Why is Manticore's population so small?

GabrialSagan wrote:That would make a degree of sense if the books did not emphatically state that one of the biggest boons the Crown foresees in annexing the Talbot Quadrant and Silesia is the huge expansion of their population and if the navy being short handed was not constantly being brought up.

GabrialSagan wrote:That would make a degree of sense if the books did not emphatically state that one of the biggest boons the Crown foresees in annexing the Talbot Quadrant and Silesia is the huge expansion of their population and if the navy being short handed was not constantly being brought up.

kzt wrote:

GabrialSagan wrote:That would make a degree of sense if the books did not emphatically state that one of the biggest boons the Crown foresees in annexing the Talbot Quadrant and Silesia is the huge expansion of their population and if the navy being short handed was not constantly being brought up.

It's because everyone in the SEM who isn't in the military is totally needed to keep the economy and war effort going. So a nation of 3 billion can put almost as many people in uniform as the 135 million population US did in 1944.

GabrialSagan wrote:And how does actively recruiting from off world and encouraging immigration not lead to an alleviation or at least mitigation of the problem of being short handed?

Brigade XO wrote:Have you read the Brochure included in one of the books for people looking to immigrate to the Manticore System? You have a range of choices from paying the whole cost plus bring enough with you to sustain yourself for a period of time till you get a job (etc) or you have skills etc that Manticore needs and can work off the debt.

No, it isn't quite that straight forward and I'm sure there are a number of things that would disqualify people. On the other hand, Manticore has been taking in Genetic Slaves and those people (that we have been shown) have been highly motivated to succeed making a life with Manticore.

Even with the losses durring the war, Manticore probably has had a net gain in population just from it's current normal birth rate. There is the problem with the length of time it takes the people being born to grow up and get the educations they need to make a contribution to the workforce but Manticore would still have a pool of people who can add specific skill sets to work in the manufacturing and related business to make a meaningfull addition without haveing the broad based skills normaly wanted or taught for any given job when they were under less pressure. Think of it as setting up more assembly line of circles of work than broadly skilled workforce. If they have come out of the general Manticore education system, they should be reasonably flexable and equiped with enough to start learning down specific but basic tracks. Presuming they survive (they are not all going into the military and getting killed) the experience and skills should build from there.

There is now an what could be seen as an Empire wide motivation to recover from the damage and get back to production and defence. Manticore, probably more than any other place, also had more experience in the automation to reduce the numbers of people in a lot of military and probably manufacturing systems (and related/support) areas. Most of that information, at least, should still exist and as the rebuild progresses, it is likely that the same processes will be rebuilt into the new facilities as it also becomes available.

The largest question is time. Will the League's ability, if not the desire, to destroy Manticore and Haven have enough time to reach a point it can do that before the League and the ability to focus several years of design and production and training of Naval personel be broken with the break-up of the League. There is also the possiblity of another not-quite-ready-but-have-to-do-it-anyway plan on the order of Oyster Bay is used to crush Manticore, Haven, Grayson, the Aldermani and probably tt least Erwhon with it's Manti-lite tech)

At some point, the League is going to fracture and that will signifcanlty change the calculations.

Maldorian wrote:Theory and Practice!

I live in Germany. At the Moment are thousands of refugees comming to Germany and thats day per day. We already have over 1 million refugees in the last months, thats over one percent of our whole Population. We have big logistic problems! A big Problem is the lack of Apartments! All the people need a roof above their heads.

Then you need enough People who speak the languege of the People and and and...

So the idea to invite People to your star system is only in Limits practical! If you cry into the galaxy that everyone should come to you, you will be overrun!

Somtaaw wrote:Wouldn't just be the money/rich society leading to a relatively small population, or a low net increase.


Prolong, and it's effect on child bearing is going to be a pretty big factor, especially since the first generation prolong's took hold fairly recently and people haven't truly adjusted to the shift from ~100-150 year lives to 300+.

For example, Allison Harrington, was older than Howard Clinkscales iirc, yet physically she was still only in her early 30s. She had at least another century or two to have a child, and truly only had them due to the fact Honor became a super-noble, and they required heirs.

From the perspective of your general, commoner Manticoran, or the average Havenite (pre- or post-People's Republic), the extra time for women to stay fertile, and the prolonged lifespans give less need to have a child to have some form of legacy.


Not even going to start into trying to follow the logic with kzt on how Manticore with a vastly larger population still puts less into uniform than the USA in WWII. That's beyond my minds ability to grasp or even attempt to.

Phalanx wrote:The Brochure is here:
http://www.baen.com/immigration-packet.html
Retention of the land grant requires permanent occupancy by your family for a period of not less than five Manticoran years (8.65 T-years) and certain mandatory improvements (including creating a landing pad for countergrav vehicles, required utility connections for communication and power generation systems, as well as basic habitability requirements) must be constructed at the occupant’s expense and maintained.

