- Location
- Minnesota
Fair enough on the R&D team's specialty, I blame the hiatus for not remembering that. That still doesn't address your plan not looking for a food production genius.
Preparing for the Storm
- Thread starter Rockeye
- Start date
Fair enough on the R&D team's specialty, I blame the hiatus for not remembering that. That still doesn't address your plan not looking for a food production genius.
We don't have any more time.
We don't have the time to form a Department first and make a good organized design.
We are at the point where we stop digging a hole, and start pouring concrete and making irreversible decisions on our bunker layout. Farming must be considered now in those decisions or else we will be unable to perform underground farming with any efficiency at all. Resulting in low crop yields and failure of the main quest.
We should have taken action to create a Agriculture Department one or two turns ago. You are arguing that because we didn't plan for farming when we should have that we should continue to fail to plan for farming.
Continuing to put this off just means a massive failure and massive expense later to try and correct it.
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Fezzes
Knight of King Stannis Baratheon
- Location
- Sydney, Australia
I'm saying we plan for it ASAP, but in the most efficient way: forming a department. I've already gone over why that's better than doing it in our R&D Queue.
We can factor it in to our decisions. But regardless of what option we take right now, we'll hit that decision point before we have even a quarter of a solution to make our estimates off. Maybe we should've done it earlier. Maybe we shouldn't have. It's too early to call it, and you're 100% fearmongering by saying that we will be totally unable to farm and proceed to die if we do not take the Farming R&D option. Recall, we built the Granary, we have years of stockpiled food. We genuinely do have time to make a department and build expansions if we have to.
- Location
- Minnesota
I would like to offer a compromise plan as a means of resolving the tie:
[ ] Plan Compromise
Jay Gould
[ ] Report
Sterling Airship Yards R&D Queue
[1] "The Behemoth" - This titanic airship will be built on a scale fit for Jules Verne. It will be half a mile long, have Heat Level 6, have immense range and carrying capacity. It will also be staggeringly expensive to build. CONSTRUCTION CAN BEGIN. DESIGN STILL ONGOING.
[2] Underground Power (Radium) - A source of power that doesn't consume all your oxygen is absolutely vital for long-term underground sustainability. Develop one based on Radium. (Manan Noor is an Expert at this).
[3] Heated Suits - By heating the crew and not the entire vessel, you can give them two Heat Levels. These might be useful in other places than onboard your airships, too.
Personal Project Queue
[1] Form Military - Find some capable military men you can put in charge of turning the scattered marines and guards across your network into an army, or at least a good militia.
[2] Search for more academic geniuses you can attempt to hire. Geniuses in Food Production: aquaponics, underground agriculture with artificial lighting, animal husbandry, cooking and nutritionists.
[3] Manage Construction - Personally supervise the initial excavation and construction work at Sterling. You're not quite an expert on this subject, but personal oversight will still speed things up by about 10-20%
Investigation/Acquisition Queue
[1] Water and sewage engineers who can move on short notice. (speeds up or replaces equivalent construction action)
[2] Vet your newly forming military to make sure the other officers are reasonably loyal to you as well as their commander.
[ ] Plan Compromise
Jay Gould
[ ] Report
Sterling Airship Yards R&D Queue
[1] "The Behemoth" - This titanic airship will be built on a scale fit for Jules Verne. It will be half a mile long, have Heat Level 6, have immense range and carrying capacity. It will also be staggeringly expensive to build. CONSTRUCTION CAN BEGIN. DESIGN STILL ONGOING.
[2] Underground Power (Radium) - A source of power that doesn't consume all your oxygen is absolutely vital for long-term underground sustainability. Develop one based on Radium. (Manan Noor is an Expert at this).
[3] Heated Suits - By heating the crew and not the entire vessel, you can give them two Heat Levels. These might be useful in other places than onboard your airships, too.
Personal Project Queue
[1] Form Military - Find some capable military men you can put in charge of turning the scattered marines and guards across your network into an army, or at least a good militia.
[2] Search for more academic geniuses you can attempt to hire. Geniuses in Food Production: aquaponics, underground agriculture with artificial lighting, animal husbandry, cooking and nutritionists.
