Like I said SPOILERS in this thread so don't continue reading if you don't want to know about the end of Empire's End.

General Review of the Aftermath Trilogy:

First I have to say in general the 3 Star Wars Aftermath books were an okay experience and it did help explain how the galaxy shaped up after the death of the Emperor. I do feel the author Chuck Wendig was okay but I was really disappointing in most of the battle scenes and fights. After a while it just felt like I was hearing the same fight scene over and over knowing the characters were never in any danger and no matter the odds something crazy was going to happen and they would survive. My least favorite characters were Temmin Wexley and Bones. Maybe is was the annoying voice of Temmin in the Audio books but I got tired of them quickley. Bones was okay but I thought it was stupid how a teenager could design a killer droid that could just easily wipe out squad after squad of storm troopers and even self repair himself after being shot to crap and in pieces in Empires End. I'm used to stupid stuff like that happening in Star Wars (Hello Ewoks) but I was still disappointing. The space battles were the biggest disappointment in the first 2 books. I could tell Chuck Wendig had no clue how to write a space battle as the first 2 were just skimmed over giving no details, no great dog fights or anything close to what you would get in the X-wing Books or first Thrawn series. In book 2 Home One and 1 squadron basically just take out 2 ISD's. That is all well in good but the description of how that happens was like a paragraph. I'll go over the big battle in Empires End Below.

I have been a little annoyed that these books and even The Force Awakens seem to shrink the size of the galaxy. What I mean by that is they tend to only show a couple of places and the entire galaxy is accessible just from a short hyperspace jump from here to there. I had my issues with the Episode's 1-3 but what they did was show how vast the Star Wars universe and galaxy is with millions of worlds. The beginning battle of Revenge of the Sith showed hundreds of ships fighting over Coruscant but it was clear that was just 1 huge battle in a vast galaxy full of large scale battles. You get the impression that there are thousands and thousands of cruisers and frigates in the galaxy. The Aftermath series and The Force Awakens make it seem as if there are only hundreds of ships if that. Everything just feels smaller and less grand to me. Take in point that the Empire has basically completely withdrawn in these books. We are led to believe that an Empire that once must have spanned Ten's of thousands of systems is now completely gathered to one backwater world of Jakku? I get they would have infighting but the scale of this just seems way to far off.

Not all was bad as I really liked Grand Admiral Sloan and Gallius Rax as Characters. The payoff of what Rax was up to was worth it at the end of Empires End. The story about the Emperor talking to young Rax playing the game where the point is to protect the Emperor and if you lose the Emperor everything is is worthless and dies because they couldn't protect their Emperor made complete sense. Why would Palpatine want the Empire that failed to protect him to survive. I'm looking forward to more books on the start of the First Order out in the Unknown Regions. Overall I give the books maybe a 3 out of 5 stars.

The big Space Battle in Empires End:

My expectations for this battle were pretty low going in after being let down in the first 2 books. Overall this one was much better that the other 2 books but I still was left disappointed and annoyed at some of the details. First there is no description of the size of the Imperial or Rebel Fleets. The author in general is terrible at giving you the big picture in almost anything. I think his writing style is to just keep everything local to what is going on with the characters but every once in a while it would have been good to get an overall description of what is going on. All we know is that there are a lot of Star Destroyers and the Super Star Destroyer Ravager over Jakku. For the Rebel Fleet we know it consists of a lot of corvette's, frigates, cruisers, Home One, and 3 Star Hawk cruisers. Other than the attack of the 3 Star Hawks we get hardly any information of what is going on in the battle other than a corvette or 2 blowing up and a Nebulon-B being cut in half. The Ravager is shown to be a huge threat that it is but all we know is that the Star Destroyers are deployed around it as a screen to protect her. We get the description that the 3 Star Hawks are pressing forward to try and take out the Ravager but there is little description of the fighter battle going on, what the other ships are doing or what the many Star Destroyers are doing to protect the Ravager. The books do show how state of the art the Star Hawks are and that they are basically twice as strong as an ISD but what I have a hard time seeing is how 3 of them hold there own against 10-20 maybe more ISD's and a Super Star Destroyer. Again this is the same issue with the Battle of Endor so I could live with it. The description of one ISD ramming a Star Hawk was cool but the events it setup didn't make sense to me. The middle Star Hawk now makes a death run on the Ravager. This is all well and good but the Super Star Destroyer combining all of its firepower on a wounded Star Hawk couldn't even blow it up. Sure they almost disabled the ship and left it a wreck venting plasma and punching holes through it but that wasn't before the Star Hawk was able to cause some good damage to the Ravager.

