FASAnomics 101

[Crude summary copy-pasted from conversation elsewhere. Still unable to blog properly.]

[Change > to block-quote indentation]

At any given moment, about 1/9th of all mech regiments are engaged in planetary assault. Mech losses are about half that amount every year.

[A second conversation]

>I want to be able to calculate or fairly generate the forces and financial resources available to an independent backwater for purposes of being an antagonist against a conquering pirate force. Rather than just randomly generating a bunch of mechs that appear out of the aether as needed

>after a week of reading all I've gotten so far is a government type (And probably unusable ISW abilities.) This is in spite of managing to choose an era that is fairly close to the only one that seems fully supported (3025.)

>the [campaign ops] force generation part felt too small in scope to cover an entire planetary government
Remember that BattleTech is post-apocalyptic, with massive hits to both infrastructure and population. The old tech ratings went
1 Standard - pre spaceflight
2 Standard - spaceflight
3 Heavy industry - terran hegemony
4 Heavy industry - star league
Which, on a bell curve, means half of civilization is using pre1960 technology.

>The scale this is at seems more bottom up.
[Original] FASAnomics is consistent and rigorous, but only the gameable parts were actually published.

Here's three bits of research most directly applicable to your independent world. In short: your world has a million people at most and a 50/50ish chance of having 1d6 companies of mutineers from some bigger nation.
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2017/07/bandit-kings-part-1-battalions-vs-worlds.html
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2017/08/bandit-kings-part-2-year-founded-vs.html
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2017/12/bandit-kings-part-3-populations.html

An overview of Inner Sphere populations for context:
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2019/02/inner-sphere-population-in-3025.html

A kingdom generator derived from my research:
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2018/11/so-you-want-to-be-king-of-some-god.html

The "guns and butter" measure of interstellar nations:
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2018/03/how-mw1e-figures-house-currencies.html

As a [solitary] planet, you won't [host] more than six companies of mechs (plus supporting forces). It looks to me like 2.5 regiments' worth of planetary infrastructures is the threshold for building military vehicles, and 27 regiments is the threshold for innovating new mech designs.
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2019/06/mechs-controlled-by-local-nobles-in-3025.html
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2017/08/house-regiments-10-mech-production.html
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/2017/08/more-mech-production-insights-from-mw1e.html

For "fairness," you measure the planet's assets against the pirate strength and the number of sessions you intend to play out.

One major thing that book probably doesn't tell you is that, as an independent backwater, you won't be getting a jumpship in-system every week or even every month.

>What difference does the population number make?
At your scale, it mostly measures how much territory you have to defend and how many foot rifle platoons you can levy.

>the Clans only had a population of a single billion total and yet the latter ran roughshod on the former.
I can't blog this properly at present, but I can tell you
- the Inner Sphere lost 95% of their star league infrastructure while the clans basically didn't
- the houses operate as separate tech bases while the clans are basically unified
- clan weapons are twice as good as inner sphere weapons

>What effect does the planet USILR have?
I don't remember the USILR ratings being particularly accurate or useful. My personal plan was to roll a random city or country from the real world and a random year and then say, like,
"Techno-economic status: 1975 northern Argentina"
"Peak industry: 2367 pharmaceuticals"
or something.

>you wont find it anywhere in BT source material, not that kind of game. Try GURPS.
Traveller would be closer to BT's roots, and much of the original campaign stuff seems to have been cribbed from pendragon.

[A third conversation]

>Trying to have hard numbers just leaves everyone upset
>Luckily CGL employees have stated that they want to avoid hard canon numbers
In the same way that TN modifers teach arithmetic, hard numbers teach such basic skills as
- critical thinking and research
- distinguishing "I don't understand this" from "this must be wrong," and "I'm not interested" from "everyone else should stop talking about it"
- how to communicate, maintain, and change scope or aesthetic from one story to the next

"Hard numbers" don't even make fact checking harder or more complicated. If anything they force you to have a more coherent and organized vision from the get-go, which is the thing which makes fact check easier.

