Yiuel wrote:I have been surprised by one thing. Loroi population, if I go along what I can infer from the Insider's guide, isn't much more than 2 billion people, 3 billion top. Their main sister planet barely reaches 1 billion. I compare that to present Earth, which probably crossed the 7 billion mark by now. And we are on a single planet. Something in there explaining why Loroi are so small in terms of total population, despite ruling the second largest State in the vincinity?
The Loroi have significant populations on a large number of planets, more than just the original Sister Worlds, so the total population is a lot more than just a few billion. Maia is the most populous Loroi world. I don't have accurate numbers on what the total population is, but it's sigificantly larger than the total human population.
The reason that most individual Loroi planets don't have populations much higher than a few billion is that they choose not to. Loroi population growth is under tight government control; you have to get permission to have children. Individual communities decide what they think is an appropriate maximum population for the area, and then they set a cap. It's only in places like Maia where the social rules and ample space/resources allow for much larger populations.
Victor_D wrote: Actually, this is something I don't understand - why should the Loroi suffer so high casualties that they need to lift population restrictions on their worlds?
The first part of the answer is that high-tech societes are specialized; it's not easy to just grab a person from one role and toss her into someone else's role. For one thing, many jobs require years of training, and for another: who's now doing that person's old job? Combat personnel are usually a small percentage of the total population (especially in any high-tech system that requires a lot of logistics and support, like air forces and navies), but they're highly specialized and can't easily be replaced, so even when the loss rates are small compared to the total population, they can still cause serious manpower shortages and disruptions to society.
If you look at the
casualty rates for WWII, which was the bloodiest war in our history, the actual percentages of loss are very small compared to the total population. Japan's disastrous losses amounted to only about 4% of the population, but they suffered from debilitating manpower shortages, especially in key areas. One key shortage I heard about was in pilots; prior to the war, the Japanese placed rigorous standards on their pilot training, and washed out large numbers of capable pilots who didn't measure up. So the result was an elite pilot corps, but very little manpower reserve, and a system that would make training more to the same standard very difficult and time-consuming. And so, when the Japanese lost a significant percentage of their best pilots at Coral Sea and Midway, this was a blow from which they were not able to recover. When the critical "big" air battles came a few years later at the Marianas and Philippines, the majority of Japanese pilots were hastily-trained replacements who were no match for their American counterparts, and the result is still remembered as a "turkey-shoot."
The Loroi had a much larger personnel reserve, but they have a similar challenge in that warriors are not recruited from civilian populations, but instead trained from a young age. It's possible to throw some desk jockeys or even civilians into needed specialties in a pinch, but that replacement is going to operate at reduced effectiveness, and the job that person used to perform prior to being reassigned will not get done. When a military loses a third of its combat forces in a single battle, that's going to present very serious personnel challenges, even if those losses represent a relatively small percentage of the total population.
The second part of answer is that the Loroi have lost a lot more than just ship crews. In the first five years of the war, the Loroi lost about a dozen inhabited systems and suffered raids directly into populated regions; the majority of the population in the lost systems were evacuated beforehand, but the loss of life was still staggering. Looking again at the WWII loss rates, even in those situations with the most appalling losses and incidents of genocide, the worst percentages of loss are "only" in the neighborhood of 16% (Poland) to 14% (Soviet Union). The loss of ten percent of your population is devastating to a modern society, especially during time of war. It's really hard to field new forces and increase production at home when you have fewer people.
I would agree that losses of ships and materiel are probably more of a crisis than the manpower shortages, but ships can be replaced on a much shorter time scale than people.
Karst45 wrote:It more than just the physical resemblance, Space Preachers !!!
Ah, I missed that element of it. Funny.