Galactic Republic carrier focus

[Illuminatus Primus]

The problem with the Clone War is it is stupidly named and its premise requires a lot of work and counterintuitive assumptions in order to make sense; autonomous droids in the infantry role was a stupid move because it begs the question of why later forces bother with organics if droid armed forces' drawbacks may be managed successfully.

[Darth Hoth]

The problem with the Clone War is it is stupidly named and its premise requires a lot of work and counterintuitive assumptions in order to make sense; autonomous droids in the infantry role was a stupid move because it begs the question of why later forces bother with organics if droid armed forces' drawbacks may be managed successfully.

The best reason I can think of off the top of my head would be that there were ridiculous amounts of badwill against 'droid armies after the "Clone Wars", since they were so associated with the enemy and totalitarianism. Palpatine and others refrained from all but small-scale testing since the public would accept nothing else. It is still stupid, of course.

[PainRack]

The problem with droid hatred as shown by that bartender is.... why are clones also feared in the SWU?

[Isolder74]

The problem with droid hatred as shown by that bartender is.... why are clones also feared in the SWU?

For the good guys it has to be the turning on the Jedi. The idea that a human being can have that kind of cold following of orders would be downright creepy.

[Darth Hoth]

The problem with droid hatred as shown by that bartender is.... why are clones also feared in the SWU?

For the good guys it has to be the turning on the Jedi. The idea that a human being can have that kind of cold following of orders would be downright creepy.

Um, did people actually witness the executions first-hand? To most, as they heard it on the HoloNet, it would look like Palpatine made it out: Treasonous Jedi SA being purged by the Heer Clonetroopers and the SS Inquisitorius. Remember, the Jedi were not all that well thought of to begin with.

Out of universe, the explanation is of course, as IP mentions, the stupid way in which George Lucas implemented the Clone Wars, which everyone (including the early Expanded Universe) quite naturally assumed had been fought against the clones. Mad clones and cloners would be hated like the equivalent of real-life Nazis. But Captain Counterintuitive thought it was a better idea to have Republic clones slug it out with silly 'droids, because:

ITT SELLZ TWOO TEH KIDDIES = MUCHO $$$ FER PAPA LUCASS!!!!!111!!

I suppose one could chalk it down to clones reminding people of the war generally, or perhaps the few anti-Imperial clone incidents the Expanded Universe authors have attempted to somehow contain Lucas's epic creative failure with, but that is too far-fetched for even an inclusionist such as myself to swallow...

[Isolder74]

The problem with droid hatred as shown by that bartender is.... why are clones also feared in the SWU?

For the good guys it has to be the turning on the Jedi. The idea that a human being can have that kind of cold following of orders would be downright creepy.

Um, did people actually witness the executions first-hand? To most, as they heard it on the HoloNet, it would look like Palpatine made it out: Treasonous Jedi SA being purged by the Heer Clonetroopers and the SS Inquisitorius. Remember, the Jedi were not all that well thought of to begin with.

Out of universe, the explanation is of course, as IP mentions, the stupid way in which George Lucas implemented the Clone Wars, which everyone (including the early Expanded Universe) quite naturally assumed had been fought against the clones. Mad clones and cloners would be hated like the equivalent of real-life Nazis. But Captain Counterintuitive thought it was a better idea to have Republic clones slug it out with silly 'droids, because:

ITT SELLZ TWOO TEH KIDDIES = MUCHO $$$ FER PAPA LUCASS!!!!!111!!

I suppose one could chalk it down to clones reminding people of the war generally, or perhaps the few anti-Imperial clone incidents the Expanded Universe authors have attempted to somehow contain Lucas's epic creative failure with, but that is too far-fetched for even an inclusionist such as myself to swallow...

Who were the good guys? That's right Ball Organna and Mon Mothma. These are people, Ball at least, who spoke with two of the surviving Jedi. Rumors of the Clones methodically turning on their commanders had to have gotten around included in that the systimatic enslavement of the Wookies.

[Darth Hoth]

Who were the good guys? That's right Ball Organna and Mon Mothma. These are people, Ball at least, who spoke with two of the surviving Jedi. Rumors of the Clones methodically turning on their commanders had to have gotten around included in that the systimatic enslavement of the Wookies.

I have questioned the often-supposed great extent of Wookiee enslavement before (massive GULag-style work camps and Draka plantation hellholes are distinctly not what we see on the supposed slave planet in the Han Solo books or elsewhere). That aside, a rumour might spread, but over a population of quadrillions (at least), and that fast? Not to mention that such rumours were all the more likely to have been treated just as such. How many Germans might have heard rumours of the Holocaust but dismissed them out of hand or just turned the other way? Vague stories do not usually trump the official version in public consciousness, let alone to the degree implied.

[Isolder74]

Who were the good guys? That's right Ball Organna and Mon Mothma. These are people, Ball at least, who spoke with two of the surviving Jedi. Rumors of the Clones methodically turning on their commanders had to have gotten around included in that the systimatic enslavement of the Wookies.

I have questioned the often-supposed great extent of Wookiee enslavement before (massive GULag-style work camps and Draka plantation hellholes are distinctly not what we see on the supposed slave planet in the Han Solo books or elsewhere). That aside, a rumour might spread, but over a population of quadrillions (at least), and that fast? Not to mention that such rumours were all the more likely to have been treated just as such. How many Germans might have heard rumours of the Holocaust but dismissed them out of hand or just turned the other way? Vague stories do not usually trump the official version in public consciousness, let alone to the degree implied.

If clones were illegal in the Empire it may have stemmed from a desire of Palpatine to ensure that no one could raise a large army against him on a short notice and very easy to hide.

[Ender]

Localized hits from blasters (Geonosis Arena: the LAAT flares to a hover and several flashes across it's belly are shown) are one thing. Massive Q and Thermal increases across the entire front half of the ship are different.

While pressure increases may be a concern, I doubt the thermal increases would be a factor. Their shields should be sufficient to protect them from those energy levels without any problems.

In 'The Clone Wars' /cartoon/ there is obvious sign of LAATs in orbit as the final Separatist Assault gets underway, including opening the side doors on a nominally free vacuum hangar. I never doubted that either repulsorlift tech works in space (something I've assumed ever since ANH when X-Wings bank and pitch and maintain constant forward thrust without acceleration) or there is some other equivalent zero point theorem propulsion in action.

It is use of repulsors. Also, Shaterpoint features LAAT/is attacking from space, and mentions that a number of them were refitted to do such.

I just don't see the utility of making all these nominally cheap 'hueys' into transatmospheric capable ships IF they are going to be brought into atmosphere by motherships to operate at sub 300 knot, sub 15K foot, altitudes.

FYI we usually convert all measurements to metric here. In the cases where metric is the incorrect unit (e.g. speed of a ship) we include metric in parentheses behind it. It isn't a written rule, but it just makes it easier.

