Star Wars the Executor?

[nhbdy]

I recently captured the Executor (don't ask how, it was hard and GM was improvising stats). and i wanted to know how you would stat this monster?

according to wookieepedia it is 12 time the size of a standard star destroyer, and has over 5,000 turbolasers, but i don't know anything else useful to statting it out, help?

here is where the wookieepedia article http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Executor

[Mad Wizard]

Well, first, which version of the rules are you using? If you're playing Saga Edition, it's statted out for you in the Starships of the Galaxy splatbook. In any case, the Executor is really so powerful that you barely need stats, since you can take on anything up to a death star. I've heard people say that, "The Executor isn't a ship, it's a plot device."

[evil]

Both editions of Starships of the Galaxy have the Executor's stats for their respective systems.

Heh, frankly, I dont even know why you'd want one. The Executor was showoffy power with no real purpose. It's stated purpose was to provide heavy support for a battlefleet, so unless you have a flotilla at your disposal just lying around, it's a waste of parts and manpower.

It did the job a half dozen Star Destroyers could do with more wasted manpower, less coverage and exponentially higher cost.

If I were you? I'd put it in orbit around some backwater planet, salvage it for parts and strip it bare bones for use as a space station.

eh, but that's just the fleet junkie in me.

[nhbdy]

Well, first, which version of the rules are you using? If you're playing Saga Edition, it's statted out for you in the Starships of the Galaxy splatbook. In any case, the Executor is really so powerful that you barely need stats, since you can take on anything up to a death star. I've heard people say that, "The Executor isn't a ship, it's a plot device."

we are using the edition with the Revised core rulebook, whichever that is, i know it isn't saga

[evil]

Then you're in luck! It would be a violation of copyright law to copy and paste the statistics from the book, HOWEVER... Wizards went ahead and did it for ya.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x...cle/SBPreview1

[nhbdy]

Then you're in luck! It would be a violation of copyright law to copy and paste the statistics from the book, HOWEVER... Wizards went ahead and did it for ya.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x...cle/SBPreview1

tyvm, this is perfect

[Mushroom Ninja]

If it's not too much trouble, I am kind of curious how you managed to steal this thing.

[evil]

They could have walked in and said please. The Imperial Navy has lower security then my local library.

They managed to have the Eclipse -class Star Dreadnought (Which makes the SSDs look stunted by comparison) stolen from Kuat, one of their most heavily defended shipyards. I mean yeesh.

[nhbdy]

If it's not too much trouble, I am kind of curious how you managed to steal this thing.

i took it by pounding it with ion cannons, it couldn't do much as we landed a boarding party :)

my GM expanded the damage table and allows multiple hits to stack, so it was out before long

[The Glyphstone]

That's an awfully big boarding party to overwhelm its 38,000 Stormtrooper garrison....:)

[RandomLunatic]

That's an awfully big boarding party to overwhelm its 38,000 Stormtrooper garrison....:)

They are Stormtroopers. The only thing you need to worry about is all that stray blaster fire gutting your prize from the inside out.

[Myshlaevsky]

That's an awfully big boarding party to overwhelm its 38,000 Stormtrooper garrison....:)

All you have to do is stand in the middle of them all.

[Nerd-o-rama]

A bigger problem was that the Executor itself was home base to Darth Vader for most of its all-to-brief existence, unless you're playing an alternate history or caught him while he was out on a mission. Or you're mistaken and it's another Executor-class vessel.

Just how many ion cannons did you need to disable the thing? I'm curious.

[Gamgee]

Gut the innards of the ship, its so useless as it is right now, replace it with a giant laser. There you now have a far more cost effective planet killer that requires only a skeleton crew to fly. Considering you took this thing out with a boarding party you have NOTHING to fear from the Imperial Navy. Good hunting, I hear those planets like to orbit lots ;)

[hamishspence]

I'm wondering how long you are having the Super. Older books have put it as 11 km, or 7 miles, or 8 km in the case of the rather poor Darksaber book but recently Saga upgraded size to 19 km (longer even than the Eclipse, though much lighter)

Note that books published around same period as Saga have gone with lower figures.

