Remove ads

Per Aspera (Space Agency Plan Quest)

Reader mode
I say we take some International M-L & C, CPAL, and FWW favor increasing options. The M-Ls and FWW currently have the most members somewhat opposed to us outside the SDL, and all four factions have significant amounts of members who could possibly be flipped to strongly support us. They also all have some highly synergistic options available to us: +2 Industry in Africa (CPAL+FWW), a Launch Facility in East Asia (ML+C), the Sao Paolo Scientific Complex (CPAL+C), and Phase 6 Materials research (FWW+C).
 
Last edited:
We should probably look into what facilities we want and use those to get support and bonuses.

We should also probably take this as a frebie:
[ ] Share the R-3 schematics with the UWF, Debsists and M-Ls. They will modify it into a capable artillery rocket. (+5PS, UWF moves 2d5 steps towards Favor, SDL move 2d5 towards Oppose)

We could also take:
[ ] Build a Launch Facility in Eastern Asia before 1956Q1 (+10PS) (Int(M-L) moves 2d10 steps towards Favor)
and
[ ] Build a Launch Facility in Asia by 1956Q1. (+10PS, Int(C) moves 2d10 steps towards Favor)
To gether to get 20 points of PS for only one project
 
Broaching nuclear power early seems good to me. It's a good platform for it. Take the bandaid off and all.
 
wow, literally the only people against spaceplanes are the SDL, and they're not long for this world. maybe we can do it anyway to wrangle some stuff out of them while they're here?
 
Rockeye said:
Broaching nuclear power early seems good to me. It's a good platform for it. Take the bandaid off and all.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'd rather do that next year when we've finished the initial project and made real progress. It'll likely cost less PS when we have more concrete results to show, too. Plus we already "took the bandaid off" when we spent -30 PS to get nuclear projects in the first place.
 
Seems like just about everyone wants their own science complex or launch facility. Can't really blame them since they're good for their respective regions.
 
Current WCC Budget: 32,000RpT//128,000RpY
Current IEC Budget (without extras): 320RpT//1280RpY (1%)
Current PS: 68

[] Budget: Nonpartisan Alloys
-[] [FUND] 1% ( -20PS)
-[] Conduct Materials Research (Phase 6) (+10 PS, Int(C) moves 2d10 steps towards Favor)
-[] Conduct Design Studies (Alternative Launch Systems) by 1955Q1. (+5PS, SDL moves 2d5 steps towards favor)
-[] Help sponsor the construction of 2 points of Industry or Infrastructure in colonized regions (+5 PS, CPAL moves 2d5 steps towards Favor)
-[] Build the Long Beach Propulsion Research Complex by 1955Q1. (+5PS, Int(D) moves 2d10 steps towards Favor)
-[] Research Support (-5PS, +3 to all Science and Engineering dice until 1955Q1)
-[] Redirect Funding to Africa
--[] Industry (-5 PS)
--[] Infrastructure(-5 PS)
-[] [GRAD] Science
-[] [GRAD] Science
-[] [GRAD] Facilities
-[] [GRAD] Operations

PS Change: -10
R Change: -20/turn
Int(C) moves 2d10 steps towards Favor
SDL moves 2d5 steps towards Favor
CPAL moves 2d5 steps towards Favor
Int(D) moves 2d10 steps towards Favor

No need for us to get involved in the World Council's...tensions. This budget should allow a fairly strong year of research consolidation, improved local conditions in Africa, and modestly gain support in along a few facets of the council.
 
Last edited:
So, a preliminary plan, with commentary:

[ ] Research Lab Construction Program
-[ ] [FUND] 1.5%
At 1.5%, we can activate all of our dice every turn. 1% is a bit low, and I think we can make a really good push this year. -60 PS.
Facilities dice usage:
-[ ] Build the Long Beach Propulsion Research Complex
Everyone wants this, it seems. It's +15 PS when you sum them all up. CHEM is also pretty useful.
-[ ] Build the Mombasa AND Sao Paolo Scientific Complexes
If we bump up our facilities dice count to 8, we can do this as well this year. AERO and COMP are important tags when thinking ahead, and they're not our highest stats. This gets us another 10 PS.
Engineering dice usage:
-[ ] Conduct Satellite Design Studies and launch the satellite before 1955Q1.
This is what we're here for. Throwing all three of our dice at this makes sense regardless. Spaceplane development studies and nuclear power might be possible, but they're not worth it in comparison IMO since they'd delay our orbital attempt. It's only +5 PS, but we were doing it anyways.
Science dice usage:
-[ ]Conduct Jet Research (Phase 2)
I'm lowballing our science commitments this year because I don't think we can make it to matsci 6. Exploratory Propellants 3 could be subbed in equally easily. I'd rather not take both, just to give us some wiggle room on the budget. +10 PS
-[ ] Do not pursue Spaceplane research
-[ ] Do not conduct military rocket launches or research
Not a fan of kowtowing to the SDL, but it's 15 free PS when we could really use it, and we aren't really planning on these anyways. 4 recon launches is way costlier and gets us less PS.
-[ ] [GRAD] Facilities (x2)
This is to get us enough facilities dice for an ambitious, but statistically very likely (98%) program of building three research complexes and finishing the minimum tracking stations for a good orbital launch IMO. These improve education in the region, which improves our long-term budget, and gets us a flat stat boost on rolls. It still leaves three to go towards stat increase rolls as well.