Economically (replacement costs) and by deckspot/mass it just doesn't make much sense to halve your total force size to double the price of a system that you then turn right around and bring into atmosphere anyway.

How does it halve their total force size? Are you speaking of LAATs or clones? Also, economically it does make sense in light of Palpatine's agenda. Loss of the corporate powers crippled the Core Worlds economies and sent them into a recession. Palpatine's behind the scenes manipulation meant he had the cash to buy these things from sources like The Wheel and other illicit and black market forces, plus wealthy individuals and alien powers. So he funneled that into the government via the bureaucracy he controlled and used that to fund massive government expenditures, e.g. purchase of new craft in addition to modifying previous ones. This increased in governemnt expenditures in addition to increased consumption by the addition of ~10^18 new bodies, which already wasn't changing due to the lack of conscription. This not only offset loss of exports, but turned around the economy, as mentioned in Labyrinth of Evil, while at the same time proceeded to build up his armed forces that he would need to maintain order after the destruction of the Jedi. Economically, Palpatine's policies are brilliant.

Particularly since cleaning up the airframe (via new design) can only help in terms of _active shield envelopes_ and blaster deflection as well. In the original Han Solo trilogy, the use of shields to smooth the spaceframe of the YT-1300 is mentioned several times as the Falcon 'glows' after Han makes a smuggler's descent to impress a girl.

Interesting, I'd always figured this was the case, and the AOTC and ROTS ICS implied that shifting the shape of the shielding improved atmospheric capabilities, but I was unaware it was explicitly stated in canon. I should read those books, it appears that there is a lot of great stuff in the older canon.

Further, given the gaping engine holes, projecting (tiny) gun tubes and generally poor in-atmosphere (straight wing) design of ships like the X-Wing, it is virtually impossible to believe that these ships are EITHER entering or exiting atmosphere at the kinds of accelerations shown in the original ANH (speeds they would have to be able to achieve to intercept the Death Star while /circumnavigating a gas giant/; Jupiter being some 280,000 miles around) without an active-ablative shield technology.

Well obviously they aren't hitting 10% of C. But we do still see unsheilded craft hitting 12k-15k kph in standard atmosphere. THe shielded ones do about 2x-3x that.

Anymore than a meteor or small asteroid would be able to survive 40,000mph (i.e. 4-5 times less than the X-Wings achieve at Yavin) speeds.

I don't think even a shielded craft is attributed a velocity that high, IIRC 44,000 kph is the max we know of. Though that doesn't preclude faster speeds.

And if shields are necessary for atmosphere penetration then this-

>
Infantry gunships were equipped with atmospheric containment shielding and could be deployed from space, although their optimal fighting range was still in the lower atmosphere, where they could reach speeds in excess of six hundred kilometers per hour.
>

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/LAAT/i

Would not be the only _environmental_ protection system mentioned.

Nor would this-

>
The HAET-221 was 17.2 meters long, and armed with antipersonnel blasters and a larger anti-vehicle laser cannon. These short-range ships were launched from low orbit, and used positional rockets to help them reach their target destinations. Once they entered the lower atmosphere, repulsorlift units were used to propel these craft. The HAET-221 usually flew at a low altitude of several meters, although it was capable of reaching an altitude of several kilometers. Once in a planet's atmosphere, these ships were incapable of returning to space on their own.
>

http://encyclopedia.wizards.pro/index.php/HAET-221

Be necessary as a followon/supplemental system.

Yeah, you should check out how the board code works. It would help you structure things a bit better.

Such is why I believe that, as the war wound on and both the sizes of the deployed forces grew and the 'coastal defense' equivalent systems prevented heavies from penetrating atmosphere; it became necessary to invest in both fewer, larger, transport hulls to transport larger numbers of forces (probably conscript).

Palpatine explicitly rules out conscription in one of the quotes in the Republic Commando books. They used stop-loss extensively and appear to conscript for specific jobs e.g. doctors, but pretty much it was all clones doing the fighting. By the way, I think you have that backwards - as defense improve you tend to go for smaller, more numerous craft to make it harder to prevent you from landing forces.

And to compensate for increasing costs by by removing atmosphere penetration (or at least /landing/) capabilities and letting smaller assault craft take in the forces with fewer troops at risk, per load.

Fair enough, I suppose Spaarti Cylinder improvements might be fast enough to create larger forces though the age-acceleration problem of raising up forces with, ahem, 'considerably less than 10 years' worth of growth cycle (the actual Clone War was what, 3-4 years, long?) would still leave a lot of psychological and phystical problems.

Nah, not even that, we look at other sources that point to huge numbers of Kamino clones prior to the induction of other types. Long story short - Traviss didn't bother to do research about the rest of canon. Remember that while clones have a long growth time, nothing prevents production of cloning tubes from following the same growth curve as battle droids with the added benefit that clone tubes can be reused to grow another clone as soon as the first is decanted. This offsets much of the advantage of droids - so long as you can start increasing your production with sufficient lead time you can keep cranking out clones at the same rate (although your carrying capacity is far lower)

Indeed, probably the biggest farce of the entire PT is the notion that droids which weight 300-500lbs and are made from metal 'through and through', while able to sustain running speeds compatible with fast moving ground vehicles (Geonosis battle plain) are somehow more vulnerable to direct fire than 200lb Clones wearing, essentially, plastic armor. Lucas effectively makes The Jedi look like idiot has beens in dire need of replacement and then makes a 5'7", pudgy, Temura Morrison into the superman followon force without a single comment as to 'how that works'.

I don't automatically disagree with your point here, but I think your rhetoric skews it - droids being heavier and moving faster will be under more stress (in the engineering sense) and thus component failure will hit them harder they you indicate it should.

Secondly, characterizing the armor as plastic ignores its observed properties - it is significantly more durable then anything we have seen. Its flaw there is that it doesn't cover as well, not in total protection. THis is stuff that takes a multimegajoule energy burst released in a fraction of a second from something that will blow limbs off to something very similar to a modern bullet wound. That is great protection.

I'd also challenge your assertion that they are a superman force - while Traviss writes it that way the rest of the canon makes it clear that they only match the standard B-1s in performance on the battlefield and aren't vastly different from baseline humans.

Because he knows it cannot.

You don't use GE and Clone tech to make slaves. Indeed, if you're going to invest the HUGE amount of time, money and educational resources inherent to artificially creating life, making mindless flesh-'bots is ridiculous because, as Obiwan himself said: "Well, if droids could _think_, none of us would be here...". And absolute loyalty to orders = absolute lack of creative tactical innovation on the battlefield = soldiers who don't live very long against physically superior battle droids.

Yes. Slave ownership is more a status thing in the GFFA, droids are treated as property, and clones are specifically stated to not be blindly loyal to orders in the films.

OTOH, if you make your creation as perfect and all-doing as possible as a cadre` force. Then you fill out the ranks with conscript troops whose childhood rearing is already paid for and who (as adults) can be trained in a matter of months, not years.

