Lit Would the Old Republic stand a chance against the Yuuzhan Vong?

The Old Republic of the Prequels timeframe? Not a chance in hell.

The Old Republic at the height of it's power? Absolutely. It would of been a tough go for sure, but the Old Republic at times boasted a substanial military built around the Republic Navy has certainly showed that it was capable of facing some pretty powerful threats.

--Adm. Nick

I agree, though it would greatly depend on if they could mobilize in time. If the Vong manage to make it to Coruscant I don't see the Republic recovering from that to mobilize sufficiently. If they can hold the Vong at bay long enough to mobilize, along with holding the Core, they have a very good chance.

Of course the ability to mass produce trillions of droids B1 and B2 to just send in wave after wave attacks would be very useful. Droid armies will be key in simply holding the Vong back until the Republic can create a professional standing army and military. But once the Vong advance is halted it's all over, without their momentum its only a matter of time.

Of course I'm assuming the Senate and bureaucracy actually decides to fight the Vong and not just ignore it until their at Coruscant.

That is a incredibly well written post, Havac. You bring up some excellent points about the Galactic Republic that I hadn't thought of. In the face of such a threat, the Old Republic, assuming that it didn't fracture politically like the New Republic nearly did, would be able to pull it off. Still, it wouldn't be easy. I can't see Kuat or Rendili or Corellia sending their powerful sector forces to the Rim until things became a bit more dire. Outer Rim systems would still fall and the early stages of this invasion would be brutal.

But yes, once the Repubic started pouring credits into shipbuilding and other military efforts, it would of essentially has the potential to be quite unbeatable. Your point about the Republic having an undamaged military infastructure is very good. Even Palpatine's Empire has to rebuild the galaxy after the Clone Wars.
This would probably make for an interesting "What If" style novel, IMO.

--Adm. Nick

Makes you wonder how different the Jedi Hersey among the Shamed Ones would be. Anakin would be Yun-Yamaka for certain but I'm not sure about the others.
If the Yuuzhan Vong got to Coruscant and Palpatine was revealed I think that the Jedi would not team up with him. They would fight until Coruscant was lost but create their own version of the Insiders or another faction.

i actually disagree. thousands upon thousands of Jedi, plus the muscle of the trade federation would win out in a costly and bloody contest.

Assuming the attack came at the time of TPM, I think the galaxy may have had a chance. The Senate would obviously be of no help but with Sidious not yet in control of the Republic the Jedi may have been able to push the Vong back. The Jedi lost the Clone Wars because Palpatine manipulated events so that they could not win. The dark side was clouding their judgement and their ability to call on the Force. However, with the dark side not clouding their abilities I believe the Jedi would have had a chance of winning a clear-cut battle against a clearly-defined enemy.

Well one has to consider that one of the main weapons the Vong could actually use against the Republic was infiltration, corruption and collaborators, just that is even more rampant with the commerce guilds and the bloated Senate which is also enables Palpatines rise. So the Vong might actually have an easier time in that department then in the NJO, from there it could go anyway, pretty much the same way as it did in the Vong War.

The Old Republic would have likely done better, actually. A larger population base to draw from, relatively more competent leadership (they didn't have Borsk Fey'lya in charge), the ability to send millions of droid shock troops, a much larger number of Jedi Knights, and an infrastructure that was not plagued by war for nearly thirty years. In fact, some truly external threat like the Vong probably would have knit the Republic together in a time where it really needed unity. It's easy to say that the Empire would do better because "fascism is efficient" but it simply wouldn't be the case. They had inept military leadership who couldn't even defeat Ewoks, their military spending is largely focused on massive superweapons or dreadnoughts that are difficult to deploy and whose loss would be catastrophic, the leader of their military punishes any and all failure with execution, meaning military doctrine would calcify, and their political apparatus is more focused on removing internal dissent, regardless of its threat to cohesion or whether or not it is justified. The rampant racism in their policy would cause alien races to actually side with the Vong, and the Empire's propensity for truly astounding levels of depravity and violence against innocent members of its own populace, even humans, would cause regional leaders to use the crisis to assert independent authority. In short, the Empire would lose a total war horribly. They would last maybe a decade before the weight of oppressing its own populace in absolutely stupidly evil ways while fighting a war would break it. In fact, to win, the Empire would have to do two things.

