Or TIE Bomber on Asteriods.

In a book for episode VIII are explained that there using a magnetic for the drop.

12 hours ago, Pigsticker said:

Yeah seriously. Notice how Empire Strikes Back ended on a tremendous amount of hope yet they never had to keep repeating the cliched line about being a "spark that lights a fire." Ugggh. Going back to my hyperspace point way earlier, the way hyperspace was described to work in the universe is that a ship cannot hyperspace into and through solid masses. Otherwise, hyperspacing into things would be the only strategy needed...ever. Plus, how are the resistance bombers supposed to work? They basically float over their target and "drop" bombs in space?

The Visual dictionary revealed that these bombs are launched from their frames, basically making the bombing mechanism a very slow Railgun, if you will.

Well, for ywings bombing the shield gate, they're just dropping them, the planets gravity is doing the rest. Why wouldn't the same work above a star destroyer after all, everybody on board is experiencing 1g of downward force why wouldn't the artificial gravity pull resistance bombs down at the same rate? This would also explain why everyone deploys in a line rather than random orientation, you wouldn't want to influence the other ships gravity.

23 hours ago, Pigsticker said:

Yeah seriously. Notice how Empire Strikes Back ended on a tremendous amount of hope yet they never had to keep repeating the cliched line about being a "spark that lights a fire." Ugggh. Going back to my hyperspace point way earlier, the way hyperspace was described to work in the universe is that a ship cannot hyperspace into and through solid masses. Otherwise, hyperspacing into things would be the only strategy needed...ever. Plus, how are the resistance bombers supposed to work? They basically float over their target and "drop" bombs in space?

Actually, hyperspace travel describes hyper spacing into things as possible and dangerous.

"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"

So it's possible to fly through a star (or planet, or any other object), but doing so is bad and would result in death and destruction. If you hyperspace into a planet, the planet wouldn't notice, but you would (well, you wouldn't because you'd instantly die). This is why hyperspace takes precise calculations, to avoid those sorts of objects.

Hyperspace attacks could very well be an effective weapon, but they are not overly powerful. Hyperspacing X-wings at the Deathstar would have been worthless. They would have done damage, but not destroyed it. Even a larger capital ship would not have destroyed it, but likely only crippled it allowing the Empire to rebuild it. Take a look at what Holdo did with the Raddus. It split a couple ships, and did a lot of damage, but only took the wing off the supremacy. There was a lot going on in the supremacy for a long time after that move. Heck, the fleet even launched a ground assault some time after the attack.

Beyond all that, hyperspacing ships into targets wastes valuable resources. The entire lesson in TLJ is that to win the resistance needs to save people, not sacrifice them. In Ep4, they had a plan, drop torps into the hole and blow the thing up. The goal is to hit it, and break away preserving lives and resources. A hyperspace assault would have required all their craft flying right at the thing in hyperspace in hopes of getting lucky and slowing it, or disabling it, or getting really lucky and destroying it. The Rebel losses would have been much greater...and in fact you'd likely find it would be hard for the Rebels to find pilots to do this. Telling someone to attempt a heroic act that may result in their death but save everyone is far different than telling them to fly really fast into a moon sized space station ensuring your own death.

And resistance bombers working in space is **** simple if you understand the concept of zero-g environments at all. Push bomb out of bomb bay and it will continue on that trajectory until another object affects it in some way. All the bombs are on track systems, so it's not hard to believe they have a system to push the bombs out. On top of that, everything with mass projects it's own gravitational effect. A ship that massive would actually attract those unguided bombs even if they weren't pushed (at a considerably slower pace however).

1 hour ago, mhd said:

Well, for ywings bombing the shield gate, they're just dropping them, the planets gravity is doing the rest. Why wouldn't the same work above a star destroyer after all, everybody on board is experiencing 1g of downward force why wouldn't the artificial gravity pull resistance bombs down at the same rate? This would also explain why everyone deploys in a line rather than random orientation, you wouldn't want to influence the other ships gravity.

