- Location
- The Underdark
now? No way in hell. Give that fifty odd years.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
- Location
- Tarn-Vedra
[X] Plan Heist + Lunar Base Go!
- Location
- MSC
[X] Plan Heist + Lunar Base Go!
The ocean floor is cold, dark, and under high pressure, all three of which are conditions that evidence suggests is inimical to the growth of crystalline Tiberium IIRC.
Besides the coastal waters which are close to land, I suspect the ocean floor is in much better shape than land surface.
COMMENTARY
Pity about the Fortress Towns not completing this turn.
That said, with the Railways completing and the war looking to take at least a year, we should do Suborbital Shuttles next. Both to mitigate the Himalayas issue, and to accelerate the delivery of critical cargo around the world; a suborbital flight is about 90 minutes, compared to around 14 plus hours to cross the Pacific by air or 6 days to cross the Atlantic by sea.
Bureaucracy dice should probably go Administrative Assistance on Fusion for the next two turns.
We need energy, and most of our Free dice is spoken for.
An extra 2 AA dice should help accelerate the availability of energy.
More Food is always good.
Almost all our military projects completed.
Thats excellent, and means we can rollout Wingman drones starting next turn.
Now to see cost estimates on Frigates vs CVEs.
I'd suggest:
1)Replace Rail Network with Suborbital Shuttles.
2)Put all 4x Bureaucracy dice into Administrative Assistance on Fusion until we have an Energy cushion.
See my reply downpost.
Its not just about Erehwon, but about those who come after him.
At least someone is having fun
Never change dude.
Tradeoffs include increased vulnerability to kaboom and sabotage, as well as proliferation risks.
Explicit IC knowledge is that opposition to Tib power, as represented by PS malus, will increase not decrease.
And that does not even price in the public reaction to any of them exploding because Mehretu pulled a Mehretu.
GDI has a very hate-hate relationship with Tiberium.
Takes two decades to raise a human from birth.
Given that Nod's Tiberium infusion experiments date back to the early 2000s according to the backstory of Renegade?
I'm going to bet this has been running since at least the Second Tib War. India's biotech theme would support that.
At least, I hope it has.
Because a secret breeding program of delta and gamma Forgotten points to a limited pool of troops who must be used sparingly.
A program that simply converts normal humans to Tiberium mutants has a much deeper recruitment pool.
He's the first of a species, a whole new type of sapient. Humanity's first children.
How we treat him helps set the tone for future relations, since those who come after will be able to follow the history of decisions made and why.
Given that GDI and sapient digital intelligence's previous history involves things like rampant EVAs dying and CABAL atempting to genocide the planet, there is a lot of pragmatic teason to invest as much effort as we can into keeping him alive and healthy.
Both for the data, and for the PR.
I suspect archeologists and other scientists would strangle anyone who made the suggestion.
Move into fifty thousand year old structures of a vanished elder race for habitation? When you can literaly ship in prefab habitats from Earth and set them up?
Might as well propose that hitchhikers move into the Taj Mahal instead of paying for a hotel.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So I'll point out we don't need a highway-sized portal to evacuate the Earth in a timely manner--just one big enough to pass a average human body with a little room to spare. Let's say...a diameter of 1.5 meters?
EDIT: I can't seem to find figures for the average width of the human body. Lots of stuff on the circumference, but not width.
To minimize portal edge mishaps, we can imagine strapping the passenger into a stretcher, running on a motorized track through the portal at the speed of a crawl, about 0.7 m/s. Let's say that the stretcher must transit 7 meters to clear the portal, and must furthermore transit back through to pick up more passengers, for a total of 14 meters per transit. (There is also on- and off-loading time, but we can imagine multiple stretchers on a forking track for both ends, so there are multiple stations for on- and off- loading in parallel and the only bottleneck is the portal.
14meters/ 1 transit * 1 second/0.7 meters = 14 seconds/0.7 transit= 9.8 seconds per transit. That's ~367 transits an hour.
1,500,000transits * 9.8 seconds/1 transit = 14,700,000 seconds.
The entirety of the world's remaining population, as of last count, can be evacuated through this crawl portal in a little under half a year.
The main bottleneck, then, is constructing sufficient housing and life support for one and a half billion people at the destination.
EDIT: I can't seem to find figures for the average width of the human body. Lots of stuff on the circumference, but not width.
