Anyone got any good population estimates for the major powers?
The minor powers, most of them depend on when they get their act together.
With cheerful assumptions, Africa could have a couple billion inhabitants
living well. With less cheerful assumptions, they could all be dead by 2050.
Presumably they aren't. LLAR's population is 100% dependant on exactally how
much spacelift capacity you want to assume. Etc.
Now, for the random handgrenades.
I was playing around with the NRE's population figures, based on some
conversations I had with Beth. Totals about 360 million or so. With means that
I could reasonably maintain maybe 3.5 million military personnel on active
duty without shooting my economy in the foot completely.
Now, the Navy has in the neighborhood of 150,000 personell on space service.
Navies in the 22nd century are not manpower intensive. Even assuming 2 support
weenies for every spacehand doing the Navy's job, that leaves me 3 million for
ground forces.
Now, let's assume that each division is approximately 20,000 troops, with
another 20,000 troops per division divvied up among the various EAC assets,
and infrastructure. Not perfect, but good enough for general purposes. So 3
million dividied by 40K equals 75 division equivelants. Spiffy! I've got, near
as I can figure out, 52 or so division equivelants (assumptions: 29 divisions,
5 heavy brigades = 2DE, 4 Kleisouri = 4 DEs, 4 Marine Brigades = 1DE, 46
Border BNs = 5DE, 20 Light Brigades = 7 DE, Stratores Division, Rest of my
Special Ops = 3 DE just because it looks close.)
It's not precise, but it's an interesting set of planning figures. Leaves me
some padding as well. Now, I realize the US Army doesn't do nearly so well in
putting riflemen on the line (although this system puts about 3600 trigger
pullers on the line out of each 40,000 troops, assuming 100 trigger pullers
per line company, which is more than a tank company has
[42] but less than a rifle company ['bout 130,
depending on your personal opinion of company HQ people]), having had a total
of 8 million soldier in WWII and having fielded a lousy 89 divisions. Plus
probably more than a few DEs in Cavalry Groups, independant brigades, et al.
There's maybe... 800,000 bodies left over for wierdness like wet navies or
planetary aerospace defense forces and whatnot.
Oh, yeah, plus reservists. I've only got 15 DE in reservists. I should crank
that up to about equal to my active force in numbers, although not in
equipment.
Probably the other 40 are militia-category
formations.
So, opinions?
I think this is clearly the place to start looking if you're going to start
estimating troops per million population:
http://www.strategypage.com/fyeo/howtomakewar/
Also, the 2300AD group (Bryn Monnery, IIRC) has developed some
rule-of-thumb
guidelines for estimating how many of what TYPE of troop you can afford per
million pop. I can try to dig them up if you like: quite reasonable.
on 02.9.3 0:22 PM, John Atkinson at johnmatkinson@yahoo.com scribbleth:
> I was playing around with the NRE's population
Hello John,
If you want to use a baseline for population figures - as well as get
an idea of what the economies are for set nations, you might want to
consider looking at http://www.umsl.edu/services/govdocs/wofact2001/
In there, you will find information on varous nations including their
population figures as well as estimated economic output, natural resources, as
well as territorial issues (causes of potential conflicts) as well as national
issues. It gives you birth and death rates along with the emmigration rates.
Having said all of that, your figure of 2 support personnel for every "active"
spaceman seems a wee bit low. When discussing the "tail" versus "Fang" aspect
of any military, I don't think the ratio is as low as 2:1.
If you want? Ask some naval recruiter what the current tail is for the navy
and see if you can get the figures. Better yet, find a liason officer in
public relations and ask him that question "What is the tail to teeth ratio in
the navy?" Other than that, I can't offer you too much more.
--- Edward Lipsett <translation@intercomltd.com>
wrote:
> Also, the 2300AD group (Bryn Monnery, IIRC) has
Go for it.
