Transport ships able to move millions?

[Lord Relvenous]

Also, supplies are not the only concerns. Take into account restroom facilities, waste, recreation, sleeping, and briefing and other mission associated rooms, and the volume needed to support an army for an extended amount of time is much larger than just the sum of the base volumes the soldiers of said army.

[D.Turtle]

Maybe using the size and crew capacity of a modern aircraft carrier would be more realistic (in considering all the equipment, supplies, etc are also on an aircraft carrier).

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier has the following dimensions (according to site:
317 x 40.8 x 11.8 meters
According to the same site it has a crew complement of 5000-5250.
So this would be a volume of 152616,48 m³ per 5000 people (to use the smaller number). Lets round this to 150000m³ per 5000 people, or 30m³ per person.
This is of course an extremely conservative estimate.

But, lets compare this to the ships Publius mentioned before:

(Attack of the Clones Incredible Cross-Sections states that the LH-1740 has some 66 million cubic meters of cargo space, to say nothing of its berthing spaces for 60,000 "trade representatives"). A Rendili StarDrive container train like IFA Black Ice, with its 100 million cubic meters or so of cargo space, could carry around 19 millions, while a Loronar field secured container vessel (FSCV), which is known from the Imperial Sourcebook, Second Edition to transport as much as 5.36 billion cubic meters of cargo, could accommodate 993 millions or so.

Using the aircraft carrier comparison (which would include command and control, equipment, leisure areas, berthing, etc) the LH-1740 could carry about 2.2 million people, the Rendili StarDrive container train about 3.3 million, while the Loronar FSCV could carry about 178.7 million people.

[EDIT]So the entire Republican clone army (numbering 3 million) can pretty much fit on one transport ship (of which hundreds or thousands were seen above Naboo). [/EDIT]

[PayBack]

I'm not sure an aircraft carrier is the best example because.. well it's an aircraft carrier. It has runways and aircraft hangers, maintenance bays and workshops. Whilst any transport is likely to have shuttles etc, it's not going to dedicate anywhere near as much space to them as a carrier does.

[Batman]

I DOES however serve as a niece lower end figure for what Star Wars transports are capable of.

[PayBack]

Compared to pulling a completely random number out of the air? Yes. But that's about all.

[D.Turtle]

I'm not sure an aircraft carrier is the best example because.. well it's an aircraft carrier. It has runways and aircraft hangers, maintenance bays and workshops. Whilst any transport is likely to have shuttles etc, it's not going to dedicate anywhere near as much space to them as a carrier does.

I used it to address the complaints of Kartr_Kana, Ender, and others that the 5.4 m³ figure used before does not address things like supply, equipment, etc.
So using an aircraft carrier would be quite a good comparison, precisely because it has all that stuff in it (like hangars).
You could of course use other ships (destroyers, cruisers, etc), but considering that some of the equipment used in SW is relatively large, I thought aircraft carriers (with their planes and all the space devoted to them) would make a nice lower limit.

[PayBack]

I just thought a Tarawa class would have been a better example as it has large equipment, craft, C3 facilities etc also, but dedicated to transporting, maintaining and delivering assault forces. Having said that it's bigger than I thought, and carries fewer personnel than I thought so maybe the difference isn't that great.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/lha-1.htm