Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Well... This very much sounds like Tatarchuk has decided to add cow brains to the cow feed.
Should probably invest in medicine some more so we notice when CJD hits the population...
It is important to remember WHY economically viable renewables didn't come onto the scene until 2010 though. This was after German subsidies created a large, reliable market for renewables and the investments by the Germans to build large wind turbines at scale were starting to pay off, and after enormous investments by the Chinese in commoditizing solar panels.
Some of the technology that goes into modern wind turbines and modern solar panels aren't yet developed in the 1970s, but mostly what we lack is large scale industry for such things so that economies of scale and network effects can bring down prices and make mass deployment of renewables a practical way of providing a significant portion of our power.
If we had the political capital to invest in concentrated solar thermal at scale, we could carpet the Central Asian deserts with economical power plants in the mid 80s or the early 90s. Of course, having enough political capital to fend off questions about why we are building this new infrastructure for a decade before we see serious returns at a time when we will have relatively cheap coal and a coal power plant building infrastructure that already has economies of scale won't be happening.
The technological part of the problem is quite minor, the political part of the problem quite major.
Especially because to anyone with a short-term outlook, unstable oil prices will provide cyclical reasons to cut renewable investments off at the knees.
And we only have functionally infinite coal and oil if we have infinite money to extract the last dregs of each deposit. We do not.
I've been telling people this was coming for real world years at this point.
Exponentially increasing resource consumption was always going to mean we had a crisis between the late 60s and early 80s, no matter how many resources were in the ground. Bigger reserves are still finite reserves, and when they are pitted against ever-faster increasing resource consumption, big reserves lose. This challenge is arriving right on time.
And there will be loads of resources left in the ground that are too expensive to extract - coal that's too deep in the ground to be worth bringing to the surface, because all the resources spent pulling it out would be greater than the return on investment we gain from burning it, iron ore that is in deposits so far from anything else in the Union that the shipping costs of a mined chunk of ore are larger than the value of the steel produced from the ore. Oil wells can't extract more than half of the oil underneath them with conventional extraction methods (and fracking the dregs only lets you get maybe an extra 10% of the oil before it gets too expensive to be worthwhile). The issue is not a lack of coal and oil per se, but rather of coal and oil that can be economically extracted.
Hm, with no West Germany and likely less access to out-of-work German designers, I would have thought French tanks would look very different in TTL...
Does anyone know how big our military is and where they are deployed? And does the US have significant assets deployed in France? I am wondering how much pressure France is under in Europe...
The limited size of the French economy, as compared to even the German economy, never mind the Soviet and German economies, will mean that if they need to have a big enough army defending their borders, they won't be able to afford a full suite of development programs AND the big army, so may be mostly using foreign designs, even for tanks.
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With regards to the vote, I think Reword the Report is the play. I sorta hope that having his work messed with by his boss lights a bit of an environmentalist fire in the fellow... (Only a bit of one, because I am sure he will still be anti-Aral sea.) And in any case, I think Klimenko is correct that the report unmodified would be political suicide by Balakirev. If anything, "line-go-upism" is even more central to Soviet politics than it is to capitalist politics.
The Mars sample return plan is appropriately dire for a roll of 3. The big issue that I see is that the plan is to leap from never having drilled off of Earth before to drilling meters into the Martian surface. A surface that we currently know very little about. If there's any saving grace to the plan, it is that such heavy landers will be able to carry far better drilling machinery than was used in the OTL NASA effort to drill into Mars. But the plan is the definition of trying to run before learning to walk.
I am not super keen on sending it to committee, as by sending it to committee, we'll have politically committed ourselves to whatever comes out of the sausage machine.
There's a compelling case for cancellation. The downside I see with cancelling it is the excuse given - the necessity for multiple launches. The multiple launch architecture is the least of the problems with the sample return mission. Axing the program because of its launch architecture is going to lead to good ideas that use multiple launch architecture getting thrown out with the bathwater, political pressure for another big rocket (which will probably be negligible) and perhaps more troubling, people will be asking questions about why we're developing nuclear engines when we have a program that could use them that then got axed out of hand...
Going for the nuclear option is weak in that it doesn't address the fundamental weaknesses of the sample return mission, on the other hand, it will give our nuclear engine program a high-profile mission to justify it. On the third hand, tying the nuclear engines to a flawed sample return plan could undermine the sample return mission.
So in the end, while I am not keen on sending this thing to committee, I think that is the least-bad option.
For the LI deputy, I have issues with Demchenko, having the state focus on specialist light industry while letting the private sector take over large scale production production is IMO exactly backwards from what we want. Also, I am fairly concerned about how strong our private sector is getting politically. That makes me leery about giving it a big boost in scale.
