Not quite sure how the various modifiers for research rolls are calculated, to be perfectly honest
We have a
tech sheet, with basic dice mods set up; effectively without invoking Gaver Dor's bonus or Captain Hwan's we can get ~1888 RPs with 95% probability. Gaver Dor gets +5d10 when working with his techs only, and Captain Hwan gets an extra 5% on anything he manages (boosting the Elysium expansion from 15% to 20% productivity) when "improving existing ME tech". If you want to play around with allocations for a long-term game plan that's a good place to do it.
The biggest flaw I see with your tech plan is that you're not putting any points into Flawless BB, or AI License Prep, critical techs that we need ASAP. We do have to put some amount of points into Flawless BB this quarter if we want it to be done in the next 3 quarters, which is the minimum practical amount of time it can possibly take. I mean, we
could do it in 2, but we'd have to devote everything we have to it, and we'd skip out on AI License Prep and its extremely important anti-AI protections for another 2 quarters if we do. You're also doing Gigawatt Energy Weapons before doing Flawless BB, and that's a
bad idea: Gigawatt lasers are potential ecosystem-killers, and we do not want them ever, ever,
ever falling into the wrong hands.
And frankly, the Mark II is just not all that high on our critical research list. The base invasion that we faced earlier had two easy fixes:
1) Less crappy dice rolls (seriously, those were awful), or
2) Missile spam, either from Tigers or Sagittarius drones, which we can build and deploy this quarter for no additional RP investment.
A Mark II suit, in contrast, wouldn't have actually helped us all that much. The suit itself would let us use biotics alongside our tech, plus let us use Repulsors as weapons and maybe allow us to hot-swap our weapons thanks to Hyper-modularity, but really not much more than that; the invasion would have largely played out the same, even with a Mark II suit.
No, our biggest vulnerability right now, aside from the dice randomly screwing us over, is the "space AK-47 ambush" that we faced in Memento Mori.
@UberJJK and
@Sylvire seem to think we can counter those with Disrupter torps fired from Gladius fighters... except that Disrupter Torps are canonically slow to accelerate, and exist to fight off large capital ships where economies of scale come into play, rather than tangling with smaller frigates. In fact, in ME frigates exist specifically to counter Disrupter-torp firing starfighters, as they are the smallest ship that can deploy a usable GARDIAN system. It's meant to be a sort of rock-paper-scissors duel, with fighter swarms > capital ships > frigates > fighters.
Anti-starship missiles short-circuits that dynamic by swapping out slow Disrupter-torps for faster Super-Piliums, which we can screen from GARDIAN systems using Hydra cluster-missles, eliminating the threat for the moment while we spend the next two years developing our stealthed GRASER-ships, which
themselves are a stepping stone to MACs that can fire black holes, thanks to the totally OP combination of Captain Hwan's ship-scale weapon/ammo mods and Conrad's Black F*cking Gun. We can get all of that done by ~mid-late 2176, at which point we can settle into building mega-Dreadnought versions of those same techs, and filling out the rest of our tech tree while we search for even more broken combos, maybe throw a few thousand RPs into Time is an Illusion or Phasing techs.
...You know, it just occurred to me that my vote is assuming that Captain Hwan's bonus applies to anti-starship missiles (they are, after all, improvements to the Pilium, which has been an ME tech for over a year now!
), and I swear I remember getting that cleared by
@Hoyr, but now I can't find the post that confirmed it. So I need to ask:
@Hoyr, does Captain Hwan's bonus apply to anti-starship missiles?
The 200m frigate is the Relentless class destroyer. I mean the 100m Sagittarius class AA frigate. It used to be the Storm class until I actually put some more effort into it.
Still, we won't have the spare production capacity until the Cabira is ready to go anyway. We'll have a Starship-specialized Space Factory I ready in 2174-Q2; that'll be our only shipyard until 2175-Q3 when the Shipyard III we will (hopefully) be able to begin in 2174-Q3 is completed. That Shipyard I will be tied up building our space yacht for 2174-Q2, and after that I'm fairly certain our best margin is going to be in building multi-core eezo drive equipped freighters, which we'll need for our eezo asteroid-mining strategy and our moving beyond the reach of the Relay network strategy. By the time the Shipyard III completes we'll have all the techs necessary for the Cabira completed, with the possible exception (for one quarter anyway) of TIR shielding/TIR stealth.
what about the Sagittarius class frigate and the Onager? Do those seem like decent ideas?
The Onager is pretty cool... except that with the Tiger and its basically-free orbital insertion abilities we can do
Rods from God fairly easily. In the face of that, does a giant Howitzer or any lesser form of over-the-horizon bombardment even make sense on a strategic level anymore?
lets say 500,000cr per person per year in hard cash. That's 750,000cr total per person per year which means it is 15,000,000cr for the entire team for a year and 3,750,000 per quarter.
Voted update:
That adds an additional 78.75m to our expenses.
That'll certainly get us noticed by ex-Special Forces, maybe even ones with previous PMC experience so we can get away with an extremely abbreviated training schedule, but note that means that the kinds of jobs we'll need to get for these people are going to involve heavy combat; there's no way anyone's going to pay ~
600,000 credits per week for a single 20-man team:
15,000,000 credits/yr
÷ 52 (weeks/yr)
÷ 0.5 (50% off-contract time for our teams for transportation, medical, suit repair, psych leave, etc)
== 576,923 credits per week per team break-even point
-for anything other than heavy combat tours deep in enemy territory. Maybe we should consider two tiers of mercs: one at the 3.75 million/quarter level, and one at the 1.05 million/quarter level for convoy/bodyguarding duty (that gives us a still high but less daunting 161,538 ==> 175K/week/team break-even point.
So, still want to send these guys out without Tigers or drone backup... or for that matter Legionaries, since even your plan doesn't even outfit all 500 of your super-expensive, super-elite troops with powered armor? That's the
other reason I want to spend at least a full quarter training the troops; even with your Legionary-heavy production schedule we can't put all these guys into a Legionary this quarter anyway, so we might as well spend the quarter training them for when we
can properly outfit them with Legionaries, Tigers, and a full complement of drones (Accipiters, Sagittarius, and Hastati).
