Architect's Workshop (Girls' Frontline design quest)

[X] Plan Electric Paratrooper
-[X] (Launch method) Heavy antigrav drone: 3000m altitude, deploy time 90 minutes.
-[X] (Airborne movement) Silent electric turbine-assisted flight: glide ratio +/= 40.
-[X] (Landing strategy) Silent electric turbine-assisted landing.

And done! You slow down your accelerated digimind to its regular speed, and note you were "out" only for a few seconds. Gager is watching you calmly, well used to your quirks by now. Though this time there is a glimmer of anticipation in her gaze. She's aware her request is not a simple one, yet she still trusts your ability to deliver. No way you're going to disappoint her!

"Gotcha, leave it to me! I believe I have a solution."

"Really? I'm counting on you then." She stands up, excitement evident in her body language. "I'll make sure no one disturbs you."

She offers you a parting smile and leaves the room. Now, you didn't voice your estimate, and for a good reason: four days should be enough to develop the tech and assemble a prototype or two, but you won't be able to produce thirty sets of wearable electric turbines in that time frame. Of course, you have a plan for that as well, but first things first. Time to get some inventing!

The low-hanging fruit here is definitely the heavy anti-gravity carrier drone part. The basic tech is already at your disposal, and you're just going to develop it to the next stage. 'Anti-gravity tech' sounds pretty cool, but under the hood it has several annoying limitations that hinder its more widespread adoption.

First, it's only good at pushing things up, away from Earth's gravitational center. And it's embarrassingly bad at producing horizontal vectors. Even strong enough wind can overcome the meager momentum it generates and blow your drone around like an overengineered balloon.

Second, anti-grav emitters start interfering with each other at certain range, to the point where two of them close together become less efficient than one a sufficient distance apart. This means you can't simply attach several existing drones, even with the latest generation anti-grav engines, to a T-Doll and lift her up. You'll need a sufficiently sized frame and strategic placement of anti-grav propulsion points to squeeze full lifting capacity out of each engine. On the upside, your calculus shows that once you manage to do it, lifting one platoon in paratrooper loadout shouldn't be a problem.

You tap into the compute capacity of Sangvis Ferri and feed the inputs, requesting the smallest frame size that'd satisfy your payload requirements under no-interference spacing. Keeping an eye on the simulation, you multitask to composing a bill of materials for the frame. Your intention is to be as minimalist as possible, you're not going to come up with a fancy hull, or bother with aerodynamic shape. Gager's would-be paratroopers can hold onto the frame and hang off it like ripe grapes for all you care, as long as they can effectively transition to horizontal electric turbine-assisted flight.

The simulation model gets your attention. It achieved the required characteristics, but boy, you'd have to raid an aerospace factory to get your hands on those quantities of aviation-grade aluminum. Good. Seems like you're not getting away from fiddling with the antigrav tech after all, just as planned.

You bring up the engine core schematics and immerse yourself in a tedious but gripping process of identifying the nature of the interference. You'll need to shield the cores somehow so that they won't have to be too far apart to perform up to specs. The day is over just like that, but not before a brand new graviton shield of your design had proven to be effective, allowing for a much tighter placement of the engines.

The second day of your assignment is about designing and assembling an airframe for the new parameters. Actually, calling the contraption you're putting together an airframe would be an insult to everything that has ever taken to the skies. Tube steel, support bars and angle irons with antigrav engine mounting slots are coming together for one sole purpose: lifting 30 T-Dolls up to the designated altitude. The frame is too big to just 3D print the parts like you usually do, so you order a bunch of structural steel components from SF factories here and there, and work with what you have. This part is too basic for your skills, so you mind isn't there: you just want to finish it ASAP and turn your attention to the worthy challenge of silent electric turbines.

The third day finds you re-purposing SF electric motors for your needs. You couldn't make those fast from scratch, so you opted to improve, reinforce and boost. Things get exciting the moment you take on magnetostriction, a phenomena that induces microscopic shape changes in electric coils due to rapid power switching. The coils act almost like loudspeakers, so you must negate it to get rid of the annoying and very stealth-breaking whine. It's an uphill battle, but it barely manages to slow you down as you reduce the side effect step by step, until what's left measures below your designated threshold. Even the neural cloud data you got from analyzing P90 comes into play when you shift a part of the sound signature you couldn't fully eliminate into the ultrasonic spectrum, and verify it's inaudible for both humans and G&K T-Dolls. After finishing it up with frictionless bearings straight out of Mr. Spinny tech, you get a very silent and very efficient electric motor. Stress-testing, dyno stands, optimizing for power consumption and turbine geometry— everything goes without hiccups, letting you clock out satisfied.

It's the last day of the paratroopers project. You're not wasting any time, taking the test batch of blades produced over the past three days and subjecting them to a number of tryouts, mostly involving attaching them to your brand new silent motors and spinning, spinning, spinning... The profile is performing as expected, as long as you keep the blade speed under the speed of sound. Your main challenge here is optimizing for maximum thrust at minimum size, watching for flow separation and monitoring sound signature. In other words, nothing you can't handle. When it's done, adding control servos is a piece of cake, and so the wearable silent turbine backpack is ready.