To minimize portal edge mishaps, we can imagine strapping the passenger into a stretcher, running on a motorized track through the portal at the speed of a crawl, about 0.7 m/s. Let's say that the stretcher must transit 7 meters to clear the portal, and must furthermore transit back through to pick up more passengers, for a total of 14 meters per transit. (There is also on- and off-loading time, but we can imagine multiple stretchers on a forking track for both ends, so there are multiple stations for on- and off- loading in parallel and the only bottleneck is the portal.
14
1,500,000
The entirety of the world's remaining population, as of last count, can be evacuated through this crawl portal in a little under half a year.
The main bottleneck, then, is constructing sufficient housing and life support for one and a half billion people at the destination.
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I suspect the time a portal is open will play a big role as well and so making a portal able to fit a train for a minute+ the train needs to pass it will probably be cheaper than keeping a smaller one open for an hour+ that the people in train would need to go through the portal on foot individually.
This said, everything is mostly speculation at the moment,
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cryptoam
building an 1980s encrypted protocol
- Location
- in lockdown waiting and bored...
IMHO, portal tech will be very limited in potential for quite a while.
The most common application will be secure no lag P2P communication between dedicated links.
The next will be for quick small item transfers(think shoebox amount with only 5 secs after a long as hell charge time).
Then we start getting into things that start becoming more like teleporters(eg step in now and go somewhere else in the next 10 secs) .
Only after that, do we get more long term systems.
Pick 2:
Large Size
Large Duration
Low Expense(energy and STU usage in design)
The most common application will be secure no lag P2P communication between dedicated links.
The next will be for quick small item transfers(think shoebox amount with only 5 secs after a long as hell charge time).
Then we start getting into things that start becoming more like teleporters(eg step in now and go somewhere else in the next 10 secs) .
Only after that, do we get more long term systems.
Pick 2:
Large Size
Large Duration
Low Expense(energy and STU usage in design)
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
Yeah, but we've got kids now. Human kids, right now. They have needs too, and there's a hell of a lot more of them then him.
Think about the message that sends. That those kids are plainly not as valuable as one AI. An AI that knows how broken he is. You want overblown egos and a distorted view on the value of individual life for future AIs? Do you want them to think an AI will always be more important then any human? Because that's a sure way to do it. Erehwon isn't the first anyway. He's the first of his exact type, but as you even pointed out there's rampant EVAs and CABAL, and while we probably don't know about it, LEGION. Erehwon is different, but he's not special. Not in that way.
I'm not saying he shouldn't be saved. But doing something that's good for him should not come at the expense of everyone else. If we can work saving him into plans that continue to improve the lives of the people of Earth, then good! I'm for it, I would be sad to see him die. But I'll be far, far more sad and very upset that he lived because resources that could've saved many others went to him.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Engineering solution: have two tracks, one below the other. The one on top carries full stretchers and needs to be high enough to accommodate a human body. The one on the bottom carries empty stretchers going the other way and drops them down a chute to be returned to the stretcher-loading station. It only needs to be a few inches high because the stretcher itself is pretty much a flatpack.
Math error. 14/0.7 is not 9.8. It's 20. You get 20 seconds per transit, or 180 transits an hour. But more importantly...
Uh... I think you're off by a factor of a thousand.
You need to transit roughly 1.5 billion people, not 1.5 million. At roughly 180 transits per hour, you can get approximately 4320 people through per day, or about 1.88 million people per year.
To get the entire 1.5 billion population of the Earth through a single stretcher portal in a single year, you'd need to launch the passengers through the portal at approximately Mach 2, end-to-end, with no pauses between incoming stretchers. Which would get... messy.
Going full ham on North Boston is something that's going to improve the lives of the people of Earth.
Now, going full ham on Nuuk alone and having more resources for other things might improve the lives of the people of Earth more.
Going partial ham on Nuuk and saving some resources to make boutique Scrintech isolinear chips for Erehwon might well be the solution that gives us the best of both worlds.
Yeah, but maintaining the portal could be a real bear, though at least getting the colony set up physically got a lot easier.
Fair enough, though for my purposes that's almost as good. Being able to reliably manage several burns of ~10 km/s each during a mission isn't as good as being able to manage one meter per second squared for hours and hours and hours almost without limit, but it's still better by a wide enough margin to make cargo shipping to Mars or the asteroids on fusion rockets significantly more practical.
Depends on, one, the sophistication of the tech, and two, how many dedicated on-site fusion reactors you're ready to build.
Oof.
Then again, just a portal a couple of feet wide (hopefully more achievable) would be enough to pass human beings through- you get into a very tight and cramped cylindrical pod, they shove you through the portal, and you climb out of the pod on the other side.
