Discussion Fanfic / RiseOfTheTau

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.

Since the original link seems to 404 I added a link to a PDF of the story, hope you folks don't mind.