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sniper4625 posted:The Jedi Academy Trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson. There's a readthrough of them going on in The Book Barn thread right now, link's in the OP. Casimir Radon posted:Jedi Academy Trilogy. Thanks for the fast replies. I'll check out the read through to brush up them.
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Aug 25, 2010 15:11
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Karandras posted:I guess it makes sense if you picture the Imperial Fleet as being basically 100% held up intimidating local systems with only a few dozen or more capital ships free for action at a time? Scale is a bitch when it comes to Star Wars. On one hand, you have things like ROTJ where the entire Rebel Fleet amounts to four cruisers and supporting vessels, and novels like the Thrawn Trilogy where Thrawn wrecks poo poo up with a tiny fleet of four vanilla Star Destroyers, and on the other hand they band around numbers like a million member systems, 100 quadrillion population of the Empire etc. It's hard to rationalise. I do it the same way you do by picturing 99% of the navy are on guard duty so it's really hard to muster an aggressive force, especially post-ROTJ when planets will be more open to rebellion. I think the Remnant had something like 2,000 ISDs by the end of the war, so if you extrapolate that backwards a ballpark figure could probably be reasoned (10x that maybe?). That the Empire would lack the resources to smash openly rebelling planets prior to ROTJ doesn't sit well with me though. I just can't picture the GCW as a land grab a la the Empire at War or Rebellion games.
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Aug 25, 2010 15:57
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Pththya-lyi posted:Speaking of terrible Star Wars names, here's how you make up your own! This is buried deep in the last thread, but I think it's worth posting again. I am Turja Howis, which seems reasonable  I have started to read the first book of the Jedi Academy trilogy and it seems alright. It is disappointing to see the Clone Wars being rehashed again - I have the Dark Horse "Graphic Novels" and the 2 DVD set that seemed very cool. I guess George must make his money somehow.
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Aug 25, 2010 15:58
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I'm pretty sure Pellaeon mentions in the camaas crisis books which I forget the proper name for, that the Empire, in its prime, had about 35,000 Star Destroyers available.
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Aug 25, 2010 16:14
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Dave Syndrome posted:Pedophilia, Incest.....The Skywalker family has it all! I also have to point out that in ep-2 I love how Mr Jinn was in as a force voice saying "Anakin noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo" when he cuts down the sand people luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuke Anakin noooooooooooooo Vader: NooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooo Lucas!!!
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Aug 25, 2010 16:33
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DougieC posted:Scale is a bitch when it comes to Star Wars. On one hand, you have things like ROTJ where the entire Rebel Fleet amounts to four cruisers and supporting vessels, and novels like the Thrawn Trilogy where Thrawn wrecks poo poo up with a tiny fleet of four vanilla Star Destroyers, and on the other hand they band around numbers like a million member systems, 100 quadrillion population of the Empire etc. It's hard to rationalise. I do it the same way you do by picturing 99% of the navy are on guard duty so it's really hard to muster an aggressive force, especially post-ROTJ when planets will be more open to rebellion. The Warhammer 40K universe suffers from this same issue. An untold number of people, an empire that spans half the galaxy, and combat where millions are killed in hours through meat grinders. Yet somehow a <million strong force of super soldiers can turn the tide. The answer isn't in any twisted, convoluted reconstruction of the fluff; the writers simply aren't that good, and they could not figure out a way to have people be badasses (or really have any influence upon events at all) against the backdrop of an unimaginably big story, so it just "is that way". There's no amount of writing or Force magic or whatever you want that could make Thrawn truly relevant, so they just wrote him as relevant.
