Starfighter Planetary Bombardment

[teukros]

Or, Not Just Like Bulls-eyeing Womp Rats.

 

If you use RebEd to organize your starfighters into flights of four, this seems to work fine for starfighter vs. starfighter combat; but there is a problem where planetary bombardment is concerned. That squadron of 12 Y-Wings with bombardment of 2 becomes three flights of Y-Wings with aggregate bombardment of 6.

 

So last night, I was in the middle of making things much harder for myself than they had to be when I asked myself, "why should any starfighters have planetary bombardment capability?"

 

How could Y-Wings, let alone X-Wings, punch through a planetary shield generator with their little torpedoes, unassissted by a capital ship's turbolaser batteries?

 

How could a single Y-Wing squadron (in the out of the box game with default values) make as much of a contribution towards collapsing an enemy planet's shield generator as an IMPERIAL STAR DESTROYER for crying out loud?

 

So, flights or squadrons, just set all starfighter bombardment ratings to zero!

 

This places a premium on ships such as the Victory Star Destroyer, which was designed to enter atmospheres and attack planetary surfaces from low altitude, and helps to rebalance the game - forcing the Rebels to be more covert with their spies and saboteurs, and allowing the Empire to be more Imperial, which is always a good thing, IMO.

[Stellar_Magic]

Actually I always increased the bombardment values of my fighters, unlike star destroyers they can target a specific building, bunker, walker, and entrenched position. Still the shields would pose something of a problem, or would they? As far as we know starfighters can collide with a planetary shield, but couldn't a star destroyer open a small whole in a planets shielding? Its something of a double edged sword.

[Evaders99]

I think that proton torpedos have a magnitude of damage much greater than any laser. A Star Destroyer uses a barrage of lasers to overpower the shields... this takes time. Torpedos release massive amounts of energy to overload the shields in one burst.

[Stellar_Magic]

True, thats why the primary weapon used by the Imperial fleet to take down substantial planetary shields was the enormous Torpedo Sphere, basically the death stars little brother that fired thousands of torps instead of a superlaser.

 

Maybe that could replace the Death Star in a mod or to?

[teukros]

I was thinking of the scene from the Zahn book where Thrawn gives the Noghri a demonstration of the power of an ISDs turbolasers - knocks the top half off of a mountain as I recall. Also the cut-scene from the "X-Wing" game where a half dozen or so Star Destroyers are firing on a Rebel base's shield until it is taken down.

 

I do have misgivings about removing all (planetary) bombardment from T.I.E. Bombers, but on the other hand, if bombing a planetary shield with fighters was so easy, why design the Victory Star Destroyer in the first place?

[Stellar_Magic]

Lets see...

 

They didn't have torpedo equipped fighters when they designed it?

[Shadow_of_Thrawn]

or very many fighters that could operate independently of capital ships.

[Stellar_Magic]

Or the VSD was designed primarily to engage other capital ships, orbital bombardment was an afterthought.

[Shadow_of_Thrawn]

the main problem i've always had with star fighters and torps in the game is the fact that they are essentially unlimited, not there relative effectiveness...instead of the 60-100 that a squadron would carry, there's essentially no limit to the damage that a group of fighters can do.

[Shadow_of_Thrawn]

Or the VSD was designed primarily to engage other capital ships, orbital bombardment was an afterthought.

 

actually i thought it was the other way around, that it was designed primarily to support ground troops during the clone wars, while the dreadnaughts and other ships escorted them and dealt with capital ships.

[Stellar_Magic]

Okay lets see what the Essential Guide to vehicles and vessels says...

 

Victory Star Destroyers were designed with three missions in mind: planetary defense, planetary assault and ground-troop support, and ship to ship combat.

 

So I guess we're both right. On another note, from the Episode III trailers it appears that dreadnaughts are a Seperatist design, not a Republic ship after all.

[Shadow_of_Thrawn]

Okay lets see what the Essential Guide to vehicles and vessels says...

 

Victory Star Destroyers were designed with three missions in mind: planetary defense, planetary assault and ground-troop support, and ship to ship combat.

 

So I guess we're both right. On another note, from the Episode III trailers it appears that dreadnaughts are a Seperatist design, not a Republic ship after all.

 

according to most of the EU stuff i've read, the dreadnaught design (i think more a type of ship in general than a specific class) predates the separtist movement by hundreds or even thousands of years....the katana fleet was a republic fleet build before the start of the clone wars, and was made up of dreadnaughts (though lucas has already done his share to discredit a lot of what zahn came up with, so one more thing wouldnt be too far out of line.)

[Texas_Fett]

Why not simply reduce the bombardment modifier of the appropriate starfighters to 1? That should only affect Y-Wings, B-Wings, and TIE Bombers, assuming you're simply modifiying the basic game.

[Stellar_Magic]

And X-wings... They've got Torps too...

