zozotroll said:
4 worlds are building feets for the 5W, but they wont be in space until 1107.
Every Sword World maintains a navy of its own. Gram, Narsil, and Sacnoth all have populations in the billions, allowing them to maintain LARGE navies. When the Confederation mobilized for the upcoming 5FW, the member nations furnished ships for four fleets. Gram, Narsil, and Sacnoth's contributions formed three of those. There may or may not have been elements from other navies included in those three fleets, but they were named after the world that provided all/most of the ships for it. The fourth fleet assembled at Joyeuse and included ships from several other navies. The ships already exist. In 1105 they're just not formed into fleets under Confederation control.
EDIT: Whoever wrote the original account of the 5FW (in
The Spinward Marches Campaign) either overlooked or ignored the planetary defenses that wasn't turned over to Confederation control. When the 214th destroyed the Sacnoth Fleet at Sting, there remained an undefined number of ships and system defenses to defend Sacnoth. Similarliy the destruction of the Gram Fleet didn't leave Gram defenseless. Luckily, it doesn't matter, because there's no mention of the Imperials invading Gram or Sacnoth.
According to the 5FW board game each of the 4 fleets has 2 battle squadrons and a cruiser squadron. So they can put out some serious fire power later.
One of the problems with providing an OOB for the Swords Worlds (or any high-population world in Charted Space for that matter) is that it would require The Powers That Be to make a choice between realistic force levels and canonical force levels.
Worlds with billons of people will be building big ships (and lots of them). Big ships leave little scope for individual player characters to make their influence felt. That's probably why no one has ever felt willing to explore just how many ships a high-population world that feels threatened by its neighbours could actually field.
An extra problem with relying on FFW for force levels is that it is based on the implicit assumption that the population multiplier is 1 (since population multipliers hadn't been introduce at the time it was published). This means that Narsil's navy is underestimated by a factor 3, Gram's by a factor 7, and Sacnoth's by a factor 8, and so on for the rest of the Sword Worlds. Similarly skewed figures apply to Imperial and (presumably) Zhodani forces.
Now if Mongoose would just do a 5FW supplement.
That would be interesting. If done well, that is.
Hans