Star Wars Industrial supremacy fact or fairy tale?

[Admiral Breetai]

basically I'm curious I hear allot about how Wars possess superior industry because they built the deathstar (never mind the feds seem to have fielded a fuckton of those huge mushroom star bases ) but is this really true? on the one end we have a power that when bleeding its population bone dry and holds one of the most oppressive states in fiction is able to field huge thousand meter vessels and of course Vaders flagship the deathstar assembled over months when the last one took decades is admittedly impressive. on the other hand we have two post scarcity civilizations one of which considers the terraforming of entire planets from mars like conditions to earth like old news and has moved on to restarting stars and resurrecting dead ones can produce the power needed from one of their capital ships to tow a moon (though it was noted by Q such an action would bust the moon and kill every one) level planets and spawn such a dramatic shift in industry with out virtual harm on the economy they go from building one Galaxy class a decade to fielding thousands of smaller to medium sized vessels and churning out monsters like the Sovereign class starship seemingly in the middle of a war and still being able to fight said battle after the Borg rampage through their own turf,

Then We have the Dominion who clone faster then the Republic could ever hope to do so seemingly cheaply fielded vastly larger numbers then the millions the republic seemed to field during the war took a small sized local power known for existing in territory so resource poor the average living conditions at one point where worse than most third world nations and turned them into a first rate fighting force who went from barely being able to handle a border war with the UFP to taking the fight to them. they accomplished this while the bulk of their own resources were geared towards building up their own assets and forces and then after being cut off and with only a handful of shipyards and cloning facilities was able to easily match an enemy who's total fleets likely where in the multiple tens of thousands needing allied support only when loosing one of these shipyards later in the war.

My point is we never see anything grandiose like the DS done by the Dominion and the UFP for starters they don't need such a thing, a cheaper method is nuking a star or ordering a starship captain to do it. I'll toss it out here the Deathstar is god damn impressive the SSD is but when you have casual mention of individual ships nuking moons towing them...the ability to basically manufacture earth like worlds to deal with hunger issues and population problems and as of DS9 stably revive dead solar systems you end up wondering why it's even remotely valid for the other side to claim other wise?

in any case the purpose of this thread was more me a humble new member tossing this out to you experts to make heads or tails of it while the empire casually builds and the old republic did as well far larger vessels and stations and in decent numbers the rapid construction of the second death star was very impressive when one considers how long the first one took to build - but the other side seems to have access to much higher end stuff and much easier

so yeah take it and run I'd like some thoughts and opinions from both sides on this. am i just horribly misinformed ? the Star Wars films portray a radical difference

oh and preemptive apology if this is in the wrong section

[Mr. Oragahn]

Well, I don't know how many of those large mushroom stations there were, but they appeared huge because the UFP ships aren't exactly that big to being with.
Some of the tallest stations were like 5 km tall, right? How many of them existed? 50? 100? Built over how long? Half a century or much more perhaps?
Not exactly huge, although what makes it huge is that the UFP's territory is far smaller than the GE's. Which means that in terms of production vs size, it does become to look impressive.

Truth being said, the DS has always been a problem. I tried to rationalize it to myself, first by assuming that the first DS took a lot of time to build, which was confirmed with ROTS. And that the second one was assembled in four years or so, which is already huge, but its construction debuted much earlier, perhaps even in parallel of the first one, with a delay of a decade or so. But there's not much evidence for it.

I tried once to begin a small essay on the cost of production of a Death Star, but the problem is that the references of prices in the EU are all over the place.
However, the West End Games rulebooks had extensive background information about the construction of the Death Star and the project itself.

Since I'm not finding time to go through it again, I may just throw the article under its very raw and skeleton form some day.

On a larger point of view, the industrialization in SW is huge, but the part devoted to the military isn't that huge at all in comparison. More so, it appears that budgetary constraints are also a serious break to the production capability. There's also contradictory details.

It's also possible that the Empire didn't have enough qualified crews to put on the ships it could have built.
When you look at it, the Death Star's crew is very small for its actual volume. The problem of a fleet is that the more warship bridges you have, the more crews you need.
The Death Star was very centralized in comparison.

