all of this would be a LOT easier if we could just have an accurate count of how many planets of each type exist under each sovereignty.

please see my last post.

Amarr has than 673 temperate planets.

And before you start your next post... plz answer the question what you have calculate.

I would if I understood the question. I don't want to rip on you if English isn't your first language or anything, so I'll just let it stand at saying that sentence doesn't make much sense.

it's nice to be proven wrong. then you can stop thanks!

Those survivors' rates, I, uh ...

Let's try to leave assumed ship deaths out of the equation of total New Eden population numbers if we can. I'd rather that they didn't affect the total pop. at all, and if they actually do, I am going to sit in a room with some people and shout at them until we can figure out a more sensible average survival rate. I don't see any sense in masses of people signing up for what's basically a career of suicide missions.

8100 AD Smaller settlements of New Eden settlers have perished, with only a few saved by larger settlements close by

I think the numbers are MUCH lower.
There were just about 80 or so years from the discovery of the EvE wh to its closure. So the time where colonists actually came through the gate might even be significantly lower.
After the closure the remaining (like in "not dead") colonists on all populated planets() had about 15000 years to grow and develope.
Its quoted (for exaple in the old storyline intro video) that "millions of colonists" went through the eve wh to New Eden. The total population of New Eden maybe severall billions but i doubt that it is within the possibilities of maths and growth rates that it would scratch trillions ;-)

Awesome! That aspect of the game world has always been immersion breaking for me. Before that chart came out, I figured crew rates were tiny and survival rates were huge. But after it did come out, nothing made any sense.

Even in wartime, when people are motivated by patriotism, you don't see masses volunteering for high casualty situations. Some do, but conscription was invented for a reason. So it makes no sense that hundreds of millions people would volunteer to help make some bastard in an egg rich, at the cost of their lives. Even in the age of sail, when life was cheap and crews were very small, crew was still precious enough as to lead to the practice of kidnapping new crew. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressment) There is nothing I've seen in the fiction to indicate this is how I fill up my Myrm with people.

This is ridiculous. I don't see how anyone could manage time to fly around at all considering the amount of sex we must have.

Templar One, 60% of the way through according to my kindle, says
"At present she was the guardian of more than one trillion souls across thousands of worlds."

Does that help you define the size of your ball-park a little better?

We could solve this by assuming that all non-essential crew members are required to enter escape pods at the moment the ship enters combat (or is about to enter) and essential crew member (f.ex. the guys who keep our guns running) enter them when situation gets critical. Upon ship destruction the escape pods survive but are hidden from capsuleer camerasystems in order to guarantee the safety of the crewmen (if they were visible, we would shoot them too). There could be also non-capsuleer ships that do nothing else but pick up those npc escape pods and these would be hidden from capsuleers as well with some jovian/concord tech - I think it was said in wiki or in chronicle that lots of npc stuff is hidden from capsuleers cameras. I think this way we could say that there's something like 90%-95% crew survival rate.

I've come up with a relatively simple way to estimate the number of crew on the ships.