Not really. Lots of empires, particularly fictional ones, are focused on conquest and expansion even at the cost of stability.
I don't think that's a good approach to this sort of thing. And after all, we know that the Republic endured for a twenty-five-thousand years. So obviously there can be a stable form of government that involves all of these pieces, even if most of it is probably very decentralized, which appears to be the situation, given the small size of Clone Army.
The problem the Empire has is one of centralization.
People will centralize power because they have to, not because they want to. Humans generally prefer decentralized power, even if it's somewhat more authoritarian, because at least then the government is local and part of the tribe. Palpatine obtained his immense power by creating the danger of the other, then centralizing power and bottle necking it all into the hands of him and his trusted few. Unfortunately, that is not only something that is next to impossible to manage, but it is also something the very people he rules will begin to resist after a while. Their natural preference would be to decentralize that power from Palpatine, who would then immediately respond by increasingly centralizing that power to prevent them taking what he already has.
Hence the Secret Police, the Inquisitors, and so on.
Well, skimming the wiki, it looks like the largest official formation they have is a sector group, but they proably wouldn't rush one of those right into this, the initial wave would likely be a fleet or two.
A Sector Group is actually a huge dedication on the part of the Empire. There are just over a thousand Sectors in the Empire, with one Sector Group per Sector. We also know that there are 25,000 built ISDs, so that would suggest roughly 25 full Sector Groups, more or less. A Sector Group has at least 2,400 ship and generally has another 1,600 ships. For a total of 4,000 ships. 24 of those are ISDs.
Honestly, anyone put in charge of this invasion would be lucky to be given a full Sector Group.
The reasoning is rooted both in politics and astrology.
First, you it's best to compare the Empire to the British Empire. Not just because they all sound like a certain mod here, but because of how they maintain power; through their navies. Of course, a Space Navy is different, but it appears to work much the same way in Star Wars. Navies are good because they allow for power projection. That was a major advantage the British had in the 19th and 20th century. The problem they encountered however, was that as soon as they took over an area, they then had to defend it. That meant that those mobile navies became far less mobile. The USA has a similar problem today, needing to monitor unruly areas or key transport routes.
So the Empire might have four or five million ships on paper and in space...but they cannot even launch 1% of that at the Federation without serious problems. Because those same ships maintain the peace, the flow of energy, the flow of goods, and the security that the Empire needs to merely function. At the height of the Galactic Rebellion, Mon Calamari was operating in open rebellion of the Empire and it would have required a Full Sector Group to match the main fleet of the Rebels. The problem was that at this point, the Empire was already fighting so many brushfires across the galaxy, that the Empire did not have those forces to spare.
In this case, the Grand Moff given this task is going to probably decide that it should be the responsibility of the closest Moff. Now, there are only a handful of reasons why the person under you is a Moff:
- Family Connections -- The person is well connected.
- Rising Star -- The person has managed to impress his superiors to get to his position.
- It was His Turn -- It was His Turn.
Following that, they may either be loyal or disloyal.
Following that, they have the following command style:
- Excitable and Competent -- Will take risks and is very good at managing those risks. Can be brilliant commanders. Can also fuck you over if they mess up.
- Relaxed and Competent -- Steady, good commanders. They take less risks. Very safe commanders. Of course, they can also be complacent.
- Relaxed and Incompetent -- Lazy and probably stupid. Will flee at the first sign of a risk and blame everyone else. Good enough for safe sectors. Probably.
- Excitable and Incompetent -- Have absolutely no idea what they're doing, but they'll gamble that Star Destroyer anyway. The worst, possible commander.
Now for a Grand Moff, they don't want a rising star, who is likely to be less loyal, very good at what he does, and willing to take huge risks. That's just a whole handbag of trouble. Best to keep them around the troublesome Rebels. You probably don't want someone who is there mostly because of their family connections, impart because they probably lack wisdom and experience, impart because they're more likely to be lazy and stupid.
That means a Grand Moff's best option is someone who is Relaxed, Competent, Loyal, and was promoted either because he was a rising star who cooled or because his ticket came up. The Grand Moff won't have to babysit him, but nor will he have to worry about his Moff running off and doing something stupid. Or worse, something heroic. Nothing worse for a Grand Moff than a heroic Moff who might actually pull it off. Might make the Emperor wonder why he isn't the Grand Moff.
