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Per Aspera (Space Agency Plan Quest)

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[X] More African Educational Infrastructure
[X] More African Transportation Infrastructure

Both good seeds for long term benefits in Africa. I like Electrical a lot but I think transit costs are ultimately far more fundamental barriers to the good life than a limited electrification, and 'Infrastructure' as a broad score is also essential.
 
I think pushing for more education synergizes well with our rocket boxes and likely further outreach initiatives. At the very least, let's get as many people as possible understanding how angles work, or literate enough to read 'don't point the rocket engine at anything flammable' warnings.

Pushing for roads and rails seems questionable to me, most stuff will come to Mogadishu by sea. Manufacturing would be useful but is perhaps putting the cart before the horse. I am torn between more budget and more electricity for the second choice.
 
[] More African Electrical Infrastructure
[X] More IEC Budget

Electrification is really good because it's a big QOL thing, an aid to other work, and a concrete sense-of-progress thing rolled into one. It's also something it seems we're currently hindering in the local area, wheras in all the other topics the space center is bringing benefits at least indirectly.

And I think we have to get the budget increase to maintain our pace of work through the next year, especially if we don't want to idle dice or waste the resources we've now spent on the combustion cycles field. If we had only one option I'd be torn but ultimately promoting the IEC is our job and promoting the other topics are somebody else's, so while I don't think a double budget increase would necessarily be justified given a single one is.

Edit: tactical voting, dropping Electrification to make it more likely to get Education + Budget, which IMO is more workable than Education + Electrical.
 
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CyberEnby said:
Counterpoint: When you have more education and less physical stuff, you end up building very JEB rockets. :V

Honesly, expanding the seaport can wait untill the Suez Canal is finished.
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We're barely scraping together funding to get a few sounding rocket launches per year. Hugely expensive projects like significantly expanding Mogadishu's seaport to handle our future needs are probably out of our reach when we haven't even launched an orbital rocket, let alone demonstrated that we continue to provide value beyond the next budget meeting.

IMO, working as fast as we can to get some weather birds up is very important.
 
[X] More IEC Budget

We really don't have enough budget. If we want more successes to keep convincing councilors to build up local more, we need to keep doing stuff. And doing that stuff is expensive. So. More budget, plz.
 
Last turn we were over our quarterly budget by 45R. Currently we have 60R excess in the bank. That means that we can expect to keep all dice activated for one more turn before cutting back. At this point we'd need a budget increase to run for the year even at the expenditure levels of last quarter's most conservative plan, let alone what we've been doing - and we can only expect prices to go up from here. We need to stop non-critical projects either way unless we find another windfall, but the budget increase could be a serious help in some of our critical, expensive science projects.
 
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Dessard said:
Last turn we were over our quarterly budget by 45R. Currently we have 60R excess in the bank. That means that we can expect to keep all dice activated for one more turn before cutting back. At this point we'd need a budget increase to run for the year even at the expenditure levels of last quarter's most conservative plan, let alone what we've been doing - and we can only expect prices to go up from here. We need to stop non-critical projects either way unless we find another windfall, but the budget increase could be a serious help in some of our critical, expensive science projects.
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Or things like the rocket boxes - those are only viable if we have enough budget, so if we want to keep doing outreach that makes the world a better place while also launching rockets, we really should be asking for more.

(of course we could stop launching rockets but ?????????)
 
You know, a methalox rocket actually makes a lot of sense for us. IRL it's a bit underwhelming for space launch compared to kerosine mostly because there's a lot of kerolox legacy.

In the 50s however, oil refineries would literally just burn it. We could get it for free. Well, we'd probably have to do a bit of infrastructural R&D into liquefaction and transportation, but that's honestly a bonus because we can show it off to the Council as us doing research beneficial to planetside concerns.

And most importantly, a methalox fuel rich staged combustion cycle is actually viable, and probably a lot easier to develop than an oxygen rich cycle - which needs a lot of material R&D. And it's a pretty decent jack of all trades propellant - decent for surface to orbit, decent for orbital stuff, decent for interplanetary missions if you have depots. Not as difficult to handle as a lot of other fuels, can double as RCS gas, etc.

Also lets us eliminate a fuel tank dome because the LOX and methane tanks can share the same temperature - early on those mass savings are significant.
 
CyberEnby said:
You know, a methalox rocket actually makes a lot of sense for us. IRL it's a bit underwhelming for space launch compared to kerosine mostly because there's a lot of kerolox legacy.

In the 50s however, oil refineries would literally just burn it. We could get it for free. Well, we'd probably have to do a bit of infrastructural R&D into liquefaction and transportation, but that's honestly a bonus because we can show it off to the Council as us doing research beneficial to planetside concerns.

And most importantly, a methalox fuel rich staged combustion cycle is actually viable, and probably a lot easier to develop than an oxygen rich cycle - which needs a lot of material R&D. And it's a pretty decent jack of all trades propellant - decent for surface to orbit, decent for orbital stuff, decent for interplanetary missions if you have depots. Not as difficult to handle as a lot of other fuels, can double as RCS gas, etc.

Also lets us eliminate a fuel tank dome because the LOX and methane tanks can share the same temperature - early on those mass savings are significant.
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Yeah, and there's probably a lot less investment sunk into jet fuel in this setting as well. Though, methane may be behind a couple of layers of Fuels research since it's not a common product yet so methane and especially staged combusion may be higher-hanging fruits than hydrogen, which is probably a more significant 'advanced' engine technology to target.
 
Dessard said:
Yeah, and there's probably a lot less investment sunk into jet fuel in this setting as well. Though, methane may be behind a couple of layers of Fuels research since it's not a common product yet so methane and especially staged combusion may be higher-hanging fruits than hydrogen, which is probably a more significant 'advanced' engine technology to target.
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The reason I bring it up is that a methane expander cycle was mentioned in the last update. Hydrogen is straight up awful - it's too low thrust for space launch.
 
CyberEnby said:
The reason I bring it up is that a methane expander cycle was mentioned in the last update. Hydrogen is straight up awful - it's too low thrust for space launch.
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Fair, that wasn't really clear - what I meant was if we're pursuing an 'advanced' propulsion project after getting something basic to maturity, closed cycle engines seem like a later priority than more efficient fuels.
 
Dessard said:
Fair, that wasn't really clear - what I meant was if we're pursuing an 'advanced' propulsion project after getting something basic to maturity, closed cycle engines seem like a later priority than more efficient fuels.
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Yeah, fancier cycles aren't as big a priority. We need to do fuels and material science I think before we start an orbital launcher. An open cycle gas generator would be above and beyond what we achieved IRL. :V

Speaking of, I was recently told to study the Soyuz rocket because it's a masterclass in structural dsign, and I bring you what I've found out:
  1. The LOX is piped through the centre of the kerosene tanks below it, so the lox pipe acts to stiffen the kerosene tank because of its location.
  2. The force of the engine is transferred directly to the rim of the fuel tanks via the engine mounts.
  3. Rather than a constant diameter core stage, the core tapers inwards at the boosters, while the boosters do the opposite. This lets the pressure assisted tanks carry the load of the booster engines up into the core without any heavy hardpoints as the tips of the booster push those loads into sockets attached to the rim of the core tank dome.
  4. Underneath the tips of the boosters, the core essentially hangs down in tension, reducing the amount of stiffening required (kind of like the proposed Neutron upper stage, or the Centaur).
  5. The boosters don't even need explosive bolts or rockets to push them away from the core. Once they burn out the centra core's continuing acceleration will cause them to rotate outwards in their sockets, which will open the LOX vent valve and propel them away. This is the source of the iconic Korolev Cross style booster separation.
 
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