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Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition

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Personally, I'd very much rather start renovating the cities rather than building civilian airports this turn. In a turn or two we should finish the metros and have enough money and dice to spend on and perhaps even focus airports, but if we don't start funding the cities now, we won't finish them before SupSov complaints even with dedicated efforts.
 
Simon_Jester said:
Making the computers upgradeable is also a big deal, and I understand it that's a big component of Hybrid Packaging. One thing we want to avoid is gigantic mainframe installations that are obsolete within a few years because there's no viable upgrade path and the whole thing has to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch.
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This is first-gen computing, these machines are never going to be upgradable. What we have to do is make them popular enough and have enough software to make backwards compatibility a thing, and to support semiconductor manufacturing and desig enough to get good technology down the line.

Also these are all huge mainframes. The lowest end 360 was 133k in 60's dollars and would take up a reasonably sized room.
 
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Is there no way we can do anything about the steel mill that completely fucked up our steel plans with a Nat 1 last turn? Cant we just overhaul it and get the full 79 steel production instead of the 24 it gives now?
 
Crazycryodude said:
Space rated electronics are garbage currently, the program started off disorganized and poorly defined, it's politically unpopular and one of the more expensive line items we have. Probably best to cancel it and circle back in a few years, if there's anything worth canceling it's an expensive, unpopular program that started off on a single-digit roll and isn't going to make or break some big prestige milestone like the moonshot. We couldn't risk touching the RLA lest we miss the moonshot but this is actively unpopular and if we get GPS a few years later or something it's really not the end of the world.
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As a bit of a counterpoint, the comms sats aren't a limiting factor for (just) GPS, but also for every single exo-planetary mission.

Anything attempting to land probes (or even just send them diving into the atmosphere destructively) will need an orbital mothership that can serve as a relay. Sending direct signals from the descender to Earth is impractical.
 
Solar Saiyan said:
Is there no way we can do anything about the steel mill that completely fucked up our steel plans with a Nat 1 last turn? Cant we just overhaul it and get the full 79 steel production instead of the 24 it gives now?
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No, this was the decision of local managers with the support of the local Soviets, they've made their grave and will lie on it. Voz is not going to waste political capital into that when he can just expand steel production in areas with low cost labor that are willing to use modern production methods.
 
I also would really like a plan that at least starts on Moscow or Leningrad even if very small to begin with
maybe spread things out between airports and city renovations
renovations in the cities also to allow space for airports
 
10ebbor10 said:
As a bit of a counterpoint, the comms sats aren't a limiting factor for (just) GPS, but also for every single exo-planetary mission.

Anything attempting to land probes (or even just send them diving into the atmosphere destructively) will need an orbital mothership that can serve as a relay. Sending direct signals from the descender to Earth is impractical.
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Yeah, but the orbital mothership relay is going to require vacuum electronics to be functional. Given how cursed our initial attempt was, I'm pretty sure "go back to the drawing board and improve the electronics" IS the option we take if we want communications satellites to be functional.

We're not going to get anywhere in space-based communications technology if the best we can do for the underlying hardware is launch copies of the Echo balloon.

agumentic said:
Personally, I'd very much rather start renovating the cities rather than building civilian airports this turn. In a turn or two we should finish the metros and have enough money and dice to spend on and perhaps even focus airports, but if we don't start funding the cities now, we won't finish them before SupSov complaints even with dedicated efforts.
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Honestly, I think we should ease off on the metros.

Remember, we've already funded metros for Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Stalingrad, Minsk, Sverdlovsk, Kharkov, Gorky, Novosibirsk, Stalino, Tashkent, Samara, Tbilisi, Baku, and Dnepropetrovsk. And now we're looking at Kazan, Chelyabinsk, and Odessa. Historically, these cities' OTL subway systems opened in, let me see...

Moscow: 1935
Leningrad: 1955
Kiev: 1960
Stalingrad: never (but kinda used some parts of it for a tram system that opened in 1984)
Minsk: 1984
Sverdlovsk: 1991
Kharkov: 1975
Gorky: 1985
Novosibirsk: 1986
Stalino: NOPE (USSR never funded the Donetsk Metro. Ukraine started it, but it's suspended indefinitely)
Tashkent: 1977
Samara: 1987
Tblisi: 1966
Baku: 1967
Dnepropetrovsk: 1995 (construction funded under the USSR, didn't finish until after the fall of the Soviet Union)
Kazan: 2005 (USSR never funded, Russian Federation funded construction starting in 1995)
Chelyabinsk: NOPE (USSR never funded, Russian Federation half-assed it, in 2021 said 'fuckit, maybe a tramline?')
Odessa: NOPE (USSR never funded, as far as I can tell no one's ever tried, city has only buses and trams)

Even granting that it takes up to a decade or sometimes more to finish a subway system with the best will in the world, we are WAY ahead of schedule. We are talking about finishing, by the early 1970s, two systems that historically were never completed and one that was completed only after the turn of the millennium.

