So an Imperial-class Star Destroyer (Star Wars) crash lands on Earth..........

[StupidMoniker]

we don't have to waste a lot of time showing every detail and step taken during a flight in a movie because this is bad story-telling. we don't have pre-flight inspections unless it's for dramatic purposes, or to add an 'air of realism', or to create suspense.

remember, this is a scenario-based rumble. we don't have compressed narrative to eliminate or reduce the 'boring parts'. if it reasonably takes 90 seconds to safely land a machine then it takes 90 seconds. if it takes one hour to travel the distance allowed by your ships maximum speed... then it takes an hour.

now, all three sources I've looked at give the shuttle's top atmospheric speed as 850 kph (or 526 mph).

to get out of the atmosphere requires time. even though there isn't a single instance where a ship in Star Wars has been shown to fly straight up into the air, perpendicular to the horizon... let's pretend that this is possible. it would still take 34 minutes for them to escape the atmosphere to reach their amazing travel speeds in space. assuming that they can travel where ever they want to almost instantaneously, they now have to descend into the atmosphere to reach their targets.

unless, of course, you can show us examples of shuttles and TIE fighters striking surface targets from outer space! since I can't recall a single instance in the entire history of Star Wars where this happened.... let's move on to the descent.

I'm going to be extremely generous and assume that the shuttle can safely dive at 200% of it's maximum level flight speed. the reason I'm prepared to do this is because they have shields. if they didn't have shields the figure would be more like 125% or 150%. the reason for this is because of the atmosphere. if aircraft moving through the atmosphere travel too fast then their control surfaces aren't strong enough to overcome the forces acting against them. in this case, air pressure, wind speed, etc. I'm not prepared to be that generous with TIE fighters and their variants because we have way too many 'feats' of them crashing into solid objects at high speed!

now, if I wanted to be really mean I would argue that "the maximum flight speed of 850 kph that I've found on every internet source also restricts their diving speed! they can't dive any faster than 850!!!". but I'm not going to be that curmudgeonly about it.

now we've got the shuttle diving 299 miles at a little over 1000 mph down from outer space into the atmosphere close to their target. that's still going to take them about 17 minutes to get back down to an altitude where they can see their targets and attack them (with their line-of-sight weapons). add this to the time it takes to exit the atmosphere and that's nearly an hour before they even reach the target. assuming they only need 30 minutes over the target, then they have to repeat that process to go back home. that gives us a round trip that lasts about 132 minutes.

You are thinking about this in real world terms when these ships do not necessarily have real world limitations. Why on earth (pun intended) are they going to make round trips from the Star Destroyer to a target? They are not relying on the Star Destroyer for anything. They have two months of consumables on board. Each shuttle has a crew of two (though you can get away with one in a pinch according to Luke) and room for 20 passengers. So you can have 10 extra crews in the back and just rotate people on shift of say 20 minutes, with each crew being on for 20 minutes and then off for 200 minutes, no one is getting exhausted. You could even group the crews so Group A is cycling 20 minutes on 100 minutes off and group B is sleeping, then they switch after 8 hours or so. These are not like real world fighter/bombers that go out, hit a target, return to base to rearm and refuel, and then fly another sortie.

even if we assumed that they had multiple crews in each shuttle, to allow the shuttles to remain in constant operation, they only have EIGHT of these things. and if the shuttles are conducting ground attack missions they can't be used for something else at the exact same time. sure, they could attack a ground target and drop off troops at one location. or they could attack one target and drop troops off at another location. but they can't be two places at once. if they're out attacking merchant convoys they can't be used for any other purpose. it might well take them over an hour to get to the next location quickly.

They would be wasted on anything besides ground attack, recon, and air superiority.

if the shuttles are going to be used for continuous surface attacks then the only thing they can carry would probably be provisions, back-up crews, sleeping quarters, and other things necessary to stay airborne.

Yes, that is all they need.

and that's just considering the shuttles. TIE fighters, infamous for being short ranged types that rely on numerical superiority... are single-seat machines. somebody might be able to last 4-to-6 hours... but that's probably the limit. since we don't have any canonical feats for them having toilets. they have to go back when nature calls.

Since TIE pilots wear life support suits, I imagine they just go in their suit like astronauts on a spacewalk.