The artificial gravity is inside the ship, not outside. It wouldn't make sense for a ship to attract things outside it to it uncontrollably like that. Missed shots would actually be pulled to the target. Space debris that would sail past would strike the ship. Star Destroyers couldn't just dump their garbage like they do in the movies because the garbage would just collect on the outside of the ship.

As for the orientation of ships...that just for audiences. Its easier for humans to understand a 2 dimensional situation than a 3 dimensional situation. That is why all the ships in almost all space movies/shows all fly with the same orientation...just so audiences don't have to strain their brain. It's really fun to look for instances where ships with artificial gravity do a barrel roll in space and the occupants end up flying off the floor....as if the orientation of the gravity inside would stay constant to the universe around them instead of to the ship they are in that is creating the gravitational field.

Also, for the shield gate, they are in orbit. Gravity is lessoned incredibly at the distance that are at. Have you ever seen video of the astronauts in the space station. They aren't being affected much by gravity. A Y-wing couldn't just drop a bomb and expect it to travel to it's target. I mean, it would make it, but it would take a considerable amount of time.

More likely the Y-Wing bombs are either launch assisted to get some velocity, or perhaps are sort of dive bombed into the target.

"Hyperspace attacks could very well be an effective weapon, but they are not overly powerful." ... "Beyond all that, hyperspacing ships into targets wastes valuable resources. The entire lesson in TLJ is that to win the resistance needs to save people, not sacrifice them. In Ep4, they had a plan, drop torps into the hole and blow the thing up. The goal is to hit it, and break away preserving lives and resources. A hyperspace assault would have required all their craft flying right at the thing in hyperspace in hopes of getting lucky and slowing it, or disabling it, or getting really lucky and destroying it. The Rebel losses would have been much greater...and in fact you'd likely find it would be hard for the Rebels to find pilots to do this."

With respect, I think both your statements are easily shown to be incorrect. Using the films as source material:

The Raddus, a single ship (itself only a little longer than the Supremacy's escorts), destroys (yes, wookiepedia lists it as destroyed) a 60 KM wide ship and destroys several of its 2+KM long escorts? at the cost of a single life. Crew of the Supremacy? 2.25 million (though only "thousands" were killed) Crew of the "several" escorts destroyed? 82,000+ per ship. Even with a conservative estimate, that's a 1 for 246,000 exchange. If I was fighting a war, I'd take those numbers any day. And that's before you make the obvious change in the plan to using a droid pilot. Astromechs have been shown to be fully able to calculate and perform hyperspace jumps without a human pilot. I'm sorry, but that's pretty *expletive deleted* effective.

In Empire Strikes Back, we see an asteroid easily destroy an Imperial Star Destroyer (it smashes into the bridge section at sub-light speed) and a comment is made remarking on the amount of damage the task force has taken scouring the field for the Falcon. We even see the Task Force firing on, and destroying approaching asteroids; a clear indicator they are a threat to the ships. 3 mile long asteroids are not uncommon. Mount some maneuvering thrusters, an astromech droid, and a hyperdrive, you have a Supremacy killer. Mount them on something the size of Vesta (an asteroid 329 miles in diameter, 2.65 times larger than the diameter of the second Death Star) and you can kill pretty much anything you want.

The real rub (as I see it) using this type of attack is the targeting. I freely admit you'd have to be extremely precise. But that's not difficult at all; we can do that now. Three ships could easily triangulate the exact location of an ISD bridge or landing bay, and then transmit that info to a freighter or GR-75 with a single droid pilot waiting on standby to hyper directly into its soft underbelly.

In short, the tactic is a freshly opened can of worms. A cat no longer in the bag. By doing it, you now have to give a reasonable explanation why no one has done it before/it's not in common use. And I'm sorry...but...there aren't really any valid reasons it's not.

On 12/29/2017 at 3:15 AM, DampfGecko said:

The Visual dictionary revealed that these bombs are launched from their frames, basically making the bombing mechanism a very slow Railgun, if you will.

Unfortunately, the movie does not support this position.

The bombs don't collide with one another - which is what has been suggested in other threads, would happen if they're relying entirely on the ship's own artificial gravity.

