- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
I'm not asking Pixy lead the ground troops. I'm asking Pixy to help Long Caster in organizing the ground troops because Long Caster is only an AWACS guy. He won't have any idea of how to do it.
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Ace Combat XCOM: Enemy Skies
- Thread starter hYGP
- Start date
I'm not asking Pixy lead the ground troops. I'm asking Pixy to help Long Caster in organizing the ground troops because Long Caster is only an AWACS guy. He won't have any idea of how to do it.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Note that my plan delegates the job to Bradford, who will predictably respond by hiring a colonel or something.
Usea has fought three major land wars in the past 23 years, and God alone knows how many little ones. There will be NO shortage of experienced ground combat experts suitable to command our base defenses.
Pixy, himself, may be hell on wheels as an 'operator,' as a man fighting with a rifle on the land. But that doesn't mean he's going to know much about organizing an entire fortress worth of defensive troops and weapons.
For that, I'd want to poach, say, the commander of one of the Menhir forces that defended Stonehenge during the fight to shoot down the first Arsenal Bird.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
Remember, we can only get our pilots to A-tier at best with non-combat training.
Yeah, you're right. When ground combat becomes necessary Pixy would be best at leading a commando team, if not in the air, not as a high ranking officer commanding troops.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yes, but if anyone on the planet can augment the XP gain that turns B-tier into A-tier into S-tier pilots, so that they learn faster... It'll be Captain Bartlett.
Remember that Bartlett is, so far as I know, literally the only person on Strangereal who has trained more than one SS-tier or greater ace. Definitely at least two, probably three, maybe four depending on what Chopper's tier was at the time of his death. That man has some serious training mojo.
The point is, Bartlett's true greatness is as a trainer of aces, not as an ace himself. His pupils shot down far, far more of the enemy than he personally ever could.
The same may be true of Pops, arguably.
Besides which, both of them are getting on in years; I'd be more comfortable with a Razgriz Squadron consisting of Blaze, Edge, Archer, and Swordsman than of Blaze, Captain, Archer, and Pops.
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
How about Mihaly? Isn't the fan theory he taught Yellow Squadron everything they knew? Then again, Yellow Squadron is dead and Razgriz Squadron isn't.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
...Are you assuming that the asteroids in question are coming from the asteroid belt? Because that sounds like the right time-frame for the asteroid belt. If so, that's not necessarily the case. Earth has lots of asteroids nearby, some of which are good mining candidates. Given that getting to the moon takes like 3 days, I'd be shocked if moving things around in low earth orbit would be on the timeframe of months. At least, once a path to-and-from the body in question is cleared.
Actually, Lagrange points, simply due to their nature, tend to have a decent density of asteroids, some of useful sizes and compositions. The space elevator is presumably on a Lagrange point. Hell, a large, naturally occurring asteroid may even be the anchor. So they may be very close by. Mining those NE asteroids also has the added benefit of them no longer being a risk to life on the planet, hence why I figured mining them would be an obvious move, with good PR potential.
This, on the other hand, is a much more convincing point. Still, zero-gee manufacturing, even without the resources of nearby asteroids, could have uses. That can be done fairly simply, too.
I never used the word "just", in that statement. But a lot of these stunts I keep hear about do remind me a lot of Star Wars. I mean, fighters taking on giant super-weapons, which seems to inevitably involve flying through tunnels and trenches? Can ya really blame me for making the comparison?
Think you answered your own question, if it's just a fan-theory.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
From the sound of it, Mihaly may have trained Yellow Thirteen, but many or most of the Yellow Squadron members were his proteges, not Mihaly.
I remember Ace Combat 4 pretty fondly; review those cut-scenes.
Also, honestly, none of the other Yellows ever struck me as being individually a match for the Razgriz. I tend to picture the Razgriz, during the bulk of their glory days, as an SSR-tier ace backed up by SS-es and S-es, much like Strider Squadron at present. Yellow Squadron strikes me more as an SS or SSR-tier ace backed up by S-es and A's, especially by the time Mobius One fights them. I know it's not really supported by gameplay, but I think that's mostly the limits of the engine.
