Empire VS any Solid Kardashev Scale level III civilizations

[Batman]

Wait, what? The Death Star destroyed 20,000 planets? Whenever did that happen?

[Xess]

Wait, what? The Death Star destroyed 20,000 planets? Whenever did that happen?

He means stored hyper-matter over 20,000 years.

[Darth Tedious]

Hehe, expensive Star Destroyers.
Way back in the really old (and since decanonised) original WEG RPG Sourcebook, it actually said that building the fleet of ISDs almost bankrupted the Empire. That might have been where the 'SSDs bankrupting the Empire' thing came from'. I think either possibility is too hard to reconcile with everything else we see in-universe.
I'm at my girlfriend's parent's place for a couple of days, but I'll dig out the quotes when I get home, for shits ans giggles.

WRT the DS: I wonder if the DS was relatively cheap (in terms of its size) compared to building ships.
Yes, I know it's the size of millions of ISDs, but every one of them has its own reactor. Wouldn't building one big reactor be cheaper than building millions of little ones?
There's other spinoffs from this- ships are packed full of complex systems, the massive internal volume of the DS taken up by the reactor are not.
I think the idea of the DS being cheaper than people expect reconciles nicely with the speed the DS2 was built (and the fact that some crimelord who didn't have a whole galaxy to siphon resources from built one).

[Batman]

Wait, what? The Death Star destroyed 20,000 planets? Whenever did that happen?

He means stored hyper-matter over 20,000 years.

Really. I never would have guessed.

[S.L.Acker]

You've been arguing that it took twenty years to build up a sufficient stockpile of hypermatter for the Death Star to accomplish the destruction of three planets.

Actually, I suspect it was closer to 20,000.

Proof or concede.

If it took such a long time to stockpile for the DS:I how do you explain the DS:II being built in secret, supplied by a single shipping company, fueled to the point where they expected to destroy Endor, with a main weapon said to recharge faster than the orginal, in only 4 years?

WRT the DS: I wonder if the DS was relatively cheap (in terms of its size) compared to building ships.
Yes, I know it's the size of millions of ISDs, but every one of them has its own reactor. Wouldn't building one big reactor be cheaper than building millions of little ones?
There's other spinoffs from this- ships are packed full of complex systems, the massive internal volume of the DS taken up by the reactor are not.
I think the idea of the DS being cheaper than people expect reconciles nicely with the speed the DS2 was built (and the fact that some crimelord who didn't have a whole galaxy to siphon resources from built one).

Not really, the DS:I was said to incorporate a bunch of new technology with the super laser going through at least one redesign between the prototype stage and the completed weapon. The project also took 20 years of building and R&D to finish. That must have been some wickedly good R&D because it appears that they had the kinks out when it came time to crank out the DS:II.

[Batman]

No, the Old Republic starting to pile up hypermatter for a superweapon the Empire would build 20 years after the Republic broke down pretty much from its beginnings 20,000 years ago makes perfect sense!

[S.L.Acker]

No, the Old Republic starting to pile up hypermatter for a superweapon the Empire would build 20 years after the Republic broke down pretty much from its beginnings 20,000 years ago makes perfect sense!

To a man who thinks TDiC shows BDZ levels of firepower anything is possible...

[S.L.Acker]

No, the Old Republic starting to pile up hypermatter for a superweapon the Empire would build 20 years after the Republic broke down pretty much from its beginnings 20,000 years ago makes perfect sense!

This is pathetic. They don't have to anticipate a specific task for it, they just store it for a rainy day.

The US has a bunch of oil stockpiled for the same purpose. It's there in case they need oil at some point, not because they are saving it up specifically to build a monster weapon.

This would be akin to the US stockpiling oil from as far back as 1776 just because they could. I'm also still awaiting your logic behind why nobody ever mentioned the serious depletion of these stockpiles, or how some Hutts, presumably lacking a stockpile on the scale of a galactic government, could build a weapon with a gun close to the same output as the DS:I.

[Batman]

The US has not only been stockpiling oil for 20,000 years but also decided to use up most of it by blowing up California for refusing to hate gay people? I must have missed that. Alderaan was a mere demonstration. The whole point of the Death Star was that it could effortlessly kill planets that were equipped to ignore entire fleets besieging them. Yeah, that's going to work really well if the thing has to spend thousands of years waiting to be refueled.

