A rugged, four-arm design wins the vote by narrow margins. The risks of industrial espionage are deemed too great for too little payoff, while a larger vessel is too much of a strain on budget and weight limits, and a lighter one is deemed less likely to hit performance metrics.
You begin a brutal turnaround to work a four-armed design into your demonstration piece at Delhi. The end product is barebones, focused on the possibilities of the rig and the reliable power supply of its fuel cells, but with four fully functioning arms and the first fuel cells off of your Baikonur production line, it does what you need it to.
Your submission to Delhi is titled the Abilkhan 2111 Technology Demonstrator. It's accepted, and gets a photo in a little-visited corner of the Expo website where it's erroneously titled the AK-2111.
The mistake is up for a little less than three hours before one of your PR people gets it fixed. Unfortunately, that's long enough for the photo to hit social media, where irony poisoned milbloggers make memes comparing it to various kalashnikovs. Fortunately, any press is good press, and you hit no serious stumble before Delhi.
The Delhi Aerospace Expo had begun before the second Space Age as a military showcase. India had wanted to take its shot at filling in the void left by Russia, China, and Europe, and while repeated corruption snafus ruined that, the new space race saved the expo. By the 2090s, the Delhi Aerospace Expo was a space cadet's dream. A cornucopia of promises, corporate, government, and independents alike painting the future in chrome and rocketry.
The main expo hall hosted a dizzying array of promises. Laser-sail barges that can cruise across the solar system without resupply, self-sustaining jovian colonies, fully contains space-station ecosystems, and even proofs-of-concept for terraforming Venus and Mars.
In this, the Abilkhan 2111 feels downright modest. Though the audience doesn't seem to agree. You have a steady stream of visitors to your test rig, which peaks when a NASA test pilot talks his way into the pilot's seat, acclimates himself for twenty minutes, and then shows up your entire test crew by flawlessly juggling demonstration blocks with all four arms.
Your crew spend the entire rest of the expo trying to recreate the trick with no luck, but do strike gold letting select journalists and astronauts try the neuro-rig out for themselves. In the aftermath, a score of small articles praise the innovative, intuitive design of the neuro-rig.
The publicity gets you a handful of investors, a small government grant, and interest from Quebec.
The Agence Spatiale Quebecoise inherited a mining claim on 434 Hungaria after the Canadian Civil War. However, as sanctions only dropped in 2095, they don't have the equipment to pursue that claim and are hoping to purchase a thousand mining vessels for their upcoming effort. The Agence's representative at Delhi was so impressed by the 2111 that he decided to give Musabayev a very exclusive opportunity to bid on the contract.
If you land it, the contract would justify the Abilkhan all on its own. It's a golden ticket you can't turn down. The main question is how to approach the bribe.
Quebec's about as corrupt as your average dictatorship, and some greased palms are expected as part of any bid. While you could refuse to play ball, it'd kill any chance at winning the bid and be deeply unpopular with the company as a whole. There are hundreds of livelihoods in the balance here, after all.
The question, then, is how much to pay.
A modest bribe would get you in and let you compete on the merits. A larger bribe might tilt the scales. And, for the good of the company, you could risk the backlash of this going public and just pour money at officials until the quality of your product doesn't matter. After all, once you have the contract the bribe will pay itself back several times over.
How Much Do You Bribe the Agence Spatiale Québecoise?
Current Budget: 7
Quebec wants an asteroid miner with a focus on utility and moderate unit cost, but doesn't care about weight or payload.
[ ] Die on Your Pride. [0 Budget. You will not get the contract. 1 Hazard: Unpopular with coworkers.]
[ ] Standard Bribe. [1 Budget.]
[ ] Tip the Scales. [2 Budget. You will have better odds at winning the contract.]
[ ] Buy Their Souls. [4 Budget. Regardless of your final design, you will get the Quebec Contract. 2 Hazard.]
Current Design
Payload: 3
Utility: 5
Weight: 4
Maintenance: 3
Unit Cost: Medium
Hazard: 0
