2)Furthermore, you're trying to rush out escort carriers without Wingman Drones.
I support him in doing this. The escort carriers aren't about conserving manpower, they're about
having more hulls, having enough hulls in the water capable of supporting naval aviation that we don't need to divert a fleet carrier every time a convoy spots a Nod destroyer division that's making them nervous or every time we think there might be a submarine in the general vicinity.
To make the escort carriers big enough to support meaningful numbers of wingman drones, we'll have to build them bigger, which almost inevitably means we'll build
fewer. Either fewer escort carriers, or fewer warships of some other type due to the opportunity costs of manning and building the bigger individual escort carriers.
Sometimes, making a platform bigger more capable is counterproductive. We don't want to fall prey to Panzer Disease.
And yes, I get that wingman drones have a lot of potential. But given GDI's very understandable reluctance to adopt fully autonomous weapon platforms, we're unlikely to see all of that potential fully realized, at least not unless we zoom out to the kind of 6-10 year time frame on which we might seriously consider
designing a new escort carrier class rather than delaying (even further) the construction of the existing (urgently needed) class.
3)We do not need a new APC/IFV yet.
Nor am I confident that we have the resources to build them when we're still trying to find enough Cap Goods to do ZA factories.
Actually, not having a new APC is kind of a problem if we plan a mass Zone Armor rollout. It's noted in the narration that the Guardian APC doesn't really fit Zone Troopers very gracefully, so we could end up with a situation where we're rolling out large amounts of powered armor that our mechanized infantry formations can't use without rewriting their doctrine to fight on (armored) foot.
So it might well be worth trying to develop a grav-lev APC
relatively shortly after we have the requisite grav-lev technology, just to make sure we get something that can accommodate the large numbers of power-armored Ground Forces infantry we expect to deploy soon.
5)Also as Simon pointed out, the dice on URLS has too low a probability of actually finishing in time to be of any benefit in Q1.
Especially given the temperamental nature of our dice.
Either move it to Sensors or Ablat.
I mean, if we were looking at 80% or better chance of getting a phase of both shells and ablatives in his plan, I'd be all for one die on URLS. 46% chance of success isn't that bad, and the total progress remaining for URLS is low enough that we kind of want to slow-walk it to avoid wasting dice.
But in Sunrise's plan
specifically the phase of ablative production isn't given as many dice as I'd like, so it's a natural swap to make.
I've come around on doing the escorts with the drones, personally. Drones make our fighters more capable in the air, so having them in the carriers would improve their military ability. Is it an absolute requirement that we cannot do without, as Uju32 insists? Not especially; without drones the Escort carriers will still be effective, if not as effective as they would with the drones. But the somewhat increased cost is likely to be worth it, overall.
I'd rather have three 35-kiloton escort carriers operating three squadrons of Super Orcas each than two 50-kiloton escort carriers operating two squadrons of Super Orcas and two squadrons of Orca Buddy wingman drones each. And I'm pretty sure the last time
@Ithillid talked about the options with us, that's what he was saying.
Basically,
numbers matter, and we can't expect to upscale the ships without reducing quantity, either here or in some other aspect of the military. With capital ships you focus on making each of them as individually powerful as is reasonably possible because they're designed to be effective against enemy heavy forces when fighting solo, and to be able to do nearly anything themselves. But escort carriers aren't expected to fight above a certain weight class, and if they have to,
you send more than one of them.
We absolutely should do wingman drones before going into Carriers otherwise we'll just wind up with a bunch of Carriers that won't be suited to take advantage of them. Like the Airforce has been hinting they would really like the wingman drones for awhile and in the last priorities statement from them it outright said those are their number 2 priority after the Orca refits.
The problem is that
@Ithillid has said that the carriers would have to be a lot bigger (and presumably, individually more expensive) to take advantage of the wingman drones. And that we'd get a design that
was thus bigger (and presumably more expensive).
Which means either accepting fewer ships, or spending more on just that one element of the overall fleet and having less elsewhere.
