- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'd be delighted to at least set up a stabilizer constellation over Venus, but yeah.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
- Location
- USA
I expect no tiberium in space at all unless we make some kind of breakthrough that lets us control it or make our own much much much safer version.
Other than that a absolute quarantine of tiberium to already affected planets and nowhere else seems like the order of the day.
Other than that a absolute quarantine of tiberium to already affected planets and nowhere else seems like the order of the day.
Well, that's a practical limitation as much as anything else. We *are* doing research on a fragment of it on a station at the Lunar L2 point, IIRC.
Speaking of which, we might want to set up a few laser defense satellites around that.
Practically, there is very little reason to seed an asteroid with tiberium - it's a small amount of resources, and we'd need to develop space-borne harvesting and refining infrastruture, which would likely be better used on other things. Venus, now... if we can get past the technical/environmental issues, I would be all for setting up a harvesting/refinery/industrial station there, just big enough to bootstrap itself up and expand. (And do further research on any ways that Venus Tib differs from Earth Tib.)
- Location
- Wall Gazing
Speaking of goals in Orbital. We are about to head into Reallocation with two of the four big stations complete, the Earth Orbits almost cleared of debris, ORSCT complete, Skywatch complete, ASAT ready for major expansion and a little bit under 5% of our economy based around Lunar Mining. Its a bit early to talk about it, but what should our goals be for the next plan in Space?
Note, we currently have 96 Orbital dice over one Plan.
First off, I think we should go for finishing the last two stations. Not only are their whispers of population bonii with the completion of Columbia, but making sure we have the options to get away from Earth in the worst case scenario is an essential plan B. With Seo's Station bonus, that would need ~31 dice for each station. So that would be a commitment of ~62 of our 96 dice.
However, if we completed both the Leopard II Factory (~5 dice) and the Station Enterprise Bay (~5 dice). We would have a 15 point stacking discount of the stations. Note: its probably better to complete the Leopard II Factory first as it might effect the Station Bay and potentially save us a die.
That would shave off 15+30+60+120+240=465 progress for each station, that means a net saving of ~2 dice over both stations when accounting for the costs of the Leopard II Factory and the Station Bay.
Thus, the net cost of the Leopard II Factory, Station Bay, Columbia, and Shala is ~60 dice.
That is probably all we would have to commit to for the next Plan for Starbound and Developmentalist commitments. Though we could commit to up to ~8 additional Lunar mines with the remaining 36 dice. Alternatively I could see us committing to developing the Conestoga class and building the Gravitic Shipyard Bay to get a more substantial interplanetary infrastructure. On the third tiberium mutated hand there's finishing the orbital clearing and getting the various orbital satellites in place, the total cost of which is a big question mark.
On the military side with Space Force, there are the various orbital satellite grids (ASAT, orbital lasers, orbital nukes, tactical ions, military support sats, etc). One of the potential things, depending on what we spot with sky watch, is developing a military version of the Conestoga, but the necessity of that is still up in the air without skywatch.
Note, we currently have 96 Orbital dice over one Plan.
First off, I think we should go for finishing the last two stations. Not only are their whispers of population bonii with the completion of Columbia, but making sure we have the options to get away from Earth in the worst case scenario is an essential plan B. With Seo's Station bonus, that would need ~31 dice for each station. So that would be a commitment of ~62 of our 96 dice.
However, if we completed both the Leopard II Factory (~5 dice) and the Station Enterprise Bay (~5 dice). We would have a 15 point stacking discount of the stations. Note: its probably better to complete the Leopard II Factory first as it might effect the Station Bay and potentially save us a die.
That would shave off 15+30+60+120+240=465 progress for each station, that means a net saving of ~2 dice over both stations when accounting for the costs of the Leopard II Factory and the Station Bay.
Thus, the net cost of the Leopard II Factory, Station Bay, Columbia, and Shala is ~60 dice.
That is probably all we would have to commit to for the next Plan for Starbound and Developmentalist commitments. Though we could commit to up to ~8 additional Lunar mines with the remaining 36 dice. Alternatively I could see us committing to developing the Conestoga class and building the Gravitic Shipyard Bay to get a more substantial interplanetary infrastructure. On the third tiberium mutated hand there's finishing the orbital clearing and getting the various orbital satellites in place, the total cost of which is a big question mark.
On the military side with Space Force, there are the various orbital satellite grids (ASAT, orbital lasers, orbital nukes, tactical ions, military support sats, etc). One of the potential things, depending on what we spot with sky watch, is developing a military version of the Conestoga, but the necessity of that is still up in the air without skywatch.
