Yeah.
We really do
need to do
Shala and
Columbia immediately after whatever basic infrastructure we construct for the express purpose of building
Shala and
Columbia.
Our space industrial base is about as developed as it reasonably can be without us successfully solving the problem of keeping large populations of specialists up in space full-time in comfortable and safe accommodations. We've built a whole lot of space infrastructure that is more or less equivalent to remote oil drilling rigs and mining outposts, but no
cities in space, and you can only do so much factory construction with no cities.
The original plan was for you to do one bay, and then do Enterprise V and then the other two bays. But since it looks like you are going to go EntV and then any bays, I am probably going to do that as part of Reallocation.
Well, we kind of got stuck with the way the plan commitments work; we're incentivized, as I understand it, to
finish the stations, rather than just make progress on them, because we got extra points for promising to do specific stations, not for just a bulk commitment of "do X thousand points no matter what they are."
If you want people to complete a bay before moving on to phase five of the station, then you probably want there to be incentives to do that, or at least no disincentives to discourage that.
With that said, I strongly,
strongly recommend making the station bay vote its own minivote. That way, we can avoid having a knock-down drag-out debate on this one issue that overshadows the other very important choices we need to make during reallocation. After all, the point of the exercise here is to take a decision that would otherwise suck all the oxygen out of the room during
another important decision-making process, and separate it out to where it can be given the attention it deserves.
The minivote would also give you an opportunity to make a separate, official and canonical post explaining everything we should, in-character, know about the different bay choices and what they would enable us to do. As it stands, a fair amount of that information is scattered or Discord-only, and formalizing it before we actually go through with the bay selection sounds like a good move.
...
This is all reminding me of a situation we have over in Xantalos' Lizardman Quest, where the players will
eventually have to decide what to do with the sub-sapient hive-minded species that lives on the planet they've been transported to, and where decisions about what to do on that front were becoming very distracting because we couldn't really take ANY of the options until another ongoing crisis had been resolved. Xantalos finally decreed that the whole issue of "so which choice will we take" was being taken entirely off the table so that plan votes could focus on the crisis, and that the issue would be strictly academic until the crisis was over, at which point we'd have a separate binding vote on the matter.
I think that was a good choice.