Total change is -5 PS, still leaving us better off than we were at the start of 1953.

Alternatively, we could do 4 recon launches, put at least one die into spaceplane research, and then we get to make the funny promise. Costs us 10 PS, but the memes.
 
Last edited:
Honestly I don't really want to do military stuff right now. Our character doesn't like it, and I kinda want to keep the dream of peaceful rocketry and not blow people up.

On the other hand I'm all for turning Africa into a hub of scientific advancement. That'd be fun.

On another note, the UWF is the only faction that has members in the strongly oppose category, but the Long Beach propulsion lab is a good olive branch for them.

@MSH you could add "Don't conduct military rocket launches" and get some free political support. Since we aren't tea doing that anyway. Though you'll probably annoy the UWF.
 
Last edited:
Shadowhisker said:
Looks like the SDL is falling out of favor- and really, that's good, fuck em. That does mean we need to find a good source of support, though. Currently the sucdems are giving the second most strongly favors and fourth most somewhat favors.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I don't think they're that bad personally, although I probably wouldn't vote for them IRL. My read on them is that they're a conservative broad tent party with some extremist elements. Unfortunately, said mistrust of the new and untested means that they aren't going to be big fans of us no matter what we do.
Doctor Elsewhere said:
I say we take some International M-L & C, CPAL, and FWW favor increasing options. The M-Ls and FWW currently have the most members somewhat opposed to us outside the SDL, and all four factions have significant amounts of members who could possibly be flipped to strongly support us. They also all have some highly synergistic options available to us: +2 Industry in Africa (CPAL+FWW), a Launch Facility in East Asia (ML+C), the Sao Paolo Scientific Complex (CPAL+C), and Phase 6 Materials research (FWW+C).
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Honestly, I wouldn't call Phase 6 Materials Research all that good of a deal, even with the synergies. We'd basically be nuking our ability to do any other Science stuff this year, and probably require taking additional Science dice as well.
C_Z said:
This is what we're here for. Throwing all three of our dice at this makes sense regardless. Spaceplane development studies and nuclear power might be possible, but they're not worth it in comparison IMO since they'd delay our orbital attempt. It's only +5 PS, but we were doing it anyways.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
It's a 5R, 100 progress project. We'd be delaying the orbital attempt by a single turn, if that. Not exactly a big sacrifice. In exchange we get a new launch vehicle with whose technology has more civilian applications (read can get us more support) and make the spaceplane faction within our organization very happy engineers. I'd say it's worth the price.
 
Last edited:
At the bare minimum, the SDL should expel its extremist wing, whom are noted to contain Populist Authoritarians and honest-to-god Monarchists. Would that be enough by itself? Probably not. But it'd earn them breathing room. Follow it up with some anodyne statement about being Stagist-Marxists or something and they can have their precious little welfare-capitalism for some more time.
 
I feel like the dice we want are science and engineering ones as we've got a lot of facilities dice already
 
always_confused said:
At the bare minimum, the SDL should expel its extremist wing, whom are noted to contain Populist Authoritarians and honest-to-god Monarchists. Would that be enough by itself? Probably not. But it'd earn them breathing room. Follow it up with some anodyne statement about being Stagist-Marxists or something and they can have their precious little welfare-capitalism for some more time.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

That'd work. And it'd placate everyone else, especially if they go and kill some of the statists that have set up in Chicago. Nothing to buy goodwill like killing someone's enemies. That's what I'd have done, though they might be a bit late.
 
Seeing a fare number of over lapping option. If we do a thing for one that an otheralso wants to we ge reward from both?

Good number of these facility requests sound like things we might want too build anyway.
I say go down too 0.75 and do the space plane things and some facility things that will help us long term.
 
always_confused said:
At the bare minimum, the SDL should expel its extremist wing, whom are noted to contain Populist Authoritarians and honest-to-god Monarchists. Would that be enough by itself? Probably not. But it'd earn them breathing room. Follow it up with some anodyne statement about being Stagist-Marxists or something and they can have their precious little welfare-capitalism for some more time.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
In theory that's a good idea. In practice however, given the wide range of conflicting ideologies in the party, any attempt to compile such a list is pretty much doomed to end in the SDL coming apart at the seams over who is placed on it.

I also don't think that they are as doomed as you describe. A couple of fringe politicians committing treason isn't going to destroy the party's credibility to that extent. They'll lose seats, no doubt about that, but their appeal to the older generations unsure about this whole "Communism" thing should be strong enough to survive. Once those folks start dying off in serious numbers in a few decades, then things will probably be different, but they have plenty of time to reinvent themselves before then.
 
