SDN: Industrial Capacity and Territorial Holdings

[Mike DiCenso]

I didn't include colonies, although I should have if Archer IV is an indication. But the line, I don't know if it's from the AU, we don't know if it's a good example for all colonies beyond that distance from Sol, etc.

If we go by the 23rd century readout display seen in ST:ENT's "In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II", Archer IV is located around 61 Ursae Majoris, or some 31 light years from Earth. However, going by where Archer points the planet out to be in "Home", it would be in a system 45-50 light years away.
-Mike

[Cocytus]

Just to interject here.

800,000,000 dead was the preliminary estimate for the planet of Cardassia, not the Empire as a whole.

The Founder:
I want the Cardassians exterminated. All of them, the entire population.

Admiral Ross:
Ben, we've driven the Dominion back to Cardassia Prime.

Sisko:
They're going to make us pay for every kilometer of the planet.

Odo:
Have you seen these reports? The Dominion has begun destroying Cardassian cities. Millions of people are dying.

Since Cardassia Prime was the only thing the Dominion retained effective control of at this point, the Founder can only mean the entire population of Cardassia Prime. 800,000,000 people died on a single planet in the short time between her giving the order, after the Cardassian Fleet switched sides, and Odo's convincing her to stand down, a matter of hours at best.

[Mike DiCenso]

The Andorian-Vulcan conflict grew out of territorial claims. Conflict, in other words, over prime colonization worlds and the military bases to protect them. Both the Andorians and the Vulcans have been spreading out for a while, and both clearly claimed control over multiple planets prior to the founding of the Federation

Considering that both Andoria and Vulcan went to war over the terraformed planetoid Weytahn (Paan Mokar), it seems that territory was very important, and both sides obviously had colonies and outposts that were brought into the Federation.

Speaking of Vulcan, a planet that they would eventually help sponsor as members of the Federation in the 23rd century, Coridan had a population of 3 billion in the middle 22nd century.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Speaking of Vulcan, a planet that they would eventually help sponsor as members of the Federation in the 23rd century, Coridan had a population of 3 billion in the middle 22nd century.

A population which declined rapidly after that due to internal wars, according to the article.
It went down to a point where they couldn't even defend their Dilythium mines...

[Mike DiCenso]

You missed that the civil war information was given in a section for non-canon information from the ST EU book "The Good That Men Do". They did not make obvious, but the decline in population was due to billions being killed in a suicide Romulan attack and the in-fighting that followed amongst the people thereafter, was from a non-canon source.

Canonically, there was a civil war going on, the rebels being back by the Andorians and the Vulcans backing the government. So it's hard to say how ravaged the planet already was, but some of the scenes did show some trashed up areas from all the fighting. Sarek does tell ambassador Gav that the planet Coridan is "under-populated", but that would also fit with the approximately 3 billion population of the 22nd century as well.

From the canon episode "Journey to Babel" [TOS, Season 2], the admission of Coridan would not just mean a single planet entering the Federation, but several as stated in in Kirk's log entry:

Captain's log, Stardate 3842.4. The interplanetary conference will consider the petition of the Coridan planets to be admitted to the Federation. The Coridan system has been claimed by some of the races now aboard our ship as delegates, races who have strong personal reasons for keeping Coridan out of the Federation. The most pressing problem aboard the Enterprise is to make sure open warfare doesn't break out among the delegates before the conference begins.

So as ravaged as Coridan was, it also had it's share of colonies or just the extra planets, inhabited or otherwise were being admitted into the Federation.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Mike, this is what is stated in the canon part of the article:

Over the next century, Coridan would become under-populated to the point that it could not defend its dilithium mines.

I don't think 3 Billion people would have any issues protecting their Dilithium mines...

[Mike DiCenso]

That's because whoever wrote that tied that in with the non-canon section's note about the Romulans causing the depopulation of the planet on a very drastic level. The 3 billion population, depending on how destabilized and ravaged Coridan is, would have a difficult time seeing how under-populated they are compared to other worlds, assuming a 4-6 billion number is the reasonable average, and especially if their space infrastructure is badly diminished. Makes patrolling their system more problematic.