The near-Earth asteroids tend to come and go, sometimes near and sometimes far. You could pick a relatively near one, but still expect travel times of a week or more without high acceleration drives (e.g. NOT ion drives). Remember that 'near-Earth' means 'a lot nearer than the asteroid belt,' not 'closer than the Moon.'
Lagrange points do have objects floating around them. But the Earth-Moon Lagrange points don't seem to support clouds of large asteroids.
A towed asteroid may be the anchor indeed- but that's not the same as a Lagrange point.
In any event, the point is simply that unless we can secure our orbital space with craft comparable to those of the aliens, or vastly superior quantity of inferior but still capable ships... we really can't afford to invest in off-planet industry under these circumstances.
It's like talking about starting up your fishing industry when you're trapped on a blockaded island. Yes, food is good, yes, fish are yummy. But if you can't do something about the blockade, you shouldn't be sending out fishing boats.
In a word, no.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
Point, though one on close approach could be mined for whatever it's worth.
Define "large". It took us until 2010 to find a sub-kilometer asteroid floating in our own L4 orbital. That's still a heck of a lot of material to work with, even if small by astronomical standards. Also, Strangereal =/= our Earth.
...Space elevators are built on/in/below (depending on perspective) Lagrange points. They need to be built on them, or Bad ThingsTM happen.
Um...no, we absolutely could invest in off-planet industry. Zero-gee manufacturing could simply and easily be done in the area immediately around the Lighthouse, if the materials are brought up from the planet. Might be a bit expensive, but you can make some things much more easily in zero-gee/hard vacuum. Vapor deposition, for instance, is much easier and "cleaner" (meaning purer products) in space. It's pretty easy to apply large amounts of heat or cool things in space, as well. I see no reason why that would be any worse than beaming down solar power.
Now, you're correct that asteroid mining is probably out, at least for the moment. But I already conceded that in my last post. So I don't know why you're harping on about it.
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Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
No, QM specifically said that only way for us to increase the XP gain from training to break past A-tier is if we got our hands on COFFIN/ZOE tech. Even if Bartlett were such a trainer that he alone could do the impossible, it would still be most likely a process taking months of training, maybe even years. Remember that all those aces didn't achieve their ace ranks on training simulators, but on the battlefield.
It is canon that Mihaly was the mentor of Yellow 13.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah, but you can't use that argument to say "you can't prove there ISN'T a 10-kilometer asteroid floating in space over there!" Strangereal could have more or less space debris at a Lagrange point than Earth does; the most reasonable benchmark is "probably about the same amount" simply because Strangereal is broadly like Earth in its bulk physical parameters as a whole.
That's not true.
You can build a space elevator on a celestial body that has no moon to form Lagrange points with. You could build a space elevator on an isolated rogue planetoid in the depths of interstellar space that doesn't even have meaningful Lagrange points with a star that it orbits because it doesn't have a stable orbit around a star.
What a space elevator needs is a counterweight, which is a very different matter.
About the only time Lagrange points and space elevators need to come into the same picture is when you're dealing with a body so small, and deep enough in a parent body's gravity well, that it doesn't have a stable synchronous orbit. Then you have to hang the space elevator off a Lagrange point... but that's a special case that's not relevant to the Lighthouse.
Physically, yes we are mechanically capable of doing that.
At the same time, an inscrutable, heavily armed, better equipped enemy force has immediate access to any industry we build in space, even if we put it high above geosynchronous altitude where debris isn't a problem. We have no means of stopping them from attacking such industry. They haven't attacked our orbital power infrastructure YET, but we have no means of stopping them. We don't know why they have abstained. We can't know.
Under the circumstances, it would be folly to construct large amounts of additional orbital assets, and risk drawing attention to a highly active space program on our part before we're ready to actually fight the aliens in orbit. In the best case, we gain some marginal bonus from small fabrication plants launched into orbit and making use of zero-g manufacturing techniques. In the worst case, the aliens go "oh hey, nice space industry, I think I'll take it" and seize it out from under us or blow it up. Probably taking out the Lighthouse en passant.
