Challenge: Invade the Star Wars galaxy

[General Donner]

Yup, it is a fanmade calculation, made by Dalton, one of SDN's Warsie resident, and current Admin of the site if I'm not mistaken...

You can immediately see that, even if he states that his calc comes from Canon material, he then assumes maximum number of ships, assumes that the Empire can build such a fleet, because he assumes that the DS project takes no amount of ressources, and that the project barely dents the Imperial's budget... :)

I see a lot of ASSumptions in there... ;)

It's indeed fan calcs. Though not by Dalton, but rather a certain Marina O'Leary (AKA Commander Theleia of ASVS fame), better known today as the Duchess of Zeon over at SDN. IIRC it's based on a number of different books, but the "Imperial Sourcebook" primarily. That book does give substantial information about the Imperial military, which does also seem to contradict the numbers given for Star Destroyers elsewhere. Most specifically:

A Sector Group [of the Imperial Navy] can be expected to contain at least 2,400 ships, 24 of which are Star Destroyers, and another 1,600 combat starships. Thousands of Sector Groups are at the Emperor’s command as he seeks to bring the galaxy firmly under his control.

O'Leary makes a number of generous assumptions compiling his numbers, but even so, going by the bare bones of the sourcebook (two thousand fleets containing only the minimum number of ships stated here), we're looking at tens of thousands of ISDs and millions of warships total. So while SWST is still wrong, he's only off by perhaps an order of magnitude or so.

[Praeothmin]

I would invite you to present evidence of this.

So you can keep ignoring it again?
Yeah... No, I'm done wasting my time with you... :)

O'Leary makes a number of generous assumptions compiling his numbers, but even so, going by the bare bones of the sourcebook (two thousand fleets containing only the minimum number of ships stated here), we're looking at tens of thousands of ISDs and millions of warships total. So while SWST is still wrong, he's only off by perhaps an order of magnitude or so.

Still, when you consider that never, in any engagements, we see anything remotely approaching those numbers, or any force landing any credence to those numbers, which are basically shat on by the TCW, the movies (RotJ where 30-ish ships was greater than the entire Rebel fleet and was considered the biggest force the Empire could assemble un-noticed), and contradicted by other EU books (Zhan trilogy where 200 older Dreadnaughts could turn the war between the New Republic and the Imperial remnants)...

[StarWarsStarTrek]

And if there is visual contridiction in the specific example you may invoke that ruling. But all of my examples are canon.

Your examples are canon, mine are canon. Mine are from large scale battles (and some one v one ones), yours are one vs one. Logical conclusion: in large battles, 10 kilometers is the typical range. In small scale battles, it is sometimes BVR.

Of course, you will argue that Trek will use BVR ranges for all combat, but you would have to provide a justification for why those ranges will be used in pitched battles instead of the 10 kilometer ranges consistently seen. Explain why your pile of evidence should be considered more valid than mine.

Sigh. You previously argued this:

And I matched you example for example and challenged one.

As to the matter as a whole you have failed to prove a contridiction and indeed one of my examples explains a reasoning for closing with the enemy vessel in order to reduce reaction time. Therefore should they have reason to fire at an enemy vessel at tens of thousands of kilometers and can not easily close the distance as they have demostrated a prefrence for they will shoot it as each of my examples shows.

If they feel a need to close distance to reduce reaction times, surely there is nothing suggesting that they would not do the same thing in this scenario, also to "reduce reaction times".

And Damar is firing them all in a solitary salvo against a single point not spreading them around equally to try and maximize damage potentional. Which brings us back to a solitary, singular big blast which must reach out hundreds of kilometers.

Because you say so? Explain why Damar uses the word "spread".

Your quote also puts into question the claim that Trek ships can launch multiple torpedos simutaneously, as it is noted that he probably wouldn't get off more than one torpedo.

And, of course, there's the possibility that "a few hundred kilometers" is simple hyperbole, much like what the main Trek excuse for the many "molten slag" BDZ citations is.

I 'm eagerly awaiting this. The best I'm aware of would be Han's blaster blowing a hole in the dirt landing pit at Mos eisley.

When they are fighting in the Death Star, Han shoots several command consoles and the like when he, Luke and Chewie pose as stormtroopers, and you see superheated steam being created. The RotS novelization also mentions tri fighters being vaporized by laser cannons, although I will have to look it up for the quote.

Your mention of phaser firepower brings into question why packing creates and natural rock formations are still a viable source of cover in the 24th century. The logical explaination is that the phaser firepower you cite drains significant amounts of power, and thus constant use is impractical.

Not that such a thing is relavant, as Trek is absolutely stomped and ass-raped on the ground. In a fleet of 30,000 ships, you could not expect more than a million man army of redshirts against, in Coruscant alone, countless billions of law enforcement officers, military troops and civilians.

(of course, your response will be to feverently deny that any civilians will volunteer in the face of their homeworlds being attacked, and that they will all surrender immediately. You will say this in spite of all common sense, statistics and the real canon fact that the GA military is a purely volunteer force)

<snip>

All self-demostrating I would think.

