So... Star Wars [Spoilers]

[hyzmarca]

If I had to justify it, I'd say that the speed of hyperdrive combined with the firepower of star destroyers makes large armies mostly pointless. With the ability for an attacker to strike anywhere at any time with little warning, defending is a fool's errand and you're better off using light and fast rapid response forces instead of traditional garrisons. That, and the actual strategic resources you want to capture or defend aren't planet wide. If you just want one mine or one shipyard, the rest of the planet doesn't matter.

[deaddmwalking]

Unless planetary shields are a thing.

Or was Rogue One parodying Space Balls?

[Emerald]

The numbers don't work out. 2 million troops, even heavily mechanized, is not enough to pacify even a single major continent on planet Earth. The Republic has thousands of planets.

One million, nay, even hundreds of thousands, is still a tiny amount for national armies. Let alone planetary. Let alone galactic. The galactic republic’s clone army when fully grown would come in at #5 on the earth military active service list.

Again, it's not that the entire army is a couple million clones, it's that that's how many clones were at the Battle of Geonosis in particular. The official numbers on the battle from the Visual Guide and other sources (contemporary ones from shortly before the movie came out, not later potential "Oops we screwed up the movie numbers, let's retcon those" sources) have the Republic forces at just about 200,000 clones at Geonosis, which matches the initial quote by Lama Su.

At the end of the movie when we see Republic army forces boarding Acclamator assault ships, we see at least 25 Acclamators loading or taking off, which going by the same sources works out to about 400,000 clones. Which is presumably a small fraction of the whole Republic Army, given that that's a single landing site, on a single planet which is not the primary source for either ships or clones, showing off in a military parade for the Supreme Chancellor--and indeed, the sources state that the Republic Army built and manned at least a thousand more immediately after the Battle of Geonosis concluded, for a minimum of 16,000,000 clones in active service, more than enough for the opening days the war when Kamino can churn out hundreds of thousands of clones every week or so.

More to the point, they can't work out, even if we increase the number to 1 trillion clone troops. The conspiracy needs to be small enough so that a couple of people can get it going underway AND integrate it into the Republic's planning with little fuss. But it also needs to be big enough to crack the Republic in two.

It's a basic unresolvable contradiction. You either have too many troops to keep it a secret conspiracy or too few to overthrew the military of a federation of thousands of planets.

The thing is, it was an easily solvable problem if they wanted to have a Clone Army plot and a conspiracy. Just reveal that Dooku and Sidious have for several decades commissioned cloners to replace people in government and military posts -- either through Pod People-style body snatching or legitimate elections. When the time is ripe, Sidious pulls a Manchurian Agent-style plot to cause mass rebellions and then using the existing military to declare martial law.

Oh, definitely, the way AotC set things up was a hilariously bad way to do it, especially considering that the name "Clone Wars" itself, the few OT references to it, and the early EU materials referencing the era all imply totally different things about the composition and nature of the Clone Wars forces.

If nothing else, if they wanted to call the movie "Attack of the Clones" in the vein of all those schlocky "Attack of the Giant/Mutant/Killer/etc. X" sci-fi B movies, it would have made much more sense for the Separatists to be the ones with the clone army, throwing a few million cloned soldiers into their fleets and ground armies to tip a delicate balance between the Republic and Separatist militaries in their favor, the same way Thrawn used clones in the EU.

I just objected to that particular point because it's a perennial complaint that the Republic's and/or Empire's armies and navies are supposedly too small for the amount of territory they have to cover, but in this specific case there's pretty good on-screen justification and hard off-screen numbers saying that that's not the case.

If I had to justify it, I'd say that the speed of hyperdrive combined with the firepower of star destroyers makes large armies mostly pointless. With the ability for an attacker to strike anywhere at any time with little warning, defending is a fool's errand and you're better off using light and fast rapid response forces instead of traditional garrisons. That, and the actual strategic resources you want to capture or defend aren't planet wide. If you just want one mine or one shipyard, the rest of the planet doesn't matter.

