Expansion of the Empire: where to?

munroburton wrote:
I don't think they'll be wanting to expand any more for a century. San Martin and Lynx got into the old Kingdom so fast because they brought the best-claim to their respective wormhole termini with them. Only Beowulf and maybe Gregor could pull that off now.

IIRC, Lynx is several light years from the "Lynx" Terminus. It just happens to be the closest inhabited system.

munroburton wrote:20-30 years isn't really that long-term. IIRC, the constitutional arrangements of Talbott's annexation will take 75 years to give the Talbotters "full" membership. The Silesians' 75-year clock hasn't even started yet.

I don't think they'll be wanting to expand any more for a century. San Martin and Lynx got into the old Kingdom so fast because they brought the best-claim to their respective wormhole termini with them. Only Beowulf and maybe Gregor could pull that off now.

And Gregor has the issue that Gregor-B, the inhabited half of that binary system, is already part of the Andermani Empire so they're not at all likely to be seeking to switch to Manticore.
(Gregor-A, where the terminus is, is an uninhabited system which is already Manticoran territory. That was part of a treaty they had with the Gregor Republic before that government joined the Andermani Empire in 1869. And the Andis honored that pre-existing treaty)

I can't remember the status of the Hennesy or Matapan Systems though; they barely get mentioned in the books except as waypoints into the the Asgard Junction and Phoenix pseudo-junction. Because of that I'm not sure if Beowulf is the only terminus with an adjacent/nearby independent inhabited system. (Well, assuming they go ahead and vote to secede)

But, still there are a very finite number of systems with low enough transit times for Manticore to be willing to incorporate into the old Kingdom rather than the broader Empire.

munroburton wrote:20-30 years isn't really that long-term. IIRC, the constitutional arrangements of Talbott's annexation will take 75 years to give the Talbotters "full" membership. The Silesians' 75-year clock hasn't even started yet.

That's true for representation in the Imperial Parliament. But citizenship is already there, as are the domestic trade and investment regulations. All companies founded in either Quandrant are full Manticoran companies, able to receive Crown subsidies or loans, or loans from any financial institution. There's also no export limitation of any technology.

Moreover, there are tax incentives for investment in those Quadrants, so existing Manticoran companies will be looking for opportunities.

I don't think they'll be wanting to expand any more for a century. San Martin and Lynx got into the old Kingdom so fast because they brought the best-claim to their respective wormhole termini with them. Only Beowulf and maybe Gregor could pull that off now.

Anyone else is going to have to demonstrate enough value to the Empire in order to justify giving them a piece of the MWJ revenue and obliging the RMN to defend them. Otherwise, they're courting the same problems the People's Republic did with trying to maintain an empire of hardscrabble frontier systems.

You're probably right that the government in Landing doesn't want to expand. But other systems may ask for annexation. So: a) which ones would be first; and b) what criteria should Manticore apply to filter those that should be granted and those that shouldn't?

For example, any European country can apply for membership in the EU, but they need to do a lot to their economies and regulations before they're granted membership. They need to stabilise their currency and keep the exchange rate within a certain percentage of the Euro; they need to adjust the regulations to match EC directives (this was one of the motivating factors for Brexit); they need to reduce deficit to a certain percentage of their GDP (the fact that existing members fail to meet that requirement is not lost on anyone). Then there's a geographical requirement: they need to be European countries and that was a huge discussion a few years ago about whether Turkey was part of Europe or not.

Theemile wrote:While Trevor's star is in Manticore hands, there were 20 systems near it that were held by Manticore between the wars that were given a plebiscite by Haven after their recapture - Havenite rule, Manticore rule, or freedom. We don't know which way any voted, so potentially Manticore may have another node of 20 planets who voluntarily want to join Manticore.

I don't think joining Manticore was an option given to them at the time. We know they could vote for independence or rejoining the Republic. Maybe they were given the option of remaining a protectorate, but even that would be time-limited.

But from what we heard of Pritchart's thoughts, aside from the one or two most recent Peep conquests, almost all systems that were liberated by the MA actually wanted to rejoin the Republic. Especially since the plebiscite was delayed by the High Ridge Government's government refusal to discuss them, so the Republic was actually experiencing economic boom when those must have finally happened.

