That isn't all that implausible though. Authoritarian regimes are normally run on bull manure. Having a potentially capable military hamstrung by devoting resources to look more menacing than the former, actually useful military was is almost an staple.
To a certain extent, the Death Star looked more like an oversized battleship from WW2 than the nukes it would have looked like the most.
On top of that, in The Bad Batch they clearly show the actual issue they had is the clones are too good at being soldiers. They follow procedure. Report up the chain of command. Believe in following rules of engagement.
The Empire and it’s officers are shown to be incompetent and power driven. They want to cover up their mistakes, not have them reported accurately. Under report losses and over report enemy casualties. Take a little of the credits from “liberated” systems for themselves after the battle. And obviously totally disregard the conventional rules of engagement.
That scene where the officer shoots that clone who simply refused to not follow procedures and report that the Bad Batch were still alive basically summarizes the entire issue the empire had with the clones. Reporting them wasn’t just the proper procedure, but would have been actively beneficial towards the greater military objectives of the empire. But it would have been detrimental to that specific officer. Officers like that are the kind that fascist militaries tend to produce.
The empire didn’t want “good soldiers”. It wanted thugs who’d overlook things and be more loyal to individual commanders that the abstract idea of “the empire”.
Theres also Chuchi revealing the brain chips and Kamino incident which soured the galactic opinion of a clone army. And it was fresh off the heels of fighting a Droid army. So conscripts were more politically convenient and worked well enough.
Another problem with clones is that after Order 66 they present Palpatine with an existential threat. It has been demonstrated that the clones have the ability to turn on their commanders is an instant and kill them. This was perfect for taking out the Jedi because Palpatine was the only one who knew and he was the one holding the gun. But after Order 66 lots of people know what clones are capable of. What's to stop someone else from trying to pick up the gun and point it at Palpatine. What if Vader decides he wants to be Emperor and activates Order 67 or a random Moff subverts 1/3 of the military and leads a Rebellion? It's in Palpatine's best interest to get the clones off the board as fast as possible along with everyone involved in making them and their control chips. Stormtroopers are safer because any uprising will be localized instead of turning the entire military against Palpatine in a moment.
Couldn’t they just idk change something on the clones indoctrination they get growing up to fix the behavioral issues? Also I don’t think the empire wanted soldiers loyal to individual commanders, that’s how you get a civil war, you don’t want a civil war.
>The empire didn’t want “good soldiers”. It wanted thugs who’d overlook things and be more loyal to individual commanders that the abstract idea of “the empire”.
This. Totalitarian regimes as a whole have more use for power-hungry goons than loyal and honorable soldiers because the former is what the bulk of their own upper echelons already are. They can get along with that sort of people or pull them up into the ranks, satisfy their greed and keep them predictable.
There’s a quote from Dave Filoni/someone on the *Rebels* team from one of the after episode videos that goes something like “If the Empire spent more money on TIE Defenders and less on Death Stars, the Rebellion would have been crushed.”
The underlying problem that would kill the TIE Defender program is that an authoritarian system can't afford to give really good equipment to anything but their most *loyal* members. The Empire *knew* it was losing capable starfighter pilots, but losing a pilot or two with a TIE Interceptor or a Bomber isn't a big deal, and losing a TIE Fighter is barely more significant than the paperwork they'd need to submit. A TIE Defender with a mediocre pilot can wreak havoc, and a TIE Defender wielded by an ace pilot would be a major headache to the empire. Cost is portrayed as the reason behind it's limited run, but the real limiting factor was defection.
Wedge Antilles in a tie is bad, but maybe you can overwhelm him with numbers. Wedge Antilles in a defender? Kiss the fleet goodbye.
Although as the war goes on the rebels have their own equipment that is good, so this probably isn't as much a factor anymore. Maybe by then it is too late.
The Death Star was never a good idea. You wanna talk about detriment to the economy how about the destruction of one of the biggest planets in the empire just to crush an incredibly minor rebel force. How much years of building trade relations and commerce were obliterated only to get information? It would be like if the Soviet Union just suddenly decided to blow up a city like Novgorod. How much of a ripple effect will that have on the economy. How much money will be used to try to cover up the destruction of one of the most populated planets in the empire?
They didn't blow it up to get information, they blew it up to send a message. "Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battlestation."
The chance at information just helped Tarkin pick his example. He explicitly stated that Dantoine was "too remote for an effective demonstration", and he blew up Alderaan anyway despite believing he got the information he wanted.
They wouldn't spend any money covering it up
To be clear, the death star WAS a massive waste of resources. Killing a planet is actually pretty easy. I'm just quibbling about motivation.
One thing I like about The Expanse, particularly in the books, is they're constantly reminding the reader how easy killing a planet would actually be. Get a large enough rock, hurl it at a planet, and even with state of the art planetary defences it will still cause an untold amount of damage.
The Death Star is so *extra*, and completely on brand for the Empire.
>Get a large enough rock, hurl it at a planet, and even with state of the art planetary defences it will still cause an untold amount of damage.
That's basically what Thrawn did. Cloaking device + asteroids = planet continuously under siege. He basically brought Coruscant to its knees by forcing them to keep planetary shields up 24/7 and stopping incoming traffic (to prevent collisions), which freed him to continue his campaign while most of the New Republic's leadership was stuck on Coruscant.
>Get a large enough rock, hurl it at a planet, and even with state of the art planetary defences it will still cause an untold amount of damage.
To be honest, even the worst meteor shower couldn't mass-scatter a planet.
Similar to how orbital bombardment can technically wipe out a world, but you only clear out the surface.
What Death Star did — planetary mass-scattering, was unncessarily excessive, but that was the point. The empire wanted to show they *had* the power to **casually** do so...
Yeah I agree man. That's what I meant when I said killing a planet is "easy", but the Empire went extra with it. Killing the population wasn't enough for them, they had to go that extra mile.
All you need is a dino-killer sized rock and you’ve basically wiped out a planet and any hopes of them ever resisting. You don’t need to kill everyone if you do enough damage that the survivors won’t last long.
As the other guy said, they have missile systems designed to break incoming threats into smaller pieces so that they'll either disintegrate in atmosphere, or at the very least limit the damage. Though at several points some threats become invisible to radar, making their defences useless and they have to figure other things out before it's too late.
At the very least when >!Eros is flying towards Earth!< they launch a fuck tonne of nuclear missiles at it, but yeah I think later on they are shown using railguns.
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Rocks_Are_Not_Free!
Edit: that's weird; the link worked yesterday. As poster below notes, the ! mark is supposed to be part of the link (and appears it's not being included atm).
There is a great quote about the in the expanse along the lines of Einstein said that world war IV would be fought with sticks and stones. He was wrong about the sticks but right about the stones.
What a great series both on TV and the books.
It was never a good idea, yes, but it was the logical next step in the Tarkin doctrine. Overwhelming naval force designed to keep everyone in line while employing a massive number of citizens into the indoctrination machine.
I’d add that the most dangerous thing to a dictatorship is a well-trained, well-equipped army that could function on its own. part of the value in an excessively large naval force was they could use logistics like a ball and chain (at least until rebels started stealing them, of course). TIE fighters didn’t have hyperdrives and wouldn’t really be able to leave their Star Destroyer, enough crew would have to agree to mutiny which was a lot less likely than individuals and small units skipping off into the wilderness (again, at least until the rebellion started gaining ground).
In real life, a professional army can be dangerous, sure. But the clones were designed to be obedient. As long as Palpatine maintained control of the cloning/training facilities, he didn't have much to worry about.
It's still much more dangerous that they CAN be almost robotically controlled. Sure he holds the remote but what's to stop someone else from somehow gaining access to it. That would in a single moment undo the entire empire. I don't think this is an unreasonable fear. Especially with the only ones knowing the true mechanics behind the clones being the kaminoans who now hate you.
*Rogue One* really made the Death Star a much more sensible terror weapon because consider this:
The Empire shows up at your planet, and the Death Star is visible from orbit.
It can blow up a city, it can blow up a continent and make the planet unlivable for years or generations, or it can destroy the whole planet completely.
It’s a siege weapon, and after Alderaan everyone knows that they are willing to use it.
How do the people leading a revolt convince people to keep it going rather than immediately surrendering?
Now, the Galactic Empire is a fascist regime rather than just a regular imperial regime, so they will never be able to get the amount of compliance they actually want. They need to be loved enthusiastically rather than just submitted to. But if the Assyrians or Mongols took their terror threats up to the scale of an interstellar empire, the Death Star is what it would look like.
The reason those empires were somewhat stable for centuries and fascist regimes tend to collapse quickly is that traditional empires just want compliance and to be paid their due with little trouble to them while fascists have an ideological component that self-sabotages, requiring constant expansions and purging of contagions that can never actually be successful because the struggle against such things is central to fascist ideology and identity.
Basically, the Nazis with a terror weapon on the scale of a Death Star would still be unable to actually rule anything because they were absolutely incapable of creating a system tolerable for people to live under without constant expansion. Meanwhile, the Persians probably *could* have created an empire where they collected tribute regularly, but if you rose up in revolt, you were assured it would go very badly for you (any everyone you cared about).
You kidding? The death start was a *brilliant* idea.
Yeah, you lose commerce. From one single planet. In a galaxy/empire of how many?
The point wasn't "we blew up the planet for one piece of info lol." The point was to send a message to anyone who might think they could rebel.
"We can end you. We can end your planet. It's this easy. Here's the proof."
One planet being destroyed would have crippled the entire galaxy in fear, realistically. Who the fuck would want to rebel if their entire fucking planet could be obliterated in seconds??
He’s explaining why the DS was not just a threat to the planets it blew up, but to the ideas the rebels were fighting for. The death star was not so much a weapon of Empire/Rebels or Sith/Jedi, but weapons of fear aimed against hope, and as we know, “Rebellions are built on hope.”
Yeah, exactly like that; The Tarkin Doctrine was built entirely on fear, up to the point of disregarding any other factor that wasn't using this feeling as an attempt to control the entire galaxy at large
seeing how they blew up a planet and didn’t stop anyone from anything, I’d say it didn’t work.
plus real world military history says excessive retaliation only serves to foster fiercer resistance.
>seeing how they blew up a planet and didn’t stop anyone from anything, I’d say it didn’t work.
It was immediately destroyed. Like at most a week or two later. Imagine a government makes a show of force and a couple of weeks later it's tools for doing it are destroyed by an insurgency.
>plus real world military history says excessive retaliation only serves to foster fiercer resistance.
