- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
You're right, but the point is, it would be grossly optimistic to make confident assertions about what plans we should make based on the assumption that the light carrier design we've actually got from the development project can be done in less than a year... In which case, the only way to get carrier decks ready in time for Karachi 2061 is, realistically, the merchantman conversions.
I'd like to at least start making progress on SADN, though, because frankly? The fact that we don't have a viable counter to "Nod repeats the Manchester raid, but with nukes in the cruise missiles, and vaporizes several dozen square kilometers of a high value target" is something that's been kind of a nail-biter for us. It's a big part of what keeps us stressed out about our Capital Goods surplus and so on.
We need those defenses, and delaying them indefinitely is a very bad idea in the long run. I'm willing to take them a bit slower, I'm not trying to rush the whole 350-point project in one turn. But I'm not going to vote for any plans that have no SADN.
Much like the Navy, it's very much time and past time that we invest in that.
Well, we have no realistic hope of completing any of those in a single turn except maybe the Apollo drones, but we must make a good faith effort to begin work on wingman drone deployment anyway. The 20 R/die revelation is certainly an unwelcome development given how heavily the production lines are based off existing 15 R/die factories, but I can shuffle things around.
[shrug]
Well, good thing we're not looking at making a Plan promise to build the things quickly, then. We'll just have to do the best we can, because on the one hand, we need them... And on the other hand, with the urgency of getting the merchantman conversions into the water, we simply cannot afford to throw five or six dice at a single giant shipyard in 2060Q2.
I am planning to throw just about every available Military die at either shipyards or wingman drone factories, with a handful of options for something else. Railgun munition development is almost certain to lead to a 'build some factories' project and we just can't squeeze that in easily. I want to at least start to hack through the deployment backwater created by last turn's aggressive development posture.
Also, nitpick, railgun harvesters use the quick-firing railgun, which frankly is the one in the least need of specialist munitions, for the same reasons that specialty bullets for normal machine guns didn't quite catch on and we still go "ah, fuckit, shoot a fast-moving aerodynamic hunk of metal" the same way we did 150 years ago.
Ehhh. In my defense, that was a pretty quick modification.
I think there's wisdom in swapping out the AA die on frigates for the Military die on the neural helmets, because you're not wrong... but there's more to it than that. The AA dice are there specifically to enhance projects in Military, because that's the area where we have a jillion things that all need doing and we need them yesterday. For example, the merchantman conversions. With only three dice, we have an 81% chance of completion, which isn't as good as I'd like. With the AA die, we get up to 95%, which is good enough. Spending a Military die there instead would just be wasteful, because that could go to a project with bigger requirements (like frigate yards) or rollover (like SADN) instead.
Look, either you believe the QM or not, okay? Don't pick fights with people over what you're convinced logically must happen, when we've been told not to expect it, and have no reason to anticipate it happening except for what you came up with in your own armchair.
I'm open to doing one phase of tiberium power plants, but I'm not going to play any games about refusing to believe that the PS cost can increase from there, or that it might decrease from there. I expect it to get worse, and I'm prepared for that.
