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Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Thu Feb 25, 2016 3:46 am
by Moff Tarquin
I think everybody here knows that I tend to inflate Star Trek weapon yields dramatically beyond the commonly accepted figures. It might therefore surprise you to know that I actually think that the Galactic Empire would be more than capable of crushing the Federation beneath its heel if it started acting intelligently. With a population in the hundreds of trillions and the capacity to build moon-sized battlestations, the right actions taken quickly enough would allow them to stand firm against a power with ships thousands of times as combat effective as their own.

This is due to the magic of something called "Lanchester's Laws."

Basically, the strength of a military force scales linearly with the combat-effectiveness of a given unit, but scales with the square of the number of units. A ten-fold advantage in quantity makes up for a hundred-fold disadvantage in quality.

Most folks here agree that Federation weaponry is in the double-digit megaton to single-digit gigaton range, while Imperial weaponry is in the triple-digit kiloton to single-digit megaton range (I differ, giving the Empire double-to-triple-digit megatons, and the Federation single-digit gigatons to single-digit teratons for ship-to-ship weapons), and that this disparity is compounded by an even greater gap in effective range and tactical mobility. However, most here also agree that the Empire has a substantially larger fleet than the Federation. The question is, just how much larger?

Now, I will concede that the best evidence we have indicates that the actual difference between the Empire as of RoTJ and the post-Dominion War Federation is a single order of magnitude or less. But, in my opinion, the construction of Death Star indicates that the Empire is exceptionally impressive in terms of its ability to acquire, transport, and process natural resources.

This topic came up on the Ep. 7 ICS thread, where I posted this:
In any case, if the Death Star and other warships are the same density, and the Death Star II was halfway finished in four years, then if 10% of those resources were diverted to building ships in an emergency situation (such as contact with a technologically superior foe), the Galactic Empire could build 2 super star destroyers, 350 star destroyers, and 3000 Acclamator-equivalents every day. With a population in the hundreds of trillions, a draft would allow them to crew all these ships. Assuming a population of a hundred trillion, and assuming that only 0.1% of the population can be drafted, and assuming that every 8e3 cubic meters of ship needs one crewman (giving the Acclamator a crew of a thousand), this could be kept up for thirty years before the Empire would run out of people to man its fleet. By that time, the fleet would have grown to a size of 20,000 SSD's, 4,000,000 ISD's, and 30,000,000 AES's. Darth Sidious is no idiot, if he needed to, he would divert resources away from his death-ticle.

I honestly think that "Federation vs Galactic Empire" would be roughly analogous to "Captain Tracey vs The Yang": "we killed them by the hundreds, but they kept coming... we killed them by the thousands, but they just kept coming!"
I will now defend this POV against the only challenge it received in that thread.
Mr. Oragahn wrote: Is there a point musing about how many ships the Empire could have gotten out of the mass of a Death Star if it had chosen differently?
There is if the crossover in which they come to make war with the Federation takes place at a time when they still could choose differently.
The point really is that the Empire did everything to get those stations built and although such resources, with a proper plan, could have been used to build a large amount of ships, it didn't happen.
The thing about this calculation is that, even if it doesn't apply to what the Empire did do, it still applies to what they could do if they faced a technologically superior foe.
Even by the old EU, it was absolutely clear that the Death Star was considerably understaffed. I'm not knowledgeable about new official figures to the present day and I may say that such information may not exist anymore, due to the canonical reboot.
IF the Death Star was understaffed (and as far as we know, there are no canonical indications that it was), that could have been fixed with a simple draft and (if necessary) relaxation of the laws regarding non-human military service.
We know that a Republic brought under a stricter rule, that of Palpatine, couldn't normally produce anything close to a fraction of the ships a shard of even the first Death Star would have afforded.
Couldn't, or merely didn't? The Star Wars universe could easily be far less warlike than we generally assume. The two conflicts we see in the Lucas canon are a Galactic Republic against a separatist movement, and a Galactic Empire against a rebellion. If there was a long period of peace prior to TPM - which would explain why the only army they had was a gaggle of psions with laser swords - then even a small civil war could result in significant public panic. It would only take a small Army of the Republic to put down such a movement, but the conflict would loom large in the public consciousness. A war that, all in all, wasn't that much larger that WWII on earth could have a massive cultural impact on a galaxy that had just gone through a millennium of peace.

