Where Next for the GSN?

tlb wrote:

Seems to me that Grayson does have an external threat: Oyster Bay hurt them badly, as you mention in your post.

However that strike did not touch their orbital farms, so they should not have a problem feeding the population. Certainly putting domes over farms is important, because they are easier and cheaper to operate than the orbitals; but need not have the highest priority. Do we know anything about genetic mods to their farm animals to survive a heavy metal environment? Seems as though there must have been at the same time as the early human mods.

Women might not generally choose construction, trades or engineering in peacetime; that is not true in wartime, particularly now that societal attitudes on a woman's place are changing. Remember Rosie the Riveter.

Given the Grayson belief in the Test, they might not be as war weary as the USA in the midst of the Vietnam War; when feelings were made worse by the belief that US leaders did not know what they were doing (as McNamara admitted in his book).

How does the Hundred Years War compare in intensity to the Thirty Years War? Was it only 30% as intense?
Edit: changed treat to threat.[/quote]
Feeding Grayson and their population boom was explained in a book. Forget which one. Essentially due to Grayson Sky Domes ability to Dome over entire farms, it is now FAR MORE economical to build ground based farms and they are far more reliable and safer. You bet your bottom Austin Credit, that when $$$ sense sees a massive opportunity heaven and earth get out of the way to see something happen. (Frankly I think the Grayson SKY DOMES thing was way overblown for plot reasons as you can do the exact same thing with greenhouses built today. Look at Netherlands for instance. Grayson would have been FORCED to turn their food production, especially their leafy greens and other vegetables, into greenhouses as they uptake large quantities of minerals. Your grains like Wheat, corn do not(as much). Rice on the other hand DOES. SO, I highly doubt you will find a grain of rice anywhere on Grayson and the simple massive problem that rice is horrifically labor intensive to cultivate.

The good thing is that all of those very very very very expensive orbital farms can easily be turned into orbital manufacturing centers and housing.

PS: Light Manufacturing is not the same thing as construction or engineering... Yes, many jobs appeal to women and fits their inclination and are superior to men. Getting sweaty, muddy and grubby on a daily basis isn't one of those inclinations out of a very rare bird. Find me one single woman in heavy construction anywhere on the planet earth whose father does not own the business..... I will be waiting. It is like girls who are good at team sports when growing up. Almost universally they have older brothers who they followed in their footsteps. Find a softball/basketball team and take an informal poll by just talking with their parents. Then sort by those who are not there just to socialize. I did when my own daughter went to play. It is eye opening. The older I get the more the differences become apparent and I am very thankful they are there. The world would be very boring and stagnant without those major differences.

PPS: Without women pushing men to improve infrastructure etc, men almost universally would not do it. Men need to be pushed and feel responsible. They are happy living in sloth. So, I suppose in Graysons situation with 3:1 sex ratio.... yea, lots of responsibility and probably not many dead beat men as they would be hen pecked in about 1 second flat.

tlb wrote:Seems to me that Grayson does have an external threat: Oyster Bay hurt them badly, as you mention in your post.

However that strike did not touch their orbital farms, so they should not have a problem feeding the population. Certainly putting domes over farms is important, because they are easier and cheaper to operate than the orbitals; but need not have the highest priority. Do we know anything about genetic mods to their farm animals to survive a heavy metal environment? Seems as though there must have been at the same time as the early human mods.

Women might not generally choose construction, trades or engineering in peacetime; that is not true in wartime, particularly now that societal attitudes on a woman's place are changing. Remember Rosie the Riveter.

Given the Grayson belief in the Test, they might not be as war weary as the USA in the midst of the Vietnam War; when feelings were made worse by the belief that US leaders did not know what they were doing (as McNamara admitted in his book).

How does the Hundred Years War compare in intensity to the Thirty Years War? Was it only 30% as intense?
Edit: changed treat to threat.

