Some comments on the economics of the series

Alizon wrote:
No, I was aware that the Junction forms a network of wormholes connecting to a number of locations in and around the League.

What I was referring to in this relation is two fold.

First you have a short term problem and that is that Manticore has recalled all of her merchant fleet to Manticore. This means that for however long this is occurring or in effect, it doesn't matter whether the Junction is closed or not. If you're merchant ships are sitting in orbit around Manticore they aren't creating transit fees, they're losing money for their shipping lines and since shipping lines don't often operate with great profit margins this means these lines will likely loose money which means no income for the crown to tax. This also does nothing to account for the fact that there are going to be a lot of unemployed merchant sailors, at least temporarily and those sailors aren't going to be earning paychecks or buying a lot of goods which will reduce or eliminate the profits of a number of other business which further reduces the tax base etc ... . The fact that this is likely to go on for several months is going to be a huge problem for the SKM all by itself.

The longer term problem doesn't have to do with the closure of the termini per se but more with what you can do with them under the current conditions.

Prior to the current unpleasantness, I believe Manticorian ships carried approximately 80% of League interstellar shipping. Given the wealth and value of that trade this is where the majority of the economic engine that drives Manticore probably lies. Most other economic engines probably are as a result of this happy circumstance, support it and are largely dependent on it.

Let's say that the Queen sent all of her merchant ships back into the trading business tomorrow. What portion of that trade do you think they could realistically access now. True, you are going to have a lot of worlds who are going to do backflips to get anyone to carry and deliver goods but even so, you're sending your merchant marine not into the League you know but into a somewhat different and much more dangerous animal.

How many warships did it used to take to convoy Manticorian Merchant vessels to the 3,000 or so League worlds whose trade they carried. As far as I know, I believe that figure was none. How many of those merchant vessels can safely reach and transport goods throughout the League now without some form of armed escort? I mean corrupt it may be but how are various units of the SLN and Frontier Fleet going to react to what have to be thousands of unarmed unprotected Manticorian freighters plying their trade deep inside the League. Why send your forces out to the edge of nowhere to raid Manticorian commerce when it's obliging transporting goods between Earth and Alpha Centauri.

If the GA has to provide armed escorts, how many can they provide to counter possible SLN intervention of unarmed merchant vessels which even a SLN SD could easily run down. What type of force protection do you have to offer them.

I'm betting that there is no practical way for the GA to actually provide adequate security to Manticorian merchants operating throughout the League. Yes, there will be a portion of the League where that will be possible but not in all of it, probably not in more than say 30% - 40% of it's normal carrying trade.

Yes, that's still a lot of trade but then my next observation is how easy it is to push a modern economy into a recession or depression.

The answer is not all that much. Have you ever calculated how much economic activity is actual lost if you reduce an economies marginal propensity to spend from around 90% to 80%? The answer his you reduce your economy by half. That's just a change of 10 cents out of every dollar and you lose not 5% or 10% of your economy, you lose half.

Its from a smaller shift that this that gave birth to the Great Depression.

Let's be generous, let's say that Manticore effectively loses half of it's League trade, half the ships carrying gainful cargo that there once were, half the transit fees, half the taxable revenue and now a need for only about half the businesses and their employees who once were employed in supporting that trade and then half of those who supported them. Pretty soon you follow the ripples out to your local supermarket which has to let people go because people don't have enough money to purchase what they used to.

Now, that's just the disruption caused by what's going on with the League. Now let's throw in the destruction of pretty much all of the Manticore system's orbital infrastructure which I understand contained almost all of its heavy industry not to mention many of the businesses which supplied those industries including your local orbital supermarket.

How many of those are out of work or just plain not economically producing because they are dead. How many ripples go out from that?

Either of these events by itself, Oyster Bay or the disruption of League trade should be enough under most circumstances to bring any economy to it's knees. That they are both happening simultaneously should not simply be an economic "hit" but something which creates and causes significant economic damage which can not be easily remedied.

I understand you reference to the Dutch, I actually find the analogy to Napoleon's Continental system worthwhile as well, in other words the large landbound group with poor modes of transport trying to keep it's members from trading with the power (England) which has the fast efficient methods of transport and control of the seas. On the other hand, the economic models for these cultures at that period of time really don't correspond well with modern more specialized economies that exist today or presumably will exist in the Honorverse.

You know, one of the reasons I never decided to take up writing is that the worlds we create are so complex that it's virtually impossible to know all the things you really need to know in order to write to the level of detail and intelligence you do. It's something that I deeply admire about your work and in seeing that you have the courage to take things on in detail that I know that are beyond me.

