Saga The big Star Wars Myth # 2 – Imperial strength and starfleet size?

How do we know that Han wasn't talking about the Starfleet in the local area as opposed to the size of the whole thing itself? As my previous math has demonstrated, it would be immensely impractical to concentrate that many ships in one spot. Granted, there were more than 1,000 TIEs at the battle of Endor. But I don't think he was talking about fighter craft. Point is, it would be very easy for the Empire to build 25,000 ISDs.

 

Hyrum_Solo I'm not sure if using the physical size of the galaxy is really the best way to estimate fleet numbers. For all we know, the vast majority of the galaxy may be made up of empty lifeless systems that would be of no interest to the Imperial Starfleet. It would be like if someone asked you to guess the number of aircraft carriers in the US navy. How many square miles of open ocean there are on earth probably wouldn't factor into your guess very much. After all, if you throw out any previous knowledge of the size of the navy, you would have a hard time getting even a ballpark estimate for what is a reasonable number of square miles that each carrier is going to cover on average -- is it 10,000? 500,000? 1,000,000? (The actual answer is an average of 12 million sq miles of ocean per carrier -- kind of an arbitrary statistic that would not be easy to guess) You can imagine that if you were approaching it in this way, it would be easy to get skewed numbers from a single missed assumption -- if you guessed that each carrier would cover 500,000 sq miles on average, for example, you would have arrived at a figure of 280 carriers in the navy rather than 11, the actual amount (140,000,000 sq miles ocean). That's why I think it's safer to use the general feel you get from the movies as at least a jumping off point.

 

I disagree. First off, I didn't start off with an arbitrary area (edit: of the space a single SD is covering) to determine how many Star Destroyers there are in the galaxy. I started with an arbitrary size of the Galaxy and then an arbitrary size of the Starfleet to determine the area.
As I stated, my calculations were based on many assumptions that do not result in an absolutely correct answer. But, they do allow us to have some perspective on the size of the galaxy in which the Starfleet operates.
There is another thing your aircraft carrier analogy doesn't take into account that I had assumed in my Starfleet calculations: weapon ranges or how far a carrier can project its power.

Using the information you gave, the US navy has 11 super carriers. Each has to project its power over 12,000,000mi^2. Now to find the diameter of the circle of influence one carrier has to project.

(12,000,000mi^2)/3.14=r^2
3,821,656.05mi^2/2=r^2/2
1,954.91mi=r
3,909.81mi=2r

Now lets see how long it takes a carrier to destroy a target by launching an F-18 if it's standing still in the center of the area it's protecting.
Mach 2=1,522mph
1,954.91mi/1,522mph=1.3 hours
Wow, look at that. It only takes a super carrier 1.3 hours to project its power if there are only 11 of them. That's a very reasonable time.
I was going to do some math for a different scenario but I'll just talk you through this one.
Let's take a super carrier and a Star Destroyer. Put them on the ocean and at the edge of our Solar system respectively. If both are standing still, how far away can each destroy a target? Both can launch fighters so we'll allow that (and the SD has lasers so we'll allow those as well) and we'll give them ten minutes of travel time.
A F-18 traveling at Mach 2 can destroy a target 253.7mi away from the carrier in ten minutes.
We don't know who fast a TIE fighter can accelerate so we'll assume that it can't go faster than light (same with the lasers). A SD can project its power < 10 light minutes or 0.000019 light years.
Let's give each an hour of travel time.
Carrier: 1,522mi
SD: < 0.00011 light years

Point is, I wasn't just looking at the area of which the SDs are covering. It looked that way because I forgot to mention that the distance a SD can project its power without moving is so small compared to the size of the galaxy that it would have to travel through hyperspace to be effective. Given this, if we allow the SD to move and there are 25,000 of them, it can project its power over a travel time of an hour and a half which is very close to the distance of the super carrier. On top of this, its very close to the distance if there were only 1,000 SDs.

Conclusion:
The 25,000 SD figure does not necessarily contradict what we see in the movies. Granted, all the SDs in the fleet aren't going to be evenly dispersed across the galaxy. In fact, I would postulate that they are concentrated in the core worlds and inner rim. One thing you have to consider about the small numbers of SDs we see in the OT is that the movies take place in the Outer rim, where fleet density is going to be the lowest.