>You look at old scenario books and they put the strength of local forces on a planet with population in the millions at a single infantry battalion.
That's basically true to life for pre-modern armies, and isn't necessarily out of place for the modern world, depending on context. Not that copying modern armies 1:1 would be "realistic" either.

>FASA numbers completely lack scale.
A [misperception] which originated with FanPro volunteers too busy or unsupplied to do the research, and kept alive by memers too lulzy to care.

>The local garrison would have mechs in the hands of different nobles but they would be spread across the planet
Depends. Anyways, even a million people won't be too spread out, and mechs have a good overland speed.

>Planetary defenders have their advantage in that it's their home turf, so they can get an endless flow of infantry fighting for their homes. The second Gray Death Legion book goes into this a lot.
Yep. Also shows the infantry being raised as needed rather than starting as a huge standing army.

[Next day edit]

>At best, BT militaries are 1 whole order of magnitude below anything we've seen in modern history
Too much to unpack right now, but key points are
- counter example [that one time an elite African paratrooper group captured the government of a neighboring country]
- mech attrition rates are decidedly pre-modern
- we actually know very little about the non-Mech forces in BT
- the capellan standard of two battalions militia per world, given a modern tooth-to-tail ratio of 1:20 and my calculation of 1 million people per typical world, falls within modern norms
- tooth-to-tail ratios increase as technology increases
- in the 1980s, NASA had a tooth-to-tail of 7:21000
- what do infantry actually DO in modern warfare, and how do those responsibilities change when local technology is ineffective against mechs and your opponents come from deep space?

>where did you get 20:1 from? Seems a tad high. Are those fighter jet figures?
I'm away from my notes and honestly don't remember. I'd found a US report online that discussed historical TTR, and now that you mention it, 1:1 is what I was using to calculate dropship needs for a FWL infantry division, so maybe 1:20 is just the size of the scaling needed to make the armies plausible and that's why it stuck in my head.

>For IRL reference, I prefer recent peacetime NATO
The ratio of NATO peacekeepers to Earth's total population is probably fairly low.

>Incidentally, something like 2/1000 is considered a minimum figure for maintaining order (including police and paramilitary).
Okay, but then you're no longer talking about total House military numbers, you're either including peacetime civilian police in secure areas or limiting the count to small regions under active occupation.

And on this point, the Houses *don't* keep order as well as modern Earth does. Easy examples
- 30% of all Mechs are mercenary
- the old lyran book says outright that the commonwealth doesn't police 100% of its planets

[May 13th edit: A fourth conversation]

>how big is your "Average" merc company?

That's a "lies, damned lies, and statistics" question. It's like having a dollar bill and some pennies in your pocket. Depending what you mean by "average," the "average" money in your pocket could be the dollar (most of your money is in the dollar), the pennies (the most common unit of currency), or a dime (the arithmetic mean, even though no dimes are actually in your pocket).

At any given moment, the majority of mercenaries are employed in regiment+ size units. Outside of planetary assaults you probably won't see the whole unit deployed in one spot though.

In any given year, the Mercenary Review Board will get more registrations from lances than from battalions, because the smaller a unit is the more likely it is to break off from a big unit and then go bankrupt (and its members sign up with someone else) before the end of the year.

The total number of mercenary units is unknown and so an arithmetic mean is difficult to calculate. In the strictest sense, the median mercenary is probably an infantry trooper working as a solitary bodyguard.

Published adventure books seem to think that twelve mechs is the most a player will want to track detailed damage and repairs for.

If you want to pick out one of the mercenary books and calculate the average starting size of a player unit, that's easier to do.

>Just to maintain IS-levels of attrition, what kind of manufacturing are you looking at, counting completed mechs?
2000 Locusts a year? 20.000?
5000 Warhammers a year? 10.000?
As a logistics autist, I'm just not at peace without a 'big picture'-kind of impression of the IS's industrial capability

BattleMech manufacturing is much smaller than 20th century wartime production of tanks and planes. Mechs are a more difficult technology, supported by a post-apocalyptic economy, which also has to support spacelift thousands of times greater than cold war earth ever attempted.

