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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Oleg-14191 said:
FYI on big cargo portal timeline:
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Don't misrepresent and cherry pick, that was in response to a two way highway. Over twice the width of a rail line, and an exponentially larger portal.

It's baffling you would withhold the quote this was responding to considering it's your own question. A US two lane highway is roughly 38 feet wide, a standardized rail car is a bit under 11 feet iirc.
 
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As far as comms go, they are likely the easiest (or maybe only, depending on how long this goes for) application we'll get.
But it isn't just the time reduction that is important. Being able to send a signal through a wormhole instead of some sort of other horrid medium (solid rock, the ionosphere, internet forums) means that you can get much more bandwidth.
 
Comm lag between Earth and Mars ranges between 5 and 20 minutes? Depending on orbits. The more useful real-time comms will be to the places past the asteroid belt, like the Scrin installation. Definitely would be helpful for that assault.

For example, every Scrin production building in game was a two-terminal portal. And they were sending a lot of mass down to Earth from way beyond Earth orbit. GDI controlled the orbits with all them fancy Ion Cannons and kept that strike capability the entire invasion.

And if we want better, noticeable impactful portals because the initial stages aren't impressive, then we should do them earlier because those we can get to the impressive things faster.

While two-lane highways or rail lines are probably decades away, I think we can mimic the portal capabilities of the Scrin unit production buildings on a once a day schedule or so within 10 years. Enough to resupply very critical parts to Mars and beyond without months long delay from order.
 
[X] Plan Thinking With Portals, with a dash of sanity
[X] Plan Thinking With Portals, with a dash of lunacy

Portals are nice, but there's need to speedrun portal research.
 
Oleg-14191 said:
FYI on big cargo portal timeline:
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Oh, come on, even the ability to drive air through portals will already provide us with a radical expansion of opportunities in terms of information transfer, and the ability to move at least tens or hundreds of grams - space, military operations and many industrial technical processes.

Driving trucks through the portal would of course be even better, but it is absurdly huge benefits we can get even in much smaller volumes.
 
[X] Plan Thinking With Portals
[X] Plan Thinking With Portals, with a dash of sanity
[X] Plan Sensible Medians and Extra Space+Portal dev.
I like Thinking With Portals, but I do want to take portals a bit slower.
 
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Taliys said:
Oh, come on, even the ability to drive air through portals will already provide us with a radical expansion of opportunities in terms of information transfer, and the ability to move at least tens or hundreds of grams - space, military operations and many industrial technical processes.

Driving trucks through the portal would of course be even better, but it is absurdly huge benefits we can get even in much smaller volumes.
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Yes.

If a portal only needs to be powered by megawatts of electricity from one side, with more modest power requirements on the other side, I can think of an extremely useful application for spaceflight:

1) Build spaceship fitted with rocket engine- in real life, an NTR sounds good, but GDI would probably us a fusion rocket.
2) Add a narrow portal that leads directly into the vessel's propellant tank.
3) Point high-pressure hose directly through aforesaid narrow portal.
4) Resupply spaceship with propellant while it is in deep space.

You now have a spaceship that can be refueled indefinitely, giving you a rocket engine with effectively unlimited delta-V as long as you can supply the electrical power budget to keep re-opening the portal.

Now, since we already have gravitic drives the value of this system is somewhat reduced. Depending on the exact details of how long you can keep a portal open, how much propellant you can transfer, and so on, it might still have applications. For instance, it might use less total STU's than a gravitic drive. It might enable continuous operation of a high-acceleration fusion rocket for a combat spaceship or missile that needs higher peak acceleration than a gravitic drive allows. It might be re-adapted as some other sort of resupply system.

And of course the same technology would also have potential value in any application that involves resupplying a fixed base on another celestial body with any consumable that can be sent over in the form of a liquid or gas. My portal may only be four inches wide and I may only be able to keep it open for about five minutes at a time... But I'm pretty sure you can put a few dozen tons of water through a four-inch portal in five minutes if you use a firehose.
 
Simon_Jester said:
If a portal only needs to be powered by megawatts of electricity from one side, with more modest power requirements on the other side, I can think of an extremely useful application for spaceflight:
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It depends if the energy necessary to keep the portal open increases with the distance or not. If it's the case, it becomes less practical.
 
