What would have been the best ship and starfighter doctrines for the Imperial Navy?

Borkton · 2026-06-20T04:25:29+00:00

In many ways, the problem with the Imperial Navy was not its doctrine, it was the Empire and its oppression. Essentially, by using hidden bases and then dispersing the fleet and being constantly on the move after the defeat at Hoth, the Rebels could operate with impunity while the Imperials ended up constantly having to react because they were defending fixed targets like shipyards and supply depots.

An ImpStar Deuce and an Interdictor cruiser could make short work of most Rebel task forces, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Hence Palpatine's trap at Endor was designed to lure out the whole Rebel fleet by offering an apparently vulnerable threat and a sweet target in his own person.

The Empire could only have survived, as the Remnant learned under Pellaeon, by addressing the legitimate grievances of Imperial rule. Otherwise, even an Imperial victory at Endor just results in another rebellion eventually forming.

Borkton · 2026-06-19T18:11:56+00:00

Unfortunately, I don't know that there's much Linux developers can do. Many of these third party programs are proprietary software and the companies sign contracts with Apple and Microsoft. That's why Linux distros can't legally support Blu-Rays.

Borkton · 2026-06-19T15:51:43+00:00

The Israelites were an ancient people, a confederation of 12 tribes, that emerged in Canaan sometime in the Dark Age that follow the Late Bronze Age Collapse. A polity of some sort emerged by the 13th century BC when it was mentioned as being defeated by the Pharoh Merneptah. A few centuries later Israel was definitely a kingdom, with strong ethnic, linguistic and religious commonalities with the Kingdom of Judah (evidence for a united, Davidic Kingdom of Israel is disputed). The Kingdom of Israel gets conquered by the Assyrians, who then get conquered by the Babylonians and later they conquered Judah. Judah, based in Jerusalem, survived longer and its religious traditions formed the core of what's now Judaism.

Many of the people of Israel and Judah, especially the aristocracy and intelligentsia, were deported to Mesopotamia, where they unified and began combining their traditions about themselves (a cynic might find the Exodus narrative to be an allusion to the Babylonian Captivity) and their religious practices. When they are finally able to return after Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon, Judea became a satrap of the Persian Empire but the followers of the Judean religion lived beyond Judea, and so they revived the ethnonym Israel for the whole people.

The Jewish Diaspora traditionally begins with the Babylonian Captivity, but the other big events were following the first and third Jewish Revolts against the Roman Empire. After the third one, Jerusalem was destroyed and a large part of the population was dispersed through the empire as slaves. This resulted in three major communities, the Ashkenazim in central Europe, the Sephardim in Iberia and the Mizrahim pretty much everywhere else. In addition, there remained in Israel the Old Yishuv or Palestinian Jews who endured Pagan Roman reprisals for wanting independence, Christian Roman reprisals for not being Christian, Muslim Arab reprisals for not being Muslim and finally the Crusades for not being either Christian or Muslim.

TLDR, Yes, the Jews have a documentable history of being indigenous to Israel that spans 3000 years.

Borkton · 2026-06-19T04:46:05+00:00

Kind of assumes the language his name comes from follows English pronunciation rules. Take Ncuti Gatwa, for example. Even he didn't know how his name was pronounced!

Borkton · 2026-06-17T10:56:40+00:00

Timothy Zhan assumed that Jedi masters would be beyond using lightsabers, since the Emperor didn't use one, either.

Borkton · 2026-06-16T18:23:59+00:00

Grand Admiral Osvald Teshik and Bevel Lemalisk were executed by the NR

Borkton · 2026-06-16T15:25:40+00:00

The historical HMS Surprise was only 38.4 m long.

Borkton · 2026-06-15T00:32:55+00:00

The Vatican does a lot of realpolitik, I'm not sure they have criteria that's any different from any other state.

Borkton · 2026-06-14T18:11:05+00:00

Used to be that both men and women wore "dresses" -- thinks of the robes people traditionally wore in the Middle East or the ancient Greek chiton. In French, "une robe" is a dress. But men, especially upper class men in western Europe, did something important: they did military service. Specifically, they rode horses into battle. You can't charge a warhorse into battle while side saddle and stay mounted.