[Philistine]

i took it by pounding it with ion cannons, it couldn't do much as we landed a boarding party :)

my GM expanded the damage table and allows multiple hits to stack, so it was out before long

Wait, what?

No seriously - what?

Your DM allowed you to capture a ship in combat... but he didn't have the ship statted out? That's... surprising.

In-game issues:
I don't even remember how long it's been since I looked at the RCR, but weren't ion cannons only effective if the target was within a size category or so of the firing ship? Meaning you'd need capship-scale ion cannons to take out a capship. (Translation: you need at least one capital ship of your own.)

Worse, the Executor-class ships are among the hardest single targets in the setting. It's not likely that one would just sit there passively while you took down her shields and got started on her systems, either - so what was the ship doing during the whole fight? (Translation: you'd need at least a small fleet of capships, and you will take casualties.)

Worse yet, what was the rest of the Imperial fleet doing? Executor was a command ship, after all; you also have to account for the rest of her squadron (9 ISDs, 1 VSD, plus ~10 miscellaneous smaller ships). Where were they while you whomped on their flagship? (Translation: Oops - turns out you'd actually need a pretty good-sized fleet of capships, and you'll take massive casualties.)

But, okay - say you've somehow miraculously disabled the SSD, and snuck a boarding party on via the hangar bay. Now it's you and your boarding party... and over three hundred thousand Imperials on the ship. Granted, most of the 280,000 ship's crew will be too far away and/or too busy actually running the ship to mess with you, but as previously mentioned there are 38,000 stormtroopers aboard who have nothing more important to do than come get in your way. I don't care how bad their marksmanship is, that's some curst long odds. And yeah - Vader's on that ship.

And then if you DO manage to overcome all that, then you've got a ship that needs almost three hundred thousand crew to operate. You'll probably get some defectors from the previous crew - but not that many. (Remember, this is Vader's personal ship, the most prestigious assignment in the Imperial Navy, so her crew would be among the most motivated in the entire fleet.) Did you have three hundred thousand trained starship crewers sitting around twiddling their thumbs for some reason?

Sorry, this whole thing really just sounds awfully silly.

EDIT:

I'm wondering how long you are having the Super. Older books have put it as 11 km, or 7 miles, or 8 km in the case of the rather poor Darksaber book but recently Saga upgraded size to 19 km (longer even than the Eclipse, though much lighter)

Note that books published around same period as Saga have gone with lower figures.

This was an error in the old WEG RPG books that has carried through to some later games and fiction. The scaling of the models in the OT had Executor at 11x the length of an ISD, whose length is well-estalished at 1mi or 1.6km. The modeling guys at ILM actually did a pretty good job, and the scaling is pretty consistent - and it's hard to call another source "more canonical" than the OT.

[hamishspence]

The more advanced the ship, the more automation involved. Still, even a skeleton crew for an SSD would be pretty large.

[Philistine]

280,000 is a skeleton crew. If an ISD needs a crew of 36000, and the SSD is 11x longer and similarly proportioned, then the SSD has 1331x as much internal volume as the ISD, so a proportional crew would be 47,916,000.

[Ossian]

Just to tell you how impressive that feat is to me (borading the f*****g executor), I once had a lvl 9 party (4 members, 2 of which level 9 force users) trying to escape (with force tricks and everything) from a Standard Star Destroyer (the Vengeance, or something...the one deployed in Tatooine's high orbit, it is also in the EU). WITH a docked ship waiting for them in one of the bays and the surprise element.

They barely made it (all injured).

And that was a puny 1600 mtr SD....

[hamishspence]

again, SSDs may use more automation than ISDs (if you believe Darksaber) and are slimmer than ISDs. so, not increase in crew in proportion to increase in size.

Devastator was Vader's ship in Star Wars, and I think Jerecs modified SSD was called Vengeance.

[Philistine]

SSDs are proportionally more slender than ISDs, but they're still vastly larger than ISDs in every dimension. (See here - one of those ISDs is clearly between the camera and the SSD and therefore appears larger in proportion, yet it's still dwarfed by Executor's hangar bay, let alone the rest of the ship.) Executor is an absolute monster.

