If that happened, I'd be inclined to spend any extra dice into one of the other two Bays. A couple spare dice won't be enough to make the Fusion/Gravitic Bay finish, but it'd make them easier to complete when we get back around to doing that. (And Orbital Cleanup, of course.)
I wasn't proposing to pitch
Outer System Probes as the
optimal course of action.
But it would be the easy way to throw a huge pile of money at SCED Quest for all their helpful work.
I actually know a bit more about how the metal refining process works. I'm not an expert, so don't quote me on any of this.
The current method of turning raw oxide into elemental metals that is being tested is electrolysis smelting. This is mostly used in the creation of aluminum in the modern world and is significantly different from the reduction smelting that you might be familiar with. This is likely because there is a lack of chemical reduction agents, like carbon, to remove oxygen. (There are a bunch more refining methods using other chemicals, but they are likely too resource intensive for the moon.)
The basic premise of electrolysis smelting is that you melt your oxide then run a current through it from an anode to a cathode. The anode attracts all the oxygen ions, that turn into a gas, and the cathode attracts the metal ions, that fall to the bottom. The problem is of course that oxides have high melting points, so they are mixed with some sort of electrolyte to lower the melting point while still allowing for the flow of ions. It is the flow of (a fuckton of) electricity that keeps this all molten.
So going back to what you said, induction smelting isn't actually being used at all in the process of refining raw oxide. However, it would likely be used to heat and melt the resulting metals for industrial use. (Hope that was a good enough explanation)
Thanks! And yeah, that does remind me of the fragments of information I retain about aluminum smelting.
Well I'm reminded of how we have a whole refit program to install the freaking infernium lasers we designed the sharks to carry, but haven't actually built yet. And that refit program is hundreds of points of progress.
That's because it's not only for the
Sharks, and because it's an entire category of weapon system we don't have production lines for. We've been told this- there's a fundamental issue there in that we're just not manufacturing "disco ball" lasers for the Navy in the first place, such that setting up production lines gets folded into the refit.
Right now, the only people who actually have them in series production are the Talons, who put them on Mastodons, and I'm pretty sure those are effectively hand-built prototypes.
So you think that they went full hog on making more armor, cost savings be damned, then...they made a tiny cost savings anyways? Simon, that's a bit of a stretch, you must admit. We got a cost reduction that made the factory smaller. You say it didn't actually make the factory smaller, it made the factory higher throughput but also smaller.
Your argument seems to be "those first-line factories must not be building many Defenders, because if they were, then said factories would have gotten a lot smaller when the Defender was revised, or there would have only been a need for five instead of six."
My counter is:
"Maybe the factories react to Defenders getting cheaper to make by making more of them. Since Ithillid is,
wisely, not in the habit of telling us micromanagerial details about what proportions of the five or so power armor variants GDI manufactures are coming out of which factories, we would have no direct way to tell."
Your counter-counter is:
"There is no textual support for this."
My counter^3 is:
"See above; Ithillid wisely does not give us specific micro-detailed information about the exact proportions of power armor of different types that are deployed. There is no reason to expect textual support for either theory; my core argument is that we do not have sufficient data, nor should we expect to get it, nor do we really need it to make sensible decisions here. Your interpretation could be correct. So could mine. Or something different could be going on."
We shouldn't build castles in the air about exact details of what Ground Force is doing with its distribution of power armor, nor should we bicker angrily and posit that we're screwing them over by building more factories rather than developing a new model, or vice versa. We shouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from too little evidence, and I think it's easy to overthink things like this and reason ourselves out of simply doing our best to fulfill simple requests on the part of ZOCOM and the Ground Force.
...
...
On a side note, you say "a surplus of Zone Defenders would not be useful, as it would not fit into Ground Force doctrine at this time." On this note, I disagree. I think that if we told Ground Force "oh hey, we simplified the design for the Defender, how would you like an extra 20,000 suits," they would say "thank you, we'll put those to good use."
For instance, they might attach power armor platoons to infantry units at the battalion-ish level of many formation, to be used as a type of support and heavy weapons unit.
They might form up a few regimental size teams of pure power armor troops who are assigned to the most intense zones of infantry combat in the world (e.g. BZ-18 tunnel warfare, if that's still on).
They might farm the suits out to the Navy, which apparently has power-armored security troops aboard its warships in case Nod attacks with giant psychotic cybersquidoids or something.
They might find any number of places to put those surplus Defender suits to work, even if that was not part of their original plan. Ground Force is not going to be inflexible and turn away sudden surges of complementary extra goodies they weren't planning to receive.
If you think 20 R factories are more affordable than 15 R R&D projects then I dunno what to say to you. Q1 is rather obviously gonna be only 10 and 5 cost projects, so I don't know why you bring up 'I want to spend our limited budget wisely' when it's clear that in a budget crunch or out of it 15 is less than 20.
Personally, I am thinking in terms of floating plan drafts that have 1-2 projects costing 15-20 R/die, and then all the rest being 5-10 R/die projects (or a zero-cost security review).
But that's me.
Other people may wish to make competing plans that have zero dice invested in anything costing over 10 R/die for the military. I respect that. There are valid reasons to want to do that. Even I certainly have no intention of spending any Free dice on the military (barring some kind of totally unexpected emergency or very special crash-project circumstance) for at least the next two in-game years.
I have no intention of finishing two Zone Armor factories "right now." Even with my own plans (which I imagine you will think are deplorably military-friendly), that will not be happening. Unless we leave reallocation with a lot more money than I expect, I am fairly sure we won't finish the third factory until 2062Q2 at the earliest; 2062Q3 seems at least as likely. I hope to have the fourth factory done by 2062Q4. There is no danger of the Lancer staying in development hell for so long it is "locked out" of the Set 1 factories as far as I'm concerned, and even if it did, it would be simplicity itself for Ground Force to specify that it wanted additional Lancer production lines baked into the
Set 2 factories, which I am pretty confident we're going to end up building some of during the course of the coming Plan.
...
As to your observation about the
Leopard IIs, thank you for sharing that. Obviously it's not good news, but it could have been considerably worse, and I appreciate your choosing to tell me. It presents us with some awkward questions, but I think they're questions we can handle gracefully.
