Just delete if this is not allowed - sorry for the nuisance.
I wrote this as a love letter to this mod and its team and the way it keeps the passion alive for us Legends fleet junkies. Thank you so much for your work.


The Ruusan Reformations of the Galactic Republic included a host of military regulations, and these were collectively referred to as the Ruusan Regime - they were an extremely effective and long-lived effort to maintain a level of relative demobilization in the Galaxy and entrench the Republic’s monopoly on true strategic power over its constituent governments and rogue states.

Rarely if ever did the Galaxy ever see almost a full millennium of peace from wars on a galactic scale apart from the Ruusan era, but what made this Regime so successful - and how was it subverted and outdone in the end? One thing was enforcement, but this article will highlight how smart regulation of armaments managed to achieve what practically no other Republic policy did in this time frame - sustained success on a galactic scale.

Core concerns

One of the Regime’s strictest sets of stipulations regarded the size limits on capital ships across the Galaxy, and these limits remained largely consistent right up until the Battle of Geonosis, albeit with a series of loopholes that were increasingly exploited in the final decades before the Clone Wars.

It was generally known that the length cap on warships was 600 meters and Hyperdrives. Less well known (among anyone outside defense or shipbuilding) were the corresponding limits on tonnage and reactor output that in actuality had a much larger impact on the designs fielded; the size limits were primarily intended to constrict the size of the reactor, given that volume and tonnage were closely connected.

The reactor output determined how much power a warship could pour into its guns, so by restricting reactor output the gun batteries’ firepower was restricted as an automatic consequence. Lighter Turbolasers became the mainstay of galactic naval gunnery for a millennium, although much larger guns were relatively prevalent, they were almost exclusively mounted on orbital or terrestrial defensive installations.

There were plenty of warships fielded before the Clone Wars in violation of the Ruusan Regime regarding length and tonnage, but the Republic very rarely enforced these limits to the letter - Republic officials concentrated on enforcing the restrictions on reactor output at the equipment manufacturing level, meaning that the reactors needed to power ships in serious violation of the Ruusan Regime practically didn’t exist.

Even when Kuat Drive Yards (KDY) and other grandiose shipwrights started truly abusing various loopholes to construct massive warships the size of powerful defensive space stations, they were practically always limited to using reactor cores built for such space stations, which didn’t need power for engines or a Hyperdrive, making them underpowered reactors for warships of equivalent tonnage. This meant that even a hulking, humpbacked Mandator I-class Star Dreadnought, the most egregious subversion of Regime limits, had a weak broadside relative to its massive size.

Not to be deterred, KDY entered the reactor market themselves and began designing reactors that could - theoretically - be fitted with a “booster” at a later stage. The now-iconic KDY bulge emerged as a result of making this process as easy as possible - although purely theoretical, as both KDY and their customers protested. These “boosters” sat idle in warehouses on Kuat and on worlds that had purchased massive KDY dreadnoughts, waiting for the hoped-for time when the Regime would either be abolished or could be flaunted more openly. In an ironic twist, the skunkworks development process ended up producing a reactor design that was more efficient than others when it came to powering larger ships and installations. It was one of KDY’s lesser known business coups during the fall of the Republic, but it became one of the main reasons for their continuing shipbuilding dominance into the Imperial era.

Wartime warheads

For warships of less massive size, this booster-bulge model wasn’t workable, but ship designers had long since turned to other loopholes. The most exploited one was related to missile weaponry. Firstly because warship tonnage was calculated “dry”, i.e. without supplies or ammunition, giving an advantage to warhead batteries, secondly because missiles and torpedoes were not dependent on the reactor. This meant that the final century of the Republic saw warships sporting a heavier and heavier load of missile and torpedo batteries, and the missiles and torpedoes themselves grew larger and larger. In the end, only practical concerns that very large warheads were too vulnerable to point-defense weaponry - and very, very dangerous cargo to store - put a limit on their size, but then weapons designers focused instead of making them more advanced and clustering warheads for saturating the target zone in the face of a wealth of countermeasures that emerged concurrently.

Two Clone Wars-era designs showcased the fruits of this effort.

The Rothana Acclamator-class assault ship, a version of their semi-Regime-compliant “patrol destroyer” line, sported a powerful frontal warhead battery designed to unleash most of its firepower in the initial minutes of an engagement in order to break blockades. Over just a few months after them being revealed to the Galaxy at the Battle of Geonosis, Acclamators quickly acquired a reputation as one of, if not the, finest offensive warships in service (relative to size, cost, requirements etc.). And this was in large part due to its missile battery, the product of decades of ingenuity in bending the rules of the Ruusan Regime.

