Irked Necron Immortal
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Found this on a fanfic page.
If you're only interested in the results, look at "Results" (at the bottom). If you want to know how I worked out those results, read everything else.
In several cases, I've used the symbol ^. This means "to the power of", in case anybody is unfamiliar with it. e.g. 2^7 is two to the power of seven, i.e. 2×2×2×2×2×2×2 (seven twos multiplied by each other).
In case anybody is unfamiliar with the concept of negative powers, x^(–y) = 1 ÷ x^y, where x and y both represent any number.
In physics, the letter c is used to represent the speed of light in a vacuum: 300,000,000m/s, or 300,000km/s.
On the matter of Star Wars canon: there are only six things which are canon: the six Star Wars films. Everything else is glorified fanfiction.
Table of contents:
1. How many inhabited planets are there in the Star Wars galaxy?
2. The speed of different methods of faster-than-light travel:
(a) For the Imperium of Man, the Orks and the Forces of Chaos
(b) For all Star Wars factions
3. Are Star Wars turbolasers and blasters made of matter, or of energy?
4. Star Wars shielding:
(a) Can Star Wars shields block solid objects?
(b) Can Star Wars shields block teleportation?
5. Star Wars fuels:
(a) How much energy can 1m³ of Star Wars capital ship fuel generate?
(b) How much energy does hyperdrive take up?
(c) What is the name of Fuel X?
6. Star Wars spaceship strengths:
(a) How much energy can the fuel of a Command-class battleship generate?
(b) How much energy can the fuel of a Magnificence-class battleship generate?
(c) How much energy can the fuel of a Trade Federation battleship generate?
(d) How much energy can the fuel of a Glory-class star destroyer generate?
(e) How much energy can the fuel of an Enforcer-class or Avenger-class star destroyer generate?
(f) How much energy can the fuel of a Unifier-class star destroyer generate?
7. Numbers of Star Wars Republican forces:
(a) How many clone troopers are there in a Glory-class star destroyer?
(b) What is the total energy generation capacity of the Imperial Starfleet at the time of A New Hope?
(c) Was the Grand Army of the Republic the entire Republican armed forces, or was there also a Republican Starfleet?
(d) How many warships does the Republican Starfleet have at the end of the Clone Wars?
8. Size of warships:
(a) Emperor Palpatine's enormous flagship from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi
(b) The mysterious ship seen at the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi
(c) Trade Federation battleship from the Star Wars prequel trilogy
(d) The Galactic Republic's star destroyers from Attack of the Clones
(e) The Galactic Empire's star destroyers from the Star Wars original trilogy
(f) The Galactic Republic's star destroyers from Revenge of the Sith
(g) Imperial Navy battleships
(h) All the various classes of Imperial Navy escorts
(i) All the various classes of Imperial Navy cruisers
9. Warship types:
(a) What types of warships are there in Warhammer 40,000?
(b) What types of warships are there in Star Wars?
10. Ship statistics for the Imperium:
(a) How much energy can 1m³ of Warhammer 40,000 fuel generate?
(b) How much energy can all the various classes of Imperial Navy escorts generate?
(c) How much energy can all the various classes of Imperial Navy cruisers generate?
11. Numbers of Warhammer 40,000 Imperial forces:
(a) How many sectors are there in the Imperium?
(b) How many warships are there in the Imperial Navy?
(c) Why aren't Space Marine fleets counted in Calculation 11(b)?
Results: speed, ship numbers and energy generation capacity.
1. How many inhabited planets are there in the Star Wars galaxy?
I begin with the premise that the Galactic Empire and the pre-Clone Wars Galactic Republic controlled the entire Star Wars galaxy. This is blindingly obvious due to their very names.
By the time of Attack of the Clones, "thousands" of Republican planets have joined the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and Dooku claims that another ten-thousand are expected to do so soon. Therefore, the galaxy contains at least 12,000 inhabited planets.
Judging by eye, the Galactic Senate has about one-thousand seats. We know that it can't be one seat per inhabited planet. So what does one senator represent? Our best clue is from The Phantom Menace, more specifically, the line:
SUPREME CHANCELLOR VALORUM: The chair recognises the Senator from the sovereign system of Naboo.
This line tells us that the Galactic Republic is not a nation; it is a federalist network, encompassing sovereign nations, such as Naboo.
Clearly, each of the one-thousand seats in the Galactic Senate represents a sovereign member-nation of the Republic. Not all of them, obviously, are made up of just one inhabited planet; otherwise the galaxy would only contain one-thousand inhabited planets, and we know that it contains at least twelve-thousand.
The Trade Federation is an obvious example of a Republican member-nation which covers many planets. Ten-thousand Trade Federation battleships were seen blockading Naboo, each of them 38 times as powerful as an Imperial star destroyer (see Calculations 8(c) and (e) for evidence of this). If it can build the equivalent of 380,000 Imperial star destroyers (and it's unlikely that the Trade Federation would have sent its whole fleet to blockade an insignificant planet like Naboo, leaving itself unprotected), it can't be limited to a single inhabited planet. The Trade Federation must possess hundreds or thousands of inhabited planets.
So we know that some Republican member-nations have far more territory than others do. In this sense, the Republic is similar to the United Nations. Compare Russia to Liechtenstein in size and influence, and you'll see my point.
But if we can figure out the number of inhabited planets in the galaxy, we can figure out the average number of inhabited planets per region.
We can put an upper limit on the galaxy's number of inhabited planets, judging by a statement in Revenge of the Sith:
OBI-WAN KENOBI: The Chancellor will not be able to control the thousands of star-systems without keeping the Senate intact.
Obviously, Obi-Wan isn't talking in the 2,000-9,000 range, since we know that the Republic has at least twelve-thousand inhabited star-systems. However, we also know that he isn't talking in the range of one-million or beyond, or he'd say "the million star-systems" or "the millions of star-systems", rather than "the thousands of star-systems". Therefore, 999,999 is a plausible upper limit on the galaxy's number of inhabited planets.
Next, we can put a lower limit on the galaxy's number of inhabited star-systems. This is a subtler point, but still valid.
The Galactic Senate contains one senator for each region. There are at least 12,000 planets which sympathise with the Separatists. And yet, in Attack of the Clones, not a single senator speaks out in favour of the Separatist cause—not one. If those 12,000 planets made up half of the Republic—even if they made up 10%—their Senators would definitely speak out when the Senate was considering sending an army against them. I mean, if you formed a considerable portion of a democratic body that was considering sending an army against you, I think that you'd want to speak out, wouldn't you?
The only plausible explanation for the Separatist Senators' failure to speak out is if they weren't there; such people are willing to speak out even when public opinion is clearly against them, such as in The Phantom Menace. Since the Senate's numbers don't appear to have noticeably decreased since The Phantom Menace, when there were no secessions, then the Senators of those twelve-thousand planets must be a very small portion of the Senate: 2%, at most. If they were any more than that, we would have seen a significant change in the Senate's numbers. In fact, they're almost certainly less than 2%, but this is a lower limit.
Note: A potential object is that the Separatists might control most of the very large member-nations (like the Trade Federation), and very few of the small ones. However, it could also be the other way around. Indeed, the dominance of Trade Federation designs in the Separatist Droid Army and the Separatist fleet alike suggests that the Trade Federation dominated the Confederacy of Independent Systems, in which case there can't have been lots of other, similarly large member-nations in the Confederacy.
Note: Another potential objection is that the Separatists couldn't have stood up to the Republic in the Clone Wars if they didn't have lots of planets. However, the Confederacy of Independent Systems was largely formed from wealthy companies like the Trade Federation. These companies would control the very richest and most industrial areas of the Star Wars galaxy. Also, they started off with a vast fleet, while the Republic had to build its fleet from scratch, so they'd have time to seize plenty of planets to even the playing field while the Republic was struggling to build a fleet to stop them.
12,000 ÷ 2% = 600,000. Therefore, there are at least 600,000 inhabited planets in the galaxy.
So we have a lower limit (600,000) and an upper limit (999,999), but no way of telling which is correct. Let's go with the simple solution: average!
(600,000 + 999,999) ÷ 2 = 800,000 [calculated to one significant figure].
For a calculation as imprecise as this, it would be unjustifiable to go to more than one significant figure.
Therefore, the galaxy is composed of one-thousand member-nations, each of which contains an average of 800 inhabited planets.
2. The speed of different methods of faster-than-light travel:
(a) For the Imperium of Man, the Orks and the Forces of Chaos
White Dwarf is kind enough to provide very clear data here. There are two tables: the amount of time that passes in the material world, and the amount of type that passes for the people on the ship itself. While the fact that there's a difference is interesting, it isn't very relevant strategically. What matters is simple: if a Warp-capable ship enters the Warp to travel to somewhere five- or ten- or twenty-thousand light-years away, how far in the future does it emerge?
The answer:
1 light-year: 43-270 minutes
5 light-years: 3.5-24 hours
10 light-years: 7-48 hours
50 light-years: 1.5-9 days
100 light-years: 3-21 days
500 light-years: 2-12 weeks
1,000 light-years: 1-6 months
5,000 light-years: 5-36 months
Now I'm going to say the speeds that all these numbers mean, in multiples of c. So 2c is twice the speed of light in a vacuum, 10c is ten times the speed of light in a vacuum, et cetera.
(Note: I'm taking a month to mean exactly 365 ÷ 12, in order to be as accurate as possible.)
1 light-year: 12,000c or 1,900c
5 light-years: 13,000c or 1,800c
10 light-years: 13,000c or 1,800c
50 light-years: 12,000c or 2,000c
100 light-years: 12,000c or 1,700c
500 light-years: 13,000c or 2,200c
1000 light-years: 12,000c or 2,000c
5000 light-years: 12,000c or 1,700c [all calculated to two significant figures].
So that's pretty clear. If Warp conditions are as good as can be reasonably expected, the speed is 12,000c to 13,000c. If Warp conditions are as bad as can be reasonably expected, the speed is only 1,700c to 2,200c.
So how do we produce a single figure? Easy. Average it!
This gives us a final answer: an average of 7,100 times the speed of light in a vacuum.
(b) For all Star Wars factions
Hyperdrive—travel through hyperspace—is the method of faster-than-light travel that is used by all Star Wars factions. I'm now going to make a conservative estimate of its speed: an estimate which gives as low a speed as possible.
In real life, we know that the radius of the Milky Way is about 60,000 light-years. We have no idea how big the Star Wars galaxy is, except that it's big enough to have two satellite galaxies (as we see in the Jedi Archives' galactic map in Attack of the Clones).
But that gives us a clue as to its size: it's only big enough to have two satellite galaxies, no more. The Milky Way has loads of satellite galaxies. From the little evidence available to us, it seems that the Star Wars galaxy might be smaller than the Milky Way.
Given that I'm making a conservative calculation of hyperdrive's speed, I'll assume that the Star Wars galaxy's radius is only 20,000 light-years.
