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 Gitzbitah wrote:
Most sci fi also assumes that the galaxy is a far less militarized and actively warlike place than our lovely planet Earth.

Once you imagine a world at peace... how much military does it need? What does it take to overwhelm a planet's militia? That's what scifi numbers require. If a Star Destroyer is bigger and tougher than an entire planetary garrison, then it's plenty to 'conquer' 10 or so star systems all on its own. You drop in, display power, crush local dissidents, perhaps assist the loyalist for a week or two every year, and move on to the next planet, with plenty of time left over for refitting.

Which could work if you're only talking a few hundred planets. The Star Wars galaxy canonically has millions of systems. The Empire has maybe a hundred thousand total ships. There is no way they could have suppression tours with their fleets while also having enough ships to spare for offensive operations.

I suppose one of the biggest issues with Sci-fi is that individual planets tend to get homogenized, as if its really a small town. Instead of an actual freaking planet. Realistically, to conquer any roughly Earth sized and populated planet, you would need millions of soldiers. And even with Naval superiority above the planet it would take decades to pacify the last holdouts of resistance. And as soon as you leave its going to pop up again.

In 40k, the fluff seems pretty set that a full chapter is an extremely powerful military force, with even SM companies handling most missions. The thing is... 40k has smaller scale conflict than you'd imagine. In Codex-Armageddon, it only lists roughly 200 regiments, which shakes out to about a million men. Likewise, it lists about a thousand warbands, defined as 600-3000 orks each, or maybe two million orks. That's on scale with the Battle of Stalingrad. Admittedly, that's one of the largest battles in history, but this is considered an unusually large battle in 40k. The same page lists about 130 space marine companies, which is only 13,000 men compared to the millions of orks or guardsmen. However, even in a battle of a millino men, 13,000 crack soldiers in exactly the right place at the right time can make all the difference.

Star wars is even simpler: blockades. You don't need to conquer every planet, just cut off it's trade, and eventually resistance will collapse.

Sure. But unlike Star Wars, at least 40k has the overall numbers of Imperial Guard regiments to a reasonable amount for a galaxy spanning empire.

Blockades are realistically less useful than you'd think when you are talking about blockading an entire planet. Especially a planet like Naboo where it is a well developed world which also has a rich and productive biosphere. You can't starve such a planet into submission. At worst, the planet becomes forced to revert to their pre-space travel economy. And since any space faring civilization is going to be quite advanced they will still have large domestic markets.

And again, space is huge. Planets are huge. To blockade any planet effectively you need to have enough ships to blanket the entire surface area with enough guns to make escape unlikely. Otherwise, the ships leaving the planet will just leave from an angle you aren't covering, or aren't covering enough to shoot them down before they jump.

Turbolasers seem to have rough canonical ranges of 1000km. Which gives a Star Destroyer a roughly 3,141,592 square kilometer coverage(in one plane). Earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometers.

So in order to cover the entire Earth in barely touching fields of fire, you would need 163 Star Destroyers. Just to ensure you could take at least max range potshots. To make sure you could kill everything that tried to flee? Probably at least double.

Honestly, the Rebels at Hoth could have easily escaped by just leaving from different parts of the planet because the Empire. only. had. 6. Star Destroyers!

Whatever few hundred thousand ships the Empire has would get used up awfully quick when you are trying to control a galaxy made up of millions of systems.

Indeed. Scifi is so bad at numbers. I dont understand why these bits of lore always insist that humans have conquered millions of worlds, its just asking for trouble. Even if you'd have only thousads or 10,000 inhabited worlds, there'd be more than enough scope for the most vibrant varieties of culture, planetary atmospheres etc

Perhaps it was more palatable if no tangible numbers were ever given.

I dont really mind though, Its just some more handwavium, scifi has always been full of it. Trying to impose realism into make-believe will always present an inescapable conceptual paradox.