Now you have a force to be reckoned with.

They went the opposite way - hire the best military minds they could and have them act as trainers and a cadre force and fill in the rest with grown clones.

Once you acknowledge that simple fact as well as 'readmit into evidence' the things that ONLY the Jedi can do (crush 5-6 droids at a time, run celerically, augment armor with saber defense), your choice of archetype to model your 'perfect warrior' from becomes obvious.

Force users have a host of other problems with them, not the least of which is that force use won't be genetically determined (see Mike's Episode 2 revelations page for more info). Much more valid concerns are keeping them from turning on you. Plus there is the fact that Palpatine didn't want an unstoppable army, he wanted an army to trap and wipe out the Jedi, then

For whatever reason, Lucas hates The Jedi so much that he avoids common sense as much as counter-elitist notions of what cloning is really good for.

It isn't that Lucas hates the Jedi, it is that Palpatine hates them and Lucas shows Palpaine acting in a fully logical manner from that premise.

Again, 'only in America' (land of the free, home of the all-volunteer professional military), do we see such contradictions in what works (5 trillion beings in the SWU) vs. what is necessary (the best commandos you can find).

This is the second time you mentioned 5 trillion beings, where are you getting that from? Also, I don't follow your last sentence, are you slamming the EU for the "uber commandos do it all, ignore a valid army size" thing?

[PainRack]

If clones were illegal in the Empire it may have stemmed from a desire of Palpatine to ensure that no one could raise a large army against him on a short notice and very easy to hide.

Except that such illegality would no better explain the "feared rumours that stormtroopers were clones" amongst the general populace.

[Darth Hoth]

If clones were illegal in the Empire it may have stemmed from a desire of Palpatine to ensure that no one could raise a large army against him on a short notice and very easy to hide.

Except that such illegality would no better explain the "feared rumours that stormtroopers were clones" amongst the general populace.

To again attempt to come up with a convoluted explanation, it might also be due to failed experiments or programmes with later clone batches (Spaarti clones), who might have suffered from clone-madness and caused various problems (even if this does not apply to the Kamino clones, the Thrawn trilogy still implies that such modified clones were active at some point in the war). If these took place late in the war or just after it, they might perhaps overshadow an earlier positive view of the clone soldiers.

[Saberist]

Ender,

While pressure increases may be a concern, I doubt the thermal increases would be a factor. Their shields should be sufficient to protect them from those energy levels without any problems.

Fine. We're talking well over 2,500`F _if_ they adopt a skip glide reentry like the Shuttle. If they go for direct entry from orbital condition, we are talking 44,000`F, more like what you would find on the front face of an asteroid

http://web.utk.edu/~comet/papers/nature/TUNGUSKA.html
http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$D_temperature.htm.

Environmental shields are obviously pretty good (witness the droid that goes swimming in a lava flow as Anakin lands on it) but I doubt seriously if that kind of long term exposure is what they are intended for and again, the 'official' descripiton says that the LAAT has no weaponized shielding at all.

It is use of repulsors. Also, Shatterpoint features LAAT/is attacking from space, and mentions that a number of them were refitted to do such.

One of the wiki or wookie articles mentions this but it specifically states it was a single use event with ion engines. It also doesn't explain reentry from orbital velocities without aeroshielding.

FYI we usually convert all measurements to metric here. In the cases where metric is the incorrect unit (e.g. speed of a ship) we include metric in parentheses behind it. It isn't a written rule, but it just makes it easier.

600km/hr and 5,000m then. The former at least is from the databank I believe.

How does it halve their total force size? Are you speaking of LAATs or clones?

I'm speaking of adding weight as platform capability at the expense of mission capability as a troop transport. Which I imagine will include quite a large (structural) inclusion as a function of taking a 600km/hr atmospheric craft ship up to an orbital capable craft.

The V-22 Osprey is the size of a CH-53 Stallion helicopter specifically because it is designed to take 15-20 troops to 500nm with 'options' for a 7,000m and 600km/hr cruise. Yet it's mission payload factor is closer to the CH-46 Seaknight which it replaces as a _medium lift_ machine. While the price (anywhere from 66-97 million, depending on the source) is almost 1.5 times that of the Stallion itself.

Nothing comes for free and assuming you can go from atmospherics to orbital capabilities is without paying a system penalty in weight and price is untenable.

Also, economically it does make sense in light of Palpatine's agenda. Loss of the corporate powers crippled the Core Worlds economies and sent them into a recession. Palpatine's behind the scenes manipulation meant he had the cash to buy these things from sources like The Wheel and other illicit and black market forces, plus wealthy individuals and alien powers. So he funneled that into the government via the bureaucracy he controlled and used that to fund massive government expenditures, e.g. purchase of new craft in addition to modifying previous ones. This increased in governemnt expenditures in addition to increased consumption by the addition of ~10^18 new bodies, which already wasn't changing due to the lack of conscription. This not only offset loss of exports, but turned around the economy, as mentioned in Labyrinth of Evil, while at the same time proceeded to build up his armed forces that he would need to maintain order after the destruction of the Jedi. Economically, Palpatine's policies are brilliant.

Only if they work on a Keynesian system of deliberate debt cycling by flooding the system with money 'as needed' while maintaining absolute pricing controls to prevent mass inflation prematurely inducing the contraction phase of the business cycle.

OTOH, idea that you NEED money in such a system is questionable because it still doesn't explain the Malthusian effects of total output losses in the commercial sector (which would include subsistence agro, redoubling) vs. excesses in the military one are accepted by a society that did just fine based on a minimalist home industry (or it would not have been lost).

As soon as Palpatine nationalizes the NEW military industries (which would take years to set up, even with droid labor and Von Neumann systems) to maintain pricing/union/resource allocation controls, he has gone to a centrally planned economy which of course did -so well- in Russian hands.

Interesting, I'd always figured this was the case, and the AOTC and ROTS ICS implied that shifting the shape of the shielding improved atmospheric capabilities, but I was unaware it was explicitly stated in canon. I should read those books, it appears that there is a lot of great stuff in the older canon.

Better stories too.

Well obviously they aren't hitting 10% of C. But we do still see unsheilded craft hitting 12k-15k kph in standard atmosphere. THe shielded ones do about 2x-3x that.

If that's true then I guess what it comes down to is nobody would install two different 'grades' of shielding if they could do the same job with one unless the power use differentials were just /enormous/.

The closest you get to this in the older books is Lando monkeying around with the weak shield matrice overlaps to better seal up the Falcon against CBR but again, the main point is that the physical dynamics are going to be so huge in terms of hitting the atmosphere at speed with bubble canopies and projecting gun barrels on a Peterbuilt style nose that it just doesn't make sense to spend the money or the weight (penalizing the payload fraction) for what is now a _shieldless_ gunship.

