[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

First off the “scarcity” of the project is only relative. The project is very well funded, well equipped, well staffed.

The scarcity is indeed relative... relative to the immensity of the task before them. I do not disagree that the Project must be vastly well funded, but if they had the entire GDP of the US to work with it would still be a fraction of what was needed to rebuild the country. Every resource must be apportioned and used as efficiently as possible if the Project is to succeed.

Originally Posted by tsofian

They have enough resources that they can build bolt holes with the intention of abandoning them. So a blast resistant structure that can house a team for several decades. It has a fusion power plan, a radio communications external sensors and a number of other systems. A bolt hole is a non trivial cost and is just going to get abandoned.

The bolt hole is abandoned because there is no better alternative - Saturn V rockets cost more than a billion (2016) dollars apiece and were completely disposable, but no one had a cheaper or reusable alternative so that's what we used. Having the bolt holes doesn't mean the Project can waste resources, it just means that those particular resources had to be expendable.

That having been said, I always presumed that the equipment in the bolt holes would be harvested later if possible, and the structure itself repurposed. It just cannot be used as a team base because nuclear survival bunkers are not inherently well-defensible against non-nuclear combatants.

Originally Posted by tsofian

"There is no good reason for the HQ to be anything but an HQ."

There are lots of good reasons... One reason is that it’s the most protected place in the project, so it might make sense to put other critical resources there. It might be a case where the planners thought there would be synergy between resources if they were collocated. It might be economy. They can only afford two really big bases, so they need to hold everything in them (Prime and back up). It might be security. Keep two locations secret will be hard enough, keeping a dozen or more becomes exponentially harder. I can come up with more reasons but that should be enough.

1) It may be the most protected place, but you're putting all your eggs in one basket and doing so at the cost of operational security - all that traffic means that all those resources could not be used without drawing attention to the HQ. This is not even hypothetical, this is exactly how Prime Base went down in canon.
2) Synergy requires co-location only for detail work. At the level of national command, there should not be any work detailed enough to require more than radio.
3) Economy does not appear to be an issue - while the Project needs to be efficient with its resources, a handful of medium bases does not seem to be vastly more costly than a single large base, and the advantage in security seems substantial.
4) The Project is already keeping thousands of sites secret, including at least a dozen canon sites that would seem to be sizable. I would argue that the difficulty in keeping a site secret goes up exponentially with size, and a 3000-person Prime Base would be impossible to conceal pre-war.

Originally Posted by tsofian

EMS does far more than just transports. They provide initial treatment, get vitals push drugs provide IV access, support respiration with O2.

Sure they do. But hospitals don't have EMS to get people from offices to the surgery. EMS is about extending medical care into the field, and if you take away the "in the field" part then you lose the value of dedicated personnel. Give a few people in each section additional training (First Responder or EMT) and spread some crash kits around.

Originally Posted by tsofian

Also a warship has a dedicated set of damage control people, the Navy had a whole rating for them: DC.

Yes, but it only has a handful and that is for a ship that is explicitly expecting to take damage. The Project is expecting to survive by stealth and cannot hold the base against any enemy able to inflict significant damage on the facility itself.

Originally Posted by tsofian

Of all the resources in Prime Base the ones that are closest to being irreplaceable are the people. There is an old saying that when someone dies a library burns. This is even more true at prime base. First most people there are experts. They represent a human technical library. In addition, billions of other libraries were burned during the war so each person at Prime Base represents a substantial fraction of all human expertise left on Earth. Putting a lot of resources into ensuring the safety and health of these people isn’t a foolish use of those resources.

That's why I don't think you should spend resources on those people. You have a hundred dedicated personnel to service a population of roughly 3000 who have presumably already been screened and prepped to be healthy and reasonably athletic. How many of those can be expected to die in the course of a decade of operations? Maybe 1%? Even if you couldn't save them, it seems like an extra 100 skilled staff would be a better use and would more than make up for the expected loss of 30 people. And making emergency services a secondary job for other staff should save the majority of those 30 anyway.

