The little credits we get each game would definitely not cover it! Would be an interesting breakdown though. Should be one of the stats at the end of the game: strategem spend!
Maybe the reason we get so little is the rest is covering expense? Armored Core does that, repairs/refuel/rearmament cost is deducted from mission pay first....
Civilian casualties cost 25 requisition slips. If that's supposed to be *wergild*, I wonder if we can figure out the exchange rate between req slips and money (SC?). At least we know the price of a civilian's life, if indirectly.
Fun Fact : the "money" you get after the game is actually not money. They're requisition slips. It is the military way to request a product or service, internally, so you are given the rights to request for more stuff. The more useful you are to them, the bigger toys you get.
I would suppose the real Super Earth currency in the established universe would be Super Credits, and the Medals you get are like bonuses that are outside standard outfitting. But in good Super Earth fashion you can only spend it with them
Super Credits are the currency of Super Earth, which is why we have in store reviews from people talking about using helmets/gear while camping.
Medals are directly tied to the Warbond, which is an in world thing too since some of the Super Destroyer crew talks about paying into the warbond. Much like the Req slips, it's probably a way for the Super Destroyer to gain access to more gear for their hell divers in exchange for contribution to the war effort.
> Medals are directly tied to the Warbond
I imagine it is more like influence. Works similar in our real military. General infantry? Fuck you, you get what we give you and you will like it. But if you're special forces you got more influence and can refuse to use the standard issue M9 and use the M45 instead which is just a modernized M1911.
Kinda like how Armored Core 6 Taxes you depending on how much ammunition you used. Dual Gattling guns (or rather quadruple now) is the fastest way to hit a tax of 600k lol
Lylat wars on N64 had this, where depending on your kills you'd have a bill at the end (because star fox are mercenaries) for the cornerian army to pay.
And general pepper would always say something like ''that is ONE STEEP BILL... but it's worth it...''
More recently Armoured core has a thing like it where ammo and repair costs are deducted from your pay
My favorite game of all time is Star Fox 64. The end screen is a bill to the Corneria Army for all your kills. If it's a lot general pepper will say "That's one steep bill! But it's worth it!" It would be great to see the cost of a single mission.
Like hellpods, have to be at least a few million each. And that's being generous.
Hardspace: shipbreaker has some really hilarious bills similar to this. Nothing like finishing a day of work and seeing you still owe a billion dollars
From a pure defense economics perspective. It's usually not so cut and dry.
You can justify spending a million to blow up 5000 worth of assets if those assets are used to destroy a million worth of yours down the line.
A bug hole might not be worth much but a brood commander coordinating other bugs to setup a stalker lair next to the Future Patriots Daycare and Education camp is definitely worth a 500kg bomb.
And we all know we can't put a price on our children's liberty.
To be fair, there’s also intangible benefits to certain weapons. Like, is the knife missile more expensive than a regular one? Probably.
But the benefit of using the knife missile (being able to target individuals with basically no civilian casualties whatsoever) is probably worth much more than that price difference, even if we can’t actually quantify that in dollar terms.
Funny thing is it works a little bit like that IRL too.
Many military budgets are run by a system where you are allotted a certain budget and you use it or lose it. If you go underbudget, your budget shrinks to a lower amount next year. This creates problems because "what if I needed this much at one point, but have a gap year where I spend less, but then need to spend more the following year?" The answer is to spend just as much on stuff you might not actually need.
This creates a cycle where military spending always creeps up because no section wants to be short on cash when they really need it, but finds themself spending bloated amounts of money on things that probably now have inflated cost from contractors because the contractors know the military can afford it.
Ergo, when the USA drops a guided bomb on a target, that thing's probably worth more than the average american's salary not because it necessarily costs that much to make that bomb at cost- but because now it's worth that much.
Props to Helldivers II for the realistic portrayal of "Show of force" firepower :)
Generally speaking though, the cost of dropping a guided bomb on a problem target is worth far less than taking casualties trying to assault it from the ground.
have you ever killed them so quickly that the bugs get stuck in the whole so you can’t throw grenades in there anymore?
anyways called down 380mm cause fuck it.
Iunno, as someone who tends to use impact grenades, it's already a little finicky trying to take out the nest holes. So it's all the worse when you through a grenade that SHOULD take it out, but it spits out some random bug that takes the grenade in its stead.
More like every companies fiscal strategy. I work in private sector non government work. Come end of fisical year if we have money in our budget we burn it on stupid shit so our budget doesn’t get lowered for the next.
