Distant Star Wars Past

[Mace MacLeod]

Hey folks, long time no nothing. Been super busy at work since returning to Canada in March, but have started banging around ideas for new fics to explore.

I've looked on wookieepedia but there doesn't seem to be anything about the main SW planets in mid-level industrial eras; every society in the SW universe seems to go right from barbarism to spacefaring without there being much in between. And I know that way, way back Correllia, Coruscant et al were supposed to be conquered by the Rakata then drove them off and back-engineered hyperdrives and turbolasers and stuff, but is there anything written about a civilization with comparable levels of advancement to our own? Or maybe a hundred years on either side, but still set in the SW galaxy and before first contact with an alien species? Or maybe the really early history of the jedi, where they'd still be coming to grips with it as a society? That sort of thing. Just trying to get the creative juices flowing.

[machievelli]

I've looked on wookieepedia but there doesn't seem to be anything about the main. SW planets in mid-level industrial eras; every society in the SW universe seems to go right from barbarism to spacefaring without there being much in between. And I know that way, way back Correllia, Coruscant et al were supposed to be conquered by the Rakata then drove them off and back-engineered hyperdrives and turbolasers and stuff, but is there anything written about a civilization with comparable levels of advancement to our own? Or maybe a hundred years on either side, but still set in the SW galaxy and before first contact with an alien species? Or maybe the really early history of the jedi, where they'd still be coming to grips with it as a society? That sort of thing. Just trying to get the creative juices flowing.

 

I tend to agree. There aren't a lot of worlds mentioned until you get to EU, and it's so much easier to use somewhere everyone already knows. That is why when I started with the 'Beginning' I used worlds with varying degrees of technology, so some you or I would feel right at home with are side by side with barbarism and ultra high tech.

[Salzella]

I've always thought it was a bit odd how you'd see sort of primitive architecture such a short time before inter-system space travel came into common use. Hell of a jump. It'd be interesting to explore that side of the galaxy i suppose.

[Corinthian]

Yeah, but consider how much Earth has leapt forward in the past 500 years. 500 years ago, guns were crude weapons, the world being round was a novel new concept not everyone had accepted, space travel was something that hadn't even been thought of. Now, humanity is capable of entering space.

 

What seems odd to me is that...in the 25000 years of the Republic being in existence, nothing seems to have changed, except the ships get bigger. When you see new technology in the EU, it's Bigger and Better Turbolasers, or Faster Hyperdrives, or a ship that's 300 kilometers long with 10000 turbolasers.

[Wookiee Rrudolf]

I'm not sure but I think that in one of comic books from 'Tales of the Jedi' series from Dark Horse there was something about development of Onderon civilization. How they came out of caves, started to tame beasts of Onderon, learnt how to use fire-arms and build fortresses. Still there wasn't much about it, only one flashback (history of a whole planet in maybe 2 or 3 pages in comic book ). But I think it's still better than nothing and it shows that at least some of planets in SW universe had a history before space ships, laser guns and lightsabers

[machievelli]

Yeah, but consider how much Earth has leapt forward in the past 500 years. 500 years ago, guns were crude weapons, the world being round was a novel new concept not everyone had accepted, space travel was something that hadn't even been thought of. Now, humanity is capable of entering space.

 

What seems odd to me is that...in the 25000 years of the Republic being in existence, nothing seems to have changed, except the ships get bigger. When you see new technology in the EU, it's Bigger and Better Turbolasers, or Faster Hyperdrives, or a ship that's 300 kilometers long with 10000 turbolasers.

 

There comes a time when people will try to halt progress. If you have read my own pre Republic work you will see that nuclear weapons and projectile weapons are the norm, as they are now, even with today.

 

I tend to chuckle when someone comments that an enemy is using fusion weapons (AKA Hydrogen bombs) as if they are still the be all and end all of weapons. Before you ask, the most recent Legacy of the Jedi book Fury had a Sith ship using these to destroy an asteroid.

 

All right anyone, care to come up with something more modern? David Weber in his apocalypse troll developed what they called a 'blaster' that created a packet of fusion plasma, dropped it into hyperspace, and had it pop up directly against the target. Deep Space 9 created a projecticle rifle that sent the bullet out as normal, but used a transporter and sight that saw through walls so you could fire it in a room half the station away and it would still hit your target.

[DeadYorick]

What seems odd to me is that...in the 25000 years of the Republic being in existence, nothing seems to have changed, except the ships get bigger. When you see new technology in the EU, it's Bigger and Better Turbolasers, or Faster Hyperdrives, or a ship that's 300 kilometers long with 10000 turbolasers.

