- Location
- alphen aan den rijn
That was one of the reasons yes
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
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Ashheap
Friend-shape little shrimp smoking remnants
- Location
- Bottom of the pot
We totally failed on purpose guys, honest!
😏
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
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- Present
I do wonder what effect this has on civilian application. Are weather satellites and communication satellites being delayed because military stuff is getting prioritized?
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- alphen aan den rijn
i do remember to debate being something along the line of "if we fail we can fund out space program more. also they us will fund theirs less."
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- A haze of forgetfulness
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- She/Her
I propose we stop all coal mining so we can open up Stage 9 of Atomash.
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- Lost in the internet
A moratorium on opening new coal mine might be a better idea, we still need coal for steel and electricity (or maybe that was you meant by other words, in that case I agree)
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- A haze of forgetfulness
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I was making what is called a joke.
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- The great frozen north
Even at current pace we'll hit the maximum stage for our central siberian coal mines midway through next plan. There's a small hard-to-access deposit around Pechora I don't think we've exploited and one in the far east that might be accessible with the Baikal-Amur mainline, not sure about how big it is, but we're looking at Peak Coal around 1980 whether we want it or not. Right around the time the oil crisis is likely to hit. Navigating that will be !!FUN!!, but if we manage we'll have plenty of political impetus to further electrify transport and build stage LARGE_INTEGER Atomash.
That doesn't really mesh with reality, unless there's something not being modeled here. Russia continues to ceaselessly mine coal to this day.
Are we not here just talking about the coal deposits that are literally just preferred surface seams? Peak Coal should be like...a century off. At high levels of expanding exploitation.
Are we not here just talking about the coal deposits that are literally just preferred surface seams? Peak Coal should be like...a century off. At high levels of expanding exploitation.
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- Lost in the internet
Peak coal in the world but strictly within the USSR we might run out of new coal source (we will still have to exploit our current mines until exhaustion/late 2k, however)
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- Lost in the internet
While it would be desirable, the more we demand from the electric grid, the more we have to add power-source and number crunchers have shown that unless we quadruple Atomash production, we will need gas and coal to fill in the production.
So unless we stop or dramatically reduce our electrical demand for each plans, we will need to keep increasing our carbon powerplants
Realistically we cant remove fossil fuels from our power grid until renewables mature in the 2010s. Until then it's just trying to make sure as much new demand is met by nuclear as possible so fosisle fuels become a smaller proportion of the grid and can eventually be offlined when our electricity use growth isn't quite as explosive
Only 46.5% coal power nationally is actually fairly impressive for this time and for us being a coal rich country.
Due to our sheer hunger for electricity, we're still heading for an earlier, harder climate shock globally, but the scale and speed of our push for gas power is something to be proud of. We could have had more coal and less gas if we'd wanted, and the climate and especially the health of our people would have paid the price.
Less coal also means less acid rain for our forests than could have been (though acid rain will be worse than in OTL, just better than it could otherwise be).
We will bury Ashbrook in cheap Soviet musical postcards! Their youth will see the superiority of our system!
Considering that we are close to plateauing our oil and gas production and coal is just starting to or about to start to decline, I suspect that we may need to invest heavily in wind simply because we're running out of alternatives.
Which is wild. Wind and solar could end up not being "ecological" choices for us and instead be "growth" choices for us.
You mean the steel we need to use more of so that getting pushed out of the American market doesn't create a rust belt? How interesting...
(That said, we'll see how much steel the river reversal consumes, if it is bad enough we may need to delay upgrading our housing stock, let alone open exciting new frontiers of steel consumption.)
I mean... The main issue with wind for us is that we lack economies of scale making the turbines, but we have economies of scale building large thermal power plants. So until we have economies of scale, wind won't be "worth it" compared to nuclear plants, but once we do have economies of scale, we should be able to provide wind power Watt-hours for about the same cost as nuclear Watt-hours.
So it all depends on when it becomes politically viable to build WindMash.
Remember that our economy is CRAZY resource intensive. Our steel output got higher that the OTL Soviet Union ever reached some time ago. Concrete production must be if anything even more crazy, given the way we casually bash out megaprojects that would have bankrupted the OTL union. Also, we consume huge amounts of electricity, 46% of which comes from coal.
And "peak coal" (or indeed peak any resource) doesn't mean resource production stops dead, it means that production can't be increased and maintaining production, or managing a slow decline of production, involves ever more resources spent to get the same amount or less output.
