Anyway, I'm not the nut that said the Normandy's core was "120 billion credits of element zero". However there is an option that helps a lot. Eezo I would suggest comes in "grades" as there is an unrefined and refined version and while its annoying to mine the cost of actually refining it without causing a detonation* is what jacks ups the piece so much.
I'm not really sure that Eezo grades is needed. Having military vessels use over-sized cores to compensate for their increased relative mass as well as their higher speed and endurance requirements more then works.
We know that the peak for FTL travel is 15LY/day but that's like saying the fastest aircraft travels at 3,500km/hr. It's true but nothing commercial goes anywhere near that speed.
Let's say a commercial craft travels 5LY/day. That means over a two day trip, within the 50 average drive endurance, they can travel 10LY. There are
nine different solar systems within 10LY of Earth, two of which (Alpha Centari and Luhman 16) are suspected to have planets.
Now throw in a single discharge, bringing it up to 4 days, and suddenly there are over 50 solar systems, 5 of which are confirmed to have planets and another 7 are suspected.
So it's easy to see civilian ships having much smaller drives. One third the speed means their drives would be at
least one third the size and possibly more since it's "exponential".
Throw in the lighter mass and lower endurance (50 hours is only the average) and the price probably falls more within the reasonable range.
I considered the GDP of only the SA's "Big five" UNAS (United North American States) , EU (European Union), CPF (Chinese People's Federation), NRF (New Russian Federation), and UIR (United Indian Republic), the last two being one either added by previous GMs or me. Then I assumed that they where all high tech and high GDP and just took the US's ~50,000 GDP per capita projected it with a 2.2% growth rate 150 years out and assumed that the nations covered ~50% of the population (6b).
That strikes me as a rather dangerous assumption. While we don't know how the trend will go in the future modern day statistics show that the more advanced a nation the lower the birthrate and population growth are.
They likely have a lot smaller percentage of the population then that. The USA, EU, Canada, and Russian come to 1,008,680,441 out of ~7,210,000,000 which is a mere 14%. Now adding China and India does bring that up to 50% however that's because India is in the middle of and China was "recently" undergoing a population boom. In a hundred years time their relative populations would have dropped significantly as more developing nations hit that tipping point which causes a population boom.
In the end though its does quite fall into the "pick something" category as you mentioned before.
The good old "pick something". It can be rather irritating can't it?
I think we've chatted about this before, there are sort of two issues here. 5% is well "peace time" spending. From what I can find using the US as an example 40% is peak wartime (WWII*), with 20% for WWI, early cold war status is 10%. I'm pretty sure the SA's rapid build up is more cold war-ish then peace time. Also there's an interesting difference if you look at the inflation adjusted spending numbers, not the percentage of GDP, the US is actually spending more then ever on the Military, even if the percentage of GDP has gone down, in part because the GDP has gone up so much.
*Worth noting that the US economy was tanked so, this is maybe a bit higher than normal
I do remember that discussion now that you mention it. You can easily make arguments both ways. On one hand the Alliance got smacked in the face by "Hostile Aliens" and the way they've been treated on the galactic stage hasn't really done much to mitigate that. On the other hand there is a massive land grab going on and supporting that along with the various diplomatic missions to solidify the Alliance's position would be a massive strain on the budget, reducing the money that can be spent on the military.
I kinda got the feeling in game that a lot of people felt the Alliance wasn't spending enough on the military, with that been the reason it was so overstretched, so I tend to favor the latter approch although the former works for me as well.
Once again non-linearity* strikes! As we're using inflation adjusted numbers (i think?) we can take the military spending per person (~$109,753) and scale it up for the 3% of population in the military which is around 390 million people. Which means the military budget for personnel needs to be 42.8 trillion far less then the 326.592 trillion suggested above. Making it a mere 2.9% or so of the budget, housing should also be de-valued to the point of irrelevancy (0.0598%). So that's 43.3% on procurement, I'm not touching R&D or Construction, though I'd bet Construction might change, space building is weird.
You raise some good counter points here. So lets look at the sort of costs that could be expected.
First off is the cost per soldier. For simplicity's sake I'll round it up to 110,000cr per soldier. Going off
past estimations the Systems Alliance Military (SAM) has roughly twelve million soldiers at any time.
As I calculated over here supporting a standing twelve million soldiers and training 2.4 million new soldiers every year costs about three trillion and 840 billion respectively each year for a combined yearly cost of 3,840 billion credits.
While we don't know how many ships the Alliance has right now it's reasonable to assume they have at least five of their eight fleets going by the descriptions for each fleet on the wiki.
Each fleet has a dreadnaught heading it and an unknown number of other ships. So I'm just going to fall back on the out of date Fleets tab:
Carriers - 12
Crusiers (Heavy) - 56
Crusiers (Light) - 448
Frigates - 1,008
Fighters - 64,000+
At 10% of their build cost per year in maintenance, as mentioned in one of your earlier posts, that puts the costs at:
Dreadnaughts - 5 * 0.1 * 20,592,680,000,000
Carriers - 12 * 0.1 * 20,592,680,000,000 * 0.5
Crusiers (Heavy) - 56 * 0.1 *13,795,770,000,000
Crusiers (Light) - 448 * 0.1 * 2,573,960,000,000
Frigates - 1,008 * 0.1 * 40,390,000,000
Fighters - 64,000 * 0.1 * 100,000,000
I'm assuming the fighters are all Scimitars for simplicity. This comes out to:
Dreadnaughts - 10,296,340,000,000
Carriers - 12,355,608,000,000
Crusiers (Heavy) - 77,256,312,000,000
Crusiers (Light) - 115,313,408,000,000
Frigates - 4,071,312,000,000
Fighters - 640,000,000,000
Total = 219,932,980,000,000cr
So the Alliance is looking at ~220
trillion credits in maintenance every year with their current fleet.
Damn!
Admittedly that is only 15% of their budget but
still...
So I'm thinking their budget would end up been something along the lines of:
Maintenance - 15%
Operations - 30%
R&D - 15%
Procurement - 35%
Other - 5%
So at 35% of 1458 trillion the Alliance has 510 trillion to spend on procurement each year.
Assuming they keep to a ratio of 1:9:18 for HC:LC:FR then the could buy:
36 Heavy Cruisers, 324 Light Cruisers, and 648 Frigates per year.
Those numbers do seem rather high. More math is clearly required.
*I'm really stating to hate it.
Everyone does.
These are reasonable enough I think that x10 cover a lot of differences between a sub and spaceship. The space shuttle is only about half as long and cost 1.7 billion a pop. I shall take the numbers under consideration, though we'll have to drop the GDP and or procurement budgets as if we us these as I'll get to in a quote. Still means cores cost a mint and are over 50% of a ship's value. Pirate would want to take ships not cargo or passengers barring VIPs.
Assuming of course that they are hitting Warships. Eezo load outs on civilian ships would be a hell of a lot lower.
You know. I'm starting to think we should just ignore the whole 120 billion credit core, or rather just assume it's an extreme outlier due to R&D focuses on seeing what they can do rather then cost efficiency, and just pick more reasonable numbers.
