More on Prime Base-I've been off for a while

[tsofian]

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/missouri-mines-state-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/2012/08/02/cdc-uncovers-small-population-with-natural-resistance-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

[dragoon500ly]

Alrighty then, have to disagree with you about the size of Prime Base, no argument with the need to automate as much as possible, but Prime was also intended to be the command facility for the entire project, including having field teams calling in for emergency tech support, etc.. I think that Prime would consist of around 400 personnel, with the majority being techies and Scientists/Engineers.

I think you are onto something with the exits, so a loading dock type level with a entrance and exit; another 3-4 sally ports to let a Recon or MARS Team out to clear the immediate perimeter; as for the emergency exits, I'd say at least 3 per tower, and another 5-6 in the annex levels.

As for the live rabies theory....it beats my idea of trained ninja mice...LOL!

Looking forward to the feedback, and a Happy New Year!!!

[tsofian]

Thanks for the feedback!

400 isn't a bad size. In fact I think it's too small. My original estimate was about ten times that, including families and everyone else. I'm going for something between these two sizes.

I agree with your number estimates for exits. I was thinking along those same lines.

So the two types of exits for the operational phase aren't actually finished. They are drilled to about 1000 feet from the surface and the big ass boring machines are parked in the tunnels, waiting to be activated to drill out the last 1000 feet. There are probably two very large machines, capable of digging large vehicle sized exits and two-four smaller machines for exits for smaller vehicles or personnel. The undug tunnels mean that they don't have to be disguised. They have 1000 feet of natural "camouflage".

I think those Ninja Mice might well be an issue.

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.

It needs several recon teams, both inside the base and nearby. There should be a number of resources available within easy reach of the base so that if the area over the base has some problems they don't need to uncork to get them cleaned off, they just call these support teams (Recon, MARS, Engineering in particular) and have them show up and deal with the problem. They should have some clever methods to scout the area, communicate securely with the base without compromising it and decoying anyone off the site, or otherwise causing anyone to scurry off.

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.

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 needs to be all the plumbers and HVAC technicians and electricians and such to run the place, so I think a staff of between 20-40 for those services.

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

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.

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.

Add Janitors, catering staff, hydoponics, assorted other folks

So with all this its around 2000 people, plus families, so maybe 3000 total?

Im open to discussion about this, of course

[bobcat]

thinking about it from the perspective of automated everything that doesn't need a human brain or human hands based on likely morrow tech.with minimal manning until the project goes live(staff that won't be needed during the inactive phase will be in stasis to reduce logistical needs) this is roughly how i would staff it. remembering that the project tried to avoid people with families for obvious security reasons.

(Staff numbers are Awake/Stasis)

C3: 15/30
Intelligence: 20/20
Maintenance:20/40
Supply: 5/25
Medical: 5/45
Laboratory:10/50
Agricultural: 20/40
Engineering: 5/45
Manufacturing: 5/45
MARS teams: 0/120
Recon Teams: 18/30

this gives us a total of 613 personnel of whom the vast majority are in stasis. which also would explain the loss of prime base and the lack of a wakeup signal had most of the prime base staff be caught still in stasis.

now the reason i have all of the MARS team members in stasis is because barring a complete failure of the intelligence and recon teams there should be some warning before they would be needed and it reduced the logistical strain of having to keep a combat force mission capable without revealing their existence.

[cosmicfish]

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.
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?

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.


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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[mmartin798]

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.

There are many maintenance needs that still need to be done, so a staff of 25 is not unreasonable. Take the geothermal power plant for instance. The main power was provided, as described in canon, by a kind of binary power plant. This make sense, since all the water is returned to the reservoir making depletion a non-problem. The way it is described though is not quite how actual binary plants work and would be terribly inefficient. But assuming in the rewrite it is an actual binary plant, the geothermal heated water is in one loop and a working fluid is in a separate closed loop that gets heated by the first one via a heat exchanger and the working fluid drives a turbine. Prime Base has four of these as modules and requires only two to be operating to supply the base will all the power it needs.

This means your regular maintenance includes cleaning the heat exchangers, checking the pump and turbine seals, checking the water return pumps and replacing them periodically (most are on a 4 year rotation), and performing routine lubrication, filter changes, chemistry checks for the cooling water in the condenser and adding scale inhibitors in the geothermal water loop. You can automate some of this, but definitely not all. Then you have the normal things in underground structures that need to be maintained, like air handling so everyone can breathe, lights, plumbing, HVAC, etc. 25 people sounds about right.

[mikeo80]

As I was reading this thread, a thought popped up. (Spell check wanted to say pooped up. That might be true as well)

Instead of small pox or rabies, I want to explore another avenue. IF you work with Ver. III, 1989 Big Bang, remember what was happening. AIDS. NO ONE knew just what the hell was going on. It had long incubation, multiple symptoms. It SEEMED localized in the gay community, but with the first non gays being infected. (Blood transfusion)

Sooooo

What if some of the conspiracy theories of the day were true. It was a weapon released first into Africa as a test. Slow morbidity did not make it a very viable weapon.

So Krell scientists developed a faster response bug. Days instead of years. NOW it is a weapon. IIRC, the first attempt at gene splicing was happening at this time. Mix AIDS with the flu you have an air deployable, fast acting multiple symptom KILLER.

Just a thought. I have run MY Prime Base fall on this premise.

My $0.02

Mike

[cosmicfish]

There are many maintenance needs that still need to be done, so a staff of 25 is not unreasonable. Take the geothermal power plant for instance. The main power was provided, as described in canon, by a kind of binary power plant...
I have no problem assigning staff to the power plant, that's just not what I understood as "structure".

[Project_Sardonicus]

The interesting thing for me on the actual Prime Base supplement is it seems to lean towards the project as being good hearted but less than competent.

The only entrance had that little security area which wouldn't have been much use in defence.

Most bunkers by the time someone got to the actual entrance it would be over.

And unlike other scenarios there are no automated weapons or other further out posts.

As such I think the project as designed has quite an interesting feel. Most of the Recon and MARS teams were scattered with seemingly little support all across the land. Whilst the lucky few were allowed to have a lifestyle most likely equal or better than they had before in their sanctum sanctorum.

As such it's not surprising that Prime Base descended into a poorly defended refugee camp and disaster. One wonders if the Phoenix teams were created as a secret way of making sure this bad situation didn't go to far wrong?

[tsofian]

Quote:
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.




Quote:
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.




Quote:
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.

Quote:
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.

Quote:
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

Quote:
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

Quote:
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.

[Project_Sardonicus]

Of course an interesting thought is did anyone actually expect the Prime Base to survive?
Bear with me on this.
Prime Base would have begun planning in say the 1960s and construction in the 1970s. Back in those days it was feasible to build a bunker that couldn't just be blown up by a couple of nukes. Cheyenne Mountain could take a 30 meg hit if it hit about a mile away. By the 80s most Russian nukes could be dropped within a couple of hundred meters. These included those fired from a submarine hiding off the coast of California. So Prime Base for all its amazing sophistication was as likely as not to vanish in a burst of light as soon as the end war kicked off. Perhaps mistaken by a Russian spy sat for a NORAD base or some such thing being constructed. You can't protect anything really from 30 million tonnes of TNT a couple of streets away.

As such the staff on board would probably be a bit more "second rank and disposable" than the actual key Morrow project staff. Most likely when they weren't killed within the first hours, never mind the months of the war they were delighted. It may also explain why they started saving the world so disasterously.

To beat the power of the nuke, the only real solutions were dispersal and secrecy. So like any government the Morrow project would have probably invested in disparate sites all over the place. A small regional airport with surprisingly large runways, a local hospital with a large number of speciality wards and a nearby solar farm. These sites might need some basic strenghtening and have really good air filtration systems. But mostly they would just be secret and dispersed. This can be seen in scenarios such as Starnaman.

As such Prime Base may just be a very fancy, expensive, white elephant an example of a much older version of the project. The actual Project maybe in far better shape than the players realise.

