I mean, you don't do the gravity yard or the development of the Conestoga. I suppose this works, but it does leave us down one bay of the two we're looking to build and we've just promised SCED a Conestoga class transport for their own use. We ought to plan to, ya know, build it fairly promptly.
I figure there'll be plenty of time to do that starting in mid-2064 or so, when
Shala is complete or nearly complete.
Unless we have specific reason to think that the gravitic yard will require a year or more to assemble the first prototype, in which case
yes that alters the timeline by imposing some more time pressure. But even combining the
Conestoga Development process (probably one die) and the
Gravitic Yard project (500 Progress, probably seven dice) is eight dice. It shouldn't delay
Shala completion more than 1-2 quarters, into
early 2065. And that's if we never spend a single Free die on space projects, and we probably should spend some.
I'm getting the impression that it is a terrible idea for us to make promises to do projects that are due 'soon', but don't have an explicit end-date, unless we are already actively working on them.
Otherwise we end up with a constant uncertainty of 'how long do we have to do this project', which is just exhausting.
As far as I know, the only such project is the
Governor-A refit. Everything else has a firm timeline. We
do have an exact, well-defined deadline for the
Conestoga project; the only unknown variable is about how long it will take to physically assemble the first ship once we build the shipyard to put it in. Given that the ship is built to the same general scale as 2000-ton naval vessels and that we're building it in a dedicated factory optimzied for building that category of ship, it seems unlikely for the rate of construction to be
truly unpredictable. So I'm confident that we'll be fine there.
And honestly, I don't think we need to worry so much. Other institutions have the capacity to communicate with us clearly and make their wishes understood. If they're starting to get antsy, they can tell us, and if they refuse to communicate with us about the timeframe of their own projects, they have only themselves to blame for their passive-aggressiveness. If they
want us to move in a hurried manner, they should (and presumably would) tell us so. At worst, we should try to average something like one die per turn on the project, such that they never have actual reason to doubt that we're trying.
I think I've mentioned this before, but I strongly dislike how much say Starbound has to say about Treasury spending, if only by implication. It feels very much like undue influence outside of normal government and political channels. Or to put it another way, I don't like how they're bribing us.
Yeah I know, we want spaceships so we can be in a stronger position to bargain with Kane because he wants a spaceship for various reasons that are important to him. Still feels very slimy and hypocritical, give how we pruged those back channels before.
This isn't a slimy thing. This was a huge political appropriations debate that necessarily happened out in the open.
Because we're talking about 5% of GDI's budget here, and it's from mines
on the goddamn moon. There's no way to hide it. All the parties know we're doing that moon mining. Everyone has their own ideas for what should be done with the money. Starbound just won the debate fair and square and got a law passed.
It's not a bribe. It's GDI's government trying to make sure that GDI's space program doesn't go unfunded just at the historical moment when the space program is finally starting to break even and pay for itself because the funds got confiscated and sent off to some other government department.
Remember that Treasury isn't some kind of separate actor outside the government who is "bribed" with government money to do its own weird things. Treasury is a
large part of the government, and in many ways serves as the government's "general contractor," the entity that does things Parliament and the people want done.
It's not a back channel though?
It all seems completely above board.
Makes sense too.
I can't imagine how insane it would be to mine on the moon and bring the resulting material to earth. Just... why would you do that?
If you think that the terrestrial economy should be subsidized by the space economy, then that is exactly what you'd do. Bring goods to
Enterprise, fabricate expensive stuff there, bring it back down in cargo shuttles. Fiddly machined parts can in fact be expensive enough to justify the cost of bringing something back down in a shuttlecraft, at least in modest quantities.
Remember, we're already running reasonably cost-effective suborbital shuttle services, and it's not clear that a suborbital shuttle hop is much cheaper than a round trip to orbit, given that the servicing requirements are broadly simliar.
