I think the merchantman conversions are a bad idea. What we'd be getting is a marginally effective carrier that's also a floating deathtrap filled with hundreds (at the least) of highly trained, extremely valuable crew. Sinking those things would be easy for Nod and each one they do sink is a massive propaganda coup for them, a big political hit for us and an enormous loss of personnel we desperately need.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
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- Mid-Atlantic
Suborbital shuttles will definitely help, but we're still gonna take a kicking, and the only real way to mitigate it is to at least try to get some hulls in the water.
There is no way around this, and the only way to avoid the problem would have been to do a lot more naval construction.
The alternative is to have no carriers to support Eastern Paris, or to have no carriers to escort convoys at all and see how Nod takes advantage of that instead.
Remember that the Navy has aggressively emphasized how much they need hulls. This is what that means. Getting hulls into the water quickly, so that the limited and slow-growing supply of high-performance warships can be concentrated onto tasks they're actually good at.
These ships can be retired as quickly as possible, but quite frankly we need them in the here-and-now.
There is no way around this, and the only way to avoid the problem would have been to do a lot more naval construction.
And yet, we need flattops. The merchantman conversions are intended for the least-threatened sealanes, the areas where a proper fleet carrier is needed least, where they are most wasted under present conditions.
The alternative is to have no carriers to support Eastern Paris, or to have no carriers to escort convoys at all and see how Nod takes advantage of that instead.
Remember that the Navy has aggressively emphasized how much they need hulls. This is what that means. Getting hulls into the water quickly, so that the limited and slow-growing supply of high-performance warships can be concentrated onto tasks they're actually good at.
These ships can be retired as quickly as possible, but quite frankly we need them in the here-and-now.
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- He/Him
Odds are that it's 3 slips cut in 2 to build 6 CVEs at once. Same way some of the cruiser yards were with some of the fleet carrier yards. But my read on that is that it's a temporary conversion to build carriers quicker and will be reversed after those 4 years since the yards used will also be needed for battleship repairs.
Reduction to the absurd. It won't be a case of no carriers for Karachi or no carriers for convoy escort at all.
We will likely lose 3-6 carriers for Karachi out of something like 30 odd. I'm certain it's been said here at some point by Ithillid but I can't remember the exact number off the top of my head.
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- Mid-Atlantic
No, because the battleships aren't that much larger than our new light carrier design. I don't think we could cut the battleship slips in two to get two light carrier slips; the light carriers are a lot bigger than the Governors.
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Fair for the cruisers but I'm pretty sure the battleships might be large enough for it to work like that. Would have to check that ofc as I don't know the battleship tonnage by heart.
I edited my original post to reply to a later comment of yours as well. I started my reply on my phone before it decided to produce endless blank lines so I waited till I got home.
- Location
- his hidden lair
Not even close to your pessimistic estimates.
you are somehow pegging the fusion powered Leopard as having substantially less lift than a Saturn V's chemical rocket, and the Union is probably substantially more. They're obviously not the DropShips they're named after, but there's a reason these things were way more revolutionary than chemical rockets- and it wasn't just reusability.
Moreover a sub-orbital launch for the purpose of shipping goods is going to take hours. And most of that is probably just lift off and touch down maintenance. Compare that to weeks of travel at least. A Union with your conservative cargo estimates at 4 launches a day is transporting 77,000 tons over the time it takes a cargo ship to cross the world apparently. That's 1/6th of the load of your hypothetical freighter.
Even assuming that we can only do 2 launches a day, and a shorter route- 500 tons for every day a cargo ship has to travel adds up really quickly. I'm pretty sure we demonstrated much lower turn around times during the race to set up the Tiberium satellite array. It's not going to be 6 shuttles per cargo ship for sure, but 2000 is a real head scratcher.
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Those areas can be covered by frigates in time for a q2 karachi if we build them this turn. 40 frigates will be able to cover 10-20 convoys, allowing us to free up flattops for karachi
- Location
- Queensland, Australia
I actually went back and checked the cargo weights after making that post and I was wrong. The Union only has a 200 ton cargo bay. The Leopard's actually got more than 100 tons, but it's left unclear how much more as it only says 'somewhat lesser than the Union' which probably means between 150 and 175 tons. Also, we know that only of our issues with the current generation of Unions and Leopards is they're extremely maintenance demanding. So I'd guess they actually only achieve 2 launches a day at most.