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Aug 25, 2010 16:38
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Rrail posted:The Warhammer 40K universe suffers from this same issue. An untold number of people, an empire that spans half the galaxy, and combat where millions are killed in hours through meat grinders. Yet somehow a <million strong force of super soldiers can turn the tide. Figure some approximate numbers here - say 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and one in one million of those has habitable planets. That gives us 100k habitable star systems...which is probably "low" for our estimate of the star wars galaxy, since wookiepedia claims that the Corporate Sector alone has 30k star systems. But, uh, yeah. Using numbers like that or even 2-3x that and you have a couple hundred thousand worlds covered by 25000 star destroyers. Use the other numbers (like the "one and a half million member and conquered worlds, as well as sixty-nine million colonies, protectorates and puppet states spread throughout the entire galaxy" line in wookiepedia) and things like a single corvette running around terrorizing worlds (a la Night Caller in Wrath Squadron) get put into perspective. You've got a huge amount of space to cover and your biggest capital ships comprise a tiny fraction of your fleet, so that when someone else (such as Thrawn) shows up with four of them in one place, the local defenses are probably very, very badly outgunned. Of course there's plenty of other poo poo throughout the EU that contrasts with this, but I think the depictions throughout the X-Wing series - where important actions occur with relatively few ships involved - feel like a good depiction of how things would "really" be. Something has to be really important to get dozens of star destroyer level capital ships involved. mynnna fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Aug 25, 2010 |
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Aug 25, 2010 17:14
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Pththya-lyi posted:Speaking of terrible Star Wars names, here's how you make up your own! This is buried deep in the last thread, but I think it's worth posting again. I'm Henma Gabro. Sounds Star Warsy, but I feel like I'd be a moisture farmer or something lame 
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Aug 25, 2010 17:17
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Add that to the fact that for the most part neither side is willing or capable of wiping out an entire planet (Toprawa, Caamas, Alderaan, etc., are exceptions) and you can see how it could potentially be possible to fortify a planet with relatively "few" forces such that the other side wouldn't be willing to attempt to conquer it. Zahn even described it that way in The Last Command when he had Thrawn take Ukio with sleight of hand. And really, at that point the Rebel Alliance didn't have THAT many planets that openly supported it. DougieC posted:That the Empire would lack the resources to smash openly rebelling planets prior to ROTJ doesn't sit well with me though. I just can't picture the GCW as a land grab a la the Empire at War or Rebellion games. That's why games aren't canon. gently caress TFU.
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Aug 25, 2010 17:18
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arioch posted:Add that to the fact that for the most part neither side is willing or capable of wiping out an entire planet (Toprawa, Caamas, Alderaan, etc., are exceptions) and you can see how it could potentially be possible to fortify a planet with relatively "few" forces such that the other side wouldn't be willing to attempt to conquer it. Zahn even described it that way in The Last Command when he had Thrawn take Ukio with sleight of hand. If that if they would, the defenders can hold out long enough for aid to arrive, and then the attacking force is caught between static planetary defenses and whatever starships come in to assist.
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Aug 25, 2010 17:26
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arioch posted:That's why games aren't canon. gently caress TFU. Yes, but my point is that in EU literature (and games like X-Wing) you have races that are in open rebellion: the Mon Calamari, the Sullustans, maybe the Bothans, but I find that impossible to stomach when the Empire has an overwhelming military/logistical advantage surely capable of making GBS threads up any planet of its choosing. Surely the only way to evade such a force is to keep on the move and be all guerilla warfare.
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Aug 25, 2010 17:38
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DougieC posted:Yes, but my point is that in EU literature (and games like X-Wing) you have races that are in open rebellion: the Mon Calamari, the Sullustans, maybe the Bothans, but I find that impossible to stomach when the Empire has an overwhelming military/logistical advantage surely capable of making GBS threads up any planet of its choosing. Surely the only way to evade such a force is to keep on the move and be all guerilla warfare. You blow up a few planets and fear of it's an effective tool, you blow up a few more planets and then the general population goes into open revolt anyway. At least, that's how you'd justify it in Star Wars. The Rebels generally set up their actual bases in out of the way backwater planets (gently caress the EU for making Hoth the second Tatooine) so the Empire has no idea where they're at to justify glassing an entire planet to get them. Which they only have to do because of the existence of planetary shielding. It makes sense. VAGENDA OF MANOCIDE fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Aug 25, 2010 |
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Aug 25, 2010 17:43
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arioch posted:You blow up a few planets and fear of it's an effective tool, you blow up a few more planets and then the general population goes into open revolt anyway. At least, that's how you'd justify it in Star Wars. The Rebels generally set up their actual bases in out of the way backwater planets (gently caress the EU for making Hoth the second Tatooine) so the Empire has no idea where they're at to justify glassing an entire planet to get them. But Mon Calamari was a planet in open rebellion, as in the kicked Imperials off the planet, stopped paying their taxes etc. The Empire could have justified loving their poo poo up by the fact that they're suppressing an open revolt for the good of the Empire and its stability. It makes far more sense to put down an open rebellion if you're a tyrannical oval office regime than allow it to exist, because tolerating it would mean more planets could try it and get away with it. I think according to Dark Empire and its RPG sourcebook, the Emperor had planned to use the Death Star on Mon Calamari, but then it went boom, so when his clone unleashed the World Devastators the planet was his first planet. So the official in-universe answer is that they never quite got around to it. Maybe it's a logistical nightmare assembling a fleet big enough to lay a smackdown on Mon Calamari and it takes several years or something. Vader's fleet in ESB was something like 27 star destroyers and that was probably the biggest mobile fleet out there, and it wouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination to think that the Mon Cal defense force (planet population of 27 billion and first-rate shipyard should equate to thousands and thousands of fighters and a number of capships) could battle that fleet to a standstill. I guess.
