Planetary/factional public finances

[Cathul Thuku]

I believe that even SW canon makes a better treatment of economics in general, and certainly public finances, compared to Chaos. Most of the time I see public finances being completely hand-waved away when it comes to the matters of planetary governance. Same goes for factions.

For those who ICly govern planets, how do you handle public finances of the planets your characters govern? Do you even make any mention of that?

Do any of you have tips on how to better write about a planet's public treasury? Or factional treasury?

Do you have any tips for say, threading about the release of a planetary/factional government budget?

Cathul didn't ICly govern Azure for that long, but she said ICly that she issued 50M credits worth of bonds at 6% APR, and that she wants to learn Force-healing so that she can reduce the financial strain of healthcare on public finances (Azure has public healthcare: she thinks that public healthcare is what's best for Azure's residents). Please keep in mind that Azure has very little population, currently about 1k, and is projected to grow only to about 30-40k population for her first IC financial year in office.

 

[Dissero]

I think financial things like what you're mentioning is a very small niche of play in the grand scheme of things here on Chaos. Most people don't have a good grasp of global finances IRL and many members here are far too young to really grasp the idea of just how much 1 million of anything is, let alone $1000 bucks invested in a bank account.

Chaos doesn't employ the use of an economy for various reasons, but I think the main part is that it's far too complicated for something that is supposed to be fun and relaxing.

In my opinion, you're looking into this far too seriously. Most of us, even those who do have some idea of how the economy would or might work in a fantasy setting such as this, use it as background fluff with bare mentions and references. Why? Because who cares. That's why.

 

[Ashin Varanin]

I did a good bit of international political economy in school, and I've come to feel like your question is a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Virtually every time I've seen anyone attempt to do planetary or interplanetary economics on Chaos, it's gone awry. The end result has usually been vulnerability to IC and OOC criticism from opposing factions and assorted others.

Also, you're trying to model an economy smaller than the podunk town where I grew up. National-scale public policy stuff doesn't mesh with that size in any real way.

 

[Aithne Charr]

Handwave it... trust me... its boring and takes a while and is annoying to reason finances for a planet.

(It can be fun if you like that stuff, but not many do.

 

[Ellie Mors]

I believe that even SW canon makes a better treatment of economics in general, and certainly public finances, compared to Chaos. Most of the time I see public finances being completely hand-waved away when it comes to the matters of planetary governance. Same goes for factions.

For those who ICly govern planets, how do you handle public finances of the planets your characters govern? Do you even make any mention of that?

Do any of you have tips on how to better write about a planet's public treasury? Or factional treasury?

Do you have any tips for say, threading about the release of a planetary/factional government budget?

Cathul didn't ICly govern Azure for that long, but she said ICly that she issued 50M credits worth of bonds at 6% APR, and that she wants to learn Force-healing so that she can reduce the financial strain of healthcare on public finances (Azure has public healthcare: she thinks that public healthcare is what's best for Azure's residents). Please keep in mind that Azure has very little population, currently about 1k, and is projected to grow only to about 30-40k population for her first IC financial year in office.

Historical wealth of the planet + common sense.

 

[Gray Raxis]

[member="Lily Kuhn"] [member="Cathul Thuku"]

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT! Who ever uses common-sense for anything? Just drill the bottom of that ocean for oil and then cause a giant spill which wipes out half the ecosystem and give half an apology then leave the planet while taking all the credits with ya.

 

[Valiens Nantaris]

[member="Cathul Thuku"]
The board does not have an economic system for the simple reason that no one here or on this planet can understand the scale and complexity of this sort of thing. It would be like asking a medieval person about globalisation, stock markets and non-specie backed money.
Sure, their experiences could help them guess, but they would have no idea.

For example, take the United States, the world’s largest economy. Very few people understand its complexities. Now make that a world government dealing with a galaxy of tens of thousands of other planets. The scale is so much larger than anything we can imagine.

So the option is there if people really want to geek out on it, but it’s left vague for a reason. For Tygara for instance, I handwave ‘reasonable’ expenses. I’ve not done a balance sheet of the Eldorai Matriarchy’s profit/loss or for Firemane’s assets/depreciations.
I have someone do my tax return for me because I have property – I’m certainly not going to try and trace out a population of 3 billion’s expenses.

