Also, batteries are very relevant to the problem of machines, because having all the pumped hydro storage in the world doesn't help much for purposes of getting your car or flying drone to run. What matters there is being able to cram energy into a storage medium into the chassis that is competitive in weight, bulk, and safety when compared to the fuel tank of an internal combustion engine.
I'd imagine it mainly being a cargo thing, and showing up most interestingly as a foreign thing- as in "this is how to get those 150-ton wind turbine nacelles get delivered to us from New York or California."
now I haven't actually read this page fully, but it mentions a 600.000 suitable locations. And I remember reading a couple other articles mentioning that in the last year or two there have been a LOT of potentially valid locations found that contradicts the "we maxed out on good locations" previous conclusion.
As far as I understand many of these findings have been relatively recent (last couple of years), so it's not that weird you missed it.
But there the issue becomes that the CFC is constantly issuing loud and specific announcements about their detailed plans to take extensive and specific measures to A) remove the infrastructure situation that gives airships their niche, and B) prepare for a total-mobilization existential war within the decade. Meaning that while it is a short-term boon that Johnson might welcome, foreign investors will need to accept an extravagant amount of risk and market volatility.
I was more imagining that some foreign outfit that already operates cargo airships might try to form contracts with us to handle specific kinds of airlift operations. Like hiring moving vans, not like building or operating your own or buying a huge fleet of moving vans yourself.But there the issue becomes that the CFC is constantly issuing loud and specific announcements about their detailed plans to take extensive and specific measures to A) remove the infrastructure situation that gives airships their niche, and B) prepare for a total-mobilization existential war within the decade. Meaning that while it is a short-term boon that Johnson might welcome, foreign investors will need to accept an extravagant amount of risk and market volatility.
Not to say that nobody will. Where there's a dollar, somebody will grab it, and at least some people will put money on you failing to close the market niche. But I don't see swarms of airships on the horizon from a dozen competing companies attempting to win your favor with low prices in your future, not that I imagine you were expecting any.
That was what I meant, yes. To summarize, I've some experience in how the travel industry works, and while they accept a high degree of volatility in their operations, they try to mitigate as much as possible, and generally look warily upon markets where the niche for their operations existing at all is going to be a question of what month and year it is in any given region; this is why travel costs are so brutally seasonal, and those variations are predictable. Cargo is different in some ways, but they still operate very expensive assets and don't want to accept the risk of those assets having to be continually retasked as the market conditions that enable them to operate balloon and collapse on as rapid a pace as you are eagerly signaling you want to achieve. They want stability. Instability costs money, and if it costs them money, they're gonna make it cost you money, where they think the risk is worth it at all.
True.
Given Victoria's status as a nation that has an easy time importing modern arms from Russia if they ask for it, I think this mentality is deeply counterproductive.
what about the US they can more then afford to do that IRL
I don't understand what your question means or how it connects to our situation. Could you clarify?
they can afford to do only focus on the war machine at the expense of the workforce and civilian population in real life if they really want to
But that's b/c they got so massive by branching out their focus and had a shit ton of trade partners. We aren't the USA, we do not have the same economic and industrial power. Trying to go all in on the military is going to set us up to be like the USSR.
Yeah. For pumped hydro storage you need a place where water can rise or fall by a long distance while moving only a short distance sideways. Preferably a place where there are large natural basin-shapes in the area's bedrock. You get that in inland areas of mountains and badlands, not near the coast.
Without ambitious civilian projects, we will likely lack the capacity to conquer Victoria unless Russia decides to let us.
The US has not truly focused on its war machine at the expense of the civilian population since the end of the World War Two mobilization- that is to say, not in your lifetime or mine.
There is a fatal flaw in your strategy: An educated workforce is a vital part of wartime production. Putting an economy on a wartime footing requires a lot of rationalization of production processes, a lot of new production lines to be opened, not to mention a lot of construction and enginnering work. All of which works way better when your workers actually know what they are doing and you have a large number of engineers to put at problems.
