So we’re all familiar with the idea that 40k isn’t very good with its maths. Space Marines in particular, numbering roughly 1,000,000, give or take, simply don’t have the numbers to make even the merest ounce of difference on the Galactic stage, regardless of how hard they are in a given bit of background or novel.
Well, thinking about it, this seems to hold true for pretty much all of SciFi that I’m familiar with.
Star Trek? Nowhere near enough ships for anyone to be a Galactic power. I mean, The Dominion have been shown to have ridiculously fast shipyards, and grow their troops to order. Yet their fleet is comparatively tiny, when you consider what they could’ve thrown up with just a couple more years of patience.
Star Wars? Reputedly 1,500,000 planets and colonies in The Empire. Yet, the star fleet apparently only had (according to the Wiki, other sources might be available) 25,000 Star Destroyers, and 50 Super Star Destroyers. How....how do those numbers work? Sure, not every planet is going to be against you. And not every system or planet opposed will have much in the way of warship building capacity. But even so....only 25,000? That’s.....the merest drop in a very, very large ocean.
Dune gets a pass because the whole thing revolves around Spice, which comes from a single planet. Sure, holding that planet is no mean feat, but at least it’s a solid anchor point for any ruler.
Maybe it’s the law of big numbers. They sound great, until you really stop to consider the difference between thousands, millions and billions.
Are there any in which the numbers make sense? I think Stargate might, because the Goa’uld prevented others attaining hyperspace capability, let alone spacefaring craft of any measure.
It helps to think about these "great powers" less as something akin to galactic space cops and more as the universe's most effective deterrents.
Space Marines do only number about 1mil soldiers. If you were a planetary governor, would you really want them dropping from the sky, using orbital bombardments to crush your palace? Probably not, so that keeps you in line. Not to mention the combined arms of the IG / Inquisition / Eccesiarchy, who you'd most likely have to face first.
Now let's say you're the Eldar. The Imperium wants you non-existent and you've already have a great enemy in the form of Slannesh. Do the Space Marines need to match you in numbers? Probably not, they need to keep you in check and make sure you don't mess with Imperial business. There's no need for constant struggle across the universe, there's a need to hold the line. That's what Space Marines are there for. Assuming they can travel to distant locations efficiently, 1 mil may very well be enough.
Ork, Tyrannids, Necrons - Space Marines have had epic battles with them a few thousand troops at a time. But conflicts tend to be localized and supported by other Imperial forces. They're the Emperor's Mailed Fist, coming in to destroy a strategic point, not the foot soldiers that fight every battle. 1 mil, again, may be enough.
With the Star Wars Empire, there's a lot of planetary & regional governments, trade federations, crime syndicates and other powers that exist in that universe. I've always thought about the Empire as the dominant force, one that has the power to exert it's will where it wants but doesn't get involved in the day-to-day of each destination in the galaxy. 25,000 Star Destroyers actually sounds like a lot when you also have diplomatic efforts for aligning other ruling institutions with your agenda.
Star Trek is different, the Federation is not about conquest or domination. They have their own worlds and just don't want them destroyed. They try not to intervene in the affairs of others, but study the universe instead. Except for the Borg.
The thing is numbers are really hard to impossible to estimate because we don't and never have, lived in an intergalactic society. We've no grounding to base off what the numbers could be and even our best scientists are basically shooting numbers at random into the stars.
I think its important that in such vast settings the numbers aren't there to be accurate, they are there to be relatable. To the reader and within the setting.
1million marines isn't' there to be perfectly scientifically accurate, its there to give an idea how many there are and that whilst its a big number; its a tiny number for the whole galaxy. It's trying to give that idea because if you start saying there's 2 billion of them then that sounds like a super big number because people aren't used to thinking of populations in numbers that are way beyond trillions (which is likely where the Imperiums population is). At some point bigger and bigger numbers lose meaning to the average person because they are so far outside their experiences.
Even a million can be quite beyond many people to envision if they aren't used to juggling such big numbers.
Also I'd say most settings tend to focus very heavily on the military end of things, even Star Trek focuses almost exclusively on the military end of most races. Consider that DS9 typically has military ships docked and we might see a frigate or transport only if it fits with the current story for the episode. When in reality it should likely have dozens of transports and trading vessels docking and leaving each day. Until the Dominion War a military/Starfleet ship should be, in comparison, a rarity appearing now and then.
Yet through the whole series we typically only see the military ships. We dont' see fleets of transports - ergo the whole civilian network - which is always far larger than the military; though would be a neat way to show differences in racial profiles -eg even Klingon transports you'd expect to be armed more heavily than Federation ones.
In fact of series that show the civilian network well I'd say that Cowboy Bebop actually does it about best.
Stargate always has an oddity that stargates, even on Goul'd worlds seem to be quite ignored. When in reality you'd expect them to be important trade and resource transport hubs. Rather than opening into empty fields or open spaces or the odd small ship compartment; you'd imagine that they'd open into large shipping networks with large round-shaped containers on transport beds being moved back and forth between worlds on a regular basis.
All the points are made up and don't mean anything?
But sure let's give this a think.
First off how many marines/star ships/star destroyers do you really need?
The world has ~200 nations (195 I think is the official tally) and the US has 12 aircraft carriers (half of which are in port at any given time) yet is considered the preeminent naval power. OK it also has nuclear attacks subs and several hundred other surface vessels but it is the preeminent naval power because no one else wants to come out and play when the US has such a massive advantage.
How many British folks were in Indian around 1945? Not nearly enough to patrol every street corner.
The Imperium has a million marines, but also has more guardsmen than there stars in the sky. And more PDF dudes than them. The Marines are scary on a one and one level but also make a difference because they can drop from orbit or teleport in. The traitor's million man army can hold off the loyalists' million man army sure, but the Marine will just drop on his palace and take on his 100-man bodyguard unit. So most 40k are between a bunch of PDF guys with autoguns and maybe a tank vs a bunch of orks with sharp sticks and maybe a Deff Dread. Marines are only called out to drop on the Warboss' head and have a real fight with multiple dreadnaughts and tanks.
The Empire in Star Wars is still establishing control, gradually usurping the Senate and local rulers. So maybe that number of ISDs will grow. But also, canonically, their long term plan was terror tactics. Death Stars roaming the galaxy blowing up planets.
I think it was a Diskworld book that explained you don't need a cop on every corner when you put a cop in everyone's head. A kid thinks about throwing rocks at a Stormtrooper, looks at the sky, thinks about what happened to Alderon, and walks away.
So in a well-run system you don't need one ship per planet or whatever, once you establish control you just need to be strong enough to keep everyone in line.
So we’re all familiar with the idea that 40k isn’t very good with its maths. Space Marines in particular, numbering roughly 1,000,000, give or take, simply don’t have the numbers to make even the merest ounce of difference on the Galactic stage, regardless of how hard they are in a given bit of background or novel.
Well, thinking about it, this seems to hold true for pretty much all of SciFi that I’m familiar with.
Star Trek? Nowhere near enough ships for anyone to be a Galactic power. I mean, The Dominion have been shown to have ridiculously fast shipyards, and grow their troops to order. Yet their fleet is comparatively tiny, when you consider what they could’ve thrown up with just a couple more years of patience.
Star Wars? Reputedly 1,500,000 planets and colonies in The Empire. Yet, the star fleet apparently only had (according to the Wiki, other sources might be available) 25,000 Star Destroyers, and 50 Super Star Destroyers. How....how do those numbers work? Sure, not every planet is going to be against you. And not every system or planet opposed will have much in the way of warship building capacity. But even so....only 25,000? That’s.....the merest drop in a very, very large ocean.
Dune gets a pass because the whole thing revolves around Spice, which comes from a single planet. Sure, holding that planet is no mean feat, but at least it’s a solid anchor point for any ruler.
Maybe it’s the law of big numbers. They sound great, until you really stop to consider the difference between thousands, millions and billions.
Are there any in which the numbers make sense? I think Stargate might, because the Goa’uld prevented others attaining hyperspace capability, let alone spacefaring craft of any measure.
keep in mind the 25,000 ISDs number is old EU and comes more from extrapolating figures from a varity of sources, source one tells us that the Imperial Navy maintains a sector fleet of 25 star destroyers per sector, and that there where approx 1000 sectors. however this doesn't include floating fleets and task forces, also those ISDs would have support ships etc. also that's just on paper, the "fleet of 25,000" ships number with regards to star wars is literally like hearing the US names battleships after states, and thus concluding the US fleet consisted of just 50 battleships.
Imposition of control (whether military or more conventional law and order), is always dependent on people willing to be controlled. Either because at some level they consent to the control (as with most civil democracies) or because the consequences of not complying are unpalatable through to terrifying (most authoritarian regimes). There has never been a military or police organisation with anywhere near enough people or firepower to enforce control if the population are sufficiently united in opposition to them.
Another big element in “successful”* empires, such as the Romans and the British, is actually just a sort of franchise system/protection racket. It’s a hell of a lot more efficient to go in and persuade the existing local rulers to sign up to the corporation, adopt your flag and rule the place in your name. So long as they pay their taxes, everyone’s happy. Well, everyone in power with titles, money, etc.
*By “successful” I mean “achieved their intended goal”, not attempting to assess or comment on any other aspects...
Jadenim wrote: Imposition of control (whether military or more conventional law and order), is always dependent on people willing to be controlled. Either because at some level they consent to the control (as with most civil democracies) or because the consequences of not complying are unpalatable through to terrifying (most authoritarian regimes). There has never been a military or police organisation with anywhere near enough people or firepower to enforce control if the population are sufficiently united in opposition to them.
Another big element in “successful”* empires, such as the Romans and the British, is actually just a sort of franchise system/protection racket. It’s a hell of a lot more efficient to go in and persuade the existing local rulers to sign up to the corporation, adopt your flag and rule the place in your name. So long as they pay their taxes, everyone’s happy. Well, everyone in power with titles, money, etc.
*By “successful” I mean “achieved their intended goal”, not attempting to assess or comment on any other aspects...
The other big thing that allowed Rome to last for so long is the concept of social mobility. That a person has options to better their situation and rise up the social hierarchy. Where people get socially and economically locked that can build up into a bubble that inevitably bursts. Rome had it with slaves; Russia had it etc.... Basically if people have the option of social and economic mobility then instead of rising up with organised uprisings, they are more likely to use the ladders to rise up. It's like a pressure release valve.
40K lacks that (in a broad sense, accepting that each world is different) and it creates an ideal hotbed of dissent and disgruntlement for chaos and genestealer cults to set root in the population. Look at most cultists models and you see your menial labourers and lower classes - those who are most oppressed and who have the least chance to economically or socially rise from their station. They have no pressure release, and thus the pressure builds and builds and a cult sets its roots in and encourages it and builds it up and up - and because there are nearly always way more on the bottom than on the top you create an ideal situation for a chaotic and massive scale uprising.
The problem with all these universes is the lack of colonies that aren't planet bound. I mean sure, they sprinkle space stations here and there, but for the most part they're restricted to planetary living. This means that gravity wells are always an issue for moving people around, and that your population is limited to planetary heat dissipation capacity. A single star with a Dyson swarm of space habitats could easily outnumber all of the Imperium of Mankind, the Federation and the Republic/Empire, COMBINED, with fleets of billions of ships.