In 3025, the inner sphere had 385 regiments of mechs (counting regiments as 128 mechs each). The inner sphere and periphery had a combined total of 55000 mechs. The inner sphere built 2700 mechs per year and the periphery built 167.

About 1/9th of all regiments are engaged in planetary assault at any given moment. Annual attrition is about half that amount.

Immediately prior to the clan invasion, the number of regiments had risen either 33% or 50% higher (I forget which), a number which could be reached by lowering attrition from 3040 to 3049 without increasing production. It's been ages since I've examined the inner sphere's recovery from early losses against the clans so I can't tell you if or how production changed in 50s and 60s.

I have calculated that, across all of known space, locusts specifically were built at a rate of 110 per year in 3025. That number would likely decrease across the 50s and 60s as new designs are introduced, and then cease completely in the pax republica.

Most of my work is here:
http://skiltao.blogspot.com/search/label/bean%20counting
It's a lot to figure out, and you need to know some of the old books pretty well, but there's enough clues to do it.

If your intent is to use this in another discussion somewhere else, please link it or give additional context.

[May 15th]

>those are LOW production numbers... For instance, the John Deere Harvester Works plant in East Moline produces about 5,000 Self-propelled Combine Harvesters a year

Now imagine if East Moline John Deere was trying to do NASA's job, without their globalized supply chain.

The knowledge to manufacture fusion engines is super, super rare. At least as rare as today in absolute terms, and rarer in per capita or geographic terms.

>We don't HAVE Fusion Engines today, we've barely have Fusion REACTORS because they aren't self-sustaining...
If the know-how to create a self-sustaining Fusion Reactor, Humanity would propagate that knowledge like the fucking WHEEL!

Specific necessary data and expertise would become as common (in the same highly limited, controlled way) as for today's manufacturing of jet engines, sure. But that's before the apocalypse that set humanity's industrial base back 600 years.

Some Star League tools and industry survive, some of it automated blackboxes, just as the medieval world benefitted from what roman roads and aqueducts survived.

BattleTech is not a game of 21st century combat.

[A fifth conversation]

>mecha production and everything in bt never made sense, for being multi planetary entities than were all out for making combat stuff, they sure produced at very low quantities. even if they were all handmade. Even in a shitty Knight world from 40k you get at about 50-100 in a small knight planet, and they are mostly feudal.

40k is styled on WWI meat grinders with intact war economies. BattleTech is scavenger economies styled on ancient greek hoplites, where there's periodic truces to recover the fallen from the field, and winners of really major battles suffer 2% to 10% losses and losers 10% to 20%.

(Figures from a 1985 duke library pdf by p krentz, found by google.)

[A July 7th conversation]

Ok, cutting to the quick [minimum reading]:

- from the OG steiner book, the economics chapter (and "daily life" and "trade" if those are in other chapters).
- from the OG marik book, the government chapter and the first part of the military chapter (before it starts listing regiments).
- from the OG periphery book (since we're talking bandits today), the chapter on minor powers and bandits.
- the 2nd and 3rd edition boxes have a page or so describing a typical planetary invasion.
- the mid 90s Objective Raids book has a similar short description of a raid.

Optional:
- the OG mercs handbook expands the rpg events tables to large battles. The force mix tables may be of interest. The supply needs might not.
- the OG DropShips and JumpShips, in the back half, discusses cargo shipping (though not trucking) as well as travel patterns.

If you're willing to read a thin book in it's entirety, the first edition rpg is - to this day - the closest thing the setting has to a proper primer.

[At some point I should collect references to how bad the population crash was. It's never addressed directly and concisely.]

>They have Fusion Engines, that's literally half your infrastructure right there.
>The rest is a matter of moving material (Pretty easy when by default you have TORCHSHIPS)
My house "has chairs." That doesn't mean it has enough for everyone at a party, or in every room/yard/place they might want to sit.