[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Their course of action is to make every appearance that PB1 is dead. To convince the attackers, whoever they maybe, that PB1 is dead and there are no more TMP assets. Anywhere.

This is a mad gamble. I don’t see that PB1 had another choice.

Except that the very thing you are proposing to do is communicate with the one other Morrow facility that the enemy must not find, and doing it while the enemy is at your gate and presumably monitoring your communications. In order to stop the automatic wakeup of PB2 they would need to establish a communications link that was very directional and/or very powerful, hack into a system that has absolutely no reason to be accessible by computer anyway (like hacking into a light switch), and gamble that the completely arbitrary wake up time they just picked is better than the completely arbitrary wake up time that already exists, all at the risk of screwing things up. and killing the Project.

You're dying. You are at best leaving suggestions for the people who are going to take over the Project after you are dead. If you are going to do that, why not just send them an after action report and let them make their own decisions when they wake?

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Where do you put it when you cannot with surety predict what will and what will not be around after a full nuclear exchange?

I am not disputing the need for Morrow production facilities, rather I am espousing the mathematical advantage in dispersing them as much as possible. To simplify, assume that 20% of the surface of the country was going to be destroyed in the war, and that you are randomly placing assets into facilities. If you place all your assets in one facility then you have an 80% chance of getting through without losses but a 20% chance of losing everything. The more you spread your assets out the lower the standard deviation becomes and the closer you get to losing 20% of your assets and having 80% survive - not great, but worthwhile when you absolutely cannot accept a total loss. It is the same basic reason why infantry squads don't cluster together in one tight group when under fire, the reason why Navy battlegroups are spread so far apart that the ships are often over the horizon from each other.

This lends to one-man boltholes if taken to that extreme, but it is counteracted somewhat by the fact that the standard deviation has dropped enough at the team level that going lower than that doesn't help that much. In addition, there are risks and inefficiencies in being spread out and since your real metric is not survivability but rather total post-war effectiveness (which includes survivability AND efficiency) there are going to be larger facilities because some facilities are much more efficient if they are larger.

So I agree with the need for general factories and perhaps a few specialized plants, but unless there is some significant need for asset A and asset B to share a facility it makes more mathematical sense to split them into separate facilities so that one nuke doesn't take out both.

Oh, as another point, remember that adding capabilities to PB1 or PB2 also increases their exposure. Manufacturing facilities have trucks coming in and out, medical facilities add patients, etc, etc. Every person or signal that comes into a base increases the odds that it will be detected and makes it that much easier to destroy, so why add signals and people that are not necessary to the core function?

PB1 was not taken out until it began caring for refugees, something that should have been farmed out to a nearby Recon team rather than risk exposing headquarters. The nuke was gotten to the base because they set up recovery efforts in their front yard. Command and control are different functions than recovery, and if they had taken the basic steps of spreading these different functions out Krell would probably have never even spent the nuke for lack of a worthwhile target.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Those are nice, but nothing beats having someone explain a subject to you in bite size pieces to you. Another thing is those Project personnel are busy; and one can expect a certain level of attrition due to the dangers of the recovery effort. Who knows what you can expect from the survivors, nuclear fires and plague are not going to discriminate. This is a longer term and more a phase two approach to the recovery effort.

And you are asset starved with no guarantee of getting to phase two if you are spending survival resources on such. If your Project personnel are too busy to teach or dying too often, why not spend those tubes on guys who can teach AND fight so that the rest of your personnel aren't so busy and more likely to survive? If phase one is unsuccessful, phase two doesn't really matter!

And incidentally, this is the reason why Morrow personnel were all supposed to be college graduates - retaining knowledge and teaching it is a core mission of the entire Project, exactly what they are supposed to shift over to when survival and priority reconstruction become less time consuming.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Additionally, I like to throw scenarios like this at PCs…… Helpless, yet valuable, civilians to protect and assist; in this way I can steer a game back around to recovery and restoring civilization if it takes a too warlike path. NPCs are great for that.

Sure, but the game is already filthy with helpless NPC's, and many of them are valuable. Most Morrow base personnel fit the bill already, as do a great many non-Morrow personnel. The world cannot be entirely composed of heroes and villains, it must be dominated in numbers by the mundane.

By the way, if I wanted helpless but valuable Morrow personnel for this reason, I would use a hospital - medical staff are important at all stages, rarely combat effective (besides the medics in the field), and notably a part of that recovery and restoration mission. An agriculture or construction support base would be good too, and none of them need to be collocated, just vulnerable and near enough by to be reachable.