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.
Hmmm.... an excellent point. While I would have to say that still think eezo would come in different purities just by dint of the fact its mined and refined, I'll probably leave it as irrelevant at the ship building level for the most part, using the speed down scaling makes the costs go down a fair bit.
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.
I wanted a vague guesstimate of the order of magnitude I'd be seeing. When you gave world GDP growth I switched to that as it was much better.
The good old "pick something". It can be rather irritating can't it?
It and it's friend non-linear effects are a pain! Esp when its hard to get people to agree on things.
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.
Thing is for me is I went back and reread the early alliance history and the main reason for its founding was "Hostile Allies" in 2149. That lead to a fleet build up of ~200 warships from zero in nine years two to three of which are the super expense dreadnaught type (assumed to be the 800m Everest class). After 2157 when "Hostile Aliens" actually happened. After that they built up their fleet over 26 years at about the same rate (ish?) while keeping under the dreadnaught limit. I also assume that they upgraded the older ships.
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.
For the sake of simplicity I've been considering the SA as a collective unit. Doing it right we should subsection based on the SA and the member states, but I've just been thinking of all their militaries as one unit, much like we've been doing with the GDP.
Also link broken
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.
Four to five sounds right.
At 10% of their build cost per year in maintenance, as mentioned in one of your earlier posts, that puts the costs at:
For the sake of accuracy this maintenance cost may include basic operations costs, fuel, supplies, training munitions, etc. On the other hand there's the price of antimatter. Mind the Citadel has been producing it for a few hundred years so the price maybe lower then one would initially expect. The 10% is "Operating and Support Costs" and it can flux from 5-10% or so. Sorry should have made that clearer.
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...
There's a reason I setup a formula chain that started with near zero maintenance and maxed procurement and donated ten percent of the latter to the former each year.
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%
I think ops is to high personally as the 10% upkeep figure should actually cover a fair bit of that, but meh, pick something.
So at 35% of 1458 trillion the Alliance has 510 trillion to spend on procurement each year.
Using my 10% trade per year calculation and a 7.5% military budget I'm getting ~538 trillion in 2173 so sounds reasonable
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.
What makes it even worse is that the ratios are wrong. An SA fleet subdivides in flotillas with each flotilla being one cruiser and 4-6 frigates. I assume there is also a carrier flotilla and a dreadnaught one do basically the number of frigates should be around four times the number of other ships. That's why ratio the fleets at 1 dreadnaught, 1 carrier, 30-40 cruisers, 128-168 frigates. That and the fleets that fought at the battle of the citadel lost around 1/3 of their strength and a ships lost estimation got me about 10 cruisers. Carrier number might be +1, I've never seen a good argument for any number of carriers other then one per fleet. Hell only ~3-4 are listed!
The key thing is that the end budget needs to equal the fleets strength, plus some to account for losses/upgrades etc. Though losses may get payed back via reduced upkeep.
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.
Maybe, but part of the reason I considered it is that the figure stated wasn't the cost of the core it was quite explicitly the cost of the
eezo in the core. "A hundred and twenty billion credits of element zero" And the core is observed to be double the normal size.
But it an option.
I'd be rather surprised if even a quarter of the procurement budget is spent on new warships. There's non-combat logistical vehicles for ground/air/space, various services that go out to bid instead of being done in-house (IT services, etc), mercenaries private military contractors, property acquisitions, construction, etc. I could be wrong, but you might also be missing a lot of the non-combat personnel that goes into supporting a military, unless that falls under "Operations".
Some of it. The issue is that the costs you mention? They're irreverent. The US military spent 0.5 Million per soldier for everything all the stuff you mentioned and their gear, their pay, etc all of it. The armed forces of the combined SA? At the same rate only needs to spend 190 Trillion to match, That all the planetary warfare, support, housing, food, medical and other things covered. The SA budget were considering has 1,458 Trillion or more credits*. That's 1,268 Trillion credit for spending just on space. That needs to be spread out over procurement, R&D, support (Maintenance+Ops) and other. R&D is a ??? and so is other though having it take out ~20% is good (Still ~200 Trillion credits, and being inflation adjusted they have the same worth you'd expect!). Procurement and support for ships have an inverse relationship with each other one goes up the other goes down. Don't have any ships to maintain or run ops with? Build more. Lots of ships? Build less.
*In about three years you could by ever single of the ~390 million people in the SA's combined forces a Legionary armor and a Tiger. Fighters would take a bit longer. Around 25 years and everyone has a deep space fighter.
Editt: Math Fail
