Maybe we can see if there's a planet in Alpha Centauri covered in some sort of fungus?
SMAC will live on in my heart forever.

Naval priorities for the next two plans primarily focus on force preservation assets, antisubmarine warfare, and enhancing convoy escort capability, alongside competency preservation and attempting to rebuild lost competencies, most notably a pilot SSN program.
Oooooh, SSN program. :D

And to be fair, they might be rebuilding lost competency in sub operations with the idea that space operations would be similar in some respects.

occasionally creating fissures and rifts that swallow entire harvesters whole.
Sweet Jesus. Well, at least we haven't run into tiberium graboids or sandworms in the Deep Red. But otherwise, it feels very much like a "Here be dragons" area.

Beyond the advances made domestically, Intelligence Operations have had a coup against the Bannerjees, who had relaxed a bit more than it was wise on the security of one group of their bioscientists.
Mwahahahaha. You stayed out of the Regency War, but we had to sneak something in against you!

--

I'm happy to see that the amphib ships won't require new yards, though the fact that we might have slightly smaller tranches of escort carriers for a bit might be annoying. Though I guess it depends on when the Islands get slotted into the carrier yards.

As for liquid tib, I'm in favor of completing the plants to buy more buffer to get new gen fusion figured out and ready for use. Possibly even get some new gen refits or the like done making use of the buffer?

[X] Complete the Plants
 
[X] Complete the Plants

We don't need it more than to do more science! As long as there no accident that blow them up. Also, something to power everything while researching better fusion plant.
 
[ ] Human Genetic Engineering Programs (Tech)
The human genome is a mess, especially in the modern day. Starting with an extreme bottleneck in diversity, and being evolved for a group of endurance predators on the open savannah rather than sedentary office workers, there are many things that can be done to either fix problems such as lactose or gluten intolerances, or increase the variability of the genome.
(Progress 209/120: 25 resources per die) (-5 Political Support) [Nat 100]
I am a bit surprised you didn't have them discover CRISPR and/or CRISPR gene editing with this Nat 100.

[X] Complete the Plants
 
[X] Do Not Complete the Plants

While the +10 power is tempting, I'm just worried about the security risk, especially since InOps is thinly stretched with the refugees right now. We could always throw a single die at it whenever we need more power.
 
Much of Chicago's planning is likely to be used for future planned cities using a hybrid model in areas like Amazonia, where GDI can use the relatively wasteful and inefficient APK process without risking civilians to feed a massive need for STU based technologies.
Ohoho?

The engineers concerned with the project have given a timeline for failure. The first plants will begin failing between early and late 2066.
This is very much a problem.

While some may describe this development as exciting, the Venusian environment makes the prospect of extracting and refining it incredibly difficult. One proposed method – that so far only exists on the drawings boards of the SCED – is using long cables tipped with tentacle harvesters dangling from aerostats to scrape off the upper layer of Tiberium from the Venusian field, but setting it up on an industrially useful scale will require an extensive orbital economy and methods to manufacture longer chains of carbon nanotubes.
I do wonder if we'll ever get something like a space elevator or skyhooks.

Alongside the scientists, InOps has also secured sizable amounts of data on the tiberium mutants called Gana by the Brotherhood of Nod – including what appears to be a new model, designated Bunyip by the analysis team. While large parts of it appear relatively familiar, it is a clear chimeric hybrid of multiple different species, and contains significant pieces of what appears to be wholly-new DNA strands.
"Bunyip" is apparently an amphibious creature from Australian Aborigine mythology. I should've expected them to create entirely new life forms.

Between the political situation, the potential of a series of new technologies that are currently being researched to completely upend the class, and the limited number of missions that it is planned to undertake, the Navy has slated no more than 18 of the class be built, spread out over the escort carrier yards.
So no expensive new shipyard project, but perhaps a longer delay.
 
