| Qty | - Class |
| 920 | - Invader (32% are commercial) |
| 497 | - Merchant |
| 268 | - Scout |
| 145 | - Star Lord |
| 78 | - Monolith |
| 42 | - ?? |
| 23 | - ?? |
| 12 | - ?Explorer? (HM:FWL, p127, 152) |
| 7 | - luxury liners (HD:FS, p173) |
| 4 | - ?? |
| 2 | - ?? |
| 1 | - ?? |
| etc | - various |
MW1e claims there are 450 "actively settled" worlds, and the House Atlases describe 156 as highly populated, leaving 294 others. There are 294 Invaders in commercial use.
145 worlds have more than a billion people. That's one world for every Star Lord.
The Successor States have 268 Scout vessels for 270 regiments' worth of House 'Mechs. Could be why there's a Suns regiment and a Capellan regiment which replace all their 'Mechs with tanks.
I've been using this sequence for a while as a fast approximation (it's easier than looking up my old MW1e estimates). Wouldn't have considered it seriously if not for conversations with Frabby and a Simulated Knave.
It averages 3 collars per JumpShip (technically 2.89 to 3.07, depending how the unidentified types shake out), which is a good sign.
P1e puts the Concordat, Canopian and Outworlder fleets in about this same ratio ("117 DropShips and JumpShips;" "less than four dozen DropShips and two dozen JumpShips;" and "twelve JumpShips and two dozen DropShips," respectively), which might suggest those last three classes are Periphery in origin.
Production Rates: if we take Monolith production as 2/3 per year, and use that as the annual turnover for 78 military ships, we get about 2.3 Scouts built/yr and 5.33 Invaders. That would leave 0.7 Merchants/yr, meaning 16% of Merchants would be in mercenary hands, which lines up pretty well with Invaders (which are 17% merc).
That still leaves Star Lord production over-represented though, even if their share is meant to cover the seven+ unidentified classes. I doubt commercial shipping has a zero turnover rate either. I suspect Monolith production should be a little higher and Invader production is meant to come out to a flat 5/yr.
Why Bother?
Many stories and campaigns don't need to know the distribution of JumpShips. At a high enough level it's more convenient to focus on the total force which can be moved instead of trying to track individual ships, and at a low enough level ships are just signposts for what's happening in the current star system - is it being scouted, how serious is an invasion fleet, is the Silver Train inbound, etc.
Some stories and campaigns bump up against the scope of the setting though. Does hijacking a single grain ship set a given world's food supply back by months or by hours? Does a region have enough JumpShips to mobilize and sustain ten regiments of 'Mechs and their auxiliaries?
The JumpShip count is a foundation from which the rest of the setting is derived or implied.
Didn't Strategic Operations Retcon the Ship Count?
As recently as the 3020s, ComStar was claiming there were only 2,000 JumpShips and 25,000 DropShips in service in the Inner Sphere, but the actual number had to be higher by at least an order of magnitude (or two) to meet the observed tonnages of bulk freight in necessities like food, petrochemicals, ores... - Strategic Operations, p250.I know from forum discussions back when Strategic Ops was published that this retcon was predicated on two major fallacies:
- Mistaking the populations in the old Kurita, Marik and Liao Atlases (which include all national and regional capitals, as well as other important worlds) as an average sampling.
- That would put the Inner Sphere's total population at 5.36 to 5.76 trillion people.
- The Inner Sphere's actual population is about 545 billion, with many of the troublesome shipping references directed at the low population worlds which total about 43.6 billion.
- Mistaking little cargo ships as outnumbering big cargo ships based on how easily small player merc units can acquire them.
- Using 3057 Revised's ship stats and FM:Merc Revised's unit generation would give the average cargo ship a capacity of 5200 to 18000 tons (depending how you spend trait points).
- DS&JS has the Behemoth as "common" a sight as the Buccaneer and Mule, hints the Mule is more common than the Buccaneer, and describes the Mammoth as "the mainstay for bulk cargo." A simple average of the four classes comes to some 33000 tons.
In-universe, the retcon is presented as part of a lecture, and the book gives plenty of reason to question its credibility - it's an offhand remark, in a recording of someone filling in for the regular lecturer, chosen by someone with an ax to grind against ComStar (c.f. "ComStar's little snit," p129) who is themselves only an assistant.
The character's perspective is understandable. They're riding a half century of industrial renaissance and population booms, gazing from an ivory tower in one of the busiest systems in the most industrialized nation, with Irian as a relatively close and familiar example while places like Okefenokee and Betelgeuse are as distant and hazy as a civilized world can get.
Margin of Error
Invaders are obviously the most common class, and Monoliths are obviously the rarest, but how do we order the other three? Can we trust the "frequency of sighting" rating? The Mammoth's entry (and the "how many DropShips want a ride" chart in the back) prove we're not talking about the highly populated or industrialized star systems which would have the bulk of traffic. I think the "frequency of sighting" can be trusted for this purpose but I don't have a direct way to confirm that.
Estimates indicate that only about a dozen new JumpShips are produced each year among all the Successor Houses. This low level of production can barely keep up with the annual number of JumpShips lost to war and age-related breakdowns. The remaining vessels number about 2,000, an amount that has remained fairly constant for decades.The DropShip count shouldn't be more than +/-500 off since it and the JumpShips round to the nearest 1000; there's a consistent 3.125x ratio of DropShips to JumpShips (37.5/12 built, 25/2 between four jumps), so JumpShips shouldn't be more than +/-160; Invader percent shouldn't be more than +/-0.5%; and the least numerous class should round to at least 1 ship.
DropShip production has also suffered greatly from the ravages of the war. Whereas, at one time, thousands of DropShips were produced annually, now about only 30-45 come out of the few remaining construction facilities. Even so, the number of DropShips still operating in the Inner Sphere has held fairly steady and is still estimated at about 25,000 vessels of both civilian and military types. - DS&JS vol 1, p15
More than a dozen JumpShip designs are still in existence, but the five described in this chapter are the types most commonly found operating in and among the Successor States. - DS&JS vol 1, p16
Waiting for a DropShip to return can take four weeks; a JumpShip takes only one week to recharge, and during the other three weeks, the ship can carry more DropShips to other systems. - DS&JS vol 2, p50
...reliable estimates indicate that approximately 46 percent of all JumpShips within the Successor States are Invaders. - DS&JS vol 1, p20
Given those constraints, we could squeeze in a geometric sequence of eleven items, or thirteen items, but twelve is the best fit. A near perfect fit! In fact, in an infinite series totaling exactly 2000 JumpShips (which is how I calculated the chart atop this post), the twelfth item rounds to 1 ship. It makes sense to describe this infinite sequence as "more than a dozen designs," assuming that the surplus classes survive in the Periphery and only occasionally wander back into the Inner Sphere.
...with some rough napkin math, it looks like commercially-controlled JumpShips really will average 3.125 collars each. That should help figure out what percentage of Merchants, Star Lords and the seven+ unidentified classes are military and what percentage are commercial.
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