Challenge: Invade the Star Wars galaxy

[Admiral Breetai]

Hey SWSt you are lying again there are no trillions of ships or quadrillions of fighter

your making that number up

[sonofccn]

My question was in response to darkstar's assertion that he could build a massive fleet of several thousand warships.

And my assertion was there was no need. The Federation has a fleet, no need to build one just for this little ruckus.

I would also question why you assert that 48,000 C is a "low" figure despite the phrase "maximum" warp being used.

Because its a "lower" high warp speed. For instance I could have used That which Survives {TOS-3}

RAHDA: It doesn't make any sense. But somehow I'd say that in a flash we've been knocked one thousand light years away from where we were.
SPOCK: Nine hundred and ninety point seven light years to be exact, Lieutenant.

Which the Enterprise covered without aid of advance alien technomagic in about a day or so or assuming the 100,000 lightyear seperation could be covered in less than a year at that speed with a couple of months max to reach the galaxy center once they did.

Already addressed this with a lockdown.

Can't be done. Knowledge is too widespread and control too loose for you to even achieve this. Pick a Cantina on the Outer Rim and I can find dubious men and women with a grudge against society and knowing the location of the single most important planet in their galaxy.

Irrelevant and untrue. Star Wars is the defender here, and you have failed to address the problem.

It most certainly is true and you were the one who started making cracks the Federation hadn't mapped the galaxy in two centuries. I was merely putting things in perspective.

Actually, in C canon it was 6 months according to Shadows of the Empire.

And you will need to produce the relavent passages to prove this.

All of these transpired before the construction of the Death Star went underway.

Actually at the start of the Empire's construction of the DS1 holocomunication was quite prevelent, look at the just finished Clonewars and their palm holos and what not, the Venator was the top of the line ship, Imperialization hasn't occured yet nor had TIE fighters been put into service. All of these events and happenings would be concurent to the first Death Star which took about 20 years to build.

so you're admitting that the Death Star was both secret and very difficult to find out about. Thank you?

That was never debated. You argued that because it was secret it must have been a tiny portion of the Imperial budget. I was arguing against.

I said activated on the fly

Which would put it on par with your average shield system, hardly out of the ordinary.

you can't honestly think that it was more prepared or packing better defensive systems than the galactic capital, especially if you find it so important that the Alliance would collapse without it.

I don't believe I argued on if the capitol had a shield or not. Merely arguing the Rebel base was not an on the fly operation which I thought you were arguing. As well I do find it dubious if the Rebel shield could be linked as you suggested. That capability was never demostrated with that type.

Around 200,000 people a day visit the United States as tourists, about 0.06% of the population. Coruscant's percentage is definitely higher given that it's the center of the entire galaxy, outside sources are within the same government, many people would have jobs that require commuting to and from Coruscant and there are millions of planets of people to arrive from; Coruscant's population is under 0.01% of the galactic population, compared to the United States being around 5%.

So therefore, you can expect around 100 billion people commuting in and out every day at the very least (and this is still rather low, given Coruscant's extreme interdependence with the galaxy).

You misunderstand. I want canon number. Real solid numbers not idle speculation based upon thin air.

Those are population estimates, and clearly wrong if you use basic math.

Well unless you have evidence Wookiepedia fracked up the numbers its C-canon that there are single digit trillions living on Coruscant and therefore can not be wrong. Merely overruled or superceded by other more numerous or higher sources.

No, in a matter of decades given the time needed to traverse 100,000 + light years

No actually pulling a slightly higher warp speed does put us back in the months department.

We already know that over 6 months the Death Star 2 can be constructed to around 60% completion,

You have not provided any confirmation of you assertion on the six months figure and it is debatable if the DS2 was at 60%. It had huge holes in it and was missing some vital features like onboard shield generators.

and it masses probably quadrillions of small fighter craft (I could do the math, but the exact number is not important) and is far more complex.

And we have evidence the DS2 doesn't scale downward. Hence 25,000 stardestroyers for the militant Empire. So we have no reason to assume it works with fighters.