There is no doubt that if the Emperor wanted it and devoted money and power to the construction of a huge fleet, it could have been possible to have a very huge one, but the amount of fuel and the crew requirements would have been an issue at first. Fuel, a bit less, since fusion fuel is easy to get, but crews, again, that's harder. Only much more academies would have allowed it.

[Mike DiCenso]

Well, I don't know how many of those large mushroom stations there were, but they appeared huge because the UFP ships aren't exactly that big to being with. Some of the tallest stations were like 5 km tall, right? How many of them existed? 50? 100? Built over how long? Half a century or much more perhaps?

Actually, the 6 km tall station was the original Earth orbiting Spacedock. The later Starbase 74, 84, 133, and Lya Alpha were vastly larger still. At least 13-14 km tall, and possibly as large as 18, depending on how you want to take your measurements. It would still take thousands of those stations to equal one Death Star, but if you compare them to the pre-DS stations of the Galactic Republic, they're quite huge, and possibly more numerous. Also bear in mind that the SB 74-type stations have vastly more internal volume than an Executor-class SSD does by a factor of 5.31 to 1.

In the Alternate Timeline of ST 2009, the Earth Spacedock station was vastly larger than it's Prime counterpart as the 700-1,000 m long Alt-E was ten times shorter in length than that station was wide!
-Mike

[Admiral Breetai]

I'm not sure how large the industrialization of the galaxy is when you have worlds like Naboo and Tatooine and the ability to project control out there being small capital being an exception

I can imagine the Deathstar taking a considerable drain on recruits and personnel but honestly if their industrial capacity and sheer size was anything like the EU just pulling a USSR and half assed training fodder and hurling them at the Rebs could of been a totally viable method of an easy victory

to mister O I doubt it would take decades to build those things that flies in the face of the shown production rates it'd also make them obsolete by the time they are Fed vessels seem to get larger and larger well the non war time fleets any ways. they also seemed to be able to cobble together large bases on the fly like..the one Admiral ross operated out of

[Trinoya]

The issue of industrial capacity has some room for debate.

The old republic is a logistical nightmare, it is in financial ruin, and is incapable of efficiently fighting wars. While 'some' of the vehicles that were employed had some practical applications they very rarely were used in such a manner and the reliance upon the Jedi was immense. Even prior to the war, the old republic was falling apart, slavery was rampant in systems right on the boarder, and other smaller groups had stronger industrial bases.


The Empire, however, consolidated a lot of this, disbanded the senate, and inhereted the strong industrial base of ALL the worlds of the republic and the sepretists around the vision of one man. The efficiency of the Empire is that the Emperor controls all and anything else is a mere illusion created to keep the masses in line.

The first death star was built in mass secrecy, it's technology unproven, and difficult to work with. The second death star was built in less than half the time. The industrial might involved in just these two actions is immense, and the fact that it was largely kept secret speaks volumes.


But the question is: Could the empires industrial might have been put to more practical purposes, like ship building. While certainly they could churn out more star destroyers the issue becomes the value of a star destroyer vs a death star. The death stars were weapons of fear, but one might be able to make an argument that they served a practical purpose, downsizing the need for more man power in the forms of sector fleets.


The game star wars rebellion illustrates this quite well. Early game the Empire has a hard time policing sectors. By the end of the game you generally would have a dedicated fleet for each sector that would respond to individual systems as needed to deal with attack. This was the cheapest option in the game.

However: When going on the offensive, consolidating territory and holding onto it was a nightmare if you didn't use the death star.


So simply put: The industrial might certainly does exist. The millions of system are there, and one could presume that if the empire had the manpower to crew them then they could ship spam to a pretty effective degree.

The issue wouldn't be building though, it would always be crewing the ships. The fleet at Endor was supposed to be an impressively large fleet, and that is backed up by every engagement in the clone wars. We see that hundreds of soldiers are generally enough to police a world (and with rapid response capability that may be true). Deathstars may very well reduce the crew capacity, while gaining fire power and a weapon of terror. Imagine if every major solar system had just ONE death star as opposed to several small fleets.


Cost effective, industrially efficient once they got the design down (and one could presume the bulk of it is most likely reproduced sections for industrial ease).

