From: Thomas Barclay <Thomas.Barclay@s...>
Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 23:50:29 -0500
Subject: potpourri
1) Debacle: see Dieppe. see Stalingrad. see most of WW1. 2) John the Inflammatory (in a comment which was unlikely to provoke the usual excitement) said "I'd mount them all in Wiesels." Sorry, but I immediately thought of "a plan so fiendishly cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a.... Weasel!"[1] 3) Regarding shipping things around in the GZGverse. Take a look at the real world people. Real economies are huge. Look at the relative total tonnage of merchant shipping to military today. Then look at the size of the GZGverse fleets (a la Indy, but its a good estimate)... many many many (care to throw out some mass totals Indy?) mass worth of ships. Figure civilian shipping will be many times this rated value. It must in order to keep the economy functioning. Ergo shipping large heavy weight items between known endpoints isn't going to be terribly expensive.... if it was, not so much would have happened and been built in 180 yrs. I agree military force sizes will be moderate for mobile forces, but this stems more from procurement costs and ongoing personel and upkeep costs than from shipping related issues. Tomb. [1] John, if you don't know the reference, you're going to buy _ME_ a beverage of my choice at our first meeting.:)