Star Wars Fleet Size

[The Romulan Republic]

What about Rebels?

I haven't seen much of the show since Siege of Lothal, as it isn't playing here currently. Where their any situations where an Acclamator might have been warranted?

[biostem]

What about Rebels?

I haven't seen much of the show since Siege of Lothal, as it isn't playing here currently. Where their any situations where an Acclamator might have been warranted?

To me, it's more a matter of the Empire inheriting all these ships from the Clone Wars, and them all basically disappearing. Even if you're not using it to land troops, it's still a capable capital ship, and I'm sure you could outfit it with more or different equipment to fill other roles...

[The Romulan Republic]

Maybe the Empire scrapped them because the felt the money to maintain an outdated design would be better spent on Death Stars or Imperials or Executors?

Or maybe sold them off (presumably with any heavy weapons removed) as military surplus?

[NecronLord]

What about Rebels?

I haven't seen much of the show since Siege of Lothal, as it isn't playing here currently. Where their any situations where an Acclamator might have been warranted?

No.

The Lothal cell still consists of dozens of men or maybe hundreds so far, and mostly they're based on their ships.

Gozanti-class transports are used in rebels, and are always sufficient to bring enough stormtroopers to put the rebels to flight.

[NecronLord]

What about Rebels?

I haven't seen much of the show since Siege of Lothal, as it isn't playing here currently. Where their any situations where an Acclamator might have been warranted?

To me, it's more a matter of the Empire inheriting all these ships from the Clone Wars, and them all basically disappearing. Even if you're not using it to land troops, it's still a capable capital ship, and I'm sure you could outfit it with more or different equipment to fill other roles...

Usually the Empire has enough capital ships to outnumber their enemies, dedicated ones. It has Arquitens to do its patrol jobs, why spend the money to fuel and deploy Acclamators when they don't really offer anything you need? Keep them on Cardia or wherever, so the troops can be trained using them.

[biostem]

What about Rebels?

I haven't seen much of the show since Siege of Lothal, as it isn't playing here currently. Where their any situations where an Acclamator might have been warranted?

To me, it's more a matter of the Empire inheriting all these ships from the Clone Wars, and them all basically disappearing. Even if you're not using it to land troops, it's still a capable capital ship, and I'm sure you could outfit it with more or different equipment to fill other roles...

Usually the Empire has enough capital ships to outnumber their enemies, dedicated ones. It has Arquitens to do its patrol jobs, why spend the money to fuel and deploy Acclamators when they don't really offer anything you need? Keep them on Cardia or wherever, so the troops can be trained using them.

But we never see any of them - From AotC to RotS, pretty much all the previous ships disappear and all new ones show up. From RotS to Rebels, the same thing seems to have happened. I certainly realize the the original trilogy was made before any of the prequel stuff, so it couldn't have foreseen the "older" designs, but AotC to RotS did have that foresight...

[NecronLord]

Yes.

The Acclamator, in particular, fills a niche the Imperator really doesn't, or at least not as well. It is a dedicated troop transport which can land troops directly on hostile worlds.

The Gozanti however...

[NecronLord]

But we never see any of them - From AotC to RotS, pretty much all the previous ships disappear and all new ones show up. From RotS to Rebels, the same thing seems to have happened. I certainly realize the the original trilogy was made before any of the prequel stuff, so it couldn't have foreseen the "older" designs, but AotC to RotS did have that foresight...

And people go to movies expecting and wanting to see each one be different to the last.

That doesn't prove the first order doesn't have Acclamators floating about somewhere.

Star Wars rebels has gone out of the way to show Hammerhead-looking ships in the movie era; they clearly survive for quite some time, and the Clone Wars showed a thousand year old ship based on one from Star Wars TOR in service with the Jedi. They're just not feature ships in the movies.

[Galvatron]

It's also possible that certain resources (e.g. thorilide) are scarce enough to limit the production of Imperial warships to a relatively small number. After all, in the new comics, the Emperor himself dispatched Vader on an errand to ensure a steady supply of rare minerals from Shu-Torun:

[RogueIce]

The 25,000 is from an old roleplaying game, and isn't canonical any more.

From Disney Canon.
Snip
Zor

Is that from the android game or something? It amuses me that Disney have made the same mistakes again, and such stuff is canon.

"Peaked at over than 25,000" indeed.

Still; good, that's amusing.

Up there with zombie stormtroopers being canon again.

It's up there with "Elite AT-AT" and "Space Bazooka Trooper" being a distinct, canon thing rather than acknowledged as a mere gameplay conceit and moving on.

But then the stupid "all-inclusive" canon policy also leads to every comic artist's half-assed attempt to draw an ISD giving us "unknown Star Destroyer variant #5834223" so really, more of the same.

Meet the New Canon, same as the Old Canon.

