Had this unfinished in a tab for the last couple weeks. So finishing and posting:
Okay, lots to unpack here so I'll just hit the basics.
Taking your examples:
The F15 Eagle is also a 1970s plane, but it doesnt fit the aesthetic, so it was never an option
The F22 was designed in the 1980s. The Super Hornet is actually the newest design there, from the 1990s.
For Victoria, the esthetic matters as much as everything else. But the aesthetic still had to bend to practicalities.
Retroculture did not allow for a professional army, and lionized the citizen-soldier.
Until it proved impractical for their ambitions and those of their patrons, and that was quietly dropped.
They had one, one armored division with T-34s. Thats a lot, but even they did not try to operate them across their army.
The Christian Marine Corps, those gallant defenders of the Victorian spirit, had 3 divisions, but they did not operate T-34s.
They operated T-55s and BMP-1s and BTR-60s. Old designs, but significantly in advance of anything else in Victoria itself or east of the Mississippi; you can still find modern European militaries from Greece to Poland operating BMP-1s today.
Victoria lies, all the time. To others, to itself.
As COVID painfully proved,
Had to stop on this.
As someone who has actually seen people die because their families couldnt afford the then-equivalent of 25 cents worth of medication? COVID, for all its unprecedented nature in the modern US, is nowhere what you would actually see in a Third World pandemic situation.
Or in a post-Collapse US which has, IRL, 37 million people with diabetes and 8.4 million people who require insulin.
A population that has become intimately re-acquainted with watching people die of preventable disease generally has very different opinions about that sort of thing, as opposed to people who still have the option of hospital in a society where health privacy rules apply, and so their fellow travellers dont get to actually watch and hear and smell them die at firsthand.
Ketamine is totally better than ether or chloroform, I said as much earlier. But it's the drug of Vietnam,
There is no indication that Victoria has made any such associations between pharmaceuticals and politics.
Medicine is not a political issue for them, and more an economic one.
Remember that while Retroculture bears a lot of resemblance to modern far-right ideology?
They are not the same thing.
They wont necessarily make the same decisions.
To give the original books a very, very small amount of credit, I hear that they do consider modern medicine important...but they also claim that Victoria invented cold fusion and had zeppelins with magical EMP.
^^^
What you're missing here, IMO, is the depth of the inferiority complex that those claims represent: the same need to be super-special that pervades most of Victorian ideology. Its the exact same impetus that drives them to characterize American and Canadian communities as "orks".
Secure nations dont need that shit.
The same Vics also adopted showy expensive megaprojects like the Fundy Bay tidal power plants that required cutting-edge 21st century technology and large scale construction to pull off. And this was despite massively de-industrializing New England so the added power wasnt necessary even before they conquered Quebec and its >37GW hydropower network.
Now for the real stuff: the nurses.
See Forgothrax, who explains this a lot better than me.
From my understanding despite all the disadvantages you listed the general consensus on how a war between Singapore and Malaysia would go is "not good for Malayasia". All those disadvantages don't stop the professional military of a wealthy city state from being enough to either outright defeat there larger land based rival or if not at least make sure the costs of victory are too high for war to ever be considered.
Everything you stated about military procurement only counts if FCNY is only willing to buy top of the line and brand new. If FCNY is willing to settle for gear a generation old that's been sitting in a storage warehouse for a decade thier options are much much more signicant. Most countries don't maintain full war time numbers 24/7. They shrink there army during peacetime to a officer/NCO heavy smaller army configuration. This allows it to be rapidly expanded in the event of an invasion by an enemy nation. In order to do that though large amounts of material reserves must be maintained. One cannot rapidly expand one's army to respond to a invasion if one had to produce all thier gear fresh.
No, strongly disagree.
Tensions and potential threat determine the size of your military.
We have had the benefit of living through decades of relatively lower political tensions IRL.
The Victoriaverse is NOT a low tensions era.
UK defense spending between 1980-1990 was ~4-5% of GDP; expect that the EU probably matches that as an average, with certain countries(see Poland) regularly exceeding it.
In a Cold War-type situation where the Russian Empire has already invaded and conquered multiple nations, and generally acts with opportunistic abandon, there's noone selling you their reserves; they might need them at short notice.
As for weapons, you are not just buying a weapons platform, you are buying training, ammunition and spare parts.
You are buying ongoing updates and compatibility testing as other manufacturers roll out weapons that can counter yours, and the makers turn out upgrades in turn.
