Remove ads

Attempting to Fulfill the Plan: GDI Edition

Reader mode
Simon_Jester said:
Apart from that, the only stuff that got through was submarine-launched hypersonic cruise missiles fired at point blank range, something that would normally be practically unstoppable by real life air defense standards. Even then, only two of the 24 missiles from one submarine got through, despite extremely daring and risky actions on their part to clear the first line of defense out of the way before firing. And the other submarine only got off about 5-6 shots that actually landed out of a dozen or more, possibly a lot more, despite having some kind of really exotic mass driver launch system. When fuckin' Matias Torres is only hitting you one time in four, you're doing pretty good defense-wise.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah, this is most of why I have been trying to hammer it in that the SADN is absurd and actually better than the ion inhibitors Nod uses. (I am aware you do not need that, but some other members of the thread do.)

Not because it stops everything. It can't. But because of the sheer scale.

As far as I can tell, Nod either cannot or has not build ion inhibitors everywhere that is economically, culturally or politically important. GDI has build SADN everywhere that is economically, culturally or politically important. You want to talk bullshit anti super weapon defenses? Come back when ion cannons no longer work on any Nod town, factory or palace whatsoever, and the only ways we have to get at them is Aurora strikes or battleship bombardment from offshore at low success rates.
 
This entire conservation is exhausting and I've been avoiding it, but there's a very obvious thing being missed. Nod didn't use bombers or ICBMs for the same reason we didn't use our ion cannons. The unreasonably bad ion storms.
 
In all fairness, ICBMs wouldn't have been too useful, as their ballistic arcs would've put them in range of ASAT. So they would've been depleted hard/entirely before getting near enough for SADN to come into play.

But yeah, the ion storms grounding the air section of the Shah's triad certainly helped.
 
grimely said:
This entire conservation is exhausting and I've been avoiding it, but there's a very obvious thing being missed. Nod didn't use bombers or ICBMs for the same reason we didn't use our ion cannons. The unreasonably bad ion storms.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Except for the fact that they very much did use ICBMs? It was literally shown in the update. They just all got shot down by our defences
 
There's also the fact that even with nature tying a hand behind their back, they still got multiple hits in. They were being restrained. Each warhead that detonated except for the backpack nuke on the fusion yards - and even then, maybe that one too! - could've been a city killer. Nuclear weapons today are dial a yield ranging in power by orders of magnitude, and the entire point of a MIRV is that only one of the warheads needs to make it through. While it is true that ICBMs also have to make it through ASAT, which presumably get a shot before warhead separation, I think it foolish to assume Nod hasn't thought through countermeasures for that. Like, say, stealth missiles.
 
Ithillid said:
They used cruise missiles, SRBMs, and some IRBMs shooting some very depressed trajectories. Nothing close to an all up ICBM.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

As a long-time lurker I'd like to say that your writing is up there with the old Li Song and Organization Geek's Guide quests under Sage of Eyes over on SB.
Or After The End here on SV by PoptartProdigy.

10/10 you make me feel emotional over a fictional world-spanning government built on the rotting carcass of NATO and whoever else got brought along for the ride.

I also really enjoy your world-building sections in the quarterly plans. You do a great job of making GDI feel like a real place with a sense of culture and pride as a nation. Same with NOD (although of course we don't get to see as much nuance as the thread isn't a NOD quest).

Your war sections are similarly enthralling.

I genuinely took in a deep breath and went "oh my god" when you described the nukes going up. The Hampton Roads strike was especially moving.

The imagery of a major naval base with ships and tons of cargo getting double-nuked felt just as heavy as the Modern Warfare U.S nuke scene.

You have a serious knack for military fiction on the tactical/strategic level imo. Or at the very least you're just a really good story-teller :).

This nuclear strike plan gave me the same feeling the opening cutscene for Command and Conquer 3 did.

I would also like to note (for people still salty in thread) in comparison to the opening of CNC 3, GDI stopped a majority of the infrastructural damage from occurring.

GDI has also currnently invaded India and sits on the doorstep of a major NOD warlord enclave.

If I had to make a comparison GDI is currently in the Africa mission section from CNC 3. It's taken some losses but NOD has once again been pushed back with some major strategic upsets in the mid-long term.

Also, as someone that has been consistently comparing this timeline to the canon CNC timeline… you guys are doing fantastic.

As of the 2060s in the original timeline GDI was coming to parlay with NOD because literally everyone was going to die.

In comparison, you guys have pushed Tiberium back. You've subsumed a huge chunk of NOD yellow zone territory. NOD isn't even fighting you guys as a peer power the way it fought GDI in the games.

You guys are so industrially superior that when a NOD guy goes "KANE SHALL UNLEASH HIS FURY" most of the current citizens of GDI can wake up and go "gee, I'm sure glad I live under the all encompassing eyes and talons of my beloved Eagle friends :)"

Faith in GDI has never been higher folks. This attack was supposed to put some fear back into GDI. And you know what? It has mostly failed.

