It's been 11 turns since we last reviewed Infrastructure so we might want to do that before finishing ICS.
Maybe. But to be blunt, I want to use
Bureaucratic Assistance to finish the Savannah MARV fleet
more. And ICS is the kind of project that is difficult to sabotage, because it represents a massive complicated upgrade rather than a single discrete facility that can be manipulated. It's possible that Nod could get a few infiltrators into key positions to be able to divert shipments or something, but I'm honestly not all that worried about it, not enough to delay the project, or even enough to delay the MARV fleet or pull a much-needed Military die off doing something else
for the project.
Kind of want this for the added defense for the sites in question. If we had more dice I'd say buy the MARVs for it as well but we got schedules to keep.
Honestly I don't think it's a major priority with everything else going on. The best way to finish it would probably be to spend on a MARV hub
somewhere else in North America and let more rollover wash into this one.
BZ-2 was a huge battleground in early Tib War III, but I think that was mainly because Nod was committed to destroying the ASAT hub at GSFC, to the extent of needing to deploy an army capable of busting deep into the Blue Zone
anyway even if the initial strike with shadow teams failed. As such, once the GSFC mission succeeded, that Nod army had basically no purpose except to run around causing as much chaos as possible. And it consisted mostly of Nod's low-end equipment, so it was probably mainly a bunch of expendable good ol' boys from the North American Yellow Zones
anyway; I doubt Kane cared very much about it.
I suspect that this time around, BZ-2 will not be heavily targeted except possibly for surgical strikes against North Boston.
That dude is still kicking around. It's crazy the old warhorse hasn't kicked the bucket yet.
Death has been informed that Havoc has a present for him, and is sensibly avoiding finding out what it is.
I wouldn't use military dice on MARVs unless we are willing to commit at least 5 tiberium dice on them. Military dice are too precious right now to spend on MARVs unless we get a lot of bang for the buck.
MARVs, or MARV
hubs?
The thing is, with four dice (two Military, two Tiberium) you have a reasonably good chance of getting two MARV hubs, but to get two MARV
fleets you need a lot more than that, because even with the integrated laser defenses, the fleets are well over half again as expensive as the hubs.
Since the hubs are not very useful (and are potentially vulnerable) without their fleets, you don't want to build hubs in batches of more than about two at a time, because otherwise you have no assurance of being able to mass-complete the corresponding fleets in a timely manner.
Depends pretty heavily on what sets it off. It is not an engineered liquid tiberium bomb getting hit by an Ion Cannon, so it is significantly less than
@Dheer suggested, but still in the multiton detonation range. Few kilotons with a catalyst device.
Pfft. A few kilotons? No problem. Lots of places we can park something that will avoid a blast
that size from seriously endangering innocent bystanders. That mitigates a lot of my concern about building the plants, though I'd still prefer to avoid needing them because trading Political Support for Energy is kind of painful.
Though from another point of view, it's a way of trading Political Support and Tiberium Dice for freed-up Heavy Industry dice, which might not always be a bad thing.
For the tiberium power cells, the update says:
Ours is fifty liters, and puts out three times the input for six months. I'm going with 50 megawatts of output. 6 months by 50 mw gives us about 220 mwh, which is about 780.000 gigajoules, which equals about 190 kilotons of TNT. Obviously, that probably won't happen,, but a few kilotons might? No idea
Doing it from my approach...
Fifty megawatts
for twenty seconds is one gigajoule. Six hours is roughly 20,000 seconds (to a vague 10%-ish standard of precision), so that's about one terajoule. Fifty megawatts for a day is thus about four terajoules (again, to a vague standard of precision; these errors are partially cancelling each other out), which is about one kiloton of TNT-equivalency. So, yes, six months of output would be around 180-190 kilotons if it happened all at once.
My working theory is that an intentionally engineered liquid tiberium bomb gets nearly all the explosive yield out of the liquid tiberium, whereas this is specifically designed
not to be a bomb and there's only so much a catalyst device can do to make it impersonate one.
But if even the worst-case scenario (direct hit by catalyst missile) produces
only a single digit kiloton explosion, the solution is just to not put anything other than hardened bunkers and expendable stuff that you probably wouldn't miss if Nod nuked it within a few kilometers of the place. Among other things, Nod could probably produce the same result more effectively by firing a
nuclear missile at the liquid tiberium power plant, and the same kind of high-end warlords who has access to catalyst weapons probably also have access to nuclear weapons if they ask nicely.
We can't reasonably use these for the bulk of our power production needs, but knowing that the upper limit of how badly they can go "kaboom" is on the level of "only a horrifying localized disaster like the Halifax explosion or the recent harbor explosion in Beirut," there
are places we could put these in respectable numbers.
Say, spread them out all over Greenland at twenty-kilometer intervals and gang them together to power Nuuk. If Nod blows a few up, who gives a shit, it's Greenland; the only single point target of real value there is the robotics factory itself.
The thing is, the lack of BVR missiles due to bullshit stealth means the Apollo has to slow down and maneuver to engage air targets. It has to play on the Barghist's level.
