Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
Engineering and Foundry, actually, in Enemy Unknown. Just Engineering in XCOM2. Skunkworks was an achievement in EU, for completing every Foundry project.
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Ace Combat XCOM: Enemy Skies
- Thread starter hYGP
- Start date
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
OK. Well, with that being the case, I think everyone's on the same page about what a Skunkworks is, why we want one, and why I want Siegfried Drache helping to develop it.
You may not agree. You may think that Streamlined Construction Practices (which apparently, @huhYeahGoodPoint is now telling us, means cheaper building construction, not cheaper planes) is a better choice. Given how many IC we're dumping into construction right now, you're not necessarily wrong.
But I had planned on Engineering Team Charlie working specifically on making better planes, and founding a Skunkworks is the first step towards that, so that's why I'm voting the way I voted on the previous page.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
More importantly, it shortens build times for all of our construction and refurbishing projects.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm not saying that's irrelevant, but right now I don't think it's a higher priority than shortening the time/difficulty for developing new planes.
So like, I'd be content to wait and let Engineering Group Able (which is our general engineering group under my schema) work on it after the next round of satellite launches.
I'm not saying it's useless or that we shouldn't research it. I'm saying that I want to keep Group Charlie focused on the project of building better aircraft because I'm pretty sure the F-14X-EML isn't actually the plane we want to stop at.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
And that is completely fair and absolutely true on F-14X, but time will always be of the essence and the way I see it, the faster we can build the better, including the things we need to fix at Fort Grays and the facilities we'll eventually need to build for to develop our new planes. So I prefer we can build fast before we start deciding what we even need to make better planes.
- Location
- Germany
I can understand both approaches. However, if I remember correctly, our losses, right now, are low, and our super-aces tend to sit safely in their better-than-F14X.
We need better planes, to exploit their potential and (most importantly) not lose the tech race. It's better to have one squad equipped with the best stuff, than to have three squads with third-best stuff, I think.
We need better planes, to exploit their potential and (most importantly) not lose the tech race. It's better to have one squad equipped with the best stuff, than to have three squads with third-best stuff, I think.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The thing is, I don't think researching a different tech before starting work on the Skunkworks will make finishing the Skunkworks faster. And the stuff that happens after that? Well before we reach the point of starting any new big factories or major megaprojects, Streamlined Construction Practices will already be done anyway. Unless, um.
@huhYeahGoodPoint , this is actually becoming a serious question that preys on my mind.
If we assign, say, 100 engineers to a task that takes 10 engineer-weeks to complete, will we get to start the team on a second task during that same week? Or will we be stuck with them idling for most of the week?
Because in the latter case, we're going to need to subdivide a lot of our teams ASAP, because they are grossly oversized for their projects when the minimum time allocation is "one week."
Also, in the latter case, we should put teams on the biggest, most time-consuming projects possible, because we want to get those out of the way with our too-big teams.
When I allocated personnel to the teams, I was worried that we'd have to burn 15 Focus on each team this week because I wasn't sure the "Organize XCOM to have single directors for engineering and research" project would pay off this week. So- and others supported/urged me ahead in this- I kept us to a small number of teams.
I'm gonna feel kind of facepalmy if that means we end up effectively wasting half our manpower because 100-person teams effortlessly finish jobs in a day or two and then sit around twiddling their thumbs.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
Vote extended, and many of you are probably going to want to revote because of some things I thought of.
On another note, I did have most of this ready to respond soonish if I hadn't been distracted by a reinvigorated discovery of XCOM Long War, so, uh, hm.
Burst Missile Technology available! [0/60] {Research} {Weapons}
Utilizing magnetic accelerators to accelerate highly radioactive particles into each other, an exceptionally powerful explosion is created. With only an understanding of magnetic accelerators the resulting warhead is too big to be mounted on typical airborne missiles - however, with advances in particle and accelerator technology it may be possible to shrink the warhead.
NOTE: This technology has international regulations placed on its research, but thanks to a couple of grandfather clauses its usage is not restricted. Proceed with whatever measures you see fit.
Hm.
Tell you what.
A lot of the lower cost techs (aka 10-30 point range) aren't really fundamental technologies (well, a few of them that open up new branches of research are but I won't get into that). Therefore, if you choose to start a low cost tech, you can start up a build queue so that I can write in multiple projects and portray the responses all at once like six days later instead of needing to literally write short updates with every new ingame day as your engineering team slams through a 10 engineer-week project in literally an afternoon.
On another note, I did have most of this ready to respond soonish if I hadn't been distracted by a reinvigorated discovery of XCOM Long War, so, uh, hm.