Finally why would you build the actual headquarters in the continential USA? For obvious reasons this is an option the US government wouldn't have had. But supposing the actual hq of the project were linked via dedicated land cables to regional hqs etc it could be anywhere, far from potential hits. Perhaps Antarctica or a remote Carribean island. Maybe the actual leadership is still slumbering many miles away waiting too for their signal?

[tsofian]

Of course an interesting thought is did anyone actually expect the Prime Base to survive?
Bear with me on this.
Prime Base would have begun planning in say the 1960s and construction in the 1970s. Back in those days it was feasible to build a bunker that couldn't just be blown up by a couple of nukes. Cheyenne Mountain could take a 30 meg hit if it hit about a mile away. By the 80s most Russian nukes could be dropped within a couple of hundred meters. These included those fired from a submarine hiding off the coast of California. So Prime Base for all its amazing sophistication was as likely as not to vanish in a burst of light as soon as the end war kicked off. Perhaps mistaken by a Russian spy sat for a NORAD base or some such thing being constructed. You can't protect anything really from 30 million tonnes of TNT a couple of streets away.

As such the staff on board would probably be a bit more "second rank and disposable" than the actual key Morrow project staff. Most likely when they weren't killed within the first hours, never mind the months of the war they were delighted. It may also explain why they started saving the world so disasterously.

To beat the power of the nuke, the only real solutions were dispersal and secrecy. So like any government the Morrow project would have probably invested in disparate sites all over the place. A small regional airport with surprisingly large runways, a local hospital with a large number of speciality wards and a nearby solar farm. These sites might need some basic strenghtening and have really good air filtration systems. But mostly they would just be secret and dispersed. This can be seen in scenarios such as Starnaman.

As such Prime Base may just be a very fancy, expensive, white elephant an example of a much older version of the project. The actual Project maybe in far better shape than the players realise.

Finally why would you build the actual headquarters in the continential USA? For obvious reasons this is an option the US government wouldn't have had. But supposing the actual hq of the project were linked via dedicated land cables to regional hqs etc it could be anywhere, far from potential hits. Perhaps Antarctica or a remote Carribean island. Maybe the actual leadership is still slumbering many miles away waiting too for their signal?

Seems like a lot of work for a stalking horse.

[mmartin798]

I don't think Sardonicus is suggesting that Prime Base was purposely built to be a stalking horse, but rather that the changing technology climate made the original design less secure and as such its role was changed. Just like his example of Cheyenne Mountain where NORAD Command has been moved and Cheyenne Mountain was redesignated the NORAD Alternate Command. It is possible that the Prime Base we are discussing was redesignated as the Alternate MP Command and that a second location is the actual MP Command. Kind of like how the books say there are two bases.

[dragoon500ly]

I can see the construction of a new hole in Nevada attracting Soviet interest so, of course, it must be a new military installation and thus deserving a couple of MIRVs. :smashfrea

Perhaps it would be more logical to go with a mine that is worked for several years and then closed.

As far as if this is THE Prime Base, or the Alternative Prime Base, perhaps it is the facility were Bruce parked all of the old Council of Tomorrow as they reached the end of their usefulness, just gives the PD more ways to entertain the players...

[ArmySGT.]

I am different from everyone else. I structure my vision of the Project as a Corporation and not a Military.

It has Departments and Divisions, but the only Branches that have a military hierarchy are Recon and MARS.

While a base or Prime Base has a commander, this person is running the day to day stuff; not the strategic. The Project has a Board of Directors meant to be thawed as the precursor to the Five Year plan.

So I am fully in line with things not going like a General or Admiral might have done it. It is a corporation that organizes and prepares stunningly well; yet may stumble on implementation.

[RandyT0001]

In late '70s with the ghost of Vietnam still influencing the US military strategic thinking, the army placed the research and reference material derived from its experiences in WW2 about military government and civil affairs in the deepest, darkest library shelf it could find with the attached note "Contents non-viewable". The US government, the US military and, especially, the US Army was 'out of the nation building business'. The few experienced servicemen involved in such endeavors would be reluctant to include that on a resume, making it difficult for the MP to recruit them because that skill set, nation building, is exactly what the MP needs in a five year, post war environment.

Fast forward to 2003. In January, two months before the invasion, the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) was created as a caretaker administration once the Iraq government was dissolved with the 2003 invasion. Those dust encased books about US military government and the transition to civil authority of Germany post WW2 sitting on the last shelf were found and opened. Once the military mission was accomplished, the Coalition Provisional Authority was installed. The reconstruction of Iraq began primarily through private contracts. After fourteen months the Iraqi Interim Government was established. As of 2013, the reconstruction of Iraq continued and was judged to be a failure due to corruption and insurgent activities.

In 2000s + the MP has a larger pool to draw from of experienced servicemen involved in military and civil affairs than what was available in the 1970s and 1980s. As written in the 3rd edition of MP there was no regional command structure, C&C was located, exclusively, at Prime Base. In 4th edition, the addition of the regional command structure was added. Now, the teams would coordinate activities through a regional commander who was under the supervision of Prime Base. This layer would be have many personnel that had military or contract experience in the M&CA activities of the Iraq war and reconstruction. IMO, this was implemented as a last resort mission "fail-safe" in case PB (and BuPB) was (again) destroyed. A regional commander (typically, a general or field grade officer with M&CA command experience) would know the wake-up codes of some of the teams (including a few group commanders) within his region to activate. From one regional base and command team the process of rebuilding the US could begin without PB. The overall process would take longer but it could be done.

[Project_Sardonicus]

In the real world it can be interesting to consider that there were only really two kinds of bunkers. The military ones like Titan Silos or aircraft shelters on base. Who's only basis was to give some key staff and equipment are passable chance of surviving a surprise attack.

And then command and control bunkers, who's sole purpose was just that command and control.

They took information in, processed it and sent instructions back out again.

In the UK the old government HQ bunker just outside of London is now a museum and it's an interesting view point into the thinking of how these things worked. It's pretty big built over 3 levels (so about the size of one of the 15 inner buildings in Cheyenne mountain so 6% the size). It would have had space for up to about 600 staff.
And would have operated like a warship (a submarine most likely no one gets on or off).

This would have meant.

1 Hot bunking and a very small locker for your belongings if you were lucky.
2 Strict rationing on water (about a litre a day and chemical toilets)
3 MREs the only source of food
4 A medical bay as opposed to any sort of hospital.
5 All staff would have been focused on the task of getting information via telex, radio then processing it, then back out again. Or actually maintaining the bunker (mechanics, electricians etc) or being in charge of services in the outside world (e.g. one person being supreme commander for all the police services for millions of citizens).
6 Most military staff would be signal corp communciation engineers. With a very limited role in maintaining order and providing military services so to speak. According to interviews I've read about soldiers on these dutys during these exercises, the arsenal of the bunker would have been a locked case containing 2-4 38 Webley revolvers of WW2 vintage and maybe 100 rounds of pistol ammo.
In theory other troops would be guarding the perimeter around the bunker. Not counting senior officers in the bunker its self etc.


Obviously this is nothing like Prime Base, which was meant to stay open for 5 years. Most bunkers of any size were expected to stay locked down and operating for no more than 3 months.

But it offers some interesting thoughts. The space in a bunker is amongst the most expensive in the world, so it can't be wasted. If you park one v-150 or even a humvee its taking space for maybe a week of week for the residents or bed space for 20.

As such it increases my view that Prime Base was a big white elephant and the actual project may still be slumbering else where.

http://www.secretnuclearbunker.com/the-bunker-history/#1476180326719-e321d028-a99d

[tsofian]

I am different from everyone else. I structure my vision of the Project as a Corporation and not a Military.

It has Departments and Divisions, but the only Branches that have a military hierarchy are Recon and MARS.

While a base or Prime Base has a commander, this person is running the day to day stuff; not the strategic. The Project has a Board of Directors meant to be thawed as the precursor to the Five Year plan.

So I am fully in line with things not going like a General or Admiral might have done it. It is a corporation that organizes and prepares stunningly well; yet may stumble on implementation.