 

That is something that has always bothered me. The only thing that I really like that is different in EU is there are better blasters. Like the Bryar Blaster pistol, the E11, The heavy repeater and the DL-44. Oh and the fact that it took Malak several hours to destroy Taris yet it took Darth Vader less then one second to destroy Alderaan with the death star. So I think that is something new

 

Anyway I noticed that ships barely have anything different in them. Like with the Ebon Hawk it has a hyper drive and a blaster turret just like a ton of ships in EU.

 

Whats the difference between faster hyperdrives and slower hyperdrives? Doesn't a light speed go the same speed on all ships?

[machievelli]

That is something that has always bothered me. The only thing that I really like that is different in EU is there are better blasters. Like the Bryar Blaster pistol, the E11, The heavy repeater and the DL-44. Oh and the fact that it took Malak several hours to destroy Taris yet it took Darth Vader less then one second to destroy Alderaan with the death star. So I think that is something new

 

Anyway I noticed that ships barely have anything different in them. Like with the Ebon Hawk it has a hyper drive and a blaster turret just like a ton of ships in EU.

 

Whats the difference between faster hyperdrives and slower hyperdrives? Doesn't a light speed go the same speed on all ships?

In David Weber's books, he postulates bands of hyper space with the higher bands having shorter distances between physical points in our galaxy, and therefore higher speeds of C. Think of the difference something as simple as wing design (Swept) made between the first jets and their descendants. That alone allowed them to break the sound barrier more readily.

 

As for interior design, the problem is people ignore a lot of the required amenities. They joked about it back when Roddenberry wrote the making of Star Trek; that the Klingons built their ships without bathrooms, which explained why they were always so surly

[vanir]

There's a mid level industrial tech in one of the EU star clusters, can't remember the name of it. Essentially it has droids, etc. but due to the long hyperspace travel times to the cluster it's all a bit like the frontier worlds like Tattooine, with firearms more widely available than blasters, beast riding more common than speeders and speeders (or short range ion shuttles) more available than starships, which are probitively expensive to purchase or maintain (tramp freighters are therefore the most common, which is a small-medium transport essentially maintained by an owner/operator using largely improvised parts, often they are suped up like the Millenium Falcon). Thing is though the planets in the cluster are all very heavily populated, so they have a mid tech level industrial feel. At least one planet has actually devolved technologically to combustion industry.

 

Hyperdrive tech is an interesting subject. Speeds in hyperspace are only half related to achievable velocities by your hyperdrive installation. The other half is navigational expertise. These are used as factors upon the most efficient navigational course available for the route in question. I'll explain with an example.

 

I live on Coruscant. I want to go to Tattooine.

Since there is no direct trade route from Coruscant to Tattooine I'm going to plot my own.

My navicomputer calculates a "distance" under ideal conditions of 3 weeks. But nobody has ever travelled this route before since it is an original one I just formulated so my navicomputer recalculates automatically giving all star systems and major anomalies between here and there a wide berth just in case some asteroid fields have moved position and other unknown factors since the last time my navicomputer had its charts updated. "Distance" is now 4 weeks, not ideal but safe.

My tramp freighter was originally fitted with a class 2 Hyperdrive (the fastest stock civilian type) which is a factor that must be applied to travel times, which would be then 8 weeks. Luckily I have modified my freighter with a military grade class 1 Hyperdrive so my travel time remains 4 weeks.

How is this possible, what has happened here? Essentially the Hyperdrive grade is a combination of navicomputer and engine. How good this combination is depends on the quality and matching of these components with a vessel. CorelliStaDrive for example makes civilian grade Hyperdrive/navicomputer installations that are Class 3 in a heavy freighter and Class 2 in a light transport. SoroSuub makes military grade ones which are Class 1 in small and mid-sized vessels and Class 2 in heavy cruisers. There are custom setups like the Millenium Falcon, which had no fewer than three separate navicomputers attached to a very powerful military hyperdrive, it was capable of "0.5 past lightspeed" or in other words was so fast and so complex it actually halved travel times, but was very high maintenance and was prone to breakdowns and quirks, for example the navicomputers sometimes argued with each other which is a bit like two hands on a clock having a spat, kinda makes it hard to tell the time since both are likely to be twirling like crazy.

 

Are you with me so far?

 

Okay so travel times within a Sector are measured in hours, within a region in days and between regions weeks or months. A factor is applied by the navicomputer itself which relates to how updated its charts are for calculating that particular route.

So a route which is never travelled is higher, and one which is frequently travelled is much lower, even though the physical distance may be the same.

This is because when people travel routes frequently they like to tell other people about supernovas and asteroid fields, or other anomalies and thus star charts get updated more frequently for those routes.

 

Let's say I'm going between two locations in the Core worlds that are 15 lightyears apart. Everybody's running around the Core worlds all the time so this might be a 15hr journey.

