Canonically, shields absolutely do absorb metric fucktons of firepower, but they are vulnerable to stacked missile attacks - if you use the correct, ship-killing missiles. On of the things about the Galactic Civil War period - the portion of the timeline where the movies take place, is that it occurred during a period in which missiles where powerful and missile technology had advanced to the point where missile barrages by starfighters could actually overwhelm the shields and subsequently crater the hull plating of capital ships. This is not always the case. In TOR you can spam literally hundreds of missiles at a modest capital ship and all you'll do is peel the turrets off, and very few of that era's starfighters are carry missile launchers anyway.FatR wrote: Shields can absorb fuck huge amounts of firepower, that swiftly scales with shielding generator size, so planetary shielding makes kinetic attacks virtually useless, and missile swarms accomplish next to nothing in space combat.
EU canon supports exactly this. Starfighters, even those armed only with laser cannons, can do serious damage to capital ships. While unlikely to penetrate the hull and crush the internal systems, they can destroy surface batteries, cripple engines and sensors, and vent the first layer of compartments to space. That means starfighter presence forces a ship to keep a full bubble of shielding up as opposed to concentrating it in just the direction an opposing capital ship. I believe the relevant example is in the novel Solo Command.In case of ship-to-ship combat this also means that fighters on their own rarely can overcome a capital ship, and even corvettes and frigates can effortlessly tank anything smaller than a whole squadron attacking with perfect coordination. However, presence of fighters on the space battlefield means than enemy ships cannot divert all power to parts of their shielding directly facing the enemy, and whenever a lucky blast from a friendly capital ship short-circuits generators for just one or two shield plates, fighters around can exploit that chance and strike the weak spot for massive damage.
In the Thrawn Trilogy (which is the most important source because it was the one that first took movie elements and codified how this stuff actually worked), Thrawn launches a surprise raid of Coruscant with a star destroyer battle group (six Imperial-class star destroyers and several dozen support ships). The New Republic briefly skirmishes in orbit before Garm Bel Iblis takes command, points out that's stupid, and they just hole up behind their planetary shield, against which the entire combined firepower of the battlegroup is useless. Thrawn uses a trick to put a bunch of cloaked asteroids in decaying orbits around the planet as an interdiction tactic designed to demoralize the New Republic and as a result Coruscant keeps their planetary shields up for what is apparently in-universe weeks.Strength of planetary shields, at least on planets that actually are major industrial and political centers, also means that you cannot just alpha strike the enemy capital as your opening act of war, and outcome of conflicts does not boil down to a single decisive fleet battle. Battering down a first-rate planet may take days or weeks, and is likely to result in severe casualties if the planet also has surface-to-space batteries worth mentioning. So even if you rout your enemy's fleet, you may be left with insufficient combat strength to conquer a major world, or siege may take enough time for the enemy fleet to recover/receive reinforcements.
So yeah, taking a planet is hard. It's also notable that, despite the incredibly large crew requirements of Imperial Star Destroyers, the number of troops they carry when it comes to the needs of planetary conquest is small. Ten thousand men and their support equipment is basically two brigades. So a full battlegroup is mustering maybe 3-4 divisions worth of ground troops unless they have dedicated troop carrying support. That's only enough to assault a combat zone around the size of the UK on a planet with an Earth-size population.
So much yes. Fuck you Abrams, fuck you so much for letting that into Force Awakens, you destroyed space combat in Star Wars forever you moron.First, no, you cannot hyperdrive out of/into the atmosphere, or under a shield. That will kill you.
Star Wars storytelling has traditionally featured as many superweapons as possible specifically to address the issue of overwhelming galactic scale. Ship-killing, planet-killing, star-killing, infinite factories, force-based weapons, biological weapons, zombies (multiple times), cyborgs, the list just goes on and on.(3)Different sort of planets. Pretty much what mechalich wrote above. A lot of the Galaxy consists of shitholes which do various equivalents of subsistence farming and have no military or economic value to speak of. Then there are extremely important industrialized worlds, each of whom runs a ton of colonies and dependencies, from automated mining stations, to pastoral planets whose main "trades" are cool scenery and quality resorts. Because assaulting a major world directly is perilous, as described above, unless one side in war has a massive advantage (and perhaps even then), a war primarily consists of struggles for control of those lesser world which may have only token defensive forces on their own, with the end purpose of cutting imports to your adversary's major worlds and either force submission or weaken them for the final assault. Because the Galaxy is absolutely enormous, and significant conflicts unfold over tens of thousands systems at a time, even though armies and fleets of every faction worth mentioning are massively big too, with an equivalent of private security force fielding dozens of battleships/carriers, individual engagements and campaigns may therefore feature forces limited enough for PCs' heroics to leave a noticeable immediate impact.
While the Rebellion has capital ships, it doesn't have a lot of them and most of them - like essentially all Nebulon-B Frigates - they got by stealing them from the Empire. In fact the majority of New Republic materiel and personnel was Imperial in origin until perhaps as much as a decade after the Battle of Endor - which is something that's seen in sources such as Dark Empire.Chamomile wrote:That scene is a star destroyer picking on a Corellian corvette (I'm assuming you mean Episode IV, since no scene from Episode I fits at all). The Rebel fleet has Mon Calamari cruisers and Nebulon frigates in it. The exact same ship that gets swallowed up by a star destroyer in A New Hope is ejected from a Rebel cruiser in Rogue One. Rebels have ships of the exact same size as the Empire, and they have them by the midpoint of the civil war. That scene isn't the standard confrontation between Rebel and Imperial forces, it's an Imperial cruiser chasing down a routing Rebel corvette in the immediate aftermath of a major fleet confrontation.
It is far easier to build something on a planet than it is to build something into a ship that needs to move about in space. Planetary defenses and weaponry are therefore stronger than ship-based ones, even really big ship-based ones until you hit the superweapon zone.angelfromanotherpin wrote:I think if the slapdash rebel base on Hoth can have an anti-bombardment shield sufficient to hold off the fucking Executor, then either bombardment tech sucks or the capital ships aren't actually designed for it.
Now, the shield protecting Echo Base did not encompass the entirety of Hoth and, if he had wanted to, Vader could have ordered Death Squadron to fire at the icy wastes until they boiled off and the atmospheric temperature hit the boiling point and killed everyone, but that would have taken a long time and wouldn't have prevented the Rebellion's forces from escaping.