Site devoted to clone, droid numbers

[Opecoiler]

This site.

Do you agree with it?

[Jedi Master Spock]

Catalog of errors and omissions:

• Territory:
  • Does not even mention the "hundred thousand" systems of the Republic (TPM), "million systems" of the Empire (ANH), or even the highly generous [and dated] Imperial Sourcebook, whose 50 million total controlled systems is the most generous figure published.
  • Interprets the 1.2 million of Shatterpoint as being "member worlds" in sharp (contradictory) contrast to the above sources.
  • Finally settles on a figure derived from wholly conjectural overcounts of essentially uninhabited systems.
• Size:
  • Claims that a sector is "made up of millions systems," rather than the 50 mentioned previously (and which are the only figures of sectors.)
  • Mistakes estimates for minimums. It is not "at least" 8.4 million clones when estimating from units of eight; also, fails to take note of EU references defining the size of a commando unit (4 being the basic unit, rather than 8.)
  • In contradiction of the above line of logic, concedes that just under 200,000 clones - not units - were deployed at the battle of Geonosis, at which point 200,000 units were ready to go, with nearly a million more on the way - the original source of the 1.2 million figure.
  • Within the same paragraph, states the number of new Acclamators ordered to accommodate the clone army (a thousand), while estimating a total army 2500 times larger than such a fleet could transport.
  • Glosses over the fact that no actual element of any EU or film work strictly requires more than the 1.2 million clones outlined for the initial stages of the conflict.
  • Fails to mention the "command" problem: All the upper officers are Jedi, of which there are very few.
• Casualties
  • Mistakenly assumes that the maximum acceptable casualties for a live fire exercise would be acceptable occurring in every live fire exercise, rather than in a handful that went poorly - i.e., an average, rather than a maximum.
  • Uses one of the most badly botched large-scale deployments as a baseline for determining the casualty rates in active combat.
  • Note that if there is a quote stating that "three quarters of the original army is still alive" after one year, this refers to survival rates rather than total army size; all indications are that the clone army grew larger over time. The page author chooses not to make explicit the calculations for this, which gives a daily casualty rate of 0.08% and a clone trooper "half life" of a bit over 2 years.
• Defense: Completely fails to acknowledge the existence of non-clone navy officers, as seen in ROTS, or non-clone troops, such as also seen in ROTS.
• Offense:
  • Assumes every warship is fully crewed and completely loaded by clones.
  • Mistakenly describes the actions as being "small" when, in fact, the worlds which we actually see described in conflict in the EU are generally very important and well-developed worlds.
  • Makes the unfounded assumption that the Republic took most of the CIS worlds during the war - and more particularly, did so through infantry attack and subsequent occupation.
  • Examples involving relatively small numbers of troops have been ignored.
• Production
  • A logistic growth model is not even appropriate enough to mention for a small artificially produced clone army being supported by an enormous Republic.
  • Similarly, an essentially exponential model becomes rapidly inappropriate in a finite resource system.
  • A logistic growth model of production capacity would be more appropriate, if you're looking for suggestions that the author might be able to calculate figures for.
• Logistics: Brief. What's there looks OK.
• Organization:
  • Finally talks about the Jedi officer problem, but not in great depth.
  • Final conclusions implicitly assume that there's no problem with having "augmented" units that grow enormously exponentially larger, with all subunits being also augmentsed.
  • Using the smallest given troop numbers and the largest given regiment sizes requires that over 98% of regimental commanders were not Jedi, which are quite rare in the EU.
• Conscription: Here the non-clone members of the army are mentioned - but very little is said or concluded.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Oh, a few interesting things in the tail:

• N^2 law: It's actually worth noting the history of this law within military history. (Hint: Look through old British naval tacticians to find early treatments.) It is in particularly worth noting this is a tactical, rather than strategic, "rule of thumb."
• Shipping:
  • Any weapon transported from out of system begins in space. Thus, the energy costs for placing it there are no higher - and the cost of removing it from there are substantially lower.
  • The cost of interstellar shipping relative to distance is a great unknown.
  • The justification for requiring methodical conquest of every enemy world is lacking, especially in light of the above, but also in light of the actual events as have happened in Star Wars.
• Cost: This section is particularly speculative. I've actually talked about the RPG costs before; it's further based on rampant speculation, odd arbitrary definitions, and optimistic projections, adding up to some of the most poorly based figures in the text.
• Conclusions: In this section the bias of the author towards larger figures is most evident.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Found I had a few more moments.