In Attack of the Clones, Kamino is in one of these satellite galaxies, and judging by eye from the Jedi Archives scene, it's about 40,000 light-years away from the centre of the Star Wars galaxy. The whole Star Wars prequel trilogy often tells us that Coruscant is at the centre of the galaxy. Therefore we know that there are 40,000 light-years between Kamino and Coruscant. In Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan crosses this distance in his fighter.
Judging by the sheer size of the fighter, it had nowhere to store food: it was tiny. Therefore we know that the trip lasted no more than 24 hours, unless Obi-Wan was willing to go without food for a whole day; he can't have picked up new supplies on his secret mission. Even this presumes that he spent large amounts of the trip sleeping in hyperspace—in fact, the trip might have taken just a few hours. But I'll assume that it took 24 hours, for the sake of being conservative.
If you travel forty-thousand light-years in one year, you're travelling at 40,000c. If you travel it in 1 day—365 times less time—then you're travelling precisely 365 times faster than that. 40,000c × 365 = 15,000,000c [calculated to two significant figures].
So hyperdrive goes at 15 million times the speed of light.
Some people might object to this, on the grounds that Obi-Wan's fighter would be an unusually fast ship. However, there are plenty of other examples of hyperdrive moving at this kind of speed: for instance, the Millennium Falcon going from Tatooine to Alderaan in A New Hope, or Padmé's ship going from Tatooine to Coruscant in The Phantom Menace, or Luke's X-Wing going from Dagobah to Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back. But the distance between Kamino and Coruscant is clearly defined, so I've chosen that.
3. Are Star Wars turbolasers and blasters made of matter, or of energy?
Regardless of their name, I can prove, in three different ways, that turbolasers and blasters are not made of energy—in which case they are almost certainly made of matter.
1. If turbolasers and blasters were actually lasers (i.e. made of pure energy), they would travel at the speed of light. The movies show us that they don't move at anywhere near the speed of light. You can actually see them moving: people can even dodge them. They're far, far, far slower than light. Therefore they aren't light.
2. Turbolasers and blasters emit a visible glow as they travel. Light does not glow. Are there big glowy yellow lines coming from the sun? No. Radiation doesn't glow; it only produces colour if it hits an object and is reflected back into your eyes at the right frequency. If anybody's ever seen a basic laser pointer, they'll know that a laser does not produce a streak of glowing stuff: it produces a bit of light at the destination. There is, however, an explanation for the streak-of-glowing-stuff phenomenon: actual matter which is glowing. Light itself doesn't emit extra light outwards, but matter can.
3. Turbolaser cannons have holes at the ends of them, not lenses. Therefore matter is physically leaving the cannon, not a laser beam.
4. Star Wars shielding:
(a) Can Star Wars shields block solid objects?
I don't know whether the Star Wars Expanded Universe has actually claimed that Star Wars shields can't block solid objects, but if so, it's wrong. I have three methods of verifying this.
1. We actually see shields capable of blocking solid objects in The Phantom Menace, in the final duel between Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Maul. This is the most conclusive evidence. It is literally depicted in the most canonical source of all: the movies. It is incontrovertible.
2. If shields were incapable of blocking solid objects in the Star Wars galaxy, turbolasers wouldn't exist. Instead, ships would spend the energy (which they canonically spend on turbolasers) on launching big blocks of solid metal at other ships, very very quickly. These blocks of metal would carry tremendous amounts of momentum. If Star Wars shields were actually incapable of blocking solid objects, everyone would use solid objects to get through shields: it would be a vast advantage to have weapons which could bypass your opponent's shields on their own.
3. The destruction of Alderaan was an incredibly violent event. An entire planet was turned into debris which was hurtled out through space tremendously quickly. We see from direct movie footage that the debris covered distances as large as the diameter of a planet in less than a second. Momentum = mass × velocity. The mass of a planet is very big. The velocity here is very big. See where I'm getting?
Even if the Death Star's armour was incredibly thick and incredibly tough, it is simply impossible for it to survive the blast without a scratch. Yet that's exactly what happens. The Death Star isn't even scratched by this incredibly large amount of debris moving incredibly quickly. Even if its armour was ridiculously tough, it would at least be scratched, and would probably be torn apart. Yet it survives unscratched. This, on its own, testifies that Star Wars shields can block solid objects.
In the Star Wars galaxy, there appear to be three kinds of shields.
1) Theatre shields. These are seen in The Phantom Menace, A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. The Gungan theatre shield in The Phantom Menace let battle droids on foot get through, but blocked hovering vehicles and weapons fire. The theatre shield of the first Death Star in A New Hope let Rebel fighters get through if they slowed down to match speeds with it; then, once they were through, they accelerated again. In The Empire Strikes Back, the Rebels have a theatre shield which is so powerful that it can block the turbolaser fire of five star destroyers and a Command-class battleship (for the name of that ship class, please see Calculation 9(b)), and which also prevented the Empire from using any units that didn't touch the ground: hence, the usage of heavy walkers at the Battle of Hoth. It's clear that theatre shields block fast-moving objects (such as turbolasers and proton torpedoes) and any objects that don't touch the ground, but let slow-moving objects through.
2) Ray-shields. These are seen in Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. In Revenge of the Sith, they prevent Anakin and Obi-Wan from getting out of them; something very similar is used by Dooku against Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones, with identical effects, so it's almost certainly the same technology. In A New Hope, they're used for the first Death Star's thermal exhaust port (though not for the first Death Star itself), and they famously turn out to be proton torpedo-permeable. The only sensible reason why anyone would bother to use ray-shields for a spaceship is that they're cheap; they're far inferior to the other two types of shields.
3) The type of shields seen in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. These shields—such as star destroyer shields, and the shields of the second Death Star—are incredibly violent. Anything that touches them—an asteroid, a fighter, another spaceship—is instantly vapourised. Obviously, they can't be used on the ground, because they'd try to vapourise the earth underfoot, and they'd run out of power while trying to do so. However, in space, they're extremely effective, and they're used for all star destroyers. Interestingly, you can open holes in them for shuttles to move in and out, and (presumably) to fire a weapon through your own shields.
This three-part explanation explains every shielding phenomenon in Star Wars that I know of.
Note: I've heard it claimed that Star Wars ships can't block solid objects because the star destroyers were worried about entering the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back. However, some asteroids are many kilometres across, and there were lots and lots of asteroids there: the asteroid field in The Empire Strikes Back was far, far denser than any known asteroid field in real life. Asteroids move surprisingly fast, too, as anyone who's ever studied asteroids in real life can attest. Just because Star Wars shields can't block very large numbers of such massive objects moving at very high speed doesn't mean that they can't block any solid objects at all: that's like saying that a truck can't carry anything because it can't pick up the Eiffel Tower.
(b) Can Star Wars shields block Warp-based teleportation?
Void Shields can block Warp-based teleportation (and they definitely can; even the God-Emperor of Mankind himself was physically unable to teleport onto the Vengeful Spirit until she lowered her Void Shields). But that is only because Void Shields work by producing a disturbance in the Warp.
The people of the Star Wars galaxy don't even appear to know that the Warp exists. It is highly unlikely that any of their technology produces disturbances in the Warp.
So, in conclusion:
Definitely not.
5. Star Wars fuels:
(a) How much energy can 1m³ of Star Wars capital ship fuel generate?
Since I don't want to have to say "Star Wars capital ship fuel" every time, I'll call it Fuel X until I've given it a name.
Let's take a look at the destruction of Alderaan by the first Death Star, in A New Hope.
Having measured the speed of the explosion in A New Hope, and knowing the approximate mass of any human-habitable planet, Dr Curtis Saxton, the physicist who wrote the Star Wars Technical Commentaries website, comes to the conclusion that the destruction of Alderaan took 10^38 joules (or thereabouts). To find his articles on this subject, please see / swtc / ds / (remove spaces).
On the same page, Saxton also calculates, by a variety of means, that the first Death Star is about 160km in diameter, and that the second Death Star is about 900km in diameter.
Note: 10^38 joules is far, far greater than the energy necessary to destroy a planet, but that's perfectly explainable. In A New Hope, we saw that Alderaan had a planetary shield which actually blocked the Death Star's bolt for about a tenth of a second—and that was a supposedly defenceless planet. An incredibly heavily-defended planet, such as Coruscant, would probably be able to do much better—perhaps even to block the bolt completely.
Sheer logic dictates that the Death Star's reactor must be located within its massive bulk: its diameter is 160km, so its radius is 80km. The firing dish isn't that big: all that space must be used for something, or else what's the point of putting it there?
Note: An alternate hypothesis suggests that the Death Star was somehow teleporting energy from a black hole or a star, but there's absolutely no evidence that teleportation technology even exists in the Star Wars galaxy, so this hypothesis fails the test of Occam's Razor.
In order to make a conservative estimate of Fuel X's energy generation capacity, I'm assuming that the first Death Star's whole interior volume was made of Fuel X, and that Grand Moff Tarkin was reckless enough to spend literally all of the first Death Star's fuel on the destruction of Alderaan in order to test the power of the Death Star.
The volume of the first Death Star can be worked out with the equation for the volume of a sphere: V = 4pr³ ÷ 3. In case anybody is unaware, p is about 3.14.
Here, the radius (r) is 80,000 (measured in metres), so, to find the volume (measured in cubic metres), I calculate: V = 4 × p × 80,000³ ÷ 3 = 2.1 × 10^15 [calculated to two significant figures]
10^38 ÷ (2.1 × 10^15) = 4.8 × 10^22 [calculated to two significant figures].
Therefore, each cubic metre of Fuel X generates 4.8 × 10^22 joules.
Note: I've heard the objection that efficiency would make Fuel X less powerful than this, but it's incorrect. Whether Fuel X operates at 0.0001% efficiency or 99.9999% (100% efficiency is physically impossible), this is the amount of energy that Star Wars technology can actually get out of Fuel X. If anything, it's likely that the first Death Star—which was a new technology rather than a tried-and-tested one, and which we already know was badly designed—is less efficient than most ships, so most ships would generate more than 4.8 × 10^22 joules per cubic metre of Fuel X.
(b) How much energy does hyperdrive take up?
We know that Fuel X generates 4.8 × 10^22 joules per cubic metre.
Luke Skywalker's X-Wing has, at most, 5m × 5m × 5m for its reactors and fuel storage: 125m³. It's probably smaller: more like 2m × 2m × 2m: 8m³. Thus, it should be able to generate at least 1.92 × 10^23 joules of energy. Even if the X-Wing can fire a million shots before running out of fuel (highly unlikely), that would put its energy generation capacity at 1.92 × 10^17 joules.
In A New Hope, Luke's X-Wing fires its blaster-cannons at the surface of the first Death Star, vapourising at least 1m³ of material with a single shot: probably more than that. If this material was iron, that would take 6 × 10^10 joules. Even if the Death Star was made out of something 1,000 times as difficult to vapourise as iron, that would only take 6 × 10^13 joules.
So the X-Wing isn't even close to as powerful as a theoretical Fuel X-powered ship of the same size. This is unsurprising, since a Fuel X reactor is probably extremely complicated, and can't be duplicated on something as small as a fighter. It would be difficult to duplicate a nuclear reactor on a fighter, let alone something as complex and ultra-energetic as Fuel X.
