Hans Rancke brought up the oft-raised point that Hard Times starship
construction levels seem to have plummeted more significantly
than justified. After thinking about it a bit more, I have come
to think that perhaps we're not looking at the problem the right
way...
It's been ~10 years since the war started. During that time,
there's been a continuous "War Footing" taxation and construction
spree, which has significantly depressed the economy in general.
The US was pretty severely taxed by fighting two fronts to victory
at the same time in WW II over four years; an equivalent effort that
took ten years would have started to very, very seriously sunk the
economy.
A depressed-in-general economy then will reduce significantly
the funds that can reasonably be spent on Navies; it's unreasonable
to tax the people to below the poverty line, so larger portions of the
populace can't be taxed at all. The richer one's aren't as rich as
they were, either. End result: factor of four to ten decline in
tax revenues.
Add to that the destruction of starports and other industries
and of trade; we've often heard that the glue holding the Imperium
together was trade. That goes away, you can't import cheap things
from other worlds anymore, and suddenly we're depressing the
economy again. Coupled with having to rebuild critical industries
and infrastructure (few traders will stop by if you don't at least
have a flat stretch of concrete with a control tower and water supply...)
and whammo, another factor of four to ten reduction, added to the first
one (what was going into shipbuilding is now being spent dealing
with rebuilding things and paying more money for building things
onplanet instead of importing them).
We now have a sum-total reduction of funds available of
rough order of 90+%, maybe a bit better, likely a lot worse.
The 5 billion person tech D starport B world would only be able
to support 1 trillion credit squadron now, with an annual budget
of about 100,000MCr. Now, imagine that all the starships that were
being built went off to war for (Lucan, Dulinor, Margaret, Craig, ...)
and didn't come back (either still there or blown to bits). Now,
you don't have to support them anymore (they've abandoned you, no?)
but you have a B starport and no or few ships... you can build
nonstarships to your hearts content, and probably will, but
it's going to take a couple of years to get any medium sized
ones online, and in the meantime you're stuck with what you've
scrounged up. Add to that the difficulty of building anything
with the occational random planetary/starport bombardments,
and you're starting to look like a GDW Hard Times world.
The only thing I find hard to believe about this is that
none of the hi-pop worlds could see it coming ahead of time
(which, with 10 years warning should have been patently
obvious to anyone with half a brain and a slight case of
overcautiousness/paranoia.) If I were, say, the chief administrator
of such a world, about halfway through the civil war I would
have started covertly building up my planetary defense forces
and kept it kill-people-to-protect-it secret. Lots of SDB's
of varying sizes, at least, and likely some bigger warships (though
Spinal Mounts are hard to hide... maybe get some allocated to
fixed planetary defenses and actually install them on a starship).
By the time the war ground to an effective halt as the starships
all died off, I'd be sitting on top of a planet with enough
defenses to hold off any comers, military or raider, and I'd
try real hard to keep that edge up on everyone else.
With a little luck, I could protect my nearby neighbors in a
little safe zone, especially the ones that send food and
raw minerals to my industries. See if you can talk the
MegaCorps into maintaining some transport and industrial
presence (not hard if you seem to be stable, it would seem)
and there's an island of stability that will last through
a long night.
In fact, it's not just amazing that one world didn't
do that. It's amazing to me that _most_ of the hi-pop worlds
didn't do that, or just outright rebel against all factions
on the grounds of self-preservation. There should have
been a mass uprising in the name of Peace about seven years
or so into the Civil War, before the corner of
more or less no return was passed. The Imperial Populace
is being portrayed as mindless sheep for the most part,
and I have a problem with that (with several trillion people,
_someone_ is going to realize this and spread the word
successfully...).
- -george william herbert
[email removed]