In 3rd edition there were no regional HQ bases. (Created by fans of the game, regional bases were added in the 4th edition.) There was Prime Base to serve as HQ. (IIRC) There was an implication that there was an unmanned back-up base that the teams could find to wake up other teams. In Final Watch it states that the Command unit of Combined Group Seattle has codes to activate the other units in their group. Unfortunately, the ash covers the recieving antenna of the other units blocking the signal so Command cannot activate them.

From my understanding Morrow would travel to the future, return to the "present" to check the progress of building the project then again travel to the future. He did this several times. My guess is that each time he went into the future he saw one of two futures. The first future proceeds where the Project works as planned. The second future progresses where Prime Base is lost, the factions (Breeders, Frozen Chosen, Krell, KFS, etc.) emerge, and the success of the Project cannot be guaranteed. Morrow had to build the Project to address either outcome, to best of his ability without tipping off those on the Council of Tomorrow who eventually set up their own facilities (like the KFS and Chosen). Despite his best attempt to hide it those individuals would discover his dual plans about half of the time. For the PC's the game is set where they find out and split their own program from the Project.

The 79 members of the 15 teams in the Seattle group were scattered around Puget Sound. In 1980 there were about 2 million in the metro area. In 1990 there were about 2.5 million in the metro area. This raises the question: is this ratio of 15 teams with about 80 personnel per 2,250,000 pre-war population used across the entire nation? ArmySGT's post in the final Watch thread (http://forum.juhlin.com/showpost.php...5&postcount=11) shows the destruction in the Pugent Sound area. Just 80 people to assist the 60,000 - 100,000 survivors over an area about 5,000 square miles, five years after the bombs fall? Seems more like a token effort to me. Using this ratio there are about 9,000-11,000 Project members using about 2200 vehicles.

How about this possibility? In 4th edition the regional bases are added. Prime Base is again lost to an attack. Before death the base's few survivors again set up a wake-up program in the base's EMP protected computer that malfunctions and wakes one team at a time. Each regional base becomes a back-up base for the Project. Each regional base has a fail-safe computer that will wake up the base's command unit six years after the the nuke attack. Unfortunately, these computers were not installed with EMP protection being sabotaged by moles of the Rich Five. Once again only one team is awaken at a time like in 3rd edition.

The same page does say there are 10 bases/depots….. and I have to dig for the entry that states the Project is divided into 10 regions. I have to look…. I don’t remember page or section….. could even be a module. There is reference to a back up to Prime and 10 supply bases is on page 34 of 3rd edition.
One of the things that makes “Final Watch” a little less desperate for the players in it, is they have these codes. I would think that the Combined Group Leader would have had more information to go with……… Like locations Commo Base KA, the location of VB-1, and some way to locate a Team that did not activate with the recall code. I would think that the first priority after assessing that something is very, very wrong with the Project would to activate the entire Combined Group. Wake the Engineers as they have digging equipment and then locate all the rest.
More or less, now add in multiple Earths all in the same scenario, but with slightly different circumstances so what works in one fails in another.
The Project is meant to assist, not do everything. They were expecting thousands of survivors with useful skills and tons of equipment that just needed to be organized, safeguarded, and put to use.

Every base so far has been buried which negates EMP, other than that it is as plausible as the others. Flesh it out.

I am curious... where does it indicate that the Rich Five were on the Council of Tomorrow? I always understood that they were able to steal some information from TMP, but the lower level of technology implied that they lacked the kind of access that Council membership should have provided.

It references supply bases and says there should be no more than 10. It makes no direct reference to command structure. 1-2 Prime Bases, <10 supply bases, an unknown number of specialty bases, and then the team boltholes and caches. No reference to command structure.

Sure they were... that still doesn't change the numbers. Randy's estimate of the total manpower is not unreasonable, and is consistent with the last module. Heck, I would consider 10-20 thousand to be the bare minimum, less than a thousand would have virtually no chance.

Which is why I think things were a set up and Bruce Morrow had other plans for those teams. He knew such a small sized group couldn't really do anything but in the future when there were less people they would be a whole more effective.

But why are you assuming "such a small sized group"? There are no canon answers as to the size of TMP, only answers as to the size of specific parts of it, and if those parts are extrapolated to cover the nation then it would suggest that there are tens of thousands of people in the project - a reasonable number for the tasks assigned!