I can see this, and I agree

[Project_Sardonicus]

Yup I tend to agree with Army Sgt, but I think one of the issues is who's actually in charge?

I'm not sure the MARS major or general or whatever his rank is would automatically knuckle under the commands of the CEO of the science division.

Who would have the highest authorising password to operate the various items of equipment?

It's an interesting question, I mean in essence there would be no external authority to sort these things out.

I think it leads to an intriguingly chaotic setting.

What happens when the science division demands 50 MARS troopers fight a suicidal rear action so they can evacuate a really important lab.

or conversely[LIST]


What happens when the local MARS commander decides he's going to draft all the agricultural experts as infantry in his brilliant campaign to crush Krell once and for all.

As the team wake up the project and its component parts is it stirring up a dormant hornets nest?

[tsofian]

These are really good questions and I am wiling to be that the Project gamed through these and many more many times, using both early AI and live role players.

This is one of the deals Prime Base might well have been designed and built to handle. Being outside the issue they may be more objective, they may also have more and better data to make decisions.

Here is how I see it going down. There is a local or regional incident. There is some confusion over what local resource will be in charge. Prime Base decides and sends out the chains of command. In certain circumstances Prime Base may start issuing orders. Like yep, the lab has to be saved and if it costs a few MARS folks the effort is worth it. Conversely if a MARS group has a chance to put paid to a big bad but needs some extra muscle, that is why everyone in the Project has combat training and a weapon. Yes the harvest might be delayed but the brains at Prime have determined the effort is again worth the downside.

[ArmySGT.]

Add Janitors, catering staff, hydoponics, assorted other folks

This is one of the mysteries of TMP.

How do you get several hundred people to give up their lives, families, and futures to be a janitor, line cook, waitress, launderer, and dozens of other low paying service jobs.

I get all the smart kids with degrees in the cool jobs, but where do these service skills people come from?

I have only one explanation. They are poor or otherwise at a disadvantage in society. So the project hires them by doing something for them. They disappear into the Project and their family gets a big life insurance pay off. Their children are accepted into great universities, maybe with an eye to making Project members of them too.

[tsofian]

This is one of the mysteries of TMP.

How do you get several hundred people to give up their lives, families, and futures to be a janitor, line cook, waitress, launderer, and dozens of other low paying service jobs.


Having done a lot of those jobs in the service I'm not so sure its that servile. The cooking staff certainly doesn't have to be meanials.

Terry

[tsofian]

It dawned on me that the digging machines will almost certainly be completely disassembled. They know that the tunnel out won't be dug for 3-5 years from the end of the war. There will be a period of years between the completion of the base and the beginning of the war that the machines will not be needed. This means there will be X=3 to 5 years when the machine will either need a lot of upkeep. I think it will be easier to take it apart and then put it back together. Just a thought

[ArmySGT.]

It dawned on me that the digging machines will almost certainly be completely disassembled. They know that the tunnel out won't be dug for 3-5 years from the end of the war. There will be a period of years between the completion of the base and the beginning of the war that the machines will not be needed. This means there will be X=3 to 5 years when the machine will either need a lot of upkeep. I think it will be easier to take it apart and then put it back together. Just a thought

Depends... Do you think they are going to have the 50 ton and 100 ton cranes to move components and assemble the combined components? These look like there is hundreds involved in the minute by minute running of one of these.

[mmartin798]

Another consideration is the technology in the tunnel boring machine or subterrene. Experiments in the 80's using a fission reactor melting lithium to heat rods used to melt and fractures the stone and soil in front showed some promise. The Project has fusion reactors and laser technology. It is possible that a Project built borer could be arguably simpler than modern borers.

[ArmySGT.]

I just can't see the Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) being a viable idea for deployment post War. These require hundreds of people. A concrete plant to make the wall sections. Dozens of dump trucks and drivers to remove spoil. The power requirement could be met by the Base systems. I get it before the War, when the place is being built, just not as a plan for after.

[Project_Sardonicus]

Having done a lot of those jobs in the service I'm not so sure its that servile. The cooking staff certainly doesn't have to be meanials.

Terry

I think everyone would have multiple roles, post apocalypse safe real estate will be the only real estate with any kind of value.

[Matt W]

I don't know if I've posted this link before, but this seems an easier way to build Prime Base: take an existing hole and put a roof on it

http://www.evolo.us/architecture/skyscraper-or-sustainable-underground-society/

[tsofian]

I'm not sure the diggers will need some of the infrastructure they usually do. The spoils can be mechanically handled by conveyor belts. Prewar pits could have been dug for all the spoils and they are just dumped the debris in them. So instead of a Conga Line of dump trucks going to a site miles away they just run the belt from the digger to the pit. The cranes and everything could be in the caverns. Heavy lifting gear isn't a bad thing to have on hand for a lot of reasons, so it isn't unlikely that they have that already.

I don't agree with the cut and cover construction method. It is way too public.

[cosmicfish]

First off the “scarcity” of the project is only relative. The project is very well funded, well equipped, well staffed.
The scarcity is indeed relative... relative to the immensity of the task before them. I do not disagree that the Project must be vastly well funded, but if they had the entire GDP of the US to work with it would still be a fraction of what was needed to rebuild the country. Every resource must be apportioned and used as efficiently as possible if the Project is to succeed.


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.
The bolt hole is abandoned because there is no better alternative - Saturn V rockets cost more than a billion (2016) dollars apiece and were completely disposable, but no one had a cheaper or reusable alternative so that's what we used. Having the bolt holes doesn't mean the Project can waste resources, it just means that those particular resources had to be expendable.

That having been said, I always presumed that the equipment in the bolt holes would be harvested later if possible, and the structure itself repurposed. It just cannot be used as a team base because nuclear survival bunkers are not inherently well-defensible against non-nuclear combatants.

"There is no good reason for the HQ to be anything but an HQ."

There are lots of good reasons... 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.
1) It may be the most protected place, but you're putting all your eggs in one basket and doing so at the cost of operational security - all that traffic means that all those resources could not be used without drawing attention to the HQ. This is not even hypothetical, this is exactly how Prime Base went down in canon.
2) Synergy requires co-location only for detail work. At the level of national command, there should not be any work detailed enough to require more than radio.
3) Economy does not appear to be an issue - while the Project needs to be efficient with its resources, a handful of medium bases does not seem to be vastly more costly than a single large base, and the advantage in security seems substantial.
4) The Project is already keeping thousands of sites secret, including at least a dozen canon sites that would seem to be sizable. I would argue that the difficulty in keeping a site secret goes up exponentially with size, and a 3000-person Prime Base would be impossible to conceal pre-war.

EMS does far more than just transports. They provide initial treatment, get vitals push drugs provide IV access, support respiration with O2.
Sure they do. But hospitals don't have EMS to get people from offices to the surgery. EMS is about extending medical care into the field, and if you take away the "in the field" part then you lose the value of dedicated personnel. Give a few people in each section additional training (First Responder or EMT) and spread some crash kits around.

Also a warship has a dedicated set of damage control people, the Navy had a whole rating for them: DC.
Yes, but it only has a handful and that is for a ship that is explicitly expecting to take damage. The Project is expecting to survive by stealth and cannot hold the base against any enemy able to inflict significant damage on the facility itself.

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.
That's why I don't think you should spend resources on those people. You have a hundred dedicated personnel to service a population of roughly 3000 who have presumably already been screened and prepped to be healthy and reasonably athletic. How many of those can be expected to die in the course of a decade of operations? Maybe 1%? Even if you couldn't save them, it seems like an extra 100 skilled staff would be a better use and would more than make up for the expected loss of 30 people. And making emergency services a secondary job for other staff should save the majority of those 30 anyway.

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.
It sounds like the base was poorly located. "Survivability" can't just be about the nukes, it has to be about everything. If you're siting a huge underground bunker that needs to remain sealed in a geologically active area then you're already in a lot of trouble.

