Mechanical/Population Changes to the CS...

[HWalsh]

This is an interesting thought experiment.

Lets throw out the current CS numbers. No more 3 million suits of SAMAS armor just sitting around and stupid stuff like that...

How big would the CS, and CS army, have to be to have the outcomes the books say they had. Namely things like, the CS army size needed in order for Tolkeen to take 4 years and to suffer losses that crippled it. How big would the CS need to be for the minion war to actually be a threat?

Lets bring it into line and get it down to a powerful, but manageable, force.

I'll post my ideas in a reply just to keep the initial post clear.

[HWalsh]

The first thing I would do is reduce the size of the CS military numbers by 90% across the board.
Giving them, as of Megaverse in Flames, a new 1,000,000 recruits as opposed to 10,000,000. 1,000,000 recruits is a HUGE number.
I would reduce their backstock of SAMAS Armors and such to around 300,000, and anything in Coalition War Campaign to no more than 100,000 (which is, again, a lot).
I would reduce their numbers following SoT to 500,000 military members. That is, again, a lot.

In the Minion War that would give them around 1,500,000 troops, which is still a ridiculously high number, but it is more realistic in terms of a military and allows other kingdoms (Lazlo etc) to not be instantly swarmed and stomped.

[shadrak]

The numbers are rather random, but you have to also factor that new troops are less experiences and less well trained than previous CS troopers. Still, look at a massively mobilized society compared to 10 years before...for example- US military in 1935 compared to US military in 1945.

Heroes of humanity also speaks a little bit to this issue, but in your Rifts Worlds the CS can be whatever you want it to be....just as Lazlo can be what you want it to be.

[Shark_Force]

eh, when you look at massively mobilized groups, the CS still looks pretty ridiculous. particularly when you remember we're only given numbers of soldiers, which means support personnel would need to take up even more of the population.

the only way it works at all is if you imagine they're able to pull off those mobilization numbers without utterly crippling their economy because of SCIENCE!!!!!!!

(as in, there isn't really any good explanation anywhere on that subject, which shouldn't be surprising to anyone, so you pretty much have to assume that the CS have some sort of completely unspecified fantastical technological advancements that have allowed them to completely buck the trend of higher tech armies needing a lower tooth-to-tail ratio. by which i mean, you pretty much have to assume that they have almost no tail whatsoever just to get something that has mobilization low enough to match WWII germany).

granted, this is probably at least partially caused by the fact that i'm pretty sure the average palladium author, when assigning population numbers to places, basically just say something along the lines of "hey, one million is a big number, right? let's say the population of the CS state of missouri is 1 million to show just how huge the CS are!"

except then you look at the numbers and you're like "ummm... the CS probably has less than 15 million people in it, officially. of which 20% are military, and probably another 10-15% are ISS (which is basically their defensive military) if not more". and those percentages go even higher if their population is lower than the high-end estimates.

basically, if a number in a palladium book goes over... oh, let's say around ten thousand, assume that nobody has sat down to really consider the logical ramifications of that number to any significant depth. thus we get apocalypse demons that go down like chumps when faced with a few hundred regular people with laser rifles, or the 2 demon dimensions consisting of 1 large world each invading 3 galaxies at simultaneously, or the xiticix population alternating between around 20 million to as much as... i think it's 600 million? depending on which book you read...

basically, what i'm saying is, palladium is really terrible at big numbers.

[eliakon]

The way to get a "realistic" CS military size is to figure out what the population of the CS is.
And then assume that somewhere between 1% to as many as 5% possibly 10% of the population are in the military.
Thus if your "CS Census" turns up a total CS population of 25,000,000 people Then you can safely assume that the CS military is somewhere between 250,000 and 2,500,000 people.

Or you can just do what the Authors seem to do and just put what numbers sound cool at the time.

[kaid]

The numbers are rather random, but you have to also factor that new troops are less experiences and less well trained than previous CS troopers. Still, look at a massively mobilized society compared to 10 years before...for example- US military in 1935 compared to US military in 1945.

Heroes of humanity also speaks a little bit to this issue, but in your Rifts Worlds the CS can be whatever you want it to be....just as Lazlo can be what you want it to be.

Or look at Israel where nearly their entire population does at least a couple years in the military.

[Shark_Force]

The numbers are rather random, but you have to also factor that new troops are less experiences and less well trained than previous CS troopers. Still, look at a massively mobilized society compared to 10 years before...for example- US military in 1935 compared to US military in 1945.

Heroes of humanity also speaks a little bit to this issue, but in your Rifts Worlds the CS can be whatever you want it to be....just as Lazlo can be what you want it to be.

Or look at Israel where nearly their entire population does at least a couple years in the military.

yes, for 2-3 years out of their entire life. the CS has 3 million soldiers in their professional army, for the expeditionary force alone. there are undoubtedly more guarding various locations around the CS, running boot camps, etc, in addition to the ISS, plus whatever special forces they have in various other parts of the world. again, we're probably looking at 30% or higher mobilization *without* counting any support personnel at all, and not just 30% of adults, but 30% of the total population.

with a nation a tiny fraction of the land (and therefore resources) and population of the modern US, they are maintaining an army that is probably double the size or more. with a population of likely less than half of civil war US times, they are fielding an army that is probably at least 2.5 times the number of soldiers that ever served on both sides of the civil war.

and that probably doesn't include dog boys. it almost definitely doesn't include skelebots, which probably take a similar amount of resources to a soldier.

again: either the CS has some technology that has completely and utterly revolutionized everything, the nature of which is utterly fantastical and probably beyond our comprehension, but which has never been mentioned as something that they have or use, or the numbers are completely unbelievable, probably because the authors never received any in-depth training to know what realistic numbers would look like (which is fine, most of them are probably working as an RPG author as a second or third job, and several years of education purely oriented around helping them know all kinds of random stuff like this is not a reasonable expectation for a job that typically does not even pay the bills).