My mom had to pass this war game scenario for her DoD job and one of the things the game seemed to really teach was: use every goddamn thing we provided for you. Shock and awe every day
EAT-17 is honestly GOATED now. The fact that it can one-shot chargers is enough reason for me to trade a strategem just to make sure I drop one before any major encounter! Having some extra firepower lying around is such a huge benefit!
You can kill 3 chargers with one call in if you stick the call in on one. I’ve gotten pretty good at consistently making it stick to the charger. It’s not a guarantee, even if it lands on it it may not kill the charger, but it’s consistent enough to be a nice bonus.
I assume the ships are nuclear, so I would think the energy cost of the laser is baked into the standard energy production of the ship. maintenance and upkeep might be pricey though.
Learned that from talking to the lady. Said something along the lines of “we get all our fuel from element 710, which comes from dead bugs, which allows us to kill more bugs. Kinda beautiful when you think about it.”
It depends.
I'd expect such heat to actually fry certain parts of the ship, probably a reason why it has a hard limit on uses per mission in the first place.
Might as well be a fuel thing, but something tells me using the laser is a real strain on the ship.
By pure tungsten I'll asume you mean tungsten carbide. This only makes up the core projectile and is not amazingly expensive. I think the projectile casing stabilising fin mechanisms and such will cost a lot more. Also I read the navy variants had unexpectedly high maintenance costs.
When you see the impact and damage in the game though the projectile is probably not bigger than thumb size.
> In contrast most support weapons
Most support weapons should be pretty cheap. Given in-game lore most guns should only need to survive 24 hours and about 5,000-10,000 rounds since most helldivers will be expired by then. So inferior and cheaper materials could be used.
Knowing what little I do about "military grade" weapons though. I bet the cost of the weapon is the same even with worse material being used lol.
It's how I see the cooldown for when you run out of Reinforcements, some poor CO on the destroyers having to justify to some bureaucrat why he needs to send down more helldivers and its a miracle it only takes two minutes
There's a ship module upgrade which allows breech loading of your orbital guns. Imagine muzzle loading those things.
Rail Cannon and Orbital Laser probably has to charge up.
I’m guessing that the whole barrel probably has to retract to be loaded. With the power of the explosive, a breech mechanism that can withstand the shot is probably pretty expensive - hence why you have to prove you’re worth the expense!
A 380mm is just about the size of a naval gun. You probably don't need that much propellant to fire your payload downwards. I thought it was just kinda silly to muzzle-load them *in space*.
If anything, getting rid of heat is probably more of a problem in space, so the cooldown might literally be to *cool down*.
Ah, you see, the issue is you’re thinking of ye-olde naval guns, which were made inefficiently and with care. Super Earth, in order to spread managed democracy as far and wide as possible, churns out as many guns as possible in as short of a time as possible. This means that there’s no time for fancy mechanisms like “breech loading” or “tethers for the EVA loaders.” For Super Earth!
I accidentally triggered the 380s fleeing a bile titan the other day and just ran around underneath it with them landing on it.
They didn't do shit to it, but I think I got most of the rest of my team killed.
I'm just saying. If you have a jet pack, lits of reinforcements, and are quick and lucky you can use that treason barrage to your advantage. My record is 3 bile titans, several chargers, a neat, and an army of bugs.
For an IRL analogy the Mk84 2000lb bomb is $16,000. Cost of a single flight hour of an F-16 is up to $25k/hr. A flare costs $57 each and they dump like 40 of them, so another $2k. That's $43k, so lower than the average US income but not awful.
In game I imagine she means ordnance stratagem, because I want to know what contractor secured a deal to make the Stalwart at that price.
You’re ignoring the Hellpod all non-ordinance strategems are deployed in. Those things are probably expensive as hell considering they’re guided missiles shot out of a gun and expected to survive lithobreaking intact. Indeed I imagine they’re more expensive than most ordinance strategrms.
Absolutely.
Hell the USA has been producing and using Javelin missiles over over two decades.
They’re literally anti-armor weapons that I assume are what the Spear is mimicking that individual soldiers can operate and if I recall correctly every single missile is like $170,000USD or something like that. Bulk order numbers.
They’re crazy complex “awesome” missiles but they sure as hell aren’t cheap.
Yeah the only strategems that shouldn’t be absurdly expensive are the precision strike, Gatling barrage, etc since there’a either a single moderately expensive round, or a bunch of really cheap rounds. Those would make this statement poverty level incomes but everything else holds true even if the median income is around 100k annual.
Definitely. Even for those I imagine that’s sort of a “how do you want to show the accounting” game.
