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Maybe this is just my ignorance of naval warfare, but I don't get the
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Maybe this is just my ignorance of naval warfare, but I don\'t get the \"Writers have no sense of scale\" trope here. The description says that \"the Tau would need a merchant fleet several times larger than their actual fleets.\" Why is that so unbelievable? If anything, that seems like a low -- I\'d expect the Tau merchant fleet to be at least an order of magnitude larger than its navy.
Edit: I just looked it up. Right now, the US merchant marine has about 1.5 ships for every combat ship the US Navy has -- if you include those merchant vessels owned by US interests but registered to other countries for tax purposes, the ratio rises to almost 4:1. (About 40% of US Navy ships are non-combat vessels -- cargo ships, tugboats, et cetera; I\'m not including them in these calculations). And the US spends a much larger portion of its budget on its navy than most countries do -- in other nations the ratio would be even larger. Now, granted the Tau are in a naval war so their military spending will rise, but this doesn\'t seem an unreasonable ratio.
Edit: I just looked it up. Right now, the US merchant marine has about 1.5 ships for every combat ship the US Navy has -- if you include those merchant vessels owned by US interests but registered to other countries for tax purposes, the ratio rises to almost 4:1. (About 40% of US Navy ships are non-combat vessels -- cargo ships, tugboats, et cetera; I\'m not including them in these calculations). And the US spends a much larger portion of its budget on its navy than most countries do -- in other nations the ratio would be even larger. Now, granted the Tau are in a naval war so their military spending will rise, but this doesn\'t seem an unreasonable ratio.
