Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The issue isn't "getting no other resources," it's handling the quantities of hazardous waste the process generates as a byproduct.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
- Location
- USA
Can't we just dump whatever waste into our tiberium storage and have it turned into more tiberium?
I think we already have a tib 'recycling' program, so presumably some part of the process produces uncapturable pollutants that are released into the air or otherwise poisons the surrounding lands.
Now what would be really fun is to convert our income into more tib, and then feed the result into the 'safe' process. Feed 100 income into the process, get (100-X) income and an additional STU out the next turn. Depending on how much of that 'x' is lost in the process, we could get a fairly nice supply going.
Now what would be really fun is to convert our income into more tib, and then feed the result into the 'safe' process. Feed 100 income into the process, get (100-X) income and an additional STU out the next turn. Depending on how much of that 'x' is lost in the process, we could get a fairly nice supply going.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, the problem seems to be that the Hewlett-Gardner process can't actually mass-produce STUs very well; it's got limited tunability.
What you'd need would be to do one of the following:
1) Build a very inefficient system wherein all the products of a specific Hewlett-Gardner refinery except the STUs are reconverted into tiberium and fed back into the refinery over and over until all that's left is STUs. This is how we used to handle totally unwanted byproducts of the older refinery process (such as arsenic), only now we'd be doing it with like 99.99% of the total quantity of material being processed.
This would require a huge amount of refining infrastructure; for all intents and purposes, you'd be running the same 10 RpT or whatever worth of tiberium back and forth through a bunch of refineries that would normally be able to process hundreds of RpTs, in exchange for getting a lot of STUs out.
OR
2) Say "ah, fuckit" and build some refineries in a very isolated location that use Nod's own Abdul-Pascal-Kane process, the one that is arbitrarily tunable but produces toxic byproducts. While this would obviously be bad for the surrounding area, it can't be that bad or no one would be left alive in the Yellow Zones. This is the sort of thing we might try in, say, reclaimed Red Zone land in a distant enclave far from any major cities.
Yes, but it's a pain in the ass, especially if the waste products in question are gaseous or corrosive. This is why Nod doesn't always bother, I gather.
NOD devotes a larger percentage of its economy to warfare, but significantly less efficiently. Note how a number of major warlords don't have tanks with plasma cannons yet, as an example. This means that in terms of absolute spending on military things, it's iffy if NOD is ahead.
The problem with the APK process is that it generates hazardous waste throughout the process, which would (I believe) cause significant overhead in terms of protective equipment and medical expenses. As well as for disposal.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Has Nod rolled out tanks armed with plasma cannon yet on a large scale anywhere?
Because the only plasma cannon I specifically recall seeing are the ones Bintang uses at warship scale for direct fire energy weapons. Has anyone actually managed to consistently engineer them down into a tank? Or is this the equivalent of what the Banshee was in Tib War Two: an alien ultratech weapon far beyond the normal limits of what Nod is capable of, maintained only by Kane's personally loyal elite who have access to the very very best of the ultratech equipment?
- Location
- Wall Gazing
I thought Gideon had them?
Yeah Gideon used them, first mentioned in Regency War Part 3. Probably came from Mondragon in Mexico from what we know of the latter's production. That may no longer be the case with the nat 1 vs 69 in GDI's favor that was rolled for our first encounter with Mondragon this turn. We will find out in the update.
Part 5 mentions Stahl and Reynaldo also have access to them.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
All right, so Nod is starting to deploy them, but not uniformly on all fronts (we think). Then again, the quarter that the Barghest first made its appearance, we could have said "relax, it's only one or two of the warlords," but they were soon around on all fronts; I think we need to assume plasma cannon will be making similar appearances on other fronts where we haven't formally seen them yet. Krukov, in particular, will very likely be rolling out something armed with a plasma cannon pretty soon, I bet.
Yeah, he'll probably be getting the tech from the Canadian warlord who defected to him... but he will have to get the tech, and then figure out how to implement it, and then actually manufacture the guns and platforms (or refit them into existing ones). It's one of the weaknesses of NOD's structure - while they can get new developments out locally much faster, we get things out close-to-globally much easier.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Who's to say Krukov doesn't already have plasma cannons and is just working on a suitable weapon platform that hasn't reached rollout yet, because he uses his Military dice differently and has prioritized something else (like "repair damage to hover battleships") over "plasma gun tank deployment?"
