Financing the rebuilding of the SKM and Grayson industry

tlb wrote:

TheMadPenguin wrote:2: Non-military hulls (freighters) and non-military production were not (IIRC) damaged, so consumer and industrial goods should be as abundant after OB as before .:. the income of the Kingdom/Empire by manufacture, shipping and selling should still be considerable. I see Klaus et amici building hulls to sell stuff from Talbott to Midgard/Matapan/Asgard/Andermani empire/SL etc. I see an economic boom.

I thought that we had the word from RFC that Oyster Bay eliminated almost all production, including non-military goods, in the Manticore system!?

If so, OB was a MASSIVE EEE violation with tens of thousands of surface strikes, or we're asserting that HD sets, air cars, medicines, and all high-value (especially for shipping purposes) products were ALL manufactured in orbit. The Daily Commute for 30% of Manti skilled labor was to orbit? I never got that impression from textev.
Not Ford & GM lines for trucks & cars, but the OshKosh tank plant. (as of Pearl, most US manufacture was not hyper-focused on war material. AFTER Pearl, Singer made machineguns instead of sewing machines) Assuming Manticore was hyper-focused on war material, any dirtside air-car maker cum assault-shuttle maker was still dirtside.

But at no point has he said Manticore can manufacture anything for export until they rebuild their facilities.

This being a conversation between military-minded admirals et amici, I understood this to mean military stuff, not HDs, air-cars, pharmaceuticals, et amici.

TheMadPenguin wrote:2: Non-military hulls (freighters) and non-military production were not (IIRC) damaged, so consumer and industrial goods should be as abundant after OB as before .:. the income of the Kingdom/Empire by manufacture, shipping and selling should still be considerable. I see Klaus et amici building hulls to sell stuff from Talbott to Midgard/Matapan/Asgard/Andermani empire/SL etc. I see an economic boom.

tlb wrote:I thought that we had the word from RFC that Oyster Bay eliminated almost all production, including non-military goods, in the Manticore system!?

TheMadPenguin wrote:If so, OB was a MASSIVE EEE violation with tens of thousands of surface strikes, or we're asserting that HD sets, air cars, medicines, and all high-value (especially for shipping purposes) products were ALL manufactured in orbit. The Daily Commute for 30% of Manti skilled labor was to orbit? I never got that impression from textev.
Not Ford & GM lines for trucks & cars, but the OshKosh tank plant. (as of Pearl, most US manufacture was not hyper-focused on war material. AFTER Pearl, Singer made machineguns instead of sewing machines) Assuming Manticore was hyper-focused on war material, any dirtside air-car maker cum assault-shuttle maker was still dirtside.

kzt wrote:But at no point has he said Manticore can manufacture anything for export until they rebuild their facilities.

This being a conversation between military-minded admirals et amici, I understood this to mean military stuff, not HDs, air-cars, pharmaceuticals, et amici.

There purposely were no EE violations: all attacks were against orbital structures and all planetary surface hits were from debris. So he was saying that almost all manufacturing was in orbit.

There are ways this could be done without a daily commute. Here on Earth some will get a minimal apartment close to work and go home on weekends, this would be helped if companies built worker motels in space. Or look at how crews work oil rigs in the ocean.

In the USA the daily commute can be bad because it is mostly done in single occupant vehicles, but Manticore could have high capacity shuttle service from the surface to distribution points and company shuttles to specific worksites - no personal vehicles needed.

kzt wrote:I use the missile pod to shoot freighters. I don't need a fire control system, and freighters dont have ECM or sidewalls and basically can’t manuver. I stick it out with a tractor and bam, i got me a freighter. Or it blows up and maybe the next one will be smarter.

I need to go some place i park the missle pod some where or just blow it up. No evidence of my being a pirate, just got me a really good deal on a million new aircars i’ll sell you at 75% off wholesale. Then maybe i’ll just abandon my ship and go relax on my new estate.

When there are few freighters in the verge to begin with your solution would be to blow up the few that venture into the verge?


Problem is that few systems would be willing to deal with you knowing you are a pirate. You may say you are not a pirate but if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck it most likely is a duck. It might work for you once but the next guy wont be so lucky. The GA cannot ensure that each and every pirate will be unsuccessful, their job would be to protect the core/shell/verge systems as best they can from descending into piracy while giving them the minimum protection and then assisting them in building their own defences.

kzt wrote:The mining and other resource production industries exist, but they have no customers. So they basically shut down, lay off 95% of their employees and try to avoid going bankrupt.

So essentially there is no money coming into the SKM, waves of mass bankrupcies and most of the surviving workforce is going to get laid off.

