David Johnson and Cynthia Higginbotham are engaging in a rather acrimonious
dispute over which version of Traveller reality we should use to visualize
fleet conditions in the Imperium.
I haven't got time for a detailed answer, but you have to start on the
basis of accepting that there is no way that 5FW can be reconciled with
TCS. Once you get past that, the reason for not accepting 5FW as the
model is this: The ship levels in 5FW are way too low for any reasonable
bottom up estimate based on population or economic activity.
Take Glisten as an example: Glisten is inhabited (according to the Imperial
Encyclopedia data) by about 8 billion people. If they were responsbile for
the maintenance of the entire "average subsector" fleet, neglecting any
contributions by the other worlds in the subsector, 42 ships with an
average crew of 1000 (probably a bit high remembering the mix of ships from
Supplement 9) would represent .0005% of the population. Even with a
thousand support personnel for each crew member (I hope you will agree that
is an unthinkable level of bureaucracy!), that would still be less than
half a percent of the population. If those 42 ships had an average displacment
of 50,000 tons, typical High Guard designs would give them a cost of about
50,000 MCr, which means that each of the 8 billion people would have con-
tributed about Cr260 to build them--over a ten year period (or more). This
would work out to be an annual tax burden of 26/12000 for the average starship
steward, 2/10 of one percent, and less than that for a more highly skilled
worker. Retirees could easily pay it out of their pensions. (-: If the
Imperium was seriously interested in defending itself, it would spend more
money. Likewise, serious attackers could easily spend more than a fraction
of a percent of the annual wages of their populations, so the 5FW numbers
are not reasonable.
I agree with Steve Higginbotham, who said that 5FW was best viewed as a
"simplified" representation of the "real" world, since no one would want to
push 10,000 counters around.
Rob Dean
(stirring in his long hibernation)