Unless planetary shields are a thing.

Or was Rogue One parodying Space Balls?

Planetary shields are indeed a thing on every major Republic world and most major Separatist ones, and hyperspace-based mobility does indeed mean that defending planets is less a matter of having enough forces to garrison or occupy the whole planet and more an issue of being able to secure the ground-based defenses and delay any space-based attackers until reinforcements can arrive in hours to days.

That's basically what you see in the Clone Wars series, where every "Meanwhile, on [planet], a major battle is occurring!" episode opens with one to a handful of Acclamators and one to a handful of Separatist ships skirmishing over some sort of local objective (a listening post, a research lab, a new superweapon, etc.), with the winning side being able to swoop in as soon as the blockade is breached/shields are brought down/generators are destroyed/etc.

[erik]

Well. On Wednesday I saw ep9 with the fam. Was about what I expected if not better. Felt a bit like RotJ getting the Force Awakens treatment but they didn’t beat me over the head as much with it copying scene for scene, except in some scenes. As with FA I was entertained and the pacing was adequate to keep me happy. Stuff violated canon. I would have done things differently as a writer. So it was a Star Wars movie.

It wasn’t like ep8 where I was suffering the entire movie and would have left if I was watching alone. (I was thankful every time a kid needed a bathroom break and i got to leave with them that film)

I probably wouldn’t have even noticed the kiss that was edited out in some markets except I was on alert and looking for it to see what the fuss was about.

and it is very tasteful when Rey deep throat french kisses Leia. Less tasteful than when Finn plows Poe on top of the x-wing but I understand the story called for it.

[Lago PARANOIA]

more than enough for the opening days the war when Kamino can churn out hundreds of thousands of clones every week or so.

I just objected to that particular point because it's a perennial complaint that the Republic's and/or Empire's armies and navies are supposedly too small for the amount of territory they have to cover, but in this specific case there's pretty good on-screen justification and hard off-screen numbers saying that that's not the case.

Like most Star Wars fans justifying your shitty plot points, you pulled these numbers out of your ass and hoped that we wouldn't notice.

COUNT DOOKU ORDERED THE FUCKING ARMY TEN YEARS AGO. THEY HAVE ON THEIR TOP END 1.5 MILLION TROOPS AT THE TIME OF ATTACK OF THE CLONES. HOW THE FUCK ARE THEY GETTING A HUNDRED THOUSAND EVERY WEEK?

[Wiseman]

I’m also curious as to why you think Attack of the Clones was more mature than the rest of the movies, unless you meant you meant you thought it was less. It has the dumbest plot of any Star Wars movie not called The Ewok Adventure, The Clone Wars or The Star Wars Holiday Special.

I would certainly agree that Attack of the Clones has the most mature targets of any of the movies. It has the thesis statement of the entire prequel trilogy, and it's dark as fuck:



The Prequel Trilogy was supposed to be about the rise of fascism, and Lucas had a lot of clear insight into this process. His predictions that we would see the rise of fascism over the escalations of inane trade deal minutiae turns out to be spot on. Who knew?

Attack of the Clones is marred by clumsy storytelling, a fucking awful romance, and some of the cringiest unintentional comedy in Star Wars history. I mean, for fuck's sake:



That's really bad, alright? It's just really bad. And between that and the whole thing where the movie made it so Vader wasn't related to Owen and knew where he lives while the original trilogy plainly stated the opposite and people were mad about Attack of the Clones. And they had a right to be. It's clumsy and most of the movie doesn't hold together very well as a stand alone work and taken as part of the series it works even less well. The call backs fail utterly because of how badly the potential romance with Amidala was set up in TPM with Anakin being played by an autistic 8 year old, and the call forwards are expletive inducing because Lucas never allowed continuity editors to go through his script drafts and match them to setting declarations from the Original Trilogy.