Now, running and maintaining that level of space colonies may not ever be practical. If that's the case, then your industrial capacity for spaceship building is similarly limited. In the case of Star Trek, the Federation is VERY young and humanity hasn't had a chance to build up numbers (and suffered a population collapse before founding the Federation), and the galaxy seems pretty short on mature starfaring races (though they did find a Dyson Sphere in one episode, which was abandoned). Star Trek races seem to evolve into energy beings beyond the need for such crap and they go to live in alternate dimensions or such. The Imperium of Mankind is far older but humanity had serious competition until the Fall of the Eldar (who were very much a mature space faring civilization), but the Age of Strife pretty much destroyed everything of value and all that is left is scraps and the Imperium can't rebuild its industrial capacity, which is in the hands of hoarders (Admech). The Republic should have been old enough and peaceful enough to form Dyson swarms, but they seem to have hard limits on maintenance issues (starships last a few decades at best), which means you can only really keep a low number of ships in service based on your economy and big stations are something of a luxury (Death Stars nothwithstanding, how long would they remain in service once built?).
Obviously most of these things really boil down to authors not thinking big enough, but the assumption that any spacefaring race would end up with quadrillions of people with billions of huge space cruisers is just that, an assumption. If space colonies are very hard/expensive to maintain, you've got hard caps on your population and most races would self-regulate their population levels.
Also I'd say most settings tend to focus very heavily on the military end of things, even Star Trek focuses almost exclusively on the military end of most races. Consider that DS9 typically has military ships docked and we might see a frigate or transport only if it fits with the current story for the episode. When in reality it should likely have dozens of transports and trading vessels docking and leaving each day. Until the Dominion War a military/Starfleet ship should be, in comparison, a rarity appearing now and then.
Yet through the whole series we typically only see the military ships. We dont' see fleets of transports - ergo the whole civilian network - which is always far larger than the military; though would be a neat way to show differences in racial profiles -eg even Klingon transports you'd expect to be armed more heavily than Federation ones.
In fact of series that show the civilian network well I'd say that Cowboy Bebop actually does it about best.
Stargate always has an oddity that stargates, even on Goul'd worlds seem to be quite ignored. When in reality you'd expect them to be important trade and resource transport hubs. Rather than opening into empty fields or open spaces or the odd small ship compartment; you'd imagine that they'd open into large shipping networks with large round-shaped containers on transport beds being moved back and forth between worlds on a regular basis.
Babylon 5 had a good take on that. There were always civilian transports and ships moving about.
This is a shortfall of the consumable product that most scifi is. Sometimes the world is thought out in enough realistic detail as to provide realistic numbers, but more often, the ins and outs of the scifi universe presented is an expedeint to facilitate the teling of a particular story and no more.
It's the same in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Cities characters visit and their economies are generally highly simplified, and are there to faciliate the moving forward of the story rather than represent in exact logistical detail the entire economy.
That said, what a great challenge now that we can do as much with computers as we can, to build fictional worlds up from detailed ai simulation of planets, resources, technologies, and personalities. Letting the simulation build itself into it's own realistic and vibrant world, then stopping it and freezing it at points to insert the drama and action, then seeing how it all readjusts to the results. Perhaps a new fronteir in gaming and story telling.
RegularGuy wrote: This is a shortfall of the consumable product that most scifi is. Sometimes the world is thought out in enough realistic detail as to provide realistic numbers, but more often, the ins and outs of the scifi universe presented is an expedeint to facilitate the teling of a particular story and no more.
It's the same in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Cities characters visit and their economies are generally highly simplified, and are there to faciliate the moving forward of the story rather than represent in exact logistical detail the entire economy.
That said, what a great challenge now that we can do as much with computers as we can, to build fictional worlds up from detailed ai simulation of planets, resources, technologies, and personalities. Letting the simulation build itself into it's own realistic and vibrant world, then stopping it and freezing it at points to insert the drama and action, then seeing how it all readjusts to the results. Perhaps a new fronteir in gaming and story telling.
Look around...... that is what you are experiencing as the real world all ready!
Ah, but that's just one of many worlds. What about when you log into your space mining and combat game, and the entire universe is a living simulation unto itself. Etc.
Space Marines are ultimately mostly a propaganda piece. The real power of the Imperium is from the normal human forces of the Imperial Navy and Imperial Guard. Organizations who are not given exact numbers.
Even with conservative estimates, the Imperial navy most likely has hundreds of thousands of ships spread across the galaxy given the immense size of the Imperium.
So we’re all familiar with the idea that 40k isn’t very good with its maths. Space Marines in particular, numbering roughly 1,000,000, give or take, simply don’t have the numbers to make even the merest ounce of difference on the Galactic stage, regardless of how hard they are in a given bit of background or novel.
Well, thinking about it, this seems to hold true for pretty much all of SciFi that I’m familiar with.
Star Trek? Nowhere near enough ships for anyone to be a Galactic power. I mean, The Dominion have been shown to have ridiculously fast shipyards, and grow their troops to order. Yet their fleet is comparatively tiny, when you consider what they could’ve thrown up with just a couple more years of patience.
Star Wars? Reputedly 1,500,000 planets and colonies in The Empire. Yet, the star fleet apparently only had (according to the Wiki, other sources might be available) 25,000 Star Destroyers, and 50 Super Star Destroyers. How....how do those numbers work? Sure, not every planet is going to be against you. And not every system or planet opposed will have much in the way of warship building capacity. But even so....only 25,000? That’s.....the merest drop in a very, very large ocean.
Dune gets a pass because the whole thing revolves around Spice, which comes from a single planet. Sure, holding that planet is no mean feat, but at least it’s a solid anchor point for any ruler.
Maybe it’s the law of big numbers. They sound great, until you really stop to consider the difference between thousands, millions and billions.
Are there any in which the numbers make sense? I think Stargate might, because the Goa’uld prevented others attaining hyperspace capability, let alone spacefaring craft of any measure.
To be fair to Star Wars, the Empire having 25,000 Imperial-class Star Destroyers (specifically Imperial Class) is like the US Navy saying they have 11 San Antonio-class LPD's. That doesn't include the countless smaller classes of vessels in Imperial service which are generally assumed to be far more numerous, nor does it include the other dozen or so classes of Star Destroyer known to be in service with the Empire either.
keep in mind the 25,000 ISDs number is old EU
No, its actually current canon as well, but again applies specifically and only to Imperial-class Star Destroyers and doesn't include Venators, Tectors, Gladiators, qaz, Victories, or any of the other known classes of Star Destroyer, nor does it include any of the light cruisers, corvettes, frigates, carriers, cruisers, heavy cruisers, battlecruisers, dreadnoughts, star dreadnoughts, etc. in Imperial service. The Imperial fleet is far larger.
That being said, Star Wars is still horrible with numbers. Legends was much better about things generally speaking - in Legends the size of the clone armies are established to measure in the billions (and it was generally understood that on Kamino when they referred to "units" they meant squads or some other metric rather than individuals) and the droids numbered somewhere in the trillions. In Canon they have adhered rigidly to the idea that "units" referred to individuals, so the entirety of the Clone army amounted to about 6-7 million clones total against a billion or so droids. One of these sets of numbers makes a lot more sense than the other.
Not every planet in the empire is corruscant or alderaan. Planets like tattooine, really wtf would it take to garrison that planet and keep it in line, assuming it's even worth keeping in line?
Hoth may have been technically an imperial world. again not worth leaving a tie fighter in orbit to control it.
The empire may boast a huge number of worlds to look and sound big and impressive, but honestly, what percentage of them would be worth 'controlling" with force? Bespin was basically cloud city, that's it. Even lando admitted it was too small for the empire to notice.
Maybe those 25,000 star destroyers were enough to keep the planets that mattered in line. Maybe most of the planets in the empire weren't really worth much in terms of population, resources, etc. Who cares if a pimple on the glaxay's @$$ declares itself 'independent'? How long would it take the empire to notice? And then what, one SD drops by, strafes a couple population centers and leave a few hundred stormtroopers and a couple walkers to beat the locals back in line? Or maybe they just drop a few dirty nukes on it and come back in a few decades.
I mean, if cut off from outside trade, how big a population could tatooine support and for how long? What resources does it have? Anything vital? If an imperial office declarers tattooine to be a world you can't do business with because it is disloyal, how long would it survive even without any direct military action? Smugglers might deal with them at exorbitant prices IF they have anything worth trading for.
Many worlds might be unable to survive without imperial trade and commerce, they don;t need a military vessel overhead to keep them in line.
Matt Swain wrote: Not every planet in the empire is corruscant or alderaan. Planets like tattooine, really wtf would it take to garrison that planet and keep it in line, assuming it's even worth keeping in line?
Probably a lot considering its basically a high crime world.
Thing is you look at the Emperor and his plan was clearly not to have the Imperial Army have to garrison every single world. Instead he was going to dissolve the Republic and let local leaders run their worlds as they wished. You'd still pay your tithe and loyalty and all to Empire, but you'd be allowed to govern yourself. If you stepped out of line you might get the Imperial Fleet turn up or he'd just blow your world up entirely with a Death Star. Chances are if he'd gone ahead with his plan he'd have used his force influence and agents to ensure that any time a single power started to rise up, another would rise against them. Basically encouraging and allowing wars within the Empire between power-parties so that they never organise enough to rise up against his control. Any that even try to would get hit by the Imperial Fleet/Deathstar.
With the very real threat of blowing up worlds that would seriously hamper any interest many systems would have in rising up against the Empire. You just don't want to risk it.
Matt Swain wrote: Not every planet in the empire is corruscant or alderaan. Planets like tattooine, really wtf would it take to garrison that planet and keep it in line, assuming it's even worth keeping in line?
Probably a lot considering its basically a high crime world.
.
Yeah, see, Tattooine was such a waste that it attracted petty criminals and such, because the empire didn't bother to maintain a presence there.
Matt Swain wrote: Not every planet in the empire is corruscant or alderaan. Planets like tattooine, really wtf would it take to garrison that planet and keep it in line, assuming it's even worth keeping in line?
Probably a lot considering its basically a high crime world.
.
Yeah, see, Tattooine was such a waste that it attracted petty criminals and such, because the empire didn't bother to maintain a presence there.
It's more that its a world on the fringe of the Republic and the Empire and was ruled by the Hutts. Clearly it was prosperous enough to become a hotbed of crime, don't forget a scrap dealer was selling hyperdrives and such, so whilst the local population are dirt poor, the world itself still has at least some significance in resources and position. Plus being a world on the fringe it likely allowed itself to be a good meeting/trading spot.
The Empire actually expanded into it (its not part of the Republic in the prequel films) and took control, though its clear that the Hutts are still the ruling power. It's distance and isolation from the core is something that comes across poorly in the films in all honesty, mostly because the films deal with so few worlds and the time between worlds is typically shown as very short (to the viewer). So we never get a true sense of the vast scale of the Republic/Empire and just how out on the edge Tattooine is.
You're right in that the number of Tatooines and Bespins in the galaxy outnumber the number of Coruscants and Naboo's, but the number of Coruscant and Naboos out there ain't small. Legends material, but we have this as a guide as to what the population breakdown looks like:
Couldn't find it in higher res, but with 1.5 million full member worlds and an additional 60-70 million colonies under its direct control, the map indicates that a fleet of 25,000 star destroyers on its own would be wholly insufficient to maintain control - mind you the map is the population as of 25ABY, so post-empire, and not all of that area *was* under Imperial control. Based on the map, it would seem that the 50th percentile for the galaxy in terms of population would fall in the 100 million to 500 million inhabitants range - so we'll say of the 1.5 million worlds, 50% of them - 750k planets - have at least 100 million people living on them ( I assume the 70 mil or so colonies and whatnot are going to be overwhelmingly in the range of 10 mil or fewer inhabitants). 25% of the 1.5 million planets (about 375k) would appear to have at least 1 billion inhabitants, and I'd estimate about 5% (75k) would have at least 100 billion.
