Quote:
Originally Posted by RN7
Australia actually does have a significant vehicle production capacity. General Dynamics builds the ASLAV in Adelaide and Thales Australia makes the Bushmaster & Hawkei in Bendigo and Wingfield, and there are commercial car and light vehicle factories in Adelaide (GM-Holden), Melbourne (Ford, IVECO, Toyota) and Geelong (Ford), a truck factory in Brisbane (Mack) and engine factories in Geelong (Ford) and Melbourne (GM-Holden).
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You have to take into account that for the armoured vehicles mentioned, the factories were not even in the construction phase let alone ready for production in the time period covered by Twilight: 2000. Also, some of the truck plants mentioned didn't come about until the mid-late 1990s and later and they don't produce a lot of vehicles - production has only risen to 7000/year in the late 2000s.
There was also significant loss of production in the 1990s due to the growth of the Korean car manufacturers and the end of Nissan production in Australia in 1992. The cheaper Korean imports caused major losses for local car makers and they cut the number of models offered and staff numbers to save money. It was widely felt in the early 1990s that the Australia auto industry would be in major decline by the 2000s
We are undoubtedly able to produce armoured vehicles, design studies were conducted in the 1980s when Project Whaler was being examined and they found that we had all the necessary infrastructure but were somewhat lacking in experience.
Having the infrastructure was one thing, political will and military necessity are other things again and at the time the political will was lacking. Nothing was really done to address this until the late 1990s - outside the timeframe of Twilight: 2000.
For example, I believe the ASLAV production in South Australia was begun in the early 2000s. The Global War On Terror gave the Australian Government the political will to invest in these facilities but for the Twilight War, I'd argue that the Australian Government would probably feel insulated from the war in Europe and would not see any urgent need to commence our own armoured vehicle production until the war with Indonesia.
By that time, it would be too late. By 2000, the country as described in the books, is in a state of chaos with significant breakdown of central government. Starting a project to build armoured vehicles would be very much a localized affair suffering all the problems that that would entail. Certainly some projects may have been started in the 1996-2000 period but with the gradual breakdown of central authority, I can't see them having much more than a limited run of vehicles at best.
Small arms, grenades & other explosives, uniforms and light vehicles are another matter again. The infrastructure for these has existed for quite some time but they too would suffer after the breakdown of central authority because their components are often sourced from either outside the nation or in areas within the nation separated by large distances.