Two things here, the Steel Talons are a combat unit first and foremost. They just have huge a huge R&D section attached to the back of them because they get to test all the new gear to death before the regular units do, ZOCOM does too even if what they test is designed more for their own operations. It's the purview of elite units to get handed the best and latest equipment then pointed either at some really hard exercises or in our case a Nod base. They are something of a weaker link because they are lacking a heavy walker to go along with the Havocs and refit Titan 2s along with many new weapons tech they would love to be testing on Nod forces right now.
The thing is, the Talons are an elite force tasked with blowing shit up on the land.
We have a lot of other forces, elite and not-so-elite, that do that same job. If the Talons are feeling a little squishy and vulnerable, those other forces can take up the slack.
The Navy is the
only force tasked with blowing shit up on and under the ocean. If they're not up to the task, then that shit doesn't get blown up, in which case
our shit gets blown up.
As such, the Navy not having what it needs, even if it's
kind of hanging in there, is more of a problem than the Talons.
Fortunately, what the Talons want is generally cheaper.
In all candor, I'm supportive of working on the Mastodon heavy walker as soon as we have
Advanced Lasers and I'm confident we have the means to integrate that for both point defense and main battery energy weapons. Because a laser-armed Mastodon is likely to be a good benchmark, and we can get there
quickly if we focus.
Second point, the navy isn't so much of a weak link. Even lacking escort carriers and frigates we still have enough fleet carriers and cruisers to seriously contest Nod at sea and our costs are pretty well protected by hydrofoils. It's worth noting that in the only major naval engagement since the end of TW3 the Nod forces ambushed 3 cruisers and pulled back once a carrier and 2 or 3 other cruisers turned up.
The problem is that the navy is always running defense and has few good answers to enemy submarine warfare. They need a lot more stuff and capabilities to handle that. Remember that we lost a cruiser to a relatively
cheap, simple Nod submarine not long ago, during the Manchester attack. And that submarine wasn't even there to
kill the cruiser, it just happened to get a shot off at it while unleashing a cruise missile attack on one of our industrial centers!
The real weak point is the air force who have hit, well, almost down to parity with Nod thanks to the Firehawk still seeing use as our most common air-superiority fighter. With even newer and deadlier Barghests coming into play the fighter built to kill the Firehawk has become more dangerous and will likely start showing up in real numbers soon. Never mind whatever the hell Varyag is capable of, with any luck Krukov crashes it on his own command bunker.
I don't think this is quite accurate.
The Air Force has encountered scary fighters, but it already has scary fighters of its own. That's why it's not asking us to develop new categories of system, just to build more of what it already has, because Apollos can pick off Barghests just fine
if there are enough of them. All they really asked is "increase production so we can stop using Firehawks as interceptors at all."
By contrast, the Navy needs entire
categories of ships it simply does not have, if it is to take down the stuff Nod is already deploying. It doesn't just need us to build a couple more hydrofoil shipyards or something.
Two things here, the Steel Talons are a combat unit first and foremost. They just have huge a huge R&D section attached to the back of them because they get to test all the new gear to death before the regular units do, ZOCOM does too even if what they test is designed more for their own operations. It's the purview of elite units to get handed the best and latest equipment then pointed either at some really hard exercises or in our case a Nod base. They are something of a weaker link because they are lacking a heavy walker to go along with the Havocs and refit Titan 2s along with many new weapons tech they would love to be testing on Nod forces right now.
The thing is, the Talons are an elite force tasked with blowing shit up on the land.
We have a lot of other forces, elite and not-so-elite, that do that same job. If the Talons are feeling a little squishy and vulnerable, those other forces can take up the slack.
The Navy is the
only force tasked with blowing shit up on and under the ocean. If they're not up to the task, then that shit doesn't get blown up, in which case
our shit gets blown up.
As such, the Navy not having what it needs, even if it's
kind of hanging in there, is more of a problem than the Talons.
Fortunately, what the Talons want is generally cheaper.
In all candor, I'm supportive of working on the Mastodon heavy walker as soon as we have
Advanced Lasers and I'm confident we have the means to integrate that for both point defense and main battery energy weapons. Because a laser-armed Mastodon is likely to be a good benchmark, and we can get there
quickly if we focus.