Tried and true military science says you need about 1 soldier for every 40-50 citizens at a bare minimum to successfully occupy a territory, deal with insurgents, and provide stability. I can't say how the more advanced technology and weapon systems utilized by the Empire might influence these numbers, but US forces in Iraq peaked at somewhere around 1 in 140, based on the success (or lackthereof) of the Empire in maintaining control of the galaxy, I would guess that they probably hit a ratio of 1 in 80 to 1 in 100 (and maybe this is justification for the Death Star, as its a force multiplier that would allow fewer troops to hold greater area). If we assume that the Empire hit a ratio of 1 in 100 and that these occupying forces were primarily garrisoned aboard Star Destroyer, then based on each ISD's compliment of roughly 50k crew + stormtroopers, you would need 1 Star Destroyer for every 5 million inhabitants of a given planet.
Based on the prior calculations of average planet pop, etc. the Empires fleet of 25,000 Star Destroyers wouldn't even be sufficient to maintain control of Coruscants estimate 1 trillion inhabitants (25k ISDs x 5million = 125 billion), let alone an estimated 150 trillion inhabitants within the Empire (1.5 million worlds with an average population of say 100 million people - this is significantly lower than the officially/semi-officially estimated population of 1 quadrillion inhabitants of the galaxy), but we'll be kind and assume that the other 850 trillion inhabitants somehow exist outside of the Empires borders or are somehow a non-factor because of weird science or something). For that 150 trillion, you would need 30 million ISDs... which is a far cry from what we got, so either theres a significant number of forces on planetside garrisons or incredibly large numbers of other ships in the Imperial Navy, or ISDs and Star Wars tech provides a dramatic force multiplier beyond what things like Lanchesters Laws, etc. can account for and enables a much more favorable occupation ratio than what real world militaries can achieve.
And how would the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy? I think GW has rather hit the nail on the head with the munitorum and Administratum. Just think of the command structure required to keep any kind of control over 25,000 capital ships, each with attendant support fleets and attached ground forces.
Matt Swain wrote: Not every planet in the empire is corruscant or alderaan. Planets like tattooine, really wtf would it take to garrison that planet and keep it in line, assuming it's even worth keeping in line?
Of course. But then, if you're not keeping a particular planet in line then its not really part of your empire is it?
Which is somewhat explained as officially Tattooine is controlled by the Hutts, not the Empire or the Republic. And most of the Outer Rim is the same. Its only under Imperial control if they are directly occupying it. But this still leaves far too much of the galactic core woefully under-garrisoned. And its an issue for all of Star Wars really, not just the Galactic Empire.
Really, the canon Imperial forces would have far too much difficulty holding even 10% of the core worlds, let alone mucking around in the Outer Rim as they are always doing. Which leads me to what I have said before. The Star Wars universe is full of complete pansies letting such a woefully incompetent and insufficient Empire hold control over them. And the only reason the Rebellion didn't just steamroll the Empire with numbers is because they are equally incompetent.
The Republic should have collapsed centuries before the Clone wars, or at least been far smaller than it actually was. Without any type of military, or even a galactic police force, they could do nothing to prevent systems from just leaving. The only logical reason for the Republic to exist at all would be to facilitate trade or resolve disputes between individual member planets. But at that point you are a more like an arbitration service than a centralized government, but the movies definitely make it seem like a highly (dis)functional centralized government.
Now presumably the Republic taxes its member planets, but without any means of enforcing those taxes it makes no sense why they didn't just hemorrhage members all the time. Really the 'crisis' of the Separatist rebellion should have been a daily occurrence rather than some shocking development. Clearly there is little benefit to being part of the galactic Republic, but a lot of downsides.
Maybe taxes collected by the Republic could be used to provide weaker members with cash to developing their infrastructure, but this would result in a one-sided situation where wealthier planets would have zero incentive to stay in the Republic. The wealthy planets gain nothing by staying in the Republic, no protection from a powerful military, and all your taxes go towards underdeveloped systems. Meanwhile, you can simply leave this Republic because they have no ability to stop you and no way to make your life miserable as punishment. You can just make your own trade treaties with other planets and not have to pay any taxes. And if the Republic does get annoyed with you, what are they gonna do? Wag their finger at you?
Matt Swain wrote: Not every planet in the empire is corruscant or alderaan. Planets like tattooine, really wtf would it take to garrison that planet and keep it in line, assuming it's even worth keeping in line?
Of course. But then, if you're not keeping a particular planet in line then its not really part of your empire is it?
Which is somewhat explained as officially Tattooine is controlled by the Hutts, not the Empire or the Republic. And most of the Outer Rim is the same. Its only under Imperial control if they are directly occupying it. But this still leaves far too much of the galactic core woefully under-garrisoned. And its an issue for all of Star Wars really, not just the Galactic Empire.
Really, the canon Imperial forces would have far too much difficulty holding even 10% of the core worlds, let alone mucking around in the Outer Rim as they are always doing. Which leads me to what I have said before. The Star Wars universe is full of complete pansies letting such a woefully incompetent and insufficient Empire hold control over them. And the only reason the Rebellion didn't just steamroll the Empire with numbers is because they are equally incompetent.
The Republic should have collapsed centuries before the Clone wars, or at least been far smaller than it actually was. Without any type of military, or even a galactic police force, they could do nothing to prevent systems from just leaving. The only logical reason for the Republic to exist at all would be to facilitate trade or resolve disputes between individual member planets. But at that point you are a more like an arbitration service than a centralized government, but the movies definitely make it seem like a highly (dis)functional centralized government.
Now presumably the Republic taxes its member planets, but without any means of enforcing those taxes it makes no sense why they didn't just hemorrhage members all the time. Really the 'crisis' of the Separatist rebellion should have been a daily occurrence rather than some shocking development. Clearly there is little benefit to being part of the galactic Republic, but a lot of downsides.
Maybe taxes collected by the Republic could be used to provide weaker members with cash to developing their infrastructure, but this would result in a one-sided situation where wealthier planets would have zero incentive to stay in the Republic. The wealthy planets gain nothing by staying in the Republic, no protection from a powerful military, and all your taxes go towards underdeveloped systems. Meanwhile, you can simply leave this Republic because they have no ability to stop you and no way to make your life miserable as punishment. You can just make your own trade treaties with other planets and not have to pay any taxes. And if the Republic does get annoyed with you, what are they gonna do? Wag their finger at you?
In Star Wars defence, in current canon we’ve only really seen the dying days of the Republic. It was dysfunctional, and hopelessly corrupt. I suspect there’s an argument that Palpatine’s actions did preserve the order the non-Seperatist worlds wanted. And such argument would only be semi-apologist, due to the sheer level of corruption involved.
By that time, you have Trade Federations, Banking clans, and Techno Unions. All smaller groups within the Republic, all pulling in more or less the same direction for their own benefit. So a world or system wanting to go it’s own way would likely struggle, as they’d need to negotiate with those groups directly.
At the risk of lighting the political blue touch paper, one could use the example of the EU and Brexit as a real world example. Brexit shows an EU member state can leave the union. Yet, as Brexit has also shown, doing so isn’t something to be done lightly, as the departing state will then have to come to trade deals with the rest of the world, on its own. So however disgruntled a member might become, it’s still a move to made only after very careful consideration.
Most sci fi also assumes that the galaxy is a far less militarized and actively warlike place than our lovely planet Earth.
Once you imagine a world at peace... how much military does it need? What does it take to overwhelm a planet's militia? That's what scifi numbers require. If a Star Destroyer is bigger and tougher than an entire planetary garrison, then it's plenty to 'conquer' 10 or so star systems all on its own. You drop in, display power, crush local dissidents, perhaps assist the loyalist for a week or two every year, and move on to the next planet, with plenty of time left over for refitting.
Local police forces would maintain order in most Imperial holdings- think about the last time you saw military troops deployed in your hometown. Ultimately, a peaceful society doesn't spend a lot on military, and even a militarized society only spends enough to beat the next biggest guy on the block. The US has 1.3 million troops of all types, which costs us as much as the next 10 countries combined, to combat or oppress a world population of 7.5 billion. Earth is far more militarized and militant than any society imagined in scifi. Spacefaring races demand planetary stability.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Didn’t the Empire hide the construction budgets of two Death Stars, totaling millions of ISDs in material? Seems like they should have more ships.
I'm sure that was part of the outer rim education and greater prosperity budget
Why would the empire "hide" the death star budget? The whole point of the death star was to be a public warning against rebellion. Keeping it secret would make no sense.
In the expanded background admiral thrawn was very opposed to the death star as it's construction would be equal to thousands of star destroyers and millions of fighters. Looks like he was right.
They must have planned to make the death star public, they'd have to have announced making it. a lot of people could have estimated its budget.
Except we have 2 entire movies based around the fact that the Death Star was a huge secret. It was only after Alderan that the Empire went public with it, which backfired a bit when it was destroyed only days later.
Matt Swain wrote: Why would the empire "hide" the death star budget? The whole point of the death star was to be a public warning against rebellion. Keeping it secret would make no sense.
It does while its being built. Keep in mind the plans turned up in Attack of the Clones, so the Death Star construction project is around the same age as Luke and Leia, or a little older. An Imperial project of that magnitude (particularly if anyone had know details about what it was for) would have attracted saboteurs like flies on dung.
Showing it off once its working is one thing, but during construction is asking for trouble. So, super secret is definitely the way to go.
And yes, it is impractical compared to more troops, more fighters, and a larger fleet. But evil villains have been compared to peacocks- they've got an innate desire to shake those tailfeathers and have a measuring contest.
Gitzbitah wrote: Most sci fi also assumes that the galaxy is a far less militarized and actively warlike place than our lovely planet Earth.
Once you imagine a world at peace... how much military does it need? What does it take to overwhelm a planet's militia? That's what scifi numbers require. If a Star Destroyer is bigger and tougher than an entire planetary garrison, then it's plenty to 'conquer' 10 or so star systems all on its own. You drop in, display power, crush local dissidents, perhaps assist the loyalist for a week or two every year, and move on to the next planet, with plenty of time left over for refitting.
Which could work if you're only talking a few hundred planets. The Star Wars galaxy canonically has millions of systems. The Empire has maybe a hundred thousand total ships. There is no way they could have suppression tours with their fleets while also having enough ships to spare for offensive operations.
I suppose one of the biggest issues with Sci-fi is that individual planets tend to get homogenized, as if its really a small town. Instead of an actual freaking planet. Realistically, to conquer any roughly Earth sized and populated planet, you would need millions of soldiers. And even with Naval superiority above the planet it would take decades to pacify the last holdouts of resistance. And as soon as you leave its going to pop up again.
In 40k, the fluff seems pretty set that a full chapter is an extremely powerful military force, with even SM companies handling most missions. The thing is... 40k has smaller scale conflict than you'd imagine. In Codex-Armageddon, it only lists roughly 200 regiments, which shakes out to about a million men. Likewise, it lists about a thousand warbands, defined as 600-3000 orks each, or maybe two million orks. That's on scale with the Battle of Stalingrad. Admittedly, that's one of the largest battles in history, but this is considered an unusually large battle in 40k. The same page lists about 130 space marine companies, which is only 13,000 men compared to the millions of orks or guardsmen. However, even in a battle of a millino men, 13,000 crack soldiers in exactly the right place at the right time can make all the difference.
Star wars is even simpler: blockades. You don't need to conquer every planet, just cut off it's trade, and eventually resistance will collapse.
Sure. But unlike Star Wars, at least 40k has the overall numbers of Imperial Guard regiments to a reasonable amount for a galaxy spanning empire.
Blockades are realistically less useful than you'd think when you are talking about blockading an entire planet. Especially a planet like Naboo where it is a well developed world which also has a rich and productive biosphere. You can't starve such a planet into submission. At worst, the planet becomes forced to revert to their pre-space travel economy. And since any space faring civilization is going to be quite advanced they will still have large domestic markets.
