(Spoiler!) What's Next for the Honorverse?(Spoiler Warning!)

PeterZ wrote:I return the to the freighter networks supporting Darius. Darius cannot turn into a heavily industrialized system supporting 30-40 billion people in 20-25 years without external help. I seem to recall its population of 4-6 billion.

I don't think that is a valid assumption. Manticore didn't have any critical imports as far as I know. There are no dilithium crystals in the Honorverse, just elements pulled from asteroids.

kzt wrote:

PeterZ wrote:I return the to the freighter networks supporting Darius. Darius cannot turn into a heavily industrialized system supporting 30-40 billion people in 20-25 years without external help. I seem to recall its population of 4-6 billion.

I don't think that is a valid assumption. Manticore didn't have any critical imports as far as I know. There are no dilithium crystals in the Honorverse, just elements pulled from asteroids.

Think about it this way. Darius has to either produce resources to increase their population and productive capacity in a way that maintains per capita productivity from internal resources or they need to import it. They have a limit of how quickly they expand their production base and still produce significant numbers of ships and weapons.

The slower they produce infrastructure and production capacity, the less of a threat they are in the short term. If they decide to take things slowly and only use internal resources, they will need 20-30 years per generation to adequately raise and educate them at a minimum.

So, just how many people can they raise and educate productively in this next generation? Trying to raise too many will result in poorer assimilation. Poor enough and that will result in a greater likelihood of a restive population down the road. That doesn't even begin to consider how many artificial wombs they'll need.

My thought was that should the MAlign grow slowly enough to maintain their society's stability using only internal resources, they won't need external help but they will also not be able to create the scythe-hammer-of-doom-and-destruction to drop on the SEM. They will not be a threat in the near to mid term.

If they want to create a production capacity in Darius to rival the SEM's, they need to expand their population and infrastructure. The SEM and Haven already have a very large resource base to build upon. The RF is currently not large enough to compete at the same level of the Grand Alliance. So, if the focus on infrastructure, they will also not be a threat near to mid term.

If they wish to do both, they need external support or face a half-ass job down the road that will cause all sorts of problems for the MAlign. Using external support means greater risk of discovery.

ONI would have to honor the threat and look for them. The longer they go without finding a clue of where they MAlign might be operating, the less of a threat the MAlign becomes in their analysis. They believe that the MAlign is there, but would have to begin considering they will not be expanding into a massive juggernought. Danger? Yes. Overwhelming? No. If they don't look, they remain oblivious to the MAlign's potential increasing capacity.

They have twice the population of Manticore, and their current production capability is almost infinitely higher. Because they blew up all all of Mnaticore and killed all the production crew.

So if Manticore can rebuild their entire infrastructure in reasonable time period, guess who can build infrastructure faster, as they are starting from a much higher base?

So I find your argument rather unconvincing.

kzt wrote:They have twice the population of Manticore, and their current production capability is almost infinitely higher. Because they blew up all all of Mnaticore and killed all the production crew.

So if Manticore can rebuild their entire infrastructure in reasonable time period, guess who can build infrastructure faster, as they are starting from a much higher base?

So I find your argument rather unconvincing.

Note also that only a tiny percentage of Manticore's population is involved in the production of goods for the navy.

Darius would do better to keep its head down for a bit and keep producing. Even better, if they can locate some orbital facilities around uninhabited planets, they would seem even more harmless.

kzt wrote:They have twice the population of Manticore, and their current production capability is almost infinitely higher. Because they blew up all all of Mnaticore and killed all the production crew.

So if Manticore can rebuild their entire infrastructure in reasonable time period, guess who can build infrastructure faster, as they are starting from a much higher base?

So I find your argument rather unconvincing.

Manticore has the population of Beowulf and Have helping them. Darius doesn't. They could get the RF to help out, but then they would not be isolated. By the time the SEM (notice I am countiung on the empire's total population) build out the capacity of their Allies and Imperial holdings, they will be much bigger than they were antebellum.

Productivity depends on population and stable population growth has limits. Manticore and the Empire can draw on a much larger population base than Darius. That population base can supply all the things a society needs but cannot make if it wants to maximize naval production. Seems straight forward to me.

