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Originally Posted by tsofian
Getting back the size of Prime Base. I go with the philosophy "It is better to have something or someone and not need them than to not have them and to need them" I'd make the base very resource heavy. If it needs one guy to do a job there are three people to cover it. If it might need a skill set there is certainly two people there to do it. If it would never in a million years need such a person there is one just waiting.
Let’s see if I can post in colors on this board. I’m just cutting Cosmicfish’s full post, putting it in word and putting my replies in. Let’s see if this works.
As an observation, this is in direct contrast to both the "reality" of the Project and the feel of the game: scarcity was always supposed to be there, the Project was always trying to do too much with too little. Why make Prime Base so abundant?
First off the “scarcity” of the project is only relative. The project is very well funded, well equipped, well staffed. They have enough resources that they can build bolt holes with the intention of abandoning them. So a blast resistant structure that can house a team for several decades. It has a fusion power plan, a radio communications external sensors and a number of other systems. A bolt hole is a non trivial cost and is just going to get abandoned.
Each team has two or three expensive vehicles. They have expensive personal equipment. The resources seem scare is because they are spread very thin. Plus it’s a single team or perhaps a very few that are awake. It isn’t even the whole project that is awake, just a tiny fraction of it.
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Originally Posted by tsofian
But it will still need a dozen recon teams and half a dozen MARS teams. These will be charged with base security during the inactive phase, as well as scouting upon activation. That's about 180 folks right there.
Other than actual security for the base (which should be well less than 6 full MARS teams!), why have all this? Seriously, they have the entire rest of the Project to go out and do these things, why expose the HQ when you can call in a nearby team to do the same thing? There is no good reason for the HQ to be anything but an HQ.
There are lots of good reasons. There are many ways to skin a cat. There isn’t any single right answer. I don’t claim to have the right answer. I claim to have answers that work for me and the way our local folks run MP. One reason is that it’s the most protected place in the project, so it might make sense to put other critical resources there. It might be a case where the planners thought there would be synergy between resources if they were collocated. It might be economy. They can only afford two really big bases, so they need to hold everything in them (Prime and back up). It might be security. Keep two locations secret will be hard enough, keeping a dozen or more becomes exponentially harder. I can come up with more reasons but that should be enough.
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Originally Posted by tsofian
I figure each tower gets the equivalent of an engine company and an ambulance crew so about 8 people. This is multiplied by three shifts so that is 24 people per tower, so if there are four towers that's about 100 more. There will also be a hazardous materials response team staged for the industrial areas, an EOD team for the ordnance area so let's say another fifty total for those groups.
There is no way Prime Base or the Project can afford dedicated fire and ambulance crews. Think about how Navy ships operate - everyone learns how to fight fires and you trust that the minimal distance to the medical bay is short enough to not require dedicated EMT's just for transport. Likewise, your hazmat teams are likely to be your regular maintenance staff - you don't have space for such specialists who are otherwise likely to spend all their time training for disasters that don't come.
EMS does far more than just transports. They provide initial treatment, get vitals push drugs provide IV access, support respiration with O2. Also a warship has a dedicated set of damage control people, the Navy had a whole rating for them: DC. Yes everyone is trained onboard ship because damage control is an all hands evolution but there are still people dedicated to it. Of all the resources in Prime Base the ones that are closest to being irreplaceable are the people. There is an old saying that when someone dies a library burns. This is even more true at prime base. First most people there are experts. They represent a human technical library. In addition, billions of other libraries were burned during the war so each person at Prime Base represents a substantial fraction of all human expertise left on Earth. Putting a lot of resources into ensuring the safety and health of these people isn’t a foolish use of those resources.
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Originally Posted by tsofian
A crew of a couple of dozen to run the diggers when they are operational. These guys will keep the basic structure of the underground buildings together otherwise
Do you really need a couple of dozen people to maintain the structure? For the relatively short period of time Prime Base is expected to operate in isolation, the structure should require minimal maintenance, perhaps none at all.
A lot depends upon where the base is, but consider this. The base is in a MINE. A mine that is in rock that may shift, or suffer from faulting or other events. So not only does the base structure need to be constantly inspected and dealt with, but the caverns that enclose the base need to be constantly monitored and inspected and such.
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Originally Posted by tsofian
A fully staffed hospital, ready to uncork and get sent someplace to set up, but also to deal with anything and everything within the base.
The base hospital needs to serve the base. There is no need for Prime Base to also serve as a general hospital.