So chances are, the Moff put in charge will probably be the 'by-the-numbers' type, who is assured of his military superiority, and is in no rush to prove himself. That Moff in turn, will probably pick an Admiral who is much like himself to command the fleet personally, since the Moff is going to be in charge of the actual Sector he is in charge of. Said Admiral will then be given a portion of his superior's forces. This will probably be three Superiority Fleets and a Bombard Fleet. That's roughly two thousand ships. That would certainly be enough to establish a beachhead in the Alpha Quadrant.
As a counterpoint, the UFP had 627 ships that were 'elements' of the Second and Fifth Fleet. The Dominion fleet was twice as large. My guess is that roughly a thousand ships might equate to full fleet. We know of ten UFP fleets, so we might presume about 10,000 combat capable ships. We also know that the UFP launched fighters against the Dominion in that same battle. The fighters were ordered to make hits and then break off into squadrons and retreat.
Assuming Sisko launched a full wing (ie, 200 fighters) against the Cardassians per wave, we're talking about 800 to 1,800 fighters. The low-end is from Nog's report that the first and second waves had already been sent, with the third and fourth waves on stand-bye. The high end remarks on the Dominion report that Sisko had sent nine waves of fighters at them. If however, Sisko was only suffering low losses in his wave attacks, he could actually reform those fighters into extra waves. So there were effectively 4 wings that performed five wave attacks on the Dominion fleet.
Going with those numbers:
UFP Fleet Size (Average)
- Capital Ship: ~1,000 capital ships
- Fighters: ~1,600 - 3,600 Fighters
I admit it makes more sense for the UFP to have closer to four times as many fighters as they do capital ships, but then again ST doesn't seem very fighter-heavy intensive and fighters may only be useful in certain situations. Then again, we have no assurances that Sisko didn't have almost two thousand fighters present at the battle.
I doubt most of those ships would be ready to engage for a sudden Imperial invasion, but the Second, Third, and Tenth fleet seemed relatively close by with significant numbers. The Klingons had also deployed close to a third of their total military force, a presumably 3,300 ships, to the Cardassian space they conquered. Assuming a similar build-up for the UFP, we might see around 3,000 ships, given the hostile forces amassing in the area.
So the Empire could easily be facing down around 6,000 capital ships and around ten thousand UFP fighters.
Good. This is the sort of clarification that is needed. How it is by nature unreasonable? I don't think it is, and that is why I asked, because all sorts of crazy things could be considered reasonable based on the standpoint you are looking from. I was thinking of how a real person who likes Star Trek, but isn't a big fan might think.
So on how they would act in war time. Well, off the top of my head I'd figure that Section 31 and the above board intelligence of the Federation would try to get into contact with the Rebels and other enemies of the Empire. After all getting the Empire into a two-front war would be advantageous to both the Feds and the Rebels et al. And the Cardies would be even more willing to play dirty, and so are the Romuluans.
As I remember pretty sure the Federation has backed rebel movements during war time.
Intelligence powers undermining the Empire is indeed reasonable.
Federation vs empire, in a vacuum.....maybe. In this scenario, no, not likely. Even assuming generally equal firepower ton for ton, the empire just has more tons and more ships, with greater FTL speed, and the federation can't easily devote resources to trying to fight the empire without compromising thier other commitments.
The Federation actually has little to worry about. The Klingon Skirmish was more about the Cardassians and the Dominion than it was about the Federation. Most of their systems are protected by local defenses and the ships that do patrol the area can be pretty light and thin. The UFP's greatest disadvantage here is that they have very little strategic depth from the direction of the threat and even less so due to the FTL speeds that the Empire can possibly achieve.
As for ship firepower, it mostly depends.
I think it's a fair point to presume that the ISDs are more heavily armed, but they are also based on the Battleship or Gunship design. They essentially have to get closer to make those shots. Larger ST cruisers and battle cruisers actually have the option of using torpedoes from a greater range. They clearly can't always do that and they often move into closer ranges for combat, but the fact is that the largest ships will have a very good reason to pelt the SW ships with as much torpedoes as they can before they close in for an engagement. That won't always be useful and it won't always be the case, but it's a good tool to have. And even in closer engagements, those torpedoes are powerful enough to deal serious damage to an ISD, even on a lower setting.
