@Crazycryodude would you be willing to do the same?
Attempting to Fulfill the Plan MNKh Edition
- Thread starter Blackstar
- Start date
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Chimeraguard
We do deserve to exist.
I'm not sure if other plans would have enough resources. I have enough because I took away from Plastics Dice to put it on cheaper ConGoods projects, so I already had a decent-ish bank.
My plan (Which Cryodude copies for non-admin actions) had 5R reserve so it now has 20R reserve, airports->metros requires 25R.
@Blackstar - thanks for the answer. What's the status of the hydrogen engine again? Also, I take it that if Aristov is attacking the space program in the SupSov, the Soviet space program is MUCH more out in the open than in OTL. Do the Americans know about the Lunar goal of our program? And if so have they reacted?
Uff! That's it! First opportunity we get, Aristov is getting sent to run a geophysical observatory in Kamchatka! May he spend the rest of his life looking at volcanoes and knowing that their smoldering fires are a mere shadow of the rage in the belly of Nikolai Voznesensky!
The OTL Soviet Union was probably spending close to 5% of GDP on its space program, and he's complaining about us spending a little more than 1% on it!
It is certainly dangerous. When Kosygin first came in and the Cold War was less intense, it might have been a better route, but the problem with capitalist demand for finished goods is they are a) unreliable markets prone to precipitous declines in demand when they cut their toes off to fit into their own boots and b) have political reasons to avoid trading for anything too high up the value chain.
In OTL one of the main reasons for the Eastern European client states for coming apart economically is they all tried to copy what was going on in East Asia and taking Western (generally West German and French) loans to build up export industries. Unfortunately, by the time those facilities were able to produce goods, Western Europe was suffering through the oil shocks and instead the Eastern European regimes became dependent on borrowing to fuel consumption, which then necessitated painful austerity measures in the 1980s that critically weakened the regimes.
And while it is hard to predict exactly when the oil shocks will happen in TTL, the exponential increase in demand that will be currently going on will make the oil market vulnerable to some manner of oil shock some time between the late 60s and the mid 70s.
On the other hand, the potential gains are rather large as well. But... Personally I would rather develop the CMEA market whenever possible (one reason why I have been so keen to encourage immigration, as allowing manpower to move to more productive economies and send rouble remittances back home is an excellent way to encourage demand for Soviet exports).
I mean... I did warn people when we were considering the Lunar program that it would demand political capital, else things would end up even worse than continuing the Malenkov path and dealing with Glushko's efforts to sabotage the program.
The current space policy of the threadviet is maybe the biggest gamble we've taken in this quest, albeit, one that's much safer on a personal level than Sergo and Mikoyan playing chicken with Stalin's paranoia, but also a big bet on an uncertain project. If we succeed, the Soviet Union gets prestige and the tools to meet its scientific, economic and military goals in space with Falcon 9 levels of cost-effectiveness as early as the mid 60s. If we fail... Well, there are a number of failure modes. But the one that worries me the most is if we get the double-whammy of failing to land on the moon in time AND get suffer a post-program hangover similar to what the US had after Apollo, where political support is so badly weakened that the SupSov removes the ability of the space program to even do effective R&D and planning, leading to decades of ever-changing plans, half-assed programs, lost scientific opportunities, and 50 years of staggeringly expensive launch.
In my mind, the failure to land on the moon and Voz having to retire due to it would be the least bad half of that sandwich of woe.
Well, keep in mind the PKA isn't really a space plane as such. More of a space unpolished brick (compare with the OTL Space Shuttle with the fine aerodynamics of a whole polished brick!) It only has a cross range in, if I remember rightly, the hundreds of kms - a super valuable capability as far as improving landing safety and containing the recovery costs, but well short of the thousands of kms cross range of the Space Shuttle or the tens of thousands of kms cross range a true space plane (which could actually fly in the atmosphere) could manage.
And I expect the PKA to be of very little use for putting satellites into orbit. I expect it will mostly be used to support humans getting up and down and for space station logistics.
