Financing the rebuilding of the SKM and Grayson industry

kzt wrote: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.

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.

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?”

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.

kzt wrote: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.”

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Exactly. That's what I meant with "the math doesn't add up". A population of 3.6 billion having 12 million in the military (0.3%) is believable -- there's a scene in one of the books with Sir Lucien Cortez telling Honor how difficult his job is. If applied to China today, that would give their military some 4 million people, which I believe is more than what they have, but they are not at war time footing.

At the same time, the fact that the RMN considered the MMM a reserve force means 400k is probably too few. Would the admiralty feel comfortable knowing they could add only 2 to 3% to their manpower? And only if they completely depleted the MMM?

Sigs wrote:Manticore lost a good chunk of their warfighting industry but defintly not all of it. A large % of their industry is on the surface of the planets. You can build alot of the components for warships and missiles on the surface of a planet and ship them to the stations for assembly, they didnt have to build everything from scratch on the stations so alot of the work force is still alive, just not the experiance part that puts everything together. I highly doubt that 100% of the manufacturing was done on Hephaestus, they had the repair facilities for the ships, they had constrction facilities and workers. They had design firms, logistics and the million and one other jobs that would support the station and essentially a mid sized city.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:And we saw shortly after the strike that they expected begin producing Mk23s again within 18 months. That was 13 months before the end of the last book.

Sigs wrote:
There is still the very minor problem of Manticore controling alot of the WH's including the MWWJ as well as the League still doesent have enough merchant ships for all their goods. The LEague still needs the MMM and they still need the MWWJ as well as all of the other once that are now controled directly by the GA or by GA allies. If the League decides to push their luck they wont have enough ships for their cargoes and they will not have acess to the WH's the GA controls. Sure they can build more merchant ships and train more crews but in the short term it will be painfull for them and if there is one thing that the Core doesent like to feel it is feeling consequinces.