Youngla0450 wrote:Mike DiCenso wrote:So your sources are a bunch of C-level and lower canon EU material versus movie and novelization G-canon?
-Mike
I am guessing you are one of
those damned Trekkies, since you keep on trying to claim that the Empire is small and weak.
Be polite, please.
Now, shall we consider what actually goes on in Star Wars, in C continuity and in G canon? Present a nice argument, for a change.
First, empires don't really have
members. A federation has members. The idea of
member worlds as distinct from
colonies is really the sort of distinction that matters in Star Trek, not Star Wars. This is because we have a United Federation
of Planets that we are concerned with. There are roughly 150 members in that Federation as of DS9.
ENT: "These are the Voyages..." indicates canonically that there are
four founding members; Earth, Tellar, Vulcan, and Andor. It is known that at least three of these claimed additional planets as possessions. Hence, resolving the number, kind, and size of colonies is a critical exercise in understanding the magnitude of the Federation.
We know that in TOS, Kirk tells Cochrane that they - presumably humans - have spread to a thousand worlds. Most of the colonies we see, however, seem fairly small. As of First Contact, we know that the Federation is spread out across 8,000 light years. We've seen a number of galactic maps, we've heard several percentages quoted for how much of the galaxy is explored, and we know specifically that certain stars, such as Rigel and Deneb, are within Federation territory.
As a result, we have a very good idea of where the Federation is and what its area of influence is, but very little of an idea of how much sheer
volume the Federation occupies, and next to no idea how many worlds the Federation controls directly (probably more than a thousand, probably less than a hundred thousand), and a hazy notion of the Federation's total population (probably more than 1 trillion, but likely less than 10 trillion).
However, in Star Wars, we have a variety of contradictory pieces of evidence that fit poorly together. The
highest level of canon alone provides a lot of information... and has a great deal of trouble being consistent. While in Star Trek, we have a paucity of information, in Star Wars, we have too much information, and it's contradictory:
TPM wrote:ten thousand Jedi knights active on a hundred thousand worlds
AOTC wrote:It was a vast network of tens of thousands of systems, and even more species, each with a distinct perspective.
Tens of thousands of systems.
AOTC wrote:The interior of the building was no less vast and impressive, its gigantic rotunda encircled, row upon row, by the floating platforms of the many Senators of the Republic, representing the great majority of the galaxy's inhabitable worlds
The senators for these tens of thousands of systems represent the "great majority" of the galaxy's inhabitable - not merely inhabited, but inhabitable - worlds.
This is a picture of the Republic. A hundred thousand worlds that the Jedi Knights intervene on - tens of thousands of worlds, encompassing the great majority of systems.
Unfortunately, in order to make this fit with Tarkin's
million systems in ANH, we're going to have to assume that there's a lot outside the Old Republic that our narrating character is simply ignorant of. Far from stretching the other direction - as Wong might choose to in cherry-picking EU material from "Dark Empire" and other books, claiming a million important systems and many more subject systems - we have to conclude that most of those million systems are Outer Rim planets, backwaters like Tattooine and Dantooine, places that don't register as important enough to count in the Senate.
The
population of the Empire then becomes another question. 100,000 Naboos is 60-450 trillion depending on which of the mutually contradictory EU sources you trust. I can easily believe anything from a hundred trillion to several quadrillion.