Serious question- why is NOD using mostly semisubmersibles instead of submarines?
I get it, easy to use and maintain. But you would think they would have used all their submarines to the max, especially with GDI Navy not in great shape.
Or is it because NOD doesn't have enough submarines? Can they actually be in the same situation as GDI - most resources were spent on ground forces to maintain their footholds on all continents and Navy was neglected?
Semi-submersibles and submersibles are probably more easily operated by their second and third-string warlords. Less demanding.
It's sort of like asking why Nod still bothers driving around in attack buggies and using (admittedly somewhat tooled-up) militants, instead of everyone stomping around in stealth tanks, Avatars, and Black Hand armor.
A fair bit of it is that. Escort Carriers have been on the docket since Q2 2055. But you spent three years ignoring it and two more wrangling over whether to do it with drones or not, and are only developing it as war kicked off.
If you had done Escort Carriers in, say Q3 2059, built a yard in Q4, and another in Q1, you would still have gotten the Merchantman conversion project, but at a much lower political cost. Because you need something to tide you over until the actual proper escort carriers start coming off the lines. But now, you have a problem, because the Navy is looking at the war and expecting to be fighting the entire thing with critically compromised designs forced on them by Treasury neglect.
Yeah. The Navy is pissed.
I don't think they're going to be
less pissed if we don't do the merchantman conversions in the long run; they're just going to be more actively blaming us for all the battles we lose, or
win-less-well, because the Navy couldn't be there because we didn't build any flattops.
I don't know if that will manifest as Political Support costs, or as the Navy pushing the legislature to twist our arms into building a gigantic naval expansion in the Fourth Four Year Plan, or what... but we're gonna pay a price. We should be looking at the political price of doing the conversion carriers as part of the tax we pay for neglecting the Navy.
Ignoring the Talons had relatively few costs and downsides. They're small.
The Navy is
big. What they do is a big deal, and no one else can do it. They have clout. They're mad at us. We're gonna take some hits from the beat-stick.
If there are issues with naval logistics having an alternative route by rail could compensate.
I don't know how many phases of rails we have to build before we get the option to dig subterranean rail tunnels connecting, say, Europe to Greenland (for Nuuk) to East Coast US to West Coast US... But I'm pretty sure it's not gonna help.
And the rail lines across Asia are
exactly why we want Karachi in the first place; they're long, overextended, and Krukov likes to use them for a goddamn scratching post.
Rails are not a viable alternative to shipping for GDI as a whole. We can reduce the need for
coastal shipping along a coastline a thousand kilometers or so, but that doesn't help much because those are the convoys that stay close to shore, within range of hydrofoils and land-based aviation. They don't
need flattops in their escort, not of any kind.
It's the convoys crossing actual oceans that need flattops, and don't have them.
To solve that problem, we need flattops, and we need them right away, not two years from now.
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As for kudzu, I'm not against it, though I prefer to spend the R and agricultural dice on food production because I anticipate a very large population surge from refugees who will need feeding, and also because if we
don't bargain down the Stored Food goal, we're gonna need a LOT of extra Food.
Ships might not be perfectly interchangeable and i agree we should build a escort carrier yard this turn but they are interchangeable to some degree especially when looked at from a global perspective.
Build escort carriers free up fleet carriers and use them in the Indian ocean is the simplest and best way to free up ships.
Simplest, yes, best, no. The problem is that SOME flattop, SOME ship capable of launching aircraft, must replace the fleet carrier.
No flattops will be constructed for about 18-21-24 months if we don't do the merchantman conversions.
Therefore, if we don't do them, we're still screwed.
This is not a purely abstract exercise in "make number go up at minimum cost." We need flattops
now. Even if they are unsatisfactory, we need them
now. This is literally the exact situation in which the US and British navies historically built dozens of, well,
escort carriers, slow small carriers built on merchant hulls,
very much like our conversion carriers. Because they had a lot of convoys to escort, to protect from German U-boats and Japanese threats of all kinds. And they could never, never have enough full-size fleet carriers to be able or willing to waste them covering all those convoys.
So we,
like the very successful WWII US Navy, are going to need to build cheap, small, quickly made, easily prepared conversion merchantman-based carriers that can close that gap. We will, like the WWII US Navy, predictably wind up abandoning the conversion carriers as soon as a more satisfactory model is available or as soon as the need passes. But the need is upon us now and we cannot afford to ignore it.
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The problem is that more frigates or cruisers
don't replace the fleet carrier in a convoy escort mission, whereas even a cheap and lesser-than merchant conversion carrier
can replace the fleet carrier.
To make a peanut butter sandwich, you need peanut butter, and you need bread. If someone takes away your bread, you can't just use twice as much peanut butter to compensate. You must have bread. If that means there's no bread available to do something else later,
it doesn't matter.
Which is why our fleet carriers are almost never available for anything except the peanut butter sandwich of all naval missions- convoy escort.
Two yards are more then doable and would produce 40 frigates before the end of the plan.
We also have a logistics buffer and can say that there will be no convoys across the Atlantic the quarter Karachi is launched and that you need to order stuff in advance or have it flow over during the landings if you normally get goods that way.
That may or may not be achievable. Even if it is, we can't declare that there will be no convoys for the duration of the war.
We need extra flattops
now, and have needed them for a long time.
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I Refuse To Give Up On Karachi Yet
