Notably, not only Able Archer didn't go hot, the situation was very different. A large scale exercise after a period of rising tension with a lot of intercepted chatter between participants and no clear cause could, in theory, be a preparation for nuclear first strike, but a large scale exercise when you're suppressing the unrest in one of your subjects is a clear "Look how tough we are, don't fuck with us" defensive message. Yes, if French wind themselves up overmuch, and false alarm happens, and they react badly because of it, a nuclear war could happen. The odds of all of that happening are miniscule.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
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Let's just say that I consider it difficult to predict "the odds of all that happening," because we're kind of viewing the internal state of French politics and internal military organization through the wrong end of the binoculars here.
Rather than try to read a few thousand words of text that collectively make up everything we know about likely French reactions dating back to the past 5-10 in-game years, and say "aha, now I know what will happen," I'm trying to allow for imponderables. Unreliable narrators are in effect; we don't know if our perception of the French reaction is itself accurate.
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Huh. So their program is going fine, but they've given up on operations beyond Earth Orbit or are happy enough being obviously second best. Well, the Solar System belonging to Communism will be a strong propaganda card.
And if there's no EPA, is there less pressure for the US to clean up its environment (like has the Cuyahoga River not caught fire as often or something) or has the US been implementing a patchwork of small measures that are spread across several agencies?
High power generators and reactors in space turn out to be really hard, such machines need moving parts and circulating fluids, or super exotic engineering, and you need to carry around a bunch of radiators to dump the waste heat. No convenient air or water around the ship to offload the heat into. All space born reactors and generators that I am aware of have had a thermal output of under a megawatt.
As you say, there are enormous rewards for cracking the problem. Alot of really fun stuff (not just ion engines) becomes practical once you have that sort of power supply in space. But I don't think that nuclear engines particularly moves us closer to such things. Maybe one of the monatomic hydrogen engines being proposed could have such spin-off applications? A reactor with a hydrogen plasma exhaust could power a MHD generator.
There's alot of practical engineering to do to get to a working liquid core or ultra-hot ceramic core reactor and then to a generator that could run off of it and then get them both to work reliably in space.
I am much more interested in designs where we could use the spent rocket reactor core as the fuel for an RTG since the weight savings of making your spent engine fuel also be the fuel for your electrical generator could be quite nice.
But so long as one of the lower cost and more practical designs gets funded, I don't think it would hurt the space program to also fund a more ambitious program. But as Crazycryodude says, a more ambitious second track program would be 50% more funding for the nuclear engines. Is something this blue-sky really something we need to spend money on right now?
If we did go for an ambitious second program primarily for spin off benefits, I have more warm feelings towards the Low Pressure Designs. A high temperature ceramic core test article would push forward our ceramic technology, which may have applications for improving the linear core or expanded surface area designs and it might eventually lead to something that could power a MHD generator. On the other hand, the liquid core option also has alot of spin-off promise, and if the problem of starting it in space is solved, would be a much more sure path to a reactor for a MHD generator. If I didn't care about getting a working nuclear rocket out of the program, I would be hard-pressed to choose between these two. In general, I would expect that the low pressure design would be better for space program spin-offs and the liquid core design would be better for Earth-bound spin-offs.
But who knows what we will end up rolling?
EDIT: Or maybe a more conservative reactor could be more useful than I had first assumed - there's some ideas for how to use them to power generators like this.
Yup, I agree.
Look comrade we solved Oxygen-Rich Preburners there is no ceramic fortress Soviet rocket science cannot storm >More seriously, I knew about how monoatomic Hydrogen was a molecular wrecking ball worse than any conventional substance. Given we rolled decently on the project roll I assumed my concerns were overblown and our engineers (as well as the researchers doing work on this later OTL) did not all collectively forget to consider this extremely severe problem on a trap option.
I was thinking about this overnight - it is possible that the engine would be more practical than I was assuming due to the low operating pressure.
But that still leaves the questions over whether this design can even sustain a chain reaction and the problem that we just don't need such performance.
So calling it a trap is probably unfair, but I still don't know why we'd try to build this right now.
If we do go for more ambitious designs later, the experience of operating more conservative designs for many years will come in handy. Indeed, there's plenty of times when an incremental approach actually is the faster route to higher technology, see how TSMC overtook Intel in using EUV in their fabs.