[X] Complete the Plants

Between the political situation, the potential of a series of new technologies that are currently being researched to completely upend the class, and the limited number of missions that it is planned to undertake, the Navy has slated no more than 18 of the class be built, spread out over the escort carrier yards.

Am I reading this right? In that there won't be a deployment phase, or is there going to be a refit to the yards similar to the battleship yards for the escort carriers?
 
Finally an explanation for the inexplicable switch by the senate between thinking the food stockpiles were overkill on their part and then demanding the stockpile is doubled or tripled in size a few month later. Its an idiot politician armed with a slogan. That makes so much more sense.

Seriously, 8 turns worth of food in the stockpile at any time on a global scale? That is an insane amount with the 3-1 storage ratio.

The idiot politicians reasoning of... fresh food is vulnerable to full scale global thermonuclear war... is... is... just crazy. Like 500-800 food going into the stockpile at any given time levels of crazy. In the case of most of the population being glassed already.

I'm pretty sure the idiot politician is seriously arguing that people are immune to nuclear fire as much because food is not. Logistics is the enemy of all right minded voters apparently.
 
Also very good news this turn, Blue + Cyan Zones are now larger then the Green + Yellow Zones (23.42 + 0.04 = 23.46, 0.81 + 22.57 = 23.38). A significant step in the war against Tiberium.
 
OnlyTheFinestOfMemes
Well I, as a blind Visceroid with genetic diseases, am thankful that finally my needs are being met.
Whoever came up with this, you're a genius.

AgathaH
#YellowZon3r insert the obligatory SPAAAAAACE
More seriously, I hope there's work looking at the Green Stuff we took from Venus, but that's probably classified. SCED is building a frackoff BIG telescope on Luna, so that will be useful for a number of things. Maybe we can see if there's a planet in Alpha Centauri covered in some sort of fungus?
:(

Poor everybody. Even, just this once, poor Kane.

Tiberium Spread
23.42 (+0.16) Blue Zone
0.04 (+0.02) Cyan Zone
0.81 (-0.16) Green Zone
Dammit, we're running out of Green Zone to blue already. Border offensives stat!

Military‌ ‌Confidence‌
Ground‌ ‌Forces‌ ‌:‌ High ‌ ‌
Air‌ ‌Force‌ ‌:‌ ‌High
Space‌ ‌Force‌ ‌:‌ Decent ‌
Steel‌ ‌Talons:‌ ‌Low (Trending to Decent)
Navy:‌ Low ‌(Trending to High)
ZOCOM:‌ ‌Decent ‌
Trending to High? Shit, that's good news. Guess they're happy with the shipyard situation. Though actually reaching High will probably take most of the decade for those shipyards to build new hulls.

Military Priorities
  • Ground Forces
Looking at the next plan, Ground Forces expect to see a general drawdown in direct military investments, with focus shifting to ecological and economic development. With the Brotherhood weakened by war, it is time to focus on new technologies, and pushing the material edge, rather than mass deployment of new technologies, especially given the crushing superiority demonstrated a mere year ago.
Okay, so they want to focus on development for the near future. I for one am fine with this; development projects are cheap per die.

Politics
While the Treasury has continued making deals, and amassing support in Parliament, the more reactionary portions of the Initiative's population have begun to radicalize. Seeing neither elections or dealmaking offering them even a hint of support, they have increasingly found themselves in smaller, more exclusive circles.

"Is it not enough that we accept these Noddists into our towns, our neighborhoods? Is it not enough that we feed them? That we offer them medical care?
No, says the Director, we must accept them as brothers and sisters.
No, says the Military, we must sacrifice our lifeblood for them.
No, says the Treasury, we must give up our bare luxuries to them."

  • Raegan Hotsh, BlueHelm.net.
Obnoxious, but... bluntly, we can deal. Thee guys don't have a lot of experience dodging InOps, and InOps itself seems pretty solid (an Initiative First-style InOps would have had us ionizing all over the place in India, for example).