[big_adventure]

You are thinking about this in real world terms when these ships do not necessarily have real world limitations. Why on earth (pun intended) are they going to make round trips from the Star Destroyer to a target? They are not relying on the Star Destroyer for anything. They have two months of consumables on board. Each shuttle has a crew of two (though you can get away with one in a pinch according to Luke) and room for 20 passengers. So you can have 10 extra crews in the back and just rotate people on shift of say 20 minutes, with each crew being on for 20 minutes and then off for 200 minutes, no one is getting exhausted. You could even group the crews so Group A is cycling 20 minutes on 100 minutes off and group B is sleeping, then they switch after 8 hours or so. These are not like real world fighter/bombers that go out, hit a target, return to base to rearm and refuel, and then fly another sortie.

They would be wasted on anything besides ground attack, recon, and air superiority.

Yes, that is all they need.

Since TIE pilots wear life support suits, I imagine they just go in their suit like astronauts on a spacewalk.

You are making huge guesses here that favor your position despite a complete and total lack of evidence to back them up.

First, they likely have only enough crews for their shuttles and fighters and such. They wouldn't have 10x as many qualified operators.

Second, you don't get to assume that they can spend 12 hours or whatever in the cockpit. You don't get to assume that they poop their suits. You don't get to assume that there is food in the ships. You don't get to assume that the stupid suits they wear are anything other than fancy stormtrooper armor, since it has no feats.

Third, and still a point, these ships don't really have durability feats outside of "ripped apart like toilet paper" and their weapons are very short range. They are going to suffer losses. And losses are infinitely worse for them than the Earthling side. 1000 to 1 ratios are acceptable in the long run.

Fourth, these ships will still have duty cycles - there is nothing ever presented to indicate that they don't. Keeping a modern fighter in the air for 4 out of 24 hours requires massive amounts of support, supplies, etc. There is no indication that GFFA ships don't need the same.

[Totoro Man]

well, I had a pretty long work week... so, I was unable to reply earlier.

I noticed that people are arguing that the Empire can cripple cities by "attacking power stations". this follows a fallacious line of reasoning that every city will have this one big, fat, juicy and completely unprotected target that will get blown up and leave the city helpless. that only works in movies.

it's almost as if people think that humans can't survive without electricity! people have survived quite well without electricity and running water for thousands of years.

think about the last time you had a power outage. think about how long it was before you got electricity back. our ability to repair electrical problems hasn't really improved that much in the last 50 years or so. highly motivated and reasonably equipped cities could get their electricity up and running inside of a day or two.

but I wanted to put things in a bit more perspective.

Arras trenches.jpg

this is the city of Arras, France during WWI. it's an important town, but it only had about 26,000 people in it. over the course of four years German fired thousands of artillery shells and dropped hundreds of bombs on this city. during that time 962 major buildings were completely destroyed. another 1,735 were severely damaged, but not beyond repair. inside the city limits were 4,521 houses. 4,229 of those houses were damaged during the war. the siege began in late 1914. it wasn't until August of 1918 that the city was evacuated. so, let's suppose that the Empire can do this inside of minutes.

they need to completely destroy 962 buildings, severely damage 1,735 of 7,218 buildings in order to cause the city to be evacuated. but, here's the problem. with only short-ranged line-of-sight weaponry that can only damage one target at a time... that would take hours to accomplish. they would need EVERY aircraft they have to make that happen in a timely fashion.

these aren't going to be like targets in Star Wars... where they're just waiting to explode in a giant ball of fire.

Hotel de Ville, Arras.jpg

this particular building, or rather... something very much like it... required 69 direct hits from heavy artillery before it was completely destroyed.

it's not enough to simply destroy a power plant. you'd also need to do things like destroy ALL of the train stations, ALL of the bridges, ALL of the warehouses, disable the hospitals, running water, department stores, radio stations, telegraph stations, and so on.

one of the things that made Arras so difficult for the Germans to conquer is that there are literally hundreds of underground cellars that reach down multiple stories under the earth. there were people living as far as 50 feet underground that were almost completely untouchable by German artillery. the city wasn't evacuated until April in 1918, when German ground forces seriously threatened to surround the city.

even if the Star Destroyer sent out EVERYTHING it had it would still take at least a day or two before they could completely subdue the city. take note, that it wasn't until ground forces threatened to cut off resupply by truck, train, and river transport that the civilians were finally evacuated from the city. and that's from a German attack that probably had about 100,000 soldiers. so, in this case, unless they send out all of their ground troops they probably won't be able to get the city to capitulate.

in the case of a 1944 scenario you would also have to repeatedly shoot down dozens, if not hundreds, of transport aircraft as well. by this stage of the war every major combatant nation could resupply their armies pretty well by using aircraft.

now, if that seems daunting... compare Arras to Paris in WW2... which would have many times larger and had over 2,000,000 people living there.

