It will cost a lot more than 5000 a turn. It will also take a long time to complete. If people want to get gene mods they will need to pay for it on their own. When we finish the Union we will have over 500,000,000 people in our nation. We can not and should not pay to add mods to that many people. It seem nice to provide for people but if there is no gain or increased output we are simply losing money and making things worse for those same people in the end.
Expensive, but not THAT expensive. If each upgrade costs 10 grand, and we gotta upgrade 1 billion people, we can pay it at 1 trillion dollars (expensive, but not unsurmountably so, 1/15 of RL USA's GDP) a year over ten years. And that'd be us paying for every single one, no one springing for hte payment themselves.
A two turn action with 5000 cost would be more appropriate to giving part of the military genemods than giving them to the entire nation. MELD is insanely expensive even once you drop the cost multiplier to 100%. Universal genemods become substantially more practical once you unlock hereditary modifications, but even that has its limitations. Specifically, hereditary modifications only work if you prevent crossbreeding between the modified and unmodified population. The Ethereals were able to genetically modify entire species because they were okay with genociding the unmodified specimens. You can get around this somewhat with minimalistic modifications, less potent packages consume less MELD, but only to a certain extent.
10 grand is laughably low. 10 million would be a better estimate, although still not necessarily an accurate one.
If that's the cost for relatively mundane enhancements, I'm not sure how military grade augmentation would ever be cost effective. Though it lines up surprisingly well with the earlier statement of 5000 upgrading part of our Military (assuming our GDP is comparable to RL US, and our Military Size is comparable). At 10 mill per person, 1.3 million people in the military, that's 13 trillion, or roughly 9500 In Game Money.
It might not be cost effective to modify the entire military. However, selective modifications to key personnel may yield outsize benefits. For instance, fighter pilots could be given greater resistance to g forces. You can also benefit from the increased force concentration. For instance, you could follow CAU's path and augment your special forces. The CAU commandoes might cost as much as a tank, but you can't airdrop tanks into a combat zone or send them deep into enemy territory on an infiltration mission.
Could one use MELD to improve tactical or strategic thinking in some way?
Yay!
1. Really minor genetic stuff like removing lethal recessives will be less expensive. It's the 'armour the spines, fix the eyes, cure cancer, improve the nervous system' packages that are impractical at foreseeable tech levels.
Yay! So close to such cool stuff.
I mean, at that point- why not just avoid doubling up on hulls and increase the size until it's capable of independent operations? It's exactly that that lead to destroyers becoming such a predominant escort class over earlier concepts. It seems we've gone from really short legged gun cutters and kinda circled back to the destroyer escort concept from WW2. Because if you are cutting back on crew requirements and endurance, we'd need a dedicated parasite tender for any fleet actions and we'd still need frigates for ranging, reconnaissance, and long range patrols. So I'd doubt we'd see all that much utility in putting them in a fleet's order of battle.
To be fair on why we shouldn't go the CAU route... our special forces are currently looking to be XCOM and we certainly couldn't make small scale special forces superior to anything they've got. I also doubt we're going to invest in too many other branches of special forces outside of more organic outgrowths of the Army like the Rangers. Although massively augmenting a few elite airborne regiments should be pretty feasible.
While I'm wholeheartedly in agreement about their actual practicality, I'm not denying their place in a space opera, I just don't think we have to or ought to. When it's gotten to the point it's more novel to avoid space fighters then they lose the luster that made it cool to justify them anyways.
Ibf the Rachni and the Chryssalids are from the same parent species.
Oh definitely, but even then I'd imagine it would deploy landing craft and aircraft from upper atmosphere while providing close ortillery support. LEO is still at least about a thousand kilometers, so you'd probably want the sturdier transport to cover some of that distance and suppress as many ground batteries before launching it's passengers as possible. It only makes sense to design an assault transport to have integrated combined arms support.
No, I thought it was fairly self-explanatory. The boxes are techs and the connecting lines indicate prerequisites.