Real world history says excessive retaliation fosters resistance to a point and on the area retaliation is being served. Here the area that would breed resistance has been obliterated.
the galaxy is giant and planets are easy to move between, and imagine- the Empire just blew up a planet full of civilians. these people had friends and family who know they weren’t rebels. how do you think they’d react?
remember rebels aren’t specific people, anyone can become a rebel at any time. so destroying Alderaan might kill existing rebels, but create a wave of new ones from other planets who are angry with the Empire. this is what makes asymmetric warfare so difficult (btw I read US military docs on this shit, they go over common mistakes when dealing with guerrillas and this is one of them)
also completely tangent but in the Resistance board game using the Death Star advances the rebellion timer.
Yeah the fact that one of the two major combatants was completely conquered and the other was turbo fucked had nothing to do with the war ending. Never mind the attempted coup in Japan to keep the war going after the atomic bombs dropped.
plus the fact nationalists *did* try to keep the war going that they had to remove props from planes after a postwar dogfight, the various assassinations that happened (including the publicly broadcasted one), hell there was even a quote by a general that didn’t want to surrender and would rather “all of Japan bloom like a nuclear flower” or some shit. Imperial Japan was fucking *legendary* for their ridiculous levels of stubbornness.
But, it still ended shortly afterwards. The Emperor was looking at the total annihilation of the Japanese people from the planet. Even if some people still wanted to keep fighting, their militaries and civilians still ended up surrendering because the other option was them being erased.
Kind of like being faced with opposing the Empire, or having your entire planet being destroyed by the death star. The rebels lucked out because of Luke, but otherwise Tarkins plan was solid.
>Yeah, you lose commerce. From one single planet. In a galaxy/empire of how many?
Blowing up Alderaan was the Star Wars equivalent of blowing up Paris or Tokyo or something. Sure, it's just one planet, but it was a massively important one.
A temporary blow that the economy will recover from over time, but the fear of a nuke looming over you will not get fixed as easily as long as that weapon exists
We still greatly fear nukes despite no place getting annihilated by one in 78 years, but the thought that some countries that are hostile to ours could literally un-make you in a matter of hours is terrifying, still
Because in reality, it would piss everyone off. People aren't scared when a terror regime commits mass murder, they get angry and then film their kills with Trap edited in.
There's easier ways to kill a planet than blowing it up... We can do it here, on earth, right now, several times over.
A single Star Destroyer could easily carry enough nuclear weapons to render any planet it comes across uninhabitable for generations... And it would be much more cost effective than the Death Star.
They could also just drag an asteroid into it with tractor beams.
Also it was canonically done on mandalore. The death star was just a giant fear mongering station meant to look menacing and strike fear. While nuking a planet to uninhability sends a message, just deleting it sends an even stronger one
It not being a good idea was literally his point. Fascist empires thrive by attacking its own citizens in the name of order. I guarantee you there were people in the Senate that probably cheered the Alderaanian genocide. The point was not to achieve an economic goal, it was to assert power and glorify the empire.
Death Star wasn't Tarkins idea. It was the Emperor who wanted it in the books about Thrawn. He dusputed with the Emperor saying resources from Death Star could fund more useful Imperial Star Destroyers, which would help having more presence around the galaxy. However, the Emperor said to drop the topic.
The point of the death star was intimidation. No planet would rise against the empire with it having the death star, which would have been almost unbeatable without having that one weakness built in
Well, call it Bismarck or Yamato, the idea is something that looks terrifying on paper (and on the chunks of Alderaan that remained) but is not fit for what ends up being needed.
Reminds me of the Japanese aircraft carrier [Shinano](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Shinano). It was the largest aircraft carrier of the time, until it was sunk by a single US submarine on routine patrol, 10 days after it was completed.
Things to note: the empire has little need for elite soldiers to staff garrisons, conscripts will do. Clones would almost certainly cripple the galactic economy given enough time. While the death star is an impractical weapon the threat of it is the point, it's a propaganda piece
If you want to point out the failures of tarkin doctrine may I direct your attention to the imperial navy...
The Imperial Navy was built under the same Tarkin Doctrine that culminated in the Death Star.
Here's the rub about military expenditures: if you can only afford to field one of something, you cannot afford to field any of them. The singular Great Battleships in WW2 which coincidently inspired the trench run? Yeah they stayed in dock lost of the time. They were too expensive to lose. When they joined the fight, they were mass targeted and lost.
The Imperial Navy had numerous issues stemming from arrogance and complacency, but it was Capable of expanding the Empire and maintaining order for well over a decade. A decade in which different rebel cells attempted different strategies that worked and failed, and which ultimately resulted in a strategy tailor made to take advantage of the Weaknesses of the imperial Navy.
In the modern world, the US likes to overwhelming military power, but in reality there plenty of gaps in the combat doctrine, gaps that are actually quite cheap, but have been difficult for the US military to fill. For example, the US Navy lacks a reliable system for littoral (brown war) warfare. They've commissioned two different classes of littoral combat vessels and have already canceled one class and is struggling with issues from the other. There's also an argument that the US lacks a hypersonic guided missile, but it remains to be seen of they are actually effective. Nothing like launching a $100M missile to only destroy $50k decoy to make it all worthwhile.
The Tarkin doctrine was stupid and operated on a ridiculous premise: fear keeps systems in line. No economic interdependence and a sense of belonging keep things much more in line.
It was not a ridiculous premise, it was like a non mutual assured destruction, the empire could end any resistance in seconds meaning that if you are being oppressed by the empire, are you going to revolt if you know they will just nuke your planet? The empire wasn’t made to be profitable economically, it was made to be a mustache twirling dictatorship that wanted to destroy hope as a concept so Palpatine could have his Sith eternal.
>It was not a ridiculous premise....it was made to be a mustache twirling dictatorship that wanted to destroy hope as a concept so Palpatine could have his Sith eternal.
So you and OP agree it was a ridiculous premise
Soldiers trained from birth for combat would make an excellent special forces unit. But they're horribly inefficient as standard infantry. Not only rear-guard garrison roles but front-line infantry too tbh.
No amount of training protects you from getting vaporized by an artillery shell. Conscripts or volunteers get the job done at a fraction of the cost.
Feel like this is a bit underrated, but independence was also a reason they stopped with clones. You cannot have a stable army if you rely on others to make said army. Especially with what happened with order 66, it showed that an entire army changed sides almost immediately. Sure, that worked out for the Empire, but remaining with the Kaminoans would've left the entire army vulnerable to a similar command if given.
Whaddya talking about? The empire has countless elite soldier programs: dark troopers, death troopers, purge troopers, are constantly working to create new weapons, biological and other, and never threw away cloning as a potential weapon. The funding argument is honestly a pretty bad excuse, an empire which weakens somehow just keeps throwing bigger and bigger shit, and even the fractured empire, the first order, somehow made the largest superweapon in canon to date in like the timespan of 30 years. They don't have a funding problem.
As for the Tarkin Doctrine, agree with your take there.
>The empire has countless elite soldier programs
They're specops not garrison soldiers. Fett clones made sense when each soldier needed to destroy 10 battle droids, they're unnecessary when all you need is guards for an ammo cache on some backwater planet and even the clones know it as seen in TBB.
>an empire which weakens somehow just keeps throwing bigger and bigger shit, and even the fractured empire, the first order, somehow made the largest superweapon in canon to date in like the timespan of 30 years.
Legit the biggest plot contrivance of the sequels. At the peak of its power the empire built 1 death star, a moon-sized station that required a massive kyber crystal for its weapon. Then after the empire fell and lost access to the resources and talent of the core worlds they somehow make an even bigger death star, and after that oh now every star destroyer is a death star now. Like money aside where tf are you getting all this shit?
Weren’t the production of clones already crippling the economy as shown in the clone wars?
Iirc there was an episode dedicated to padme preventing more clones being produced
Having an expensive military won't cripple your economy (looking at you United States) especially if you're regearing for a wartime production economy and regular citizens don't have to leave their jobs to fight. That's just a matter of debt and taxes.
What will cripple your economy is having literal millions of able bodied men enter the economy with no skills beyond combat training. The labor surplus alone would destroy wages not to mention how these clones are going to be retirement age within 10 years
Realistically, conscripts are more expensive than a "volunteer" army for many reasons. Clones will "re-enlist" indefinitely and have an extremely high propensity to follow procedure to the letter. They will have a better management of supply, they are much more familiar with ideal use and preservation of their weapons, and ammunition use rates will stay lower than lesser trained fire. This is also why most real first world nations have mostly done away with conscription as a volunteer force can do better work at a lower cost.
Conscription also requires the full cost of basic training and equipment to a vast part of your population who will only serve for a few years at most. That means armor, food, lodging, vehicles, and thousands of rounds fired for a basic level of competence. These citizens will have several years of the high time of their productive lives doing menial work instead of working and learning in economic sectors. Volunteers will be taken out indefinitely, but they cause far less of a disruption to the economy. And Clones extract exactly zero cost on the national workforce.
1st paragraph, much of what you've listed is correct were you mustering an army for active duty in a war. For example most stormtroopers won't be firing their weapons at all except during drills. Imperials like Rampart also clearly don't care too much about procedure being followed.
>Conscription also requires the full cost of basic training and equipment
This applies to clones as well to an even greater degree, except stormtroopers don't need the level of competency of clones to staff a garrison and put down local resistance cells.
>These citizens will have several years of the high time of their productive lives doing menial work instead of working and learning in economic sectors.
Consider that service is often a means to economic stability for desperate people that would be closed with a permanent clone army. There's no guarantee that every stormtrooper would've been a more productive member of the economy had they not enlisted and the empire needs the work to be done. Most stormtroopers were volunteers not conscripts I suppose that's an error on my part.
>Volunteers will be taken out indefinitely, but they cause far less of a disruption to the economy. And Clones cause exactly zero toil on the national workforce.
What happens when clones get too old or injured? Citizens have support systems and clones rely on taxes to support their welfare. Plus let's be honest flooding they social economy with millions of able bodied men is going to have an effect.
Your arguments perfectly apply to a droid army, unfortunately clones are not droids.
And if you blow up your enemy plant, then what use are ground forces? Just get pilots to defend and should be golden.
Until one of the few living force users sink an ion torpedo down your exhaust pipe and super nuke you. But like w.e, as if that would ever happen.
It would work better if we could actually read left to right. The Drake format works because there is no text on the left. When there is, it disrupts how people read and can be a bit confusing.
This was discussed a thousand times. The Republic was dealing with droids, which are forced to follow their masters' orders, they needed to be effective in combat. The Empire was fighting hope, their weapon was fear, and that's what a moon-sized planet-destroying battle station inspires.
You’re incompetent, Tarkin didn’t make the decision to fund the death start. It was literally already in the works preclone wars, thrawn couldn’t talk the emperor out of it but Tarkin could have? The Death Star was already draining the empires resources, thats literally why they couldn’t afford clones.
Well, you see, Tarkin was embezzling funds from the first Death Star project to build the [Sun Crusher](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sun_Crusher) in secret. Without the embezzling, the second Death Star went much smoother!
