Review of scifights.net Federation vs. Empire: Logistics
Posted: Thu Jan 16, 2014 7:01 pm
Logistics – scifights.net: Federation vs. Empire
I wanted to steer clear of critiqueing the scifights.net Federation vs. Empire videos because, for the most part, they are restatements of information found in other videos. However this logistics video is entirely new, save for several parts which were minor components in other videos.
Again I will attempt to organize this critique into the order it is shown in Brian's video. It should be somewhat easier for this one as it follows a more direct path than say the phasers video. Also I will not cover everything in the video, only large things that jumped out at me as being blatantly wrong.
So without further ado,
/*NOTE: The darkened areas below have been re-written, they contained incorrect information (mostly due to me being mildly lazy :) ), a corrected re-write is six posts below, I leave this with a note here for reference.*/
8:55:
At this section of the video Brian is going over the likely size of the Imperial army, as a reference he discusses the rapid production of droids on Geonosis and then says this about the cloning facility on Kamino which supplies all of the clones to the Grand Army of the Republic:
"Also we saw the cloning facility at Kamino. And I don't how many Clones they were producing, but it was a lot."
However we do actually know about how many they were producing.
"Two-hundred-thousand units are ready, with a million more well on the way."
Whether or not units refers to individual clones or groups of clones is somewhat unclear, but in modern terms a unit can refer to about 30 guys (a sub-sub-unit) to between 300 and 1,300 guys. Which puts the Republic army at between 200,000 and 260,000,000 clones. Both seem somewhat implausible given later in TCW: "Pursuit of Peace" 5,000,000 clones are considered a substantial amount both militarily and financially, but not more than they already have. Using the lower end 30 clones per unit and saying that the army was composed of 200,000 units would put the army at 6 million clones at the start of the war later growing to 36 million when the other million units are finished.
This fits in line with both how many clones we normally see working together as a group in episodes (tens, normally < 100) and allows the 5 million additional clones to be a noticeable addition to the army, especially after casualties.
One might assume this number to go up with the rise of the Empire, but by how much is uncertain, especially after casualties.
A comment is made about how the Empire must have many more as they need to rule a galaxy by threat of force. There are two problems with that assertion. First, Tarkin comments in A New Hope that the senate served to keep the emperor in control and only after the creation of the first Death Star was there true subjugation through fear as the senate was dissolved. They were able to dissolve the senate because they could now maintain control by use of the Death Star, which they couldn't with the fleet alone. Or at least not as effectively. And second, they maintain through the threat of force. This does not require troops and star destroyers to be present at every moment. They just need to stop by now and again on patrol, and show up when they are needed to quell some dissent. For the most part we do not see star destroyers everywhere, they are spread out and just occasionally show up.
9:35:
More of a note after doing the math on the above I calculated the clone army to be about 41 million clones (up to a possible-but-rather-unargueable 1.5 billion). During the Dominion war the Cardassians alone suffered 807 million casualties. The claim is made that there are "obviously a lot more of them [Stormtroopers] than Starfleet security guys" (9:37). However if Starfleet possessed forces only a tenth the size of the Cardassian casualties they would outnumber the likely size of the Republic's clone army about two-to-one, so possibly on par with the Empire.
This makes little sense until you think more about it. The Empire relies on a small, but effective and above all else loyal, fighting base to keep the population in check. The Federation draws a fighting force from its population dedicated protecting their ideals and way of life. While the Empire is far larger in population, it does not draw its army from that population. It clones them instead, from one location. So its military size is effectively independent of its population.
12:50:
Brian discusses if Starfleet possesses so many (thousands) ships, why are they always hours and days from distress calls.
First most of these are from TNG, and largely the Enterprise does not spend her time in Federation space as is clear by her constant exploration and contact with other civilizations. So she is responding to calls where no one else is, i.e. not in the Federation. Also, the guestimating the Federation to be roughly 8,000 ly* 4,000 ly* 800 ly would give it a volume of about 25.6 billion cubic lightyears, averaging (with a fleet of ten-thousand ships) 2.56 million cubic lightyears per ship. This is, assuming a homogenous dispersal of ships, an average of 137 ly to the nearest ship. And even at that, a lot of those ships would be outside or on the edge of Federation space for filling their mission, exploration.
