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Old 03-30-2016, 08:51 PM
cosmicfish cosmicfish is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798 View Post
I do see where you are coming from and agree the security risk arising from being overrun by refugees, warlords and religious fanatics in the early years if Prime has a more or less permanent surface structure is great. A permanent settlement in the early years is problem. But we are talking about people with families and the desire to get back to a "normal" existence again. What policies were in place for this is the question. One that gets very murky.
But also one that should have been addressed in multiple ways before PB was even staffed. The staff at PB could not be the kind of people who seriously needed to get back to a "normal" existence any time soon, any more than the field teams could be the kind of people who wanted to lead ordinarily selfish lives without risk of violence. If they cannot find people able and willing to live underground for 5 years (rough estimate), and then enforce it, then they cannot have Prime Base!


Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798 View Post
The Counsel of Tomorrow was assembled by Bruce Morrow. He told them what he saw and must have had a way to reasonably prove he traveled time. Prime Base is part of the plan the CoT was working toward, but Bruce Morrow wanted no knowledge of its location. How much of the leadership adopted a similar viewpoint, assigning plans for Prime Bases location and construction to the equivalent of a Special Access Program.
I've worked those kinds of programs, and while the details must necessarily be compartmented the overall philosophy and SOP's cannot. Otherwise you wind up with Thunderdome (tm). BEM is a bit of a special case because he is a time traveler, but the CoT had to have a few people shoulder-deep in planning Prime Base.



Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798 View Post
Only those in the SAP would know where Prime Base would be and what the operational protocols would be with no oversight and review except in a need to know situation.
Without a general awareness of how PB operates, the entire rest of the Project cannot even really start. You can't set up comminications or command protocols, you cannot lay in appropriate supplies or plan distribution networks, etc. There is a reason that half the people authorized on special access programs don't show up for the meetings - they're in charge of related projects that need a certain amount of information in order for their own projects to work. Or they're in charge of integrating the SAP product into a cohesive force.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798 View Post
The members would most likely be engineers, psychologist and the workers building and planning for many years underground. Those with extensive military and security backgrounds would have been pressed into the role of instructors doing combat training for team members as they enter the Project and not available to be in the SAP. Security planning might get limited to operational security during construction. As such, the discussions mentioned in the Prime Base module that lead to building the settlement could have been discussed prior to the war and considered acceptable risks. This would seem to be supported by the lack of sound military planning during the failed rescue and the porous security perimeter that allowed insurgents to bring in two WMDs into the settlement.
This plays into one of the basic problems with PB in particular, TMP* in general, and fiction in very general. TMP starts off with the idea that these very competent were recruited, given tremendous resources and the advantage of knowing the future, but them for narrative purposes suddenly turn incompetent when called upon to do the exact jobs they trained for! Yes, the description of the fall of PB demonstrates a tremendous lack of planning and there are a number of inexplicably poor decisions, but the problem with letting all that stand (much less using it as the inspiration for more bad planning and decisions!) is that you can't build off of stupid. At least, you can't build smart off of stupid.

These are supposed to be competent people, if they are going to make predictably bad decisions, there needs to be a good reason why it would happen, otherwise they weren't competent. And if they weren't competent, then the game starts to look like Paranoia.

Incidentally, I always thought that the planners should have sought out a good ballistic missile sub commander to run PB. Get someone who has already been trained for isolation and to manage a ridiculously huge responsibility, and then give them a decade of additional training and experience putting the Project together - they wouldn't bat an eye at doing what needed to be done even when it was what they didn't want to do.
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