NationStates Jolt Archive

I want to arm my military and have several Questions.
Firstly, Thirdgeek says that I my nations spends $818,298,224,640.00 on defence. I'm assuming thats per annum, but how long is a year in terms of spending? is one NS year the same as an RL year? or is it shorter?
Also, is ther any standard equation or somewhere that tells me how many troops I can have? or is there a standard amount that it costs to train a certain number of troops to a certain level?

I want to do this, but I want to do it properly, so any assistance would be helpful.

I consider 1 RL day 1 NS year, also it is widely accepted that 5% of your population is the largest supportable number of military personnel you can have before you destroy your economy.

is it accumulative? e.g. I havent spent any money on my military yet, so do I have 4 months worth of spending there? or do I just start from scratch?

I personally accumulate only to a point (1-2 RL weeks, seeing as I'm making about 10.7 trillion USD per day for my Def. Budget) however if you want you can accumulate as long as you want, or start from scratch everyday.

Most people are not as large as Shenyang here, so they scrimp and save as much as they can. The only problem with this p[lan is that there is a risk of a godmode. Noone ever bothers to check and see if you telling the truth if you say you have a lot of money saved up. You can also buy stuff from your goverment waste fund.

To avoid cries of God-Mode!, you'd be best advised to assume that you've been spending money on your defenses all along, at a far smaller number than what you've been allowed. Having said that, you should assume that any excess was taken up by other government departments (since you're just getting going, this is a reasonable assumption).

Once you start paying attention to your military, you can assume that your government spends the entire amount on buying new equipment, hiring troops, and maintaining existing equipment. That 818 billion dollars is not solely for the purpose of buying stuff. All of your troops need to be paid, they have to have someplace to work (military bases, etc) which will require upkeep, and the government has to pay for uniforms, weapons, ammunition, ships, planes, tanks, and upkeep on all of that equipment as well.

A quick and dirty rule of thumb for military expenses: It will cost approximately 10% of the purchase price to maintain military equipment every year. For example, if you have a billion dollar destroyer, it will cost 100 million dollars to maintain the ship in fighting trim every year. The same holds true for tanks, planes, military bases, guns, etc.

Don't despair. You needn't get too terribly involved in the minutiae of your military (unless you want to). Simply decide what sort of military you want. Figure out roughly how much it would cost to build or buy it (there are a lot of military storefronts that can help, or you could go to your local library and check out Janes Fighting Ships). This will let you have a military, without getting bogged down in the details.

If you TG me your email address, I will send you a MS Excel spreadsheet that helps you pick and build a military.


TEO