Yet an X-Wing, which is thousands of times weaker than it would be if powered by Fuel X (instead of whatever it really uses), can power hyperdrive with no difficulties—see how easy it is for Luke to fly around the galaxy in his X-Wing in The Empire Strikes Back, never worrying that he needs to refuel.
Even more tellingly, X-Wings are fighters—every scrap of power is vital, and they're carried by capital ships, so there's no real need for them to use hyperdrive. Yet they do anyway. This shows that hyperdrive's energy requirements aren't just tiny for a Fuel X-powered capital ship, they're tiny for a fighter.
Therefore, on a warship captain's list of things that could go wrong, "What if hyperdrive takes up too much of our fuel?" would be somewhere next to "What if fairies come in and steal all the chocolate?"
Perhaps hyperdrive takes up enormous quantities of some kind of special technobabble device, but it doesn't take up much actual energy.
(c) What is the name of Fuel X?
The X-Wing does, however, have some weapons on the same scale as Fuel X: proton torpedoes. If they're similar in energy to Jango Fett's seismic charges from Attack of the Clones (since they're from several decades later, they're likely to be at least as powerful) they're in the range of gigatons—4.2 × 10^18 to 4.2 × 10^21 joules.
That's approximately the energy generation capacity that an X-Wing would have if it was powered by Fuel X (considering that a fighter only has single-digit numbers of proton torpedoes available, probably because of their size).
Proton torpedoes must have some sort of super-high-tech energy source to generate that kind of amount of energy. They're called 'proton torpedoes', so I suggest that they contain 'proton fuel'.
So Death Stars and Star Wars capital ships run on proton fuel. I don't know how it works, of course, but for the purposes of this calculation I don't need to.
6. Star Wars spaceship strengths:
(a) How much energy can the fuel of a Command-class battleship generate?
Emperor Palpatine's enormous flagship from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi doesn't have a canonical name, but I'm keeping the SWEU's name for that ship, Executor, for two reasons: first, that the word Executor does sound like something that the Empire would call a ship, and secondly, I just like the word.
For the reason why I think that Executor is called a Command-class battleship, please see Calculation 9(b).
For proof that the total volume of a Command-class battleship is 54,000,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(a).
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of a Command-class ship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, fighters and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of a Command-class ship's fuel capacity.
The presence of General Veers indicates that there were troops aboard Executor, even though she is a battleship rather than a troopship. Though odd, this can be explained by the idea that Executor is so much larger than any other battleship that she can actually afford to use some of her internal volume for secondary functions, serving as a troopship too.
Since I'm going for a conservative estimate of a Command-class battleship's fuel capacity, I should go for a generous estimate of the amount of volume that she dedicates to troops. Therefore, I'll assume that 25% of her volume goes for troops.
That leaves 50% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
Note: Of course, it goes without saying that there wouldn't just be one massive reactor supplying the whole ship—if the designers had a grain of sense, there'd be lots of different reactors. But the total volume of all those reactors and their fuel storage, I estimate, is 50% of the ship's volume.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 40% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that fighters would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Even if we made the ridiculously over-generous assumptions that TIE fighters are 15m×15m×15m in dimension and that 10,000 TIEs came from Executor, then, if we make the reasonable assumption that a TIE takes up ten times its volume in order to be accessed by its pilot and to comfortably get out of its mother-ship without bumping into other TIEs, TIEs would take up a total of 340,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]: less than 1% of Executor's volume, and therefore a proportion that can be ignored.
Therefore, the volume of the proton fuel in a Command-class ship is 54,000,000,000m³ × 40% = 22,000,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
So she can generate 4.8 × 10^22 × 22,000,000,000 = 1.1 × 10^33 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
An exaton of energy is equivalent to 4.2 × 10^27 joules of energy.
Therefore, a Command-class battleship, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 260,000 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
(b) How much energy can the fuel of a Magnificence-class battleship generate?
For the reason why I think that this ship is called a Magnificence-class battleship, please see Calculation 7(d).
For proof that the total volume of a Magnificence-class battleship is 3,100,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(b).
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of a Magnificence-class ship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, fighters and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of a Magnificence-class ship's fuel capacity.
There is no reason to believe that there are any troops aboard a Magnificence-class ship, and active reason to believe that there aren't, since she's a warship and she should be trying to conserve space for firepower.
That leaves 75% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 60% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that fighters would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the proton fuel in a Magnificence-class ship is 3,100,000,000m³ × 60% = 1,900,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
So she can generate 4.8 × 10^22 × 1,900,000,000 = 9.1 × 10^31 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
An exaton of energy is equivalent to 4.2 × 10^27 joules of energy.
Therefore, a Magnificence-class battleship, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 22,000 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
(c) How much energy can the fuel of a Trade Federation battleship generate?
For proof that the total volume of a Trade Federation battleship is 2,500,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(c).
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of a Trade Federation battleship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, fighters and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of a Trade Federation battleship's fuel capacity.
There is no reason to believe that there are any troops aboard a Trade Federation battleship, and active reason to believe that there aren't, since she's a warship and she should be trying to conserve space for firepower.
That leaves 75% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 60% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that fighters would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the proton fuel in a Trade Federation battleship is 2,500,000,000m³ × 60% = 1,500,000,000m³.
So she can generate 4.8 × 10^22 × 1,500,000,000 = 7.2 × 10^31 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
An exaton of energy is equivalent to 4.2 × 10^27 joules of energy.
Therefore, a Trade Federation battleship, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 17,000 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
(d) How much energy can the fuel of a Glory-class star destroyer generate?
To make it clear, I'm referring to the star destroyer that we saw the Galactic Republic using in Revenge of the Sith. This ship class has no canonical name, so I've made up the name 'Glory-class star destroyer' for it. (The SWEU calls it a Venator-class star destroyer, but the Star Wars galaxy doesn't speak Latin or anything analogous to it like High Gothic, so that's stupid.)
I'm not referring to the 750m-long ship class from Attack of the Clones, which is clearly a completely different class.
For proof that the total volume of a Glory-class star destroyer is 33,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(d).
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of a Glory-class ship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, fighters and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of a Glory-class ship's fuel capacity.
We know that there are troops aboard Glory-class ships, since we see them several times in Revenge of the Sith. This tells us that star destroyers are actually destroyers cum troopships—which isn't surprising, since a star destroyer under the personal command of Lord Darth Vader dispatched Imperial stormtroopers to the surface of Tatooine in A New Hope.
Since I'm going for a conservative estimate of a Glory-class star destroyer's fuel capacity, I should go for a generous estimate of the amount of volume that she dedicates to troops. Therefore, I'll assume that 25% of her volume goes for troops.
That leaves 50% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 40% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that fighters would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the proton fuel in a Glory-class ship is 33,000,000m³ × 40% = 13,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
So she can generate 4.8 × 10^22 × 13,000,000 = 6.2 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
An exaton of energy is equivalent to 4.2 × 10^27 joules of energy.
Therefore, a Glory-class star destroyer, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 150 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
(e) How much energy can the fuel of an Enforcer-class or Avenger-class star destroyer generate?
There are two different classes of ordinary Imperial star destroyer—the one we saw throughout the whole Star Wars original trilogy, and the one we saw in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi but not in A New Hope. Neither of them are given names in Star Wars canon, so I'll make up my own names for them.
The former, purely arbitrarily, I shall call the Enforcer-class star destroyer, since we don't know the name of any individual star destroyer of that class.
The latter, I shall call an Avenger-class star destroyer, after Avenger, a star destroyer of that class. Incidentally, the star destroyer Avenger is the only Imperial ship that was ever named in canon.
Fortunately, Enforcer-class ships and Avenger-class ships are the same size, have the same role and are from the same civilisation, so they're probably roughly equivalent in energy generation capacity.
For proof that the total volume of an Enforcer-class or Avenger-class star destroyer is 100,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(e).
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of an Enforcer-class or Avenger-class ship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, fighters and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of a Glory-class ship's fuel capacity.
We know that there are troops aboard Enforcer-class or Avenger-class ships, since star destroyers are both destroyers and troopships—please see Calculation 6(d).
Since I'm going for a conservative estimate of an Enforcer-class or Avenger-class star destroyer's fuel capacity, I should go for a generous estimate of the amount of volume that she dedicates to troops. Therefore, I'll assume that 25% of her volume goes for troops.
That leaves 50% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 40% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that fighters would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the proton fuel in an Enforcer-class or Avenger-class ship is 100,000,000m³ × 40% = 40,000,000m³.
So she can generate 4.8 × 10^22 × 40,000,000 = 1.9 × 10^30 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
An exaton of energy is equivalent to 4.2 × 10^27 joules of energy.
Therefore, an Enforcer-class or Avenger-class star destroyer, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 450 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
(f) How much energy can the fuel of a Unifier-class star destroyer generate?
To make it clear, I'm referring to the star destroyer that we saw the Galactic Republic using in Attack of the Clones. This ship class has no canonical name, so I've made up the name 'Unifier-class star destroyer' for it. (The SWEU calls it an Acclamator-class assault ship, but the Star Wars galaxy doesn't speak Latin or anything analogous to it like High Gothic, so that's stupid.)
I'm not referring to the 1,100m-long ship class from Revenge of the Sith, which is clearly a completely different class.
For proof that the total volume of a Unifier-class star destroyer is 11,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(f).
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of aUnifier-class ship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, fighters and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of a Unifier-class ship's fuel capacity.
We know that there are troops aboard Unifier-class ships, since star destroyers are both destroyers and troopships—please see Calculation 6(d).
Since I'm going for a conservative estimate of a Unifier-class star destroyer's fuel capacity, I should go for a generous estimate of the amount of volume that she dedicates to troops. Therefore, I'll assume that 25% of her volume goes for troops.
That leaves 50% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 40% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that fighters would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the proton fuel in a Unifier-class ship is 11,000,000m³ × 40% = 4,400,000m³.
So she can generate 4.8 × 10^22 × 4,400,000 = 2.1 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
An exaton of energy is equivalent to 4.2 × 10^27 joules of energy.
Therefore, a Unifier-class star destroyer, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 50 exatons of energy.
7. Numbers of Star Wars Republican forces:
(a) How many clone troopers are there in a Glory-class star destroyer?
For proof that the total volume of a Glory-class star destroyer is 33,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(d).
I've already estimated in Calculation 6(d) that 25% of her volume goes to troops. This leaves the volume to troops at 8,300,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
Now, let's look at a real, oceanic warship: HMS Dreadnought (yes, I'm British, sue me). I'll work out Dreadnought's volume in cubic metres, and then divide it by her complement to find the amount of space which one person needs (in cubic metres). Then I'll divide 8,300,000m³ by that number, to find the number of people who can fit in the troops areas of a Glory-class star destroyer.
I'm making a conservative assumption of the number of people aboard a Glory-class ship. Therefore, I want to make a generous estimate of the size of HMS Dreadnought. I already know Dreadnought's complement (700 to 810: I'll assume 700 people, since I'm being conservative here). The larger Dreadnought was, the larger the amount of space it takes to hold 700 people, the larger the amount of space it takes to hold one person, the fewer clone troopers a Glory-class ship's troops areas can hold.
