No it's not, it's one level below. Super Heavy is level 6, currently all Avernus cities have Incredibly Heavy defenses (lvl 7) with the exception of psyker cities who have Ultra Heavy ones (lvl 8).
Embers in the Dusk: A Planetary Governor Quest (43k) | Page 3953
We're still listed as Super Heavy level 6 defenses.
Half the fleet we make goes to the Trust. For every warp ship they make they must make another for the trust. So they are helping the trust greatly in that way. While they are the largest shipyard in the trust Midguard and Avernus are still growing their as well as the colonial shipyards. It is similiar to the way Midgard provides more troops than everyone else. It is incredibly valuable but Midgard also has its own fleet.
I'm a little unclear on what you mean here.
Building a massive navy is why Vanaheim is contributing more than their fair share to the Trust though. No one else spends so much on ships the way they do. Troops aren't contributed at anywhere near the 50/50 split of ships, and Midgard throwing people at the problem isn't really at all comparable. Midgard has so many people they'd rather get rid of them than keep them, so it's no great expense for them to throw 20 billion people at a problem, I rather doubt they spend all that much on them.
Vanaheim spending so much on their fleet despite knowing that half of it will go to the Trust is a huge contribution. Whereas you look at someplace like Svartalfheim where they choose instead to spend on building up defenses which suffer no tithe at all. You can look at it from the perspective of how much a planet spends on defenses versus ships being how much they want to contribute to the Trust. The more they spend on defenses the less they contribute to the Trust. By spending itself into massive debt on ships, Vanaheim has contributed a huge amount to the Trust. By running a surplus and building up absurd defenses, Svartalfheim has focused on itself.
Troops are sort of a middle ground because they suffer a much smaller tithe than ships, but do have a tithe unlike defenses.
What I wil be proposing besides banking reform, is to raise the tithe, increase the rebate and to bring even more of the current core worlds military to be under the trust. The most expensive thing we have is that we are paying for the upkeep of our forces. Both the fleet and the hellguard cost significant amount. I believe that tithing more ships or tithing even more troops with revenues raised from taxes/tithe/levies would greatly help pay for the expansion we need with out putting too much of a financial burden on the core worlds but on the trust as a whole.
We need to grow the economy of not just the core worlds but the trust as a whole. In order to do that we need time and stability.
The Trust as a whole is in far larger debt than any individual member. Trying to offload our upkeep cost onto the Trust isn't going to work because they can afford it less than we can.
These is the end times while we are about to finish book one soon, us making it to the end is not guaranteed. It is why he has been so generous with everything.
Surviving any point is not guaranteed. However throwing away our future to ensure the now only ensures that we definitely die when the economy implodes later. Given we know there is a later, we can't afford that. We have to take risks now to avoid certain death later.
Don't higher ground defenses allow better defenses of Orbitals?
In every war we've had the ground defenses have contributed very little to defending the orbitals. It's there, but it's so minor it might as well not be.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Forces capable of defeating higher-level orbital defenses will have bigger, more powerful ground contingents. Meanwhile, sufficiently heavy ground defenses can hold off non-exterminatus orbital attack pretty much indefinitely, and are more likely to hold against ground forces long enough for reinforcements to arrive.
No it really doesn't work that way. It straight up means you need a bigger attack force to accomplish
anything against that planet. Whereas lower orbital defenses and higher ground defenses still means our enemies can land outside the cities and do whatever the fuck they want in the countryside outside the cities. This is really bad against both Chaos and Orks. Chaos because they can do rituals in the countryside that still give you a bad day even without ever assaulting your walls. Orks because it means they can start up an Ork ecosystem. Orbital defenses are actually especially effective against orks because they bring their transports in as capital ships rather than protecting them, so every ship you shoot down decreases their ground forces.
You're also assuming the enemy
won't exterminatus. We've been told you need at least some orbital control to execute an exterminatus, but you don't have to do anything to the ground defenses for that. Why wouldn't an enemy exterminatus a planet with tough ground defenses and lacking orbital defenses? This becomes even more dangerous when you consider expected chaos raids where they have no hope of holding the planet long term and just want to cripple us. They aren't going to be able to overwhelm even Heavy defenses before reinforcements arrive. Running around exterminatusing our colonies would cripple the Trust in short order in a way landing raiders and shooting at walls for a couple days before having to run away won't.
