Small-town Mandalorian values: a review of Order 66

[General Soontir Fel]

Small-town Mandalorian values: a review of Order 66

We grow good people in small towns.

Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People are everywhere in fiction. You see them in Westerns: they are the wonderful quaint little villages whose inhabitants get along fabulously with the native Indians and who need rescuing from evil land barons who want to take their land. You see them in sitcoms: they are the good-hearted out-of-towners who visit the city and don't understand strange alien concepts like "violence" and "crime". You hear about them in songs: John Cougar Mellencamp waxed poetic about life in small towns, and he wasn't exactly the only singer to do so. There's no escaping Wholesome Small-Town Folksy People. They till the land. They love their children. They never swear, they don't commit crimes, they are never violent. They hate technology. They live the wholesome life, as a shining example to all of us, the unwashed masses.

Not a perfect match, granted, especially with regard to violence. But the idea that they are "shining example", an ideal to aspire to--with everything that it entails, including the corresponding dislike of the big cities is hammered into the reader via the Mandalorian characters in Republic Commando: Order 66, the latest installment in Karen Traviss' series about Clone Troopers from the Star Wars prequel era. To call it a Star Wars novel would be disingeneous, however. To misinterpret things, as Traviss did in her previous novels, is one thing. To completely twist G-canon in protecting both her characters and her previous misinterpretations is something else.

The novel isn't lacking in other problems, of course. Poor editing seems to indicate a rush job, lack of any sympathetic characters makes the thing read off like a checklist of events, and the plot is workable only through rampant stupidity. But the most off-putting thing about this is the (very odd given that Traviss is British) way it echoes the right-wing side of U.S. culture wars.

A simple editing process would have caught the mistake that appears not just at the start--in the "Dramatis Personae" list.

GENERAL ETAIN TUR-MUKAN, Jedi Knight (male human)

I suppose we should be glad Traviss didn't put this into an in-universe document, or it would be official Star Wars canon that male humans can get pregnant and deliver babies.

The claim of quadrillions, quintillions, and even septillions of Separatist battle droids is so ludicrous that we'd rush to debunk it if someone didn't have a vested interest in making us believe it. Nothing adds up--literally. Do you know how big a quadrillion is? Let's use the Galactic standard notation--a thousand million million. A quintillion? A million quadrillions. A septillion? A billion quadrillions. Any coalition capable of producing even quadrillions of any machine could roll over the Republic in a few days. And the amount of materials and energy needed to produce and move even a quadrillion droids is immense--it would drain star systems. Either our government is composed of innumerate idiots, or it's inflating the threat way beyond the average citizen's math skills so that it can justify the war and where it's heading.
--Hirib Bassot, current affairs pundit, speaking on HNE shortly before being found dead at home from alleged abuse of contaminated glitterstim.

You're off by a factor of a thousand there, KT. A quintillion is a thousand quadrillions, not a million. More to the point, you don't seem to have any idea how big a planet is, let alone a galaxy. Here are some more numbers for you: the Earth's mass is six million quintillion kilograms. The Sun's energy output is four hundred million quintillion joules per second. Drain star systems? A quadrillion battle droids shouldn't even scratch the surface. Now, it is, of course, true that an army of three million clones would be overwhelmed by this droid force. But there is another way to reconcile this issue than the droid army being too big...

And despite the annotation implying some sort of conspiracy, it actually makes sense, in a perverse way. Someone who lives in a galactic civilization and can't see that a quadrillion of droids is possible is clearly drug-addled. You, KT, and your mouthpiece, Hirib Bassot, are the innumerate idiots.

Traviss' main thesis throughout the Republic Commando books: clones are good. Mandalorians are better. Mandalorian clones are the best of all. Any action is justified if it helps the clones.

I repeat, any action.

(Bardan Jusik, a Jedi who became a Mandalorian, talks to himself)

I choose to let the galaxy look after itself, and save those men that the rest of the civilized world relegates to the status of beasts.

Desertion.

(referring to the potential of supplementing the clone army with citizen recruits)

I'd rather work short handed than to serve with mongrels.

Bigotry.

(Bessany Wennen already committed an act of terrorism and got away with it. Now...)

...her datapad, full of heavily encrypted data that should never have left the Treasury mainframe.

Treason.

