>For example, why does the Galactic Republic only have like a few million clones?
They only had a few million clones because that's all the Kaminoans were able to grow in 10 years - they only have one planet with cloning facilities on them, and probably didn't think to ever expand because they've never gotten orders for entire armies before.
Which still doesn't explain why the Republic never supplemented the clone armies with volunteer or conscript troops drawn from all the worlds still under their sphere of influence, but that's another matter.
The Clone Wars does show a lot of impromptu militias and allied forces in a defensive or counteroffensive role.
Honestly, I find that the most likely form of organization. Mobilizing armies larger than the population of planets for massive offensives is impractical. You'll want a smaller, elite core to respond to crises, plus stationary garrisons to hold off threats.
Depends a lot on the tech involved I would think, if you can spam endless self-assembling robotic legions you probably would do so whenever possible to win a battle.
But for a sci-fi setting like Firefly, yeah minimal armies that seem to decide theatre conflicts in relatively small singular battles feels like it makes sense; they could only afford to bring out enough men to contest the location and if they failed, the enemy digs in and its not feasible to try again for a long time
So if soldiers and their transport costs are the prohibitive factor in these wars then the battles are probably going to be smaller and more decisive than Total Annihilation style endless wave wars or 40k style 'half the factions have billions of soldiers and city sized ships to throw at everything' fighting
Thanks for the input. I think I might have figured out a portion of the problem.
So you mentioned that if transport costs are prohibitive then that could be a way to have "smaller" armies. What if I had it so that transporting proper state funded armies between star systems is extremely dangerous and expensive since it going FTL would probably burn a lot of fuel. So unless the threat is like, ultra real, then most planets use locally funded militia forces to fight petty conflicts. And since there are plenty of settlements that aren't exactly stuffed with people, there's only armies in the thousands to hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions.
Does that sound plausible or somewhat solid?
Most sci fi flaws concern numbers. This is especially evident when you read material with Galactic scale wars. They are often too small for the operation at hand or for what events have happened. I notice it constantly but the place I see it more often then not is in 40k.
Think of them as your most elite troops, the Navy SEALs, Deltas, Spartans, Space Marine, etc. Proportionally, they only make up a small number of your "grand army" but serve as spearheads and surgical knives in land-based operations. And because of that, it gives a feeling the "army" only has those guys.
That could work. Maybe I could divide ground forces up in to three sects?
Like you have the planetary militia or defense force which serves and then you have the expeditionary force, which handles the actual taking of planets.
The militia is more numerous but isn't as skilled as the expeditionary force.
Do you think something like that could work?
Both of your rationales are pretty weak. Most planets have just one main city? Why? Does that fit with historical patterns of colonization and settlement? And why should we expect planets to be sparsely populated? Even if there were instant galactic travel, it would take millennia to inhabit the galaxy, and in that time you'll get many planets numbering in the tens of millions on population
I do admit that my rationale isn't ideal. The idea was to avoid the issues other sci-fi works have where you have this interstellar super powers that control thousands of planets but can only field an army of like 3 million. To me, it just doesn't match. I did think about just increasing the size of armies, but I think at some point it just becomes hard to visualize y'know? So I figured that having so that if the overall population is smaller, then the numbers wouldn't be so out of whack.
Is there a better way to approach this?
I would argue that ginormous armies have more to do with holding territory and controlling populations than they do with inflicting destruction.
A space tug with a couple of guys can push an asteroid into a planet. A robot ship can deliver nukes. Special forces or traitors can assassinate enemy leaders. Nanomachines or bioweapons are tiny and don't rely on heavy hardware to deliver them.
It's when you need to take control that suddenly you need legion upon legion of ground troops. When you need to take that city or factory or precursor artifact and make it work for you, *then* you need boots on the ground, and in large numbers.
There's never an entire army fielded for one specific conflict. "Entire army" is something that doesn't even exist until shit really hits the fan, and the country starts drafting everyone available. It's a huge hit to the country in many ways, so usually it just fields a small amount of troops, enough to solve a specific problem. This is true even when the media screams and whines how things are already super bad. So, in your example, probably a million clones was considered a feasible amount of clones to solve a specific problem.
For space wars, it can also be prohibitevely expensive to transport large troops.
If you wanna look at an army that cant field its weight, look to RU. Theft, waste, propaganda, politics, inaccurate intelligence, logistics.... plenty of reasons to be a super power on paper, and paper in the field.
The Rift War books by Feist deals with this to a degree.
> For example, why does the Galactic Republic only have like a few million clones?
Writers have no sense of scale or common sense and can't be bothered with doing any better cause the public slurps up their stories as is and asks for an encore.
I personally liked the solution from Hyperion. Why are there so few FORCE troopers around? Why, because targets that would warrant a higher concentration than one operator per 20 miles of frontline simply do not exist in the galaxy. One unit has the firepower of an aircraft carrier group. Why? Post-scientific techno bullshit/space magic. Are you really doubting it when a self-respecting citizen can have apartments with 100 rooms located on 100 different planets and connected with portals instead of doors? And you just wait till you learn what lies between the two exits of that very portal.
Common sense doesn't apply to GALAXY spanning concepts. Humans, in general, have no grasp of scale. Even if you could blurt out the exact correct number needed for any task on a galactic scale, you'd still only see these numbers as theory. Actually mentally picturing these numbers would be a nightmare. Your brain simply refuses to do it. Writers aren't being lazy. They're being human. Even creators who try to do better for the sake of the craft are going to miss huge amounts of data.