G'day,
> Anyone got any good population estimates for the major
I've got some on my home machine (so will have to send them this evening my
time). These are using the same assumptions I ran with your stuff - i.e.
intermediate terran population growth and no crash. This was a favourite
scenario about 10 yr ago amongst global modellers, now the crash scenario is
becoming more popular, though (in my opinion) doesn't make for as good a
GZGverse as less pressure to expand and less bods/resources to do it
with and sustain all those wars;)
> --- hal@buffnet.net wrote:
> yet, find a liason
Well, let's see...
According to their website, the USN has 386,904 personnel.
53 SSNs @ 134 = 7102 18 SSBN @ 155 = 2790 12 Carriers @ 5597 = 67164 7 LHD @
1108 = 7756 5 LHA @ 964 = 4820 2 LCC @ 842 = 1684 11 LPD @ 420 = 4620 2 AGF @
499 = 998 27 CG @ 364 = 9828 36 DDG @ 323 = 11628 19 DD @ 382 = 7258 15 LSD @
358 = 5370 34 FFG @ 300 = 10200
141,218 in the combatant ships of the USN totals 1.7 support weenies
(including crews of logistics ships) per crewmember of warship. Where
different classes of ship varied, I used the smallest crew total for them all.
Now, I did cheat and include the Gator Navy
(Amphibious ships--anything with an L in the title).
Without those, and their 24,250 crewmen the total drops to 116,968 and 2.3
support weenies (including Gator Navy sailors) per fighting crewmember.
So, 2 per warship crewman is a reasonably estimate.
Now, just under half of those ships are actually at sea at any given day. But
they exist and could presumably sortie in an emergency situation.
The thing about the Navy is they take their tail with them and hence it counts
(sort of) as teeth. In the USAF anyone not flying an airplane is tail. In the
USA or USMC anyone not pulling triggers, yanking lanyards, or otherwise
directly killing badguys is tail. In the USN, only their infrastructure and
logistics counts as tail, since they take all their mechanics et al with them
into a combat zone. To make a meaningful comparison with the Army or Marine
tooth-tail ratios, you'd have to figure out who in/on
those ships actually spends their time operating guns and missle launchers.
Hello John, Good breakdown and thanks for the "numbers":)
Got any idea of what the breakdowns are for the Air Force? ;)
Apart from the population figures, there are a number of assumptions that go
into figuring out the strength of the armed forces:
- What is the economic productivity of the nation and its industrial
strength?
This affects equipment more than raw numbers, but a high-productivity
economy has more reserves to cut to put people into the forces.
- How much of the economy is on a war footing ? Is it at an all-out war
level (e.g.as in WWII), at an intermediate level (e.g.the Cold War), or are
military expenditures a sideshow (a peace dividend period). The
GZG-verse seems, to me, to be at an intermediate level.
- How much of the logistic tail and other support organizations
(e.g.intelligence) is part of the official military? Is everybody, right back
to the miners who dig iron ore for the armour under military
control? Or is even, say, the maintenance of front-line aircraft done
by civilian contractors?
Greetings Karl Heinz
G'day,
> Anyone got any good population estimates for the major
The following a the (VERY rough) figures I doodled up one day in response to
someone else's (TomB? Laserlight?) ponderings on the same topic. These
numbers were done by continent/planet rather than individual nations
(i.e. I
did the entire NSL at once rather than splitting into
Germany/Austria/etc
and then summing over the end result, which would be more "accurate"). I
haven't included any epidemics/disasters and have only made simple
assumptions about war losses rather than get into too many details there
either. End message these are rough, but nonetheless here they are....
Populations for 2188 (projecting from populations/growth rates in 1995
and assuming efficient mass transport for immigrants into space and high
growth rates on colony worlds)
Power On Earth In Space Total
NAC 8.5 billion 2 billion 10.5 billion [1]
ESU 5 billion 2 billion 7 billion
FSE 375 million 600 million 975 million NSL 400 million 700 million 1.1
billion
Superpowers 14 billion 5 billion 20 billion
Humanity 17 billion ???? > 20 billion [2]
[1] The reason this gets so big is because the Americas as a whole
aren't as taxed as Europe and so the NAC has more of its carrying capacity
left to fill (especially as I also assumed a fair% of the South American
population
was left on Earth) whereas the FSE/NSL (and to a lesser extent the ESU)
have less resources to build from starting now (and its the early growth
potential that really matters in these things).