Quantity has a quality all it's own and if you have a full hangar of 100 gunships vs. the 80 that you can afford with full exoatmospherics propulsion and shield aeroshaping, while the exo-capables typically lose 10% of their number _to orbital defenses_ (i.e. capship killers which should have no problems destroying gunships with each hit, shields or no), while the ground force also lose HALF it's nominal 30 troop payload due to secondary system installations. You are looking at the difference between 3,000 men leaving the more heavily protected Acclimator hull after atmosphere penetration as essentially a regimental force. And 1,080 men or a battalion.

Sorry, but given the capship can come in at all, I would prefer to tackle battlefield defenses to fixed orbital weapons.

And if parent ship cannot, it would still be better if the replacement dropship could also bring a vehicle since _driving_ to the sound of gunfire not only keeps your troops under armor for the whole trip but it also allows you to set up the LZ of your choice and further conserve your insertion/extraction force from target terminal area defenses.

I don't think even a shielded craft is attributed a velocity that high, IIRC 44,000 kph is the max we know of. Though that doesn't preclude faster speeds.

I must assume then that the fighters which came around Yavin were in fact using microjumps to close the distance while retaining acceptable orbital intercept velocities indeed, it may be that they have to overtake the battle station from behind.

Palpatine explicitly rules out conscription in one of the quotes in the Republic Commando books. They used stop-loss extensively and appear to conscript for specific jobs e.g. doctors, but pretty much it was all clones doing the fighting. By the way, I think you have that backwards - as defense improve you tend to go for smaller, more numerous craft to make it harder to prevent you from landing forces.

It wouldn't work. A single factory that has adequate supplies is putting out 2 conventional battledroids every ten seconds on Geonosis and frankly it doesn't look that sophisticated a setup.

Every year, here on Earth, we manufacture around 50 MILLION automobiles, globally, and we have nothing like the capabilities of the Republic when it comes to mass automation.

The only way to beat the Separatists (whose droids are superior in carriage weight, endurance and absolute performance anyway) is to beat them early before they can put so many remote Von Neumann factories into production that they essentially run away from the Republic on a soldier:soldier basis, forcing the Navy to obliterate worlds lest they be occupied.

Which is part of why I suggest heavier and heavier capship hulls with larger internal volumes and less wasted space for landing. Because the FEWER capships you have to buy, the less your total hullcount cost drivers will be on your most expensive single platform purchase.

And the internal volume scale will not be linear for price.

Think oil tanker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker

Take a 60 million dollar Aframax in the 100KDWT range and double the price to a 120 million dollar VLCC in the 300KDWT range.

Now apply this to a capship which uses it's _new design_ dropship force, to bring troops straight from a far orbit around the backside of the plane,t avoiding orbital flak for either parent or landed force.

But only once it has been proven that the surface defenses are too tough for conventional 'all in' approaches with regimental sized Acclamator landing ships that save on costs by being the sole transatmospheric capable platforms on what is otherwise a single-environment LAAT force.

It is a cost trade (making full vac capable assault forces vs. just the main delivery hull which is also better designed for atmosphere penetration and anti-orbital weapon shielding), but the overall design approach is one that saves money by building fewer, more capable, large hulls.

Rather than risk losing not only the primary taskforce assets but also the full landing force once surface defenses are too sophisticated and dense to set down right at the landing zone.

This is why AT-ATs come over the far horizon. It is also why even low yield nukes can still deny invasion forces access to defended areas, should they bypass the shielded/ion cannon protected zones for an indirect landing using mechanized armor instead of airmobile for force delivery.

Because the inhabited areas will have a regional shield and several large caliber cannons protecting them. And nobody will mind so much if you irradiate remote/rural areas.

Nah, not even that, we look at other sources that point to huge numbers of Kamino clones prior to the induction of other types. Long story short - Traviss didn't bother to do research about the rest of canon. Remember that while clones have a long growth time, nothing prevents production of cloning tubes from following the same growth curve as battle droids with the added benefit that clone tubes can be reused to grow another clone as soon as the first is decanted. This offsets much of the advantage of droids - so long as you can start increasing your production with sufficient lead time you can keep cranking out clones at the same rate (although your carrying capacity is far lower)

Sorry, I just don't see it. Battledroids are dead, inanimate, matter. They are not grown so much as poured from crucibles into casting blocks which are subsequently hotstamped to shape.

Clones are are limited by the rate at which epigenetic sequencers can add/subtract ethyl terminus' activators to enable or stop protein expression from a totipotent cellular state to individual (organs etc.)segregated tissues. That alone should take weeks under best-case scenarios (no transcription errors).

You may be able to compress the post-natal equivalent growth cycle, in cylinder or out, but to direct-download a military training program during this period and avoid all hands-on training also seems incredibly unlikely (given Lucas /insists/ that the Clones were not 'programmed' to obey Order 66).

And why try? On Geonosis we see robots running at full tilt _and shooting on the run_ in company with wheel carts across kilometers deep battlespace between the various launching cradle docks.

We only see Clones /walking/ in the final 'standup fight' closure to terminal distances. And with the massive numbers of bolts flying NOT ONCE do we see a saturation hit on the soldier's armor.

Which suggest cowardice on the part of the director in illustrating whether, once hit, 'plastic armor' is good enough to take the heat.

I don't automatically disagree with your point here, but I think your rhetoric skews it - droids being heavier and moving faster will be under more stress (in the engineering sense) and thus component failure will hit them harder they you indicate it should.

Not as hard as a blaster bolt to the chest. And a droid which has a ruined chassis is still probably good from the hips up. A human is not cannibalizeable that way.

While humans may have superior joint function under light loads at at lower speeds, it's a known fact that ex-infantry suffer chronic and often severe medical injuries after working life of as little as 10 years in the fielded combat branches, toting 70-120lb loads at least 40 of which is an Interceptor PBA.

OTOH, the battledroids very skeleton is effectively armor-classification rated. And so any auxilliary package should take this baseline (fail operative) capacity into account as the equivalent of a lower 'zero point' starting weight. Because droids don't eat, drink, carry a separate radio or need additional clothing for environment or armor purposes.

Secondly, characterizing the armor as plastic ignores its observed properties - it is significantly more durable then anything we have seen. Its flaw there is that it doesn't cover as well, not in total protection. THis is stuff that takes a multimegajoule energy burst released in a fraction of a second from something that will blow limbs off to something very similar to a modern bullet wound. That is great protection.

But it's not integral. Like adding armor packages to a Humvee, as soon as you're finished, you've so heavily loaded the baseline chassis and suspension that there is no mobility and a greatly reduced service life.

As for thickness, oh please.

http://www.houseshadowwolf.com/ep3blueclone.jpg
http://www.starfortressproductions.com/ ... earmor.jpg

You can't forge or cast metal that thin and if you did, it would have the rigidity and tensile strength of an aluminum can. OTOH, if the chest plate is made of some kind of RCC/silicon carbide mix, it alone would make the trooper walk in a permanent hunch.

