NationStates Jolt Archive

First, can somebody show me where there are general rules/guidelines for manufacturing your own weapons, and what is considered to be within your nation's defense budget? I realize that my nation is tiny, but I would like to read up on this for future reference.

For manufacturing your own weapons:

1. It is understood that most nations manufacture weapons. However, it is also understood that those weapons are limited to weapons that are either in the public domain -- i.e. you can find their specs on Wikipedia or GlobalSecurity or something -- or weapons you make yourself.

2. To design a weapon yourself, visit the NS Draftroom, at http://z4.invisionfree.com/NSDraftroom/index.php; the people who hang out there have knowledge of weapons and warfare and will be able to help you create realistic, or at least fun-to-RP, weapons.

For the defence budget:

First, calculate your GDP or GNP. This is the primary measure of your economic strength; you can determine it by looking at the GDP/GNPs per capita of real-life nations, deciding what your nation is most like, then making up a number and multiplying by population. Alternately, use a GDP calculator like Sunset or NSEconomy (there are links..... somewhere.....). This is the total amount of revenue produced by the citizens and government of your nation.

Second, you take the ways your government has of making money. Taxes are first -- income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes and all the other stuff you're supposed to fill out by the fifteenth of March; they're usually represented by a percentage, which in a market economy shouldn't go above about forty or fifty per cent as serious economic repercussions will result. (In a planned economy, tax rates can be eighty per cent or more, of course; but planned economies have their drawbacks, such as the fact that they have yet to establish the same standard of living in real life as have market economies.) Then add on total exports minus total imports. A positive difference is a trade surplus; a negative difference is a trade deficit.

Third, you divide up this money; that is the government budget. Most governments are divided into departments, each of which will claim a percentage of the funds. Alternately, you are a totalitarian despot and all of the money goes to your nine palatial estates, hovercars, and personal guard and your citizens subsist upon rats and grass soup. Whatever. Anyway, in a night-watchman state with low taxes and little government interference in anything, most of the money will go to the police and military because the government's only duty will be to defend its citizens from evil foreigners. In a social democracy, the government and its budget will be larger, but more money will also have to go to education, welfare, healthcare, urban development and all that, so the military budget will end up being about the same size.

A practical upper limit for military expenditures as % of GDP is 10% in peacetime. In wartime, you can go up to 40 or 50% -- the USA spent 48% of its budget on arms in WWII -- but with equivalent economic consequences, such as rationing of vital substances, reduced government services, and angry taxpayers.

tl;dr: Lots of unwritten rules, V-N is contradicting himself again, don't worry about it and just RP.

Also it depends on your chosen tech level- I play NFT going into FT and finding the cost of such weapons is well, not easy to do, so you kinda have to decide on your own, if you are PMT going into NFT going into FT or are straight FT.

Here's an economy tracker that I like...

Sunset Tracker (http://www.sunsetrpg.com/economystatistics.php?nation=Tanaara) - just input your nations name in the 'View this Nation' box at the top.

Look down the colums and it will give you what your nation is spending on Defense currently- this can and will change as you chose various option in your daily issues.

You can see that my nation has no income tax, and spends a LOT on Defense, but that is the nature of the Nation I play.

PMT- Post Modern Tech - what wew'll be doing in the next 25 years or so
NFT- Near Future Tech - after that
FT- Future Tech - Star Trek, Star Wars and even more...