Still, questionable grammar of "over than" aside, that merely serves to set the 25,000 ISD number as a lower limit since clearly, there are more than them. Depending on how exactly you're supposed to parse "peaked at over than 25,000" since that doesn't sound like any English I know. But hey, making every half-assed mobile game or cheap merchandising tie-in as True Canon™ could never have any downside, right?

[Galvatron]

I'm fine with 25,000 ISDs. In fact, that's better than I expected with this new EU after reading Lost Stars.

I also assume that this means the Empire has even more of the smaller ships, such as the seemingly ubiquitous Arquitens-class light cruisers.

I'd be even happier if they'd tell us that there were in fact dozens of Executor-class ships as well.

[Rhadamantus]

Is there any reason why the Galactic Empire doesn't have billions of ISDs? ...

Is there any reason besides George Lucas is bad at math?

Because each ISD is capable of burning a world, and finding reliable crews and officers for ISDs is hard even if building them isn't?

They could easily make them (1/2 of a DSII per 6 months is about 3 billion ISD masses), and crew them (38,000*5 billion is 190 trillion, which is .2 percent of the Empire's population).

As noted, the question is how you find reliable crews. ISDs can cause disproportionate amounts of harm in a very small amount of time; this makes it disproportionately difficult to ensure that they are reliable instruments of state authority in an autocracy.

Yes, an ISD can burn a planet, but if it has 1/1000 the shields of Alderaan, it's gonna take it a couple months to pound through the shields. To get through shields of a decently defended planet before takes an armada of millions of ships, and there aren't that many of them.

Only making 25,000 is insane and suicidal, since that means one world working for a decade can outproduce you and smash your fleet.

Not if you are paying attention to the activities of the kind of major industrialized world that could do this. Moreover, if they're spending a decade building ships, you can respond by escalating production at the many industrialized worlds you control.

If the rebels had the industrial base of one average world, they'd be able to make a couple thousand ISDs per year. They are a lot of planets for the Empire to search. Or if Kuat rebels, then a month they have ten million ISDs and you're fucked.

It's like asking why the US didn't buy 5000 F-22s. We could have done so, but 200 or so them was enough to counter any immediately foreseeable threat, and any unforeseen threat that might arise in the future could be countered by other means.

[Simon_Jester]

I'd be even happier if they'd tell us that there were in fact dozens of Executor-class ships as well.

"There are a lot of command ships." Han wouldn't have reason to say that if there were, oh, five.

Is there any reason why the Galactic Empire doesn't have billions of ISDs? ...

Is there any reason besides George Lucas is bad at math?

Because each ISD is capable of burning a world, and finding reliable crews and officers for ISDs is hard even if building them isn't?

Yes, an ISD can burn a planet, but if it has 1/1000 the shields of Alderaan, it's gonna take it a couple months to pound through the shields. To get through shields of a decently defended planet before takes an armada of millions of ships, and there aren't that many of them.

*cough* Base Delta Zero *cough.*

We already have reason to think that an ISD can devastate a planet singlehandedly in a short amount of time. Sure, a shielded planet such as a wealthy core world can laugh off a lone star destroyer's attacks, assuming it has time to raise the shields before the star destroyer begins firing.

That doesn't do a lot of good if some mentally unstable gunner puts a heavy turbolaser bolt into their ex-boyfriend's city by surprise when the ship is in a parking orbit. Or if spare parts (such as guns and fuel) for your star destroyers occasionally go missing so that 0.1% of your supplies wind up in rebel hands... which is enough to supply a fleet of a million ships that can quickly devastate a core world. Or if the 0.01% of your captains who go renegade in a given year burn one 'minor' world apiece... and that represents 0.01% of a billion ships, which equals a hundred thousand 'minor' planets lost in a year.

And yes, those are all concerns which can be addressed by making sure the people running your logistics and crewing your ships are politically reliable and psychologically stable. Which is not easy, and as you make your organization exponentially larger, the task gets exponentially harder.

The Empire never seems to have suffered any real problems as a consequence of a shortage of star destroyers. Why would they bother building a thousand times more, when that would not fix any of their existing problems, and make some of their other existing problems literally a thousand times worse?

Only making 25,000 is insane and suicidal, since that means one world working for a decade can outproduce you and smash your fleet.

Not if you are paying attention to the activities of the kind of major industrialized world that could do this. Moreover, if they're spending a decade building ships, you can respond by escalating production at the many industrialized worlds you control.

If the rebels had the industrial base of one average world, they'd be able to make a couple thousand ISDs per year. They are a lot of planets for the Empire to search. Or if Kuat rebels, then a month they have ten million ISDs and you're fucked.[/quote]Except that there is NO evidence that "just any" random planet could actually produce that many functional warships in a year. There is no evidence for star destroyers and other, comparably powerful ships being manufactured anywhere in the galaxy, except at a limited number of specific, well known, heavily industrialized worlds (e.g. Kuat, Fondor, Corellia, Mon Calamari, and so on).

