Aren’t TV and movie space battles a bit tame?<\/p>\n
Take the battle of Waterloo<\/a>. It contained approx 140,000 soldiers. The battle of Kursk<\/a> was 900,000 Germans vs 1,300,000 Russians, complete with 3,600 tanks and 20,000 guns. This was a big battle between two countries in a world war, fought over 50 years ago, when the world population was smaller.<\/p>\n Imagine a modern day non-nuclear war between China and Russia on one side, and everyone else on the other side. Now picture it as a purely naval battle. How many people would be involved? Lets say conservatively that each side only fielded 2 million troops (a trivial subset of fit, able potential combatants). Lets look at a big US battleship : The USS Massachusetts <\/em><\/strong>has approx 2,000 crew involved. Lets assume only 10% of our navy serve on these big ships (200,000 men) so thats 1,000 battleships, in an all out naval war. (remember we are talking a war for survival, not the relative peacetime deployments of today).<\/p>\n That’s a large fight between two earth-bound nations.<\/p>\n But lets assume a planet with less water-coverage than earth, and slightly larger, so it has double our population. Thats a factor of two. Now fast forward another two generations time wise and assume a doubling of that population again. Thats x4. Now assume that they are all on the same side (x6) and that they form part of a federation of 20 such worlds (still an incredibly small speck in an average size galaxy). Thats 120 x 1,000 battleships.<\/p>\n What I’m getting at, is when the Rebel Alliance attacked the death star<\/a>, they seemed to do it with the sort of navy you would use to maybe lay siege to Malta, or at best, to attack Dieppe. Hardly a clash of galactic powers.\u00a0 Assume 20% of your 240,000,000 are in fighters and thats suddenly 12,000,000 fighters, or a million twelve man squadrons. Imagine how long “all wings report in” would take… Imagine how quickly you run out of colors?<\/p>\n “Peach-tinted fuschia leader standing by”, “Oaky pastel rose leader standing by…”<\/p>\n So I guess that issue, and the whole problem of ILM filming a million plastic model flybys in 1983 doesn’t help.<\/p>\n