One major thing that makes me want to destroy all traces of the portals and not invest a single turn in them is that they threaten our greatest advantage over NOD and if we restore one and the knowledge of how to do it or god forbid the knowledge of how to do portals with human tech leaks, and it would eventually, we lose all orbital and defensive depth we have acquired due to the fact that NOD can not just bomb any of our facilities, space stations or other critical nodes but NOD would most importantly be able to escape the earth and become a truly untraceable or containable threat.
They could set up bases on any planet in the system or even hollow out asteroids in the belt and start launching them at us, god forbid if they pull a Marco Inaros and start attaching stealth coatings and shielding to asteroids and micro meteorites.
The portals might help us streamline logistics in setting up off world or high orbit production but the risks of it falling into enemy hands far out weigh the benefits i feel.
I mean I'm not trying to sound like a dick but if people invest into portals why would we do any defensive focuses going forward or invest into navy or anything else like that which is mainly slow or static in nature, because it has to be assumed that as soon as we get portals NOD does too. To do any defensive options taken, all the work on strategic area defenses, walls, military bastions, orbital nuclear caches, land based nuclear caches, satellite weapons, etc would become useless as NOD would be able to take them out in wave one without even having to put forward effort of using stealth strike teams or large scale offensives. It'd just become a game of build portal facility, send bombs through to destroy cities and infrastructure or maybe strike teams through to find intel on enemy portal facility, bomb portal facility, have portal facility bombed, repeat
So far, all our work on portals suggests that for the foreseeable future (the next 50+ years), portals will require fixed infrastructure at both ends- you can't beam a bomb into someone's living room with them, and they have to know you're coming. To make the portals a realistic Nod threat, they'd have to already have huge, logistically expansive installations set up in the area they want to portal stuff to, and if Nod can get away with building a giant mega-machine under your nose, they could have already ambushed you with whatever they used to
do that with.
We still shouldn't push it now. If it'll pay off in 15-20 years, then it can wait another 3-4 while we work on other things. If those other things pay off, we might even end up getting the portals faster.
Accelerating a project by 3-4 years by doing other stuff to compensate for deliberately waiting 3-4 years sounds pretty unlikely without a specific, clear plan for how that works.
Personally, I want to get our capital goods and energy problems dealt with so we can hammer out the EVA's and then maybe reorganize our bureaucracy or something.
Honestly, I don't think the portal action on our docket right now really gets in the way of that? Even on Derpmind's plan, we're spending our efforts on actual Plan goals and stuff we'd have to do anyway, the order of operations is a little different but it's not that outlandish. Now, nine dice on reforestation is a little much, for instance, but this isn't just us fucking around doing nothing in order to accomplish portals. Real, important work is getting done in every department.
Keep in mind that we're effectively paying ~2 extra dice by not doing alloys this turn.
I really think we can afford to do 1 die Portals this turn, and 3 dice next turn, instead of 4 this turn. Even at 4, it only has a ~50% CoS.
I'm in agreement with you (hence my plan being what it is), but I do think that sacrificing the 5% Progress boost across the board for one turn is at least
commensurate in value with "get portals done really fast." Which, even compared to an aggressive 1-3 program, this plan does.
I haven't voted for it, but it feels legit to me.
This is baseless hysteria.
Nod aren't wizards - for them to know we have working portal tech requires that the project not be a blacksite with no outward communications and a staff that never leaves. There needs to be a plausible line of information; if there isn't a way for information to pass out, Nod can only plausibly know that GDI is working on something top secret, but not what it is. Nod tried to infiltrate and find out what we were doing, and we slammed the proverbial cookie jar shut on their fingers.
In fairness, it is reasonable to assume that Nod would
eventually, given time, succeed in stealing the secrets of portals from us over the course of decades. Especially if we start actually deploying them for industrial or logistical purposes.
You're quite right, though, that there's no compelling reason to expect this to happen
now. I doubt it even could happen unless Nod-plus-Kane bends all their efforts towards it
and they roll amazingly well and so on. And I'm not at all confident that they'd even know to try.
