Happy Friday friends of the Internet.

Who excited is everyone that we are just about at Article time for the Super Star Destoryer ..... Woot Woot.

Question for the week, should it have a weekness to A-Wings?

?

be excellent, up lifting and fly outstanding,

Once per turn an A-Wing attacking the front hull zone of an SSD may have the bomber rule but is removed from play after it attacks.

It it is the old conundrum when writing Wargames rules. Should a particular historical action be represented by a good dice modifier or was it a lucky roll?

Was the Bismark shooting at HMS Hood using a +2 or was it just rolling a natural 6 on the hit location table...

6 hours ago, Cubanboy said:

Happy Friday friends of the Internet.

Who excited is everyone that we are just about at Article time for the Super Star Destoryer ..... Woot Woot.

Question for the week, should it have a weekness to A-Wings?

?

be excellent, up lifting and fly outstanding,

No but the first time an A Wing is the final blow to an almost dead SSD, I think everyone will cheer.

Dude, cheers on always brightening up our Fridays

As it was leaked: Epic Game Rule #66 "Whenever you destroy a ship of huge size, you can remove 1 friendly squadron at distance 1. If you do so, you can declare the squadron to be cause of the destruction and double the FP of the huge-sized ship when determining the Margin of Victory (MoV)."

Happy Friday to all SSD-killers!

Closure to more armada news.. typo or pun?

Had a mild panic attack when seeing this thread, this coming Friday is the start of my work weekend. ?

A-wing weakness only as a a situational/scenario option.

In RotJ, we note that Akbar gives order to "Focus (All) Fire" on that Super Star Destroyer. So, not sure how safe an assumption it is, but shields have to have been pummeled if the Rebel fleet was throwing everything they had at it... also, "we've lost our bridge deflector shields." So, considering there are no kamikaze attacks allowed (barring Last Jedi), it feels like a rule that all ships would be vulnerable to. Something like this:

If a squadron loses it's last hull within Squadron Range 1 of target ship, it can roll 1 one black dice. Usual rules apply for damage with the following additions:

1. If the target ship has 0 shield in its forward firing arc, and

2. If a crit+hit is rolled, roll a second, single Red Dice.

3. If that final red dice is also a crit, the target ship has lost its bridge and takes rolled damage plus 3 additional face-up damage cards. Any other result on this final Red dice has no effect.

EDIT 4. (Optional) If target ship is the enemy's Flagship, they lose their commander and his effects (wait...isn't this the usual case with destroyed flagships?) Maybe all ships in enemy fleet lose one command token per ship, of their choice, if their ships have any command tokens.

You guys edit that or balance it out for how many face up you think OR if you think you get to total the ship....

IMHO, to total the ship, it would have to have something to collide with to produce the catastrophic effect we see in the Executor's final moments. As far as anyone can tell, all that happened was the bridge was compromised, likely killing most if not all the crew on that bridge (commander included-edit and adding rule 4), there was a temporary loss of control with a hard pitch to port. With it's proximity to Death Star II, the auxiliary helmsmen in secondary, tertiary, etc command centers didn't have time to correct vector, plowing into one of the most gawdawful mushroom clouds the Empire ever had to endure.

9 hours ago, Ono-boso said:

If a squadron loses it's last hull within Squadron Range 1 of target ship, it can roll 1 one black dice. Usual rules apply for damage with the following additions:

1. If the target ship has 0 shield in its forward firing arc, and

2. If a crit+hit is rolled, roll a second, single Red Dice.

3. If that final red dice is also a crit, [...]

... roll three blue dice.

4. If three crits are rolled, you flip a coin.

5. If the coin shows head you throw again. If it shows head a second time, you race around the table.

6. If you run faster that your opponent, he wouldn't beat you with a stick for being a jerk and shout

"Happy Friday!"

You're taking this WAY too seriously!!! ?

