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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Ithillid said:
The "super" version of the MARV is intended to solve both of these problems. An additional trailer section behind the main gun turret adds much more space for weaponry and more storage for Tiberium while retaining the (admittedly limited) mobility that makes the MARV functional. This adds two sections for additional gun mounts and more tiberium storage.
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From the development blurb for the Super Marv. One of those sections previously used for storage has probably been converted into a refinery.

Simon_Jester said:
Given that MARVs don't fight very often anymore and that we have huge operations in the Red Zones which are basically hundreds of miles from serious Nod interference... It probably wouldn't bother anyone very much to build an unarmed MARV variant that leaves the guns off too, if that was what it took to get the mobile refinery working properly.
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A MARV without weaponry ceases to be a MARV - at that point it's just a needlessly large and expensive harvester. Besides, the weaponry is useful for more than just fighting off Nod; visceroids and some other Tib-life still exist and are still hostile and it makes sense to clear those out if we ever want to establish further footholds in those locations, and furthermore the MARV can use its weaponry (particularly the big sonic cannon) to break down larger formations of crystal for processing.
 
Strunkriidiisk said:
A MARV without weaponry ceases to be a MARV - at that point it's just a needlessly large and expensive harvester.
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Yes, but that doesn't mean that no vehicle built on the MARV chassis would be useless apart from a MARV itself. In this case, we're notionally discussing something built on the MARV chassis but bearing a mobile refinery. I don't know what we'd call it; I'm going to tentatively call it the MARV-R variant.

Such a vehicle is very much not "needlessly large," since we've been told no smaller platform can even carry the mobile refinery. Nor would it be "needlessly expensive," if there are sufficient benefits to being able to mount an APK mobile refinery and drive it into a Red Zone. It would merely be a different vehicle than the MARV, conveniently sharing a lot of parts commonality for ease of servicing and operations in a difficult environment.

Compare and contrast to the recovery vehicles various militaries operate that are built on tank chassis. Removing the guns (and often armor) from the recovery vehicle means it can no longer be used as a tank, but it is very much not useless or "unnecessarily expensive," because it takes something with the horsepower and traction of a tank chassis to act as an effective tow vehicle for a tank.

Some lighter sonic guns or other weapons might well be included on the MARV-R, to be sure! As you say, they are not useless. But doctrinally, the MARV-R would not be a frontline independent combatant operating without support, so it might well adopt lighter or different weapons.

My point here being, quite simply, that the MARV-R might represent a valid variant on the MARV design, but would not be a valid replacement for the existing S-MARV design. Not unless we could fit the refinery equipment in and still have room for nearly everything else the old S-MARVs have. Which would be delightful if true, but seems optimistic to me.

On the other hand, some modifications would almost certainly be integrated into the MARV-R, such as T-Glass and the U-Series alloys, just as a matter of necessity given that we'd likely be setting up a new production line anyway. With that in mind, work on the MARV-R might well be a stepping stone to a more ambitious and comprehensive "MARV Mk III" project that would fully update the Mk II "S-MARV" design and replace the old MARV-R with a new and still more capable mobile refinery variant.
 
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Strunkriidiisk said:
A MARV without weaponry ceases to be a MARV - at that point it's just a needlessly large and expensive harvester. Besides, the weaponry is useful for more than just fighting off Nod; visceroids and some other Tib-life still exist and are still hostile and it makes sense to clear those out if we ever want to establish further footholds in those locations, and furthermore the MARV can use its weaponry (particularly the big sonic cannon) to break down larger formations of crystal for processing.
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Fighting off NOD is still important, too. I don't want to get too memetic NOD here, but MARV-sized vehicles are massive and expensive targets, and NOD is capable of launching ambushes practically anywhere in the Red Zones. An unarmed MARV-style vehicle would be a vulnerable and tempting target for NOD, especially if we built entire fleets of them. In a sense, a proper MARV is a self-escorting harvester fleet in one package, so removing the weapons would require equivalent military support added to defend it. Which in the Red Zones is very difficult, hence, the MARV.

(On the flipside, territory we take with a MARV hub and fleet tends to be effectively invulnerable to all but the largest NOD assaults. That's valuable too.)
 
I think that doctrinally, each MARV-R with a mobile refinery would be likely to have conventional MARV escorts (among other things to harvest tiberium to pour into its refinery).

And, again, it's reasonably likely from just the sheer size of the thing that we'd include self-defense weaponry (e.g. point defense lasers, lighter sonic artillery, rapid fire railguns, and so on).

