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First off, there’s another Aurora LP already running, and you should go read that one too! It can be found here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3932867&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1Serf posted:hell yeah Pirate Radar posted:There is almost nothing on the Cydonia Proton--as we have begun calling the ship designated Proton-B 001 among ourselves--that is older than me. Senior Engineer Kosciuszko, the senior of the two engineers caring for the M109 nuclear thermal engine, is older than I am, as is our senior sensor operator, Senior Technician Rosario. They are both graduates of their technical schools rather than officers commissioned into the command track like myself. The other crew--the two pilots and the junior engineers and technicians under Kosciuszko and Rosario--are younger, and all of the equipment is new. Aurora is a turn-based space 4X game developed by one man as a vast, glorious, awe-inspiring passion project that has taken many, many years already. Often compared to Dwarf Fortress, it brings a similar level of detail, complexity, and horrifyingly bad UI design to space strategy. Much like DF, all of these complex systems interacting with each other in often unpredictable ways makes it a drat solid story generator, and it’s a popular game to LP; there have been several extremely good ones on this very forum over the years, sometimes even multiple running concurrently. I play this game a lot, so I decided to throw my hat in the ring. This game is played primarily through a series of spreadsheets and text menus, and what graphics there are consist of a bunch of little lines and dots. It's really not much to look at, so be prepared for that.  If you’ve played it in the past, or followed the old LPs, you’ll be noticing a few big differences in this one. This is because, a few months ago, Steve (the sole developer) finally released the much-anticipated C# Update, which he’s been working on for years and years. See, the game was originally coded entirely in VB6. It ran like rear end on even the best computers; running a 30-day turn was a matter of clicking the button and then walking away from your computer for anywhere from ten minutes to two hours. What’s more, this couldn’t really be improved without rewriting the game in an entirely different programming language – which is exactly what the crazy bastard did, making substantial changes to a number of different game mechanics in the process. The game now runs literally hundreds of times faster, especially in the early game, and a bunch of different QOL improvements have made it a much easier game to play and much less of a hassle to LP. The UI is still horrible – it is still Aurora – but it’s less horrible. C# has also introduced its own fun bugs and weird design decisions, in particular an absolutely baffling new ground combat system which features vastly more micromanagement than the old VB6 system to no real gameplay benefit. One of the things that makes Aurora LPs so great is Goon Participation, and this one will be no different. We will be playing this game together.  Specifically, you will be playing as the political, scientific, and military leadership of the Comintern, a loose, unstable coalition that’s not quite a world government, but has aspirations on becoming one. You will begin this journey to the stars on Earth on January 1st, 1978, a few short years after the conclusion of World War Three, officially referred to in most Comintern member nations as the Great Revolutionary War. You will, at first, be the only faction on Earth reasonably capable of large-scale space travel, and will, as such, be the only Earth-based faction fully represented in the game, a situation which absolutely can change depending on your decisions and how things develop.  Don’t know how to play Aurora? No problem! I will be introducing and explaining concepts as best I can as they come up, and you should absolutely feel free to suggest courses of action even if you don't entirely understand how they would be implemented ingame. If it won't work I'll tell you. THE RULES This will be conducted primarily as a legislative-style game. During peacetime, legislative sessions will be convened once every in-game year, with additional emergency sessions convened whenever an urgent decision is required. We may change this timeframe later, either to make it longer or shorter, but for now we’ll give this a try. After a standard session is convened, the thread will have 48 hours to propose, discuss, and amend legislation, and then 48 hours to vote on it. There will be no specific rules on the language of legislation, except that I have to be able to understand what you're trying to do. If I can't I will ask for clarification. During wartime, sessions will instead be held every three months or whenever urgent input is needed, and in addition to civilian legislators the players will also represent the Comintern military's strategic and operational level command staff. You will set objectives, develop plans for accomplishing those objectives, and detail forces to carry out those objectives. These plans may be very broad, in which case I will enact them based on my interpretation of how best to carry out your goals, or very specific, in which case I will follow them to the letter. Whenever urgent decisions need to be made, you'll get to vote on those too. Whenever there is an issue I think needs addressing, I will suggest it as an Order of the Day for the legislative session, strongly encouraging (but not necessarily requiring) the People’s Congress (that’s you!) to pass legislation related to it. When there is an issue that must be addressed, I will mark it as Urgent Business and it must be voted on this session. Under normal circumstances, voting will be a simple Yes/No vote on each proposal, with a simple majority of votes required to pass. If at any time there is a vote with more than two options, voting will be by ranked list and will use an instant-runoff system. Design competitions for ships, fighters, missiles//probes/mines/buoys, components, ground formations, etc. can be proposed by legislation, and can either use existing technology or (via the game’s new ‘prototyping’ mechanic) technology one tier higher than what we currently have; when proposing a design competition, specify if it is for a production (current-tech) or prototype design. You may propose multiple designs at once; if multiple designs are required by legislation, please specific whether the contest will be for all of them as a slate or each design separate and individually. New ship designs may include new components; if such a design is adopted, approval of the new components for adoption is implicit. Designs may be submitted for 48 hours after the proposal has passed, and then the thread will have 24 hours to vote on designs, unless only one design is submitted, in which case it will be automatically adopted at the end of the 48 hours. If multiple competitions are voted on in the same legislative session, they will run concurrently to avoid bogging the game down too much. All times are approximate; I can't guarantee I'll be able to post exactly 48 hours after a session opens or whatever - in practice, voting will be open until I say it's closed. Additional rules relating to parliamentary procedure – whether instituted by me to make the game more fun or easier to run, or instituted by you through voting – may come later. I will reserve the right to exercise an emergency veto on legislation that will make running the LP difficult, obnoxiously time-consuming, or impossible to continue, or which will be completely impossible to implement, with a promise not to exercise it unless absolutely necessary and to fully explain why if it is ever exercised. I'll do my best to point out impossible legislation before it actually comes to a vote, and provide suggestions on other ways you might be able to accomplish your intended goal. Active legislation will be consolidated in a Google doc. Other important information, such as current economic data, disposition of fleets and colonies, and a current directory of active ship classes will be maintained and kept available. DWARF ME! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13Xvzd-VkUzdHorTF_fJ1aoX_FMaHFgTrVecsqbHyNxE/edit?usp=sharing So you want to go to space, do you? Post in this here spreadsheet! Indicate whether you want to be a Naval Officer, a Ground Forces Officer, a Scientist, or a Civilian Administrator. If you have any preferences for skills, personality traits, or type of assignment, list those, optionally. If your character dies, you will automatically be added to the bottom of the list, and, upon rejoining the game, will become (your name) II, III, IV, etc. depending on how many times you've managed to get yourself killed. I'll be following this up with a little backstory infodump which you can feel free to read or skip, and then our first proper update! Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Apr 1, 2021 |
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Oct 14, 2020 08:34
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BIG BACKSTORY POST – HOW WE GOT HERE This game of Aurora will, like most of them, start on Earth, at the dawn of a new age of space exploration. The period known as the ‘Trans-Newtonian Era’ is generally accepted to have begun on January 1st, 1978. Ten years prior, in May 1968, a student demonstration in France exploded into a nationwide general strike that quickly gripped the country in insurrection. The first red flags were hoisted a few short weeks later – and, despite insurrection turning to revolution, and then to civil war, they never came down again. NATO’s controversial decision to intervene on the side of the government in August 1968, despite France not being a member of the alliance, caused an uproar in many of its member states. Italian troops, spurred on by communist agitators in the ranks, mutinied and refused to cross the French border; less than a month later, the Communist Party, the second-largest in parliament at the time, managed to wrangle enough support from other parties to narrowly force through a bill withdrawing Italy from NATO. Spanish troops attempting to reinforce the French government found themselves coming under attack from anti-Franco guerrillas emboldened by events in France and Italy. The Labour-led British government, unwilling to get involved in a European war less than 25 years after the end of WW2, dragged its feet on intervening in France, supported in this by elements in the British trade unions who carried out a number of sympathy strikes. Months passed, fighting raged, and, while continuing to allow the US to use the isles as a base for their own operations, the British did nothing. Mass anti-American protests outside military bases became a regular occurrence, and bitter fights in the House of Commons were soon the norm. Elements in MI5, already suspecting the Prime Minister to be a ‘Soviet puppet’, and having already been casually discussing the possibility of a coup d’etat before any of this happened, had their resolve strengthened by this growing crisis. Contacting various disaffected elements in the British government, military, and business community, and reaching out to potential supporters in the far right, they began putting a plan into motion. West Germany, now facing the threat of Communism from the West as well as the East, became increasingly politically polarized, with the Christian Democrats quickly losing ground to the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party and the Social Democrats facing challenges from militant elements within their own base (actual communist parties generally being illegal). The government, torn between those who wished to seek closer ties with the United States to resist the rising red tide and a growing pro-unification bloc that sought to kick out the US entirely, rapidly ground to a halt. The United States, ‘leader of the free world’, was caught flat-footed by events in France. Already heavily committed in Vietnam, they were now faced with the sprouting of a second Vietnam in their own ‘backyard’ - and their back exposed to the Soviets should they intervene. With more and more critical situations developing every day, the ‘domino effect’ theory seemingly being proven correct before their very eyes, and NATO quickly disintegrating, the US stretched itself wide in an attempt to put out every fire at once. Troops were deployed to France to relieve beleaguered government forces in the rapidly-shrinking enclaves still controlled by de Gaulle, to West Germany to discourage Ivan, and to Vietnam to keep up the ongoing war there. The nation’s vast nuclear arsenal looked more and more tempting to the generals with each passing day. Domestically, things weren’t much better. Less than a month after the outbreak of revolution in France, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots spread like wildfire, gripping the country in insurrection for a full week. They had barely died down before the draft riots started. Cities burned, and confrontations between protesters and ‘patriotic’ counter-demonstrators descended into brawls or even gun battles. Police and military forces killed hundreds in the attempted crackdowns – and lost dozens, as people fired back. In this atmosphere of general chaos, Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States in an overwhelming landslide, in a highly controversial election with an extremely low turnout, multiple reports of election-day violence at polling places, and accusations of fraud from all sides. Fans of alternate-history scenarios have speculated, based on internal information from his campaign, that he would have attempted to normalize relations with China, exploited the developing rift between them and the Soviets, and tried to develop an alliance of convenience with them in order to counter the ascendant USSR; if this had happened, the world might look much different. We will never know, however, because Richard Nixon was assassinated by a sniper’s bullet on December 3, 1968, before he could even take office. The shooter was never caught; a group calling itself the New Afrikan People’s Army, previously unattested, claimed credit for the shooting in a press statement, calling it ‘vengeance for Doctor King’. 1969 began with a few months of uneasy relative calm. Faltering morale among the USA’s draftee army, and several high-profile defections from the French national military, allowed the self-styled Commune of France to consolidate itself in the territory it controlled. The Italian far left continued to grow in power, and their opponents in the far right became more and more aggressive in their campaigns of violence in response – which served only to unite the radicals against a common enemy. Along the border between East and West Germany, a tense peace prevailed; the calm before the storm. In basements, backrooms, and alleys, people organized and plotted, on both sides of the political spectrum, for the moment the hammer fell. In May, a year after the initial uprising, it finally did. The Commune launched a major offensive aimed at taking the French Republic’s primary mainland stronghold at Amiens – aided by the surprise simultaneous defections of two French Army brigades and one US Army battalion to the Commune. At the same time, solidarity demonstrations celebrating the anniversary of the uprising broke out around the world. In Britain, MI5 decided this was the last opportunity they’d get to crush the left and reestablish order, and, with the aging Earl Louis Mountbatten as a figurehead interim Prime Minister, launched their coup, declaring sitting Labour PM Harold Wilson a traitor. The street fighting between British Army troops and hastily-organized union militias was unexpectedly fierce; what was intended to be a swift coup and a brutal crackdown instead became the opening shots of the British Civil War. All hell broke loose after that. Books and entire academic careers have been dedicated to covering the Third World War; for the purposes of this overview, we’ll limit ourselves to extremely broad strokes. The UK, the US, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and West Germany all erupted in insurrectionary violence one right after the other, with many of their colonial holdings quickly following suit. Their overseas deployments – particularly the USA’s – began to fall apart, with the command structure paralyzed by split loyalties as it became less and less obvious who the hell was even issuing orders anymore, and more than a few mutinies among the rank and file. It was the USA’s Joint Chiefs of Staff who, in desperation, made the unilateral decision to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons in early July of 1969. President Agnew may or may not have even been aware of this decision; to this day it’s unclear. Nukes were deployed first in Vietnam, then in France. Brezhnev’s initial refusal to respond in kind, fearing that doing so would lead to nuclear armageddon, was overruled by a coalition of young radical internationalists in the officer corps, who removed him from office overnight in a quiet coup; Soviet nuclear weapons detonated over NATO troop concentrations in Belgium, France, and Germany hours later. The exchanges continued, alongside more conventional fighting, escalating in size and intensity, for weeks, each side gradually getting closer and closer to a full-scale strategic strike. It is perhaps only luck that it did not happen, that the United States fell apart so quickly, that before long there was simply no one left with sufficient authority to give that order. Almost forgotten, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin of the USA’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration became the first humans to walk on another world. They left an American flag planted in the lunar regolith. As they left the Moon behind, the exhaust from the ascent module’s engine blew the flag over, and it fell to the ground, where it remains to this day. THE AFTERMATH AND THE TRANS-NEWTONIAN REVOLUTION It took many years to finally conclude the Great Revolutionary War, and, when it ended, it was in no way a clean or decisive victory. Tens of millions perished, even more than in the Second World War a few decades prior. Entire nations were left devastated by nuclear fire, conventional warfare, or the economic collapse and famine that inevitably followed. Borders were redrawn, old nations dissolved, new nations formed to take their place. With the dissolution of the United States into a patchwork of feuding polities, the Soviet Union, which had emerged relatively unscathed (‘relatively’ being the operative word), emerged as the world’s premier military and economic power, and the de facto leader of the communist bloc. Although there were a wide range of different ideological tendencies represented in the Red uprisings that launched this war, common enemies and common interests brought them together. Over the next few years, they coalesced into a loose confederation of states, statelike entities, and extragovernmental organizations. While some unofficially referred to this body as the “Fifth International”, this was a controversial term at best, and officially it was merely the renewed Communist International. With its member states representing just over half of the approximately 3.9 billion people on Earth, the Comintern is the closest thing the post-war world has to a replacement for the United Nations (said body technically still exists, but as a forgotten and largely meaningless afterthought). Composed of former members of both the Soviet and Chinese camps, much of the Non-Aligned Movement, and various new polities that emerged out of the chaos of war and revolution, the young Comintern in 1978 is a fractious, argumentative, chaotic, and high-spirited body. It’s managed to hold together, mostly, but no one knows how long that will last, or if it will last. The process of rebuilding, and fighting the various capitalist remnants and insurgencies within their borders, has kept them mostly moving in the same direction, but no nation or ideological tendency is really strong enough to truly dominate the organization, and that combined with the loose, decentralized structure has kept it from solidifying into a true world government. LITTLE GREEN MEN In early 1973 a team of commandos from the People’s Republic of California, accompanied by liaisons from the KGB and a few scientists, launched an expedition into the disputed territory of the Nevada Desert, to investigate rumors of a valuable military secret left over from before the war. No central authority held sway here, and the military installations around Nellis Air Force Base had been largely destroyed during the initial collapse of the United States. Their target, located on the dry bed of Groom Lake, was extremely secret, extremely isolated, and intact, and they gambled – correctly, as it turned out – that no one had yet looted or occupied it. In this secret base was an elevator. At the bottom of the elevator, a laboratory. Stored in the laboratory, the remains of the roughly disc-shaped flying object which had, in the process of crashing, collided with and destroyed a US military high-altitude research balloon over Roswell, New Mexico on July 6, 1947. The remains of its pilot and crew. Data tapes and hard-copy of the results of decades of research – unsuccessful research, mostly, as the American scientists beat their head against the wall attempting to figure out just how the gently caress this thing worked. They had duplicated it, crudely, but never really understood it. A team secluded in a closed city in Siberia, working in the field of high energy physics, turned out to have the missing piece to the puzzle the Americans had never been able to solve. They had developed a series of mathematical proofs based on available data that suggested the existence of a near-parallel dimension, another universe, in which the laws of physics and the structure of spacetime were vastly different. They had further theorized that this dimension could potentially interact with ours, and vice versa. These theories provided them the framework needed to understand the Roswell spacecraft. Built partially out out of exotic materials which existed simultaneously in both dimensions, the vessel was able to, essentially, sidestep the normal bounds of Newtonian physics. The materials out of which it was constructed were far stronger and denser than anything humanity could have created through conventional means, and yet massed less. The remnants of its badly damaged electronics, engines, and power plants provided tantalizing hints of what else these materials were capable of. Relativistic speeds. Inertialess travel. Near-limitless electrical power, generated easily and safely. Faster-than-light communication. There was, of course, also the additional factor of the vessel being definitive proof of extraterrestrial intelligence, which is, well, a pretty big deal, to say the least. In 1975, the two most important scientific papers in human history were published. One, the first non-theoretical xenobiology paper ever, detailed the biology and physiology of four preserved alien corpses. The second contains the framework for Trans-Newtonian Theory, the foundation upon which a new human civilization would be built. WHERE WE ARE NOW On January 1st, 1978, after a few years of hasty preparation, the Ministry for Outer Space Affairs was officially stood up. Taking control of the space assets of all Comintern member nations, and drawing its personnel from a new class of young cosmonauts trained specifically for the purpose, the Ministry at the time of creation has a broad mandate, an unusual amount of power, and an unclear place in the Comintern’s structure. Is it a civilian space agency? Is it a military? Is it something else entirely? Time will tell. For now, only one thing is certain – as fragile as it is, as uncertain as it is, humanity has found a shared purpose. Many in the Comintern’s leadership are looking to the Ministry as the thing that will unite the coalition, draw it closer together, forge it into something greater. In the black skies above Earth, beyond the craters and ruins, the ash and radiation, they will seek humanity’s future, for better or worse. As the first crude Trans-Newtonian spacecraft ascend to orbit, from Vandenberg and Baikonur and Jiuquan, and the stations that will become orbital shipyards are assembled from repurposed Salyut modules and Apollo/Saturn mission hardware, plans are being drawn up. Scientists are recruited, labs staffed, administrative bodies organized, facilities slapped together out of available buildings, repurposed hardware, prefab huts, tents. There are so many volunteers that some of them have to be turned away, and the academy established at Baikonur is already filled to capacity with a second class before the first graduating class has finished clearing out their dormitories. Humanity has, in the last hundred years, faced wars, plagues, revolutions and counterrevolutions, the rise and fall of empires. It has stared Armageddon in the face, waded through nuclear fire, and emerged battered but alive. It has endured, it will endure, and we will build a better tomorrow. There’s something in the air. People have been afraid to name it, worried that if they draw attention to it, they’ll lose it – but everyone senses it. Hope.
