I mean, if we want to not be powering our Inhibitors and our automated shipyards and our Zone Armor factories and our heavy robotics facilities and whatever piece of Scrin-based Clarke tech we happen to pull out of our hats this Plan with liquid Tiberium...
No, seriously.
Math. Gib math.
How much Energy do you expect to need during the current Plan, and how many phases of power plants do you expect to build to make that happen? Give me a baseline, and I'll tell you how much Power Plant Guy is worth.
These dudes are dead if this every gets back to Kane.
Yeah, he doesn't take well to attacks by his own forces.
On the other hand, they wouldn't be the first round of Noddies to defect when they realize Kane is on the rampage. And since we already know they're good for tech and can more or less protect ex-Noddies, it's kind of win-win for us.
What Im trying to figure out is if we're better off doing 12 of A, or if 6 of A, 6 of B might be a better fit for our immediate purposes.
And what I'm trying to tell you is that you're wasting your time.
Let the Navy figure that out.
Satellite recon has its demonstrated limits inquest. Aircraft overflights have no persistence.
Longrange surveillance UAVs controlled by satellite dont seem to have ever taken off(pun intended) in this AU, possibly due to occasional comm disruptions and Nod electronic warfare.
A squadron of LCS/monitors on the other hand can spawn camp a suspect stretch of coastline for weeks at a few tens of km offshore, at a fraction of the cost of a carrier strike group, with enough offshore firepower to wreck battalions at a time, dropping off surveillance drones and special forces teams until said bases show their hand, at which point the big girls of the fleet can act.
If a squadron of monitors and light warship hover around off a Nod-occupied coastline for weeks, they're gonna start drawing cruise missile barrages from land-based antiship launchers that are stealthed and impractical to detect at a distance without aerial reconnaissance to get close enough to the launch sites to see through with our anti-cloak sensors.
Because one of the realities of fighting Nod is that if you're attacking into their territory, you can't actually
see anything until you get close. It's arguably their single best line of defense. And even with our greatly improved anti-stealth tech, you need to push platforms close... which, in turn, means either operating so close to the coastline that
antitank missiles become a realistic threat, and certainly well within tactical laser range, or relying on aerial recon.
But I'll take the Navy's word that monitors are useful for offensive naval operations. I just think it's kind of unwise to ignore
the Navy's own recommendations that we prioritize the escort carriers over all those other ship classes they're talking about.
Which is why Im considering an early LCS introduction.
The Navy called for hydrofoils, cruisers and (later and most recently)escort carriers.
We built two thirds of the hydrofoils, then pivoted to finishing cruisers because there were broader strategic issues in play.
Honestly, not so much? It was mostly because the hydrofoil production lines are insanely Energy-intensive, and so for a few years there we shrugged and went "eh, close enough" in response to having
two hydrofoil yards. By the time we were doing well enough to seriously consider finishing the third, it had become established that the cruiser project was much higher priority as far as the Navy was concerned, so we pivoted to that.
But in that case,
the Navy recommended that we do this. They specifically endorsed that prioritization.
The hydrofoil->cruiser shift isn't an example of us making an enlightened decision about how the military should operate. It's about us doing one thing, then stopping, and then the Navy telling us to do another thing instead,
and us doing that.
You, by contrast, are basically ignoring the prioritization the armed forces give us, in areas where we would
definitely expect the Navy to have already thought this matter through. They know what their own situation is and what their most immediate needs are, and if they say their biggest problem is that they've got fleet carriers tied up doing things they really shouldn't have to do and that it's interfering with their ability to stage combat operations?
Believe them.
Wingman Drones are aircraft. Thats what Im referring to, not an Apollo 2 or MegaOrca A17.
If we want Wingman Drones on the Assault Ships and Escort Carriers bulking up their air wings and providing a firepower and survivability boost for their manned aircraft, we need to have the RnD done before we design the ships so the ship designers can allow for them ahead of time.
That way, whenever they're produced, they are a slot-in upgrade.
Alternatively, if the escort carriers are developed before the drones, then the drones may be designed to fit the carriers.
I think you're doing that thing again where you decide how the setting works and then ignoring things the QM has directly told you in the update posts. I'd rather short-circuit this process because it rarely ends well.
@Ithillid , can you weigh in on this? How would a reasonably typical Navy officer react to the suggestion that instead of prioritizing the escort carriers they're asking for, we should instead build some complicated three-class force mix of different ships instead, but at more or less the same budget that we'd otherwise put into
just building more escort carrier yards so that they get individually less of each of the three classes?
Okay, we have 3 Steel Talons development projects and we need to deploy them by the end of the term. So 3 dice total on the development, and lets say 200 progress each of the deployments, so that's 3-4 dice each. So we have to spend at least around 12-15 dice on this. With our mandatory military spending, I think that it would be too much for our free dice to push for it. Unless you wish for a one term thing, which is an option. Still, I think putting a Graduates die on military is better.
Ummm. I mean, the whole
point of having General Jackson is that we get +2 Military dice from her per turn.
So maybe we end up spending 12-15 dice on the Talons (depending on whether we're expected to do a factory for the "Plasma Weapons" option). But we
get 30 dice back from her, to spend on whatever we like. We come out ahead.
And it's not like developing the Talons projects is useless; they go into combat and blow shit up, and the stuff they prototype is useful. We were seriously planning to develop the Havoc anyway,
specifically because it's useful as a support platform for ZOCOM, who are already pretty hard pressed. That's between one half and one third of what General Jackson would expect us to do anyway, and we were already planning to do that
in the near future.
Hiring General Jackson means
less strain on our Free dice and
more options for spending Free dice on non-military applications. Not more strain and less options.
Granted, it does mean we have to find the Resources to fund Jackson's extra dice... but we can profitably spend 20 R on two military dice worth of shells or ablatives for a
LONG time to come, so that's not a big expense.
