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Mange the Swede wrote:A person posted...
+http://karentraviss.livejournal.com/284 ... 4#t5115274

... which was followed by insinuations of Aspergers.

Lord Poe wrote:Ossus, what's the exact link for that?

VT-16 wrote:

Lord Poe wrote:Ossus, what's the exact link for that?

+http://karentraviss.livejournal.com/280980.html

I participated in this debate (as Cpt_Kraut) and it revealed quite alot of absurdity on her followers part. But I did get to school Dark_Moose and state my case without being ridiculed, so it wasn't a waste of time.

thejester wrote:Er...does anyone else find her livejournal avatar somewhat....disturbing?

Ryan Kaufman wrote:FYI, re: 3 million.

LFL was very clear to us that no fixed number of total clones would or could be assigned.

Therefore, the number 3 million (plus) does not represent the entire fighting force.

Karen Traviss wrote: Can you cite me a source for Kamino's capacity?

Factors you need to consider are:

1. In a war, you're not always fighting on all fronts all the time.

2. Theatres of war shift. Not every planet is involved every day of the war. Think shifting task force.

3. And...it's Star Wars! Chaps, when you can accept that a bunch of aliens can breed humans to order and grow them to maturity in ten years...that a handful of Jedi can take on armies with magic and a fluorescent light fitting...when you don't worry about the total absence of time dilation when ships move light years between worlds...how can you argue about real numbers?


Comrades, I'm the real-life defence specialist, and if I could swallow this fictional premise without too much pain, I don't see why you can't... tongue

This is a fit between real life defence and a science fantasy world. We fit it as best we can between the endstops.

Qu_Klaani wrote:I just wanted to point out this from the other thread:

Grand Army
10 Systems Army + additional (3,000,000 +/-)

Its good to see an increase from that ridiculous 1.2 million figure but even then 3 million is no way near enough to fight a galactic war for 3 years, if it was going to be increased it should have been done properly, there's no reason (unless LFL insisted, and then its their fault) for such a miniscule number of clones. Either that figure should have at least a couple more 0s on the end, Im missing something, or the clones really were the minority of the republic military, which would be disapointing anyway. Don't get me wrong, Im really glad of the article, with the clone wars over it seemed likely that we'd go back to endless amounts of post rotj material, so to see authors with a real passion and interest in the era still working on it and filling in the many gaps is great...but three million clones, thats less than most of the major powers in the second world war.

Gladiuus wrote:Yeah, as great as this article is, three million is a ridiculously small number. Unless, like you said, clones make up a very small part of the entire military (and little evidence points to this) the number should be in the tens of billions at least.

FTeik wrote:Hmm, when did a handful of Jedi take on an entire army and didn't get its butt kicked?

Special operations, my a..! Are all the clones now commandos or ARCs?

Small, highly mobile units may be favoured today, but we can see in Iraq how quick a military can reach its limits.

Siege of Saleumici? Battle of Jabiim? Those were battles lasting for weeks, if not months.

And the CIS-leadership must have been truly incompetent to a degree impossible to describe. One has to wonder, how they made it till Duro with Durge's Lance.

nexubiir wrote: Yeah, 3 million would be used up right and quick just attending to capitals ships alone, not to mention fighters and the other roles besides combat infantry.

And then to say that 3 million clone troopers are SO good that they took on an army of "quadrillions" of CIS Droids is, frankly, silly. No matter what their skill level was, or how well they sabotaged enemy plants, 3 million is NEVER going to even out to quadrillions. In this case, quantity far outdoes quality. And that's assuming that most Battle Droids are FAR inferior to a Clone Trooper. This has been shown to not be the case, by the films, among other EU sources. It's not as though the droids drop like flies as soon as a squad of clones appears on the scene.

Kudzu wrote:I think three million is too little as well.

Leto II wrote:It is too little.

Simply look no further than three months post-Geonosis, in the text of Hard Contact: there are several direct quotes and referents stating that the GAR is "millions strong"...that's simply accounting for the 1.2 million immediately-ready-to-deploy Kaminoan clones in AOTC, along with the "millions" more clones right then undergoing final performance evaluations planetside (per Inside the Worlds of AOTC).

