How large do you think independent system navies and armies are? (lore)

I know that in-game during wars ships are essentially infinite for both sides, but for the purpose of writing a fanfic, I'm interested in how large independent system fleets and armies could be. Lets take an independent system with an Earth-like world and about a billion residents and another system with an outpost and a population of 50,000. What in your opinion would be realistic and reasonable, in terms of active duty personnel, tanks, artillery pieces, IFVs and ships?
 
For a heavily-militarised modern-day society - and with the number of wars in ED, most of them probably are - somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population as active duty soldiers is a normal range, plus rather more variable numbers of reservists. So for the billion-resident ELW somewhere around a few million active duty personnel, and a few tens of thousands of spaceships, seems reasonable (ownership split between the various factions, of course).

For the 50,000 outpost, that same percentage would give 50-500 soldiers split between the various factions, which probably in practice means that there's no standing force as such: internal 'wars' will be "two groups of drunk rowdies having a punch-up" up to "two security teams have a brief firefight", if the system as a whole needs defending it'll be "whoever has an armed ship tries to make the best of it while everyone else tries to barricade and use the Pioneer Supplies stock for when the boarding parties get through"
 
Have a look at wiki for something like armed forces of XXX for various pop sizes.

A place like Iceland, has only a coast guard of 200 and currently operates 4 patrol boats and 4 aircraft. 380k pop.

The Royal Navy currently has about 83 ships of various types with 32k+ personnel.

The defence forces of Ireland would give another benchmark.

Steve
 
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For a heavily-militarised modern-day society - and with the number of wars in ED, most of them probably are - somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population as active duty soldiers is a normal range, plus rather more variable numbers of reservists. So for the billion-resident ELW somewhere around a few million active duty personnel, and a few tens of thousands of spaceships, seems reasonable (ownership split between the various factions, of course).

For the 50,000 outpost, that same percentage would give 50-500 soldiers split between the various factions, which probably in practice means that there's no standing force as such: internal 'wars' will be "two groups of drunk rowdies having a punch-up" up to "two security teams have a brief firefight", if the system as a whole needs defending it'll be "whoever has an armed ship tries to make the best of it while everyone else tries to barricade and use the Pioneer Supplies stock for when the boarding parties get through"
On an economic note, consider the number of population required to support each person in uniform and that is even before equipment is taken into account.

of a 50k pop, take out the under 20s and the over 40s as a baseline, and the eligible pool for any service is likely to be 40%. A small pop is likely to have lots of young and child carers.

Steve
 
10% - 30% fighting personnel the rest of the military doing all the work to get them in the fight at the right place and time with working kit.

How big a proportion of the society the military will be is less easy to guestimate because it depends on the society.
 
i would think many small to medium factions / nation states would contract defense out to specialized corps. rather than have independent defense systems... which would be expensive and difficult to maintain and man given the various types of factions.
 
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