I'm... pretty sure pretty much every "special ops" soldier in real life was originally just a regular grunt soldier at one point.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
The thing is, thanks to Karen Traviss's dumb ass, we have to accept the fact that the Republic managed to fight off an army of "quintillion's(a million trillions)" of CIS droids (according to Star Wars insider #86), with an army of only 3 million clones. 3 million vs. quintillions. Even if we assumed that it was just 1 quintillion, and even then if we assumed that the CIS only had enough ships to transport only half of that, no let's be even more generous, a quarter, that would be like 250 trillion forces.
So like, no matter how you cut it, throughout the entire war the clones were ridiculously numerically challenged. So that being the case, the only way I could even see the Clones having Arcs and commandos near the endpoint of the war would be to start cutting corners and just training regular joes.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Yeah. Really doesn't put the CIS in any type of positive light. There's around a million planets in Star Wars I believe (according to EU anyway I guess), so that means that if they wanted to they could put a billion troops on every single little planet in the Galaxy simultaneously, assuming they had the ships for it.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Well, I suppose plante sthat coose one side or another and have their own army wouldn't need any droids or clones? Only when threatened by the other side.
Except when you genetically dumb down a soldier to be less independant, they dont make good commandos or supersoldiers. This isnt about Traviss, ARCs are far more prevalent than her books. This is about common logic and Star Wars CANON vs this show.
It takes 10 years to grow clones with Kamino growthh acceleration. During Geonosis battle droids are literally coming off the line every few seconds. Its obvious that the Clones are tremendously outnumbered. If "the first battallions are ready" means you have say 10 X 1000 troops., thats 10,000 clones against a Seperatist army that is combined from multiple organizations with pre-constructed mechanicanized armies (the Trade Federation alone was strong enough to invade an entire planet) and seemingly unlimited production capacity and a shit ton of droids still remaining at the end of the war that they can be "shut down."
The only logical explination ares there were not that many droids either...in which case why is this a Galactic war with tons of planets being occupied by the seperatists? or clones are highly effective soldiers and even the stormie-level troopers have great kill ratios (which is the explanation both I and Traviss prefer).
So you think that the Clones have like, 3000:1 kill ratios? Because, that's about the only way they could stand up against a force that numbers "in the quintillions".
I don't know why you and her would prefer that, because that's really... not logical. Every single engagement ever shown within the mythos shows clones suffering heavy losses, not as bad as the droids, but usually at least 30-50% of any group shown at any particular time.
However I do see how she could be pidgeonholed into the dumbshit with that number. According to that Kiminoen in AotC they had something like 220K in production and another million on the way. If it took them 20 years to get to that number (assuming they began creating the army as soon as Sipho-Dias paid for it), it would be impossible for them to cook out another few million over the course of a 4 year war.
Still, 3 million... *sighs*
*editing for accuracy D:
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."
Last edited by Tzeentch on Oct 11th, 2010 at 05:54 PM
I dont like the 3 million number either, for a variety of reasons and I've never defended it. Aside from that one clear mistake, Traviss has in my opinion an almost flawless interpretation of the Clone Wars, one way more fascinating that Lucas.
In terms of the droid armies in her books, a lot of the droid numbers were subterfuge. Her books never really state how many droids there are. A lot of it is rumor and speculation. The size of the droid army seems to be more driven as a disinformation campaign to inspire fear in the Republic. The only thing that is clear is that droids MASSIVELY outnumber the Republic, and I'm cool with that.
Traviss mentions that the kill ratios were a few hundred to one for a basic trooper model. For Commandos, ARCs, etc these would be much higher. She stated that clones with accuracy ratings below 97% were killed off (no *ucking 99s). The real kicker though are the Jedi who can absolutely decimate armies.
So how does this stack up against the films and the show? Clearly these sort of kill ratios aren't seen. We did see such kill ratios for Jedi in the Gendy series. in this series, in Ambush we had the "jedi is worth more than 1000 droids" Clearly that the episode would even start with jedi = droid is ridiculous, but at least we have some precedent established. In my opinion this episode should have been that 1 clone is better than 100 droids, but we know what I think of Lucas and Filoni.
The rest of the time I feel the show suffers from its cheapness. Rarely have we seen something equivalent of a full out battle. I just think its easier to show 10 clones against 30 droids and have all the droids and half the clones die, even with Jedi. Then people can die, but there is no real regard for the context of the war. With reasonable kill ratios, we could go a whole episode without a single clone dying and they'd have to render 1000 times the droids they are now.
However, in the movies there are multiple planet wide seiges going on simultaneously, and we clearly saw what the Trade Federation alone used to blockade (there were at least 20 ships) and invade a planet without a military. It seems that for what Kamino was capable of producing vs how many of those stupid droids you'd need to control a planet would be a very low clone:droid ratio.
Well...I <3 clones. After Episode 2 I had to know more lol. Lots of interesting stories.
CW is sucking hard, though actually I laughed because TFN and those Lucas-sucking faps actually reviewed an episode harder than I would have. It was pretty boring and nonsensical, but at least it wasnt another rehash and provided some depth. I'm much more frightened for this week when we get another Ashoka-goes-on-a-mission-and-grows-up.
Its just that moment when you're on Kamino, the most beautifully designed planet in the Star Wars universe, and Kenobi steps out over the balcony, and you see the white armor, and suddenly the entire Saga is bridged.
I have nothing to say. We're in agreement for the most part.
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"The Daemon lied with every breath. It could not help itself but to deceive and dismay, to riddle and ruin. The more we conversed, the closer I drew to one singularly ineluctable fact: I would gain no wisdom here."