Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[crazyabe]

Skyhawk: (3) SMMI, Madman, Crazy

[Detoxicated]

Have we wasted our treasure expense Credit for a stage magician?

Skyhawk: (4) SMMI, Madman, Crazy, Detoxicated

[NUKE9.13]

...I'm still holding out hope that we'll get something for our efforts. I mean, if we hadn't spent the credit, him disappearing would've been anti-climactic. Perhaps he will return in a few years with a boatload of... stuff. Or something.
Godsdammit, I shouldn't've trusted a man who literally deceives people for a living.

[Taricus]

We can take pride in that at least the arstotzkans didn't get the design credit at least

[Kashyyk]

Please explain to me why a rail gun is not a good decision right now? It'll help counter their overwhelming artillery advantage after all.

[Taricus]

Because our air forces deal with their artillery effectively, we need weapons which to counter their infantry. And frankly the skyhawk isn't doing ANYTHING our existing units cannot do now.

[NUKE9.13]

Well, our first railgun would be unlikely to compete with their cannons. It may be a better long-term strategy, but people might be looking for short-term gains.
Which I disagree with. I don't think we're going to win this war in 3 turns by blitzing the taiga. Now that the pressure is off of the desert, it is the perfect time to develop new strategies.

al-Maghnat's Cannon: al-Maghnat is one of the foremost researchers of Kahrab, or Harnessed Lightning. His workshop consumes huge quantities of WoTs (Wand of Thunderbolt), miles of copper cable, and crateloads of other esoteric materials. Recently he has earned the favour of the princess, who finds his work fascinating. Before that, we merely humoured him and his experiments- now we have been forced to actually pay attention to what he has come up with.
Aside from his 'Northfinder' (a curious trinket, but I don't see it catching on), his work on what he humbly refers to as 'Maghnatism' has not yielded results- until now. An Adamantium barrel, wrapped in several coils of copper cable. A WoT is connected to each of the coils, and an ingenious mechanism allows them to fire one after another in rapid succession. Which does nothing, until one inserts a lump of iron into the barrel. The coils generate Maghnatism, according to the researcher, which pulls the iron towards it. As each coil fires in turn, the iron is rapidly accelerated, until it leaves the barrel travelling at such a velocity that it generates an audible boom.
We are impressed by al-Maghnat's Cannon, and attempts to put it into mass production are underway.

frankly the skyhawk isn't doing ANYTHING our existing units cannot do now.

No, but to be fair, it does it better. Also, which existing unit is capable of airlifting units and depositing them behind enemy lines?

Skyhawk: (4) SMMI, Madman, Crazy, Detoxicated
al-Maghnat's Cannon: (1) NUKE9.13

[Taricus]

The thing is that competing with their cannons right now is pointless, and airlifting infantry doesn't do anything because our infantry don't have much to use against their troops and railguns would take far too long to actually trim down into something our infantry can use and to do it on a large scale.

[Madman198237]

The two-turn plan for the Skyhawk is as follows: Right now, it gives our still-inferior ballista a solid firing platform with the mobility to screw with cannon fire. With the revision giving us the Wind Machine (Adamantine scroll that pushes projectiles at moderate velocity), it will have a dedicated VARIANT that does boom-and-zoom raids using said Wind Machines to drop huge amounts of explosives, before darting off to reload from the belowdecks cargo bay.

[Taricus]

Dropping a large amount of explosives isn't going to matter if the explosives we have are unsuitable to actually killing the enemy. We need to get better explosives before a larger bomber becomes viable as our skyskiffs are capable with what ordinance we have right now.

[Happerry]

Skyhawk: (4) SMMI, Madman, Crazy, Detoxicated
al-Maghnat's Cannon: (2) NUKE9.13, Happerry

[evictedSaint]

Design: Skyhawk [2+1, 1+1, 3]

The Skyhawk is an improvement over our aging airships of yesteryear.

It is a new hull design, shaped like a large canoe with a flat, narrow deck and made of Adamantium that can resist an HAC-1 up to medium range.  The two ballistas above deck can point fore, aft, starboard and port.  They can be aimed between 0° and 45° up.  The ammo is primarily Fire and Thunder shells, stored below deck. 

It uses four Adamantium scroll clusters, operated by wizards to keep them running in tune.

The artillery doesn't really work well against targets within close range below it, and there's not really any other weapons on board aside from Wands of Thunderbolts.  The ship is just a little faster than the Phoenix, but not nearly as fast as the Skyskiff.  The relatively narrow width means that the ship is prone to capsizing if an Adamantium scroll gets knocked out or if a manuever overextends too far.  It requires a team of mages to operate.  Very Expensive.

[NUKE9.13]

Hmm. I suppose it is possible to roll worse than that, so we should be grateful.

We could spend our revision trying to fix it... but there are so many things wrong with it:
-Speed (or lack thereof)
-Lack of cargo capacity
-Fragility
-Cost
I don't think we can fix all three with a single revision. Now, if we had an expense credit, we could solve the cost issue... but somebody stole it.
I think the worst problem is the lack of speed, since that reduces survivability enormously. So if we do use a revision to fix it, we should focus on that.

We could also do something a little more experimental...

al-Maghnat's Northfinder: From the labs of the eccentric al-Maghnat comes this curious device. An iron needle, mounted in a dish such that it may spin freely. And the curious thing is this: the needle always points north. al-Maghnat claims this device is three centuries ahead of its time. We couldn't really think of a use for this curio- until we showed it to one of our admirals. They thought up ways it could be used to help our ships (and airships) navigate out of sight of the coast- if that is indeed possible, it would be a major advantage, allowing us to outflank and surprise Arstotzkan fleets, or bypass them entirely to conduct daring raids on their home ports, cutting them off from supplies.

[Taricus]

Well, the cargo thing isn't a worry; the phoenix can just be revised so that we have a variant as a cargo hauler.

[Madman198237]

The cargo capacity was for a specific purpose, a design next turn should get us a hyper-fast boom-and-zoom-with-lots-of-bombs version that is capable of landing raiders behind enemy lines. That, or we just go ahead and develop a coilgun (Railguns have wear-and-tear issues, though perhaps that's a secondary concern in an Arms Race) for long-range artillery support from the (Hopefully) revised platform.