There is the issue that the support structure is wholly inadequate, but the published material in 3rd edition was pretty thin and gives every evidence of simply having been poorly and perhaps inconsistently written. This is not unique to TMP, most fiction franchises run into this problem, it comes from putting specific objectives (like "exciting game play" and "meeting deadlines") ahead of creating a coherent fictional universe.

If you want to reinvent Morrow as a villain, go ahead, but I prefer to keep the tone of the game intact and change the details that are inconsistent with that tone.

Eh, maybe I'm just seeing a conspiracy were there is none. But then again when I look at the teams themselves, they sheer amount of total fails that happen you almost can't see not being deliberate you have to wonder.
Then again you can also see it as a game written by people who didn't serve in the military or didn't understand just what would be needed to actually work.

Prime Base was half staffed when it died, CG Seattle is 79 persons, the AG base is 8 persons, the manned commo base was six persons........
There isn't any indications that the Project had thousands of people.

How do you get brilliant, productive, healthy, well adjusted people to give up their lives, and families to be cryogenically frozen and help in the recovery of a nuclear war?

That is a tough sell. I have always believed the Project has lots of equipment and very few people.

Kevin Dockery is a Viet Nam vet...... I don't know if Richard Tucholka is or isn't, or for that matter Robert Sadler.

Richard is very approachable and I think Tri Tac games will be at GenCon this year too.

All the modules written by Timeline? I don't know anything about any of them. Joeseph Benedetto is a recent member here and could maybe answer that.

Most of the failures are simply a plot device to explain why the PCs are out there on their own.

Those are the two options: a great execution of a terribly flawed world, or a terribly flawed execution of a great world. Personally, I think TMP falls into the latter category, and I think that is the general perception of the game within the larger community. The authors simply did not spend the time to create a solid foundation for the game, and the game suffered for it. At the end of the day, they were doing this for money, and it is usually better to get paid something for a half-assed job than to produce a masterpiece at a net loss.

Without knowing the rest of the Project organization or the demands expected to be placed upon them, the staff of no one facility is going to say much about the size of the Project. The indication, the only real indication we see of the size of TMP, is CG Seattle. That group was the frontline (and potentially vast bulk of) support for the people living in that area. Their area of responsibility was "the Puget Sound area and Seattle in particular", an ambiguous term that could mean as few as 500,000 people (the ~1987 population of Seattle), or as many as 3 million (2/3 of the 1987 Washington state population), or as I prefer, the 1.4 million 1987 residents of King County.

If we call the population they were meant to serve X, accept 242.3 million as the US population in 1987m and assume that the civilian-to-team member ration in Seattle is typical for the US, then the "group-level" staff of TMP is simply 79 * (242.3 million / X). Varying X from 0.5-3.0 million gives us a group-level Morrow roster between 6,381 and 38,283. A roster of less than a thousand becomes patently absurd by simple math, unless you concoct some reason why Seattle would have a substantially higher-than-normal concentration of team members, something that I do not believe is supported in 3rd edition and probably has not been addressed in 4th edition.

To a certain extent, that can already be answered by recruiters for the military, Peace Corps, and clergy - many people are willing to sacrifice a lotfor what they perceive is a worthy cause. And considering that TMP only had to recruit between 250 and 2000 people a year out of the entire population that should not have been as hard as you think.

So have I, but then I cannot see any reason why TMP would be cash constrained in any way - even if supporting the financial health of the project was only 10% of Morrow's time, they should have still held so much innovation and competitive advantage (even in a parallel-universes scenario) that Project funding should be at least in the hundreds of billions. Recruiting people should always have been the hardest part.

So much of the entire setting is just a "plot device to explain why the PC's are out on their own". It is an old and common gotta-finish-fast writing mistake - they needed a specific effect, fudged the cause, and hoped that no one will notice or care. You can see it all over the place, especially in the new Star Trek movies - nothing in those films makes sense, they even allude to that in the beginning of the second, but they hope that the fast pace and lens flare will keep you from noticing. RPG's don't have the advantage of fast pace and lens flare, so the oddities and apparent mistakes are all the more glaring.

Or they left up to us to figure out down the road and debate on a forum twenty some odd years later...

