- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
Because they don't like the real Scrin. We appear to be associated with the real Scrin in some way. And allowing resistance to survive and spread hurts in the long term.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
If the Visitors show up with a proper invasion fleet then that's game over. Period. We fought off the equivalent of civilian wildcat miners with a bit of PMC hanger ons.
There is no way that we'll be able to fight off a proper military expedition.
- Location
- USA
Yeah...
The stealth stuff is looking fairly urgent at this point.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
That makes more sense than a mining project, although I wasn't aware of a real Scrin or a connection between them and humans, and I'm not seeing it on the wiki. Is that a quest thing?
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Two problems:
1.Tiberium explosions are ridiculously energetic--an apparently missile-deliverable warhead has a yield of two gigatons. It utterly dwarfs the Tsar Bomba, itself only deliverable by aircraft--the largest underground nuclear tests wouldn't even register.
2.Liquid Tiberium detonations will set off more tiberium in the vicinity--including solid Tiberium. So it's not just the pocket you have to worry about, it's all those lesser deposits meandering their way through the rock that will chain detonate.
Read the informational threadmark "Visitors." There is cut content which indicates that the "Scrin" are not the Scrin - the species who created the Tacitus, and think we are them.
F0lkL0re
Officially not an Inquisitor
- Location
- Shetland
I know that the stealth stuff is growing even more important then it was before but can we shore up the steel talons, air force and navy first before diving into the countermeasure hole.
The precedent of Caravansai declaring neutrality is very interesting. However it puts them in direct opposition of the NOD warlords in Africa. Those dudes ain't switching for nothing. I wonder if the Shah of the atom can be brought to the table given their relationship?
Something to ponder. As for Rey, that's interesting and somewhat disturbing.
Something to ponder. As for Rey, that's interesting and somewhat disturbing.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
That kind of energy density is pretty absurd; maybe as much as a third or half the mass energy of the converted material. Depending on how heavy a payload the missile in question is carrying. (Mass energy is 47 grams per megaton, so 100% conversion would be a 94kg warhead, but I'm guessing the warhead was a lot heavier than that. Typical strategic nuke warhead size might be more like 200-300kg.)
Anyway, that kind of yield evidently requires a 'catalyst' of some sort and proper engineering. Triggering a random vein of liquid tiberium wouldn't get you anywhere near that much. Couldn't, because if it did then there'd be 9+ magnitude Earthquakes going off all over the place when a little bit of it got triggered underground by whatever.
Either it's too stable for any of it to have gone off (but it's explicitly described as very unstable) or it takes a big pocket of liquid tiberium + regular tiberium to make enough of a boom to be a problem.
And if it takes a big pocket to be a problem, then you can safely detonate small pockets prematurely to deal with them until you can mine out the stuff.
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The thing is, GDI currently only knows that there is more underground Tiberium than we expected.
OOC, we know that part of the path of growth of Tiberium, as expected by the Scrin, is that eventually it will build up and explode in something similar to what Kane arranged to happen at Temple Prime. And Ithillid has said that if we work at it with harvesting, mitigation measures, vein mines and boreholes, we can keep the Earth habitable for a while, possibly up to a century or so, but without a TCN it's not really possible to save it.
- Location
- USA
It depends.
We just have a ton of stuff we need to do.
The anti-stealth stuff because it's looking like nod has some very serious stuff under stealth including something that may or may not be space worthy, which is a nightmare scenario.
We definitely need the Hallucinogen Countermeasures because they keep using them on our defensive strong points.
And as you said, we need to buff the Talons, navy, and air force.
Busy, busy, busy...
Strunkriidiisk
THE LEGEND
- Location
- Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
What I'm getting from this is as long as we don't bring our war to Mecca, they have no real problems with us. We may or may not be able to expand the GZ in the Arabian Peninsula, but if not that's fine, and we do in fact have a diplomatic inroad with them so we can all be transparent about what we all can and cannot do.
