Those Arc-Reactor sales also bring in a lot of tax money the Alliance may really, really want to fund the war effort.
Eh; not really. PI makes 1 trillion credits profit on that Arc Reactor contract and at 20% tax the Alliance gets 200 billion. Now that might seem like a lot, and for a private company it kinda is, but for a species wide government it's a drop in the bucket. I
worked out ages ago that the Alliance probably has a GDP around 637 trillion credits* of which 5% (31.9 trillion) goes to the military. Factor in that the Alliance is likely undergoing mobilization which could push that figure to somewhere between 20% (WWI level) and 40% (WWII level) of GDP. In that sort of scope an extra 200 billion really doesn't change things. Especially not when they are paying us 36.3 billion per LLP and we'll probably be delivering 181 LLPs over the next year which comes to 6,570.3 billion or about 20.6% of their pre-war annual budget.
*Which fits with the median wage in the Alliance being around 50,000cr and there being around 12 billion humans since multiplied together that gives 600 trillion credits. Although the wealth disparity means the average, which is what GDP should be calculated off, would be skewed higher.
Really we ought to ask for more money right now, when wartime budgets are going to be shoveling money out the door as fast as possible. We can justify it by telling the Alliance we need the money to expand production operations to Earth, which would reduce the strategic vulnerability of having most of our critical production assets in far-flung colonies; we don't need to tell them we've actually been planning to do that anyway. You can bet that Cord-Hislop Aerospace is cleaning up on Gladius sales, with the Alliance cycling out the fighters on their carrier groups for the new model, and the colonies are getting a lot of business building our Super-Piliums and Hydras.
Yeah there is no chance of us getting paid more for the LLPs when we'd
already essentially entered a contract with them at 36.3 billion per ship. Sure they massive accelerated the timeline since we weren't planning on selling them until 2175-Q1 with most our planned sales being tentatively penned in for Q3 and Q4 of 2175 since that is when our second and third Space Factory IIs come online but it's hard to argue when
we are a primary target of the Batarians
and the Alliance just permanently parked an entire
fleet (the 4th Fleet) with
attached Dreadnought overhead to protect us.
Plus we kinda
want the Alliance to grab as many LLPs since their hypermodularity means they'll be
very useful when the Reapers attack since we can swap out their currently 'weak' lasers for heavy duty ones. Also great for treaty busting.
That being said we probably want to keep up the Arc Reactor production. I set the price for LLPs to be just above the "minimum" threshold (IE: the point where production is better spent on general sales rather then contracts) so it only makes 270,697cr/pr while our sales of Arc Reactors to the Citadel Races brings in 666,667cr/pr so switching over would represent an effective "loss" of just shy of 594 billion credits.
I remember bringing this up before but I don't recall consensus ever being formed; if we swap out our Gen I Arc Reactors for Gen IIs we can both seriously increase the number of LLPs we can sell to the Alliance
and our profit from the Citadel contract.
Gen I 5GW Arc Reactors cost 50,000cr and 0.3pr while Gen II 5GW Arc Reactors 15,000cr and 0.075pr. So by switching over on 5 million Arc Reactors we save 175 billion credits (IE: +175 billion profit) and 1,125,000pr (IE: +18 LLPs) which even with the low 'effective' profit on LLPs is still an extra 298 billion. Thus by switching we can make an extra 473 billion and get the Alliance an extra 18 LLPs per quarter. Still people have raised some concerns about switching over to our newer Gen II Arc Reactors even with Flawless Black Boxing.
Since this will probably come up
next update since that is when we'll be voting on our production I figure it's a question worth clarifying now. Also worth discussing is if we'll be switching over to Gen II Arc Reactors on our various other product lines. I haven't done the math (yet) but there are a lot of savings, and thus profit, to be made by doing so.
