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Old 03-09-2010, 09:31 PM
sic1701 sic1701 is offline
sic1701
 
Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Omaha, NE
Posts: 93
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There's no law that says Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles need to be launched from submarines.

Another poster mentioned an isolated island out in Lake Huron, sparsely populated, that would be an ideal acquisition by Morrow Industries, Ltd. Caissons could be constructed on the shoreline then rolled into the lake and emplaced on the lake floor as silos for SLBMs. On the island a small pre-existing airfield and facilities are expanded and a small aircraft plant is built for business jets such as Gulfstreams, Lear Jets, etc. Whatever aircraft is constructed, the fuselage is slightly longer than and larger in diameter than a Trident II SLBM. The fuselages are constructed at a mainland facility in Utah, then shipped via rail to a Project marine terminal on the Great Lakes, such as Michigan's relatively secluded Upper Peninsula, then barged out to the island where final assembly is conducted.

I am not sure where Tridents are manufactured in real-life. But it stands to reason that they are transported from their manufacturing facility to the various submarine bases via rail. In keeping with a cargo-tunnel complex built on an old former short-line railroad in the Rockies (and now called MorrowRail) as described in an earlier thread, a small shipment of a half-dozen Tridents could roll into the tunnel enroute to a Navy submarine base and be offloaded into temporary storage while after a suitable interval to reflect a slow tunnel voyage, a small train with Trident mock-ups that is already positioned near the tunnel exit could leave the tunnel, thereby fooling satellite or aircraft coverage that the shipment is intact and the train continued through the tunnel slowly but surely.

Later, a trainload of aircraft fuselages would arrive at the tunnel complex, while the Tridents (now embedded within a fuselage shipment that arrived days earlier to the tunnel complex and were offloaded) are positioned near the tunnel exit.

And then a few days later a trainload of "aircraft fuselages" arrive at the Morrow marine terminal on the Great Lakes, then barged to the island. When the coast is clear of onlookers (with the exception of Morrow-employed photographers to document what happens next), they are offloaded...but then tragedy strikes! A barge sinks with several fuselages! Satellite imagery shows an upended sunken barge, reinforced with photographs and a news report of a sunken barge, and MorrowAir writes off a dozen fuselages but in reality Morrow scuba teams and aquatic engineers strip the fuselages underwater and emplace the Tridents, safely in waterproof cannisters (I don't know if they travel in said cannisters straight from the manufacturer or if the tunnel folks would place the missiles in them...), into the offshore submerged silos.

A special barge or boat parked over the submerged silo could deploy some kind of airlock over the silo lid, open the silo and cannister, winch the missile up into the airlock, remove the Trident nose cap (the warheads are kept at the Navy submarine bases), then put their own satellites in them.

And in the interim, a trainload of six "Trident SLBMs" derails and violently explodes inside a tunnel of a short-line railroad (also a wholly-owned subsidiary of MorrowRail) somewhere in the South between the tunnel complex in the Rockies and, say, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Georgia, destroying the tunnel...and eliminating the possibility of Navy personnel discovering the ruse and the missing Tridents.

For that matter, it is entirely possible with the resources of the Morrow Project that they may even possess a limited nuclear capability, whether obtained from the government, skimmed from other Morrow Industries subsidiaries related to the nuclear energy industry, or seized later from military bases reeling from the nuclear attacks. There may even be a special team with its own VTOL transportation at the island with instructions to wait until after-action reports from satellite imagery (courtesy of MorrowSpace) indicate what military installations within VTOL range that possess nuclear warheads in storage are still intact, or reasonably enough so that the special team can deploy to seize those nuclear assets. Got a Minuteman III that failed to launch but still has it's silo lid off? Ideal!

In fact, that may even be how Krell obtained the nuclear weapon with which he attacked Prime Base in the original MP game history.
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