(Wennen gets caught by a Republic Intelligence agent, but her clone boyfriend conveniently arrives on the scene. They kidnap the agent, the clone Gary Stu slices through his false identity in seconds, sprinkling in Mandalorian "language". Wennen defies his offer to turn herself in--wow, that is so difficult given the situation , and...)

Then--no speeches, no insults, no warnings--Ordo simply raised the DH-17, held it to the agent's temple, and fired.

Murder.

I could go on. Kal Skirata steals (both directly and by bank fraud) and breaks his biological daughter out of a POW camp (funnily enough, in Invincible, KT had Jusik lecture Jaina Solo on the evilness of Jedi, one of which is that you start using the Force to help your family). Wennen later on implicates her friend in her own treason, then, after the friend is arrested, helps escape and takes her to Mandalore. Because that place, like the Mandalorians themselves is TEH AWSOME .

By the way, regarding Skirata, who's another of KT's Gary Stus--we lean why his marriage ended. It's even stupider than KT's story about Boba Fett's wife.

(Kal is contacted by his biological sons, who left him with their mother years ago, because their sister disappeared. Kal reflects:)

Ilippi thought the beskar'gam was dashing when she married Skirata, but his long absences on deployment started to wear on her with three small kids to care for, and then she hit the big cultural wall--Tor was coming up on eight years old, and Skirata wanted to do as all Mando fathers did, to take his son to train and fight alongside him for five years.
Skirata could picture Ilippi now, five-year-old Ruusaan and six-year-old Ijaat clinging to her legs, crying, while she yelled that no baby boy of hers was going to war. From that argument--and she shouldn't have yelled like that, not in front of the kids--their marriage went rapidly downhill.

Your wife, Kal, acted like any sane mother would. Why, yes, Mandalorian mothers, as KT writes them, are insane. Fathers, too. And funny, how it is that the wife's supposed big crime is defying the father in front of the kids, making him lose face.

The Clones and Mandalorians are Gary Stus, and like in all Mary Sue and Gary Stu stories, other characters don't find any fault with them. Hence, the lack of sympathetic characters I mentioned above. KT has successfully demonized those she wanted--not that most of the work hadn't already been done for her with regard to the Republic government in the movies--and failed to evoke any sympathy to the gaggle of Mandalorians and Mandalorian admirers of her own creation.

The closest to a sympathetic character is Jedi General Arligan Zey. But KT wrote him as utterly unable to respond to Mandalorians' assertions, forcing to him to use his rank to dismiss them--even, at one point, acknowledging Skirata's moral superiority to himself:

That's why I need the Skiratas of this world. He lives his compassion, even if he has no idea what it is philosophically.

So Zey also drank the Mando Kool-aid. He's the only Jedi of KT's creation who actually gets killed by the clones. But even then, his death is stupid--first, Zey was a deskbound military bureaucrat==he didn't lead from the front. He vanishes when the order is given, and (presumabl) goes to the Temple to defend it. Later, he returns to the barracks where his unit used to be quartered.

"I've never disobeyed an order," said the ARC captain. Zey didn't seem to have the strength to turn and look at his former aide, just shutting his eyes as if he was waiting for the coup de grâce. "What am I supposed to do? Pick and choose? That's the irony. The Jedi thought we were excellent troops because we're so disciplined and we obey orders, but when we obey all orders--and they're lawful orders, remember--then we've betrayed them. Can't have it both ways, General."

That's the reasoning of an SS guard at Auschwitz. Congratulations, KT. No one thinks that in Order 66 the clones betrayed the Jedi. Clones were tools--literally. The betrayer of the Jedi (and the Republic) was Palpatine. But this monologue shouldn't exist at all. Clones had no choice but to carry out Order 66. Physically incapable--otherwise, event their creation makes absolutely no sense.

What is happening right now is why the Clone Wars were fought in the first place. It is their reason for existence. The Clone Wars have always been, in and of themselves, from their very inception, the revenge of the Sith.

They were irresistible bait. They took place in remote locations, on planet that belonged, primarily, to "somebody else." They were fought by expendable proxies. And they were constructed as a win-win situation.

The Clone Wars were the perfect Jedi trap.

By fighting at all, the Jedi lost.

With the Jedi Order overextended, spread thin across the galaxy, each Jedi is alone surrounded only by whatever clone troops he, she, or it commands. War itself pours darkness into the Force, deepening the cloud that limits Jedi perception. And the clones have no malice, no hatred, not the slightest ill intent that might give warning. They are only following orders.

In this case, Order Sixty-Six.

