Aucune réponse à ce sujet

[AnuzaGray]

There is a trope known as Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale (see here-> http://tvtropes.org/...eNoSenseOfScale). Aside from the obvious implications in that ships zoom across the galaxy at astounding speeds and distance is meaningless, you also witness space battles taking place within very small distances for the sake of looking cool even though a realistic fight would occur at distances of hundreds of kilometers. 

More importantly though, is the apparent difficulty of creating a realistic future military. There is the obvious limitation that a faction's navy is limited by the amount of ships they have and it is safe to assume that the cost of said vessels would be far beyond that of modern warships, but is it also assumed that the relative cost also increases? 

The largest current warship is the Nimitz class aircraft carrier. It measures just over 300m in length and has a crew of just of roughly 5,500. Only a handful of these exist and their operating cost is enormous. 

Is it feasible to have space faring warships of a similar or greater size? 

As far as armies go, a popular example of ineptitude is the "Grand Army of the Republic" that consists of less than 2 million Clone Troopers for a galaxy spanning Republic of thousands of inhabited systems. 

There are also examples in Star Trek and Babylon 5 of wars being nowhere near the scale of Earth's largest wars, despite involving entire worlds instead of a single planet. 

I don't know if this scale issue is due to writers being unable or unwilling to grapple with the fact a futuristic military would number in the billions if it remained in proportion with modern forces or if these scifi militaries are scaled down because of the limitations of space travel. 

For example, transporting an entire division (upwards of 20,00 soldiers), would require a massive vessel or many smaller vessels. Moving an entire army group would be an amazing feat. 

And if, such vessels were capable of being simply blasted out of the sky/space, then the death toll in just transporting troops during a war would be beyond almost incomprehensible. 

Which then begs the question, is interplanetary warfare that makes use of large armies even feasible or would galactic warfare primarily rely upon a relatively smaller number of warships capable of decimating planets?