- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Sorry. Noted. Worked on it.
You're totally right, but we have about three years to deal with this problem.
Remember, the pre-TWIII economic consensus of GDI was neoliberal hell and the Free Market Party wanted to go back to it, and if you just looked at the situation in 2053Q1, with the Treasury still struggling to supply food better than fungus bars and basic shit like appliances, you might well have expected the 2056 elections to be a blowout in favor of the FMP and the Hawks (a coalition of today's Militarists and Initiative Firsters).
Instead, we buckled the fuck down, built up Consumer Goods output, significantly improved food diversity relative to the previous baseline, and by the time the election rolled around, we'd literally punched the FMP and the proto-IF so hard that they crumbled and new splinter parties fell off.
You're identifying a real problem, but you're plotting eleven turns into the future to do it. We've got time to sort this out.
I thought we already did Perennials Phase 3. Like, wasn't that a Plan requirement of the Second Plan?
Given that tiberium seems to be in the same general density range as rock or metal, this isn't unreasonable. Though note that it's fricking heavy. In the sense that a four-inch cube of the stuff weighs about eighteen pounds.
(eight kilograms per liter; a liter is a cube ten centimeters or roughly four inches on a side, and eight kilograms is roughly eighteen pounds)
Uh... hold the phone.
Let's see. Roughly speaking, 80 million square kilometers of tiberium fields. 80 trillion square meters. That is NOT 1.2e15 cubic meters of tiberium, unless I'm making a serious math error.
If tiberium covers the entire surface to an average depth of fifteen centimeters, then crudely speaking, each six or so square meters of surface must have 90% of a cubic meter of tiberium (let's round that up to a whole cubic meter, because we're forgetting glaciers). Thus, 80 trillion square meters of surface tiberium fields should be about 80/6 is roughly equal to 15 trillion cubic meters of tiberium (again, I'm rounding up).
So, not 1.2e15. 1.5e13. Which, yes, translates into about 120 trillion tons of tiberium.
Thinking about it, that wouldn't make sense. The oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface, to an average depth of several kilometers thick. Sure, water is only 1/8 as dense as tiberium is supposed to be, but the combined mass of the oceans would still be equal to a blanket covering 70% of the Earth's surface (as opposed to half of 30%)... to a depth of several hundred meters.
Unless the entire Red Zones were just solid tiberium glaciers about a quarter mile thick, they couldn't contain as much surface tiberium as the oceans.
You missed a few orders of magnitude. Basically, you can carpet the entire surface of the Red Zones in a six-inch (15 cm) layer of tiberium with about 120 trillion tons of the stuff. By contrast, the total mass of the Earth's oceans is about 1300000 trillion tons of water. Yes, those zeroes are intentional. This is because seawater covers several times more of the Earth's surface than tiberium, to depths of way more than fifteen centimeters.
Subterranean tiberium really does add to the total, but even then, I would casually estimate that we are looking at somewhere between one and ten quadrillion tons of tiberium on Earth.
Unless I'm missing something, getting much beyond that strains credulity with the sheer amount of bedrock that would have to be converted to tiberium. Like, you'd need solid layers of underground tiberium hundreds of meters thick underlying virtually every part of the planetary surface to get up to 100 quadrillion tons. Even then, you would be well short of the total mass of the Earth's crust (roughly 25 quintillion tons, if cursory Internet research hasn't failed me)
Well, we can lay groundwork.
We can use Infrastructure dice to build up projects that boost the public, such as lots and lots of Apartments. Or, while we have the money, suborbital shuttles. Scaling up shuttle flights would permit civilian passenger flights between the Zones to resume more freely, too, which will help.
We can use all Light Industry dice not committed to Bergen towards stuff that improves civilian quality of life. I think we should finish the drone factories, but aside from that, let's look heavily at the new projects that appeared in the 2061Q1 turn post.
We can continue to use Agriculture dice (on the basis I planned in my recent plan draft a little while ago) to prepare to get Ranching Domes out by the end of the year, which is then the cornerstone for systematic diversification and expansion of luxury foods (by 2050s GDI standards) in the Fourth Plan.
We can see what pops up in Services; historically, whenever there's been a lot of demand for improved quality of life, we've seen Services projects that enhance it. I for one would be interested to see a revival of the old Virtual Reality Arcades option, which disappeared at the end of the Second Plan when Seo took office. Back then, a project with a description like
(progress 0/225: 10 resources per die) (++++ Consumer Goods, - Capital Goods, --- Energy)
Was kind of toxic. Nowadays we'd be all over that.
I want mechanization for flavor and capstone benefits. I suspect that gated behind Phase 2 of mechanization are things like "advances to space agriculture" and "using lots of civilian drones on this stuff" and "large-scale expansions of automated production of yummies."
Just churning out more and more Standard Issue Aquaponics Bays isn't going to get us anything new.
Besides, I'm not really Resource-hungry in this plan draft; I had no trouble finding the R to pay for everything, though I might have done a second Bergen die if I had a little more money.
So I say we go for the project that's been sitting there taunting us all this time. We'll get the job done.[/quote]
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