Relax wrote:drothgery wrote:
Though I suspect that percentage was quite a bit lower when you could travel to Canada, Mexico, and some Caribbean countries without a passport (and League citizens will, for the most part, be able to do the equivalent of that).
If one removes travel to the Caribbean, Mexico, and Canada, people in the USA rarely travel anywhere else. 67Million traveled abroad in 2016.... of that total almost 40% was to Mexico. roughly 20% was to Canada. 10% was to the Caribbean. So, of the 67Million who traveled 70% never went outside the USA sphere of influence. So, in effect roughly speaking 20million out of 350Million traveled overseas where the travel time is measured generally speaking in less than 24 hours one way and typical is probably around 8 to 12 hours.
The real question, of that 20 million, how many went for more than 2 weeks? I would bet less than 1% and I would also bet the majority of those were retired.
An aside:
I get a good laugh at the Europeans who say they travel. Ask them if they have children(most don't, the USA does and why they are importing people by the million because they have voted for themselves lavish pensions without having any children to enslave to their pensions), then the number of people who travel drops drastically. At most most Europeans who have children never leave the Shengen zone. Just as most with children never leave the USA proper. IT costs too much and takes too much time. In regards to the Honorverse, Prolong by now would assure that more people would travel as they have more time and $$$ without children to complicate things. So, in Honorverse terms, I could see MORE people traveling due to lack of children. Now what percentage of the population this is? Well...
A world is a vast place. No one even if they traveled 24/7 for their entire life could see what is on planet earth let alone what is on other planets so, honestly I think the "mass interplanetary travel" is a complete bunch of BS. Of course the countervailing principle is that humans always see the grass greener on the other side of the fence. So....
There is both more and less interstellar passenger travel in the Honorverse than I think some people are assuming.
For the majority of star systems, who don’t have handy wormholes they can pop across anytime they choose, interstellar travel is
definitely more than a day trip or a transatlantic flight. For somebody living in Manticore for example, a trip to Beowulf is literally a day trip, effectively as brief as a trip from Manticore or Sphinx to Gryphon, or a flight from New York to Paris or — at worst — from Tacoma to Taiwan. That’s one reason there’s been so much intermarriage between Beowulfers and Manticorans over the centuries.
Pleasure travel between star systems is relatively limited, outside those “daytrip” destinations. It’s no more expensive than a ticket on a present day cruise ship would be. Indeed, relative to levels of disposable Honorverse income, it’s a lot cheaper. But the cost is still substantial, and climbing onto a starship for a trip that’s going to take anywhere up to a month or two to reach its destination puts sort of a hole in one’s normal activities (and employment). Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, because it does, but it’s pretty much a fringe element in interstellar travel and commerce and it is much more concentrated among the particularly affluent.
There’s quite a bit of what I think of as “professional travel” — travel by business executives, technicians being shipped out to one of the transstellars’ satellite operations, OFS personnel being sent to new postings, diplomatic personnel, etc. In fact, there’s a
lot of that, since we are talking about an interstellar commercial and business network which has had literally centuries to grow up, as opposed to our own current day transnational operations which have really only been growing since the first half of the twentieth century.
And, finally, there’s a
whole lot of ongoing emigration. The Fringe continues to absorb a lot of new citizens every year as people who were Solarians (or unfortunate enough to be citizens of one of the star systems ruled by its homegrown kleptocracy or which have been handed over to OFS cronies). I think there was a question about this on one of the other threads, and the answer is that, yes, the “frontier” is still being extended by “hearty pioneer stock” — i.e., people who have “voted with their feet” on the state of affairs on the planets of their birth.
Now, Lacoön Two is designed to close wormholes to
Solarian traffic. Manticoran shipping has been called home from the League’s territory; it’s still busy flowing around the Fringe and the Verge, however. So even though a wormhole’s been seized, that doesn’t necessarily mean that nothing is passing through it. Moreover, the Star Empire was aware from the beginning that shutting down the wormholes was going to have an impact on Solarian citizens and (presumably) on Solarian public opinion. So they have been at some pains to allow
local traffic through the wormholes even in the League, although that traffic is no longer moving in Solarian-registered bottoms. That is, some of those freighters and passenger vessels otherwise idled by Lacoön are being employed to move critical humanitarian cargoes, private citizens, etc., back and forth through the termini. You can get to any star system served by a wormhole aboard a Solarian ship; you just can’t then travel
through the wormhole aboard that same ship. For that matter, quite a few “Manticoran” ships have been quietly purchased by the Crown (often as a way to indemnify owner-operators against the catastrophic financial consequences of both Lacoön phases) for lease or sale to private owners or government entities in the star systems affected by Lacoön Two which
are not member systems of the League. Some systems have taken advantage of this; others have decided that doing so would get them on the League’s . . . bad side, shall we say?