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Aug 25, 2010 18:14
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The simplest answer as to why the Empire didn't reconquer Mon Calamari is that they didn't want to have to be near it's disgusting Fishmonster residents for any long periods of time.
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Aug 25, 2010 18:45
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IMO the Empire didn't fight the Mon Cal because it didn't want them to be made a Martyr. The Ackbars kick the Empire off the planet, and have enough ships (sleeper ships? hidden stash?) in orbit so that there would be very significant losses in re-taking the planet. I imagine the Empire's thinking went kinda like this; The First Galactic Empire posted:Dear Mon Calamari, Without the alliance to back them, I think the Mon Cal would have come crawling back within a few years.
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Aug 25, 2010 19:48
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Slantedfloors posted:The simplest answer as to why the Empire didn't reconquer Mon Calamari is that they didn't want to have to be near it's disgusting Fishmonster residents for any long periods of time. I was trying to watch the cartoon Clone Wars but that sequence with Fisto and the Mon Cals with lances riding seamonkeys killed my interest. That poo poo reached "Rocket Robin Hood" levels of awful.
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Aug 25, 2010 20:00
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Dick Trauma posted:I was trying to watch the cartoon Clone Wars but that sequence with Fisto and the Mon Cals with lances riding seamonkeys killed my interest. That poo poo reached "Rocket Robin Hood" levels of awful. Another thing the Legacy Comics got right: The retarded Mon Calamari Sea-Knight guys all got slaughtered by the Sith.
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Aug 25, 2010 20:07
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But the Mon Calamari Capital Ships are mostly converted pleasure cruisers with top of the line shield generators? Maybe they just have a kick rear end ship yard as good as Kuat and any mass invasion wouldn threaten them to scuttle one of the biggest ship yards in the Galaxy?
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Aug 25, 2010 20:59
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Torael_7 posted:Figure some approximate numbers here - say 100 billion stars in the galaxy, and one in one million of those has habitable planets. That gives us 100k habitable star systems...which is probably "low" for our estimate of the star wars galaxy, since wookiepedia claims that the Corporate Sector alone has 30k star systems. Star Wars isn't hard SF so I don't imagine anyone official thought this through very hard. If I were writing a book or RPG and had canon-altering authority, the only way I can think of to make it sensible is to assume the population and number of inhabited worlds is much smaller than the current EU. Say, ten thousand or so human-inhabited worlds, most with just a few million to a few hundred million people. Say another thirty thousand planets inhabited mostly by non-humans. Humans and non-humans frequently both live on planets where their biology allows it. I figure a modern Nimitz aircraft carrier is a big deal for a nation of three hundred million, so a Star Destroyer of nearly a cubic mile of high-tech construction requires substantial resource and manpower costs even spread over thousands of planets. Thus it's reasonable that the ROTJ fleet actually was a substantial fraction of the entire Imperial navy.
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Aug 25, 2010 21:24
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SeanBeansShako posted:Maybe they just have a kick rear end ship yard as good as Kuat and any mass invasion wouldn threaten them to scuttle one of the biggest ship yards in the Galaxy? The Rebel Alliance Sourcebook for the old RPG actually give an estimate of their production capacity: about a cruiser every half year or so. On the scale of the Empire, it's just not that important compared to what it is for the Rebellion. Also, most of the stuff in the RPG sourcebooks point towards the fact that the Empire is extremely rigid in doing stuff most of the time and while they can concentrate significant military power, a hard target is a hard target, and it would require effort from the Empire to take Mon Calamari. After all, most of the Imperial fleet is actually tied up in Sector Groups and as of Empire Strikes Back, they're still working on concepts like Oversectors and Grand Moffs to actually be able to use that military power in a more orderly fashion.