So your assertion is fundamentally wrong. Most of the Empire's planets, by all appearance, lack the means to suddenly spam huge fleets of heavy warships. The small number of worlds that might be able to do that are easily patrolled and controlled. And even if there exists equipment capable of mass-producing thousands of star destroyers in a hurry, this equipment cannot itself be made in a hurry. Much like nuclear weapons, you cannot really develop such a thing in secret without anyone else knowing you're doing it. Not in the modern world, not when there's a larger and richer power (such as the entire imperial government) monitoring to see who is purchasing the equipment to build heavy ships.

[DrStrangelove]

The 25,000 is from an old roleplaying game, and isn't canonical any more.

From Disney Canon.
Snip
Zor

Is that from the android game or something? It amuses me that Disney have made the same mistakes again, and such stuff is canon.

"Peaked at over than 25,000" indeed.

Still; good, that's amusing.

Up there with zombie stormtroopers being canon again.

The canon guy on the story group is a WEG author, and notorious minimalist he recanonized the WEG death star sizes

[NecronLord]

The canon guy on the story group is a WEG author, and notorious minimalist he recanonized the WEG death star sizes

Well there's a lot of good things about WEG, and really, it's easy to see why their numbers win out time and again. They're just more approachable than the realistic numbers most Saxtonites (including me) want.

I'm lukewarm on Pablo. He's done a very nice take on the actual idea of canon on twitter lately:

When you ask 'is it canon?' The answer means 'do other storytellers need to take it into account?' That's all the answer means.

Which frankly, is a good way of saying it.

The Death Star sizes don't really bother me at all; it's a more accessible figure to a lot of people, to imagine the second death star was somewhat bigger (I always imagined as a kid it was twice the size) than the original, rather than dwarfing it.

The 900 ± 60 km scaling used by Dr Saxton is based on sound astrophyiscal reasoning, and statements of scale used by the staff who created the visual effects, but the needs of the reference material and the ongoing canon aren't entirely set by being accurate frame-for-frame by ongoing material.

As Pablo says there, canon is what storytellers need to take into account; the size of the second death star (beyond 'bigger') isn't important. The same with the 8km super star destroyer. What role it serves in the story is. The second Death Star's size is fundamentally unimportant, and in some ways the smaller one makes more thematic sense; replacing it with something twice the volume is much more practical than something with almost one hundred and eighty times the volume.

3.82e8 km³/2.14e6 km³ = 179 (Film Scalings)
2.14e6 km³/9.05e5 km³ = 2.3 (WEG)

While the 900 km Death Star II is more accurate to the film, it's also... a little bit absurd. The idea that the Emperor chose to make something equal to a hundred death stars, rather than just a bunch of them, doesn't fit the story well; it just doesn't. The rebels risk everything to stop this monstrosity, but really the Emperor could just skim 10% of the resources and build another death star or five somewhere. The 900 km scaling is accurate to the movie frame; the 160 (and 120 for original death star) is accurate to the story.

Of course, I have doubts that correct and consistent visual scaling of the death star will be performed for Rogue One; so no doubt that will be a nail in the coffin of exact visual scaling.

I'm less keen on the 25,000 Imperators because it makes them a truly rare sight, when they're somewhat iconic of the Empire, which never fitted with my understanding of the movies (but does with Han Solo's reaction to them as 'Imperial Cruisers' in the original movie, which is where I suspect lots of people get the impression of them as impregnable behemoths from) as I imagine these Imperial iconic ships would be common, but seems to fit for lots of people.

Of course, when we look at the days when the Imperial Sourcebook was taken seriously, and as Rebels expands and we see more Arquitens classes, Inquisitors and Quasar Fire cruiser-carriers in Rebels, it becomes clear that the notion of lots of lesser ships being around is somewhat valid; as Commander Thelea points out even the WEG figures indicate a minimum of over a hundred thousand star destroyers (perhaps Imperators are actually quite rare and most sector fleets make do with Venators/Victories etc.)

In Star Wars Rebels, even Ryloth, a planet with a seat in the Galactic Senate, doesn't rate a star destroyer to occupy its orbit, even when a pacification campaign is being fought, instead only a single Quasar Fire, with an eight-strong bomber squadron. Now certainly EU sources have depicted the twi'leks as primitive, and easily victimized, but it's pretty clear star destroyers being rare is going to be the star wars we're going to get.

We may want Dark Empire, with its fleets of star destroyers orbiting Byss by the thousand, but it seems we're going to get the Thrawn Trilogy, like it or not. Really, I can see why they do it, it's hard to tell a story about the Dark Empire/Saxtonite Empire most of us want, because it'd just shit all over the rebels (as indeed the Dark Empire one did, with multiple painful deus ex machina contortions and the Emperor's personal weaknesses and fetish for Luke Skywalker required to cause it to fall) which would make for terrible TV.