Jump ahead three years, with nearly a dozen major production facilities across the galaxy pumping out troops -- plus likely still more secondary and tertiary ones -- we're looking at tens of millions, fully in situ field-stationed. Labyrinth of Evil likewise mentions a second and third generation of clones delivered to the Republic after Geonosis...potential millions more right there, circa 20 ABG when the first Clone Commanders were getting integrated.

President Sharky wrote: I in fact have one complaints, but it is a complaint none the less. The 3,000,000 figure for the entire Grand Army is still way to minimalistic for a galactic-scale war. No matter how skilled the clones are and no matter how the lines shift in war, it is utterly unrealistic to think that a mere 3 million clones could have fought off not quadrillions, but quintillions (reference: ROTS Incredible Cross-Sections) of droid fighters and battledroids. If we take the very conservative estimate of 100,000,000,000,000,000 (100 Quardrillon) battledroids in CIS service and apply the maximalist 200:1 droids to clones ratio to it, we still get 500,000,000,000,000 clones. That's five hundred trillion. Now I understand that this may be an overly maximalist estimate for the GAR, I just wanted to point out how the 200:1 droids:clone ratio does not work as support for a smaller clone army. Because even a GAR 10 million or a 100 million strong is still grossly outnumbered. Don't forget that GAR clones were used as police forces on Coruscant. Do you realize how many clones would be needed simply to effectively police a world with a population in the tens of trillions? It must therefore be assumed that the majority of occupational and non-major military actions were indeed carried out by volunteers from federalized local systems armies. Sorry, but 3,000,000 is still too little for a Galaxy with 1,000,000 inhabited worlds.

Brian_Babtech wrote:Good point about the Acclamators and ISDs. And those would just be ISDs, not other ships like Executor, assault cruisers, bases, small garrisons, etc. How many troops do Venators carry? How many hundreds or thousands were in the battle at Coruscant?

Those of you who think a clone can take on even dozens of standard battle droids need to watch ROTS again. I seem to recall them struggling with a similar number (to their own forces) of droids immediately after Kenobi's duel with Grievous. And at Kashyyyk.
And in the Clone Wars cartoons, droids were overpowering clones until Kenobi arrived, in the episode with Durge (sp?).

[...][Three posts later:] In other words, those of you who think 3,000,000 troops is enough to wage war in Star Wars, have been watching too much Star Trek.
Without air or space support (many times *more* personnel), 3 million clone troopers would have a hard time beating China.
Fact.

Diesel213 wrote:The 3 million number would have to be for one "Grand Army", with others in existance in order to justify this incredibly low number. The problem there was the whole speech with Palpatine creating a "Grand Army of the Republic" (singular). Further, I don't see how the movies themselves even support this 200:1 kill ratio or what have you. We saw many clonetroopers go down in battle with the droids and not kill 200 each time. Unless the clonetroopers that we see in actual battle is somehow not indicitive of their actual abilites.

Quite frankly Ossus nailed my feelings on it as well.

Jim Raynor, in his second post wrote:
[In response to jedimasterED] Half a billion is 500 million, which is almost 100 times what you calculated. And even that is too little.

Borleias wrote: I'd be BLUNT.

From what I've read so far, your conclusion (GAR in the millions range) seems predetermined and then you randomly added apparently unjustified assumptions that
1) Clones are at least 200x superior (not just superior, but 200x so) to Droids (which is actually against the AOTC novelization which clearly says that a standard droid is almost as good and a superbattledroid is superior in combat ability) ...
2) decided Separatist officers are incompetents while Republic officers are gods (never mind what we saw in AOTC, in which the clones are in old style marching phalanxes just begging to be cut down by heavy weapons. And I really doubt the quality of Jedi leadership considering Mace Windu's wonderful Jedi deployment in AOTC, which led to their near annihilation.)...
3) and added a huge bunch of defective droids and loaded a few billion sabotaged droids to the mix, then tried to imply the Separatists are not as big as other sources claim them to be.

Even after adding all of them together, the math doesn't hold up.

Renegade_Paladin wrote: Yes, but think of the sheer number of inhabited worlds in the Republic. You do not deploy an army evenly (I am reminded of Napoleon asking one of his generals if he wished to prevent smuggling when presented with such a plan of defense), but three million is less than three soldiers per world at the most conservative estimate of the size of the Republic. More men than that were fielded simply for the push into Germany in 1944-1945; do you honestly think that such numbers would be sufficient to launch an offensive across multiple worlds?