As for the rebellion, we know now how hard it is to beat guerrillas with a conventional army. A weapon of terror might actually be more effective, especially if the public at large wasn't used to a true state of war, and thus wasn't prepared to actually be the boots on the ground. Of course, a weapon of terror could easily backfire if used unwisely, which the Death Star was.
Therefore, we may open ourselves to massive speculation as to how Palpatine's empire managed to find the resources for the battle stations. Squeezing worlds until they'd crack is possible, but that would have likely pushed more worlds into the Rebellion's arms, yet even up to ANH, a seditious organization such as the Rebellion didn't display any of the assets it later had.
It could be that they were widely perceived as "the bad guys" until the destruction of Alderaan. Of course, Rebels might harpoon that idea...
For all intents and purposes, the Empire's been a rather quiet evil that most of the galaxy accepted. No one could even deny its prestige and the peaceful times it brought (regardless of why the war actually occured). Even the Senate itself remained officially in effect for decades up until ANH because it worked better that way.
And it's because most of the galaxy accepted it for so long that the Empire never made a navy proportionate to its industrial capacity.

Needless to say, the Federation won't let that evil be. It will try and liberate the denizens of the Galaxy Far Far Away, and, for the first time in its history - possibly in all the recorded history of the Empire, the Republic, and their predecessors - it will face an existential threat. Palpetine is no fool. He will divert resources from the weapon of terror to weapons of war. If he needs to, he will institute a draft - accompanied by inflammatory propaganda. Whether people like it or not, they will become soldiers. The logistical behemoth that turned the GDP of a million systems into a single engine of destruction will mobilize a fleet of millions. The Federation's advantages are mostly tactical. While tactics win battles, and strategy wins campaigns, it is logistics that wins wars. And when it comes to logistics, the Federation is quite simply outclassed.

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 6:58 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
Would you mind inflating Stargate's Wraith war industry in the same way? :3

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Mon Feb 29, 2016 7:14 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
The old EU even had the Empire cannibalize hyperspace transceivers for the Star Destroyers. Now that is stuff of Legends.

More importantly, the Clone Wars had the entire Republic brought close to bankruptcy because of the clone production and ships. We talked a lot about it in this forum.
If Palpatine would have had the Republic to use gloves, considering the amount of ships a Death Star's worth of materials could allow to produce, it would mean that the CIS, having no reason to pull punches, would have represented something like 0.0001% of the Republic's might.
That's certainly not what happened, the CIS was very close in terms of scope to the Republic.

Remember when they had alreadun begun building the first station at the end of episode 3? It was already massive even if largely hollow.
Even if the project had been started ten years before, that's still enormous and an insane equivalent of star destroyers out of the drydocks per year.

This is seriously one of the biggest internal discrepancies of this universe.

It would just be as easy as to say that upon receiving the plans for a battle station (at the time of AOTC, there's no idea how big it was planned to be), Palpatine said let's make it bigger, much bigger.
To that purpose, he used some super ancient replotech that was mothballed in some distant sector. He didn't know what to do of it, initially meant to build small worlds for defense, or perhaps to escape some impending doom and therefore have people live in fortress worlds (that would actually be a cool plot).

Those artifacts, battle station kits, Sith based, whatever, couldn't easily be repurposed.
It would grow on its own based on some blueprint, all it would need is something big to devour for minerals.

That's really my personnal fan fiction I use to solve this issue.

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Tue Mar 01, 2016 12:05 am
by Moff Tarquin
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Would you mind inflating Stargate's Wraith war industry in the same way? :3
Not in the least!