And they don't desert. G-canon, KT.

"To hide the bodies, no point there is."

Obi-Wan nodded agreement. "These are clones; an abandoned post is as much giveaway as a pile of corpses.

In the short death scene of Arligan Zey, two of the novel's many stupidities appear. One, as stated, is clones deciding to carry out Order 66. The second is Zey, hours after the attack on the Temple, knowing that Palpatine is a Sith.

He can't know. Palpatine didn't publicly proclaim himself to be one. Mace Windu didn't declare his plans before departing. Obi-Wan and Yoda are still light-years away and don't know. This is an obvious plot hole--there was nothing and no one Zey could have learned it from.

Throughout the novel, we're being hammered by three themes: 1)Palpatine is building a secret army, but the secret shouldn't be secret, given how many people would be involved; 2)Clones are awesome in every way--women swoon over them, the brain-dead clone Wennen took hostages to rescue in True Colors recovers fully; and 3)clones have never seen quadrillions of droids, so there can't be that many. I'm not joking--practically in every battle, some clone is reflecting on how there aren't quadrillions of droids in front of him. Also, KT has a new in-universe justification for the numbers. It used to be bad intelligence, now it's Palpatine's propaganda.

Beings believe what you tell them. They never check, they never ask, they never think. Tell them the state is menaced by quadrillions of battle droids, and they will not count.

Propaganda has to be believable. Imagine if in 2002, George W. Bush stood up and announced that Saddam Hussein has a)100,000 thermonuclear warheads, b)10 million tanks, and c)a fleet with 1000 aircraft carriers, and that therefore, we must invade Iraq. Would anyone believe that? Two questions would arise immediately: where is all that military hardware, and if it's true, how the hell are we going to fight it? And this disparity is smaller than the one KT proposes.

Traviss likes to sprinkle in irrelevant details that either compound the stupidity, or simply waste page space. The new clones, part of the "secret" army, weren't grown on Kamino, but were told they were. Supposedly, it was to keep the secret, but they give themselves away as soon as they start talking to the clones from the original batch--and both we, the readers, and the clone troopers in question already knew about the secret buildup. Mandalorians can marry by Holonet transmission--the clone trooper who got Etain pregnant does that during the Battle of Coruscant, when he thinks he might not survive. For three novels, Etain has been KT's pet Jedi, whom she now uses to propagate her anti-Jedi stance.

As I said numerous times before, KT could have partially redeemed herself if she had Darman, the clone lover and father of Etain's child, be with her, receive Order 66, and blow her brains out, only to realize what he'd done. It would have been nice to have her killed by Darman's "brothers"--that would also cause a bit of reflection on his part. Instead, we get:

(A couple of Jedi Padawans are trying to sneak off-planet, but their cover is blown):

The young male Jedi spun and raised his lightsaber to the clone, desperate to get past him, through him. Etain snapped. Pure reflex, animal and instant: she blocked the Jedi, every bit as fast and Force-agile as he was. Her hand went for her weapon, unbidden. Her body took over. [/"]Don't touch him!"[/i] She felt it was unraveling in slow motion. "Don't!"

Because she knew what a lightsaber could do, because she'd killed with one, because the trooper was a man, a living breathing man--she stepped into the clone's path, and into the downward arc of a lightsaber.

And later, Darman's squadmate Ordo reflects:

Ordo understood vengeance better than anyone, but there was nobody alive now to take it out on. Some Jedi, though... some might have made it.

He'd know what to do when he met them.

No, we can't have clone troopers thinking bad thoughts about their "brothers." That's why Etain had to be killed by Jedi--and we'll just ignore the fact that if it wasn't for Order 66, she wouldn't be in that fight in the first place.

And the last bit of stupidity. Well, no. That last one I'll cover.

Now do you see? Do you? Vau hissed the sibilant like escaping steam. Mird cowered on the floor, whining softly. "I'm sick to death of your sentimental twaddle about Jango betraying is by letting Kamino use his genes. He did it to stop the Jedi. He did it to create an army strong enough to bring them down. You drone on about the injustice of unelected elites, my little working-class hero--well, now they're gone. Yes, it cost our boys' lives, but the Jedi are gone, gone, gone. And they won't be killing Mandalorians again, not for a long time. Maybe never.

No words.

Note that odd phrasing:

injustice of unelected elites

This isn't the only such reference in the novel. For example, right before Arligan Zey is executed:

"Because," said Maze's voice from outside the doors, "it's neither your right nor your position to decide who runs the Republic. Who elected you?"