But this just reinforces my point: all evidence suggests that joining a larger, prosperous entity brings a share of that prosperity. It's clear that no two systems are alike and even if they were, the entity that they join isn't alike either. So what works for one may not work for the other. And yet this argument can be used by the local campaigns proposing membership.

Matapan - Matapan is a cluster of stars that just started getting colonized via the wormhole. Manticore is the de facto policing power in the region, but each planet is a sovereign nation. Currently, these young colonies started because they wanted to leave the shackles of another power. Economic hardship might change this and make some of these stars voluntarily join the SKM.

Good point: depending on why they were founded, they may not want to voluntarily submit to a distant government.

In Talbott, I believe it was New Tuscany which ended up not going with SEM of the original group (other than Lynx) that applied together with the prodding of the Rembrant Trade Union founder.
Manticore set the criteria for membership which included a lot of things. Mostly it was that they had to set in-place Manticrian law in the system and there would be no special extra deals for customs, etc. Comming into the SEM would put you on an even trade basis with the rest of the Empire as far as moving your goods around (no internal tariffs). Civil and Criminal Law was going to be the same as the rest of the SEM.
There were some things about the political systems but would have to go back and reread that. SEM is a Constitusional Monarcy with bicameral houses of the legislature. The Quadrant was to have a Royal Governor but there was an elected Quadrant
Government and then each system was going to have essentialy local elected government-withing the framework of SEM. New Tuscany wanted to grandfather in all sorts of power and exemptions to maintain the oligarchy structure they had and disallow the expantion of franchise to it's citizens.
Everybody else ended up going with the package. New Tuscany thought they would ride the coat-tails of that for expanded volume of trade and oppertunity and flow through of investment and expected prosperity without having to give up their own power. What they got was Manpower (and the Alinment) makeing them "offers" they ended up finding really bad news plus they got first Byng and then Crandall and you know that OFS was going to be right behind that though it wasn't brought up in the book...you know..."protection" and levelel the playing field with the big bad Manties who arn't going to have the benifits of membership without taking the responsibities of membership and keeping your special positions.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Theemile wrote:While Trevor's star is in Manticore hands, there were 20 systems near it that were held by Manticore between the wars that were given a plebiscite by Haven after their recapture - Havenite rule, Manticore rule, or freedom. We don't know which way any voted, so potentially Manticore may have another node of 20 planets who voluntarily want to join Manticore.

I don't think joining Manticore was an option given to them at the time. We know they could vote for independence or rejoining the Republic. Maybe they were given the option of remaining a protectorate, but even that would be time-limited.

But from what we heard of Pritchart's thoughts, aside from the one or two most recent Peep conquests, almost all systems that were liberated by the MA actually wanted to rejoin the Republic. Especially since the plebiscite was delayed by the High Ridge Government's government refusal to discuss them, so the Republic was actually experiencing economic boom when those must have finally happened.

But this just reinforces my point: all evidence suggests that joining a larger, prosperous entity brings a share of that prosperity. It's clear that no two systems are alike and even if they were, the entity that they join isn't alike either. So what works for one may not work for the other. And yet this argument can be used by the local campaigns proposing membership.

The Peblicite might not have had a "I like the SKM" box, but anyone could see that "not with the RoH" box pretty much comes with the option to vote Manticore at a later date.

And I agree, that at least aligning your self with the one of the economic engines is a good thing - true, complete independence also means thinking as small as your horizons, and economic prosperity will scale with said horizons.

Fox2! wrote:

munroburton wrote:
I don't think they'll be wanting to expand any more for a century. San Martin and Lynx got into the old Kingdom so fast because they brought the best-claim to their respective wormhole termini with them. Only Beowulf and maybe Gregor could pull that off now.

IIRC, Lynx is several light years from the "Lynx" Terminus. It just happens to be the closest inhabited system.

a small side track, and one of the very few things that bugs me about the Honorverse...

namely all the explored systems seem to exist pretty much in a flat[ish] plane [same applies to wormholes], so all the talk of expansion seems to implicitly use this assumption that you can expand left & right, north and south, but not up and down.