Also, keep in mind that GDI doesn't always roll out entire divisions of new equipment at a time. Building a stock of materiel and training personnel on them takes time, you know?
GDI just plainly has a much better distribution and manufacturing system, so it tends to disperse or concentrate the valuable upgrades much better on a worldwide scale.
Hell, the Homeguard is going to end up mostly fielding TW3 era stuff simply because GDI's army is going to shed its TW3 era arsenal, and doing that change over is going to take years for each battlefield role.
GDI just plainly has a much better distribution and manufacturing system, so it tends to disperse or concentrate the valuable upgrades much better on a worldwide scale.
Hell, the Homeguard is going to end up mostly fielding TW3 era stuff simply because GDI's army is going to shed its TW3 era arsenal, and doing that change over is going to take years for each battlefield role.
Are they?
There are major military benefits for GDI in maintaining the same factory assembly lines, training schools and maintenance stockpiles for all its forces, whether regulars or Home Guard. Given the semi-regular outbreaks of total war, not having to fumble around weapon stockpiles and having all your troops trained on the same vehicles can turn out to be a war winner.
The cost is a relatively minor concern, compared to not getting industrial heartland wasted or losing humans unnecessarily. Home Guard may only get deliveries after the regulars have their pick, but once the production infrastructure is built, I'd put it at less than two years for a complete changeover across the board.
Noone's going to be driving M60s a decade after the M1 was introduced in this army.
Furthermore, the Initiative actually has designers whose work is to try to maintain ergonomic and interface commonality between different generations of weapons and weapon platforms.
Between that and the proliferation of EVAs....
- Location
- his hidden lair
I mean, given that GDI has had the ability to make hover battleships since TW2 given the existence of the Kodiak... This is almost certainly a case where the changing dynamics after TW2 led GDI to shift away from super expensive cutting edge platforms like most of the walkers and the Mammoth especially.
There just hasn't been any need for hover battleships, not when GDI has orbital superiority as a matter of course, with far bigger guns than you could fit on a flying ship. The Varyag probably changes this somewhat, but this is legitimately a field we probably have at least as much experience as NOD in- if less alien wondertech to shove in.
Yes, at least at first.
While GDI's resources are vast, they are not endless. The Homeguard does not need the newest and best toys to the same extent as GDI's special forces do, or the regular army.
That does not mean that over time the Homeguard won't be switching over to the new stuff. Just that as GDI's main forces adopt the new stuff first, the Homeguard gets the old stuff to work with, until production catches up enough and GDI can start equipping Homeguard units with the new stuff too.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
In fairness, you're right that GDI superheavy VTOL aircraft that certainly look like they have hover capability (or some hellacious damn sustained-burn rocket engines) existed in Tib War II.
On the other hand, one question on my mind is whether those craft have the requisite density to be fully packed with armaments and defenses and called a battleship. As I understand it, they never deployed all that much air-to-ground or air-to-air firepower compared with their size.
You can get a fair amount of mileage out of an airborne command ship that is 80% engine by mass as long as the other 20% is command and control equipment. That's not so cost-effective for something that's specifically intended to throw hands with enemy forces.
- Location
- his hidden lair
That's not wrong, and it's not like I think we should reintroduce Orca Command Ships back into service with just some minor modifications- but clearly some technical know how and experience with flying ships is on the table.
A warship probably will require a lower ratio of engines to mass- but that's where all the technologies we've developed as well as the priceless opportunity to play around with the captured Varyag come into play. We're developing Scrin structural materials (which are probably good for a massive and stressed airframe like this), we're potentially reaching the point where mounting a fusion reactor on one is possible, we can counteract some of gravity's pull with our own drives, etc.
The other warlords will probably be able to make Varyags before we can roll out a flying warship, but I don't think it'll be a huge gap
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Of course, "drown the thing in plasma missile fire" is a reasonable response to a flying warship. Honestly, I think whoever-it-was was correct to be frankly more concerned about the uptick in Nod logistical and interconnective capability implied by cloaked flying cargo ships. Though hopefully, flying ships will be too expensive to be used for such roles in large numbers for the foreseeable future, even for Nod with all their STUs.
Also, the Orca Command Vehicle production got cancelled due to expense for both building and maintaining. And it's capable of being a troop carrier. The Huron from the Tiberium Wars novel is apparently one of these, and it carried the 22nd ID during TW3.
