Financing the rebuilding of the SKM and Grayson industry

Sigs wrote:
Unless the government steps in and goes in further debt to prevent a complete economic collapse.

Sure. They need to provide a decade of GSP. This is roughly akin to the the US government deciding to run a 200 trillon dollar deficit next year.

How do you think that will work out? Have you met Mr Hyperinflation?

And I’m not ever sure the SKM CAN legally run a deficit.

tlb wrote:

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.

Wasn't the new missile production at Beowulf? If you have evidence that it was at Manticore, please provide book title and chapter.

It was at Beowulf. But at the moment the dialogue was spoken, hot in the heels of Oyster Bay (Feb/March 1922), the didn't know they could count on Beowulf yet. Or Haven, for that matter, since the war was still on and Honor was in Nouveau Paris negotiating. Those predictions must have been counting on Manticore Alliance infrastructure alone.

We also know that production was ahead of schedule. That can probably be explained by Beowulf's help.

kzt wrote:

Sigs wrote:
Unless the government steps in and goes in further debt to prevent a complete economic collapse.

Sure. They need to provide a decade of GSP. This is roughly akin to the the US government deciding to run a 200 trillon dollar deficit next year.

How do you think that will work out? Have you met Mr Hyperinflation?

And I’m not ever sure the SKM CAN legally run a deficit.

Not all of the expenditures will be made by the Crown, unless Elizabeth steps in to make good on losses that the insurers refuse to cover as "acts of war". The impact on the total Manticoran economy will be about the same, but the distribution of the sources of funds.

Sigs wrote:Unless the government steps in and goes in further debt to prevent a complete economic collapse.

kzt wrote:Sure. They need to provide a decade of GSP. This is roughly akin to the the US government deciding to run a 200 trillon dollar deficit next year.

How do you think that will work out? Have you met Mr Hyperinflation?

And I’m not ever sure the SKM CAN legally run a deficit.

Fox2! wrote:Not all of the expenditures will be made by the Crown, unless Elizabeth steps in to make good on losses that the insurers refuse to cover as "acts of war". The impact on the total Manticoran economy will be about the same, but the distribution of the sources of funds.

Why would the Crown make ANY of the expenditures? Even covering losses due to acts of war would be up to the government. So what do you mean by "The impact on the total Manticoran economy will be about the same, but the distribution of the sources of funds {will be different (??)}"?

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I agree it did not lose all of it. But not for the reason you stated: it makes no sense to build components down a gravity well if the raw material and the final destination are both in space. And you wouldn't mine your planet if you have readily accessible rocks in space that are otherwise useless junk. Once you have space industry capability, you build things in space.

I would thing that the majority of humanity is conditioned to live in open space like on a planet so my assumption is that even if it is a little more problematic to move the raw materials and finished product it would be offset by the fact that long term the majority of your work force might prefer a planetary location and I would assume that maintaining infrastructure in space would be more involved and expensive than infrastructure on a planet.


If we use the US as a model something like 47.4% of the population makes up the work force, that might be skewed in the Honorverse due to prolong and more modern technology but we can assume that 47.4% of the SKM's population is in the work force that would mean that 1.422 billion people are in the workforce, of that the manufacturing in the US represents 8.5% of the work force or 12.75 million. If we use the same % we get that roughly 120,000,000 people are in the manufacturing sector. No matter how advanced the SKM is it would be pretty hard to anything but a small % of the manufacturing jobs in space because a large chunk of the other 91.5% of the workforce directly or indirectly supports the manufacturing. Even if we cut the number to 1/3 it still represents 40,000,000 people in manufacturing which would require several times that number to support them. So if the majority of the SKM's work force was in space that would represent a massive and unnecessary investment because supporting 40/50 or 100 million people in space might not be a trivial matter and it might take several centuries of concentrated effort to develop something that the SKM might not have had the need to do over the in the last 330 years and only recently started with the buildup for the war with Haven, and there the focused would have been merchant ships and warfighting not bringing the rest of the working population in space.

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.

