Hi Duckk,
I first suggested 40-100,000 ships for the MMM over 8 years ago, but the MWW [now RFC] refused to provide any more specific numbers when he critiqued my assumptions, but his post didn't make it to the pearls like so many others, presumably for good reasons.
One of the reasons I like the forums so much is all his posts are available and searchable.
From the textev of HAE, the average freighter had some 50-60 crew for ships in the 6-7 MT range, and from SoS the 4.5 MT Emerald Dawn seemed to have a crew or at least 40-50, so while they're small they're not quite as small as only a dozen or so, though the trend does seem aimed in that direction with the current largest container freighter here on earth [for 52 days] having a crew of only 23 according to yesterday's news reports.
Given the size of the MMM, and all the textev how the RMN recruits heavily from the very large Manticoran merchant marine, 40-100,000 freighters etc seems a good bracket; less than 40K seems too low and above 100,000 seems too many for several reasons, some already cited.
Bear in mind the earliest textev said the MMM dominated the trade beyond the SL, ie the verge etc where about a third of humanity lived, ~2/3 residing in the SL, and the MMM was 'only' the fourth largest, with Beowulf having a rather large merchant marine, but RFC hasn't remained the same over the past 20 years and neither should his ideas, if anyone wants to plot the MMM's shift in size and emphasis to the SL.
[Somebody please do!]
I believe someone earlier, probably on another thread, mentioned Hamburg had 27 arrivals and departures every day, or almost 10,000 per year.
27 arrivals and departures per day for a system like Mesa seems quite possible given a wormhole bridge connection, and that's just one wormhole terminus compared to the couple thousand per day now for the SEM's WHJ, ie some 730,000 transits per year, with many being MMM repeat customers.
Originally the SL had only 5 termini within its borders according to the UHH, but we never learned the names of the other two after Yildin in SoS, now there are dozens.
Regarding Grayson building a dozen Hauptman freighters, I had the impression that such industrial subcontracting was part of the typical SKM aid package to its 20+ first war allies, if not always by Hauptman, and once built a billion dollar [Manticoran] freighter that lasts a couple hundred years before the MMM replaces it implies only a hundred built on average for those two centuries, so perhaps such orders went to only half the SKM's allies while all Manticoran shipyards built warships or naval freighters, like the AMC's initially were.
L
Duckk wrote:I don't think it's that unreasonable. You're looking at a dozen-ish crew per ship. Even with a million ships (which I think is a grossly inflated estimate), 12 million is still a third the people that were in uniform for Manticore at the height of the First Havenite War.
And getting back to the estimate for the number of ships, let's remember that Grayson was building a dozen freighters for Hauptman, and everyone thought that was a pretty big deal. Those ships would be less than a drop in the bucket if there really were millions of Manty merchants floating around. Furthermore, the number of ships queued at the Manticore Wormhole Junction doesn't seem to imply that there are that many ships out there. The queue has been growing recently, but even at its worst ships seem to make transit in an hour or two of entering the queue. They're certainly not backed up in a traffic jam by the hundreds or thousands, which would be the case if there was that many ships trying to access the "highway" which is the wormhole network.
I could see the Manticore's merchant fleet number in the tens of thousands, maybe even as many as a hundred thousand, but not a whole lot higher than that.