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Oct 14, 2020 08:37
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January 1, 1978 This is the inner Sol system, our home. We'll be seeing a lot of this screen. Earth is the third rock from the Sun, visible with two little rings around it to indicate it is an inhabited body with minerals.  This is the colony window for our sole inhabited body, planet Earth. Earth is still recovering from the limited nuclear exchanges of the late war, with atmospheric dust and ash still lingering and many heavily-hit areas still badly irradiated ruins, as you can see near the top of the left column. Large numbers of stateless refugees are still occupying camps and makeshift settlements and some populated regions, particularly in the former United States, are still not effectively controlled by any organized polity. Approximately two billion people live in the areas under the effective control of the various Comintern member polities, as visible in the left column. The largest proportion of them are in the People’s Republic of China, with the USSR, the Commune of France, and Mexico also being significant population centers. About 287 million of those could still be put to useful labor, representing a significant and valuable resource.  A substantial amount of modern heavy industry has survived the war or been built since, all of it now totally obsolete in the face of the Trans-Newtonian Revolution. It will need to be updated to modern standards. It is visible in the central column on the main colony screen, as 3,200 Conventional Industry. Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh SSR currently functions as Earth’s sole spaceport capable of launching and receiving hypothetical Trans-Newtonian spacecraft, and the de facto headquarters of the Ministry for Outer Space Affairs; it is also capable of maintaining hypothetical space vehicles up to about 5000 tons. Interkosmos Academy, currently training the next generation of cosmonauts, is also located there.  Four small space stations have been lofted to serve as research platforms for Trans-Newtonian spaceflight, and shipyards for orbital construction. Two of them are reserved for construction of large-scale civilian utility vessels, while the other two are set aside for smaller, high-performance militarized craft. Each of them is currently hypothetically capable of constructing a single vessel, massing at most 10,000 or 1,000 tons respectively. They are currently ad-hoc installations built mostly out of existing pre-TN spaceflight hardware and will need substantial work to be expanded into proper shipyards. We’ll look at the shipyards in more detail once there is a use for them.  Once the principles of Trans-Newtonian Theory were understood, instruments were quickly developed to identify TNEs, and a full survey of the Earth was conducted. Earth has modest harvestable stockpiles of all currently known elements. Mining them is a complicated process, requiring a lot of energy and newly-designed specialized equipment in order to separate them from the conventional elements they are mixed with, stabilize their mind-bending half-existence, and refine them into something usable. ‘Bringing them up the well’ is the colloquialism that has quickly caught on, and to do it on any kind of large scale, we will need to build specialized mines; it’s no longer as simple as just digging things up. Production, Stockpile, and Use numbers on this screen are per year, by the way. At the moment, the only TNE which is seeing significant usage is Sorium, which exists as a liquid at normal atmospheric temperatures and pressures and can be refined into a stable, easily-transported fuel of incredible energy density. It has already become the rocket fuel of choice, and will likely remain that way for the foreseeable future, as well as filling many other roles. Active fighting is still ongoing in sub-Saharan Africa and the former United States, as well as smaller policing actions throughout the world, and most military resources are still allocated to the various national governments. Only a token contribution, in the form of a single small training camp in Siberia, has been made to the Comintern’s hypothetical joint army, and no units have been formally organized.  Arguably the greatest success of the Comintern so far has been the speed and effectiveness at which it has integrated the remaining academic and research institutions in its member polities. Though desperately short of proper leadership, the global scientific community still has substantial resources to bring to bear on any problems you instruct it to solve. MECHANICS So, let’s talk about research, construction, and mining. Research is the most important thing in the game. You need to develop new technology in order to spread to the stars – and protect your new holdings. Research depends on two things – Laboratories and Scientists. Each technology you research has a cost, in Research Points or RP. A Research Laboratory generates a certain number of RP per year so long as it is staffed by workers, modified by the Specialization and Bonus of the scientist assigned to lead them. A good scientist, working in their area of expertise, can make a huge difference. Once you have developed a technology that allows you to design a ship component, weapon, or ground unit, you’re not done. You must then actually design something that uses that technology, and it must be researched separately. Once you’ve created the project it’s researched like any other technology, and once completed it can be used freely in designs. Construction is mostly pretty self-explanatory. Industry staffed by workers generates Build Points or BP. Building new things costs a certain amount of Build Points, Wealth (more on Wealth in a later update), and TNEs. Your planetside industry may build Buildings, prefabricated Ship Components (we’ll talk about why you would want to do that when we cover ship design and construction later), expendable Ordnance such as missiles, probes, and buoys, Fighters and fighter-sized spacecraft, and civilian Space Stations. In the early game you have Conventional Industry, which does all of these things, as well as mining and fuel refining, but does all of them poorly. You will want to convert them into specialized facilities quickly. Specialized facilities can only be used for their specific type of construction – a Fighter Factory will only generate BP that can be used to build Fighters, for example. Space Stations, Ship Components, and Buildings all use Construction, and as such Construction Factories are generally your second most important industry. Mining, however, will always be your most important industry. You will use TNEs for everything. Ships cost TNEs to build and maintain, and without refined Sorium fuel in their tanks, they don’t fly. Everything else costs TNEs to build too. Without these magic space rocks, there is no super-science, and no space-faring civilization. Getting them out of the ground is therefore of vital importance. So long as your Mines are staffed by workers, they will produce a certain quantity of TNEs per year, modified by the Accessibility rating of the mineral deposit (so an Accessibility 0.1 deposit will be mined at 10% the speed of an Accessibility 1 deposit, for example). The production output for all these industries can be increased substantially via research projects in the Construction/Production tree. BUSINESS There is much anticipation as the delegates to the People’s Congress begin to arrive at this year’s host city (the ‘capitol’ rotates, and this session you’re in scenic Havana). The stars have captivated humanity’s imagination, and informal hallway discussions almost inevitably turn towards space; even the most practical and down-to-Earth cannot avoid discussing how to apply Trans-Newtonian materials and technology here on the ground. The most paranoid talk of military preparations to defend against possible incursion from the Roswell aliens, the most idealistic talk of preparations for diplomacy and first contact. With many of these ideas now possible to implement on a large scale, they will inevitably dominate the agenda. ORDERS OF THE DAY: 1. Research. The laboratories are at your disposal. They will need direction. For now, you should give fairly broad instructions on where to focus our efforts; all of these new fields are still in their infancy, after all. In later legislative sessions, you will have the opportunity to allocate scientists and labs to specific technologies should you so choose, and I will prepare and maintain a list of everything available. There are 50 lab complexes to be allocated between our six lead scientists as you see fit. The available fields of study are as follows: - Biology/Genetics: Modifying planets to make them more suitable for humans, or modifying humans to make them more suitable for other planets. Before making any serious progress in this area, you will need to lay down the proper groundwork by sequencing the human genome, which is where most resources will be directed should you prioritize this. - Construction/Production: Incremental improvements to things like construction speed, shipbuilding speed, mining speed, and research speed. Boring, and also vitally important. - Defensive Systems: Armor, stealth technology such as baffled engines, and hypothetical energy shield tech, as well as damage control systems for emergency field repairs. Keeps spaceships alive longer. - Energy Weapons: Lasers as well as more exotic beam weapons such as microwaves, meson cannons, and particle beams. - Ground Combat: While mostly pretty self-explanatory – weapons, vehicles, and equipment to be used on the ground – the Ground Combat tree also includes Xenoarchaeology Equipment for studying alien ruins, Geosurvey Equipment for planetary survey expeditions, and mobile Construction Equipment for building remote outposts. - Logistics: slightly less boring than Construction/Production and every bit as important, Logistics is the science of moving things from where they are to where they need to be, and includes cargo bays, maintenance facilities, refueling systems, and cryogenic passenger transport modules. - Missiles/Kinetic Weapons: weapons which fire physical projectiles at their targets, including railguns and gauss guns. All missiles in Aurora are tipped with nuclear warheads. ‘Missiles’ as a category also includes mines, buoys, drones, and probes; these will be explained in more detail in a dedicated ‘missiles’ post later. - Power and Propulsion: Engines, reactors, and things which modify the effects of engines and reactors, such as power boosts and fuel efficiency bonuses. Engines are how you make your ships move, while reactors charge and fire your ships’ weapons. Also included in this category are a series of proposals outlining a theoretical basis for faster-than-light travel, though it will represent a significant investment in lab time and resources to determine if this is even feasible. - Sensors and Control Systems: Your civilization’s eyes and ears. Includes various sensors for detecting objects in space, thermal and EM emissions, and the like, as well as vitally-important survey sensors which will allow you to explore new worlds. Also includes additional command and control facilities that you can install on your ships, such as Science Departments which will enhance survey sensors, or Main Engineering facilities that will improve a ship’s reliability and repair rate. The science team suggests that developing a practical TNE-based fission reactor, in addition to revolutionizing civilian power generation, would also pave the way for development of a Trans-Newtonian nuclear thermal rocket engine. Such an engine would be vastly more powerful and efficient than a conventional chemical rocket of equivalent mass, and would trivialize interplanetary travel. A proposal for a simple pressurized-water fission reactor has been distributed to all delegates, and assigning a scientist to focus on Power and Propulsion will ensure it receives the highest priority. 2. Construction. The Comintern’s industry stands idle, ready for instructions. You have 3,200 conventional factories that can be converted into any number of things, or be used to build new structures entirely from scratch (very inefficiently). Take a look at the list up there, see anything you like? If you're unsure what exactly a facility does, or what it would cost, just ask. 3. Shipyards. Do we focus on expanding the tonnage capacity of our existing slipways first, letting us build bigger ships, or adding more slipways, letting us build more ships? How should we plan our yard expansions? 4. Scientist shortage. You have only six qualified Trans-Newtonian scientists, all of them drawn from the original research team that unlocked the secrets of the Roswell craft. There are many ways to address this – you could construct an additional Academy, for example; you could also assign a scientist of sufficient rank (capable of commanding 10 or more laboratories) as the Commandant of Interkosmos Academy, which will attract more scientific talent to the program (in game terms, it will increase the likelihood of generating new scientists). We'll cover Commandants in more detail when we go over the Officer/Leader mechanics. URGENT BUSINESS: UB-01: MOSA HQ The Ministry of Outer Space Affairs is currently headquartered in a temporary tent-city complex at Baikonur. It will need more permanent headquarters facilities, and where to place them is a matter of some contention. After much debate, the following four options have been narrowed down, to be voted on by ranked list: 1. Stay at Baikonur, USSR. And why not? The beating heart of the Soviet space program from the days of Sputnik and Vostok (less than twenty years ago…), the most well-developed space launch facility on the planet, where else to begin a journey to the stars? There is the matter of the ongoing argument over the inordinate amount of influence the Soviets are exercising over the program; formally headquartering the Ministry here is bound to inflame some tensions. Doing this will offend the Chinese and French, who are wary of Soviet hegemony, and will also allow the Ministry to more effectively leverage the expertise of the old Soviet cosmonaut corps to enhance Interkosmos training programs, effectively granting you one additional Military Academy for free. 2. Vandenberg Air Force Base, People’s Republic of California: The only former American space launch site that is both intact and reasonably possible for us to access (Cape Canaveral in Florida is apparently largely unscathed but not a realistic option due to local instability). California is politically unstable and engaged in active border disputes, jockeying for territory with the equally unstable non-Comintern states of Cascadia and Deseret – but, more importantly, with two other Comintern members, Mexico and the Navajo-dominated Southwestern Tribal Confederation. Setting up shop here will be seen as the Comintern granting legitimacy to Californian territorial claims, reinforcing the fragile central government and pissing the Navajo and Mexicans off quite a bit. The Californians offer the Ministry access to nearby Camp Pendleton as well as Vandenberg’s extensive sensor arrays, effectively giving you four Ground Forces Training Facilities and one Deep Space Tracking Station for free. 3. Dongfeng Aerospace City, People’s Republic of China: The center of the PRC’s nascent space program, located in remote Inner Mongolia. In terms of infrastructure it’s essentially a worse, less-developed Baikonur, but there’s a lot of growth potential. The Soviets, who already have Interkosmos Academy and the spaceport, aren’t going to mind losing the headquarters complex that much, but the Vietnamese will raise hell, and the French are just as wary of Chinese dominance as they are of the Soviets. The Chinese government have offered to expand the research city to accommodate the Ministry, effectively giving the Comintern access to two additional research labs for free. 4. Ascension Island: a 34-square-mile rock in the middle of loving nowhere, with no indigenous population (although a few hundred people do currently live there, they are not natives to the island). Formerly a British territory, the island has been in an administrative limbo since the collapse of the Empire, and should the Ministry be located here, the island will be ceded to the Comintern outright. A sizable airbase is located here, as well as a ground tracking station used by the Americans for their space program, back when there were Americans. These limited facilities can be expanded, but for now all you’ll be able to get out of it is one Deep Space Tracking Station for free. However, it would also establish MOSA as a neutral and independent entity, above the political squabbles of the Comintern’s member nations, and that may be worth a lot in the coming days. The 1978 legislative session of the International People’s Congress is now open! You will have 48-ish hours to ask questions, make plans, and submit proposals, and then we'll get this thing rolling! Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Oct 14, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2020 08:47
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DagPenge posted:The Earth has seen enough bloodshed for the considerable future, so lets place the headquarters on Ascension Island and try to be as political neutral as we can. This proposal to establish a moon colony will require designing a new engine and a couple of new ship classes, and so is a perfect excuse to talk about basic component and commercial ship design! Component designs are assembled in this screen:  Each little drop-down menu allows us to tweak various parameters of the design. Most only have one, or zero, options at game start - for example, because we currently only have conventional chemical rockets, we are limited to designing a Conventional Engine, and because we have no engine stealth tech or fuel efficiency tech, we cannot reduce fuel consumption or baffle the engine. A ship component has a bunch of associated stats. Size is pretty self-explanatory, being the total mass of the component in Hull Size Points (each HS is 50 tons) or tons. HTK is the total number of damage points the component can take in combat before being destroyed. Cost is specifically its cost in Wealth, Crew are the number of people required to operate and maintain the component (crew, and crew quarters, are automatically added to a ship design as needed), Development Cost is the number of Research Points required to finish designing the component (50 RP is very cheap, a Propulsion specialist with a few labs could finish this in days). Materials Required is a list of the TNEs required to construct one of this component, whether prefabbed in a factory or built at a shipyard. Engines specifically have a few unique stats. Engine Power is a measure of how much thrust the engine puts out, measured in Some Sort Of Arbitrary Unit. Fuel Use Per Hour is self-explanatory, while Fuel Consumption per Engine Power Hour is a measure of fuel efficiency, expressed in the form of how much fuel this engine would consume if it were outputting 1EP of thrust for one hour. Thermal Signature is how much thermal energy this engine outputs at full power, and is a measure of how easily the engine can be detected by passive thermal sensors (running an engine at less than full power decreases its thermal signature accordingly). Explosion Chance is the risk of the engine catastrophically exploding when destroyed, and Max Explosion Size is the amount of damage that explosion can potentially do to the ship's internals. The last, and most important, thing to note there is 'Commercial Engine'. Aurora divides engines into Commercial and Military. Military engines are high-performance and high-maintenance; Commercial engines are low-power, low-maintenance, and extremely fuel efficient. Commercial engines have to be big - this 25HS engine here is the minimum size for a Commercial engine. They also have to be low power, with 50% Engine Power being the maximum upper limit. Anything 25HS or bigger, with 50% Engine Power or less, is classified as a Commercial Engine. Anything else is a Military Engine. Commercial engines can be mounted on commercial or military ships and built in commercial or military yards; Military engines can only be mounted on military ships and built in military yards. We'll get into the distinction in just a minute. Once you're satisfied with a design, you name the component, name the company that designed the component, and send it over to the Research screen, where you research it like any other technology. Once it's researched, it can then be built and used immediately. This is literally the only commercial engine you can make with current tech, so I'm just going to give you this engine design as a freebie and research it instantly so we can move on to Ship Design.  Ships are designed on this invitingly blank screen. Space stations and fighters, despite being built in a much different way, are considered ships and are designed the same way as ships. On the left side of the screen is a list of all of the empire's ship classes, of which we currently have none. One column over, a list of all currently available ship components. By default, Obsolete components and Prototype components are not visible here, but there are options to enable them. A ship class is assembled out of these components, encased in armor. Let's throw a basic design together real quick.  We switch over to the Class Components tab to see everything we installed in this ship. I've designed four classes, two passenger transports and two cargo ships, a Fast and Slow variant of each, using only technology you currently have. You could build any of these right now. This is the Fast variant of the cargo ship. It has three of the engines we just designed, five of the smallest cargo hold available, two Cargo Shuttle Bays (ships of this mass cannot land on planetary surfaces, so you need these to load or unload on planets without spaceports), a bridge, some crew quarters, an engineering deck, a fuel tank, and a whopping 2000 tons of steel hull plating despite being basically unarmored (low-tech armor is incredibly mass-inefficient). Its three huge sorium rockets can push this thing at a max speed of 197 kilometers per second, which is enough to reach the Moon from Low Earth Orbit in about half an hour. The Passenger variant is exactly the same except that it carries 250 passengers instead of 2500 cargo. The Slow variant drops the speed to 66 km/s, which will reach the Moon in an hour and 45 minutes or so, but doubles the passenger and cargo capacity. Both versions have the same absurd 8 billion kilometer range and could easily reach as far as Jupiter without having to worry about fuel, albeit slowly (space is huge). A ship design can be output as text, which for the Fast Luna looks like this: code:The key thing about Commercial ships is that, aside from fuel, they require no maintenance. Their crews do not accrue deployment time and do not need shore leave, their components do not accumulate wear or fail, the ships never need to be overhauled. I could technically turn the deployment time on these down to squeeze out a bit more mass (the lower the deployment time, the more spartan the crew quarters, and thus the less mass you need to house the same amount of crew), but there's not really any reason to for these. These are extremely basic and low-tech, for the most part representing conventional 1970s-era technology with some very crudely-applied Trans-Newtonian enhancements, but you could build them now, and they would definitely be enough to establish simple permanent outposts. As you develop more technology, you'll be able to create things which outperform these primitive designs by orders of magnitude, but you've gotta start somewhere, right? Without prefabricating components you could build one of these per slipway about every six months or so with current shipbuilding tech; prefabbing the engines and other parts in groundside factories could shave a couple months off that. We'll go over Military Ship design once you've researched things that can go in military ships. That reminds me - we still need to decide how we're going to prioritize our 50 labs and 6 scientists! If you feel like you don't have enough information to suggest a course of action there, tune in shortly for a more detailed explanation of how research works! Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Oct 14, 2020 |
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Oct 14, 2020 20:04
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Research! I gave a short overview of how research works in the first update, but let's look at it in more detail.  Research is shared throughout your empire but is organized on a per-planet basis. All our labs are on Earth right now so that's where all our research will be conducted. At the moment we're researching nothing. Let's change that.  Pressurized Water Reactor is an important technology, it will allow us to generate power for weapons and is also a necessary prerequisite for our first engine technology. Let's start with that. We have a Power and Propulsion specialist, so let's assign them that project and give them, say, one laboratory.  poo poo, that's going to take a while. Even with their huge bonus more than doubling the output of the laboratory, it'll still take a couple years for them to deliver us a breakthrough. Fortunately we have 49 more unassigned labs. Let's add more up to this scientist's administration ability.  That's more like it, now it'll be done in about a month and a half. Scientists can get better at administration (increasing the number of labs they can control) or research (increasing their RP generation bonus) by working - interestingly, they don't necessarily have to be working as scientists, and can still gradually increase their skills by running an academy instead of researching a project. Giving scientists a project and a single laboratory to give them hands-on time and build their skills is a common practice, although not one we can really afford right now. Scientists can research projects outside of their specialization, and because we're missing several key specializations right now, they will probably have to. This is inefficient, as the Research Point bonus for a scientist working in their specialty is pretty big, so we'll want to avoid doing it when possible.
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Oct 15, 2020 01:08
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Voting on resolution UB-01 is closed! In the end the vote is nearly unanimous, and sleepy Ascension Island is chosen as the site for the Ministry's headquarters facilities.  Featuring a single concrete runway, small but well-equipped airport facilities, advanced communications and ground-tracking systems, one grocery store, one school, a three-screen movie theatre infamous for its popcorn-scented air fresheners and total lack of popcorn, and a football pitch capable of seating nearly fifty spectators, Ascension has a lot of potential, albeit not much else right now. A scouting team from the Ministry was already on site in case the location was selected, and basic administrative functions can be brought online quickly; it will take months at least to construct more permanent facilities there, but it will be done. The tiny population of the island will increase at least tenfold in the coming weeks, likely more, as it is inundated with construction crews, technicians, administrative personnel, and all the various workers needed to support them. A harbor will need to be built, an additional runway laid down, and a new power plant constructed to run all this new stuff. Volunteers will be easy to find, and no expense will be spared. A few more proposals have been brought to the floor for consideration: idhrendur posted:As a leading scientist from the California Republic, I recommend we continue the recent assignment of groups under Matveyev. Nikitin should be assigned 10-15 labs to study Genome Sequencing. I can bring to bear California's knowledge of computing to Sensors and Control systems, if my comrades would pick an appropriate project (what are the available choices there?). Any remaining labs should be split between Vasilyev and Sergeyev to an appropriate logistics project. Grizzwold posted:4,3,1,2 I-02 and G-03 are two competing proposals about research priorities. I-02 suggests that we prioritize Power and Propulsion (assigning 25 labs to reactor and engine development), Biology/Genetics (assigning 15 labs to the Human Genome Project), and Sensors/Control Systems (assigning the remaining labs).  These are the available research projects for Sensors/Control Systems projects. I will explain all of these in full detail later, but for now, the ten labs will first be allocated to Geological Survey Sensors, an absolutely vital technology for exploring new worlds, without which we will not be able to detect new TNE deposits. G-03 also prioritizes Power and Propulsion, and will assign labs to reactor and engine development. Remaining labs will be split between Construction/Production to improve research speed and industrial output, as well as developing high-capacity passenger transport modules and improved cargo lander shuttles, both of which are extremely important to colonization efforts. Foxfire_ posted:Genetic modification wasn't implemented in 1.11 and isn't in the 1.12 changes, so Human Genome Project is mostly mechanically useless I think. There's some ground unit stuff behind it and all the other research is unusable. Veloxyll posted:We should work in converting say 500 Conventional Industry over to TN Factories, then a similar number to Mines to feed the newly converted factories. And say 100 to fuel refineries to cap off our initial construction order. V-04 and F-06 are two competing proposals for industry conversion. V-04 proposes we convert 500 of our 3200 Conventional Industry to TN Construction Factories, 500 to Mines, and 100 to Fuel Refineries, leaving 2100 left over for us to convert as we please later. F-06 is a more sweeping plan, and proposes a radical restructuring of the planetary economy to use Trans-Newtonian materials. If Foxfire's proposal passes, we will convert our industry into 1000 Construction Factories, 1000 Mines, 300 Fuel Refineries, and 800 Financial Centres. F-07 is a proposal to reallocate our research personnel, retraining two of our scientists and assigning a third as Commandant of Interkosmos Academy. DagPenge posted:I must also propose that we start planning on constructing a colony on the moon, which can serve as a beacon for hope. Just before the last destructive conflict mankind had established a presence on the moon and now with peace, it is fitting that we go back and expand on this important milestep. Maybe one of the civilan shipyards can be tooled to build a small ship, which can move infrastruture and people there? The ship might be small, but its a short trip and it will give us valuable experience in space flight. DP-05 is the most ambitious of these proposals, and the one that has sparked the most discussion among the delegates. DagPenge suggests that the Ministry's first mission be to establish a permanent base on the Moon as soon as possible. This is a significant undertaking. We will have to construct life support infrastructure on the Moon, design and build ships capable of carrying cargo and passengers, transport settlers to the new world, and ensure they remain alive. Only two humans have ever walked on the Moon, and it was nearly a decade ago; this plan proposes we send hundreds, thousands, maybe even more. It's a big engineering challenge, but very feasible with current technology. If this is voted down, we will instead focus on internal development for now. Later, when a proposal requires a ship to be designed, we will hold a ship design contest, and you will make all our ship designs; this early in the game, there are too few options for a contest to be interesting, so we'll skip it to save time. If this proposal passes, the following ship classes will be designed, and one of each will be built (additional hulls may be ordered later if you want them for some reason): code:code:Research: vote for either I-02 (Power/Propulsion, Biology/Genetics, Sensors/Control) or G-03 (Power/Propulsion, Construction/Production, Logistics) Industry: Vote V-04 (partial conversion) or F-06 (radical restructuring) F-07: Vote Yes or No DP-05: Vote Yes or No Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Oct 16, 2020 |
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Oct 16, 2020 03:02
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Foxfire_ posted:Genetic modification wasn't implemented in 1.11 and isn't in the 1.12 changes, so Human Genome Project is mostly mechanically useless I think. There's some ground unit stuff behind it and all the other research is unusable. since you submitted these so soon after voting was opened, I went ahead and accepted them, and they've been added to the list of proposals up for vote in the previous post.
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Oct 16, 2020 04:19
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Boksi posted:I must ask, however, what will be the political status of the moon colony? And of space itself, for that matter? Can a single polity stretch between multiple planets? With our new technology we can travel to the moon in less time than it takes to travel across the Soviet Union by airplane, so distance isn't such an issue anymore. An excellent question, one which you have the authority to craft legislation to answer! For the moment, the Moon colony, which at this point is unlikely to number more than a few thousand people, will be administered as a scientific outpost similar to bases in Antarctica, but obviously that's not going to be sustainable if there are ever hundreds of thousands or millions of people there.
