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I would say we were relatively lucky. A range of disasters could've happened if Marcos didn't give the order not to attack ranging from an EDSA massacre, a RAM military junta, to a full on civil war (possibly even three way if the NPA decides to join in).
Eh, it isn't like there are calls for civil war.

Though given the insanity that may be coming in the coming days... we'll see.

Speaking of the quest, Jeez, @HeroCooky I thought my luck about writing about an event that could never happen that comes to pass was just to me.

It seems the powers that be want to prove you a prophet.
 
I would say we were relatively lucky. A range of disasters could've happened if Marcos didn't give the order not to attack ranging from an EDSA massacre, a RAM military junta, to a full on civil war (possibly even three way if the NPA decides to join in).

Considering the pit of snakes and vermin that never got purged and our subsequent decline into cyberpunk anarcho-capitalism, some would argue the civil war would have been the better option. :p

But that's getting off topic. As for the Quest, one can hope Guangchou strengthens its ties with a new Philippines and Indonesia. :p
 
You have a coast guard. It is called the People of Guangchou Liberation Navy.

And the marines wouldn't care. They ded, after the japanese killed 'em.

Also, just as an aside observation due to recent news;
I am kinda surprised and yet not at all that nobody noticed that Roe V. Wade was thrown out in TTL. And also... american dudes, dudettes, and dittos... I am writing about the bad time line.

For the love of Baphomet, stop speedrunning the Handmaidens Tale!

Oh, what happened to them? Last stand holding off landing forces, or sunk with the rest of the navy?

...Oh hell...
sounds like things may indeed start getting ugly...
The Civil rights conflict sounds like it's only gonna get hotter.

As Deus Ex put it: It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.

It's so much fun watching a country you share the wold's longer land border with skip merrily towards it's Years of Lead. /s

Militaries can't really switch away from the chain of command. While systems to prevent abuse of the enlisted men are vital the chain of command is a product of 1000s of years of bloody natural selection on a global level to figure out what works and it turns out that having a hierarchy in the military produces the best results.

SO! You are wrong! But this is a fascinating topic so I'm glad you brought it up!

Here is an excellent post about the issue experienced by the Spanish anarchists during their civil war - there's actually a longer more involved conversation around this if you want to scroll up and down, but the TL;DR is that the Anarchists did abolish the traditional military hierarchy and the issues they experienced did not stem from that but rather material conditions like 'our dudes don't have enough guns', 'our dudes don't have any training', and 'our dudes are getting fucked over by the Soviets who hate anarchism'. For the most part, the actual horizontal organization of their soldiers was on par with the more traditional hierarchical structure in terms of leadership and organization.

From discussions with leftist ex-USN people, there's basically nothing aboard a ship that requires an officer class.
In the present day, the chiefs can already run the ship - and if your enlisted are all qualified on their watches and everything is properly manned then you don't even need that.
The only thing the officers do that is unique to them is give orders, and take orders from the Pentagon - both tasks that could be given to senior NCOs without difficulty.

Now, there's a very valid argument to be made that somebody needs to keep an eye on the big picture and do all the organizational labour necessary to actually keep a plane/boat/whatever formation functional, but that doesn't automatically translate into replicating the current hierarchies. There's nothing saying that you NEED to have the people who do organizational labour have obsolete power over everyone else instead of treating that as just another role to be filled by whomever has the skill-set.

The Army for instance probably needs something close enough to officers that the difference is semantic because it operates in an environment where things get much more chaotic, and more of the organizational labour (in the form of tactics and strategy) needs doing. The Navy and Airforce however tend to be way more self contained.

Here's one way you could do things on a ship for instance, proposed by said ex-USN peeps: You have an Captain&XO elected from a pool of the crew who have the requisite qualifications (and you can get nominated or nominate yourself to go take the classes needed to get those qualifications), and otherwise the department heads otherwise work to keep their department running smoothly and coordinate to keep the ship running.

A lot of military leadership is apparently just: don't micromanage people, tell them what needs to be done, for what goal, and at least two levels above what they need to know so that they can make decisions and act independently if people die/communications fail/they have to make a decision immediately. And there are carefully determined timings so that you ensure when you brief people they have time to brief their subordinates and on down the chain.
So in that respect not much is actually changing compared to how things are done de facto today. We're just cleaning off some monarchist crust that has accumulated on the org chart.


On a tangent, Guangchou is probably one of the few places where it makes sense to have the Air Force separate from the army, instead of attached as organic air support in some fashion because we have Big Moat to keep the other guy's army out and we're not interested in Going Over There to kick anyone in the face.

