How many star destroyers were in the Imperial fleet during its zenith?

Does anybody know?
Also, how many of each type, and how they were organized, grouped, and deployed.

How many were sent to crush the rebels at hoth for instance...

 

The number usually quoted is 25,000 Star Destroyers.

I'll leave others to explain the many, many ins and outs, however.

(Did I mention MANY? )

 

Three Million.

 

The 25,000 quote, (still controversy on whether or not that's an accurate number) refers to only the Imperial class. It doesn't cover how many Tectors, Victories, and other SD types were in the Fleet. No fixed number for the total amount of Star Destroyers the Fleet has ever been given.

 

Ironically, the 25,000 number is from Zahn, who is somewhat of a minimalist.

 

Over 25,000 Imperial-class Star Destroyers, according to the Star Wars Trilogy Sourcebook Special Edition. Unless I'm mistaken. Need to recheck.

Venator-class, Tector-class, Gladiator-class, etc. unknown. Only one fleet of Victory-class Star Destroyers known, with 250 ships. Up to 1,000 Venators at the Battle of Coruscant.

Anything else is unknown.

 

27th Denarian fleet, with 520 of them sold to the Corporate sector. Transposed numbers should not be proliferated.

That fleet, the K-Wing's appearance, and the unholy continuation of the T-65J series when it should have long been a K model are all ways to make Wes a dull boy.

 

A man after my own heart! I just thought most people would treat the later number as "more" canon, even though it's a mistake.

 

Unfortunately we don't have a context for the number of 25,000 ISDs.

Is it the entire number of ISDs?

Is it only the number of those deployed, while more are sitting in drydocks or on route to their area of responsibility?

Is it the number of ships the emperor can deploy everywhere within the galaxy? Then we'd have to add the ISDs within the sectorgroups.

If you have 24-80 ISDs per sector (according to the ISB) and "thousands" of sectors, you would have a number of ISDs between 24,000 and 160,000 (at the time of ANH, according to the RASB or RESB the "empire's military forces doubled in strenght" between ANH and ROTJ)?

What about the free-roving forces? Or those ships guarding fixed installations like Coruscant or Tangrene?

Are there ten percent or fifty percent of the fleet kept in the core as reserve?

And so on.

 

What about patrol craft, support craft, transports, supply convoys, etc? All of that is pretty essential to a fleet.

 

Minimum naval forces of a sectorgroup contain 24 ISDs, 1,600 other warships (corvette/gunship and above) and 800 support- and supply-vessels of which 25% are up to twenty kilometer long FSCVs.

 

We know from various sourcebooks that 10% of the Imperial Navy was in reserves in the Core. 50% of all Imperial-class destroyers were in these forces, which means the other 50% is the 25,000+ ships mentioned, or that there were only 12,500+ in the sector forces.

 

BEN: Destroyed...by the Empire!

HAN: The entire starfleet couldn't destroy the whole planet. It'd take a thousand ships with more fire power than I've...

 

Good lord, what is it with authors and overkill? With fleets that huge who needs a Death Star to rule the galaxy? A sector fleet of 250 frigate-sized vessels would already be a very impressive force by my book.

Edit:
This is from the Starwars.com Databank: "There are whole systems whose gross domestic product is less than the cost of a single Star Destroyer. There are entire nations that, throughout their history, do not expend as much energy as a Star Destroyer does during a hyperspace jump. Powering the 1.6 kilometer-long craft is nothing short of a miniature sun -- a solar ionization reactor bulges from the ventral spine, using its raging fires to fuel the giant warship."

This is from Wookiepedia: "For instance, in 19 ABY, the Remnant controlled only eight sectors, which were said to contain "over a thousand inhabited systems"[2], which would indicate an average size of 125 inhabited systems per sector."

Someone above said about 25-80 ISD's per sector....so I'll take a middle number of about 60. Sixty ISD's for about 125 systems is about one Star Destroyer for every two systems. And the Databank already says that the average star system's economic output is exceeded by a single Star Destroyer. Even without having done that bit of math I always believed that such massive estimates of naval strength were absurdly unrealistic....

 

Sci-fi writers have no understanding of scale. Especially when one considers that ONE ISD could apparantly drain the treasuries of several whole planets (not Coruscant or Corellia or Kuat, economic powerhouses, but others certainly.

