I see what you are talking about now. But in this case, there is nothing to hide. Morrow Industries has large scale excavation projects, failed mining projects, accidents at nuclear waste disposal facilities and still has a huge manufacturing base. There is nothing to stop them from milling, stamping and assembling their own replacement parts, probably without license, for the purpose you propose. There would be no weapons purchases. Just lots of steel bar stock and rolled steel that would be trivial to explain.

In the event there is an unforeseen truck jackknife or train derailment (and the associated local/federal investigations) there better be some type of cover story that holds up until you can cover your tracks.

If a box car with hundreds of military grade weapons/ordinance with no documentation whatsoever is found, the ATF, DOD, and FBI would be swarming all over wherever it came from.

This makes me think you need to have at least one legit purchase of everything you need. Then you can say you are just moving it around.



Edit. I have been thinking about this a little more and I could see the Project deal with a corrupt Military Quartermaster at some point so they could have a fall guy. You buy stuff from him on the black market and then when you produce new product, you give then the same serial numbers as the stolen material. That way if anything gets intercepted the military, atf and fbi will start looking in the wrong place.

Also the Council of Tomorrow were defense industry types who could get and move such items easily.

Well they can move them without question if they produce them in the public eye.

If they are producing unlicensed copies of something (The COT cant own everything) you might want to cover your tracks by legally purchasing some items for use in destructive testing of vehicles.

If for example you publicly don't produce 25mm ammo, you buy some to test different armor configurations and cover the stuff you produce with legally documented lot numbers.

Maybe the COT brought in some "cleaners" to take care of such accidents. That might be a whole different lot of MP personnel. Want to roleplay that?

Can you imagine the Machiavellian scheme for a coverup if the truck delivering the V-150 and all the equipment for a Recon or MARS bolthole overturned on the way to the secret bolthole location for burial?

My cover story has always been a mobile sales unit for selling military equipment to local police forces.

IIRC the LA Police got their first armored car in the early 80's and you can follow up on that by going to every city with over 100k population showing them what an APC can do for their force. At that point you have quite a few local forces making a windfall from captured drug money/assets and making extravagant purchases, so a couple of actual sales are not out of the question.

Heck while interacting with all those police forces, you can even do some stage 1 reviews of possible recruits and local on the ground intelligence gathering.

So how shady does a Morrow Industries branch of Private Military Contractors go?

Keeping with the theme of the thread.... I keep the HP-35. It just gets updated with better materials so +P+ ammunition is possible and a double action trigger too if the PC wants it.

I have considered the AR-18 for project issue. That has atleast been adopted at one time by some south east asian military (singapore?) and was manufactured in quantity. Has two advantages over the AR15, a side folding stock, and gas piston. The hinge pin holes at the front of the lower receiver are weak and have been know to break off if handled improperly. This renders an AR18 useless. The AR18 will use M16 magazines.

What about upgrades to existing weapons in the stockpile. ALL of the M14 EBR-RI (Enhanced Battle Rifle-Rock Island) DMR's in service now are simply remanufactured M-14's with a Sage International stock, 6 mags, sling, Harris Bipod, Leupold 3.5 to 10 power scope and special scope mount, and a match grade trigger. All of the parts are simply "dropped into" previously stored rifles to create the M14 EBR-RI. This can be done with just about every gun but the 1911 (which often requires "hand fitting"). What's stopping the caretakers' of the site from updating the equipment in this manner?

Caches of this type are carefully hidden, often with an elaborate deception plan hiding the existence of the cache from public knowledge.

The interiors of the cache are sealed with a nitrogen (or other noble gas) environment to prevent oxidation and deterioration. These caches were buried decades in advance to be available after an American-Soviet nuclear war. The first caches were laid down in the early days for the Project using the technology at hand 1960s to early 1970s. Then Bruce E. Morrow returns from the future with the plans and a functioning example of some advanced technologies. The cryogenic sleep tubes to preserve Project members in their physical and mental prime and portable micro fusion power plants to power their equipment and untether them from fuel pumps.

Canonically, a mass update of equipment occurs in the mid 1980s for third edition with a war on 19 November 1989. 4th edition I don't recall if their is an equipment update before a 2017 War/Dinosaur killer comet strike.

My First Comment
 

I have experimented in several different campaigns with switching out the Basic Load weapons but always seem to come back to the ones in 3rd Edition. It feels more like Morrow Project that way...
That said, I usually add the M16A2 as a replacement system and upgrade the M16A1s (Basic Load 2), though I've kept the XM174 grenade launcher, instead of replacing it with the Mark 19. The differences in size and weight between them convinced me of that. I know the system didn't work out well in the Real World, so let's hope the Project managed to fix the problems it had.
I always liked the idea that there were redundant systems in the Project, like the Uzi/Mac-10, indicating that MP was picking things up as they went along and that it wasn't a monolithic entity you were dealing with but rather a group trying to get things done as best they could.
Though, I've been playing and running the game since the 80s so perhaps I'm just set in my ways.
Also not a fan of the Humvee so I normally keep the XR-311 too..