On 12/29/2017 at 4:40 PM, kmanweiss said:

And resistance bombers working in space is **** simple if you understand the concept of zero-g environments at all. Push bomb out of bomb bay and it will continue on that trajectory until another object affects it in some way. All the bombs are on track systems, so it's not hard to believe they have a system to push the bombs out. On top of that, everything with mass projects it's own gravitational effect. A ship that massive would actually attract those unguided bombs even if they weren't pushed (at a considerably slower pace however).

Actually, you're right on this, which is exactly why I believe the point you're supporting is wrong. For starters, the bombs themselves have mass, and would affect the trajectories of every other bomb near them; this would have a domino effect upon the bombs, disrupting the accuracy of the drop if not actually leading to fratricide of the entire payload well before reaching anything other than a "point blank" target, making any mission the bomber flies almost certainly a one way job. Now granted, this "problem" can be overcome easily, but in doing so you effectively make the entire bombing run sequence unnecessary. If the bombs will continue forward (especially if projected via some form of "rail gun" delivery (which, by the way, current actual rail gun tech fires projectiles around Mach 7)) then you don't need to get into gun range of the enemy ship, you just drop them and let them head toward the target. Since each Resistance bomber carries a payload of 1052 proton bombs, that would leave a "targeted minefield" of 12,624 bombs heading right for them at what arguably should be at least around 2.4km/sec...and them with their point defense guns destroyed by Poe's run.

Still, this sort of attack leads to a whole new problem. The sheer size of drop on that many highly explosive devices in that kind of sheet proximity to each other is, by its very nature, going to be easy to fratricide. Should any bomb in the drop be hit before the entire payload has left the bomber, it's almost guaranteed to take the entire drop with it, bomber and all. Even if the bombs themselves can be designed to resist damage when the one next to it explodes, unless they can course correct, the explosion will push a large number of them off target. ...which puts us right back in the original situation of needing a close-in, on target drop.

...which is exactly not what the bomber is designed to do. And I qoute: "As a bomber, the MG-100 Starfortress was slow and ungainly...Part of the ship's intent was to help capture besieged Imperial holdouts." These were primarily ground target aircraft; exactly the last thing any sane commander would throw at a starship.

Even if we overlook all of that, they're cheap, and easily replaced. "Other decommissioned craft saw widespread (emphasis added) civilian use. Mining companies used them to drop explosives that broke up ice and rock, local governments deployed them as rescue ships, fuel tankers, and fire-fighting craft, and scout services relied on them for celestial mapping and exploration." A single payload likely cost the Resistance more than the entire squadron, pilots and all.

In the end, like them or not, I think the bombers are in the same boat as the "hyperspace ram" attack: they are both the product of poorly thought out, lazy writing.

On 12/19/2017 at 10:51 PM, xanderf said:

So maybe this has already been covered, but has anyone realized how ANH completely changed canon by basically making it possible for a ship to fire a single pair of proton torpedoes through an exhaust port and destroy an entire battle station, with the hundreds of fighters and ships in it? Does that mean that for Armada, the new game will just be a race to fire a proton torpedo into one another to destroy them?

Or maybe...the film doesn't present the expected result at all, but rather an act of sheer desperation, that only this one time worked out this well because of luck/destiny/the Force/whatever.

But someone shooting a torpedo into that exhaust port was the expected result. Rogue One tells me so. Gaylen Erso, the finest engineer in the galaxy risked his life working in a flaw because he knew it was worth it since there were like a million Jedi at the time and any one of them could totally make that super easy shot.

I got the impression from the way the supremacy bridge crew acted the tactic generally doesn't work because most of the time you would have sufficient time to kill the enemy ship before it made the jump. Hence the order to attack the Raddus as soon as they realize what it was doing.

On 12/29/2017 at 6:34 PM, Arowmund said:

"Hyperspace attacks could very well be an effective weapon, but they are not overly powerful." ... "Beyond all that, hyperspacing ships into targets wastes valuable resources. The entire lesson in TLJ is that to win the resistance needs to save people, not sacrifice them. In Ep4, they had a plan, drop torps into the hole and blow the thing up. The goal is to hit it, and break away preserving lives and resources. A hyperspace assault would have required all their craft flying right at the thing in hyperspace in hopes of getting lucky and slowing it, or disabling it, or getting really lucky and destroying it. The Rebel losses would have been much greater...and in fact you'd likely find it would be hard for the Rebels to find pilots to do this."