Koykolainen sounds dull, but if we don't do a LI focused plan next, he's probably the best pick.
Solovyov sounds good if we do plan a LI focus next, and it sounds like we are. So I'll vote for him.
[X]Reword the Report
[X]Send it to a Committee
[X]Yuri Filippovich Solovyov
Regards,
fasquardon
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HanEmpire
Delicious
Our economy grew too much and too quickly is the issue. Blackstar mentioned on Discord that we've begun extracting resource deposits that RL Russian Federation only started mining in the 21st century.
Most of our extra growth happened during ww2 by not losing a large chunk of our population then afterward by not fucking up the recovery phase soon after and being a functional economy. We are richer before ww2 but not by much, mostly just being slightly less fucky with our people and agriculture.
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- Location
- The great frozen north
Damn. That's impressive. Did she name any specific deposits? I'm curious.
We've also got a much larger resource bloc than the OTL Soviet Union. Our European bloc is much larger and more cohesive, our relations with China and India are both better, and the kind of international trade stripped of geopolitical alignment that we only saw OTL from the 80s or so began between the US and USSR in the 40s and never stopped.
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- UTC+0
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You are seriously underestimating the costs of thermal solar power (concentrated solar), until 2017 it was quite literally more expensive than nuclear, and only cheaper than running peaker gas plants and photovoltaic before the revolution in price reductions in the 2010s (which I frankly don't think we can replicate in the 20th Century). They are extremely uneconomical and it is cheaper to run coal plants and burn imported oil from the ME (when prices stabilize following the probably inevitable oil shock) than cover CA with solar plants...
Wind power was also more expensive than pretty much any other conventional form of power generation until the 2010s, even nuclear. And its not like there was not a lot of money poured into developing them, by the 80s, Boeing was commercializimg 3.2 megawatts turbines it developed with NASA, but it and its competitors got killed by economics with the decline in oil prices in the late 80s.
At the end of the day, we don't control directly which products end at our table, our characters do. I am sure Balakirev would at least test the viability of either of these options by presenting some projects when oil prices peak. But as economic planners with limited resources and quotas, our characters will ultimately choose whatever makes more sense, so I expect those projects to be one offs when their costs become apparent.
No, I'm not, you're just completely missing my point.
My point is that even concentrated solar thermal, which is awkward in a number of ways (land hungry, needs to be put in out of the way places that are distant from labour and consumers, uses smaller turbines than nuclear and coal power, and therefore can't leverage existing coal power plant building industry in the way that nuclear can, has lots of mirrors to maintain, has moving parts to maintain and so on...) even this, if we constructed the supporting industry at scale and could thus pump out powerplants like we do with autocoal or autogas, would be economically viable.
Again: Even one of the worst options available could be competitive with coal if executed at scale.
Because the industry hadn't achieved scale yet.
Technological advancement isn't anywhere near to being the main determinant of the prices in that graph. Economies of scale are far more important. Those rising costs for nuclear and coal? Largely driven by shrinking economies of scale. The technology for them wasn't getting worse! The huge drop in solar LCOE? You really think that some revolutionary technology appeared in 2009 to cause that? No! That was driven economies of scale!
The technology in mass market solar panels is from the 90s. Because, you know, when the Chinese were building up their manufacturing capacity, they needed well enough understood manufacturing processes that they could scale up rapidly and they also couldn't get the really cutting edge stuff when they were building their factories in the early 2000s. However, building up that much manufacturing capacity would probably take us a decade as well, so probably the earliest we could do a PV revolution is c. 2005. And that's assuming our solar panel technology was ready in the 90s, which it may not be. So here I agree.
However, there's no reason why we couldn't have a revolution in wind turbine costs in the 90s. Well, except for, would we have the political capital? And if we had the political capital, would we spend it on wind power?
I am expecting that a large-scale roll-out of nuclear power will be more viable politically.
But since the cost of renewables will depend largely on how we and our trading partners choose to scale them, to simply say "well, after 2010 these will all be good options, and before then these will all be bad options" is to entirely misunderstand what has happened in recent decades. If we invest in scaling things up sooner than Germany and China did in OTL, we'll have a price revolution earlier than OTL. If we invest later, we have a later price revolution.
Regards,
fasquardon
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Well fasquardon can imagine the French still making native tank designs just because of the french leadership way of wanting to appear to be the one in charge/leading the alliance, combined with seeing itself as being the Wests front line making them realistically believe they can't count on consistent resupply from allies from ships being killed by the Warsaw submarine fleet?
- Location
- Asia
[X]Cancel it
[X]Yuri Filippovich Solovyov
[X]Reword the Report
[X]Yuri Filippovich Solovyov
[X]Reword the Report
- Location
- The great frozen north
Am I missing some McDonalds dog whistles in this report? I don't get why everyone is so sure Tatarchuk is about to start an epidemic of mad cow disease.