We do not need to finish the metros now. We're good enough. We're doing great. It's 1960, and we've fully funded three metro systems that historically the USSR never funded in its entire history, and we're looking at funding three more that the USSR also never funded.


By contrast, our airport infrastructure is almost certainly a joke, behind even the OTL Soviet Union's. For example, let us look at the historical airports around Moscow:

Khodynka Aerodrome (Founded 1910, closed by the late 1940s)
Tushino Airfield (Founded 1933, dirt runway, seems to have served mainly as a place to watch airshow flyovers from during the Cold War)

Bykovo Airport (Founded 1933 with grass runway, upgraded to 1000m brick runway during World War Two, expanded/rebuilt in 1960s, defunct as of 2010)
Vnukovo International Airport (Founded 1941 as a military airbase, used for passengers afterwards, killed a Romanian foreign minister in an accident in the '50s)

Sheremetyevo International Airport (Founded as a military airfield, completed 1957, fully converted for civilian use in 1959, now busiest of the several airports serving Moscow)
Moscow Domodedovo Airport (Completed in 1962)
Zhukovsky International Airport (Completed in 1941, seemingly mainly as a military and emergency airfield, not really converted for passenger aviation until after the fall of the Soviet Union as I understand it).

The first two of those airports are hopefully already closed down or defunct as in OTL. The last three almost certainly haven't been founded yet. The middle two are probably the ones we're relying on. It's entirely possible that many flights flying into and out of Moscow are using a brick runway. I'm pretty sure that's not even possible for jetliners.

Seriously.

We need airports.

It's one of the areas where we're behind even the OTL Soviet Union, whereas in subway construction we are far, far ahead of them.

...

I think this is the same issue people have with the roads. We're heavily influenced by 21st century ideas about transportation and fuel economy, many of them inspired heavily by 21st century concerns and by specific desires to react against 21st century American problems involving the rise of suburbs.

And it's coloring our ideas about what infrastructure we can or should build in the 1960-era Soviet Union.

But a lot of that infrastructure was built, around the world, for very good reasons. Planes and trucks and cars provide functionality that railroads and subway tunnels cannot duplicate.

Trying to anachronistically beat global warming by having our one country deliberately stunt its transportation infrastructure in all modalities except rail is going to kick us in the ass.

We need roads and airports.
 
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Yeah I'm convinced about the value of airports. Making that shift plus catching a few math mistakes in my original draft let me put 3 dice into airports, plus a die into starting the Leningrad renovation (yell at each other over if that should be a 4th airport die if you want, they're functionally interchangeable from a budget perspective).

I still had 60R and a free die left over after that, and while we could put it in Services or Infra I noticed that upgrading our nationwide cold chain is a dirt cheap /150 action in Ag as "Enterprise Supply Management." I think that's being slept on, the cold chain is critical for supplying fresh food across large distances... like if you're trying to distribute fresh meat, fruit, and veggies across the largest country in the world where most people live massively inland from the ports the goods land at. I think it meshes well with the fruit program, as well as general vegetable intensification from pesticides and fertilizers, Voz is underselling it in his little blurb.

[] Plan Planes, Trains, Reefers, and Automobiles
[]Infrastructure, 5 Dice + 1 Free, 335 Resources
--[] Leningrad Renovation: 0/400, 1 die (50R)
--[] Passenger Rail Network (Western SU): 1551/2250, 1 die (75R)
--[] Civilian Airports (Stage 1): 0/300, 3 dice (150R)
--[] Telecommunications Infrastructure (Stage 4): 167/250, 1 die (60R)
-[]Heavy Industry, 5/8 Dice, 485 Resources
--[] Novocherkassk Locomotive Plant: 82/250, 1 die (80R)
--[] Further Arc Furnace Efforts: 0/250, 3 dice (330R)
--[] New Automotive Plants (Zaporozhye): 153/225, 1 die (75R)
-[]Rocketry, 3 Dice, 100 Resources
--[] Cancel Project: Communications Satellite
--[] Development of the Stalingrad Plant (Stage 3): 88/200, 1 die (100R)
--[] Hydrogen Engine Programs, 1 die
--[] Vacuum Electronic Development, 1 die
-[]Light and Chemical Industry, 8 Dice + 1 Free, 470 Resources
--[] Petrochemical Pipelines (Stage 4): 92/350, 3 dice (150R)
--[] Fertilizer Plants (Stage 4/5): 36/560, 4 dice (240R)
--[] Luxury Goods Initiatives (Stage 3): 63/200, 2 dice (80R)
-[]Agriculture, 5 Dice, 180 Resources
--[] Peoples Dietary Initiatives: 71/200, 1 die (40R)
--[] Enterprise Supply Management: 0/150, 2 dice (60R)
--[] GOST Standardization: 132/150, 1 die (20R)
--[] Development of Additional Fruits: 158/200, 1 die (60R)
-[]Services, 0 Dice + 2 Free, 120 Resources
--[] Film Studio Formation (Stage 3): 132/150, 1 die (60R)
--[] Television Station Development (Stage 3): 48/175, 1 die (60R)
-[]Bureaucracy, 5 Dice
--[] Dedicate Focus: Arc Furnaces, 1 die
--[] Advocate Cross CMEA Standardization, 1 die
--[] Accelerate Rural Development Programs, 1 die
--[] Negotiate with Kosygin and Podgorny, 2 dice
-[]Total Cost: 1690/1695 Resources, 5 reserved
 
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@Crazycryodude

I really do think we should prioritize Moscow over Leningrad for the renovations.