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Oct 17, 2020 00:39
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Voting remains open! Additionally, here is a bit more information on the Roswell object, in the form of a classified report from the USSR's military intelligence directorate, included with the materials transferred to the Ministry's control when it took possession of the object. This information has not been made publicly available to avoid causing a panic; as far as the public knows, the Roswell object was unarmed. Report on ‘Object A’ GRU Ninth Directorate March 8, 1974 ‘Object A’ is the badly-mangled wreck of a disc-shaped spacecraft approximately 25 meters in diameter. The total wreckage recovered by the Americans massed approximately 500 tons empty, in addition to crew corpses, personal effects, consumable supplies, and several thousand litres of what we now know to be refined sorium fuel. It is metallic gray in color, with an outer hull composed of a duranium-based composite material. There is a small angled porthole window forward, composed of an as yet unidentified material; this window provides visibility to the vehicle’s main cockpit. Aft, marring the symmetry of the disc, is the remains of the primary engine assembly. This assembly has been almost completely destroyed, but based on the wreckage recovered, was composed of three small, independent, gimballed engines. Around the circumference of the object are over one hundred small attitude control thrusters, and several dozen small sensors encased in the same transparent material as the cockpit window. Forward, along the spacecraft’s dorsal surface, are ten shutters which, when closed, integrate seamlessly into the spacecraft’s hull. When open, each shutter exposes a long, thin internal compartment. Along the ventral surface are the remains of three landing struts and a number of antennae, which when retracted integrate seamlessly into the hull. The spacecraft has no movable control surfaces (no ailerons, rudder, elevator, etc). While the internals were severely damaged in the crash, the spacecraft had a pressure-sealed crew compartment composed of a single deck, with access via ladder from a hatch directly aft of the cockpit. We believe, based on the layout, that it had a crew of either four or five humanoids. The size of the seats, controls, and other fixtures in the crew compartment are consistent with the size and shape of the four corpses recovered with the craft, and we believe these occupants were of the same species that designed and built the object. Many of the internal components are surprisingly identifiable – four padded rectangular shelves of the appropriate size to serve as bunks, implying a need for sleep; something which is very obviously a lavatory, implying a need to evacuate waste; four stools around a table near a storage compartment containing what we believe to be processed foodstuffs, implying both a need to eat and a desire for group socialization. The four seats in the cockpit have a variety of what we believe to be computerized instrumentation; disassembly of an intact display panel for one of these instruments revealed it to be a very sophisticated version of a ‘Liquid Crystal Display’. Our team believes, based on an analysis of the object, that it is a mass-produced, armed spacecraft intended for military use. They believe it was armed with missiles, rockets, or some sort of similar self-propelled projectile weapon. Furthermore, they believe that it was intended for very short operations of no more than a few days, and have been unable to find any provision for reloading the ten compartments tentatively identified as missile launchers. This implies the existence of a larger ‘carrier’ vessel for storing and replenishing these craft, as well as a complex logistical system for resupplying munitions, fuel, and provisions, and an organized command and control structure to maintain it. Based on the remnants of the engines, the craft was fueled by refined sorium. Rather than serving as a traditional combusting propellant, we believe the sorium served as a working fluid which was passed through a nuclear fission reactor in order to generate thrust, what is generally referred to as a ‘nuclear thermal rocket’; it should be noted that the engines were very badly damaged, however. It would have been capable of single-stage takeoff to orbit from sea level with minimal difficulty, and in vacuum could likely achieve inertialess travel at speeds in the multiple thousands of kilometers per second. Its duranium-composite shell would have been extremely tough and resistant to conventional weapons, and its very small radar cross-section would make it difficult to target or hit with current air defense weaponry. Tactically, Object A represents a serious threat. That having been said, while extremely durable, it is not invincible, and we have developed suggestions for countermeasures should similar vehicles approach the Earth with hostile intent. In atmosphere, conventional anti-aircraft weaponry, particularly large surface-to-air missiles, can achieve success through extreme volume of fire – multiple direct missile hits should penetrate the armor shell, and the internal components are not significantly more durable than those of a human aircraft. Air-to-air weaponry is an option of last resort, as this vehicle would be unimaginably fast and maneuverable by conventional standards, and our aircraft would take disproportionate casualties in such an encounter; even so, with enough planes, we would be all but guaranteed a few kills. Nuclear weapons are a more viable option – based on our materials testing, a direct hit or near miss from a nuclear warhead in the 100+ kiloton range will reliably penetrate Object A’s armor 100% of the time, while a warhead in the 250+ kiloton range should usually destroy the spacecraft outright. Actually hitting the craft with a missile is a difficult proposition, and, again, a high volume of fire is recommended, but unlike conventional weapons, we’ll only need a single hit. If the builders of this spacecraft had invaded Earth in 1947 it is unlikely we would have been able to stop them. Today, we believe an engagement with such a force would be enormously difficult and result in great loss of life, but may we winnable. We strongly recommend the development of defensive countermeasures to prepare for a potential military threat from outer space. Addendum, from source codenamed BALCONY VIEW, director, GRU Ninth Directorate: Speaking candidly, this thing scares the hell out of me, but not for any of the reasons enumerated in this report. This thing was heavily damaged, understand? It shouldn’t have been that mangled if it just crashed; just impacting the ground wouldn’t have done that kind of damage. The exterior hull was melted through in places. The engines were practically obliterated. I don’t care if it’s a MiG or a BF-109 or a flying loving saucer, I’ve been in enough dogfights to know battle damage when I see it. There’s something else. The Americans found nothing in the missile tubes, and the amount of fuel they recovered is not consistent with the volume of the tank; it was at maybe 1/10 capacity. In short, this thing burned hard, expended most of its fuel, fired all its missiles, and then something shot it down. It wasn’t the Americans, they found it like this. So who or what was it? Where did they go? And why hasn't anyone come to get it? Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Oct 30, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 02:06
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NewMars posted:As someone who is new to Aurora, is there any possibility of slash potential benefit to building gundam-esque orbital colonies? There certainly is, and on some planets orbital habs are the only viable option for large scale settlement (Venus, for example). However, we currently lack the technology for building them. The main benefit to orbital habitats is that they bypass the restrictions of the planet they're on entirely. Colony cost doesn't matter, infrastructure doesn't matter, even the population capacity of the planet doesn't matter. The main downside is that they're huge, way too big to realistically move them under their own power (even the smallest one will require a shipyard over fifty times the size of our largest if we tried to build it as a ship). You either need to build powerful tugs to tow them to their destination, or ship building materials and construction equipment there and build them on-site. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Oct 17, 2020 |
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Oct 17, 2020 15:01
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Everyone who has signed up for a leader position is now ingame! Anyone else, feel free to sign up by adding your name to the spreadsheet in the OP! Voting is closed! Resolution G-03 is adopted, and research assets will be allocated to Power/Propulsion, Construction/Production, and Logistics. Resolution F-06 is adopted, and a vast, sweeping Trans-Newtonian industrialization program will be undertaken. Resolution F-07 is adopted, and three of our eminent scientists are reassigned to better serve the interests of the Comintern. Resolution DP-05 is adopted, and we will go to the Moon.  January 1, 1978 Required listening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2wFknH7E5Y For the first time in the Comintern's short history, the deliberations and results of this year's legislative session are broadcast in real time, and the decisions made begin implementation before the affair has even concluded. Many in the Comintern's member nations are able to watch the proceedings via television broadcast, and there is much discussion in homes, workplaces, and social spaces about the implications of these decisions. Like or dislike, agree or disagree, there is one thing that's certain: there is a whole lot of work to be done.  The USSR's aerospace industry is the first and most eager to get to work. Their manned lunar program was abruptly put on hold by the outbreak of the Great Revolutionary War, and they've been desperate to get up there ever since; the American lunar lander still resting on its surface was taken as a quiet insult by many in the Soviet space program. The designs for many of these modules were already completed, and it's just a matter of building them. The factories come online within hours, and the mood among the engineers and workers is happy and celebratory. There are reports that Korolev Design Bureau's engineering staff all watched the broadcast of the final vote together, crowded around a pub television, and that they erupted into cheers when DP-05 passed almost unanimously. The same cannot be said for the rest of the over one hundred and sixty million workers whose lives are about to be radically, permanently altered. Reactions to Resolution F-06 among the people, and governments, of the Comintern range from enthusiasm to confusion to anger and dismay. Lives will be upended by this decision, communities destroyed, and everything touched by it permanently altered. Your leaders are confident it is for the best, and that this will lead to a better future for all - but getting there from here is going to be rough. It will likely take several months before large-scale industrial conversion even starts, and the full slate of projects contained in Resolution F-06 will take years. Government agencies, and the equivalent bodies in the Comintern's few members that do not officially consider themselves states, are already working overtime developing plans for how to implement this - how to build the new industry, how to staff the projects, supply them, how to manage the transition, what to do with the old stuff. A lot of bureaucrats and administrators are going to lose a lot of sleep in the coming weeks - but it will be done.  The work will require enormous quantities of Trans-Newtonian materials - more neutronium than has ever been mined, for example. The crude, primitive, inefficient systems with which we currently extract them will be pushed to their absolute limits in the coming years, and the development of a proper TNE-extracting infrastructure will be, well, revolutionary.   Assigned to oversee this project is the Comintern's lead industrial troubleshooter, DagPenge, whose reputation is already well-established among the member nations. Callous, blunt, direct, fanatically loyal, brave, and legendarily creative and resourceful when faced with a problem, DagPenge's knowledge of mining techniques is unmatched, and their expertise in environmental engineering, ecology, and urban planning is also substantial. DagPenge's leadership has already proven invaluable in the rebuilding efforts after the war, and they were a logical choice to lead the largest engineering project in human history. Due to a computer error, DagPenge's age is listed as 20 on all official records, and cannot be corrected.  Available research laboratories all over the world are brought online and given tasks and direction. The lion's share of the Comintern's available R&D assets are tasked with developing practical Trans-Newtonian fission power, under the leadership of Dr. Uriah Matveyev. Early testing with alloys of boronide has shown promising results for both reactor containment vessels and control rods, and as the basic design of the reactor will be unchanged, they expect to be able to apply this technology in a practical form in as little as a few months. An existing nuclear reactor has already been selected for conversion and work will begin immediately. Dr. Kodos666 is assigned 15 research complexes and tasked with applying TN technology to telecommunications, building upon the USA's ARPANET project, the USSR's own data network experiments, and the work of computer experts and theoreticians the world over. It is believed that corundium-based fiber-optic cables would allow for truly enormous transfer rates at incredible speeds, and uridium-based transmitter/receiver arrays show great promise for wireless telecommunications. The end goal of this project is enormously ambitious - a worldwide, decentralized, international 'web' of linked computers, that could be accessed by anyone, from anywhere. The physical infrastructure for this 'Internetwork' is only part of the project - protocols will have to be developed to operate it, software written to interface with it, and a standardized terminal developed with which to access it. It is expected to take several years, during which the project will consume large quantities of resources and require millions of workers, but has incredible implications for the future of communications and computing. Dr. Zory Vasilyev, a 'cryonicist' once dismissed as a crank, has been given five lab complexes, and an opportunity to prove that TNE-based compounds can allow for practical cryopreservation, and more importantly revival of cryopreserved patients. If his theories prove true, the so-called 'Vasilyev process' could allow for people and animals to be held in 'suspended animation', which has many potential applications. The requirements of Resolution G-03 fulfilled, the remaining few research complexes are allocated to Dr. Idhrendur to develop a suite of sensors and scientific instruments which will allow for high-resolution multi-spectrum survey of planetary bodies from orbit, the most economically important of which is basically a 'TNE detector', that will allow a ship or probe to scan for TNE deposits from orbit.  Young prodigy Nadia Konovolova is assigned as the first Commandant of Interkosmos Academy, and tasked with encouraging the development of new scientific talent among the academy's cosmonaut-cadets. The delegates to the People's Congress begin the journeys to their home nations. January 5, 1978 Augusto Pinochet, the disgraced Chilean military officer who led an attempted coup against Salvador Allende's government in 1973, dies in prison. The death is ruled a suicide. Conspiracy theories about his assassination begin cropping up almost immediately. January 13, 1978 A production run of six Trans-Newtonian rocket engines, running on a refined sorium/liquid oxygen mixture, are completed by Korolev Design Bureau in the USSR. The crews worked rotating 12-hour shifts to work on the project 24/7 for nearly two weeks, completing it in record time. They immediately move on to other parts for the lunar spacecraft ordered by Resolution DP-05. Though the plans are still technically confidential, they are an open secret, and an artist's concept of the 'Luna' makes the front page of Pravda this morning. January 25, 1978 An enormous blizzard, the worst in North American history to date, strikes the Great Lakes region of the former United States. Snowfalls of up to 40 inches are recorded over the course of the three-day storm, and the scattered patchwork of factions and microstates that make up the territory are completely unprepared to deal with it. The Detroit Commune and the Free City of Chicago, both Comintern member states, formally petition the body for aid, and humanitarian relief flows into the territory, though distributing it is extremely difficult. The rump US Federal Government impotently denounces the aid efforts as a Communist invasion, and local militant groups engage in sporadic fighting with Comintern peacekeepers and each other. Thousands will die in the coming days, and the 'Great Blizzard of 1978' is sure to go down in history as a great humanitarian disaster. Refugees fleeing the aftermath scatter throughout the continent, forming huge columns that settle wherever they can. Many of them find their way to existing encampments of war refugees. February 5, 1978 A second catastrophic blizzard strikes the former United States, this one hitting the New England region. Over 20 inches of snow fall on Atlantic City. The Commonwealth of New England, which is not a Comintern member nation, politely declines offers of humanitarian aid. Damage from the blizzard is enormous and hundreds of lives are lost; it is a massive blow to the fledgling state. February 12, 1978  XTR-1, the first Trans-Newtonian power plant, officially comes online. It is a fission reactor of the pressurized-water type, and, as predicted, is capable of outputting much more power, much more safely and efficiently, than equivalent designs constructed out of conventional materials. The personnel and equipment assigned to the project are immediately re-allocated to research into a TNE-based nuclear thermal engine design. Using knowledge from the USA's NERVA program and analysis of the wreckage of the Roswell alien spacecraft, the project has much of its work already finished, and Dr. Matveyev promises results within a few months. On the same day, humanity's first Trans-Newtonian spacecraft, the Luna and Tranquility, are officially laid down at the Comintern's brand new orbital shipyard stations. Nothing like this has ever been done before, and the process of building these spacecraft promises to be an important learning experience. March 1978 Humanitarian relief efforts continue in areas effected by the Great Blizzard, finding increasing success as the snows melt, and going a long way to building goodwill with the embattled residents of the former United States. The white ethnostate of Rhodesia falls to a joint force consisting of local, ANC, Angolan, Namibian, and Cuban forces. The remnants of its government and military flee to South Africa, whose days are surely numbered. The Republic of Zimbabwe is declared. After months of preparation, the process of converting the Comintern's industry to use Trans-Newtonian materials officially begins; Administrator DagPenge uses a shovel of pure duranium in the groundbreaking ceremony of a factory in Hamburg. April 25, 1978  Dr. Matveyev's team test-fires a sorium-powered nuclear thermal rocket on live television. The test is an unqualified success, and the project is officially complete. The Luna and Tranquility, just over half-finished in their orbital cradles, with workers still swarming over their steel skeleton frames, are instantly obsolete. On the same day, a roadside bomb destroys an armored car belonging to the Irish Republican Army's 5th Brigade during a routine patrol in East Belfast. Eight IRA soldiers are killed, the Irish military's largest loss of life in a single attack since reunification. The Ulster Volunteer Force claims responsibility. May 1, 1978 International Workers' Day, the socialist world's greatest and most important holiday. Workers the world over take the day off, and parades, commemorations, and celebrations bring millions out onto the streets. Even the orbital shipyards cease their work for a few hours. June 17, 1978    She is finished. Inspectors in EVA suits finish their final checks, examining every centimeter of the ship, making sure everything is in order. Her crew, working inside, goes over their own checklists. Primary computer, check. Backup computer, check. Life support, check. Main power, check. Auxiliary power, check. Floating through the central access tube, observing all, is her captain.  Captain Akratic Method was hand-selected for this role. Patient and careful, they are an ideal choice for such an important mission- and the charming and attractive young cosmonaut makes an excellent propaganda figurehead, too. Everything must be perfect. Half a dozen television cameras are recording all of this for posterity. This is the moment of truth. The future of humanity begins, really, truly begins, right here, right now.  In the newly-constructed control facility on Ascension Island, the staff check and re-check every single line of data. Finally, after hours and hours of preparations, everyone is satisfied. The inspectors return to the station, the crew straps into their launch seats, and Akratic Method speaks into the ship's radio, voice ringing out across Planet Earth. "Ascension Control, this is the Luna, we are go for launch." The docking clamps are released, and, at an order from the captain, the ship - the largest humanity has ever built - slowly, slowly drifts out of its shipyard slipway, propelled by occasional puffs from its RCS thrusters. It rotates to orient itself, its brilliant white hull gleaming as it catches the sun. No cargo will be carried on this, its first test flight. The only thing the Luna has to do on her first journey to the Moon is prove that she can go there. Prove that we can go there. After verifying that everything is still working properly, which takes a few more hours, Ascension Control finally gives the ship the go-ahead, and officially transfers command authority to her captain. The television cameras catch the moment the order is given. "Helm, fire up the main engines, all ahead full." Her three cavernous engine bells fill with fire. The crew are pressed back into their seats. The Luna pulls away from the shipyard, slowly at first, but then faster, and faster, and faster...  ...until she's gone. The Luna is officially launched, and begins her maiden voyage, sailing to the Moon in just over half an hour. She will remain there for several weeks, during which her crew will carry out experiments, perform various maneuvers in Lunar orbit including simulated landings (they will not actually land on the Moon just yet), and run every last component of the ship through extensive tests. They will also take lots of photographs. July 5, 1978  Matveyev delivers another breakthrough, this time an iterative improvement on sorium-based fuel mixtures. July 11, 1978   Tranquility finishes her work-up and is officially commissioned as the Comintern's second interplanetary spacecraft. The officer assigned as her first captain, Dirt5o8, is a skilled and charismatic speaker, ideal for the role. Competition for the first 250 slots in the Tranquility's passenger compartment is fierce, and final selection is over a month away. Over a million people signed up for the initial selection. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Oct 18, 2020 |
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Oct 18, 2020 08:12
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PurpleXVI posted:What's with the falling political stability? While nothing ever got truly apocalyptic, the planet was still nuked a few hundred times, and the areas in which the heaviest fighting took place are still badly irradiated. Even in places where no nukes fell, war, civil unrest, and everything that came with it left few places on Earth truly unscathed. Fully rebuilding will take many years, and until then parts of the Earth will remain dangerously unstable. Part of the problem is that, while the Comintern officially has a peacekeeping force, in practice it draws its forces entirely from the member nations' militaries, who deploy troops on temporary assignment - and, with a few wars and active insurgencies still ongoing, and most of those countries still having rebuilding of their own to do, there's just not a ton to spare for humanitarian work. There is a shell of a professional Comintern military, but what little of it exists is currently dedicated entirely to maintaining the space program. NewMars posted:What can we actually do, game-wise to help maintain political stability and the like? Game-wise the only way to do it is by garrisoning the planet with ground troops, which is an option. I can also just arbitrarily reduce or remove the source of the unrest using game-master powers, if someone comes up with solutions that make sense in the fiction but don't work in-game. Even then you're probably going to require some sort of peacekeeping force, though. Note that radiation gradually dissipates on its own, so if you just do nothing things will eventually be fine, a solution which is sure to have no long-term political or diplomatic consequences whatsoever! ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ July 7, 1978 In a very closely contested referendum, the Solomon Islands vote against joining the Union of Australasian Workers' Republics, choosing to remain independent for the time being. July 28, 1978 Astronomers in the Kingdom of Hawaii, working in friendly collaboration with MOSA as part of the International Deep Sky Survey, announce the discovery of Sol's tenth and eleventh planets, and their temporary names for them.   Eris is a small, rocky world similar in size to Pluto. It orbits the Sun in an eccentric, highly inclined orbit with an aphelion of about 14.5 billion kilometers, and an orbital period of 559 years. It has a single tiny moon, Dysnomia.  Minerva is a very cold, very distant, very dim gas giant. The smallest yet discovered, it has a diameter slightly smaller than that of Neptune, and a density a little less than twice that of Saturn. Minerva masses a mere 9.36 Earth-masses, less than one-tenth that of Saturn. It orbits the Sun in a near-circular orbit with a distance of over 27 billion kilometers and an orbital period of 2,428 years. It has an extensive family of twenty-one moons, all currently unnamed. The largest of these, Moon #7, is enormous, the biggest moon in the Solar System by far, with a greater diameter than the planets Eris, Pluto, and Mercury. It is hypothesized that Minerva's gravitational influence has 'cleared the neighborhood' in its orbital path, and thus that it serves as a sort of boundary between the inner Kuiper Belt and the more distant objects beyond. Speaking of the Kuiper Belt, the International Deep Sky Survey, tasked with turning Trans-Newtonian sensor technology to deep space observation, has been busy.  While the existence of such a collection of objects had long been hypothesized, new telescopes and sensors have allowed them to finally be observed, and hundreds of Kuiper Belt objects have already been discovered, most of them as yet unnamed. A few of them are large enough that their discoverers have argued they should be considered planets. August 14, 1978 Members of the Nicaraguan counterrevolutionary guerrilla group known as the Contras raid a military encampment, killing several Nicaraguan soldiers and making off with large quantities of weaponry. Among the dead Contras are three American expatriates. The Sandanista government condemns the attack and promises a swift, decisive response. September 11, 1978 The five-year anniversary of Pinochet's failed coup in Chile is marked by commemorations in socialist states throughout the Americas. In the People's Republic of California, the celebrations are disrupted by refugees protesting conditions in the camps. The protests are peaceful and televised live, and generate a lot of public sympathy for the plight of war refugees. October 9, 1978 The Deep Sky Survey discovers Earth's first confirmed 'Trojan' asteroid, a tiny rock referred to as TK7. October 22, 1978 Construction of the new Ruhr Industrial Megaplex in Germany is completed. The enormous complex is state-of-the-art, and will serve as a model for future Trans-Newtonian industrial development. It is immediately put to work building more of itself. November 7, 1978 The sixty-first anniversary of the October Revolution, a national holiday throughout the Comintern. The highlight of the day's television broadcasts is a live feed of the Luna's bridge crew singing L'Internationale, with the moon looming in the window behind them. November 17, 1978 The first mission to the Moon ends, and the Luna makes a triumphant return to Earth orbit, having gathered invaluable data. Its crew are given a few days of shore leave and then quickly put to work loading outpost infrastructure. The first 250 pioneers, who have spent the last few months undergoing extensive training, begin final preparations for their journey to orbit. November 20, 1978  The Matveyev Design Bureau, as it has come to be known, presents a breakthrough in Trans-Newtonian electrical capacitors. On the same day, a skirmish between two groups of squatters in the ruins of Amiens, France escalates into an enormous city-wide gun battle as various other groups are pulled into the conflict. It takes the French Army several days to restore order, and estimates of the death toll are in the low hundreds. November 29, 1978 250 brave souls board the Tranquility, and the last outpost modules and supplies are secured aboard the Luna. The two ships assemble in orbit. The Luna will go several days in advance, to prepare the way. November 31, 1978  For the second time in history, a human walks on the Moon. Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, already a legend due to completing the world's first spacewalk in 1965, leaves his bootprints in the regolith. There were arguments over exactly which flag he should plant, with a few people arguing that the temporary flag design currently used by the Comintern is nearly identical to the Soviet flag and denouncing 'Russian dominance' over the program. In the end, what he unfurls and plants in the ground is a plain, unadorned red flag. "We come in peace, to build a better future for all," he says, after the flag is planted. He will spend a few hours on the surface alone, visually verifying the suitability of the outpost site, before finally calling down the rest of the landers. Dozens of cosmonauts land, and begin the difficult work of erecting the outpost informally named 'Lunagrad'. As soon as the first structures are assembled and the crew returns to orbit, the Luna turns around and heads right back to Earth, to load more. They will make this trip dozens of times over the coming days, and it will quickly become routine. After the first few trips, no one even bothers to report on it anymore. December 5, 1978 The First 250 arrive at Lunagrad. They are scientists, engineers, common laborers, from 38 different nations, some of which no longer exist. They are the first permanent residents of another world. The Tranquility immediately departs to pick up the next 250; like her sister ship, this journey will quickly become routine. The wait list is in the millions. Even with the thirty-minute travel time, and the few short hours spend loading and unloading each cycle, transporting them all like this would take decades. December 8, 1978 So, uh, we have to talk about the Kingdom of Hawaii.  The Kingdom is the most stable polity formed out of the collapse of the United States. Though not a socialist state or a member of the Comintern, Hawaii's status as a post-colonial state born in a revolution, and its commitment to neutrality, have resulted in it being on generally friendly terms with the Comintern. Moving against it would probably result in the various indigenous-led states and organizations in the Comintern raising hell and possibly lead to some secessions, so nobody dares even speak of the possibility. They've been allowed to chart an independent course, and have emerged as the de facto leader of the various independent island states scattered throughout the Pacific. When the Ministry for Outer Space Affairs was established, a provision was included allowing for the chartering of independent civilian space agencies, the idea being that such bodies could handle logistical tasks and free up the Ministry to focus on exploration. There was much debate over who should be issued the first charter; whether it should go to a nation, or a worker collective, or even a private enterprise (a few Comintern nations still maintain some vestiges of a market system). In the end, a compromise option was selected - a neutral country would receive the first charter, and be allowed to register and operate space vessels under their flag. This is how the newly reborn state of Hawaii got itself a manned space program. It has mostly contented itself with flights to low Earth orbit until now, performing support tasks for the shipyard stations and training flights. Today, however, things changed. Big time.  The Queen Lili'uokalani has been under construction in a sealed shipyard on the surface for nearly a year. Secrecy was strict, and analysts assumed it was an oceangoing ship, presumably some sort of new warship. Today, however, it was hoisted vertical, and, assisted by eight huge detachable rocket boosters, launched into orbit. The ship is impressive in its scale and sheer brute efficiency. It has no scientific instruments, no significant amenites, very little of anything at all, really. Humanity's third interplanetary spacecraft is a box, filled with seats, with rudimentary life support and six enormous engines strapped to its rear. It's big, too, really, really big, twice the size of the Tranquility. An official communique from the Kingdom, polite and tinged with just a hint of smugness, informs the Ministry that they are ready to fulfill the obligations of their spaceflight charter, and offer to begin loading the first fifty thousand people on the wait list for resettlement to Lunagrad. Note: I was really, really not expecting a civilian shipping line to launch a ship literally days after the colony was established, this kind of threw me for a loop. Delegates for the next session of the People's Congress were already beginning to assemble in Algiers, so it's pretty trivial to call an emergency session a couple weeks early. Information is prepared for the delegates to peruse. Planets  Earth continues to exist. Industrial conversion continues apace. There remains a lot of social unrest, and conflict still rages in some of the world's trouble spots.  Lunagrad, only a few days old, has nothing to speak of. Large-scale habitation was always the plan, and the pioneers currently there report that, with some improvisation, the structures currently present on the Moon's surface could be retrofitted to house and support a little over one hundred thousand people, in somewhat ramshackle hab modules. Any more than that will require additional infrastructure to be shipped from Earth, which fortunately the Luna is already doing. Shipyards  With no other work assigned, the shipyard stations are assigned to instead focus on expanding their capacity, allowing larger ships to be built. Research  Our investment in power and propulsion continues to pay dividends. Also close to a breakthrough is Dr. Vasilyev, who reports that he will have cyronic 'tubes' ready for mass production within weeks. This should allow for high-density passenger transport across very long distances. The next update will break down all currently-available research projects and what they do. Leaders We have ships to command, academies to staff, and outposts to govern now, so it's time to talk about leaders and the command and control heirarchy. This will also be covered in the next update. THE 1979 LEGISLATIVE SESSION IS NOW OPEN! a few weeks early There is no Urgent Business requiring an immediate vote. ORDER OF THE DAY: what, if anything, do we do about the Hawaiians? Under the charter we issued them, they have every right to do what they're doing, but it is enormously disruptive, and we're still not entirely sure how they built such a large spacecraft so quickly. Other issues worth considering include the ongoing unrest and instability, future research priorities and lab allocation, and applications for the fancy nuclear thermal engines we've developed. As a reminder, you may submit proposals on any subject. Deliberations will be open for approximately 48 hours before we move on to voting. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 18, 2020 |
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Oct 18, 2020 17:51
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Foxfire_ posted:This is weird since they're not supposed to be able to yet. Civilian passenger liners are supposed to need inhabited planets in two different systems and we don't have cryotransport tech for colony ships yet. What's actually in the design, nuclear thermal + a bunch of luxury passenger accommodations? Mechanics-wise it's nuclear thermal plus a bunch of cryotransport modules they shouldn't be able to build because we don't have the technology for them yet. This ship getting built at all is a bug, albeit a minor one. I could have SM-deleted it since it shouldn't be able to exist yet, but I decided to just roll with it, and fluff it as instead being a bunch of people crammed end to end in a big pressurized chamber like an enormous airliner, since the trip to the Moon takes like eight minutes at those speeds so you really don't need cryo tech to achieve high passenger densities.