[Totoro Man]

let's say that these guys only had to 'subdue' 2,000 cities by destroying 1000 buildings, and damaging another 2,000 cities were they merely damage 2,000 buildings in each town to say that they had successful conquered the world. that means they would have to destroy 2,000,000 buildings and damage 4,000,000 buildings to satisfy that admittedly small number required to conquer the world.

think about how long it would take the 144 aircraft on that Star Destroyer to destroy or damage 6,000,000 buildings.

[Totoro Man]

y'know, if we're going to adhere to canonical feats based on the films and television shows... I've never seen a shuttle fire a weapon at anything. until somebody mentioned that those shuttles have guns on them... I assumed that they were unarmed based on their complete lack of combat feats in all of the films.

the other problem is that they are clearly piloted by human beings, and are thusly restricted by human reflexes and reaction time.

let's say that a TIE fighter can move 1,000 feet per second at it's best combat speed in the atmosphere. let's also suppose they have a maximum firing range of 5,000 feet. (based on demonstrated feats, that's being REALLY generous). that means they have about 4 seconds on target during their firing run. but that means that they have to extend away that same distance before they can turn back to make another attack run. the problem with insisting that TIE fighters are always flying so fast that nobody can touch them is this... attacking ground targets at your highest available speed is actually a terrible idea. it puts you at great risk for crashing into huge solid objects (which is something TIE fighters are quite good at!)

it's HARDER to hit ground targets than aerial targets because they're not flying away from you, thusly giving you more time to stay on target. with ground targets they just sit there and you have to be much more careful about your altitude, timing, and so forth. there's more likely to be things in the way, that reduce your chances of inflicting serious damage. it's also harder to see, and do follow up attacks because of smoke, dust, and debris. if you don't score a couple of really good hits and inflict serious damage, you've just obscured your target. even if you're first attack might inflict serious damage... your subsequent attacks will do even less damage because of reduced visibility. then you have to press your attacks from a new direction, or go back and try to get even closer on your next firing run to achieve similar results.

[Captain Smith]

Just for info, German submarines sunk 5,000 ships in WWI and yet Europe was resupplied, millions of US troops and material got to Europe. Think the Empire fliers could control the seas? Fat chance. I don't see them with the sensors to control the Atlantic seaways and find the ships.

WWII levels of shipping - yeah, right.

Two years worth of supplies. The world can just sit it out and cooperate, passive resistance and then walk to a new space ship for us!

Read the texts and manuals, get educated on the science by officers and men would by then would really like a bucket of chicken, a bottle of wine and some cheese.

[Alan2099]

Part of this reminds me of the set up for the old Strikeforce Moritui series. I'm probabaly horribly mispelling that.

The invading aliens had technology far beyond anything that earth had. They could come in, strike anywhere, and there wasn't much anyone could do to stop it.

However they lacked the man power to actually hold onto anything, which left both sides playing hit and run against each other.

[Totoro Man]

another odd thing that springs to mind:

if the sensors on the Star Destroyers are so fantastic... why did they need to send down search parties to find two droids? why did they set up roadblocks and checkpoints? why did they consult various spies and bounty hunters to track people down and capture them?

if their sensor technology was so much more amazing than anything available to us right now... you would think that none of those things would be necessary to find two droids. if the technology was so fantastic then they wouldn't have to go through that sort of trouble to find one spaceship.

in the real world, ships and aircraft do NOT navigate by only using real-time data feedback from onboard sensor arrays. people navigate by combining visual cues (eyesight) from sensory data that's tracked in real-time from the environment from multiple sources. they use charts, maps, on board data banks, and live data feeds from external sources. they also use weather reports, infrared, radar, radio feedback from observers, etc. if something is unchartered, for example, the odds of something going wrong goes way up.

the fact that the Empire had to spend so much time hunting down two droids on foot suggests that the Star Wars universe uses essentially the same system on a more advanced scale.

another fun detail: shields can't deflect attacks indefinitely. notice how many X-wings get shot down over the course of the films? if shields were capable of no-selling any and all attacks you would think that this sort of thing wouldn't happen.

