Build a Fleet!

Sigs wrote:Did you miss the ENTIRE post that just pointed out that even IF they wanted to, they couldn't? Unless the timeline is 50-100 years...

Yea, and I say your base assumptions are complete hoey as HISTORICALLY today, we know that my numbers I posted are CONSERVATIVE if we only go by historical records from the 20th century!

In 2000 years, guess what robots will be an even LARGER part of the work force than today, requiring fewer human man hours per product produced meaning there is an even LARGER % of population free for military forces.

Look at the world today, if we wanted to, and in some cases we do so,(You can buy jeans made in the USA) cheaper than foreign made jeans if you so wish. They are produced on a robotic line. We can build clothing via robotics, but do not as slave labor in Bangladesh is cheaper. Is this still going to be true in 2000+ years? I dare say not. AN immense amount of the worlds population is manufacturing daily use goods because and only because slave labor(people) are cheaper than robots for doing the same job. From food to clothes to consumables.

What happens to all those people whose repetitive labor jobs just vanished? They become unemployeed. They become free for military use and will be more than willing to "do something" instead of sitting on their bumpkins.

Belial666 wrote:2000 planets needing policing.

1 CLAC + 4 Rolands per planet = 2.000 people per planet.
4.000.000 people as police. 16.000.000 support personnel.


10 Manty trade ships per planet = 20.000 merchant ships
2 escort Rolands per ship = 40.000 Rolands.
2.480.000 people as escorts. 9.920.000 support personnel.
1.240.000 people as merchants. 4.960.000 support personnel.


10 sector fleets of 200 capital ships = 2.000 capital ships.
4.000.000 people in battlefleet. 16.000.000 support personnel.




Total occupation personnel:
60 million manties (0.6% of population)

Benefits of occupation:
1) Total suppression of threat on all planets.
2) Trade in galaxy is only Manty = more money than costs.
3) Complete access to orbital industry/research.
4) Bragging rights for conquering the Galaxy.

Drawbacks of occupation:
1) Political nagging of opposition parties.
2) Political nagging of democrats.
3) Political nagging of armchair philosophers.
.
.
.
n-1) Political nagging of anyone not mentioned so far.
n) Having to actually rule 2000+ planets.

Are you serious or are you just pulling my leg?

I’ll go forth with the assumption your are serious.

1)

-Your ships per system is ridiculous. Why you ask? Because you are assuming that every system in the League is of equal importance or faces the same problems, there would be some systems in the verge that can get away with a squadron or two of LAC’s while others would be much more of a juicy target and would therefore require significantly more protection/policing. So there go your 2,000 CLACs and 8,000 Destroyers. Add in the fact that those destroyers would require to keep to a maintenance cycle so you will need more CLACs and Destroyers to account for that but you also cannot send your crews to to some hell hole weeks or months of travel from their families for years and years on end, you will need some slack in order to rotate the crews out of their station.

2)

Now lets go on to the Merchant ships. The Merchant fleet of Manticore makes a lot of money for the SEM, but it will not make any money if it has to support an additional 2 ships for every merchantman. Lets use your numbers, instead of having 20,000 merchant ships with a crew of 1.2 million operating them you will have 20,000 merchant ships with a essentially a crew of 13,640,000+ to support thereby making the Merchant Marine a drain on Manticore’s resources rather than an economic asset, and this does not account for the cost of the 40,000 DDs, their maintenance etc... I dont think I have ever heard of 1:1 let alone 2:1 in escorts to merchant ships.

So far we have a fleet of 48,000 DDs and 2,000 CLACs with an estimated 200,000 LACs which is roughly 27,000,000,000 tons, or more accuratly the equivalent tonnage of ~11.8 times the 1905 RMN’s entire fleet. Or almost 8 times the combined fleet of Haven and Manticore prior to the first war between them... and we have not taken into account your 10 sector fleets with 200 “capital ships” which could mean BC’s,BB’,DN’s,SD’s or more CLACs. And thats without an estimate of escorts/light combatants... if I were to add the tonnage for those, we could be looking at another 10 or more billion tons of warships... And nowhere do you say anything about Home Fleet, and defense of Talbott, Silesia and any other systems that may want to join the SEM.

So, to summarize this, you have added somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000 Capital ships with at least 2,000 of them being CLACs the others unknown as of yet. You have added at least 200,000 LAC’s if not much more to the RMN. At least 48,000 destroyers but most likely many more... The Merchant marine is a monetary drain because every time it leaves port the 180-200 crew members and 3 ships each merchantman is supposed to support is eating up all of the profits and then quite alot more. This fleet does not even account for the ships that would protect Manticore...