Regards,
fasquardon
Uff! That's it! First opportunity we get, Aristov is getting sent to run a geophysical observatory in Kamchatka! May he spend the rest of his life looking at volcanoes and knowing that their smoldering fires are a mere shadow of the rage in the belly of Nikolai Voznesensky!
The OTL Soviet Union was probably spending close to 5% of GDP on its space program, and he's complaining about us spending a little more than 1% on it!
It is certainly dangerous. When Kosygin first came in and the Cold War was less intense, it might have been a better route, but the problem with capitalist demand for finished goods is they are a) unreliable markets prone to precipitous declines in demand when they cut their toes off to fit into their own boots and b) have political reasons to avoid trading for anything too high up the value chain.
In OTL one of the main reasons for the Eastern European client states for coming apart economically is they all tried to copy what was going on in East Asia and taking Western (generally West German and French) loans to build up export industries. Unfortunately, by the time those facilities were able to produce goods, Western Europe was suffering through the oil shocks and instead the Eastern European regimes became dependent on borrowing to fuel consumption, which then necessitated painful austerity measures in the 1980s that critically weakened the regimes.
And while it is hard to predict exactly when the oil shocks will happen in TTL, the exponential increase in demand that will be currently going on will make the oil market vulnerable to some manner of oil shock some time between the late 60s and the mid 70s.
On the other hand, the potential gains are rather large as well. But... Personally I would rather develop the CMEA market whenever possible (one reason why I have been so keen to encourage immigration, as allowing manpower to move to more productive economies and send rouble remittances back home is an excellent way to encourage demand for Soviet exports).
I mean... I did warn people when we were considering the Lunar program that it would demand political capital, else things would end up even worse than continuing the Malenkov path and dealing with Glushko's efforts to sabotage the program.
The current space policy of the threadviet is maybe the biggest gamble we've taken in this quest, albeit, one that's much safer on a personal level than Sergo and Mikoyan playing chicken with Stalin's paranoia, but also a big bet on an uncertain project. If we succeed, the Soviet Union gets prestige and the tools to meet its scientific, economic and military goals in space with Falcon 9 levels of cost-effectiveness as early as the mid 60s. If we fail... Well, there are a number of failure modes. But the one that worries me the most is if we get the double-whammy of failing to land on the moon in time AND get suffer a post-program hangover similar to what the US had after Apollo, where political support is so badly weakened that the SupSov removes the ability of the space program to even do effective R&D and planning, leading to decades of ever-changing plans, half-assed programs, lost scientific opportunities, and 50 years of staggeringly expensive launch.
In my mind, the failure to land on the moon and Voz having to retire due to it would be the least bad half of that sandwich of woe.
Well, keep in mind the PKA isn't really a space plane as such. More of a space unpolished brick (compare with the OTL Space Shuttle with the fine aerodynamics of a whole polished brick!) It only has a cross range in, if I remember rightly, the hundreds of kms - a super valuable capability as far as improving landing safety and containing the recovery costs, but well short of the thousands of kms cross range of the Space Shuttle or the tens of thousands of kms cross range a true space plane (which could actually fly in the atmosphere) could manage.
And I expect the PKA to be of very little use for putting satellites into orbit. I expect it will mostly be used to support humans getting up and down and for space station logistics.
Regards,
fasquardon
While the RLA is a beast that has grown to consume ever more of out space budget, at least with the variable amount of external boosters we can attach we'll probably get more use out of it after the moon race ends than the US got out of the Saturn 5. If we want to launch anything with the RLA where it's full capabilities would be wasted, we can just remove the extra boosters. If we can use that to just keep production of it going, I imagine we could get a bunch of money "back" just through cost reduction from mass production.
Even with that, another reason we might consider rolling back the latest RLA expansion rather than the hydrogen engine is that it would reduce our budget a bit more than the other options, hopefully giving us a bit more breathing room if a project that we decide we have to take, even after this mess, comes up.
I'm still leaning towards cutting the Hydrogen Engines though, because even in the blurb it only said it might be ready in time for our moon shot. And while a really high specific impulse closed cycle hydrogen engine would be nice, the continued use of nuclear weapons for civilian use may shift SupSov attitudes enough that much higher ISP nuclear engines for upper stages may no longer be as toxic an idea.
