Star Wars Clone Wars Incredible Vehicles (Star Wars the Clone Wars) [Hardcover]

This book had a lot of information about the vehicles in one place . It is a good addition to a Star Wars fan's library.

I promised myself to not write any more Star Wars reviews anymore, but I can't resist, especially when it comes to the more technically related material. I know this is more directed more at children than adults, but I still got to take this one to task. I also know most of Star Wars literature, including the Clone Wars series, is for some unknown reason uber-minimalistic. They should consider changing the name of the show to the "Clone Really Small Skirmishes" show.

With that said, as an engineer I love to see technical stuff, but on the other hand by no means do I want the Star Wars universe to be too overly concerned with technical explanations and be like the other hard science sci-fi genres. However, many of the authors of Star Wars related literature are really way off the mark when describing the technical attributes and scope of a super advanced space faring civilization.

After all that intro/rant, here are the things I specifically didn't like:
- Hmmm.... 20 Republic Medstations, one for each of the 20 Sector Armies, that's a supper crazy uber-paltry 2,949,120 Clone Troopers. Pretty much a number not even worthy to be the total police force for a city planet like Coruscant, even with its supper crazy uber-paltry given population of a few trillion. Think BIG and EPIC people, this galaxy spanning conflict should involve many trillions of natural born/clone forces fighting quintillions of battle droids. The total US military personal who served in WWII beats the Grand Army of the Republic by more than a factor of 5. Stop trying to scale things down to present day Earth, but instead think of millions of Earths with technologies and populations that far exceed anything we can think of.
- The new up sized versions of the Confederate Recusant and Munificent-class class warships, why not instead take the time to make up a new class of warship or just name these Type-II class vessels. The Episode III cross section book already gave a reasonable size and technical descriptions for these two classes of warship. Then on top of that it is mentioned that the Commerce Guild Destroyer is the "largest" ship in the Separatist fleet when you have the "larger" Lucrehulk-class battleship on the same page. Then after that you have the even larger Subjugator-class heavy cruisers shown later on in the book. This class is wisely mentioned in other SW literature to be one of the largest classes of warships in the Separatist Navy, but NOT the largest class of warship that was fielded by them during the war. The Providence-class Destroyers are for some reason left out completely. Does anyone even try to edit this stuff, I would gladly do it for free.
- Never use phases like "one of the biggest warships ever", when referring to a military history spanning many millennia. As far as galactic history goes there should have been a countless number of warship classes that were "larger" than and just as powerful as the Malevolence at any given time. Also what does the biggest or largest refer to? Length? Volume? Mass? Height? Phrases like that create pigeon holes.
- No real weapon specifications, always disappointing since it would be pretty simple to destroy unshielded planet at the drop of a hat considering the super advanced technology of the SW verse. Instead few dozen incompetent battledroids seem to threaten entire worlds, but I guess that's what happens when your planetary defense force usually consists of 2 body guards.

I really would love to see another technical cross section book in the future, one hopefully written by a physicist, much like the fantastic Incredible Cross-sections of Star Wars, Episode II - Attack of the Clones: The Definitive Guide to the Craft and Incredible Cross-sections of Star Wars, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith: The Definitive Guide to Spaceships and Vehicles. These books had a lot of stuff going for them like:
- Decent explanations of Star Wars technology using real world physics
- An excellent sense of scope with regards to a galactic Type-III civilization
- The description of conventional (non-planet killers) Star Wars weaponry being scaled such that it makes the combined firepower of present day Earth look very pathetic in comparison, by many orders of magnitude
- The impression that Clone Wars was a vast conflict fought by two sides who possessed trillions of troops and millions of capital ships
- The mention of non-clones eventually making up a larger segment of the Republic military
- The mention of individual planetary governments within the Republic possessing large militaries, with very large and powerful capital ships
- Cool little historical tidbits regarding some planetary governments, corporations, the Republic's Nobility, and other random facts

It sure would be nice to have a common sense editor when it comes to determining any of the numbers related to the SW verse. I still can hold out hope that one day an incredible cross section book for the Clone Wars can be re-done by an author more like Curtis Saxton. Only then a proper sense of awe and wonder can be restored to SW verse.

I will give this book at least 2 stars for all of the new information provided for the vehicles that have made their debut in the Clone Wars series.