[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Even easier...... Damocles was on (in game mode) and recording in it's role as a backup to National command Authority (or atleast Strategic Missile ommand.

If there was a lapse in COMSEC and/or SIGINT, then Damocles may have triangulated the "Unknown". Transmissions from radio, microwave, satellite to LEO, LEO to unknown ground position, and phone lines that should be dead or have an unknown origination code. Then there is RADAR, LIDAR, used to sweep the air above Prime Base even if it is just to assess fallout patterns.

How is Damocles intercepting all of this? By the time Prime Base started to move, its unlikely that the US has any significant satellite assets still functioning, the only radio transmissions it is likely to have access to is those actually reaching the facility (and there will still likely be significant chatter and noise for several years post-war - radios are too simple to silence quickly), phone lines (why would the Project be using them?) would probably be severed between Damocles and PB, and any radar or lidar that could image PB would almost certainly be killed long before PB unbuttoned.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Not just Prime Base, surely as Paiute Place was being put together and the word went out to refugees, so did signals. People, ordinary, Non Projet people must have used CB radios, Shortwave radios, and with barely a hope Cellular phones to try and reach loved ones.

And this would not be happening in a vacuum - those communications systems would be lit up for years with stories about safe zones and resources.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Damocles, is or was, integrated into the Defense Switched Network (DSN) aka AUTOVON, Distant Early Warning, Defense Action Network, and others (presumably) through connections with nearby Sawyer Air Force Base.

All of those should be ash by the time PB wakes up, and Damocles would not likely have been online during any significant period of PB pre-war operations.

Also recognize that Damocles was still in the testing phase when the war came. It would not be fully integrated into everything, for a variety of reasons - the potential for compromising those systems, the bureaucratic nightmare of addressing all those different security systems, the costs required to so heavily integrate for a system that was still a prototype, etc. Damocles was hooked in enough to be able to know that nuclear war had happened, but that doesn't mean it should reasonably have access to every single bit of signal in the world.

You have to step carefully with Damocles. If you make it too smart and too far-reaching then it becomes a literal Deus ex Machina. If it can find Prime Base, the proverbial needle in the haystack, how much must it know of the KFS? Or Krell? Or any other vaguely technologically-advanced society? If the team can befriend Damocles, do they need to do anything else at all in the game?