AI in Star Wars is very widespread

Droids are widespread but they don't get employed normally in manning ship operations, humans do it. Han pilots, or chewie, the MF. Clones controled the Venators. Imperial humans manned ISD's. It falls to you to prove it is feasible in the StarWars to build droneships ala the M-5.

Yes it does, as you use it just as much, if they fight at close ranges in times when being able to fight at longer ranges would have been an advantage.

No it doesn't. They chose to close for some reason. We don't need to know why. But they rather consistently target and shoot at thing in the tens to hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

In the Dominion War, starships are shown consistently missing not-that-fast moving ST fighters doing very close range strafing runs, so how do you expect them to stop small craft accelerating outwards from random points from the planet's surface?

If its the example I'm thinking off they didn't do that bad, about one fighter per pass missing every other shot IIRC. Hardly uber bad targeting, once again far superior to what Star Wars could hope to accomplish, and done by the Cardies who have hardly the greatest warships. And I think the ships will do very well against freightors and their fighter escorts.

That isn't to say that Coruscant wasn't important, but capturing it does not guarantee victory any more than capturing DC did for the British.

Guarantee? No. But it is the central goverment and a symbol and its captured would hardly unify the diverse organizations of the Alliance.

Several problems with this quite frankly ridiculous assertion. First, I play the role of the Chief of State to offset the ST president having an OOU outlook, as is specified in the OP.

I'd prefer to think of this as running simulations than some Roleplay. Assuming that a populace will think centric to themselves and not some greater whole is hardly an absurde assumption.

Secondly, you're assuming that Star Wars military leaders are backwards retards that would assume for absolutely no reason that the enemy has "unlimited resources"

No I'm arguing that is how it seems. You see your own problems clearly, the enemy hides his same as you do from him. You don't see him struggling to keep shields at 100% at the expense of cutting life support by a fraction. All you see is you've hammered his ships six ways to sunday and they are still throwing up unbreakable deflector screens.

even though they are clearly using physical projectiles as a main combat weapon

Actually phasers are main combat weapons. Torpedoes are heavy munitions.

endless waves of soldiers (even though their fleet is clearly large, but not larger than a few thousand ships, and basic math can show that this does not provide room for endless waves of soldiers)

Once again I said that is how it seems. The enemy throws wave after wave after wave at you. You don't see him agonize over cutting engineering to fill up depleted infantry ranks. All you see is you repulsed the army a dozen times and they still keep coming up with reserves.

or that they are 100% devoted to the cause

Yes. You don't hear the enemy bicker amongst itself that this is a debacle. And you do realize all of this cuts both ways right? This isn't something special for Star Wars. Its human nature.

No, really, this assertion you seem to have pulled out of thin air. There is absolutely no reason for any intelligent person to overestimate the Federation fleet to any extreme.

Sigh. At no point did I ever suggest they would literaly believe the aformentioned merely that is how it would appear and no they wouldn't just sit back point to "math" and say everything going to fine.

Thirdly the Voyager hardly survived with ease, and hardly had to fight constant battles or blockade an entire planet.

I didn't say with ease. I said with strain but the ship did survive and did fight on more than one occansion. And since I assume any logistical chain I have would be better than the one Voyager didn't have the fleet will perform better. That isn't good if your plan is to try and wait the fleet out.

Simple; we know that Han Solo has a ship, the Millennium Falcon.

Cute. I want data on shipyards, production rates not your attempts to derive estimates based upon nebulous data points.

We know that the SW galaxy consists of 100 quadrillion sapient beings

[/quote]Canon source please and I mean provide and excerpt.

so therefore there must be at least hundreds of trillion of ships in order for even 0.01% of the populace to own one

Well if we have canon evidence .01% of the galactic population owns a starship than that would be something. As is we don't know the exact distrubution of ships merely that is possible for private citizens to purchase them. Our scales could be askewed because we tend to hang out in space ports and such which would have a higher percentage of ship owners to populace than elsewhere.

Honestly, your refusal to acknowledge the scale of a galactic civilization to even the slightest degree is silly and irritating.