Hmm... Hive ships are biological, right? 'Cause I think I have a solution. It's NSFW, but it'll make the rate of Hive ship production grow exponentially!
More importantly, the Clone Wars had the entire Republic brought close to bankruptcy because of the clone production and ships. We talked a lot about it in this forum.
If Palpatine would have had the Republic to use gloves, considering the amount of ships a Death Star's worth of materials could allow to produce, it would mean that the CIS, having no reason to pull punches, would have represented something like 0.0001% of the Republic's might.
That's certainly not what happened, the CIS was very close in terms of scope to the Republic.
I think the solution may be found in the fact that we have no idea how the Republic's budget compares to the Empire's. I mean, the Republic's standing army was a bunch of magical rent-a-cops. With swords. IN SPAAAAACE!!! The Republic's citizenry, for the most part, lived in luxury, everything all bright and shiny and new...* If I had to guess, I'd say that tax revenues were fairly low. It's not obvious what it was that the government was doing, but it doesn't seem to have been doing too much other than get itself worked up into a tizzy over regional conflicts. Prior to the Clone Wars proper, we haven't seen the Republic itself take military action. We've seen the inhabitants of Naboo, both human and Gungan, take military action, and we've seen the Jedi Order take military action, but we've never seen the Republic itself put anything other than Jedi in the field. Palpy fixed that with the grand army of the republic, which, while tiny by Galactic standards (population in the trillions!), was still big enough to deal with the threat. Of course, going from an army of a couple hundred dudes in bathrobes to an army of three million trained soldiers in need of materiel is going to put a strain on a polity that had, until now, had a non-existent military budget.

While the CIS may have been similar in scope, it was also ultimately Palpy's pawn. So while it may have had no reason to pull its punches as a pseudo-independent state, Palpy had every reason to pull its punches, since he wanted something left to rule over when all was said and done.

Needless to say, all that could change once everybody was under Palpy's thumb. Crushing taxation and high military expendatures could suddenly be the norm. To make a long story short, trying to judge the capacities of an oppressive and militaristic regime by looking at the capacities of one who had spent millennia without a standing army worth speaking of is probably a non-starter.

*needless to say, that last bit doesn't mean much to me, but it should probably mean something to you.

Of course, there is another way to explain the bankruptcy of the Republic, and you mentioned it yourself!
Remember when they had alreadun begun building the first station at the end of episode 3? It was already massive even if largely hollow.
Even if the project had been started ten years before, that's still enormous and an insane equivalent of star destroyers out of the drydocks per year.
And that could very well be why the Republic was flirting with bankruptcy: Palpy was using his wartime powers to divert funds to his deathticle.

I'm not saying that the Death Stars were easy to make. The second one (halfway built in about four years) could easily represent the galaxy's GDP in one year. However, the ability to get 25% of a galaxy's GDP into one place, and then build an eighth of a moon-sized battlestation out of it, represents a huge logistical and industrial capacity, orders of magnitude beyond what we can see in Star Trek.

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2016 2:56 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
I became interested in the underlying economical reality of the existence of such behemoths because to me they were at odds with the rest of the canvas and it is undeniable that many wars and sudden political changes are always related to money.
At first I'd argue that the Empire did produce those stations at a great cost; it literally drained the entire Empire's worlds in a vampiric way and couldn't be replicated ad infinitum. The major proof being that while decades were necessary for the first Death Star to be built, the second one was fairly advanced within four years, and it was bigger. When volumetrics change that much and certain core systems need to be revised, you cannot use advantages obtained because of costs and scale. The DSII wasn't a reboot but was not a minor change either. Yet there it was.

Now let's imagine that the galaxy had a population of some 300 trillion people and all worlds were sufficiently developped.
The USA is more than 323 million souls. It has the biggest military budget I can think of and is massively indebted. It wages wars left and right, spreads chaos more than anything else and has a very large number of bases all over the planet, making it an empire.