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Oct 19, 2020 01:11
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RESEARCH So I've been dreading this, but the good thing is I only have to do this once, and then I can just do tech write-ups one at a time as new ones come available. Here's every goddamn technology available for research right now. BIOLOGY/GENETICS Genome Sequence Research 5000 RP: A project to map all of the over three billion nucleotides in the human genome, which will require a large team of skilled biologists and a vast amount of computing power. Has far-reaching implications for medicine and bioscience. In game terms this currently does almost nothing, as the extensive genetic modification system from VB6 is not yet implemented in this version of Aurora. That having been said, if you do research it, there will be benefits to doing so. Terraforming Module 5000 RP: The alternate dimension known formally as Trans-Newtonian Space, or informally in some sources as the 'Aether', contains more than just Trans-Newtonian elements. All the conventional elements of the periodic table can be found drifting through the fluid of Trans-Newtonian spacetime. By modifying the techniques used for mining Trans-Newtonian elements, conventional elements can also be drawn from this dimension into our own, or siphoned out of real-space into Trans-Newtonian space. Doing this requires huge amounts of energy and is only practical with minute amounts of very light elements. Currently, performing this work will require huge surface facilities and massive workforces. This project will develop a miniaturized system that can be lofted into orbit on a space station or a ship, and perform the work with a fraction of the personnel. Terraforming Modules are exactly as effective as planet-bound Terraforming Installations, but require only 100 crew instead of 250,000 population, and are much more mobile. They're also cheaper. Once you've got these there's no reason to ever build planet-bound terraformers. Terraforming Rate 0.00032atm 3000 RP: Improved cross-dimensional boring techniques increase the rate at which gases can be siphoned out of, or pumped into, Trans-Newtonian space. CONSTRUCTION/PRODUCTION: Construction Rate 12 BP 3000 RP: At the moment, our 'Trans-Newtonian' factories are still basically using conventional tools, equipment, and production techniques, with TNEs substituted for conventional materials in a few places. This project will involve an extensive study of industrial processes and machinery, as well as experiments in materials science, engineering, and physics. The goal will be a radical transformation of heavy industry to take advantage of the extraordinary properties of TNEs. The new methods and materials should result in faster, safer, cleaner, and more efficient work. A straightforward incremental improvement of the Build Point output for Construction Factories and Construction Equipment. Fighter Production Rate 12 BP 3000 RP: The aerospace industry is another which has yet to really take proper advantage of TNEs. This project will encompass a series of experiments with the goal of integrating TNEs into aircraft design and developing a system of standards and practices for their use. The same as the last, but for Fighter Factories. Fuel Production 48,000 Litres 3000 RP: Refining Sorium into usable fuel is a difficult and energy-intensive process. The refining machinery we currently use is basically research equipment, and is not equipped to supply the needs of our growing Trans-Newtonian economy. We will develop practical industrial-scale refining technology. Same as the last, but for Fuel Refineries. Maintenance Production Rate 24 MSP 5000 RP: As our space fleet grows, so too will its hunger for spare parts, tools, and other maintenance supplies. We will optimize production and distribution of these critical resources. Same as the last, except for Maintenance Facility supply output. Maximum Orbital Mining Diameter 125 km 2000 RP: A theoretical improvement to the capabilities of an orbital mining module, a technology which does not yet exist. Increases the max size of bodies that can be mined from orbit. Since we can't mine anything from orbit right now, this technology does nothing. Mining Production 12 tons 3000 RP: Mining Trans-Newtonian Elements is a lot more complicated than just digging them out of the ground. These exotic materials don't exactly exist in our universe in their unrefined forms. They must be drawn across the boundary between universes, then stabilized. This involves boring a minute tunnel through the very fabric of spacetime, holding it open, and passing a great deal of energy through it, then mixing the resulting 'ore' with conventional materials to anchor it in realspace. The machines with which we do it now are slow, crude, and inefficient. We can do much better. Incremental improvement of the TNE production per Mine, Automated Mine, or Orbital Mining Module. Orbital Mining Module 5000 RP: A miniaturized, mobile Trans-Newtonian mining machine, capable of being mounted on a ship or space station. Because it operates from orbit, it cannot bore very deeply into a gravity well, and thus can only be used on very small bodies. Has the same output as a Mine, but requires a very small crew, is mobile, and can be used on uncolonized bodies. It can also only be used on very, very small objects. Shipbuilding Rate 560 BP 5000 RP: Developing purpose-built tools and heavy equipment for orbital shipbuilding, and a set of standards for using them, should significantly increase the speed with which we can build ships. You know the drill, incremental improvement, blah blah blah. Build ships faster. Shipyard Operations: 5% Time/Cost Saving 2500 RP: Establishing a professional organization of shipwrights, a technical college for educating them, and a formal administrative body to oversee them will be the first step in developing a proper orbital shipbuilding industry. Expand shipyard capacity faster and cheaper. Build new slipways faster and cheaper. You don't know it yet, but you want this technology very, very badly. Sorium Harvester 5000 RP: Sorium is the lightest of the known Trans-Newtonian elements, the one which 'floats' nearest to the top of gravity wells in TN space, and the easiest one to draw into realspace. As such, it is the only one which is practical to mine from gas giants - and based on our theoretical models, it should accumulate there in very large quantities. This device combines a trans-dimensional bore, a gas siphon, and a fuel refinery, and will be able to draw raw Sorium from a gas giant, then immediately refine it into usable fuel on site. A mining module and fuel refinery rolled into one, that can only be used on gas giants. Gas giants often have vast quantities of sorium, and this is the only way to get at it. Wealth Generation per Million TN Workers: 120 3000 RP: Our research into TNEs will be turned towards consumer goods and the service industry. New production techniques, new technologies, and new materials should allow us to produce more for less, not only increasing the average standard of living, but also reducing the amount of resources required to provide that standard of living. Wealth is used for everything. It is produced by population. This increases the amount of wealth produced by populations. DEFENSIVE SYSTEMS Alpha Shields 1000 RP: Experiments with corbomite have shown that a thin lattice of the material, when charged by a powerful electrical current, can project a powerful energy field. It should have many defensive applications. Shields are a sci fi cliche at this point, you know what shields are. Alpha Shields are the weakest, cheapest shields you can get. Cloaking Theory 10,000 RP: Invisibility is impossible, you can't actually cloak a ship visually. Fortunately, space is enormous, so we don't have to do that. This project is a study of practical stealth technology. Preliminary work indicates that a modification of the same corbomite-lattice approach used to produce energy shields could be used to build a device that would 'mask' most of a ship's mass, making it appear to mass much less than it actually did. A ship equipped with such a device would exercise much less gravitational influence over realspace, and would thus be much harder to detect using active gravitational sensors. Prerequisite technology for all the cloaking techs, which let you make ships that are very hard to detect with active sensors. Conventional Composite Armor 250 RP: At the moment our ships' outer hulls are constructed mostly of steel and aluminum. This project will replace most of them with high-strength composite materials. This doesn't necessarily make our armor stronger per se - what it does is reduces the mass of X amount of armor strength, allowing us to fit more armor into the same amount of mass - or keep the same amount of armor and free up that space for something else. Early game armor is extremely loving inefficient and our first ship designs waste a ton of space on heavy steel plating. Damage Control 5000 RP: If there's one constant in the universe, it's this: things break. As we spread to the stars, it is certain that eventually, somewhere, something mission-critical will break far away from any shipyard or maintenance facility, and it may need to be repaired very quickly if the ship and crew are to survive. We will develop tools and techniques for rapid emergency repairs in the field. Damage Control modules increase the speed at which a ship can repair parts that have been damaged or destroyed, usually in battle. Only works if the ship has enough maintenance supplies on hand to fix the damaged component. Maximum Shield Generator Size - 12 2000 RP: Build bigger shield generators that make stronger shields. Shield Regeneration Rate 1 1000 RP: The rate at which shields recharge. Early tech shields charge very slowly. Thermal Reduction: Signature 75% Normal 1500 RP: Engines give off an enormous amount of heat, which can be detectable from very long range. By developing a system of Trans-Newtonian 'baffles' which radiate part of the engine's thermal output across the dimensional boundary into TN space, we can reduce the effective thermal output of an engine, making it more difficult to detect. While cloaking makes a ship harder to detect with active sensors, thermal reduction makes it harder to detect with passive thermal sensors. Unlike cloaking, this isn't a separate module, it's just applied to the engine design. Baffled engines have exactly the same performance as an equivalent non-baffled engine, but they can be much more expensive, and are thus generally reserved for a few ship classes that can benefit from stealth. ENERGY WEAPONS 10cm Laser Focal Size 1000 RP: Lasers have been around for about eighteen years and have many scientific applications, but their military use has remained strictly theoretical until now - it was simply not practically possible to make a beam of sufficient intensity to use as a weapon. Corundium focusing lenses should be able to produce brilliant, powerful beams that output incredible energy at great ranges. Base technology for laser weapons; this is essentially the 'caliber' of the weapon, and is the main thing determining how much damage a laser does. 10cm Meson Focal Size 1000 RP: One of the more exotic energy weapon proposals, meson cannons fire packets of subatomic particles that should be able to pass through solid objects before explosively annihilating themselves. In theory, such a weapon should be able to bypass a target's armor and detonate inside a target. Same as lasers, but for meson cannons. All meson cannons do 1 point of damage, but they do it through shields, and have a pretty good chance of bypassing armor as well. Since they only ever do 1 damage, increasing the caliber basically just increases their range. 10cm Microwave Focal Size 1000 RP: A beam of high-powered microwaves has been proposed as an active electronic warfare system, disabling a target's sensors, fire controls, and other electronic systems. Such a weapon would probably do no direct damage to a spacecraft on its own, but still shows promise as a tactical weapon. Microwaves do no damage to hull or armor, but they absolutely rip through shields, and then bypass armor to do damage directly to ship systems. A well-applied microwave attack can leave an enemy ship blind, deaf, and defenseless, easy prey for a follow-up attack with a damaging weapon. 15cm Carronade 500 RP: The simplest and most immediately practical of the various energy weapon designs that have been proposed, the plasma cannon uses a ring of powerful TN electromagnets to shape a volume of superheated ionized gas into a coherent 'bolt', which is accelerated out of the device's bore at relativistic speeds. The weapon should be capable of delivering terrifying amounts of thermal and mechanical force on impact at close range, potentially melting clean through a target's armor. The downside is that there is nothing holding the projectile together except the electromagnets in the weapon's barrel, and the plasma will begin to dissipate almost immediately upon leaving the barrel. This will lead to short range and rapid damage falloff. Plasma carronades are very short range, very high damage weapons, basically space shotguns. Unlike all other energy weapons, they only require one tech to make instead of two or three, and they're relatively cheap RP-wise. This may lead you to think they're bad, and you'd be wrong. Used intelligently, they're brutally effective. Infrared Laser 500 RP: A laser emitter that outputs in the infrared wavelength. Wavelength is the main modifier on a laser weapon's range. Higher wavelength equals longer max range and less damage falloff with range. Meson Armour Retardation 50% 500 RP: Denser meson 'packets' should be able to penetrate deeper into a target before detonating. This is the percentage chance that a meson cannon shot will be blocked by a single layer of armor. If it is blocked, it does one damage to the armor instead of the components inside. Meson Focusing Technology 1 1000 RP: Elongating and narrowing the meson packet should result in a much longer effective range. Higher focus, longer range, pretty straightforward. Microwave Focusing Technology 1 1000 RP: A narrower, more focused, more intense beam should be effective at longer ranges. Ditto, fry shields and electronics from further away. Particle Beam Range 60,000 km 1000 RP: Before the Trans-Newtonian era, particle accelerators were enormous things, the size of buildings or even bigger, and required extensive power infrastructure. This novel proposal suggests a cyclotron particle accelerator that makes extensive use of TNEs to massively reduce its size and increase its power output, then directs the resulting beam of relativistic-speed charged particles out of an emitter as a weapon. The beam should hit a target with much force even at extreme range. Particle beams do less damage than lasers but suffer no damage fall-off at all, always doing their maximum possible damage no matter the range. Particle Beam Strength 2 2000 RP: More powerful particle accelerators should result in more damaging beams. Higher strength, more damage. Reduced-Size Laser 0.75 Size / 4x Recharge 5000 RP: Self-explanatory, smaller lasers that take longer to recharge. Spinal Mount 5000 RP: By integrating a laser emitter and its associated electronics into the central structural spine of a ship, we believe we can construct and operate much larger, more powerful lasers than we otherwise could. Spinal mounts work only with lasers. You can only have one on a ship, and it can be one size higher than your normal maximum size. Turret Tracking Speed (10% Gear) 2000 km/s 1000 RP: Integrating TNEs into our gear designs should allow them to handle incredible strain. Weapons can be mounted in turrets to increase the max speed at which they can accurately track a target. This technology increases the tracking speed of a turret dedicating 10% of its mass to rotational gears. You can always increase the tracking speed by increasing the percentage dedicated to gear, resulting in a larger turret. The higher this tech, the smaller a turret has to be to achieve a desired tracking speed. GROUND COMBAT Construction Equipment 5000 RP: Mobile Trans-Newtonian construction and engineering equipment, including earthmovers, cranes, and other heavy machinery. It's a Construction Factory, but it requires no population, and is mobile. Must be mounted on a ground vehicle. Desert Warfare Training, Jungle Warfare Training, Mountain Warfare Training, Rift Valley Warfare Training 5000 RP each: Specialized training regimens, tactics, and equipment for carrying out warfare in different environments. Makes a ground unit more effective in that terrain type. One unit can be given more than one. Extreme Pressure Capability, Extreme Temperature Capability, High Gravity Capability, Low Gravity Capability 5000 RP each: One day it is conceivable that our soldiers may have to do battle on worlds other than Earth, and they may face any number of extreme environments with their own unique challenges. We must develop weapons, equipment, and tactics for fighting in these environments. Same as previous. Fighter Air-to-Air Pod, Autocannon Pod, Bombardment Pod 5000 RP each: Enhancing our existing aircraft weapon technology with Trans-Newtonian materials. They're weapons you put on fighters, allowing direct fire against other airplanes, close air support, or bombing. For when you want to support your ground formations with fighters but don't want to bathe the enemy in nuclear fire. Geosurvey Equipment 5000 RP: A suite of scientific equipment for exploring and surveying planetary surfaces. Geological Survey Sensors, but on the ground. Allows ground surveys. Ground Formation Construction Rate - 320 2000 RP: Developing training manuals and curriculum for applying TNE-based equipment in combat should increase the rate at which we can train new ground troops. Incremental production speed increase tech, but for the rate at which ground forces are trained. Ground Unit Base Type - Heavy Vehicle 5000 RP: TNE-based materials and power plants should in theory allow us to make really, really big armored vehicles, encased in thick armor and bristling with weapons. It's a big-rear end heavy vehicle. You can put big guns on it, you can put construction equipment on it to make a heavy engineering vehicle, you can make a gigantic supply crawler or a mobile headquarters or an exploration rover. Heavy Anti-Air Weapons 6000 RP: Developing a TNE-based surface-to-air missile, and the search arrays and targeting systems required to use it, should revolutionize strategic-level anti-aircraft capability. Big, heavy, expensive backline support anti-air system, for when you absolutely, positively need every enemy fighter in a battlespace destroyed. Heavy Anti-Vehicle Weapon 5000 RP: As vehicles get bigger and armor gets stronger, we will need to keep pace with our weapon designs. Large-caliber, high-velocity guns, more effective shaped charges and penetrators, and larger, heavier anti-tank guided missiles will ensure we remain competitive no matter what a future enemy throws our way. Me like big gun. Me put big gun on armored chassis. Big gun make big tank go kaboom. Heavy Autocannon 8000 RP: The high strength, durability, and favorable thermal properties of TNEs allow for revolutionary autocannon designs, that rip into targets with an absolute deluge of high-caliber shells. Autocannons are equally effective against infantry and armored targets. This is a really big one. Heavy Bombardment Weapon 6000 RP: What's better than artillery? Bigger artillery. TNE-reinforced barrels, gun carriages, and projectile designs will let us make very large indirect-fire weapons. Artillery can engage in indirect fire from the back line, to support troops fighting on the front lines, or engage in counterbattery fire against enemy artillery. This one's bigger. Heavy Crew-Served Anti-Personnel 4000 RP: As an anonymous French revolutionary was quoted as saying during the Battle of Amiens, you don't need to be a better shot, you just need to fire more bullets. Regular crew-served anti-personnel weapons are very good at killing large numbers of infantry quickly. Heavy CSAP is that, but bigger and scarier. Heavy Static Armour 6000 RP: You would think stationary emplacements would be very easy to armor. You would be wrong - it's not as simple as just slapping more metal on the outside; you also need to engineer the structure in such a way that it doesn't fall down under all that additional weight. Armor makes things more difficult to kill. This lets you more heavily armor stationary emplacements such as bunkers and surface-to-orbit installations. Heavy Vehicle Armour 5000 RP: Armor, on a vehicle, which is heavy. Trans-Newtonian materials should allow for very thick, very dense armor without sacrificing a vehicle's speed or maneuverability. For people who derive satisfaction from the sound of the enemy's anti-tank shells ricocheting off their armor. Long Range Bombardment Weapon 6000 RP: Rocket artillery is nothing new, rocket artillery capable of this kind of accuracy at this kind of range certainly is new. It's a Medium Bombardment Weapon with the range of a Heavy Bombardment Weapon, for cheaper, lighter long-range support with a smaller logistical footprint. Powered Infantry Armour 2000 RP: A game-changing development in infantry combat, these powered, armored exoskeletons should increase a wearer's strength and speed while also massively increasing their durability against anti-infantry weapons. Makes infantry using it a lot harder to kill and a lot more expensive. Troop Transport Bay - Standard 4000 RP: A spacecraft module that can house ground troops and their equipment, and (slowly) deploy them on planetary surfaces. Not equipped for drops into hot LZs. It's a cargo hold but it carries ground units instead of cargo. Xenoarchaeology Equipment 5000 RP: Given that we already know extraterrestrial life exists, and that it was present in this very solar system, developing a suite of scientific equipment intended specifically for studying artificial structures on alien worlds seems prudent. If and when you find alien ruins, send in the xenoarchaeologists to unlock their secrets. you know what, gently caress it, it's extremely late and there's a billion of these, I'll edit in the rest tomorrow Logistics Boat Bay 1000 RP: The most difficult part of developing an enclosed hangar on a spacecraft is the outer door, which has to be very large, capable of opening directly to space, and also capable of sealing well enough to maintain a pressurized environment inside the hangar when closed. The pumps required to rapidly evacuate the atmosphere of the bay are also a major engineering challenge. Basically, the entire hangar has to be one giant airlock. Even so, we believe that small hangars should be relatively easy to design. Boat bays and hangar bays allow smaller craft to dock with and be carried inside larger ones. The mothership provides maintenance, fuel, and ordnance to the docked ship, and berths its crew, so the docked ship does not accrue deployment time. This early bay will allow us to dock up to 250 tons worth of craft per bay. Boat Bay - Small 500 RP: Very small internal docking bays should be trivially easy to develop. Same, but 125 tons, which is of questionable utility. You can make a fighter that small, but the reason you would do so is because you want to deploy a whole lot of them; I'm hard pressed to think of a use case for one by itself. Cargo Hold - Large 2500 RP: 'A bigger box' seems like it would be a simple proposition, but making a large empty void in a spacecraft structurally sound is actually a pretty difficult engineering challenge. As with most things, TNE-based materials should simplify the undertaking a great deal. Large cargo holds can transport 125000 units of cargo capacity each. For comparison, our Luna freighter's 5 Tiny-size cargo holds can transport a combined total of 2500. Colonization Cost Reduction 5% 10000 RP: Humans are not designed to survive anywhere except Earth, and, unless we find another planet with a similar environment, wherever we wish humans to survive, we'll have to bring a little piece of Earth there. At the moment, the equipment to do this is big, bulky, and inefficient. Habitat modules are low, squat things encased in heavy steel and dense radiation shielding, with little porthole windows. Merely maintaining basic life support functions will occupy much of our pioneers' labor. We can do better. Colony Cost is a multiplier which determines how much life support infrastructure it takes to support a human population on a planet, and what percentage of that population must dedicate their labor to basic survival. A 5% reduction may not seem like much, but it adds up on worlds with large populations or very harsh environments. Cryogenic Transport - Emergency 2000 RP: In addition to passenger transport, the Vasilyev Process shows great promise in the medical field, and one of the proposals on our desks is for a very small cryo module for use in emergency situations. A normal cryo module holds 10,000 people; this one holds 200. May seem useless, but when we're losing ships and need to pick up their lifeboats before the survivors all asphyxiate, a zippy little search and rescue shuttle with one of these in it is going to look mighty appealing. Cryogenic Transport - Small 1000 RP: A midpoint between the huge standard model and the miniaturized emergency model. Holds 1000 people, is mainly used on hospital ships. Fuel Storage - Large 1000 RP: Developing bigger fuel tanks is a similar engineering challenge to developing larger cargo bays, but has a few unique challenges of its own. Holds 250,000 liters of fuel. Improved Command and Control 5000 RP: It is conceivable that, one day, humanity may spread to the stars. If and when we do, carrying out governance on such a grand scale will require new forms of organization, new administrative techniques, and new technology. Allows the construction of Sector Command facilities, which will allow us to organize star systems into Sectors and assign civilian administrators to these sectors. Sector admins give bonuses to every settled world in their sector. Maintenance Module 5000 RP: At the moment, spacecraft maintenance is carried out by large, stationary facilities, and miniaturizing their functions into something that can be made mobile will take a lot of work - but it can be done. It's a Maintenance Facility, but it requires no workers and can be mounted on a ship or space station. Maintenance Support per Facility 1250 Tons 2000 RP: Maintaining and repairing a spaceship in orbit is a new field, and we are still novices. With a bit of work, and a bit of thought, we could become much more efficient at it. At the moment, each maintenance facility can provide maintenance support for up to 1000 tons of ship, meaning if our navy had a total of, say, 100,000 fleet tonnage we'd need 100 fully operational maintenance facilities to keep them all in top condition. This incremental technology reduces the number of maintenance facilities we'll need. Orbital Habitat Module 5000 RP: Every space station built by humanity to date has been a small, cramped thing composed of little cylindrical modules and skeletal struts. With TNEs, we believe we can build them bigger. Much, much bigger. Can only be mounted on space stations. Each module provides life support and living space for 50,000 people, and completely bypasses infrastructure requirements, surface gravity, and planet population capacity. On some particularly hostile planets, like Venus, orbital habs are the only realistic way to have a permanent population. Ordnance Transfer Hub 10000 RP: One day we may have a navy, and that navy may use missiles. In that case, it won't do for them to have to sail all the way back to Earth to replenish their magazines. A ship or station with one of these can reload the missile stores of multiple ships at once, provided it has missiles to reload them with, of course. Ordnance Transfer System: 48 MSP per Hour 2000 RP: Semi-automated systems that should make transferring missiles, probes, and buoys between ships faster. Load ships' magazines faster. Refuelling Hub 10000 RP: The further we range from Earth, the more important ready access to fuel will be. Like the Ordnance Transfer Hub, but for refueling. Refuelling System: 60,000 LPH 2000 RP: More efficient pumping systems will allow us to transfer fuel between ships more quickly. LPH is 'liters per hour'; a ship with this technology can refuel another ship's tanks at that rate. Salvage Module 500 5000 RP: Given that we have already discovered one wrecked alien ship, we must be prepared for the possibility we will find more. Lets a ship salvage shipwrecks to recover TNEs or technology. Ship to Ship Tractor Beam 5000 RP: A concentrated beam of gravitational force that can 'link' two ships together. Potential applications include tugs and rescue ships. Without these, the only way you're going to get to use space stations is if you assemble them on-site, and any ship that loses its engines might as well just scuttle itself. Trans-Newtonian Cargo Shuttles 5000 RP: The landers currently in use are modifications of craft developed for the old lunar program. They work, but they're slow and low-capacity. Developing new light spacecraft designed for short-range hops to and from low orbit will pay dividends in the long run. Freighters and passenger ships don't load or unload instantly, they need shuttles either on the ship or on the planet's surface and it takes time. The better the shuttles, the faster that happens. Underway Replenishment 20% Rate 2500 RP: At the moment any ships that wish to dock with each other to transfer crew or resources would have to slow to a stop. This project aims to develop the capability to carry out these transfers while under thrust. Lets ships refuel, rearm, and resupply while moving, at 20% the normal rate of transfer. MISSILES/KINETIC WEAPONS 10cm Railgun 1000 RP: An electrically-powered projectile weapon which uses two powerful electromagnetic rails to accelerate a ferromagnetic projectile to incredible