Colonial Chrome

In the same way it can be used as an army transport... Light vehicles and troops...

Well... ALL cargo vessels and luxury liners could be used as army transports after few modifications...
Look at the "Queen Mary"

Well, to be fair the Queen Mary was used as a troop transport, for which it needed no modifications at all - it was already designed to move hundreds of people.

The main problem with using cargo pods to shift vehicles is head height; vehicles can't be greater than, or really all that close to, the 2.5 meters of headroom.

You could shift a few speederbikes in an R-10 but always always always - why would you? There are plenty of ships designed to do that to begin with that wouldn't have the same problems as this ship'd have.

If you are Imperial Navy, you can build ships for everything. But if you are Rebellion, you've to modify, even if you only can include Speeder Bikes, Skiffs ore little Landspeeders. Home One and Liberty (rest in peace, lovely one) were luxury cruisers, before refitted into battleships (Not CC-Canon, correct)
Queen Mary was refitted to. Not so much, but a military transport have other needs than a luxury cruisers (Or: Why do soldier need a theater (mission breefing, okay), luxury restaurants or suits?)

This has been split off as it's going into tangental areas.



No, the Alliance have always used military hardware for military ends. You have to remember that the Alliance is formed of Governments, most covertly, but some overtly as of the Battle of Endor, supporting a political agenda to remove Palpatine from power. At Yavin we see one CDF and one Chadrillan squadron supporting an Alderaanian politic group, along with transport craft from an unidentified source. At Hoth we have the same but with an additional few units, at least one infantry regiment and a mechanised ground attack unit. At Endor we see ALL of the Alliance military power, and all of these units are keel-up military.

I am aware that officially MC designs were once liners, but this is nonsense.
There's no indication whatsoever that this is the case on screen. MC designs are shown to be capable fighting ships right off the bat. The entire military force assembled in a last ditch effort is commanded by Ackbar, who by extension must have extensive combat experience with the forces available to him. Ergo, the MC warships ARE warships.

The whole converted liners thing emerged because as far as I can tell, some gimboid didn't understand the nature of the civil war and decided the Alliance would have to make it's own ships, and probably couldn't, so decided they must convert other big ships. This is fuzzy thinking, wrong in every respect and fails to account for the fundamental principles of ship design.

Not to mention of course that the Mon Calamari fielded warships at the Battle of Coruscant - this was a deliberate move by George, demonstrating that ultimately Palpatine falls in part as a result of his own machinations: He starts a war and makes a movement to oppose the Republic, then he changes the Republic into the Empire, now there's a force that opposes the Empire from the get go. He decapitates the leadership, but by then the dissidents in the Senate have formed a NEW leadership group which essentially take over. In the end, the fleet that distract his defences long enough for Skywalker to off him is the fleet that he himself built to distract the Republic into giving him power.


The refits to QM included painting it grey and fitting AA batteries and a few light guns to it. Extraneous furniture was removed but there was no substantial changes to layout in any area. With regards such features as theatres most of these had their seats removed to make room for litters.[/quote]

Thank you for clarification

As Ben already pointed out, military ships tend to have different needs than civilian ships.

Eventually, the whole matter is very complicated. First of all, peacetime ships have their place under wartime conditions. Most of them, but not all. Peacetime civilian transports will serve in the same role during war and transport stuff. The cargo may be of military or paramilitary purpose, but it still is cargo. Passenger ships will still carry passengers, only that these passengers now are soldiers, wounded, pows, fugitives or slave labor.

Converting civilian ships for actual combat deployment will be done, but not the way some people think of first. A cruise liner will not become a warship, because it is completely unfit for such a conversion. You would end up changing more than you'd keep and it would be more efficient, even faster, to built a new warship and scavenge the cruise liner for metal.
A conversion that has been done and will done however are Q-ships. Upgunned and armored civilian ships that still look civilian but are able to unleash hell on the enemy's logistic transports. Small and medium sized vessels qualify for such an application. Cruise liners and similarly large vessels don't. A supertanker is nothing but a super target, unless you convert it into a makeshift aircraft carrier.

Another option other than turning ships into Q-ships is to turn them into fireships. Stuff them with explosives or even just kinetic impact mass and then ram them into enemy vessels. The rebellion did so to bring down Executor, according to the ROTJ novelization, fielding Gallofrees as fireships. This is the only reason why this ship type was present at the battle of Endor at all, because they have no real combat value whatsoever, apart from this.

Another aspect that prevents easy modding of civilian ships into real warships is that in Star Wars size really does matter a helluva lot. A lot more than in our world and time. The size of a ship will have a massive impact on it's ability to generate power and the space available for shield systems. Armor is of secondary importance, because most ships will be doomed anyway without their shields. The Falcon for example is tiny like a bug, compared to an ISD. Yet it was able to handle a few hits from an ISDs batteries. Some of them likely almost half the size of the Falcon. It could not do so because of armor, because if that had been the case, ISDs would be proportionally invulnerable, which we know they are not. Even dedicated starfighters blow up from starfighter guns. Ships like the Falcon don't. Since the Falcon is (even though unreliably) a tuned and upgraded hotrod, it is also pretty close to the maximum you can probably get out of such a ship's frame. The classical hero ship.

