Star Wars Star Wars Discussion Thread - LET THE PAST D-! Oh, wait, nevermind

Skallagrim

Well-known member
To some people, the New Class modernisation programme simply doesn't seem to exist. As with the previous "arguments" I dismantled, the accusations against the New Republic are just patently false.

I agree with @Lord Sovereign that the Venator was a great design, which actually disproves the pretension that "BIGGAH IS ALWAYS BETTAH!" (which was the misguided Imperial doctrine). However... the NR in fact designed and mass-constructed the optimised successor to the Venator, in the form of the excellent Nebula-class.

e49ca9a90c80bfe00c2d19f178692ad3.jpg


It's not the biggest ship, but it packed a serious punch. In short: you get way more bang for your buck, and you can field way, way more of them (at the same cost).



I agree to some extent that for narrative reasons, the NR fleet sometimes just didn't show up in a story, when having it appear would immediately solve the problem at hand. @ShadowArxxy is dramatically over-stating it, though. Typically, some in-universe reason was at least given (the fleet being busy elsewhere), with our intrepid heroes being forced to solve the situation at hand. Out-of-story, it was made exceedingly clear that the NR fleet was a powerhouse. This was just not typically shown on the page, because stories featuring our familiar heroes were (perceived to be) more popular.

For this reason, we are not shown (for instance) the NR victories at Columus, Champala, Taris, Ketaris, Tangrene and Anx Minor... even though those battles are described as having utterly broken the fleet of the Imperial Remnant, reducing Imperial control to a mere eight Outer Rim sectors.
 
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Lord Sovereign

Well-known member
I notice the New Republic's naval modernisation program, whilst building rather powerful battlegroups, appears to lack a mainstay light cruiser class. Given the sheer amount of territory they have to police as well as defend, one would have thought a light cruiser would be the backbone of the navy.
 

The Whispering Monk

Well-known member
Osaul
I notice the New Republic's naval modernisation program, whilst building rather powerful battlegroups, appears to lack a mainstay light cruiser class. Given the sheer amount of territory they have to police as well as defend, one would have thought a light cruiser would be the backbone of the navy.
The Corona Class is probably what you're looking for. Corona-class frigate | Wookieepedia | Fandom
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
I agree to some extent that for narrative reasons, the NR fleet sometimes just didn't show up in a story, when having it appear would immediately solve the problem at hand. @ShadowArxxy is dramatically over-stating it, though. Typically, some in-universe reason was at least given (the fleet being busy elsewhere), with our intrepid heroes being forced to solve the situation at hand. Out-of-story, it was made exceedingly clear that the NR fleet was a powerhouse.


The problem is not that the New Republic fleet and/or ground forces are sometimes absent so the heroes can shine. The problem is that they are pretty much always handwaved away in every single actual story told, which makes it feel like they don't really exist in any meaningful way.

The "look and feel" of the EU stories ends up being "more Rebel Alliance stories about Luke, Han, and their plucky gang of heroic friends fighting the good fight against all odds" and never actually, "We're the government now; we have actual galactic-scale resources."

For this reason, we are not shown (for instance) the NR victories at Columus, Champala, Taris, Ketaris, Tangrene and Anx Minor... even though those battles are described as having utterly broken the fleet of the Imperial Remnant, reducing Imperial control to a mere eight Outer Rim sectors.

Which is exactly my point. The New Republic military pretty much exists only as a backstory item, which is a very, very clumsy way to write at points in the setting where the New Republic is supposedly the acknowledged government of the majority of the galaxy.

It's like writing stories about the Gulf War where for some reason, the entire U.S. military doesn't show up in any of the actual decisive conflicts, existing only as a vague background element for the war-winning adventures of a plucky private military corporation which single-handedly carries out every single important operation of the entire war.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
To some people, the New Class modernisation programme simply doesn't seem to exist. As with the previous "arguments" I dismantled, the accusations against the New Republic are just patently false.