Now, looking back at Star Wars, although it's an advanced universe, we see that the way things are maintained and built isn't exactly that different from what we see today: droid factories on Geonosis more or less worked like automated car factories and I'm sure the output by cubic meter of factory, ton of materials and per hour wouldn't exactly be that much different between both. By that I mean I'd expect a difference of an order of magnitude at most. The CIS droid factory still had to melt ore, transport it, mould it, assemble all parts, etc.
Considering that droids were more a Confederational thing than a Republican one, I would expect man labour to still hold a major place in the construction of imperial assets, including starships.

So if we basically take the USA and give them a SW paint brush, we could work from the fairly generous assumption that it could output one Imperial Star Destroyer per year. An ISD is a fairly big ship that's worth many modern super carriers, frigates and submarines.
I'm going to round the population to 300 million btw.

Meaning that upscaling this to a population of 300 trillion, we get a million ISDs per year. That makes it 2,740 ISDs per day.

You said:
Moff Tarquin wrote: In any case, if the Death Star and other warships are the same density, and the Death Star II was halfway finished in four years, then if 10% of those resources were diverted to building ships in an emergency situation (such as contact with a technologically superior foe), the Galactic Empire could build 2 super star destroyers, 350 star destroyers, and 3000 Acclamator-equivalents every day. With a population in the hundreds of trillions, a draft would allow them to crew all these ships. Assuming a population of a hundred trillion, and assuming that only 0.1% of the population can be drafted, and assuming that every 8e3 cubic meters of ship needs one crewman (giving the Acclamator a crew of a thousand), this could be kept up for thirty years before the Empire would run out of people to man its fleet. By that time, the fleet would have grown to a size of 20,000 SSD's, 4,000,000 ISD's, and 30,000,000 AES's. Darth Sidious is no idiot, if he needed to, he would divert resources away from his death-ticle.
The process I'm exposing serves verifying if with 100% of its worlds' resources, the Empire could build the DSII within that timeframe.
My daily-output numbers aren't far from yours except for the fact that yours are based on the 10% slice.
At 100%, you add a zero to all the figures you mentionned. So we get 20 super star destroyers, 3,500 star destroyers, and 30,000 Acclamator-equivalents every day

Yet, a Starwars'd USA civilizational model applied to an entire Galactic Empire falls short of that threshold. Even if we get numbers for the ISDs in the same ballpark, yours remain superior. Then we add the SSDs and ACDs and it's completely off.
We also consider that the Republic had like 100,000 member worlds iirc (well, maybe those numbers aren't legit anymore, I'd have to check the sources), while the Empire counted a million worlds, but only by the time of ANH. Which means the added numbers couldn't have an effect as soon as the Clone Wars ended. This, however, would explain why as membership numbers grew, it became more and more easy for the Empire to obtain its resources for the construction. But then we remember that the Empire was already outputing ships too.
But it's almost immediately smacked shut by the simple fact that at the end of ROTS, a considerable portion of the DSI's skeleton was already finished. Both from an economical or an engineering perspective, this is not possible by simply super taxing the worlds and converting many quarters of the production of industrial worlds into something totally new. We're talking about a newborn empire here, one which would have to ascertain its power over what it claimed to be ruling. One that couldn't immediately make all the regular political powers not see a massive saping of financial and material resources. No matter what, there is an inertia to all things.
Let's not forget the small gap between AOTC and ROTS!

Of course this is all mitigated even more when we add the fact that from what we've seen, few prominent worlds appear to be very populated, or that there's no indication that the majority of them are sufficiently developed either. Besides, there could be only 2 to 3 trillion people tops, which removes two zeroes to what my roughly modeled yankee'ed galaxy could output. Also, all these worlds would need to massively taxed for the military budget well beyond what they have experienced before.

The DSII's construction was almost off the schedules so we could safely consider that the Empire devoted almost all it could to this project by the time of ROTJ.

