"Not Star Wars" Imperial Fleet

Introduction

An older Star Destroyer from the Star Wars universe.  This one is not from the Empire, but rather from the New Republic.

Here's something different.  All the spaceship fleets I've displayed on this blog have been "not Star Trek" (though some of them are a bit obscure for the casual fan).  However, I also have 1 "not Star Wars" fleet - the Imperial Star Navy!

Actually, I built this fleet mainly so that I could deploy hordes of TIE fighters and pretend to stand on the bridge of the flagship in a natty grey uniform whilst proclaiming "You are part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor. Take her away!".  Everyone must bow to the will of the Emperor!

Design Philosophy

OK, enough with the megalomania and on to the ships!

I see the vessels of the Imperial fleet as slow and stodgy, so they all have relatively low thrust ratings (even the smallest ships).  They are large enough to absorb a fair amount of damage, but aren't very good at preventing it.  For this, I give them armour rather than screens; attacks will cause damage (with nice, cinematic explosions), even if it takes a while before the ship ceases to function properly.

As well as the usual beam batteries, the signature weapons of this fleet are fighters and ion cannons.  Fighters are already modeled in Full Thrust, so no problem there.  All larger ships in my fleet will carry some fighters; there won't be any dedicated carriers.

What about the ion cannon, though?  It seems to be a direct-fire weapon, as opposed to a seeking device.  I think it has a very potent effect if it hits but won't achieve anything if it misses, so no area effect.  There's a weapon out there that behaves something like this already: the UNSC graser.  Roughly speaking, this is a bit like a regular beam weapon (if expensive and massive!), except that each hit does 1d6 damage points instead of 1!  There's a bit more to it than this; follow the link to find out.

The Fleet

My Imperial ships come from Kallistra's useful "Space Dreadnought 3000" range.  Appropriately enough they are from the "Earth Empire" faction!  Note that I'm missing E3, that model was absent from the fleet pack I bought long ago.

The fighters are from Studio Bergstrom and are officially "Scythe Empire" fleet scale craft.  But we all know where the inspiration for these comes from, don't we :-) ?
An OpenOffice .odg document containing all the SSDs for this fleet is available: here.

My apologies for the slightly red tinge in the pictures below and for the silvering of the labels on the ships' bases.  These are both artifacts of my camera flash and are not present on the original models.

Manufacturer's Designation	Picture	Full Thrust SSD
E1 Earth Empire Patrol Ship
E2 Earth Empire Destroyer
E4 Earth Empire Battlecruiser
E5 Earth Empire Dreadnought
E6 Earth Empire Super Dreadnought
TIE Bombers
TIE Fighters