KT has failed to realize that being elected means nothing when it comes to freedom or justice--when it comes to doing what's right, like Traviss likes to preach about her Mandalorians. These sentences resemble rants by U.S. right-wingers when the courts strike down unjust laws--school prayer, anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-pornography.

Those who really had tried to depose Palpatine--well, they should have know better. The Grand Army's purpose was to defend the Republic--even against Jedi.

You know, in the given situation, the Jedi can have a legitimate argument of the same stripe: the Jedi's purpose is to defend the Republic--even against the Chancellor.

Here's another element straight from the culture wars:

Enlightened Coruscant society would have tutted at the traditionalist view that the females of the household were valued for their cooking skills, but Jusik was getting used to a subtler Mando take on that. The whole clan--even if Jusik couldn't define it, he knew the the feeling of clan--was a fighting unit. Those who weren't on the front line as teeth were the essential tail, and many happened to be female. Sometimes women fought alongside the men, and sometimes they didn't. But those who didn't still had a job to do--keeping warriors fed and supplied and the base or homestead defended. One couldn't operate without the other. And at this moment of crisis for the Skirata clan, the females had taken over and made sure that the front line was fed and rested.

Funny how the men aren't expected to pitch in on the home front. The above passage could have been written by Phylis Schlafly.

In general, one can substitute Coruscant for "coasts" and Mandalore for "heartland", and you have the right-wing culture warriors' vision of modern United States--someone who sees the elitist liberals sneering at the conservative traditions, persecuting heartlanders for their religious and political beliefs, while sending them out to fight their wars. The heartland is the place of family values. The heartland is the place of brave patriots. The heartland is full of wonderful people whom we should emulate, and the coastal cities are cesspools of immorality, crime, and tyranny.

The picture, is, of course, utterly false in the real world. But, KT did everything in her power to make it true in the fictional universe of Star Wars, and make her pet characters the militia heroes opposing the oppressive central government, and having the most moral reason--protecting their family--behind them. Of course, one can only take it so much. When, in the end of the novel, the Mandalorians are forced to agree to an Imperial garrison on Mandalore, I instantly thought of military bases in the U.S. heartland--a major effect of which are that the so-called "red states" take in more in federal government money than they pay in taxes. I would have thought the whole thing to be parody, except I doubt that KT is capable of it.

Not having read any of KT's non-Star Wars work, I could not think of a real reason why she has such a right-wing fanbase. But Order 66 makes it clear: whether Traviss is a right-winger herself, she can write catering to them, confirming their perceptions of the real world via a fictional one.

[BountyHunterSAx]

Eloquently said. So I take it Traviss is an author I'll not be reading, then?

-AHMAD

[NecronLord]

Any coalition capable of producing even quadrillions of any machine could roll over the Republic in a few days.

The sad thing is, this does describe the CIS. They expected to overwhelm the jedi swiftly. And even after the war was begun, they must have had a massive numerical advantage on the ground (and that's even discounting their use of self-replicating scaleable assemblies), insurmountable, almost. However, given that Palpatine wanted the Republic to win, so that for the next twenty years anyone who criticised the government could be dismissed with "you're sounding like a Seperatist"

As far as we know, the Republic navy had no major advantage over the CIS navy (observe that they have no ships to spare in the latest Clone Wars episodes; there's at least vague parity there, or the Republic would be able to send major reinforcements to confront the Malevolance) either.

So, yes. The CIS probably could roll over the Republic given a fair shot. Clones might be viewed as just as expendable, but 'droids are much faster to produce, even with the faster production techniques used later (and with conscription; even flash learning should take longer to make a conscript battleworthy than a droid factory) the longer the war went on, the more that numerical gap would grow.

Of course, the CIS was never meant to win, and everything Palpatine did, from picking their major founders, to appointing General Grievous, a leering, moustache twirling, lunatic, by this stage, as thier supreme commander, was intended to make them look bad, and ensure that there'd be broad public support for beating the tar out of them.


I think Traviss' resistance to 'Saxonite' numbers comes in no small part because she's unwilling to admit that the only reason the clones ever had a chance against those bumbling B1 battle droids was because Palpatine wanted them to, rather than any actual skill or bravery on the part of the clones. Aside from Order 66, nothing her precious Mandos ever did in the war mattered.