[shadrak]

The numbers are rather random, but you have to also factor that new troops are less experiences and less well trained than previous CS troopers. Still, look at a massively mobilized society compared to 10 years before...for example- US military in 1935 compared to US military in 1945.

Heroes of humanity also speaks a little bit to this issue, but in your Rifts Worlds the CS can be whatever you want it to be....just as Lazlo can be what you want it to be.

Or look at Israel where nearly their entire population does at least a couple years in the military.

yes, for 2-3 years out of their entire life. the CS has 3 million soldiers in their professional army, for the expeditionary force alone. there are undoubtedly more guarding various locations around the CS, running boot camps, etc, in addition to the ISS, plus whatever special forces they have in various other parts of the world. again, we're probably looking at 30% or higher mobilization *without* counting any support personnel at all, and not just 30% of adults, but 30% of the total population.

with a nation a tiny fraction of the land (and therefore resources) and population of the modern US, they are maintaining an army that is probably double the size or more. with a population of likely less than half of civil war US times, they are fielding an army that is probably at least 2.5 times the number of soldiers that ever served on both sides of the civil war.

and that probably doesn't include dog boys. it almost definitely doesn't include skelebots, which probably take a similar amount of resources to a soldier.

again: either the CS has some technology that has completely and utterly revolutionized everything, the nature of which is utterly fantastical and probably beyond our comprehension, but which has never been mentioned as something that they have or use, or the numbers are completely unbelievable, probably because the authors never received any in-depth training to know what realistic numbers would look like (which is fine, most of them are probably working as an RPG author as a second or third job, and several years of education purely oriented around helping them know all kinds of random stuff like this is not a reasonable expectation for a job that typically does not even pay the bills).

What happens when you automate 90% of conventional manual jobs or increase worker productivity to the point where 1 man can do the work of 10? What happens to your economy amd your society when you have 30 jobs and 100 laborers? Do you become a welfare society consisting of an upper class, working class, and welfare class?

Well, if you are subsidizing non-working individuals amyway, why not subsidize them as combat troops?

Unfortunately, we dont have a lot of canon material on the CS economy and most aspects of it have to be assumed or extrapolated...but we can assume high levels of automation in manufacturing aling with a farming system that ranges from medieval to highly efficient corporate farms. Natural resources and raw materials are never adequately addressed, but amy society that can create a few million automated combat robots can probably automate most aspects of their economy even more effectively...

So, if everyone is going to be on the government dole anyway, why not put 10-20% of the population in uniform?

[shadrak]

Also, with the CS's universal credit system established as a north american standard amd the CS representing 80% or more of economic output on the continent, the military might just be the most effective way of dealing with economoc distortions

[kaid]

The numbers are rather random, but you have to also factor that new troops are less experiences and less well trained than previous CS troopers. Still, look at a massively mobilized society compared to 10 years before...for example- US military in 1935 compared to US military in 1945.

Heroes of humanity also speaks a little bit to this issue, but in your Rifts Worlds the CS can be whatever you want it to be....just as Lazlo can be what you want it to be.

Or look at Israel where nearly their entire population does at least a couple years in the military.

yes, for 2-3 years out of their entire life. the CS has 3 million soldiers in their professional army, for the expeditionary force alone. there are undoubtedly more guarding various locations around the CS, running boot camps, etc, in addition to the ISS, plus whatever special forces they have in various other parts of the world. again, we're probably looking at 30% or higher mobilization *without* counting any support personnel at all, and not just 30% of adults, but 30% of the total population.

with a nation a tiny fraction of the land (and therefore resources) and population of the modern US, they are maintaining an army that is probably double the size or more. with a population of likely less than half of civil war US times, they are fielding an army that is probably at least 2.5 times the number of soldiers that ever served on both sides of the civil war.

and that probably doesn't include dog boys. it almost definitely doesn't include skelebots, which probably take a similar amount of resources to a soldier.

again: either the CS has some technology that has completely and utterly revolutionized everything, the nature of which is utterly fantastical and probably beyond our comprehension, but which has never been mentioned as something that they have or use, or the numbers are completely unbelievable, probably because the authors never received any in-depth training to know what realistic numbers would look like (which is fine, most of them are probably working as an RPG author as a second or third job, and several years of education purely oriented around helping them know all kinds of random stuff like this is not a reasonable expectation for a job that typically does not even pay the bills).

What happens when you automate 90% of conventional manual jobs or increase worker productivity to the point where 1 man can do the work of 10? What happens to your economy amd your society when you have 30 jobs and 100 laborers? Do you become a welfare society consisting of an upper class, working class, and welfare class?

Well, if you are subsidizing non-working individuals amyway, why not subsidize them as combat troops?

