Empire VS any Solid Kardashev Scale level III civilizations

[lordofchange13]

Not to get in the middle of your fight, but the fact that the Death Star is better then most if not all other empire machinery is irrelevant to Empires placement on the scale.

It's very important, since this scale is about the average of the whole thing, not the peak output, nor any other statistical outliers.

All the other evidence (that I've seen anyway) points to everything else being significantly lower than the DS. Scaling it to other ships and gear gives numbers much higher than the observed things; the DS is way off the chart.

This leads to a big question: how can this be? Something can only exist if the infrastructure is there, and the infrastructure is likely only there if people actually use it.

Why build a million times more power generation than you actually need for your civilization?


This can go one of two ways: a) you could say the DS proves their civilization uses shitloads of power, and inflate one or every other number well beyond even the most generous observations. (Either all the population and ship counts are a million times higher than the canon figures, or the power usage is a million times higher than the canon observations. Either way, we're running afowl of something.)

Or, you could say b) the DS's peak should be included with all the other evidence we have, and try to figure out how that outlier is possible rather than assuming we can extrapolate a single data point at the expense of all others.



One possibility is that it uses fuel which was saved up over time.

Reread the rules of the scaling, my mistake.

[lordofchange13]

Xenosaga

Is extremely powerful when it wants to be, but I don't think it really counts as a Type III civilisation.

Xenosaga is the same as the Empire, they got the abillity but they don't use that much energy all the time. they are at least very close to a 3.

[Terralthra]

The DSII was destroyed before it could be finished. It never displayed either mobility or the ability to destroy a planet. Certainly, those things would have to be part of the finished product, but it was still under construction. For that matter, the work crews seem to have just about killed themselves getting it operational enough for the Emperors plans, which suggests to me that less time-critical systems were put on hold. The DSII did blow up several capital ships, but surely no one can think it at all similar to destroy 500 meter spacecraft and an entire world?

It is declared by the Emperor to be 'fully armed and operational.' That means.... fully armed. And operational. It is also in the novel preparing to fire on Endor on the Emperor's orders after the shield is dropped. It had the capacity, and consequently the power generation capability, this is canonical.

Is this a joke? The Emperor gloating to Luke in dialogue is now acceptable evidence, despite rather obvious evidence that it was not, in fact "fully...operational"? I mean, it didn't have functional shield generators, so the idea that it's fully operational is ridiculous.

[S.L.Acker]

Is this a joke? The Emperor gloating to Luke in dialogue is now acceptable evidence, despite rather obvious evidence that it was not, in fact "fully...operational"? I mean, it didn't have functional shield generators, so the idea that it's fully operational is ridiculous.

I'm pretty sure if we're just talking about power generation and the super laser then fully operational might not be a stretch at all.

[Ford Prefect]

Xenosaga is the same as the Empire, they got the abillity but they don't use that much energy all the time. they are at least very close to a 3.

The thing is that if you're talking about a Type III civilisation, the Galaxy Federation just isn't one, even if its members routinely deal with and do things which a Type III civilisation couldn't - I mean yes U-TIC was capable of building the Zohar Emulators and KOS-MOS and U-DO accidentally a whole galactic supercluster in that possible future, but the rest of the civilisation is a little more grounded. Half a million star systems and so on.

[lordofchange13]

Ok, Xenosaga will be stricken form the level 3 list.

[Batman]

Is this a joke? The Emperor gloating to Luke in dialogue is now acceptable evidence, despite rather obvious evidence that it was not, in fact "fully...operational"? I mean, it didn't have functional shield generators, so the idea that it's fully operational is ridiculous.

English is apparently not your first language. 'Fully armed', i.e. the armament is working as intended, and 'operational', which means it is operational...to some extent. 'Fully armed and operational' does not equal 'fully armed and fully operational', the latter of which would definitely be untrue (what with a goodly chunk of the thing not existing yet). And while Palpy was gloating and it was dialogue, until and unless you present evidence he was lying (unlikely at least as far as the superlaser is concerned given that as per the novelization they absolutely intended to blow up Endor) his statements stand.