You take the prototype to the shooting range, where the antigrav drone is already prepared to take off. You look at its frame, then at the turbine harness. The former to lift the troops, the latter to propel them towards their target.

...

Tech combo requirement (Anti-gravity + electric turbine): True

Breakthrough points requirement (3): True
Solution unlocked: Multi-purpose electrojet attack craft

Breakthrough points requirement (4): True
Solution unlocked: Electrojet missile-drone

Breakthrough points requirement (5): False
???

You almost overlooked this. You firmly grip the turbine and hold it to the drone frame. It's obvious: some turbines attached to the anti-grav drone would make it capable of fast horizontal movement, increasing range of the paratroopers solution and even enabling extraction missions. You digimind is already running numbers, so moments later your assembly lines come to life once again, producing components for bigger, more powerful turbines, while you order a pair of Judge's spare heavy plasma throwers and Ouroboros' rocket pods to be delivered to your workshop ASAP. There is no doubt about it: the era of G&K air supremacy is ending right at this moment.

Hang on, what if go a step further and just stuff this thing with explosives for payload? Platoon of fully equipped T-Dolls worth a lot in weight, and you won't need an oversized warhead with the precision and intelligence of a Sangvis Ferri Core for guidance (you're fairly sure even a simplistic Dinergate digimind can adequately steer the missile-drone to its target). This means a lot of weight reduction, and that in turn translates into a lot of additional range. You're talking a full-fledged operational-tactical level strike capability, maybe even deep strikes! Holy circuits, what have you gotten yourself into this time...

---

It's morning, and you've just finished putting together everything you could. The antigrav drone looks almost the same as yesterday, except for a pair of electric turbines affixed to its frame. Besides it there's a smaller, slicker airframe armed with dual HPTs and guided micro-missiles, though it lacks turbines at the moment. A stealth gunship, capable of delivering close air-to-ground fire support, as well as swatting G&K helicopters out of the skies, just needs means of propulsion to start kicking ass, and you're going to get those for it. Sure, nobody requested it, but you're confident it's going to be a game-changer.

Gager joins you shortly after you call her.

"Wow, Archi, what am I looking at here?"— she asks, eyeing the airframes with suspicion.

"Lo and behold! The larger one is our airborne personnel carrier! The smaller one requires some finishing touches, so don't mind it for now."

Gager nods and starts walking around the carrier drone, checking it out.

"So, how does it work? And what can it do?"

This is the question you've been waiting for!

"Our paratroopers wear this"— you demonstrate the wearable turbine pack— "and hold onto the frame while it lifts them up three clicks. Then they activate the packs and let go, up to 120 clicks, full stealth." Gager stops walking to stare at you wide-eyed. "I've also made a last-minute improvement to the drone itself," you continue, "added a set of turbines to it, so it is now able to move about 80 clicks on its own! With all the implications that come with that."

Clearly agitated, Gager briskly walks up to you.

"You mean we can send a platoon up to 200 kilometers from the launch site?!"

"Weeell, more like 160. The drone needs enough juice to come back."

"This... Architect, let me assemble a strike team immediately. It's going to change the status quo! There are"— she trails off, frowning. "I don't see thirty electrojet backpacks."

"Yeah, I was about to get to it. You see, my workshop is good for prototyping and maybe producing small batches of stuff. It's not capable of operating at scale, nor should it be able to. It's more of a lab than an industrial complex. And that's why I'll be soloing the first deployment with this only pack I have here."

"And your destination is?"

"Agent's office."

---

You explain your plan to Gager. In order to produce 30 electrojet backpacks in the remaining days, you'll need a significant slice of SF manufacturing capacity dedicated to yourself. As they say, seeing is believing, so nothing is going to be more convincing than dropping on Agent's head in the middle of her stronghold, bypassing all the defenses. You'll make your case that way, and she'll allocate the required capacities to the cause. Simple. Except... if you mess something up, fail to demonstrate your invention properly, you probably won't be getting anything. Gager nods, thinks for a moment, and then says, "I should go instead."

"Why?"

"I promise I'll get her approval. This is too important, I won't botch it no matter what."

You consider her suggestion. She says it like this, so you can rest assured this is exactly how it's going to be. There is a trade-off though: if you go yourself, you'll try to get the attack craft and the missile drone approved as well. Gager, on the other hand, will only get you the paratroopers part. Hmmm...

[] Go yourself.
You'll be rolling 1d10 vs TNs 3, 5, 7 to get 1 full paratroopers platoon, 1 attack craft, 3 missile drones respectively ready by day X. Rolling 10 will double everything.
[] Send Gager.
She'll get the approval for 1 full paratroopers platoon ready by day X without rolls.