Yep the Death Star took years to build the first one and was a huge logistical element to amass resources and manpower in that one region to achieve. That they basically managed to finish it entirely and have it fully operational before the Republic was aware and able to counter it is a sign of just how insanely well the secrecy around it was kept.

They had no chance to get spies on board; to sabotage deliveries; sneak on board bombs; delay construction etc... Even its core weakness is a tiny bit of a plot contrivance introduced only in the Rebel One film.


Otherwise its a fantastic achievement for the Empire; a huge mobile space station that's able to destroy whole worlds. Fully staffed, fully supported and operational with a complete logistics chain and everything




Consider that the second Death Star was destroyed during the construction phase where the size of the structure allowed ships to penetrate into the interior and take out the primary generator. The Emperors desire to force combat toward that moment and have the Deathstar act as bait in that moment and have it operational was also its doom. I suspect normal construction would have likely been different (they were clearly rushing to get the main gun online, hence why huge segments of it were still open to space to allow materials and construction ships into the interior.

It was always my impression that the reason they kept it secret was because knowledge of such a horrifying project might unite the remaining supporters of the Republic against them (and in the early days of the Empire they might have enough forces to win).

It's one of the bits that I found really interesting in Rogue One was the in-fighting in the Alliance and the fact that, even then, some of them were trying to use the existence of the Death Star as evidence / diplomatic leverage to try and oust Palpatine through the Senate ("Hopelessly deluded" is I think the phrase...)

The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.

Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.

In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.

Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.

 Matt Swain wrote:
Why would the empire "hide" the death star budget? The whole point of the death star was to be a public warning against rebellion. Keeping it secret would make no sense.

In the expanded background admiral thrawn was very opposed to the death star as it's construction would be equal to thousands of star destroyers and millions of fighters. Looks like he was right.

They must have planned to make the death star public, they'd have to have announced making it. a lot of people could have estimated its budget.

Why hide the construction? To prevent various parties that had not yet come together into the Rebel Alliance from trying their best to disrupt, delay, and ultimately destroy it BEFORE it gets completed.

Once completed it was supposed to be indestructible, thus proving the Empire had never heard of the Titanic...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Gitzbitah wrote:
Most sci fi also assumes that the galaxy is a far less militarized and actively warlike place than our lovely planet Earth.

Once you imagine a world at peace... how much military does it need? What does it take to overwhelm a planet's militia? That's what scifi numbers require. If a Star Destroyer is bigger and tougher than an entire planetary garrison, then it's plenty to 'conquer' 10 or so star systems all on its own. You drop in, display power, crush local dissidents, perhaps assist the loyalist for a week or two every year, and move on to the next planet, with plenty of time left over for refitting.

Which could work if you're only talking a few hundred planets. The Star Wars galaxy canonically has millions of systems. The Empire has maybe a hundred thousand total ships. There is no way they could have suppression tours with their fleets while also having enough ships to spare for offensive operations.

I suppose one of the biggest issues with Sci-fi is that individual planets tend to get homogenized, as if its really a small town. Instead of an actual freaking planet. Realistically, to conquer any roughly Earth sized and populated planet, you would need millions of soldiers. And even with Naval superiority above the planet it would take decades to pacify the last holdouts of resistance. And as soon as you leave its going to pop up again.

No, pacifying holdouts takes mere hours from orbit, especially if you've got millions of other planets to call on for resources. You roll in, take the high orbitals, and issue your terms of surrender. If they don't accept, well, orbital bombardment can strip a planet straight down to bedrock inside a single day. Unless there's something there that's absolutely irreplaceable, a totalitarian state will find it more palatable to destroy such a holdout than waste time rooting them out of various hidey-holes. Where the Rebellion succeeds is in NOT having overt planetary support, allowing them to hide out on nominally loyal IMPERIAL planets.

Not that this saves Alderaan, of course.

The existence of planetary shields does complicate matters, but I would expect those to be too expensive for most planets to have. Naboo, for example, is a reasonably wealthy planet in the mid-rim, but does not have one to stop the Trade Federation from landing troops wherever they wanted.

