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Considering the numbers of troops the Empire must have moved, I'm guessing they had transports able to move a million or more men in one go? If so, are there any reference to them anywhere? If not, does that mean fewer bigger ships have no advantage over more smaller ships?

PayBack wrote:Considering the numbers of troops the Empire must have moved, I'm guessing they had transports able to move a million or more men in one go? If so, are there any reference to them anywhere? If not, does that mean fewer bigger ships have no advantage over more smaller ships?

There was this world ship under the.. what that idiot and sorry excuse for villain in Crystal Star.. that was quite large. There was no stated size however.

The Death Star did and could move million over around.

PayBack wrote:Considering the numbers of troops the Empire must have moved, I'm guessing they had transports able to move a million or more men in one go? If so, are there any reference to them anywhere? If not, does that mean fewer bigger ships have no advantage over more smaller ships?

There are references to quite enormous transport craft; SW technology is obviously capable of it. They're designed for cargo though, IIRC.

As for transporting military personnel, the saying about putting one's eggs into a basket comes to mind...

Pelagia, transport for "a hundred thousand ground troops and their assault armor," springs to mind. (see "Empire's End," part 1)

Elheru Aran wrote: As for transporting military personnel, the saying about putting one's eggs into a basket comes to mind...

Though a million men would be far from putting all your eggs in one basket surely? How many men would they move to secure a single system?

D-Day saw about 1.5 million troops ashore in the first month, trying to retake territory with a friendly population. That's for one front of a war on one continent. A million troops for an entire system pales into insignificance.

Howedar wrote:D-Day saw about 1.5 million troops ashore in the first month, trying to retake territory with a friendly population. That's for one front of a war on one continent. A million troops for an entire system pales into insignificance.

Then again, the garrisoning of a world requiring such troop strength would probably not need to be done all at once.

And as for military actions, the Empire saw very few, if any, battles over the course of its existance that would be of comparable scale. Hoth was probably one of their more impressive battles; a campaign of such engagements would only occur during the Galactic Civil War on a world with a functional, well-defended planetary shield that prevented intervention from orbiting vessels, as the Imperial fleet would essentially always have space superiority. I doubt many worlds that were so equipped were particularly inclined to defy the Emperor so spectacularly. For the occasional need that might have arisen, a fleet of smaller vessels would have more than sufficed.

Of course, the Clone Wars are an entirely different matter. I wouldn't be surprised if both sides of that conflict had mass troop carriers, especially the CIS.

PayBack wrote:

Elheru Aran wrote: As for transporting military personnel, the saying about putting one's eggs into a basket comes to mind...

Though a million men would be far from putting all your eggs in one basket surely? How many men would they move to secure a single system?

It depends on the scale of the conflict. If it's a minor uprising on a planet, but you know they have some ships, it's prudent to divide your troops and use ships capable of defending themselves like Acclamators or Venators instead of purpose-built transports which will only have basic shields and minimal weapons. If there are no ships, a suppressing fire from orbit should be sufficient to prevent any ground-to-orbit weaponry from doing any damage, and you could presumably use larger craft to deploy all your men at once.

As for D-Day... they didn't land those 1.5 million soldiers *all* at once, did they?

OK but I was thinking about scenarios such as... Empire finds a planet of value and decides to annex it. Surely after the defences have been overcome securing said planet would require moving in garrisons in the high millions? And you're not going to do that with ships only capable of carrying 16,000 a pop?

PayBack wrote:OK but I was thinking about scenarios such as... Empire finds a planet of value and decides to annex it. Surely after the defences have been overcome securing said planet would require moving in garrisons in the high millions? And you're not going to do that with ships only capable of carrying 16,000 a pop?

Actually, you do. With a lot of 'em.

But if you wanted to do that? I don't see any reason why not, it just depends on the time you're thinking-- for example, Old Republic era or mid-Empire, would probably be easier to jerry-rig a bulk transport for the purpose. Clone Wars era, would probably be easier to find a purpose-built military mass transport. And so on...

The Empire hauled away the entire oceans of a planet once. Even if that planet had only one tenth as much water as Earth, this is still a monstrous task which makes million-man transports seem trivial by comparison.

Noble Ire wrote:

Howedar wrote:D-Day saw about 1.5 million troops ashore in the first month, trying to retake territory with a friendly population. That's for one front of a war on one continent. A million troops for an entire system pales into insignificance.

Then again, the garrisoning of a world requiring such troop strength would probably not need to be done all at once.

With what do you think you win a war? Boots on the ground.

And as for military actions, the Empire saw very few, if any, battles over the course of its existance that would be of comparable scale. Hoth was probably one of their more impressive battles; a campaign of such engagements would only occur during the Galactic Civil War on a world with a functional, well-defended planetary shield that prevented intervention from orbiting vessels, as the Imperial fleet would essentially always have space superiority. I doubt many worlds that were so equipped were particularly inclined to defy the Emperor so spectacularly. For the occasional need that might have arisen, a fleet of smaller vessels would have more than sufficed.

