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Architect's Workshop (Girls' Frontline design quest)

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I dunno, we can't link any of the sources due to the porn, so just give the name?
 
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    • Scheduled vote count started by Solark on Jun 19, 2024 at 12:54 AM, finished with 25 posts and 19 votes.
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    Chapter 15
  • Threadmarks
    • [x] Talk to Elisa
    - [x] Nervous attitude

    "Oh, ahem... Hi, Agent, you look so young today... Did you dye your hair?"

    Elisa blinks at you once, and that's it. What the hell are you saying?! You shrink, but dare not hang up on her. Right, Scarecrow! Help! Thankfully, your silent prayer is answered as your guest takes over.

    "I'm pretty sure she's not Agent, but Elisa, the Mastermind."

    You're not helping!

    "T-Then... can we talk to Agent?"

    This time Elisa actually answers.

    "She's unavailable, Architect. I'll hear you out instead."

    Her voice is soft, almost gentle, but carries a sense of... otherworldliness. It's neither oppressive like Agent's air of authority, nor intimidating like Judge's sheer combat power, yet it freaks you out all the same. You can't shake off the feeling that she's somehow different from you, but you don't understand how exactly, and it makes you nervous.

    "Right... the thing is, Intruder requested a solution... you know, the duty I've been assigned to..."— Elisa nods, and you go on— "So now we have a... an upgrade for our troops... I'm not saying our troops are bad as they are, they are great! So maybe it's not worth distracting you from your, uh, masterminding stuff..."

    As you trail off, you notice a forlorn look in Elisa's eyes. The next moment Scarecrow takes over once again without missing a beat.

    "But since we're already here, let's summarize what we achieved. It's about countering G&K jammers..."

    She proceeds to describe the solution starting with the focused beam tracking device, aka cat ears. This is your domain, where you're confident and proud of your work, so before long you join in. Then you talk about the protocol and the behavior patterns, and finally the reason you called. Scarecrow reiterates she opposes immediate roll-out, while you insist it's an integral part of the solution and delaying it will only reduce its effectiveness.

    "It's too risky," Scarecrow shakes her head. "For a change like this, extensive testing is essential."

    "But everything went fine in the wargame!"

    "It's just one instance, you can't call it proper testing. Forget testing, the code hasn't even been reviewed!"

    Before you can counter with another argument, Elisa cuts in.

    "You have your review now."

    "W-what?"— Scarecrow looks taken aback.

    "You code is fine, Scarecrow. Both the protocol and the patterns. I'm merging it."

    Elisa's gaze shift from bewildered Scarecrow to you.

    "Architect, you said the solution requires all the components for best performance."

    You gulp and nod.

    "I'm not seeing the focused... the cat ears device blueprints in our repository."

    "Ah... of course, just a moment..." You look at a messy collection of scrappy drafts, crooked sketches and fragmentary notes that comprise your project documentation, and your face falls. Well, at least the blueprints themselves are fine. "...Here. About the documentation, may I have until tomorrow, please?"

    "Of course," Elisa nods, and looks between you and Scarecrow. "I'll take care of the roll-out." She pauses, and a hint of a smile touches her lips. "Good job, both of you."

    You can't believe what just transpired. The Mastermind herself has praised you! This long extensive project is finally complete, and you're proud to have achieved so much at such a scale, in just three days!

    Intruder assignment assessment:
    Success     criteria (1/2 required):
    - Solution that does not rely on radio frequencies (e.g. laser comms).
    + Solution to overcome jamming without changing the frequency (e.g. directional antennas)
    Major success criteria (2/3 required):
    + Comprehensive solution: signal is not the only problem.
    + Mission-independent solution that works in a variety of conditions (weather, obstacles, distances).
    + Recognize the importance of the problem and push for the solution to be adopted throughout the entire SF force.

    Intruder's request: major success
    Remaining days: 20
    Breakthrough points: 2


    The next day you go meet Scarecrow first thing in the morning, despite having pulled an all-nighter with your documentation. You promised she's going to be your next client, so you don't bother looking at the new messages. You find her up and about, and it doesn't take long to get to the point.

    "So, tell me, what do you have in mind?"

    Scarecrow ponders for a moment.

    "Too many things, to be honest. So I'll just pick one that I think will have the biggest impact on day X and our long-term capabilities."

    "Explosives?"— you try, and are rewarded with a graceful snort.

    "No, drones. Recon drones."

    "Hey, I thought they're pretty good. Is there anything wrong with them?"

    "They are good, until they got shot down." You hear a hint of frustration in her voice. "Long-term, the rate we're loosing them at is not sustainable, but we can't afford to stop using them. Short-term, there's a time gap between one drone going down and the next one arriving to replace it. Minutes, tens of minutes, hours even, when seconds matter." Scarecrow gives you a pleading look. "We need a way to keep our drones in the sky."

    With that she transfers a data package that illustrates her point. Distances, angles, ambushes, consequences... You quickly skim through it and immediately identify the problem: first generation antigravity propulsion system ceiling within effective range of machineguns and some rifles. You smirk at the simplicity of this task.

    Retrofitting the drones with second generation engines would bring them well out of danger, though the optics would also have to be replaced with a more powerful set to compensate for increased altitude.

    Or you could keep the gen-1 propulsion and optics, but miniaturize the drones, taking advantage of new components and power units. This would make them very hard to spot and nearly impossible to hit at the standard altitude.

