Comedy/Tragedy of Errors: Stupidity in the Honorverse

Belial666 wrote:

Honorverse Economics are just a Comedy

Say hello to the twin beasts of socialism and private enterprise. If 99% of your economy goes effectively to welfare (if you're a Peep) or to civilian companies (if you're a Manty), there's little left for your fleet. And when you try to shift into a war footing, there is a) the problem of affording military infrastructure you didn't have in both time and money and b) the amount of fools opposed to "wasting" money on the military regardless of the situation. In comparison, Grayson managed to build 2/3 the ships Manticore had despite having 1/5 the total economic strength because they are neither socialists nor capitalists.



Generally speaking, a population should be capable of comfortably affording 1% of its population going to the military. That would be nearly 50 million people for the manticore system. 20 million in the industrial sector, 20 million in the support/administration/infrastructure sector and 10 million sailors and officers.

That would amount to 4.000+ fully crewed SDs.

You are confusing war and peace. They are not even in the same neighborhood.

Dial 1 for long distance first.

Relax wrote:You are confusing war and peace. They are not even in the same neighborhood.

Just because a war starts, your percentage of idiots doesn't disappear. By definition, 50% of the population has below-average intelligence. And while that can be good when they're open to government manipulation, it can just as easily be very bad if they start thinking that the war is bad or wrong or that the government is not handling said war well.


Also, the time to build up your military industry is before the war, not during it. During the war, you're putting a lot of your capabilities into keeping the existing military fully supplied and operational and the economy takes a hit due to a drop in trade, negativity in the stock market, repurposing of manpower and resources, and possibly enemy action. You're far less likely to have the capacity to build infrastructure during the war.

Belial

By any chance have you read a history book on the logistics behind WWII? Well, let me answer my own question. No, no you have not. All you have to do is briefly study German productivity to figure that out.

How long was the 1st Havenite war? Ended in 1915 or so. 10 years from the opening shot, and they knew it was coming years before that. Call it 15. WWII was all of 7 years if you call the so called "conferences" giving Checkelslovakia and Austria to Germany. The actual war less than 5 years long. Factories get built very quickly. RFC has repeatedly stated the problem was manpower, not material limitations even though robots pretty much build the ships, which if manpower was truly a problem means they should have had bucket loads of idle ships looking for crews.

In WWII, the only limitation on USA production was material limitation availability. It was not manpower. The factories were literally stalled due to lack of steel or aluminum in many cases. Especially the ship building industry. Had to curtail the number of naval ships built due to this lack of steel. Honorverse has no such problem.

Manticore expects to rebuild their entire industrial infrastructure and be building modern SD(P)s in under 5 years, starting from essentially scratch. So if you actually have a complete industrial infrastructure it obviously would take a lot less time.

Belial666 wrote:

Honorverse Economics are just a Comedy

Say hello to the twin beasts of socialism and private enterprise. If 99% of your economy goes effectively to welfare (if you're a Peep) or to civilian companies (if you're a Manty), there's little left for your fleet. And when you try to shift into a war footing, there is a) the problem of affording military infrastructure you didn't have in both time and money and b) the amount of fools opposed to "wasting" money on the military regardless of the situation. In comparison, Grayson managed to build 2/3 the ships Manticore had despite having 1/5 the total economic strength because they are neither socialists nor capitalists.

Generally speaking, a population should be capable of comfortably affording 1% of its population going to the military. That would be nearly 50 million people for the manticore system. 20 million in the industrial sector, 20 million in the support/administration/infrastructure sector and 10 million sailors and officers.

That would amount to 4.000+ fully crewed SDs.

While I might agree with you (I don't), there's more to it, and RFC pretty much points out that prior naval administrations were ostrichlike "buried head in sand" until about mid-way through King Roger's short reign, due to the political stupidity of the major political units. Then the decision was quality plus quantity over pure quantity or "perfect quality, low quantity", which has effectively won the war. Since that point in King Roger's reign, Manticore's space industry has been churning out warships at full capacity, and even started buying hulls from Grayson because of that fact. (Flag in Exile).

Consider the US military as a reference. Why do we have a trillion dollar investment in a plane that has yet to be deployed vs. say 800-1000 more front line fighters? Because it's profitable! etc. Why do we have more money spent on satellite and internet tracking than we do on effective water purification and medical development in third world countries? Politics and profitability before wisdom?

Yet all it would take is an "Oyster Bay" on a small number of naval building yards, and the US Navy would be hamstrung for at least a decade, same thing for the US Air Force.

WWII

Different industry altogether.

WWII industry was still labor-intensive with limited technical knowledge per worker in its majority so almost anyone could potentially learn it in months. Tolerances come in millimeters so some lack of skill isn't much of an issue. In addition, an accident there had a 5-15 meter kill radius in the worst cases so you don't mind much if 1 guy in 10.000 breaks something.


In comparison, just to work in orbit in the Honorverse you need zero-g tolerance training, EVA training, several courses in engineering just for quality control, programming skills to control the automated parts of the fabrication. Tolerances come in microns so the smallest error will result into what you're building failing to work properly - and thus high skill is a must. Last but not least, an accident could result in a fusion explosion or capacitor discharge that blows up the station.

Returning to the Topic (never in the course of human events have so many topics changed subjects so often in so short a time as this place... ), here is one where the person actually admits he's been stupid...

Shadow of Freedom,as Stephen Westman reflects:

The real problem, he admitted to himself, was that he had been played like a fiddle by “Firebrand,” the Mesan agent provocateur who’d offered to provide his own resistance effort with weapons for his campaign to prevent Montana from becoming part of the Star Empire of Manticore. He’d done some stupid things in his life, but right off hand, he couldn’t think of any which had been stupider than that one. For one thing, he’d been wrong about the Manties. For that matter, he’d even been wrong about Bernardus Van Dort, and that had been a really unpleasant pill to swallow. But what he found even harder to forgive himself for was accepting Firebrand at face value. When he’d discovered he’d actually been working with something as foul as Manpower, Incorporated…

Over confidence being a version of stupidity.

Why has Commodore Yeargin at Adler not been mentioned?

Have fun,
T2M

For champion of stupidity and a Darwin award, consider Zeno Egervary destroying Hexapuma's pinnace in SoS?

I nominate Denver Summervale for "Stupido of the Year" award.

He allows The Salamander's most hated enemy to hire him to kill her lover.

He carries out that contract.

He underestimates the killer within the Salamander.

He failed to realize he wasn't even in her league.

He sits and waits in a bar to bring the praying mantis to the worm.

He then allows her to anger him! Therefore she picked the protocol.

Then on the field he misjudged her stance.

OKAY! OKAY! Perhaps he wasn't so stupid. All that borders insanity!