 

25,000

About the sense of scale, having a star destroyer bankrupt space age nations is a little far fetched, but not THAT far fetched on the 3 million clones far fetched level. At the risk of sounding like a ****ing fanboy, a star destroyer's reactor would basically have the power generation of a small star, and getting hypermatter for that would likely cost a huge amount of money, also there would be costs for the crew, hull, etc.

 

It says there are some star systems who do not. Not that the average system does not. Plus, looking at the population guide in the Atlas, the vast majority of Star Wars planets have populations much smaller than earth's, so they wouldn't need that much energy. Especially when you count the surprising number of planets that have almost no technology outside of a spaceport or two.

 

Where's the irony? It's a minimalist number.

Note that those on-paper minimums were not always met, with some sectors getting a tiny fraction of that.

It never said "average." It said that "there are whole systems whose gross domestic product is less than the cost of a single Star Destroyer." Given an Outer Rim filled with podunk colonies and hardscrabble hideouts, that statement is likely just as true of X-wings. Indeed, there are so many small-population worlds in the galaxy, I would not be surprised to find the galactic median star system to have a GDP lower than that of Earth, with the bottom quartile having GDPs comparable to a third-world country. But that top quartile . . . hoo boy, do they have a lot of dough!

The use of "nation" in the same quote regarding an ISD's energy output is similarly unhelpful, since, again, there are countless nations of relatively low technological sophistication and relatively short lifetimes. It would be easy for their all-time energy output to be smaller than a single ISD turbolaser shot, let alone hyperspace jump.

 

Much of the Databank entry is repeated in the SW Trilogy Special Edition SB.

Other quotes: "It would be impossible to garrison every system in the Empire - but its Star Destroyers give the Empire the ability to project its power anywhere it wishes on short notice. Much of the Imperial Navy is permanently deployed in reserve in the Galactic Core, ready to swiftly respond to any threats, anywhere.
The Imperial Navy is organized into fleets, which are composed of one Imperial-class Star Destroyer accompanied by support and lesser combat ships. Each fleet can operate independently. In practice, Star Destroyers can be combined in Task Forces of three, Sector Squadrons of six, or Regional and Territorial Fleets of 24 - but it is unusual for more than one to occupy the same star system, except for ceremonial purposes. Such concentrations of force are rarely necessary - there are few things which can seriously challenge even one Star Destroyer." - p. 138.

Also, from the CWAS:
"All told, the Empire built more than 25,000 Star Destroyers, holding half of them on reserve in the Galactic Core to protect key military, industrial, and political systems. The Empire could strategically deploy the ships anywhere on short notice." - Star Destroyer entry

 

Yeah, well, those are the only ones that matter anyway.

 

hey,

here's an interesting article what it once considered quite logical

http://daltonator.net/fanfics/archive.html

go in the middle to essays and than to Imperial Fleet Size Calculations

this is a very good calculation which is consistent with the SW altas

greats Ketan

 

We also have to consider the fact that a sector like Chommell (Naboo's home-sector) is described as "sparsely populated" and had "thirty-six star systems that were members of the Galactic Republic, an additional 40,000 settled dependencies and 300,000,000 barren stars and even in such a sparsely populated sector, a thorough home constituency tour for the local Senator could take a lifetime" in AOTC:ICS.

We know that since the Imperial Navy was meant to project Imperial power directly around its holdings, it has to have a lot of ships going around. Even a sparcely populated planetoid with one Rebel base usually has a Star Destroyer show up, so obviously, the Empire doesn't have a logistical issue there. With 12,500 ISDs in service throughout the sectors, and their profiles always claiming they are the most recognizable face of Imperial might, they must make up the most numerous class of Star Destroyer in service, but the figure puts a limit on them, personally.

If each sector has token Star Destroyers present, the Venators were usually found in Moff's personal fleets only, the Victorys were being phased out and used more in the outback areas and the Gladiators were only used out on the frontiers, that leaves some room for more designs to bridge the gap between systems with SD presence and systems without. The Calamari technician Terpfen worked on new designs as a slave (The Jedi Academy Sourcebook), the Aggressor design was made and a prototype was built during the Empire (TCSWE), TFU has a Venator/Imperial hybrid-design, Rothana was making more dagger-shaped designs at the start of the CW, there's the Republic battleships with no name mentioned in several books, which Acclamators and Venators sometimes escorted, there's dagger-shaped designs made by rival ship-builders apart from KDY, Sienar and RSD during the CW (AOTC:ICS, OS). There's plenty of opportunities for new stuff.