[S.L.Acker]

The US has not only been stockpiling oil for 20,000 years but also decided to use up most of it by blowing up California for refusing to hate gay people? I must have missed that. Alderaan was a mere demonstration. The whole point of the Death Star was that it could effortlessly kill planets that were equipped to ignore entire fleets besieging them. Yeah, that's going to work really well if the thing has to spend thousands of years waiting to be refueled.

More like nuking Puerto Rico for protesting against Gitmo and calling for action against Bush.

[Batman]

Yes, that example probably works a lot better.

[Sriad]

No, the Old Republic starting to pile up hypermatter for a superweapon the Empire would build 20 years after the Republic broke down pretty much from its beginnings 20,000 years ago makes perfect sense!

This is pathetic. They don't have to anticipate a specific task for it, they just store it for a rainy day.

The US has a bunch of oil stockpiled for the same purpose. It's there in case they need oil at some point, not because they are saving it up specifically to build a monster weapon.

Wait.

What.

No.

This is the sort of baseless low-balling that we normally associate with "The Enterprise-D could take out like 3 Star Destroyers at once" idiocy.

Has there EVER, in ANY material of ANY cannon level been reference to a millenia-old governmental Strategic Hypermatter Reserve? I can understand the idea of Palpatine banking it for 20 years to build an irresistible superweapon, but 20-THOUSAND years is just wild whole-sale invention on your part...why? To cut the Empire down from a 2.3 or 2.4 civilization to 2.1-2.2? And for even that to make sense Palpatine would need to be the FIRST person in those 20,000 years to dip into the pool.

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

Petitio principii. The reasoning is that it justifies the conclusion D13 wants to come to- no less, no more, like the terawatt/person estimate it starts with the answer and works backwards.

In practise the galaxy's starship fuel production capacity- any objections to it following a reasonably rational supply and demand?

What makes sense to me is for there to have been a more or less steady level of generation to serve the civil market in the run up to the clone wars, subject to fluctuations, a few percent worth of capacity brought on line or closed down relative to whatever the GFFA is using for long term economic cycles.

Maybe some forgotten and/or mothballed facilities from previous wars, Ordnance/Regional Depots, pocket empires no longer actively maintaining fleets- not that much.

During the Clone Wars, the slack gets taken up, and then some- I do believe, and will justify yet again if need be, that military ships run vastly hotter than civil, their energy needs are much higher, and the civil market cannot easily distort enough to support them.

There are likely to have been new "refineries"- generating facilities really- built to serve the new level of demand- and after the war, both sides' facilities belong to the Empire.

"Millions" of Separatist warships, of which their main line types are Munificent frigates and Recusant destroyers, drawing 8600 tons/sec for a Recusant, 2300 tons/sec for a Munificent- 7.44E23W and 2E23W respectively; there's another guess here to be made about activity cycle, what fraction of their output they run continuously at- well, optempo, it is war.
Assume for calculation purposes, and bear the error bars this produces in mind, one in a thousand- as a long term average they run at a thousandth of capacity, or alternatively at full power less than a tenth of a percent of the time. The more energetic hyperdrive is, that would drive that ratio up. Could be higher.

That means a million Recusants and a million Munificents require a steady fuel generating capacity of ~1E27 W; their collective peak output would be ~1E30. Consider that the Republic fleet was winning.

You know, that's not as big a number as I had thought. Still two orders of magnitude short of being able to support the Death Star on the same activity estimate.

[Simon_Jester]

That, what, the Death Star is firing its main gun 0.1% of the time?

Seems very unlikely. The Death Star needs a minimum-ish figure of ten to the thirty-third joules to blow apart a planet, can do that in a few seconds' firing... consider the strategic use of the weapon. You don't really need to blow up all an enemy faction's planets quickly. It's more like dropping atomic bombs on 1945 Japan, you want to hit their cities one at a time, spacing the strikes apart widely enough for the full horror and devastation to sink in. The gap between August 6 and 9, 1945 worked well on Japan, so let's posit that the Death Star is expected to fire every three days. Which, come to think of it, is not all that far from the likely time-lapse between the destruction of Alderaan and the attack on Yavin; it could conceivably have been less than three days but there's not much if any evidence for it if all you do is watch the films.

A day is eighty-six thousand hours... so, call it one firing about every 250000 seconds, ten to the thirty-third joules expended at those intervals, so the continuous power output needed to 'charge' the Death Star works out to...

