7163-9-9, 5:03 EDT
“Finally. The evacuation of Terra is continuing without problems, and we have destroyed multiple dangerous enemy formations trying to attack the Gates slated for evacuation. Now, I want to make use of my actual speciality, and instead of trying to organize a war and an evacuation, I would like to try and organize the economy. What will we need, not only in regards of war material, but also in regards of keeping the population happy. While the population might be ready to face hardship, for most this war will be far away.”, a Lady in a business suit said.
Someone interjected: “Well, it will be far away from them until either the Lizards figure out how to use and build Gates, it is not as if that is particularly difficult, or until in some other universe the Lizards or a different alien group attacks.”
“You do realize that they also need to figure out which Gatekeys we are using?”, one of the technicians in the room called out.
But another interfered: “While we use a mind boggling amount of digits to transcribe our Keys, they are a) public knowledge and b) concentrated in two areas. The first is counting upwards from zero and the other is around this dimension. Although, admittedly, you are correct that they are unlikely to find us only by knowing the amount of digits in one of our keys and randomly trying those out. Counting upwards will be significantly more likely to succeed.”
“Could you please stop this unnecessary discussion? Even if they figure out the technology behind the Gates, they are unlikely to be capable of waging war on enough worlds at the same time to make it problematic for us. If they are a Kardashev three civilization, maybe, but every evidence we have is that they are not, at least not in the classical sense.”, the woman said.
“Why does Mrs. Simmons say things like that without explaining. What the hell is a Kardashev three Civilization even?”, a person in the background of the room murmured.
“Ok, but back to the matter at hand. Mrs, I believe you asked what the military will need, as well as the civilians, and how important it is that it gets to where it is needed. Which brings a question in the room we have not even asked yet, mostly because everyone fears the answer. What are the plans of the civilian government in regards of Terra. Is the military allowed to abandon our home earth or should it hold it at any cost against an invader? Or should it just wage a constant guerrilla war if the enemy decides to settle down on Terra?”, a grizzled old soldier, who was the current leader of the UE’s military asked.
President Vanwagner answered: “Terra can not fall. I do not care how many soldiers are on Terra at any given moment, but I want to be able to honestly say that Terra is still fighting. I hope that answers your question, General Arasim. But do not expend to many resources on that. Is that enough to answer Mrs Simmons question?”
He answered: “Yes, it does. Ok, what do I need then? I need a few rifles and a bit of manpower per month to keep that sustained. Explosives would be nice as well. Otherwise, not much. What would I like? I would like man-portable anti-starship weaponry, to make the live of the enemy difficult. If he decides it is to costly to hold the system, we have already won a lot of breathing room. Without a powerful space fleet of our own, we cannot prevent incursions like this if some other alien civilization in a different universe finds us. But we can drastically reduce the amount of damage this could cause to us. First, having prepared evacuation plans, known to the public would help a lot. Especially prepared on the other side of the Gate. The less time we need to get every civilian out of the line of fire, the less time the enemy has to kill them. The local forces should have some stores of heavy weapons, especially anti-tank and anti-air weaponry. Optimally, I would put a garrison force on every earth with more than a hundred million or so inhabitants, which has the job of holding the line until everyone has evacuated. But I do not nearly have the manpower for that currently. Keep in mind, that those garrisons could help each other out if one comes under attack, so they do not need to be large. I would say five to fifty thousand per earth, with a significant reserve force for all earths to repel any landing. Keep in mind that I do not have the numbers here, and they are surprisingly difficult to look up, but we have roughly seven hundred billion worlds with that kind of population to protect, which means that the amount of men needed is somewhere in the quadrillions. The good news is, that the ten million men I want for the reserve garrison are really a rounding error at that point. Considering available training facilities, which honestly, together with pre-existing manpower, are our greatest bottlenecks, we will need more then a century to bring our forces to that level. Ignoring any other demands on military manpower, which honestly will not amount to that much, less than one percent of our population will need to serve in the military.”