Merely demanding evidence. I never was a fan of these back of the envelope projections, its always funny how "common sense" solutions end up being at odd with how these Sci-Fi type universes actually are.

I'm pretty sure that if I claim that SW must have trillions of bathrooms, you will demand for "canon evidence"

If you were using it to try and claim an advantage yes I would.

Or if I claim that they have no shortage of hydrogen, you will demand citations.

No. Unless you tried to argue for a specific number.

What's next? You demand evidence that the Alliance has a greater industrial might than Nazi Germany?

Obviously if you have evidence that would be greatly apreciated but I wasn't planning on comparing the two no.

In order to survive as a civilization, Star Wars would have to produce hundreds of quadrillions of pounds of food just to be able to eat.

And if you were arguing that their food production was an advantage over the Federation I'd still demand evidence. In debates you must prove your assertions.

You aren't fully grasping how large a galaxy is.

I am. But Lucas or sci-fi writers don't. And they set the universe not you.

Earth has a population of 12 billion.

I'm actually curious where you pulled this gem from. I wasn't aware Earth gave a population figure.

Based on these numbers, the Federation has not passed one trillion citizens.

Bzzzt!

BASHIR: If we fight, there will be over nine hundred billion casualties. If we surrender, no one dies. Either way we're in for five generations of Dominion rule. Eventually a rebellion will form, centring on Earth. It'll spread, and within another generation, they'll succeed in conquering the Dominion. The Alpha Quadrant will unite and a new, stronger Federation will rule for thousands of years. Since we can't win this war, why don't we save as many lives as we can? I know it's difficult to accept.

24th century Federation can sustain over nine hundred billion casualties place its population on the lower end roughly at 1 trillion and likely more considering it has to recover and overthrow the Dominion.

But it is true that the estimated death of the Dominion war was in the hundreds of billions, so it would be reasonable to postulate an Alpha Quadrant population of hundreds of trillions at the very, very most.

nearly a trillion actually for just the Federation. A single political entity, we simply do not have sufficent data to make conclusions on the Alpha quadrent in this matter.

It is not just possible, it is certain. The Star Wars galaxy has been spacefaring for 25,000+ years.

To be certain we would need the total population of the Alpha quadrent. We do not posses this to my knowledge. So no it is not certain. And how long Wars has been a spacefaring society matters not in this matter.

Now that you know that there was a typo involved, feel free to rebute the point.

Very well. At 48,000c it would take about two years to cross 100,000 lightyears. Not 33 years. At 168000c as suggested by That Which Survives {TOS-3} We would be talking about a couple hundred days.

You've got it backwards; construction time gets easier after you successfully build prototypes, such as what the Death Star 1 and 2 essentially were.

No. You are basing your construction off of a six month assumption you have not provided evidence for. I am looking at the construction of the first death star and looking at the implied time lapse between the firsts destruction and the reveal of the second half way under construction. Until evidence is presented to say otherwise I do not see any error in assuming years to construct death stars.

The Death Stars mass far more.

And if it worked that way the Empire could have built hundreds of thousands of star destroyers. They didn't. Ergo raw volume of raw resources doesn't scale down to smaller projects. It doesn't mesh with the universe.

That's bullshit. You know as well as I that hyperdrive allows for trans-galactic travel within hours.

Wasn't even thinking of speed, but trans-galatic? ;), but detection of enemy warships, deducing thier destination, determing a plan of action, ordering and arranging for ships flung across your galaxy to all meet up at Coruscant. All takes time.

On the contrary, based on darkstar's plan, which involves blockading Coruscant with his entire fleet, I would cripple the Federation's entire invasion force at the cost of one planet out of millions of inhabited planets and many hundreds of billions of uninhabited ones.

Two thousand ships you may or may not destroy, assuming you could even blow your planet in the first place, and the Federation can send another two thousand. You in turn are out a heavy industrialisted capitol and have trillions of refugees to feed.

