Karp
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How large should the CIS/Clone Trooper forces be?
🕑 Added 2025-05-24 07:56:57 +0000 UTCThis poll is to help determine the scale of the conflict. In the movies, we see the Jedi getting gunned down by a handful of clones. But what if that squad turned into thousands or tens of thousands? Much more believable.
Here's some quick math/logistics to put things into perspective.
The two large ships the republic had during the war for troop transport are the venator shown in episode 3 and in engagements throughout the clone wars show. These large ships had a troop complement of only 2,000. Meaning to carry 1 million clone troopers, you would need 500 of them with no other ships.
The other ship was the acclamator, primarily only shown in episode 2. This ship is much better, but still only held 16,000 troops. 62.5 rounded to 63 would be enough to carry 1 million troops.
This doesn't include vessels specifically meant to transport troops, and in a galaxy with 1 quintillion lifeforms, maybe doesn't seem so impressive.
The logistics required to move 1 billion men would require 62,500 Acclamators. But in a galaxy where a Death Star was completed (in secret by slave, not droid labor) is this number so farfetched?
The way I imagine the conflict is that clones/droids primarily engaged in offensive actions, whilst ordinary people on both sides mostly engaged in defensive actions with the exception of officers.
Anyway, as the Kamino chapter is coming up, I'd appreciate your guys' feedback. Let's just say I have some dasterdly plans, and Palpatine will indeed have his potato salad trod upon.
Comments
Nyarlathotep Flagg
Sounds about right, with it mostly being about key systems along hyperspace lanes, core worlds, and specific strategic sites like large manufacturing plants/shipyards. Although one can't really say what they meant, and 2million is absolutely enough to start a large scale ground conflict on one planet. But considering the issues with mostly only having Spartoi/Spaarti type clones and the like for the rest of the war... That probably isn't the case. I think most ppl agree with that overall assessment, because they're hovering between 500mil and 10 billion in the votes.
Nick Mar
I think among the fandom, which has gone through this analysis a few times, it is more accepted that "unit" refers to army operational unit, which at the lowest level in an army refers to a squad "7-14" men, but personally I think based on what we see at the end of Attack of the Clones, for the parade in terms of Acclamators, the likely unit refers to a batallion (400-1200 men), the lowest level accepted for independent logistics structure and therefore independent action. This makes the initial attack on Kamino involve (If you assume they managed to get half of the available army ready, 100 000 units, packed and shipping in a matter of days, which is a stretch even given clone efficiency) about 120 million men, 240 million men initial production, with the total for the war being around 2.4 billion. This may not seem like a lot, BUT....if you take world war 2, which involved the mobilization of 120 million men, as the maximum standard for planetary level warfare, it would enable the Republic to carry out full on assault or defense in a maximum of 10-20 systems at the same time, which actually fits well with the Canon where we mainly see Jedi Council members be in charge of main system fronts and there are a maximum of 12 of those at any time. This also fits well with the GAR canon organization into 10 System armies. So I think it's a decent compromise between Canon and numbers that would more logically make sense for a galactic level war.
Joseph
Something to note down is the capacity that Kamino could produce, feed, etc. I honestly don't think they could do more than about 1 billion men at the most extreme, and I still question where they got the food from if nothing else (especially with the secrecy the project had). Also, it's an aquatic planet, just how big would their facilities be to hold 1 billion men, if not more. Personally, I always like the idea that a unit was a platoon of soldiers, which would hit the right balance between absolute minimum numbers to fight a galactic war (with local forces being auxiliary units to hold ground where there are far less enemy droids) and the carrying capacity of Kamino. This would put the total number of troops (which is canonically somewhere between 6-8 million units from what I can tell from some brief research) at around 250-500 million soldiers.