HMS Dreadnought was 160.6m long. She was 25m wide at her widest point, and equally wide for most of her length: not all of it, but then again, I am making a conservative assumption. Her hull extended 9m below sea level, and about the same distance above sea level: 18m in all. Therefore, her total volume was 160.6m × 25m × 9m = 36,135m³.
36,135m³ ÷ 700 = 52m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
8,300,000m³ ÷ 52m³ = 160,000 clone troopers [calculated to two significant figures].
Now let's look at the Star Wars Expanded Universe's suggestion for the number of men in a Glory-class star destroyer.
According to the SWEU, there are 9,400 people (2,000 troops and 7,400 crewmen) in a Glory-class ship. If so, in order to see how much volume there is per person, we divide 8,300,000 by 9,400. Our result is 880m³ per person [calculated to two significant figures].
If the SWEU's figure is right, Palpatine is an incredibly generous man, since he gives each of his minions—every single one—an on-board living space as big as a respectable two-storey house. Looking at the Star Wars films, tell me honestly: does Darth Sidious, Dark Lord of the Sith, strike you as that type of guy?
(b) What is the total energy generation capacity of the Imperial Starfleet at the time of A New Hope?
In A New Hope, General Dodonna of the Rebel Alliance—who, given his position, should certainly know—said of the first Death Star that "that thing" had more firepower than half the Imperial Starfleet. In order to make a conservative estimate of the energy generation capacity of the Imperial Starfleet, I'll assume that he meant only one Death Star bolt, not the entire fuel stores of the first Death Star.
Note: Given the context, I'm taking the word 'firepower' to mean energy generation capacity, not power (the rate of energy output), because it is Dodonna who is speaking, on Yavin. To Dodonna, it doesn't matter whether the first Death Star can fire once per second or once per day: either way, it can still destroy both Yavin and the Rebel Alliance, and that is the crucial point to make.
Therefore, the Imperial Starfleet's total energy generation capacity is at least 10^38 joules, since it took that much energy to destroy Alderaan: probably greater, since Dodonna did say "more firepower than half the Imperial Starfleet" (italics are my own), not "as much firepower as the entire Imperial Starfleet".
Even if Dodonna was wrong, the first Death Star can't be much more powerful than the Imperial Starfleet. That would be blatantly unrealistic, since the second Death Star was over a hundred times the size of the first Death Star, so if it was true the Empire would have to maintain a ludicrously small military.
(c) Was the Grand Army of the Republic the entire Republican armed forces, or was there also a Republican Starfleet?
At the end of Revenge of the Sith, we saw officers of the newly formed Imperial Starfleet: non-clone, non-Jedi officers. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was made up completely out of clones and Jedi. This proves the existence of the Republican Starfleet as a separate unit from the GAR, unless one believes that the First Galactic Empire suddenly took in lots of new, untrained officers in the few hours/days between the foundation of the Empire and the scene with the Imperial Starfleet officers.
Also, Bail Organa served in the Republican armed forces (as we know from Princess Leia Organa in A New Hope), but he is neither a Jedi nor a clone, so he can't have served in the GAR.
This means that the Galactic Republic did have a starfleet before the Clone Wars; it was an army that it lacked.
This makes sense, since, while it is one thing to hide the mass cloning of trillions of soldiers (as we already know that the Kaminoans did successfully), it's quite another to hide the massive resources that would be going into constructing a large starfleet, especially when the powers that would later form the Confederacy of Independent Systems would be watching carefully for such a thing. Therefore the Republican Starfleet probably existed before the existence of the GAR was revealed to the Star Wars galaxy.
Note: I call it the Republican Starfleet because its successor was known as the Imperial Starfleet (not the Imperial Navy, despite what lots of SWEU-loving morons would claim), so it's likely that it's called something very similar.
(d) How many warships does the Republican Starfleet have at the end of the Clone Wars?
In Attack of the Clones, the Republican Starfleet's best ships—the ones it sent into an active warzone to retrieve 200 of the galaxy's thousands of Jedi and to capture the Separatist leadership, ending the Clone Wars before they began—were 750m-long star destroyers, which I'll arbitrarily call Unifier-class star destroyers. (The SWEU calls them Acclamator-class assault ships, but the Star Wars galaxy doesn't speak Latin or anything analogous to it like High Gothic, so that's stupid.)
Yet, during the Battle of Coruscant in Revenge of the Sith four years later, there wasn't a single Unifier-class star destroyers in sight. Every Republican star destroyer—every single one—was a Glory-class ship. We saw hundreds of Glory-class star destroyers, and not a single other star destroyer.
Thus we know that almost all, and maybe all, of the Republican Starfleet's star destroyers were of the Glory class rather than the Unifier class during the last year of the Clone Wars.
The Republican Starfleet must have had some battleships, and they would have wanted their battleships to be slightly more powerful than Trade Federation battleships. The mysterious 5,900m-long ship class fits this description to a T, so I think that it might have been made by the Republic, in which case the class would have a Republican-style name such as 'Magnificence-class battleship', rather than an Imperial-style name such as 'Annihilator-class battleship'.
Note: For why I think that the mysterious 5,900m-long ship is a battleship, please see Calculation 9(b).
Judging by the construction rate of the second Death Star, we can figure out the size of the Republican Starfleet.
The second Death Star was at least 20% constructed (I'll assume 20%, in order to be conservative—it could be as much as 80%) between the end of A New Hope and the events of Return of the Jedi. 20% of it would be able to generate 3.6 × 10^39 joules: in other words, 860,000,000,000 exatons [calculated to two significant figures].
A group of (star) destroyers alone is called a flotilla. A group containing one battleship and several (star) destroyers escorting her is called a battlegroup.
At the Battle of Endor, Executor was escorted by five star destroyers, and, later, a Magnificence-class battleship turned up with twenty-seven other star destroyers. If the Magnificence-class ship, like Executor, was escorted by five star destroyers, then there were 22 star destroyers in a flotilla, and two battlegroups, each containing a battleship and five star destroyers escorting her.
Occam's Razor says that, lacking any evidence to the contrary, we should assume that the make-up of the fleet at Endor—a battlegroup of five star destroyers and one battleship, another such battlegroup, and a flotilla of 22 star destroyers—is fairly typical.
So the Republican Starfleet is split into units of unknown name—henceforth titled Unit Xs—, each containing two battlegroups and a flotilla.
Each Unit X contained 48,800 exatons of energy generation capacity: two Magnificence-class battleships, representing 44,000 exatons between them both, and 32 Glory-class star destroyers, representing 4,800 exatons between them all.
860,000,000,000 ÷ 48,800 = 18,000,000 [calculated to two significant figures]. So, instead of 20% of the second Death Star, the Empire could have built 18 million Unit Xs (albeit with perhaps old-fashioned Republican ships): in other words, 36 million Magnificence-class battleships and 576 million Glory-class star destroyers—though it might not have been able to provide crews for them.
But the Clone Wars lasted four years. How long did it take to build 20% of the second Death Star?
Between the end of A New Hope and the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, anything between one year and five years might have taken place, judging by Luke having risen to the rank of wing commander (he is in the Rebel fighter force, and he is addressed as "Commander Skywalker"; what other conclusion can there be?) and none of the main characters appearing much older. As a middling estimate, I'll assume three years.
Luke must have spent at least three years on Dagobah, since the Millennium Falcon travelled slower-than-light from the Anoat system to the Bespin system, which are at least three systems—and thus at least three light-years, if those systems were ridiculously close together—away. More likely, since it takes time to accelerate to nearly the speed of light and then to decelerate from there, he spent at least four years there. (Of course, Han, Chewbacca and Leia would experience much less time, due to the effects of travelling at relativistic speeds, but at least four years would pass in the outside galaxy.)
If Anoat and Bespin were further apart, they might have been as much as twelve light-years away, turning the Millennium Falcon's travel time to thirteen years.
However, judging by how little Luke and Lando have aged by the latter stage of The Empire Strikes Back, then, unless Lando was swindled by and knew Han when he was a teenager, they can't have spent more than eight years. In fact, Luke appears to have aged so little that I think that it would take as short a time as I can conceivably imagine it taking: that is to say, four years.
Then, at least a year, during which Luke must have trained himself (probably with the help of Obi-Wan's ghost), must have taken place, in order to account for Luke's otherwise inexplicable increase in skill—he can't have got that much better without any tuition. More likely, he spent two or three years doing this: let's say, two.
So six years took place between the end of A New Hope and the events of Return of the Jedi.
So the galaxy could build 12 million Unit Xs—24 million battleships, and 384 million star destroyers—in four years.
But the Republic only held about half of the Star Wars galaxy's industrial capacity (albeit probably more than half the galaxy, since the Separatists had disproportionately large industrial capacity, due to being centres of business) during the Clone Wars, and the Republican Starfleet would suffer casualties during the wars. We must also remember that it would take time to mobilise the Star Wars galaxy's industries, which would not be mobilised at the beginning of the war. Each of those three factors is probably responsible for downgrading that figure by a factor of two.
So the Republic had 3 million Magnificence-class battleships and 48 million Glory-class star destroyers at the end of the Clone Wars.
This is consistent with The Phantom Menace, where the density of spaceships in the sky indicates that there are literally millions of spaceships above Coruscant alone. This isn't a galactic fleet, this is just ordinary civilian activity on one planet! Clearly, people who, like the SWEU, say that the Republic/Empire only has a few thousand ships are wrong: one planet, albeit a very important one, has millions of spaceships, and there are nearly a million planets in the Star Wars galaxy.
Also in The Phantom Menace, the Trade Federation—a private shipping company—deploys the equivalent of over 1.1 million Glory-class star destroyers in the blockade of Naboo (a helpless target), just to prove a political point. If that's what a private shipping company can do in peacetime as a political gesture, what can a galactic government do in wartime as a serious effort?
8. Size of warships:
(a) Emperor Palpatine's enormous flagship from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi
Emperor Palpatine's enormous flagship from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi doesn't have a canonical name, but I'm keeping the SWEU's name for that ship, Executor, for two reasons: first, that the word Executor does sound like something that the Empire would call a ship, and secondly, I just like the word.
According to Dr Curtis Saxton's detailed scaling from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi on his Star Wars Technical Commentaries website, Executor is eleven times the length of an Imperial star destroyer, and, thus, is 17,600m long. Unfortunately, he didn't choose to scale her width or height (if he, or someone else reliable, did, then please tell me).
As such, I had to judge by screenshot + ruler. Her height is roughly equal to the length of an Imperial star destroyer (which is 1,600m), at her highest point: the back of her. And her width is roughly five times the length of an Imperial star destroyer, at her widest point.
Unfortunately, Executor doesn't have as simple a shape as an Imperial star destroyer. The front part of her declines fairly evenly to one point at the end, just like an Imperial star destroyer, but about 2/13 of her length—approximately the back 2,700m—is of a width which declines in the opposite direction, and which averages 1/3 of her width at her widest point: in other words, it's 2,700m wide.