The next sequence is what literally had me saying "oh that is a loud of crap". After the Ravager pretty much disables the Star Hawk that is now heading for Jakku we start to learn of how powerful the tractor beams are on the Star Hawks. Apparently these tractor beams are still functional and able to provide full power even when most of the ship is a smoldering wreck crashing to the planet. The Super Star Destroyer that was once being so well protected is now suddenly overwhelmed by star fighters in a matter of a minute taking out the rest of hear shields and then her engines. The sequence is very quick in less than a minute the Super Star Destroyer is helplessly crashing to the planet. The biggest WTF moment was when the Grand Moff says to target the Star Hawk that is now causing them to crash to the planet and he is told they can't because ALL of the Ravagers guns are still cycling and down for another 2 minutes....2 MINUTES? Where did they suddenly get this idea from. Apparently a Super Star Destroyer that is an 18KM long Dagger was able to fire ALL of its guns at the Star Hawk and now they are all down for over 2 minutes recharging? So far in the movies we haven't seen anything like this. Most shots of Capital ships firing is one shot after the other. We don't see big massive broadsides and then a wait before the next big massive broadside. Anyway once that happened I just had another bad taste in my mouth. I knew the Ravager was going down to Jakku but I think they got very lazy with the way they did it. They could of showed a grand space battle with the Ravager and the ISD screens being overwhelmed by New Republic cruisers and star fighters making bombing runs but we just got another easy answer in 1 ship dragging the Ravager down to the planet after having its engines easily taken out.

Possible Impact on Armada:

I do hope that we will see some ships from the Aftermath books in Armada. Specifically the Star Hawks. They could be a much more powerful Mon Cal cruiser with very good shields and maybe only 6-7 hull. They should have ISD2 level front arcs with some very powerful upgrade slots for Turbos, and Ions.

Maybe a Super Star Destroyer some day, maybe? The books do mention several Super Star Destroyers. The Ravager being the big one but also a captured one by Pirates, The former Annihilator and also the Eclipse that is off in the unknown regions. We have several titles that could be added for it. No clue on balance for it but my guess is that it would make the most sense as an expansion designed for another Corellian Conflict campaign.

Anyway those are my ramblings. I'm curious what other people thought of the books and the battle. I'm definitely an Empire fan boy so I set my self up for disappointment as the good guys have to win.

Yup, I hated how he handled the SSD/Starhawks tractor beam too. It was sooooo stupid. However, the Starhawk itself sounds like a pretty cool ship. Just leave the tractor beam crap out of it.

Meh...the Ravager crashing didn't bother me that much. I mean, the series of events that lead up to it's demise was just reasonable enough that I could believe it happening, and at least it's more plausible than a single A-wing crashing into the bridge and knocking out the entire ship. The weapon cooldown of the Ravager, though, does seem out of the blue and makes little sense given how SW capital ship weapons work. The only way I can possible imagine that happening is that the Ravager was firing and over-cycling its weapons until it overheated and was forced to stop for a couple of minutes to cooldown before firing again.

And with regards to the firepower of the Ravager, I always imagined a ship that size would never be able to bring all of its weapons to bear on a single ship, especially one that is significantly smaller in size and also moving into point blank range, whereas the Starhawk in return could easily unleash it's full payload. Still to be able to take a beating from an SSD like that makes Starhawk seem like a beast of a ship in it's own regard.

1 hour ago, BMcDonald7 said:

The Super Star Destroyer that was once being so well protected is now suddenly overwhelmed by star fighters in a matter of a minute taking out the rest of hear shields and then her engines.

As far as I understand how shields work in Star Wars, you don't need to take down the entire shield matrix to start dealing damage to the hull and structure of a ship. Focus firing in a local region of a ship with enough firepower and speed can momentarily open up the shield in said region and start wrecking the hull of the ship itself.

I'd like to disagree with you on a lot of things you said...

But I can't. I had to re read the tractor beam thing. Three times. Meh.. neat set of circumstances led up to it. But still meh.

Temmin and bones. Not having listened to the audio books, I didn't have him with a whiney voice. Bones, meh.

Over all. Yup. Agree 100% and can't wait for more on Sloan and first order creation books.

I found myself skipping over many pages with a speed of 2 secs per each. And even the slightly mor interesting things were one-dimensional and foreseeable.