And all irrelevant. All but one quantify weapons in the megajoule range, which is the energy of a DC15 rifle on full power, or the energy needed to vaporize a female's entire torso (Star Wars: Fatal Alliance). Probably less than the energy needed to turn a wampa into dust (Empire Strikes Back).

I'll also note that 100 meter thermal bombs used by prison guards exist in Star Wars, thermal detonators are standard issue and vaporize anything within a 10 meter radius and guided rocket launchers have an effective range of 50 kilometers. Obviously, I will get my citations as soon as I fix up my desktop computer.

I'll also note that you fail to explain how the Federation penetrates planetary shields, or how its ground forces deal with armored vehicles and walkers such as the AT-AT, gunships such as the LAAT, heavy combat droids such as YVH hunters or droidekas and the various other scary shit that a combined arms military has and a bunch of retards wearig pajamas don't.

Uncounted quadrillions, not tens or hundreds, for the Galaxy as a whole and G-canon Trillion living on Coruscant.

Silly argument, "uncounted" implies the possibility of anything within the realm of "quadrillions", 100 quadrilion is indeed a plural quadrillion and thus fits with the quote, not to mention with mathematics (indeed, basic population growth formulas would indicate a populations in the quintillions, assuming 25,000 years of growth).

G-canon of there being Trillions only in the Republic shortly before the start of the clonewars.

Which is at odds with both my equally canon quote, the Essential Atlas and various other EU sources. If you assume only "trillions" of citizens in the galaxy; and, by your reasoning, this would be only 9 trillion at the most, and one million planets with life on them in the Republic, you would be left with one around one million people per planet.

This does not fit with population growth trends. In just a matter of centuries the American colonies had millions of civilians, and they had to deal with constant warfare, bad nutruition and plagues that routinely killed off 1/3 of the population. Over the projection of 25,000 years without these problems, my quadrillions model fits better.

But why am I bothering? I know how much you hate inductive reasoning, and will dismiss it on a whim.

Major Coruscant port handls millions of tons of supplies and thousands and thousands of people.

Millions of tons sounds about right for a single port, thousands and thousands of people is somewhat low, but still fine as well. We have no idea how many of these ports Coruscant has. Obviously more than one.

Hundred thousand worlds of the Old Republic which reinforces the view Tarkin was making a sweep of territory breadth with his million systems remark.

"sweep of territory breadth" means what exactly? That he also included sparsely inhabited colonies? Unlikely, as the Empire has over 50 million colony planets. That he was claiming uninhabited planets as imperial planets to inflate its numbers in his mind? If that were true, he would have mentioned hundreds of billions of planets that the Empire could claim on a whim, with nobody there to challenge it since...they're uninhabited, regardless of whether the Empire actually had any use for those worlds or could even access them. Tarkin may be arrogant, but the Star Wars: Death Star novel does show moments of considering his weaknesses and analyzing things objectively; he is not so delusional and stupid as to inflate the size of the Empire drastically within his own mind.

100,000 worlds likely simply means member "worlds" (which may be different from "planet") with enough population to be considered a world and not a territory, ie sparsely inhabited colonies.

I think this covered the basics of your previous post, please fill free to restate anything you feel I have overlooked or bypassed.

Sure, you have. You have failed to explain planetary shields, numerical disparities without dismissing any inductive reasoning or logic on a whim as invalid, your logistics, the construction of the Death Star...

[StarWarsStarTrek]

So you can keep ignoring it again?
Yeah... No, I'm done wasting my time with you... :)

Fine by me. But then do not accuse me of dishonesty or ignoring evidence. I straight up asked you to respost it (which you could have done faster than it would have taken for you to type up this post and your several other attacks against me), and you refused for absolutely no reason. You see, if you actually posted the evidence and I ignored it, you'd have definite proof of my dishonesty. For now, you just have nonexistant evidence you claim exists.

Still, when you consider that never, in any engagements, we see anything remotely approaching those numbers, or any force landing any credence to those numbers, which are basically shat on by the TCW, the movies (RotJ where 30-ish ships was greater than the entire Rebel fleet and was considered the biggest force the Empire could assemble un-noticed), and contradicted by other EU books (Zhan trilogy where 200 older Dreadnaughts could turn the war between the New Republic and the Imperial remnants)...

Feel free to show me what episode the Federation amassed its thirty thousand ship fleet on screen at once. I'd really enjoy watching that one.

Oh, and by the way, the idea that the United States has 12 aircraft carriers is bull. There is absolutely no video evidence showing them all together in a battle, nor is there, for that matter, any video evidence of the army's supposed 1.2 million soldiers fighting all at once. Therefore it must not exist.