Relax wrote:Feeding Grayson and their population boom was explained in a book. Forget which one. Essentially due to Grayson Sky Domes ability to Dome over entire farms, it is now FAR MORE economical to build ground based farms and they are far more reliable and safer. You bet your bottom Austin Credit, that when $$$ sense sees a massive opportunity heaven and earth get out of the way to see something happen. (Frankly I think the Grayson SKY DOMES thing was way overblown for plot reasons as you can do the exact same thing with greenhouses built today. Look at Netherlands for instance. Grayson would have been FORCED to turn their food production, especially their leafy greens and other vegetables, into greenhouses as they uptake large quantities of minerals. Your grains like Wheat, corn do not(as much). Rice on the other hand DOES. SO, I highly doubt you will find a grain of rice anywhere on Grayson and the simple massive problem that rice is horrifically labor intensive to cultivate.

The good thing is that all of those very very very very expensive orbital farms can easily be turned into orbital manufacturing centers and housing.

PS: Light Manufacturing is not the same thing as construction or engineering... Yes, many jobs appeal to women and fits their inclination and are superior to men. Getting sweaty, muddy and grubby on a daily basis isn't one of those inclinations out of a very rare bird. Find me one single woman in heavy construction anywhere on the planet earth whose father does not own the business..... I will be waiting. It is like girls who are good at team sports when growing up. Almost universally they have older brothers who they followed in their footsteps. Find a softball/basketball team and take an informal poll by just talking with their parents. Then sort by those who are not there just to socialize. I did when my own daughter went to play. It is eye opening. The older I get the more the differences become apparent and I am very thankful they are there. The world would be very boring and stagnant without those major differences.

PPS: Without women pushing men to improve infrastructure etc, men almost universally would not do it. Men need to be pushed and feel responsible. They are happy living in sloth. So, I suppose in Graysons situation with 3:1 sex ratio.... yea, lots of responsibility and probably not many dead beat men as they would be hen pecked in about 1 second flat.

How did you manage to mess up the quote structure so badly after complaining about someone else (ldwechsler) ? If you use the preview button it would be impossible to miss!

I understand that a domed farm is better, that has been known since Flag in Exile; but it need not be the highest priority, because the orbitals were untouched. Certainly they will be retired on a schedule, but earlier you made it seen as though the process would be all consuming.
You also said there was NO external threat and I pointed out that Oyster Bay included an attack that wiped out their entire ship building industry. Instead you choose to talk about notions of division of work by the gender. Leaving aside whether those ideas are true in the world where we live; there is no reason to assume they are true in the Honorverse. Somewhere in the books Honor notes the percentage of women working in her Grayson shipyards. In the books very little construction or engineering is muddy, grubby or sweaty.

Here is the quote from Mission of Honor, chapter 36:

"They don't seem to have used as many of those graser-armed remote platforms of theirs," Yanakov continued, as if he'd heard her thoughts, "but they used a lot more missiles and kinetic strikes to compensate. According to the Office of Shipbuilding, at least ninety-six percent of the physical plant was destroyed outright or damaged beyond repair. And, as I say, personnel losses were near total."
Honor nodded, and fresh shadows gathered in her eyes. She'd been one of the major investors when Blackbird was built, and the economic loss was going to be a severe blow in a financial sense. That was totally immaterial to her, however, beside the human cost. Almost a third of the total workforce had been from Harrington Steading itself or employed by Skydomes. And over eighteen percent of those employees had been women—a stupendous percentage for patriarchal Grayson, even now.
"The only good news is that Blackbird was far enough away from the planet that we didn't take any collateral damage to the orbital habitats or farms. Or"—his eyes met hers—"to the planet itself, of course."

Thought this was obvious, but: Oyster bay "threat" has nothing to do with ship numbers or SDP requirements. Thought I rather covered that emphatically mentioning the building of true modern forts. Those forts are to house/shield defense network(sensors, CM's, C&C) which due to FTL and 4 drive system defense missiles makes your fleet as your defense near superfluous. Now since your system has more real estate than a single planet,blackbird for instance, you still need a system defense force to beat the offenders either into your defenses, or shoo them away completely.