Fortunately, the height of that section roughly follows the same pattern as the rest of Executor.
Therefore the average height of Executor is about 800m, and her area is:
(14,900m × 4,000m) + (2,700m × 2,700m)
= 59,600,000m² + 7,290,000m²
= 66,890,000m²
So the volume of Executor is
V = 800m × 66,890,000m² = 53,512,000,000m³ = 54,000,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
(b) The mysterious ship seen at the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi
When Luke Skywalker looks out from the window of Emperor Palpatine's throne room on the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, he sees a very large vessel that is obviously Executor, many smaller vessels that are obviously Imperial star destroyers, and a mid-sized vessel, a third of the length of Executor but half Executor's height. As such, this ship must be 5,900m long and an average of 400m high.
To confirm the existence of a warship class at Endor which is neither the Majestifc nor a known class of star destroyer, we see a damaged bridge tower which is different to any other bridge tower ever seen in Star Wars, as is described on Dr Curtis Saxton's Star Wars Technical Commentaries website.
Note: Of course, it's always possible that this bridge tower belongs to another new class of Imperial warship, but Occam's Razor says that, lacking any evidence to the contrary, we should assume that there's only one new class of Imperial warship.
If this ship's average width is 5/22 of her length, like Executor's width, then her average width is 1,300m [calculated to two significant figures].
If this ship's average width is 1/4 of her length, like the width of every star destroyer ever seen in Star Wars, then her average width is 1,500m [calculated to two significant figures].
Since this ship, like Executor, is a battleship (for why I think this, please see Calculation 9(b)), it's likelier to be similar to Executor than to a star destroyer. Therefore, I assume that this ship's average width is 1,300m.
V = 400m × 5,900m × 1,300m = 3,100,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
(c) Trade Federation battleship from the Star Wars prequel trilogy
Scaling from the Star Wars prequel trilogy reveals the Trade Federation battleship to be 3,200m in length. Simple eyesight reveals the Trade Federation battleship to be a torus, with a sphere in the middle.
The sphere's diameter is about the same as the diameter of the torus, which, in turn, is about the same as the gap between the edge of the torus and the corresponding point on the equator of the sphere.
Therefore, the sphere's diameter is a fifth of 3,200m: 640m. Therefore the radius of either the sphere or the torus is 320m, and, if a straight line was drawn right through the middle of the torus, it would be 1,600m – 320m = 1,280m away from the centre of the battleship at any point.
Let are be the radius of the torus's ring or the sphere, and let R be the radius between the centre of the torus's ring and the centre of the battleship.
Volume of sphere: V = 4pr³ ÷ 3 = 4p × 320³ ÷ 3 = 137,258,277.4m³.
Volume of a torus: V = pr² × 2pR = 2p²r²R = 2p² × 320² × 1,280 = 2,587,257,576m³.
But the ring is actually only 330 degrees of a ring, not a full 360 degrees, since it has a hole at one point of about 30 degrees. Therefore:
2,587,257,576 × 330 ÷ 360 = 2,371,652,778m³.
V = 137,258,277.4m³ + 2,371,652,778m³ = 2,508,911,055.4m³ = 2,500,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
(d) The Galactic Republic's star destroyers from Attack of the Clones
Judging by scaling from when Chancellor Palpatine watches some clone troopers boarding these star destroyers at the end of Attack of the Clones, these star destroyers are 750m long.
Judging by eye (which is all that I can do), their width is about a quarter of their length (on average, that is: they're narrower at the front and wider at the back), so they're 187.5m wide, and their height is about a tenth of their length (on average, since they're shorter at the front and taller at the back), so they're about 75m tall.
V = 750m × 187.5m × 75m = 11,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
(e) The Galactic Empire's star destroyers from the Star Wars original trilogy
Judging by scaling from the Star Wars original trilogy, these star destroyers are 1,600m long. The scaling has been performed with a star destroyer next to an Imperial shuttle in Return of the Jedi, with the star destroyer Avenger (on whose bridge tower the Millennium Falcon was perched) in The Empire Strikes Back, and with the Organas' "consular ship" (as it was described by a Rebel in A New Hope) next to the star destroyer which captured Princess Leia in A New Hope. All of them produce consistent results indicating a length of 1,600m.
Judging by eye, their width is about a quarter of their length (on average, that is: they're narrower at the front and wider at the back), so they're 400m wide, and their height is about a tenth of their length (on average, since they're shorter at the front and taller at the back), so they're about 160m tall.
V = 1,600m × 400m × 160m = 100,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
(f) The Galactic Republic's star destroyers from Revenge of the Sith
Judging by scaling from when Anakin and Obi-Wan's fighters fly over one of these star destroyers in the Battle of Coruscant in Revenge of the Sith, these star destroyers are 1,100m long.
Judging by eye (which is all that I can do), their width is about a quarter of their length (on average, that is: they're narrower at the front and wider at the back), so they're 275m wide, and their height is about a tenth of their length (on average, since they're shorter at the front and taller at the back), so they're about 110m tall.
V = 1,100m × 275m × 110m = 33,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
(g) Imperial Navy battleships
All four classes of Imperial Navy battleships—the Apocalypse, Emperor, Oberon and Retribution classes—are 8,000m long, and roughly the same as each other in all height and with.
Judging simply by appearance, the width of all Imperial Navy battleships is very similar to their height.
Unfortunately, Rogue Trader does not give the width of any battleship, as it does for the other warships.
However, one should presume that an Imperial Navy battleship is at least as big as even the largest grand cruiser in all dimensions, and Rogue Trader says that an Avenger-class grand cruiser is 1,800m wide, so an Imperial Navy battleship's volume is:
V = 8,000 × 1,800 × 1,800 = 26,000,000,000m³
Fortunately, every other Imperial Navy warship is either given exact measurements by Rogue Trader, or is given no data at all and is therefore unable to be calculated.
(h) All the various classes of Imperial Navy escorts
This calculation will compare the volume of seven of the eight known classes of escort warships in the Imperial Navy. It won't cover troopships or logistics ships.
The only class of escort warship that I've left out is the Defence Monitor. I would have liked to cover her, but I can't, because I know absolutely nothing about her size. She might be anything from 1,000m long to 3,000m long; I simply don't know.
First, we must calculate their volume. Judging simply by appearance, the width of all Imperial Navy battleships is very similar to their height.
Claymore-class corvette: 1,400m × 300m × 300m = 130,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Cobra-class destroyer: 1,500m × 300m × 300m = 140,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Sword-class frigate: 1,600m × 300m × 300m = 140,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Firestorm-class frigate: 1,800m × 300m × 300m = 160,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Turbulent-class heavy frigate: 1,950m × 300m × 300m = 180,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Falchion-class escort: 2,200m × 300m × 300m = 200,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Tempest-class frigate: 1,500m × 400m × 400m = 240,000,000m³.
(i) All the various classes of Imperial Navy cruisers
This calculation will compare the volume of twelve of the sixteen known classes of cruisers in the Imperial Navy.
The four classes of cruiser that I've left out are the Endurance-class light cruiser, the Dominator-class cruiser, the Gothic-class cruiser and the Vengeance-class grand cruiser. I would have liked to cover them, but I can't, because I know absolutely nothing about their size.
First, we must calculate their volume. Judging simply by appearance, the width of all Imperial Navy battleships is very similar to their height.
Defiant-class light cruiser: 3,800m × 500m × 500m = 950,000,000m³
Endeavour-class light cruiser: 3,800m × 500m × 500m = 950,000,000m³
Dauntless-class light cruiser: 4,500m × 500m × 500m = 1,100,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Armageddon-class battlecruiser: 5,000m × 800m × 800m = 3,200,000,000m³
Lunar-class cruiser: 5,000m × 800m × 800m = 3,200,000,000m³
Tyrant-class cruiser: 5,000m × 800m × 800m = 3,200,000,000m³
Chalice-class battlecruiser: 5,100m × 800m × 800m = 3,300,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Dictator-class cruiser: 5,100m × 800m × 800m = 3,300,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Overlord-class battlecruiser: 5,300m × 850m × 850m = 3,800,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Mars-class battlecruiser: 5,400m × 850m × 850m = 3,900,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Exorcist-class grand cruiser: 7,300m × 1,100m × 1,100m = 8,800,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Avenger-class grand cruiser: 7,500m × 1,800m × 1,800m = 24,000,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
9. Warship types:
(a) What types of warships are there in Warhammer 40,000?
Escorts—frigates and destroyers—exist, and do similar things to what they do in real life: frigates protect convoys from pirates and enemy raiders, and destroyers protect bigger ships from aircraft—or rather, their Warhammer 40,000 equivalent, namely attack craft. (In real life, destroyers are also supposed to protect bigger ships from torpedo boats and submarines, but there are no analogies for torpedo boats or submarines in Warhammer 40,000 warfare.)
However, unlike in real life, all Warhammer 40,000 escorts act like real-life destroyers, including Warhammer 40,000 frigates. For instance, Sword-class frigates are ubiquitous at the side of Imperial Navy battleships, whereas in real life frigates are just there to protect convoys, and the protection of battleships has always been a role for destroyers.
This tells us that, in Warhammer 40,000, all escorts are effectively destroyers, and the different names for each—for instance, Cobra-class ships being called destroyers, and Tempest-class ships being called frigates—are just names, not indicative of any true difference in role.
The majority of warships in most fleets are light cruisers (such as the Endurance-class and Defiant-class light cruisers), second-line cruisers (such as the Gothic-class and Dominator-class cruisers) and first-line cruisers (such as the Overlord-class and Armageddon-class battlecruisers).
Note: The phrases "second-line cruiser" and "first-line cruiser" come from warship counts for the Imperial fleet at Armageddon, from the 3rd Edition of Codex: Armageddon. Their meanings (conventional cruiser and battlecruiser, respectively) are my own assumptions, based on the fact that there are 63 first-line cruisers and 90 second-line cruisers, which would fit with the idea of first-line cruisers being more powerful (a bit like the rating system often employed in the Napoleonic Wars, where the most powerful type of ship was a 'first-rate', followed by a 'second-rate' and so on).
Battlecruisers play an interesting role in Warhammer 40,000. In real life, the Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition, Revised) defines a battlecruiser thus: "A large warship of a type built in the early 20th century, carrying similar armament to a battleship but faster and more lightly armoured." However, in Warhammer 40,000, battlecruisers do not perform this role: they are basically heavy cruisers, nothing more. They certainly don't have the same firepower as battleships.
There is another type of warship in Warhammer 40,000, however, which does not exist in real life: the grand cruiser. Grand cruisers are very rare in the 41st millennium, though they used to be popular in the Imperial Navy because they actually did have the same firepower as battleships, and many Imperial Navy officers began to treat them as battleships. However, it was soon discovered that they could not take as much damage as they could dish out, so grand cruisers became distrusted. This role (though it appears unpopular) is precisely analogous to a real battlecruiser: a warship with similar armament (offensive firepower) as a battleship, but with much less weaker defences, intended to beat anything less than a true battleship and run away if she does encounter a true battleship.