There is also the issue of how quickly Coridan recovered after it became a Federation member in the 2260's. By the TNG-era more than 100 years later, they could easily have a population that exceeds 3 billion, especially if they recovered from their conflict as quickly as Earth did after first contact with the Vulcans.
-Mike

[Praeothmin]

Ah, I thought all the information above the "non-Canon" section was supposed to be Canon.
Sorry...

[Mr. Oragahn]

Ten thousand one century more? I'd say 5000 thousand tops.

It's generally an exponential growth curve. Finding new colony sites has been one of the driving forces behind exploration. There are easily at least ten times as many ships exploring, on average, in the TOS-TNG era as the TOS-ENT era, with average speeds ten times as fast.

But you still need people. Unless most humans can't stay put at least one generation, it's going to take time for kisd to grow and start moving out.
If it's the same people moving around, OK, you're settling new words, but you're not raising the population numbers. Your numbers get pretty thin in fact.

From what I saw, most colonies, especially the distant ones, closer to new territories, are not looking like worlds of depearture for further colonization, and if any has to happen from these worlds, we're again going to find very low population numbers, which to borrow your words, the E-D would have no difficulty evacuating in short order.

The idea of including colonies to member world, as affiliations, is not strange indeed. However, it doesn't lend any legitimacy to that 50 billion figure.

Attaching colonies to member worlds to total an average of 50 billion per member world isn't strange at all.

Aside from the idea that we don't get much evidence that there's anything around 50 billion people as an average. Even less when you consider that it would mean highly populated worlds have much more billion inhabitants, which there's even less evidence for.

The only bit I'd agree on is that Terrans have by far been the highest colonization faction of the UFP.

Why ten times? That's based on what precisely?

That's possibly because you also use socio-economical rules as they work on Earth and its ravaged or dominated countries, which would still be worse than a control under Dominion rule where synthetizers and easy energy production would still exist.
Not to say of course that Dominion rule might evolve over 125 years.

If it's worse under Dominion control, then 10% casualties causing five generations of submission is not the least bit unexpected.

I don't think Bashir's numbers mean anything. Simply put, whatever the outcome of the war, he estimates that the revolt will burgeon after five generations.
I'm sorry, but that's bogus. It's either one or the other. Not five generations plus one for the revolt for either outcome.

This is not the problem. The problem lies in who colonizes space. Andorians, Vulcans and some other members don't show to fancy large populations nor massive urbanized areas.

The Andorian-Vulcan conflict grew out of territorial claims. Conflict, in other words, over prime colonization worlds and the military bases to protect them. Both the Andorians and the Vulcans have been spreading out for a while, and both clearly claimed control over multiple planets prior to the founding of the Federation (ref). Even Bajor, one of the poorer members of the Federation with close religious ties to the homeworld, has had eight colonies mentioned onscreen.[/quote]

But with no evidence to consider these colonies more populated than the lightly populated homeworlds.

The Vulcans, in fact, have had a rather major misplaced colony grow into something called the Romulan Star Empire. Vulcan reproductive habits are quite well documented; after reaching maturity, they normally mate like clockwork every seven years with a partner they were engaged to at an early age. Having more than one child seems typical, and Vulcans live a couple hundred years normally... and the Vulcans have been traveling the stars for something like three thousand years.

Well then they must eat their kids because there's no evidence that even Vulcan is highly populated. And frankly, despite that backstory of colonization, how much Vulcans have we seen throughout the UFP and its starships?
It's pretty thin, really.
If it wasn't for Trek's happy hippy spirit, one would even consider possible xenophobic bias, but I don't want to start a new thread on that... yet.

The reasons why we don't see many Vulcans in Starfleet has been discussed at great length, of course, but it's really worth assuming that most Federation members are in on the colonization game.

Well I never read those long discussions, I'm not a Trekkie. Still, that's a good topic to kickstart in a thread here, if it's not already been done.

Rather obvious, humans are one, if not THE most spread species as far as I've seen in the Federation. All other Federation alien species are almost sidekicks.

We mostly see the Earth-based Starfleet onscreen. The Federation council, of course, is largely nonhuman. The cantina scenes - whether in TNG, DS9, or the movies - have significant alien populations.

Again, without wanting to go too deep into this other topic, I'll just say that it's normal that the council shows many faces, if it's supposed to represent all member worlds and that nearly all of them have unique alien species.
It doesn't say much about their actual numbers though.

