

If she wasn't the first person to come up with this genius tactic, it wouldn't of been named after her.

Cope and Seethe Imperial MAGAts! Women can finally do things in Star Wars too.

 

[Allanon]

Look, hyperspace was entering a sort of alternate reality because even if you traveled at light speed it would take years, decades, centuries, millenia, to reach another star system. And this ignores the time-shift problem, something even "Space: 1999" had some grasp of.

So the only way it could work was by being in some other sort of reality. This is why you could not track ships in hyperspace- they literally weren't existing in this universe any longer. If any books in the EU allowed this it was a serious mistake and technically non-canon.

In my sci-fi one could use "time missiles." When you launched one it would vanish, only to reappear wherever you figured it would be after a certain time. This is why it was so hard to use them against fast-moving ships, you had to get too lucky and why Imperial Star Destroyers and that Super Star Destroyer would be so vulnerable to them- their size and lack of maneuverability would work against them and shields would not stop such weapons. But this was not hyperspace, it was traveling along a time line and both sides had "temporal fields" able to block these things, which is why a warbase or ship had to be damaged first before time missiles could be used.

 

[Allanon]

Cope and Seethe Imperial MAGAts! Women can finally do things in Star Wars too.

Yeah, like totally screw up the franchise...


Hey, posts here can enter hyperspace and end up in a different part of the Sietch Universe!

 

[Husky_Khan]

Yeah, like totally screw up the franchise...

Ah...

nvm

 

[Skallagrim]

It happened in an old Marvel Star Wars comic. Three ISD-I's came out of hyperspace directly onto the Executor and rammed it. The Executor's shields held and the ship itself suffered no damage.

Also it wasn't even a "tactic." The Imperial Admiral tried to execute a microjump to catch the Rebel Fleet between two forces but instead due to stellar interference the Imperial Star Destroyers came out of hyperspace directly into the Executor.

Thus Admiral Purple Hair Holdo is the single greatest mind in the fifty or hundred thousand years or whatever of Star Wars space combat confirmed for discovering and executing the Hyperspace Ramming maneuever. It's called the Holdo Maneuver for a reason after all.

If she wasn't the first person to come up with this genius tactic, it wouldn't of been named after her.

Cope and Seethe Imperial MAGAts! Women can finally do things in Star Wars too.

Yup. This was in the old (I mean OT-in-the-theatres era) Marvel comics, and it happened once. The 'ramming' ships exploded, the 'hit' ship... was unharmed.

That's pretty much sensible, and exactly what you'd expect. The ships have to "drop back" into realspace, and can't. So they don't even really hit you at all. Their just explode upon re-entering realspace... apparently without enough force to penetrate a decently strong energy shield.

I could believe that if you did it to an unshielded ship, you could do some real damage. But even then... an ImpStar is (taking the Executor's maximum size estimate!) a twelfth of the SSD's size. And this is three of them. Meanwhile, the Raddus is less than one seventeenth of the Supremacy's size. If these ImpStars can't even overload the shield, then using that logic, the explosion can't be all that powerful, and the TLJ explosion ought to be proportionally weaker.

(Meanwhile, the TLJ explosion destroyed twenty other SDs, canonically, including ones that are outside the 'debris cone'. They got cut in half with a weird light-effect, due to some magical hyperspace effect. Yes, hyperspace ramming canically destroys other ships in the target region as well.)

We may thus assume that in Disney canon, hyperspace-exit booms are way more powerful than in the old continuity. So much more that this tactic is a viable one-shot fleet-destroying move, which would furthermore allow a decently big ship to (for instance) at least render the Death Star's superlaser very damaged and inoperable.

It's also not "one in a million", since we see it happening again during one of the finale shots in TRoS (over Endor, I think). That's the same film that claims that it was "one in a million"!

So it's absolutely, unquestionably lore-breaking. The introduction of this notion renders all other space battles in the entire setting useless. Even if you have to sacrifice a lot of ships because it often goes wrong... that's worth it. Hyperspace ramming would be the number one successful tactic. All space battles would be centred around the aim of getting your forces in such a position that your big 'ram-ships' can do this specific thing.

 

[Allanon]

One curious thing about "Star Wars" was the lack of nuclear weapons. If an Imperial Star Destroyer ever came too close to one of our satellites and it had a nuclear warhead then it could either destroy or heavily damage that ship. Certainly a field nuke could take out Imperial Walkers and troops.


It's funny, watching the unaltered original. There was just something about it.

 

[Skallagrim]

One curious thing about "Star Wars" was the lack of nuclear weapons. If an Imperial Star Destroyer ever came too close to one of our satellites and it had a nuclear warhead then it could either destroy or heavily damage that ship. Certainly a field nuke could take out Imperial Walkers and troops.