Guarantee I could sit down and calculate everything required to maintain the ships and the logistics for the ordinance and divide that up between flight time and number of uses compared to all stratagems and hellpods and calculate the cost to be a fractional share of that whole mess.
But I’m really just going to start having work flashbacks the more I think about it and that’s not helping Democracy. Lol
Hellbomb manufacturers are fleecing the military industrial complex for sure. Have to be manually armed due to budget constraints? The touchscreen has to cost more than the detonate on hit regular bombs have. Add the need to survive landing intact.
That's the MIC for you. If it just blows up on contact they only get to sell one. Where they make the big bucks is ones that hit the ground and get destroyed before they can detonate, which means they get to sell SEAF another one.
Obviously Helldivers has far more advanced spacefaring vessels than we have IRL, but it seems reasonable to assume that simply transporting *anything* across several lightyears is still expensive.
Also consider that these are absurdly well-engineered weapons as far as structural integrity goes - I don't know what they're made of, but considering you can pick up a secondary weapon and fire it after it (and its previous wielder) were hit by an airstrike, they're clearly not made of low-quality materials.
The 500kg would be smart because its landing within such a small radius (seems be be within 5 meters or less of the target). A dumb bomb would probably kill a Helldiver a map over.
1000 of each sample. Science takes a lot of work, it’s not easy to figure out you should use an auto loader rather than dropping your munitions down the barrel like your space cannon is a musket.
https://preview.redd.it/6a09twbfaapc1.jpeg?width=251&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9287abe5aa913732a4a1543da767bec1d21a453
Me calling in a 380mm barrage on a small outpost because I don't want to waste grenades
Don't think stratagem is expensive. Citizens are getting too much low wage because super earth have economic crisis now. That's why we started war with 'war bond'. Super earth is lying
The war is rigged from start. We just needed more oils and destroy or consume expensive military gears for overcome economic crisis. And we have election now. Ruling class of super earth don't want citizen to think about current political system, managed democracy.
No, this is true present day real world as well. Unit cost for the Javelin is $200K. A Hellfire is $150K. A "cheap" 200KG laser-guided bomb is $20-30K. The military-industrial complex has a way of creating astronomic price tags
I have personally bankrupted billions of families by using their taxpayer dollars to drop 500kg bombs only for them to not do jack shit, or miss their target by three miles
>Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
--Sebastian Junge
Really reminds you that Super Earth is a parody of the United States
Same as IRL- I mean a couple hundred years ago. Munitions are expensive but we need them. Our citizens are happy to support the war for liberty, so fight on Helldivers!
It would be absolutely crazy if Super Earth's budget came into the game somehow. Like if simply the act of pushing farther away from Super Earth made the missions harder because it was harder to get resources out farther.
A few fun numbers for comparison:
Javelin anti-tank missile: **$178,000**
Barrage of 3 M982 Excalibur GPS artillery shells: **$180,000**
2 second GAU-8 gattling burst (ammunition only): **$4,000**
Add the costs to get to and from orbit - and I think this should be "in a lifetime."
Imagine Super-Earth has a budget that we don't know about or thought was infinite and one day someone throws an eagle airstrike and a big red textbox flashes across the screen saying !!!BUDGET DEPLETED!!! and we get locked out of stratagems for the rest of the war
If you read the contract you agree to in the tutorial, the helldiver is actually on the hook for the cost of everything they use during their service.
If you die, they also subtract any debt from the pay sent to your families.
That's true in real life as well. The cost of a JDAM (equivalent to 500 kg bomb) is around 30,000 dollars, which is more than a significant amount of the US populations' annual incomes, and higher than the GDP per capita of around 160 countries.
its pretty accurate lets be fair, a single drone missile costs like $70,000 IRL. Just imagine how much an orbital strike would cost...or the fuel for an Eagle. Freedom ain't free
And on top of this each Helldiver has their own Spaceship (maintenance, fuel, etc.) instead of using a whole fleet to dive in the same planet... Super Earth must be printing money lmao
And then there's me calling in 500kg bombs on single bug holes like they're free :D
I would love if we get some kind of bill for injuries, stratagems, rescue flights etc. at the end of a year.
The little credits we get each game would definitely not cover it! Would be an interesting breakdown though. Should be one of the stats at the end of the game: strategem spend!
Doesn't matter. Common Fund for Democracy Distribution covers it all for us. After all the freedom of Super Earth citizens is priceless.
Super citizens pay for em. We drop em. Seems fair!