Unfortunately, we dont have a lot of canon material on the CS economy and most aspects of it have to be assumed or extrapolated...but we can assume high levels of automation in manufacturing aling with a farming system that ranges from medieval to highly efficient corporate farms. Natural resources and raw materials are never adequately addressed, but amy society that can create a few million automated combat robots can probably automate most aspects of their economy even more effectively...

So, if everyone is going to be on the government dole anyway, why not put 10-20% of the population in uniform?

Given what skelebots and NG labor bots are capable of rifts tech societies could be capable of levels of military mobilization that we could not manage simply because they can have robots and automation do the grunt work of keeping society running that normally would break down if you conscript/activate a large percentage of your population.

Also given the nature of rifts earth I think most societies in it would accept a MUCH higher level of military mobilization of their population than anything we would see currently.

[shadrak]

The numbers are rather random, but you have to also factor that new troops are less experiences and less well trained than previous CS troopers. Still, look at a massively mobilized society compared to 10 years before...for example- US military in 1935 compared to US military in 1945.

Heroes of humanity also speaks a little bit to this issue, but in your Rifts Worlds the CS can be whatever you want it to be....just as Lazlo can be what you want it to be.

Or look at Israel where nearly their entire population does at least a couple years in the military.

yes, for 2-3 years out of their entire life. the CS has 3 million soldiers in their professional army, for the expeditionary force alone. there are undoubtedly more guarding various locations around the CS, running boot camps, etc, in addition to the ISS, plus whatever special forces they have in various other parts of the world. again, we're probably looking at 30% or higher mobilization *without* counting any support personnel at all, and not just 30% of adults, but 30% of the total population.

with a nation a tiny fraction of the land (and therefore resources) and population of the modern US, they are maintaining an army that is probably double the size or more. with a population of likely less than half of civil war US times, they are fielding an army that is probably at least 2.5 times the number of soldiers that ever served on both sides of the civil war.

and that probably doesn't include dog boys. it almost definitely doesn't include skelebots, which probably take a similar amount of resources to a soldier.

again: either the CS has some technology that has completely and utterly revolutionized everything, the nature of which is utterly fantastical and probably beyond our comprehension, but which has never been mentioned as something that they have or use, or the numbers are completely unbelievable, probably because the authors never received any in-depth training to know what realistic numbers would look like (which is fine, most of them are probably working as an RPG author as a second or third job, and several years of education purely oriented around helping them know all kinds of random stuff like this is not a reasonable expectation for a job that typically does not even pay the bills).

What happens when you automate 90% of conventional manual jobs or increase worker productivity to the point where 1 man can do the work of 10? What happens to your economy amd your society when you have 30 jobs and 100 laborers? Do you become a welfare society consisting of an upper class, working class, and welfare class?

Well, if you are subsidizing non-working individuals amyway, why not subsidize them as combat troops?

Unfortunately, we dont have a lot of canon material on the CS economy and most aspects of it have to be assumed or extrapolated...but we can assume high levels of automation in manufacturing aling with a farming system that ranges from medieval to highly efficient corporate farms. Natural resources and raw materials are never adequately addressed, but amy society that can create a few million automated combat robots can probably automate most aspects of their economy even more effectively...

So, if everyone is going to be on the government dole anyway, why not put 10-20% of the population in uniform?

Given what skelebots and NG labor bots are capable of rifts tech societies could be capable of levels of military mobilization that we could not manage simply because they can have robots and automation do the grunt work of keeping society running that normally would break down if you conscript/activate a large percentage of your population.

Also given the nature of rifts earth I think most societies in it would accept a MUCH higher level of military mobilization of their population than anything we would see currently.

Exactly! The CS can either have 10 million more people on welfare or they can have a 10 million man army. May as well create demand for labor if you are going to pay either way.

[Shark_Force]

well, first off, we know the CS is recruiting from non-citizens. i think it's fairly safe to say that they aren't doing that because they need more citizens to go on welfare, so having everything automated is unlikely. i especially doubt that they would be recruiting from a population that could be disloyal, is almost definitely poorly trained, may or may not have undesirable thoughts and ideas, may or may not follow orders well, and may or may not be suitable for combat duty, if they could just replace them with competent AI.

which brings me to my second point: the state of the CS's automation is pretty poor if they're handling everything that way. skelebots do not reflect automation that has reached a level where it can replace humans consistently. now, i'm not saying that skelebots are the pinnacle of CS artificial intelligence... i am simply pointing out that if the CS was so comfortable with artificial intelligence handling everything, their skelebots would be smarter. yet, we know that they are of very limited intelligence, and tend to be easily fooled into stupid tactical errors that allow theoretically weaker enemies to defeat them in huge numbers.

thirdly, those robots would still need resources. the CS covers a tiny area. world trade is very limited. where are they getting the materials and energy to build 15 million or more robots to do all the work?

fourthly, while we don't have an in-depth look at CS society, we do have a lot of windows that allow us to get a peek. none of them suggest that the CS runs on machine labour for everything.