And thank you, general, for your citation. Assuming 1000 sectors, we actually have a very accurate 24,000 star destroyers, which most of you here agree with, so I fail to see how this violates the other canon statement of 25,000 star destroyers at all, or darkstar's on fan calcs. This also fits strangely well with Dodonna calcs if you assume that he is referring to the DS's turbolasers. 1600 combat starships would mean 1,600,000 "combat starships" (ie frigates, corvettes, etc), far more than the Federation's nonexistant 30,000 ships fleet. Remember that 99% of the Federation's ships are smaller than an ISD and more similar in size to a frigate or corvette, so the Empire has the numbers advantage by a huge margin.

[Admiral Breetai]

sonofccn, these are all numbers SWST is aware of, as they have been given to him on numerous occasions in previous posts...

then perhaps it's time to warn him for lying? and dodging our arguments? because he's ran from myself and mojo

"Look out there, Anakin. A trillion beings on this planet alone — in the galaxy as awhole, uncounted quadrillions — and of them all, I have chosen you, Anakin Skywalker, to be the heir to my power. To all that I am."

Uncounted quadrillions, not tens or hundreds, for the Galaxy as a whole and G-canon Trillion living on Coruscant.

The massive towers of the Republic Executive Building loomed above it all, seeming as if they would reach the very heavens. And that seemed fitting indeed, for inside, even at this early hour, the events and participants took on godlike stature to the trillions of common folk of the Republic

G-canon of there being Trillions only in the Republic shortly before the start of the clonewars.
.

well that's interesting the vast majority of the population lies in the core worlds then? With planets like Curoscant Alsaka and all the mega cities in the EU with hundreds of millions or..tens of billions plus the capitals trillion figure

you could very well have over half the population of the republic concentrated in one Sector, this is a staggering weakness and directly contradicts the trillions of vessels figure

Now Mike, please feel free to tell me which of the 24 new posts directed at me I should refute. Shall I take another two hours to respond to each and every of them? But they're mainly redundant. But if one of these posts contains anything unique or special from another, I will get jumped for "ignoring evidence" and "dishonesty".

you could reply to me you liar and prove to me where your bullshit quadrillions of vessels comes from..and answer to me why a trek power would take multidecades to get home when they have hurled themselves across the galaxy many times

[Mike DiCenso]

sonofccn, these are all numbers SWST is aware of, as they have been given to him on numerous occasions in previous posts...

I would invite you to present evidence of this. I would also invite you to refudiate the various justifications I have presented for not being able to rebute every last post directed at me, the latest being that my desktop computer's harddrive just died.

Now Mike, please feel free to tell me which of the 24 new posts directed at me I should refute. Shall I take another two hours to respond to each and every of them? But they're mainly redundant. But if one of these posts contains anything unique or special from another, I will get jumped for "ignoring evidence" and "dishonesty".

Sigh. Here in lies the problem. I understand that real life concerns take precedent over all of this, so I don't care about that. What I do care about is when you do respond, that you at least not pretend like you were being presented the information as though for the very first time ever. That is dishonesty. And really, go look up our previous Warsie resident extraordinaire, Kane Starkiller. While we all largely disagreed with him, he did at least acknowledge the Trek evidence, and he would also have to deal with multiple opposing debaters. The thing is Kane took time to address the salient points that everyone brought up in one big long post in a thread, and he did not jump around to multiple threads and get in over his head that way.

Furthermore take a page from General Donner, who takes time and choses carefully how and when he responds to others, and in particular takes an informative role, rather than combative role. His providing information in this thread is a great example of that. Everyone respects him. Or at least I do, anyway.

The Dude, aka, Corporal Kendal is another such person who takes an informative stance when defending Star Wars or SDN, even. Do we always agree with him? No. But he is highly liked and respected around here, and we do wish he was not retired from Versus debating as he is a rare reasonable debater.

But this isn't the first time this has been given to you as advice, which is why patience is running thin around here.
-Mike

[sonofccn]

Of course, you will argue that Trek will use BVR ranges for all combat

I have never stated Trek will use BVR in all engagments. I have argued that they have the capability and should the need become apparent they can do so.

but you would have to provide a justification for why those ranges will be used in pitched battles instead of the 10 kilometer ranges consistently seen.

Because there is no conflict between your "evidence" and my "evidence". It would be like saying a rifle could not hit a target at X meters because you've seen them shooting at Y meters. To force a conflict you must have several examples of them being unable to target something in the tens of thousands of kilometers range. So for you have not provided that.

If they feel a need to close distance to reduce reaction times, surely there is nothing suggesting that they would not do the same thing in this scenario, also to "reduce reaction times".

They likely will however that doesn't prevent them from firing at longer ranges as demostrated with eight seperate examples spanning every variant of Star Trek live action series.

Because you say so? Explain why Damar uses the word "spread".

Very well

here

PICARD
Mister Worf. Photon torpedos.
Maximum yield, full spread.

WORF
Aye.

Worf touches the panel as though it's his final act.

30 EXT. SPACE - THE ENTERPRISE (OPTICAL)

A full spread of photon torpedos fires away, hitting
the probe. There is a tremendous explosion.

The E-D fires a salvo of torpedoes, a clutch of them etc.