This is very good for us. The Caravanserai/Locals own the Peninsula, and we don't really need to worry about them attacking us out of hand as long as we're cool; this is also just about the best we can hope for out of them for the next while. Zayyin is walking a very delicate line here - he has a degree of immunity to retaliation only so long as this is perceived as one Brotherhood warlord getting pissed at another for interfering in his territory - which means he cannot throw in with GDI without risking his neighbours jumping on him. Like the update says, if Mehretu, Al-Isfahani, or the Indian warlord/s wanted him dead he would be dead and there is nothing we could do to feasibly stop that short of maybe putting him on the Philadelphia - Nod is very, very good at special operations. And of course that's just external threats, and we have no idea whether his faction would erupt into a civil war over it if he threw in with us.
Also, the above is contingent on them wanting to join up, which at this juncture feels unlikely. Any efforts to get the Middle Eastern Brotherhood properly on-side would take years more of peace, and at this point we're less than five years into a détente with them. Give it time.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
Perhaps someone can help with the lore on this; at least going by the wiki, the details of what the TCN does are so vague it's really hard to gauge what it does that abatement efforts can't. We know that it requires 'a vast network of interconnected pipes and cables', and it extends the Scrin tower harvesting operation somehow, but I can't find anything on how the towers actually harvest. Some sort of action at a distance of some sort?
That aside, anything that would build up and detonate in a big way should be possible to detonate prematurely in a controlled way. That leaves the remaining problem sheer mass of tiberium (and therefore conversion rate) getting out of hand, rather than sudden boom.
Edit: The loss scenario might not look like a liquid tiberium triggered mega-explosion; instead it might look like too much of the lower crust being converted to tiberium for abatement efforts to be viable given the depth. Tiberium would fill in and creep upward and eventually there would be no rock left, just a layer of tiberium floating on the Earth's mantle.
What you'd really need at that point is some sort of anti-tiberium that converts tiberium into more of itself.
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Regarding the TCN: we don't know how it will work. We do know that there are varying possible forms it may take, and the version seen from TibTwilight is a pretty poor one. (Although, IIRC it would be better than the one we could monkey together just from Scrintech if we get the correct 7 technologies.) However, much of that lore is behind research projects we haven't unlocked yet.
So, yeah, I suspect a non-TCN abatement-heavy loss of the planet would either be losing too much mass of Earth, or Tiberium mutating sufficiently that we just can't keep it from spreading anymore.
Which, on a vaguely related note, is why I intend to push for atmospheric containment shields in SCEDquest as soon as we can, because that probably leads to being able to set up aerostats on Venus which don't have to deal with the atmosphere trying to corrode everything.
- Location
- Queensland, Australia
Honestly, liquid tiberium actually could be rather stable. I'm pretty sure one of Nod's abilities in game is a tiberium vapour 'fuel-air' bomb? Which indicates that it's stable enough you can make a bomb out of it, fly it into a combat zone, and only have the bomb detonate when the conditions are right. However we also know it explodes extremely vigorously when the conditions are right, of which getting hit by an ion cannon strike more than counts. And that it causes a chain reaction in surrounding tiberium when detonated that goes on for a while before the energy falls below the threshold needed for further chain reactions.
We also know that sonic waves are an extremely efficient method of breaking up tiberium crystals as shown by how our glacier mining operations use them to crack apart the glaciers into manageable shards. Whilst from the games we know that tiberium crystals when hit by an explosion, sonic wave or other shockwave, violently shatter in a way that causes damage to anything in them at the time. Not quite an explosion unless we're talking about the blue (to a lesser degree) and red (at least that's what it's suggested they would be like if they weren't cut) tiberium crystals.
How this goes together is I'm pretty sure liquid tiberium is rather stable, right up until subjected to sudden and intense pressure. So basically, it forms deep underground and just sits there. Then one of the earthquakes or other forms of major earth movement occurs due to the effects of tiberium and a large pool of liquid tiberium that had been stable gets crushed. At which point, it creates a massive continent shaking explosion. So there's a bunch of tremors and the like as early warning signs that liquid tiberium concentrations are building up, but you are okay until pools containing a few tons of liquid tiberium have formed. After that point however, it's just a matter of luck as to where and how devastating the detonations will be.
As for mining the stuff so it doesn't ever form a pool that large? Just how expensive do you think it will be to ensure that there's nowhere a few tons of liquid-T can pool, whilst also dealing with the fact that the surrounding rock is extremely unstable with frequent tremors and collapses causing movement of a few metres at a time all over the place, even if the many metres or colliding rockfaces that don't have a crack for the Liquid-T to escape through are rarer. And just to make things so much better, all this time the tiberium is not only extending deeper into the crust, thus reducing how much pressure the rock movement needs to achieve to set it off, but it's also mutating so the methods you are using to harvest the tiberium are more and more ineffective.