On the surface, it seems that battleships play the same role in Warhammer 40,000 as in real life: "A heavy warship of a type built chiefly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with extensive armour protection and large-calibre guns", as the Oxford Dictionary of English describes it. But if you look more closely, they don't. Battleships come in such small numbers—there are four battleships in an Imperial Navy battlefleet of 642 ships (360 escorts and 278 cruisers of various kinds)—that, in spite of battleships' great firepower, it's the cruisers that form the real heart of an Imperial Navy battlefleet.
So what's our conclusion? The Imperial Navy is centred around its cruisers, which are guarded by destroyers just as the battleships are. Battleships exist, but only really as a way for admirals to show off how powerful they are; they don't really fulfil the real-life role: that is to say, a line-of-battle ship, which exists for its firepower.
Essentially, an Imperial 'battleship' is more like a real-life super battleship, and an Imperial 'cruiser' is a sort of multi-role cruiser/battleship.
(b) What types of warships are there in Star Wars?
Sadly, the Star Wars films are much less consistent on warship types than Warhammer 40,000 sources.
The first thing to take note of is Emperor Palpatine's enormous flagship from The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi (she is Lord Darth Vader's flagship, too). This ship doesn't have a canonical name, but I'm keeping the SWEU's name for that ship, Executor, for two reasons: first, that the word Executor does sound like something that the Empire would call a ship, and secondly, I just like the word.
For proof that the volume of Executor is 540 times the volume of an Imperial star destroyer, please see Calculation 8(a) and (e).
When Luke Skywalker looks out from the window of Emperor Palpatine's throne room on the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi, he sees a very large vessel that is obviously Executor, many smaller vessels that are obviously Imperial star destroyers, and a mid-sized, 5,900m-long vessel.
This mysterious ship is 150 [calculated to two significant figures] times as powerful as an Imperial star destroyer, and 1.3 [calculated to two significant figures] times the volume of a Trade Federation battleship, though only 1/17 of the volume of Executor herself. Please see Calculations 6(a), (b), (c) and (e) for the energy generation capacity of Executor, the mysterious 5,900m-long ship, Trade Federation battleships, and Imperial star destroyers, respectively.
At Endor, Emperor Palpatine calls Executor "the command ship" more than once in Return of the Jedi. Obviously, this means that the other large vessel in the Imperial fleet at Endor—the mysterious 5,900m-long vessel—is not a command ship. In real life, the term 'command ship' is just another way of saying 'flagship': the vessel in a fleet where the commanding officer of that fleet resides.
However, it is possible that, in Star Wars, the term 'command ship' can have another meaning. This is not unreasonable; a very famous example of a term having additional meanings in Star Wars would be the word 'force'.
There are three ways to interpret this:
1. 'Command ship' is the same thing as the real-life term 'command ship'.
2. 'Command ship' is a specific type of ship, like 'light cruiser' or 'battleship'.
3. Executor is a Command-class ship.
But only one of these makes sense when we take into account another piece of evidence. When Han and Luke can clearly see Executor at Endor in Return of the Jedi, Luke claims that Lord Darth Vader is on that ship (later in the film, Luke reveals that he and Vader can sense when each other is near, via the Force), and Han says, "Now don't get jittery, Luke. There are a lot of command ships," implying that the one in front of them might not be Executor (which would have Vader on it).
This statement would be meaningless if he meant Option 1. Any ship can be the flagship of the commanding officer of a fleet. Lord Vader himself travelled to Endor aboard a star destroyer, not Executor, which was reserved for Emperor Palpatine on that occasion; thus, that star destroyer was, at that point, the flagship of the Empire's second-in-command.
The statement would also be meaningless if he meant Option 2. There might be lots of ship classes of around that size, but only one class—the class of which Executor is a member—would look identical to Executor, and Han's comment only makes sense if he means, specifically, that there are a lot of ships which look identical to Executor.
Thus, we know that 'command ship' is indeed a specific class of ship, so Executor is a Command-class ship.
To back this up, in The Empire Strikes Back, an Imperial soldier says, "Lord Vader, ship approaching. X-Wing-class." Thus we know that Star Wars people do have a habit of missing out the suffix '-class' in such situations.
Some people argue that Executor is a star destroyer, but that's just wrong. A statement commonly used to argue for this is Darth Vader's line: "Alert my star destroyer to prepare for my arrival." But we have no evidence that he was actually calling for Executor; he might have been calling for a star destroyer. Another such statement is Leia saying "star destroyer" as she spots Executor pursuing the Millennium Falcon from Bespin. But she's very tired at the time, and if you can't tell the size difference, Executor does look fairly like a star destroyer: they're both greyish, wedge-shaped warships, it's just that one of them is much, much bigger.
That's the most important reason why we know that Executor isn't a star destroyer. In real life, even the biggest ships ever built aren't 540 times the size of a destroyer. The idea that two ships whose size are separated by a factor of over 500 could be the same type of ship is just ridiculous.
There's only one type of ship into which Executor fits: a battleship, "A heavy warship of a type built chiefly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with extensive armour protection and large-calibre guns", as the Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition, Revised) defines it. Certainly Executor is a heavy warship; certainly, due to its sheer size, it must have lots of armour, and we've seen in Return of the Jedi that it definitely has lots and lots of big guns.
The mysterious 5,900m-long ship, we now know, is bigger than one class of battleship (a Trade Federation battleship), so it's too big to be anything other than a battleship; but it's about 1/17th the size of Executor, so it obviously can't be called a battleship of the same calibre as Executor. However, real life does possess an analogy to this situation: dreadnoughts.
When HMS Dreadnought was launched, it was a battleship so powerful that every other battleship was almost instantly made obsolete. As such, battleships built after Dreadnought's launch became known as 'dreadnoughts', and other battleships became known as 'pre-dreadnought battleships'. Pre-dreadnought battleships were practically useless in comparison to dreadnoughts.
Command-class battleships might be similar to dreadnoughts: new battleships, so much more powerful than previous battleships that they make previous battleships seem useless. This is backed up by the fact that the Command class must have been fairly new, or else it wouldn't have such an enormous design flaw as it does: namely, the fact that it has lots of shields instead of a single large shield covering the whole ship, so a much smaller ship might disable a Command-class battleship by breaking through her bridge shields and then firing at her bridge.
There is a common disagreement on whether the term 'star destroyer' is
1. A class of warship (like a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier)
2. A name for any warship of the Empire
3. A type of warship (like a light cruiser)
4. A name for dagger-shaped warships
My own opinion has switched many times, but we can disqualify Options 1 and 2:
The term 'star destroyer' is used for three classes of 1,600m-long Imperial spaceships. We see the first class throughout the entire original trilogy, the second class in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and the third class briefly in the Battle of Endor in Return of the Jedi. This disproves Option 1.
The phrase "Imperial star destroyer" is often used. This would be pointless if every star destroyer was, by definition, Imperial. Therefore, it must be theoretically possible for a star destroyer to be non-Imperial: the star destroyers of the Republic, for example. This disproves Option 2.
This leaves two ideas: Options 3 and 4. Option 3 is largely based on the term 'star destroyer' being roughly equivalent to 'destroyer' IN SPACE: the same idea as 'starships' or 'star wars' meaning ships or wars IN SPACE. Option 4 is largely based on Han's reference to star destroyers as "cruisers" in A New Hope.
So we should look at what a destroyer actually is, and what a cruiser actually is. Let's go to the Oxford Dictionary of English (Second Edition, Revised) and find the relevant definitions:
Destroyer: "A small, fast warship, especially one equipped for a defensive role against submarines and aircraft."
Cruiser: "A relatively fast warship larger than a destroyer and less heavily armed than a battleship."
The problem with the idea that star destroyers are cruisers is that they're so small. No real-life cruiser is 32 times smaller than a battleship; it just doesn't happen. The entire Imperial fleet at Endor (except for Executor, of course) of 32 star destroyers was equal in firepower to the Magnificence-class battleship there, all on its own. That makes some sort of sense if star destroyers are destroyers. It makes no sense at all if star destroyers are cruisers.
It's true that star destroyers sometimes operate alone, like cruisers do. But the vast majority of the time, star destroyers operate in teams, either serving as a star destroyer screen for a bigger ship or acting as a squadron or flotilla. Both roles are completely consistent with how destroyers operate in real life. They only ever operate alone when they're chasing far inferior opposition, such as Leia's tiny consular ship, or when they're launching probe droids (which isn't exactly combat duty). Even when chasing the Millennium Falcon in A New Hope, two star destroyers are sent, not one.
So, now that we've confirmed that a star destroyer is just a destroyer IN SPACE, we need to rationalise Han's calling them cruisers. My answer is to point to how a Trade Federation droid addressed a tiny Republican ship (probably less than 100m long) as a "Republic cruiser" and how Nute Gunray addressed Amidala's similarly small ship as a "Naboo cruiser" in The Phantom Menace. Basically, in Star Wars, people often use the word 'cruiser' in the informal definition of "any ship", rather than the formal, correct definition of "a relatively fast warship larger than a destroyer and less heavily armed than a battleship". This shouldn't be too surprising—after all, in real life, I doubt that most people check to see whether a luxury cruiser is technically larger than a destroyer before calling it a luxury cruiser.
There's one more piece of opposition to the idea that a star destroyer is a destroyer. The Rebel spaceships in Return of the Jedi, some of which are 3,800m long and others of which are 1,200m long and thus smaller than star destroyers, are all called "cruisers" three times in Rebel dialogue, so some people argue that star destroyers don't qualify as destroyers because cruisers are, by definition, larger than destroyers.
But all the Rebels' lines can be explained in two ways: either by the idea that the Rebels are using the informal definition of the word 'cruiser' (as described two paragraphs above this one), or by the following:
ADMIRAL ACKBAR: Once the shield is down, our cruisers will create a perimeter, while the fighters fly into the superstructure and attempt to knock out the main reactor.
Admiral Ackbar might have meant, "Our cruisers [the 3,800m-long ones] will create a perimeter, and our star destroyers [the 1,200m-long ones] will escort them."
LANDO: Draw their fire away from the cruisers.
In this case, Lando might genuinely only be talking about the 3,800m-long cruisers, since he doesn't specify. After all, it's more important to protect the Rebel cruisers (which are more expensive and less replaceable) than it is to protect the Rebel star destroyers.
ADMIRAL ACKBAR (referring to the second Death Star): Our cruisers can't repel firepower of that magnitude!
Ackbar is very likely to have meant, "Our cruisers can't repel firepower of that magnitude, so our star destroyers don't stand a chance!"
Next, we should deal with the term 'super star destroyer'. This term only appears once, used by Admiral Ackbar to describe Executor:
ADMIRAL ACKBAR: Concentrate all fire on that super star destroyer!
Obviously, the term 'super star destroyer' is likely to mean 'any warship larger than a star destroyer'. It's highly unlikely to be a formal ship type, because that implies that Executor is just an unusually large star destroyer, when in fact Executor is much, much, much larger than any star destroyer. We also know that it doesn't refer to Executor's specific class, because, if it did, the first ship of Executor's class must have been called Super, and no-one would call a ship Super; that would just be silly.
