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I don't know about all this (haven't checked the numbers), but I would imagine that the most accurate explanation is somewhere in the middle. Remember, people in NYC don't cram about like Jem'Hadar, with or without equipment. Residents of a city have apartments/condos/houses, restaurants, and work places. They are not everywhere at once. So in reality you could cram WAY more people even into New York if people lived on their desks.

But that's neither here nor there.

It is conceivable that some supplies might not be kept aboard the transport (although that would kind of defeat the purpose of having an all-in-one assault transport), but also remember that Jem'Hadar don't eat (at least according to the child Odo rescued and raised), and that even if they did matter could be stored and replicated as needed.

Also, many people on this site have discussed the "Appalling Lack Of Ground Vehicles"(TM), and it could be argued that the Jem'Hadar simply don't carry their support vehicles with them. A command post need be no more than a First, a few subordinates, and some PADDs and scanners. Communication equipment is carried by each soldier, and does not seem to be centralized except for BIG installations (AR-558).

I believe that the big advantages of the Jem'Hadar is that they don't require anywhere near as much logistical support as traditional soldiers would. Seriously, keep the White coming and they're happy (and fed). Also, they are generally shock troops who are beamed around to trouble spots (usually urban warfare), and don't seem to need support vehicles at all. When you have ships in orbit (particularly one of those dreadnoughts), you wouldn't exactly need artillery!

In conclusion, I don't know if 2,000,000 is a LITTLE exaggeration, but I think it is more reasonable than some think. I figured very conservatively on 4.8 million square meters per deck. Assuming 50 decks, that is 240 million square meters. I am sitting in a room that is about 20 square meters, give or take. Triple bunked, I could probably fit around 24 people in there with a good amount of equipment (certainly the stuff we see Jem'Hadar carry). If the whole floor space of each of those decks was living quarters like that, we have 12,000,000 barrack rooms. If that was ALL they needed, I can fit 288 million Jem'Hadar on that ship!

Now honestly, that is a BIT much . Let's assume that the usable width of each deck (no accommodations in the wings, etc) is only about 500m. That gives a per-deck space of only 2.4 million square meters. I will keep with the 50 soldier-decks, but remember that if each deck was 4 meters, and the ship is 1,300 meters tall, there could be more than 325 decks! I think devoting the equivalent of 50 for soldiers alone is more than reasonable, if troop transport is a primary design goal. (that leaves around 275 decks for ship equipment, weapons, shields, etc. Not to mention all those precious ground vehicles.)

But I digress. So 50 decks of 2.4 million square meters gives us 120 million square meters on the accommodation decks. That would mean that each of those 2 million Jem'Hadar would have 60 square meters all to himself. Now that breaks down to, what? 540 square feet or so? There are smaller apartments. Probably even in New York. I could cram a LOT of white, rifles, pistols, pikes, even a gaggle of those ridiculous mines in there and still have room to mess around in! Even if the actual deck space was lower due to the shape of the ship, remember that there are around 275 more decks to use!

Put it another way. The RMS Queen Mary carried upwards of 15,000 troops at a time overseas during World War II. She is (roughly) 311m x 36m x 55m. How many Queen Marys would fit into that dreadnought?

The dreadnought is calculated at 4,800 x 3,235 m x 1,393 m. Now it isn't anywhere as close to being a rectangular prism as the Queen Mary is, but don't fret. I'll adjust accordingly.

Suppose that you could 're-arrange' the volume of the dreadnought into a prism? I would eyeball it at around 4800 x 1000 x 500m to be hopefully somewhat conservative. That is a volume of 2.4 BILLION cubic meters. The Queen Mary has a volume of roughly 615,780 cubic meters. Divide, and we see that there could be no fewer than 3,897 Queen Marys within the Dreadnought.