• Territory: Gives a 16,000 count in toto and then assumes, more or less arbitrarily, that represents 500 times as many actual systems.
• Size:
  • As expected from the rest of the website, this page mostly attempts to justify the "quintillions" figure of the ICS.
  • The production based estimate is treated as a minimum, rather than an estimator in its own right. I'd also like to see it explained.
  • Doesn't mention the story Odds, which offers the explanation that the droid armies were severely overstated.
  • The problem of transportation is again not addressed, although the website author seems to overestimate the capacity of Trade Federation ships as well as the size of their fleet.
• Defense: This section mostly again concentrates on army size, and is subject to most of the same objections.
• Offense:
  • Reiteration of the traditional SDN claims of a very large fleet (here about 25,000) in TPM, which is canonically described as being in the "hundreds."
  • Here we see more details about how the overestimation of capacity is being carried out; the author looks at bulk cargo capacity to estimate how many droids a ship can carry, rather than actual designed landing capacity. This leads to gross overestimates of the number of troops actually involved.
• Production:
  • Here "Odds" finally gains mention.
  • Again, an inappropriate exponential growth model is used. Resources are not unlimited, in spite of any claims to the contrary, and tend to become more expensive to obtain once the easier sources have been exhausted.
  • The figures used are purely conjectural.
• Organization: Not much to see here. It's worth noting that the command structure in TPM is very simple; we had one huge army of private soldiers being run by one computer.

Note that a Trade Federation battleship carries, per the SWDB, 550 MTTs, 6,250 AATs, 1,500 troop carriers, 50 C-9979 landing craft and 1,500 droid starfighters. Namely, it is the 50 C-9979 landing craft which deploy the other tanks and transports - 28 Trade Federation troop carriers (112 ea), 114 AATs (4 ea), and 11 MTTs (112 ea), with 88 on-board crew, for a ground army deployment of a quarter million per battleship.

That means that one billion droids deployed as a ground army requires 4,000 battleships as transports. One trillion take 4 million battleships. To move, say, 2.5 quadrillion battledroids, you'd need a hundred thousand battleships to make a hundred thousand trips each.

Given the TPM fleet numbered canonically in the hundreds (by which we may say almost certainly 200-1000), and the capacity in the low hundreds of thousands, we have a total Naboo invasion army somewhere between 50 million and 250 million, rather than 5 billion. High tens to low hundreds of millions.

[Mith]

Interesting.

You know how the Republic Senate was the representation of the Republic Alliance? Well, looking at a pic (unfortunately, it didn't show the whole thing), I counted up to 23 pods per row (although this is likely to be about 50 pods, so I'll go with that until I get a better pic), and 38 rows (we'll go with 40 to be safe). That only gives us about 4,000 planets, assuming that each pod holds two for every planet (suggested by the fact that Alderaan and Naboo shared the same pod). These would naturally be the Core Worlds, as in, worlds like Naboo and Alderaan, and possibly (although unlikely Totooine).

With only 4,000 races major planets, one has to wonder just how big this empire really is. I mean sure, you have your worlds used mainly for constructions of fleets, or perhaps as colonies, but even assuming five to each planet (for average, as Naboo had none to speak of), you still only get 20,000 worlds. Not something to laugh at, but surely not as great as some would lead us to believe.

Also, I would like to make note of this:

LAMA SU: Please... (gestures to chair) And now to business.
You will be delighted to hear we are on schedule. Two
hundred thousand units are ready, with another million well
on the way.

OBI-WAN: (improvising) That is... good news.

LAMA SU: Please tell your Master Sifo-Dyas that we have
every confidence his order will be met on time and in full.
He is well, I hope.

OBI-WAN: I'm sorry? Master - ?

LAMA SU: Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas. He's still a leading member
of the Jedi Council, is he not?

OBI-WAN: Master Sifo-Dyas was killed almost ten years ago.

LAMA SU: Oh, I'm so sorry to hear that. But I'm sure he
would have been proud of the army we've built for him.

....

LAMA SU: We take great pride in our combat education and
training programs. This group was created about five years
ago.

OBI-WAN: You mentioned growth acceleration...

LAMA SU: Oh yes, it's essential. Otherwise, a mature clone
would take a lifetime to grow. Now, we can do it in half
the time. Those items you saw on the parade ground were
started ten years ago, when Sifo-Dyas first placed the
order, and they're already mature.

According to this, they had managed to clone two hundred thousand clones in in ten years. The million quote is a bit shakey, but I suspect they were the ones ready at the end of the movie. So, 1,200,000 clones can be made within ten years. No doubt impressive, but I can't help but think that would be somewhat of a small number for a galactic army. I mean, the Clone Wars lasted what? Thre or four Years? Even assuming they had another batch ready, that's still only 2,400,000 soldiers in the span of nearly fifteen years.