 

Forgive me for what might be stating the obvious, but... I think it might be prudent to point out there is a vast difference between what would be necessary to subject the Galaxy as opposed to what could feasibly be constructed even with the methods the Empire employed and the time needed to construct all the technological terrors the Empire wished to employ against its constituents, lack of knowing the true exchange rate of a Credit aside. Knowing how big the Galaxy is and calculating how long it might take to get from Point A to Point B is only useful for knowing how to practically take hold of the Galaxy and keep it subjugated. The Fact of the matter is the Empire would have had to not only scrap/ reconfigure its Venator-Class SD's into Victory/ Imperial-Class Star Destroyers, but build the Carriers, Cruisers, Frigates, TIE Series, and other miscellaneous vessels for the new Imperial Fleet... in just under two decades. It took just as long for the Emperor to finally whittle away the Imperial Senate from where it was in ROTS to finally being irrelevant enough that its dismissal could be executed with little fanfare and hardly missed.

Personally, a smaller Imperial Starfleet with numerous local fleets being dragooned into Imperial Work makes far more sense since it saves resources that could be used to build a 100 more Star Destroyers and various other vessels... or wasted on the Fool's Errand that was the Death Star.

 

Me and my assumptions.
Suppose it takes two months to build an SD. Suppose KDY can make only ten at the same time (absurd, but really conservative). That's 2,400 SDs in two decades. But now Ryloth is also building as many, and Coruscant, and Correllia, and Alsakan, and Fondor. That's 14,400 SDs in two decades. Yeah, I'm sure the Empire could manufacture 25,000 SDs.
Plus the DSII only took 5 years to build and who knows how many SDs you could have built with the same volume of materials.

 

I don't think that's how it was punctuated. I think it was:

"I've outrun Imperial starships. Not the local bulk cruisers, mind you - I'm talking about the big Corellian ships now."


So he's talking about at least two categories of Imperial starships - slower moving bulk cruisers, and faster-moving Big Corellian Ships.

 

Two months to build a 1,000 meter-long warship from scratch? I'm not sure such a pace of production would be realistic or sustainable. To use an aircraft carrier as a point of comparison again, Wikipedia says that the latest Nimitz carrier, the George H.W. Bush, a 300 meter-long warship, was originally ordered in 2001, with the keel being laid in 2003. The ship was launched 3 years later in 2006 and commissioned 3 years after that in 2009. That's the greater part of a decade from the original order to a fully operational ship. Of course, the Star Wars galaxy clearly has far greater technological capabilities than we do, so it's not entirely a fair comparison. But I think it does illustrate that these sorts of things tend to take longer than one might think.

And, it shouldn't be discounted that the early Empire also faces some serious bureaucratic challenges of its own compared to the US government of today. It's clear that the Republic had a very weak central government by our standards: it had no standing army whatsoever. It probably had more in common with something like the Roman Republic than a modern nation-state. It could barely pass tax or trade reform legislation without sparking a crisis with the trade federation that it was mostly unequipped to deal with. And then it went through a devastating and no doubt very expensive civil war. Yes, Palpatine is doing what he can in the aftermath to centralize his authority. But such a process takes time and money, and his government is likely deeply in debt from the Clone Wars. He appears to have enough popular support to keep his position, probably because people are sick and tired of the dysfunction of the Republic that led to the wars, but would he feel secure enough to immediately start creating even more new taxes to not only pay for the war but also purchase thousands more capital ships, while also secretly building the death star and super star destroyers and vastly expanding the central bureaucracy and all the rest? Remember, he didn't get around to removing the Senate for nearly twenty years, despite that being a source of opposition to his rule.

 

Torib
I am well aware of my galactic history. Without searching Wookiepedia, does the phrase, "Russan Reformation" mean anything to you our shall I give a condensed history lesson sponsored by the Essential Guide to Warfare?

 

In the newcanon Catalyst novel, we get a timeframe to build a "dreadnought" (Super Star Destroyer, a pre-Executor version) of less than 1 year.

p153:
They stopped at a massive viewport to observe a new capital ship - a dreadnought - being inaugurated for launch from its bay.
"Completed in less than a standard year," Tarkin said, as if he had built it himself.
"And yet already obsolete?" Krennic said.
Tarkin glanced at him. "A placeholder. I'm certain, however, that it will do until the battle station is deployed."
The two officers had begun to circle each other as they spoke.
"Our main weapon will have more power than ten vessels that size," Krennic said.

p279:
"It's obvious to all of us that a superlaser of the sort we're postulating would dwarf any ship of the line, even the largest of the dreadnoughts."

