Civil War Casualties

Robert Treder · Post by **Robert Treder** » 2003-01-23 10:52pm

I'm trying to get a rough estimate on the number of deaths in the Galactic Civil War, from the Imperials, Rebels, and civilians. Let's try to see what we know...

Alderaan: at the very least, it probably had 1 billion beings. It's supposed to be mostly naturalistic, so I'd guess a higher end estimate would be 6-7 billion.

Death Star 1&2: what are estimates on the crews here? DSII wasn't complete, so it wouldn't be fully crewed, but it definitely had construction workers, as Randall points out in Clerks.

Fleet losses: the Executor and at least a few dozen Imperators were destroyed, not to mention countless smaller ships and fighters. The rebels definitely lost many capships and fighters as well.

I think we should be able to generate at least a very rough estimate on the number of deaths that occur as a result of the war between the time of ANH and ROJ. This would be, to say the least, an interesting statistic.

Darth Garden Gnome · Post by **Darth Garden Gnome** » 2003-01-23 11:01pm

The EGTV&V say the DS1 had (after adding all total perosnnel) nearly 1 million beings, then they add "Even more amazing, these figures indicatedminimumcrew standards."

There is no figure for the DS2, but it was bigger so it might've had more, but then again it wasn't completed. So its fair to assume about the same amount.

I can't find any figures for the ISD directly, but the Acclamator had 16,000 personnel total so manipulate that figure in someway....

Mon Cals could be treated in a similar fashion to ISDs.

Th Executer, according to the EGTV&V has 38,000groundtroops, but otherwise unknown personnel. And they're working off teh 8km figure!

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-01-23 11:02pm

Impossible. There's WAY too much we don't know.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2003-01-23 11:02pm

I did a minimum calc for stormtroopers aboard the Empire's warships.

It ended up in the minimum around 215 billion. The total number is easily 3 or 4 x that, conservatively.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-01-23 11:04pm

About DSII: I think GL recently said something about the Death Star II construction workers; many of them were Geonosians.

Darth Garden Gnome · Post by **Darth Garden Gnome** » 2003-01-23 11:11pm

But that seems seems greviously under-populated for a moon sized planet destroying battle station.

But then again it's likley that many of the deaths on the DS's AND the ISDs and Mon Cals were droids too. That being said, that would cut down the actual living casualties greatly.

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2003-01-25 02:22am

1 million crew=rebel propaganda, just like the reduced size of the thing. Its entirely possible that more people died aboard the DS1 than were killed on Alderaan.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-01-25 02:29am

Massive, but we really have no way of getting useful calculations. The scale of the universe would suggest multiple tens of trillions at the very least, though many EU authors seem to bee thinking tens of millions.

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2003-01-25 02:45am

Many EU authors have difficulty dealing with the true scope of a Galaxy.

Robert Treder · Post by **Robert Treder** » 2003-01-25 06:12am

For a fanfic I'm working on, I'm trying to get a rough number...would anybody object to me saying "over nine billion" or are there any strong feelings that it should be higher or lower?

Here are my figurings (very rough estimates, naturally):

Alderaan: 6 billion
DS1: 1 billion
DS2: 1.5 billion
Yavin Rebels: 27
Hoth Rebels: 1000
Hoth Imperials: 300
Endor Liberty: 1000
Endor other Rebels: 4000
Endor Executor: 17000
Endor other Imperials: 3500
Various naval battles (eg TIE Fighter, X-wing game campaigns): 6000

I then rounded up greatly. Alderaan makes up the majority of the deaths...I guess that makes sense.
My reasoning for pegging Alderaan at about 6 billion is that Earth has about that many. Alderaan is supposed to be relatively naturalistic, but when you think about it, Earth is mostly still "natural" too, especially in comparison to Star Wars-scale metropolii. Remember too that Star Wars technology will allow for people to live more comfortably in denser conditions than is possible on Earth (simply look at Coruscant for evidence). I'm thinking 6 billion is a low-end estimate.
Also, droids or no droids, the Death Stars have to have a massive population. I at first thought of pegging DS1 at 10 million, but then I remembered that the San Francisco Bay Area has over 7 million, and that's on a flat surface that is very small compared to the Death Star's size. Not only does the Death Star have a vast diameter, but it's spherical. Even if a large part of the core were unoccupied, there has to be at least 100 stories worth of living space around the surface (excluding the firing dish), and that's dense living space. As with Alderaan, this seems to be a very low-end estimate.
As it turns out, not only are the estimates for ship crews very hit-and-miss, but when added to the Alderaan and DS1&2 stats, they don't matter much. For the Executor, I gave it 1000 people for each click of length.

