Aw hell yeah, back in business! The economy is chugging along pretty well sounds like, perpetually short on electricity but hopefully we get over the hump in the next year or two as hydro spins up and the coal plants build a buffer. Just in time to suddenly need more domestic aluminum for the space program and obliterate our carefully hoarded power surplus, I'm sure. Petro complex is doing its thing, Ag and Services sound.... fine, they're not really a huge focus of the FYP but they're doing what they do well.
As for the votes.... we really should not pull a Malenkov and just detonate the ministry. We're not the sole crusader fighting against the tide here, the political currents are already leaning towards a broadly effective-ish wave of anti-corruption. Play along, offer up some heads that need to go anyways, but our old friend decisive action is probably a bad idea. It's also a bad idea to evade the investigations though, they do need to happen, the best option for Ministry stability is probably offering up a few choice suspects, while the best option for cleaning out Ministry corruption long term is probably killing time and forcing the bad apples out peacefully on a pension instead of detonating our support base with mass public firings.
I could go for either []Equivocate or []Form Suspects, leaning towards the former, as long as we trust Voz to actually pressure a lot of the corrupt old guard into taking their pensions and leaving before the cops drag them out kicking and screaming. Thoughts?
For the political response, I think there's a solid chance we can get away with playing the firebrand. It'll piss off the SupSov, but between Kosygin and the new radical bloc I think there's enough support that we won't be fired, and if the Party expansion programs do their job the next few SupSov elections should see increasing turnover pushing out the old Stalin-era idiots who we'd be pissing off anyways (please ignore that we're also from the Stalin era, we're not an idiot). If we don't want to play the firebrand then I think we should probably just shut up, joining in the struggle session and mass denunciation against the people who are already doomed is a little too Stalin-y for my tastes, shutting up and doing our job is always a safe fallback. So either []Act like a Firebrand or []Stay Passive for me.
Rocketry I think is pretty easy, although not in the way y'all might expect. Shoot for the 1960 window, we absolutely cannot afford to risk getting beat by the Americans until we have a few more milestones under our belt. We're already on thin ice for Sputnik getting beat by a few weeks, if the Amis beat us to Mars by years we're gonna be in even more political trouble. It's not about the science here, it's about minimizing the risk of getting fired. And if/when the rushed 1960 probe doesn't work super well, at least we rolled the dice, and the 1962 window isn't going to stop being there. We can just also start a 1962 program, either in parallel or after the 1960 program fails. Even if we just run the exact same program again for 1962, two repeated rolls against a 40% success chance have a much higher probability of succeeding than one roll against a 50%. And we'll probably learn enough from the 1960 shot, even if it fails, to make a '62 shot better than 40% success chance.
I definitely don't want to gamble getting beaten to Mars on a coinflip, the Amis will quite possibly be making their own shot in the '62 window, we need to roll early and often. []Rushed Minimal Probe for me, easy.
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