Your quote also puts into question the claim that Trek ships can launch multiple torpedos simutaneously, as it is noted that he probably wouldn't get off more than one torpedo.

Multiple and rapid firing of torpedoes has been demostrated with Federation vessels. Now the ship in question would be a Klingon Bird of prey a smaller type of vessel and I do not off hand know if it can actually fire a spread of torpedoes or not but that doesn't change anything.

As a Klingon Bird of Prey uncloaks at the station.

23A INT. DOCKING RING CORRIDOR

GUL DUKAT warmly embraces his daughter, ZIYAL. Dukat
is dressed in a grab bag of Klingon and Cardassian
clothing and equipment.

DUKAT
Ziyal.

ZIYAL
It's so good to see you, Father.

DUKAT
Your message said that it was
urgent I come to the station.
What's wrong?

Kira steps forward and Dukat notices her for the first
time.

KIRA
I can answer that.

CUT TO:

24 INT. HABITAT RING CORRIDOR

Kira has just explained their mission to Dukat and he's
not happy about it.

DEEP SPACE NINE: "Apocalypse... " - REV. 07/19/96 - ACT ONE 14.

24 CONTINUED:

DUKAT
Major, I must say, I'm shocked.
You used my daughter to lure me
here. You're asking me to risk my
ship on some fool's errand into
the Klingon Empire. And you're
pregnant. I hope First Minister
Shakaar appreciates what a lucky
man he is.

And, of course, there's the possibility that "a few hundred kilometers" is simple hyperbole, much like what the main Trek excuse for the many "molten slag" BDZ citations is.

Oddly precise and lacking in artistic or descriptive licence that such terms as "molten slag" or "vaporize" can be used for.

When they are fighting in the Death Star, Han shoots several command consoles and the like when he, Luke and Chewie pose as stormtroopers, and you see superheated steam being created.

You looked at the pictures I provided correct? We are talking about a metal disc roughly six feet across and six inches to a foot thick going off the old mark I eyeball. Blowing up a console, even with super heated steam, doesn't approach the the firepower of that example much less my three others.

The RotS novelization also mentions tri fighters being vaporized by laser cannons, although I will have to look it up for the quote.

Which we see said battle in the movie and it doesn't involve literial vaporization as well that is a fighter grade weaponry a bit like comparing the gun on a F-16 to a grunt's M-16 rifle.

Your mention of phaser firepower brings into question why packing creates and natural rock formations are still a viable source of cover in the 24th century.

For one obviously not everyone fires at level sixteen. And second "packing crates" require special material to effect cover.

On Sisko and Eddington, hiding behind some storage
drums. Phaser fire flashes over their heads. Sisko
looks approvingly at the drums.

SISKO
Duridium. That should hold them
off for a while.
(turns to Eddington)
I thought you said the Jem'Hadar
would never find this place.

The logical explaination is that the phaser firepower you cite drains significant amounts of power, and thus constant use is impractical.

Not a paticular serious limit.

TRACEY: No messages. Kirk, the savage in the cell with you. Did you set him free? You sent him, Kirk. You sent him to warn the tribes! The Yangs must've been warned. They sacrificed hundreds just to draw us out in the open. And then they came, and they came. We drained four of our phasers, and they still came. We killed thousands and they still came.

And Trace had his phaser set to disintergrate which would take up the most juice as evident here sometime before the battle

Here
here
and here

In addition if you wish to argue use of phasers at high power is prevenativly energy intensive it would fall to you to provide evidence to support your theroy. Merely using "logic", which oddly seems to magnify the setting your prefer and downgrade the setting you don't, would be insufficent.

Not that such a thing is relavant, as Trek is absolutely stomped and ass-raped on the ground.

You are free to proof this assumption but merely restating it does not make it true.

In a fleet of 30,000 ships, you could not expect more than a million man army of redshirts against

The previous time I asked for how you were calculating men you stated something to the effect of there being only a few hundred people on board and that being the max you could squeeze out of the armada however such a broad statment is uncorrect. A vessel such as a galaxy class starship carries a compliment of over a thousand and in times of war:

TASHA
(re: the new Enterprise)
She was the first Galaxy Class
warship built by the Federation...
forty-two decks... capable of
transporting over six thousand
troops...

Admittedly this is from an alternate timeline due to the Enterprise-C being catapulted in time but the Enterprise-D appears the same beyond cosmetic differences. The same model is used for the ship, nothing indicates its massively larger than its main time variant.

Now plugging in that troop compliment for your 30,000 fleet, just for giggles, 180,000,000 soldiers. Now of course a fleet would hardly be composed of Galaxy class starships but it is equally absurd to expect military warships to ferry ground pounders. Instead it is far more likely they used something akin to this:

PICARD
Until the arrival of a colony
transport ship equipped with
dedicated personnel shuttles

A dedicated transport ship in addition to their fleet to carry soldiers.

in Coruscant alone, countless billions of law enforcement officers, military troops and civilians.