[charlemagne]

Great review!

3)clones have never seen quadrillions of droids, so there can't be that many. I'm not joking--practically in every battle, some clone is reflecting on how there aren't quadrillions of droids in front of him. Also, KT has a new in-universe justification for the numbers. It used to be bad intelligence, now it's Palpatine's propaganda.

I wonder why she is allowed to continue this petty feuding. It sounds like she's only a step away from writing something like

As the mighty Mando sat to take a mighty dump, he surfed the Holonet and thought to himself "I pity those pro-Jedi fools, they are stupid in every way, not like us 3 million clones, who are almost as awesome as the great mind who invented us."

[Darth Raptor]

You know, in the given situation, the Jedi can have a legitimate argument of the same stripe: the Jedi's purpose is to defend the Republic--even against the Chancellor.

Hilariously, Order 65 allows for just such a contingency. Had the Jedi been, oh, not retarded and stopped to consider that a blatantly illegal coup d'etat might be a Bad Idea, Palpatine might have found himself on the business end of a blaster rifle.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Its hilarious that Traviss becomes a mouthpiece for quasi-right-wing apologism, given her entire soapbox if you read her "origin" of the Mandalorians is of that don't-need-no-education, everyone-who-ever-was-oppressed-is-virtuous simpleminded left-leaning postmodernism. But like most people, she's dumb, and has no coherent ideology or philosophy. Just like many would-be left-wingers in the U.S. are sadly vulnerable to media favoritism toward Small-town Folksy People. The funny thing about Traviss is despite being a haphazard amalgation of prejudices, kneejerk preferences, and historical revisionism/postmodernist deconstructionism, she fancies herself an intellectual who can educate.

[NecronLord]

You know, in the given situation, the Jedi can have a legitimate argument of the same stripe: the Jedi's purpose is to defend the Republic--even against the Chancellor.

Hilariously, Order 65 allows for just such a contingency. Had the Jedi been, oh, not retarded and stopped to consider that a blatantly illegal coup d'etat might be a Bad Idea, Palpatine might have found himself on the business end of a blaster rifle.

Except... Palpatine controlled the senate. Short of a complete revalation with proof of his Sith lord status (and even that might not work, depending on how effective Palpatine's mesmeric powers are) getting them to declare him unfit would be near impossible.

And of course, Traviss herself made up Order 65.

[Ender]

I flipped through this at the store and decided it wasn't worth my money, nor the aggravation.

[Connor MacLeod]

I spent my money on the Luceno "Millenium Falcon" novel instead.

[seanrobertson]

Thanks for the outstanding review, General Fel. Two thumbs up.

I've made my feelings for that rancid "journo" cunt Traviss before, and I doubt anyone would accuse me of holding back in that regard

All I'll directly comment on is this:

Any coalition capable of producing even quadrillions of any machine could roll over the Republic in a few days. And the amount of materials and energy needed to produce and move even a quadrillion droids is immense--it would drain star systems.

Does this stupid bitch not realize the scale of a GALACTIC civilization?

Dumb question on my part: she obviously doesn't grasp that a civilization that's spanned a galaxy for milennia -- nevermind one which can build things like the DEATH STAR -- should be capable of pumping out a number of battledroids to boggle the mind.

I would LOVE to collaborate with someone and come up with a list of every stupid SW mistake she's made (and that's to say nothing of all the ridiculous horseshit she's spewed online vis-à-vis "Talifans").

[Junghalli]

Dumb question on my part: she obviously doesn't grasp that a civilization that's spanned a galaxy for milennia -- nevermind one which can build things like the DEATH STAR -- should be capable of pumping out a number of battledroids to boggle the mind.

Heck, just for fun, let's scale it off the Death Star. Let's use the DS2. Now the DS2 has a radius of around 450 km and according to Wookiepedia it was completed within 4 years. It's a sphere, so we can just plug that into the equation for volume of a sphere. Let's assume the DS2 has a density of 200 kg/m^2 (equal to high end balsa wood!). Let's also assume your average droid masses 400 kg.

That gives the DS2 a mass of 7.63 X 10^19 kg. Divided by four that's an annual production of around 2 X 10^19 kg. That equals the equivalent of 4.77 X 10^16 droids.

