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Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can hypothetically keep 120 military ships en route to the colony at all times so that a forceful response is always at most one month away. One problem with that idea is that either the king's forces would be spread very thin or they would be massively (and expensively) oversized.
Just make most of your economy based on mass manufacturing weapons and vehicles, problem solved
> Just make most of your economy based on mass manufacturing weapons and vehicles, problem solved
That feels like "solution" that you spent little more time thinking through than it took you to write it. Those kind of things both unconvincing and have a very high probability of being wrong. I mean, you don't even mention trade-offs and there are obvious historical parallels that call your solution into question. Isn't one of the (many) reasons the Soviet Union collapsed is that is allocated too much of its economic capacity to military expenditures?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I introduce you to the British Empire, pre-steamships: https://www.britishempire.co.uk/maproom/sailingtimes.htm Or in 1914: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter1/the-setting... (post-steamships) The Spanish Empire was probably worse at its height.
All those areas beyond 1 month travel? No longer a part of the empire. They kicked off the American revolution and the Indian independence movement. So yes, it's possible to create an empire beyond a month travel. But I maintain that no one has held onto one, which is the point the author was making I believe.
India was ruled by the British East India Company from 1760-ish to 1858 and by the British Crown directly until 1947; again, nearly 200 years. And by the time the British Empire started to collapse, travel time had been significantly reduced for something like 75 years.