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The galaxy is at peace. The imperial remnant and the Galactic Alliance are relatively friendly allies, and it seems as though the days of endless civil war is over.

But then a not so new threat rises out from the ashes: Palpatine. For whatever reason, he has managed to come back from the dead yet again. He lures the entire Jedi Order into an industrialized planet and springs his trap. Somehow, Palpatine has gathered all of the troopers from the original 501st in their prime and has dispatched them to take down the Jedi.

This planet has a population of 50 billion people, with cities covering around 8% of the planet and the surface consisting of 28% water. There are four decent sized continents. The planet; let's call it Gaala, is a SW tech level planet. Its civilians are mixed in their political and social views. It's police force is mysteriously absent.

The New Jedi Order starts clustered in the western hemisphere, while the 501st legion is dropped off 3000 km away across an ocean. For the record, they consist of 10,000 highly trained soldiers, and perhaps 1000 AT-RTs and a juggernaut war vehicle.

As much as I disliked the NJO books, these Jedi have been through war, were trained for war, were trained by a Jedi Master who himself were trained for war. The old Order Palpatine killed off were really only relearning how to fight in a war when the purge happened, the Clone Wars being 3 years long? They saw themselves as 'keepers of the peace, not soldiers' where as Luke's crew were fighting from the get go. I give it to the Jedi.

Element of surprise would be an important (though quite possibly not decisive) factor. Do the NJO know there is an army of Jedi-killing clones out for their blood? A lot more of the Old Order would have survived if they'd known the were about to be attacked.
This would really only affect the earliest stages of engagement.

The Jedi would most likely win (for the reason Knife already outlined), but I would be cheering for the 501st out of unabashed personal bias.

Not only are the NJO Jedi a lot more martial and ruthless than their Old Republic counterparts, but coming from a tradition that was nearly destroyed by treachery, they're all well trained in escape and evasion and guerilla tactics.

One issue here is the number of Jedi that make up the NJO. Even if we assume that they are at their absolute peak in numbers, there are still perhaps a 200 full Jedi, . In the numbers game they would likely be in fairly bad shape but in any kind of realistic engagement they could likely wear the clones down over time given their greater martial skills than their predecessors, unless the Jedi are ambushed, in which case the Clones could win if enough overwhelming firepower is brought to bear on the unsuspecting Jedi. Despite this possible advantage, it is possible that Jedi precog would allow them to foresee the ambush and prevent it. Remember that the shroud of the Dark Side is no longer in effect and that the Force has returned to its full levels, allowing the Jedi greater powers of precognition.

One other factor worth mentioning is the large number of armed personal starships in use by the NJO, Luke, Corran and Jaina all have X-wings, Mara has the Jade's Sabre (or Shadow), and most other Jedi have some form of personal ship, most with some level of firepower. In addition there were several Jedi led fighter squadrons during the Yuuzhan Vong War. Given that Palpatine apparently lured the Jedi to this world, it is likely that they used their personal ships to reach this planet and therefore would be available.

Despite their advantages, the Jedi do have a major weakness, their desire to protect the innocent. If the 501st is smart and not overly concerned with civilian losses, they could use the risks of collateral damage to force the Jedi into a less than advantageous position as well as negate their air support. Though in the event that the 501st causes large levels of collateral damage themselves, the population of the world would likely turn against them.

However, given the initial positioning and lack of vehicles, the 501st would likely never be able to even engage the Jedi, let alone take advantage of the element of surprise. This would force them to fight an enemy with air cover with nothing but infantry and a handful of vehicles that would be overwhelmed by the Jedi air cover.

You forget one thing.

The New Jedi Order has Kyle 'I take down entire armies by myself' Katarn.

Also, the New Jedi Order is not afraid to push the Force to it's limited. Luke himself comes to mind. (Remember in Spectre of the Past he was debating between crushing a dreadnaughts weapons, or just the entire ship itself)

Then you have a few other Masters in the same general league. Mara Jade comes to mind, so does Kyp Durron.

Luke and Kyle mop the 501st up themselves, then the Order goes and beats the crap out of Palpatine for bothering them.

10,000 combat troops bred to be combat troops against 200 Jedi.

Assuming the 501st can get to the Jedi (they seem to be absent aerial or water transports and are an ocean away) and stay en mass. They should be able to overwhelm the Jedi easily.


If that is an accurate image, that should be 10,000 dots, which would represent the clones. Two groups of those squares of 100 would represent the Jedi.

Now I agree with Knife's point about Luke's Jedi not focusing at all on the philosophical side of being Jedi, and that they are effectively blunt instruments of war, but so are the 501st.

Assuming a straight up fight, there is no way the Jedi can deflect the amount of fire 10,000 clones can bring upon them. Even if they were able to deflect most of them, not every bolt goes back against it's attacker and it is reasonable to assume that some of the fire is going to hit other Jedi.