Compare this to a droid where a direct strike on the centermass that _through and throughs_ the target may not even incapacitate it immediately as it may be wiser to let the act of penetration expend the round energy while using internal redundancies and compartmentalization to minimize systems damage.

Similarly, specific local upgrades (better alloys) to joints can improve improve overall loadbearing capacities without nominally changing the basic chassis design (by weight) a bit.

Whereas, by the time you thicken the bones to accept the muscle inserts and flex loads on a human 'looking able to bear another 50lbs worth of equipment', junior he has gone from Linebacker to Weight Lifter in body volume metric and the /existing/ (zeropoint) base load stress on his skeleton and joints will be that much greater without any added loads.

Like a big dog with bad hips, humans don't scale well.

I'd also challenge your assertion that they are a superman force - while Traviss writes it that way the rest of the canon makes it clear that they only match the standard B-1s in performance on the battlefield and aren't vastly different from baseline humans.

I see a 5'7" man turned into a '1.83 meter' clone who is continually shot at an upwards camera angle to make it look like he's 1.91 meters at least and I wonder what Lucas is thinking. Because whether he is anticlone/GE or not, he has made them -cooler than Jedi- as an elite force. Of super commandos.

I know that you believe that the numbers game is 'all just a mistake' but all the online GAR resources put it as 3 million men. Not units. Men.

And _3 million men_ cannot beat trillions of droids, whether supermen or not. Furthermore, if you are going to breed supermen, you'd better take the top of the line Jedi who at least bring some mental abilities to the game 'when they remember to use them'.

They went the opposite way - hire the best military minds they could and have them act as trainers and a cadre force and fill in the rest with grown clones.

And you will lose the numbers game on the number of weeks or months it takes to train your force, even if you can /somehow/ (miraculously) speed up the gestation interval itself to match what will _still be_ mechanically superior battle droids.

Force users have a host of other problems with them, not the least of which is that force use won't be genetically determined (see Mike's Episode 2 revelations page for more info).

If midichlorians are antennas for The Force and occupy the same extranuclear position as mitochondrial organelles then 'characterizing The Force' should be possible by characterizing the midi counts. As indeed it appears to be.

Of course it will pass to you via your mother, not your dad.

But effectively, what tht midis do is allow Lucas to claim what he never shows. And given he has the technology to make spectacular FX events and keep the Jedi at least /relevant to the peace/ if not the war; he instead chooses to dumb down the action and indeed _remove_ 90% of it as a excuse to not illustrating a capable psionic martial arts system to compete with his precious Clones.

And that in and of itself suggests that he is afraid of using a 'not an Aryan superman' archetype for what Cloning and GE could do _with Jedi_.

Rather than with 'just like most men' Mandalorians.

This is strategically stupid, it plays into the existing trope of why GE is only good for breeding big dumb dogs, and it is _dramatically boring_.

Since with a hundred thousand Jedi clones trained to 'die on command' at the issuance of Order 89. There is no realistic justification not to use them and so bump up the Sith attack Jeid with Jedi sophistication of the threat besides.

Much more valid concerns are keeping them from turning on you. Plus there is the fact that Palpatine didn't want an unstoppable army, he wanted an army to trap and wipe out the Jedi, then

Which is effectively The Sith admitting to weakness in their 'two and only two' system. They cannot control more than that even though they equally cannot administer an Empire with just two men and the use of the Clone betrayal theme shows how vulnerable 'even Force users' are to mere mortals.

Then we have all the Dark Jedi, Hands and 'bred stupid' assumptions for the existing Clones and the notion of not being able to exploit a system of prejudice (similar to Obiwan's "You are the best of the best" speech) to generate absolute loyalty amounts to Palpatine not having any kind of a PLAN to replace the Republic with a Sith infrastructure or dynasty capable of outliving himself.

And again, I don't buy it. 1,000 years worth of waiting for...this? No way.

It isn't that Lucas hates the Jedi, it is that Palpatine hates them and Lucas shows Palpaine acting in a fully logical manner from that premise.

2 Men take on 10,000 and win. Without a hint of Force useage beyond some dramatic convenience of 'Shroud Of The Darkside' which is neither an emission nor an self-manifested occlusion because Jedi sit five feet from Palpatine and don't notice it. While Jedi across the galaxy haven't detected any change in the all the years leading up to the Clone Wars as might derive from say increasing levels of inspired violence and chaos.

Right.

Add to this Lucas' admitted lack of comfort with 'religious discussions' and the way he ensures that Jedi /never/ use The Force in such dire sistuations as the Geonosis Arena Battle, despite finally having the technology to render it wondrous as an effect, and you're left wondering:

How did they fool them so long with such weakness?

Not a clinging doubt you want to take into a movie theater with you.

This is the second time you mentioned 5 trillion beings, where are you getting that from?

I don't read the YV period stuff. I'm sorry but when I read about leather biker smurfs with 'living snake staffs' it's just too hard not to laugh.
However; online someplace I read that between 2-2.5 trillion people died in those wars and that it was 'roughly half the population of the Republic at that time'.

This being why the Jedi were so resented in concluding the conflict by treaty after having so little to do with it's actual fighting.

If that's not correct then point me at something G-canonish which is.

Also, I don't follow your last sentence, are you slamming the EU for the "uber commandos do it all, ignore a valid army size" thing?

The thing about interstellar war is that you don't have to (and indeed /cannot/ without massive planetary defenses) 'win the world' to win the battle. But what you cannot do is allow someone else to take (or hold) it if you don't.

Such is the essend of razed earth politics in a warfighter condition where you don't have to sleep on the planet you burn to ashes. It simply being too easy to dump an old fashioned hypernuke on their heads and go find an alternative world with equivalent industry/resource/positioning that you can exploit.

That said, if you are going to abandon the idea of a standing army using the most readily available forces out there (conscripts whose participation amounts to a social contract if not blackmail into 'justified patriotism') it makes sense to do so on the basis of picking the best possible fighters.

And those are not Mandalorian Bounty Hunters whose last major war was a loss 4,000 years before.

They are Jedi.

And if Jedi can be cloned with Force Talent (as the cloning of Palpatine and Luke would suggest in the EU) then 'pretending' that a brawny super soldier is the way to go is moronic.

In abandoning such an elitist thought, Lucas went with another microforce /less capable/ than the Jedi in the areas where psionics can actually make a numeric deficit less important (not being where the hypernuke will land, force shoving whole waves of droid infantry etc.) and furthermore _made them bred to battle slaves_, far more than even a conscript force.

I don't see that as being sensible or even comprehensible as a dramatic or social commentary driven theme.

I mean would YOU trust 3 million chia-pet slave soldiers to defend you from 3 trillion droids if you could have 5 trillion conscripts and a REAL vs. assumed loyal superman cadre` force leadership besides?

I wonder if Lucas truly understands the nature of the symbolisms he's exploiting or if he is simply so disabused of the Jedi concept that he will do anything to make them look like idiots and 'avoid becoming Elron Hubbard' in the process.