You - wait a second you do have Magnetic Accelerators and the people who know how to apply them for the purpose of making Burst Missiles.
Burst Missile Technology available! [0/60] {Research} {Weapons}
Utilizing magnetic accelerators to accelerate highly radioactive particles into each other, an exceptionally powerful explosion is created. With only an understanding of magnetic accelerators the resulting warhead is too big to be mounted on typical airborne missiles - however, with advances in particle and accelerator technology it may be possible to shrink the warhead.
NOTE: This technology has international regulations placed on its research, but thanks to a couple of grandfather clauses its usage is not restricted. Proceed with whatever measures you see fit.
You're supposed to be able to start the team on a second task during the same week, but that would also currently hilariously slow down the update-to-ingame-time ratio if I had to write out the option of choosing every time, so...
Hm.
Tell you what.
A lot of the lower cost techs (aka 10-30 point range) aren't really fundamental technologies (well, a few of them that open up new branches of research are but I won't get into that). Therefore, if you choose to start a low cost tech, you can start up a build queue so that I can write in multiple projects and portray the responses all at once like six days later instead of needing to literally write short updates with every new ingame day as your engineering team slams through a 10 engineer-week project in literally an afternoon.
Terra Allias
World's only Magical Girl Spec Ops Asuka fan
- Location
- Cheverly
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hypothetically speaking, how would we conduct a guerilla war against Advent if we lose?
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
OK that is cool and I am glad you said so, but.
Um.
It doesn't quite address my question.
See, the ADMM fires these absurdly powerful missile warheads. And it fires twelve of them, from three packs mounted on separate hardpoints.
So could we just, uh... order a system that only fires one pack? Or just fires the individual missiles? Is that a thing? Because it'd probably be a lot more practical to engineer that into our frontline fighter models.
If that's not a thing, fine, and I'm not going to pick fights or argue about it. I'm just wondering if that's a thing?
OK that's good and I'll craft a vote that goes with it soon.
EDIT:
The other reason it makes sense is that if you tell Shen to do four trifling little projects in one week, he's not just going to have all his people knock off one project Monday, one Tuesday, and so on. He's going to subdivide his team and give all of them a week to work on it, which is a more realistic way to actually get anything done anyway.
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- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
It's the one company in Estovakia that makes it and they produce ADMMs. That's why if you want to see if they can make a system that fires only one pack, or individual missiles, you'll have to talk it out with them.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
I don't except that either, but the way i see it the Skunkworks unlocks the facilities that we need to create our new planes, so finishing Streamlined Construction Practices means we can build what it gives us faster. And we're going to be doing building and such even before that, with the need to fix Fort Grays, harden our structures, expand our factory, build at least one new hangar for Selatapura, etc.
Is this an upgrade for regular missiles or a new SP weapon?
That's very good thing. Reworking my plan.
[X] Plan: Build Queue
-[X] Able
--[X] Project Neighborhood Watch [0/10] {REPEATABLE}
---[X] Streamlined Construction Practices [0/30]
----[X] Electrothermal Chemical Firing
-[X] Charlie
--[X] Aircraft Skunkworks [0/60]
I decided to add one more project to Able, since the first two are small projects, in case they finish before the week is over. And the upgrade to our railguns and large guns is nice.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
SP weapons, holy hell are they SP weapons/groundborne installations.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
[X] Engineering Plan: Stay On Point
-[X] Team Able is to distribute time and labor among these four projects, in descending order of completion priority, as Shen sees fit. Team Charlie is to finish the Skunkworks then start work on the F-35D. Team Baker keeps working on Stonehenge, but we knew that.
-[X] Engineering Team Able
--[X] Project Neighborhood Watch [0/10] {REPEATABLE} (focus on Belka)
--[X] Streamlined Construction Practices [0/30]
--[X] Project Dove [0/10] (start clearing that debris)
--[X] Resistant Structures [0/??] (overflow, gets us the benefit of what Verusa gave us)
-[X] Engineering Team Charlie
--[X] Aircraft Skunkworks [0/60]
--[X] F-35D "Lightning III" (see footnote)
FOOTNOTE:
The goal for the "Lightning III" project is to upgrade the F-35, with its existing (in various models) vectored thrust capability, stealth, and battlefield sensor integration. The main focus is to improve its agility for better dogfighting performance, and equip it with improved special weapons. This will enable the multirole F-35 to better meet X-COM's needs, which focus primarily on air combat and secondarily on ground attack.
Design targets for the F-35D include:
1) Supermaneuverability in the same class as the F-14X and F-22; increased cost to achieve superior maneuverability to these aircraft is accepted.
