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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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I've been thinking that road development has been lagging behind for IRL/out-of-quest years and in-quest/TTL decades at this point: what can we seriously do to improve meaningfully, let alone fix this ongoing issue?

Our current trajectory seems nowhere near sufficient to 'catch up' to where our roads should be, which is seriously holding back most other sectors of the economy and economic development. This will only get worse if we continue letting the problem fester.

Would setting up a dedicated road-building/maintenance/network government (sub-)agency/ministry that we could delegate/"automate" road actions to be helpful?

Asking for a funding surge in the next plan specifically for roads (and perhaps making road-creation a core priority next plan and in every subsequent plan until the road system is adequate?), possibly raised with a temporary and targeted "roads fund" levy, or a round of national debt/deficit increases, or trying to cut (and repurpose) defence/military spending?

Trying to attract foreign road infrastructure investment to get more resources beyond what's immediately available from the domestic economy?

Whatever we do, it is clear we need to do something significantly different and probably more intensive/expansive/expensive, as what we are currently doing isn't working.

Apologies if I missed or misunderstood these ideas being proposed earlier, and as always feedback and additional ideas/brainstorming are more than welcome!
 
Negentropy said:
I've been thinking that road development has been lagging behind for IRL/out-of-quest years and in-quest/TTL decades at this point: what can we seriously do to improve meaningfully, let alone fix this ongoing issue?

Our current trajectory seems nowhere near sufficient to 'catch up' to where our roads should be, which is seriously holding back most other sectors of the economy and economic development. This will only get worse if we continue letting the problem fester.

Would setting up a dedicated road-building/maintenance/network government (sub-)agency/ministry that we could delegate/"automate" road actions to be helpful?

Asking for a funding surge in the next plan specifically for roads (and perhaps making road-creation a core priority next plan and in every subsequent plan until the road system is adequate?), possibly raised with a temporary and targeted "roads fund" levy, or a round of national debt/deficit increases, or trying to cut (and repurpose) defence/military spending?

Trying to attract foreign road infrastructure investment to get more resources beyond what's immediately available from the domestic economy?

Whatever we do, it is clear we need to do something significantly different and probably more intensive/expansive/expensive, as what we are currently doing isn't working.

Apologies if I missed or misunderstood these ideas being proposed earlier, and as always feedback and additional ideas/brainstorming are more than welcome!
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I think @Blackstar just needs to make it clear that our road troubles led to USA doubling down on roads and suburbia since Threadvied is operating from perspective of USA PTDS from suburbia.
 
ChaddicusMaximus said:
I think @Blackstar just needs to make it clear that our road troubles led to USA doubling down on roads and suburbia since Threadvied is operating from perspective of USA PTDS from suburbia.
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...but how does that resolve our problems?

Regardless of whether TTL USA has doubled down on its roads or not, or how OTL USA's road-centric transport infrastructure and planning have influenced the quest's thought process and internal biases, we are still left with a significant road deficiency in the USSR we need to resolve before it strangles our economic potential.
 
So, if each road stage needs 25 more progress than the previous, discounting our rolls this turn we need 493 (western) + 375 (caucasus) + 525 (ural) + 411 (central asia) = 1804 road progress. At an average roll of 90 that's, rounding up, 21 dice. Maybe another 7-8 dice on the stages of automotive infrastructure.

That's not THAT bad? we can finish that by the third turn of next plan easily, if we hyper-focus infra on roads
 
I guess finishing all currently visible projects would let one solve the worst road issues with in a few years of investment. Though I kind of suspect that just moves the needle from 25% required to 50% of required roads. Well still better then not moving that needle at all though.
 
My concern is that currently visible road projects are just the tip of the iceberg, and only once we start more aggressively tackling roads will the true scope of actions/projected and the associated resource + political costs necessary to get ahead of the problem will be apparent, especially considering the sheer scale of deficiency and the length of time it has been not or inadequately addressed.
 
