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Per Aspera (Space Agency Plan Quest)

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CyberEnby said:
I think it makes more sense to stay on target with Rocket Boxes. It demonstrates that we did all we could to meet our promise and were on track to do it but got delayed by circumstances outside our control.

Hedging next turn by doing three dice on Tracking Station Survey's would probably be better to alleviate the sting of not finishing rocket boxes by generating leverage elsewhere.
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I don't think the surveys themselves do that, just the possibility of committing to building the stations. Which we might want, but I doubt an overfulfillment on the surveys themselves will be worth much (since the construction is in a different category anyway). Agreed on holding the course on rocket boxes though.
 
CyberEnby said:
I think it makes more sense to stay on target with Rocket Boxes. It demonstrates that we did all we could to meet our promise and were on track to do it but got delayed by circumstances outside our control.

Hedging next turn by doing three dice on Tracking Station Survey's would probably be better to alleviate the sting of not finishing rocket boxes by generating leverage elsewhere.
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I'm wary of plan continuation bias. We don't know if we'll get anything for trying but failing to complete it, but we could get stuff from the other options. I'm not sure if it's the right choice, but we should explore what available options we have now that the likelihood of succeeding is so low.

With how poorly we did on our rolls, I think going all in on TSS is smart as well. I don't think it'll actually gain us much on its own (I think the benefit will mostly be future promises of "yeah we can do the political corruption thing and agree to build a tracking station where you want, councilor"), but heading into a very tough assembly, we need all the help we can get.
yeastmobile said:
Agreed, we dont need the politic dice for anything else right now and we have two turns to do it in so high hopes there!
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Only one turn left now, AIUI (we're on Q4 1952), and there are several things that we could do otherwise:
[ ] Bothering Councilors - The year's budget is set, but next year's is very much not. You can influence investment priorities if you want to apply enough political pressure to the right people to convince them to fund, say, better roads out of Mogadishu… elementary and secondary schools in Africa… that kind of thing. (-10 PS, roll a quality dice to give options for influencing infrastructure funding, triggers subvote)

[ ] Rocket Reels - The test footage the IEC produces for scientific value can be easily copied and turned into high-octane spectacle for the purposes of swaying the public's opinion and imagination. The best part is, the more rocket launches you do, the better your reels get. (5R per die, 0/120, gain a coinflip for 1 additional Political Support per quarter; successful rocket launches give you an additional coin flip for each launch.)

[ ] Space For All - The PAO survey revealed that most people just… don't think about space with any regularity, if at all. The best and most common way for people to get into it seems to be as children, getting their imaginations fired by comic books and science fiction and the occasional radio drama or movie. The PAO proposes developing a set of educational films and television shows aimed at all age groups to tell them about the amazing wonders of the universe and what we can accomplish in it. (5R, 0/120, +10PS on completion, ???)
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Bothering councilors directly can get us more budget next year, offsetting the loss we'll experience from reduced support and other priorities.

Rocket Reels doesn't help in the short term, but does result in a reliable source of PS.

Space for All grants an immediate boost in PS that we could barter away when negotiating next year's budget and likely has other, beneficial effects (the [???])
 
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C_Z said:
Only one turn left now, AIUI (we're on Q4 1952), and there are several things that we could do otherwise:
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Ah only one turn? Well, regardless of the other choices I would think it would be better narratively to continue doing what we're doing to try and meet our goals as a show of good faith to the council even if we fall short. There might be less grumbling and a lower PS cost and we still have a small possibility of completing the thing. Heck someone could write an omake about it and boost our odds a little futher.
 
yeastmobile said:
Ah only one turn? Well, regardless of the other choices I would think it would be better narratively to continue doing what we're doing to try and meet our goals as a show of good faith to the council even if we fall short. There might be less grumbling and a lower PS cost and we still have a small possibility of completing the thing. Heck someone could write an omake about it and boost our odds a little futher.
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Yeah, we had one year to do it, and we made the promise before the start of 1952 Q1.