You make a good point on not discrediting the idea of multiple launches but axing it outright and I'm tempted to back the committee. On the other hand, the multiple launches seem to be the main thing worrying people in-universe with them not even thinking about the drill. How confident are you that the committee will not end up trying to retool it into a non-multiple launch mission anyway?
nat 1. "modified standards for the handling of livestock"
- Location
- The great frozen north
OK. I figured that meant something unsanitary, but I was unclear why that meant feeding them mashed cow instead of just say packing them way too close together. Anyways, what is a realistic timeframe before this causes a serious mad cow epidemic to break out?
...Speaking of mismanaging animals, I wonder when we'll finally hear about those invasive catfish we let loose by nat 1 a few decades back.
Ashheap
Friend-shape little shrimp smoking remnants
- Location
- Bottom of the pot
May I have a source for this? Do you count biomass and bio-fuel as viable cause those are terrible at scale.
Only after decade of research and development, also got a boost in the 80s and 90s with solar cell pocket calculator boom as well.
I don't think you can make a case of comparing Economies of Scale (EoS) straight up bwt wind+solar and coal as the former output are quite dependent on location while coal just need to be place wherever they're needed. Not to mention the battery, transmission line, transformer and other works. Whole other ball game.
On the other hand, our economy this time is clearly superior, so is some of our tech, so why are we still sticking with OTL estimation of tech discovery and application so much?
At least for solar we got a lot of convenient desert for all our CMEA solar energy demand, dunno abt wind though.
So we need:
- Sufficient tech to at least have a chance at beating coal/oil/gas price
- Adequate industrial base for EoS
- Favorable political climate with perhaps energy independence policy and a history of wild oil price fluctuation
Speaking of replicating conditions for OTL advancement in tech, can anyone list all those steps for making PV solar panel cheaper?
May be more meddling in the Middle East and Venezuela? Is OPEC a thing yet?
Some of us may even want a little global warming for the Arctic Route, right?
That's a good point...
If they're so focused on the launch architecture, yes, they may entirely miss the challenges of drilling.
I may change my vote.
The part that I find particularly concerning is: "The largest of the measures effectively subsidizes the consumption of secondary resources in the process of production."
If meat is a primary resource, then offal could be classified as a secondary resource. So let's grind it up and put it in the animal feed! Nothing can go wrong!
Of course, I may be reading this wrong, and it might be some other dumb idea that's being implemented.
It occurs to me that with all of our water-way re-plumbing, not only will the catfish have been able to spread further, but the disruption of the native ecolonies will have given them more opportunities.
Gonna be fun when that report does land on our desks...
I don't count biomess and biofuel, no. When implemented at scale, they aren't really renewable. See Sweden strip mining its forests to produce "renewable" wood pellets.
They're the kind of things that work on quite small scales in the right circumstances (like a cabin in the woods), but not on a Soviet Union level.
And while there are useful large-scale things, like growing sugar cane to make alcohol to add to gasoline which could be considered as biofuel production, I wouldn't count it as a renewable or really as a biofuel. Most of the gasoline is still fossil derived and the alcohol is mainly there as a way to reduce engine knocking and to subsidize farmers.
The alcohol is a fuel additive that happens to be carbon negative when sourced from the right crops, not a renewable or a fuel in its own right. And if we had the Indonesians grow enough sugar cane to replace ALL of the Soviet Union's gasoline demand, that wouldn't be a sustainable system.
I'll do some digging... I originally got this from an article about concentrated solar thermal plants being built in Morocco (the article was mainly about how the solar thermal plants were worse than PV in the same environment).
Can't remember where the article was.
There are a number of issues that limit wind and solar economies of scale, but so too are there limits to the economies of scale of coal power. For example, coal power needs access to cooling water, needs to be sited with access to sufficiently cheap coal, needs to be somewhere people don't choke to death on their fumes, needs to be close enough to demand to incurr minimal transmission losses, needs to have access to transport networks that can support bringing in the extremely large and heavy components of the station, like turbines and so on.
And in the present, what we're seeing is that solar PV and wind power respond BETTER to economies of scale than coal power.
New work has shown that the EROI of even poorly sited wind turbines is above the fossil fuel average and well above the EROI of coal. Poorly sited PV (and by poorly, I mean they are in a meh spot, not an actually bad spot) has an EROI only a little worse than the fossil fuel average. Well sited wind and solar has an EROI well above any fossil fuel power source.
A good EROI means that there's room in the energy budget to deal with things like higher transmission losses and energy losses in storage systems and the like.
Of course storage is an issue, but there are scalable solutions to that too - old oil wells are a promising target for turning into compressed air storage sites, and there'll be plenty of those in Central Asia, which is where most of our renewable potential will be.