Saberist

[Illuminatus Primus]

Who gives a shit about the "official" documentation, its often unreliable and stupid. The visuals of AOTC clearly show LAAT/i shields, including multiple shield interactions from AAA (not flak bursts; the beams go through the burst and keep going) and small arms firing hitting the underside of LAAT/i's with bright shield flashes.

[Ender]

Ender,

Fine. We're talking well over 2,500`F _if_ they adopt a skip glide reentry like the Shuttle. If they go for direct entry from orbital condition, we are talking 44,000`F, more like what you would find on the front face of an asteroid

http://web.utk.edu/~comet/papers/nature/TUNGUSKA.html
http://www.columbiassacrifice.com/$D_temperature.htm.

Environmental shields are obviously pretty good (witness the droid that goes swimming in a lava flow as Anakin lands on it) but I doubt seriously if that kind of long term exposure is what they are intended for and again, the 'official' descripiton says that the LAAT has no weaponized shielding at all.

While it was not listed in the ICS, it is clearly visible in the film. Do not mistake temperature for energy or power, the weapons levels observed on the battlefield are far in excess of that of re-entry.

One of the wiki or wookie articles mentions this but it specifically states it was a single use event with ion engines. It also doesn't explain reentry from orbital velocities without aeroshielding.

The wiki is wrong, the LAATs were for extraction, single use would preclude their returning to the ship. Further, shields preclude the name for additional aeroshielding.

I'm speaking of adding weight as platform capability at the expense of mission capability as a troop transport. Which I imagine will include quite a large (structural) inclusion as a function of taking a 600km/hr atmospheric craft ship up to an orbital capable craft.

Yes, but these craft were used for extraction and strikes, not mass deployment. Loss of troop carrying capability is less of a concern when ou are parking an Acclamator on the ground.

Nothing comes for free and assuming you can go from atmospherics to orbital capabilities is without paying a system penalty in weight and price is untenable.

I'm not assuming that, but it is worth pointing out that the few times we have seen them used in attacks from orbit, it was either not an invasion, or there were transports landing as well.

Only if they work on a Keynesian system of deliberate debt cycling by flooding the system with money 'as needed' while maintaining absolute pricing controls to prevent mass inflation prematurely inducing the contraction phase of the business cycle.

As near as can be determined, there has been no inflation for at least 5000 years - prices for goods in the Tales of the Jedi era are about the same as in the Galactic Empire era.

OTOH, idea that you NEED money in such a system is questionable because it still doesn't explain the Malthusian effects of total output losses in the commercial sector (which would include subsistence agro, redoubling) vs. excesses in the military one are accepted by a society that did just fine based on a minimalist home industry (or it would not have been lost).

I don't think the idea they were based on a minimalist home industry is at all supported by the evidence. Convince me otherwise.

As soon as Palpatine nationalizes the NEW military industries (which would take years to set up, even with droid labor and Von Neumann systems) to maintain pricing/union/resource allocation controls, he has gone to a centrally planned economy which of course did -so well- in Russian hands.

Nationalization of the corporations is a trcky subject, I will defer to the essays at Domis Publica on that subject.

If that's true then I guess what it comes down to is nobody would install two different 'grades' of shielding if they could do the same job with one unless the power use differentials were just /enormous/.

There are two different grades of shielding though - particle and ray. The former appears to be based more on inertia compensator technology, the latter makes incoming energy go to dedicated radiators and heat sinks.

The closest you get to this in the older books is Lando monkeying around with the weak shield matrice overlaps to better seal up the Falcon against CBR but again, the main point is that the physical dynamics are going to be so huge in terms of hitting the atmosphere at speed with bubble canopies and projecting gun barrels on a Peterbuilt style nose that it just doesn't make sense to spend the money or the weight (penalizing the payload fraction) for what is now a _shieldless_ gunship.

Yes, which is why shields can be configured to provide a more aerodynamic shape.

Quantity has a quality all it's own and if you have a full hangar of 100 gunships vs. the 80 that you can afford with full exoatmospherics propulsion and shield aeroshaping, while the exo-capables typically lose 10% of their number _to orbital defenses_ (i.e. capship killers which should have no problems destroying gunships with each hit, shields or no),

Capship killers should have a problem taking out gunships by virtue of the difference in size. Big guns require massive support to deal with power, recoil, cooling, etc. Which makes it slower to transverse.

while the ground force also lose HALF it's nominal 30 troop payload due to secondary system installations. You are looking at the difference between 3,000 men leaving the more heavily protected Acclimator hull after atmosphere penetration as essentially a regimental force. And 1,080 men or a battalion.

I take issue with your troop counts, they don't mesh with canon.

Sorry, but given the capship can come in at all, I would prefer to tackle battlefield defenses to fixed orbital weapons.

They tend to be used interchangably.

And if parent ship cannot, it would still be better if the replacement dropship could also bring a vehicle since _driving_ to the sound of gunfire not only keeps your troops under armor for the whole trip but it also allows you to set up the LZ of your choice and further conserve your insertion/extraction force from target terminal area defenses.

LAATT/cs carry walkers, tanks, etc allowing just that.

I must assume then that the fighters which came around Yavin were in fact using microjumps to close the distance while retaining acceptable orbital intercept velocities indeed, it may be that they have to overtake the battle station from behind.

Why? The velocity I gave was max airspeed, in space craft can easily hit relativistic velocities.

It wouldn't work. A single factory that has adequate supplies is putting out 2 conventional battledroids every ten seconds on Geonosis and frankly it doesn't look that sophisticated a setup.

Most estimates here are 1 droid/sec actually. But you aren't considering that, with lead time, the same applies to clones, only more so.

Every year, here on Earth, we manufacture around 50 MILLION automobiles, globally, and we have nothing like the capabilities of the Republic when it comes to mass automation.

The Death Stars provide a pretty good indication.

The only way to beat the Separatists (whose droids are superior in carriage weight, endurance and absolute performance anyway)

Clones are supposed to match B-1s and be exceeded by B-2s. Depending on the force breakdown the performance bit is questionable.

is to beat them early before they can put so many remote Von Neumann factories into production that they essentially run away from the Republic on a soldier:soldier basis, forcing the Navy to obliterate worlds lest they be occupied.

Except the Republic can do the same with clones, so long as they have the 10 year lead time we know they did.

Which is part of why I suggest heavier and heavier capship hulls with larger internal volumes and less wasted space for landing. Because the FEWER capships you have to buy, the less your total hullcount cost drivers will be on your most expensive single platform purchase.

And the internal volume scale will not be linear for price.

Think oil tanker.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_tanker

Take a 60 million dollar Aframax in the 100KDWT range and double the price to a 120 million dollar VLCC in the 300KDWT range.

And this was the tend of the war and later Empire.

