I was talking about Columbia , our experimental station for the basic technologies to live in space , and the thing that provides basic living quarters, and saying we've already gotten warnings that the living conditions in orbit are terrible.
Yes. Which is why
Columbia is the next thing we do...
after we build the tools to build
Columbia right and quickly and well.
Nothing is more important than
Columbia, but we may wish to do another thing
for Columbia's sake before we actually start physically welding
Columbia together.
Like... if
Enterprise Phase 5 weren't a Plan promise, I would probably have advocated that we stop work on
Enterprise, build the station bay and the
Leopard II yard, and I'm pretty sure we'd
already be building
Columbia.
But I want to get the infrastructure to do the job properly in place first. We'll actually save time and energy on the task on net.
Aside from more places to stash away backup colonies...no, not in the immediate, I think. They're not going to be that much easier to secure than, say, Vulcan, against reactionless drive warcraft.
In the long term, Tiberium abatement on Venus will be a major concern going forward, and saying Mercury has abundant solar power is a little like saying hurricanes have a lot of rainfall. But that's distinctly post-Visitor.
Well, we might want to at least
look into the idea of putting a stabilizer constellation around Venus like the one we've set up around Earth. If we had a fleet of G-drive ships to shuttle the satellites back and forth in, that would be relatively straightforward, and a stabilizer constellation
significantly slows the pace of tiberium mutation and "buys time" before anything too ugly can happen.
The main reason I'm suggesting this is that it's the only thing we can do about tiberium on Venus that doesn't involve messing around
on the surface; we can just drop the stabilizer satellites off in Venus orbit and leave them there with minimal oversight and maintenance, and it wouldn't really require us to develop hardened industrial and basing equipment capable of surviving Venus surface conditions.
Random question. At some point we need pull an XCOM build Avengers and confront the visitors at their home base. So that means orbital construction, mining construction, space craft construction and space warcraft construction. I saw mention of secure lunar orbit as well asan aside which got me thinking. Is there any benefit from securing Mercury or Venus first before heading our past Mars to slug it out with the visitors?
Mercury's just a rock like many others as far as we know, so no point.
Venus has tiberium and it's theoretically possible that the Visitors might go there, but assuming
they don't start expanding and building bases and giving us reason to think they're visiting Venus for the tiberium, it's probably not worth our while. Venus is a very inhospitable environment, and trying to build a whole-ass planetary defense system and shipping it to Venus would distract us from the effort of going all final base assault on their staiton around Jupiter.
The reason for us to secure lunar orbit is because we're
doing stuff on the moon; it's desirable to us in and of itself.
Also, remember that planets circle the sun at different rates. At the best time for us to go punch the Visitors in the face around Jupiter, Mars, Venus, or Mercury may be on literally the opposite side of the Sun from us and there may be no planets even remotely "between" Earth and Jupiter. But that's a detail.
We pretty much have the choice of 'bad or worse' for engines, is the thing. Either we have a 12 gee fusion rocket with hydrocarbon thrust augmentation and can at least attempt comparable combat accelerations, or we have a 0.5 gee gravy drive that's the next best thing to stationary.
Which is one of the reasons I was speculating on fusion drive parasite craft operating off of gravy drive battlestars--we close the capabilities gap by specialization.
True.
I think we might also deliberately adopt a naval doctrine that... Well, it reminds me of the design philosophy the US Navy put into its "Standard battleships" before and during World War One.
Basically, you know your ships aren't gonna get anywhere very fast, and the enemy has plenty of options for outmaneuvering and raiding you. So you rely on coastal defenses to protect anything truly essential, and the overall strategic size and scale of your nation to make enemy pinprick damage acceptable or at least survivable. Then you design
your ships to be tough, reasonably well-armed brawlers that can sail straight up to the enemy's home base and force them to fight against their will, such that their superior mobility does not save them from having to fight you on your own terms unless they're prepared to write off their base.
In that case, we'd end up with big, boxy, janky warships liberally festooned with railguns and ion cannons and whatnot, and just trundle on up to Jupiter and start throwing hands. I kind of like the idea, in all truth.
I've been talking about a Plan 4 RZ abatement heavy plan for a while now, if not necessarily in thread. I agree that the RZs are enemy held territory. We absolutely should do something about them.
