Thread: Prime Base
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Old 09-07-2015, 02:13 PM
tsofian tsofian is offline
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Default More thoughts on Prime Base Staffing

Staffing and a few other ideas

In the original module the Grand Deception was a key part of play. The deal was that the top level of all three cylinders was converted into the appearance of a wrecked base. It was also supposed to indicate that there was a reactor and that the reactor shielding had failed.
This is a great idea and a really serious issue for any players trying to unravel the mystery of what happened to the Base. I suggested some tweaks about 20 years ago when I wrote. Over the last generation I have occasionally thought about Prime Base and the Grand Deception and have a few comments and corrections to add to the discussion.
Let’s start with the three “transcores” or transportation cores. As these were written there are a number of issues with them. The Life and Operations cylinders have transcores that consist of a group of 8 passenger elevators, a freight elevator and a set of stairs. The Support cylinder has fewer elevators and a ramp. According to the text the elevators are not on emergency power. This means that if the base loses power the only way to get up and down are stairs in two of the cylinders and the ramp in Support. So any heavy equipment will need to either be dragged up flights of stairs or taken up the ramp in Support and then humped over to the place it is needed.
The text says these transcores are not primarily structural, but that makes a limited amount of sense. They will need to be strong enough to support a number of high speed passenger elevators, a 16 ton freight elevator and a wide staircase. The square transcore structure makes this a bit difficult. A hollow tube would make more sense. The whole 8 elevator system; some of which open in each direction, doesn’t really make much sense and just complicate everything. Also eight elevators for a structure the size of the cylinders seems a bit excessive. I would skip the staircase and go with a central bank of elevators surrounded by a ramp. The ramp will have a flat landing section on each level. The freight elevator opens to the ramp. The passenger elevators will open to the opposite side of the cylinder. The core can be sealed at each level by drop down fire doors that close off the fronts of the elevators as well as the entrance to the ramp. This will prevent the transcore from becoming a conduit for heat, smoke and flame in the event of a fire.
It also means that there has to be emergency staircases someplace else in the base. I would go with a staircase at each end of the tubes that connect the cylinders. This allows the staircases to be separate from the basic structure of the cylinders and they only have a small entrance that disrupts the strength of the cylinders. Self-closing fire doors with panic bars will close off the staircases and in the event of really serious issues there will be heavy remotely controlled drop down doors.
This change up in the vertical movement systems of the base makes the Grand Deception a lot easier. In the module there was concern about intruders tapping against the transcore walls and hearing an echo. Even in the original module I don’t think that is likely, but in this case they will be banging against either the structural portion of the tube, or the heavy drop down fire barriers. The transformation of the transcores into a fake damaged nuclear reactor would consist of some paint and some radioactive material brought up from the radioactive material storage associated with the operation of the cyclotron. Also since everyone is going to die, or has already died putting a few corpses in radiation gear near the damaged reactor before setting the entire place on fire would help sell the story. Its brutal but the event called for brutal solutions.
Another issue that could be easily fixed is the problems caused by the farm on Level 1 of Support. It really doesn’t make sense to have the farm on the top level. It does make sense to a warehouse which “supports” the other activities on Level I of the other two cylinders. This would be all the items needed in the decontamination area of the Base entrance, medical supplies for the medical section in Operations. It also gives a place where items that might be needed in a hurry for surface activities. It is a big space for these things, but it also means that instead of trying to explain why there is a farm that can’t possibly supply either enough food or enough replacement oxygen to the people in the base having a great big warehouse (from which everything that wasn’t nailed down has been removed) makes a lot more sense.
