- Pronouns
- He/It/Argh!
Should be easy enough to do seismically with all the advanced sonic tech GDI has.
Liquids are easy to detect as they don't propagate shear waves, rocks do.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition
Liquids are easy to detect as they don't propagate shear waves, rocks do.
political cost is far to great for that
- Location
- USA
True. It would burn off small amounts as useful energy.
But I'm fairly certain that doesn't even come close to addressing the scale of the problem, let alone the political and security concerns.
I still absolutely want to do at least the first phase of the powercells and see what comes of it, but I'd be lying if I said nods espionage and sabotage warlord getting Kanes personal attention doesn't make me incredibly nervous about practically everything with any risk.
- Location
- MSC
What happens to liquid Tib at the power plant?
It gets consumed in the process or reverts back to crystal form?
It gets consumed in the process or reverts back to crystal form?
Yes we do have a diplomatic corp.
I doubt they'll attack our MARV hubs, they're ridiculously hard targets and they don't have enough people for that not to cripple them. Also, our MARVs are one of the things keeping Tiberium away from mecca, they're unlikely to want to interfere with that
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
We barely do anything with our political stock, we've got like 80ish points saved, and it at most costs 5 PI per die. It's not going to break any banks. And even that cost is likely to go down once it's normalized.
So said the old woman who pissed in the sea, "Every bit helps". It's more then we're currently doing, and any step forward is a step in the right direction.
- Location
- USA
As I recall, a small amount of liquid tiberium gets a current run through it, the liquid tiberium transforms slowly into energy and amplifies the current giving us more power eventually become consumed by the process.
I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure that's about right.
True, but I think the Visceroid Research is a better bet as it directly mentions liquid tiberium solutions as a possible result of it.
Nottheunmaker
Altman be praised
- Location
- USG Ishimura
I agree it's something to be perused, but as an additional measure, not an either or. If we have the dice to play with I see no reason not to do both.
- Location
- USA
Oh sure. No problem.
And the political cost isn't per die. It's 5 for the powercells and 10 for the Visceroids.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I'm kind of skeptical. I'm pretty sure the problem isn't so much disposing of liquid tiberium safely if you have it in your control and want it gone, it's finding the stuff and hoovering it up from pockets kilometers underground when it forms and seeps into the ground on its own from all the enormous tiberium glaciers on your planet.
I'd hope so. On the other hand, these are not large liquid pockets, getting dense sensor coverage is tricky, even digging to the pockets is tricky (i.e. you may have to cut through multiple tiberium veins to get there), and...
Tiberium interacts significantly with sonics; we know this because sonics can inhibit or even smash tiberium. It's quite possible that using sonic vibrations to map underground areas rich in tiberium is a complex project, for the same reasons that trying to use LIDAR in a fog cloud or radar in an environment rich in electrically charged plasmas would be. If the background medium interacts significantly with the modulated and calibrated signals you're searching with, it's hard to find things.
This is what we know from canon:
View: https://youtu.be/ajjl19MtAIk
If it was being harvested, we'd presumably see gaping earth where Tib used to be.
If it simply turned into energy, we'd both see gaping canyons where Tiberium used to be, and be witness to gigaton-class events.
Hence the impression that dissipate = turn back into normal matter.
Anyway, what the GM rules for this quest is not necessarily what happened in CnC4.
We'll see.
- Location
- his hidden lair
I guess the major and only meaningful point of divergence is I think we'll be exploiting the Venusian Tiberium much sooner than you do, as in it might be a bigger priority than Martian mining. Martian mining is undeniably going to be easier, but it's not as lucrative, and it's not as revolutionary as 'a massive source of Tiberium that GDI has exclusive access to and can possibly get away with exploiting with measures the public might dislike out of principle based off of distance'. Especially given it seems like STUs are going to become the major limiting factors in our economy. What's more attractive, base metals off of Mars, or STUs off of Venus?
Mars and the moon are set to become less valuable and relevant over time rather than more so in terms of impact on our economy- simply because as we advance technologically our dependence on Tiberium for it's unique properties rather than it's abilities to replace conventional resources will only increase.