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Aug 25, 2010 21:34
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Speaking of ship yards, does the Empire have any they have actual full control over? The Corellian ones are sort of Independent like the system, Kuat is all business and Mon Calamari are supplying independents and the Alliance.
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Aug 25, 2010 21:47
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SeanBeansShako posted:The Corellian ones are sort of Independent like the system, Kuat is all business and Mon Calamari are supplying independents and the Alliance. According to most sources, Kuat and Corellia are both firmly under the thumb of the Empire, and why wouldn't they be? It's not like anyone else can offer them that much business. Corellia is ruled by an Imperial-minded dictator and the Kuat system is a major Imperial military post. Then there is Sluis Van from the Thrawn books, and that was too under Imperial management. There's also something in the Imperial Sourcebook by WEG that every sector group has a number of hyperspace-capable dockyards for maintenance that can also be used to construct new ships.
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Aug 25, 2010 21:56
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Fondor?
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Aug 25, 2010 22:01
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SeanBeansShako posted:The Corellian ones are sort of Independent like the system, Kuat is all business and Mon Calamari are supplying independents and the Alliance. The Corellian system was "independent" in the same way that the Warsaw Pact countries were independent - they could make their own decision for the most part,except for anything the Empire didn't want them to do. Kuat was nominally independent under a system of feuding Noble houses, but had an exclusive purchasing relationship and an Imperial garrison in system in case anyone got too uppity. After Endor the Empire invaded Kuat and annexed it in its entirety, largely due to an internal shakeup THAT WILL NEVER BE MENTIONED AGAIN. NEVER. JUST DON'T loving TALK ABOUT IT.
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Aug 25, 2010 22:26
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Bene Elim posted:IMO the Empire didn't fight the Mon Cal because it didn't want them to be made a Martyr. This answer makes a lot of sense. The way I always viewed it, the Empire basically acted like the later era Roman Empire in that they had a large military force and had governors and such, but weren't occupying every single territory to the brim with troops, but if they needed to suppress an uprising, they had the means to do so. Same thing with the Empire, they have a large presence but don't necessarily have to leave huge garrisons on every planet that falls under their domain.
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Aug 25, 2010 22:34
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Slantedfloors posted:Kuat was nominally independent under a system of feuding Noble houses, but had an exclusive purchasing relationship and an Imperial garrison in system in case anyone got too uppity. After Endor the Empire invaded Kuat and annexed it in its entirety, largely due to an internal shakeup THAT WILL NEVER BE MENTIONED AGAIN. NEVER. JUST DON'T loving TALK ABOUT IT. Could somebody talk about this please? I'm interested because i've been told not to be.  Also, hello Star Wars Thread!
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Aug 25, 2010 23:29
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Lord Thiefington posted:Could somebody talk about this please? I'm interested because i've been told not to be. For that I'd have to direct you to the Book Barn and the Let's Read Terrible Star Wars Novels thread. I don't remember what book it was though.
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Aug 25, 2010 23:41
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Tarezax posted:For that I'd have to direct you to the Book Barn and the Let's Read Terrible Star Wars Novels thread. I don't remember what book it was though. The Bounty Hunter Trilogy.
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Aug 25, 2010 23:42
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sniper4625 posted:The Bounty Hunter Trilogy. YOU WEREN'T THERE MAN YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE
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Aug 25, 2010 23:46
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SeanBeansShako posted:But the Mon Calamari Capital Ships are mostly converted pleasure cruisers with top of the line shield generators? I read somewhere that their ships were built under-water hidden from the empire. I can't remember where tho. Might of been on wookiepedia when I read it for hours on end laughing my balls off. hellsy fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Aug 25, 2010 |
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Aug 25, 2010 23:56
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The Mon Cal history is one of the many EU things that got messed up by the prequels. Originally they had no contact with the galaxy outside their star system until the Empire invaded and occupied their planet. Sources from that era were the ones that said that their starships were pleasure cruisers later refurbished as warships. Then when there were Mon Cals and Quarren in the prequel movies (meaning they were obviously part of the greater galaxy pre-Empire) and newer EU had them building starships for the Confederacy (to explain why the ships in ROTS looked similar to the organic Rebel designs in ROTJ) the whole thing went wonky. I'm not actually sure how they reconciled the pre-prequel and post-prequel Mon Cal stuff or if they just basically handwaved the earlier stuff away.