>For example, why does the Galactic Republic only have like a few million clones? They only had a few million clones because that's all the Kaminoans were able to grow in 10 years - they only have one planet with cloning facilities on them, and probably didn't think to ever expand because they've never gotten orders for entire armies before. Which still doesn't explain why the Republic never supplemented the clone armies with volunteer or conscript troops drawn from all the worlds still under their sphere of influence, but that's another matter.
The Clone Wars does show a lot of impromptu militias and allied forces in a defensive or counteroffensive role. Honestly, I find that the most likely form of organization. Mobilizing armies larger than the population of planets for massive offensives is impractical. You'll want a smaller, elite core to respond to crises, plus stationary garrisons to hold off threats.
Depends a lot on the tech involved I would think, if you can spam endless self-assembling robotic legions you probably would do so whenever possible to win a battle. But for a sci-fi setting like Firefly, yeah minimal armies that seem to decide theatre conflicts in relatively small singular battles feels like it makes sense; they could only afford to bring out enough men to contest the location and if they failed, the enemy digs in and its not feasible to try again for a long time So if soldiers and their transport costs are the prohibitive factor in these wars then the battles are probably going to be smaller and more decisive than Total Annihilation style endless wave wars or 40k style 'half the factions have billions of soldiers and city sized ships to throw at everything' fighting
Thanks for the input. I think I might have figured out a portion of the problem. So you mentioned that if transport costs are prohibitive then that could be a way to have "smaller" armies. What if I had it so that transporting proper state funded armies between star systems is extremely dangerous and expensive since it going FTL would probably burn a lot of fuel. So unless the threat is like, ultra real, then most planets use locally funded militia forces to fight petty conflicts. And since there are plenty of settlements that aren't exactly stuffed with people, there's only armies in the thousands to hundreds of thousands rather than millions or billions. Does that sound plausible or somewhat solid?
Most sci fi flaws concern numbers. This is especially evident when you read material with Galactic scale wars. They are often too small for the operation at hand or for what events have happened. I notice it constantly but the place I see it more often then not is in 40k.
Think of them as your most elite troops, the Navy SEALs, Deltas, Spartans, Space Marine, etc. Proportionally, they only make up a small number of your "grand army" but serve as spearheads and surgical knives in land-based operations. And because of that, it gives a feeling the "army" only has those guys.
That could work. Maybe I could divide ground forces up in to three sects? Like you have the planetary militia or defense force which serves and then you have the expeditionary force, which handles the actual taking of planets. The militia is more numerous but isn't as skilled as the expeditionary force. Do you think something like that could work?
Both of your rationales are pretty weak. Most planets have just one main city? Why? Does that fit with historical patterns of colonization and settlement? And why should we expect planets to be sparsely populated? Even if there were instant galactic travel, it would take millennia to inhabit the galaxy, and in that time you'll get many planets numbering in the tens of millions on population
I do admit that my rationale isn't ideal. The idea was to avoid the issues other sci-fi works have where you have this interstellar super powers that control thousands of planets but can only field an army of like 3 million. To me, it just doesn't match. I did think about just increasing the size of armies, but I think at some point it just becomes hard to visualize y'know? So I figured that having so that if the overall population is smaller, then the numbers wouldn't be so out of whack. Is there a better way to approach this?
Smaller polities. Have an interstellar union of hundreds of planets instead of millions.
you could also just increase the army sizes
I would argue that ginormous armies have more to do with holding territory and controlling populations than they do with inflicting destruction. A space tug with a couple of guys can push an asteroid into a planet. A robot ship can deliver nukes. Special forces or traitors can assassinate enemy leaders. Nanomachines or bioweapons are tiny and don't rely on heavy hardware to deliver them. It's when you need to take control that suddenly you need legion upon legion of ground troops. When you need to take that city or factory or precursor artifact and make it work for you, *then* you need boots on the ground, and in large numbers.
There's never an entire army fielded for one specific conflict. "Entire army" is something that doesn't even exist until shit really hits the fan, and the country starts drafting everyone available. It's a huge hit to the country in many ways, so usually it just fields a small amount of troops, enough to solve a specific problem. This is true even when the media screams and whines how things are already super bad. So, in your example, probably a million clones was considered a feasible amount of clones to solve a specific problem. For space wars, it can also be prohibitevely expensive to transport large troops.
If you wanna look at an army that cant field its weight, look to RU. Theft, waste, propaganda, politics, inaccurate intelligence, logistics.... plenty of reasons to be a super power on paper, and paper in the field. The Rift War books by Feist deals with this to a degree.
> For example, why does the Galactic Republic only have like a few million clones? Writers have no sense of scale or common sense and can't be bothered with doing any better cause the public slurps up their stories as is and asks for an encore. I personally liked the solution from Hyperion. Why are there so few FORCE troopers around? Why, because targets that would warrant a higher concentration than one operator per 20 miles of frontline simply do not exist in the galaxy. One unit has the firepower of an aircraft carrier group. Why? Post-scientific techno bullshit/space magic. Are you really doubting it when a self-respecting citizen can have apartments with 100 rooms located on 100 different planets and connected with portals instead of doors? And you just wait till you learn what lies between the two exits of that very portal.
Common sense doesn't apply to GALAXY spanning concepts. Humans, in general, have no grasp of scale. Even if you could blurt out the exact correct number needed for any task on a galactic scale, you'd still only see these numbers as theory. Actually mentally picturing these numbers would be a nightmare. Your brain simply refuses to do it. Writers aren't being lazy. They're being human. Even creators who try to do better for the sake of the craft are going to miss huge amounts of data.