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Why are Star Wars Battles SO SMALL?
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- Опубліковано 10 кві 2022
- Star Wars has a scale issue - on today's Star Wars Lore video, we take a look at Star Wars Legends and Canon and try to examine why Star Wars Battles -- even large ones like the Battle of Endor or the Battle of Coruscant -- seem to be so small! All that and more on today's video
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![Space Stalingrad: The Underrated Brutality Behind the Space Battle that HAD to be Won [Kamino]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1uQ4O4LYLhc/mqdefault.jpg)
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Another good video young man.
Brother summon the fleets!
Which ones?
ALL OF THEM!!!
Wait ...what? Darth Jar Jar????
Planets are even more underscaled. The earth is home to billions of humans at the moment. Then why are the population sizes on everything but the most important planets shown to be really low? With their technologie even planets in the outer rim should contain at least a few trillions of idividuals, especially if they home some smaller alien race. On earth many countries including some small ones have millions of soldiers, why does the republic use only similar amounts of clones? Why are a few star destroyers enough to block a planet? Every planet should have at least dozents, maybe hundrets of star destroyers even if they were less militarised than the democraties on earth! Is there an explanation for this?
Better question, why haven't you covered _Legend of the Galactic Heroes?_
I completely agree on the small scale. This was super apparent in the sequel trilogy. I remember watching the casino scene and just saying over and over "please don't be Lando". So many planets, each with millions to billions of people on them, and we just so happen to see the same ten or so people over and over again?
'Cause marketing
And then Ep9 came along
@@spicetea4060 Moichendizen moichendizen! It’s where the real money is made!
I mean, if you take a look at real warfare, and in particular ww2 (seeing as much of starwars is themed around it), you will see that there were large battles at important points, but the army still had the rest of the front to cover. Take the eastern front and look at kursk, that was a huge battle, but both soviets and germans still had plenty of forces stretched allong the front to hold the line.
@@liamnacinovich8232 wiser words never festered in any other milk product.
A good example of the limited scale of star wars is that the lost Katana Fleet, consisting of 200 obsolete Dreadnaught heavy cruisers, was considered to be a total game changer for whoever was able to find it first.
It's not just that they were 200 outdated dreadnoughts....dreadnoughts were still very powerful even for their age...and the fact that you could control the katana fleet with little to no manpower is huge....for anyone....
Great call.
the thing is a dreadnought is the step below star destroyers with the crew requirements to match in legends an isd 2 had a requirement of 37 thousand to work at maximum efficiency the Katana fleet needed 2 thousand per ship instead of 16 thousand unmodified.
From an "in universe" perspective, I'd guess suddenly having 200 extra ships not devoted to defending something practically materializing from nowhere could make a huge difference. Particularly if they are powerful enough to threaten most of your own ships, but could still be considered a bit expendable.
Likewise, Thrawn being able to pull more valuable ships from defense and sub in Dreadnoughts instead probably also was a big changer. Or adding some more defense to previously exposed targets.
Is it entirely plausible? Eh... But I can see it from a tactics perspective if we accept the general "WW2 in space" thing for scale.
That was because the one who finds the Katana Fleet would gain 200 new Warships without compromising there on defensive. Before finding that thrawn had to draw away forces from strategic position in order do gather such a large fleet which would leave them open for attack. But now he got it for free without sacrificing anything on resources that my needed elsewhere. Same applies for the New Republic. That’s why it was such a big deal or at least that’s my reasoning
The only "big" battle we see on the big screen is that of the Attack on Coruscant but even then we only see a fraction of it.
Yes, would love to see a TV series of it
Clone wars has plenty big battles but it makes one get weirded out how an entire planet was captured when a war consist in one part of the planet and not the entire one
@@Ben-Hollingbery the 2003 mini series Clone Wars :)
It’s on Disney + :D
think of napoleon u rarely saw his whole army some of them were busy elsewhere or on the way and some of them were fighting the whole enemy at once
@@lookwaticando909 the difference is napoleon isn’t against the whole world. Most of the Star Wars battles that conquer planets are in one part of it.
As far as what's on screen is concerned, I always figured that it was just what we could see of the battle. In the Battle of Coruscant, we only see one or two dozen ships, but I personally got the notion of thousands. But, given the low to mid orbit where it takes place, the vast majority of capital ships would be just a bunch of dots. Most battles felt like just a few caps and their escort fleet. But some showed just a few, but gave me the impression of more that were out of view.
The Tartikovski Clone Wars really sold that. The opening scene of the episode featuring the Battle of Coruscant has us zooming in through what looks like a grey cloud over the planet, only for it to be revealed to be thousands of warships clashing.
Then two CIS ships transition in from hyperspace and promptly ram a Venator by accident cause theres NO ROOM TO MOVE.
@@KillerOrca Yes, that is the true picture of the battle that was not seen.
For now we can only take that battle to 3D in games like mod Republic AT War.
Ships out of position engaging in smaller battles is a really good way to lose a war when you don't need to.
Well. If you read the novels and the lore, they talk about the Battle of Courscant being in the THOUSANDS if not TENS OF THOUSANDS of ships.
@@Luciferdesrea Who cares what the novels say? Prequels and Original Trilogy. Anything else is irrelevant
Something you miss is that the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar(Coruscant Liberation 2 Yuuzhan Vong Boogaloo) takes place after both sides were substantially reduced by the much larger Defense of Mon Calamari with five thousand vessels on the Vong side and around two thousand on the Galactic Alliance side.
Excellent point! Though that does still sound pretty small scale relative to how big that battle is haha
@@JainaSoloB312 at least it’s not too small for that battle
Hmm, what was the exact sources for that? I tried to get a count, and only got generic 'thousands' overall for each side, @Grand Admiral Zaarin .
- edit, well if it was Mon Calamari, not Yuuzhan'tar, then I guess I forgot that. Still, the two battles of Coruscant seemed way more populated than just 'hundreds' of ships, like Eckhart said.
@@chrissonofpear1384 Nas Choka is mentioned having 5,000 vessels in his armada in The Unifying Force. The numbers for the Galactic Alliance are specified as being outnumbered at least two to one. By the time of the following battles of Corulag and Yuuzhan'tar both sides have suffered heavy casualties and are much reduced but relative strength hasn't changed between the two.
@@chrissonofpear1384 another thing to remember is that the battle itself was just one of a number of engagements in multiple systems that constituted an offensive and counterattack
I always thought this when I watched star wars. Why would it take less than 100,000 soldiers to take a planet populated by billions
Holding key points and cutting off supply lines tends to go a long way in pacifying a planet.. especially if most of the population is comprised of civilians and local defense forces
@@kazumablackwing4270 that works if the population is complacent but if they aren't then the invaders have a billion person problem
@@danielpullen7787 true, though blockades, bombardments, and other force multipliers capable of inflicting mass casualties do tend to break any resistance after a while...or at least reduce it to disorganized, scattered pockets
@@kazumablackwing4270 that is a good point if the invaders utalise air and space superiority than they could theoretically starve out the population although the methods would be unpopular with the locals and would mean that support for the invader would be very low
@@kazumablackwing4270 That's a decent point. If I wanted to paralyze this planet's powers, I would hold and threaten destruction of major sea ports and rail hubs.
A population facing a complete stoppage of food and medicine shipments can do a lot of your work for you when it comes to bending the wills of governments.
I liked the moment in the 2003 Clone Wars where during the Battle of Coruscant Saesee Tiin and his Clone strike force enter the atmosphere and what looks like numerous stars and planets are revealed to be countless Venators and Providence Class Cruisers. Took my breath away when I saw it the first time. It really shows the scale that Star Wars could be capable of.
It's how the opening of the ROTS novellization, which takes place in the same continuation-- Also actually describes it. With even civilians watching up through planetary mirrors that way.
I feel like that sort of scale is just way to difficult to make feel right in a character driven story like Star Wars. I want to see battles where a ship destroyed means something rather than just looking at the thousands of others instead.
I can't believe this scene wasn't mentioned. Easily on of the best shots in Star Wars.
@@graypudding3005 I see your point but sometimes you need establishing shots like that to show just the utter chaos of war, particularly something as monumental as the Battle of Coruscant
As Eck mentions, Star Wars is generally meant to be more "WWII in space" than an attempt at accurately portraying interstellar warfare. What he didn't mention is the implication this has for fleet sizes. Most fleet actions in WWII involved total ships numbering in the dozens with single digits of capital ships. And even an important action like Denmark Strait could be only a 2v2. Star Wars also takes some inspiration from the Age of Sail, which typically saw battles of a similar scale. Larger engagements involving hundreds of total ships were possible in both eras - Spanish Armada, Leyte Gulf - but those were very much exceptional.
It would be interesting to see a sci-fi franchise that takes it's inspiration from the galley era. There would routinely be battles involving hundreds of individually low powered ships. Of course we already have Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which is largely inspired by blackpowder era land warfare and so has battles with tens or sometimes even hundreds of thousands of glass cannon ships.