(of course, your response will be to feverently deny that any civilians will volunteer in the face of their homeworlds being attacked, and that they will all surrender immediately.

Considering they didn't enlist in mass for the Clone Wars, fought primarly between clones and droids, that throwing brigades can conqure a planet like Utapa thrice over ect no I do not expect to meet massive, organized militia resiestence. As to the army any data you can provide to the Coruscant armed forces at the time in question would be apreciated but I see no reason to assume in the absence of evidence ungodly huge forces.

You will say this in spite of all common sense, statistics and the real canon fact that the GA military is a purely volunteer force)

G and T canon support a generaly passive populace easily conqured and ruled with minute sized armies changing the scales of power. That is the universe you wish to debate and all "common sense" and "statistics" can not alter that fact.

And all irrelevant. All but one quantify weapons in the megajoule range

One on a test setting and the other firing every three miliseconds for about 1.5 gigajoules per second.

which is the energy of a DC15 rifle on full power, or the energy needed to vaporize a female's entire tors

You will need to provide more data, is this stated as full power discharge of a dc15 rifle or a calc.

Probably less than the energy needed to turn a wampa into dust

That would be a probe droid and its a weapon not observed in the movie or if I'm not mistaken ever again.

I'll also note that 100 meter thermal bombs used by prison guards exist in Star Wars, thermal detonators are standard issue and vaporize anything within a 10 meter radius and guided rocket launchers have an effective range of 50 kilometers.

And the Federation has photon grenades with a lethal range as to provoke this:

KIRK: An evaluation, Mister Kelowitz. Where do you think they are?
KELOWITZ: If I were them, I'd go to the high ground on the right. I make it twelve hundred yards, azimuth eighty seven. It's pretty close for one of these little jewels, Captain.

Obviously, I will get my citations as soon as I fix up my desktop computer.

If you are having problems which interfere with your debating I recomend delaying until they are resolved, there is not time limit and it would save time in the long run so that you can provide your arguments with sufficent backing.

I'll also note that you fail to explain how the Federation penetrates planetary shields

I condensed the arguments to the basics, altering the basic underpinnings of what you were arguing I felt sufficent changed the situation that such secondary concerns would needlessly clutter up my post. However to Coruscant's plantary shield I'd recomend concetration of fire from multiple vessels, as evident with the existence of torpedo spheres the shield matrix would be weak to such an attack.

how its ground forces deal with armored vehicles and walkers such as the AT-AT

Photon grenade, beam soldiers aboard it, use phasers to dig a pit for it, string cable in front of it, employ a shuttle, fire volleys of high powered phaser rifle shots at it.

gunships such as the LAAT

Shuttle or a Runabout.

heavy combat droids such as YVH hunters or droidekas

Phasers. Droidekas can be instantly overwhelmed by fighter grade weapronry, and fail to have shields while on the move, which is not overly impressive as observed at Genosis as the fighters and LAATs mixed it up. YVH hunters you have not quantified so obviously I can not speak with certainity.

and the various other scary shit that a combined arms military has and a bunch of retards wearig pajamas don't.

Please make your argument and leave such "colorful" termilogy where it belongs.

Silly argument, "uncounted" implies the possibility of anything within the realm of "quadrillions"

No. For starters that would be an overly literal and inane reading of the quote. Second it would involve warping G-canon to try and make it fit with C-canon when the reverse is what must happen.

It takes no more effort for Palpy to say hundreds of quadrillions and would further underscore the case he is making. Instead he says there is a possibility in the universe that there are uncounted quadrillions in the galaxy hardly what he would say if there were 100 quadrillion people living in the Republic.

Which is at odds with both my equally canon quote, the Essential Atlas and various other EU sources.

You have provided no quote equal to G-canon supporting more than Trillions in the Republic. Your prefered interpepation of a quote is merely made that much more unworkable that is all.

and, by your reasoning, this would be only 9 trillion at the most, and one million planets with life on them in the Republic, you would be left with one around one million people per planet.

Hundred thousand worlds in the Republic not one million.

This does not fit with population growth trends. In just a matter of centuries the American colonies had millions of civilians, and they had to deal with constant warfare, bad nutruition and plagues that routinely killed off 1/3 of the population. Over the projection of 25,000 years without these problems, my quadrillions model fits better.

One can not overrule G-canon with fan calculations. That way leads to anarchy.

Millions of tons sounds about right for a single port, thousands and thousands of people is somewhat low, but still fine as well. We have no idea how many of these ports Coruscant has. Obviously more than one.

It is not obvious from the quote there is more than one port. It speaks of docks and mentions millions of tons of supplies needed to keep the city-planet alive. This industrial sector port could very well be the sole port on the planet.

"sweep of territory breadth" means what exactly?

That he's speaking of the Empire's territoral claims, ie he's speaking about the Empire as a whole.

That he also included sparsely inhabited colonies?

Among other territoral possesions yes.