PeterZ wrote:Think about it this way. Darius has to either produce resources to increase their population and productive capacity in a way that maintains per capita productivity from internal resources or they need to import it. They have a limit of how quickly they expand their production base and still produce significant numbers of ships and weapons.

The slower they produce infrastructure and production capacity, the less of a threat they are in the short term. If they decide to take things slowly and only use internal resources, they will need 20-30 years per generation to adequately raise and educate them at a minimum.

So, just how many people can they raise and educate productively in this next generation? Trying to raise too many will result in poorer assimilation. Poor enough and that will result in a greater likelihood of a restive population down the road. That doesn't even begin to consider how many artificial wombs they'll need.

My thought was that should the MAlign grow slowly enough to maintain their society's stability using only internal resources, they won't need external help but they will also not be able to create the scythe-hammer-of-doom-and-destruction to drop on the SEM. They will not be a threat in the near to mid term.

If they want to create a production capacity in Darius to rival the SEM's, they need to expand their population and infrastructure. The SEM and Haven already have a very large resource base to build upon. The RF is currently not large enough to compete at the same level of the Grand Alliance. So, if the focus on infrastructure, they will also not be a threat near to mid term.

If they wish to do both, they need external support or face a half-ass job down the road that will cause all sorts of problems for the MAlign. Using external support means greater risk of discovery.

ONI would have to honor the threat and look for them. The longer they go without finding a clue of where they MAlign might be operating, the less of a threat the MAlign becomes in their analysis. They believe that the MAlign is there, but would have to begin considering they will not be expanding into a massive juggernought. Danger? Yes. Overwhelming? No. If they don't look, they remain oblivious to the MAlign's potential increasing capacity.

But theirs is a command economy. It is being manipulated by the MAlign quints (or however many clones there are) And they don't need their own resources, at least not in the way other planets would.

Yes there are absolute terms but they are much deeper than would be the care on other verge worlds.

It seems that folks are getting caught up with scarcity. I agree that Darius are produce whatever materials they require. However, the absolute size of Darius' weapons production depends on their population. Expanding the population depends on raising and educating children. Will this be done by parents or by institutions? The larger the population's growth rate, the greater the reliance on institutions. Reliance institutions means less direct human contact. That hinders both physical, mental and social development. If they insist on individuals raising children, then those child rearers cannot perform other function. Optimal child rearing mandates redirecting human resources away from weapons production and more towards all the production supporting growing and developing human beings and those that nurture them.

They could grow faster if the imported some or all those support products. No matter that this is a command economy, there are needs the members of society have to maintain optimal productivity.. Anything short of creating a society that optimizes productivity is simply wasting Mesan A-line über mensch.

PeterZ wrote:It seems that folks are getting caught up with scarcity. I agree that Darius are produce whatever materials they require. However, the absolute size of Darius' weapons production depends on their population.

Not in the Honorverse.

The casualties produced by totally destroying the entire naval production infrastructure of the entire Manticore system AND the three largest RMN bases amounted to less than 6 million. Probably about 0.5M got out of Wayland, it was a closed R&D base. So the entirety of the people who produced the entire RMN's military capability was under 7 million, out of something like 3.5 billion people.

This included the people who ran the machines as well as their children, their children's teachers, the store clerks, the people serving drinks in the bars and the crews of dozens of RMN ships and the entire shore establishment that supported those ships.

There was probably less than a million people directly involved in producing ships, ship components and weapons. Out of 3.5 billion. So no, I'm unconvinced you need a huge population in the Honorverse to build a large lethal navy.

And remember, despite the trappings, Darius is a dictatotship.
Which means they can focus a whole lot more of their resources into Naval research and construction etc.

Not to mention, given the fore thought that went into it, massive funding streams. (No doubt all routed through various RF planets to make them hard to track)

kzt wrote:There was probably less than a million people directly involved in producing ships, ship components and weapons. Out of 3.5 billion. So no, I'm unconvinced you need a huge population in the Honorverse to build a large lethal navy.

You're probably, mostly, correct. It doesn't take a large population to build a Navy, it just takes a large population to man the ships after they're built.