May I suggest David Weber's Safehold Series?
One of my friends and I have a gag universe where they have spaceships but not effective ranged weapons, and so space combat consists of ships ramming into each other. It's based on the trireme warfare of the ancient Mediterranean.
LoGH has amazing visuals for such an old show and I love it. Love the look of fields of points lawyering each other with occasional bright flashes of explosions.
And yeah I would say this relies even on WWI era tactics with a focus on artillery bombardment and trench warfare at times.
@@aralornwolf3140 Also, his Honor Harrington Series. Some terrifically large battles in many of those. And even in those, Weber tends to focus on a small portion of the battle, as far as personal stories go. However, trying to bring those to live action would be daunting, even with the current CGI.
The Traveller RPG is based on the age of sail.
I think this is mostly for behind-the-scene reasons. I think it's simply easier to write compelling battles with fewer ships (or at least only show small portions of a larger battle). One of the best sci-fi battles ever shown, imho, is the battle of New Caprica from BSG, and it involved only 2 battlestars and 4 Cylon basestars. A good space battle relies on maneuvers and decisions the audience can understand, as well as well-established personal stakes to the people inside the ships. If you show too many ships at once like Exegol, you inevitably make a large number of them expendable, and without clear direction the whole battle can become a confusing CGI soup because the audience has zero idea what each fleet is doing and what decisions, actions and reactions are being made (like Exegol).
I still have no fucking clue what happened at Exogol.
@@KillerOrca A bunch of props got destroyed by an even larger group of props that by all rights shouldn’t have been able to destroy ships equipped with a laser capable of blowing up planets.
When the Galactica jumps in and out of New Caprica’s atmosphere: goosebumps every time.
"Daniels", that guy from the 'Spacedock' vlog mentioned that 'small numbers' are better because that way we know 'the odds; In New Caprica, Rogue One or the B5 Rebel Earthforce v Loyal Earthforce ship battles, we all know who the 'friendlies' are and who the hostiles are. We can tell almost immediately tell when the good guys are in trouble or are winning.
@@nickmitsialis and also all of the battles from The Expanse
Genndy Tartakovsky’s Clone Wars really amplified the size of the battles especially the Battle of Coruscant. My favorite shot is a group of star fighters flying into space and what you think are stars are just thousands upon thousands of Venators.
I like the battle of Munnilinst the most
This is interesting, the idea that the battles were smaller in scale never even occurred to me until watching this.
In the real world, because technology has become so deadly in its capacity, battles tend to be small in scale.
I thought the reason why the clone army was relatively small was because all of the local system defense forces were folded into the GAR, and that the Clones were mostly an intervening/crucial objective force rather than a force meant to engage in the thousands of Civil Wars happening at once.
That would make sense with how they are always paired up with the limited number of Jedi and always seem on the offensive.
That worked fine until TCW showed them in every role down to sanitation.
Thats how the old Legends Essential Guide To Warfare handled it.
@@antonisauren8998 I don't really understand how that makes it non workable. In order to do force projection for the republic you need a finely tuned logistics network.
Also, having every station be manned by genetically altered super soldiers who are bred to be loyal to the republic cuts down the likelihood of CIS saboteurs infiltrating your operation.
I think it makes more sense if a "unit" is like a squad of 11 clones and the galaxy itself doesn't have a very large population outside of coruscant. most planets we see have populations in the thousands or low millions.
All Sci-fi gets galactic empire scales really wrong. Once you've heard someone like Isaac Arthur point this out it's kind of hard to ignore. That being said it would be hard to do this sort of thing right given special effects budgets and the average punter probably doesn't think about this sort of thing.
Not to mention covering every bit of land is not necessary tbh. We've seen how controlling people can be with a garrison using Spears & shields can be in reality. Then we have stuff like star destroyers here which can cut off all communication and set the planet ablaze within hours. Of course SW does do it's most interesting to balance these aspects out so that ground battles can happen. Point being, that generally even with 25000 star destroyers active minimum it's possible to believe that they would control most of the galaxy.
Save for Warhammer which probably gets it right by just saying everything is so numerous it is incalculable.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes has the exacts numbers you need for a big space battle.
I love Isaac Arthur. I rarely see other fans of him out in the wild.
@@Dakarai_Knight Same! I got excited when I saw the original post. Isaac does great work, more people should check his stuff out, really eye opening stuff.
"Why are the battle in SW so small?"
1. Most basic rule of war; Keep reserves, never commit your entire force into a single engagement (unless you are in some sort of fight or die last stand type scenario)
2. Most of the battles in SW are actually quite large in terms of their logictics and the forces available to each side. The Empire may have had 1000s of Star Destroyers but they were spread thin throughout the galaxy and even with Hyperdrives I imagine military logistics to still be a nightmare in SW if not at least a headache to deal with.
3. Intelligence is superior to firepower in every scenario. You can destroy a force 10x your size, if you know when and where to hit them hard. Fleets are collectives of individual warships, if comms between them are intercepted or disrupted then all cohesion is lost and gaps will form that can be exploited.
Agree on the above, but we also need to keep in mind, ships are tens or even hundreds of kilometers apart.
Lol, number 3 is literally Thrawn in a nutshell
Especially the old Pre RotS/pre AotC travel times. Or even the original WEG travel times that a lot of the better writers still used where crossing a sector or two could take days.
"gabs that can be exploited"
You Heard your armchair General boys
It did still take a while in the prequels probably, but otherwise it's reasonable to say that some go faster due to different types of hyper drives.
I thought about this the other day
Maybe occasionally in the original films, but a star destroyer is a big deal and the rebel alliance was much smaller than the empire, realistically later on in shows movies book and games battles get a lot bigger even though the empire and ect are very spread out forces!
I think w40k has a very similar problem to this, there are a few occasions where they get it right and have thousands of ships or billions of soldiers, but one of the biggest most consistent issues is space marine numbers. A chapter can conquer a whole solar system with 1000 marines? I know they're really overpowered but so are the enemies they face, so it never really made sense to me.
The explanation for it is propaganda
The imperium want the space marine to appear so op when maybe in fact there are 5 to 15 times that number
My head canon is whenever see the gw number just add a couple zero and that good to go
40k is probably the fictionnal universe that is the close to have the right scal we would expect for an intergalactic civilizations, the problem is that the scale is right in the general lore, and then, is compeltely screwed up by author writing books.
Though completely agree with Space Marine. I can get behind the fact that a chapter can completely reverse the situation to the point of going from being defeated too we took back the solar sytem, but on their own the would never have the ability to conquer a solar system, it would just be an endless whack a mole until they are out of the supply and their fleet knocked out from orbit.
@@benjaminparent4115 The disconnect between whats blasted in the Codex's (which of course are intenitonally inflated to sell said book and make the army it covers sound more awesome so the person reading will of course buy more minis) and then what we read or see in the actual raw lore is noticable.
Reading how the Guard operates in the Codex and then, say, reading Gaunts Ghosts or the Ciaphus Cain novels and you get quite a lot of disconnect.
Let us consider Gaunt's Ghosts. Abnett centres the novels on a force of (initially) 2,000 troops of a particular regiment, the Tanith First-and-Only. He does take care to note that the Tanith are usually only one part of the entire Imperial effort on a given planet, and that the total effort usually has several million troops in it. And even then, the people actually doing anything are the same two dozen people over and over again (the cast changes slightly after Necropolis)
That's something of a narrative requirement - casts of thousands don't really work, narratively, so in these novels, it's always the Tanith (and usually also their leader) who are crucial to Imperial success. As a historical narrative, it's utterly nonsensical.
You can see the same pattern in a lot of historical(ly inspired) fiction. Operation Lumberjack involved the entirety of 1st US Army, three full corps with well over 100k troops. What do people make movies of? The capture of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, and even that tends to focus on a company-sized elements that first got there, completely eliding the week-long air battle that erupted over it, US efforts to shore up the bridge and expand the bridgehead . . . you get the idea.
Or compare the number of named characters in Band of Brothers to the number of soldiers assigned to 82nd Airborne Division on the eve of Overlord. Same thing.
@@jochentram9301 To be fair I was not really talking about author focusing on the same character, I was more talking about author failling to take the scale into account when writing the background of their stories, though sometimes even the stories themsleves do not take it into account, like the whole Damocles crusade, that is called a crusade despite involving barely a dozen of planet, and having grand space battle that involve as many ship as the US fielded during WW2, A crusade Should be big, not small.
And to be fair important battle can really be swayed by few soldier, or might even involve very few soldier in the first place, you talk about the 101 airborne division fielding way more men than portrayed in band of brothers, but the whole battle of Carentan ,didn't involved that many men the 101 st division only had 8400 had suffered numerous loss before the battle of Carentan , and during the battle itself only a few battalion at a times were engage in battles while the rest was in reserve or defense some notable action during the battle were caused by the action of a single company.
