Lit The Rebel Alliance is suprisingly clean

It does raise the question of why the narrative switches from "Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor" to "Death Star" partway through the Vader hologram's narrative:

Spoiler

"Behold my Master and weep. He has been stolen from us by those who embrace hatred. The Emperor learned that the Rebels had stolen plans for an Imperial Planetary Ore Extractor and intended to use the one they were fabricating at Endor on inhabited planets. He assembled his fleet, and, heedless of personal danger, he had me take him to Endor. He infiltrated the half-completed extractor, offering these Rebels his forgiveness and a hand in friendship. They rejected him and attacked his fleet. My Master had no choice but to destroy this Death Star himself, perishing in the process so his citizens could live on. I was slain with him, but my death did not distress me, for it came in service to my Master."

 

They treat it like the Rebels using the ore extractor would corrupt it, hence the "Death Star" moniker.

 

Them being able to build a Death Star also doesn't go with the notion of the Rebels as a tiny, almost irrelevant faction compared to the Empire.

 

You expect loyal citizens to use such logic! They must leave logic to the makers of such fine displays

 

The Rebel Alliance was clean because it had to be - it was founded on an almost entirely moral argument, not a political one. The founders were, after all, three Senators, all of whom had served in the Senate during the Clone Wars and who had, in fact, voted for Palpatine's appointment as Emperor (well, at least Bail and Mothma, not sure if Bel Iblis is on record for that one). They rose in rebellion on the concept that Palpatine's actions and practices had negated the authority of his government so much that it had to be replaced. As a result, they had to hold themselves to a higher moral standard or the ideological foundation behind their rebellion would collapse. This is not just a political fact, but a military one - a huge percentage of the Rebel Alliance's men and materiel were acquired through the straight-up defection of Imperial forces, especially prior to Mon Calamari joining in - moral superiority was absolutely essential to maintaining that flow.

Many of the various other forces in the galaxy were not bound by any such ethical constraints. Native uprisings, Separatist holdouts, and areas resisting outside Imperial conquest (the last category is a big one, Palpatine set Imperial forces to probably hundreds of thousands of planets out of a purely expansionary dictate), almost certainly fought back plenty dirty out of a need for pure survival. This further reinforced the Rebellion's need to maintain high ethical standards, as a way of separating itself from other groups and retaining popular support against the Empire.

 

Warloardism says hello

 

Huh ... Alderaan? Corellia? Chandrila? The three founding resistance movements of the Rebel Alliance? Sure, those aren't Core Worlds. Maybe they didn't have full,and official government support on those planets, but then again by that definition the Vichy Government of France should have been left in charge after WWII. Or the US should have remained a British colonial possession following the capture of New York City and Philadelphia with their substantial Loyalist elements.

And if the Rebellion never had the support of anybody of consequence, it speaks rather poorly of Palpatine and the Imperial military that they ended up consigned to the ash heap of history by such a rabble

 

I am well aware that you will never accept that the Rebellion had actual support in the Core, so I'm just going to say I contest that statement and believe your viewpoint to be incorrect on that matter and move on to address the second part of the statement - that the Core contains the majority of the galactic populace.

First, a bit about area. Using ImageJ and the galactic map from the Atlas, I took and measured the area of polygons representing both the Core Worlds and the rest of the settled galaxy minus the Core. These are by necessity approximations, it being unclear where exactly the boundary of settled space versus the unknown regions lies, and the polygonal mapping being somewhat imperfect, but I'd say they're within ten percent. According to those numbers the Core Worlds constitute 3.4% of the total settled area in the galaxy (and 2.1% of the galaxy as a whole).

Now, obviously area does not properly proxy the Core Worlds, which are, after all, surely considerably more populous than the galactic norm. On the temp boards I had a complex analysis regarding planetary categorization, including population, that broke the planets of the galaxy into four groups: full imperial members, planets with imperial representation, known planets without representation, and unknown planets. Speculating from canon figures in the Atlas, the number of planets in each group worked out like this:




Now, assuming planets are distributed equally across the galaxy (obviously in-accurate, I'll get to that in a minute), at 2.1% of galactic area, the Core Worlds would contain 23 million planets. Still, to counteract for habitation and settlement biases, let be real generous and just flat double that, give the Core 46 million inhabited planets. Then we can determine what percentage of each planetary category lies in the core and calculate an estimate of total core population versus the rest of the galaxy.

Imperial Full Members: probably very heavy in the Core, certainly, but not completely. Some are surely in the Colonies, and we know of planets like Eriadu, Muunilist, Bastion, and the like that even in the Outer Rim. Still, I'll be generous and give the Core 85% of those worlds. That's 1,487500 planets and 14.9 quadrillion people.