Meanwhile, his entire navy would be dead

A fleet assuming this actually worked.

the Federation would be open to invasion

Not particuarly. There would still be eight thousand waiting. And I think you are seriously downplaying the toll of evacuation, the destruction of a key industrial world, as well as the symbolic defeat of destroying your capitol.

and building up another fleet (and trying to restore morale after your earlier fleet was destroyed) would take decades.

I'm sorry I find this bloody rib tickling. At best you would have destroyed a fifth of the Federation fleet assuming everything worked perfectly and all things considered you've just inflicted far more pain on yourself than you have on your enemy.

If it does, my ships would travel faster than your FTL communication

:) Okay lets just calculate how fast your ships are, using highest G-Canon so we have the most accurate and close picture of the True StarWars universe, So lets look at AOTC

PADME
They'll never get there in time to
save him. They have to come half
way across the galaxy. Look,
Geonosis is less than a parsec away.

If the entire trip took an hour that would be 24192c for a oneway trip of 4 years between galaxies. Even if we assume only fifteen minutes pass your still only to 96768 and a year transit between galaxies plus additional months to leave your galaxy.

Conversly we have Family Buisness:

KASIDY: It's not what you think. It's kind of a family obligation. You see, my youngest brother, he's a colonist on Cestus Three.
SISKO: That's on the other side of the Federation.
KASIDY: It's so far away, it takes two weeks for a subspace transmission to get here and I'm expecting one tonight. I promised my brother I'd listen to it as it came in.

So 4000 lightyears per week equates out to roughly 192000 for about six months between galaxies.

So no unless you have G-canon evidence, time and distance stated on screen, I do believe you just failed to outrun my com signal. :)

Edit:Fixed a glaring typo, its DS1 not DS2 being built at the close of the Clonewars.

[Picard]

Make Section 31 get its hands on hyperdrive, or star charts, and most problems are out of window. Then Federation would simply have to destroy SW galaxy's industrial base and leave it to collapse due to political bickering. After that, spend few centuries annexing worlds, making it for a sustainable increase in UFP's size.

[Praeothmin]

So 4000 lightyears per week equates out to roughly 192000 for about six months between galaxies.

So no unless you have G-canon evidence, time and distance stated on screen, I do believe you just failed to outrun my com signal. :)

And, as always, as SWST is used to doing, he ignores all the real-time transmissions between DS9 and Earth, 50 something LY apart from one another.
How fast is that, 50 LY in less than a second?
Ah, yes, it is 1 576 800 000c...
Much, much faster than any SW ship... :)

[2046]

SWST, I didn't say the Federation would need to build a fleet. I said "assemble" a fleet.

By your reasoning, Picard's fleet in "Redemption, Pt II" was constructed, not gathered together, since it was explicitly assembled. What, do all those times people were ordered to assemble, like "assemble the senior staff" or "assemble a security team" suddenly make transporter duplication a lot more commonplace?

If you had a history of honesty I couldn't possibly be led to believe that this use of fallacious equivocation on your part was meant to create a straw man to knock down, but unfortunately I cannot ignore that possibility with you. Please don't repeat that ever so cutesy behavior.

[2046]

Congratulations in displaying your grammatical superiority.

It's fact, not grammar.

This is my thread. If you don't like my rules, then go make your own.

You declare the canon of a non-existent person. Seems like normal canon rules apply, to me.

Besides, I include an entity that only exists in the EU, so trying to only apply "Star Wars canon" is hilariously futile.

A Leia-run post-Imperial state is an acceptable surmise, given the ending line of RotJ . . . to paraphrase, "the Empire is dead; long live the Alliance."

Time to find Coruscant: Decades? Centuries? As Chief of State I could order a lockdown on all disclosure of hyperspace routes or the coordinates of GA planets. You will have to find Coruscant manually, and after centuries the Federation has yet to chart out its own galaxy.

That's about as likely as the Federation trying to lock down information on Earth's location, and about as likely to succeed. It isn't like the Europeans had maps of native American empires, after all.

In about a year I could likely build a death star.