So I definitely think it is possible to compromise and have story with a small cast, while still keeping the scale big, you just need to set the tone right your battalion didn't participated in a battle that saved the whole campaign, they participated in battle that salvaged the effort of the whole division, avoiding a retreat.
Excellent analysis! From an in universe perspective, your points stand up very well and make the Galactic Civil War sound like a real war. Where in technological civilization, no war is decided by one battle at which all of both sides' resources are in play. Even in earlier levels of technology, larger wars did not all get settled by one battle, and even if they did, neither side of the campaign necessarily new where and when that would happen or could concentrate everything they had on it. Someone was ALWAYS doing something else because there was other work to do, including covering other lines in case those became the decisive point. Having a war of any scale decided by one battle with literally everything on deck is a narrative trope, not war.
Out of universe, yep- technological and narrative requirements. One just has to assume there's other stuff going on. The EU novels as well as sourcebooks helped. It is supposed to be a Galactic Republic/Empire/Civil War after all, not some schoolboy quarrel among a handful of podunk systems.
Good point, even on the personal scale war sounds pretty boring. Troops will spend days waiting for those few minutes that will decide their fate never knowing when that will come.
I imagine that most of the galaxy was like that small post in the clone wars ep "rookies", just sitting around because something might happen there.
@@viperstriker4728 or doing nothing at all
While you’re right that no country has ever staked all of their resources to one battle, there are plenty of battles throughout history that proved so pivotal it determined the outcome of wars. Like, you don’t just lose 1/3rd of your total fighting force, which includes some of your best fighters and commanders and just bounce back from that. Ask Germany how well things went in the eastern front after the battle for Stalingrad or Imperial Japan after Midway or the Confederacy after Gettysburg. Some losses are just too severe to simply replace and it can definitely cost you a war for it.
Can't thank you enough to breaking down and sharing your opinions on these topics. I really grows my appreciation for the entire concept of the lore. May the force be with you.
MTFBWY
I just always assumed that there are multiple battles and skirmishes going on simultaneously across the *galaxy.* There's an entire galaxy to patrol, scout, defend, attack and so on. Think of the sheer numbers of planetary systems, stars, and other points of interest for them to cover. Humans have trouble with scale. We don't typically properly "handle" extremely large numbers (or extremely small numbers) well. Hell some people can't even properly fathom the size of the earth (looking at you, flat-earthers), let alone an entire galaxy.
That's how it was handled in the Dune movie. Even though we just see the invasion of the capital, the characters talk about simultaneous attacks on all of the other major cities on planet.
@@douglasarchibald9504 it really is the simplest explanation that makes the most sense.
The Battle of Yuuzhan'tar would still definitely be among the largest battles we have in Star Wars. I recall there being a mention that the casaulties in the GA fleet were something like several million dead, and unless they lost a pretty insane percentage of their overall force, the amount of individuals taking part in it would be way higher then a lot of other battles we have in Star Wars. Also I think part of the issue is that we're looking at number of ships, when capital ships in Star Wars have pretty huge crew compliments. Modern aircraft carriers typically have a crew size of around 5,500, and WWII battleships around 3,000. Star Wars capital ships often have crew sizes in the tens of thousands.
I was thinking similar things. Viewport shows target and a dozen ships. But actually zooming in, those are the big ships, each with a contingent of support craft. And then below that, numerous buzzing flights of fighters and bombers trying to navigate or shore up defenses.
The exception would be the CIS Navy; because their armed forces mostly consisted of droids, their ships could run on considerably less crew than organic counterparts. The Subjugator-Class for example can run on 600-900 droid crew despite being nearly 5 times larger than Venator-class that needs about 7400+ crew to run
@@MrOiram46 Yeah, and Mon Cal capital ships used during the Rebellion had smaller crews more in line with the kinds of capital ships we have in the present day. But with Star Destroyers, that the New Republic and GA started using as well, having crew compliments of like 25,000+ along with thousands of marines, even a few ships end up involving massive numbers of individuals in battles.
The battle and fall of Coruscant during Yuuzhan Vong invasion had thousands of ships on each side. I remember that Denning really went up with the scale compared to other NJO books at the time of Star by Star release.
The thing that still annoys me is the number of clone units given in AotC. Its just way too small. And in this case it doesnt falls in the category "budget or on screen depiction.
My head canon is that the clones were deployed as the emergency force on geonosis. Then as the CIS instinctively pulls not knowing the true size the republic has time to recruits regular armies. Particularly if the standard recruits wear the same armor it could show up all the time and we would never know. And their is enough clones to cover the limited number of Jedi to make up elite units that are perfect for camera, while the main army slugs it out in the trenches of the hundreds of planets that would have been too boring to watch.
I will back this up by stating that the clone army was literally just infantry. Presumable the republic didn't have the entire fleet mothballed somewhere encase a clone army showed up to man them. So that has to be much more logistics then what we see.
Or it could be that their was multiply cloning facilities and that scene was only the army at that one facility.... when the entire planet is might actually be covered in them.
Or it could even be that the vast majority of the galaxy just went "meh" and let the fighting hit the political centers of the galaxy. We see that happen in real life civil wars when there are places that have heavy fighting but busy as usual just a few blocks away.
@@viperstriker4728 my headcanon aligns but with the addition that 200,000 units with a million more well on the way doesn’t mean 1,200,000 clones but 1,200,000 clone units, the smallest of which would be platoons of 40 plus a lieutenant. 48,000,000 at least is more reasonable, but “unit” is flexible and undefined
@@WyattKittle I always got the feeling a "unit" meant a single clone.
Well, Taun We says that they have a certain number of units, which is a very vague reference. Does that mean individual clones, squads, companies, brigades, what? I head canon it as at least squads which multiplies the number by five, but that still seems small
@@DavidbarZeus1 non-special-unit squads are 10!
Loved the Siege of Terra Warhammer 40k series for this reason. One of the books the invading traitors had to rip a hole in time and space to clog the whole solar system with ships. Would highly recommend the series if you’re into the franchise.
scale so massive that it can almost never be made into movies, shows.. the emperor is sad
Horus Heresy is so fricking huge saga that one could just marvel all the battles
The battle of Coruscant as depicted in the Genndy Tartakovsky Clone Wars micro series, which if you will recall was canon at the time and intended to bridge the gap between Episode 2 and 3 prior to the release of Episode 3, set the scale of that battle showing thousands upon thousands of ships.
Doesnt the ROTS novelization mention something about battle droids numbering in the quintillions?
Probably the most accurate scaling in numbers ive seen in star wars.
I estimate that for the Expanse at the start of the series, Mars had about 200 ships at least where Earth had five times as many. By those numbers, the Sol System had about 1,200 ships, not including by thing from the Belt or the OPA.
We got’ta rise up beltalowda!
How big were those ships? From what I've seen, the dreadnoughts/battleships at the start of the conflict were all under 500 meters long, making them, in Star Wars, frigates. Vast majority of warships were under 100 meters long making them, in Star Wars, gunships at best.
Those same ships in another IP, Honorverse, would be...
Leonidas-class battleship (270 meters) = Frigate
Truman-class dreadnought (376 meters) = Destroyer
Donnager-class battleship (475.5 meters) = Light Cruiser
Scirocco-class Assault Cruiser (200 meters) = Frigate
Amun-Ra-class Stealth Frigate (61.5 meters) = Light Assault Craft
Corvette-class Light Frigate (46 meters) = Assault Shuttle
Morrigan-class Patrol Destroyer (33.5 meters) = Armed Pinnace
The largest warships in the Honorverse are superdreadnaughts, which are between 1,300 meters to 1,400 meters long with the mass of 8 million (metric) tons to 10 million (metric) tons. In one specific battle, there were around 450 superdreadnoughts participating along with over 10,000 Light Assault Craft. The other ship classes didn't matter as the LACs, which survived to reach energy range, pretty much annihilated them.
Getting back to reality (so we can have something to compare the IPs to)... the largest aircraft carrier today is the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is about 335 meters long with a mass of around 101,000 (metric) tons. Its cost is estimated to be over 12 billion USD. Comparing the USS Gerald R. Ford... Each of the Honorverse superdreadnoughts would cost approximately 1 trillion USD. The GDP for Earth is about 85 trillion USD (2020). Even if Earth's GDP is 10 x as large due to space exploitation... making a single superdreadnought would tie up a large amounts of resources better spent on much smaller ships. Which is why only the richest of all star nations are able to build and maintain superdreadnoughts. The vast majority of systems used a combination of LACs, corvettes, frigates, with destroyers and light cruisers for the more militaristic nations for defence and power projection.
The Mon Cal Cruisers in Star Wars are taller and broader than Honorverse superdreadnoughts which would increase their cost by a factor of 3 or 4 if not more. The Star Destroyers are larger still... so they would be few and far between.
So, I agree, the vast majority of warships in Star Wars would be light warships; corvettes, frigates, small cruisers. Gunships wouldn't be used as proton torpedo armed fighters out class them; which is also why the capital warships (Mon Cal Cruisers, Star Destroyers, etc.) in Star Wars are so large.