[3] Manage Construction - Personally supervise the initial excavation and construction work at Sterling. You're not quite an expert on this subject, but personal oversight will still speed things up by about 10-20%
Investigation/Acquisition Queue
[1] Water and sewage engineers who can move on short notice. (speeds up or replaces equivalent construction action)
[2] Vet your newly forming military to make sure the other officers are reasonably loyal to you as well as their commander.
redzonejoe
Vaguely Pastafarian
- Location
- Canada
K so I had this quest in an open tab that I meant to get to eventually for a long while now, and eventually ended up being today.
[X] Plan Finishing basics
Tiebreaker 2: tiebreak harder.
I just wanted to be included ok? Don't leave me out in the cold!
I know right? Every damn time I see this guy, he lives up to that phrase.
Err, I guess the vote was probably closed after the tiebreaker, so this is meaningless, but...
[X] Plan Finishing basics
Tiebreaker 2: tiebreak harder.
I just wanted to be included ok? Don't leave me out in the cold!
Time For Bunker Planning
Rockeye
Plausible Engineer
- Location
- Midwestern U.S.
Yeah, right.
October 25, 1891
Things are moving along quickly. You've gathered together quite the collection of farmers, food scientists, and agronomy professors. While they're arguing with each other quite a lot over what will work and there's no real geniuses or leaders in the lot, you send over a few competent managers to keep them on track and generating ideas and prototypes. Progress is being made, enough that you know what kind of tools and facilities they will need to actually grow food, at least. Enough that you can set aside material, space, and equipment and not be entirely wasting your time and effort.
Agriculture Department is complete enough to start planning hydroponics rooms.
Things have not gotten any colder quite yet, and the one storm surge that hit America savaged the West Coast. The perennially warm states of California was unprepared for sudden cold. Few buildings there are built to deal with low temperatures, so that even inside buildings temperatures near freezing, and a great many houses have their plumbing ruined as water freezes in the pipes. What's more, snowdrifts in the coastal cities and towns have more or less paralyzed an entire state with no snow-plows or other means of clearing it. It wasn't cold enough to kill anyone but the homeless, but certainly enough to be starkly unpleasant. Combine that with a great many people sick and miserable from the cold and things are looking a bit grim in the area.
It looks like there are active riots and clashes between immigrant communities and authorities in all the major cities, mass protests over a number of things - poor conditions and racism, generally, plus the apparent incompetence of city governments. You sent out instructions to take good care of the immigrant workers on your lines, so that your trains and airships in the region would keep running without morale issues, but both the snow and the unrest has disrupted things despite that. Well, something like this was going to happen sooner or later. Still, the unpleasant feeling that this is just the beginning settles in your gut like a bad egg...
Western US experiences a -2 Storm Surge, for a total of -3 HLs. They experienced Frozen temperatures with little preparation for it. Unrest is increasing.
Local and state governments, as well as the federal government, are starting to seriously consider heavy weatherization programs instead of trying to ride things out, but the state of affairs on the west coast is embarrassing and spiraling into more and more trouble. Mr. Carnegie was planning the construction of a vast weatherized city some time ago, and it seems that is going forward. You have to shake your head at a newspaper that announces the plan and spells out the location - the coast of Lake Erie, just west of Cleveland. The article shows detailed city plans including an underground transit system, with photos of large, thick square steel and concrete frames already rising.
The city-shelter is apparently planned to house 100,000 people. You don't see how they can possibly hope to build it within another year. And even then, it's not nearly enough, with how public it is now. And how are they going to secure coal and food for that place?
As for Jay Gould... Nothing seems to have changed yet, despite your anonymous tip detailing his near slave-driving work gangs and the unpleasant tang of a potential coup. He's continuing his subtle fortifications, though it looks like progress has slowed down - probably because of either weather or unrest. You're not sure if the authorities are taking their time before moving on him, or if they decided to ignore you.
Carnegie and US Govt. unveil the city to survive the winter! You are doubtful. Gould status is ???
Worrying about all that can wait. You have three important decisions to make, decisions that have been looming over you for a bit.
Your quiet reaching-out to military men benefits significantly from both how much attention you're giving it, and your connections as a once-captain and big ship operator - not to mention the incredibly helpful Mr. Astor's contacts, as well. You're accumulating a list of skilled soldiers including some solid sergeants and the like. The soldiers are worried about the future, so while they're a bit dubious, careful mentions of your extensive preparations wins many over.