In any case, I'd put it down to 1,200,000 clones that the movie claims within the span of ten years, with a possible number of 2,400,000 clones in action throughout the war.

Low: 1,200,000 clones
High: 2,400,000 clones

Considering we're talking about 4,000 core worlds, with about 700 of them being under the influence of the CIS, that leaves about 3,300 worlds for the Republic to defend. Assuming a that they have 500 clones per ship, that would give us about 2,400 ships, although it could be as high as 4,800 going by that number.

Alternatively, we could assume that each one had closer to a hundred per ship, which would be more likely, thus giving us 12,000 - 24,000 ships.

Considering its a 4,000 core planet war, that's about a fair size, and is somewhat within the ballpark for Jedi numbering in the thousands to command such an army.

[Praeothmin]

Mith, we had that discussion in another thread, and Cpl Kendall came up with a very good point:
Lama Su does not state that 200 000 clones are ready, he states that 200 000 units are ready.
In the military, which Cpl Kendall was part of, a unit can have over 100 men, some even 1000, depending on what type of unit you're talking about.
So that could put the clone numbers from to 20 million to 200 million clones ready, and 100 million to 1 billion on the way.

Quite a different ballgame here.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Indeed. Besides, some pods were used by financial representatives, guilds and all that jazz.

The only thing that hurts the EU is that higher canon says the SW galaxy is a small one. Yet, the EU pretends it's 100,000 LY wide, and some pretend it's even larger.

Oh, but what large does mean? Well, as far as I'm concerned, unless all galaxies which inhabit the same cluster are literally twice or thrice the size of the SW one, small couldn't be anything close to 100,000 LY.

[Jedi Master Spock]

Mith, we had that discussion in another thread, and Cpl Kendall came up with a very good point:
Lama Su does not state that 200 000 clones are ready, he states that 200 000 units are ready.
In the military, which Cpl Kendall was part of, a unit can have over 100 men, some even 1000, depending on what type of unit you're talking about.
So that could put the clone numbers from to 20 million to 200 million clones ready, and 100 million to 1 billion on the way.

Quite a different ballgame here.

And as I've pointed out before, there are several problems with that, especially if (as Cpl Kendall would prefer) you make any consideration of the EU, namely, as I pointed out above... the ~200,000 ready "units" turned into a ~200,000 clone army hitting Geonosis. There is, of course, a large body of supporting EU material that Kendall has chosen to ignore regarding a small GAR, but it's not for any reason required by the G canon itself.

We really don't have anything directly suggesting that "unit" means anything other than a dehumanizing term for individual clones. The only thing we really have are terribly huge droid numbers.

[Mr. Oragahn]

Mith, we had that discussion in another thread, and Cpl Kendall came up with a very good point:
Lama Su does not state that 200 000 clones are ready, he states that 200 000 units are ready.
In the military, which Cpl Kendall was part of, a unit can have over 100 men, some even 1000, depending on what type of unit you're talking about.
So that could put the clone numbers from to 20 million to 200 million clones ready, and 100 million to 1 billion on the way.

Quite a different ballgame here.

And as I've pointed out before, there are several problems with that, especially if (as Cpl Kendall would prefer) you make any consideration of the EU, namely, as I pointed out above... the ~200,000 ready "units" turned into a ~200,000 clone army hitting Geonosis. There is, of course, a large body of supporting EU material that Kendall has chosen to ignore regarding a small GAR, but it's not for any reason required by the G canon itself.

We really don't have anything directly suggesting that "unit" means anything other than a dehumanizing term for individual clones. The only thing we really have are terribly huge droid numbers.

Which, if I am correct, were retconned in the EU as some bad information, or pure disinformation.
I don't know the details, it might be absurd, but it's there, somewhere.

[Mith]

Mith, we had that discussion in another thread, and Cpl Kendall came up with a very good point:
Lama Su does not state that 200 000 clones are ready, he states that 200 000 units are ready.
In the military, which Cpl Kendall was part of, a unit can have over 100 men, some even 1000, depending on what type of unit you're talking about.
So that could put the clone numbers from to 20 million to 200 million clones ready, and 100 million to 1 billion on the way.

Quite a different ballgame here.

And as I've pointed out before, there are several problems with that, especially if (as Cpl Kendall would prefer) you make any consideration of the EU, namely, as I pointed out above... the ~200,000 ready "units" turned into a ~200,000 clone army hitting Geonosis. There is, of course, a large body of supporting EU material that Kendall has chosen to ignore regarding a small GAR, but it's not for any reason required by the G canon itself.