[Cesario]

Is this a joke? The Emperor gloating to Luke in dialogue is now acceptable evidence, despite rather obvious evidence that it was not, in fact "fully...operational"? I mean, it didn't have functional shield generators, so the idea that it's fully operational is ridiculous.

English is apparently not your first language. 'Fully armed', i.e. the armament is working as intended, and 'operational', which means it is operational...to some extent. 'Fully armed and operational' does not equal 'fully armed and fully operational', the latter of which would definitely be untrue (what with a goodly chunk of the thing not existing yet). And while Palpy was gloating and it was dialogue, until and unless you present evidence he was lying (unlikely at least as far as the superlaser is concerned given that as per the novelization they absolutely intended to blow up Endor) his statements stand.

Can we say the same about that legion of his best troops?

[S.L.Acker]

Can we say the same about that legion of his best troops?

I'd think that the defeat on the ground was mainly due to them being lax at covering the rear entrance. Even with the defense they still only lost due to Chewie managing to capture that AT-ST. Had that not happened the rebel commando mission would have been sunk.

[Batman]

Can we say the same about that legion of his best troops?

I never liked the idea of the Stormtroopers being the elite topnotch one-of-a-kind special forces given that in the OT (and in the PT and the Clone Wars cartoon) pretty much every infantry soldier wore Storm/Clonetrooper armour and as has been pointed out like 19 million times before the Imperials were winning hands-down before Chewie kidnapped that AT-ST. At best, that shows Palpy's Elite sucks. This changes the DSII being fully armed-why?

[S.L.Acker]

I never liked the idea of the Stormtroopers being the elite topnotch one-of-a-kind special forces given that in the OT (and in the PT and the Clone Wars cartoon) pretty much every infantry soldier wore Storm/Clonetrooper armour and as has been pointed out like 19 million times before the Imperials were winning hands-down before Chewie kidnapped that AT-ST. At best, that shows Palpy's Elite sucks. This changes the DSII being fully armed-why?

I wonder if in this case the unit was elite more because they could be trusted than due to being, well, elite. It wouldn't be the first time that elite forces have been picked for reasons other than skill at arms.

[Simon_Jester]

Is this a joke? The Emperor gloating to Luke in dialogue is now acceptable evidence, despite rather obvious evidence that it was not, in fact "fully...operational"? I mean, it didn't have functional shield generators, so the idea that it's fully operational is ridiculous.

I'm pretty sure if we're just talking about power generation and the super laser then fully operational might not be a stretch at all.

The hull wasn't finished. It could neither move nor generate shielding under its own power, and there were holes in the structure large enough to allow fighters (or guided missiles) to penetrate easily into the main reactor.

"Fully armed and operational" is pretty obviously just Palpatine saying "the gun works." He'd be a fool to order the station into normal operation; it can't even move.

[Darth Tedious]

FFS PEOPLE

The gun and the reactor worked. That much we know. If people want to calc energy output based on the gun's capabilities, they can.

Damned semantic bullshit nitpicking...

[Darth Hoth]

Speaking of throwing stones, how do you explain the line about the Executor bankrupting the empire?

The guy who said it was a bloody retard?

Seriously. The quote goes:

"I can't believe it," Pellaeon said beside her. "Only the Executor was this big - and that one ship practically bankrupted the Empire."

"What is it?" Daala asked.

Cronus smiled, his expressive face showing his obvious enjoyment at her reaction - but it was Pellaeon who answered. "It's a Super Star Destroyer," he said.

Cronus nodded eagerly. "Worth twenty Imperial Star Destroyers," he said, his eyes flashing with pride.

So according to this passage, a ship worth twenty standard ISDs suddenly bankrupts an Empire that has many thousands of those, and millions of smaller capital ships - in addition to building huge Death Stars in a few years on peacetime black budgets. It also claims only one Executor-class ship was ever built, and no ship of any class larger, which all other canon since, and some before, has disagreed with. Even in the film RotJ, Han calmly dismisses the Executor as just one among many similar vessels - "There are a lot of command ships."

