Well what are we going to use that ~690RP for next quarter? One 400-point tech, plus maybe the rest of the Invisible Man tech, right? Why not just get the lasers done this quarter, so we can start shopping around the various mining laser ideas a quarter early? This Gold Rush strategy of mine is going to take a few years to really get off the ground anyway; may as well get all the pieces in place ASAP.
Xenobiology. With the bonus RP from our trade deal and Mordin actually joining us that
should hopefully be enough to actually complete it. If not the inevitable bonus omakes should be.
That is true; I suppose sacrificing efficiency for overall readability isn't such a big loss, at this stage of the game. However, once we have that Lab III built on Elysium (2175-Q1) I might argue the point again: 5% of a full lab stack is ~70 RPs per quarter, and I'd rather not just throw that away if we don't have to.
Indeed. Optimizing our RP use is definitely something we need to consider going forwards.
The size would impart depend on your goals for the institution and intended scale. Also don't forget to consider teachers, there basically aren't any human options right now.
Hm.
@TheEyes I think we might want to scrap the Campus Shield and just go with a full on City Shield. It would probably have to wait until next quarter and take a full year but that should, hopefully, be alright since we are talking about a location in the
heart of Alliance territory. Given the number of Biotic's
@Hoyr mentions later on the place is likely going to be big enough that multiple Campus Shields would be required so we might as well just go all the way.
Also we definitely need to do some investigation on Biotic Instructors.
As for security, recall that this is a school for kids. Kids that can basically do magic, but kids. your going to want the security to... look attractive? I'm not sure how to put it, but making it seem like a top sec military base would be a little to far, gotta draw people in and make parents feel good about the idea.
We are asking parents to send their children
lightyears from home to a boarding school. One which trains them to use powers that can
very easily turn deadly and puts them at risk of all sorts of groups wanting to kidnap/kill them. Having the best security money can buy is going to be a reassurance to most parents.
Furthermore we're talking about a pretty massive area. For example the private school I went to for my high school years, although it was a full range school covering from Pre-school to year 12, had a total area of 41.7 acres (169,083m^2) but only housed about a
thousand students.
Even factoring in that there was a lot of free space,
four ovals, that is a pretty massive area. Considering that you mentioned a possible
sixty thousand students we might end up creating our own damn
city. If anything I'd say 8 teams
isn't enough. Fortunately I doubt our school will be opening next quarter since we have to find teachers (both biotic and regular), arrange for students to both enroll and travel there, ensure that we have enough amenities and such.
@UberJJK One thing I think we both sort of forgot about: shouldn't we be building anti-starship missiles for our Gladius fighters? I mean, that's what they're there for, right? Maybe we need to axe the Demeter expansions this quarter in favor of building enough small/medium anti-starship missiles to outfit our fighters?
60 Small Anti-ship missiles for ParSec - 6,300 m + 18,000 production
10 Medium Anti-ship missiles for ParSec - 2,625 m + 7,500 production
Total: 6300+2625 + 6630 (lost production) = 15,555 m, plus whatever Hydras cost in terms of price/production.
Oh, and I don't think we ever wrote out actual specs and prices for the Hydra cluster-missiles we've sort of been talking up for awhile now.
We'll
definitely have to axe the Demeter expansion if we want to outfit our fighters with missiles. However I think you are
drastically underestimating how many missiles we'd need. My plan calls for 60 Gladii with enough personnel for them to be ready and in the air in less then 15 minutes. So with your load out each fighter would only have 1 missile with the Flight leads (barring two unlucky ones) having a second missile.
Bare minimum each fighter needs 6 Hydra and 2 Super-Pilums, which is just enough to fill the interior bays, and can carry up to a maximum of 6 Hydra and 10 Super-Pilums.
So just for the minimum load out your looking at more like
360 Hydra Cluster Missles for ParSec - 1,440m + 6,120 production
120 Medium Anti-Ship missiles for ParSec - 21,000m + 60,000 production
Incidentally I think those missile numbers need rejiggering. I honestly don't know what I was thinking when I wrote them. Because:
Hmm. A single Pilum costs 25k plus 0.05 Production and is roughly 35,470mm^3 going by Iron Man 1. Scaled up to to the size of an AIM-120 (377,000,000mm^3), about what I was figuring a Super-Pilum would be, puts it at roughly 10,000 times larger. Following that logic the Super-Pilum would be 250,000,000cr plus 500 Production.
