I suspect that pulling a Jeremy Clarkson and shoving moar powerrrr! at it solves a lot of range related purposes, and we don't need to be able to mass blam stealth fields from long range. Even if we're only able to blam a field per continent per day, that's a critically compromised position that can be leveled at will by GDI at this point. Even more so once we roll out orbital missile drop pods; blam the field, take a few pictures, check the coordinates. Then load them up and drop a pod or three to make the place disappear beneath the barrage.
GDI has the lift capacity for it.
And if we do manage to create a satellite of 200 tons or less that can blam a stealth field, and can mass produce it at a low cost, whyever not?
My argument is not that I'm
sure we can't build stealth disruptor satellites capable of blamming Nod stealth fields to useful good effect from orbit altitude. And it surely isn't that such satellites would be useless if they were built.
But do not know. There may be design reasons why the 'blam' effect cannot penetrate more than a few kilometers of atmosphere under any circumstances. Or perhaps because it's a resonance effect, the power required to blam a stealth field may scale with the fourth power of the distance between the generator and the stealth field in question. Or perhaps the thing is so colossally power-intensive that it requires
several hundred tons of powerpack and supporting equipment, suitable for fixed field installations but requiring an entirely separate and dedicated platform that straddles the line between "station" and "satellite" and so cannot be integrated simply
with the LOSS constellation because it is properly a different thing. Or perhaps overcoming one or more of these limitations will take years of further development, such that delaying launch of the LOSS constellation until stealth disruptor satellites are ready becomes a case of "the perfect is the enemy of the good."
The point here is not that the beautiful dream of orbital stealth-blamming you have presented is somehow
bad. It is that there are many reasons why artificially delaying LOSS until this technology becomes available could be counterproductive.
I suppose that the local and integrated facilities suited to rolling out bodily implants that need neural work are of 'marginal' importance to any project meant to provide large sections of our populations with such implants, yes.
Given that demand for the new implants is not expected to be overwhelmingly high at first, and that the procedures involved are not emergency surgery, and that the vast majority of our population is well served by the existing hospital facilities, and that the new cities tend to be within at most a few hundred kilometers of existing older facilities because the Blue Zones mostly just aren't that
big...
Look, I'm not saying they don't matter at all, but I'd still rather at least
begin to make the ocular implants available, even if it means specifically delaying one turn on the hospitals.
If I thought there were a genuine crisis of care, as opposed to one that parts of the voter base has decided logically must exist even when the QM commentary indicates otherwise, I would be making the hospitals my top priority. As it is, I'm making the blind citizens in particular my top priority.
... Do we need all drones finished this quarter, or can we be confident that the military can carry the day ably enough with the equipment already slated to be done rolling out when we start on Karachi?
I'm hoping we can at least deploy
specifically Phase 1 of the Orca drones. I think that's the specific sub-project most likely to impact our naval aviation performance, and naval aviation is part of overall naval performance, the
sole and single area in which I lack total confidence in our military.
Unfortunately, naval performance is virtually indispensable for Karachi to be a success, so it is the one thing really driving and motivating action choices, as opposed to "fuckit, things are good enough, do what we'd have done anyway." Well, with the
possible exception of the GD-3.
Yes, I expect the dice for Karachi to be split between Infrastructure and Tiberium, I even agree its probably going to be split pretty evenly, though we are likely to put any Free dice on Karachi in Tiberium. That will probably be a change for the Q3 preliminary.
Given that we can finish off Karachi in 2-3 turns without spending any Free dice at all, and we have no other projects in either area that are so critical they're likely to prevent us from investing heavily in Karachi during the core timeframe of our work on it... I don't see why we'd even bother to spend Free dice on Karachi unless we strongly desire to do so.
As I have said previously these analyses are to get a picture for the slack available in our dice and our economy, projected out for the rest of the Plan. Recognition that the Energy situation is on a knifes edge despite our current surplus is a good thing. As for the Fusion refit timeline, I would have to think about how to incorporate it, the only early fusion reactors that are likely to need a refit before the end of the Plan are the various prototype V0.5 Reactors completed before the current CCF design, I'd have to double check how much Energy they'd produced, something also for the Q3 preliminary.
I think that to avoid the risk of sudden disasters and abrupt blackouts, we'll need to start the refurbishment in the current Plan.
The progression of actual fusion plants was something like
Prototype (+1 Energy)
Peaker Plants (+4 Energy)
Synchronized Set of Peaker Plants (+8 Energy)
Continuous Cycle Plants (+16 Energy)
But I'm not sure the peaker plants even have the same problem the continuous cycle ones do, since by design the peaker plants spend most of their day being shut down and examined for problems. The thing is that I gather that the youngest continuous cycle plants are expected to start failing in, oh, 2066... and we do NOT want to be only beginning the project to overhaul/replace them in 2065 under those conditions. The engineers' estimates might have turned out to be optimistic, after all, and it would only take one or two disastrous failures to make us look
very stupid for delaying the overhauls.
Remember that time we accidentally walked into a 2/3 chance of starting a nuclear war with Nod because we took one more phase of
Yellow Zone Harvesting and assumed it was safe because we accepted intelligence reports that turned out to have misjudged Nod?
I don't want any repeats of that. Better safe than sorry.
You are absolutely correct. The lowest plan I could come up with that wasn't massively over investing in R cheap projects was 60 R over budget.
Hm. It would not be a violation of my oath to craft no plans
for this vote to try that as a thought experiment... hm.
I'm going to assume we have 1050+60 R to work with, on the assumption that we complete two stages of vein mining (a likely prediction for the current leading plans) and have at it in a bit.
