So out of curiosity I looked at a few different methods to estimate Deneb fleet budgets, to see if the numbers in the Deneb Sector book matched any of them. I wasn't looking for a "best" or "official" method, just wondering how the different approaches would compare.
- One is to use Resource Units (RU), which is an abstract number that first appeared in T4 and has been adopted by T5. RUs don't correspond directly to credits, but give a relative sense of how each system's economy compares to others.
- The second was to use the formula from Striker, a CT supplement. This renders a budget in Credits
- The third is to use the formula from Mongoose's Trillion Credit Squadron, which also gives a budget in credits.
- The fourth was to use the values straight out of the book, given in credits.
A fifth method that I considered but didn't try would be to use the formula from an old
Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society article on armies of the Fifth Frontier War (and generally adopted by GURPS Traveller: Ground Forces). This formula is geared for armies and generates a number of "battalion equivalents." However, if we assumed (per Striker) that naval and army budgets are generally proportional for most worlds, the relative army strengths would also inform the relative naval strength.
So I ran the numbers using the four different methods, then ranked the results and pulled the top 20 budgets for each. (I excluded Denebian worlds that did not have budgets in the sector book.)
The results were pretty interesting -- there was a reasonably close relationship between the T5 RU rankings and the Deneb Sector book rankings, and a reasonably close relationship between the Striker and Trillion Credit Squadron ranking. The latter two methods are driven very much by world population, while the former two have much flatter progression. Using the sector book values, for example, the 20th largest budget is only about 1/3 of the 1st largest budget. At the other end of the spectrum, using the TCS budgets the 20th largest budget is almost 1/1,100th of the 1st largest budget!
I discovered that one could roughly estimate the Deneb Sector book fleet budgets by multiplying the T5 RU value by 10 and rounding the results to the nearest thousandth, giving a fleet budget in MCr.