My biggest reason for needing to come up with a realistic failure scenario is that if I ever pulled my gaming group back together, they would ask questions and if they ever get to a point where they get answers (inside prime for example) I want the best possible answers.

Due to their real world jobs they have seen real world failures (one is a forensic accountant specializing in huge corporate bankruptcies). They will accept that failure can happen. However if their characters chose to give up everything for a project at a minimum I would expect they would have needed to have some confidence in the planners.

For example how did the project get Phoenix team to join if they could not handle basics concepts of redundancy? Phoenix are portrayed as pretty sharp dudes who would have not just accept "oh we have everything covered".

Then the first question becomes "what reasonable steps would TMP have taken to wake everyone up?", and the next question becomes "how then can this be circumvented?"

On the first, I would expect a given team to be awoken under any of the following circumstances:

1) Wake-up call from Prime Base
2) 5-year timer runs out (timer can be remotely reset by anyone superior in chain of command)
3) Bolthole is compromised
4) If any of the capsules fail*, endangering the crew - this might just awaken the CO and/or medic(s).

I would also expect that members at any given command tier have sufficient knowledge to take command at the tier above in the occasion that this is necessary, but that there are safeguards to prevent a coup (we can discuss this issue later). I would likewise assume that teams have the ability to go back to sleep if they feel it necessary, like, for example, if the area was too radioactive.

As to the second, here is my first stab: Don't assume a screw up on the part of leadership, assume enemy action.

Shortly after the war, before they knew about Krell, Prime Base sent out a coded set of commands to all the teams and facilities - the timer reset code, followed by request for a reply indicating the status of each facility and the success of the reset. This was considered a necessary step to ensure that the system worked and to determine the status of the Project as needed for planning. Unfortunately, one of Krell's hackers got lucky** and captured and recorded the signal, not knowing what it was but recognizing any powerful post-war transmission as important. They were even able to establish a rough location of the transmitter off of the signal, leading them to the area of Prime Base.

During the attack on the base, that same hacker wanted to rebroadcast the signal to see if they could gain some situational understanding of its purpose. Taking advantage of Krell's control of the exterior, he found Prime Base's powerful transmitter and patched into the system, drawing on the base's own power and using it to broadcast the signal over and over again while he monitored the area for a response. His efforts wound up being for naught - the nuke was detonated shortly after, killing him and damaging his patched-in hardware, slowing his retransmit rate by a factor of 2^15. Instead of transmitting every 30 minutes, it was transmitting every 2 years, powered entirely off of the base's own power supply.

After the Krell attack, command tried to wake up the designated backup command location, knowing that if for some reason that failed, the timers would wake up the entire Project in a few years anyway. They failed because the nuke had not only damaged the hacker's timer but also the communication line between the base and the antenna. They attempted to repair the damage and resend, but all died before they could even make it to the site of the damage.

So the result winds up being much the same - the Project made no ridiculous mistakes, but the Project is still asleep thanks to a damaged transmitter hardwired to a fusion plant that resends the timer reset faster than the timer can wake anyone up. For the first century or so, the only teams being woken were due to exterior damage to the bolthole or deliberate actions by groups like Krell and the Kentucky Free State, either of which tended to lead to the destruction of the team. Capsule failure has started to be an issue in the last few decades, but not enough to wake up many teams. The big command facilities were better protected and none of them have experienced any survivable failures***, and prior to the PC team none of the handful of teams to survive their unplanned awakening were able to establish the kind of contact needed to awaken the Project. The bulk of the losses to the Project, besides Prime Base, happened in the war itself or due to predation.

*: Note that surviving the capsule is not guaranteed even if the capsule reports itself to be working perfectly - survival is dependent on the capsule AND the individual. The capsules themselves have many backup systems and an extremely low failure rate, even though some will not be revived from nominally functioning capsules.

**: Going with one of Pixar's admonishments to writers - using coincidence to get the protagonists INTO trouble is good writing, using it to get them OUT of trouble is bad writing.

***: So some might have gotten nuked, but none had a cave-in or capsule failure.

Funny you mention this as PIXAR had their asses saved by coincidence during the work on Toy Story 2 by sheer luck.

The story goes that 3 or 4 compounding failures led 90% of the work on the movie being lost. One Major executive happened to be on maternity leave and bandwitdh not being as strong as it is now she had a backup brought to her house for review.

