Rogue One

[CoffeeGrunt]

I'd like to see less mono-biome planets, personally. And more fleet action, dammit! I want a proper capital ship battle in Star Wars for once!

[Mr Mystery]

That would be cool!

Though with the Republic fleet allegedly gone (or at least the bulk of it?) we might need to wait until the third film.

I guess it all depends on the will and resources to replace the fleet within the Republic. The Rebels amassed a fair sized fleet by using old, decrepit models then later adding Mon Calamari cruisers.

Given the attack on Hosnian Prime, it seems possible their may be more of an appetite for a robust fleet to counter the First Order. Plus, all those Star Destroyers of the old Empire? Wonder where they are, and what state they're in? They might be outdated by new models, but something is better than nothing. But would that be palatable to the Republic?

[CoffeeGrunt]

Using WWII as a reference, all sides involved were more than happy to capture abandoned tanks and put them to use. I sincerely doubt the Republic would be averse to fielding Star Destroyers because they were used by the bad guys, when our Tommies were nicking every German weapon they could get their hands on because times were desperate and they were well-made.

Just my thinking, though. I wouldn't be surprised if most Star Destroyers were scuttled rather than handed over. There may not be many left.

[Mr Mystery]

True dat.

You know, I don't think I've ever seen canon information about how long it takes to build a capital scale ship? Because so far as I can guess, that's the one thing that could prevent the Republic rebuilding their fleet quickly enough to counter the First Order?

[Psychosplodge]

It certainly happened in the previous stuff.

Plus its easier to make one type of model and rebadge/colour it right?

[CoffeeGrunt]

Yeah, mass producing a single model is typically faster than producing various different designs. The more commonality in parts, the better. That said, the sheer size of Star Destroyers would trump that rule, as they're significantly larger than most man-made things at 1.6Km in length and bulky with it. (Though it made me laugh when I just Googled that, as the CCS Battlecruiser from Halo is bigger than that, and that's just a Cruiser..)

In terms of an engineering challenge, it's more akin to building a skycraper as it's more than three times longer than the largest naval vessel ever constructed. It's safe to say that it could take years to build one. The [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimitz-class_aircraft_carrier"]Nimitz-class Aircraft Carrier[/URL] had its first ship built in 1975, and it took until 2009 to build the other nine of them. That's for a 333m-long aircraft carrier, the largest naval warship ever built, but still piddly compared to an ISD.

So it looks like the Republic will have to scrimp and salvage what they can, again. They may have shipyards away from that capital planet that blew up, but it's unlikely.

Then again, Star Wars is a universe where shields don't really do anything and point defense weapons are inadequate, with bombers being able to wreck capital ships all the way up to superheavy space stations. They don't really need capital ships, despite how god-damn cool capital warship battles are. The best we get is in the Clone Wars, and that little bit of the Battle of Coruscant at the start of Revenge.

[Mr Mystery]

Would being built in Zero G not help speed things up though? Sorry if it's a noob question, I really know arse all about such things!

[Psychosplodge]

Traditionally shipyards were at Corellia* Kuat and Fondor**

*Han Solo - A new hope "I've outrun the big correllian ships" or whatever the line is
**both claim to have built the Executor in technical manuals iirc. How relevant the technical manuals are anymore?

[CoffeeGrunt]

Would being built in Zero G not help speed things up though? Sorry if it's a noob question, I really know arse all about such things!

The zero g and the vacuum would make it more awkward, depending on the manufacturing method. For one, there's the simple matter of operator safety, though you can use droids to mitigate this. Consider the size of components you'd need for a 1.6Km ship. The less joins in an armour plate, the less weaknesses, so it needs to be massive. Either they'd need a stupendously-big orbital forge station producing them, or they'd be made of many smaller plates that would be perforated with weak links between them.

Not to mention that a lot of primary forming techniques wouldn't work in a zero-g environment. Injection moulding would, but it would be a hell of a thing to try and injection mould panels big enough. Current methods for ceramic or metal parts also require the parts be sintered in an oven afterwards, so again, that's a tough process. Handling molten material in general would be a real pig in zero-g.

It's possible that parts would be assembled on the planet and shipped up to orbit, but that would be a time-and-resource consuming method, unless they had an orbital elevator or something like that. It'd just be a massive undertaking, really. Consider that the largest thing we've ever put in space is the ISS, at 109x73 meters, slightly bigger than a football field, and weighing 450 tons. It took about 13 years to assemble.

It's kinda impossible to imagine what it would take to build something so much larger than that. Especially considering incredibly fragile components like the reactor or warp drive, that take us decades to build at a comparable scale, and one of them, ITER, is literally an international scientific undertaking comparable to the ISS.

The problems with radiation, vacuum, zero-g effects on the body, space debris, and all that other stuff would make it a hefty undertaking, though. Even with all the tech Star Wars has it'd still be a massive operation simply because of the size and complexity.

[Psychosplodge]

Don't forget they also have antigrav tech so lifting stuff to orbit wouldn't necessarily pose anywhere near the challenge we have.

tbf we could have probably made the ISS quicker but the Space Shuttle was always a bottleneck there.

Google seems to suggest the first death star took 20 years.