I think that we should take a lot of Engineering or Science Dice and no Facilities dice this time, as Facilities are the most expensive categories of dice and we already need to invest some of them into the Tracking Stations for the Satellite.

Relatedly I don't want to take too many Complex commitments, though of course still take some, and instead more Research Commitments. I'll hopefully draw up a full plan eventually but wanted to get my thoughts out first.
 
Last edited:
Hunter531 said:
It's a 5R, 100 progress project. We'd be delaying the orbital attempt by a single turn, if that. Not exactly a big sacrifice. In exchange we get a new launch vehicle with whose technology has more civilian applications (read can get us more support) and make the spaceplane faction within our organization very happy engineers. I'd say it's worth the price.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I don't think the prototype space plane is a launch vehicle, but instead an X-15 type thing. It also only breaks even with the pomise to not do spaceplane research. If we finish first satellite early, we could go on to design our second satellite; I'd like to get our first generation of weather and communications birds up as soon as possible. It's also better to under-promise, since it means we don't have to activate all our engineering dice just yet and therefore can save money if something comes up.

MordredRaal said:
I think that we should take a lot of Engineering or Science Dice and no Facilities dice this time, as Facilities are the most expensive categories of dice and we already need to invest some of them into the Tracking Stations for the Satellite.

Relatedly I don't want to take too many Complex commitments, though of course still take some, and instead more Research Commitments. I'll hopefully draw up a full plan eventually but wanted to get my thoughts out first.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm not a fan of taking non-facilities dice. Each die we take is reducing the background stat increases:
Picking fewer Graduates than are available will add additional background rolls per quarter to increase the world's stats, such as Industry or Electrification. E.g., taking 1 fewer dice adds 1 additional roll per quarter for stats. This directly influences the world's Reconstruction rate and thus your baseline budget update during the next WC.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
The facilities choices can act to improve stats - science centres add +1 education, Big Ear (which is a joint science/facilities project AIUI) adds +1 infra and electrification, and we can presumably either demobilize the dice in a few years' time (i.e., letting other orgs use our infrastructure to get stat boosts) or do things like construct nuclear reactors around Mogadishu to get + electrification. Engineering doesn't have any associated stat boosts, so I think it's better that we get engineering dice through job fairs which aren't going to harm background stat growth, AIUI.
 
Upon further reading and discussion in Discord I have decided I support @C_Z 's Plan and won't be making a research focused one after all. The argument for the Research Complexes is just too strong with so much overlap there.
 
C_Z said:
I don't think the prototype space plane is a launch vehicle, but instead an X-15 type thing. It also only breaks even with the pomise to not do spaceplane research. If we finish first satellite early, we could go on to design our second satellite; I'd like to get our first generation of weather and communications birds up as soon as possible. It's also better to under-promise, since it means we don't have to activate all our engineering dice just yet and therefore can save money if something comes up.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I acknowledge that my choice of words was poor. Our first Spaceplane might not qualify as a launch vehicle, although given how developed our engines and other technology have become, I wouldn't be totally shocked if it does. Developing it is still likely to offer more civilian aviation benefits compared to alternative platforms, which I believe is worth the minor delays you described. Again, we will only need to use two dice on this, three tops.

Also, I don't think we'd save much money by not doing it. It's a 100 progress, 5R/die project after all. As it is, we'd have a 76.54% chance of completing it at a cost of only 10R, and a 97.52% chance of completing it for only 15R. If we were still stuck with only 3 Engineering dice I'd say you'd have a point, since it could be a bit tricky to fit it all in if the dice gods feel cruel, but we got that fourth die last turn. That should give us the slack to get everything done.
 
Hunter531 said:
I acknowledge that my choice of words was poor. Our first Spaceplane might not qualify as a launch vehicle, although given how developed our engines and other technology have become, I wouldn't be totally shocked if it does. Developing it is still likely to offer more civilian aviation benefits compared to alternative platforms, which I believe is worth the minor delays you described. Again, we will only need to use two dice on this, three tops.

Also, I don't think we'd save much money by not doing it. It's a 100 progress, 5R/die project after all. As it is, we'd have a 76.54% chance of completing it at a cost of only 10R, and a 97.52% chance of completing it for only 15R. If we were still stuck with only 3 Engineering dice I'd say you'd have a point, since it could be a bit tricky to fit it all in if the dice gods feel cruel, but we got that fourth die last turn. That should give us the slack to get everything done.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Forgot about the fourth die, it might be worth it in that case since we'd need to have a second project anyways. Hm, it might be worth it then, someone should run the odds of us completing both stages of satellite plus [insert other project] with four dice and see what we can achieve.
 
I dunno if I clarified but I feel like I remember someone asking the question: yes, when you finish a rocket development project you get a 'free' rocket of that type added to your inventory.
 
Neat.

Now we just have the question on if we should launch the R-4 as soon as it's available or if we should wait for the satellite payload to be finished.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top