I challenge darkstar to a debate

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by KSW » Sun Feb 12, 2012 8:08 pm

Admiral Breetai wrote:
MauriceWindows wrote:
I don't even know about Coruscant having 100 billion, since the galaxy is still in the agricultural stage, i.e. they have no replicators for their food and textiles, so they'd have to produce something in order to sustain their population-- either growing it on their own via farms, or trading for it with other planets; even if the planet was rich in some rare mineral they'd still have to mine it.
Coruscant is said to have a population in the trillions or more IIRC but considering they have to import water daily the thought of that population making sense is asinine.
l
A population of one trillion on an earth-sized planet would amount to less than 2000 square feet per person on the whole planet. That's not what we saw in the movies.
a blockade of that planet would be a truly horrific sight you'd have mass starvation within days and a total collapse of everything else in a week or two...that planet if the numbers are accurate couldn't hope to withstand a siege at al
Except it's the Jedi homeworld. Dex's diner wouldn't even run out of food before the blockade would be broken and the organizers caught or killed.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Admiral Breetai » Mon Feb 13, 2012 7:25 am

MauriceWindows wrote:
Except it's the Jedi homeworld. Dex's diner wouldn't even run out of food before the blockade would be broken and the organizers caught or killed.
a Federation blockade? the Force aint matching Q torps

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by StarWarsStarTrek » Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:43 pm

low-canon garbage that is clearly contradicted by the movies, their novelizations, and the TCW.

You are so impartial, Mike.

Quite frankly, after you mistook a quoted response to Praeothmin for one to Khor, along with an absolutely classic case of irony, it's hard to take you seriously anymore.
There are no trillions of Storm troopers anywhere
This is your pathetic attempt at proving your claim that trillions of storm troopers (a completely reasonable figure if you do some basic math) 'is "clearly" contradicted' by the movies?

So because you don't see trillions of stormtroopers directly anywhere in the movies, you conclude, with your unparralleled reasoning skills, that they must exist. After all, we all know that there is no such thing as a 1.2 man United States regular army, because I've never seen a million soldiers anywhere! Heck, our 12 ship carrier fleet is nothing more than a lie, because we've never seen it all in one place!

Then again, the Federation does not have the 30,000 ship fleet that is attributed to them, because we never see all of the ships at once, and we all know that this means that they don't exist, because we all know that you clump all of your ships together in a galactic war. Well, maybe you do in Trek, where bronze age vertical wall formations are considered to be ingenious tactics, and it took a 60 year old bald guy to figure out the original plan of actually using warp drive combatically.
and 5 million Clone troopers was enough to bankrupt the Republic as per TCW "Heroes and Villains". You can't afford trillions, if you can't afford millions.
It was enough to bankrupt the Republic, yet they could still afford a fleet of thousands of Victory class star destroyers as per RotS, and the Empire could afford to build a Death Star, in the outer rim, in secret?

Give me a break. Besides, by Mr. O's own assertion, the Clone Wars was a proxy war with deliberately pissy forces anyway. And the ability to build a Death Star completely destroys any attempt to claim that equipping trillions of conscripts with plastoid armer and E11s is somehow beyond the Empire's capabilities.
As Praeothimin noted, you can't even show the math or anything else, and all too often you rely on other peoples' flawed work. You've never even have demonstrated that any serious disparity exists.
What? The Empire built the Death Star 2 in the outer rim, in secret. The Federation starfleet at its highest reasonable calculation was 30,000 during the Dominion War. Now, I earlier claimed that the Death Star 2 massed trillions of Federation ships. A very relevant rebuttal brought in the Death Star size argument and claimed that I was wrong...because it only masses billions of Federation ships! Hahahaha.

In other words, the Empire built in secret something massing more than the entire Federation fleet, after more than a year of mobilization and full war production, by numerous orders of magnitude.

Like:
(Picard)
Death Star II has diameter of 180 km. That is volume of 3 032 628 km^2. Assuming density of 2000 kg/m^2 (based on data from Darkstar's starship volumetrics page) we get 6.065 x 10e18 kg. Which is 2 021 752 000 times more than entire Starfleet tonnage in starships.

So, next time, please say "billions" of times. It doesn't make large difference to the point you are making, and is actually supportable.


Despite making an errouneous size claim (180 kilometers is not "nearly twice as large" as per the ROTJ opening crawl), he is correct. The Death Star 2, built in secret in the Outer Rim, masses 2 billion times the entire federation Starfleet in tonnage.

The Executor alone (and Han Solo heavily disputes the idea that it is anything unusual in the Empire in ROTJ when he simply categorizes it as a "command ship", and says that there "plenty of [them]") masses many tens of thousands of Enterprises. What about Golan Defense Stations, which are affordable by even borderline backwaters? Or the 1.6 million sector fleet calculated from WEG?