Of course, that's a solution if it's easy to keep portals open for a long time but they have to be very narrow. If the reverse is true (it's easy to make a wide portal but only for a short time), then you use different solutions, such as driving crowded buses through the portal.
Broadly speaking, it depends. If we want two phases of Fortress Towns to support the large gains we hope to make with the current offensive (or to give our troops positions to fall back on if Nod turns the tide), then we probably can't/shouldn't afford to try much with Suborbital Shuttles this turn.
If we're only trying for one phase of Fortress towns with no real effort to achieve a second in 2060Q2, then things are different. Personally, I think the Infrastructure department's priority should continue to be supporting the offensive and making sure GDI is able to retain any territory it captures, so my lineup will probably be:
Infrastructure 6/6 Dice 110 R
-[] Yellow Zone Fortress Towns (Phase 4+5) 232/550 (4 Dice, 80 R) (72% chance of Phase 5)
-[] Rail Network Construction Campaigns (Phase 3) 159/300 (2 Dice, 30 R) (84% chance; one die would not be enough)
Because realistically we need at least three dice and 90 R to do even the first phase of Suborbital Shuttles. That's not in the budget unless we spend Free dice on Infrastructure and give up any reasonably good chance of getting Fortress Towns Phase 5. And I want that second phase.
If we prioritize North Boston Phase 5 this turn, you're probably right. If we prioritize Nuuk Phase 3, I disagree, we should spend at least one and preferably two Heavy Industry dice on fusion power this turn.
Because Nuuk Phase 3 will eat through most of our remaining Energy reserve all by itself, and we could lose some Energy production capacity to Nod raids at any time. This is too important to entrust to Administrative Assistance. I want the certainty (and probable significant rollover) that comes with actual Heavy Industry dice.
Also, Bureaucracy is frankly due for its security review, so giving it a turn of downtime sounds like a good idea.
...
Also, let me point something else out to you. You are perhaps the thread's most outspoken opponent of tiberium energy. You have made no bones about the fact that you want nothing to do with tiberium energy, ever, if there is any way to avoid being forced to accept it. You think it is a terrible idea on many levels.
With this being the case, let me tell you, you do NOT want to put us in a situation where we are in danger of hitting +1 Energy or less due to completing an Energy-hungry factory and failing to complete the corresponding fusion reactors.
Not in the middle of a shooting war, one where Nod may or may not be about to unleash psychic commandoes and literal cyborg Godzilla on our asses.
Because that is the kind of situation where an avalanche of voters start piling in on tiberium energy plans out of desperation.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him
Goddamn it. I did the dimension analysis after computing.
OK, so what I'm hearing here is I need remedial courses in basic math.
Yeah, that's my view on it to.
In my opinion, the best plan for keeping our little AI buddy alive would be to take advantage of the boost the reroll gave in time until death, and rtush through Nuuk stage 3 to get the cap goods to cover military usages, then start pumping HI dice into North Boston to get to stage 5 if we can, with fusion/tib power covering the rest. Hopefully by the time we get low on cap goods, which can be extended with the macrospinner and semiconductors, we'll be getting the influx from Boston stage 4.
As for portals, my view on the best way is that it'll basically take the form of a train, the cars queued up waiting, maybe even in motion as the portal is opening, and then the portal opens, the cars go in, and then the portal closes. Of course it all depends on the size of the portal and amount of time that it stays open. Forget two lane highways, I want a two track rail line.
- Location
- MSC
Need to research it, but is it possible that humans may not require protection to use portal?
Also, I hope we can get Scrin energy technology from gacha.
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Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I believe the idea is to reduce the likely number of injuries from people, say, touching the edge of the portal.
- Location
- canada
I agree completely. The only reasons I could think that people vote otherwise would be these:
1. Erewhon is a name that people can associate and sympathize with much more easily than an imprecise number of people that aren't given individual identities. Because like someone once said, "A Single Death Is a Tragedy; A Million Deaths Is a Statistic". So it stands to reason some voters might not care as much when the alternative aren't given as much details and attention to care about.
2. Erewhon is more unique and harder to create, while human population that aren't specifically named characters are more easily replaceable. So perhaps the voters don't mind doing slightly less for the majority of the population and preventing the potential deaths of soldiers due to less effort going to them when they've already done that for 99% of the quest vs preserving the more unique and less replaceable singular individual.
