Arioch wrote:Zorg56 wrote:It was the bridge shield.
Main shield was taken out by Rebel MC cruisers bombardment, even in the movie you can clearly see how admiral Ackbar orders his entire fleet to focusfire executor.
If a ship that costs as much as an entire fleet can be taken out by an entire fleet, then it is an inferior use of those resources, since the whole thing is lost if the enemy focuses fire on it. Whereas the fleet loses only one ship at a time to focus fire.
The dreadnought principle only works if the larger vessel is mostly impervious to damage by smaller vessels.
You know, that isn't necessarily correct. If the only thing you care about is delivered firepower then sure, but what little we know of Star Destroyers of any size indicates that they were not really fit to the battleship mold. A galleon/carrier hybrid would be more appropriate, as they were simultaneously heavily armed warships, small-craft carriers, and landingship+troop carriers. I wouldn't be surprised if the Executor at least could provide limited drydock facilities to repair smaller ships as well, given that the thing was both huge, and apparently designed as a command ship. Even if the Executor cost as much as a fleet of ISDs, it's strategic worth might have been much, much more if you assume the existence of other Imperial fleets. It may well be that the Executor was actually being use as a supply base to support the Imperial fleet at Endor, rather than being a purely combat resource.
Also, it may have been designed & construction started before the Rebellion got lots of ships, in which case there arguably would have been nothing that could have actually done lasting damage to it. Even in RotJ, if it hadn't run into the Death Star 2 then it probably could have been salvaged and returned to duty later (unless it was using it's engines to sustain an artificial orbit).
Siber wrote:
P.s. You can feel it in a lot of strategy games, closer to the theme- EaW Remake, placing few ISDs betwees SSD and enemy turns large piniata into chainsaw for enemy fleets.
Those games are not tactical simulators, they're games designed and balanced around making getting the expensive cool thing a good idea. In Supreme Commander building a thirty storey tall spider mech with a giant laser on it is a good idea, when in reality it'd be an absurd one, killed by a single high altitude bomber rather than need to be pecked to death by dozens.
The attrition curve effects(your point B) in video games are weird compared to a reasonable scenario because typically units fight at 100% effectiveness until they moment they die, or close to it, while this is not the case in reality. There's no lucky hit on a magazine blowing a huge chunk out of the super-battleship and disabling a major part of its weaponry, or degraded effectiveness as it's crew gets worn down.
One note: taking out a magazine is commonly a game-ender for a battleship, super or otherwise. Those are stored
inside the primary armor because detonating all of your powder charge at once beside
or inside your armor is much more damaging to you than detonating it piece-wise beside your target... and yet the piece-wise approach was supposed to be destructive enough to take out an enemy battleship anyways, suggesting that your magazine going off should generally take you off the board completely.
Also, the main guns were heavily armored, so taking them out was meant to be about as hard as getting to the magazine. The secondary armaments would be a better comparison, as they were still decently powerful, but inevitable less well armed.