Minimum tech base

[EnterpriseSovereign]

A scenario which has been bugging me for a while is this- if an SW power, like the Empire or New Republic had to send an expedition to the milky way galaxy to establish a colony and/or bases but could not receive reinforcements or supplies on the scale they'd need due to the distances involved (say the trip takes a number of weeks), what's the likely size and composition of the fleet they'd need to bring? They'd be able to receive shipments of supplies and stuff periodically, but they wouldn't be able to have small ships come and go as they pleased- the shipments are mainly to get things started until the colony is self-sufficient.

Bearing in mind the end goal is to have a completely self-sufficient setup to produce SW-level ships and stuff, with the only resources they have to work with are what they bring with them, and the raw materials that they can harvest and/or trade for, the idea being the large part of what they need to produce has to be done at this end. Assuming they want to be able to crank out fully functional ships and other vehicles within a few months of arriving, and larger scale things within a few years, and that they have access to at least half a dozen to a dozen unclaimed systems that have habitable and/or mineable planets/asteroids, how huge an undertaking would this be? Given they can bring anything that can be hauled by ship, and as many as they want (either all at once or as part of the shipments), what's the minimum size they would bring, and in what order? They'd be able to bring as many scientists\engineers\droids as they needed to.

Since they'll be in completely uncharted territory, they'll bring a substantial military force since they don't know what the locals are going to be like, what kind of ratio of military to civilian craft is this likely to entail.

Granted, World Devastators would definitely take care of production short term, but what about in the longer term, when crewing these ships becomes a concern and Kamino-style cloning can only go so far, how many ordinary civilians would they need to form colonies from which they could train/recruit personnel? Is this sort of thing even possible, or because of SW tech being what it is, can it only be produced when a large chunk of the galaxy is available due to the sheer complexity of assembling everything from the ground up?

Anyway, this went on longer than I intended, I hope I manage to get my point across

[Batman]

The inability to receive reinforcements on the scale they need means the expedition is doomed from the word go.The whole point of making an operation self-sufficcient is it not needing reinforcements.

[madd0ct0r]

on the short timescales you're talkng about, they'll have to ship everything to do the raw material processing and manufacturing prebuilt - that's a shit load of stuff.

[FaxModem1]

Essentially, you're talking about something like Outbound Flight, which purpose was to go beyond the SW galaxy and explore, make a new colony somewhere, and go where no one has gone before.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Kind of, but unlike Outbound flight, the colonies that would result wouldn't necessarily be connected to the republic/empire because of the distances involved. Because they're in a different galaxy altogether, they're weeks from their original galaxy thus are having to build an entire infrastructure from what they can bring with them and/or fabricate from what they find.

Since it's a new galaxy and they have no idea what they'll be up against, they'll have to send along a sizable military force to protect these new colonies as they build a power base- Outbound Flight was able to defend itself by having the Jedi manning the weapons to link minds, but it wouldn't be able to do more than defend a single colony once it had arrived- unless there was a way of having individual dreadnoughts detach and reattach to the central core, but even then those ships were considerably inferior to say, an ISD in size and capabilities. Since the industrial capabilities of the Empire are pretty enormous, there's no question they could put together something like this. As an aside, the largest cargo ship I could find, the PCL 27, could carry 160,000 metric tons and seems the most suitable for the task, with 6 months of supplies for the crew for the journey. I'd be interested to know if there were any better ships for the task and how many of these it would take.

I'm thinking that the SW expedition arrives in a section of the Milky Way several hundred light years from the AQ/BQ powers- far enough that it would take several weeks for locals to reach them even if they somehow learn of their arrival- since they'll be carrying plenty of probe droids they'll be able to map out their surroundings pretty throroughly and listen in to galactic comm traffic. They'll want to keep as low a profile as possible at first until they establish a strong foothold & build up their strength before making contact with the indigenous spacefaring civilisations.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Seriously, that's the largest freighter you could find? Go look up the Lucrehulks, they could carry something like 50 million tonnes combined in both cargo arms.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Seriously, that's the largest freighter you could find? Go look up the Lucrehulks, they could carry something like 50 million tonnes combined in both cargo arms.

Can't believe they didn't show up on searches for cargo ships, the Lucrehulk-class LH-3210 cargo freighter shows up as having 25 million. The core ship is helpfully listed as having 66,000,000 cubic metres capacity, as opposed to showing the tonnage

[Batman]

Why is tonnage necessarily more important than cubeage? The ability to lift a billion tons isn't all that useful when the equpment massing that bilion tons won't fit in your cargo hold. (not that 25/50 million tons-or 66 million cubic metres, for that matter-is all that impressive given the size of Wars vessels, but 160,000 tons isn't even all that impressive by modern world standards).

[EnterpriseSovereign]

That all depends on the density of the cargo; I looked up real-world cargo ships to see how much freight the largest ones carry- it would help if TEU was an exact unit. Of course, what we don't really know is whether SW cargo ships are internally divided into individual cargo bays or have one large cargo hold.

As for actual manufacturing, is there sufficient information on the capabilities of the molecular furnaces in the world devastators to determine whether it could produce anything other than military vehicles? Assuming it had a full set of schematics and plenty of raw materials, theoretically it could cut down on the amount of machinery needed for the expedition massively.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I would think the limit would be the tooling initially present in the WD and the programming on board. However, since the WD's can "grow" they must by default be able to manufacture hull materials and non-military production line type equipment.

[Imperial528]

IIRC World Devastators are one of those sorts of ships that come equipped with a basic "universal factory" such that if need be they can add on to themselves with more sophisticated manufacturing bays.

Hell, since the things are intelligent (they are giant droids after all) it's possible that if one got "smart" enough it could design its own ships and hardware to produce, as they are capable of adding on to themselves at will provided the time and materials. It's even said in the guide to vehicles and vessels that no WD in service is like another, unless just manufactured.