It's just not worth it.
I get that space industry is desirable IN GENERAL in buildup quests like this, but right now the bottleneck on our capabilities isn't that we need more industry, it's that we need to unlock the secrets of the aliens' weaponry. Everything else we do is a stopgap measure.
So unless we get specific evidence that only through zero-g manufacturing techniques can we make the tools we need to fight the aliens... We shouldn't be focused on setting up zero-g factories right now.
I don't think I've adequately conveyed my point.
I'm trying to say that having Bartlett in charge of training and by extension wargaming and by extension digestion of post-battle lessons learned from combat experience might collectively provide benefits. The benefit might take the form "A-rank pilots gain +25% experience from being in combats," making them more likely to break through after and only after combat. We have no idea how XP mechanics work in this setting, so it's not inconceivable.
But I'm not really banking on that.
Because it is as much to the point that there is simply no man living on Strangereal who is better qualified, on the strength of his results, to handle the training and tactics branch of our X-COM unit. Yes, Bartlett's a valuable ace in his own right, but at the moment we have many aces, and may well have more in the near future. Whereas there is no one available to us with his track record of training an entire squadron of future elite aces singlehandedly.
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Tracers in the Sky IV: Belkan War Woes (Noncanon, ??)
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
Here's another omake for your perusal @huhYeahGoodPoint
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"But, but sir. We have already agreed to Belka's demand for 70% of the profits for the game. Why does the Belkan government want the Belkan War Expansion cancelled all of a sudden?" Welewe Game Studio President Arnold Rimer gasped out in response to the news given to him by the Belkan Ambassador to Wellow.
"Because Dinsmark has finally decided that no amount of money will make up for the humiliation of seeing the defeat of Belka portrayed in media," the Belkan Ambassador answered.
"Then what about 'Warriors and the Belkan War'? How did several Belkan aces get interviewed by the Osean Broadcasting Corporation if Dinsmark doesn't want the Belkan War portrayed in media?" Chef for Flyverkommandoen Major General Arnold Delacroix asked in a hostile manner.
Rimer and Customer Relations Officer Samwise Delacroix, brother of Arnold Delacroix, winced at hearing Arnold's tone.
"We will solve that in the near future," the Belkan Ambassador replied in an arrogant tone.
"With the help of your alien friends?" Maj. Gen. Delacroix asked.
The Belkan Ambassador didn't deign to notice that question. He just looked down at Rimer and talked at him.
"Remember. Belkan War will no longer be made, here or abroad by anyone...or else."
After those ominous words the Ambassador whirled around, and walked out of the room in an arrogant manner.
A minute of silence passed before someone talked.
"Brother, what does he mean by 'or else'? And Belka is allied with the aliens? Since when?" Samwise asked his brother.
"Since the Battle over Granada Plains. Samwise, things are happening behind the scenes that I can't tell you. Things that mean all the Naalakkersuisut can do in response to that bastard threatening you and Welewe Game Studio is to compensate you folks for enduring that."
"...isn't that just paying us for our silence?" Rimer asked Arnold Delacroix.
"Yes."
Another minute of silence passed Rimer managed to say something again.
"Major General Delacroix, Wellow is still a neutral country, right?"
"...Rimer, Dinsmark is making that very hard to do nowadays."
"Alfred...are we still safe here in Ethelfleda-burh?" Samwise asked his brother.
"The Naalakkersuisut is continuously working on it. Don't worry Samwise. Just...go along with what the bastard said."
"Give up Belkan War? Damn...we have already started on so many things. The plot, the locations, the...everything!"
"Why not change it to the Usean Continental War?" Alfred suggested.
"Because we don't have people over there to look at the locations of the battles, or start consulting Usean military personnel."
"Maybe instead of playing as a fictional character, try playing as...Mobius One. See the war through his point of view," Alfred suggested.
"Can we even interview him Alfred? Ask him to provide the voice for the game?" Samwise asked.
"Do you have people to send to Usea? Because I know where he is right now."
