Insider #84's Guide to the Grand Army of the Republic

Fire Fly · Post by **Fire Fly** » 2005-09-27 12:20am

Oh sorry, thought it was obvious. Dr. Saxton.

Noble Ire · Post by **Noble Ire** » 2005-09-27 12:25am

Fire Fly wrote:Oh sorry, thought it was obvious. Dr. Saxton.

Ah. I misunderstood.
I agree whole-heartedly. It's a shame that aren't more EU writers willing to actually appreicate the size of it all, but as you say, there would be a lot of "a thousand warships in a battle? Wank!" morons out there decrying it.

Mange · Post by **Mange** » 2005-09-29 05:14am

I think it's very strange that so little research was conducted before the article was written. I mean, the ItW:AOTC has some great information on the matter.

Kazuaki Shimazaki · Post by **Kazuaki Shimazaki** » 2005-09-29 06:25am

Mange the Swede wrote:I think it's very strange that so little research was conducted before the article was written. I mean, the ItW:AOTC has some great information on the matter.

It is the personnel. I forgot whether Saxton wrote the ITW:AOTC, but it was written AFAIK while he was there, so his handprints are probably on it. Competents get kinda scarce after that.

Imperial Overlord · Post by **Imperial Overlord** » 2005-09-29 06:53am

Stover also has a good appreciation for the size and scale of the Star Wars galaxy.

18-Till-I-Die · Post by **18-Till-I-Die** » 2005-09-29 08:30am

It wouldnt be so much of a problem if the number of droids to clones was decreased. Like, instead of 'quintillions' or whatever, just say tens of millions or hundreds of millions.

And no of course it isnt 'wow zany big galactic' numbers, but you could just say they were only fighting on a few worlds on teh ground and most of the battles were fought in space or ended quickly with orbital bombardment.

I could see the clones being superior enough to warrant a 10-1 kill ratio, the droids didnt strike me as all that impressive or menacing. Combine that with Jedi, and say there was a relatively few actual ground battles (say on planets with shields) and that should have tied it up nicely.

But as is, the GAR is simply far too small.

Mange · Post by **Mange** » 2005-09-29 08:36am

Kazuaki Shimazaki wrote:
Mange the Swede wrote:I think it's very strange that so little research was conducted before the article was written. I mean, the ItW:AOTC has some great information on the matter.
It is the personnel. I forgot whether Saxton wrote the ITW:AOTC, but it was written AFAIK while he was there, so his handprints are probably on it. Competents get kinda scarce after that.

IIRC, Dr. Saxton was indeed consultant.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-09-29 12:23pm

18-Till-I-Die wrote:It wouldnt be so much of a problem if the number of droids to clones was decreased. Like, instead of 'quintillions' or whatever, just say tens of millions or hundreds of millions.

You're talking about making the droid army .00000001% (or smaller) the size that it is accredited as being. This doesn't strike you as being a problem? Hundreds of millions is not sufficient to fight a galactic conflict.

And no of course it isnt 'wow zany big galactic' numbers, but you could just say they were only fighting on a few worlds on teh ground and most of the battles were fought in space or ended quickly with orbital bombardment.

Except that that contradicts observation.

I could see the clones being superior enough to warrant a 10-1 kill ratio, the droids didnt strike me as all that impressive or menacing. Combine that with Jedi, and say there was a relatively few actual ground battles (say on planets with shields) and that should have tied it up nicely.

But as is, the GAR is simply far too small.

Under your "solution," BOTH armies would be far too small.

DPDarkPrimus · Post by **DPDarkPrimus** » 2005-09-29 06:31pm

Reading the article, it seems like even the flavor text contradicts the numbers.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-09-29 07:29pm

DPDarkPrimus wrote:Reading the article, it seems like even the flavor text contradicts the numbers.

Oh, it does, as do the author's comments on the TFN thread. Really, the numbers are contradicted in so many places that they lose any sense of self-consistency.

Lord_Xerxes · Post by **Lord_Xerxes** » 2005-10-01 01:20am

I still think it's sad that according to text I attributed from Jedi Trial, the CIS fielded HALF of the total number we are being given of the GARs forces in a single battle. And that's not even taking into consideration the reinforcements that the Admiral was asking for and later arrived. Very sad indeed.

The Original Nex · Post by **The Original Nex** » 2005-10-02 11:19am

Man, Traviss seems to have made a complete 180, she's almost hypocritical. In her Republic Commando books she invents a freakin language for the Mandalorians ans then on her blogs she says we can't talk about the culture, physics and economics of Star Wars because it's all iconic. . .

+http://blogs.starwars.com/karentraviss/28/comments

Here's the link to the blog in question, my comments follow along with her replys.

VT-16 · Post by **VT-16** » 2005-10-02 12:35pm

I see DarkMoose is brown-nosing his way through life:

"Oh no, Ms. Traviss, I would never clog up your blog, that would be impolite of me" Right after you wrote a lengthy reply. Fucktard.

