MissileTeatime
By the power of Vaporware!
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- Apr 21, 2017
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Oh sure, the Vilani empire is teeny tiny compared to the galaxy as a whole. But the thing is, space is big. (Yes yes, Douglas Adams quote here, laugh it up fuzzball.)To note, actually, the Galaxy is approximately, tip to tip, 40000 Paraecs across (I believe the number is 30-40 thousand, but whatever). Assuming the Vilani travel at Jump 2 the whole way and they still have the week wait time between activation and return, it'd take them nearly 800 years to go from one end of the galaxy to the other. That's basically drawing a straight line between one tip and the other and following that line to a T.
They've been in space a while, but not long enough that an 800 year voyage would seem worth it. And that's not even counting the fact that you're barely exploring anything else outside the planned route.
In short, I'm pretty sure that the Vilani empire is small, all things considered, and I'm pretty sure outside of their empire, maybe on the other side of the galaxy there are other alien species.
If we assume the Vilani empire is a cube (to make the math easy) 100 parsecs to a side (pulled from my ass; about a year's travel from edge to edge in a straight line); that there are about three star systems for every four cubic parsecs in that region; that at most a third of those systems are reachable; and that only 1 in 20 reachable systems can be made "habitable" (as in, settling planets and planetoids, counting terraforming but not building space stations and asteroid bases); that's still 12,500 systems.
To put that in perspective, according to this source (grabbed blindly while ducking around) there are around 19,500 "incorporated areas" (towns, villages, cities, et cetera) in the United States. Per my envelope math, the Vilani empire probably administrates a number of star systems comparable to the number of towns and cities in the United States. That's kind of gargantuan from an administrative perspective.
I don't actually know how "thick" the galactic disk is. Is 100 parsecs reasonable? Too small?