Follow-up to the 1.2 million figure in Shatterpoint

Joe Momma · Post by **Joe Momma** » 2003-07-22 05:58pm

I didn't want to drag the whole thread back up (though you can find it here),
but when I was rereading the book recently I noticed that Mace Windu comments again on the 1.2 million clonetroopers near the end of the book.

Dammit, I forgot to bring the book with me. I'll post the page number and exact quote tomorrow, but Windu mentions in his journal that 1.2 million troops is only enough to put a single clonetrooper on each world of the Republic with a "handful of thousands" left over. FWIW, Windu then laments the fact that this means the real brunt of the Clone Wars will be borne by the ordinary citizens of the galaxy.

I'm only mentioning this because it was suggested in the previous thread that the author kept the 1.2 million figure because he hadn't considered how small it was. I think this quote illustrates that Stover had considered ijust how ridiculously miniscule the number was.

BTW, has anyone compared the Clone Wars timeline info in the Clone Wars Database Thread with the Lucasbooks timeline on the inside cover of Shatterpoint (or any other Clone Wars books -- I haven't kept up with the SW books in the last few months)?

-- Joe Momma[/url]

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-07-22 06:48pm

Eat that, minimalist EU authors.

Stover also deserves credit for staying away from minimalism elsewhere; in Traitor, he estimated the amount of survivors on Coruscant at nine hundred billion.

Grand Admiral Thrawn · Post by **Grand Admiral Thrawn** » 2003-07-22 08:49pm

Durran Korr wrote:

Eat that, minimalist EU authors.

Stover also deserves credit for staying away from minimalism elsewhere; in Traitor, he estimated the amount of survivors on Coruscant at nine hundred billion.

So? Saxton estimates that the population of Coruscant was hundreds of trillions minimum.

consequences · Post by **consequences** » 2003-07-22 09:09pm

Hell, didn't WEG put the figure at 600+ trillion?

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-07-22 10:15pm

Yikes. I stand corrected.

Oh well, if it was Zahn we'd be hearing about 60 billion survivors out of a population of 100 billion.

Joe Momma · Post by **Joe Momma** » 2003-07-23 07:12pm

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:
Durran Korr wrote:Stover also deserves credit for staying away from minimalism elsewhere; in Traitor, he estimated the amount of survivors on Coruscant at nine hundred billion.
So? Saxton estimates that the population of Coruscant was hundreds of trillions minimum.

Lets go toward the high end and say the population of Coruscant is 900 trillion. 900 billion would still be a survival rate of one in a thousand, which is actually pretty good considering the devastation and subsequent conditions on Coruscant, at least up to the last NJO book I'd read (which was Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand).

Anyway, here's the quote and page number I promised earlier, for whatever misdeeds to which you care to apply it:

Page 259 of Shatterpoint (hardcover):

"...(A)nd I remember that the Grand Army of the Republic numbers 1.2 million clone troopers -- just enough to station a single trooper -- one lone man -- on each planet of the Republic, and have a handful of thousands left over.
"If this Clone War escalates the way Depa thinks it will, it will be fought not by clones and Jedi and battle droids, but by ordinary people."

I find myself wondering why these battles were called the Clone Wars in the first place. Usually wars and battles are named after their location, the factions, or the issues, either singly or in combination, rather than a particular battle group. I've heard the American Civil War also referred to as The War of Southern Independence, The War Between the States, and The Confederate War, for example, but I've never heard it called the Grand Army of Virginia Wars.

It looks like Yoda coined the term when the Republic sent the clone troopers off to the front lines. Maybe it caught on initially in honor of the troops that were going to save the Republic? Makes me wonder what the Separatists call the war. The War for the Military-Industrial Complex's Independence, maybe.

-- Joe Momma

Jim Raynor · Post by **Jim Raynor** » 2003-07-23 07:55pm

Perhaps the small, elite clone armies distinguished themselves by taking part in and winning the major battles of the war? I don't know, if it were up to me I wouldn't have used that silly 1.2 million number in the first place.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2003-07-23 08:10pm

It was pretty clear to me that Palpatine was going to shoe-horn the systems that were leaning-pacifist into war because this elite artificial clone army would pick up the burden of combat duty, thus relieving their sons from conscription to the front lines.

Plus AOTC seemed to show to me that the clones were supposed to be the ubiquitous "droid substitute" of the Republic. Watch the closing scene on Coruscant and tell me that that is telling you the clones are some tiny collection of fire-brigades and spec-ops for high-priority missions while Joe Citizen picks up the majority of the war effort, rather than the Army of the Republic?