Unlikely. The Rebels surely must realize that building a Death Star at the expense of a real fleet is a path to failure, not to mention the horror that would come with building one from their eyes anyway. And unlike the many years of secretive construction or the multiple years of semi-secret construction, an open and massive construction project is gonna be known.

Except that, thanks to hyperdrive's enormous speed, reinforcements from every fleet across the galaxy would arrive within hours, whereas you cannot send any more ships from the Milky Way within 30 years, given the 100,000 light year gap.

Don't move the goalposts. There's a 100,000 kilometer border by your opening post, and something about warp and hyperdrive being unrestricted, too. Even if we were to grant a speed advantage to hyperdrive of up to 10 times (which is completely unsupported by the canon), you're simply not going to have every ship show up.

Besides, if that's all it took to assemble a megafleet in Star Wars, there wouldn't be any of these handful-of-ship engagements in TCW. You'd simply move the whole fleet around as needed.

Worst case, I lay siege and blockade the planet,

You cannot blockade the planet effectively in all dimensions with just 6 month's worth of warships, especially not fast, single manned craft such as X wings or even larger craft like the Falcon.

I can pop those like balloons from thousands of kilometers.

You also cannot penetrate Coruscant's planetary shield, which is authorized under the OP.

I see no evidence of that.

I could have a fleet of trillions of random civilian ships constructed and controlled by computers, and have them randomly all fly out at once and watch as you waste your precious photon torpedos on them.

You think you can build trillions of ships on Coruscant within months?

Coruscant has defensive batteries.

Useless at Federation ranges. That's one reason why the Death Star was such an awesome weapon . . . extreme range, for Star Wars.

With the fall of Coruscant other worlds would likely fall in line quickly enough.

{...}It is still just one planet out of millions.

Wrong. Per all we've seen in the canon, there is no equal. It is the single city in an empire of towns and villages.

the RotS: novel confirms a population of "quadrillions"

Hypothesized for the entire galaxy, not the Republic.

Your situation is hopeless. A Federation hell-bent on conquest is the Empire's worst nightmare. Can we occupy every world with troops? No. But the beauty is, we don't need to. Decapitate, and it's yours.

[Trinoya]

I require clarification before I can respond.

You will not use any Treknologies of the week and vice versa. No Genesis devices, no phase-cloak, etc.

Many people have different definitions of "technologies of the week" which is why it comes up so often in debates. I am under the opinion that unless a technology is mentioned more than once (in a capacity that implies use or intent/consideration to use) or demonstrated more than once, then it is technology of the week. Do we share this definition?

Visuals > dialogue, unless if it is a clear glitch or error.

Naturally you mean that the visuals are greater than the dialog OR are to be demonstrated to make sense with the dialog provided?

Last but not least: Time period for the trek side, I presume would be the most recent on screen appearance?

[sonofccn]

So 4000 lightyears per week equates out to roughly 192000 for about six months between galaxies.

So no unless you have G-canon evidence, time and distance stated on screen, I do believe you just failed to outrun my com signal. :)

And, as always, as SWST is used to doing, he ignores all the real-time transmissions between DS9 and Earth, 50 something LY apart from one another.
How fast is that, 50 LY in less than a second?
Ah, yes, it is 1 576 800 000c...
Much, much faster than any SW ship... :)

Well in his defense it would fall to me to bring them up, it isn't his job to provide my evidence, and I, as usual, didn't feel like combing episodes to find the one of the ones where Sisko speaks to Earth for what largely amounted to a "joke" post anyway. :)

[Praeothmin]

Except, sonofccn, that these examples were provided dozens of times in older debates in which he participated, and these examples were given as counters to his bullshit claims about slow communications for ST... :)

[Admiral Breetai]

not passed one trillion? bullshit they likely have a population a bit higher than that hell there are a few hundred billion humans

[StarWarsStarTrek]

It's fact, not grammar.

And you don't think that grammar is fact?

You declare the canon of a non-existent person. Seems like normal canon rules apply, to me.