Originally Posted by tsofian

A lot depends upon where the base is, but consider this. The base is in a MINE. A mine that is in rock that may shift, or suffer from faulting or other events. So not only does the base structure need to be constantly inspected and dealt with, but the caverns that enclose the base need to be constantly monitored and inspected and such.

It sounds like the base was poorly located. "Survivability" can't just be about the nukes, it has to be about everything. If you're siting a huge underground bunker that needs to remain sealed in a geologically active area then you're already in a lot of trouble.

Originally Posted by tsofian

There needs to be that sort of resource available to the project. There are pros and cons to it being at Prime Base

The base needs a hospital or clinic to serve its own population, but I cannot think of any pros that come near to the cons of integrating a general-access hospital with your command center.

Originally Posted by tsofian

Why would Prime Base be handling these issues? Because it is the Command and Control center for the Project. The Project is designed to help people and people will need the most help during disaster. If the US Government and State governments have ceased to exist only the Project has a regional, let along continental network of communications and resources. So if the Project is to have any value above local levels it better be able to handle regional crisis. If Prime Base isn’t handling things like this why does it exist?

I misspoke a little. The Project would be coordinating responses... but that coordination should not require more than a couple of people per "regional issue" simply because there is not much that the national HQ can do besides dispatch teams... which is already part of their ordinary jobs. If you really want these people to be effective beyond ordering teams to relocate then they need to be located outside Prime Base where they can get their hands dirty.

Originally Posted by tsofian

As for how many people it takes to run a regional disaster I can say it generally takes a lot more than most people think. Having been involved in [/COLOR]the responses to several regional or national disasters including the Missouri State response to Katrina and the St Louis responses to several severe storms and power outages as well as assisting with response to flooding in Panama which knocked out most of their water treatment I can say first hand that 30 people per shift is going to be very tight for a lot of events, remember the 100 people is for extended 24 h

The response by the Project to such a disaster is going to be very different than a contemporary response. The resources available are going to be very different as are the "acceptable" options. A Project response is going to tend strongly towards evacuation and with poor non-Project communications the majority will need to be coordinated on the ground.

Originally Posted by tsofian

That is your opinion and you are welcome to it. I disagree with it. The Project is to support all sorts of field team activities. They won’t micromanage but they are the “on call” service for the teams. Yes there will be intermediate levels of command and control, including Group command teams and probably regional or branch command groups. That being said Prime Base is the point where the top level of C3I is found.
The Project is compartmentalized prewar and in the early postwar period. I don’t think it can perform its mission once the Project is active and maintain its secretive nature.

You asked for opinions, I'm giving one. I have no particular expectation that you will do anything with it.

I am glad that you expect intermediate command structures, but have you done any accounting to figure out how large they (and the Project) will be? I have always worked with the assumption that total Project staffing was in the 10-50 thousand range, and in that size a 3000-person national base seems like huge overkill - too many Chiefs, not enough Indians. Every person you have at Prime Base is another person you can't have in the field (just like every person who is a full-time firefighter in Prime Base takes a spot that could have had a scientist or MARS teamer or comms staff or...), so you really need to put Prime Base in the context of the Project at large, something NOT done anywhere in 3ed.

As to post-war operations, it depends on what is there. There is no reason for a command and control center to EVER "go public". That is why I endorse keeping Prime Base as it was originally described in 3ed - a small command and control base with no other functions. It can do this just fine for decades without ever opening a door anyone would notice. When you add in all these other groups, it exposes the HQ precisely because they cannot operate long in the dark and therefore drag the most vulnerable part of the Project into the dangerous light.

Originally Posted by tsofian

The more bases and facilities you have the more likely one will get stumbled on pre war. It is a trade off. There is no “right” answer. If you have separate hospital and someone gets sick at Prime Base they can’t get treated because they can’t get to the hospital.

The first part I already addressed. The second part assumes that removing a "national" hospital from Prime Base would somehow prevent having a hospital sized and staffed appropriately to handle its own needs. It doesn't.