Though on the flying cargo ships front... C&C4's backstory did have Stratospheric Transports. They were filled with Tiberium contaminated waste that they flew into space and then launched the waste out into space. They were later adapted to being military transports and the waste launch system became a drop pod delivery system. The original waste transport version showed up by 2064.
--
So, I was going to try to come up with rough numbers of suits needed for garrison replacements for ZOCOM detachments and how that'd impact having Zone Armor GF units for Karachi, when I ended up throwing my hands in the air and deciding not to worry about it. Because a GDI rifle squad is 6 people. If we combine the Grenadier and Missile Squads, that's a 6-man Heavy Weapons squad. Zone Troopers/Raiders are a 4-man squad.
But I think you can get the idea of why I ended up going "fuck it, I'm not going to try to come up with numbers for any form of discussion." I'm just super glad we don't have to figure that kind of shit out. God speed Ground Forces!
Though on the flying cargo ships front... C&C4's backstory did have Stratospheric Transports. They were filled with Tiberium contaminated waste that they flew into space and then launched the waste out into space. They were later adapted to being military transports and the waste launch system became a drop pod delivery system. The original waste transport version showed up by 2064.
--
So, I was going to try to come up with rough numbers of suits needed for garrison replacements for ZOCOM detachments and how that'd impact having Zone Armor GF units for Karachi, when I ended up throwing my hands in the air and deciding not to worry about it. Because a GDI rifle squad is 6 people. If we combine the Grenadier and Missile Squads, that's a 6-man Heavy Weapons squad. Zone Troopers/Raiders are a 4-man squad.
Which results in needing a lot a spitballing. Would GDI GF stay with a 6-man squad when only 4 Zone Armor fits in a Guardian? Would it switch to ZOCOM's 4-man squad? (If it sticks to 6-man, that's more Guardians needed per platoon. If they switch to 4-man, then do they add more squads per platoon to maintain force numbers per platoon, or add more platoons/companies/regiments/battalions/divisions with "freed up" forces?) And depending which way GDI goes could impact Guardian Mk 2's design (If they stick to 6-man, Guardian Mk 2's probably going to be lengthened to fit 2 more Zone Armors beyond anything other changes planned.) And if Guardian Mk 2 allows 6 Zone Armor, would ZOCOM's squad sizes change? I mean, did they choose 4 because it's the best balance for their needs, or because that's all that could fit into a Guardian and Treasury wouldn't fund a ZOCOM specific APC?
In case you were wondering, I was figuring GF used 6-man squads. Platoons 3 rifle squad + 1 Hvy Squad + Command element (26 people). Companies would be 3 platoons + Hvy/Special Platoon + Command Squad (110 people). Battalions 3 companies + HHC (440 people). Brigades would be 6 battalions + HHC (2750 people). Divisions would be 4 brigades + HQ battalion (11,440 people). Though this is a straight up infantry force, not a mechanized or armored unit. Given mention in 2056 of ZOCOM having 2 corps of troops, 4 Divisions + 7ish Brigades + HQ Battalion to a Corps (65,450 people)?
And I was figuring the experience between ZOCOM and GF was enough that I'd initially place a battalion in place of a ZOCOM detachment of whatever size, plus that we'd supply a replacement suit for each person (and then 50% replacements each year after that). But they had a Battalion deployed at Chicago when Gideon attacked in late 2056 (and dropped 3 companies on West Sinai/Suez in Q2 2058), so if I'm thinking a larger GF unit to initially replace... a full Brigade? Break half a brigade off and call it a regiment? But if they shift to 4-man squads, that shifts required suit numbers (18 man platoons, 76 man companies, 304 man battalions, 1900 man brigades, 7904 man divisions, 45,220 man Corps).
Known spots that currently have ZOCOM detachments? - Glacier Mines: 6 (Anzio, Mobile, Amazon, Milan, Nile, West Sinai/Suez, East Sinai/Israel/Jordan, Eritrea), RZ Harvesting: 3 (Asiatic, Poland), RZ hubs?: 5 (Genoa, Amazon, Lima, Evanston (Chicago), Mobile), Planned City: 2 (Chicago, Mecca)
If ZOCOM basically put a battalion on each point... 11-16 battalions minimum. 2 Corps of ZOCOM is ~96 battalions. Where there were glacier mines after RZ Harvesting, I didn't count the harvesting separate, but if we did, that's 7 more battalions. So somewhere between 10 and 25% of ZOCOM's strength is spent on these operations we started since 2050. If you include patrolling containment fence lines plus their regular offensive operations etc...