Near term the alliance is not worried about offensive firepower. That have that in oodles. What the need is information and better sensors to detect spider drives. Neither of those requires massive fleets. Grayson essentially has no interstellar commerce. So, outside of being good allies and helping patrol the spaceways to build up goodwill, or in this case, maintain goodwill and standing in the alliance, they have no true need for light combatants either.

Long term, everyone will have FTL guided missiles which makes inner system defense fort networks even MORE needful and degrades SD's to offensive assault only. Unless one places the SD's in the role of forts adding bucket loads of armor to the top/bottom that right now they do not have.

As for the food part..... Appears you missed the logic train.

Graysons have piss poor health because of their piss poor environment making them drink piss poor water eat piss poor food which gives them PISS POOR HEALTH. Orbital farms supply only a pittance of their food requirements. Super Vast majority is grown on Grayson. Out in the open. Thus anyone wanting to improve Graysons life, decrease overhead costs(orbital farms), toxic dust problems, rain leeching, need to get 100% of their food grown in greenhouses ASAP. Once food production is moved under a roof, manpower requirements just to sustain life on Grayson drops by a massive extent. HINT: Our own modern world is predicated on our ability to easily grow food, transport food, freeing up insane amounts of manpower for other endeavors, like posting useless drivel on the internet about Amazing fantasy worlds.

Appears you still do not know the difference between heavy industry and manufacturing. Assembly line manufacturing can employ anyone. No reason that 18% shouldn't be 75% for assembly line stuff.

PS. Sorry, edited bad on the quote... obviously

The reason pods have limited life on the hull is because they are not designed for that. It’s an engineering issue to solve.

I am bringing together remarks from your earlier post together with this latest one, so we can examine what you have written better.

Relax wrote:3) Their entire war plant got destroyed
3a) Logistics is a MASSIVE problem as they have none
3b) Must be rebuilt from scratch. This requires DECADES in lost personnel and plant rebuilding.

Grayson is Tired but on an upward trajectory.
Grayson has no true external threat.

Relax wrote: Thought this was obvious, but: Oyster bay "threat" has nothing to do with ship numbers or SDP requirements.

I have not written about SDP requirements, but am trying to get you to reconcile the statements that Grayson has no true external "threat" with the statement that their entire war plant got destroyed. How did that happen, if not by an external threat?

Relax wrote:2e) They are just starting to build Domes for farming... Let you do the simple math of area required to feed 4 BILLION people and the immense insane amount of manhours required to build the structure, let alone decontaminate the soil and all of the filtration systems required. This alone will tie up the entire Grayson industrial plant for the next 2 decades.

Relax wrote:Graysons have piss poor health because of their piss poor environment making them drink piss poor water eat piss poor food which gives them PISS POOR HEALTH. Orbital farms supply only a pittance of their food requirements. Super Vast majority is grown on Grayson. Out in the open. Thus anyone wanting to improve Graysons life, decrease overhead costs(orbital farms), toxic dust problems, rain leeching, need to get 100% of their food grown in greenhouses ASAP. Once food production is moved under a roof, manpower requirements just to sustain life on Grayson drops by a massive extent. HINT: Our own modern world is predicated on our ability to easily grow food, transport food, freeing up insane amounts of manpower for other endeavors, like posting useless drivel on the internet about Amazing fantasy worlds.

From Flag in Exile, chapter 5:

Food production had always been a major limiting factor on Grayson's population. Not even its natives could survive for long on vegetables grown in unreclaimed soil, and keeping farmland decontaminated was a nightmare task, so over two-thirds of their food was grown in space. The orbital farms were far more productive, on a volume-for-volume basis, than any dirt-side farm, but building them had been hideously expensive, especially with pre-Alliance technology. Historically, simply feeding its people had soaked up something like seventy percent of Yeltsin's gross system product, but that was about to change. Sky Domes' projections indicated that food could be produced in domed farms—essentially nothing more than vast, self-contained greenhouses—for little more than two-thirds of the orbital habitats' ongoing production costs and with far smaller startup investments.
The consequences, both economically and for the population the system could support, would be stupendous. Sky Domes wasn't merely going to make Grayson cities nicer; it was going to eliminate factors which had forced Grayson to practice draconian population control throughout its history, and only the influx of Manticoran technology and Honor's own financial backing had made it possible.