Anyways, so we can't come up with any stat of real value, but what would you be least opposed to as a line in a fanfic? Or, let's put it this way: if an official source were to publish the statistic, what would you prefer it to say?

Lord Pounder · Post by **Lord Pounder** » 2003-01-25 01:01pm

In the Black Fleet Crisis Luke gives a definate figure of the number on the DS1. bure really 1000 ppl onboard the MCC Liberty come on i'd add another 0 to that. From what i read 32,000 ppl crewed an ISD hell it took something like 10,000 just to crew a Dreadnaught.

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2003-01-26 12:05am

16000 crew on a dreadnaught, and the Black Fleet Crisis author also seemed to think the Empire never had more than 3000 ships in total. Please disregard anything he has to say on the subject.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-01-26 12:48am

Robert Treder wrote:For a fanfic I'm working on, I'm trying to get a rough number...would anybody object to me saying "over nine billion" or are there any strong feelings that it should be higher or lower?

Here are my figurings (very rough estimates, naturally):

Alderaan: 6 billion
DS1: 1 billion
DS2: 1.5 billion
Yavin Rebels: 27
Hoth Rebels: 1000
Hoth Imperials: 300
Endor Liberty: 1000
Endor other Rebels: 4000
Endor Executor: 17000
Endor other Imperials: 3500
Various naval battles (eg TIE Fighter, X-wing game campaigns): 6000

Your numbers are ridiculously low even by WEG standards. Hell they give the cut rate 8 kilometer Executor a crew of over a quarter million. The full version would be into the tens if not hundreds of millions. As a major core world Alderaan would have needed tens of billions of people at least.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2003-01-26 01:13am

consequences wrote:Many EU authors have difficulty dealing with the true scope of a Galaxy.

That's putting it rather gently. I suppose your ability to visualize the scope of an entire galaxy would be handicapped if you'd spent your entire career staring at the inside of your own colon.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2003-01-26 02:05am

I'd give the Alderaanians 100 billion easily, given how compact SW cities can be. They don't have to develop the land because food, power, resources--everything is shipped in. They just stay in their small, environmentally-sound canyon cities or whatever, but they're probably still SW-dense.

Robert Treder · Post by **Robert Treder** » 2003-01-26 04:17am

OK, that's what I was thinking, but I wanted to start out conservatively.

Kurgan · Post by **Kurgan** » 2003-01-26 04:44pm

I highly doubt the DS, which was the size of a "small moon" had more human beings on it than an earth-sized planet like Alderaan.

Even the DS2 was TINY compared to the heavily populated Forest Moon of Endor. C'mon people...

I will submit that the EU authors tend to "under" estimate scope. What I don't understand, is why ships can't make heavy use of droids and computers to run things, and have to have billions of people on board (the more people you have.. the more supplies you need, thus the bigger the ship, etc etc).

Kurgan · Post by **Kurgan** » 2003-01-26 04:46pm

I should say "beings" ... because Endor had humans on it (the Imperial legions) but it also had the Ewoks, which appear to be natives there.

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2003-01-26 06:42pm

You are comparing surface area when you should be looking at total habitable area.

I highly doubt the DS, which was the size of a "small moon" had more human beings on it than an earth-sized planet like Alderaan.

Most planets don't have hundreds of decks beneath the surface, or machinery throughout the center that has to be operated and maintained.

Kurgan · Post by **Kurgan** » 2003-01-26 10:15pm

I know what you're saying, but consider this:

civilized planets have huge (much bigger than we have on earth) skyscrapers with hundreds if not thousands of floors, floating platforms, skyhooks, etc and undersea/water cities.

Thousands of refugees leave Coruscant every day, according to AOTC, and it doesn't seem like a big deal.

