Catching up...
I'd say more F-15/F-16.
F-35 as an example would be for a cheaper multirole version of the Apollo. Not quite as good at A2A, but significantly better at A2G work.
Not really.
The Firehawk was designed from the ground up to be a heavy strike fighter as well as an air to air combatant, same as the F35.
A multirole conversion would be more slong the lines of the F15 to F15E change.
I doubt we're ever going to see an AtG-optimized Apollo.
Given our technological trajectory, more likely to see upgrades to the Firehawk before its replaced entirely by some repulsordrive vehicle.
Though, lets say we secure Iberia from Nod. If we secure the North Africa YZ coastline... Does that mean we basically secured the Med (aside from what Kane could get up to from his Tower)? Take that thought, and consider what it would take to reopen the Suez, if we built up a few military bases along the Med to provide air cover between Gibraltar and Port Said in Egypt.
No it doesnt.
As long as Kane holds Threshold 19 the Med is not secure, and is not worth the trouble of attempting to secure it.
I doubt we can secure all of Iberia in Steel Vanguard anyway, not at a reasonable cost.
We dont need military bases along the Med. Most if its coastline is RZ, so no Nod presence.
Restoring Suez would be driving a 250ish kilometer Red Zone corridor from the vicinity of Eilat to Port Said.
Then maybe grabbing Crete before dropping MARV hubs in Beirut and Istanbul. Its well within our technical capability as long as noone is shooting at us. We did worse to build the Himalayan rail lines.
Karachi doesn't restrict India's operations. Raiding Nod would certainly be valuable, but a Planned City is expensive, and India would be extremely capable of hitting any harvesters we send out into the area. The more I think about it, the more I ask what the actual benefits of Karachi are. Unless India decides to imitate Gideon and suicide attack into a fortified position, having one Planned City in the area doesn't accomplish much.
This is inaccurate.
Karachi as an air amd naval base would allow even naval hydrofoils to reach two thirds of the way to Mumbai on coastal patrols
And it would allow GDI Auroras to threaten almost every major port on the west coast of India.
Putting that many ports under threat would force resource reallocation to defenses.
And it means that the only safe harbors left would be in the Bay of Bengal, on the Indian subcontinent's east coastline. Which would add days and thousands of kilometres to the shipping distance of any westbound cargos.
You act like we have to abandon the Fortress towns once a warlord is dealt with, when the entire advantage of toppling a warlord is we don't need to hold unproductive territory to root them out and deny it to them. Who cares if there's if we mark part of the map with 'Here be NOD' if we're confident Redeemers aren't going to start boiling out of the w
We do. Because Big Daddy Kane is out there with his goody bag full of xenotech goodies and can feasibly replace or replenish a lot of those losses in short order right under our noses. And the existence of Gana and MoK-style cyborgs means that we cannot even assume trained manpower will remain a bottleneck in the future.
Battling Nod is a lot like battling Tiberium. If you leave fragments lying around, it returns as a problem fast.
For Krukov, you are absolutely correct that he is not coming south. Especially now that one of his super-weapons was captured by the Initiative.
Thats optimistic. At best.
A significant chunk of his industry and resource collection is along the Central Asian Red Zones. Just to my imexperienced eyes, there exists a lot of room for him to pivot south.
As for Bintang, at present there are reasons she hasn't left the area of the South China Sea and Indonesia, which are exactly what enables her to be so irritating in concentrating and dispersing her forces. Those islands are filled with hidden shipyards and ports. Which allows her to hit and fade the trade that passes though her area especially that which goes from Japan and Korea to Australia and new Zealand, and from either of those to BZ 4 in the Arabian Peninsula. She can sustain operations away from her haunting grounds for two reasons, first is we'd hit her support structure if we found out she was raiding as far afield as the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman. Even if her ships could travel at 40 kts its a 2900 nm trip from Karachi to Singapore and that would take her 3 days if she found out and started returning immediately when we started hitting her.
Noone is likely to be sending shipping through the South China Sea to AUS/NZ, right through the backyard of Nod's naval specialist.
There's cheaper ways to lose cargo ships.
Since GDI ships moved to nukes, fuel capacity is not a consideration when planning ship routes.
Any shipping from Japan/Korea is much more likely to go north and skim the Pacific rim by way of Siberia, Alaska and California before doing a run down the eastern Pacific. Though I suspect most of AUSNZ's shipping comes by way of South America.
This is the best argument I have heard so far.
However, I think we can afford a great many suborbital shuttles for the cost of one Planned City. The Himalaya BZ is in the mountains, so it just has to hold out until we can send in the Air Force along with reinforcements in suborbital shuttles. It's not optimal, but the sea route to Karachi is long and vulnerable, and I don't know if Oman has the military infrastructure to support a significant campaign.
Surface shipping moves orders of magnitude more tonnage than aircraft or shuttles.
