cthia wrote:
I'm not sure I completely agree with that Jonathan. It is certainly a factor on present day earth, but in the Honorverse, factoring in prolong, couples most likely have children at some point, as Honor's parents said they were meaning to. Although Honor's parents are Commoners and are less affluent than the average Manticoran I'd presume. Certainly for the most part of their lives. People want heirs, especially affluent people. And of course, there is a significant difference in age of respective settlements.
That would be an insanely large nursery to produce such numbers in a couple centuries from the initial settlement and the significant time needed to effect research and begin to produce stock from "successful" genetic "experimentation" and to be government run to boot. And talk about dysfunctional beings caused by a lack of bonding and natural human love and warmth.
And remember, the MAlign were practicing quite a bit of winnowing inferior births.
You are most likely right about the average size of Manticoran families opposed to the MAlign. You have to be for the numbers to have better than a snowballs chance in hell to make sense. But the average number of MAlign families would have to be significantly high.
And again, if the MAlign can simply "ramp up" births then why such a shortage of personnel for the MAN?
I get the impression that the heavy winnowing is something that happens mostly in the MAlign's cutting edlge experimental breeding - trying to push the edge and see how new gene clusters work out.
Staffing up a planet would likely involve lots of much lower risk breeding - using genetics that have by and large survived the risky trial stages and been officially incorporated in the various Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta clusters of genomes. So I don't think there would be quite as much 'wastage' as you seem to be assuming.
Also, prolong's effects on family growth are still shaking out, it's a pretty new technology in the grand scheme of things. Yes, more people probably find time for a couple of kids over their centuries of life - but we've also seen examples where people (Honor's parents) just kind of kept procrastinating on their next kid(s) for decades -- knowing they wanted more but somehow just putting it off a little more until they turned around and realized it had been over 30 years. So it'll probably still take a while for the population to really expand just due to Prolong.
And personnel shortage for the MAN is mostly a matter of rapidly changing priorities without sufficient contingency planning. There were enough people who could have been training at Darius, but they didn't train them (yet) because the original plan wasn't to pull the wraps off the MAlign for another several decades.
Their training programs appear to have been set-up on that basis - they didn't have or need hardly any navy 40 years ago and didn't expect to need one ready to go for at least another 30-40 years.
But Detwiler upset the entire timetable when he decided that Apollo was too alarming to stick to the schedule - and the Manticore-Haven fragile ceasefire too good an opportunity to pass up.
So he basically went to war with the initial cadre that in the original plan would have been seasoned and then used to train the main bulk of the naval personnel - which would have been ready as or before their naval shipbuilding also hit its war footing stride and turned out all the ships for them to serve on.
Oops.