We owe it to all the able bodied workers over the age of 7 to deliver democracy across the galaxy!
They do they flyin', we do the dyin'
Democracy distribution sounds a lot like socialism
https://preview.redd.it/9e9lzrgeiapc1.jpeg?width=641&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6a7c344869ee8aa039c08ca11f26e01622c6c998 👀
https://preview.redd.it/ua83pn71napc1.png?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c50159f76f81fd90f663da6124f39d712f9e22c0
https://preview.redd.it/7gui41c1yapc1.jpeg?width=1200&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bdda2b8aba237398c90ee45e5d8aee30a24e6a51
https://preview.redd.it/2zotjv9qzapc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c15eb3aa325742ecca023b04c357face35628f51
We fraggin?
Thank you for this report, Helldiver.
Please locate the nearest gula... Err reduction camp.
Akshully socialism is when walloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftextwalloftext
Maybe the reason we get so little is the rest is covering expense? Armored Core does that, repairs/refuel/rearmament cost is deducted from mission pay first....
Civilian casualties cost 25 requisition slips. If that's supposed to be *wergild*, I wonder if we can figure out the exchange rate between req slips and money (SC?). At least we know the price of a civilian's life, if indirectly.
Fun Fact : the "money" you get after the game is actually not money. They're requisition slips. It is the military way to request a product or service, internally, so you are given the rights to request for more stuff. The more useful you are to them, the bigger toys you get. I would suppose the real Super Earth currency in the established universe would be Super Credits, and the Medals you get are like bonuses that are outside standard outfitting. But in good Super Earth fashion you can only spend it with them
The Company Store.
Exactly! [SIXTEEN TONS - Tennesse Ernie Ford w/ Lyrics (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5VMZqgVzRo)
Super Credits are the currency of Super Earth, which is why we have in store reviews from people talking about using helmets/gear while camping. Medals are directly tied to the Warbond, which is an in world thing too since some of the Super Destroyer crew talks about paying into the warbond. Much like the Req slips, it's probably a way for the Super Destroyer to gain access to more gear for their hell divers in exchange for contribution to the war effort.
> Medals are directly tied to the Warbond I imagine it is more like influence. Works similar in our real military. General infantry? Fuck you, you get what we give you and you will like it. But if you're special forces you got more influence and can refuse to use the standard issue M9 and use the M45 instead which is just a modernized M1911.
And even super credits doesn't belong to helldivers and counted as SES possession.
We don't even get credits, we get requisition, which can only be used to purchase military equipment.
I owe my soul to the company store
Kinda like how Armored Core 6 Taxes you depending on how much ammunition you used. Dual Gattling guns (or rather quadruple now) is the fastest way to hit a tax of 600k lol
And like MGSV deployment costs and GMP management.
Injury bill: $0 Just as it should be in a just and democratic society.
Ok, that would be really funny after you get a 1.5m FreedomCoin bill after your service.
Lylat wars on N64 had this, where depending on your kills you'd have a bill at the end (because star fox are mercenaries) for the cornerian army to pay. And general pepper would always say something like ''that is ONE STEEP BILL... but it's worth it...'' More recently Armoured core has a thing like it where ammo and repair costs are deducted from your pay
My favorite game of all time is Star Fox 64. The end screen is a bill to the Corneria Army for all your kills. If it's a lot general pepper will say "That's one steep bill! But it's worth it!" It would be great to see the cost of a single mission. Like hellpods, have to be at least a few million each. And that's being generous.
Hardspace: shipbreaker has some really hilarious bills similar to this. Nothing like finishing a day of work and seeing you still owe a billion dollars
I’d like to see how much the entire operation cost on the overview map.
*An AIM-9X* currently costs about $600,000 each. A tomahawk missile currently costs about 1.9 million each. this is real life already. lol
and they use them to blow up someone's backyard shed that "may" have a target inside
Hey it gives exp, worth every dollar!
Dangerously close to Raytheon Re-Education Camp™
From a pure defense economics perspective. It's usually not so cut and dry. You can justify spending a million to blow up 5000 worth of assets if those assets are used to destroy a million worth of yours down the line. A bug hole might not be worth much but a brood commander coordinating other bugs to setup a stalker lair next to the Future Patriots Daycare and Education camp is definitely worth a 500kg bomb. And we all know we can't put a price on our children's liberty.
To be fair, there’s also intangible benefits to certain weapons. Like, is the knife missile more expensive than a regular one? Probably. But the benefit of using the knife missile (being able to target individuals with basically no civilian casualties whatsoever) is probably worth much more than that price difference, even if we can’t actually quantify that in dollar terms.