The very same missile advances helped get the Victory Star Destroyer into battle ahead of schedule. The Victor Initiative Project was a sub-project within the Star Destroyer Program that aimed specifically at creating a fast, powerful ship of the line that could take heavy punishment and dish out even more. What later became known as the Victory II-class Star Destroyer with its powerful Turbolaser batteries and impressive speed was the actual endgoal of the project, and what became known as the Victory I-class Star Destroyer was never even intended to exist. But when it became clear that Separatist admiral Dua Ningo’s fleet of deadly Bulwark Battlecruisers - themselves built around an innovative batch of reactors assembled secretly and illegally by the Techno Union right before the war - would break the blockade of the shipyard world of Foerost and rampage across the Core during the second year of the Clone Wars, it was decided to accelerate the Victor plans and launch the fleet six months early.

But the modern reactors built without any Ruusan Regime constraints were still in short supply, especially due to KDY snatching a massive Republic contract in the Star Destroyer Program for their new Venator-class Star Destroyer and ending up with the lion’s share of the new souped-up reactor production - a source of particular friction seeing as the Victor Initiative Project was supposed to be a good-faith collaboration between Rendili and Kuat. This meant that the Victory Fleet could not be outfitted with reactor models capable of meeting the simultaneous demands of heavy Turbolaser batteries, powerful shields, fast Realspace speed and a state-of-the-art-Hyperdrive, because Rendili simply didn’t have any such reactors on hand. What the Rendili yards did have was a massive store of Regime-compliant equipment and weaponry, including assault concussion missile tubes and missile magazines for their planetary defense force contracts leading up to the Clone Wars.

Thus, what became the Victory I-class Star Destroyer was a hastily adopted stopgap solution thrown together in the nick of time to meet the Bulwark Fleet head on. The weaker reactor and less powerful Turbolaser batteries were compensated for by grafting massive missile batteries with impressive magazines onto the hulls. The Rendili engineers opted to cap the Realspace speed to save power for the Hyperdrive, enabling the Star Destroyer to keep pace with other Republic warships in strategic maneuvering.

The end result was probably one of the best defensive ships ever fielded - an ironic counterpart to the Acclamator’s offensive credentials. And production lines continued until Rendili and their expansive network of license yards and subcontractors ran out of their massive stores of missile batteries and pre-war reactors, at which point the production of the Victory II-class finally began.

Generation clash

Despite their shared hulls, the Victory I- and Victory II-classes thus represented two different generations of warship designs - the pre-war designs with Regime-compliant weak reactors and heavy missile weaponry and the wartime designs with unfettered reactor and gun power. Nevertheless, the Victory I-class could be considered the peak of Regime-era warship design, and no skilled star warrior ever took a VSD I lightly even decades later.

In a similar vein, practically the entire buildup of naval assets by the various organizations that rallied to Count Dooku’s cause in the period leading up to the Clone Wars, although outright illegal in itself, was achieved using Regime-compliant equipment and components. Even in this gross violation of it, the Ruusan Regime showed its effectiveness by retarding the power of these large, illegal warships.

The various iterations of the Providence-class assembled at Pammant and Minntooine, ultimately derivatives of the trusty Rendili Dreadnaught line, were archetypes of upscaled vessels fitted with pre-war technology and equipment, even more so than the Victory I-class. The Providences leaned heavily on warhead munitions, and their main guns were underpowered compared not just to those of their enemy counterpart, the Republic Venator-class, but also to the wartime Mon Cala design of the extremely expendable Recusant-class light destroyer that bolstered many Separatist fleets after mass-production came online. Even the most fearsome Providence-class iteration, the two-kilometer Dreadnought variant, was assembled from (mostly) Regime-compliant equipment, and consequently had quite puny Turbolaser batteries for its size; it was very reliant on its missile batteries, among the most massive ever built.

All this serves to show how much the Regime equipment limits impacted warship production even after their actual repeal when the Clone Wars began, and neither regular citizens nor many parts of the military and defense community truly grasped what power had been unleashed by the repeal of the Regime until seeing first-hand what an Imperator-class (later known as the Imperial I-class) Star Destroyer was capable of on its own. During one of the first deployments, a sole Imperator managed to run down and destroy a fleeing Separatist task force of a cruiser, four light destroyers and two frigates - after which lead designer Lira Wessex quipped: “I am become death, the destroyer of droids.”

The Imperial era did not stop the arms race seen during the Clone Wars, it merely made it a one-sided affair as the Empire mass-produced untold numbers of warships and weapons of terror on a scale never seen before to fight an enemy that virtually didn’t exist until the Empire’s brutality created it.

This in turn set in motion new developments in weapons and warship production, but that is a story for another time.