But I have to admit that I look at these events and I feel that the economic impact of them may be underappreciated by many.

runsforcelery wrote:
"...reopen their interstellar commerce under the GA's hospices. "

runsforcelery wrote:Seventh, there is an intact core of cutting-edge Manty tech available in the yards around San Martin and in the MWHJ service and repairs yards which can be immediately retasked. By the same token, the captured Grendelsbane personnel being returned by Haven and the skilled workforce orbiting San Martin, working in the Alizon and Zanzibar yards, working in the San Martin and junction yards, and even assigned to Marsh and/or on loan to Grayson will be available to serve as a core of fully trained workers who can oversee and update Havenites, Beowulfers, and Graysons pouring into Manticore to begin the task of rebuilding.

The task will be arduous, demanding, and quite possibly heartbreaking along the way, but it will not take anything remotely like the timeframe you are projecting.

runsforcelery wrote:Respectfully, you're wrong.

First, an Honorverse generation is a heck of a lot longer than 20 years or so. This is not going to take a century to fix.

Second, the training schools and facilities to rebuild the labor force still exist, at least in large part. The education system and infrastructure are essentially intact and prepared to train new workers. Most training in Manticore has been done in simulators for at least 80 T-years, and the simulators are either still sitting right where they were or readily replaced. It's more a software issue than anything else in that respect.

Third, the blueprints/plans for every single lost item still exist. There's no mystery about what needs to be built or how it goes together, and there isn't a single part of the destroyed Manticoran infrastructure which cannot be rebuilt/replaced using the tech readily available in Haven and --- especially for the high-end stuff --- Beowulf.

Fourth, you have immediately available the surplus labor force of Beowulf and a huge potential Havenite labor force. You think for one minute a Havenite ex-Dolist wouldn't sell one of his kidneys for the opportunity to train on cutting-edge Manty hardware and be in on the ground floor of rebuilding it? The skill set and experience he would acquire along the way --- courtesy of training in that intact educational infrastructure and the later hands-on experience of the projects themselves --- would be literally priceless when he returned home to a Havenite infrastructure beginning to undo the last century or so of self-inflicted damage.

Fifth, Beowulf and Haven are going to see both the necessity of getting Manticore back on its feet as a key player in the Grand Alliance and (especially in Haven's case) an opportunity to make some really, really good long term financial investments in a sort of reverse Marshall Plan.

Sixth, from where I sit, it seems to me that you are hugely underestimating the rate at which Honorverse industry and construction can complete a given task. Once the rebuilding process begins, it will go far more rapidly than you seem to believe, and the primary sources of the necessary materials --- the orbital extraction yards and refineries --- are still intact.

Seventh, there is an intact core of cutting-edge Manty tech available in the yards around San Martin and in the MWHJ service and repairs yards which can be immediately retasked. By the same token, the captured Grendelsbane personnel being returned by Haven and the skilled workforce orbiting San Martin, working in the Alizon and Zanzibar yards, working in the San Martin and junction yards, and even assigned to Marsh and/or on loan to Grayson will be available to serve as a core of fully trained workers who can oversee and update Havenites, Beowulfers, and Graysons pouring into Manticore to begin the task of rebuilding.

The task will be arduous, demanding, and quite possibly heartbreaking along the way, but it will not take anything remotely like the timeframe you are projecting.

kzt wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:Respectfully, you're wrong.

First, an Honorverse generation is a heck of a lot longer than 20 years or so. This is not going to take a century to fix.

Second, the training schools and facilities to rebuild the labor force still exist, at least in large part. The education system and infrastructure are essentially intact and prepared to train new workers. Most training in Manticore has been done in simulators for at least 80 T-years, and the simulators are either still sitting right where they were or readily replaced. It's more a software issue than anything else in that respect.

Third, the blueprints/plans for every single lost item still exist. There's no mystery about what needs to be built or how it goes together, and there isn't a single part of the destroyed Manticoran infrastructure which cannot be rebuilt/replaced using the tech readily available in Haven and --- especially for the high-end stuff --- Beowulf.

Fourth, you have immediately available the surplus labor force of Beowulf and a huge potential Havenite labor force. You think for one minute a Havenite ex-Dolist wouldn't sell one of his kidneys for the opportunity to train on cutting-edge Manty hardware and be in on the ground floor of rebuilding it? The skill set and experience he would acquire along the way --- courtesy of training in that intact educational infrastructure and the later hands-on experience of the projects themselves --- would be literally priceless when he returned home to a Havenite infrastructure beginning to undo the last century or so of self-inflicted damage.

Fifth, Beowulf and Haven are going to see both the necessity of getting Manticore back on its feet as a key player in the Grand Alliance and (especially in Haven's case) an opportunity to make some really, really good long term financial investments in a sort of reverse Marshall Plan.

Sixth, from where I sit, it seems to me that you are hugely underestimating the rate at which Honorverse industry and construction can complete a given task. Once the rebuilding process begins, it will go far more rapidly than you seem to believe, and the primary sources of the necessary materials --- the orbital extraction yards and refineries --- are still intact.