I digress, long winded and off topic does not suit anyone well:

Long story short: They could build the ships.. but if they could crew them remains to be seen. The imperial navy looked to be a well chosen, and extremely loyal bunch... and your average citizen wouldn't be.


The old republic, however, would be luck if they could industrialize their way out of the stone age, but how much of that is directly because of palpy is an unknown.

[Praeothmin]

I had a similar argument a while back, Trinoya, and what I was saying is that the DS itself surely has a crew large enough to crew a lot of ISDs.
The numbers I've seen for the DS were over 1 000 000 people.
It seems I was wrong.
Looking at the Wookiepedia entry on an ISD, it seems it needs a crew 37 000, not counting the troops stationed on the ship.
The DS I, according to SW.com, had a crew of around 260 000 people, so about 8 ISDs, and the DS II had twice that number of people.

So yeah, it depends on if they would have had the personnel to crew the shipd they built instead of a DS...

[Mr. Oragahn]

And considering you could get billions of ISDs out of a Death Star's volume.

The other problem with the Death Star is that it had so unique parts that once the Empire had put lots of money into that project, all it could build was more Death Stars, and any change of size or else would still require lots of money and redesign.
Scaling systems up wouldn't be a design nightmare, since you're basically asking everything to be more powerful or cover more area. But building the super sized versions, that's pricey, because your former tools were meant to built elements of a given size. Even if lots of the Death Star's padding is made up of modular parts, the essential gigantic elements are totally unique.

The Empire also used lots of slave labor, at least on the first one, which it would not do for the construction of traditional naval ships. That cut the costs.

As for the secrecy, I'm not so convinced on how it demonstrates anything. The Emperor controlled about everything. It really was a top down system with everything about being compartmentalized : the modules that would be used to fit inside destroyers or typical space stations were partly rerouted towards the Death Star, and the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. You can already see what happens with a large bureaucracy that tries being efficient: it's already a big mess, and you're driven nuts because no one knows what goes on.
Now think of a very centralized system where it actually make this situation worse, and it's relatively easy to see how such a project could be hidden in huge amounts of paperwork.
The final destination, the Max complex, surely had a many front names, so much that when one shipyard finally built X modules, and a percentage of that was meant to be used for the Death Star, all you had to do was move that percentage around the galaxy to planet A, B, C then station D, then planet E, F, and finally planet Cuckoo and Zantra which no one cared about, but which were both front names for the Maw installation.
With everyone safe the Emperor and his close lackeys being out of the loop, who would care or even be ringed over the unknown and lost destination of a shipment of totally boring amount of standardized spare parts?

No journos, no congress, and with space being desperately large and empty, it's quite easy to hide stuff in a remote hole of the galaxy, contrary to what you can do on Earth where everything is damn mapped and there aren't many holes to hide in, especially with all those satellites.
Heck, if you check out Iran as an example, with its half buried nuclear installation, it seems that the best spy agencies in the US can't really provide any proof of what they're looking for.

Since no shipyard would have to release official production numbers and since they could all be modified, and there were probably thousands of them involved, who could even begin to see that there was an increase of production and that some modules were not actually being integrated to space ships, space stations or ready to deploy prefab Imperial bases?

[Mr. Oragahn]

to mister O I doubt it would take decades to build those things that flies in the face of the shown production rates it'd also make them obsolete by the time they are Fed vessels seem to get larger and larger well the non war time fleets any ways. they also seemed to be able to cobble together large bases on the fly like..the one Admiral ross operated out of

That's quite a good point. How many new ship can actually enter the pre-TNG stations?
Still, the TNG+ ships don't strike me as particularly larger, safe for the few ones like Sovereign-class and the Galaxy-class. But then I don't keep tabs on ship sizes in Trek so that's an interesting topic.
They're often quite longer though.

[Praeothmin]

to mister O I doubt it would take decades to build those things that flies in the face of the shown production rates it'd also make them obsolete by the time they are Fed vessels seem to get larger and larger well the non war time fleets any ways. they also seemed to be able to cobble together large bases on the fly like..the one Admiral ross operated out of

That's quite a good point. How many new ship can actually enter the pre-TNG stations?
Still, the TNG+ ships don't strike me as particularly larger, safe for the few ones like Sovereign-class and the Galaxy-class. But then I don't keep tabs on ship sizes in Trek so that's an interesting topic.
They're often quite longer though.