Upside to your plan:
1)You build a lot of nice, shiny new ships.
2)--------------



Downside:
1)You bankrupt Manticore.
2)You piss off the rest of the Galaxy
3)End up pissing off so many people that you end up with a whole bunch of wars to fight thereby becoming as oppressive as the League was.
4)Pissing off your people right along with the rest of the Galaxy.
5)Can’t work on Talbott and Silesia’s economy since all of your money is going to “protect” 2,000+ other systems.
6)And then you get to watch genocide after genocide after genocide from front row seats up in space because you forgot to bring the army along because once again, you bankrupted Manticore.
7)Can’t convince the citizens of Manticore to pay significant taxes to “protect” every former member of the League and this results in your party being destroyed in the next election.
8)Can’t convince them that the thousands of Manticore citizens dying every so often are dying for a good cause.




I really hope you were joking with this post.

Relax wrote:

Sigs wrote:Did you miss the ENTIRE post that just pointed out that even IF they wanted to, they couldn't? Unless the timeline is 50-100 years...

Yea, and I say your base assumptions are complete hoey as HISTORICALLY today, we know that my numbers I posted are CONSERVATIVE if we only go by historical records from the 20th century!

Did you actually read the post?

Where would you get the manpower to train those 270,000,000 members when they require significantly longer training periods? If you rush their training, you end up with a fleet that is more likely to blow itself up than blow the enemy up, with a bunch of captured SLN ships because you cannot afford to build warships for all of your new “crews”. You can buy a rifle for everyone above the age of 5, but it doesn't make them an army and it will make no difference in the outcome.

Relax wrote:In 2000 years, guess what robots will be an even LARGER part of the work force than today, requiring fewer human man hours per product produced meaning there is an even LARGER % of population free for military forces.

Are you serious? When Manticore with their 3,000,000,000 citizens supported a military of 30,000,000 people they were on the edge, as in if they recruited any significant number more, they will be taking a noticeable hit in the economy ergo those people were employed... Nowhere does it say that the economy is so automated that billions of Manticoreans are twiddling their thumbs and waiting to go to war...

Relax wrote:Look at the world today, if we wanted to, and in some cases we do so,(You can buy jeans made in the USA) cheaper than foreign made jeans if you so wish.

And that proves what? That some company overseas is charging you $100 for a pair of $10 Jeans because they are a brand name while some no name company is charging you $50 dollars for a pair of $40 jeans made in the US.

And even if those said jeans were cheaper to produce in the US, that is one product out of millions which proves nothing.

Relax wrote:They are produced on a robotic line.

Have a source for that? Meaning that they are cheaper to make and are made with robotic labour

Relax wrote:We can build clothing via robotics, but do not as slave labor in Bangladesh is cheaper.

What is the difference in employed personnel between the Bangladesh factory and the “robotic” American factory?

Relax wrote: Is this still going to be true in 2000+ years? I dare say not.

So this is how you think it will be in the Harrington universe rather than how the AUTHOR has made it?

Relax wrote: AN immense amount of the worlds population is manufacturing daily use goods because and only because slave labor(people) are cheaper than robots for doing the same job. From food to clothes to consumables.

So Manticore has a large % of unemployed citizens? Were they sitting on their couch waiting for a war to start so they can finally be productive?

Relax wrote: What happens to all those people whose repetitive labor jobs just vanished? They become unemployed. They become free for military use and will be more than willing to "do something" instead of sitting on their bumpkins

As someone who has served in the military for nearly a decade, I can safely tell you that a large % of the population of any country will not willingly go in to the military.


You make it sound like humanity as a whole is stupid... like humanity had 2,000 years but couldn't figure out a way to create new jobs and maintain almost full employment. If your vision was correct in the Harrignton universe, Manticore would have been able to conscript enough people during the first war, to be able to triple their military without affecting their workforce in any significant manner.



You don't seem to be able to answer any of the questions but keep insisting that a more automated workplace 2,000 years from now would mean more people are unemployed and thus free for military service...

My bad sigs. How dare I use historically verifiable numbers to project into the future. Much better to disregard reality...

Relax wrote:My bad sigs. How dare I use historically verifiable numbers to project into the future. Much better to disregard reality...

You shouldn't be predicting the future… you should be working within the framework of the universe that the author has created. If I think that in 2,000 years we would have teleportation and we can create infinite energy from say a single potato, should I then go and base my scenario based on my fleet having teleportation and infinite energy source from a single potato?


Besides, most of the "verifiable" numbers you presented were questionable at best, pulled out of thin air at worst. If your argument had any value, the Yawata Strikes would not be presented as being so devastating… after all you would be replacing a bunch of machines… right?

