The Monarchy has commissioned the worlds first military airship, the HMIAS Wene, which is of semi-rigid structure and is armed with a number of machineguns and a pair of cannons. Oddly, during its tour to show it off to the Monarchy's people its two cannons where missing.
Well. Crap. I mean, hooray for the news update, but crap.
Okay, implications. Presuming that they aren't at a resource limitation, they can churn out at least one airship a turn and may have the infrastructure to begin producing more than one a turn soon. The machine guns are most likely for anti-air defense and the cannons are for bombardments. The lack of cannons might mean that they don't have the cannon design they want to mount on it yet, or they forgot to produce it.
The news update probably means that we're not in a
position to edit our production order, which means a roughly even mix of HMGs and Ratios, which isn't bad, but artillery seems like it might be more useful at the moment.
We're going to need tracer rounds. We planned on making them, but now we sort of need them, unless the 40mm anti air sharpnel shells work very effectively.
If we go ahead with the plane, it's going to take 2 turns minimum to begin production, assuming that we create a useable plane design in one turn. Let's assume it's going to take 5 turns without botchs to make the plane (plane design building + beginning plane design, actually being able to have the building in full use designing + plane engine design, test flight, revisions based on test flight, production). We can set aside 10 engineers to work on all of the involved parts of the project (designs and buildings) while we use the rest of our engineers to work elsewhere.
I kind of want to design a submarine as a kind of screw you to the Monarchy, but we can't really afford that at the moment.
@Funk: I'm going to outline the areas that I find make the rocket project an inefficient use of resources and man power. If you can prove otherwise on these points I will support the project.
The Qassam rocket you're using as an example is 100 years ahead of us timeline wise. It takes advantage of solid fuel which we have no experience in at the moment and of which your rocket design relies on gunpowder for propulsion. It also has the advantage of 100 years of aerodynamic design research, development, and experimentation. In addition to that, it is specifically called out for being exceptionally inaccurate for hitting specific military targets, which suggests that even if we managed to make it, we'd have to be well within its 5km range to hit what we want. The enemy would almost certainly be able to fire upon the rockets well before they get into position and are able to fire.
Rockets seem complex enough that they would require a specific factory to make them, (
Aseaheru, are we able to get confirmation on that) which is not something that our government has shown itself willing to do so far. This means that we would need to devote factories to producing them which would be production that we could have used on things we know work well in the field. In addition to that, presuming we advance to the Qassam design, it would require Special Fuel which means that we would need to design the process to produce said fuel and then set up chemical plants to put the process into practice.
Let's say we use 10 engineers on all aspects of this project. Fuel Design + Chemical Plants => Rocket Design + Rocket Factories => Rocket Fin Redesign = 3 turns. Assuming 1 botch and 2 extra turns needed to form a base design to be further refined in any part of the process, that means it will take at least 6 turns to set up the rocket system, assuming the minimal goes wrong. Can we afford to use these engineers like that?
In regards to the "really large rocket." That would certainly require a specific factory for it. We have a 42cm siege mortar which will do exactly what you want while being reusable and having a 14km range. Engineers would be better spent turning the siege mortar into something we can actually use rather than working out a rocket that won't have near the same range for exactly one use. At what point would a rocket of that size be able to bring back a return in PP while still being able to provide the same level of accurate destruction that we would seek from it?