 

No, I don't recognize that phrase. I don't really follow the EU.

 

Ok, here we go.
The Russan Reformations were a result of the last of the Alsakan conflicts. They entailed strict restrictions on capital ship space craft that made anything larger than a corvette or frigate impractical to use. They also decentralized the OR's navy and made individual planets responsible to field there own fleets, these became known as Planetary Security Forces (PSF) . This doesn't mean they had to build there own; it was still possible to buy ships from manufacturers such as Rendill Star Drive, Kuat Drive Yards, and Correllian Engineering Systems. Planets were left to themselves to fight pirates and scare off any ambitious neighbors. If the latter occurred all the Republic could do was send some Judicial Forces and the Jedi. By 20 years before TPM, the ones with the largest fleets were the mega corporations such as the TF and SubCorp. They were the ones with fleets large enough to either bully their way into business or offer themselves as guns for higher for planets that couldn't field a PSF. Over the course of many years, the Republic had turned in upon itself, with its founders the core worlds giving less and less care to the planets beyond themselves. Because of the lack of a centralized fleet, planets that didn't feel the influence of the Republic disregarded its authority and looked after themselves only. Then the events leading up to he Clone Wars happened. A part of these events was the secret ordering of the Clone Army, and secret commissions to KDY to supply transports and heavy ground vehicles for this army (which were developed and built by the Rothana Heavy Engineering branch of KDY). Though Rendill Star Drive had been the leading spaceship manufacturer of the OR, KDY had been able to keep itself going by the selling of large battle cruisers that ironically were under armored, under gunned, and terribly slow for their size due to the Russan Reformations. At the start of the Clone Wars (CW) the CIS was a loosely held collaboration of separatists movements with the majority of its military held by mega corporations. This allowed time for the Republic to get its full building power behind the war effort that would eventually win the war. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the fighting that happened during the CW was between the Republic and Separatist PSF, with nary a clone or droid insight. This allowed for old rivalries to be fought out or greedy planets an excuse to grab more power. Keep in mind that the OR was able to produce all the Capital Ships you see at the Battle of Coruscant in a five year period, from scratch while constantly making replacements. Also keep in mind that Palpatine was manipulating both sides of the war and had set himself up to win with which ever side was better. Now for the part that all this build up was for. The CW ended with the massacre of the Separatist leaders and the deactivation of he droid armies five years after the start of the CW. The Empire was created and all of the elements for the Empire Palpatine needed were already in place. No Jedi, a centralized military, a new command structure, a suspension of citizen's rights, and complete power for himself. The end of the CW didn't mean the end of the wartime production. Space ship manufacturers were given the assets of the mega corps that had supported the CIS. More orders for new ships were coming all of the time. Immediately after the CWs was the reconquest of the outer rim, which included events like the Western Reaches operations. Planets that had ignored republic authority had to be "subjugated" and Imperialized. Moffs were given direct control over there fleets without having to worry about the senate and were allowed to do with them what ever they willed. To protect himself from an ambitious Moff, Palpatine made all of the authorities of the Imperial government competing with themselves so no one man could become powerful enough to challenge him for the throne. This led Star Fleets to ever grow in size to compete with their neighbors. And who have the most money to spend on SDs? The core worlds. Where are the major spacedocks located? The core worlds. Who have the closest neighbors? The core worlds.

That was a little longer than I thought it would be. See how much you miss if you don't dive into the EU?

I could tell you how many SDs the Empire could build with the volume of the DSI instead of building the DS if you like.

 

Is this still canon or legends? as you said this is the EU it likely is...
cause the clone wars pretty much made it that the CIS navy was very centralized with all the corporations giving warships to the centralized fleet and no a lot of battles were between Clones and droids including the majority of space battles. I don't recall the new canon separatist mega corporations ever really doing anything very selfish besides the Banking Clan, Techno Union and Trade Federation in the clone wars.