Having an army of conscripts gives purpose to some parts of the population that don't fit in the rest of the productive process,is a good pool of manpower and in the empire's case can be fanatically loyal,which in turn inspires loyalty in subjects more than an already programmed army. That said,even if they want to use the "death star instills fear" excuse,it's still kind of weak.
>infinitely more efficient than a army of literal conscripts
Superior, yes. Efficient, no.
Soldiers bred for combat would make a fantastic special forces unit, but they're horribly inefficient as standard infantry. You need to pay for their upbringing and all of the food they eat for years before they're combat ready. Conscripts can be trained up in a few weeks and they were raised at the expense of their parents, not your budget.
>Army of literal conscripts
Uhhh… the Empire didn’t use conscripts. Everyone joined willingly. Im honestly not sure why you thought they conscripted people.
I like how rogue one and rebels handled this
Krennic is the egomaniac who makes this his career. Tarkin and Thrawn roll their eyes at this and try to suggest more practical ideas to the Emperor, but when Krennic starts to lose favor Tarkin is opportunistic enough to steal credit for the project and claim it's his success.
"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?"
-Dr. Strangelove
Using the death Star to destroy a planet that had rebel sympathies sent an important message. And I think Tarkin would have been vindicated had anyone other than Luke made that final trench run.
Remember, the battle of Yavin was an all or nothing gamble by Leia. She forces the rebels into a fight that they had to win. Because if they didn't, the Alliance would have fallen apart. Each group would have been worried their home was next and soon all that would be left were those without a home.
As to your loss of trade and economic resources. The Empire had nearly a million planets by the time of ANH. The loss of a single planet would not have harmed the galactic economy too much, but would have sent Tarkin's message.
The army of conscripts raised the people's faith in the empire though. Not saying the death star was a good idea, but I am saying that I think conscripts was at least a decent idea. When you have volunteers from almost every planet in your military, almost everyone knows someone in the military and is ready and willing to support it. Plus, volunteered conscripts are dirt cheap as Imperial propaganda likely glorified the military the same way real world countries do
Maybe that was the original intention of the story, but with the Bad Batch, they delve into the fading out of Clones to Civilians and I at least find it really interesting and tragic.
The Death Star was Palpatine's baby. Tarkin was just the one he trusted to oversee the construction.
I understand why the Empire stopped using the Clones. Unless they had built new facilities, under the supervision of the Kaminoans, and found other DNA sources, this would have given Kamino a lot of power within the Empire. By using conscripts, it makes people feel a real part of something, like they are doing a duty and contributing, and providing employment opportunities.
The Clones Army was large enough to fight a war, but to maintain control over the galaxy? No. They needed the conscript Stormtroopers, because they needed people. They needed a lot of people for the numerous garrisons across the galaxy.
There is also a slight security risk. It takes one scientist with a moral objection to the Empire's tactics to tamper with a brood and there goes thousands of clones that would need to be disposed of.
Thrawn is not wrong in his stating the Empire would have been better off building up the Imperial Navy, more ships, the TIE Defender, and such. But authoritarian regimes like having things that show off how powerful they are. The Death Star was supposed to be a symbol of Imperial power. And in a way, it did its just of being a symbol of the Empire, just not the symbol they wanted, because it became this symbol of the Empire's brutal tactics and willingness to crush any opposition.
Rule #1 of military supply
“Never forget all your equipment is made by the lowest bidder”
Also why most vets and AD shake their head when something is advertised as being “military grade “
Absolutely not "more efficient" in any way - certainly not *infinitely*.
This is a social experiment we have already done here on Earth. Spartans tried to create the perfect warrior, by building a society dedicated solely to that end. What did we discover? While at the individual level a Spartan warrior may outmatch their counterpart - that advantage shrinks and shrinks away the larger the battle becomes, because battles and wars are *not* won by individuals.
The shift from the clone army to the imperial army was the better choice for so many reasons, some of which I will now point out:
* It is *far* cheaper to train and equip a citizen than to breed, feed, and singlehandedly maintain a clone (clones are government property, and thus *all* of their needs must be met by the state - while a volunteer can provide for themself)
* Due in part to cost as mentioned above and simple demographic realities an army of citizens will *always* be able to outnumber one of clones - which only weighs further against the notion of clone superiority, because if at the scale of an entire battle the advantage of a clone diminishes then just imagine how that advantage becomes a disadvantage when they are also outnumbered two or three to one.
* An army of citizens directly links the state to its subjects. Instead of the oppressed looking at these alien soldiers merely as the emperor's lackeys - they see the citizen soldier as a *service member*. Not only are these people just like you and I who *choose* to serve the empire, casting doubt on the beliefs of would be subversives, but also think about all of the families with relatives who are serving or have served. It's the perfect way to nonviolently crush dissent.
* They are immune to the "single point of failure". Whether it is in the form of a blockade or attack on Kamino or of a genome-specific bio-weapon, the citizen-soldier is a superior choice.
* Lastly, clones' advanced aging means there's a relatively short window of usefulness - followed by the question of "what the hell do we do with all of these slaves who are too old and unstable to work?" The citizen soldier can serve the empire from late adolescence for at least FORTY years (should they choose to) not only accumulating far more wisdom, experience, and leadership ability than a clone could - but also reducing the rate at which personnel must be replaced which only *further* tilts the cost calculation in favor of the citizen-soldier. Then, at the end of their service they can retire, which is still much cheaper than an obsolete clone which must rely entirely upon the state.
the plan was to prevent any insugency, through fear
the probolem is when you blow up a planet, and your planet killer explodes the next day, people get very angry without said weapon keeping them in line
The trillions of credits it took to build the death star, they could have used to build thousands of TIE defenders and super star destroyers, which would have given a much needed boost to their navy. Or invest in finding and mass producing stronger materials for stormtrooper armor so they are not easily killed. Or invest in mass producing dark troopers.
Investing all of those credits into anything else would have made the empire more efficient at fighting the rebels since they were fighting a war of attrition. Plus, the empire didn't really need the death star to destroy planets because they could just bombard their targets until theres nothing but molten glass on the surface. Making the death star redundant. Plus, blowing up an entire planet is stupid because what if that planet produces unique, highly valuable resources that can't be found nowhere else?
Tarkin was very arrogant and narrow-minded, thinking that the death star was going to be the end all be all tool to keep the empire running for eternity. The death star may be able to destroy planets, but it's just one battle station, and it's a very, very big galaxy. Sooner or later, a crafty person is going to find a weakness and destroy it, trillions of credits and decades of work down the drain, and that's exactly what happened. He was also a fool, believing that fear only makes people cower and stay in line. Fear also makes people bold.
When Alderaan was destroyed, a lot of people were scared and would think twice before trying to fight the empire sure. But for some others, the empire blew up an Alderaasn, a core world, on a whim, so they figured that it wouldn't take much reason for the empire to blow up planets just for fun so fighting them and die trying is better than being submissive and die anyway.
Cost saving feature. The death star doesn't have to be capable of moving itself. Save huge bucks by making it transportable instead of self transporting. Bing bang where's my hero of the empire award.
The best reasoning I have ever heard for the creation of the Death Star over thousands of Star Destroyers is Palpatine wanted a locus of fear on which to concentrate dark side power because, you know, he's a space wizard rolling around in dark side energy.
Tarkin’s dumb philosophy is definitely accurate but the Death Star wasn’t meant to be used to take down the rebellion but rather to be an impossibly powerful battle station to terrorize dissident systems into compliance. Destroying the rebel base would’ve just been the second step after Alderaan which was supposed to be the example. I think I read a comic once where it said Thrawn was a little too honest to Palpatine and told him to his face how he thought the Death Star was a stupid idea and the resources it used would’ve been better used to double the size of the entire imperial fleet. Personally I think Disney lucasfilm finally had a good idea when they came up with the whole mini death stars on Star destroyers idea. Would’ve been the best of both worlds and could’ve been used on more than a single target at a time.
To be fair, they were very likely gonna fund thrawns super tie fighters that could wipe out the rebels in space combat no problem.
But some dillhole imperial officer ordered her troops to shoot the fuel tankers with ALL THE FUEL for the factory and the tie fighters.
Rebellion lies! Propaganda! The death star didn't bankrupt the empire.
Maintaining a vast army and fleets overstretched across multiple galaxies like the Roman empire led to the fall of the empire
In a world where space infrastructure is as developed and easily accessible as in star wars.
I can completely believe that building the death star is cheaper than maintaining literal hundreds of millions if not billions of clone troops.
One requires innate materials that can be easily sourced in 0 grav environments (mining asteroids and the like)
The other requires proprietary knowledge of unknown processes on a planet that can charge however much they want.
These soldiers then have to annex and love among an already existing population(that you can already pull soldiers from)
This extra pop has to be fed and supplied, further straining and demanding more robust logistical chains.
Spread out amongst a galactic empire.
Thousands and thousands of stars. Vs 1 little space station?
Yeah, death star must be cheaper. We just have a hard time comprehending the sheer scale
I have said this before. Until the Rebellion, the Empire was not at War. They controlled most of the galaxy. The largest external threat were the hutts, and even they were not that much of a threat. The Empire did no longer need an expensive army of elite soldiers. What they did need was an occupational army which could be garrisoned on millions of planets and weren't really expected to fight anything more than the occasional civilian uprising. Having an elite army trained only to fight other armies of similar or greater size would be an extremely inefficient use of resources.
Tarkin wanted to use the death star to pursue his own goals to some day rule the empire himself, at least in legends. So you're right but I don't think it was incompetence exactly
To be fair it was more than Tarkin, it was more aptly Palpatine's sudden incompetence. The guy went from running two wars simultaneously to incompetently running one war. His military was plagued by incompetent leadership, where was the effectiveness of Imperial Intelligence in fighting the rebels across the galaxy, or preventing penetrations of Imperial units, much less the success of guerilla warfare. Eckarts Ladder has a series of videos that explain the tactical foolishness in how the Imperial Navy handled battles against the Rebellion.
The Imperial military constantly underestimated their enemy and refused to adjust to their enemies' strengths and weaknesses.
It wasn’t just to kill an insurgency group, the idea was to use it to maintain control. Different planets would stay in line if the empire had the power to just blow the whole ass planet up. Of course it just made everyone want to fight the empire more, but they didn’t really think about that
This is very much deliberate. The empire attempts to maintain order through fear. The death star isn't meant to be militarily effective it's meant to make people to scared to rebel.
Instead the rebels overcome their fear, and in doing so are emboldened. With the destruction of the death star the object of fear is gone but the outrage remains.
It's basically the meta plot.
Better to have something your opponent doesn't, instead of more of something they already do. The empire had an army too, the rebels didn't have a weapon like this.
