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Sentillian Naval Warfare, Production, Demographics, Doctrine, and Application in a Lively Galaxy.

Number sizes

Million 1,000,000 (in square cm, would be the size of a small house)

Billion 1,000,000,000 (in square cm would be square meterage of an entire apartment complex)

Trillion 1,000,000,000,000 (an area the size of the island of Jersey)

Quadrillion 1,000,000,000,000 (roughly the size of Ohio, in square cm)

Quintillion 1,000,000,000,000,000 (roughly the size of Egypt in square cm)

Sol Population 8 Billion (Earth 2022) ISS (8) Moon (0) Mars (0)

Standard System population 12.4 Billion on 2 inhabited bodies and one artificial. Natural bodies average 5 billion, artificial 2, remaining 0.4B comes from asteroid or orbital structure habitation.

Of the estimate 90.7 Quadrillion sentients mobilzed in total in the Sentillian Empire, and the 100.5 Quadrillion Jeewol and Thinking machines brought to bear by the Jeewol Reclaimers, a third became casualties, twenty percent died, sixty percent required limb or sensory organ replacement and were discharged, and five percent suffered severe psychological breaks resulting in discharge, the last fifteen percent went missing, never seen nor heard from again. Of that 50 trillion odd missing men, only a billion were foot soldiers, the rest were navy crew. In terms of civilians 140 quadrillion died in Sentillian claimed space, a shocking 20% of their population while further 200 quadrillion were rendered homeless or otherwise displaced. 70% of the entire Jeewol population died, a whopping 900 quadrillion, though 60% of their population was the thinking machines, of which only 100,000 survived the war bringing the organic number to 360 quadrillion, or roughly 45,000 times Earth's population in 2022.

These horrific casualties numbers are mainly caused by the most important theaters of the war, the cold emptiness between stars. The average tonnage of a late war Sentillian Standard Fleet was about 100 Exagrams which is roughly 100 trillion tons or 1.67 Earths in tonnage. Aboard the roughly one billion spacecraft in such a fleet were farms, factories, hospitals, ten trillion crewmen, an average of a thousand crew per ship, of course, this is an average some had crews in the billions others in the tens. One Imperial Standard Fleet covered ten lightyears of space. The Sentillian Navy at the end of the war had 500 fleets, while the Jeewol still maintained a 491 fleet-sized formations. The Jeewol started the war with 600 fleet sized formations, peaked in year 8 with 843, and over the next four years would lose so many crewmen they designated a fourth of their war-ready vessels to reserve simply because they ran out of men while another fourth were absorbed into larger units due to the destruction or crippling of vessels. The Sentillians started the war with 45 fleet-sized formations and Ancie with 783 fleet-sized formations, by the end of the war, the Ancie had 234 and had been reduced in year 4 to 531.

Ancie Fleet Collapse during the Vela and Rwamni Campaigns and Long Delaying Action by the Sentillians.