 

Legends, though I abide by the rule that if it isn't contradicted it still stands.
I thought I mention that the CIS fleets started out decentralized but soon after became centralized. And I did mention that not many battles were between clones and droids. The reason you don't hear much about the mega corporation's involvement was because GL felt bad about the way he portrayed the TF and pulled them out of involvement in the war in the CW TV series (a bad call IMHO).

 

I will admit that one of the weaker areas of my argument is the sheer volume of the Death Star (and to a lesser extent the Super Star Destroyers as well). Certainly it's hard to argue against the idea that the Empire would have been far wiser to have put those resources into more modest conventional ships like Star Destroyers. The truth is that the Death Star was a staggeringly huge waste of resources. Perhaps to an almost ridiculous degree if you believe in a smaller Imperial Starfleet. But I guess it works well in the format of a movie: a larger-than-life display of hubris and overconfidence in technology.

I suppose one argument I could throw out there is that perhaps the real limiting factor here is less that of mass or construction materials (after all there's plenty of metal ore available in space) and more one of the operating costs involved. If each SD has 27,000 crew (which seems quite large, but is what Wookiepedia says) and there are 10,000 of them, that's 270,000,000 active duty crew that all have to be trained and paid salaries (and that's ignoring whatever administrative and logistical support would also be required to keep such a fleet running). This from a government that only recently began centralizing and consolidating power, that didn't even have an army at all only a few years prior, that was already in debt from the Clone Wars. In contrast, the Death Star (had it not been exploded) would have been a far cheaper and more elegant long term solution.

 

270 million souls, serving aboard star destroyers. That's 3.605% of the EARTH's population!!!

I don't think you're helping your argument here .. what's the population of Coruscant lol.

 

Eh.. if you don't think that's a large number I don't know what to tell you. You can't compare active duty members to a planet's total population, that's apples to oranges. And other than Coruscant the planets that we see tend to be quite sparsely populated. Not to mention that most of the population in the galaxy appears to be made up of aliens, which we know the Empire doesn't recruit. More importantly, you have to remember that the Empire has only begun relatively recently the process of centralization as it reorganizes from the Republic (which I will stress again had NO standing army AT ALL). Evidently it is quite a bit harder to form and fund a strong central government in the GFFA than it is in our own universe.

The order of clones in AOTC can help give us a good sense of perspective. There were 200,000 units that were ready, with a million more on the way. That was explicitly considered by the players involved to be a significant, considerable enough number to shift the balance of power in the galaxy. That's canon. Now you're saying that several hundred times that number is a piddly amount. It doesn't jive.

 

I never found the crew of 27,000 to be realistic to a star destroyer because one of the few we can compare it to is a Aircraft carrier irl like the nimitz (5000 crew) or Gerald R. Ford class (4000 crew) Aircraft Carriers. Well I don't know the size of a ISD off the top of my head but 27,000 is quite populated. Especially if a ISD is not loaded for an invasion to full capacity I never found them to carry much crew *around 1000 to several 100 in my head canon* since the ghost crew in rebels can easily infiltrate the ships without seeing many imperial personal. plus in the clone wars the crews of Venator Class cruisers could not of been huge since we've seen many a time them getting quite overrun easily as in an episode in clone wars one company of clone troopers, Green Company, around 20 men, seemed like the only ones defending a Venator against invasion by Super Battle Droids. So from the tv shows I've never found that these star destroyers were never fully loaded for a invasion or perhaps to full capacity (since they never seem to have enough men or ships as their wookieepedia databanks tells us they have).

 

Haha, don't even get me started about how easy it is for the Ghost crew to infiltrate SD's, that's gotta be my single biggest pet peeve with that show. But yeah, I agree that 27,000 does seem way too high unless it's landing an army (and it seems like that's likely more the role of the SSD's anyway).

 

I've ported the above from this thread: http://boards.theforce.net/threads/...st-of-the-saga.50043047/page-19#post-54070832

I hope you don't mind.

I just wanted to comment that I feel it unlikely the Emperor would be okay with allowing it's member worlds or sectors to maintain a naval force that would be any kind of a match for the central Imperial starfleet. He's too paranoid for that based on everything else we've seen.