I agree with @Lord Sovereign that the Venator was a great design, which actually disproves the pretension that "BIGGAH IS ALWAYS BETTAH!" (which was the misguided Imperial doctrine).

The problem with the Venator class is that the inherent downsides of a hybrid carrier-cruiser design are pretty much carried away by plot, which makes it look a lot better than it "should" actually be in-universe terms.

Because we never actually see the Victory-class Star Destroyer or even the Venator-II adaptations in action, the Venator's limited firepower compared to a "proper" cruiser is never directly visible. Conversely, the highly stylized Tarkovsky cartoon is the only material that even remotely portrays the Venator's literal multiple hundreds of small starfighters, as opposed to "a couple of squadrons here and there", which makes the even larger numbers of fighters that pure carriers could bring to bear even more unreachable.
 
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ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Stupid thing is, there was a class of vessel that suited the New Republic's needs perfectly in this regard, as a ship of war and policing that wasn't too big.

To be fair, out of character that asinine "doctrine" was created as a very poorly thought out excuse for why the Republic when the Yuzzan Vong showed up with really big ships, the Republic had no remotely large ships of its own to respond directly with, and especially why the canonically captured Lusankya could only be used as an incredibly stupid suicide ram.
 

Skallagrim

Well-known member
The problem is not that the New Republic fleet and/or ground forces are sometimes absent so the heroes can shine. The problem is that they are pretty much always handwaved away in every single actual story told, which makes it feel like they don't really exist in any meaningful way.

The "look and feel" of the EU stories ends up being "more Rebel Alliance stories about Luke, Han, and their plucky gang of heroic friends fighting the good fight against all odds" and never actually, "We're the government now; we have actual galactic-scale resources."



Which is exactly my point. The New Republic military pretty much exists only as a backstory item, which is a very, very clumsy way to write at points in the setting where the New Republic is supposedly the acknowledged government of the majority of the galaxy.

It's like writing stories about the Gulf War where for some reason, the entire U.S. military doesn't show up in any of the actual decisive conflicts, existing only as a vague background element for the war-winning adventures of a plucky private military corporation which single-handedly carries out every single important operation of the entire war.
We were talking about the New Republic and its real (versus its supposed) nature. Various claims have been made about the NR supposedly being a failure, and repeating the errors of the Old Republic's terminal stage. I have refuted those claims.

Now you change the argument to "but the stories were badly written!" -- which is a completely different conversation. You're shifting the goalposts, and blithely ignoring that you posited incorrect claim, such as this one:

The original EU New Republic also repeated the error of the Old Republic in eliminating a strong central military capable of handling galactic-scale crises

That claim is blatantly false, and I've disproved it. But you are very eager to quickly drop that, and move on to a new topic... while pretending that this was the topic all along.

It's getting very tiring, because this kind of stuff happens every time you get called out for false claims. You never just man up and admit that you were wrong,. And honestly: there's just no fun in talking to someone who always acts like that.
 
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ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
To some people, the New Class modernisation programme simply doesn't seem to exist.

As your own source admits, the "New Class modernization programme" is only mentioned in one set of three incredibly obscure EU books by a single author, and those books are heavily inconsistent with the rest of the entire EU lore to boot. That entire set of ship classes subsequently disappear into a puff of plot hole magic and are literally never seen again in the Star Wars universe. Much like the E-Wing, but they at least had the grace to retcon that as an actual design flop in character to explain why it got largely de-existed in favor of X-Wings.

As with the previous "arguments" I dismantled, the accusations against the New Republic are just patently false.

Except there is no meaningful difference between, "The New Republic doesn't have a centralized military capable of handling galactic-scale crisis" and "The New Republic has a variably-powerful centralized military force which is magically absent from all meaningful galactic affairs and requires that all galactic-scale crisis be handled by other means."

Out-of-story, it was made exceedingly clear that the NR fleet was a powerhouse.

A supposed "powerhouse" that is literally never seen in-universe to the point where the Plucky Band of Rebel Heroes (tm) always has to be the ones intervening in every single meaningful event in all of galactic history. That's functionally the same as "the NRDF fleet doesn't exist, let alone their even more invisible ground forces".