============================================================================================================================
*SIGH*
What do you think @huhYeahGoodPoint?
============================================================================================================================
"But, but sir. We have already agreed to Belka's demand for 70% of the profits for the game. Why does the Belkan government want the Belkan War Expansion cancelled all of a sudden?" Welewe Game Studio President Arnold Rimer gasped out in response to the news given to him by the Belkan Ambassador to Wellow.
"Because Dinsmark has finally decided that no amount of money will make up for the humiliation of seeing the defeat of Belka portrayed in media," the Belkan Ambassador answered.
"Then what about 'Warriors and the Belkan War'? How did several Belkan aces get interviewed by the Osean Broadcasting Corporation if Dinsmark doesn't want the Belkan War portrayed in media?" Chef for Flyverkommandoen Major General Arnold Delacroix asked in a hostile manner.
Rimer and Customer Relations Officer Samwise Delacroix, brother of Arnold Delacroix, winced at hearing Arnold's tone.
"We will solve that in the near future," the Belkan Ambassador replied in an arrogant tone.
"With the help of your alien friends?" Maj. Gen. Delacroix asked.
The Belkan Ambassador didn't deign to notice that question. He just looked down at Rimer and talked at him.
"Remember. Belkan War will no longer be made, here or abroad by anyone...or else."
After those ominous words the Ambassador whirled around, and walked out of the room in an arrogant manner.
A minute of silence passed before someone talked.
"Brother, what does he mean by 'or else'? And Belka is allied with the aliens? Since when?" Samwise asked his brother.
"Since the Battle over Granada Plains. Samwise, things are happening behind the scenes that I can't tell you. Things that mean all the Naalakkersuisut can do in response to that bastard threatening you and Welewe Game Studio is to compensate you folks for enduring that."
"...isn't that just paying us for our silence?" Rimer asked Arnold Delacroix.
"Yes."
Another minute of silence passed Rimer managed to say something again.
"Major General Delacroix, Wellow is still a neutral country, right?"
"...Rimer, Dinsmark is making that very hard to do nowadays."
"Alfred...are we still safe here in Ethelfleda-burh?" Samwise asked his brother.
"The Naalakkersuisut is continuously working on it. Don't worry Samwise. Just...go along with what the bastard said."
"Give up Belkan War? Damn...we have already started on so many things. The plot, the locations, the...everything!"
"Why not change it to the Usean Continental War?" Alfred suggested.
"Because we don't have people over there to look at the locations of the battles, or start consulting Usean military personnel."
"Maybe instead of playing as a fictional character, try playing as...Mobius One. See the war through his point of view," Alfred suggested.
"Can we even interview him Alfred? Ask him to provide the voice for the game?" Samwise asked.
"Do you have people to send to Usea? Because I know where he is right now."
============================================================================================================================
*SIGH*
What do you think @huhYeahGoodPoint?
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Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
@huhYeahGoodPoint
Is there anything to this? Would putting Bartlett in charge of training and such actually give big enough benefits to outweight his usefulness as a pilot?
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I would like to clarify that I'm talking about doing this with Bartlett IF AND ONLY IF we can recruit Snow or Nagase to round out the Razgriz roster without Bartlett's presence, or if we already have so many S-rank or greater aces that it starts making less of a difference whether the Razgriz fly with four planes or three.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
The benchmark is "there's however much debris as the GM says there is". Whether this is due to a roll of the dice or something pre-establshed, that's up to them. I'm saying it's worthy of some degree of consideration, once other parameters are met. That said, given the whole Ulysses thing, the odds are decent there's a bit more in the way of big asteroids orbiting around Strangereal. Even if the Arkbird got most of the possibly dangerous stuff, it didn't manage to get everything.
Also, bit of a straw-man there, since I explicitly brought up a sub-kilometer Trojan we only just noticed a decade ago, IRL. Stuff that's "small" and hard to spot by astronomical standards can still be still a massive amount of resources. A nickel-iron asteroid roughly half a klick in diameter is ~3 million kilos of material, if I did my math right (assuming a spherical
...*looks it up*
Could have sworn I saw something...yeah, no, I'm wrong there. I blame 00 Gundam.