fifthly, you still need the tail for the tooth to tail ratio. making it robotic wouldn't make it go away. to sustain 3 million soldiers would likely require 6 million or more people today. robots are often more limited in what they can do, not less, so now we're looking at 6 or more million robots following this army around. where are they? how are they not a gigantic weakness, considering that their combat robots are absolute rubbish at military strategy? how did the CS military not run out of everything a few hours into the war due to tolkeen forces having their way with the supply chain if the supply chain was a bunch of derpy robots that can be duped into walking straight into an ambush with ease? we're told the tolkeen side of the war was able to easily defeat armies of several tens of thousands of skelebots with ease. there are literally areas of the tolkeen countryside where there are fields of destroyed skelebots that walked into traps like a bunch of idiots.

sixthly, such extensive use of robots would of necessity spread to the rest of the world. if the robots were so cheap and good at their job, other nations would acquire them, at least a few. yet we see no sign of this anywhere in the setting. businesses don't use robots to perform their manual labour. rich people aren't mentioned to have a dozen housekeeping robots. the only labour robot we've seen in the setting has basically been a thinly-veiled combat robot.


to address another point...

it isn't a question of willingness to have higher levels of mobilization. you need people to keep working. notice how in our world wars, when mobilization levels were very high, the women all went to work in spite of the fact that traditionally women didn't. that was to keep things running. rationing and such were simply not enough. in the absence of something to do the work, drafting more people is simply not an option, because your troops will starve if you do it for any length of time. and as i've noted above: there are no signs of some fantastical (or non-fantastical) technological advance that just completely replaces human labour.

[dreicunan]

This argument always boils down to people who assume that canon must be wrong asserting that their assumptuons about how things work in Rifts are somehow more correct than those who assume that canon is correct ans then figure out how to fill in the blanks to make it correct. It is the same as the "Kevin S. is wrong. Mega-damage weapons and materials aren't actually rare," argument.

[eliakon]

This argument always boils down to people who assume that canon must be wrong asserting that their assumptuons about how things work in Rifts are somehow more correct than those who assume that canon is correct ans then figure out how to fill in the blanks to make it correct. It is the same as the "Kevin S. is wrong. Mega-damage weapons and materials aren't actually rare," argument.

I don't see any issue with this though.
We know that the rules are self contradictory all the time.
Why should we expect the populations, or gear distributions, or economic systems, or any of the rest of it to be any better?

Simply put we know that it is physically impossible to run a rifts game with out making at least some deviations from the RAW... so we can throw out "canon is inviolate and always right" instead the best we can hope for is "what is the most likely given the inherent contradictions"

It is also extremely rude, considering that the entire thread was specifically a "lets throw out the canon and reverse engineer new numbers" situation.
So coming in and telling people off and saying they are bad gamers because they are doing what the thread is about seems to be the height of rude arrogance and possibly trolling.

[dreicunan]

This argument always boils down to people who assume that canon must be wrong asserting that their assumptuons about how things work in Rifts are somehow more correct than those who assume that canon is correct ans then figure out how to fill in the blanks to make it correct. It is the same as the "Kevin S. is wrong. Mega-damage weapons and materials aren't actually rare," argument.

I don't see any issue with this though.
We know that the rules are self contradictory all the time.
Why should we expect the populations, or gear distributions, or economic systems, or any of the rest of it to be any better?

Simply put we know that it is physically impossible to run a rifts game with out making at least some deviations from the RAW... so we can throw out "canon is inviolate and always right" instead the best we can hope for is "what is the most likely given the inherent contradictions"

It is also extremely rude, considering that the entire thread was specifically a "lets throw out the canon and reverse engineer new numbers" situation.
So coming in and telling people off and saying they are bad gamers because they are doing what the thread is about seems to be the height of rude arrogance and possibly trolling.

That might be rude and arrogant, almost as rude and arrogant as saying that this thead is going to throw out the 3 million and suits of SAMAS just sitting around and "stupid stuff like that."

So I'm sure that you will be thrilled to find out that I never told anyone off or called anyone a bad gamer, as is clear to anyone who reads my post.

[HWalsh]

This argument always boils down to people who assume that canon must be wrong asserting that their assumptuons about how things work in Rifts are somehow more correct than those who assume that canon is correct ans then figure out how to fill in the blanks to make it correct. It is the same as the "Kevin S. is wrong. Mega-damage weapons and materials aren't actually rare," argument.

I don't see any issue with this though.
We know that the rules are self contradictory all the time.
Why should we expect the populations, or gear distributions, or economic systems, or any of the rest of it to be any better?

Simply put we know that it is physically impossible to run a rifts game with out making at least some deviations from the RAW... so we can throw out "canon is inviolate and always right" instead the best we can hope for is "what is the most likely given the inherent contradictions"

It is also extremely rude, considering that the entire thread was specifically a "lets throw out the canon and reverse engineer new numbers" situation.
So coming in and telling people off and saying they are bad gamers because they are doing what the thread is about seems to be the height of rude arrogance and possibly trolling.

That might be rude and arrogant, almost as rude and arrogant as saying that this thead is going to throw out the 3 million and suits of SAMAS just sitting around and "stupid stuff like that."

So I'm sure that you will be thrilled to find out that I never told anyone off or called anyone a bad gamer, as is clear to anyone who reads my post.

Do you know how big of an area you would need to store 3 million suits of SAMAS armor?

To put this in perspective:
If you fill Fenway Park to capacity it holds 53,000 people.
You could squeeze another 2500 people shoulder to shoulder on the field.

Let's get crazy and say we could fit 56,000 people in Fenway park.

Now...