So Manticore is not exactly welcoming to the "poor, huddled masses".

The greatest growth of the Manticoran welfare state likely occured under Roger II(as per "What Price Dreams?") BEFORE he married Solange. Angelique likely rolled back that spending to fund military expenditures.

So while Manticore may have some immigration need following oyster bay, I imagine that their trade with the other groups in the sector will allow for natural immigration, rather than any centralized effort on behalf of the government.

Worlds of Honor, What Price Dreams, Chapter 3 wrote:A great many people had been astonished when Crown Prince Roger wedded Solange Chabala. Not by the fact that she wasn't a noblewoman, for the Constitution specifically required the Heir to marry a commoner, but rather because she was so . . . well, plain. With all the Crown's subjects to choose from, surely Prince Roger (who possessed the Winton handsomeness in full measure) could have picked someone who stood more than a hundred and fifty-one centimeters and had a face that was more than merely . . . comfortable looking. Oh, in the proper lighting little Princess Solange could pass for pretty, but she'd been undeniably plump, and she'd never managed to cultivate the air of boredom which was any proper aristocrat's birthright. Instead, she'd bustled, and she'd smiled incessantly, and she'd always been doing something, and somehow, without anyone's realizing it was happening, she had gathered the entire Star Kingdom to her heart and it had discovered that, without quite knowing how, it had learned to love her.
As Adrienne had. And her father. Indeed, King Roger had adored his Queen, and she had exercised a profound impact upon him. In his youth, Prince Roger had been the darling of the Liberals and the despair of his parents, for he'd been strongly attracted to the assertion that monarchies were obsolete. That argument had been around almost since the beginning of the Star Kingdom, of course, but in the last thirty or forty T-years the Liberal 'faxes had begun pointing to the growing Republic of Haven and its daughter colonies as the way of the future. Not even the discovery of the Manticore Wormhole Junction forty-five T-years before Adrienne's birth seemed likely to allow the Star Kingdom to close the vast gap in wealth and power between it and the Republic, and "the dead hand of monarchy" had been a favorite Liberal explanation for why that was so. For herself, Adrienne had been impressed by the fact that none of the Liberal Party's aristocratic members had ever been heard to comment on "the dead hand of the nobility" or to offer up their own privilege and wealth upon the altar of economic equality, universal suffrage, and democracy. But Roger had found much of the Liberal platform very appealing, although he hadn't quite known what to do about the Liberal notion that the monarchy, as the first, most fundamental barrier to the implementation of their sweeping changes, must be removed.
Until Princess Solange arrived, that was. Even now, with all the hurt and all the pain since, Adrienne had to smile whenever she thought of how her mother's impact had shaken Manticoran political circles. She was energetic, kind, caring, cheerful . . . and implacable as a Sphinx glacier. Her Gryphon yeoman background had gifted her with a sturdy sense of independence, a fundamental distrust of aristocrats who kept talking about how much they wanted to "help the common man," and a deep sense of trust in the monarchy. It never occurred to her that the Crown might be anything but the commoners' natural ally against the wealth and power of the aristocracy—whether that aristocracy described itself as Liberal, Conservative, or Reactionary—and she went through Mount Royal Palace like a hurricane of fresh air.
Those had been the good years, Adrienne thought now. The years when her mother and father had been a team. When first Princess and then Queen Consort Solange had convinced her husband to stop dabbling with theories of social engineering and get down to the pragmatic task of making the monarchy work to produce the things he'd longed to give his subjects. Adrienne could still remember childhood nights, sitting at the dinner table with her parents while she listened to them stripping the bones out of one problem after another, analyzing them, coming up with strategies. She'd been too young to understand what they were trying to accomplish, but she'd felt their energy and vibrancy, the gusto with which they tackled the job, and she'd known even then that it had been both her parents. That her father was the strategist and the planner, but that her mother was the power plant that drove the machine and the warm, caring heart which had become her husband's moral compass.

House of Steel, I Will Build My House of Steel, April 1867 PD wrote:That connection of the Winton Dynasty with the Star Kingdom’s commoners had been renewed with his marriage to Queen Consort Angelique, who’d won Manticore’s collective heart by her beauty and obvious love for their King . . . and it had been underscored afresh by the birth of Crown Princess Elizabeth Adrienne Samantha Annette Winton, exactly one T-year ago next month. If the Opposition pushed him to it, if its leaders provoked a government shutdown, there wasn’t much question what would happen in the House of Commons in the next general election. It might take a year or two, but the outcome would be the decimation of the Opposition parties’ representation in the lower house. And while that might not much concern the Conservative Association, which was overwhelmingly a party of the aristocracy, it definitely loomed large in the thinking of Sir Orwell Lebrun’s Liberals and Janice MacMillan’s Progressives.

Silverwall wrote:Historically the richer and more educated your population base the lower the birth rate, if anything the populations of the rest of the honorverse are high.