speeds. People have been trying to design a practical railgun since World War 1 and the first design was patented in 1922, and technically feasible designs have been around since the 1940s. The limitations have always been the enormous power requirements and the extreme structural strain the rails are subjected to. TNEs make both of these problems look very solvable, and with a bit of work it should be easy to create a practical railgun. Railguns do less damage than lasers per projectile, but each individual railgun 'shot' is actually a burst of four projectiles. If all four shots hit, they do more total raw damage than an equivalent-caliber laser, but it's less concentrated and thus worse at piercing armor. Box Launcher Explosion Chance - 70% 1000 RP: Armoring our missile launch tubes should make them less likely to explode catastrophically when hit. Sometimes when missiles in box launchers are hit, they explode in the tube. This is very bad. This makes that less likely. Enhanced Radiation Warhead (50% Yield, 2x Rad) 1000 RP: It is theoretically possible for us to develop a nuclear warhead tuned for maximum radiation output and minimum explosive force, in order to kill as much of an enemy's civilian population as possible while minimizing damage to infrastructure. The mere suggestion of this proposal has generated a lot of controversy in the scientific community, and actually building one of these weapons is sure to infuriate a lot of people. Designed specifically for use against civilian populations, and of little use against warships or ground units, missiles with these warheads pump a lot of hard radiation into the target at the cost of sacrificing half of their direct damage. There will be severe political consequences for building these. Gauss Cannon Launch Velocity 10,000 500 RP: A coilgun is an electrically-powered projectile weapon which uses a series of coiled electromagnets to accelerate a projectile down a barrel. Much less powerful than a railgun, they're also much easier to build and power. Gauss cannons do exactly one damage per shot, no matter how advanced they get. They also require no reactor to power them, can be made extremely small with no additional miniaturization tech, and can be mounted in turrets. Higher launch velocity means longer range and better accuracy at range. An essential tech for CIWS. Gauss Cannon Rate of Fire 2 1500 RP: Better capacitors and a more advanced projectile loading system will allow a coilgun to fire a shot every 2.5 seconds. The rate of fire is per 5-second increment. High tech level gauss cannons are the fastest-firing weapons in the game and allow for unmatched volume of fire. Implosion Fission Warhead: Strength 3xMSP 2000 RP: TNE-based nuclear warheads should be much smaller and much more powerful than their counterparts made out of conventional materials. Warhead strength is how much damage a Size 1 missile warhead will do. You can of course make the warhead bigger to do more damage, but that will result in a bigger missile. Magazine Feed System Efficiency - 75% 1000 RP: At the moment, auto-loading systems are bulky and will take up a lot of the space in a magazine. The more efficient we can make them, the more space can be dedicated to missiles. Carry more missiles in the same amount of space, what's not to love? Magazine Neutralization System - 70% Chance 500 RP: Magazine explosions are bad news, and developing better fire suppression systems and a series of automated emergency bulkheads will make them less likely. Sometimes when missile magazines are hit they blow up, which is usually a death sentence. This technology makes that less likely. Missile Agility 32 per MSP 2000 RP: Better maneuvering thrusters and more advanced targeting computers will make our missiles more accurate against fast-moving targets. There are two ways to make a missile more accurate: make it faster, and make it more agile. This technology allows us to make more agile missiles. Missile Launcher Reload Rate 2 2000 RP: Faster auto-loaders will increase the rate of fire of our missile tubes. Reload rate is the size of launcher that can be reloaded in 30 seconds - so at rate 2, a size 2 launcher will take 30 seconds per shot, a size 1 launcher 15 seconds, a size 4 launcher 60 seconds, etc. Ordnance Production 12 BP 3000 RP: Streamlining the assembly lines will allow for faster missile production. Incremental build speed improvement for Ordnance Factories. Railgun Launch Velocity 10000 1000 RP: Faster railgun projectiles are more accurate and longer-ranged. POWER AND PROPULSION Capacitor Recharge Rate 3 4000 RP: We've already made some advances in TN electrical systems, and further research in this field should result in even greater rewards. The recharge rate is how much power we can feed into a weapon system in every 5-second increment, so at Recharge Rate 3 we could charge a weapon system requiring 3 power in 5 seconds, 6 power in 10 seconds, etc. Improved Pressurized Water Reactor 1200 RP: Having converted a conventional nuclear reactor to use TNEs, the logical next step is to design a reactor from the ground up to use them. While it is an iterative development, it's still an important one. A slightly better reactor, that is a precursor to a slightly better engine technology. Engine and power plant techs all work that way - each new power plant unlocks a new engine tech, and each new engine unlocks a new power plant tech. Jump Point Theory 5000 RP: The geometry of spacetime in Trans-Newtonian space is difficult to understand, but we know it differs substantially from realspace. A few of our scientists have hypothesized that, at certain points in TN space with very specific physical characteristics, a 'bridge' between two very distant points in realspace might be able to exist. If such a thing were to exist, and it could be stabilized enough to send objects through, it would allow for near-instant travel across interstellar distances. Prerequisite tech for all technology related to faster-than-light travel. Maximum Engine Size 40 2000 RP: Our current materials science places a hard upper limit on the size of an engine, but with a bit of work we could safely make them bigger. Bigger engines are more fuel-efficient but also easier to disable. Minimum Engine Power Modifier x0.4 1000 RP: Sometimes you just need a little less rocket. Lower power equals more fuel efficiency. Power Plant Boost 10% Explosion 7% 500 RP: By removing a few nonessential safety systems, we can achieve higher power outputs from our nuclear reactors, with only a slight increase in the risk of catastrophic explosions. More power from the same-size reactor, with a risk of the reactor exploding when hit by an enemy weapon. Mainly useful in fighters, which are generally dead if they get hit anyway. SENSORS AND CONTROL SYSTEMS Active Grav Sensor Strength 10 1000 RP: The potential for these devices was actually discovered by accident, a byproduct of Trans-Newtonian mining research. By modifying the machine used to open the trans-dimensional bore, and passing an extreme-voltage electrical current through it, a 'pulse' of gravity waves can be sent radiating out from that point through TN space in all directions; the scientists presenting the proposal liken it to the ripples produced when you drop a rock into a pond. These waves interact with physical objects of sufficient mass, and the resulting disturbances can be detected by a properly configured uridium antenna array. This is one half of the technology for active grav sensors, specifically the half that generates the output pulse. Grav sensors are basically active sonar in space - they send out a 'ping' and then listen for the echoes. The most reliable way to detect ships, and a vitally important component for warships, they're also not stealthy at all. Think of it like turning on a flashlight in a dark room - you can see, but now everyone can see you, too. Auxiliary Control 2000 RP: Redundancy is an important consideration in deep space missions. The Auxiliary Control is a smaller, secondary bridge, serving as a backup in case a ship's main bridge is destroyed or otherwise rendered inoperative. During emergencies or theoretical combat scenarios, the ship's first officer will be stationed here. A ship with an Auxiliary Control can assign an officer as Executive Officer, the second in command immediately below the captain. The Executive Officer's skill bonuses will be applied to the ship similar to the captain's. Beam Fire Control Range 32000 km 2000 RP: To aim direct-fire weapon systems at ranges in the hundreds of thousands of kilometers, specialized targeting systems are required. This is one half of that project, focusing on developing the ranging/targeting laser. Beam weapons cannot fire at a longer range than the maximum of the fire control. You can make beam FCs larger to increase their max range beyond the normal max allowed by your technology (or make them smaller at the cost of reduced range). 32,000 kilometers seems like a lot, but space is loving enormous, and that's just about knife fight range. Combat Information Centre 10000 RP: The most paranoid members of the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs' administrative committees speak of the possibility of a full-scale war with a hostile alien power, dozens of ships, hundreds of tactical options to keep track of, a vast deluge of mission-critical data that must be tracked and sorted through in an instant. They propose the development of an advanced tactical center capable of collecting and processing information from a battlespace, organizing it, and presenting it, in order to facilitate command and control in a combat situation. The computer systems that will need to be developed for this 'CIC' are...well, they're technically feasible, but making them a reality will take years. A ship with a CIC can assign an officer as Tactical Officer. The Tactical Officer applies skill bonuses to the ship's combat capabilities. Electronic Hardening Level 1 2500 RP: Sheathing sensitive parts of our shipboard electronics in protective materials should make them less vulnerable to disruption. Can be applied to sensors and a few other components in order to armor them against attack from high-powered microwaves. Electronic Intelligence and Analysis Module - Strength 5 2000 RP: The Cold War has taught us that, even in times of peace, it is sometimes essential to see what the other side does not want you to see. Intelligence-gathering module, for spy ships. Park it in enemy territory to listen in on their communications and steal their secrets. Usually used in combination with stealth technology and powerful passive sensors. Electronic Warfare 5000 RP: The arms race between designers of electronic counter-measures and counter-counter-measures, in the years before the Great Revolutionary War, reminds one of the dreadnought era's constant struggle between gun-makers and armor-makers. We expect the trend to continue in space warfare, and will develop a theoretical framework for applying TN tech to E-War. A precursor tech that does nothing on its own, but unlocks ECM and ECCM techs. EM Sensor Sensitivity 6 2000 RP: A uridium-based antenna can be configured to detect emissions across the electromagnetic spectrum. Large, stationary models are already in use for civilian astronomy, as radio telescopes. Smaller, ship-mounted ones could be configured to detect artificial EM emissions. This tech serves two purposes. It's the other half of active sensors, the 'listening' component. It also allows you to construct passive EM sensors, which detect various forms of EM emission, such as raised shields. Passive sensors don't transmit anything, they just listen, and as a result they cannot be detected by an opponent. Fire Control Speed Rating 2000 km/s 2000 RP: The other half of a direct-fire targeting control system, just as important as the sensor package, is the control computer. More powerful computers, with more advanced software, will allow our beam targeting systems to accurately track and fire at faster targets. Tracking speed acts as a modifier on accuracy - you can still fire at targets faster than your max tracking speed, but suffer penalties to accuracy for doing so. Very high tracking speed is essential for anti-missile and anti-fighter weapons. As with range, you can make the fire control system bigger to increase max tracking speed past the normal limitations of the tech. Flag Bridge 3000 RP: Coordinating an entire fleet of ships on maneuver requires a different skillset from commanding a single vessel, and access to different information, as well. The flag bridge will be a command center optimized for this function. Allows you to appoint a flag officer as a Fleet Commander, who will grant combat bonuses to every ship under their command. Main Engineering 5000 RP: While every ship has an engineering section, larger ships, or ships that will be deployed for a very long time, may need to dedicate more space to maintenance and repair. A Main Engineering module will include a small machine shop, limited light manufacturing facilities, a very wide selection of diagnostic equipment, and a central monitoring station from which every piece of information critical to the ship's continued functioning can be monitored. A chief engineer's dream. A ship with a Main Engineering module can appoint an officer as Chief Engineer, granting the ship a bonus to its maintenance and repair rates provided they have the appropriate skill. Max Tracking Time for Bonus vs. Missiles: 30 Seconds (6%) 1000 RP: Writing improved targeting software specific to anti-missile work will lead to more effective point defense. With this tech, the longer a beam fire control tracks a missile, the more accurate its shots on that missile will be. With this level of the tech, the bonus maxes out after 30 seconds of continuous tracking. Planetary Sensor Strength 300 3000 RP: Our planetary observatories and sensor arrays have already granted us a wealth of knowledge about our own solar system; we've even discovered planets we didn't know existed. Who knows what we'll be able to see if we make them bigger and more powerful. This is the passive sensor strength provided by each Deep Space Tracking Station on a planetary body. DSTS require minimal staffing and can be placed on otherwise-uninhabited worlds as stealthy listening posts, or they can be placed on inhabited bodies to provide early warning of incoming threats or simply track movement in the area. Primary Flight Control 10000 RP: As the Combat Information Centre will manage a warship, so will the Primary Flight Control facility manage a theoretical carrier ship's fighter squadrons. From this advanced facility, a command team can track dozens of small ships simultaneously, coordinate their actions, and alert them to incoming threats. Allows a ship with this module to assign an officer as Commander, Air Group. A CAG grants combat bonuses based on their skills to the ship's fighters. Science Department 5000 RP: A suite of laboratories, clean-rooms, and offices built around a state-of-the-art Trans-Newtonian supercomputer, a ship with a Science Department will be well-equipped to explore new worlds and seek out new knowledge. Allows a ship to assign a Science Officer, who grants bonuses to the ship's survey speed. Thermal Sensor Sensitivity 6 2000 RP: Heat is very difficult to hide in space, and building sensors specifically designed to detect and track infrared emissions should be both easy and useful. The other kind of passive sensor. Like EM passive sensors, they're completely undetectable. Unlike EM sensors, these detect thermal emissions - mostly engines, but also including waste heat from planetary settlements. Earth, with its billions of people, will light up like a beacon on thermal sensors, for example. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 05:55 on Oct 20, 2020 |
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Oct 19, 2020 09:17
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Deliberations are closed! There's a lot of proposals up for discussion, some of which are similar enough that I'm going to merge them (if you're opposed to this, speak up, and I'll separate out your proposal again). NewMars posted:As premier of the UAWR, I would like to state my support for the Solomon Islands. I understand their hesitancy and wish them well in charting their own future. NM-08 suggests that we draft a 'Treaty of Reciprocation'. As I interpret it, this is a document that focuses on the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs' interactions with the world's remaining non-Comintern nations, and proposes that signatories to this treaty will freely share civilian spaceflight technology, pertinent technical knowledge and expertise, and new scientific discoveries between each other. Such signatories would function like 'associate members' of the Ministry, reaping fewer rewards from the Comintern's space program than full members do, but also having fewer responsibilities. It could be a way to bring fence-sitting neutral nations into the fold and gently urge them to join the socialist project. It could also be a way for the world's remaining capitalists and reactionaries to steal a bunch of valuable data and use it for nefarious purposes. NM-09 proposes that we make the world's most war-torn regions the focus of our grand TNE industrial development project. There is some wisdom in this - the economies of North America, much of Western and Central Europe, and a few other regions are still in utter ruins - but it is also a bit less efficient than building everything where the intact factories and infrastructure are already located. in game terms, if this passes, I'll permanently lock Conventional Industry conversion processes at a maximum of 95% construction capacity, instead of the current max of 100%; effectively a 5% speed reduction. It will also have political and social effects. Kodos666 posted:Well, we have been duped by the Hawaiians. Sadly, there's nothing we can do about it. Right now we can only accept the facts and keep a wary eye on them. K-10, the Socialist Aid Project, proposes dedicating some of our newly-converted Trans-Newtonian industry to mass production of prefabricated housing, in an attempt to combat homelessness and overcrowding in the world's remaining refugee camps. If passed, a small amount of industrial capacity will be re-allocated from the industrialization project to this end, until such time as this body votes to end the Aid Project. Boksi posted:Hawaii definitely has some outside aid. I can buy them having the technical knowhow needed to design that ship, but the sheer amount of materials and highly-skilled labor needed to build it, especially this quickly and secretly, is just too much for such a small nation. That said, until we know more, there's nothing to be gained from antagonizing them so we should just congratulate them and try to step up our timetables for the lunar outpost. And maybe just perhaps investigate how this happened through, ah, unofficial channels. B-11 proposes that we queue up a research project for improved hydroponics facilities, which I'm interpreting ingame as colonization cost reduction tech (if you had something else in mind let me know). As this is proposing a specific project and not a change to our broader research priorities, if it passes, we will otherwise conduct research according to the priorities set by this body. After the day's deliberations, a nondescript person in civilian clothing visits delegate Boksi at their hotel room and promises to keep them informed of the results of inquiries through 'unofficial channels'. Veloxyll posted:After the disaster of a humanitarian relief effort to the North American north east, it is clear that while our future lies in the stars, our home is in need of care. We should establish a relief force, with a unit for providing aid and associated security forces. I ride bikes all day posted:My fellow loyalists, we must not be reckless in these early years of the TN age. Our sacred duty is to the workers who make up our many nations, and it is to their benefit that we should be looking. I propose we we refocus our research to prioritize mining and industry. Perhaps once we have the ability to find these new minerals on objects in space, we can properly justify moving workers to them. NewMars posted:I wish to propose that we focus research on wealth generation technology. Listen, the world is still a wreck. Rad-storms ravage the worst areas and places better off still face massive crop failures, brushfire wars and general collapse. If we are to make ourselves worthy of the stars, we have to fix our problems down here. JR-12 (short for Joint Resolution) is a combination of NewMars' and I ride bikes all days' research proposals, suggesting that we focus our labs primarily on internal development - mining, industry, consumer goods. It will override last year's research priorities if passed, although existing research projects will not be cancelled. JR-13 is a combination of Boksi's, Veloxyll's, and I ride bikes all day's proposals to establish a standing, professional security force. A basic organizational structure will be developed, arms, equipment, and vehicles will be procured, and a few units will be raised. We will first prioritize the training of security forces to guard Ascension Island and a few other critical facilities, a quartermaster corps equipped with heavy-duty trucks to assist in relief efforts (and, not coincidentally, military logistics, should we need it later), and such troops as are necessary to guard aid convoys, in that order. ganthony posted:Wealth generation? Comrade, those are the words of a Capitalist, not a loyal member of the Revolution. I propose that we begin research on providing our ships and troops with more advanced armour. . It's a fundamental requirement, and we know that beings from other worlds have already visited us once. We must not allow the Revolution to be snuffed out as we look to turn the stars red. Foxfire_ posted:The current industrial plan should leave us well supplied though. Given that we have geosensors under research and will probably want to launch a survey vessel soon, we should aim our research towards making those initial ships the best they can be. JR-14 is a combination of ganthony's and Foxfire's proposals. It suggests that we reprioritize our research to focus on armor, engine/power plant technology, fuel efficiency tech, and basic sensor technology, with the goal being to develop all the necessary tech for a practical deep-space exploration vessel. It will override last year's research priorities, although existing research projects will not be cancelled. IN SUMMARY A nonbinding resolution congratulating the Kingdom of Hawaii on their launch of a spacefaring vessel passes unanimously. In addition, 6 proposals are up for vote. Research: vote either A, Status Quo (Power/Propulsion, Construction/Production, Logistics), B, JR-12 (Construction/Production with a specific focus on improving resource output and the civilian economy), or C, JR-14 (Power/Propulsion, Sensors/Control, and a little bit of Defensive Systems, with a specific focus on developing necessary techs for a survey ship). Vote by ranked list. NM-08, draft the Treaty of Reciprocation: vote Yes or No NM-09, focus our industrial might on rebuilding the world's war-torn regions: vote Yes or No B-11, allocate some of our research laboratories to improved hydroponics, to assist in space colonization and combat food insecurity here at home: vote Yes or No K-10, dedicate some industry to the Socialist Aid Program: vote Yes or No JR-13, begin raising the rudimentary skeleton of a professional army loyal to the Comintern rather than the member nations: vote Yes or No Voting is now open, and will remain open for about 48 hours! also I finally finished writing out short descriptions for every single research project, and while they need an editing pass to cut down on the repetitive purple prose I tend to fall into when tired, they're at least readable; thank gently caress that's done Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 07:16 on Oct 20, 2020 |
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Oct 20, 2020 06:52
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Voting is closed! RESULTS Research: Option B, Joint Resolution 12, passes by a margin of one vote. For the next year we will focus on incremental improvements to production capabilities. NM-08: an exact 50-50 tie, which I resolve by flipping a coin. According to Senor Peso, NM-08 fails, and MOSA's relationship with the non-member nations will not change at this time. NM-09: Passes B-11: Passes K-10: Passes JR-13: Passes So the original plan was to make my next mechanics explainer post about leaders, officers, and how admin commands and academies work, but since JR-13 will require us to design some ground units, it's going to be about that instead. As with ships, for all future proposals, you'll design our techs and units yourselves. Also as with ships, it's extremely early in the game and this is a basic unit design, so I'm going to design this one myself, both to keep things moving along and also to serve as a tutorial for the design process. You can alter, disband, or rename this formation later as you please.  This is the Ground Forces window. It's currently on the Order of Battle tab, which is empty because we don't have anything in the OOB.  This is the Formation Templates tab. Formations are the basic organizational building block of our ground forces. They can be organized into command hierarchies, and are built out of individual troops and equipment. Every formation we've organized will be listed here, along with the TO&E for that formation, which we can modify.  And here is the Class Design screen, where we make the troops and equipment we fill those out with. Top left we have the Base Type. These are pretty self-explanatory - infantry are foot-mobiles, light vehicles are things like buggies, trucks, and armored cars, medium vehicles are your APCs, IFVs, and light tanks, and static are fortified emplacements. Top center is the armor, which right now is limited to basic light armor for our ground-pounders. To the right of that is where we add any special training or capabilities the unit gets, like boarding, mountain warfare, or low-gravity combat. Since we have none to choose from right now, making a choice is pretty easy. Bottom left is where you determine what the unit actually does. Let's make a basic unit, an infantry soldier with a personal weapon and light armor. That looks like this:  An infantry unit with personal weapons represents one soldier, everything else in Infantry represents a small team. The 5 tons of transport capacity represents the soldier, all their gear, and the food, ammunition, medical supplies, clothing, and other sundries that you need to keep that soldier alive and fighting in the field.  Let's design a couple other units to fill out our security battalion: a crew-served machine gun...  ...a light anti-tank weapon...  ...and a MANPADS.  Last, the headquarters. There's some argument in the community over whether it's best to have the lowest independent unit of organization in your army be the company or the battalion; I generally prefer battalions for everything except marines and expensive specialist troops, and the vote specified a battalion. That means we'll need to set the headquarters size appropriately. I like to do 2500-ton battalions and 500-ton companies, so this HQ team will need to be able to command 2500 tons' worth of troops. You can adjust it with that number up there.  We'll need some supply trucks, too. These are soft, unarmed units, so we set them as non-combat. They will avoid contact with the enemy unless forced to engage, which generally means things are going very bad. Now, at such low tech levels, ground troops take absurdly few RP to research....  ...so I'm just going to give them to you using SM powers, instead of reassigning a lab for the couple of ingame hours it'll take to generate 5 RP. That gives us a formation design screen that looks like this.  Let's create a unit.  It's just an empty shell now, and defaults to being commanded by a Major (we can change that, and in fact we could change our rank structure quite dramatically if we wanted to; more on that when we cover Leaders). Let's give it some stuff.  D'oh, 2499 tons. I could have made it more tonnage-efficient by giving it footmobile supply teams instead of supply trucks but whatever. Ideally you'd have battalions dedicated entirely to combat troops and then have all the supply trucks elsewhere in the unit's command hierarchy, but at least at first these units will be acting independently. We can always update their TO&E later. To summarize, this unit has 402 riflemen, 2 HQ sections (in case one is destroyed), 4 supply trucks, 4 anti-air teams, 6 crew-served anti-personnel weapons, and 4 anti-air teams. It's very fragile and not much use on offense, you shouldn't be dropping these guys from orbit - but for defending fixed positions, or doing policing duty, they'll do just fine. Since we have one ground forces training facility, we can train one unit at a time. This battalion will take about three months to be trained and deployed. We also voted to design some supply-heavy HQ units, so let's do that.  We'll start by designing a command unit. HQ capacity does not stack, so you need an HQ unit capable of commanding everything you expect to be under it in the hierarchy. I want this to be able to command four battalions plus itself. We also give it medium armor and a mounted machine gun. This one you'll actually have to research, although because you voted to design these units, voting to research the tech is implicit. It'll be queued up when a slot becomes available. For the moment all these cadres will have is supply trucks and the command vehicles, with room to spare in the unit for you to add brigade-level support units if and when you vote to expand these into a full-on army. Actual update coming.
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Oct 22, 2020 04:38
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whoops, I straight-up forgot to do that, didn't I? fixed now!