For example, the US experienced peak oil in the late 60s. It is still a major oil producer and production in the ConUS has been slowly increasing for some decades from the lows of the 70s, largely thanks to stunning efforts expended fracking the heck out of the country, and before that spamming expensive offshore rigs.
Similarly, OTL Russia could be both past its peak production of coal and still be a major coal producer.
We will still be mining alot of coal in TTL for some decades yet, but past 1980, we will probably be unable to increase coal mining to keep up with economic growth.
Both of those would have considerable utility for the air force, who seem to be the military branch that owns the US space program in TTL. Though I expect the US moved more slowly to do those things, since in OTL the airforce was very focused on putting people into space and have manned observation or coms sats. Such utilitarian things as robotic satellites were more of a Navy thing and thus would make any right thinking USAF officer feel dirty to think about. That said, the ideas were so clearly superior that OTL the USAF embraced such things eventually, so if the Americans were slowed in TTL, it was probably only by a year or two.
Civilian coms sats and television sats may have been more delayed though. That was something NASA started pushing pretty early as part of its mission to justify itself and why a civilian space program had value for America.
My memory is that was a genuine failure.
We had discussed the benefits for us of the US getting first artificial satellite, but I believe the people who wanted to be first in orbit won the argument. But picking Glushko and then starving him of resources (meaning that he then stole from the programs we funded to pay for things he considered more important) meant that we couldn't overcome some meh rolls, so the US beat us by something like 6 months.
Hm, I am not sure.
It is going to be interesting to see how much useful stuff the American space nerds can get out of the mad rush for SDI that Ashbrook has commanded.
But it certainly looks like that failure worked out for us.
And not only that failure. When the SupSov freaked out and demanded an explaination for why the space program had been beaten, the Threadviet chose to blame the military. That resulted in the civilianized space program that we recently doubled down on in the face of American talk about SDI.
So without the response to that crisis, we wouldn't have been able to push Intercosmos as far so fast (because a more military program would need more secrecy, and more secrecy would mean less opportunity to bring in scientists, engineers and cosmonauts from other countries, especially from countries like China who have more military independence from us) and we at minimum would have a higher DC to avoid getting into a spending competition over who could waste more money on SDI. More likely, we wouldn't have had the option at all to avoid getting drawn into an SDI race.
As someone who is very pessimistic about SDI's potential to be useful in the next 50 years (in game), I think the voters who decided to put the boot into the military and protect Glushko are probably about to be vindicated bigtime.
(Though, having read into some of the stuff that the US military is doing with rail guns and laser weapons today, my earlier posts where I said that SDI could never ever work against a peer economy may have been over-stating the case against SDI. Maybe in the 2030s or the 2040s we will have the capability to shoot down nuclear warheads with space-based weapons platforms.)
Anyways, we'll see what happens.
Regards,
fasquardon
I personally suspect what we'll be running out of are economical coal deposits. As in, coal deposits that at current energy prices make sense to exploit. Though like the increasing oil prices have shown, if there are just no alternatives at all and one has to just accept higher energy prices and thus less easy growth; well in such a case something can still be done. Like the shale oil and gas in the USA now.
It would seem reasonably logical to suspect that the USSR should have coal deposits that are similarly non-economical, unless energy prices really go up. Though their value is more perhaps in being able to keep coal production going a bit longer and thus making use of already made capital investments in coal energy, rather then being able to power much in the way of affordable growth.
So in that sense, I guess in the short term coal import dependence might continuing to increase then. Which means the USSR might be needing the ability to build more large cargo ships to haul it all in at some what reasonable costs.
It's been awhile since I've heard much in the way of competition from the USA in the robotic probes field either. It kind of feels like we've been lapping them a bit there and they some what ceded the win in that area to us.
At the least, can't recall them being competitive to getting first to any of the planets since the Mars race. Our Jupiter mission seems to have been pretty uncontested as well. Maye they are still sending some probes around I guess? But I'm guessing their tempo is far lower then the Soviets.
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I mean if the military still runs the USA space program then we wouldn't hear about everything since a portion would be classified more than a civilian program.
There's not much reason to classify missions to other planets. Though even if you did, you can't easily hide that you're burning something towards another planet. Thus why there haven't really been any secret missions to other planets in our history so far. At least so far as I know.
Now what they might be getting up to in Earth orbit though... yeah who knows for sure really I guess. Well maybe the Soviet spy services would have some idea, in the original time line they were kind of effective.
Of course, note that if the US hadn't used up most of the gushers in Texas and the deep sea reserves of the Gulf of Mexico, shale oil wouldn't be worth exploiting.