3. Erewhon's survival could potentially lead to more gains in overall productivity and life saved in the future than the productivity gained and lives potentially saved with alternative choices. That is of course if A.Is could be developed fast enough to be useful in becoming a crucial component of economic and military affairs. As such there should be as much effort going into saving it as possible, even if it's only for the sake of ensuring the future generations A.Is would have more reasons to be more grateful and loyal to humanity. In other words the perceived long term gains over short term gains.
TBH personally I'm not sure if focusing in investing in more capital Goods and doing more AEVA first would be more useful in general than concentrating on the stuff that saves the A.I as much, since I got no idea what sort of benefits that could mechanically bring vs the AEVA. But the lure of mystery boxes was always a thing anyways for many people in quests, so I'm not surprised if they want to rely on unknown factors vs known values, which is strange to me since people did the opposite when they choose to delay relying and funding the free economy and making use of the unknown gains in value from it vs making use of the well known gains in value for a Tiberium economy instead.
Then again, maybe due to how this is a time period when GDI and human survival is less time critical and in question in comparison, and the cost of helping erewhon is more of a slight lag or just redirection in development pace, they feel it's ok to rely on unknown values? Then again Discord exists and who knows what the QM told them that wasn't discussed here, so I might be completely wrong about the benefits being unquantifiable.
4. Most voters might not actually care all that much about the details and are simply voting for whichever plans has the parts they liked and trust the plan maker with the rest of their plan. Thus a relatively small affair such as reducing the bonuses of a single category by a minor amount, or even larger ones such as investing massively in something else for the sake of a single project, even at the opportunity cost of more useful stuff to save a few more lives before they're lost, could be almost irrelevant to most people.
I am admittingly of the last category, because I have long stopped caring and arguing that much about specific details of plans that didn't interest me so long as the stuff I liked gets voted for. It just isn't worth the effort to me anymore to do otherwise. My advice is to care less, stress less, and enjoy more for less effort.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
[puts his professional capacity hat on]
No, you just need to be a little more careful about the intermediate steps. Like, if you'd actually done the "how many people per day" calculation, you would have immediately realized that 4320 (or for that matter roughly twice that many, using the 9.8 seconds per person figure) people per day could never result in over a billion people per year. But most of us don't have a good intuitive sense of how many minutes or hours there are in a year (catchy tunes from Rent aside), so it's easy to lose sight of that if you don't walk it through the intermediate numbers directly.
Isolinear chips and focusing on Nuuk may be a better choice overall than pushing North Boston Phase 5 primarily/immediately. Remember that for this application we need boutique amounts of the best computing hardware possible, not a gigantic global supply chain for a nation of hundreds of millions.
Of course, we couldn't have known we'd have the isolinear option until it popped up right in front of us.
It's overwhelmingly #3. Among other things because if we succeed in making a truly competent AI, one that is stable enough to survive, then by far our greatest concern is ensuring said AI's loyalty. Failure in this area of endeavor has the potential to create an entire third category of existential threat to GDI, alongside Nod and tiberium.
People made extensive use of the tiberium economy and abatement.
As far as I can determine, you're unhappy because we don't throw all our Free dice at tiberium with occasional sojourns into Heavy Industry or something. And there is, indeed, a reason we don't do that- namely, that if we did, we'd wind up so hilariously overextended that Nod would beat us like a drum. The only option that avoids this problem is mass vein mining, which has a certain logic to it, but there were reasons not to pursue that specific singular strategy.
Among other things, you will note that we're not really struggling to fund all our dice every turn... which is about the best we can expect to be doing at the moment. Even if we had half again as many resources, we'd have a hard time figuring out how to use them to good effect.
Any option taken to preserve and improve the life of Erewhon by definition has other benefits, both mechanically and narratively.
Boston V is a capstone project that unlocks new computing tech, which has an impact on everything, considering everything involves the usage of computers. Trying to improve Erewhon's condition gives us practice and information about how to better create future AI.
Trying to frame the situation as a 'helping Erewhon means children die' is a purely cynical appeal to emotion. If you care so much about the children, why aren't you demanding every available dice goes towards liberating the Yellow zones?
Boston V is a capstone project that unlocks new computing tech, which has an impact on everything, considering everything involves the usage of computers. Trying to improve Erewhon's condition gives us practice and information about how to better create future AI.
Trying to frame the situation as a 'helping Erewhon means children die' is a purely cynical appeal to emotion. If you care so much about the children, why aren't you demanding every available dice goes towards liberating the Yellow zones?
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- Location
- USA
My only issue with Boston 5 is that it is a huge commitment.
