User:McEwok/SSDtemp

Temp version of SSD page "behind the scenes", rewriting for accuracy.

Behind the scenes



 * "Executor" comes from the Latin word meaning "an administrator or executive officer".


 * Other names used to describe these vessels were "battlecruiser", "battleship" and "dreadnought" (Star Wars Comic Strip), "Star Destroyer", and "Star Cruiser".


 * In the Empire Strikes Back arcade game for Atari, an Imperial ship can be seen searching for the Rebel's secret base after the Battle of Massassi Temple. This crude vector-drawing was quite similar to an early Executor production painting.




 * The filming model of Executor included some unusual items attached or built-in to create the illusion of detail. One notable item visible on close examination of the model is a toy soldier.


 * The special-effects model used in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983) depicts a massive warship, more than ten times the length of a normal Star Destroyer.
 * However, in the fourth draft] script (1978), where Darth Vader's Star Destroyer appears for the first time, it was said simply to be "larger and stranger than the five Imperial Star Destroyers that surround it"; in the published script this became "larger and more awesome", and in the Empire Strikes Back novelization (1980), "[t]he sleekly elongated ship was larger and even more ominous than the five wedge-shaped Imperial Star Destroyers guarding it". Strictly speaking, these early descriptions do not specify that Vader's ship was larger than all the other Star Destroyers in the fleet, simply that it was bigger than any of them. That Vader's command ship was not originally conceived as dramatically over-sized is also hinted at by other details: the ship bears the same "Star Destroyer" designation in all early material, and the novel describes the fleet together as "six cruisers".
 * Early official literature adapted the text of the script, but twisted its meaning slightly, producing a claim that the ship was the size of five Star Destroyers&mdash;significantly under-size compared with its on-screen depiction: the The Empire Strikes Back Official Poster Monthly (1980) describes Vader's ship as "larger and stronger than five ordinary Star Destroyers", while A Guide to the Star Wars Universe (First Edition) (1984) described it as being "approximately five times larger and more destructive than any Star Destroyer in the Imperial Fleet".
 * In 1989, the RPG-based Imperial Sourcebook stated that the "Super-class Star Destroyer" was exactly five times the length of the Imperial-class Star Destroyer. Its armament was also made to be five times that of the more powerful variant of the Imperial-class design. These figures, while under-size compared with the movies, are based directly on the statements in earlier official literature, and were perpetuated for a further 15 years, in game and non-game sources. Often, the accompanying Executor illustration did not match the model used in the films, notably in depicting a proportionally larger command tower.
 * The behind-the-scenes book on Lucasfilm, From Star Wars to Indiana Jones: The Best of the Lucasfilm Archives (1995), showed the film props and stated that the Executor was conceived as eleven times the size of the original Star Destroyer, which itself was one mile (1,6 km) long. However, the Star Wars Customizable Card Game (1996) stated that the Executor was over 8km long, while the Topps Widevision card set released in the same year, repeated that the Executor was larger than the five ISDs that accompanied it in ESB. The novel X-wing: The Bacta War also mentioned a sister-ship, the Lusankya, as being eight kilometers long. It is [theforce.net/swtc/novels/xwtbw.html sometimes claimed] by critics of the 8km size that the Lusankya ' s captain dismisses an ISD as "a tenth our size", but quite apart from the fact that this is merely a throwaway line of dialogue that cannot be counted as reliable, the actual scene is ambiguous, and the line could equally refer to the 350m-long Valiant. As a measure of the level of misrepresentation, a dozen lines have been excised from the quotation on the web-page linked to above to disguise its ambugity, and the novel's explicit references to the Lusankya as 8km long (p.) have been ignored.
 * This 8km size was restated on every appearance of Lusankya until the ship's destruction in Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand in 2002, and as of 2007, no Star Wars novel has explicitly described a Super-class Star Destroyer at any length other than 8km.
 * The Black Fleet Crisis novel Shield of Lies (1996), contained a reference to one of the Executor´s sister-ships as an "Executor-class Star Destroyer". The Executor-class would later on become the new class name of the Executor and its sister-ships.
 * One later canon source has suggested that "ordinary" Star Destroyers might have been larger than the usual Imperial-class design: Dark Forces: Soldier for the Empire (1997) indicates that the Vengeance was "not one of the Empire's larger Star Destroyers" in the period before the Battle of Yavin (though it is possible that the ).
 * The 1998 Lucasarts interactive CD-ROM Star Wars: Behind the Magic described the Executor alternately as 8km and 12,8km. Also in 1998, David West Reynolds began to supply information, including measurements of the ILM model, to Curtis Saxton's Star Wars Technical Commentaries fansite, which had strongly criticised the 8km figure as incompatible with the movies.
 * Attack of the Clones: Incredible Cross-Sections (2002), "miles-long" Star Destroyers.
 * In 2004, the Inside the Worlds of the Star Wars Trilogy reference book, on which Dr. Saxton recieved cover credit as "consultant", changed the Executor´s canonical size to 19km long. It was explained by continuity checker Leland Chee that the deciding factor was a sense that this was more consistent with the films. Later books and reference guides mostly followed this number.
 * The Official Databank has given various sizes over the years, starting with "over eight times longer than an ISD", to 12,8km (as a compromise between fan groups) and finally, 19km. In addition to the Executor´s size, its class and its members were retconned to be Executor-class Star Dreadnoughts, with the earlier classifications of Super Star Destroyer and Super-class Star Destroyer being explained as military colloquialisms and used originally for disinformation purposes by the Empire (explained on the Wizards of the Coast website).
 * This information was criticised by some fans for only pandering to a group derisively called "Saxtonites" (based on the SW author and technical fansite webmaster, Curtis Saxton), and it is still dismissed by some that the earlier 8 km number was erroneous or that the films can be used to justify "facts" in the SW universe, despite being classified by Lucas Licensing as the highest canon externally and as part of G-canon internally.
 * In addition to the reclassification of the Executor, there have been many additions to the Super Star Destroyer line, which originally only described the Executor and its class. Starting with big flagships seen in early comics, the Eclipse, Allegiance and Sovereign seen in Dark Empire and its Sourcebook, several types described in ITW:OT, the sixteen-engine Megador featured in the the Dark Nest Trilogy, an early, smaller prototype explored in Dawn of Defiance, and a class between 8 and 10 times the size of an ISD mentioned in the Death Star novel. Additionally, 8km long Super Star Destroyers have been mentioned in later novels without necessarily referring to Executor-class ships that simply use the older size.


 * When the domes on Executor´s bridge tower exploded during the Battle of Endor, a crewman said that the bridge shields were down. Most people believed that this meant the domes were shield generators (despite one dome being intact), something that was reinforced by the Star Wars Roleplaying Game's sourcebooks. In the February 1983 issue of CINEFEX, Richard Edlund of Industrial Light and Magic simply referred to them as "radar domes", similar to real-life domes on warships. Despite this, novels like the X-wing books have used destroying the domes to disable shields as a plot point. The Inside the Worlds of the Star Wars Trilogy later stated that these domes were, in fact, sensor domes with local-area shield emitter vanes.




 * The official crew compliment of 279,144 was originally intended for the 8,000 meter length and has never been updated. If the crew density were to remain the same, the crew compliment of the 19,000-meter Executor would likely be on the order of 3.3 million.


 * In one of the new shots inserted into The Empire Strikes Back 1997 Special Edition, Executor was shown as being light gray, as opposed to all other shots of it in the film being blueish-gray. This could be accounted for by different background lighting, as the Executor is seen as both light gray and white in publicity shots.