Nightmare1 wrote:[...]
As for the size of the G.A.R... the three millions is a ludicrous number. If you think a few million troops would be enough for a galactic scale war and be plausible in context, your head isn't screwed on right. Heck, you can increase the number of the Clonetroopers by a factor of a thousand, decrease the number of Separatist droids by the same amount, and you still have a disparity of at the very least several hundreds to one. That's also totally ignoring that it takes ten *years* to make a new batch of clones, while even a single factory like the one on Geonosis could produce millions of droids in months, counting very, VERY low.

It's not about imagination. It's simply not possible anymore than the sun actually being a great big green hairy kiwifruit sprouting its juice over us to make us grow into nice little redhat mushrooms.

Rawtooth wrote:Ok, I did some math recently which works out the CIS-GAR disparity with a lot of favors towards the Republic that still shows at least the raw numbers are on the Seppies side. If we assume that the Separatists reported quintillions instead of quadrillions, thus increasing the apparent size of their force by a factor of 1000, and we only assume they built the bare-bones to get “quintillions” which means that the raw over-all total of droids for the Separatist army is 2 quadrillion.

Then if we assume that ¾ of the entire army was built half-assed or wasn’t completed at all, we still have 500,000,000,000,000 droids that are fully working and operating at peak ability. Dividing 500 trillion by 3 million gets you... 166,666,666.6 repeating droids per 1 clone.

At that point ‘shifting theaters of war’ don’t matter simply because the Grand Army can’t be at the thousands of different planets which the Seppies can attack due to the sheer mass of troops they have. Quantity does matter over quality when you can attack every where the enemy isn’t. And since per droid to clone-trooper the Separatists have either almost as good, better, or obscenely better in just pure infantry combat, which is how regular battle-droids, super battle droids, and droidekas rank against clone-troopers…

Mind you, this isn’t even counting the fact that even six months into the war the Republic still hasn’t gotten it’s industrial advantage into play while the Separatist government has been churning out ships and droids since day one. Mind you, this isn’t even counting the fact that droids can operate longer in the field compared to clones since droids only need to be recharged like batteries while clones need sleep, food, water, and proper sleeping conditions.

Look, I love imagination, I love the look and feel of Star Wars, I love the heroic story of a smaller army defeating a larger one, but… simply put the Separatists would have conquered the Republic very quickly. The only explanation for what happened during the Clone Wars if the Republic had an army 3 million strong at the beginning was that Palpatine didn’t want the Republic demolished.

DarthBoba wrote:
Also: 3 million clone troopers defeating an army of quadrillions of battle droids and then defeating a "traitorous" Jedi Order-all while Palpatine is in direct command of them-is quite the achievement, isn't it? The war, in addition to destroying potential enemies of Palpatine, made Palpatine appear practically a hero of the kind the Republic had not seen in a very long time. This one man, not a Force-sensitive by public knowledge, held together a rotting Republic with his iron will, won a war against a hugely superior force that many believed would destroy the Republic, and then put down a "rebellion" by an order of magic-wielding superheroes.

MasterControlProgram wrote:

nexubiir wrote:Ah, so now you're going with "It's all make-believe, it doesn't have to make sense." If you feel that way fin. But don't participate in a disagreement about "suspension of disbelief" if you're just going to cop-out with "it's just a moooovieee" when the going gets tough.

applause

puresabacc wrote:

jedimasterED wrote:So you can imagine a scenario where this [the 3 million number] works out!

Words cannot describe how utterly foolish that statement is. Even if it is a joke, your not answering the question. How do the Clones overcome such a numerical disadvantage without each being able to take on the population of a moderately sized planet, each of whom has battle armor, ingrained fighting ability, and a large blaster weapon?

johnthejedi24" wrote:I think there is a qoute from LFL that there will never be a straight-up answer to the number of clone-troopers in the GAR, they purposely leave it vague. Besides, I think that it would require a HELL of alot more than just 3 million clone troopers to combat a GALAXY wide war. The number is probably by the time of ROTS in the hundreds of milllions to the tens of billions, if not more. I am Not dissing you Karen, I love your work, and I think hard contact is a great book, but where did you come up with the 3 million figure? It just seems way too low.