There needs to be that sort of resource available to the project. There are pros and cons to it being at Prime Base
The base needs a hospital or clinic to serve its own population, but I cannot think of any pros that come near to the cons of integrating a general-access hospital with your command center.

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?
I misspoke a little. The Project would be coordinating responses... but that coordination should not require more than a couple of people per "regional issue" simply because there is not much that the national HQ can do besides dispatch teams... which is already part of their ordinary jobs. If you really want these people to be effective beyond ordering teams to relocate then they need to be located outside Prime Base where they can get their hands dirty.

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 [/COLOR]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
The response by the Project to such a disaster is going to be very different than a contemporary response. The resources available are going to be very different as are the "acceptable" options. A Project response is going to tend strongly towards evacuation and with poor non-Project communications the majority will need to be coordinated on the ground.

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.
You asked for opinions, I'm giving one. I have no particular expectation that you will do anything with it.

I am glad that you expect intermediate command structures, but have you done any accounting to figure out how large they (and the Project) will be? I have always worked with the assumption that total Project staffing was in the 10-50 thousand range, and in that size a 3000-person national base seems like huge overkill - too many Chiefs, not enough Indians. Every person you have at Prime Base is another person you can't have in the field (just like every person who is a full-time firefighter in Prime Base takes a spot that could have had a scientist or MARS teamer or comms staff or...), so you really need to put Prime Base in the context of the Project at large, something NOT done anywhere in 3ed.

As to post-war operations, it depends on what is there. There is no reason for a command and control center to EVER "go public". That is why I endorse keeping Prime Base as it was originally described in 3ed - a small command and control base with no other functions. It can do this just fine for decades without ever opening a door anyone would notice. When you add in all these other groups, it exposes the HQ precisely because they cannot operate long in the dark and therefore drag the most vulnerable part of the Project into the dangerous light.

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.
The first part I already addressed. The second part assumes that removing a "national" hospital from Prime Base would somehow prevent having a hospital sized and staffed appropriately to handle its own needs. It doesn't.

[cosmicfish]

Of course an interesting thought is did anyone actually expect the Prime Base to survive?
If they didn't, why build it? And why haven't the "real" leaders stepped up and taken command? The idea of the game requires that the Project command gets its head cut off, so if Prime Base isn't the actual command then you still have to account for the real one. And if the reason Prime Base isn't survivable is because it is too large (and I agree), isn't the answer to make it smaller?

[cosmicfish]

I am different from everyone else. I structure my vision of the Project as a Corporation and not a Military.

It has Departments and Divisions, but the only Branches that have a military hierarchy are Recon and MARS.

While a base or Prime Base has a commander, this person is running the day to day stuff; not the strategic. The Project has a Board of Directors meant to be thawed as the precursor to the Five Year plan.

So I am fully in line with things not going like a General or Admiral might have done it. It is a corporation that organizes and prepares stunningly well; yet may stumble on implementation.
I think Corporate and Military management structures have come a lot closer than they used to be. Corporate Boards don't exercise a lot of strategic command, they select the executives who do. I would not say that the Project would be explicitly military any more than it had to be, but I think the way it needs to operate and the things it needs to do would make it more like a military (or at least defense contractor) than a conventional corporation.

But I confess that I am not entirely sure what distinctions you are seeing between corporate and military, if you would elaborate I would appreciate it.

[cosmicfish]

I think it leads to an intriguingly chaotic setting.

What happens when the science division demands 50 MARS troopers fight a suicidal rear action so they can evacuate a really important lab.

or conversely[LIST]


What happens when the local MARS commander decides he's going to draft all the agricultural experts as infantry in his brilliant campaign to crush Krell once and for all.

As the team wake up the project and its component parts is it stirring up a dormant hornets nest?
I think this is exactly why a traditional corporate structure not only wouldn't work but would in fact fail early in the planning stages. Everyone in the Project is armed. Some of them are specifically trained and tasked with killing other people. Some are barely competent to defend themselves. Any "commander" or "director" or "manager" who leads both types (or any otherwise mixed group) is going to have to address that, and that means being able to make military decisions.

The military figured this out a long time ago. Corporations have never had to.

[cosmicfish]

This is one of the mysteries of TMP.

How do you get several hundred people to give up their lives, families, and futures to be a janitor, line cook, waitress, launderer, and dozens of other low paying service jobs.

I get all the smart kids with degrees in the cool jobs, but where do these service skills people come from?
I never saw this as much of a mystery.

First, the Project has advanced technology and I see no reason why they wouldn't have spend some "above-board" assets on minimizing menial labor for Prime Base. Buy some Roombas.

Second, a lot of these jobs can be either secondary tasks assigned to regular staff or primary jobs for people with significant other (and more advanced) responsibilities. I once worked in a classified lab that was unable to get janitorial staff cleared for the area, so all those tasks were divvied up between a dozen or so engineers and scientists. It can work.

Lastly, for those jobs that cannot be eliminated or given to someone on a part-time basis... time to justify saving your spouse! Seriously, there are probably a lot of people who would be ideal for the Project except they have that one person they won't go without. Make them a package deal. One person takes an important Project job, the other gets to come along and cook. Heck, even if you are separated into separate bases, at least you know the other is alive. Probably.

Makes for a nice side plot for a character - they're in Recon Team K-7, but their wife/husband/other is doing laundry at Prime Base and they WILL get there to find out what is going on!!

[cosmicfish]

Sorry for the avalanche of posts, I was out of contact for the holidays but there was a lot of good stuff in here.

[tsofian]

I think Corporate and Military management structures have come a lot closer than they used to be. Corporate Boards don't exercise a lot of strategic command, they select the executives who do. I would not say that the Project would be explicitly military any more than it had to be, but I think the way it needs to operate and the things it needs to do would make it more like a military (or at least defense contractor) than a conventional corporation.

But I confess that I am not entirely sure what distinctions you are seeing between corporate and military, if you would elaborate I would appreciate it.

This may be the real reason why Prime Base failed. The Project was caught between two schools of thought. There were some places where the rigid command structure of the traditional military would work best and other points were a "board room" style would be more effective. The issue became how to interface and switch between these two forms of control.

So when the refugees show up on the Prime Base doorstep there is a conflict between the leadership. Unable to decide what to do the debate dragged on and more people arrived and more people died. The situation produced an intolerable strain in the base personnel. Being Americans (for the most part) they demanded a voice in the decision and the situation became a subject put to the vote of the Prime Base population. They made a group decision, it turned out to be a really bad one, but it was done by vote. It makes perfect sense to me that the people who would be selected by the Project would take the data they had and make the decision they did.

[RandyT0001]

"So when the refugees show up on the Prime Base doorstep...."

Must be some hardy refugees to wander across miles of desert only to encounter Prime Base nestled in the mountains located above the Black Rock playa. It must have been hundreds, drawn from the surrounding 8,000 square miles (from 50 miles away) that made the journey. Finding the refugee camp to be so well run with plenty of food, water, and shelter that some left to journey, across the desert, to other nearby communities up to a hundred miles away to tell those survivors of the great Camp Morrow refugee center. After the first couple of weeks, some smart person decided to use some old school buses to transport the flood of refugees from Reno to Camp Morrow.

Considering the population density of northwest Nevada is it reasonable to expect that there would be a large number of refugees at the camp?

No.

Considering the importance of Prime Base to the Morrow Project, is it reasonable to expect that the board of directors and/or military commander, now emotionally overwhelmed with an immense level of compassion, rarely seen in corporate board rooms concerning the average working person, to agree to the establishment of a refugee camp, whose existence significantly increases the risk to PB, anywhere within fifty miles of PB, knowing the amount of effort and money that went into the erection of PB?

No. The screening process that MP used would have selected leaders for Prime Base that were not that stupid, not that emotional.

If you believe in the fusion power packs you have to believe that MP's HR department would be able to select people for such important positions that were not so emotional and not so dumb.