Even with that, another reason we might consider rolling back the latest RLA expansion rather than the hydrogen engine is that it would reduce our budget a bit more than the other options, hopefully giving us a bit more breathing room if a project that we decide we have to take, even after this mess, comes up.
I'm still leaning towards cutting the Hydrogen Engines though, because even in the blurb it only said it might be ready in time for our moon shot. And while a really high specific impulse closed cycle hydrogen engine would be nice, the continued use of nuclear weapons for civilian use may shift SupSov attitudes enough that much higher ISP nuclear engines for upper stages may no longer be as toxic an idea.
Honestly, it makes me wonder what might be going on instead right now if all the way back then we had voted to do the space industry goal instead of getting on the race to the moon.
- Location
- The United States
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Americans have their own Lunar goal and the program is semi out in the open. In that most rank and file party members can read the general status/appropriations and you are using it as a propaganda device. The US is also playing the dump funding game, but both of you only have so much political support that can be expended on it.
You are thinking of all total military funding and the ICBM program as well. Which for you are another few percent. The downside of splitting away from the military is that you cant justify everything as a military necessity. And money spent on the program is well, money directly not spent on the people.
This will be a little long, but I hope it clarifies some of the reasoning going in to rocket systems and why one thing and not another.
The RLA is if I recall correctly a 4 meter diameter rocket stage, about the largest that will fit on the Soviet rail system. To compare this to a modern system we know, the Falcon 9, this has a 3.7 meter diameter. So it's pretty obvious from just this alone that we have potential for a medium class launch rocket with the RLA and those have been perfectly useful for a long time. So I think your production ideas are realistic enough, though many of the launches in future will probably end up just being the core stage as such, as that will be sufficient. (Though with 2-4 boosters it can probably hit super heavy loads as well, especially after further improvements. So basically there probably is near no near or mid term goal it won't be able to launch for the USSR at reasonable costs.)
As such the RLA should handle many of the launches in the future of the USSR and should have a quite reasonable yearly production rate which is probably substantially more then the Falcon 9 as they reuse their first stages. In fact now that's almost a certainty really due to how limited funding from the SovSup actually is, because apparently we will only be able to afford to create a single medium launch system while also financing a moon mission. Quite unlike how the USA market as such turned out. Combining this further with the Soviet economy and its clients being much larger, and that means all medium launch and heavy launch demand of this much larger market will all be funneled in to the RLA only. So basically it wouldn't be surprising if in busier years you're making an RLA core every week, if not even every few days.
Ah well, I guess as advantage of its exclusivity, it will in a year or two place the SupSov in the political position of having no choice but to support it at any cost actually required to complete it. Because it will be their literal only option at any real development level, they cancelled the alternatives and restricted funding for developing any other alternative (ie MCAS) to even be possible as well, so unless they want to fall behind the USA by an enormous level in the middle of a space race they will have to live with consequences of their choices. Certainly will make life easier for Voz in the political arguments in future I guess.
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Aside of the above, your thoughts on the hydrogen engine while interesting are missing some important details which put its value in a different light. Specifically, hydrogen engines can be used in atmosphere, so their efficiency is something you can use to get to space while nuclear engines are only usable once in orbit really. So in that sense losing the hydrogen engine is a bit unfortunate as it cuts the ability to have a more efficient launch in atmosphere.
Though having said that if we look at the history of hydrogen rockets, it is actually a bit of a mixed bag in practice as well. This is because rockets have an interesting trade off where how more efficient your engine is, how less raw brute force lifting power it tends to be able to create, I won't get in to why, it just simply is the case efficiency is less brute force. And this means hydrogen engines have always struggle to be made good enough to launch a rocket all on their own due to relatively poor thrust to weight, while this is perhaps solvable in principle with sufficient work, it's always been a major problem. Enough so that in general hydrogen rockets have tended to thus use boosters to get them up to altitude and speed a bit.
