General Grievous: Lord of War/Odds (official ICS retcon?)

[Jedi Master Spock]

General Grievous: Lord of War is a short piece published in 2006 for SW:Inside's online supplement. It's available to HyperSpace subscribers.

Two passages are in particularly worthy of note in considering the droid/clone army size schism between Traviss and Saxton. This article, along with the short story Odds, by Karen Traviss, seem to be the closest to being official in-universe retcons of the AOTC:ICS droid figures.

Odds, as is well-known by now, is a Traviss short story that suggests that the quadrillons/quintillions figures spouted in the ICS are misinformation that was officially propagated within the Star Wars universe by people with an interest in overstating the droid army, and that the actual droid figures are many orders of magnitude lower (annual production figures more like 100 million).

General Grievous: Lord of War is, unsurprisingly, by someone other than Traviss (writing clones has been her specialty) - Abel G. Peña.

These three sentences in one stroke acknowledge the quintillions favored by the pro-ICS crowd, and then substitute a much lower figure for actual fighting droids:

With several quintillions of droids by the close of the Clone Wars, the number of robotic troops at his disposal played out in Grievous' imagination like a barely fathomable string of trinary code. Certainly, more than a billion of these battle droids were vulture droids and tri-fighters, spacebound and largely consigned to the Confederacy navy. But without even including biological conscripts and militias from Confederacy worlds (including the insuperable Mandalorian Protectors who ravaged the Kamino cloning facilities ), that still left billions of mechanized infantry, tank droids, hailfire droids and other monstrous Separatist automata to oppose the Republic's ground forces.

With 1500 active droid fighters assigned to each battleship according to other EU sources, that leaves room for a very large CIS navy, actually, but still, only "billions" of groundpounding battledroids?

And this sentence:

In the Battle of Coruscant alone, hundreds of millions of battle droids saw action on the ground and in space.

Only hundreds of millions of battle droids? A significant fraction, in other words, of the billions of infantry, fighters, tanks, and other violent "automata."

By what measure could we consider the ICS droid army figures to have not been retconned away?

[Mr. Oragahn]

Trinary code? 0, 1 and 2?

[Praeothmin]

And this sentence:

In the Battle of Coruscant alone, hundreds of millions of battle droids saw action on the ground and in space.

Only hundreds of millions of battle droids? A significant fraction, in other words, of the billions of infantry, fighters, tanks, and other violent "automata."

The millions of Battledroids are in conflict with what was shown in RotS.
Millions of Battledroids would have required thousands of ships to transport them all.
There weren't thousands of ships at the Battle of Coruscant from what I remember...

[Mr. Oragahn]

And this sentence:

In the Battle of Coruscant alone, hundreds of millions of battle droids saw action on the ground and in space.

Only hundreds of millions of battle droids? A significant fraction, in other words, of the billions of infantry, fighters, tanks, and other violent "automata."

The millions of Battledroids are in conflict with what was shown in RotS.
Millions of Battledroids would have required thousands of ships to transport them all.
There weren't thousands of ships at the Battle of Coruscant from what I remember...

We didn't see all, and some of them could have already been destroyed, or were already landed.

That said, there are not many debris to be found for a battle which supposedly involved so many ships and started quite some time ago.

[Jedi Master Spock]

And this sentence:

In the Battle of Coruscant alone, hundreds of millions of battle droids saw action on the ground and in space.

Only hundreds of millions of battle droids? A significant fraction, in other words, of the billions of infantry, fighters, tanks, and other violent "automata."

The millions of Battledroids are in conflict with what was shown in RotS.
Millions of Battledroids would have required thousands of ships to transport them all.
There weren't thousands of ships at the Battle of Coruscant from what I remember...

Well, according to the EU, the Trade Federation battleships typically had >300,000 battledroids on board...

... and does this "hundreds of millions" count include things like buzzdroids? It's not too far-fetched, really. This is really a hundreds of ships estimate rather than a thousands of ships estimate - perhaps still more than we actually can count onscreen, but not off by the traditional six orders of magnitude of ICS figures.

[Praeothmin]

I have a hard time believing that 300 000 droids includes the Droid Starfighters, or that the Federation ships seen in the Battle above Coruscant in RotS can contain 300 000 battledroids...

[GStone]

Even with stacking them up one on top of each other, there's also the tanks, the cargo, the fact that in ep 1, we see a partial shot of inside the hangar when Jinn and Ben arrive. If they were really cramming so many in there, there wouldn't be all that open space in those shots we saw.

Not unless they have a bunch of them sitting 'inside hyperspace' inside the ships. It's a new tech we've never seen before for Wars.

[Jedi Master Spock]

330,000 droids would be an average of one battle droid every 6,000 cubic meters of ship. That's not remarkably far off from what we see in the hangar. For comparison, putting 40,000 crew on a 1600m ISD (the traditional EU figures) gives an average of one live crew member per 1300 cubic meters of ship. Add in the 10,000 stormtroopers most EU sources do, and it drops to around 1 per 1000 m^3.

I don't have a precise cubage for the similarly shaped Venator, but the ROTS:ICS gives it a 7400 crew and 2000 ground troops, or somewhere between 1 per 2000 m^3 and 1 per 3000 m^3. The EU puts the Victory at 5200, or around 1 per 1800 m^3.

