SPOILERS

SPOILERS

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TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

CREW COMPLIMENT

Xyston is Greek for Spear or Spearhead

It has a cool name. That is about all the positive things I can say about the ship. I mean the design is basically an ISD, which is after all the best looking ship in all of science fiction, so it is still nice to look at. But to me the ship represents nothing but wasted potential.

They look the same as ISD. But of course bigger...

Oh look, they glued an oversized gun to it!

The lame level is extreme.

7 hours ago, Imperial Advisor Arem Heshvaun said:

LENGTH 2,406 meters

The ISD-I is 1,600 meters. So I'm guessing someone just said "ok, let's just say it is 50% bigger." They don't seem to have made any major changes to the design (other than the extra gun), including the gun turrets and the bridge.

So I'm assuming that means everything on the Star Destroyer is just 50% bigger. So the ceilings are 50% higher, the bunks are larger, the crew pits deeper, the 'freshers are 50% in all dimensions.

Or maybe it's that the crew aren't humans but special Sith hybrids, and are 50% larger than normal humans?

So, so silly. Why not just have a load of normal ISDs and throw in some Onagers?

Again this is the Visual Dictionary, not the film, and I don’t buy it.

The bridge is the same size from the outside and inside. These are just regular ISDs with giant guns strapped on them and that works for me.

Palpatine had fleets rendezvous in the unknown regions, that were gutted with most of the space dedicated toward facilitating the gun.

I would have preferred them go for just ISD with more guns and had them orbitally bombard planets instead. But of all the nonsense in SW this doesn’t break anything for me.

TRoS is decent to good. I have few grievances with it.

It's rare to see a ship be an insult to creative design both inside and outside the universe, but this is such a case. It's small wonder they fell to civilian craft, because by now every form of life in the galaxy has probably memorized the technical specs and weak points.

I wish Palpatine's fleet had been composed of K-wings and giant Ewok gliders that destroyed planets by "dropping" other planets on them, because it would be creative and make more sense.

I have a lot more to say, and considered setting up a thread for it, but this is enough.

7 hours ago, LordCola said:

It has a cool name. That is about all the positive things I can say about the ship. I mean the design is basically an ISD, which is after all the best looking ship in all of science fiction, so it is still nice to look at. But to me the ship represents nothing but wasted potential.

Fully agree here. Keeping them ISD I’s would also help further explain Canon Lore in some 100 ISDs were left pulled away from their assigned zones at crucial times, giving the Rebellion inroads to blitz their gains after Endor.

Refitting the older ships and upgrading the Superlaser technology would count for the slow build up to the events of the current Galaxtic timeline.

2 hours ago, Grumbleduke said:

Why not just have a load of normal ISDs and throw in some Onagers?

I’m with you on this on the ISDs.

The Onager was a creation of Lucasfilms story group and later on FFG built on the design, I doubt JJ Abrams and his team even knew of it.

37 minutes ago, The Jabbawookie said:

I wish Palpatine's fleet had been composed of K-wings and giant Ewok gliders that destroyed planets by "dropping" other planets on them, because it would be creative and make more sense.

At least I now know who purchased my Nightmare Journal (2006 - 2007) on eBay.

1 hour ago, Imperial Advisor Arem Heshvaun said:

The Onager was a creation of Lucasfilms story group and later on FFG built on the design, I doubt JJ Abrams and his team even knew of it.

Given the timing I suspect the Onager-class was developed as concept art for TROS, possibly before Abrams took over in mid-2017. Replacing them with big-gun-ISDs fits in with the general "let's cram in as much nostalgia as possible" feel the film has.

How amazing would it have been for a few ISDs rise from the ice, all impressive and foreboding, only for a much larger siege ship to rise between and overshadow them?

Then zoom out to see the fleet comprised of similar formations all around.

I wonder how many of these Xyston were built? A few hundred doesn’t seem all that unreasonable, especially if built from the space frames of regular ISDs.

8 hours ago, Grumbleduke said:

The ISD-I is 1,600 meters. So I'm guessing someone just said "ok, let's just say it is 50% bigger." They don't seem to have made any major changes to the design (other than the extra gun), including the gun turrets and the bridge.

So I'm assuming that means everything on the Star Destroyer is just 50% bigger. So the ceilings are 50% higher, the bunks are larger, the crew pits deeper, the 'freshers are 50% in all dimensions.

Or maybe it's that the crew aren't humans but special Sith hybrids, and are 50% larger than normal humans?

So, so silly. Why not just have a load of normal ISDs and throw in some Onagers?