Yes, even 1% of the DSII in ships per year would make for a formidable fleet.
But from what I'm looking at, it takes the most generous parameters and a yearly output of 1 ISD per .3 Bn people for my "galactic USA" to reach only a portion of the numbers you gave; numbers based on only 10% of the DSII's mass.

I'll also remind readers again that there is no proof the Geonosian blueprints were meant to build such a large station. For all we know, the new design could have been a 5 to 10 kilometers large battle spheroid. There's not even any proof that they planned to build only one. Maybe it would have been a new type of CIS coreship.

Then Palpatine, with access to *stuff* said make it BIGGER!!!
To a small degree because he had the resources of an empire in the culp of his hands, but also because of a super secret small world builder thing which existence is most certainly confirmed inside my head.

I think...
Anyway, as far as it goes, in the end, a wizard did it.

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2016 3:42 am
by Moff Tarquin
If you raise the Empire's size from 300 trillion to 383 trillion, you end up with 3500 ISD's per day. Then, if you assume that the Death Star is ~1/3 the density of a starship (with the remaining 2/3 being devoted entirely to extra fuel tanks for blowing up planets), you can cut all my figures in three (since, based on Darkstar's volumetrics page, 1 SSD = 175 ISD's = 1500 AES's) and be perfectly fine. So we're talking about ~5 SSD's, ~800 ISD's, and ~7000 AES's per week, which is still absolutely incredible.

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2016 6:19 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
Moff Tarquin wrote:If you raise the Empire's size from 300 trillion to 383 trillion, you end up with 3500 ISD's per day. Then, if you assume that the Death Star is ~1/3 the density of a starship (with the remaining 2/3 being devoted entirely to extra fuel tanks for blowing up planets), you can cut all my figures in three (since, based on Darkstar's volumetrics page, 1 SSD = 175 ISD's = 1500 AES's) and be perfectly fine. So we're talking about ~5 SSD's, ~800 ISD's, and ~7000 AES's per week, which is still absolutely incredible.
I don't see why a Death Star would need more tanks than a ship. It's even less probably if beyond a certain size, the Death Star can benefit from some forms of hypermatter based technology that provide far more power per cubic meter than what a starship can gather.
An ISD's ventral dome largely suggests a large power core and the main hangar bay already occupies a non-negligible volume. On the other hand, all battle station / Death Star schematics we've seen show reactors taking far less than even a third of their volume.

Besides, was it ever proved that the Republic counted trillions of people? Or was it for the whole galaxy?
Did it say tens of trillions or even hundreds of them, or just trillions?
From that perspective, are we sure the Empire captured nearly the whole of that cake? Did it absorb the vast majority of CIS worlds?

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2016 4:56 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
For reference, G2K has compiled a list of snippets taken from the written sources auxiliary to the Lucas movies here.
G2K wrote: TPM
Thousands of Senators inhabit the Senate dome during a session.
There are ten thousand Jedi knights working on a hundred thousand different worlds.

AOTC
Several hundred ... then thousands ... of star systems are leaving the Republic.
The Republic is a vast network of tens of thousands of systems, and even more species.
The Republic has trillions of "common folk".

ROTS
Palpatine notes that there are a trillion beings on Coruscant alone, and speculates that there are uncounted quadrillions in the galaxy as a whole.

ANH
There are a million systems in the Empire.
So the Empire seems to have absorbed many worlds, increasing its world count ten times up to one million.
When the Republic was a tenth of that size, many of these worlds were grouped within tens of thousands of systems.
By that time the Republic did count trillions of people.
Coruscant had a trillion people at the end of the Republic.
The quadrillions of the whole galaxy are uncounted and much speculated by Palpatine.
Anakin thinks there are trillions spread across the galaxy.

So the Galactic Empire may include trillions, tens or even hundreds of trillions of people.

Regarding the imperial drafting process, you have to exclude non-humans.

