How big will the Star Empire of Manticore's economy be?

tlb wrote:

GloriousRuse wrote:A consideration:

Much has been laid at the feet of a revitalizing Manty merchant marine. There are two significant problems with this:

1) The British merchant fleets after whom the Manties are styled was busy transporting the fruits of a world spanning colonial empire and the products of the early industrial revolution that was fed by that empire. Alas, the Manty consumer tech/industry base was blown to smithereens. I imagine luxury good and non-vital commodity production was not high on the priority list compared to say, missile production lines. I also imagine that “act of god/war” losses probably crippled vast swathes of the private sector with no hope of recompense - even if we ignore the probable Great Depression level effects as entire investment group and funds lose every piece of capital they own, and off-world trade suddenly goes to zero because you have nothing to trade - the Merchant Marine is now more Maersk than the East India Company. A shipping line for other people’s goods. Maersk has yet to subsidize Pax Denmark-ia.

2) Lets imagine that somehow, despite its explicit destruction and being on war footing for twenty years, the Manty non-military industrial base is still running strong. Their biggest recipient was the Solarian League. The league provided an accessible, secure, rich market with a reasonably unified poltical and legal structure which ensured that aside from a few new-barb regions most people could enjoy the Space International Waters with Sollie backing. Basically, the Manties got to free ride the SL hegemony. But now the league is fracturing, weakened, and is trying to form a new basis of government for 1728 star systems in a month while the Manties point a gun at their heads. All of a sudden the great free trading zone...isn’t. The costs and risks of trading are about to expand, wildly.

1. Much of what the merchant fleet was carrying was Solarian to Solarian trade, which is why Laccoon I was so effective. How much of that will come back is questionable. The Solarian core worlds were basically unaffected by the war (except for the infrastructure at Sol itself). The biggest effects on the League will be planets leaving (like Beowulf) and the breaking of ties to the Verge.

2. Making that assumption; the question is how much of the trade formerly with the League will be replaced by trade with Haven, the Talbot Quadrant and the acquired section of Silesia? Whatever it is, the merchant fleet will switch to these new routes away from the League (unless the League welcomes some back).

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Note -- Two of the points for Lancoon were (1) the obvious closing of the wormholes and warp-bridges but also (2) that 60% to 75% of Solaran trade was carried in Mantie merchant hulls. With the withdrawal of the Mantie merchant fleet (and re-assignment to Havenite and Silesian routes) (a) how long will it take for Sollie merchant lines to get ships in place or (b) decide that re-locating their lines (and re-flagging) to Joshua or Erewhon or Saltash or ANYWHERE that is not Solaran .... (sort of like half the US Merchant fleet is officially Panamanian, Liberian or other flags...)

-- Stewart

tlb wrote:2. Making that assumption; the question is how much of the trade formerly with the League will be replaced by trade with Haven, the Talbot Quadrant and the acquired section of Silesia? Whatever it is, the merchant fleet will switch to these new routes away from the League (unless the League welcomes some back).

Probably not that much. Haven , Silesia, and Talbot all have at least some merchant capacity themselves, and the total number of planets served between them is maybe 100. Furthermore, the relative compactness is greater, which means the same number of ships can make more trips in the same amount of time.

Those areas will help some, but to really recover Manticore is going to have to reclaim at least some of its League Core routes and make/take over new routes in the Verge and ex-League Shell.

I think we may have forgotten some minor details in the rebuilding process. The most prominent is reparations. The SL launched an attack on Beowulf that resulted in 40 million deaths. No the SLN did not intend for those murdered individuals to be killed, but their attack fully recognized that such a death toll was possible. So, the peace treaty the SL 2.0 has to negotiate with the GA will involve reparations.

Furthermore, I suspect that any SL members not desiring to join the SL 2.0 still needs to pay some sort of exit fee for their part in the damage caused. I suspect that all those that voted against the motion against Beowulf may be given a get out of jail free card. Rebuilding 9 systems' industrial cores (Grayson, Manticore, Beowulf and 6 indy core worlds) is negligible for the former Core SL worlds. Those 100-200 Core systems have the industrial output to produce enough modules to jump start the civilian economies of those destroyed worlds within 1 year, excluding transit times. Within 3 years every one of those destroyed worlds will have been completely rebuilt with their industrial capacity approaching pre-attack levels.

