Take evasive action!
STAR WARS: REBELS Discussion Thread!
It's a trap!!
"Fighters, coming in!"
10 hours ago, Captain Lackwit said:I've always kinda wondered, given rebel helmets lack a breathing apparatus of any sort. Unless you played Star Wars Galaxies, then your Rebel Ace helmet had exactly that.
I seem to recall in Legends the ejection mechanism in the seat projected some sort of temporary atmospheric bubble, but that's from years old use of google, so might not be true.
Presumably there's still some contingency in Canon too, otherwise Bigg's advice to Porkins to eject when he was having issues with his X-Wing is pretty dark (in both Legend and Canon, IIRC, Biggs is relatively experienced by this point, so it's likely not a rookie error).
Tbh, the Imperial doctrine of 'lets save money by having our pilots in sealed flight suits rather than install life support in our snub fighters' is one of the few things they get really right. The number of time an X-Wing crashes and I think "you are SO lucky that you are crashing on a planet with a breathable atmosphere", especially when it's some totally uncharted world like Dagobah. I know, in terms of film making, the rebel helmets are for character reasons and to evoke that WWII feel, but I'd definitely want to go into space combat looking more like a TIE pilot.
While I'm geeking out about space suits, FWIW, I strongly suggest this webpage: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacesuits.php (and the rest of the site, if you like falling down Hard Sci-Fi rabbit holes. Just, if you've any attachment to X-Wings...skip over the bits where they talk about the practicality of space fighters)
Edited by KtanI've had that debate a thousand times and I still believe Fighters have a **** of a role they can fill. Craft like that simply aren't worthless. Not useful for attacking larger ships, typically, no. That's pure fiction unless we're talking very heavily armed and well defended "bomber" platforms that, eventually, aren't exactly fighters anymore.
I solemnly swear I am
up to no good
not going to debate if star fighters should actually exist.
I am going to say they are Extremely Fun and Cool though. And it's fun to rationalise the absurd stuff they do.
(One person rationalised that Star Wars fighters bank when they turn to get a better field of view in the direction of their banking. That only makes sense with ships with large transparent overhead canopies, like the X,B and A wings, but I like it)
One thing of note is, and I think it was in the second season of clone wars, the Jedi characters eject and the system resembles an inflatable shell that also functions as an alternative to a parachute.
Perhaps x-wings have a similar system.
3 hours ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:One thing of note is, and I think it was in the second season of clone wars, the Jedi characters eject and the system resembles an inflatable shell that also functions as an alternative to a parachute.
Perhaps x-wings have a similar system.
You would think so, but given how many of them tend to sit there as their crafts slowly tear apart, crash, or explode around them, I wonder...
9 minutes ago, DarthEnderX said:You would think so, but given how many of them tend to sit there as their crafts slowly tear apart, crash, or explode around them, I wonder...
In fairness to the death star run, the pilots didn't have many options for ejecting. What would it accomplish? You would be stuck either very close or on the surface of the space station you were trying to blow up.
If you eject and land on the surface of the death star, and your allies are successful, you aren't getting picked up. If they aren't successful, there is no one to pick you up.
1 hour ago, That Blasted Samophlange said:In fairness to the death star run, the pilots didn't have many options for ejecting. What would it accomplish? You would be stuck either very close or on the surface of the space station you were trying to blow up.
If you eject and land on the surface of the death star, and your allies are successful, you aren't getting picked up. If they aren't successful, there is no one to pick you up.
And that might well extend to normal missions as well. Since the Rebellion is primarily about 'hit and fade' types of missions, you generally don't get the opportunity to send rescue craft in after the fact in order to retrieve downed pilots as the place is crawling with Imperial forces at this point and the Rebellion just doesn't have the resources to also mount a mission like that.
I'd imagine that all the pilots are fully aware of how the Empire treats its prisoners and likely would choose death over floating disco balls of pain. Of course, I'm sure in Rebels the worst that will happen to Hera is that she will sit in a cell and have to eat bad tasting food. The only other thing I can think of is that ejecting involves more than a handful of seconds to accomplish and most of the Rebels we see shot down just don't have that kind of time. Otherwise they're just trying to do a controlled crash landing with fighters with skids (the skids always seemed kind of stupid to me for that exaxt reason).
11 minutes ago, flyboymb said:I'd imagine that all the pilots are fully aware of how the Empire treats its prisoners and likely would choose death over floating disco balls of pain. Of course, I'm sure in Rebels the worst that will happen to Hera is that she will sit in a cell and have to eat bad tasting food.