All in all not a good book in my book, despite all the cool things there could have been there, politically and militarily. There ar better books in the new canon, Lost Stars for example.

The EU did a much better job with the Thrawn trilogy, even if you cant compare 1:1.

When will you learn?

ALL Star Wars novels are crap. Some are pure crap, some a bit Dillinger, but still crap.

And the NEW EU is no better than the old. Actually some of it is worse.

I write better novels than the rubbish they put out.

End rant.

38 minutes ago, NebulonB said:

...better books in the new canon, Lost Stars for example.

Sad to say it, but of all the books in the 'new canon' (and to be clear, nearly all of the 'old canon' was pure, steaming, shite)....that one is just about the only one tolerable.

It's not great, but it's pretty good.

The books are terrible.

And what drives me crazy is the idea that a space ship can function in space with thrusters facing in a single direction!! or that the Engine has to be mounted just the other side of the thruster cone.

The idea that a 12 mile long space ship is controlled from a single point a few hundred feet square, that is outside the main hull, and has GLASS windows in it mind you! is asinine, can you even imagine trying to wire everything to a single control point at a distance of 11 miles from its end point, seems like the designers are complete and utter morons, not a possible vulnerability at all, I mean I have a high IQ, and I thought of how utterly crazy it would be not to have redundant CnC points dispersed around it, because you can bet your ass it has redundant systems for everything else on board, just not the most important thing.

Shields require energy, and require generators, more energy = stronger shields, more space = redundancy, banks of energy capacitors that can front load power into a shield generator that just collapsed, to quickly re-establish a shield. This is basically what we see through out Star Wars, something loses shields, because they were overloaded, shield generator shuts down, Artoo whistles and tweets and starts shunting energy back into it from the drive core, or he fixes any blow back damage by rerouting circuits and voila the shields come back up, so if a single Astromech droid, and a star fighter power core is sufficent, to repower shields that can stop Tie Fighter TL blasts cold, it begs the question then, on a ship that is the size of a small city, how is any group of fighter craft capable of overloading a shield segment? the generators and power involved is of a significant magnitude in difference, it would be like shooting at an M1 Abrams with a platoon of M16's, it doesn't matter if you add in another 100 platoons of M16's, they are not going to penetrate the M1 Abrams, because the M1 Abrams is designed to stop weapons of a different magnitude, and you can draw the same conclusion with Space craft (Capital ships are designed to deal with capital ship class weapon systems).

As for the StarHawk being able to not only arrest the momentum of the SSD, but to negate it, and then have sufficient power to drag that monumental mass along with it...obviously the author is not very concerned about making his work believable. (Yes it is made up, but we can suspend disbelief if the stuff is true to the rules that have been created to allow us to experience it.) The power required for a tractor beam to hold a ship the size of an SSD, without blowing out? without being ripped out of its mountings?

I'm going to stop now, because I'm just venting.

Sure thing King, Star Wars is a space opera and generally does not care for physics anyway. Orbital mechanics does not allow for very involved storytelling as far as dynamic multiple ship action is concerned (it absolutely can create very involved stories, but the focus and scale has to be different), so we usually hand wave most things and are fine with it.

That is, we are fine with it as long as the stories are actually well-written, which is unfortunately often not the case in IP-based books in general, and Star Wars in particular...

2 hours ago, xanderf said:

Sad to say it, but of all the books in the 'new canon' (and to be clear, nearly all of the 'old canon' was pure, steaming, shite)....that one is just about the only one tolerable.

It's not great, but it's pretty good.

QFT!

7 hours ago, TheEasternKing said:

Shields require energy, and require generators, more energy = stronger shields, more space = redundancy, banks of energy capacitors that can front load power into a shield generator that just collapsed, to quickly re-establish a shield. This is basically what we see through out Star Wars, something loses shields, because they were overloaded, shield generator shuts down, Artoo whistles and tweets and starts shunting energy back into it from the drive core, or he fixes any blow back damage by rerouting circuits and voila the shields come back up, so if a single Astromech droid, and a star fighter power core is sufficent, to repower shields that can stop Tie Fighter TL blasts cold, it begs the question then, on a ship that is the size of a small city, how is any group of fighter craft capable of overloading a shield segment?

We are pretty much in agreement here except it wasn't just the fighters attacking the engines, it was also the New Republic capital ships, or at least those that could get behind the SSD.

Also, let's not forget what a handful of B-wings can do to a ISD. They could likewise do some significant damage to the SSD engines.

