With all the recent discussion, both here and on the BT boards, about the production and use of WarShips in 3025, I decided to try and make a historically plausible crack at it. Here is what I cam up with.
Firstly, I looked over Historical: Reunification War. This gives the strength of the major militaries going into the Star League era. We also know that the edict of 2650, which limited the size of House militaries, was amended in 2752, doubling member state forces. So, as a rough rule of thumb, I doubled the totals, for both regiments and ships.
I then counted the number of HOUSE regiments each state had in 3025, per the 3025 House Books, and compared this to the number of regiments at the end of the Star League era. The 3025 number was then expressed as a percentage of the Star League number. E.g., for the LCAF, the SL number was 170 and the 3025 number was 53, giving a percentage of 31.18%.
I then multiplied the number of WarShips available at the end of Star League era by the percentage, but this gave fleet numbers of up to 50 for some states, so I halved the results. For the number of shipbuilding slips, the number of WarShips was divided by 10 and assigned to canon 3025 shipyards.
The strengths of each navy were as follows, using ships from canon that were part of that nation’s fleets either pre or post-Succession Wars for flavour (only the LC could not be filled out this way):
State WS Slips Ships
FS 25 Kathil (3), New Syrtis (2) 3 New Syrtis, 5 Avalon, 11 Davion II, 5 Fox, 1 Robinson
CC 15 Capella (3) 3 Du Shi Wang, 3 Feng Huang, 10 Impavido
DC 18 Chatham (2) 3 Samarkand, 4 Kirashima, 7 Kyushu, 5 Inazuma
FW 16 Tamarind (1), Atreus (1), Lopez (1), Marik (1) 1 Atreus, 2 Thera, 3 Agamemnon, 6 Eagle, 4 Zechetineau
LC 19 Alarion (4), Gibbs (1) 1 Tharkad, 2 Molijnir, 4 Congress, 11 Mako, 1 Sylvester
MC 1 1 Concordat
OA 0
RW 0
TC 3 Taurus (1) 3 Concordat
Of course this ship list is open to debate, as SL era vessels, or completely new designs, could well be part of any or all of the fleets and the post-3050 designs may never have arisen. They are merely for show.
I then had to come up with a back story, which in short is this:
Over the Succession Wars, the various state militaries desperately tried to keep their fleets and WarShip building infrastructure operating, sinking vast sums of money and masses of men and material into keeping the shipyards operational.
Over time, what came to be known as Anchorage systems evolved, where military and commercial shipbuilding became largely, but not totally concentrated. These few systems, ever decreasing in number, siphoned off so much of the material of the rebuilding efforts, that most other systems suffered, greatly accelerating the technological and industrial declines on those worlds and across each realm.
By 3025, only eleven Anchorage Worlds remained, each a bastion of interstellar commerce, shipbuilding and slowly recovering technology. Each of these Anchorage Worlds was seen as almost as important as a State’s Capital world, as each represented over 250 years of dedicated effort and expenditure.
Be interesting what others think regarding this.
