Financing the rebuilding of the SKM and Grayson industry

kzt wrote: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?”

If 2% of the workforce are trained each year, then it takes 50 years to completely replace the workers; if that is the normal length of career then we have a steady state with inflow equal to outflow (a 4% training rate gives full replacement after 25 years).

Of the presumed 1 million graduates each year, how many are trained in manufacturing and systems engineering? We might be able to find recently retired experienced certified engineers to supervise the new trainees, but first we might need them to assemble the new manufacturing lines where the newbies will be trained. Anyone who had been receiving on the job training already was lost in the Yawata Strike.

Any company trying to restart its business will be bidding up the salary of those recently retired experienced certified engineers (and ex-navy men), which will add competition to what the Navy needs for its rebuilding. The smaller companies will lose out in this labor market.

Well, every company went bankrupt anyhow. They owe life insurance payouts to their dead employees families (likely 1-5 years pay) and the bond holders want you to pay off the corporate bonds they used to buy the production equipment that got blown up. And the bank wants their line of credit they use to buy parts paid off.

So they will all hit up the insurance companies. Guess what? The insurance companies don't have the funds to cover several decades worth of gross system product and a few million people getting blown up all at once.

I’d expect that some of them would have bought reinsurance from really large conglomerates i. The SL. Who will say “Oh, darn we are at war with you. No money for you, but thanks for all the premiums.”

Or the insurers say “act of war or terrorism, explicitly not covered by clause 31a. Best of luck.”

Either way, I’d kind of expect pretty much every company that had operations on the platforms to go chapter 7 and cease to exist as soon as the case gets in front of the bankruptcy judge.

This has consequences for all the bondholders, which will typically be the large financial firms. And more extreme consequences to shareholders of the largest SKM industrial firms, whose stock is now just wallpaper as something like 1/4 of the entire economy just vanished.

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.

I tend to think the stations were more of a critical path in much of the manufacturing - rather than hosting all of it.

But within mining being almost exclusively an orbital activity the stations are the logical place to concentrate heavy industry -- taking the output of the belt smelters and doing heavy manufacturing there rather than shipping it all down to the surface.


But the Honorverse economics definitely seem to be a less worked out area of the stories; so it isn't clear what most of the people do for work or why with populations that size the relatively small percent recruited into the rapidly expanding navy was begining to be a real economic drain byt the middle of the war. So it's consequently hard to see how the small percent of the population on the stations, and their facilities, could be such a widespread impact to Manticore's wider manufacturing sector.

kzt wrote:Well, every company went bankrupt anyhow. They owe life insurance payouts to their dead employees families (likely 1-5 years pay) and the bond holders want you to pay off the corporate bonds they used to buy the production equipment that got blown up. And the bank wants their line of credit they use to buy parts paid off.

So they will all hit up the insurance companies. Guess what? The insurance companies don't have the funds to cover several decades worth of gross system product and a few million people getting blown up all at once.

I’d expect that some of them would have bought reinsurance from really large conglomerates i. The SL. Who will say “Oh, darn we are at war with you. No money for you, but thanks for all the premiums.”

Or the insurers say “act of war or terrorism, explicitly not covered by clause 31a. Best of luck.”

Either way, I’d kind of expect pretty much every company that had operations on the platforms to go chapter 7 and cease to exist as soon as the case gets in front of the bankruptcy judge.

This has consequences for all the bondholders, which will typically be the large financial firms. And more extreme consequences to shareholders of the largest SKM industrial firms, whose stock is now just wallpaper as something like 1/4 of the entire economy just vanished.

We've already established it's not several decades of gross system product. It's several decades of investment. And even then, the total amount of assets must equal to only the last half-decade or so of capital expenditure -- I'll grant you 10 years. Just think about it: the stations had grown considerably during the wars, so a good chunk of it was new construction. All equipment to support new technologies is new. There's a distinct difference and it's going to be several orders of magnitude less.

It's going to hurt, definitely. All the small and medium-sized companies will, like you said, Chapter 7 and go belly up, quite a few others Chapter 11. The big ones will have had less exposure and will be able to survive -- Hauptman Cartel, for example.