Now apply this to a capship which uses it's _new design_ dropship force, to bring troops straight from a far orbit around the backside of the plane,t avoiding orbital flak for either parent or landed force.

Except you rapidly hit a cap of the horizon issue and ground pressure.

But only once it has been proven that the surface defenses are too tough for conventional 'all in' approaches with regimental sized Acclamator landing ships that save on costs by being the sole transatmospheric capable platforms on what is otherwise a single-environment LAAT force.

Yes, in those cases they usually inserted elite clones and Jedi to clear the road.

It is a cost trade (making full vac capable assault forces vs. just the main delivery hull which is also better designed for atmosphere penetration and anti-orbital weapon shielding), but the overall design approach is one that saves money by building fewer, more capable, large hulls.

Rather than risk losing not only the primary taskforce assets but also the full landing force once surface defenses are too sophisticated and dense to set down right at the landing zone.

This is why AT-ATs come over the far horizon.

No, that was because the shield precluded any other options.

It is also why even low yield nukes can still deny invasion forces access to defended areas, should they bypass the shielded/ion cannon protected zones for an indirect landing using mechanized armor instead of airmobile for force delivery.

Because the inhabited areas will have a regional shield and several large caliber cannons protecting them. And nobody will mind so much if you irradiate remote/rural areas.

Yes, these would be the Outer RIm sieges

Sorry, I just don't see it. Battledroids are dead, inanimate, matter. They are not grown so much as poured from crucibles into casting blocks which are subsequently hotstamped to shape.

Clones are are limited by the rate at which epigenetic sequencers can add/subtract ethyl terminus' activators to enable or stop protein expression from a totipotent cellular state to individual (organs etc.)segregated tissues. That alone should take weeks under best-case scenarios (no transcription errors).

You misunderstand me - the same mathematical model that lets you crank out battle droids at an exponential rate works for any product. Now substitute "clone tanks" for "battle droids". Give the 10 year lead-time for growth, and clones will be delivered at the same exponential rate that the tanks were build and they were grown.

You may be able to compress the post-natal equivalent growth cycle, in cylinder or out, but to direct-download a military training program during this period and avoid all hands-on training also seems incredibly unlikely (given Lucas /insists/ that the Clones were not 'programmed' to obey Order 66).

Again, you misunderstand me. The same setup you have for producing battle droids at an exponential rate can be used to produce clone tanks. Start 1 clone in each tank and decant when growth is complete and begin training. This ends up with clones being produced at an exponential rate as well. When you consider that the tanks can be reused after the clone is decant it is even more efficient. The downside is the lower carrying capacity results in a lower total soldier cap and the 10 year lead time it requires to turn out results - the droid factory produces soldiers from the get go.

And why try? On Geonosis we see robots running at full tilt _and shooting on the run_ in company with wheel carts across kilometers deep battlespace between the various launching cradle docks.

We only see Clones /walking/ in the final 'standup fight' closure to terminal distances. And with the massive numbers of bolts flying NOT ONCE do we see a saturation hit on the soldier's armor.

Which suggest cowardice on the part of the director in illustrating whether, once hit, 'plastic armor' is good enough to take the heat.

Running at full tilt and shooting at a distance of several kilometers, do you expect the shots to be anywhere close to the targets?

Not as hard as a blaster bolt to the chest. And a droid which has a ruined chassis is still probably good from the hips up. A human is not cannibalizeable that way.

Yes it can be recycled if you recover it, but that doesn't change the fact that each individual droid goes down as easily.

While humans may have superior joint function under light loads at at lower speeds, it's a known fact that ex-infantry suffer chronic and often severe medical injuries after working life of as little as 10 years in the fielded combat branches, toting 70-120lb loads at least 40 of which is an Interceptor PBA.

OTOH, the battledroids very skeleton is effectively armor-classification rated. And so any auxilliary package should take this baseline (fail operative) capacity into account as the equivalent of a lower 'zero point' starting weight. Because droids don't eat, drink, carry a separate radio or need additional clothing for environment or armor purposes.

Droids are also designed to be weak enough to allow recycling though - remember the end of TPM where the gungans were able to knock them apart by hand once the electromagnetic joint supports were disabled? They clearly are not designed for harsh, durable use.

But it's not integral. Like adding armor packages to a Humvee, as soon as you're finished, you've so heavily loaded the baseline chassis and suspension that there is no mobility and a greatly reduced service life.

As for thickness, oh please.

http://www.houseshadowwolf.com/ep3blueclone.jpg
http://www.starfortressproductions.com/ ... earmor.jpg

You can't forge or cast metal that thin and if you did, it would have the rigidity and tensile strength of an aluminum can. OTOH, if the chest plate is made of some kind of RCC/silicon carbide mix, it alone would make the trooper walk in a permanent hunch.

Firstly I didn't mention thickness, secondly you are discarding the fact that we see the everyday materials in SW far exceed what materials we know should be capable of. The armor offers excellent protection for its environment - I can't really point to anything beyond that. A blaster shot should induce hydrostatic shock in the body it strikes, resulting in blowing limbs clean off if it strikes an extremity, and blowing most of the insides out your back in a cloud of steam, juice, and plasma if you were shot in the chest. We don't see that in the films. While this may be because they are PG films, under suspension of disbelief we must conclude that the armor does its job.

Compare this to a droid where a direct strike on the centermass that _through and throughs_ the target may not even incapacitate it immediately as it may be wiser to let the act of penetration expend the round energy while using internal redundancies and compartmentalization to minimize systems damage.

Deflected blaster bolts take out droids. Clearly SW has hit the point that, as good as its defense tech may be, offensive technology has surpassed it.

Similarly, specific local upgrades (better alloys) to joints can improve improve overall loadbearing capacities without nominally changing the basic chassis design (by weight) a bit.

Whereas, by the time you thicken the bones to accept the muscle inserts and flex loads on a human 'looking able to bear another 50lbs worth of equipment', junior he has gone from Linebacker to Weight Lifter in body volume metric and the /existing/ (zeropoint) base load stress on his skeleton and joints will be that much greater without any added loads.

Like a big dog with bad hips, humans don't scale well.

No disagreement, though I do recall this was a point you brought up in another thread - that the Fett sequence had been altered to the point where they looked like Space Marines.

I see a 5'7" man turned into a '1.83 meter' clone who is continually shot at an upwards camera angle to make it look like he's 1.91 meters at least and I wonder what Lucas is thinking. Because whether he is anticlone/GE or not, he has made them -cooler than Jedi- as an elite force. Of super commandos.

I know that you believe that the numbers game is 'all just a mistake' but all the online GAR resources put it as 3 million men. Not units. Men.

There is a lot of history to this - basically the 3 million line comes from one source, and discounts the other sources that talk of millions of divisions, multiple grand armies, wars of attrition against quintillions of droids, etc. As I said, Karen Traviss didn't do any research. When it was brought up, she started ranting about how she wanted to kill those who disagreed with her.

