fleets revisited, again...

Lyle:

>    I hope this was some kind of joke?  Deficit spending is done by the
>government borrowing money and/or selling bonds that they cannot
>reasonably expect to pay without borrowing.  The amount of actual
>cash money that is printed by the government has nothing to do with
>either its income or its outlay, especially in a modern economy where
>90+% of all government transactions are either electronic or paper
>(not cash) transactions.  In point of fact, I believe the actual
>amount of cash money in circulation has been dropping, as the
>government prints/coins less than it destroys as outdated and estimates
>is lost/destroyed in private hands.  Inflation and deficit spending are
>linked, true, but neither has anything to do with printing money.

The phrase "print money" is a figure of speech, based on the bad old
days of the sixties when the government did, in fact, print more money.
Any process whereby a government spends money it doesn't have, and can't
get, can be described that way.  BTW, I noticed in the newspaper
yesterday that the Russians were going to deal with an expected revenue
shortfall by (in the words of their spokesman) "printing more money".


Bertil:

>> No.  You can only fight pirates where you are.  The number of ships
>> would be the minimum required to put an adequate force in EVERY
>> system needing them.
>
>  How about the convoy tactic? Or 'defended sealine'? This could be
>realized in Traveller by putting three of my 'stronger than the
>pirates' military ships at each main world and at one gas giant in each
>system: One ship would guard a 'jump point' where the merchants jump in
>and out, one would guard the mainworld or gasgiant and the third would
>escort them between the point and the mainworld/gasgiant.

The "jumppoiny is a myth.  Properly, it is the surface of a sphere of
radius 100 planetary diameters.  It would take considerably more than
one ship to defend same (perhaps 12, as I said earlier (for a world, a
gas giant would require thousands).
I take it you have little enough traffic that convoying daily traffic
with one ship is possible.  In our game, the level of merchant traffic
is measured in thousands of ships per day to most non-backwaters.
Under that kind of load, escort duties could only be met by hundreds of
ships per world.


>  I'm assuming that each ship lasts 40 years and that crew costs are
>50% of the budget. This is a low estimate: The Swedish defence budget
>is about 60% wages despite the fact that all conscripts go on $4 to $25
>per day.
>  This will lead to a expenditure of 25% of the full price of the ships
>for each ship each year (10% base, 40 years life is 1/40th per year:
>2.5%, 12.5% doubled is 25%.)

Sigh... TCS already sets crew and basing costs at 99% of the Naval
Budget.  Which is where the 10% base comes from.


>12.5 Teracredits. A suitable ship is the Sun Tzu cruiser, which cost
>GCr31.

Actually, a "suitable" ship is the 5000 ton fleet escort at about GCr4.
Multiply ship availability by 7.75 again.


>they would have 30 times as much as needed. So if we make all military
>ships 50 times as expensive, they will have to cut down on either
>anti-zhodani or anti-piracy work.

And if we make automobiles fifty times as expensive, people will stop
buying them.  Of course, the pirates will then cost fifty times as much,
too.  If they don't, then they are built like merchant ships, and a
Naval vessel that could fight them could be built that way, too.  Then
the price of anti-piracy operations drop by a factor of 50, and the
Imperial merchants breathe a collective sigh of relief.

>> And if piracy levels are high, then worlds will be forced to develop
>> their own resources, rather than importing things, and the merchant
>> traffic will cease, and the pirates will disappear.
>
>  And when the pirates are gone, trade will commence again and so on.

No.  If you are forced by "other concerns" to build a grav unit factory
on your own planet, then when the pirates are gone, why would you shut
it down and start importing them?  Once your indigenous industry can
build something, importing it becomes a waste.  Therefore, after the
pirates go away, trade will remain virtually non-existant.


>> In that case, use bigger nukes.
>
>  I don't have a killpound table handy, but there is a limit on how big
>a nuke one can cram into a 100kg 15cm missile, and it is smaller than
>the nuke one can cram into a 400kg(?) 25cm missile which in turn is
>smaller than that in a 65cm missile.

Too true.  But I don't believe in 100Kg missiles that can cross
500,000Km at 6Gs, either.  Using MT design rules, a missile that could
do that will either be MUCH bigger, or MUCH more expensive and only
three or four times as big.  In any case, by the time you finish
building a missile of the correct size, you will notice that it has room
for a Minuteman RV as a warhead.

>> I can see other ways.  Removing all interstellar governments from the
>> scene would be a good start.  NOT reducing them in size, removing
>> them completely.
>
>  Will it be Traveller? I've seen more persons using the Traveller
>background with other rules than the Traveller rules with other
>backgrounds so I am forced to look upon 'Traveller' as a setting more
>than a set of rules.

Will it be Traveller if you increase the cost of the Navy by a factor of
fifty?  For that matter, is Hard Times Traveller?  How about the
Rebellion?


>  Deficit spending is the government spending more than what the
>government 'earns' from taxes. But taxes are just a percentage of the
>GNP, so it isn't a case of the government spending more than the GNP.

Actually true.  Notice that creative bookkeeping can fix that.  By
mass-producing money, and importing with this phony money before
inflation devalues the currency into trivia, the government can
certainly fake it quite well for a time.  A short time.
However, see my opinion about the resource limits on the Imperium for my
own belifs on the matter.
BTW, I do NOT believe that this solution (deficit spending) is useful.
I DO belive that governments throughout history have used that method of
stealing from their citizens and other countries.


Later...

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I have learned to use the word "impossible" with the greatest caution.
                                    --W. von Braun