Unlikely, as the Empire has over 50 million colony planets

From a C-canon source. I have provided G-canon the Republic which the Empire sprang from had a hundred thousand worlds which means the Empire would have had to expand ten fold merely to posses a million worlds much less your view of a million member worlds plus assorted holdings.

In addition you have not provided any cause or reason why Tarkin, boasting about how he'd keep the systems in line, would limit himself to merely members when he could easily add an "s" to the end of million and further the point he was trying to make.

That he was claiming uninhabited planets as imperial planets to inflate its numbers in his mind? If that were true, he would have mentioned hundreds of billions of planets that the Empire could claim on a whim, with nobody there to challenge it since...they're uninhabited, regardless of whether the Empire actually had any use for those worlds or could even access them. Tarkin may be arrogant, but the Star Wars: Death Star novel does show moments of considering his weaknesses and analyzing things objectively; he is not so delusional and stupid as to inflate the size of the Empire drastically within his own mind.

It is simple. Tarkin says the million systems of the empire and a system refers to a solitary planet. Ergo the Empire lays claim to a million worlds, the gradiant of worlds between colonies, craven lead populace or uninhabited world with a fluttering Imperial flag on it are not important.

100,000 worlds likely simply means member "worlds" (which may be different from "planet") with enough population to be considered a world and not a territory, ie sparsely inhabited coloni

It says worlds in refrence to the Republic. That is extremely straightforward. There is no need or warrent to imagine "world" means anything else but a world.

Sure, you have. You have failed to explain planetary shields, numerical disparities without dismissing any inductive reasoning or logic on a whim as invalid, your logistics, the construction of the Death Star...

For must of this would be a move away from arguing over specifics to instead better flesh out the general universe and you are free to provide evidence the Death Star's mass can be transfered on a 1 to 1 ratio into making conventual warships.

[Lucky]

(of course, your response will be to feverently deny that any civilians will volunteer in the face of their homeworlds being attacked, and that they will all surrender immediately. You will say this in spite of all common sense, statistics and the real canon fact that the GA military is a purely volunteer force)

What is this GA military you are talking about?

It only takes a battalion or three to take a planet.

[General Donner]

Still, when you consider that never, in any engagements, we see anything remotely approaching those numbers, or any force landing any credence to those numbers, which are basically shat on by the TCW, the movies (RotJ where 30-ish ships was greater than the entire Rebel fleet and was considered the biggest force the Empire could assemble un-noticed), and contradicted by other EU books (Zhan trilogy where 200 older Dreadnaughts could turn the war between the New Republic and the Imperial remnants)...

The Rebel fleet in the films I have no problem with being small. The Rebels were supposed to be a small, fledgling band, after all. Imperial failure to concentrate larger forces at Endor is easily chalked up to overconfidence, and/or other such "human error" reasons.

Now, the vast majority of the EU novels were what we'd call "minimalistic" and did often go against those numbers by implication if not explicitly. Numbers like those in the ISB showed up primarily in the RPG books. But there were also exceptions, such as the famous Gholondreine-Beta incident. The Black Fleet books, while often maligned by the SDN camp for minimalisms of various kinds, offered thousands of warships for the New Republic when it only encompassed some ten thousand planets (to be contrasted to the Empire's millions). Even the Thrawn Trilogy did mention "sector fleets" -- that would be the last book in the series IIRC.

Taken together, back then I don't think the millions+ numbers were really very unreasonable. Especially not considering the scale of the galaxy at large. Or the Death Star itself, for that matter. (In the old Technical Journal, building the whole thing took only two years, and it was done in secret.)

Nowadays, with the prequels and Clone Wars cartoon systematically destroying the EU I used to like? The whole galaxy probably has a smaller combined fleet than the US Coast Guard, going by the latest incarnation of Lucas's nebulous "vision" of Star Wars. I was just out to clarify misunderstandings about what the WEG books actually say.

[sonofccn]

@General Donner
Well for me there being fifty thousand star destroyers and millions of "support ships" ranging from corvetts to strike cruisers doesn't radically alter my view of the GE. Space is very big and a million systems is a lot of worlds easy to see how Star Destroyers, the big boys in charge of keeping order and peace, could be "lost" doing patrol, assigned guard duty over vital areas we didn't see or in spacedock being overhauled.

Hell even TCW the way they can keep spamming three packs of venators for a war which spans across unknown number of starsystems, and which Generals such as Anakin have lost most if not all of their fleet in some of them, suggests to me "big" numbers even if they are far short of SDN view.

The Black Fleet books, while often maligned by the SDN camp for minimalisms of various kinds

Just out of curosity what didn't they like? From what little I know of the subject they were a more militant "Tom Clancyish" take on Star Wars. I would have thought they'd have liked that.

[General Donner]

Well for me there being fifty thousand star destroyers and millions of "support ships" ranging from corvetts to strike cruisers doesn't radically alter my view of the GE. Space is very big and a million systems is a lot of worlds easy to see how Star Destroyers, the big boys in charge of keeping order and peace, could be "lost" doing patrol, assigned guard duty over vital areas we didn't see or in spacedock being overhauled.