So as a pure troop transport, (i.e. the same person-volume-equipment ratio as a WWII liner), there could be up to 58,455,000 troops aboard. Gladly taking vast chunks of volume away from that for ship equipment, supplies, etc, and I could easily see the ship retaining 3% of the usable volume for that 2 million troops.

Wooohoo! My numbers weren't totally absurd!

Wow someone did maths to prove a point lol. Here I ws thinking it was useless.

To get a rough idea of the sizes involved go to the size comparison chart on the main site and select the Dominion Dreadnaught or Battleship and the Titanic - she's close enough in size to the Queen Mary not to affect general impressions on the scale involved. Then consider the fact that the QM could carry 15k troops, as DBS pointed out and ask yourself if the Dominion ship carrying about 150 times that is unreasonable.

Has no one stopped to think that the ship isn't hollow! It has weapons, engines, warp core (maybe two, shes a big girl), Hull, armor, Brace and buttress, decks, poker table (just kidding! God!). Point to be made that ship could hall 2 million troops if thats all she did but she is a warship, not a troop transport, so the thought of it some how being hollowed out and nothing but racks for troops and her weapons then are just magic as they seem to be everywhere but no one has commented on them!

Ok, just had to vent. This topic fell from grace and i thought i'd slap it back to reality for a little bit. Toodles!

Yeah it has to have all that but Bryan proved that it has a LOT of room in it. More than enough for equipment and troops.

It just doesnt matter, packing that number of troops on board would cause huge problems the ships operations, the KW would run out in a week at best and it would take months to replace that many troops if just one ship went down. Space or not it just is not a realistic idea no matter how anyone tries to twist it. 60% of all space on the avg ship is taken up by eq. So your left with 40%, now fit 2 million troops plus the KW, plus weapons, ammo, comms, mines, relays, spare parts for the troops, spare parts for the ship, control and service rooms, weapons bays, munitions bays, you guys just over shot everything!

A little thing called a replicator can handle most of that stuff. Plus they would only be on board for a few weeks max. Its not like they keep it fully loaded all the time. They would only use it at max volume for when they take planets like Betazed.

Its still just lacks sense, if you were going to have a ship to transport that many troops it would be a TRANSPORT, the whole thing about the 2 mill just seems a load of bull and has as many flips as the defiants size does. Nothing makes sense so people spin doctor it in a sad attempt to do so, again that makes no sense, if it were striped down to the bare min, then maybe DBS could do it, but not if it were on combat duty, it would have to be one or the other and even then its still a huge stretch!

If I were to have 2 million troops in a ship I would rather it have power shields and guns on it. This thing blasts through the defence and lands a shit load of troops on the surface.

The Neg'var has the same system. It blasted throught DS9 shields to land troops on it.

but it only has 6000 troops

Has anyone else noticed how it seems that so few soldiers are able to conquer planets? In Unification, where the Romulans were sending over a disguised invasion force to take Vulcan, there were only about 3000 soldiers! How on earth can 3000 soldiers take on a planet? I mean Vulcan's military must be at least 10 million strong, and then when everyone else takes up arms it would be a few billion. It seems very absurd to me that the Romulans think 3000 soldiers could invade a planet.

And fighting on planets surfaces; 2,000,000 really is nothing. One photon torpedo from orbit could kill everyone of those. I never got ground fighting - why can't the people on the ground just be bombarded from the air? Have they lost the art of bombers (shuttles) going down and shooting the crap out of them. Or sending missles (torpedos) and just finding their command posts...

All they have to do is take over the main Governmental bodies and they have won. Have a few ships in orbit to keep the fear of airial attacks and the population is subdued.

Teaos wrote:All they have to do is take over the main Governmental bodies and they have won. Have a few ships in orbit to keep the fear of airial attacks and the population is subdued.

There were 3 vulcan transports only; with no weaponary. 3000 could never take on an entire planet. In WW2 several million Nazis couldn't even take over all of Europe. How would 3000 do the job to an arguably more advanced civilisation than themselves?