Australia Twilight War & After...

[RN7]

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

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.

I think the plant at Bendigo was around during the Twilight War period and run by ADI Ltd. The Mack truck factory in Wacol QLD was built in 1972 and is now owned by Volvo. Also I think FIAT-IVECO were building trucks and plant machinery in Australia in the 1990s.

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

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.

Chrysler and the British car makers are long gone but GM Holden and Ford have been in Australia since well before WW2 and are still going strong, in fact they seem to be doing better than the Japanese as Nissan and Mitsubishi are now gone leaving only Toyota.

Originally Posted by StainlessSteelCynic

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.

Australia's defence industry has certainly been on an upswing since 2000, their even building ships for the US Navy at the moment. Although a lot of the infrastructure is new, a lot of it was also around in the 1990s. Outside of the 2300AD timeline there is little of nothing about what happens in Australia during the Twilight War from canon, so we dont know if it was nuked or how heavily it was nuked. But 2300AD does state that the Australian military survived and took control of the country, and if that is the case then factories that produced its guns, munitions, uniforms and sundaries are likely to have been well defended.