Scene from the Rise of Skywalker trailer
Words by Marcus Boothby
So it's been a month since Rise of Skywalker came out in the cinemas and reception has been lukewarm at best. In all fairness, the entire Star Wars sequel trilogy has been lukewarm at best with The Force Awakens being the best of the three.
More importantly, there has been no real evolution in capital and star ship design for both the First Order/Final Order/Sith Eternal or the New Republic/Resistance. Sure, we got the brutalist beauty that is the Resurgent-Class Star Destroyer and the Mandator 4 Dreadnought, but nothing groundbreaking.
The Resurgence is a beautiful design and improves on everything wrong with the Imperial Star Destroyer (ISD-1/2), with some added bad-guy coolness. The Mandator 4 on the other hand, is just a massive triangle with some big boi cannons on its belly. So much for progress then. Then we have Snoke's Mega Star Destroyer which let's be honest, did nothing other than to increase rendering times in the design studios at Lucasfilm.
An example of good Star Destroyer, the Resurgent - Image from Battlefront 2
And then we have the Star Destroyer as seen in Rise of Skywalker; the Xyston-Class. Sure, it has a cool name but that's about it. Star Wars fans would have noticed that it was based on the design for the ISD-1 as it has an exposed tractor beam array, rather than an internal one, as was fitted to the ISD-2. This is where the problems begin.
There's no current canon lore explanation to why the Xyston was designed off of an ISD-1, as by the time of Rise of Skywalker, the design would have been 53 years old! That's really old for a ship of the line design, especially when the former Empire was all about cutting edge tech. But this is where the fun begins.
So, the eagle-eyed fans (myself included) noticed that the Xyston is in fact, not a brand new ship, in fact it's a scaled up ISD-1 model taken directly from Rogue One and the hull was remodelled to accommodate the big boi laser taken off presumably the Mandator 4 model as seen in The Last Jedi. The laziness didn't stop there though. Being a scaled up Rogue One model, the specs were scaled up too. So, a normal ISD-1 comes in at 1600 metres long, while the Xyston comes in at 2406 metres long, making it roughly 1.5x larger than the ISD-1. This increase applies to everything on the Xyston, so things like the bridge, reactor, that tractor beam array, shield generators etc are 1.5x bigger. This just sounds impractical.
This is the same model used for the Xyston in Rise of Skywalker - Rouge One
Also, if the movie is anything to go by, the Final Order/Sith Eternal had hundreds of these on Exegol, all with the same flaws as the ISD-1 they're based off of. Oh, and the biggest flaw for plot reasons, the Xyston's could not leave Exegol's atmosphere because they "required a navigational beacon in order to leave Exegol. A navigational tower existed on the planet for this purpose." That's a quote from Wookiepedia and yes, this is Canon. I know Exegol is in an uncharted part of the Unknown Regions but somehow, the heroes and the Resistance fleet managed to find their way to Exegol with no problem at all. I hate it when the plot of the movie requires the bad guys to have a problem the good guys can magically overcome.
So what would I do about the Xyston problem then? Well, if I worked on the creative team at Lucasfilm, I would have designed a new ship from the ground up. They managed to do it with the Resurgent so why not with the Xyston? In the Rise of Skywalker art book, you can see that there were some fantastic designs for the Xyston and other First Order flagships which probably didn't make it into the movie for whatever reason. Instead, we got a chonky Imperial Star Destroyer with a massive laser. This is lazier than Starkiller Base. Actually, Starkiller Base was really cool.
Regardless, Rise of Skywalker was a rubbish Star Wars film, and arguably the worst way to end a saga that has been running for 42 years. Well done J.J Abrams, you managed to make a worse Star Wars film than Rian Johnson.