(Why didn't the Trade Federation just bombard the planet into submission or outright destruction? Good question. Presumably it was avoid blowing the situation up out of their control, but we don't have any evidence to support this.)

One thing to consider in Star Wars is that it has:

1.) Real time communication across the galaxy (holonet)
2.) Ship transit times from system to system varying from hours to weeks at most, not years/decades.

This means you can deploy a small fleet exactly where it needs to be within days of any problem arising, especially if it's near the major trade lanes (for those that don't know, travel time in Star Wars is a factor of how well a route is mapped/updated rather than any limit on the actual speed of the ships).

IOW logistics was easier for the Empire than it would be for the Imperium or Star Trek.

 Easy E wrote:
The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.

Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.

In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.

Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.

I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.

For me, one of the biggest problems with these Sci-Fi settings that have massive numbers of populated worlds is that each world is its own monolithic culture. Or worse, each race, regardless of how many worlds they control, is a monolithic culture. Just look at how many hundreds of different cultural variations we have on our own planet. But go to any one of these other sci-fi worlds, and everyone has the same religion, the same language, the same food, the same clothes. Unless the culture has been really fleshed out, and then they might have two (or even three!) sub-cultures.
In trying to make space seem vast by filling it with lots of populated planets, sci-fi writers often forget just how big one planet is.

Fantasy often has the same problem. While sometimes there are multiple sub-races of elves, usually there are dozens of human kingdoms and a handful of kingdoms of the other major races. Or none at all, and they're just a minority everywhere (D&D halflings and gnomes usually end up here, plus the inevitable half-races)

Voss wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.

Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.

In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.

Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.

I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.

Well, we really only have our Solar System to go off of. If we only look at planets, you have a 1 in 8 (or 9 ) chance of having a useful planet. If we start adding moons and other satellites then the odds get even worse!

Now, let's also look at Star Wars the OT. We see 1 planet of value, and it gets blown up before we know anything about it. Tatooine is a desert, Hoth is a hellscape, Yavin is unlivable, there is an inhabited jungle moon, a small cloud city on a gas giant, etc. We see maybe 1 "earth like" planet out of .... 9 or so? The rest are primitve forest moons, or gas giants, or as you say.... Hellscapes. That doesn't give the Star Wars universe that much better odds than our real solar system of having a good planet worth fighting over.

Well don't forget most of Starwars is focused on fringe worlds. That's where the Empire is weaker and where the rebels are hiding. So yep it makes sense that most of the worlds we see aren't ideal habitable worlds for humans.


That said also remember that there's a huge range of alien lifeforms and as a result the range of habitable worlds is far greater if you account for the whole population of the Empire/Republic.

 Easy E wrote:

Voss wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.

Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.

In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.

Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.

I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.

Well, we really only have our Solar System to go off of. If we only look at planets, you have a 1 in 8 (or 9 ) chance of having a useful planet. If we start adding moons and other satellites then the odds get even worse!

Now, let's also look at Star Wars the OT. We see 1 planet of value, and it gets blown up before we know anything about it. Tatooine is a desert, Hoth is a hellscape, Yavin is unlivable, there is an inhabited jungle moon, a small cloud city on a gas giant, etc. We see maybe 1 "earth like" planet out of .... 9 or so? The rest are primitve forest moons, or gas giants, or as you say.... Hellscapes. That doesn't give the Star Wars universe that much better odds than our real solar system of having a good planet worth fighting over.

No, that's a logic problem. You're looking at a stacked sample (chosen for distinctive filming locations and lack of extraneous people) and concluding that the setting is built using that as some sort of numeric average.
The planets we don't see (but get referenced) are very different. When they talk about worlds in star wars, they're not talking about the local equivalent of Mercury or Venus, they talk about inhabited places.