We really don't have anything directly suggesting that "unit" means anything other than a dehumanizing term for individual clones. The only thing we really have are terribly huge droid numbers.

Which, if I am correct, were retconned in the EU as some bad information, or pure disinformation.
I don't know the details, it might be absurd, but it's there, somewhere.

I thought EU wasn't canon?

In any case, there exists the problem that EU cannot retcon anything G-Canon does.

u·nit Audio Help /ˈyunɪt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[yoo-nit] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun 1. a single thing or person.
2. any group of things or persons regarded as an entity: They formed a cohesive unit.
3. one of the individuals or groups that together constitute a whole; one of the parts or elements into which a whole may be divided or analyzed.
4. one of a number of things, organizations, etc., identical or equivalent in function or form: a rental unit; a unit of rolling stock.
5. any magnitude regarded as an independent whole; a single, indivisible entity.
6. Also called dimension. any specified amount of a quantity, as of length, volume, force, momentum, or time, by comparison with which any other quantity of the same kind is measured or estimated.
7. the least positive integer; one.
8. Also called unit's place. a. (in a mixed number) the position of the first digit to the left of the decimal point.
b. (in a whole number) the position of the first digit from the right of the decimal point.

9. a machine, part, or system of machines having a specified purpose; apparatus: a heating unit.
10. Education. a division of instruction centering on a single theme.
11. Military. an organized body of soldiers, varying in size and constituting a subdivision of a larger body.
12. Medicine/Medical. a. the measured amount of a substance necessary to cause a certain effect; a clinical quantity used when a substance cannot be readily isolated in pure form and its activity determined directly.
b. the amount necessary to cause a specific effect upon a specific animal or upon animal tissues.

13. Mathematics. a. an identity element.
b. an element in a group, ring, etc., that possesses an inverse.

That suggests that a unit can be either one, or many people. If G-Canon says 200,000 units, and later we're told 200,000 soldiers, than that means that they were refering to units as being one person or thing, which is well within proper grammar to do so. Although I admit it's a bit odd when refering to a clone army, the cloners in question are said to do what you want for money. They may have a merchant's mind about them, rather than a military one.

[Praeothmin]

the ~200,000 ready "units" turned into a ~200,000 clone army hitting Geonosis.

How do we know that all the readied units were in fact thrown in the fight at Geonosis?
The Senate could have simply been the necessary force (say, a few thousands of troups) to wage the battle of Geonosis.

[Mr. Oragahn]

I thought EU wasn't canon?

In any case, there exists the problem that EU cannot retcon anything G-Canon does.

Well, I'm a purist, but I can accept talking about EU. I'd rather present the two versions, if possible; the purist one, and the EU friendly one, notably if the thread raises an issue which is relevant to the EU.

That said, globally, you'll notice that most thread here largely rely on G-canon, and nothing else.

We largely adress EU when we spot problems.

That suggests that a unit can be either one, or many people. If G-Canon says 200,000 units, and later we're told 200,000 soldiers, than that means that they were refering to units as being one person or thing, which is well within proper grammar to do so. Although I admit it's a bit odd when refering to a clone army, the cloners in question are said to do what you want for money. They may have a merchant's mind about them, rather than a military one.

Merchants and business men talk in terms of shipped units.

[Mith]

the ~200,000 ready "units" turned into a ~200,000 clone army hitting Geonosis.

How do we know that all the readied units were in fact thrown in the fight at Geonosis?
The Senate could have simply been the necessary force (say, a few thousands of troups) to wage the battle of Geonosis.

Seems unlikely, the major leaders of the CIS were on that planet. If I was the Jedi Council or the Republic Senate, I'd send everything I had at them, rather than give the enemy time to escape.

Also, if it was, that's a strange thing for the numbers to be identical, double so when unit can mean individual person or thing.

[Mith]

Well, I'm a purist, but I can accept talking about EU. I'd rather present the two versions, if possible; the purist one, and the EU friendly one, notably if the thread raises an issue which is relevant to the EU.

That said, globally, you'll notice that most thread here largely rely on G-canon, and nothing else.

We largely adress EU when we spot problems.

Ah, I see.

Merchants and business men talk in terms of shipped units.

For the most part yes, but someone might say "This unit can produce about 7 kilowatts of power..." which is perfectly valid as well. It was strange in the way it was used in Attack of the Clones, but not unheard of.

[Mr. Oragahn]

If people are ticking because of the Kaminoans using the term unit... well, first, they're an isolated species, so they're probably going to have "an opinion" about aliens.
Secondly, the term unit I think serves to really deshumanize the clones, as said by someone else.