Well, the Akira, Galaxy, Nebula and Sovereign are all much larger than an Excelsior, so any Mushroom station they fit in had to be constructed in TNG time...

[Admiral Breetai]

That's quite a good point. How many new ship can actually enter the pre-TNG stations?
Still, the TNG+ ships don't strike me as particularly larger, safe for the few ones like Sovereign-class and the Galaxy-class. But then I don't keep tabs on ship sizes in Trek so that's an interesting topic.
They're often quite longer though.

in wrath of khan the enterprise at least in search for Spock the big E and the USS excelsior and the thing looked like it had room for dozens of those suckers seeing how massive the interior looked compared to the two big E's

the newer ones made Galaxy class starships look like Match Box toys basically for a size comparison.

in any case people do keep talking about the deathstar and ISD's as proof but what about the large scale planetary engineering and the ease with which industrial replicators seem to be able to maintain large numbers and deal with losses

[Mike DiCenso]

And considering you could get billions of ISDs out of a Death Star's volume.

Not really. For a 120 km wide Death Star, you get an absolute maximum of 1.3 billion ISDs.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

to mister O I doubt it would take decades to build those things that flies in the face of the shown production rates it'd also make them obsolete by the time they are Fed vessels seem to get larger and larger well the non war time fleets any ways. they also seemed to be able to cobble together large bases on the fly like..the one Admiral ross operated out of

That's quite a good point. How many new ship can actually enter the pre-TNG stations?
Still, the TNG+ ships don't strike me as particularly larger, safe for the few ones like Sovereign-class and the Galaxy-class. But then I don't keep tabs on ship sizes in Trek so that's an interesting topic.
They're often quite longer though.

Well, the Akira, Galaxy, Nebula and Sovereign are all much larger than an Excelsior, so any Mushroom station they fit in had to be constructed in TNG time...

A Galaxy, Nebula, Sovereign, and similar sized TNG vessels are up to ten times the volume of a TOS-era ship. The E-D, for example is 642 x 470 x 140 meters while it's Constitution predecesor is 305 x 142 x 73 meters. That's quite a difference. So the space doors on SB 74 have to be at least 2.33 times larger to emit a GCS than they do for a Connie or Excelsior. Correspondingly, the rest of the base is the same size since for episodes like "11001001", all that was done was a reuse and rescaling of the ST:TSFS Spacedock footage to fit the new E-D footage that was shot for the episode.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Which means any such stations had to be made in the TNG era to accomodate such vessels.
How many such bases are there?

[Picard]

Unknown.

Numbering of Starbases suggests somwhere around 700 Starbases by TNG, but not all of them are as big as TNG Spacedock. Actually, Spacedocks are probably vast minority, few dozen at most, with most Starbases being medium-sized bases like Starbase 74, and some even being built on planetary surface.

[Cocytus]

Starbase 173 from "Measure of a Man" is also quite large. The main bay almost looks large enough to accomodate the Enterprise D.

http://tng.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/ ... man025.jpg

Anyway, while I don't doubt the industrial might of the Star Wars galaxy, the size discrepancy between ST and SW vessels to my mind has more to do with use and technological sophistication. Miniaturization in general seems more advanced in Star Trek, but the big issues I see are the transporter and the replicator. Without transporters, SW vessels need large internal bays to store landing craft, such as those on Home One et alia, as well as space for their fighter wings. ST ships have no fighters to store, and landing operations and other troop mobilization efforts can be conducted with the transporter. Remember Admiral Layton from "Homefront:"

Mister President, we can use the
Lakota's transporters and
communications system to mobilize
every Starfleet officer on Earth
in less than twelve hours.

A single Starfleet ship mobilizing every officer on Earth in less than 12 hours.

There's also the issue of food storage. With such large crews as they have SW vessels should require considerable space just for the storing of food, which contrasts with ST vessels of the 24th century where much of it is provided by replication. We do still hear of cooks and kitchens on these ships, which seem to be more for diplomatic functions (such as in "Lonely Among Us," where the Anticans thought replicated food "barbaric" and eventually asked the chefs to broil one of the opposing Selay.)