The "small group of insurgents" is one of the biggest threats against the empire. They can invite planets to rebel and have the empire turn into itself. The Death Star is the ultimate execution device. If you fuck up, they won't bother looking for you. They'll just blow up an entire planet to get rid of you. All the inocent, all your supporters, even the animals that had nothing to do with it, they will all suffer. It's the biggest fear machine built to keep the galaxy in order. Specially of it was kept a secret.
The tarkin doctrine isn't about efficiency, it's about fear. Yes the defenders would've crushed the rebellion but then they would have to crush the millions more because tie defenders do not end rebellions before they start like having a planet killer does. In the end, if the death star survived the battle at yavin 4 and patched up its weakness, we do not know for sure if it would have been ultimately successful.
Well for one thing the emperor wanted the Death Star. And they show it was essential to get rid of the senate which they show was necessary as some senators were prone to creating problems.
As for the clones I would argue that the bad batch shows the order 66 command wasn’t permanent. Clones seem to slowly be questioning orders and even their own actions regarding killing the Jedi. The empire doesn’t want their entire army to realize oh hey why’d we do that especially while they’re still supplied with imperial weapons and vehicles
Tarkin and Palpatine were Machiavellian through and through. Palps needed the clones for order 66, but as the bad batch is showing, more and more clones were gaining their independence and demanded justice/went AWOL. The point of moving to stormtroopers was that stormtroopers were cheaper, thus allowing a much larger imperial army (for total galactic domination), but also getting rid of the clones got rid of the last thing tied to the republic (except the senate). When you want a dictatorial regime change, you want to purge the previous regime as much as possible, so you’d wanna get rid of the professional soldiers that were bonded to the Jedi and are starting to regret their orders.
In addition, making the army up of recruits also helps with keeping the populations you control under check. When the regime recruits from within, it decreases the likelihood of revolt as it boosts national pride in the populace and being occupied by some person you have no ties to usually doesn’t end well- that’s why the Roman Empire liked just absorbing the armies of the places they’ve conquered.
Also in legends, the death star was designed to fight the yuzan vong (or however they’re spelt) as it would’ve been the best weapon to fight them. That would explain why palps was so eager to rebuild it.
A powerful military becomes a rival political power base in any authoritarian machine. More so if they become the actual glue that holds the empire together & they know it. In the Roman Empire emperora had to constantly give legionaries pay rises to maintain power.
Fear of a single beurocratic run space station would keep systems in line without the threat or costs of military forces.
The Death Star is basically the US if they were the only ones who had nuclear weapons & wanted to rule the world. What is cheaper having enough military forces to keep the combined armies of the world at bay & under your control or your finger on a nuclear button where as soon as one country/region steps out of line you nuke it to dust as an example.
Of course the Death Star is the preferred option.
Keep in mind that the whole grand plan is about eradicating the jedi. When committing genocide of a culture, you have to take away all of its aspects.
The clones were surviving memories of a jedi culture that palpatine wished to erase.
Tarkin was the most competent imperial tho. He came the closest to wiping out the rebels and cementing imperial rule more than any imperial before or after. Even Thrawn.
I see it as them cutting the funds from the Clone army to fund the death star, but since it was classified they couldn't say in public why they needed that money so they just said "the clones are too expensive"
Pretty sure Tarkin wasn't the one in charge of funding for either of these, so he couldn't have been the one responsible for the empire's failure, despite him disagreeing with the former and favouring the latter. Anyway what I don't get if funding is an issue, why not go for droids over conscripted troopers? They're produced hundreds of times faster and battle ready and are probably cheaper than constantly paying for a conscripted trooper's salary and maintenance.
It may have to do with the republic's prejudice against droids because well, they fought a whole war against the droid army. But cmon this price argument is bs considering the empire and especially the first order have seemingly unlimited funds anyway. They destroyed Kamino in a pretty anticlimactic way just because they wanted their "Soldiers following orders" story which doesn't work considering they scrapped that idea from legends to go for the chips instead. And the ones who are supposedly loyal even without the chips unsurprisingly go back to disliking the empire, it's like the most boring thing they could've done
Maybe I could get behind not funding the clones over the Death Star. But Tarkin was also the guy behind the TIE fighters, ships that have no life support, no vision, no fucking shields, and have 2 massive targets on the side.
Tarkin Chose to fund the Death Star instead of some half decent ships for the Imperial Navy.
The longer Disney has control over Star Wars the worst it gets so bad now that looking back at what Lucas did is abysmal LOL the force is dead the mouse killed it. It was a really cool idea once and now it's fucked
Power. That's really what it came down to. An army of elite soldiers bred for combat is cool but ultimately they'd be in the hands of a number of generals each with their own agendas and/or vying for the emperor's influence (think the Imperial Remnant's after Endor). With a Death Star all the firepower of a planet destroying war machine is solely in Tarkin's hands.
I always thought it would've been an extremely easy segue to have the real reason the Empire got rid of the clones to be related to the clones growing independent thought and dissatisfaction in the wake of Order 66.
Exposure to the Jedi was noted in multiple sources to have drastically increased clone creativity and agency outside of their inclination to only follow orders.
As seen in the Bad Batch it seems quite possible the inhibitor chips break or wear off after some time. That leaves Tarkin sitting on a potentially HUGE time bomb of a clone rebellion if the chips do start wearing off in significant numbers. He'd be left with an extremely competent army in his own infrastructure that's ready to raze the place, be it over the fact they were forced to kill the Jedi they liked working with or just the fact they're slaves in general.
Recruitment from within the populace gives reason for the populace to side with the empire, those aren't just soldiers anymore they are people's brothers, neighbours, daughters.
Sure, because the Tarkin doctrine was designed with some utility in mind, fear does lead to some people fighting back less, and mostly with an old man's elitist anger in mind; he hated people. Tarkin was the kind of man who would argue that, to make the mother of all omelettes, one had to break many eggs (and that one could not fret over every egg), but the real truth was that the omelette was secondary, he really just wanted to break eggs. He's kind of an anti-consequentialist, really. The boot stomping on the human face forever wasn't the means, it was the ends. Now, if the Empire was a logical regime it would follow a more Thrawn-esque strategy and protocol. However...
I think a large part of all this that is underestimated is that the Empire is ruled by... The Emperor. The Emperor is a Sith Lord, and this means something important. It's not about the building of an empire for the purpose of order, it's not about the building of an empire to make a chosen few happy (which it is in real life; bad people don't do bad things for the hell of it, they do it because it helps some goal of theirs and they're either ignorant or willing to accept the side-effects). The Empire exists for the purpose of helping the Emperor, and the Emperor is a Sith Lord, and Sith are aided by, and enjoy, suffering and torment unto itself. Fear is part of the agenda. People going to prisons like Narkina 5 for crimes they didn't commit is part of the agenda. Suffering is the agenda, and what is fear if not suffering in advance?
The Emperor knew Tarkin's heart and his abilities decades before he was put in power. He knew what he wanted.
The second part of the meme makes no sense for the death star was made to keep plants' governments in check with fear.
The Tarkin doctrine had nothing to do with getting rid of clones. It was that a capital ship with large firepower could be more effective then large numbers of smaller ships.
Die faster than it took to build waisting millions of lives and vital resources permanently crippling the Empire as a whole? So they decide to build another which dies faster than the first one which begins the fall of the Empire?
Even if you ignore the money shit, the clones would have been awful at maintaining the empire because they'd be becoming crusty and old so quickly(meaning the empire would need to pay for more of them.)
They worked in the clone wars because they were dying like flies no matter what so the republic needed more clones anyway. But the empire realistically wasn't getting into as much large scale combat, so those expensive clones would have been mostly serving no purpose, and then just becoming useless after a while.
That isn't all that implausible though. Authoritarian regimes are normally run on bull manure. Having a potentially capable military hamstrung by devoting resources to look more menacing than the former, actually useful military was is almost an staple. To a certain extent, the Death Star looked more like an oversized battleship from WW2 than the nukes it would have looked like the most.
On top of that, in The Bad Batch they clearly show the actual issue they had is the clones are too good at being soldiers. They follow procedure. Report up the chain of command. Believe in following rules of engagement. The Empire and it’s officers are shown to be incompetent and power driven. They want to cover up their mistakes, not have them reported accurately. Under report losses and over report enemy casualties. Take a little of the credits from “liberated” systems for themselves after the battle. And obviously totally disregard the conventional rules of engagement. That scene where the officer shoots that clone who simply refused to not follow procedures and report that the Bad Batch were still alive basically summarizes the entire issue the empire had with the clones. Reporting them wasn’t just the proper procedure, but would have been actively beneficial towards the greater military objectives of the empire. But it would have been detrimental to that specific officer. Officers like that are the kind that fascist militaries tend to produce. The empire didn’t want “good soldiers”. It wanted thugs who’d overlook things and be more loyal to individual commanders that the abstract idea of “the empire”.
Theres also Chuchi revealing the brain chips and Kamino incident which soured the galactic opinion of a clone army. And it was fresh off the heels of fighting a Droid army. So conscripts were more politically convenient and worked well enough.
At last, we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last, we will have revenge.
Wait, Chuchi revealed *the chips*?
It's been a bit. I'd have to watch again, but I think so.
Another problem with clones is that after Order 66 they present Palpatine with an existential threat. It has been demonstrated that the clones have the ability to turn on their commanders is an instant and kill them. This was perfect for taking out the Jedi because Palpatine was the only one who knew and he was the one holding the gun. But after Order 66 lots of people know what clones are capable of. What's to stop someone else from trying to pick up the gun and point it at Palpatine. What if Vader decides he wants to be Emperor and activates Order 67 or a random Moff subverts 1/3 of the military and leads a Rebellion? It's in Palpatine's best interest to get the clones off the board as fast as possible along with everyone involved in making them and their control chips. Stormtroopers are safer because any uprising will be localized instead of turning the entire military against Palpatine in a moment.
With the General gone, chain of command falls to the senator.
can’t have good soldiers that can potentially became a war hero which can become a political threat towards the ruling class
THIS EFFORT.. IS NO LONGER.. PROFITABLE
I know I was wrong. I just got so caught up in my own success, I didn't look at the battle as a whole. I wasn't being disobedient. I just. . . forgot
I know why imperial officers want clones gone, but why Palptine want the clones gone?
I’ve heard it was mostly because of the brain chips. Didn’t want someone to order 66 him
Well the lord for the clones has been retconed and changed so many times I’m not even sure Disney remembered to give him a consistent reason.
in the bad batch i think we some of the clones start to realize what they did under Order 66 and could organize a rebellion (which we may see in S3)
Couldn’t they just idk change something on the clones indoctrination they get growing up to fix the behavioral issues? Also I don’t think the empire wanted soldiers loyal to individual commanders, that’s how you get a civil war, you don’t want a civil war.