Once they realized that multiple failures in their main storage (which I look back on for inspiration how a well run company can just blow it sometimes) they sent for the unintentional offsite backup (wrapping the computer in blankets and buckling it in as it was now worth over 50 million dollars in potential lost effort).

The timer reset is very interesting and makes sense.

Timer failure right from the get go. Imagine that one of the Rich Five had been the manufacturer and set them all up to pass the bench test but fail after say four years and six months automatically.
That or the Timers actually do go off but some programming in the code actually doesn't wake the teams up because its looking for the wake up call and not a timer. A single line of code written wrong can doom everything. I've seen things like that happen where an update has actually derailed the entire program and no one knew it until a specific set of circumstances had passed.

I don't recall any evidence that the Rich Five were that able to influence the Project - can anyone tell me where it says that? Because it seems that if they were, the Project would be in dire, dire straits right from the get go, and the whole feel of the game becomes radically changed.

I actually considered something like that, but I prefer a story that has conflict between strong sides over a story that has the home team just fumbling the ball.

Well the Rich Five had access to a lot of the same tech the Morrow Project had so there was some crossover, though probably more of the industrial espionage variety. Another option is Krell who was a member of the Project I believe. But honestly the home team fumbling the ball is the most believable of them all. It happens all the time.

That was always my assumption - it seems like if they had anything close to full access to the Project that they would both more tech and also more knowledge/control over Project resources in their territory.

One alternate idea that I toyed with was reverse industrial espionage - perhaps the Rich Five originated cryogenics, and Morrow poached it from them!

Is that ever said anywhere? Krell always seemed like a deliberate mystery, like even the authors had not decided who he was and how he got his information on the Project.

Sure, but something as important as that code would have been checked and rechecked and tested and retested. A big programming error by one dying, rushed programmer makes sense, but this would have been much less likely. It absolutely could have happened, but like I said, I personally prefer the enemy action option because it adds capability to the enemy and makes them a bigger opponent for the players to eventually deal with.

But it does not hugely impact the game, unlike the massive, widespread incompetence implied in the canon 3ed fall of the Project.

You would hope, but testing only goes so far. I was part of one of the largest IT failures in history (700 million dollars with literally nothing to show for it). We had 500 plus programmers who did a tremendous amount of unit testing but when everything was integrated, a system which was supposed to handle all the communication for 1500 locations was reduced to 4 bytes per minute rather than the multiple megs per second that were promised.

Same here, my brief employment as a Computer Programmer was a colossal failure due to a team of twenty working on a project, debugging and reviewing the program we worked on for months and we never did get it to work right. The problem was that it did work, it passed every test we threw at it, but when it needed to work 'in the field' it failed every time.
And no one could figure it out. We had other teams look at it, we had outside contractors look at it. We even gave it to a school and hoped a fresh perspective from some students would find the problem. And no one ever figured it out.
The project was scrapped soon after and I decided that several months of frustration was it and looked for other work. Plus honestly I doubted my ability's at that point pretty badly.

From the 4th edition, p.27
P. 22
P. 23
So it seems that TMP did have a back up base but the question is what happened to it - captured by Krell? Subverted by the Frozen Chosen?

So each team member has training on how to make contact with post-war (at 5 years after the war) locals.

In addition each team member has training on the basic needs of a community, food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, etc. and they know enough about law enforcement to be able to teach it to others.

I'm guessing the Back Up base was the base captured by Krell but whomever was stationed there may have nerfed it a bit when it was captured. Krell may have gotten the cryogenic pods and the armorys but the C&C was destroyed.

I think the reason there aren't consistent, canonical answers on Krell is because they never decided on any. They wanted to avoid committing to an answer until they were ready to write something where it was needed. Unfortunately, they missed the point that the truth about Krell (and so many other people and groups) was needed to understand the history and present of the Project.

So make up an answer that makes you happy, because they aren't going to do it until they are ready to write the "take down Krell" module... which is never going to happen.

I haven't ignored your question....... I just haven't found an answer in Canon materials.

Bullets and Bluegrass tells us that the Rich Five had Cryosleep technology before the War on their own. Canon states that the Cryosleep technology was in use by the Project, the U.S. government (Canada too, with Snake Eaters), the Frozen Chosen, and the Rich Five.