Politically, a lot of the Supreme Soviet is going to be pissy if Leningrad is getting major renovations years earlier than Moscow, and Moscow, not Leningrad, is the place we take foreign dignitaries first most of the time, so it's the place with show-off value.

From a Number Go Up standpoint, there's also the extra Free die, which would be really handy to have.

I know it's a slightly more expensive and about 1.5 dice larger project, but I really do think we get what we pay for.
 
I picked Leningrad first because Leningrad is 10R cheaper and has the older infrastructure in more dire need of updating, but I think more importantly it's where Voz and Kosygin's cliques are based. While I'm not opposed to funding Moscow in parallel to Leningrad in future turns, shoring up our alliance with the General Secretary and growing our own powerbase wins for me over playing to the Supreme Soviet, especially since we've got enough of a fig leaf about costs, need, experimenting on Leningrad first so that Moscow can learn lessons, etc. that they probably won't make too much trouble as long as Moscow starts within a year or two as well.
 
Re: Metros, I thought the current stage was supposed to be the final one anyway? As for airports, not only is our infrastructure sorely lacking but safety is so bad in what we do have that there's a non-negligible risk of Important Government People just suddenly dying in a plane crash. Anyways, by next turn we'll hopefully have both metros and the current telecom stage done, which will allow us to spare some dice for renovations and Enhanced Earthmoving. Still think that road-wise Trans-Siberian is the only priority, I'll elaborate more on that later when I have time.

DeltaV11.2 said:
This is first-gen computing, these machines are never going to be upgradable.
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How are generations defined? I thought we're on second-gen at least, given on turn 53 we completed something called "Next-Generation Computing Plant", and we further modernized the computer industry on turn 62.
 
Even the current hybrid logic is already decently past vacuum tubes, its starting the research efforts for board integration/single boards with a bunch of transistor units. Think along the lines of SLT or different attempts at HIC/non monolithic circutry integration using discrete transistors. Effectivly constructing SSI circuts on a modular-ish kinda board. Ranging to discrete things that reach into MSI.
 
Simon_Jester said:
I think this is the same issue people have with the roads. We're heavily influenced by 21st century ideas about transportation and fuel economy, many of them inspired heavily by 21st century concerns and by specific desires to react against 21st century American problems involving the rise of suburbs.

And it's coloring our ideas about what infrastructure we can or should build in the 1960-era Soviet Union.

But a lot of that infrastructure was built, around the world, for very good reasons. Planes and trucks and cars provide functionality that railroads and subway tunnels cannot duplicate.

Trying to anachronistically beat global warming by having our one country deliberately stunt its transportation infrastructure in all modalities except rail is going to kick us in the ass.

We need roads and airports.
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Another way of looking at it is, is that even countries that rejected the USA way of building cities, and perhaps mostly skipped suburbs entirely, still do have some level of roads and airfields, albeit less of them.

Freeways still exist for instance, though freeways through cities often times don't really and instead bypasses in semi or a full ring around a city is done instead. In such a case it isn't about pushing all the cars in to the city then, the design is more about keeping traffic that doesn't need to be in the city out of it.

And while short range airfields don't tend to see much use aside from some private fights enthusiasts and such, the long range large airfields do tend to see substantial use. Aircraft are in a sense a large bus that moves people between two far away points much faster then other modes of transport can. Or alternately moves them in large groups between places to small to justify the cost of a rail connection.


Also... as a final point of import, it is worth emphasizing that the people in charge of the USSR are really taken in by high density buildings... perhaps a little to much so even, especially on the very high density variants. And in the current plans for housing they'll be continuing to focus building along that direction for probably much of the decade at least. And this will greatly determine the immediate coming future of the cities and their needs as well. Basically, suburbs aren't even a real possibility to happen in the USSR for the next decade or two. Such inefficient house building as in suburbs, when there is a major housing shortage in general, probably really won't be favored. Truthfully I wouldn't be surprised if it's a luxury that can't even be very seriously entertained until the 80s at earliest, at which point suburbs are already on the way out in numerous places as an idea.


So in summary, I think you're right that one can't ignore the other transport areas to much, else you'll eventually hurt the maximum economic potential and flexibility of the USSR. And that the thing many a person fears the most could happen, has no potential to really happen for now anyway. But of course just to make sure it won't happen one can heavily bias infrastructure build out in certain directions, like has already been done with the development of the USSRs own high speed rail system.
 
I don't disagree that we should start focusing a bit more on airports, but I think it would still make sense to finish up this last stage of metros. It's what, 80 progress left? That's nothing, it might even finish in a single die. And it still provides a good amount of benefit.
 
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