1 per 6000 m^3 is not an atypical TNG era Trek crew density. The USS Brattain, for example, had a crew of 35, or about 1 per 6200 m^3. The Enterprise D had around 1 per 5800 m^3. The Enterprise C had 1 per 4100 m^3 a generation earlier, and of course the original NCC-1701 Enterprise had about 1 per 500 m^3 back in the TOS era.

I don't consider a third of a million droids being onboard every TF battleship unreasonable. A few packed cargo compartments could drive the numbers up quickly from there - 1% of total volume of the ship being taken up by folded and packed basic battledroids would increase the numbers a hundredfold.

How many they actually land on, say, Naboo, is limited by their dropship capacity. Transportation bottlenecks are quite important here. Even the EU doesn't put more than 50 dropships per battleship and around 5000 ground troops (and a bit over a hundred tanks) per dropship. It doesn't look, in TPM, like they're launching anywhere near 50 dropships per battleship, of course, but even by the EU, you have a landing force of no more than a quarter million per battleship.

[GStone]

We saw nothing close to starfighters stacked on top of each other and it seemed that there was too much wide open spaces. If they were all walking around Ben and Jinn would have knee deep in droid parts. Either 300,000 is 99% your basic battle droids for foldability or the Fed ships are even larger storage holds and is only a couple decks for people.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I'm still stuck on the "string of trinary code" thing. This is an improvement upon binary code, but comes terribly short of what would be expected from biochips.

[The Real Aaron A Aaronson]

Trinary code? 0, 1 and 2?

A typical habit employed by the uncreative: Increment something real to make it sound FROM THE FUTURE!

Just another typical example of the poor scientific accuracy of SW compared to ST isn't

[Mr. Oragahn]

Trinary code? 0, 1 and 2?

A typical habit employed by the uncreative: Increment something real to make it sound FROM THE FUTURE!

Just another typical example of the poor scientific accuracy of SW compared to ST isn't

I don't know. Assuming critically downsized binary chipsets, and then put up to the trinary range, couldn't it be possible, in some bright future, to cram many many childs of Deep Blue in one droid?

[l33telboi]

It would appear that the quintillions number is given in the new Visual Guide book thingy for the Clone Wars cartoon:

They're not smart, but they're not supposed to be. Rather, battle droids are simple, sturdy machines designed to overwhelm enemies through sheer numbers. Estimates put the number of droids destroyed in the quintillions. But however many battle droids the Republic destroys, more are always on the way.

The phrasing seems to fit with Lord of War, "number of droids in the quintillions" (not battle droids or wardroids). But what exactly is that Travis figure you were talking about earlier? Do you have a quote of it? How exactly does it fit into all of this, or does it fit at all?

Same book also says there are 'millions' of clones though. Which is rather weird. They must be killing droids by the bucketload. Or then the high number is just due to smaller maintenance droids and stuff like that being deactivated or destroyed when worlds are lost. In any case, I'm sure we'll hear more about it in the future.

[Jedi Master Spock]

For some reason, droid numbers have been on my mind lately, and I thought to go dig up this thread. I actually fell substantially short of a complete analysis of the Lord of War quote here. The number of vulture droids and trifighters is only a bit more than a billion.

These are the ship classes for which we have both official fighter capacities and "groundpounder" battle droid capacities:

Recusant, 240, 40000
Providence, 240, 18000
Lucrehulk, 1500, 330000
Subjugator, 192, 60000

Ratios: From 75:1 to 312.5:1. Munificents carry 150000, supposedly, but while they can also carry fighters, the number of fighters isn't given. So in general, we might have about 1 fighter required as escort for every 200 groundpounders. If the CIS is shuttling around 100 billion ground troops on the droid level, that requires an escort of a half billion fighters. 200 billion would require a full billion fighters.

If the CIS is operating only on the order of a billion droid fighters, and maintaining full escorts for its ships, then it definitely is operating less than a trillion ground troops in its offensive operations, and likely no more than one or two hundred billion. It's a basic transportation problem.

And for what it's worth, the CIS does not appear to be operating quite that many capital ships. A billion vulture droids is enough to fill out the escort complements of over 600,000 Trade Federation battleships.

For reference, the later - and substantially more militarily powerful - Empire only carted around about 25,000 Star Destroyers. If we assumed there were a hundred thousand each of the Providence, Lucrehulk, Munificent, and Recusant classes - a gross overestimate of the total CIS fleet, IMO, when we consider that the later Imperial fleet should be able to handily defeat it - that is transportation for barely more than 50 billion basic battledroids at any given time. This is a major logistical obstacle. To transport a trillion battledroids into action, the CIS must make >20 round trips with each ship.

And that's assuming that the CIS fleet outmasses the later Imperial fleet by a factor of about 100:1. ISDs are about 1/40th the size of TFBs, most other SDs are smaller, and there are only 25,000 SDs in the fleet. Capital ships that aren't SDs are miniscule compared to ISDs (a 600m ship is ~5% of the size of a 1600m one, and a 300m ship <1%), so even if there are a couple million of them, the CIS fleet described above would have close to a hundred times the cubage.

If you assume a mere 5,000 TFBs, 10,000 Providence and Munificent, and 20,000 Recusant, something that doesn't look like it outmatches the later Imperial fleet, that's transport capacity for <4 billion battledroids.

In that case, putting a trillion battledroids into action entails making >250 round trips per ship.

[Mith]

It's possible that the fighters are dedicated to other things such as starbases and planets for defense and planetary oppression.