As for bonds and insurance, you may be right that there were war and act of God clauses, so I don't know if they need to be paid. If they won't be, the Crown will be making stimulus packages.

But they may be, since terrorism is not war. And the financial relationship is not to the SL alone, but to individual banks and core world governments. No one (except the MA, but including the RF) wants to pick a fight with SEM now and I'm not even talking about military action. The SEM can easily retaliate by getting all the junctions under GA control to close traffic to system governments failing to honour their financial obligations or protecting financial institutions that don't.

Lets talk about Hauptmann. So what do they do?

Primary business is shipping. Well, that is now an expense as they need to keep paying for their ships that are not making any money. I’d expect their ship crews are mostly laid off and collecting unemployment. Their various activities in support of that trade are also not making any money due to lack of traffic.

Secondary is ship building. All their yards are gone. They owe money to a lot of people for those yards that don't exist. The people buying their multi-billion credit hulls are not goong to be paying for them, and likely will want their payments back. They still owe the bank for the line of credit that allows them to buy all the equipment for those ships. And the bank eants to be paid on schedule and in full.

All their yard infrastructure is gone. This is normally funded by corporate bonds. Whose holders expect to be paid back, and if you can’t then they can, and usually will, force you into bankruptcy so they can hold you by your proverbial ankles and shake all the money out of your proverbial pockets.

So they are in pretty desperate straits. The only assets they have to sell are ships, and there is suddenly a glut of them.

Oh, and they forfeited all their security bonds when they stole the cargos in the SL and ran back to Manticore. So its not trivial to reestablish their carrying trade.

Jonathan_S wrote:

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.

I tend to think the stations were more of a critical path in much of the manufacturing - rather than hosting all of it.

But within mining being almost exclusively an orbital activity the stations are the logical place to concentrate heavy industry -- taking the output of the belt smelters and doing heavy manufacturing there rather than shipping it all down to the surface.


But the Honorverse economics definitely seem to be a less worked out area of the stories; so it isn't clear what most of the people do for work or why with populations that size the relatively small percent recruited into the rapidly expanding navy was begining to be a real economic drain byt the middle of the war. So it's consequently hard to see how the small percent of the population on the stations, and their facilities, could be such a widespread impact to Manticore's wider manufacturing sector.

Adding to what has been said by everyone so far...

As you can tell this has been brought up numerous times, With various responses from David, including the relocation of the Hauptman Unicorn Belt yards to the Weyland station (so it was destroyed in the OB strike, like the rest), David seemingly forgetting about the Talbot (the star, not the cluster) SD production station from the 1st war when asked, then spinning a story about political intrigue causing their government to "take their ball and go home", and seemingly completely forgetting the 300 million civilians in Gryphon B space and what they do for a living (all we can come up with is ore extraction and Adult entertainment, because there was no manufacturing near them).

UC did shed light on modern manufacturing (probably for this purpose) and the Nano-farms that are so important for production. Critically, those were destroyed withthe major stations, which would have effected lesser manufacturing around the system that relied on the major nano-farms.

After we heard of OB, I came up with ~25 sources of manpower to make cadre teams to rebuild the workforce. I had items like vacationing workers, business travelers, telepresence workers, sick workers, off shift workers, etc. David said that most station workers lived there, and did not commute daily. and there was little need to telecommute.

Now in Today's workforce, people go on vacation to other states, commute for hours between cities (my current commute is currently 2 hr, between 2 metro areas in 2 different states), Many people Telecommute (I've worked jobs where I controlled hardware in over 20 different countries remotely from my desk in the US - longest ping was 220 seconds to Singapore), 4% of the US workforce is on vacation at any time, 2% of the US workforce will be on sickleave, on any given day, 2-6% will be traveling for Business.
On a Space station, 75% of the workforce will be offshift at any time (assuming 3 40 hour shifts and weekends), many of those may jump a shuttle to the surface to visit family, a Lover, or have a dinner with friends in Landing.

