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CRMcNeill
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 Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 10:32 am Post subject: |
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| Sutehp wrote: | | garhkal wrote: | | That makes me wonder. HOW big would the 'landing' gear of an ISD BE?? Where in the ISD hull would they have to be? |
Not to mention the question of "Where would it land?" At 1,600 meters long, the ISD rivals the size of the smaller spaceports. Where the hell are you going to find a landing pad big enough to accommodate a friggin' Imperator Star Destroyer? |
Again, you dont need a true landing field because of the repulsorlifts supporting most of the weight. I look as the Consolidator being equipped to deploy its troops under several different methods:1). It can land in dedicated planetside docking berths, ala the Venator in ROTS.
2). In the absence of a docking berth, it has rough field landing capability, although its size limits its selection of landing sites. Also generally requires the landing site to be secured by assault troops in the event of an invasion.
3). In the absence of either 1 or 2 for whatever reason, it carries enough landing barges and other small craft to transfer its passengers from orbit.
Options 1 and 2 are preferable, as loading and unloading proceeds much more quickly when carried troops and equipment can be deployed directly to the planet, but the ship is more than capable of exercising Option 3 as needed.
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Sutehp
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 1:27 pm Post subject: |
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| Ninja-Bear wrote: | | Sutehp wrote: | | garhkal wrote: | | That makes me wonder. HOW big would the 'landing' gear of an ISD BE?? Where in the ISD hull would they have to be? |
Not to mention the question of "Where would it land?" At 1,600 meters long, the ISD rivals the size of the smaller spaceports. Where the hell are you going to find a landing pad big enough to accommodate a friggin' Imperator Star Destroyer? |
The answer is where ever it wants to? |
ROFL! Ninja-Bear, it's totally awesome that a guy with an ursine-esque name said the punchline to the old joke about where do bears sit?
Answer: "Wherever he damn well wants!" 
| CRMcNeill wrote: | Again, you dont need a true landing field because of the repulsorlifts supporting most of the weight. I look as the Consolidator being equipped to deploy its troops under several different methods:1). It can land in dedicated planetside docking berths, ala the Venator in ROTS.
2). In the absence of a docking berth, it has rough field landing capability, although its size limits its selection of landing sites. Also generally requires the landing site to be secured by assault troops in the event of an invasion.
3). In the absence of either 1 or 2 for whatever reason, it carries enough landing barges and other small craft to transfer its passengers from orbit.
Options 1 and 2 are preferable, as loading and unloading proceeds much more quickly when carried troops and equipment can be deployed directly to the planet, but the ship is more than capable of exercising Option 3 as needed. |
Quite true, insofar as it goes. My issue with Options 1 and 2 are their practicality (or seeming lack thereof) for non-urban worlds.
For Option 1 on such worlds, dedicated planetside docking berths are likely going to be lacking if (and granted this is a big "if") the map of the starport in Hideouts and Strongholds is any indication. That starport (which might have been standard type or Imperial type, I don't remember it being mentioned) only had pads for light freighters as well as bulk medium freighters, but not nearly anything large enough to accommodate a Star Destroyer of any type, even the smaller ones like Venators. Again, this starport might or might not be typical, so it is very possible that the Consolidator will be able to land at Imperial-type starports, though whether it could land at standard starports remains an open question.
Option 2, as CRM stated, is possible, but landing sites are going to be few and far between for something as large as a Consolidator. Remember, it's not just the lack of landing pads, it's also forbidden by some types of terrain: A Consolidator isn't going to be able to land in the mountains or on an ocean, for example. Sure, it has the capability of hovering over such landing sites, but then what would be the point of trying to rush through a planet's defenses to hover over the surface of a planet when offloading through Option 3 would be more practicable and safer? Where CRM and I disagree is just how many such landing sites there are: I think there would be fewer such sites than CRM does, it seems. (Which is fine as there's nothing to prove either one of us right; this is purely subjective.)
So while Options 1 and 2 might be preferable in that they get the cargo and materiel offloaded faster, I think Option 3 is going to be the default option simply because of lack of practicality/possibility for Options 1 and 2.
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 4:42 pm Post subject: |
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I do a lot of posting from my tablet, and removing massive blocks of text by holding down my backspace key for five minutes is frigging annoying. Please, for the love of God, it is not necessary to quote my previous post in its entirety.
| Sutehp wrote: | | So while Options 1 and 2 might be preferable in that they get the cargo and materiel offloaded faster, I think Option 3 is going to be the default option simply because of lack of practicality/possibility for Options 1 and 2. |
I think you underestimate how much vast, wide-open space there is on an Earth-like planet. As a truck driver, I have seen dozens of locations that would accomodate a hundred or more of these ships at a time: Bonneville Salt Flats, deserts of southern Arizona, California's San Joaquin Valley, parts of West Texas, etc.
