The Reason I Crunch Numbers

Although my crunching of the numbers for Star Wars might be excessive, I enjoy it, and I find it to be a useful activity, both as a fan and a writer. It's important to try to understand the way a world works, its nuances and behaviors. To be able to understand and write about a world, it's important to understand how it works. And that's where something like crunching the numbers comes in. A few years ago, I wrote an entry in another blog somewhere about why Sauron could never bring the amount of forces shown to bear on Gondor--there is no way that, with medieval technology and supply routes, he would have been able to provide food, shelter, equipment, stables, etc. for such a vast force. I brought in some modern arguments about things like the supposed million-strong army of the Persians: it's just not possible to have a force that vast all in one place. It's very rare to see an army over 200,000 strong in the ancient world for that reason, and even that army needs massive numbers of followers and support personnel. Historically, I've heard it said that an army would have followers on a 1/1 ratio. Even assuming orcs don't bring their families along... but now I'm getting carried away again.

These are the considerations every fan needs to take into account when thinking about a world. It's the little things that turn a book or movie from just a story into a living, breathing world in which the audience's imagination can run wild. Whenever I'm watching or reading something that moves me, I imagine myself into that world, creating new stories and characters on a whim. That is the deepest level of immersion in a world, and it's necessary to understand the mechanics of that world in order to do that. It's also the reason I read slowly: I can go through text very quickly if I'm just reading for comprehension, but I prefer to read slowly, to stop to picture scenes, to think about what if and to fill in the gaps in the story with my imagination.

That's my reasoning behind spending all that time on crunching the numbers for my favorite stories. It's fun, and it's useful. Maybe you should try it, too. Keep your favorite writers honest: what's possible and what isn't?

By the way, I notice now that I didn't take the modern navy numbers by a third, as I was doing for the others to simulate the lack of extreme poverty in Star Wars. In that case, there would have been 800 Star Destroyers rather than 2,400. Fewer, but that's still a lot. Then again, I doubt the extreme poor contribute all that much to military economies, so perhaps my initial figure was reasonable.