Total $Tax Rates$ In The Honorverse? ...

The E wrote:.... That ... does not actually work. These aren't carpenters or woodcutters who you can press-gang into making ship hulls, these are highly trained engineers who have all manner of subtle ways of fucking up things intentionally if they don't feel particularly motivated to help you build ships with which to kill their countrymen. Just as you wouldn't trust captured pirates to serve as crew on your ships, you wouldn't trust these people to build ships for you (And that's before we consider that the Grendelsbane workers were captured by the Havenite Republic under Theisman and Pritchard, who do not seem like the kind of people who would allow POWs to be used in forced labor camps).

I didn't say they took the offer, just that it was made. I wanted to be clever about offering the POWs reading material but I couldn't figure out a way to do it.

kzt wrote:They just got back from years of being in a prison camp. I would tend to suspect fewer would be enthusiastic at doing this than you think.

It's not been all that long, at most two or three years. What rust there is will not take all that long to blow off. Combined with the workers from Wyland, Manticore has a pool of workers that could be as high as a 250,000+ personnel.

saber964 wrote:It's not been all that long, at most two or three years. What rust there is will not take all that long to blow off. Combined with the workers from Wyland, Manticore has a pool of workers that could be as high as a 250,000+ personnel.

You have been locked up in a prison camp for multiple years, mostly separated from your family. The Government owes you a pile of money. The last group of people who were working there ALL died.

Are you going to get on the first shuttle to go work in deep space to build more targets? Or maybe you should do something different?

kzt wrote:

saber964 wrote:It's not been all that long, at most two or three years. What rust there is will not take all that long to blow off. Combined with the workers from Wyland, Manticore has a pool of workers that could be as high as a 250,000+ personnel.

You have been locked up in a prison camp for multiple years, mostly separated from your family. The Government owes you a pile of money. The last group of people who were working there ALL died.

Are you going to get on the first shuttle to go work in deep space to build more targets? Or maybe you should do something different?

What else are you going to do? You are trained as a space construction worker, or space factory worker, or space maintenance worker, or whatever. What other job are you going to take, assuming you don't want to move away from Manticore?

It doesn't matter whether they decide to work for the navy or find a civilian job. Manticore needs both military and civilian workers, and the pay for experienced people is going to be good. They aren't going to find those kinds of jobs on the ground. And whatever kind of job in space they take, it's going to help Manticore, and it's going to count towards the total number of space workers.

Yes, they count.

are the returned workers going to be scared or angry?

yes some will no doubt be somewhat afraid but they will likely have lost friends or acquaintances in the strike, many of them will be raring to go, eager to help rebuild so that Manticore can get some payback from those who ordered the strike.

also this is a nation that has been at war for the last 2 decades, casualties among civilians has been fairly low but not unknown. The attacks on Alison and Basilisk despite efforts by the peeps will have no doubt resulted in some civilian casualties if not on the scale of the Yawta strike.

RFC has made it clear over the books that just because you are civilian, life is not without risk.

Sheila wrote:While the attacks on the space stations were devastating, I suspected that at least 5% of the stations personal survived by the simple mechism of not accually being on the station during the attack. They were elsewhere on vacation, dirtside for the weekend seeing friends and family, dirtside for meetings, in transit between stations, etc.. In addition there would have been a handful of ridiculousy lucky people who just survived the attack. In devastating of this scale there general is.

We discussed this pretty thoroughly several years ago, and the number could be quite higher than 5%. The US average for workers for vacation days is ~4% alone. Throw in the fact that Space stations have no "day" and probably have 3 shifts working, the other 2 shifts could be anywhere. Some could commute daily, while others are just having a romantic dinner in Landing or visiting mom for her birthday in new new Deli. Also consider knowledge workers who telecommute, or can monitor multiple pieces of remote hardware from a central monitoring station (ps- I do a similar job NOW, monitoring and controling robotic systems in 60 locals around the world I have never visited), or are off-site training or on a business trip. Throw in some sick days, and the low end of those items using US averages is >15%, and could be as high as 25% because there are dozens of factors we just don't know. You can also add the thousands of tech reps which left Manticore on various ships whose construction was expediated, and any workers who over the years moved on to a non-station job.

The number of surviving workers is potentially huge.

Theemile wrote:

Sheila wrote:While the attacks on the space stations were devastating, I suspected that at least 5% of the stations personal survived by the simple mechism of not accually being on the station during the attack. They were elsewhere on vacation, dirtside for the weekend seeing friends and family, dirtside for meetings, in transit between stations, etc.. In addition there would have been a handful of ridiculousy lucky people who just survived the attack. In devastating of this scale there general is.

We discussed this pretty thoroughly several years ago, and the number could be quite higher than 5%. The US average for workers for vacation days is ~4% alone. Throw in the fact that Space stations have no "day" and probably have 3 shifts working, the other 2 shifts could be anywhere. Some could commute daily, while others are just having a romantic dinner in Landing or visiting mom for her birthday in new new Deli. Also consider knowledge workers who telecommute, or can monitor multiple pieces of remote hardware from a central monitoring station (ps- I do a similar job NOW, monitoring and controling robotic systems in 60 locals around the world I have never visited), or are off-site training or on a business trip. Throw in some sick days, and the low end of those items using US averages is >15%, and could be as high as 25% because there are dozens of factors we just don't know. You can also add the thousands of tech reps which left Manticore on various ships whose construction was expediated, and any workers who over the years moved on to a non-station job.

The number of surviving workers is potentially huge.

I don't think there would be too much difference in the figures quoted as a lot of people lived on the stations as well as working there.

A problem with this discussion of survivors is that RFC has- several times- beaten it with at 20lb sledge hammer. Off-shift workes would NOT be routinely dropping down to which ever planet the station they were on was orbiting. Same for "vacations" or "weekends" (any multi-day non-work time off). The largest "yards" were part of each station. All the Grayson style disbursed yards- that were active- were hit at the same time as the major stations.

SOME of the trained workforce survied (other than Wyland's crew who were sent down by the evacuation drill but that station also lost a lot of Sr. people and staff who were still aboard to monitor the drill) but they represent a very tiny portion of what had been the skilled manufacturing and administrative compliment of the stations, the shipyards, the orbital manufacturing base and the service industries/orgainzations (like restaurants and ice cream parlors, and bars.

It was even worse for Grayson since Blackbird was not set up relative to a habitable plent but spread out in a compleatly separate area within the asteroid belt that contined asteroid Blackbird.

With the Manticore stations, a lot of the casualties were civilians, a large number of which were the dependents of either military or civilians working and living on the stations.

I actually think that 20 years might be too short a time for Manticore to recover to the level of consumer/commercial (local and export) manufacturing plus military manufacturing it lost. It takes time to train people to expert/master levels of manufacturing including how to think about what you are doing and make decisions based on experience above "book learning" and training.

Brigade XO wrote:It was even worse for Grayson since Blackbird was not set up relative to a habitable plent but spread out in a compleatly separate area within the asteroid belt that contined asteroid Blackbird.

Quibble:

Blackbird is a moon of Uriel, a gas giant in the Yeltsin system.

Brigade XO wrote:A problem with this discussion of survivors is that RFC has- several times- beaten it with at 20lb sledge hammer. Off-shift workes would NOT be routinely dropping down to which ever planet the station they were on was orbiting. Same for "vacations" or "weekends" (any multi-day non-work time off).

Yeah, maybe those returning POW's would like to get in another line of work. "Prison! It was my first time away from work in years!!"