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[Bong-cha Jones]

Have I really come off so anti-fed?

No, and I'm not feeling any 'ire' either.  But 'the bombardment of Caldari Prime explains the Deteis actions and the tube child program' does lay the ultimate cause at the feet of the Federation, and I think that's an incorrect conclusion, without really even considering your intentions, which I'm not really that concerned about.

[Gesakaarin]

Have I really come off so anti-fed?   I never could post anything about about that era without somebody saying 'it's not the Fed's fault.'   I lost interest in the Gallente-Caldari dynamic six years ago and my only reason for exploring this area was as a traumatic experience that shaped modern Caldari culture.    Painting the Federation with a black brush IC or even interacting with Gallente RPers in an IC setting had zero appeal to me.

As for OOC, I found Federation cannon to be dull but had no interest in casting the Gallente as bad guys - only in exploring the nature of the Caldari.   I don't know why I seemed to draw such attention and ire from certain quarters.   Was it because without the Caldari 'antagonists' to drive conflict there isn't anything to make Gallente RP interesting?  Was there no internal drivers?  Did they literally need an external source to survive, and thus latched onto anything we did as a matter of necessity?

A fundamental issue I noticed with Fed RP having been a part of it for an extended period is that there is a continued association with it as a parallel of modern western democracies. This caused an inability for players to disassociate their own politics and views from the fictional entity that is the Gallente Federation, to the point that it felt like people weren't engaging with what the Federation is as presented in its background but more playing, "This is basically myself and my own views but with a Gallente hat on."

The politics, culture, history and intellectual body of work surrounding the Federation have absolutely nothing to do with modern democracy, but that is a point lost on many of its participants in my view. All the other factions in Eve promote far less projection of player RL opinions upon them and a greater degree of introspection into their society than is the case with the Fed.

Gallente RP is interesting in its own right, but only when time is taken to explore its internal complexities and not just treat it as a western democracy in space with all that brings. In comparison, I've found Caldari players far more willing and able to explore the subtleties and complexities of the State that I never found in the years I played in the Fed.

[Hamish Grayson]

That would be why I speculated the Deteis population was small to begin with and that the problem was potentially made worse by the bombardment of Caldari prime.

As for the tone of your post; no I don't think you came across as hostile.  To the contrary, you were quite reasonable, your points were valid and contributed to the discussion at hand. 

However, in past discussions others have not been so pleasant to interact with.

[orange]

Dex's only offspring is a more recent Tube Child.  Not necessarily the same program, but a artificial maturation, orphanage/creche program.  Effectively a love child created between two young people who were entering different worlds (Lai Dai and Hyasyoda) due to family, honor, and duty.

Whether or not such a program will ever be PF, I don't know, but it was a story I wrote.

[Pieter Tuulinen]

Surely the technology is there for any of the Corporations to use as they see fit. As far as creches go, why would they not educate and socialise the tubekids in the same creches that they already use to educate the non-tubekids - since Caldari mothers don't really aspire to stay home and be broodmothers but, instead, to get back into the workforce and leave the educating and raising of the kids to professionals in the creches?

Obviously Sibkin would need to actually domicile in barracks as they have no family homes to go to, but that wouldn't be seen as being weird since non-married Caldari also reside in barracks.

[Svetlana Scarlet]

I think the biggest issue I had with this article was saying that 15% of the Caldari State's population is militarized. That's completely ridiculous, even with a very generous description of what "militarized" means. The Caldari military is entirely overhead, and even a highly militarized culture simply can't afford to maintain a military that large as a portion of its population. ~1% is usually the figure given as a "large" professional military that pushes the bounds of what a state can afford to maintain, so that figure seems off by an order of magnitude at least. It's worth noting that the the "modern" state that comes closest to that figure is...North Korea (which, if you believe them, has a 1M man army in a state of 24M people (~4%)), which is hardly the shining example of a strong economy. The United States, which spends more on its military than every other military on the planet combined, only has 1.5M (~0.5%). Even if you include police (~800,000) and private security personnel, the number is still probably less than 1% of the US population.

