drothgery wrote:pnakasone wrote:The GA knows it has no long term capability of preventing the SL worlds from building a fleet capable of steamrollering the GA.
It would take fundamental changes in how the League government and SLN work to allow the League to construct and maintain one or more 'boltholes' long enough to build a consequential fleet (really, I doubt the ability of any democracy to create a bolthole, or to maintain the secrecy around one in peacetime; defense contracts are worth lots of money, and politicians generally want a lot of influence over where it's spent).
Defense projects are only worth money when it's being subcontracted to a civilian firm.
Defense projects are worth diddly when the government or military itself is doing all the work, and not subcontracting to civilian firms. Especially when the money for it is buried in a black budget.
That appears to mostly be the case for Haven, especially regarding Bolthole, and Manticoran military R&D. Both probably do much the same with the white parts of their military budgets, especially shipbuilding, and Manticore almost certainly does based on
Hephaestus,
Vulcan, and
Weyland stations have functionally all of Manticore's space-based industry.
