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A comment on The size of an empire cannot be larger than 1 month of travel from capital. Parent comment

Re:The size of an empire cannot be larger than 1 month of tr... by tablespoon on Friday January 06, 2023 @06:23PM (#34282835)
> You can hypothetically keep 120 military ships en route to the colony at all times so that a forceful response is always at most one month away.

One problem with that idea is that either the king's forces would be spread very thin or they would be massively (and expensively) oversized.

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Re:The size of an empire cannot be larger than 1 month of tr... by speed_spread on Friday January 06, 2023 @10:05PM (#34284708)
Just make most of your economy based on mass manufacturing weapons and vehicles, problem solved
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Re:The size of an empire cannot be larger than 1 month of tr... by tablespoon on Monday January 09, 2023 @12:34PM (#34313036)
>> One problem with that idea is that either the king's forces would be spread very thin or they would be massively (and expensively) oversized.

> Just make most of your economy based on mass manufacturing weapons and vehicles, problem solved

That feels like "solution" that you spent little more time thinking through than it took you to write it. Those kind of things both unconvincing and have a very high probability of being wrong. I mean, you don't even mention trade-offs and there are obvious historical parallels that call your solution into question. Isn't one of the (many) reasons the Soviet Union collapsed is that is allocated too much of its economic capacity to military expenditures?

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