Nine months maximum effort launch capacity from all our shuttles as well as chemical rockets pulled out of storage had us put around six hundred kilotons of payload in space over nine months.
By comparison, a RL freight train will move anywhere from 2 kilotons to 10 kilotons of cargo in a trip, and an oceangoing containership will move 50-100 kilotons on the average IRL.
You cannot replace the rail links to the Himalayas with suborbital shuttles. Those are only for low bulk, high priority things.
It can be argued that BZ 4 is a relative backwater due to the nations therein mostly relying on oil for their economies which went the way of the dodo with the advent of Tiberium.
Not particularly.
If you look at the map, GDI Arabia would have been the destination site for a whole bunch of refugees across the rim of the Middle East, from East Africa in the west to Iran and coastal Pakistan in the east. There's almost certainly a lot of people there.
Further, unless we route shipping through Malacca and Indonesia, I don't see how Bintang will target the convoys to Karachi, she is on the other side of the Indian Ocean and, even if she could make 40 kts it would still take ~4 days to get to the area from her base of operations. And she would need to be stealthed the entire way or we would spot her from orbit and reroute the convoys. We would also try to raid her home base if she moves too far away and she knows that. Even if she could raid all the way across the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, we would know as soon as she hit a convoy. Then, knowing she was gone, we could scour the Indonesian Archipelago for her bases without worrying that she would pick off our search squadrons.
Also worth noting:
We almost definitely mine the Straits of Malacca regularly. Its cheap to do, it can be done from everything from fishing boats to aircraft, it targets both surface ships and subs, and it is a deterrent to attempts to run the straits at any sort of speed, or to run the straits at all.
Battlefield denial of a route that GDI ships dont really use.
The Straits are the gateway from Bintang's stomping grounds in the South Pacific to the Indian Ocean.
Putting explosive party favors in the waters there makes that a non-viable option for the sort of fast transit into the Indian Ocean that others have suggested.
Naval Procurement is one of the longest lead items possible besides Orbital Infrastructure and Support:
Frigates are a year long Keel to Shakedown for a 6K Ton vessel
Destroyers are a year and a quarter for a 9,000-12,000 Ton Vessel
Cruisers between 1.5 and 2 years for a 20-ish thousand ton Vessel
The Light Carriers (which went from 35,000 Tons to 50,000 Tons) are a full 3 Years atm
Battleships are a full 3 Years
Supercarriers are 5 Years.
So yea, thats how this shakes out to be, and right now those Frigates still got 2 turns before the first batch is out
Most of these details are inaccurate.
1)Frigates are 9-15 months to build and commission, starting at 15 months and dropping to 9 months with practice.
They are described as mini-Governors, with 90% of the missile cells of a Governor, 25% of the guns, and 2x ASW helicopters.
Thats presumably, by my estimates, Burke-ish displacement, 9-12 kilotons.
They build in batches of 20 each per shipyard, with 3 shipyards planned.
2)We arent building destroyers.
3)Cruisers took 12-18 months to build and commission, starting around 18 months and currently dropping to 12 months as the shipbuilders gain familiarity with the type. They are 17 kilotons plus, presumably light or standard displacement.
They build in batches of 5 each per shipyard. 6 shipyards exist.
4)CVLs are 18-24 months to build and commission.
They mass 50 kilotons plus.
3 shipyards planned.
5)We dont know how long it takes to build a battleship or supercarrier from scratch.
Just that it takes multiple years.
Along with that I would at least like to complete at least Firehawk Wingmen and Plasma warheads for the air force. I am less sold on the other options at this point. Our main concern with the air force has been losses to our air superiority wings. We haven't had as much a problem with the Orcas and Hammerheads, so I think we can delay those until the next Plan. The Apollo factories are heavy in Energy cost, and since we already have a lot of Energy hungry factories and yards it might be best to delay them until the next Plan. If we can find the Energy though each only takes a die to set up.
Point of order:
We havent had as much a problem with Orcas and Hammerheads because we have largely avoided inserting them into areas of significant aerial threat. Thereby not using a large chunk of our aircraft fully for fear of losses.
If we want that to change, we need those drones too.
Incidentally, does anyone realize quite how high endurance maritime patrol aircraft are these days? While trying to get an idea for convoy support from shore, I was figuring, "oh, just double the combat radius of a Rapier and call it a good estimate at 900km."
I specifically made a post about this and how it probably affects GDI logistics
As promised, a brief analysis of GDI naval logistical imperatives. I've lost this thing twice already, so Im putting it up as is without further polishing. Happy New Year y'all. SEA CONTROL, SHIPPING,SEA LINES OF COMMUNICATION AND GDI NAVAL STRATEGY 1) Assume all major GDI merchant shipping...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
With cargo aircraft having demonstrably transPacific range in this AU, as seen in the Kanes Wrath Incident, its safe to assume that landbased Naval Aviation with modified Carryalls and V35s et al are a big part of naval operations.