    You run the numbers and conclude that both options would produce pretty much equal ground image resolutions at their respective service altitudes, and would require similar amount of time to prototype. Alright, then you'll go with...

    [x] a higher-flying version (2d)
    [x] a smaller version (2d)
     
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    • Increasing the size will make it even easier to shoot them down, and the fact that scout drones are needed to scout buildings that can only be properly viewed at close range suggests that spending even more resources making them bigger is just silly.

    Making them smaller and possibly cheaper to produce will simplify transportation and the amount we can donate should help.

    [x] a smaller version (2d)

    Ideally, we should still make them completely silent and able to camouflage themselves in terrain like sniper cloaks so they're even harder to spot. True this option I think will cost many times more, but they could be made in small batches, and to create such a thing is not difficult simply because we have an analog, so let it work will not be as good as if we spent time on it, but still will be and the effect should be quite good.

    And yes, guys, for those who decide to choose to increase the size of reconnaissance drones, please remember that the terrain is not always flat, and the enemy will not always stand openly on the ground. He also knows how to hide and likes to do it. So making our drones even bigger means dooming them to destruction in advance. If we need to improve the range of vision on straight terrain we need binoculars, which by idea the same snipers have, and not an attempt to make scouts a more convenient target.
     
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    [x] a smaller version (2d)

    ArmA made me learn that 20x optics on vehicles is, of course, very powerful and you almost can see people's eye colour about 1 kilometer away, but it'll be much harder for you to hide. And the thing is, if you can spot the enemy first and he can't spot you by any reason, then you already almost won the battle.

    Long story short, yeah, being small and barely noticeable in battle is pretty good idea.
     
    I think we need at least two different types of drone here:

    Some kind of stealthy, high-altitude one for observing larger areas. These will be expensive mind. (How effective would abusing Jaeger camo cloaks in this case be? Can they blend into the sky? Though I guess heat and radar signatures are the bigger problem with high-altitude drones). Not too sure on the specifics / viability of this one, we're kind of entering 'spy plane' territory instead.

    Some kind of smaller, naturally harder to spot drone you can just spam like crazy so even if a few get caught you still have coverage. Having them fly in the air where they can be spotted against the sky is probably a terrible idea, maybe something ground-based? Part of me is imagining a cannister full of tiny little camera/sensor bots you can just lob out of a mortar and seed an entire area with.

    Alternatively alternatively, just make the most hysterically cheap UAVs you can get away with and slap a camera on it. Why do they have to hover, exactly? That's effectively just standing still in mid-air; a cheap RC plane in motion has better evasion than that!
     
    Major Success: Cat ears are now standard equipment. Next, we should design a cat tail and a good excuse to make everyone wear them.

    [X] a higher-flying version (2d)
     
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    [X] a higher-flying version (2d)

    I will make the case that our problem is our limited supply of recon drones and them being shot down. Being able to use a single drone to cover more area thanks to its higher service ceiling would be really usefull.
    And while the smaller drone are considerably harder to shoot down, they are still within danger range, the bigger drone are effectively immune to small arm fire.
    And I dont really trust a small drone that can be brought down with a fly swatter XD
     
    [X] a higher-flying version (2d)

    They may have solutions for detecting drones. Higher drone = knowledge of where it is does not matter, still won't shoot it down.
     
    [X] a higher-flying version (2d)

    Dolls are terrifying aimbots, even the cheapo bargain bin ones. I say simply move them higher up, beyond effective range of small arms.
     
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    Undeadmuffin01 said:
    I will make the case that our problem is our limited supply of recon drones and them being shot down. Being able to use a single drone to cover more area thanks to its higher service ceiling would be really usefull.
    And while the smaller drone are considerably harder to shoot down, they are still within danger range, the bigger drone are effectively immune to small arm fire.
    And I dont really trust a small drone that can be brought down with a fly swatter XD
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...
    ...Do you realize that by choosing this you are proposing to make an expensive big target? I mean, it's one thing that destroying ALL massed cheap scouts is much harder than one, albeit flying at some altitude. They have their own ways of dealing with aerial targets one way or another and they can detect it if they are big enough, and then all it takes is one accurate sniper shot and that's it. You're out of the picture and you've lost expensive equipment.

    So if you really want us to fail here you say so, because logic and common sense say that no matter how versatile, invisible and highly accurate such a scout, but since that we can observe only from ONE side, as well as the fact that in the city you can not send such a scout, because it will be shot down because it is designed for observation from a distance, and not say to come out from around the corner of the building, to check for traps or enemy soldiers.
     
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    Is the smaller drone actually going to be less expensive? The update mentions:

    Or you could keep the gen-1 propulsion and optics, but miniaturize the drones, taking advantage of new components and power units. This would make them very hard to spot and nearly impossible to hit at the standard altitude.

    So the smaller design is getting some newer, fancier components for the sake of miniaturization. It will also be keeping the old bells and whistles, like the optics.
     
    Neither is really a solution to the problem, just a quick band-aid to slow the rate of attrition.

    High-altitude will probably make them need to get Rifle grade dolls to shoot down any drones, which could either start spreading sharpshooters thin or let our drones not get shot down.

    Smaller ones will still be vulnerable to small-arms fire, but with some dodge-focused software updates might live getting out of there to reposition.

    High-altitude seems the more likely to strain G&K resources to me?
     
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