It's only been three weeks, but you've already found one option - Gerald Clark a retired Navy Admiral who ran the experimental sub-marine division, and is very well acquainted with high-tech and delicate machinery, in cramped spaces, that one's life depends on. But there are concerns - for one thing, Mr. Astor is worried that as a naval officer he lacks experience leading ground infantry, which could be important. And for another, your investigators have uncovered the circumstances of the man's retirement, a 'voluntary resignation' right after an investigation that cleared him of wrongdoing for insubordination and subversion. There are unconfirmed whispers that he has sympathies to the ideology of Communism, a strange belief system that calls for worker's unions to seize property from those who rightfully own it.
[ ] Try to hire Gerald Clark as military leader.
-[ ] What is your pitch?
[ ] Have Mr. Astor be the military leader.
[ ] Keep searching.
With your bunker rapidly approaching the point where you'll need to set aside space for Manan's Radium devices, you check in on his and the engineers' work. You don't really understand it all, but the gist you can understand is that they have a fairly solid theoretical understanding of a Radium generator, but are still running small-scale experiments to make sure things work how they expect. They have no set finish date at the moment, it could be three months or a year. Worrying.
You ask whether they could speed it up by trying larger, faster experiments and building prototypes. Manan Noor explains that he can, but it would be dangerous - it could expose the engineers to strange sickness or in the worst case contaminate a large section of your engineering workshops with some kind of Radium poison. Just how dangerous it would be, he can't predict, but he thinks it's a fairly small risk, at least compared to the certainty of freezing to death. It would speed up their work at least fifty percent to do this, but a disaster would greatly set them back and cost you some of your brightest minds.
What's more, there are a few different ways they can attempt to prepare Radium fuel, and he wants to know which ones they can look into and try out. That, at least, is simple. You tell them to pick the four most promising and try them all, all at once. You'll buy whatever they need. Money is not really a concern for you at the moment. But the question of dangerous experiments is something you have to carefully consider.
[ ] Push faster, build prototypes and do bigger experiments. Low to moderate risk of disaster, fastest progress.
[ ] Wait until an underground lab section in the bunker is complete. Low risk of disaster, slower progress.
[ ] Keep the work slow and safe as reasonably possible. Tiny risk of disaster, slowest progress.
And now to the task you've been waiting for. The vast pit that you have opened up in the middle of an ordinary patch of Midwestern farmland, much to the vehement annoyance of all the neighboring farmers with all the dust and the noise and the disruption, is wide and deep enough to remind you of the great pit mines that feed industry all over the world. It's time to lay down steel and concrete in this hole, so that you can ultimately seal it all up again, sealed away from the bitter cold above.
And that means it's time to finalize the plans for your bunker that have accumulated pages and pages of annotations, revisions, sketches, estimates, comments, and so on. You have a lot of ideas for various features and compromises you could make, but before you can get into the details you have to decide the basic plan and layout for the bunker. The three core concepts for the layout are an integrated approach, a centralized approach, or a modular approach.
The integrated approach would distribute smaller versions of things like ventilation plants, kitchens, workshops, steam distribution hubs, and so on around the bunker as much as possible to add redundancy and make total failures less likely. Having to walk less would be nice, too. Depending on how Manan Noor's work shakes out, you might be able to produce several Radium generators and have a backup for that key system as well.
The centralized approach would eke out about ten to twenty percent more capacity, leaving more room for people and facilities, by centralizing all the major facilities, for example having one enormous cafeteria that people eat staggered in shifts from. By having larger, more efficient versions of everything you can fit more in the bunker.
The modular approach would have you construct the main structure as a massive underground vault with support pillars and a few other sturdy structural elements, but with large spaces in between. These spaces would be filled in with easily movable wooden walls and floors, and the steam piping and the like would also be designed for rerouting, allowing you to make changes and add or remove facilities later without as much trouble.
[ ] Distributed approach. Makes the bunker more redundant and slightly more comfortable.
[ ] Centralized approach. Gain about 10-20% extra room in the bunker.
[ ] Modular approach. Most flexible, can change facilities around easier.
