Subject: Eeeeeee!
Author:
Posted on: 2017-10-19 10:33:00 UTC
(So I've managed to accidentally spark off a canon debate... I usually can't manage that deliberately! Anyway, I love this. ^^)
I kind of disagree with your disagreement, in a fair number of places:
Shields
These go together, because you've pinned your discussion of shields on the strength of the weapons (entirely fair). First off, the rules of canon have changed since the Disney takeover - everything is now officially at the same level of canon, so it doesn't matter if you cite The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars: Rebels, Aftermath, or Doctor Aphra. That said... I don't know many details from the new canon, so I'll work from the movies anyway. ^^
You talk about shields holding up to 'continuous bombardment', but that's not really what we see. R2 gets knocked out in ANH by about six shots; in RotJ, two A-Wings fire for about a second to take out Executor's bridge shields and destroy the shield sensor big dome. The key seems to be that (unlike Star Trek, where shields are a bubble that stands or falls as a whole) it's possible to 'burn through' a point on the shields, and to do so very quickly. Presumably that then regenerates, as otherwise they wouldn't be much good, but if you can put two capital ship blasts on the same spot, you're probably getting through.
Shields can also be taken out and damaged through in a single hit. Just before the death of the Executor, we see an X-Wing blasted to smithereens by a single turbolaser shot. So a power discrepancy removes even the dubious benefit of energy shields.
Interestingly, both types of shields can be 'focussed' on a specific area - Han Solo keeps wanting to 'angle the deflector shields' - though the Executor shows that there are also separate generators for different areas of the ship. So you can knock out the forward shields without having to worry that they'll shift the rear shields to compensate.
Ultimately, I think both shields are broadly equivalent. Pinpoint targetting can take out Star Wars ships with ease, but in a long battle, they might last longer if they can keep from being critically hit.
Weapons
I'm... dubious about using the asteroids in ESB as a yardstick here. Looking first at fighter weapons, a direct hit to Artoo's dome left him in a recoverable condition, and most fighter deaths we see in RotJ occur by going out of control and hitting something; lasers are clearly designed to hit explosive components, not to destroy outright.
Turbolasers? As mentioned, one can take out a fighter in a single hit, but we don't see any turbolaser-damage to capital ships in RotJ. Both the Empire and the Rebellion use fighters to cause damage, and there must be a reason for that.
One possible reason is targetting. We know that the Falcon has no auto-targetting - just swivel chairs - and I don't think we ever see anything that does. The only way to hit something is to point your gun manually at it and hit the trigger. That's... not gonna get you very far at any range (and explains why all the guns seem to come in pairs - they need two simultaneous hits to get through the shields, and they can't do that with multiple shots!).
Maneuvering
This is where Star Wars takes the advantage, not just over 40K but over practically everything. Very few canons have a jump drive as fast as hyperdrive. Star Trek? Battlestar? Dead in the water compared even to an X-Wing. There is (somewhere - can't find it) a list of 'Star Wars v Star Trek' scenarios showing how each side would approach them, and virtually every time, the Empire just uses hyperdrive to bypass the problem.
This has actually gotten worse in the new canon. In The Force Awakens, the Falcon is shown to both jump to hyperspace from a ship's docking bay, and jump to inside a planetary shield, only a few hundred meters above the surface. No 'mass shadows' any more - they can jump anywhere, anywhen.
So, in the Empire v. Imperium war, the Imperium can probably decimate the Imperial fleet - until the Empire loads a Star Destroyer full of proton torpedos and jumps it directly from the outer rim of the galaxy, through (or past) Terra's shields, to crash directly onto the Golden Throne. Goodbye, God-Emperor of Mankind. Goodbye, Astronomican. Goodbye, warp travel. Goodbye, any hope the Imperium has of survival.
Yeah. Hyperdrive is basically the cheat code for these games.
But! Luckily we're not talking about an Imp-v-Imp war. We're talking about a couple of ships at most. So if we assume that the Imperium can't replicate the hyperdrive (which seems fair, given their technological state), you'd have to sacrifice a valuable piece of tech to pull something like that off. And it wouldn't be much good against Chaos, since they don't have a single point of failure to target. Might explain why they want to get their hands on it, though.
And that's the thing: we're not talking about bringing a fleet across, but a single ship. Turbolasers wouldn't do much good on an Imperium ship, because they'd be tied to the same operating system as the normal guns. If the hyperdrive can be scaled up (big if), you can outfit a single ship to be able to go anywhere fast, and probably give it energy shields - but once it runs into more than token opposition, it's space debris.
The Force
I agree with you that this is a big win for Star Wars, but that scale difference is going to be a killer. Remember that 200 Jedi basically lost the Battle of Geonosis, and that was against droids! A Force user would almost certainly survive in combat against the Imperium (unless they got shot in the back), but they wouldn't turn the tide of a pitched battle. They need the smaller scale, where they can take a pivotal action. (Unless you delve into the old canon and battle meditation, but we're not doing that. Sadly.)
Conclusion/Scenario
Out of nowhere, a Galaxy Far Far Away appears, intersecting the Milky Way at right angles. It's a little before the Thirteenth Black Crusade - and also just before the Battle of Yavin (ie, the Empire at its height, with the Death Star at its disposal to make things interesting). Since the GFFA is stuffed with aliens, and Palpatine is a Force user, the Imperium wants to blow it up/take it over. So how does the war go?
Assume for some reason that the 'blow up the Emperor' plan is impossible. Maybe hyperdrive can't jump past void shielding, that'll work. The Imperium probably sends the biggest fleet it can on the most direct route it can find towards Coruscant, but finds that the Empire can get everywhere before it. Every system they stop off in is fortified against them, and there's ambushes everywhere. They stall out, as so many Imperial crusades do.
Palpatine, meanwhile, has bigger problems: Chaos. The founder of the New Order finds the whole concept terrifying, and directs the full might of the Empire to take it out. But... it doesn't work. 40K ships are just too big, and Palpy's Force users keep going crazy and turning into demons (they have an open link to the minds of Chaos-infected soldiers, after all). The Death Star is all well and good, but it can't blow up the Eye of Terror.
From the 40K side, this turns into a stalemate. The Empire becomes something like the Tau: able to hold their own, but unable to make any real advances. They can strike at any system, but can't do enough damage for it to matter.
From the SW side, though... Palpatine likes superweapons. He loves them. And given that the First Order was able to build a hyperspace-firing planet-killer, it's safe to say that with a bit of research, he can build something to turn the tide...
Wait a decade or so. Then tell me how the Eye of Terror will hold up to a constant barrage of world-destroying shots, each powered by the death of a sun...
hS