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Masahiko Scruff, one of the foremost public relations experts in the UE answered: “On the civilian side, we need to prevent shortages, especially in food, so we need to keep enough of that infrastructure going. Considering that we only tend to use any one earth for a century, because of obscure environmental protection laws, and the sheer amount of earths we use to grow and raise our food, an attack on them would need to be massive enough to topple the UE. We can afford to loose them. Still, a bit of funding for technologies that would make them unnecessary outside of luxury goods would not hurt, but it has a low priority. More important is our satellite and computer production. We can loose roughly twenty percent of the existing civilian satellite production to the military without anyone realizing, and we could accept to loose up to fifty percent, at least with enough propaganda. We would want it back in the next thirty years, because we loose a lot of our ability to replace the obscure ones in that case, mind you, especially if we continue to settle new earths. To which I will come back to in a moment. Computers, we have bigger problems. We give our citizens, more or less for free, new computers every four years. Roughly ninety percent of our entire production, including the one that goes into satellites and similar things is going towards that program. Discontinuing it would be beyond problematic, the situation would need to be a lot more desperate to even consider that, in my opinion. We can slow down the turnover, but not by that much, without massively increasing the amount of repairs needed for the devices. And we will need to pay for those, at least in part. New computers every five years would free 18 percent production, and I would take another two from the luxury goods production. So twenty percent of our current capacity can be given to the military. We can order to increase the amount of earths we take resources from at any given time fairly easily. We can improve that every year by roughly ten percent without trouble. To use those resources is significantly more difficult, considering fabricators are to specialized to be easily retooled, and expensive to build. But we can order any capacities for fabricator production be used for the military, at least for the next ten years. After that we will need that capacity desperately elsewhere, to prevent a lot of small catastrophes. The big fabricators, which I guess you will need for tanks and aircraft, as well as first experiments with a space fleet, we can only produce a million or so total per year. Hopefully that is enough for now. I would leave, if in any way possible, at least half of the capacity producing more fabricator-fabricators. Back to settling new earths. This is an especially complicated situation. We cannot, I repeat, we cannot stop doing it. Slow it down? Easily. But settling new earths is essentially what the UE stands for in the minds of a lot of our citizens. But here are the big problems. Settling new worlds costs fabricators. A lot of them. Most of our existing capacity exist for colonization and occasional vanity projects. We loose roughly a thousand of the big fabricator-fabricators to that per earth, for ten years. But we only need somewhere between ten and twenty colonizations going, so I guess we can afford that. But the men we send out to scout and prepare those worlds, and which more often than not are a significant portion of the first settlers, those come out of the same manpower pool we take our more or less trained military personnel from. And as my colleague General Arasim has said, we are short on exactly that, and we need every single one we can find. We have a manpower pool of roughly five billion we can draw upon for colonization and fifty million we can draw upon for military use. But the colonization needs at least, per earth, fifty thousand from the military pool, and another five hundred thousand from the non military pool. But here is were it gets even more problematic. That five billion? Those is the manpower we can retrain for the military the easiest. And we currently need every man in the military. So we loose somewhere between one and two percent of our military manpower to those actions, over the next ten years. While it might not sound like a lot, and honestly, it is not, we currently need trainers. And these people can be easily retrained to be those. But I am getting outside my area of expertise. Oh, I think we can stop most ongoing vanity projects of one earth or another and repurpose their resources with ease. But I would decide that on need and not ability.”
Mrs. Simmons took a while to gather her thoughts and then said: “Ok, so the situation is desperate, and the people will not be happy, but they will be accepting. At least that is the hope. Good old propaganda might help out a bit on that front. Ok, we want a space fleet, just to prevent more invasions from happening. Those anyone know what we need to invest into getting one, and where we should invest? While the enemy is likely to have faster than light travel in some way available, we actually have no need for that. And I do not think the military would want to wait until we have cracked that, although it would give the enemy a significant advantage. Or at least it could, we have no clue about its limitations.”
A person in the back answered the question: “Therion. Who better than followers of a crazy space cult to build our ships? But all jokes aside, they have the necessary industry already in place, and that is ignoring their experience in building that industry. They currently have roughly sixty percent of the entire space industry in the UE, and that is including our satellite networks. But they also have more than eighty percent of the UE’s specialized fabricators for space industry and somewhere around ninety-nine percent of our space based industry. They also need a significant garission. Losing them would cost us a lot of knowledge and experience, ignoring the specialized industry we would be losing. But then there is this thing.”, he held up his pad, on which there was a picture of a massive construct out of concrete and steel: “This is Therions space elevator Those take decades to build and this one here is already in construction for more than one hundred and fifty years. It is planned to be finished in twenty five years, but I believe it could be done faster. We would need to ask how much faster. If it is finished, it would reduce the cost of building things in space, especially if they are near earth, by up to ninety-nine percent.”
The president interjected: “Ok, that is something to look into. I want better plans, more concrete numbers soon, but do not make mistakes, the existence of our nation could depend on that.”
Everyone in the room stood up and called: “Yes, ma’am!”, and then they went to work.