SDN: Naboo blockade and fleet numbers

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Mr. Oragahn
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SDN: Naboo blockade and fleet numbers

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Sep 28, 2007 2:44 am

In a faithfully regular demonstration of their habit to completely dismiss canon and favour their own view instead, just to wank things up a bit more, there are those pages, here and here, to read.

Topic : counting the number of Trade Federation ships, based on their baseless estimation of the requirements to blockade such a planet.
It's literally funny, though unsurprising, that one can literally pretend making some pseudo calculation, and get a result of 1.2 million Trade Federation ships blockading Naboo.

But let's get it post by post.

Someone said, on a previous page, "When did we see the Trade Federation with more than a thousand ships at Naboo? Remember Movie canon."

Enters Stark:
Stark wrote:TF ships at Naboo can be extrapolated by the density of ships surrounding the planet. It was a blockade, and we get a sense of the spacing between blockade ships, so maths show us how many total there should be. The idea you can blockade a planet with a small number of ships is absurd.

Dialogue being 100% correct is a hilarious take on 'canon'. It's 'canon' Han SAID IT, it's not canon it was correct.
If 99.99% of your solutions to quit a planet are concentrated in the astroports, it's, on the contrary, fairly easy to blockade a planet. Place a couple of ships in geosynchronous orbit above them, and you're done.
Wings of fighters would complete the picture, by providing additional space interdiction.
Besides, if any cargo was to enter the system and head for Naboo, it would be intercepted.
Finally, Naboo has near to no defenses, and couldn't even properly engage one ship.

So that's quite an easy blockade to enforce here.

Next. Darth Servo's turn.
Darth Servo wrote:When Qui-gon and Obi-wan are on approach. Trade Fed ships were spaced roughly 20 km apart.

Assuming Naboo is similar to Earth: Earth's circumference is ~24,000 km. At a ship ever 20 km, thats 1200 ships just to form a ring around the equator at ground level. I'm not even including the third dimention or accounting for the increase in circumference due to the ships elevation.
And again...
Better numbers for the Naboo blockade.

Earth radius: 6378km
Surface area: 5.112E8 km^2
Ships 20km apart or 400 km^2 per ship
Means about 1.28 MILLION ships, for a full planetary blockade at ground level.
Darwin thinks "that seems awfully, awfully close. Those ships are barely smaller than 20km. 10,000km apart is still plenty tight to blockade, and they won't be accidentally ramming into each other either."

Huh, a guy who registered in 2002 at SDN, has several hundreds of posts there, and still thinks that these ships were 20km wide. Sheesh. Even the official site has a size for them.

Darth Servo corrects him, and revisits his fleet size estimation:
As for spacing:
http://image30.webshots.com/31/0/0/10/2 ... nNN_ph.jpg (note: broken link)

Hmm. Perhaps its closer to 30 km apart. But even at 40km, thats still over 300,000 ships.
At the end of the page, Darwin admits his mistake regarding the ship sizes, and asks the following question:
Darwin wrote: looks to be 30-40km from that screenshot, yes. Is that representative of the entire blockade though, or are they clustered? Bears further examination.
This question remains unanswered on the following page.

Darth Servo retaliates:
Darth Servo wrote:New link

This one should work better.
So basically, we see that all their estimations are based on possibly the most pointless shot they could have found.

Surlethe wrote: Just eyeballing it, it looks like they're in low orbit -- about 800 km up. If the ships are 30 km apart, with 900 km^2/ship (I'm not sure if that's the proper math for this, but I'm tired so it'll do), then the area they cover is 6.5e8 km^2 and the number of ships is a little over 700,000.

EDIT: I used 800 km in my calcs, not 2000. Whoops. 2000 km is an upper limit.
Darth Holbytlan wrote:My calculation based on the above numbers:

Ships 30 km apart means that each ship is roughly covering a disk 15 km in radius, or a bit over 700 km^2/ship. At 2000 km up, they are at a radius of about 8400 km (assuming Earth radius) or 8.8e8 km^2. This makes the blockade over 1.2 million ships.
And since a bit more wank does not hurt...
Connor MacLeod wrote:Note that if one does go for lower numbers for the blockade, then the ships in question have to be able to cover/target a wider area with their weapons to ensure that noone could escape. This would imply a range of many thousands or tens of thousands of kilometers, given that the blockade wasn't completely englobing the planet (someone launching from higher up "above" or "below" the blockade ring would naturally be further away, and would need to be within weapons range to be stopped.