If this scenario was a series game Hampton Roads and a chunk of the Eastern Seaboard likely would have been lost. (Like how NOD got nearly all of continental Australia Greened Up).

GDI is on track to not only survive thru the canon timeline dates, but actively achieve a geopolitical peace with NOD that doesn't rely on the shifting machinations of Kane.

I'm not gonna wade into the Nuke discussion otherwise except to say GDI Doesn't Use Nukes as people have already said.

But otherwise…

Be Proud GDI. You stand tall. And this Eagle stands with you. Like y'all have achieved success on par with the Soviet Union thread having like ~ 2 million casualties and handily winning WW2 without back breaking destruction imo. You're doing fine.
 
Last edited:
grimely said:
There's also the fact that even with nature tying a hand behind their back, they still got multiple hits in. They were being restrained. Each warhead that detonated except for the backpack nuke on the fusion yards - and even then, maybe that one too! - could've been a city killer. Nuclear weapons today are dial a yield ranging in power by orders of magnitude, and the entire point of a MIRV is that only one of the warheads needs to make it through. While it is true that ICBMs also have to make it through ASAT, which presumably get a shot before warhead separation, I think it foolish to assume Nod hasn't thought through countermeasures for that. Like, say, stealth missiles.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
ICBMs basically depend on ASAT somehow being down, or otherwise unable to engage - they go high enough that they spend long enough in engagement range that they're highly unlikely to survive. And IIRC we currently do not know of any stealth systems that work in space, especially not on platforms radiating as strongly in the infrared that ICBMs would. The bombers? Some of them were grounded by the ion storm, but others by InOps action. (See the Greymalkin section.)

As for this strike being restrained... kinda.
The attack was aimed at targets which were likely known to have defenses, and specifically not aimed at civilian-only targets. As a maximum launch of a high-second-tier warlord, it was something that could have been quite bad.
 
No. It was not the maximum launch. Every single nuke that hit the macrospanner could have destroyed Johannesburg. Not "this proves they could've hit it with a nuke that powerful", literally the same warhead hitting in the exact same spot if it had been dialed up to a higher yield. This was a restrained strike.
 
Last edited:
grimely said:
No. It was not. Every single nuke that hit the macrospanner could have destroyed Johannesburg. Not "this proves they could've hit it with a nuke that powerful", literally the same warhead hitting in the exact same spot if it had been dialed up to a higher yield. This was a restrained strike.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You're making assumptions. Warheads that will fit on certain types of missiles, will not fit on others. We don't know what the warheads on these sub-launched hypersonic missiles have as their maximum yield. They quite possibly could have had bigger yields, yes, but we don't know that for sure. What I was saying was that this was, very likely, al-Isfahani using all the launch/strike assets he had, so it wasn't restrained in that way. It was restrained in terms of target selection, and possibly in terms of yield used, but we don't know for sure on that.
 
Lightwhispers said:
You're making assumptions. Warheads that will fit on certain types of missiles, will not fit on others. We don't know what the warheads on these sub-launched hypersonic missiles have as their maximum yield. They quite possibly could have had bigger yields, yes, but we don't know that for sure. What I was saying was that this was, very likely, al-Isfahani using all the launch/strike assets he had, so it wasn't restrained in that way. It was restrained in terms of target selection, and possibly in terms of yield used, but we don't know for sure on that.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I am making extrapolations off of actual missile designs in real life, where nuclear strikes do not occur. I find it very likely that in a setting set in a future with nearly seventy years of global warfare, in which nuclear exchanges repeatedly occur, the warheads created would retain a capability that every fusion weapon has had for decades before a weird green rock landed in the Tiber.
 
For Johannesburg specifically, no one has ever shot a nuke out of rail gun either, so nobody knows how much a dial-a-yield fusion warhead would be effected by that. In addition, as great as these discussions probably are for the forum thread section of the update, it's worth remembering that getting the suitcase nuke to Monrovia was a substantial expenditure of effort by Mehretu, that wasn't easy.

The two successful sub strikes also used novel methods to get those successful deployments, sneaking all the way up into the harbor and, again, launching nuclear weapons out of a rail gun.

I doubt the Nod warlords supporting Isfahani would want to dial their warheads all the way up into the megaton range to ensure kills or start countervalue strikes, because that would force GDI to rip the breaks off military spending to reach security again.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's a project added to increase SADN coverage out to sea to counter said rail gun nuke subs.
 