Seventh, there is an intact core of cutting-edge Manty tech available in the yards around San Martin and in the MWHJ service and repairs yards which can be immediately retasked. By the same token, the captured Grendelsbane personnel being returned by Haven and the skilled workforce orbiting San Martin, working in the Alizon and Zanzibar yards, working in the San Martin and junction yards, and even assigned to Marsh and/or on loan to Grayson will be available to serve as a core of fully trained workers who can oversee and update Havenites, Beowulfers, and Graysons pouring into Manticore to begin the task of rebuilding.

The task will be arduous, demanding, and quite possibly heartbreaking along the way, but it will not take anything remotely like the timeframe you are projecting.

Well, I might be. But maybe I'm not.

Lets take education. My assumption is that the shortage isn't in terms of people willing to work, it's people who can run what was described as the most advanced manufacturing system in the known galaxy.

In a rationally run system, the rate at which the educational system produces trained people is roughly equivalent to the rate at which they can find work. So if you assume a career is 20 years you are going to be set to produce starting workers equal to about 5% of the total workforce every year. (This assumes no insanities like the current grad school issues, where every year you get 5 years worth of new PhDs in English etc.)

If the process is roughly akin to the described RMN training system increasing the input doesn't increase the output for years. And you can't massively increase the output rate without without seriously compromising the quality of the output.

Worse, what this produces are trained but not experienced workers. They understand the theory but "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." People who haven't actually done the work don't know what can go wrong and how to effectively fix it. This is why foremen and leads have significantly more experience than the average guy out the school.

Sane people (and people following the law) don't assign a newly graduated structural engineer as the lead guy doing the engineering for a 80 story building, because they don't know what they don't know. (There is a reason why you are not even eligible to take the PE test without 4 or more years of professional experience.)

The same is true of people building safety critical components, except when you are building weapon systems and spacecraft there isn't very much that isn't safety critical. You really want the guy in charge of ensuring that the wings are firmly attached to the plane to have enough experience to know what can go wrong, how to spot this, how to fix it, and how to NOT "fix" it.



I'm sure they have the blueprints, but that isn't actually enough to build stuff that will work. Even assuming that they have not just blueprints but also the details on how the design was actually changed during production and what you have to do to make the asemply process work (neither of which are part of the official blueprints) that still isn't enough to build it.

For example, most complex weapon systems and safety related systems depend on a cloud of small parts and sub-assemblies made by well known vendors that were carefully selected and specified by the various system designers. I'd expect that these parts are mostly not available because their manufacturers are out of business because their production facility exploded, their workforce died and their customers ceased to exist.

The bluepints might very well specify that you need a Vector model 567A3 pump and a SQV model 67C-option4d valves in the fuel feed, but they are really unlikely to include detailed plans on how to produce the pumps and valves. So you have to substitute. There was a reason why they specified a Vector 567A3 and not a Jones A14D6, as they are rarely identical with a different label. And you'll need to do this everywhere. Now that means you are no longer producing a tested and qualified design, you are producing something that just looks a whole lot like your tested and qualified design.

And you are doing it without the people who really understand exactly how to produce the design you had. And without the QC people who knew what to look for to stop bad products from leaving.

Every part substituted might only have minor chance of causing any issue, but there are a LOT of parts. So the law of large numbers says you have only a minimal likelihood that this will actually work as designed without changes to reflect subtle differences that you inadvertently introduced.

Essentially a missile or radar built like this is a completely new missile or radar and needs to go through the same step by step integration testing and service qualification you do on a completely new missile or radar before you start installing them where they can kill large numbers of people in all sorts of interesting ways.

It's a lot like the problem of trying to build a Saturn 5 today. We have the blueprints, we have lots of other documentation and we have complete examples, but many of the parts needed are no longer available. To quote NASA "There is no point in even contemplating trying to rebuild the Saturn 5 ... The real problem is the hundreds of thousands of parts that are simply not manufactured any more."

Daryl wrote:RFC -"And I might point out, if I were in a snitty mood, that to a significant extent, this is a case of my universe, my governing assumptions."

Damn right.

I (and all others here if they are honest) would love to have earned the right to make that statement.
I'll add that the extraordinary scrutiny that the anal retentive train spotters here have applied to all aspects of the many novels in the Honorverse, has actually illustrated just how well the original universe was designed for the first novels.

No other series set in a future universe with yet to be imagined tech could survive a fraction of the analysis that this has. Many are still good stories but you have to accept an amount of handwavium in them.

dreamrider wrote:

Daryl wrote:RFC -"And I might point out, if I were in a snitty mood, that to a significant extent, this is a case of my universe, my governing assumptions."

Damn right.

I (and all others here if they are honest) would love to have earned the right to make that statement.
I'll add that the extraordinary scrutiny that the anal retentive train spotters here have applied to all aspects of the many novels in the Honorverse, has actually illustrated just how well the original universe was designed for the first novels.

No other series set in a future universe with yet to be imagined tech could survive a fraction of the analysis that this has. Many are still good stories but you have to accept an amount of handwavium in them.

Can you say "Doc" Smith, Mr Piper?

lol


dreamrider