we also hear them talking about redirecting power to specific shields. so, this requires energy that has to be built up within the ship itself prior to usage. that means that the energy can get depleted by constantly being hit by various forms of attacks. this has been shown repeatedly in every film.

notice how a Star Destroyer has it's bridge taken out by an asteroid following clip from "the Empire Strikes Back"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gh7AcuxfxI

the jump cut to Vader losing the signal of one of his officers clearly suggests that the impact of that asteroid crippled the ship that was struck by it.

there appears to be a limit to what these things can handle. presumably after getting hit by enough large solid objects the deflector shield used up all of it's available energy and the ship took damage from getting hit by a physical object.

additionally, when Piett tells Vader that Palpatine wishes to speak with him... Vader specifically tells him to move the ship they're in away from the asteroids so that they can send a clear transmission. this implies a fair amount on the limitations of Imperial sensor technology. it suggests that while it has better range than anything available in WW2, that it is clearly inferior to what is achievable by what is available to us now.

in "Return of the Jedi", when the Executor's main shield gets taken out by blaster fire... all it takes is for a solitary A-wing crashing into the bridge to disable the entire ship.

this suggests that if Germany kept firing thousands of V-1 rockets at the stationary Star Destroyer, that eventually the shield would crumble under repeated attacks. a V-1 flying bomb would weigh several thousand pounds and be flying about 400 mph. Germany launched over 9,000 V-1 rockets at England during WW2. if they felt that the Star Destroyer was a bigger threat they would not hesitate to start attacking them.

a V-2 rocket, after expending all of it's fuel would weight about 8,380 pounds and descend on the Star Destroyer at about 3,500 mph. that's over 4 times faster than the fastest declared atmospheric travel speed attributed to anything in the Imperial arsenal.

[StupidMoniker]

Hotel de Ville, Arras.jpg

this particular building, or rather... something very much like it... required 69 direct hits from heavy artillery before it was completely destroyed.

Let's try to figure out how long it would take a TIE fighter or similar to destroy a building like that.
https://youtu.be/lRCh26hdXSA
Not very long, it looks like, as large parts of the building are collapsing into other parts of the builting in the first 7 seconds. It's almost like Fantasy spaceships are not the same as WWII era technologies and it is silly to put the limitations on them that you would apply to WWII era technologies. Note also that they are hitting with every shot, including hits to the inside walls that face the courtyard. By 1:10, the entire structure has been reduced to ruins. And that is with strafing runs by TIE fighters firing a single shot each (though admittedly these are First Order TIEs and not Imperial, so their weapons could be more powerful).

There is also no need to destroy every building or get the population to abandon a town, that is a ridiculous standard. If the town is left without power, without vehicle traffic, and without industry, you can move on to the next town and just come back if they repair this one to any sort of functionality. It really doesn't require that you absolutely subdue all the people, because unlike the Germans you are not trying to make it perfectly safe to quarter troops here or run a supply train through it, you just need to make it unsuitable as a base from which to launch an attack on the Star Destroyer and the area around it. There are not 6,000,000 strategically important buildings on earth at some time shortly after June 6, 1944. During the war, all the factories on both sides produced about 6 million air, land, and sea vehicles combined. Unless the only buildings of importance are factories and each factory built one vehicle over the course of six years, there are not even close to that many. They don't need to eliminate the human population in two years, they need to eliminate the ability to attack an area around the star destroyer sufficient to allow the occupants therein to become self sufficient in that time (water sources and land for food, maybe some mining, etc). Once they become self sustaining, that takes the clock off of them and they have essentially all the time in the world to subdue humanity as long as each day is on average a net negative for earth in the war effort). So while yes people can survive without electricity, blowing up power plants is hugely disruptive to efforts to build war materiel, as is destroying factories. They can transport people and equipment by foot, but it is very disruptive to production to destroy roads, bridges, harbors, warehouses, and fuel depots. If the war machine grinds to a halt, it doesn't matter if the individuals of each town hold out in their basements for a thousand years.

