Content warning: Effort Post. Take your time and come back to this if you don't have it right now. It will take some time to fully read.
A few reactions:
To start with, for the orbital housing: Columbia and Shala together are 4.75k population before bays, so the initial numbers were off. Add the Medium density housing bay, and that's 5.55k housing, leaving 14.45k left. We had to recalculate a fair number of things.
-Inferno Gel and a number of other projects were removed for various reasons, some Doylist, some more Watsonian.
-SSNs are a potential platform that may deploy drones, but it's not a drone tech. I don't believe designing them is not really all that likely to get us more underwater abatement - the design premises are just too different, and the whole use cases are also way too different. The only likely change would be due to an increase in secure territory.
-I think you're misunderstanding what effect the SoL realignment will have - businesses are likely mostly at full capacity, so they may change what sort of consumer goods they are making, but I don't see how that would allow them to make more than they already are. Transferring Capital Goods may, but not the realignment.
OK good to know on the housing, that is a non-answer, having the ability to build subs will open up options for building underwater harvesting down the line at the very least and I didn't say that the current corporations would in and of themselves be able to make more, I said that the larger the adjustment to the SoL the more of a green ligh it would be for the corporations to expand.
See the economy is an emergent property of three types of spending: microeconomics, economics and macroeconomics. Now the plain definitions of these that I am using here are in order: the economic decision making of individual economic entities (people or organisations), the general interactions of economic expenditures and the economic decision making of the entire system.
We're the ones in charge of the GDI system. We will most likely decide that it is now OK for individual economic entities to spend more. This means an increase in both economic expenditures and a larger demand for more options to make economic expenditures. This expanding demand will then be met by an expanding supply in the form of both more corporations being funded and us getting more civilian projects to complete which will come in the form of expansions to the old civilian projects and in new base supply projects.
I'm expecting the SOL realignment to be Large given what I've seen of the plans, so what are the knock-on effects we can expect from that?
Hopefully, it's enough to keep the Free Market Party from howling for our blood over the next few years, cause I'm expecting a whole lot of private employees are going to go into government when we finally exhaust the Labor pool.
That is not how that works. Tha larger the SoL adjustment the more the Free Market Party will be happy with us. That doesn't mean they will fully side with us because Free Markets are bad for militaries in multiple different ways and we will need to ban hammer them when they overreach which will leave them feeling salty.
As for the Labor pool? We are not exausting that. First off see
this effort post of mine on prosthetics and what they will do for our Labor pool. Then there are the drones, a
bit lot of history of drone improvements during this quest:
[X] Tiberium Algae Decontamination
The eradication of Tiberium algae in the aftermath of the Second Tiberium War was a major milestone in our war to retake the earth, and was a major lauding point for the future successes that the GDI would be able to accomplish. Unfortunately, this success story is now in ruins, with new growths detected in many of our major lakes and rivers. By focusing on water purification and wet-water harvesting systems, we can hopefully be able to boast once again that the GDI, and by extension humanity, still has a future on Earth. (Progress 537/400: 10 resources per die) (slightly contributes to plan goal)
In a massive shock labor operation, combining dredging, submarine harvesting, and bag netting of drifting algae pods, the waterborne forms of the xenoforming crystals have been beaten back around the world. With much of the labor being done by drone operations, there have been efficiencies discovered that were not during the interbellum. With fewer crews and much more effective collection methods, what had been expected to be a value neutral operation has actually been running a small surplus, something that has been a pleasant surprise given the limits of GDI's military response forces.
We started improving our drone tech with the Critical Success on Tiberium Algae Decontamination back in Q3 2051 that netted us some level of efficiencies that enabeled us to use more drones with less crew.
Then in Q2 2053 we did:
[ ] New Moscow Robotics Works
While chips are one of the most pressing crises, one of the other significant hurdles is the provision of robotic assemblies, ranging from waldoes and robotic arms, to Crab, Bee, and Elephant class construction drones. While construction gangs have become a common sight across the initiative, in more normal times, most of the work is handled by drones, assembling buildings under the direction of human foremen. While it will not reach full capacity without the output of more chip fabricators, replacing humans in construction will speed along many projects. (Progress 209/200: 20 resources per die) (++ Capital Goods)
Biomimetics is not a particularly new science. Leonardo Da Vinci attempted to build flying machines by studying bird wings for example. However, the term was not coined until 1969, by Otto Schmitt. Ranging from velcro to the shape of bullet trains, biomimicry can be found everywhere. However in few places is it more noticeable than the Crab and Elephant construction drones.
The former is built for large scale hauling and installation. Its left arm is a modular hardpoint, generally used for a rivet gun, welder assembly, or other fusing tool. Its right is a multi axis manipulator, to position the parts being fused together. Its broad back and six legs give it the capacity to carry loads stably at angles that human, or even tracked vehicles would struggle with, a great asset in places like the Himalayan Blue Zone, where even with decades of terracing, there are many steep mountainsides in the way of construction.
The latter is even heavier, typically used to haul large prefabricated sections around a construction site. With broad sides, the prefabricated section is carefully positioned, and then stabilized with the trunk, ready for other units to link it into position.
Far less biomimetic is the bee. A simple quadcopter design, the bee can either carry light loads, or cooperatively carry much larger ones. Primarily used in a support role, bees swarm around construction sites, delivering everything from rivet refills to water, to the construction units and people on site.
However, construction drones are actually the least important part of the construction at New Moscow. Far more important are the robotic arms that are used to assemble everything from cars to phones, to satellites. The continuing outflow of industrial components has brought many factories much closer to their rated productivity, replacing rooms of manual fitting with efficient high speed production lines, increasing both precision and rate of assembly.
some construction drones which we have been using ever since. Better drone networks here mean less people working the same construction yard which will be useful, but we may need to retrofit this factory before we get that bonus.
We skipped doing drones for about 5 years because everything was still mostly on fire and we were running against multiple clocks. We got back to drone tech in Q2 2058 with:
[ ] Automated Civilian Shipyards
With GDI's ever increasing need for shipping, production of cargo ships, the backbone of global logistics, must increase. A series of heavily automated shipyards will fill the gap, requiring substantial investments of capital goods, but able to produce ships far faster than human construction crews.
(Progress 139/250: 20 resources per die) (+9 Logistics, -1 Capital Goods, -4 Energy)
Ground has been broken on a number of civilian shipyards, including one at the Busan-Ulsan complex. These shipyards are building the already heavily automated (including a number of standardized evasion patterns) standard civilian cargo ship design. While so far progress has not reached a point where hulls can be cut, there are many steps before that point. Each ship, beyond the hull, is a series of standardized subassemblies. For example, standard containerized cargo ships, unpressurized liquid haulers, pressurized liquid haulers and passenger ships all share the same bridge assembly, only differentiated by its location on the ship, with the former two having the bridge at the stern, and the latter two at the bow. Similar principles apply to a number of other systems, such as lifeboat launch bays, accessways, and numerous other assemblies that apply to multiple classes of ship.
The serious developmental work has delayed a number of other projects, however this is one of the very highest priorities, not only to continue supplying GDI's many far flung outposts, but to maintain open lines of transport and redeployment around the world.
[ ] Wartime Factory Refits (Phase 1)
As a first critical phase of refits, there are the various specialist vehicles that GDI is not at this time looking to replace. Things like the RIGs, Firehawks, and MCVs are unlikely to make any significant changes in the near future. Simply by supplying marginally more capital goods and some relatively simple installations, major improvements in the availability of spare parts and actual fully functional vehicles can be made.
(Progress 60/60: 20 resources per die) (-1 Capital Goods)
(Progress 52/90: 20 resources per die) (-3 Capital Goods)
Under the current system, the Treasury has gone to great lengths to ensure that the military has enough supplies. During the collapsing global economy of the Third Tiberium War, the Treasury built dozens of factories, and more broadly massive investments into military readiness. While this did require significant triage, it was enough to keep the military in guns, shells, and most importantly vehicles and environmental equipment. However, it has required significant sacrifices, not only on the Treasury's part to ensure the flow of war material to the exclusion of civilian concerns, but also sacrifices in the altar of expediency, where 'what works' became the working ethos. Efficiency and quality control thresholds were lowered, and that had left indelible marks on the GDI war machine even after the war. Ones shown in the disparity between older Zone Armour factories and the newer ones that no longer needed to rely on hand-fitted armours.
Given how long the refit proposal had languished, the work itself has gone stunningly well. While the completion of the project this quarter was always expected with minimal interruptions, nobody expected the sheer efficiency gains made by the introduction of new automation systems. Perhaps it was a boon that advances to automation systems happened before the refit project was started. Due to GDI's diversification attempts in spreading factory sites, the spare parts flow much easier and easier to produce– with a great sum of the supply chain no longer backlogged waiting for one factory to finish the whole list. Due to other advances in myomers and iterations to modern material engineering, superior performance could be eked out with comparatively lesser cost than any electric hydraulic systems. All these, and more, led to a significant reduction in the estimated need for capital goods. And not only would this cost-savings impact the current phase, but also that of the hundreds of system refit proposals left to cover.Current progress is projected to have significant impacts on readiness. While standard equipment pools have had some supplies on standby ever since the Third Tiberium War, they have rarely been full, especially with the nearly constant aggression of the Granger administration. However, with this first phase of refits, core assets, especially the Firehawks, are reporting not only increasing readiness rates, but are projected to fill their standard stockpiles by the end of the year, and beyond that significant strategic stockpiles are expected to be formed, beginning in major hub cities in the Blue Zones and propagating forward to meet the front lines around the world.
[ ] Private Industrial Automation
Providing a steady supply of capital goods to the larger cooperatives should serve to increase private output substantially. While these cooperatives would be unlikely to free up labor in any significant amount, they would increase production as much as possible.
(-2 Capital Goods)
Beginning to supply the private sector with a steady stream of labor saving devices has led to noticeable restructings across the sector, with thousands being transferred to other jobs, and more broadly a general replacement and restructuring of the system as a whole. While this has increased the output of the private sector significantly, including a noticeable increase in taxes, the restructuring has widened the gaps between larger and smaller companies, creating a wealth gap in the workforce, and making it more difficult for small companies to compete. However, with the workforce problem, if not solved, put at bay for some time, more companies are being founded, and many new startups are filing for incorporation, a fifteen percent increase over the average for the program.
Automated Civilian Shipyards, the 1st Phase of Wartime Factory Refits and the start of giving Private Industry Capital Goods so they can Automate their production. In Q3 2058 we continued pushing only the Automated Civilian shipyards because as usual we had other things that needed to be done more at the time:
[ ] Automated Civilian Shipyards
With GDI's ever increasing need for shipping, production of cargo ships, the backbone of global logistics, must increase. A series of heavily automated shipyards will fill the gap, requiring substantial investments of capital goods, but able to produce ships far faster than human construction crews.
(Progress 353/250: 20 resources per die) (+9 Logistics, -1 Capital Goods, -4 Energy)
A modern cargo ship can operate with an extremely skeletonized crew. While technically speaking wholly unmanned ships are possible, current regulations call for a crew of no less than nine to twelve, and ideally fifteen operating in three shifts. All are conducting remote operations from a central command bridge in the ship's upper works. Typically, that is an officer, a helmsman, a signalman, an engineer and the fire director. However, most ships only run with a crew of nine, dropping the engineer and the fire director as they are considered to be less useful, especially with the limited capacity of either to affect ship systems. In the former case, the number of repairs, even with robotic assistance that can be conducted at sea are limited. Most things more complicated than patching holes as a form of rudimentary damage control, or doing basic repair tasks on the engines are simply too big and complicated for the skeleton crews of the Initiative to handle without assistance from a port, and port crews have far more support to work from in nearly every case. Similarly, the fire director can both be replaced to some degree by the officer, and has little to work with. While most cargo ships do carry a small handful of lightweight missiles and potentially a pair of short ranged point defense mounts, they simply cannot do more than take the hits in most cases.
The allocation to more shipyards, especially high output automated designs, is projected to hit a number of hard limits in the coming months and years. The closest one is actually port facilities. There is only so much that GDI can handle, even coming through its largest ports. Beyond that, there is only so much cargo that needs to be transported the long distances that cargo ships excel at. With the Initiative having fought multiple global wars that cut the vital sea lanes to nearly a dead stop, there has been massive effort expended to ensure that there is little cargo that actually needs to be carried long distances, much less than the increasingly globalized world of the late 20th century that the Initiative was founded to protect in any case.
which hit multiple roadblocks on being expanded more, but between the submarine development and deployment and the new drone networks we will be revisiting and expanding this Action at some point in the next plan at the latest.
We had other things to do for most of a year and the automation tech is improved once again in Q2 2059 with a bit of a curveball:
[ ] Integrated Cargo System
GDI has done a number of patchwork programs, ranging from civilian shipbuilding to rail, road and aircraft networks. However, a full integrated cargo system will bring previously unimaginable efficiencies to the cargo system. A combined system of shipping ports, rail lines, and aircraft can deliver anything, anywhere in the world with reasonable speed. While working within the political and physical realities of the post Third Tiberium War world means that it cannot work on the same efficiencies as the cargo systems of the late 20th century, it is as close as it is practical to get barring revolutionary new technologies.
(progress 307/800: 15 resources per die) (+18 Logistics, -2 Labor, -2 Energy, -2 Capital Goods)
[88, 19, 10, 45, 10]
Work on the ICS so far has been primarily theoretical. With GDI operating a global logistics network, there are thousands of potential pitfalls involved in such a radical restructuring. While local logistics are generally good enough, and in some places better than that, they are also relatively inefficient, with local planners and administrators often placing greater emphasis on keystone projects rather than the general needs of the population. In Boston for example, there are significant concessions made towards the North Boston Chip Fabricator, which creates turbulence for other needs and demands. Similarly in Helsinki, the C-35 factory has a direct route to the airport, a concession to the need to transport to a launching site, but one that is distinctly inefficient from both growth and traffic flow perspectives. This kind of problem is a result of insufficient communication between central and local planners, and the need for prompt resumption in economic growth after the war.
[ ] Advanced Electronic Video Assistant Development
With the Edinburgh EVA Research Centre working on improved models of the EVA units common across the Initiative, a potential improved model will increase the efficiency of general systems management, and will likely lead to significant advancements in combat and in the civilian sphere. (Progress 81/60: 20 resources per die)
[21]
Despite not having as much to work with as the Artificial Intelligence design groups, the EVA team has produced a significant step forward. While an iterative model on previous designs, it is noticeably faster, more capable, and includes a key new feature: an iterative learning heuristic. When paired with a person, a new model EVA adapts to their needs, their voice commands, and how they prefer to operate. Similarly, while most activities have mathematical optimization patterns, they can adapt to real world conditions on the fly, especially as they gather more information.