The shale oil wasn't an alternative that happened to be there, it was exploited as a direct result of cheaper and higher quality resources being used up.
To be fair, we don't hear much about the American space program and never have. Like we weren't kept ups to speed on what their Lunar program was doing (and thus didn't know just how laughable their efforts were). And we've gotten hints that the Americans are ahead of us in the space station race and are developing super heavy lift capability of some kind, but these are just implied things in projects that our underlings are trying to sell as ways to catch up with America.
Generally, it seems that the rocket nerds don't think that the minister needs to know much of anything about what the American nerds are doing.
As such, the Americans could have a probe program almost as good as ours, or they could be full on robot-phobes, coping with our success by insisting that men in space are the only things that really count. Or more likely, they'll be somewhere in between. But who knows where?
Not only would an Earth departure trajectory make it obvious that something was up, but if they kept the discoveries of their probes secret, how could they show off?
Secret interplanetary probes defeat almost all of the value of sending the probe. And not only for the propagandists. Science needs a certain amount of openness to be effective.
Regards,
fasquardon
plotvitalnpc
Once more walking the path of the catgirl.
Well, if we can get our demand growth per annum down below 700 per annum we can probably build enough nuclear and hydro capacity that when those long-completion timeline plants join the grid, it'd be possible to stand down enough fossil fuel plants constructed during the plant that we'd come out of the plan with most of the still-operating power generation built during the plan being green energy, and a minority being natural gas, before considering the fact that our nuclear autodice from this plan still stand to be enhanced considerably by atomash if I'm not mistaken.
If we could get it down to about where it was at when the plan started, that'd be even better.
And of course, an infrastructure-services plan would have a far lower annual electrical demand growth than the HI/CI plan we just did. HI/LCI are effectively some of the most energy-hungry categories on the docket.
Following numbers are given without regard to confidence intervals.
In year 1870-71, heavy industry sucked up 140 power, LI sucked up 69, and chemical industry sucked up 168 units of electrical power. Aside from those ~377 power, no other category seems to have taken any, though the civilians took ~240 power.
In 1871-72, infra sucked up 21, HI sucked up 96, LI sucked up 36, and CI sucked up 198, while services sucked up 10. No other category drank power aside from those ~361 power, though the civilians took ~260 power.
In 1872-73, HI sucked up 361 electricity, LI sucked up 80, and CI sucked up 131. No other category seems to have drunk any aside from those ~571 power, though the civilians took ~290 power.
In 1873-74, HI sucked up 175 electricity, LI 128, CI sucked 152 while putting 120 back on the grid, agg sucked 26, and nothing else seems to have taken any aside from those ~481 power, though the civilians took ~300 power.
In 1874-75 (not yet in a story post), Infra seems to have sucked 16, HI 210, LI 60, CI 184 (while adding 120), Agriculture 29, and services 15. That totals to ~514, though the civilians took ~300 power.
Our from-projects electrical demands this plan are about 2,304 units and civilians about 1,390 - averaging ~739 power draw per turn between the two. HI sucked up 982. LI sucked up 373. CI sucked up 833. 60% of our free HI dice and 54.5% of our free CI dice came from the type of plan we were running.
If we'd been running a plan without those focuses, HI would have sucked up ~393 electricity and ~379 instead assuming a strictly proportional reduction in costs - put another way, we would have saved an average of ~209 power every turn just by having different focuses. That would have reduced our average per-turn growth power draw to ~530 units of electricity - a rate at which atomash would cover half of new demand on its own once the plants started activating.
Similar assumptions can be made of the next plan. We'll need to build more of both kinds of fossil fuel plant initially, in all likelihood, but we should be able to shut the coal back down in the 11th plan and reduce the load on the natural gas plants at the same time.
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- Europe
Hmm, interesting.
I wonder what comrade Karl Marx would think about that after we pushed for the state wide electrification commitment for the construction of communism.
Too bad he retired just a few years ago.
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- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
While we are talking power generation, we should work on better efficiency from appliances, equipment and reduce losses from transmission. Alternative power should also be researched, while it may not suitable now for heavy industry wind power could be used for isolated settlements for example.
I believe that TTL's USSR is fully exploiting coal deposits in the 1970s which are still essentially undeveloped in OTL 2024 Russia. The vastly expanded economy TTL comes with (and because of!) vastly expanded resource extraction TTL. Also as others have said, "peak coal" is more short for "peak rate of growth of coal", we're not going to literally run out of coal but we will soon run out of the ability to extract MORE coal year-on-year, every year. Impossible to have infinite growth in a finite system, etc.