And again, space is huge. Planets are huge. To blockade any planet effectively you need to have enough ships to blanket the entire surface area with enough guns to make escape unlikely. Otherwise, the ships leaving the planet will just leave from an angle you aren't covering, or aren't covering enough to shoot them down before they jump.
Turbolasers seem to have rough canonical ranges of 1000km. Which gives a Star Destroyer a roughly 3,141,592 square kilometer coverage(in one plane). Earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometers.
So in order to cover the entire Earth in barely touching fields of fire, you would need 163 Star Destroyers. Just to ensure you could take at least max range potshots. To make sure you could kill everything that tried to flee? Probably at least double.
Honestly, the Rebels at Hoth could have easily escaped by just leaving from different parts of the planet because the Empire. only. had. 6. Star Destroyers!
Whatever few hundred thousand ships the Empire has would get used up awfully quick when you are trying to control a galaxy made up of millions of systems.
Indeed. Scifi is so bad at numbers. I dont understand why these bits of lore always insist that humans have conquered millions of worlds, its just asking for trouble. Even if you'd have only thousads or 10,000 inhabited worlds, there'd be more than enough scope for the most vibrant varieties of culture, planetary atmospheres etc
Perhaps it was more palatable if no tangible numbers were ever given.
I dont really mind though, Its just some more handwavium, scifi has always been full of it. Trying to impose realism into make-believe will always present an inescapable conceptual paradox.
Yep the Death Star took years to build the first one and was a huge logistical element to amass resources and manpower in that one region to achieve. That they basically managed to finish it entirely and have it fully operational before the Republic was aware and able to counter it is a sign of just how insanely well the secrecy around it was kept.
They had no chance to get spies on board; to sabotage deliveries; sneak on board bombs; delay construction etc... Even its core weakness is a tiny bit of a plot contrivance introduced only in the Rebel One film.
Otherwise its a fantastic achievement for the Empire; a huge mobile space station that's able to destroy whole worlds. Fully staffed, fully supported and operational with a complete logistics chain and everything
Consider that the second Death Star was destroyed during the construction phase where the size of the structure allowed ships to penetrate into the interior and take out the primary generator. The Emperors desire to force combat toward that moment and have the Deathstar act as bait in that moment and have it operational was also its doom. I suspect normal construction would have likely been different (they were clearly rushing to get the main gun online, hence why huge segments of it were still open to space to allow materials and construction ships into the interior.
It was always my impression that the reason they kept it secret was because knowledge of such a horrifying project might unite the remaining supporters of the Republic against them (and in the early days of the Empire they might have enough forces to win).
It's one of the bits that I found really interesting in Rogue One was the in-fighting in the Alliance and the fact that, even then, some of them were trying to use the existence of the Death Star as evidence / diplomatic leverage to try and oust Palpatine through the Senate ("Hopelessly deluded" is I think the phrase...)
The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.
Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.
In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.
Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.
Matt Swain wrote: Why would the empire "hide" the death star budget? The whole point of the death star was to be a public warning against rebellion. Keeping it secret would make no sense.
In the expanded background admiral thrawn was very opposed to the death star as it's construction would be equal to thousands of star destroyers and millions of fighters. Looks like he was right.
They must have planned to make the death star public, they'd have to have announced making it. a lot of people could have estimated its budget.
Why hide the construction? To prevent various parties that had not yet come together into the Rebel Alliance from trying their best to disrupt, delay, and ultimately destroy it BEFORE it gets completed.
Once completed it was supposed to be indestructible, thus proving the Empire had never heard of the Titanic...
Gitzbitah wrote: Most sci fi also assumes that the galaxy is a far less militarized and actively warlike place than our lovely planet Earth.
Once you imagine a world at peace... how much military does it need? What does it take to overwhelm a planet's militia? That's what scifi numbers require. If a Star Destroyer is bigger and tougher than an entire planetary garrison, then it's plenty to 'conquer' 10 or so star systems all on its own. You drop in, display power, crush local dissidents, perhaps assist the loyalist for a week or two every year, and move on to the next planet, with plenty of time left over for refitting.
Which could work if you're only talking a few hundred planets. The Star Wars galaxy canonically has millions of systems. The Empire has maybe a hundred thousand total ships. There is no way they could have suppression tours with their fleets while also having enough ships to spare for offensive operations.
I suppose one of the biggest issues with Sci-fi is that individual planets tend to get homogenized, as if its really a small town. Instead of an actual freaking planet. Realistically, to conquer any roughly Earth sized and populated planet, you would need millions of soldiers. And even with Naval superiority above the planet it would take decades to pacify the last holdouts of resistance. And as soon as you leave its going to pop up again.
No, pacifying holdouts takes mere hours from orbit, especially if you've got millions of other planets to call on for resources. You roll in, take the high orbitals, and issue your terms of surrender. If they don't accept, well, orbital bombardment can strip a planet straight down to bedrock inside a single day. Unless there's something there that's absolutely irreplaceable, a totalitarian state will find it more palatable to destroy such a holdout than waste time rooting them out of various hidey-holes. Where the Rebellion succeeds is in NOT having overt planetary support, allowing them to hide out on nominally loyal IMPERIAL planets.
Not that this saves Alderaan, of course.
The existence of planetary shields does complicate matters, but I would expect those to be too expensive for most planets to have. Naboo, for example, is a reasonably wealthy planet in the mid-rim, but does not have one to stop the Trade Federation from landing troops wherever they wanted.
(Why didn't the Trade Federation just bombard the planet into submission or outright destruction? Good question. Presumably it was avoid blowing the situation up out of their control, but we don't have any evidence to support this.)
One thing to consider in Star Wars is that it has:
1.) Real time communication across the galaxy (holonet)
2.) Ship transit times from system to system varying from hours to weeks at most, not years/decades.
This means you can deploy a small fleet exactly where it needs to be within days of any problem arising, especially if it's near the major trade lanes (for those that don't know, travel time in Star Wars is a factor of how well a route is mapped/updated rather than any limit on the actual speed of the ships).
IOW logistics was easier for the Empire than it would be for the Imperium or Star Trek.
Easy E wrote: The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.
Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.
In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.
Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.
I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.
For me, one of the biggest problems with these Sci-Fi settings that have massive numbers of populated worlds is that each world is its own monolithic culture. Or worse, each race, regardless of how many worlds they control, is a monolithic culture. Just look at how many hundreds of different cultural variations we have on our own planet. But go to any one of these other sci-fi worlds, and everyone has the same religion, the same language, the same food, the same clothes. Unless the culture has been really fleshed out, and then they might have two (or even three!) sub-cultures.
In trying to make space seem vast by filling it with lots of populated planets, sci-fi writers often forget just how big one planet is.
Fantasy often has the same problem. While sometimes there are multiple sub-races of elves, usually there are dozens of human kingdoms and a handful of kingdoms of the other major races. Or none at all, and they're just a minority everywhere (D&D halflings and gnomes usually end up here, plus the inevitable half-races)
Easy E wrote: The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.
Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.
In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.
Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.
I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.
Well, we really only have our Solar System to go off of. If we only look at planets, you have a 1 in 8 (or 9 ) chance of having a useful planet. If we start adding moons and other satellites then the odds get even worse!
Now, let's also look at Star Wars the OT. We see 1 planet of value, and it gets blown up before we know anything about it. Tatooine is a desert, Hoth is a hellscape, Yavin is unlivable, there is an inhabited jungle moon, a small cloud city on a gas giant, etc. We see maybe 1 "earth like" planet out of .... 9 or so? The rest are primitve forest moons, or gas giants, or as you say.... Hellscapes. That doesn't give the Star Wars universe that much better odds than our real solar system of having a good planet worth fighting over.
Well don't forget most of Starwars is focused on fringe worlds. That's where the Empire is weaker and where the rebels are hiding. So yep it makes sense that most of the worlds we see aren't ideal habitable worlds for humans.
That said also remember that there's a huge range of alien lifeforms and as a result the range of habitable worlds is far greater if you account for the whole population of the Empire/Republic.
Easy E wrote: The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.
Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.
In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.
Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.
I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.
Well, we really only have our Solar System to go off of. If we only look at planets, you have a 1 in 8 (or 9 ) chance of having a useful planet. If we start adding moons and other satellites then the odds get even worse!
Now, let's also look at Star Wars the OT. We see 1 planet of value, and it gets blown up before we know anything about it. Tatooine is a desert, Hoth is a hellscape, Yavin is unlivable, there is an inhabited jungle moon, a small cloud city on a gas giant, etc. We see maybe 1 "earth like" planet out of .... 9 or so? The rest are primitve forest moons, or gas giants, or as you say.... Hellscapes. That doesn't give the Star Wars universe that much better odds than our real solar system of having a good planet worth fighting over.
No, that's a logic problem. You're looking at a stacked sample (chosen for distinctive filming locations and lack of extraneous people) and concluding that the setting is built using that as some sort of numeric average.
The planets we don't see (but get referenced) are very different. When they talk about worlds in star wars, they're not talking about the local equivalent of Mercury or Venus, they talk about inhabited places.
I guess the empire never thought of anyone just building a destroyer class ship thart was just one long gun meant to do noting but drop out of hyperspace and kill the deathstar.
of course if we accept TLJ then all you need to do is ram the deathstar with a ship loaded with bombs doing a hyyperjump...
Matt Swain wrote: I guess the empire never thought of anyone just building a destroyer class ship thart was just one long gun meant to do noting but drop out of hyperspace and kill the deathstar.
of course if we accept TLJ then all you need to do is ram the deathstar with a ship loaded with bombs doing a hyyperjump...
The Raddus was able to do that due to advanced shielding, essentially turning it into a hyperspace Lightsaber equivalent.]
Once completed it was supposed to be indestructible, thus proving the Empire had never heard of the Titanic...
In all fairness the Titanic's demise is in the Empire's future.
It’s more the risk/reward/punishment balance.
Ultimately, the Death Star(s) are the ultimate sanction. A galaxy controlling Nuke. To really mix my metaphors, and to quote Tony Stark? Find an excuse to let one of these off the chain, and I guarantee you the bad guys won’t want to come out of their caves”.
We see this is in the decision to knack Alderaan. As a planet, it hadn’t done anything particularly wrong. Though it’s Senator had. It was a statement of intent.
Had the Rebels failed? It would’ve become the ultimate power in the galaxy. Because sure, you could attack it. But if that attack fails in anyway? The consequences would be dire. The ISB would eventually find out who was responsible, and that would be it for their home planet/s.
Exactly and destroying a world like Alderon as basically a public weapons test is a massive display of not just firepower, but the Empires willingness to use the weapon.
The Emperor has his finger on the button and he's willing to press it.
I would wager his next move after dissolving the Republic system, would be to ensure that not only he held the most powerful weapon, but that the different system rulers would be encouraged to fight each other for prestige and power. Ergo if any rose to any degree of power, he'd ensure others would rise to challenge them. Civil war on the small scale to basically ensure that no other force could raise resources sufficient to challenge him and to eventually end up rather like the Emperor in Dune - ruling over multiple other power bodies, who are all too busy fighting each other for scraps to ever amount to a serious threat.
Given Palpatine was a master manipulator, one suspects he had multiple outcomes planned for.
Certainly, I for one am satisfied the second Death Star was under construction before the first was destroyed. If I’m right there (entirely possible there’s background I’m not aware of to confirm I’m wrong), then he was never going to stop at just two, was he? One per sector may well have been the aim.
Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote: Given Palpatine was a master manipulator, one suspects he had multiple outcomes planned for.
Certainly, I for one am satisfied the second Death Star was under construction before the first was destroyed. If I’m right there (entirely possible there’s background I’m not aware of to confirm I’m wrong), then he was never going to stop at just two, was he? One per sector may well have been the aim.