With the AI development team largely spinning their wheels waiting for more funding, several experts were borrowed from that team to help ensure that the increased adaptability will not result in these new EVAs "waking up". This has largely been fine-tuning of existing restrictions, and so should not impact the performance improvement. However, it is running a significantly more accepting risk profile than previous development plans.
Yes those both count as a form of automation. Just not drone tech. Fourth generation EVAs are noted as "something of a wet squib" in the fifth gen EVA Action description. In Q3 2059 we did do actual drone tech:
[ ] Integrated Cargo System
GDI has done a number of patchwork programs, ranging from civilian shipbuilding to rail, road and aircraft networks. However, a full integrated cargo system will bring previously unimaginable efficiencies to the cargo system. A combined system of shipping ports, rail lines, and aircraft can deliver anything, anywhere in the world with reasonable speed. While working within the political and physical realities of the post Third Tiberium War world means that it cannot work on the same efficiencies as the cargo systems of the late 20th century, it is as close as it is practical to get barring revolutionary new technologies.
(progress 695/800: 15 resources per die) (+18 Logistics, -2 Labor, -2 Energy, -2 Capital Goods) [16, 89, 28, 47, 68]
The ICS program is now in full swing, with the primary computing systems already linked together. However, the physical side is significantly more problematic. While most of the vehicular accomodations pertaining land and air transports have been settled, the seaborne infrastructure have not. Paradoxically, smoothening the cargo systems meant that the docks and ports of the GDI, already a key bottleneck, needed to operate at a higher efficiency. Though refurbishment of the dockyards have been made a priority since the rebuilding process, they were meant for the compromised and expedient systems. As a result, a final surge of funding would be needed to develop additional docking slips, linkages to land and air networks, and in general allowing for greater surge capacity in the coming war.
Strategically, this has become of the highest priority for many organizations outside the Treasury. While politics have been slow to move, the military sees this as a strategic necessity, as it will place severe demands on the Initiative's logistical system to redeploy troops from secured locations onto battlefronts around the world, and supply them with the masses of equipment needed to prosecute the war to come.
[ ] Early Prototype General Artificial Intelligence Development
While development of true artificial intelligences is politically severely problematic, it is also an area where if a model can be developed that is sane, stable, and willing to help the Initiative, it could be a revolutionary breakthrough in many ways.
(Progress 187/120: 20 resources per die) (-10 PS) (Quality: 32, 7, 27) [93]
The AI produced, named Erewhon, after one of the first conceptualizations of what could be called AI, has been a grand disappointment to the Treasury. Error ridden, depressed, and fundamentally broken in numerous ways, it is surprisingly adorable. Simply put, it is incapable of producing useful work, and is miserable enough to not want to.
While there will be attempts, and further funding, going towards stabilizing and improving Erewhon, it is likely that there will not be another attempt towards producing an AI until GDI has improved its computational infrastructure, either with the completion of the experimental branch of North Boston, or future developmental projects.
Looking more broadly at the theory of AI development, Initiative scientists believe that there are three main ways to produce an Artificial Intelligence. First is what could be termed wet or biologically derived artificial intelligence. With CABAL as an example, this can be produced by rigging together groups of human (or in theory other animal) brains. However, this is also theoretically possible to do with an artificially produced substrate. Second is Emergent Artificial Intelligence, with the rampant EVAs being a prime example. While they were unstable, they were clearly intelligences, and emerged without any intentional development from GDI. Third and finally is Erewhon's type, an intentionally shaped artificial intelligence built from the ground up to be one.
[ ] Wartime Factory Refits (Phase 3)
A third phase of refits begins to allocate resources towards rationalizing and standardizing the massed bulk of GDI's equipment. Units like the Predator, Guardian, and other hardware that GDI is using in large quantities but is also beginning to look towards replacing.
(Progress 100/100: 20 resources per die) (-4 Capital Goods) (+1 Energy)
(Progress 103/100: 20 resources per die) (-4 Capital Goods) (+1 Energy) (+1d2 Military Dice) (+1 Military die) [44, 23, 58]
Nearly a decade after the end of the Third Tiberium War, the final waves of factory consolidations and shutdowns have swept across the Initiative.The two main production systems, the piece de resistance of the refits, featured the venerable Predator Tanks and the Guardian IFV. Of the former, more than a dozen factories were rushed into existence during the onset of the Third War and seven more had been created to produce Predators in the interbellum. Neither are on par with the standards of a rebuilt Initiative or the passing of nearly three decades, respectively. Consolidated and joined together into a set of ten factories all over the world, these factories now enjoy the benefits of the latest in automation development.
At the same time, the refurbishment of the Guardian factories was underway. Though larger berth patterns have yet to emerge to accommodate Zone Armor integration, the work here is even more vital. In the wake of the Northern Campaign and the proving of the Home Guards, the APCs are more necessary to provide commensurate protection to the less experienced yet no less motivated formations. For that, over twenty factories are retrofitted to take as much advantage of a Tiberium-based world as possible, where metal is a thousand fold cheaper than any single soul within. And as the result, a tidal wave of Guardians now rolls out of the factories, with plenty to spare, stocked all around Fortress Cities and Green Zone choke points, ready to replace combat attrition in a pace comparable to the worst fighting of the Third Tiberium War, at least for a time. Some commanders have in fact used the opportunity to use the surplus for evacuation exercises, stress testing the vehicles in ways that normally couldn't be done.
More than that, the entire refit affair had freed a millstone around the Treasury's neck. Streamlined production, increased though the rate has become, had wrung free long occupied administrative capabilities, allowing the Treasury more capacity to coordinate efforts in building the warmachines of the Initiative.
By both finishing off the Wartime Factory Refits while building/programming/awakening Erewhon. We also continued to work on the Integrated Cargo System.
Then in Q4 2059 we:
[ ] Integrated Cargo System
GDI has done a number of patchwork programs, ranging from civilian shipbuilding to rail, road and aircraft networks. However, a full integrated cargo system will bring previously unimaginable efficiencies to the cargo system. A combined system of cargo ports, rail lines, and aircraft can deliver anything, anywhere in the world with reasonable speed. While working within the political and physical realities of the post Third Tiberium War world means that it cannot work on the same efficiencies as the cargo systems of the late 20th century, it is as close as it is practical to get barring revolutionary new technologies.
(progress 935/800: 15 resources per die) (+18 Logistics, -2 Labor, -2 Energy, -2 Capital Goods) [96, 78]
A final surge of development on the ICS network, primarily in the shipyards has left GDI in an enviable position. Today, even if there are significant losses to commerce raiding, blockade, or other Brotherhood activity, it should be able to be routed around if the Navy is unable to solve the problem. Additionally, it has cut the number of direct routes substantially. Instead of, for example, shipping computer chips from Manchester to Monrovia, it is instead likely to be shipped coastally, to Brest, and then in a convoy to Monrovia, and from there, take a load of supplies across the Atlantic to the South American Tiberium Mines, and from there, up and back to Europe, avoiding the southern coast of North America as much as possible. While there are some direct routes, most notably the ones to service GDI's Gulf Coast assets, they are a relative rarity in the rationalized systems.
Much of the practical work has been in expanding port facilities. While the sum total of the tonnage passing through GDI's network is more than an order of magnitude less than the peak of international shipping in the early 21st century, it is still substantial, and much of the world's port facilities have been lost to rust and ruin, mostly in the late 2020s and early 2030s. Today, most modern port facilities are relatively small niches, carved out of the rusting hulks of the old system. However, with the ICS expansions, many ports boast new wharves, new cranes, and new resources to move goods off of ships and onto waiting trucks and trains.
[ ] Neural Interface System Development
Pioneered by GDI's Firehawk program and the Brotherhood of Nod's Purifier, neural interface is not precisely a new technology, however, the Talons are taking another crack at developing a variant that is cheap, noninvasive, and flexible, hopefully cutting crew requirements by enhancing situational awareness and intuitive control schemes.
(Progress 113/60: 25 resources per die) [83]
Broadly speaking there are four ways to handle neural interfaces, at least in theory. Read Only and Read/Write on one axis, and hard and soft interface on the other. On the first axis, there is read only. Read Only is the simplest approach. Using relatively simple technology and an EVA unit, a pilot can activate a series of features of their aircraft. Read/Write on the other hand is substantially more complicated. In essence it is a form of induced synthanasia. While each pilot is unique, most describe tasting almonds when they have expended their missile ammunition. Similarly, damage is often felt as either heat or cold, more often the former.
The other axis is hard versus soft interface. Hard interface is by far the more invasive. Implants along or even inside a person's brain can allow for detailed rapid read and write features. However, as seen with the pilots of the Purifier and Avatar, it can have severe consequences, including emotional deadening, damage to risk assessment capabilities, hormonal imbalances, and in the long term a series of neurological issues, including what could be called phantom mech syndrome, where a person feels like they are controlling their vehicle even when they are not in it. Soft on the other hand is far more favored by the Initiative. Rather than directly sticking an implant into the brain or the brainstem, soft interfaces are all built into the helmet, and leave the pilot with no obvious signs of implantation. While it does have its drawbacks, both short and long term, it is far less damaging than even a competently done hard interface.
The Firehawk and the new model design are both soft read/write systems. However, the Firehawk's version is far more capable. With both read and write functions, and a dedicated EVA assistant to ensure full control, it is a substantially costly endeavor to build. The Talons have been able to cut significant swathes of that, producing a helmet that, while bulky, and only allows an approximately 170 degree turning angle, is massively cheaper to produce and maintain. The new model is primarily built as a write platform, specifically to impart a kinesthetic sense to the wearer. While it does have read functionality, it is limited to a handful of commands, primarily built around the weapons systems, effectively a look and shoot functionality.
"Captain Inazuri's taken to the new interface like a duck to water-our ace hardly even uses her triggers anymore. She says that her husband's bro squad have given her plenty of practice at channeling 'killing intent' to get them to clear out after a night of beers. Should I be worried for the Lt?"
We finished the Integrated Cargo System, which we may need to refit if the drone networks and the new rail lines prove disruptive enough, and developed the better Neural Interface System which has already been paying dividends in drone tech.
The Regency War started in Q1 2060 and we shat out two Phases of Nuuk:
[ ] Nuuk Heavy Robotics Foundry (Phase 1)
GDI needs ever more heavy robots, and ever greater supplies of automation. With projects in the Red Zones, and potentially underground mines, the current construction yards and systems are completely insufficient. Nuuk is planned to be the largest existing robotics construction work. While it will be expensive, it will also provide masses of capital goods.
(Progress 160/160: 20 resources per die)(-1 Labor)
(Progress 320/320: 20 resources per die)(+4 Capital Goods, -2 Labor, -4 Energy)
(Progress 118/640: 20 resources per die)(+16 Capital Goods, -2 Labor, -8 Energy)(Nat 100) [9, 81, 99, 31, 100, 71, 4]
Massive resources have been poured into erecting a vast robotics plant. Nicknamed Santa's Workshop by some of the more spiritually inclined members of the team, it is a testament to GDI's ability to mechanize construction work. What could not be done by man and muscle, can be done with swarms of robots, and in some ways has produced a von Neumann machine. Robots, fresh off the assembly line, poured back into building the facilities. Assembly drones, construction units, diggers. And then there are the thousands upon thousands of robots that do not move, Computer Numerically Controlled units, assembly arms, the paraphernalia of modern industrial society, all pouring out of the assembly bays at Nuuk.
The port has seen multiple fully loaded cargo ships a day in throughput, straining it to the maximum, and the roads from the port to the site are a procession of crawling beetles, an ant line writ gargantuan as truck after truck hauls components and parts to construct the facility. With local tiberium sources being few and far between, a result of the northerly latitudes and the region never having much Tiberium contamination, it has also had to ship in massive quantities of material, an inconvenience, but not a significant one, especially due to its location, midway on the North Atlantic loop, meaning that ships from both Europe and North America can make stops there without too significant a diversion from a best speed course.
The exigencies of war have also created certain breakthroughs in efficiency. While the project has been pouring resources into a hole in a mad dash for speed, its architects do realize that this is not by any means sustainable, and have continued work on high efficiency large scale use of drones,
[ ] Reykjavik Myomer Macrospinner (Phase 4)
Further expansion of the Reykjavik Macrospinner is going to focus on heavy myomer bundles, which are keys to mass production of modern zone armor and mech projects as they provide highly efficient mobility options.
(Progress 378/640: 20 resources per die)(+4 Capital Goods, +2 Energy) [20, 46, 12, 84, 76]
The Reykjavik macrospinner has seen major further investment this quarter, as a secondary source of critical capital goods. Take, for example, the Pattern 2027 six axis light and ultralight pneumatic robotic arm variants. A marginal improvement over the pattern 2016 robotic arms, it was a standard element in numerous assembly lines across the Initiative, including both military and civilian assembly units. It is also nearing retirement as the Initiative pushes more modern myomer based arms to more factories, cutting maintenance downtime requirements while at the same time increasing speed, and in some cases, reducing the number of arms needed at any given factory for expected throughputs. The Pattern 2027s are not the only ones reaching end of life, with the Pattern 2031 Heavy six axis arm reaching the same point, with only two years expected before it is completely phased out.
The industrial sites allocated to the maintenance and upkeep of the Initiative's Pattern 2027 and 2031 are unlikely to be simply retired. Rather they are likely to be auctioned off to the private sector, as, while they are no longer useful to the Initiative proper, they are still robotic assembly arms, and they can still be useful to the private market.
[ ] Neural Interfaced Operating Theater Development
Advances in neuro helmets make it possible to improve upon current generation remote controlled operating theaters by permitting greater precision with the equipment. Rather than reading the inputs from gloves, buttons and joysticks, the neuro helmet will permit the machinery to read the intent of the surgeon and cut only what needs to be cut without needing to risk delays by the microtremor suppressing algorithms.