Your argument seems to hinge on there being a finite number of jobs. We may end up having the cashier at McDonalds being replaced with a computer but that does not mean that over the next 2,000 years new jobs and new kinds of jobs cannot be created...

Sigs wrote:Your argument seems to hinge on there being a finite number of jobs. We may end up having the cashier at McDonalds being replaced with a computer but that does not mean that over the next 2,000 years new jobs and new kinds of jobs cannot be created...

Historically the jobs that existed were:

Farmer, today far fewer farmers are needed due to? Machines. Far fewer will be needed tomorrow.

Teacher, today far fewer are needed there as well as curriculum materials improve and more become available.

Engineer/civil etc. Number is dropping as the infrastructure available for excellent life is in place. Contentment. When a new technology comes around, a whole new plethora of engineers are needed to design and implement this into everyday life. Once this is done, the engineers in this field essentially vanish. Once this is done in enough fields, the reliability of these fields increases to such an extent that fewer are needed to maintain as well.

In short, we are at the very beginning of the technology age. We are now projecting 2000 years into the future where infrastructure has had 2000 years to be built. The speed of building said infrastructure is directly tied to energy available and the available machines.

If you want a basic tutorial, look no further than the Nicaraguan canal cost analysis. Their one and only true cost is the $$$ required for diesel fuel to run various machines to move earth and create power to either create concrete or bring it in from outside sources. This is true of all infrastructure by and large be it telecommunications or road building.

Honorverse has Fusion tech and has had it for a VERY long time. Thus, infrastructure costs and manhour costs are minute at best. Vastly lower than they are today. This frees up an enormous number of people to do OTHER jobs. Millions of people in the USA for instance out of a population of 350Million are employed in the resource extraction, energy, infrastructure business. If 75% of them are now out of work, guess what? They are going to jump at anything else.

So, basic needs, food(farming), and housing/transportation(infrastructure) are all created in the Honorverse at a fraction of the manhours and $$$ required today. This is why in economics class one learns the difference between Internal consumption of GDP, and GDP available for external uses and this ultimately comes down to number of people available who are doing NOTHING and why when you look at a fact book of a country, demographics for men of military age is the true defining factor for a countries ability to fight.

You may wish to observe why unemployment is rampant in the world and their standard of living is so low and why you might want to look up why the recession in the USA really happened. Both are tied 100% to manufacturing. First complete lack of manufacturing providing a base and 2nd losing said manufacturing jobs lowers the base. So, if robots take most of those base jobs, the only base jobs left, are maintaining/designing those robots. Everyone else is a service job. If far fewer has a base job, those in the service sector are "helping" a far smaller number and therefore far fewer of them are needed as well.

Where are all the major unemployment centers in so called "1st nations"; where there is not manufacturing. When manufacturing or large infrastructure projects leaves, so does the population.

As for education required to be in the military.... KISS is true today and will be true 2000 years from now. Maybe high schools in 2000 years will "devolve" back into actually teaching students so they don't have to waste 4 years learning what they should have learned in high school to begin with. Maybe JR. High's in 2000 years will "devolve" backwards to where students are taught what used to be taught in them instead "letting" those rebelling against authority hold back the rest of the classes. Maybe in 2000 years grade school will actually be taught so students learn how to read, WRITE, do arithmetic and start learning how to critically think instead of waving them through and giving everyone "participation" awards instead of achievement awards slowing the learning process down to a snails pace sow what have been learned 3 years ago is only starting to be taught. Oh the horrors, Johnny who is rebelling will get held back a year...

Sigs wrote:You shouldn't be predicting the future… you should be working within the framework of the universe that the author has created.

If you won't, why should he?

I never thought I'd see the day.


EIGHT pages and nobody has mentioned 'the ship class that shall not be named'.

Will the wonders ever cease?

jtg452 wrote:EIGHT pages and nobody has mentioned 'the ship class that shall not be named'.

Frigates? Mentioned in the OP:

Erls wrote:All this talk about DDs, Frigates, the 'new' Cruiser, etc... is great, ...

Sigs wrote:If your argument had any value, the Yawata Strikes would not be presented as being so devastating… after all you would be replacing a bunch of machines… right?

Wait, that is exactly what RFC is doing. Waving his magic wand and saying industry will be back to normal in a year or two by buying the MACHINES from Beowulf etc.

So which is it?

RFC post Yawata or prior Yawata strike...

Heck, he has Beowulf producing extremely sensitive high end technology in LARGE quantities in less than 6 months! 6! Starting from 0! 0!

Education? Say what? None here.
OTJT? None here required!
Testing? None required, comes out perfect the 1st time.
Integration testing? None required.