Force Allocation

[The Romulan Republic]

A few points:

1. Are the novelizations still canon?

2. The number of ships is not stated in that quote.

3. We cannot assume the fleet composition at Endor was the same as the fleet composition at the meeting (it doesn't really match up with what's shown on screen at Endor). I actually did a thread on this very early in my days on this board:

https://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic ... 3&t=130141

4. There is a possible contradiction between a fleet massing outside the galaxy and one massing near Sullust.

Granted without contest; the point is that forty star destroyers is a whopping massive super-duper force, hyper-militarised and even Rhad's own numbers suggest that buying them is a quarter of the planetary GDP.

No argument here. It certainly seems to me to be an excessive force for one system unless that system has "Kuat" in its name.

[Rhadamantus]

Just to clarify, this is set in a maximalist setting. I took the size of Starkiller Base, divided by population, and took this as an average militarization level. You get about one star destroyer per million people (less actually). This is then small enough that the Empire doesn't care, and selling old stuff to both sides. They are currently in a cold war, and are therefore spending far too much on their militaries.

Starkiller Base is an entire world that has been turned into a giant military facility. To treat that as in any way representative of a typical level of militarization is ridiculous, because Starkiller Base is all militarized.

Starkiller base is the size of 4 trillion star destroyers. There are 100 quadrillion people. This works out to one star destroyer per 2500 people. If you realize that the first order is a tiny fraction of the galaxy, it's less. I used a million as a possible, albiet high, number.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Ok I'll throw my hat in.

If we are not expecting war to break out within, say, ten years, then I decide to forgo building a fleet at all. Invest massively in expanding my infrastructure on whichever is the planet that is a) all mine and b) most heavily populated. Begin transferring all of civilian population to said world (because we have at most 40 million people this should be pretty damn easy). Then thro my enire military budget into building very strong ground-based defences.

A full planetary shield, combined with a network of V-150 planetary ion cannons (the guns from Hoth), the related W-165 planetary turbolasers (that according to the old EU can rip through ISDs with a single volley) and hypervelocity guns. Once defences are complete (or mostly so) build squadrons of fast raider type ships.

I now have a planet that even the Imperial Fleet would be hard-pressed to take over short of a truly massive bombardment fleet or superweapons. The enemy can waste whatever ships they've built against my defences (as it's my only world they don't have any other targets) while I can send my raiders out against their smaller outposts.

Alternatively, don't bother with raiders at all. Buy and sell stuff exclusively from Imperial-controlled companies, so if the enemy go the siege/blockade route they risk pissing off the Empire by attacking their ships. Plus, a siege shouldn't be that effective against a population of 40 odd million people with a whole planet to support them.

[NecronLord]

Just to clarify, this is set in a maximalist setting. I took the size of Starkiller Base, divided by population, and took this as an average militarization level. You get about one star destroyer per million people (less actually). This is then small enough that the Empire doesn't care, and selling old stuff to both sides. They are currently in a cold war, and are therefore spending far too much on their militaries.

Starkiller Base is an entire world that has been turned into a giant military facility. To treat that as in any way representative of a typical level of militarization is ridiculous, because Starkiller Base is all militarized.

Starkiller base is the size of 4 trillion star destroyers. There are 100 quadrillion people. This works out to one star destroyer per 2500 people. If you realize that the first order is a tiny fraction of the galaxy, it's less. I used a million as a possible, albiet high, number.

And we're refuting your predicate, because, you know what; unless something's escaped me we don't know anything about the funding of the Starkiller base. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

We know a lot more about how the Galactic Empire organized its navy, and what defensive resources average planets had, and they're not comparable.

[Eternal_Freedom]

More to the point, Starkiller Base wasn't built out of whole cloth, it explicitly says the weapon was built into the planet. Still highly impressive but nowhere near the level of "we built a fucking planet."

[Rhadamantus]

They took apart a decent part of a fucking planet. The industrial capacity needed to do that is still insane.

[Eternal_Freedom]

As I said, it's still very impressive, but a lot less than building it from nothing.

I've no idea why you're using Starkiller Base as a baseline for the level of militarisation when you specifically said ESB era.

[Rhadamantus]

A, I can't imagine it would have changed that much. B, this is a tiny colony which the Empire is selling old stuff to.

[Eternal_Freedom]

So what period are we in? If Tectors, Imperators and freaking Allegiance's are described as "old stuff" then something is very very off with your timeline.

[Rhadamantus]

50 years after ESB. The New Empire is getting rid of old surplus stuff by selling it to backwater primitives, and ripping them off.

[Esquire]

Dude, warships aren't obsolete after 50 years even today; the US used WWII battleships during Desert Storm. Star Wars tech cycles don't work like ours.

Anyway, setting aside the absolutely ludicrous idea that a nation of 40 million can crew a proper fleet - If they've somehow managed to scrape up the tech base and funding to do so, they're either too rich to be left alone or too powerful to be ignored as primitives, pick any one. And to address the last point, Starkiller Base is 100% militarized since it's a strategic weapons platform; there's precisely zero useful way to extrapolate from that. In a galaxy with casual AI, hyperdrives, Death Stars, and multiple ecumenopoli, hollowing out a single planet isn't really that impressive.