[Galvatron]

It's also possible that the fleet size increased dramatically following the Battle of Yavin so maybe what we see in SWR isn't the best indicator.

[Elheru Aran]

It's also possible that the fleet size increased dramatically following the Battle of Yavin so maybe what we see in SWR isn't the best indicator.

If Tagge was in charge of a chunk of the military at that time, it would make sense, especially given how he wanted to focus on ship-building (especially super star destroyers) versus the single-item expenditure required to build a Death Star.

I've only read the collected paperbacks of the new comics, but I suspect Vader is likely to strangle Tagge out and make it look like an accident or some such sometime before ESB happens...

[Galvatron]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Additionally, I presume that the Imperial Senate may have had something akin to a defense appropriations committee with at least some power over military spending. If so, that may have been yet another obstacle to the buildup of a gigantic conventional fleet.

That would certainly explain why the military was so reluctant to piss them off and why the fleet might have seen unrestricted growth in the aftermath of its dissolution.

[Elheru Aran]

Right... then Palpatine bumps off the Senate, just in time for the DS to go kablooey and flush however many giga-quadrillions of credits down the toilet. In the aftermath, once Tagge gets over his whole "I TOLD YOU SO" happy dance, he opens his briefcase and plonks down a couple reams of blueprints in front of the Emperor with his best puppy-dog expression and "Pretty please sign these appropriations for a few extra sector fleets?" And Palpatine drops a couple of space Alka-Seltzer in a glass, rubs his brow, tells Tagge to do whatever he wants and goes to bed with a sick headache.

Er, perhaps a little less sitcom-y, but in general that was probably what all happened.

Realistically: The Clone Wars were only ending ~20 years before ANH. There would have been a ramping-up of production during the war years, building up all those Venators, Arquitens, Acclamators and what not. The Victorys and Imperials would have been the newest class rolling off the line. Makes sense there wouldn't have been a lot floating around during ANH, especially if the Senate was holding down production during the interim in order to save money. Palpatine might have justified further military contracts in order to hold down the former Separatist planets and prevent them from rising up again. By ESB, which is a few years later, more have been cranked out along with the Supers and the fleet is reinforced. Perhaps there were a lot of half-finished hulls being only worked on when money came in, and then when the Senate was dismissed and Tagge got the go-ahead from the Emperor, he threw money at them and they got finished up real fast.

[Galvatron]

If the construction timeline of the DS2 is an indicator of how fast the Empire can build shit, I imagine Tagge could have had his dream fleet in no time. This would also explain why the Emperor keeps sending Vader to secure resources versus having him focus on hunting down the rebels.

[Elheru Aran]

I can never remember, was it ever explicitly stated that the DSII was built *from scratch* after the destruction of the DSI? That's a fairly impressive achievement...

[Galvatron]

I'm not sure if the citation is accurate, but the canon section of the Wookieepedia entry says this and references Star Wars: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know by DK as the source:

With the dissolution of the Imperial Senate and increasing pirate and rebel attacks, the Emperor immediately began construction on a new and improved battle station, one more powerful and without the fatal flaw of its predecessor.

Sounds like they started from scratch shortly after ANH. That is, assuming the Wookieepedia is right.

[Elheru Aran]

Well then. Considering the quantity of the material being directed towards that, is it plausible that there would *also* have been a heavy build-up of the Imperial fleet at the same time? Especially considering current trends are leaning towards minimalism?

Or is it more likely that the fleet was always fairly sizeable, utilized resources built up in the inter-conflict period as well as resources from the Clone Wars (both ex-Republic and potentially seized Separatist fleets), with some new construction towards the latter half that only got stepped up enough after ANH to turn out the Super Star Destroyers and some new assets?

[Eternal_Freedom]

There must have been some fleet expansion, as we only start seeing ISD II's after ANH.

[Galvatron]

Well then. Considering the quantity of the material being directed towards that, is it plausible that there would *also* have been a heavy build-up of the Imperial fleet at the same time? Especially considering current trends are leaning towards minimalism?

Or is it more likely that the fleet was always fairly sizeable, utilized resources built up in the inter-conflict period as well as resources from the Clone Wars (both ex-Republic and potentially seized Separatist fleets), with some new construction towards the latter half that only got stepped up enough after ANH to turn out the Super Star Destroyers and some new assets?

I'm not convinced that there has to be a choice between a large fleet or another Death Star, given what the First Order was able to build with their comparatively paltry resources. Although, there is still the little matter of exotic resource scarcity that the new EU seems to be emphasizing.

It's also possible that the Empire routinely strips and recycles these resources from older model ships for use in the newer ones. That may be why we never see any of the older models around in the OT.