I'm genuinely sorry for how much this has kinda blown out of proportion, you've certainly put more time into debating this issue than I think our disagreement deserves, but I guess the crux of my thinking is 'unless we intend on completely rejecting the avenue of technological advancement we're walking down, we are inherently and utterly dependent on Tiberium to sustain that tech to the point where Venus is a bigger priority than any other exploitable resource in the Solar system. As a result, I think we'll ultimately invest far more into mining Venus than the Moon once we really start investing into space- our current lunar mines amount to a political sop and supporting the local maintenance depot by comparison'. Maybe we can synthesize STUs with particle accelerators once we know what we're looking for- but to do that on industrial scales? The infrastructure and energy requirements would be insane to say the least.
I mean, I'm all for neutral camps, but a decent part of GDI's identity is on being the legitimate world government. We'll probably take a soft line on the matter, but GDI very much does want a world that's just GDI blue, as opposed to red or grey. I don't think our parliament is even geographically districted.
What we probably want to see is a bunch of relatively disinterested observers sit on the sideline as we finally deal with our chronic Scorpion infestation only to turn around and try and draw all the neutrals in by giving them a stake and say in the global rebuilding and resettlement GDI is liable to push for once they have the breathing room. It's going to be a bit paternalistic no matter what but I think GDI is ideologically committed to the idea of a one world government in a way we won't be able to reject once NOD is dealt with.
To expand on this, Kane is evidently not completely unknown to the 'Scrin'... and it's likely the Scrin are idly curious about human resistance in the first place. I think it's all but stated the Scrin practically never encounter viable civilizations once Tib gets through them. Some historical empires have invested more effort for lesser reasons.
Besides, from their perspective- the natives managed to beat off the mining expedition- the natives were annoying when they were just hurling rocks really fast. How obnoxious are they going to be when they get industrial grade wormhole tech? Or Tib refinement? Or plasma weaponry. Yeah the Scrin have better toys than anything we've seen, but that's hardly an excuse to let us scurry off, jury rig and appropriate their technology and come back to cause them more problems later. Especially when they know both factions were deploying anti-Tiberium (and thus anti-Scrin weapons) by the end of things between 'Sonic' weaponry and Catalyst missiles. I think we all can agree if we had a century or two we'd absolutely be preparing to throw hands with the Scrin, just in case.
Barring unforeseen limitations of the technology, it's entirely possible that GDI could develop WMDs involving wormholes to shunt stellar plasma uncomfortably close in a hundred years. Yeah, that's a planetary extinction event and it makes sense why the Scrin didn't do that- but we theoretically could, and who wants to let some random monkeys run around packing that kind of heat?
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Specifically for this part, Scrin wormholes technology is both something quite powerful and has limitations which can be observed in the Campaign and battles. One infrastructure based wormholes are far cheaper and easier energy wise as we see them use it extensively to transport manufactured drones with the transmitted tiberium from the bases with those wormholes at net energy such them transporting buzzers, seekers and other vehicles, or to especially make a point create thresholds as it far easier to create a wormhole network across interstellar distances than it is for ship based ftl .
Two free standing wormholes are far more energy intensive in both consumption and maintenance, in which we see them creating those wormholes to reduce distance of ground forces continuously instead of using air transports both on a tactical scale on the battles, a strategic scale if Global Conquest depiction of Scrin wormholes is accurate, or possibly smaller scale if teleportation is not used to for the Summon Buzzers ability on the field, which is somewhat doubtful as we see shocktroopers use blink packs before.
Lastly we have seen freestanding wormholes being created to connect Earth and deep space, the Rift Generator of the Scrin which if looking at it from a mining perspective is basically a device specialized in creating freestanding wormholes in the solar system, possibly to transport things in space. The rift Generator as we saw consumes much energy for the Creation of a short wormhole in deep space and likely has the limitation of taking much more energy the further away the wormhole is away from the generator, meaning attempting to as you say shunt stellar plasma would be extremely difficult for the Scrin and nearly impossible for GDI to do with Wormhole tech being far more primitives' than Scrin.
Instant switcheroo from Tiberium to normal matter sounds extremely spooky to me. That means control of the Tiberium that is outright magical. *Uses this magical control to change useless asteroids to whatever you want* (remember, in CnC4 Tib mining is basically privatized).
Meanwhile in GDI edition: Caravanserai start a religious mutiny (which are semi-ok, while rebellions get stamped by NOD). This is not entirely a bad thing.