The link at the top of this forum about the droid army is a good primer. The archives have some more, and Wayne Poe has some YouTube videos about it. I'm in the middle of revising my essay on the topic (hence my interest in discussing it)

Simply put, to harmonize all of the sources, the GAR had to be ~10^17 guys.

And _3 million men_ cannot beat trillions of droids, whether supermen or not. Furthermore, if you are going to breed supermen, you'd better take the top of the line Jedi who at least bring some mental abilities to the game 'when they remember to use them'.

No disagreement here, that is one of the points against the 3 million argument. Though "trillions" is replaced by "quintillions"

And you will lose the numbers game on the number of weeks or months it takes to train your force, even if you can /somehow/ (miraculously) speed up the gestation interval itself to match what will _still be_ mechanically superior battle droids.

Yes, but in this case they were given the 10 years of lead time they needed to match the droid army. Initially the GAR had the upperhand in the conflict, but CIS positioning meant they couldn't strike well. Towards then end the CIS production had overtaken GAR production, but not by much.

If midichlorians are antennas for The Force and occupy the same extranuclear position as mitochondrial organelles then 'characterizing The Force' should be possible by characterizing the midi counts. As indeed it appears to be.

Of course it will pass to you via your mother, not your dad.

But effectively, what tht midis do is allow Lucas to claim what he never shows. And given he has the technology to make spectacular FX events and keep the Jedi at least /relevant to the peace/ if not the war; he instead chooses to dumb down the action and indeed _remove_ 90% of it as a excuse to not illustrating a capable psionic martial arts system to compete with his precious Clones.

And that in and of itself suggests that he is afraid of using a 'not an Aryan superman' archetype for what Cloning and GE could do _with Jedi_.

Rather than with 'just like most men' Mandalorians.

This is strategically stupid, it plays into the existing trope of why GE is only good for breeding big dumb dogs, and it is _dramatically boring_.

If use of the FOrce was determined by genetics, then natural selection would have long ago resulted in every species having it - telekinesis and precognition are of such obvious survival benefit that this is pretty much beyond questioning. So clearly it isn't purely genetically related, which precludes creating armies of Jedi.


I agree the Jedi fought in the wrong way - the description in Jim Butcher's Codex Aldera series of a battle between "fury users" and barbarians is how it should have gone down. The fury users used their power to bury the army halfway into the ground, then set fire to the battlefield. Their troops went through later and stabbed any survivors.

But that is what I want, rather then what is. What is is that Jedi who were so overt were harshly stopped by the Jedi Council, as such wanton displays of power were seen as related to the dark side.

Since with a hundred thousand Jedi clones trained to 'die on command' at the issuance of Order 89. There is no realistic justification not to use them and so bump up the Sith attack Jeid with Jedi sophistication of the threat besides.

Aside fromt he fact that force use is clearly not genetically related.

Which is effectively The Sith admitting to weakness in their 'two and only two' system. They cannot control more than that even though they equally cannot administer an Empire with just two men and the use of the Clone betrayal theme shows how vulnerable 'even Force users' are to mere mortals.

They can't control more because when you had the power of a god to someone you can't make sure they will use it how you want. Even here when "what would you do with force powers" comes up, the mind trick to have sex is pretty common - despite the fact that people saying so are declaring that they are rapists who just lack the ability to get away with it.

Then we have all the Dark Jedi, Hands and 'bred stupid' assumptions for the existing Clones and the notion of not being able to exploit a system of prejudice (similar to Obiwan's "You are the best of the best" speech) to generate absolute loyalty amounts to Palpatine not having any kind of a PLAN to replace the Republic with a Sith infrastructure or dynasty capable of outliving himself.

2 Men take on 10,000 and win. Without a hint of Force useage beyond some dramatic convenience of 'Shroud Of The Darkside' which is neither an emission nor an self-manifested occlusion because Jedi sit five feet from Palpatine and don't notice it. While Jedi across the galaxy haven't detected any change in the all the years leading up to the Clone Wars as might derive from say increasing levels of inspired violence and chaos.

Right.

Two men do it because they play it smart and use technology and deception as massive force multipliers.

Add to this Lucas' admitted lack of comfort with 'religious discussions' and the way he ensures that Jedi /never/ use The Force in such dire sistuations as the Geonosis Arena Battle, despite finally having the technology to render it wondrous as an effect, and you're left wondering:

How did they fool them so long with such weakness?

Not a clinging doubt you want to take into a movie theater with you.

I don't read the YV period stuff. I'm sorry but when I read about leather biker smurfs with 'living snake staffs' it's just too hard not to laugh.
However; online someplace I read that between 2-2.5 trillion people died in those wars and that it was 'roughly half the population of the Republic at that time'.

Ah. No, it was 365 trillion, but not anything more then a drop in the bucket of the population. Coruscant alone is said to have a trillion beings which would be 10^12 or 10^18 depending on how you read that. The total population is said to be hundreds of quadrillions with the odd example stating quintillions, suggesting that "hundreds of quardillions" should be 10^27 sapients if both statements are true (since quadrillion can be 10^25th in the metric system and quintillion 10^18th in the American system). That's ~1/100th the total carrying capacity of the galaxy based off our solar system and human requirements.

The thing about interstellar war is that you don't have to (and indeed /cannot/ without massive planetary defenses) 'win the world' to win the battle. But what you cannot do is allow someone else to take (or hold) it if you don't.

Such is the essend of razed earth politics in a warfighter condition where you don't have to sleep on the planet you burn to ashes. It simply being too easy to dump an old fashioned hypernuke on their heads and go find an alternative world with equivalent industry/resource/positioning that you can exploit.

That said, if you are going to abandon the idea of a standing army using the most readily available forces out there (conscripts whose participation amounts to a social contract if not blackmail into 'justified patriotism') it makes sense to do so on the basis of picking the best possible fighters.

And those are not Mandalorian Bounty Hunters whose last major war was a loss 4,000 years before.

They are Jedi.

And if Jedi can be cloned with Force Talent (as the cloning of Palpatine and Luke would suggest in the EU) then 'pretending' that a brawny super soldier is the way to go is moronic.

Except it appears there is no guarantee that a clone will use the force since it can't be genetic. Genetics merely indicate a predisposition towards it.

In abandoning such an elitist thought, Lucas went with another microforce /less capable/ than the Jedi in the areas where psionics can actually make a numeric deficit less important (not being where the hypernuke will land, force shoving whole waves of droid infantry etc.) and furthermore _made them bred to battle slaves_, far more than even a conscript force.

I don't see that as being sensible or even comprehensible as a dramatic or social commentary driven theme.

I mean would YOU trust 3 million chia-pet slave soldiers to defend you from 3 trillion droids if you could have 5 trillion conscripts and a REAL vs. assumed loyal superman cadre` force leadership besides?

I don't disagree with your point other then the fact you are attributing it to Lucas when most of the GAR bullshit comes from Karen Traviss.