And I would agree with you that as of the 24th century, humanity is probably the most spread out (and quite possibly most populous) member of the Federation. However, I still think they're a minority within the Federation, and I don't think humans made up the largest portion of the Federation when it was founded - indeed, I strongly suspect they made up the smallest portion of the population of any of the members.

I thereby claim we need a new thread, about species representation in the Federation and percentages!

Just to interject here.

800,000,000 dead was the preliminary estimate for the planet of Cardassia, not the Empire as a whole.

The Founder:
I want the Cardassians exterminated. All of them, the entire population.

Admiral Ross:
Ben, we've driven the Dominion back to Cardassia Prime.

Sisko:
They're going to make us pay for every kilometer of the planet.

Odo:
Have you seen these reports? The Dominion has begun destroying Cardassian cities. Millions of people are dying.

Since Cardassia Prime was the only thing the Dominion retained effective control of at this point, the Founder can only mean the entire population of Cardassia Prime. 800,000,000 people died on a single planet in the short time between her giving the order, after the Cardassian Fleet switched sides, and Odo's convincing her to stand down, a matter of hours at best.

Nothing surprising, if the Dominion had a large contingent of forces and ships in the system. It would take no time to have a good number of their ships strike at the cities, and have other Jem'Hadar troops continue the mop up/genocide.
What I'd add is how the population seemed oddly concentrated before hand. Indeed, the destruction of cities is far from being terrible from what we see, yet the death toll is high. It's possible that some cities were spared more than others, or something else.
It's just a side issue anyway. Yes, it was clear that they talked about the planet.

How could the Federation recover from a 900 billion loss after only 5 generations if this number represented the majority of the Federation's population?

Even modern Earth would be hit hard if even, say, 10% of it's population (roughly 700 Million people), would suddenly die or be killed (close to what happened to the Cardassians, which is no wonder they felt such disarray)...

Putting aside the bizarre mono-projection of the doctor no matter what happens, considering how human population grew on Earth in one century (more than 3.73 times), let's assume the Vulcans decide to really show they can fuck every seven years, say the humans really decide to have big familes and copy the highest Chinese (6.2) and African growth rates, mixed to a relatively better average health system than we enjoy, and say the Federation had 1000 billion people (so 100 Bn left), that's going to be at least more than 400 billion people 100 years later, plus the new generation batch in its vigorous youth, to feed upon for the civil war/insurrection.
Logically, the harsher the response of the old Dominion, the more people would join the ranks of the Insurrectionists. You'd have Lebanon/Gaza all over the ex-UFP, with the difference that humans would probably have the possibility to hijack Dominion shipyards and run over garrisons to grab weapons.
That's certainly nothing to scoff at.

[Jedi Master Spock]

But you still need people. Unless most humans can't stay put at least one generation, it's going to take time for kisd to grow and start moving out.
If it's the same people moving around, OK, you're settling new words, but you're not raising the population numbers. Your numbers get pretty thin in fact.

Except that with no environmental restrictions, the population numbers tend towards exponential curves rather than logistic. What dispersing to numerous small colonies does is help keep the birth rate up, and with Federation medical technology, it's possible (if not all that likely) for colonies' population to expand at a rate that is fast by the standards of the modern developing world.

I see most population growth happening in colonies; I also see the edgy frontier types starting to shift out again to start new colonies in only a couple generations.

Aside from the idea that we don't get much evidence that there's anything around 50 billion people as an average. Even less when you consider that it would mean highly populated worlds have much more billion inhabitants, which there's even less evidence for.

Well, it's very difficult to gauge a planetary population from a handful of shots. The Earth has 6 billion, but you could look at Tokyo or look at the Australian outback.

Vulcan certainly has fewer people than Gideon.

I don't think Bashir's numbers mean anything. Simply put, whatever the outcome of the war, he estimates that the revolt will burgeon after five generations.
I'm sorry, but that's bogus. It's either one or the other. Not five generations plus one for the revolt for either outcome.

They do mean something. You need to be able to recover, and in the scenario where the Dominion killed 900 billion, recovering means repopulating to a state nearly indistinguishable from the state where they didn't kill 900 billion people. That's very hard if 900 billion is almost all of the Federation's population.

But with no evidence to consider these colonies more populated than the lightly populated homeworlds.

