Novus Niciae wrote:I am looking to create a realistic MT version of my nation so I can participate in some of the MT RP since FT seems to be a barren wasteland at the moment as far as decent RP goes.
I intend to base my military off my tracker stats as follows:
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Is this a good start point?
And where can I go to find the approximate price tags for various pieces of military hardware which I will need to equip my armed forces?
You might want to distinguish between combat and non-combat personnel, as well as between active and inactive units. It takes a great deal of support units to maintain a single combat unit, and those numbers go up with the complexity of the weapons used by your forces. I've seen arguments that a single combat infantryman requires between 3 and 7 supporting personnel, so your ratio of combat troops in ground forces should be about 1:3 - 1:7. For naval units (ships being more complex than rifles and tanks) this ratio increases to 1:5-1:20 (using civillians in the merchant marine can held keep this ratio low). For air force pilots the ratio should be around 1:50 (although including static or mobile air defense batteries - guns or missiles doesn't matter - to your air force will reduce this ratio significantly).
At any rate, you should list combat strength for all branches, using these ratios as a guide. You can then determine the total number of aircraft, ships, tanks, etc used by your troops. After than, it's just number crunching while you try to determine what level of weapons systems you can operate. It's generally accepted that all nations can produce any RL weapon system themselves, without resorting to a middle-man supplier. This allows you to hand-wave older equipment as being already in your military's inventory and just pay for NS designs, rather than the entirety of your military hardware. Estimate prices for many RL designs can be found on Wikipedia or its various links (remember to adjust for inflation!). As far as NS equipment goes, check the GE&T forum - Lyras, Anemos Major, and Yohannes seem to be the dominant arms exporters at the moment, with Questers having many good ships and Mikoyan-Guryevich having some nice aircraft. The NS Draftroom is also a good spot to find cutting edge NS designs.