Now for taking on enemy fighters that is waaay overkill since that is actually more expensive then even a Gladius. However this is a missile billed as a replacement for Disruptor Torpedoes. Even a crappy Space-AK Wuni costs 72x that much. For comparison a MIG-21 (Fighter-AK) costs around 1m at the upper end while the AIM-120 (discounting the super expensive version) costs ~350k for a 2.8x cost difference.
while true ignores the fact that it would be cheaper to crash fighters into ships then fire a missile at them.
This is a
bad thing because Fighters have like something on the order of 200x the mass and are FTL capable. So having a cost anywhere
close just doesn't make sense.
Furthermore in the Disruptor Torpedoes description:
Torpedoes are the main anti-ship weapon used by fighters. Launched at point-blank range in "ripple-fire" waves, they are reminiscent of the ancient Calliope rocket artillery launchers (thus their popular nickname, "Callies"). By saturating defensive GARDIAN systems with multiple targets, at least a few torpedoes will get through.
Here is the
Calliope in action for reference. If the SA can afford to fire missiles that cost as much as a
fighter that fast...
So on reflection missile prices are
badly in need of revision.
What do you think
@Hoyr
It's still got a gigawatt laser. And even rad shielding melts (or burns or what ever).
Let me pull up my laser spread sheet... let's see one gigawatt yeah... Gamma Ray. Well if I ignore aspect ratio of the hole the thing can slice dreadnaught sized blocks of pure carbon in half at 20,000km with a 0.13 second blast.
Including aspect ratio (I hear 1:20 for a drilled laser hole is reasonable) a one second blast eats a 13.16 cm wide and 2.63 meter deep hole for a one second blast.
And really that's all you need. If you can accurately hit your target,
lasers, then even a tiny hole is enough to take one out. Even a 1cm hole in a ship's reactor will kill it.
Also with the more reasonable, including aspect ratio, figure you have to remember to factor in that a
gigajoule of energy has just been dumped inside the ship. That is equivalent to 239kg of TNT, half of one of
these, going off.
Hm. I suspect that doing something like the Wrath of Khan (ripping a long tear in the side of the ship) might actually be more damaging then a deeper impact. It will open a number of compartments up to space, create a vulnerable section, and have a better chance at hitting something important.
really, 200 million for a research university that should be teaching grades from middle school through college? That'll barely cover admin areas, lecture halls and conference rooms
On reflection your probably right. We're likely going to have to sit down and properly plan out the whole thing.
So far in human history only about 100,000-200,000 (guesstimate by me) people have shown signs of biotic potential. A exposure event kills or causes severe heath issues for 30% of the unborn children effected and biotic talent of any level is noted in 7% (10% of the survivors).
That said the oldest human biotics are 23. Let's roll with the higher end. Of those assuming you start at the age of 13ish about 95,000 are in the right range to attend 52,000 are in middle to high school range. So at a guess maybe 60,000 people would be old enough interested and biotic.
Unless you want to exclude very minor biotic talents, that'll drop the number a bit. They still can be trained but they're never going to be combat biotics, barring combo work.
I say we go for the full 60,000 biotics! It will
definitely be difficult to set up, probably take the rest of the year before the school is ready, but I think it will be worth it.
The main problem is these Company Actions votes, because we're trying to do so much in such a short amount of time.
I think the core part of the problem is that PI is in
too good a position. Normal quests you have half a dozen or so actions and get to pick one or two of them. PI meanwhile can afford, both cost and production wise, to take like a
dozen of them all at once. Even worse is that we're basically on an exponential growth pattern so every turn we can do more and more which lets us then do more and more and more the next turn and so on.
I'm really not sure how we could go about simplifying the system without severely limiting what PI can do and I'm not really in favor of a nerf considering what we're up against.
Best I can think of is getting the plans involved heavily in the quarterly plans (generally me,
@TheEyes , and
@Yog) together with
@Hoyr to hash together a couple plans before the part three updates which can then be presented (likely in simplified form) in the update which everyone can then pick from.
The biggest problem I see here, besides isolating the majority of players from a major part of the planning process, is that for the most part every quarterly plan has just been minor variations on a single core plan so I'm not really sure we could come up with multiple independent yet equally viable plans each quarter.