Imagine that a SAMAS is about 1.5 of the space a normal person takes up.

So you could fit around 37,000 SAMAS in the same area.

So to fit THREE MILLION SAMAS you would need a warehouse roughly the size of 83 Fenway Parks.

83 Fenway Parks.

An 83 story Fenway Park.

Even 8f you broke this up in 10 different sites you're looking at 8+ stories of areas the size of Fenway Park just for ONE ITEM.

That's not counting the area you need for millions of Skelebots. Millions of guns. Millions of suits of armor.

That's just for the stuff the CS has in storage.

It goes to the "MD is uncommon" argument. In the same setting where, when you do the math, there are (this is not a joke) a series of warehouses that MUST be the size of NEW YORK STATE just to house the OLD CS equipment that is in storage.

This isn't counting what they have for modern troops. This is literally what they have in storage.

That. Is. Insane.

There are only 8.63 million people in New York City.

The CS has a warehouse that is bigger than New York City.

For all of their old and unused vehicles.

I can't state how that doesn't work in a setting where MD material is rare. You have something the size of one of the current largest cities in North America that is literally filled wall to wall with excess CS gear.

We're talking about a single structure the size of NEW YORK CITY that is *at least* 8 stories tall *just* for skelebots and old equipment.

Sure, that is what the setting has, so that is what it has, but we need to understand the ramifications of a structure of that size just for decommissioned equipment.

I can't even wrap my mind around enormity on that scale.

[The Beast]

Clearly the reason why MDC is rare is due to the CS hogging it all.

[shadrak]

well, first off, we know the CS is recruiting from non-citizens. i think it's fairly safe to say that they aren't doing that because they need more citizens to go on welfare, so having everything automated is unlikely. i especially doubt that they would be recruiting from a population that could be disloyal, is almost definitely poorly trained, may or may not have undesirable thoughts and ideas, may or may not follow orders well, and may or may not be suitable for combat duty, if they could just replace them with competent AI.

which brings me to my second point: the state of the CS's automation is pretty poor if they're handling everything that way. skelebots do not reflect automation that has reached a level where it can replace humans consistently. now, i'm not saying that skelebots are the pinnacle of CS artificial intelligence... i am simply pointing out that if the CS was so comfortable with artificial intelligence handling everything, their skelebots would be smarter. yet, we know that they are of very limited intelligence, and tend to be easily fooled into stupid tactical errors that allow theoretically weaker enemies to defeat them in huge numbers.

thirdly, those robots would still need resources. the CS covers a tiny area. world trade is very limited. where are they getting the materials and energy to build 15 million or more robots to do all the work?

fourthly, while we don't have an in-depth look at CS society, we do have a lot of windows that allow us to get a peek. none of them suggest that the CS runs on machine labour for everything.

fifthly, you still need the tail for the tooth to tail ratio. making it robotic wouldn't make it go away. to sustain 3 million soldiers would likely require 6 million or more people today. robots are often more limited in what they can do, not less, so now we're looking at 6 or more million robots following this army around. where are they? how are they not a gigantic weakness, considering that their combat robots are absolute rubbish at military strategy? how did the CS military not run out of everything a few hours into the war due to tolkeen forces having their way with the supply chain if the supply chain was a bunch of derpy robots that can be duped into walking straight into an ambush with ease? we're told the tolkeen side of the war was able to easily defeat armies of several tens of thousands of skelebots with ease. there are literally areas of the tolkeen countryside where there are fields of destroyed skelebots that walked into traps like a bunch of idiots.

sixthly, such extensive use of robots would of necessity spread to the rest of the world. if the robots were so cheap and good at their job, other nations would acquire them, at least a few. yet we see no sign of this anywhere in the setting. businesses don't use robots to perform their manual labour. rich people aren't mentioned to have a dozen housekeeping robots. the only labour robot we've seen in the setting has basically been a thinly-veiled combat robot.


to address another point...

it isn't a question of willingness to have higher levels of mobilization. you need people to keep working. notice how in our world wars, when mobilization levels were very high, the women all went to work in spite of the fact that traditionally women didn't. that was to keep things running. rationing and such were simply not enough. in the absence of something to do the work, drafting more people is simply not an option, because your troops will starve if you do it for any length of time. and as i've noted above: there are no signs of some fantastical (or non-fantastical) technological advance that just completely replaces human labour.

Uhm...???

Automation is not an synonym for artificial intelligence...

And yes, CS manufacturing is heavily automated....because all modern manufacturing is heavily automated...which is why modern economies have shifted from primary (resource production) and secondary sectors (manufacturing) to tertiary (services) and quarternary (knowledge, tech)...

The CS doesn’t “need” more people to go on welfare....in their controlled society, with few requirements for resource production and manufacturing as a portion of the labor force and a limited/non-functioning service and knowledge sector with the ability to provide basic living requirements for most citizens (food, shelter, etc.), they simply have a HUGE surplus of otherwise unemployed citizens...

You don’t need millions of citizens to build SAMAS suits or Aircraft carriers and tanks...you don’t have sectors of the economy that are demanding labor in competition with military mobilization.

The fact that you have crafted a response under an assumption that the argument is that resource and manufacturing is conducted by skelebots means that you need to reassess your response....