A point that has to be borne in mind is that Lacoön Two is waging economic warfare on a
limited segment of the Core Worlds’ populations. This is hurting the transstellars, it’s hurting the shipping lines, it’s hurting the people whose earnings are directly related to ongoing interstellar commerce, but those are all a relatively small proportion of any Core World’s population. In many cases — especially in systems dominated by one or a group of transstellars — the proportion is much higher and the general economic impact is far greater, but that’s fine with the Manties, because
those people were already going to be in the Mandarins' pocket where anything designed to prune back the Star Empire’s dominance of the interstellar carrying trade was concerned. In other words, they were going to be vociferously agitating for the SEM to have the snot knocked out of it, no matter what.
Because of this, the impact on the overall Solarian economy is a lot more limited than one might think. Oh, it’s going to be significant in the long run, but that kind of pinch is going to take a while to ramp up in the case of most of the League’s member systems. For most of the League’s citizens, it’s going to mean an increase in the cost of living coupled with a decrease in buying power and its likely to generate a moderate recession overall. For some systems — again, those whose economies are dominated by transstellars deeply dependent upon the interstellar movement of goods, people, and services — the effect will be far, far worse. But, again, the people in those star systems would want Manticore’s scalp no matter what.
The true target of Lacoön Two isn’t the League’s economy as a whole. Frankly, the best that Manticore could hope for where the overall League economy is concerned would be to produce a severe recession — maybe even a general depression — until sufficient Solarian tonnage was built to service the League’s internal markets even with the substantially longer voyage times loss of the termini will impose. Lacoön Two’s
target, however, is the federal government’s revenue stream, given the Constitutional prohibition against funding the federal government with anything except service fees. It was clearly intended by the Founders that those service fees would be earned solely from the League’s
primary designed function as a regulator of interstellar commerce and movement. In addition to traffic control fees and duties on imports, exports, and freight handling, all Solarian-registered vessels pay an annual “inspection and certification” fee to the federal government. Without being inspected and certified, they lose their registrations and the right to transit Solarian space. (This, by the way, is another reason the Mandarins resent the Star Empire of Manticore. Essentially, the Star Kingdom told them long ago that Manticore would inspect and certify its own shipping and that the Solarian League could either accept the Manticoran certification or have all Solarian ships decertified in
Manticoran space . . . or transiting the Junction. This means, among other things, that a sizable income stream is denied to the federal coffers.) The consequences of all of the above are that a good-sized chunk of the Mandarins revenue stream comes from sources directly tied to the steady, free movement of interstellar shipping. By closing down the wormholes, Manticore effectively cuts that entire revenue stream off at the knees. Oh, there’s still some internal shipping, but without the Manticoran merchies which carried a lot of it, there is far less and what there is of it takes much longer to reach its destination, which means that even the shipping which still exists is paying much less in the way of fees.
The second source of the federal government’s economy are the “fees” charged the Protectorates in return for OFS’s benign oversight of their star systems. This has become both a steadily growing component of the League government’s income as the Protectorates grew and a steadily more
important component as Manticoran dominance of interstellar shipping cut deeper into service fees generated by interstellar commerce. This is the entire reason the Mandarins will not –
cannot — reform the situation in the Protectorates . . . and the thing that makes/will make them view the "Manticoran" agent provocateur of Operation Janus as only one more aspect of the existential threat to their existence.
So the basic strategy of the Star Empire — which has been endorsed and embraced by its Allies — has been to kill the
Solarian government’s solvency while killing as few Solarian
citizens as possible. Hopefully, this will bring about a collapse of the Mandarins and the ungoverned, corrupt bureaucracy which has driven and controlled Solarian policy for the last several centuries. At the very least, that would give the Grand Alliance the opportunity to negotiate with a new set of ministers who presumably wouldn’t be as thoroughly captive to the existing system. A better outcome would be the outright collapse of the bureaucratic system of government and a reassertion of control by elected,
accountable ministers rather than the permanent senior undersecretaries. Ideally, it will also result in the secession of a substantial number of the less satisfied member systems of the League coupled with the collapse of the League’s dominance in the present Protectorates.
Whether or not their strategy will have the outcome(s) they want is something of which they can’t be certain, and something over which there’s been a fair amount of debate behind the scenes. What they are trying, above all, to accomplish, however, is to limit the massive destruction and loss of life which would attend any general Alliance offensive into the League. They aren’t afraid that they couldn’t
carry out exactly that sort of offensive; they simply realize that the level of carnage involved would be morally abhorrent and unacceptable and that the hatred engendered among the survivors in systems where that carnage occurred would be impossible to overestimate.
Can't stop laughing.