Let's say we moved these coordinates to the Outer Rim where people travel infrequently or keep it to themselves when they do. The same 15LY journey might take 30hrs because that's the best the navicomputer can calculate for safely due to the state of its current star charts for that region.

 

It is after this we apply the quality of my hyperdrive/navicomputer/starship class matching.

 

As a rough measure, the grade of hyperdrives in Ulic Qel Droma's era was x5 military and x10 civlian. But this really reflects the state of the available star charts in that time as opposed to the Skywalker era, by which time the galaxy had been more widely travelled and explored. Essentially navigational factors were far more complicated, so far more computing power was required to achieve the same result, prohibitively so. It was not so much the power of the engines which was deficient, it was the sheer mass of the computer banks required and their power requirements to calculate fast navigational routes during a time where even the major trade routes were relatively unexplored.

 

 

At the end of the day in other words, a vessel with a Class 2 hyperdrive literally takes longer routes between the same points as one fitted with a Class 1 military grade hyperdrive, in this example it is mostly because military vessels have access to better star charts which have restricted access.

 

A vessel like the Millenium Falcon not only has military grade engines, it has a frigate sized power core, and an ad hoc custom navicomputer setup attempting to keep the whole package functioning, which has star charts you can only get your hands on in the black market. It is a very, very illegal spaceship, but it can outrun anything in the galaxy for this reason...in terms of hyperspace travel times. It literally plots shorter distances, with more direct routes, cutting space anomalies and supernovas very closely, moreso than anything else is really capable of doing safely.

 

Indeed navigation aside, over a very short 2hr straighline hyperspace jump some engine/starship combinations do have simply more brute power. Dropping the engines out of cruiser into a small transport generally makes it quicker. So the same fitment of Class 3 engines in a Bulk Freighter becomes a Class 2 fitment in a light freighter, or you could get funky in your tramp freighter and upgrade the power core and use twin hyperdrives for a Class 1 setup, then go to town on the navicomputer and so on.

[machievelli]

That is something that has always bothered me. The only thing that I really like that is different in EU is there are better blasters. Like the Bryar Blaster pistol, the E11, The heavy repeater and the DL-44. Oh and the fact that it took Malak several hours to destroy Taris yet it took Darth Vader less then one second to destroy Alderaan with the death star. So I think that is something new

 

Anyway I noticed that ships barely have anything different in them. Like with the Ebon Hawk it has a hyper drive and a blaster turret just like a ton of ships in EU.

 

First weapons design does not just make massive leaps in technology. Take ranged weapons for example. The primary differences between the bows used by the Egyptians, and those used by the Mongolians and British long bow were increments in design and tension. The British/ Welsh longbow was half again the length of most other bows used, giving a longer draw, and therefore, increased range The Mongolian bow for example used wood and horn laminated to make a stiffer bow that fires the arrow a long distance even with a shorter bow.

 

As for the weapons in star wars, the primary difference between Malek's era and Luke's is the addition of Tibanna gas making the laser more efficient.

 

You're also not noticing the size of the ships involved. You can only put a gun into something big enough to hold it and survive it's recoil. The largest guns made up to now, the 16" and 18" guns of WWII needed something that weighed 40,000 tons plus to manage that feat. When an Iowa class (Missouri and New Jersey) class fired their guns in a full 9 gun broadside, it shoved the ship ten feet to the side.

 

There is a new design created during the 90s called the supergun, but it needs a barrel over 300 meters in length, meaning you could put only one in a ship that size. So the Death Star's cannon needs a massive amount of power, meaning it needs large numbers of generators to create it

 

In the EU they showed one ship that carried nothing but the same main gun used in the Death Star, but it was between the Star Destroyer and Super Star destroyer in length and very slow in comparison even to those huge ships. Unable to defend itself as well.

[vanir]

Oh yes the Eclipse and Sovereign class Super Star Destroyers featured in the Dark Horse series Dark Empire (in fact the Eclipse was a unique flagship but became instant canon for the RPG series which introduced it as a new class of warship along with the Sovereign).

 

The technical specifications for these warships were very much like a historical comparison of the Yamoto and Musashi compared to its contemporary battleships in WW2, that is they were humongous, in fact extremely well armed and equipped with all manner of secondary weapons banks from small, fast tracking starfighter-screening turbolasers to heavy ship to ship laser-energy and ion cannons.

 

We had one and a few Sovereigns in a campaign I GM'd and trust me these things were unbeatable no matter what you threw at them, in our alternate timeline game spanning nearly two years realtime we had whole fleets of the best MonCal battlecruisers and refitted Star Destroyers, plus our own Fortress Worlds to work with, and it cost us half of everything and Jedi involvement to take down one Sovereign class, the stats for them is just off the wall compared to anything else in the game.