(There are plenty of counter-examples tho. Sometimes a little ambition is the way to get better, faster.)
There is a case for Protect Socialism here. But when dealing with unrest, history shows that either a decisive crack-down is required, or a laid back approach works best. The middle path (like the MFA proposal) is too soft to control things if they get bad and hard enough to piss people off.
For me, I am looking at how badly the Afghan, Hungarian and Czechoslovak interventions went for the OTL USSR. Going in hard put the lid on small unrest, but at the cost of seriously weakening the global position of the USSR.
Also, what do you mean by "losing Austria"? If you mean Austria allying with France or the US, yeah, we'd have a war. An actual counter-revolution would be an issue too. But that's not what anyone is calling for in Austria. There are protestors who want to be neutral. There are protestors who feel the current regime is too authoritarian - that's different from being actually counter-revolutionaries. And honestly, a neutral Austria would help our security situation. That's why the Soviets let Austria be neutral in OTL. I think the regime could cope with Austria becoming a neutral Socialist state like Yugoslavia.
You are assuming that the French share the politburo's view of how serious the situation in Austria is. We can't control what information the French get or how they interpret it.
And keep in mind, we've been majorly heating up the Cold War in Africa, which especially targets France. This isn't a good time for tensions in Europe itself.
Regards,
fasquardon
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Well, I don't. I feel very confidently saying that we'd have to roll two nat1s in a row or somesuch for a nuclear war to happen.
No, it really couldn't. There's a reason the compromise option mentions building up troops on the border of Austria - it leaving our sphere is not acceptable. Yugoslavia is not neutral here either, I will add.
Good point.
A 1 in 10,000 chance is actually pretty bad if you ask me.
I'm not sure that things will go super badly in any of the cases we choose. Sending in the troops is the low risk, low reward option, but comes with unavoidable downsides. The MFA proposal could work, backing the Gen Sec could work - both very much put our trust in Häuser and his government in different ways. Or both could go really badly.
But when one of the real bad we-roll-like-chumps outcomes is an actual hot nuclear war, even if we are talking about absurdly low chances, I just don't think it's worth it.
Regards,
fasquardon
Yeah, the BES-5 satellite reactor that the OTL USSR used around now only produced 3 kilowatts of electricity, a far cry from a megawatt reactor. When you start comparing it to RTGs though that's still a whole lot more power available, the 3 RTGs on the Voyager probes could only generate 157 watts of electricity each at launch.
Regardless, I remember asking about it in the discord and none of these options are really going to push power reactors beyond just starting the fundamental work on having reactors in space at all. It's why I'm not really that interested in spending even more space budget when we can get that fundamental work done with just the linear and twisted ribbon designs. Maybe if we had kept a much more manned-mission focused space program and were aiming for a Mars flyby in a decade or something I would value the actual rocket part more, but our unmanned probes should be much more fine with cruising for long periods in interplanetary space, and keeping the cost to 10 RpY instead of 15 means that we'll still have just barely enough budget free to squeeze in the Mars sample return program with everything we've learned from our successful Lunar missions. Or not have to pick between checking out Mercury and experimenting with inflatable stations. Or whatever other crazy 70s space projects we might get offered and want to push through where they failed OTL.
Trying to make a NTR usable as a RTG when offline sounds neat, but my gut feeling is that there might be some efficiency issues compared to normal RTGs since it's going to be primarily designed to be good at dumping heat into flowing propellant while critical, instead of generating electricity through thermoelectric couples while sub-critical. That and it would also mean the final payload still has to haul around the mass of the rocket, reactor, and everything attached to it that the lump of sub-critical fuel doesn't need if it's working as a RTG, cutting down the payloads ability to shift or orientate itself with RCS thrusters or whatever it uses.
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With the 10 RpT option for atomic rockets winning, we have 10 RpT of slack left in the budget. Which is tricky, because there's 15 RpT of things we really want (Mars sample return and inflatable stations). The good news is that our light launcher program is doing well, so we are likely to get the 5 RpT from that back very soon. My vision right now is that next turn we start the Inflatable Section experiments (it's a fundamental research effort, best start that early) and launch the Mars sample return as soon as the light launcher is done.
EDIT: Are those inflatable space stations something that was tried OTL? It sounds really useful, but the ISS does not look at all like a balloon. Something is not as simple as it looks.