4*10^27 watts.

Which is not out of line with ECR's estimate above. Of course, you would want your Death Star to have enough onboard tankage to fire multiple planet-busting shots (explaining why we didn't see it topping off from a fleet of huge tankers during Episode IV), and you'd want a strategic reserve... but if you run those 4E27 watts of production capacity for several years, you will have a strategic reserve, enough to destroy hundreds of worlds without even bothering to accelerate production.

[dragon]

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.

Well crap could be an issue. After all an Imperial Class Star Destroyer has what 37,000 officers and crew and they take at least one a day. So one could say SD's are full of it. We know it's standard procedure to dump waste before a jump but what if they're staying in system. Heaven's forbid they have a plumbing problem

Modern navy waste management is actually a very important task. Related to waste is food a modern aircraft carrier prepares over 18,000 meals a day, imagine how many a SD would need.

More than 18,000 meals are prepared daily

link

[Eleventh Century Remnant]

D13, I think you started from the wrong end- what's the Japanese saying, "one mat, half mat, handful of rice"? Or if you prefer the Napoleonic version, "Even on the highest throne in the world, a man is ultimately seated on nothing but his own arse." Unless you're looking at a world where everyone has taken up mountain building for a hobby (or a fantastically hostile world where serious survival gear probably including some form of shielding is needed), personal energy needs aren't going to be that high, because personhood just doesn't change that much.

In fact you could argue that until it does, and progressively as it does, social change drives energy consumption- this may be reinventing the wheel, literally if you consider the difference between someone whose personal needs include a car and someone who's personal needs are a good pair of shoes.

There'll always be the conspicuously rich and ostentatious, but what they do to the average...depends a lot on the shape society is, and in the runup to the Clone Wars I'd actually expect- from a society about to suffer something like the clone wars- moderately high inequality. Not as bad as it later became under the Empire, but still unequal. Worse than present day Earth? Hm. More thought required on that one.

Anyway, most people in the GFFA don't lead lives sufficiently different from ours as to justify that massive a difference in personal energy consumption- starting with the people leads to a low number.

Where the big watts come from is the industrial- economic implications of being a society that spread out among the stars, of maintaining and running ecumenopoli and galaxy spanning polities, which are the numbers you get when you start with the Death Star and the Imperial Starfleet and work downwards. I think we've genuinely got two separate models here- and I'm actually starting to warm to the idea of an in- universe disconnect between them.

If the people are that divorced from the main line energy economy, if the grand feats of astroengineering are almost as far beyond them as they are beyond us- I think it helps explain quite a lot about how the Republican government works, and how it makes the decisions and mistakes it does- the spacers are the people who quite literally have the power. It helps explain why ground forces are so much more pathetic than space forces, why people in universe don't seem to understand space very well (ahem, EU, cough), why there are so many planets full of primitives- they've got theirs, nobody cares.

[Eternal_Freedom]

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

Well crap could be an issue. After all an Imperial Class Star Destroyer has what 37,000 officers and crew and they take at least one a day. So one could say SD's are full of it. We know it's standard procedure to dump waste before a jump but what if they're staying in system. Heaven's forbid they have a plumbing problem

Modern navy waste management is actually a very important task. Related to waste is food a modern aircraft carrier prepares over 18,000 meals a day, imagine how many a SD would need.

More than 18,000 meals are prepared daily

link

I don't dispute that at all, I merely question the metaphor DXIII used. We don't hear about people taking a shit because it's an everyday thing people take for granted. We know that the crew are going to need to shit, piss, wash etc, so it's not a big deal. Incidentally, we do hear about people going to the bathroom in the EU, they're called "refreshers" and they turn up regularly in the X-Wing novels to name but some. Indeed, in X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar, when Red FLight is visiting a planet they are warned that the plumbing might seem primitive to them.

So take that DXIII and shove it.

[Simon_Jester]

The big growth sector in personal energy consumption over the past ten to twenty years has been computers and portable devices- a cell phone doesn't use all that much power, but a cell phone tower does. Big servers are power hogs too, and so on. In Star Wars you'd see considerable growth in those areas- though probably not enough to make a significant dent compared to the demands of hyperspace travel in the civilian economy... except, of course, for the unknown but large power consumption demanded by the interstellar HoloNet.

