Hmm, do you think it would be possible for us to use a Tiberium crystal as a focusing device for our laser tech, and if so, what effects would the Tiberium have on the laser produced?
Nod knows. We do not want to know, because we
do know the tiberium focusing crystal would start to eat the rifle, and possibly get all over the hands of any poor fucker expected to maintain the rifle, and the next thing you know your armory personnel have tiberium shards in their hands and you have to send them back to a Blue Zone hospital to get chunks of their fingers cut off and hopefully regenerated.
Nod just says "ah fuckit," tells the armory workers to wear gloves, and replaces them or turns them into cyborgs or shoots them full of tiberium infusion drugs if they get unlucky.
75-ish progress is comparable to a regional factory, of which we often have to build multiple of. Like the Air Force's two Aurora factories and three Apollo factories, or the earlier ZOCOM Zone Armor factories. A single 50-75 progress project wouldn't fit with the pattern of earlier factories we've had to deal with.
Yes, because those were projects to build a
single facility that would be equal to (a large fraction of) the task of equipping an entire planetary military with heavy machined equipment.
Realistically, we're going to be building dozens of small plants to produce the new railgun munitions, all of which are individually too small to track.
Pessimistically, I'd expect something analogous to a phase of
Shell Plants.
Optimistically, we might be looking at a whole host of relatively minor modifications that get handled below the level of our simulation.
Somewhere in between, we'd see a single project (like a phase of
Shell Plants),
but cheaper.
If things turned out this way, I say IF, it'd be because we're retooling less actual production capacity, or because the retooling is simple. Note that indirect fire artillery goes through a LOT of ammunition per day of combat, ton-for-ton, probably more than direct fire railgun weapons do, and the total bulk tonnage of munitions produced has something to do with the scale of the project. But
if things worked out like this, we'd be looking at a project with something like 50-75-100 Progress, total.
IF.
...
Now, I'm not sure which of the three possibilities to expect, and I'm not surgically welded to any one of them. So I'd prefer not to bicker over it endlessly.
Well. The other option is to short the other departments in order to do more/more expensive military projects. Much as I dislike leaving even a single die in L&CI or Services unactivated, it is an option we should keep in mind. (That, and downgrading projects to cheaper options, like doing the 10R/die Strategic Food Stockpile Construction rather than working on the 20R/die Freeze Dried Food Plants.)
Even
with downgrading to cheaper options, the budget's gonna be tight. Leaving dice fallow is certainly possible, but it's not a good idea to do that when there are perfectly valid and greatly desired 10 R/die options just sitting on the table in Military, as long as we're still making some reasonable amount of progress on the 20+ R/die projects that need to get done.
Wait, we are close infantry-scale laser and plasma weapons?
It sounds like we might be close to infantry-scale lasers, but it's pretty obviously gated behind that
Modern Lasers development project. Nod's been deploying infantry laser rifles for years, so it's not like there's any shortage of working models. We'd just need how to design a working model that doesn't rely unacceptably on hazardous tiberium derivatives.
Infantry scale plasma weapons are almost certainly a long way in the future, I think.
The point is, while we
might conceivably be able to start issuing laser rifles to our front line infantry within a year or two,
MAYBE...
There is no realistic way we're going to be able to do so in time for the Karachi Sprint.
So we might as well give the poor bloody infantry
something with more stopping power against giant biomonsters, even if the lasguns or plasma rifles aren't going to be available.
Yeah on the Plasma, it's a Steel Talons project and a Plan Goal.
The thing is, that just gets us bleeding-edge prototype giant-ass plasma cannons that fit in a big stompy battlemech.
There's a lot of things that could go wrong between the part where we design that and the part where we design an infantry-scale plasma rifle.
Most important I think is that this will be available to our assorted militias and hangers on. The ability of those units to ambush and kill cyborg crocs units is really useful. Because if we start digging into India I expect to see more across the planet. Also if it can wreck a borg? It'll give regular infantry and the power armor crowd bad days as well.
I'm pretty sure the GD-3 will still be a pretty bad choice for fighting giant cyborg bears with laser eyes or whatever Nod is throwing around these days.
It's just going to be
less bad than the GD-2...