 

[Horus]

I've been tracking the Commonwealths treasury and currently we have 24cr to our name and a coupon.

 

[Quietus]

[member="Horus"]

That's the most reasonable claim of governmental finances I've ever seen on Chaos.

 

[Kuzo]

[member="Horus"] Yeah, but that coupon expires next week.

 

[Gray Raxis]

[member="Horus"]

You have a coupon? Rich people disgust me!

 

[Popo]

[member="Cathul Thuku"]
[member="Ayden Cater"] and I once calculated the broadly estimated income of the Galactic Republic just after the loss of Coruscant when I was Supreme Chancellor, but we included the lost worlds for the sake of easy calculations at the time. I think we used the overall income of RL earth for the last fiscal year to give an average for each world in the Republic's space, then used like... %10 of each world's income to calculate just how many ships the Republic could field. I wanna say we used the basic canon Imperial Star Destroyer for a price guide, using the credit as equal to a dollar (Hugely speculative, there's no actual equivalent). Came up with the math stating that each planet would be able to sport a picket fleet of about 6km and the Republic had about 32km worth of ships as an actual mobile fleet. And that was if the entire %10 of military revenue from each planet was only spent on ships and fleets, not troops or supplies or ammo or fuel.

Again, all speculation and broad, broad estimations of calculations based on rough concepts, but it gave an idea of how farcical it was for people to drop hundreds of Star Destroyers and hundreds of millions of troops.

That said, this is Star Wars. Its not Star Wars unless you can summon millions upon millions of troops, tanks, and ships to hurl at the enemies of the God-Emperor of Mankind Republic or Empire.

 

[Kurayami Bloodborn]

Why bother with spreadsheets and company gross profit vs net profit when I could simply work on trying to figure out what exactly I want to do with the company itself IC? Besides, I would rather not have to determine how much of the budget goes towards every detail in the construction of a new design, or an existing design, or make a list of how much each employee in RnD earns as opposed to the manual laborers who build the ships. Or how much replacing a speeder to get around the complex would cost if one broke down. Not to mention pay rates for those who are in management positions, how much of the profit goes back to Nubia, what the maintenance costs are per facility, cost of safety equipment for crews, etcetera.

That would be a very incomplete list for a single business. Now you take that list, apply what is necessary to each business on the planet, now apply those businesses and their gain/losses to each planet, and then from there to the galaxy as a whole. The complexity would require such a huge amount of upkeep that there would have to be moderators whose only jobs would be to monitor all of that activity and suck all the fun out of business RP or any economic transaction in RP period. See where this might not be a thing people want?

TL;DR- Way too much to deal with for the average RPer, and even those who study global scale economics would have issue scaling it up. Then there would be making it simple enough that people still want to use it and that just isn't going to happen.

 

[Cathul Thuku]

[member="Valiens Nantaris"] Asking for tips as to how to better write and thread about a planet's public finances is not the same as asking for a board-wide economic system. At this rate I probably have it wrong even with only a few thousand in population - Cathul will probably fall flat on her face ICly if I can't write better about public finances; she invoked her planet's public finances as the reason why she wanted to learn Force-healing. That may make sense now while Azure undertakes early stages of reconstruction from its pre-dominion state of no population, while it has 1k population, but that wouldn't fly if she ruled a planet with even a 1M population, let alone planets with populations ranging well into the billions.

[member="Ajira Cardei"] Fast-forward 5 IC years (pre-Omega vs. post-Omega) and I might change the tune about Azure's population. Because it is currently in its early stages of reconstruction ICly. By that point it would no longer be about ruling over a planet with 1k population, it would be 500k-1M population instead.

Plus Cathul was in office for what, 1 IC month? Give her a chance (at least ICly)...

[member="Kurayami Bloodborn"] That's not the level of complexity I intend to play with Azure's public finances.

I was thinking more at a more simplified level you would usually hear about in newspapers when government budgets are released. Perhaps similar to the pie charts they show on TV when you see each sector has how much share of the revenue (same with expenditures), how large is the bottom line (deficit or surplus), how large is the public debt, with the corresponding unemployment rate, with perhaps assets, liabilities as well as their respective deprecations. That's one of the most detailed levels at which canon describes economics, and it's just fine to show that there are IC consequences to a planetary government's actions.

