Economic Heft of Worlds

[robject]

MWM 2020

Aryu (RU). Resource Unit. An arbitrary financial accounting unit for planetary, governmental, or megacorporate expenditures. The term is synonymous with “wealth beyond imagining” and reflects the great divide between personal wealth and corporate wealth.

There is no direct correlation between the Resource Unit and the Credit or MegaCredit, although it is substantially larger than a MegaCredit.

Specifically, Aryu is often used as a comparative. The RU for a world can be calculated (the process is not necessary here) based on its Resources, Labor, Infrastructure, and local Efficiencies (or Inefficiencies). Knowing the RU for two different worlds, accountants and planners can compare the two. If World A has RU=20, and World B has RU=10, then World A probably has twice the budget for naval construction, or public education.

"An arbitrary financial accounting unit for planetary, governmental, or megacorporate expenditures."

I'm trying to figure out what T5's RU really means.

WRONG ASSUMPTIONS

I thought of RUs as things you spend. Like buying a fleet. But, there's no direct correlation between RU and the credit.

ASSUMPTIONS

RU are allocations of resources. Rather than buying ships, RU shows a comparative budget allocation for the sectors of a government.
RU are budgets -- in a way. They reflect quality of goods -- in a way.
RU is not related to Tech Level.


WORLDS TO THINK ABOUT
Regina has 6370 RU.
Rhylanor has 3072 RU (!) Yeah, it's half of Regina's. I didn't see that coming.
Mora's is 12,150 RU.
Gram's is 8960 RU.

Hefry, on the other hand, has -90 RU. That's NEGATIVE 90. I assume the whole thing, being a Scout enclave, is being funded by the Imperium.

You get the idea.
Having thousands of RU makes you a regional superpower.

But what do you get?


WHAT RU GETS YOU

Better fleets.
Better habitats.
A better army.
Better favors.

RU can be "traded" or perhaps "loaned".

Maybe you can "buy" a nearby system with a negative RU? I suppose that would mean your reach is kind of extended. I don't think it means you've conquered that world -- rather, it means you're subsidizing it. Maybe you have a seat in their government. Or two. Or all of them?

What else?

 

[robject]

Let's look at the Sword Worlds. The Sword Worlds created four fleets. "Each was named for the world primarily responsible for raising and supporting it."

Narsil 7695 RU
Joyeuse 4200 RU
Gram 8960 RU
Sacnoth.6144 RU

Implications: these worlds can each raise a fleet.

What makes one fleet better than another? Perhaps it's the RU.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Regina's budget is 6370 RU.
Rhylanor's budget is 3072 RU (!) Yeah, it's half of Regina's. I didn't see that coming.
Mora's is 11,475 RU.
Gram's is 8960 RU.

Karin/Five Sisters is 4,500 RU.
Iderati/Five Sisters is 3,360 RU.
Jewell/Jewell is 10,240 RU.
Louzy/Jewell is 1,053 RU.
Garda-Vilis/Vilis is 2,002 RU.
Vilis/Vilis is 1,456 RU.
Collace/District 268 is 1,536 RU.
Efate/Regina is 1,496 RU.
Feri/Regina is 4,368 RU.
Extolay/Lanth is 3,388 RU.
Equus/Lanth is 2,016 RU.
Lunion/Lunion is 4,896 RU.
Strouden/Lunion is 6,656 RU.
Glisten/Glisten is 7,072 RU.
Trin/Trin's Veil is 7,956 RU.

Near as I can tell, Jewell and Mora have the highest RU of any systems in the Marches.

 

[whartung]

RUs are very similar to T4 Pocket Empires RU. PE spends several pages discussing them.

The base definition of an RU is "raw materials and the labor, tech, and infrastructure to gather and process them".

That's what an RU is. It's not just the raw material, say, Aluminum. Its the ability to extract it, move it, and convert it in to something useful.