At the start of the war, the Ancie fielded the second largest fleet total in the galaxy roughly a hundredth of their larger, theocratic kin, they had the second highest population as well, a mind boggling 2.3 quintillion with an average of 54.2 billion citizens per star, by contrast the Sentillians averaged 12.3. The Ancie frontier, where most of the food was grown, was the first target by the conqueror-settlers that were the ant-like Jeewol. The Ancie figured that the Jeewol were like any other "primitive" coalition of stars under some conqueror and their overconfident leaders led them into disaster. The kind of disaster that wipes out 2% of your population in five months and a third of your military power. In Vela, also known as the empty crossing, 320 Jeewol fleets in groups of 80 groups of 4 fleets began to scour the Ancie agriworlds, wiping out 240 billion tons of food (it takes a half ton of food to feed a normal sentient per year Earth year) and settling 160 billion Jeewol on 400 worlds starting the Jeewol Republic. This warranted an immediate and large scale retaliation by the Ancie, who sent 500 fleets to retake the region and re-evict the Jeewol from the galaxy. The inexperienced High-Admirals of the Ancie thought their presence alone would scare off the Jeewol. It did not. Realizing the Jeewol meant to fight, the Ancie fleet command figured it would use its massive numerical superiority. The Jeewol had counters to the Ancie shields however, and in years 1-2 of the war, the Ancie hemorrhaged ships, losing a fleet every two weeks in year 2. By the start of year 3, the Ancie had lost 105 fleets and a quadrillion men. By the end of the Vela campaign, the inexperienced and antiquated Ancie fleet made a slow, costly retreat after losing 98 fleets worth of ships and 94 quadrillion Ancie lives as the entire Ancie systems were hit with space-based planet cleansers simultaneously, but still the Jeewol focused on the Ancie. In Rwamni, the start of the core of the Ancie, the Ancie mustered their entire fleet, some 600 fleets with 6.4 quadrillion men. Here they blunted the Jeewol blitz, and for a year they held them, but in turn lost 43 fleets and 0.9 quadrillion crew, The Jeewol, who entered Rwamni with 300 fleets and 3.5 quadrillion men, had lost thirty fleets and only 250 trillion men. Year four saw the breakdown of the Ancie fleet command as the Jeewol, now numbering 270 fleets shattered the nearly double sized line of Ancie fleets through mass deployment of their disruptors and anti-radiation missiles, breaking their line and disabling their ships with a round of nuclear missiles. Rather than disable the vessels, the Jeewol slipped past them and began to harrow the core of the empire. Every day from year 4-7 the Ancie lost ten systems per day and with them 350 billion citizens per day.

After year 7, it was ten systems per day until year 11 when their harrowing fleets were picked off one by one by a reorganized Ancie fleet, but by then they had lost 60% of their population as the Jeewol would go out of their way to exterminate Ancie planets. This usually wouldn't be a problem but as the Jeewol had space superiority in most systems they came across the worlds were helpless and the populations that survived were usually in extreme climates or in underground networks. By the end of it, 11 quadrillion, roughly half of the entire Royal Ancie population was exterminated, and the Long Decline of the Royal Ancie was over and now came the power vacuum.

By year 7 the Sentillians had mobilized enough to provide a larger threat than the Ancie, however, the Harrowing of the Royal Ancie had been near enough to cause a collapse in the Ancie economy, population, but had separated the wheat from the chaff, and now the Ancie fleets were slowly destroying the isolated Jeewol fleets. From year 7 onward the war was focused around the Orion spur, and this is where most of the military deaths were concentrated for the remainder of the war until the Jeewol production base collapsed due to the spread of both computer viruses and various weaponized pathogens rendered them unable to continue the war.

Sentillian Production Numbers

Until year 4 the Sentillians were unable to resist the Jeewol, instead relying on biological weapons, traps, and ambushes to delay the Jeewol while they evacuated the populations and industry of planets in their path. As the Sentillians rapidly standardized their tooling and industry was built up. The Empire's total ship production in year one of the war was 1,000,000 ships, by year 2 it was 500,000,000 ships, year three saw them cross to 5 billion, and year four saw them produce fifty billion. Sentillian production stabilized at 80 billion annual average until the end of the war, 80 fleets worth of ships flying out the dockyard. To facilitate this massive production, long deactivated shipyards were restarted, and new ones based on these old ones were produced. Entire planets in uninhabited systems were hollowed by having their mantles and cores sucked out from orbit. From there it would be processed, refined, and stored and delivered to a foundry ship and further refined. Sentillian production, already used to being mobile from the nature of their empire, would arrive at planetary or solar shipyards with all the parts prefabricated, only being assembled in port, then crewed and would move to the war effort.