With respect, I think both your statements are easily shown to be incorrect. Using the films as source material:

The Raddus, a single ship (itself only a little longer than the Supremacy's escorts), destroys (yes, wookiepedia lists it as destroyed) a 60 KM wide ship and destroys several of its 2+KM long escorts? at the cost of a single life. Crew of the Supremacy? 2.25 million (though only "thousands" were killed) Crew of the "several" escorts destroyed? 82,000+ per ship. Even with a conservative estimate, that's a 1 for 246,000 exchange. If I was fighting a war, I'd take those numbers any day. And that's before you make the obvious change in the plan to using a droid pilot. Astromechs have been shown to be fully able to calculate and perform hyperspace jumps without a human pilot. I'm sorry, but that's pretty *expletive deleted* effective.

In Empire Strikes Back, we see an asteroid easily destroy an Imperial Star Destroyer (it smashes into the bridge section at sub-light speed) and a comment is made remarking on the amount of damage the task force has taken scouring the field for the Falcon. We even see the Task Force firing on, and destroying approaching asteroids; a clear indicator they are a threat to the ships. 3 mile long asteroids are not uncommon. Mount some maneuvering thrusters, an astromech droid, and a hyperdrive, you have a Supremacy killer. Mount them on something the size of Vesta (an asteroid 329 miles in diameter, 2.65 times larger than the diameter of the second Death Star) and you can kill pretty much anything you want.

The real rub (as I see it) using this type of attack is the targeting. I freely admit you'd have to be extremely precise. But that's not difficult at all; we can do that now. Three ships could easily triangulate the exact location of an ISD bridge or landing bay, and then transmit that info to a freighter or GR-75 with a single droid pilot waiting on standby to hyper directly into its soft underbelly.

In short, the tactic is a freshly opened can of worms. A cat no longer in the bag. By doing it, you now have to give a reasonable explanation why no one has done it before/it's not in common use. And I'm sorry...but...there aren't really any valid reasons it's not.

My point exactly, I have a long running game of the FFG SWRPG and now all my players are like "why fight space battles and risk ourselves and our ships? Lets just buy crappy silouette 5 ships give them some droid crew and hyperspace them into star destroyers." I felt it was just stupid, lazy storytelling that has now become part of cannon because it looked pretty and people love explosions. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but in Rouge One, didn't a GR-75 start to hyperspace out and then crash into Vader's ship and desentigtrate? Why didn't it tear it's way through Vader's ship and annihilate everyone on board?

2 hours ago, chr335 said:

I got the impression from the way the supremacy bridge crew acted the tactic generally doesn't work because most of the time you would have sufficient time to kill the enemy ship before it made the jump. Hence the order to attack the Raddus as soon as they realize what it was doing.

A fair interpretation. To counter; hyperspace is used to travel all over the galaxy...not exactly something I'd label as "limited by range." You wouldn't have to be anywhere near your target, just know where it is. Which brings in a whole new aspect that weighs in on the issue. In Empire Strikes Back, the command SSD is visible well before the Falcon enters its gun range, making itself an easy target for hyperspace attacks (if they're a viable tactic and not just something writer pulled out of thin air without considering the implications of doing so). The very existence of a 12km long class of command ship (to say nothing of building one 60km wide?) is some pretty strong circumstantial evidence that you "can't" do it.