Otherwise, the Initiative has been engaging in the ritual bloodletting that is the campaigning towards the new plan. One of the major splits has been between the Developmentalist/Socialist/Starbound alignment, and the Militarist/Homeland/United Yellow List coalition. While both are generally friendly to the Treasury, that is where their shared interests stop. The Developmentalists are aiming for major draw-downs in military spending and creating massive new industrial and economic campaigns that will improve every aspect of civilian living, using the Socialist Party's overall platform as a guidebook to development. The Militarist Party on the other hand has been smelling blood, and sees the chance to push the Brotherhood of Nod even more on the back foot, even with the military itself being more inclined to allow other fields to take primacy.
Uhoh. This could get fraught.

I have no idea what this is. :(

The bands of fortress towns along the edges of the Green Zones have been completed and increasingly expanded. Many towns now sport multiple sections, with additional "neighborhoods" sprawling out from the core, each with defensive lines of their own. The perimeter of GDI territory is now dotted with towns strung out strongpoint to strongpoint, each situated on a rise, by a river or lake, or some other piece of favorable terrain. Between them lie strands of Initiative military outposts, connected by rail and roads – a hard shell, much like the ones built by the Initiative before the Third Tiberium War.

However, the fortress town program as a whole is beginning to reach a natural endpoint. With the Brotherhood of Nod increasingly unable to effectively deploy forces to overmatch GDI's assets, and the threat of nuclear war an ever present specter in Initiative strategic planning, more fortress towns are not nearly so needed. While protecting the borderlands is mission critical, future projects are unlikely to see GDI leap forward nearly so far.
Gotcha. Hopefully, this will lower the military Logistics burden? Though it doesn't seem to have done.

The engineers concerned with the project have given a timeline for failure. The first plants will begin failing between early and late 2066. While not absolutely certain, that is the point at which wear failures will begin to outstrip the plant's usefulness. While plants after the first phase are expected to last longer, into the early 2070s, there is a serious coming power crunch unless some significant portion of the plants can be taken offline for long periods in order to both put fewer operational hours on the program, and do massive refits, effectively pulling them entirely apart to install new systems.
Good, good. We can work with this. With the current Energy glut and us hopefully being able to design second-generation plants some time in 2062Q2-3 or so, we should be able to do phased refurbishments and upgrades.

The production model is the H-61, and is fundamentally a lightweight model, of a similar carrying capacity to minivans and two-axle trucks. Primarily built to service last-mile logistical purposes which it can do at extreme speeds, but has difficulty cornering. Running the motor circuit at Suzuka, it was able to do so remarkably quickly, but had a severe learning curve, with over a dozen incidents of the vehicle exiting the track at high velocities during early testing – although without significant damage to the vehicles, drivers, or the track itself – a count which has only increased despite refinement of the vehicle and drivers gaining experience with its quirks. Under more reasonable flight regimes, and with less daredevil drivers, it is significantly slower, but able to go over extremes of rough terrain without having to worry, with an operational ceiling of between two and three meters above any contiguous surface.
Okay, this is hilarious. Crazed test pilots stunting all over the place in hovertrucks. :p

One of the major remaining problems is, in fact, integration. With the drones more systematically available than ever, many of GDI's organs are proposing ambitious integration attempts, ranging from abolishing delivery drivers entirely, and instead using automated drone swarms, to cutting medevac chopper space and budgets for a greater allocation of drones.
Good news we tapped into that drone tech, then?

However, the parties involved are likely to request further expansions in the near future, even with GDI struggling with the refugee wave and the resulting need to expand many of its services to a broader population...

