JanGaarni

The weapons count of the Executor is a gross understatment to put it mildly. The amount of guns that is said to be on the Executor is too far spread out to give propper coverage. Curtis Saxton has studied pictures he has taken of the modell of the Executor, and counted the bumps on it, which is about the same size as 1 of the Imperator class' 8 eight gun batteri turrets. He came to the conclution, if those bumps truly represent a heavy 8 gun turret battery, that there are around 616 of them covering the surface of the Executor. And that's just of the really heavy kind of guns. How many turbolasers, lasercannons (if any), and ion cannons there are on it is anyones guess really. But if you multiply the amount found on an Imperator class with 77 (616 \ 8 = 77) I don't think you would be too far off.

Well, most of them were EU creations. However, the VSD was his (or rather, his emploees, as he just approves what is used and not ), and was originally to be starring as the ship we see in the opening scene of ANH. So I'm abit dissapointed that that one wasn't even included, yeah. But, George does what George wants.

Who says they couldn't see very well? If you're thinking of Lukes comment, he probably didn't use it propperly. He shot damn well for not being able to see anything though.

Stormtroopers arn't standard troops, they are the shock troopers of the Empire. They are a division of their own, seperate from the Army and Navy. Sorta like the US Marines. As for the helmet, it's packed with communcations gear and other aids such as infrared, holographic imagery, gasmask, etc....

I've seen stormtroopers with black pauldrons aswell.

The colorored pads, 3 confirmed so far (highest ranked to lowest: red, white, and black), are indeed rank indicators. Though this may be more towards the public rather than ment for the troopers themselfs to identify who's who, as that is suggested their helmets provide adequate information on in the past.

Ah, I see why there's a difference. One is the VSD Mark I, the other Mark II.

Reason for why the Eclipse was said is twice as large, is because it comes from the erronomous lenght value of the Executor that existed back then. The very first mention of the lenght of the Eclipse in km (around 17) is where we are introduced to it the first time. At that same time, most of the owrld had bought into WEG's (West End Games) bad research into the actual lenght of the Executor, believing it to be 8km long, or 5 times as great as an ISD. Like the movie poster said. Yes, I said movie poster. It seems they got the idea that the Executor was 5 times as long as an ISD from a poster for the ESB movie. The poster doesn't actually say it's 5 times longer, just that it is (over) 5 times greater than an ISD. Which could mean pretty much anything from lenght, mass, or firepower. Obviously, judging by the movies, they don't mean it's lenght. Anyway, as I was saying, since at the time the Eclipse was popular to have in the stories, the Executor was believed to be only less than half it's true size, later published works did not mentiong the Eclipse lenght in km, but in how much longer it was compared to the Executor, which is of course incorrect. However, while the Executor class may be longer, the Eclipse certaintly is larger volume-wise, and more powerfull, concidering the mini super laser it carries. You might even say the Eclipse is twice as large as the Executor still, without it meaning lenght-wise. Personally, the Essential Guide, while I find it usefull to read, is not known for it's accuracy in all things. Executor Class lenght is one such thing, the AT-AT height another.

If they are to add something similar to the SSD, then I surely hope they use the Bulwark Battlecruiser. I darely hope they arn't going to go all creative and create another behemoth cruiser on the rebel side. I was barely able to swallow and move on when the Bulwark was introduced the first time in Rebellion. Alliance with a behemoth ship, what the hell?!?

The Twin Stars were never completed, and was not even operational when they were scrapped. There has been many Death Stars, but most have either been incomplete or prototypes. The one we see in RotS is something the Confederacy of Independent Systems started on, called the Great Weapon. It is unknown to this date what happened to it and exactly when the Emperors forces captured it. It was atleast in the hands of the Emperor at the end of RotS, that much is clear. A prototype was also constructed in the Maw between RotS and ANH. Exactly why seeing they had an already worked on station is unclear. Perhaps they encountered problems with the original design, the Great Weapon. It's clear from the hologram we see in AotC that the DS design went thru atleast some visual changes until the first operational Death Star came into play just before ANH. There are the Twin Stars, but I'm not exactly sure how large they were intended to be. What I do know is that they never became operational and was eventually abandoned and scrapped. At the same time they worked on the Second Death Star which was a massive behemoth in comparison to the previous model. Although its super weaapon atleast was operational, the shields was not, and possibly other functions might also not been prioritiesed over getting the stations weapons systems operational in time for the big surprise party the Emperor had invited the rebels to. Years later after the Emperors death, Bevel helped Durga the Hutt to create a death star for them, called Darksabre. But luckily this one was never completed. In fact, it never got further in the building than to create a skeleton with drives and the superlaser before the New Republic got wind of it and destroyed it.

There has never been visable shield interactions in Star Wars, so I don't see why they need to start to show them now. You don't see shields (except for very few types, Gungan shields come to mind) in any Star Wars movie or game from past, and that's the way it should be. The only game I can think of that shows shields (atleast in space) is SWG, but that one has lost all of it's credence over the past few years for many reasons. A reason why they added that in though could be because it has elements from Wing Commander (which is a good series of games, but it's not Star Wars). And that doesn't surprise me seeing the lead guy working on it also worked on the Wing Commander series.