They're talking about this kind of list and its ridiculous (for a list of completely fictional places) 521 footnotes.
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_planets

I guess the empire never thought of anyone just building a destroyer class ship thart was just one long gun meant to do noting but drop out of hyperspace and kill the deathstar.

of course if we accept TLJ then all you need to do is ram the deathstar with a ship loaded with bombs doing a hyyperjump...

 Matt Swain wrote:
I guess the empire never thought of anyone just building a destroyer class ship thart was just one long gun meant to do noting but drop out of hyperspace and kill the deathstar.

of course if we accept TLJ then all you need to do is ram the deathstar with a ship loaded with bombs doing a hyyperjump...

The Raddus was able to do that due to advanced shielding, essentially turning it into a hyperspace Lightsaber equivalent.]

It may be daft, but it remains an explanation

 Vulcan wrote:

Once completed it was supposed to be indestructible, thus proving the Empire had never heard of the Titanic...

In all fairness the Titanic's demise is in the Empire's future.

 Alpharius Walks wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

Once completed it was supposed to be indestructible, thus proving the Empire had never heard of the Titanic...

In all fairness the Titanic's demise is in the Empire's future.

It’s more the risk/reward/punishment balance.

Ultimately, the Death Star(s) are the ultimate sanction. A galaxy controlling Nuke. To really mix my metaphors, and to quote Tony Stark? Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain, and I guarantee you the bad guys won’t want to come out of their caves”.

We see this is in the decision to knack Alderaan. As a planet, it hadn’t done anything particularly wrong. Though it’s Senator had. It was a statement of intent.

Had the Rebels failed? It would’ve become the ultimate power in the galaxy. Because sure, you could attack it. But if that attack fails in anyway? The consequences would be dire. The ISB would eventually find out who was responsible, and that would be it for their home planet/s.

Exactly and destroying a world like Alderon as basically a public weapons test is a massive display of not just firepower, but the Empires willingness to use the weapon.

The Emperor has his finger on the button and he's willing to press it.



I would wager his next move after dissolving the Republic system, would be to ensure that not only he held the most powerful weapon, but that the different system rulers would be encouraged to fight each other for prestige and power. Ergo if any rose to any degree of power, he'd ensure others would rise to challenge them. Civil war on the small scale to basically ensure that no other force could raise resources sufficient to challenge him and to eventually end up rather like the Emperor in Dune - ruling over multiple other power bodies, who are all too busy fighting each other for scraps to ever amount to a serious threat.

Given Palpatine was a master manipulator, one suspects he had multiple outcomes planned for.

Certainly, I for one am satisfied the second Death Star was under construction before the first was destroyed. If I’m right there (entirely possible there’s background I’m not aware of to confirm I’m wrong), then he was never going to stop at just two, was he? One per sector may well have been the aim.

Lots of possibilities there.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Given Palpatine was a master manipulator, one suspects he had multiple outcomes planned for.

Certainly, I for one am satisfied the second Death Star was under construction before the first was destroyed. If I’m right there (entirely possible there’s background I’m not aware of to confirm I’m wrong), then he was never going to stop at just two, was he? One per sector may well have been the aim.

Lots of possibilities there.

In theory the only weakness is logistics. Actual manning and building on a galactic scale isn't the issue for building multiple Deathstars. The real limit is resources for keeping them going. Maintenance, food, water, energy as well as things like waste disposal etc...

Basically as long as he can supply then he can basically keep building them. Heck it wouldn't surprise me if he'd have built several and then built a series of planet killer space ships. The idea being the Deathstars are the show-boat; whilst the planet killer ships are basically the main gun and engines. A stripped down crew and resources so that it requires very little to keep operating; but can be deployed quickly. The kind of thing you hit no-name worlds with or use to hit multiple worlds at once. It's not as showy, but its a more practical use of force.

True. And I guess even showing you’re willing and capable of building additional is quite the statement of intent as well. Akin to “even if you take away my toy, I’ll just get a new one, because powerful as this is, it is not the only string to my bow”.

