Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
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.
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There are many maintenance needs that still need to be done, so a staff of 25 is not unreasonable. Take the geothermal power plant for instance. The main power was provided, as described in canon, by a kind of binary power plant. This make sense, since all the water is returned to the reservoir making depletion a non-problem. The way it is described though is not quite how actual binary plants work and would be terribly inefficient. But assuming in the rewrite it is an actual binary plant, the geothermal heated water is in one loop and a working fluid is in a separate closed loop that gets heated by the first one via a heat exchanger and the working fluid drives a turbine. Prime Base has four of these as modules and requires only two to be operating to supply the base will all the power it needs.
This means your regular maintenance includes cleaning the heat exchangers, checking the pump and turbine seals, checking the water return pumps and replacing them periodically (most are on a 4 year rotation), and performing routine lubrication, filter changes, chemistry checks for the cooling water in the condenser and adding scale inhibitors in the geothermal water loop. You can automate some of this, but definitely not all. Then you have the normal things in underground structures that need to be maintained, like air handling so everyone can breathe, lights, plumbing, HVAC, etc. 25 people sounds about right.