LogFAQs > #913531619

Unbridled9 posted...

It may be a 'single use' but that capitol ship you just blew up cost, like, 6,000,000 times more

First off, it's "capital ship", not "capitol ship". A capitol is a building; all other uses of the word are "capital".

Secondly, the fact that the attacker wins the cost tradeoff doesn't actually mean much, because even if the Rebels kill 6 million times their credit value, the Empire has billions more in resources (source: they built a moon-sized battlestation that was an order of magnitude larger than the entire rebel fleet at its peak; then they built a second, even bigger one when the first one blew up).

Unbridled9 posted...

You can't possibly tell me that, say, twelve hyper-space X-wing missiles cost MORE than a single Star Destroyer. If you slapped a hyperdrive onto an asteroid you wouldn't even need to factor in a cost for the ship.

Well, first off, a Star Destroyer is roughly 1.92 x 10^8 cubic metres in volume, while a roughly X-wing-sized pyramid of metal would be about 300 cubic metres. If you wanted to use those to blow up a single Star Destroyer (of which the Empire has literally tens of thousands, nevermind their other ships) you'd need roughly 6500 X-wing missiles per Star Destroyer.

Or, you could use a single squadron of twelve, armed with much more easily replaceable proton torpedoes, and blow up said Star Destroyer *without* losing any ships. Which sounds much more economical.

I've heard the asteroid idea before, and that's even less feasible than most, because no one bothers to take into account the logistical hurdles that immediately present themselves. The first issue is that, as previously mentioned, the hyperdrive makes up a pretty substantial portion of a ship's cost (judging by TPM and the negotiations with Watto) so the cost savings are already questionable. Secondly, unless you're using these to defend a base that's already located at or near an asteroid field, you'll need to bring the asteroids to their targets. That will require some form of a carrier ship (more cost), along with tugs of some sort to move the asteroids onto or off of the carrier ship (still more cost), manoeuvring jets for the asteroid to make sure it's pointed in the right direction (even more cost), plus a droid brain/autopilot to actually run the calculations and make the jump (yet another cost), and most of those costs (carrier and tugs aside) are for a single-use weapon. It's not even clear that this would result in a feasible weapon - if we're factoring the EU into this debate, it's established that the transition into hyperspace exerts enormous forces on the ship that it has to be carefully engineered to withstand; it's debatable whether an asteroid would even survive the hyperspace transition without simply disintegrating.
---

Kill 1 man: You are a murderer. Kill 10 men: You are a monster.
Kill 100 men: You are a hero. Kill 10,000 men, you are a conqueror!