Per in-universe rationalisation, the guy had no idea what he was talking about, since his facts are not only canonically wrong, but utterly counterintuitive given the established scale of the setting. Out of universe, the author (Kevin J. Anderson) simply botched his research for the book (he does that for many other details, too). Whichever approach one chooses, the datum as it stands is in error and can be safely dismissed by the weight of evidence against it.

What I'm doing here is drawing a conclusion from the whole of canon evidence, not making stuff up.

The problem with the Death Star being a unique megaproject that siphoned off significant portions of the Empire's total economy is that in the setting, it was supposedly built in secret. The total cost was thus logically not proportionally greater than whatever would allow the Empire to hide it in their peacetime budget.

Apart from that, I actually agree with you somewhat on this issue - the Star Wars galaxy, as portrayed in the EU, does not generally appear to use energy on the magnitude the Death Star would imply. Then again, we never see much of how their industry and such works - maybe they use tons of exotic materials in their starship construction and so on, that take ungodly amounts of energy to put together? Though you no doubt factored that into your rather generous assumed per capita power consumption. (The total Imperial population is actually a hundred-plus quadrillions per the EU, but your 1 TW figure would most likely more than compensate for those orders of magnitude.)

[NecronLord]

Checking your number at least vaguely is also what you would call 'high school' in fact, it's substantially more basic than that. "Just admit you are ignorant of simple school procedure." Or we could admit that this being a web forum the standards of quality aren't exactly pinpoint, and your not checking if your figures are within ten orders of magnitude of what you want to say and my habit of just bunging constants off a reference page into the little calculator at the top of the screen are understandable, human failings. Or would that be too sensible?

As for the Excecutor bankrupting the empire, what do I make of it? I consider it silly. Just like the idea that Sarapin, a volcanic planet, produces 80% of the Core Worlds' power(!) by geothermal energy(!!) which I also mentioned These are silly, and difficult to reconcile with the movies without in-universe idiocy playing a role. Star Wars has a whole lot of this kind of authorial brainfart, you can happily make an argument to depict the Republic as less than a type one based on the Sarapin thing.

I really don't care much except that people provide working when they produce claims like "I figure the SW empire is somewhere around a type 2.1 or 2.2" if you want to produce numbers (not that the Kardashev Scale actually has anything but one significant figure; Sagan's adaptation does, but that's even more incompatible with our topic). Choosing to pick my battleground on the Death Star there is natural; it is the most prominent example of a powerful technological device in the films, after all

Your arugment based on the SWTJ quote about the ISD reactor is... interesting, though. There's some assumptions there I question, of course, and the utility of that quote can be made useless indeed by making it self-referential if we say that a "typical planetary civilization" has a theatre shield which at some point it will use (remember, Admiral Ozzel considered it insuffiicient proof of Rebel activity to see one) to defend against assault by a warship, not unreasonable given events like the New Sith Wars probably touch most planet's history.

[Metahive]

Your arugment based on the SWTJ quote about the ISD reactor is... interesting, though. There's some assumptions there I question, of course, and the utility of that quote can be made useless indeed by making it self-referential if we say that a "typical planetary civilization" has a theatre shield which at some point it will use (remember, Admiral Ozzel considered it insuffiicient proof of Rebel activity to see one) to defend against assault by a warship, not unreasonable given events like the New Sith Wars probably touch most planet's history.

Correction, Ozzel considered it insignificant that there were signs of civilization at all on a remote planet like Hoth. Vader didn't give him any time to comment on the shield. The Empire certainly didn't expect to be confronted with a strong theater shield, otherwise they would have brought more ships with them to overpower such if necessary.

[S.L.Acker]

Your arugment based on the SWTJ quote about the ISD reactor is... interesting, though. There's some assumptions there I question, of course, and the utility of that quote can be made useless indeed by making it self-referential if we say that a "typical planetary civilization" has a theatre shield which at some point it will use (remember, Admiral Ozzel considered it insuffiicient proof of Rebel activity to see one) to defend against assault by a warship, not unreasonable given events like the New Sith Wars probably touch most planet's history.