Simon, building a strong economy is part of optimizing our war machine. Or to be more precise, building up an educated work force and the heavy industry to sustain high consumption of consumables [ammunition, fuel, shells] is absolutely vital.
I don't think anyone has argued building our society around only war. Ikacprzak has explicitly argued for getting the necessary capital [presumably heavy industry] for the war. I would agree our economic strategy should also improve our civilian economy, I would consider much of the industrialization spending to be a kind of indirect military spending, since it correlates to our ability to mobilize and fight protracted wars. With this in mind, I think the argument for the primacy of military related investment is clear. We will fight an existential conflict in the near future against a well armed and modernized opponent. This is the situation in which you invest highly into anything that improves military performance, since the price for insufficient investment is death. Our economy needs to be maximized for war, since any long-term prospect of the economy or state depends on our victory.
The idea that we can get by with a functional economy that imports more tonnage of arms than of capital goods runs into the same problems that trying to wage war with an uneducated workforce does. It falls apart. You need machine tools and electric generators and rolling stock for the railroads and chemical industry equipment and a thousand other things to run a war economy, and all of THAT has to be imported at least as much as guided missiles do.
You are over-focusing on specific narrow periods of history, and so missing the point of the analysis.
I think you are mistaken on this part. Our international trade routes are not secure. The current ability to trade internationally will last until the Victorians are willing to risk conflict, and the Mississippi is yet to be secured. Our access to imports can be interrupted at any time in the next few years. And even if we secure that route, it's uncertain how much we can get trough it. Russia will almost certainly try to keep shipping trough the Caribbean on the low end.
I think your analysis is flawed: The Japenese military was highly effective until the launched too many wars of conquest and were embargoed by the USA. The faltering comes from trying to take on two great Asian naval powers and being starved of vital resources, not from the economy being underdeveloped. Good electronics are useless if you start running out of fuel for your ships and rubber for modern equipment. Crucially, economic investment doesn't fix that. No matter how much you invest into the 1930s Japanese economy, you can't conjure up huge oil and rubber deposits out of nothing. Your suggestion of "build a strong economy and invest in workforce training" is unrelated to the major problems of maintaining a functional japanese war economy.
I struggle to see the applicability of economic footing of a superpower engaging in a global struggle for influence when compared to us. We will engage in one very important war in the future in our region, not a cold war against a distant superpower. Our first concern this decade is "will our economy be prepared enough for the war", not "will we have sufficient economic growth indicators to keep with our rival". To use an imperfect analogy for our position: We are WW1 France, and Victoria is Germany. Hence, our primary national concern is "survive the rematch".
While there are benefits, I'm going to caution against fishing for unexpected benefits to the detriment of our industrialization and military development. Nation who don't maintain high military spending in favor of social spending don't tend to better at waging war [case and point, interwar France]. You can make an argument for a beneficial downstream effects of social spending, but the key question isn't "is there any benefit" but "what comparative advantage would be gained by spending on industry and military". The box is there for a reason.
By the same token we cannot rely on ongoing import of arms during wartime, by the same argument and for the same reasons. Indeed, less so, because the civilian economy relies more heavily on sheer bulk of imports and thus makes water traffic the most important, whereas things like guided missiles could reasonably be air-freighted to us in useful quantities if our allies on this continent wanted to help us with that.
"The Japanese military was highly effective until they launched too many wars and were embargoed" is another way of saying "the Japanese military was equal to the task of bullying a third-rate military power." Which, yes, it was. This is not relevant. The underlying problem was that Japan could not win a war with the US despite a very long string of early victories, because it simply was not grounded in a civilian economy sufficient to the task. Even a nation like Britain would have posed enormous difficulties for Japan in the long run had Britain not been spending nearly all their available efforts fighting Germany, which was much closer, much richer, and much more of a direct threat. The problem, again, is that you cannot really turn a second-rate economic power into a first-rate military power simply by the power of spending really hard and cutting out all the butter in favor of maximum guns.
There is a difference between arguing that we need to spend 4% of GDP and not 2% so that we'll be prepared, and arguing that we need to spend 20% and not, say, 7% for the same reason.