Simon_Jester said:
1) Build spaceship fitted with rocket engine- in real life, an NTR sounds good, but GDI would probably us a fusion rocket.
2) Add a narrow portal that leads directly into the vessel's propellant tank.
3) Point high-pressure hose directly through aforesaid narrow portal.
4) Resupply spaceship with propellant while it is in deep space.
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Depending on how momentum works with the portals, you can skip a few steps.

More specifically, does the portal care about the momentum of objects passing through it? If it acts 'like a door' and doesn't care, then you have to pipe propellant into the tank. If it experiences and induces 'equal and opposite' forces on objects passing through, however, then you can brace the Earthside end, point your rocket at it on a test stand, and point the spaceship end out into space. The spaceship end will act against the outflowing matter and experience a reaction force, providing thrust.
 
K von Carstein said:
It depends if the energy necessary to keep the portal open increases with the distance or not. If it's the case, it becomes less practical.
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Given that the Scrin seem to be able to generate interplanetary portals casually, but don't have casual installations capable of generating enough energy to, say, fire beam weapons overwhelmingly more powerful than a GDI ion cannon... I suspect that portal power requirements are fairly range-insensitive.

TripleTango said:
Depending on how momentum works with the portals, you can skip a few steps.

More specifically, does the portal care about the momentum of objects passing through it? If it acts 'like a door' and doesn't care, then you have to pipe propellant into the tank. If it experiences and induces 'equal and opposite' forces on objects passing through, however, then you can brace the Earthside end, point your rocket at it on a test stand, and point the spaceship end out into space. The spaceship end will act against the outflowing matter and experience a reaction force, providing thrust.
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As noted, this works only for specific relationships between the portal and the matter passing through it that enable portals to be used as a reactionless drive. Also, it means that the ship must maintain a portal at all times while generating thrust, rather than only needing the portal to refuel periodically. If portals need to be shut down regularly, then this is problematic.
 
[X] Plan Thinking With Portals

This for now because my plan for this turn has turned into how to math doing alloys and the portal at the same time while doing as much of our plan and regular goals at the same time. I'm not sure I'll be able to solve it, but I will at least try to.
 
This far into the vote, I have to say, I never expected what was originally supposed to be a memeplan to still be so competitive. It was really just me throwing together something (seemingly) absurd for the fun of it, and I only accidentally managed to make the rest of the plan work out reasonably. So I'm just happy that so many people liked it enough to vote for it.

With how the vote's gone, I suppose I should try a more serious argument as to why we'd want to try to finish the portal project in one turn. Mainly, it's to avoid lag time. Say, for the sake of the argument, that we'll always get a new portal project 2 years after we finish the previous one. And if we do the portal project at a slow, reasonable pace, it'll always take us 1 year to complete it. The pattern would look like this:

Portal 1 year.
Wait 2 years.
Portal 1 year.
Wait 2 years.
Portal 1 year.
Total: 7 years, or 28 turns.

That doesn't seem too bad. But compare it to us doing an unreasonable pace, and we cram that portal project into just 1/4th of a year:

Portal 1/4th year.
Wait 2 years.
Portal 1/4th year.
Wait 2 years.
Portal 1/4th year.
Total: 4.75 years, or 19 turns.

There is, in fact, quite a significant amount of time that could be saved. We can reasonably deduce, from what we've been told, that the portal technology will require us to do multiple successive projects over many years. And while we cannot change how long it'll take the science to advance between projects, we can speed up how fast we work on the projects when they do show up. And if we do each project in sequence as fast as we can manage, we can accelerate the availability of the later, more impactful stages by entire years.
 
Yes. But we have more going on than portals.

If we completely abandon all other goals to bum rush portals whenever they show up they would be useful faster.

But we would screw up everything else.

I don't see getting portals a few turns faster as worth chucking everything else we were planning.

Portals will be useful. But they aren't a plan goal. They aren't urgent. We don't need free dice in agriculture.
 
But Thinking with Portals isn't chucking everything out the window. The 4 dice portal plan still advances our plan promises. It's working on space, energy, and SADN. The only thing that it "throws out" is alloys, and that's just a delay.
 
AntiSanity said:
But Thinking with Portals isn't chucking everything out the window. The 4 dice portal plan still advances our plan promises. It's working on space, energy, and SADN. The only thing that it "throws out" is alloys, and that's just a delay.
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And it puts free dice on agriculture to afford it. Which is a category that doesn't need any free dice. That hurts heavy industry and orbital that really do need the free dice.
 
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