TaliesinSkye
Occasional Editor
- Location
- Northeast Ohio, United States
You'd want to use techniques like ground penetrating radar or sonography to locate the pockets on the basis of tiberium having a different density from the surrounding rock.
You could also just follow the surface veins; tiberium grows from contact with tiberium, so to get deep there has to be an unbroken chain of crystal that goes deep.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I get the logic.
The countervailing point is mostly about the scale of megaproject required to make Venusian tiberium accessible to GDI's industry when Earth has prodigious amounts of tiberium, arguably more than we could imagine using even in a very very hungry 'om nom nom' green rock eating economy. And Earthly tiberium is both easier to access even ignoring transportation issues (because "at the bottom of the Venusian atmosphere" makes even tiberium nastier to work with), and right there in that it's directly plugged into the economy of Earth where we keep most of our stuff.
It's going to be hard for GDI to justify large scale deployment of tiberium harvesting hardware on Venus when for the same expense outlay we could probably harvest ??? times more tons of tiberium from the Red Zones of the Earth itself. Sure, we could probably do shit like plunk down growth accelerators on Venus, but here on Earth we don't need that, not yet and not soon. There's still more tiberium than we know what to do with (literally), and in the notional scenario under discussion, Nod will have mostly gotten out of the way.
...
This is why I think GDI is only likely to invest in large scale harvesting of Venusian tiberium after:
1) Earth is largely evacuated and we're a spacefaring civilization dealing with the reality that Earth and Venus are about equally habitable ("Plan B" scenarios, c. 2100 or later).
2) Earthly tiberium is firmly under control and still around in the wake of a successful TCN construction, with Kane gone and one of GDI's main concerns being to stabilize the tiberium situation on Venus.
3) Earthly tiberium has outright vanished and we're forced to mine Venus for more tiberium by default.
Until at least one of those conditions is fulfilled, I just can't think of any situation where GDI would invest, say, 30 dice and 600-900 R into building up infrastructure to mine tiberium on Venus when it could do the same on Earth for higher probable return on investment.
Here's hoping that ether 2 or 3 happens in quest.🤞
I approve of the blue zone vein mines, but we will need more of them than we can reasonably provide capgoods with from the spider cotton - finishing Nuuk phase 3 next turn will help a lot, and we should be able to 2-3 turn complete phase 4 not long after that. Probably a good idea to look into Visceroids, just to see if we can figure out what is going on with them, but I don't think it's particularly urgent
Some parts of the crust will think swiss cheese looks solid by comparison, if we do as much as I want.
We don't have any MARV hubs near the Middle East - the closest is in Italy, and the others are in the Americas
It's not, because we aren't mining naturally occurring LT to put in the power plants we're manufacturing it from crystal. We could build 10 phases of LT power plants and only increase the amount of LT on Earth because now there's whatever's cooking deep in the crust plus the extra X thousand liters we manufacture on top of that.
If you want to dig up naturally occurring LT and find some way to get rid of it, that's probably the vein mines > boreholes > ??? > profit tech tree, not the LT power one.
- Location
- Somewhere between the stars
- Pronouns
- She/Her
For the not!scrin it's important to remember we aren't just some natives that managed to survive. We are natives who has Kane on our planet, a know element to the not!scrin.
Whoever, or whatever Kane is, and his connections are, he is tied to the alien species at large. Without knowing more about what this connection consist of, it's hard to accuratly predict what type of responce the not!scrin will eventually decided on.
Is Kane some mysterious boogyman, who's gonna make every single alien species terrified of us, and make them all enact a "no visitor zone" in whatever quadrant of space we are in? Is he some big war criminal, and we're gonna get the collective Galaxtic UN gunning for our heads? Is he space messiah, with tons of alien pilgrims coming soon and Kane getting elected to galaxtic god-emperor?
It's a lot up in the air, and i think that humans as a species comes secondary to Kane in this instance. Without deeper knowledge of Kane, it becomes too murky.
Whoever, or whatever Kane is, and his connections are, he is tied to the alien species at large. Without knowing more about what this connection consist of, it's hard to accuratly predict what type of responce the not!scrin will eventually decided on.