No, this is my thread. You will follow my thread's rules, regardless of whether it fits with "Lucas's vision". You will argue whether or not SW EU can resist an invasion by ST. You are not arguing that the EU is "canon", we are simply arguing how well it would do against ST. If I win the debate, you have every right to simply say "Ok, SW EU beats ST...but it isn't canon, so it doesn't change the primary debate".

And please, PLEASE do not go on and say that the SW EU does not exist, or I will laugh. Hardly. Profusely. Star Wars and Star Trek do not exist. They do exist as fictional series, and so does the EU, even if it is not "canon" (which it is, but that is not our argument). We are arguing the SW EU, not whether or not it is canon.

A Leia-run post-Imperial state is an acceptable surmise, given the ending line of RotJ . . . to paraphrase, "the Empire is dead; long live the Alliance."

So now you are resorting to inventing a completely hypothetical post-movies galaxy of your own imagination. At least the EU is licensed material.

That's about as likely as the Federation trying to lock down information on Earth's location, and about as likely to succeed. It isn't like the Europeans had maps of native American empires, after all.

The American continents are incalculably smaller than a galaxy.

Unlikely. The Rebels surely must realize that building a Death Star at the expense of a real fleet is a path to failure,

Why? The Federation doesn't have a giant spy network that could steal the station's plans, nor would the Alliance make the same design flaws as before (assuming competence, which we are, to the level of competence that I could provide).

not to mention the horror that would come with building one from their eyes anyway.

Just rename it as liberty star, or strategic defense station, or whatever.

And unlike the many years of secretive construction or the multiple years of semi-secret construction, an open and massive construction project is gonna be known.

So what? The Federation's communication tech is fundamentally different (and inferior) to the holonet, they can't intercept anything and would not be able to learn anything if they did. They'd only find out once they actually got to Coruscant, in which case it would be too late.

Don't move the goalposts. There's a 100,000 kilometer border by your opening post, and something about warp and hyperdrive being unrestricted, too.

Unrestricted by the galactic barrier or by the hyperlane blackout past the galaxy. That did not equate to infinite FTL speed.

Even if we were to grant a speed advantage to hyperdrive of up to 10 times (which is completely unsupported by the canon),

If hyperdrive were no faster than warp drive, it would take senators years to commute from their homeworlds to Coruscant (even though there are "emergency meetings of Congress"), and Anakin would have been a teenager in TPM by the time they reached Coruscant. And this is if you use a small SW galaxy.

How did Darth Maul travel from Coruscant to Tatooine within a day? How did Padme travel to Mustafar in the time it takes for Anakin to massacre the seperatist leadership? By your figures cross-galactic travel would take weeks, months or even years. In canon it takes hours or days.

simply not going to have every ship show up.

Why not? Your strategy involves blitzing Coruscant, no other planets are at immediate risk.

Besides, if that's all it took to assemble a megafleet in Star Wars, there wouldn't be any of these handful-of-ship engagements in TCW. You'd simply move the whole fleet around as needed.

Because usually:

1. The enemy can quickly rally ships to attack other planets on a whim. The Federation cannot do this; you have no reinforcements that are due to arrive within 3 decades, nor can you mount attacks at pretty much any planet in the galaxy without warning.

2. The confrontations take place in distant, out of place planets lacking hyperspace routes as fast as the figurative center of the galaxy.

3. None of the confrontations are as important as the Galactic capital being in jepardy.

If you desire proof that a giant navy will appear in defense of Coruscant, look at RotS. There were at least hundreds of ships, and we didn't see all of them.

I can pop those like balloons from thousands of kilometers.

Such claims require evidence of some sort.

I see no evidence of that.

You see no evidence of the OP existing? You see no evidence that the EU is authorized in this thread?

You also conveniently ignored my suggestion of the use of overlapping theater shields, which indisputably exist.

You think you can build trillions of ships on Coruscant within months?

No, maybe millions within the 30 years it would take for you to cross the 100,000 light years, barring typos.

Useless at Federation ranges. That's one reason why the Death Star was such an awesome weapon . . . extreme range, for Star Wars.

You mean like the 10 kilometer ranges demonstrated in basically every large scale Trek combat in canon, such as the Battle of Worf 359 and the Second Battle of DS9?