Wildabeest said:
I wouldn't be surprised if there's a project added to increase SADN coverage out to sea to counter said rail gun nuke subs.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
There'd be a question of whether Hampton Roads was covered by a Phase 1-3 system, and if it was 2 or especially 3, it's possible the system wasn't fully complete at the time of the attack. Likewise for Johannesburg. Even if it was a fully operational system, it seemed like they were doing really low arc lobbing for Hampton Roads, which might've caused trouble with sensors picking it up past ground clutter. If nothing else, adding more sensors sites out that direction along with additional ASW efforts to push potential launch sites as far out as possible to increase warning and tracking time would be helpful.

Ironically, if they had gone for countervalue strikes, they would've been more successful, as Phase 4 is several quarters from completion (barring flight paths bringing things into range of Phase 1-3 towers). Flipside, that almost certainly would've resulted in the restricted spending on military being rescinded... and I think all of Nod would rather not convince GDI to go 200% on military again, considering how that turned out for them leading up to and during the Regency War.
 
To an extent this also shows the well, massive vulnerability of ABM in spite of it performing better then any ABM system in history. There were no pre-blinding nuclear EMP's, no pre softening of orbit and charging the ionosphere. Negligible decoys and a lot of vehicles by dint of not having the re-entry energy to use proper maneuvering heads. Assuming the use of more capable systems even circa 80s ones built to launch limits rather then SALT limits the strike was incredibly tame. One single shot could deliver the current number of independent vehicles in decoys, much less the impact on ABM of proper preparation aid measures. Plus, independently maneuvering RV's would pose a massive issue to not even go into the HGV in the room. If this was a full commitment strike it could have been orders of magnitude worse even if the same exact number of warheads was used.
 
Blackstar said:
To an extent this also shows the well, massive vulnerability of ABM in spite of it performing better then any ABM system in history. There were no pre-blinding nuclear EMP's, no pre softening of orbit and charging the ionosphere. Negligible decoys and a lot of vehicles by dint of not having the re-entry energy to use proper maneuvering heads. Assuming the use of more capable systems even circa 80s ones built to launch limits rather then SALT limits the strike was incredibly tame. One single shot could deliver the current number of independent vehicles in decoys, much less the impact on ABM of proper preparation aid measures. Plus, independently maneuvering RV's would pose a massive issue to not even go into the HGV in the room. If this was a full commitment strike it could have been orders of magnitude worse even if the same exact number of warheads was used.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A lot of those tactics would require engaging the ASAT network, which would likely require a full Nod-wide effort to have a chance of succeeding. (Whether by a Kane-level infiltration Masterstroke to take out the groundside ASAT control station and the 3 orbiting control stations, or by launching a full-scale attack on GDI's orbital assets.) And that would be the beginning of TW 4, which, through metaknowledge, we know that Kane does not want.
 
A full scale attack on GDI's orbital assets, or a countervalue strike of the scope Blackstar proposes, would also trigger the 'oh fuck' alarms in GDI and get Orbital Command to point GDI's orbital death cannons at everything of value in Nod and to keep firing until there's nothing left.

Because as far as GDI can tell Nod is already on the losing side in pretty much every metric, and it expects that it can keep pushing Nod back in the long term, drain it of manpower, outperform its economy by orders of magnitude, provide a far better standard of living, and so on. Such a countervalue/orbital denying attack would be read as a way to drag GDI into the tomb with Nod.
 
Lightwhispers said:
A lot of those tactics would require engaging the ASAT network, which would likely require a full Nod-wide effort to have a chance of succeeding. (Whether by a Kane-level infiltration Masterstroke to take out the groundside ASAT control station and the 3 orbiting control stations, or by launching a full-scale attack on GDI's orbital assets.) And that would be the beginning of TW 4, which, through metaknowledge, we know that Kane does not want.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
No? That would require a complexity of strike missions more advanced than 1960's standard. ASAT is not a magical effort, and the ionosphere provides massive cover for a theoretical strike from EMP effect alone. Also, why would it require engaging the ASAT network? it would just be by blinding it and in case of a larger effort the orbital stations are fairly vulnerable to effectively casseted shots of fragments in opposite orbits from anyone that has any form of space launch capacity that is not actively getting burned down, which shows by the lack interception of this strike in the lower atmosphere/acceleration phase, our network cannot burn said capacity down. This added to the lack of decoys in the heads they fired or the ability for rapid maneuvering due to trajectory. Decoy saturation alone would have greatly increased leakage rate as there would be 4-5 decoys for every warhead, effectively ensuring that defensive networks could be over-saturated massively increasing penetration rate. My point is more that with this strike they were not trying that hard to kill us, this was a limited counterforce strike not inherently strategic, and was using primarily tactical systems. Nothing in this represents well, the total capability of NOD/allies and is more of a spoiling strike showing that they are willing to do far worse if pushed hard enough.
 
Jo burg was hit by a sub off the coast launching on a flat arc. I'm pretty sure Hampton Roads was hit by a sub that had maneuvered inside the bay and then launched cruise missiles with tactical warheads and anti-shipping missiles to target the destroyer.