This way we infer that the Rich Five, as industrialists, had to be part of the Council of Tomorrow, or the Corporations responsible for Cryosleep research or production...... Cryosleep research begins in the 1960s with animal research (Fallback), though principal researchers, corporation, and places of production are not named.

I will continue to have a look through the modules, I think the answer is there.

It is one of the most problematical situations of the back story. Krell has an empire but, is defeated by the Morrow Project. The Project in the form of Prime Base opens up and constructs Paiute place to test if the goals and hopes of the Project can be realized. Krell forces infect Prime Base with a lethal bioweapon that has enough infectious period without symptoms to ensure everyone in Prime Base has it. Krell forces using a nuclear bomb destroy Paiute place and believe that Prime Base is sealed under rubble. Paiute Place is built using materials, equipment, and supplies from Prime Base but, the huge exterior doors to the vehicle bay and warehouse were never uncovered. Krell goes on to war with the Project destroying several bases. Krell forces have captured one base intact and Krell uses this to cryosleep for a few decades, then come out and conquer some more. The Krell territory is in the upper midwest. Krell has a ship and a crew with warriors sailing in the Pacific and a threat to Seattle and the *censored* in Seattle for "Final Watch".....

Ummm, welcome to the Labyrinth...... Causes happen before the effects.

The Rich Five, Frozen Chosen, and the Snake Eaters are all indicated as having cryo technology in the 3ed core rulebook, it is never indicated which direction technology was flowing, or how. We can surmise anything we want, but the US government sure wasn't on the CoT and they had cryo technology! Again, it seems that if the Rich Five were on the CoT they would have more Morrow technology and enough information to make sure that every team was already dead before becoming a problem. More likely (to me) is that the Rich Five included the contractors developing cryo tech for the government prior to the war. The Chosen Frozen stole it (good old industrial espionage), as did Bruce Morrow, who took the tech back in time and used it as the foundation for the Project's more refined systems.

It's a Krell of a problem.

Hundreds, Yes; thousands, No.

Typically, rail to a depot with a railyard. Then under canvas to the bolt hole.

For inspection purposes, there is a data plate on the driver side door jamb and a VIN plate like any other vehicle. These identifiers are listed with the DMV and titled as demonstration units for sale purposes.

Cops and DOT inspector would look for those and wouldn't be looking for serial numbers anywhere else.

Depending on the size of the Project, there might be thousands!

Sure, but it is going to be next to impossible to keep eyes off of these vehicles - they are just too bulky and conspicuous, and orchestrating the movement of all these vehicles is going to be tricky. Of course, we already know that the existence of the Project was already compromised by the time of the war, perhaps this is how!

I am in the camp that the Project only has a few hundred personnel. Due to all the security constraints and that people accepted would have to give up their lives and family, worse without warning them or aiding them for the impending, inevitable war. I do think that CG Seattle is indicative of a Combined Group. I don't think the Project would bother half staffing anywhere. I think the will fill a region at a time, starting with regions with the highest probability of recovery according to the plan.

I don't think so...... Your average civilian has no idea what they are looking at. Any thing with tracks is a tank, for example.

I agree that those are serious issues, but I do not think that it is an impossible challenge considering the sheer population of the country and the time scale of recruiting. I also think that the recruiting process is likely to be in stages that allow the Project to not only identify but actively groom and indoctrinate prospective members.

Importantly, I just do not see a Project of a few hundred or even a few thousand making any real dent in the post-war problems. There are just too few of them, spread too thin. Even if nothing goes wrong, they are going to have a heck of a time providing any level of service, and being so few they would be tremendously vulnerable to any number of problems. It's just a bad bet. With a few hundred people, think of how few experts in any given field you really have, and think about how easy it is then to lose entire disciplines (as an example).

I am not sure how this works then - if CG Seattle is typical for the population it serves, are you saying that the Project is only distributed across portions of the country? If CG Seattle was serving a pre-war population of 1.4 million (King County, in 1987) then 10 such combined groups (790 field staff) would serve only 5.8% of the 1987 US population of 242.3 million.

It is hard for me to believe that Morrow hoped to have any real impact with such a low level of coverage.

In all these cases I expect the Project to be heavily recruiting from the survivors to fill out the thousands of jobs that are not highly skilled or needed a someone frozen before the War.