The 501 takes this.

In a straight up fight on open field, the 501st massacres similar to Operation Knightfall. But if the Jedi were stupid enough to take on fifty times their number medieval style, they would have died long ago.

Luke Skywalker wrote:In a straight up fight on open field, the 501st massacres similar to Operation Knightfall. But if the Jedi were stupid enough to take on fifty times their number medieval style, they would have died long ago.

Old Order Jedi were certainly stupid enough to. How many died at the Battle of Geonosis?
And that was against droids...

A guerrilla war may go better, but not every Jedi is Luke, or Mara or Kyle. They're representative of the upper echelon. That guy Jango caps in AOTC is probably closer to what a regular Jedi can do against a highly trained clone. Block a few bolts but get over powered if he can't get in close enough to strike or can't deflect the bolts back.

The numbers are still just overwhelming. 50-1 is still far more than even Luke's Jedi can overcome.

Darth Tedious wrote:

Luke Skywalker wrote:In a straight up fight on open field, the 501st massacres similar to Operation Knightfall. But if the Jedi were stupid enough to take on fifty times their number medieval style, they would have died long ago.

Old Order Jedi were certainly stupid enough to. How many died at the Battle of Geonosis?
And that was against droids...

The AotC novelization implies that Mace Windu was anticipating that he only would have had to fight off Geononsian warriors. How he missed the presence of millions of battle droids escapes me, but oh well.

The New Jedi Order is better versed in military tactics than the PT Old Jedi Order; the former was constantly fighting battles against organized militaries and consisted of many ex military Jedi, while the latter had not fought against an organized military for milenia.

Havok wrote:A guerrilla war may go better, but not every Jedi is Luke, or Mara or Kyle. They're representative of the upper echelon. That guy Jango caps in AOTC is probably closer to what a regular Jedi can do against a highly trained clone. Block a few bolts but get over powered if he can't get in close enough to strike or can't deflect the bolts back.

The numbers are still just overwhelming. 50-1 is still far more than even Luke's Jedi can overcome.

Let's say that the 501st has split up to search for the Jedi in a large SW city. How would they locate the Jedi, and how would, for example, a few dozen clones on X city block they be able to take out a group of the Jedi, who would ambush them, kill them and vanish long before the nearest reinforcements arrive?

The 501st's best bet would be to lure the NJO into open ground; track them to a city, siege and bombard the city and force them to flee, and then hunt them from there. The NJO takes this if they can hide out in cities and slowly pick off the 501st before vanishing into the crowd. Hit and run tactics with Jedi is very effective.

The Jedi melt into the population and leave the 501st with nothing to do. Bit by bit they book civilian passage off the planet until they're all gone. The 501st eventually gets bored and leaves.

If an Act of Thread prevents this, the Jedi blend into the population and bide their time regardless. A force of 10,000 just isn't enough to even begin thinking about searching a population of 50,000,000,000 for 200 people who don't want to be found. If the 501st does anything but build a base and refuse to ever come out, the Jedi start picking off patrols and such.

Really this is a terrible scenario for the troopers. If the Jedi don't think they can win, they won't fight. If the Jedi decide not to fight, the troops have literally no way of making them.

Havok wrote:A guerrilla war may go better, but not every Jedi is Luke, or Mara or Kyle. They're representative of the upper echelon. That guy Jango caps in AOTC is probably closer to what a regular Jedi can do against a highly trained clone. Block a few bolts but get over powered if he can't get in close enough to strike or can't deflect the bolts back.

The numbers are still just overwhelming. 50-1 is still far more than even Luke's Jedi can overcome.

You neglect to mention that the NJO has went through situations like this before. Daala assault on Yavin IV, although ultimately repulsed by a combination of Dorsk 81 Force push and Ackbar reinforcements, had the much smaller Jedi order successfully evading and defeating smaller patrols of combined arms Imperials supported by TIEs and orbital bombardment.

Given the scale of the Star Destroyers "potential" deployment, the 501st wouldn't have sufficied to have defeated the NJO during Daala era. The NJO in the thread is much larger, with more military experience.

Darth Tedious wrote:Old Order Jedi were certainly stupid enough to. How many died at the Battle of Geonosis?
And that was against droids...

I stand by my original statement regarding this. Mace Windu assumed he was sent to "keep the peace", and the action look significantly like police tactics.

A show of force by armed Jedi, to cow the Geonosians and the Seperatist leadership into submission. Granted, this means that Windu was unaware of the scale of the droid armies on Geonosis but the movie itself doesn't suggest Obiwan was able to tell how large the potential armies were.

Let's put it this way. 10,000 troopers vs 200 jedi. That's 50 troopers per jedi. Which can kill your average Jedi I won't doubt (even without some hinderance like the Shroud). But that assumes it will be a straight up fight (to build on what DudeguyMan says.)