That claim is blatantly false, and I've disproved it.
No, it's not blatantly false.

You're cherry-picking one very minor and obscure set of atypical EU books which were very much the only ones that ever presented the New Republic having a fleet that did anything at all, and dismissing out of hand the entire rest of the EU in which the NRDF fleet is just. . . a large, empty plot hole.

Now you change the argument to "but the stories were badly written!" -- which is a completely different conversation. You're shifting the goalposts, and blithely ignoring that you posited incorrect claim, such as this one:

That is not even remotely my argument, and I never said the stores were badly written. I said they were written based on the desire to continue writing stories that continued to be all about the Plucky Band of Rebel Heroes (tm), and they succeeded at that. However, these stories simply do not leave room in the universe for a powerful NRDF fleet, especially when some of those stories explicitly lay out New Republic political mandates dictating that no such fleet was permitted to exist in the long term.

Case in point, the *very* popular Rogue Squadron series, pretty much the second most popular piece of the entire EU after Zahn's Thrawn series books, consistently portray an NRDF where a couple of small capital ships and one or two squadrons of starfighters is a major force commitment.

The idea that there is a large NRDF that can casually deploy dozens of Star Destroyers, hundreds of lesser capital warships and thousands of starfighters like the Imperial Navy did, is simply not compatible with the EU as written. The EU as fans imagine it "should have been", perhaps, but it's not what the books we actually got described in the slightest.

The three Black Fleet Crisis books are just about the only EU material that ever even implied the Republic had built up significant numbers of its own major fleet assets, and even there they are largely offscreen. Your argument appears to rest entirely with extrapolating from what BFC at best implied, and then doubling down that it tacitly overrides all other EU materials, even though the existence of even a fraction of that fleet strength would have massively alters the way just about every single EU story was handled.

Again -- if the fleet is "elsewhere" in one or two stories, that's entirely plausible. If the fleet is handwaved out of existence every time, every place is could possibly ever actually be that is an entirely different matter.
 
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Knowledgeispower

Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
To be fair, out of character that asinine "doctrine" was created as a very poorly thought out excuse for why the Republic when the Yuzzan Vong showed up with really big ships, the Republic had no remotely large ships of its own to respond directly with, and especially why the canonically captured Lusankya could only be used as an incredibly stupid suicide ram.
Err didn't the NR have a sister to the Lusankya and wasn't she expended in said role after taking a stupid amount of damage. Also...points at the Mediator class battlecruiser and the Viscount class Star Defender programs which to be fair I will admit weren't really hadn't yet commissioned many if any commissioned ships beyond the prototypes when the vong showed
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Err didn't the NR have a sister to the Lusankya and wasn't she expended in said role after taking a stupid amount of damage.

That was Lusankya, and the book went into quite a bit of detail about how she was completely unusable as a conventional warship due to being mothballed and nearly scrapped due to New Republic politics (the afore-mentioned thing about "Super Star Destroyers" being innately immoral).

By the time they took the Vong threat seriously, they didn't have enough time to actually refit the badly deteriorated hulk into a functional warship, so they bluffed. They pulled off this huge gambit where they leaked false intelligence that they were upgrading her into an anti-Vong superwewapon, but they actually stripped all armament and other useful parts from her to refit other New Republic ships and made the gutted hulk into an unarmed suicide ramship with her keel turned into an armored spike.

Also...points at the Mediator class battlecruiser and the Viscount class Star Defender programs which to be fair I will admit weren't really hadn't yet commissioned many if any commissioned ships beyond the prototypes when the vong showed

The problem with those classes is that their use in the EU stories is incredibly inconsistent, and even if you kinda smooth it over with headcanons, you can't get around them being built only in very small numbers.

