Lonestar wrote:Mostly that while she had the conn Mandalorians went from being enemies of the Jedi in the distant past to super-dooper living/breathing warrior race. And okay, fine, but my(fanboy) perception of the Mandalorians has always been that they were skilled fighters, like Gurhkas. Not nearly superhuman warriors one or two levels below that of the Jedi. They've become more cliched Sci-fi warriors.
Well, the cliched "trained from birth" warrior culture, at least. There's nothing supposedly biologically superior about the Mandalorians, so far as I can tell; they're stock humans.
The second one is that the Clones were suppose to represent faceless masses as a predecessor to the Imperial Marines/Stormtroopers. Obviously, Commando Teams are going to have different attitudes and outlooks on life than the mass-produced bog-standard clones, but wedging in Mandalorian culture just for the Hell of it is kind of lazy writing.
I think it's actually good to see clones grasping for some kind of "real" culture to make their own. Not so certain on the specifics. IMO, she gets too wrapped up in limited third person.
Third, Sci-fi languages. The most successful ones out there are Klingon and Ewok, both written up by professional linguists. My own foreign language skills are abysmal(Some Spanish and even less Swedish), but Mando'a sounds and reads like a language a kid could have made up.
Can't say I've learned much about Mando'a, so I can't comment either way.
Hmm...maybe, maybe not. Undesignated Deck Seaman always have chips on their shoulder.
Franchise authors who are next to unknown outside of the franchise don't. Not with their editors, not if they want to keep a career going.
Bad analogy. The Falklands was an extremely localized conflict, throughout the EU(and later, the ROTS) invasions of enemy capital worlds(various backers of the Confederacy, Coruscant) would require wwwaaaaaayyyyy more than 3 million clonetroopers, no matter how elite they are. Especially as so many have now been shown to be tied up operating guns on starships(ugh).
I think it's apt to what she's describing - a series of scattered local conflicts, like the Falklands, each small, each brief, each involving a small amount of casualties on the global scale.
Let's assume that the population of, say, Neimodia is 6 Billion sentient beings. Odds are that, as the homeworld of the most prominent race in the Trade Federation the population would be much larger, but let's run with the same population of modern day Earth. RAND did a study(right before OIF, but that didn't stop the sitting Administration from having a screwed up force structure) that indicated that, based upon successful occupations in the past, a soldier-to-civilian ratio of 1 to every 50 civilians. Which means that in order to successfully occupy Neimodia(in peacetime, once the shooting has stopped) you'd need 120 million soldiers. Obviously, they don't need to all be clones, but are you going to use anything but your best guys for the Invasion of the homeworld of one of your primary adversaries?
Ah, but the Republic can use droids as UAVs/UGVs, and since AI is sufficiently advanced you probably won't need to stick an E4 in front of 20 monitors for a 8 hour watch, let's reduce that by, hmm, 2/3rds.
Still at 40 million or so for a successful peacetime occupation. To say nothing of the actual conquest. And that's just one major planet that was fought over during the Clone Wars!
Which is particularly problematic given that Cato Neimoidia was captured using
three Republic attack cruisers, according to the official story of events. (Neimoidia itself was hit a little earlier by a Republic ground force; Cato Neimoidia was where the Separatists' strong point was within the Neimoidian systems.)
I agree this is terribly problematic, but this problem didn't start with Traviss; the problem started when Lucas had 200,000 clones with a million more on the way in AOTC, and continued when
Obi-Wan Kenobi said he could take three worlds like Utapau with two clone brigades.
Utapau has a population of close to a
hundred million. Two clone brigades - in other words, something like 10,000 troops in the landing bays of an attack cruiser - are supposed to be enough to capture planets occupied by around 300 million people. That's not 50:1; that's 30,000:1, a ratio which roughly fits the actual battle of Cato Neimoidia as described in the EU.
It's hard to find anything close in history. The Spanish conquests in the New World or the rise of the Mongolian Empire are as close as you'll get, but even then, you tend to be at least an order of magnitude short. This didn't start with Karen Traviss; this, like the utterly bizarre behavior of lasers, is all over the Star Wars universe.
Are we supposed to say that it's completely unrealistic, or that Star Wars populations are stricken by remarkably complete apathy? Or too afraid of thousands dying in collateral damage when "precision" orbital strikes target centers of resistance?
It may be more realistic than hearing engine noise in space, but it's pretty clear this is what Lucas and company have decided is sufficient to wage the Clone Wars. Not trillions or quadrillions, but mere millions.
This is a part of the reason why I like the WH40K franchise so much, yeah, it's over-the-top, but at least Games Workshop knows they have a big Galaxy, and have the armies sized accordingly.
Same number of worlds in the Imperium as the Empire... the Empire is painted more impressively than the Republic, granted, and transit times seem to be quicker than in Warhammer, allowing the use of smaller (and more mobile) armies.... but I agree very much that GW has a better grasp on the sheer scale of a galaxy than Lucas and company.