We are starting a war, we don't know what damage our economy might have, and we might really need to do other things with the dice than Boston 5.
If we were at peace time (relatively speaking) I wouldn't have a issue with it at all.
Though the idea that isolinear stuff might show up and obsolete our computer chips in the middle of upgrading Boston does bother me quite a bit. Would we just stop Boston and swap to isolinear facilities? Waste all that investment?
The AI issue has very little value to me. If we can help him, great, that's fine. But I'm not willing to hypothetically wreak our economy to save one person. Hopefully, we never have to make that decision but if we do hopefully future AI can understand context and the overall situation.
We are starting a war, we don't know what damage our economy might have, and we might really need to do other things with the dice than Boston 5.
If we were at peace time (relatively speaking) I wouldn't have a issue with it at all.
Though the idea that isolinear stuff might show up and obsolete our computer chips in the middle of upgrading Boston does bother me quite a bit. Would we just stop Boston and swap to isolinear facilities? Waste all that investment?
The AI issue has very little value to me. If we can help him, great, that's fine. But I'm not willing to hypothetically wreak our economy to save one person. Hopefully, we never have to make that decision but if we do hopefully future AI can understand context and the overall situation.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hmmmm, portals makes the Alpha Centauri probe much more interesting. Imagine getting pictures after 6 years instead of 10.
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- Location
- MSC
Upgrade to Isolinear probably can be included in Boston stage 5, as in new part of complex for it or as overall upgrade. Maybe…
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I would ask you to please not make accusations of moral impurity part of this argument. Characterizing people's arguments as "a purely cynical appeal to emotion" is rather highly inflammatory. And it's not any more an emotional appeal than the posts calling Erewhon "our child". People can have attachment to fictional characters just as they have investment in the state of a fictional world; neither of which is some moral wrong.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I dearly hope not!
I'm uncomfortable with how over-concentrated our computer chip production infrastructure is; I believe we have low-level secondary fabrication capacity in Manchester and aboard Enterpise, but by far the vast majority of all our electronics comes from North Boston, to the point where any serious interruption of production for more than a short time would be a disaster.
I sincerely regret us losing/missing the option to build at least a few phases of the Tokyo fabricator, and I will be very unhappy if the first major isolinear chip production ends up co-located with North Boston. I don't mind the idea that we eventually start making isolinear chips there, but I don't want it to be our first and only site.
My words are inflammatory because I am inflamed. I don't appreciate people slinging around the 'think of the children' rhetorical tactic to imply that anyone who chooses a specific option they don't agree with is willing to pay for it with dead children.
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@Derpmind, @Darkandus, I very deliberately choose not to participate in the discussion, but do want to say that the discussion is loaded and can summon Mods fast. Let's try to be civil to each other and careful with the topic in general.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
It's noteworthy that the question in context is "which giant heavy industrial megaproject do we build" and there's no easy objective way to say whether "more heavy robotics" or "better computers" is the objectively better choice for the people of GDI.
The big difference between the two is that an aggressive beeline on North Boston would mean we have, over the course of 2060, several less Free dice (say, about six to nine dice) to put into other categories, which realistically would mostly go to Orbital and Military. It's hard to predict the consequences of that action.
I'm not saying there would be no adverse consequences, but we simply have no realistic way of evaluating those consequences, or the indirect rewards of either course of action. I know that when next turn pops, I plan to offer two plans, one based on a North Boston sprint, and one based on a Nuuk/isolinear plan. Personally, I'll favor the Nuuk/isolinear option, since it seems likely to me that developing isolinear chips and rapidly setting up a small production line for boutique quantities of them will be a more efficient way to help Erewhon anyway.
- Location
- his hidden lair
This seems dangerously dismissive of the alien super rock that we've seen mutating into how many different strains by this point? Moreover, Venus is objective proof that high pressure and low light levels aren't all that limiting. Especially when you factor in ion storms reduce the ambient light levels around major Tiberium concentrations further…
There's just way too much we don't know, so saying 'oh yeah man, the Marianas get all the way down to 34 degrees Fahrenheit- 1 degree Celsius, there's no way Tiberium is devouring our planet down there too!' Is just asking for us to get screwed over. If Tiberium can grow on Venus, then at a bare minimum every seafloor at 1 km or less depth is at risk, the lack of heat is a laughable non factor considering much colder places only slow down Tiberium somewhat. The lack of light is the only potential obstacle, and considering Tiberium generates massive amounts of cloud cover- I'm skeptical it's much of an obstacle.