150 worlds making up the Federation, actually.
Of course, in TOS, humanity has spread to "a thousand worlds." 150 members and 1500 worlds with noticable levels of settlement is reasonable, but certainly the entire thing is quite puzzling.
Oh boy, I think it's time I stopped taking numbers out of my a** and look them up before posting... :)
Seriously, now looking at your numbers JMS, I'm wondering where the heck I got the 1500 number from?!?!?!
First, productivity per world. IMO, hull volume per world probably shouldn't be too different, but it's possible that the Federation and Empire have different priorities on the importance of the fleet.
Even if their productivity is different, the number of worlds in the Federation being 150, and not 1500 like I (so strangely) thought so, means that the Empire controls even more ressources then the Federation could ever hope to match.
Second, lifespan of a ship. The on-screen evidence indicates ST starships are kept in service for 2-3 times as long, although the EU shows some older ships still in action.
I completely agree on that one.
In fact I would argue that while we do se ST ships being used for over 100 years (Excelsior and Miranda classes), we still haven't seen any capital ship in SW that was used for even 20 years.
The ony ships that I recall being used for that long would be Boba Fett's Slave-1, which he inherited from his "father" when Jango "lost his head" and attacked a Jedi... :)
Third, allocation of production facilities. There are two critical features here: Import/export volumes and other building projects. How much tonnage is shipped in and out of Coruscant, and how much more did the Death Star projects cost than the Federation's network of starbases?
Although, judging by the size of the Starbases in TNG compared to those of TOS, the Federation had to upgrade them,resize them to fit the newer, bigger ships.
At least the most important ones, like the one over Earth.
That would stretch the limits of 150 world's ressources if they're building ships also.
And concerning ship building, when we look at those Fleets in DS9, we see a lot of Excelsior and Miranda class ships, ships that would not have been built recently, but over the last hundred years, as well as the Constellations,the Ambassadors.
At most they would have been refitted for renewed use.
I don't know how much of the fleet those old ships comprise, but if they were only half of the fleet, then the Feds only built half their fleet in the last 10, 15 years by the time of DS9' seasons 6 and 7.
I would suggest this, but I'm not sure if he's talking about that or not...
Ah, thanks...
Actually, up to hundreds have shown up in battle that I knew of; someone (I think Mike DiCenso) linked to a shot that certainly suggests far more than the Naboo blockade, and we've had plenty of references in dialogue that peg the fleets at thousands.
All in all, we can be much more certain of the size and composition of the Federation's fleet in DS9 than the size and composition of the Imperial fleet, even if we include the various puzzling EU references.
Yeah, I have to agree, I just looked at the links Mike re-posted, and in some cases, although we "only" see a few dozens of ships, it does indicate a fleet numbering in the hundreds.
But do we really know if that fleet was surrounding the entire planet?
(genuine question... :) )
Speaking of the blockade of Naboo, from the pictures that were linked by Mike, it seems that the ships were tightly spaced (not as much as in DS9, of course) toghether.
According to SW.com, those ships are 3170 meters in diameter (see, I'm finally starting to check my numbers... :) ).
They seem unevenly spaced, one is barely 7 km from the other (on the horizontal plane, the one on hte right), while another (to the far left on picture 1) seems like it is about 30 km from the center one.
Now, if they are truly blockading the planet, then they must surround it.
If we assume an average of 30 km of distance from one another (from center to center), with a planetary diameter equal to that of the Earth (we'll round it down to 40 000 km), then it amounts to about 1333.3 ships.
That would be for only one ring, but on the picture we do see another one a little higher then the three making the horizontal line, so it wouldn't be too hard to imagine maybe twice that number of ships (one horizontal ring, one vertical in order to successfully cut off the world).
But it is still way lower then the Federation ship estimation of DS9.
An interesting thing to bring up here since some people are insistant on using the EU as evidence
Actually, these people only use
those parts of the EU that suits their purposes... :)
But it is a valid point, 200 ships should not even have been a drop in the bucket to them...
The difference here is that you seem to think that 2,800 ships alone are enough to scare them away when it was those ships plus, say, the 20,000 other ships that they were already fighting what really scared them in that way.
Of course not, and I never said as much.
Since the beginning, I believe I have stated that if a
reinforcement fleet of 2800 ships (so by using reinforcement I'm already stating I know it is not the only ships they are fighting) can scare them, then a power capble of bringing
more reinforcements -meaning more ships than those they are already fighting- would be an even bigger threat.
In fact, here is part of one of my statements:
ships are considered a considerable reinforcement,
So we both agre that they were already fighting a big fleet, but that 2800 ships as reinforcement was enough to scare them.
The only actual place we disagree on, is the Empire's capacity to produce the kind of reinforcements I'm talking about.
We'll get to that later... :)
that the Empire might have the edge in any possible confrontation with the Federation but only because of its sheer size and resources? Why are we debating?
Because we like to?... :)
We are debating the actual industrial capacity of both the Feds and the Empire to produce huge fleets.
If you re-read all our posts, you will notice that is essentially the only thing we disagree on... :)
But boy, do we ever... :)
But for the Empire during the OT there are times that a few hundred ships would come in handy but they simply weren’t there.
Mmmm... Agreed!
No, sorry but no. If the Empire really has millions of ships a thousand would be as unsuspicious as 30, it would be only 0.1 % of the total of ships, assuming a million ships total.
Well, yes
and no...
Yes because, since the beginning, I stated that if the Empire had a million ships, they
would not only be ISDs.
Their total ship count would include all the smaller cruisers, transport vessels, all the support vessels they needed, just like the Fed's fleet isn't only comprised of Sovereign-class vessels.
No because, your point is a really good one:
30 vessels, no matter how big, would not have been noticed any more than perhaps 100 to 300 (I'm not too sure about 1000, because I truly feel a fleet movement of 1000 ISDs would be too big to pass unnoticed... ).
My problem is with those scenarios where small task forces are enough to battle the full might of Starfleet and its allies.
I don't simply have a problem with that, I feel it is simply impossible... :)
Now it seems to me that the Empire cannot deploy the overwhelming numbers that are required for the job at hand.
Yeah, since I have to admit that what you showed and explained does prove that somewhat (although the fleet around Coruscant seemed like a big one)...
As I posted earlier, a stalemate seems more than likely the result in any realistic scenario.
The Empire still has the Deathstar.
The Federation has nothing to match it.
The Empire can just start hopping to the nearby systems and destroy planet after planet.
That would weight heavily on Fed forces' morale.
I agree it wouold be a long and arduous battle for the Empire, moreso now that you have succeeded in convincing me that they may not have as many vessels as one would think (which raises the question, how can they patrol thier territory effectively?), but in the end, they would prevail.
If they decided to speed up their production for war efforts, I'm not sure the Feds could resist.
Look at Japan and America in WWII.
The biggest industrial productions and ressources won the day, and a superweapon ony the Empi... Americans had sealed the fate of the Japanese... :)
