Ramblings on the Imperial Navy budget

[Carlobrand]

Occasionally we grapple with issues of scale. We find ourselves imperfectly reckoning with the truly huge distances over which ships fight, the truly huge areas of planets and their orbital spaces, and so forth. This, I think, is one of those moments.

Based on the info in the wiki and the starmap, the Imperium consists of 8926 worlds with a total population of just a bit over 15 trillion enumerated sapients. Rebellion Source book tells us these 15 trillion support an Imperial fleet of about 1000 ships per sector: "This number includes combat vessels such as cruisers, carriers, battleships, and some escorts; it does not include auxiliaries, support ships, and scouts." There are 320 numbered fleets (I can only find 319) among some 28 sectors in which Imperial fleets are present, with several sectors having as few as two to four fleets. So, there are in the vicinity of 20,000 combat ships in the Imperial fleet.

On average, each warship is supported by a population of 750 million.

The fleet also includes the reserve fleet, 320 squadrons, about the same number of older warships.

Okay then, each warship is supported by a population of 375 million.

If we assume that the "escort" reference is a mistake, then there's roughly 4000 Imperial supporting every dTon of capital ship. Typical capital ship runs 0.5 to 0.7 megacredits per dTon - about 150 credits a person over the life of the ship, which can be anything from 10 years to 50 or longer, depending on your source. If we lean toward the AHL description of things, the average Imperial pays a whopping 3 - count them, 3 - credits per year to build warships for the fleet. And, if you decide that "escort" reference is NOT a mistake, then it's real easy to cut that number to less than one.

There are other costs. Maintenance could be anything from the standard Book-2 1% to the TCS 10% of the ship's costs. Crew costs are around 0.02 to 0.03%. We've no idea what the supporting installations cost, or how many personnel they take, or how much tonnage there is in auxiliaries, support ships and scouts. However, even if we assume they're spending just as much constructing and maintaining installations as they spend on warships, and then assume again that they're spending as much for auxiliaries as for warships, it still comes to less than ten credits a head, annually.

By comparison, the U.S. spends 5 or 6 times as much on NASA. Worldwide military spending overall is about $300 a person on things military, about 2.4% of GWP. We're kind of a militant world, the U.S. accounts for about a third of that all by itself, but on the other hand a TL9-15 community of almost 9000 worlds is likely to do a bit better than we do on GWP, and the dollar's only worth about a third what it was when the ship construction rules were published. If we were an Imperial world, Cr10 a head would hit right around 1% of GWP - IF we assumed the warfleet's only a third of their costs and the other two thirds are installations and auxiliaries and such. Alter either of those assumptions, or decide that the "1000" figure includes escorts, and it's real easy to get down to 0.1% - which is down around the range that the U.N. gets.

So, we're rather forced to assume the Imperial Fleet has a big installation expense and a whole lotta tonnage in auxiliaries just to get close to a 1% mark. Or, we're looking at an Imperium whose footprint in the typical Imperial's life isn't much larger than the U.N.'s footprint in the modern Terran's -

- and still manages to give us 120 capital ships in a subsector. Not an auspicious sign for the small-ship universe.:devil:

 

[LeperColony]

Remember, the Imperium also maintains the Reserve Fleets, so that at least spreads the naval budget a little further.

 

[Xerxeskingofking]

He did account for that

On average, each warship is supported by a population of 750 million.

The fleet also includes the reserve fleet, 320 squadrons, about the same number of older warships.

Okay then, each warship is supported by a population of 375 million.

 

[rancke]

I can't deal with this again. Not today, anyway. Perhaps later.


Hans

 

[Carlobrand]

I can't deal with this again. Not today, anyway. Perhaps later.


Hans

Is cool, we've all been there.

 

[mike wightman]

IMTU solutions to the whopping great budget, fairly abstract ramblings:

At least one fleet of auxiliaries per combat fleet.

A naval base is actually a collection of 1000000t+ vessels.

An awful lot of 1000000t + jump 6 frames to carry BBs and BRs to the assembly point from their reserve positions.

An equally large amount of 1000000t drop tank carriers.

Several secret empty hex naval supply and refit bases per frontier sub sector

For every known depot a secret one that is involved in black projects.