The layout of the Consolidator's landing gear indicates an uneven field landing capability, and if all the ship needs is to rest a fraction of its weight on the ground to stabilize it while loading and unloading, the ground doesnt need to be sufficiently firm to support the ship's entire weight.
A recurring problem I've seen here is scope of scale: viewing the SWU throught the lense of the real world. "There's no way a ship that size could carry that many people." "There's no way a ship that size could possibly land on a planet." Yet the SWU is a place where entire planets can be covered in cities, or space stations the size of a small moon can travel through interstellar space. Having traveled just a portion of the surface of this planet gives me some appreciation for the sheer massive size of something like Coruscant. Having something like the Consolidator come into contact with the ground is small potatoes by comparison.
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garhkal
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2017 11:10 pm Post subject: |
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That makes me wonder. If it was say hovering 200m up, and all of a sudden the repulsors died off and so it 'belly floops' onto the ground, what damage would the ship take?
I can also see it being an 'insta kill' for pretty much ANYTHING underneath it... Even walkers!
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Sutehp
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2017 3:09 am Post subject: |
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After going back to earlier pages of this thread and reading the small ships complement, I realized that the TIE complement exactly matches the TIE complement of a single pre-fab garrison. Considering the Dictator's/Consolidator's size, I just realized that it likely has the cargo space to transport at least one pre-fab garrison base; it's already carrying way more than enough troops to fully staff a garrison base, more than enough Titan landing barges to transport the unassembled garrison, as well as a complete garrison's TIE complement.
So my question is: how many pre-fab garrison bases can the Dictator hold and transport?
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ForbinProject
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2017 5:49 am Post subject: |
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| Ships might also be able to also land on water. |
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2017 9:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Sutehp wrote: | After going back to earlier pages of this thread and reading the small ships complement, I realized that the TIE complement exactly matches the TIE complement of a single pre-fab garrison. Considering the Dictator's/Consolidator's size, I just realized that it likely has the cargo space to transport at least one pre-fab garrison base; it's already carrying way more than enough troops to fully staff a garrison base, more than enough Titan landing barges to transport the unassembled garrison, as well as a complete garrison's TIE complement.
So my question is: how many pre-fab garrison bases can the Dictator hold and transport? |
I originally envisioned the Dictator as a pure Army Corps transport, so any carried TIEs would be part of a corps' Ground Support Wing, not the complement of a garrison base.
It's noteworthy that, in the Imperial Sourcebook, it's stated that the staff of a garrison base mirrors the HQ of an Imperial Army Corps, and that it is common practice to simply graft army battlegroups onto a garrison base as needed to establish an ad hoc corps.
However, I did note that the Dictator's interior was modular, so it could be reconfigured as an occupation platform, carrying any number of garrison bases, along with their staff.
I can actually see a place for both, with the Consolidator as a follow-on to the Dictator.
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Sutehp
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| Posted: Sun Jan 29, 2017 11:19 pm Post subject: |
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I think I'm going to modify my Dictator stats/capsule to add that in addition to the full Army Corps it can carry, it also holds a single pre-fab base. After all, the Dictator is about as large as an ISD and, while the ISD and the Dictator have different missions and different cargo capacities, it seems reasonable to me that a Dictator, while designed to be a pure transport for an Army Corps, is also large enough to carry a pre-fab base (or its unassembled components, since it takes several landing barges to transport all the parts of a pre-fab base to the surface) as well as all the corps' men and materiel.
After all, it hardly makes sense to move all that men and materiel to another planet if there's nowhere to park them and an ISD isn't available to drop its own pre-fab base at the Dictator's destination. This doesn't mean that the Dictator always has to deploy its pre-fab base every time it delivers its Corps; Dictators can obviously be used to reinforce an already-existing garrison (or any other sort of Imperial complex). But for those times when a Dictator is deploying its cargo for a brand new occupation, it makes sense to have the pre-fab base on hand to build a new garrison when necessary rather than wait for an ISD to show up and deploy its garrison base.
And as CRM has said, due to its modular design, the Dictator certainly seems like it can carry several pre-fab bases at once (while I think switching out part of the Corps out of its cargo bays to make room would be necessary) in order to build multi-garrison complexes. (Gawds, a single garrison is intimidating enough; garrison complexes of up to six garrison bases arranged in a close formation are hideous to contemplate.)
As to how much of the Corps would have to be switched out in order to accommodate how many pre-fab bases is a question I leave to CRM to answer. (Although, I did take a stab at answering this question myself, see below.)
| CRMcNeill wrote: | | I can actually see a place for both, with the Consolidator as a follow-on to the Dictator. |
Could you elaborate on this, CRM?