Lots of possibilities there.
In theory the only weakness is logistics. Actual manning and building on a galactic scale isn't the issue for building multiple Deathstars. The real limit is resources for keeping them going. Maintenance, food, water, energy as well as things like waste disposal etc...
Basically as long as he can supply then he can basically keep building them. Heck it wouldn't surprise me if he'd have built several and then built a series of planet killer space ships. The idea being the Deathstars are the show-boat; whilst the planet killer ships are basically the main gun and engines. A stripped down crew and resources so that it requires very little to keep operating; but can be deployed quickly. The kind of thing you hit no-name worlds with or use to hit multiple worlds at once. It's not as showy, but its a more practical use of force.
True. And I guess even showing you’re willing and capable of building additional is quite the statement of intent as well. Akin to “even if you take away my toy, I’ll just get a new one, because powerful as this is, it is not the only string to my bow”.
I’d say the crucial mistake Palpatine made was dissolving the Senate before recovering the Death Star plans. With the body politic to muck about with, he’d at least provide the semblance of a non-violent opposition route, something he could tie up for however long was necessary to get the second up and running.
If he'd kept to the shadows he could have ruled in secret for generations simply having a puppet Emperor in the seat of power each time. Essentially replaying the same tricks he did during the Clone Wars and the run up to them over and over again.
Keep a hidden loyal core of clone warriors all to himself for emergancies and then simply have agents doing his will. Even if they stepped out of line he'd have others to take their place. A continual shift of power that keeps forces like the Jedi from ever rising again and yet at the same time has no fear of rebellion
Sadly, pretty sure his Ego is like a certain person who may or may not be Prime Minister, and so simply cannot contemplate someone else getting credit for something they themself may or may not have played a role in
In theory the only weakness is logistics. Actual manning and building on a galactic scale isn't the issue for building multiple Deathstars. The real limit is resources for keeping them going. Maintenance, food, water, energy as well as things like waste disposal etc...
Well, the Death Stars obviously have no shortage of energy supplies, so food, water and waste recycling isn't an issue. Maintenance, OTOH, is nightmarish. It's a first generation prototype of a new military technology (rare in the Star Wars setting as technology is basically mature and stable). But the Death Star can certainly support a lot of maintenance personnel!
Matt Swain wrote: I guess the empire never thought of anyone just building a destroyer class ship thart was just one long gun meant to do noting but drop out of hyperspace and kill the deathstar.
of course if we accept TLJ then all you need to do is ram the deathstar with a ship loaded with bombs doing a hyyperjump...
The Raddus was able to do that due to advanced shielding, essentially turning it into a hyperspace Lightsaber equivalent.]
It may be daft, but it remains an explanation
What do shields have to do with a hyperspace jump? The base YT-1300 has a x2 hyperdrive and NO shields. Non sequitur.
It's a dumb idea for Star Wars. It invalidates the defenses of every single large ship, from the ISD on up to the second Death Star. It invalidates the whole point of the Death Stars and Starkiller Base. Done once, it can and will be done again, and SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE WELL BEFORE THIS since galactic history goes back thousands of years. Don't give me any 'million to one shot' BS; that's a cop-out.
Everyone gets all upset about the Holdo maneuver, but ignores that its been present in Star Wars canon/legends for ages. In Season 1 Episode 4 of The Clone Wars (canon) R2 sabotages the Malevolence so that it will launch into hyperspace on a collision course with a planet (literally exactly what Holdo does, just substitute a planet with a warship). The collision causes a massive blinding explosion, we don't see the extent of the damage to the planet, but the magnitude of the explosion (and the screen shake implying that the distant republic fleet can somehow feel the impact despite being in the airless vacuum of space) implies some pretty dramatic damage resulting from the collision, likely comparable to (or far in excess of) what occurred when the Raddus collided with the Supremacy.
This was actually pretty deliberately written this way for the exact purpose of showing a hyperspace collision. In a make of feature Henry Gilroy said:
"The idea being that we haven't seen a ship smash into a planet at the speed of light or in hyperspace, so this was the opportunity to show it, and what better ship than the Malevolence?"
And that wasn't even the first time such an event was depicted. It was a semi-recurring thing in pre-Disney Star Wars fiction.
In "Galaxy of Intrigue", a Star Wars RPG product form WOTC released in 2010, discusses how a hyperspace collision could have devestating results on inhabited planets and that there was know real defense for it. Specifically citing that a planet like Coruscant would see millions of lives lost in such an event, even if the planetary shields were active.
In Legends, there exists the story of the Republic warship Quaestor which suffered a malfunction and collided with the Separatist world of Pammant and fractured the planet to its core. This appears in a number of sources, including "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Incredible Cross-Sections" (i.e. a book that was released as a tie-in product to the film release), "Star Wars: Complete Cross-Sections", "The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia", and "The Essential Guide to Warfare".
Then there was the Shawken Device - a superweapon from comics published in the 80s. It was designed to destroy the planet Shawken and launch the planetary fragments into hyperspace to collide with other worlds in such a manner that would fracture them as well and cause the ejecta to also get launched into hyperspace, creating a chain reaction intended to destroy the entire galaxy (actually IIRC the dude wanted to destroy the universe with the expectation that everything would be pulverized to the point that a new universe would form).
In another 80s era comic strip, an Imperial Admiral by the name of Griff is trying to capture escaping Rebels, he orders three Star Destroyers (including his own) into hyperspace after them - all three of them collide with the Executor (yes, that Executor) when they exit hyperspace right into the Executors shields. The Executors shields are knocked out by the collision but otherwise suffers no damage.
I can recall a few other times I've seen hyperspace ramming/collisions referenced though I can't point to any specific examples.
And of course, its been long established in Star Wars lore what the risks of hyperspace collisions are and why hyperdrives had built in failsafes to prevent mass-shadow collisions - failsafes which presumably could be overwritten.
And all of that goes back to one line in A New Hope:
"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
The implication being that yes, in fact, objects flying into/out of/through hyperspace can collide with other objects in the real world.
So you can hate TLJ all you want, but this is stuff thats been in Star Wars for literal decades. It says more about you that you're overlooking that than it does about Rian Johnson for incorporating it.
As for why it wasn't done in the past, I think the explanation is pretty simple - its expensive. Look, the Raddus was a 2 mile long warship - the collision with the Supremacy can be assumed to be a lucky hit, with the understanding that the collision didn't actually destroy the Supremacy, merely clipped its wing off from the rest of it (the ship was later scuttled by the First Order as it was deemed a lost cause to try to repair it). A number of the escorting Star Destroyers were destroyed, sure, but that was from the debris caused by the collision, not by the hyperspace ram itself.
Its unreasonable to assume, assuming the Rebellion had access to a ship of that size, that such a collision would have destroyed either Death Star - vessels which were many times more massive than the Supremacy itself. Its unreasonable to assume that such a vessel would destroy a planet (the only example we have of that is the case of the Quaestor, its possible Pammant was a smaller planet, or the Quaestor was traveling at full speed through hyperspace which translated to more kinetic energy, etc.). The Star Wars RPG makes it pretty clear that a hyperspace collision would only kill millions... on a planet with a population measured in the trillions.
Could hyperspace ramming do some damage? Sure. But would that damage be worth it? Probably not. The utility of an intact warship is clearly far greater - not just in the ability to transport troops, materiel, and starfighters, but also in its reusability. An Imperial Star Destroyer, about half the length of the Raddus (and thanks to the square cube law I would guess about a quarter of the mass), is capable of sterilizing an entire planet with its turbolasers (its called "base delta zero", its a sustainted planetary bombardment capable of turning the entirety of a worlds upper crust into molten slag). Thats one star destroyer able to do that - even assuming that an ISD was a suitably sized mass to be weaponized as a meaningful hyperspace ram (probably not) against a target - why would you want to? You can only pop a single target with it as a hyperspace ram, whereas if you just wanted to go around doing the whole base delta zero thing, that one ISD is good for how many planets and warships destroyed?
Real world kamikaze attacks are very effective, but not often used due to a) they’re actually very costly in terms of material for that effectiveness and b) you have to have people willing to commit suicide. I never understood the big controversy around that scene, I always took it as just difficult to achieve and only effective in certain situations (I.e. no other option). I think the arrogance of the First Order also contributes to it’s success, by getting to point blank range in close formation, making themselves much easier to hit.
So if it's a canon manoeuvr that is well known in the background, why hasn't it been weaponized? If all you need to do is strap a guidance module to a hyper drive to make the ultimate capital ship killer missile, it rather invalidates the usefulness of capital ships.
Well probably because if you keep throwing away you hyperdrives and space ships you'll run out of ships.
There's also the issue of the Empire having far more resources to work with, they can afford to lose quite a lot of capital ships and still build more to replace them. For the Rebels every ship is important. Why throw away a ship to take out one enemy ship when that ship might combine with others to take out multiple enemy ships.
There's also the fact that the Empire has put its stock into larger craft rather than fighter craft; if the Empire started losing large ships en-mass the Rebels would lose their fighter advantage as you'd expect to see the Empire put more and more resources into better fighters - we actually see this in Return of the Jedi with the interceptor class tie-fighters.
Flinty wrote: So if it's a canon manoeuvr that is well known in the background, why hasn't it been weaponized? If all you need to do is strap a guidance module to a hyper drive to make the ultimate capital ship killer missile, it rather invalidates the usefulness of capital ships.
Because, presumably, its a function of the hyperspace projectiles mass. Again, all the above examples of hyperspace rams are ships 3-4km long, you're probably not going to kill a capital ship with something smaller. Then on top of that theres the whole aiming bit. Its a lot easier to hit a planet (most of the examples we have) than it is a capital ship - the capital ship in question just happened to be particularly large. Its presumably a factor of mass shadows, if it has enough mass to create one in hyperspace then it can presumably be hit - it would seem that smaller vessels (by which I mean anything smaller than say an Executor-class SSD) do not have sufficient mass to create a mass shadow and thus cannot be hit.
You also have to hit the target in question - most of the examples we have are of objects hitting planets, planets are pretty big, even the Death Stars are tiny by comparison (as is Star Killer base), though it would probably qualify as a small planetoid). Most of the impacts occur during hyperphase transit, we have one example of a collision when an object exits hyperspace (three 1.6km long star destroyers hit the executor, the executor survives without damage because of its shields), and in the case of Holdo the collision occured while accelerating into hyperspace. In the case of those first two examples, it would be really hard to weaponize it against vessels, because you would have to enter hyperspace from lightyears away and would essentially be flying blind with regards to their position - while you're in hyperspace you have no means of detecting or tracking their position in the real world (and their mass shadows are irrelevant in size anyway). The only reason the Executor was hit was because it was accidentally hanging out at the exact coordinates that the ISDs were jumping to .You might be able to hit something like the Death Star provided you know its position and it doesn't move, but given that it seems to spend most of its time in orbit around a planet you're going to have a tough time hitting the station instead of the planet.
The reason Holdo could hit the Supremacy was because she jumped into it from however many dozens of km away (and even then the chance of a successful hit was said to be 1 in 1 million). In practical terms, this would be useless, because you would have to bring your km long hyperspace projectile onto the battlefield with you, hope it doesn't get destroyed by enemy fire in the process of aiming it, and then hope that your well aimed shot succeeds in its .000001% probability of hitting its target.
The problem with declaring Hyperspace ramming as a one in a million shot is it was done a second time in RoS, with devastating visual effects able to be seen from the surface of a world. Its clearly something that can be done, multiple times, with much higher probability. Functionally speaking as well, the SW universe does have accurate tracking information for ships to be able to safely jump into hyperspace, which means you can still make it more precise to hit a target with a near instantaneous projectile.