I’d say the crucial mistake Palpatine made was dissolving the Senate before recovering the Death Star plans. With the body politic to muck about with, he’d at least provide the semblance of a non-violent opposition route, something he could tie up for however long was necessary to get the second up and running.

His main mistake was making himself Emperor.

If he'd kept to the shadows he could have ruled in secret for generations simply having a puppet Emperor in the seat of power each time. Essentially replaying the same tricks he did during the Clone Wars and the run up to them over and over again.

Keep a hidden loyal core of clone warriors all to himself for emergancies and then simply have agents doing his will. Even if they stepped out of line he'd have others to take their place. A continual shift of power that keeps forces like the Jedi from ever rising again and yet at the same time has no fear of rebellion

That’s certainly an interesting point.

Sadly, pretty sure his Ego is like a certain person who may or may not be Prime Minister, and so simply cannot contemplate someone else getting credit for something they themself may or may not have played a role in

 Overread wrote:

In theory the only weakness is logistics. Actual manning and building on a galactic scale isn't the issue for building multiple Deathstars. The real limit is resources for keeping them going. Maintenance, food, water, energy as well as things like waste disposal etc...

Well, the Death Stars obviously have no shortage of energy supplies, so food, water and waste recycling isn't an issue. Maintenance, OTOH, is nightmarish. It's a first generation prototype of a new military technology (rare in the Star Wars setting as technology is basically mature and stable). But the Death Star can certainly support a lot of maintenance personnel!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Matt Swain wrote:
I guess the empire never thought of anyone just building a destroyer class ship thart was just one long gun meant to do noting but drop out of hyperspace and kill the deathstar.

of course if we accept TLJ then all you need to do is ram the deathstar with a ship loaded with bombs doing a hyyperjump...

The Raddus was able to do that due to advanced shielding, essentially turning it into a hyperspace Lightsaber equivalent.]

It may be daft, but it remains an explanation

What do shields have to do with a hyperspace jump? The base YT-1300 has a x2 hyperdrive and NO shields. Non sequitur.

It's a dumb idea for Star Wars. It invalidates the defenses of every single large ship, from the ISD on up to the second Death Star. It invalidates the whole point of the Death Stars and Starkiller Base. Done once, it can and will be done again, and SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE WELL BEFORE THIS since galactic history goes back thousands of years. Don't give me any 'million to one shot' BS; that's a cop-out.

Everyone gets all upset about the Holdo maneuver, but ignores that its been present in Star Wars canon/legends for ages. In Season 1 Episode 4 of The Clone Wars (canon) R2 sabotages the Malevolence so that it will launch into hyperspace on a collision course with a planet (literally exactly what Holdo does, just substitute a planet with a warship). The collision causes a massive blinding explosion, we don't see the extent of the damage to the planet, but the magnitude of the explosion (and the screen shake implying that the distant republic fleet can somehow feel the impact despite being in the airless vacuum of space) implies some pretty dramatic damage resulting from the collision, likely comparable to (or far in excess of) what occurred when the Raddus collided with the Supremacy.

This was actually pretty deliberately written this way for the exact purpose of showing a hyperspace collision. In a make of feature Henry Gilroy said:

"The idea being that we haven't seen a ship smash into a planet at the speed of light or in hyperspace, so this was the opportunity to show it, and what better ship than the Malevolence?"

And that wasn't even the first time such an event was depicted. It was a semi-recurring thing in pre-Disney Star Wars fiction.

In "Galaxy of Intrigue", a Star Wars RPG product form WOTC released in 2010, discusses how a hyperspace collision could have devestating results on inhabited planets and that there was know real defense for it. Specifically citing that a planet like Coruscant would see millions of lives lost in such an event, even if the planetary shields were active.

In Legends, there exists the story of the Republic warship Quaestor which suffered a malfunction and collided with the Separatist world of Pammant and fractured the planet to its core. This appears in a number of sources, including "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Incredible Cross-Sections" (i.e. a book that was released as a tie-in product to the film release), "Star Wars: Complete Cross-Sections", "The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia", and "The Essential Guide to Warfare".