The issues with solar and wind power aren't so much that they are worse than coal power, as it appeared back in the 70s when coal was enjoying its peak economies of scale and thus extremely cheap, it's that their issues are different from those of large thermal power plants like coal burning stations, so investment needed to be made in significantly different capabilities than those needed for building coal power stations.
Compare to nuclear power plants, which besides the reactor, are mostly the same as coal power plants. Which, by the way, is a big part of why I've been so keen on nuclear energy in the quest. In the quest, we are managing a Soviet Union that is good at building large thermal power plants, and so transitioning from big fossil fuel thermal power plants to big nuclear thermal power plants is more suitable in the situation.
Regards,
fasquardon
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Because we're ahead of the OTL USSR technologically and economically, but not really ahead of the OTL United States.
More generally, trying to force the cost curves on renewables is almost certainly possible, but with mixed results. We won't be able to get 2020-era economic efficiency from a solar power plant built in 1980, but we may be able to get 1995-era efficiency from a solar power plant built in 1982 or something.
In general, the best opportunity comes from places where the underlying technology is well understood and just needs to mature. For instance, wind turbines are conceptually very basic and use technologies well understood in the general engineering knowledge of a 20th century industrial civilization. The problem is in implementing the specific details needed to make them work at scale at high efficiency by fine-tuning a basic concept we can already build. This takes real time and investment, yes. But I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the "killer app" technologies that have done good things for the cost of wind power in real life are things we could have had 5-10 or even more years sooner if a country had put its people under more pressure to deliver.
- Location
- Spain
[X]Reword the Report
[X]Send it to a Committee
[X]Incorporate Nuclear Propulsion
[X]Send it to a Committee
[X]Incorporate Nuclear Propulsion
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X]Cancel it
[X]Yuri Filippovich Solovyov
[X]Reword the Report
[X]Yuri Filippovich Solovyov
[X]Reword the Report
- Location
- The great frozen north
So we got some of the Sovetsky Soyuz class battleships built in TTL, thanks to our lager steel supply. They're acknowledged as bad designs overall in the narrative, but they worked and served effectively in World War 2. I'm curious how the development and building of the ships went. Because today Drachinifel released a video on failures of naval engineering. The section on the Soviet battleboats is from 27:10 to 33:00.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH96hb9NCXU
It's a rapid-fire run down of incompetence, with design requirements totally at odds with the capability or experience of the designers, major design changes made on whims, and horrendously poor construction overall. TTL they might be able to actually make the armor plate in one piece, but having MegaMag will not solve the broad quality issues of rivets, serious delays and disorganization in construction of the machinery, and general inexperience of the shipbuilding industry after 30 years of inactivity. Still something clearly went better than OTL, given our ships survived long enough to get turned into museums instead of crumbling apart midway through the war.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH96hb9NCXU
It's a rapid-fire run down of incompetence, with design requirements totally at odds with the capability or experience of the designers, major design changes made on whims, and horrendously poor construction overall. TTL they might be able to actually make the armor plate in one piece, but having MegaMag will not solve the broad quality issues of rivets, serious delays and disorganization in construction of the machinery, and general inexperience of the shipbuilding industry after 30 years of inactivity. Still something clearly went better than OTL, given our ships survived long enough to get turned into museums instead of crumbling apart midway through the war.
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- UTC+0
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OOC Blackstar has repeatedly emphasized they are crap ships, like, do remember that we witnessed them in action as a man who knew nothing about naval matters acting as glorified floating batteries during the Stalin era (criticizing his toys too much, because that's what they were would uh, not be a politically wise statement to say the least). Their main accomplishments are shelling the outskirts of Odessa and cratering Riga, not exactly a storied naval career. They got turned into musem ships because well, they look impressive and serve as symbols of Soviet strenght in the GPW. A tidbit from Discord to well, give you a more accurate assessment of their capabilites rather than IC mentions of them by Mikoyan:
"The Soyuz vs the Yavuz
the only fight that thing can actually win
plus possibly a litteral
1891
pre dreadnought"
For context the Yavuz was a Turkish battlecruiser that they acquired from the Germans in like the 1910s and was in serious disrepair by the 1940s. Put them against any modern battleship and they would perform poorly to say the least. The 1891 pre-dreadnaught was another Turkish vintage in service at that time as well.
Not sinking to bad weather or something is the bare minimum tbh, and they mostly saw action where we had air supremacy I think. That and some luck meant they got through the war.
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CrabMonarchy
Allegedly Dutch
- Location
- the Netherlands, apparently
Behold, the pride of the Soviet Navy:
Bonus round: Sovetsky Soyuz vs. Bismark, fight!
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