The question relating to energy usage here is how much do regular people travel day to day? If it's not much, the individual ships may be small suns, but the civilization as a whole doesn't rank very high just because those individual ships are a) the minority of the population and b) idle most the time, so the average is way below the peak.

There are ecumenopolitan planets which have vast ship traffic every day- Coruscant being the biggest but not the only one. I seem to remember that much of Coruscant's food and consumer goods comes from off-planet sources, which implies huge cargoes being moved through hyperspace every day. The fuel consumption of "regular people" might be small, but if the consumption of the network they depend on is large, it doesn't matter.

[S.L.Acker]

Assuming that Coruscant eats at the same rate the modern United States does (roughly 1 ton per person per year), that means that for the 1 trillion people you need at least 2E15 lb. of foor per year. It seems fair to assume that Coruscant would grow some small amount of food themselves, however food also goes to waste unsold, and we know that Coruscant is a massive importer of goods; so we can assume it balances. We also know that they would import lots of other goods, for example vehicles, assuming they import vehicles at the same rate as modern Earth does (we built roughly 53 million cars in 2008) that means that Coruscant imports around 5.78 billion speeder cars per year, if we assume each weighs a ton and a half, that means that Coruscant imports 1.52E13 lb. of vehicles each year. These things alone will take (assuming each cargo container holds 64,000 lb.) 31.5 billion cargo containers to ship.

I'm having trouble finding the numbers for how much energy it would take for a modern fleet of cargo ships to transport that cargo, but I'm not finding much. If we could we would at least have some energy numbers to compare hyperdrive transport to.

[Simon_Jester]

If we can work out hyperdrive energy consumption for a typical-ish freighter, and work out how many cargo containers it could hold, that gives us another benchmark...

[S.L.Acker]

There's too many assumptions in there.... in real life, the majority of production is done in large cities. Coruscant might be an importer of food, but an importer of cars? That seems much less likely.

"The Works was once one of the galaxy's major manufacturing areas, where spacecraft parts, droids, and building materials were heavily produced during centuries, but as construction and industry became more efficient and cheaper away from Coruscant, The Works fell into disrepair."

Source: Star Wars: Complete Locations

[SpaceMarine93]

Assuming that Coruscant eats at the same rate the modern United States does (roughly 1 ton per person per year), that means that for the 1 trillion people you need at least 2E15 lb. of foor per year. It seems fair to assume that Coruscant would grow some small amount of food themselves, however food also goes to waste unsold, and we know that Coruscant is a massive importer of goods; so we can assume it balances. We also know that they would import lots of other goods, for example vehicles, assuming they import vehicles at the same rate as modern Earth does (we built roughly 53 million cars in 2008) that means that Coruscant imports around 5.78 billion speeder cars per year, if we assume each weighs a ton and a half, that means that Coruscant imports 1.52E13 lb. of vehicles each year. These things alone will take (assuming each cargo container holds 64,000 lb.) 31.5 billion cargo containers to ship.

I'm having trouble finding the numbers for how much energy it would take for a modern fleet of cargo ships to transport that cargo, but I'm not finding much. If we could we would at least have some energy numbers to compare hyperdrive transport to.

Have you consider it is possible they might take at least a significant fraction of the cargo ship needs off via hydroponics facility?

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, he did. "It seems fair to assume that Coruscant would grow some small amount of food themselves." Say, run enough hydroponic farms to feel two hundred billion people, twenty times the optimistic carrying capacity of an Earthlike planet... and yet it's still only a small fraction of what the trillion-man population of the planet would need.

[Batman]

I don't consider 10 billion to be all that optimistic really. We currently manage to feed 7 billion (if barely and inadequately for a lot of them) and that's with humanity doing a really shitty job of managing the resources available (if you're using the 1E12 billion I'm naturally retracting the criticism).

[S.L.Acker]

Have you consider it is possible they might take at least a significant fraction of the cargo ship needs off via hydroponics facility?

They're said to be massive food importers, no mention of any large scale hydroponics operations capable of feeding a significant fraction of people. I also only went with food actually purchased as imports, I assumed that food production and waste of unsold food would balance. I also didn't account for feeding the additional 2 trillion people suspected of living on world but not on the census , so we can add in an additional 50 or so billion containers of food each year for that. If we factor in importing raw materials for buildings, and importing finished goods we can likely round off to 100 billion shipping containers of cargo per year as a rough estimate.

We can likely increase that number by many times if we start counting shipping traffic that gets routed through Coruscanti space.