n7axw wrote:But how does all of this look long term? Historically what happens when empires come unglued isn’t pretty. Chaos, warlordism, states that don’t have the legs to last, almost pertetual war over time. The result is a decline in economic activity and the impoverishment of once prosperous areas who are conquered, perhaps repeatedly, and pillaged. One remembers Rome and the beginning of the Dark Ages. The situations are not completely congruent, of course. But they are close enough to make the comparison uncomfortable. The League’s policies in the Verge were pretty nasty and the systems in the shell were disadvantaged for the benefit of the core worlds. But the League kept the peace in areas it dominated and even though the result frequently wasn’t fair, for a substantial portion of human occupied space, peace allowed trade and prosperity to flourish.
Don, although I agree with you about the consequences of an empire's collapse, I don't think the situation vis a vis the Fall of Rome is analogous to the Solarian League.
The lands beyond Rome's European borders may be compared to the Verge - very superfluously - but that is where the comparison ends. At the time of Rome's Fall, the northern European lands were in upheaval, with entire populations migrating away from the east and northeast in a ripple effect, to get away from the advancing Huns. There were other reasons as well for the Germanic and Slavic Migrations, among them overpopulation and climate change.
The situation in the Verge is much different. We don't see huge displaced populations putting pressure on the League's borders, for instance. As for the League itself, yes, the central bureaucracy has quite a lot of authority to regulate trade and industry, and as it controls the League's armed forces, it can police the spaceways and enforce compliance with its rulings. However, unlike in Rome where ALL authority derived from the Emperor and lack of direction from the Emperor basically incapacitated local administrators, political authority in the League is vested first and foremost in the governments of the League's various member states. The collapse of central authority in the League will not have nearly as much of a disrupting effect on its member states as the collapse of central authority had for Rome's outlying territories.
HB of CJ wrote:The only way the GA has a snow balls chance in hades of winning is to quickly force some sort of negotiated settlement with the Sollies. Force a quick, victorious war?
The League is just too big for the GA to even think of engaging in a 'short, victorious war'. Even if anyone in the GA leadership was stupid enough to put credence in such a fallacy, and even if the League decided for some reason to suddenly surrender unconditionally, the GA simply does not have enough manpower or ships to enforce a complete disarmament by the League, or to take over the peacekeeping and piracy-suppressing role of the League Navy, or to prevent any rearmament by the League. Besides, as Weird Harold wrote, the GA wants the League to disintegrate - a process that has already started with Beowulf's and her daughter worlds' decision (or imminent decisions) to vote on secession from the League.
n7axw wrote:namelessfly wrote:One change will be a drastic increase of military spending and military forces deployed. Under the SL, some 2,000 SL systems were content to depend on the SLN for their security. BF's much vaunted active 2,000 SDs and 10,000 SDs in reserve seems enormous but works out to only 1 active SD and 10 reserve SDs per star system. This is trivial by even the pre King Roger standards of the RMN. Based on what the SKM was able to build and deploy, I estimate that the SLN fleet strength required the expenditure of much less than 1% of the GDP of the SL, perhaps even only 1/10 of one percent. Given the inevitable chaos, I expect that everyone who can build and deploy a fleet and system defense forces (missile pods with MDMs make "fixed forts" extremely effective) will do so and they will be willing to spend about 1/10 of their GDP on their military. This will result in each of most populace and industrialized systems having somewhere around a dozen to a gross of SDs or SD(P)s in their fleet for a grand total of perhaps 100,000 SD class combatants roaming the human inhabited galaxy.
We also might see smaller numbers of new ship classes that dwarf the tonnage and combat power of SDs.
This is exactly the scenario that concerns me. Lots of that buildup will be valid with only defensive purposes in mind. But given human nature, there will be those who think, Wouldn't it be nice if WE could be the toughest kid on the block... So you get a scramble to develop new empires some more successful than others, but almost always someone waiting to pull down whoever the king on the hill might be... not a good situation. Dark ages indeed.
Don
This is a far more likely scenario than the 'woe, oh woe, the barbarians are coming' scenario we had with the Fall of Rome or many other ancient terrestrial empires.
I think that two words should suffice: Legislaturalist Haven. By which I mean, that is the kind of situation we're going to see in former League space, only with many little imitators of expansionist Haven under the Legislaturalists.
Some systems are going to be aggressors, others are going to do everything they can to remain neutral, and still others are going to band together either in defensive alliances or amalgamate into strong enough star nations to deter any conquistadores. Lots of chaos in the short term, maybe even resulting in true Dark Ages in some of the more remote regions of the former League.
Most of the Core and Shell worlds will, however, seize control of their local BF detachments (if they do not have their own SDFs, or even if they do), which in the short to medium terms will be sufficient for their needs, as their only possible opponents will be other systems with the same level of military technology.
The Protectorates and Verge will be the only regions where 'warlordism' will become a real problem, as most of the systems there don't have the deeply-entrenched political traditions and strong, prosperous economies that exist in the Core and Shell - except for those systems that are located close enough to the relative few Verge systems that are stable and prosperous enough to survive the coming upheavals relatively unscathed.
Remember, the Haven sector's star nations are not the ONLY Verge polities that are prosperous and stable - there has to be others, but since the series focuses on the Haven sector for the most part, we know little of the other stable Verge polities out there.