[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Matt W

IMHO the idea of the Project being of any use in the "5-years-after" period is one of those things that shouldn't be examined too closely.

I am trying to create a Project that makes sense, a Project that (in my mind) would have actually have been put together by the kinds of people supposedly on the CoT. And that requires designing it for the time period in which they expected it to operate! That in turn requires understanding what the world would be like 5 years after the war.

Originally Posted by Matt W

On the other hand, about 90% of the population would die in the first 5 years, so it MIGHT be possible for the Project to help some small areas.

90% fatalities is exceptionally harsh for even full-scale nuclear war, but let's run with it. If I keep the same modifications from the previous posts but dial down the initial survival rates to:

Urban: 35%, with 5% survival rate day 1
Suburban: 45%, with 15% survival rate day 1
Rural: 20%, with 50% survival rate day 1

Then the population becomes:

Population over time:
War+1 day: 60,125,000 (18.5% of Day 0)
War+3 years: 36,924,266 (11.4% of Day 0)
War+5 years: 31,252,698 (9.6% of Day 0)
War+40 years: 18,830,263 (5.8% of Day 0)
War+150 years: 53,497,696 (16.5 of Day 0)

That is assuming that survival rates were far worse than estimated by the sources I found, and it is still pretty high for the desolate world described in 3ed.

Originally Posted by Matt W

But if we use the rulebook for inspiration, here's a vague guesstimate for the 150+ era: About 20 or 30 million in North America.

I am still easily twice that. If 90% of the population died in the first 5 years then 20-30 million would require that the following 145 years saw a net population loss, and I don't see how to justify that unless there were other large-scale population decreasing events in the meantime.