@@deriznohappehquite Nah, Belters might not get everything they want, but frankly the people on Earth don't live the greatest lives either - sure they have water and don't need to keep an eye on the oxygen-supply, but that doesn't mean that they have it great! Hell, Belterns should start blaming their own ancestors, who knew the danger of constantly living in near zero-g! They decided to stay out there and even have kids!
Mars is slightly better, they have some of the Belter's problems (low gravity, oxygen-supply is critical etc.), but they seem to live the best lives over all.
@@aralornwolf3140 The Expanse has an advantage in long range and power.
@@WolfeSaber9933 ,
Over what, us, in Reality? I agree... over Star Wars, no. Over the Honorverse, Honorverse ships fight at the distances of millions of Kilometers...
I remember something about how a Star Destroyer cost the old Sith Empire a Decade of a Planet's production Capacity.
That's accurate
I remember Naboo's sector being stated in one of the reference books as being a lightly populated backwater, but 'lightly populated' was stated at being some 1,000 major system and I think 40,000 'dependencies'. So if that's a backwater sector, then it totally makes sense that these navies are stretched REALLY thin to cover everything they can and it's only one or two ships at a time.
Glad you mentioned the distance issue, I have always been a little annoyed at the distances used in the space battles of Star Wars. What should be listed in Km is only in yards :(. But I know this is just the limits of what would look good on film. If it was more realistic it would be small lights flashing, no sound, and cut scenes of captains and pilots snarling at the camera and I doubt few people would like that.
TBH if the ranges were not so limited starfighters would be pretty useless. Longer ranges would almost certainly require faster projectiles and computer targeting systems, meaning X-Wings and the like get blown up before they even get within visual range.
One thing most forget is speed of light/sensors. A ship at long range at sea can actually vary it's speed and heading enough to avoid fire from naval cannons for example (including modern battleships). So visual distance fights make sense, as it's a lot harder to avoid fire by randomly altering speed and direction than when the distance is measured in light seconds (at certain ranges it would take 1-2 seconds for the change to be detected and that can mean shoots missing) It's something easily forgotten or ignored by many with space battles, where long range combat would be either self guided and correcting weapons (missiles) or a lot of flak shots (fill the area and hope it hits)
Also at longer ranges energy and direct fire weapons can see weaker effects (unable to keep the beam focused, loss of velocity, etc) resulting in grazing shots vs direct hits.
So real long range space battles would require closing the distance to the point of direct fire or focusing on missile style weapons. Or a mix of both, with starfighters being more akin to tactical support craft giving faster updates and information to the fleet while trying to eliminate the other side's fighters denying them the information.
@@Mortvent That is the one thing I will give the last jedi credit for. Canonizing that the turbolazers can hit at extreme distances but don't have the power to breach shields was genius. Now if only they didn't make the the shots arch in space I might have actually enjoyed the scene.
@@Mortvent for modern lasers short range would be 600,000Km or two light seconds, long range would be around 2 million Km, in space a laser does not lose focus because there is nothing to defuse it, in planetary scale space outside of a planets atmosphere any atoms that would diffuse a laser beam would be almost non existent, so Turbo lasers would have a practical range of 6 million Km? As for sensors your still talking millions of Km's of detection range,
As for torpedo's and other projectiles after a brief burst of propellant to get it up to speed nothing else would be needed except small bursts of bursts of propellent from the maneuver jets in the front body of the object, unless it is a rail gun or gauss weapon, then it is just a cloud of solid objects traveling around 9000 km/sec.
Fighters would be next to useless except as patrol craft.
There is a sourcebook on the Colonial Marines from the Aliens movie that describes space combat very well, two snipers trying to look for each other and the first one to land a shot would be the winner.
Real space combat would be visually boring, very quick, and extremely deadly.
Starfighter combat typically seems to be only 1 to 7 km, especially in the books and X-Wing games, with torpedoes maxing out at about 100 km range (if we take Luke's targeting computer readout literally, say) Ship to ship range usually seems within 1000 km distances, in large ship battles though.
And orbital bombardment, a little above that?
I’ve since lost the math for it but I think about point is- some of these ships over a kilometer long would DRAIN some of the largest ore mines on earth. And even the entire asteroid belt is smaller than Pluto combined. The galaxy may have billions of systems but draining whole systems in a few years is just inefficient.
I like the idea of “scrap” worlds like Bracca- In theory even trashed 1,000 year old republic ships should still have the same basic raw material to reuse.
Again I lost my math on it but basically there’s no way a single planet like Kuat had enough material for a fraction of the fleet- meaning whole worlds worth of raw material had to be transported there.
Now, if most ships in Star Wars were 150m or so, I could see fleets almost in the millions- but at star destroyer sizes, yea, 24,000 maximum in 20 years is insane by earth outputs but not impossible in space.
MILLIONS of ISD? That would be monumental to pull off in 20 years even in a galaxy wide civilization.
The scale of battle issue is an interesting one to compare in the three eras of the 10 movies (yes I am including Rogue One)
In the OT, the battles whether on land or space felt about right that the Empire would always have more ships, more fighters, more uniformity in look whereas the Rebels would be a small hodge podge of everything thrown in and manage to find ways to use their smallness as an advantage.
In the Prequels and then Clone Wars show, the opposing sides would start out small then as the war progressed to the point by the end, I buy that millions of people on both sides are fighting and each Jedi was in charge of his or her own army/fleet.
then we got the sequels and Rogue One...
Rogue One was probably the best at scale that in that the Rebellion did throw all its chips at one hail mary move to get the death star plans at Scarif and so they're throwing everything while the Empire only had the garrison for the planet both on land and space...until they could bring in re-enforcements from nearby systems.
The sequels...I just don't buy any of it for one simple reason, Disney went too big, too over the top, to the point of silliness.
We get Star Killer Base, a Planet Death Star, and it looked like the First Order sank al its resources into and stationed its military there. and yet some how this thing is even easier to blow up than the previous 2 Death Stars, the first one because of an achilles heel built into it, the other because it was under construction so logically a ship could fly into it through all those giant holes.
BUT THEN, unlike the Empire who still had a galaxy spanding military and could endure losing the Death Star in Episode 4, the First Order, somehow, SOMEHOW, after losing Their planet size death Star and all the resources into it, act like it was no big deal, and thanks to bad writing, only got bigger and stronger with bigger and more ships...that couldn't move faster than one Resistance ship that was running out of fuel...whatever that means..
and then it all implodes in Rise of Skywalker where Jar Jar Abrams can just pull a thousand Star Destroyers out of his ass and have a bajillion ships show up to fight them and space horse...oh my god the Sequels are so damn awful.
I'd point to the Battle of Coruscant as a good example of a large battle shown on- screen.
I wish Star Wars battles were similair in scale to the battles in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, where almost every battle would have tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands of ships on both sides.
Just imagine a Star Wars space battle on the scale like those in 40K or Legend of Galactic Heroes (anime)
I've largely chalked it up to logistics. Yes you still have a galaxy worth of resources at your disposal but getting an army or fleet to where it needs to be and getting it there in a size that you can support with your supply chain is another thing. You might then think that you could increase the scale of your supply operation but then when you do that you also have to increase the scale of the security operation required to secure your supply chain. Essentially what I've imagined that we're seeing in Star Wars films and TV is the Empire/Republic/Sith Empire/Confederation operating at the maximum capability that their supply chain will allow. In modern history the sizes of armies have expanded and contracted over historical periods and logistics has played a key factor as to why.
Love it as always. Makes me think back to the classic anime "Legend of Galactic Heroes" where it was very common for battles to have tens of thousands of capitol ships per side. Basically the Napoleonic wars, but with capital ships instead of soldiers
Realistically speaking, there should be a million of spaceships fighting each other in space
Coruscant….
@@josiahkruse1180 I thought that was only a thousand ships on each side
Realistically speaking space ships fighting should be tens of thousands of miles apart
Should be billions of billions. A million ships should be a single large planet's fleet. Gotta remember that a eucomonopolis or planet city like Corusant's should have trillions of beings so a billion or couple hundred million ships should be a cakewalk.
Billions if not trillions with allcthe available resources. We're talking about a galactic empire.
Also, the number of people in the galaxy should be much much much larger that Star Wars tends portray.
Is what it is though. Most people can't even fathom the size of our solar system, let alone a galaxy. So I get why many science fiction writer usually get things like this wrong.
If you want battles in huge scale, look up Legend of the Galactic Heroes. They have fleets numbering in the thousands. And every battle is a big one.
I have wanted to check this out but haven’t been able to track it down, is it streaming anywhere?
@@FlynnTaggartGuy they have clips of some of the battles on UA-cam. Both the original and the remake.
@@FlynnTaggartGuy Legally, you go to HIDive. Not so legally? Ask around.