[Silver Night]

Some of the difference might be down to a lot of quasi- and para- military stuff going on. The Caldari Navy is home for a lot of people who aren't what we probably would think of as 'military' - but they are probably all in there. Similarly everyone employed by the megacorp security arms.

[orange]

I think it very much depends on how broad of a brush we choose to paint "Caldari military" with.

Assuming one of the Security Corporations has everything it needs to be a functioning entity in its own right - ie the Home Guard or CN has its own mining units, R&D division,  shipyards, agro-cultural systems, etc and does not contract it out, we might be able to get there.

[Svetlana Scarlet]

Some of the difference might be down to a lot of quasi- and para- military stuff going on. The Caldari Navy is home for a lot of people who aren't what we probably would think of as 'military' - but they are probably all in there. Similarly everyone employed by the megacorp security arms.

Like I said, even if you include police and private security personnel (which, like much of the Caldari military, are megacorporate operations), the number is still considerably less than 1% in the United States (let alone 15%). The problem is that the Caldari are supposed to be avaricious capitalists, albeit nationalist and militarist ones, and security forces are ONLY overhead -- they don't generate profit (unless you're subcontracting to someone else, but even then it's a sunk cost -- it doesn't generate overall profit for the Caldari State).

I could have bought 1.5% with a significant reserve, but 15% active duty personnel is pretty ridiculous. According to numbers I can find, even at its greatest extent, the Wehrmacht under Nazi Germany had fewer than 10M people under arms at a time when the population of Germany alone was ~90M (or ~11%), and that's if you ignore that much of the Wehrmacht in 1943/1944 was conscripts from occupied countries and/or men who were barely fit for duty (including teenagers and old men). The thing that pisses me off is that anyone who did the least bit of research on numbers that would make sense here would have seen that that number is just ridiculous.

[Silver Night]

I mean, they probably count everyone who 'belongs to' one of the corporate security arms, the navy, or a traditional PMC. All of those probably engage in a lot of activities other than warfighting, though - and they all have a lot of what would in RL would be considered 'civilian' staff who probably are instead considered part of the military just by virtue of who employs them.

If we start with almost everyone in the State being part of a Mega, I could see 15% each one's employees - or maybe a little less - being part of that Mega's 'military' arm (with the majority being in non-combat roles, obviously). They are not, I think, only militaries, in the traditional sense. They have entire (quite large) stations, and one suspects the other trappings of large State corporations, ie they act as the government for large swaths of the population - and all those people are probably counted toward the 15%

Also, there is probably some kind of very extensive 'reserve' program.

I'm not arguing it isn't a very high number, or that the State realistically has that many people directly engaged in military activity. If you broaden the scope of what they are talking about, though, it can make a little more sense.

[Svetlana Scarlet]

I mean, they probably count everyone who 'belongs to' one of the corporate security arms, the navy, or a traditional PMC. All of those probably engage in a lot of activities other than warfighting, though - and they all have a lot of what would in RL would be considered 'civilian' staff who probably are instead considered part of the military just by virtue of who employs them.

If we start with almost everyone in the State being part of a Mega, I could see 15% each one's employees - or maybe a little less - being part of that Mega's 'military' arm (with the majority being in non-combat roles, obviously). They are not, I think, only militaries, in the traditional sense. They have entire (quite large) stations, and one suspects the other trappings of large State corporations, ie they act as the government for large swaths of the population - and all those people are probably counted toward the 15%

Also, there is probably some kind of very extensive 'reserve' program.

I'm not arguing it isn't a very high number, or that the State realistically has that many people directly engaged in military activity. If you broaden the scope of what they are talking about, though, it can make a little more sense.

Even if you include all those people though, the number is still ridiculously off. And if you include everyone in the military-industrial complex (which might get you close to that number, I suppose), it doesn't make much sense to call an assembly line worker at a Lockheed plant a "soldier". And the definition given in the article is:

Enlisted military personnel make up a massive 15% of the State’s citizenry, the largest ratio of any empire. Anyone employed full-time by the Caldari Navy, Army, or any of the eight corporate forces, are accounted for in this figure.