10 hours ago, Ono-boso said:

You're taking this WAY too seriously!!! ?

I'm a very serious person. ?

I only spect keyforge articles:(

On 10/5/2018 at 3:54 AM, Mad Cat said:

Once per turn an A-Wing attacking the front hull zone of an SSD may have the bomber rule but is removed from play after it attacks.

It it is the old conundrum when writing Wargames rules. Should a particular historical action be represented by a good dice modifier or was it a lucky roll?

Would be better in Corellian Conflict II to just create an Arvel A-Wing Squadron that had Bomber (like Green Squadron) and some rule like "When attacking a hull zone with no shields, instead of rolling dice you may remove yourself from the game (counts as destroyed) to force the defender to suffer two face-up damage cards."

On 10/9/2018 at 7:58 PM, Ono-boso said:

In RotJ, we note that Akbar gives order to "Focus (All) Fire" on that Super Star Destroyer. So, not sure how safe an assumption it is, but shields have to have been pummeled if the Rebel fleet was throwing everything they had at it... also, "we've lost our bridge deflector shields."

Yup, the battle against the Executor was gonna be a major plot-line of the RotJ, but was dropped for time, budget, and plot simplicity (as was the Jerjerrod's Inner Turmoil plotline, which can still largely be found in the deleted scenes). From the early scripts, storyboards, and deleted scenes we can reconstruct how the SSD battle was going to play out:

(1) Madine's task force of about a dozen Mon Cal warships was gonna start attacking and pummeling the SSD's shields. [We still see these Mon Cal ships surrounding the SSD in the background of the SSD scenes, especially from the bridge's view (Piett scenes), where all those Mon Cals are looming out there.]

(2) AFTER bridge deflectors collapse from the slugfest, Green Squad attacks the port sensor array and Blue Squad the starboard array. In all official notes and materials at the time, those domes on top of Star Destroyers were labeled as sensor arrays (hence why they look like real-world arrays) and they had nothing to do with shields. They could only be destroyed because the shields were down, and it so happens in the film that their destruction is a confirmation that the deflectors have failed. So when they blow up and then we see a bridge officer shout "we've lost bridge deflectors!" it's correlated, but not causally related. However, since so many people viewed those two events as casually related with the domes blowing up CAUSING the shields to be dropped, official materials ultimately retconned those big domes into shield projectors... which if you think about it is a terrible design flaw... but oh well.

(3) With the bridge now vulnerable because it was both shieldless (work of Mon Cal warships) and lacking reliable sensor array data to aide with targeting (work of Green and Blue Group), available fighters from Green Group were strafing over the dorsal hull trying to stay low to avoid fire while approaching the bridge to barrage it with ordnance (the mostly B-Wing Blue Group was too slow and unmaneuverable for this dangerous task). Think of the 'stay on target' sort of suspense from Yavin being homaged here with Arvel trying to keep his group's X-Wings and A-Wings on course to that bridge through the surface structure of the SSD.

(4) With fighters now strafing the vulnerable bridge, the forward firepower is intensified to create a screen to keep them away (since they are firing more blind than usual, given loss of both sensor arrays), and this still kills most of the fighters approaching just given the sheer volume of guns on the SSD (you see fighters blowing up behind Arvel). Arvel is the only fighter that gets through, but his A-Wing is hit and damaged, forcing him into a death-spiral. He is able to maintain enough control to steer his now worthless fighter into the bridge of the Executor. This disrupts command of the ship, but all in all isn't fatal to such a large vessel.

(5) After the bridge goes out, remaining fighters from Blue Group then pummel and disable a few of the lowest ventral engines, now causing the SSD to start to 'dive' because the dorsal engines were still firing without that ventral compensation. This, coupled with disruption in command to the SSD preventing the dorsal engines from being powered down, then sends the Executor diving into the DSII.