The SEM will have to further tweak their modules to produce their bleeding edge capabilities. That may mean 4-5 years before they can produce quantities of naval hardware at the pre-Oyster Bay tech levels. Those limits are purely for their naval output, which can be more than offset by Bolthole and the Bopsey Twins. The SEM civilian industrial output, including more standard factory modules production for basic systems infrastructure should be humming along after 3 years.

So, I just don't see the prospects of a serious economic depression impacting any of those damaged star nations. Manticore and Beowulf have oodles of capital. The SL has oodles of production that they will be donating as reparations in any sort of peace treaty. All those 6 damaged indy Core worlds have oodles of trained manpower idled by the SLN's attack on their infrastructure. Getting those 6 Core worlds up an running should be easy enough to do within 1 year. Those trained folks training a cadre of industrial workers for Beowulf and the SEM while their infrastructure is being rebuilt is also simple enough. So, while the SL pays for the hardware, the SEM and Beowulf pays for the training. I further suspect that those training classes will also include a large number of Talbotters, Havenites and Silesians. Hate to waste an opportunity for training in modern industrial techniques.

Yeah, there will be economic dislocation, but there will not be a seriously long depression. In all likelihood, there will be nasty recession for about 1 year as people and assets are being reallocated in the rebuilding process. After that year, the capital, material assets and personnel will begin to produce again. After 3 years that production will be able to export beyond the SEM, including Talbot and Silesia, into the Verge and Protectorates. After 5 years the SEM can begin to produce even their bleeding edge military hardware. By the time we resume the mainline books, Grayson, Beowulf, the IAN, the RoH and the SEM will have the capacity to produce their top of the line hardware in serious quantities. They will also have economies that will be supplying the majority of the Verge and Protectorate with personnel, capital and material to bring them to complete self-sufficiency.

Brigade XO wrote:There is certainly a lot of equipment and tools that Manticore and others could import for the rebuilding and as they are buying a lot of what they need from Beowulf they are probably getting as much of the state-of-the-art items as possible from Beowulf.
One of the challenges, however, is that the processes and tech that Manticore and Grayson had been using for the military and high end gear was somewhat ahead of much of the SL and Beowulf may not have had all that long to get the required manufacturing geared up.

Yes, Beowulf is producing quality goods. At this point Haven is doing some of that. What is really needed is for the entire feeder chains of the production facilities and manufacturing have to be at least replaced at the peak capacity with the quality and high end tech as they were before Oyster Bay. At some point fairly early on there is going to be a gap between buying manufaturing equipment from out-system (and out of the tier of Manticore, Beowulf, Erwhon and the IAE because while you may be able to by NEW prodution equipment, you won't be able to buy equipment with the ability to be used to manufacture they higher end products you need. All that bleeding edge military and scientifc gear. Shipyards to build the most recent designer. Tools to build the tools to build the tools......there better be a point shortly where Manticore and Grayson have at least one of each total manufacturing and supply production line to produce their high end warfighting and government needs.
Same for replacing the volume of consumer and export goods along with commerical production.
It's probably going to be a race between getting their nessisary manufactring infrastructure back to needed levels and getting the minimum number of people trained to keep production moving with quality and consistency.
Manticore has to both replace the ability to maintain/improve the RMN and generate income with exports of Manticorian goods.
Even with all sorts of political and other goals of assisting with the recovery of systems decimated by the SL's activities, a lot of the assistance being set out is going to have to head in the direction of their Talbot and Silesian systems. Why? Because that is going to strengthen the Empire from the standpoints of both bringing them more solidly into the Empire politicaly and ecomomicaly while raising the capasities of those systems for levels of tech. Improve the general educations levels and technology and capaisity of the populations how to raise their standards of living.

Some notes here:

CONCERNING SHIPPING

The SEM post Talbott represents 22B people, with a handful of core class worlds. The PRH is eleven systems and, but given its entire reason for aggressive wars was it was collapsing under its own weight with 66%(!!!) unemployment, to say it is the economic league of the SEM would be cheating. We’ll be generous and que them up as another 15B. Beowulf IS a full core class world , with, if we’re weighing the scales, 10B population. We’ll charitably call the Andermani an SEM equivalent, and likewise Maya Sector.