[cosmicfish]

This may be the real reason why Prime Base failed. The Project was caught between two schools of thought. There were some places where the rigid command structure of the traditional military would work best and other points were a "board room" style would be more effective. The issue became how to interface and switch between these two forms of control.
For the life of me I've never understood why the reason Prime Base falls always has to be the incompetence of the planners. Resurrecting the Project was always going to be a monumental feat and it turned out to be operating in the face of overt, skilled opposition in the form of Krell. There is no reason for the base to come down by incompetence, and I think that incompetence reflects poorly on the characters. And what you are talking about is incompetence. These issues have not been new for centuries, and there are entire schools of thought about how to address them, and the entire job of the Council of Tomorrow would realistically be to find people capable of making those decisions and delegate the task to them.

So when the refugees show up on the Prime Base doorstep...
I have to echo @RandyT0001 here, the refugee thing bugged me even back when I was a kid reading Prime Base. Why were people traipsing across the Nevada desert? How did they even make it that far? How did they happen to come across the base in the middle of so much nothing? Why did the base commander ever risk his headquarters, responsible for saving millions, to save a few hundred when the defense of that headquarters had been made such a priority? Why did he even have the resources on hand to do it in the first place?

Being Americans (for the most part) they demanded a voice in the decision and the situation became a subject put to the vote of the Prime Base population. They made a group decision, it turned out to be a really bad one, but it was done by vote. It makes perfect sense to me that the people who would be selected by the Project would take the data they had and make the decision they did.
It boggles my mind that in that situation it would become a "group decision". Discipline and trust in each others' expertise had to be a key part of selection and training, and no competent director would turn over the decision to their subordinates - they are there to make these exact decisions, after all.

[ArmySGT.]

Burning Man (aka Black Rock City)

Gerlach, Nevada is on the Playa right outside Prime Base....

Hundreds of people have been there.... it is mid way between Sacramento and Reno in the West and Salt Lake City in the East. This is off I-80 a two sometime three lanes in each direction interstate.

Many people including some that are stunningly rich have campers, buses, and RVs in Gerlach year round just to do drugs and have crazy sex with 10,000 other people in bizarre costumes and camps taking drugs and having bizarre sex.

There is also a very sizeable population in Reno, NV and Susanville, CA who will be running for their lives after Carson City, NV and Sierra Army Depot are nuked.

There is your refugees... and everyone lucky to be living in that strip of California between the Sierra Nevadas and the Nevada border.

There is only three ways across Nevada... I-15 (North/South), I-80 (East/West), and Highway 50 (East/West) also called the Loneliest Road in America. There are no towns or services on Highway 50 between Fallon and Ely. Carry gas or suffer.

[mmartin798]

This fits really well with 4th edition canon, since the war happens on 12 June 2017 and Burning Man starts at the end of August. Burning Man attracts between 65,000 and 70,000 people. There would be some sort of advance team for Burning Man in the area already in June. So a couple hundred planners and builders in the area and people already planning to head to Burning Man that started getting their transportation ready and you could have a good sized group of refugees "Just outside the door" so to speak.

[cosmicfish]

By my reckoning, Burning Man takes place about 50-60 miles south of Prime Base*, "right outside" only on a national scale. And I see no reason why anyone at that location would choose to go further into a barren desert towards Prime Base, north is literally the hardest, least promising direction they could go. To be honest "refugees at the gates" was always a stretch when you consider the obstacles to travel in the region and that roads past it were hardly on the way to anywhere in particular.

Remember also that Prime Base didn't even unbutton until a couple of years post-war*, and what are the odds that Burning Man staffers would still be in the Black Rock Desert after all that time? These aren't really rugged survivalists, why didn't they head east or west towards towns and modest civilization? Prime Base could unbutton right after the war, notice a small group of people hours away, and risk the entire Project in an environment that could not possible have been adequately surveyed yet... but why would they?

*: Per 3ed, at least, since I do not have 4ed.

[RandyT0001]

An analogy for PB building a refugee camp just miles from the facility location.

War is declared and a US SSBM sub hears a Russian hunter killer sub enter it's launch box. Within a few minutes the US sub hears a ship enter its launch box which is identified as the 1500 passenger Princess Cruise ship. The US sub hears the torpedo attack by the Russian sub on the cruise ship which begins to sink. The signal to launch missiles is decoded by the US sub. Overwhelmed with outrage and hatred, the US sub commander ignores his launch mission which he has been training for years as a submariner and orders his crew to intercept the Russian hunter killer sub for an attack. All of the training, preparation, screening, and placement into a position of extreme responsibility is ignored as the command officers follow the commanders orders to attack the Russian sub.

We know that this situation could not happen on a US SSBM sub because the command crew would intervene, arrest the deranged commander, and pursue their actual mission of launching the missiles. The Navy trains them to do that and they are expected to do that, complete the mission.

The people put in charge of PB are not going to ignore their mission, either. They have been selected for their positions because they complete the mission without overt emotion.

[ArmySGT.]

By my reckoning, Burning Man takes place about 50-60 miles south of Prime Base*, "right outside" only on a national scale. And I see no reason why anyone at that location would choose to go further into a barren desert towards Prime Base, north is literally the hardest, least promising direction they could go. To be honest "refugees at the gates" was always a stretch when you consider the obstacles to travel in the region and that roads past it were hardly on the way to anywhere in particular.


West takes you to Susanville and within the fallout patterns from Sierra Army Depot. South west takes you to Reno and Carson city which was nuked also. South takes you to Fallon, NV. Oops Naval Air Station Fallon NV also nuked. South east takes you toward Ely, NV and Great Basin National Park a desolate dry sage covered high desert. Further south takes you into the Nevada test range where nukes were detonated decades before. East takes you to The Great Salt Lake and the sand flats... Crossing that takes you to the nuclear fallout the was Hill Air force base, Ogden, Salt Lake City, and Toole Army Depot. North east takes you to the fallout and radioactivity that was Boise and Mountain Home Airforce base. North takes you to the crater that was the Air National guard base at Klamath Falls, OR.

So which direction do you think the refugees went?

[cosmicfish]

So which direction do you think the refugees went?
Well, I think that these guys have been suggested as planning staff and early attendees to Burning Man, so I'm pretty sure they don't have any idea about any targets they don't actually see get hit, and have no idea about fallout patterns, and don't know where the different bases and test ranges are, but I'm betting that they would prefer to strike out towards the last town they passed, somewhere they can find help and find out what's going on. Perhaps Gerlach but certainly any direction but north towards Prime Base. If they don't know "this is the end" they're going to go towards civilization and if they DO know they'll probably still risk fallout and eventual cancer over dying alone in the high desert.

And even if they did, what are the odds they actually wind up near enough to Prime Base for it to be even noted? There's a lot of desert and not much else. And even if they, by luck or some brilliant bit of prescience that the deep desert is their best option they make it... why would Prime Base open? Because this would presumably be in the first hours or days after the war, when biological weapons and other problems would be at their highest and opening the base would be at the dumbest. And there is no way these guys are still surviving in the desert 2 years post war.

So yeah, my guesses are probably south to Gerlach or dead in the desert before Prime Base does anything or even notices them.

[ArmySGT.]

So yeah, my guesses are probably south to Gerlach or dead in the desert before Prime Base does anything or even notices them.

That takes you to Wadsworth, NV about 15 miles east of Nevada on interstate 80....

So you get the initial rush of survivors from Reno and Carson City heading east. Their met by the truckers, tour buses, and cars from West Wendover, and others fleeing west from the nukes in Salt Lake City.

Now their city on the only east west path with mobs of more refugees coming at them . I-80 is a funnel for everyone coming out of Northern California trying to escape east.

North and slightly east to lightly populated eastern Oregon and the Snake River.... Cour'd' alene maybe?

Or maybe they just hold up on the Soldiers Meadow Dude Ranch, as it is one of the only areas with year around water?

[mmartin798]

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.