So the defeat of the Executor was going to be the culmination of about a dozen mon cal warships creating an opportunity for two full squadrons of fighters to target weaknesses and capitalize on an opportunity to take the ship out with a collision, given its proximity to the DSII surface. Of course, because of what minimal amount ends up on screen and because people can't generally appreciate correlation vs causation, we get everyone going: LOL, SSD STUPID. TWO A-WINGS BLOW UP ITS SHIELDS AND ONE SMOOSHES IT GOOD! THEN IT FALLS WITH NO GRAVITY CUZ STAR-WARS 'SCIENCE' LULZ.

But, there is so much going on in the background and offscreen that much better explains the SSD's demise and would have made for a very interesting and tactical battle. But you can't blame LFL for bailing on it, I mean the scenes from the space battle in Endor were already the most complicated scenes ever put to film (some of those 2-3 seconds clips of the Falcon whooshing past things required over 200 separate layers of film to be overlayed together to create them). Couple this with an already long movie and three other simultaneous plots going on (Bunker, DSII Scaffolding Attack Run, Throne Room) and yea, it's a bit overkill to expect it all to have been put on screen.


But we can appreciate this grand idea, limited largely be special effects technology at the time, for what Star Wars space combat wanted to look like in 1983. Then we can look at what we got in 2017 with TLJ, when we are no longer limited by special effects technology, but nevertheless we merely get a slow straight-line chase after getting a "super bombers fly in super slow straight line and blow up one by one until one drops bombs on ship and boom, all after one X-Wing strips all the guns off of a mega-warship" scene. Ugh, so lazy.

1 hour ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

(...)

This is amazing. I always imagined destruction of the Executor as result of coordinated attack of multiple Rebel warships which happened "behind the scenes" but I didn't know that actually there is so much information about that. @AllWingsStandyingBy, can you possibly provide source of this? Or is this scattered across many publications?

11 minutes ago, noggin said:

This is amazing. I always imagined destruction of the Executor as result of coordinated attack of multiple Rebel warships which happened "behind the scenes" but I didn't know that actually there is so much information about that. @AllWingsStandyingBy, can you possibly provide source of this? Or is this scattered across many publications?

Well, the easiest place to start is to check out ROTJ Deleted Scenes on YouTube. There you will see scenes of Madine swiveling about on the bridge of a Mon Cal Warship. You'll also find some scenes of a Sullustan and Mon Cal B-Wing pilots, as well as scenes of Cracken and Blount gunning in the Falcon's gunner ports and a Sullustan engineer running about the Falcon during the battle fixing stuff. There are also all the scenes that relate to the Jerjerrod Inner Struggle. Then you can also find on YouTube black and white test footage of three female Rebel pilots, but two of these were dropped and one was dubbed over with a man's voice since (allegedly) RotJ would have been flirting with a PG13 rating if they included female combatants in service and dying (it was a different time back then).

After that, you have to dredge up original storyboards and draft scripts, which are scattered about a variety sources (e.g. I found some of the story-board stuff years ago on a very detailed fansite forum for reconstructing accurate and authentic rebel pilot costumes and officer uniforms). Early tech manuals and such include reference to the domes on top of Star Destroyers being "sensor domes," and even the "sensor dome" entry on Wokieepedia still notes that those domes were packed full of sensors and fed targeting data to the ship's weapon systems, making them viable targets after the shields were down (though also includes some mumbo-jumbo about how they had an auxiliary localized shielding system). Behind the scenes specials indicate how complex filming the space battle scenes in Endor turned out to be, and just how long they took, and how frustrated the crew was getting with the sheer complexity and volume of it all (one of the FX specialists even says that at one point he included a shoe in the background of some scenes as a ship stand-in because he believed no one would even notice, given the complexity of the scenes), which gives credence to the practical needs to trim it all down.


So, really, I've pieced it all together from a variety or sources and places over the years. But, for me, since the space battle of Endor is THE paradigmatic Star Wars, I've always had a long standing interest in the battle and the call signs and such. Almost like a fictional historian of the battle.