(Progress 95/80: 20 resources per die) [63]
Automatic support for a surgeon is not exactly a new idea. As long as GDI has been in existence there have been proposals for one form of systemic revision to how surgery is performed, and in some ways the modern surgical operating theater is very different from those of the early 20th century, including most surgeons wearing personalized heads up displays to aid them, and the widespread use of remote waldoes and other mechanisms to provide for improved control. However, a neural interfaced operating theater is a very different creature. Rather than manually inputting commands, the test theaters have the surgeon using mental commands to link together automatic and manual segments. So, in the case of doing stitches for example, the doctor manually starts the process, allows an automated program to conduct the vast majority of the stitch, and then concludes with their own skills. This system is likely to be fairly expensive to deploy, but that is the cost of breakthrough medical technologies.
[ ] Neural Interface System Refits (Talons)
The Talons have multiple mech programs that could make use of this system, however it does require an extensive rebuild of their interface systems. Doing so would however significantly improve their performance, both in battle and across terrain, along with hopefully making pilots less reckless with their Havoc knees and hips.
(Progress 83/105: 25 resources per die) [57, 29]
With the Steel Talons widely engaged in combat, and making full demands on their supply lines, slack has vanished from the system as full wartime production needs have effectively blocked off the upgrade, as the alternative would have been to fully stop production of the Havoc and Titan, especially painful right as the Havoc is finally coming into full production. Additionally, the neural interface itself is large and somewhat cumbersome to install, and if not properly shielded, can interfere with other control electronics, causing feedback that varies from annoying to potentially damaging. The factories could have completed the refits on their own, if they could have stopped production for a month in April to bring everything into compliance and iron out the kinks. This will not be happening, nor can anyone foresee an opening for such a stoppage soon. However, with more resources, the bugs can be flushed out of the installations by building a second, practice production line-and then replacing the existing one once the second one is ready to hit production targets. While inefficient, it is an inefficiency brought on by wartime needs, and a result of technological and political developments not always meshing particularly well.
while also developing operating theaters that use the neural interface and failing to refit the Steel Talons with them. Also the point where our myomer production start to affect automation tech as better and more precise robots can now begin to be built.
The shape of our current Labor saving project begins to take place in Q2 2060:
[ ] Tick Rapid Digger System Development (New)
The Tick Tank, one of the Brotherhood's more creative ideas among a long list of them, used rapid automated diggers to allow it to entrench rapidly, even in an open field. The same technologies are likely to be quite useful in rapid construction efforts, and speed the works of many infrastructure programs.
(Progress 52/40: 20 resources per die) [13]
The Tick tank was a particularly odd piece of Brotherhood hardware from the Second Tiberium War. From the Second World War onward, many tanks had various forms of either drop-down digging blades or attached components to allow themselves to go hull-down in any terrain. However, the Tick's version is fundamentally more complicated and ambitious. Rather than simply covering up the lower glacis, as most other systems attempted, the Tick's design was able to dig the tank into a position where it could fight with only its turret exposed.
To do this, the Tick had a deployable rotating drum cutter between the tracks, using a gearing system to connect that to the tracks. The system has always been a bit finicky, and could be unreliable. However, even when it worked poorly, a partial deployment was enough to cut an entrenchment for the tank to fight in.
The Initiative's version is substantially more reasonable. Rather than trying to dig a tank in, and make the sacrifices in internal space required, it is a set of cutting blades attached to a tractor, designed as a rapid enclosed trench digger, something that can be put into action without nearly as much preparation as other options.
[ ] Nuuk Heavy Robotics Foundry (Phase 3) (Updated)
With the initial production shock labored into existence, further development is predicated on massive investment and expansion of the project, laying massive production lines, and setting them in motion towards one of the largest projects ever envisioned by the Global Defense Initiative.
(Progress 352/600: 20 resources per die) (+16 Capital Goods, -2 Labor, -8 Energy) [87, 89]
Investment in Nuuk has been unfortunately reduced this quarter, as despite the need for a new wing of the facility almost as soon as the core complex was completed, the demands of the war are quite intensive.
The new wing, laid to the south of the core facility, is focused on heavy transport and construction robots. Behemoths, Crabs, and the other multi-terrain, multirole units, useful everywhere from the Himalayas to coastal construction, have not yet begun to roll out of the foundry, but shipload after shipload of myomer bundles have arrived to ensure that when the final stages are completed production can begin immediately.
Similarly, the new Tick series digger robots have had a production line of their own start construction. While initial production will be slow, with maybe a dozen units produced a month, the scalability is high, with up to six hundred a month at maximum production from the south wing of the facility.
Beyond the Nuuk project itself, there is the problem of the port facilities. As Nuuk was one of the destination cities during the evacuations of the 2030s, it has port facilities, and relatively good ones for a city of its size. However they are drastically insufficient for the massive demands about to be placed on them. Work is underway to add a half dozen new loading cranes, able to transfer some fifty containers an hour apiece between the quay and the cargo ships that will come in as part of the great northern route between the North American and European Blue Zones.
Currently, the building is still distinctly incomplete, with masses of equipment - ranging from heavy presses to build the casings, to wire extruders for the hundreds of kilometers of standard-gauge wiring it will consume with every day of operation - still being awaited for installation. While work is slated to continue at a rapid pace, it will need substantially more funding to reach production readiness quickly.
[ ] Isolinear Chip Development (New)
The Scrin-derived isolinear chip is a three-dimensional optical computer, built as a single unit, compacted down into something that can fit in the palm of one's hand. Even early versions make a modern computer look akin to the devices that put men on the moon, leaving the only real questions being scaling up production to effective levels.
(Progress 123/60: 40 resources per die) [89]
The term chip originates with the old English forcippian, "to pare away by cutting." Under this definition, the isolinear computer does not have chips, rather it has integrated, individually constructed optical circuitry. The core element is quartz -or in scientific terms, silicon oxides - deposited in cryptocrystalline layers before being fused into a single block, ready to operate as a complete computer. Acting to distort the light, serving as the millions upon millions of switches, are microimpurities, inserted into the structure as it is built from the bottom up. Current models are extremely crude compared to those in use by the Scrin. The first iteration of isolinear circuitry is 75mm long, 25mm wide, and about 5mm thick, with a further inert "tab" of 10mm on one end. While not yet quite capable of beating out the best the Initiative has to offer in terms of computing technology, it is substantially tougher, and vastly more compact.
One of the first beneficiaries has in fact been Erewhon. With its limited need for support, the first isolinear fabricator has been dedicated to its needs, and has started slowly replacing silicon and germanium with pieces of isolinear quartz. While this has not improved its overall stability, it does seem to have given it marginal improvements in its ability to conduct operations.
[ ] Neural-Interfaced Operating Theaters
While much of the funding for this can come from the welfare department, other parts, such as the capital goods required to set up these complex and highly technical rooms, will need to come from the Treasury, and the Services department.
(Progress 122/160: 20 resources per die) (+6 Health, -2 Capital Goods) [6, 62]
While the operating theaters themselves are complete, the system as a whole has run into a number of issues. To begin with, nearly all of the experts in neural interface training and the neural interfaces themselves are either military or (in far smaller numbers) Treasury staff. This has meant that the end users have had to rely on a very small cadre of technicians from the Treasury, especially when it comes to learning how to use the new system, and calibrating the machines. With neural interfaces, each brain is unique, and while it is not something where you need a different neurohelmet for each person, it is something where everyone needs to have their mental imprint and sensor settings on file in the computer, a process that takes a substantial amount of time to complete, as they need to go through every command possible with the system.
At the same time, there are problems on the medical side, specifically in the training allocations. With the medical system increasingly overstressed by waves of wounded and refugees, there are simply not enough practitioner hours to both provide care in an immediate sense and learn an entirely new system, even if that system was faster, cheaper, and substantially more efficient than traditional medical methodology.
[ ] Neural Interface System Refits (Talons)
The Talons have multiple mech programs that could make use of this system, however it does require an extensive rebuild of their interface systems. Doing so would however significantly improve their performance, both in battle and across terrain, along with hopefully making pilots less reckless with their Havoc knees and hips.
(Progress 170/105: 25 resources per die) [87]
As the production lines have finished their refits, the first neural interface systems have begun to hit field units. While so far only a marginal number have been deployed to the field, the units that have gotten the refits, mostly in the deeper Blue Zones, are quite happy with them. For one, they have begun requesting about half again as many units as previous copilots are now able to pilot a mech on their own. This is especially the case for Titan companies, as the integrated system now allows a mech to be adequately fought without a second person assisting. While there are still significant advantages to having a pair of operators, the Talons current thinking is that those best apply to the commanders rather than the rank and file. So, in the proposed system, a squadron of Titans would remain an eight man unit, but with six mechs instead of four, with the Commander and the Second operating in the rumble seat to manage the unit as a whole, while the pilot drives.
The other elements of the Steel Titans have their own praise, with the Havocs offering the most complaints, mostly of hip and knee pains. The Logistics department has noted that units equipped with the new neurohelmets are significantly less likely to require replacement hips and knees.
"Had a guy coming back from a long patrol in a Wolverine decide he was just gonna go to bed after reporting in. So he tried to walk into the CO's office and make his report, forgetting he was still in the Wolverine."
-Anonymous
As we're doing Phase 3 of Nuuk while also getting Tick drones developed and then integrated into Nuuk's production systems, developing Isolinear Chips which unlocks our Erewhon Die and deploying Neural Interfaces to our medical and military operating theaters. The military deployment is finished and tells us that the interfaces cut the needed personal to operate complex machinery at least in half.
Moving onto Q3 of 2060 we:
[ ] Nuuk Heavy Robotics Foundry (Phase 3) (Updated)
With the initial production shock labored into existence, further development is predicated on massive investment and expansion of the project, laying massive production lines, and setting them in motion towards one of the largest projects ever envisioned by the Global Defense Initiative.
(Progress 600/600: 20 resources per die) (+16 Capital Goods, -2 Labor, -8 Energy)
(Progress 143/1200: 20 resources per die) (+32 Capital Goods, -2 Labor, -8 Energy) (+1 to Infrastructure dice)
Further investment into the Nuuk complex has seen what is in effect a small city appear from nearly nothing, turning square kilometers of frozen wasteland into massive industrial blocks, many of them filled with machines producing more machines. While not a true Von Neumann system, it is close enough that GDI only needs to supply materials and plans, and it will effectively build itself.
Beyond the immediate project, significant efforts have begun going to making the complex far more self-sustaining, with a small chip fabricator beginning construction, alongside a myomer spinner, and other light and heavy industrial elements, integrating a vertical supply chain, and more importantly reducing the number of ships needing deadhead runs*. While the complex will always need shipping to make work, it is hoped that by increasing the amount of on hand production, that the import and export volumes can be much more balanced.
In terms of Erewhon's assistance, it has been a particularly good influence. While its error prone nature has limited what it can efficiently manage, it is a good worker, and popular with many of the crews, with many of its fleet getting unauthorized artwork added to them by workers in their off hours. While it has a tendency to work harder rather than smarter, and give often overly generous safety margins, those have been steadily reduced over the course of the quarter as it became more comfortable with its tools.
*In the context of shipping, a deadhead run is a run where a cargo ship or aircraft does not have a cargo to carry.
[ ] Neural-Interfaced Operating Theaters
While much of the funding for this can come from the welfare department, other parts, such as the capital goods required to set up these complex and highly technical rooms, will need to come from the Treasury, and the Services department.
(Progress 188/160: 20 resources per die) (+6 Health, -2 Capital Goods)
The deployment of the operating theaters with neural interfaces has already been a significant impact, allowing GDI to reallocate a large number of nurses from ICUs and surgical bays to more general purpose nursing affairs, including many of the health problems faced by the refugees, at least on a part time basis. While combat medicine staffs remain fully on duty, for much of the Initiative the problem comes less from acute dangers, and more from chronic health problems; and the same applies to many of the refugees – ranging from needing intensive vaccination regimens, to various early-stage Tiberium exposures, such as rock lung among others.
Additionally, these make adding robotic assistants even more useful, as a single medical professional can ride herd on a whole swarm of robots, in much the same way that construction crews often have robotic workforces many times more numerous than the number of humans on the worksite. Rather than needing to focus on a single patient, for most routine operations a significant portion of the time the patient can be handed off to a robot for all but the most specialized of work, giving doctors and surgeons more time to focus on other problems.
[ ] Automatic Medical Assistants (Updated)
GDI's medical system is extensive, however it is also significantly overworked. By supplying a number of automated assistants to conduct routine procedures the valuable manpower can be concentrated working on more important and skill based fields.
(Progress 101/300: 20 resources per die) (+5 Health, +4 Labor, -4 Capital Goods, -2 Energy)
The development project for Automatic Medical Assistants has been significantly diverted by the deployment of neural interfaces. Instead of being a simple bed or operating table with integrated tooling, sensors, and the like, it is now a mobile platform, designed to assist doctors, nurses and other medical professionals in their day to day operations.
The basic platform for the assistants is a two-meter-tall mushroom. At the base is a simple set of rubber tracks, providing a modicum of mobility – although it is by any standards slow-moving. However, this is in trade for having a very stable platform and the ability to turn on the spot. Around the perimeter of the tube-shaped trunk are a series of two dozen collapsing arms, and a series of compartments for storing (and sterilizing) various medical implements, with the core being a sizable battery pack to feed everything. Finally there is the saucer head, which is the basic platform for a wide array of sensors, and rotates independently of the body.
Functionally, these operate on a client system. A server rack in the hospital will provide centralized direction, while a RAM-centric memory bank on the machine itself will load directions as needed.
"While some may have found it entertaining, tampering with hospital computer systems and uploading a new voice pack to the robotic assistants is unacceptable. Not only could patients have been frightened, it shows a lack of respect for your co-workers and the hospital as a whole."
-notice in Cambridge Central hospital
"The kids loved it, and it was great for a laugh"
-scrawled beneath said notice
FIND A SENSE OF HUMOR, MEATBAG
-printed in block letters below the first comment
[ ] Wingman Drone Deployment (High Priority)
With the Wingman drones, GDI has begun to lay out a platform for a future of warfare, primarily built around pilot survivability, and preparing for a series of larger and more intensive aerial campaigns around the world.
- [ ] Firehawk Wingmen (Progress 215/450: 20 resources per die) (-1 Labor, -6 Energy, -2 Capital Goods)
The Firehawk Wingman program has made significant progress on airframe construction. While engines and avionics will be drawn from the broader Firehawk program, the airframe is a significant revision, with a set of completely redesigned canards and wings, due to a shifted center of mass. Without the titanium bathtub, life support, and pilot's seat near the nose, the center of mass shifted back about half a meter.
