To begin with, the D6 space rules actually differ a bit from Star Wars D6. I'm not sure if it matters for this particular question (I haven't fully read through D6 Space), but it's worth being aware of.
This answer is based on the Second Edition, Revised and Expanded rules (Color Millennium Falcon cover; the most recent prior to D6 Space).
Basic Targetting
For ranged, the difficulty is based on the range to your target (page 88). Point-blank is Very Easy, medium range is Moderate, etc.
The actual distance defined as point-blank, medium, etc. varies from weapon to weapon. For example, a Bowcaster is listed as having a range of 3-10/30/50. This means that 0-3 meters is point-blank, 3-10 meters is short range, 10-30 meters is medium range, and 30-50 meters is long range.
For melee, the difficulty to hit is listed on the weapon (page 89). A vibro-ax is a moderate difficulty to hit with. A knife is a very easy difficulty.
Resisting Targets
Characters can use reaction skills to make themselves harder to hit (page 79). This is generally going to be either dodge, melee parry, or brawling parry.
When someone attacks you, but before you know if they hit, you can declare a reaction. This uses either one of your pre-declared actions or can be a new action (your choice). Multiple action penalties apply to the reaction, and if you make it a new action while you have other actions remaining the reaction adds to the multiple action penalty for those additional actions.
The reaction roll replaces your base target number to be hit. Even if it's lower. And it applies to all further attacks of that type in the round. A bad reaction roll can potentially be bad news (although the difficulties in ranged combat are generally pretty low to begin with).
The reaction skills are summarized on pages 89 and 90. Note that dodge is exclusively for ranged attacks and grenades. Ducking out of the way of a knife is brawling parry, not dodge.
Modifiers
There are a few modifiers that apply on top of reaction skill use.
Unarmed vs. Armed -- When armed, attacking or parrying against an unarmed opponent gains a static bonus (melee parry gets +5 vs. unarmed opponents, brawling parry grants armed opponents a +10 bonus). Just add this in when it's appropriate (page 90).
Cover -- Usually if you have cover from one person, you'll have it against everyone. When this isn't the case, you have a few options:
Roll the dodge and cover separately. Keep track of both numbers and apply as appropriate.
Roll the dodge during the first attack. During each attack impacted by cover, have the player roll his cover dice whenever he would otherwise be hit.
If the attacker beats the target number to hit the character (i.e. their dodge in most cases) but misses due to cover, they hit what the character was hiding behind. If it's something that can be damaged, they roll to damage the cover (page 93-94).
Full Reaction
The final piece to the reaction skill puzzle is full reactions. This represents going entirely on the defensive. A full reaction can be the only action taken in the round, but adds the base difficulty to hit to the reaction skill (page 90). Note that a full dodge precludes parrying (and vice versa).
The number of hardpoints armour has is an inherent limitation—they simply physically do not have anywhere to put the mod, or lack sufficient internal power systems to make it function. No amount of credits can overcome that.
This makes sense for "armoured clothing," which is merely a set of plates you wear under bulky clothing. There isn't anywhere to attach a moderately-sized mod like the Optical Camouflage System, and it doesn't have a power or control system to make the OCS go.
This makes sense from a game-design perspective too—if more hardpoints could simply be added with more money, there would be no point in using the concept of hardpoints as a limitation and it would simply give an increased cost. Further, there'd then be nothing apart from money and XP (potentially unlimited, over a long enough game) to prevent people from attaching every single mod to their "stealthy" under-clothes plates.
To accomplish what you're aiming to using gear, you have two options. You can either:
Wear heavier armour such as Laminate, which is designed to "be easily modified with after-market attachments" such as an OCS.
Or you can somehow acquire an Outlaw Tech Personal Stealth Field. Good luck with that, though—they're Rarity 9 and cost 20,000 credits!
Best Answer
Somewhere between 250 and 950 people, assuming that you don't need to run it for more than a couple of watches. Your best option is a crew of droids, as they don't need the downtime a normal crew does. This presumes that normal PC-centric options (social engineering, being Jedi, being Sith) are out of the picture and that the party actually wants to be able to run the ship with their own crew for any length of time.
In the mindset of the 70's, the technology of a capital ship could not be automated to any significant degree. From a military role perspective, ISDs performed cruiser roles:
Furthermore:
A cruiser:
Thus, we have a vessel capable of patrolling on its own or operating in fleets.