Now obviously the RLA can easily copy this solution by using non-hydrogen side cores and a central hydrogen core, and then you could reap much of the efficiency gain from orbit, though not all. But at the cost of now having two fuels and engines and having to work with annoying to work with hydrogen... so in that sense it was potentially a dead-end in creating the cheapest mass producible rockets possible, as you might have just stopped using the core after the moon mission as it was to overpowered for near any future mission bar perhaps a few. Still it would have been a nice additional technology for say throwing interplanetary missions to the outer gas giants. One can in the end basically say much the same about nuclear engine as well really, it just adds cost and complexity for something that will only be really useful if you have to launch things beyond what a standard medium launcher can launch. Which means only a very small minority of missions, so it's a very low production rate system then and as such expensive.
Still this doesn't mean one just has to stick to kerosene forever, there is a reasonable alternative with better efficiency efficiency in methane, all while still allowing for very good thrust to weight and thus brute force propulsion. So no boosters required, while at the same time you make a good step towards future reusability as it burns much cleaner. Also it stores at near the same temperatures as liquid oxygen, which means it has no additional handling difficulties beyond what already existed. And unlike the extremely not-dense hydrogen it actually is still reasonably dense still, and so it's possibly to be fit in a modified RLA with a stretched rocket body, a modification made on many rockets from the 60s over the decades.
So for those reasons losing hydrogen and just forgetting about it for now, and instead hoping one can get a methane engine instead would be a perfectly ok trade-off for us. It just fits much better if ones goal is to push costs down to the minimum.
Chimeraguard
We do deserve to exist.
Hmm, not enough resources to do it for all of them, but I wonder if I should swap 2 of my Dice on one Consumer Goods project for 2 on Plastic, so there's at least some progress being made.
Or should I just keep them all on Consumer Goods?
Or should I just keep them all on Consumer Goods?
- Location
- Northish
[X] Plan ConGoods and Medicine
Getting the consumer good shortage under control would bring more popular support and therefore political cover. Plus I don't want to have the same problems of Soviet citizens unable to get the basics of Western luxuries as we got in OTL.
[X] Plan CapGoods and Medicine with High Speed Rail
Ah, I see. I thought that when you said the amount was masked by spending by the military that you meant the 1-and-a-bit-% included the military.
OK, maybe Aristov can be banished to a slightly nicer retirement post.
Hm, so the US got serious about the moon in OTL on May 25, 1961, when Kennedy set the goal in a speech to congress. If the US is already cutting programs in their space effort (is there a NASA in this history, or is some combination of military branches doing it?) that implies they started earlier in TTL, which makes sense as the Soviets making a public commitment would put pressure on them to respond, even if most in the US likely have doubts on if we are crazy enough to actually do the thing.
Which means that we should be aiming for our effort to be ready by 67/68 for maximum effectiveness. (An earlier US start plus a more competitive Soviet program putting pressure on the race means that the US moonlanding could (assuming their program follows a trajectory like OTL) happen up to 2 years early. Though we're probably safe from a landing happening too much earlier, as the technological and economic capacities of the US place limits on how fast beyond the foundation of civilian tech they can push.
I'd prefer to Encourage CMEA HSR instead of Push Towards Trade Agreements, so I'll stick in a vote of confidence for your plan, and also make an alternative with that change.