Other fun facts:

-- Jerjerrod was having his team flood portions of the DSII with high bursts of radiation and was rerouting power all around to random systems to try and decoy the Rebel Fighters away from the actual main reactor. This is in part why you see some weird arc-lightning and other effects as fighters are flying through the superstructure. When Lando orders the Rebels to split up because maybe they'll "take some of the fighters with you" it was because the TIEs' sensors weren't strong enough to try and pin down a main power source, so they were merely following Rebel fighters and basically flying blind. Also, by splitting up, it forced the Imperial technicians in the command room to divert their efforts to send false power signals to two groups of Rebel fighters.

-- The Falcon doesn't fire it's turrets behind itself during the chase scenes through the superstructure, because initially both turrets had been planned to have been destroyed by that point. One during the battle, and then the other gets jammed up after dinging part of the DSII structure at the same time the dish gets knocked off.

-- The Rebel fighter groups at Endor were originally intended to be mixed squadrons and were filmed as such. Most people assume that Red Group was all X-Wings, Gray Group all Y-Wings, etc. and this has sort of been presented as the case in sources like the Decipher CCG and such, but the fighter types were largely mixed. Based on Wedge's lines, we see that he's referring to an A-Wing and a Y-Wing when he's talking to Red 2 and Red 3. When Lando orders "Red Group, Gold Group, all fighters follow me!" we see a mix of X-Wings, A-Wings, and a Y-Wing in the attack run. These were all the remaining fighters of Red and Gold groups, which is why it never made any sense to have Horton Salm (Gray Group Leader) or Tycho (Green Group Member) present on the attack run, as the EU suggested. Meanwhile, the EU also put Jake Farrel (who we see in the attack run, "Copy, Gold Leader") into Green Group, since it would seem like he should have been Red or Gold Group if he was a part of the attack. Green and Blue Groups were meant to be out attacking the SSD. In the opening scenes of the RotJ space battle, when we see the Falcon leading three X-Wings, three Y-Wings, and some A-Wings and B-Wings to the front of the fleet, I'm pretty convinced that those ~dozen fighters were Gold Squadron.

-- The Rebel fleet severely outnumbered and outpowered the Imperial fleet at Endor. At the end of the battle of Endor, we know that at the absolute minimum at least eight Mon Cal warships still alive, and we know several were lost during the battle. I suspect the Rebels had at least 20 Mon Cal warships at Endor, and possibly many more. Meanwhile, there were only somewhere around 12-17 ISDs at Endor in total. This is because Palpatine just wanted the ISDs to screen the Rebels from escaping and was planning on the Superlaser doing 90% of the work against the Rebel ships, so he didn't station a ton of his ships at Endor and left the vast majority to their garrison and usual duties across the galaxy. But, when Lando convinces Ackbar to take the Rebel fleet into the heart of the Imperial position, this severely limits how effective the superlaser can be in the battle, and when the DSII is lost, the Rebels now have an undeniable edge in the battle, and this is why the remaining Imperial ships retreat from Endor (allowing the Rebels to actually like have a party down with the Ewoks... if the Imperial fleet was advantaged, they'd have stuck around and bombarded the forest moon to oblivion). It would take the Imperial remnants a long time to suss out power struggles and reorganize and redeploy in a way that could then rival the Rebel (soon to be New Republic) fleet.






How canon does any of this stuff remain? Well, who knows. But it's still my head-canon, if nothing else

On 10/11/2018 at 6:01 PM, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

(...)

Thank you very much! I had a look and I found some of these scenes. Amazing! I had no idea that these exist. I think you're right about mixed rebel squadrons. I always thought that at least Gold Squadron was mix of different fighter types.

