Super Long Megapost First post working version.

[Haste]

Keep grasping at straws. If the population was approximately 5,000 twenty years ago, it being 10,000 today is already a stretch.

Some sort of mass-migration to Freeports, as you are suggesting, is a silly attempt to try and make the illogical nature of the Zoner faction's increase in size, logical.

These Freeports were designed to house a certain number of people. The biggest had 2,000 people on it, and was the biggest by a very large margin. Let's say that one went up to about 3,000. Let's say even the ones with 100 people on it somehow attracted 2,900 new people and managed to house and feed them. All of these assumptions are silly and unlikely, but let's roll with it anyways. We'd still be stuck at something like 30,000 people for the entire Zoner population.

So basically, the equivalent of a small town on Earth. Would you expect the inhabitants of a small town to build a dozen aircraft carriers to protect themselves?



"High fertility, high life expectancy, high migration"
Population doubles in 100 years.

It seems pretty safe to state that the Zoners would have to have a population in the millions, not the thousands, to even consider building/acquiring capital ships. The kind of population growth required to go from 5,000 people to 1,000,000 people (That's 200 times as many people) in 20 years is completely absurd and planted firmly outside the realm of logic.

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