You also have to decide what sort of housing to provide people. It doesn't have as much of an impact on your capacity as you might have expected, since you're also dedicating a generous amount of space to the prototype hydroponics setups to grow the food you'll eat, but it's still a key decision. A barracks or bunkhouse style housing with communal kitchens and the like would fit more people, which would be a boon for your survival, but such living conditions are unpleasant and might be difficult for your workers to tolerate in the long term.
[ ] Bunkhouses and barrack style housing for everyone. (About 3600 capacity)
[ ] Bunkhouses for single workers, apartments for families. (About 3300 capacity)
[ ] Apartment style housing, some smaller and some larger. (About 3000 capacity)
[ ] Apartments for single workers, suites for families. (About 2800 capacity)
The basic structure of the bunker is already incredibly warm being well insulated deep below the Earth, but it does still need to have openings above ground for ventilation and entrances/exits. I'm giving it a base Heat Level of 8 once complete. The features you choose to add in the next vote might change this. You currently expect the bunker to probably be complete in April or May of next year. Possibly later if you add more features or face delays.
You will be able to slowly expand your underground town through tunneling after bunker construction is complete, so you aren't locked to what you build here forever. You need to house about 2500 people at minimum to cover all your employees and their immediate families. Adding more features to the bunker in the next phase of bunker planning will potentially reduce or increase your capacity, heat level, or construction time. This just sets the overall design.
Make all the plans you like, but don't actually vote yet. Some time later, I'll collect a post with all the relevant plans and actually open voting.
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- Location
- USA
10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
I'd really prefer to keep any kind of experimental reactor outside the bunker. If a reactor goes wrong, we're never cleaning that out.
Anything that could blow up, should blow up topside in a disposable building. Only the final reactor should be build inside.
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
[X] Keep searching.
[X] Wait until an underground lab section in the bunker is complete.
Low risk of disaster, slower progress.
[X] Modular approach. Most flexible, can change facilities around easier.
[X] Apartments for single workers, suites for families. (About 2800 capacity)
[X] Wait until an underground lab section in the bunker is complete.
Low risk of disaster, slower progress.
[X] Modular approach. Most flexible, can change facilities around easier.
[X] Apartments for single workers, suites for families. (About 2800 capacity)
Seems like this was two sentences that got spliced together, and left something missing?
What are the circumstances of the man's retirement?
Leaning towards modular here. We need the flexibility.
Based on this, I think we need to have a little bit of extra room in our bunker so we can add these other features. Also, a finish date of August or even September ought to be fine, so we can add more features there. As for the military leader, I think I prefer Mr Astor, so let's keep searching for one more round and if we don't find someone else then we go with Astor.
[] Plan Safe and Flexible
-[] Keep searching.
-[] Keep the work slow and safe as reasonably possible. Tiny risk of disaster, slowest progress.
-[] Modular approach. Most flexible, can change facilities around easier.
-[] Bunkhouses for single workers, apartments for families. (About 3300 capacity)
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- Location
- Hell
Is this actually a worry in this time period? I was not aware that they were a big risk at this point
QM even made it nice and bold, just for you
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
- Location
- Texas
Plan Sardine Packaging Company
[ ] Keep searching.
[ ] Wait until an underground lab section in the bunker is complete. Low risk of disaster, slower progress.
[ ] Centralized approach. Gain about 10-20% extra room in the bunker.
[ ] Bunkhouses and barrack style housing for everyone. (About 3600 capacity)
Post disaster population levels are going to be critical. The people can bear some discomfort. Not particularly opposed to using Astor as military leader, but we might as well keep searching. Getting the radium research done quickly and on a better time table than 3 months to a year would be most excellent as well.
[ ] Keep searching.
[ ] Wait until an underground lab section in the bunker is complete. Low risk of disaster, slower progress.
[ ] Centralized approach. Gain about 10-20% extra room in the bunker.
[ ] Bunkhouses and barrack style housing for everyone. (About 3600 capacity)
Post disaster population levels are going to be critical. The people can bear some discomfort. Not particularly opposed to using Astor as military leader, but we might as well keep searching. Getting the radium research done quickly and on a better time table than 3 months to a year would be most excellent as well.
Rockeye
Plausible Engineer
- Location
- Midwestern U.S.
The bunker can't use coal. You'd suffocate on carbon dioxide.
Edited.