Which is where have a nuclear-tipped AAM would come in handy, in regards to not needing ideal launch conditions--it can be dropped out of a munition sled and still have a reasonable probability of a hit. Which in turn means the Aurora never has to slow down to engage air targets.
Basically, where the Apollo is an air superiority fighter like the F-22, the NAAM-armed Aurora is a hypersonic interceptor, more in the vein of the YF-12.
Hypersonic interceptors are very much designed for an operational regime where BVR engagement is possible. Your idea only works if the NAAM can independently acquire targets. Because in the process of being dropped out of a hypersonic aircraft (which can have air search radar to get firing solutions) on a munitions sled (that can't) and slowing down to a reasonable speed... Well, you see the problem, I imagine. Especially what with Nod being fairly good at stealth and ECCM in general.
In many cases the NAAMs would simply
miss the target entirely, I suspect, or rather fail to get/maintain a lock on the target after being dropped from the Aurora. And that would present problems. Does the NAAM know when to detonate in response to missing a target or failing to find one? Does it have a salvage fuze to detonate it in the air comfortably above ground level so as not to cause collateral damage? Do the EMPs from a bunch of NAAMs detonating present any problems with using these things anywhere near GDI's own territory?
Does GDI with all its issues surrounding automation, trust a missile that, when dropped out of a plane, can lock onto any airborne target in a fairly large area in front of itself and autonomously engage that target with a nuclear weapon?
There are good reasons why nuclear-tipped AAMs were phased out in real life. I think those reasons apply in even greater force to the concept you've described.
And doesn't have to. The whole point of the glide bomb is you not only don't have to overfly the target, you don't have to overfly the air defenses either.
A hypersonic bomber isn't going to have a good enough turning radius to reliably turn around short of the target unless it drops munitions from an
extremely long standoff range. The downside of penetrating enemy airspace at speeds of over one kilometer per second is that your turning radius is measured in hundreds of kilometers. There is still a considerable risk of overflying defense laser installations (which may not be co-located with the target).
Unless, of course, a hypersonic glide bomb can be reliably designed to have an effective range of a thousand kilometers or more so that you can launch the things from well outside the territory the target warlord controls... But in that case, why did you bother with the Aurora when a hypersonic cruise missile would probably do the same job about as effectively?
Which significantly increases the expense of your air defense grid, because now you don't just need missiles and laser turrets capable of engaging hypersonic aircraft, you need more of them to guard a much wider perimeter.
It absolutely does, mind you- but depending on the effective range of the weapon system, I would caution against anyone developing too firm a conviction that Nod won't be able to find some way to shoot down Auroras.
Another possibility is something like an airborne laser platform, something that stays cloaked in the atmosphere until firing and exploits the low density of the upper air to gain long engagement range against targets that are likewise in or above the tropopause.
@Simon_Jester for the orbital part of your plan I recommend Colombia in place of Novel Material study for now. We get more support and restore hope sooner that way.
I actually agree with you, but we fought a big and rather ugly argument over trying to build any
Columbia phases in 2059, and I don't want to refight that battle more times than necessary.
As for agri I advocate Kudzu over Food Stockpiles. We have a fair stockpile already so we can afford to wait a little on that.
I don't disagree, but the stockpile action I'm contemplating is one that explicitly positions food stockpiles forward in the Green Zones, so that we can feed refugees and surviving civilian populations in those areas during the war I'm expecting to break out shortly. Which I consider to be fairly important and at least worth considering, even if we fight it off. Right now, all our stockpiles are deep in the Blue Zones, so moving them forward puts a strain on our transportation assets.
Speaking of strain on our transportation assets in wartime...
I can see going for 6 dice here but do we need this so badly we want to spend free dice we might not need as the odds are:
Integrated Cargo System 207/800 5 dice 75R 10%, 6 dice 90R 46%, 7 dice 105R 82%
...Again, we might experience a global surge in warlord attacks
at any time. The ICS provides few or no benefits until completed, and the main reason I'm pushing for it is because the massive improvement in worldwide transportation systems gives us a much more robust ability to move goods around the world. If Bintang busts out that "burn big chunks of my fleet to hit GDI with a temporary -20 Logistics penalty" gambit, if Reynaldo and Mehretu are smuggling everything up to and including nukes into our marshalling yards and ports, if shit on the supply front is in general Going Bad... We will really want the ICS on hand.
Even if the Nod warlords can't dent our Logistics that hard, having a huge Logistics buffer will make it much easier to ensure that GDI's military is liberally supplied with everything they need and everything we can give them, even as civilians are sheltered from the fighting as much as possible and normal economic activity can go on.
...
Thus, I consider the investment of an extra Free die to be well worth the increased security of being
fairly sure the system will be fully operational before the 2059Q4 turn starts.
Frankly, I consider this to be a more useful application of the two Free dice I'm assigning to the ICS than any single military project that I could assign those Free dice to.
Because while two dice might complete a single vehicle factory or a single phase of shell plants three months sooner, having reasonable confidence of completing
an entire global supply chain upgrade during the opening phase of, or on the eve of, war is far more likely to have decisive impact.
It's not as glamorous as building a factory for Havocs or Aurora bombers, but it's likely to be even more effective.