Eh, they've got resource extraction, all these freighters sitting pretty idle, and a new market of Haven to deal with. (Who, not coincidentally is in the middle of a major naval build-up and a domestic economic boom)

And interstellar shipping is cheap I'd say they'd be highly motivated to undercut Haven's current domestic resource extraction prices in order to sell that suddenly excess capacity specifically so they don't have a catastrophic collapse of the entire sector. Sometimes its better to run at or below breakeven for a bit rather than firing everybody and closing the doors. They can't sell enough to crash Haven's extraction industries either, but Haven's got a lot of systems so you can sell a fair bit by spreading it around so it doesn't crush any one system's extraction economy.

It's nowhere near as profitable as the trade they lost with the League, but it's better than closing the doors and everybody going on unemployment.

Jonathan_S wrote:

kzt wrote:The mining and other resource production industries exist, but they have no customers. So they basically shut down, lay off 95% of their employees and try to avoid going bankrupt.

So essentially there is no money coming into the SKM, waves of mass bankrupcies and most of the surviving workforce is going to get laid off.

Eh, they've got resource extraction, all these freighters sitting pretty idle, and a new market of Haven to deal with. (Who, not coincidentally is in the middle of a major naval build-up and a domestic economic boom)

And interstellar shipping is cheap I'd say they'd be highly motivated to undercut Haven's current domestic resource extraction prices in order to sell that suddenly excess capacity specifically so they don't have a catastrophic collapse of the entire sector. Sometimes its better to run at or below breakeven for a bit rather than firing everybody and closing the doors. They can't sell enough to crash Haven's extraction industries either, but Haven's got a lot of systems so you can sell a fair bit by spreading it around so it doesn't crush any one system's extraction economy.

It's nowhere near as profitable as the trade they lost with the League, but it's better than closing the doors and everybody going on unemployment.

Everyone already has their own resource production process in place, and it’s already working. It’s akin to shipping iron ore from Duluth to Shanghai. I suspect that value and price will be low. Which is why people don’t do that.

Oh yeah, and the ships designed to haul the asteroid materials from the belts to the platforms are probably not hyper capable. Hyperdrives are expensive and not needed. Nor nearly enough of them, as a week round trip becomes a month plus round trip even if they had a hyperdrive.

kzt wrote:Everyone already has their own resource production process in place, and it’s already working. It’s akin to shipping iron ore from Duluth to Shanghai. I suspect that value and price will be low. Which is why people don’t do that.

Oh yeah, and the ships designed to haul the asteroid materials from the belts to the platforms are probably not hyper capable. Hyperdrives are expensive and not needed. Nor nearly enough of them, as a week round trip becomes a month plus round trip even if they had a hyperdrive.

It's in the SITS books that merchie ships returning from the Silesia Triangle trade routinely hauled back ore if they couldn't find other cargos - or enough other cargos; they could still undercut prices of Manticorian ore by a few pennies/ton, paying the bills and making the return voyage a very slight win.

The smelters are located in the asteroid belts, so there would be no need for the ore boats to have hyper. The ones that handled processed/finished materials from the smelters might have hyper drives, but who knows for sure.

kzt wrote:
All the expert manufacturing engineers, most design engineers and virtually every hands-on person involved in manufacturing is dead. Any critical information that wasn't written down and was shared insider data is gone. All the design tools and resources are gone. It will take 4 years to train more engineers, and somehow I doubt they have the instructors/facilites to train 50X to usual class size. It will probably take more like 10 years to produce the experienced people you rely on to keep things working and solve issues as they arise.

The problem is that the math just doesn't add up. The Yawata Strike caused something around 5-5.5 million deaths. The Manticore Binary System alone had a population of 3.6 billion so, however tragic, that's only 0.15% of the population. You can't have such a tiny percentage responsible for such an enormous part of the GDP. In any case, the losses in Gryphon were minor: the entire technical staff survived. Plus, Pritchart returned the Grendelsbane staff.

Schools and colleges were probably not aboard the stations either, so there is no problem with the upcoming workforce, nor those who had changed jobs (in a prolong society, people may change careers multiple times). You won't need 50x class sizes for a decade. The MBS alone probably graduates about a million a year anyway (NSF data says the US, with a tenth the population, graduated ~600k in 2012). So you may need 1.2x for a decade, or 2x for the next couple of years. Coupled with incentives to immigration, the workforce would recover inside of 5 years.

David also mentioned that the data was judiciously backed up, off-site. So not much data was lost. Sure, latent knowledge was.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

kzt wrote:
All the expert manufacturing engineers, most design engineers and virtually every hands-on person involved in manufacturing is dead. Any critical information that wasn't written down and was shared insider data is gone. All the design tools and resources are gone. It will take 4 years to train more engineers, and somehow I doubt they have the instructors/facilites to train 50X to usual class size. It will probably take more like 10 years to produce the experienced people you rely on to keep things working and solve issues as they arise.