All this does not even really touch the matter of galactic economy and supply, by the way. Worlds like Coruscant are highly likely to be almost completely dependent on a huge supply train from other systems. So are practically all worlds with similar habitation concepts. Just because it is war does not mean that you could stop supplying your metropolitan planets, so even if you could draw heavily from the pool of civilian ships, it will be hard to actually do so without strangling population centers in a deadlock. Deadlock spelled with billions dead and starving. This affects the Empire as much as it affects the rebels, because once the rebels are significant enough to really oppose the Empire's existence, they have similar supply issues of their own. Instead of converting ships you will likely end up in a position, where you need all of them where they already are and on top of that you now need to protect them from enemy warships and Q-ships.

The best compromise is probably to upgun the previously civilian vessels just enough so that they can take care of small threats themselves, while the bulk of arms, armor material, shield systems, large scale reactors and high yield thrust systems is reserved to construct real warships.

Eventually, converting purely civilian vessels into pure warships is a sign of severe desperation tied to a high probability of inevitable failure. The rebellion was neither desperate, nor inevitably hopeless. Most of what they did showed a profound ability to outfit, deploy and command large scale military operations. They were shown to be resourceful, yes. However, resourcefulness and creativity manifests itself in the ability to use what you got to maximum effect, not to degrade useful things in roles they can never fulfill with a real chance of success.

Depending on your personal interpretation of how warfare in Star Wars actually looks on the strategic level, beyond tactical formations and which ship to shoot at, it may even become more diffuse up to the point where it might well be completely useless to arm civilian ships at all. If commerce raider fleets, made up of real warships, can go practically everywhere and attack at will throughout the galaxy, some lousy quadblasters won't do any good. They will only waste money and resources. In such a scenario of interpretation the only thing that will do any good is to spread out your supply transports as far as possible to minimize losses and try to keep up in production with them.
If you follow the approach that there are actually homogeneous spheres of control with actual front lines, battle intensiv parts and safe lanes, it makes not much sense to upgun civilian vessels, either. Because either they are safe anyway, away from the border and screened by the military fleet, or they are hopelessly out gunned outside these areas anyway.
Only an in-between mix of both concepts makes upgunned and armored civilian ships slightly useful at all.

Hello VOID and thank you.

I understand, what you mean and I see similiarities with german bombers in WWII (The FW200 was intended as a personal transport (where it could be a good one in his time) but used as a bomber and so many "advantages" for civil flying were cancelled)

Not to nitpick, but aren't the Gallofree Transports converted into warships for Endor? Or did someone really expect those two pairs of light guns per ship to make a difference?

Or (most likely, now that I think about it), were they just there to provide supplies and got caught up in the ambush with everyone else?

The way I read it, the entire Alliance show up for Endor, every single man woman, droid, bolt and chihuahua.
It's an all or nothing fight to the death, as so, yeah, everything goes.

if you have a fleet replinishment ship you have a few choices when battle comes send it to a safe port (rebals realy do not have one) hold it back with a few escorts to help after the battle (this implies you have the ships for escort to spare the rebles did not) or you stick it in the middle of the fleet only real options i can see though i sapose there are others i just do not care to think about it to hard.

Oh, no, they do, they have plenty of places they can safely stash things, this is what Leia means when she say "The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems slip through your fingers."
There are lots of Alliance sympathising worlds by the time of Endor.


The thing is, if they lose at Endor, they lose everything, if the Empire get the second Death Star up and running they have no hope at all. So it makes no difference, either they win, or there's nothing to fall back to. So, harsh as it is, you take everything, because every shot wasted on a cargo transport is a shot not fired at a combat ship.

stashing things is not what i meant was refering to the ships that are to help resupply a fleet after battle if it can be aranged eseir to have support ships in the vicinity then to have to limp back to a safe point but you have to have a way to keepthem safe not sure if i whould bring them to battle but oh well

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, Admiral. When you're going for broke, planning for the future is... well, for the future, and ever little bit in the here and now helps.

Xerty: Out of curiousity, why the cruelty to the rules of grammar and punctuation? It makes your posts very hard to read...

But what difference would it make; if they lose this battle, they lose everything, there's nothing left to fight for.

My understanding (from the Novel I believe) was that the Gallofree Transports were (supposedly) loaded up with heavy ore/ metals or explosives etc to add mass and were intended essentially as kinetic energy Ram ships or fire ships. they were also used for this function in Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike during the attacks on the Fondor ship yards.

there is a mention of it here
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/GR-75_medium_transport

I know we could take all of 2 seconds to poke about 27 holes in this accounting, but there it is, it works for me (as I too often asked why these ships were in the battle)