Jonas-the-Jedi wrote:Hi guys,

Long time lurker, first time poster, and I feel that I might (inadvertently) offend some people, but please know that I'm not doing it from malice.

I've got a question; how can anyone support the 3 million GAR figure with a straight face?

Have you even thought of its implications? Do you realise that Palpatine has only three times the Army size of North Korea? North Korea, not a planet, not a system of planets, but a relatively small country on this one planet.

Honestly, when did Star Wars fans suddenly morph into the most deluded of all Sci-Fi fanatics; Star Trek fans? When did we suddenly stop thinking for ourselves and say; hey that doesn't make any kind of logical sense, none whatsoever. When did the entire community decide to have a labotamy and accept this kind of ... well I don't know what to label it.

Sure there are 'rationalisations', the figure only applies to Clones, and specifically ARC troopers which are really analogous to Earth's special forces, which actually makes sense, but only now it doesn't. Suddenly we are told that this is it. And you accept this?

Rogue Follower wrote:Just going to pop my .02 creds in the machine.

Remember, the GAR didn't defeat the droid army, Vader shut it down. There could still be millions or billions of battle droids undestroyed.

Though I believe that 3-6 million clones is a bit low.

QuentinGeorge wrote:It's pretty much patently obvious from ROTS - we see clones fighting on the battlefield, clones policing the streets of Coruscant (you'd need millions just for that) and clones manning the guns in Venators, for jimminy's sake.

Pelranius wrote:Just treat three million as three million army corps.

Daniel K wrote:[...]

* About the only way to explain a disparity as great as the one potrayed in this article is to claim that the Republic used a LOT of orbital bombardment. This would mean the Jedi sanctioned and ordered planetary depopulation events on a galactic scale. If that is the case, the rat bastards deserved to be exterminated like vermin.

* LoE credits the Seperatist with 6,000 systems, but AOTC implies at the time of signing the agreement there are over 10,000 systems with another 10,000 to join.

* Depite what we commonly see, the key infastructure and important parts of the system are going to be in space, not on the habitable planet.

Make of this what you will, I'm of to get insider 84

LTNowis wrote: Agreed, we should probably just throw this number out. In the long run, this won't be a big deal. It'll join the ridiculously low estimates for Coruscant's population, and we'll move on.

Anyways, there have been too many clone deployments for the number to be realistic. In addition to the all the fierce engagements in the cartoon, novels, and comics, there were a bunch of big battles in Clone Wars Adventrues, the Boba Fett books, and some short stories.[Note: In later threads, he's obviously changed his mind and now supports the 3 million figure.]

darthvader88 wrote:i don't know about you, but 3 million is just too low a number for a Galaxy with a Million Planets, maybe even more. maybe it was 300 Quadrillion Clones......

ConservativeSoldier wrote: Well, I personally don't feel the number is adequate, particularly when placed in the context of other military forces during the Star Wars timeframe. The Yuuzhan Vong were throwing billions and billions of forces at the New Republic/Galactic Alliance. And they didn't have the capacity to replicate themselves on the scale that the GAR did.

Fortunately, the article that Karen and Ryan did, provided some maneuvering room with the number. I see the number of clonetroopers being somewhere in the billions.

Mange wrote: I must say that I find it very strange as it seems as if little or no research was conducted before the article was written. Movie reference works, such as the Inside the Worlds of Star Wars, Episode II - Attack of the Clones: The Complete Guide to the Incredible Locations expanded on the cloning of the Grand Army, saying that the cloning facilities on Kamino were equipped to produce "millions" of clones and that "millions" of clones were already undergoing tests.

After Palpatine announced the creation of the Grand Army of the Republic, the cloning operation would no longer have to be kept secret, and more resources would have been available to research how to speed up the cloning process and to expand the operations. There's a war on a galactic scale going on, and without any reserves, how would the GAR cope with losses? How would the GAR control the population of CIS worlds that has been occupied? With all due respect, I don't find it enough to say "It's Star Wars" in a condescending fashion.