Instead of assuming skelebots are doing the work, make your response with the assumption that some/many farmers in the CS have large Combines with driver assistance or and the trucks that follow collecting grain are pilotless...

In this scenario you can have 4 or 5 farmers managing thousands of acreage...

With regard to production, in 2020 how many laborers do you need to produce a line of vehicles? How big of a factory do you need to produce a million M4 rifles (CP-40s) or a million boron carbide armor plates (CA-3 armor). How many illiterate laborers do you need to build Samsung TVs? You don’t have 1 million operators making parts for consumer or military electronics like an 18th century blacksmith.

What happens to production if you have 3D printers?

What does the CS consumer economy look like? Does it require manufacturing labor?

I would argue that the CS, with a late 20th century-early 21st century manufacturing capability and a controlled economy with all knowledge industry controlled by the government and most citizens illiterate will end up with a surplus of labor...and that is without the automated factories in Lone Star


The real question is what does the CS do with so many people that are complete crap as laborers? Are they all waiters?

I would argue that the only way the CS works is with an almost entirely mobilized population...or made up government jobs and government work projects.

[shadrak]

I mean, 90% of the CS’s population is urban...what jobs are they working? What is their 9 to 5? Are they all illiterate computer programmers selling each other apps? Are they bankers? Real Estate brokers? Selling state-owned apartments and engaging in the sale of derivatives of a universal credit system? Medical device and pharmaceutical sales? Vehicle sales? Driving public transportation in a fortress city?


Are they landscapers in these fortress cities that contain 50% of the CS population?

Surely many of them are government employed sanitation workers and grocery store clerks, but how many?

[Shark_Force]

i never said skelebots are doing the work.

i said that if they had robots that do everything to the point where no actual people are needed, that would mean they have widespread use of robots that aren't stupid. they would need to, otherwise the robots would be screwing things up all the time.

but we know that the only official major use of robots in their society, which is by the military (which has by far the biggest budget to make a good robot out of any other group in their entire civilization) only uses robots that are stupid enough to get themselves destroyed by the tens of thousands, putting to waste all of their expensive equipment (including a very expensive nuclear power supply).

does that mean that the CS definitely for 100% sure doesn't have really smart robots? nope. does it reaaaaally strongly suggest that they either don't have or don't use them? sure does. if they had the technology for smart robots and were comfortable enough to put it into widespread use everywhere else in their society, then it is an absolutely huge stretch to assume they would be making stupid robots for their military. it simply is not a credible conclusion to reach without some really compelling evidence to that effect elsewhere. and there isn't any. for all of the reasons i've already listed, and probably more.

[dreicunan]

This argument always boils down to people who assume that canon must be wrong asserting that their assumptuons about how things work in Rifts are somehow more correct than those who assume that canon is correct ans then figure out how to fill in the blanks to make it correct. It is the same as the "Kevin S. is wrong. Mega-damage weapons and materials aren't actually rare," argument.

I don't see any issue with this though.
We know that the rules are self contradictory all the time.
Why should we expect the populations, or gear distributions, or economic systems, or any of the rest of it to be any better?

Simply put we know that it is physically impossible to run a rifts game with out making at least some deviations from the RAW... so we can throw out "canon is inviolate and always right" instead the best we can hope for is "what is the most likely given the inherent contradictions"

It is also extremely rude, considering that the entire thread was specifically a "lets throw out the canon and reverse engineer new numbers" situation.
So coming in and telling people off and saying they are bad gamers because they are doing what the thread is about seems to be the height of rude arrogance and possibly trolling.

That might be rude and arrogant, almost as rude and arrogant as saying that this thead is going to throw out the 3 million and suits of SAMAS just sitting around and "stupid stuff like that."

So I'm sure that you will be thrilled to find out that I never told anyone off or called anyone a bad gamer, as is clear to anyone who reads my post.

Do you know how big of an area you would need to store 3 million suits of SAMAS armor?

To put this in perspective:
If you fill Fenway Park to capacity it holds 53,000 people.
You could squeeze another 2500 people shoulder to shoulder on the field.

Let's get crazy and say we could fit 56,000 people in Fenway park.

Now...

Imagine that a SAMAS is about 1.5 of the space a normal person takes up.

So you could fit around 37,000 SAMAS in the same area.

So to fit THREE MILLION SAMAS you would need a warehouse roughly the size of 83 Fenway Parks.

83 Fenway Parks.

An 83 story Fenway Park.

Even 8f you broke this up in 10 different sites you're looking at 8+ stories of areas the size of Fenway Park just for ONE ITEM.

That's not counting the area you need for millions of Skelebots. Millions of guns. Millions of suits of armor.

That's just for the stuff the CS has in storage.

It goes to the "MD is uncommon" argument. In the same setting where, when you do the math, there are (this is not a joke) a series of warehouses that MUST be the size of NEW YORK STATE just to house the OLD CS equipment that is in storage.

This isn't counting what they have for modern troops. This is literally what they have in storage.

That. Is. Insane.

There are only 8.63 million people in New York City.

The CS has a warehouse that is bigger than New York City.

For all of their old and unused vehicles.

I can't state how that doesn't work in a setting where MD material is rare. You have something the size of one of the current largest cities in North America that is literally filled wall to wall with excess CS gear.

We're talking about a single structure the size of NEW YORK CITY that is *at least* 8 stories tall *just* for skelebots and old equipment.