--------

Also -- even setting aside the fact that it was created for a niche book series and never seen outside that series, the problem with the whole "New Class modernization program" that Skullagrim is pushing as the centerpiece of his "large, powerful NRDF" theory? The Nebula-class is basically on par with an Imperial Star Destroyer while being only two-thirds the size -- which is reasonably impressive, but it's also explicitly stated to be the largest and most powerful warship in the New Class series, and only a handful were built.

Yes, in theory these "more efficient" ships are better for the money than their Imperial counterparts, but only if you actually build more of them. The NRDF canonically did not ; Craken's Threat Dossier stated that there were all of ten Nebulas in service in 17 ABY with planned further construction of one per year.
 

Knowledgeispower

Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
That was Lusankya, and the book went into quite a bit of detail about how she was completely unusable as a conventional warship due to being mothballed and nearly scrapped due to New Republic politics (the afore-mentioned thing about "Super Star Destroyers" being innately immoral).

By the time they took the Vong threat seriously, they didn't have enough time to actually refit the badly deteriorated hulk into a functional warship, so they bluffed. They pulled off this huge gambit where they leaked false intelligence that they were upgrading her into an anti-Vong superwewapon, but they actually stripped all armament and other useful parts from her to refit other New Republic ships and made the gutted hulk into an unarmed suicide ramship with her keel turned into an armored spike.



The problem with those classes is that their use in the EU stories is incredibly inconsistent, and even if you kinda smooth it over with headcanons, you can't get around them being built only in very small numbers.

--------

Also -- even setting aside the fact that it was created for a niche book series and never seen outside that series, the problem with the whole "New Class modernization program" that Skullagrim is pushing as the centerpiece of his "large, powerful NRDF" theory? The Nebula-class is basically on par with an Imperial Star Destroyer while being only two-thirds the size -- which is reasonably impressive, but it's also explicitly stated to be the largest and most powerful warship in the New Class series, and only a handful were built.

Yes, in theory these "more efficient" ships are better for the money than their Imperial counterparts, but only if you actually build more of them. The NRDF canonically did not ; Craken's Threat Dossier stated that there were all of ten Nebulas in service in 17 ABY with planned further construction of one per year.
Actually was referring to this ship https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Guardian_(Executor-class) which was captured in 16 ABY. And yeah the nebula class really ought to have been built in greater numbers but between several yards making MC90s and ISDs the need for large numbers of it the design being produced wasn't that great pre the vong showing up. I read it as the NR basically giving the line making the design enough work to stay open
 

ShadowsOfParadox

Well-known member
Except there is no meaningful difference between, "The New Republic doesn't have a centralized military capable of handling galactic-scale crisis" and "The New Republic has a variably-powerful centralized military force which is magically absent from all meaningful galactic affairs and requires that all galactic-scale crisis be handled by other means."
Ah yes... galaxies only ever have ONE threat at a time... yes...
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Ah yes... galaxies only ever have ONE threat at a time... yes...

The thing is, that pretty much *is* what happens in the Star Wars EU; you generally only had one major threat story arc at a time so that the Plucky Band of Recognized Heroes could handle it, and defeated past foes pretty much never came back as a separate front from whatever the Threat of the Day was.
 

ShadowsOfParadox

Well-known member
The thing is, that pretty much *is* what happens in the Star Wars EU; you generally only had one major threat story arc at a time so that the Plucky Band of Recognized Heroes could handle it, and defeated past foes pretty much never came back as a separate front from whatever the Threat of the Day was.
In my own experience, either the threat the "Plucky Band of Recognized Heroes" was handling was pretty small time, specific to The Force, not something a fleet could help with anyway, or the fleet was explicitly busy handling a DIFFERENT Galactic Threat.