There needs to be that sort of resource available to the project. There are pros and cons to it being at Prime Base
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Originally Posted by tsofian
I'm going to have to look over the operational people for command staffs and such, but I feel the base should be able to handle 3-5 regional level incidents at one time-These would be floods, or wildfires or epidemics or military campaigns. They should also be able to juggle a dozen "minor" problems. This means full commo for the bandwidth needed for all these simultaneous events 24 hours a day.
So I think 500 for the major events and 120 for the minor issues, so about 650 all together.
Why would Prime Base be handling these issues, and what would they be doing, anyway? Prime Base can coordinate a response, but they don't need 100 people to remotely manage a wildfire. I think you need to define more exactly what these people are doing, but I think C&C is likely on the order of 50-100 general staff plus a small pool of experts.
Why would Prime Base be handling these issues? Because it is the Command and Control center for the Project. The Project is designed to help people and people will need the most help during disaster. If the US Government and State governments have ceased to exist only the Project has a regional, let along continental network of communications and resources. So if the Project is to have any value above local levels it better be able to handle regional crisis. If Prime Base isn’t handling things like this why does it exist?
As for how many people it takes to run a regional disaster I can say it generally takes a lot more than most people think. Having been involved in the responses to several regional or national disasters including the Missouri State response to Katrina and the St Louis responses to several severe storms and power outages as well as assisting with response to flooding in Panama which knocked out most of their water treatment I can say first hand that 30 people per shift is going to be very tight for a lot of events, remember the 100 people is for extended 24 h
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Originally Posted by tsofian
So with all this its around 2000 people, plus families, so maybe 3000 total?
What is the total size of the Project? And how many links are there in the command chain? 2000 operational staff is huge for a Project even as large as 50,000, even if it is the only level of command. Throw in regional commands and group commands (both of which exist in canon) and you quickly have a Project that is all HQ and no line.
3000 people is the crew of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. For comparison, the USS Blue Ridge has an operational staff of 842 to run the ship and a command staff of 599 to run the 60-70 ships, 300 aircraft, and 40,000 personnel of the US 7th Fleet*. The mission of the Project was expected to be lower tempo than large-scale war, and the resources were expected to be lean or outright scarce. 2000 people is just too much for the Project to have sitting in the desert listening to radios.
The battlegroup analogy is not a particularly good one. Each ship has a CIC, each carrier has a command staff as well. I also disagree that resources were to be outright scare. There were supply bases and other resources. YES in game play resources are scare, but that is because “The Project” doesn’t exist as a going concern. This wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. The fragmentation of the Project makes for interesting game play, but it was not the Plan.
And as a note... there is really no good reason for Prime Base to do more than national-level command, and lots of great reasons for them NOT to do anything else. Everything else in the Project is compartmented into little sections for security, there is no sense in having the national HQ also be responsible for local assistance and national transportation and logistics and everything else in the original Prime Base. All those entrances and traffic make the base a target. Prime Base should be a few hundred people buried in the desert with radios.
That is your opinion and you are welcome to it. I disagree with it. The Project is to support all sorts of field team activities. They won’t micromanage but they are the “on call” service for the teams. Yes there will be intermediate levels of command and control, including Group command teams and probably regional or branch command groups. That being said Prime Base is the point where the top level of C3I is found.
The Project is compartmentalized prewar and in the early postwar period. I don’t think it can perform its mission once the Project is active and maintain its secretive nature.
Someone gets sick? Have a separate hospital. If the site gets compromised, you lose a hospital and not a headquarters. Need some big planes? Keep 'em at a dedicated air base. If someone targets it, you lose some planes and not your entire command staff. The Pentagon does not include manufacturing and the White House does not handle local law enforcement beyond securing its own perimeter, and there are good reasons for both of these things.
The more bases and facilities you have the more likely one will get stumbled on pre war. It is a trade off. There is no “right” answer. If you have separate hospital and someone gets sick at Prime Base they can’t get treated because they can’t get to the hospital.
EDIT: I know that the canonical Prime Base could do all those things, but I think that is the result of the designers wanting to make things easier on the players - all of those resources in one location make it a lot easier for a handful of people to "run" the Project if you don't think about it too hard. But it makes zero sense from the perspective of someone designing a command structure with the expectation that it will actually be used as designed. And as a bonus, the fewer assets present at Prime, the fewer assets LOST in the fall of the base and therefore available to the team in resurrecting the Project.
*: Yes, there are additional "command" assets NOT on the ship, but the Fleet is supposed to be able to be commanded from the Blue Ridge for extended periods without land-based resources.
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