But Attack of the Clones is absolutely the movie that has the biggest big boy pants in the entire series. The political subplot is dark, prescient, and actually quite chilling. But a lot of people don't notice because bad romance and messy storytelling. I mean, that movie has Elan Sleazebaggano in it. When it's not doing its galaxy brain takes on the fail states of democratic government, the movie is a fucking mess.

-Username17

Yeah, there's actually a good story (themes?) being told there. It's just that everything else around it both obscures it and drags it down. Which is a shame because it seems to scare away most future writers from trying similar things.

This is an actually very interesting video on the topic: https://youtu.be/CZNDaqKza8Q

[Emerald]

Less tasteful than when Finn plows Poe on top of the x-wing but I understand the story called for it.

If that were actually in the movie, that'd probably be the one thing that could ever make me sit through one of the sequel trilogy movies again.

I'll keep my fingers crossed that it makes the director's cut.

----

Like most Star Wars fans justifying your shitty plot points, you pulled these numbers out of your ass and hoped that we wouldn't notice.

COUNT DOOKU ORDERED THE FUCKING ARMY TEN YEARS AGO. THEY HAVE ON THEIR TOP END 1.5 MILLION TROOPS AT THE TIME OF ATTACK OF THE CLONES. HOW THE FUCK ARE THEY GETTING A HUNDRED THOUSAND EVERY WEEK?

I'm not pulling numbers out of my ass, I'm pulling them from the official sources. You might find the numbers given to be stupid or nonsensical, but they're still the official numbers.

The army was small 10 years into the cloning contract because the clones take 10 years to fully grow and train due to the genetic tweaks for growth acceleration, so the ones at Geonosis were the first set finished.

“Oh yes, it’s essential,” the Prime Minister replied. “Otherwise a mature clone would take a lifetime to grow. Now we can do it in half the time. The units you will soon see on the parade ground we started ten years ago, when Sifo-Dyas first placed the order, and they’re already mature and quite ready for duty.”

We see clones in all stages of development from embryo to adulthood during Obi-Wan's tour, so the clones are in continuous production:

“How many are there?” Obi-Wan asked. “In here, I mean.”

“We have several hatcheries throughout the city. This, of course, is the most crucial phase, though with our techniques, we expect a survival rate of over ninety percent. Every so often, an entire batch will develop a… an issue, but we expect the clone production to remain steady, and with our accelerated growth methods, these before you will be fully matured and ready for battle in just over a decade.”

Two hundred thousand units are ready, with another million well on the way. Lama Su’s previous boast echoed ominously in Obi-Wan’s thoughts. A production center, supremely efficient, producing a steady stream of superbly trained and conditioned warriors. The implications were staggering.

In the hatchery that Obi-Wan tours, in the scene right before Lama Su explains growth acceleration, you can see a bunch of frisbee-looking cloning chambers in the background. Each disk has about 60 clones on it and is one of 6 disks in a snowflake-like set, each set being one of at around 5 stacked on top of each other, and there are about 8 stacks in the background, for a total of 14,400 embryonic clones in a single room.

There are at least 3 rooms of cloning chambers in that hatchery (the one with the children getting tested, the one with the young adults eating a meal, and the one with the adults training), so assuming "several" hatcheries means at least 3, that's a minimum of 129,600 clones at a given stage of life. Just over a week passes between the Battle of Geonosis and the end of the movie (8 days, 13:5:21 to 13:5:29), which means hundreds of thousands of clones reach maturity in a week.

It would of course be reasonable to assume that there are more than 3 rooms and more than 3 hatcheries when almost the entirety of Tipoca City is devoted to the cloning complex, and that's borne out by the book Inside the Worlds of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, which captions the hatchery tour with:

The first batch of clone divisions are ready for deployment; millions more are undergoing intensive performance evaluations.

...so assuming a 10,000-man division (the smaller end of a modern military division), that's on the order of 10 billion clones undergoing training and testing at a given time.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Using the EU as an argument probably won't end very well. That was written by someone trying to fill in the potholes (plotholes?) that Lucas accidentally made.

[MGuy]

I like Quinton Reviews. The videos are interesting..

