There was a view, very prevalent in our society, and also in theirs, that to get the best you had to go and take them, gather them up. But that was impatient. A better view was if you wanted the best, you should gather raw material and make them.
The Imperials did not train for battles fighting equal or superior forces. The whole idea of the Empire's war machine was always, ALWAYS to outgun, overpower and overwhelm all opposition with massively superior force.
Fine when you could afford them, but when you couldn't you had to take other options. And one of those options was to train his fleet officers in ship tactics so they would be prepared to take the fight to an enemy who was more used to bombarding for submission than battling for supremacy among equivalent starfighters and cruisers.
Ranma's ships were unmatched in their size class. He didn't get them to be that way by finding them out there. He got himself some starting point and improved it from there. Bart wanted his naval officers and crew to be of the same caliber.
Palpatine's Empire trained for loyalty first and all other concepts last. Most of their training was to break the spirits and crush the individuality of their men so they could be molded to proper puppets of the New Order. Only after personalities were reduced to pliable forms, cast in the proper molds with instructors certain of their purity of Imperial thought, were the recruits taught any skills. More than half of any additional training was further indoctrination so they didn't slip the leash while acquiring ability to perform their jobs.
It was a testament to how bad the Empire was that subsequent experience doing its dirty business taught many of those men to overcome their training and rebel against the New Order. Also, those who'd been in the armed forces before Palpatine took power, those who really loved the service and came from families of military traditions, escaped the mind bending because they'd joined before he'd added that stuff to the recruitment process, and subsequently they gave the Emperor alot more grief over his policies, by and large.
That was part of why Palpatine was working so hard to destroy those households and drive them from the militaries. It was working. They flooded directly into the Rebel's camp.
Mancuso wasn't bending anyone's mind. He had decent men loyal to a good cause and all he wanted to do was teach them how to fight, and fight well. He put ship officers through war game simulations commanding single ships and squadrons in tactics learning to defeat the entire array of options in the Imperial Book of Naval Strategy.
They'd written the book on war, but he had a copy. He also had brilliant minds helping him devise counters to every strategy in there, and simulators to teach those to his officers and men. Actual practice at thinking in terms of cruiser battles gave his forces the edge the same way a fighter jock has dogfighting a rival trained only in bombing runs.
Sairune was modernizing their defense force, and his officers who'd evaded the sentence of death passed over him had gone out to find a field all ready to harvest. The best of the old navy families were signing up with Sairune in droves of hundreds of thousands, and most of them were getting passed on by Sylphiel and ending up here. Some remained to run the expanded planetary navy. But spies and nere-do-wells were getting neutralized, put in positions on Sairune that were effectively blind, then fed disinformation to turn the Empire's attentions away and get their boot off Sairune's neck, at least for a while.
Mushroom jobs; kept in the dark and fed steer manure.
It also gave the Jedi a hugely expanding force of experienced crew and officers. Bart was making it his job to make them all better. They had a while to train before the heavy cruiser battles they later expected, and unlike the Imp Navy they had a practically unlimited ration of fuel to perform maneuvers and mock battles with real starships so the crew could learn to handle them under battle-like conditions while the officers tested each other's skills. And you can devise new things out of actual, practical experience that you would never have thought of otherwise. Innovations began to spring up in all areas, basically adding polish to a jewel Ranma had already cut to perfection: Little things like control layouts, the shape of handles on the equipment hatches, improvements to the galley, 'fresher stations, and all of the stuff the crew will see every day that falls below the notice of even an inspired starship design engineer focused on the bigger things like how to make the whole thing run and fight to the best of its ability.
With the cream of experienced Old Navy and Clone Wars hands, alot of hard won, thought over for decades improvements found they were at last being incorporated into a naval ship, and in time to make the current refit projects. Ranma's mind burned with Force-guided fire as he included the countless suggestions, even improving on some of the ideas.
It made the cruisers dream berths to serve on.
Mancuso put in a request to repair their stock of captured Imperial SDs to use as aggressor ships, so his program could use the real thing as opponents and thus give better values for training. He got approval on that, too, as with the reprogrammed Trade Fed droids working in as labor they suddenly had dockyard capacity enough to spare.
With more crew than finished ships, he even let himself give the training a branch on board the various captured Star Destroyers, so his people would learn their handling and abilities and how to fight the Empire's starships from the inside. Given that, they'd know better how to judge what those ships were capable of. Knowing that, they beat em far more often than simple tactics could allow. Bart even got permission to do the same leg of training aboard unmodified Dreadnoughts and Victorys, as they could trust the Empire would use some of those, presuming they still had 'em when the fight came.
Only a tight budget kept Ranma from draining Imperial fleet reserve yards like an air leak in vacuum. They had samples of just about every ship in the Empire, and determined to use them for this program.
This was a great advantage for several reasons, not least of which was experience with a vast array of ships proved valuable in knowing them, their weaknesses, strengths, and how to fight with them or against them. Also experience with the range of equipment made them appreciate Ranma's designs that much more, and exposure to several ways to do things had offered profound insights to many which led to great improvement over a wide array of small stuff too minor to get Ranma's notice, and even refine some he had done in an odd kind of reversal.
Color coded control knobs and cables was a user interface feature more than a functioning engineering question, but made it a ton easier to grab the right thing in a panic or put the right replacements in for a bundle of mixed cabling severed in tense combat.
Getting time in the actual Imperial ships was great training for spies and commando teams also, as they got exposed to the actual stuff they would be working against and got to see how to sneak through it and practice how to defeat their sensors and security.
For fighters they had only captured TIEs, but Mancuso knew they'd need a fighter program eventually, so he took some pilots and started to train them in TIEs. If nothing else it made mock battles that much more realistic to have the things screaming around, even if all of the lasers were set too low to damage anything.
Then they began to incorporate Trade Federation equipment, fighters and battleships, into the training as aggressor fleets as well, teaching his people the lessons taught by the Clone Wars so they didn't forget useful tactics. It also gave him a wider range of enemy ships to train against and a larger pool to train with. Modified and unmodified opponents, separate or mixed with each other or available Imperial designs.
It made for a great program.
Besides, a screaming attack of droid fighters bore alot of similarities to massed TIE assaults. You learn to deal with one and you're pretty much set for the other.
Practice began immediately.
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(Posted Mon, 10 May 2004 21:24)
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