Three million men, that's what Germany had to invade Russia with during World War II. Thankfully, Germany lost the war (no offense intended towards the present day Germans visiting this board of course), but trying to apply that number on a galactic scale without reserves... that's mind-boggling.

Painrack wrote:[...]
3 million infantry soldiers on its own is simply too small an army to fight on a galactic scale, and that's what the Insider guide is telling us.Hell, 3 million infantry soldiers is just barely enough to fight a battle for a planet, and the way Insider presents its, the 3 million would include headquarters troops, as opposed to just plain infantry.[...]

Vympel wrote: I think it's obvious where my view lies- the idea that an army of a mere 3,000,000 could stand up to quintillions of droids is so mindnumbingly absurd as to beggar belief. Never mind the kill ratios proposed by the Insider article bear absolutely no resemblance to the films or the EU that has come before (just look at the clones go down in droves on Utapau!), never mind the canon novelization statement that a super battle droid is more than a match for a clone!

Icehawk181 wrote:The three million number for the GAR is clearly flawed no matter what level of rationalization you employ to defend it.

Charlemagne19 wrote: I agree that the 3,000,000 number doesn't seem like it could wage the war we've seen depicted.

However, I have faith canon will right itself on its own even if it WERE this forthe entire war (which I don't think anyone at Lucasfilm believes)

As stated, there could be a pied piper indcident we know where nearly all Battle droids were destroyed in one titanic swoop.

We can't judge all the facts because they can be made up at a whim

DarthDubya05 wrote:If you ask me, Karen Traviss should go back and rework some numbers.

Lord_Hydronium wrote:Considering that three million or any equally low number is expressly contradicted by Inside the Worlds of AOTC, it's odd that this is even still an argument.

Karen Traviss wrote: [On the Galactic Senate message board:]
I've spent way too much time addressing the aggressively-expressed obsessions of fewer than a dozen people. (I counted them at the time. Some have disappeared, I'm told, but I'll be generous with the estimate.) I think I've explained my position fully, and sourced it fully. And LFL are perfectly happy with it. I'm not going to waste any more time on it beyond a blog entry to accompany Odds, which is actually for the 100,000-plus Insider readers out there to help them examine the issues in SW and the real world.

Stofsk wrote:

thejester wrote:Er...does anyone else find her livejournal avatar somewhat....disturbing?

There's nothing about this whole matter which I don't find disturbing.

Karen Traviss wrote:Something got right up our collective noses. So we vented our spleen to each other, unable to target the object of our shared rage - not with the ordnance we preferred, anyway - and felt a bit better. And it's at times like this that I say thank God for Mando'a.

Developing the language has saved my sanity more than once. Driven to the brink of ripping someone's trachea out of their pitifully unworthy neck, I can now step back from the precipice by rushing to my spreadsheet and creating a few more choice insults and anatomically impossible instructions.

Master of Ossus wrote:I'm going to go through this thread:

+http://boards.theforce.net/Literature/b ... 19/p9/?214

at TFN to dig up the old quotes, there.

Karen Travis wrote:For those of you who haven't followed yesterday's blog thread, we strayed onto clone numbers. Knowing that some folk just read the main blog entry and don't trawl through the replies because it takes a lot of time, I'm going to repost it in one chunk here. It's about how using real-world logic selectively to argue against something leads you into a sequence that destroys the whole edifice.

So flame me - although you'll have a hard job hitting the target, because I'll shove Ryan Kaufman in the way of the jet, just like Boba showed me... Plus, I have a nice new Verp...

________________________________________________

Digest of my replies from yesterday:

I hope nobody's ever put off asking questions. I don't mind what folks ask as long as they're prepared to hear the answers. You know why the number of clones will never work out right? Because there are a number of things already floating around that make the two ends of the equation irreconcilable using real world numbers.

We know how big Kamino is, we had existing clone numbers, but we also have mega-figures for droids. The two don't mix. But what we did know was that the war would never run its course, and so most of those droids would never see battle. So that's how we took the numbers we had and retconned them the way we did.