Which is why its generally better for you to buy a currentgen weapons system thats being built and maintained and upgraded, than something that has end of lifed and is in depots.
You WANT stuff that comes off active assembly lines for both strategic security and logistical reasons.
Back in the Cold War, there were tens of thousands of military vehicles across Europe and in depots.
West Germany alone had two thousand Leopard 2 tanks, plus several thousand more Leopard 1s in reserves. The US Army didnt drop below 2 million during the Cold War, but its around 1.4 million now despite a much larger population to draw from.
So I have actually been thinking on the naval problem specifically and I don't actually think its a problem.
Blue water navies are the most expensive military arm in the world, with the longest setup time for construction and operating infrastructure, and with the longest lead time on acquisitions. Fighter aircraft, specifically cutting-edge jet engines, require the highest tech, but navies take the longest time just to get the equipment.
It takes the Chinese, the world's fastest warship builders, roughly 9-18 months to build a 5-7000 ton frigate; the first ship of the Type 054B-class frigate began construction in late 2022, and began builder's trials in Jan 2024.
It takes everyone else at least 18-24 months. Usually longer.
And thats before the ship itself is worked up with its crew and undergoes sea trials; Im not counting training times.
Right now, a single Russian Navy surface ship could strangle FCNY at will if the EU didnt intervene.
A platoon of Russians with Victorian passports could close FCNY's ports with a bunch of imported surface drones.
A buncha covert minelayers could close all of FCNY's ports.
Things will improve as FCNY get an Air Force up and running, with naval patrol aircraft and drones to actually remediate the situation, but naval ships have the longest lead times of all military hardware.
Its gonna be a while before they can get any new ships.
Ten years to build a bluewater navy for patrolling their sealanes.
Five if they prioritize it, are willing to accept off the shelf designs, and there is spare construction capacity in the naval shipyards and military-industrial complex of Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia and everything goes right.
EDIT
Just for an example of how the modern USN does things in peacetime, because thats best documented:
The USN announced an RFI for the FFG-X, a 7 kiloton frigate with 1x main gun, 1x helicopter bay, and 32x VLS missiles, in 2017. Selected 5x contenders to submit ship designs in 2018. Picked a design, and a winner, in 2020, and awarded contracts in the same year. The ship began construction in August 2022, and is expected to enter service in 2026.
9 years.
en.wikipedia.org
Even if we assume NY buys a small fleet of frigates, now New York has almost certainly violated a treaty.
Point of correction:
One of the requirements of the Commonwealth-Victoria peace treaty was that Victoria unilaterally repudiate any and all treaties it had binding US successor states.
So FCNY is officially unbound by any arms restriction treaties.
If they choose, they can pursue a nuclear program even. Assuming they can find any space for it.
All the talk about the Vics potentially Gassing new York also gave me another thought. Perhaps we should consider developing our own Poison Gas Stockpile.
1)Its against the Rules of War. Yes, noone enforcing it doesnt mean they dont matter.
2)It costs us PR points internationally and in the American-Canadian diaspora, and we are particularly reliant on external PR
3)Its militarily ineffective as opposed to an equivalent amount of explosives.
You could also quite easily murder one of your own bases or production centers if you fuck up.
Or if an enemy strike sets it off.
Between the special production and storage requirements, the special training requirements to use it, and the fact that these are also vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather?
I would say the juice wasnt worth the squeeze.
Militaries have well-developed protocols for dealing with chemical weapon deployment, and have since the mid-1960s; they're uncomfortable and distressing, but they work. Its only real use is as a terror weapon against civilians and the unprepared.
See how ineffective people like Assad's Syrian Army have been at using sarin during their civil war, for example.
We train for defense, and stockpile counteragents, which we would anyway, and have our civilians undergo civil defense training that we can likely get other nations and NGOs to subsidize.
Then invest that cash into actually useful weapons.
Quite true, though I don't see how it negates or contradicts my real point. I may be forgetting something here.
I think the point I was making at the time was that the preferred form of the Vic medical system and the paucity of support services meant that even among the elite, there werent that many people who would benefit from access to medical tourism. The medics who treat the elite might get training, but not the years of hands-on experience to recognize serious problems early.
Im assuming that the Arctic Conservancy was their preferred medical tourism destination.
Closer than trying to fly over the North Atlantic and a hostile Western Europe to Imperial Russia or its puppet states, easier to pressure, and lower-profile than FCNY.
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