Statistics:
Length of war: forty-eight years, one month.
Total casualties, including machines (reckoned on logarithmic sentience scale), medjel and non-combatants:
851.4 billion (\B1 .3%). Losses: ships (all classes above interplanetary) -
91,215,660 (\B1 200); Orbitals - 14,334; planets and major moons - 53; Rings - 1;
Spheres - 3; stars (undergoing significant induced mass-loss or
sequence-position alteration) - 6.
Historical perspective
A small, short war that rarely extended throughout more than .02% of the galaxy by volume and .01% by stellar population. rumours persist of far more impressive conflicts, stretching through vastly greater amounts of time and space… Nevertheless, the chronicles of the galaxy’s elder civilisations rate the Idiran-Culture war as the most significant conflict of the past fifty thousand years, and one of those singularly interesting Events they see so rarely these days.
It’s more that it is mind bogglingly huge by our standards, yet still a blip on the scale of the galaxy.
The appendix in Consider Phlebus put the Iridian war into interesting perspective.
Wasn’t it just one GSV on the Culture side basically fighting the whole war?
It’s more that it is mind bogglingly huge by our standards, yet still a blip on the scale of the galaxy.