Although we did see in Lengends that the Corporate Sector purchased many Victory-class star destroyers so your point in not without merrit. I just don't think the nation/regional forces would have amounted to much compared to the Imperial Navy.

You make a great point, all I'm saying is that sometimes these canon facts and figures don't make logical sense.

-270 million people isn't a significant portion of the Earth's population, never mind an entire galaxy, it's less than a drop in a very large bucket. While it may seem like a large number, it's an insignificant percentage of the Empire's population.
-In the new canon the Empire has been depicted as far less speciest and misogynistic.

Well, the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier has:

508 officers
3,789 enlisted

and it's:

Length: 1,106 ft
Beam: 256 ft
Height: 250 ft

Those dimension aren't representative of the living space but it won't matter. That's 70,784,000 cubic feet.

An Imperial I-class star destroyer is:

Length: 5,249 ft
Beam: 2788 ft
Height: 984 ft

That doesn't include the command tower. Accounting for it's wedge shape, that's 3,600,016,152 or more than 50 times the volume of the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier. So the complement of:

Officers: 9,235
Enlisted: 27,850
Stormtroopers: 9,700

Is only about 11 times greater than the crew of the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier. Let's not forget the crew of the Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier would include navy crew and air wing, while I've also included the stormtroopers aboard the Imperial I-class star destroyer. I'm assuming the starfighter/support vessel complement is included in the Imperial I-class star destroyer crew numbers due to the large ratio of officers to enlisted personnel.

Seems reasonable to me, even with the increased automation we should expect from a more technologically advanced space fairing vessel. Keep in mind I used conservative numbers every step of the way.

 

http://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWvolumetrics.html#mozTocId697772
ISD volume: 69,534,240m^3
total crew: 46,785
volume per crew member: 1,486m^3.

ISDs were design to operate mostly by themselves (on account of being too fast for most escorts) and could subjugate an entire star system (hence Star Destroyer) by itself and do this for a year without resupplying. I'd hate to see the food storage area on an SD *shudders*.

On the number of humans in the galaxy: I've always had the understanding that humans were the most numerous of all species on account of that fact that the human race was the most adaptable of all the species in the galaxy (keep in mind, they've had millennia to spread themselves around the galaxy since hyperspace was discovered). Just because we see a lot of aliens in the senate doesn't mean the majority of those planets population weren't human. If anything it just shows the higher social status of aliens on there respective homeworlds.

One of the things I don't get with the NEU, is why can't the evil bad guys be allowed to be racist and sexist? I mean honestly.

Torib
Do you at least agree with most of what I'm saying about the size of the Imperial Starfleet?

 

Well, I've enjoyed the discussion and learning some of the EU's galactic history, but ultimately I still subscribe to the small fleet model because it meshes much more closely with the movies themselves, which I regard as "primary sources". The exposition by Han, Leia, and the Imperial officers in ANH is particularly clearly stated and taken together provides strong evidence for the small fleet model, as do the events in ESB with the Hoth battle and ROTJ with the Endor trap.

I do sympathise with some of your arguments when it comes to the size of space and some of these other scale issues like with the death star. But ultimately these sorts of discrepancies will inevitably pop up when you try to realistically "simulate" (if only in your mind) a series of movies that function essentially as World War 2 in space. In reality, any future wars in space would likely be fought mostly with AI-driven drones and missiles that would not be limited by the mere nine g's we frail humans can withstand. I mean, if you think about it logically, of course controlling a real world galaxy with what are in spirit little more than world war II battleships with hyperdrives attached would be incredibly inefficient. But the rules of Star Wars are evidently different and contain some strange contradictions that kind of have to be taken on faith: there are droids advanced enough to have distinct, individual personalities and yet for some indiscernable reason most ship gun turrets seem to be manually operated, something that long ago went obsolete in our own world even though advanced AI's are still out of reach. You see what I'm getting at? I could argue that clearly the movies must be wrong to show manual turrets being used in space combat, because the speeds and distances involved would be far beyond human capabilities with any ship capable of the kind of speed Star Wars ships are shown to have. Even our simple jet fighters on earth which travel at only a fraction the speed of any spacecraft are already hindered by human physiology and reaction time, to the point that long range, beyond visual range missiles are the norm. Logically, it simply doesn't hold up that ships that can travel through a solar system in a matter of hours could be remotely threatened by a human gunner. It's laughable, really. But it's what the movies establish. And so that's what we accept that it is, even if exactly how or why it is that way remains fuzzy or unexplained at best (perhaps the physical rules of the universe are a bit different there -- the real answer of course is that they're just made-up movies). That's a more black-and-white example, but I think the same dynamic is at play here. It's a question of whether your understanding of the GFFA is coming from the movies and subsequently establishing the universe's rules, or whether you start with the rules based on logic and real-world understanding and retroactively apply those to the movies.