 

[Condottiere]

Besides infrastructure, there's also the Imperial bureaucracy, R&D, Marines, Scouts Service and the Army. One assumes the Imperium equivalent of the NSA hoovers up a considerable amount.

 

[Garyius2003]

Besides infrastructure, there's also the Imperial bureaucracy, R&D, Marines, Scouts Service and the Army. One assumes the Imperium equivalent of the NSA hoovers up a considerable amount.

Yep, back that up to each 3I citizen being responsible for 6-8,000 credits worth of military spending over the course of normal life.

Add another 4-6k for non-military spending including the bureaus, nobles, and starports not economically viable, and it turns into a bite.

If the average wage earner makes 1k per month, that is a year's wages going to the 3I off of a worker's working life, plus local planet costs (welfare, retirement, infrastructure, medical; all of course depending on what the local planet pays for or takes).



We have one of these threads every year or so, they get complex. Others will come up with numbers different than I, others will be close. None of us are right or wrong, just different.

 

[rancke]

If the average wage earner makes 1k per month...

According to Striker, the per capita income of a TL12 world (said elsewhere to be average Imperial tech level) and no trade modifiers is 16,000 local credits. Assuming the world has a class A starport, its credits are worth 0.7 CrImp, so the final result would be CrImp11,200, very close to your assumption.

However, there's a correlation between high population level and TL (a +2 bonus to TL, IIRC), so the high-popuation worlds would tend to contribute more heavily to the budget than less populous worlds, and I have no idea if this bias is already accounted for in the supposed Imperial average of TL12. (Nor do I know if the supposed Imperial average is correct or fetched out of thin air).

A TL15 world with an Industrial trade modifier would have a per capita income of Cr30,800, and if the starport is class A, those credits would be equivalent to Imperial credits.

TL15 worlds with Rich and Agricultural trade modifiers have a per capita income of Cr42,200, but rich worlds are never high-population, so they don't contribute so much to the overall budget.


Hans

 

[savage]

Occasionally we grapple with issues of scale. ...
total population of just a bit over 15 trillion enumerated sapients. Rebellion Source book tells us these 15 trillion support an Imperial fleet of about 1000 ships per sector: ...
The fleet also includes the reserve fleet, 320 squadrons, about the same number of older warships.

Okay then, each warship is supported by a population of 375 million.
... If we lean toward the AHL description of things, the average Imperial pays a whopping 3 - count them, 3 - credits per year to build warships for the fleet. And, if you decide that "escort" reference is NOT a mistake, then it's real easy to cut that number to less than one.

There are other costs. Maintenance could be anything from the standard Book-2 1% to the TCS 10% of the ship's costs. Crew costs are around 0.02 to 0.03%. We've no idea what the supporting installations cost, or how many personnel they take, or how much tonnage there is in auxiliaries, support ships and scouts. However, even if we assume they're spending just as much constructing and maintaining installations as they spend on warships, and then assume again that they're spending as much for auxiliaries as for warships, it still comes to less than ten credits a head, annually.

By comparison, the U.S. spends 5 or 6 times as much on NASA. Worldwide military spending overall is about $300 a person on things military, about 2.4% of GWP. We're kind of a militant world, the U.S. accounts for about a third of that all by itself, but on the other hand a TL9-15 community of almost 9000 worlds is likely to do a bit better than we do on GWP, and the dollar's only worth about a third what it was when the ship construction rules were published. If we were an Imperial world, Cr10 a head would hit right around 1% of GWP - IF we assumed the warfleet's only a third of their costs and the other two thirds are installations and auxiliaries and such. Alter either of those assumptions, or decide that the "1000" figure includes escorts, and it's real easy to get down to 0.1% - which is down around the range that the U.N. gets.

So, we're rather forced to assume the Imperial Fleet has a big installation expense and a whole lotta tonnage in auxiliaries just to get close to a 1% mark. Or, we're looking at an Imperium whose footprint in the typical Imperial's life isn't much larger than the U.N.'s footprint in the modern Terran's -

- and still manages to give us 120 capital ships in a subsector. Not an auspicious sign for the small-ship universe.:devil:

I'm assuming you mean sumarized there are about 1000 warships ships in the sector fleet with its subsectors. Another 1000 plus in the support fleets including reserves. Yeah. Facilities cost a lot. In CT, we see a highport with 170m dtons. Far more pricey than a few ships.