Like, sure, it's pretty sad that the EU writers were so focused on the "Plucky Band of Recognized Heroes" instead of any of them wanting to write cool fleet actions... but saying "because the Writers wanted to write about 'Plucky Band of Recognized Heroes' the New Republic obviously had no fleet" when the writers made sure to have vaguely plausible reasons for the fleet to be not an option explicitly because the New Republic had a fleet... well.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
Actually was referring to this ship https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Guardian_(Executor-class) which was captured in 16 ABY. And yeah the nebula class really ought to have been built in greater numbers but between several yards making MC90s and ISDs the need for large numbers of it the design being produced wasn't that great pre the vong showing up. I read it as the NR basically giving the line making the design enough work to stay open

The thing is that the Nebula class was explicitly supposed to be the heavy flagship while also explicitly being no more powerful than an ISD, and also supposedly the "new line" ship while also being very rare.

Even in the Black Fleet stories -- which again, are inconsistent with the rest of the EU in showing a much larger and more active NRDF fleet -- the brand new "Fifth Fleet" only had five ships of this magnitude, with either a Nebula-class or its Endurance-class carrier cousin serving as the flagship of each of its subsidiary task forces. And this fleet with just five Star Destroyers was portrayed in the stories as being a huge political controversy for the New Republic, because even though the "New Class" program slavishly followed the rule that no warship should be more powerful than an ISD, many people apparently believed that five ISD-class ships was too big and powerful a fleet.
 

Knowledgeispower

Ah I love the smell of missile spam in the morning
The thing is that the Nebula class was explicitly supposed to be the heavy flagship while also explicitly being no more powerful than an ISD, and also supposedly the "new line" ship while also being very rare.

Even in the Black Fleet stories -- which again, are inconsistent with the rest of the EU in showing a much larger and more active NRDF fleet -- the brand new "Fifth Fleet" only had five ships of this magnitude, with either a Nebula-class or its Endurance-class carrier cousin serving as the flagship of each of its subsidiary task forces. And this fleet with just five Star Destroyers was portrayed in the stories as being a huge political controversy for the New Republic, because even though the "New Class" program slavishly followed the rule that no warship should be more powerful than an ISD, many people apparently believed that five ISD-class ships was too big and powerful a fleet.
blame the authors of that book, I tend to follow the Essential Guide to Warfare
 

Skallagrim

Well-known member
@ShadowArxxy -- once again you prove yourself a disturbingly dishonest hypocrite.


Except there is no meaningful difference between, "The New Republic doesn't have a centralized military capable of handling galactic-scale crisis" and "The New Republic has a variably-powerful centralized military force which is magically absent from all meaningful galactic affairs and requires that all galactic-scale crisis be handled by other means."
A supposed "powerhouse" that is literally never seen in-universe to the point where the Plucky Band of Rebel Heroes (tm) always has to be the ones intervening in every single meaningful event in all of galactic history. That's functionally the same as "the NRDF fleet doesn't exist, let alone their even more invisible ground forces".
I've pointed out that you conflate "this is what the EU books cover" is not the same as "this is everything that happened". Which is why there are non-story sources, all canonical, that fill in the blanks. You accuse me of cherry-pickinging, but you're the one who wants to be highly selective in which sources you want to consider.


You're cherry-picking one very minor and obscure set of atypical EU books
You eagely dismisses sources you don't like as "obscure", as if you're the great Canon Arbiter of what's more "true", when in reality, they're all equally true in-universe. You also use frequent weasel words, like the insane claim that Wookieepedia supposedly "admits" (GASP!) that the New Class modernisation programme only appers in a few books. It doesn't "admit" anything, you delusional tosser: it lists sources, like it does for every topic. But what have you done here, hoping nobody would notice? That's right, you've ignored all non-story sources that are listed:

-- Cracken's Threat Dossier
-- Starships of the Galaxy (+revisions & expansions)
-- The Essential Chronology (+revisions & expansions)
-- The Essential Guide to Warfare

Those are all canonical, too. They all support my view of a substantial NR fleet. You don't like that, because it makes your claims look stupid and wrong, so you ignore these source. Anything to avoid admitting that you've once again been caught peddling bullshit.


