Slow rolling ICS to avoid cap good hits until we know the BZ Heavy Industrial finishes, suborbital though at 30R means cuts elsewhere, intent for ICS is to try and push it to finish Q4 after we have enough of a cap good buffer to avoid it being marginal. I could swap to 2 on rails and 3 on ICS to get more progress on it and leave it in striking range for Q4.
We have the Capital Goods for ICS; we just got them out of the macrospinner. Sitting on a +2 extra Capital Goods buffer when it deprives us of a +18 Logistics buffer doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Besides, as soon as we due BZHIS we'll just spend all those Capital Goods on the war factory refits anyway, so we'll be right back where we started.
To me, it's simple. We need(ed) two Capital Goods to do the ICS; we got them from Phase 3 of Reykjavik. We need eight Capital Goods to do some combination of Super Orcas and war factory refits, we're gonna get them from BZHIS. We have enough of a Capital Goods buffer (small, admittedly) that we can afford to do the Super Orca bit before BZHIS completes (which will lower war factory refit costs, so it's effectively doing an installment of that project early), but aside from that, there it is.
I never felt like completing the ICS was gated behind being absolutely sure BZHIS was finished, because we don't need BZHIS to pay for the ICS. We don't even need BZHIS to stop us from
having the same size buffer we had in Q1 after completing the ICS.
We have a major cap good problem and need to get to later stages of Nuuk to bring in the good amounts, more so with 8 going out to factory refit and orca combo, 2 to ICS, some to vein mine, some to ground armor and such.
We aren't
currently spending dice on vein mining and Ground Forces zone armor, and that's
precisely because we don't have the Capital Goods.
That doesn't mean we need to put off the ICS until some arbitrarily distant future point at which we have a +20 Capital Goods surplus or whatever. We've done tons of important projects that cost -1 or -2 Capital Goods in the past, paying for them a bit at a time with projects that provided +2 or +4 or +8 Capital Goods at a time. We have every reason to go on doing that
for now, specifically with the ICS.
We really need to push that more to allow smooth flow of other projects. As is Orbital needs more free dice, and free dice on mil/tib to get more income increases to make sure we are activating dice on projects we want.
Orbital doesn't urgently need Free dice in 2059Q3 and you yourself do not budget any Free dice on it. Free dice on Military and Tiberium so we can quickly complete important projects are a good idea, but the ICS is an important project
right now and you're leaving it on the back burner until, I dunno, until you finish Nuuk Phase 2? Nuuk Phase 3? Where do we draw the line?
I say we have enough Capital Goods to do the job right now, whether BZHIS completes next turn or not, as it well might complete anyway if we're putting three dice on it because that gives it a 92% chance of finishing in Q3 anyway. But it doesn't even matter, because "complete BZHIS" is not under any reasonable terms a prerequisite for "we can afford to finish the ICS," nor should it be because we've effectively budgeted almost every scrap of output from BZHIS to the war factory refits anyway!
I think we have to acknowledge the simple fact that our current ASAT is much stronger than our ability to rapidly redeploy forces.
Yes, but ASAT is the only line of defense we have for our space stuff from any asshole anywhere on the planet who wants to take a shot at it.
Whereas we
have forces
everywhere on the planet, on every continent. We've fought and won wars without OSRCT before, and our purely local forces have kept each warlord in check, one by one.
There is no clear evidence that we
vitally, as in "cannot reasonably expect to win at acceptable cost without this," need OSRCT for the coming warlord dogpile. And if we do need it we're probably screwed anyway because it's not like we're going to complete 4+ phases of it in 2-3 quarters' time. Just doing Phase 1 or Phase 2 can't possibly have
that much impact all by itself because we can only space-drop so much STEEL REHN from a handful of stations.
We don't have any warlords in easy striking distance of Halstead Station- and the naval warlord is way out of position to launch that sort of strike. And if she launches that strike? We will almost certainly raze and level as much of the vital infrastructure she needs to support her fleet in Indonesia while it's in the North Atlantic- because we'll have a pacific fleet in the region while she needs to commit to assaulting ~Greenland or something. That leaves what- over saturating the ASAT system? If a warlord is capable of that, we have bigger problems.
Again, we're expecting synchronized action by multiple warlords. And we know at least one is working on an unknown superweapon that might well be an anti-space weapon.
As for Bintang, how long has she spent building up her submarine arm? It's entirely possible that she (or the Indian warlord) has enough submarines to launch a saturation attack on Halstead Station,
specifically, without somehow committing so much of Bintang's strength that she (or the Indian warlord) are helpless to defend themselves.
Sure, we might hulk out and go nuclear on the warlords if they succeed in hitting the
Philadelphia again, but then, they could go nuclear on us, and it'd rapidly turn into a horribly ugly war that might well wipe out civilization on the planet fatally. I'd rather not rely on mutually assured destruction to deter an enemy who hates our guts, has seen their beloved prophet hurt us badly with decapitation attacks, and who has a track record of fanaticism and poor choices that are
literally killing their followers from tiberium spread even as we speak.
I want to reinforce ASAT now that we have or will soon have the
Philadelphia finished.
I am not the only person who has advocated this.
i am advocating starting OSRCT
literally the next fucking turn afterwards... but I want to try and do a phase of ASAT.
Meanwhile the fundamental problem of the disposition of our forces is that they are stationed all around the world, and we have no real ability to relocate forces between theaters to respond to a warlord's surprise attack. The OSRCT is revolutionary in a way the ASAT is not...
OSRCT helps guarantee the security of the ASAT stations planetside, lets us respond to any warlord offensive and reserves and lets us exploit the greatest weakness of the warlords. By definition, they're not in as close communication, nor as close cooperation as our centralized military command structure, nor do they have every reason to want to see each other succeed. The OSRCT potentially helps us pull off the ultimate operational victory in offering forces that can deploy, and more importantly redeploy to fight multiple warlords in turn.
That's the sort of revolutionary advantage we need to be securing as crunch time approaches, not getting just as stuck in a rut preparing to fight the last war as you are convinced the warlords will fall into.
The OSRCT is only revolutionary if it can deliver enough troops on target to matter on the scale of the relevant conflict. It's unclear exactly how fast that stacks up, but there's probably a reason the Space Force wants
four phases done, and it's not because Phase 1 or 1+2 is enough all by itself to have a decisive impact on a global conflict all by itself.
Among other things, because the OSRCT strategic reserve units can each only be deployed in one place at a time, and getting them back up
into space is a major effort, so they aren't just casually teleporting around the globe on a strategic level.
I'm in favor of them, I want them, I'm
specifically saying to do them.
But the idea of us doing ASAT Phase 4 as a capstone at the same time we finished the
Philadelphia isn't somehow new, shouldn't somehow be shocking. It's just an attempt to reinforce our defenses in good faith to reflect the fact that we've got nine dice and +10 per die riding on a single space station that could in theory be destroyed by a single well placed fusion bomb.