And clearing out the space junk with lasers and launching spy sats is less likely to attract negative attention to our base of operations than floating out relatively tiny facilities, or even just installing them somewhere on existing infrastructure, like solar panel arrays...why, exactly? If we're already messing around in space, like you're already voting to do, building some protein crystal fabricators isn't going to do much.
I'm not talking about megastructures, huge factories, or shipyards, I'm talking about f*cking Skylabs. Small, speciality fabricators for manufacturing things like microchips, nanomaterials protein crystals, and semiconductors. Low weight and high value are the name of the game, here, because nothing else is going to be worth building the machines, and shipping the materials and products up and down, even with the reduced costs of entering orbit a space elevator provides. I'm talking about making meters of graphene, or grams upon grams of large protein crystals. Nothing particularly huge or notable is required to manufacture such things. We probably did equal amounts of labor bringing our microwave emitters back online.
Hell, I'll take building some zero-gee lab facilities, so we can actually try and determine if the conditions of space do have some effect on working with Alien Alloy, or opening up their spacecraft. It's entirely possible, now that I consider it, that hard vacuum and zero-gee would allow us to open one up without it falling apart shortly thereafter. Gravity and air pressure could very well be factors in that collapse.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I mean, it is, don't get me wrong- and that's more like a few billion tonnes- in other words, comparable to total real-world output of something like steel for a few years. It is, legitimately, quite a lot.
But the catch is that grabbing that and chunking it up is easier said than done, and that we are probably not primarily limited by access to raw materials right now.
How much raw nickel-iron alloy metal would it take for us to beat the aliens, in other words? The answer, as long as we can't duplicate their drives and energy weapons, and as long as we don't know where their base(s) are, is "no amount could ever realistically be enough." Conversely, if we can match their tech, it matters much much less whether we have nigh-limitless amounts of bulk goods.
We need to invest, short-term, in the kinds of defenses that buy us several months of time to reverse-engineer their tech. That's the X-COM way.
I don't disagree with you as such, except that I'm not sure we need them or would help them.
It's like, don't get me wrong, once we've got X-COM's bureaucracy better established, I wouldn't mind having a whip-round to ask world experts for suggestions on what we can do with the Lighthouse to help humanity and defend ourselves better.
But it's not something we should regard as a primary focus in the immediately foreseeable future. If this were peacetime, this kind of deep space development would be the most important thing anyone on the planet could plausibly do. But when being invaded by aliens with total space supremacy that they have mysteriously chosen not to use, upsetting the status quo seems unwise, and we cannot afford to set up an economic base that depends too heavily on zero-g manufactured materials when our supplies of such can be cut off at any time.
[Also, side note, clearing space junk is the kind of thing I'm actually hesitant to do until we have the means to fight in space. The main reason I'm even interested in it is the hope that it'll provide sort of a transitional stepping stone to development of space weapons platforms that can defend our space assets, much as the Arkbird was starting to do]
If our science teams start recommending that we give them the option to work in microgravity, I'm all for it.
But I want to place "build a bunch of stuff in space" firmly behind the step where we develop the means to defend space assets. Our being highly reliant on the Lighthouse for power generation is enough of a problem as it is.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
Not arguing otherwise. I have already conceded that we'd need their drives to safely mine asteroids anyway. Don't mistake my pedantry and need to correct perceived mistakes as me arguing for doing it in the near future.
That said, asteroids and the Moon may have some amount of rare isotopes on them, due to the amount of radiation coming off the Sun and their lack of magnetosphere and atmosphere. They also may contain higher levels of iridium and other rare alloys than can easily be found on Earth. So they may still be useful to us in the future. But we'll leave that for future consideration,
When did I say it needed to be a primary focus? While easy access to nanomaterials is probably worthwhile (new composites and the like), it's not like we can't apparently make enough for a space elevator. I feel like you keep extrapolating my points to extremes I don't actually state. I'm not advocating we make our economic base dependent on this, I'm saying it's a worthwhile capability to have, and the risk is minimal.