Case in point, the *very* popular Rogue Squadron series, pretty much the second most popular piece of the entire EU after Zahn's Thrawn series books, consistently portray an NRDF where a couple of small capital ships and one or two squadrons of starfighters is a major force commitment.
More intellectual dishonesty from you: these books mosly take place in the war-torn years right after Endor, with Coruscant being liberated half-way through. The Rebels really are still rebels at that stage. They only start setting up a functional government after Coruscant has been captured... at which point we do, in fact, see the series moving towards larger fleet engagements. (And in fact, the older heroes having a tough time getting out of the cockpit and accepting promition is a plot point.)



...Anyway, we're done here. You've lied so many times that any further debate is pointless. You always try to twist anything and everything to avoid admitting that you were wrong, and -- hilariously -- you are wrong ludicrously often. People call you out on your lies in every thread where you start peddling your idiosyncratic and dubious claims, but when confronted with facts... well, you lie, then you lie some more, and when your lies have been thoroughly deconstructed, you drop out of the thread for a few weeks. And then you come back, pretend it never happened, and repeat the same lies.

There's no use in any future conversation with you, so this'll be the final word from me. Looking at decomposing garbage would be a better use of my time than any future conversation with you.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
@ShadowArxxy -- once again you prove yourself a disturbingly dishonest hypocrite.

I've pointed out that you conflate "this is what the EU books cover" is not the same as "this is everything that happened".

You're repeatedly ignoring my actual argument, which is that, "When the actual stories told in the EU write the fleet out of action every time, every where, every when, and those stories cover vast narrative arcs that define the history Star Wars universe, it does not make any sense to assert that, "The New Republic actually has a massive centralized military, it's just. . . never here."

I made my argument very explicit: it makes perfect sense that the fleet and ground forces wouldn't always be present for every single emergent crisis. But it doesn't make any sense to assert that there's a huge fleet around when it's never actually around, and doubly so when the minority of sources that even mention it -- again, including your own beloved Black Fleet Crisis books, including Cracken's Threat Dossier -- also explicitly mention it to be a force of limited size.

You also use frequent weasel words, like the insane claim that Wookieepedia supposedly "admits" (GASP!) that the New Class modernisation programme only appers in a few books. It doesn't "admit" anything, you delusional tosser: it lists sources, like it does for every topic. But what have you done here, hoping nobody would notice? That's right, you've ignored all non-story sources that are listed:

-- Cracken's Threat Dossier
-- Starships of the Galaxy (+revisions & expansions)
-- The Essential Chronology (+revisions & expansions)
-- The Essential Guide to Warfare


Oh really now? You were the one who argued that people were "pretending New Class didn't exist" as if it was some incredibly well-known element of the EU. I never made any assertion that Wookiepedia listing the sources was unusual, I pointed out that Wookiepedia's source listing shows that the New Class program is only mentioned in-universe in three books by one author, i.e. a niche corner of the EU which was not widely adopted into the EU at large.

Non-story sources are very much secondary. They're canon, but they compile information that is in the primary stories. More importantly, consider what those sources actually say -- rather than "these ships I like were mentioned in these canon sources, therefore they are important!".

As I directly cited, Cracken's Threat Dossier is the source that states that the NRDF had only ten Nebulas built by 17 ABY with plans to build just one more per year for an unspecified further period until the New Class building program was complete. This directly contradicts your assertion that these sources imply a massive, important, and huge NRDF.

Those are all canonical, too. They all support my view of a substantial NR fleet. You don't like that, because it makes your claims look stupid and wrong, so you ignore these source. Anything to avoid admitting that you've once again been caught peddling bullshit.

Again: those very sources state that the Nebula-class was the largest and most powerful warship of the New Class modernization program, while also stating it to be on par with a standard Imperial Star Destroyer. They also state that the Fifth Fleet, the NRDF's largest and most powerful fleet, specifically built as a decisive rapid-reaction force of the New Republic's best ships, and so powerful that it was politically controversial in the New Republic, had only five ships of this magnitude.

A five Star Destroyer fleet being seen as a decisive and controversial rapid reaction force is not compatible with the idea of a huge, powerful NRDF on par with the former Imperial military.
 

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