EDIT: Are those inflatable space stations something that was tried OTL? It sounds really useful, but the ISS does not look at all like a balloon. Something is not as simple as it looks.
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I think that "1 in 10000 chance" seems rather contrived. I'd count us lucky if that were the chance of nuclear war breaking out by bad luck at all, during normal times, what with it being the Cold War.
Terminator57
Southern trees bear a strange fruit
I was sure you were not the guy to send in the clowns haha
There were - and are, I believe - experiments with the design, but it never got enough funding for proper testing. It's something I am pretty excited about, actually.
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Do we have anything plan for Planetary Grand Tour like the US or is our outer planet program just single destination?
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Yup. One probe per planet. Annoyingly the restructuring talked all about using a new more robust bus, but it's very unclear as to what the overall change in the mission plan is.
There's no change in the mission plan, but instead of relying on Glushko's bespoke design he didn't tell anyone anything about, we're delaying Galileo Program until technology develops enough the probes we launch during it will serve as prototypes for the Outer Planets Survey ones.
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So, to be clear for all the low-to-medium information voter participants, does "staggered launches" mean "no, no we are not doing a Grand Tour with any single probe visiting four planets like Voyager 2 did?"
Because I think that's the question being asked.
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This is the mention of what staggered launches mean. Its basically means visiting the moons of saturn and jupiter and if we can also visit pluto
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So we ARE visiting all the planets under this program, it's just that we're not going to have any one probe deliberately swinging Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune the way Voyager 2 did?
We aren't doing the Voyager 2 "one probe for all outer planets" tour, no, but our program isn't single destination either - we're doing Outer Planets Working Group original suggestion of two probes for Juptier-Saturn-Pluto and another two for Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune, as far as I can tell. And there's also the Galileo program that just focuses on Jupiter.
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I have been thinking more about which pair of nuclear engine proposals to back, and I wonder if backing one of the more ambitious designs would be worthwhile...
If I changed my vote, at the moment I am favouring the low pressure engine combined with the linear reactor engine. The linear reactor, I have a hard time imagining us failing, giving us a basic nuclear engine for our basic desires. The low pressure design I am skeptical of for its usefulness as an engine, but pushing forward our knowledge of high temperature ceramics would have useful spin-offs that applied to the linear reactor as well as high temperature chemistry on Earth. And looking at the other available things to do in space, the only project I feel we need to do soon is the inflatable station work, and that would fit into the budget even if we pushed the frontiers of science on the nuclear engines a bit...
The liquid core engine could also have nice spin-offs, but there's less synergy with the other engine designs IMO.
What do people think? Is it worth investing in something probably less useful for the space program to push forward our technological edge?
Is true. We may find that it works better to have two specialized systems that do one job really well than a less specialized systems that does two jobs poorly.
We'll see what we roll.
Until 2016, the only inflatable structure that flew in space was the inflatable airlock on Voskhod-2. In 2016, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) was mated to the ISS and it is still in use today, having exceeded expectations. I'm not really sure why the Soviets didn't do anything beyond that first airlock. The Salyut, Mir and the core of the ISS space stations were cobbled together out of the leftovers of the military Almaz station program of the 60s and the half-completed work on the TKS capsule that Chelomei designed to support it. It may simply be that further work on inflatables was lost in the political shuffle (the inflatable airlock was a product of Korolev's OKB-1, who didn't get to put any of their space station ideas into practice) and making do with leftovers.
On the US side, NASA's early work on inflatables was cancelled to feed the Apollo program's ravenous hunger for funds. NASA came back to inflatables in the 90s with TransHab, but that was cancelled to cover the cost overruns of the ISS. Congress also forbade NASA from working further on inflatables around this time. The technology developed in the 90s would then be licensed to Bigelow Aerospace which developed a number of applications of the TransHab tech, including two free-flying unmanned stations (Genesis 1 and 2) and the BEAM currently attached to the ISS, Bigelow Aerospace went bust in 2020, which was blamed as being in large part due to the pandemic. Current work is being done by Sierra Space, who have since recieved the license to use the TransHab technology.
So to my knowledge, inflatables are better in nearly every respect to more traditional man-in-a-can designs, being lighter, tougher, lower radiation and capable of taking on more ergonomic forms. But up to the present day, Almaz-derived stations have been good enough and desire to push forward space technology has been lacking, so they've languished.