- Location
- USA
We're going to have more goals in space next 4YP.
Ithillid has mentioned quotas of people in space higher than just Columbia alone could support several times in Discord at least.
So I would expect more dice required, either free or by picking some up during reallocation.
Ithillid has mentioned quotas of people in space higher than just Columbia alone could support several times in Discord at least.
So I would expect more dice required, either free or by picking some up during reallocation.
- Location
- Wall Gazing
Shala provides people in space as well, so I guess it depends on exactly how many people need to be in orbit. But if it exceeds even that which we can get with Columbia and Shala we'd need additional orbital habitats, which would be interesting to handle.
- Location
- Wall Gazing
Uhhh. Ok. Hopefully they'd be cheaper then Columbia, but building 2 additional Columbias is technically possible in a Plan (even assuming no cost decrease cost for the mass production Columbias) with only our currently available dice, but I wouldn't say no to more bonuses/dice in Orbital if that is the case.
I mean, putting free dice into space will probably save a lot more lives than putting free dice into abatement. As Earth's doomed no matter how much abatement we build (absent Kane's intervention).
That said, both will probably save more lives over the coming decade than the endless flow of free dice into the military.
That said, both will probably save more lives over the coming decade than the endless flow of free dice into the military.
- Location
- USA
Free dice into abatement though buys us more turns which means more dice doing everything so its a balancing act.
So long as abatement is above 50 in both categories we will on average push tiberium back, and we can easily maintain something like our current levels of abatement in each category with just tiberium dice unless mutation really picks up. Which means free dice into space isn't really hurting abatement.
This isn't a zero sum situation. We have dice for all categories. And once the budget reconstruction is well underway, we could easily afford to push both. And while we're doing budget reconstruction, that's a lot of resources going into tiberium efforts, which - shock and horror - pushes abatement efforts.
The smart move is working to get people off planet even as we work to push back tiberium. After all, it takes one extreme mutation to toss our abatement efforts out the window, or discover that we missed abating a tiberium category, and the planet's completely fucked. And we can't count on Kane showing up with a plot device to save the planet to prevent the extinction of humanity. This is also why we're making a solid effort to work on portal tech, because that'll also help a lot on evacuating humanity if required.
- Location
- New England
Man, that'd be a great plot point for cracking the GDI monolith (even if just a little bit).
- Location
- Wall Gazing
I believe once we have sufficient Lunar mines we'll get the option to develop the water and He3 mines and that will let us build/expand the base. More the former then the latter, but the latter will give us access to vast quantities of He3 a key fusion ingredient. Or it could happen the other way where once we have sufficient Lunar mines we'll get the option to build a settlement/processing hub. Currently all our processing is handled by Enterprise, but that might not be sufficient for expansive operations and/or when we start asteroid mining.
We only just finished our fourth lunar mine, so it makes sense that it'll take a few more to make a permanent base worth it.
We only just finished our fourth lunar mine, so it makes sense that it'll take a few more to make a permanent base worth it.
Actually, Lunar stuff beyond mining is gated behind the major Stations, those being Enterprise, Shala and Columbia.
- Location
- Wall Gazing
Ah. Well all the more reason to try to finish Columbia and Shala next plan. Assuming we don't get an overly large amount of orbital permanent residents as a plan requirement. IE anything over 4.75k residents, the combined amount from Columbia and Shala.
Inhabitants of the Moon will probably count towards that goal.
Otherwise, deal with it. Parliament is the boss, we just tell them whether or not their goals can reasonably be done and perform the ones assigned while also dealing with stuff that pops up as needed.
- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
As far as scope of our Orbital Goals go, I think we took on a little bit too much this Plan. We did not have any flexibility, and had to bump up our Orbital Dice majorly to get close to completing our goals. (I think Parliament was careless in how much it asked for.)
So I wouldn't want to aim for much more in this coming Plan.
I'm expecting Shala and Columbia to be the minimum we have to do for Projects. Although we will likely also have to commit to a minimum of 4000 Station progress, and those two Stations won't even contribute 3000 due to discounts.
However, we can do three Bays to get that up to over 4000 Station progress. And one Bay per Station would be a good target to aim for.
The Starbound Party will likely be asking for more though. At the last reallocation they had options including Mars and Asteroid Belt mining, both of which still seem premature. We'd want to have a proper intra-solar system logistics setup running first.
Starting on a Lunar Base should be viable though. So hopefully, they have that as an option.
If they somehow talk it up enough, we might have to build the GDSS Vulcan. :/
So I wouldn't want to aim for much more in this coming Plan.