[Totoro Man]

StupidMonikor, you need to decide what method the Empire is going to use to achieve victory. they don't have enough resources to pick more than one long-term strategy.

since you were proposing that they would be turning large sections of city into glass with blaster fire I figured you meant terror 'bombings' where very large numbers of buildings would be indiscriminately destroyed. all this requires is that they fly in overlapping lines and obliterate anything that is in front of their aircraft until they reach a satisfactory number of buildings destroyed. obviously this strategy is only viable if the Star Destroyer could actually fly. but you have argued in favor of this method earlier in the thread. I believe I have already successfully argued against the validity of this strategy.

if they are going for surgical interdiction strikes to cripple the economy and movement of military resources... then the number of targets is lower. however, this requires more time and higher levels of accuracy for each attack. it would also require that the Empire repeatedly hit the same targets over and over again to prevent them from being put back into service. for something as important as a power station or a bridge, people will most certainly take active measures to repair these structures. the Empire might have to attack the same targets every ten days to make sure that these aren't put back into action.

I'll stick with Arras, for the time being, as I've been working on a video game map that focuses on this region.

Arras city map (bridges and principal structures).jpgbridge access points to Arras.jpg

as I pointed out earlier, destroying a mere 13% of the roughly 7000+ buildings in Arras is actually a relatively small requirement. it's much lower than what would typically have happened during WW2.

now, disabling a city is not simply a matter of blowing up a power plant. you can't cripple the industry of a town by only blowing up a dozen buildings. that's like assuming if you blow up a SINGLE gas station that it's impossible for people within the city limits to get gas for their cars! it also assumes that they can't meet this basic need by simply loading up jerry cans of gasoline on a flatbed truck and simply driving into the city and using a new location.

to effectively neutralize a city you would also have to destroy all of the major access points. in the case of Arras you would have to destroy about 7 bridges inside of the city limits to severely impair the city's ability to supply it's basic needs.

let's assume that the only thing the Empire has to destroy are the red X's on this map. that only includes the 7 aforementioned bridges and less than HALF of the most necessary buildings in the city. you couldn't even seriously keep the city down for a couple of days by only destroying these things.

however, this does NOT effectively isolate the city. no, it simply makes the actions of administration and resupply more difficult. if we include the suburbs and outlying areas this gives us a figure of 45 bridges that need to be destroyed to prevent the people in the city from simply getting resupplied by local resources via trucks and railroads.

this ignores the fact that most countries could solve bridging issues at Arras inside of two days by using pontoon bridges.

additionally, ALL of the ground attacks being made by Imperial forces to inflict this damage will have to be made at very low altitudes... using line-of-sight short ranged weapons.

and this isn't even getting into the insane number of targets that would have to be destroyed to disable a REALLY important city like London or Paris.

[Twickster]

I am obviously not as knowledgeable about this as Totoro Man, but arguing "surgical strikes" in WWII is ludicrous. The allied firebombings alone went far beyond simply "blowing up a powerplant", and the victims of those bombings held out far longer than the Star Destroyer in this scenario has supplies. Arguing "surgical strikes" is transposing present day sensibilities (where the threshold for losses and casualties is much lower) in a total war scenario where the major powers were far too willing to absorb losses so long as the war was won.

[Totoro Man]

*** they need to eliminate the ability to attack an area around the star destroyer sufficient to allow the occupants therein to become self sufficient in that time (water sources and land for food, maybe some mining, etc). Once they become self sustaining, that takes the clock off of them and they have essentially all the time in the world to subdue humanity as long as each day is on average a net negative for earth in the war effort).

you do need to realize that with less than 50,000 people, a mere 144 serviceable aircraft, 15 ground transports, and a handful of AT-ATs that this Star Destroyer is NEVER going to be completely self sufficient to provide all of it's basic needs, right? they will be attempting to do so on a hostile planet. sure, they have been provided with two years worth of provisions. but what happens when those supplies run out? the Star Destroyer is still stuck at a known location on the ground.

who is going to grow those crops? where will they get the necessary livestock? who is going to raise, nurture, and slaughter all of that livestock? who is going to do the mining? we're talking about a lot of very specialized skills being used on a hostile planet. these people would need to be protected by constant vigilant patrols to prevent them from getting attacked. the Star Destroyer crew can't conquer every city in France while simultaneously protecting their own efforts at farming, mining, and other resource focused activities.

even if they pull crew members from otherwise useless sections of the stranded vessel itself that might only give them 20,000 laborers. there's no guarantee that any of these people have the skill sets required to establish a production base to meet their basic needs even if those resources were available!

realistically, they can't do any of these activities without forming an alliance with the local population.