[Lago PARANOIA]

Emerald is doing Move #2 of people justifying shitty Star Wars plot points: bring out the EU.

Disney sucks shit and I want to nail Baby Yoda to a cross, but I'm glad and genuinely appreciative how Disney nuked the shit out of your EU canon. I want them to take another creamy shit all over the Legends series as well, that would put a smile on my face.

I'll humor your argument, just be aware that I reserve the right to end our discussion at any time for no other reason than 'bringing EU shit into discussing the structural failures of mainline movies causes you to automatically lose the argument.'.

[Lago PARANOIA]

But anyway, Emerald: Even if I let you use the EU as an argument, your numbers still don't work out. You can't get an exponential result out of a linear equation.

You seem to be extremely confused here.

“We have several hatcheries throughout the city. This, of course, is the most crucial phase, though with our techniques, we expect a survival rate of over ninety percent. Every so often, an entire batch will develop a… an issue, but we expect the clone production to remain steady, and with our accelerated growth methods, these before you will be fully matured and ready for battle in just over a decade.”

Two hundred thousand units are ready, with another million well on the way. Lama Su’s previous boast echoed ominously in Obi-Wan’s thoughts. A production center, supremely efficient, producing a steady stream of superbly trained and conditioned warriors. The implications were staggering.

If it took them 10 years to make 2 million clones, cutting the development time to 5 years or even 6 months would not allow them to produce 100k a week, This for two OBVIOUS reasons. The first one is that the cloners can't (or maybe they did, lol EU) retroactively recover the time lost on the old process. Even if they did start using the new process, it doesn't do shit for the slow way forward. They're not getting up to 100k a week.

The second is that there ISN'T some magic acceleration factor. They said they can get a clone in half of the time, which was ten years. Did you forget that it takes about 20 years for humans to become adults? Or did your shitty fucking apologia novel mention that they could accelerate the development of a clone to a week?

There are at least 3 rooms of cloning chambers in that hatchery (the one with the children getting tested, the one with the young adults eating a meal, and the one with the adults training), so assuming "several" hatcheries means at least 3, that's a minimum of 129,600 clones at a given stage of life. Just over a week passes between the Battle of Geonosis and the end of the movie (8 days, 13:5:21 to 13:5:29), which means hundreds of thousands of clones reach maturity in a week.

...so assuming a 10,000-man division (the smaller end of a modern military division), that's on the order of 10 billion clones undergoing training and testing at a given time.

You and the EU need to take a remedial math class, this is embarrassing.

[Kaelik]

In response, Chancellor Palpatine secretly commissioned a new cloning operation, away from Kamino and under his direct supervision. Unknown to all except a select few, millions of clones were being engineered on Centax-2, one of Coruscant's moons.

Developed in secret, the new clone army was distinguished from the original clone troopers by two main factors: the use of Spaarti technology by Arkanian Microtechnologies scientists. After relations soured between Chancellor Palpatine and Kamino Prime Minister Lama Su, Arkanian Clone Masters were contracted to develop additional clones in secret facilities on Centax-2. The use of Spaarti cloning cylinders enabled them to produce full-grown troopers in only one year, as opposed to the ten years needed for clones bred on Kamino.

So after someone who WASN'T Palpatine commissioned a clone army 20 years before Palpatine needed it, then he secretly during the clone wars set up a new secret clone factory with 1 year times.

Though the much shorter time frames of the spartii cloning cylinders are demonstrated and explained for the first time in the Timothy Zhan Thrawn trilogy, the most widely respected star wars books as being of quality.

I just had to go find some dumb prequel source for how the clone army developed for 20 years was actually shit and palpatine could crank out the entire 20 years of production in two years during the clone wars on a coruscanti moon.

EDIT: As I recall, cloning people in a week was always possible, but they came out mentally unstable, but Thrawn discovered the Yslamari could be used to allow 1 week clones to be mentally stable. Before that a year was the minimum.