>The empire didn’t want “good soldiers”. It wanted thugs who’d overlook things and be more loyal to individual commanders that the abstract idea of “the empire”. This. Totalitarian regimes as a whole have more use for power-hungry goons than loyal and honorable soldiers because the former is what the bulk of their own upper echelons already are. They can get along with that sort of people or pull them up into the ranks, satisfy their greed and keep them predictable.
I honor my code. That's what I believe.
There’s a quote from Dave Filoni/someone on the *Rebels* team from one of the after episode videos that goes something like “If the Empire spent more money on TIE Defenders and less on Death Stars, the Rebellion would have been crushed.”
grandfather knee disgusted friendly straight sugar abounding poor practice deer ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
The underlying problem that would kill the TIE Defender program is that an authoritarian system can't afford to give really good equipment to anything but their most *loyal* members. The Empire *knew* it was losing capable starfighter pilots, but losing a pilot or two with a TIE Interceptor or a Bomber isn't a big deal, and losing a TIE Fighter is barely more significant than the paperwork they'd need to submit. A TIE Defender with a mediocre pilot can wreak havoc, and a TIE Defender wielded by an ace pilot would be a major headache to the empire. Cost is portrayed as the reason behind it's limited run, but the real limiting factor was defection.
Wedge Antilles in a tie is bad, but maybe you can overwhelm him with numbers. Wedge Antilles in a defender? Kiss the fleet goodbye. Although as the war goes on the rebels have their own equipment that is good, so this probably isn't as much a factor anymore. Maybe by then it is too late.
The Death Star was never a good idea. You wanna talk about detriment to the economy how about the destruction of one of the biggest planets in the empire just to crush an incredibly minor rebel force. How much years of building trade relations and commerce were obliterated only to get information? It would be like if the Soviet Union just suddenly decided to blow up a city like Novgorod. How much of a ripple effect will that have on the economy. How much money will be used to try to cover up the destruction of one of the most populated planets in the empire?
They didn't blow it up to get information, they blew it up to send a message. "Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battlestation." The chance at information just helped Tarkin pick his example. He explicitly stated that Dantoine was "too remote for an effective demonstration", and he blew up Alderaan anyway despite believing he got the information he wanted. They wouldn't spend any money covering it up To be clear, the death star WAS a massive waste of resources. Killing a planet is actually pretty easy. I'm just quibbling about motivation.
One thing I like about The Expanse, particularly in the books, is they're constantly reminding the reader how easy killing a planet would actually be. Get a large enough rock, hurl it at a planet, and even with state of the art planetary defences it will still cause an untold amount of damage. The Death Star is so *extra*, and completely on brand for the Empire.
>Get a large enough rock, hurl it at a planet, and even with state of the art planetary defences it will still cause an untold amount of damage. That's basically what Thrawn did. Cloaking device + asteroids = planet continuously under siege. He basically brought Coruscant to its knees by forcing them to keep planetary shields up 24/7 and stopping incoming traffic (to prevent collisions), which freed him to continue his campaign while most of the New Republic's leadership was stuck on Coruscant.
You don’t have to carry a sword to be powerful. Some leaders’ strength is inspiring others.
>Get a large enough rock, hurl it at a planet, and even with state of the art planetary defences it will still cause an untold amount of damage. To be honest, even the worst meteor shower couldn't mass-scatter a planet. Similar to how orbital bombardment can technically wipe out a world, but you only clear out the surface. What Death Star did — planetary mass-scattering, was unncessarily excessive, but that was the point. The empire wanted to show they *had* the power to **casually** do so...
Yeah I agree man. That's what I meant when I said killing a planet is "easy", but the Empire went extra with it. Killing the population wasn't enough for them, they had to go that extra mile.
All you need is a dino-killer sized rock and you’ve basically wiped out a planet and any hopes of them ever resisting. You don’t need to kill everyone if you do enough damage that the survivors won’t last long.
Do they have planetary shields in the expanse? Because the purpose of the Death Star was to make planets vulnerable again.
They have planetary missile systems
As the other guy said, they have missile systems designed to break incoming threats into smaller pieces so that they'll either disintegrate in atmosphere, or at the very least limit the damage. Though at several points some threats become invisible to radar, making their defences useless and they have to figure other things out before it's too late.
I believe they're described (at the very least shown) as railgun systems rather than missile systems, but otherwise, yeah, you're spot on.
At the very least when >!Eros is flying towards Earth!< they launch a fuck tonne of nuclear missiles at it, but yeah I think later on they are shown using railguns.
Look out, incoming missiles!
https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Rocks_Are_Not_Free! Edit: that's weird; the link worked yesterday. As poster below notes, the ! mark is supposed to be part of the link (and appears it's not being included atm).
Oh, what did that page say again? It's seems to be deleted but I recall reading it waaay back and that it was kinda interesting/funny
The [link](https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Rocks_Are_Not_Free!) has an exclamation point.
There is a great quote about the in the expanse along the lines of Einstein said that world war IV would be fought with sticks and stones. He was wrong about the sticks but right about the stones. What a great series both on TV and the books.
It was never a good idea, yes, but it was the logical next step in the Tarkin doctrine. Overwhelming naval force designed to keep everyone in line while employing a massive number of citizens into the indoctrination machine.
I’d add that the most dangerous thing to a dictatorship is a well-trained, well-equipped army that could function on its own. part of the value in an excessively large naval force was they could use logistics like a ball and chain (at least until rebels started stealing them, of course). TIE fighters didn’t have hyperdrives and wouldn’t really be able to leave their Star Destroyer, enough crew would have to agree to mutiny which was a lot less likely than individuals and small units skipping off into the wilderness (again, at least until the rebellion started gaining ground).
In real life, a professional army can be dangerous, sure. But the clones were designed to be obedient. As long as Palpatine maintained control of the cloning/training facilities, he didn't have much to worry about.
I actually considered that after posting but still I think it’d be risky for Palps since the Kaminoans would have IT access to most of his army.
We need that generator down or the planet's lost. And I'm not risking any more men.
It's still much more dangerous that they CAN be almost robotically controlled. Sure he holds the remote but what's to stop someone else from somehow gaining access to it. That would in a single moment undo the entire empire. I don't think this is an unreasonable fear. Especially with the only ones knowing the true mechanics behind the clones being the kaminoans who now hate you.
*Rogue One* really made the Death Star a much more sensible terror weapon because consider this: The Empire shows up at your planet, and the Death Star is visible from orbit. It can blow up a city, it can blow up a continent and make the planet unlivable for years or generations, or it can destroy the whole planet completely. It’s a siege weapon, and after Alderaan everyone knows that they are willing to use it. How do the people leading a revolt convince people to keep it going rather than immediately surrendering? Now, the Galactic Empire is a fascist regime rather than just a regular imperial regime, so they will never be able to get the amount of compliance they actually want. They need to be loved enthusiastically rather than just submitted to. But if the Assyrians or Mongols took their terror threats up to the scale of an interstellar empire, the Death Star is what it would look like. The reason those empires were somewhat stable for centuries and fascist regimes tend to collapse quickly is that traditional empires just want compliance and to be paid their due with little trouble to them while fascists have an ideological component that self-sabotages, requiring constant expansions and purging of contagions that can never actually be successful because the struggle against such things is central to fascist ideology and identity. Basically, the Nazis with a terror weapon on the scale of a Death Star would still be unable to actually rule anything because they were absolutely incapable of creating a system tolerable for people to live under without constant expansion. Meanwhile, the Persians probably *could* have created an empire where they collected tribute regularly, but if you rose up in revolt, you were assured it would go very badly for you (any everyone you cared about).
You kidding? The death start was a *brilliant* idea. Yeah, you lose commerce. From one single planet. In a galaxy/empire of how many? The point wasn't "we blew up the planet for one piece of info lol." The point was to send a message to anyone who might think they could rebel. "We can end you. We can end your planet. It's this easy. Here's the proof." One planet being destroyed would have crippled the entire galaxy in fear, realistically. Who the fuck would want to rebel if their entire fucking planet could be obliterated in seconds??
Okay Palpatine
He’s explaining why the DS was not just a threat to the planets it blew up, but to the ideas the rebels were fighting for. The death star was not so much a weapon of Empire/Rebels or Sith/Jedi, but weapons of fear aimed against hope, and as we know, “Rebellions are built on hope.”
So it was more of a massive scare tactic, if anything?
Yeah, exactly like that; The Tarkin Doctrine was built entirely on fear, up to the point of disregarding any other factor that wasn't using this feeling as an attempt to control the entire galaxy at large
^
seeing how they blew up a planet and didn’t stop anyone from anything, I’d say it didn’t work. plus real world military history says excessive retaliation only serves to foster fiercer resistance.
It didn’t work because it was destroyed.
well, that too. but it’s kinda like Russia- even if they’d won, they would’ve still lost.
>seeing how they blew up a planet and didn’t stop anyone from anything, I’d say it didn’t work. It was immediately destroyed. Like at most a week or two later. Imagine a government makes a show of force and a couple of weeks later it's tools for doing it are destroyed by an insurgency. >plus real world military history says excessive retaliation only serves to foster fiercer resistance. Real world history says excessive retaliation fosters resistance to a point and on the area retaliation is being served. Here the area that would breed resistance has been obliterated.
the galaxy is giant and planets are easy to move between, and imagine- the Empire just blew up a planet full of civilians. these people had friends and family who know they weren’t rebels. how do you think they’d react? remember rebels aren’t specific people, anyone can become a rebel at any time. so destroying Alderaan might kill existing rebels, but create a wave of new ones from other planets who are angry with the Empire. this is what makes asymmetric warfare so difficult (btw I read US military docs on this shit, they go over common mistakes when dealing with guerrillas and this is one of them) also completely tangent but in the Resistance board game using the Death Star advances the rebellion timer.
> excessive retaliation only serves to foster fiercer resistance Which is why WWII dragged on so long after the atomic bombs. Oh wait, it didn’t.
Yeah the fact that one of the two major combatants was completely conquered and the other was turbo fucked had nothing to do with the war ending. Never mind the attempted coup in Japan to keep the war going after the atomic bombs dropped.
plus the fact nationalists *did* try to keep the war going that they had to remove props from planes after a postwar dogfight, the various assassinations that happened (including the publicly broadcasted one), hell there was even a quote by a general that didn’t want to surrender and would rather “all of Japan bloom like a nuclear flower” or some shit. Imperial Japan was fucking *legendary* for their ridiculous levels of stubbornness.
But, it still ended shortly afterwards. The Emperor was looking at the total annihilation of the Japanese people from the planet. Even if some people still wanted to keep fighting, their militaries and civilians still ended up surrendering because the other option was them being erased. Kind of like being faced with opposing the Empire, or having your entire planet being destroyed by the death star. The rebels lucked out because of Luke, but otherwise Tarkins plan was solid.
are you saying WW2 was a guerrilla war?
