- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
You will note that virtually every one of the popular vote plans invests 2-3 dice in Yellow Zone Water Purification this turn. So this is not a good knock-down argument against central economic planning in the Yellow Zones.
Among other things, Yellow Zone agriculture is inherently going to be unprofitable compared to Blue Zone agriculture; private corporations probably wouldn't bother. If our economy were mostly private and decentralized, the odds are that conditions in the GDI-held parts of the Yellow Zones would be significantly worse, because the only really profitable enterprises that could sustain themselves there would be sweatshops using manual labor and minimal tooling- an option we had once upon a time but ignored.
The operative problem with this idea is that solar, wind, and hydroelectric power are all vulnerable to tiberium contamination except in carefully cultivated Blue Zone regions.
Note how relatively dice-intensive (though resource-cheap) the Yellow Zone power grid options were before we started getting fusion reactors- this is because it's just so damn exhausting to build and maintain solar panels and wind turbines in an area where wind-blown tiberium dust gets on your panels or rotors and starts eating them.
The bulk of GDI's energy infrastructure continues to be built around fission and fusion power plants. Wind and solar aren't economically competitive, and private corporations reliant on them would be outcompeted by GDI's state-owned facilities running fission or now fusion.
And yes, state-owned.
Fission power in private enterprise hands raises concerns about Nod infiltrating the supply chain and either sabotaging the plants to cause radiation contamination of scarce and very precious Blue Zone land, or just embezzling nuclear fuel rods to make into more nuclear weapons. It's untenable for many of the same security reasons you've discussed.
Developing fusion power was a prodigiously expensive heavy industrial project that has taken several years and I forget how many dice we've spent on it, nor can I easily look it up because we don't threadmark winning plans around here, so finding them is a toughie. In short, fusion research has eaten up a double digit percentage of GDI's national annual gross domestic product (which is in turn probably a majority of the planetary gross domestic product). Converting it into real life money it would probably have taken a multi-trillion dollar project to get this far (on the cusp of starting to build truly economical fusion reactors). No private corporation could do that in a reasonable amount of time, unless it were so large that it would be functionally impossible to regulate, something capable of singlehandedly wrapping GDI's internal politics around its finger in its own right.
You are grossly over-optimistic. Nod regularly steals GDI military equipment whenever it can and would happily continue to do so, plenty of "neutral" warlords would eagerly serve as points to launder weapons exports from GDI to Nod, and importantly GDI operates on a continuous war footing.
Guess what sector of industry tends to get, if not outright nationalized, so heavily controlled by the state during wartime that it might as well be nationalized in practice? Even in liberal capitalist democracies like the UK and US?
Yeah, war production. Because it's an area where you can't afford to cut corners or take years to discover that someone marketed a product that doesn't work, not during a major land war.
Honestly, consumer goods is the best case for non-government-run enterprises in Quest!GDI's present. Because it's the area where we're least likely to trip over major security concerns brought about by Nod, tiberium, or both... and such security concerns are an area where you Do Not Fuck Around.
It's already happening at the margins. What do you think it means when the Blue Zones expand? It means that in certain territories we control, at or near the perimeter of our existing Blue Zones, our tiberium abatement efforts have been successful enough that we can proclaim certain areas "blue." Of course, in reality the distinction between the most tiberium-ariffic parts of a Blue Zone and the cleanest parts of the adjoining Yellow Zone are a difference of degree and not a difference in kind, but whatever threshold we have that causes us to declare land Blue/Yellow is being crossed.
And the areas in which it is being crossed are all GDI-controlled former Yellow Zones, that is to say, Blue Zones.
Given that ion disruptors seem to be an expensive and rare item,* they are probably difficult to set up, and wasteful to set up in artillery range of the enemy.
However, it bears considering that there isn't really anything stopping us from just building a thermonuclear bomb; it's not GDI's normal style but we surely have the blueprints and I'm pretty sure we have the warheads given that at least one Nod mission involves stealing them from us as I recall. So a place that cannot be ionized probably just gets nuked by an air-dropped or space-dropped munition.
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*(Nod cannot just build and deploy them at will as base structures at will in the actual Third Tiberium War)