It's just bad writing without thought to logical consequences. This is why Star Wars, Star Trek and 40k aren't hard sci-fi, because hard sci fi is all about logical consequences of fictional tech.
Jadenim wrote: Real world kamikaze attacks are very effective, but not often used due to a) they’re actually very costly in terms of material for that effectiveness and b) you have to have people willing to commit suicide. I never understood the big controversy around that scene, I always took it as just difficult to achieve and only effective in certain situations (I.e. no other option). I think the arrogance of the First Order also contributes to it’s success, by getting to point blank range in close formation, making themselves much easier to hit.
In real life we build missiles—kamikaze aircraft without pilots that are actually cost effective. In ESB, we saw the Empire use hundreds (probably more like millions) of disposable, pilotless hyper drives to deliver probe droids. Hyper-ram missiles should be standard equipment if price were the reason fleets refused to use hyperramming against hard targets.
For F’s sake, the Death Star would have been the one scenario that would justify kamikazeing a whole fleet, and they didn’t even try it once. Either everyone in the OT is unbelievable stupid, or TLJ’s one use of this tactic is bs. I know which explanation I prefer.
Mass is easy. Strap.a hyperdrive to an asteroid. If Thrawn can use asteroids and cloaking devices to besiege Coruscant, then they should be easily used as pre existing mass for ship killer missiles. And for a military engagement, you dont need to blow something up entirely to.make it combat ineffective.
Given that you can apparently find a perfectly usable.hyperdrive for quite a large ship in a scrap.yard in the arsiest end of beyond, the propulsion would appear not to be the bottleneck.
Guidance wise, droids or even suicide.pilots would work just as well. Clones bred solely for the purpose.
AegisFate wrote: The problem with declaring Hyperspace ramming as a one in a million shot is it was done a second time in RoS, with devastating visual effects able to be seen from the surface of a world. Its clearly something that can be done, multiple times, with much higher probability. Functionally speaking as well, the SW universe does have accurate tracking information for ships to be able to safely jump into hyperspace, which means you can still make it more precise to hit a target with a near instantaneous projectile.
Its pure fan conjecture that it was a holdo maneuver shot over Endor. Give it a couple years and there will no doubt be an alternative canon explanation of what cut that star destroyer in half.
In real life we build missiles—kamikaze aircraft without pilots that are actually cost effective. In ESB, we saw the Empire use hundreds (probably more like millions) of disposable, pilotless hyper drives to deliver probe droids. Hyper-ram missiles should be standard equipment if price were the reason fleets refused to use hyperramming against hard targets.
I mean, in real life kamikaze aircraft really weren't all that effective a weapon system. Their psychological impact was more severe than the physical impact. Japanese claims would have you indicate that the damage done to US Naval vessels was catastrophic and responsible for like 80% of US wartime naval losses in the pacific or something. "Officially", according to the US military, "approximately 2,800 Kamikaze attackers sank 34 Navy ships, damaged 368 others, killed 4,900 sailors, and wounded over 4,800. Despite radar detection and cuing, airborne interception, attrition, and massive anti-aircraft barrages, 14 percent of Kamikazes survived to score a hit on a ship; nearly 8.5 percent of all ships hit by Kamikazes sank." With regards to that last sentence its important to understand that just because a ship was sunk after being hit by a kamikaze attack, doesn't mean that the ship sunk *because* of the kamikaze attack.This data doesn't include the kamikaze attacks that failed to reach targets or which were utilized against other targets - in total Japan lost 3,912 kamikaze pilots and aircraft in attack vs the 2800 that the US Navy recorded. By comparison, Japans conventional aerial attacks against US Navy vessels had a much better ratio in Japans favor than the kamikaze attacks did.
As for hyperspace missiles - the Galaxy Gun (amongst others) exists - but the warheads they packed were apparently much more damaging than what they could achieve by just ramming the planet, as they were capable of outright disintegrating the planet to its constituent molecules and thus dropped into realspace before collision.
For F’s sake, the Death Star would have been the one scenario that would justify kamikazeing a whole fleet, and they didn’t even try it once. Either everyone in the OT is unbelievable stupid, or TLJ’s one use of this tactic is bs. I know which explanation I prefer.
But the Rebellion apparently didn't have a whole fleet. In fact, Rogue One basically shows us that most of the Rebel fleet that existed at the time was captured or destroyed at Scarif just a few days before the Battle of Yavin. At this point you're looking for fictional problems that don't exist and ignoring the fictional realities that justify events happening the way they did.
Mass is easy. Strap.a hyperdrive to an asteroid. If Thrawn can use asteroids and cloaking devices to besiege Coruscant, then they should be easily used as pre existing mass for ship killer missiles. And for a military engagement, you dont need to blow something up entirely to.make it combat ineffective.
Given that you can apparently find a perfectly usable.hyperdrive for quite a large ship in a scrap.yard in the arsiest end of beyond, the propulsion would appear not to be the bottleneck.
The Naboo starship wasn't really all that large, being only about the size of the Falcon. Again, all the successful hyperspace rams out there involved a 3km+ long vessel, so its pretty clear that something the size of the Millennium Falcon probably wouldn't cut it. And your asteroid suggestion is cute, theres plenty of big 'uns out there that they could take advantage of - theres just one problem: you still need power to actually get the hyperdrive to do its thing. Its fair to assume that the power requirements, as well as the necessary size and cost of the hyperdrive, correlate directly to the mass of the object in question. So even strapping a hyperdrive and the necessary fusion powerplant to an asteroid is still going to be a pretty expensive operation.
Guidance wise, droids or even suicide.pilots would work just as well. Clones bred solely for the purpose.
Thats not how hyperspace works. You're not going to guide anything into any target at superluminal velocities. You're aiming at a fixed point in space before you even activate your hyperdrive, maybe accounting for orbital drift or other variations in movement, etc. and then hoping the object is still where you think it is when you get there. Unless you mean guidance as a battlefield weapon, in which case you still come into the problem that you've invested a lot of time, money, and resources to outfit an asteroid with a hyperdrive, powerplant, and guidance system in order to get you a .000001% probability of actually hitting a target while it jumps to lightspeed. Not really cost effective at all to say the least - and as we've established, its entirely possible that vessels below a certain mass threshold simply can't be hit in such a manner (i.e. your hyper-rock is useless against 99% of the warships in existence and is only really viable against targets in excess of an Executor-class in mass).
Flinty wrote: Mass is easy. Strap.a hyperdrive to an asteroid.
Not even that.
Just make a missile around the size of a regular fighter. Put a cheapo class 7-8 hyperdrive in it along with some method of triggering it remotely. Put a ton or so of iron in the nose as the "payload". Have some basic maneuvering thrusters. Now make a few hundred of them. When you attack something, all you gotta do is remotely pilot it till its pointing directly at a target and then activate the hyperdrive, using the thrusters to keep it aligned till the hyperdrive activates.
Even a poor quality hyperdrive is going to accelerate a 1 ton payload to devastating speed. Even if we say that a class 8 hyperdrive only comes out at 1/2 the speed of light, a 1 ton payload is still going to impart roughly 6,317,523,806,110 megajoules on impact.
Its certainly not the Raddus, but that is going to seriously damage anything it hits. And you've got plenty of them.
Given that space ships are about as common as pickup trucks, getting a bunch of throw away hyper drives would not be an issue.
chaos0xomega wrote: Could hyperspace ramming do some damage? Sure. But would that damage be worth it? Probably not. The utility of an intact warship is clearly far greater - not just in the ability to transport troops, materiel, and starfighters, but also in its reusability. An Imperial Star Destroyer, about half the length of the Raddus (and thanks to the square cube law I would guess about a quarter of the mass), is capable of sterilizing an entire planet with its turbolasers (its called "base delta zero", its a sustainted planetary bombardment capable of turning the entirety of a worlds upper crust into molten slag). Thats one star destroyer able to do that - even assuming that an ISD was a suitably sized mass to be weaponized as a meaningful hyperspace ram (probably not) against a target - why would you want to? You can only pop a single target with it as a hyperspace ram, whereas if you just wanted to go around doing the whole base delta zero thing, that one ISD is good for how many planets and warships destroyed?
Even in Star Wars, E= MCsquared. Load a GR-75 with rocks and at lightspeed it'll have enough energy to melt the entire Death Star into slag.
Vulcan wrote: Even in Star Wars, E= MCsquared. Load a GR-75 with rocks and at lightspeed it'll have enough energy to melt the entire Death Star into slag.
Not quite, as if that was true FTL (at least how it is shown in Star Wars) would be impossible.
That's why most sci-fi settings have alternate universes or dimensions as shortcuts for FTL, because realspace FTL kinda breaks physics. And even with shortcuts, you run into the issue that FTL is time travel, but everyone ignores that (except the Xeeleeverse) so we can say that relativity (which includes E=MCsquared) isn't truly a thing in Star Wars, or most sci-fi settings for that matter.
BTW, a rock (or an hydrogen atom for that matter) at lightspeed wouldn't just melt the Death Star, it would break the universe*, because anything at lighspeed has infinite kinetic energy.
*If we want to be even more technical, the universe would still expand faster than the released energy (which is still shackled by lightspeed), so it wouldn't truly end the universe.
Overread wrote: Well probably because if you keep throwing away you hyperdrives and space ships you'll run out of ships.
In theory. In practice we've seen huge areas (and even entire planets) with junked ships. Scavenging crap is good enough for this kind of purpose, as long as it can go in a straight line and hit 'minimum' light speed in the weird star wars classification of hyperdrive ratings.
Even without that, the sheer number of ships wandering around the SW universe is astronomical in its own right. There doesn't seem to be an Unobtainium limit on cranking things out. Especially given the completely nonsense numbers of First Order ships (not to mention the ships that RoS simply handwaves into existence).
Hyperspeed had two explanations before Disneywars: Hyperspace is an alternate dimension (in which case hyperramming shouldn’t work) and, after Saxton’s canon ICS books, Hpwrspace as the tachyon of version of the universe, where mass is transformed into tachyonic mass (in which case hyperramming shouldn’t work).
Also, ignoring your huge block of text, if the Rebels had no fleet after Scarif (as opposed to having a dispersed fleet that couldn’t be Hosnian Primed), they sure manages to gather forces quickly, lending credence to the idea that hyper-capable ships are cheap and plentiful (which we knew). For all the words, they still boil down to an ineffectual attempt to argue away how hyperramming makes sense in a universe already established around a set of rules that exclude it.
We’ve never seen a hyperdrive set to “still” or destination=departure point, so if some wiseass put that in the next movie to, make the movie happen easier create a hyperspace shockwave that polarized the inverters and kept fleeing rebel fleets from escaping via hyperdrive, that would be cool? You wouldn’t have a problem bullshitting that into the setting like it wouldn’t instantly imply the OT characters were morons?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and if you think my only problem is with TLJ, you haven’t heard me go off on the just-as-stupid “hyper under the shields” bs from TFA. Add in hyperskipping and each ST movie breaks the setting in its own way.
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Hyperspeed had two explanations before Disneywars: Hyperspace is an alternate dimension (in which case hyperramming shouldn’t work) and, after Saxton’s canon ICS books, Hpwrspace as the tachyon of version of the universe, where mass is transformed into tachyonic mass (in which case hyperramming shouldn’t work).
Pretty sure one of those explanations made it explicitly impossible to 'fly right through a star, or bounce too close to a super-nova' either, but taking the time to explain the system in any level of detail is going to be rife with pitfalls.
Personally I would have preferred they ditch the idea of hyperspace ramming when they split legends off of canon, (have the Holdo maneuver work because the hyperspace tracking tech meant the Supremacy was partially in hyperspace at all times or something) but the inmates are still running the asylum at Lucasfilm despite what the Disney haters say.