To put it in another perspective: 200 Jedi on a palnet with a population of 50 billion. That's one Jedi per 250 million. 10,000 clones vs 50 billion is 1 clone per five million. Some 70% of the planet (nevermind the 8% cities) is a HUGE amount of surface area to cover as well some 40 trillion square meters of city territory (disregarding altitude/height of buildings), and an even heftier 140 trillion or so square meters of land to cover. Some of which will be open, some may be desert, some ice, but others will be places like swamp, forest, mountains, etc. That offers quite a few places to hide.

Now in this situation one of the key advantages the Jedi have is that they can to certain extents travel steathily (up to a point) and have some fairly potent but undetectable means of detection and communcation amongst themselves and whatever allies they may have or cultivate. The Force doesn't have to be lifting up and hurling multi ton objects or zapping lightning to be useful here, many of its more subtle abilities will in fact be of great value in avoiding detection and possibly beating the 501st. Why this should focus solely on combat ability or straight up combat I don't get. The main point we want to emphasize about the NJO is they're not the deluded, complacent fools the Old jedi order were. They may still have some flaws (Quite a few actually, as I recall) but they're head and shoulders above a good many of the old order. They can do without alot of technological gadgets the clones may need, and in all probability many of them can forage to some degree or another (up to a point - alot of this depends on the nature of the ecoystem and how friendly it is to various life forms. jedi may be required to make food runs at varying points in time which ups the risks some.)

The clones will need alot more than just raw firepower to defeat the Jedi. They need good surveillance and intel capabilities, good logistics to maintain themselves while they search, and so on. This more than likely means they need the cooperation of the local authorities if not their actual assistance (orbital or aerial surveillance, access to population records and data, supplies and other resources, and so on.) and it probably shafted them quite a bit for the OP to give them no organic intel/surveillance assets of their own aside from tha AT-RTs. They don't need vehicles to kill the jedi, but they do need vehicles to get around, and sensors to hunt them out, and so on.

Which isn't to say the Jedi don't need some of this to if they intend to fight. They'll need resources, probably help (locally recruited), money and contacts to provide them assistance/resources/intel as well. This may be the government (or parts of it) or it may actually be some other faction (offworld or on world) - possibly even criminal. This leads to an interesting situation of how far one might expect the Jedi to go (or be willing to go) in order to survive or defeat the clones. Indeed it might be a potentially divisive issue - its not the first time the Jedi have had a falling out over doctrinal matters, even with Luke's bunch (Eg Kyp Durron.)

But it's also fair to say that with a whole planet as the arena, that they arne't able to take advantage of the enviroment to benefit them (and that includes hiring help to fight or kill the clones. A blaster wielded by a thug can kill a clone as well as a Jedi can.)

Question: Is Palpatine involved in this trap? There are a lot of assumptions on the Jedi side, can we assume that Palpatine will be effecting the playing field?
It seems pretty stupid to just spring this trap and then leave it all up to the clones, a tactic that we have never seen employed by Palpatine. (Order 66 was a surprise to the Jedi and the assault on the Temple was led by Anakin/Vader)

In a straight up contest with no outside forces influencing the outcome I take the NJO. Luke Skywalker is immensely powerful during the time of the NJO. His depiction in Unifying Force is quite impressive. The Solo kids when they grow up are pretty skilled as well.

Luke shrugs off AT AT fire in Dark Empire and then takes it down single handedly, he might also be able to use force choke on a longer scale depending on how much he improved after RoTJ.

Havok wrote:Question: Is Palpatine involved in this trap? There are a lot of assumptions on the Jedi side, can we assume that Palpatine will be effecting the playing field?
It seems pretty stupid to just spring this trap and then leave it all up to the clones, a tactic that we have never seen employed by Palpatine. (Order 66 was a surprise to the Jedi and the assault on the Temple was led by Anakin/Vader)

Come on man, they're just gonna run out and have a big 200 versus 10,000 battle anyway! Remember the dots?

DudeGuyMan wrote:

Havok wrote:Question: Is Palpatine involved in this trap? There are a lot of assumptions on the Jedi side, can we assume that Palpatine will be effecting the playing field?
It seems pretty stupid to just spring this trap and then leave it all up to the clones, a tactic that we have never seen employed by Palpatine. (Order 66 was a surprise to the Jedi and the assault on the Temple was led by Anakin/Vader)

Come on man, they're just gonna run out and have a big 200 versus 10,000 battle anyway! Remember the dots?

Fuck off. I was just illustrating the numbers point.

Palpatine would be quite an advantage to have. He has the ability to cloud the Jedi's ability to use the Force. He also can help find them. He can also engage them. Outside of Luke, he should be able to take them a handful at a time, given the opportunity.