Indeed, the equipment needed for trillions of stormtroopers and naval crew probably outmasses the Federation starfleet alone. And that is canon, not "canon garbage".

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Praeothmin » Mon Feb 13, 2012 1:28 pm

SWST wrote:it's hard to take you seriously anymore.
Coming from you, that's rich... :)

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Mon Feb 13, 2012 2:42 pm

Han's quote about the command ship is too ambiguous to make a definitive statement from it. Just let it rot there, it's been argued to death for decades and nothing has moved an inch.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by sonofccn » Mon Feb 13, 2012 6:37 pm

SWST wrote:Or the 1.6 million sector fleet calculated from WEG?
Actually if your pulling this from where I think you are, Imperial Source Book, the total Imperial navy fleet strenght, all sector groups, should be 3.2 million "combat starships" excluding Star Destroyers and running from heavy cruisers down to system patrol ships.
The Death Star 2, built in secret in the Outer Rim, masses 2 billion times the entire federation Starfleet in tonnage.
I don't think anyone is doubting DS are big nor is it not an industrial feat. Just that there is a disconnect between that project and their regular ship building. Be it G-canon with only thirty odd ISDs pulled for Endor to T-cannon five million more clones plus hopefully their equipment will bankrupt them to C-canon with the ISB mentoning the death star project only took resources to field a score or so of sector groups or about thirty thousand combat starships of every make and model. All of it adds up to the death stars not being the benchmark for industrial prowess but the outliers.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Tue Feb 14, 2012 4:26 pm

Check this.
With something like just above a thousand Sectors, the ISB would give something between 300,000,000 and 1,600,000,000 troops in total, when referring to the Army.

The Navy has naval troopers, and the ISB says that they were the uniform of the Death Star troopers, meaning that NT once wore another kind of suit.

Army troopers were an uniform similar to that of Naval troopers, but grey and with a bit more armour. There are the Army Assault crews, for the vehicles.
Stormtroopers are the elite, and support both the Army and the Navy. They're in much more under the Emperor's direct control.
Straight to the Sector Army, we get 774,576 Army troopers, even those found in the fleet, plus 1,180,309 personnel in total.

The ISB speaks of rumours saying that the core stormtrooper forces are greater than the regular Army and Naval forces combined.
There's not much info on the stormtroopers in fact, aside from specialized units, which are supplementary division from the core forces.
We also read that each Imperial-class Star Detroyer carries a full stormtrooper division.
There's a full corp on SSDs, but we don't know how many men that represents. But on page 92, it's said that Battlegroups are a recent addition and replace divisions. When it comes to the Army, this represents always more than than 10,000 men, plus thousands more on vehicles or other duties.
It's hard to tell if this applies to stortroopers. Stortroopers have no support personnel as far as I can tell, so they draw upon the resources of the Army or the Navy when needed.
I'd say that, at best, a stormtrooper division might be worth 10~15 K men, but it could very well be less than that, considering that stormtroopers division must fit inside ISDs which are not given beyond thousands of troops besides their crews. There couldn't be much room for the extra stormtroopers to mass the equivalent of a complete crew or more.
Nevertheless, that still goes for something like many millions stormtroopers : 5000 of them per division over 24000 ISDs would mean 120 M men in white armour.
We could easily reach a billion or two under certain circumstances.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by StarWarsStarTrek » Wed Feb 15, 2012 12:53 pm

Mr. Oragahn wrote:Check this.
With something like just above a thousand Sectors, the ISB would give something between 300,000,000 and 1,600,000,000 troops in total, when referring to the Army.
Blantant canon statements quantifying trillions of army troops vs Guesstimates based on RPG stats (and the ridiculous assumption that the entire ground army belongs to sector fleets). Well...
Straight to the Sector Army, we get 774,576 Army troopers, even those found in the fleet, plus 1,180,309 personnel in total.
Only an absolute retard would think this to be the entire army, so what's your point?
Nevertheless, that still goes for something like many millions stormtroopers : 5000 of them per division over 24000 ISDs would mean 120 M men in white armour.
We could easily reach a billion or two under certain circumstances.
So because the sector ISD's typically hold a total of millions of stormtroopers, you set this as any type of limit for the actual stormtrooper corps size, rather than as a lower extreme? What about the various stormtroopers stationed on various worlds? What about those contained within transport ships and space stations? What about the canonical "trillions" of army troopers and naval crew?

And even "a billion or two" is far larger than any estimation of the Federation "army" size ever approaches.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Praeothmin » Wed Feb 15, 2012 12:57 pm

SWST wrote:And even "a billion or two" is far larger than any estimation of the Federation "army" size ever approaches.
Where's the math proving this?

