I assume it's mostly for a plot, as it was in the Succesion Wars at the beginning. With some of planetary campaigns taking several months, there is no room for a big faster than light fleets. Leftovers are just a spares for maybe a future use.
Following universe logic, maybe it is now an investment, until everyone else skips on fleets, too. Since no other threaten anyone in space, why wasting resources to protect it? It was exactly the same, until in 3050 the Clans came with Star League fleets. Only then Houses prepared limited fleet assets again.
Per the canon, the Houses had waship programs started
in the 3040s.you know, right after the war of '39 for steiners and davions etc. etc.
We're not even at the point talking warships here, and there's
seven times as long anyway involved.
Shipyards are BASIC infrastructure for an island nation or interstellar nation.
and a functional national navy is how you keep your nation from fragmenting.
It's an authority to handle humanitarian crises in the event of disasters, it's the means you use to get ground troops to temporary hot spots, it's how you conduct customs inspections and smuggler interdiction to keep your currency stable and the public reassured that yes, they have a national government.
Navies need shipyards, because shipyards do all the fancy 'above operator level" maintenance on your dropships and jumsphips (and running them under the navy means consistent quality specs for your D-level and higher checks on spacecraft to verify you're not going to strand your military traffic on a broken boat.)
Nobody built any replacements for the damn YARDS, never mind building enough yards to maintain the leftover cripples in their fleet, or replacements for those cripples.
It's
basic. During the succession wars, it made some sense that yard spaces were limited because everyone was flicking nukes every five minutes for two and a half centuries and no breath was there to be had...but the era of Stone's 'Peace'??
was not that level of ongoing conflict that saps resources and sees Comstar-sponsored assassination teams taking out engineers and erasing libraries with mushroom clouds.
Navies fill jobs armies of battlemechs don't...can't...fill. Everything from inspecting merchant traffic to control contraband and collect taxes to certifying that merchant traffic is safe for civilians to move their goods on, to providing training and chart updates for navigation to maintaining quarantine beacons and assuring nobody goes down to the surface of Alarion or odessa or Galedon to bring back by accident the gifts that keep on killing to a population center.
(Dead taxpayers don't pay for secret battlemech armies. Dead workers don't build them.)
You can't maintain the superfund leftovers of the Jihad (iow keep the various plagues contained) without a navy, it's just too far to walk a battlemech, and space has no floor, and thing is, people are remarkably stubborn AND stupid about that kind of thing and if you don't have security keeping those systems in isolation, they're going to have grave-robbers that bring the contagion home along with the salvaged goods.
and that doesn't even touch on the "catch a Pirate/stop a bandit" role that keeps the peace peaceful. (again, by the time you've moved a military unit on civilian routes, the raid's over, the raiders are gone, and you're too late-even if comstar's cooperative about getting word out swiftly, there's no guaranteed express route without having a Navy between your RCT's home base, and that collection of taxpayers on a nearby, but politically less important planet.)
This doesn't even touch on how many times the HPG net 'went down' or was interdicted in the years leading up to the Jihad, during it, etc. etc.
So there's actually a role here, too, that INTELLIGENT House Lords would have to account for, and that's before Gray Monday-the role of "We gotta be able to communicate with our administrators if the network has problems."
Mail Delivery. Internal communications in the event of an emergency-which there are so many examples leading up to the present of 3132, that such a service would definitely be necessary to have in-place and ready to go in the event that something political or technical happens to the phone company as has happened many, many times in the past.
Reliable communication is how you can measure how large an empire can be and sustain itself. Literally the reach of your military traffic dictates how much territory you can actually hold or maintain, this is true even on one little blue planet called earth. It's why the Roman Empire ended up fracturing into eastern and western empires and why it eventually failed and collapsed.
It's why the Mongol Empire is reduced to a dry, somewhat worthless, land-locked client state when they're the first bunch to successfully win a series of land wars in asia.
Communication was how the British Empire got so big-they had a Navy to carry it until Telegraphs and Wireless were invented, and successfully integrated those means into their existing system-but they didn't give up using the navy to carry messages they didn't want, say, foreign competitors to read (From, say, London to Capetown, or from London to Hong Kong.)
Reliable shipping requires PROTECTION...and battlemechs don't fly very well and there's no floor in space. If there's a way to make an illicit profit hijacking shipping, (and there always is) then someone is going to be doing that, and the only real protection you have is Naval forces trained and equipped for the task.
It's BASIC infrastructure. Not complex, not something you can, as a government, afford to put off until next year because there's a street fair in tharkad city you want to attend.
It's also not something you're wise to subcontract out to a foreign nation. IN the case of "Your capital is Sian" it's something you're explicitly NOT going to sub out to the people you're intent on fighting a war with.
Per the canon, nobody did this. THAT in turn suggests that nobody COULD DO THIS.
which makes the 'great recovery' a lie, propaganda.
Unlike starting a war, this is one of those things that if you CAN do it, you DO IT because you want to be able to make that choice or defend your territory later when someone else has made that investment.
Because they WILL. The damned thing is too vital NOT to do it...unless they really can't, in which case, your remnant states are basically plunging into collapse head-first LONG BEFORE Gray Monday.