The conflict over terraformed and habitable worlds makes little sense with no population pressure.

For reference, actually, in "Justice," we hear a figure for the number of potential colony worlds in a particular star cluster - over three thousand - of which the Enterprise just planted one. Clearly the inhabited worlds are being found.

[Mike DiCenso]

Here is Data's dialog from Justice where he mentions how many other potential planets there are for colonisation:

"It is perhaps not what we would understand as a vessel, sir. The dimensions this one occupies allows them to be, well, to be in several places at once. But they consider this entire star cluster to be theirs. It was probably unwise of us to attempt to place a human colony in this area. Of course, there are three thousand four other planets in this star cluster in which we could have colonised. The largest and closest.."

Also interesting is at the begining of the same episode where they discuss what a strain moving the colonist has been:

"Establishing that colony has been exhausting for the entire crew, Captain. We're not a supply vessel. Settling all those people has been a strain on everyone. I'm tired myself. "

This is very unsual to hear since of another colony move that involved such a strain on the ship and it's crew. Given that in "Ensigns of Command" the ship has a capacity for over 15,000 passengers, above and beyond the thousand-plus crew and families regularly on-board, we might assume that this particular colony in "Justice" was nearly at or possibly somewhere above that number.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

But you still need people. Unless most humans can't stay put at least one generation, it's going to take time for kisd to grow and start moving out.
If it's the same people moving around, OK, you're settling new words, but you're not raising the population numbers. Your numbers get pretty thin in fact.

Except that with no environmental restrictions, the population numbers tend towards exponential curves rather than logistic.

Based on what exactly?

What dispersing to numerous small colonies does is help keep the birth rate up, and with Federation medical technology, it's possible (if not all that likely) for colonies' population to expand at a rate that is fast by the standards of the modern developing world.

Not only it's disputable that growth rates would go up, but all the time spent moving in ships and building colonies is all the more time lost capitalizing on already populated and developped older colonies.

I see most population growth happening in colonies; I also see the edgy frontier types starting to shift out again to start new colonies in only a couple generations.

I'd agree on the idea that any new colony would only see people moving away again several generations later on, but they'd require quite some large ships to do so, otherwise they'd rely on small crafts, and thus make quite smaller colonies.

Aside from the idea that we don't get much evidence that there's anything around 50 billion people as an average. Even less when you consider that it would mean highly populated worlds have much more billion inhabitants, which there's even less evidence for.

Well, it's very difficult to gauge a planetary population from a handful of shots. The Earth has 6 billion, but you could look at Tokyo or look at the Australian outback.

We happen to see the most prohiminent cities in Trek and their expansion in relation to the surrounding environment.
It's like looking at New York or Tokyo while having a good sight of the country around. You would immediately know that on the average, the largest cities tend to look like X, with a given urbanization spread that looks like Y, with so much wilder lands aroud.

Vulcan certainly has fewer people than Gideon.

What happened to Gideon is intriguing, although it's an oddity on its own, very special.
If it was part of the UFP, I could argue that nuking the surface of this world woud cut off a major and high percentage of the overall UFP population.

I don't think Bashir's numbers mean anything. Simply put, whatever the outcome of the war, he estimates that the revolt will burgeon after five generations.
I'm sorry, but that's bogus. It's either one or the other. Not five generations plus one for the revolt for either outcome.

They do mean something. You need to be able to recover, and in the scenario where the Dominion killed 900 billion, recovering means repopulating to a state nearly indistinguishable from the state where they didn't kill 900 billion people. That's very hard if 900 billion is almost all of the Federation's population.

That is certainly not necessary, especially with the expectable low death rates due to the technology and medicines, and high population growth rate.

Moreso, the only right interpretation of Bashir's words is that either way, you're in for at least five generations of Dominion rule. Eventually, in one of the two scenarios, a rebellion will grow around the time of the sixth generation, while this rebellion will occur much later on in the other scenario.

But with no evidence to consider these colonies more populated than the lightly populated homeworlds.

The conflict over terraformed and habitable worlds makes little sense with no population pressure.

It does. Inhabitable worlds are rare. The closer the better for securized and fast exchange of goods and resources. It's also easier to plant a colony here, much more enjoyable, etc.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Based on what exactly?