This is something I truly missed from Clone War (or the Clone Wars, I always mix the names).
The battles were HUGE. Both land and space. Showed how massive the scale of the galactic war that it was.
The battles outside the 6 movies in the series and whatnot few too small even for the galactic civil war that was in a smaller scale and scattered across the galaxy.
Exegol's scale is an example of how it's very hard to actually make a battle that size interesting. Unless you're animating the LoGH OVA.
I would say it wouldn’t be hard to big fleet battles interesting(space battleship Yamato comes to mind, especially in 2202 when earth vs white comet), the difficult part is balancing small size fights(Jedi boarding) and big fleet battles.
Were LoGH battles so interesting due to their scale or despite of it? Just a bunch of white dots fireing white lines as far as an eye can see. Form vertical planes at the edge of gun range and shoot into each other. All briliat strategies felt more bullshity cause of that scale, as every charge should result in anihilation of attacking side.
Was wondering when someone would bring up LoGH, HA
Legend of the Galactic Heroes provides likely the most grounded interpretation of a galactic war, while also being far more massive in scale than most Star Wars battles. Fleets of thousands of battleships essentially function as long-range laser guns that can get pretty hectic when they happen to converge. I’d recommend checking it out.
This deserves more views. I sure watched this yesterday. The only thing I would add is that scale is a such mess even in the old Legends continuity. There’s a line in Kevin J. Anderson Darksaber that implies that the battle of Endor was somehow the ENTIRE Imperial navy of about 200 ships. Meanwhile the Timothy Zahn books talk about there being 20,000 Star Destroyers patrolling the 1million solar systems in the Empire. In ANH Han Solo says “the whole fleet couldn’t destroy the entire planet. It would take a *thousand* ships.” Scale is a MESS in Star Wars
Love these type of videos, I enjoy when you go on tangents about topics that are not easily googable. Don't get me wrong I'll watch any starship break down, I love every one you do. But these formats seem more organic and helps actually expand and give context to the universes you discuss.
Keep up the good work!
What was count dooku referring to when he said "there are too many"
During episode 2 when the trade federation reps said "we must send all available droids Into battle"
We're there too many clones, or was he referring to them having to many droids to manage?
well, in the canon says more than a million droids were ''used'' during the battle of Geonosis. If by used it means, activated and sent to combat then we can asume they had millions more waiting for activation. In legends it says they had 4 million more in storge that couldnt be activated on time and needed to be evacuated to avoid a total loss.
Keep in mind that Dooku was also in on the plan.
And probably thought "Wow! This is a dumb plan! We can wipe put their entire military right now, but we can't and Sidious' plan must be kept. So I'll just pretend like we can't and retreat".
I think it was fine, outside teh Clone Wars numbers on screen talked about.
Completely agree it needed to be Trillions, Hundreds of Trillions of Clones at least.
But the battle sizes are fine.
Its a big Galaxy, you can't have your whole fleet at any one point ever if you want to pretend to control it all.
@@TheLastKentuckyIrregular9524 At the peak of its size and power the Empire had 1.5 million planets that were officially empire planets with around 60+ million other planets that were considered either colonies or outright puppet states of the empire. Every single colony would require a standing empire presence. Assuming a total army size of 1 trillion soldiers in the galaxy. That's only 16,000ish soldiers per planet. The U.S. (only about 5% of Earth's population) has 1.4 million soldiers full time. 16,000 soldiers isn't enough to hold a relatively peaceful planet let alone one with a major conflict. Any galactic war would require a 100 trillion soldiers as a bare minimum for sustained operations.
Any military force less than a trillion in number isn't even worth mentioning on a galactic scale. 1 trillion soldiers could only reasonably conqueror a single system before being stretched too thin to continue actively fighting.
@@hamsterfromabove8905 What was the combined population of those 1.5 million planets, though? Couldn't it be that only a few of them had large populations while the majority were relatively sparsely populated?
@@antred11 There are over 100 billion planets. The 1.5 million planets are already accounting for only the heavy populations. The scale of a galactic empire is massive. 1 trillion troops is almost nothing on that scale.
Good conversation piece. As a D&D channel, this is a really good conversation when it comes to "mass battles" in RPGs vs "wargaming". The point on "focusing on the induvial among the battle" is something that is the point of RPG storytelling, while if you want massive battle numbers, the questions change from "who are the heroes who can make a difference? what can we do to help?" to "Why is the fleet in this battle so large? Why is the side spending so many resources for this fight?" because the individual doesn't matter as much as the actual forces. Therefore when the battles are smaller, we can assume the individual can influence the outcome.
I think you hit on everything! I especially agree that Star Wars is about individuals, and in this way, Lucas was trying to emulate the battles from WWII, which would have at most a few dozen ships on each side led by heroes.
This is why I've never bought the "Empire has 25,000 Star Destroyers" in either Legends or Canon. 25,000 total ships MAYBE, if you count all the picket ships, but not 25,000 ISDs. It just does not match what we see on screen.
I think when it comes to space battles, there's also the problem of actual room to fight, especially when taking in the existence of hyperspace lanes. It's why blockades worked. There was a very limited amount of space to enter and leave systems. They simply couldn't fit thousands or even hundreds of ships in that limited area. Their forces would be running into each other trying to come out of hyperspace. And even if you spread out your forces over the entirety of the planet's orbit, their weapons still had limited range. They couldn't fly forever like a projectile could. Plus if you try to shove a bunch of ships together to make up for that, the enemy doesn't have to aim. They simply fire and hit something. Space battles had to be limited for several reasons. And don't even get me started on land battles with limited numbers like the Clones.
Try playing the old Star wars Rebellion game, despite it maxing out at 200 planets, it still shows VERY well just how difficult it can be to amass large fleets without making yourself excessively vulnerable.
(even, or even worse, if like me you play with reduce maintenance requirements to allow larger fleets)
This might just be my own mind talking, but one issue with massive battles is that after awhile it stops being impressive because the mind can't really picture it. A lot of comments on this video talk about 'Legends Of The Galactic Heroes' and how that has fights with tens if not hundreds of thousands of ships, but what does that look like? A few dozen to a hundred ships is easier to wrap the mind around so it's easier to write about, even when the lore of the world and situation would warrant something far bigger.
There is a sensible limit to it, like in old B5. In there it was explained that making a working spaceship is so freaking expensive that even oldest races can barely whip up resources to make one or maximum few ships / populated planet in a year. Which kind of sounds realistic, since making even a kilometer long cylinder out of metal takes quite lot of it and you need all of it to be shipped into orbit first, or mined directly from asteroids inside the system, or shipped from some other system, which takes even more time and resources. Not to mention all the high-tech inside it...
One should not underestimate the "Economy-of-Scale". Making one kilometre long habitat would be hugely expensive, but making 100 would not be 100 time that.
Imagine if you had to commission an artisan to, from scratch, design every bit of electronic hardware and piece of software in a cellphone. I doubt any regular person would ever even see one.
One of the most expensive aspects of warships today seems to be that you only ever build a few prototypes. On the vehicles that move into any kind of serial production you generally see a large drop in per unite cost.
You wanna know something crazy? In the first Punic War, one of the largest naval engagements in human history took place involving thousands of ships and tens of thousands of sailors on both sides. We wouldn’t have engagements of that scale again for centuries. It’s oddly strange that the galaxy far, far, away with a massive industrial complex doesn’t somehow have equally massive fleets with an equivalent number of crew to man said ships.
They clearly have the ability for it if the Empire can afford to build not one but two Death Stars or produce an even larger SUPER Star Destroyer…because a regular Star Destroyer wasn’t big enough.
The Death Star was a colossal waste of resources. A single Star Destroyer could glass a planet if it wanted to.
large fleets are inefficient, because ships in the middle of the formation can't use all the firepower, because they can destroy allied ships. In WWII was a little different because cannons had indirect fire. That is why the "ships of the line" strategy was created
My favorite example of scaling in Star Wars must be on the OG clone wars cartoon when they get off the surface of Coruscant and join the battle in orbit. You can see what look like stars slowly grow into thousands of star destroyers blanketing the sky and then we join the little sector we’re participating in
Would love to see battle breakdowns come back to this channel!
I've always liked the 'small scale' of Star Wars battles
it allows you to really care about individual ships that aren't dreadnoughts, even things like a corvette
I noticed this immediately while playing Stellaris: even battleships are so plentiful that it's impossible to get attached to any particular ship
and that makes it harder to enjoy the space battles as a story
and while sure, people remember the Iron Fist and the Executor more than Home One or the Chimaera, but those smaller ships are still known because people were able to get attached to them
I think this is one area where my willing suspension of disbelief is able to forgive not having the massive numbers that would probably be the actual case
it's so much easier to care when there aren't five or more zeroes after every number
Exegol is actually a pretty good example of why larger battles aren't done--it doesn't work well. If theres too much it just feels like a kid smashing action figures together.
