George W Herbert:
> 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...
>
> [10 years of fighting will strain the economy fearfully.]
Very true. On the other hand, the 500 Cr per citizen figure represents
peacetime spending (something like 1-2 % of GNP, I think?) Wartime
spending in England in WW II approached 40% (I've been told; this may
be completely untrue). 'Striker' mentions 15% as the maximum. Still,
I agree that it would be reasonable to reduce Naval spending due to
depressed economy. But how much?
> 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.
There's a lot of difference between survivable poverty and endurable
poverty. In peacetime people will demand a lot more than they will
make do with in wartime. And the 500 Cr per citizen figure is peace-
time spending, remember?
> 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...)
We're talking about a Class B Starport.
> 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.
The squadron they do maintain is worth a little over 8 billion (Most of it
in non-starships). That's less than 1% of the trillion credit you mention.
>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.
The point is that to deal with the menaces of Indro the Lightless and the
other terrible reaver bands that apparently plague the worlds of Hard Times
a world would need perhaps 100 fighters. Now take your Starport B, TL D,
population 5 billion world and strip it of it's defenses down to the last
SDB. Furthermore assume that not the least little lost squadron of warships
will accept service with this world in return for maintenance and fat
salaries (incredible, but let's assume it). This world will have to
bootstrap itself.
The world still have its naval yards (That's what makes it Class B, after
all). Capacity is 5 million ton. Reduce that by 90% to account for bombardment
damage. Capacity 500.000 T. Now tax every citizen 5 Cr (that's 1% of peacetime
spending. You'll agree that they should be able to afford that?). That's 25
billion Credit. Now start building 100 fighters. Of course you have a standard
model ready, but let's just assume for the sake of argument that you don't.
I'll use Termagant Fighters (20 T, price MCr 31.33) for the example. Tonnage:
2000. Assign double yard capacity and pay 60% overtime, and you'll have your
100 fighters in 12 weeks at a cost of 5 billion credits, leaving you 20
billion credits for other projects. The next batch of fighters will cost 3,1
billion credits, or 2,5 billion if you're willing to wait an extra 10 days to
get them.
Now decide you want to help your neighbouring planets and your own trade.
You can build jump 100 T shuttles capable of moving your standard fighters
in 40 weeks (20 if you're busy). I don't have a design for one, but they
can't cost much more than a Free Trader (in fact, you can use Free Traders
to move them). Yes, let's make the jump shuttles 200 T, capable of carrying
4 fighters each. It'll take 8 (or 4) weeks longer to build them, but what
the hey... You can build 25 of them for less than a billion Cr. Let's see,
what's left? A shipyard capacity of 491.000 T and a budget of 16,5 billion
unspent. 400 more fighters and the Unity of Promise can protect each of
the 5 other planets in the Unity. That leaves 6,5 billion for ambitious stuff
like converting type M liners into fighting ships. You can afford to build
(not support, BUILD) 11 of these the first year. I think you have to put
in a new power plant, so this will take 18 weeks if you don't want to spend
money on speeding up work. Shipyard capacity is no problem (it could have
been reduced by 99% and still be plenty. Heck, you can build these fighters
in any car factory on the world, though tooling up may take a while. But
even monthly pirate raids will not keep these fighters unbuilt for long),
so you can make them all concurrently.
Now let's look at next year's budget: Fleet consists of 600 20 Fighters
(BCr 15,04*), 25 Jump Shuttles (BCr 0,8*) and 11 _Vigilantes_ (BCr 6,68).
(Actually you'd have a mix of different types, which is why I don't give
class discount for these.)
*: 20% class discount included. The first batch may have cost more, but
they're just as easy to maintain.
Total value BCr 22.52. Maintenance: BCr 2,25, leaving you with BCr 22,75
to spend on other projects. Perhaps we can lay down a couple of 1000 T
Destroyers... And of course more fighters to protect more of your neigh-
bouring planets, expanding your protective umbrella further and further out.
In the meantime trade is beginning to revive. Next year's budget will
be bigger.
>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.
Who's performing these bombardments? Anyone strong enough to do so is
strong enough to protect his own merchants. To desrtoy this light in
the Long Night you have to introduce another.
> [Anyone with an ounce of brains could predict and avoid this. ]
I agree. And even if noone did, lots of these planets can bootstrap
their fleet and trade in less than a year.
Wildstar writes:
> Trade, Commerce, Taxation, and the Imperial Navy
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Recap for Those Who Came In Late
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Using the TCS starship construction rules in combination with (hopefully
> reasonable) assumptions about the types of ships constructed, I further
> calculated that there are 11,813,221 starships registered in the Imperium;
> with an aggregate volume of 73,832,634,000 tons displacement. The original
> article, along with the supporting data tables to support my conclusions,
> should be available from one of the TML FTP sites. Recently, I have been
> looking at some of these figures more closely.
