Did Vader ever fathom that Palpatine was Darth Sideous?

The Jedi are a few hundred guys, tops. There are trillions of people on Coruscant alone. The scale of the galaxy means that the vast majority of people only know about the Jedi via crazy inflated rumors and the likelihood of actually meeting someone with Force Powers is so small that you're better off spending your entire life savings on lottery tickets.

And really, anything that a Force User can do can easily be replicated by technology and slight-of-hand, so tales of Jedi magic are just as easily chocked up to con artists bilking the rubes.

The battles in the Clone Wars were tiny. Seriously. They did not rip up entire planets. The major battles of the Clone Wars were equivalent to small skirmishes from a modern perspective. Battles consisted of a few hundred guys with minimal combined arms support using Napoleonic tactics fighting over a few square kilometers of land at best.

Every Clone trooper and Battle Droid in the entire SW Galaxy could be dropped in Kansas tomorrow and fight a war and we'd barely notice.

 

More like a hundred hundred.

 

We wouldn't notice a minimum of three million clonetroopers and a droid army of at least three hundred million?

As for this assertion that battles in the Clone Wars did not "rip up entire planets" and that battles were "equivalent to small skirmishes from a modern perspective," I suggest perusing the Clone Wars entry at Wookiepedia, because you definitely are not describing an accurate scope of the conflict.

I've been doing some searching, and the most common number I can find is 10,000 Jedi at the time of TPM. This number is contradicted on whether that was the entirety of the Order, or merely the number of Jedi on Coruscant at that time. Some citations seem to come from the novelization for TPM, and others are citing Episode I: The Visual Dictionary. Do you recall where you got the hundred thousand number from?

 

I didn't say a hundred thousand. I said a hundred hundred.

The TPM novel reference says "spread across a galaxy", so it's not just the ones on Coruscant.

 

Oops, yeah, misread that. Sorry!

As for the TPM novel: I know that it said 10,000 in the galaxy, but other people trying to find an answer to the question of how many Jedi were in the galaxy at the time of the Clone Wars also cited Episode I: The Visual Dictionary as saying 10,000 Jedi total. That's where my confusion comes in. I suppose the discrepancy is probably as simple as miscommunication between authors and editors.

 

I don't see how that's a discrepancy.

 

Why would they advertise their numbers?

And what about Jedi missionaries sent off into unknown space to look for untapped potential.

There were some novels about a splinter group of imperials that had been growing off in the wastlands dealing with some unspecified threat, yet when they returned they seemed to be at least 20 times the size of the Emperors homefront at the hieght of the Empires might which which the Rebellion had barely managed to rought when they wereon a warfooting.

 

I'm not doing too well with my proof-reading lately.

In that last post, I meant to say that Episode I: The Visual Dictionary supposedly says that there were 10,000 Jedi on Coruscant at the time of TPM. I say "supposedly" because I haven't read it myself, but have seen posts elsewhere citing it.

So there's a discrepancy between whether there were 10,000 Jedi total in the Order at the beginning of the prequel trilogy, or if that was merely the number still on Coruscant during the events of TPM.

 

http://scifi.stackexchange.com/ques...hts-lived-in-the-galaxy-before-the-clone-wars

Other sources:

Episode I Adventures 1: Search for the Lost Jedi

"over ten thousand Jedi Knights throughout the galaxy".

Description on LucasArts website for Episode I: Jedi Power Battles game

"Out of 10,000 Jedi in the Galactic Republic, you are the one".

 

I never worry about exact numbers when it comes to Star Wars- it's more of a fairy tale than science fiction so I don't think it matters much.