And the good old bullshit rebuttal "it's all fiction!" pops up again.

Ask her why she put 3 million down for the clone army. A hard number that shouldn't be there if it's all "fantasy".

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2005-10-02 01:11pm

Who the fuck started this "it's just fantasy, so we don't have to worry about being sloppy" meme? JRR Tolkien created an entire fucking consistent language for his Lord of the Rings books, and these people are running around saying that fantasy doesn't have to be consistent?

Lord Poe · Post by **Lord Poe** » 2005-10-02 01:26pm

I'm so sick of this fucking, "Sound in space! Wooo!" bullshit to ward off any logical sense in sci-fi. Yes, just like captions, thoughts we the audience "hear" someone thinking, onscreen translations of warning signs, etc. that is a cinematic cheat for the audience's benefit.

You fucking bone-headed morons...

Spanky The Dolphin · Post by **Spanky The Dolphin** » 2005-10-03 12:14pm

Specifically, sound in space (as well as soundtrack score) would fall under the category of non-diegetic sound, since it occurs outside of the filmic universe.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-10-03 06:12pm

Lord Poe wrote:I'm so sick of this fucking, "Sound in space! Wooo!" bullshit to ward off any logical sense in sci-fi. Yes, just like captions, thoughts we the audience "hear" someone thinking, onscreen translations of warning signs, etc. that is a cinematic cheat for the audience's benefit.

You fucking bone-headed morons...

Check out the TFN thread about it. I'm DESTROYING their positions over there. In particular, I just showed that moving the planet Gholondrein-b's oceans is a much more difficult logistical feat than moving the droid army around--something that Karen Traviss claimed in her blog that the CIS was incapable of doing given three years of fighting. I also went ahead and ripped up her cowardly comments in the blog, which I will shamelessly re-post here.

Master_of_Ossus wrote:Let me break down Karen's statements in the blog and then jump in when I notice mistakes, just as I do when replying to posts here. I think that's the easiest way to do this:

Karen Traviss wrote:I hope nobody's ever put off asking questions. I don't mind what folks ask as long as they're prepared to hear the answers.
I enjoy debating other people and hearing their perspectives, but we have to remember in debates as well as life that it's possible for people to be mistaken and when they are they frequently make up excuses in an effort to determine the validity of their arguments. That's why it's important to hear the answers that are given when queried, but it's equally important to UNDERSTAND and then EVALUATE the answers given. In college (and, for that matter, throughout my educational career) I often asked professors or other teachers for advice on dealing with problems. Every once in a while, a professor would make a mistake when asked a question. Did the class sit quiet and take what the professor had said to be gospel truth? No! They saw the mistakes the professor had made and then pointed them out because we as a collective group of students were making an effort to understand the material.

You know why the number of clones will never work out right? Because there are a number of things already floating around that make the two ends of the equation irreconcilable using real world numbers.
In other words Ms. Traviss acknowledges that her number does not make any logical sense within the universe. As we shall see, she is flat out wrong about several things because she has no appreciation for the scale of the SW Galaxy and its industrial/logistical complex.

We know how big Kamino is, we had existing clone numbers, but we also have mega-figures for droids. The two don't mix.
Yes they do. See below.

But what we did know was that the war would never run its course, and so most of those droids would never see battle. So that's how we took the numbers we had and retconned them the way we did.
In three years of fighting the droids never engaged in significant combat? Even if the droid numbers were overstated by a factor of one thousand, the CIS would have to deploy only .00015% of its forces in order to outnumber the GAR numbers given by ONE THOUSAND TIMES. Is there any way that Ms. Traviss can justify this given that the Galaxy has sufficient logistical forces to literally move entire oceans from one planet to another?

If you took this to its logical conclusion, the numbers of clone soldiers needed would have been many billions. Kamino is about half as big again as Earth (population 6 billion, with lots of land masses) and a waterworld. It has a billion inhabitants. So - and this is where it takes the fun out of it - real science and numbers means that they could never have produced and trained anything like that number of clones, because the infrastructure alone would have been unworkable. In fact, the whole physics and economics of them having an advanced industrial world doesn't stack up - using hard facts.
Coruscant is only SLIGHTLY bigger than Earth, yet it houses a population of many billions of beings. The only reason that this seems unreasonable to Ms. Traviss is because she failed in her research efforts to understand the ability of the Galaxy to move supplies and food and similar things around. Furthermore, oceans on Earth actually support denser populations of people than the land itself. That's one reason why so many major cities are located near the coast--because they grew up from towns that developed along the coast to take advantage of all of the resources that the waters could provide. We know from ITW that the cloning facilities included vast caverns and training facilities well beneath the surface, and frankly there is no reason to doubt that Kamino's population was in any way limited by the planet. For that matter, Kamino may not have been the only cloning facility. We already know that the Kaminoans outsourced a substantial fraction of the clone army off-world. Why not grow clones on other planets?

And they wouldn't have had the resources or infrastructure to create huge training and exercise areas, either.
They did, though. See ITW.