It is for sure contrived. But I was playing along with what agumentic was saying and pointing out that the odds of two crit fails in a row is actually uncomfortably high.
Playing lots of quests can give us an idea of double crit fails being a big deal, but in day to day life, things that are 1 chance in 10,000 happen all the time.
Regards,
fasquardon
If I changed my vote, at the moment I am favouring the low pressure engine combined with the linear reactor engine. The linear reactor, I have a hard time imagining us failing, giving us a basic nuclear engine for our basic desires. The low pressure design I am skeptical of for its usefulness as an engine, but pushing forward our knowledge of high temperature ceramics would have useful spin-offs that applied to the linear reactor as well as high temperature chemistry on Earth. And looking at the other available things to do in space, the only project I feel we need to do soon is the inflatable station work, and that would fit into the budget even if we pushed the frontiers of science on the nuclear engines a bit...
The liquid core engine could also have nice spin-offs, but there's less synergy with the other engine designs IMO.
What do people think? Is it worth investing in something probably less useful for the space program to push forward our technological edge?
Is true. We may find that it works better to have two specialized systems that do one job really well than a less specialized systems that does two jobs poorly.
We'll see what we roll.
Until 2016, the only inflatable structure that flew in space was the inflatable airlock on Voskhod-2. In 2016, the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) was mated to the ISS and it is still in use today, having exceeded expectations. I'm not really sure why the Soviets didn't do anything beyond that first airlock. The Salyut, Mir and the core of the ISS space stations were cobbled together out of the leftovers of the military Almaz station program of the 60s and the half-completed work on the TKS capsule that Chelomei designed to support it. It may simply be that further work on inflatables was lost in the political shuffle (the inflatable airlock was a product of Korolev's OKB-1, who didn't get to put any of their space station ideas into practice) and making do with leftovers.
On the US side, NASA's early work on inflatables was cancelled to feed the Apollo program's ravenous hunger for funds. NASA came back to inflatables in the 90s with TransHab, but that was cancelled to cover the cost overruns of the ISS. Congress also forbade NASA from working further on inflatables around this time. The technology developed in the 90s would then be licensed to Bigelow Aerospace which developed a number of applications of the TransHab tech, including two free-flying unmanned stations (Genesis 1 and 2) and the BEAM currently attached to the ISS, Bigelow Aerospace went bust in 2020, which was blamed as being in large part due to the pandemic. Current work is being done by Sierra Space, who have since recieved the license to use the TransHab technology.
So to my knowledge, inflatables are better in nearly every respect to more traditional man-in-a-can designs, being lighter, tougher, lower radiation and capable of taking on more ergonomic forms. But up to the present day, Almaz-derived stations have been good enough and desire to push forward space technology has been lacking, so they've languished.
It is for sure contrived. But I was playing along with what agumentic was saying and pointing out that the odds of two crit fails in a row is actually uncomfortably high.
Playing lots of quests can give us an idea of double crit fails being a big deal, but in day to day life, things that are 1 chance in 10,000 happen all the time.
Regards,
fasquardon
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Well, using Jupiter for gravitational slingshots kind of is the optimal way to get probes to the outer planets. It's practical, arguably the only practical way to get them up to a speed that gets stuff out to the vicinity of Neptune or Pluto in anything remotely resembling a reasonable amount of time.
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With two critfails on air conditioning that had the planners and supsov go "forget fancy building design, just slap a heat pump on everything" its sadly going to be a long time before we get a chance to create something like a passive house standard.
My knee-jerk reaction was "no", but thinking more it could work. We'll have to drop the mars sample return mission, but with probes going to all the outer planets and satellite work still going swell it should be prestige enough for the space program to give us room for more fundamental research. What would the main benefits of high-temperature ceramic be though, that won't naturally arise from research solving other problems? It won't help our nuclear projects: The current plan is to standardize on a specific VVER blueprint and build a factory to make over nine thousand of them. Seems the ship of voting has sailed though, in any case.
Thanks for the info about inflatable space stations. Man it's heart-breaking to read how many great projects fell aside thanks to political and economic fuckery, and that much of the famous stations were built from the leftovers of grander ambitions.