If we take some of the feats they perform seriously, the weapons, shields and even materials seen in SW are all ludicrously powerful, and nukes would be almost useless in major engagements. Of course, SW is hardly consistent. If you take the "high end" feats performed by the tech as the base-line, then even a common hand-held blaster is enough to one-shot an Abrams tank, for instance. And I really mean "blow the whole thing to smithereens".

Somewhat realistically, nukes might be useful against smaller vessels, but are probably no good against heavy-duty shields. They would be useful in ground engaments, but I imagine big turbo-lasers also get the job done... with no fall-out. After all, when we assume there are no shields, even a group of ImpStars can canonically glass a whole planet's surface in a matter of days (if not less). At least in the EU. I think the new continuity's Operation Cinder stuff implies much the same.

In the old EU, nukes were used in the ancient past, though. They're basically out-dated weapons, no longer useful in an era of powerful shields and planet-glassing laser weapons. (After all, in the old days, when lasers and shields -- insofar as they were even practical -- were much weaker, nukes were explicitly used to blast Desevro back into the stone age, during the Tionese War.)

 

[Allanon]

I'm assuming the EMP from a nuke would affect large ships like that cannon on Hoth did. That pulse would be what would make a large ships vulnerable.

Don't forget a ship with its shields up could still be seen. Therefore shields did not keep out electromagnetic energy so a laser would just ignore them.

I also wonder how well a Jedi would do against a sawed-off shotgun.

I need a life...

 

[Lord Sovereign]

So it's absolutely, unquestionably lore-breaking. The introduction of this notion renders all other space battles in the entire setting useless. Even if you have to sacrifice a lot of ships because it often goes wrong... that's worth it. Hyperspace ramming would be the number one successful tactic. All space battles would be centred around the aim of getting your forces in such a position that your big 'ram-ships' can do this specific thing.

Or build their own version of Halo’s MAC guns that accelerate rounds into hyperspace and slap them on their warships.

Either way, it devastates the lore.

 

[Doomsought]

The mega-star-destyroyer is a support ship, not a true warship, so it is relatively thin skinned and cannot devote as much energy to shields.

I'm assuming the EMP from a nuke would affect large ships like that cannon on Hoth did. That pulse would be what would make a large ships vulnerable.

Not really, the EMP from a nuke is the result of the plasma from a nuclear detonation interacting with a planet's magnetic field. Ion cannons on the other hand are particle accelerators that accelerate highly charged ions into machines in order to create electrical interference.

 

[Bigking321]

The old EU rules for hyperspace were better and more sensible.

It kicks you out of normal space into a higher dimension without normal matter and where space is compressed allowing much faster travel without having to worry about hitting stuff.

Gravity wells are the exception. They leave shadows in hyperspace and will drag you back into real space. That's why courses were complicated to plot. You needed to path a way past all the stars, planets, and other assorted things that could pull you out.

The lighter and smaller the ship and the faster and more powerful the hyperdrive determined how close you could get to gravity wells without getting pulled out letting there be a variance in how fast ships can travel and how limited the routes were. A example being why the Death Star didn't just show up next to Yavin 4 and blow it up. It was so huge it had to show up much farther out of the system and come in with regular propulsion.

That's why finding new routes and blind jumps are so dangerous. You appear in real space in the middle of a asteroid field or about to be sucked into a black hole.

That necessitates the need for safe and known routes between systems which is the basis for well established corridors and predictable travel destinations based on where one enters and leaves a system.

Which in turn lead to Interdictior cruisers which could create artificial gravity shadows and pull ships out of hyperspace.

It was a good system. No ramming or appearing inside planets as their gravity would revert you to normal space, and no ramming ships at hyper speed because you're in a higher dimension at that point.

 

[Allanon]

The mega-star-destyroyer is a support ship, not a true warship, so it is relatively thin skinned and cannot devote as much energy to shields.

Not really, the EMP from a nuke is the result of the plasma from a nuclear detonation interacting with a planet's magnetic field. Ion cannons on the other hand are particle accelerators that accelerate highly charged ions into machines in order to create electrical interference.

But you can still see a shielded ship. So the electromagnetic energy given off by a nuke would just go right through.

If I remember blasters were not "lasers," but some sort of high-energy gas which is why light sabers could deflect them- they would not be simple energy. A Jedi, even if fast enough, could not deflect a laser with a light saber.

And against a sawed-off shotgun well...

I DO need a life, don't I?