A planetary shipyard could create ships up to 100km (60 miles) long, while solar shipyards could go as long as 1000km (600 miles). In the empire there were 500,000 shipyards of all sizes, cranking out an average of 160,000 ships per year. The average time to complete a non-tethered spacecraft was 3 months. The average shipyard had 40,000 drydocks each requiring 1200 workers to a grand total of 48 million workers needed per shipyard. Every 1000 workers requires 100 admin personnel, 4.8 million in total, of which each need one a for every ten, 480,000, and a further 50,000 higher level admin staff. Just for each shipyard, 50 million men were needed, just for the ships, assuming near equal numbers of dockworkers to move cargo on and off the ships that arrive to deliver the parts, the minimum number of people needed to operate a planetary-shipyard is 100 million, assume a spouse, 200 million, and minimum of 2 kids, 400 million. Now including support personnel, teachers, government officials, and whatnot redoubled that and the minimum population needed to run a planetary shipyard is 1.4 billion roughly the population of India. Assume other businesses and the number skyrockets between 3-5 billion, earth's population at the start of the 1960s and 1990s respectively. So there are (assume a median of 4 billion people per shipyard world) 200 trillion Sentillian citizens involved in the manufacturing and support of the manufacturing of space vessels

As for tethered air/spacecraft 3700 workers (factory and admin) to make an F-35, 325 are produced per year. Assuming future tech, we can cut down the workers to 2500 and bump production to 1000 of any type (averaged) per year. Assume for every one billion vessels one hundred billion fighters/bombers/recon/breacher tethered craft are needed. Since tethered craft need more replacement craft and parts, assume for every one fielded three need to be produced, and that no more than three hundred thousand factories can exist on any one planet, but the average is 150,000 production lines per production body. Each planet makes 50000 TCs (Tethered Craft) per year. Assuming four bodies in a system can be dedicated (moons, planets, artificial stations) each system produced 200,000 TCs, meaning about 36 million workers are involved with production directly, quadruple for families to 142 million, double again for amenities, to 284 million and again for other injuries, to 568 million minimum sentients, or the entire population of earth in the year 1600. Since you need 50 systems per billion TCs, and you need ten billion per fleet, so every year 50 systems can outfit an entire fleet in one year, so there is a minimum of 1600 stars supplying the Sentillian navy and 3.2 trillion workers directly tied to the industry. So, just for the assembling of the Sentillian Navy, it requires 203.2 Trillion Workers. This excludes munitions, resource refining, electronics, and everything outside the assembling the final product, which I will gladly multiply that number by 200 to a total of 40.63 quadrillion workers or slightly more than 5% of the Empire's entire pre-war population are involved directly with the creation of the navy itself and its weapons. This excludes food, construction, capital goods production, farming, and everything else not related to the production of wartime spacecraft. 8% are mobilized, so for every worker there are two soldiers, which seems wrong. So 8 of all men are on the assembly line, 16% are in the service, and that leaves 76%. Assuming 20% are too young for anything and 40% too old to serve half for anything, that leaves us a hole of 36% of the population. The remaining 36% are probably 20% agriculture and small-medium business, 14% can be involved in other in non-military or non-exclusively military like surface space factories and supporting businesses like terraformation, banking, medical goods production, electronics production, civil-industrial construction, and merchant fleet construction (usually 600 meter vessels with a cargo hold of 54,000,000 cubic meters). As for women, they too worked to in the factories but at any given moment 7% of the population was heavily gravid or nursing (or species equivalent, some egg-laying species had to either sit the eggs and feeding hatchlings is usually more intensive than nursing, other species had communal child-rearing from spawning pits and others have very long pregnancies or nursing periods so it averages out).

Of course these are annual averages, with soldiers serving a maximum of 18 earth months without leave, it was preferred to have 10 months on two months off in a rotation aligned with the supply ships, this way, every nine months (standard biped reproductive cycle) there was yet another future worker or soldier from the government's perspective assuming the war lasted indefinitely. Given that the preexisting wormhole complex network was still mostly intact, the majority of the war involved maneuvering around the wormhole generating stations, usually, a front-line spanning one light-year +- 15% depending on cosmic features as it requires far more ships to hold a nebula than a standard system and harder to hold an empty stretch of space. Ironically it is the empty vastness that was most key as maneuver superiority, being able to have the ability to move long the string of wormholes meant that you could still be dragged back down to being three dimensional rather than operating in a time-fixed movement through a wormhole. This is how entire fleets would engage would be from contesting control over known wormhole routes in the space between galactic arms. Trillions could die in a few days during multi-fleet engagements across a particularly contested route. In the galactic arms, fleet groups would make maneuvers designed to either force an enemy outside an arm where they could use superior numbers to destroy them, or contain a larger force within the galactic arm and target star system industries or use smaller numbers of more advanced craft to halt larger numbers of vessels so more ships could be assigned to more mass engagement theaters of war. About a trillion casualties were tallied every day during the war by the Sentillians, or about 1200 times earth's population daily. Jeewol losses to the Sentillians were comparable, initially being far lower but by the end the Sentillians averaged it within +-5% as true casualties are unknown.