Also: Kanan seems to have made friends with magically-teleporting-space-wolves, so...doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to free her, given that.
10 minutes ago, flyboymb said:
And that might well extend to normal missions as well. Since the Rebellion is primarily about 'hit and fade' types of missions, you generally don't get the opportunity to send rescue craft in after the fact in order to retrieve downed pilots as the place is crawling with Imperial forces at this point and the Rebellion just doesn't have the resources to also mount a mission like that.
I'd imagine that all the pilots are fully aware of how the Empire treats its prisoners and likely would choose death over floating disco balls of pain. Of course, I'm sure in Rebels the worst that will happen to Hera is that she will sit in a cell and have to eat bad tasting food. The only other thing I can think of is that ejecting involves more than a handful of seconds to accomplish and most of the Rebels we see shot down just don't have that kind of time. Otherwise they're just trying to do a controlled crash landing with fighters with skids (the skids always seemed kind of stupid to me for that exaxt reason).
Yeah... it is not like Kanan was tortured or anything when he was captured.
While much of the space combat in Star Wars was based on world war II, there is some similarities to World War I air combat. As space is vast a person hard to find, parachute or no you could still burn up in an atmosphere, asteroids or debris can pulverize a pilot. Space combat is very dangerous indeed.
Ejecting may indeed be a afterthought for the pilots and as you say, possibly not feasable based on how quickly they get shot down.
Crashing may be easier to survive in Star Wars as well. A backup repulsar generator could soften the impact considerably.
9 hours ago, Ktan said:I solemnly swear I am
up to no goodnot going to debate if star fighters should actually exist.I am going to say they are Extremely Fun and Cool though. And it's fun to rationalise the absurd stuff they do.
(One person rationalised that Star Wars fighters bank when they turn to get a better field of view in the direction of their banking. That only makes sense with ships with large transparent overhead canopies, like the X,B and A wings, but I like it)
I have no doubt that they will exist.
I also have no doubt that every single one of them will be a robot. Less Rebels and more CIS.
But just in terms of combat practicality, you will need an intelligent being to be in danger at some point out in the star-field due to light lag. A message can travel no faster than the speed of light, which is the same speed as one of your primary weapons. Every light-second away from the weapons package you place the operator is a light-second the target has to jink and evade; you can't kill an afterimage. Thus, in order to kill the enemy, something pretty smart has to get into that sub-1-light-second danger-zone where the enemy is actually
where you see them
.
That smart thing could be an AI-controlled drone fighter, or a C&C corvette slaved to a swarm of Casaba-Howitzer missiles, or so on. You might even have Anime Drone Pilots fighting with drones at unthinkable velocities while the operators sit in a high-speed jinking router controlling individual drone swarms from the relative safety of the ship.
So yeah, there will be fighters. They may be nothing but an engine, a gun, and a guidance chip - but they will exist. It's just that
people
as we know them can't survive the acceleration required to dodge lasers in space so it's going to be bots.
(By "dodge lasers" I mean "Jink randomly and at high speed so that you can outrun your own shadow, ie. the image that the enemy will see at a given distance.)
(And there are schools of thought on this as well, such as the age-old-question of Missile Frigate vs Laser Star, and how much money is too much to invest in a single ship? You may see corvette-sized single-pilot "fighters" used as patrol ships or scouts for power projection where you just don't need a battleship. In space, a battleship will kill a fighter every time, but it's a waste of money to put a battleship on deep-space patrol policing merchants and civvies.)
My only problem with star fighters is how crunchy capital ships are to them. Bombers make sense but anti fighters shouldn't be able to do any damage to capital ships short of crashing into an unshielded bridge
Well, in one way or another that's been a thing ever since 2 A-Wings blew up a shield generator on the Executorr in RotJ.
Star Wars' shields always being precisely the strength the plot needs them to be causes so many issues that I feel like it would be easier if ships just didn't have shields half the time.
I feel like if, for example, there was literally no mention of deflector shields in the Battle of Yavin, absolutely nothing would have been lost.
Edited by KtanOn 2017. 11. 18. at 9:27 PM, OneKelvin said:I have no doubt that they will exist.
I also have no doubt that every single one of them will be a robot. Less Rebels and more CIS.
But just in terms of combat practicality, you will need an intelligent being to be in danger at some point out in the star-field due to light lag. A message can travel no faster than the speed of light, which is the same speed as one of your primary weapons. Every light-second away from the weapons package you place the operator is a light-second the target has to jink and evade; you can't kill an afterimage. Thus, in order to kill the enemy, something pretty smart has to get into that sub-1-light-second danger-zone where the enemy is actually where you see them .