"We are prepared, of course, to require the full measure of forthcoming preparations from the Global Defense Initiative's agriculture department. We cannot depend on the productivity of vulnerable greenhouses and vertical farms in a full-throated Total War where NOD warlords no longer fight with one hand behind their back and nuclear warheads seek out softer targets. GDI must secure two years of global food supply, in order to feed the entire population in a true crisis situation! And I will fight to see that it is stored in your hands, in local repositories, in churches and in schools!"
-UYL Representative Unyime Usman
I don't think Unyime really thought through how much space two years' worth of food would take up in those churches and schools. :p

More seriously, though, oof. On the other hand, just how many months of Stored Food are we at now? It's kind of unclear how the Stored Food points cash out in reality, so Unyime's goal may not be as tough as we think.

West of Chicago, and east of California, the first pair of massed border offensives launched deep into the Red Zones. Conditions are tough, with the two consuming material at a prodigious rate. While manpower is more defended than ever before, with tib glass, zone armor, and other new pieces of equipment, GDI is pushing into the deepest red zones it has ever seriously faced. In many places microclimates make the air unbreathable, ion storms ravage the landscape, even as the tiberium beneath the offensive churns and roils, occasionally creating fissures and rifts that swallow entire harvesters whole.
The offensive has been a slog, gaining meters and in some cases losing kilometers overnight as tiberium erupts beneath their feet, Shatterers burning out their crystals, and Pacifiers lobbing tens of thousands of rounds into the great masses of deadly green. Not since 2049, and the dying days of the Scrin invasion have so many Initiative soldiers battled this far into the deepest red zones. In fact, the planned course of this operation will take GDI directly through some of those old battlefields, unrecognizable now in the amaranthine shifting of the glaciers. But here was also a Threshold Tower, one of the great gates of the Visitors toppled by Initiative force of arms. What remains is unknown, hidden beneath ion storms for the last decade. Up above, on Philadelphia, the politicians and the planners had grandiose dreams, of a new transcontinental railroad, a blue zone under Initiative control linking San Franscisco to New York, but here, on the ground, amid mountains and plains of endless green, the pawns of the war struggle ever onward in war upon the earth itself.
Ithillid, you did a great job here capturing the terrible grandeur of this.

In terms of problems, aside from issues of safety and security, there are fundamental problems with the design, most notably with contamination. Electricity causes the liquid Tiberium in the tank to break down, creating motes of particulate, bubbles of various gasses, and quite a number of liquid compounds. Most are simple, no more than two to three atoms drifting together in the soup, but the longer the facility runs, the more reactive and volatile it becomes, with buildups of oxygen, methane, acetylene, alongside metallic potassium, sodium, and rubidium. While there are elements from across the table forming, along with mutagenic deactivated liquid tiberium, and a number of even less savory compounds, these are among the most dangerous, because in sufficient quantities, they become a fuel/air/tiberium device of significant power. At the same time, actually removing the buildups is significantly problematic, due to it being mixed with liquid tiberium, and spread throughout the containment vessel. While venting the gasses is easier, even that is likely to break down relatively quickly compared to most other energy solutions.
Yeah. As reviewed, this is NOT a viable way to dispose of liquid tiberium.

Vote:

[ ] Complete the Plants
While currently GDI has no need for significant additional power supplies, it is well within reach to complete the second phase of plants. While this will cost significant political support. It does mean that GDI will not need to produce additional fusion plants with the same longevity issues nearly as soon. (Applies Omake bonus)

[ ] Do Not Complete the Plants
Intentionally not completing the plants will cause significant wastage of manpower and materials, however it will also maintain a relatively small window of vulnerability to Brotherhood operations against the Liquid Tiberium facilities and their support operations. (Does not apply Omake bonus)
Ooohg. Honestly thinking "don't," because I don't really want to burn -10 PS for +10 Energy right now.

In practical terms, the upshot of the studies is unfortunately not some breakthrough as has been proposed in liquid tiberium handling, as it actually appears that liquid tiberium is more easily processed by Visceroids than any other form. However that only results in bigger roiling masses of Tiberium infused biomatter. However, it does have some interesting implications as far as stabilizing Tiberium infusions, especially when compared to the mutations found in Forgotten test subjects.
...That is a breakthrough in liquid tiberium handling, because ten tons of liquid tiberium is less of a problem than ten tons of visceroid.