Well they got the people that the RHN capture in Grendelsbane back, thats 42,000 shipyard workers and if I was in the SEM's place I would focuse on missiles first and worry about the rest later on.

Fox2! wrote:
The SLN should be undergoing a significant RIF, which will free up a lot of spacers for the rebuilding Solarian Merchant Marine.

Depends on which way the League goes, how many systems they lose and what the MA does. They might reduce their bloated rank structure but ultimately they will maintain everything they have awaiting new ships unless it completely disintegrated in the mean time. The SLN has 150,000,000 active personnel out of a population in excess of 3,000,000,000,000 more likely 2 or 3 times that number. The RMN at the height of the war with Haven had 30,000,000 people in uniform while the SLN at the same time had 150,000,000 people in uniform. The League population is between 2,000 and 4,000 times larger than that of the SKM while their military is only 5 times bigger. What the League learned was that even if there was technological equality the SLN would have had significant problems fighting the GA when the GA had half as many wallers for 10% of the inhabited systems along with internal lines of communication so I would say that the SLN will grow rather than shrink even with automation.

kzt wrote:

Sigs wrote:
Unless the government steps in and goes in further debt to prevent a complete economic collapse.

Sure. They need to provide a decade of GSP. This is roughly akin to the the US government deciding to run a 200 trillon dollar deficit next year.

How do you think that will work out? Have you met Mr Hyperinflation?

From what I read in the books the SKM/SEM has significant investments and assets in the League, something the League would be more than willing to honor and liquidate at the SEM's request since they cant really do anything about it. It might wipe out decades or centuries of investments in the League but the SEM and the GA have much bigger fish to fry and the potential to reinvest a lot of those resources in verge systems which would grow exponentially over the next few decades or centuries. The government doesn't have to step in and save every company, they just have to save the largest companies and go from there. They don't have to fix all the problems, they have to invest just enough to prevent disaster long enough to rebuild and since the SKM has been investing the excess proceeds from the junction for a couple of hundred years in the League I would hope that would amount to a pretty penny.

And I’m not ever sure the SKM CAN legally run a deficit.

It can be changed if the incentive was there and the incentive is very much there.

Sigs wrote:

ThinksMarkedly wrote:
I agree it did not lose all of it. But not for the reason you stated: it makes no sense to build components down a gravity well if the raw material and the final destination are both in space. And you wouldn't mine your planet if you have readily accessible rocks in space that are otherwise useless junk. Once you have space industry capability, you build things in space.

I would thing that the majority of humanity is conditioned to live in open space like on a planet so my assumption is that even if it is a little more problematic to move the raw materials and finished product it would be offset by the fact that long term the majority of your work force might prefer a planetary location and I would assume that maintaining infrastructure in space would be more involved and expensive than infrastructure on a planet.

(snip the rest)

I'm coming with different perspective, but I admit much of this depends on factors we simply don't know. My perspective is highly biased to orbital habitats, which are actually cheap to produce and maintain for a civilisation that can build starships and the shipyards to build them. I invite you to watch some of the Megastructures and Colonising Space playlists in Isaac Arthur's YouTube channel for more details, but the summary is that, as we understand physics today, we'd colonise other systems *first* in space, then land on planets. That is, a newly arrived colonising fleet would first set up asteroid mining and hydrogen/helium extraction for fusion, then build habitats close to those production sources, then attempt to land.

But like I said, it depends on parameters we don't know. Given the abundance of habitable planets in the Honorverse, and the existence of countergrav and impellers, the conclusions might well be the opposite. After all, if it's cheap to get out of the gravity well, then you may as well set up shop down there for purely psychological reasons.

In fact, I should probably just agree with you. Take the example of Beowulf: a system settled for nearly 1900 years where the biggest orbital habitat had "only" 22 million people and there were few enough of them that you referred to them by Greek letters. If Arthur's predictions were correct for the Honorverse, Beowulf and Sol should have anywhere from tens of thousands to tens of millions of habitats, with a population of a similar magnitude greater. Since that isn't the case, the economics must have worked differently.