Even the instance with the Supremacy and Raddus has tremendous plot issues. I mean, come on; they announced the Raddus was preparing for a hyperspace jump, and then forgot all about her as she did a long, slow, lumbering turn to point her nose directly at them? If hyperspace ram attacks could be done at all, what kind of crew would take their eyes off a ship that has primed its hyperdrive? Ramming is one of the oldest tactics in history. Even if it weren't, how many ships have we seen collide with each other in the Star Wars series? The very fact that no one on the Supremacy didn't watch the Raddus like a hawk and "expect" that a fleeing ship that had been evacuated of all the crew and was about to run out of fuel might be up to something is testament to the tactic itself not being an option. Some have argued they wouldn't expect them to sacrifice the Raddus that way. I ask "Sacrifice how? By using it to at least take someone with them as it's destroyed versus just letting them enemy blow it up with impunity?"
Also, how far away from Supremacy was the Raddus? As I recall, it's stated they were essentially already outside the effective range of her guns, and Supremacy was still clearly visible. So a ship cruising toward the Supremacy could have been at the same range the Raddus and still performed the attack "safely." Oh sure, the Supremacy could have unloaded with all her guns, but good luck hitting a ship coming at you at roughly 186,000m/s. Essentially, the bigger the ship, the more vulnerable it is to the attack because you're actually able to hit it from even further away. Now you can argue it's the act of going to hyperspace and that you have to be right on top of it, but then leaving hyperspace should arguably have the exact same "reality warp" effect, so that's rather a non-point.

In summation, it's a very poorly thought out bit of writing that sacrifices logic and the established history of the universe in exchange for a short lived "Ooooo. Pretty!" from the audience. Now if they'd worked in a line about how their techs discovered that the only way the Supremacy was tracking them was if they'd somehow "linked" their hyperdrives, and that was when the Vice Admiral hatched her "secret" plan to get them all to the closest Rebel base to evacuate them, and then use their link against them somehow by sacrificing the Raddus (say, by deducing that the link would actually allow them to hyper into the exact same spot the Supremacy is already in, and both ships exist for an instant before exploding violently?) ... Well...then that would have made sense.

3 minutes ago, kenngp said:

My point exactly, I have a long running game of the FFG SWRPG and now all my players are like "why fight space battles and risk ourselves and our ships? Lets just buy crappy silouette 5 ships give them some droid crew and hyperspace them into star destroyers." I felt it was just stupid, lazy storytelling that has now become part of cannon because it looked pretty and people love explosions. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but in Rouge One, didn't a GR-75 start to hyperspace out and then crash into Vader's ship and desentigtrate? Why didn't it tear it's way through Vader's ship and annihilate everyone on board?

lol I feel your pain!

As a GM, I would just announce that it doesn't work, period. Your world is your world. Sure, you can get people who say "But it's in the movies, it's cannon!" Then smile and say "Okay, you want cannon? Midichlorians are real. After achieving power, the Emperor passed legislation that requires blood testing of everyone at birth for "health" reasons. Anyone who had a count that was deemed "at risk" was killed in the hospital at birth. Any character who is force sensitive is now dead." Remind them cannon isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Or, you can just politely remind them that what works for them, works for everyone else. Do they really want an Imperial Moff in their campaign who realizes "Hey, I can secure this whole sector just by hyperspacing my Tyderium shuttles through the players ships!"

10 minutes ago, kenngp said:

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but in Rouge One, didn't a GR-75 start to hyperspace out and then crash into Vader's ship and desentigtrate? Why didn't it tear it's way through Vader's ship and annihilate everyone on board?

It was preparing to, and as Vader's ships drops out in front of it, safety system kicks in and stops it from jumping to hyperspace and you can even see it trying to maneuver away before it just normally crashes onto the ISD

I imagine a hyperspace ram isn't used much because it only works in a select few very specific situations. It also might be a 3 km long ship is the minimum size needed to even accomplish this task

3 hours ago, kenngp said:

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but in Rouge One, didn't a GR-75 start to hyperspace out and then crash into Vader's ship and desentigtrate? Why didn't it tear it's way through Vader's ship and annihilate everyone on board?

When a flotilla rams a ship only the flotilla takes damage.

3 hours ago, chr335 said:

I imagine a hyperspace ram isn't used much because it only works in a select few very specific situations. It also might be a 3 km long ship is the minimum size needed to even accomplish this task

This is almost the exact definition of a mcguffin.

On 12/29/2017 at 3:53 PM, kmanweiss said:

Also, for the shield gate, they are in orbit. Gravity is lessoned incredibly at the distance that are at. Have you ever seen video of the astronauts in the space station. They aren't being affected much by gravity.