Sure, that is what the setting has, so that is what it has, but we need to understand the ramifications of a structure of that size just for decommissioned equipment.

I can't even wrap my mind around enormity on that scale.

HWalsh, I agree with that last line, because your math is so far off that it is ridiculous. Citing the capacity of Fenway Park is an atrocious example, because Fenway park wastes an incredible amount of space with air. But let's focus on just how ludicrous your New York City example is.

We know the SAMAS dimensions with wings down (which would be the logical position for storage). 8' x 3.5' x 4.5'. The height of a story can vary, but warehouses with floors are going to have at least that much space. Thus, we can ignore that and just calculate area, so a SAMAS takes up 15.75 sq ft. New York City has an area of 306.2 sq miles, or 8,436,003,840 sq ft. 3,000,000 Samas only take up 47,250,000 sq ft. That is only 0.056% of the area of a single story of a New York City sized building for the mothballed SAMAS.

Boeing's Everett Factory covers 4,299,966 sq ft (rounding down), so if you just stand all the SAMAS next to each other it would take about 11 Everett Factories to house them. But the Everett Factory has DOORS that are 82 ft high. It is pretty reasonable to assume that if the CS is building warehouses for military equipment that they could fit at least 3 stories into a building that size, so 4 Everett Factories would be more than enough space without bothering to find a more efficient way to store them than just having them stand there.

Yes, I'm only accounting for SAMAS and not the rest of the surplus, and yes I've done very simple math for this - one could slightly tweak the area SAMAS takes up, for example - but I think that I've already demonstrated that your estimates are ludicrously off.

[HWalsh]

This argument always boils down to people who assume that canon must be wrong asserting that their assumptuons about how things work in Rifts are somehow more correct than those who assume that canon is correct ans then figure out how to fill in the blanks to make it correct. It is the same as the "Kevin S. is wrong. Mega-damage weapons and materials aren't actually rare," argument.

I don't see any issue with this though.
We know that the rules are self contradictory all the time.
Why should we expect the populations, or gear distributions, or economic systems, or any of the rest of it to be any better?

Simply put we know that it is physically impossible to run a rifts game with out making at least some deviations from the RAW... so we can throw out "canon is inviolate and always right" instead the best we can hope for is "what is the most likely given the inherent contradictions"

It is also extremely rude, considering that the entire thread was specifically a "lets throw out the canon and reverse engineer new numbers" situation.
So coming in and telling people off and saying they are bad gamers because they are doing what the thread is about seems to be the height of rude arrogance and possibly trolling.

That might be rude and arrogant, almost as rude and arrogant as saying that this thead is going to throw out the 3 million and suits of SAMAS just sitting around and "stupid stuff like that."

So I'm sure that you will be thrilled to find out that I never told anyone off or called anyone a bad gamer, as is clear to anyone who reads my post.

Do you know how big of an area you would need to store 3 million suits of SAMAS armor?

To put this in perspective:
If you fill Fenway Park to capacity it holds 53,000 people.
You could squeeze another 2500 people shoulder to shoulder on the field.

Let's get crazy and say we could fit 56,000 people in Fenway park.

Now...

Imagine that a SAMAS is about 1.5 of the space a normal person takes up.

So you could fit around 37,000 SAMAS in the same area.

So to fit THREE MILLION SAMAS you would need a warehouse roughly the size of 83 Fenway Parks.

83 Fenway Parks.

An 83 story Fenway Park.

Even 8f you broke this up in 10 different sites you're looking at 8+ stories of areas the size of Fenway Park just for ONE ITEM.

That's not counting the area you need for millions of Skelebots. Millions of guns. Millions of suits of armor.

That's just for the stuff the CS has in storage.

It goes to the "MD is uncommon" argument. In the same setting where, when you do the math, there are (this is not a joke) a series of warehouses that MUST be the size of NEW YORK STATE just to house the OLD CS equipment that is in storage.

This isn't counting what they have for modern troops. This is literally what they have in storage.

That. Is. Insane.

There are only 8.63 million people in New York City.

The CS has a warehouse that is bigger than New York City.

For all of their old and unused vehicles.

I can't state how that doesn't work in a setting where MD material is rare. You have something the size of one of the current largest cities in North America that is literally filled wall to wall with excess CS gear.

We're talking about a single structure the size of NEW YORK CITY that is *at least* 8 stories tall *just* for skelebots and old equipment.

Sure, that is what the setting has, so that is what it has, but we need to understand the ramifications of a structure of that size just for decommissioned equipment.

I can't even wrap my mind around enormity on that scale.

HWalsh, I agree with that last line, because your math is so far off that it is ridiculous. Citing the capacity of Fenway Park is an atrocious example, because Fenway park wastes an incredible amount of space with air. But let's focus on just how ludicrous your New York City example is.

We know the SAMAS dimensions with wings down (which would be the logical position for storage). 8' x 3.5' x 4.5'. The height of a story can vary, but warehouses with floors are going to have at least that much space. Thus, we can ignore that and just calculate area, so a SAMAS takes up 15.75 sq ft. New York City has an area of 306.2 sq miles, or 8,436,003,840 sq ft. 3,000,000 Samas only take up 47,250,000 sq ft. That is only 0.056% of the area of a single story of a New York City sized building for the mothballed SAMAS.