Joe Momma · Post by **Joe Momma** » 2003-07-23 08:11pm

Jim Raynor wrote:Perhaps the small, elite clone armies distinguished themselves by taking part in and winning the major battles of the war? I don't know, if it were up to me I wouldn't have used that silly 1.2 million number in the first place.

I think that's the general consensus.

Hopefully Lucas will jack the number up a bit by then. Christ, the United States has almost a fourth of that (363,000 troops) deployed in Iraq right now.

-- Joe Momma

SPOOFE · Post by **SPOOFE** » 2003-07-24 02:38am

I find myself wondering why these battles were called the Clone Wars in the first place.

Hopefully, things pick up in Episode III. I recall there being another 10 million "units" on the way, on Kamino... which would allow them to station a whole ELEVEN troops on each planet in the Republic!

Wild ass guess? There're more sources of clones than just Kamino. It'll be interesting to see several clone armies, each with their own "flavor" of clone, duking it out. And let's not forget the clones trained for space combat...

vakundok · Post by **vakundok** » 2003-07-24 03:31am

SPOOFE wrote:
I find myself wondering why these battles were called the Clone Wars in the first place.
Hopefully, things pick up in Episode III. I recall there being another 10 million "units" on the way, on Kamino... which would allow them to station a whole ELEVEN troops on each planet in the Republic!

Wild ass guess? There're more sources of clones than just Kamino. It'll be interesting to see several clone armies, each with their own "flavor" of clone, duking it out. And let's not forget the clones trained for space combat...

Excuse me, but wasn't it 200,000 finished and further one million under production? And we saw that some of them were at the very beginning of the production and some of them were halfway. (They will be only on the 16 years old level in ep3.) If these are true, it means that the number 1,200,000 would be reached nearly ten years after AotC, 7 years after ep 3! If we count a linear clone output, there will be only 500,000 clones (minus losses) at the time of ep3!

EDIT: SPOOFE: Without that "growing acceleration", any clones those production was started at the same time of the kaminoian order will only be 13 years old, just as Boba.

Joe Momma · Post by **Joe Momma** » 2003-08-02 04:21pm

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:
Durran Korr wrote:

Eat that, minimalist EU authors.

Stover also deserves credit for staying away from minimalism elsewhere; in Traitor, he estimated the amount of survivors on Coruscant at nine hundred billion.

So? Saxton estimates that the population of Coruscant was hundreds of trillions minimum.

Finally read Traitor. Stover was estimating a 10 percent casualty rate (100 billion dead, 900 billion survivors), so he was starting with a population number of only 1 trillion, which sounds a little low.

Are there any other official numbers for Coruscant's population?

-- Joe Momma

Publius · Post by **Publius** » 2003-08-02 06:22pm

vakundok wrote:EDIT: SPOOFE: Without that "growing acceleration", any clones those production was started at the same time of the kaminoian order will only be 13 years old, just as Boba.

Fortunately, according to "Hero of Cartao I: Hero's Call", accelerated growth times are indeed possible:

"I don't know if Master Doriana mentioned it, but these are a more advanced model of cloning tank than the design they used on Kamino," the commander [Roshton] went on, turning his head slowly as he surveyed the bustling assembly area. "That's the main problem with keeping yourselves isolated; you don't keep up with modern technological advances. These should be able to turn out clones in a tenth of the time the Kaminoans needed to do the job. We get a few million of these on-line, and the Separatists can kiss their precious droid armies good-bye."

The advanced cloning cylinders to be produced at Spaarti Creations on Cartao, at Supreme Chancellor Palpatine's orders, per Senate Directive 3591, are theoretically much speedier than the Kaminoan method. It is probable that these particular Spaarti-brand clone cylinders are the same model as was later stored in Mt Tantiss (especially given that Mr Zahn is the author of "Hero of Cartao").

Publius

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-08-02 06:32pm

Joe Momma wrote:
Lets go toward the high end and say the population of Coruscant is 900 trillion. 900 billion would still be a survival rate of one in a thousand, which is actually pretty good considering the devastation and subsequent conditions on Coruscant, at least up to the last NJO book I'd read (which was Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand).