2) Retention of stealth capability, to reduce the threat of humans acting as sepoys for alien forces.
3) Advanced special weapon compatibility, including at least one of the following:
3a) The EML, in keeping with existing X-COM USEA armament and doctrine,
3b) The ADMM, and/or a reduced-volume ADMM derivative firing fewer missiles per salvo.
Even something that could be downsized to be fighter-portable except possibly as a gravity bomb would probably be farther down the chain.
-[X] Team Able is to distribute time and labor among these four projects, in descending order of completion priority, as Shen sees fit. Team Charlie is to finish the Skunkworks then start work on the F-35D. Team Baker keeps working on Stonehenge, but we knew that.
-[X] Engineering Team Able
--[X] Project Neighborhood Watch [0/10] {REPEATABLE} (focus on Belka)
--[X] Streamlined Construction Practices [0/30]
--[X] Project Dove [0/10] (start clearing that debris)
--[X] Resistant Structures [0/??] (overflow, gets us the benefit of what Verusa gave us)
-[X] Engineering Team Charlie
--[X] Aircraft Skunkworks [0/60]
--[X] F-35D "Lightning III" (see footnote)
FOOTNOTE:
The goal for the "Lightning III" project is to upgrade the F-35, with its existing (in various models) vectored thrust capability, stealth, and battlefield sensor integration. The main focus is to improve its agility for better dogfighting performance, and equip it with improved special weapons. This will enable the multirole F-35 to better meet X-COM's needs, which focus primarily on air combat and secondarily on ground attack.
Design targets for the F-35D include:
1) Supermaneuverability in the same class as the F-14X and F-22; increased cost to achieve superior maneuverability to these aircraft is accepted.
2) Retention of stealth capability, to reduce the threat of humans acting as sepoys for alien forces.
3) Advanced special weapon compatibility, including at least one of the following:
3a) The EML, in keeping with existing X-COM USEA armament and doctrine,
3b) The ADMM, and/or a reduced-volume ADMM derivative firing fewer missiles per salvo.
From the sound of it, the initial "Burst Missile" research project unlocks a warhead so big it takes something the size of an ICBM or a heavy cruise missile to deliver it. Something like what the Yuktobanians were slinging around in the Circum-Pacific War (which I headcanon as actually being fairly old tech), or the Helios cruise missiles used by the Arsenal Bird, or whatever the fuck was the warhead of that last wiggly evasive cruise missile from the "Breaking Arrows" mission of Ace Combat 4.
Even something that could be downsized to be fighter-portable except possibly as a gravity bomb would probably be farther down the chain.
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- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
I'll put together a full plan tomorrow, but I don't want to lose sight of the goal, here.
It's XCOM -- we win when we successfully contest the Strangereal orbitals. Since this is also Ace Combat, we do this by dogfighting the Alien Mothership in HEO.
Now that we know it's there, we need to do the following things, in some order:
It's XCOM -- we win when we successfully contest the Strangereal orbitals. Since this is also Ace Combat, we do this by dogfighting the Alien Mothership in HEO.
Now that we know it's there, we need to do the following things, in some order:
- Have planes that can dogfight in HEO. For this, we need the Skunkworks.
- Have weapons that can hit the mothership. I'm curious whether meson cannons will be effective at all against the aliens -- or if we're better served with high velocity projectiles, realizing that the more crap we put into orbit the harder postwar cleanup will be.
- The ability to transit LEO. We may get this for free, if we don't need a fighter tender facility in LEO
- Recon the mothership, so we know what the final battle will look like. We may achieve this with a sufficient understanding of alien psychology and reverse-engineering their ships.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Marina Popova:
"Point of order, I am fairly sure that is next to last thing you do before you win. After that, you will have to fly inside a gigantic tunnel system and blow up some kind of missile or something."
Mobius One, over teleconference: "Yep."
Trigger waggles hand, holds up sign: "Eh, more or less."
Blaze: "...Am I the only one here who thinks it won't be over after that?"
Pixy, also over teleconference: "...No?"
That's... a fair point. On the other hand...
Why aren't the aliens already clearing the debris field themselves, if this is a priority for them? They have spaceships. They have craft that can presumably fly in space. They have energy weapons, which we know are capable of targeting inanimate objects such as missiles and drone aircraft. Anything we can do with Project Dove, they can do better. Yet as far as we know, there is no sign of alien fighters or six-gun craft sweeping up the debris field.
With that said, the debris field in low orbit MAY be a load-bearing component of Strangereal's planetary defenses, even if we put it there completely by accident. We probably shouldn't clear it until we're confident we have the means of reliably engaging targets in low planetary orbit. EXCEPT, perhaps, to target stuff that looks likely to hit the Lighthouse, which may be taking cumulative damage from debris strikes, though it's probably got Whipple shields or something along most of its lower length.