The problem is that the math just doesn't add up. The Yawata Strike caused something around 5-5.5 million deaths. The Manticore Binary System alone had a population of 3.6 billion so, however tragic, that's only 0.15% of the population. You can't have such a tiny percentage responsible for such an enormous part of the GDP. In any case, the losses in Gryphon were minor: the entire technical staff survived. Plus, Pritchart returned the Grendelsbane staff.

Schools and colleges were probably not aboard the stations either, so there is no problem with the upcoming workforce, nor those who had changed jobs (in a prolong society, people may change careers multiple times). You won't need 50x class sizes for a decade. The MBS alone probably graduates about a million a year anyway (NSF data says the US, with a tenth the population, graduated ~600k in 2012). So you may need 1.2x for a decade, or 2x for the next couple of years. Coupled with incentives to immigration, the workforce would recover inside of 5 years.

David also mentioned that the data was judiciously backed up, off-site. So not much data was lost. Sure, latent knowledge was.

Well, that's what David (and the characters) says happens in act 1. And then in act 2 it's all suddenly better.

In act 1 EVERYONE who worked on the platform lived on the platform. Why they would choose to live in tiny, heavily regulated and terrible expensive living quarters when at 500G from a shuttle bus the entire planet is 30 minutes away is not even mentioned, much less explained.

In act 2 they are all still dead, but it's no big deal.

In act 1 everyone talks about how the loss of the missile stores and fabrication capabilities pose severe problems for the operations of the RMN. In act 2 nobody even mentions this again.

You tell me.

I think it's that David painted himself into a corner and decided that the cure was to ignore the paint. Same way one of the stupider space battles in subsequent books has the SLN automatically line of missiles head to toe (which means they won't possibly hit their targets) so the RMN can show how clever they are.

Sorry, having the vastly weaker side demonstrate that the smartest of them is hopelessly incompetent is BORING. "James, it looks like the natives are getting having another war dance with their spears in that village. Could you ask the corp artillery to have one of their multiple launch rocket brigades quiet them down? On and bring me some wine to celebrate our glorious victory."

ThinksMarkedly wrote:The problem is that the math just doesn't add up. The Yawata Strike caused something around 5-5.5 million deaths. The Manticore Binary System alone had a population of 3.6 billion so, however tragic, that's only 0.15% of the population. You can't have such a tiny percentage responsible for such an enormous part of the GDP. In any case, the losses in Gryphon were minor: the entire technical staff survived. Plus, Pritchart returned the Grendelsbane staff.

Schools and colleges were probably not aboard the stations either, so there is no problem with the upcoming workforce, nor those who had changed jobs (in a prolong society, people may change careers multiple times). You won't need 50x class sizes for a decade. The MBS alone probably graduates about a million a year anyway (NSF data says the US, with a tenth the population, graduated ~600k in 2012). So you may need 1.2x for a decade, or 2x for the next couple of years. Coupled with incentives to immigration, the workforce would recover inside of 5 years.

David also mentioned that the data was judiciously backed up, off-site. So not much data was lost. Sure, latent knowledge was.

I believe that the commercial activity was mainly confined to HMSS Hephaestus; the other stations were dedicated to naval research and construction. The comment about data being saved off-site referred to the naval research projects. Also the people saved due to the training exercise were purely naval workers, nothing commercial. The same way the people returned from Grendelsbane will help naval construction projects, but not help commercial manufacturing.

The 5 million is number of people lost in the orbital stations and construction sites. According to Chapter 30 of Mission of Honor, there were also over 7 million civilian deaths on the planetary surfaces. That is quoted as totaling slightly more that two tenths of a percent. So only a little more than you said, but it was a precision strike on the workers in the manufacturing sector as well that the equipment used for that manufacturing.

I have no idea whether the workers can be replaced as quickly as you suggest.

Assume, in a prolong world, that people have a 50 year career. Which seems reasonable to me. So it was stated that basically everyone working in manufacturing died. What fraction of thr total workforce do you think usually was trained each year? I’d guess somewhere between 2% and 4% of the total workforce.

How mich do you think this can be ramped up? Its not like there are surplus of experienced manufacturing engineers looking for a teaching job, the vast majority of the experienced ones still alive are the university instructors.

And things like manufacturing and systems engineering are not a 6 month course, they are typically at least a 4 year undergrad if not a 6 year graduate program. And the it takes like 3-5 more years of work and training under an experienced certified engineer before you are judged competent to work without fairly close supervision (PE).

So who is going to mentor your newly graduated engineers and keep them from making all the typical mistakes? Or are they going to say “cool new compensator design, lets build and deploy it since it looks so shiny. After all, whats the worst that could happen?”