7 hours ago, TheEasternKing said:

The books are terrible.

And what drives me crazy is the idea that a space ship can function in space with thrusters facing in a single direction!! or that the Engine has to be mounted just the other side of the thruster cone.

The idea that a 12 mile long space ship is controlled from a single point a few hundred feet square, that is outside the main hull, and has GLASS windows in it mind you! is asinine, can you even imagine trying to wire everything to a single control point at a distance of 11 miles from its end point, seems like the designers are complete and utter morons, not a possible vulnerability at all, I mean I have a high IQ, and I thought of how utterly crazy it would be not to have redundant CnC points dispersed around it, because you can bet your ass it has redundant systems for everything else on board, just not the most important thing.

Shields require energy, and require generators, more energy = stronger shields, more space = redundancy, banks of energy capacitors that can front load power into a shield generator that just collapsed, to quickly re-establish a shield. This is basically what we see through out Star Wars, something loses shields, because they were overloaded, shield generator shuts down, Artoo whistles and tweets and starts shunting energy back into it from the drive core, or he fixes any blow back damage by rerouting circuits and voila the shields come back up, so if a single Astromech droid, and a star fighter power core is sufficent, to repower shields that can stop Tie Fighter TL blasts cold, it begs the question then, on a ship that is the size of a small city, how is any group of fighter craft capable of overloading a shield segment? the generators and power involved is of a significant magnitude in difference, it would be like shooting at an M1 Abrams with a platoon of M16's, it doesn't matter if you add in another 100 platoons of M16's, they are not going to penetrate the M1 Abrams, because the M1 Abrams is designed to stop weapons of a different magnitude, and you can draw the same conclusion with Space craft (Capital ships are designed to deal with capital ship class weapon systems).

As for the StarHawk being able to not only arrest the momentum of the SSD, but to negate it, and then have sufficient power to drag that monumental mass along with it...obviously the author is not very concerned about making his work believable. (Yes it is made up, but we can suspend disbelief if the stuff is true to the rules that have been created to allow us to experience it.) The power required for a tractor beam to hold a ship the size of an SSD, without blowing out? without being ripped out of its mountings?

I'm going to stop now, because I'm just venting.

It depends on the size class of the Nadiri starhawks.

If they are considered the same size class as the ravager, then no problem Phylon Q7 Tractor Beams still procs.

Now, for how fast they changed the Ravager's speed though....

The first Aftermath book was meh. The last two have been enjoyable for me. Bloodlines has been the roughest book for me thus far although now having had many things explained to me in Empire's End it makes much more sense. I love hard scifi and super compelling characters but for gods sake this is Star Wars. You people can't enjoy pulpy scifi and I feel bad for you. To quote Dutch, "Loosen up!"

I really do not care for Chuck Wendig's writing. It's like he sees each unfinished page of a new book as a fresh blank chalkboard, just waiting to be filled. And then he imagines his words are fingernails and drags them screeching across that chalkboard in terribly grating ways. I say this having only tried (and failed) to get through Aftermath, so perhaps it's a bit unfair.

46 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

I really do not care for Chuck Wendig's writing. It's like he sees each unfinished page of a new book as a fresh blank chalkboard, just waiting to be filled. And then he imagines his words are fingernails and drags them screeching across that chalkboard in terribly grating ways. I say this having only tried (and failed) to get through Aftermath, so perhaps it's a bit unfair.

Aftermath is significantly worse then the other two since it was a rush job. I've read Aftermath and Life Debt and personally I couldnt stand the former but I enjoyed the latter.

However I hear the audiobook versions of the trilogy are great, Marc Thompson is an incredible narrator.

Does anyone have a picture of these starhawks? The only image I found looked like the offspring of an AFmk2/VSD/GSD three way

8 hours ago, Church14 said:

Does anyone have a picture of these starhawks? The only image I found looked like the offspring of an AFmk2/VSD/GSD three way

I did a websearch and found nothing either. If they really are the same class as a SSD then ffg could probably be waiting for an official design schematics before releasing them together as a counterpart with the SSD.

There are no official images of the Starhawk as of yet, as far as I'm aware of. Perhaps in the "The Last Jedi"? Personally, I think there's a slight possibility.

If they make the Star Hawks twice the size of an ISD, then it explains why the First Order introduced the much larger Resurgent class.

It all comes down to the final design of the Star Hawk, whenever they release it, VIII?

If it is in Aftermath, Episode VIII appearances seem pretty reasonable