The biggest problem is the sheer number demanded. While the Apollo has been taking over an increasing number of air superiority missions, the Firehawk is still the general-purpose strike craft of the Initiative, the mainstay of its carrier fleet, and has been in production and service for over two decades at this point. Development started shortly after the end of the Second Tiberium War, as GDI's "Universal Orca" concept proved its limitations. With so many airframes, across such a wide array of formations, production will have to be rapid and massive, needing thousands of drones produced just to reach a meaningful number, in a very short span of time.
With the program far from ready to begin producing functional aircraft, significant further investment is needed. Although the critical moments of the war have likely already passed, and there are already noises about reconfiguring the project, completing some parts before others and beginning a small trickle of functional drones, rather than an immediate flood. While a potential option, currently those noises are little more than discontented militarist politicians wanting photo opportunities with new hardware.
finished Phase 3 of Nuuk and then stopped working on it all together until about now when we are contemplating starting work on it again.
We got a preview of how the next generation of Automation is going to work with Neural-Interfaced Operating Theaters finishing changing how Automatic Medical Assistants work and we started deploying the Wingmen Drones to our Firehawks which is where the effects of our Mil Drone Tech starts to be seen.
Our Drone Tech finally goes into a proper drive in Q4 2060 with:
[ ] Civilian Drone Factories
Civilian drones have a large number of potential uses, ranging from rapid delivery of goods, medicines, and simple recreation. While flying a drone is not the same as flying an actual aircraft, it has often been a popular sport, with drone races (both in stock and custom categories) being a fairly popular sport, especially for children.
(Progress 104/380: 10 resources per die) (+2 Logistics, +1 Health, +4 Consumer Goods) (-2 Energy) [80]
Civilian drones have been a site of contention for decades, with military authorities oftentimes hating the concept, especially as the Brotherhood of Nod has made good use of disposable drones for terrorist attacks. For a long time, the military has been primarily interested in deconflicting the extremely low altitudes, allowing for indiscriminate fire. However, in recent years, civilian pushback has reached a point where it is practical to begin mass producing a handful of known designs.
Beyond the politics, the civilian drones in the planning stages are primarily multirotor designs, effectively a massively scaled down version of the carryalls that have been popular for decades. While there are many requests for fixed wing drones for use in surveying, and a wide array of other fields, these are fundamentally more difficult, because the Brotherhood has a tendency to use very similar models as the basis for a lot of their attack drones. The largest are designed to carry a single intermodal container, the same that are mounted on trucks, trains, and ships. While they can't carry the heaviest of loads, and have a range measured in bare tens of kilometers, they are primarily acting as cranes, moving bulk supplies to otherwise inconvenient locations. Far more relevant are the smaller scale drones, primarily intended to carry small, high priority items, such as organs, medication, and similar.
As a key concession to the military environment, the drones will be fixed to semi-automated 'guide rails' for longer ranged flights, especially in urban environments. While this will congest the skies rapidly as drone fleets increase in size, it is a small concession, especially compared to the wide array of other demands proposed to maintain security – such as built-in hardware kill systems, power to weight ratio limitations that would have crippled the program from the get go, and a wide variety of other demands. While the drones are still going to be noticeably fatter, slower, and louder than they have to be, it does get the program off the ground, and with the security services potentially getting their hands on drone fleets of their own, there is quite a potential to remove these limitations in the future.
[ ] Automatic Medical Assistants (Updated)
GDI's medical system is extensive, however it is also significantly overworked. By supplying a number of automated assistants to conduct routine procedures the valuable manpower can be concentrated working on more important and skill based fields.
(Progress 302/300: 20 resources per die) (+5 Health, +4 Labor, -4 Capital Goods, -2 Energy) [28, 56, 26]
While the automatic medical assistants have noticeably freed up skilled medical labor, the primary impacts have been two-fold. First, cutting into the pool of less skilled labor needed by the staff, and in supporting many of the more routine activities. Nurses and doctors are already reporting lower stress levels, as the droids can take over portions of critical importance and of highly technical results.
In hospital work, there have often been traditions of twelve or even twenty four hour shifts. These, to be put bluntly, are incredibly stupid. After about ten hours of even light work, people start crossing the point of negative value produced – and for heavier or skilled work like nursing it is significantly shorter. With each nurse and most doctors working in conjunction with a swarm of robots however, there are rippling effects through the entire field, with more nurses available, more downtime, more ability to have everyone working shorter and easier shifts.
[ ] Wingman Drone Deployment (High Priority)
With the Wingman drones, GDI has begun to lay out a platform for a future of warfare, primarily built around pilot survivability, and preparing for a series of larger and more intensive aerial campaigns around the world.
- [ ] Firehawk Wingmen (Progress 454/450: 20 resources per die) (-1 Labor, -6 Energy, -2 Capital Goods) [74, 77, 10]
Firehawk wingman rollout has been a slow and painstaking process. With the first deliveries happening as effectively Christmas presents to their units, the Wingmen have only had bare days to make an impact. While any influence they have at this point is circumstantial, they have already begun forming a reputation as good luck charms, with the handful of Wingman drones dropping casualty rates on the missions they were assigned to by over a third. With priority going to squadrons also being issued the Infernium laser modules, this decrease in loss rate is primarily due to the pilots being better able to stand off from the main engagement, tossing in their wingmen instead. For the drones however, loss rates are high – higher than for standard pilots in fact.
Despite interface improvements, pilots are still complaining about unintuitive and slow controls. While some of this is simply learning time, it is also a matter of the control scheme on the Firehawk being decades old, and having limited amounts of spare space for additional displays and toggles.
In terms of timeline, the sheer number of Firehawk Wingmen needed is a fundamental problem. Even working flat out, it will be over a year before numbers rise to the point that they will begin making an impact in every theater. At this time the Navy, long in need of extra airborne firepower, (especially after the recent battles in the Pacific,) is getting priority, as the current Atlantis class aircraft carriers can trade two squadrons of Naval Firehawks for three of the new wingman squadrons, giving a noticeable increase in throw weight.
"The problem is logistics, at this point. We're looking at more missions, more fuel consumption, more missiles-we need more airfields and support as well, just to get enough physical slots to hold the damn things. Shipping the drones themselves is easy enough, but we also need to ship the weapons for them, and store enough bombs and missiles for surge missions while not also leaving enough munitions about for a NOD commando to easily blow a whole base sky high."
"It's a wonderful problem to have, mind you. You just have to complain about something."
- Armond Torres, Air Force Captain.
the start of deploying Civilian Drones while also having deployed the Medical Assistant and Firehawk Wingman Drones.
Q1 2061 sees:
[ ] Isolinear Chip Foundry Anadyr
With the Isolinear chip a reality, rather than a work of science fiction, GDI can begin substantial development of a prototype small scale chip fabricator. While it will be a massively expensive project, it is putting resources towards a new generation of computing technology that leaves all existing models in the dust.
(Progress 258/320: 50 resources per die) (+4 Capital Goods) (-2 Energy) [16, 99]
The isolinear chip foundry has been undergoing rapid construction. A constant stream of plasma containment chambers, crucibles, and sintering machines have entered the premises and await installation. Currently the core problem is training and calibration. There are only a few people who actually know how to operate the machines, as it is currently more of an art than a science, with many steps operating by feel and instinct as much as measurement. The formation of a bubble a mere millimeter across in the substrate can ruin a chip. Beyond that, figuring out all of the various elements that impact overall performance is still an ongoing process, with experiments being carried out at the site.
In the coming weeks, LRIP is expected to begin, with major expansions of production following that. One of the major bottlenecks on the isolinear chip performance is the need to shift between electronic and optical computing systems, as there are no peripherals designed to interface directly with the new systems, and the delays imposed by the need to translate between optical and electronic signals cuts significantly into the edge that the chips can provide. While improved and purpose built systems will come in time, that is a long term problem, and not hugely relevant to many of the mass data processing jobs that will be the primary purpose of the upcoming isolinear chips.
[ ] Agriculture Mechanization Projects (Phase 1)
While GDI's current agricultural methods are not particularly labor intensive, a widespread deployment of additional mechanization and statistical analysis should allow for the reduction in overall labor committed to the agricultural sector, and rapidly increase food production by a significant margin
(Progress 150/150: 15 resources per die) (+8 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods)
(Progress 26/250: 15 resources per die) (+12 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) [73, 55]
For most of human history, agricultural success was a function of the amount of manpower and horsepower that could be supplied. From the rolling Roman farms worked by enslaved labor, to incan networks of terraces, to the vast plantations full of sugarcane, rice, cotton, and the other luxuries of the colonial period, nearly every society of the past broke the land to their needs through the vast application of (not necessarily willing) manpower. Beyond that, animal labor was, in areas where there were appropriate animals, extremely widespread, between horse or oxen drawn plows and tillers, flour mills, and a hundred other devices, animals were a critical component of agriculture for the vast majority of human history.
It was not until the 19th century that chemical energy was added. While small one and two horsepower engines were not particularly uncommon by the tail end of the period, one of the most important inventions would not take shape until 1892, when the first tractor was invented.
In the modern day, nearly all of that experience is either pointless or counterproductive. There is no soil to be tilled, no field to plow, no need for sweeping sprinkler systems or, for that matter, a hundred other problems that machines were built to solve. Instead, it is a system of robotic arms, elevators, and cameras, all linked to a single control room. Entire cubic kilometers of production space per person, all automated from the planting to loading produce onto pallets and from there onto trucks.
the start of deploying the Isolinear Chips and the deployement of the first Phase of our Agriculture Mechanization Project which is improved by the Neural Links.
Drone tech keeps on rolling in Q2 2061 with:
[ ] Isolinear Chip Foundry Anadyr
With the Isolinear chip a reality, rather than a work of science fiction, GDI can begin substantial development of a prototype small scale chip fabricator. While it will be a massively expensive project, it is putting resources towards a new generation of computing technology that leaves all existing models in the dust.
(Progress 370/320: 50 resources per die) (+4 Capital Goods) (-2 Energy) [83]
An isolinear chip, or 'tab,' is a fundamentally different creature from any standard computer chip, and one that defies many common comparisons. A common comparison is that an isolinear chip that fits in the palm of one's hand is capable of as many parallel computations as an old style supercomputer cluster, if not the same total FLOP throughput. Notably, it achieves this functionality as a macroscopically homogeneous material, without requiring supporting hardware such as RAM, separate non-volatile memory, or a clock generator.
Right now, all production is going to critical implements and research laboratories. While they can be used elsewhere, it is a matter of needing to substantially scale up total production, and develop a set of peripherals that can actually allow a more average user to take full advantage of the enhanced capabilities. Beyond that, there is also a need for a more diverse range in sizes – between smaller scale devices, such as computation beads for things like smart optics and targeting computers, and larger scale systems such as battlefield data management, or server operations.
Beyond that, there has been some work on new programming languages. While a GDI-produced isochip certainly can run the various programming languages already in use – many of which hail from nearly a century ago, refined every step of the way – the current users believe that they can make substantially more efficient use by writing their own languages to optimize for the hardware, taking already fast computing potential and speeding it up even more.
[ ] Civilian Drone Factories
Civilian drones have a large number of potential uses, ranging from rapid delivery of goods and medicines, to simple recreation. While flying a drone is not the same as flying an actual aircraft, it has often been a popular sport, with drone races (both in stock and custom categories) being a fairly popular sport, especially for children.
(Progress 292/380: 10 resources per die) (+2 Logistics, +1 Health, +4 Consumer Goods) (-2 Energy) [6, 88, 22]
Progress was made, and the security services' opposition has continued on the civilian drone program. While the systems are increasingly in place and readying to begin serial production, there are still significant questions to be answered about the broad scale use of drones. The constant debate has remained between the advantages that drones can offer GDI, and the desire of the military and security services to keep GDI's skies clear so that they can treat any incoming unmanned flier as a legitimate target.
Beyond the ongoing political conflict, drone factories are complicated. While the small size and limited sophistication makes some drone components amazingly cheap, such as small scale rotors that can be simple molded or even extruded polymer, others are complicated to begin with, like the medium and high performance electric engines used across the fleet. For most of these, they are relying on various forms of geared engine, as electric motors are at their most efficient and have the highest torque at low rotations per minute; and so using a series of stepper gears to spin rotors is oftentimes more efficient than direct drive, even with energy losses at each step.
the deployment of the Isolinear Chips in experimental condition and the continued deploying of the Civilian Drones which we completed in Q4 2061:
[ ] Civilian Drone Factories
Civilian drones have a large number of potential uses, ranging from rapid delivery of goods and medicines, to simple recreation. While flying a drone is not the same as flying an actual aircraft, it has often been a popular sport, with drone races (both in stock and custom categories) being a fairly popular sport, especially for children.
(Progress 394/380: 10 resources per die) (+2 Logistics, +1 Health, +4 Consumer Goods) (-2 Energy) [78]
With the security state's concerns somewhat mollified, GDI's use of airborne drones has been significantly expanded. With the list of authorized users being actually quite short (at least for now), the Initiative is expected to have little need for new factories on an immediate scale. However in the longer term, drones – both individually and in EVA-controlled drone swarms – are likely to make up an increasingly sizable percentage of GDI's civil operations, with flights significantly expanding the amount of volume that can be used for the last mile deliveries. While those security concerns do mean that it will not be particularly revolutionary, that is something where funding and attention to their concerns will likely be able to slacken their opposition to certain parts of the program.
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. Others however have effectively dismissed their effectiveness, seeing them as a novelty item that cannot match manned aviation in safety, or responsiveness.
Q1 of 2062 was a real shot in the arm for our drone tech:
[ ] Isolinear Peripherals Development
While Isolinear computers are fast, the human/machine interface, and the interfaces between isolinear and more traditional computers are very slow and currently have to be custom-fitted in most cases. Developing a standard array of systems to allow the computers to effectively talk to humans and each other is an important part of making Isolinear computing practical for the modern age.
(Progress 202/160: 10 resources per die) [Natural 100, 46]
Not long into the quarter, the team working on the isolinear peripherals got a rude shock. They had already laid out and gotten approval for finalization of their design when they received word from the Treasury that the isolinear programming team also got their project funded and they had done what they thought impossible in making a highly viable language to use.
All of the features that were envisioned to be part of the peripherals to interface and make the most of the new tech were no longer necessary. All of it could be run right on the isolinear chip.
Except for one thing. Communicating between conventional devices and the isolinear computer. This one bottleneck would make or break it in the future, advanced xenotech or not. If it can't reach a certain level of data transmission, the whole point would be wasted. Previous attempts to input and output data from isolinear computers have relied on kludged together, custom built, multi stage interfaces between a conventional silicon based computer, and an alien isolinear one.
