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Did the MBS corner the market on trade?

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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by cthia   » Mon Oct 26, 2020 8:18 am

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Jonathan_S wrote:
tlb wrote:We have discussed this before and there were people insistent that there must be manufacturing planet-side. I do not have evidence in either direction, but I am certain there were others who could quote from RFC that this was not the case. Neither were there other stations of a private nature that Oyster Bay had not impacted.

Please let us known if I remembered that incorrectly.

I also seem to recall those discussions about location of Manticore's industry (orbital vs planetary) as some very lengthy threads with lots of arguments with RFC explaining that for economic (most of the raw material came from space so only shipping down finished products was far more efficient) and environmental reasons almost all the heavy and even much of the light industry was orbital.
But I'm now guessing it predated my attempts to keep copies of RFC posts before they fell off the board. There is a post saved in the infodumps from April 13, 2010 - The impact of Oyster Bay on Manticoran and Grayson industry, and it was probably part of the arguments in those threads. (My oldest saved RFC post was from 2011 - and I believe the threads had likely petered out before then)

So despite all the keywords I could think of, and then skimming a fair bit of the cache, the only thing I really found about orbital industry in my cache of RFC posts was this tidbit from 2018
Sun Jun 17, 2018 10:55 pm Re: SPOILER end of the MA wrote:No, you are missing the point that the majority of industry, even in Verge systems, is located in space and that means infrastructure in their asteroid belt. In the Honorverse, planet-based industry is the exception, although a forward thinking systems with strategic concerns will build some of it at the bottom of a gravity well to give them a cushion in the event of a Yawata Strike scenario.

I did find a post from 2015 reminding folks that while Blackbird yards got destroyed, and with it most Grayson's primary modern industrial node, the older orbital industry in Grayson orbit survived; so they didn't take as large a hit to their industrial capacity as Manticore did.

But couldn't find any of the rest of his posts about orbital vs planetside industry that I believe did form part of what I recall as some quite lengthy threads.




And also - I blame you both ;) for flashbacks to various endless arguments over the last 9 years I got from skimming through that cache; for example about a return of frigates or special scout frigates back in 2011/2012 - so, so, many posts from RFC explaining why that wasn't going to happen and wasn't actually practical. :D

It is simply difficult to fathom. I can certainly understand the move to a greener planet less toxic emissions and planet poisoning industries. But that's putting all of your eggs in one basket. In one fell swoop, ALL of your industry can be destroyed. If that is the case, why is just the ability to build ships the only concern? Who are making toilets, roofing equipment, batteries, watches, furniture, windows, toasters, ovens, microwaves, refrigerators, toys . . .

Is Manticore importing all of those goods now?

Plus! As I've already mentioned. That's a huge percentage of your population in space every single hour of every single day. During war, evacuation of that population has to be an immense proposition and very annoying. Heck, the tactic of popping in and out of a system's periphery just to annoy them like Honor did simply must initiate an evacuation to be safe and responsible. And I can't see everyone being evacuated. 20% of Americans are in industry. If it is the same (but it's probably significantly higher) on Manticore whose population is, what, 3.8B, that's over 750M people needing evacuation during each battle or rumor or threat of battle. During war, production probably simply disappears from stops and starts.

A lot of the population should have been lost during Oyster Bay!



P.S. What's friggin wrong with friggin frigates? I'd think poorer planets would have to crawl before they can walk. :D

At any rate, frigs should be sent to the breakers. The forum's dead letter pastures for dead horses.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by tlb   » Mon Oct 26, 2020 9:46 am

tlb
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Jonathan_S wrote:And also - I blame you both ;) for flashbacks to various endless arguments over the last 9 years I got from skimming through that cache; for example about a return of frigates or special scout frigates back in 2011/2012 - so, so, many posts from RFC explaining why that wasn't going to happen and wasn't actually practical. :D

And now for a rousing chorus of
"Memories light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories of the way we were
...
Can it be that it was all so simple then
Or has time rewritten every line
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we?
Could we?".

