Star Wars - The Essential Guide to Warfare official comments and observations

Lusankya technically is the Executor II, sister ship, supposedly.

Weren't those ships the first ships known and named. Lusankya wasn't known until later.

Remember your formal training, we only use SSD when discussing soppy admirals worried about their Star Destroyers getting usurped.

There are now officially twenty or so Executor-class models that we know of post-Endor, however any Imperial era Dreadnought over 5km is informally labeled an SSD out of derision.

Done in secret.

Then you've got the Vengeance, Guardian, Annihilator, Whelm (oddest name for an SSD in my book)... and an unnamed one blown up at Fondor before completion not long before Endor (might not be counted in any listings), and the Terror (which might or might not have been done in secret- it was attached to a secret project at least, and got blown up pre-Endor)...

isn't that the one in Forces of Corruption?

Nah, that was the Annihilator. The one I'm talking about was from Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike.

The cloaked Executor?

Engineer: What should we call the ninth hull?

Moff: Whelm...

Engineer: Brilliant.

Moff: Wait!

Engineer: That'll be number 10.

Moff: Fu- never mind.

Overwhelm obviously, but Whelm just doesn't have the same panache to it as its obvious extended name.

Yea, that one.

Exactly. It's like, it has whelm, but not enough whelm to qualify for overwhelm.

I get Lokar's point...but those are all cover images. Comic covers are notorious, across companies, for wildly inaccurate depictions of their own contents.

It's...irritating, that there's an a Executor-class SSD named Vengeance, and at least two regular ISDs named Vengeance, and still unknown-class SSD Jerec had in Jedi Knight, also named Vengeance. It'd be nice if there was a clear lineage to them, but that doesn't seem to work out.

Could Whelm be shorthand for "Wilhelm", as in Tarkin?

Some commanders seem to very proudly boast of their own "Super Star Destroyers", so while it may have started derisively, it didn't remain that way.

Does the EGtW give rough dates of introduction for the "new" SSD classes that first appeared in Dark Empire? I would think some were around before Endor, and some are more recent designs from Clone Palp's secret holdings in the Deep Core. Operation Shadow Hand did seem to pull in an usual amount of large ships. Thrawn was waging his own counteroffensive from the Outer Rim months before, but he didn't have a single ship bigger than an Imperial-II in his war fleet. Separate warlords who had Exectuors seemed to guard them jealously, as having one made you a serious player.

Oh, she was going *into* hyperspace when she hit the planet, not coming out of it. That might explain why we don't have a lot more known cases of planets getting pulped by brake failures. It's not the exit that's the problem.
I wonder how badly damaged the planet the Malevolence jumped into was.

Why isn't there a manual shut-down for the hyperdrive, though? The shuttle in 'Jedi Crash" had the same problem, damage started up the program and they couldn't turn it off.

Could be, but just considering their names, i mean, Executor, Aggressor, Annihilator, Enforcer, Guardian, Intimidator, Iron Fist, Knight Hammer, Razor's Kiss, Second Death, Reaper and Terror - that completely seems unlikely.

So no.

But you're forgetting the Lusankya. If they can name one after a KGB prison they can name one after a Tarkin. Although the famous one is actually Wilhuff, so the slang would have been Huff...or perhaps "Big Willy"

Alternately, maybe there was Darth Whelm somewhere in history; he was not terribly impressive, but not quite a disappointment either.

Lusankya was originally the Executor II, remember. Lusankya as a name was a name that was supposed to be a prison name to begin with, and the ship got re-named for the prison facility within it by Isard.

No, at least I don't think so.

One thing I solidly get the impression of: Ships larger than Star Destroyer class aren't necessary. They're nice to have a few of, but the NR even tried going without them for awhile (though they eventually did back off a bit on that and do the Viscount class).

I suspect a lot of the warlords focused on building larger-than-ISD ships (but not the super huge ones, 2-4 KM ones which were more affordable for such powers and which made up a lot of the Dark Empire ships) for the intimidation factor and threat in one-on-one duels, but this ultimately likely proved a tactical detriment in flexibility. Thrawn, having come in to a part of the Empire that was mostly made up of pre-Endor designs, felt no need to change from standarization and seek out such ships.