The Death Star, on the other hand, is huge, but it only needs enough personel to run everything, not including droids and computers.

Robert Treder · Post by **Robert Treder** » 2003-01-27 03:15am

OK...but who said that the Death Stars had more people than Alderaan?

Illuminatus Primus' estimation for Alderaan was the highest at 100+ billion. This seems reasonable to me. Even my low-end estimate (6 bil) is higher than the highest estimates for the DS listed here...

This is what Saxton has to say about the population of the Death Stars, on the appropriate portion of his DS page:

Curtis Saxton wrote:Realistic crew and troop populations for the Death Stars must be at least several thousand times the previously published estimates. Each of these battle stations probably carried a few billion military personnel. Given that the Galactic Empire is able to recruit from millions of worlds which typically have populations of billions, this is still only a miniscule fraction of the galaxy's total resources. It should be remembered that there exist totalitarian states on Earth where a substantial proportion of the total population is in military service. The Galactic Empire is probably a relatively under-militarised society by comparison.

There simply has to be a vast population on both Death Stars. Saxton finds the size of DS1 to be 160-165km in diameter. If you take a circular portion of land with a diameter of 160km, and you center it on Manhattan, you'll find that over 20 million people inhabit that area, and that's including a lot of ocean (ref. US Census Ranking Tables for Metropolitan Areas).
Now, the Death Star obviously is much more densely populated than even the New York metropolitan area (no parks, open fields, rivers, etc. on the DS). The DS has at least skyscraper-depth living areas across almost all of its surface, and its core is filled with machines that must be maintained and operated. Even its droid crew must be maintained and instructed by living beings.

In short, the Death Stars must have massive populations.

Kurgan · Post by **Kurgan** » 2003-01-27 11:23pm

Interesting points, but there is still a fundamental difference between the DS populations and a planet. The other thing to consider about major cities is that not everyone there is a worker. There are thousands of unemployed, homeless, children, elderly, etc.

So (at least by employment standards) a lot of those people in a major city, or on a planet, aren't really useful or being put to use, they just take up space (not wanting to sound cruel or insensitive, but you get what I mean). I would think the DS (a military battlestation, crucial to the Empire's war machine) would include only essential workers.

I would assume that the Death Star would be made up of able-bodied personel... or are we to assume that its like the Enterprise-D with children and civilian families on board?

Far from sounding like Rebellion propaganda, now its beginning to sound like Imperial propaganda.

Rebel terrorists blow up 6 billion civilians on defensive space station! Horrors! *

*Well, you get my drift anyway. ; )

Kurgan · Post by **Kurgan** » 2003-01-27 11:27pm

And incidentally, with relation to the state of the droid art in the galaxy.. why would we need to assume that many people are needed to monitor these droids?

We know from the likes of C3PO and R2D2 that droids are incredibly durable, in the most extreme conditions, and are quite resourceful, despite their apparently clumsiness and goofy personality quirks. Did the Droid armies in TPM and AOTC need a huge command crew of living operators to monitor their every move?

Now, granted, battle droids are a somewhat different animal, since most of them are just fodder anyway. You'd expect salvage teams to go through the battlefield afterward to pick up valuable metal to re-use (saves money), but surely you don't need 1 person for every droid you have.

Heck, you can have droids repair other droids. Now just for the sake of argument, I wouldn't be surprised if the DS were mostly droid run, with the higher command functions being ruled by humans of course. You'd still need a lot of people, but surely not as much as a planet. The implication was given above that the DS population was equal or nearly equal to that of Alderaan, simply because it had lots of decks.

Marcus · Post by **Marcus** » 2003-01-27 11:36pm

Hmm... other people must say things better than I do. When I tried to put some sanity to the population of the Death Stars, I got told 'its all droids, its all engines, gee, aint imperial technology great?'

I ~still~ like the idea of Death Stars as Generation Ships. If not in the SW universe, then in some other.

Kurgan · Post by **Kurgan** » 2003-01-28 12:19am

Sure.. why not? Portable planets.

And perfect propaganda too... you go around blowing up planets, and if you ever get nailed.. "oh no! you just blew up a planet full of families!"

Come to think of it, "Space 1999" had a generational ship that was a planetoid (actually Earth's moon).