[Texas_Fett]

I would agree, but from Teukros' standpoint I would argue that they aren't really designed for that role, so I could stomach reducing their effectiveness to 0. I don't think I'd make the same changes in my own game, though. Then again, I'm not trying to change 12-ship squadrons to 4-ship flights, either.

[teukros]

Why not simply reduce the bombardment modifier of the appropriate starfighters to 1? That should only affect Y-Wings, B-Wings, and TIE Bombers, assuming you're simply modifiying the basic game.

 

I considered this but the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea that only capships should be able to destroy planetary shields.

 

On the other hand, T.I.E. Bombers (at least) should be able to attack unshielded targets on the ground.

 

But if those Bombers are based from Star Destroyers (and not from carriers) then I can't imagine how the Star Destroyers would have insufficient bombardment to destroy e.g. unshielded Alliance Army Regiments, so it would make no difference. The Alliance meanwhile has those (damned) Corellian Corvettes!

 

The only times that starfighter planetary bombardment are important are:

 

1. If the taskforce has no ships which can bombard (e.g. carriers);

 

2. If the planet is protected by a Gencore Shield Generator.

 

Addressing 1., I feel that anything in the game that increases the incentive to build capital ships and decreases the incentive to build carriers is a good thing.

 

Addressing 2., I feel that it is also a good thing that Gencores will give planets significant protection and that early in the game, only the Empire will be able to build a fleet capable of destroying them. Remember my idea for a fast fleet consisting of three VSDs and nine Carrack light cruisers? Two of those fleets would do the trick. Of course that would be quite expensive... 876 MAT I think (not counting the costs of supporting fighters).

 

In all likelihood the greatest threat to shield generators will be sabotage (in which the Alliance has a clear advantage) - just like it showed in the movies AND in the Zahn novels.

[AdmiralFishface]

My main thought was this:

 

Hoth.

 

Or (long version): The Empire was not able to break through a shield the Rebels erected on a planet with no infrastructure, and so had to rely on troops.

They had the Executor, and several Star Destroyers. That's one strong shield for you.

In defense of the Imperial fleet, the shield was probably concentrated to cover an area of a few kilometers across only, instead of whole cities. But still. Impressive shielding.

 

Odd thing is, if the Imps could bring landing craft down there, why not fighters and bombers? Surely, a flight of TIE Bombers would have atomized the base within minutes.

 

The answer is obvious, of couse. GL wanted a ground battle, and he got one. But there must be a better explanation around.

[Shadow_of_Thrawn]

fighters and bombers can't caputure prisoners, which was supposed to be one of the primary motives of going after the rebel base there.

[Stellar_Magic]

Because the Hoth shield was only over a single base and covered a few kilometers it could be immensly strong, its been suggested that one way to preserve a base under bombardment was to shrink the shield radius and allow noncritcal buildings to come under bombardment.

 

To penetrate shields encircling an entire planet would be relatively easy, weaker shields larger coverage, so a barrage of torpedoes might be able to knock down the shields in a small enough area to allow a number of starfighters to slip through, but in a hoth scenario there is a much more difficult problem.

 

Because of the shield's immense strength the normal means of inserting fighters no longer works, instead the craft would have to be shipped or flown onto the planet and manually maneuvered through the shield. Then they could engage targets, the imperials didn't do this because they saw little need, the AT-ATs were thought to be all but invulnerable against attack.

 

In the EU it is suggested that once the shields were knocked down by the ground forces Imperial Starfighters were launched against the base. This is even suggested by the last communicaque in the film between Veers and Vader. Supposably they attempted to destroy the rebel transports as they fled.

[teukros]

In "Spectre of the Past / Vision of the Future" it is clear that one planetary shield is relatively impervious to bombardment by even a fairly large fleet.

[Shadow_of_Thrawn]

id imagine it depends on the shield...some are stronger than others, unlike rebellion, there seems to be many varieties of shielding available...ranging from the small-scale base protection of hoth, to global shielding like that around Ukio, to the complex, layered defenses of coruscant. basically, there is no set formula to taking down a shield system, but in general, the richer and more developed the planet, the tougher it will be to knock it out. the generic shields of rebellion however, take something away from this to the point where it basically comes down to, the more generators you have, the stronger it will be.

[Nero]

Here's my opinion(pretty technological) on this:

Starfighters have inertial compensators, as they call them, to slow the G-Forces from knocking out a pilot(the reason Wedge and the others never wore an oxygen mask). This compensator made an eliptical field around the fighter that could be enlarged or contracted as the pilot wishes(this was used to combat the Yuuzhan Vong). Because they weekened the forces acting on the ship, fighters could pass through most shields, host a bombing run and incinerate the shield projector. Capital ships don't have these compensators due to how slow they move. Very few ships move starfighters speeds, so few have the Gs of the smaller ships. So I think, that starfighters are very effective against ground targets. Read the X-Wing series by Stackpole, good books