We wont be locked in though? We can retool any factory at any time if we decide we dont want to make it anymore. A factory isnt permanent.
But we have to spend AP to do that. There's lots of gear we need, much of which we'll make forever. IF we genuinely think we won't make Brigantine forever why not make a Foundry for something that we won't have to spend AP to switch?
because we can cheaply refit it later and it gives us the ability to emergency conscript soldiers if the chaos comes knocking before our proper military refit is done?
1) We've been told Chaos won't come knocking
2) We've a vast allied army sitting around as a garrison on our craftworld compared to which any citizen militia we hand out gear to will be irrelevant
3) We could make a foundry that can make other gear citixen conscripts can also make good use of that we won't have to refit one day.
We will be decomissioning every single piece of armor we currently have available to us at *some* point in the quest. We will be discovering new technologies and advancing our tech base as THE premier Vaulish faction of the Aeldari people. Our Grand Academy project allows us to steal ideas from other species and that one feudal planet with Golden Age Humanity wrecks in orbit, was specifically pointed out as a place we can go to loot for shiny gubbins.
If we decide to wait to build a foundry for a suit of armor we will never replace we wont build a foundary until after Big E is placed permanently on his golden toilet seat. Ideally we will be making Mk2 Ithilmar (Infantry scale grav shields are going to be a thing eventually, explicitly so, allowing us to stick more stuff into the Ithilmar), we are going to be making a Mk2 VGW, a Mk2 Brigandine, etc. Stuff will change, we will gain new things to produce. It is inevitable.
But twenty perfect suits of armor next week is worth five suits today. We cannot put off producing wargear forever while waiting for the suit we are never going to replace. Yes its technically not efficient points wise, but we cannot just sit back and wait for perfection while we make Zhar-Tann do all of our dirty work for us. We need to contribute too and to do that we need to start making wargear to give our soldiers.
There's equipment we could make a foundry for that we're very unlikely to ever decommission. Our Pre-Fall gear, for example.
Twenty perfect suits of armour next week are worth a lot more than five today if we're not going to use any suits of armour at all for a year. We have no anticipated ground combat coming up after this turn.
We don't need to wait for perfection, but we can wait until things are a lot better than they are now.
I'm of the opinion Brigantine in good enough for mass production right now. Even if we decide later on that we can sustain VG as standard and transition to that it doesn't invalidate the value of having thousands of Brigantine on hand for emergency deployment after that.
As it is we have something Good Enough that we can make a lot of. We don't need to worry our ideal force composition, we can build up to that over the next few century. We should still be worrying about crash building an actually functional army within the next 50 decades (10 turns).
We don't need to crash build any army. We've dodged the need for that.
And if we want to mass produce an armour, marginal improvements become even more important, as a small relative improvement multiplied over thousands of suits is a large absolute improvement.
We've spent
1 AP designing these suits. That's all. We don't need to commit to them. We don't owe them money. They didn't save our mother's life.
An armour that's even 5% better that we invest the equivalent of twenty AP in building, which is quite plausible based on what you're saying, breaks even with spending 1 AP on a redesign to make something better that costs the same to make.
It's things we might mass deploy where it's most important that we care about careful optimisation. Spending one AP to upgrade these doesn't meaningfully slow down our initial buildup over the course of ten plus turns, it just means that our results after ten turns will be noticeably better.