An uninhabited planet can have lots of raw Bauxite, but that's a far cry from Aluminum ingots.

So, RU is essentially, the amount of "exploited" resources a planet can generate over a unit of time, without going into really more detail than that.

Aluminum ingots, steel bars, powdered sulfur, etc. etc.

 

[robject]

Well what happens is that I tend to think of RU as a budget.

But RU is not that. I KNOW this but I fall into the trap.

Budget is always some amended, Empire-Friendly variant of Trillion Credit Squadron. I have to remember that TCr are TCr.

---

I'm still grappling with what RU "is" in a practical sense. Marc suggested that I think about the Sword Worlds during the Fifth Frontier War:

Marc told me that "the money is always there". In other words, worlds can find funding to build things and maintain them. So MCr is not RU. Marc also told me that RU is independent of TL (beyond Importance, that is). Colonial fleets are built at TL. Import stuff at a higher TL... which costs money. Not RU.


Joyeuse, Sacnoth, Narsil, and Gram each "raised one fleet" during the War. They can find the money. They can import TL from among themselves if they want to.


Now look at RU. The four worlds range from 4000 to 8900 RU. Marc suggests that this is a way to compare the fleets. The Gram fleet (8960 RU) is "twice as good" as the Joyeuse fleet (4200 RU) based on the RU. (And then of course there may be other considerations (TL)).

Something Marc then said makes sense. He said that this value influences the Imperium when deciding where to build fleets.

 

[Spinward Flow]

this value influences the Imperium when deciding where to build fleets.

If so, then Jewell (10,240 RU), Regina (6370 RU), Strouden (6,656 RU), Glisten (7,072 RU), Mora (11,475 RU) and Trin (7,956 RU) would be the primary shipyards for building/maintaining fleets within the Spinward Marches (for example) since they're all over 6000+ RU each ... and both Jewell and Mora over 10,000+ RU each.

And yet you've got Efate (1,496 RU) operating as an Industrialized world with a "boneyard" for the Imperial Navy in the system.

Certainly puts a different "spin" on the "economies of empire" when it comes to naval shipbuilding program allocations.

 

[whartung]

The way I read the RU is that it's not "money" per se.

There's an entire page in PE on converting RUs to Credits. But, they way it's presented, an RU seems to be more a capability than a currency.

Which sounds weird.

Going back to the Aluminum idea. Planet A has "RU = 0". Sure, it has large amount of Aluminum ore, but it's buried in the ground. Unusable.

(Note, these numbers are contrived...)

So, you land 1000 miners on the planet, and now it's "RU = 1". The miners are there with their coffee, mules, and pickaxes, beating the ore out of the ground. They have the lowest tech stamp mills and smelters to process the ore and create aluminum. So, while you have all this potential, 1000 miners with pick axes and water wheels...can't really exploit that potential.

So, you can boost the RUs by either adding more miners, or adding more technology, or both. Realizing the potential of extracting the aluminum.

Thus, in this specific case, the RU is a measure of "How much aluminum can I extract from this world in a year". It's NOT the actual aluminum. It's the capability.

Let's say we add a lot more miners, and fusion plants, and equipment. Now the RUs of this planet are 1000.

But if you don't tap that RU, if you don't use, it just sits. Unless there's demand for the aluminum, it's not extracted. All of that infrastructure sits idle. That's why after 10 years, you don't have 10,000 "RUs" of aluminum stored up. After 10 years, it's STILL a "RU 1000" planet. Meaning, if tapped, it has the capacity to generate 1000 RUs.

But you have to use it.

Similar, consider a shipyard.

100,000 dTon ship yard facility. After 10 years, you don't have 1M dTons of capacity. You still have 100,000 dTons. But if you need a fleet of 500,000 dTons, this place could deliver it in 5 years.