1.) Kill and replace much of its military and political leadership with something other than the stupidly evil.

2.) Attack immediately and win. If they lose, they get bogged down in a long war, which would not, actually, be to their advantage as they have dubious levels of local support.

I'm pretty sure the Clone Wars-era Republic is much more heavily militarized and has an advantage of ten thousand mobilized and organized Jedi Knights that, collectively, outclass Luke's new order by several orders of magnitude. Not burdened by the same level of incompetence and mismanagement that plagued the New Republic and benefited by the greatest strategist in the mythos, they'd probably clean house.

Have you been reading the same EU material as the rest of us, by any chance?

Sure have. What's the problem?

I'm sure Palpatine would be able to rally the galaxy against to Yuuzhan Vong. I mean he did use extra galactic invasion as an excuse for preserving such a massive military after the Clone Wars.

Plus, why would you want to side with the Vong, who enslave prisoners and torture them to death. I understand people would want to escpae and oppressive government, but why trade it for an even worse one??

He managed to rally the entire Galaxy by being well-meaning and publicly benevolent during a crisis. The people of the Empire would have known him to be a hooded guy with a gnarled face whose armies blow up planets, gun down innocent people, and enslave millions of sentient beings. Once Palpatine was unfettered by the constraints of republican government in name as well as in practice, his approval amongst the people tanked. And aliens would likely support the Vong over the Empire, if anything to get to give humanity the finger. Using a crisis as a way of uniting people to your banner only works if you make an effort to appear better than the invaders.

If you've read NJO you know that the Vong's treatment of sentient beings is far more cruel than anything Palpatine or Tarkin dreamed of. Any aliens who went running to the Vong out of spite for humans would be begging to go back to their safe oppressive Empire within a day.

They might, but not all of them. And in the time it takes for these alien races to pick which set of genocidal maniacs to follow, the Empire's order of battle and its slave-based economy would have been ruined from within. All it takes is for this sort of subversion and rebellion to start during such a war and that's it, the Empire's done. Few follow the Empire out of real loyalty (or else rule by fear wouldn't be necessary); once the strength keeping them in line is shattered, they won't simply stay. In real life, plenty of people have supported invaders hoping for a change from their repressive government only to find out that the new boss is the same, or worse, than the old boss. It's not out of the question.

The Empire's economy is most certainly not 'slave-based.' It's the same sort of pseudo-corporatist incredibly unequal Core World dominated that the Old Republic had and the New Republic continued. Slavery is a complete economic non-factor in Star Wars, it exists for punitive purposes and to please the psychologies of certain deranged individuals and unusually oriented species. Droids are both cheaper and more efficient by an order of magnitude (you can do the calculations an ASP costs 1,000 credits, or the a tenth of the price of new landspeeder, and can perform unskilled labor 99% of the time).

And the physical evidence is quite clear that, unpopular or not, wracked by uprisings or not, the Empire still produced, fielded, and maintained the most powerful war machine in galactic history and it was only overthrown because the death of the Emperor at Endor (and later at Byss) meant that the Empire expended the bulk of its military strength in internal conflict rather than fighting the rebel fleet or alien uprisings.

Considering how common it is in mining and agriculture it apparently isn’t, we have whole Sector economies build on it or where it clearly is a large factor outside of “entertainment value” or ideological reasons.

They aren’t actually, requiring constant maintenance, mind wipes, upgrades and apparently also have a higher bulk purchasing cost then mass slavery which pretty much maintains itself. Plus there are just way to many regions of space that simply don’t have access to mass produced technology and the means to keep it running.

SW Droids have an alarming tendency to malfunction or perform in ineffective and dangerous ways, plus we have a rather high number of exotic metals and radiation kinds that will just simply short them out, many of them created in industrial processes or on mining worlds where slavery or at least some kind of unfree labor is very common.

Of course the Empires economy is not slavery based as a whole, but it certainly is an economic factor.