As for the travel time, these days it takes about 40 days for a cargo ship to get from the UK to Australia's East Coast, which is one of longer routes. But it's extremely unlikely that much is actually shipped from the European Blue Zones to the Pacific Blue Zones because of that time delay except for a handful of critical goods such as chips from Manchester or North Boston and maybe the robots from Nuuk if the small robot production facilities closer can't handle them.
However that '40 days speed' is assuming you are using modern cargo ship speeds which are 20 knots or less. But that's due to the higher oil consumption involved with higher speeds which aren't an issue here. As I'm pretty sure even our civilian ships use nuclear reactors to power them due to the reduced cost of radioactives compared to fossil fuels. Which means that cargo ships probably travel at 30 knots or more.
Now, this isn't to say what you said had some merit. But much less than what you said.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Do you have @Ithillid confirmation on this? Or is it just something you eyeballed?
For that matter, I'd be pretty impressed at the scale of frigate shipyard it would take to build forty ships in a year. We might not be able to ensure that it gets built in one turn, or it might be much harder to ensure that it gets built in one turn than to just do the conversion carriers.
Karachi is only 500km from Oman one of our blue zones if needed we can base a lot of aircraft there(but we better boost the airforce enough to get control over the airspace above the invasion).
We should do the battleships conversoins and a frigate yard even if we try to the invasoin with air support a else we run the risk of the convoys not being able to reach their destinations in the year post Karachi
We should do the battleships conversoins and a frigate yard even if we try to the invasoin with air support a else we run the risk of the convoys not being able to reach their destinations in the year post Karachi
- Location
- his hidden lair
Okay, given the Tib satellites weighed 150 tons I think we can reasonably assume Leopards have at least that much lift. Our first quarter when we were getting our feet under us, we moved 30000 tons of material into orbit.
30000 tons out of the roughly 450,000 tons worth of satellites we put up in 3 quarters. Now, most of that occurred in the second quarter so I'll say, peddle to the metal total mobilization, rapid turn around moved 300,000 tons of material into orbit in a single quarter.
We're not going to do the same levels of mobilization here I don't think, but suborbital flights should potentially put let strain on the drives, and I think we'd all be willing to sacrifice some craft needing to be permanently down checked if that's what it took to get us the slack we need. Personally? I'd wonder if we could use the orbital dice on that particular logistics project and push for it if we can. We can probably transport over 150,000 tons of material a quarter if we try. We have a larger fleet of fusion craft now, the Unions don't have wasted payload, we're substantially more familiar running these ships hard now, sub-orbital supply runs should be substantially easier than establishing a 3000 satellite network in terms of mission complexity, etc.
It's not replacing everything, and it's arguably less than a single cargo ship over a quarter- but I don't think we can say it's too little to matter: 150 kilotons is a lot to shake a stick at no matter what.
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- Mid-Atlantic
It's not just the airspace over the actual zone we're using as a beachhead that's the problem. It's:
1) Air and naval elements based out of India or Bintang's territory striking GDI convoys headed to supply Karachi all over the Indian Ocean. We need broad coverage of the sea and the ability to hunt down and destroy raiding ship forces with air power if we're to hold the raiders at bay.
2) Trying to hit back, to keep the Indian Nod warlord off-balance, because if we're not keeping them off-balance and disrupting their own coastal activities, they have much more freedom to line up their shots and put us on the defensive. Remember that India is basically the one major warlord territory unlikely to be threatened or weakened by Steel Vanguard. Carrier air raids against the enemy coastline can do a lot to force them to think about how to respond to us rather than just endlessly pelting us with bomber attacks, missile attacks, raiding boat/ship/sub attacks, and so on.
The fleet carriers are a big element of our chances of supporting Karachi, and our ability to control the seas in general. There was explicit language in the last update about this...