This is actually completely false. It's a popular perception, but it bears no relationship to reality.

Earth's gravitational pull at the International Space Station is roughly 90% of what it is on earth's surface. Astronauts act as if they are in zero-g because they are in free fall - the space station is falling through space at the same speed that they are. The same phenomenon can happen when a plane dives - see NASAs Vomit Comet as an example.

On 1/1/2018 at 6:48 AM, kenngp said:

My point exactly, I have a long running game of the FFG SWRPG and now all my players are like "why fight space battles and risk ourselves and our ships? Lets just buy crappy silouette 5 ships give them some droid crew and hyperspace them into star destroyers." I felt it was just stupid, lazy storytelling that has now become part of cannon because it looked pretty and people love explosions. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but in Rouge One, didn't a GR-75 start to hyperspace out and then crash into Vader's ship and desentigtrate? Why didn't it tear it's way through Vader's ship and annihilate everyone on board?

This is a good question. I will have to look at that scene more closely now.

On 1/1/2018 at 6:48 AM, kenngp said:

My point exactly, I have a long running game of the FFG SWRPG and now all my players are like "why fight space battles and risk ourselves and our ships? Lets just buy crappy silouette 5 ships give them some droid crew and hyperspace them into star destroyers." I felt it was just stupid, lazy storytelling that has now become part of cannon because it looked pretty and people love explosions. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but in Rouge One, didn't a GR-75 start to hyperspace out and then crash into Vader's ship and desentigtrate? Why didn't it tear it's way through Vader's ship and annihilate everyone on board?

Just watched that scene again, the GR-75 didn't get to start the transition to hyperspace when Vader's ISD appears. Thinking about it though, there was nothing stopping the rest of the fleet from making the jump once Vader arrived.

What screen writers really need to learn is how to create logical space battles given the known tech level of the universe they write for. Having the leadership of the First Order continually make stupid tactical blunders really diminishes the believeability of the story. If the story doesn't make sense, then you lose the audience. There are stretches we can forgive and stretches we can't. A hammerhead corvette generating enough momentum to move a disabled star destroyer with sufficient force to shear off the superstructure of another star destroyer is complete BS, but we can forgive it. It's not a world breaking stretch. Having Starkiller base take the entire mass and heat of a sun, suck it into the core of the planet with no gravitic or heat consequences, is a bridge too far. In the same vein, having the FO not have part of the fleet microjump ahead of the fleeing cruisers to catch them in the vice was incredibly stupid not to mention their target selection priorities. The base is being abandoned, it's not going anywhere. Take out the means of escape first then mop up the stragglers. In Empire Strikes Back, Vader tried to do this but Admiral Ozzel came out of hyperspace in such a way to allow gaps in the blockade that the rebels exploited. If the villains don't adapt their tactics or learn anything from their mistakes, they aren't really villains so much as buffoons for the heroes to beat up.

9 minutes ago, Woobyluv said:

What screen writers really need to learn is how to create logical space battles given the known tech level of the universe they write for.

If they knew how to do that they wouldnt be a writer, they'd be an engineer.

So how do you propose to achieve this?

Maybe if they'd taken all the time and resources sunk into Starkiller Base and applied them to their Stormtrooper legions, they'd have had thousands of "Phasma" troopers.

Just imagine it; an entire formation of reflective, shiny silver-chrome Cylons -- Er, Stormtroopers -- marching at your defenses, gunning everyone down as your return fire glances harmlessly off them.

9 minutes ago, Ginkapo said:

If they knew how to do that they wouldnt be a writer, they'd be an engineer.

So how do you propose to achieve this?

We aren't going to get super precision, because even with the best tactics laid forth, people can still make mistakes, but it doesn't take a genius to figure some of this stuff out. They should be simulating the situations before they go in the story to see how best to use it. Make the corrections needed and carry on. When Vader's subordinates messed up royally, they got "relieved". Here, they continue to command making them seem like cartoon characters. Hux can't be so important that he is irreplaceable, not for a monolithic star empire like the FO.