Re: [FH] Dollars to Credits

At 12:12 AM 3/15/99 -0500, you wrote:

>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.

You may be reading too much into the US example. I realize that most of
the
world seems to be heading towards the "small, professional" model of the
US
and Britain (and Canada and Oz and anyone else who want's credit :-),
but
your method breaks down when trying to plan for a classical
Swiss/Israeli
type of military with small cadres and enormous reserve forces. Terrible
expeditionary types of forces, but enough to bloody the nose of any
attacker. As an example my own Free State deeply wants cutting edge grav
tanks, but from a financal point of view it simply makes more sense to
invest in starships (and even more, the fighters [see the relevant posts
on
the 'pedia list]) to prevent the Bad Guys from landing. So the elite
armoured units have heavy tracks and the rest soldier on with light
tracks
and wheeled vehicles, very little of which can be said to be high tech.
They also manage to put only a few brigades in the real hot spots,
because
there's only so much shipping to cart the troops around. Which actually
reinforces my preference for fighters, since a few squadrons can put a
real
crimp in the plans of an insufficently advanced enemy, and the most
advanced enemy I have is second or third rate. It seems to be working
for
me. :-)

-- 
Don