This leaves us with our final list of types of capital ships, in order of increasing size: star destroyer, cruiser and battleship.
There is only one question left to answer: Why are destroyers prefixed with "star", but not battleships or cruisers?
It's impossible to be sure on this one, but remember the Trade Federation-owned, and later Separatist-owned, destroyer droids from the Star Wars prequel trilogy. Perhaps the Republic renamed its destroyers 'star destroyers' to render them distinct from "those evil machines of those evil Separatists". It's a long shot, but as far as I know, no-one else has any better ideas.
10. Ship statistics for the Imperium:
(a) How much energy can 1m³ of Warhammer 40,000 fuel generate?
Warhammer 40,000 technology (except for that of the Necrons) is powered by "Plasma Generators", based on nuclear fusion. I don't need to know much about how they work: I'm going to work out how much energy they can effectively deliver.
I'm going to work out the total energy generation capacity of the Apocalypse-class battleship by calculating the energy delivered by its main weapon, the mighty Nova Cannon, one of the most powerful weapons in Warhammer 40,000. I'm calculating based on the Nova Cannon because its energy is fairly easy to work out.
The Nova Cannon is a massive object with a diameter of 50m (and therefore a radius of 25m), fired at nearly the speed of light in a vacuum (300,000,000m/s): let's say it's travelling at 99% of the speed of light in a vacuum, 0.99c (the letter c is used in physics to symbolise the speed of light in a vacuum). First, we have to work out its volume.
I've been informed that Rogue Trader says that Nova Cannon shells normally mirror traditional explosive shells, so they're cylindrical and their length is 75m (three times their radius). If so, we must work out the volume of a cylinder: V = pr²h.
pr²h = p × 25² × 75 = 150,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
We can use this to work out the mass of a Nova Cannon projectile. The densest stable metal in the universe, osmium, has a density of 23,000kg/m³ [calculated to two significant figures]. To put this into perspective, lead's density is 11,000kg/m³: about half as dense. Osmium is very, very dense. However, this is sci-fi, so the Imperium might be able to develop materials that are even heavier than osmium.
For the sake of making a generous assumption, let's say that Nova Cannon projectiles are a full ten times as dense as osmium: 230,000kg/m³. In that case, the mass of a Nova Cannon projectile is 35,000,000,000kg [calculated to two significant figures].
Now I calculate how much kinetic energy it takes to send that mass at 297,000,000m/s, by using the equation for relativistic kinetic energy: KE = mc² ÷ v(1 – v² ÷ c²) – mc².
KE = 35,000,000,000 × 300,000,000² ÷ v(1 – (0.99c)² ÷ c²) – 35,000,000,000 × 300,000,000²
= 3.15 × 10^27 ÷ v(1 – 0.9801) – 3.15 × 10^27
= 3.15 × 10^27 ÷ 0.1410673598 – 3.15 × 10^27
= 1.9 × 10^28 [calculated to two significant figures].
But there's actually an even bigger difference than that. If that much kinetic energy was applied to the battleship in recoil (and it would be), then the battleship would be immediately hurled away from the battle at tens of thousands of kilometres per second. Obviously, this doesn't happen, so the recoil must be compensated for, by putting extra energy to the engines.
In that case, in order to counter the momentum of the Nova Cannon shell, the battleship actually needs 1.9 × 10^28 × 2 = 3.8 × 10^28 joules.
Now I have to find out two more things: How many times can an Apocalypse-class battleship fire her Nova Cannon? How much of the Apocalypse-class ship's energy generation capacity is devoted to her Nova Cannon?
I must estimate these: 192 times, and 1/10. The latter is fairly arbitrary (and thus I've chosen to be generous in assuming that the Nova Cannon is only a small proportion of the ship's energy generation capacity). As for the former, I've heard somewhere (I'm afraid that I don't recall the source) that a Nova Cannon's rate of fire is twice per hour. If that is true, then, given that an Apocalypse-class battleship was engaged in a fight, it would take 96 hours (four days) of continuous firing for her to run out of plasma fuel for her Nova Cannon: a highly generous estimate of the Apocalypse class's capability.
Therefore, the total energy generation capacity of an Apocalypse-class battleship is 3.8 × 10^28 × 192 ÷ 1/10 = 7.3 × 10^31 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
An exaton of energy is equivalent to 4.2 × 10^27 joules of energy.
Therefore, an Apocalypse-class battleship, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 17,000 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
For proof that the total volume of an Imperial Navy battleship is 26,000,000,000m³, please see Calculation 8(g).
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of an Apocalypse-class ship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, attack craft and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of an Apocalypse-class ship's fuel capacity.
There is no reason to believe that there are any troops aboard an Apocalypse-class ship, and active reason to believe that there aren't, since she's a warship and she should be trying to conserve space for firepower.
That leaves 75% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 60% of the ship's volume as pure plasma fuel.
Note: Some people argue that attack craft would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the plasma fuel in an Apocalypse-class ship is 26,000,000,000m³ × 60% = 16,000,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
Note: I'm generously assuming that the Apocalypse class, despite being an unusually powerful battleship, doesn't require an unusually large amount of plasma fuel.
Therefore, it takes 16 billion cubic metres of plasma fuel for an Imperial Navy warship to generate 7.3 × 10^31 joules of energy.
7.3 × 10^31 ÷ 16,000,000,000 = 4.6 × 10^21 [calculated to two significant figures].
Therefore, each cubic metre of plasma fuel generates 4.6 × 10^21 joules.
This is slightly less than a tenth as much as the value for proton fuel.
(b) How much energy can all the various classes of Imperial Navy escorts generate?
This calculation will compare the energy generation capacity of seven of the eight known classes of escort warships in the Imperial Navy. It won't cover troopships or logistics ships.
The only class of escort warship that I've left out is the Defence Monitor. I would have liked to cover her, but I can't, because I know absolutely nothing about her size. She might be anything from 1,000m long to 3,000m long; I simply don't know.
First, we must calculate their volume. That has been done in Calculation 8(h). Next, we must calculate the volume of plasma fuel in each escort.
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of an Imperial Navy escort warship's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, attack craft and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of an Imperial Navy escort warship's fuel capacity.
There is no reason to believe that there are any troops aboard an Imperial Navy escort warship, and active reason to believe that there aren't, since she's a warship and she should be trying to conserve space for firepower.
That leaves 75% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 60% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that attack craft would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the plasma fuel in any escort warship of the Imperial Navy is (total volume of ship) × 60%.
Claymore: 130,000,000m³ × 60% = 78,000,000m³
Cobra: 140,000,000m³ × 60% = 84,000,000m³
Sword: 140,000,000m³ × 60% = 84,000,000m³
Firestorm: 160,000,000m³ × 60% = 96,000,000m³
Turbulent: 180,000,000m³ × 60% = 110,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Falchion: 200,000,000m³ × 60% = 120,000,000m³
Tempest: 240,000,000m³ × 60% = 140,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
Finally, we just multiply all these by 4.6 × 10^21 joules, and we get:
Claymore: 78,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 3.6 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Cobra: 84,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 3.9 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Sword: 84,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 3.9 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Firestorm: 96,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 4.4 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Turbulent: 110,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 5.1 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Falchion: 120,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 5.5 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Tempest: 140,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 6.4 × 10^29 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
To translate this into an easier-to-understand form, there are 4.2 × 10^27 joules in one exaton. Therefore, in conclusion:
A Claymore-class corvette, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 86 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Cobra-class destroyer, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 93 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Sword-class frigate, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 93 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Firestorm-class frigate, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 100 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Turbulent-class heavy frigate, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 120 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Falchion-class escort, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 130 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Tempest-class frigate, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 150 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
(c) How much energy can all the various classes of Imperial Navy cruisers generate?
This calculation will compare the energy generation capacity of twelve of the sixteen known classes of cruisers in the Imperial Navy.
The four classes of cruiser that I've left out are the Endurance-class light cruiser, the Dominator-class cruiser, the Gothic-class cruiser and the Vengeance-class grand cruiser. I would have liked to cover them, but I can't, because I know absolutely nothing about their size.
First, we must calculate their volume. That has been done in Calculation 8(i). Next, we must calculate the volume of plasma fuel in each escort.
Note: For those who object to this method on grounds that efficiency would change things, please see my note at the end of Calculation 5(a).
In real life, a warship's armour and internal walls and suchlike take up about 5% of the ship's volume. I'll go with this for my calculations.
I'm also assuming that a full 20% of an Imperial Navy cruiser's volume is taken up by the spaces for crewmen, attack craft and other operators. This is probably an overestimate, but that's acceptable, because I am trying to make a conservative estimate of an Imperial Navy cruiser's fuel capacity.
There is no reason to believe that there are any troops aboard an Imperial Navy cruiser, and active reason to believe that there aren't, since she's a warship and she should be trying to conserve space for firepower.
That leaves 75% of the ship's bulk for reactors and fuel storage.
If 20% of that, in turn, is taken up by internal walls and equipment of sorts, that would leave 60% of the ship's volume as pure proton fuel.
Note: Some people argue that attack craft would take up a significant portion of the ship's mass, but that's just stupid. Please see my note on this in Calculation 6(a).
Therefore, the volume of the plasma fuel in any cruiser of the Imperial Navy is (total volume of ship) × 60%.
Defiant: 950,000,000m³ × 60% = 570,000,000m³
Endeavour: 950,000,000m³ × 60% = 570,000,000m³
Dauntless: 1,100,000,000m³ × 60% = 660,000,000m³
Armageddon: 3,200,000,000m³ × 60% = 1,900,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Lunar: 3,200,000,000m³ × 60% = 1,900,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Tyrant: 3,200,000,000m³ × 60% = 1,900,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Chalice: 3,300,000,000m³ × 60% = 2,000,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Dictator: 3,300,000,000m³ × 60% = 2,000,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Overlord: 3,800,000,000m³ × 60% = 2,300,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Mars: 3,900,000,000m³ × 60% = 2,300,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Exorcist: 8,800,000,000m³ × 60% = 5,300,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures]
Avenger: 24,000,000,000m³ × 60% = 14,000,000,000m³ [calculated to two significant figures].
Finally, we just multiply all these by 4.6 × 10^21 joules, and we get:
Defiant: 570,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 2.6 × 10^30 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Endeavour: 570,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 2.6 × 10^30 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Dauntless: 660,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 3.0 × 10^30 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Armageddon: 1,900,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 8.7 × 10^30 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Lunar: 1,900,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 8.7 × 10^30 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Tyrant: 1,900,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 8.7 × 10^30 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Chalice: 2,000,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 9.2 × 10^30 joules
Dictator: 2,000,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 9.2 × 10^30 joules
Overlord: 2,300,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 1.1 × 10^31 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Mars: 2,300,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 1.1 × 10^31 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Exorcist: 5,300,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 2.4 × 10^31 joules [calculated to two significant figures]
Avenger: 14,000,000,000 × 4.6 × 10^21 = 6.4 × 10^31 joules [calculated to two significant figures].