Also, the only way Nod tries to go after our orbital assets as a whole is if Kane tries pulling some shit he does not want to. They probably couldn't hide that level of global preparation from GDI either.
 
Phht said:
There'd be a question of whether Hampton Roads was covered by a Phase 1-3 system, and if it was 2 or especially 3, it's possible the system wasn't fully complete at the time of the attack. Likewise for Johannesburg. Even if it was a fully operational system, it seemed like they were doing really low arc lobbing for Hampton Roads, which might've caused trouble with sensors picking it up past ground clutter.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think those were sea skimming cruise missiles, not ballistic missiles of any kind.

Blackstar said:
No? That would require a complexity of strike missions more advanced than 1960's standard. ASAT is not a magical effort, and the ionosphere provides massive cover for a theoretical strike from EMP effect alone. Also, why would it require engaging the ASAT network? it would just be by blinding it and in case of a larger effort the orbital stations are fairly vulnerable to effectively casseted shots of fragments in opposite orbits from anyone that has any form of space launch capacity that is not actively getting burned down...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
First, while the ASAT network isn't magic, it's going to habitually burn down anything launched into orbit that isn't a GDI launch vehicle, especially if it's lifting off from a nonstandard location and on a highly nonstandard and hazardous (e.g. retrograde) orbit.

Second, I strongly suspect that the ASAT orbital stations are heavily Whipple-shielded and built with a high degree of redundancy, both with themselves and with ground station support, precisely to keep the whole network from being put out of action easily. Remember that "generals tend to fight the last war" cuts both ways, and the tremendous, humiliating early blow GDI took in the last war started with the ASAT network being disabled, Nod regaining the ability to make space launches, and the surviving ion cannon batteries being forced onto a much more limited form of manual control.

which shows by the lack interception of this strike in the lower atmosphere/acceleration phase, our network cannot burn said capacity down.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm not at all sure that any of this stuff ever really broke up out of the stratosphere, at least of the stuff that actually landed on GDI bases.

This added to the lack of decoys in the heads they fired or the ability for rapid maneuvering due to trajectory. Decoy saturation alone would have greatly increased leakage rate as there would be 4-5 decoys for every warhead, effectively ensuring that defensive networks could be over-saturated massively increasing penetration rate.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I think you may be overestimating the capability of decoys. To give the effect you're looking for, you need bus separation very early, and you need the decoys to be very effective at fooling a system that is chiefly limited by rate of fire despite having minutes to warm up and engage.

I'm not saying real world space-based ABM systems are super-reliable, but GDI has the capacity to put up huge satellite constellations and a variety of bullshit energy weapons and other capabilities that don't exist in real life. I'm not saying Nod can't overwhelm the system by sheer volume (including blinding attacks, decoys, et cetera). But I don't think they can do it cheap.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I think those were sea skimming cruise missiles, not ballistic missiles of any kind.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
SADN is general air defense, not purely ABM. It can engage ballistic missiles, but also planes and drones, etc. A sea-skimming cruise missile should be within its list of valid targets, and low flying missiles get mentioned repeatedly in the blurb for Phase 1 funding completion.

I am now imagining if we had a SADN set-up at LA back when the Marked of Kane were rolling for Cheyenne Mountain. God, that probably would've been amazing. I wonder if there's a "Alt History" fiction forum on GDI Online where someone has a fic that ISOTs a SADN system to LA 2052 and changes the course of history. ...Though perhaps for the worse since the Tacitus was probably destabilizing at the time. Not that GDI civilians probably know that, so the change is probably for the better given all the 2060s tech in a SADN constellation.
 
Phht said:
SADN is general air defense, not purely ABM. It can engage ballistic missiles, but also planes and drones, etc. A sea-skimming cruise missile should be within its list of valid targets, and low flying missiles get mentioned repeatedly in the blurb for Phase 1 funding completion.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Yeah sure. It's just that sea-skimming cruise missiles have some plausible chance of getting through the defenses, whereas a high-trajectory ballistic missiles' chances are a lot worse with SADN. Especially with all the lasers.
 
Ultimately, the nuclear strike is weird.

The Shah presumably intended to hit the point that is as painful as possible for the GDI, while not upsetting to Kane or allied warlords, while also not causing the GDI to make the Sha's death our number three priority (behind tiberium and Kane). Then factor in numerous technological and resource considerations, and that tiberium makes long range strikes difficult...

And to top it off, we don't know what the failed strike packages consisted of, nor what they were targetting.

Making analysis very difficult.
 
Also, a lot of the strike packages weren't actually launched by al-Isfahani. He may not even have known about them, except perhaps for vague "you are not forgotten" language from the relevant warlords. So the targeting priorities probably reflect a wide range of different warlords' attitude and philosophies.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top