bring up numbers in the books of things to try to convey how big the galaxy is... for example in the second medstar book it was talking about one of the groups having a hit song in the top 40,000 chart instead of the top 40 chart. Or in shadows games when they said juval charn's record the billion seller mark. is it just me or does it feel forced when they do that?
I mean it does feel kind of forced but it does also have a cheesy aspect to it. What really makes me angry (Karen Travis had a bad habit of doing it) is when they utilize things that only exist in our world to convey that meaning, which is totally out of context of star wars.
It can feel forced when they do this sort of thing, yes, because it is often done rather sloppily. On the other hand the galaxy is unbelievably huge and that needs to be reinforced regularly or it can be forgotten. When possible though it should be done without using numbers. Using numbers in fantasy is dangerous, because one number can be made into many numbers and produce unforseen side-effects through the consequences of some fairly basic arithmetic. Therefore a number should never be laid out flippantly, but should only be produced after due deliberation.
Top 40,000 chart? I suppose with a chart that large you might have a chance in finding some musical diversity... maybe the GFFA is on to something.
Regional charts like that, to me, would be more effective. If someone has a song on numerous regional top 40 charts, then that would be quite notable, as different regions, different tastes. Put together an average based on various regional census, then tout Gungan Style as taking the galaxy by storm, based on those findings from different sectors. It would lend a bit more credibility that way.
Is Javul Charn supposed to be big or something? I mean, in terms of record sales Thriller sold atleast 50 mil, which is about 0.7 percent of the population of Earth. By comparision a billion is about 0.1 percent of a trillion, the absolute lowest estimate for the population of Coruscant, which is one planet. If that's gross for a movie it becomes simply pathetic. A better way to get across that the galaxy is big could be to show that the average bum in the galaxy doesn't know all that much about it. Maybe some guy in the outerest of the outer rim has no idea what a Skywalker or a Jedi is. Or a pampered rich kid in the core who hasn't ever seen or heard of a Whipid. But that would require the writers to write as if the characters had never seen the movies, which is apparently alot harder than it sounds.
In the Jedi Academy Trilogy by Anderson and the Jabiim comic arc, it was mentioned that some planets have never been visited by Jedi and thus, the natives do not know what a Jedi is. Well, I really loved that comment!
It's worth noting that Star Wars do not have a mass media or internet in the same way that we do. They have the HoloNet, yes, but access, even under the relatively accomidating Old Republic regime was limited and extremely expensive - there are numerous references to how much a live holo-call from one side of the galaxy to another costs and how uncommon this is. The media environment much resembles a far older model, perhaps early 20th century Earth, shortly after the invention of radio, when most information was still transmitted via short-burst telegraph messages or actual long-hand letters (the Star Wars equivalents being the slower subspace network and actual physical starship couriers. So news, and media, does not travel across the galaxy at the speed of hyperspace, it moves slowly. This is why someone with a fast-paced ship can actually outrun it in some sense. The boundaries of a planet's atmosphere are not like a national border, they are a big deal. Spacefaring culture is small, only a tiny fraction of any planet's populace ever leaves home, and most do primarily for military service. While this would work, the functional reality is that Star Wars is not about the stories of most of the galaxy's citizens - who are economically, politically, and militarily more or less powerless. The Star Wars galaxy is not a nice place and for the most part the stories we see are about members of a relatively privledged group (and in this context even someone with Luke or Han's upbringing is privledged) fighting over ideological principles that will determine the fate of countless of those less fortunate. It is very Cold Wars-y in that sense - not surprising given that it was concieved during the height of the Cold War.
I bet Ayla Secura's holonet page has a trillion Likes. Is there a Yodatube? Is there any reason Shami could not have sent a holotext saying "Watto sold me."? In a galactic civilization are their MMO's fantasy worlds or are there one trillion Jedi Knight characters having holo duels?
Jacen Solo had a cribbed Tony Blair quote for a line in one of the books, I think. And a transparent allegory of Sir Francis Drake. I don't think Star Wars has been too bad at hackneyed real life political parallels. Comics are the king of that. But I'd prefer EU writers to come up with their own lines and worldbuilding than just cut and paste it from the real world.