I still have problems with this route of exposure. Smallpox vaccine is administered via a bifurcated needle dipped into the vaccine and basically tattooed to the skin of the upper arm. Add in the rabies virus and the rabies virus is delivered via a nonbite exposure. This rarely develops into a rabies infection according to the CDC and in nonbite exposures they may not even administer the rabies vaccine as a post exposure prophylactic. So if we read "rarely" as meaning 50% of the time, Prime Base would still survive. You need to find an intramuscular injection if you want the rabies to work in the manner you describe. If you can make it getting MMRV boosters that are tainted with rabies, then you have your infection and kill rates where you want them.

[cosmicfish]

That takes you to Wadsworth, NV about 15 miles east of Nevada on interstate 80....

So you get the initial rush of survivors from Reno and Carson City heading east. Their met by the truckers, tour buses, and cars from West Wendover, and others fleeing west from the nukes in Salt Lake City.

Now their city on the only east west path with mobs of more refugees coming at them . I-80 is a funnel for everyone coming out of Northern California trying to escape east.

North and slightly east to lightly populated eastern Oregon and the Snake River.... Cour'd' alene maybe?

Or maybe they just hold up on the Soldiers Meadow Dude Ranch, as it is one of the only areas with year around water?
So these refugees decide to go not with the crowd but towards a region so desolate that a dude ranch is the best chance they have for survival in the region, AND they know that ranch is there in the first place, AND they stay in the area long enough that they overwhelm the ranch's resources AND the Project notices them AND the Project decides to risk the entire Project to expose the headquarters at the worst possible time?

To quote the great Jayne Cobb, "Smelling a lot of 'if' comin' off this plan..."

There are two major issues.

First, the site for Prime Base was chosen specifically to be out of the way. It is hours of travel away from anyone who might have any reason to move, and it is hours away from those people in a direction that they have no reason to go unless they want a slow, lingering death in the desert. For them to go that direction requires that they have a massive amount of information that no one outside of Prime Base is likely to have at that point, and probably not even they have it.

Second, the timetable for this option requires that Prime Base not expose themselves at the beginning of operations but at the beginning of the "hide and watch" phase. It is the worst decision they could make and they would have to know it. They have minimal understanding of what is going on in the world, and refugees at this point are at the very most likely to be carrying a biological weapon. Heck, the war is not likely to be an "overnight" thing, Prime Base opening their doors could very well get seen on satellite and receive a nuke for their troubles! Prime Base has to stay hidden until they are sure that (a) everyone is done shooting and (b) there aren't any roaming hazards like biological weapons in the area.

So Prime Base falling because it takes on refugees from Burning Man requires both brilliantly informed refugees and even more colossal stupidity and disregard for "the plan" than ever. I just don't see it.

[cosmicfish]

I still have problems with this route of exposure. Smallpox vaccine is administered via a bifurcated needle dipped into the vaccine and basically tattooed to the skin of the upper arm. Add in the rabies virus and the rabies virus is delivered via a nonbite exposure. This rarely develops into a rabies infection according to the CDC and in nonbite exposures they may not even administer the rabies vaccine as a post exposure prophylactic. So if we read "rarely" as meaning 50% of the time, Prime Base would still survive. You need to find an intramuscular injection if you want the rabies to work in the manner you describe. If you can make it getting MMRV boosters that are tainted with rabies, then you have your infection and kill rates where you want them.
It is worthwhile to remember that in this universe, the US government has already found a way to steal or independently develop things like cryogenic freezing of living humans, so it is probably not a stretch to say that new biological weapons, that don't match current performance, could be in play.

That having been said, a biological weapon that is 100% fatal is highly improbable and pretty stupid (unless there is a counteragent that for some reason the Project cannot develop). I still think that sabotage in Prime Base is probably the best bet.

[ArmySGT.]

So these refugees decide to go not with the crowd but towards a region so desolate that a dude ranch is the best chance they have for survival in the region, AND they know that ranch is there in the first place, AND they stay in the area long enough that they overwhelm the ranch's resources AND the Project notices them AND the Project decides to risk the entire Project to expose the headquarters at the worst possible time?

To quote the great Jayne Cobb, "Smelling a lot of 'if' comin' off this plan..." The Burning Man crowd is the crowd to follow in this case. They know how to organize on a big scale. The ranch like many others and the sources for water are all on standard topographical maps. North or Northeast are the only ways to logically go. They cannot stay on the Playa/Gerlach; and to the north is eastern Oregon which isn't much of a high desert except where OR/NV/ID come together. Eastern Oregon is plains and forested hills with lots of water and many, many ranches. The border with NV is where that is coming together. The valleys have seasonal creeks or runoff and year round ground water. The only issue is fallout from Sierra Army Depot and Carson City, NV and with diseases like cholera breaking out from poor sanitation discipline. There is pretty good game in the area. White tail deer and prong horns, along with feral cattle, goats, and wild horses. Rabbits seem to die by the dozens on the roadways without a dent in their population.

There are two major issues.

First, the site for Prime Base was chosen specifically to be out of the way. It is hours of travel away from anyone who might have any reason to move, and it is hours away from those people in a direction that they have no reason to go unless they want a slow, lingering death in the desert. For them to go that direction requires that they have a massive amount of information that no one outside of Prime Base is likely to have at that point, and probably not even they have it. Prime Base was sited and chosen specifically in the 1960s and 1970s.... They could not have anticipated all the aging hippies, anarchists, drug fueled electronic music kids, and their dealers coming to the Playa to get naked, stoned, and have orgies for a week in the summer. They didn't anticipate the growth of Gerlach and the federal agencies in the area to support the Burning Man event either.

It's all high desert. Low rainfall, but not the absolute lack of water. It is there to be found the area is blanketed in sage brush and cedar trees with grasses aplenty.

Second, the timetable for this option requires that Prime Base not expose themselves at the beginning of operations but at the beginning of the "hide and watch" phase. It is the worst decision they could make and they would have to know it. They have minimal understanding of what is going on in the world, and refugees at this point are at the very most likely to be carrying a biological weapon. Heck, the war is not likely to be an "overnight" thing, Prime Base opening their doors could very well get seen on satellite and receive a nuke for their troubles! Prime Base has to stay hidden until they are sure that (a) everyone is done shooting and (b) there aren't any roaming hazards like biological weapons in the area. I didn't say that Prime Base opened immediately. I gave a plausible enough reason for why there are refugees to be in the area.. because any other direction is dead, destroyed, polluted, or completely uninhabitable.... Nevada is a donut with an uninhabitable center that the USAF/USN enjoys the freedom to drop all manner of ordnance with a circle of habitable green all around it.

So Prime Base falling because it takes on refugees from Burning Man requires both brilliantly informed refugees and even more colossal stupidity and disregard for "the plan" than ever. I just don't see it. Considering the staggering number of under 30 mulitmillionaire compsci tech Brogrammers in the Burning Man crowd and multimillionaire actors/actresses from Hollywood attending with their entourages..... still not that impossible.

[cosmicfish]

The Burning Man crowd is the crowd to follow in this case. They know how to organize on a big scale.
They know how to organize a long party and haven't had to do it without preexisting infrastructure in decades. Planning survival in a post-apocalypse setting is a real stretch of their abilities.

The ranch like many others and the sources for water are all on standard topographical maps.
How many topo maps do they have? Seriously, because the internet just went down for good and I don't know how many Burning Man attendees are packing USGS surveys.

North or Northeast are the only ways to logically go.
I categorically disagree. Gerlach and Empire to the south make absolute sense - they are far closer, have far more resources than anything north, and are probably already known to a large number of those in attendance. Long before you hit Fallon you hit Pyramid Lake. They don't know what was hit unless it was within maybe 50-100 miles or so, and they sure don't have any way to know where the fallout will be or how intense. They're not looking for someplace to whether a war, they're looking for someplace to get their collective crap together and preferably try and get back to their actual homes and loved ones. Going north does none of that. Going north makes sense only if they know everything that is going on and decide to abandon everything and gamble that a dude ranch in the desert is the best place to spend the rest of their lives. And if there is anything serious going on, heading to that dude ranch would have to be a one-way trip - can't count on gas being available, you set up shop there you're going to be walking 50 miles to Gerlach if you need anything!

Another question: how many people at Burning Man have vehicles?