Wrong. Per all we've seen in the canon, there is no equal. It is the single city in an empire of towns and villages.

Prove that the Empire is full of "towns and villages". The RotS novelization gives the galaxy a population of "quadrillions", which could not have stemmed from a million "towns and villages".

Hypothesized for the entire galaxy, not the Republic.

The Republic pre-civil war controls the galactic core and is the only spacefaring, multi-planet civilization. It's like saying that X population estimate is only accounting the UN nations and not the rest of the world.

Your situation is hopeless. A Federation hell-bent on conquest is the Empire's worst nightmare. Can we occupy every world with troops? No. But the beauty is, we don't need to. Decapitate, and it's yours.

You reach this conclusion with the clever decapitation of half of my post, the quotes that you kept not in any way being representative of the sections you snipped.

I've got to say that this is one of your weaker arguments, darkstar. You refuse to obey my thread rules, refuse to acknowledge the presence of overlapping theater shields, refuse to explain why the rest of the galaxy will fall in line because Coruscant falls (even though they know very well that your supply lines are 100,000 light years long), refuse to rebute the Alliance's impossibly larger industrial might and refuse to account for food, clothing, antimatter, fuel, or much of really anything in your bat-shit insane plan.

Here's how your invasion "plan" will likely turn out:

You assemble together your fleet, amassing after 6 months of production around 30,000 ships (and this is a very generous estimate, as it matches the entire Dominion fleet at its height after years of mobilization). You warp over to the Star Wars galaxy. By the time you get there, 30 years have passed, but to be fair you could have used stasis chambers to preserve your crew. You try to find Coruscant. How? I don't know, I guess that you could send scouting ships. Your response may be to claim that you could intercept SW ships and capture their databases or bribe them, but how will you catch any of them? The only reason why they would be so many light years away from home would be if they are using FTL, and you have no way to pull them out of hyperspace. Not to mention that the chances of being on a hyperspace lane and actually catching a ship in the trillions of kilometers of space is ridiculously small.

Miraculously, you find Coruscant. Warping there takes another few years. By this time, as many as 40 or 50 years have passed, giving me time to amass an enormous fleet. How enormous? Well, with a population of 100 quadrillion (official sources), and the knowledge that ships in SW are very common (Han Solo was hardly rich), you can conclude that there must be several trillion small ships manufactured every year in order to keep up with the demand; at just a 1% birth rate, 100 trillion people will reach whatever the galactic space-flying age limit is every year, and many will want a ship. This fits well with the Death Star and Death Star 2, whom both mass hundreds of millions, if not hundreds of billions of ISD's. I understand that construction times on ISD's will not scale directly porportionally to either of these, but it does give you an idea as to the monstrous fleet I could pull together in half a decade.

You may wonder why we never see this fleet in the movies. Obviously it's because no sane military regularly throws its entire fleet into a single battle. Same goes with TCW: if you see a battle involving a few dozen ships or less, you can be assured that thousands of such battles are happening across the galaxy at that very moment. Therefore, trying to disprove the industrial capabilities of a galactic civilization that has demonstrated feats proving their capabilities (Coruscant's cityscape, the Death Stars, a transport fleet that can carry away the oceans of a planet, etc) by pointing out that you don't see huge amounts of ships in a particular battle is like me viewing an Iraqi war footage and concluding that the US army consists of no more than a few hundred troops because that's all I saw onscreen.

So you have 30,000 ships surround Coruscant. I have a planetary shield/overlapping theater shields up. You fail to penetrate this. You decide to blockade the planet and starve me out. The next day, several hundred million ISD's (massing less than the two Death Stars) accompanied by several billion more vessels (since the frigates:ISD ratio is higher than one) and several Death Stars (given the speed in which the second one was almost completed) appear, surrounding your fleet. You die.

[Praeothmin]

Of course, because wanting to conquer a neighbouring Galaxy 100 000 LY away, I will certainly not try to devellop TransWarp, or Wormhole technology based on captured Borg equipment...