EDIT: So I tried to answer my own question about the Dictator carrying pre-fab bases. Here's the paragraph I added to my Dictator write-up:
| Quote: | | In addition to being able to carry a larger-than-standard Army corps, the Dictator also has sufficient cargo space to carry an entire pre-fabricated garrison. Furthermore, if the Dictator is not carrying the troops and vehicles of the Army corps, it can carry up to six pre-fab garrisons, which makes it ideal for quick deployments of Imperial garrison complexes. However, when fully loaded with six pre-fab garrisons, this configuration precludes the personnel and vehicles for the intended complex from also traveling aboard the Dictator, though the problem is usually solved by having the personnel and vehicles stowed on a different Dictator in troop-carrying configuration. |
What do you think, CRM?
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2017 10:50 am Post subject: |
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| Sutehp wrote: | | CRMcNeill wrote: | | I can actually see a place for both, with the Consolidator as a follow-on to the Dictator. |
Could you elaborate on this, CRM? |
My original intention upon accepting the Consolidator as a viable concept was to toss out the Dictator entirely, since the Consolidator is much more visually inspiring. However, IMO, there is a place for both, as the Dictator is a better fit to the pure-space operations of the Imperial Fleet's Technical Services groups. A ship outfitted for such wouldn't need the repulsorlifts or landing gear...
| Quote: | | What do you think, CRM? |
I think it's heavily predicated on the assumption that a pre-fab garrison base takes up a lot of room. I specifically wrote the stats of the Dictator / Consolidator so as to make room for the "expansion" described in the Imperial Sourcebook. Considering it has almost 16x the transport capacity of an ISD (which only carries one garrison base), I'd think six garrison bases and their full staff would fit into a Dictator / Consolidator with room to spare.
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Sutehp
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| Posted: Tue Jan 31, 2017 5:16 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Sutehp wrote: | | What do you think, CRM? |
I think it's heavily predicated on the assumption that a pre-fab garrison base takes up a lot of room. I specifically wrote the stats of the Dictator / Consolidator so as to make room for the "expansion" described in the Imperial Sourcebook. Considering it has almost 16x the transport capacity of an ISD (which only carries one garrison base), I'd think six garrison bases and their full staff would fit into a Dictator / Consolidator with room to spare. |
Including their vehicles as well? If so, then that is alot of cargo space the Consolidator has. I'm wondering just how bulky a pre-fab base is before it's deployed. It's not like the Empire can just drop a fully assembled garrison base from orbit (not acording to Wookieepedia, anyway). I remember reading somewhere that Titan-class barges (which are too large to fit on Imperator ISDs) as well as Theta-class barges (which can fit on ISDs) are essential for transporting the pre-fab base components to the surface because the other landing barges weren't large enough for said components. Wookieepedia specifically mentions that the Titan is essential for this on spaceships larger than the Imperator ISD. I can see the Consolidator being specifically designed to accommodate Titans, so that won't be a problem. But we're talking about a military cargo ship that is designed to hold a full corps or more (24,576+ soldiers in a corps, according to the Imperial Sourcebook, I don't know if this is just soldiers or includes their support staff, probably the latter) perhaps as many as a full Army (98,304 men) since the stats say the Dictator can carry 120,000 passengers, their vehicles (including large vehicles like Juggernauts and AT-ATs which require multiple Titans and Thetas to transport to the surface), their ammo and other supplies, and on top of all of that, the components for at least 6 to 16 (I came up with this number because you mentioned "16x the transport capacity of an ISD")buildings that, when fully completed, are 300 meters by 300 meters by 70 meters (give or take).
Granted, I'm only going by the visual of fractalsponge's Consolidator (as I have no visual of what the Dictator looks like), but can a 1,400 meter wedge-shaped ship really accommodate all that? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm really asking. And I understand that my visual concept of the Consolidator might be throwing me off because I basically grafted the image of the Consolidator onto the Dictator's stats, which makes things even more murky. But does the Dictator really have that much cargo space? (If it does, that's a very nice transport. I'll take three. 8) )
Maybe you mentioning "16x the transport capacity of an ISD" is throwing me off. In any case, I'm just wondering how many Garrison bases as well as the other cargo a Dictator can carry. You said there was room to spare for the full Army (did my memory fail me and I misunderstood that the Consolidator is an Army transport and I mistakenly thought it was just a corps transport? I think I did somewhere.) as well as six garrison bases with room to spare.
So I guess the TL;DR version of my post here is: how much more room is there to spare beyond the Army and the six garrison bases? Would that spare room accommodate additional garrison bases? If so, how many?
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CRMcNeill
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| Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 4:46 am Post subject: |
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Sorry. Been meaning to get back to this, but got distracted by real life.
I mixed up the numbers because, for whatever reason, I thought I had given the Dictator a base passenger capacity of 160,000.