Let's also note that thousands of systems had joined the CIS by the time of AOTC and the leak was high too.
I think it was said in an early TCWS episode that there were basically 200 battle droids for each clone. So the CIS infantry would have counted at least 240,000 droids and perhaps a few multiples of that later on, at a time when the CIS would have represented a large number of worlds, probably many thousands. This an idea of what a nascent war industry could output, although the Trade Federation clearly had begun earlier since it already possessed a hundred large and armed ships at least.

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2016 7:11 pm
by Mike DiCenso
Mr. Oragahn wrote:

Quote:
In any case, if the Death Star and other warships are the same density, and the Death Star II was halfway finished in four years, then if 10% of those resources were diverted to building ships in an emergency situation (such as contact with a technologically superior foe), the Galactic Empire could build 2 super star destroyers, 350 star destroyers, and 3000 Acclamator-equivalents every day. With a population in the hundreds of trillions, a draft would allow them to crew all these ships. Assuming a population of a hundred trillion, and assuming that only 0.1% of the population can be drafted, and assuming that every 8e3 cubic meters of ship needs one crewman (giving the Acclamator a crew of a thousand), this could be kept up for thirty years before the Empire would run out of people to man its fleet. By that time, the fleet would have grown to a size of 20,000 SSD's, 4,000,000 ISD's, and 30,000,000 AES's. Darth Sidious is no idiot, if he needed to, he would divert resources away from his death-ticle.

I honestly think that "Federation vs Galactic Empire" would be roughly analogous to "Captain Tracey vs The Yang": "we killed them by the hundreds, but they kept coming... we killed them by the thousands, but they just kept coming!"



Moff Tarquin wrote:I will now defend this POV against the only challenge it received in that thread.
The problem is that if you go down this route, you have to do so for the Federation and almost any other Trek power. For example, Starbase 74 and its similar 8.5 x 14 km brethren, each would equal about 2,689 Galaxy-class starships. So does that mean that the Federation, if pressed, will build that many GCS or the very closely sized Sovereign or Nebula-class starships? I mean, if you have at least 84 such bases, that's 225,890 such ships (going by tonnage). That maintains a 17:1 ratio against, which is well within the Federation ships' ability to keep on top of in dealing the Imperial menace.
-Mike

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 3:29 am
by Moff Tarquin
Sorry for the tardiness of my replies. School comes before this stuff, and midterms are coming up, so I've been spending more of my time on more important things.
Mike DiCenso wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:

Quote:
In any case, if the Death Star and other warships are the same density, and the Death Star II was halfway finished in four years, then if 10% of those resources were diverted to building ships in an emergency situation (such as contact with a technologically superior foe), the Galactic Empire could build 2 super star destroyers, 350 star destroyers, and 3000 Acclamator-equivalents every day. With a population in the hundreds of trillions, a draft would allow them to crew all these ships. Assuming a population of a hundred trillion, and assuming that only 0.1% of the population can be drafted, and assuming that every 8e3 cubic meters of ship needs one crewman (giving the Acclamator a crew of a thousand), this could be kept up for thirty years before the Empire would run out of people to man its fleet. By that time, the fleet would have grown to a size of 20,000 SSD's, 4,000,000 ISD's, and 30,000,000 AES's. Darth Sidious is no idiot, if he needed to, he would divert resources away from his death-ticle.

I honestly think that "Federation vs Galactic Empire" would be roughly analogous to "Captain Tracey vs The Yang": "we killed them by the hundreds, but they kept coming... we killed them by the thousands, but they just kept coming!"



Moff Tarquin wrote:I will now defend this POV against the only challenge it received in that thread.
The problem is that if you go down this route, you have to do so for the Federation and almost any other Trek power. For example, Starbase 74 and its similar 8.5 x 14 km brethren, each would equal about 2,689 Galaxy-class starships. So does that mean that the Federation, if pressed, will build that many GCS or the very closely sized Sovereign or Nebula-class starships? I mean, if you have at least 84 such bases, that's 225,890 such ships (going by tonnage).
On the one hand, yes, I would gladly maintain that the Federation is capable of building starships as quickly as starbases.