Hm... why not. The Skyriver galaxy contains one billion inhabited worlds with 100 quadrillion sentient beings while it's known history spans thousands of generations. What I dislike is when writers underestimate their numbers grossly, like with those 3.2 million clonetroopers, 200 Katana ships, 120 worlds in the Old Sith Empire, 10,000 soldiers for a planetary invasion and so on. To fight a full-scale galactic war, you need billions of ground soldiers, and dozens or hundreds of thousands if you want to conquer and hold a full member world with say one billion people living on it. Also millions of capital ships: Combat vessels, transports and support ships. With millions of planets to draw ressources from (for example, Earth's and many other planets' cores in the Sol system are made of iron. By mining it - and they can do this, for example on Coruscant are build energy generators that use the core's heat extense via tunnels deep into the planet and if the Empire has a laser able to blow up a planet, why not a laser just able to create a hole through it - you can get enough iron for thousands of capital warships. FROM ONE STAR SYSTEM OF MANY!!!), quadrillions of tax-paying people, hundreds or thousands of shipyards - if not enough including the ability to build more from those ressources which could be used to create starships - and quadrillions of sentient being that can work in the shipyards, mines, factories or serve in the military, it should be no problem to build and substain such fighting forces. Same if they don't realize how big the galaxy is (noted above) or a planet is. For example in Knights of the Old Republic: Rakata Prime contains thousands of islands, Carth tried to land the Ebon Hawk without getting blown-up, fortunately just on the island where the Rakata temple is build on. What if he had choosen an island 1000 miles away from the temple? Maybe the Force did it. Adrian the Cool
Might have been a bit of evolution over time- early figures based on early numbers. Such as "a million worlds" being the Empire- and it only later being clarified that this is "full member worlds".
Some of those numbers are less preposterous than others. Here's why: 100 quadrillion sentient beings (10^17) divided by 1 billion inhabited star systems (10^9) (not planets) = 100 million (10^8). That is slightly less than the population of Mexico. other the other hand, Coruscant and similar major ecumenopoli have ~1 trillion people (10^12). This gives some idea of the inequality of planets. So, in certain circumstances, yes, you could very easily invade a planet with 10,000 men, it just wouldn't be a very populous planet. 120 planets could, if they were industrial powerhouses, fight a conglomerate of worlds where the mean was considerably less. Likewise, 200 Katana fleet dreadnaughts, each of which is capable of killing everyone on an unshielded planet in a matter of hours to days through bombardment, is a fairly powerful force for a demilitarized state to field (or to drop out of nothing onto the order of battle fully crewed as Thrawn did). The 3 million clones number remains really quite absurd of course, because it simply doesn't match with how it was subsequently used - clones everywhere doign every single military task. It can't be made to finesse the other numbers in any reasonable way given how it has been deployed across the EU. Durasteel, which is the primary metal used for armor plate and other heavy military components, is made from carvanium, lommite, carbon, meleenium, neutronium, and zersium these largely fictional substances are presumably not abundant in the Star Wars galaxy and are only mined in a few, highly selective places. In fact the generalized rarity and localized distribution of key components of advanced Star Wars technology goes a long way to explain the techno-segregation of the galaxy - it simply isn't possible to develop the technologies used by spacefaring society with the mineral resources of most star systems. While treating planets as if they were nothing more than a spaceport is a problem in the Star Wars universe the example you cited isn't really one of them. In that case the Ebon Hawk tracked in toward the origin point of the disruption field that crippled its systems, as many other ships had done before. It wasn't random, it followed a designed plan for that defense system.
Given the low population of most worlds (source: The Essential Atlas) and the ease of travel, would it not be logical for most planets to only have one settlement of note?
It is indeed probable that most planets have only one spaceport and that happens to be the dominant settlement, but it's not going to be the only place where anything happens. Planets are huge after all, and considering that the primary function of planetary colonization in Star Wars is either resource extraction or homesteading - both spatially widespread practices - people are going to be all over the place. So even if the bulk of the population is confined to a single urban area, it would be foolish to pretend the vast settled or unsettled rural spaces basically don't exist.
Think of it this way: Lots of different cities in the Northeast, but I do think it's safe to say that New York City is the most well-known. It's not that the others don't exist, or there's no small towns or such, but to someone in another country, New York would most likely top their list if asked to name US cities. Thus, on other worlds, it's not that there's just one single urban area—it's just that one single urban area is more well-known to the galactic populace than the rest.