*Rolleyes*

[Picard]

In Dominion war, 900 billion people were expected to be killed before Federation surrendered. That gives 1 trillion people for total populace minimum. Maybe even 5 - 10 trillion.

So now you are resorting to inventing a completely hypothetical post-movies galaxy of your own imagination. At least the EU is licensed material.

Star Trek EU is also lincensed material and part of Star Trek.

The American continents are incalculably smaller than a galaxy.

And 16th century Europeans had incalculably smaller useful sensors range - few tens of kilometers against few light years.

So what? The Federation's communication tech is fundamentally different (and inferior) to the holonet, they can't intercept anything and would not be able to learn anything if they did. They'd only find out once they actually got to Coruscant, in which case it would be too late.

2370-s Federation has communications network that allows for real-time communication inside Federation territorry.

So you have 30,000 ships surround Coruscant. I have a planetary shield/overlapping theater shields up. You fail to penetrate this. You decide to blockade the planet and starve me out. The next day, several hundred million ISD's (massing less than the two Death Stars) accompanied by several billion more vessels (since the frigates:ISD ratio is higher than one) and several Death Stars (given the speed in which the second one was almost completed) appear, surrounding your fleet. You die.

Federation has firepower advantage large enough to one-shot ISD's with photon torpedoes. Besides, you have no proof that Empire could actually man that many ISD's. Death Stars didn't seem to have high crew density. I'd assume few million to few tens of millions of people... about enough to man additional 100 k capital ships (frigattes, corvettes, ISD's). That is, to double Imperial Fleet. And where would Empire find one-and-half trillion people required to man that fleet? It obviously can't do it efficiently, since it decided to build Death Stars in first place. Death Stars were manpower- and cost- -reducing measure.

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2011/04/2 ... economics/

[Mr. Oragahn]

The 900 billion figure is not a minimum for the population.
Why I don't doubt the population could be worth several trillions from certain interpretations, where those people are found is more puzzling, and above all, it was a figure corresponding to the lasting war scenario, not the surrender one.
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... 178#p14178
http://www.starfleetjedi.net/forum/view ... 029#p17029
Plus, considering that he said they were in for generations of Dominion domination (...) no matter what, we may not even know the duration of the war scenario. Depending on the interpretation, you could think it meant five generations of domination and then one generation of resistance, or x years of war and then five generations of domination (and eventually some resistance as well).

When you see the loss of life for the USSR in WWII, considering the duration for the count (6 years) and that the UFP could keep fighting much longer and send more and more people at it, tapping military and civilians alike (turning the later into military or at least using them to build more weapons and soon enough, considering the Dominion would win, ending being killed by strategical actions aiming at disrupting the UFP's industrial and agricultural abilities), you could easily get to the 900 billion with a very few trillions of the population or even less if the war allows for new generations of soldiers to birth and grow up.
It would easily allow for the high USSR's percentage to be renewed several times.
For example, it wouldn't be too shocking to see like, on the average, 200 worlds having lost a total of 4.5 bl lives each after a war having lasted more than a century, or much more (and considering how old people can get in ST by that time, the duration of a generation may have been stretched a tad)!

It's quite weird, in fact, that a rebellion forming on Earth was considering to be capable of toppling the Dominion, which has a pop of a few billion souls when all goes well (and is located deep inside the UFP territories), after a war where the whole of the UFP would have suffered 900 bn casualties!
Did we miss something? Like, I don't know, counting for the use of some forbidden technologies, like mass cloning or something?

Obviously, most of the 900 bn would be of civilian nature, or ex-civilians, but not present Starfleet personnel.

[Picard]

You misread it. I said that 1 trilion was minimum for population, not 900 billion. I actually increased range - my original estimate was 1.2 to 2 trillion people.

EDIT: Earth is, so to speak, "spiritual leader" of Federation. Point was that rebellion would form on Earth, and rest of ex-Federation would soon follow.

And given the rate of war, I doubt that war would have lasted more than a decade-or-so. Maybe two or three decades if Romulans joined late.