-
Going forward, links to content from Twitter (now X) will no longer be embedded. Pre-existing links should not be affected.
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
- Alt. History Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
Yeah fair enough, those are in general fairly reasonable points.
And in the end I guess one also just has to see how one manages to translate it all through Voz as well... which is probably quite the challenge at times. Perfection won't be had usually I imagine.
[X] Plan Planes, Trains, Reefers, and Automobiles
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
- Location
- The Surface Of A Hostile Planet
[X] Plan Planes, Trains, Reefers, and Automobiles
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Well, doing the first phase of the "build a national motorway network" is probably pretty safe as a bet. That's the kind of thing that probably makes sense to do in and of itself regardless of Voz shenanigans.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah.
The flip side of that is that if he thinks we need to build highways and airports, we probably need to build highways and airports.
It's not part of some evil master plan to introduce a bazillion hectares of suburban tract housing to the Soviet Union via the back door.
...
Now what we really need to keep an eye out for is the dachas.
EDIT: Then again, dachas are by definition not places you stay or demand access to major heavy services and commercial districts, so it's probably not as much of a problem as one might think.
The flip side of that is that if he thinks we need to build highways and airports, we probably need to build highways and airports.
It's not part of some evil master plan to introduce a bazillion hectares of suburban tract housing to the Soviet Union via the back door.
...
Now what we really need to keep an eye out for is the dachas.
EDIT: Then again, dachas are by definition not places you stay or demand access to major heavy services and commercial districts, so it's probably not as much of a problem as one might think.
Last edited:
People need to internalize this: we will never have suburbs because we don't want them.
Anyway the highways are fine, building them as a bypass so we don't get traffic that just needs to go through the parts where the locals go to. Just don't open palm slam a Soviet interstate through the middle of Moscow because a cheychnyan neighborhood or whatever is there
Anyway the highways are fine, building them as a bypass so we don't get traffic that just needs to go through the parts where the locals go to. Just don't open palm slam a Soviet interstate through the middle of Moscow because a cheychnyan neighborhood or whatever is there
- Location
- India
- Pronouns
- He/His
Isnt that kind of counterproductive? They are not just hurting themselves, but also us, since we have to scramble to complete plans to get the stell production to where it shoild have been, instead of making new plans to get the already high steel production to obscene levels. We are being forced to play catch up, when this was the time for upgrades.
So, shouldnt we look into firing the managers with accusations of sabotage (mostly true) and heinous corruption, and then overhauling the steel plant?
- Location
- UTC+0
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They
Its annoying for us, not them, and its not necessarily sabotage or corruption, just managers going forward with unwise decisions for political reasons. In theory we could force the issue, but that would cost political capital, so why do that instead of just building a new one in a more efficient location?
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Very much yes. Suburbs don't happen because you start building four-lane motorways between major cities and then you just take one puff of that sweet sweet automotive addiction and then you're hooked.
The most likely thing to arise are, again, big tracts of dachas. Which have some of the problems, but very very much not all of them, for obvious reasons.
I don't think we're going to see much of that, though I also don't think there's much we can do meaningfully to minimize it. We don't have detail-level control of where motorways get built. But the design philosophy outlined for the motorways pretty clearly focuses on keeping them out of the city centers, so there's that at least.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
The real underlying reason we're in that bad position is that we rolled a 1. Something bad was gonna happen.
1) Accusing people of sabotage for making decisions the boss disagrees with is a Stalinist-era relic that we are well rid of.
2) Using central government politics to squash local political groups' ability to make impactful economic choices feels like the right move here, but the more we do it, the more of the OTL USSR's problems with central economic planning we're likely to have.
3) Ultimately, the reason we have this problem is because we rolled a Natural 1. Something bad was going to happen, and there's no "you win" scenario where we're going to be as well off as if we never rolled the 1. In practice, what happened was that the project "completed" but in a nerfed, inadequate manner. Could be worse.
4) Realistically, to get comparable results by forcing through the project, we'd have to do it all over again, with dice investment fully comparable to just building a new plant. And we'd be facetanking the problems outlined in (1) and (2).
I don't see the point.
- Location
- The great frozen north
Yes I know we will never have suburbs no matter what. I'm a little tired of people saying that, "doing better than the absolute nightmare of urban planning catastrophe that is the United States of America" is a very low bar and just because we clear it does not mean we are free of problems with car-heavy societies. Way back on Discord IIRC Blackstar said the worst outcome for us car-wise is along the lines of OTL western Europe which (if it still applies) would count as just barely tolerable in my book. It's been slowly getting better since the nineties, but Netherlands aside a lot of large cities still have too damn much urban traffic.
Anyways since my earlier plans clearly aren't winning, I'm changing my vote to
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
since it starts some of the computing modernization stuff.
Also speaking of nat 1s, have all those invasive catfish from when that fish farm exploded been causing any problems big enough to be noticed yet?
Anyways since my earlier plans clearly aren't winning, I'm changing my vote to
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
since it starts some of the computing modernization stuff.
Also speaking of nat 1s, have all those invasive catfish from when that fish farm exploded been causing any problems big enough to be noticed yet?
