Atekimogus wrote:Which is only an argument if you believe that ISDs are only small escorts, which I know you do but we simply have to agree to disagree there. For me, the simple fact that an ISD is a carrier, troop transport, battleship and patrolship all simultaniously is a heavy indicator that our conventional naming scheme for sea-going ships just doesn't apply anymore here.
Why not? Their use films show their primary role roughly matches that of a destroyer, with a few extra goodies, although considerably fewer than a dedicated carrier or troop transport.
You wouldn't use a small destroyer in a captial ship role like they did with the blockade fleet on endor.
As in any fleet formation you use a large number of escorts in support of a few heavies (in this case Executor and at least two AWC "battlecruisers").
So on one hand you say that Home One and Liberty would wipe the floor with an ISD
No, I said a couple of task groups took down the Ex. Home One would kill an ISD pretty easily, but a Liberty is an even match, with a possible advantage to the ISD.
on the other hand you can give no reason why they then didn't think about bringing at least one or two of their own supposedly existing capital ships other then the Executor to the fight
Simple - those heavy ships didn't come into service until decades later.
And the same fucking mistake happened when they formed a dedicated battlegroup to hunt down the major Rebel base on Hoth?
You mean the battlegroup of a dreadnought and a few escorts?
Oh I forgot....the "real" captial ships where busy chasing down the rebels.
No, they were being held in reserve in the core.
It was your argument for destroyers being used in a capacity they are not really designed for.
It was the demonstrate that the mere fact that a ship carries troops (or fighters) does not disprove its primary role. The fact that they were using cruisers as well doesn't change this (especially as Imperial Star Cruisers probably also have the same troop/fighter extras as the ISD.
And how would our navies look like if the only expected threat were Somalia pirates? Probably the same as the imperial fleet, a few big ass ships like the executor for when the shit gets real, but mostly they are in docks and the rest smaller multiporpuse ships which are expected to handle everything that can be thrown at them, like the ISD. There is no need for ships inbetween.
A modern fleet isn't a great force to use as comparison, due to its overwhelming dependence on air power and submarines to do the heavy work. WW1 is probably the closest, albeit with added fighters - destroyers for the mundane work including fleet escort, cruisers as destroyer leaders/local heavies in less important parts of the world, and battleships for killing other battleships.
Or we can cut the crap and agree that ol' Palpatine didn't have a clue about the Vong? Now I am ready to accept it if it is somewhere writen, but it has to be more than just idle speculation that he "might" have had a bad dream about them.
Jedi, or Sith, rarely dream, and when they have a bad one it's usually an indication that there's serious trouble on the way.
Hmm....don't remember this. Was it in the novelization?
Nope - the film. From the Executor's bridge as the A-Wing hit you can see three Liberty/wingless Liberty-types off her port side, which the view of her dive shows was the same side as Home One. The view of the dive also shows at least one Liberty and one Home One of her port side.
Apples and Oranges. If there was no need for a shipclass between an ISD and an Super-ISD (which quite honestly, seems to fall in the same category as the DS, namely just to intimidate with being complete overkill) why would they built intermediary ships?
If 99% of their job is to chase down pirates/rebels - as you say - than what use is a heavy cruiser or dreadnaught when a smaller ship can do so much better and cost efficient?
For targets that could shrug off an ISD's attack but for which an Ex would be overkill. I've no doubt that the vast majority of the fleet are the small ships such as ISDs, but the existence of the larger ships is indisputable.
The size of the bridge and sensor domes? Are you shitting me? (pardon my french).
Not at all - the Imperial heavies seem to use the same basic superstructure regardless of their size, so the bridge can be used as a yardstick. Compare the bridge structures of the
ISD,
Allegiance,
Bellator and
Assertor and you'll see they're all the same size, despite the vastly different sizes of the ships..
Alone in the picture I posted there could be rounding errors of a few hundred percent because it is SO detailed.
Not that much. Certainly you can't say (for example) "that ship is 4852.56 metres long", but you can estimate their sizes to within a km or so. For example, both the ships you've posted are clearly larger than the ISD, due to the lesser prominence of the bridge structure, with the second one the larger.
And you missed the point completely that I wouldn't use those as evidence - not because I am an idiot (btw. no need to get offensive there) - but because this analysis is extremely inconclusive.
It's imprecise in terms of their exact size, role, and firepower, but the evidence for their existence and approximate size is quite conclusive.
We are talking about ships with no names, sometimes even without sighting or anything even remotely approaching a good size reference.
And?
everything written in the analysis about it is written in stone?
Not at all - we have the fact of its existence and its approximate size. That says nothing about its role, precise dimensions, armament, troop or fighter complement
just because some bloke on the internet assigned a number on it? (Boy I hope you are not the author of that site....that would be a me dropping a foot in it
).
When a bloke far more intelligent than you or I (as demonstrated by his PhD in astrophysics) looks at an image and says "this ship is between length x and length y", I tend to pay attention
Heck for all I know they are still discussing the exact size of the Executor so this is all very flimsy indeed.
No, that's finally been solved (due in large part to the work of the site you're bitching about).
Boy...that sure makes discussing star trek canon almost simply compared to this mess.
Absolutely. Indeed, if C-canon got taken out things would be much easier to resolve, as we'd only have seven Imperial-era ship classes to worry about - four destroyers (Liberty, wingless Liberty, ISD and Tector), two cruisers (the Endor comm ship and Home One) and a battleship (Executor).