There is also the unknown Traveller assets (planetary navies and armies, non-mainworld, not really empty parsecs, etc.).

On another thread, didn't someone suggest a budget of about $250 trillion. I don't recall the exact number.

Very little of this suggest small ship universe. I don't see a 1% as realistic.

 

[Carlobrand]

... There is also the unknown Traveller assets (planetary navies and armies, non-mainworld, not really empty parsecs, etc.). ...

I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's nothing to suggest the Navy budget funds planetary navies and armies and, if the average citizen is being tapped for less than the price of a decent meal annually, there's plenty left in the GWP for a given planetary government to set its own taxes and pay for whatever it can afford on its own. There's bits and pieces of canon to guide anyone who wants to play around figuring out what assets a planetary government might field.

... I don't see a 1% as realistic.

How so?

 

[savage]

I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's nothing to suggest the Navy budget funds planetary navies and armies and, if the average citizen is being tapped for less than the price of a decent meal annually, there's plenty left in the GWP for a given planetary government to set its own taxes and pay for whatever it can afford on its own. There's bits and pieces of canon to guide anyone who wants to play around figuring out what assets a planetary government might field.



How so?

I'm being too brief again. Sorry, multi-tasking.

Are you only looking at military expenditures of the INS including Marines? Then ok, that infrastructure includes many expensive military highports. But there are many organizations whose budgets have not been discussed. I love the fact that Traveller is open, but 1% GDP seems far too low. I'd double or triple it. Another thing to consider is interstellar corporate taxes, intergalactic trade, and income from non-mainworlds. This supports the "big" ship economy, don't you agree?

So, developing those areas is purely new ground not covered in Canon. It is great people have stepped up with the statistics. What probably needs to be identified is "big" ship universe and "little" ship universe economics.

 

[rancke]

I'm not sure what you mean by that. There's nothing to suggest the Navy budget funds planetary navies and armies and, if the average citizen is being tapped for less than the price of a decent meal annually, there's plenty left in the GWP for a given planetary government to set its own taxes and pay for whatever it can afford on its own. There's bits and pieces of canon to guide anyone who wants to play around figuring out what assets a planetary government might field.

According to Striker, the Imperium gets 30% of a member world's military budget. Planetary military budgets run from 1% minimum to 10% in peacetime up to 15% in wartime for a limited (but unspecified) time. Average military budgets for Imperial worlds is 3% of GWP.

What isn't specified anywhere:

* How the Imperium's cut is split between subsector and regular forces.
* How the regular forces' cut is split between the various services.
* Whether the Scouts are paid out of the military budget.
* The number and sizes of the IN's auxiliaries.

Note that TCS implies that 10% of original cost is enough to support a ship completely, wich means everything, including ground establishment, bases, logistics (includsing transportation), and peacetime replacement of ships. Only exception is wartime repairs and replacement of battle losses.

The numbers I've come up with based on various (IMO) reasonable assumptions I've posted before.


Hans

 

[Carlobrand]

According to Striker, the Imperium gets 30% of a member world's military budget. Planetary military budgets run from 1% minimum to 10% in peacetime up to 15% in wartime for a limited (but unspecified) time. Average military budgets for Imperial worlds is 3% of GWP.

What isn't specified anywhere:

* How the Imperium's cut is split between subsector and regular forces.
* How the regular forces' cut is split between the various services.
* Whether the Scouts are paid out of the military budget.
* The number and sizes of the IN's auxiliaries.

Note that TCS implies that 10% of original cost is enough to support a ship completely, wich means everything, including ground establishment, bases, logistics (includsing transportation), and peacetime replacement of ships. Only exception is wartime repairs and replacement of battle losses.

The numbers I've come up with based on various (IMO) reasonable assumptions I've posted before.