I expect the Project to move into an area, establish a refugee camp from pre-positioned supplies, recruit from the refugees persons with competent skills or abilities. Then expect them to depart to start another camp somewhere else. This with detachments moving about trying to get essential service like water treatment and sewerage operational, to establish a clinic and staff this with surviving medical personnel. Etc.

I don't expect them to do it. I expect them to provide the materials and a kick in the ass to get it started.

Then I expect them to protect said from marauders and politicians both most likely to plunder a recovery effort.

I expect that too, but it is like the F550 parts issue - if you are expecting 98% of the population to die in the war, how much can you depend on finding experts to recruit in any given area? Especially if, as you mention below, you are taking your time getting to that area?

How long do you expect them to spend in each area? Realistically, even if you work every Project member for the rest of their lives (hard for recruiting) you won't have much time with any one population before you would have to either move on or abandon your goal of covering the US. And incidentally, you have every reason to expect that areas waiting on Morrow teams to arrive are going to see ongoing deaths and loss of resources - take too long to get to an area and there might not be anyone left to help!

I think this is the biggest issue I have. If you assume a surviving population of just 1%, you have 2,423,000 survivors. If just 1%* of those are problematic, then you have TMP dealing with 24,230 "problem" people. The game provides numerous examples of large groups 150 years post-war who still have significant military hardware, I cannot imagine how the Project would deal with a dispersed array of military forces 20+ times their own number. Even with Phoenix that is a tall order, and considering that they are likely only supported by maybe 80** MARS teamers and 200*** Recon teamers, they are really outnumbered more like 80 to one, combatant-to-combatant. And no one knows about Phoenix.

Plus remember that you have to deal with protecting your entire force, which is going to rapidly become publicly known and spread across 3.8 million square miles. With the few aircraft available, you are spread too thin to protect anyone, and we've already seen how quickly people will turn to tyrants who provide security over good people who can't.

Going back to the recruiting problem, I would think this to be one of the biggest issues - recruiting people to save the world is hard enough without one of them doing the math and realizing that it is a suicide mission.


*: Personally, I would expect a lot more than 1% to be problematic - murderers and militants have pretty good survival instincts.

**: Based on CG Seattle. And remember that half will be tasked as protective details for Science teams.

***: Also based on CG Seattle.

I didn't mean engineers and cardiac surgeons..... I meant people capable of running a village with a little jumpstart..... The Project isn't going to be able to dictate who is in or out by much. Still at 3-5 years your going to find electricians, plumbers, warehouse managers, policemen, chefs, hoteliers, green house operators and local politicians and a host of people that can learn.

I can't believe truly unskilled people are going to be around at 3-5 years.

Your right, you cannot plan for every contingency. You can't recruit people on the scaled needed to rebuild a large metro area either. You spread it around and create a system of villages,that make them interdependent and cooperative.

One to two weeks tops. Jumpstart, get it going, and leave it in the hands of locally recruited competent persons.... The survivor population is going to elect and follow their own, unless the Project is installing a dictatorship and shooting dissenters.

Forget about controlling it. Deliver the equipment, install it, and bring in the survivors. The survivors will self identify and it will shake itself out.

The Project has more important tasks like water treatment plants and power plants..... Things that will speed recovery by orders of magnitude.

Don't fret about village level politics.


That has so many variables it can be argued anyway either of us wants to spin it. How many come over when there is a warm bed and food on the table?

I leave it to MARS, the Snake Eaters, surviving .gov assets, and frankly the survivors populating the recovery site who know damn well what they stand to lose.

I think you overestimate the number of "skilled" people in this country, compared to the number of people who answer phones or wait tables or groom dogs or any of the thousands of occupations that earn people money but do not necessarily translate well to a post-apocalyptic setting. I also think that even people with useful skills are going to be at a competitive disadvantage for years compared to people whose primary skills are simply survival.

So... you see the Project as basically showing up, dumping a set of gear, and leaving after showing them how to turn it on? Then why bother with the college degrees? Why bother with psychological and civil affairs teams (who will take months or years to see a result with any particular population)? Heck, the basic challenge of reconnoitering and securing an area is going to take substantially longer than 1-2 weeks! I would expect marauders to just follow the groups around, pillaging those untrained and unprotected villages as fast as Morrow leaves!

That is a lot more callous approach to aid than I can imagine working. I also think that a lot of Morrow equipment is effectively irreplaceable, and giving it over to a bunch of shoe salesmen and hoping they will figure it out is more than a bit optimistic.