Admittedly 48 million is out on the high end of the scale, but come on - a ship so much larger than an ISD that it could easily fit 4 or 5 ISDs in its hangar bay... but with less than 8x the crew requirement? Even if the ISDs are just insanely inefficient manpower hogs, 280,000 crew for Executor is way, way, way low.

[Emperor Tippy]

To be fair a lot of that crew could be redundancy. If you have the space and nothing better to fill it with then you might as well throw in an extra 100 bridges, power plants, water reclamation plants, etc. and the crew needed to run all of those other 100 sets of systems.

Granted if it was me I would massively automate and reduce the size of both the crew and the vessel drastically. A naval ship is ultimately just a weapons delivery system. It's job is to get the most powerful weapons payload to the battle and ensure that said payload survives the battle.

[Triaxx]

Hang on. What was the quote manpower requirement for the Death Star? (The first one, the second wasn't complete.) I'm doubting even it required 48million crew. Besides, size isn't all that counts. A large chunk of that is taken up by power systems and internals.

[Philistine]

To be fair a lot of that crew could be redundancy. If you have the space and nothing better to fill it with then you might as well throw in an extra 100 bridges, power plants, water reclamation plants, etc. and the crew needed to run all of those other 100 sets of systems.

Granted if it was me I would massively automate and reduce the size of both the crew and the vessel drastically. A naval ship is ultimately just a weapons delivery system. It's job is to get the most powerful weapons payload to the battle and ensure that said payload survives the battle.

Actually, I agree with that. There's just no real mission for something as big as an Executor - it doesn't do anything a squadron of ISDs couldn't do just as well, and for much less cost. It would be different if the SW setting included an analogue to really big guns, but the closest real world analogue for Executor would be a 60,000t battleship with 200 5" guns. It's a powerful ship, but in many ways it's less powerful than the same weight of armament spread over ~20 separate hulls. In fact, I'd scale down the ISDs, too, for the same reasons - there's no good reason for them to be as large as they are, given what appears to be a hard upper limit on weapon size in the setting.

...

Hang on. What was the quote manpower requirement for the Death Star? (The first one, the second wasn't complete.) I'm doubting even it required 48million crew.

To run the station? It's quoted as ~755,000 (station crew, officers, support & maintenance, and gunnery crews), plus 400,000 droids. Plus 600,000 troops, 157,000 pilots for the various starfighters and smallcraft, and room for 800,000 passengers.

This also sounds ridiculously low - the station has an internal volume around 2 million cubic km, and supports a population of only ~2 million people? No wonder Han, Luke, & co. were able to run all over the place inside the station - it only had only one crew member per cubic kilometer!

Besides, size isn't all that counts. A large chunk of that is taken up by power systems and internals.

Yes, but the same applies to everything else too. And IRL at least, powerplant and internal structure tend to take up proportionately less weight and volume in larger ships. Meaning even more of Executor would be... empty space, apparently? (Well, it does have that humongous hangar bay...)

(I mentioned before that the modeling crew at ILM did a good job - it probably goes without saying, but my good opinion does not extend to some of the clowns who've written in the setting. )

[fractic]

Actually, I agree with that. There's just no real mission for something as big as an Executor - it doesn't do anything a squadron of ISDs couldn't do just as well, and for much less cost.

It compensates better?

[Mando Knight]

In any case, the Executor is really so powerful that you barely need stats, since you can take on anything up to a death star. I've heard people say that, "The Executor isn't a ship, it's a plot device."

Yeah... it's almost as if you had enslaved Orcus in D&D... once you own an Excecutor class SSD, the only challenges left are Deus Ex Machina-powered enemies, like an Eclipse or a Death Star... things that can take down anything that the GM should allow anyone under level 20 to own in one shot.

Anyway, the Death Star actually probably has a disproportionately massive powerplant, considering that it can fire a beam that spends several terajoules of energy destroying Earth-sized planets...

[nhbdy]

Wait, what?

No seriously - what?

Your DM allowed you to capture a ship in combat... but he didn't have the ship statted out? That's... surprising.

In-game issues:
I don't even remember how long it's been since I looked at the RCR, but weren't ion cannons only effective if the target was within a size category or so of the firing ship? Meaning you'd need capship-scale ion cannons to take out a capship. (Translation: you need at least one capital ship of your own.)