Think you need to expand your horizons abit before making such claims -large battles with dozens of onscreen ships have been well done even way back on TV in the 90s and 00s on shows like B5 and ST....it's pretty ridiculous to think that just because SW can't/couldn't do it; it's impossible.
Pretty solid reasons. I always figured that in-galaxy the wars were just far too spread out to commit anything larger than 3 or so capital ships in most battles. But I hadn't thought of the 'theme' of Star Wars being a reason as well. Especially the space Western style of focusing on just a few main characters being the ones to really carry the day even if it isn't the most practical if you think about the setting.
Then you also have the random numbers BS like crew numbers from one ship to another being so wildly inconsistent, so unfortunately 3rd party explanations struggle with the problem just as much as Lucas did.
I believe this limitation in battle size keeps Star Wars a bit more ground and matches our reality. Looking at modern earth military, the numbers of ships or aircraft in operation is substantially lower than what the average person might expect. Military equipment is expensive. Resources are not infinite. If that was the case for Star Wars, the universe would look completely different, not just concerning the number of vessels in a battle.
Precisely why Genndy Tartakovsky's, "Clone Wars" is my favorite Star Wars animated series. He wastes no time in showing the endless hordes of Battle droids. Likewise the series ends on a space battle involving countless capital ships, blasting away at each other. The incessant broadside volleys. The starcraft behaving as the monstrous hydra of Greek mythology. Being struck down, only to be inevitably replaced by another; different, yet still the same. The futility of it all. Punctuating the never ending struggle that is war. The oldest of human rituals.
Ty. Ty. My book drops next Thursday
Also cuz my boi Grevious is portrayed with dignity. Nahmsayin?
The zoom in to the space battle over Coruscant is still one of my favorite scenes in animation. At first it just looks like a normal field of stars, and then you see that half of 'em are massive ships.
I think you pretty much nailed it eck. I've always felt star wars had a problem with scale and no more so than the scene where the kaminoins tell obi-wan that they have only 200,000 units ready for deployment. Even 14 year old me thought that was several orders of magnitude too few. That said, aside from the few eyebrow raising moments it's never detracted from my enjoyment of star wars mostly because the characters struggles were the primary focus.
I like the connection like what EC Henry pointed out with almost ridiculously small engagement ranges for ships and then similarly for infantry
On the topic of space combat and how the ships fight in Star Wars, I do like stories where they try to be more realistic like the Expanse and The Lost Fleet books by Jack Campbell, but I'm also glad that Star Wars isn't that. It's a bit exciting, especially on screen, and like you said, it allows for a more personal feeling in the battles.
Except for "the battle of Jutland", I can't think of anything that comes even CLOSE to Star Wars' Battle of Endor in modern history.
You need to go back to a time when naval vessels were made from wood, and sometimes TINY to get anywhere close to those numbers!
Try the Battle of Leyte Gulf--a far bigger engagement. One segment of that battle pitted the largest battleship in the world (plus other battleships) against three American destroyers, four American destroyer escorts and seven American "jeep" carriers.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_off_Samar
The Battle off Samar ended when the Imperial Japanese Navy fled. Simply "cut and paste" this real-world battle into a Star Wars universe and it's a good fit.
EP 9, during The battle of Exogal reported to having 10's of thousands of large SD each with planet destroying weapons.
@@Aegis030 There are only 6 episodes!
@@alancranford3398 You make a good point!
But despite the name, the battle of Laeyte Gulf was not a battle, it was a series of smaller battles, and and although it involved a greater number of ships, many of those were destroyer size or smaller.
The Battle of Jutland had more "Ship of the line" so to speak.
Still a Star Wars movie (or just a regular movie) based on the Battle off Samar could be awesome!
@@Grubnar One part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf pitted five American battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor (plus a sixth battleship) against two Japanese battleships--and bunches more ships.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leyte_Gulf#Battle_of_Surigao_Strait
I have to admit that Jutland had more battleships, but I was fooled by the small number of ships sunk.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jutland
#AskEck is there an explanation in canon for the seemingly random nature of holo projector? What I mean is that sometimes you would see someone talking to someone else’s miniature hologram and therefore looking down to it, when you go to the other side of the conversation, that other person is talking to a full scale hologram that is not looking down but looking forward… the worst case of this is in Clone Wars season 7 when Maul’s hologram looks at Ahsoka who was hiding beneath his interlocutor obviously out of the range of the holo camera
I think you have the right track here. It helps keep the story understandable, and keep from just overwhelming people with puer numbers
The the clone wars micro series the battles were massive! I guess they can’t make ‘em like that in live action or 3D animation due to budget reasons.
This video was brought to you by Legend of the Galactic Heroes gang
"it's very very infrequent that a faction in SW will dedicate all of their resources to one place"
Meanwhile the Canon New Republic just amasses all their military in one place, I'm sure nothing will go wrong.
They were so determined to mass all their military in one place, that they assigned General Leia to create her own militia to defend the entire galaxy on their behalf.
@@shadowslayer205 except that apparently they never even openly or covertly supported the Resistance. Such shitty world building man.
@@shadowslayer205 🤣🤣🤣
Meanwhile Legend of the Galactic Heroes:
"Alright, we got tens of thousands of ships in this battle"
I do agree with all the points you make, though i do want to make an observation about the point you made about the factions dispersing their ships to protect their territory. To continue with the wwii analogy (specifically in the pacific theater) the reason you see large battle groups/ fleets sailing around is because if you disperse yourself in small groups (sometimes called “penny packets”) you run the risk of something called “defeat in detail”, if the empire leaves two star destroyers to defend a system and the rebels can manage to scrape together four mon cal cruisers to have local superiority and roll in and trash the two star destroyers then move on and repeat. Do this enough times and the empire runs out of star destroyers. That’s why in the real world you tend to see combat power congregated into bigish groups
Great vid as always 👏🏻 … I’m curious does anyone know what the last clip is from (6:12 to the end of the video)?
I've been watching Legends of the Galactic Heroes and yeah, those space battles are massive with hundreds of thousands of ships. This makes absolute sense because both nations encompass numerous planets which can produce huge amounts of soldiers and ships. It feels like Star Wars creators were using scales based in our world.
There's also two factors the books and movies almost never mention unless they want a plot point- time and fuel. They only ever offhandedly mention 'that's far from here' or 'we're low on fuel' but never a consistent sort of logistical standard. However the simple fact that they do admit ships can run out of fuel and do take time to get places (even though they are more than happy to move characters nearly instantly when it suits them), mean we can posit that beyond a certain quantity, it takes too much time and/or fuel to move a lot of ships to a battle location.
If you want scale you should really look into Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Tens of thousands of ships in each fleet, hundreds of thousands in major battles, big sweeping tactical & strategic maneuvers. Plus, a great story, hundreds of characters, and plenty of classical music. 🤓👍
#AskEck Why didn't the Empire retrofit all of its Star Destroyers and other large ships with lots of extra AA in order to neutralize the threat of Rebel Starfighters doing hit and run attacks?
Even adding a couple of hundred laser cannons to a ISD wouldn't mean having to lose a lot of turbolaser cannons - not enough to make a difference in a slugfest with another capital ship that would be outgunned by a ISD.
But it would have made a ISD a instant death zone to any Rebel snubfighters hyperspacing in, and it would have _increased_ the relative firepower of Imperial fleets compared to Rebel fleets, considering so much of the Rebels firepower in any engagement (even when the Rebels brought in capital ships) was tied up in their fighters and fighter/bombers.
If I had to guess I would say inefficient command structure. If o one takes the initiative to innovate it is pretty easy to push the problem around until everyone things the other guys are working on it.
Looking at the Tie defender I think makes this point. It was nothing special and didn't take a genius engineer. Rather one man with a vision who put the work in.
Because military doctrine is VERY difficult so change and shift.
I like smaller battles, where you can actually tell what's going on. Whenever you have thousands of ships, it starts to feel cartoonish, and the big intimidating ships, start to lose their intimidation.
thats matter of personal opion
As a fan of Stargate I always thought that tv show had such a great space battles even though it's from the 90s and early 2000s, and I just hope to see that in Star Wars one day as well.
Something I have been thinking on a bit: in most navies (space or ocean), the destroyer is typically the second smallest class of large ships. In Star Wars, the largest ship we typically see is one of the many types of Star Destroyer or other similarly sized ships. Rarely do we see even larger versions of ships: the light cruisers, cruisers, battle cruisers and battleships. If destroyer class ships are over 1km long; I wonder how insanely massive a battleship would be, and what would a fleet look like that was designed around a pair of such ships?
"Star Destroyer" doesn't necessarily translate to "destroyer" as with our ships on Earth as far as class and role are concerned. It has more to do with the design/wedge shape than size. Saying "Star Destroyer" in Star Wars is more akin to saying "Man o' War". Man o' War was British slang for any ship that had sails and had only one purpose which was war, while "galley" referred to oar powered ships which were also for strictly military use.