The Grand Deception calls for the top three levels to look like they had been abandoned after being heavily damaged by fire. To sell this (and to make it possible) the automated fire systems would all have been turned off. The sprinklers would have been valved off and drained on the top levels. All the extinguishers were either removed or just discharged before the fires were set. To make the fires actually burn a lot of material from throughout the base would have had to have been brought in, since the base was built to be as close to fire proof as possible. This means that almost every room will have either had a drum of flammable liquid or a high pressure gas cylinder of flammable gas thrown in and opened before the matches were struck. This would also have reduced the hazard to the rest of the base, since there will be a lot less hazardous materials around. It also means that the upper level of the base will have a highly toxic and possibly oxygen deficient environment. Too this either a timer would need to be placed or a person close to death, but not too close, would need to stay on Level1 to ignite the fires. They would be sealed in as their compatriots closed off the rest of the base from below. Once the fire starts it will continue to burn until all the fuel is used up or all the oxygen. Either way the entire level will be filled with toxic smoke and combustion products such as CO, CO2, NO2, probably phosgene and phosphine. The upper levels of the base have to be absolutely sealed from the lower levels or those products will fill the entire base. Even after a few hundred years there will no place for this gas to go so the level will still be filled with a stew of toxic gases. The fire will probably produce an overpressure within the upper level that will possibly leak out over time but there will be very little gas moving back in, so the toxic gases will not be diluted very much.
I honestly can’t see how a team can survive long enough to explore unless they have close circuit breathing apparatus or a nearly unlimited number of bottles for SCBAs.
Instead of the fire perhaps a couple of claymores or some grenades were put in every room. This will give a goodly level of destruction without making the top level totally deadly.

I got back to counting positions in the base. On page 35 of the book detailing OPS Cylinder level 5 (Communications Intercept Center). It is broken up into CW, Crypto, Microwave, Satellite, Media, Voice, Recording and Traffic Analysis. In the book it calls out 16 + 20 + 40 + 100+ 12 or 188 operators without staffing for Microwave, Crypto and Traffic Analysis being specifically called out. The statement for these is made that these numbers are “at one time”. So this is around 200 people right there, on a single shift. The Module states that there is capacity for 448 active staff and actually had 247 staffers at the time of the war. If the staffing numbers are correct then a 24 hour operation with 3 eight hour shifts would require 600 staffers for this one level of the base alone. That is more than the base is set to house in total. So I’m thinking that it might require three cylinders with accommodations, one being set for mostly singles rather than families so perhaps a total of 1500-1600 active staffer and about 1000 dependents.

So a few more tweaks
Let’s go back to first principals. Prime base would absolutely not have any single points of failure. The most obviously place where they have a single point of failure is the fusion power plant. There is discussion about the use of an Emergency Power Grid. However since the Project doles out fusion power generators like doctors give out lollypops there is no reason why there is a single power unit in Prime Base. I would go with two complete physical plants, power, water, air. Even in these plants there would be some redundancies. I would have three fusion plants in each location. The entire plant can be run by any two fusion units. So an entire triple unit can be taken off line for repairs or individual units so long as two of the six are up and running. The Emergency Power Grid can run off of a single unit. Each cylinder also has a number of vehicle power units available that can run the emergency power for that cylinder. In this I am thinking about how a warship has a highly survivable power system that consists of multiple busses and various types of emergency generators. Prime Base should be at least as well provided.
The hospital is a mess. The concept is that the hospital is designed only to serve the base personnel and that the staff here is the “second string” with the very best physicians-especially specialists being in the field teams. This doesn’t make any sense. The field team medical folks are likely to be working on a shoestring. Even after only five years most medical supplies and equipment will be used up, destroyed in the crossfire, ruined by lack of proper storage or maintenance or otherwise rendered useless. The only thing planners could have counted on was the items the Project would have preserved. There will certainly be some well-equipped field hospital teams, but these will still not be able to rival the facilities at a base, especially Prime Base. Prime Base should have the very best medical teams, if for no other reason than to consult with the field teams. Also with the aviation assets critical patients can be flown back to the base for treatment or physicians can be flown out to field units for special care as needed.