[Totoro Man]

Let's try to figure out how long it would take a TIE fighter or similar to destroy a building like that.
https://youtu.be/lRCh26hdXSA
Not very long, it looks like, as large parts of the building are collapsing into other parts of the builting in the first 7 seconds.

yeah, I also noticed how low they had to fly: less than 300 ft above the ground. they also appeared to be less than several thousand feet away and flying less than 100 mph before they could open fire. that means they have to get in really low, get really close, and fly really slow to achieve those results. I also noticed that Takodana seemed to consist of less than a half-dozen buildings all concentrated in an area smaller than that occupied by the prison at Arras. notice how many aircraft and gunnery passes were required to do that damage? they also had to attack from multiple angles... because some of that damage couldn't be achieved from attacking in the same direction every time. there was also nothing in the way to obstruct their fire.

it seems impressive until you realize just how much damage would need to be inflicted to put a city out of action.

[Totoro Man]

do we have a response for how Imperial Star Destroyer deflector shields appear to have a limit to how much damage they can no-sell and shrug off? is there any reason to believe that if they had thousands of artillery shells and hundreds of V1 rockets fired on them at the same time that it wouldn't have an impact? most heavy artillery in WW2 would be able to inflict far more damage than those TIE fighter blaster bolts that knocked down the temple at Takodana. are we just going to assume that a 1500 pound high explosive shell traveling over 3000 mph can't match the feat of several TIE fighter blaster bolts? based on what we know a 210 or 240 mm artillery shell is capable of... it packs more power than that.

if getting hit by multiple asteroids can wear down the shield of a Star Destroyer that suggests that thousands of shells can do likewise. now, to be fair, the clip I linked to simply shows a large asteroid crashing headlong into a Star Destroyer and crippling it immediately. so, based on the onscreen feats I can remember, Star Destroyers appear to have zero feats for no-selling impacts from solid objects. does anybody have evidence to the contrary?

[StupidMoniker]

StupidMonikor, you need to decide what method the Empire is going to use to achieve victory. they don't have enough resources to pick more than one long-term strategy.

Sure. The long term strategy is to rely on their overwhelming technological advantage to destroy any capacity of the world to make war against them. Obviously this involves a number of actions on both a tactical and strategic level. The first goal is to secure an area around the Star Destroyer (given the description, it seems it has crashed in Luxembourg) to establish self sufficiency. The LOS weapons on the star destroyer would allow, by my rough math, coverage of a radius of 38.5 miles (horizon distance from the topmost weapons sitting at an altitude of about 300 meters). If they were fortunate enough to land atop a hill or something, this could be greater. Anything entering that radius gets blasted and immediately destroyed. These weapons are probably not going to hit with 100% accuracy against fighters (or missiles, if there are any random V-2's coming their way) but anything slower than a fighter is getting zapped. So, the first order of business is to expand their safe radius by destroying any weapon systems outside this killzone but inside the effective range of the earth weapons. This is not going to be much. Some railway guns have extreme ranges, but your typical WWII artillery pieces like a M1 Long Tom or a German 15 cm Kanone 18 are going to have ranges around 15 miles. For this purpose you can use the shielded shuttles. Put one up into space or the upper atmosphere to scan and direct the rest of the forces. The rest run down all of the artillery and anti-aircraft weapons within say 100 miles of the SD. This would be establishing a beachhead, so to speak. At that point, you start to set up farming, irrigation, water supplies, water treatment, machine shops, etc. inside the safe zone. Your goal here in this first stage is to be able to feed and water everyone and have facilities for repairs and maintenance of equipment. This should be trivial. As a side goal, you would ideally be monitoring communications and if possible you would interdict any knowledge of your landing. In an ideal scenario, the rest of the war is going on without bothering the SD which is well behind the German lines at this point.

Stage 2 would be to see if you can quietly gather the resources necessary to build new equipment. This is a total unknown. Could the crew of a Star Destroyer with the materials available on earth in 1945 and the remains of a Star Destroyer build something like a Carrack class light cruiser. If possible, they would get to work on putting that together. If they can get a true capital ship airborne with shielding and 10 heavy turbolasers, the rest becomes trivial and they can bombard the earth from orbit to their heart's content. If they are unable to do this, and instead are forced to rely on what they have.

since you were proposing that they would be turning large sections of city into glass with blaster fire I figured you meant terror 'bombings' where very large numbers of buildings would be indiscriminately destroyed. all this requires is that they fly in overlapping lines and obliterate anything that is in front of their aircraft until they reach a satisfactory number of buildings destroyed. obviously this strategy is only viable if the Star Destroyer could actually fly. but you have argued in favor of this method earlier in the thread. I believe I have already successfully argued against the validity of this strategy.