So the team got to work and when they finished, they came out with something deceptive. A modified GPU, set into a housing meant to encapsulate the isolinear chip, and meant to do one thing in massively parallel processes. Transmit data to and from the isolinear computer. Ironically, by simplifying the design, the peripherals turned out far better than expected from their original design brief, and while the new peripheral chips do have some flaws, such as excessive heat and a bulky design, an isolinear computer using the new peripheral outperforms anything of equivalent size using conventional technology by a significant margin. This, fundamentally, makes the entire process radically simpler, as rather than needing to reinvent every piece of computer auxiliary hardware from scratch, conventional auxiliaries can continue in use, with isolinear converters simply added on.
[ ] Advanced Electronic Video Assistant Deployment
The Advanced EVA system will need substantial pools of computer supplies for deployment, but should substantially improve the overall output of the Initiative. It will also require significant assistance from the field, which makes it somewhat problematic for immediate deployment beyond the need for capital goods.
-[ ] Orbital (Progress 280/200: 20 resources per die) (+3 to field dice) (-4 Capital Goods, -3 Energy) (Locks 1 field die until project is complete) [47, 85, 55]
The AEVA units dispatched to the orbitals have been assigned in a wide variety of roles, most prominently, traffic control. Axiomatically, hitting things in space is hard, and in most of space, that is distinctly accurate. For example, even with all of the mass being shuttled back and forth between the Earth's orbitals and the Moon's ground side mining stations, it averages out to being just a small handful of atoms more per cubic meter. However, looking at a smaller space, things become significantly more challenging.
Take a hundred kilometer radius around GDSS Enterprise for example. Navigation is a challenge, between bringing shuttles in from Earth with spare parts, bringing Lunar shuttles in with raw ore, bringing personnel shuttles in from the other stations, maintenance shuttles coming in from doing work on one satellite or another, and then giving all of them routes out as well. This is a complicated dance of thrust vectors, acceleration profiles, and safety margins, with a trio of AEVAs as its conductors. Named Katherine, Mary, and Dorothy, they operate as a team, Katherine managing approaching craft. Mary the docking craft and the near Enterprise vicinity, and Dorothy handling departures. There are other counterparts, with the Moon having one AEVA to manage landing pads, as well as Philadelphia having its own trio. Beyond running traffic control, EVAs have been assigned to hundreds of other roles, ranging from assisting researchers, to running much of the back end calculation work, many named after the human calculators that first put men into space.
[ ] Specialist Isolinear Programming Development
With Isolinear computers having a fundamentally different structure than all other Initiative computing systems, creating a dedicated set of compilers and other supporting digital infrastructure is a key part of preparing for an even wider adoption profile.
(Progress 136/120: 10 resources per die) [Natural 100]
The Global Defense Initiative's first successful digital interactions with isolinear computing xenotech in 2059 were possible primarily not because of the skill and insight of the research group involved, but rather because of an incredibly convenient confluence of the fundamental structure of the isolinear computing substrate and alien design methodologies. When one of the general purpose computing crystals of a Scrin artifact receives an input datastream sufficiently outside the bounds of what it was designed to expect, it often shifts into what appears to be analogous to a zero-confidence Safe Mode that both locks out existing stored data, possibly irretrievably, and serves as an integral adaptive diagnostics and reprogramming toolset.
One of the features of this Safe Mode is that one region of the surface is isolated by a ring of non-interactive space, endlessly signaling an overwrite sequence that induces other isolinear chips of the same category to enter into what is currently considered a 'factory fresh' state, which appears to be a variant of the original Safe Mode. As of 2062, all successful isolinear device experiments have been produced by using this sequence to instantiate a replica of the original crystal structure. Consequently, the underlying computer architecture model, instruction sets, programming methodologies, and so on utilized by the Scrin remain a mystery[6].
Instead, the various programming efforts operate by taking advantage of various experimentally observed behaviors to formulate Turing-complete libraries of compatible stimuli. Over the course of the past three months, these libraries have been collated and cross-referenced to create a central reference database and decide on two standardized instruction sets for broad-scale utilization. While humanity's collective understanding of this technology remains grossly incomplete, it is, at last, now a coherent field of study that can be taught and discussed with mostly unified terminology rather than a wholly opaque and incomprehensible curiosity.
Aspirationally, the first thesis defense on isolinear computing practices may be held in as few as five years.
[ ] Infantry Recon Support Drone Development (Platform)
One advantage of the Zone Armor is that every man has a significantly more powerful radio than could be given to any infantry force. While long range drone operations are significantly contraindicated by the nature of Red Zone environments, small "pop up" drones should provide advanced reconnaissance, and act as forward sensor platforms.
(Progress 86/40: 10 resources per die) [51]
The infantry recon drones are fundamentally simple things. An attachment onto a Zone Armor's backpack, the drone is carried in a compacted state, launched with a command, and then self managing its flight path along a usually predetermined route, either maintaining an orbit around the squad, or, when multiple are being used, sweeping a particular sector at a given range. There are two standard models. A fixed wing pusher design, with wide wings for maximum lift at low velocity, that are packed folded in and then electrified for stiffness during launch. While endurance is not the best, less than an hour in standard regimes, and just over that in power saving mode, it is enough to give Zone Armor a significant overlook capability, being able to find opposition and scout terrain without exposing themselves to unneeded danger. The second design is a quadrotor drone, meant to operate in more vertical environments, such as built up urban fighting, with greater recoverability for short jaunts, rather than extended searches, and capable of docking with the Zone Armor automatically. However, not all Zone Armor has equal room for drones, as they compete with power cells, missile launchers, and jump jets for space on the back. Zone Defenders have the greatest potential, with Captains sitting in the middle, and Zone Raiders and Marauders have the greatest limitations
[ ] Modular Rapid Assembly System Prototypes (Tech) (High Priority)
With the Initiative going on a large-scale offensive, more of its supporting assets need to be moved to smaller units, to give them greater freedom of movement and increased striking power. Shrinking down the system used by various Initiative buildings even more than they already are should allow the ability to cram significant portions of the utility of a full base into a mobile platform.
(Progress 56/125: 20 resources per die) [21]
The concept of the modular rapid assembly system is relatively simple. A mobile factory, capable of taking raw materials and blank templates and converting them into fully finished ready to use materials. Now, when it comes to this, there is a matter of setting expectations. It is not and is likely never to be a fully featured factory. It is simply not viable to try to make any but the most utterly basic materials from scratch. Most things more complicated than a cartridge cannot be built from scratch in any design, and even the cartridge would need the propellant supplied separately.
The development has been split among three separate design groups.
Based out of Chicago, the largest of the projects takes a MARV chassis as the baseline, and strips out most of the internals for a pass through factory, taking in materials from one side, and rolling finished vehicles out the other side. However, it has three critical flaws. The first is the MARV hull itself. The MARV simply can't operate at long ranges from massive, and expensive, hubs, which require a substantial amount of upkeep themselves. Trying to migrate them from base to base is also excessively problematic, between needing to replace the entire drive train after such a trip, the other component wear issues, and the sheer size of the vehicles, meaning that there is no existing infrastructure capable of holding it. Second, the MARV base puts severe restrictions on both manufacturing speed and the size of what can be handled.
In Oslo, the program is quite a bit different, smaller, lighter, far more compact, something that is more an iterative evolution of the mobile construction vehicles of the current Initiative. A flatpack factory in other words. The problems this one has are more to do with that fragility. The systems don't do well in transit, and when deploying need vast amounts of flat space, while also needing to run extensive calibrations, that, even with the science team, take days between setup beginning, and production starting.
The third design is more revolutionary. Taking an old Orca Command Vehicle schematic from the Second Tiberium War, the team in Seoul is still on the drawing boards, planning on trimming nearly every noncritical system to make space for more factory tooling, and conveyors. The project is rumbling along at a very slow pace, with each step being an intricate balancing act to both make a functional factory, and make it fly.
The problems on the various prototypes cover nearly every word of the title. Some are insufficiently modular, others are far too modular. Some are far too slow and some have limited range of assembly. They are simply not ready, and all will need far more funding and time to make effective progress.
[ ] Dr. Rima Alcard
A robotics scientist with some radical views on automation, Rima has been sidelined repeatedly for her advocacy of a systematic machine state. However, with some funding, and work on her experimental systems, she may be on to some quite encouraging design work.
(+1 Light Industry Die, -5 to Light Industry) (unlocks automation/robotics projects)
with a double NAT 100 on Isolinear Development Projects/Actions, deploying the Orbital AEVAs, developing Zone Armor Drones, starting development on Rapid Modular Assemblers and hiring Dr. Rima Alcard.
In Q2 2062 we had unexpected gains with:
[ ] Home Robotics Development (New)
While robots in the home are far from a new thing, with the Electrolux Trilobite, the first robotic vacuum cleaner, releasing only a year after the fall of Tiberium to earth, and home mechanization being far older than that, development has in many ways stalled out. While some smart home systems have proliferated, many more failed, as they were in most cases curiosities rather than something intended to practically improve home life. Taking a hard look at home robotics, there is significant potential for new and exciting ways to make life easier for large sections of the initiative population.
(Progress 70/60: 10 resources per die) [42]
While not quite taking the early 21st century idea of the smart home to its reasonable, or unreasonable conclusions, advances in robotics technology are in many cases relatively simple transfers from other fields, most notably hospitals and military bases. The biggest problems are actually in adapting them to home use. Effectively every GDI hospital is essentially different arrangements of the same set of buildings, and extensively marked. For rough navigation, it is as simple as loading in the right map, and from there, letting the robot follow the indicators laid on the floor and walls. In a family home however, it is a very different matter. Even in the most cookie cutter apartments, there are noticeable differences in internal layout. One family may have arranged a room to focus on a screen or a window, while another may have put things into a rough ring to allow for better interaction, or built around a table. Making robots that can effectively navigate these often chaotic environments, without the standardization that a more institutional setting can provide is in and of itself a challenge, but one that can be understood and overcome.
Beyond the challenges of mobile robotics, there are stationeries, such as autofridges and autofreezers, where the food is stored in standardized bins, and a series of conveyors can present requested foodstuffs quickly, allowing for much deeper and more importantly more preserving fridges and freezers. With a standard upright freezer, the cold air tends to fall out of the front every time it is opened, leading to significant swings in temperature, leading to much quicker food spoilage than is possible with an autofridge that keeps the vast majority of the cold air inside the unit at all times. Similarly, automation of ovens, cooktops, and similar are certainly possible, although there are still noticeable debates over how much of the automation is actually useful and viable.
When it comes to integrating robotics into the home of the available housing pools, it is actually easiest to integrate them into the immediate post war housing blocks, built to an extremely standardized pattern, with little space given to reconfigurable areas. While people still manage to make them more homey, there are significant amounts of fixed areas, where a robot can manage without a significant array of expensive sensors and processing units. The worst are actually the duplex homes, which, while not huge by pre-tiberium standards, have substantial amounts of reconfigurable space, making mobility around the rooms noticeably more difficult.
Looking into the future, the biggest area where further practical development is needed is actually with human interaction robotics, ranging from nurse units, designed to engage with babies and provide general care in assistance of a mother, to elderly assistance robots, which, in many cases, are likely to be more needed, especially with an Initiative population significantly below replacement rates.
[ ] Kamisuwa Optical Laboratories
While the Model 2061 ocular implants are functional, they are clunky, obviously cybernetic, and highly invasive. However, building a longer term set of specialized laboratories in Nagoya Prefecture will be the first step towards building optical implants that are less invasive and more functional.
(Progress 79/250: 20 resources per die) (-2 Labor, -2 Energy) [4, 13]
An optical laboratory begins with a simple bed of concrete. Like most things, it is a foundation, sharing its nature with a thousand other buildings. But this one is special. It will grow to house some of the most precise machines on earth. In an eye, the cornea is a mere five to seven cells thick, approximately fifty micrometers, or about three of the finest hairs on record. Those cells are one part of a machine to create vision. One that can fit inside a human skull, provide information that can be interpolated by a mass of fat and neurons the size of a grapefruit, and provide around a hundred degrees of peripheral vision, and refocus anywhere from a few centimeters in front of it, to the horizon tens of kilometers off. To call the task daunting would be a dramatic understatement.
The mere laying of concrete will not do. Seismic events are common in Japan, and much of this quarter's effort went into surveying fault lines, searching for alternate sites, and ultimately, designing a new foundation. This is no mere 'bed' of concrete, but instead a three-layer cake of seismic dampers that ensure that the laboratories will be in effect permanently suspended.
[ ] Ocular Implant Deployment
While there are not currently long waiting lists for the new Model 2061 ocular implants, they are still going to be useful as a stopgap between no implants and better ones. With the Initiative working against neuroplasticity, and the need to keep exercising the parts of the brain that deal with vision, small scale production will help the currently blinded keep those parts of the brain functional, rather than having it reallocated to other senses.
(Progress 201/200: 25 resources per die) (+1 Labor, -1 Health) [34, Natural 100]
The Initiative always expected backlash from its work on cybernetic eyesight. The scars of CABAL, of the Marked, of Brotherhood cybernetic agents run deep. Beyond that, the helmets themselves are far from perfect. Invasive, scarring, deeply problematic, with a tendency to cause seizures if not properly calibrated, the current generation of implants are very much an absolutely minimum viable product. The thing is that while the first wave of recipients were few and far between, the social backlash has simply not appeared. While there is still likely some level of conscious or unconscious bias, things like complaints to the labor bureaus have, to this point not had a single complaint over a firing due to cybernetics, and no actionable complaint of hiring discrimination.
Looking longer term, there are noticeable problems with the system as implemented. To begin with there are the bolts that will hold the helmet in place, permanently affixed to the skull. Beyond that, the helmets are potentially very problematic for the neck muscles. There are also the long term implications of chronic use of neurohelmets. While Firehawk pilots have been using them for years, the average Firehawk pilot only gets a few hundred hours of active flight time out of the eight thousand, seven hundred and sixty in the year, with the rest of the time allowing their brain to rest. Many, if not nearly all of the recipients are likely to be spending thousands of hours in the helmets, potentially not even taking it off to sleep regularly.
[ ] Modular Rapid Assembly System Prototypes (Tech) (High Priority)
With the Initiative going on a large-scale offensive, more of its supporting assets need to be moved to smaller units, to give them greater freedom of movement and increased striking power. Shrinking down the system used by various Initiative buildings even more than they already are should allow the ability to cram significant portions of the utility of a full base into a mobile platform.