 

[Ellie Mors]

[member="Cathul Thuku"]
The way I play it for the Empress Teta system is this:
Empress Teta/Koros Major is historically wealthy, full of rich architecture, and has an aristocracy of sorts (along with their Emperor & Empress). They have a state-run shipwright company, they have a state-run carbonite mining facility on one of the planets within the system, and it's an ecumenopolis like Coruscant. So, while what has happened to it (two invasions and a terrorist attack) have caused hurt to its economy at large for a few years (when this character was a child), I still consider it a fairly wealthy planet.

Each of the surrounding planets in the system, though? The ones without any information I just consider as small territories owned by the namesake planet for the system, no where near as rich as the capital world, but more or less average (middle-class heavy, less upper class) and then the ones that are mining worlds I consider as sources of revenue for the system and not as habitable worlds.

I don't make up a system-wide or even planetary GDP (which is insane because the world GDP on Earth is already almost impossible to figure out and really doesn't matter, plus Empress Teta has more than ten times the population of Earth and sells ships that canon says are worth millions of credits), I don't give myself a concrete budget, and I don't make up a public debt. As far as unemployment goes, I don't say a specific %, I say "there's a lot of employed people" or "there's a rise in unemployment". I don't try to center my time on this site to acting or emulating a real government beyond the normal generalized stuff. It's too much work, and it's not super fun.

 

[Cyrus Tregessar]

I believe that even SW canon makes a better treatment of economics in general, and certainly public finances, compared to Chaos.

You're talking about a canon that can't even settle on how much a credit is worth, or how to balance that out in terms of costs of a blaster rifle compared to a fighter, then manages to think that a space station the size of a moon is a good investment. To not even get started on the supposedly twenty-five thousand star destroyers the Empire fielded (and the SSD's my gawd).

Have you ever stood next to a Nimitz-class Aircraft Carrier? They're enormous, a floating city that take years to build and cost literally billions of dollars.They're the size of a fucking frigate according to Star Wars.

I just try to keep things reasonable, with an acknowledgement for the increased scale of Star Wars. I once figured the total strength of the One Sith Navy as its height to be around 25,000 ships total, with 1000 of those being Star Destroyer-sized vessels and at least half being various corvettes/escorts. Much of those ships would be planetary defense fleets, and likely made up of ships that have held that role for decades, not new constructions.

Even that, which could well be excessively minuscule by Star Wars terms, is an indication of such a colossal use of resources that it's hard to put into proper terms.

Hell this actually makes me want to do another blog post.

 

[Wolf]

[member="Horus"]
What is your justification for such vast resources? I hardly think a new faction should have such wealth.

 

[Flora Burn]

I've been tracking the Commonwealths treasury and currently we have 24cr to our name and a coupon.

Are you buying me drink with that sailor?

 

[sabrina]

[member="Lily Kuhn"] I am not sure who too but the world owes, 223 trillion dollars to someone as an estimate, I hope it's me.
Also total gdp of planet is is roughly 78 trillion dollars, so we screwed on the debt front.

 

[Ayden Cater]

[member="Cyrus Tregessar"]

The cost of some vessels here on Earth can certainly be mind-boggling, it's true. But we have to remember we're dealing with an infinitely (metaphorically) larger universe where one has access to unfathomable resources if one's governments are large enough. The estimated Gross World Product (sum of the world's GDPs) of 2014 was just north of $100 trillion. The Nimitz class is estimated to cost about $4.5 billion. While one could make the argument of costing less to produce a similar product through Star Wars tech, we'll leave the cost as is. 10% of the world's estimated GWP gives us around 220 Nimitz carriers.

EU canon says there's about 180 billion star systems in the main Star Wars galaxy. Even if we only assume a minuscule number (0.000001%) of these are reachable systems, you're still talking about 180 thousand star systems. It would only take the aforementioned 10% rule on 125 systems to get your estimated figure for the height of the One Sith's navy.

My point in this post is that there's no way to truly estimate the reasonability of things like navies or planetary economies. We have a hard enough time comprehending the value of our own planet. A whole galaxy's worth to consider? Impossible.