[NecronLord]

50 years after ESB. The New Empire is getting rid of old surplus stuff by selling it to backwater primitives, and ripping them off.

New Empire huh, and set in the future relative to the current canon. So, appealing to the Jedi might be possible after all.

As Eternal says, there are better uses for the money than that. The hoth shield could deflect 'any bombardment' from Death Squadron, and the Executor has more power output than our entire enemy's fleet, so we double down on that and things like the W-165 which will cut through anything they have with ease. Then tax breaks/repayment of national debt.

Best of all my W-165s and their ion-equivalents can pretty much act as micro-death stars to all those asteroid dwellers across the system, because my rival has spent all his money on a fleet of capital ships that actually can't defend his people who live in easily-shattered, incapable-of-dodging, asteroids.

I look at joining the New Republic too, it'll almost certainly cost less.

[NecronLord]

[Snip]
That's not how math works.

2.5 % of 4 trillion is 100 billion. Are we supposed to be borrowing ten times our military budget to support this comical procurement?

I miss when there was a math test to register on this forum.

Yes, but they build ships for more than one year. If ships have a service lifetime of 30 years, then 1/3 of the naval budget would be shipbuilding. See how that works?

I missed this yesterday. Also, no, that's still not how it works. Your math figures are wrong and do not add up. If you're trying to say these ships will be acquired over many years, you need to specify that or people will assume it's annual. For instance when people talk about the procurement budget for the United States they're describing the several tens of billions of dollars which cover maybe nine ships.

Through its $161 billion base budget request, the Navy will procure nine ships and 124 manned and unmanned aircraft. [...] In its budget request to Congress, the Navy asks for $44.4 billion for procurement, $50.6 billion for operations and maintenance and $17.9 billion for research and development. It seeks an additional $7 billion in overseas contingency operations funding.

You quoted your procurement figure among annual figures, just as this source above does. If you quote a budget number without changing the period over which it's calculated explicitly, that means that people read it with the same time period.

Fuck off and do your math again.

[Rhadamantus]

Anyway, setting aside the absolutely ludicrous idea that a nation of 40 million can crew a proper fleet

38,000 crew per ship times 40 ships is 1.5 million people. That's certainly within the realm of possibility.

[Rhadamantus]

50 years after ESB. The New Empire is getting rid of old surplus stuff by selling it to backwater primitives, and ripping them off.

New Empire huh, and set in the future relative to the current canon. So, appealing to the Jedi might be possible after all.

As Eternal says, there are better uses for the money than that. The hoth shield could deflect 'any bombardment' from Death Squadron, and the Executor has more power output than our entire enemy's fleet, so we double down on that and things like the W-165 which will cut through anything they have with ease. Then tax breaks/repayment of national debt.

Best of all my W-165s and their ion-equivalents can pretty much act as micro-death stars to all those asteroid dwellers across the system, because my rival has spent all his money on a fleet of capital ships that actually can't defend his people who live in easily-shattered, incapable-of-dodging, asteroids.

I look at joining the New Republic too, it'll almost certainly cost less.

That is a excellent idea.

[Esquire]

Anyway, setting aside the absolutely ludicrous idea that a nation of 40 million can crew a proper fleet

38,000 crew per ship times 40 ships is 1.5 million people. That's certainly within the realm of possibility.

Mathematically, maybe, but not if you factor in any of the many logistical problems. The officers and crew of a space navy must unavoidably all be highly-competent and trained personnel, the nation's best and brightest. You're expecting this nation to somehow sustain a standing fleet as large as, say, the fully-mobilized French Army was during WW1... a level of mobilization that was crippling when drawn from uneducated peasant farmers, never mind highly trained technicians, and this is without accounting for the massive ground forces you'd need to wage an multiplanetary war. Or, more to the point, the fleet's 'tail' - support services including yards, munitions manufacture, data analysts, administrative and training commands... if we set the tooth-to-tail ratio at an extremely generous 1-to-3, you're looking at well over 10% of the population under arms, without even accounting for ground troops and planetary garrisons.

If you really think that's workable, I invite you to prove it.

[NecronLord]

In fairness, I've argued in the past that the hundredfold increase in crew density from the Clone Wars separatist ships (A converted Lucrehulk's living crew numbered 350 including trade specialists) to the Imperial ones (An 30,000+ crew ISD is smaller and with less reactor power, and not a match for a Lucrehulk at least by Saxton's estimates) might represent a large scale make-work programme to reduce unemployment.

It's obvious (and explicit) that they used more 'droids on the separatist ships, but I generally attribute this to political reasons and a prejudice against automated warships.

It's possible that the enlisted crew of Imperial warships are otherwise unemployable and they spend all their time polishing things and doing not-particularly technical or high-qualification work.

