Super-class Star Destroyer

The Super-class Star Destroyer was a massive warship, designed and built for the Imperial Starfleet by Lira Wessex and her Kuat Drive Yards team, often confused with the even larger, but similar-looking, Executor.

Confusion with Executor
At 8,000m from bow to stern, the Super-class ships were publicly proclaimed as the largest combat starships in known space when they entered service after the Battle of Yavin. In fact, Darth Vader's mighty new flagship Executor was much larger, but her true firepower was kept secret, and she was widely misidentified as a Super-class ship herself, apparently as a result of of a deliberately–engineered program of deception.

Although the Super-class ships were less than half the length of Executor, and a mere fraction of the tonnage of that behemoth, they were designed along closely similar lines, and were still many times bigger than almost any other warships in known space. The first batch of Super-class ships even entered service simultaneously with Executor, and the Imperial military were able to play off the broad similarities of the two types to ensure that the civilian public and most Rebel Alliance personnel remained confused for many years. But there are also indications that the deception was maintained even at the highest levels within the Empire. Extant documents indicate that the Navy high command even claimed that Executor was a Super-class ship to members of the mighty Ruling Council when negotiating with them over budgetary allocations.

The misdirection program also caused some confusion in nomenclature and designation: publicly, the lead ship of the class was Executor herself, and as a result, Super-class ships are sometimes referred to as "Executor-class Star Destroyers", while the "Super-class" moniker is sometimes applied to Executor, and also to a number of other massive Imperial destroyer and dreadnaught designs, such as the mighty Eclipse-class and Sovereign-class Star Destroyers.

Statistics and Capabilities
The Super-class Star Destroyer was five miles long, armed with 500 turbolaser batteries, 250 Ion cannon, 250 concussion-missile tubes and 40 tractor beams, twelve TIE squadrons, and a full Corps of stormtroopers with 25 AT-ATs, 50 AT-STs, and three garrison bases. A single ship of this class was normally considered the equal of ten or twenty Imperial-class ships, and they were used as command ships by many of the most important Sector Fleets in the Empire.

Behind the Scenes
The Super-class Star Destroyer was proposed by several fans as a way to resolve several of the problems discussed at SSD Continuity Issues. When the length of Executor was officially retconned upwards, first to 8 miles and then to 19km, to more closely correspond to the scale indicated by the FX models used in the movies, a significant number of references to an 8,000-meter Super Star Destroyer remained in Expanded Universe sources, and it was suggested that these references could perhaps indicate a smaller class of ship, with the attribution of Executor to this class being a result of error or disinformation.

Until recently, this conjecture remained entirely in the realms of fanon, but an obscure but official source has recently suggested that only Executor and possibly one other ship were in fact the larger retconn size:

"It is possible that the Executor was the only ship of its type that was ever constructed, although the Lusankya - the ship of the director of Imperial intelligence service, Ysanne Isard - may have belonged to this class."

- Star Wars: The Official Figurine Collection

If only Executor and perhaps Lusankya were 19km behemoths, this would, of course, imply that the other ships identified as 8km Super-class ships should remain at that size, thus preserving the basic consistency of this aspect of Star Wars continuity. At present, this one reference tips the balance fractionally in favour of the existence of an 8km "Super-class", notwithstanding that these Star Destroyers were originally concieved as sister-ships for Executor. All references identifying ships as both 8km Super-class vessels and as sister-ships of Executor requires some sort of emendation, and there is nothing to say that the correct emendation is to retconn the size of these ships as has been done with Executor herself: an erroneous in-universe belief that Executor was Super-class herself allows most, if not all, of these references to be dealt with without actually creating any genuine continuity paradox, and could be considered "implied" by the cumulative evidence of canon. Nevertheless, the reference in the Figurine Collection magazine is somewhat obscure, and more prominent publications may yet countermand its implications, so at present, the suggestions on this page must be treated very cautiously.

If the Super-class ship is indeed canonically distinct from the Executor, further questions remain, most notably about their exact appearance. The illustrations of the ships in old West End Games role-playing material differ from Executor as seen in the movies in a number of ways, most notably in having nine heat exhausts rather than the thirteen, and a proportionally larger command tower, and the Vengeance in the computer game Empire at War is different again. However, other comparable illustrations boast comparable discrepancies to movie images, and Super-class ships may "really" be closer in proportion to the Executor (although on a reduced scale) than these images suggest.