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Oct 22, 2020 05:07
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December 12, 1978 A few days into the deliberations of the People's Congress, the Hawaiian ship, crammed with 50,000 people in cramped, uncomfortable conditions, arrives at Luna. Although it only took a few minutes to fly there, using its gigantic Trans-Newtonian engines, it will take days to actually unload the ship's passengers, and weeks to properly house them. The 3,000 or so pioneers already present at Lunagrad are working around the clock setting up life support infrastructure and makeshift housing. Most of them haven't slept in days. Cargo pods are pressurized and refitted into temporary housing. What were intended to be small habitat modules are hastily shut down, ripped apart, and the components used to seal off and pressurize natural caves, which are filled with basic living infrastructure. To maximize available space, hydroponic greenhouses, engineering and life support spaces, storage rooms, and communal spaces are made to pull double duty as housing. Oxygen, water, and heat shouldn't be a problem for this population size; this was always the plan, so the machinery is extremely overengineered. The problem is space. There just isn't enough physical space right now. Lunagrad has only existed for a few days, and they haven't had time to erect anything more than a small outpost. The first large group of settlers wasn't supposed to arrive for months at least.  The Luna is cycling back and forth between Earth and the Moon as fast as they can load and unload the cargo holds, loaded down with life support supplies and prefabbed structures - but its very small cargo holds are a major limitation. Even so, the Lunar pioneers are confident that, by the time the first 50,000 finish unloading, there will be sufficient space for over 200,000 people.  This is good, because the people on the wait list are getting impatient. The first few thousand pioneers are scientists, engineers, technical experts, and trained cosmonauts. They were carefully selected and rigorously trained. They came for various reasons - the pursuit of knowledge, adventure, fame, serving the Revolution, whatever - but they all ultimately chose to be here. The rest of the millions of people from around the world who have signed up for Lunagrad, on the other hand, come from all walks of life. They are doctors and teachers, factory workers, miners, farmers, deckhands, dishwashers, any profession you can imagine. Those who the lottery placed higher on the list have received some limited training for surviving and operating in space, enough to mostly get by, but they're no cosmonauts. Many of them are people who have been displaced by the war; some of them were never successfully relocated, and will be going straight from refugee camps to the Moon. They're coming because they need to.  We can't resettle every displaced person offworld, of course; we probably can't even do it for a small fraction of them. But we can do it for some of them, and they're coming, ready or not. We could have asked the Hawaiians to delay, and they probably would have; they're happy to have a win, but they are still ultimately transporting passengers on the Comintern's behalf, to a Comintern outpost, and they have reason to stay on our good side - but unrest is getting serious, and the solutions the Congress is implementing will take months. Trying to stop the flood, while a functioning passenger ship capable of carrying them hangs in orbit, would make it worse. And so, they come. The delegates to the Congress watch live feeds from the Moon as the Hawaiian landers, from their design clearly heavily based on the American Apollo hardware, start to descend. December 18, 1978 The Queen's passengers are mostly unloaded. It's chaos down there right now - there isn't even a common language, to say nothing of a proper administrative structure. Ad-hoc collectives of people who live in the same hab, or speak the same language, or work in the same facility have started to form, and spokespeople for these collectives meet with the scientific committee that had been running the place before they arrived (not that they had time to do much of that). This is the closest thing the Moon has to a government right now.  One person, the First 250's mental health expert, known as Freudian, holds everything together. Officially he's no more 'in charge' than anyone else on the science committee, but unofficially, more and more people have been looking to him for leadership. A simple, down-to-earth person from a desperately poor background, Freudian knows how to talk to the new arrivals in a way they understand, without condescending - and, more importantly, listen to them. He hears what is needed and promises it will get done - and when he says that, it gets done, even if he has to do it himself. There are rumors already spreading among the cramped halls that Freudian never sleeps. December 19, 1978 The People's Congress for the coming year concludes, and the delegates begin returning to their home nations. Recruits for the Ascension Island Security Force begin assembling at the training camp in Siberia. Promising young prospects are sent from around the Comintern; this must be a multinational force. Though the officers and senior NCOs will all be Great Revolutionary War veterans from several countries, all of the enlisted personnel will be completely new to this - it's important that the new unit be loyal to the Comintern as a whole, and not their host nations; they must think of this organization as their organization, not a body they are on temporary assignment to. It will take months to make a proper unit out of them. December 25, 1978 Christmas. The Queen's second load of passengers have just finished unloading, and there are now over 100,000 people on the Moon. They sprawl across the surface around the Lunagrad site. All four natural caves in the area have been sealed off and converted into living space, and some enterprising former miners are already talking about tunnelling out additional space or even sinking entirely new shafts. The crates new cargo arrives in (for the Luna is still shuttling back and forth, multiple times per day) are disassembled by work crews in space suits as soon as they're unloaded, working right there on the hardened-regolith shuttle landing pad that is the center of the city. They are relayed by still more work crews - rovers and heavy equipment are precious resources, and there are so, so many people, so manual labor is applied wherever it can be. Teams manhandle the big metal panels and struts along trails threading between the modules, which have been cleared of large rocks and graded flat by still more work crews, who are busy doing the same elsewhere. They bring them to construction sites, where they are erected into frames around which duranium-alloy hull plating and radiation shielding can be fastened. Others string electrical cables to the new sites from Lunagrad's central nuclear reactor, along poles driven into the ground next to the dirt roads. Hanging from these poles are strings of lights, which are not currently needed in the perpetual day, but the waning moon will in a few Earth-days plunge the city into a month of darkness. Someone has hung little festive green tree-shaped decorations, shaped from scrap wire, from many of them. The hab collectives have caught on over the course of the week, and unless something big changes are likely here to stay as part of the Moon's culture. New arrivals are greeted at the pad by 'veterans' who have scarcely been here longer than they have, and directed to a group that can help them find their way - or encouraged to find other new arrivals to group up with. Travelling between habitats is still difficult; a few of the central structures are linked by tubes, but reaching most of the outlying habs requires EVA, and that's not something you can do casually. As a result, Christmas on the Moon mostly happens where people sleep. There are children to enjoy it, a few hundred in total; children were not included in the lottery, but people who had children were permitted to bring them. The gifts are generally small and simple, for mass is at a premium right now. The base main command center hosts a small televised party, broadcast live on Earth. Freudian falls asleep at a desk and remains there, visible on camera, for the entire evening. December 26, 1978  Having enjoyed a brief day off, Dr. Matveyev and his team deliver the results of their latest project, an optimization of their nuclear thermal engine design. In accordance with the will of the People's Congress, they are immediately retasked to radically different work. They will begin developing improved Trans-Newtonian industrial machinery and processes, using the practical knowledge of working with TNEs they have already developed on the power plant project. This will likely occupy Matveyev, and the 25 research complexes under his authority, for a year. January 1, 1979  On New Year's Day, the Socialist Aid Program is officially put into effect. Industry is retasked to build a series of simple prefabricated housing designs, with standardized furniture and appliances to place in them. Factory conversion assets are re-prioritized to focus on war-torn regions. The city-state of Detroit, already a Comintern member, is selected as the site for a pilot program that will show the potential of the project - a shiny new Trans-Newtonian factory complex, surrounded by beautiful new socialist housing, in a park-like remediated natural environment. Production power and efficiency, natural beauty in defiance of the devastation of war, and homes for the people. It will take many months to build. January 15, 1979 A severe blizzard choked with atmospheric ash, similar to but of lesser intensity than the Great Blizzard that struck North America last year, tears through Western Europe. Though dozens are killed, the relatively more stable political situation there, and the much more favorable geography (France is a lot smaller than the United States), makes humanitarian efforts significantly easier. Coverage of this polarizes opinions in the former United States, with some pointing to it as an example of what the socialists can do for those who join them, while others use it to argue a conspiracy theory that the Comintern deliberately allowed Americans to die, and may have even caused the blizzard in the first place. January 28, 1979  It has been less than two months since Leonov landed. Over four hundred thousand people live on the Moon. They work constantly, in shifts, swarming over the surface, packing the regolith down tight with their boots. Already they have more than quadrupled the size main settlement at Lunagrad. Two more outposts have been constructed, kilometers away, in promising sites for future development. A wide, graded dirt road separates them, graded largely by hand. Regular rover service connects them. Both of them already have over ten thousand residents, most of whom have only been there for a few days.  On this same day, the civilian shipyards complete their first major expansion. We can now build two civilian ships at a time with a maximum displacement of 20,000 void tons, twice the size of the Luna and Tranquility and of comparable size to the Queen. With no explicit directive from the government, the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs on their own initiative elect to focus next on adding additional slipways to the yards. February 3, 1979  The Hawaiians launch a second ship, named after the current reigning queen. It is of exactly the same design as their first ship, and in the announcement they state that the two had been under construction at the same time, but they had been unable to finish them simultaneously due to limited supplies of TNEs for construction. They mention the enormous expense of launching the ships to orbit in the press release, and conclude by stating the next priority of HRSA will be to loft an orbital shipyard station. Privately, their administrators contact the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs to coordinate an orbital slot for the station that will not impede MOSA operations.  At this point the extra ship is a welcome addition; people are still clamoring to come to the Moon, a situation exacerbated by positive publicity from television reports and messages home from the new arrivals. In addition, Doctor Vasilyev, formerly dismissed as a crank and a charlatan, presents a working cryonics system, which has enormous implications for both transportation and medicine. The Vasilyev Process will allow organisms to be held in suspended animation indefinitely, so long as there is power, appropriate environmental conditions, and regular maintenance. Vasilyev's findings are distributed throughout the Comintern, and it won't be long before they start to be applied. Having proven himself a real scientist and not a quack, Vasilyev and his small team are, in accordance with the current research priorities, put to work on a project to improve the common workers' access to luxury goods. This is far outside his area of expertise, but we have determined it is the work needed for the Revolution right now, and he will adapt. February 4, 1979  A young PhD, Louise Garner, finishes her education at Interkosmos and joins the Comintern's scientific team. She hails from Huntsville in New Afrika, an embattled patchwork nation in the former United States which is gradually growing its strength and territory and building coalitions with other nascent socialist states in the region. Garner is an expert in missiles and rocketry. February 7, 1979 Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele suffers a stroke and drowns in a swimming pool in Brazil. The Comintern regrets not having been able to execute him officially. A coalition of Shia Islamist, socialist, communist, and liberal groups launch a general uprising against the government of Iran; the country is soon gripped in insurrection. February 13, 1979 An abnormally intense snowstorm destroys the Hood Canal Bridge in Washington State, Cascadia. Miraculously, no one is killed. February 18, 1979 The Shah of Iran and many of his closest supporters flee to Saudi Arabia, and his government functionally ceases to exist. Rebels occupying Tehran proclaim the Provisional Government of the Republic of Iran. It is a loose and uneasy coalition between Islamists and socialists that could fall apart at any moment. March 5, 1979  The first proper unit of the International People's Army is officially certified as ready to deploy. They march in review alongside troops from several of the host nation armies in Red Square in Moscow, to celebrate the beginning of a permanent multinational force. It was deemed important that the new troops stand out. They're using Russian equipment, mostly, and the uniforms are surplus Russian as well. They need to look distinct from the Russians in any way possible, to make it clear that they are independent, that they serve all the people, not just one nation. The easiest and simplest way to do this was to change the uniforms. From there the question was just which colors of dye were most easily available in large quantities, and, once they found out, that shade was officially adopted, now and for the foreseeable future, as the color of the standard duty uniform of the IPA. It is for this reason that, alongside soldiers in various shades of tan and green and brown, there is a formation parading down the street in uniforms of rather fetching sky blue.  Their first commanding officer, Colonel Mr Pwase, marches in front. A harsh but fair taskmaster with a good mind for philosophy, the men and women under Mr Pwase's command have grown to respect him a great deal, and his skill on the battlefield is undeniable. After the review, the battalion is immediately loaded onto planes for the long flight to Ascension Island, their duty posting. A second battalion begins training. March 7, 1979 The crew of the Luna, who have been worked to exhaustion, are allowed a few weeks of well-earned shore leave. They return to Earth to a hero's welcome, and shipyard techs spend the whole time swarming over their ship checking and rechecking every component. March 15, 1979 The first Socialist Aid Project prefabricated housing developments are completed - part of the initial pilot program in Detroit, completed earlier in the rest to house construction workers; one in California, one in Angola, one in Zimbabwe, one in Vietnam, one in Chile, and one in France. It is hoped that the wide variety of different cultures, local environmental conditions, and political situations will allow valuable data to be collected about the designs of the structures, their viability, and what, if anything needs to be changed. As a bonus, they will also immediately house tens of thousands of displaced persons. March 23, 1979 Less than four months after the initial landing, one million people live on the Moon. They hail from every member nation in the Comintern and most of the nations outside of it. A hundred languages can be heard spoken in the caves and the modules and the corridors. The central outpost at Lunagrad is now a metropolis of over 700,000, sprawling out from the central pad in organic organized chaos. Nearly a dozen smaller settlements exist at the end of dirt roads radiating out from Lunagrad like spokes on a wheel. Their lights can be seen from orbit when the moon is dark, and powerful telescopes can even see them from Earth. All of the life support infrastructure and hab modules constructed for the initial development of the settlement have been expended, and there is no available industrial capacity to build more. Local collectives, taking the initiative, have started mining local conventional materials and manufacturing new infrastructure on site, but it's a slow and inefficient process being conducted essentially as a cottage industry, insufficient to really keep up with growth. The informal, ad-hoc structure of a federation of collectives sending spokespeople to meet with the governing scientific council (for it is still officially governed as a research outpost) is starting to solidify into something permanent, and people are beginning to talk about standardization, and about getting things in writing, and about a nation. March 31, 1979 The Hawaiians announce a suspension of transportation of new Comintern pioneers to the Moon until such time as the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs verifies there is sufficient life support for new arrivals. The Two Queens park in low Earth orbit, and their crews are presented medals by the Crown Princess upon returning to Honolulu. The Comintern's own Tranquility continues to run multiple flights a day, carrying passengers in both directions along with small packages. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 07:55
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There will be longer term effects in localized areas that were heavily bombed, climate disruptions for years, and increased global incidence of cancer and birth defects for likely decades, but on a global scale it's mostly dissipated. The last bombs were detonated seven years or so ago and atmospheric radiation is, as a global average, on track to approaching normal pre-war background levels. There are one or two places in Europe where bombing destroyed nuclear plants that will be uninhabitable basically forever without some heavy remediation, and lingering pockets of dangerous radiation in some ruined areas that have not been fully rebuilt. In particular those few sites where a warhead detonated on or under the ground are still generally not safe for habitation. In game mechanics terms this has little effect as the game only tracks atmospheric radiation. If and when it needs to be simulated I will do so in other surprise ways, and I promise that any policy developed to address it will have positive effects mechanically and not just in the story (in general this will be true for any policy you make, even if the effect is very minor). Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 20:17
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Yeah, more or less, with the problem being that some of them contained an order of magnitude more people than that and not all of them have been able to leave for various reasons. Ironically the Chernobyl NPP itself is being converted to use TNE reactors and the disaster that destroyed it in an alternate timeline will soon be functionally impossible.
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Oct 23, 2020 20:38
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Antilles posted:Mister Bates what's the feasibility currently of building enough infantry to arrest the decline of Political Stability? If Logistics and (eventually) Construction units don't count towards this, what about fluffing it as a whole bunch of the cheapest type of infantry? The issue there is throughput, you have exactly one training facility which can train one military unit (of any size) at a time. You'd need to reallocate some industry to bringing more ground forces training facilities online. You could in theory make a bunch of independent company-size or even platoon-size formations and train them extremely quickly, but they'll have a correspondingly small stability impact. You could also increase production speed while still improving political stability by organizing units out of just basic infantry armed with light personal weapons instead of standard personal weapons; they'd be of little use for anything but peacekeeping duty, but they would be faster and cheaper to train. Without additional training facilities you'd still be limited to training one formation at a time, though. To break down the numbers a bit: In game mechanics terms, to completely counteract the stability decline right now would require 1000-ish ground policing points. The security battalion you just trained supplies around ten, plus a bonus from one of the CO's skills. You're going to need divisions of troops to completely nullify the stability issues through solely military means, which is simply not feasible with one training facility. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 22:11
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For the hell of it I just tested and a column of 100 completely unarmed Ural trucks actually provides 30 ground policing points, or three times what the security battalion does. It is also about five times more expensive and takes four times longer to build, though. I then used foot-mobile supply teams with light logistics modules, and made a 2500-ton battalion out of them. It provided 8, or almost as much as the security battalions, while taking very slightly less time to train. Also I'm going to try to play through the rest of this year in the next hour or two and get the next update up shortly after. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Oct 23, 2020 |
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Oct 23, 2020 22:39
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First, put this on, because I forgot to put it in the post at the beginning of 1979: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvRHXnb039Q April 1, 1979  As of today, 137 Trans-Newtonian factory complexes have been built and brought online. In accordance with policy, most new construction this year has been in regions adversely effected by war or post-war economic collapse, or underdeveloped due to colonialism. Each new factory is put to work converting more factories, meaning the process of industrial conversion does not merely continue, but is actually accelerating. The completion date does not take into account the build points from factories that don't exist yet, so it will get earlier and earlier with each new factory converted. April 28, 1979  Another scientist, also a rocketry specialist, completes their study at Interkosmos and joins the research faculty. May 1, 1979 Another year, another International Workers' Day. Parades, celebrations, the like. In Lunagrad there's even a small space-suited procession down the city's central avenue, which is now four lanes wide, though still dirt. Leading the procession is a suited figure bearing the proposed, still-unofficial flag of the Lunar Socialist Republic. May 28th, 1979  A second battalion of the People's Army finishes training. Its new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Welfarestateofmind, is an easy choice for the position, with a set of skills and personality traits that make him ideal for deployment in dangerous areas. Interkosmos Academy has also certified him a qualified Xenoarchaeology Technician after he completed an academy course on the Roswell object and its contents. Training for a third battalion will begin immediately, and the second battalion ships out to support member nation forces engaged in humanitarian aid work in the Americas. June 3, 1979 After years of delays, last-minute schedule changes, location changes, and various other issues, the Lucasfilm Cooperative releases its first feature film (the second they produced; the first completed production in the middle of the war and has yet to receive a wide release). 'Star Wars' is an instant worldwide hit, and the Californian press goes wild over it, with the Los Angeles Weekly Worker running a front-page story featuring the film's poster and the title 'HOLLYWOOD'S BACK'. It is particularly popular on the Moon, where three additional cinemas are hastily built by rearranging space in existing communal recreation facilities to keep up with demand. June 22, 1979 The Hawaii Report. The KGB presents its assessment of the Hawaiian space program to select members of the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs and other departments of the Comintern government. The summary is as follows: - Security in and around HRSA itself is extremely high and very little direct information could be obtained without compromising our agents. We know that most, probably nearly all, of their lead scientists are NASA exiles, that they maintain two launch pads and an offshore launch platform built out of a WW2-era US aircraft carrier, and that they are constructing a space station that should be complete sometime in 1980. They are chartered to provide logistical support for the Comintern's MOSA and most of their public-facing activities are in service of that objective, though they also perform satellite launches for various other countries. - Income from the program, in the form of currency payments for satellite launches and payments in goods and raw materials from the Comintern, has caused the Hawaiian economy to begin an unprecedented boom, and there are likely components for more ships already being fabricated, to be used for construction once the orbital is online. - We believe based on import/export numbers that the Hawaiian claim of only having had enough TNEs available to finish one ship at first is truthful, and that they burned through nearly all of their reserves building the two vessels. They have since imported fairly large amounts and have probably largely replenished their stockpiles. - A contact in the Japanese government reports that their own space program has been closely coordinating with the Hawaiians but has no specifics. The contact supplied photographs of Hawaiian and Japanese officials meeting in Tokyo. - Inquiries in the various Polynesian island nations reveal the Hawaiians have, since launch, used the ships to begin a major propaganda push, emphasizing Hawaii as an independent power with a bright future and encouraging their 'brothers and sisters' to join them in shared prosperity. - Unless they are importing large quantities of TNEs in secret or have domestic sources they have concealed, their imports are consistent with an entirely civilian space program, with no indication that they are engaged in weapons development. July 9, 1979 A car bomb destroys the personal vehicle of freelance 'Nazi hunters' Serge and Beate Klarsfeld outside their personal residence in Paris. A note left at the scene calls it revenge for their actions, in particular the kidnapping of two former Nazi officers who they remanded into the custody of the Stasi during the Great Revolutionary War. The note identifies the responsible party as 'Gladio'. No one is injured. July 21, 1979 In 'Operation Sandino', a combined force consisting of elements of the IPA 2nd Security Battalion and the Nicaraguan Army assault and destroy a fortified redoubt of the 'Contra' rebel movement. It is the first combat action in the short history of the People's Army, and is an impressive victory. In the field they swap out the highly visible blue duty uniforms for proper environmentally-appropriate camouflage. August 8, 1979  A cosmonaut named 'Moose Stubblefield' graduates a senior officer training course at Interkosmos Academy, which is of no particular importance, but it's a funny name. hey, slow news year, what can I say August 14, 1979  DagPenge hosts a successful summit with labor leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa that makes him a number of valuable political contacts. August 26, 1979  A third IPA battalion is trained and a fourth begins training. The Third's new CO, Stairmaster, has a lot to prove, having come from an extremely wealthy background prior to the Revolution, but their service during the conflict was exemplary, and they're also very good at what they do. They and their unit are deployed to North America. August 29, 1979 ZERO RAD DAY. For the first time since the initial nuclear detonations of the early war, the average global background radiation count has fallen to levels generally considered to be of no significant health risk. Note that that's average, and there are still areas that are dangerously irradiated - and pedantic scientists are quick to point out that 'no significant health risk' doesn't mean 'normal', and that atmospheric background will take years to truly return to prewar levels. Still, it's a pretty big milestone in the recovery from the war's devastation. September 4, 1979 A preliminary report on the success of the Socialist Aid Program reports high satisfaction with the new housing. Over two million displaced persons have been resettled in the blocky white prefabs now going up around the world. September 13, 1979  An overstressed oxygenator in one of the smaller outlying settlements on the Moon fails, and until it can be fixed the town's 7000 inhabitants are forced to cram into available space elsewhere. The resulting overcrowding creates tension and leads to some minor altercations, although nothing severe as of yet. this is from natural population growth, no new settlers have been shipped here in many months October 14, 1979 Station Six incident. The long roads on the Moon have small automated stations placed at regular intervals, with a little pressurized habitat, recharging and refueling systems, and emergency supplies. Today, a cargo rover approached Station Six, about halfway along the route between Lunagrad and the outlying city of New Aotearoa, for a routine recharge along the route. They found another rover parked there to charge, a road maintenance crew vehicle. Upon disembarking, the crew found the airlock open on both ends, and the facility depressurized. Work crews responsible for building these facilities and extending the road use a number of 'powder-actuated' tools. A powder-actuated tool uses a chemical explosive activated by a primer. A powder-actuated spike driver, used to drive metal spikes into hard rock for use as supports for cables or lights, uses that explosive to drive a projectile down a barrel. Another word for this is 'gun'. One of these is presumably what drove a 14-inch-long alloy steel spike through the EVA helmet faceplate of the rover's driver, and his skull, killing him instantly. His body was inside the airlock. The remaining five members of the crew were dead of decompression, scattered about the inside of the facility. Officially the incident is recorded as an accidental life support failure. Investigators are summoned from Earth to attempt to determine the true cause, beginning the first murder investigation in Lunar history. October 17, 1979 Initial investigation of Station Six finds the word 'GLADIO' written in the regolith next to the structure, an expended cartridge from a powder-actuated tool, and too many footprints and rover tracks to separate them out. The dead workers are identified as Giuseppe and Erika Miozzi of Italy, Anthony Manzano from the Five Nations of Manhattan (the driver), Diljan Halil of Albania, and Qin Hua of the People's Republic of China. All of them are members of the Collettivo Giuseppe Garibaldi, an Italian-speaking collective of a few thousand that occupies a small crater in southern Lunagrad. The Miozzis and Halil were Great Revolutionary War veterans. All were well-liked by their hab-mates and there are no obvious suspects among their immediate acquaintances. The investigation continues. November 15, 1979  Scientist Idhrendur achieves a momentous breakthrough when their team delivers a practical geological sensor suite for spacecraft use. The exploration and extraction of off-world TNE deposits is now feasible. The 5 labs freed up are reallocated to an existing project, Vasilyev's work, rather than being used to immediately start a new one. November 22, 1979 A fourth IPA security battalion is trained, and deployed to France to participate in humanitarian aid efforts in and around the ruins of Amiens. November 27, 1979  The naval shipyards finish expanding their construction capacity. Lacking any explicit direction, the Ministry, on their own initiative, next begins constructing additional slipways at the yards. December 10, 1979 The delegates begin assembling for the 1980 People's Congress, to be held in Santiago, Chile. Delegates from the Moon board the Tranquility for a flight to Earth. December 15, 1979 The 1980 People's Congress officially begins.  Planets   Industry - Earth  Minerals - Earth  Shipyards  Research  THE 1980 LEGISLATIVE SESSION IS NOW OPEN! There is no urgent business requiring an immediate vote. Orders of the Day: - Ships! You've got geosurvey sensors, nuclear thermal engines, and the technology to build very basic, starter-level EM and thermal sensors. The ships you can build will be very mass-inefficient with steel armor, but should still be usable. You can construct military ships up to 3000 void-tons. You can also construct civilian vessels of up to 20,000 void-tons - The status of Luna must be addressed. The local government has requested admission into the Comintern as a full member nation. - Research priorities for the next year. The floor is now open for deliberations and will remain open for ~48 hours before we move on to voting. our next mechanics post will add all the remaining Goons on the list to the game and also finally explain how leaders work. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 05:30 on Oct 24, 2020 |
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Oct 24, 2020 02:08
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Antilles posted:Some questions to Mister Bates (and other knowledgeable comrades) before making a deliberation: Construction Equipment ground units function exactly the same as Construction Factories except that they require no workers and are more portable. One Construction Factory worth of ground units builds exactly as quickly as one Construction Factory with no cap, so how fast they can build is limited entirely by how many of them we send and how many resources we give them. We will have to either mine minerals on site or ship them to the Moon, but it is worth noting that the minerals required to build, say, a unit of Infrastructure take up a tiny fraction of the cargo space that same unit of Infrastructure would (and there are ways to ship minerals that require no ships at all). As for operating time, there are four factors for a survey ship: fuel, maintenance life, maintenance supply storage, and crew deployment time. Warships often have a fifth concern which is ammunition. Fuel is self-explanatory. Fuel efficiency can be improved significantly with the right techs and with a properly optimized engine design. Maintenance life is roughly how long the ship is designed to operate between shipyard overhauls. The closer the ship gets to its designed maintenance life, the more often its components will fail. You can roll back this time to zero with an overhaul at a shipyard. Components that fail have to be fixed with maintenance supply points or MSP. MSP are produced at Maintenance Facilities. If a ship runs out of them, then when parts break in the field, they stay broken. Finally there's deployment time. Crews need periodic shore leave. The longer a ship's designed deployment time, the more amenities it will have, and the longer the crew can serve on the ship before morale starts to fall (and efficiency with it). Higher deployment time requires more mass for crew quarters. Let's look at a basic-rear end ship design. code:code:
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Oct 24, 2020 03:53
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Antilles posted:Weird that they're self-sustaining, but ok. Presumably they wouldn't be able to actually grow without support from Earth? Does Luna even create anything at the moment, presumably aside from Wealth from its citizens? They're self-sustaining in the sense that the current population is capable of producing enough basic goods locally to not starve or asphyxiate, but are just barely able to produce enough additional life support infrastructure locally to keep up with natural population growth, so in practice will still need quite a bit of support from Earth. At the moment the only goods Luna creates, not counting the 15% of the population working in agriculture or operating critical life support infrastructure, are 2.4 Infrastructure per year, which is enough to increase its population capacity by 12,000 or so per year. This means that the slight overcrowding Luna is currently experiencing will eventually resolve itself, as local production increases the life support capacity just enough to make up for the new births, but that also means it'll take current local production 100 years to bring the pop cap up to two million. In short, the Moon settlement can survive without Earth if it had to, but it can't grow significantly without Earth. In terms of supply flights, the freighter Luna has actually been idling in Earth orbit for months, because the only thing the settlement really needs that Earth can supply right now is life support infrastructure, and at the moment the resources that would be spent on that are being spent producing Socialist Aid Program housing. They're not reliant on food shipments and the colony isn't large enough for there to be a significant demand for consumer goods, beyond what they can produce locally with light industry. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Oct 24, 2020 |
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Oct 24, 2020 06:34
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excerpt from an episode of Moonrise, a children's educational television program produced on the Moon for an Earth audience "Hi I'm Jenny from Belfast and I want to know what people on the Moon eat!" "That's a great question, Jenny! Let's ask Doctor Gutierrez! Doctor Gutierrez is a botanist. That means he knows a lot about plants!" The view transitions to a long, high-ceilinged room lit with bright light strips, with rows and rows of shelves, densely stacked vertically and extending horizonally as far as the eye can see. The shelves are covered in green plants. A short, old man in a stained white work jumpsuit emerges from a gap between two rows of shelves, beaming. "Your body needs lots of different nutrients to grow big and strong! You need to eat a variety of different foods to stay healthy. Calories aren't enough by themselves! You need vitamins and minerals, protein, and carbs too. At first, we brought everything we needed from Earth, and we ate freeze-dried food, like this:" Doctor Gutierrez produces something that looks not entirely unlike a TV dinner tray. "But it's very heavy and takes up a lot of space, and with so many people here on the Moon, we just couldn't do that. So we thought, why can't we just make our own food, right here?" He gestures at the room around him. "This place is called Hydroponics Farm D. It's called D because it's the fourth one we built. Hydroponics means growing plants in water, without any soil. You can't grow plants in moon dirt, even if you bring it inside and water it - and we can't bring enough dirt from Earth to feed everyone. We do it this way instead. Now, you can't just use any water; plants need nutrients just like people do. We use a special mineral water solution to make sure our plants grow big, healthy, and tasty." The camera pans lovingly over rows of Romaine lettuce, onions, tomato plants, peppers, strawberries. "With these farms, we can grow all kinds of tasty fresh fruits and vegetables. But that's not all. On the Moon, if something breaks, we never know if we'll be able to fix it. We have to make sure everything has plenty of redundancy - that means that we need to have more than one way to do everything. When it comes to food, you can't afford to put all your eggs in one basket! So we do all sorts of different things." Wipe transition to a dimly lit room; one of the walls is the curved natural rock of a lava tube. Hundreds of little mushrooms grow in long, low troughs. "Things like fungiculture, where we use our food waste and other trash to grow mushrooms!" Transition again to a room full of pipes leading to and from big glass-walled tanks full of greenish liquid. "And algae farming, growing lots of very small plants that live in water. We don't eat any meat on the moon, but we can make things out of algae that look and taste almost like it! We can't make very much of it right now, so it's only for very special occasions." Transition one more time and Doctor Gutierrez is in a big commercial kitchen surrounded by cooks. "It takes a lot of hard work. Over 10% of the people on the Moon work to grow food - that means over one in ten! And even when it's made, it takes even more work to clean it, store it, ship it, and then cook it. People like my friends here make sure everyone has enough to eat, and that it's the best food it can be." One of the cooks slides a steaming plate in front of the good doctor, piled high with steaming vegetables, mushrooms, and an algae-based meat analogue patty. He picks up a fork and takes a big bite, smiling for the camera. "Delicious!"