Furthermore the assertion that there are only 150 planets in the Federation is ridiculous. That is the number of full member planets, not the count of all major plants, colonies, protectorates or other such things that fall under the control of each of those members. Statistically speaking based on the stellar density of our galaxy, the Federaion should contain some 144 million stars and 6.1 million Earth sized planets (numbers halved to account for position in galaxy). So it is not much of a stretch to say something like ten-thousand are actually populated to various extents.
13:20:
Brian points out the use of very old vessels in the dominion war, some designs were up to around one hundred year old.
Yet, they still fired modern looking phasers and torpedoes and could vaguely keep up with newer ships. So they were refitted ships and not just pulled from mothballs as he states.
15:20:
Here he goes into warp speeds, lots more info here, from that thread I think it is safe to conclude crossing the Federation in a fast ship can be done in around two weeks. Now on the scale of galactic travel (not going for consistent speed here, just trends) it should take years.
He discusses how it would take Starfleet a long time to rally their forces into any defensive force, however in every attack on the core Federaion (i.e. not some random colony outside their political borders) many starships have rallied to defend against attacks like the Borg in TNG: "Best of Both Worlds", ST: "First Contact", VOY: "Endgame", the Dominion at the start of the war, and the Klingon civil war in TNG: "Redemption" with Picard's tachyon net. Each of these engagements involved dozens if not hundreds of ships arriving on short notice.
One thing cleanly skipped over in the video is how Hyperdrive requires mapped hyper lanes in order to function anywhere near its full potential as established throughout The Clone Wars. As the Emprire does not have a map of the hyper lanes in the Federation or any of its surrounding territory they would not be able to take advantage of their full speed advantage. In fact they would need to proceed quite slowly, stopping and going, as they don't seem to have long-range scanners and need to not bump into gravity wells in hyperspace.
25:00:
Brian comments that in VOY: "Paralax", the second episode of the series, Voyager is already having power problems. He argues that this is indicative of the ship lacking any range. However this is not the case, in the first episode VOY: "Caretaker" Voyager was established to have suffered significant damage from its trip to the Delta Quadrant including a fracture in the warp core and probably much more.
27:08:
Here Brian comments on subspace communications. He cites how they travel slowly and can take weeks to reach Starfleet Command.
However this completely ignores all other times where it is real-time communications. First the Enterprise is likely outside the Federation sub-space network, and second we have seen so many counter examples it is hardly fair to say this is the norm. Not even to mention the holo-communicator in DS9: "For the Uniform".
32:50:
In this section Brian compares the advantages and disadvantages of both the Empre's and Federation's methods of landing troops. While the Empire must land troops by shuttling them down in gunships or the significantly larger acclamator assault craft (as of the Clone Wars era) the Federation relies almost entirely on its transporter to directly beam people to the surface.
A clip from TNG: "Descent Part II" is shown which shows the Enterprise beaming up about one hundred personnel from the planet's surface. Brian concludes from several clips in this sequence that the maximum transport rate is about one person every second both up and down.
Then an image of Clone Troopers boarding and acclamator is shown. He uses the ICS book to determine the troop capacity of the ship to be 16,000 clones. Based on his conclusions from TNG: "Descent Part II" he concludes that it would take a federation Galaxy-class ship approximately four and a half hours to offload what an assault craft can do in what is tens of minutes.
Assuming for a minute that this is the only instance of large transporter operations, which it isn't, the number of people being beamed up is largely an underestimate. We are told earlier that the Enterprise is being left running with a skeleton crew abroad. Since she normally carries a crew of about one thousand individuals there must be at least several hundred personnel on the surface in need of being transported up to the ship. As we are given fixed numbers it would seem the vast majority are fairly quickly beamed up and it just takes more time to locate and recover the straggler groups still out searching or something.
Further uncredited advantages of transporting personnel vs landing the ship are not having to land, still being able to have a orbital presence, not putting the ship in the line of fire for ground emplacements, and one can distribute the troops across the entire planet rather than one point at a time. Many times in The Clone Wars the Republic has had difficulty with landing troops because of enemy ships being in orbit who would fire on the troop transports. Such as the blockade over Ryloth in TCW: "Strom over Ryloth" which prevented the landing of any troops at all. Again along a similar line in TCW: "Innocents of Ryloth" a lone artillery emplacement shoots down one of the acclamator landing craft while it is in-atmosphere moving in to land. Starships with transporters do not suffer from this issue as they may safely deploy troops while remaining out of range of sub-orbital guns.