That smart thing could be an AI-controlled drone fighter, or a C&C corvette slaved to a swarm of Casaba-Howitzer missiles, or so on. You might even have Anime Drone Pilots fighting with drones at unthinkable velocities while the operators sit in a high-speed jinking router controlling individual drone swarms from the relative safety of the ship.
So yeah, there will be fighters. They may be nothing but an engine, a gun, and a guidance chip - but they will exist. It's just that people as we know them can't survive the acceleration required to dodge lasers in space so it's going to be bots.
(By "dodge lasers" I mean "Jink randomly and at high speed so that you can outrun your own shadow, ie. the image that the enemy will see at a given distance.)
(And there are schools of thought on this as well, such as the age-old-question of Missile Frigate vs Laser Star, and how much money is too much to invest in a single ship? You may see corvette-sized single-pilot "fighters" used as patrol ships or scouts for power projection where you just don't need a battleship. In space, a battleship will kill a fighter every time, but it's a waste of money to put a battleship on deep-space patrol policing merchants and civvies.)
But star wars doesn't even have proper lasers. They are plasma cannons really. So they do not travel at the speed of light. Its just a cool sounding sci fi word that doesn't actually describe what it actually is.
Regarding Thrawn ordering his gunners to fire while Hera was making what appeared to be an attack run on his Star Destroyer:
I feel that if Skerris hadn't been in pursuit trying to shoot at Hera, it wouldn't have been nearly as much of an issue. One X-Wing against a Star Destroyer is hardly a threat. However, when there's a TIE Defender immediately behind that X-Wing, shooting in the direction of the Star Destroyer in an attempt to gun down the X-Wing, that might have been enough to make Thrawn nervous. Any shots Skerris fired that missed the X-Wing would hit the Star Destroyer, and odds are the TIE Defender guns were strong enough to seriously impact the shielding on the Star Destroyer. And there was a solid chance of Skerris killing Hera, but then her X-Wing crashing into the Star Destroyer's command bridge as a result, which would have been devastating. Thrawn made the right call having his gunners open fire when Skerris refused to break off his attack run.
2 hours ago, Underachiever599 said:Regarding Thrawn ordering his gunners to fire while Hera was making what appeared to be an attack run on his Star Destroyer:
I feel that if Skerris hadn't been in pursuit trying to shoot at Hera, it wouldn't have been nearly as much of an issue. One X-Wing against a Star Destroyer is hardly a threat. However, when there's a TIE Defender immediately behind that X-Wing, shooting in the direction of the Star Destroyer in an attempt to gun down the X-Wing, that might have been enough to make Thrawn nervous. Any shots Skerris fired that missed the X-Wing would hit the Star Destroyer, and odds are the TIE Defender guns were strong enough to seriously impact the shielding on the Star Destroyer. And there was a solid chance of Skerris killing Hera, but then her X-Wing crashing into the Star Destroyer's command bridge as a result, which would have been devastating. Thrawn made the right call having his gunners open fire when Skerris refused to break off his attack run.
Or the simpler explanation: skerris was to much like Constantine, blinded by personal pride rather than getting the mission done. He failed to follow orders. Someone says get out of the machine gun barrels way, you typically move as fast as you can.
Just now, FlyingAnchors said:Or the simpler explanation: skerris was to much like Constantine, blinded by personal pride rather than getting the mission done. He failed to follow orders. Someone says get out of the machine gun barrels way, you typically move as fast as you can.
I don't see this as 'either or'. I think both are true. Skerris came down with a bad case of Konstantine Syndrome, and Thrawn would rather shoot in the direction of his own TIE Defender than have stray shots and a possible X-Wing hitting his Star Destroyer.
23 minutes ago, Underachiever599 said:I don't see this as 'either or'. I think both are true. Skerris came down with a bad case of Konstantine Syndrome, and Thrawn would rather shoot in the direction of his own TIE Defender than have stray shots and a possible X-Wing hitting his Star Destroyer.
Honestly though since ISDs should be able to tank turbolaser fire and go toe to toe with MC80 cruisers, even laser fire from a TIE Defender is still a drop in the ocean compared to multiple broadsides from weapons batteries. In the end, a Star Destroyer was still lost as well as a light cruiser due to Thrawn's actions.