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mike DiCenso » Wed Feb 15, 2012 7:09 pm

SWST, you are on very thin ice right now. Either back up what you say, or put a sock in it. I can fiddle with numbers all I like to get billions of Federation troops, because we know from various episodes how much Federation starships max out at. For example, I could cherrypick a minimum of 16,000 people for E-D in full evacuation mode in "Ensigns of Command" [TNG, season 3] and plug that in with the theoretical number of available Federation starships during the Dominion War (approx 10,000) to arrive at 160,000,000 million troops, not counting dedicated troop transports, or starbase personnel.

See how that works? Also it behooves you to stop clinging to other people's calcs and do some of your own, and back it up with real, substantial evidence, not a tiny bit of cherrypicked evidence that is contradicted by most other G, T, and C canon sources.
-Mike

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Feb 16, 2012 12:29 am

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:
Mr. Oragahn wrote:Check this.
With something like just above a thousand Sectors, the ISB would give something between 300,000,000 and 1,600,000,000 troops in total, when referring to the Army.
Blantant canon statements quantifying trillions of army troops vs Guesstimates based on RPG stats (and the ridiculous assumption that the entire ground army belongs to sector fleets). Well...
Until you provide the evidence of trillions, I don't see anything beyond facts from the book. Oh yes, my god, I made a calculation. Yet all the numbers are there. Number of sectors and troop count per sector. The math, geez, it hurtz me berain.
Straight to the Sector Army, we get 774,576 Army troopers, even those found in the fleet, plus 1,180,309 personnel in total.
Only an absolute retard would think this to be the entire army, so what's your point?
The absolute retard only copies what he read in the official book. It IS the entire army of a sector.
It's not complicated. Globally there's the Navy, with its own troopers, then there's the Army, with troopers transported by some of their own ships but also a lot by the Navy, and there's the stormtroopers, working with both, but contrary to the former two, having no listed support personnel.
Nevertheless, that still goes for something like many millions stormtroopers : 5000 of them per division over 24000 ISDs would mean 120 M men in white armour.
We could easily reach a billion or two under certain circumstances.
So because the sector ISD's typically hold a total of millions of stormtroopers, you set this as any type of limit for the actual stormtrooper corps size, rather than as a lower extreme?


Where did I say it was any kind of limit? It's just an estimation base on safe numbers. no more, no less.
There could be more, but I don't know of any information yet to complement this initial guess.
What about the various stormtroopers stationed on various worlds? What about those contained within transport ships and space stations? What about the canonical "trillions" of army troopers and naval crew?
The book says that stormtroopers are used for attack or defending important worlds. When some imperial presence is needed for prolonged times outside of complicated worlds, the Army does the job.
And even "a billion or two" is far larger than any estimation of the Federation "army" size ever approaches.
Possible, I don't know. Let's not forget logistics though.

Now, I got to find some bits of info from wookieepedia, which may not be hard to pin down and find in the appropriate sources:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Stormtrooper
At first, the Stormtrooper Corps was composed almost entirely of clone soldiers based on the Fett template.[2] That included the remaining clones that were engineered on Kamino, supplemented by the millions of clones created on Coruscant and Centax-2 through Spaarti technology,[3] and three new stormtrooper clone batches grown in the Outer Rim Territories. During this time, traces of the clones' obsolete armor remained in the design of their new and improved armor. However, the stormtrooper ranks would cease to be dominated by Fett's progeny after the Battle of Kamino in 12 BBY.[2]
Considering that we proved the Kamino hatcheries only produced millions or so clones, and that they had been attacked and likely saw their efficiency reduced, I don't think we could suddenly find some missing billions produce on Kamino.
Some millions of clones for the stormtrooper corps were produced on Coruscant, with spaarti cloning tech.
Sources are:

[2] ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 Star Wars: Battlefront II
[3] ↑ Order 66: A Republic Commando Novel
By the time the Galactic Civil War began in earnest, Jango Fett's clones were heavily supplanted by clones based on a variety of templates around 9 BBY,[2] followed shortly after by enlisted Humans.[6] Thus, the Fett clones were ironically reduced to a minority status after years of virtually filling the stormtrooper ranks in its entirety. According to a stormtrooper's entry log in the 501st Journal, none of the Fett clones were ever truly able to come to terms with serving alongside recruits and different clones, all of whom were disdainfully dubbed as the "new guys."[2] Commander Cody, a first generation clone of Jango Fett and a veteran of the Clone Wars, found stormtrooper recruits to be absolutely intolerable. Due to the significant decrease in the Imperial Military's operational effectiveness and his own feelings of nostalgia over the Republic's "army of one man," Cody viewed enlisted troopers as incompetent idiots, all of whom he would have gladly sacrificed for just one real clone trooper.[6]
[2] again
[6] ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
Despite the influx of new troopers from various sources, the ranks remained dominated by Human males, thus reflecting the New Order's Human High Culture. By 0 BBY, roughly one-third of the stormtroopers were clones based on the Fett template, while recruits steadily became the majority within the Stormtrooper Corps.[7] Service in the Stormtrooper Corps was open to both Human men and women, but female stormtroopers were an extremely rare sight under Palpatine's reign.[8] In spite of this disparity, some female troopers served in elite units, such as the Coruscant Guard.[9]
[7] ↑ Star Wars Insider 96
[8] ↑ Galaxy at War, page 95
[9] ↑ Roleplaying Game Revised Core Rulebook, page 271