Now transitioning away from this idea that the beam-up in descent is the only such instance, we find that in DS9: "Homefront" there is another such example:
Leyton: "Mister President, we can use the Lakota's transporters and communications system to mobilise every Starfleet officer on Earth in less than twelve hours. We've been preparing for something like this for a long time. We have stockpiles of phaser rifles, personal forcefields, photon grenades, enough to equip an entire army. I can start getting men on the streets immediately."
According to this statement one Excelsior-class starship can mobilize all Starfleet personnel on Earth within twelve hours. This 12-hour timeframe includes getting all of them prepared, briefed, organized, armed, and deployed. Now given that Earth houses both Starfleet Headquarters and Starfleet Academy, this is a lot of people being deployed all over the planet on very abrupt notice. Not to mention the large space dock in orbit which probably houses quite a number of personnel who could potentially be deployed as well. And this is not just some exaggeration or statement do be dismissed, we both see it carried out (with officers beaming into the streets outside Sisko's dad's restaurant) and hear about it later.
Furthermore we have instances of mass and quick beamings. Such as those in ST: First Contact with the Enterprise-E beaming the Defiant crew aboard in seconds and in TOS: "The Doomsday Machine" where Decker beams down his entire crew during battle due to imminent destruction.
And even with such a great advantage to Starfleet in troop deployment so far, it gets even greater. The ships that have been mentioned for deployment so far are: a Galaxy-class, a Constitution-class, and an Excelsior-class. But as mentioned in DS9: "Waltz" Starfleet also possesses dedicated troop transport vessels of which a small convoy can carry over 30,000 troops. Presumably these vessels would have superior deployment speeds to even what has been mentioned above.
So between rapid and wide spread deployment, not having to land thus not waisting time, not going within range of sub-orbital defense guns, and being able to simultaneously maintain space superiority one can see just how out-classed the Empire and Republic are by the Federation when it comes to troop deployment. In many situations mobility is everything, and the transporter gives you just that, exceptional and unparalleled mobility. Plus the ability to re-deploy to a different location on a moment's notice, or be able to pull troops out safe from air defense guns. Given how a lone starship can deploy across an entire planet there really is no contest, except just the opposite of what is argued it the video.
EDIT: Included reference to re-written sections
I wanted to steer clear of critiqueing the scifights.net Federation vs. Empire videos because, for the most part, they are restatements of information found in other videos. However this logistics video is entirely new, save for several parts which were minor components in other videos.
Again I will attempt to organize this critique into the order it is shown in Brian's video. It should be somewhat easier for this one as it follows a more direct path than say the phasers video. Also I will not cover everything in the video, only large things that jumped out at me as being blatantly wrong.
So without further ado,
/*NOTE: The darkened areas below have been re-written, they contained incorrect information (mostly due to me being mildly lazy :) ), a corrected re-write is six posts below, I leave this with a note here for reference.*/
8:55:
At this section of the video Brian is going over the likely size of the Imperial army, as a reference he discusses the rapid production of droids on Geonosis and then says this about the cloning facility on Kamino which supplies all of the clones to the Grand Army of the Republic:
"Also we saw the cloning facility at Kamino. And I don't how many Clones they were producing, but it was a lot."
However we do actually know about how many they were producing.
"Two-hundred-thousand units are ready, with a million more well on the way."
Whether or not units refers to individual clones or groups of clones is somewhat unclear, but in modern terms a unit can refer to about 30 guys (a sub-sub-unit) to between 300 and 1,300 guys. Which puts the Republic army at between 200,000 and 260,000,000 clones. Both seem somewhat implausible given later in TCW: "Pursuit of Peace" 5,000,000 clones are considered a substantial amount both militarily and financially, but not more than they already have. Using the lower end 30 clones per unit and saying that the army was composed of 200,000 units would put the army at 6 million clones at the start of the war later growing to 36 million when the other million units are finished.
This fits in line with both how many clones we normally see working together as a group in episodes (tens, normally < 100) and allows the 5 million additional clones to be a noticeable addition to the army, especially after casualties.
One might assume this number to go up with the rise of the Empire, but by how much is uncertain, especially after casualties.