Worse, the Executor-class ships are among the hardest single targets in the setting. It's not likely that one would just sit there passively while you took down her shields and got started on her systems, either - so what was the ship doing during the whole fight? (Translation: you'd need at least a small fleet of capships, and you will take casualties.)

Worse yet, what was the rest of the Imperial fleet doing? Executor was a command ship, after all; you also have to account for the rest of her squadron (9 ISDs, 1 VSD, plus ~10 miscellaneous smaller ships). Where were they while you whomped on their flagship? (Translation: Oops - turns out you'd actually need a pretty good-sized fleet of capships, and you'll take massive casualties.)

But, okay - say you've somehow miraculously disabled the SSD, and snuck a boarding party on via the hangar bay. Now it's you and your boarding party... and over three hundred thousand Imperials on the ship. Granted, most of the 280,000 ship's crew will be too far away and/or too busy actually running the ship to mess with you, but as previously mentioned there are 38,000 stormtroopers aboard who have nothing more important to do than come get in your way. I don't care how bad their marksmanship is, that's some curst long odds. And yeah - Vader's on that ship.

And then if you DO manage to overcome all that, then you've got a ship that needs almost three hundred thousand crew to operate. You'll probably get some defectors from the previous crew - but not that many. (Remember, this is Vader's personal ship, the most prestigious assignment in the Imperial Navy, so her crew would be among the most motivated in the entire fleet.) Did you have three hundred thousand trained starship crewers sitting around twiddling their thumbs for some reason?

Sorry, this whole thing really just sounds awfully silly.

EDIT:


This was an error in the old WEG RPG books that has carried through to some later games and fiction. The scaling of the models in the OT had Executor at 11x the length of an ISD, whose length is well-estalished at 1mi or 1.6km. The modeling guys at ILM actually did a pretty good job, and the scaling is pretty consistent - and it's hard to call another source "more canonical" than the OT.

I did have a massive fleet, i was leading an assualt for the rebellion, so we had a lot of capital ships and we had lots of smaller ships to deal with the swarms of tiny ships. Vader was allready dead, i ambushed him when he was on a mission. does that answer your question?

[Morandir Nailo]

I did have a massive fleet, i was leading an assualt for the rebellion, so we had a lot of capital ships and we had lots of smaller ships to deal with the swarms of tiny ships. Vader was allready dead, i ambushed him when he was on a mission. does that answer your question?

That's one heck of an epic game, my friend. Must be a blast to play in! Makes me wish I was still playing SW myself...

Mor

[Name_Here]

A bigger problem was that the Executor itself was home base to Darth Vader for most of its all-to-brief existence, unless you're playing an alternate history or caught him while he was out on a mission. Or you're mistaken and it's another Executor-class vessel.

Just how many ion cannons did you need to disable the thing? I'm curious.

Well I don't know about the Role Playing game but in most of the expanded universe the Ion Cannons are always way overpowered. In TIE fighter the ion cannon of star fighters was more than enough to knock out capital ships in only a few passes. And of course the Ion Cannon on Hoth that was able to knock out Star Destroyers in one hit.

[Philistine]

I did have a massive fleet, i was leading an assualt for the rebellion, so we had a lot of capital ships and we had lots of smaller ships to deal with the swarms of tiny ships. Vader was allready dead, i ambushed him when he was on a mission. does that answer your question?

I guess it does. So were you playing as Admiral Ackbar, or Mon Mothma?

Seriously, though, I still would have expected a major fleet unit like that to be statted out by the DM before trying to run it in combat. That's one crazy, crazy game, dude.

EDIT:

Well I don't know about the Role Playing game but in most of the expanded universe the Ion Cannons are always way overpowered. In TIE fighter the ion cannon of star fighters was more than enough to knock out capital ships in only a few passes. And of course the Ion Cannon on Hoth that was able to knock out Star Destroyers in one hit.

To be fair, the Rebels' ground-based ion cannon at Hoth appeared to be much larger than the turbolaser emplacements seen on various occasions through the OT. So it definitely looked to be in "capship scale," possibly even larger.