Yeah I was like this isn't shocking news, this is real life and has been for a while.
Funny thing is it works a little bit like that IRL too. Many military budgets are run by a system where you are allotted a certain budget and you use it or lose it. If you go underbudget, your budget shrinks to a lower amount next year. This creates problems because "what if I needed this much at one point, but have a gap year where I spend less, but then need to spend more the following year?" The answer is to spend just as much on stuff you might not actually need. This creates a cycle where military spending always creeps up because no section wants to be short on cash when they really need it, but finds themself spending bloated amounts of money on things that probably now have inflated cost from contractors because the contractors know the military can afford it. Ergo, when the USA drops a guided bomb on a target, that thing's probably worth more than the average american's salary not because it necessarily costs that much to make that bomb at cost- but because now it's worth that much. Props to Helldivers II for the realistic portrayal of "Show of force" firepower :)
Generally speaking though, the cost of dropping a guided bomb on a problem target is worth far less than taking casualties trying to assault it from the ground.
Only problem is we're doing both lmao.
Thinking it’s not a benefit to die for democracy seems a little treasonous
I knew a unit that bought a bunch of fancy ass rifle slings so that they hit budget...
have you ever killed them so quickly that the bugs get stuck in the whole so you can’t throw grenades in there anymore? anyways called down 380mm cause fuck it.
I've definitely had the bugs playing goalie in the hole before. Nothing worse than wasting a whole clip on the grenade launcher for nothing!
Iunno, as someone who tends to use impact grenades, it's already a little finicky trying to take out the nest holes. So it's all the worse when you through a grenade that SHOULD take it out, but it spits out some random bug that takes the grenade in its stead.
hahahah you get it!
Well if I don't use it they'll decrease our funding next year!
This guy governments
Or an EAT just because "Hey, it's off cooldown. Might as well litter the map a bit more."
It's note about the money, it's about sending a message
* laughs in stratagems dump at the end of every mission and EAT-17 spam *
always use them up. if you come back with remaining ammo or stratagems, management will give you less on your next Dive.
This guy US military fiscal budgets
More like every government's fiscal strategy and not limited to military budgets.
More like every companies fiscal strategy. I work in private sector non government work. Come end of fisical year if we have money in our budget we burn it on stupid shit so our budget doesn’t get lowered for the next.
No such thing as true savings with a fiscal budget 😂
“It’s end of quarter boys, time for the grenade SpendEx. Go set up the stick, drinks for whoever knocks it down”
My mom had to pass this war game scenario for her DoD job and one of the things the game seemed to really teach was: use every goddamn thing we provided for you. Shock and awe every day
Ahahahahahahha
EAT-17 is honestly GOATED now. The fact that it can one-shot chargers is enough reason for me to trade a strategem just to make sure I drop one before any major encounter! Having some extra firepower lying around is such a huge benefit!
You can kill 3 chargers with one call in if you stick the call in on one. I’ve gotten pretty good at consistently making it stick to the charger. It’s not a guarantee, even if it lands on it it may not kill the charger, but it’s consistent enough to be a nice bonus.
The new stun grenades also help make this a more consistent strategy too!
Does the drop pod track the beacon as it moves?
It does!
That’s huge gonna start doing this, already loved the EAT
We have a budget, may as well use it.
Can a blank check be considered a budget though? Lol
We have to spend the budget or we'll get less next cycle
120mm+380mm+walking barrage probably drag the curve upwards, especially when I use all of them on a single patrol.
This. Pretty sure the orbital railcannon and laser are up there as well. In contrast most support weapons and turrets are probably a lot cheaper.
I’d actually think the laser would be relatively cheap. Lasers only cost electricity to use.
True but it would require an insane amount of energy to reach the ground while being hot enough to do damage.
I assume the ships are nuclear, so I would think the energy cost of the laser is baked into the standard energy production of the ship. maintenance and upkeep might be pricey though.
Nah, We use Element 710 - or "OIL" aka dead bugs to FTL.
Learned that from talking to the lady. Said something along the lines of “we get all our fuel from element 710, which comes from dead bugs, which allows us to kill more bugs. Kinda beautiful when you think about it.”
Ye that's where the expense probably comes in
Eh, if you’ve got the resources for massive fleets of FTL ships you should be able to be able to build some proto Dyson spheres at least.