I think.

:p

"This is Tamara Keen on the scene in the central Atlantic. Three days ago, a GDI transport spacecraft disintegrated in mid air and now a massive salvage effort is underway, with more salvage barges on their way from as far away as Iceland. Already, four aircraft carriers are beating the sea with sonar to scare away NOD submarines while crews more used to scraping coastal Tiberium now are sending down remotely operated vehicles and giant salvage claws to grab every piece of wreckage they can find. But it's a hard job ahead of them, as over a thousand square kilometers of ocean are now areas of interest in the search."
  • Keen on the Scene Broadcast November 21 2061
Oooof. And I see why further improvements and modifications are needed.

Beyond the advances made domestically, Intelligence Operations have had a coup against the Bannerjees, who had relaxed a bit more than it was wise on the security of one group of their bioscientists. Hidden away in an urban apartment complex, Initiative intelligence agents backed by two commando teams infiltrated the Lucknow facility, and conducted a hard extraction of sixteen Brotherhood scientists – who are currently being held in an undisclosed facility, awaiting transfer to Hanslope Park for assessment and interrogation. Alongside the scientists, InOps has also secured sizable amounts of data on the tiberium mutants called Gana by the Brotherhood of Nod – including what appears to be a new model, designated Bunyip by the analysis team. While large parts of it appear relatively familiar, it is a clear chimeric hybrid of multiple different species, and contains significant pieces of what appears to be wholly-new DNA strands.
Heheh. Nice.

GDI Commandos: "Word is, you got a present for us."

Bannerjees: "Eepy."

[ ] Ground Forces Zone Armor (Set 1) (Updated)
The Initiative's Ground Forces are ready to begin refitting to an entirely zone armored force. The refit will create a leaner, harder, and drastically more lethal force, one that can engage the best that NOD has to offer, and come out on top. While this first wave of factories will only be enough to equip the tip of the spear, that is the area with the most vital set of requirements (High Priority)
-[ ] London (Progress 223/180: 20 resources per die) (-2 Labor, -2 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) [Nat 1, 49]

While the London factory has completed, it has faced critical problems as its seal manufacturing facilities have been found to be producing material that is not up to standard. Zone Armor is manufactured in pieces, and those pieces have to be within extremely tight tolerances, often less than a hundredth of a millimeter to maintain a constant affirmative seal. While they do wear with time and use, that is usually a secondary cause of replacement after tiberium contamination begins to eat away at the armor. The London facility will need to work hard to refit the production lines in order to make schedule, with the tens of thousands of zone suits needed in the immediate future, between GDI's expensive offensives into the deeper red zones, and the overall program to transition infantry forces into more armored formations.
Ahh. Delay in the output starting because the line's initial products aren't ready.

Between the political situation, the potential of a series of new technologies that are currently being researched to completely upend the class, and the limited number of missions that it is planned to undertake, the Navy has slated no more than 18 of the class be built, spread out over the escort carrier yards.
Ahh, so they won't need a fundamentally new set of yards. Though this might inspire the Navy to ask for one more escort carrier yard, just so the overall fleet deployment can be done in roughly the same timeframe. I wouldn't mind giving them one.

About as effective when untuned as the Shimmer shield is tuned, it is likely to be a substantial survivability upgrade as soon as GDI is able to roll it out in significant ways. It is also significantly stronger tuned, with the Initiative able to get between 25 and 35 percent degradation of laser pulses against such shield modules in testing. However the real benefit is actually in mating the Sparkle module with the Firestorm Barrier.