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Oct 24, 2020 07:31
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At the moment asteroid mining would involve putting actual physical mining installations on the surface of the asteroids, either automated mines (which are expensive) or regular mines (which would also mean you'd have to build life support infrastructure and then transport workers there). Standard mines are going to be limited both by the amount of life support infrastructure you can build and also by the number of people you can physically fit on the asteroid, which can range from hundreds of millions (Ceres, etc.) to less than ten thousand on the smallest rocks. Once you've done that, getting the minerals back to Earth is actually very easy, you just put a Mass Driver installation on the asteroid and another on Earth (do not fire mineral packets at Earth unless there is a mass driver also present there, it doesn't need any new craters). The hard part is transporting all the facilities and workers to the site, which you would have to do yourselves since the Hawaiians have not launched any freighters yet. The Luna, which has extremely small cargo holds due to dedicating almost all of its mass to engines and steel hull plating, can carry 1 unit of Infrastructure at a time. That means it requires over 200 trips to supply enough infrastructure to house 1 million people. It is capable of transporting 1/10 of a mining installation per trip, meaning that it would require 500 trips to transport the 50 or so mines that 1 million workers could staff (each mine employs 50,000 people). Larger, more technologically advanced freighters will have both far more cargo capacity and far higher speed, and presumably by the time you've started surveying the belt you will have designed and built some of those.. The other option, which will involve researching them first, is to design and build ships or space stations with orbital mining modules. These function as automated mines, except they're attached to the ship/station, and are therefore highly mobile. If you've got a lot of asteroids with small mineral deposits on them, it's usually way, way more efficient to have a small fleet of mining ships (or mining stations towed by tugs) moving around harvesting them than a fleet of freighters shuttling your surface mines from location to location. The downside is that they don't work on large asteroids, and definitely don't work on planets or moons. Also, if you build them as ships, they have to be built using shipyards, which both limits your production rate and also ties up the yards; on the other hand, building them as stations, which lets you make them very large and very quickly, means you'll have to design and build tugs capable of dragging them to their destination. Note that if for whatever reason you want to turn a small asteroid into a population center, orbital habitat modules bypass the population cap of the body they're orbiting, so by attaching enough space habitats to the exterior you can put an arbitrarily large number of people on any body regardless of size. There isn't often any particular reason you would do that, but you can.
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Oct 24, 2020 16:37
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Serf posted:hey Mister Bates, how do you feel about other people contributing short pieces of in-universe fiction? something in one of the updates really inspired me Please do! It is You Play Aurora, after all.
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Oct 24, 2020 19:50
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Foxfire_ posted:Be aware that even if we dropped absolutely everything to prioritize a troop transport, it'd still be multiple years away. Troop Transport Bay is a 4000RP project and we have no ground combat scientists, then shipyard tooling, then actual construction. Yeah it would honestly be faster to transport a ground training facility and the appropriate minerals to the Moon and then raise troops locally.
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Oct 25, 2020 00:33
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Grizzwold posted:I'm not aware of any recent advances that would permit actual military operations on the lunar surface beyond search and rescue, and the presence of firearms in a pressurized habitat of the kind currently in use seems like a disaster waiting to happen. If we are deadset on sending peacekeepers in any capacity to the moon, we will need to adjust our research priorities accordingly (and don't dress them up as stormtroopers for gently caress's sake). Naturally any fruits of this research should also be applied to improving conditions for our comrades in Lunagrad. Sure, I'll make a list of them! Writing another one up now, in fact. Also, assuming you dedicated 100% of your current industrial capacity to expanding labs, you could build one lab every six months or so, and each lab would use about 10% of your current Duranium stocks and about 20% of your current Mercassium stocks. Labs are expensive. As you convert more of your conventional industry to TN standards that speed will get faster, though, and the increased research speed tech you're nearly done with will also substantially increase your per-lab output.
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Oct 25, 2020 03:50
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INTRO TO COMMANDERS, INTRO TO ADMINISTRATION, AND MEDALS We're going to start this post off with the Academies tab on our empire overview screen. All ships require enlisted crew and junior officers. Normally, these personnel are drawn from a pool that is generated by academies (ships can be set to instead use untrained civilian crews in order to avoid using crew from this pool). With our one academy, Interkosmos Academy on Earth, we generate 1000 new crew per year, and they start green. We could instead train smaller numbers of higher-quality crew by changing our focus from Quantity (where it is now) closer to Quality. More importantly, the academy generates 5 senior officers per year. These officers can be naval officers, ground forces officers, scientists, or civilian administrators. Normally the distribution is random but weighted slightly towards naval officers. We can adjust that weighting, and in fact we have done so.  Missile and Kinetic Weapons specialist Nadia Konovalova is currently serving as the commandant of Interkosmos Academy. An Academy Commandant alters the weighting of the random check for new officers towards their own field. The effect is not equal. An academy commanded by a scientist will produce a lot more scientists than normal, but will still produce very few of them and most of the graduates will be of other types, for example, while an academy commanded by a naval officer will produce almost exclusively more naval officers. In addition, new recruits have a chance to learn a skill or specialization from the Commandant upon graduation - Interkosmos Academy will not just produce more scientists, for example, but more of those scientists will be Missile/Kinetic Weapons specialists than normal. While you can have multiple academies on a planet and their output scales linearly, Commandants are assigned per planet, which means that if you want to specialize academies, you need to put them on different worlds. Notably, Military Academies are one of the few installations in the game that require no population to run, meaning you can put them anywhere. Larger Academies require higher-ranked Commandants but otherwise there's no real restriction on size. So that's how you get commanders. What do you do with them, once you have them?  This is the Commanders screen. It's a slightly misleading name because many of these people are going to end up being staff officers or junior officers when all is said and done, and some of them might end up as fighter pilots who only 'command' themselves, but whatever, roll with it. On the left is an expandable list of all our Commanders, divided up by profession and rank (or field of expertise in the case of scientists). Commanders are distinct characters who each have a name, a planet of origin, a university alma mater, a bunch of skills, a Health stat that effects how long they'll last before having to retire, an age (every Commander starts the game at age 20, which is silly), and often some personality traits. The personality traits do nothing, by the way, they're just for roleplay purposes. The skills, on the other hand, can be very important, and we'll get to that. The two sections at the bottom of the screen are for assigning commanders to postings and sorting them by skills. We have no warships, so the 'warships' tab has no postings available, obviously. The middle section is the officer's ribbon rack, tracking all the medals they've earned. I absolutely want us to be using medals and I want you folks to design them (there is a fun and easy tool for making them yourself that I'll post here for download), so I will explain how those work in a bit. Medals are important because of the other stat Commanders have - Promotion Score. You may notice that we've only got a certain number of officers at each rank, and the number of them gets smaller the higher up the hierarchy you get. The top ranks currently have no one in them. Promotions work two ways - manually, in which I click a button to promote a specific officer, and automatically, in which the game promotes officers to higher ranks as new Academy graduates enter the hierarchy at the lowest level. Nearly all our promotions will be automatic, and when, say, a new Commander position opens, and a Lieutenant Commander is promoted to that slot, the Lieutenant Commander with the highest Promotion Score takes the job. Promotion score is generated by three things: time in grade, skills, and medals. Skills generally have the biggest impact. All but one of these skills also have powerful gameplay effects when the officer is assigned to a duty posting. One of them, Political Reliability, is completely useless and does literally nothing, except count as a skill for generating promotion score. This means that some of our officers will rise through the ranks on connections rather than ability.  At the moment we're just using the default US Military derived rank structure. You can add ranks, delete ranks, or rename ranks, and should feel free to do this as you see fit. One common change I've seen a bunch of Aurora players make is that, if they're planning on making company-size formations the smallest independent unit in their army, they'll add a Captain rank below Major.  Ranks are more than symbolic, they also effect what an officer can do. For example, the Luna and Tranquility, being small civilian vessels, can be commanded by a Naval Commander of any rank, with a minimum rank of Lieutenant Commander (their COs for now are actually Captains, but normally they'd be LCDRs). Larger ships will usually be commanded by Commanders or Captains, and task force command ships or very large warships may even be commanded by Rear Admirals. Ground Forces follow a similar structure; higher-level formations in the command hierarchy, or larger independent formations, must be commanded by officers of higher rank. The Ground Force hierarchy is fairly simple and doesn't really have admin or staff commands, just a straightforward Order of Battle consisting of formations commanded by formations commanded by formations etc. Civilian administration is also very simple - each Civilian Admin has an 'admin rating' which is the size of the colony they can administrate, higher ranked admins can administer bigger colonies, that's pretty much it. The Naval hierarchy is where most of the meat is, and we'll be mostly focusing on that. Lower-ranked officers can, in addition to command duties on smaller ships, be assigned as ship's officers aboard ships equipped with appropriate facilities - First Officers, Science Officers, Chief Engineers, and the like. We lack the ability to do this right now but it can be very valuable. An officer in one of these postings lends their rating in the relevant skill as a bonus to the ship's performance (a Science Officer with Survey skill increases the ship's surveying ability, for example). Higher-ranked Naval Officers can be assigned as Fleet Commanders aboard command ships, which we don't have and can't do, and they can be given Admin Commands, which are the most important use for your senior naval officers. Let's see how they work.  This is the Naval Organization screen. Here we see our top-level admin command, the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs, which oversees all our space operations. Below it are a bunch of empty fleets the game automatically creates, the Luna and Tranquility, and the Hawaiian Royal Space Agency. In game terms the Hawaiians are currently represented as a Civilian Shipping Line, an autonomous civilian body subordinate to us who build unarmed freight and passenger ships we do not control and use them to ship goods and people around. Civilians are enormously useful and when well-managed can handle a lot of logistical challenges for you, but let's focus on everything else. Admin commands give skill bonuses to every ship and station under them in the hierarchy, provided they are within range of the command. These bonuses are a portion of the admin officer's skills - so, for example, an officer with a high Survey score will boost the survey abilities of the ships under them in the hierarchy.  There are seven types of Admin Commands. General gives small boosts to every skill; the top-level command is always a General command. Naval commands, intended for our main war fleets, give bonuses to Crew Training, Reaction Speed, Tactical, and Engineering. Patrol commands only give Reaction and Engineering bonuses, but give them at much longer ranges. Survey commands give Engineering and Survey bonuses. Training commands give huge Crew Training bonuses and nothing else (Training Commands are unique, they'll get their own section shortly). Logistics commands give a big Logistics bonus and a small Industrial/Production bonus; Industrial commands give a big Industrial/Production bonus and a small Logistics bonus.  The range in which these bonuses are applied is calculated in star systems, from the system the command is based in. An admin command must be housed in a Naval Headquarters installation, of which we currently have one, on Earth. It does not have to be in the same location as its superior command - we could, for example, have a Survey Command on Earth that has as a subordinate a Naval Command three systems away.  Speaking of which, subordinate commands do not need to be of the same type as their parent command, and you can make the hierarchy go as deep as your rank structure and officer corps allows. The reason to do this, aside from roleplay reasons, is that a ship gets skill bonuses from every admin command it's under and within range of, although they reduce in strength the longer the chain gets. A good Admin Command structure, staffed by good officers, can vastly improve a fleet's effectiveness. If it's well organized it also makes large fleets enormously easier to keep track of and manage. You may have noticed that the Ministry currently has no commander. Let's fix that.   There, much better. At the moment we don't actually need a Vice Admiral and could get by with a Rear Admiral in the posting, because there's almost nothing to command. The max rank of an admin command is based on the things under it - all our empty example commands could be run by mere Commanders right now, for example. Most admin commands are designed to have ships assigned to them permanently, or at least very long term, and serve as the core of your fleet's organizational structure. Training Commands are different. A Training Command is something ships should be assigned to temporarily. Ships under Training Commands will spend the entire time undergoing intensive training. They will consume fuel, accrue deployment time, and experience wear and maintenance failures at double the normal rate so long as they are assigned to the command. In exchange, their crews will be trained extremely quickly. Well-trained crews follow orders better, and more quickly; they're extremely powerful at higher levels and are worth investing in. I personally like to put Training Command HQs on isolated planets near good sources of fuel, as a specialized 'training ground', but this has no mechanical benefit, it's just cool.  Now, on to medals. A medal is composed out of multiple parts: a ribbon, a name, a description, and the amount of promotion score points it is worth. Manuals can either be manually awarded, or conditional. Medals with conditions are automatically awarded by the game to any officer who meets any of the conditions set for the medal. Let's create an example conditional medal using a ribbon I already had lying around.  The Military Order of Placeholder gives the bearer 500 promotion points. It is awarded whenever an officer, scientist, or civilian admin destroys 10,000 total tons of enemy military shipping, destroys 100,000 tons of enemy commercial shipping, commands a troop transport during a combat drop, discovers alien ruins, or completes a research project, just to showcase the broad variety of conditions available to you. It allows multiple awards, so every time someone completes one of these requirements they get it awarded again. To show what awarding one is like, let's create a manual one. One of my favorite uses for manual awards is for service ribbons and campaign ribbons. I usually give them very small promotion bonuses (bigger for more important operations or service in more important branches), and use them to keep a visual record of everything major an officer has done in their career. So if someone spends a few years in the logistics/transport command they get an appropriate service ribbon for it, everyone who participates in exploring a certain star system gets a campaign ribbon for it, etc. Let's make one for Operation Sandino, the action against the Contras that one of our new People's Army battalions participated in. Again, we'll use a ribbon design I already had handy. We can always change it later.   When you manually award a medal, you do so with a Citation, a brief description of what the medal was awarded for. Automatically-awarded medals generate their own citations automatically. Lieutenant Colonel Welfarestateofmind is now 20 promotion points better off. Medals can be manually awarded to individuals, everyone on a certain ship, everyone in a certain fleet or ground formation, everyone in a certain admin command or hierarchy, or everyone of a certain role or position in any of those categories - I could, for example, award a medal to every single Chief Engineer in a fleet with a single click. They can be awarded to any Commander type, including civilians. A good rule of thumb I like to use for medal promotion scores is that your highest decoration, your Medal of Honor or Victoria Cross or Hero of the Soviet Union, should be about 1000 promotion score. Service and campaign ribbons should be less than 100; I like to put them in the 10-50 range most of the time. Other medals should be between those two ranges. Promotion score also determines order of precedence (the order in which they appear on the ribbon rack), which doesn't matter except aesthetically, but can be something to consider. Medals are .pngs and you can make them in any image editing program. 100 pixels is the standard width for ribbons, while 30 pixels is the generally accepted height, but these are not hard limitations. Here is an example of a game that is not mine in which they've made full versions of Soviet medals that were worn in full, instead of just using ribbons for them:  (if you want to use any of these in our game, they can be found here: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10763.0) That having been said, it's often quicker and easier to use ribbons, and the best way to make those is to use the excellent Ribbon Maker tool, downloadable here: http://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=10959.0. It's extremely easy to use, intuitive, and can accept almost any monochrome image as a recolorable device to be added to the ribbon. You can make manually awarded medals for any thing you please; if it's feasible for me to track it happening, I'll take care of it. You can also make manually awarded medals awarded solely at the discretion of the legislative body, meaning you vote to give them out. You can also make automatic ones. Here are all of the conditions you can assign to medals to auto-award them: code:also this is in the OP now Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 07:40 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 07:24
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War weariness is still extremely high both in the Comintern and in the remaining capitalist states, particularly because the aftershocks of the last war still haven't entirely stopped yet, and there are still places where active combat is ongoing, though fewer of them every year. There are definitely a few people and organizations pushing for more aggressive actions, especially the ones that are either bordered by one of the capitalist holdouts, are dealing with active insurgencies, or are themselves insurgencies, but they remain in the minority. Even assuming you could avoid a second nuclear exchange, trying to push for a major conventional military build-up targeted at other Earth nations, without first doing a lot of politicking to build support for it, would be a difficult proposition. You could still do it, but you'd need to either plausibly build a support base or be prepared for some difficult political consequences. Also this raises an important question, which is 'where are all the nukes?' I'm going to do proper country write-ups for a few of the big players soon to explain it in more detail, but the short and sweet version is that the USSR, France, and the PRC still retain most of their strategic nuclear arsenal; a lot of tactical nukes got set off, but with very rare exceptions the city-killers mostly did not get busted out. The USA's remaining nuclear arsenal has mostly scattered to the four winds. Some of them were detonated on US soil during the fighting. Various US successor states have some of them, with a few small states retaining territorial cohesion and legitimacy based entirely around their ICBMs. Some are in the hands of Comintern states, some are not, and consolidating control of the nuclear arsenal is one of the main long-term goals of peacekeeping in North America. The rump federal government retains the largest number of them. The second-largest number of former US nukes are in the hands of the 'US Government in Exile', which is based out of Tokyo, run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, regards President Agnew as a traitor who destroyed America, and controls almost every US SSBN that didn't end up in the hands of the Hawaiians or the Californians. Most US nuclear missiles no longer work due to lack of maintenance or lack of fuel. The former United Kingdom's remaining nukes are mostly in the hands of its various socialist successor states, with the exception of the SSBN Revenge, which went missing during the Revolution with its full payload of missiles and was probably lost during the war, though there are persistent conspiracy theories that it's in hiding in a neutral country or even in the Arctic. India, Israel, and South Africa, all of which remain capitalist and all of which are dealing with active insurgencies, retain their full prewar nuclear arsenals. The Comintern won the Cold War, collectively counts the majority of the human race as citizens, and is currently the only body on the planet that can make any kind of claim to being a 'great power', but there are still enough bombs left on the planet to turn the almost-apocalypse of World War III into the actual apocalypse of World War IV, so some caution still needs to be exercised. Antilles posted:Some sort of "Exemplary Service" medal should be implemented, say a simple 10-pointer rewarded repeatedly every ten years? Ten-year, twenty-year, and thirty-year service medals can be auto-awarded by the game if you choose to create them. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Oct 25, 2020 |
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Oct 25, 2020 08:10
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Deliberations are closed! We've got a bunch of stuff up for vote today and I think I got all of it. These are getting pretty hard to keep track of and separate out (in particular, it's frequently been unclear whether people are putting something up for a vote or just making plans for the future), so in the future, if you're making a policy proposal you intend to be voted on, please clearly indicate it with one nice big bold heading for each individual proposal you are sending to the floor. This is a very good problem to have, I like that people are participating and I want them to keep doing it, but I also want to make sure I see their participation and include them in the game. If the game continues to grow in participation, I may also start requiring proposals to be seconded by another poster before they go to vote, in order to keep the final votes from getting too long and complex. I'd also like to encourage posters to cooperate and combine similar or compatible proposals when you feel comfortable doing so; I've been combining identical proposals into Joint Resolutions myself, but you should feel free to suggest such things among yourselves, too. First: the status of Luna, for which you can vote, by ranked list: - A. A transition to self-rule as the Lunar Socialist Republic as soon as practical, to be admitted into the Comintern as a full member nation. - B. Limited autonomy and local self-governance while still remaining under Comintern administration, with the goal of gradually developing the capacity for self-sufficiency, then full self-rule for the Lunar Socialist Republic as an equal member nation of the Comintern once it has grown enough. - C. Limited autonomy and local self-governance while still remaining under Comintern administration, as a permanent Autonomous Oblast. The specific administrative structure will be developed by a Lunar Planning Committee composed 50% of representatives selected by the Lunar population and 50% of representatives selected by Ascension Island. - D. Status quo. The Moon will remain a scientific outpost administered directly by the Comintern via Ascension Island. Whatever you choose, it will probably serve as a precedent that will influence thinking about the development of future extraplanetary governments, although nothing will necessarily be set in stone. Second: the 'Gladio' issue, which has worrying implications, but so far has claimed a mere five lives across two incidents. Vote by ranked list. - A. Task our security and intelligence services to a thorough and subtle investigation of these terrorist activities, and until it has born fruit, be patient and do nothing. - B. As previous, but proactively beef up security around strategic civil infrastructure and public figures. - C. Begin an aggressive security crackdown of known or suspected capitalist or reactionary sympathizers, coupled with an intensive investigation. - D. As previous, but also proactively deploy the IPA and member-state military forces to defend against potential counterrevolutionary activity. Next, survey ships, and for that, we've got a few options. Boksi posted:I do like the suggestion of developing a survey vessel. In fact, I hereby propose the Solar System Surveying Act, which would authorize the following: Foxfire_ posted:Proposal - Surveycraft Antilles posted:The Kalmar Union agrees with the need for survey ships but recommend we limit them initially both in number and operational area, which is to say not beyond Mars. We suggest this limit remain until such time as the research, prototyping and construction of one or more dedicated support ships, providing refueling, maintenance and if necessary rescue services to the survey ships and eventually other ships operating in the outer solar system. Fivemarks posted:Further, New Afrika suggests that Geological Surveys of our system must focus on the Luna and Mars first, then the Asteroid Belt. As of now, Venus and Mercury are not worth it. -A. Resolution B-15, the Solar System Surveying Act. A class of exploration vessel, equipped with geological survey sensors, will be designed, and four of this class shall be built and commissioned. A design competition will be held immediately. The design must meet the requirements specified. -B. Resolution F-16, the Surveycraft Proposal. As previous, except the technologies outlined in the Foxfire plan will first be developed. A design competition will be held as soon as the necessary techs are researched. And for Survey Priority, by ranked list: -A. Entire system, beginning with planets and moons and moving on to asteroids only after. -B. Inner system, with no surveying beyond Mars until such time as better support ships are available. -C. Prioritize Luna, Mars, then the asteroid belt. Next, individual resolutions. Serf posted:3) Some scientific resources should be used to explore the use of TNE-derived technologies for radiation cleanup, and should that prove feasible and carried out, propaganda should be deployed that informs the global proletariat that the Comintern is devoted to preserving Earth's ecosystem. Fivemarks posted:New Afrika wholeheartedly endorses the ascension to the brotherhood of nations that of the people of Luna. We would also like to take this chance to propose that Luna be the model for which future colonies of humankind be treated, with the threshold for recognition as a nation and full member of the Internationale for colonies being 1 million inhabitants. Antilles posted:The Kalmar Union agrees with their New Afrika comrades that while some day we may be forced to turn our energies back to war, that time is not now. We will go even further and suggest that the following be made into a fundamental principle of MOSA, Comintern, and hopefully the human race as a whole, that come what may, humanity will not fire the first shot. Peace should always be our first and strongest instinct, so that we may ever avoid such bloodshed and horror as we are still recovering from. F-19 proposes that, should faster-than-light travel be developed, humanity's first interstellar exploration vessels be called the Tsiolkovsky class, and proposes a naming scheme. JR-20 is a proposal to clarify the exact nature and function of the Ministry of Outer Space Affairs, which is currently sitting at a fuzzy halfway point between a civilian space agency and a military. This resolution will establish 'No First Strike' as the primary guiding principle under which MOSA operates, and focus the organization's efforts on peaceful exploration. JR-20 will also ban the construction of pure warships that do not serve any exploratory purpose, except as absolutely necessary to provide for the defense of humanity. This ban will be automatically rescinded in times of emergency or if a hostile alien race is encountered, or may be repealed by later legislation without invalidating the rest of the resolution. MOSA's officer ranks will be renamed slightly to emphasize the civilian nature of the agency. Antilles posted:When it comes to putting boots on the ground on the moon, just sending troops feels a bit like occupying the place just as they're starting to talk of independence, not a good look. I propse we collaborate with the councils of Lunagrad to establish a joint training operation on the moon, to give some of our troops low-gravity and spacesuit experience. If we happen to bring an excess of equipment and materials to set up offices and training sites, well these things happen and I'm sure the locals would put them to good use. And while these men are on the moon training alongside the lunar peacekeepers it'd be only comradely to lend a hand if situations arise where we could do good. Speleothing posted:Comrades, we need a second, a third, and perpaps a fourth Luna-class cargo transport vessel! Our bold explorers on the moon need habitation and life support. Build the vessels with whatever design improvements can be included from the past few years. The need of great speed for immediate delivery of equipment has been lessened by the capacity of the local manufacturing plant soviets. We have all seen the reports of neo-fascist or libertarian gangs attempting acts of terrorism around the globe and beyond. Disruption of the lunar supply chain by counter-revolutionaries must be pre-empted with the construction of these new vessels. Finally, Y-23 proposes that the Comintern begin working on a program studying the viability of adopting a constructed universal second language, either Esperanto or a language specifically developed for the purpose, as outlined in the theoretical whitepaper to be found here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3943978&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=4#post509250673. IN SUMMARY, that's ten votes: - Luna: Make a ranked-list vote of A (full independence as soon as possible), B (full independence after a period of development under limited self-rule), C (limited self-rule under Cominter administration), or D (status quo). - Gladio: Make a ranked-list vote of A (the subtle approach), B (the slightly less subtle approach), C (the blunt approach), or D (the unreasonably blunt approach). - Survey Ships: Vote A (build ships now with current tech) or B (build ships in four months after a highly focused research and development program aimed at improving our ship designs). - Survey Priorities: Make a ranked-list vote of A (entire system, planets and moons first, then asteroids), B (inner system only), or C (Luna, Mars, and then the asteroid belt). - S-17, Radiation Cleanup: vote Yes or No - F-18, One Million Citizens Autonomy Requirement: vote Yes or No - F-19, A Ship Naming Scheme: vote Yes or No - JR-20, The No First Strike Policy: vote Yes or No - A-21, the Lunar Self-Defense Forces: vote Yes or No - S-22, Logistics Expansion: vote Yes or No - Y-23, the Constructed Language Study: vote Yes or No Voting is now open, and will remain open for about 48 hours! Tomorrow, instead of a mechanics post, I'm going to focus on making the LP easier to navigate by improving the OP - a table of contents for mechanics posts will be added, a Google Doc listing every single resolution we've ever voted on, and advice for how to format proposals, among other minor things.