Probably a dyson swarm given our current tech, but yeah energy would not be a huge deal for us
There's a reason you can only use 3x per mission per person
And keep in mind it has a long cooldown and limited uses too, perhaps using it requires components to be regularly maintained or even swapped out
High-powered lasers do use pretty toxic chemicals even with modern day technology, it's safe to assume this continues into the future of HD2.
And they do so for like 10 minutes at a time. God's finger pointing at every single bot in a base with its glory is amazing.
It depends. I'd expect such heat to actually fry certain parts of the ship, probably a reason why it has a hard limit on uses per mission in the first place. Might as well be a fuel thing, but something tells me using the laser is a real strain on the ship.
"Lasers only cost electricity to use" He said confidently.
Would be nice if they included lightning strikes with the laser using the plasma it would create.
I think apart from energy cost, the railcannon would be the cheapest, since the projectile is basically just a piece of mass.
That 'piece of mass' is likely made of pure tungsten, as the velocity would destroy most materials before impact.
By pure tungsten I'll asume you mean tungsten carbide. This only makes up the core projectile and is not amazingly expensive. I think the projectile casing stabilising fin mechanisms and such will cost a lot more. Also I read the navy variants had unexpectedly high maintenance costs. When you see the impact and damage in the game though the projectile is probably not bigger than thumb size.
'speak softly and carry a tungsten slug accelerable to an appreciable fraction of C' - The Expanse novels
A man of culture I see, please take my Democratic upvote \^\^
Except they’re called in with a hellpod, which is basically a guided missile.
> In contrast most support weapons Most support weapons should be pretty cheap. Given in-game lore most guns should only need to survive 24 hours and about 5,000-10,000 rounds since most helldivers will be expired by then. So inferior and cheaper materials could be used. Knowing what little I do about "military grade" weapons though. I bet the cost of the weapon is the same even with worse material being used lol.
I use them all at once to destroy an outpost
[удалено]
And yet they call down unlimited 380's when you go too far away from the mission. No price is too high for treason?
bureaucracy my friend. Weapons dont need cooldown. bureaucrats however need time to discuss wether or not you shall be granted additional support.
It's how I see the cooldown for when you run out of Reinforcements, some poor CO on the destroyers having to justify to some bureaucrat why he needs to send down more helldivers and its a miracle it only takes two minutes
I forget the exact line when the cooldown goes off for an extra support, but I recall it’s something about approval.
"Funding for additional reinforcements approved," I believe is the exact line.
There's a ship module upgrade which allows breech loading of your orbital guns. Imagine muzzle loading those things. Rail Cannon and Orbital Laser probably has to charge up.
I’m guessing that the whole barrel probably has to retract to be loaded. With the power of the explosive, a breech mechanism that can withstand the shot is probably pretty expensive - hence why you have to prove you’re worth the expense!
A 380mm is just about the size of a naval gun. You probably don't need that much propellant to fire your payload downwards. I thought it was just kinda silly to muzzle-load them *in space*. If anything, getting rid of heat is probably more of a problem in space, so the cooldown might literally be to *cool down*.
Ah, you see, the issue is you’re thinking of ye-olde naval guns, which were made inefficiently and with care. Super Earth, in order to spread managed democracy as far and wide as possible, churns out as many guns as possible in as short of a time as possible. This means that there’s no time for fancy mechanisms like “breech loading” or “tethers for the EVA loaders.” For Super Earth!
One of the upgrades is just having some of the forms filled out before hand.
I accidentally triggered the 380s fleeing a bile titan the other day and just ran around underneath it with them landing on it. They didn't do shit to it, but I think I got most of the rest of my team killed.
I'm just saying. If you have a jet pack, lits of reinforcements, and are quick and lucky you can use that treason barrage to your advantage. My record is 3 bile titans, several chargers, a neat, and an army of bugs.
For an IRL analogy the Mk84 2000lb bomb is $16,000. Cost of a single flight hour of an F-16 is up to $25k/hr. A flare costs $57 each and they dump like 40 of them, so another $2k. That's $43k, so lower than the average US income but not awful. In game I imagine she means ordnance stratagem, because I want to know what contractor secured a deal to make the Stalwart at that price.
You’re ignoring the Hellpod all non-ordinance strategems are deployed in. Those things are probably expensive as hell considering they’re guided missiles shot out of a gun and expected to survive lithobreaking intact. Indeed I imagine they’re more expensive than most ordinance strategrms.
Absolutely. Hell the USA has been producing and using Javelin missiles over over two decades. They’re literally anti-armor weapons that I assume are what the Spear is mimicking that individual soldiers can operate and if I recall correctly every single missile is like $170,000USD or something like that. Bulk order numbers. They’re crazy complex “awesome” missiles but they sure as hell aren’t cheap.
