Subject: Colonial powers and battles

This stuff about robot factories is interesting.  They show up alot in
H.
Beam Piper's work - among my favorite sci-fi writers (check out Space
Viking
or the Cosmic Computer - lousy titles, but it was the 1950's)

Even today some decidedly non-first rate economies are cranking out some
astonishing amounts/bits of military equipment.  I may be mistaken, but
aren't the Egyptians building M1A1's  (granted a lot of the components
are
imported)?

I find the arguments about shipping capacity/costs interesting as well.
There's little said about any difficulty in interface transport in FT or
Dirtside as compared to a game like Traveller 2300 with it's pre-grav
assortment of spaceplanes, old-fashioned rocket-ridin' shuttles and
beanstalks (somehow I always had trouble wrapping my mind that concept).
Landing a tank division on a planet may be no big thing (or the 1st
Guards
Tank Army for that matter).  Ultimately boils down to the sort of game
you
want to play (which I recall was once the GZG mantra).	I mean I've
followed
the Grav vs. GEV argument and the MD versus CPR threads among others and
somehow arguing the "technical parameters" and power weight ratios of
something as PSB as a grav drive (or FTL for that matter) stikes me as a
bit
like the old angels vs. head of a pin arguement.  But then I'm an
armchair
General and historian not an armchair physicist.

					-M

Oh, and speaking of 2300 check out:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/9292/UK.htm
An exhaustively detailed site with TOE's etc. for Britain in the 2300
universe (including some colonial forces and all nicely based on current
and
past British practice - imagine the Coldstream Guards with power walkers
or
the Desert Rats with hovertanks).  All very easily adaptable to the NAC
in
the Tuffleyverse (even includes some Dirtside 2300 conversions)