Generally, I'd agree. The RPG books went on record saying it was rare for any single planet to see more than one ISD at once ... which makes sense, since even on the higher end there were only one or two for every ten thousand planets in the Sector fleets. And the Empire never really had any good reason to gather large forces in any one place, since they also had little large-scale opposition.

The same explanation doesn't really work as well for the Clone Wars, though, when there's an actual war going on and battles over major worlds are being fought.

Just out of curosity what didn't they like? From what little I know of the subject they were a more militant "Tom Clancyish" take on Star Wars. I would have thought they'd have liked that.

Standard stuff about how everything wasn't awesome enough, for the most part. The author also went on record online saying he didn't believe Coruscant could be an entire planetwide city for various reasons and tried to retcon it as only partially urbanized. You can guess how well that went with the ASVS/SDN crowd.

At least some of them did seem to somewhat appreciate an author who actually knew something about how militaries work, though. In sharp contrast to the more cartoonish approach taken by KJA in particular.

[Mr. Oragahn]

@General Donner
Well for me there being fifty thousand star destroyers and millions of "support ships" ranging from corvetts to strike cruisers doesn't radically alter my view of the GE. Space is very big and a million systems is a lot of worlds easy to see how Star Destroyers, the big boys in charge of keeping order and peace, could be "lost" doing patrol, assigned guard duty over vital areas we didn't see or in spacedock being overhauled.

Hell even TCW the way they can keep spamming three packs of venators for a war which spans across unknown number of starsystems, and which Generals such as Anakin have lost most if not all of their fleet in some of them, suggests to me "big" numbers even if they are far short of SDN view.

The Black Fleet books, while often maligned by the SDN camp for minimalisms of various kinds

Just out of curosity what didn't they like? From what little I know of the subject they were a more militant "Tom Clancyish" take on Star Wars. I would have thought they'd have liked that.

The books weren't bad, and the overall themes a bit more mature than usual, however iirc there was totally useless, irrelevant, off topic arc about that artefact ship Lando and some droids kept chasing and then explored. I don't know why it was crammed into the main plot, it completely killed the tension, and if the plan was to give a SW story a feeling of Star Trek in your typical let's be amazed at some big dumb thing (V'ger, whale probe, dyson sphere, etc.), well then it completely failed. That trilogy could be much more dynamic without that stuff, and would be reduced to a duology very easily.

[StarWarsStarTrek]

Fucking silly piece of fucking...

My response was reset after I went to google to search something up and pressed "back" to get back to my posting page. Gah...

EDIT: btw, from a realism/logically consistent standpoint, do you guys prefer a minimalist interpretation of Star Wars or a Saxtonian view, if you absolutely had to choose one? Does 200 gigatons per shot from a turbolaser strike you as more crazy than 4 million soldiers fighting a galactic war?

[Mike DiCenso]

That's a false dilemma fallacy. There are other alternatives, especially since both are extremely silly choices to make. It's abundantly clear that Star Wars conventional forces are not anywhere near as powerful as the Saxtonian model, and it is hard to say if the clone troopers are the one and only military forces as we have seen them providing heavy combat support to modest or fairly decently equipped local militia forces on worlds like Ryloth, Utapa, Mon Calamari, and Kashyyyk. So tens of millions of high-quality, well-equipped clone trooper numbers to back up billions of regular planetary militia troops. No big stretch there.

As for computer problems when you reply, I suggest high lighting what you have typed up to a point, then copy it when you go to open another window so that if an error occurs that wipes out what is in the Post a reply window, you can just paste it right back in there again.
-Mike

[Mike DiCenso]

While I'm sure that there is some distortion due to the camera angle being about 20 or so degrees off-center relative to the Defiant's bolts, I think it's safe to say that my numbers are within a reasonable margin of error. But only about 30 percent or so at most given it is a three quarters view.

There's just as much distortion when we're looking at the Defiant. The camera is not right in front of the ship, and we get a good idea of where the camera is located regarding the bolts and the target in the second sequence since the bolts clearly zap close to the viewers' fov.
The tails of the right bolts points to the lower left corner of the video, that after passing just next to "us". There's no doubt that that 3/4 angle when we see the comet is about the same as the 3/4 when we see the Defiant.
So no. The salvo is clearly narrowed on x.

Right, but we don't care as much about the Defiant angle, except to give us a general idea of the distortion. The bolts themselves as they head to the comet and impact it are far more important.

Like I said before, it is quite likely that my numbers are extremely conservative given the effects as well as other parameters such as the unusual spherical shape of the comet nucleus itself, which not only indicates an extremely high density, but also ups the volume of the thing considerably over a more natural shape where the long axis might be 2 km wide, but the short axis only 1 or so km, reducing the total volume.

They could actually be way more conservative.