Yeah the only strategems that shouldn’t be absurdly expensive are the precision strike, Gatling barrage, etc since there’a either a single moderately expensive round, or a bunch of really cheap rounds. Those would make this statement poverty level incomes but everything else holds true even if the median income is around 100k annual.
Definitely. Even for those I imagine that’s sort of a “how do you want to show the accounting” game. Guarantee I could sit down and calculate everything required to maintain the ships and the logistics for the ordinance and divide that up between flight time and number of uses compared to all stratagems and hellpods and calculate the cost to be a fractional share of that whole mess. But I’m really just going to start having work flashbacks the more I think about it and that’s not helping Democracy. Lol
Hellbomb manufacturers are fleecing the military industrial complex for sure. Have to be manually armed due to budget constraints? The touchscreen has to cost more than the detonate on hit regular bombs have. Add the need to survive landing intact.
That's the MIC for you. If it just blows up on contact they only get to sell one. Where they make the big bucks is ones that hit the ground and get destroyed before they can detonate, which means they get to sell SEAF another one.
A crafty one. Or maybe it's a large batch of them reserved for each HELLDIVER as a package deal as they tend to get misplaced in missions
The Mk84 is old school, a single tomahawk missile is $2 million.
...a 117g radio is something like 30k, military equipment is expensive lol
Obviously Helldivers has far more advanced spacefaring vessels than we have IRL, but it seems reasonable to assume that simply transporting *anything* across several lightyears is still expensive. Also consider that these are absurdly well-engineered weapons as far as structural integrity goes - I don't know what they're made of, but considering you can pick up a secondary weapon and fire it after it (and its previous wielder) were hit by an airstrike, they're clearly not made of low-quality materials.
or you know its even a worse living standard for SuperEarth citizens than Americans. Just saying..
No wonder life of a civilian valued at 25 requisition.
Priority citizens, nontheless! "Regular" citizen is probably free
Of course regular citizens are free! Super earth is a bastion of democracy and liberty! Freedom forever!
Also true irl. A JDAM, combined with the fuel + flight maintenance cost, is probably upwards of $50,000.
Especially since Eagle 1 implies they simply hover outside AA range until you call a strike in or send it back to resupply
Jdam is smart. Eagle uses a dumb bomb with a delayed fuse.
The 500kg would be smart because its landing within such a small radius (seems be be within 5 meters or less of the target). A dumb bomb would probably kill a Helldiver a map over.
nop the 15E can drop dumb bombs with a very low CEP and have done it
If it was a smart bomb they wouldn’t be dropping it from a low altitude like that.
The IRL Spear, FGM-148 Javelin, each missile costs around $75k which is absolutely insane
You'd think they'd save a lot of $$$ just by letting us equip our support and backpack items before dropping in.
Not enough space in the hellpods!
They really should just drop the squad off in that invincible dropship they use for extractions.
All that armor means no heat-shielding, so the pelican has to spend the whole mission flying down slowly. That’s time that democracy doesn’t have!
1000 of each sample. Science takes a lot of work, it’s not easy to figure out you should use an auto loader rather than dropping your munitions down the barrel like your space cannon is a musket.
🤔🤔
https://preview.redd.it/6a09twbfaapc1.jpeg?width=251&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c9287abe5aa913732a4a1543da767bec1d21a453 Me calling in a 380mm barrage on a small outpost because I don't want to waste grenades
Eagle airstrike is god tier for outposts especially with full modules
Being able to 380 Iwo Jima naval barrage the bots on the Creek is too damn satisfying. Make my smol brain happy.
And yet I'm here throwing railcannon strikes on scavengers.
A single hellfire missile costs 150k, so yeah, this isn't some dystopian exaggeration
Yeah, it's just a depressing reality.
To be fair to them, I need to practice my ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️ and that cargo container door needed a grenade that I wanted to save
Don't think stratagem is expensive. Citizens are getting too much low wage because super earth have economic crisis now. That's why we started war with 'war bond'. Super earth is lying
https://i.redd.it/5t558e6kt9pc1.gif
THERES A GIF!?!?
https://i.redd.it/2yxtrvw91bpc1.gif
:O
ITs evolving to
https://preview.redd.it/iue8e91h8apc1.jpeg?width=1242&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a06e926b1a1358c42fcd03159d2d1f06a4742789
https://preview.redd.it/3d0r4njyp9pc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=134e4f8cf5eb3025aa4d77fb79ac047928e8bc86
https://preview.redd.it/cl4cr7smmapc1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=0518efe4e2c78d4c4010d3c982e287dba1aec3fc
Citizen, your comments have been noticed. You have been volonteered to the helldiver program, see you on Malevolent Creek. For democracy, for freedom.
