I like SilverDragon's idea of smallness -- I mean, sure, you see lots of stuff destroyed jumping around, but remember each experience in a system is roughly a day, so at most 5-6 ships would be destroyed on each side per day, per system. Productivity of large governments would be quite huge, but producing hundreds or even thousands of these massive warships would be quite a task, requiring significant resources (which would not be totally unfeasible given the abundance of iron in the asteroid belt). But still, I would doubt that the number of destroyers gets much over a few hundred at all, and carriers should be quite rare (I mean, the U.S. doesn't even have 20 aircraft carriers).
If these governments really had thousands of ships, you'd have hundreds of ships in every system at any given time.
As for defense fleets, I'd imagine that the siege of a planetary defense would take weeks. So if you consider reinforcements, and increased productivity during the siege period... (and besides, Earth isn't supposed to be conquerable -- in reality, it'd have ground-based defenses and such anyway).
So, taking all that into consideration:
U.E. -- 20 carriers, 100 destroyers, 1000 fighters
Voinians -- 1 dreadnought, 40 cruisers, 140 frigates, 250 interceptors, 850 fighters
Emalgha -- 400 warships, 1200 fighters (they probably harvest and replant forests pretty quickly, and have genetically engineered trees and so on)
Azdgari -- 40 warships, 440 aradas, 4004 azdaras
Zidagar -- 80 zidaras, 2000 fighters
Igadzra -- 25 igazras, 850 aradas
Zachit -- 5 gunships, 35 aradas, 125 fighters (small but efficient)
This is an interesting topic -- sure beats those fighter polls...
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Mike Lee (Firebird)
And Firebird, what brought you back?