I disagree, since we know fairly well what the angle is, and I have gone through a range of possible sizes. But for the sake of arguement, let's go over it. 100 meters is typical phaser seperation for a 170 meter offically sized Defiant. So we say get 1,900 m to 2 km for the comet, less the .25 is 1,500, and 900 m on a 125 meter Defiant. The lowest energies you get out of this are 48 megatons and 232 megatons respectively.

But we can compensate for all of this since nothing else is really changed, especially since the comet nucleus itself is a near-perfect sphere and is going to look unchanged regardless of the angle. What we only need do is get a relative proportion of bolt width size to comet size and go from there.

Also I have yet to see you present any real argument or objection with regards to my calculations.

I already pointed out that the width between the bolts of a salvo you used is narrower than the distance on x between the phaser banks on the Defiant. That would make the quite comet smaller; almost twice as small in fact.
Your size estimation is a good one but no way the real conservative one. That is the point.

No, it is not. The narrower bolts are the ends of the ones closest to the comet, thus giving us a far more accurate reading than using ones furthest from it, which would yeild an unnecessary lower limit.

The effects are hardly tame, especially when we consider that the bolts are burrowing down through the comet's material, then releasing their energies inside the dense silithium core.

That's the theory? Because I can't remember anyone in the show pointing out that this was what the bolts were supposed to do. Not to say that I don't know where you're pull that burrowing phaser bolt theory from. I don't remember anything like as far as the Defiant's weapons are concerned.

Again, go back re-read the dialog provided earlier in thread. The original plan had been to modify the phasers to allow for even vaporization, much like what the E-D did in "Masks". So that actually works against you here since the bolts in the phasers had been sabotaged so they fired in normal mode instead of in the moded form, thus they punched through into the comet like bullets through an apple, and caused it to heat unevenly when it hits the dense silithium core.

That model fits everything; the visuals as I have provided, the timing, the fact that we see clear DET-like effects in the internal, centrally located glow inside the comet after several hits from the phaser bolts with more bolts on the way to provide more energy, and we see clear surface cracking across one whole hemisphere merely 2 seconds when it blows up completely.

And it doesn't matter. You don't seem to grasp what DET means, despite years now arguing about planetary blasts, chain reaction, Alderaan, Scorpion, so on and so forth.
Look, it's simple. It doesn't really matter how dense the core is. If there were megatons worth of fire poured into the core, it would be immediately visible. Now, if for some reason, the bolts were behaving like bunker busters and burrowing with little thermal expense, and then blowing up inside every time, you'd still get massive blasts coming through the very holes dug by the bolts.
We get none of that. Just some fancy glowing and some rather weird cracking.
That's a chain reaction, and phasers are well known to produce such effects: hitting on and on, either in bursts or with a long continuous beam, and then the target blowing up.

I do grasp it. Ease off with the insults. If you could show me where there is real weirdness, like planar rings, the comet sitting perfectly pristine for seconds with no effects until well after the last phaser bolt has hit it, you might have a reasonable objection. As it stands, even granting the slightly off factors, it's still a very DET-like effect compared to most seen in Trek or sci-fi shows and movies in general.

Have I been saying it is all DET? No. But I do suggest there is an equivalency at the very least, and that's all I've been calculating here so far.

Again, refer to the images I've posted here, the initial, and very significant internal heating and thermal expansion occurs well before even the last of the bolts has reached the comet and the thing explodes only a second or two after, if even that.

Now, do you have any real quantifiable objections, other than handwaving? I think it's safe to say that this should go down as one of the higher-end Trek firepower examples.
-Mike

It just shows that the final effect blew the comet into plenty of bits, which I don't deny. But that's the final effect.


Proof that it's funky otherwise the heating producing that cracking would already manifest itself under the form of geysers of ejecta worth of countless megatons.
This does not happen. It can't be simpler, really.

My real quantifiable objections are clearly valid for someone who gets what direct energy transfer means. You can't heat up a rock like some homogeneous oven if you are the one delivering the necessary petawatts to do so, and yet get none of the most expected immediate blast effects and nuclear fire geysers you know. One just doesn't go without the other.
It wouldn't be the first time that phasers turn out to be able to heat up some object in a short timeframe, yet without damaging it at the very point of impact (I'm thinking of Sulu's trick on a rock in TOS for example).

No, we don't see an obvious geyser of material, though there is that suface impact glow that could be that as the phasers punch holes into the comet turning the material into super-heated plasma that would not be readily visible. The big issue is why that is not causing the comet to suddenly accelerate and wobble about, but that's something else entirely.

And I disagree with the comparison to Sulu's "Enemy Within" phaser since he was using three beams to evenly heat the surface area of the boulder. A better comparison would be to the explosive effects of Kirk's phaser rifle in "Where no Man Has Gone Before" or Dr. Crater's phaser pistol on the rock columns in "Man Trap". But the Defiant's phasers did far more even than that, which is the point. Any debris we see leftover is insignificant to the overall original mass, even if you could claim the little tiny sparkling bits in the explosion were debris, they still don't even add up to enough mass to explain away the disappearance of 99 percent of the rest of the comet's mass.
-Mike