Imperial Representation: This category, presumably makes up the balance of the rest. 46 million - 1.49 - 2.3 = 42.2 million planets, And 42.2 quadrillion people.

Known, No Representation: So, here's a question, how many planets in the Core have no Imperial representation, meaning no Imperial presence at all. It's probably not that many, but there are certainly some exceptions. Corellia nominally falls into this category under the Diktat, and certain other autonomous and/or totally non-human planets, such as Skako (hardly insignificant, at 500 billion inhabitants it's 1/20,000th of the total galactic populace). I'll say 5% of the 46 million - 2.3 million planets, and 34 trillion people.

Unknown: I think we can safely say there are no unknown settlements in the Core worlds, so this is a nice even zero across the board.

So, the running total is 14.9+42.2+0.03= 57.1 quadrillion.

Yes, that does give the Core Worlds a clear majority of the galactic populace. Somewhat to my surprise, in this calculation, Jello's point holds. Of course, the central reason this is so is that I chose to over-represent the Core by a factor of 2. Remove that and the Core drops to 34%. Still, considering that only 1 in 3.2 habitable systems in the galaxy actually are inhabited, the factor of 2 is probably reasonable. Hmm...I may have to consider the full implications of this analysis with regards to overall galaxy structure further.

 

1,1 billion inhabited planets? This seems to be rather to much for me, I did a calculation by myself based on the Essential Atlas some time ago and came up with ~100-150 million planets, that's a tenth of what you're using. Instead of over 500 million known unrepresented worlds I thought ~50 million would fit more and systems unknown to the Galactic Civilation I did not count. As for the galactic population, 3~5 quadrillion in the known galaxy, Humans the most numerous species made up ~20 percent.
But there are different sources, some claim there are only one million planets at all. For example, in The Lost Suns it is mentioned the holonet connects six million worlds.

 

Would have been hilarity plus practicality if Luke had taken that whole Emperor Skywalker thing off the planet.

 

"Patriotism" my dear man. Zsinj was a freedom fighter didn't you know?

 

Who else but a good and honorable man could have such a great taste in facial hair?

 

The Essential Atlas pg. x "-that's about 3.2 billion habitable star systems. We haven't gotten everywhere yet - it's estimated that nearly a billion of those systems actually have someone living in them"

I up the number of planets, rather than systems, by ten percent, to account for the rather large number of systems liable to have more than one inhabited world (something apparently particularly common in the Core).

The 100 Quadrillion number is also canon, though the source is rather obscure (my memory is saying its actually in one of the old Bantam Tales anthologies), and is actually not all that high, given that 10^17/10^9 runs a fairly modest 100 million average and we have several planets pushing the 1 trillion range all by themselves.

The Essential Atlas is, so far as I know, the most recent source to address this, and as such, all other things being equal, the definitive one.

I've looked at that map many times. Regrettably it has both astonishingly large population ranges, and absolutely no indication of how densely settled planets might be in any given patch. Still the map would appear to indicate that the Core is generally orders of magnitude more populous than most of the rest of the galaxy excepting a few small key areas (which would account for that other 15% of the full Imperial Representatives), which is in line with the numbers I presented.

I would note this, even conceding the Core contains the 'majority' of the galactic population, it by no means contains everyone in the galaxy. I came up with 57%, you could probably defend anything from about 35-65%, which would leave, even at worst, 35% of the galaxy where the Rebellion did have popular support. That's a powerful fraction of the body politic by any standard, not some kind of fringe group. The Empire may not have been openly oppressive or even especially unpleasant to the majority, but it was horrific for a pretty ****ing big minority.

 

But, the core is nothing but a pustule of slime and corruption anyway. wealth and power they have alright, wealth and power stolen from the hard working people of the Rim to feed their decadence. They incite wars, bomb planets, monopolize labor, leave people in poverty - then they have the nerve to sneer at that poverty. Nothing good comes from the core - everything that is good in the Republic comes from the Rim. The galaxy would be a much better place if the black hole at the heart of the galaxy swallowed it up.

 

Nope.

Has been a while since that guy posted huh. I barely even remember him.

 

You forget that the evil House of Organa had been stealing from the pockets of the poor for generations.

Then the Rebel leaders had the audacity to blame the poor Emperor for their own people's poverty when they had been using the very money he had provided in aid handouts to build their doomsday devices.

 

Bah! Villains, barbarians and terrorists! The galaxy will breathe a collective sigh of relief once the last Rebel draws their final breath!

 

. . . Rouge77, is that you?

 

I remember that awesome thread that covered the entire Marvel run.