What I don't like about the large fleet model is it renders the events of the movies themselves amost nonsensical at times -- Palpatine's trap being a good example -- to resolve a question of scale that can actually be answered in other ways such as by a less strongly federalized Imperial government than is often assumed (and there are some hints to this effect in both the OT and PT).

 

Before numbers and calculations take over this thread completely, I feel compelled to ask one basic but IMHO probably decisive question:

Why would anyone with 25,000 Star Destroyers at his disposal even remotely require a Death Star battle station?

Even if we were to assume that star systems A, B. C, D, E and F would agree (on paper) to form a coalition, bring all their ships to the table, and risk open conflict with the Galactic Empire, how realistic would be the practical implementation?

The government of the revolting system the closest to the (current) position of the bulk of the Imperial Starfleet would be sufficiently aware that the surfaces of their worlds would be the first to be reduced to ashes (our current nuclear Earth arsenal has the potential to do that, so it stands to reson that one or a few Star Destroyers could easily accomplish annihilation on a similar magnitude).

I think it's fair to say that the victims on any such planets couldn't care less whether they are killed because the surface of their planet is reduced to slag or whether their planet vanishes in a big explosion.

With 25,000 Star Destroyers there wouldn't be any need for any Death Star. The Death Stars were created because the Empire does NOT have 25,000 Star Destroyers.
But it carries the same threat potential, that's why they were built.

 

Torib
I can see where you're coming from. The way I like to look at it is a combination of both ways of looking at it: from the movie, and retroactively outside the movie. For example, you said retroactively that humans shouldn't be operating turrets on spaceships. I would say that it makes sense that humans would operate the turrets where target priority is concerned (and anticipating the unexpected) , the computers are the ones doing the real calculations for aiming. From the movie we now that gravity control is a thing, so live pilots would make sense if you had inertial dampeners that prevent the pilot from blacking out. And yes, while the main saga is a space opera the makers f the films had a very keen eye for making things relatable, so most things never discussed in the movies (fleet size, logistics of the empire, travel time, etc) can be looked at in a real world manner and be consistent.
One stumbling block that I've had with the NEU is the events unfolding after endor. As you said, the losses suffered by the Empire at the BoE would be insignificant compared to a fleet of 25,000 SDs. Thankfully, I found out that mass defections occurred which actually makes some sense. What doesn't make sense is that the potentially most interesting part of the Galactic Civil War only lasts one year.
That I still can't reconcile.

edit: Lt. Hija
I don't think you fully understand Imperial policy

 

Planetary shielding. The Hoth shield "is strong enough to deflect any bombardment" (Super Star Destroyer is significantly over 100x volume of ISD, and is typically estimated as 100+ times firepower - so that's a shield that can take on over 100 Star Destroyers) and the Scarif shield encompasses the entire planet (but the Death Star superlaser, even on low power, punches right through it).

So maybe a sufficiently powerful planetary shield network could hold off most of the Imperial Fleet, yet lose to the Death Star.

 

Hyrum_Solo wrote

I don't think you fully understand Imperial policy

But you do?

Iron_lord wrote

Planetary shielding.

True, but that makes me even further wonder why you then should need 25,000 Star Destroyers as 5 in ESB were enough to be deployed so that nothing could get out of the Hoth System (Vader didn't knew the Alliance had a big ion cannon on the planet...).

Apparently you'd only need that many ships to fight piracy and smuggling, but then again I'm certain, that the Empire did delegate this kind of police enforcement to the local systems and "local bulk cruisers".

Simple but efficient reason: If the local system is supposed to be to collecting the taxes for highly priced (smuggling) products like Spice, then it's in their own interest to fight piracy and smuggling so they remain able to forward Coruscant their expected quota.