Welcome!Hasek wrote:Hi guys first post!
The SLN had two things going against it:The SL has ~1780 full member governments (any multi-systems members?) and about 2-300 OFS controlled systems. My guess would be that within 20 years all the OFS systems are "gone". that alone would be the greatest balkanization in human history and even if only 10% of the SL goes with it that's another 200ish new nations.
While the SL Member's all have a lot of autonomy they're still a unified economy with all the cross-connections of 700 years of open borders (Think the EU after 700 years) also while they all have their own SDF's the SLN was the real provider of security, if Battle Fleet as the front line of SL defense had the ingrained belief that they would never be actually used how bad do you think the SDF's habits are going to be?
1 - The conviction that it was, had been for so long, and always would be, absolutely and unquestionably the best by a vast margin: best in numbers, almost certainly best in quality, by all means best in the product of numbers and quality.
2 - Having no living experience of having fought nor any expectation of having to.
The SDF's won't suffer from (1); they may suffer from (2) a bit worse. So there are issues there but it's complicated just how bad off they are relative to the SLN that way.
What i would expect to see is within a generation 2-400 or possible more then a thousand new nations are going to be formed in a environment of complete economic political and military chaos. Many of the former OFS systems will become outright pirate kingdoms of some sort. even the former full members will have serious defense issues.
The great question i see most people missing (and hasn't been mentioned in the books) is where are the shipyards?
For example the US can build CVN's but only one company in a single yard can build them, if the US broke up only Newport News, Virginia can actually build them. So if/when the SL breaks up where are these new nations going to get new hardware?
Likely from those same shipyards, assuming they survive. The goal here - ever for the GA, and mostly for the Alignment - isn't widescale destruction, just removing the bonds (such as they are) that make the League the League. People will continue, ships will continue, businesses and shipyards will continue, mostly.
We've had word of about two dozen major yards, and about a 20%/80% split between those that handle wallers and those that handle smaller warships only. Locations aren't yet detailed, but we can assume that the yards sufficient for wallers - the Battle Fleet ones - are all or almost all in the Core, and that that Frontier Fleet ones are a bit more spread out. (Smaller yards won't necessarily cry out for a Core industrial plant under them, and FF could use yards closer to where they work. On the other hand, security and being able to count on those industrial bases would nudge some of those yards Core-ward.)
Chances are Sol and Yildun host some of the major yards.