The downside is that yes, the ISD is far more powerful than one ST ship in a gunfight. Of course, the ISD itself is worth more than a whole squadron. Which is generally about 60 ships. That can vary of course, depending upon the line, but part of it has to do with the fact that a ship in a squadron can be anywhere from hot off the assembly at two years...or over two hundred years. Given the nature of the fleet, we'll probably see a higher concentration of ISDs and other heavy cruisers, but there is only so much to be handed out.
They're already skirmishing with the Klingons and need at least some forces there to at least hold the line, and if they move too many ships in they're likely going to have dominion ships come pouring out of the wormhole, so they also need a force there to keep guard. Presuming the Empire is halfway sane and aim for just the federation (or just the cardies) rather than trying to attack the entire quadrant at once, they could easily cause enough damage to force the federation to sue for peace, if not just flat out conquer them.
Ooh, meant to make a note of that. No Dominion in this scenario.
That sounds like just a biased sample set, though. Yeah, the empire has a fair number of terrible officers, but they've got a decent number of good ones too. Even in the more cartoonish bits of Disney canon, the average level of capability seemed alright, with a few geniuses and a few fools mixed in.
Saying the empire's officers are poor as a whole just doesn't seem to fit the evidence, any more than saying all the federation admirals are nuts and incompetent just because we see a whole bunch of them that are.
It's the culture I'm looking at, actually. The way the Empire works, via corruption, connections, threats, and personal power...you have lots of poor officers who make it into the upper ranks because they can buy their way in. That's less likely in Starfleet. Of course, it's probably worse in the Klingon Empire or about the same for the Romulan Star Empire.
And....then what? Like, they could maybe help a bit, trade technologies and the like, but they don't have anything that's going to be an outright game changer. Transporters and the like, while useful, are sill blocked by shields and we've known for ages that anything that's important to the empire has a shield in place.
Actually, the greatest thing Starfleet can do is provide training and basic weapons. Or supplies for important assassinations or raids. Starfleet doesn't need to bring down the entire Empire, they just need to keep the Empire distracted. If a revolution or civil war erupts, all the better, but the real goal will be to prevent local forces from being diverted to the war efforts. That can be done.
The cardies are too busy getting their butts kicked by the Klingons, and while the Romulans will play dirty, they have no particular reason to do so on behalf of the federation. Remember, when the dominion invaded, they just signed a non-aggression pact and let the feds deal with it themselves, and the Empire is arguably less malevolent than the dominion.
They actually aren't. The Dominion is far smaller, actually less aggressive, and far more diplomatic. They're much more xenophobic and probably more prone to genocide or biological weapons, but for the Dominion, it was a chess game. I agree that the Romulans will sit it out, but not for long. They'll wait to see where the winds are shifting or if they're going to be directly threatened.
Eh, they can presumably only fit a limited number through, but it's not like some kind portal that only opens every so often, they can get a constant stream of ships through and unless it's immediately surrounded and interdicted by hostile ships, which it won't be, they can easily secure both ends of the portal in a fairly short period of time.
I expect they can establish a foothold.
True, but then they don't need much. As far as I know and can tell, the federation has a lot of it's key facilities and materials concentrated in a fairly small number (maybe 20, 30 systems max), so while they'll have mobility issues at first, they only need to be fast enough to reach and hit a few locations. And while they're going in blind, they can fix that, all they need is a map (which they can obtain pretty easily, either via capturing it, dupping someone into handing them one, buy one from some passing ferengi, ect), and they can brute force the routes they need via testing them with probe droids, scout ships, etc.
Getting information of the local astrology is not going to be that hard. Simple heat searches will tell you where most everyone is. They might even get some decent astrological maps from the Ferengi, including homeworlds and possible industrial centers. The problem though, is being able to assault those areas--and holding them. Assaulting a target like Earth will be very difficult and they would need to hit not just Earth, Vulcan, Tellarite, and Andoria--
but also their oldest colonies. Looking to the smaller Cardassian Empire, the DS9 TM indicates that Cardassia Prime and fifteen nearby worlds make up the bulk of their industrial base. They also have 153 orbital and deep space facilities. Just looking at the planets, that's 16 different systems. The Federation could easily have 64 industrial worlds given that they were forged by four strong local powers. Add in another 16 for the Klingons and another 16 for the Romulans...we're talking about over a hundred industrial world targets that the Empire would need to target with about two thousand ships, at most about ten thousand if the Grand Moff in charge pours about two and a half Sector Group's worth into the invasion effort.