In addition, if a business has a planetside presence (which the low population suggests) workers who have shifted to a non-production position, or been promoted to management would be planetside, as would telecommuters, who maintain and program the automated production systems remotely. (A modern Google or Amazon server farm, with footprints measured in acres, usually have less than a 1/2 dozen workers on hand at any time, doing maintenance, while millions access those servers remotely. Yes, it's not manufacturing, but with nanobots, there isn't much difference.). in addition, we have the business travelers I mentioned, some of which are visiting their home companies for some reason, or visiting another company.

Rough numbers, 10-20% of the nromal workforce should have survived for nothing else that they had a Dentist appointment with their old family dentist.

Basically, very few people in Manticore seem to do anything productive.

The industrial workforce was probably under 2 million, the rest of the casualties were the bartenders and kindergarten teachers.

Banking isn't a manpower intensive thing in the honorverse.

Assuming 20,000 freighters with a crew of 20 people that’s another 400,000.

What does everyone else do? I have mo idea, and i doubt David knows either. Which kind of raise the questions as to how Manticore has the terrible bottleneck of people for the military.

Theemile wrote:After we heard of OB, I came up with ~25 sources of manpower to make cadre teams to rebuild the workforce. I had items like vacationing workers, business travelers, telepresence workers, sick workers, off shift workers, etc. David said that most station workers lived there, and did not commute daily. and there was little need to telecommute.

And don't forget that prolong has been around long enough that many of the early recipients have probably hit their 50 years in a career and switched jobs or temporarily retired.

Here on earth a lot of manufacturing jobs really can't be done well by someone who has hit 65 and retired; especially if they're now up into their 70s. The knowledge may still be there, but the body isn't as up to it anymore. But in the Honorverse you should have people who are still in early middle age who've done that career for decades, gotten bored, and gone off to do something else. Many of them should have survived and be available in this emergency as cadre. Sure their skills are probably a bit rusty; but that still beats the heck out of someone totally inexperience, fresh out of training.



But as you've said - we've had these manpower (lower case) debates before. It really doesn't seem like it should be quite as bad as it was painted in the books or in some of David's forum posts. Still a major disaster; but not a complete wipe of all relevantly skilled people.

kzt wrote:Lets talk about Hauptmann. So what do they do?

Primary business is shipping. Well, that is now an expense as they need to keep paying for their ships that are not making any money. I’d expect their ship crews are mostly laid off and collecting unemployment. Their various activities in support of that trade are also not making any money due to lack of traffic.

Secondary is ship building. All their yards are gone. They owe money to a lot of people for those yards that don't exist. The people buying their multi-billion credit hulls are not goong to be paying for them, and likely will want their payments back. They still owe the bank for the line of credit that allows them to buy all the equipment for those ships. And the bank eants to be paid on schedule and in full.

All their yard infrastructure is gone. This is normally funded by corporate bonds. Whose holders expect to be paid back, and if you can’t then they can, and usually will, force you into bankruptcy so they can hold you by your proverbial ankles and shake all the money out of your proverbial pockets.

So they are in pretty desperate straits. The only assets they have to sell are ships, and there is suddenly a glut of them.

Oh, and they forfeited all their security bonds when they stole the cargos in the SL and ran back to Manticore. So its not trivial to reestablish their carrying trade.

Part of Honor's surrender demands should have been that the MMM could not be held responsible for the cargos lost due to the conflict. it's not going to fix much, but it will protect the MMM from such penalities and getting arrested for piracy if they ever return to the SLN.

Theemile wrote:

Oh, and they forfeited all their security bonds when they stole the cargos in the SL and ran back to Manticore. So its not trivial to reestablish their carrying trade.

Part of Honor's surrender demands should have been that the MMM could not be held responsible for the cargos lost due to the conflict. it's not going to fix much, but it will protect the MMM from such penalities and getting arrested for piracy if they ever return to the SLN.

The money is already gone. It would have been collected by the shipper. Their answer is going to be “You didnt deliver, per contract you forfited your security bond. You don’t like that then sue us. Per contract it is done in our planetary courts. Have a nice day. And good luck with finding customers when you are suing all the major corps over the fact that you stole our cargoes.”