It's just the glorified sonic battleship gun that might get left off, I think, maybe.
 
-[ ] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 4 West (Progress 0/250) (Mawlamyine) (2 Points Red Zone Mitigation, 5 RpT) (+1 Energy, +1 STU)

Here is the current draft, and yes it still has its guns and armor, it just doesn't really have room for a lot of other things.
 
Ithillid said:
-[ ] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 4 West (Progress 0/250) (Mawlamyine) (2 Points Red Zone Mitigation, 5 RpT) (+1 Energy, +1 STU)

Here is the current draft, and yes it still has its guns and armor, it just doesn't really have room for a lot of other things.
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Should we consider abandoning Containment Lines in favour of MARV spam?
Yes, more expensive and needs Mil dice, but we'll get 5-6 STU.
 
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We can actually get 8 STU, if we decide to abandon Deep Glaciers.
But then we'll have to spam a lot of Vein Mines for Income goal and we might not have Cap Goods for that.
 
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20R for 1 STU is really efficient. But unlike normal refining, here we're directly turning 20 R into an STU. Rather than getting an STU as a bonus. Still, at least some of NOD's refining is operating at this much efficiency. It wouldn't surprise me if NOD has at least twice as many STUs as GDI, maybe three times as many.

I wonder if we'll get to refit our current MARVs to do this? I believe we have 5 RZ MARVs, so that would be -100 RpT for 5 STUs.
 
Q3 2063 Turn Post Version
-[ ] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 4 West (Progress 0/270) (Mawlamyine) (3 Points Red Zone Mitigation, 25 RpT) (+1 Energy)
STU version
-[ ] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 4 West (Progress 0/250) (Mawlamyine) (2 Points Red Zone Mitigation, 5 RpT) (+1 Energy, +1 STU)

So a net change of -20 Progress cost, -1 RZ Mitigation -20 RpT and +1 STU.

Because of the RZ mitigation loss I don't think we should refit the STU MARVs, at least not without investing in more RZ mitigation to compensate. It seems to me to be something we need later. We will probably want to do the refit as even if we are losing out on some RZ mitigation we do need the STUs. This does mean more STU expensive projects are more viable now with another 11 (16 with refits) STUs on the table for relatively cheap.
 
I'm all for a putting up 2 new MARV hubs to get those STUs, and then turn those around into the Microfusion Cell Laboratories. Going off that one post, MFCs could save 20 tons on a MARV. I like the idea of stuffing things extra full of technology, then turning around and freeing up space with more new tech.
doruma1920 said:
Q3 2063 Turn Post Version
-[ ] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 4 West (Progress 0/270) (Mawlamyine) (3 Points Red Zone Mitigation, 25 RpT) (+1 Energy)
STU version
-[ ] Reclamator Hub Red Zone 4 West (Progress 0/250) (Mawlamyine) (2 Points Red Zone Mitigation, 5 RpT) (+1 Energy, +1 STU)

So a net change of -20 Progress cost, -1 RZ Mitigation -20 RpT and +1 STU.

Because of the RZ mitigation loss I don't think we should refit the STU MARVs, at least not without investing in more RZ mitigation to compensate. It seems to me to be something we need later. We will probably want to do the refit as even if we are losing out on some RZ mitigation we do need the STUs. This does mean more STU expensive projects are more viable now with another 11 (16 with refits) STUs on the table for relatively cheap.
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The hypothetical refit project would probably fall under the Department of Refits, so timing that also becomes more important. Don't want to lose the RZ mitigation, but also don't want to miss out on the STUs.

Though, could be the right push to get us building more Red Zone Inhibitors to go with our hubs.

Oh, it just occurred to me. We're getting 5 Rpt because of the Harvesting Tendrill refit. So the alien tech is making the MARVs still Rpt positive while we're using the Nod on-the-go refining tech. Current gen MARVs are beautiful abominations of GDI, Nod and Scrin tech.
 
doruma1920 said:
So a net change of -20 Progress cost, -1 RZ Mitigation -20 RpT and +1 STU.
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The 20 progress reduction is from the last phase of U-Series Alloys completing. But I didn't notice that this reduces our RZ Mitigation by one point. That makes a refit look far less attractive, so we'll definitely want to wait on it for now.
 
I bet the reduced mitigation is two things: 1) less hopper space to hold Tiberium, so the MARV can't gather as quickly as before, and 2) it's dumping waste products off the side into the Tiberium, feeding the tiberium for more growth. Shame about the reduced RpT, but the gain of STU is well worth it and it's not like we were really using MARVs for income generation.