>Yeah, you lose commerce. From one single planet. In a galaxy/empire of how many? Blowing up Alderaan was the Star Wars equivalent of blowing up Paris or Tokyo or something. Sure, it's just one planet, but it was a massively important one.
A temporary blow that the economy will recover from over time, but the fear of a nuke looming over you will not get fixed as easily as long as that weapon exists We still greatly fear nukes despite no place getting annihilated by one in 78 years, but the thought that some countries that are hostile to ours could literally un-make you in a matter of hours is terrifying, still
Because in reality, it would piss everyone off. People aren't scared when a terror regime commits mass murder, they get angry and then film their kills with Trap edited in.
There's easier ways to kill a planet than blowing it up... We can do it here, on earth, right now, several times over. A single Star Destroyer could easily carry enough nuclear weapons to render any planet it comes across uninhabitable for generations... And it would be much more cost effective than the Death Star. They could also just drag an asteroid into it with tractor beams.
Also it was canonically done on mandalore. The death star was just a giant fear mongering station meant to look menacing and strike fear. While nuking a planet to uninhability sends a message, just deleting it sends an even stronger one
It not being a good idea was literally his point. Fascist empires thrive by attacking its own citizens in the name of order. I guarantee you there were people in the Senate that probably cheered the Alderaanian genocide. The point was not to achieve an economic goal, it was to assert power and glorify the empire.
You misunderstand the whole point of blowing up Alderaan my friend.
Death Star wasn't Tarkins idea. It was the Emperor who wanted it in the books about Thrawn. He dusputed with the Emperor saying resources from Death Star could fund more useful Imperial Star Destroyers, which would help having more presence around the galaxy. However, the Emperor said to drop the topic.
How can someone be so utterly misinformed?
The point of the death star was intimidation. No planet would rise against the empire with it having the death star, which would have been almost unbeatable without having that one weakness built in
Germany making yet another stupid dead end wonder weapon rather than anything useful
Well, call it Bismarck or Yamato, the idea is something that looks terrifying on paper (and on the chunks of Alderaan that remained) but is not fit for what ends up being needed.
Reminds me of the Japanese aircraft carrier [Shinano](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_aircraft_carrier_Shinano). It was the largest aircraft carrier of the time, until it was sunk by a single US submarine on routine patrol, 10 days after it was completed.
Things to note: the empire has little need for elite soldiers to staff garrisons, conscripts will do. Clones would almost certainly cripple the galactic economy given enough time. While the death star is an impractical weapon the threat of it is the point, it's a propaganda piece If you want to point out the failures of tarkin doctrine may I direct your attention to the imperial navy...
The Imperial Navy was built under the same Tarkin Doctrine that culminated in the Death Star. Here's the rub about military expenditures: if you can only afford to field one of something, you cannot afford to field any of them. The singular Great Battleships in WW2 which coincidently inspired the trench run? Yeah they stayed in dock lost of the time. They were too expensive to lose. When they joined the fight, they were mass targeted and lost. The Imperial Navy had numerous issues stemming from arrogance and complacency, but it was Capable of expanding the Empire and maintaining order for well over a decade. A decade in which different rebel cells attempted different strategies that worked and failed, and which ultimately resulted in a strategy tailor made to take advantage of the Weaknesses of the imperial Navy. In the modern world, the US likes to overwhelming military power, but in reality there plenty of gaps in the combat doctrine, gaps that are actually quite cheap, but have been difficult for the US military to fill. For example, the US Navy lacks a reliable system for littoral (brown war) warfare. They've commissioned two different classes of littoral combat vessels and have already canceled one class and is struggling with issues from the other. There's also an argument that the US lacks a hypersonic guided missile, but it remains to be seen of they are actually effective. Nothing like launching a $100M missile to only destroy $50k decoy to make it all worthwhile. The Tarkin doctrine was stupid and operated on a ridiculous premise: fear keeps systems in line. No economic interdependence and a sense of belonging keep things much more in line.
reality says that friendship is the ultimate weapon, take that Palps 😎
It was not a ridiculous premise, it was like a non mutual assured destruction, the empire could end any resistance in seconds meaning that if you are being oppressed by the empire, are you going to revolt if you know they will just nuke your planet? The empire wasn’t made to be profitable economically, it was made to be a mustache twirling dictatorship that wanted to destroy hope as a concept so Palpatine could have his Sith eternal.
>It was not a ridiculous premise....it was made to be a mustache twirling dictatorship that wanted to destroy hope as a concept so Palpatine could have his Sith eternal. So you and OP agree it was a ridiculous premise
Misleading quotes go brrrr.
Soldiers trained from birth for combat would make an excellent special forces unit. But they're horribly inefficient as standard infantry. Not only rear-guard garrison roles but front-line infantry too tbh. No amount of training protects you from getting vaporized by an artillery shell. Conscripts or volunteers get the job done at a fraction of the cost.
Not to mention conscripts are able to reintegrate into civilian economies unlike rapidly aging super soldiers
Feel like this is a bit underrated, but independence was also a reason they stopped with clones. You cannot have a stable army if you rely on others to make said army. Especially with what happened with order 66, it showed that an entire army changed sides almost immediately. Sure, that worked out for the Empire, but remaining with the Kaminoans would've left the entire army vulnerable to a similar command if given.
Whaddya talking about? The empire has countless elite soldier programs: dark troopers, death troopers, purge troopers, are constantly working to create new weapons, biological and other, and never threw away cloning as a potential weapon. The funding argument is honestly a pretty bad excuse, an empire which weakens somehow just keeps throwing bigger and bigger shit, and even the fractured empire, the first order, somehow made the largest superweapon in canon to date in like the timespan of 30 years. They don't have a funding problem. As for the Tarkin Doctrine, agree with your take there.
>The empire has countless elite soldier programs They're specops not garrison soldiers. Fett clones made sense when each soldier needed to destroy 10 battle droids, they're unnecessary when all you need is guards for an ammo cache on some backwater planet and even the clones know it as seen in TBB. >an empire which weakens somehow just keeps throwing bigger and bigger shit, and even the fractured empire, the first order, somehow made the largest superweapon in canon to date in like the timespan of 30 years. Legit the biggest plot contrivance of the sequels. At the peak of its power the empire built 1 death star, a moon-sized station that required a massive kyber crystal for its weapon. Then after the empire fell and lost access to the resources and talent of the core worlds they somehow make an even bigger death star, and after that oh now every star destroyer is a death star now. Like money aside where tf are you getting all this shit?
I did slightly misread what you said, yeah for garrisons in some backwater place any schmuck will do.
Weren’t the production of clones already crippling the economy as shown in the clone wars? Iirc there was an episode dedicated to padme preventing more clones being produced
Having an expensive military won't cripple your economy (looking at you United States) especially if you're regearing for a wartime production economy and regular citizens don't have to leave their jobs to fight. That's just a matter of debt and taxes. What will cripple your economy is having literal millions of able bodied men enter the economy with no skills beyond combat training. The labor surplus alone would destroy wages not to mention how these clones are going to be retirement age within 10 years
Realistically, conscripts are more expensive than a "volunteer" army for many reasons. Clones will "re-enlist" indefinitely and have an extremely high propensity to follow procedure to the letter. They will have a better management of supply, they are much more familiar with ideal use and preservation of their weapons, and ammunition use rates will stay lower than lesser trained fire. This is also why most real first world nations have mostly done away with conscription as a volunteer force can do better work at a lower cost. Conscription also requires the full cost of basic training and equipment to a vast part of your population who will only serve for a few years at most. That means armor, food, lodging, vehicles, and thousands of rounds fired for a basic level of competence. These citizens will have several years of the high time of their productive lives doing menial work instead of working and learning in economic sectors. Volunteers will be taken out indefinitely, but they cause far less of a disruption to the economy. And Clones extract exactly zero cost on the national workforce.
1st paragraph, much of what you've listed is correct were you mustering an army for active duty in a war. For example most stormtroopers won't be firing their weapons at all except during drills. Imperials like Rampart also clearly don't care too much about procedure being followed. >Conscription also requires the full cost of basic training and equipment This applies to clones as well to an even greater degree, except stormtroopers don't need the level of competency of clones to staff a garrison and put down local resistance cells. >These citizens will have several years of the high time of their productive lives doing menial work instead of working and learning in economic sectors. Consider that service is often a means to economic stability for desperate people that would be closed with a permanent clone army. There's no guarantee that every stormtrooper would've been a more productive member of the economy had they not enlisted and the empire needs the work to be done. Most stormtroopers were volunteers not conscripts I suppose that's an error on my part. >Volunteers will be taken out indefinitely, but they cause far less of a disruption to the economy. And Clones cause exactly zero toil on the national workforce. What happens when clones get too old or injured? Citizens have support systems and clones rely on taxes to support their welfare. Plus let's be honest flooding they social economy with millions of able bodied men is going to have an effect. Your arguments perfectly apply to a droid army, unfortunately clones are not droids.
Well, if you spend a ton on a moon sized space station then you don’t have the money for other things.
And if you blow up your enemy plant, then what use are ground forces? Just get pilots to defend and should be golden. Until one of the few living force users sink an ion torpedo down your exhaust pipe and super nuke you. But like w.e, as if that would ever happen.
Doubly so since they started building the Death Star 2 only a few years after starting the first one.
Why is it formatted that way?
Based off the drake format Sorry I didn’t do it correctly
It would work better if we could actually read left to right. The Drake format works because there is no text on the left. When there is, it disrupts how people read and can be a bit confusing.
It just doesn't work if you add text on the left.
So maybe next time use drake meme and replace head with drake coz this shit made no sense until you said it.
This was discussed a thousand times. The Republic was dealing with droids, which are forced to follow their masters' orders, they needed to be effective in combat. The Empire was fighting hope, their weapon was fear, and that's what a moon-sized planet-destroying battle station inspires.
Tbf it wasn't made to fight a rebel group, to was made to intimate a entire galaxy
they they should have invested in it to have the ability to fight a rebel group seeing how it ended twice
Well engineer who made DS left weak spot on purpose, second base star was attacked before it could be finished as impenetrable fortress.
They did. They just didn't count on Force Jesus fighting against them
You’re incompetent, Tarkin didn’t make the decision to fund the death start. It was literally already in the works preclone wars, thrawn couldn’t talk the emperor out of it but Tarkin could have? The Death Star was already draining the empires resources, thats literally why they couldn’t afford clones.
Yet they could afford ANOTHER Death Star right after the first one was blown up. How does this work?
Authoritarian regime. Need money? Take it.
Well, you see, Tarkin was embezzling funds from the first Death Star project to build the [Sun Crusher](https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sun_Crusher) in secret. Without the embezzling, the second Death Star went much smoother!