Boeing's Everett Factory covers 4,299,966 sq ft (rounding down), so if you just stand all the SAMAS next to each other it would take about 11 Everett Factories to house them. But the Everett Factory has DOORS that are 82 ft high. It is pretty reasonable to assume that if the CS is building warehouses for military equipment that they could fit at least 3 stories into a building that size, so 4 Everett Factories would be more than enough space without bothering to find a more efficient way to store them than just having them stand there.

Yes, I'm only accounting for SAMAS and not the rest of the surplus, and yes I've done very simple math for this - one could slightly tweak the area SAMAS takes up, for example - but I think that I've already demonstrated that your estimates are ludicrously off.

Reporting for targeting another poster with an insult. A violation of forum rules.

[dreicunan]

Reporting for targeting another poster with an insult. A violation of forum rules.

Thanks for letting me know. However, since the definition of "insult" is not "use math correctly to debunk someone's claims," I'm not worried, as your accusation against me is baseless.

Now, if you think that I've made an error in my math, please point it out.

[RockJock]

Just to throw it out there, Triax 2 talks spends a good bit of time on battery powered SDC labor bots, and their possible skill selections. As I recall they are not considered common outside of Europe, but they do solve a lot of the labor problems for repetitive jobs, and things like a dozen bots supporting a single farmer on a corporate farm.

The CS population, and large stockpiles of equipment is a problem to me. I think support bots can help with the logistics train to a point. I also see how universal e-clips and common recharging ports in all CS nuke powered vehicles cut down on field logistics greatly, but at some point you are going to have transport and logistics troops out there.

In some ways it makes more sense to me for the CS "citizens" to be more of an elite, highly trained and educated group with more engineers and scientists then guys and gals punching out weapons in a factory, but the lack of education kinda kills that. I'll save that for the NGR.

[Wise_Owl]

Two Answers;

1) The Unsatisfacotry one, is that the CS is a Cartoon Villain. They exist and have the things they have to further their continued cartoon villainy. Trying to make them make sense in a world-building sense basically requires you to routinely violate 'Canon'.

2)If you want to ignore point 1, then you are looking at logistical questions. Where does the CS get its food from; what are its people doing and how does its economy function.

To 2, we don't have a lot of information, but if you want to keep the earliest conceptions fo the CS intact we do have that it's A) A Fascistic society, B)That Education for the masses is highly limited and what might constitute a generalized education, even by 19th century standards. and C)Evolved from a surviving community centred around the US military with a 'survive at any cost' mentality.

The CS has these huge mega-cities that are functionally giant Arcologies and it makes sense to a point; one assumed the CS was functionally super-defensive prior to the Prosek Era, and a centralized defence point makes sense against most threats in Rifts(save those with the ability to teleport).

Looking at Comparable societies in our world, though accounting for the differences in technology and social dynamic we can presume, from a mdoern POV, the Coalitions economy is a mess. Likely plenty of industrial and farming practices are vastly more 'archaic' then they 'need' to be, because human labour would be vastly cheaper than automation. Especially if education is being highly controlled/limited in a caste-system like way. You have huge groups of people whose choices are 'accept this menial work, or starve to death and/or be pushed out of the safe place into the demonic hell-scape'.

I would expect total CS populations to be somewhere in the 20 Million Mark? with big chunks of that in the Mega-cities, another big chunk spread throughout mass farms being operated like a weird hybrid of modern hydroponics farms and pre-industrial plantations, and the remaining in a variety of sub-strata.

There are plenty of other issues to deal with; the CS as described would probably be suffering a mass economic collapse in the aftermath of the Tolkien conflict(even if it went as described). Post-Industrial societies can take some punched, but losing that many lives and that much material in such a short period of time is going to cause problems; trying to refurbish your military is going to stretch your social mechanisms thin. Labour shortages will not be something the CS social dynamic can handle.

[kaid]

I would argue even in the prosek era the CS is still basically very defensive in stance. Look at their expansions into some of the new states they are establishing. It is noted in the books that they are basically setting up the fortress cities before moving the bulk of the population to them. It seems their normal mode of expansion is claim an area, patrol it with forces while you can setup the construction of a fortress city complete that and THEN start moving people in and then start construction of the next fortress city and so on. Thats why you get their newer southern holdings they have military patrols and presence but until the fortress cities get rolling their actual footprint is minimal. It really smacks of being very very cautious about overextending.

[Shark_Force]

they've just come out of an attempted 2-front war with the express goal of conquering new territory that lasted years. i don't think their recent expansion can be characterized as defensive at all.

(but it would make a heck of a lot of sense if, after the clown fiesta of a war that they just had, they plan on going back to their previous ways of murdering small populations of largely defenseless people they don't like that live near territory they want and pressuring any remaining communities into welcoming them with open arms lest they get the same treatment, then gradually building up into that area).

[zexsis]

We have all had moments when reading Rifts books where we go "This doesn't make sense. it shouldn't be like this... this is what should have happened"... I've done it myself however the books are written how they are written and I ask you a simple question: What ways/things can you yourself come up with that would justify things as they are written?

(Kevin brought us Rifts and all the other stuff, we can't expect him to have all answers and information perfectly in mind to make everything make sense to everyone.)

Just a thought here.. you can sit around finding fault with how things are written or spend more time enjoying what is a great setting and have more fun with it all.