I think we should instead prioritize sweeping up the debris in geosynchronous orbit. Right now we still have a 24-satellite GPS constellation, but eventually some of those will get hit by debris strikes. Geosynchronous orbit may also be a place for us to hang assets associated with the Lighthouse.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
If the aliens wanted to bombard us from orbit, they would have already done so. They have no problem with getting ships past the debris field, or they could just have the Temple Ship push past it if they needed to. Or they could just grab larger pieces of debris and drop them on strategic locations.
I don't think that the aliens are going to care for us starting to clean up the orbit, as long as we don't make hostile actions against the Temple ship or get too close to it, or try to actually leave the orbit.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
They surely could. On the other hand, they may be relying heavily on their shield ships to get through the debris- fire a braking burn to drop out of orbit, then descend from orbit with their APS systems up and descend into the atmosphere, just letting any orbiting debris smack into their shield bubbles. They only switch the shields off when they reach altitudes and speeds where doing so is safe.
(I suspect that an active APS is fairly effective as a heat-shield aeroshell during reentry too)
Hmmm. Maaaybe. On the other hand, it's hard to be sure and I kind of worry about it.
I'd actually like to ensure that when we send up Pilgrim One for Project Dove, we don't have Nagase aboard, precisely because she's, like, an S or SS-tier ace when she's in good form and I don't want to risk losing her if the aliens take violent exception to the ship's activities lasering debris.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
I'm sure that it does have an APS, but remember, Pilgrim One made it through the debris field of High Earth Orbit to at least to Geostationary orbit in one piece and fully functional, and it didn't have APS or space bullshit metal armoring.
If the aliens saw a need to destroy our space capabilities, all they needed to do was move the Temple Ship closer and destroy/damage Pilgrim One while it is parked at the Lighthouse.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
Uh...doesn't seem to have done much to stop them, so far. Sure, the Mothership is still in orbit, but the damn thing is about as large and massive (if not more) as the Ulysses impactor. I don't see that ever "landing", and I'm not entirely convinced it could survive entry to the atmosphere. Or far enough in for the whole rigamarole involving heat and pressure that shuttles are built to survive, if you want to be pedantic, since the atmosphere technically extends further out than the Moon, we've recently discovered.
Also, as written, your statement seems to be saying the Mothership needs to land to orbitally bombard us. Which would be an...interesting accomplishment. I'm not really going to go into why the debris wouldn't be an impediment to bombardment, as others have already covered it.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
Very good point. I've been thinking that one of the reasons why aliens have been leaving the Lighthouse alone is that they want to use it to move personnel and equipment on to the surface after Earth has been conquered.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Uh, for all I know, Pilgrim One docked at the TOP of the space elevator and is still up there in geosynchronous orbit, having never descended through the debris field. It's the astronauts who came down the space elevator, not their ship.
Am I mistaken, @huhYeahGoodPoint
Well yes, but there's a difference between blowing up our spaceship when it's parked at the Lighthouse, and blowing up our spaceship when it's flitting around potting debris with a laser cannon.
True.
With that said, though, I think it might be prudent to leave the LEO debris field in place until we have a better understanding of the aliens' situation and logistical constraints. It MIGHT be causing them problems, and we very much do not want and do not need to create a situation where the aliens enjoy any more freedom of action than they now have.
The geosynchronous debris field is another matter, mind you.
That does seem likely. It's one of the few human artifacts on Strangereal that they're likely to even recognize as being significant and worth preserving if reasonably practical. On the other hand, their patience and willingness to tolerate its continued existence probably has limits, which is why I'm very hesitant about building or developing space infrastructure until we have space-capable fighting ships on par with the aliens', ships which are capable of defending it.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
GEO and HEO have smaller debris fields, too. As for the place for ship to dock, it would have to be either in the GEO or LEO. The game never told us and the plans for a theoretical real life space dock would have it placed at LEO, but since Strangereal has an actual space elevator, they could have place it at GEO, since all the real life plans for this stuff are theoretical.
But I think we got bit away from the original subject. Of which we agreed that if the Temple Ship wanted to go through the debris field, it could and be in tip top shape afterwards.
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- He/Him/His
I think I'm phrasing this kind of badly -- the lose condition I'm thinking about is less "military targets are turned into craters from orbit" and more in the sense of "aliens able to conduct gunboat diplomacy and force/mind control nations into submission." That still may not be the exact threat model, but I do think regardless of the mechanism, the Alien Mothership getting too close should be thought of as a loss condition.