Nope doesn't work, because has also mentioned that only 100 billion had been killed or evacuated. He was clearly assuming the population was only one trillion, which is what its placed as in a couple Eu sources. It is however absurdly small, Saxton has suggested not hundreds of trillions but that quadrillions could easily be on the planet.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-08-02 07:09pm

At its peak, perhaps. But since the start of the war people have been fleeing Coruscant. If we assume that every fifteen minutes, 10,000 transports with a capacity of 500 people each leave, that's 480 million people leaving each day, 3.36 billion people leaving each week, 1.44 trillion people leaving each month.

Ok, so maybe that's not enough to make a difference in the short term, or even in the long term: at that rate, you'll still be only moving 17 trillion people per year.

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2003-08-03 02:11am

I'm not entirely convinced that the low numbers were not intentional, so as to provide justification for the start of the Death Star project in ep 3. It'd shoot the production rate observed in ROTJ all to hell, but Lucas did that with the 1000 years and such already.

Illuminatus Primus · Post by **Illuminatus Primus** » 2003-08-03 02:35am

The Death Star project would be a Seperatist project so far, so I don't see how low clone numbers would have it be constructed.

Lucas would be an idiot to have the Death Star start construction in Episode III.

What, the first one takes 20 years to finish, and the second one which is far larger takes six months to be half-built?

How does 1000 years, however idiotic, shoot down production rates?

Ender · Post by **Ender** » 2003-08-03 03:05am

Illuminatus Primus wrote:The Death Star project would be a Seperatist project so far, so I don't see how low clone numbers would have it be constructed.

Yet we know that it is eventually constructed by the group that becomes the Empire. Events could transpire that Palpy unveils it for some reason.

Lucas would be an idiot to have the Death Star start construction in Episode III.

What, the first one takes 20 years to finish, and the second one which is far larger takes six months to be half-built?

I stated as much

How does 1000 years, however idiotic, shoot down production rates?

It wouldn't, it would be an internal contradiction. Production rates would be off, just like the generations/years are.

vakundok · Post by **vakundok** » 2003-08-03 04:16am

Publius wrote:The advanced cloning cylinders to be produced at Spaarti Creations on Cartao, at Supreme Chancellor Palpatine's orders, per Senate Directive 3591, are theoretically much speedier than the Kaminoan method. It is probable that these particular Spaarti-brand clone cylinders are the same model as was later stored in Mt Tantiss (especially given that Mr Zahn is the author of "Hero of Cartao").

Publius

Hmm, interesting. However there are nitpicking problems.
1: Zahn wrote that the ideal was a 3-5 years cycle for the Spaarti clones. He also wrote that early Spaarti clones that were growth even quicker (less than one year) went totally insane. So it suggests earlier failures. Most likely these clones (growth in one tenth of the ten year) would be the "failure".
2: Kamino must be rich. (The novelization stated that their cities were designed by the best engineers of the galaxy.) I highly doubt that they would not monitor their competitors very closely.
3: The one million Spaarti tubes already on-line is a very high figure. I do not think that there were more than 200,000 tubes on Kamino. (I do not know about the Inside the worlds figure.)
4: Growing a clone is one thing. But what about their equipment? (Especially the heavy weaponry and the ships.) KDY was most likely contracted to design and produce these for the 1.2 million clones in 20 years. Producing these for another 1,000,000 clones per year is a far larger task.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2003-08-03 04:58am

I'm sorry, but I cannot comprehend how it is possible for the population of Coruscant to be in the low trillions.

Could someone break down mathematically how this could be so? No "There's 1.2 million member worlds and each one has an ambassador" logic. I'd like to see some MATH.

There's 6 billion people on earth. to get to 100 trillion you'd have to multiply the earth's population 17,000 times. I realize that almost 90% of the planet is inhabited (minus polar caps and an artificial sea) and the infrastructure reaches up almost 10 kilometers, but there's alot of space in between those buildings, and the bottom kilometer or so is dangerous to inhabit.

I personally think that the hundreds of billions is more accurate. Can anyone convert me? I respond well to reason.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-08-03 05:16am

Manhattan Island occupies 830 square kilometers of land, and at night is filled with approximately 1.4 million people.

Now, assume that the inhabited portion of Manhattan stretches 10 kilometers vertically. You now have 14 million people on 830 square kilometers of land.

Working off the radius of the Earth and using the 90% usable estimate, you get ~460,000,000 square kilometers of usable space.

Multiplying the population density by the usable surface area yields a population of 7.756 trillion people.

That enough math for ya?

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-08-03 05:26am

Ok, some further stuff.