In case you missed it, here is that earlier thread:
Retrofitting the RMN: A Saganami Island Assignment
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Mon Oct 26, 2020 10:20 am

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cthia wrote:P.S. What's friggin wrong with friggin frigates? I'd think poorer planets would have to crawl before they can walk. :D

At any rate, frigs should be sent to the breakers. The forum's dead letter pastures for dead horses.
:D
Nothing's especially wrong with them for poorer planets - if they need range and cruising endurance more than combat power/survivability. Having a few even for just for show the flag presence missions (beyond the effective range of the destroyers such a system could operate) could be quite useful; if they can't afford light cruisers to get both range and combat power.

The endless arguments, inspired by the Shrike-derived frigates Torch got, was people advocating loudly that top tier navies now needed bunches of updated frigates.
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by Brigade XO   » Mon Oct 26, 2020 1:51 pm

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Apparently the majority of the heavy manufacuting industries were located in space though not nessisarily on the three space stations.
Alot of less poluting or for various other reasons, some manufacturing was planetside. To borrow a line from somewhere: "It depends".
The extraction and refining industries (and things like scrapyards for spaceborn equipment etc) are primarily in space. On the other hand, obviously things like forest products (massive numbers of things) the agriculture on the majority of habitable planets (no Grayson is the exception not a norm), fisheries and similar industries are on the planet. Much of the equipment to work them might be- if not fully assembled- have many of their parts fabricated there.
If the three major stations were each 70km (or 70 miles) long, just exactly how much could be manufactured there? On the other hand, you might put arms and other weapons manufacture in seperate stations (and locations).
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Oct 27, 2020 1:14 am

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Brigade XO wrote:Apparently the majority of the heavy manufacuting industries were located in space though not nessisarily on the three space stations.
Alot of less poluting or for various other reasons, some manufacturing was planetside. To borrow a line from somewhere: "It depends".


Space-based industries make complete sense for space-based societies. Any colonisation effort probably starts with space, since that's where resources are more readily available. There are a lot of small rocks in an asteroid belt, small moons, and cometary halos to supply almost everything a colony needs to get started with. It doesn't even have to dig through mountains.

You probably start that before waking up most of your colonists. That way, you have industry and agriculture up and running for when they wake up and are hungry.

Plus all the environmental benefits of not polluting one's planet.

What doesn't make sense is to put all or almost all of the industry in a single station in each planet. But that's what RFC says happened.
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by cthia   » Tue Oct 27, 2020 5:48 am

cthia
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ThinksMarkedly wrote:
Brigade XO wrote:Apparently the majority of the heavy manufacuting industries were located in space though not nessisarily on the three space stations.
Alot of less poluting or for various other reasons, some manufacturing was planetside. To borrow a line from somewhere: "It depends".


Space-based industries make complete sense for space-based societies. Any colonisation effort probably starts with space, since that's where resources are more readily available. There are a lot of small rocks in an asteroid belt, small moons, and cometary halos to supply almost everything a colony needs to get started with. It doesn't even have to dig through mountains.

You probably start that before waking up most of your colonists. That way, you have industry and agriculture up and running for when they wake up and are hungry.

Plus all the environmental benefits of not polluting one's planet.

What doesn't make sense is to put all or almost all of the industry in a single station in each planet. But that's what RFC says happened.

Space based industries certainly make sense. Heck, the medical field prefers it because zero-g is perfect for R&D.

But putting all of a system's potential industry in space? That is simply reckless and short-sighted. Idle minds are the Devil's playground, what do the spouses and offspring left on planet do while the rest of the family are away?

And again, that is a quarter to a third of the population in space even if our own current model of 20% of the workforce is employed in industry. Undoubtedly for the MBS it is significantly higher.

That is a disaster brewing in the pot. The MAlign could have attacked and wiped out ALL industry along with up to a third of the population in one fell swoop! I'm not even sure it could have been characterised as an EE violation.