EDIT2: I guess while I'm making the mistake of being involved in this discussion about clone wars army sizes, my understanding of Star Wars is basically that no one gives a shit how big your army is, because the premise is that you land a governor and 30 troops on a planet with 5 billion people and say "these people are now in charge, do what they say" and co-opt whatever the local infrastructure is because if those 30 people don't get their way you use Turbolasers from space to genocide a billion people then repeat the request.

Hence, the Rebellion wins by convincing the local infrastructure that Turbolasers from space won't blow them up because they have a superior navy. And then hopes existing governments want to throw off the 31 people the empire has there.

[Chamomile]

Emerald is doing Move #2 of people justifying shitty Star Wars plot points: bring out the EU.

No? Like, Inside Star Wars is EU content, and the exact text from the AotC novelization is EU content, but the same scene appears in the movie with basically the same dialogue. The minor differences in phrasing between one version and the other aren't relevant. The novelization is just easier to quote on a forum. Indeed, it is the EU that introduced the numerical problem. Whereas the movie makes a vague reference to two hundred thousand "units," with a million more "on the way," it's EU Clone Wars novels that commit to one "unit" being a single clone and "well on the way" meaning "available within the opening stages of the war" rather than "available next week." Going strictly on the movie scene, it's unclear whether a "unit" refers to a single clone or an entire division, nor whether the batches are spaced out by four and a half month accelerated gestation periods or if they're staggered out and get delivered once every week.

If it took them 10 years to make 2 million clones, cutting the development time to 5 years or even 6 months would not allow them to produce 100k a week

What about "clones are in continuous production" is hard for your to grasp? Kamino has 200,000 "units" ready to go right now. They have a million more "well on the way." Even assuming that all embryo chambers were filled in the same day when production started, the Attack of the Clones makes it clear that all stages of clone development are in constant use. They are making new embryonic clones even now, ten years after production began, who will not be ready for another ten years still, and we see clone children, teenagers, and full grown combat ready units. Which means the most pessimistic estimate is that batches are churned out once every four and a half months for an accelerated gestation period. They don't have to take ten years to start a new batch because they already have new batches in constant production.

This assumes they're able to get their entire cloning operation running on all cylinders on the same day, but we know that either the second batch is much bigger than the first or that five batches of the same size as the first are expected to be completed in the near future. Either way, they definitely weren't running their cloning operation at maximum capacity from day one, which means either they staggered their batches because it takes time to fill up the embryo tubes, in which case their batches will come out faster, or else they continuously expanded the size of their hatchery during production, in which case each subsequent batch could be larger than the one before by an unknown amount.

tl;dr the Attack of the Clones scene is extremely vague about how far apart different clone batches are from one another and how many clones are in each batch. EU sources committed to specific and insufficient numbers, but the movie only tells us that they are making some number at some speed and that this amount is evidently sufficient to fight a galactic war.

[Emerald]

Using the EU as an argument probably won't end very well. That was written by someone trying to fill in the potholes (plotholes?) that Lucas accidentally made.

Well, there's EU stuff and then there's EU stuff. There are definitely books/series/games out there that come out later and try to retcon or explain things from the movies (like the Clone Wars novels mucking with things as Cham mentioned), but the novelizations, Visual Guides, and similar movie-tie-in material were made at the same time and under the direction of the same folks as the movies (which is why they often include or refer to deleted scenes, since those weren't removed from the movies yet).

I could understand why Lago was having a minor stroke about the EU stuff if I were going "Well, if you look at the second top panel on page 53 of Republic Commando Comics #52, published 3 years after AotC, you can clearly see...", but quoting the script via the novelization? C'mon.

Disney sucks shit and I want to nail Baby Yoda to a cross, but I'm glad and genuinely appreciative how Disney nuked the shit out of your EU canon. I want them to take another creamy shit all over the Legends series as well, that would put a smile on my face.

Personally, I'd take another Splinter of the Mind's Eye, Crystal Star, Red Harvest, or Glove of Darth Vader over anything Disney has put out since getting the license; at least those tried to be internally consistent with themselves and the rest of the EU, respect the movies that came before, and not be a psychedelic snoozefest from start to finish.