A comment is made about how the Empire must have many more as they need to rule a galaxy by threat of force. There are two problems with that assertion. First, Tarkin comments in A New Hope that the senate served to keep the emperor in control and only after the creation of the first Death Star was there true subjugation through fear as the senate was dissolved. They were able to dissolve the senate because they could now maintain control by use of the Death Star, which they couldn't with the fleet alone. Or at least not as effectively. And second, they maintain through the threat of force. This does not require troops and star destroyers to be present at every moment. They just need to stop by now and again on patrol, and show up when they are needed to quell some dissent. For the most part we do not see star destroyers everywhere, they are spread out and just occasionally show up.
9:35:
More of a note after doing the math on the above I calculated the clone army to be about 41 million clones (up to a possible-but-rather-unargueable 1.5 billion). During the Dominion war the Cardassians alone suffered 807 million casualties. The claim is made that there are "obviously a lot more of them [Stormtroopers] than Starfleet security guys" (9:37). However if Starfleet possessed forces only a tenth the size of the Cardassian casualties they would outnumber the likely size of the Republic's clone army about two-to-one, so possibly on par with the Empire.
This makes little sense until you think more about it. The Empire relies on a small, but effective and above all else loyal, fighting base to keep the population in check. The Federation draws a fighting force from its population dedicated protecting their ideals and way of life. While the Empire is far larger in population, it does not draw its army from that population. It clones them instead, from one location. So its military size is effectively independent of its population.
12:50:
Brian discusses if Starfleet possesses so many (thousands) ships, why are they always hours and days from distress calls.
First most of these are from TNG, and largely the Enterprise does not spend her time in Federation space as is clear by her constant exploration and contact with other civilizations. So she is responding to calls where no one else is, i.e. not in the Federation. Also, the guestimating the Federation to be roughly 8,000 ly* 4,000 ly* 800 ly would give it a volume of about 25.6 billion cubic lightyears, averaging (with a fleet of ten-thousand ships) 2.56 million cubic lightyears per ship. This is, assuming a homogenous dispersal of ships, an average of 137 ly to the nearest ship. And even at that, a lot of those ships would be outside or on the edge of Federation space for filling their mission, exploration.
Furthermore the assertion that there are only 150 planets in the Federation is ridiculous. That is the number of full member planets, not the count of all major plants, colonies, protectorates or other such things that fall under the control of each of those members. Statistically speaking based on the stellar density of our galaxy, the Federaion should contain some 144 million stars and 6.1 million Earth sized planets (numbers halved to account for position in galaxy). So it is not much of a stretch to say something like ten-thousand are actually populated to various extents.
13:20:
Brian points out the use of very old vessels in the dominion war, some designs were up to around one hundred year old.
Yet, they still fired modern looking phasers and torpedoes and could vaguely keep up with newer ships. So they were refitted ships and not just pulled from mothballs as he states.
15:20:
Here he goes into warp speeds, lots more info here, from that thread I think it is safe to conclude crossing the Federation in a fast ship can be done in around two weeks. Now on the scale of galactic travel (not going for consistent speed here, just trends) it should take years.
He discusses how it would take Starfleet a long time to rally their forces into any defensive force, however in every attack on the core Federaion (i.e. not some random colony outside their political borders) many starships have rallied to defend against attacks like the Borg in TNG: "Best of Both Worlds", ST: "First Contact", VOY: "Endgame", the Dominion at the start of the war, and the Klingon civil war in TNG: "Redemption" with Picard's tachyon net. Each of these engagements involved dozens if not hundreds of ships arriving on short notice.
One thing cleanly skipped over in the video is how Hyperdrive requires mapped hyper lanes in order to function anywhere near its full potential as established throughout The Clone Wars. As the Emprire does not have a map of the hyper lanes in the Federation or any of its surrounding territory they would not be able to take advantage of their full speed advantage. In fact they would need to proceed quite slowly, stopping and going, as they don't seem to have long-range scanners and need to not bump into gravity wells in hyperspace.
25:00:
Brian comments that in VOY: "Paralax", the second episode of the series, Voyager is already having power problems. He argues that this is indicative of the ship lacking any range. However this is not the case, in the first episode VOY: "Caretaker" Voyager was established to have suffered significant damage from its trip to the Delta Quadrant including a fracture in the warp core and probably much more.
27:08:
Here Brian comments on subspace communications. He cites how they travel slowly and can take weeks to reach Starfleet Command.
However this completely ignores all other times where it is real-time communications. First the Enterprise is likely outside the Federation sub-space network, and second we have seen so many counter examples it is hardly fair to say this is the norm. Not even to mention the holo-communicator in DS9: "For the Uniform".