Even with an omake bonus, our odds are... bad. Really bad.

It's also worth remembering that the benefit we got from this promise was "(+5 PS, CPAL moves 2d10 steps towards Favor)". If the penalty isn't greater than what we gained from the initial promise and we're willing to accept CPAL not liking as much us for a bit, we could get a much more likely shot at +10 PS from Space for All by putting three dice into it. I'm hesitant to loudly advocate for this, though (beyond "hey let's consider") because the penalty may well be more than the 5 PS we initially gained.
 
Poor roll on building another rocket, though we had a real good run getting a rocket built every quarter until now. Good thing we have a spare.
I think that's a launch failure by 1 point. So hopefully just some sort of failure that prevents the launch rather than a big explosion.
Finally the computers roll well. Probably too well since we overshot by a whole 2/3rds.
Good stuff on orbital. Probably complete the first phase next quarter. Mobile good too.
Meh engineering rolls and finally some really terrible politic rolls.

Rocket boxes are probably not going to complete. Even with a +39 and a reroll we still need rolls worth 236 points next turn. Possible I guess.
Guess we should have been a bit more careful agreeing to what turned out to be a 675 point project.
 
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C_Z said:
Yeah, we had one year to do it, and we made the promise before the start of 1952 Q1.

Even with an omake bonus, our odds are... bad. Really bad.

It's also worth remembering that the benefit we got from this promise was "(+5 PS, CPAL moves 2d10 steps towards Favor)". If the penalty isn't greater than what we gained from the initial promise and we're willing to accept CPAL not liking as much us for a bit, we could get a much more likely shot at +10 PS from Space for All by putting three dice into it. I'm hesitant to loudly advocate for this, though (beyond "hey let's consider") because the penalty may well be more than the 5 PS we initially gained.
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SFA is an options, but yeah, I feel like we're less likely to be dinged with a big penalty is we do our best to fulfill our initial promise rather than play political games.

We're at 40 PS right now, which is not ideal by any stretch, but I think we can afford burning some of it to maintain our current resource allotment. Especially if we can go straight to doing SFA in Q1. Again, fingers crossed that we can gain PS by promising not to do stuff because those are effectively free infusions of PS.
 
Maybe we can shift a die elsewhere next turn, but we definitely should not drop rocket boxes totally. A quarter with minimal effort into it makes it look like we're abandoning the promise and that does not look good.
 
CyberEnby said:
SFA is an options, but yeah, I feel like we're less likely to be dinged with a big penalty is we do our best to fulfill our initial promise rather than play political games.

We're at 40 PS right now, which is not ideal by any stretch, but I think we can afford burning some of it to maintain our current resource allotment. Especially if we can go straight to doing SFA in Q1. Again, fingers crossed that we can gain PS by promising not to do stuff because those are effectively free infusions of PS.
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Agreed, if we spend three dice next turn we will have spent 11/12 applicable dice on Rocket Boxes this year. That sends a very powerful message that we gave it our best shot, but circumstances beyond our control foiled our plans. Cutting dice spending now that it looks unlikely to complete in time (although by no means impossible) sends a rather different, and less appealing, one.
 
Chlof said:
Construct a 2-Stage Sounding Rocket (2/45) - 13/45 / Launch - 49
Construct a Computational Research Facility (103/180) - 300/180
Conduct Design Studies (Early Orbital Rocket) (Phase I) [AERO, PHYS] (59/300) - 233/300
Mobile Launch Operations (0/50) - 90/50
Tracking Station Surveys (27/150) - 66/150
Conduct Materials Research (Phase 1) (15R per die, 0/150) - 74/150
Rocket Boxes (Phase 3) (3/350) - 75/350
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Launch success. To-Pass is >40.
 
Next turn lets finally get our heavy sounding rocket going, research and launch site. Get experience with something a little bigger than the small rocket we have before we go into orbital rockets.
 