Maybe not quintillions or septillions, but a good 48 quadrillion. So the Star Wars galaxy has the capacity to build at least quadrillions of droids per year, and that's movie canon. Also note that we're assuming the DS2 is the density of balsa wood, which considering its thick armor and metal construction is almost certainly rather ludicrous. Using a more plausible figure of 1/4 the density of iron the DS2 represents the equivalent of 4.7 X 10^17 (470 quadrillion) droids per year.

Assuming I haven't messed up the math in there somewhere.

Hmm, maybe I should post this to the tech debates forum on SB.

[Darksider]

This novel is even worse than I thought it would be.

What's more, I'm pretty sure that the "injustice of unelected elites" line is taken directly from one of the bitch's online anti-jedi rants. She's using the exact same words that she used online to rant against the jedi in an official product.

She has completely given up any pretext whatsoever of being impartial, not that we didn't all know she wasn't anyways.

[Ford Prefect]

Assuming I haven't messed up the math in there somewhere.

What makes it more amusing is that you have assumed a massively overstated mass for a B1. While I cannot make any actual claims with regards to their mass, they clatter around like tin cans when they fall over. I hit the ground harder than they do.

[Ekiqa]

Heck, just for fun, let's scale it off the Death Star. Let's use the DS2. Now the DS2 has a radius of around 450 km and according to Wookiepedia it was completed within 4 years. It's a sphere, so we can just plug that into the equation for volume of a sphere. Let's assume the DS2 has a density of 200 kg/m^2 (equal to high end balsa wood!). Let's also assume your average droid masses 400 kg.

That gives the DS2 a mass of 7.63 X 10^19 kg. Divided by four that's an annual production of around 2 X 10^19 kg. That equals the equivalent of 4.77 X 10^16 droids.

Maybe not quintillions or septillions, but a good 48 quadrillion. So the Star Wars galaxy has the capacity to build at least quadrillions of droids per year, and that's movie canon. Also note that we're assuming the DS2 is the density of balsa wood, which considering its thick armor and metal construction is almost certainly rather ludicrous. Using a more plausible figure of 1/4 the density of iron the DS2 represents the equivalent of 4.7 X 10^17 (470 quadrillion) droids per year.

Assuming I haven't messed up the math in there somewhere.

Hmm, maybe I should post this to the tech debates forum on SB.

DS2 is 900km in diametre, and as I'm not good at maths anymore, I'll let someone else fix it for you.

[General Soontir Fel]

Heck, just for fun, let's scale it off the Death Star. Let's use the DS2. Now the DS2 has a radius of around 450 km and according to Wookiepedia it was completed within 4 years. It's a sphere, so we can just plug that into the equation for volume of a sphere. Let's assume the DS2 has a density of 200 kg/m^2 (equal to high end balsa wood!). Let's also assume your average droid masses 400 kg.

Well, the Death Star is not a solid ball of metal, so the actual amount of material is probably less.

What makes it more amusing is that you have assumed a massively overstated mass for a B1. While I cannot make any actual claims with regards to their mass, they clatter around like tin cans when they fall over. I hit the ground harder than they do.

They don't leave deep footprints when walking across the grassland on Naboo. There should be a way to get an upper limit from that. If someone knows the relationship between the depth of a footprint and pressure in a typical layer of soil, could you tell me so I can perform the calculations?

[Illuminatus Primus]

A radius is half of a diameter.

[Ekiqa]

A radius is half of a diameter.

Shit. My REAL bad.

As I said, my maths is really poor.

Almost Travisty level bad.

[Junghalli]

Well, the Death Star is not a solid ball of metal, so the actual amount of material is probably less.

A solid ball of metal would be much more massive (iron is around 7.87 tons per m^3 for instance, even water isn't much less than 1 ton/m^3). Based on a quick back of the envelope calculation 200 kg/m^3 is around the same ballpark as a WWII battleship (the Iowa). Given the Death Star's thick armor and sturdy metal construction that seems a reasonable yardstick.

And yeah, I think 400 kg is probably a dramatic overestimate for a typical droid. Really, based on the movies I'm not seeing a B1 massing more than around twice as much as a man (~200 kg), if that. So realistically you should probably double all my droid numbers.

[Connor MacLeod]

Dumb question on my part: she obviously doesn't grasp that a civilization that's spanned a galaxy for milennia -- nevermind one which can build things like the DEATH STAR -- should be capable of pumping out a number of battledroids to boggle the mind.