To translate this into an easier-to-understand form, there are 4.2 × 10^27 joules in one exaton. Therefore, in conclusion:
A Defiant-class light cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 620 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
An Endeavour-class light cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 620 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Dauntless-class light cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 710 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
An Armageddon-class battlecruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 2,100 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Lunar-class cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 2,100 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Tyrant-class cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 2,100 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Chalice-class battlecruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 2,200 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Dictator-class cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 2,200 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
An Overlord-class battlecruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 2,600 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
A Mars-class battlecruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 2,600 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
An Exorcist-class grand cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 5,700 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
An Avenger-class grand cruiser, if her fuel tanks are full, can generate 15,000 exatons of energy [calculated to two significant figures].
11. Numbers of Warhammer 40,000 Imperial forces:
(a) How many sectors are there in the Imperium?
Numerous Warhammer 40,000 sources state that the Imperium contains one-million inhabited planets; this figure is not in serious dispute. To give but one of the many existing examples, the 5th Edition says, "The Imperium of Man comprises a million inhabited worlds."
Imperial space is divided into five Segmenta, which are then subdivided into sectors.
There are many canonical figures determining this, but two of them are the most precise:
1. The Gothic sector contains 73 inhabited planets (if my count is correct: I might be off by one or two or three). I'll round this off to 70, for ease of calculations.
2. A sector is a cube of space with a side-length of 200 light-years. This gives it a volume of 8,000,000 cubic light-years.
Unfortunately, Warhammer 40,000 canon is rarely consistent (though it looks perfect, in comparison to the Star Wars Expanded Universe). These figures are inconsistent with each other, so I'm going with the former, because the latter leads to some truly insane conclusions.
In real life, the Milky Way is 1,000 light-years thick and 60,000 light-years in radius, so its total volume is 60,000² × p × 1,000 = 11,000,000,000,000 cubic light-years [calculated to two significant figures]. 11,000,000,000,000 ÷ 8,000,000 = 1,400,000 [calculated to two significant figures].
Therefore, even if the Imperium only controls half the Milky Way, the latter calculation suggests that the Imperium has a whopping 700,000 sectors. In that case, the majority of Imperial sectors have only one planet each, and all the others would boast a grand total of… two planets each. That's obviously wrong, so I'm going with the other calculation.
If the Imperium has one-million planets and there are 70 planets per sector, then there are about 14,000 [calculated to two significant figures] sectors in the Imperium.
(b) How many warships are there in the Imperial Navy?
The canonical nomenclature for Imperial fleets seems to vary all the time, so I'll make it simple: each sector has a battlefleet, and each Segmentum has a warfleet. Sometimes Segmenta are described as having battlefleets too, but I'll use the term 'warfleet' for the purpose of clarification.
For a start, let's look at the following quotation from the 5th Edition, on the subject of the Catelexis Heresy:
"Millions upon millions of ships are lost in the resulting upheaval and entire sub-sectors slide into barbarism without the dictats of the Adeptus Terra to guide them."
This proves that the Imperium has at least four-million spaceships ("millions upon millions" must mean at least two pairs of "millions", and "millions" must mean at least two-million). Of course, spaceships ? warships, so this statement doesn't prove that the Imperium has millions of warships; indeed, the combined number of supply ships, merchantmen (trading ships) and troopships are likely to dwarf the number of warships—but probably not by more than a factor of ten, and certainly not by more than a factor of one-hundred. As such, the Imperium has at least 40,000 warships, and probably at least 400,000, that were lost (this figure doesn't include all the other ships that were still working just fine); and that was going with the most conservative interpretation of the meaning of "millions upon millions of ships". As such, the figures that I'm about to give out are justified.
According to the 3rd Edition of Codex: Armageddon, the following Imperial Navy warships were present at Armageddon:
6 first-line cruiser squadrons
9 second-line cruiser squadrons
12 light cruiser squadrons
36 escort squadrons
Archangel - Defiant-class light cruiser
Forebearer - Defiant-class light cruiser
Ex Cathedra - Armageddon-class battlecruiser
Hammer of Light - Armageddon-class battlecruiser
Thunderchild - Armageddon-class battlecruiser
Green Lake - Oberon-class battleship
His Will - Apocalypse-class battleship
Leonid - Endeavour-class light cruiser
Triumph - Apocalypse-class battleship
Inomine Veritas - Emperor-class battleship
Sanctis Legate - Endeavour-class light cruiser
Sword of Voss - Endeavour-class light cruiser
If we assume that a squadron contains (on average) ten ships, this includes:
360 escorts
125 light cruisers
90 cruisers
63 battlecruisers
4 battleships
(I'm assuming that "first-line cruisers" are battlecruisers, and that "second-line cruisers" are standard cruisers.)
This adds up to 642 warships. I'm going to make the extremely generous assumption that all Imperial sectors have an average of 642 ships in their battlefleets.
In fact, the Armageddon sector contains a forge world: one of a few hundred planets that form virtually the entire industrial base of the Imperium. For that reason alone, the Armageddon sector is far more important than most sectors: it's stated that, if the planet Armageddon falls, hundreds of Imperial planets will be left vulnerable.
However, my assumption is vaguely excusable, on the basis that Armageddon's reinforcements seem to have consisted largely of Space Marines. There were 14 Battle Barges and 103 Strike Cruisers at Armageddon: a staggering feat, since there are only 1,000,000 loyalist Space Marines in the entire Imperium, and each Space Marine capital ship must contain at least a hundred Space Marines. Thus, this force represents at least 10,000 Space Marines. Let me repeat: at least 10,000 of the million Space Marines, who are meant to protect a million planets, went to only one planet.
With so many Space Marines at Armageddon, it's justifiable, albeit dodgy, to say that the Imperial Navy wouldn't see the need to give them large numbers of reinforcements. After all, a group containing thousands of Space Marines should be able to handle most opponents.
So I'm going with the assumption that a typical Imperial battlefleet contains 642 warships, 360 of which are escorts and four of which are battleships. Of course, places like Cadia contain far more, but I'm dealing with the average Imperial battlefleet, not the best of the best.
642 × 14,000 = 9,000,000 warships [calculated to two significant figures].
What about Imperial warfleets?
On the one hand, most Imperial Guard activity seems to be organised from a very centralised, high level. For instance, the Armageddon Steel Legion is found all over the Imperium, not just in the vicinity of Armageddon.
On the other hand, the Imperial Navy seems to be much less centralised. Virtually all activity seems to come from the battlefleets of individual sectors, with only limited help being given by the strategic reserve fleets at a Segmentum level.
However, there definitely are strategic reserve fleets: one in each Segmentum. These fleets are called warfleets, and they're based at one planet in each Segmentum: Warfleet Obscurus at Cypra Mundi, Warfleet Pacificus at Hydraphur, Warfleet Solar at Mars, Warfleet Tempestus at Bakka and Warfleet Ultima at Kar Duniash.
Warfleet Solar is especially large: likely to be, let's say, twice as large as any other warfleet. This is because the Sol system is the most heavily defended star-system in the Imperium: not just slightly so, but by a great margin.
However, the warfleets are strategic reserves; it's the battlefleets that are the main units of the Imperial Navy. Therefore, it seems likely that the warfleets form no more than 20% of the Imperial Navy: probably less, but I'll be generous.
So, if the battlefleets have 9,000,000 ships, then the warfleets have 2,250,000 warships.
Now we just divide 2.25 million by six, since there are five warfleets but Warfleet Solar is worth two other warfleets. This tells us that a normal warfleet contains about 375,000 warships, and Warfleet Solar contains about 750,000 of them.
9,000,000 + 2,250,000 = 11,250,000 Imperial Navy warships.
Obviously, because of the imprecision of this calculation, we shouldn't treat this as an exact figure, but it does tell us that the Imperial Navy contains somewhere vaguely around 11 million warships.
(c) Why aren't Space Marine fleets counted in Calculation 11(b)?
The 5th Edition of Codex: Space Marines says, "There are only a thousand such chapters [loyalist Space Marine chapters] spanning the galaxy." This is well established. It also says, "Chapters have often exceeded their basic fighting strength of one thousand souls during times of prolonged war." As such, if I'm going to be generous, I might assume that, in the troubled times of the 41st millennium, the Space Marines number as many as two-million.
However, only the greatest chapters have over two or three Battle Barges, and many chapters have only one. In order to be generous, let's say that each chapter has, on average, two Battle Barges. Since a Battle Barge carries two or three companies of Space Marines, two Battle Barges would take up 40%-60% of the entire chapter.
A Space Marine Strike Cruiser carries a company of one-hundred Space Marines. Therefore, each chapter can only use four to six Strike Cruisers. So, every Space Marine chapter has a fleet of two Battle Barges, four to six Strike Cruisers and the appropriate escorts—and that's the maximum. Some Space Marine chapters only have one Battle Barge and a few Strike Cruisers.
That simply isn't enough to count on a galactic scale. That's two-thousand Battle Barges and 4,000-6,000 Strike Cruisers: a fleet of similar size to the combined battlefleets of about 1%-2% of the sectors in the Imperium. And those Space Marines are spread all over the Imperium, with extremely disproportionate numbers heading to places like Cadia and the areas menaced by Hive Fleet Leviathan.
The Space Marines are definitely an essential part of the Warhammer 40,000 franchise, but they aren't an essential part of the Imperium's space warfare. There just aren't enough of them for that.
Results: speed, ship numbers and energy generation capacity.
Note: If you want to find the source of these results, please see the rest of my calculations.
Results about speed:
Hyperdrive is 15,000,000 times the speed of light in a vacuum.
Warp Drive is, on average, 7,100 times the speed of light in a vacuum.
Results about ship numbers:
The Galactic Republic has about 51 million warships.
The Imperium of Man has about 11 million warships.
Results about energy generation capacity (Warhammer 40,000):
Claymore-class corvette: 86 exatons
Cobra-class destroyer: 93 exatons
Sword-class frigate: 93 exatons
Firestorm-class frigate: 100 exatons
Turbulent-class heavy frigate: 120 exatons
Falchion-class escort: 130 exatons
Tempest-class frigate: 150 exatons
Defiant-class or Endeavour-class light cruiser: 620 exatons
Dauntless-class light cruiser: 710 exatons
Armageddon-class battlecruiser: 2,100 exatons
Lunar-class or Tyrant-class cruiser: 2,100 exatons
Chalice-class battlecruiser: 2,200 exatons
Dictator-class cruiser: 2,200 exatons
Mars-class or Overlord-class battlecruiser: 2,600 exatons
Exorcist-class grand cruiser: 5,700 exatons
Avenger-class grand cruiser: 15,000 exatons
Apocalypse-class, Emperor-class, Oberon-class or Retribution-class battleship: 17,000 exatons
Results about energy generation capacity (Star Wars)
Unifier-class star destroyer: 50 exatons
Glory-class star destroyer: 150 exatons
Enforcer-class or Avenger-class star destroyer: 450 exatons
Trade Federation battleship: 17,000 exatons
Magnificence-class battleship: 22,000 exatons
Command-class battleship: 260,000 exatons
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Keep in mind that its Star Wars vs 40k but it does list technical info.
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