In canon there are two operating theaters in the level 1 Ops in Medical Screening, four standard and two overflow in the Hospital in Life. Since there are two overflow operating suites in medical it must be assumed that planners would staff for at least six and possibly eight simultaneous medical operations. So if it takes 8 people to conduct an operation this is 48 to 64 for a single shift. Surgeons can be counted on to work 12 hour shifts so that means if maximum use is anticipated for over 1 shift we are looking at 100-130 people. This is just the surgery staff. If everyone in the base gets a physical once a year that means about 3,000 hours of work for a physician or similar skilled clinician. That is basically a full time position and a half. That doesn’t include the lab techs needed to process the tests. Dental cleanings will be similar, but those are twice a year so we can see a staff of several dental hygienists as well as a couple of general dentists, a couple of first rate oral surgeons and an orthodontist or two, so the Dental staff will be at least a dozen or perhaps a bit more. There will also be a couple of optometrists and at least one ophthalmologist, maybe two. In addition there will be a group of staff phycologists and related disciplines (living underground and waiting for the end of the world has got to be depressing. There will also be some veterinarians. These will take care of animals in the farms and laboratories as well the pats that people will bring with them. In my view there is no way that people won’t bring pets. Animal companionship will be a good treatment for depression and will lighten the burden of the children, especially. I give the medical group as being somewhere between 200 and 250 staffers, plus dependents.
So let’s talk about the fire department of Prime Base. Prevention will be the goal of this group. They will be servicing the various detection and suppression systems. Every extinguisher in the place will need to be visually inspected once a month and serviced annually. The detectors will each get tested annually. The alarms and such tested annually. Piping and valving will get tested on anything from a weekly to an annual basis (at least they won’t need back flow preventers). The fire water pumps will need to be tested as well. In the outside world Firefighters work Kelly Shifts (24 hours on and a variable number of days off depending upon where they are in the cycle. Paramedics usually work 12 hour shifts. I can see the base going either way. The canon is that everyone in the base would be trained to fight fires. This makes a great deal of sense but the problem becomes one of equipment. How much turn out gear will the base have? I can see the base training everyone to fight “incipient” fires (which are the first stages of a fire) and then sealing the fire barriers, letting the sprinklers do their work and the fully equipped full time fire fighters going in for aggressive attacks against the fires. To do this will require full crews of firefighers, probably based more on Navy Damage Control than upon civilian firefighting pre 1990. So three man hose teams (two) a gas free engineer and such on each shift, plus a couple of paramedics. As I said before I would put at least one firehouse in each cylinder and in annexes as well. So this will be, let’s say each station has ten staffer and there are ten of them and they are running Kelly shifts so that is 10X10X3 or 300 fire fighters. This is probably really excessive so we can halve it to 150.
Let’s talk about Facilities Management personnel. Prime base is a huge complex and complex is the operative word. It has everything from a hospital to food service to warehousing to research laboratories to what amounts to several luxury apartment buildings. They also have the added problem that they cannot just call in a contractor to do the work. The base has to be totally self-contained so that when the balloon goes up they can fix any problem that could possibly arise. I worked at Monsanto’s Saint Louis campuses which housed around 5000 employees and contractors. I was part of the contract company that provided full service Facilities Management to the campuses (which included support for the Monsanto leased aircraft hangar with its five aircraft, a research farm, several leased properties and a large warehouse facility. The company I worked for had over 100 people on that contract, which I think is probably a fairly reasonable number, divided into a main day shift and smaller second and third shifts.
The Mission of Prime base is to support the field teams. To do this they have a number of operation centers within the base, so let’s say they can run six simultaneous operation centers as well as one that manages the base itself. A State level command center might have as many as 30 or even more people in it, but I have run regional command posts with as few as 10. So this will be three shifts with seven operational groups with maybe 15 people per shift on average. That is another 315 people.
Branch operations is another group, and this might well be 30 people or even more per branch, so let’s say there are 200 staffers in the group.
That is 1600 staffers already, so now I am thinking four Life Cylinders!
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