Correction, Ozzel considered it insignificant that there were signs of civilization at all on a remote planet like Hoth. Vader didn't give him any time to comment on the shield. The Empire certainly didn't expect to be confronted with a strong theater shield, otherwise they would have brought more ships with them to overpower such if necessary.

They could already have overpowered the shield if needed, the only reason they didn't was because Vader wanted to capture Luke.

[S.L.Acker]

I'd say the same thing about Curtis Saxton the in-universe propagandist who wrote the ICS2, based on pretty much the same reasoning.

But, people bitch and moan about it. It's canon, deal with it. So, now I try to include everything, and find a way to make it all work whenever possible.

"X is an idiot. Case Closed." breaks suspension of disbelief. The characters are supposed to be competent in the story.

If you take the bankrupty thing in isolation, it's fairly ridiculous, but if it's some kind of straw that almost broke the camel's back, it just might work.

Proof that any of the ICS books were written by an in universe character with an agenda, or are you clutching at straws again?

That works with a multi-year stockpile too: unless a disaster hits, nobody will notice it missing, so regular day to day things are pretty unaffected.

Funny how there was never a single mention of them stock pilling anything and how swiftly the DSII was under construction, again with no mention of stockpiling. Mind staying within the facts and not wandering into fanfic land?

[NecronLord]

"X is an idiot. Case Closed." breaks suspension of disbelief. The characters are supposed to be competent in the story.

Actually, as I recall it, Daala did in fact kill that fellow, among others, for his incompetence. Though I doubt he was intended to be talking out of his backside there, he's certainly not meant to be the sharpest star destroyer in the fleet, as it were.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Besides, that's a lower cannon level than ROTJ, with Han expressing no surprise at the Executor, which he would have if it were a one-off.

Heck, we have cannon examples of Kuat continuing to build Executors after Endor (specifically, X-Wing: Iron Fist, with them building Razor's Kiss.

[NecronLord]

Correction, Ozzel considered it insignificant that there were signs of civilization at all on a remote planet like Hoth. Vader didn't give him any time to comment on the shield. The Empire certainly didn't expect to be confronted with a strong theater shield, otherwise they would have brought more ships with them to overpower such if necessary.

I'll review my DVDs, but as I recall they were looking at an annotated picture of the shield generator from the probe droid when they said it.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Funny how there was never a single mention of them stock pilling anything and how swiftly the DSII was under construction, again with no mention of stockpiling. Mind staying within the facts and not wandering into fanfic land?

There's no single mention of people taking a crap on a starship in the movies either, but we figure it probably happens based on other facts.

But people taking a crap isn't vital to the ship's function, whilst your supposed fuel stockpile is.

[NecronLord]

I'm not sure many people hold to that in-universe author thing these days. That quote may not be entirely represenatative.

[S.L.Acker]

(remember that under "suspension of disbelief", all official literature is presumed to be published by some in-universe entity with his own agenda, just as it is in real life).

http://stardestroyer.net/Empire/Essays/Analysis.html

It seems like it has the same agenda as any book on military hardware does, to inform the reader about the capabilities of the technology in question. In this case, those capabilities line up with what has already been supposed so we have no reason to doubt their accuracy. What agenda were you ascribing to them?

There's no single mention of people taking a crap on a starship in the movies either, but we figure it probably happens based on other facts.

Not really the same, two massive depletions of stockpiles of hypermatter would have been something we would have heard an some New Republic bureaucrat bitching about in the EU. Yet we never hear about that shortage effecting shipbuilding or force projection capacity in any source.

[Serafina]

If the Death Star required a large percentage of the Empires hypermatter output in order to fire once, Tarkin would not have used it so carelessly on Alderaan. It'd be like the United States using one of their first nukes on an uninhabitated islands.

Also, if the Death Star required a massive logistics chain, it would not have the status as an "unassailable weapon of mass destruction" it (was supposed to have) had. Rebels could have attacked the supply ships (capturing valuable hypermatter in the process) or the hypermatter factories.