2 ms·

Those ships are expensive because their ships. Complex redundant systems pieced together bit by bit by hand. Throwing a hyperdrive on whatever mass you have ha

Those ships are expensive because their ships. Complex redundant systems pieced together bit by bit by hand. Throwing a hyperdrive on whatever mass you have handy is a whole different ball game. Unless the hyperdrive itself represents the dominant cost it should be at least two orders of magnitude cheaper going by the cost of ordnance vs the cost of a warship. And even one order of magnitude would be enough. War is about economics as much as it is about winning battles. If you can force them to build ships that you can destroy at 1/10th the cost with no loss of life (people are a resource /Negan) you are doing good. Ship to ship combat is not cheap or without risk either. Ships are damaged and lost and in a real war you can lose quite a few of them!

pavel_lishin 9y ago
You bring up good points. Maybe larger ships require larger, more expensive hyperdrive installations, and are more difficult to install - maybe it's not just a matter of bolting a hyperdrive unit onto something. There might be conduits you have to run all over and throughout the structure, there may be mass and balance concerns, etc. I don't know enough about the SW universe to really back up my hypothesis. (One of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of the SW universe as a playground for the mind is that it's fairly inconsistent, and the Rule of Cool that another user mentioned tends to trump other considerations. In one sense it's freeing, and in another sense, any given work set in that universe is free to disregard large portions of previous works.)