Well of Souls Forums

Could be just your timing.

IIRC, in WWII the US put out something like half the world's industrial production. This was probably true for some time after the war too, what, with most other people's industry being blown up and all.

Hm... American history is not one of my strongpoints, but those numbers show clearly how hopeless the confederate position was, right from the start. I was not aware of that. :shock: Their only hope of winning would have been either a quick victory over the union or support from the european powers...

The Union had about 22 million people, 21.5 million of whom were free. The CSA had about 9 million people, 5.5 million of whom were free. So yeah, the North had a 5 to 2 advantage in population overall, and about a 4 to 1 advantage in free people. As to the industrial advantage, the North had about ...

I dunno if this would count as a spoiler, since I am just guessing but... The Loroi had a bad jump. The bad jump shunted them back in time, or the next best thing to it. If they're back in time and the the "many worlds" (copenhagen) interpretation is not in use, then, for whatever reason, their earl...

I definately think that Loroi are more attractive to humans then humans are to Loroi. It'd only make sense, we "miss" something extremely important for social development purposes, from their perspective. From our perspective, they are just aloof, telepathic space amazon elves. Even on the purely p...

Could be that humanity in 2160 has a high tech dipilatory cream that not only removes existing hair, but prevents new growth for some time.

MOO2 has several flavors of planetary shields. Arioch has dropped hints as to some type of super-tech planetary shielding used on radiated worlds by the Soia so as to make planets hospitable enough for further terraforming. I think planetary shields sound like an awesome sci-fi technology! Basicall...

I was going with the Union war fleet being ~1000 ships because that's the number Dragoongfa mentioned. And yeah, an invasion force can be relatively small if the planet gets a thorough orbital bombardment first, but it seemed to me that Dragoongfa was arguing for invasion without significant bombard...

The thing is, 50% of the population on any Loroi world will already be warriors. Spending the resources to breed and possibly move to other star systems several billion more doesn't seem like that good of a return on investment. Is 60 or 70% of the population being warriors really going to tip the b...

I've thought about it some more, and recognized a flaw in my assumptions. The proportion of all Loroi warriors who are in naval castes at the start of the war should have been much, much lower than even 1 in 100. If the standing fleet didn't have jobs for 400 million sailors, they wouldn't breed 400...

The 20 to 1 ratio is also only for the Navy, ignoring all of the other armed forces, and all of the other government and administration duties that are performed by the Loroi warrior class. The 400,000,000 number for which 20 to 1 ratio applies is also only the Navy, which, in this example, is only...

The Loroi fought the war mostly on the defense and in their own territory. This would greatly ease their logistic requirements. Most of the Loroi fleet would be concentrated in defensive positions in Loroi territory, with only interdiction groups operating in the steppes. Behind the lines, supply wo...

Damn, I hate it when it logs me out while I am writing a response, then loses my response when I log back in to post it. Anyway.... Long response short : I accounted for most Loroi being ground troops, administrators, and so on by assuming only 1% were available for shipboard duty. That means 400,00...

I don't know that there would be billions of extra warriors laying around. Whoever controls space, controls (or sterilizes) the land. So the war was primarily a ship to ship thing. It has not been made clear just how many ships the Loroi had, but it has been said (IIRC) that about 50% of the Loroi w...

Or it could be the loooong boring part of the trip where she sets everything to autopilot and comes back to the passenger cabin for some Tang.

Hm.. I posted a reply earlier, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the board. Well, Majorminor covered part of it, but here's the other: Could it be that countries that have short term conscription to fill out their ranks tend more toward "top down" command structures? If many/most of your troops...

A command culture that is too 'top down' is likely to really reduce or eliminate an army's ability to exploit transient opportunities. Also, as Absalom was intimating, a military culture that has too much permission seeking is pretty vulnerable to disruptions of its command structure. Can't ask perm...

It could also be that the Empire (or its remnants) don't bother to salvage because there's more money for the 'right people' in just building a new one. Just send a team down soon after it crashes to make sure the guns/drives/computers are perma-toast. Who cares if the local scavengers start strippi...

I wore out on the mainline Honorverse when Honor started feeling a little too Mary Sue.