(Progress 171/125: 20 resources per die) [80]
While none of the three systems have passed their tests with what could be termed flying colors, all have seen significant revision in the past three months and are at least minimally functional.
The Chicago team has focused primarily on mobile organic repair capacity. While still slow and limited, their pass through system has been successfully demonstrated under field conditions, with units south of Chicago being used as test cases as they rotated off the front lines, passed their armored complements through the test crawlers, and then had them checked again by qualified technicians and engineers for faults. While still noticeably slow-working – under half the pace of a fully featured maintenance depot – it is still a maintenance depot that can effectively keep up with advancing forces, at least for the first few hundred kilometers. However, the problems of range and flexibility are still quite distinct, and cannot really be resolved without significant further development away from the MARV baseline. Building a MARV Mark II is one potential outcome of this program, but as things stand, it is an interesting, if not entirely useful, course of events.
The Oslo program has been slower, focusing as much on the platform to be moved as it has the chassis doing the moving. With a more modest set of capabilities than the Chicago team, Oslo has been constantly asked a simple question: Why not use an MCV? In the end, 'go-anywhere' has become the watchword, and as one might expect for the Steel Talons, this has been done with a series of legged mecha that push up right to the very limits and in some cases overload what the design paradigm can bear. Thus, every addition to the cargo to be carried must be carefully weight-balanced and assessed for its utility.
The Seoul program has run into significant issues, primarily with the engines. The Orca command vehicles of the Second Tiberium War ran their engines hot and hard, and even the ones that did get preserved have massive problems, between engine components cracking, and the simple fact that nobody in the Initiative makes those specific parts anymore. The team has stripped every boneyard and storehouse in the circum-Pacific for Orca command vehicle engine components, and has still often been coming up short, leaving the system running well behind schedule. One experimental flight however, has garnered ample interest from the Air and Space force for continued testing, though the Steel Talons are trying to keep the project in house for the moment.
the Deployment of our at the time current Optical Prosthetics getting a NAT 100 that meant there was no social backlash to them being in GDI society which is important for drone tech as well because if people are more accepting of cybernetic clunk we can build more drones sooner without having to focus on having them be pleasing to people's sensibiities which would have been an extra Action to do down the line.
Also Dr. Alcard's project for home automation was Developed, a dedicated Optical Laboratories broke ground in Japan and our Modular Rapid Assembly Prototypes were developed to the point one of the three options was now on the docket for deplyoment. We still have that deployment to finish and Optical Loboratories are important for drone tech as they enable better feedback for drone operators in almost all cases.
The hard push for automation continued in Q3 2062:
[ ] Home Robotics Factories (New)
While most of the designs are already in production, bringing them to the masses rather than keeping them for the Initiative proper's use will require a substantial number of new factories, and expansions to already existing facilities.
(Progress 114/145: 15 resources per die) (-1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods, +4 Consumer Goods, +1 Labor) [91]
Converting robots to home use from public spaces is not quite a one-to-one problem. While there are a significant number of overlaps with public spaces, the fundamental problem is in the homes themselves. People, as it turns out, love to customize their own spaces, ranging from different arrangements of desks, to carpets, rugs, and tapestries hung on the walls and sprawling onto the floor. While for some homes the existing models work just fine, most were designed with hard and relatively grippy flooring as their baseline, where smooth hard wheels provide plenty of traction. Yet, trying to use those same wheels on a rug, for example, has tended to produce the rug moving at best, and in most cases, a simple flailing, rather than actually cleaning the floor for example. All are solvable problems, most notably in the wheel and suspension base, but it is taking a fair bit of effort to make the changes in ways that do not complicate the systems.
[ ] Advanced Electronic Video Assistant Deployment
The Advanced EVA system will need substantial pools of computer supplies for deployment, but should substantially improve the overall output of the Initiative. It will also require significant assistance from the field, which makes it somewhat problematic for immediate deployment beyond the need for capital goods.
-[ ] Services (Progress 167/200: 20 resources per die) (+3 to field dice) (-4 Capital Goods, -3 Energy) (Locks 1 field die until project is complete) [31, 17, 26]
Services is a big field, and unfortunately that comes with complications. The biggest one is the simple degree of specialization and range of specializations within the field. Areas as widely separated as healthcare, education, and welfare all fall under the general field, and that makes things more difficult. While all need confidentiality, automated paperwork, and data crunching, all of those are things that previous generations of EVAs can manage, often without too many problems.
It was expected that machine learning, and the long experiences with previous generations of EVAs have created an environment where a new generation can be slotted in, and that was attempted. However, the attempt proceeded to break everything from HR services to multiple cases of prescriptions not passing through the system properly, leaving two major hospital services functioning on handwritten notes for over a day as the changes were reverted. A slower, more intentionally disruptive system changeover is being prepared, with the plans being for a rolling changeover, starting in BZ-1 and rolling around the world from there.
[ ] Orca Wingmen Drone Deployment (Phase 1) (High Priority)
Deploying Wingman drones for the Orca program will rapidly increase the effectively available CAS and ASW assets around the world, especially for land based air. Additionally, with these following the A-16 pattern, and therefore carrying air to air missiles, they will be a significant aid in fending off Brotherhood air attack.
(Progress 260/260: 20 resources per die) (-1 Labor, -3 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) (Projected: 4 quarters to begin, 16 to complete)
(Progress 56/260: 20 resources per die) (-1 Labor, -3 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) (Projected: 4 quarters to begin, 16 to complete) [17, 46, 46, 87]
Aircraft, even one as derivative as a wingman drone, take a large amount of time to produce at a useful scale, especially one expected to be used, and used up, by the thousands. In joint air/ground forces wargames over the last few years, the average simulated wingman lasted between three and five missions, and saved over a dozen Initiative lives. In large part because they fundamentally change the threat matrix, especially as they appear in larger numbers. Rather than a risky strike putting up to dozens of Initiative pilots, each taking over a year to train, in harm's way, that same strike package can be handled by as few as one or two in the most extreme variants of the wargames. And, those pilots have a significantly higher chance of coming back alive, due to the drones having the option of acting as missile catchers themselves.
For the Navy however, they are serving a fundamentally different role. Rather than being used to increase the survival rate of pilots and the ability to take on risky missions, they are being used to increase the throw weight of the Initiative's carrier fleet, one that has declined significantly since the layouts found before the Third Tiberium War. A wingman equipped formation can in most cases double the throw weight of one without, for only adding half as much space requirement, giving sharper blades, rather than trying to change the mission profiles.
In either case, deployment is going to be slow. Within the next year, only a bare handful of squadrons will receive a pair for every aircraft in operation, over the next four, while most will get a pair, few to none will receive a second or third, even if operations remain slow, and there is nearly no chance with currently projected levels of production for a sizable surplus to be built up, a vital necessity in case of a future major war. Over the years of the Third Tiberium War's various phases, GDI burned through decades of production and in the immediate aftermath, was operating with effectively zero stockpile and trying to fight on a just in time delivery system.
but we were running into problems with both Home Robotics Factories and the Services AEVAs not being complete while we did get to deploy the first Phase of the Orca Wingmen. We lost our Hammerhead Wingman Drones Deployment Action in Q4 of 2062 and also:
Janitorial Woes: The thread for complaining about the new cleaning bots.
Tim Drake
I know, I know, nobody likes the vacuum patrol, or long mopping sessions, but still, just got surplussed out into the general pool from this, and it is annoying. My apartment complex was an easy job, but I don't have the quals for robot caretaking. Like, most of it is not hard, but seriously, I don't want to go through six months of training to go back to doing the same thing that I was doing, just with extra bot wrangling.
The whole damn nonsense is frustrating, because we have people who want to be doing things, even if they are not fun things, and now we are getting kicked out of our positions, because some damn Treasury weenie has a hair up their rear about something or other with automation.
FloatingWood
… It takes 6 months to learn bot wrangling?
GDIWife
It takes about 5 minutes to learn bot wrangling, as in using the bots. It takes a lot longer to learn proper maintenance, how to fix various common electrical issues, etc. I have a guy in my arcology I take mine to.
FloatingWood
Well sure, but he's already qualified for general maintenance and the like, he said that.
EDIT: Oh, you mean bot maintenance. I don't see the issue, that's something you can outsource to a maintenance technician easily enough, right?
GDIWife
Maintaining the robots is something different
EDIT: Didn't see the correction. The issue is that he has presumably lost his previous job due to the bots making it unnecessary and so he'd require retraining as a maintenance technician.
Personally I like mine, although my cats keep sitting on it and riding it through the apartment.
InTheZONE
We got one at my barracks. As predicted it lasted all of 3 hours before someone taped a knife to it and called it Pvt Stabby.
Tim Drake
#FloatingWood
It is a series of programs. Maintenance and Upkeep, Repair, and Programming. Basically give me the tools to wrangle a whole building's worth of drones at once.
1Fox2FoxRedFoxGreenFolx
The cleaning bots save time but I cant help but feel like the treasury could spend the money better. Thats alot of electronics and machine time.
CatQueen
So we got one on the cargo ship i work on, and i got to say, i hate it. The reason i hate it is that it tried to knocked Milo (my cat) overboard, turns out ours had a bug in the code and was fortunately fixed. So good news we dont have another killer AI out in the world.
AnyaFälscher
I got yelled at for putting tape on the bots cameras, even though I know for a fact they were spying on me!
ProfCollingsworth
#1Fox2FoxRedFoxGreenFolx The usual idea for automation of tasks is to allow the people who were doing those things to work on something else… which may be very useful in the future, if the current demographic trends continue. That's a long-run possible benefit against the short-term expenditure, though, which does not seem to be immediately all that beneficial.
…But then, generally it takes a while to actually see the outcomes of an action. (Yes, I'm aware that's a justification for the existence of historians, but it's also true.)
FloatingWood
#AnyaFälscher InOps doesn't need the bots to spy on you. They can track you through your online presence far better than they can track you through whatever bots might have a lens on you. And boy, are you boring.
Also, #CatQueen bots better leave the cats alone. The cats are cute. The bots are not.
#ProfCollingsworth I've had a chance to look at the population trends last month. There has been a… shift, so to speak. We may need more schools in the future, although it seems to be nothing more than a slowing of the decline.
ProfCollingsworth
#FloatingWood I'm doing better than usual - my students joke that I'm paying attention to current events if I'm aware of things that happened 5 years ago.
Solan
I guess the new robot fleet we have is nice. Sure, they can be a bit fiddly at times but the base looked cleaner in some areas than before. Now I won't say we don't need the janitorial staff, we still hire those for some very sensitive areas where people are still needed and InOps vetted. But the current cleaning bots we have are getting modified for something, I don't know but some officers are looking into physical and digital upgrades for our needs and resource savings.
GDIWife
#FloatingWood Counterpoint: cats sitting on bots are adorable
InTheZONE
News update, Pvt Stabby has been promoted to Sgt Stabby and is 'officially' running a course on threat awareness. If you get stabbed it means you failed.
Solan
So I got an update from the lab people and they managed to get some bots to be sturdier and repairable testing subjects and training targets. It's a lot cheaper than spending some of our targets and we can get recruits into training for maintenance. The problem is that we are underspending and current budgetary guidelines are a use it or lose it system so I'm currently waiting for the pitches in this latest series of budgetary surplus since our maintenance and procurement costs are going down.
[ ] Home Robotics Factories
While most of the designs are already in production, bringing them to the masses rather than keeping them for the Initiative proper's use will require a substantial number of new factories, and expansions to already existing facilities.
(Progress 222/140: 15 resources per die) (-1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods, +4 Consumer Goods, +1 Labor) [84]
With masses of home robots beginning to come off the assembly line, it is often good to remember that improvements in technology are rarely as revolutionary as they first appear. The vacuum cleaner was promised to revolutionize house cleaning, so was the Trilobite, and the Roomba, and beyond. None of them have really ensured that cleaning the house is as easy as they promised. They did however make it far easier to clean, and dramatically changed the skills needed to care for a house. The standardized Initiative designs are also launched to market with a rising tide of accessories and customization in their wake, as the private sector chases the trend and seeks to get their cut of the pie.
For Dr. Alcard, the program is an unmitigated success story, a means of making people's lives better through the mass use of robotics. She has immediately turned around and proposed mass-automation programs for multiple areas, requesting sizable percentages of the Initiative's total manufacturing capacity for her ideas.
[ ] Advanced Electronic Video Assistant Deployment
The Advanced EVA system will need substantial pools of computer supplies for deployment, but should substantially improve the overall output of the Initiative. It will also require significant assistance from the field, which makes it somewhat problematic for immediate deployment beyond the need for capital goods.
-[ ] Services (Progress 231/200: 20 resources per die) (+3 to field dice) (-4 Capital Goods, -3 Energy) (Locks 1 field die until project is complete) [32]
While the deployment has taken longer than initially hoped, and the systematic deployment is still not entirely complete, there are now a number of management EVAs across the Initiative. Most are simply automating away paperwork, filling forms and directing calls or requests for help navigating GDI's various benefits and healthcare programs. A few, however, are noteworthy. As an example of this, one AEVA module has been configured to appear more trustworthy to Yellow Zone refugees, modulating its voice in a more discrete whisper and sharing information as if presenting a treasured secret. That this is all in the service of getting people to fill out medical histories is beside the point. AEVA NIGHTINGALE on the other hand is a hospital monitor that can distinguish between an ordinary heart-rate excursion and an incipient panic attack or coronary event. Perhaps the oddest assistant EVA is labeled Scrooge in a fit of whimsy, for helping people to find cheap housing in the morass of available apartments.
Seriously, Scrooge? I get the reference, and that's part of the problem. Scrooge in A Christmas Carol was a tightfisted bastard of an exploitative landlord, give it another name!
Derek Chickens, Public Outreach Department
just finished off the Services AEVAs while being informed by the Home Robotics Factories Action finishing off that there will be an adjustment period for any drone tech project going forwards. Dr. Alcard got to propose multiple automation/drone projects that never went anywhere because:
Assassinations
Mehretu, seeing the Treasury's hand behind the Initiative's new diplomatic outreach, has unleashed his agents against their assets.