With the analogy established, we can look at what it takes to run a cruiser and extrapolate from there. It's important to note that the Imperium \footnote{served very poorly by the propaganda of the rebel's amateur war films titled "Star wars"} is modeled after the soviet "Evil Empire" mythos. Therefore, an approximate ship is a Kiev Class "Aircraft Cruiser" which was subsequently reclassified as a carrier.
A Kiev has a crew of:
First, consider that a warship has to be operational 24/7, this requires at least 3 shifts.
Consider an onboard nuclear reactor, almost certainly to be simpler than the ISD's powerplant:
A nuc requires:
The reason it requires that many people is that there is no room for unnecessary redundancy in a warship: wasted mass can be used more profitably in doing something to further the mission. Thus, you need lots of people just to make sure every little bit is working, as there's no room for error and the machine is sufficiently complex that automation is either difficult, impossible, or wasteful (especially with pre-transistor computers).
Now, consider an ISD:
At the very least you need: people on the bridge. People at the reactor. People in environmental And people on the three different propulsion systems:
You also need people fiddling with shield systems, simply because space isn't empty that the speeds an ISD is travelling at. You'll want minimal crew on sensors, just to make sure you're not running into anything.
So, with this in mind, it looks like there are 3800 flight personnel listed for an ISD. Looking here, we see the Bluejacket's manual has crewing requirements for the USN. According to here: there are 6 (counting both halves of the dogwatch as 1) distinct watch-times. There's no reason to suppose that an ISD does away with this tradition. To allow for crew rest over a 6 year deployment, 3 watches will be absolutely minimum, with a likely 4 watches to account for necessary downtime. I'll assume 4 watches for this math, as it allows people a day off every so often.
3800/4 = 950 people on watch at any given time for just flight systems. As this is 950 crew running the essential functions of a mile long ship, this is not unreasonable.
There are the following logically derived areas: Bridge & Sensors, Environmental, Reactor, Hyperspace Propulsion, Sublight Propulsion, Shields. Roughly speaking 150 people for an even split, though the bridge and shields will likely take less and the reactor take way more.
The reactor of an ISD, described here has an output equivalent to a "miniature sun." Assuming that 200 people can tend a sun, even with automation, is all kinds of silly. Still, assuming automation, with merely someone running the essential activites as they come up, not counting for any margin in case of unexpected emergencies (space is full of unexpected emergencies...) assume a quarter is necessary to run themselves ragged with no backup. A skeleton crew of 250 or so to run a mile long starship for about 4 hours sounds about right. It means you can have a few people in each critical area making sure that the automation is doing what it should. Trying to run an ISD for any length of time without a normal watch means that stuff will start breaking very very very quickly as tolerances are exceeded. (Remember, military equipment assumes you know what you're doing. It'll allow itself to go out of spec instead of shutting down).
And thus, we get the 250-950 number stated above. 1970's conceptions of technology combined with a mile long ship, the running of a miniature sun to power the damn thing, three different engine systems, environmental control, and making sure the ship knows where it is and where it's going is an incredibly difficult task.
For more accurate guesses, use the spreadsheet found here.
Long deployment ships could not run 12 hour shifts for very long, even assuming hyper-disciplined clone armies. Given that there are explicit "hospitality sections" on an ISD, I can't even imagine gengineered clones being able to sustain that for 6 years. On the other hand, that would make a fascinating plot.
In a ship a mile long for a 6 year deployment, you're going to have more than simple bunks and always-on crew. (In contrast, a US sub that has a steeply limited number of crew can only deploy for a few months at best. You're going to have large food sections, what amount to on-board hotels and people to staff them, and places for clones and non-clone military to enjoy themselves. The other problem is that stormtroopers don't serve as part of flight crew, as they're part of the Imperial Army.
The huge crew is to maintain the machinery and ensure that everything stays within bounds. To be clear, they don't exactly need to be pushing buttons to keep machinery running. They need to be pushing buttons to stop from turning into a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma :) And yes, this is horribly inefficient from modern non-military standards (look at my last link) but reflects the technological biases of the time. -- Judging from some of the technokinetic tricks I know that some jedi/sith can do, the number drops sharply with a force-enabled crew. But that is functionally plot-magic.