Haven't really been following all the discussion, but it sounds like you have good reasons for why nothing the Lyrans are going to do as far as production and upgrades is an idiotic mistake, but it seems to me there should be a bunch of mistakes. Can't really offer any good suggestions to what the mistakes could be, but they're large enough there should be a bunch of mistakes.
Oh, there are mistakes coming, just very few substantial mistakes. Many of the 3050 ‘upgrades’ in canon weren’t just mistakes, they were outright dumb. Any competent engineer should have been able to tell they were dumb, and the fact that they were allowed into production is almost SOD-breaking in the sheer level of dumb. I’m attempting to make mistakes that are in-line with doctrine. For the Lyrans, that tends to mean things like less than ideal Fast Assaults and issues with ASFs.
That makes sense, however my point is that in RL with large organizations you get SoD breaking stupidities. Granted in a competent, well managed organization those tend to be fairly rare, but they do happen.
Not really. The Archon is, when it comes down to it, only one person and most of her time needs to be taken up with running of the entire empire. She can take some time occasionally to focus on pet projects, but generally any decisions on what projects get funded would need to be done on a much lower level, with her getting at best a summary, and most likely not having time to read that unless there's some disaster involved.
Yeah, you do occasionally get really big problems, but not normally when you've just raked some of the biggest troublemakers over the coals.
Erm. This is major military R&D where several of the companies involved have accepted guaranteed loans to be able to do the projects. The Archon is definitely going to be checking in on them. Every day? No. Probably not even every month. But every quarter? Damn straight! And if shit gets too far off the rails, she ain't gonna be happy about it.
Lyran ASF numbers are low enough that she can’t even threaten that. She needs every ASF she can beg for, borrow, or steal. What she can do is hint that the Rapier seems like a much superior option and that Bowie would lose prestige if the Rapier became the preferred LCAF heavy ASF platform. Oh, and please ensure that your new Chippewa variant includes [insert list here].
Such as not magically blow up/catch fire/melt the pilot if someone within 100 meters of the cockpit even thinks of pulling the Alpha Strike trigger? That and point out that she is willing to drop a ASF (the Lucifier) if better options come out in great enough numbers? Do we have any word on the Vulcan ASF Weber will be making to complement the Rapier/ kill the Lucifer?
Speaking of the Lucifer a good thing to retool the lines for it would be getting the rights to Corsair via the FedCom Alliance and copious amounts of money and then use to tech available to significantly upgrade it
The only information I’ve released at this point is that it will be built based on both the original and the upteched schematics, and that the people in charge want either more ERPPCs, more Gauss Rifles, or both.
Hmmm given that the fully updated Rapier will probably have a pair of ERPPCs I'm leaning towards the use of Gauss Rifles. Also question would the extra available weight be worth the cost to make the design have a XLFE 240 since the CAC will be making those for Centurion refit kits anyways? If not it just costs my variant of the Vulcan some armor(and if I wanted 24 volleys of Gauss ammo instead of 20 1 tons of ammo) and given it has more than the Royal Stuka by a decent amount as is that's not the end of the world
If they can fix the production value of the Gauss line that might work. Problem is most of CAC ERPPC production is spoken for and building a new line is not cheep and the Gauss Line is a bit of a lemon at the moment. Now if it is a gravity issue then moving the line to another line planet might work but that opens issues of protecting the line. the Rapier has a AC20 as its anti dropship weapon right? Could the Vulcan pull the Lucifier trick of massed LRM's I think was mentioned by Weber.
I mean sure the Vulcan could do the LRM trick like the Lucifier but the Thunderbird and the Chippewa also do that so its not really needed by the Lyrans. As for where they could put the Gauss line the orbital station would a solid choice if it fits. Alternatively the CAC could relocate the gauss line to Sudeten and have the Gauss rifles needed for Vulcan production brought to Catachan on the return trip of the dropships moving parts and components from Catachan to Sudeten and sell the rest of the output to other companies with the benefit of the production site being in a much less outlying location
They have the facilities for 240 XL production and are planning on fully reactivating them to make Centurion refit kits anyways. It's just that my design variant that uses the XL engine basically uses the saved weight to slap 5.5 tons of extra armor on the thing and that's it.
Two different things, or possibly more than two depending on how you look at it. You're talking about blatant and large scale corruption, I'm talking about simple incompetence, mis-communications, project bloat, petty empire building and interference for personal reasons, etc...
I find it believable that Katrina will take the time to look in on such projects every few months, but it's not her job. That would be at least two levels below her. i.e some assistant to the secretary of defense (or depudy under-secretary, or whatever) would go to the various major projects, get a pretty power point display along with a lot of ass-kissing and promises the project will be the best thing since sliced bread, possibly get to see a very artificial display of what they produced and head off to write a report. Their boss would then take that report, along with dozens or hundreds of other reports and condense that into a report short enough the Archon could conceivably read it.
These would tend to reduce how much damage the screwups do, but we're still talking about only two people so the screwups will happen.
And I'm sure she will, I'm just saying there should still be an occasional screw up. Not Corruption, just "I can't believe they were that stupid" screwup.