Is Kane some mysterious boogyman, who's gonna make every single alien species terrified of us, and make them all enact a "no visitor zone" in whatever quadrant of space we are in? Is he some big war criminal, and we're gonna get the collective Galaxtic UN gunning for our heads? Is he space messiah, with tons of alien pilgrims coming soon and Kane getting elected to galaxtic god-emperor?
It's a lot up in the air, and i think that humans as a species comes secondary to Kane in this instance. Without deeper knowledge of Kane, it becomes too murky.
Sailor_Skarro
The Lurker
Oh yeah, end goal is peaceful assimilation hopefully, but both short and long term, groups spinning off of NOD that aren't hostile to GDI are a Good Thing, because even if they don't necessarily add to our strength they sure take away from NOD's.
There are some details about Kane which we know about and has varying implications ranging from both normal to utterly terrifying especially regarding the questions that pop up.
One we know Kane is ancient beyond belief and has being present on Earth for thousands of years which has led him to have a very intimate knowledge on the nature of humanity, its psychology and other factors which we are unaware off.
Two we know is an alien who is anomalous in a variety of manners ranging from eating ion cannon to face and surviving, being seemingly ageless unlike most organisms we see and potentially other abilities such as rapid regeneration.
The third and most alarming and terrifying knowledge both OOC and for GDI from the InOPS to the government itself, is the fact Kane seemingly has knowledge of tiberium far beyond then that of the Visitor's, who live and breath tiberium and use it continuously. The evidence supporting this is the World Altering Missile or WAM for short. There is Nothing that indicates the Visitor's are capable of creating WAMS like Kane did and several evidence supporting against it such as if they had it, they would never need to sent meteors in the place and instead instantly covert any planet and it's ecosystem they desire at will into tiberium based. Which is something I did not consider the terrifying implications off Kane being able create the WAM and the Visitor's being not able to.
There are several questions that pop up as result of the details we know.
What has Kane being doing Earth for over the last 1000 or more years? What has he being doing all this time trapped on Earth as I doubt he was just sitting and doing nothing during those years?
What sort of alien is Kane to match the appearance of humans so closely and yet be so different in so many details? From where did Kane come from?
Lastly How does Kane have knowledge of tiberium beyond that of the Visitor's? What is he? How did he obtain it?
One we know Kane is ancient beyond belief and has being present on Earth for thousands of years which has led him to have a very intimate knowledge on the nature of humanity, its psychology and other factors which we are unaware off.
Two we know is an alien who is anomalous in a variety of manners ranging from eating ion cannon to face and surviving, being seemingly ageless unlike most organisms we see and potentially other abilities such as rapid regeneration.
The third and most alarming and terrifying knowledge both OOC and for GDI from the InOPS to the government itself, is the fact Kane seemingly has knowledge of tiberium far beyond then that of the Visitor's, who live and breath tiberium and use it continuously. The evidence supporting this is the World Altering Missile or WAM for short. There is Nothing that indicates the Visitor's are capable of creating WAMS like Kane did and several evidence supporting against it such as if they had it, they would never need to sent meteors in the place and instead instantly covert any planet and it's ecosystem they desire at will into tiberium based. Which is something I did not consider the terrifying implications off Kane being able create the WAM and the Visitor's being not able to.
There are several questions that pop up as result of the details we know.
What has Kane being doing Earth for over the last 1000 or more years? What has he being doing all this time trapped on Earth as I doubt he was just sitting and doing nothing during those years?
What sort of alien is Kane to match the appearance of humans so closely and yet be so different in so many details? From where did Kane come from?
Lastly How does Kane have knowledge of tiberium beyond that of the Visitor's? What is he? How did he obtain it?
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- Location
- Eugene OR US
It almost makes one think that Kane is actually human, just that he time travelled from a distant future.
- Location
- Somewhere between the stars
- Pronouns
- She/Her
While that might make kinda sense, this is the same series Red Alert with it's rather infamous time-travell came from, so it's not impossible, i do not think it's the case.
Kane was know to the not!scrin. And they had no contact, or even knowledge about humanity before they came to harvest in the twilight dawn of the third war. Which implies however Kane is know to them, it must have been before the not!scrin even arrived to our solar system. Which i think discloses the possiblity of him being actual time-traveller
(Unless he like, time travelled to 4000BC into an alien planet, but that's so far in speculation territory, it becomes hard to put down as actual concrete fact)
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