ChaddicusMaximus said:
Wanna bet that we wont ? DiscordBureo treats roads like Stalin Trotskits.
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Do they really? Do you even participate in the Discord? Do you have a clear understanding of how this is just a specific subset of quest participants spitballing ideas, not a conspiracy of secret masters? I don't chime in on the Discord except once in a long while, but I see it, and frankly I think you're blandly repeating or sensationalizing other people's criticisms here, rather than speaking truth about the present time.

The people actually IN the Discord routinely put large road expenditures into their plan drafts these days and are not, in fact, a cabal of squabbling anti-road people.
 
General_Urist said:
So, if each road stage needs 25 more progress than the previous, discounting our rolls this turn we need 493 (western) + 375 (caucasus) + 525 (ural) + 411 (central asia) = 1804 road progress. At an average roll of 90 that's, rounding up, 21 dice. Maybe another 7-8 dice on the stages of automotive infrastructure.

That's not THAT bad? we can finish that by the third turn of next plan easily, if we hyper-focus infra on roads
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My estimate of the remaining progress for the projects we currently see, using a bit of discord information, is 3500 progress, so about 40 dice. We probably want to keep investing ~9 dice per turn into them for the time being.
ChaddicusMaximus said:
Wanna bet that we wont ? DiscordBureo treats roads like Stalin Trotskits.
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As a voting member of Discordbureau, I somewhat take offense to this characterization. No one outright hates roads or thinks they are unnecessary, but they are often easy to cut from the plans, especially when just recently thread was very into other infra. I doubt it would be well taken if anyone said "actually, sewers are getting cut, we're all on roads now". Now that the extent of problem has been made clear, we, as a thread, will probably manage to hold our focus for a while.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Do they really? Do you even participate in the Discord? Do you have a clear understanding of how this is just a specific subset of quest participants spitballing ideas, not a conspiracy of secret masters? I don't chime in on the Discord except once in a long while, but I see it, and frankly I think you're blandly repeating or sensationalizing other people's criticisms here, rather than speaking truth about the present time.

The people actually IN the Discord routinely put large road expenditures into their plan drafts these days and are not, in fact, a cabal of squabbling anti-road people.
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As someone that has participated in the Thread & Discord since before WW2 happened in the Quest, the anti-road memes/voices have only recently become not ubiquitous. You could basically expect a anti-road meme any time roads or their state got ever mentioned, and as one of the few old Pro-Road Discordburo members for several IRL years, you can not imagine how fast this joke became unfunny.
 
ChaddicusMaximus said:
Wanna bet that we wont ? DiscordBureo treats roads like Stalin Trotskits.
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Have the Discordburo been in the thread at all lately, when we've been very loudly told in and out of universe that we need several dozen dice of roads yesterday? Eh, never mind. The Discord doesn't have a monopoly on plan making.

agumentic said:
My estimate of the remaining progress for the projects we currently see, using a bit of discord information, is 3500 progress, so about 40 dice. We probably want to keep investing ~9 dice per turn into them for the time being.
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Huh. Could you please cite some of the discord quotes that indicate I'm off my a factor of two? I imagine there's some extra from yet-unseen projects like local roads in Siberia and maybe projects go up more than 25 a stage, but another 1700 progress is a lot.
 
General_Urist said:
Have the Discordburo been in the thread at all lately, when we've been very loudly told in and out of universe that we need several dozen dice of roads yesterday? Eh, never mind. The Discord doesn't have a monopoly on plan making.
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Let's not kid ourselves here. When is the last time even a non-discord plan has gotten traction, much less one against the discord? They've even shifted up more than a day into a vote and won.
 
General_Urist said:
Huh. Could you please cite some of the discord quotes that indicate I'm off my a factor of two? I imagine there's some extra from yet-unseen projects like local roads in Siberia and maybe projects go up more than 25 a stage, but another 1700 progress is a lot.
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It's second stage of Western roads being 400 and second stage of Automobile Infra being 300. With jumps like this, I assume next projects go up significantly and estimate from that.
 
We're currently considering how many of our new dice to add to infrastructure and whether it makes sense to do infra-services next next 5YP.