[2] Probably about 21 or 22 billion, MAYBE as high as 25 billion at an
extreme push. I assumed about 2 billion for the IF and about a billion in
total for everybody else.
Like I said earlier, when I first got into this, this would've fitted OK
with the medium/highish growth area of the UN projections and it was way
smaller than their largest projections (so not too way out there, especially
given its sci-fi and we want to encourage wargames etc). It is larger
than any of the crash scenarios though. Besides all that there is heaps of
leeway as its fiction and thus up to the imagination anyway;)
Cheers
On Mon, 2 Sep 2002 21:05:53 -0700 (PDT), John Atkinson
> <johnmatkinson@yahoo.com> wrote:
> To make
Out of curiousity, would that even give you a proper "tooth to tail" ratio? I
was watching a whole bunch of military shows yesterday on TV (just got
cable!). One was showing some carrier operations. They were showing a fire
drill in which only a very, very small fraction of the people on the fire
drill were fire fighters. The rest were mostly admin types. When at general
quarters, the admin types work in damage control. Would you consider damage
control a "tooth" function? If you do, that puts a ship at pretty much 100%
tooth, doesn't it?
> --- Allan Goodall <agoodall@att.net> wrote:
> quarters, the admin types work in damage control.
Again, it depends on how you want to count it.
The Army's "damage control" function is performed by mechanics which are
generally considered "tail".
"Tail" is a term which means whatever you want it to. It's more or less
meaningless unless considering identical forces. Even comparing the USA and
the IDF is meaningless (in this way) because the USA is intended to fight
1000s of Ks from our bases on the other side of an ocean, where the IDF rarely
goes more than 200 K from their borders. So the USA has far
more log weenies and less trigger-pullers.
Now, consider the XVIII Airborne Corps and compare it to the French FAR. That
would be a meaningful comparison. Or the old BAOR vs. the USAREUR.
> --- Beth.Fulton@csiro.au wrote:
> Power On Earth In Space Total
Nearly 1.5 times as big? And with a better economy (Capitalism vs. Socialism,
Capitalists win)? I'm surprised ESU doesn't go tits up quick.
> --- hal@buffnet.net wrote:
Are utility helicoptors, weather aircraft, trainers, EW, Transport, SOF
Transports, SAR, Tankers, Airborne command posts, AWACs, VIP transports, or
medevac aircraft tooth, or tail? Or ICBMs??
> Power On Earth In Space Total
> Nearly 1.5 times as big? And with a better economy (Capitalism vs.
Socialism, Capitalists win)? I'm surprised ESU doesn't go tits up quick.
Possible balancing assumptions: a) the ESU devotes a higher percentage of GNP
to weapons than the NAC; b) the NAC's system slides more towards socialism
("the People's Republic of Massachusetts"); c) the ESU permits some capitalism
d) the NAC has a "defend everything" mentality at the start and gets chopped
up in detail by more concentrated ESU fleets, and it takes a while to rebuild
G'day,
> Nearly 1.5 times as big? And with a better economy (Capitalism vs.
e) The NAC has to be so much bigger to soak up the losses from all those break
away republics <GRIN>
<duck>
judging from my 30+ years old associations with the USAF, it would seeem
to ME that 2 trigger pullers (pilot and Security Police)) is supported by 18
support types OVERSEAS. in the States, where civvie emplyoyees are used a lot
this number crawls upwards to 2 and 28.
i have nothig really scientific to bas this on -just appearances.
DAWGIE
> Power On Earth In Space Total
Beth.Fulton@csiro.au schrieb:
> e) The NAC has to be so much bigger to soak up the losses
Slightly more seriously: How come the NAC is that much bigger than the ESU?
