>>43328750That is exactly what was mentioned above.
Even if spaceships with jump drives are hideously expensive, and even if it takes years to reverse-engineer the tech the refugees had, Earth's industrial capacity should be able to build more than a dozen ships.
To put this into perspective, the entire population of the Loroi empire is given as 'around 100 billion'.
Of course, the average loroi will be more productive when building a spaceship.
The loroi also have other races in their 'alliance' who are also building ships and parts of ships for them.
It's not that I expect Earth to just magically make a huge fleet, but the refugee ship popping into your universe like that with an old civilian freighter that just casually shows you that your tech is pretty much shit by local galactic standards should serve as a great method for getting funds to do research and build infrastructure.
Just looko at history. In many cases, the mere perception of a power gap caused fuckhuge investments into defense projects.
In this case there is very real evidence that the potentially hostile alien empires are vastly more powerful, so research and infrascructure programs are the least I'd expect
In a way that is exactly what those scout ships represent. a small-ish run of deep-sapce capable ships, sent out to find the aliens, make contact and (presumably) bring back more tech examples.
That last bit is probably not for the ships sent into the actual combat area, but since the refugees were from some sort of mostly trade-oriented species, it would make a lot of sense to send some scouts to their former trade partners to get more hightech.