Ehm, I don't think G-Canon has ever stated them to be shield domes. Are you sure you didn't mean to say C-Canon there?

That is true, and something we all (probably) are thinking too. However, I have noticed that in most (if not all) movies and screenshots, I've seen the star destroyers getting blown up before anyone has touched the domes. Which could mean they arn't going to touch the widely debated subject at all and simply ignore it completely. Which wouldn't be a bad decision in my opinion.

Yeah, but the "You don't get more than one Death Star?" question throws the whole answer into a "huh,what? what did you mean?" kind of state. I think we can safely say they haven't really answered this question properly. The other thing we can say for sure is that you will be able to build atleast 1 Death Star. And since the game starts a few years BBY then I assume it will be the first one.

Actually, LucasArts is a game developer, and has always been a low priority source when you look for info on most thing. For christ sakes, they can't even decide how long the Executor is: 8km, 12.8km, make up your minds. (it's measured to be 17.6km though) The oldest official reference to the domes being sensor domes is from 1978 schematics of the star destroyer, where also the ships class is mentioned: Imperator. No G-canon source has stated this before or since, thus it takes precedence over anything C-level canon published later, no matter how poorly WEG and other sources have researched on it.

Hahaha, good one.

Actually the Imperial class is powered by a solar ionization reactor, the nuclear reactors feed directly into the engines and utilize their highly charged radioactive particles to propel the vessel. It's the same reactor. The fusion reactor is pretty much a small sun inside a ship, powering it.

Seeing all these vessels have a nuclear reactor (of the fusion kind), and star destroyers of the Imperator class has 3 massive ones too mind you, I don't think they have any problem with heat dissipation. There are 2 important feature of a ships shields in Star Wars. The projectors, which needs to be at the surface, and the generator(s) creating the power. Actually, there's 3 main componments, as ships usually have 2 kinds of shielding: Ray shielding, which sucks quite a large amount of power and is therefore usually turned off outside combat, and Deflector Shields, which strenghten the hulls ability to absorb kinetic energy. The latter one has capacitors to dicipate the kinetic energy caused by objects hitting the hull and are usually always turned on.

Heh, nice post, Garm Bel Iblis.

Well, to be technically correct, the argument has never been between the domes being Sensor Domes or Shield Projectors, but Sensor Domes and Shield Generators. These are 2 different things. So the sensor domes having shield projectors isn't really a big deal. Why wouldn't they be protected by a shield? The actual shield generator(s) however is somewhere else on the ship. Projectors are doted around on the ships to project it with a force field.

The Victory is a Rendili StarDrive design. The Venator is KDY.

This is probably an old issue and probably posted before, but I'll post it again, cause it's my only beef with the Mod really. Fighters - it's a pain in the ass to try and dock them inside star destroyers and other hangar capable ships (seems the support carrier is the most difficult one I've tried, don't make them anymore, ain't worth the resources ) and installations for when I want to do a quick get away, or a quick mobilization of my forces before I jump into/out of combat. 1 and 1 fighter wing is ok, usually no problem, but when I try to dock for instance the full load a star destroyer can carry at once, then it most of the time hangs. Not the game, the game can still be played, the fighters just don't dock, they just line up in preperation to dock (sometimes they swirl around the ship too trying to line up). Another small thing - The Enforcer Class is stated to carry 4 fighter wings, but it only takes 2. Other than that, great Mod. Excellent realisation of Star Wars spacebattles. Oh, one more thing: How come when you research star destroyer designs, the VSD II get's unlocked before the VSD I?!?

Keep in mind though, that Mr. Saxton has written both the Attack of the Clones Visual Dictionary and the Revenge of the Sith - Incredible Cross-sections, which used to be written by David West Reynolds, and was the consultant to Simon Beecroft who wrote the Attack of the Clones: Complete Guide to Incredible Locations, so he has his foot inside the door so to speak. Yes, his site is based on pretty much all of Star Wars (official works mind you), which is the policy of Lucas Licensing has set (there's no more Canon and EU, only G-level, C-Level and S-level canon now), but I find his research most of the time alot more accurate and more thoroughly done than those who has the final say on things ... in my opinion of course. I mostly go by what he has discovered over most online sites (especially fan made sites), and sometimes official sources aswell where the logic fails it. It wasn't long ago since, I believe, StarWars.Com used the 8km SSD fallacy aswell (ok, it's been some years now ). It's since been bumped up to 12.8, perhaps in order to not disturb too much the Eclipse Class lenght description of 17.5 km - although the first description of the Eclipse Class' lenght was that it was "twice as large as the Executor" which later publications translated into twice as long. Much the same way as the poster for ESB said the Executor was "... 5 times more powerfull than a standard star destroyer" and it later became translated to mean 8km long. So the 17.6 lenght figure of the Executor doesn't really disturb the 17.5 lenght value of the Eclipse, as it is clear the Eclipse, while abit shorter, has alot more volume than the Executor. So much more volume, you could say it is twice as large as the Executor.