I understand the green aspect of it. The planet should be as healthy as a virgin waiting to be settled. But in the HV I wouldn't think it would be that critical. Smoke stack technology which dominated early man's factories now have benefit of HV technology. Factories should be able to operate as clean as a whistle. Nuclear energy is safe and efficient. Wastes are disposed of in space. And there's no more need to destroy mountains for resources. So what if materials have to be flown in from space. That should be cheaper than leveling and digging into a mountain.

@Tlb, you forgot one line in the song, Memories. "Should we?"

Yes! But I'll go sit in a corner like Baby and mind my own business.

What is a third or more of Manticore's population doing now? Commuting in the carpool lane, all roads leading to Bolthole? Heck, if the MA wants to find Bolthole, GET IN THE CARPOOL LANE!

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by tlb   » Tue Oct 27, 2020 8:30 am

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cthia wrote:@Tlb, you forgot one line in the song, Memories. "Should we?"

Yes! But I'll go sit in a corner like Baby and mind my own business.

I did not "forget", since I had to look the lyrics up. And I was having a hard time of it, until I finally remembered that the title of this particular song was not Memories, but was The Way We Were.
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by cthia   » Tue Oct 27, 2020 8:59 am

cthia
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tlb wrote:
cthia wrote:@Tlb, you forgot one line in the song, Memories. "Should we?"

Yes! But I'll go sit in a corner like Baby and mind my own business.

I did not "forget", since I had to look the lyrics up. And I was having a hard time of it, until I finally remembered that the title of this particular song was not Memories, but was The Way We Were.

But I thought you were alluding to the stanza Memories and those memories of the thread.

It's my kind of music. Without looking it up, I think it's the Carpenters. The lovely Karen Carpenter and her brothers.

Late Edit: I should have looked it up. It's Barbra Streisand.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by tlb   » Tue Oct 27, 2020 10:06 am

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cthia wrote:@Tlb, you forgot one line in the song, Memories. "Should we?"

Yes! But I'll go sit in a corner like Baby and mind my own business.

tlb wrote:I did not "forget", since I had to look the lyrics up. And I was having a hard time of it, until I finally remembered that the title of this particular song was not Memories, but was The Way We Were.

cthia wrote:But I thought you were alluding to the stanza Memories and those memories of the thread.

It's my kind of music. Without looking it up, I think it's the Carpenters. The lovely Karen Carpenter and her brothers.

Late Edit: I should have looked it up. It's Barbra Streisand.

You are right, that is why I quoted the lyrics; but to get the lyrics right, I had to look them up and to do that I had to remember the correct title.

The Carpenters were a trio, but only Richard was her brother; the other man was a friend. I think she had a wonderful voice; the question about the contralto singing voice brought up the nugget that she was a contralto with a 3 octave range. A friend suggested that she had a saccharine voice, but I very much disagree; her voice was great, but it was the songs that were often saccharine.
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Re: Did the MBS corner the market on trade?
Post by ThinksMarkedly   » Tue Oct 27, 2020 7:53 pm

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cthia wrote:Space based industries certainly make sense. Heck, the medical field prefers it because zero-g is perfect for R&D.

But putting all of a system's potential industry in space? That is simply reckless and short-sighted. Idle minds are the Devil's playground, what do the spouses and offspring left on planet do while the rest of the family are away?


No, it isn't. The planet is no more protected than the industries orbiting it. If someone can hit one, they can hit the other. If they can obtain local superiority to demand surrender of one, they can do the same for the other.

As for being away from family, this doesn't apply in the Honorverse. People frequently commute to orbit, because it's cheap. And besides, you don't need a lot of on-site workers: factories of the future are highly automated and can be mostly supervised from anywhere else within 10,000 km radius (that's a 33.3 ms lag time).

That is a disaster brewing in the pot. The MAlign could have attacked and wiped out ALL industry along with up to a third of the population in one fell swoop! I'm not even sure it could have been characterised as an EE violation.


It's as much a violation as a planetary target.

The mistake is to put all of it in a single station. That's a Single Point of Failure. Instead, if you have a lot of dispersed nodes, hundreds or thousands of them in orbit, the damage is minimised.
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