So taking some loose IRL examples, on rough average you have about 20 cops/law enforcement per 10000 people or so.
USA has about 1.5 million active military to its population of roughly 325 million. For a place like Hawaii, with about 1.5 million people, active military comes in around 100k people.
As such, what sort of force sizes might we see with various Starfinder groups?
Absolom station has about 2.5 mil people. And its kind of the "New York City" in terms of UN/Pact World diplomacy location. Would it be fair to use the 20 to 10000 numbers for 'security/etc' forces on station, so what...5000 'cops' of various levels.
Then when you take Stewards and local military forces maybe 150,000 total or so?
How big is the rest of the Pact World forces? I mean, I can't imagine there being hundreds of thousands of Hellknights...what were the totals back in Pathfinder days?
If we took the total population of the Golarion system are we looking at billions (like modern Earth, but spread across planets), or millions?
Are the Azlanti Empire dudes billions? Was the swarm an invasion of billions? etc etc.
If your generals and tacticians are high-level spellcasters with access to teleportation spells, you might not need to have as large forces. One army could be effectively many if they can teleport around the planet in a matter of minutes.
Just another variable to throw into your calculations.
And fleet organization becomes interesting as well, because fighter carriers aren't exactly holding large numbers. So against something like the Swarm, does this imply that vessels are very common or just that large-scale fleet actions are rare?
I think vessels are very common. The Corpse Fleet has seven task forces of a few dozen ships each, and, potential growth aside, it started as a minority portion of the Eox navy. Eox famously has a pretty small population, even if what there is is highly militarized and fleshed (heh) out by mindless undead minions.
The Hellknight orders each have a citadel ship that's much bigger than a dreadnought, and some number of battleships, cruisers, and smaller ships. The Corpse Fleet task forces are supposed to be similar in size to private organization fleets, so that puts a Hellknight order, Knights of Golarion, and the Skyfire mercenary group at several dozen ships minimum.
Plus Abadarcorp's security forces (and innumerable armed merchant ships). Smaller corporate forces. Planetary defense forces. Smaller mercenary groups. Pirates (assume the Free Captains are a few dozen loosely affiliated ships all alone). Xenowardens, who seem to be scattered all over the place in decent numbers, even if their individual ships aren't super powerful. And thousands (or more likely tens of thousands) of low CR but armed exploration and merchant ships operated by individuals and small companies trying to earn a living or make a big score around the edges of the big players.
So what are everybody's rough thoughts on planetary/system defense fleets then?
Let's take a station half the size of Absalom (for resource purposes, call it half that as well).
Or perhaps a system settled and exploited in a bit of a resource war between a corp like Apsis and say a branch of an order of Hellknights.
I suspect that a portion of planetary/subplanetary nation defense fleets are on permanent secondment to Pact Worlds fleets as part of the Pact, with the rest on reserve/call up status in the event of a large attack.
Aballon probably has a couple of hundred ships at least, given its population and industrialization. Castrovel probably has several per city state (and queen hive), similar for Akiton. Verces I would expect at least a hundred. The independent moons like Arkanen might have only a dozen for smaller populations, up to a few dozen for big ones. Triaxus probably doesn't have much of a formal unified or cooperative navy, given the splintered and rival governments, and that's probably why the Veskarium attacked there first. The Barathu are powerful and numerous, but it's not obvious that they engage in much starfaring themselves. They might only have a few dozen ships, but could probably afford to staff and build hundreds if they wanted.
Absalom station probably only has a couple of dozen, backed up by the Armada and a score (or more) high PCU draw, linked capital grade weapon turrets.
As such, what sort of force sizes might we see with various Starfinder groups? [& c]
I worked out a spreadsheet for my campaign when similar questions came up for me. The assumptions I used:
- The Pact Worlds population is about a billion sentients. (Total guesswork, especially given how hard it is to know what to count as "population" in the Pact Worlds, but basing it roughly on the assumption of lots of big high-tech cities and settlements surrounded by plenty of wilderness, it seems to work, and it still fits with what we see in the Pact Worlds supplement.)
- "Hero" characters of the kind that would have Classes and Levels are no more than 1% of the populace.
- The Starfinder Society as a whole is one of the bigger major factions and has around 755K such Heroes (not counting support staff and civilians) operating from the Pact Worlds.
- This number is usually closer to a million but about a fifth of the membership -- about 177,000 people -- is currently cut off in the Scoured Stars. This is a particularly big hit in terms of high-level Starfinders because Jadnura's expedition actually accounted for 80% of Starfinders over 4th Level.