But as was mentioned earlier it seems that shields are only a factor when they really need to be. I guess the same can be said of weapons. Both the X-Wing and the Defender tanked a shot from the ISD's MAIN BATTERY. Now they might have been pulling their shots, but there's a bunch of better weapons to do that kind of work than their main guns.
10 hours ago, RufusDaMan said:But star wars doesn't even have proper lasers. They are plasma cannons really. So they do not travel at the speed of light. Its just a cool sounding sci fi word that doesn't actually describe what it actually is.
Well, yes.
My spiel was about the practicality of starfighters in our universe with our physical laws.
Assuming that the denizens of the Star Wars galaxy aren't all idiots, it probably makes sense in-universe from an engineering and tactical standpoint to use starfighters. They use starfighters, and keep using starfighters even when their existance depends on it, so we can assume that starfighters are indeed
the way to go
and not just an in-universe cultural icon.
That galaxy seems to operate on a slightly different set of physical rules than our own, and if it doesn't then they have access to some fundamental understanding of the universe that we just haven't grasped yet. Artificial gravity for example, makes many technologies in SW plausible and possible, and that's only one innovation
we know about.
It may take 10^24 terawatsits of energy to blow up a planet in real life, but it might take a lot less in SW because the process isn't that simple.
A graviton injected into a plasma packet might be enough to keep it coherent enough to use as a long-range projectile, and a lot of gravitons or anti-gravitons might make a planet's own mass repel itself. It might also be that in a rough-and-tumble galaxy with slavery and moisture farmers that slang and vernacular are somewhat removed from the facts.
I don't know exactly how my computer works; it uses semi-conductors and electricity to do calculations, but how that turns into forum posts is magic to me. I know how my car works, but couldn't build one, and I don't know the proper terms for all of the pieces.
If Farmer McMoisture says that his gun shoots lasers, he might be wrong. Many people today think that AR-15 stands for "Assault Rifle No 15" when in fact AR stands for Armalite; the company that made the gun. Many people think it, and those people aren't idiots, they're just wrong about something they don't need to understand to use.
Edit: This is an odd instance where me being wrong about the facts in my post only further proves my point.
1 hour ago, flyboymb said:Now they might have been pulling their shots, but there's a bunch of better weapons to do that kind of work than their main guns.
I mean, theoretically an ISD-I has a healthy array of large-scale ion cannons at its behest, but that might have required some fidgeting with the model for just one scene when they already rigged the barbettes to work - but otherwise actually no, an ISD has **** all in the way of point defense - the remainder of it's arsenal is just different configurations of various levels of turbolaser. Many imperial ships downplay the ability of fighter-sized vessels to hurt them, or are otherwise entirely reliant on the complement to run CAP to defend themselves from such an attack.
1 hour ago, UnitOmega said:I mean, theoretically an ISD-I has a healthy array of large-scale ion cannons at its behest, but that might have required some fidgeting with the model for just one scene when they already rigged the barbettes to work - but otherwise actually no, an ISD has **** all in the way of point defense - the remainder of it's arsenal is just different configurations of various levels of turbolaser. Many imperial ships downplay the ability of fighter-sized vessels to hurt them, or are otherwise entirely reliant on the complement to run CAP to defend themselves from such an attack.
They can be hurt... But not in a single attack. A fighter against a star destroyer without it's TIEs wins the battle by whittling it down over the course of several attack runs.
The main defenses of an ISD against fighters (after TIEs) are the Shields. The Shields of a capital ship cannot be penetrated by fighters, unless massed.
But xwings carry torpedos that bypass Shields. That's scary. A well aimed torpedo can damage a capital ship. It won't go down due to sheer size, but it can disable a turbo laser turret for example.
So unless an extremely accurate shot with a turbo laser, a fighter can be threatening. But even then it may take a while. We are talking about a mile long ship!
And that single fighter is not likely to shear off the entire bridge tower of the ISD unlike Thrawn's hastily caused chain reaction.
And I'd imagine that the smaller turbolasers would be quicker to fire due to having smaller capacitors to fire or smaller amounts of tibanna gas to infuse (or whatever these things do to 'reload') just as much as 40mm Bofors could more easily fire on targets than 16 in main guns. But perhaps those more forward guns would have to make more of a deflection shot than the main turrets further back.
The whole thing still once again makes Star Destroyers out to be made of Aluminum and with weapons weaker than the TIE Defender. This is honestly getting into the territory of when some mook decided that ISDs were destroyers in the line of battle instead of carrying a name that invoked the image that they had the power to destroy stars.
This is Rebels, I'm inclined to believe that a stray shot from a fighter could vaporize the bridge of a ISD.