From an RU point of view, if you have an empire that rated at 10,000 RUs, and a fleet of 5,000 RUs, that fleet consumed half of the empires capacity to build. But once built it's a fleet, you can't sell it for "RUs", as you don't get the capacity back. That time back. You could sell the fleet to another empire if they're willing to dedicate their RUs to your needs, trade finished good for industrial capacity, but that still doesn't really make an RU a currency.

 

[Drew]

I'm trying to figure out what T5's RU really means.

WRONG ASSUMPTIONS

I thought of RUs as money. Larger sums than megacredits. You spend them to buy things, and things have prices in RU, that sort of thing.


ASSUMPTIONS
RU are allocations of resources. When you "spend" them, they stay spent until the unit is disbanded.

RU are not purchases. They're not mapped to credits -- you can raise cash in many ways. RU are not them.

RU are budgets -- in a way. They reflect quality of goods -- in a way.

RU is not related to Tech Level.


WORLDS TO THINK ABOUT
Regina's budget is 6370 RU.
Rhylanor's budget is 3072 RU (!) Yeah, it's half of Regina's. I didn't see that coming.
Mora's is 12,150 RU.
Gram's is 8960 RU.

Hefry, on the other hand, has -90 RU. That's NEGATIVE 90. I assume the whole thing, being a Scout enclave, is being funded by the Imperium.

You get the idea.
Having thousands of RU makes you a regional superpower.

But what do you get?



WHAT YOU CAN'T DO

You can't buy things. You can't buy fleets with RU.



WHAT YOU CAN DO

You can make the fleets you buy better than others' fleets.
You can make habitats better.
A better army.
Better favors, perhaps.

RU can be "traded", somehow.

Maybe you can "buy" a nearby system with a negative RU? I suppose that would mean your reach is kind of extended. I don't think it means you've conquered that world -- rather, it means you're subsidizing it. Maybe you have a seat in their government. Or two. Or all of them?

What else?

My personal opinion is that RUs should be considered as a planetary focus. It becomes in simplistic terms one of guns or butter. How much of your planetary output do you want to devote to a project? For example, how much was devoted to the Apollo mission? Would have devoted more resources at the expense of military or societal enhancements to colonize the moon? Let's focus on a non-agricultural planet; how much would be devoted to increasing crop yields, vertical farming, desalinization plants or harvesting ice asteroids to make the planet an agriculturally sufficient planet? If you have a Class D or worse star port; how much would a planet spend to upgrade that star port so that it could be included in a trade route. It's a question of payouts for the leadership. A classic example would be North Korea devoting all of its resources to maintain its power base of the military at the expense of its population's well being.

 

[Spinward Flow]

For example, how much was devoted to the Apollo mission?

American women spent more on cosmetics each year during that time than NASA did on Apollo.
The implications of that factoid are quite terrifying if you think about it long enough.

 

[Condottiere]

Consider the scale.

Only a couple of guys for that money get to go to the Moon.

 

[Spinward Flow]

Only a couple of guys for that money get to go to the Moon.

That ... and a couple of decades of technological advances that the rest of the world took a while to catch up to.

Oh and we also got this ...

 

[robject]

I loved grape Tang...

 

[Hairy Jim DeGriz]

One of my questions about RUs, (RLI+E) and Efficiency in particular, is Are the values fixed? Labor being the exception since that can changed with the world population (how often does that change? - another topic).

Is your world doomed to be forever inefficient -2? Or can that change over time as the economy gets better? Consider the US in the 30's vs. the 40's and 50's. Efficiency -5 to +5 in 10 years. What besides a world war could change the efficiency of a planet? How often can it change? What was the US in the 20's +2 Efficiency? +2 to -5 to +5 in 25 years?

The rules are stacked against the worlds.

