[Goober5000]

The NTF has stood off the GTVA for eighteen months at the time of the start of the game and is showing no signs of strain. Before deploying the Colossus they specifically say that the GTVA might have to seek peace terms with the NTF because the war cannot be sustained. This implies the the NTF is able to go on with an attritional combat strategy even after taking serious losses in Deneb. That means industrial production at a significant percentage of the GTVA's. Economics.

Not rly.  The GTVA has to defend (or at the very least patrol) 22 systems before it fires a single shot; don't forget that they simply can't devote their entire military to the NTF war, especially after the Shivans arrive.  The NTF has to only defend from 3 to 6, depending on what point in time you're focusing on.

Furthermore, it's much easier to wage a defensive war than an offensive one.  A rule of thumb I've seen is that the attacking force has to be 3x the defending force to have a reasonable chance of victory.  It's probably much more lopsided in the FreeSpace universe because nodes are excellent choke points.

Plunging civilization into war and economic turmoil is a pretty stupid way of distracting a civilization from economics. It's also a pretty stupid way to treat a civilization that you love. Lastly, it's quite clear that Bosch's ultimate goal was a bit more relevant to the GTVA's foreign policy than to their economic dealings.

One could argue that war in some form would have happened anyway, given the conditions at the time.  Bosch stepped into the leadership void and focused the sentiments, energy, and societal current into something that he could use for his own purposes.

[Dilmah G]

A rule of thumb I've seen is that the attacking force has to be 3x the defending force to have a reasonable chance of victory.

That's quotable for ground warfare, and even then, smart commanders can sometimes make-do. There are a few too many variables in FS warfare for that to hold true though, in my opinion, except when you mount the initial invasion (e.g. Breaching the node).

/off-topic.

[Charismatic]

Did it ever occur to you people that the T-V war, the turmoil during the Reconstruction Era, Hades Rebellion, Bosch's war, etc...that it wasn't really based around 'hatred of Vasudans' or 'mistranslated greetings,' but that these were just coverups for, well, what 21st century wars are based around...which is economics.

No I fully disagree.

[Dr. Pwnguin]

As far as economic aspects of FS2 goes, the effects are very reaching. The GTVA's main industrial assets were completely destroyed or cutoff at the end of FS1 (Vasuda and Sol, respectively), leaving an industrial vacuum that would've had to be rebuilt on the remaining systems. Any systems that revolted or joined the NTF would have been a major blow to the GTVA war-machine both in terms of population, taxation and industrial infrastructure.

Xenocidal alien species that can implode stars and glass planets for fun tend to throw that economic aspect of war for a spin though.

[Flipside]

Thing is, we never really get much of an idea how established the GTA colonies are, as far as I can remember, so these planets could be anything from non-industrial to highly industrial in nature, without better knowledge of the disposition of wealth within the GTVA, it's really not all the easy to guess how difficult a recovery would be from those situations.

[General Battuta]

Thing is, we never really get much of an idea how established the GTA colonies are, as far as I can remember, so these planets could be anything from non-industrial to highly industrial in nature, without better knowledge of the disposition of wealth within the GTVA, it's really not all the easy to guess how difficult a recovery would be from those situations.

We do know canonically that the bulk of the GTA's industry was in Sol.

[Mongoose]

And, one would imagine, its population too.  FS2 gives the impression that Capella was a relatively-well-populated system...yet it had fewer people living in it than the US does today.  There's a significant difference of scale at work there.

[General Battuta]

I concur.

[Klaustrophobia]

sol may have been THE largest, but i don't think it was the ONLY large industrial base.  i think sol was much more important as a business or research hub for the economy rather than resources and actual industrial manufacturing.  we do know for instance that shipyards were all over the place, seemingly not centered in sol.

[General Battuta]

sol may have been THE largest, but i don't think it was the ONLY large industrial base.  i think sol was much more important as a business or research hub for the economy rather than resources and actual industrial manufacturing.  we do know for instance that shipyards were all over the place, seemingly not centered in sol.

I believe that Sol was canonically stated to contain either 'the bulk' or 'the majority' of the GTA's industrial base.

[Droid803]

Obviously that would have changed during the reconstruction era.
Some of the smaller industrial bases would likely have been expanded to meet the new demands.

[Dilmah G]

Indeed. And to think each system has a fleet, therefore, it makes sense to have that system have the infrastructure to support an entire fleet.

[Mongoose]

sol may have been THE largest, but i don't think it was the ONLY large industrial base.  i think sol was much more important as a business or research hub for the economy rather than resources and actual industrial manufacturing.  we do know for instance that shipyards were all over the place, seemingly not centered in sol.

Sol was where the working shield prototypes in "The Hammer and the Anvil" were eventually headed, so that they could be mass-produced in the quantities needed to outfit the whole GTA fleet.  In addition, a few of the weapons introduced during the campaign are said to have been developed and tested in Sol.  Remember that it presumably wasn't too long after the GTA started exploring and colonizing other systems that it encountered the Vasudans, with the 14-Year War following soon after (I can't seem to find set dates for this, if we have any).  There simply wasn't enough time to build up external manufacturing sites on a scale even close to that which already existed back on Sol.

[Goober5000]

Canonically, subspace was "discovered" only about ten years before the T-V war.  I don't know the exact date, but it's in the FS Ref Bible.

TVWP retcons this into the discovery of intersystem subspace, in order to make the timeline slightly less rushed.

[Ace]

Which doesn't make sense, because if anything brute-forcing artificial jumps in-system seems to be an extension of the technology developed for using natural nodes. ...plus it undermines whole idea of subspace changing everything overnight.

[Mongoose]

Which doesn't make sense, because if anything brute-forcing artificial jumps in-system seems to be an extension of the technology developed for using natural nodes. ...plus it undermines whole idea of subspace changing everything overnight.

We do know that intersystem jumps require substantially more energy than the intrasystem variety, to the point where anything smaller than a freighter couldn't perform them until near the end of the Great War.  This would suggest that the intrasystem drive was the first one developed, as it was significantly easier to utilize.  I think it also makes sense that the theory of subspace travel via N-dimensional vibration would first be put into practice in that more general sense, as you'd think that there was a lot of chance involved in the discovery of a single anomaly which enabled travel between systems.

As for subspace changing everything, I think that still holds true for intrasystem jumps, as the TVWP fiction suggests.  If there were multiple adversarial factions in Sol before the invention of the subspace drive, it would have immediately changed the entire landscape of the system; forces which might have taken weeks, or even months, to meet each other could now do so in seconds.  I think you can drawn an analogy to the development of the nuclear ICBM: when the push of a button can quite literally bring about the destruction of civilization as we know it in a manner of minutes, you tend to want to think things through before making any moves.