The Treasury won't care in 2062. All the Treasury will care about is getting as much of the money goal done as fast as possible so that the Treasury has a budget to work with. And right now, our best money growing option that does not require ZA factories is YZ abatement.
So that is what I suspect the Treasury will be going for until ZOCOM gives the green light for the RZ Offensives and super glacier mines. And we won't get that before the ZA factories have been up and running for quite a while.
To be honest, I'd hoped to crank out ZA factories earlier, so we could do both RZ abatement and grow our money piles rapidly, but that's proven false.
My hope- my
hope- is that by starting Ground Force Zone Armor production in Q3 or Q4 of this year, we can start to transition towards
Red Zone Border Offensives and super-glacier mining as a source of income (and abatement) a little sooner than we otherwise would. We can start out on vein mining like you say, then transition to an attack on the Red Zones. We'd probably do this anyway, but we'll be able to start doing it
faster if we are more aggressive about getting the Zone Armor rolled out sooner rather than later.
This imparts a certain sense of urgency to my actions.
Vein mining certainly won't be a bad thing for overall abatement considerations, mind you- as the fate of the New York carrier yard illustrates, we have real problems with underground tiberium in the Blue Zones and our existing program of tiberium spikes doesn't do enough to keep it under control.
Weren't the MARV fleets mostly constructed with tib dice for that quarter?
Really, the problem is that we kept going for glacier mines without factoring the need of MARVs to protect them. Then were shocked a few turns later to learn that the local warlord was about to destroy them if we didn't give ZOCOM heavy metal to defend themselves.
MARVs alone are too big and trundly to protect large scale Red Zone operations. ZOCOM has a whole array of vehicles and troop types whose job is to fight in Red Zones, and they need those too. Supertanks don't work at full potential without infantry and support assets, and MARVs in particular aren't supposed to spend all their time just sitting around passively defending anything. They're there to go out and munch up the tiberium deposits too.
So our main limit on glacier mining has always been ZOCOM's actual troops, not just our own failure to build MARVs. That's why we're hitting a hard cap again- ZOCOM's actual troops are stretched too thin and they want Ground Force to pick up the slack. Both by taking over the heavy infantry role in Yellow Zone and Blue Zone deployments where ZOCOM is currently deployed wastefully, and by being able to deploy (in armor) to shallow Red Zone operations directly.
MARVs at least have the advantage that they can mostly protect
themselves without a disproportionate amount of ZOCOM effort, but they don't ultimately solve this problem.
I still don't see why that's so desirable. Why not plan things out so we get some of those "whatever we want" projects in Q3, in exchange for finishing some obligatory projects off in Q4? We have the freedom of choice now to commit ourselves to doing some things a turn later. Why can't we make that choice? (Especially for the projects that have extra phases to catch any roll-over progress; that being ASAT and Food Stockpiles. Extra dice there aren't wasted.)
We can make that choice, but I think it's a bad idea. Well, apart from ASAT rollover which is cool in moderation.
Because dice are swingy, there's a fundamental difference between spending two dice now and spending one now and one later, when you are treating the project as something that
must get done.
My goal here is to front-load the most critical, required spending, because then if we roll badly on the optional projects, we don't get
hurt, we just... deal with the project not being finished.
For example, if we spend three free dice on
Vertical Farms this turn, in the expectation that we'll just spend three more dice on food stockpiles next turn... Well, maybe we get our vertical farms, and maybe we don't, much as with the ranching domes last turn. And there's a very plausible scenario where we are effectively
forced to spend
five dice next turn- one to finish the vertical farms that didn't complete, and four to be genuinely sure the stockpiles finish. By contrast, if we spent the three dice on the stockpiles up front, we would have more dice- potentially all five!- to throw at vertical farms later. But if the vertical farm rolls next quarter didn't go well,
it wouldn't be so bad. We'd just grunt in displeasure and finish off the project in 2062 as soon as practical.
I'm trying to push to rapidly complete all the projects that have the power to hurt us if they aren't
specifically finished next turn, so that we have the maximum number of wiggle dice to pursue other projects that can't hurt us.
...
There's a time to pace yourself, and there's a time to stop and smell the flowers, and there's a time to hustle so you can be sure of getting where you're going before the sun goes down.
And the sun's setting on this Four Year Plan.