Rogue One being the only exception, which I'd put somewhere around the Jedi Knight series. Not great, but not Children of the Jedi bad.

EDIT2: I guess while I'm making the mistake of being involved in this discussion about clone wars army sizes, my understanding of Star Wars is basically that no one gives a shit how big your army is, because the premise is that you land a governor and 30 troops on a planet with 5 billion people and say "these people are now in charge, do what they say" and co-opt whatever the local infrastructure is because if those 30 people don't get their way you use Turbolasers from space to genocide a billion people then repeat the request.

It's more that most of the galaxy is already propagandized into being loyal to the Empire so they don't really need to run things everywhere with a heavy hand. Most folks in the Core to Expansion Region think life is just hunky dory in the galaxy, and feel about the Outer Rim and Wild Space much how 1700s English nobility felt about its colonies or modern American right-wingers feel about the Middle East.

The Outer Rim is mostly where the Empire does the "listen to the stormtroopers or we Base Delta Zero your ass to smithereens" thing, and that works because a detachment of well-trained and well-equipped stormtroopers is probably the biggest power on the planet compared to a smuggling gang here or primitive tribe there even before you take the potential Star Destroyer backup into account.

The planets that fall somewhere in between those two points are where all the fighting happens in the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War. Those do care how big your army is, but then realistically you're spreading the bulk of your army over a dozen planets at a time, not the entire galaxy at once.

[Kaelik]

It's more that most of the galaxy is already propagandized into being loyal to the Empire so they don't really need to run things everywhere with a heavy hand. Most folks in the Core to Expansion Region think life is just hunky dory in the galaxy, and feel about the Outer Rim and Wild Space much how 1700s English nobility felt about its colonies or modern American right-wingers feel about the Middle East.

The Outer Rim is mostly where the Empire does the "listen to the stormtroopers or we Base Delta Zero your ass to smithereens" thing, and that works because a detachment of well-trained and well-equipped stormtroopers is probably the biggest power on the planet compared to a smuggling gang here or primitive tribe there even before you take the potential Star Destroyer backup into account.

The planets that fall somewhere in between those two points are where all the fighting happens in the Clone Wars and Galactic Civil War. Those do care how big your army is, but then realistically you're spreading the bulk of your army over a dozen planets at a time, not the entire galaxy at once.

When I said "my understanding" what I meant was "I've read every single EU book that is currently classified as Legends, and this is how Thrawn conquered worlds, and this is how Daala and Isard and other warlords conquered worlds, and no one literally ever uses actual fucking armies to conquer worlds until the Yuuzhan Vong and that is for entirely different reasons."

[Username17]

The Phantom Menace is a mess. A genuine travesty. But you could see how you'd take the basic movie they had and rework it to be a good film and also how you could make it a good entry into the Star Wars franchise. All of the actors are fine except Jar Jar and Anakin.

The Naboo storyline is broadly speaking fine. It needs to be tightened up obviously and the villains need to have an Alderan moment. I mean, they don't need to literally blow up a planet full of people, but they do need to do something on screen that designates them as being actual bad guys. The Tatooine segments are not OK. The entire sequence can be excised from the movie with no loss. All the shit about virgin births and mitochondrial tests and junkyard slavers and shit just has to go. It adds nothing to the movie but confusion.

But on the whole, if you managed to get Lucas to accept some fucking editing and do some minimal continuity work with the other movies and drop his dumb Ben Hur pastiche, that movie could be fine. You don't have to add much, and the stuff you need to take out uses a lot of screen time, but isn't very big in terms of the movie as a whole. It's instructive how little the beginning and end of the movie are impacted by the Tatooine segment. Other than the Tatooine disaster, the structure and message nd characters of The Phantom Menace are mostly salvageable.