IN FACT, a good air force is probably better for defending Guangchou in terms of cost/benefit than submarines. Having a good air force and submarines would round out our defensive ability real nice, but planes and missiles are cheaper than whole-ass-submarines, and work just as well for sinking ships. Nobody's going to invade you with submarines after all.

I'm very tempted to re-prioritize aircraft development, and treat submarines as a stretch goals for our military modernization.
 
Aren't people doing subs because they are cool?

If we just wanted anti air/ships wouldn't missile spam be better?

No quite, we hyperfocused on subs because they're fantastic asymmetric combatants that would let us reap a disproportionate toll if anyone tried to invade us.

Missile spam.... can be better, but there are caveats.
The biggest issue is targeting, having a fighter there to guide cruise missiles in and provide mid course course corrections would be a huge advantage over relying on a missile's onboard seekers and shore based command guidance when operating against ships. And missile truck planes + missiles may be cheaper than just long ranged missiles alone - but that's a harder value proposition to determine.

Against enemy-planes however fighter intercepts are strictly superior to ground SAMs because an SAM has to start from 0/0 speed/altitude, which cuts down the range, which forces you to have a bigger missile, etc. And their radars are much shorter ranged because of the horizon.
Furthermore, you kind of need an interceptor aircraft anyway to make sure your target is actually a bad guy and not a lost passenger plane.

IRL, SAMs are cheaper than planes, but we don't have to deal with the sort of grift most modern military-industrial complexes accumulate, so I'd argue we have a much more attractive value proposition in building a good air force. We also can't underestimate the prestige that a good air force will give us, which will be useful for international affairs.

Edit: @HeroCooky, do we need an action to comb over the Iwo Jima looking for anything juicy the Americans may have left behind by accident? We also don't have any actions listed to invite the PRC/USSR to come over and have a look.
 
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Edit: @HeroCooky, do we need an action to comb over the Iwo Jima looking for anything juicy the Americans may have left behind by accident? We also don't have any actions listed to invite the PRC/USSR to come over and have a look.
I added two actions to show your boat to the Chinese and Russians, giving you Mystery Reward for doing so.

And I rolled for the Iwo Jima, unfortunately, anything that could be used by you had already been destroyed by the Americans. Other than the structure of a WW2 aircraft carrier, you know little more.
 
Huuuuh, according to wikipedia the USSR did trade with America (through foreign trade was a relatively small part of the soviet economy) to a degree that fluctuated with the quality of the relations between the two, so I guess we could trade with the West.

It would be particularly nice if we could steal Sony's thunder and release a portable cassette player before they come out with their Walkman, and we could certainly reverse engineer their best stuff, strip out the planned obsolescence, then change things just enough to get around IP laws before selling things back to them at a profit and using that profit to fund homegrown initiatives.

edit: Throuhg, of course, we should limit ourselves to luxury goods when trading with the West. Critical materials like food and bulk raw material should be relied on only from other socialist nations.
 
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When we unveil Iron Tigers, we need to develop our entertainment right away. IT vs IT fights, especially.

Guangchou's Tiger Brawls (alternative name Tiger Wars) shall be the talk of the world!

They don't need to be top-of-the-line models ofc. We might not be able to afford all those costs with the destruction that would take place. We can just handwave it as a test of piloting skill and luck. That, or encourage sponsors. What better way for the Red Cross to promote the dangers of high-impact-collision vehicular accidents and drunk driving than by sponsoring their own Iron Tiger!

:V:V:V
 
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Huuuuh, according to wikipedia the USSR did trade with America (through foreign trade was a relatively small part of the soviet economy) to a degree that fluctuated with the quality of the relations between the two, so I guess we could trade with the West.

It would be particularly nice if we could steal Sony's thunder and release a portable cassette player before they come out with their Walkman, and we could certainly reverse engineer their best stuff, strip out the planned obsolescence, then change things just enough to get around IP laws before selling things back to them at a profit and using that profit to fund homegrown initiatives.

edit: Throuhg, of course, we should limit ourselves to luxury goods when trading with the West. Critical materials like food and bulk raw material should be relied on only from other socialist nations.
If I remeber right most of what was sold to the USSR was food. Basicly it was decided that keeping the soviet population from starving was worth doing some business with the USSR. It'd the same logic that makes it taboo to sanction any kind of food production.
 