[Esquire]

Oh, absolutely Imperial crew sizes are large to cover for Lucas' lack of imagination anti-droid prejudice. I'm a little skeptical that the Imperial Navy has ten times the necessary crew for no reason, though; one man per shift to replace a single engine-room technical droid isn't makework, it's an inefficient but still valid choice given recent galactic history.

[NecronLord]

Even with a less extreme example, the Venator's 7,400 men to the Impstar's 37,085 (excluding ground troops) is odd. Sure they're bigger, but not that much, even accounting for inverse squares law. A Venator the length of an Imperator would have just about three times the volume, but... hrrm, I've disproven my own argument there.

[Esquire]

Yeah; there's some difference left over, but that can be explained as the Venators having been designed for more diligent clone crews or carriers being more crew-efficient in the Star Wars universe. I wonder if somebody at Lucasfilm actually sat down and did the scaling, or if it just worked out that way?

[Adam Reynolds]

One thing that does rather justify this change is politics. After the Clone Wars, using anything but conventionally recruited soldiers in an army would be political suicide. Which was quite clever on Palpatine's part, he used both of the sorts of armies that can be produced in secret, meaning that there would be a political backlash if anyone tried it again, meaning they would have to use normal armies that he would notice if anyone seriously developed them.

Though I wonder what the actual theoretical limit on crewing warships would be for a nation state. In reality, resource limitations would almost certainly matter more, but such things would not apply to the same degree in Star Wars.

Though one also has to consider that Star Wars is a setting that is extremely under militarized. Apart from the Death Star we have never seen the thousands of warships in a single engagement one would expect for a setting as outright large as Star Wars. The majority of engagements in Clone Wars featured less than a dozen capital ships. Perhaps the reason why is that certain exotic resources are too expensive when used on the scale of full size warships.

What is also odd is that no one ever seems to bother with old designs, with even the Rebel Alliance building their own fighters rather than using Clone Wars era surplus. Which would fit the exotic resources theory. Even for the cash strapped Rebel Alliance, it was cheaper overall to use relatively new designs that would last longer in combat than surplus hulls that would be destroyed full of expensive fuels. It would also fit the point made in ANH with Luke commenting that they could buy their own ship for the price that Han was charging them to fly to Alderaan. Fuel is more expensive than starship hulls.

It would also explain why the Second Death Star was so much bigger, that the increase in efficiency that went with a larger design was more than worth the extra building material involved.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Honestly, arguing about crew sizes is fairly irrelevant. Based solely on the OP (and the follow-up) we can't really decide what forces to build/buy without having at least some idea of what the enemy is building or buying. And since what they have will depend on what you already have and so on it's difficult to work out.

Hence my "move everyone to one planet and fortify the hell out of it" idea. Much simpler, keeps all important assets in one place thats easily defended, and nothing the bad guys can buy is going to break through those defences without it becoming a Pyrrhic victory at best. Unless the "New Empire" is selling planet-killers as "old stuff" to backwater worlds.

[The Romulan Republic]

It also entails forced relocation of a large percentage of your populace and seceding the majority of your territory at the outset.

I doubt any government would survive enacting such a policy.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Then in that case leave the populations where they are and begin building the defences as planned. Build or purchase a large group of large, very well-shielded ships with point-defence armament only to evacuate civilians tot he fortress-world if there is a threat of war.

However, you are assuming that I jump straight to "forced relocation." If we are in a state of cold war then it's bound to be tense, no doubt in my population I have propaganda experts that can spin it as "the only way to ensure the safety and survival of my people."

Hell, put it to a bloody vote if needs be. But since the choice (as would be presented) is "stay on an asteroid colony (or wherever else they are) that we can't defend or come to this lovely big planet with plenty of room and defences the devil himself couldn't crack."

Though this does assume this is actually in any way a democracy. If not, then moving people to new homes on a safe world isn't going to make the government fall.

[The Romulan Republic]

Then in that case leave the populations where they are and begin building the defences as planned. Build or purchase a large group of large, very well-shielded ships with point-defence armament only to evacuate civilians tot he fortress-world if there is a threat of war.

This is a bit more reasonable.

However, you are assuming that I jump straight to "forced relocation." If we are in a state of cold war then it's bound to be tense, no doubt in my population I have propaganda experts that can spin it as "the only way to ensure the safety and survival of my people."

I'm not assuming you'll jump immediately to forced relocation, but how the hell else do you get millions of people to leave their homes?

Hell, put it to a bloody vote if needs be.

Yeah, good luck winning that vote.

But since the choice (as would be presented) is "stay on an asteroid colony (or wherever else they are) that we can't defend or come to this lovely big planet with plenty of room and defences the devil himself couldn't crack."

Though this does assume this is actually in any way a democracy. If not, then moving people to new homes on a safe world isn't going to make the government fall.

Revolutions and coups do happen.

You are talking about the relocation from their homes of, going off the OP, the vast majority of the population, using security as a pretext. Its the Marquis of Star Trek writ large.

Edit: And that's not even getting into the infrastructure/logistic/economic clusterfuck.