Originally posted by Hal:
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Question? When you utilized the figures, did you divide the military budget amongst the various forces or utilize it fully by the Navy? At present, I'm leaning towards the following:
Well, I hadn't really thought about it. I've got about twelve irons in the fire related to Traveller, plus other game systems I don't mention here, and hadn't done detailed budgetary work for Subsectors and so on.
Among other things, I was occasionally glancing at Pocket Empires and trying to come up with an even higher level abstraction, sort of a per-body avg value cost per year for the Military, for the Bureaucracy, and the Intelligence groups. Then, I was going to go over the down-payment w/monthly payments (summarized by year for easier tracking) to see what sort of budget was really necessary to keep a fleet. There would be annual capital to purchase new ships, annual costs to scrap (or mothball, or transfer, or whatever) ships too old to keep in service, and the sum total of each years mortgage payments (and annual maintence), plus a reasonable overall surcharge in extra payments for repairs (an active fleet damages itself during training here and there), and a fraction of ships to replace (there are always some losses in training; which would need to be replaced by each year's capital purchases budget.
From ship designs, you'd know your crewing levels. You could also do another abstraction for personnel necessary for bases, support, and administration (additional personnel based on added % values of the total personnel aboard fighting ships).
Your avg faceless Navy body would also have a cost. Each year, a fraction of the total personnel in service retire or die (requiring exit costs (mustering out benefits or death benefits) and assumption of retirement pension pay (or delivery to beneficiary), the fraction of total personnel that are new recruits (requiring additional recruit training costs), and the rest of the personnel (who require their abstracted annual pay; which includes everything, including refresher training, etc.)
Of the 15.9 TCr, I was thinking, at the time of writing the original post, that it was sufficiently large that 2 TCr could be devoted to the Navy, and another 1 TCr to the Subsector Army (bases, transports, everything; with a lot more in the way of small elite TL-15 strike teams and a brigade or five than in lots of Army Corp to drag around; that's the province if the IM). Only 3 TCr for the military leaves 12.9 TCr for the Imperial Bureacracy, etc. (The Subsector Duke's stipend was something like 200 GCr, so he pays for his Office and personnel and their maintenence out of that).
I've been looking over the translated Per Capita earnings table I made last year (I only had GT:FT for 2 weeks, made the table, then had to give GT:FT back to its owner; and only got myself a new copy a month or two ago). I seem to recall a serious disagreement with the per capita earnings at the higher TLs. GT:TL-12 only earns 15,000 GT:Cr. If I translate at the same rate as 3500 GT:Cr = 1 GT:High Passage, then the conversion rate to the OTU:High Passage of OTU:Cr (10,000) is 2.86. I went with 3, though. However, that gives us a canon per capita earnings for the avg OTU:TL-15 citizen of 45,000 OTU:Cr. This seemed rather low to me at the time (8 TLs higher than now and only 45 OTU:KCr?). I WAGed out some higher per capita values at TL-13 to TL-15. I need to look at it again. Oh yeah, given that my database has a boatload (30+ TL-16 worlds, I had a TL-16 value as well).
Also, as I mentioned, originally, I missed the modifiers for Trade Codes, which I haven't designed new queries to handle, so that isn't taken into account.
Originally posted by Hal:
3% of GDP of a world goes to its planety military needs. All of this is spent on such things as Planetary Defense, Marines, Army, Navy, COAAC, and special forces.
In addition to the world's normal taxation, another layer of taxation by treaty is appended to the planetary structure. This taxation in turn is utilized as funding for the subsector level government as well as military. I'm leaning towards 25% of the subsector tax being spent on the military. This military structure however does not have a planetary defense budget nor a COAAC portion.
What comes next however isn't a happy mix of budgetting:
Sensor platforms for early warning
Repair and maintenance
Wages both during employment and retirement benefits
Basing costs for military and families
Subsidiary benefits (medical, education, etc)
Training costs
Resupply of expendables etc
And so on. This doesn't even mention things such as R&R of systems nor does it mention R&R for ship building by class etc.
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Wanna exchange emails and see what we can come up with?
I'd be happy to discuss it.
But why not right here on CotI?
Ok, I've just spent a minute looking at the list Armored Cruiser from CT:Supp: 9. For the cost of one ship, I can pay for the mortgages of 18.18 of them.
The formula I used to arrive at the annual cost (not counting down payment, which would be handled out of the capital expenditures budget) was:
</font><blockquote>code:</font><hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">ShipCost / 240 x 12 + (Shipcost * .005)</pre>[/QUOTE]In this, I effectively propose that Military vessels require .5% per year to maintain, instead of the normal .1%, to cover a variety of additional expenditures that civilian craft certainly don't have, and the tougher handling they receive overall.
Under this quick estimation (even a 1 TCr/year budget could probably field 100 Armored Cruiers without difficulty. It would only need to purchase, each year, about 2.5 (100 years / 40 year ship effective lifespan; 2 on even years, 3 on odd years).
If we take 100 / 18.18 = 5.5.
5.5 x ShipCost + (Ship Cost x 2.5) = 237.759 GCr. Ok, that's 25%, maybe a little too high (for the 1 TCr budget, but probably not for the 2 TCr budget). Maybe cut down to 25-50 ships or so. At this point, there's still plenty left over for other supporting vessels.