The reasoning for such large numbers is that the Imperial Sourcebook specifically mentions that the Empire is not merely expanding the number of corps at a fast clip; they're also expanding the size of Army Corps themselves, along with expanding the corps' subordinate units. As such, the Evakmar-KDY would need to have capacity for a lot more than just the basic corps units listed in the ImpSB.
As far as the garrison bases, I'd like to clarify that I don't think the bases are shipped pre-formed. I believe the garrison bases are modular, broken down into components for maximum storage efficiency, and are then assembled on-site as needed. This allows it to be transported much more compactly than simply hauling a fully assembled garrison through space. However, without knowing exactly how compactly it can be stored when broken down, we don't really have a way to estimate how many can be carried.
Frankly, I can't imagine a game scenario where knowing the exact number matters. They aren't going to be deployed, set up and prepared in real-time; they'll simply be present as story factors when needed.
As an aside, a couple other fractalsponge options for deployment are the Chi-Class Heavy Dropship and the Zeta-Class Tactical CarryAll.
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 4:52 am Post subject: |
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Oh, and here is the link the Broadsword's page on the Holocron, including the only existing image of the ship.
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Sutehp
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| Posted: Fri Feb 03, 2017 5:31 am Post subject: |
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Yeah, when I saw that the Dictator/Consolidator had a passenger capacity of 120,000, i realized that that's more than enough for a full army (4 corps, so 98,000+ men) so I decided to make the Consolidator an army transport rather than a corps transport. Your capsule mentioned a design feature about a capacity for a 50% increase in cargo space in case large units were expanded in the future, so I just modified that to 25% to account for the difference between an army (98,000 men) and the 130,000 passenger capacity of the Consolidator.
And you're right about the pre-fab garrisons being unassembled while in transit, so as you said, there's no way to tell how many can be carried in a capital sized ship, especially one thats designed to be both modular and a dedicated military transport rather than a warship.
| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Frankly, I can't imagine a game scenario where knowing the exact number matters. They aren't going to be deployed, set up and prepared in real-time; they'll simply be present as story factors when needed. |
Also quite true. Then again, if the Rebels come across a pre-fab garrison as it's in the process of being built, that would make for an excellent target of opportunity to harass the construction through hit-and-fade raids if the Rebellion can whistle up enough forces in time. SpecForce infiltrators would have a field day sabotaging the construction equipment during a nighttime raid. ("Let's go scare the flarg out of those Imperial officers!" indeed.)
As for the links, fractalsponge does some great work. Even so, I prefer to keep things simple and if I need landing barges to transport vehicles to the surface, I stick with Thetas and Titans. (Then again, I might need something to transport non-walker vehicles...) As for personnel and cargo, that's what Sentinels, Lambdas and the Zetas from Rogue One (I can't wait to see those stats) are for.
EDIT: oh, and CRM, I bumped that nearly 3-year-old thread about the Modular Taskforce Cruisers; I was wondering if anyone was going to stat those fanmade modules. 8)
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
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| Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 7:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Sutehp wrote: | | Yeah, when I saw that the Dictator/Consolidator had a passenger capacity of 120,000, i realized that that's more than enough for a full army (4 corps, so 98,000+ men) so I decided to make the Consolidator an army transport rather than a corps transport. Your capsule mentioned a design feature about a capacity for a 50% increase in cargo space in case large units were expanded in the future, so I just modified that to 25% to account for the difference between an army (98,000 men) and the 130,000 passenger capacity of the Consolidator. |
I'm curious where you are getting your numbers. Per the ImpSB, Imperial Army Corps range from ~70,000-75,000 personnel plus equipment. A full Army contains one of each Corps type (Line, Assault, Mobile and Armored), and comes up just short of 300,000 personnel.
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Sutehp
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| Posted: Sat Feb 04, 2017 8:33 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Sutehp wrote: | | Yeah, when I saw that the Dictator/Consolidator had a passenger capacity of 120,000, i realized that that's more than enough for a full army (4 corps, so 98,000+ men) so I decided to make the Consolidator an army transport rather than a corps transport. Your capsule mentioned a design feature about a capacity for a 50% increase in cargo space in case large units were expanded in the future, so I just modified that to 25% to account for the difference between an army (98,000 men) and the 130,000 passenger capacity of the Consolidator. |
I'm curious where you are getting your numbers. Per the ImpSB, Imperial Army Corps range from ~70,000-75,000 personnel plus equipment. A full Army contains one of each Corps type (Line, Assault, Mobile and Armored), and comes up just short of 300,000 personnel. |
Ah, crap, I went by the blurb "Army Organization in Brief" on page 83 and extrapolated up from there. Did WEG screw up and make this inconsistent with the rest of the chapter? Shoddy work, indeed.
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