I'm expecting Shala and Columbia to be the minimum we have to do for Projects. Although we will likely also have to commit to a minimum of 4000 Station progress, and those two Stations won't even contribute 3000 due to discounts.
However, we can do three Bays to get that up to over 4000 Station progress. And one Bay per Station would be a good target to aim for.
The Starbound Party will likely be asking for more though. At the last reallocation they had options including Mars and Asteroid Belt mining, both of which still seem premature. We'd want to have a proper intra-solar system logistics setup running first.
Starting on a Lunar Base should be viable though. So hopefully, they have that as an option.
If they somehow talk it up enough, we might have to build the GDSS Vulcan. :/
- Location
- Wall Gazing
I agree that anyone who is settled permanently off earth should count towards that goal. The goal is to get a viable population away from the green death rock, with that in mind it doesn't particularly matter if that 'away' is in orbit or on the moon, as long as there is no tiberium growing there.
We have spent a total of 12 dice in orbital that weren't on our Plan goals in that category:
-Expand Orbital Communications Network (2 dice Q1 2058, 3 dice Q2 2058, and 1 die Q3 2058) (Note this helped provide Logistics to fund our early Plan Glacier Mines)
-Nanotube Hull Panelling Development (1 Die Q3 2058) (Note this reduced the cost of all stations by 5 Progress for each stage (non stacking) as a result saved a total of 70 Progress over the four big stations. IE will have saved a die when we finish the remaining three big Stations.
-Study Novel Material (1 die Q3 2059) (Novel material study lab)
-Orbital Clean Up (1 die Q1 2060 and 2 dice Q2 2060) (was more of a way to use R cheap Orbital dice to save some R and generate some stockpiled R for the next turns)
-Security Review (1 die Q4 2060) (Checking up on our security measures)
We have also invested a total of 10 Free dice in Orbital and left 1 Orbital die fallow:
-Q1 2058: 1 dice fallow
-Q3 2058: 1 Free die
-Q4 2058: 2 Free dice
-Q1 2058: 2 Free dice
-Q2 2058: 4 Free dice
-Q4 2060: 1 Free die
And currently we have ~2 spare dice left in the Plan in Orbital.
So we've had 13 dice not be assigned to Orbital Plan goals, and we have 2 which on average shouldn't need to be assigned to Orbital Plan goals, plus we have thus far invested 10 Free dice in Orbital. From this we could say that, in hindsight, Orbital had 5 dice of slack in it when we started the Plan. Given that we now have 96 Orbtial dice per Plan that is rather tight, and we started with half that per Plan. So yes, our Orbital goals were a little aggressive, but we do still expect to achieve those Plan goals.
I think we could make an aggressive commitment on the order of ~80 dice required, though I personally prefer commitments that are either projects we have already unlocked or are commitments that can be met by already unlocked projects and that caps how aggressive I'm willing to go.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
If I want to be equally condescending, I can ask you why you want everyone to die together when the Earth predictably explodes due to the unreachable subterranean tiberium we can't mitigate finally going 'kaboom' and popping the Earth's crust like a zit.
But you don't want that. And I know that.
And you should know that those of us who want to put a lot of dice into space don't want to abandon anyone to tiberium.
But we've been told point blank by the QM that mitigation alone will not get us out of this. Absent the TCN, Earth has a finite span of time in which to live, probably something in the range of 50-100 years despite everything we've already done.
Refusing to work on the lifeboats, or slow-walking our effort to build lifeboats, out of solidarity with the possibility that we won't have enough lifeboats for everyone... Well, that would be grossly irresponsible to literally everyone, in my opinion.
Honestly, Parliament was very intentionally asking us to invest hard in space infrastructure, which is exactly what we did.
The entire point was to get us to commit to something like a 100+ R/turn investment in space infrastructure, and to creating the bureaucratic infrastructure (that is to say, the dice) capable of using said investment effectively and turning it into actual Stuff In Space.
Given that space colonization is going to be very important to us for the foreseeable future and may be our only hope of survival if Kane doesn't decide to make nice, I would prefer not to feel bad about having aggressive space targets. We're investing all these dice and building these capabilities from scratch for a reason.
First, I think that's not entirely true. With the likely discounts coming up (-10 from the station bay and -5 from the Leopard II yards), the first phase of a new major station should, I think, cost 65 Progress. If so, the subsequent four phases would cost 130, 260, 520, and 1040 Progress, for a total cost of 2015 Progress per major station. We'd be fine.
However.