Heck, just for fun, let's scale it off the Death Star. Let's use the DS2. Now the DS2 has a radius of around 450 km and according to Wookiepedia it was completed within 4 years. It's a sphere, so we can just plug that into the equation for volume of a sphere. Let's assume the DS2 has a density of 200 kg/m^2 (equal to high end balsa wood!). Let's also assume your average droid masses 400 kg.

That gives the DS2 a mass of 7.63 X 10^19 kg. Divided by four that's an annual production of around 2 X 10^19 kg. That equals the equivalent of 4.77 X 10^16 droids.

Maybe not quintillions or septillions, but a good 48 quadrillion. So the Star Wars galaxy has the capacity to build at least quadrillions of droids per year, and that's movie canon. Also note that we're assuming the DS2 is the density of balsa wood, which considering its thick armor and metal construction is almost certainly rather ludicrous. Using a more plausible figure of 1/4 the density of iron the DS2 represents the equivalent of 4.7 X 10^17 (470 quadrillion) droids per year.

Assuming I haven't messed up the math in there somewhere.

I figure its around 2e20 kg (at least what I remember all the times I ran calcs on it) though that's probably cuz you use a lower density than I do and you probably overestimated droid mass by a factor of 2-3.

I'll note that what I can dredge up from my memory of the old EU novels, the budget for the DS2 was basically black, and was hidden in the budgets for other unrelated projects.. so it clearly wasn't a massive economic drain on the Empire any more than it was a resource drain.

Hmm, maybe I should post this to the tech debates forum on SB.

I wouldn't bother. That'll just save you the hassle of having to deal with the SFJ jokers that whinge about it (witness the recent threads complaining about SW.) Far more hassle than its worth IMHO.

[Palantas]

That's an impressive review and an enjoyable read. I haven't picked up a Star Wars novel in ages, and it seems I'm not missing much.

In regards to Traviss, what the hell is her problem? She pulls that three million figure out of her ass, then gets into flame wars with fans over it, then takes her flame war to her novels. Who does that? She reminds me of Derek Smart.

[Covenant]

That's an impressive review and an enjoyable read. I haven't picked up a Star Wars novel in ages, and it seems I'm not missing much.

In regards to Traviss, what the hell is her problem? She pulls that three million figure out of her ass, then gets into flame wars with fans over it, then takes her flame war to her novels. Who does that? She reminds me of Derek Smart.

Star Wars fiction seems fairly balkanized from out here in the Non-EU Reading hinterlands. Different sources have their own interpertations striving to reinvent the past and create the next cool thing that's better than all the other cool things that came before it. The Dark Empire series did it with it's piece of the fiction, the Vong and the New Jedi bullshit do it too, and Traviss sleazes around the Clone War era trying to wank out her special ideas. While most writers didn't have to stoop so low as to publish refutations of their opposition in the text, it's not suprising to see such a hack writer do it. She's got a thin skin and is very visible, which lets her soak up praise but also makes her a bigger target. If a no-name writer had written this and stayed quiet off to the sidelines, humble about their place in the fiction and just professing to tell a tale of Star War's sidelines, then that would be one thing. We'd howl and snark but the hate wouldn't be so hot as it is, what with Karen vamping it up to the fans like some burlesque-show balloon dancer.

[Palantas]

Speaking of Traviss...
Forgive my igorance. What the does "talifan" mean? I know its what she calls everyone who thinks she's full of it, but where the hell did she get that term?

[Fire Fly]

Speaking of Traviss...
Forgive my igorance. What the does "talifan" mean? I know its what she calls everyone who thinks she's full of it, but where the hell did she get that term?

Talifans = Taliban + fans

They're Star Wars fans who, as she perceives, imposes their interpretation of Star Wars onto others (the irony...) and attack those who they disagree with (primarily her). The term arose when the Star Wars Insider article on the clone army was first published. People wanted to know what her rationale was for making the Grand Army 3 million large and when she couldn't back up her position and stubbornly refused to admit she arbitrarily chose that number/didn't understand scale/didn't understand math, she resorted to threats, insults, and playing the gender card.

[Palantas]

Talifans = Taliban + fans

Seriously? She compares people who disagree with her to Islamic fundamentalists? Gee, why stop there? Why not just call anyone she doesn't like "Nazis"?

[NecronLord]

I don't think it's so much an arbitrary number as someone in LFL saying 'unit = clone' which is a fairly consistant line. Of course, she didn't have the intelligence to just say 'the boss told me to' but rather tried to defend her idiotic numbers as plausible.