Prime Base was sited and chosen specifically in the 1960s and 1970s.... They could not have anticipated all the aging hippies, anarchists, drug fueled electronic music kids, and their dealers coming to the Playa to get naked, stoned, and have orgies for a week in the summer. They didn't anticipate the growth of Gerlach and the federal agencies in the area to support the Burning Man event either.
First, why not? It has always seemed weird to me that the Project had access to a genuine time traveler and yet get caught flat-footed all the time. I mean, sure they can't know everything... but Morrow never walks into a Project office and asks "got anything for me to take back to the 60's?" "Yeah boss, we knew you were coming because when you go back you tell them to plan for this. So here's a computer with an instruction manual. It has a lot of good stuff. See you next year!"

Second, Prime Base doesn't need to anticipate any of this. The only thing within 50 miles of desert is a single dude ranch, and the smartest thing they could do is buy the danged thing and then run it into the ground. And if someone shows up at their doorstep somehow, they just need to do the incredibly important jobs they have been training hard to do and keep the door shut.

I didn't say that Prime Base opened immediately.
Not explicitly, but if they don't then this is a staggeringly irrelevant discussion. If they do not respond to people in the area then those people have no impact on the Project. The whole conversation started because tsofian brought up the role of refugees in the fall of the Project and you proposed Burning Man as the source. If they aren't the refugees for whom Prime Base opens.... then they are irrelevant to anything.

Or are you saying that they stay at the dude ranch for 2 years, and THEN Prime Base takes them in? Because at that point, they aren't refugees, they're settlers. They're doing okay.

Considering the staggering number of under 30 mulitmillionaire compsci tech Brogrammers in the Burning Man crowd and multimillionaire actors/actresses from Hollywood attending with their entourages..... still not that impossible.
That does not at all sound like a crowd ready to tackle sociopathic* post-apocalyptic desert survival strategies, especially without the internet. Heck that sounds more like "get me back to civilization NOW so I can access my resources and comforts!" Seriously, that crowd has no particular knowledge or resources at Burning Man that they can leverage to help them here. I've spoken to Elon Musk, he's great in a certain role, he can't design 99% of what he is famous for producing and would not be high on my list of "guys I want leading if Mad Max isn't available."

*: Sociopathic not because of outsiders but because they are going to abandon everyone and everything they didn't bring to Burning Man with them, and instead head in a direction chosen only because they are experts on fallout who know what's been hit and by what and who have determined that a dude ranch in the high desert is going to be their "forever home" whether the occupants like it or not. They're sociopaths!

[ArmySGT.]

Now imagine if the Wasteland cosplayers were having their event as the War kicks off. https://www.wired.com/2016/09/wasteland-mad-max-festival-makes-burning-man-look-lame/

and there is great pictures for you to use as wasteland neobarbs.

[mmartin798]

Burning Man does not only attract unskilled party attendees. I would expect the early group to have construction workers, long-haul truck drivers, artisans and engineers. This group has a good likely hood of having survival skills from their hobbies, some will have reconstruction skills via vocation and there will be paper maps in the form of at least a few road atlases.

In a few years will they be a thriving community? No probably not. What they will be is a group that looks like they are trying to accomplish in some small way the mission of the Project. If only they had a few more resources, they might just make it.

[RandyT0001]

Burning Man takes place on federally controlled land. If the Feds and the local county governments do not issue the permits there will be no Burning Man. How likely will the Feds be willing to issue the permits for a big party out in a desert with 1), war with the Chinese and Russians looming and 2), the impending impact of a giant asteroid? How likely will the super rich hippies want to attend Burning Man when the possibility of losing their wealth in the big WW3 looms large on the horizon?

I doubt the local counties would issue the permits because they do not want to be the governments responsible for caring and rescuing the hippies stuck out in the desert when poop hits the fan.

More than likely the BOD of the businesses those super rich hippies own will push for less play time and more prep for the bleak future.

Whereas in 3rd edition nobody saw it coming in 4th edition everybody sees it coming and can prepare.

[mmartin798]

I am sure that there would be many who were planning to have an End of the World Burning Man celebration before the asteroid strike, permits be damned, since the impact location would not be exactly pinpointed. With the military on high alert for foreign threats, a group of hippies in the desert away from high population centers will not get much of a response. The nukes were still unexpected and changed everything.

[.45cultist]

Hmmm, Add a weak LE response and one may have a militia cadre.

[ArmySGT.]

Burning Man takes place on federally controlled land. If the Feds and the local county governments do not issue the permits there will be no Burning Man. How likely will the Feds be willing to issue the permits for a big party out in a desert with 1), war with the Chinese and Russians looming and 2), the impending impact of a giant asteroid? How likely will the super rich hippies want to attend Burning Man when the possibility of losing their wealth in the big WW3 looms large on the horizon? Why would the federal government aka the Park Service care? At this point they have other things more important to do than babysit adults who want to get drunk / stoned and dance to wierd music. What would their response be when half that number 50,000 people turn up anyway?

I doubt the local counties would issue the permits because they do not want to be the governments responsible for caring and rescuing the hippies stuck out in the desert when poop hits the fan. At that point I don't think anyone could careless about permits. The code enforcement guy would just get laughed back into his car.

More than likely the BOD of the businesses those super rich hippies own will push for less play time and more prep for the bleak future. Maybe, or their isn't any point. Some businesses wouldn't have a purpose without the grid and financial institutions. Oracle and Cisco come to mind.

Whereas in 3rd edition nobody saw it coming in 4th edition everybody sees it coming and can prepare.

I am so disappointed in the editing and final product that I paid $50.00 for ........ I don't give a damn what the 4th edition says.

If I could get my $50 back I might care.

[ArmySGT.]

They know how to organize a long party and haven't had to do it without preexisting infrastructure in decades. Planning survival in a post-apocalypse setting is a real stretch of their abilities. Water, toilets, EMTs, Fire Services, Food distribution, waste management, and power generation with strict zoning and maintenance of lanes and structures. Built on a site atop a desert playa to support 100,000 revelers for seven days and a few hundred for a week before and a week after..... possibly 30 - 45 days..... for a seven day event.

If you say so.


How many topo maps do they have? Seriously, because the internet just went down for good and I don't know how many Burning Man attendees are packing USGS surveys. These are not expensive and people out here tend to get out alot. Personally in my SUV at this moment is a topo atlas for NV, UT, OR, and CO... along with city maps for Denver, Salt Lake, Las Vegas, and a dozen others large enough to get lost in. The Ranger District can provide dozens or hundreds just ask. I don't use GPS, but I learned maps and compass in the Army. Experience in the Army taught me not to trust GPS navigation either. Maps abound.


I categorically disagree. Gerlach and Empire to the south make absolute sense - they are far closer, have far more resources than anything north, and are probably already known to a large number of those in attendance. Long before you hit Fallon you hit Pyramid Lake. They don't know what was hit unless it was within maybe 50-100 miles or so, and they sure don't have any way to know where the fallout will be or how intense. They're not looking for someplace to whether a war, they're looking for someplace to get their collective crap together and preferably try and get back to their actual homes and loved ones. Going north does none of that. Going north makes sense only if they know everything that is going on and decide to abandon everything and gamble that a dude ranch in the desert is the best place to spend the rest of their lives. And if there is anything serious going on, heading to that dude ranch would have to be a one-way trip - can't count on gas being available, you set up shop there you're going to be walking 50 miles to Gerlach if you need anything!

Another question: how many people at Burning Man have vehicles?

If you like, going back south puts you into the fallout pattern of all the places just visited. Right back into the confused frightened mobs fleeing east from Sacrament on I80 and the confused frightened mobs fleeing west from Salt Lake City. I would like to think that some semblance of the rapidly disintegrating FedGov is broadcasting from Raven Rock Alternate Joint Command or Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center in the Emergency broadcasting system via AM/FM/Shortwave with facts on fallout and impacts.