The issue wouldn't be in gathering intel, it would be in using it. Yeah, they can figure out where SW ships are and what they're doing just fine, but how much can use that information to actually stop them?
Yes, I believe so.
The dominion weren't an OCP either, and they came very close to conquering the federation. Noting being an outside context problem doesn't mean they therefore must be a surmountable problem.
Not as close as you might think. Conquering the UFP, even after they'd burned Earth, would have actually taken another year or so. Possibly more. It would have taken them another several years to conquer the Klingons and the Romulans. The Dominion was sort of on the "Western Front" of the UFP, which is actually where it happens to be the most exposed, since it pressed up mostly against the Beta Quadrant powers.
Ironically, Earth is more threatened by the Cardassian Empire as it grows, because there is so little strategic depth compared to powers like the Klingon Empire or even the Romulan Star Empire, which is mostly contained. Meanwhile, the Cardassians and other powers are closer to Earth and probably with fewer obstacles. The Dominion's greatest threat impart, was that it was so close to the wormhole; about 66 LY. Compare that to nearly 88 LY between them and the Klingons. It would take the Dominion only 13.2 days at high warp to reach Earth. 23 of that 66 LY distance would be through unclaimed and almost undefended space. That's only 8.6 days within UFP space at high warp. Compare that to the Klingon border, in which the UFP controls all the space between them and the time is closer to 18 days. At high warp. Granted, I think that you're more likely to look at Warp 8, so it's probably closer to 23 days and 30 days respectfully.
That's why the Empire has other ships designed to fight smaller, more agile foes. A defiant or BOP might be able to outfly a SD, but can they outfly an
imperial raider?
The Defiant probably outclasses an Imperial Raider, to be honest. A BOP might be able to take it on. Not sure. And a lot of the Empire's smaller ships are not the most impressive. A lot of them are mostly designed for local suppression and dealing with poorly armed Rebels, they're not meant to fight against fully armed and capable warships.
And even if they can, there are still ways around that, setting a formation where ships can overlap their weapons to cover one another's blindspots is fairly easy. If beating up SD was as easy as "just fly something too fast for them to shoot, LOL", the CIS or Rebels would have figured that out a while ago.
Absolutely. The Empire in fact, tends to focus their entire squadron around screening their more valuable ships, especially the ISDs. The problem is that most corvettes don't have the firepower needed to really do the screening requires against anything larger than a UFP fighter. You still have frigates and such, but by the time the two fleets engage in a lot of instances, most of the smaller ships will have been torn apart by torpedoes and that allows the ST fleets to focus upon the ISDs.
Also, they don't need to tangle with the federation fleet to win, or even to destroy it. Take out shipyards, take out starbases, or take out/occupy key planets or just threaten them enough, and they can destroy starfleet's ability to fight even if they have a hard time destroying federation ships directly.
Those facilities will be defended. And they still have to locate them. The Cardassians have a hundred and fifty orbital and deep space facilities. The UFP is much bigger and much more capable. We're probably looking at several hundred of facilities the Empire would have to raze in order for the UFP to rebuild their facilities. Still, that's not a bad plan. The problem comes down to mapping hyperspace. And once the UFP learns that the Empire can use gravity tech to pull a ship out of hyperspace, they can ring their space with gravity machines that actually produce more gravity. And just knowing that gravity can badly affect hyperdrive means that you can actually drop facilities near high gravity areas to reduce the effectiveness of their hyperdrive. And of course, the larger the ship, the more restrictive the hyperdrive. As we learned with the Malevolence.
I generally prefer to assume ton for ton equivalency, unless the true figures are so disproportionate that such a equivalency is an unfair unfair to one side, or there's some special property or design element that's relevant.
That way, the debate is more about tactics and capabilities rather than getting bogged down in "well, he said they destroyed 30% of the crust, but the yield needed for that doesn't match the size of the fireball from this other scene, therefore...." type semantics.
Ton for ton can be deceptive. Because not all ships are designed with the same intent in mind or the same design scheme. The ISD, for example, is also designed to be a carrier of sorts for ground assaults. Including carrying massive vehicles dozens of meters tall. This is not the case with a GCS, which has fairly limited troop capacity and deployment vehicles is minimal.
Sort of like comparing a modern day destroyer to a super carrier.
