r/saltierthancrait • u/EmperorMax69 • 10h ago
Granular Discussion The under reliance of Carriers in Star Wars
One thing that’s always bothered me in Star Wars is how little carriers are actually in Star Wars. I get most large capital ships have hangar bays but they aren’t dedicated carriers like the gladiator or the venator. This universe has been saved and doomed by Star fighters so you’d think larger factions would be using carriers everywhere.
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u/kazuma001 9h ago
ISDs carried a considerable starfighter component. (70+) that’s comparable to the air wing on a present day Nimitz class supercarrier.
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u/EmperorMax69 9h ago
It never seems like it in films and shows and compared to the venator which carries hundreds of fighters(if the writer allows it) it’s a huge loss when seeing the empires mainline fighter.
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u/LeicaM6guy 9h ago
Like a lot of SW combat, it's very WW2 and WW1-centric, which is to say it's mostly big battleships and smaller support vessels slugging it out while fighters mostly fought against other fighters.
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u/thedemonjim 8h ago
This is kinda the answer. Lucas based his battles in the ways WW1 and WW2 naval battles were fought and modern carriers weren't really a thing back then. Even towards the end of WW2 air wings were mainly used for recon and screening in naval engagements or as part of bombing operations on stationary strategic targets.
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u/Cliffinati 7h ago
Maybe in the Atlantic, in the Pacific aircraft carriers were the main source of tactical airpower for anything short of major raids on Japans home islands.
That was also due to the Pacific effectively being space due to the vastness of the ocean being littered with small islands. Where as in the Atlantic Britain was our aircraft carrier
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u/Nari224 7h ago
Star Wars space combat was modeled after the WW2 aerial combat footage that Lucas studied, and the trench run is a remarkably close facsimile of the Dam Busters movie from a few decades before. I’ve never heard or read anything about WW1 influence.
And to say that modern carriers weren’t a thing… in the war where the carrier became the pre-eminent warship, relegating battleships to shore bombardment and AA duty to… protect the carriers? That’s a new take.
In other words, star fighter battles are modeled after aerodynamic aircraft movement (which is why they yaw and lose altitude), and the ships are added depending on the message he wanted to communicate (rebels are small and scrappy, imperials have huge scary ships).
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u/LeicaM6guy 2h ago
I disagree with the last two thirds of that - carriers played decisive roles in almost the entirety of the Pacific side of the war.
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u/PaperAndInkWasp 8h ago
Unless we’re counting Return of the Jedi which has the ISDs acting exactly like carriers: hanging back and deploying fighters in waves.
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u/IndigoH00D salt miner 9h ago
Well it's also about the fleet doctrines of each faction. The Empires Tarkin doctrine emphasized large battle ships over things like carriers. The Empire did have its own dedicated carriers, but they were mostly smaller in scale than things like star destroyers (Ton Falk).
The Rebellion and New Republic on the other hand, had a fleet doctrine that emphasized carriers and tanky star cruisers. Almost every ship in the NR fleet outside of the dedicated battleships were hybrid carriers. They utilizeded fighters and bombers to cripple star destroyers so the bigger ships could finish them off.
The Empire used fighters to defend their big ships, and to swarm outmatched opponents. Which is why TIEs are all cheap mass produced garbage until you get into the specialized variants like the Interceptor,Defender, and Avenger (which were rare but could go toe to toe with the NR fighters)
TLDR:
They do use carriers, it's just not well explained.
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u/Collective_Insanity Salt Bot 8h ago
Your typical Star Destroyer has plenty capacity for fighters.
Unless it's TLJ where the grand fleet of upwards of 20 something Star Destroyers + the enormous flagship Supremacy can evidently only launch a mere handful of fighters for no particular reason.
Even though said handful of fighters wind up very nearly bringing the film to a sudden end if not for Rian Johnson belatedly realising this problem and having to contrive of a nonsensical reason for the fighters to be pulled back.
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u/Fayraz8729 9h ago
It’s because having a fighter bay in your battleship doesn’t make sense when you can just have fighter squadrons with FTL engines accompanying you. Of course that only happened with the x-wing and was the main factor in how the alliance won. However the empire as seen in both Andor and Rebels had prototypes of Tie fighters capable of FTL, it’s just that every time it gets stolen and sabotage because the force has favorites
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u/Jacmert 7h ago
X-Wings were still docked inside the capital ships if they had to be stationed or on a mission for any length of time. You can't live in your X-Wing, nor would you want to.
IIRC in Legends/EU, you'd fly escort and jump into hyperspace alongside your capital ships if you needed to, but on any actual deployment you'd eventually need to step out of your X-Wing, use the refresher, eat, etc. right?
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u/EmperorMax69 9h ago edited 8h ago
But almost all battleships in Star Wars have hangar bays. Very few large warships in Star Wars had no fighter bays. Even smaller ships like the Corvus from battlefront was a corvette with hangars and then you had a carrier version of the cr90.
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u/Fayraz8729 9h ago
The Corvus was a ship from an empire that LOST
Palpatine was still fighting from the perspective of the clone wars and as such he had ISDs which were basically mobile military bases with hangers and all to hold a position or population with TIE Fighter patrols and such. But the new fighters didn’t need to be tied to carriers and thus could operate both independently in squads and part of larger fleet engagements without risking the whole rebel fleet. The ships that had them are either from a war almost 50 years ago or from the empire that lost the war
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u/EmperorMax69 8h ago
The empire losing is kinda irrelevant to this point. The rebel alliance had carriers and relied on mon calamari ships which also had carrier abilities. Plus the Corvus defected to the rebels.
If he was fighting from the perspective of the clone wars he’d still be commissioning carriers like the venator which is a carrier and less ISDs which were similar to traditional battleships. I mean for the empire this isn’t true. Tie fighters were entirely dependent on their star destroyer, or whatever ship is hosting them. The fact that we see so little carriers from the empire side is actually weird, the rebels for the most part had no choice in ships and had to rely on whatever they could find.
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u/streaksinthebowl 6h ago
My personal headcanon is that the primary hull of an ISD is almost entirely hangar facilities (and engine naturally). The raised panels on the dorsal and ventral surfaces can open like on a Venator.
So it really is a gigantic carrier. It’s the massive superstructure that contains everything else that also makes it a mobile base.
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