Ranges could drop some if the number of ships increases, but there would still be limits on range since they still AREN'T englobing the entire planet, so they'd still probably need thousands/tens of thousands of km. (The firing on the Naboo cruiser reinforces this.)

Given that those were lighter weapons and not heavy guns (the cruiser is a fairly small target) is another factor.
1. The range against such small vessels isn't even good enough to let such ships fire beyond 90 km.
Even using more favourable angles wouldn't change the figures enough to let them argue for thousands of kilometers.
At best, we have the hundreds of kilomters from the ROTS novelisation.

2. The weapons used against the Naboo yatch are, for all intents and purposes, the heavier weapons the ship had at her disposal, especially considering how later on, during the space battle, N-1 fighters were shot down with the heavier weapons mounted on the droid control ship: the quad cannons.

Now, let's put that nonsense to rest, with a picture (no DVD cap, sorry):

Image

Hundreds of thousands of ships? Even... tens of thousands of ships?

Views from the bridge show Naboo in the background, but no noticable ship either.
At that point, the fact that none of them was even arsed or honest enough to post that picture, or would even remember that the film's very opening offered enough evidence to dispute those extravagant claims, is tiring. I find it hard to believe that none of the members taking part in this discussion, notably the likes of Servo or MacLeod, wouldn't remember that the opening sequence contained all the evidence they needed.

Besides, remember that this started with someone asking, on one of the two boards, how they could make those claims, despite the movie canon?

Well, as you can see, they pretty much completely ignored that single point to obtain their absurd fleet numbers.



Now, I also spotted this from Ender:
Ender wrote:
Darth Servo wrote: Did you see his "analysis" of the ROTS novelilzation on the fusion issue?

Novelization: "Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers."

Darkstar: Once again, we have it clearly stated that Star Wars power systems are fusion-based like suns are, much as was seen in the other novelizations. It can hardly get any plainer.
This stands in stark contradiction to the claims made elsewhere.
EU-philes are attempting to claim that this quote is either non-literal, based on children's delusions, or is somehow supposed to refer to fusion of EU hypermatter, any of which are intended to maintain the claim of ridiculously-large energy generation numbers for SW vessels. Just reading the quote, however, shows that none of these attempted reinterpretations have any basis in reality. Sun-type fusion is the power system of Star Wars vehicles.

Yes, Darkstar is actually insisting on a literal interpretation of a statement that talks about DRAGONS living in stars.
Never mind the fact that it is blatantly contradicted by the movie - Qui-Gon gives Anakin a power cell that he stole from Watto to power the podracer.
For anyone who'd like to verify that claim from the film, you would actually notice the energy arc between the two engines.
But I guess that's a natural phenomenom, and the power cell handled by Qui-Gon couldn't have been used to start the computer or control systems.
Truth is, a power cell is nothing more than a charged battery, and the podracer's engines were already active before Anakin's plugged the power cell.
Last edited by Mr. Oragahn on Tue Nov 06, 2007 1:26 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by Praeothmin » Fri Sep 28, 2007 1:07 pm

So let me get this straight:
The trade Federation needs millions of ships to blockade Naboo,
but only one ISD is all that is needed to completely melt a planet's surface in under 1 hour...

Contradictions, contradictions... :)

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Post by Kane Starkiller » Fri Sep 28, 2007 2:47 pm

Stop. Canon time.
TPM novelization, page 24 wrote:The small Republic space cruiser, its red color the symbol of ambassadorial neutrality, knifed through starry blackness toward the emerald bright planet of Naboo and the cluster of Trade Federation ships that encircled it.
You can't touch this.
Praeothmin wrote:So let me get this straight:
The trade Federation needs millions of ships to blockade Naboo,
but only one ISD is all that is needed to completely melt a planet's surface in under 1 hour...