From Mission of Honor, chapter 36:

"The only good news is that Blackbird was far enough away from the planet that we didn't take any collateral damage to the orbital habitats or farms. Or"—his eyes met hers—"to the planet itself, of course."

How many years have passed between chapter 5 in Flag in Exile and chapter 36 in Mission of Honor? It appears that Grayson has had other priorities than devoting all their resources to replacing their orbital farms with domed farms as you stated they should. Orbital farms that produce 66% of their food needs, not the pittance that you wrote.

Relax wrote:Appears you still do not know the difference between heavy industry and manufacturing. Assembly line manufacturing can employ anyone. No reason that 18% shouldn't be 75% for assembly line stuff.

Relax wrote:like posting useless drivel on the internet about Amazing fantasy worlds.

So ship building is NOT heavy industry? You are free to think whatever you want about gender capabilities in our world; but to extrapolate those thoughts to the Honorverse requires some text evidence. But perhaps you are right in saying that RFC has constructed an Amazing fantasy world and we are just posting useless drivel on the internet.

tlb wrote:I am bringing together remarks from your earlier post together with this latest one, so we can examine what you have written better.
[quotlike posting useless drivel on the internet about Amazing fantasy worlds.

So ship building is NOT heavy industry? You are free to think whatever you want about gender capabilities in our world; but to extrapolate those thoughts to the Honorverse requires some text evidence. But perhaps you are right in saying that RFC has constructed an Amazing fantasy world and we are just posting useless drivel on the internet.[/quote]

A lot of confusion. There are not four billion people on Grayson. There almost have to be a lot fewer because of the environment.

Second, Grayson was hit in Oyster Bay. And it did rebuild. The new tech Honor brought in did a lot of good. Also keep in mind even though it has not been mentioned is that even now we know
how to grow enormous amounts of food in small high tech areas. Check out the Netherlands and Israel for more info. That would be incorporated into Grayson.

Grayson is considered a full partner by the current government. They will have a particularly huge high tech base as time goes on as the quarter of a million refugees from Grayson retire and settle down.

I would not worry over that world.

ldwechsler wrote:A lot of confusion. There are not four billion people on Grayson. There almost have to be a lot fewer because of the environment.

I found the remark that prompted this remark. According to The Honorverse Companion: as of 1921 PD the population of Grayson was 3 billion and expanding after a period of stagnant growth.

Relax wrote:Let you do the simple math of area required to feed 4 BILLION people

kzt wrote:The reason pods have limited life on the hull is because they are not designed for that. It’s an engineering issue to solve.

The Honorverse excludes extension cords and power plugs.

If you recall Flag In Exile, the PRN brought along freighters because they were planning to destroy the GSN then carve up Grayson's orbital industrial platforms to extract all of the high technology fabrication stuff the Manticore gave them then cart it off back to Haven.

Why are Manticore, Grayson, not raiding SL core worlds to steal their orbital industrial platforms so they can rebuild faster.

TFLYTSNBN wrote:If you recall Flag In Exile, the PRN brought along freighters because they were planning to destroy the GSN then carve up Grayson's orbital industrial platforms to extract all of the high technology fabrication stuff the Manticore gave them then cart it off back to Haven.

Why are Manticore, Grayson, not raiding SL core worlds to steal their orbital industrial platforms so they can rebuild faster?

Because of the Harrington Plan? They want to limit actual damage to the core worlds to just the disruption of trade caused by Lacoon. That way it would be easier to re-establish peaceful ties, if they can fracture the League.