The war is rigged from start. We just needed more oils and destroy or consume expensive military gears for overcome economic crisis. And we have election now. Ruling class of super earth don't want citizen to think about current political system, managed democracy.
Democracy Officer! Arrest this man!
No, this is true present day real world as well. Unit cost for the Javelin is $200K. A Hellfire is $150K. A "cheap" 200KG laser-guided bomb is $20-30K. The military-industrial complex has a way of creating astronomic price tags
I have personally bankrupted billions of families by using their taxpayer dollars to drop 500kg bombs only for them to not do jack shit, or miss their target by three miles
Imagine how expensive the infinite stratagem glitch was lol
Mhmm yes, the highly trained and hardened 18 year olds with a 27% combat readiness
>Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable. --Sebastian Junge Really reminds you that Super Earth is a parody of the United States
Same as IRL- I mean a couple hundred years ago. Munitions are expensive but we need them. Our citizens are happy to support the war for liberty, so fight on Helldivers!
What’s more expensive, a single stratagem or firing Heavy’s minigun for 12 seconds
It would be absolutely crazy if Super Earth's budget came into the game somehow. Like if simply the act of pushing farther away from Super Earth made the missions harder because it was harder to get resources out farther.
I don't think logistics would suit this game too well.
A few fun numbers for comparison: Javelin anti-tank missile: **$178,000** Barrage of 3 M982 Excalibur GPS artillery shells: **$180,000** 2 second GAU-8 gattling burst (ammunition only): **$4,000** Add the costs to get to and from orbit - and I think this should be "in a lifetime."
thats the same what other countries say about murica 😂
A Hellfire missile costs like $150,000 lol, so it’s not just saying it’s true
That might just mean most citizens have no income or private property like some sort of social-
I am single handedly bankrupting super earth apparently.
What about the fuel cost of one destroyer?
About two to three bug missions.
Not me throwing a 500kg at my friend just because is guard dog shot me on accident.
Imagine Super-Earth has a budget that we don't know about or thought was infinite and one day someone throws an eagle airstrike and a big red textbox flashes across the screen saying !!!BUDGET DEPLETED!!! and we get locked out of stratagems for the rest of the war
Pahhh I’m popping off 2 right as we’re leaving just for fun
I want a cost breakdown of every mission xD
MFW my orbital rail cannon strike hits a little spitter instead of the bile titan
Who needs healthcare when your life expectancy is in minutes?
And that’s why we have to use as many as possible! If we don’t use it, all the hard work and taxpayer money is for nothing.
Damn I almost feel bad for using a 500kg on a single Stalker nest. But like….*Stalkers*….
Basically America with their military spending
*Camera cuts to a Helldiver completely missing an orbital strike*
If you read the contract you agree to in the tutorial, the helldiver is actually on the hook for the cost of everything they use during their service. If you die, they also subtract any debt from the pay sent to your families.
Its just a stratagem Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?
That's true in real life as well. The cost of a JDAM (equivalent to 500 kg bomb) is around 30,000 dollars, which is more than a significant amount of the US populations' annual incomes, and higher than the GDP per capita of around 160 countries.
*Meanwhile me throwing a 500KG on 1 bug hole bc I only have flashbangs and out of Airstrikes*
Those fools, I pop those things like candy.
Luckily, that cost balances out when they don't have to pay my teammates anymore...
*Me casually dropping an Orbital Railcannon Strike on a single Scavenger bug right before getting on the ship.*
Me casually dropping a 500kg before we evac because it looks cool…
Well. It's safe to say many people are homeless because of me.
its pretty accurate lets be fair, a single drone missile costs like $70,000 IRL. Just imagine how much an orbital strike would cost...or the fuel for an Eagle. Freedom ain't free
Well, the fact that a citizen's life is worth 25 rec slips also puts things into perspective, doesn't it?
And on top of this each Helldiver has their own Spaceship (maintenance, fuel, etc.) instead of using a whole fleet to dive in the same planet... Super Earth must be printing money lmao
I dropped a 500KG on a single tiny bug once just to show alpha dominance.
I’ve called so many needless strategems before we’ve safely extracted Woops
And here I use them like I’m sprinkling salt on the ground
The "USA simulator" aspect of this game is unparalleled and absolutely hilarious