On the other hand, we haven't the foggiest idea of how long it took them to build 74 starbases, whereas with the Death Star 2, we can be certain that it took less that 24 years, and fairly confident that it took less than 4 years.
That maintains a 17:1 ratio against, which is well within the Federation ships' ability to keep on top of in dealing the Imperial menace.
-Mike
A 17:1 ratio in numbers can only be matched by a 1:289 ratio in the strength of individual units. This seems somewhat probable. However, unless those 74 starbases were built in less than 4 years, the ratio is going to be rather higher.
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I don't see why a Death Star would need more tanks than a ship. It's even less probably if beyond a certain size, the Death Star can benefit from some forms of hypermatter based technology that provide far more power per cubic meter than what a starship can gather.
An ISD's ventral dome largely suggests a large power core and the main hangar bay already occupies a non-negligible volume. On the other hand, all battle station / Death Star schematics we've seen show reactors taking far less than even a third of their volume.
The main issue is that the disparity between the Death Star's abilities and the ISD's capabilities (blow up a planet vs vaporize a small town) is far, far greater than the disparity between their sizes. Even allowing for the whole hypermatter thing, the Death Star is putting out firepower on the order of 69,000,000,000,000,000 MT, while the ISD is putting out less than 150 MT. The ratio in firepower is 460,000,000,000,000:1, but the ratio in size is 30,000,000:1. Even if the Death Star only fires once per day but the ISD fires once per second (and we have no indication that the ISD's big guns fire anywhere near that rapidly), the ratio in firepower is 530,000,000:1. Pound for pound, the Death Star is somewhere between 18 times and 15,000,000 times as impressive as an ISD.
So the Galactic Empire may include trillions, tens or even hundreds of trillions of people.
Guess which one I'm going to push for. ;D
Regarding the imperial drafting process, you have to exclude non-humans.
Of the folks we've seen onscreen, at least one out of one thousand has been a human male.
Let's also note that thousands of systems had joined the CIS by the time of AOTC and the leak was high too.
I think it was said in an early TCWS episode that there were basically 200 battle droids for each clone. So the CIS infantry would have counted at least 240,000 droids and perhaps a few multiples of that later on, at a time when the CIS would have represented a large number of worlds, probably many thousands. This an idea of what a nascent war industry could output, although the Trade Federation clearly had begun earlier since it already possessed a hundred large and armed ships at least.
If there were 1.5 million clones and they were outnumbered 200 to one, there would have been closer to 300,000,000 battle droids. And of course, given that the ten thousand-ish Jedi were the only standing army the Republic had prior to the Clone Wars, it's easy to see how even a small separatist movement could spook the entire polity.

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 4:59 am
by Mike DiCenso
Moff Tarquin wrote:On the one hand, yes, I would gladly maintain that the Federation is capable of building starships as quickly as starbases.

On the other hand, we haven't the foggiest idea of how long it took them to build 74 starbases, whereas with the Death Star 2, we can be certain that it took less that 24 years, and fairly confident that it took less than 4 years.
I think we have a good idea, thanks to the Narada Incursion Alternate Timeline, on how quickly the Federation can build ships and stations. For example, the mile long Vengeance was designed, built, and operational in less than a year. That's pretty damned impressive, and we saw that the Federation was able to churn out 700 meter plus sized starships as well as they had a completely different 10 km wide Spacedock that utterly dwarfs the 6 km Prime Timeline one. And that's the mid-23rd century Federation.

