The Let's Play Archive

Buzz Aldrin's Race Into Space

by Frankomatic

Part 6: Spring 1958: Pre-Vote




You guys get an immediate decision that needs to be made: Pay 10 MBs up front, or suffer a 10% safety factor penalty on the Atlas's next mission. Which, I might remind you, is this season. You guys have 80/90/95 MB currently to work with. Due to the way saves in this work and the fact that the prompt for this comes up immediately, I'm going to have to fix my percentages on my research after this vote ends. I can't save until the prompt is fulfilled, and reloading the save I made during my turn goes back to the end of the US turn, so... yeah.

Here's what's stayed static after some testing: This event is going to happen no matter what, and you guys will have either 80, 90, or 95 MB to work with for budget. If you want to submit three possible votes based on what you'd have left from any number option, that's fine. I'll pick the appropriate one. Also, the gains you guys got from your research are staying the same, as the save took after your research was done, so don't worry about that.

I'd stay up for a little while to let the vote happen now, but I need to go to bed for work in a few hours. Sorry this ended up going kinda weird. Anyways, the new stuff for you guys:



This is the assembly screen. It will show you both what you need for the mission and allow you to change it up a bit if there are multiple options. If you don't have everything you need, you can click AutoPurchase to buy it all up right from here. Since you guys have it, I'll just hit assign for now to show you the other fairly important option:



Mission scheduling! What you see here is a very interesting little feature, you can choose to launch this mission in May for no cost or penalty... or, you can choose to launch a month or two earlier to try to be sure to beat me to the punch. If you decide to launch in April, it will cost 3 MB and put on a -3 Rushing Penalty to all steps of the mission. If you go for March, it'll be 6 MB and -6 Rushing Penalty. Is it worth the risk? You decide!



Lastly, you can now hire 7 Astronauts for 20 MB. Once hired, they will go into Basic Training, where they will remain until either their 4th season or you pull them out of Basic early. Every Astronaut has five stats that will help in their missions: Capsule Pilot, LM Pilot, EVA, Docking, and Endurance. The problem is...



You can't see all of these until after you've hired them, you can only see Capsule Pilot and Endurance. Anyways, here is your list of Astronauts and the relevant stats. They're also huge whiny babies, but that can be talked about after the vote. If you'd like to hire some this season, please list the seven of your choice.

Grissom: 3 Cap, 1 End
Shepard: 1 Cap, 2 End
Glenn: 1 Cap, 1 End
Carpenter: 1 Cap, 2 End
Schirra: 2 Cap, 1 End
Cooper: 2 Cap, 3 End
Slayton: 4 Cap, 1 End
Kincheloe: 3 Cap, 2 End
Walker: 3 Cap, 1 End
Wood: 2 Cap, 1 End
Rogers: 1 Cap, 2 End

And with that, that should be everything new you need to vote on, aside from the old style R&D questions and any possible new eqiupment you may want. Here is your status report.


Status Report: Spring 1958, US Side

Purchased Projects and relevant information
Explorer Satellite
Unit Cost: 1
R&D Cost Per Team: 1
Unit Weight: 300
Current Safety: 87%
Max R&D: 95%
Max Safety: 98%

Atlas
Unit Cost: 3
R&D Cost Per Team: 2
Max Payload: 600
Current Safety: 54%
Max R&D: 84%
Max Safety: 98%

Equipment List

Missions you could attempt
Orbital Satellite: 3 steps, 2 checks v Rocket, 1 check v Satellite. Requires 1 rocket, 1 Satellite.

Missions to occur this season
Orbital Satellite: Keep (with appropriate updates as listed in post above) or Scrub?

Voting for what to do will end at 6:00AM EST on Sunday, Feb 20th.

Once again, I really apologize for how messed up this turn kinda ended up getting. I didn't realize the saves worked the way that did as... well, it's usually pretty quick to just blast through a full game on your own. I've already stayed up a bit later than I should have... but hopefully it won't be too big of an issue. (And honestly, every test I've done of my new research puts the USSR even further in the hole, so it works out good for y'all at least?)