With Attack of the Clones, I don't even know where to start. I genuinely don't. Every part of that movie's structure and story is brain breaking. The few good scenes are floating in space. General Grievous is cool looking, but his fight doesn't mean anything. It's all in media res, and it doesn't go anywhere or tie back to anything. The scene about democracy dying with thunderous applause is the thesis statement for the entire prequel trilogy and it's not actually backed up by the goings on in the rest of the movie.

Attack of the Clones was supposed to establish:

• Anakin had anger issues.
• Anakin and Padme were in love.
• The Republic needed a military force to protect itself.
• The militarization came at the cost of the Republic being a republic.

Seriously. Those were the four themes that needed to be handled by the movie. And the movie did an absolutely terrible job of handling all of them.

Now some of that was that TPM set the movie up so poorly. Anakin was played by an autistic 10 year old and there was less than zero romantic chemistry there. If you want to set up a relationship between characters who are 8 years apart, do not start their interactions when one of them is ten fucking years old. Because that is creepy as hell. And of course, the militarization plotline wasn't established because actually factually Naboo was liberated by its own militia and Republic advisors turned out to be totally sufficient.

But even given those limitations, the total failure of Attack of the Clones to draw lines between any of the plot points is a fucking achievement.

-Username17

[Kevin Mack]

Uh grievous dosent show up till revenge of the sith (Unless you mean the clone wars cartoon.) Same with the democracy dying to applause comment. but otherwise agree 100%

[Lago PARANOIA]

Revenge of the Sith is a victim of the failings of the previous two movies. While there were obviously a bunch of areas they could improve on, I can't think of a single problem in the movie (besides General Grievous's underwhelming death) that wasn't due to a problem in the last two movies.

[Stahlseele]

Yeah, Grievous was wasted in both the show and the movie . .
I have only found one redeeming thing about the newer movies.

the way rey? kills snoke? by actually being a smart little asshole with the lightsabre. even if he knows and does not resist. That stuff is how an asshole jedi or sith should be fighting with that blasted thing.

[MGuy]

Grievous's existence is more tied to the little in-between cartoon that Cartoon Network did between movies. The little cartoon was more entertaining than the movies that preceded and followed it. It also is the best version of Grievous by far, even in the Clone Wars animated series.

[Lokey]

Any creativity or thought that's actually in Star Wars will get snuffed out by the fans, but I went to Wookiepedia against my better judgement to see if there were any numbers about ships.

There isn't, even though the article has cites down to the ttg level.

There is a mention that Kimono (or something like that, the Prequel cloners) also supplied the ships. Built them under the ocean or on the other side of the planet that we see from space? Was hoping that the smaller Star Destroyer shaped ships would be clown cars or have 5 clone troopers per, but there's no way to tell unless someone wants to look up the groups mentioned from Clone Wars like Kit Fisto's fleet, which is apparently a thing.

[Blade]

I remember reading the Thrawn trilogy and reading many references to how the "clone war" was that horrible thing and that hopefully all the technology was lost. And I imagined it as a sort of galaxy-shaking event with two opposing clone armies with theoretically infinite soldiers that were fighting each other and murdering countless clones.

I was a bit disappointed when I discovered what it truly was.

[Kaelik]

I remember reading the Thrawn trilogy and reading many references to how the "clone war" was that horrible thing and that hopefully all the technology was lost. And I imagined it as a sort of galaxy-shaking event with two opposing clone armies with theoretically infinite soldiers that were fighting each other and murdering countless clones.

I was a bit disappointed when I discovered what it truly was.

Well that was written before Lucas had worked out what it was, as I understand, so it was premised on something like that because that's a much more interesting "clone wars" story than "we had some clone friends fight with us, but they were a normal amount, and we mostly fought robots and it was hard to feel bad when anyone died, but also there weren't waves of infinite casualties hitting each other."

[phlapjackage]

I was a bit disappointed when I discovered what it truly was.

The Clone Wars were so lame, they even had to have Yoda tell the audience that THESE were the Clone Wars that had begun...

[hyzmarca]

I assumed that the Clone Wars were more important people being covertly replaced by clones, and starting wars.