Part 13: Fall 1959: Post-Vote
Sorry for the sort of late update, but let's get this fall season out of the way, shall we?
A Manned Earth Orbital is planned for next Spring with this man as the Primary. In other Astronaut news, I moved Kincheloe and Cooper into Mercury after doing this.
The Titan program is purchased and two teams assigned to it. The two teams were apparently sleeping on the job a bit there, but hey, better than nothing.
The rest of the research goes quite nicely. Looks like you'll definitely have a maxxed out Mercury program for the Spring launch. With the entire budget used up, it's time to move on to the Soviet turn.
MEANWHILE, in glorius
I'm fairly certain we just abducted a German scientist for more R&D wizardry. Also the Cosmonauts have drank enough to think being strapped into the deathtrap of the Vostok is a good idea, so they're considered graduates. It's also at this point that I realize I've overlooked something rather vital and forgot to pull anyone for the Vostok program, so I can't schedule a manned launch for Spring at all. Whoops.
Research continues regardless to my own stupidity, and progresses quite nicely.
...huh, apparently I've found either a bug or a change in the Freeware version. Looks like it DOES allow you to assign teams in training to missions next season. I'm torn between this feeling like blatant cheating and the interest of trying to keep things interesting... so I've tenatively scheduled a mission of some secret type for Spring as well through this. I've made a completely different save for this, so if you all think it's a little too gamey of a move, I'll back it out. If you want to let it go, I'm fine with you guys using the bug/feature as well in the future as it's relatively harmless aside from making astronaut management a little less of a pain in the ass.
Once again, I think I'll hold on to my surplus MB and call it a turn now.