The opposite example would be a "dreadnaught heavy cruiser" in Star Wars, which is an extremely specific ship type, while dreadnaught simply refers to a large war ship on Earth (excluding the original HMS Dreadnought).
A better way to explain this is: during WWII, the US could have deployed all it's Navel resources to the Pacific and completely destroyed the Japanese Navy in six months, but that would have left the East Coast vulnerable to the German Navy in the Atlantic and the Allied convoys defenseless. Instead, President Roosevelt ordered the Navy to split the assets as needed to fight the sea war the best way possible.
I do like that in many book, Heir to the Empire series as well, logistics are often talked about.
In any IRL military as well too, the support structures grow by magnitudes, the larger the combat ready forces get. 10 support personnel for every soldier/pilot.
Armies of millions instead of trillions seems closer to reality for me. The amount of production, supply and support to manage supply and support trillions of combat troops even in a galaxy wide war seems not feasible in any fantasy setting.
I recall listening to a podcast once on WWI supply numbers. Daily, to support some millions, the supply was STAGGERING in terms of food, water, bullets, bandages and more. Hundreds of thousands of pounds to some million tons for coffee, meat and pork, and more - per day. The support personnel to get the materials to the lines was even bigger.
They could only maintain that for some 4 years then. The absolute drain on societies in WWII was even bigger. What then for city sized ships and tens of millions of combat troops and pilots?
Interesting. Also, lots of the planets on both sides of the clone wars weren’t really that compliant, so I’m assuming it would be really hard to rally enough support to provide for all those clones
@@homemadefilms5718 In the Heir to the Empire series (If I recall the name of the three excellent books), both the Republic and Thrawn several times mention key temperate worlds that were basically all out farm worlds they had to protect or capture for just this very thing.
The three Bs of war applied even there: Bullets, beans and bandaids.
Have you seen the anime Legend of the Galactic heroes. In it battles involve tens of thousands of ships and as the conflict escalates, it becomes hundreds of thousands. I think it's scale is pretty good. Also just a great show.
I think the game Star Wars Rebellion highlights this the best. There are so many sectors you need to protect that you can't really amass your fleets all in one location. If you run around with a single large fleet you can end up leaving other system undefended.
I don’t know that I ever really considered the battles small. Even now, I still don’t think they are.
Agreed. The number of capital ships in these battles may be rather small, but people seem to forget the _scale_ of many of these ships. Star Destroyers are over a Kilometer long, can launch dozens of fighters, and have a crew of over 30 thousand! The logistics for funding, constructing, and manning just one ship like that would be insane!
@@scottthewaterwarrior yeah but put that up with the millions of planets and population numbers in the quintillions
@@scottthewaterwarrior But then you must also consider that their complement is **only** a few thousand soldiers. Which is hardly enough to take and pacify entire planets.
And when your Empire has an entire Galaxy worth of resources and manpower it is easy to see why scale is a problem.
@@josephcharles4549 What if the empire didn't have near enough to control the galaxy and consequently could collect resource on mass to build that army. So instead they play a shell game moving star destroys around so everyone thinks they are hundreds of times stronger then they are.
If that were the case the Tarkin doctrine goes from a very stupid idea that lost the war, into a genius bluff that works pretty well consider only a hand full of planets make major contributions to the rebels and even they get wishy washy when ISDs show up in orbit.
I keep getting asked, "Alan, how real do you want your fantasies?"
The massive battles of World War Two were resource-limited. Want to compare the Battle of the Coral Sea to the Battle of Midway or the Battle of Leyte Gulf? How about the thousand-plane raids over Germany, dwarfing the Battle of Britain's mere hundreds of bombers? Compare Kursk and Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge to a typical raid. Then there's the issue of distances--the target array for the atomic bomb tests at Operation Crossroads in 1946 had a sampling of ships at closer intervals for administrative purposes. Space combat distances would be so great that no two ships could fit on the average movie screen and the ships involved would be mere dots on the home "big screen TV."
There's a story-telling reason for "small battles." Imagine that you're a soldier in a filthy, gas-filled trench in World War One. You might be able to see a few hundred meters if you stick your head up above the parapet--just before you get a bullet in the face. You can only see a few meters in either direction and see only a few dozen men--though for "safety" dispersing the soldiers so that one lucky artillery shell only kills three or four instead of a hundred was the practice. Individuals get swallowed up in vast battles and are no longer individuals. The Big Picture doesn't capture human drama--all the storyteller can do is toss up numbers. Once the number exceeds six or nine people, the individuals blur into masses. Do you watch movies so that you can learn all about math? Drama is on the individual scale. It was dramatic for Richard Ira Bong, America's Ace of Aces, to go one-on-one and shoot down 40 Japanese aircraft in air-to-air combat (that's oversimplification). It was important during the Battle of Stalingrad for Hero of the Soviet Union Vassili to have an epic one-on-one battle with Koenig -- even though the reality was wholesale slaughter instead of retail one-at-a-time murder. For dramatic reasons, the battles have to be reduced to human scale. There should have been zero collisions between Imperial star destroyers. That is one of the factors in formations--the Roman Legion fought in open order because they wanted mutual support without interfering with each other, and the Roman Legion routinely slaughtered armed warrior mobs who fought in close order because the Romans would surround and jam their enemies into a tight clump where the enemy couldn't swing a sword or poke with their spear because of overcrowding. World War Two American bomber "defensive boxes" had three functions--concentration of bombs on target, mutual defense against enemy fighter-interceptors, and enough dispersion so that if a plane fell out of formation or was actually hit and exploded, the rest of the formation was far enough away that only one plane was lost. But the storytelling reason for "small battles" is that the human mind cannot take in battles that span hundreds of thousands of kilometers. The distances in space battles are so vast that communications lag becomes a factor. Star Wars ignores the speed-of-light limitation on current human communications technology. The speed of light is roughly 300,000 kilometers per second and for a fleet that is spread across three million kilometers, a message from one end of the formation will take ten seconds to reach the other end. When radio communications became common for real-world naval battles, removing the line-of-sight limit on communications and allowing micromanaging of global naval strategy (even individual ships), this shrunk naval battles even though the distances actually increased. Battleships had so much reach with their main guns that the battleship was shooting at things that nobody on the battleship could see--so scout ships (with radios) and scout planes (with radios) would detect, locate and give firing directions to the enemy and then radio in corrections to the firing solution. This permitted shooting at enemy ships in excess of 30 kilometers--but the ballistic solutions involved would fill a book and I'm already long-winded. In the space of a century naval battles went from having to close within a few hundred meters before the smooth-bore cannon of the day took effect to fighting at night or shooting at radar blips or trying to destroy a fast-moving enemy a hundred meters beneath the ocean's surface. Those battles were experienced in a small compartment on the ship with maps and marks on Plexiglas and dials and little dots on radar screens or possibly a sonar display. The lookouts topside might see nothing--until shells rained out of the sky and splashed around the ship.
Try making that into an exciting screen moment. In Tora, Tora, Tora the actors playing Imperial Japanese Navy officers were shown standing around on the bridge stiffly talking to each other. The Battle of Britain Fighter Command scenes were women shoving around little markers on a big map while the peanut gallery (RAF command) looked on. A few moments of that real-world glimpse of air combat was enough to get the message across--the rest was individuals and their little piece of the Big Picture battle.
I disagree with this assessment. Though not very "big," it doesn't matter whether it's 30 ships or 3000 ships - the scale at which the Battle of Endor was fought is clearly proof that big battles can make for good stories. Even a gargantuan battle can have heroes that turn the tides of battles if written well enough. The battle of Geonosis is pretty good example too - I'd say Geonosis was pretty big, and yet we see the individuals who can turn the tide!
It's called fiction for a reason. You can make large scale battles that are reasonably interesting and give light to the heroes.
nobody is asking you that lol
You would love "the lost fleet" book series. He does sci Fi space combat justice. The writer was previously a submariner in the navy and it definitely shows in his writing.
They have FTL but it's based on gravity wells that link stars together. They base their acceleration on percentage of light speed. He gives directions for angling vectors and there is always time delay and lag with communications between ships as well as visual because light travels just like radio waves do.
Before watching, I'm going to speculate more movie production issues that are backfilled with exposition and reasoning. Story wise though the later era movies focuses on Rebellions and insurgent forces. When an enemy has overwhelming resources smaller hit and run tactics are the only viable strategy. Building up forces in a single area is asking for them to be crushed. The Battle of Coruscant in episode 3 in contrast feels like a much larger peer scale grand battle, though the Prequels are likewise limited in scale due to Republic treaties that limit system forces to small defensive forces comparative to post WW2 Japan. Also contemporary naval vessels cost billions of dollars to construct. I can't imagine the equivalent cost for space ships. Sure most systems have a single world governments, which makes it easier to focus an entire planet's resource into producing such ships.
Id love KOTOR or Legacy Era content that's focused on Republic VS Imperial forces. The battles during the Mandalorian crusades had to be quite intense.
This video: “Why are Star Wars battles so small?”