Normal population dynamics. As a population of anything reproduces, it usually reproduces exponentially until it starts to approach its carrying capacity, at which point it diverges from an exponential curve and we start to see logistic behavior.

"Ensigns of Command" probably shows somewhere around a 4% annual average growth rate under hostile conditions, but it shouldn't be considered typical in any way.

Not only it's disputable that growth rates would go up, but all the time spent moving in ships and building colonies is all the more time lost capitalizing on already populated and developped older colonies.

Not really. It may be an economic loss - whatever that means in a replicator economy - but since cold sleep went out of fashion, transit time hasn't cut from reproduction. In fact, a subculture that mainly reproduces in space is showcased in ENT.

I'd agree on the idea that any new colony would only see people moving away again several generations later on, but they'd require quite some large ships to do so, otherwise they'd rely on small crafts, and thus make quite smaller colonies.

OK, so here's the pattern I suggest is typical. Large fast ships start major colonies, as the E-D did in "Justice" (as DiCenso pointed out, the ship has a rated capacity of over ten thousand) and probably start getting a large number of immigrants from the core worlds once the first generation proves that the planet isn't lethal and sets up the basic infrastructure.

Starting around the third generation or so, frontier types start feeling crowded, and might establish new colonies nearby using smaller, slower ships. These colonies will start with a smaller population and not as much support, and have a higher failure rate.

Then there are also ad hoc colonies that weren't planned ahead of time.

We happen to see the most prohiminent cities in Trek and their expansion in relation to the surrounding environment.
It's like looking at New York or Tokyo while having a good sight of the country around. You would immediately know that on the average, the largest cities tend to look like X, with a given urbanization spread that looks like Y, with so much wilder lands aroud.

Except that if you looked at New York and Tokyo, Mexico City would throw you for a loop. And that's a major city, too.

Looking at New York city would not prepare you for the population density of Wyoming, either. A United States with population densities more typical of the Northeastern states could have a population exceeding China - yet without seeming much more crowded at the few points we've seen.

It could also easily be less populated. You might look at Russia as a whole compared with the European bit of it.

Vulcan certainly has fewer people than Gideon.

What happened to Gideon is intriguing, although it's an oddity on its own, very special.
If it was part of the UFP, I could argue that nuking the surface of this world woud cut off a major and high percentage of the overall UFP population.

I assume Gideon has substantially reduced its population, one way or another. However, it helps point out another problem with guessing populations; it's very easy for only a handful of extraordinarily heavily populated planets to throw the total off.

When we're dealing with WH40k, at least we now have a good idea of how many hive worlds there are, and population figures for a handful of them. Bashir's figures, as fast and loose as they may sound, are the most solid piece of data we have to work with on the overall population of the Federation... and what fraction of the population of the Federation that represents is unclear.

I don't think Bashir's numbers mean anything. Simply put, whatever the outcome of the war, he estimates that the revolt will burgeon after five generations.
I'm sorry, but that's bogus. It's either one or the other. Not five generations plus one for the revolt for either outcome.

They do mean something. You need to be able to recover, and in the scenario where the Dominion killed 900 billion, recovering means repopulating to a state nearly indistinguishable from the state where they didn't kill 900 billion people. That's very hard if 900 billion is almost all of the Federation's population.

That is certainly not necessary, especially with the expectable low death rates due to the technology and medicines, and high population growth rate.

Moreso, the only right interpretation of Bashir's words is that either way, you're in for at least five generations of Dominion rule. Eventually, in one of the two scenarios, a rebellion will grow around the time of the sixth generation, while this rebellion will occur much later on in the other scenario.

But with no evidence to consider these colonies more populated than the lightly populated homeworlds.

The conflict over terraformed and habitable worlds makes little sense with no population pressure.

It does. Inhabitable worlds are rare. The closer the better for securized and fast exchange of goods and resources. It's also easier to plant a colony here, much more enjoyable, etc.

So rare, that in "Justice," there were over three thousand known worlds that the Federation could plant colonies on within in a single star cluster? That's an impressive total for the Drake equation.

Think carefully about Vulcans and Andorians. Regulus (77 LY away) was near the Andorian-Vulcan border, and Vulcan is quite close to Earth (16 LY); if Andoria and Vulcan are similar distances from their mutual borders (a reasonable assumption) they should be between 100 and 200 light years apart. So when we're thinking of Andorians and Vulcans competing for scarce habitable worlds, we're talking about a region containing over ten thousand stars. Andoria is a winter world with a lot of water (mostly frozen); Vulcan is a searing desert world.