- Other major factions' Heroic personnel:
The Knights of Golarion: 828K
Aspis Consortium: 528K
AbadarCorp: 1,027K
Hell Knight Orders: 827K
Free Captains: 528K
The Stewards: 1,326K
Cult of the Devourer: 529K
Xenowardens: 1,127K
Android Abolition Front: 229K
The Augmented: 130K
- Most of these are too loosely organized to count as "forces" in any unified sense, the Starfinders included. So the really centralized and regimented factions -- AbadarCorp, the Stewards, Aspis -- are much more dominant presences than they otherwise might be.
- Other factions (Golden League, Sanjaval and other corps, Elder God Cults, Skyfire Legion) tend to have around 200K Heroic personnel each.
- As per usual when I do something like this, I went a bit crazy and worked out things like how many high-level spellcasters there are (some 4.6K in total at 16th level or above) how many Solarians there are and how many of those are non-Kasatha and so on. But I haven't worked out how many ships everyone has.
I'm thinking some organizations, like the Stewards, probably employ the services of security bots to help bolster their forces. One steward could patrol the streets with 2-4 bots, for example. Likewise, I'm sure there are similar resources, such as drones, AIs, volunteers, and privatized military units, available to all factions. Same goes for starships. With this taken into consideration, the numbers of fieldable units must be staggering.
If I may ask, why did you put your estimate so low?
-Beta
Extrapolating roughly based on the size of settlements we do see and the amount of planetary real estate that is outright hostile, or extremely difficult to settle, or too wild to really be more than nominally under anyone's authority.
There are probably many more sentients than this in Pact World space when you count the full masses of anacites, undead, Formians on Castrovel, Fey and elementals, exotic beings on Bretheda and Liavara and their moons, creatures on Aucturn, tribal and nomadic communities on Akiton and so on. But many of these are sufficiently remote from civilisation or sufficiently exotic that it's not clear how one would even count them in a census or how much they'd care about being counted thusly*.
So the billion figure counts mostly humanoids and those species who interact with humanoids in everyday fashion in civilised centres. I could still go higher than a billion, maybe, and still be within the realm of reason for the canon size of settlements in the Pact Worlds, but probably not higher than four. I chose the lower figure mainly because it feels to me like civilisation in the Pact Worlds is meant to seem a bit tenuous -- menaced from every side and with adventure always close at hand -- and it would also be consistent with people being motivated to leave that environment and settle the galaxy.
(* Barathus are only individuals as we understand it in something like their larval or juvenile state, for instance. Formians and anacites both have arthropod-style societies featuring things like "worker" castes. It's an open secret that Apostae's Drow population suppresses the rest of the planetoid's "native" populace in virtual slavery. Et cetera.)
Yeah numbers get a bit wonky if we take the numbers we already have in sources as starting point. Personally I feel like most population sizes listed (planetary and crew) should be x5- to x10 their listed values. Like the populations provided in the books/pact world, seem like they would fit as individual nations on Golarion, but not really as 'independent worlds' in Starfinder.
But even then my numbers would be wonky because not every population listed should be multiplied either.
I mean I realize in the practical sense we don't NEED to have a planet with billions of people on it, since it'll never really be practical in a PC involvement sense and really even in sci-fi media you rarely see hard implementation of size considerations. Stories tend to focus on the handfew of 'player chars' and then the support/antagonists around them which maybe have a hundred of so named types, and a thousand+ nameless.
Yeah, and really, a billion is plenty of people. At certain tech levels population should decline instead of expanding anyway... and Golarion was the system's primary population center.
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Yeah but a side-effect of the Gap is we have no way of knowing what Space Age Golarion's population was; it could well have been at the ten billion mark on it's own.
A billion strikes me as low, over all. I'd honestly be surprised if Castrovel didn't have a population of at least a billion on it's own. Probably not much more than a billion, probably less than two billion, but still.
Verces could conceivably have a billion people. Even along the habitable zone there's more than enough space. The question mark would be sustainability given the lack of farm land but it's possible sea life from the night side could provide, supplemented by imported resources. That's not even counting immigrant kasatha & shirren on the day side & ryphorians on the night side.
Nchak & Kalo-Mahoi could possibly both have billion-strong populations or near enough. We don't really have enough information to know.
I doubt Akiton, Eox, or Triaxus individually have a billion people but I could believe there being a billion split between the three of them.
A trillion is probably way, way too high of an estimate. But I could see there being 5-10 billion humanoids, and a population of tens of billions when factoring races such as anacites, barathus, and haans.
Personally I would expect Castrovel to have a population considerably lower than a billion. Excepting the Formians, its civilizations are specifically preoccupied with preserving the wilderness (imperfectly so maybe, but that's a recent development). An entire continent is a wilderness preserve. Its largest Lashunta city-state has a population comparable to London in the late 18th century.
No doubt, though, a lot of this is left intentionally vague in canon so people can supply their own interpretations.
