Re: Realistic Fleet sizes

In message <3.0.32.19970920060719.006abaac@spiritone.com>
	  "Joseph A. Troche" <trochej@spiritone.com> wrote:

> At 10:06 AM 9/19/97 -0500, you wrote:
> >>  Divide by ten and we have a 2 Billion
> >>world with a budget of 5,000 pts and a fleet of size 50,000 pts.
> >>
> >
> >So this is the fleet per world ?
> >
> How would a planet of 2 billion come up with this kind of GNP?  To me
this
> looks more like the budget and Fleet for a coop of planets.

Or, it could be the fleet budget for a single person.
It all depends on the prevalent technology. If you have
large automated factories, with automated robotic mining
etc, then you feed in a plan for a SDN, and the factory ship
trundles off to the nearest asteroid belt, mines the
necessary raw materials, builds a small fleet of robots,
mines more raw meterials, and the robots build you a shiny
new SDN.

Practically no outlay or effort on the part of the humans
beyond the initial factory.

Then you feed in blue prints for another factory, and...

Advanced automation (especially if you have AIs) can lead
to big fleets very quickly in an interstellar economy.
Resources are relatively cheap, and labour can be free.

The above can lead to unplayable campaigns though, so
the FT background is probably somewhere between todays
capabilities, and the 'infinite' capabilities of the above.

But there's no reason why a couple of billion people
on some colony world couldn't field fleets of several
tens of thousands of points. The real problem will be
crewing them (which comes back to the AI question).

-- 
Be seeing you,
Sam.