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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

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Personally, I'm expecting the negotiations re: TCN to be one of the final things we do in the Quest before time skip.

As for the TCN... it's a "control" network, so I would expect you could control where it goes and what not, so could pull Tib out from deep in the crust and have specific mining areas for it, with it "disappearing" outside those zones. Between that and Venus, we have time to figure out how to make STUs without needing Tiberium. Eezo might end up involved.

Honestly, it would be hilarious if the only real use of Eezo in our tech turns out to be in the field of STU production. FTL? Nah, we portal ourselves around. Make the ship lighter? Nah, we portal ourselves around. Biotics? I'm sorry, we have very strict handling and transfer protocols to prevent exposure to it, especially around pregnant women. Shield systems? Pah, we cracked that before we really got studying any amount of Eezo. More powerful reactor systems? Have you seen how much we've miniaturized our fusion systems? We have fusion batteries in our knives. Our civilians have microfusion batteries in their phones. Mass Relays? Did you miss the part where we portal ourselves around?
 
HousePet said:
Could be interesting to do a few less intensive votes for the time skip.
Lots of different ways for things to develop.
What terms does GDI work with for the construction of the TCN?
Does GDI focus more on space population, or does it focus on reclaiming the Earth after the TCN turns on?
Do future space developments focus on Luna, Mars, or Venus?
Interaction with the Visitor outpost.
What future technologies are pursued?
etc.
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Poptart did something like that with the Terminus Quest timeskip and it worked out really well.
 
Phht said:
Honestly, it would be hilarious if the only real use of Eezo in our tech turns out to be in the field of STU production. FTL? Nah, we portal ourselves around. Make the ship lighter? Nah, we portal ourselves around. Biotics? I'm sorry, we have very strict handling and transfer protocols to prevent exposure to it, especially around pregnant women. Shield systems? Pah, we cracked that before we really got studying any amount of Eezo. More powerful reactor systems? Have you seen how much we've miniaturized our fusion systems? We have fusion batteries in our knives. Our civilians have microfusion batteries in their phones. Mass Relays? Did you miss the part where we portal ourselves around?
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It'd be amusing, but I suspect eezo will turn out to be at least as useful as any of the other known STU substances.

Among other things, I strongly suspect it'll make artificial gravity a lot more efficient and shipboard propulsion likewise. What we've seen of portal tech suggests it's going to be insanely energy-intensive, and require a lot of fixed infrastructure.

It's also very effective at building low-energy barrier shields that specifically stop kinetic impactors, which is something.
 
Simon_Jester said:
It'd be amusing, but I suspect eezo will turn out to be at least as useful as any of the other known STU substances.

Among other things, I strongly suspect it'll make artificial gravity a lot more efficient and shipboard propulsion likewise. What we've seen of portal tech suggests it's going to be insanely energy-intensive, and require a lot of fixed infrastructure.

It's also very effective at building low-energy barrier shields that specifically stop kinetic impactors, which is something.
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Don't forget the greatest use of Eezo, that is you take gun and shove in more gun, none of this hinged compaction shit. Just imagine the the horrors our enemies will face fighting our power armored infantry who have up-gunned guns.
 
Our energy weapon techs may make this kind of superfluous, especially if the rest of the galaxy is mostly within Mass Effect's technical paradigm.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Our energy weapon techs may make this kind of superfluous, especially if the rest of the galaxy is mostly within Mass Effect's technical paradigm.
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I mean, we shouldn't assume we can't draw on the ME paradigm with eezo. Given that particle weapons are a thing in ME, but notably more advanced than most civilizations are capable of, and that particle weaponry is fairly low hanging fruit in our tiberium based paradigm- Eezo should be applicable to our own accelerator technology.
 
edofthesquid said:
I do wonder if at some point post TCN we might be able to swing dropping tiberium on things like asteroids or barren bodies which have solid cores (so no liquid tib explosions for self propagation)
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No. Not with the species wide trauma Tiberium has already caused.
 
Dmol8 said:
No. Not with the species wide trauma Tiberium has already caused.
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I have a suspicion, based on what I picked up from a reread of the thread, that Tiberium really doesn't like being exposed to radiation. Everything in space is bathed in radiation constantly and asteroids would need to be seeded, deliberately, in order for that to work.

Either way, that is decades in the future, TCN or not. GDI can't decide whether they hate Nod or Tiberium more, and some might argue it's Tiberium because Nod loves using the stuff to ruin everyone's day.
 
Difference being our economy, basic and advanced material supply, and trash disposal, is all dependent on the glowing space rocks, while Nod is basically all problem and no benefit.
 
Something I remembered Squid brought up a long time ago, was that when we get asteroid mining going, it would be dumping immense amounts of resources into GDI. I think by the point we get there, those resources might be absorbed by the civilian economy and finally allow for unfettered economic growth again.
 
Wildabeest said:
Something I remembered Squid brought up a long time ago, was that when we get asteroid mining going, it would be dumping immense amounts of resources into GDI. I think by the point we get there, those resources might be absorbed by the civilian economy and finally allow for unfettered economic growth again.
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Except that the big problem our civilian economy is having is less 'lack of resources' and more 'not enough people for the jobs and working for GDI pays better so they poach the best employees'
 
MightbeaMimic said:
Except that the big problem our civilian economy is having is less 'lack of resources' and more 'not enough people for the jobs and working for GDI pays better so they poach the best employees'
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Yes, but one of our answers for this is to just keep scaling up our industrial automation, which requires us to have plenty of bulk material on hand. On Earth it's more economical to make that out of tiberium, at least for now, but in space, the cost of mining the ore in space and turning it into bulk materials can turn out to be more cost-effective than mining tiberium on Earth and then launching those bulk materials into space on a fusion rocket.
 