In the RU formula, Efficiency at -1 or less turns the RUs available negative: the Inefficiencies are so destructive as to make the economy a net drain. Such barriers represent a welfare state; cultural influences which do not value wealth, even physical limitations. T5, Book 3, p.18

I did not see any modifiers for Efficiency, it's generated by a flux roll, except that 0 is treated as 1. Flux 15/36 = 42% of the planets in the universe are generating negative RUs, which I interpret to mean dependent on other worlds for their continued survival. This would decrease the number of pocket empires at the border, and also reduce the number of independent inhabited worlds outside of the very generous Imperium.

Also, does Importance or Infrastructure ever change? Or Resources? Are they ever depleted or can more be discovered within an entire solar system?

Last questions, how did an economy slide to -5? And what are the implications? Civil unrest? Regime Change? Mass Migration?

 

[Spinward Flow]

Last questions, how did an economy slide to -5? And what are the implications? Civil unrest? Regime Change? Mass Migration?

Try Bread & Circuses for the "peaceful" slide into decadence and decay.

 

[Grav_Moped]

-5 would be heavy subsidization (a colony entirely dependent on outside support from the homeworld).

The way I see it, the sign is whether it's a net resource or drain for the colonizer, the absolute value is how efficient the economy is.

 

[Grav_Moped]

Try Bread & Circuses for the "peaceful" slide into decadence and decay.

Don't mind me, just sharing an obscure 80's earworm (and it's so, so very '80s):

Come tomorrow, the dream might go away
Guilt and sorrow, the price you have to pay
Snobbery and decay... (Youtube)

Funny the things you remember...


Sorry about the sidetrack.

 

[aramis]

That ... and a couple of decades of technological advances that the rest of the world took a while to catch up to.

Oh and we also got this ...

Tang wasn't actually a spinoff; the space program happened to select it. The product hadn't taken off in the market until after the space program adopted it.

How NASA Made Tang Cool

No one was interested in Tang until NASA sent it into space and then it became a phenomenon.

www.foodandwine.com

 

[robject]

One of my questions about RUs, (RLI+E) and Efficiency in particular, is Are the values fixed?

Short answer: not fixed.


Theoretical example: If you can lift Darrian's Efficiency rating, its RU rockets up significantly.

 

[Hairy Jim DeGriz]

-5 would be heavy subsidization (a colony entirely dependent on outside support from the homeworld).

The way I see it, the sign is whether it's a net resource or drain for the colonizer, the absolute value is how efficient the economy is.

I grok the concept and the objectives, but I think that there should be modifiers to prevent, say, important worlds, high tech or high population worlds from being a negative multiplied drain on resources and completely subsidized.

The concept makes complete sense for 2 mm people on a world with no resources or no infrastructure ... but those 2 million are actually better off than the same population with abundant resources and a fully functional infrastructure.

Pop 2mm poor/ good resources (4:10) and poor / good infrastructure (4:6) multiply the dependency of the planet, rather than alleviating it.
= RLIE 4 x 5 x 4 x -5 = -400
v. RLIE 10 x 5 x 6 x -5 = -1500

I played around with this a lot when I first got T5, and I house decided either:
R x (L-E) x I
-or-
R x L x (I-E)
to create more sustainable independent worlds and pocket empires outside of the Imperium welfare state.

Labor - Efficiency represents an unmotivated workforce possibly because they are too rich or too poor.
Infrastructure - Efficiency represents a system that is perhaps not maintained, or perhaps poorly managed or both and it hinders the overall economy.

I'll find my notes and share which one I used and why, if anyone is interested.

Efficiency in these formulas still creates a drag on the economy, and can even turn it negative, as intended, but you don't end up with 42% Worlds on Welfare.

 

[robject]

The concept makes complete sense for 2 mm people on a world with no resources or no infrastructure ... but those 2 million are actually better off than the same population with abundant resources and a fully functional infrastructure.

Yes -- RU is framed in terms of Empire. When we're talking about Dumarest-style totally independent worlds, the interpretation changes in kind.

But, it doesn't change in degree. In other words, comparing two worlds by their RU works regardless of Empire or No Empire or Other Things.