All this information is great source of inspiration for recreation of Battle of Endor. And I'm deffinitely playing one after SSD drops. Do you have any thoughts or information on role of the rebel transports in the battle? Or we have to accept that film makers just re-used available models? I always assumed they were there to deliver troops to Endor's surface. From the game point of view it's not a problem, you can stick some fleet support on them, but it doesn't justify their presence on the screen.

On 10/14/2018 at 5:50 AM, noggin said:

Thank you very much! I had a look and I found some of these scenes. Amazing! I had no idea that these exist. I think you're right about mixed rebel squadrons. I always thought that at least Gold Squadron was mix of different fighter types.

All this information is great source of inspiration for recreation of Battle of Endor. And I'm deffinitely playing one after SSD drops. Do you have any thoughts or information on role of the rebel transports in the battle? Or we have to accept that film makers just re-used available models? I always assumed they were there to deliver troops to Endor's surface. From the game point of view it's not a problem, you can stick some fleet support on them, but it doesn't justify their presence on the screen.

I remember reading, though cannot recall where, that some of them were packed full of explosives with droid pilots, ready to sacrificially ram into enemy ships and detonate their cargo. Though, since I cannot recall the source I'm not confident this was in anyway official or even "Legends EU" material (side rant: and here's another reason I hate TLJ: if the "Holdo Maneuver" was possible, these GR75s would just be hyperspacing through the bridges of ISDs, into the Endor Shield Generator, and into the DSII's superlaser... ugh.).

Beyond that, I think GR75s have served a variety of roles in space battles for the Rebellion:
- Pilot Rescue (when pilots eject, something has to pick them up and I think the faster more maneuverable GR-75s would serve this role)
- Fighter Coordination
- Targeting Sensor Relays (relaying sensor data back to larger warships)
- Jamming fields and electronic warfare to disrupt enemy ship and fighter targeting
- Light combat support (I think at least some, if not most, GR-75s were assumed to be lightly armed, so they could provide some offensive output. While we don't see they shooting in the OT, we never really see Mon Cals or Nebulons firing shots either).

And, of course, activation padding ...

34 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

I remember reading, though cannot recall where, that some of them were packed full of explosives with droid pilots, ready to sacrificially ram into enemy ships and detonate their cargo. Though, since I cannot recall the source I'm not confident this was in anyway official or even "Legends EU" material (side rant: and here's another reason I hate TLJ: if the "Holdo Maneuver" was possible, these GR75s would just be hyperspacing through the bridges of ISDs, into the Endor Shield Generator, and into the DSII's superlaser... ugh.).

I always thought that if a ship hit another ship or a gravity well while in hyperspace the hyperspacing ship would blow up in hyperspace, like this Y-Wing here.

TLJ makes it seem like hyperspace is merely going superfast rather than being an alternative dimension.

30 minutes ago, Piratical Moustache said:

I always thought that if a ship hit another ship or a gravity well while in hyperspace the hyperspacing ship would blow up in hyperspace, like this Y-Wing here.

TLJ makes it seem like hyperspace is merely going superfast rather than being an alternative dimension.

Yea, the TFA, RO, and TLJ all* 'retcon' how hyperspace works in the Star Wars universe, which basically renders the entirety of space-combat in Star Wars utterly pointless, since all anyone would ever do is just use weaponized hyperspace if that were possible (as the Disney-era films have suggested). Why not make hyperspace-capable ballistic torpedoes? Why not build ships that are just mass and hyperdrive engines with one droid-brain controlling it? No need for weapon systems, life support, crew quarters, or anything like that on such ships. So ships would be of two totally different types: transports and hyper-rams.


*In TFA, Han hyperspaces right adjacent to a planet (to go under the shield), in RO the U-Wing hyperspaces away from Jedha's destruction while in the atmosphere, and in TLJ we have the Holdo maneuver. None of these would have previously been possible, because large grav wells (like planets) prevented hyperspace drives from functioning (so much like an interdictor cruiser's grav wells, you'd be ripped into normal space when in close enough proximity to a grav well and you had to clear a planet's grav well sufficiently to jump into hyperspace).

