Economics of dreadplanets

Andrew Apter:
>In my campain the Dreadplanet would cost the entire tax base of
100 major
>star systems for a year.  With that kind of costs how do you
buy such heavy
>defences too?

Well, Stilt's got more megacredits than you've got.

IIRC we decided (ie, I worked out and no one objected too
bitterly) that US$4 is (roughly) Cr1.
1 million citizens at 8000Cr per year per capita GNP paying 5%
of GNP into military works out to 400MCr per annum.  Figure the
navy gets 1/3 and the shipbuilding budget is about 1/3 of the
navy's budget--based on USN about 10 years ago but it's a
reasonable figure for this kind of BOTE job--and you come up
with roughly 45MCr shipbuilding budget per million people per
year.
   Caveats: You've got plenty of room here to flex the $:Cr
ratio; in addition, a government that's actively at war is
likely to spend something more than 5% of the GNP on the
military too--I don't recall what the US was spending in WW2 but
20% is almost certainly low.  USSR was spending about 18% on
their military in the late Cold War; Angola spent something like
35% for a while there.	Further, my per capita GNP is based on
the US--a few nations might have higher but quite a few will be
lower.

Let's see, 5000 points = 50,000MCr / 45MCr =  1.1 billion
people-years (at 5% military tax rate).  If the US went to
wartime 20% tax levels, it could produce a dreadplanet every
year, with plenty left over for army, orbital defenses--even
skirmishers <grin>.