Second point, the navy isn't so much of a weak link. Even lacking escort carriers and frigates we still have enough fleet carriers and cruisers to seriously contest Nod at sea and our costs are pretty well protected by hydrofoils. It's worth noting that in the only major naval engagement since the end of TW3 the Nod forces ambushed 3 cruisers and pulled back once a carrier and 2 or 3 other cruisers turned up.
The problem is that the navy is always running defense and has few good answers to enemy submarine warfare. They need a lot more stuff and capabilities to handle that. Remember that we lost a cruiser to a relatively
cheap, simple Nod submarine not long ago, during the Manchester attack. And that submarine wasn't even there to
kill the cruiser, it just happened to get a shot off at it while unleashing a cruise missile attack on one of our industrial centers!
The real weak point is the air force who have hit, well, almost down to parity with Nod thanks to the Firehawk still seeing use as our most common air-superiority fighter. With even newer and deadlier Barghests coming into play the fighter built to kill the Firehawk has become more dangerous and will likely start showing up in real numbers soon. Never mind whatever the hell Varyag is capable of, with any luck Krukov crashes it on his own command bunker.
I don't think this is quite accurate.
The Air Force has encountered scary fighters, but it already has scary fighters of its own. That's why it's not asking us to develop new categories of system, just to build more of what it already has, because Apollos can pick off Barghests just fine
if there are enough of them. All they really asked is "increase production so we can stop using Firehawks as interceptors at all."
By contrast, the Navy needs entire
categories of ships it simply does not have, if it is to take down the stuff Nod is already deploying. It doesn't just need us to build a couple more hydrofoil shipyards or something.
Railgun munitions aren't a priority, if anything the Army is quite happy to let other branches get money and to be fair a steel slug from a railgun will still hurt a lot. Hallucinogen protection is a bit too expensive to get with all the other dev projects.
On the scale of a global war we're gonna have a
LOT of casualties from those hallucinogens. It's worth spending literally one die to look into countermeasures.
Railgun munitions are a Plan promise we have to do anyway sooner or later, and unless manufacturing the munitions turns out to be much harder than I expect, it's also likely to be a relatively cheap, impactful way for us to enable Ground Forces to do more damage to Nod this year.
Remember, just because Ground Forces are very very confident doesn't mean that further enhancing their performance doesn't matter.
For me Nuuk is already reserved for all the upcoming cap good expenditure in mil (ground armor factories have 1 each, escort carriers will take some given the cruiser shipyards, likely that some of the new vehicle deployments as well).
And we also need energy out of HI so we cant just shock Nuuk- so you are looking at multiple turns or free dice or both, but free dice will also be needed in mil.
Just meeting our Capital Goods target for the Plan
at all means Free dice on Heavy Industry.
We need to accept that we can't just dump all our Free dice into the military every turn; it's not sustainable. The civilian economy needs upgrades too, and having shiny new tanks and planes only carries you so far when you're struggling just to build power plants fast enough. So,
yes, I think we need to think in terms of averaging 7-8 Heavy Industry dice a turn, at which point it's pretty easy to keep up with demand in Energy while getting Nuuk done up to Phase 3
pretty fast.
Meanwhile, you can't just say "oh, all 20 Capital Goods we can get from Nuuk this year are consumed by projects X, Y, and Z" when some of the projects in question
shouldn't be done this year anyway. We shouldn't be doing major ground vehicle rollouts that the Ground Forces don't consider a priority, before we do Zone Armor rollouts they
do consider a priority. And realistically, if the escort carrier shipyards are a project on the same scale as the
Governor yards, we won't be doing them all in a single year anyway.
It's just... let's not de-emphasize Nuuk, and let's keep up some flexible mindedness about where our Capital Goods are going to go and what we'll be doing with them.
But then again maybe people are no longer interested in things like more Red Zone mining or Glacier mines until the start of the next plan, even with the vastly expanded Logistics that will only keep on increasing with Karachi, so who knows how useful the factories will be seen by people until then. Oh well.
Marids,
seriously, will you cut out the passive-aggressive shit-slinging?
All it has
ever done is irritate and alienate people.