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Aug 26, 2010 00:03
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hellsy posted:I read somewhere that their ships were built under-water hidden from the empire. I can't remember where tho. Might of been on wookiepedia when I read it for hours on end laughing my balls off. Well, you don't get much mention of Conventional Sea Based Navy Based operations at all most of the time so that could actually be a valid stategy.
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Aug 26, 2010 00:09
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I like the bounty hunter trilogy.
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Aug 26, 2010 00:52
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Chairman Capone posted:The Mon Cal history is one of the many EU things that got messed up by the prequels. But, why couldn't other races have organic shapes in their ships?
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Aug 26, 2010 01:08
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Chairman Capone posted:The Mon Cal history is one of the many EU things that got messed up by the prequels. The original story, in which the Mon Cals had no contact with the galaxy prior to the movies, was retconned into Imperial propaganda designed to make one of the more respectable nonhuman species into a bunch of backwater fishmen who had never been out into the galaxy before the Empire came along.
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Aug 26, 2010 01:10
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Lord Thiefington posted:Could somebody talk about this please? I'm interested because i've been told not to be. The short version from the three books is a lot of convoluted subtlety and intrigue between "Kuat of Kuat" (the leader) and others who want his position and may or may not want to also stay aligned with the Empire. Boba Fett gets tangled up in all of this. At the end of the trilogy, Kuat of Kuat, who would rather see the shipyards burn than let someone else control them, is trying to blow them up. However, Fett, who wants answers, confronts him on the bridge of a mostly-finished Star Destroyer, through which the explosive sequence ran. After getting his answers he then single-handedly pilots the loving thing out of the shipyard, simultaneously saving his own skin and, oh yeah, earning a lot of gratitude from Kuat's successor, since without the destroyer in the chain, the destruction of the shipyards was only partially completed. The whole concept is a little over the top and, I guess, puts some people off, though I don't think the books are that bad on the whole. v  v
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Aug 26, 2010 01:19
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Chaos Hippy posted:The original story, in which the Mon Cals had no contact with the galaxy prior to the movies, was retconned into Imperial propaganda designed to make one of the more respectable nonhuman species into a bunch of backwater fishmen who had never been out into the galaxy before the Empire came along. And we all totally bought it! Star Wars fans will believe just about anything!
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Aug 26, 2010 01:20
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Bounty Hunter books brought in the assembler, one of the best Aliens Star Wars has to offer. It gets a pass on the rest of the poo poo cause of it. Plus watching Xizor and Vader try to outdick each other is always awesome.
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Aug 26, 2010 01:22
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Are you guys certain Mon Cal was in open revolt? I thought they built a whole bunch of ships, the Imperials came along and said "nice ships, we'll take them" and the Mon Cals got enslaved, then escaped with their ships leaving their planet behind and joining the rebels. I thought the Imperials just occupied the planet ie: a few ships and space stations in orbit, send in the stormies if anyone makes trouble, leave the natives to their stinking wet mess. A planet being in open revolt makes no sense. Any Imperial admiral who wants a promotion would be coming up with plans to boil the oceans and burn the ashes. That's why the rebels were always building bases in the middle of nowhere. As soon as someone says "we be rebels, yo" they get completely annihilated. I didn't think Bothawui was in open revolt either. At least from what I remember in Shadows of the Empire, they had to be sneaky because there were stormtroopers around who could (and did) bust down doors and kill everyone. I also remember an epic X-Wing Alliance mission where you're at Bothawui running cover from some awesome space platform in a B-wing against the local Imperial traffic, and the Executor shows up and unloads fighters everywhere. I need to reinstall that game. Sullust too: openly cooperating with the Empire, but a few pro-rebel cells. The Empire happened to be fairly aware of them so they kept the boot firmly on the Sullustan neck. Karandras posted:How many TIE defenders were roughly made? The wiki source says at least 10,000 were unaccounted for, which indicates there were a lot made post Endor.
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Aug 26, 2010 01:26
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T-1000 posted:The Empire happened to be fairly aware of them so they kept the boot firmly on the Sullustan neck. Do Sullustans even have necks? Isn't their head just a disgusting lump coming off their torso?
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Aug 26, 2010 01:28
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