Atekimogus wrote:Yes you mentioned that and that is were my confusion lies. Who the hell are those Warlords? If you read the Thrawn triology you are under the assumption that Thrawn is the supreme commander of the imperial forces. No Warlords mentioned iirc. (Maybe they are retconnend in one of the following novels?) Since I can hardly imagine that huge parts of the Imperial fleet just say: "Well, he is our duly appointed commander...but frak it, we rather just stay at home/not phoning in that we are still there, I have to assume that the Warlords are not part of the Empire?
Yes and no. The warlords were senior Imperial commanders (mostly of sectors, oversectors and independent fleets) who went rogue after Endor (mostly in two waves immediately after Endor and after the fall of Coruscant). They continued to run their areas and fleets on Imperial lines, and continued to fight the New Republic, but also fought the other walords, and the forces still loyal to what remained of the core Imperial government: the Ruling Council. During Thrawn's War they supported his campaigns, but it was a much looser arrangement than it would have been had they still been part of the Empire proper.
I don't really have a probleme with that to be honest. The scope he adopts for his books is in scale with the movies imho.
No it isn't. The movies show the backwaters of the galaxy - the only areas the Rebellion can safely operate in. It's still crawling with Star Destroyers, best shown when Vader was able to deploy something like half a dozen of them over Tatooine at almost no notice, and when the Tyrant was disabled by the Rebel's
black market ion cannon at Hoth.
Moreover, look at the heavy guns of the fleet - the Ex, which utterly dwarfs the ISDs, and the two Death Stars, big enough to produce millions or billions of ISDs from the same resources.
If we really assume a MUCH bigger imperial fleet consisting of thousands of star ships etc. the movies also start to make not much sense. The rebel force gathered for Endor - which we are led to believe is basically the bulk of what the rebel alliance is able to muster, an all out desperate attack before the DS2 comes online, would simply be a laughable non-issue and prior to their attack they wouldn't even be able to raid or make hit and run attacks with their pitiful force.
That was covered in Mothma's briefing in RotJ - "with the Imperial fleet spread throughout the galaxy in a vain effort to engage us..." In a galaxy of hundreds of billions of star systems, and tens of millions of major inhabited systems, the notion of an Imperial fleet of less than hundreds of thousands of Star Destroyers is ludicrous.
For example?
This lot
And just because it is named a Star "Destroyer" doesn't mean that it is in any way, shape or form comparable to real life ocean going destroyers.
No, the fact that it does a destroyer's job (escorting the big ships, establishing a blockade of a fourth-rate shithole like Tatooine, chasing down random smugglers, etc) makes it a destroyer.
Also Dreadnaughts are smaller than destroyers so another indicator that our nomenclature is not in use within the Empire.
Dreadnaught-class heavy cruisers, not dreadnoughts in the sense of the ship type.
Well it makes sense that he wouldn't replace all his fleets commanders just for the sake of it. Still the thing about him being supreme commander is that he could order them around as he saw fit which means he HAD access to them which would then mean that the fleet was indeed not so big as we are later led to believe and that a few hundred dreadnoughts really made a difference. (iirc the republic (or Solo) assumed that they had far more time to prepare against the Katana-fleet simply because he didn't know about the cloning facility and he assumed that it just would take a while for the Empire to raise the manpower to crew those ships. That simply wouldn't have been such an issue when there are huge Warlord-fleets in reserve roaming around as we are led to believe in following novels.)
They weren't just roaming randomly - they were engaging the NR in other areas of the galaxy. It's a big place, and you need a lot of ships to conduct a war the length and breadth of it.
Ah well, have you played Empire at War?
Nope.