[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

Getting back the size of Prime Base. I go with the philosophy "It is better to have something or someone and not need them than to not have them and to need them" I'd make the base very resource heavy. If it needs one guy to do a job there are three people to cover it. If it might need a skill set there is certainly two people there to do it. If it would never in a million years need such a person there is one just waiting.

As an observation, this is in direct contrast to both the "reality" of the Project and the feel of the game: scarcity was always supposed to be there, the Project was always trying to do too much with too little. Why make Prime Base so abundant?

Originally Posted by tsofian

But it will still need a dozen recon teams and half a dozen MARS teams. These will be charged with base security during the inactive phase, as well as scouting upon activation. That's about 180 folks right there.

Other than actual security for the base (which should be well less than 6 full MARS teams!), why have all this? Seriously, they have the entire rest of the Project to go out and do these things, why expose the HQ when you can call in a nearby team to do the same thing? There is no good reason for the HQ to be anything but an HQ.

Originally Posted by tsofian

I figure each tower gets the equivalent of an engine company and an ambulance crew so about 8 people. This is multiplied by three shifts so that is 24 people per tower, so if there are four towers that's about 100 more. There will also be a hazardous materials response team staged for the industrial areas, an EOD team for the ordnance area so let's say another fifty total for those groups.

There is no way Prime Base or the Project can afford dedicated fire and ambulance crews. Think about how Navy ships operate - everyone learns how to fight fires and you trust that the minimal distance to the medical bay is short enough to not require dedicated EMT's just for transport. Likewise, your hazmat teams are likely to be your regular maintenance staff - you don't have space for such specialists who are otherwise likely to spend all their time training for disasters that don't come.

Originally Posted by tsofian

A crew of a couple of dozen to run the diggers when they are operational. These guys will keep the basic structure of the underground buildings together otherwise

Do you really need a couple of dozen people to maintain the structure? For the relatively short period of time Prime Base is expected to operate in isolation, the structure should require minimal maintenance, perhaps none at all.

Originally Posted by tsofian

A fully staffed hospital, ready to uncork and get sent someplace to set up, but also to deal with anything and everything within the base.

The base hospital needs to serve the base. There is no need for Prime Base to also serve as a general hospital.

Originally Posted by tsofian

I'm going to have to look over the operational people for command staffs and such, but I feel the base should be able to handle 3-5 regional level incidents at one time-These would be floods, or wildfires or epidemics or military campaigns. They should also be able to juggle a dozen "minor" problems. This means full commo for the bandwidth needed for all these simultaneous events 24 hours a day.

So I think 500 for the major events and 120 for the minor issues, so about 650 all together.

Why would Prime Base be handling these issues, and what would they be doing, anyway? Prime Base can coordinate a response, but they don't need 100 people to remotely manage a wildfire. I think you need to define more exactly what these people are doing, but I think C&C is likely on the order of 50-100 general staff plus a small pool of experts.

Originally Posted by tsofian

So with all this its around 2000 people, plus families, so maybe 3000 total?

What is the total size of the Project? And how many links are there in the command chain? 2000 operational staff is huge for a Project even as large as 50,000, even if it is the only level of command. Throw in regional commands and group commands (both of which exist in canon) and you quickly have a Project that is all HQ and no line.

3000 people is the crew of a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. For comparison, the USS Blue Ridge has an operational staff of 842 to run the ship and a command staff of 599 to run the 60-70 ships, 300 aircraft, and 40,000 personnel of the US 7th Fleet*. The mission of the Project was expected to be lower tempo than large-scale war, and the resources were expected to be lean or outright scarce. 2000 people is just too much for the Project to have sitting in the desert listening to radios.

And as a note... there is really no good reason for Prime Base to do more than national-level command, and lots of great reasons for them NOT to do anything else. Everything else in the Project is compartmented into little sections for security, there is no sense in having the national HQ also be responsible for local assistance and national transportation and logistics and everything else in the original Prime Base. All those entrances and traffic make the base a target. Prime Base should be a few hundred people buried in the desert with radios.

Someone gets sick? Have a separate hospital. If the site gets compromised, you lose a hospital and not a headquarters. Need some big planes? Keep 'em at a dedicated air base. If someone targets it, you lose some planes and not your entire command staff. The Pentagon does not include manufacturing and the White House does not handle local law enforcement beyond securing its own perimeter, and there are good reasons for both of these things.

EDIT: I know that the canonical Prime Base could do all those things, but I think that is the result of the designers wanting to make things easier on the players - all of those resources in one location make it a lot easier for a handful of people to "run" the Project if you don't think about it too hard. But it makes zero sense from the perspective of someone designing a command structure with the expectation that it will actually be used as designed. And as a bonus, the fewer assets present at Prime, the fewer assets LOST in the fall of the base and therefore available to the team in resurrecting the Project.

*: Yes, there are additional "command" assets NOT on the ship, but the Fleet is supposed to be able to be commanded from the Blue Ridge for extended periods without land-based resources.