32:50:
In this section Brian compares the advantages and disadvantages of both the Empre's and Federation's methods of landing troops. While the Empire must land troops by shuttling them down in gunships or the significantly larger acclamator assault craft (as of the Clone Wars era) the Federation relies almost entirely on its transporter to directly beam people to the surface.
A clip from TNG: "Descent Part II" is shown which shows the Enterprise beaming up about one hundred personnel from the planet's surface. Brian concludes from several clips in this sequence that the maximum transport rate is about one person every second both up and down.
Then an image of Clone Troopers boarding and acclamator is shown. He uses the ICS book to determine the troop capacity of the ship to be 16,000 clones. Based on his conclusions from TNG: "Descent Part II" he concludes that it would take a federation Galaxy-class ship approximately four and a half hours to offload what an assault craft can do in what is tens of minutes.
Assuming for a minute that this is the only instance of large transporter operations, which it isn't, the number of people being beamed up is largely an underestimate. We are told earlier that the Enterprise is being left running with a skeleton crew abroad. Since she normally carries a crew of about one thousand individuals there must be at least several hundred personnel on the surface in need of being transported up to the ship. As we are given fixed numbers it would seem the vast majority are fairly quickly beamed up and it just takes more time to locate and recover the straggler groups still out searching or something.
Further uncredited advantages of transporting personnel vs landing the ship are not having to land, still being able to have a orbital presence, not putting the ship in the line of fire for ground emplacements, and one can distribute the troops across the entire planet rather than one point at a time. Many times in The Clone Wars the Republic has had difficulty with landing troops because of enemy ships being in orbit who would fire on the troop transports. Such as the blockade over Ryloth in TCW: "Strom over Ryloth" which prevented the landing of any troops at all. Again along a similar line in TCW: "Innocents of Ryloth" a lone artillery emplacement shoots down one of the acclamator landing craft while it is in-atmosphere moving in to land. Starships with transporters do not suffer from this issue as they may safely deploy troops while remaining out of range of sub-orbital guns.
Now transitioning away from this idea that the beam-up in descent is the only such instance, we find that in DS9: "Homefront" there is another such example:
Leyton: "Mister President, we can use the Lakota's transporters and communications system to mobilise every Starfleet officer on Earth in less than twelve hours. We've been preparing for something like this for a long time. We have stockpiles of phaser rifles, personal forcefields, photon grenades, enough to equip an entire army. I can start getting men on the streets immediately."
According to this statement one Excelsior-class starship can mobilize all Starfleet personnel on Earth within twelve hours. This 12-hour timeframe includes getting all of them prepared, briefed, organized, armed, and deployed. Now given that Earth houses both Starfleet Headquarters and Starfleet Academy, this is a lot of people being deployed all over the planet on very abrupt notice. Not to mention the large space dock in orbit which probably houses quite a number of personnel who could potentially be deployed as well. And this is not just some exaggeration or statement do be dismissed, we both see it carried out (with officers beaming into the streets outside Sisko's dad's restaurant) and hear about it later.
Furthermore we have instances of mass and quick beamings. Such as those in ST: First Contact with the Enterprise-E beaming the Defiant crew aboard in seconds and in TOS: "The Doomsday Machine" where Decker beams down his entire crew during battle due to imminent destruction.
And even with such a great advantage to Starfleet in troop deployment so far, it gets even greater. The ships that have been mentioned for deployment so far are: a Galaxy-class, a Constitution-class, and an Excelsior-class. But as mentioned in DS9: "Waltz" Starfleet also possesses dedicated troop transport vessels of which a small convoy can carry over 30,000 troops. Presumably these vessels would have superior deployment speeds to even what has been mentioned above.
So between rapid and wide spread deployment, not having to land thus not waisting time, not going within range of sub-orbital defense guns, and being able to simultaneously maintain space superiority one can see just how out-classed the Empire and Republic are by the Federation when it comes to troop deployment. In many situations mobility is everything, and the transporter gives you just that, exceptional and unparalleled mobility. Plus the ability to re-deploy to a different location on a moment's notice, or be able to pull troops out safe from air defense guns. Given how a lone starship can deploy across an entire planet there really is no contest, except just the opposite of what is argued it the video.
EDIT: Included reference to re-written sections