Jeep carriers
and SADN? It will be a pleasure to approval-vote you.
If we want to apologize to the Navy for making them take the CAMs, let's be sure to get all the CVE yards done by end of plan regardless of commitment level, all the frigate yards if possible (I'd sacrifice a yard or two here in order to complete Plan goals like developing and deploying the Mastodon), and hopefully Orca or Hammerhead drones. Probably Hammerhead if we could only get one. Because they'd be our ASW helos, and having more helos in the air would really help locate a sub or discourage them from getting closer. Also, make sure we get the inferium lasers developed, and depending on resources, at least design either the assault ship (gee, what would be useful for a naval invasion to build Karachi....
) or the monitor, even if we don't build any yards for them until next Plan.
I'm pretty sure Orcas are even more useful for maritime warfare, because they can deploy ASW munitions themselves, and are also the general-purpose maritime strike aircraft flying off a lot of our carriers. Only the fleet carriers carry Firehawks, and I think they
also carry Orcas.
And yeah, the fleet carriers are ugly; I can only assume they work better in practice than their game model would indicate.
Basically, let's not let it languish in an effort to unlock more shiny tech to throw at [the Mastodon]
I agree, but because the vast majority of our Military dice are being thrown at the Air Force and Navy for the immediate future, I may or may not support Mastodon development in 'Q3.
I figure that getting the Enterprise a full mix of metal inputs so it can stop relying on Earth for shipments of vanadium etc. is better for our space industry than a bonus stage of orbital cleanup that we don't super need.
The extra orbital cleanup is meant to push us closer to the advanced stages where we get extra project options (including space-based solar power and military support satellites), plus that nice little +5 PS and cheaper satellites cherry on top for clearing all stages. That's how I see it. As to the mines... eh. Given that we have a tiberium economy, spacelifting rare alloying metals made from tiberium to
Enterprise may well be more economical than spacelifting them from the moon where they're dug out of the ground.
You use that stuff in the hundreds of kilograms, not the hundreds of tons, so it costing several hundred dollars per kilo to lift from Earth to LEO, as opposed to less than that from the moon to LEO, may not actually make much difference compared to the sheer
ease of sourcing the stuff from a Hewlett-Granger tiberium refinery.
I'm not saying don't do rare metals, but I don't think it's really bottlenecking
Enterprise compared to a general lack of advanced processing equipment and low scale of operations.
The time to build the ships for this war was last plan. Unless a war lasts more than 2 years, you always need to have the navy you need already build.
Now, I had believed that the Governors would've been enough, but I also had not believed the Karachi sprint would've been a thing, and I had believed that, when we started speaking of the Karachi sprint GDI would do so at a time of heightened activity but not the dogpile we are in.
But now?
Karachi this Plan is unlikely at best. Even with carrier conversions, Karachi this Plan is unlikely at best...
I will make that assessment
after the war has had some more time to play out, and that's all I can say that isn't redundant. You may be right, but I'm not going to make a decision whether you're right or wrong yet.
because for Karachi this plan we need to have the merchant carrier conversions or CVEs ready for operations by Q1 2061. And they won't be. Even if we slammed out all the yards this turn, we'd be lucky to have either of them by Q2, far more likely is Q3, or early next Plan.
I am pretty sure the merchant carrier conversions will be ready for operations well before 2061Q1
if we actually bother to build them.
Thinking over the debate: It looks like Simon_Jester is primarily saying "Let's get more botes now", with a secondary message of "and not give up on doing Karachi before we have to".
While my argument is "Let's ensure that we can put off Karachi until after the war is over," with a secondary message of "and ensure the Navy gets the botes they want, since we can get some of them out in about a year. They seem to think they can hold the line until then, so long as we don't make any further asks."
Even if we can't or won't do Karachi in 2061, we still need the conversion carriers ASAP, because freeing up
any fleet carriers is going to have significant impact on the war at sea. I want those fleet carriers to start roaming the oceans and bullying Nod raiding squadrons and minor ports in 2060Q3 and 'Q4, not have them tied down ushering convoys back and forth from Nuuk.
If you want to postpone Karachi why isn't your plan actually trying to postpone Karachi is my biggest question I guess. Yeah we could try to do the renegotiation action next turn but then the argument has to be had all over again...
"Renegotiation" is an easier sell than "don't do merchantman conversions."
Like, I would be largely peacing out of this discussion if the prevailing plans had included merchantman conversions from the beginning. Because even I see ways to benefit from the renegotiations
even if we keep Karachi, because I think the Stored Food requirement is kind of stupid and counterproductive given our predictable need to feed all those refugees.
Now, I'd put up a fight during the subvote on whether or not to give up on Karachi, but even then I might not fight so hard because after all, if things look
good in 2061Q2, we can always give Gulati a happy surprise and do it anyway, right? We exceed expectations all the time, at least in some categories. I don't
mind having the wiggle room.
Though I do honestly think it's unrealistic to think we'll be well positioned to do anything about Karachi in 2062 with the budget situation being rough. Even if we just do nothing but aggressive vein/glacier mining in 2062Q1-Q2, we'll still be low-income, and fully funding a Karachi Sprint to the tune of ~260R per turn for two turns would be
tough and painful.