- Location
- Outside the Box
- Pronouns
- She/Her
For the Secondary City Metro Lines, I have to say that from a meta perspective, leaving a project deliberately unfinished when it's very close to being completely done has usually turned our very badly in planquests. This is hitting a lot of my "this is a dumb decision" buttons.
Having so many cities using metro lines this early in the timeline likely has major implications for urban development going forward. Having less cities than that means whatever large-scale benefits could be gained, won't be, because we didn't cross the threshold of proliferation gained by completing the project. Maybe it was a long term mistake to build so many metros so early on. But the question going forward isn't "develop lots of metros early in the timelines for ??? or spend dice elsewhere." Intentionally or not, that ship has already sailed, and most of those dice have already been spent. Now that it's so close to completion, deliberately stopping forever right next to the finish line feels like a massive own goal.
Having so many cities using metro lines this early in the timeline likely has major implications for urban development going forward. Having less cities than that means whatever large-scale benefits could be gained, won't be, because we didn't cross the threshold of proliferation gained by completing the project. Maybe it was a long term mistake to build so many metros so early on. But the question going forward isn't "develop lots of metros early in the timelines for ??? or spend dice elsewhere." Intentionally or not, that ship has already sailed, and most of those dice have already been spent. Now that it's so close to completion, deliberately stopping forever right next to the finish line feels like a massive own goal.
Last edited:
[X] Plan Planes, Trains, Reefers, and Automobiles
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
I'd tend to agree with that, once you've already spent a lot of the resources on it the real question becomes if you want the benefits from the small remaining cost or not. And cities to an extent are built around the infrastructure that is there as well. So it being there or not will influence the development over decades and more, including the economic potential.
So unless there was some huge issue to the project, I'm not sure why you'd want to do more then at most temporarily delay fully finishing it.
- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I don't think anyone advocated more than a temporary delay.
The problem is that we have a quite limited number of Infrastructure dice, we've already funded subway systems in nearly every city of sufficiently major economic importance to merit it and every system the USSR historically ever did fund them in, and meanwhile there are other areas of our infrastructure development that are lagging behind badly.
The question for debate, and basically this is something that went unaddressed or inadequately addressed in the past if you ask me, is "should we take a pause and prioritize, for instance, airports over continuing to fund the metros?" As in, "is having modern airports for Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev that are capable of accommodating passenger jets and safe air traffic control more a more pressing need than having subway systems for Odessa, Kazan, and Chelyabinsk?"
I submit that the answer is "...probably."
The complication is that we've pushed the metro construction program so far that we actually are in a credible position to say "just 1-2 more dice, and we'll have funded subways in every city Voz thinks can remotely justify needing a subway system, and then the issue will never trouble us again."
The complicating factor here is that we're explicitly presented with a "the perfect is the enemy of the good" situation. Now, at this point it may be too late to worry about it and we should just finish Stage 5 on general principles!
But more generally, we've repeatedly worked on an infrastructure project up to Stage X and then quit in this quest, or made the decision to leave a project "unfinished" such as the Balkan railroads. And there are real arguments for doing so. For instance, trying to keep doing more and more phases of the electrical grid "until it is done" would mean less resources for constructing high speed rail and housing and so on. Likewise, if we'd wasted time in the late '40s or early '50s doing gauge changes on every last fiddly little mountain rail line in Yugoslavia in an attempt to get every last village connected to the network without a gauge change being required, it would have eaten up 400 Progress worth of infrastructure we could have been using to, say, get clean water to Soviet households faster.
So we do need to recognize that in some cases, the correct move is to just mash the "stop" button on a project at a certain point and switch to another project, so that we don't end up with absurd or lopsided outcomes from metaphorically "skipping leg day."
[X] Plan Planes, Trains, Reefers, and Automobiles
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
- Location
- Europe
Honestly, probably this isn't right.
The metros which were built directly concurred in helping to reduce the quantity of bus needed. As in, the ministry should think about building more bus' factories if it slows down in making metros.
Night_stalker
Slava Ukraini!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
[X] Plan Planes, Trains, Reefers, and Automobiles
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
[X] Plan Moderate Technological Investment
There's maybe 2 million people total in 1960 Odessa + Kazan + Chelyabinsk, and that's with taking the OTL population numbers and adding like 50% which is probably too much. There are single districts of Moscow with more people in them than all three of the cities in question combined. Yes, we should go back and finish the metros eventually. But no, I do not buy that getting a metro system in a few third rate cities online a couple years earlier is going to solve our bus problem, the bus problem is bottomless demand from Moscow/Kiev/Leningrad and probably quite a few rural towns that have enough people/economic activity to justify a bus stop that never existed or got burned down by Nazis OTL, not three distinctly minor cities at the bottom of the priority list.
We're talking like Buffalo, Louisville, and Phoenix sized cities here, not New York and Chicago.
We're talking like Buffalo, Louisville, and Phoenix sized cities here, not New York and Chicago.
Last edited:
In all honesty, the metro funding and construction is often so fucked, historically speaking, that "the funding stopped halfway for six months or a year" is a very small problem. I still want to finish it soon, since finding a single free die for not the most costly project is not that difficult, but waiting a bit is unlikely to be a "massive own goal".
Last edited: