The hope here is that we're investing in something that's likely to bear fruit 15-20 years from now or some such, when we operate under different constraints and in a different context. But that tech won't get developed if we don't push it; the sheer scale and costs involved make it obvious that this won't happen without major Treasury funding to the tone of a "moonshot," "at least a few percent of GDP" expenditure of civilizational effort.
Why didn't the Visitors do that back during the Third Tiberium War, then? Why did they have to send Drone Platforms to build bases instead of simply teleporting buildings (or units, for that matter) to the desired destination? Why did they even need to approach the Earth normally through space instead of teleporting directly down to the surface? All available evidence indicates that even for the Visitors, who are vastly and incomprehensibly more advanced in the field of portals than GDI or Nod, doing this sort of strategic-scale one-sided teleportation is not trivial, and the specific application you are describing is a capability that has literally never been demonstrated by *anyone* that we know of in-setting. I see no reason to believe that GDI or Nod could suddenly achieve what the Visitors could not in an infinitesimal fraction of the time that the Visitors have been working with portals.I mean I'm not trying to sound like a dick but if people invest into portals why would we do any defensive focuses going forward or invest into navy or anything else like that which is mainly slow or static in nature, because it has to be assumed that as soon as we get portals NOD does too. To do any defensive options taken, all the work on strategic area defenses, walls, military bastions, orbital nuclear caches, land based nuclear caches, satellite weapons, etc would become useless as NOD would be able to take them out in wave one without even having to put forward effort of using stealth strike teams or large scale offensives. It'd just become a game of build portal facility, send bombs through to destroy cities and infrastructure or maybe strike teams through to find intel on enemy portal facility, bomb portal facility, have portal facility bombed, repeat
Tl;dr; not how portals work, not something Nod can do either. Even our current state-of-the-art portals are shitty as fuck, energy hogs, require substantial portions of GDIs entire GDP, which is far bigger than Nods, and are tied to specific locations, not a free-positioning one-end-only deal. By the time Portals are actually advanced and Nod could have possibly both stolen them and acquired the necessary resources, this conflict is almost certain to be over.One major thing that makes me want to destroy all traces of the portals and not invest a single turn in them is that they threaten our greatest advantage over NOD and if we restore one and the knowledge of how to do it or god forbid the knowledge of how to do portals with human tech leaks, and it would eventually, we lose all orbital and defensive depth we have acquired due to the fact that NOD can not just bomb any of our facilities, space stations or other critical nodes but NOD would most importantly be able to escape the earth and become a truly untraceable or containable threat.
They could set up bases on any planet in the system or even hollow out asteroids in the belt and start launching them at us, god forbid if they pull a Marco Inaros and start attaching stealth coatings and shielding to asteroids and micro meteorites.
The portals might help us streamline logistics in setting up off world or high orbit production but the risks of it falling into enemy hands far out weigh the benefits i feel.
I mean I'm not trying to sound like a dick but if people invest into portals why would we do any defensive focuses going forward or invest into navy or anything else like that which is mainly slow or static in nature, because it has to be assumed that as soon as we get portals NOD does too. To do any defensive options taken, all the work on strategic area defenses, walls, military bastions, orbital nuclear caches, land based nuclear caches, satellite weapons, etc would become useless as NOD would be able to take them out in wave one without even having to put forward effort of using stealth strike teams or large scale offensives. It'd just become a game of build portal facility, send bombs through to destroy cities and infrastructure or maybe strike teams through to find intel on enemy portal facility, bomb portal facility, have portal facility bombed, repeat
I don't know why you think that, this is a blacksite project far as I remember. Nobody that doesn't need to know this is being worked on should know it's being worked on. The public will know about it when GDI as an institution can do something with it.But in all seriousness, I think this is the sort of big ticket game changer that's going to really firm up confidence in what GDI as a government is doing about the looming end of the world when the times come. People are scared now that the public is aware the end of the world is coming, and that's not going to go away on its own over time just because the clock is quietly ticking down- not when GDI is publicly treating the threat of Tiberium at least on par with the threat of NOD. It may take years and years to reach a point where GDI can fully exploit the portal tech in a public way, but that just means as the outlook gets darker we can start delivering on a revolutionary solution.
What part about 'years and years to reach a point where we can exploit this technology in a public way' was unclear? That's my entire point, the public is going to rapidly learn about it the moment we can do something meaningful with it because hiding logistical infrastructure is much easier said than done.I don't know why you think that, this is a blacksite project far as I remember. Nobody that doesn't need to know this is being worked on should know it's being worked on. The public will know about it when GDI as an institution can do something with it.
This is baseless hysteria.One major thing that makes me want to destroy all traces of the portals and not invest a single turn in them is that they threaten our greatest advantage over NOD and if we restore one and the knowledge of how to do it or god forbid the knowledge of how to do portals with human tech leaks, and it would eventually, we lose all orbital and defensive depth we have acquired due to the fact that NOD can not just bomb any of our facilities, space stations or other critical nodes but NOD would most importantly be able to escape the earth and become a truly untraceable or containable threat.
They could set up bases on any planet in the system or even hollow out asteroids in the belt and start launching them at us, god forbid if they pull a Marco Inaros and start attaching stealth coatings and shielding to asteroids and micro meteorites.
The portals might help us streamline logistics in setting up off world or high orbit production but the risks of it falling into enemy hands far out weigh the benefits i feel.
I mean I'm not trying to sound like a dick but if people invest into portals why would we do any defensive focuses going forward or invest into navy or anything else like that which is mainly slow or static in nature, because it has to be assumed that as soon as we get portals NOD does too. To do any defensive options taken, all the work on strategic area defenses, walls, military bastions, orbital nuclear caches, land based nuclear caches, satellite weapons, etc would become useless as NOD would be able to take them out in wave one without even having to put forward effort of using stealth strike teams or large scale offensives. It'd just become a game of build portal facility, send bombs through to destroy cities and infrastructure or maybe strike teams through to find intel on enemy portal facility, bomb portal facility, have portal facility bombed, repeat
Because you also said "people are scared now". The entire point of doing something that shows we're working on solutions is that we can show them.To be able to present a new and radical solution down the road was the core point. We're not exactly going to be able to hide a space station that doesn't receive shipments from the ground but still winds up offloading cargo to translunar cargo ships which is probably going to be what the next phase after this one entails.
And I said they're only going to get more scared as things inexorably deteriorate. And I don't think there's a conventional solution around we could throw ourselves hard enough to reassure the populace that 'no, don't panic the world may explode but we'll get everyone out safe and sound'.Because you also said "people are scared now". The entire point of doing something that shows we're working on solutions is that we can show them.
That said, I seem to have misread your original post. And while I agree with the logic kinda, I still don't think it's worth 400R, kicking most of the other service projects out the window for a turn, and delaying Alloys another turn. One turn does not make a significant difference for Portals in the long run. The way dice are allocated here does seems to hurt some of our plan goals.
The one I put in bold seems to be a typo and should say Q4 2066 instead of Q4 2067. Especially since Q4 2067 shows up later on.Projected Fusion Power Plant Decommissioning
-3 Energy Q3 2063
-8 Energy Q1 2064
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q1 2065
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q4 2065
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q3 2066
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q4 2067
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q2 2067
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q3 2067
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q4 2067
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q2 2068
-16 Energy, +1 Labor Q4 2068
Consumer Goods: +226 (+5 per turn from Private Industry) (+3 per turn from sub-departments) (+2 per turn from perennials. -1 per turn Q1 2064) (Net +9 per turn)