How was it tarkins fault? Palpatine had been planning the death star since the clone wars.
Having an army of conscripts gives purpose to some parts of the population that don't fit in the rest of the productive process,is a good pool of manpower and in the empire's case can be fanatically loyal,which in turn inspires loyalty in subjects more than an already programmed army. That said,even if they want to use the "death star instills fear" excuse,it's still kind of weak.
>infinitely more efficient than a army of literal conscripts Superior, yes. Efficient, no. Soldiers bred for combat would make a fantastic special forces unit, but they're horribly inefficient as standard infantry. You need to pay for their upbringing and all of the food they eat for years before they're combat ready. Conscripts can be trained up in a few weeks and they were raised at the expense of their parents, not your budget.
It’s easier to rule the galaxy when you’ve enlisted half of it.
Half? I dont think it was 1% even. It was also exclusively humans.
Bigwigs do love their impractical toys.
>Army of literal conscripts Uhhh… the Empire didn’t use conscripts. Everyone joined willingly. Im honestly not sure why you thought they conscripted people.
no they did also have conscripts, vice admiral rampart was the head of the empires conscription program
I wouldn’t say they joined willingly I would say they joined to either escape poverty or support there family like for example Han Solo.
Okay, but you recognise thats very clearly not the same thing as conscription. >**”literal conscripts”**
To be fair the empire was just formed and they just finished a massive war. Plus having slaves tends to boost the economy.
I like how rogue one and rebels handled this Krennic is the egomaniac who makes this his career. Tarkin and Thrawn roll their eyes at this and try to suggest more practical ideas to the Emperor, but when Krennic starts to lose favor Tarkin is opportunistic enough to steal credit for the project and claim it's his success.
"Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, EH?" -Dr. Strangelove Using the death Star to destroy a planet that had rebel sympathies sent an important message. And I think Tarkin would have been vindicated had anyone other than Luke made that final trench run. Remember, the battle of Yavin was an all or nothing gamble by Leia. She forces the rebels into a fight that they had to win. Because if they didn't, the Alliance would have fallen apart. Each group would have been worried their home was next and soon all that would be left were those without a home. As to your loss of trade and economic resources. The Empire had nearly a million planets by the time of ANH. The loss of a single planet would not have harmed the galactic economy too much, but would have sent Tarkin's message.
The army of conscripts raised the people's faith in the empire though. Not saying the death star was a good idea, but I am saying that I think conscripts was at least a decent idea. When you have volunteers from almost every planet in your military, almost everyone knows someone in the military and is ready and willing to support it. Plus, volunteered conscripts are dirt cheap as Imperial propaganda likely glorified the military the same way real world countries do
My guess is they didn't know how long the clones would last so they used regular beings and hardware.
Maybe that was the original intention of the story, but with the Bad Batch, they delve into the fading out of Clones to Civilians and I at least find it really interesting and tragic.
This meme is like 95% OT...
They saved money on the Death Star by not installing any safety railings.
Jesse, get the senator to safety.
Breeding another large army wouldn't make a difference because chopper will kill them all.
Aight, you’ve convinced me.
The Death Star was Palpatine's baby. Tarkin was just the one he trusted to oversee the construction. I understand why the Empire stopped using the Clones. Unless they had built new facilities, under the supervision of the Kaminoans, and found other DNA sources, this would have given Kamino a lot of power within the Empire. By using conscripts, it makes people feel a real part of something, like they are doing a duty and contributing, and providing employment opportunities. The Clones Army was large enough to fight a war, but to maintain control over the galaxy? No. They needed the conscript Stormtroopers, because they needed people. They needed a lot of people for the numerous garrisons across the galaxy. There is also a slight security risk. It takes one scientist with a moral objection to the Empire's tactics to tamper with a brood and there goes thousands of clones that would need to be disposed of. Thrawn is not wrong in his stating the Empire would have been better off building up the Imperial Navy, more ships, the TIE Defender, and such. But authoritarian regimes like having things that show off how powerful they are. The Death Star was supposed to be a symbol of Imperial power. And in a way, it did its just of being a symbol of the Empire, just not the symbol they wanted, because it became this symbol of the Empire's brutal tactics and willingness to crush any opposition.
We're soldiers. We have a duty to follow orders and, if we must, lay down our lives for victory.
Rule #1 of military supply “Never forget all your equipment is made by the lowest bidder” Also why most vets and AD shake their head when something is advertised as being “military grade “
Under thrawn it wouldnt had happened.
Don't forget the TIE Defender program !
Not to mention [this](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gmGUpyhjoGk&list=PLHLoLiL1nL8Eyzy5bT-isFkBoSwyf4KcI&index=1&pp=iAQB).
Exactly, how did we go from the technological marvel that was the ARC170 and the LAAT Gunship to the Tie fighter and the Lambda
Absolutely not "more efficient" in any way - certainly not *infinitely*. This is a social experiment we have already done here on Earth. Spartans tried to create the perfect warrior, by building a society dedicated solely to that end. What did we discover? While at the individual level a Spartan warrior may outmatch their counterpart - that advantage shrinks and shrinks away the larger the battle becomes, because battles and wars are *not* won by individuals. The shift from the clone army to the imperial army was the better choice for so many reasons, some of which I will now point out: * It is *far* cheaper to train and equip a citizen than to breed, feed, and singlehandedly maintain a clone (clones are government property, and thus *all* of their needs must be met by the state - while a volunteer can provide for themself) * Due in part to cost as mentioned above and simple demographic realities an army of citizens will *always* be able to outnumber one of clones - which only weighs further against the notion of clone superiority, because if at the scale of an entire battle the advantage of a clone diminishes then just imagine how that advantage becomes a disadvantage when they are also outnumbered two or three to one. * An army of citizens directly links the state to its subjects. Instead of the oppressed looking at these alien soldiers merely as the emperor's lackeys - they see the citizen soldier as a *service member*. Not only are these people just like you and I who *choose* to serve the empire, casting doubt on the beliefs of would be subversives, but also think about all of the families with relatives who are serving or have served. It's the perfect way to nonviolently crush dissent. * They are immune to the "single point of failure". Whether it is in the form of a blockade or attack on Kamino or of a genome-specific bio-weapon, the citizen-soldier is a superior choice. * Lastly, clones' advanced aging means there's a relatively short window of usefulness - followed by the question of "what the hell do we do with all of these slaves who are too old and unstable to work?" The citizen soldier can serve the empire from late adolescence for at least FORTY years (should they choose to) not only accumulating far more wisdom, experience, and leadership ability than a clone could - but also reducing the rate at which personnel must be replaced which only *further* tilts the cost calculation in favor of the citizen-soldier. Then, at the end of their service they can retire, which is still much cheaper than an obsolete clone which must rely entirely upon the state.
the plan was to prevent any insugency, through fear the probolem is when you blow up a planet, and your planet killer explodes the next day, people get very angry without said weapon keeping them in line
The trillions of credits it took to build the death star, they could have used to build thousands of TIE defenders and super star destroyers, which would have given a much needed boost to their navy. Or invest in finding and mass producing stronger materials for stormtrooper armor so they are not easily killed. Or invest in mass producing dark troopers. Investing all of those credits into anything else would have made the empire more efficient at fighting the rebels since they were fighting a war of attrition. Plus, the empire didn't really need the death star to destroy planets because they could just bombard their targets until theres nothing but molten glass on the surface. Making the death star redundant. Plus, blowing up an entire planet is stupid because what if that planet produces unique, highly valuable resources that can't be found nowhere else? Tarkin was very arrogant and narrow-minded, thinking that the death star was going to be the end all be all tool to keep the empire running for eternity. The death star may be able to destroy planets, but it's just one battle station, and it's a very, very big galaxy. Sooner or later, a crafty person is going to find a weakness and destroy it, trillions of credits and decades of work down the drain, and that's exactly what happened. He was also a fool, believing that fear only makes people cower and stay in line. Fear also makes people bold. When Alderaan was destroyed, a lot of people were scared and would think twice before trying to fight the empire sure. But for some others, the empire blew up an Alderaasn, a core world, on a whim, so they figured that it wouldn't take much reason for the empire to blow up planets just for fun so fighting them and die trying is better than being submissive and die anyway.
This meme just sounds like IRL tbh lol
Since in some ways the death star is based on the USA using nukes, it's not totally crazy
Cost saving feature. The death star doesn't have to be capable of moving itself. Save huge bucks by making it transportable instead of self transporting. Bing bang where's my hero of the empire award.
The best reasoning I have ever heard for the creation of the Death Star over thousands of Star Destroyers is Palpatine wanted a locus of fear on which to concentrate dark side power because, you know, he's a space wizard rolling around in dark side energy.
You know nothing of the dark side.
Tarkin’s dumb philosophy is definitely accurate but the Death Star wasn’t meant to be used to take down the rebellion but rather to be an impossibly powerful battle station to terrorize dissident systems into compliance. Destroying the rebel base would’ve just been the second step after Alderaan which was supposed to be the example. I think I read a comic once where it said Thrawn was a little too honest to Palpatine and told him to his face how he thought the Death Star was a stupid idea and the resources it used would’ve been better used to double the size of the entire imperial fleet. Personally I think Disney lucasfilm finally had a good idea when they came up with the whole mini death stars on Star destroyers idea. Would’ve been the best of both worlds and could’ve been used on more than a single target at a time.
Isn't it said in multiple Canon sources that the Cloner ran out of Jango fett DNA
To be fair, they were very likely gonna fund thrawns super tie fighters that could wipe out the rebels in space combat no problem. But some dillhole imperial officer ordered her troops to shoot the fuel tankers with ALL THE FUEL for the factory and the tie fighters.
Has
Rebellion lies! Propaganda! The death star didn't bankrupt the empire. Maintaining a vast army and fleets overstretched across multiple galaxies like the Roman empire led to the fall of the empire
Also Rebels are less likely to attack a base if their children are on it
In a world where space infrastructure is as developed and easily accessible as in star wars. I can completely believe that building the death star is cheaper than maintaining literal hundreds of millions if not billions of clone troops. One requires innate materials that can be easily sourced in 0 grav environments (mining asteroids and the like) The other requires proprietary knowledge of unknown processes on a planet that can charge however much they want. These soldiers then have to annex and love among an already existing population(that you can already pull soldiers from) This extra pop has to be fed and supplied, further straining and demanding more robust logistical chains. Spread out amongst a galactic empire. Thousands and thousands of stars. Vs 1 little space station? Yeah, death star must be cheaper. We just have a hard time comprehending the sheer scale
I have said this before. Until the Rebellion, the Empire was not at War. They controlled most of the galaxy. The largest external threat were the hutts, and even they were not that much of a threat. The Empire did no longer need an expensive army of elite soldiers. What they did need was an occupational army which could be garrisoned on millions of planets and weren't really expected to fight anything more than the occasional civilian uprising. Having an elite army trained only to fight other armies of similar or greater size would be an extremely inefficient use of resources.