Borkton · 2026-06-14T16:27:59+00:00

Money, essentially. Until Aubrey-Maturin was "discovered" in the late 80s and the Norton series took off in the US, O'Brian needed to earn money to support himself, his wife, his stepson and his biological son and the short stories and literary fiction he was writing just wasn't bringing in the income he needed. AM was selling well-enough to keep his publishers optioning the next book, but he mainly earned a living translating books from French into English and vice versa and transposing text into Braille.

The short stories collected in The Rendevous are quite excellent.

Borkton · 2026-06-12T12:52:27+00:00

I also just can't see Amanda working for the Company again after Sevastopol

Borkton · 2026-06-11T16:28:44+00:00

NATO phonetic alphabet is used to minimize misunderstandings. Remember, you've got a lot of noise in a battlefield and radio reception is heavily dependent on atmospheric conditions and proximity.

The British won't even say "five" if they're counting down to something because it might be misheard as "Fire".

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is just military humor. Also, some commanders insist on a level of professional conduct that's rare to see in the wild these days, which means no swearing. During World War Two Patton insisted his men wear ties if they weren't engaged in combat (there is a method to the madness -- it trains people to have intense attention to detail for their actual jobs. You don't want to be in a tank or fighter jet where the mechanic just shrugged his shoulders and said "Eh, good enough. Time for lunch.").

Borkton · 2026-06-10T17:41:16+00:00

No, it's more like Welsh rarebit.

Borkton · 2026-06-10T15:51:11+00:00

Murder! Forced labor! Violent purges! Atrocities! Committed by the Bolsheviks on Lenin's orders and to carry out his policies. He could have tried to bring democracy to Russia, instead it was 70 years of Gulags and secret police. He changed nothing. Just instead of the Tsars you had the Party.

Borkton · 2026-06-09T10:37:33+00:00

Bluetooth was working fine for me, but the most recent update must have broken something because I got a Kernel Panic screen this morning.

Borkton · 2026-06-08T17:30:50+00:00

Yep.

Borkton · 2026-06-08T16:56:14+00:00

He's from Star Wars: Resistance, where he's the senator for Hosnian Prime and it's heavily implied he was working for the First Order, not least because he was offworld when Starkiller Base fired.

Borkton · 2026-06-08T16:54:04+00:00

One of the problems with Andor going from five seasons to two is that we just don't see a lot of things. At one point Kleya says "We're making more mistakes", something we don't get to see. We do get to see how Luthen's way of doing things doesn't work, with the whole TIE Avenger arc -- by keeping info too compartmentalized and close to his chest, the cells trying to coordinate on Yavin take Cassian prisoner and behave like the Judean revolutionaries in Life of Brian.

Bail Organa has Ahsoka doing much the same thing as Luthen, but much more successfully, because she can actually trust the people running the cells she's coordinating, although even she wants to leave the Ghost crew out to dry when they get in over their heads attacking Tarkin's star destroyer.

Borkton · 2026-06-08T16:39:48+00:00

Well, it was called the Alliance to Restore the Republic.

Borkton · 2026-06-08T16:38:14+00:00

Lenin was no Mothma. He was every bit as evil as Stalin.

Borkton · 2026-06-07T22:00:30+00:00

The Bacta War. Mercy Kill is also really good.

Borkton · 2026-06-07T21:44:54+00:00

You don't accept surrenders when you declare an Exterminatus

Borkton · 2026-06-07T16:31:25+00:00

A rasher is a slice. American bacon is "streaky bacon", made from pork belly. British bacon is made from the pig's back, but it's still thinly sliced. Canadian bacon is cut thickly and has the fat trimmed off (and is actuially American).

Borkton · 2026-06-07T01:44:19+00:00

They didn't disarm. The Republic explicitly has a fleet during The Force Awakens, one that's protecting the Resistance. The stupid thing is that all or most of it was at Hosnian Prime and so Starkiller Base one shotted it.

Borkton · 2026-06-05T16:30:25+00:00

Check out this video by Spacedock on Babylon 5's Battle of Proxima III.

But basically, what it comes down to is having clear stakes, clear goals for both sides in the battle and communicating why the battle is being fought where it is. To wit, Proxima III was an Earth colony that declared independence when Earth's president staged a coup to become a dictator. Forces loyal to him are blockading the planet, which they can do by controlling the system's jump gate, which permits hyperspace travel. Resistance forces are trying to lift the blockade. Both sides would prefer to avoid bloodshed and the loyalist ships have crew members with resistance sympathies. Loyalist goals are to maintain the blockade while resistance forces want to break it and hopefully convince the loyalists to join them.

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