The present population of the (former) Soviet Union, China and India is rather
bigger than that of North and South America combined.
And I don't think Britain adds that much ;-)
Greetings Karl Heinz
G'day,
> Slightly more seriously: How come the NAC is that much bigger than the
Under the rough calculations I was allowing the south american part of the NAC
to come up to the US rates of growth and production rather than the north
american half dropping, as a result you get the high estimates. By the same
token if you assume a communist regime would not lead to very good
environmental states (which it didn't in our reality) then you end up with an
ESU that hasn't had too big a population explosion because it doesn't have the
stretch in the resources to do it.
If you take a different view of the GZGverse, with the NAC not raising
everyone up (or if they parcelled off great swathes of the South American
continent as parks) then you end up with NAC earth population of about 6
-
6.5 million. If you also assume that the ESU get eco-savy and use better
agricultural practices, terraforming of deserts and polar areas then you can
see them get to 8 billion.
Like I said the numbers were rough, with lots of leeway based on assumptions
about how tech will/won't keep up and how much you can increase the
Earth's carrying capacity.
Another possibility is that enclaves remain on each continent that end up
being under UN auspices rather than belonging to the big powers and that could
be where they get some of their people power from. So you could have
(say)
Power On Earth In Space Total
NAC 6 billion 1.5 billion 7.5 billion ESU 6.5 billion 2.5 billion 9 billion
FSE 375 million 600 million 975 million NSL 400 million 700 million 1.1
billion UN 500 million 500 million 1 billion
Superpowers 14 billion 6 billion 20 billion
Humanity 17 billion ???? > 20 billion
This seems to fit with the stuff Oerjan posted the other day.
Just a thought
From: ~ On Behalf Of John Atkinson
Sent: 03 September 2002 04:22
Subject: Thinking out loud. . .
> Anyone got any good population estimates for the major
John, you've got a free hand to paint whatever you want (and I'm trying to
think of a reasonable top end for that) because there simply isn't enough hard
information on which to base a proper estimate.
The timeline entry for 2135 states that the NAC capital moves to Albion "which
now has a population almost as large as England thanks to massive immigration
and engineered population growth programmes".
Beth, I've no more evidence than that, but my gut
reaction is that your figures for off-world populations
are too low. If the powers have got themselves into a "population race" and
started fooling around with birth labs then you want to consider maximums
rather than growth rates.
Extrapolations from current populations are all well and good, but have you
factored in all the other bumps in the history? We don't know how destructive
the Wars of the Americas were, or what loss of civilian life was entailed by
the breakup of the EC.
-- ====================================================
Nathan "build a granary and discover sanitation" Girdler
G'day,
> John, you've got a free hand to paint whatever you want
Do you mean population modelling now with projections forward, or information
in the timeline to guide the projections?
> Beth, I've no more evidence than that, but my gut
The population growth rates I used set pretty quickly to levels close on
double that humans comfortably naturally maintain (though they would equal
what you'd get everyone had big "farming" families and no infant mortality).
One of the critical factors is how quickly the effective resource base rises
to high levels. Am willing to change these factors, if people actually have
a feeling for how advanced (quick/good) terraforming and "reproduction
science" are in the GZGverse, and about what time (late 2000s, early 2100s,
mid 2100s) they got that way.
> Extrapolations from current populations are all well
I've made some allowance for this and I've added noise (which is a first proxy
for environment and political interactions). If anything its all on the high
side as I haven't allowed for epidemic disease, restricted movement
bottlenecks, natural disasters, major climate change working against
terraforming etc etc. I could factor all those in, even add in cohort
structure, sex ratio fluctuation, economic pressures, the effect of the
welfare system used, sublethal effects of altered environments on reproductive
biology and psychology. That would take a while though (need spare time to
modify my code to include economics... eeek!) and ultimately most people would
disagree anyway if they hard a long hard look at the assumptions. You have to
make some grand assumptions about how easy migration is, how fast terraforming
will occur, how habitable planets will be without help, how well humans will
respond to "lots of free space and the need to fill it" if you want even
halfway decent offworld populations by the 2180s. As Noam as mentioned before
its a lot easier (with a lot "safer" assumptions) to get the numbers we all
feel fit the GZGverse if it were a wee bit further into the future.