[X] Plan ConGoods and Medicine
[X] Secondary Metros and CMEA HSR
-[X]Cancel MKAS and Hydrogen Engines
-[X]1910/1925 Resources (15 Reserve), 31 Dice Rolled
Infrastructure (7/5 Dice, 420 R)
-[X]Secondary City Metro Lines(Stage 5), 1 Dice (75 R)
-[X]Moscow Renovation, 2 Dice (120 R)
-[X]Leningrad Renovation, 1 Dice (50 R)
-[X]Passenger Rail Network(Western SU), 1 Dice (75 R)
-[X]Civilian Airports(Stage 2), 1 Die (50 R)
-[X]Unified Canal System(Step 1 of 3), 1 Dice (50 R)
Heavy Industry (7/8 Dice, 750 R)
-[X]Severouralsk MMK(Stage 1), 2 Dice (150 R)
-[X]Coal Power Plants, 3 Dice (300 R)
-[X]Second Generation Precision Machinery, 2 Dice (300 R)
Rocketry (0/2 Dice, 0 R)
Light and Chemical Industry (8/8 Dice, 420 R)
-[X]District Gas Heating(Stage 3), 1 Dice (60 R)
-[X]Fertilizer Plants(Stage 4/5), 1 Dice (60 R)
-[X]Consumable Product Initiatives(Stage 1), 2 Dice (100 R)
-[X]Textile Industry Modernization(Stage 2), 2 Dice (100 R)
-[X]Chemicalization of Alcohol Production, 2 Dice (100 R)
Agriculture (3/5 Dice, 160 R)
-[X]Expanding Rural Production, 2 Dice (100 R)
-[X]Secondary Agricultural Production, 1 Dice (60 R)
Services (3/0 Dice, 160 R)
-[X]Review of the Pharmaceutical Industry, 1 Dice (60 R)
-[X]GOST Medical Standards, 2 Dice (100 R)
Bureaucracy (5/5 Dice, 0 R)
-[X]Dedicate Focus Towards a Project(Coal Power Plants), 1 Dice
-[X]Dedicate Focus Towards a Project(Second Generation Precision Machinery), 1 Dice
-[X]Encourage CMEA HSR, 1 Dice
-[X]Currency Agitation, 1 Dice
-[X]Fire Incompetents, 1 Dice
Regards,
fasquardon
- Location
- UTC+0
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They
Isn't fire incompetents this turn a bit risky? We are already under attack from both wings of the Party, I feel like this might be drawing a target on ourselves since this would be Voz firing people aligned to those wings and replacing them with cronies. Also, not thrilled about losing free dice.
[X] Plan CapGoods and Medicine with High Speed Rail
[X] Plan CapGoods and Medicine with High Speed Rail
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Stellarengine676
To eternity we shall ride
- Pronouns
- He
[X] Plan CapGoods and Medicine with High Speed Rail
The second generation tooling will help the military and rocket program immensely.
The second generation tooling will help the military and rocket program immensely.
[X] Secondary Metros and CMEA HSR
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What shortage? Every report we see talks about how production is growing faster than domestic consumption and we're making big piles of money on exporting excess consumer goods.
[X] Secondary Metros and CMEA HSR
- Location
- The great frozen north
Huh, seems the status page has not been updated with our new deputy ministers yet. Do they just take a little time to get promoted? Anyways, decided to check on what the lads in the rest of the Soviet government are up to.
Same ol' good stuff. But not sure if Stalinism really still needs pressure, or if Kos is witch-hunting.
Keeping order, and keeping thing honest. A good and quiet politician, if that is what it says.
Working on that military expansion after the Vietnam freakout. He's been working on that Plutonium target for a long time, how long does reaching 6 tons a year take?
He's really committed to preparing for a unified currency. Nice, I hope this works out!
Still poking Italy (questionable) and France (poggers). I am curious how the state building is going, I am curious if any sub-saharan borders are substantially different from OTL due to Britain doing the "drop the colonies and run" thing in 1953.
Well this is interesting! Way back when forming a goverment with Kos, Dudorov floated a prison reform out of fear our system was becoming slavery-like due to perverse incentives. We unfortunately had to scupper that for sausage-making reasons. Barsukov taking a long look at the prison-labor system will probably discover the extent to which the problem exists and how bad it's gotten. Hopefully, this will give us a second chance at doing that prison labor reform to make our system wholesome again.
This guy is heating things up! Supplying weapons to South Africa is good, let the Boer Horde get burnt for supporting Rhodesia! But arming the Communist Party of Italy? My guess is that he looked at the right-wing crackdown and decided that civil war is the only hope for leftism's survival in the boot. This could get rather messy.
My understanding: They ceasefire(?) with them holding a strip of land along the Algerian coast. It'll ignite again any moment.