We also know that sonic waves are an extremely efficient method of breaking up tiberium crystals as shown by how our glacier mining operations use them to crack apart the glaciers into manageable shards. Whilst from the games we know that tiberium crystals when hit by an explosion, sonic wave or other shockwave, violently shatter in a way that causes damage to anything in them at the time. Not quite an explosion unless we're talking about the blue (to a lesser degree) and red (at least that's what it's suggested they would be like if they weren't cut) tiberium crystals.
How this goes together is I'm pretty sure liquid tiberium is rather stable, right up until subjected to sudden and intense pressure. So basically, it forms deep underground and just sits there. Then one of the earthquakes or other forms of major earth movement occurs due to the effects of tiberium and a large pool of liquid tiberium that had been stable gets crushed. At which point, it creates a massive continent shaking explosion. So there's a bunch of tremors and the like as early warning signs that liquid tiberium concentrations are building up, but you are okay until pools containing a few tons of liquid tiberium have formed. After that point however, it's just a matter of luck as to where and how devastating the detonations will be.
As for mining the stuff so it doesn't ever form a pool that large? Just how expensive do you think it will be to ensure that there's nowhere a few tons of liquid-T can pool, whilst also dealing with the fact that the surrounding rock is extremely unstable with frequent tremors and collapses causing movement of a few metres at a time all over the place, even if the many metres or colliding rockfaces that don't have a crack for the Liquid-T to escape through are rarer. And just to make things so much better, all this time the tiberium is not only extending deeper into the crust, thus reducing how much pressure the rock movement needs to achieve to set it off, but it's also mutating so the methods you are using to harvest the tiberium are more and more ineffective.
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- Location
- USA
Ugh...
We definitely need a way to do SOMETHING about liquid tiberium.
We should probably do that research if we can spare a few tib dice.
We definitely need a way to do SOMETHING about liquid tiberium.
We should probably do that research if we can spare a few tib dice.
From what I can tell, the TCN in canon triggers reverse-transmutation of Tiberium back into normal earth and minerals.
Somehow. This is from an Earth much worse infested by Tib than this one.
That might not be true for this quest, so we have no idea how it will work here until we have one.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I mean, that's not any less credible than what Tiberium already does; we have processes to turn Tiberium into usable materials, somehow, and if Tiberium is artificial it makes sense that there'd be a panic switch buried in there somewhere.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
In cannon, all it does is make it so that Tiberium can be contained and used somewhat safely. Once it was connected to Threshold-19 it somehow expanded the thresholds mining and refining effects across the planet, though where the resources went and what happened to the underground deposits is never explained. All we know is that it was hooked up to the Threshold and what was near the nodes started to dissipate.
In all honesty, I think Kane either stepped through that portal to a motherlode of refined materials or the not-Scrin got the cost of the mining fleet back. Kane may of given them a refund
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Durabys
Miaow! Break the Chains!
- Location
- the land of the Boii
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Kane: "Here. Have the Ichor money you lost on that little adventure. You now do not need to bother the Earth anymore."
Visitors: "*grumblegrumble* Fine!"
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The problem with the Danegeld is when you pay it, you'll never get rid of the Dane...
EDIT:Then again that's not Kane's problem anymore.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Covering Mecca/Medina/Jeddah area is, as I understand it, a major component of Phase 1 of the SADN grid all by itself, which would be significant to the Caravansarai.
Covering the entire Arabian peninsula would probably require us to go even beyond the existing Phase 3 of the project already envisioned.
That would require you to locate all the pockets, which sounds like kind of a stretch. Just how much exploratory drilling are we talking about doing here?
Major liquid tiberium explosions might mass-scatter a small asteroid, and airless moons aren't necessarily good environments for tiberium growth. The only known tiberium deposits that are growing are found on planets with atmospheres, and even though the Temple Prime explosion really seems like something that could have lofted tiberium ejecta on trajectories likely to hit the moon, we have no evidence of tiberium growing there.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
Going to point out that the liquid T power plants would be a useful way of dealing with at least a portion of liquid tiberium.