In the debate thread, I just told him to start over because I finally realized how ridiculously long and non-narrow he'd been, in violation of the terms. I mentioned there that I'd gone through like a whole section before realizing there were like 99 more.
Here's my response to that section, raw and unpolished (no links in it yet, for instance), and since he'll be starting over this is not part of the debate. That's why I feel okay posting it in that state. And, hopefully it'll give him some pointers on how to proceed and how not to proceed, the biggest being "SHOW YOUR SOURCES!!!!":
StarWarsStarTrek wrote:Ok, my opening arguments.
Canon Policy
We've already had a semi agreement on this for this debate,
Then it was a waste of your time, my time, and the readers' time to discuss it.
But as long as you have:
the ICS's, that's about the movies, obviously isn't another universe, because it's about the freaking movies. This is quite simple stuff.
My site's about the movies. So what?
Now, on to the meat:
Size, Industry and Numbers
Star Wars has millions of planets. The Federation at its peak has; what; 1000 at most? This is staggering number difference, one that is very rare to be found in a conventional war. It's like the industrial disadvantage that the Axis had, but times several hundred. And that's not taking into account other things.
I certainly concede that the Empire has more planets than the Federation, though I imagine the Federation has more than a thousand. But that's neither here nor there at the moment. In any case, as I put it on my site years ago, the Federation is, by comparison to the Empire, a rounding error.
However, that does not necessarily demand that there be an industrial advantage in regards to military needs. It wasn't that long ago that China had far more people than the United States but far less industrial output and even-more-far-less military industry output. So, although I suspect you are correct, we do not know that for sure.
After all, as noted in "Pursuit of Peace"[TCW3], a relatively small military increase (when compared with the population of Coruscant) is sufficient to virtually bankrupt the Republic, seemingly due to the government's funding of the population's basic services (which had already been curtailed by war funding).
Although we don't have great insight into the general economics of the Republic and Empire, it is safe to say that they seem to have a rather inefficient system in regards to military economics. That is, if they can't field a force of a few million clones without going bankrupt, then leaping to the conclusion that their war industry output would swamp the Federation's is questionable at best.
Star Wars hyperdrive speeds and their capability to travel across large portions of the galaxy within a day
Evidence, please.
You might point out that hyperdrives need hyperlanes to travel. However, G canon points out that hyperlanes are not necessary for hyperdrive travel. Obi Wan traveled to Kamino, which was a virtually unknown world and therefore almost certainly had no hyperlanes to it.
"A galaxy divided! Striking swifty after the battle of Geonosis, Count Dooku's droid army has seized control of the major hyperspace lanes, separating the Republic from the majority of its clone army. With few clones available, the Jedi generals cannot gain a foothold in the Outer Rim, as more and more planets choose to join Dooku's Separatists."
That's from the opening to the TCW film. So yeah, you might be able to travel without a hyperlane, but it is clear that the lanes are so tactically and strategically significant that, militarily speaking, you're screwed without them.
Possibilities for their utility include extra velocity, extra efficiency of transit, safety concerns, temporal distortion concerns, and a wide variety of other possibilities more wild and more mundane. But whatever the cause or causes, not having access to them is obviously enough to lose a war over.
And he still did it likely within a day.
I'm not aware of any such timeframe being required.
The construction of the Death Star 2 in only 60 months to 60% completion shows a staggering level of industrial might.
Where do your "60" figures come from? The month one is not awful, but it's awfully specific. We have no clear date for RotJ, because TESB's duration is not known. And, the RotJ novel implies a significant passage of time between the end of TESB and the beginning of RotJ. See
http://www.st-v-sw.net/archive/TA-SWchron.html
As for percent completion, we are told in the novel that it was half complete ... if we're told 60% somewhere then I have forgotten.
In any case, we are given no clear date for the beginning of DS2's construction. If we assume it to have begun at the destruction of the first Death Star, and if we further assume your five year figure, then given the sizes provided we are only looking at a five-fold construction rate increase by volume.
That is, if you take the volume of DS1 (about 9.05E14 cubic meters) and half the volume of the complete DS2 (about 10.72E14), then you're only looking at a ~20% increase in volume. And given the 20+ years of DS1's "long years of secretive construction" versus the five years we're assuming, then it's a four-fold increase before we count the volume difference, and only 4.8 fold if we do.
Frankly, going from secretive construction to non-secretive construction will provide that sort of improvement, so I don't really see that the DS2 construction time proves some massive increase in output.
And, we don't know how much output is involved, but we can guess. Given the fleet sizes indicated in the canon, the general military budget and shipbuilding capacity must be tiny by comparison to the Death Star's needs.
The Construction of the Death Star 2 is one of the most impressive industrial feats in Star Wars, and one that has not been replicated by the Federation
True enough, the Federation's never built something so big.
But, I would love to know how long it takes Starfleet to build one of the Starbases of the SB-74 type, which is over five times the size of the Executor.
You know Coruscant? The EU suggests a number of about 3 trillion,
The Republic has "trillions of common folk" per AotC Ch. 5, and per RotS Ch. 15 Coruscant has "a trillion beings on this planet alone".
My previous estimate for the Empire was 200 trillion persons, but now that we've seen some of the other worlds I'm thinking that should be revised downwards.
The density of New York City’s population is about 10,000 people per km^2. The surface area of Earth is about 150 million km^2. That’s about 1.5 trillion people.
Good estimate . . . only 50% off from the canon figure.
The densest city in the world is Manila, with about 43,000 people per km^2. Using this, that’s about 6.45 trillion people. Woah.
Uh-oh, getting colder . . .
that’s about 30 trillion people.
. . . colder . . .
which bumps up our number to over 150 trillion people.
. . . frigid! . . .
That outnumbers the entire Federation. On one planet.
Nah, the Federation has twice Coruscant's population, at least, and probably significantly more.
Seizing and maintain control of such a populous planet would require hundred of billions to trillions of troops, ground troops in the level that the Federation doesn’t have. They’d need to recruit the vast majority of their civilian population just to have the ability to occupy Coruscant.
The invasion of Iraq, with a population of 31 million, was accomplished with a force that topped out at ~300,000, and the occupation topped out around half that figure.
Using that for Coruscant, we'd be looking at an invasion force that would have to be 1/100th of the population size, and an occupation force 1/200th.
Or, the Federation would need one billion troops to invade Coruscant, and 500 million to hold on to it.
Does the Federation have a billion troops? There's a chance they could, but I rather doubt they do . . . I estimate low tens of millions.
As for ship counts, the Battle of Coruscant. It shows huge fleets rivaling the dominion wars in size.
The battle to retake DS9 featured 1,800 total warships on both sides. I'm not aware of any indication that the Battle of Coruscant featured that many ships. Not that they couldn't have, mind you . . . I estimate the later Empire's fleet count to be about twice the Federation fleet count . . . but I just don't know of any evidence.