Then there was the Shawken Device - a superweapon from comics published in the 80s. It was designed to destroy the planet Shawken and launch the planetary fragments into hyperspace to collide with other worlds in such a manner that would fracture them as well and cause the ejecta to also get launched into hyperspace, creating a chain reaction intended to destroy the entire galaxy (actually IIRC the dude wanted to destroy the universe with the expectation that everything would be pulverized to the point that a new universe would form).

In another 80s era comic strip, an Imperial Admiral by the name of Griff is trying to capture escaping Rebels, he orders three Star Destroyers (including his own) into hyperspace after them - all three of them collide with the Executor (yes, that Executor) when they exit hyperspace right into the Executors shields. The Executors shields are knocked out by the collision but otherwise suffers no damage.

I can recall a few other times I've seen hyperspace ramming/collisions referenced though I can't point to any specific examples.

And of course, its been long established in Star Wars lore what the risks of hyperspace collisions are and why hyperdrives had built in failsafes to prevent mass-shadow collisions - failsafes which presumably could be overwritten.

And all of that goes back to one line in A New Hope:

"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"

The implication being that yes, in fact, objects flying into/out of/through hyperspace can collide with other objects in the real world.

So you can hate TLJ all you want, but this is stuff thats been in Star Wars for literal decades. It says more about you that you're overlooking that than it does about Rian Johnson for incorporating it.

As for why it wasn't done in the past, I think the explanation is pretty simple - its expensive. Look, the Raddus was a 2 mile long warship - the collision with the Supremacy can be assumed to be a lucky hit, with the understanding that the collision didn't actually destroy the Supremacy, merely clipped its wing off from the rest of it (the ship was later scuttled by the First Order as it was deemed a lost cause to try to repair it). A number of the escorting Star Destroyers were destroyed, sure, but that was from the debris caused by the collision, not by the hyperspace ram itself.

Its unreasonable to assume, assuming the Rebellion had access to a ship of that size, that such a collision would have destroyed either Death Star - vessels which were many times more massive than the Supremacy itself. Its unreasonable to assume that such a vessel would destroy a planet (the only example we have of that is the case of the Quaestor, its possible Pammant was a smaller planet, or the Quaestor was traveling at full speed through hyperspace which translated to more kinetic energy, etc.). The Star Wars RPG makes it pretty clear that a hyperspace collision would only kill millions... on a planet with a population measured in the trillions.

Could hyperspace ramming do some damage? Sure. But would that damage be worth it? Probably not. The utility of an intact warship is clearly far greater - not just in the ability to transport troops, materiel, and starfighters, but also in its reusability. An Imperial Star Destroyer, about half the length of the Raddus (and thanks to the square cube law I would guess about a quarter of the mass), is capable of sterilizing an entire planet with its turbolasers (its called "base delta zero", its a sustainted planetary bombardment capable of turning the entirety of a worlds upper crust into molten slag). Thats one star destroyer able to do that - even assuming that an ISD was a suitably sized mass to be weaponized as a meaningful hyperspace ram (probably not) against a target - why would you want to? You can only pop a single target with it as a hyperspace ram, whereas if you just wanted to go around doing the whole base delta zero thing, that one ISD is good for how many planets and warships destroyed?

Real world kamikaze attacks are very effective, but not often used due to a) they’re actually very costly in terms of material for that effectiveness and b) you have to have people willing to commit suicide. I never understood the big controversy around that scene, I always took it as just difficult to achieve and only effective in certain situations (I.e. no other option). I think the arrogance of the First Order also contributes to it’s success, by getting to point blank range in close formation, making themselves much easier to hit.

So if it's a canon manoeuvr that is well known in the background, why hasn't it been weaponized? If all you need to do is strap a guidance module to a hyper drive to make the ultimate capital ship killer missile, it rather invalidates the usefulness of capital ships.