[Gelrir]

From TM 1-1:

"Frozen before the war with the express purpose to find out what the Morrow Project is. They were triggered to wake up on the release of a Morrow wake up signal."

From "The Ruins of Chicago", mostly around pg. 12-14:

" ... ordered only to find out about the Morrow Project."

" ... drawn from volunteers at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center in June of 1985. The Federal Government was very curious about something going on known only as "The Morrow Project". Vague rumours were all they had to go on, but some SF A-teams, made up of volunteers with few family ties, were frozen in order to find out what they could. No one suspected the true nature and duration of The Morrow Project. So, as usual, the A-teams were "left hanging".

"(Captain Bauer) familiarized with his team for six months and they were frozen in 1985."

So freezing was presumably in December of 1985. Note the scenario was published in 1983.

Page 24 mentions a cache; pg. 25 lists some equipment that was presumably stashed with the frozen team.

They don't seem to have any anachronistic equipment in Chicago; their cryogenic capsules and power supply are presumably at Woodstock (about 50 miles from Chicago).

From "Damocles", pg11:

"Construction of Damocles began in 1980 and was scheduled to take 7 years to complete."

Note the scenario was published in 1982.

pg. 29:

"U.S. government research teams broke the fusion power deadlock in 1985. In this room one of the first fusion reactors furnished power for the Damocles complex."

The reactor is 18 cubic meters in volume, and "has sufficient fuel to operate until the year 2300."

So: deductions.

• Snake Eater teams have a bulky fusion reactor in their boltholes, along with a good supply of weaponry either in the bolthole, or in caches. Their reactors are too big to be used as a power supply for any reasonable "overland" vehicle.
• the 20 year fuel supply for Project reactors is a lot less than the 300 year supply for Army reactors; of course, most Project reactors have already been operating for 150+ years, the 'fuel supply' description might be just a simplification of the different amount of fuel remaining.
• The Rich Five and Frozen Chosen might have just as easily gotten their technical assistance from Federal programs. If the Department of Energy reactors are much bulkier than Project reactors, that might explain why no Rich Five/KFS or Frozen Chosen fusion-powered vehicles are described in the published material.
• given the late-Seventies date of the original game, it's possible that Dockery, Sadler and Tucholka expected fusion power to be available in a general way by 1989 -- not secret, just very expensive. Sort of like space travel, say, or supersonic aircraft.
• the Federal Government didn't know where many (any?) Morrow Project teams were located; the sample team in Ruins of Chicago certainly didn't.

If I ever have Snake Eaters meet up with MP characters, I'd really want to work up more about those "vague rumors", to make Snake Eater reactions more interesting.

I mean: if the rumor was "the Project is going to wake up after a nuclear war", would the Snake Eaters be the proper response? The rumors have to result in freezing Special Forces teams as (part of) the most rational response. The rumors should not be something that paints the Project as a James Bond villain group from the start (like "The Spy Who Loved Me" and "Moonraker", say).

We also don't know that "Operation Freeze-An-A-Team" was the only response by the Federal government ... just the part that's still around to make a difference in 2139.

Heh, TM 1-1 doesn't actually say that Morrow Industries didn't introduce fusion power publicly ... or that it remained a "secret known only to the Project". The secret nature of fusion power is a reasonable assumption from the published game, but it's not made an explicit condition.

Anyone had any good thoughts on what the United States government might have learned (or mistakenly assumed) about the Project?

--
Michael B.