Episode 9: “Am I a joke to you?” (Don’t answer that!)
Yes, this is classic Eckhart’s Ladder! This topic is so equally accessible to noobs and superfans, and every nerdfibre of my body is starting to vibrate with ACKCHUALLY….
The 2003 Clone Wars turned up the scale to an 11. I felt it was “cartoonish” at first with the swathes of clones and droids but then thought more about it and truly it would fit the OT lore about how horrific the clone wars were and should never be repeated due to the loss of life and materiel.
I know it’s now Legends but I feel that was a better scale.
Considering the advanced technology on those ships resources/cost might also be a consideration, I know money was an issue for the republic during the clone wars and the trade federation wasn’t keen on losing their investment in the separatist ships either
I want to know what the video was with the tie fighter missing his escape ship. That's an interesting story.
This is what I particularly dislike about sci-fi stories and in particular, star wars. This is one of the main problems that really irks me about star wars. You're telling me, that the Galactic Empire, who ruled the entire known galaxy, or if we're being technical, then half of the whole galaxy, can only produce 25,000 Imperial Star Destroyers? Are you kidding me? An Empire, who controls millions of planets, does not have the resources to build more? The United States, built hundreds of ships during world war 2. The United States, built 150 or so carriers, during world war 2. During the Battle of the Leyte Gulf, the United States had 300 ships present. A country, that doesn't even occupy half of North America, is capable of producing hundreds of ships and an Empire, that controlled half the galaxy can only produce thousands?
Imagine if Earth was a single country, imagine how many naval ships we can produce and leisurely maintain for decades without going bankrupt! Really, what a terrible scaling. This is mainly the reason why my favorite space-related war series is the Legend of the Galactic heroes. It had truly massive fleets worthy of the territory the 2 competing nations in the story occupied. The Galactic Empire of LOGH had many ships and so did the Free Planets Alliance. Both nations had Fleets with a standard complement of 20,000 ships, consisting mostly of Battleships, Carriers, Cruisers, Destroyers, Frigates, and even corvettes.
A true fleet in the very sense with proper ship classes. And the interesting part was that both nations had dozens of fleets worthy of the territories they control. Granted, the whole premise only happens within the Orion arm of the milky way galaxy and the human Galactic Empire only actually controlled a bit of it(and the Alliance size probably a quarter of the Empire's territory), they still held control over hundreds if not thousands of planets. The Legend of the Galactic Heroes had at least, believable scale because owning hundreds and thousands of planets should give a nation enough resources to build a Fleet proportionate to the territory they control. If you haven't seen Legend of the Galactic Heroes, I suggest you check even just the 1st episode if you truly hate anime. I promise the introductory battle is amazing. You can watch either the old one or the remake, LOGH the new thesis, both are amazing in their own right.
One other explanation for smaller battles is, basically, that hyperspace travel means that it's hard to consolidate and keep consolidated unless you have a way to stop one side from running away or a reason for them to stay.
Send to big of a force and, well, the enemy bolts unless there is a massive reason that they're forced to stand and fight. You also hit the amount of space to cover, so a large fleet might still be spread around a lot of systems, and if you hit one, the rest might show up to pounce on you or ravage what you're supposed to be protecting.
Every time you see massive fleets, there was something there that kept them from breaking the engagement...the 2nd Death Star is one where the rebel fleet didn't think they would ever have a second chance to go after it. Coruscant was basically the fleet defending the capital...the same thing as the NJO Battle of Coruscant with everyone there.
In Legends, for the vast majority of it, you have one side that's far larger than the other which means they need to prevent the other from running...which the Interdictor allowed, or to corner them in a place that they couldn't just cut and run from like Zsinj being cornered over Dathomir where he couldn't just run away from the fight.
On top of that, you hit the firepower situation, a single Star Destroyer has the firepower to wreck a planets surface, so you'd have people not always seeing the need there as well.
There were 20k star destroyers manned with each a crew of 37k, now that makes around 740 Million Crew personal.
Now we have to take into account logistics to maintain such behemoths.
Now, in modern warfare (as an estimate) in the US the amount of support personal per brigade is 80%. So for each 5000 man brigade there is about 20k people supporting them somewhere along the supply chain.
Let’s convert this to Starwars, for sake of argument
740 million are 20%
Times 5 is:
So 3.7 Billion People just to maintain the Star destroyers alone.
Now comes along smaller ship classes, bureaucracy, the main army, ship builders, army maintained mines (mandatorian) and so on.
The whole Imperial Army probably is in the upper 30-40 Billion People.
Now let’s draw a parallel to our modern world: the US army is 1,2 Million. Which is a fraction of the Population (329 Million)
So.. let’s multiply 40 Billion by 329,
this is 13.16 Trillion.
Yeah the scale isn’t that small anymore, remember logistics is the hidden factor.
It’s easy to say hurr durr muh scale when only looking at the surface, but what goes into maintaing an army and fleet is immense.
This isn’t any different in the SW universe :)
Edit: let’s look at the whole military-industrial complex: ship builders and everything that supports it adds another huge percentage of the population that’s occupied in that regard, and not available as soldiers.
Also: a society doesn’t run on good will alone, the US had to rely on women to maintain factory productivity because the men went into the army.
Another thing people forget is that not everyone of the population is in fighting age :) half the population is women, which make up a small percentage of army personnel in SW. Another big half is the people growing up and old people. So the manpower pool is already smaller.
Adding to this comes the aspect that, as said previously, a complex society with very complex supply chains cannot divert a lot of people to fight. The Germans for example in WW2 mustered a lot of manpower for Operation Barbarossa, and they took a lot of factory workers to the frontline. This manpower was missing and in the end of 1941 they had to recall a huge number of men to the factories else their whole supply chain and production would have collapsed.
the numbers in paper are perfectly fine, the problem is the visual scale. For example during the clone wars series, capital ships can carry tens of thousands of troops, and yet they only deploy a very few hundred to supposedly ''massive'' battles and then the heroes need to come up with some mumbo jumbo plot armor bullshit plan to save the day because they are getting slaughtered for been outguned and outnumbered.
That still makes Star Wars' scale look way too small lol. According to Google, the population of the Star Wars Galaxy is 100 quadrillion. So even if only half of them lived under the Galactic Empire, 13.16 trillion military personnel still represents only 0.026% of their available population. By comparison, the modern US military represents 0.425% of the population. To equal the US rate of enlistment, the Empire would need almost 212 trillion military personnel!
The Star Wars Universe also has access to advanced robotics and automation, meaning they don't need regular people to work in factories. A large portion of the logistics would also be handled by droids, freeing up additional manpower.
The Galactic Empire also has access to millions of worlds worth of resources. Their economy would be exponentially larger than ours, and with cheap Droid labor, the cost to manufactured goods would be much cheaper.
Allegories to WWII era production and logistics don't really work because the Star Wars economy functions so differently.
@@Akapaco2 100 Quadrillion? Yeah whoever came up with that number googled “what comes after billion” and picked something that sounds cool to him. It’s totally out of touch.
The Tech in Star Wars really isn’t that advanced if you think about it, and a lot of resources are mined in quite primitive ways, as shown in lots of EU material. (Swotor, Kotor, Clone Wars etc).
@@Akapaco2 also you can’t compare the SW universe to anything as it’s fantasy and the writers didn’t think about something complex such as economy.
Thing is: you could compare it to a lot of things and it wouldn’t make sense probably, it’s just a benchmark to make an estimate.
@@enrixosjjdjd187 True lol. That 100 quadrillion number is hilarious!!. I can't even comprehend one government trying to govern that many people lmao! You would need billions of representatives. Even just voting on anything would take years lol. Imagine the size of the bureaucracy.
And you're right, Star Wars isn't meant to be taken realistically. It's meant to be fun and entertaining. Trying to show thousands of ships on screen at once would be a mess.
Nice, you sure come up with great topics! Thanks. Good stuff to make everyone to think about
I’ve read somewhere that a sci-fi book series begins with large-scale battles involving hundreds of ships, but by the end, no side commits more than a single ship to any engagement, and battles involve one ship chasing the other with both hurling drones at each other. This is compared to the evolution of naval combat between, say, the Battle of Jutland (250 ships) and the Battle of the Denmark Straight (6 ships) with only 25 years between the two
Great video. I got my friend's kid hook on watching the dog having fun at the end of most videos. We call it 'doggie-time'.
I am glad they invest the mayority to create an interesting and cohesive stories in star wars, specially in the sequels 😍❤️😍
In a situation where weapons and armor tech has barely changed for ages it makes sense that militaries would begin using mobility based tactics on a smaller scale. Basically trying to inflict maximum casualties for minimum losses makes a lot more sense when you have really fast, highly mobile forces that can do just as much damage as anything else.
#AskEck.Hey Eck,I was wondering if you could talk about the Jedi Order,how they operate,how YOU would want them to operate,and how you think they should operate after TRoS.If they should at all.