Ultimately, they can probably carry out this strategy, but it would take a very long time and I don't think they would need to finish before the world powers decided to sue for peace. There are a lot of comparisons being made to people holding out against allied firebombing, but I view this is psychologically different. People can understand airplanes dropping bombs from the sky. They know their general capabilities. They understand that the bombers can be shot down by fighters. They know their own side has similar weapons they are using against the enemy. It is fundamentally different to see a single thing, roughly the size of a B-17, descend from the sky and float above the city and then rain down green energy beams that destroy whatever they touch. Watch as weapons fired at the thing have no effect and those firing are quickly destroyed. The ship floats there, implacable, blasting buildings, roads, cars, trucks, tanks, people. Destroying everything it sees with impunity. That is not going to have the same effect as waves of familiar bombers. You would have no idea where this thing came from, if it will ever leave, how many more there are just like it?

Ultimately, I don't think even that is necessary though, because they can do things that are completely outside of the box of what people in 1945 could consider. Which moves us along to the more surgical option.

if they are going for surgical interdiction strikes to cripple the economy and movement of military resources... then the number of targets is lower. however, this requires more time and higher levels of accuracy for each attack. it would also require that the Empire repeatedly hit the same targets over and over again to prevent them from being put back into service. for something as important as a power station or a bridge, people will most certainly take active measures to repair these structures. the Empire might have to attack the same targets every ten days to make sure that these aren't put back into action.

It is not a simple matter to go from 100% production on your line building Bf109s to the factory, the power plant powering the factory, the rail lines supplying the factory, all the people in the factory, and the roads leading to the factory being destroyed, and back to 100% production. Blowing up 30ish targets around a city is trivial. It wouldn't take an hour. That is with one shuttle.

I'll stick with Arras, for the time being, as I've been working on a video game map that focuses on this region.

Arras city map (bridges and principal structures).jpgbridge access points to Arras.jpg

as I pointed out earlier, destroying a mere 13% of the roughly 7000+ buildings in Arras is actually a relatively small requirement. it's much lower than what would typically have happened during WW2.

now, disabling a city is not simply a matter of blowing up a power plant. you can't cripple the industry of a town by only blowing up a dozen buildings. that's like assuming if you blow up a SINGLE gas station that it's impossible for people within the city limits to get gas for their cars! it also assumes that they can't meet this basic need by simply loading up jerry cans of gasoline on a flatbed truck and simply driving into the city and using a new location.

to effectively neutralize a city you would also have to destroy all of the major access points. in the case of Arras you would have to destroy about 7 bridges inside of the city limits to severely impair the city's ability to supply it's basic needs.

let's assume that the only thing the Empire has to destroy are the red X's on this map. that only includes the 7 aforementioned bridges and less than HALF of the most necessary buildings in the city. you couldn't even seriously keep the city down for a couple of days by only destroying these things.

however, this does NOT effectively isolate the city. no, it simply makes the actions of administration and resupply more difficult. if we include the suburbs and outlying areas this gives us a figure of 45 bridges that need to be destroyed to prevent the people in the city from simply getting resupplied by local resources via trucks and railroads.

Destroying all of the red xs and the blue bridge markers would be trivial though. It would probably take an hour or two for one aircraft to do it, and that's if they want to be really thorough and reduce stuff to rubble instead of just blasting big chunks out of it.

this ignores the fact that most countries could solve bridging issues at Arras inside of two days by using pontoon bridges.

This assumes that they would be allowed to just bring the pontoon bridges in unmolested instead of being blasted to bits before reaching the river when they pick you up on sensors.

additionally, ALL of the ground attacks being made by Imperial forces to inflict this damage will have to be made at very low altitudes... using line-of-sight short ranged weapons.

This doesn't really seem to be a problem.

and this isn't even getting into the insane number of targets that would have to be destroyed to disable a REALLY important city like London or Paris.

You don't need to disable London or Paris. You need to disable the Rolls Royce plant making spitfire engines, or the steel and aluminum foundries. It is a game of attrition. If team A can make it so that each day team B is in a worse position than before and team B cannot do the same to team A, then team A's victory is inevitable, it just requires patience. If the earth forces cannot cause any attrition against the empire, they are fighting a losing battle.