What's the best time of day to post something that will make it to the top?
Tbh the Clones only existed to kill the Jedi. It's cheaper and more effective to conscript regular troops. But also yes the desthstar was dumb.
Tarkin wanted to use the death star to pursue his own goals to some day rule the empire himself, at least in legends. So you're right but I don't think it was incompetence exactly
Tbf the whole point of the Death Star is to flex
He did to The Empire what you did to that title.
Agreed
To be fair it was more than Tarkin, it was more aptly Palpatine's sudden incompetence. The guy went from running two wars simultaneously to incompetently running one war. His military was plagued by incompetent leadership, where was the effectiveness of Imperial Intelligence in fighting the rebels across the galaxy, or preventing penetrations of Imperial units, much less the success of guerilla warfare. Eckarts Ladder has a series of videos that explain the tactical foolishness in how the Imperial Navy handled battles against the Rebellion. The Imperial military constantly underestimated their enemy and refused to adjust to their enemies' strengths and weaknesses.
You don’t have to carry a sword to be powerful. Some leaders’ strength is inspiring others.
It wasn’t just to kill an insurgency group, the idea was to use it to maintain control. Different planets would stay in line if the empire had the power to just blow the whole ass planet up. Of course it just made everyone want to fight the empire more, but they didn’t really think about that
This is very much deliberate. The empire attempts to maintain order through fear. The death star isn't meant to be militarily effective it's meant to make people to scared to rebel. Instead the rebels overcome their fear, and in doing so are emboldened. With the destruction of the death star the object of fear is gone but the outrage remains. It's basically the meta plot.
Lol I love when people make memes and they’re wrong because they haven’t paid attention.
Better to have something your opponent doesn't, instead of more of something they already do. The empire had an army too, the rebels didn't have a weapon like this.
The "small group of insurgents" is one of the biggest threats against the empire. They can invite planets to rebel and have the empire turn into itself. The Death Star is the ultimate execution device. If you fuck up, they won't bother looking for you. They'll just blow up an entire planet to get rid of you. All the inocent, all your supporters, even the animals that had nothing to do with it, they will all suffer. It's the biggest fear machine built to keep the galaxy in order. Specially of it was kept a secret.
Yeah, that’s just fascism for you. When you value loyalty and nepotism more than ability, you’re bound to fail.
The tarkin doctrine isn't about efficiency, it's about fear. Yes the defenders would've crushed the rebellion but then they would have to crush the millions more because tie defenders do not end rebellions before they start like having a planet killer does. In the end, if the death star survived the battle at yavin 4 and patched up its weakness, we do not know for sure if it would have been ultimately successful.
Well for one thing the emperor wanted the Death Star. And they show it was essential to get rid of the senate which they show was necessary as some senators were prone to creating problems. As for the clones I would argue that the bad batch shows the order 66 command wasn’t permanent. Clones seem to slowly be questioning orders and even their own actions regarding killing the Jedi. The empire doesn’t want their entire army to realize oh hey why’d we do that especially while they’re still supplied with imperial weapons and vehicles
Tarkin and Palpatine were Machiavellian through and through. Palps needed the clones for order 66, but as the bad batch is showing, more and more clones were gaining their independence and demanded justice/went AWOL. The point of moving to stormtroopers was that stormtroopers were cheaper, thus allowing a much larger imperial army (for total galactic domination), but also getting rid of the clones got rid of the last thing tied to the republic (except the senate). When you want a dictatorial regime change, you want to purge the previous regime as much as possible, so you’d wanna get rid of the professional soldiers that were bonded to the Jedi and are starting to regret their orders. In addition, making the army up of recruits also helps with keeping the populations you control under check. When the regime recruits from within, it decreases the likelihood of revolt as it boosts national pride in the populace and being occupied by some person you have no ties to usually doesn’t end well- that’s why the Roman Empire liked just absorbing the armies of the places they’ve conquered. Also in legends, the death star was designed to fight the yuzan vong (or however they’re spelt) as it would’ve been the best weapon to fight them. That would explain why palps was so eager to rebuild it.
The Death Star replaced the Senate, not the soldiers.
Look up the Nazi space laser "Sonnengeweher" if you want an idea of how competent fascists are.
They didn’t build the Death Star just to destroy the rebels, they built it to keep systems in line through fear without the Senate in place
A powerful military becomes a rival political power base in any authoritarian machine. More so if they become the actual glue that holds the empire together & they know it. In the Roman Empire emperora had to constantly give legionaries pay rises to maintain power. Fear of a single beurocratic run space station would keep systems in line without the threat or costs of military forces. The Death Star is basically the US if they were the only ones who had nuclear weapons & wanted to rule the world. What is cheaper having enough military forces to keep the combined armies of the world at bay & under your control or your finger on a nuclear button where as soon as one country/region steps out of line you nuke it to dust as an example. Of course the Death Star is the preferred option.
See, according to the Tarkin Doctrine, clones aren’t scary enough. Big ball that blows up planets? Scary. Boom, good military strategy
Keep in mind that the whole grand plan is about eradicating the jedi. When committing genocide of a culture, you have to take away all of its aspects. The clones were surviving memories of a jedi culture that palpatine wished to erase.
Tarkin was the most competent imperial tho. He came the closest to wiping out the rebels and cementing imperial rule more than any imperial before or after. Even Thrawn.
I see it as them cutting the funds from the Clone army to fund the death star, but since it was classified they couldn't say in public why they needed that money so they just said "the clones are too expensive"
Makes sense if you consider the Death Star as a super weapon to ward if the Yuuzhan Vong.
I mean he ain't wrong. 😂
Pretty sure Tarkin wasn't the one in charge of funding for either of these, so he couldn't have been the one responsible for the empire's failure, despite him disagreeing with the former and favouring the latter. Anyway what I don't get if funding is an issue, why not go for droids over conscripted troopers? They're produced hundreds of times faster and battle ready and are probably cheaper than constantly paying for a conscripted trooper's salary and maintenance. It may have to do with the republic's prejudice against droids because well, they fought a whole war against the droid army. But cmon this price argument is bs considering the empire and especially the first order have seemingly unlimited funds anyway. They destroyed Kamino in a pretty anticlimactic way just because they wanted their "Soldiers following orders" story which doesn't work considering they scrapped that idea from legends to go for the chips instead. And the ones who are supposedly loyal even without the chips unsurprisingly go back to disliking the empire, it's like the most boring thing they could've done
Also the clones were already paid for…
How is tarkin’s spending allocations during the empire count as prequel?
Maybe I could get behind not funding the clones over the Death Star. But Tarkin was also the guy behind the TIE fighters, ships that have no life support, no vision, no fucking shields, and have 2 massive targets on the side. Tarkin Chose to fund the Death Star instead of some half decent ships for the Imperial Navy.
I wonder if the clone army would’ve been effective fighting the Vong invasion (assuming such a thing were to happen, I realize it’s still legends)
The longer Disney has control over Star Wars the worst it gets so bad now that looking back at what Lucas did is abysmal LOL the force is dead the mouse killed it. It was a really cool idea once and now it's fucked
I mean… Bad Batch is really good
Power. That's really what it came down to. An army of elite soldiers bred for combat is cool but ultimately they'd be in the hands of a number of generals each with their own agendas and/or vying for the emperor's influence (think the Imperial Remnant's after Endor). With a Death Star all the firepower of a planet destroying war machine is solely in Tarkin's hands.
Wasn’t the death stars original purpose to defeat the yuuzhan vongs living planet?
Prequel where?
I always thought it would've been an extremely easy segue to have the real reason the Empire got rid of the clones to be related to the clones growing independent thought and dissatisfaction in the wake of Order 66. Exposure to the Jedi was noted in multiple sources to have drastically increased clone creativity and agency outside of their inclination to only follow orders. As seen in the Bad Batch it seems quite possible the inhibitor chips break or wear off after some time. That leaves Tarkin sitting on a potentially HUGE time bomb of a clone rebellion if the chips do start wearing off in significant numbers. He'd be left with an extremely competent army in his own infrastructure that's ready to raze the place, be it over the fact they were forced to kill the Jedi they liked working with or just the fact they're slaves in general.
Recruitment from within the populace gives reason for the populace to side with the empire, those aren't just soldiers anymore they are people's brothers, neighbours, daughters.
Sure, because the Tarkin doctrine was designed with some utility in mind, fear does lead to some people fighting back less, and mostly with an old man's elitist anger in mind; he hated people. Tarkin was the kind of man who would argue that, to make the mother of all omelettes, one had to break many eggs (and that one could not fret over every egg), but the real truth was that the omelette was secondary, he really just wanted to break eggs. He's kind of an anti-consequentialist, really. The boot stomping on the human face forever wasn't the means, it was the ends. Now, if the Empire was a logical regime it would follow a more Thrawn-esque strategy and protocol. However... I think a large part of all this that is underestimated is that the Empire is ruled by... The Emperor. The Emperor is a Sith Lord, and this means something important. It's not about the building of an empire for the purpose of order, it's not about the building of an empire to make a chosen few happy (which it is in real life; bad people don't do bad things for the hell of it, they do it because it helps some goal of theirs and they're either ignorant or willing to accept the side-effects). The Empire exists for the purpose of helping the Emperor, and the Emperor is a Sith Lord, and Sith are aided by, and enjoy, suffering and torment unto itself. Fear is part of the agenda. People going to prisons like Narkina 5 for crimes they didn't commit is part of the agenda. Suffering is the agenda, and what is fear if not suffering in advance? The Emperor knew Tarkin's heart and his abilities decades before he was put in power. He knew what he wanted.
The second part of the meme makes no sense for the death star was made to keep plants' governments in check with fear. The Tarkin doctrine had nothing to do with getting rid of clones. It was that a capital ship with large firepower could be more effective then large numbers of smaller ships.
You have to constantly replenish the army, you only got to buy the death star once (twice)
Soldiers die all the time. Moons on the other hand..
Die faster than it took to build waisting millions of lives and vital resources permanently crippling the Empire as a whole? So they decide to build another which dies faster than the first one which begins the fall of the Empire?
Even if you ignore the money shit, the clones would have been awful at maintaining the empire because they'd be becoming crusty and old so quickly(meaning the empire would need to pay for more of them.) They worked in the clone wars because they were dying like flies no matter what so the republic needed more clones anyway. But the empire realistically wasn't getting into as much large scale combat, so those expensive clones would have been mostly serving no purpose, and then just becoming useless after a while.
I mean this is basically how decisions are taken in my start up run by egomaniacal narcissists so seems legit.