Yeah but late 18th century isn't far from where we reached a billion(1804). Given that a lot of their wilderness preservation is aided by magic & advanced biotech it's very conceivable that they could have a billion, billion & a half population without running as roughshot over the environment as we have. Not to mention that the nature preserve continent has it's own humanoid(technically) population in the khizars.
But you're right, it is ultimately left vague & we're probably never going to get a solid answer on it. We're also probably never going to know how much thought & research the devs put into population growth, sustainability, and the effect magic & sci fi tech can have on same before they put those numbers down. It's an established trope that "Sci Fi writers have no sense of scale" and we already know that they messed up the calculations for the mass of star ships, so it's entirely possible they put less thought into this than some of us may do.
Btw, do people also use our irl inspired Ranking systems? I can't tell if there really is an 'active' military other than Stewards and combination of other more paramilitary forces like the Knights.
I mean we don't see anything about United Pact Navy, or army or whatever.
I see the Corpse fleet sorta has ranks, but that's more titles for the higher end leaders.
Yes, naturally. But that doesn't solve the problem of how to enumerate them when talking about population numbers. The same thing holds true of hive societies and other exotic entities.
I can't tell if there really is an 'active' military other than Stewards and combination of other more paramilitary forces like the Knights.
The Pact is rather like the United Nations. It's the constituent worlds, and the nations on those worlds, that have militaries. The Pact itself has no standing army or navy that I know of.
(The Stewards are a paramilitary AFAICT, not a navy. Their primary job is enforcing Pact World law in places where none of the member worlds has sole jurisdiction.)
Well, canonically they are law enforcement, peacekeepers and diplomats who tend to eschew hard power for soft power. I was going to compare them to the Coast Guard but that's not quite apt...
They're Mass Effect Citadel Spectres, but with bigger numbers, their own ships, organizational units rather than lone wolves, and fewer assassinations and sabotage jobs.
I don't know about that. Eox, Castrovel, Verces, Triaxus, Aballon and Bretheda are all capable of fielding pretty significant forces of their own AFAIK.
Which makes me realize there's a major flaw in my calculations upthread about "Heroic" levelled personnel: they don't take into account major planetary military forces. I think I should probably rectify that.
For that matter I think there's probably a slightly higher proportion of combat capable 'civilians' on worlds like Castrovel and Triaxus if for no other reason than you're more likely going to have to fight off dangerous wildlife on these planets than the average citizen of a modern industrialized nation on earth. Not to mention whatever percentage of people in "civilian" jobs are still things like mechanics, mystics, and technomancers that have significant non-combat commercial applications.
Aballon probably has even more naval power than that, either more ships or just more powerful ships. A Veskarium "recon force"/assault fleet that was otherwise just kind of rampaging through the system was utterly wiped out by Aballon the moment they took the matter seriously. If I had to guess, Aballon has a mightier navy than any three of the other major worlds combined, minimum.
Bretheda is a giant question mark, because they don't just build ships. The Barathu can also become ships via merging. They might or might not have an especially powerful navy, but that could change tomorrow.
It is noted that brethda also fashions organic space ships as well as utilizing things like orma. Pact worlds also has examples of xenowarden bio ships as well. Given how large the two main worlds that are under barathu control and their protectorships I assume they are pretty comparable in force to Aballon force wise. It also seems like organizations like hell knights and the immodean crusaders have pretty sizable fleets when the overall people who make up those factions can't be that big compared to other powers in the system. So overall it seems like ship building is reasonably easy to do so even minor factional powers can produce fleets.
They're Mass Effect Citadel Spectres, but with bigger numbers, their own ships, organizational units rather than lone wolves, and fewer assassinations and sabotage jobs.
They're more C-SEC than Spectres. They're actually bound by laws, as far as I can tell; Spectres are without any restrictions other than reporting to the Council.
Think less Saren, more Garrus.
Alternately we can also maybe look at ship complements on a scale of the Colonial Marines (aliens) or like...I dunno Deathwatch Space Marines.
You can have these huge ass ships that have relatively small crews, to ridiculously small crews, to practically automated. While the general expectation is a PC sized group of eh...6 on the high end, runs around in an explorer that it becomes totally ok if they run around in a Destroyer or larger
Still I wouldn't mind, maybe when the Ships book comes out, of a rough estimate of how many ships are in various fleets and stuff. Like Corpse fleet has "each admiral has several dozen ships" and 'rear admirals and commodores have fleets of 4 to 8 ships" and a general restriction of "task forces rarely work with each other to hide their numbers" but we don't have an idea of "how many admirals/thus larger task force fleets' or 'how many smaller 4-8 fleets"
Again, in the practical sense it doesn't really matter since you shouldn't be throwing "task forces" level stuff at PCs anyway unless they're also part of a 'task force' level size feet for your adventure narrative.