I mean, I'm basically considering it for the same reason you give for wanting to work on clearing space junk. It's a spring-board, a starting point for future construction. Also, just gonna point out that being able to build those lasers in-situ is not a bad capacity to have, either. It means they can be designed for operation in zero-gee, without having to worry about being able to withstand the force of gravity on the ground. Alien Alloys would be much easier to work with in space, too, come to think of it, given how dense and heavy they are. Getting them up might be a pain, though.
Chicken-and-egg problem, here. You usually need to build stuff in space to have a way to defend things in space.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Given that our first generation effective space defense asset will probably be a fighter craft modeled after the ones the aliens use but intended for use by human pilots... I'm not so sure.
In the original X-COM, one of the big moments in the game is when you upgrade from jet-fighter interceptors to the Firestorm based on alien technology- suddenly, you have the ability to chase down and engage aliens much more effectively. I don't think things will be different here.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
And nothing in that statement contradicts the idea that building such a craft would be easier and more effective in space. Given that the nature of the alien craft and their Alloys have been severely altered, chances are the production methods have been too. Don't go and start assuming our tech tree is going to mirror the one in the games perfectly. It probably won't. That would be far too easy.
Edit: Also, still going to have to build those stepping-stone lasers you want. Potentially. I'm willing to abstract that out, but my tech advice and comments? Aren't just meant for the players, but also for the GM to poach as desired.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Having our only weapon capable of fighting the aliens on their own level be manufactured in space, a place where the aliens are strong and we are relatively weak, presents some significant vulnerabilities.
Going into space to fight the aliens is like going into the water to fight a shark. Only do it if you are quite sure you're well prepared for what you're getting into.
I'm not making assumptions about the tech tree, I'm making observations about the game genre. The key to success in X-COM is to use Earth technology to fight the aliens long enough to build up a force armed with alien tech that is capable of stopping them and/or taking the fight to their home territory.
The laser platform idea is, to me, a plausible mass-produced option for 'static' defenses in orbit, or a prototype for surface-to-aerospace defensive weapons.
The big problem is that I have an unpleasant suspicion that the alien hull material will prove very resistant to laser weapons, so it may simply not be effective against the aliens. That's a big part of why I'm pushing to test-fire a TLS pod against alien wrecks. If their anti-beam weapon armor is good enough, it's not worth us developing the tech much further.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
Okay...so what exactly do you propose we do to fight off a space-based incursion? Against enemies that can turn on a dime, without being in space? So, presumably, with ground units. If you're going to keep nixing my ideas due purely to fear and paranoia, please give me an alternative.
Because to me, this seems like a necessary risk, if we want to protect our existing space infrastructure. We're already halfway in the damn water, and you keep insisting it's too dangerous to stick our arm in to punch the shark in the snoot before it bites our toes off. So...are we just supposed to let it bite our metaphorical toes off, or what?
In which XCom game did we invade the alien's homeworld? Or hell, even fight them in space? I've only played the new ones, so maybe that happened in the older games, and I'm just ignorant. But the Firestorm is likely an in-atmosphere craft, because all the UFO interceptions prior seemed to be happening in-atmosphere.
Okay. Still not seeing where building them in space is worse than shipping them up from the ground.
- Location
- Meycauayan, Bulacan, Philippines
The original X-COM had you attacking their Cydonia base in Mars in the endgame.
Nixeu
Lord of Madness, Harbinger of Llamas
- Location
- Your nightmares.
Technically not space or their homeworld. I think. Unless they were from Mars in the older games. In which case, I cede the point.
- Location
- Somewhere over the rainbow
ugh this update's fightin' me every step of the way; the plans are definitely too big, but I might as well lock in @Icipall's plan Building Planes, Building Bridges as the winning plan.
In the meantime, thread trawl!
Yes, all three stats are related, but the specific thing that Standard of Living controls is how much the economy can be leveraged at maximum mobilization. The higher a country's Standard of Living, the higher its IC cap goes. For an example of how ridiculous this gets, in January 2011, as Osea's mobilization of the industrial economy for the Circum-Pacific War finally paid off, Osea was producing about 800,000 IC every week.