When we unveil Iron Tigers, we need to develop our entertainment right away. IT vs IT fights, especially.

Guangchou's Tiger Brawls (alternative name Tiger Wars) shall be the talk of the world!

They don't need to be top-of-the-line models ofc. We might not be able to afford all those costs with the destruction that would take place. We can just handwave it as a test of piloting skill and luck. That, or encourage sponsors. What better way for the Red Cross to promote the dangers of high-impact-collision vehicular accidents and drunk driving than by sponsoring their own Iron Tiger!

:V:V:V

Mecha MMA. But maybe not for a while yet. Let the west figure out how to build them before we make a sport out of it - it's no fun when you've got no competitors. :p

Wait a minute, Le Mans! We could enter Le Mans with a hybrid electric race car as a publicity stunt - we're always hurting for rep, this could be a nice way of boosting it. Developing the technology for the race would also transfer over to making our own cars, so it's perfect, and Le Mans is an endurance and distance race, where the reliability of the electric motors and the fuel efficiency of the hybrid electric system will shine!

If I remeber right most of what was sold to the USSR was food. Basicly it was decided that keeping the soviet population from starving was worth doing some business with the USSR. It'd the same logic that makes it taboo to sanction any kind of food production.

I mean, in 1976 consumer goods made up 13% of total imports - the majority of which came from other communist countries, true, but that fact that not all of it did suggests that it wasn't a complete freeze of the movement of goods across the Iron Curtain. I think a lot of the fact that there wasn't more trade in consumer goods was that Soviet consumer goods were just not as good. We, on the other hand, would be aiming for high profit margin items, so we can fleece the west to give our economy another shot in the arm. They'll wise up in a few years and slap down major tariffs on our stuff no doubt, but by then we can just pivot to developing markets in the USSR, China, and the developing world where we just sell at a lower markup or straight up trade for in kind resources.
 
If I remeber right most of what was sold to the USSR was food. Basicly it was decided that keeping the soviet population from starving was worth doing some business with the USSR. It'd the same logic that makes it taboo to sanction any kind of food production.

Part of it was industrial stuff. Since America had higher quality processed goods and equipment.
it's no fun when you've got no competitors

It's fine, we'll just do intranational fights, and by the time the rest of the world catches up, we'll have a significant skill lead. :D
 
Part of it was industrial stuff. Since America had higher quality processed goods and equipment.


It's fine, we'll just do intranational fights, and by the time the rest of the world catches up, we'll have a significant skill lead. :D

Huh, you know it might not be a bad idea. Just hype up these mechs and watch Japan and the US go batshit on trying to build super robots. Meanwhile Guangchou is just using go them as logistical and engineering support, laughing at Capitalist Efficiency. :p
 
Huh, you know it might not be a bad idea. Just hype up these mechs and watch Japan and the US go batshit on trying to build super robots. Meanwhile Guangchou is just using go them as logistical and engineering support, laughing at Capitalist Efficiency. :p
Sigh... one day I will write a quest where Combat Mecha are not only cool, but sensible!

Wait, I already do that.

Oh well.


Also, voting ends at 8:00 CET tomorrow peeps!
 
Oh, before I forget it, the Cybersin Action will use the +2 from WEISOFT in its bonuses.
(Just adding this in case I forget tomorrow.)
 
That reminds me, is that +2 for only 1 of the 8 actions? Can we dedicate it to bumping our lowest roll?
Since all Actions would use WEISOFT (your only software) as a basis to build the Cybersin, I am ruling it as a general +2 per die.

Also, with the +2 to any Technology also applying to all actions, and your +2 Ambition, you will roll with a +6 for Cybersin. Per dice.

...doing Cybersin in one go is quite possibly the best choice you could have made, seeing as you could have accidentally lowered the bonus to a "mere" +2, and diluted the average.
 
Since all Actions would use WEISOFT (your only software) as a basis to build the Cybersin, I am ruling it as a general +2 per die.

Also, with the +2 to any Technology also applying to all actions, and your +2 Ambition, you will roll with a +6 for Cybersin. Per dice.

...doing Cybersin in one go is quite possibly the best choice you could have made, seeing as you could have accidentally lowered the bonus to a "mere" +2, and diluted the average.

lol, lmao

FALGSC here we come. Hmmm, we have Gay covered, and we're making good strides toward Communism. After that we just need Fully-Automated, Luxury, and Space.
That list is starting to look like a bunch of 5YP focuses. :thonk:

I totally thought our Ambition wouldn't apply to software development.
 
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