Personally I'm considering something like ++ Infra, + HI, CI-Services.
RentingViewer said:
the most recent one we had, the runner up plan to the leading one was close to it and was from a non discord plan
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It was also a clonemod of a discord plan, and by someone who's somewhat active in discord. :p
 
plotvitalnpc said:
We're currently considering how many of our new dice to add to infrastructure and whether it makes sense to do infra-services next next 5YP.

Personally I'm considering something like ++ Infra, + HI, CI-Services.
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Much the same debate as the threadviet regarding focus huh? Well, we won't really know until we see what each focus gives us on the plan vote.

As for dice, do we really need more HI and service dice? They'd be nice to have, of course, but unlike the desperate Infra and Chemical Industry I am yet unconvinced said convenience would be worth taking an additional malus to our global dice bonus.
 
General_Urist said:
Much the same debate as the threadviet regarding focus huh? Well, we won't really know until we see what each focus gives us on the plan vote.

As for dice, do we really need more HI and service dice? They'd be nice to have, of course, but unlike the desperate Infra and Chemical Industry I am yet unconvinced said convenience would be worth taking an additional malus to our global dice bonus.
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oh, to be clear, I mean 'add 2/3 of the dice to infra, add 1/3 to HI to ensure it doesn't fall off a cliff in this time of increasing coal burning and nuclear power spending, do a CI-Service focus'.

While in theory the extra atommash die will be compensated for by the freeing up of the HI die from the gas industry, there's a certain temptation to reduce the amount of gas we're burning for power and increase the amount of coal to make keeping on top of the CMEA gas demands easier, and that would eat into our HI die margins pretty fast. Plus we could just use a couple more HI dice to manage our current industrial transition.
 
DerechteNikolaus said:
As someone that has participated in the Thread & Discord since before WW2 happened in the Quest, the anti-road memes/voices have only recently become not ubiquitous. You could basically expect a anti-road meme any time roads or their state got ever mentioned, and as one of the few old Pro-Road Discordburo members for several IRL years, you can not imagine how fast this joke became unfunny.
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I sympathize, but how recently is "recently" at this point? In-quest, it's 1979. In-quest 1972 was six months ago in real life. In-quest 1969 was a year ago in real life.

General_Urist said:
OK I am now scared.
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When we think about how much work the railroad projects were, and that building out entire road networks involves clearing a lot more right-of-way paths, I'm not surprised if we're looking at "yeah, the country needs ~4000 Progress worth of roads" or something like that.
 
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Woggie said:
Once again, that is not at all an accurate indicator. We have no clue what percentage of roads we have compared to the ideal equilibrium point. We only have an offhand comment about building at 1/4th the speed as our ministers want to overcome the current crisis.
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Was it about funding rates? Though it is hard to recall many periods all that much was put in to roads... So I guess one could speculate if that has been the case for the entire life time of the USSR.
 
Quickshot0 said:
Was it about funding rates? Though it is hard to recall many periods all that much was put in to roads... So I guess one could speculate if that has been the case for the entire life time of the USSR.
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Only period where we put lots of funding and dice into roads was during Klimenko's time and that was to fix the horrible state of the roads, helped when we accepted a mandate to do lots of roads projects because of a crit fail.
 
plotvitalnpc said:
It was also a clonemod of a discord plan, and by someone who's somewhat active in discord. :p
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What, my plan? Yeah, totally a clone. But I am not on discord, and all you people spending time on there rather than discussing things on the thread are a buncha deviationists.

Negentropy said:
I've been thinking that road development has been lagging behind for IRL/out-of-quest years and in-quest/TTL decades at this point: what can we seriously do to improve meaningfully, let alone fix this ongoing issue?
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In the absence of reforms that would give us a stat to measure our road performance by, we'll just need to keep reminding ourselves to double check for clues to the state of roads in the option text.

In the short term though, it'll be pretty easy, we are a long way from overdoing roads, so the questions are instead ones of which roads to prioritize, and how much we can invest in roads without undermining something even more important.

Regards,

fasquardon
 
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