We’ve never seen a hyperdrive set to “still” or destination=departure point, so if some wiseass put that in the next movie to, make the movie happen easier create a hyperspace shockwave that polarized the inverters and kept fleeing rebel fleets from escaping via hyperdrive, that would be cool? You wouldn’t have a problem bullshitting that into the setting like it wouldn’t instantly imply the OT characters were morons?
The interdictor is still canon: it has to work somehow!
Could we go back to making fun of other series' weird logistic stuff? How many times has the Enterprise been the only ship between earth and the Klingon border?
BobtheInquisitor wrote: Hyperspeed had two explanations before Disneywars: Hyperspace is an alternate dimension (in which case hyperramming shouldn’t work) and, after Saxton’s canon ICS books, Hpwrspace as the tachyon of version of the universe, where mass is transformed into tachyonic mass (in which case hyperramming shouldn’t work).
The only explanation that actually works (except scientifically) is what Lucas put forward in the original film: Hyperspeed just means 'superfast' and the details are sort of vaguely handwaved. It consistent with both Lucas' and Abrams' ignorance of time, distance and basic units of measurement, and works with Johnson's stupid hyperram. It also works with the OT's need to navigate around obstacles. And its also consistent with Lucas' belief that going between two different solar systems without lightspeed is possible over the course of days rather than decades.
The only thing it doesn't work with is Abrams dumb idea that its possible to pass through shields at light speed but also decelerate safely between the shield and the planet. But that's his complete and utter ignorance of time, distance and the physical universe cropping up again. Which is also how we also somehow get light speed megalasers that are nigh-instantaneous and can be seen from the surface of other planets with the naked eye.
The Enterprise being the only ship near Earth can only be explained by psychotic admirals or malevolent superbeings. Fortunately, the setting has provided plenty of both.
The best explanation for Trek inconsistencies comes from the Department of Temporal Investigations books (and The Buried Age by the same author, sort of): space/subspace is unstable, there are constantly small temporal events and countless branching timelines that reconverge with the main timeline in messy ways. For example, Khan Noonien Singh exists in a branch caused by time travel, yet he exists in Kirk’s past, just as we do, without existing in our universe. Due to the sheer amount of time f—ery, there are lots of inconsistencies in cause and effect for any individual observer, and they may differ for each observer.
Easy E wrote: The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.
Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.
In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.
Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.
I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.
Well, we really only have our Solar System to go off of. If we only look at planets, you have a 1 in 8 (or 9 ) chance of having a useful planet. If we start adding moons and other satellites then the odds get even worse!
Now, let's also look at Star Wars the OT. We see 1 planet of value, and it gets blown up before we know anything about it. Tatooine is a desert, Hoth is a hellscape, Yavin is unlivable, there is an inhabited jungle moon, a small cloud city on a gas giant, etc. We see maybe 1 "earth like" planet out of .... 9 or so? The rest are primitve forest moons, or gas giants, or as you say.... Hellscapes. That doesn't give the Star Wars universe that much better odds than our real solar system of having a good planet worth fighting over.
No, that's a logic problem. You're looking at a stacked sample (chosen for distinctive filming locations and lack of extraneous people) and concluding that the setting is built using that as some sort of numeric average.
The planets we don't see (but get referenced) are very different. When they talk about worlds in star wars, they're not talking about the local equivalent of Mercury or Venus, they talk about inhabited places.
Easy E wrote: The dirty secret of 40K and Star Wars is that there really are not that many worlds of the "Millions" that have a population of any size.
Taros is a great example. That was a "world" but it was a small mining world with a breathable atmosphere and limited water. The population was not large.
In addition, there are many "worlds" in these galaxies that are more like Venus and Mars with very small colonial populations and not much in the way of good press.
Therefore, worlds like Armageddon, Coruscant, Necromunda, and Corelia are the exception and not the rule. Most of the planet's in these "Galactic Empires" are just useless rocks. Therefore, you don't need anything to garrison or repress those. If they are not useless rocks, then they have smaller populations than Earth does.
I'm not sure that's actually true in Star Wars (In 40k its kind of a crap shoot). The Republic was a galactic entity for thousands of years- we really only see the tail end of it in the films.
There isn't anything at all to indicate that 'most' worlds are useless rocks- in theory a great many of them have signficant populations and are functionally Earthlike- populated and with their own rich histories, presumably going back even further. We don't see much of those worlds (pretty much every planet in the OT is a hellscape of one variety or other, barring the Yavin and Endor moons), but the avalanche of expanded material points to tens of thousands of 'Earths' if not more.
Well, we really only have our Solar System to go off of. If we only look at planets, you have a 1 in 8 (or 9 ) chance of having a useful planet. If we start adding moons and other satellites then the odds get even worse!
Now, let's also look at Star Wars the OT. We see 1 planet of value, and it gets blown up before we know anything about it. Tatooine is a desert, Hoth is a hellscape, Yavin is unlivable, there is an inhabited jungle moon, a small cloud city on a gas giant, etc. We see maybe 1 "earth like" planet out of .... 9 or so? The rest are primitve forest moons, or gas giants, or as you say.... Hellscapes. That doesn't give the Star Wars universe that much better odds than our real solar system of having a good planet worth fighting over.
No, that's a logic problem. You're looking at a stacked sample (chosen for distinctive filming locations and lack of extraneous people) and concluding that the setting is built using that as some sort of numeric average.
The planets we don't see (but get referenced) are very different. When they talk about worlds in star wars, they're not talking about the local equivalent of Mercury or Venus, they talk about inhabited places.
Well then go back to my original point. SciFi doesn't have a problem with numbers. The fans do.
Erm. I'm not sure 'the fans' are the ones with this specific problem.
I can't think of many fan complaints about new worlds in the Disney trilogy (some that new desert planet isn't distinguishable from Tattooine, perhaps) or the impossibility of controlling planets.
I shrug, in part because an iconic scene of the OT is the smallest ship in the Rebel arsenal taking down the biggest ship we've ever seen by ramming into the bridge. The fact people accept the silly technical explanations for how that worked entertains me to no end. Very few iconic moments in the franchise care about the "rules" mostly because I don't think a single movie was written being aware they exist.
Vulcan wrote: Even in Star Wars, E= MCsquared. Load a GR-75 with rocks and at lightspeed it'll have enough energy to melt the entire Death Star into slag.
Not quite, as if that was true FTL (at least how it is shown in Star Wars) would be impossible.
That's why most sci-fi settings have alternate universes or dimensions as shortcuts for FTL, because realspace FTL kinda breaks physics. And even with shortcuts, you run into the issue that FTL is time travel, but everyone ignores that (except the Xeeleeverse) so we can say that relativity (which includes E=MCsquared) isn't truly a thing in Star Wars, or most sci-fi settings for that matter.
BTW, a rock (or an hydrogen atom for that matter) at lightspeed wouldn't just melt the Death Star, it would break the universe*, because anything at lighspeed has infinite kinetic energy.
*If we want to be even more technical, the universe would still expand faster than the released energy (which is still shackled by lightspeed), so it wouldn't truly end the universe.
Except now we've seen it done in TLJ, so in SW it clearly IS possible.
Now I agree with you, PROR to TLJ I just assumed that lightspeed happened in an alternate dimension and the catastrophic effect of a mass shadow on a ship in this alternate lightspeed dimension was limited to the ship itself. That just made the Holdo Maneuver even more surprising - and silly - in my eyes,
Gravity Well Projectors, which allow it the mass shadow of a planet.
As to how they work? Pass.
How do they generate the mass shadow, or how does the mass shadow keep hyperdrives from working?
I'd always assumed a ship traveling in SW lightspeed would hit a mass shadow and, due to it's speed, experience the gravity of that mass shadow in a similar way to a normal-space ship experiences the gravity well of a black hole. In short, spaghettification (and somehow, that word actually IS in the spell-checker!) and destruction on a molecular level.
My point was that you cannot use relativity because Star Wars, TLJ included, is not using relativity. My point is that E=MCsquared is not a thing in Star Wars.
I’ve always assumed Gravity Well Projectors work by triggering Hyperspace Failsafes. They mimic the granitic mass of a planetary body, so the HF kicks in.
From there, good old shock and awe, as one assumes bypassing HF takes time to arrange, and isn’t something someone is just gonna fly around without day to day.
Tyran wrote: My point was that you cannot use relativity because Star Wars, TLJ included, is not using relativity. My point is that E=MCsquared is not a thing in Star Wars.
Okay, then F=ma. Given the rate of acceleration ships have going from orbital speeds to hyperspace, that's STILL going to be a huge amount of force on impact.
It seems fairly parsimonious to assume that relativity holds in Star Wars until someone switches on the hyperdrive. Most conceptions of hyperdrive have the ftl ships separate from the universe and unable to interact with matter directly, aside from gravitational effects or neutrino-something-something.
Meanwhile Star Trek has fairly robust explanations for their ftl engines and how they interact with the real world. It helps that “subspace anomalies” and “unpredicTble particle interactions” are baked into the setting to explain away issues.
I forget what it was the other day that was on the tv in the background as I wasnt watching it. Something like Stargate or maybe something else. There was some planet scale disaster going to happen and the numbers someone came out with was "Hundreds of thousands will die". Must have been a pretty small planet.
Dropbear Victim wrote: I forget what it was the other day that was on the tv in the background as I wasnt watching it. Something like Stargate or maybe something else. There was some planet scale disaster going to happen and the numbers someone came out with was "Hundreds of thousands will die". Must have been a pretty small planet.
Might make some sense in Stargate. Lots of planets there don't have planetary populations, just single civilizations located near the gate for plot convenience.
The real number problem in that series is time. Societies can change massively in a mere 100 years. The idea that there are Norse peoples off in space, completely unchanged from 1500 years ago is kind of absurd. Those people would have died out or developed new cultual ideas in 1500 years. Ain't no society going to be locked in a picture perfect replica of the iron age for that long. Of course, if I'm going to critique that I might as well critique the series' entire 'ancient aliens' nonsense but w/e it was a good show!
Has anyone mentioned Karen Travis infamous claim that the Galactic Republic fought a galaxy wide war with a mere 2,000,000 troops? I can complain about Travis all day, but that's the one aspect of her work everyone seems to agree is absolutely silly. No one is fighting a galactic war with 2,000,000 men. A nation state on modern Earth can muster more manpower than that in peace times.
2 million might make sense in a setting where, for logistical reasons, it was difficult to mobilize more troops across a galactic front. Maybe because space ships are expensive so you have very limited shipping capacity. But that results in the problem that any established planet is going to easily outnumber any attacking army with their local forces, meaning offensive wars would be largely impossible. And of course, Star Wars has extremely fast and convenient FTL so logistical concerns aren't much of an issue.
If you have any type of galaxy spanning government with populations in the quadrillions, you're going to need trillions of soldiers and millions of ships just to garrison your military bases, let alone conduct offensive operations.
Gravity Well Projectors, which allow it the mass shadow of a planet.
As to how they work? Pass.
How do they generate the mass shadow, or how does the mass shadow keep hyperdrives from working?
I'd always assumed a ship traveling in SW lightspeed would hit a mass shadow and, due to it's speed, experience the gravity of that mass shadow in a similar way to a normal-space ship experiences the gravity well of a black hole. In short, spaghettification (and somehow, that word actually IS in the spell-checker!) and destruction on a molecular level.
In terms of the effect, every time I've seen them used within books, the mass shadow is described as forcing ships back into realspace - as MDG suggested, I believe this is due to some form of safety system, so you don't plow into unexpected celestial bodies.
Said shadow is also enough to stop you jumping into hyperspace, too, as you (apparently) can't jump from too close to a planet - assuming some hack isn't writing your script, anyway.