The problem here is that the figures in TCS only concerns themselves with
building and maintaining naval ships. Merchant traffic is not touched at
all. We've no way to estimate civilian traffic (unless you count the ship
encounter tables ;-). Based purely on a fantasy game sourcebook I use a
figure of 2 tons of merchant shipping per ton of military shipping. This
could be miles off.
> This puts the grant total at 79,203,958,000,000 Cr per voyage. I assume
> that the average commercial starship makes one voyage every two weeks,
> except for the 4-week maintainance period, for a total of 24 trips per year.
> This means that in the course of a year, the total Imperial interstellar
> trade contribution to the GIP is 1,900,894,900,000,000 Cr. Therefore,
> interstellar trade contributes 0.8661% of the total GIP. This slightly less
> than the tax burden imposed by the Imperium, and is in fact a such a small
> fraction of the GIP that the complete cessation of interstellar trade should
> cause no more hardship than a recession.
Ouch!
> Reason for the End of the Imperium #542: It is more economically feasable
> for member worlds to cease all interstellar trade than it is for them to
> continue to pay Imperial taxes.
> One of the more disturbing results above is that the Imperial tax burden is
> greater than the fraction of the GIP due to interstellar trade.
I think this is the place to present my fix for reducing the size of the
Navy of interstellar powers:
Argument: The more people a society consists of, the higher the proportion of
non-contributing members. By contributing members I mean anyone in a primary
or secondary occupation. I don't mean to imply that people in tertiary occu-
pations dosen't work, but they all live one way or another on whatever wealth
the primary and secondary occupations creates. The amount of money that a
planet can afford [1] to spend on naval forces is therefor modified by a
factor that depends on the size of the population:
Factor = 1/(2 to the power of (8 - log (population))).
This factor is 1 for a population of 100 million, 1/2 for one of 1 billion
and 1/4 for one of 10 billion. It will be 2 for a population of 10 million
and go on doubling every time the population level goes down by one.
(Obviously there is a limit to this. I suggest that we ignore any world with
a population less than 100.000. Such will tend to be colonies and outposts
and thus go on the parent planet's budget anyway.)
[1] Actually "are willing to spend". This is what the government can get
their taxpayers to pony up with without them growing resentful. And
we're talking peacetime. In wartime all bets are off. A society will
willingly spend much more than they can afford in such circumstances,
witness how WWII more or less ruined Britain even though they won.
In a interstellar society all planets will want the other planets to pay
proportionally the same as themselves, so the budget must be tuned to the
ones who can pay the least per citizen. We ignore the possibility that the
interstellar government will force the minorities to pay disproportionally
much. Certainly the Imperium could do so, but that will just add extra
complications to the calculations. The high-population worlds contribute
most to the Naval budget, and it's them we reduce most in capacity to
contribute. So (using TCS figures) Planet Big, with population 1 billion,
can't pay more than 250 Cr/citizen. 30% of this goes to the federation,
so Planet Big pays 75 Cr/citizen to the federation fleet. They retain
175 Cr/citizen for their own planetary defenses. Planet Medium, with
population 100 million, can afford to use 500 Cr/citizen, but they still
only pay 75 Cr/citizen to the federation. (Incidentally, they don't _need_
to use all the 425 Cr left over on planetary defenses. If they're near an
unfriendly border they propably will, if they feel secure they may give
their citizens a tax break (or waste it on other things)).
Note that if you multiply the population by 10 you multiply the naval
budget by 5, so a high-pop world will still be considerably stronger
than a low-pop world.
I don't know the population of the most populous planet in the Imperium,
but assuming it's 50 billion, the Imperial tax will come to 30% of Cr 77
= 23 Cr. Let's use a little Imperial muscle and demand 25 Crimp (Imperial
credit) per citizen (this means that a low tech planet will get screwed out
of quite a lot more than 30% of their military budget, but who listens to
the complaints of low tech planets anyway?)
> Starship Construction
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> One of the main obstacles to larger merchant ships is the economics of ship
> building. As detailed in Trillion Credit Squadron, a ship under
> construction uses shipyard space equal to its displacement for the entire
> time it is being constructed. This rule does not seem to have been changed
> in MegaTraveller.
It has been changed. It has been made a lot more vague. Look at page 61 of
_Referee's Manual_. Ships under 60.000 kiloliters (4444,44 T) takes 36
months. Ships of more than that takes 'from 24 to 60 months based on
conditions, volume of orders, and the degree of haste desired by the
ordering government'. Class ships takes 80% of the time.
Incidentally, I just noticed a sentence on the same page: 'A shipyard
navy may construct ships on its planet using local resources, even if
a shipyard is not present'.
Hans Rancke
University of Copenhagen
[email removed]
- ------------
"A subsector official pompously states that the
subsector armed forces have four Kinunir class
ships in service, each with enough troop strength
to put down any military operations that threathen
the peace of the Imperium."
---Adventure 1, The Kinunir