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Oct 26, 2020 09:11
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Antilles posted:Mister Bates, a question/clarification: Just like the Terraforming research apparently can be used to mitigate the environmental damage from nuclear fallout, can we assume the Genome Sequence Research would do something similar? Maybe unlocking new cures/treatments for cancer/radiation poisoning? Correct
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Oct 26, 2020 20:19
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Voting will remain open for a few more hours. At the moment, the most contentious issue up for a vote right now, the Luna plan, is looking like B will carry the day barring some last-minute votes, with Option B receiving exactly 50% of first-preference votes so far, A and C in distant second and third place respectively, and no first-preference votes for option D. The vote for JR-20 is extremely close, with Yes currently having a lead of just one vote. Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Oct 27, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 21:19
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Freudian posted:Do you mean JR-20 or A-21? whoops, fixed! JR-20, the No First Strike Clause, is currently winning by one vote. (A-21, the Lunar Self-Defense Forces, has an extremely comfortable lead and is currently all but guaranteed to pass)
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Oct 27, 2020 21:38
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There is pretty broad consensus among the current Lunar population that they want an autonomous local government and the Lunar flag has already been adopted as an unofficial local cultural symbol, but what specifically that should look like and how exactly they want to fit into the Comintern's political structure remains a contentious issue, and the debates can get heated. The Lunar delegation to this year's Congress is majority pro-independence. For what it's worth the Comintern explicitly aspires in its charter to dissolve national boundaries and unite humanity under a single banner, although there's still argument about what exactly that means. Right now it's a loose confederation of mostly-sovereign polities. Part of membership involves accepting the People's Congress as supreme legislative authority which is how you're able to pass things like 'a massive worldwide industrialization campaign'. In that respect the Comintern is a world government, but there's a long way to go before people really believe in it as one. Many people still see themselves as citizens of their own nation first and the Comintern second. How will Luna effect that? I don't know, make a decision and then play to find out!
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Oct 28, 2020 00:45
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Voting is closed! We had a lot of stuff to vote on and a lot of votes, which is awesome! Final results are as follows: The Status of Luna:: although I provided for an instant runoff via ranked list, it was barely necessary, as Option B won exactly half of all first-preference votes. Once second-preference votes were counted B won handily. The Lunar Socialist Republic will be recognized as a provisional member of the Comintern. They will be permitted to organize their local government as they see fit, within the restrictions laid out in the membership requirements of the Comintern's Charter (so, no monarchies, no capitalism, etc.). That local government will be granted voting representation in the People's Congress effective immediately. A 100-member Lunar Planning Committee or Lunplan will be established, staffed 51% by representatives chosen by the Lunar government (using whatever method they see fit) and 49% by representatives selected by the Comintern, with the responsibility of overseeing the development of the Lunar Socialist Republic, integrating it into the Comintern's political, economic, and social system, and ensuring the functionality and stability of its political system. Lunplan will annually assess the state of Luna and issue a report on the viability of the LSR, with the sole mandate of preparing Luna for full Comintern membership and the explicit goal of dissolving itself once its mission is complete. If and when Lunplan deems the LSR to be ready for full membership, or ten years after the passage of this resolution, whichever is sooner, the Lunar government will hold a referendum on full Comintern membership. Should that referendum pass with a simple majority, Lunplan will be dissolved and the Lunar Socialist Republic will effective immediately be a full member nation of the Comintern, with all rights and responsibilities of the same. Should it fail, a second referendum will be held in five years' time, and should that fail, a third in five more years' time. If all three referenda fail, Lunplan will be dissolved and the Lunar Socialist Republic will be incorporated as an autonomous territory of the Comintern. Until that point, the LSR will retain no standing military forces (the LSDF will be organized as a branch of the People's Army), will conclude no treaties or engage in any other formal diplomacy with non-Comintern states, and will agree to abide by the development plans laid out by Lunplan. Lunplan will not interfere in the domestic affairs of the Lunar Socialist Republic, will exercise no veto power or other authority on local legislative decisions, and will take a neutral position on all internal elections, referenda, and other decision-making processes within the Lunar Socialist Republic. Should the LSR violate the founding principles of the Comintern by promoting reaction, capitalism, fascism, other counterrevolutionary ideologies, or attempting to undermine the integrity of the Comintern, their autonomy may be withdrawn by an emergency vote of the People's Congress. This plan may be modified by later legislation if there are parts of it not to your satisfaction, with the caveat that anything that reduces the Moon's autonomy after giving it to them will almost certainly result in heavy pushback. The Gladio Investigation: in this case no second-preference vote counting was needed, as Option B won an outright majority in the first round. Comintern internal security agencies will be tasked with conducting inquiries and investigations into this 'Gladio', and minor adjustments will be made to military and security deployments in order to increase protection around some key facilities and people, as quietly as possible. Survey Ships: The Foxfire Proposal wins, and an intensive research and development program for space technology will be initiated, scheduled to take about four months. When completed, a design competition will be held, and four of the winning design will be commissioned. Survey Priorities: No option won a majority in the first round. After second-round votes are counted, Option B wins due to every single C voter listing B as their second preference. Our surveyors will be first tasked with thoroughly surveying the inner solar system. S-17: passes almost unanimously, and the radiation cleanup project will be queued up. F-18: passes extremely narrowly, and offworld settlements that meet or exceed a permanent population of 1 million will be permitted to begin the process of seeking autonomy. JR-20: passes by one vote. The Ministry of Outer Space Affairs is officially classified as a civilian organization, and its mission statement clarified to emphasize peaceful exploration of space above all. Ministry armed vessels will, in first contact scenarios, not fire unless fired upon, and will always prioritize peaceful and diplomatic conduct in future interactions. The development or construction of warships is banned, with the exception of those strictly necessary to ensure the defense of humanity. In game terms, this means that any armed spacecraft larger than 1000 tons must have either a deployment time of less than three months (to allow for defensive and short-ranged patrol vessels), an explicit and specific scientific or exploratory role for which its weapons are necessary (subject to the interpretation of the People's Congress), or one of the following: a Diplomacy Module, Geosurvey or Gravsurvey Sensors, large passive sensors, or a missile magazine that is kept loaded at least 50% with sensor drones/buoys or survey drones/buoys during peacetime. CIWS do not count as weapons for the purposes of this restriction, and this restriction is immediately voided should the Comintern ever find itself in a state of war with another spacefaring power or civilization. A-21: passes handily. An armed defense force, drawn from local volunteers and staffed with local NCOs recruited from Great Revolutionary War veterans, will be raised on Luna. They will not only be used to defend Luna from possible threats, they will also be used as a laboratory to test suit, weapon, and equipment designs, tactics, training methods, and survival techniques for future deep space operations, in a relatively safe environment. The original proposal did not necessarily specify that a new training facility had to be built. As such, in order to address one of the few objections to this resolution, rather than building one, the facilities of the existing People's Army Training Command will instead be relocated to hab complexes on the Moon. S-22: passes, and four more freighters will be designed and built. The design competition will begin in four months, in order to take advantage of the new technology provided by the Foxfire plan. Y-23: passes, and a committee will be struck with the responsibility of examining the potential viability of a 'Universal Second Language' for the Comintern. No official changes will be made to Comintern policy at this time, but the committee is granted a budget and mandate to conduct extensive studies and experimentation. Normally I would follow this up immediately with a story update, but I had a very long day at work, so the next proper update will come tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who proposed something, voted, or participated in the discussion!
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Oct 28, 2020 06:13
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space piracy is not explicitly modeled as a game mechanic but that doesn't mean it can't happen. also the ban on warships was actually suggested by Fivemarks; I combined your resolution and theirs into a single joint resolution since they were so similar in form and intent. Whenever a resolution is named 'JR-##' it's short for 'Joint Resolution' and is two or more posters' proposals combined into a single one because they are either identical or very similar to each other. In retrospect 'no warships' is a big enough deal that I probably shouldn't have done that and should have had those two on the ballot separately, but oh well, you can always amend it later if people find it odious in practice.
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Oct 28, 2020 07:37
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Mandatory listening for this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYOJB2CWG4I December 20, 1979  As deliberations continue, news of votes and decisions goes out around the world. On Luna, the radio broadcast of the results of the autonomy vote is met with enthusiasm, and raucous parties, a couple of which result in brawls in cramped habs, but most of which go just fine. Another, more covert, radio broadcast is picked up by the appropriate authorities on Luna and the KGB goes to work. On the same day, the Matveyev Design Bureau makes a momentous announcement. The one-year industrial development program has been completed. They present the world with a slate of new industrial machinery and processes for applying them. Though ultimately evolutionary rather than revolutionary, a development on the early Trans-Newtonian industrial machines the Comintern is already using, they represent a shift from transitional tech to a new generation of equipment designed and built from the ground up specifically to work with Trans-Newtonian materials. The net effect will be a significant increase in factory output. Knock-on effects are expected to ripple out through the global economy - in particular, the Socialist Aid Program and the global industrial development program should both see benefits from this almost immediately.  Matveyev's teams are immediately retasked to aerospace research, with the end goal being to develop a Duranium-hulled spacecraft, inspired by the Roswell object. Before they can do that, they'll need to develop foundational technologies, and for now they'll be working with conventional materials. December 21, 1979 The People's Congress adjourns for the year and the delegates begin returning home for Christmas. The Tranquility identifies itself to space traffic control on Ascension Island as 'carrying the delegation from the Lunar Socialist Republic' as it departs Earth orbit. December 24, 1979 President Taraki of Afghanistan greets newly-arriving Comintern military and technical advisors at Kabul Airport. As most of them are from the USSR, some jokers refer to this deployment as the 'Soviet invasion of Afghanistan', although they are unarmed. January 1, 1980  The Ministry of Outer Space Affairs and the International People's Army begin their first joint operation, the relocation of the Siberian army training complex to the Moon. This will be an extremely complex operation involving weeks of work and dozens of round trips to the Moon and back, and just the process of relocating the facility will be a valuable learning experience. January 6, 1980 Half a dozen masked gunmen make an attempt on the life of the President of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella, a former Christian Democracy political leader whose drift to the Communist Party in the years since the Revolution were known to have made him many enemies. He is critically wounded, but members of the increased security detail he had just been assigned drive off the gunmen before they manage to finish the job. Two of the gunmen are killed, and identified as known members of the Sicilian Mafia. US M-16 assault rifles, spare magazines, hand grenades, and an encrypted two-way radio are recovered from the bodies. The remaining gunmen escape. In a phone call to the local news radio station, a heavily distorted voice claims responsibility for the attack, identifying themselves as Colonel Vinciguerra of Gladio, and adding that the 'traitor' Mattarella would be 'brought to justice' soon. The call is suppressed by Italian state security forces, and the attack is added to the ongoing investigation. January 11,1980 Fifty Sicilian Mafia associates and made men are arrested in a series of raids. All disclaim any knowledge of the attack or the two men killed. Nothing of value is learned from them after weeks of interrogation and investigation; the conclusion of the Italian intelligence services is that, while the Mafia would not be sad to see Mattarella killed, the leadership of the local crime families legitimately had no idea about the assassination plan. January 19, 1980 Matveyev's research team delivers the first of the three incremental armor technologies they are tasked with developing, and immediately begin work on the second. January 20, 1980 The first Super Bowl in six years is held. The Pittsburgh Steelers have to cross multiple national borders to reach the stadium in Pasadena, People's Republic of California, and neither team is playing in top form, but the game is still a thrilling affair. The Steelers beat the Rams 34-31 in overtime. The game is an enormous media event throughout North America, and the 'commercials' showcasing the benefits of socialism and the prosperity the Comintern can bring are seen in millions of households. In particular, there is an exceptional 90-second segment showcasing a Socialist Aid Program housing block and the refugee families who now live in it. February 13, 1980 The Winter Spartakiade, the People's Olympiad, opens in the Bolivian Andes (it's technically summer down there, but in the high mountains it hardly matters). The two-week-long athletic event is considered a successor to the Olympic Games, which have not been held in many years. February 18, 1980 A sniper attack on a group of German Army soldiers on a training exercise in the Black Forest leaves two wounded. The sniper is not identified or captured. March 1, 1980  As of today, nearly 350 factory complexes have been fully modernized to Trans-Newtonian standards. The newest factory has come online in Atlanta, and takes full advantage of TN technologies. The complex is sleek, futuristic, largely automated, and fully equipped to shape Trans-Newtonian materials into all sorts of useful forms on a large scale. It is put to work producing Socialist Aid Program residential prefabs. March 4, 1980 Dr. Matveyev reports another breakthrough, and begins work on the final stage of the project, a stable duranium-aluminum alloy suitable for spacecraft hull construction. March 8, 1980 The first rock music show in Soviet history. It is simulcast live throughout the Union. March 11, 1980 South Africa, the last holdout of colonialism on the continent, falls to a joint Angolan-Namibian-Cuban-Zimbabwean-ANC force. Though mop-up operations will take weeks and the task of securing the new state from white supremacist guerrilla holdouts will likely take years, this ends major combat operations on the African continent. Fidel Castro personally leads the victorious Cuban army on parade through the streets of Johannesburg, and embraces Nelson Mandela in front of the TV cameras. The new government immediately announces an intention to join the Comintern. March 19, 1980 Unionist paramilitaries attempting to assault and destroy a major power plant in the north of Ireland are successfully ambushed by government forces. All fourteen militants are killed, as are three IRA soldiers. The attack is uncharacteristically bold, and had security forces not been detailed to guard this site on Comintern instructions, would have probably succeeded. Two of the attackers died by suicide. The group is well-armed and were carrying a Stinger anti-aircraft missile launcher in addition to small arms and explosives. March 27, 1980  The relocation of People's Army training operations to the Moon is complete. It has taken many months and the work of thousands of people, and the fledgling nation of Lunagrad has devoted much labor and resources to the project. It's more than just a training camp - light industrial facilities to produce needed equipment and parts on-site had to be established, labs and testing facilities in which designs can be workshopped, maintenance facilities to keep everything operational, and of course service industries to support all the people it will bring in. All told, the facility and the associated industry is going to occupy the labor of every single formerly-unemployed worker on Luna, and could easily expand to accommodate more. Having just been granted autonomy, the inhabitants of Luna are also given a purpose - learn how to thrive on an alien world. Teach others. Develop and apply new methods, new tactics, new survival strategies and educational methodologies. Prepare future expeditions. And, if need be, ensure they're capable of defending themselves. Many on Luna aspire to see the world develop into an industrial powerhouse one day; they envision factories producing everything humanity could possibly need, up here with no atmosphere to pollute and no biosphere to defile. One day they may see it - but, for now, there is other work to be done. that worker shortage slows the facility's work but does not prevent it from working  Volunteers for the new security force are easy to find. For now, they will be equipped with very lightly armored space suits little different from civilian models, and their 'weapons' will be crude, simple things, mostly melee weapons at first (conventional firearms actually do work in vacuum, but not well, and not for very long). Their job will be as much about learning how to be soldiers in space as it will be about actually being soldiers. The small amount of Vendarite required to build this unit was transported from Earth by the Luna. April 3, 1980 Comintern peacekeepers and local allied forces successfully convince the 2nd Tennessee Volunteers, nominally an Army unit loyal to the US Government-in-Exile in Tokyo but in practice a large and organized bandit gang, to surrender peacefully after weeks of skirmishing. The half-starved, ragged fighters are disarmed and given food. The rump federal government in DC, who views the 'government in exile' as traitors (the feeling is mutual), issues an amnesty for any former members of the 2nd Tennessee who defect to Federal-aligned forces, though it's unlikely any of them will take the offer at this point. April 8, 1980 KGB investigators on Luna identify 83 people who appear on passenger manifests of flights to the Moon, but are unaccounted for in a survey of the Lunar population, living or dead, nor have they appeared on any flights leading back from the Moon. On a hunch, they begin exhaustively going over cargo manifests of every one of the hundreds upon hundreds of cargo flights since the settlement was founded, looking for further discrepancies. April 22, 1980 A newly-erected Socialist Aid Program housing block in Chicago is burned in an apparent arson. Though the interior is gutted, the structure, made out of sturdy TNE-based alloys, is essentially undamaged, and the building can and will be restored to full livability. Graffiti reading 'Don't be a SAP!' is sprayed on the pavement outside, with a crude rendition of an American flag and a stylized image of a short sword. April 30, 1980  The Matveyev Design Bureau presents a formula for a stable duranium-aluminum alloy. The dull grey metal is unbelievably strong, durable, light, and resistant to heat, stress, and corrosion. It is also almost impossible to form or shape with conventional tools - fortunately, fewer and fewer industries use conventional tools anymore. Working with pure TNEs on such a large scale is beyond our current capabilities, though Matveyev issues a proposal for further development in hull material technologies that will change that. For now, though, this will do. SHIP DESIGN CONTEST  For all later contests, what I intend to do is create a clean Aurora database file that has every single technology you've researched, including weapons, engines, sensors, etc., and let you design and test designs in that. For now the list of techs is extremely short, so I'll just post the full list and let you add them in yourself.  This is the state of the shipyards. It should go without saying that your design must be buildable in our current yards. You'll need a copy of C# Aurora updated to the latest version. The following ships need to be designed: - A geological survey vessel. It must carry geological survey sensors. Strongly recommended, but not necessarily required, are a long deployment time, a long maintenance life, and a long range. - A freighter. It must be a civilian vessel. - A cryo-equipped colony ship. It must be a civilian vessel. You may submit one or any of these designs. Submit it in the following format, using the [ code ] tags: code:Submissions are now open and will remain open for at least 24 hours! our next mechanics post will, fittingly, be about military ship design Mister Bates fucked around with this message at 14:30 on Oct 29, 2020 |
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Oct 29, 2020 07:17
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