Hans

Yup:

"The average expenditure of a nation or world on its military is 3% of its GNP; on worlds where the state of international tension is high, this may range as high as 15%; where little conflict has been experienced for extended periods of time the military budget may be as low as 1% of the GNP ... On Imperial worlds, roughly 30% of the total military budget goes to the lmperium for maintenance of the Imperial military." (Ergo your 0.9% estimate, which I rounded a bit for convenience.)

The locals have their own budget. The Imperial cut of the pie is for Imperial military stuff.

A problem I'm encountering in divvying up the pie between the Impie Army and Navy is that ships are expensive while units - even with their vehicles - are comparatively cheap. Hard to make a precise estimate for obvious reasons, but I get somewhere between 250 and 300 million credits to field a battalion, which is about half the price of a destroyer escort. A field army costs roughly what a single dreadnought costs. If I cut the piece down the middle, even allowing for the same we-don't-know-what-infrastructure-costs problem, that's a whole lotta armies - as in, "We could field one or two field armies in each and every system including the unpopulated ones," lotta armies. Which is a lot - and yet not a lot since it comes out to about 1 field army per 750 million pop. Does that sound reasonable?

Actually, that gives me an idea for approaching the question in reverse. Let me work on that and get back to you.

 

[rancke]

A problem I'm encountering in divvying up the pie between the Impie Army and Navy is that ships are expensive while units - even with their vehicles - are comparatively cheap. Hard to make a precise estimate for obvious reasons, but I get somewhere between 250 and 300 million credits to field a battalion, which is about half the price of a destroyer escort. A field army costs roughly what a single dreadnought costs. If I cut the piece down the middle, even allowing for the same we-don't-know-what-infrastructure-costs problem, that's a whole lotta armies - as in, "We could field one or two field armies in each and every system including the unpopulated ones," lotta armies. Which is a lot - and yet not a lot since it comes out to about 1 field army per 750 million pop. Does that sound reasonable?

We have a couple of figures that may help our guesstimate. The statement that planetary military budgets are split 60/40 between navy and army, but that for vacuum worlds the split is 94/6. I submit that the Imperial needs would be closer to that of a vacuum world than to that of your ordinary member world with the breathable atmosphere. For many years I've been operating with an assumed 90/10 split. A while back someone (I think it was Chris Trash) convinced me that 85/15 was a better figure, but I can't for the life of me remember what the argument was.

As for the Marines, I'm sure that in-setting they have their own separate budget, but for simplicity I lump them together with the navy in my calculations.

The Scouts I'm inclined to believe are funded out of some other budget, not the military one. (Pure guess).



Hans

 

[savage]

Again...TCS, Striker, the traveller map and data do not account for several probably income streams for the INS. 10% of a ship compounded is fine, but they could have four-five thousand ships in a sector instead of 2000.

We do know that population numbers for non-mainworlds have some formulas for estimations. We know that trade with certain client states, friendly alien species should be lucrative, but not necessarily work into Financials for mainworlds. We have little to nothing on empty parsecs.

 

[Carlobrand]

Again...TCS, Striker, the traveller map and data do not account for several probably income streams for the INS. 10% of a ship compounded is fine, but they could have four-five thousand ships in a sector instead of 2000. ...

It's less an income stream thing than an attempt to limit ourselves to the canon description in MT Rebellion Sourcebook. Of course, we don't absolutely have to live by that limit, but it's interesting to see where working under that constraint takes us.

 

[savage]

It's less an income stream thing than an attempt to limit ourselves to the canon description in MT Rebellion Sourcebook. Of course, we don't absolutely have to live by that limit, but it's interesting to see where working under that constraint takes us.

Of course!
Keeping in mind a potential macroeconomic scale may have future value.
I am not familiar with all MgT products. There may be clues there now or in the future.

 

[Condottiere]

You have to give subsector Dukes something to do, so I suspect they are responsible for collecting taxes and distributing largess amongst various bureaucratic bodies, including those responsible for the subsector military, and giving Caesar what's due to Caesar, or Casear's viceroy in the form of the sector Duke.

 

[LeperColony]

We know that pensions and health care are a major factor in the U.S. military budget. Maybe a lot of that money goes to rather unglamorous but still useful service and post-service support. Travel costs for discharged veterans to return home could be quite pricey.

Also, it's not unreasonable to suppose that the Imperial military spends quite a lot on R&D.