So, the current Manticore lines deliver to a bit under 100B population with, say, 10-12 core class worlds.

The SL core alone represents 100+ core class worlds, with at least 1T population - probably higher given these are the old, developed planets...

In other words, the Core alone, at a minimum, likely carries ten times the trade weight as the entirety of everyone else even vaguely aligned with Manticore. A more balanced assesment night see it carrying twenty times. And then there is the rest of the league.

Losing, or even degrading/threatening/increasing costs in that market for the manties is nigh on catastrophic. UNLESS they don’t actually carry that much to begin with (and they certainly don’t carry 75% of that weight, or Laccoon would have wrecked the insterstellar economy in months, not slowly starved the government in years).

Bluntly, there is nothing in the verge even in the same order of magnitude as the SL core trade routes - even before the other two thirds of the frontier come to the party. This lead is to either:

A) The manties are screwed because they are about to take a vast revenue hit or

B) The importance of the Manty merchant fleet to the rest of the universe has been blatantly over stated.

ON CONVENIENCE FLAGGING

Convenience flagging (Flying the flag of a nation with better tax breaks/diplomatic status/what have you)works because of strong international systems that are currently enforced by a relatively small handful of western nations. Any attack on international shipping will invoke French insurers, danish shipping contracts, US naval response, and London bonds bearers into a multi-party alliance that ensures the “Panamanian” ship and its actual corporate owners in question have every possible protection, conveyed with near real time communications, to help them.

That WAS the League...sort of. Given its “Napoleon in Space”, more likely if you aren’t flagged as Manty, you lose the support of the Marty government. Unless they are going to rebuild the late 20th century hegemonic system across a universe literally 40x the size of their empire that has more systems than they have warships...

ON REPARATIONS

Who pays them? The old league government? It’s broke. And decapitated. The new league government? Doesn’t exist yet... Are the manties going to insist they Weimar it up? What happens when systems refuse, or secede? Is the GA fleet coming in to Nemesis anyone who doesn’t play ball?

How far do the manties push before some says “nah...turns out we have 5m catahprhracs in pods. I think we’re just going to turn off the self destructs and going Rocket Tag. “

GloriousRuse wrote:A consideration:

Much has been laid at the feet of a revitalizing Manty merchant marine. There are two significant problems with this:

1) The British merchant fleets after whom the Manties are styled was busy transporting the fruits of a world spanning colonial empire and the products of the early industrial revolution that was fed by that empire. Alas, the Manty consumer tech/industry base was blown to smithereens. I imagine luxury good and non-vital commodity production was not high on the priority list compared to say, missile production lines. I also imagine that “act of god/war” losses probably crippled vast swathes of the private sector with no hope of recompense - even if we ignore the probable Great Depression level effects as entire investment group and funds lose every piece of capital they own, and off-world trade suddenly goes to zero because you have nothing to trade - the Merchant Marine is now more Maersk than the East India Company. A shipping line for other people’s goods. Maersk has yet to subsidize Pax Denmark-ia.

2) Lets imagine that somehow, despite its explicit destruction and being on war footing for twenty years, the Manty non-military industrial base is still running strong. Their biggest recipient was the Solarian League. The league provided an accessible, secure, rich market with a reasonably unified poltical and legal structure which ensured that aside from a few new-barb regions most people could enjoy the Space International Waters with Sollie backing. Basically, the Manties got to free ride the SL hegemony. But now the league is fracturing, weakened, and is trying to form a new basis of government for 1728 star systems in a month while the Manties point a gun at their heads. All of a sudden the great free trading zone...isn’t. The costs and risks of trading are about to expand, wildly.

Stop being logical. Nobody likes rational thought.

The SL member states are responsible for the actions of their federal government. Just because the SL 2.0 hasn't been constituted, doesn't need that the SL 1.0 under emergency military governance of the SLN can't effect limited policy initiatives. They already jailed the Mandarins after all. If they accept responsibility for reparations, their successors will honor it. Especially if remains in the peace treaty to keep the RMN from exacting punitive measures. Those measures need not be military either. Denying access to the Manticoran WHJ is still an option. Heck, denying access to ANY wormhole termini is still an option.

Core worlds will caugh up their share of reparations to regain access to wormhole junctions.

stewart wrote:(2) that 60% to 75% of Solaran trade was carried in Mantie merchant hulls.

