The Frigates of Eve book provides the following information about the navy sizes of the empire.
Imperial Armed Forces: 51 Fleets
State Armed Forces: 4 Wings with 47 squadrons
Federal Combined Armed Forces: No data but we can assume 54 fleets or squadron equivalents as other empire navies had groupings correlating to the number of constellations of the empire.
Republic Military: 7 Fleets (possibly broken down into 41 subgroupings as they have 41 constellations)
My question is, do we know anything about the size and composition of the fleets/squadrons of the empire navies? If not, what are the best estimates? Would it be fair to assume that they are as large as a full capsuleer fleet (256 ships per fleet/squadron/whatever the minmatar use to break down their fleets)
As far as I know, we know very little. But I would assume that the empires’ fleets are orders of magnitudes bigger than capsuleer fleet system - The Amarr Navy, for example likely has at least tens of thousands of warships, if not hundreds of thousands. I think it has been mentioned somewhere that something like 25% of the Amarr fleet is under maintenance or retrofits at any given time due to it having some of the oldest ships of all the fleets of the empires.
And the Amarr navy is the largest navy in the cluster, I’m pretty sure. Gallente comes next in size, then Minmatar and last Caldari. Size isn’t everything though, as fleet quality and tactics also mean something and the Caldari, and IMO Minmatar can punch way above their weight when needed to.
I was digging through the new fiction portal and was surprised to find a lot of new articles have been written. One of them details the Caldari “37th Octupus Squadron”.
It appears the numbers provided are very low. Maybe it’s because the 37th is a Capsuleer Squadron but the numbers are as follows:
As of YC119, the 37th (Octopus) Squadron’s seven flights are organized as follows:
Orange Flight - Heavy Assault / 5 Cruisers (Cerberus)
Red Flight - Light Assault / 5 Cruisers (Caracal)
Blue Flight - Rapid Attack / 5 Frigates (Hookbill)
Green Flight - Rapid Support / 5 Frigates (Griffin and Kirin)
I would expect a normal squadron to be much bigger than that. It’s also interesting to note that squadrons are further broken down into “flights”.
In the book templar one (watch out spoilers) Mens Reppola orders the deployment of Ishukone’s forces
“I want you to ready our fleet. Emergency deployment orders. Mobilize like we’re being invaded. I don’t care how much noise it makes. I don’t care who asks what we’re doing. We are going to Pike’s Landing. And we are bringing hell with us.”
“Ishukone has achieved maximum wartime readiness,” she said.
This Ishukone fleet seems to consist of 300 ships 16 of which are Wyverns
—as nearly three hundred new contacts warped into the field, almost directly on top of Admiral Freeman’s fleet. Every single one had a Caldari State IDENT signature…
…Sixteen Wyvern-class supercarriers were now in the battle.
So those seem to be the numbers for one of the mega corporations.
I wonder if that’s just sci-fi writers having no sense of scale. That fleet sounds ridiculously small, even if Ishukone is the smallest of the Megacorps.
Octopus Squadron is a special forces group afaik, so it does have small fleets. And indeed, the fact that it’s a capsuleer squadron effects its size as well. Capsuleers can do more with less.
Regarding Templar One and other EVE events going on around then, the devs and writers of that time just significantly understated the size of the fleets. They wanted to work with smaller forces, which is fine, but then they went around claiming these forces were massive fleets, which was the big error on their part. Personally, I prefer just considering the fleets in Templar One and related events to be small detachments, rather than representing the entirety of their nation’s forces. Their sizes are much more reasonable when viewed in that light.
Yes, that’s a common problem. In their defense, imagining future events is difficult enough let alone the infrastructure needed to have space empires. Even notable and very intelligent authors, like Isaac Asimov, struggled and occasionally failed in this.
the same as some aithors strugle with turn rates of space vehicles or some readers with the outcome of said struggle according to a complaint i once heard about a star wars novel.