I briefly considered how well a MARV refinery would work if you replaced the harvesting gear with Tiberium transfer gear, but then we'd probably need to alter the Super MARVs to use the harvester stowage units and that could reduce the hopper/stowage space on a MARV. ...Though, if we replaced the refinery part of the MARV with more stowage... Probably not worth the extra hassle.
 
Rakuhn said:
@Ithillid
If we build a Very High Density Bay as part of Columbia, would future (non-Columbia) space Very High Density housing be built as mixed density* , or would it still be concentrated into separate districts? Assuming that the experiment is successful, of course.

*e.g.an apartment building containing some medium density rooms some high density rooms, and some very high density rooms, or a street having different density lots
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@Ithillid Would it be possible, if we try out VHD bays now, to design a variant... something that provides 80-90% of the housing that VHD does, but is just as shit to live in, but it is made so that there is a sort of wall panel that can be slid back and thus have two of these 'new-VHD' rooms combined into the equivalent of one 'High-Density' room?

My idea is getting as many people up asap, and then as time goes on and more stations/Lunar/Martian housing is built the emergency VHD romms are trivially changed into something a bit less fucking awful.
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[X] Plan Evacuation Prep
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Edit: Or is my question also answered by:
This is getting a lot more into the nitty gritty than you really need to go. Think of the bays more as influencing the average, and what people expect when it comes to extraterran living.
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?
 
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Wow. The change to MARVs really changes things up. On the one hand, it means we can't rely on MARV hubs as much for +RpT and Red Zone mitigation (where we'd pinned our hopes on them for about +75 RpT and +9 RZ Mitigation in many outlines of how we'd hit our Plan targets). On the other hand, they're still good for Red Zone mitigation (+2 per) and they still have Red Zone inhibitors gated behind them. So we can still get, say +10 Red Zone mitigation by building three MARV hubs in RZ-1 and RZ-3, then building the corresponding inhibitors. And while we'd only get +15 RpT instead of +75 RpT out of the deal, we'd be getting +3 STU, which is a very valuable prize.

The caveat is that we're going to need to do more of the Lines and Coordinated Abatement to fight back the Red Zones. We need +25 Red Zone mitigation. I believe we can get +4 from Coordinated Abatement Phases 2+3, +9 from Red Zone Containment Lines Stage 6+7+8, +10 from the aforesaid MARV-and-inhibitor project... which leaves us needing just +2, which may come out of the remaining super glacier mines or some other source, such as beginning the RZ-2 MARV hubs.

The other big factor here is that we're gonna need to do more +RpT from other forms of tiberium mining (or something else entirely such as moon mining), since we just lost at least 60 RpT of planned-for income from those MARV hubs.

BeepSmile said:
@Ithillid Would it be possible, if we try out VHD bays now, to design a variant... something that provides 80-90% of the housing that VHD does, but is just as shit to live in, but it is made so that there is a sort of wall panel that can be slid back and thus have two of these 'new-VHD' rooms combined into the equivalent of one 'High-Density' room?

My idea is getting as many people up asap, and then as time goes on and more stations/Lunar/Martian housing is built the emergency VHD romms are trivially changed into something a bit less fucking awful.
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I'm sure that it's possible to design for the possibility of retrofits, but that's the kind of thing you do in the second generation of design, in my opinion. Because you have to integrate those features around everything else you know about how to make the project work or not work.

You need to know, for example, "actual sleeping tubes like Japanese offices don't work, but tiny apartments like Tokyo has do surprisingly better than you'd expect," so that you can even begin to design vaguely functional VHD-esque densities that also fulfill some other specification like "easy modular reconfiguration."
 
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Simon_Jester said:
The caveat is that we're going to need to do more of the Lines and Coordinated Abatement to fight back the Red Zones. We need +25 Red Zone mitigation. I believe we can get +4 from Coordinated Abatement Phases 2+3, +9 from Red Zone Containment Lines Stage 6+7+8, +10 from the aforesaid MARV-and-inhibitor project... which leaves us needing just +2, which may come out of the remaining super glacier mines or some other source, such as beginning the RZ-2 MARV hubs.
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We completed 5 RZ Abatement this turn, and therefore need 20 more. We are required to complete an additional 4 from Coordinated Abatement, and will probably eventually get 4 from Deep Glaciers. Plus 9 from Containment lines, adds up to 17, two STU MARVs (or RZ South MARV plus the associated inhibitor) gives us the needed RZ mitigation.
 
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