Those are indeed very important, but they are also large-scale projects that will take a long time to implement for even a small area - Morrow is not building and maintaining a national power grid in the first year, probably not in the first 5.

You have to worry about any level of politics that has control over equipment/supplies you are distributing and/or that has the ability to pose a threat. CG Seattle has 79 people. A modest village that knows the lay of the land and has spent 5 years fighting for survival might be one election away from being the exact kind of militia that can take down a bunch of idealists who eventually have to leave the V-150 to urinate.

There are a lot of variables in there, but I was being far, far more favorable to the Project in my estimates than I actually think realistic. At any given time in this country, we have about a third of a percent of our population incarcerated not counting those still going through the courts, those released, and those simply not yet caught. Add to that the opportunists and other types who won't commit a crime in a "civilized" society but who turn wolf after missing a couple of meals, and one percent seems awfully darned low to me.

It's an odds game. You cannot handle every contingency, but you can't just ignore them either, you have to prepare for enough challenges to have a solid chance of success, and considering that this is a completely unknown set of challenges I can't see doing this in a minimalist manner and expecting anything other than disaster. When you are stretched so thin, there are just too many things that can go wrong and take you down, and why would TMP accept that?

When you provide no security, no policing, and no permanence, probably not that many. Five years post war I would expect that vast majority to have formed small, tight communities that do not trust outsiders and are not likely to accept the brigands' promises to be good in return for three hots and a cot. It is going to take more than a few weeks for a bunch of educated novices to take a population scattered and changed by years of post-war struggles, identify and filter out the "bad eggs", and integrate the rest.

Per your staffing level, MARS would be less than 100 people for the entire country, the Snake Eaters are unknown to the pre-war Project and may be hostile even post-war, other surviving government assets may or may not be the exact enemy you are fighting against, and the survivors likely lack the weapons or training to protect anything that anyone else really wants to take.

I think you vastly UNDERestimate the number of skilled survivors. Sure nuclear bombs and biowarfare do not discriminate but, nature is harsh. If you didn’t have any skills one day after the war, you were dead by day seven. People with skills were valuable to one another, they were valuable to anyone with even some advantage.

Define a skill like survival in a post apocalypse anyway. Finding clean water? Finding canned goods and wild berries? Knowing which way is north? Fishing in uncontaminated streams? Killing people with something, so you can go one more day?

We know that in every case hunter gatherer cultures remained small and ineffective at holding terrain versus static agrarian cultures. By year 3-5 the survivalists have looted all the food from stores, depots, and small survivor groups. They have burned through their ammo and lost their most aggressive members to wounds.
I see the project arriving at a suitable location probably a small town that already exists. They leave some alcohol powered generators, two way base station radio, drill a well, stock a clinic, gather people and have the people hold an election. By 3-5 years the weak and those incapable of defending themselves are dead and gone or they have learned.
After 3-5 years the survivors know a hell of a lot more about surviving than any Morrow Project member has ever learned.
Those are the hubs you start building from. You don’t need to bring the municipal water system for the greater Seattle area online or any other major city for that matter. Every small town has a water treatment plant that has been isolated by the loss of the national power grid. It needs some techs to make it run, power, and the right chemicals. That is where you start.
If they were that way before Project personnel were to make contact then that would be apparent. Recon and specialist Psyops teams would have effectively identified these groups.

You can’t stand over these villages and hold them hostage to your preferred form of government. That isn’t what the Project is about and it ties up Project members like MARS indefinitely.
By year three these guys have starved to death and died of exposure. These career criminals definitely are violent predators but, they don’t know a blessed thing about providing for themselves. When all the stores and depots are looted these guys become cannibals and later die.
Because the Project isn’t a conquering army ready to set things right for God and Justice….. They have limited personnel and lots of resources.

A village is built, the people moved in, and 10 miles away another is built. These are set up to mutually trade and mutually assist. One have the mechanics and the dentist, the other the electricians and the doctor.
I expect few brigands to be left. The hostiles are a few of these villages that are hostile to other groups and raid for what they don’t have. However, once they can get what they need without being killed trying to take it, that will be incentive enough.
That is better than a Morrow Project of 20,000 that is 1% science, 9% recon, and 90% MARS.