While I'm in total agreement, for this exact reason, TBH...

...the same problem exists with the Victory-class. Aside from a slightly different bridge structure, and those 'wings', it's again the same exact design, just...smaller. I guess the Victory-class had really tiny ceilings and bunks and computer consoles with itty-bitty buttons on them???

The real question is, would you buy it if FFG released it for Armada?

imo I would, the red outlining is rad

But I wonder how the cannon would be simulated. Similar to Onager?

Part of the reason this movie makes me sad is that we get this Final Order crap instead of more First Order equipment. The Final Order is just a bad, juvenile idea that....ughf. And these ISDs with guns glued to their bottoms is just a highlight of it all. The actual, interesting new stuff (Sith Troopers and their TIEs) make such a limited appearance the entire faction is a cop-out.

1 hour ago, xanderf said:

While I'm in total agreement, for this exact reason, TBH...

...the same problem exists with the Victory-class. Aside from a slightly different bridge structure, and those 'wings', it's again the same exact design, just...smaller. I guess the Victory-class had really tiny ceilings and bunks and computer consoles with itty-bitty buttons on them???

The original VSD artwork was ambiguous enough that differences can be pulled out of it... in fact... the original flight simulators did just that (adding twin antenna, two engines instead of three, splitting the wings). It's only things like Empire at War that re-uses the ISD model that makes the impression it's just a shrunken ISD.

So....

The final order was a contingency plan, ie: if starkiller base had worked & ended the resistance, Palpatine would have popped up anyways, removed Snoke & taken over. Right?

So this means Papa P knew how to shrink planet killer tech but let the FO waste god knows how much time & resources building their super-duper DS mk3...

And I’m generally calling BS on them being able to shrink that tech in the first place.

5 hours ago, ISD Avenger said:

So....

The final order was a contingency plan, ie: if starkiller base had worked & ended the resistance, Palpatine would have popped up anyways, removed Snoke & taken over. Right?

So this means Papa P knew how to shrink planet killer tech but let the FO waste god knows how much time & resources building their super-duper DS mk3...

And I’m generally calling BS on them being able to shrink that tech in the first place.

I'm going to go with "Starkiller base HAD to destroy the Republic fleet so the really fragile not-ISDs could actually destroy stuff before being blown up by actual battleships".

Starkiller Base could fire across the entire galaxy from an unknown position whereas these clearly have short range. Doesn’t sound like a waste of resources to me.

Remember in the Last Jedi they had the miniaturized Death Star tech in the siege cannon?

It doesnt bother me because again it seems like a logical progression of the technology AND at the very least the new ISDS were glass cannons.

I imagine the new ISDs were so combustible because their internal volume was almost entirely devoted to the primary cannon.

2 hours ago, Forresto said:

Remember in the Last Jedi they had the miniaturized Death Star tech in the siege cannon?

It was not implied that cannon had the ability to blow up Crait were it only pointed downwards. It was capable of breaching a really thick door, which is not the same thing.

Even if we ignore the physics of it (which are even more absurd than normal), from a writing standpoint having a mass-produced planet killer only a few hundred meters long cheapens the concept (which, having already been the focal point of 3 movies, is already pretty cheap.) Remember when Alderaan's destruction caused an actual emotional reaction? Watching Kijimi get turned into pebbles didn't even make me blink. In fact, I had to look up the name, because I forgot it, because it didn't matter.

Unless the point of the franchise is to make an audience apathetic to planetary genocide, the superweapon trope has to go. It just doesn't raise the stakes anymore.

Rewatched the film a third time.

There are at most a couple thousand star destroyers of this class if not simply a thousand.

In comparison to the twenty five thousand regular ISDs, fifteen SSDs, two deathstars, and tens of thousands of support craft the Imperials built.

@The Jabbawookie I hate superweapons. I think by now, between the films and legends, they’re overdone and lazy. When the leaks broke and I heard about these my hopes for TROS dissipated as they did when I first heard about Starkiller Base.

I’ve gotta say they don’t bother me. I definitely wouldn’t have made the same choice if I was writing Ep IX. I wish they were just hyped up versions of the dreadnaughts, wipe out the planetary surface rather then the planet itself.

On the other hand there’s not many of them and they’re glass cannons. They have limitations BECAUSE of their primary weapon. And they demonstrate the villains learning, distributing their eggs rather then putting them all in one basket.

Should be 50 points per model and allows you to "spawn" them on the table the same way Palpatine did just by raising them from the ground.

...

