Glad to hear you two are on the same page. I still feel the Cabira is poorly optimised for the Alliance, they aren't looking for a hunter killer.
Also when I said the Cabira was a late game frigate I said that under the assumption we'll be producing Cabira MK whatevers until there aren't any more reapers. Not that it was the be all end all of ship design.
They're not looking for a hunter killer
today, or at least they can't be
seen as needing one today. The thing is, though, war with the Batarians is coming, and very soon. If you look at the political situation, it's obvious: the Alliance has received what amounts to a mandate to build settlements/colonies in an area that has for thousands of years been considered an area of Batarian influence. Moreover, the Batarians have basically declared war on the Alliance already, since anyone with even a modicum of sense can tell that this whole "pirate army" thing is just a fig leaf.
The obvious, stark truth, the one that the politicians are desperate to cover up, is that the moment humanity came on the scene and gave the Turians a bloody nose, yet proved to actually be very amenable to negotiation with the Asari (unlike, as a
pure hypothetical, the Batarians, who have been restless and hostile for thousands of years, forcing other species into slavery, funding pirates, oppressing their own people and demanding that other governments do the same, etc), the Alliance was basically ordered to provoke the Batarians into a war, and everyone knows it. That's why the Alliance is investing heavily into dreadnought/carrier production rather than colony defense: it's only a matter of time until those dreadnoughts/carriers are going to be needed to run off the Batarians' own dreadnoughts. Hell, the Alliance is probably getting tens of trillions of foreign aid from the Council that is "secretly" being earmarked for human dreadnought production, to get the Alliance up to speed quickly.
So, what the Alliance
thinks it wants is a smokescreen: a bunch of mass-produced, cheap frigates that they can parade around to show the galaxy (eg. the Batarians) that their military budget is really, truly, going to colony defense, honest. We totally buy your "pirates" story and we're not really secretly investing hundreds of trillions into dreadnoughts to counter your invasion plans. What the Alliance
really wants, but doesn't know to ask for, is "colony defense" frigate that can be quickly and easily re-tooled to fight the coming war with the Batarians. That's the Pydna model: a bunch of cheap 100-meter frigates, outfitted with drones and anti-ship missiles for colony defense, that can all be retrofitted into dreadnought-killer Cabiras in 18 months when the Batarians invade.
As to the Reapers, I'm not entirely sure that the Reapers will even be vulnerable to GRASERs. All you really need is TIR shielding--not even TIR stealth!--to make laser weapons obsolete, and it's likely that the Reapers have tech more advanced than that. No; lasers, like anti-ship missiles, are an interim measure, to let PI and the Alliance dominate the galaxy for the next 5-10 years while we develop more effective weapon systems out of Repulsor particle beams and black hole guns.
I'd like to see it switched over to RP in a pool rather then dice. I don't know about
@TheEyes but I generally spend an hour or two optimizing the dice layout to get 95%+ certainty of completion. Cutting it down to simply allocating RP would turn that into a one job.
Yeah, I'm starting to come around to that thinking myself. Maybe just pre-roll the RPs and let us assign them as desired?
Hm. Well if we assume that every planet has an average of 3 cities and the SA has a current total of 50 planets, going off the
Human worlds list, for a total of 150 cities then we could put a GARDIAN tower and Arc Reactor to power it in every city for 15,225m credits. If we wanted to be more secure a trio of towers in each city would put us back 45,675m, a mere 9.7% of our total budget for this quarter.
There has to be more to it than that, or the Alliance would have done it already; as you've said, protecting 150 cities with GARDIAN towers is cheap, and kind of a no-brainer considering the politics. Maybe there are hundreds, even thousands, of "undocumented" colony towns scattered over each of the 50-100 human colony worlds? Maybe these towns don't properly register with the Alliance colonization board, and only have a few hundred, or thousand people each? That actually seems likely, given that the whole premise of being a colonist in the first place is to get away from an overcrowded planet and its "oppressive" government(s), and moving to an officially-sanctioned city with hundreds of thousands of other people is kind of the opposite of that.
How hard would it be to make the GARDIAN towers semi-mobile? If they can move around a bit, it makes them harder to target from orbit as they can constantly change their position.
In other words, you want to build Bolos. I think we'd need to invest in tank research for that, and we've got a little too much on our research plate already.
Amusingly, if we actually went with our super frigatte that can compete with Dreadnoughts, the best thing the Alliance could do would be to sell all their Dreads and Carriers immediately and buy thousands of our frigattes for that money.
Well, what we really need is a quick 1-3 trillion cash infusion right now, so we can get started on the space factories to build our dreadnought killer fleet a few quarters early. It's unfortunate that there isn't enough mutual trust and knowledge between Revy and whoever is secretly funding the hundreds of trillions worth of Alliance dreadnoughts; if we could siphon off 1-2% of that cashflow for a quarter we'd be able to get Cabiras out that much sooner, and make the whole dreadnought investment thing yesterday's news.