According to Curtis Saxton, Coruscant has 1.39 times the diameter of Earth, which produces a usable surface yield of 889 million square meters.

Again multiplying by the conservative Manhattan estimate, it produces about twice Earth's estimate. So a low-end figure for Coruscant is 14 trillion inhabitants...

Publius · Post by **Publius** » 2003-08-03 05:59am

vakundok wrote:Hmm, interesting. However there are nitpicking problems.
1: Zahn wrote that the ideal was a 3-5 years cycle for the Spaarti clones. He also wrote that early Spaarti clones that were growth even quicker (less than one year) went totally insane. So it suggests earlier failures. Most likely these clones (growth in one tenth of the ten year) would be the "failure".

That is not, strictly speaking, a problem. It is quite probable that the first clones decanted from the advanced, Spaarti-manufactured clone cylinders will indeed suffer from "clone madness" due to excessively fast creation.

2: Kamino must be rich. (The novelization stated that their cities were designed by the best engineers of the galaxy.) I highly doubt that they would not monitor their competitors very closely.

That would be the prudent thing to do, certainly; however, the nonconsequentialist Kaminoans have not demonstrated an especially high degree of prudence. They did not even bother to authenticate Master Kenobi's credentials as an agent of the Jedi High Council (in fact, he never even presented any). They are shockingly naïve, and, according to the Databank on the official site, "have very little interest in life beyond their solar system, other than the imports needed by their society".

3: The one million Spaarti tubes already on-line is a very high figure. I do not think that there were more than 200,000 tubes on Kamino. (I do not know about the Inside the worlds figure.)

What one million Spaarti tubes? Spaarti Creations had not yet begun to manufacture clone cylinders as of the start of "Hero of Cartao".

4: Growing a clone is one thing. But what about their equipment? (Especially the heavy weaponry and the ships.) KDY was most likely contracted to design and produce these for the 1.2 million clones in 20 years. Producing these for another 1,000,000 clones per year is a far larger task.

There is no hard and fast rule requiring that Kuat Drive Yards be the sole arsenal of the Republic. There are no doubt many, many other industrial colossi remaining loyal to the Republic, such as the Tagge Company, and, quite likely, the other members of the Galactic Corporate Policy League.

Furthermore, Senate Directive 3591 grants the Supreme Chancellor of the Republic "unlimited authority to commandeer any resource or group of resources he feels necessary for a swift conclusion of hostilities" ("Hero of Cartao I: Hero's Call", p. 55); it was this directive which granted Supreme Chancellor Palpatine statutory authority to galacticise Spaarti Creations in the first place.

On a side note, Senate Directive 3591, along with Representative Binks's emergency powers resolution, makes Supreme Chancellor Palpatine not only a dictator, but also a despot, with no constitutional or legal limitations to his authority; the senators have all but crowned him already. The supreme irony is that the Senate has thoroughly -- and voluntarily -- eradicated republicanism in the name of preserving the Republic; no doubt Supreme Chancellor Palpatine will be laughing all the way to the throne.

Publius

vakundok · Post by **vakundok** » 2003-08-03 08:46am

Publius:
The topic is about that the 1,200,000 clones figure for the army of the Republic is so low. In my opinion, if the Republic turns to be the Empire 3 years after AotC, the Republic will never get even those 1,200,000 clones from Kamino.
Of course, the Spaarti cylinders can solve this numerical problem, and produce a far larger army for the Republic (in this case, there is no reason to keep the 1.2 million figure at all). (And, in my opinion, the Republic army, suffering from the 'clone madness' could provide a very cool situation.) However, currently it is up to Lucas, whether he will use this or not.

Side note about the population of the Republic:
1: The Republic was based on tolerancy. So, I think everyone was a citizen.
2: The novelization of AotC states that there were trillions of citizens. It can mean 2-1000 trillions for the whole Republic. (More likely 2-20 trillions, otherwise it would say tens of trillions.)
I cannot quote it, but it is after Amidala's arrival to the Senate (and the session).

The Duchess of Zeon · Post by **The Duchess of Zeon** » 2003-08-03 09:52am

I doubt Coruscant ever recovered from the Rebels taking it; the Imperial Civil War; and the Clone Emperor's resurgence. Quite simply, the past few decades have been the equivlant of the Visigothic and Vandal sacks of Rome in succession. The Roman Empire wasn't quite dead yet either but its capable certainly was a shell. Same thing with Coruscant and the Republic/Empire in general.