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[Chiefwaffles]

We can't afford to spend an entire design on countering one alien action. They'll be able to nullify -- completely or mostly -- the design with a revision, greatly hurting us in the most important Arms Race metric: action economy.

We'll be trading our design for their revision. That's not a good trade. We can't just let ourselves stick still while we counter one alien design while they're designing new things to beat us at air and ground. We can't win by just reacting to alien designs we see as powerful; we have to counter them by introducing our own more powerful things.

The Gravity Pulse Drive allows our craft to consistently doge alien projectiles, and gives them a general improvement in all of dogfighting and more, as well as progressing our understanding of alien propulsion techniques. It works against the alien missiles without being a narrowminded counter that sacrifices other progression.

[Blood_Librarian]

The Choice is obvious.

Magnetic Anti-Missile System [Use an Alien Equipment Token] : (3) Happerry, Emral282, Cnidaros
Hot-Blind System [Use an Alien Equipment Token] : (1), Rockeater
Gravity Pulse Drive [Alien Equipment] (2): Chiefwaffles, Blood_Librarian
"Starling" Drone Network [Use Alien Equipment Token] (1): MoP

[Man of Paper]

The engine is a good idea - won't mind if that goes through. I'd just prefer trying to branch out our tech tree as much as we can, build wide, as it were. Even on a low roll we should at least get experience with AI, which is a real solid counter to psionics.

I also think a psilab should be a priority once we have the tokens to throw at it.

[Happerry]

We can't afford to spend an entire design on countering one alien action. They'll be able to nullify -- completely or mostly -- the design with a revision, greatly hurting us in the most important Arms Race metric: action economy.

We'll be trading our design for their revision. That's not a good trade. We can't just let ourselves stick still while we counter one alien design while they're designing new things to beat us at air and ground. We can't win by just reacting to alien designs we see as powerful; we have to counter them by introducing our own more powerful things.

The Gravity Pulse Drive allows our craft to consistently doge alien projectiles, and gives them a general improvement in all of dogfighting and more, as well as progressing our understanding of alien propulsion techniques. It works against the alien missiles without being a narrowminded counter that sacrifices other progression.

We can already dodge the enemy missiles. It doesn't help. As for it being a narrowminded counter, I've already spoken on how I want to reuse it as a HWP weapon, it advances our railgun tech which is our primary weapon tech, it advances our computer and sensor tech by making new systems that can accurately detect, target, and hit alien missiles, and unlike 'dodging' it isn't something which our skyrangers have to stop doing when they slow down to deploy our troops.

I also call fowl on describing the alien missiles as 'just a revision'. The alien missiles have been showing up for several turns now, and they've been getting more effective as time goes by. I'd be highly surprised if they weren't the result of several actions, designs and revisions, but they certainly aren't just a revision, and at minimum I'd expect them to be a design and a revision, and that's only if the other side consistently rolled high on them without getting any flaws. And that basically never happens.

I really don't see what you expect the better drives to actually do, because our main interception issue has been detection, not interception, and we can already dodge the enemy missiles long enough to blow the hell out of enemy UFOs, so we don't need to extend our dodge time in battle. And they aren't going to keep our Skyrangers from being blown the shit out of, which is the biggest issue with the missiles right now, because last fight we won in the air and then got blown up before it could turn into a ground fight, and better engines aren't going to magically let transports dodge enemy missiles as they slow down to landing speed.

And, hell, if we want to talk about narrow designs and opening up stuff for the future, what the hell does better drives give us anyway? We aren't ready for another generation of fighters, we just got our current one and can barely afford enough of them anyway, it won't help in ground fights, it doesn't unlock anything new, it doesn't lead to unlocking anything new in the next action, and it doesn't even help with our biggest current issue. If we want better gravity engines it should be rolled into a Gravity Ranger design, so we can have an alien alloy transport that's more resistant to being shot down, not some upgrade pack for a counter that we're already succeeding at in combat.

[Chiefwaffles]

...what?

1.) I did not say the alien missiles were "just a revision." I said that they can just revise them again to undo most, if not all, of our designed counter.
2.) We can dodge the enemy missiles once. The problem is that we can't dodge them again, as the Talons' agility just aren't there yet. "Yet" being the keyword, and GPD aims to fix that.
3.) I explicitly say what I expect the better drives to do multiple times in our revision.
4.) A benefit from the GPD, which is apparent from reading the design proposal, is that it allows 360 degree maneuverability and fast acceleration. The Skyrangers have a problem with dodging with their current engines. Not forever. If we get the GPD on Skyrangers, then they can just delay landing until the projectiles are gone, or land when the missiles are chasing Talons and dodge afterwards. If missiles hitting our Skyrangers is something we have to worry about in the same way we did last interception, then we don't have to worry about waiting. The aliens won't have any intact ships. A couple more minutes spend in a holding-dodging pattern won't allow them to suddenly disappear.

