this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Nobody else likes to address this, but the ships with their drives are still weapons. If you know where an enemy is (or where their planet, ships, etc are), you can simply jump a ship to that location. The ship won't survive, but you've introduced mass and energy where there previously was none... sending a bomb.
I'm brought back to that scene in one of the later Star Wars movies, where that one Jedi flagship went FTL into the middle of Kylo Ren's stupid mega-cruiser, destroying everything. Why hasn't that been used the entire time? Kamikaze attacks are still attacks.
We don't really have specifics on how the Clone memory logging and data transfer works, but if its anywhere near real time or FTL, then you can send an army of Cleons out to scout, find an enemy, relay that thought to a control center, and jump a bomb ship. You could even just jump a drive strapped to a load of garbage for that extra juicy mass with little extra cost. It's a green alternative to conventional warfare as you get to take out the trash.
Yeah, this has been a hole in a lot of sci-fi for a while, it was a shock when TLJ did it, but now it's open everywhere.
The writers messed this one up by making Foundation FTL jumps have basically no caveats. In the books ships could only jump to Hyperspace when they are a few days away from the nearest planet, jumps take days to calculate, have lots of error, and can only be reasonably accurate for modest distances.
When you write in "it's magic and anything can happen" then you start to ask "why not use every ship as a weapon?" or "why not leverage the vault as the obvious galactic-scale superweapon that it is?"