In order for conflict over "scarce" colony worlds to even remotely plausible, we need to have population pressure.

[Kane Starkiller]

Except that we're not dealing with 50 or 100 or 150 worlds; we're dealing with something like 150 member worlds, each with its own colonies that don't qualify as independent units.

I saw no evidence that 150 number Picard stated only includes member worlds and not, for example, all major established worlds.

Remember that Earth alone, after about 200 years of warp drive, had spread its inhabitants to a thousand worlds, and we're concerned about what the terrain looks like after 300 years.

There is no evidence Kirk referred to only human colonies when talking to Cochrane. It would be like George Washington meeting a Navy Captain and asking him how the US is doing and the Captain only citing the current population of the original 13 colonies.
Not only do many have the population of under a million but a vast majority (if not all) planets referred to as colonies were basically a single village with a few hundred or maybe thousand people.
Not to mention the possibility we also discussed before: that many of the colonies were abandoned. After all majority of seen colonies were no more than a small settlement.

Normal population dynamics. As a population of anything reproduces, it usually reproduces exponentially until it starts to approach its carrying capacity, at which point it diverges from an exponential curve and we start to see logistic behavior.

We already had this discussion here where I pointed out that human population growth is mostly unrelated to the amount of available space but to overall education level of the population. Hence most of developed countries have a below replacement fertility rate while places like Bangladesh have above replacement fertility rate even though it has half of the US population on a territory the size of Iowa.

Not really. It may be an economic loss - whatever that means in a replicator economy - but since cold sleep went out of fashion, transit time hasn't cut from reproduction. In fact, a subculture that mainly reproduces in space is showcased in ENT.

Obviously replicators do not eliminate economic loss and they do have a steep energy price since it was cheaper to put up with Neelix' cooking and actually descend on planetary surface to restock then to use replicators.

So rare, that in "Justice," there were over three thousand known worlds that the Federation could plant colonies on within in a single star cluster? That's an impressive total for the Drake equation.

And just how hospitable were those worlds? How much arable land did they have and how much natural resources? A planet could be "habitable" as in support human life and still be 99% covered in sand dunes.

Think carefully about Vulcans and Andorians. Regulus (77 LY away) was near the Andorian-Vulcan border, and Vulcan is quite close to Earth (16 LY); if Andoria and Vulcan are similar distances from their mutual borders (a reasonable assumption) they should be between 100 and 200 light years apart. So when we're thinking of Andorians and Vulcans competing for scarce habitable worlds, we're talking about a region containing over ten thousand stars. Andoria is a winter world with a lot of water (mostly frozen); Vulcan is a searing desert world.

In order for conflict over "scarce" colony worlds to even remotely plausible, we need to have population pressure.

Again how many "M class" planets did their space encompass? How many of those "M class" planets were actually fertile resource rich worlds? Finally what difference does it make whether their own planets are overpopulated? Planets are still the source of food, energy and natural resources and would definitely be fought over.

I would also strongly suspect that 900 billion represents only a relatively small fraction of the total population of the Federation. 10% casualties across an entire population is a devastating blow to a human social structure regardless of what else happened in a war (see, for example, this list for percentage population losses in WWII); couple it with disarmament and military suppression, and it will be many generations before recovery.

Which is, of course, predicted by a bunch of mental patients and which was utterly bogus since Federation did in fact win the war. If they failed to even predict the next 2-3 years how could they possibly know there would be a rising 5 generations later and that it would specifically originate on Earth? There was an episode in which Weyoun stated that the first thing he plans to do after conquest is exterminate the population of Earth precisely to eliminate any possibility of an uprising.
So who knows what kind of assumptions they made when they predicted the uprising or even what 900 billion number included. After all they took the liberty to project the future of Federation for over 1000 years who knows who they predicted joining the war.



Now to deal with Galactic Republic/Empire:

This is even more interesting, and also slightly problematic in relation to the 1 million system mark of the Empire. I've argued for a Core-centric viewpoint of the Republic which leads to overlooking Rim worlds on the basis of population. The core systems should contain the majority of the populatio. One almost has to add in some extra "subject" systems, or virtually uninhabited territories, or a period of rapid exploration/colonization/remapping to justify the difference given that line.