The Qatarites have spent over a decade at this point being a gaping wound in the pride of the Brotherhood. A sign of their mistakes, of their messiah's failings as a leader. And this has not been something that can be forgiven. Especially not as they placed into the Initiative's hands technologies of peace and war, filled desperately needed leadership roles and formed cadres that trained tens of thousands of Initiative service personnel how the Brotherhood fought, trained, and lived. Their value as propaganda pieces, even above that, went even further. Mehretu burned dozens of agents, and hundreds of patsies in trying to kill off as many Qatarites as he possibly could. Here, while he had more success than the Initiative would have liked, and many did die, including a number of the more valuable members, many had already passed on much of their knowledge.
Beyond the attacks on the Qatarites, there was another significant casualty, Dr. Rima Alcard. While only a recent recruit to the Treasury, she had already begun efforts to heavily automate GDI society. While on her way to visit a working group in Scandinavia, her aircraft went down over the north sea. There were no survivors.
Dr Bora was another target, but one that managed to survive. While two shadow teams attempted to breach the perimeter of the complex in former Connecticut that he had been assigned to most recently, neither survived encounters with Initiative security teams.
Research Breakthrough
That research group in Scandinavia had been working on one of the remnants of CABAL's work, specifically its work with cybernetics. GDI has traditionally preferred softer mechanisms to both read and react to muscular and neural impulses, and to send commands to muscles and nerves. Nod, and CABAL especially, has preferred hard connections. The breakthroughs have been in the discovery of a number of treatments, both curative and chronic to repair nerve interface sites and maintain proper connection between a cybernetic augment, and the meat.
"I never asked for this. They say they saved me, but I'm not sure saved is the right word." - InOps interrogation of Eva Jensen, sole survivor of Dr. Alcard's security detail.
she was killed in Q1 of 2063 by Mehretu throwing a temper tantrum and the sole survivor of her security detail got to be the guinea pig for our newest cybernetics research breaktroughs while I memed Deus Ex below the results post. In that quarter we also:
[ ] Agriculture Mechanization Projects (Phase 2)
Expanding the robotization of agriculture to rapidly improve the total food supply will require vast numbers of units, produced in dozens of robot foundries around the world, but mostly supplied by Nuuk, and the myomer macrospinners, their efficiencies creating cascade effects.
(Progress 83/240: 15 resources per die) (+12 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) [28]
The Agricultural mechanization project has once more seen effort put towards it, although a limited one, primarily focused on small scale agricultural tooling. While, for example, wheat, rice, and other fields have long been automated, going back to the 20th century, and in significant ways to the 19th century, places like berries, stone-fruit, citrus, and a wide variety of other, relatively fragile plants have long resisted efforts to automate production, leading to the emergence of classes of migratory workers around the world, following the agricultural seasons. However, myomer technology, and the increases in precision that come with that have finally resulted in picking technologies that are precise enough to pluck fruit en masse, without significant bruising, and the damages to both visuals and lifespan that results.
For staple crops, and processing, the trend has been to squeeze out the last few remaining jobs altogether. The problem here is that fully automating an entire operation to squeeze out the last few humans is an art of diminishing returns-investing more and more capital to do less and less. It also chokes off a number of relatively low skill jobs, in an economy that is ever more oriented towards high skill and technical jobs, with even the majority of the military requiring significant technical qualifications.
[ ] Kamisuwa Optical Laboratories
While the Model 2061 ocular implants are functional, they are clunky, obviously cybernetic, and highly invasive. However, building a longer term set of specialized laboratories in Nagoya Prefecture will be the first step towards building optical implants that are less invasive and more functional.
(Progress 243/240: 20 resources per die) (-2 Labor, -2 Energy) [4, 87]
Kamisuwa has three critical problems that its staff is attempting to address. First, optics. It is certainly possible to build a camera that is over twice as precise as a human eyeball. It is not currently possible to build one that fits into the eye sockets, or even really comfortably around the eye sockets. Second, they need to work on the interface. Current systems work, but building one that does not result in seizures if misused is a high priority, either through permanently affixed interface ports that cannot move out of position naturally, or with other forms of nerve/machine interface systems that are less overall invasive, such as direct stimulation of the optic nerve. Third and finally, maintenance. Current models require extensive and ongoing upkeep, in ways that significantly reduce quality of life, making travel difficult among a wide variety of other problems.
Attacking all the problems at once is probably not a viable solution, with the Kamisuwa staff splitting up the problem among over a dozen working groups, building not only ever more efficient camera systems, but developing improved mounting systems, nontoxic interfaces, and a wide variety of other pieces of the broader problem. Others are tackling the replacement problem from the other side, looking at blue sky research at bioconstruction and attempting to build the means to grow or regrow the complex sensor systems of the human body.
[ ] Autodoc Systems Development (New)
A next generation of medical automation, derived from CABAL's inner workings, the autodoc is likely to be a particularly scary project, with most Initiative citizens uncomfortable with the idea of an AI or EVA working on them, especially without direct human supervision. However, between their battlefield utility, and the need to prepare for workforce shortages in the coming decade, it is not so much a choice as a requirement.
(Progress 52/120: 30 resources per die) [13]
The autodoc technologies stolen from the Brotherhood of Nod, fundamentally work. The idea of making an automated system that can sew a human closed, or perform complicated work is not particularly new, and even practical with GDI's technology. The problem is simplifying the system to not require oversight by a true AI, such as CABAL, and making it something that GDI citizens are willing to use. Neither of which is a particularly easy task.
No two bodies are exactly similar, and, for that matter, a single body can change significantly in the course of a day, let alone weeks, months, or years. Hydration and activity levels for example can change the path of a vein by entire millimeters on a single patient, and then there are all the differences between patients on top of that. That is what makes downteching the problem difficult, at its heart. A simple decision tree can, perhaps, handle the problem, but it would have to be so large and complex that it would require several gigabytes at minimum to store, and take significant time to execute. A problem as comparatively simple as high level chess took a computer capable of 11.38 GFLOPs, back in 1997. Even then, it must deal with odd situations that are not in its exact parameters, or misdiagnose the problem and identify the wrong solution.
Beyond that, there is the political aspect. The original design is essentially a metal coffin, taking in people and churning out cyborgs. Patient comfort was not exactly a priority. Changing cladding materials, providing a more comforting color scheme of mostly blues and natural greens, and making the entire facility significantly larger all significantly help and help avert claustrophobia, however, they are not by themselves enough.
started on the second Phase of the Agricultural Mechanization, finished the Optical Laboratories and started Developing the Autodocs.
Seo was happy in Q2 2063:
Mad Science.
There is oft a fine line between genius, inspiration, and madness. The creation of CABAL, the Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform, took that line and did its best to play jump rope with it. A project started in the early 21st century, CABAL was a project that reshaped the modern face of the Brotherhood of Nod. Its legacy is LEGION, a weapon that the Initiative has not built an equal too.
The core idea is, fundamentally, a simple one. Rather than trying to convince rocks to think, or for that matter, trying to conjure consciousness in one of a hundred other ways that have been proposed, take a system that is already known to work, and use that. In this case, human brains.
While calling the idea politically radioactive is probably something of an understatement, with no human currently in political power not remembering in vivid detail the events of the Firestorm crisis, and the second closest that humanity has come to extinction likely ever. It is interesting and potentially quite useful, so long as the resulting intelligences are safe, and there are a wide array of secondary technologies surrounding it that are far more flexible than another way to produce artificial intelligences.
[ ] Autodoc Systems Development
A next generation of medical automation, derived from CABAL's inner workings, the autodoc is likely to be a particularly scary project, with most Initiative citizens uncomfortable with the idea of an AI or EVA working on them, especially without direct human supervision. However, between their battlefield utility, and the need to prepare for workforce shortages in the coming decade, it is not so much a choice as a requirement.
(Progress 123/120: 30 resources per die) [16]
A GDI Autodoc is a small room, typically somewhat smaller than a prison cell, about three meters by two. The walls and ceiling are lined with a series of pop out panels, each one holding a set of surgical tools under sterile conditions, and allowing the tooling to be changed out without needing to be in view of the patient. Exposed tools, limbs, and the like, produce significantly higher stress responses in test patients, meaning that they have been, to the extent possible, deleted. Similarly, rather than using automated systems to, for example, intubate the patient if needed, a human has been tasked with the job, with most GDI patients responding far better to manual care.
All of this does require a combination of EVA and more standard programs, working in tandem with a set of robotic assistants, both stationary and mobile. Running an operating theater like this one requires a substantial amount of computing power, far more than even the remote operating theaters already in service. In fact, much of the equipment is cross compatible with those remote operating theaters, but there are a number of key differences, the biggest being that even though the robot is still operating on the patient, the knowledge that it is a person behind those arms is fundamentally comforting to many in the Initiative, compared to what is often thought of as being a cold, impersonal program.
Because we got the Wetware AI research option and completed the Development of GDI Autodoc Systems.
Our drone tech had a shake up in Q3 2063 as:
[ ] Agriculture Mechanization Projects (Phase 2)
Expanding the robotization of agriculture to rapidly improve the total food supply will require vast numbers of units, produced in dozens of robot foundries around the world but mostly supplied by Nuuk and the myomer macrospinners, with their efficiencies creating cascade effects.
(Progress 203/230: 15 resources per die) (+12 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) [45, 17]
Agricultural mechanization has run into a number of issues, the biggest being the shift in needed skills. While farm work has needed mechanical skills for centuries, the next generation of robots has shifted the needed skill set once again. Repairing a myomer-based walker, designed to precisely step between rows of crops, or calibrating a grabber so that it can pluck berries without squishing them is in and of itself a set of skills that the vast majority of Initiative farmers simply don't have, and ones that there are fairly limited means to learn. While farmers are looking to learn those skills, they are competing with factory workers, and other departments for a skill that is less than a decade old – and in many cases, losing out.
[ ] Tiberium Vein Mines (Stage 9)
The rapid development of underground Tiberium mining has pushed the Initiative towards digging deeply and greedily, searching for dangerous treasures deep below ground. While the mines are becoming progressively more expensive, they are still worthwhile from both environmental and economic perspectives.
(Progress 160/160: 20 resources per die) (Additional Income Trickle [25-35]) (-2 Capital Goods)
(Progress 36/155: 20 resources per die) (Additional Income Trickle [25-35]) (-2 Capital Goods) [nat 1, 95]
Income 1d3: [2] = +30 RpT
On 19th September, the Mount Belaya Tiberium mining complex detonated in a multi-kiloton explosion, throwing clouds of dust in a blast radius that covered much of the Anadyr highlands and the Siberian Blue Zone, with some clouds even reaching as far south as Hokkaido.
While it is difficult to find the cause due to a combination of factors, most notably the recording backups actually being within the blast radius of the detonation, the most likely answer is that the complex hit a previously unknown pressurized pocket of liquid Tiberium that created a fuel-air explosion and propagated back into the pocket.
Immediate casualties were limited to the few dozen men and women working the immediate mining complex largely working in the surface worksites, the maintenance barn, and the control center. Casualties from the after effects of the event are still trickling in, and are substantially higher, especially as GDI was forced to rush significant numbers of abatement assets into the region.
The political and practical consequences of the detonation are likely to be far more lasting. The blast was impossible to downplay, especially since the detonation of Temple Prime GDI has seen significant paranoia about the potential of liquid Tiberium explosions, and in light of the detonation, that paranoia has become not only justified, but if anything, understated. The Initiative has seen substantial public pressure to increase safety margins, and maintain far larger and more capable reserve forces to respond to future detonations, both of which will steal away significant assets that could otherwise be moved to the front lines of the war on Tiberium.
[ ] Infantry Recon Support Drone Deployment
While the drones themselves are mostly made from off the shelf components, cheap, and simple to build at that, they still need dedicated space for production lines in light industrial districts, and integration into the military's procurement and logistics systems.
(Progress 245/160: 10 resources per die) (-1 Energy) (3 quarters to begin, 9 to complete) [88, 95]
The recon drones have begun initial production, and a few batches have even made their way out to the troops, where the drones have often been promptly massacred by the Brotherhood of Nod. While certainly not unexpected, infantry lasers being a fairly common occurrence at this point, or one of the dozens of other laser equipped platforms the Brotherhood of Nod fields, all being more than capable of hitting and killing these relatively small drones at a reasonable range, it does make them a very expendable form of reconnaissance.
"Fum?"
"Yeah?"
"Drone's dead."
"I know Sibo. It fell on my head."
"Imagine if you'd stuck your head up instead."
"No thanks, I like living more than 3 seconds."
- [Recording of two Zone Troopers on the West African front discussing the results of the recon drone they just deployed]
[ ] Unmanned Support Ground Vehicle Development (Tech)
The capture of Brotherhood toolsets and AI development systems for their Mantis Mobile Anti-Aircraft Vehicle provides a strong starting point for the development of support vehicles. Instead of needing to man every vehicle on the ground, automated support vehicles can be used to either mount optional weapons loads, or be sent into dangerous positions rather than risking manned vehicles.
(Progress 97/80: 20 resources per die) [61]
Companion vehicles have a long history, going back as far as the original tanks. On 15 September 1916, twenty one British tanks rolled into battle during the first armored action in the world. These tanks, the survivors of fifty armored fighting vehicles shipped to France, were a mix of 'male' and 'female' designs. Male, in this case, referred to a tank produced with a pair of 57mm guns, while the female tank was entirely armed with machine guns. Doctrinally, the male tanks were intended to fight pillboxes and machine gun nests, while being protected from infantry attack by the female tanks.
In Initiative use, the basic frame for the 'Moa' USGVs is a single, lightweight, tracked chassis, with a modular, drop-in turret section. While not really intended to be field-swappable, as that would make more problems than it solves, the support drone should be able to operate in either an automatic support mode, sticking reasonably close to a manned fighting vehicle, or, act as a manually controlled operation. The planned use is to stick them primarily in automatic support mode, since most Initiative vehicles are already running into serious problems with task saturation, especially the Titan and Predator. There are only so many things one person, or even a three-man crew, can actually pay attention to at any given time.
In terms of roles, there are three turret systems currently in consideration: a lightweight crystal beam laser system; an anti-aircraft focused missile launcher platform: and finally, a sensor platform, mounting a relatively high powered phased array radar dish among other sensors to help move Initiative stealth detection roles away from manned platforms, especially as hunting stealth tanks is a relatively high risk job to begin with.
For the wit who decided to drop a design for a 'fortification breaching charge' in the idea box; no, we are not shoving 5 tons of explosives into the unmanned support chassis or its turret so it can roll up to an enemy bunker and demolish it. It's the first thing we simulated and we can't shove enough ablator on the damn UGV to make it go even half way.