Cheers
> John, you've got a free hand to paint whatever you want
> From: ~ On Behalf Of Beth.Fulton@csiro.au
> Do you mean population modelling now with projections forward,
Apologies for the late reply on this; I've been working late the last few
nights.
I was thinking of information not only from the timeline, but also canon
information about the "present day" (say 2183 or '88) GZGverse. I see from
your final paragraph that you are already fretting about most of the factors I
had in mind. Let's try a simplification:
1. We only want a top-end figure; any lower total can be put
down to whatever accidents of fate future histories might decree.
2. The number of habitable planets is "sufficient", or people can adapt to
living in a protected environment without any reduction in fertility.
3. There is enough lift capacity to transport everyone to wherever they need
to go to get that "wide open spaces" perspective. If they need a protected
environment when they get there, there is the industrial capacity to do this.
4. The practical upshot of assumptions 2 and 3 is that the entire population
(including that part remaining on Earth) can expand at whatever you decree the
maximum rate to be. Assumption 4 is that every power has adopted a policy of
maximum growth because those that do not will be reduced to insignificant
numbers by those that do.
Yes, there are lots of reasons why assumptions 2 and 3 don't stand up: see
assumption 1. Side [FH] issue: those states that don't have their own access
to significant FTL technology have to subscribe to the UN expansion programme
in order to avoid being trammelled on Earth.
> Beth, I've no more evidence than that, but my gut
I should admit here that I'm starting from the desired
objective of a large off-world population then working back
to find how it might come about.
> The population growth rates I used set pretty quickly to
Idle curiosity here: what is the "comfortable" rate, and where is it drawn
from?
By "birth labs" I'm referring to the wholesale construction of clone
populations a la C.J.Cherryh's "Cyteen" and other Merchanter novels. The
maximum growth rate then becomes a question of economics and industrial power.
-- ========================================================
Nathan "GM [Stellar Conquest]" Girdler
> From: ~ On Behalf Of Beth.Fulton@csiro.au
> The population growth rates I used set pretty quickly to
I've been thinking of ways to push beyond these limits without resorting to
azi. How about using a drug (administered to the entire breeding population)
to throw
the natural M/F ratio on conception? Automated labour (i.e.
robots) and vastly improved gerontology cover for the missing male population.
Admitted, there's nothing in the canon background to suggest this might be so,
even within states such as the ESU.
-- ========================================================
Nathan "Mr. Dystopia" Girdler
[quoted original message omitted]
From: "K.H.Ranitzsch" <KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de>
> The IF would love that, I guess. 4 women for every man ;-)
The limit is four wives...but you can have as many concubines as you wish. The
key is whether you can afford them...and I suspect the usual number of wives a
man can afford is about 0.8.... <vbg>
G'day,
> Idle curiosity here: what is the "comfortable" rate,
About 2% in the long term, though it can get up to 5% for a while.
> and where is it drawn from?
Reading more deathly dull papers than I care to remember;)
Cheers
G'day,
> I've been thinking of ways to push beyond these limits
You'd also have to put in suitable support, welfare and social stems otherwise
a system like this may even lead to a drop off in long term reproductive
success. The most recent population studies are showing that in western
countries women must feel like they're not being disadvantaged by having
children to have more and in other parts of the world social traditions that
have lead to a skewing of the population (admittedly in the direction of
males) are a bit of a problem. On top of all that there is (believe it or not)
the effect of globalisation on the perception of beauty. A recent mathematical
paper (discussed in the New Scientist within the last 12 months) shows that if
there is a common idea of beauty (say imposed by
blanket media hype) then the rate of long-term partner success is much
much lower than if there is variation in what people perceive as attractive.
Cheers