You have to prepare for the eventuality. Like it or not, it's possible in the SW universe to prepare a force of millions or billions of droid troops (and at least hundreds of thousands of clones!) semi- or completely covertly. Mass landings to pacify a territory happened many times during the Clone Wars; why wouldn't the Empire want to be prepared for an actual uprising?

Of course, the Clone Wars are an entirely different matter. I wouldn't be surprised if both sides of that conflict had mass troop carriers, especially the CIS.

So why would the Empire ditch them, especially so soon after the Clone Wars? I haven't yet seen a good reason for them to do so.

They can store people - they did for clones anyway - in cold storage or stasis or whatever. So they don't even need onboard extensive creature comforts and accomodations.

For a rough idea of how much space one million soldiers would take up, the C-17 transport plane has a capacity of 102 troops and its cargo compartment has a volume of 552 m^3, according to the Air Force's website, giving 5.4 m^3 per soldier. At that volume per soldier, one million would take up a total of 5 411 764 m^3. That is the volume of a cube 175.5 meters per side.

XaLEv wrote:For a rough idea of how much space one million soldiers would take up, the C-17 transport plane has a capacity of 102 troops and its cargo compartment has a volume of 552 m^3, according to the Air Force's website, giving 5.4 m^3 per soldier. At that volume per soldier, one million would take up a total of 5 411 764 m^3. That is the volume of a cube 175.5 meters per side.

So a ship only, oh, say 400 meters long and 200 meters tall should be able to transport 1,000,000 troops? And we have multi Kilometer starships in StarWars? Shoot, the entire 3,000,000 "Army" could fit onto one ISD sized Transport.

Modern stadiums can easily seat and serve 80,000 to 100,000 people. A ship of comparable size optimized for troop ferrying should easily carry one million or more soldiers. Given the size and scope of the Star Wars galaxy, I would not be surprised if there were ships capable of moving tens of millions of people.

Illuminatus Primus wrote:They can store people - they did for clones anyway - in cold storage or stasis or whatever. So they don't even need onboard extensive creature comforts and accomodations.

Considering how short Hyperdrive makes journeys in SW they wouldn't need much of that anyway if they simply gonna transport somebody from A to B.

Acclamators transport 16,000 men and their equipment.

Imperial Evakmar-transports carry entire Army-Corps around.

In the NJO-novel Traitor the Yuuzhan Vong sent ships each with a million survivors from Coruscant to remaining NR-worlds to force them to spent their resources on other things than warmaterial.

There's also the CW-era "supercruiser" transport, capable of carrying 20,000 troops.

Darth Wong wrote:The Empire hauled away the entire oceans of a planet once. Even if that planet had only one tenth as much water as Earth, this is still a monstrous task which makes million-man transports seem trivial by comparison.

I don't doubt this, but I've never heard of it. Can you elaborate on this event?

CaptainChewbacca wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:The Empire hauled away the entire oceans of a planet once. Even if that planet had only one tenth as much water as Earth, this is still a monstrous task which makes million-man transports seem trivial by comparison.

I don't doubt this, but I've never heard of it. Can you elaborate on this event?

I don't know that it's ever been expanded upon in detail (except for possibly the Internet). IIRC, it was simply stated as a single line in one of the books, I think it was from the Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy IIRC.

CaptainChewbacca wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:The Empire hauled away the entire oceans of a planet once. Even if that planet had only one tenth as much water as Earth, this is still a monstrous task which makes million-man transports seem trivial by comparison.

I don't doubt this, but I've never heard of it. Can you elaborate on this event?

It's under the "SW Industrial Capacity" page.

"More evidence of the massive scale of Imperial transport fleets can be seen in the fate of Gholondreine-b. On pg. 167, it states:

"The oceans of Gholondreine-b had been sucked down to the last molecule of saline liquid, then transported by a fleet of massive Imperial freighters to an orbital catalysis plant near Coruscant. Economy hadn't been the motivating factor- it was more expensive to ship that amount of water than to synthesize it- but punishment had been."

Note the ramifications: a single transport fleet carried the entire planetary oceans of Gholondreine-b away. If Gholondreine-b was similar to Earth, then the mass of its oceans would have been roughly 1.4E21 kilograms. Even if the transport fleet was composed of a million ships, each vessel would have had to carry 1.4 trillion tons of water! The density of water is roughly 1 metric ton/m³, so each ship would have needed at least 1.4 trillion cubic metres of cargo space. If the transports were cylindrical in shape, they had to be 5 km in diameter and at least 71 km long to have that much internal space! Even if each ship took 1000 round trips, the operation would have required a million-ship fleet of vessels measuring 1km in diameter and 1.8km long. This incident shows again how the Imperial transport fleet is superior to anything the Federation could possibly field.



The snip is from Han Solo and the Lost Legacy.

I believe the clip is from the Boba Fett trilogy, actually.

Enforcer Talen wrote:I believe the clip is from the Boba Fett trilogy, actually.

It is. 'Slave Ship', to be exact.

Batman wrote:

Enforcer Talen wrote:I believe the clip is from the Boba Fett trilogy, actually.

It is. 'Slave Ship', to be exact.

Huh. Looks like I missed something. Wong had Han Solo mentioned and then discussed SotE right before the snip. I wouldn't know, I haven't read either yet.