A Prime Base Survivor

[tsofian]

Well he or they won't be alive when the Players get there, however

I find it hard to imaging an airborne disease that would infect EVERYBODY in a population of several hundred or several thousand and kill them ALL. Virgin field epidemics don't even do that. Even HIV had a statistical immune population. Anthrax might come close but even untreated anthrax isn't always fatal.

So there were probably a person or even a few people who were issued the suicide pills and waited until they felt very ill, as they were instructed to do, and never got sick. They may have ended up taking the pills anyway, because life in what amounted to a giant tomb where not only all the people they had known for years, but all their dreams and indeed the dreams of mankind had been brutally murdered would have to suck!

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by tsofian

Well he or they won't be alive when the Players get there, however

I find it hard to imaging an airborne disease that would infect EVERYBODY in a population of several hundred or several thousand and kill them ALL. Virgin field epidemics don't even do that. Even HIV had a statistical immune population. Anthrax might come close but even untreated anthrax isn't always fatal.

So there were probably a person or even a few people who were issued the suicide pills and waited until they felt very ill, as they were instructed to do, and never got sick. They may have ended up taking the pills anyway, because life in what amounted to a giant tomb where not only all the people they had known for years, but all their dreams and indeed the dreams of mankind had been brutally murdered would have to suck!

I would still write everyone off as dead. Even with statistical probability, the chance is remote.

However, as I see it the personnel awake prior to the war and awake and recording through the conflict are not the Project command team.

These are the base caretakers. The ones that oversee day to day operations and would keep the lights on until year three. Then at year three an assessment would be made as to awaken the Command staff.

So in my scenario, it is the Command Staff and not the Pheonix team in cryosleep.

[cosmicfish]

I agree that there should have been survivors, and that survivors should have been able to take steps to revive the Project. I disagree that the kind of people chosen to be in PB would give up so easily, so how (other than suicide) could they have met an early-but-post-outbreak demise?

[.45cultist]

You'd think that they might have used the automed's cryosleep on a few people in the hidden parts of the base. The infected are restricted to certain areas until the impromtu bolt hole is prepped, one is given sealed envelopes containing a briefing of events"just in case". Some personal gear stashed as well like the frozen watch.

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by .45cultist

The infected are restricted to certain areas until the impromtu bolt hole is prepped,

Therein lies the problem. If we assume the bioweapon works as described, they would not know who was infected until it was too late. So this saved person would very likely have the infection and it would live again when they were revived and kill the players. Even if they were immune, as the thread assumes, they could be a carrier and by never showing symptoms be froze and again bring the bioweapon back to the player team. Kind of brutal.

[.45cultist]

Make that two sets of autodocs, with the uninfected either in th vehicle bay or one of t he side tunnels. It takes some "Haid 'rangling", but a plausible source of new PC's is possible, and they know where thier personal effects are!

[cosmicfish]

Look at this from a different viewpoint: It is essential to the story that everyone in PB is killed but that the facility itself survives essentially intact. So starting from a blank slate, how do we kill PB?

A biological agent would only work if the defensive measure was to preventively place everyone possible into cryosleep early on, and even then it would be a remarkable stroke of bad luck to keep awake only those who were susceptible. A chemical or radiological agent could be much more effective, but how does that get into a facility designed specifically to keep such things out?

It seems impossible to me that PB could fall physically intact but with no survivors without either some element of internal betrayal or some level of Krell superscience. Does one of those sound particularly plausible, or is there some solution I am not seeing?