"While so far, the raiding activities have been warded off with naval escorts, it is only a matter of time before the Brotherhood manages to do significant damage to GDI's ability to maintain global supply networks. With the Navy still distinctly short on modern hulls, and with only a relative few currently under construction, it is likely to be the element that drags GDI's offensives to a halt."
We need to do as much as we can to forestall that drag-to-halt if we want to pull off Karachi.
We should be trying to do as many escort carrier and frigate yards as we can regardless because the navy urgently needs all of those ships and it needs them yesterday.
The conversion carriers in particular are only a necessity because the Navy is so overstretched, though.
- Location
- Queensland, Australia
So I just looked up how many supplies a Division uses in a single day and it looks like bad news. Because, removing replacement parts and other maintenance needs whilst halving fuel because our vehicles may be electric but I'm pretty sure that just swaps those fuel needs for something else, a US Armoured Division seems to use up around 7000 tons of supplies a day. Or in other words, that 150000 tons of material a quarter would supply a single armoured division for only twenty one and a half days.
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I disagree, the cycle railgun is more comparable to an autocannon, which do in fact use specialized ammunition.
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- Mid-Atlantic
Problems:
1) The round caliber on a quick-fire railgun is probably lower than on many though perhaps not all autocannon, which makes specialized ammunition less viable and effective.
2) The quick-fire railgun needs specialized ammunition less than does a full-size antitank railgun, because its greater rate of fire gives it more options for engaging lightly protected enemies.
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- He/Him
As a counter I'd argue this: "While capable of achieving the same velocity as the Zone Trooper's design, each assembly can put more rounds downrange per minute than an entire squad of Zone Troopers. However, this does come with the inherent downsides of needing much more power to keep the guns firing." One squad of ZTs are four soldiers, each capable of firing once every 2.3 seconds, this gives the squad roughly a fire rate of 105 rounds/second, which is still worse than many irl autoguns, and while I agree that HE-munitions are probably not viable, the basic concept of a canister shot that has been discussed should still work.
I can't remember if it has WOG confirmation yet but 9 months seems to be the current assumption on discord and it hasn't been corrected for what it's worth. Each shipyard builds 20 at a time, 40 would be 2
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- Mid-Atlantic
I don't recall what the real rate of fire in-game for Zone Trooper rifles is, as compared to Command and Conquer gameplay.
Anyway, ehhhh. It's relative. I'm not trying to dogmatically insist that there is no such thing as beneficial special munitions for Wolverine/harvester light railguns. I'm saying the tank guns need it more and would probably get more benefit out of it, the quick-firing guns relatively less.
Given just how big the frigate yards are implied to be, I'm not sure it's realistic for us to try to tackle two in one turn, because getting both of them with enough confidence that we're sure more than one will finish involves a LOT of overinvestment.
I'm pro overinvesting in frigate yards this turn because of the lead time and focusing more on wingman next turn because they'll be out quicker
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- Mid-Atlantic
Okay, but I want to do the carrier conversions too. I could see just making a modest investment in wingman drones- but those are badly needed too and we're getting chewed up in the air, so I don't want to ignore it entirely.
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- Wall Gazing
True, but that likely has to be latter, as we need hulls in the water and drones in the sky yesterday. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if almost all of our military dice goes into that.
I understand that. It just sounds like those conversions are deathtraps that'll get a lot of people killed.
I'm for 100% of military to go on navy for 1 turn just so we have a chance of actually doing karachi next year. Funding wingman and frigates at the same time i feel is unlikely to complete either so i'd rather focus one, then the other
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You know what's an even bigger deathtrap than a converted merchantman carrier?
No carrier at all.
The only difference is that the people who die or suffer from "no carrier" tend to be more dispersed, and don't get a chance to kill the enemy before the enemy kills them. They die aboard the freighters that get sunk, or in the combat zones not supported by proper fleet carriers, or of the long-term complications of the industrial disruptions that are in turn caused by the disrupted convoy schedules that are in turn caused by the unavailability of escorting warships.
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- USA
Aren't the convoys ok at the moment? Just under more pressure than normal from nod.
Our issue is having enough to cover Karachi and the convoys at the same time. It would be nice if we had more ships but I think you are a bit exaggerating things here. If we weren't still planning on trying Karachi we wouldn't be nearly as concerned.