The Firestorm is a plasma field, shaped and molded, while the Sparkle shield is two sided, with protection on both ends. Mating together a Firestorm and a Sparkle module significantly decreases the energy needs of the Firestorm system and significantly increases the defensive capacity of the shield. In effect it stresses the shield to the point where it becomes brittle, stopping attacks until it has received sufficient disruption, at which point it 'pops.' With extremely high speed cameras, at between 900,000 and 1,000,000 frames per second, the shield peels apart, like an inflated balloon being punctured. While it can't stop everything, it can reliably take a shot from a Third Tiberium War era Scorpion's primary gun in early testing. However, when the shield is destabilized, it takes a complicated and extended process to reset and reboot the system.
Ooooh, nice. This lines up with the Firestorm barrier. Good to know. Although it sounds like it's gonna take a lot of testing before it's viable against 'proper' modern antitank weapons, since a 2040s-era Scorpion's standard gun isn't a very impressive weapon.

At this point, expanding the OSRCT formations will require a combination of multiple factors, namely, increased orbital manufacturing and resourcing, orbital habitation for specialists, families, and other support staff, and greater mobility, including potentially using ships for deployments rather than stations, as they can provide more and better angles of approach.
So we may see more in the future- but not right away. As suspected.
 
[x] Complete the Plants
 
Between the political situation, the potential of a series of new technologies that are currently being researched to completely upend the class, and the limited number of missions that it is planned to undertake, the Navy has slated no more than 18 of the class be built, spread out over the escort carrier yards.
Wait wait wait. Do i have this right? Does this mean we don't need to build new shipyards. That our existing ones can cover their construction?

Has, has Kane grown hair?

[X] Complete the Plants
Peace through power brother. Peace through power.
Halo style plasma shields
Huh, just realized that in any C&C/Halo cross, tiberium will have completely erased all traces of the Forerunners from Earth. Huh.
 
But should finish off these plants since, yanno, we got them. And them 'being a weak point for Nod to exploit' doesn't super make sense.
Well, the trick is that the plants are being installed in locations maximally remote from Nod and not-strategically critical first. The closer they are to Nod, the easier they are to hit. And Nod has incentives to hit them, because they cause much more damage to the surrounding area than a fusion plant would, and probably more than even our old-school nuclear plants would given that said plants aren't designed like so many Chernobyls.

Now, Nod's unlikely to bother with the worst case of catalyst missiles chucked at the plants, because Kane seems to keep those under tight control, plus also a catalyst missile on one of those would be broadly like hitting it with a nuke, and Nod has plenty of those anyway.

But given that they contain assorted hell-brews of fuel-air-tiberium and mutagenic tiberium-based compounds as waste products... Yeah, there's a lot of room for fuckery.

What BotCommander acquired for us with those models of various GDI units.
Nice... but no idea what it means. :p

[] Complete the Plants

For that extra room, so we can get the best possible CCF Generational improvement
Honestly, I think we have that pretty well locked in anyway. The short-list stuff we had on the menu for improved fusion was Bergen for superconductors (and we've massively expanded capacity, with the ability to produce more if we need to) and Sparkle Shields (which we just developed).

The other listed items were the Advanced Materials Bay, which we skipped as an option so it won't be around for the foreseeable future, and Helium-3 Mining, which will become possible at some indefinite future time but isn't necessarily something we should sit around waiting for, especially since it'll compete for Orbital dice with other projects.

So we're actually all set for Improved Fusion; the only reason not to pursue it in 2062Q1 is that it's an expensive project per die and we won't have much incentive or capacity to build new fusion plants in 2062Q2 anyway, no matter how good they are.

This was beautiful.

Truly, the humanitarian principles of the GDI reaches ever further across the Earth and beyond.
Honestly, how would you even tell if a visceroid has a genetic disease? Too relaxed, chill, and generally non-monstrous?

I notice a little cyan dot in Stahl's territory.
Oh?

Well good for the magnificent bastard, then. Sounds like he took Kane's "continue your good work" as a direct order to emulate the work he'd actually praised.

Frankly, we need the power, and I want an ability to experiment with it further.
InOps: "Drop your weapon and step away from the taco cart."
 
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