Everyone forgets the qualifier. 'At some point in the journey.' They were not being carried end-to-end, they were using Manticoran hulls at some point in the months long journey.

PeterZ wrote:I think we may have forgotten some minor details in the rebuilding process. The most prominent is reparations. The SL launched an attack on Beowulf that resulted in 40 million deaths. No the SLN did not intend for those murdered individuals to be killed, but their attack fully recognized that such a death toll was possible.

No, this was clearly a terrorist attack that had nothing to do with the actions of the SLN other than coincidental timing. There was zero involvement by the SLN. It was due to bombs planted on the stations by terrorists and the bombs were detonated by some means after the SLN had hypered out.

Unless you want to claim that the SLN was fully justified in destroying the 3 manticoran destroyers that were responsible for destroying the station in the quadrant, because reasons. Are you?

GloriousRuse wrote:Bluntly, there is nothing in the verge even in the same order of magnitude as the SL core trade routes - even before the other two thirds of the frontier come to the party. This lead is to either:

A) The manties are screwed because they are about to take a vast revenue hit or

B) The importance of the Manty merchant fleet to the rest of the universe has been blatantly over stated.

As an aside; I do not believe that the GA is going to impose reparations; they know that the biggest hits (Yawata Strike and Beowulf's orbitals) were not caused by the League.

I think we are conflating several things when discussing the gross system product of Manticore:
1. Revenue from the wormhole junction is going to rise back to normal with the end of hostilities, because there is no good alternative to the time savings it provides.
2. Until alternate ships are built by League members, the Manticore merchant shipping should recover most of their traffic, which was not dependent on locally produced trade goods. Note that this building might not happen since the Manticore merchant shipping can offer savings due to reduced WH transit costs.
3. Local manufacture will suffer, because of the destruction of the plants, and those goods will have to be replaced from elsewhere until things are rebuilt.
4. I believe RFC has mentioned that the SEM (both publically and privately) has vast investments in the Core worlds of the League (another reason for not asking for reparations) and those can be drawn against until everything is reconstructed.

kzt wrote:

PeterZ wrote:I think we may have forgotten some minor details in the rebuilding process. The most prominent is reparations. The SL launched an attack on Beowulf that resulted in 40 million deaths. No the SLN did not intend for those murdered individuals to be killed, but their attack fully recognized that such a death toll was possible.

No, this was clearly a terrorist attack that had nothing to do with the actions of the SLN other than coincidental timing. There was zero involvement by the SLN. It was due to bombs planted on the stations by terrorists and the bombs were detonated by some means after the SLN had hypered out.

Unless you want to claim that the SLN was fully justified in destroying the 3 manticoran destroyers that were responsible for destroying the station in the quadrant, because reasons. Are you?

So the SEM gets the SL to cough up reparations for the damage Buccaneer did. That's still 6 systems' orbital infrastructure the SL rebuilds. That's assuming the SL openly accepts that third parties are involved in fanning the flames of this war. If they do accept that, then must also accept the SEM may indeed have been right all along regarding the MAlign. Because of the timing of stealth grasers destroying the FTL component of Mycroft, those terrorist third parties were acting with knowledge of the SLN plans. That argues for some coordination between the SLN and those terrorists which resulted in 40 million dead. There were agents in place within the SL federal government linked to those terrorists. Those agents influenced SL policy. That influence facilitated the terrorist attacks on Beowulf.

If the SL does not acknowledge an unknown third party, any terrorist attack was launched BECAUSE the SL was willing to use force to prohibit Beowulf's secession. It's a tacit approval of using force to deny Beowulf their constitutional rights.

Either way the SL's actions resulted in premeditated actions leading to 40 million deaths and the destruction of 3 orbital habitats. The fact that the SL was willing to engage in Parthian Shot as an option for Operation Buccaneer argues for the SL's willingness to kill millions of people. These facts support the premise that the SL would have caused those 40 million deaths had they had the capacity to inflict them. Such willingness allowed those who had that capacity to bring about those deaths. These facts make holding the SL blameless for the damage to Beowulf and the victims of Operation Buccaneer niegh impossible. Whether the eparations also pay to rebuild the SEM infrastructure as well is almost moot.