5.) What does GPD do for us in the future?
     A.) It upgrades the maneuverability of all our craft, vastly improving the Skyranger and futureproofing our ships against future alien craft in addition to working against their missiles.
     B.) It advances our knowledge of gravity propulsion, allowing for future designs such as personal infantry grav-based propulsion systems.
     C.) It makes future aircraft designs easier, as they won't have to worry at all about propulsion.

6.) Agility is not a "counter we're already succeeding at in combat." First, seeing everything as counters is just the wrong way to see things in arms races. Second, it'd only be successful if we had enough agility to keep our aircraft from being shot down. We don't.

[Chiefwaffles]

How about this, though, as a second option? Almost directly counters alien missiles, but also reduces the chance that they can be fired in the first place and just improves our destructive capabilities. Reminder that our missiles are currently useless due to the alien plasma shielding.
Design: Earthshatter Missiles (Alien Equipment Token)

The Rockbreaker is an interesting design. An offshoot of our more successful Rockslide missiles, it makes a poor attempt to use alien explosives and whatnot for a more effective missile. It's not great for current use, but it's a good platform to start off of.

The Earthshatter missile is fairly straightforward. It uses a small gravitational drive to move, allowing for extreme agility and speed in the air relative to our older missiles (though it still keeps the aerodynamic shape, as most of its motion will be forward and variations of forward). Taking some tips from alien equipment, we've overhauled the power source employed in Rockbreakers to allow for it to remain fairly stable until detonation, and use it to power the propulsion to save space and weight that would be normally spent on fuel.

A thin alien alloy coating remains in the design from the Rockbreaker, protecting it from countermeasures that would normally destroy a regular missile. However, we've adjusted the coating for a very destructive fragmenting shatter pattern, allowing missiles to inflict damage through both high-speed alien alloy fragments and the Elerium power core blast.
The missile uses a slightly-upgraded version of the Rockslide algorithms, taking some knowledge of what we've learned in it in ventures such as the Brazil computer core. This should just allow for some slightly better targeting from afar, but most importantly, it includes an ability to detect lethal alien missiles and prematurely detonate the missile, using the fragmenting blast to also detonate the alien missile before it reaches allied aircraft.


The Earthshatter should do more damage, be more accurate, be much faster (hopefully allowing in elimination of some alien craft before they fire their missiles), and should increase survivability of our own craft. And it won't blow up prematurely, which is nice.
All of this is accomplished through fairly iterative improvements. Adjusting the coating for fragmenting effect, spending a bit of time re-stabilizing the core to appropriate levels, adding a smaller grav drive (of the same type used in the Talon, roughly), and doing a small upgrade to the electronics based on stuff we've already done with Rockslide computing.



Also.
Here's a revision for later, to deal with infiltration:
Revision: Computer Core Discriminatory Analysis

A revision to the computer core in Brazil, this isn't quite as bad as the name may imply.
Simply put, right now the computer scans for broad patterns on a global scale. It's really useful, but it could be more useful. By giving the computer the capabilities and permissions to temporarily decrease the scope of a scan when deemed necessary, the computer should be able to analyze smaller patterns indicative of suspicious activity that we wouldn't normally recognize.

We hope to use this new feature to locate any aforementioned "suspicious activity" in countries indicative of alien sympathizers or infiltrators. A politician with very strange meetings coinciding with alien visits or alien activity is a more obvious example of what the computer may pick up, and knowledge of this should allow us to pre-emptively deal with alien sympathizers/infiltrators before they strike, and have more intel of alien-compromised entities if we want to act on it further.

[Man of Paper]

While waffles summed it up nicely, I would just like to expand a little on the fact that it's an engine design we can build off of. It'll also probably allow interceptors to pursue further and faster. While it'll let us evade more effectively more than once, it could also deal with that pesky problem of most of our enemy ships getting away without contest.

I'd still prefer the utility of the drones at this moment though

[Chiefwaffles]

MoP, you should probably vote for the engines then. You can change your vote if you manage to get more support for the drones, but right now without any changes the easily-nullifiable direct counter design will win.

[Man of Paper]

Magnetic Anti-Missile System [Use an Alien Equipment Token] : (3) Happerry, Emral282, Cnidaros
Hot-Blind System [Use an Alien Equipment Token] : (1), Rockeater
Gravity Pulse Drive [Alien Equipment] (3): Chiefwaffles, Blood_Librarian, MoP
"Starling" Drone Network [Use Alien Equipment Token] (0):

Good call. I was hoping to see more activity but I failed to realize there were already 7 votes. I'll propose the "Starling" again if it becomes appropriate.

[Rockeater]

Magnetic Anti-Missile System [Use an Alien Equipment Token] : (3) Happerry, Emral282, Cnidaros
Hot-Blind System [Use an Alien Equipment Token] : (0)
Gravity Pulse Drive [Alien Equipment] (4): Chiefwaffles, Blood_Librarian, MoP, Rockeater
"Starling" Drone Network [Use Alien Equipment Token] (0):

Missed the mentioning of the Skyrangers in the GPD