Those diminishing numbers of Fett clones, merely millions from the beginning, comprised about a third of the total of stormtroopers in the whole STC.
You know, even if you stretch the millions of Fett clones to just below the billion mark, you still only get 3 billions in total.

But didn't the Old Republic almost got crippled by some extra 5 million clonetroopers, eh?

Guess that my unmarked figure, which you had me claim being an upper end, and then which you presented as an extreme low end... turns out to be an extreme upper end, after all.

:)

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Mr. O Ignoring Shit

Post by StarWarsStarTrek » Thu Feb 16, 2012 12:57 pm

Until you provide the evidence of trillions, I don't see anything beyond facts from the book.
Who is the one "ignoring canon evidence" now? Your statement is a hilarious oxymoron, because the book itself is proof of there being trillions of army and navy crew. You might as well say that, beyond the novels, there is no evidence that Jaina Solo's name is Jaina Solo.

Sure, I could easily churn out math and educated speculation to support my position, but why should I, when I have definite proof and all you have are calculations based on ridiculous premises that the army is all situated under sector fleets and the number of stormtroopers carried by each ISD somehow is even remotely enough to even question a canonical statement?


I'm getting tired and sick of your insistence that any canon source you don't like constitutes as a fanon claim that can be questioned by the most inconclusive guesstimations by your truly.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by Picard » Thu Feb 16, 2012 3:52 pm

Most recent versions of movies > movie novels / TCW > radio plays > movie scripts > everything else.

Unless I screwed up, but that's basically that. You can't counter movie with EU.

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Re: Mr. O Ignoring Shit

Post by Mr. Oragahn » Thu Feb 16, 2012 5:54 pm

StarWarsStarTrek wrote:
Until you provide the evidence of trillions, I don't see anything beyond facts from the book.
Who is the one "ignoring canon evidence" now? Your statement is a hilarious oxymoron, because the book itself is proof of there being trillions of army and navy crew. You might as well say that, beyond the novels, there is no evidence that Jaina Solo's name is Jaina Solo.

Sure, I could easily churn out math and educated speculation to support my position, but why should I, when I have definite proof and all you have are calculations based on ridiculous premises that the army is all situated under sector fleets and the number of stormtroopers carried by each ISD somehow is even remotely enough to even question a canonical statement?


I'm getting tired and sick of your insistence that any canon source you don't like constitutes as a fanon claim that can be questioned by the most inconclusive guesstimations by your truly.
Then post this evidence. Or repost it, I don't know. Do something instead of whining, for a change.

For the reminder, his OP contained the following claim with:
SWST wrote:2. Shock troopers were said to have a figuratively omnipresence on Coruscant. Coruscant has at least a trillion beings, and Galactic city spans basically the entire surface of Coruscant. This would mean that at least a billion shock troopers on Coruscant would be needed.
The ubiquitous part is certainly nothing solid, especially when we actually got several occasions to look at Coruscant, both in the movies and in TCWS, and hardly saw a huge concentration of such clone troopers at every corner. If anything, the senate itself was desperately underguarded.

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Re: I challenge darkstar to a debate

Post by General Donner » Fri Feb 17, 2012 4:19 pm

The "trillions" reference comes from an RPG book, one of the small, square hardbacks in the final edition of the D20 game from Wizards of the Coast. The relevant quote, I believe, would be:
Rebellion Era Campaign Guide, p. 121 wrote:The Imperial military is a massive organization, with tens of trillions of regular army soldiers, trillions of fleet crew, and a vast force of stormtroopers both cloned and conditioned. The sheer weight of numbers enables the Empire to simply overwhelm opponents in head-to-head battle.
The Sector army numbers I thought, and still think today, were just ridiculously low in the original sourcebook. It posited that a Sector (which will generally contain dozens of planets, on the low end) had a total army strength of only between two and four "systems armies" (which were supposedly the systems level of deployment, just above a standard multi-corps "army"). That still looks odd, and I'd personally think trillions is a better number. It works as a ret-con, if nothing else.

Of course, nowadays we have that retarded cartoon instead as higher canon, which thinks every one of the planets in the Republic should have a garrison of half a trooper or so apiece. Which is one reason (among several) why I don't bother debating for Wars much any more. But it we could ignore that bit of colossal idiocy, SWST would have a legitimate point on this issue.

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