Relax wrote:Not sure anyone can remember this far back, but right after the implosion of the USSR, guess what got cut first? R&D. I was working on two black box projects that vanished overnight. The third vanished after it partially failed when initially tested. Of course 10 years later, it got funded again and it is now a certain THAAD program.
Thankfully the oil and gas industry kept me in a job during that time. That is the nature of defense industry. If you have a contract you are golden. If you are in R&D you can make it big or get instantly cut.
Manticore had far more avenues of research going on simultaneously than Apollo/Ghost Rider. Might remember a certain program the Grayson's continued? LAC superiority fighter.
Another program that got axxed after the USSR collapsed was the new naval equivalent to the F22. To get a new aircraft, the navy pulled a fast one and got an "upgraded" F18 through when in reality it was a completely new plane. Sounds an awful like the SAG-C and NIKE BCL eh?
The other item we have not mentioned is the training of new talent - during downtimes, current talent is not just shed, but new talent is not hired. This has consequences years down the line as the talent pool is much smaller when you attempt to grow again, taking longer to increase the size of your projects.
I was just entering college after the fall of the USSR, and many of my older schoolmates had internships, or research grants with mil-industrial firms, NASA, DoD or DoE. We had "The Board" where such opportunities were posted, as well as news of who was doing what currently for whom (This is Physics, so much was classified, and usually written as to hide (yet tell, to those in the know) what was really going on.) As usual, a suprising number of people were working for companies like "Randstad".
As my under-graduate years crept by, the board got more and more deserted, and fewer of my friends had Under-Graduate research grants, or were able to find work directly out of college. One friend had a internship at Digital pulled out from under his feet 3 days before it was supposed to start (He went to GMI/Kettering where having an internship 6 months of the year is part of the school program.) Fortunately, he found another program. (and Digital pretty much disolved within the next 5 years as they failed to move with the PC industry as mainframes all but disappeared.)
But if you shrink your programs and don't attract new talent (you have too many engineers now, why do you want more, right?) you have a problem growing later, due to a lack of 2nd teir cadre, as well as a knowledge hole when the current crop retires. Retirement isn't so much a problem in the Honorverse as here, but you still need a steady stream of engineers and scientists working on problems.
For those who ask, personel turnover in Science is a good thing - we have a morbid saying, "Science moves forward one death at a time". Old scientists are very conservative and set in their ways, while the young are pushing the boundaries and grab on to the new discoveries and more readilly accept them as fact. Ideas like Plate techtonics, Pulsars/Neutron stars, meteorite impact craters, and even Relativity were not generally accepted in their own fields (let alone by the public) until multiple decades after they were theorized. This is partially due to the accumulation of evidence proving them, but also due to the old guard who ignored/stiffled such evidence slowly dying off, and those who had "known" of the concept their entire careers taking over the controls of the field. - I have often wondered how much this affects the Honorverse scientists (who can have a 250 year career) because it's not about age, it's about what you learned initially (Your "bedrock" of the science). Can you continually shift that basic understanding and keep everything viable?
