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[Nautilus81]

There's something I've always been wondering about since I first started playing this game, but I haven't been able to find a definitely answer to it as of yet.
Just how many ships are there in each of the Sector Power's navies, lore-wise? In particular, how common are capital ships compared to cruisers and smaller vessels? Are we talking about no more than a handful for the whole sector, a couple dozen per power, something in between? What would be the typical size and ship-mix for a Domain Battlegroup at full muster?

Similarly, while the powers that be do have heavy industry, do they actually have the ability to construct new capital ship hulls, or is it more that they're able to keep already-built ones running? Is there a possibility that the sector could see capitals go extinct entirely?

My doubt on high numbers of capitals mainly comes from the menu missions; a fleet engagement like The Last Hurrah involves only two capital ships total, while Sinking the Bismar and Nothing Personal demonstrate that the Hegemony either was desperate enough or found it convenient enough to recover the 3-year old drifting hulk of an Onslaught and decide to repair and refit it to service. Would the numbers represented in the missions be fully accurate to what "truly happened", or would this be more an abstraction for an even larger engagement? 

[Redmoe]

A question I've wondered as well!

Capitals can go extinct, as the XIV pattern of the Legion is only found by exploring. Also the Hegemony is shown assembling new Eagles in story, so cruisers are definitely replaceable in-lore. One of the reasons the Enforcer is popular with Hegemony is they can use it's compatible parts for repairing them. The Sindirian Diktat is creating it's own capital ships based on the League, so it must be possible to create them from scratch. They've been around for 40 cycles so the timescale of creating a capital ship would have to be less than that.

Wanted to try using napkin math to get a rough estimate. A Onslaught takes 1,500 crew. The Hegemony has a population of somewhere between 112m-1.2b. Let's take the lower bound and since only a small percentage of the population is available as crew, 1% as being in the military, they would have about a 1 million in the crew. A portion of each fleet will be tied up in smaller ships, marines, and support ships so let's say about 5% of the military is tied up in capital ships. That would mean about 33 capitals for Hegemony.

Personally see it in the 10-100 range for Hegemony.

I think in-lore the numbers are much lower than in game, so would take the missions being more accurate. Though it's likely somewhere in-between as they aren't the entire navies in one place.

[Nautilus81]

The Sindirian Diktat is creating it's own capital ships based on the League, so it must be possible to create them from scratch. They've been around for 40 cycles so the timescale of creating a capital ship would have to be less than that.

Yeah, that new blog post definitely answered that question at least. As for your napkin math, I'd say the lower end of that scale would be a safer bet, perhaps only 2-3 capital ships per system as a whole, at least in regards to the Hegemony. I could see the Diktat going a bit more top-heavy with the Executor as well.