22 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

In TFA, Han hyperspaces right adjacent to a planet (to go under the shield), in RO the U-Wing hyperspaces away from Jedha's destruction while in the atmosphere, and in TLJ we have the Holdo maneuver. None of these would have previously been possible, because large grav wells (like planets) prevented hyperspace drives from functioning (so much like an interdictor cruiser's grav wells, you'd be ripped into normal space when in close enough proximity to a grav well and you had to clear a planet's grav well sufficiently to jump into hyperspace).

IIRC you could always hyperspace super close to things, the computer would just hate you for it, and often safety overrides would pull you out of hyperspace.

10 minutes ago, AllWingsStandyingBy said:

Yea, the TFA, RO, and TLJ all* 'retcon' how hyperspace works in the Star Wars universe, which basically renders the entirety of space-combat in Star Wars utterly pointless, since all anyone would ever do is just use weaponized hyperspace if that were possible (as the Disney-era films have suggested). Why not make hyperspace-capable ballistic torpedoes? Why not build ships that are just mass and hyperdrive engines with one droid-brain controlling it? No need for weapon systems, life support, crew quarters, or anything like that on such ships. So ships would be of two totally different types: transports and hyper-rams.


*In TFA, Han hyperspaces right adjacent to a planet (to go under the shield), in RO the U-Wing hyperspaces away from Jedha's destruction while in the atmosphere, and in TLJ we have the Holdo maneuver. None of these would have previously been possible, because large grav wells (like planets) prevented hyperspace drives from functioning (so much like an interdictor cruiser's grav wells, you'd be ripped into normal space when in close enough proximity to a grav well and you had to clear a planet's grav well sufficiently to jump into hyperspace).

Nothing can fix this plot hole either, the most common "fix" I hear is that hyperdrives are too expensive to weaponize. Nearly every starship has a hyperdrive installed, and the technology is publicly available, and there would be massive savings for any military by attaching hyperdrives to a droid controlled rod of tungsten instead of making warships. It makes all the previous space battles look meaningless and stupid.

5 hours ago, Piratical Moustache said:

Nothing can fix this plot hole either, the most common "fix" I hear is that hyperdrives are too expensive to weaponize. Nearly every starship has a hyperdrive installed, and the technology is publicly available, and there would be massive savings for any military by attaching hyperdrives to a droid controlled rod of tungsten instead of making warships. It makes all the previous space battles look meaningless and stupid.

Or it just has incredibly low odds of working. We didn’t watch ESB and conclude any idiot with a freighter can get through an asteroid field. Even though they made it incredibly obvious that it was a bad plan then, all of these more modern examples still come across as desperate, last-ditch efforts. If nothing else, flip the conundrum upside down: the fact hyperspace hasn’t been weaponized means it isn’t currently feasible, for whatever reason. Let Disney canon be bent by Lucas canon, not the other way around.

44 minutes ago, The Jabbawookie said:

Or it just has incredibly low odds of working. We didn’t watch ESB and conclude any idiot with a freighter can get through an asteroid field. Even though they made it incredibly obvious that it was a bad plan then, all of these more modern examples still come across as desperate, last-ditch efforts. If nothing else, flip the conundrum upside down: the fact hyperspace hasn’t been weaponized means it isn’t currently feasible, for whatever reason. Let Disney canon be bent by Lucas canon, not the other way around.

But then what am I supposed to complain about? As a white male on the internet, EVERYONE needs to hear my opinion!

21 minutes ago, geek19 said:

But then what am I supposed to complain about?

No new Rebel ships announced? ?

22 hours ago, Piratical Moustache said:

Nothing can fix this plot hole either...

Yup. I wish I could say that it was the prime reason that I think makes TLJ utterly incompatible with the built-world of Star Wars, but it's probably like reason three or four on the list, sadly.