Dropbear Victim wrote: I forget what it was the other day that was on the tv in the background as I wasnt watching it. Something like Stargate or maybe something else. There was some planet scale disaster going to happen and the numbers someone came out with was "Hundreds of thousands will die". Must have been a pretty small planet.
Might make some sense in Stargate. Lots of planets there don't have planetary populations, just single civilizations located near the gate for plot convenience.
The real number problem in that series is time. Societies can change massively in a mere 100 years. The idea that there are Norse peoples off in space, completely unchanged from 1500 years ago is kind of absurd. Those people would have died out or developed new cultual ideas in 1500 years. Ain't no society going to be locked in a picture perfect replica of the iron age for that long. Of course, if I'm going to critique that I might as well critique the series' entire 'ancient aliens' nonsense but w/e it was a good show!
Aye, but don't forget the Goul'd had kept control over most of those human settlements and had deliberately kept them primitive and from developing. They only wanted them to survive to act as a source of hosts and for basic resource production. Though I do agree most should have had extensive populations over the world. I think this is again one of those things that is casually mentioned in the earlier series - ergo they are dealing with one settlement of many; and which by the latter series is "assumed" or just totally ignored.
The real anomaly is why the Goul'd didn't just nuke Earth from orbit which is only covered when the Asguard at least appear on scene as Earth's protectors.
In general Stargate's main issue is that its a small format show designed around a small format team and it suffers a lack of budget, scope and story building early on to let them extrapolate easily out toward a bigger setting. They do do this a few times near the end, but its still tricky to keep things going as they are. Honestly by the time you're fending off alien fleets in Earth's orbit and have multiple world governments involved it should have been near impossible to keep it all hush hush. But we accept it for the charm of the series itself. It sort of outgrew its roots.
One small number cock-up that always bothered me was in Halo Reach, as the Covenant are beginning to glass the planet.
"Radiation flare, big! 40 million Roentgens!"
They've just thrown out a big number to sound impressive without knowing how much that is. Regardless of the fact that the Roentgen is considered an outdated unit even today with the Sievert or Gray more commonly used, 500 Roentgens over 5 hours is usually a lethal dose, anything over 1000 and you're 100% guaranteed dead within a couple of days, even with treatment. That's it. To receive 40 million in a single flare, well I can't actually imagine how that would affect someone.
Arguably the best example was the original mass numbers for ships in Fall of Reach, which were so absurdly light the ships were literally lighter than air.
Thankfully that was changed to more realistic numbers with Warfleet.
Gravity Well Projectors, which allow it the mass shadow of a planet.
As to how they work? Pass.
How do they generate the mass shadow, or how does the mass shadow keep hyperdrives from working?
I'd always assumed a ship traveling in SW lightspeed would hit a mass shadow and, due to it's speed, experience the gravity of that mass shadow in a similar way to a normal-space ship experiences the gravity well of a black hole. In short, spaghettification (and somehow, that word actually IS in the spell-checker!) and destruction on a molecular level.
In terms of the effect, every time I've seen them used within books, the mass shadow is described as forcing ships back into realspace - as MDG suggested, I believe this is due to some form of safety system, so you don't plow into unexpected celestial bodies.
Said shadow is also enough to stop you jumping into hyperspace, too, as you (apparently) can't jump from too close to a planet - assuming some hack isn't writing your script, anyway.
Actually, having the safety overrides drop the ship out of hyperspace and refuse to take it back into hyperspace in a gravity well makes that bit make sense. Only a truly magnificent and yet utterly reckless pilot with complete trust in his skills and his ship would dare override those safety features to make that jump even possible.
It's basically a final tribute to just how skilled, confident, and lucky Han Solo actually was, that he was one of the few people in the galaxy who not only coud do it, but actually would do it.
(Of course, this is just rationalizing how something that should not have been possible in universe managed to occur anyway.)
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Valkyrie wrote: One small number cock-up that always bothered me was in Halo Reach, as the Covenant are beginning to glass the planet.
"Radiation flare, big! 40 million Roentgens!"
They've just thrown out a big number to sound impressive without knowing how much that is. Regardless of the fact that the Roentgen is considered an outdated unit even today with the Sievert or Gray more commonly used, 500 Roentgens over 5 hours is usually a lethal dose, anything over 1000 and you're 100% guaranteed dead within a couple of days, even with treatment. That's it. To receive 40 million in a single flare, well I can't actually imagine how that would affect someone.
I think it would give new meaning to someone getting half-baked....
Valkyrie wrote: One small number cock-up that always bothered me was in Halo Reach, as the Covenant are beginning to glass the planet.
"Radiation flare, big! 40 million Roentgens!"
They've just thrown out a big number to sound impressive without knowing how much that is. Regardless of the fact that the Roentgen is considered an outdated unit even today with the Sievert or Gray more commonly used, 500 Roentgens over 5 hours is usually a lethal dose, anything over 1000 and you're 100% guaranteed dead within a couple of days, even with treatment. That's it. To receive 40 million in a single flare, well I can't actually imagine how that would affect someone.
Maybe people went back to Roentgen as a respect to the guy who pioneered radiation research.
Speaking of alternative names to radiation, the us military tried to lable it sunshine units to make ti less scary. This was flatly rejected, scientists outside the military flatly refused to use this unit, as did some members of the military, they just could not swallow that much BS. It died out quickly under a sustained fire of ridicule and rejection.
Valkyrie wrote: One small number cock-up that always bothered me was in Halo Reach, as the Covenant are beginning to glass the planet.
"Radiation flare, big! 40 million Roentgens!"
They've just thrown out a big number to sound impressive without knowing how much that is. Regardless of the fact that the Roentgen is considered an outdated unit even today with the Sievert or Gray more commonly used, 500 Roentgens over 5 hours is usually a lethal dose, anything over 1000 and you're 100% guaranteed dead within a couple of days, even with treatment. That's it. To receive 40 million in a single flare, well I can't actually imagine how that would affect someone.
I mean... there's dosages of radiation that are lethal with medical attention, then there are dosages that will kill you before you notice symptoms, then there are dosages that essentially mean your cells have been converted instantly into an ionized gass and none of them even approach 40,000,000 roentgens.
Valkyrie wrote: One small number cock-up that always bothered me was in Halo Reach, as the Covenant are beginning to glass the planet.
"Radiation flare, big! 40 million Roentgens!"
They've just thrown out a big number to sound impressive without knowing how much that is. Regardless of the fact that the Roentgen is considered an outdated unit even today with the Sievert or Gray more commonly used, 500 Roentgens over 5 hours is usually a lethal dose, anything over 1000 and you're 100% guaranteed dead within a couple of days, even with treatment. That's it. To receive 40 million in a single flare, well I can't actually imagine how that would affect someone.
I mean... there's dosages of radiation that are lethal with medical attention, then there are dosages that will kill you before you notice symptoms, then there are dosages that essentially mean your cells have been converted instantly into an ionized gass and none of them even approach 40,000,000 roentgens.
I dont think its just limited to "problem with numbers", its problems with real-life complexity of systems altogether. Like what happens within a certain timespan and how diverse a signle planet can be in terms of ethnicities, cultures, flora & fauna, and on and on.
Scifi is largely ridiculous when it comes to "realism", and until we use computer models and machine learning to model the backstories, this will be unlikely to change.
I think we are all forgetting that Sci-Fi is a medium for story telling. If it is not relevant to the story, it is kind of irrelevant to the author or creator to write about.
It is the fans who demand the minutia so therefore it is the Fans who have a problem with numbers. They let them get in the way of the story.
Yeah, the radiation thing, if it were measures at the source then yeah, 40 million roentgens is not impossible, but the inverse square law come into play.
Easy E wrote: I think we are all forgetting that Sci-Fi is a medium for story telling. If it is not relevant to the story, it is kind of irrelevant to the author or creator to write about.
It is the fans who demand the minutia so therefore it is the Fans who have a problem with numbers. They let them get in the way of the story.
Of course, any writer needs to realize that they are writing to please their audience. If you are making a sci-fi product, you have to accept that people will want at least somewhat realistic numbers. The more grounded a story, the better it does generally.
Easy E wrote: I think we are all forgetting that Sci-Fi is a medium for story telling. If it is not relevant to the story, it is kind of irrelevant to the author or creator to write about.
It is the fans who demand the minutia so therefore it is the Fans who have a problem with numbers. They let them get in the way of the story.
Of course, any writer needs to realize that they are writing to please their audience. If you are making a sci-fi product, you have to accept that people will want at least somewhat realistic numbers. The more grounded a story, the better it does generally.
Are you sure about that?
Is a writer writing to please the audience or are they writing to please themselves, and the pleasure of the audience is a happy by-product? Many writers I know write because they have to write. Even if there was no audience, they would still be writing.
Hopefully, there is some synergy between the audience desires and the writer's needs, but does there have to be? No. That is for publishers and editors to worry about. Maybe we should be mad at them for not knowing their target audience enough? IDK.... maybe it is all semantics and doesn't even matter?
Writers write for various reasons - though its a tough market to make head way in and thus most writers do so as a side job unless they are lucky enough to either land a landmark series or do contract work for others.
Eg many of the BL writers often write for BL, but also other firms as well.
In general they are thus a market dominated by people who enjoy their craft, however they will run the gauntlet from those who write purely for themselves and any fans are a happy byproduct; through to those who are writing "for the audience" and have a firm grasp over theories and concepts relating to their specific chosen target audience.
And most authors will be dancing somewhere in the middle of those two extreme stances; often with variation between publications - some will be more personal projects others being far more "formula" for the market etc...
Easy E wrote: I think we are all forgetting that Sci-Fi is a medium for story telling. If it is not relevant to the story, it is kind of irrelevant to the author or creator to write about.
It is the fans who demand the minutia so therefore it is the Fans who have a problem with numbers. They let them get in the way of the story.
Of course, any writer needs to realize that they are writing to please their audience. If you are making a sci-fi product, you have to accept that people will want at least somewhat realistic numbers. The more grounded a story, the better it does generally.
Are you sure about that?
Is a writer writing to please the audience or are they writing to please themselves, and the pleasure of the audience is a happy by-product? Many writers I know write because they have to write. Even if there was no audience, they would still be writing.
Hopefully, there is some synergy between the audience desires and the writer's needs, but does there have to be? No. That is for publishers and editors to worry about. Maybe we should be mad at them for not knowing their target audience enough? IDK.... maybe it is all semantics and doesn't even matter?
Writing is ultimately no different than any other consumer good. You are producing a good that a consumer may want to purchase. If you fail to make your product in a way that appeals to the consumer than you have not succeeded.
Now maybe the writer feels that he is writing for himself, so he is his own consumer. And that fine, but such an author should not be annoyed if he chooses to publish his work and has it critiqued by other people. By offering it to other people you are changing the dynamic of who is the consumer.
Any writer who is writing a book with the intention of publishing it should never expect the audience to simply accept all of his creative decisions without question. And if you are intending to seriously produce a specific genre of content than you should at least attempt to fully understand the genre and who your audience is, because at this point you aren't just writing for fun, you have a real job with expectations of performance. And that demands a little more professional attitude towards it.
For sci-fi specifically, I think this means that authors at least have a responsibility to competently build their setting. Establish rules for the various fantastic elements to their setting and mesh them as much as possible with reality. Because the best books are those that make you feel like you are there, and the best way to do that is to ground the book so the reader can visualize what is going on. The more reality you have in you book, the easier the fantastic elements are to visualize and engage with.
However there are different audiences, even within sci-fi. The super analytical geek/nerd audience that demands realistic numbers is a very niche audience even in this context.
Space Operas like Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo and even 40k are not really meant for that audience and focusing to much on numbers and technical details will bore the larger but more casual audience.
) chance of having a useful planet. If we start adding moons and other satellites then the odds get even worse!