 

The Eclipse class was over 17km in length and saying that doesn't at all get across just how big this thing was given its volumetric mass. Its boarded complement was that of a major strategic Imperial planet, its cavernous hangars held of total of a thousand vessels including TIE fighters, shuttles, drop ships and even its own picketing vessels (small corvettes). It was a one ship fleet, designed to take on not just fleets, any Super class Star Destroyer could do that but this thing could waltz into the Core Worlds blasting anything that challenged it and destroy any planetary defences of any Fortress World in the galaxy.

Its axial superlaser was designed to defeat planetary shielding systems like those used by the Rebel Alliance at the Battle of Hoth, which are also used to defend many Battle Stations and all typical Fortress Worlds and can otherwise withstand any Capital-scale bombardment (and must normally be defeated by a surface campaign to destroy shield generators).

 

If the Rebels had their hands on the Eclipse at the Battle of Endor for example, they never would've had to land a commando team at the moon, but could've waltzed straight up to the New Death Star and taken down its shields with repeated attacks from the axial superlaser. This weapon is not as high powered as when mounted to a space station (ie. Death Star) however and is capable of doing only superficial Planetary-scale damage (destroying structures, potentially causing earthquakes, etc.), thus it is unsuitable as a primary offensive weapon. Had it been used by the Rebels at Endor in an alternate timeline for example, its defeat of the planetary shielding used to protect the Death Star from attack would have to be followed up with conventional attacks and strategy.

 

Nevertheless when it appeared in Dark Empire in the hands of the resurrected Palpatine (in his cloned new body), it posed a formiddable threat to the New Republic because it made no place in the Galaxy safe and effectively combined the best elements of the old Imperial Fleet and the Death Stars. It was of course more manoeuvrable for deep penetration incursions than battle stations which were inherently designed to enter poorly defended space and terrorise worlds which were already subjugated (secondary role of fleet support). These massive warships could be used as temporary battlestations like any Super class Star Destroyer having their own manufacturing industry and support facilities and capable of acting independently for up to ten years without replenishment.

 

In his typical style however Palpatine ran around using the Eclipse superlaser like an antiship sledgehammer, the same way he used the second Death Star and similar mistakes were made. His ego blinded him to unlocking the full strategic and tactical potential of such a vessel, and it effectively took down a handful of battlecruisers for its own destruction, the cost in resources to his secret DeepCore Fortress Worlds effectively nullifying their strategic impact against the New Republic military.

 

It is much like the story of the 70,000 ton Musashi and Yamato in WW2, unbeatable in traditional ship to ship warfare but as it turned out their tremendous value found it necessary for admirals to shepherd and shield them from combat and finally expend them uselessly in unwinnable battles when all else had failed or been sunk. Their only hopeful mission was to be shore bombardment and the only time they fired their massive guns in anger was against destroyers and escort carriers, and aircraft. Put simply they wound up being used in a job best suited to heavy cruisers and had been very, very costly to have been built where four or five more fleet carriers would've been far more useful.

 

The main technological advances made since the Battle of Yavin by the Eclipse class were like the New Death Star the superlaser was now fed power by a capacitor system which stored energy from the main reactors. The first Death Star could only fire its superlaser once in a 24hr period due to the immense strain on reactors to produce the kind of power necessary for its use. The New Death Star could fire several times at reduced power, so that the same energy store could feed many more shots before having to wait the 24hr cooldown period. This was developed to counter the Rebellion obtaining planetary shields, which are capable of withstanding a superlaser; one or two shots at a lesser power setting would be used to take down the shields and then the remaining store of energy could be used to destroy the undefended planet.

 

What the Eclipse (and Sovereign) class did was mount this newer superlaser system with innately much weaker reactors, it could not produce enough power to completely destroy a planet, but it could definitely take down planetary shielding systems so that traditional orbital bombardment could be performed.

 

Also like the New Death Star the new Super Star Destroyers fixed an inherent weakness of the old Imperial Fleet vessels, which were never designed to combat smaller vessels because it was assumed the embarked TIE complement could handle this job. The Rebellion proved them wrong. These new vessels therefore have additional banks of fast tracking turbolasers for anti-starfighter screening duties, they are extremely accurate and plentiful, this is in addition to traditional ship to ship combat weapons banks. Of these Ion banks are designed to take down the shields of enemy vessels (MonCal ships have excellent shielding systems), whilst heavy laser cannon are extremely powerful and capable of dealing with any kind of battlecruiser.

 

Palpatine of course is a moron and used the superlaser for ship to ship combat, which means the reactors had to be fired up and the energy stored in the vessels capacitors, once used up could not be replenished again for another 24hrs. Basically once that gun was used up on MonCal cruisers you could've sent your own battlestations in against it without fear of that superlaser, and taken it down in a blow for blow streetbrawl by giving it some of its own medicine.