Of course, this is from the perspective of a purely "infantry"ish set-up. Presumably ZOCOM units would be more mechanized, with Guardians and Pitbulls present minimum (also Predators, Shatterers, Pacifiers, Havocs possible), which might throw off numbers.
In case you were wondering, I was figuring GF used 6-man squads. Platoons 3 rifle squad + 1 Hvy Squad + Command element (26 people). Companies would be 3 platoons + Hvy/Special Platoon + Command Squad (110 people). Battalions 3 companies + HHC (440 people). Brigades would be 6 battalions + HHC (2750 people). Divisions would be 4 brigades + HQ battalion (11,440 people). Though this is a straight up infantry force, not a mechanized or armored unit. Given mention in 2056 of ZOCOM having 2 corps of troops, 4 Divisions + 7ish Brigades + HQ Battalion to a Corps (65,450 people)?
And I was figuring the experience between ZOCOM and GF was enough that I'd initially place a battalion in place of a ZOCOM detachment of whatever size, plus that we'd supply a replacement suit for each person (and then 50% replacements each year after that). But they had a Battalion deployed at Chicago when Gideon attacked in late 2056 (and dropped 3 companies on West Sinai/Suez in Q2 2058), so if I'm thinking a larger GF unit to initially replace... a full Brigade? Break half a brigade off and call it a regiment? But if they shift to 4-man squads, that shifts required suit numbers (18 man platoons, 76 man companies, 304 man battalions, 1900 man brigades, 7904 man divisions, 45,220 man Corps).
Known spots that currently have ZOCOM detachments? - Glacier Mines: 6 (Anzio, Mobile, Amazon, Milan, Nile, West Sinai/Suez, East Sinai/Israel/Jordan, Eritrea), RZ Harvesting: 3 (Asiatic, Poland), RZ hubs?: 5 (Genoa, Amazon, Lima, Evanston (Chicago), Mobile), Planned City: 2 (Chicago, Mecca)
If ZOCOM basically put a battalion on each point... 11-16 battalions minimum. 2 Corps of ZOCOM is ~96 battalions. Where there were glacier mines after RZ Harvesting, I didn't count the harvesting separate, but if we did, that's 7 more battalions. So somewhere between 10 and 25% of ZOCOM's strength is spent on these operations we started since 2050. If you include patrolling containment fence lines plus their regular offensive operations etc...
Of course, this is from the perspective of a purely "infantry"ish set-up. Presumably ZOCOM units would be more mechanized, with Guardians and Pitbulls present minimum (also Predators, Shatterers, Pacifiers, Havocs possible), which might throw off numbers.
But I think you can get the idea of why I ended up going "fuck it, I'm not going to try to come up with numbers for any form of discussion." I'm just super glad we don't have to figure that kind of shit out. God speed Ground Forces!
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
...Of all the stupid-ass-
Just dump the shit on a Red Zone dammit!
>_<
I do think it might be pushing things a bit too much to posit that the exact small-unit force structure of GDI infantry is taken straight from Command & Conquer 3. It's an RTS game; things like "having combined arms within the same unit" are pretty much not on the table. It seems a lot more likely that typical GDI "squads" have some integrated combination of weapons that make them at least somewhat effective against all types of targets, and the exact manpower counts seem a bit iffy.
So I think this may be overthinking this.
One thing to note is that ZOCOM will almost certainly KEEP the Red Zone operations part of its mission, or most of that. There's more to operating in a Red Zone than just tooling up in power armor; you are effectively an astronaut operating on an alien planet that very much wants to kill you, and where a breach in your environmental protection is very likely to mean a lingering death from green death rocks. This is the environment ZOCOM trains for, and the need to maintain that training and use specialist equipment just to survive in the environment, let alone perform missions there, is why Zone Troopers are an elite force that is hard to recruit more of.
It's everywhere else that Ground Force troops in power armor can and likely will supplant ZOCOM troops in power armor. Chicago's in a shallow Blue Zone now; the Mecca-Medina-Jeddah area is a relatively secure Yellow Zone and as I understand it, we're rolling back the Red away from those cities every year. And Ground Force can operate in Yellow Zones just fine, when they need to.
What's gonna go, or rather be replaced by Ground Force troops in Zone Armor, is all the little detachments of ZOCOM that a Ground Force general successfully appealed to have detached to his forces because he needed some heavy infantry, all the little forward bases in Yellow Zones that could be held by Ground Forces but are environmentally kinda rough, and so on.