I only have Audiobooks, and I could have sworn there was a Lieutenant Xyston on the Ultimatum when Sloane was in Charge of it....

But being Audiobooks, it probably just *sounds* like that, rather than actually being that.

On 12/26/2019 at 3:50 PM, LordCola said:

I mean the design is basically an ISD, which is after all the best looking ship in all of science fiction,

With SSD's permission.

On 12/27/2019 at 5:54 AM, Muelmuel said:

The real question is, would you buy it if FFG released it for Armada?

That's out of question. Of course I'd do!

On 12/28/2019 at 4:45 AM, Forresto said:

And they demonstrate the villains learning, distributing their eggs rather then putting them all in one basket.

It's more like just getting more eggs rather than distributing them. Actually they still put them in the same basket... I guess that's 4th trilogy lesson stuff.

I think this starship perfectly summarizes everything that is wrong with the Disney-trilogy.

5 hours ago, Norell said:

I think this starship perfectly summarizes everything that is wrong with the Disney-trilogy.

No worse then a Star destroyer the size of Manhattan being brought down by an A-Wing or the Empire leaving a Milenium Falcon sized hole straight to the main reactor.

8 hours ago, Forresto said:

No worse then a Star destroyer the size of Manhattan being brought down by an A-Wing or the Empire leaving a Milenium Falcon sized hole straight to the main reactor.

Again, the battle with the Executor was an entire mini-act of ROTJ that was ultimately cut mostly from the film due to the overworked special effects team responsible for filiming the space battle basically revolting (fun fact, the most complex scene ever created by overlaying multiple layers of film was done in RotJ, where something like 206 different layers of film were overlaid to add different elements to one scene) coupled with concerns over final run time and complexity of too many sub-plots. There was also a sub-plot involving a crisis of faith of Moff Jerjerrod after he is ordered to stop targeting the fleet and to blow up the forest moon (after the shield generator is destroyed), which is the culmination of many deleted scenes involving a power struggle between Palpatine vs Vader vs Jerjerrod.

Re: the Executor , it was not taken out by a single A-Wing (though the final theatrical cut can support such an impression). In actuality, Madine's taskforce of around 8-12 mon calamari warships attack the Executor (seen around the ship during shots from the Battle of Endor, effectively screening off the SSD from the rest of the Imperial fleet). As they mount a sustained pummeling of the SSD, they start dropping sections of its shields. At this point, Green Squadron strafes the port sensor array while Blue Squadron strafes the aft array (the geodesic domes ontop of the bridge) [NOTE: it was until well after the release of ROTJ that these domes were retconned into "shield generators," as originally they were sensor arrays and it was the shields dropping that allowed the starfighters to blow up the domes, not vice versa. But given the juxtaposition of scenes, viewers assumed causation when only there was correlation]. When these arrays are taken down, it reduces the visualization and targeting abilities of the Executor 's gunners, at which point the starfighters begin an attack run on the bridge, hoping to fly low through the SSD's surface structure and then hit the bridge with their missiles and torpedoes. These scenes harkened back to the original trench run, and THIS attack strategy is what causes Piett to order concentrated firepower to make sure nothing gets through (to make an ordnance strike on the bridge). But, since the guns are blind-firing without their sensor array targeting signals, it's harder for the point defenses to take out the fighters. Still, they blow most of them up but only wing Arvel Crynyrd's A-Wing. At this point, either through intentional sacrifice or simply blind death-spin luck, Green One collides with the main bridge and destroys it. This alone would not finish off the Executor , but with the main bridge destroyed and command of the ship (temporarily) in disarray, the Rebel Fleet begins the second portion of its attack plan which is to have the surviving members of Blue and Green squadron take out a few of the ventral engine ports, resulting in the ship starting to travel "downward" as its dorsal engines are not compensated by the ventral ones. Meanwhile Madine's remaining Mon Cal warships use their tractor beams to "push" the SSD downward as well. As a result, while command and control of the ship are temporarily in chaos, the Executor careens into the DSII, causing a fatal collision that destroys the warship. This gamble to destroy the SSD was only possible because of its proximity to DSII, and this is something Ackbar and Madine exploit to destroy the SSD with far less firepower than would typically be required.

So, in the end, it requires an entire Mon Calamari battleship taskforce plus two full flight groups of fighters (Green and Blue groups) working in unison to execute a multistep plan taking advangate of a large mass close enough to the SSD to destroy it upon collision.

But sure... an A-Wing bonked it or something...


Sources, piecemeal : RotJ Deleted Scenes, Novelization, Cast Interviews, Original Storyboards, etc.