Contradictions, contradictions... :)
So let me get this straight. A single F-22 armed with nuclear tipped missiles can destroy Baghdad and yet USA needs thousands of troops and vehicles to control it?
Contradictions, contradictions...:)

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Post by l33telboi » Fri Sep 28, 2007 3:19 pm

Kane Starkiller wrote:Stop. Canon time.
TPM novelization, page 24 wrote:The small Republic space cruiser, its red color the symbol of ambassadorial neutrality, knifed through starry blackness toward the emerald bright planet of Naboo and the cluster of Trade Federation ships that encircled it.
I do believe you can encircle something without having the ships be evenly spaced. It's pretty much something we have to accept seeing as how the movie shows us there are clusters where ships are more densly packed.

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Post by Praeothmin » Fri Sep 28, 2007 3:20 pm

Kane Starkiller wrote:So let me get this straight. A single F-22 armed with nuclear tipped missiles can destroy Baghdad and yet USA needs thousands of troops and vehicles to control it?
And here I thought we were always going to argue on the same side... :)

So if I understand correctly, in your mind the difference in fire power between an ISD and a Trade Federation ship is equivalent to the difference between an F-22 with nuclear missiles and a soldier?

And as you said, the US only needs thousands of such soldiers with some support vehicules, compared to the estimated millions of Trade Federation ships...

You're right though, it's not really a contradiction as much as a really bad estimate...

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Post by Kane Starkiller » Fri Sep 28, 2007 3:29 pm

As a civilization develops the gap between low end and high end firepower increases.
Your point that it's millions instead of thousands is completely irrelevant. The point is that there are certain objectives that cannot be met by brute force.

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Post by l33telboi » Fri Sep 28, 2007 3:37 pm

Kane Starkiller wrote:As a civilization develops the gap between low end and high end firepower increases.
Your point that it's millions instead of thousands is completely irrelevant. The point is that there are certain objectives that cannot be met by brute force.
If I understood his initial argument correctly, then he was talking about the assumed 1h timeframe for a BDZ. The reasoning behind the figure is that a single ISD should be able to prevent any escape from the planet, otherwise it would render the operation ‘impotent’.

It does raise an eyebrow when you first do a calculation based on the assumption that an ISD has to be able to suppress an entire planet, in order to up the firepower, and then turn around and claim another instance needs millions of ships, in order to up the ship numbers.

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Post by Praeothmin » Fri Sep 28, 2007 3:49 pm

Kane Starkiller wrote:As a civilization develops the gap between low end and high end firepower increases.
Your point that it's millions instead of thousands is completely irrelevant. The point is that there are certain objectives that cannot be met by brute force.
So the Trade Federation battleships are now low-end firepower examples?
When an Acclamator transport is supposed to have 200 Gigatons Turbolasers?
The difference in technology from the OT and the PT isn't that great.
In fact, the only noticeable difference is the size of the ships.

My point that it's millions instead of thousands is completely relevent.
The US troops do not completely surround Bahgdad, but are posted at strategic locations to ensure maximum efficiency.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Sep 28, 2007 4:23 pm

l33telboi wrote:
Kane Starkiller wrote:As a civilization develops the gap between low end and high end firepower increases.
Your point that it's millions instead of thousands is completely irrelevant. The point is that there are certain objectives that cannot be met by brute force.
If I understood his initial argument correctly, then he was talking about the assumed 1h timeframe for a BDZ. The reasoning behind the figure is that a single ISD should be able to prevent any escape from the planet, otherwise it would render the operation ‘impotent’.

It does raise an eyebrow when you first do a calculation based on the assumption that an ISD has to be able to suppress an entire planet, in order to up the firepower, and then turn around and claim another instance needs millions of ships, in order to up the ship numbers.
Well, on the other hand, their claim is that they don't want to capture the planet, but just destroy it.
Their point is that the ship needs to be powerful and fast enough to waste the planet, so now one could have time to escape.