There are thousands of vehicles at Burning Man.. During the event people must walk or use pedal power unless the vehicle has been deemed mobile art... Art cars are popular and very creative. People arrive on buses then sleep in tents. RV, campers, and all manner of conversions. Gasoline, diesel, biodiesel, hybrids, electrics, solar..... These are creative people and crafty people. Sail racing and velocipede racing are side activities.


First, why not? It has always seemed weird to me that the Project had access to a genuine time traveler and yet get caught flat-footed all the time. I mean, sure they can't know everything... but Morrow never walks into a Project office and asks "got anything for me to take back to the 60's?" "Yeah boss, we knew you were coming because when you go back you tell them to plan for this. So here's a computer with an instruction manual. It has a lot of good stuff. See you next year!" Oh Bruce.... According to Richard Tucholka, it isn't that certain. One Bruce also side steps dimensions.. Infinite earths. Bruce gets a small mention in Fringeworthy, another game by Richard. Second, there is also paradoxes, every change upsets all the other futures. When Bruce tries to implement large changes at some singular point things change radically. The sort where Hitler dies as corporal from allied artillery in 1917. Leon Trotsky bests Josef Stalin for the number two position in the Soviet in the 1920s forcing Stalin into exile. That sort of thing. Bruce can implement the Big Picture like organizing the Council of Tomorrow and that seems to not produce so many possible outcomes.

Second, Prime Base doesn't need to anticipate any of this. The only thing within 50 miles of desert is a single dude ranch, and the smartest thing they could do is buy the danged thing and then run it into the ground. And if someone shows up at their doorstep somehow, they just need to do the incredibly important jobs they have been training hard to do and keep the door shut. Which I assume they would do. Is it heartless and cruel? Yes, so is a nurse debriding dead flesh off a third degree burn. The Project is to save civilization, not survivors.

Not explicitly, but if they don't then this is a staggeringly irrelevant discussion. If they do not respond to people in the area then those people have no impact on the Project. The whole conversation started because tsofian brought up the role of refugees in the fall of the Project and you proposed Burning Man as the source. If they aren't the refugees for whom Prime Base opens.... then they are irrelevant to anything. If you say so. I think many will still be in the area five years on. Simply because there isn't much point in traveling hundreds of miles of unknown to look at another nuke impact. Will there be 100,000... not with the canon 95% death toll from nukes, disease, war plagues, and nuclear winter. A few hundred living in RVs and living on game and gardening in canyons. Sure, why not?

Or are you saying that they stay at the dude ranch for 2 years, and THEN Prime Base takes them in? Because at that point, they aren't refugees, they're settlers. They're doing okay. Managing, subsisting, yep. Prime Base can do better with at a minimum modern medicine and agricultural assistance.


That does not at all sound like a crowd ready to tackle sociopathic* post-apocalyptic desert survival strategies, especially without the internet. Heck that sounds more like "get me back to civilization NOW so I can access my resources and comforts!" Seriously, that crowd has no particular knowledge or resources at Burning Man that they can leverage to help them here. I've spoken to Elon Musk, he's great in a certain role, he can't design 99% of what he is famous for producing and would not be high on my list of "guys I want leading if Mad Max isn't available."

If you say so.... I see the type that gets things done. That sold door to door or worked three jobs and made their own success. I don't think any are going to rise up and be George Washington. I think they will still rise to the top in organization and using resources to max potential making them Mayors more than Kings. That goes for the business leaders, the film stars and rock stars, I expect will just die or get their hands dirty.

*: Sociopathic not because of outsiders but because they are going to abandon everyone and everything they didn't bring to Burning Man with them, and instead head in a direction chosen only because they are experts on fallout who know what's been hit and by what and who have determined that a dude ranch in the high desert is going to be their "forever home" whether the occupants like it or not. They're sociopaths! Meh, we can only speculate. People do some amazing things when the other option is death.

[tsofian]

I still have problems with this route of exposure. Smallpox vaccine is administered via a bifurcated needle dipped into the vaccine and basically tattooed to the skin of the upper arm. Add in the rabies virus and the rabies virus is delivered via a nonbite exposure. This rarely develops into a rabies infection according to the CDC and in nonbite exposures they may not even administer the rabies vaccine as a post exposure prophylactic. So if we read "rarely" as meaning 50% of the time, Prime Base would still survive. You need to find an intramuscular injection if you want the rabies to work in the manner you describe. If you can make it getting MMRV boosters that are tainted with rabies, then you have your infection and kill rates where you want them.

The sore caused by the small pox vaccination will likely be enough to introduce the rabies virus into the host-I can't state this as a fact because I doubt there is any literature on this, but since the smallpox vaccine causes a small to moderate amount of tissue damage at the inoculation site it doesn't seem unreasonable to me. The rabies virus would quite likely find a lovely place to hang out and multiply in that region until it can get into the host.

[.45cultist]

Why would the federal government aka the Park Service care? At this point they have other things more important to do than babysit adults who want to get drunk / stoned and dance to wierd music. What would their response be when half that number 50,000 people turn up anyway?

At that point I don't think anyone could careless about permits. The code enforcement guy would just get laughed back into his car.

Maybe, or their isn't any point. Some businesses wouldn't have a purpose without the grid and financial institutions. Oracle and Cisco come to mind.



I am so disappointed in the editing and final product that I paid $50.00 for ........ I don't give a damn what the 4th edition says.

If I could get my $50 back I might care.

What changes have you made? What do you replace the asteroids with? Plague or "Rage Zombies" are two possibilities, I use Rogue 417 in my early 4TH musings. Drop the Judge and P38, if I want a 9mm single stack, I'd use Colt Commanders. I'm rotating UH1's and 5 Ton trucks into the mix, but I lost which axles are V150's. The V100 used M54 axles, this is for supply reasons in my game, also made it easier to convert. The UH1 is less complex and common enough. I'm thinking of adding an off site transportation base for ground and an air one beyond that.
Prime Base victim to Rogue, hmmm, that would require minor changes, perhaps more battle damage that would aid in the deception. Rogue would be long dead by the time the PC's arrived but one could kepp them in suspense with dust and fake rolling of dice. Actually I wouldn't use rogue at all 150 years later, but it allows me two campaigns in a shared world.

[ArmySGT.]

What changes have you made? What do you replace the asteroids with? Plague or "Rage Zombies" are two possibilities, I use Rogue 417 in my early 4TH musings. Drop the Judge and P38, if I want a 9mm single stack, I'd use Colt Commanders. I'm rotating UH1's and 5 Ton trucks into the mix, but I lost which axles are V150's. The V100 used M54 axles, this is for supply reasons in my game, also made it easier to convert. The UH1 is less complex and common enough. I'm thinking of adding an off site transportation base for ground and an air one beyond that.
Prime Base victim to Rogue, hmmm, that would require minor changes, perhaps more battle damage that would aid in the deception. Rogue would be long dead by the time the PC's arrived but one could kepp them in suspense with dust and fake rolling of dice. Actually I wouldn't use rogue at all 150 years later, but it allows me two campaigns in a shared world.

I am forced to make changes if I was to PD a game. Everyone I know that would love to play this has read the game book and modules cover to cover many times. Also as 40+ years old and most are less interested in combat and more problems in world building. They can be really critical of handwavium too.

Right now, I am thinking of how to introduce a plausible Soviets threat as great as the Kentucky Free States... So I am thinking of reinforcements coming from a NeoSoviet Republic formed from an alliance of Vladivosok and Petropavlosk in the Soviet Far East to the Soviet enclave in Seattle.

As far as the Cause of the War.... The accidental computer wargame fires a total U.S. nuclear response and Soviets Dead Hand system retaliates with a total Soviet nuclear response. India and Pakistan go to it and collapse into failed states. The Chinese strike out in all directions with an arsenal far greater than expected. The Chinese aim is to wreck the governments and structure of local rivals so as to position themselves as a superpower for a hundred years. Except that China gets it back from Soviets and India in larger scale than anticipated. The real devastation comes from the indiscriminate release of viral and bacterial plagues by governments, terrorists, and religious fanatics with irrational grudges that decimate not only human populations, but livestock and farm crops too.