You assume that each senator represents a single system for which you have no evidence. In fact since there are only 1000 seats and we know from the films that over ten thousand systems will join the CIS there must be senators which represent more than one system.

- It's a modest sized galaxy, which regarding the samples we can study nowadays, means it's certainly not anywhere close to 100,000 LY.

"Modest" is a subjective term. As a matter of fact ITW of Ep1 explicitly states that the SW galaxy is about 100,000 ly wide. The drawing of the galaxy with a scale next to it actually shows a width closer to 120,000ly but it is possible one side is less wide and 100,000ly is the average diameter.

The Republic, just before the Clone Wars, held ten thousand systems. To fit with the film, we would have to consider that half the Senate was empty, with around +- 10K systems affiliated to the Separatists (with the possibility of a few seceding to remain neutral and fully independant).

We know it had 100,000 worlds while the Empire had million. How they are spread out between systems is anyone's guess.

Actually, you're right on the first part. I was not thinking clearly.
It is mathematically obvious that you cannot remove 10K from 10K and say that's splitting the Republic in half.

Not only that but Palpatine never said "split in half" but "split in two". Not only did Palpatine never imply these parts are equal but we don't even know whether he would be talking about the planet count or total population and percentage of GDP etc. etc. Finally he was a corrupt politician using the war to climb to power. Trying to divine the total number of planets from his statement is like trying to ascertain the influence of Jews on German society by listening to Hitler's speeches.

[Praeothmin]

I saw no evidence that 150 number Picard stated only includes member worlds and not, for example, all major established worlds.

Except for the fact that he was talking specifically about the Federation and what it represented.

If someone was to ask you what are the USA, you would mention the 50 states and the federal district, and you wouldn't mention the countries where you're located and have influence as part of the USA, because they're not.
You wouldn't mention Iraq as part of the US, nor Panama, nor Afghanistan, even though you have influence and a military presence there, because they're not part of the US.
You won't talk about a US research station in Antartica, even though it is a US research station, because it is still not part of the US.

In other words, logic points a lot more to those 150 worlds to being the members of the Federation, then to being all the worlds where the Federation has a presence, whether as comercial or diplomatic...

growth is mostly unrelated to the amount of available space but to overall education level of the population.

This is oversimplifying things a bit Kane.
There's also the values espoused by the society in question.
Rural China doesn't necessarily have a higher education level then rural Bengladesh, but where in Bengladesh the gorvernment hasn't curtailed the birth rate, China did.
And in industrialized countries, we've grown away from family values, installed values that state that a successful woman cannot be one that stays at home, that we need to amass great material wealth to be happy (forcing both members of a couple to work), etc...

In a society where wealth has been downplayed, and where having families is encouraged (like the Federation), and where every basic need is taken care of, you'll have a lot more births then in modern America.
I know a lot of people who'd love to have kids, but they don't actually have the means to support them, so they wait until they do...

Obviously replicators do not eliminate economic loss and they do have a steep energy price since it was cheaper to put up with Neelix' cooking and actually descend on planetary surface to restock then to use replicators.

The price is only steep for a ship lost in the middle of newhere and who doesn't know when they will be able to replenish fuel and energy sources.
Not for a Federation world or even a colony within reach of major worlds...

Which is, of course, predicted by a bunch of mental patients and which was utterly bogus since Federation did in fact win the war.

Their quirks did not stop them from having bright minds, just like some Autists will be great matematicians.
And by the way, the Feds won the war because the Bajoran Prophets sealed the wormhole and stemmed the tide or reinforcements the Dominion was expecting.
Please tell us how they should have predicted that... :)

You assume that each senator represents a single system for which you have no evidence. In fact since there are only 1000 seats and we know from the films that over ten thousand systems will join the CIS there must be senators which represent more than one system.

Agreed...

As a matter of fact ITW of Ep1 explicitly states that the SW galaxy is about 100,000 ly wide.

What book is this?
Because the novelisation of ANH states that the galaxy is "modest", and since the Milky Way, at 100 000LY isn't a "modest" galaxy, in fact being a rather large one, I was under the impression that the SW galaxy was much smaller then this...