Seriously, the most likely reason for no nukes in "Star Wars" was probably the same reason Teenage Mutant Turtles didn't use guns- it would screw up the story. Imperial Walkers appear, nuke is set off, Walkers melted lumps of metal, battle over...wouldn't be quite as good.

 

[Allanon]

The old EU rules for hyperspace were better and more sensible.

It kicks you out of normal space into a higher dimension without normal matter and where space is compressed allowing much faster travel without having to worry about hitting stuff.

Gravity wells are the exception. They leave shadows in hyperspace and will drag you back into real space. That's why courses were complicated to plot. You needed to path a way past all the stars, planets, and other assorted things that could pull you out.

The lighter and smaller the ship and the faster and more powerful the hyperdrive determined how close you could get to gravity wells without getting pulled out letting there be a variance in how fast ships can travel and how limited the routes were. A example being why the Death Star didn't just show up next to Yavin 4 and blow it up. It was so huge it had to show up much farther out of the system and come in with regular propulsion.

That's why finding new routes and blind jumps are so dangerous. You appear in real space in the middle of a asteroid field or about to be sucked into a black hole.

That necessitates the need for safe and known routes between systems which is the basis for well established corridors and predictable travel destinations based on where one enters and leaves a system.

Which in turn lead to Interdictior cruisers which could create artificial gravity shadows and pull ships out of hyperspace.

It was a good system. No ramming or appearing inside planets as their gravity would revert you to normal space, and no ramming ships at hyper speed because you're in a higher dimension at that point.

It's funny you should mention that. In the late 1970s "Star Wars" comics Chewbacca was able to trick Crimson Jack the pirate by stealing the charts for hyperspace travel from his stolen Star Destroyer's computers. A navigator mentioned using guesswork which would likely do something like you mentioned.


One thing Lucas understood, which the sequels didn't, was that imposing limitations made for a more interesting story. By the third sequel The Force could almost move planets, teleport, stop huge ships, etc. So where was the challenge? Jedi had to be smart or they'd get squished soon enough before, even with the prequels. It's like Batman as opposed to Superman.

 

[Doomsought]

But you can still see a shielded ship. So the electromagnetic energy given off by a nuke would just go right through.

The nuke wouldn't produce the same electrical interference because doesn't have an atmosphere to create plasma and does not have the magnetic field to induct the expanding plasma. The nuke just produces some radation and a very small amount of plasma. Unless it is a contact detonation, even common structural steel will tank the plasma and the starship has plenty of ray shielding to protect against the radiation.

 

[Allanon]

The USS Enterprise was hurt by a nearby nuke.

 

[Lord Sovereign]

To my mind a nuclear warhead would be primitive but devastating. Regardless of the mundanity of them in a galaxy far, far away, it's still a miniature sun popping into existence. That will do more than merely scratch the paint job of a starship.

 

[Allanon]

Curiously in ground combat we Earth humans could stand up to Imperial forces.

The problem for the Empire would be if we ever started using nukes. Yes they would devastate Imperial forces but the Empire would wonder about a race insane enough to use such terrible weapons on their own world when we have no real spaceships or the means of leaving our world. They would conclude that this world with such crazy people is not worth the effort since we'd blow it up from under us.

 

[Bigking321]

Aren't nukes kinda worthless in space? If a ship has any kind of shielding against the radiation in space a nuke wouldn't really add much to it.

And there really isn't enough matter in space to propagate the blast wave like on a planet with atmosphere.

Nukes work great on planets. Not so much off of them.

Unless you get the nuke on the ship you're trying to kill. Fair enough.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

Look, hyperspace was entering a sort of alternate reality because even if you traveled at light speed it would take years, decades, centuries, millenia, to reach another star system. And this ignores the time-shift problem, something even "Space: 1999" had some grasp of.

In both the old EU content and in the Disney Canon version, the ramming ship wasn't in hyperspace at the time of the collision -- in the EU example the ramming ships had just reverted from hyperspace, in the Disney example the ramming ship was making its spool-up jump. So in both cases the ramming was simply taking advantage of the extreme realspace velocity reached during the jump process.

The mega-star-destyroyer is a support ship, not a true warship, so it is relatively thin skinned and cannot devote as much energy to shields.

Not really, the EMP from a nuke is the result of the plasma from a nuclear detonation interacting with a planet's magnetic field. Ion cannons on the other hand are particle accelerators that accelerate highly charged ions into machines in order to create electrical interference.

It may not have even had shields up. In TESB we saw that the Imperial Star Destroyer "Avenger" did not actually have its shields up while chasing the Millennium Falcon; the shields weren't raised until the Falcon turned to attack position.