Well obviously its not a very good trap. Since all the troopers start on the wrong side of the planet.

Considering this is a typical SW planet, why are the Jedi not hiking to the nearest space port and just leaving?

Havok wrote:Question: Is Palpatine involved in this trap? There are a lot of assumptions on the Jedi side, can we assume that Palpatine will be effecting the playing field?
It seems pretty stupid to just spring this trap and then leave it all up to the clones, a tactic that we have never seen employed by Palpatine. (Order 66 was a surprise to the Jedi and the assault on the Temple was led by Anakin/Vader)

Why would we assume he's micromanaging this issue? When has he ever made it a habit of micro-managing his subordinate's activities. If anything, Palpatine has a record of acting through agents, intermediaries, and loyal henchmen than anything else, because among other things, it gives him plausible deniability. HE didn't micromanage Darth Maul in any of his missions. HE never micromanaged Vader. He didn't micromanage the Clone Army before or after the Clone Wars started (certainly not during Order 66.) He didn't micromanage the Death Star, he didn't micromanage Vader's hunt for the Rebels. In fact, the only thing I distinctly seeing to personally was Luke and the whole trap at endor, and that still involved him ignoring huge chunks of it (The space battle and the ground battle.) and when he was Mad Vampire Palpatine during Dark Empire (at that time he was degenerating to the point where he woudl destroy individual starships or planets who dared oppose him. Rathre a far cry from the prequel era or even the OT era Palpatine.)

That actually brings up another point, even if we ASSUME Palpaitne exists, why should we assume it is prequel era (politically cunning and relatively sane) Palpatine rather than crazy vampire Palpatine from DE onwards? If he somehow managed to survive and re-resurrect himself by the NJO, he'd probably be downright insane.

Palpatine, as we saw in ROTS, is not above getting his hands dirty killing Jedi when the need arises. If he is resurrected with the same hatred of Jedi he had before, and the knowledge of only about 200 Jedi in the galaxy, which he obviously has, since he lured them into a trap, there is no reason to assume he will not personally hunt down the Jedi. Especially that Luke guy who he may hold a grudge against, but I'm just guessing.

It is not about micromanaging (this is a horrible example of that by the way) but about ensuring final victory. Especially after how the hands off approach worked so well for him last time.

Even if Palpy decides to join the fray personally, I'd pick late-era Luke over him in a slugfest.

Havok wrote:Palpatine, as we saw in ROTS, is not above getting his hands dirty killing Jedi when the need arises.

Yes, but its not like he goes out of his way to do this. He let Anakin lead the purge on the temple because that suited his purposes, nor did he go out personally to kill any. Of the thousands of Jedi in the galaxy, he killed few directly. More often than not he leaves tasks to his subordinates. I suppose it will depend on how important he figures matters are, and what iteration of Palpy it is (I'd bet on insane though, since we're talking another reincarnation after an unplanned, horrific death)

If he is resurrected with the same hatred of Jedi he had before, and the knowledge of only about 200 Jedi in the galaxy, which he obviously has, since he lured them into a trap, there is no reason to assume he will not personally hunt down the Jedi. Especially that Luke guy who he may hold a grudge against, but I'm just guessing.

If he's insane he might be the most likely to get personally involved. However the level of cunning he has is probably questionable. DE era Palpy post DE was not terribly subtle or cunning, and even DE Palpy was not nearly the manipulator he was in the prequel era. And I'm not even bringing up the "hunting for a child to possess' subquest that totally distracted him and lead to one of his more pathetic deaths.

Sane, prequel era Palpy is the one that best serves the 501st's job, but it is also the least likely to be present. AT best we're looking at DE Palpy.

It is not about micromanaging (this is a horrible example of that by the way) but about ensuring final victory. Especially after how the hands off approach worked so well for him last time.

Well, it could also be said tha hands on approach didnt work either *coughcoughEndorcough* I'm not saying it won't have an effect, but I'm hardly convinced it will be decisive.

Havok wrote:Palpatine, as we saw in ROTS, is not above getting his hands dirty killing Jedi when the need arises. If he is resurrected with the same hatred of Jedi he had before, and the knowledge of only about 200 Jedi in the galaxy, which he obviously has, since he lured them into a trap, there is no reason to assume he will not personally hunt down the Jedi. Especially that Luke guy who he may hold a grudge against, but I'm just guessing.

It is not about micromanaging (this is a horrible example of that by the way) but about ensuring final victory. Especially after how the hands off approach worked so well for him last time.

Palpatine is not in this fight, and if he was, as dudeguyman said, late era Luke could probably take him in a fight, especially with other Jedi to support him.

To the clones' defense about finding the Jedi, the LotF secret police crippled terrorist networks in a planet of many trillions within weeks, and the clones were able to find and kill many hiding Jedi in the Dark Times.