[] Plan I Refuse To Give Up On Karachi Yet
So glad i waited till i woke up to vote. We finally got a department head (plan maker) that actually realizes that we need to stop waiting for the wunderwaffen, and build what we need now. And yes i am talking about the carrier conversions.
Also, if Bintang somehow accidentally winds up re-enacting the Battle of Samar against a little cluster of our conversion carriers, only with her cast as Admiral Kurita and her giant-ass ion-proof plasma battleship cast as the
Yamato, I'm going to
fucking laugh.
But that would be too much to hope for.
[] Plan I Refuse To Give Up On Karachi Yet
Simply put, we are at war.
We need more escort carriers now, not tomorrow or any other time.
Converting cargo ships into escort carriers is certainly not ideal, but it is still better than having no additional ships to relieve our fleet carriers of the task of escorting convoys so that they can do something more useful in this war.
Nitpick: we need more escort carriers now
and tomorrow
and at future times. That's why all my draft plans after this one will include like three dice per turn on building escort carrier shipyards.
I, frankly, do not consider current winning plan to be particularly terrible from "how to respond to the immediate issues" perspective, but I have no one iota of desire to try to push Karachi through under current circumstances. I disagree with long-term intent behind it.
Nitpick: There is nothing in my plan that commits us to Karachi.
I'm just trying to avoid a self-fulfilling prophecy where we
could have done Karachi except, despairing of any chance of doing Karachi, we give up on building the conversion carriers
we would need anyway, but especially super-double-plus need if we're going to even consider doing Karachi.
@Simon_Jester Why are you going for high commitment instead of low in the conversions?
Because I intend to spend the entire rest of the Four Year Plan kicking and screaming and demanding that we finish the escort carrier yards well before 2061Q4 anyway, so I figure we might as well not needlessly expend five points of Political Support to get permission to delay building the yards longer when we really
really shouldn't delay building those yards.
@Simon_Jester I was looking up the climate of Pakistan and I found a wrinkle in the retreating-monsoon that might interest you. It seems that if you arrive in Q4 the monsoon *is* retreating from Karachi itself, but that just means that the tropical cyclones are moving into the area. We know that Tiberium-earth has a bad case of climate change, and has had to extend the Categorization of hurricanes and tornadoes because of the extreme numbers of Cat 5 events of both. In other words, between
15 September to 15 November, and
15 May to 15 July, Karachi is on the line to be hit by huge cyclones, of enormous size and power. The odds of any given hurricane in the Arabian sea heading it's way are about 30%, so if there are 3-4 cyclones in a season, odds are good that one of them will hit the construction or worse, the over-the-beach landings.
Giant-ass hurricanes, admittedly, I would prefer to avoid, and they do certainly give me pause.
That is completely irrelevant to the climate in 2061 tiberium ravaged Pakistan. The only thing that determines that is the QM and he has already said that November is still monsooning.
I trust HousePet, I was listening to
@HousePet on this. And my understanding of
@Ithillid 's words was that there would be rain, but not necessarily enough rain to stop the engineering teams who, again,
built a giant factory in Greenland in February.
Giant-ass hurricanes, or their trusty cousins the cyclones, mind you, I would
probably prefer to give a miss to, even if I think we could cope because you can see them coming a long way off.
Also, your plan does not have nearly enough hulls ready in Q2 for that to be reasonable. You might even have 0 new actual military hulls.
We'll see. I wouldn't be surprised if the military impact of the conversion carriers is out of all proportion to their nominal combat capability, simply because they free up fleet carriers.
And the sharks, wingmen, airborne lasers, masterdons, SADN, ASAT, OSRCT, URLS, shell plants, ablat and any surprises from the war?
And that's just from the military we have other things that need dice, power and cap goods.
We have in hand more than enough Capital Goods to do all the shipyard projects, and with
Nuuk Phase 3 we will get enough
all over again to do them all
again if we had to. Energy is an issue, but we're gonna be cranking it out by the ton anyway. It's not that much of a problem.
As to all the rest, yes, it's a lot. On the other hand, we have 56 more Military dice to spend between now and the end of the Plan, plus realistically a lot of Free dice. We can do it.
If you take one dice from this and put one on Harvesting Tendrils I will vote for it, although I may vote for it anyway.
I'm not gonna do that exactly because finishing that is actually important to me; it's a Steel Vanguard target. I'd be more likely to take the die off
Green Zone Harvesting Intensification and make up the extra 15 R I needed by canceling the hallucinogen research in Services, which I only did in the first place when I noticed I had an extra 15 R left over.
But I think I'd rather not do changes like that at this late stage.
Yeah, I've spent the last 90 minutes in a frenzy trying to catch up with thread discussion, because I spent the two hours before THAT heavily preoccupied with a lot of medical stuff and only vaguely aware of what was going on. I missed the cyclone stuff until a while later.
I still think we could do it, but it'd make things a lot harder and it'd be desirable to avoid it.
In a blue zone, with robots. In a yellow zone, with far fewer robots, and less planning, things may be less forgiving. Also, the monsoon conditions in northern pakistan near Islamabad or wherever the northern Terminus of the Karachi Corridor is may also need to be accounted for.
Still, I'm glad to know that Cat 5 tropical cyclones hold no fear for you.
I completely missed your post in the thread discussion, and all posts downstream of it that included the same information. As noted in the post above, as soon as I
became aware of your post, I took it into account.
en.wikipedia.org