Second, I think you're making a mistake in expecting the Fourth Four Year Plan's space targets to look like the Third Plan's targets. When we started the Third Plan, there wasn't actually much in space- we had Enterprise Phase 3, Philadelphia Phase 3, some commsats, and a single round of moon mines done as an experimental passion project in 2057. Making us hit a big ambitious station target was a way of ensuring that we actually completed big stations and expanded our infrastructure and unlocked capstone capabilities.
It is effectively a foregone conclusion that, left to our own devices, we will attempt to finish Shala and Columbia during the current Plan. This means that we are likely to get a new goal, one that incentivizes us to aim high and to find new ways of accomplishing great things in space. I think a "space population" target is a likely example. Though if that came up, I'd like some assurance from @Ithillid that we'd be getting SOME kind of "increase space population meaningfully" project that doesn't cost like 1000 Progress just to do at all after Columbia Phase 5 completes, just so we're not forced down a "failure is the only option" path from trying to finish Shala and Columbia.
So don't over-plan around the idea that we're going to be monofocused on station construction. It may even be the case that we're incentivized to, say, finish Columbia, make progress on but NOT finish Shala, and then do something else entirely that's gated behind Columbia or otherwise a different project.
Remembering that "evacuate hundreds of millions to space habitats" is supposed to be a theoretically viable project, I'm pretty sure that the number of people we can house in space as a function of how much Progress we spend on projects will start ramping up after Columbia hits its capstone.
I was under the impression that those were gated behind SCED research projects, or possibly behind projects like "actually develop a reactor that uses helium-3" and "actually build a big enough moon base that supplying it with water in situ becomes a significant cost savings."
The mines themselves probably contain enough housing to (tautologically) support the mines.
It's just that right now, working on a moon mine is like working on a deep sea oil drilling rig in real life. You go out there for a fairly long stint in temporary housing, but you come back regularly. It's a resource extraction outpost too remote to commute to and from every day, but it's not a colony.
While we're at it, we also have moon bases canonically thanks to SCED Quest, which runs some research outposts on the moon and is contemplating the craterscope, which would probably imply considerable additional basing to support the project.
The catch is that as alluded to above, a lunar 'base' for us right now is like an Antarctic research station in real life. Nobody stays there permanently and the facilities are far too rudimentary to make doing so even possible, let alone comfortable.
Moving to the next stage, with actual lunar communities, is gonna require finishing Columbia, I'm pretty sure.
- Location
- The Underdark
There are going to be sub 1000 progress means of getting meaningful amounts of population in space. It will however be noticeably more expensive than other options.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You are right, a need to develop the technology and the infrastructure is very much necessary.
No, I was not meaning to be condescending. I just fear, due to how political the issue will be, of a Space First party out of the Starbound party in much the same way the Initiative First party developed, with life boat selection becoming a political land mine and long pointless fights over who gets to go.
I also worry that an overfocus on space colonization will lead to less resources spent on abatement, or on terrestrial quality of life improvements while we're at a time where GDI doesn't have a majority of the human population, and doesn't have a majority of the planet. And even among those we do have, there is still a lingering difference between traditional blue Zoners and Yellow Zoner refugees. While I'm glad we're taking in record number of refugees in higher and higher numbers, I do worry about eventual political blowback from parliament or some other figure wanting us to focus more on saving those who are already GDI citizens over those who are fleeing the yellow and red zones.
I fear that it will develop in a similar way to how arcology resident selection is a hot button issue currently, with there being talk of how the Yellow Zoners should be happy they're getting to live in the fortress towns.
And I get that the cold calculus is that it's better to have the good over the perfect, and to save some when we can't save all. I'm just worried about this becoming a huge class issue, either about class, zone origin, political connections, family connections, education, etc. Because we know it will. And the more our leadership and those they care about are in orbit, the less they'll care about helping out those who are still on the ground.
Boiling it down, I worry about a space aristocracy rising up from this in the name of cold, cold calculus.
- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
I may have miscounted...
I'm not actually doing that. I just had a look at what sort of projects we declined doing, because the Starbound party appears to have a tendency to have overly high expectations. So I'm trying to get a feel for what sort of goals they might try to put on us.
A population in space target is possible, but the Station target was really only there because the Developmentalists supported it, not because Starbound did. However, the Socialist Party also appear to support space population, so even if it isn't a main policy for the Developmentalists, it could still happen.
One point against a space population target for the next Plan is that space habitability hasn't really been proven yet. So pushing a target that goes far beyond building the Columbia, which is the testbed for space habitations would be a reckless move. May not be politically viable.
Will need to see if public sentiment has shifted due to the Regency War. The huge investment in Space, while the War brought people's attention back to Earth, may not have been popular.
Not our problem though. That is for Starbound to address.