So that seems to indicate to me that that is actual military/security personnel, not factory workers. And if you include reservists, that number is still ludicrously high. The US has 1.5M reservists in addition to its 1.5M active duty personnel -- North Korea claims to have 8M, but can barely afford to equip its supposed 1M active duty military, so that number is a little suspect. And, it's worth noting that despite the fact that the US military is positively tiny relative to the claimed size of the Caldari military, there's serious concerns that the sheer expense of maintaining our military is one of the biggest drains on our economy as a whole. For a state where efficiency and profitability are paramount concerns, dumping a huge amount of money into maintaining a military of insane size does not seem like a particularly characteristic move.

I'll also point out that the number of US active duty personnel includes things like logistics personnel, military police, and other non-frontline combat troops already. The US Department of Defense webpage says they have 450,000 employees, but I don't know how many of those are military and how many are civilian.

[Publius Valerius]

Some of the difference might be down to a lot of quasi- and para- military stuff going on. The Caldari Navy is home for a lot of people who aren't what we probably would think of as 'military' - but they are probably all in there. Similarly everyone employed by the megacorp security arms.

Like I said, even if you include police and private security personnel (which, like much of the Caldari military, are megacorporate operations), the number is still considerably less than 1% in the United States (let alone 15%). The problem is that the Caldari are supposed to be avaricious capitalists, albeit nationalist and militarist ones, and security forces are ONLY overhead -- they don't generate profit (unless you're subcontracting to someone else, but even then it's a sunk cost -- it doesn't generate overall profit for the Caldari State).

I could have bought 1.5% with a significant reserve, but 15% active duty personnel is pretty ridiculous. According to numbers I can find, even at its greatest extent, the Wehrmacht under Nazi Germany had fewer than 10M people under arms at a time when the population of Germany alone was ~90M (or ~11%), and that's if you ignore that much of the Wehrmacht in 1943/1944 was conscripts from occupied countries and/or men who were barely fit for duty (including teenagers and old men). The thing that pisses me off is that anyone who did the least bit of research on numbers that would make sense here would have seen that that number is just ridiculous.

Ehm. Die Wehrmacht had more around ~18M active soldiers on maximum here and here.
+600k "Hilfswillige, unter anderem Soldaten der Roten Armee und ethnische Minderheiten in der Sowjetunion" Auxiliary volunteers, including Red Army soldiers and ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. Which were directly under the control of the Wehrmacht.
+594k maximum for the Waffen-SS, with Volksdeutsche and Auxiliary volunteers.
+150k around, count for members the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) – bestehend aus Geheimer Staats- (Gestapo) und Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) –, des Sicherheitsdienstes (SD), der Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) etc.. also counting again with auxiliary volunteers, like Algirdas Klimaitis etc.
+100-500 ad hoc units like Sonderkommandos which had done some police work and some other shit. but the were short living, most with just one purpose and mostly made out personal with no fighting value (former Russian criminals etc..)

So in total around 19.5M by a population in 1939 (with Austria, Bohemia, Memelland etc..) 79.525M, which gives us around 24%

But now a huge but. The problem as Svetlana rightfully mention in this numbers are also Volksdeutsche and auxiliary troops etc.... Secondly which is more important, that Germany had during that time the resources of whole Europe. As some french historians rightfully mention, they have pay for the German army and its campaigns. So two elements which the Caldari dont have. So I think, as well as Svetlana that the US or maybe the imperial Germany would be better examples. During the first world war had imperial Germany around 13M troops (counting navy and army) by a population of 67,5M. And that was already the maximum on possibilities, as Germany was collapsing for sure after 4 years (economically and socially). Which gives us around 19%. So, I dont think 15% is realistic too. I dont think that the Caladri would have such along breath. As already mention, ships are capital intensive and when you think how up to date the Caldari hold there fleet; you would count that most likely their navy is the most capital intensive in New Eden. And not forget, the lost man power (labour); as well as already mention, that they are dead investment (about: sunk costs. They are past cost, which cannot be recovered. They also shouldnt be part of a decision as its distort a cost-benifit analysis etc...). So back to the topic.