- Eliza Harkon, Project Manager for Proposals.
lost our mechanization bonus for Vein Mines to a Critical Failure, we kept going with the Agriculture Mechanization Projects and Deployed the Infantry Recon Support Drones while Developing Vehicle Drones.
Q4 2063 was marked by just regular continuing mechanization as we:
[ ] Agriculture Mechanization Projects (Phase 2)
Expanding the robotization of agriculture to rapidly improve the total food supply will require vast numbers of units, produced in dozens of robot foundries around the world but mostly supplied by Nuuk and the myomer macrospinners, with their efficiencies creating cascade effects.
(Progress 300/230: 15 resources per die) (+12 Food, -1 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) [68]
Putting food on the table at this point is a fairly simple affair, with GDI running a significant surplus, and in large part not only feeding itself but providing substantial food aid to both the Forgotten and the Brotherhood of Nod. In the future, especially with a continually shrinking human population, the largest challenges of the Initiative's food programs are going to be logistical – a problem of moving food from where it can be made at a reasonable systematic cost, to a place where the people are.
One of the interesting pieces is that not all of the mechanization is human-replacing, so much as human-augmenting. Within the aquaponic bays for example, much of the harvest has been mechanized, with machines that automatically lift fully grown trays out of the water, and carry them over to sorting, which is still primarily human-driven, reducing the number of overall jobs while minimizing the amount of wasted time.
While there are going to be substantial ongoing issues between the need for skills retraining and personnel displacement, the density of labor per square kilometer has substantially dropped due to mechanization, and an even more increased centralization of labor as the roboticized workforce has pushed most of the jobs into the maintenance barns, rather than the fields.
[ ] Tiberium Vein Mines (Stage 10)
While no longer positive in terms of abatement resources freed up, vein mines still represent a significant way for the Initiative to increase its Tiberium mining output without either requiring significant conflicts with the Brotherhood of Nod, or putting its men and material at significant risk in the Red Zones of the world.
(Progress 150/150: 20 resources per die) (Additional Income Trickle [25-35]) (-2 Capital Goods)
(Progress 4/165: 20 resources per die) (Additional Income Trickle [25-35]) (-2 Capital Goods) [74]
Income 1d3: [2] = +30 RpT
The Initiative's mining programs have undertaken further expansion. However there is significant public fear surrounding them, with the opening of a mine near instantly spiking requests for new housing - in some cases doubling or even tripling the volume of such overnight. The public fear caused by the Mount Belaya explosion has fundamentally changed how the Vein Mine program is viewed both outside and inside the Treasury.
The mines themselves however have been going fairly well, between expansions and a series of new precautions, including expansion of the use of multi point sonar sweeps to find pockets of liquid Tiberium. While the use of sonar and ground penetrating radar is nothing particularly new, the use of multiple sensors to better localize pockets so that the Initiative can mine around them has been seeing some success, although not enough to prevent two more breaches in LT pockets this quarter, although fortunately neither detonated.
finished our Agriculture Mechanization Projects for now and continued work on the now less Labor freeing Vein Mines.
Last turn in Q1 2064 we:
The Flying Cars of the Future
Fourcorneredwheel
So, everyone knows about that hovercar that ran around the Suzuki racetrack a few years back, and the fairly stuttering efforts GDI has made to get various forms of hovertech for logistics trucks and the like. Certainly far from nothing, but certainly nothing on the mass scale of trying to build a flying cars that our grandparents were promised.
Now, a lot of this stuff is still very classified, and I have no idea how long it will be until we get public acknowledgement
FloatingWood
Well… I think we'll get hovercars basically never. Hover vehicles sure, those will show up. All in the hands of government agencies. Think difficult terrain rescue vehicles and the like. But hovercars? I wouldn't trust the average GDI citizen with a ground car, too many idiots parking in buildings through the window already, what if they can start doing that in the first floor and up?
YellowZon3r
Only Hover harvesters please. That is, in fact the intended purpose of hover vehicles to operate in yellow zones and red zones without contact with Tiberium. Most people, especially in deep blue zone cities won't ever need a hover vehicle.
HigherThanYou
Flying cars may be okay for out in the country, but for anyone who thinks they're a good idea for cities, I have two words for you.
Bird. Strike.
GDIWife
I really hope we'll get some. I'm still working towards my standard car license but flying sounds cool. Maybe some kind of autodrive?
FloatingWood
… Crap.
GDIWife found out.
YellowZon3r
I've changed my mind. Get GDIWife a car ASAP. There is absolutely no way it can possibly go wrong.
Erewhon
Is a flying car Driven or Flown? Discuss.
InTheZONE
#Erewhon Yes
AccomplishingProvidence
Mankind has imagined having "flying cars" for over a century now, I'd imagine we'll see another generation of disappointment that this technology likely won't be universally available. Yet that is likely the wisest course of action. Even the most well-meaning of pilot-drivers will likely struggle with the open-air three-dimensional movement.
It does have potential for regular mass-movement of cargo and the like, though. As well as for emergency services and rapid-use public transit, perhaps?
I suppose if this is available on the civilian side it's likely even more available and advanced for military hardware? Perhaps we will see gravity-defying vehicles that outperform even the most advanced Nod vehicles soon?
HigherThanYou
#YellowZon3r hey, she can't be worse than some of the rookies I've seen. Most of them didn't kill anyone when they crashed… in reality. Sims? Heh.
InTheZONE
#AccomplishingProvidence Look, I don't care about flying cars, I want my cool hoverboard. That thing will kill off an entire generation of teenagers.
#HigherThanYou Ehhh… she managed to (in sims) crash into Philadelphia. By accident. How do you even do that?
GDIWife
A lot of judgemental people here. At least #YellowZon3r is being supportive
FloatingWood
Wife, how long have you been trying for a standard driving license? And how much trouble have you been having with that?
I genuinely fear that if you were to drive a hovercar you would end up killing people. Not deliberately, not by malice, but, well, that still kills people. Quite possibly you included.
Solan
What I want to know if the hover cars can work on mountainsides and prevent it from falling off. Suzuki is great to test things out but not enough to fully fix the kinks on roads where the edge would lead to almost certain death. While there is certainly no more out of the way towns and villages with the years of urbanization and centralization thanks to TIberium the roads have always been maintained not because of inertia but because of a lot of facilities throughout GDI that requires a more secure path to travel. Not only that but it helps a lot in road efforts when we inevitably create non-rail connections to areas that don't warrant a full rail line. It dare I say help in our outreach efforts to Nod when the roads there were described as either damaged or non-existent after neglect when Tiberium ravaged the Earth.
CrystalSkull
Flying cars? Yeah, no thanks. I like the idea of being close to the ground. I'll take the hover car.
[ ] Second Generation Repulsorplate Factories
With the repulsorplate finally offering significant edges, and opening up a wide variety of new niches including the potential of flying ships, building enough to supply the Initiative as a whole is somewhat problematic, and will require far more than what the Suzuka factory can produce alone, especially if they are to become a somewhat standard feature, rather than a specific exception to the rule.
(Progress 543/525: 25 resources per die) (+8 Logistics, +8 Capital Goods, -4 STUs, -6 Energy, -2 Labor) (Unlocks further military and space projects) [2, 47, 12, 49]
Factories across the Blue Zones have started producing their first batches of repulsorplates. Although these initial batches are small and subject to rigorous quality control testing, they will grow in size as the producers grow more confident in their skill and machinery, and more personnel are hired.
Putting the repulsorplates to good use will take a substantial amount of development work, as (while they are eminently useful) GDI has few designs that actually are set up to use them. Fortunately, most designs are already hybrid electric, or have substantial electrical power systems already installed, meaning that bolting on a repulsorplate (or more than one) is actually reasonably viable. Perhaps the most urgently needed hovervehicle design is a common chassis that can be used for both civilian and military cargo transport, capable of being configured as everything from a tanker to an intermodal container carrier, to a bus.
[ ] Advanced Tunnel Borer Development (Tech) (New)
While digging holes is something that GDI has gotten remarkably good at, the Brotherhood was at one point a master of the field, connecting large parts of the world through a network of tunnel systems, allowing them to move forces safe from GDI airborne and orbital surveillance. Adapting their technology, if not their ambitions is likely to open new areas where the Initiative can make connections, and speed construction.
(Progress 80/80: 15 resources per die) [40, 8, 20]
Tunnel boring machines are not particularly new, with the first being Marc Isambard Brunel's shield in 1818, a relatively simple iron scaffold that provided protection for the twelve excavators working the tunnel face. While the shield would be relatively quickly outdated, with Michel Henri Joseph Maus inventing a steam powered tunnel boring machine named the Mountain Slicer, built for the king of Sardinia in an attempt to build a 12.8 kilometer tunnel through the Alps, which, at the time, would have been the longest tunnel in the world.
Brotherhood tunneling networks have their own history, with the first generation actually predating the First Tiberium War, with multiple major tunneling companies actually being Brotherhood fronts, developing the technology under the noses of everyone else. However, it was in the prelude to the Second Tiberium War that the Brotherhood, first as disparate groups, and later as a systematic program, began development of a worldwide tunnel network, able to travel nearly anywhere through a so-called "underway" that still has sections in use today. The big innovation has been speed – a combination of an adaptive drill head, that can dial its openings and cutting edges so that it can change the profile of attack to best match whatever is being cut through, a series of waterjets that provide critical cooling at the interface, and a number of other systems to improve the speed of the drills. These include various means of producing shock heating to fracture the rocks being drilled, mostly implementations of crystal beam lasers – but in some cases plasma cutters, and occasionally even more exotic options might be employed.
The Initiative design adds a few of its own tricks: namely a set of sonic projectors, effectively allowing it to use modulated sonic pulses to shatter and shake loose rock and dirt and stone in the way, easing the course of the borer and minimizing the amount of wear on the cutting head – an important innovation especially as it also does a fair bit to break up the Tiberium that is so common underground. However, the primary utility is likely not going to be on Earth, but rather in the digging of Lunar colonies, with the now finished 'Crown Jewel' stations offering a blueprint for life among the cosmos.
[ ] North Boston Chip Fabricator (Phase 5)
A fifth and final expansion to the North Boston complex, this will focus not just on expanding chip fabrication, but also on a number of new technologies. While it is unlikely that these technologies will completely replace existing designs, there are a number of edge cases where inferior performance in one aspect is made up for by superior performance in others.
(Progress 750/1805: 15 resources per die) (+35 Capital Goods, +16 Consumer Goods, -2 Labor, -8 Energy) (Required for further AI projects.) [16, 20, 28, 44, 38, 17, 3, 42]
North Boston has seen significant work, with a number of new annexes along the Mystic River, and has gone reasonably well, with few serious incidents. While there were a number of injuries from an incorrectly calibrated particle accelerator violently tearing itself apart, most are expected to have returned to work by the end of the quarter. This is a credit to the precautions GDI takes as a matter of course with high energy equipment, as aside the compartmentalization substantially decreasing the spread of flying debris, the mandatory protective equipment worn by personnel working around such equipment is rated as sufficient for small caliber fire and light artillery fragments. Between the blast and debris, equipment with heavy power draws does tend to explode in a manner that is similar enough in effect to an artillery shell.
However, the project is not all doom and gloom. The most basic items of supply for the manufacture of computer chips are the high-purity raw materials needed – silicon wafers, carbon nanotubes, and a wide variety of other products have been projected to be consumed by the Mystic River annexes in huge quantities. Thus, setting up forges to supply the basic materials has been a first step towards both opening the annexes, and ironing out a few lingering supply chain issues.
[ ] Orca Wingmen Drone Deployment (Phase 2) (High Priority)
While the project is currently underway for naval aviation, and high priority land based air projects, GDI will need substantially more to mitigate for wartime expected loss rates, and provide for lower priority operations, such as interdiction support, the ZOCOM air wings, and training cadre for new pilots.
(Progress 217/215: 20 resources per die) (-1 Labor, -3 Energy, -1 Capital Goods) (Projected: 4 quarters to begin, 16 to complete) [4, 7]
Orca drones have begun to slowly proliferate to the second line positions where they can do the most good. While the overall program has been somewhat slow, and the drones are putting significant mental strain on the pilots due to needing to pay attention to far more items at once, the Orca corps in many ways is the group that needed the platforms most, as they have needed to change their tactics the most in order to keep themselves alive in their role as close air support and tactical strike aircraft.
Close air support has always been one of the most dangerous mission types available, only beaten out in some cases by strategic bombing, as both have often required long periods of the aircraft presenting themselves to both GBAD and enemy aircraft, while other operations spend much less time directly at the front.
got Repulsorplates deployed which will affect at least some of our drone tech going forward making maintenance cheaper, Advanced Tunnel Borrer were developed which will change how infrastructure is planned including our drone networks going forward, North Bostone Phase 5 was started up and with it the prospect of better AI and more Labor gains from better overall mechanisation and we finished the Orca Wingmen Drone Deployment.
This turn we are most likely getting:
[ ] Fifth Generation Electronic Video Assistants
The fourth generation of EVAs was something of a wet squib, pushed to readiness too early and with too little in the way of support, leaving refits both expensive and doing relatively little. However, GDI's computing technology has advanced in leaps and bounds, providing significant hardware and software advances. This, combined with the lessons learned from previous generations, has provided the opportunity for a new, better-supported generation of EVAs.
(Progress 0/200: 40 resources per die)
Second is harvested from the Scrin networks. What seems to be a black boxed artificial stupid for lack of a better term, it appears to be a relatively complicated priority management and navigation system for drone control. While controlling drone swarms is something that has been experimented with for the last half century and beyond, it can still be a very limited and finicky task, one that hopefully this advanced control system is able to make practical on a battlefield or strategic operational level.
[ ] Drone Control Hub Development (Tech)
The Visitors were, from what GDI can tell, an incredibly automated force, with only a bare handful of actual intelligences running the entire affair. Much of the work was offloaded onto various forms of EVA equivalents, managing the networks of drone systems across their invasion force. While replicating that level of automation with current computing technology is impossible, many advances in the practice and theory of large drone swarms can still be made while isolinear and other computer technologies mature.
(Progress 0/180: 20 resources per die)
fifth generation EVAs and the Drone Control Hub Developed because at this point
@Derpmind's plan is the most likely to win. All the while we are building up the 5th phase of North Boston which will net us more AI tech. I'll make a seperate effort post for that though.
As you see we have a lot of Labor gain incoming and we chould be fine even if things go pear shaped in some way from Karachi, as we have multiple independent sources of Labor both for government work and the free market expansions we are going to start dealing with by the end of this plan.