I don't think we'll see Ground Force power armor troops deploying heavily into the Red Zones, but rather deploying everywhere else and letting ZOCOM deploy in the places only they are trained to go.
To be fair, C&C4 is the garbage timeline, where tiberium spread went to shit and Kane showed up at a GDI Council meeting with the Tacitus going "I can solve your Tiberium problems. Shall we make a deal?" and GDI agreed. "Dump it on a red zone" might be dumping it one block over.
I think we just have a perspective issue here. I've been thinking of ZOCOM as a red zone offensive command. You, probably more accurately, see it as a general red zone operations command.
So from my perspective, Zone GF could be used to take over "quiet" RZ garrison duties (as opposed to the "hot" garrison spots) from ZOCOM, allowing ZOCOM to put more troops into offensive work elsewhere. I figure the Zone GF would get the survival training, but not the tactical training, etc. So while they can handle RZ duties, they just use slightly adapted conventional tactics rather than the highly adapted tactics of ZOCOM.
OTOH, if they're a general RZ operations group, then putting Zone GF in Green Zones up against Red Zones, or places like Chicago or Jeddah, etc. while leaving the purely RZ stuff to ZOCOM. But GF is going to become increasingly Zone Armored, and we'll come closer and closer to Red Zones globally, so the difference between them and ZOCOM in operational areas will slowly vanish. Which means in the end, ZOCOM might end up more in line with the perspective I'd been using. Maybe re-designate them by that point as Raider units (1st and 2nd Raider Corps?) rather than ZOCOM.
But yeah, I think I've been thinking ZOCOM as something a bit more specialized/focused than it actually is (though still specialized).
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
...Dump it on a distant Red Zone. The point is, this is less of a pain in the ass than launching it to escape velocity, GAH!
Well, think about it.
Nod doesn't live in the Red Zones. No one can. We've had it explicitly confirmed that when Nod tries to operate in a Red Zone, they generally end up having to write off a lot of valuable equipment (and potentially people) because of tiberium contamination. Even they aren't immune, though they surely have their own equivalents of T-Glass and so on.
So ZOCOM probably spends a significant amount of time guarding stuff that isn't, at that particular moment, under attack. Because no one else can do that job, no one else can guard that stuff, because...
The problem is that the survival training... and importantly, survival equipment, which means not just the power armor but the environmentally sealed everything, the hover-vehicles that can drive over a tiberium patch and not have to be scrapped because the running gear turns into a solid mass of tiberium within a few days, stuff like that...
All that survival stuff is probably the single biggest point of divergence between ZOCOM and Ground Forces. By the time you take a Ground Force unit and train and equip them to (1) operate power armor and (2) to survive in a Red Zone, you have effectively got a ZOCOM unit.
So I just don't think we're going to see much Ground Force deployment into Red Zones, except perhaps for very specific duties at the very fringes of a Red Zone territory providing flank security for one of our big Red Zone 'offensive' harvesting operations
The trend is going to be that Ground Forces operates up to the Red Zones, while ZOCOM operates in the Red Zones. Historically, ZOCOM tended to operate heavily in the Yellow Zones as well, but that was up to and during Tib War III, when there were more of them and when GDI very rarely actually bothered doing much in the Yellow Zones, so you could have nothing but elite strike units to do anything there and it wouldn't matter because the tempo of Yellow Zone operations was low. By contrast, postwar GDI in the quest timeline has aggressively pushed forward into the Yellow Zones and has built up plenty of experience fighting and building in those conditions... But the Red Zones are just so incredibly much worse that it would be madness to try to take a force equipped and trained for general ground warfare in the parts of the Earth humans can still more or less survive in, and expect them to be reliable garrison troops for the uninhabitable, rarely Nod-assaulted Red Zone regions.
What will really reduce the pressure on ZOCOM is the use of power armored Ground Force units to do the Yellow Zone stuff ZOCOM has historically been doing ever since before the Third Tiberium War.
- Location
- Mobile, Alabama
Also hopefully it'll take power armor from the elite unit only category and place it into spear head formations category. Which would hopefully make parts more common as well as push innovation with suit upgrades.
Well. C&C4 was also the game that had Tiberium based powerups (canonically they are Liquid T powercells) fall from space into a battlezone.
Or how GDI had NOD lazer technology in their basement since Tib War 2. There's a long list of stupider shit that game posits.
Last edited: