[Darkwing]

Originally Posted by natehale1971

i am a DAV, so i know there are many in uniform who don't care about the flag or the constitution or ideals of america. but one thing you are forgetting. the project SCREENED everyone to make sure that only those who believed in those three things got into the operation.

screening isn't perfect, and after a major event, some people change, even if they thought they were prepared. I've seen it. No matter how intellectually prepared you are for it, pulling a Rip Van Winkle until after your world ends and finding yourself in a whole new world WILL unhinge some of your sleepers and temporarily unbalance more of them. PCs of course have enough emotional insulation that it won't happen to them, but it can and should be expected to happen to a portion of the NPC sleepers.

And what you and Tony are not getting is the fact that I have worked with Preppers, and know that what I am talking about is NOT difficult. Every prepper I have worked with has stated that stockpiling FOOD is the easiest (and cheapest) part of their preps.

Not my point. There's a finite amount of space that can be hidden without giving the secret away by the work required to hide it. Then there's distribution. After Katrina, my family did disaster relief on the Gulf Coast, so I have some idea.

As I stated. Saving lives is never a drain, and is always justifiable.

Any use is a drain. Groceries are necessary, but they still drain money from my account. Your position is emotional. I've been a stretcher bearer, and one of the lessons is that it is sometimes necessary - not pleasant or desirable, but necessary - to sacrifice some who could be saved in order to save others or to save the ship as a whole. During the evac from Katrina, a hospital in New Orleans was evacuated with outside aid. The workers evacuating the hospital focused on readily transportable patients first, leaving the worst cases and least likely to survive for last, and ultimately, left some behind. The doctors and nurses complained about it on the news afterwords - they were trying to get everyone out, starting with the ones worst off. Not only were they wrong, their skewed priorities and cross-purposes with the workers very likely contributed to the number of patients who had to be left to die. They were idiots, putting emotion before reason in a survival situation.

Remember that the project is country wide, and that they have to place resources in a way that will allow the intital teams the greatest flexibliy to do their jobs without immediate support from the main resources of the Project itself.

I get that. I simply asked where do you draw the line? How much can you stash without blowing cover, and how much can you control after you wake up? "Hey, we don't know the lay of the land, don't know the players, but we got a bunch of food"
"Ok", says the local warlord "after I kill you, my troops will have enough food to support us for our next campaign". Rear-echelons staying in the 20th/21st centuries can ask these questions, model them, and make cold-blooded decisions the personnel waking up may be too involved to arrive at.

CIAB gives that ability. it allows for teams on the ground/frontlines to do their job, and do it right up until they can get access to the rest of the Project's resources in all those hidden warehouses in Alaska and Canada.

That's why i came up with CIAB in my campaigns.

It's a good idea, I think we're haggling the details. Each cache and CIAB/FIAB/etc is less money and resources to apply towards teams to sleep into the future and do the rebuilding work, and that much more chance to blow the secret. You have to strike a balance.

I came up with CIAB using the Planning on how to do things with the 5 to 10 year window after TEOTWAWKI in mind. Considering the way the game has it being 150 years afterwards... the CIAB allows teams to have the ability to set up a settlement, and give them the breathing room to set up everything that can give them a sense of self-sufficiency.

If it survived the wait and wasn't found and looted in the interim, yes.

Now, some other things to think about: How many species will die out? In addition to food, you probably would want mini-Svalbard-style seed vaults for important plants, maybe a Titan AE-style gene bank (in the 60's, it'd just be frozen animal ova and semen, towards the end it might get more sophisticated) with useful species. If gengineering gets good enough neo-mules like Buck (Time Enough For Love, Heinlein) might be developed. Neo-mules were intelligent, spoke somewhat intellibly, and bred true. Even if they aren't developed, I would put some pack and riding animals in cryo chambers (what survives freezing better? Zebras, ponies, camels?). They can replace their numbers without factories or spare parts. Maybe some dogs, too. Include the hardware to assemble a couple of Connestogas in any cache and in the CIAB for transporting the goods if necessary. Lower tech is more sustainable in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Then there's the possibility of project members who don't want to be frozen. It'd be helpful to have families living in the area who could check on the boltholes and caches, and if they successfully pass on their charge to their children, the PCs might wake up to a small community with working farmland to brief them on how the world has changed and to provide an initial base of operations - or maybe a worshipper base, if the wording of their duty got garbled. Or maybe even the villagers think they're supposed to guard AGAINST the demons ever waking up? For such a village, if feasible, I'd have built them their own cache, knowing they'd have used it before the PCs woke up. But it would have given them a head start and ensured they had the tools to survive the Big Uh-OH!

In my first thread I asked about others disliking Bruce as a time traveler - it seems to me that the only thing given up by making him a precognitive with a silver tongue is the advanced tech - no resist weve, no fusion, no lasers - and I'm cool with that.

OTOH, if I were a time traveler in his shoes, I'd go farther back. I'd set up a brokerage in the 20s, play the market, and pull out just in time. Then I'd use that money to bribe senators and bureaucrats into making secure "food storage" vaults all over as WPA and CCC projects, invoking the dust bowl and food riots as justification. Have them built the same way the Nazi's made bunkers, concrete reinforced to 4 times the civil construction standard. Then quietly suggest around '39 - '40 that the economy can continue recovery without these projects as we prepare to help England. In the 40's, while everyone's thinking about other things, I'd quietly buy those plots through agents, holding them through proxies and dummy corporations. That gets a lot of your digging done early and before satellite photography, and none of it is in your name.

Then, when the project officially starts in the 60's, it inherits a lot of pre-prepared sites. Maybe even enough to fulfill the design.

"Blessed Saint Liebowitz, keep 'em dreaming down there" Astronaut Randy Claggett, Space, James Michener