Out of curiosity,
@NullVoid, is there a particular reason you think that Syndicate resilience and how to lower it is
less important than the three things you voted for? Remember, you don't have to vote for an exact copy of someone else's plan via copy-paste. Line-item votes are a good opportunity for us to use critical thinking, and this is a line-item vote not a plan vote.
__________________
@aeqnai,
@Nervos Belli ...
Looking at the US mobilization in more detail, and not just as abstract numbers, some trends stand out.
1) The classes of ship that boomed the most rapidly were amphibious craft, destroyer escorts, light patrol and auxiliary craft, and so forth- ships of less than 5000 tons or so. Escort carriers also boomed.
2) By contrast, the numbers of battleships, carriers, and cruisers (ships over about 10000 tons) increased only slowly until 1943, at which point the cruiser and (especially) carrier numbers grew quickly, though battleship numbers grew little no faster than they'd been growing before the war.
Why is this so? Because by and large...
War Mobilization Changes Things, Not Just Accelerates Them
This is an important concept. During wartime, people look at every part of a nation's industrial infrastructure and ask "what can this do for the war effort?"
The trick is, some kinds of infrastructure (like battleship-sized construction berths) are already working for the war effort. You can maybe accelerate them a bit, but not much- note how in the Biophage crisis, accelerating a ship's construction required the commitment of one of our limited number of 'teams.' We never actually did it, precisely because we didn't expect it to make much difference. We MIGHT have done it if we'd had one new explorer almost ready... but that was back in the days when we had like five
Excelsiors total, so having one more made a big difference.
So some things aren't going to change much in a state of war.
What you really see is three major changes.
One, factories and so on that used to run slowly start running more quickly, as labor and resources are poured into those facilities at the maximum physically possible rate. This is great for military goods that have to be mass-produced and that the military will be using in the thousands (tanks, planes, rifles, photon torpedoes). It is NOT helpful for things that are probably already being produced at literally the maximum possible rate because the entire economy runs on them (electrical power, oil, dilithium).
Two, things that
used to be used for peaceful purposes get repurposed for war use. For example, the US built a huge number of escort carriers during WWII. Why? Because an escort carrier is basically a big freighter with a runway built on top. It's not fast like a 'real' carrier, it's nowhere near as large or capable... But if you can build a freighter in a given shipyard, you can build an escort carrier instead, in about the same amount of time. So a lot of US civilian shipyards, in addition to running faster due to the war, could be easily repurposed to build escort carriers. The result? Escort carrier spam!
Three, there is a tendency to ruthlessly focus on projects that will make a difference to the outcome of the war. For example, the Royal Navy canceled a lot of battleship production in 1939 and 1940. That sounds like insanity- until you reflect that Britain was in a desperate struggle for survival. In particular they were fighting German air attacks and U-boats... And battleships that wouldn't be finished until 1944 or so weren't going to help them win that specific fight. Even after they were finished, Germany didn't have many battleships of its own, so there was a high risk of new British battleships just sitting around with nothing to do. Waste of time. Therefore, the British battleships were canceled, so that resources could instead be committed to something that would matter to whether or not Britain could win the war.
Now, I have to go for at least a few minutes, so I won't have time to talk about the implications of all this right now. I hope that people agree that these are the three main things that happen during war mobilization.
My views on what we can expect from war mobilization flow out of the things I say in this post.