And if we will absolutely always NEED tiberium to produce the more exotic materials I'm certain we're smart enough to build Forge Stations or something that are completely dedicated to maintaining and feeding a small super secure amount of Tiberium for STU production away from Earth and Venus. With all kinds of security , warning systems, and disaster recovery to prevent it ever escaping.
 
Yeah sure.

The thing is, I'm pretty sure that for space applications we're going to transition away from the nearly pure tiberium economy we have on Earth, to an economic model where only rare elements are actually made directly out of tiberium and we have more normal modes of resource extraction to get most of the bulk materials in situ.

Because making stuff out of tiberium, even bulk commodities like steel, is clearly very economical on the Earth's surface when Earth is overrun by tiberium. But that economy doesn't make nearly as much sense if it forces you to spacelift every ton of all of the everything off Earth, or I suppose off Venus, in order to build anything off-planet.

It's not a problem to be shipping STUs out of the Earths' gravity well for off-planet manufacture, because the price of STUs per kilogram will always easily justify that. The price of certain non-STU rare materials such as gold and rare earth elements may very well fall into the same category.

But we'd be unwise to be shipping bulk steel, aluminum, oxygen, or water from Earth, whether made from tiberium or otherwise, to build city-sized moon bases.
 
That doesn't track because we have portal technology. It's mostly academically interesting right right now, but as the Scrin demonstrated it gets down right silly. With them in the equation, passing basic or STU materials across space is easy. Heck, you don't even need to send the alloys if you're really concerned about efficiency, you can just send the raw STUs from Earth and have them alloyed at the final destination.
 
Nottheunmaker said:
That doesn't track because we have portal technology. It's mostly academically interesting right right now, but as the Scrin demonstrated it gets down right silly. With them in the equation, passing basic or STU materials across space is easy. Heck, you don't even need to send the alloys if you're really concerned about efficiency, you can just send the raw STUs from Earth and have them alloyed at the final destination.
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Depends on how far portals can go 'efficiently' (by our standards). Like, transit-size portals are great but we don't even know what it'll take to make them cross-system, let alone inter-system.
 
Nottheunmaker said:
That doesn't track because we have portal technology. It's mostly academically interesting right right now, but as the Scrin demonstrated it gets down right silly. With them in the equation, passing basic or STU materials across space is easy. Heck, you don't even need to send the alloys if you're really concerned about efficiency, you can just send the raw STUs from Earth and have them alloyed at the final destination.
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Shipping steel girders through a sustainable portal from Earth to Mars may turn out to be a lot more energy-intensive than hitching a shitload of them up to a grav-drive freighter that hauls them lazily through deep space from the top of the space elevator that lifted them off the lunar surface.

We know the Scrin can basically dispense with normal industrial logistics in favor of just portalling everything everywhere, but we have good reason to think they've been refining this technology for millennia.

Shipping STUs through a portal, by contrast, will likely make economic sense, again because the cost per kilogram is so insane and they are only available on Earth and maybe Venus anyway.
 
The other reason to sort of pry Tiberium out of our industry is security. A Tib-fueled industry based solely off Earth and Venus is a huge logistical bottleneck and strategic weakness, if there's no/minimal production infrastructure in any outer colony; spreading industry out there means they can't easily be cut off. And it's better for it not to be Tiberium-based because that comes with more security concerns - the more places Tiberium is known to be, the harder it's going to be to keep exclusive access and defend against espionage - and logistical ones; if we put Tib somewhere we also have to manage it, either through extremely carefully only seeding asteroids and mining them locally or setting up a new TCN at every mining planet - both of which are expensive even before the aforementioned security considerations and expenses.
 
I would call the prospect of mastering Scrin Portal tech to the degree we can easily, consistently and economically portal massive amounts of construction material into space soon ™️ "optimistic"
 
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Simon_Jester said:
Yes, but one of our answers for this is to just keep scaling up our industrial automation, which requires us to have plenty of bulk material on hand. On Earth it's more economical to make that out of tiberium, at least for now, but in space, the cost of mining the ore in space and turning it into bulk materials can turn out to be more cost-effective than mining tiberium on Earth and then launching those bulk materials into space on a fusion rocket.
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Right, but in that case we're not talking about bulk material (R) being important as much as we are talking about making Cap Goods available to the civilian market being important. Dumping a shitload of steel onto the civilian economy doesn't help without the machines to actually build shit out of it
 
MightbeaMimic said:
Right, but in that case we're not talking about bulk material (R) being important as much as we are talking about making Cap Goods available to the civilian market being important. Dumping a shitload of steel onto the civilian economy doesn't help without the machines to actually build shit out of it
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Given which kinds of projects give us +Capital Goods and which do not, building physically larger robots (or robot swarms) and physically larger machinery and facilities out of bulk material, to be controlled by the same advanced computer chips (especially with isolinear tech and the new drone tech we're working on) is as likely to express itself as greater Resource cost as in terms of Capital Goods cost.

Also, part of my point is that I've been talking about space, where the economic costs of just getting the bulk materials into position is actually significant. There's a reason that we have to work roughly as hard to house a thousand people on the moon as we do to house roughly ten million people on Earth, and it's not because of the demand on our Capital Goods budget.

If we want to build, say, giant O'Neil cylinder colonies, capable of housing tens or hundreds of thousands of people with a reasonable number of dice, we may find the costs running up to 40+ R/die quite easily.
 
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The 'good' news is that it'll take many years to build the TCN (if we get it).

There'll be plenty of time to build our space industry during that time frame. For now, getting people into space is the far more pressing priority. The Earth will be effectively uninhabitable far sooner than it will be unminable, and we have relatively cheap spacelift thanks to fusion engine (and soon, much cheaper spacelift thanks to our antigravity drives).
 
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