Ship based weapons, purpose and range

Nuclear Anti-TC Missiles: Wiping out tethered craft formations, theoretically infinite range (kinetic) accurate within 1.4 M Km.

Matter Accelerators; Ignoring Enemy Shields, Destroying the structural integrity of enemy vessels or outright destruction depending on scale, theoretically infinite but usually 200B km

Lasers; heating enemy vessels, point defense, up to 5B Km for largest varieties, 3.25B km for frigate mounted.

Loitering Torpedoes; lying in wait until enemy vessels enter its range then activating its engines to break into the hull of a vessel and unleash its payload; 15B km.

Plasma Bolts; overheating and melting of individual enemy vessels; 4B km max.

Plasma Arcs; overheating and melting of massed formations of vessels or tethered craft, max 50m km.

Singularity Warheads: Generating a small, temporary black hole to cripple enemy fleets within 100m km of the singularity, collapses in on itself within 10 earth years. Range is dependent on delivery method, usually a 0.8 or Loitering Torpedo.

0.8 Torpedos: Delivering a payload and massive kinetic shock to a vessel at 0.8 times the speed of light; rapid munitions deployment; accurate to 5B Km, recommended to only 4B Km.

Arc Emitters: A two-part weapon system with a large capacitor that is fired at an intended target and forms a circuit in vacuum which then fills the intended target with massive electrical charge, designed to disable ships with electromagnetic resistant coatings or are non-metal hulls. Crew casualties are usually mitigated by rubber soles and rubber-lined gloves.

ABC Warheads: Atomic, Biological, and Chemical torpedo or missile warheads, Atomic are usually used to temporarily disable shields. Biological warheads exploit the gap and insert metal-consuming insects or bacteria or anti-crew pathogens. Chemical warheads are used to make oxidizing clouds to weaken structures or designed to breach the hull and use various chemical agents to disable the crew or compromise the ship in another way.

Tethered Craft: Various small weapons including marine breaching companies, range 1.4 BKm to 380 BKm.

Ion Lance: Cutting a 10, 30, or 50 meter hole in any non-shielded structure up to 1500 decreasing by one meter every 5 km of space to a maximum 7B Km where it dissipates entirely, used at a maximum of 5B km but but recommended at no less than 4.5B km.

Both the Sentillians and Jeewol had a doctrine of trying to capture one another's capital ships, so the course of an engagement would use mass anti-shield weapons be it nuclear or arc weapons, followed by full-weapon engagement using kinetics, heat lasers, plasma arcs, electrical arcs, ABC torpedo, both autonomous and organic boarding operations, and nuclear devices. Nuclear weapons were not the most desirable weapon for naval war in the void as they were rather primitive and really only used for disabling shields temporarily while more effective void weapons could exploit the gap. In terms of ranges, the average range of engagement was about 3 billion km, or 1.1 times the diameter of our solar system. Usually fleets would be engaged and not even be able to see each other and brutal amounts of vector analysis, power usage, and heat generation/dispersion were the keys to victory. In terms of least-preferable way to die, it would have to go to prolonged use of heat weapons, designed to fry the most sensitive electronics and overwhelm coolant systems, usually at this point the vessel would either be evacuated and heat-sunk by its allies or surrender. If neither happened, the crew were baked alive in their metal ovens over the course of hours as the temperature went from 25C to 125C. The other forms would kill the crew in minutes if not near enough to instantly.