Figuring out how to take the Osean Federation off that kind of mobilization without immediately sparking a Great Depression was one of Harling's lesser-recognized accomplishments. What he did to take Osea off that kind of mobilization is very much one of President Harling's signature accomplishments.hint hint it's the Lighthouse
By contrast, Estovakia coming off the Estovakian Civil War couldn't really mobilize much more of their industry than 3,000 IC per week; their early victories are better attributed to superweapons and unbelievably skilled troops rather than a real ability to seriously prosecute an industrial war.
Each country's IC cap is related to their peacetime mobilization, with some variation based on availability of Special Assets.
They'd be ramping up the nationalistic rhetoric to higher levels, and while spy satellite feeds are down, individual border units are beginning to report a disconcerting amount of military units moving towards the forward bases.
That being said, part of the reason why Grunder is in such disarray is because shell companies are beginning to sell off shares, certain shareholders are requesting frankly contradictory things and there are apparently dozens of different orders for any single line. Things are very confusing, so very little is actually being done.
For good and bad alike.
In the meantime, thread trawl!
I must've missed this as it was edited, but I'd like to comment; very insightful.
Yes, all three stats are related, but the specific thing that Standard of Living controls is how much the economy can be leveraged at maximum mobilization. The higher a country's Standard of Living, the higher its IC cap goes. For an example of how ridiculous this gets, in January 2011, as Osea's mobilization of the industrial economy for the Circum-Pacific War finally paid off, Osea was producing about 800,000 IC every week.
Figuring out how to take the Osean Federation off that kind of mobilization without immediately sparking a Great Depression was one of Harling's lesser-recognized accomplishments. What he did to take Osea off that kind of mobilization is very much one of President Harling's signature accomplishments.
By contrast, Estovakia coming off the Estovakian Civil War couldn't really mobilize much more of their industry than 3,000 IC per week; their early victories are better attributed to superweapons and unbelievably skilled troops rather than a real ability to seriously prosecute an industrial war.
Each country's IC cap is related to their peacetime mobilization, with some variation based on availability of Special Assets.
Welll, the big project was launching the Pilgrim One to avert another potential Ulysses Event, and after that the main focus was building the solar and microwave infrastructure to turn the Lighthouse into the power supply for the whole continent and then some.
Yes and no; Grundergram the name exists, Grundergram the series does not.@huhYeahGoodPoint, a question.
Does Grundergram exist in your Strangereal?
Wellll, the real problem is that Grunder poached a lot of the UAV-45 team to help them work on the MQ-101 drones, so even if Estovakia wanted to build more UAV-45s their project leads and engineers left the project.
This was one of the things you accidentally bulldozed over in the early turns; Estovakia basically said "there's no way we can supply XCOM USEA without lifting the arms restrictions, and they're getting so much results it only makes sense," Nordennavic backed you up because "fuck yeah shooting down aliens," Emmeria rolled their eyes and said "fine", and now that's why Estovakia basically isn't working under arms restrictions right now.
Noncanon, mostly because Belka's ambassadors wouldn't really be going to individual companies.
They'd be ramping up the nationalistic rhetoric to higher levels, and while spy satellite feeds are down, individual border units are beginning to report a disconcerting amount of military units moving towards the forward bases.
That being said, part of the reason why Grunder is in such disarray is because shell companies are beginning to sell off shares, certain shareholders are requesting frankly contradictory things and there are apparently dozens of different orders for any single line. Things are very confusing, so very little is actually being done.
For good and bad alike.
That is for you to decide.
Icipall
Don't worry, we can fanfix that!
- Location
- Cold snow fields of Finland
I like the attitude of Nordennavic.
Well, the latter has succeeded, but what about the former? Do we know how Pilgrim One's mission went?
- Location
- Seattle, Washington
They returned at the end of the Lighthouse war, and their mission was to prevent a second Ulysses like impact. I doubt they would have returned without destroying or diverting the incoming asteroid, which would have been an order of magnitude easier to do because of it's distance from earth.