I absolutely realise that this is really needed for the maps and distance calcs, but still...

I suppose it fits in with HH being inspired by Hornblower.

isaac_newton wrote:a small side track, and one of the very few things that bugs me about the Honorverse...

namely all the explored systems seem to exist pretty much in a flat[ish] plane [same applies to wormholes], so all the talk of expansion seems to implicitly use this assumption that you can expand left & right, north and south, but not up and down.

I absolutely realise that this is really needed for the maps and distance calcs, but still...

I suppose it fits in with HH being inspired by Hornblower.

It's not completely ignored. Apparent discrepancies between the flattened maps and travel times in stories can be handwaved away by hidden vertical separation.

But yes, entities such as the Solarian League, Republic of Haven or regions like Silesia and Talbott could be as "tall" as they are "wide". The Milky Way's thin disc is ~1,000 LY deep.

munroburton wrote:

isaac_newton wrote:a small side track, and one of the very few things that bugs me about the Honorverse...

namely all the explored systems seem to exist pretty much in a flat[ish] plane [same applies to wormholes], so all the talk of expansion seems to implicitly use this assumption that you can expand left & right, north and south, but not up and down.

I absolutely realise that this is really needed for the maps and distance calcs, but still...

I suppose it fits in with HH being inspired by Hornblower.

It's not completely ignored. Apparent discrepancies between the flattened maps and travel times in stories can be handwaved away by hidden vertical separation.

But yes, entities such as the Solarian League, Republic of Haven or regions like Silesia and Talbott could be as "tall" as they are "wide". The Milky Way's thin disc is ~1,000 LY deep.

I believe those trying to fit the distances found there had to be a 40-50 light year thickness to the map to make everything work.

In addition, the SITS Map of Silesia, showed the location of the stars above and below the plane of the map. Once again, this was only a handful of light years +/-.

It's still not jiving with reality, but....

There was conversation a couple of years ago about trying to get/use maping software that could present the stars in the Honorvers in a 3 demential presentation. Mostly what I remember was that it was expensive and that there wasn't enough information on what was already in the various "flat" maps to give you the desired results.

Yes, you need a z-axis to play with. A single star can be 40 lys from two other stars but that would (without other information put it anywhere) be somewhere on a plain between them which starts 40LY diretly between the two stars and extends outward as the relative distance between the two stars diminishes. So where is it? And how much further or closer to anything else than to two your have the original reference for?

And we are told from present knowlege that there are "cluster" of stars and there are sometimes formidiabl gaps between clusters of stars (we won't even get to discussing galaxies) and that there are some times a light sprinkling of stars in an area and that there appear to be individual starts sort of "outside" what is thought to be the precieved edge of the galaxy. At least in the Honorverse, you can have habitable (at least with terraforming in various cases) planets which can support human life around many types of stars. And you don't need to have a star particularly near anything else to be able to use a habitable planet. Heck, if you have the "normal" amound of systems debris associated with formation, you don't need a habitable planet at all as long as you have the technology to build habitats and extract resources. Like Yldin and the Technodyne operation

We have been told that the Harvest Joy was a RMN survey ship and the captain had, what, 50 years experience in survey and investigation. So what, in addition to doing the system equevelent of a geological survey and looking for evidence of a possible wormhole, was she doing for all that time? And where? If I recall, she is a one point described as an older light cruiser converted to a flying science lab for system and wormhole surveys. Along with a 4 month cruise endurence of consumables etc, she was armed and expected to be able to at leasts take care of herself in strange places and probably "discourage" unfriendly interests by people who might want to grab some merchant ship if the oppertunity presented itself.

How many survery ships does SKM/SEM have? We know there has been that war on with Haven but even if you eliminate everthing within the war zones there is a lot of area to go exploring in. We know it was a Manticorian ship that worked out the wormhole bridge for Idaho but that may have been 50 years befor the discovery of the wormhole from the Junction to Talbott.

It's research with clear economic potential. Even if you don't find a wormhole, you are going to learn about other places and keep looking for places that MIGHT be useful for colonization or resource extraction (like Grendelsbane or Yelton).