- Tupolev
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- Honorable Member
Posted by: CTN 0452 9
That's why I also showed the estimate for the number of troops on board of the supercarrier. The Nimitz was there as a lower bound (disproving my previous out of the air estimate). The assault carrier provides an upper bound, at 27 km long with several hundred thousand troops, scale this back to a 5 km long ship and you get around 50,000 when only scaling for length.
Going any lower would be foolish because of how effectively the Covenant was able to lock down New Mombasa, with troops to spare for Delta Halo.
My entire point was that your low bound was extremely low; the fact that these objects are 3 dimensional means that you have to scale their capacities cubically, not linearly.
Basically, if a Nimitz was 27km long, it wouldn't have 27000/332.8=81.13 times the capacity of a standard Nimitz. It would have (27000/332.8)^3=531000 times the capacity. I used the same sort of scaling math to find the Assault Carrier capacity, figuring that even if the assault carrier only had a personell density of 1/19th that of Nimitz, it would still have over one millions troops on board. Making the same assumption about a supercarrier, and you wind up with a vessel carrying over 150 million troops.
On the other hand, if they have the personell density of a Nimitz and comparable volume per length, then they can carry just over 3 billion Covenant troops. Basically, 5680*(27000/332.8)^3.
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...Which, if you were wondering, is why many people still refuse to believe that the supercarrier is canonically intended to be as big as depicted in Long Night of Solace, as opposed to being a simple 5km Assault Carrier.