If you took this to its logical conclusion, the numbers of clone soldiers needed would have been many billions. Kamino is about half as big again as Earth (population 6 billion, with lots of land masses) and a waterworld. It has a billion inhabitants. So - and this is where it takes the fun out of it - real science and numbers means that they could never have produced and trained anything like that number of clones, because the infrastructure alone would have been unworkable. In fact, the whole physics and economics of them having an advanced industrial world doesn't stack up - using hard facts.

And they wouldn't have had the resources or infrastructure to create huge training and exercise areas, either. And clones produced by that method wouldn't have been functional enough as human beings to operate on the battlefield. And you can't teach everything by flash training; you need them to do it for real. And...keeping secret the supply of the hardware alone would have been impossible. And...

So...bang goes the whole clone wars thanks to reality. And that's why I get a litle impatient when I get folks flaming me about the numbers. They're being selective. They don't look at the whole equation, which is a lot more complex than dividing droids by clones!

_____________________________________

So there you have it, folks. Whatever figure we opted for would have been wrong in the real world at one end of the equation or the other. Ryan and I settled for middle ground with the numbers we had to work with, and even as someone who's worked in the defence world, I could live with it in context.

Continuity is always going to be full of stuff that doesn't fit to start with, and requires some sleight of hand to cover the seams at a later date. If you want to know how continuity actually works, see this essay from my LJ blog. Continuity is much harder than reality, because there's no...causality.

Lord Poe wrote:Something to consider: Besides jamesgilmer, who is responsible for a sizable portion of her fanwank on LJ, and besides Dark Moose, how many different people regularly interact with her on these "talifan" rants? Is it...more than a dozen?

Commander5052 wrote:Master, I'm a Fando, but I do agree with you when I say that I couldn't find any evidence [of Karen being flamed] either.
I even scoured the old GGAR article thread to find evidence, and came up empty.

Commander5052 wrote: Starkiller, if anyone has done anything to Karen, I hope they feel guilty.
Thing is, we've found no evidence.
If my fellow Fandos, or anyone, have any evidence, please present it.

Master_Keralys, in response to Commander 5052 wrote:There is none. I don't know how many times I've repeated that lately, but there is none - what little bit there might have been was completely destroyed by the overzealous mods at TOS. It's a sad state of affairs. Moreover, I don't think there was terribly much to begin with - anything that was said in the vein of flaming was said at other places, where she (as far as we know) does NOT go. So that line is worth dropping.

But more than that is the realization that Karen was not driven away by flaming. She may have chosen to prolong her staying away because of how heated things have been, and I think all of us who've interacted with her know that she would have no desire to be caught in the middle of these kinds of discussions, much less to have people attempt to use her as a pawn, as some undoubtedly would. If I were her, I'd stay clear till this blew over and everyone caught their breaths... then come back and act like nothing ever happened - if someone brings it up, say, "Yeah, hey, sorry that caused such a mess around here," or something to that effect, and let it go at that.

I think there's a general consensus at this point that nothing was done to attack her. And in fact, Havac never said that anything was done wrong - just that he wanted to clean up the way the boards became after she left, so that if she did want to come back, she could do so without it being such a madhouse.

With that perspective on things, is this a "treaty" that everyone can put their names to?

- Keralys

Havac (several posts later) wrote: Exactly, Keralys. I checked what discussion I could find -- I saw no flaming initially, just questions, Karen and Ryan acting a bit dismissive, which I think was because they knew something like this could happen and wanted to get off the topic quickly, and then they left and the argument heated up. However, after she left, the board situation has gotten very bad, with a lot of tension between the two parties. I know that I've seen her flamed -- President_Sharky trolled over to the ARC thread and ripped Ms. Traviss personally for her response. A couple others and I responded with the Fandalorian sense of humor, which didn't help and for which I apologize. Things got fairly fiery in there, so I know there is bad blood. I want to get rid of that so that if Karen wants to come back, she'll have a decent environment, and if she doesn't, the boards will still benefit.

Karen Traviss wrote:I use my VIP blog (Cannon to the Right...) to kick ideas around; to get people thinking, especially about writing, because most readers never get to talk to writers and find out how they do their job...

to get people thinking

VT-16 wrote:

to get people thinking

Well, she did succeed in that particular aspect. Just not what she wanted them to think.

NRS Guardian wrote:Hell, this board could have come up with a better guide to the GAR than Kaufman and Traviss did.