Man, we overshot the target for the Computation Research Facility by two-thirds. I wonder if we'll get any little bonus for that achievement?

One of the most annoying things in a planquest is when your roll average is on paper average... but most of the bad rolls hit on ongoing projects and most of the good rolls hit things with only a little left to complete, meaning a lot of progress gets used up on overshooting a DC.
 
General_Urist said:
Man, we overshot the target for the Computation Research Facility by two-thirds. I wonder if we'll get any little bonus for that achievement?

One of the most annoying things in a planquest is when your roll average is on paper average... but most of the bad rolls hit on ongoing projects and most of the good rolls hit things with only a little left to complete, meaning a lot of progress gets used up on overshooting a DC.
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Oooo, maybe we can branch out into some paths not taken on computation and data storage? Wires instead of magnetic tapes?
 
It would be nice to have at least one free dice. Just in case we have a project we need some extra effort in. Like the Rocket Boxes next turn.
 
trooperist said:
It would be nice to have at least one free dice. Just in case we have a project we need some extra effort in. Like the Rocket Boxes next turn.
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Yeah, and we could chip away at the slight excess of resource points we have accumulated. The Council might be less inclined to cut our budget if they see us making us of all of it.
 
I'm personally not a super-huge fan of that just because I think it's more mechanically interesting for us to need to weigh the risk of committing too many dice to something and "wasting" one. Losing is fun!

On a different note, I just noticed that we likely have a name vote for our mobile launch platform coming up. Anyone have any ideas?
 
C_Z said:
I'm personally not a super-huge fan of that just because I think it's more mechanically interesting for us to need to weigh the risk of committing too many dice to something and "wasting" one. Losing is fun!

On a different note, I just noticed that we likely have a name vote for our mobile launch platform coming up. Anyone have any ideas?
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I remain a big fan of (Deity Name) (Letter of the Greek Alphabet) combination. It gives very Pacific Rim vibes:

Sekhmet Alpha.
 
I like the idea of just giving it a generic name and everybody calling it the Rocket Truck, because of the connection to Rocket Boxes - it's exciting for a Rocket Box arrive, but if you're really lucky a Rocket Truck will show up and launch a truck-sized rocket close enough to watch. Since they'll probably see thousands of uses across the world in the next few decades, I figure it could something a lot of people get an opportunity to see - once the rocket itself gets a lot more reliable!
 
Dessard said:
I like the idea of just giving it a generic name and everybody calling it the Rocket Truck, because of the connection to Rocket Boxes - it's exciting for a Rocket Box arrive, but if you're really lucky a Rocket Truck will show up and launch a truck-sized rocket close enough to watch. Since they'll probably see thousands of uses across the world in the next few decades, I figure it could something a lot of people get an opportunity to see - once the rocket itself gets a lot more reliable!
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"Mobile Rocket Launch System Model 1952, or, as it's more commonly called, the 'rocket truck'"

:D
 
Oh jeez, both Rocket Truck and Mobile Launch Rocket System are so good, I don't know which one to vote for!

It's probably a good thing AnCom space program beat the Imperial Victory scenario in the opening vote. Because otherwiser probably wouldn't get the fuzzy feeling from educating the downtrodden people of the world, and probably would find ourselves sending killdozers to take land from the natives when we wanted to build new facilities.
 
General_Urist said:
Oh jeez, both Rocket Truck and Mobile Launch Rocket System are so good, I don't know which one to vote for!

It's probably a good thing AnCom space program beat the Imperial Victory scenario in the opening vote. Because otherwiser probably wouldn't get the fuzzy feeling from educating the downtrodden people of the world, and probably would find ourselves sending killdozers to take land from the natives when we wanted to build new facilities.
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We'd be building F U N hypergolic missiles tho.

And an absolutely cancerous space program based on hydraflox propellant.
 
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