Now imagine what the late 24th century one should be able to do.
Moff Tarquin wrote:A 17:1 ratio in numbers can only be matched by a 1:289 ratio in the strength of individual units. This seems somewhat probable. However, unless those 74 starbases were built in less than 4 years, the ratio is going to be rather higher.
That's a question of need more than anything else, and during the Second Borg Incursion, the Klingon Skirmishing, and the Dominion War, the Federation demonstrated it could replace and maintain many thousands of starships within just a few years time. There's also another issue: the way in which the Empire is getting its forces to the Milky Way Galaxy. If it is via wormhole, they face dealing with it being mined, just as the Bajoran one was, and even if they get a foothold somehow, they still have to contend with a slow pace due to them not having any hyperlanes to travel with. Which means they have to spend a lot of time trying to chart the Alpha quadrant and the Milky Way as a whole, and that can prove fatal if they cannot do it in a couple of years.
-Mike

Re: Empire Industrial Capacity

Posted: Mon Mar 14, 2016 3:08 pm
by Mr. Oragahn
Moff Tarquin wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:I don't see why a Death Star would need more tanks than a ship. It's even less probably if beyond a certain size, the Death Star can benefit from some forms of hypermatter based technology that provide far more power per cubic meter than what a starship can gather.
An ISD's ventral dome largely suggests a large power core and the main hangar bay already occupies a non-negligible volume. On the other hand, all battle station / Death Star schematics we've seen show reactors taking far less than even a third of their volume.
The main issue is that the disparity between the Death Star's abilities and the ISD's capabilities (blow up a planet vs vaporize a small town) is far, far greater than the disparity between their sizes. Even allowing for the whole hypermatter thing, the Death Star is putting out firepower on the order of 69,000,000,000,000,000 MT, while the ISD is putting out less than 150 MT. The ratio in firepower is 460,000,000,000,000:1, but the ratio in size is 30,000,000:1. Even if the Death Star only fires once per day but the ISD fires once per second (and we have no indication that the ISD's big guns fire anywhere near that rapidly), the ratio in firepower is 530,000,000:1. Pound for pound, the Death Star is somewhere between 18 times and 15,000,000 times as impressive as an ISD.
Going by more accurate numbers regarding firepower, that is, something akin to perhaps a dozen up to fifty KT-level explosions at the surface of a planet, all grouped (that's what the real, direct effect of the superlaser is), which gives us like 1200 to 5000 teratons (1.2~5 petatons) and comparing that with, say, 10 MT for an ISD's entire firepower delivery over a full second (a figure I wouldn't grant to an ISD but I'm in the mood of being generous here), we have some rule-of-thumb average firepower ratio of 310,000,000:1.
For the reminder, my current appreciation of an ISD's overall firepower per second would have me add two to three zeroes to that ratio.
Regarding the imperial drafting process, you have to exclude non-humans.
Of the folks we've seen onscreen, at least one out of one thousand has been a human male.
Although old SW had less of a tendency to free non-humans from non-human accents, the stormtroopers' helmets are clearly designed for a human head's proportions and suits for human bodies. Forget about the Twi'leks, Trandoshans and Zabraks, or even Greedo's species.
Besides, the entire Imperial navy comprises humans only, and that was also largely the case for the Republic's navy but likely largely exacerbated. The odds in favour of human-exclusive stormtrooper corps are quite high.
It's going to be even more prevalent in a post-war context where the more species diverse ex-CIS forces have been subjugated.
Let's also note that thousands of systems had joined the CIS by the time of AOTC and the leak was high too.
I think it was said in an early TCWS episode that there were basically 200 battle droids for each clone. So the CIS infantry would have counted at least 240,000 droids and perhaps a few multiples of that later on, at a time when the CIS would have represented a large number of worlds, probably many thousands. This an idea of what a nascent war industry could output, although the Trade Federation clearly had begun earlier since it already possessed a hundred large and armed ships at least.
If there were 1.5 million clones and they were outnumbered 200 to one, there would have been closer to 300,000,000 battle droids. And of course, given that the ten thousand-ish Jedi were the only standing army the Republic had prior to the Clone Wars, it's easy to see how even a small separatist movement could spook the entire polity.
Woops. I don't know what I had in mind when I typed 240,000.