So, YES! I SECOND, that the number is way to high.

[Svetlana Scarlet]

Ehm. Die Wehrmacht had more around ~18M active soldiers on maximum here and here.
+600k "Hilfswillige, unter anderem Soldaten der Roten Armee und ethnische Minderheiten in der Sowjetunion" Auxiliary volunteers, including Red Army soldiers and ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. Which were directly under the control of the Wehrmacht.
+594k maximum for the Waffen-SS, with Volksdeutsche and Auxiliary volunteers.
+150k around, count for members the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) – bestehend aus Geheimer Staats- (Gestapo) und Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) –, des Sicherheitsdienstes (SD), der Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) etc.. also counting again with auxiliary volunteers, like Algirdas Klimaitis etc.
+100-500 ad hoc units like Sonderkommandos which had done some police work and some other shit. but the were short living, most with just one purpose and mostly made out personal with no fighting value (former Russian criminals etc..)

You'll note that that article says the Wehrmacht drafted 19M people into service...but also specifically states that the number of personnel on active duty was far less. This page appears to have a better breakdown of the numbers, and you'll notice that it says ~18M is the total number of people who served in the Wehrmacht at any time -- the highest number they give for any particular year is considerably less (~12M). The source I originally looked at put the number at ~9M, but I can't find it now. It's also worth noting that at the time of the outbreak of the war it was ~2M, and the height of its numbers was during the most desperate part of the war when they were throwing anything they could into the meat grinder. Whatever you want to call factional warfare, it definitely isn't a knock-down, drag-out battle for the very survival of the Caldari State; it's a limited war at best.

[Publius Valerius]

Ehm. Die Wehrmacht had more around ~18M active soldiers on maximum here and here.
+600k "Hilfswillige, unter anderem Soldaten der Roten Armee und ethnische Minderheiten in der Sowjetunion" Auxiliary volunteers, including Red Army soldiers and ethnic minorities in the Soviet Union. Which were directly under the control of the Wehrmacht.
+594k maximum for the Waffen-SS, with Volksdeutsche and Auxiliary volunteers.
+150k around, count for members the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) – bestehend aus Geheimer Staats- (Gestapo) und Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) –, des Sicherheitsdienstes (SD), der Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) etc.. also counting again with auxiliary volunteers, like Algirdas Klimaitis etc.
+100-500 ad hoc units like Sonderkommandos which had done some police work and some other shit. but the were short living, most with just one purpose and mostly made out personal with no fighting value (former Russian criminals etc..)

You'll note that that article says the Wehrmacht drafted 19M people into service...but also specifically states that the number of personnel on active duty was far less. This page appears to have a better breakdown of the numbers, and you'll notice that it says ~18M is the total number of people who served in the Wehrmacht at any time -- the highest number they give for any particular year is considerably less (~12M). The source I originally looked at put the number at ~9M, but I can't find it now. It's also worth noting that at the time of the outbreak of the war it was ~2M, and the height of its numbers was during the most desperate part of the war when they were throwing anything they could into the meat grinder. Whatever you want to call factional warfare, it definitely isn't a knock-down, drag-out battle for the very survival of the Caldari State; it's a limited war at best.

True. I agree. And I would also add to my comment before, that Germany had bust/back up their economy with a huge amount of Zwangsarbeiter. So you can add, that they had the capital and labor of almost whole Europe. Something what the Caldari dont have. And of course all the other points, as mention before.

About: "Whatever you want to call factional warfare, it definitely isn't a knock-down, drag-out battle for the very survival of the Caldari State; it's a limited war at best." I agree.

[Silver Night]

Anyone employed full-time by the Caldari Navy, Army, or any of the eight corporate forces, are accounted for in this figure.

It does, explicitly, include people like factory workers, administrators, etc.