Re: [FH] Dollars to Credits

Schoon said:
>I think that many on the list, as well as myself, would benefit from a
>simple comparison, after all the numbers have been crunched, of
military or
>naval budget (estimated) in MUcr per million population.
>
>If necessary, you can add in a militancy multiplier (average assumed at
1.00).

I'm still playing around with the figures myself, trying to get
something
that gives me (Alarish) a reasonable but respectable fleet.  I'll go
through
my calculations in detail to show the assumptions, then simplify.

Per Capita income = 8000Cr (current $24000 divided by $3/Cr)
1M population * 8000Cr per capita = GNP
Defense Budget = 5% GNP (The lowest I know of has been Japan at
1%--under US
protection; the highest I know of has been Saudi Arabia at 28% with oil
money; the highest for a normal nation has been the USSR at 14%; global
average is about 5%)

Army and Navy split the budget equally.  Each spends about a third of
their
budget on new units--the balance goes to maintenance and support.  You
may
tamper with the percentages here a bit, but not very much--weapons that
aren't maintained don't do you any good.

Navy spends about 33% on ship construction; therefore 1M *
8000*.05*.5*.33 =
66MCr per year (per million population).  Figure a ship lasts 20 years
(without a major rebuild, which comes out of the construction budget),
so
you'd have 1320  MCr worth of ships per million population.

Army spends about 33% on raising new troops.  66MCr per year over 5
years
builds a battalion with support units; cost to maintain is 66Mcr, so 1M
population fairly neatly results in one battalion.  (Cross check--the US
had
as I recall 30 divisions of 10 battalions--some were Light, Airborne etc
and
were presumably a bit smaller than a normal divisions--so let's say
250-300
battalions.  US population is around 280M, so I guess this works
reasonably
well).	These are line troops, by the way--you'd have a lot less if you
go
in for power armor like I do.

The two figures you can really juggle are % of your GNP to defense (note
that the more you put into defense, the less goes into investment, and
sooner or later you end up like the USSR), and the way the budget splits
between Army and Navy.	The current US budget is fairly evenly split
among
Army, Navy and Air Force.  The Alarishi budget, on the other hand, goes
80%
to Navy.

So to put it in the simplified form you asked for, 1 million population
usually results in about 1300 MCr (130 points) of ships and 1 line
battalion
with support units.