So I took time off to run a successful kickstarter for Hive, Queen and Country (we funded three books!)
Let me get back to some issues with Prime Base, which is never far from my mind.
First let's think about entrances. I figure there are five types of entrances to the base: Prewar entrance, sally port (for scouting), emergency exits, small and large service exits for use during the active phase. These will all be different. The prewar entrances will need to be based on the cover story. They will have to be large enough to allow access for all the big parts of the base. They will have to be of a nature that they can be sealed and concealed when the base is completed and they are no longer needed.
The sally ports will be small, for nothing bigger than a small vehicle, if that. They will be well hidden and protected and there will only be a few of them.
The easiest to design are the emergency exits. These will be vertical shafts that are very deep. The top part will be filled with sand. The bottom half is empty. If they need to be used the fill from the upper half drops into the empty portion and opens up the passageway. The top has a covering that can be opened from below.
The service entrances are also based on the cover story and location of the base.
I think the base was oversized in the original module. There are a HUGE number of people who are supposed to be monitoring radio traffic during the war itself. Why is this not automated? It should be all sorts of recording equipment but no one needs to be listening to it. So instead of hundreds of seats being occupied it might be a dozen or so. This means the base might not need all the personnel I think it did originally. I still think it needs a second habitation unit, but probably not two.
There are a lot of options for cover for the base. One would be based on the Swiss Nuclear Plant incident
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucens_reactor, with an experimental nuclear plant. Another possibility is something like the old Proton Decay Experiment
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~lpt/erie.htm. Both these have large underground chambers. Another option is hardrock mines, such as they have in Missouri. I was at the Missouri Mine Museum
https://mostateparks.com/park/missou...-historic-site a couple of months ago. The lead mines had huge chambers, that would be idea for Prime Base. the problem is that in Missouri the ground water is so high that all the chambers would be flooded. The Bonne Terre mine
http://www.bonneterremine.com/ is famous as an underground dive site. The region would be have some excellent geology for the base, but the ground water is a huge issue. I'm not sure if there are hard rock mines out west that might also serve the purpose with huge deep chambers, but I'm not sure.
I'm still going to stick with my live rabies virus in the smallpox vaccine story for the destruction of Prime Base and why the field teams were never woken up. Someone on here reported that CDC had found rabies may not be 100% fatal to humans. I went and looked up the report
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/0...to-rabies.html
The population that CDC looked at have lived in South America in a region where rabies carrying vampire bats are very common. This is a tiny population in an extremely specific environment with very little genetic variability from outside sources. I am willing to concede that there might be a person in the Prime Base who is from this group and has this amazingly rare genetic modification. I really doubt it though. So I'm going to stick with all the field teams getting one batch of smallpox vaccine before freezing and the Prime Base getting the tainted batch after a suspected breach of the base. Krell had tainted the vaccine. Prime realized what happened after symptoms surfaced. They couldn't know if all the vaccine was bad. If the field teams got bad vaccine waking them up without getting the rabies vaccine to them would be a death sentence.
I know folks have complained about the small pox vaccinations. It seems a prudent policy to vaccinate against this known potential biowarfare agent for the field teams and to have a supply of the vaccine for the base as well. With the CDC protocols in place in the 1980s the live rabies virus would have gone unnoticed in the QC process.
Just a few notes on this Christmas Day-Happy Holidays to all