Now, blockading a planet is not the same in terms of operations.
When you want to keep the infrastructures intact, you're going to do something else to prevent escapes or new arrivals.
That's where the fleet becomes handy.

But off course, we also realize that if one single ship, and its complement of fighters, interceptors, shuttles and bombers, could be enough to prevent any escape while the planet is being attacked, then even in an operation where you don't destroy the planet, you wouldn't suddenly need thousands, not even millions of ships to blockade a world, especialy one as Naboo.

For pet's sake, there were only two Star Destroyers orbiting Tatooine to prevent the rebels from escaping with the Death Star's plans.

Even if the EU says that all the cities are clustered on the pole, the only inhabitable region of that planet, we simply see that when you want to enforce a sort of blockade against a planet where the urban zones are easily identified, you don't need wangtastic fleet numbers to make it done.

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Fri Sep 28, 2007 4:30 pm

Praeothmin wrote:
Kane Starkiller wrote:As a civilization develops the gap between low end and high end firepower increases.
Your point that it's millions instead of thousands is completely irrelevant. The point is that there are certain objectives that cannot be met by brute force.
So the Trade Federation battleships are now low-end firepower examples?
When an Acclamator transport is supposed to have 200 Gigatons Turbolasers?
The difference in technology from the OT and the PT isn't that great.
In fact, the only noticeable difference is the size of the ships.

My point that it's millions instead of thousands is completely relevent.
The US troops do not completely surround Bahgdad, but are posted at strategic locations to ensure maximum efficiency.
You can also see it that way:

The quad cannons on the Trade Federation warship, large pieces of artillery in fact, couldn't one shot the Naboo yatch, despite the clear goal to destroy it.

Could it be that the shields were in the megatons?

No, since the ship is still rocket by point blank explosions after the shields are down.

Could it be that the armour is worth several megatons?

No. Not when even your military defense force has fighters which can't withstand, shields up, a single shot from an AAT's cannon.

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Post by SSFPhoenix » Sat Sep 29, 2007 3:23 am

I tried to point that there wasn't millions of ships at Naboo. The funny part was when they said the something like (i'm to lazy to go look and see what they said exactly): "The Trade Federation isn't militaryish."

after that I didn't bother about naboo any more.

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Post by Mike DiCenso » Sat Sep 29, 2007 10:33 pm

You know, it's funny when they come up with a million or so starships at Naboo, yet if we were to apply the very same reasoning to DS9, in particular the massive fleets seen in the "What You Leave Behind" finale, we can come up with many millions of starships for the Dominion, as well as the Alpha quadrent alliance opposing them:


FEMALE SHAPE-SHIFTER
(taking charge)
Have our forces pull back and
regroup at Cardassia Prime.


WEYOUN
But we'll be completely
surrounded.



FEMALE SHAPE-SHIFTER
There'll be no more running.




A little bit later:


ROSS
Ben, we've driven the Dominion
back to Cardassia Prime. We can
keep them bottled-up there
indefinitely
.



The dialog from above is more than matched by visuals where we see not only multi-kilometer sized Dominion battleships, but a much denser deployment of starships that is visible as a cloud-like clusters many thousands of km away. Far denser, in fact, than anything seen in the Trade Federation Naboo fleets.


http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 73&pos=366

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 73&pos=367

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 73&pos=367

http://ds9.trekcore.com/gallery/display ... 73&pos=369

But you know the militant Warsies would never except that idea, dispite the evidence. ;-)
-Mike

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Post by Mr. Oragahn » Sun Sep 30, 2007 2:39 am

Wow, that's a lot of ships, really. We see plenty of dots clustered together in the background, greyer than the stars, much more crammed inside a same zone than the stars, and actually visible upon the horizon, stacking upon the planet's haze.

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Post by Mike DiCenso » Sun Sep 30, 2007 11:06 pm

Yes, it is a lot of Dominion and Breen ships! Now use the same reasoning as the Warsies do for their estimates of the Trade Federation ship numbers, and apply that to the DS9 screencaps to see what you get. Also remember that the Federation and their allies' fleet was above the Dominion/Breen fleet in a higher altitude and had completely surrounded Cardassia!
-Mike

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