And clones produced by that method wouldn't have been functional enough as human beings to operate on the battlefield. And you can't teach everything by flash training; you need them to do it for real. And...keeping secret the supply of the hardware alone would have been impossible. And...
Given that Grand Admiral Thrawn believed flash-training sufficient to instruct a clone of himself in the art of tactics that he had elevated to a science, it is highly unlikely that flash-training is as limited as Ms. Traviss suggests. Furthermore, we know that the Kaminoans DID HAVE TRAINING FACILITIES. She obviously never read ITW.

As the final, and perhaps ultimate insult, she claims that keeping secret the hardware "would have been impossible" in a Galaxy that built the DEATH STAR II IN SECRET on a very limited time-scale. In short, when Ms. Traviss totally ignores vast aspects of the Star Wars universe she is able to claim inconsistencies within that universe. Had she done her research properly, however, she would have soon realized that these feats are not at all inconsistent with the scale of the Galaxy.

So...bang goes the whole clone wars thanks to reality. And that's why I get a litle impatient when I get folks flaming me about the numbers. They're being selective. They don't look at the whole equation, which is a lot more complex than dividing droids by clones!
No, Ms. Traviss is herself being selective because she hasn't done her research--which is a lot more complicated than waving hands around after-the-fact as many Star Wars authors could have told her.

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2005-10-03 06:32pm

Ummm, there's like a gazzilion forums on TF.net ... where exactly did you post this?

Noble Ire · Post by **Noble Ire** » 2005-10-03 06:36pm

Crown wrote:Ummm, there's like a gazzilion forums on TF.net ... where exactly did you post this?

The EU/Literature one I would suspect, the Insider discussion topic.

The Original Nex · Post by **The Original Nex** » 2005-10-03 06:40pm

My opinion on Traviss is that she's stuck between a rock and a hard place. She knows that her statements are bogus, and they go against statements she's made in earlier publications, but she's bound by LFL, and won't concede simply because she's part of the hierarchy there. I get the feeling that, if she were un-biased, and without the VIP privilages, special treatment, and needing to suck up to LFL herself, she would have conceded the point long ago.

Crown · Post by **Crown** » 2005-10-03 06:42pm

Noble Ire wrote:
Crown wrote:Ummm, there's like a gazzilion forums on TF.net ... where exactly did you post this?
The EU/Literature one I would suspect, the Insider discussion topic.

Ah yes ... I checked the last page and it wasn't there, it's on the second last page.

Noble Ire · Post by **Noble Ire** » 2005-10-03 06:46pm

The Original Nex wrote:My opinion on Traviss is that she's stuck between a rock and a hard place. She knows that her statements are bogus, and they go against statements she's made in earlier publications, but she's bound by LFL, and won't concede simply because she's part of the hierarchy there. I get the feeling that, if she were un-biased, and without the VIP privilages, special treatment, and needing to suck up to LFL herself, she would have conceded the point long ago.

One can only hope, she is one of my favorite current EU authors, and it would be a shame if she was an actual moron. Nevertheless, it's a shame that she and others aren't trying more to go against the grain, like Saxton. Still, I suppose that being too aggresive could cost her contracts.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-10-03 06:52pm

Noble Ire wrote:
The Original Nex wrote:My opinion on Traviss is that she's stuck between a rock and a hard place. She knows that her statements are bogus, and they go against statements she's made in earlier publications, but she's bound by LFL, and won't concede simply because she's part of the hierarchy there. I get the feeling that, if she were un-biased, and without the VIP privilages, special treatment, and needing to suck up to LFL herself, she would have conceded the point long ago.
One can only hope, she is one of my favorite current EU authors, and it would be a shame if she was an actual moron. Nevertheless, it's a shame that she and others aren't trying more to go against the grain, like Saxton. Still, I suppose that being too aggresive could cost her contracts.

She wouldn't actually bother me nearly as much as she does if she had just stopped talking about it altogether when she was shown to be wrong. Her blog entry, though, was basically an ill-conceived effort to defend her work when it's CLEARLY erroneous. That's why I'm not too upset with Ryan Kaufman, for example. He just kinda dropped the subject and hasn't discussed it, so I'm not going after him. Karen, though, seems quite adamant in her refusal to listen to reason because she keeps arguing that the figure makes sense, and the BS excuse that it doesn't make sense anyway is a cop-out.

The Original Nex · Post by **The Original Nex** » 2005-10-03 07:00pm

That's why I'm not too upset with Ryan Kaufman, for example. He just kinda dropped the subject and hasn't discussed it, so I'm not going after him.

Well I doubt you'll be very fond of this then. He's jumping on the "Numbers in Star Wars are Silly" band wagon too. . .

He's babbling on about mythology, and how numbers are meaningless.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-10-03 07:01pm

The Original Nex wrote:Well I doubt you'll be very fond of this then. He's jumping on the "Numbers in Star Wars are Silly" band wagon too. . .

He's babbling on about mythology, and how numbers are meaningless.

Oh, geez.