It may also be that more isolated sectors were more likely to request or make for themselves a larger command ship / possibly they were considered less expendable so saw fewer casualties in conflicts with the NR and other warlords than the ISDs did, so Palp's call to all quarters brought in a lot of them.

True. But deliberately i left the Lusankya out as it didn't follow the norm. And Wilhelm -/- Whelm....seems plausible but unlikely.
Besides as Q99 stated

It only because Lusankya after they needed somewhere to put it....besides it was supposed to be used as Palpatine's secret escape ship....so somehow i figure he would have reverted it back to Executor II sometime later...

It's Lubyanka, not a Lusankya.

The Ship is Lusankya.....named similarly to Lubyanka

One interesting thing is that by Legacy, giant ships are pretty much completely gone, and even the GFFA's line ships have gone down in size.

Perhaps the advancements made during the period of conflict did lead to, eventually, more efficient ships winning over, especially when peace broke out.

I think more likely, when peace broke out the need for heavily armed and armored battlewagons, and the subsequent excuses for their horrendous costs, went out the window and the people demanded the Navy make do with less. If there's no one to fight then there's no justification for gigantic war machines.

I still maintain that the reason ships much larger than an ISD never made the impact they should have on paper is that proper strategy and tactics were never developed for their use and implemented on a wide enough level to make a difference. Too many Admirals disliked them and wouldn't give them the chance they deserved and the Admirals who did like them didn't know how to properly utilize them.

Yea, though it still says something that by the time of the comics (where the Sith Empire vs Empire-in-Exile war had been going on for a bit), the most powerful new ship around is still only a slightly large upgrade of the Pellaeon-class Star Destroyer.

Then Krayt brought out his Dragon ships in the late game, which were bigger, but still likely only 2x as big as a Pallaeon SD and *maybe* edging into the Battlecruiser category but not by much. (image).

Few numbers making for lack of good doctrine for them? Makes sense.

Considering how every warlord seemed to try them too, perhaps there managed to simultaneously be plenty of opportunity to come up with good anti-big ship tactics. Trench run syndrome and all that.


Hm, and possibly it was found they just weren't the proper tool for fighting insurgencies and such, which is what the galaxy had more of than big fleet clashes.

There were plenty of big fleet clashes between the warlords, but like dolts they all seemed to think that dreadnoughts could stand alone when that isn't what they're meant to do at all. A dreadnought is meant to anchor an entire fleet and be the backbone for it. You don't throw it against an opposing fleet all alone and expect it to win the day for you as is so often portrayed in the EU. A perfect example of this would be the debacle between Grand Admiral Pitta and Grand Admiral Grunger. Pitta had virtually no fleet, but he did have a Torpedo Sphere. Grunger had a fleet and an Executor-class dreadnought, the Aggressor, which he didn't commit to battle until after most of his fleet had been gutted by Pitta's Torpedo Sphere. Ultimately he ended up ramming the Sphere and destroying both vessels and killing them both.

Now that sounds like a battle that'd discourage people off big ships

I guess I should say: The Rebellion wasn't impressed by them because they fought like an insurgency and found they weren't as scary as a well-run fleet. The Imperial Warlords who were impressed with them did stupid stuff like that, and many of the most successful Imperials who went on to form the Remnant were the ones who focused on more standard ship sizes. In the NR there did seem to be a tendency to sacrifice them to blow up big things too.

Whatever the case, their popularity fell, and there was a general move towards smaller in the following century.

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New Endnotes is up, part 8.

It's lunacy like that which makes me think most Grand Admirality appointments were purely political in nature. Only a few of them were portrayed as being even slightly more competent than the typical Imperial Idiot and at least one was a blatant political appointee.

Most of them were political appointments. I think it states that only 3, maybe 4, Grand Admirals were appointed because of their military capabilities...they were Thrawn, Teshik, Takle and....on other.

I assumed the Imperious/Alliance is at least a few times bigger than the other ships.
Though I think the cosest thing to an official size is John Ostrander online confirming that it is indeed "more bigger" than a Pellaeon.

I'm glad Teshik was given respect. He's my hands down favorite and I hated how he went out.