PF 010 Final Watch

[ArmySGT.]

Combined Team Seattle's Mission was to help the survivors of Seattle rebuild the shattered remains of their city. Command Team UC-1C hadn't bargained on what had happened to the city after the passage of 150 years. They were even less prepared for the threat of annihilation of the Morrow Project they faced alone in the fog of the Pacific Northwest.

[dragoon500ly]

This module is one of the harder ones. The team has a Ranger (poor saps!), they are in the middle of a 150-year old war AND dealing with the after effects of a major volcanoic event. Talk about raining on the players!

The first of TMP's radio relay stations is introduced. And we have a race to prevent the bad guys from getting their hands on 150-year old SLBMs......what fun!

[ArmySGT.]

It is the volcanic event I find completely implausible.

I can't see that the worldwide exchange of nukes is going to set off volcanoes.

The Soviets should be far more bad ass. Soviet Airborne troops are chosen partly for their political reliability and almost totally ethnically Russian....

These should be the Red Banner waving "Die, Capitalist pig dogs" Communists and universally unfriendly to anything "Amerikanski".

[Matt W]

The big problem with this module is the physical geography.

Volcanic gases/dust are poisonous in the short term BUT after 150 years the stuff would have broken down into very fertile soil (there's a reason people still farm on the slopes of Mount Etna). I suspect that this module was written soon after the Mount St Helens eruption - and before it was realised just how quickly the local ecology recovered

The area is a Temperate Rain Forest in real life. That's not going to change because of a few nukes and volcanoes. This amount of rainfall will have an interesting effect on dry volcanic dust.

Thirdly, I've always found the Truckers and Bikers with wooden/iron wheels to be a liitle odd.

[dragoon500ly]

Originally Posted by Matt W

Thirdly, I've always found the Truckers and Bikers with wooden/iron wheels to be a liitle odd.

Not so odd, the first bike/auto wheels were wood and iron and later wood and rubber.

[mikeo80]

Originally Posted by dragoon500ly

Not so odd, the first bike/auto wheels were wood and iron and later wood and rubber.

You can go farther back in time. Roman trade wagons seemed to be built around wood and iron.

My $0.02

Mike

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by Matt W

The big problem with this module is the physical geography.

Volcanic gases/dust are poisonous in the short term BUT after 150 years the stuff would have broken down into very fertile soil (there's a reason people still farm on the slopes of Mount Etna). I suspect that this module was written soon after the Mount St Helens eruption - and before it was realised just how quickly the local ecology recovered

The area is a Temperate Rain Forest in real life. That's not going to change because of a few nukes and volcanoes. This amount of rainfall will have an interesting effect on dry volcanic dust.

Thirdly, I've always found the Truckers and Bikers with wooden/iron wheels to be a liitle odd.

I would be thinking that an event of this size would have made all of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, along with the southern portions of the neighboring Canadian Provinces just as or even more uninhabitable.

The prevailing winds are west to east. Look up the ash fall patterns for Mt. St. Helens sometime to see what I am talking about.

[dragoon500ly]

Of course, if one is a truly evil PD....just have the Yellowstone Super Volcano blow....this will require a truly awesome amount of prep work by the PD, but is an excellent way to screw with a player team's collective mind!

"But the map says there is a mountain....where is the mountain?!??!"

[ArmySGT.]

That is an Extinction level event.

The ash layers in Oklahoma are something like 10 feet or more. Ash fall all the way to New York State is something like 3-6 feet.

[ArmySGT.]

Another item introduced is that the Krell are coming in a ship........

Presumably this is a Merchant vessel of some sort. OK.

So are they devolved thugs like the baddies in "the Road Warrior" or a sophisticated Political group with a charismatic leader.

On one hand the Krell have 150 years ago nuclear weapons and scientist capable of producing bio war plagues.

Then 150 years later despite capturing several Morrow Bases....... their savages barely capable of mounting a campaign in Ohio to which one decrepit M60A1 guarding a bridge is a major obstacle?

But they have a Navy of sorts in the Pacific? What kind of schizophrenia is this?

[ArmySGT.]

Seattle 1 Mt ground burst
Tacoma 25 Mt air burst
Olympia 4x200 Kt air burst
Spokane 3x500 Kt air burst
Boise 2 Mt air burst
Portland 4x200 Kt air burst
Salem 2 Mt air burst
Grand Coulee dam 2 Mt air burst
Bonneville dam 2 Mt air burst
John Day dam 4x200 Kt air burst
Chief Joseph dam 4x200 Kt air burst
Naval Ammuntion Depot (Indian Island NAD) 3x500 Kt air burst
Fairchild AFB 4x200 Kt air burst
McChord AFB 4x200 Kt air burst
Ft. Lewis 4x200 Kt airburst
Kingsley Field ORANG 4x200 Kt air burst
Whidbey Island NAS 4x200 Kt air burst
Naval Support Base Bangor 25Mt surface
Idaho National Laboratory (National Reactor Test site) 4x200 Kt air burst
Chilliwack 100 Kt air burst
Vancouver 1 Mt air burst
Victoria 100 Kt air burst
CFB Comox 100 Kt surface burst
CFB Esquimalt 100 Kt air burst
NRS Aldergrove 100 Kt air burst
Sumas Center 100 Kt air burst
W.A.C. Bennett Dam 3x 100 Kt air burst

[stormlion1]

Krell having access to a ship always seemed the odd bit for me. There power I always thought was more centrally located in the continental US. The coasts seeing far less of them. As for volcano's in the area, well wouldn't it look like this after 150 years? That is a rainforest all round it. Close to what the area would look like after a 150 years of growth.

[ArmySGT.]

Ok......... I am extremely skeptical that a nuclear war..... even a total annihilation scenario would cause volcanoes to erupt.

However, I could be persuaded that the 25 Megaton ground bursts in multiple locations around Puget Sound could maybe (just maybe) set off a Cascadia earthquake event. A Cascadia earthquake would mean devastating ground shock and fallen building everywhere not just the nuke impact areas.

As near as Mt Ranier is to Puget Sound, then I could understand the eruption.... Not going with the wholesale eruption of the "Ring of Fire" though and reducing the scale of the ashfall considerably.

Seattle...... with 3 to 20 feet of ash? No. There could and would be a really nasty mud flow into Seattle but, wind direction is west to east.

Ash yes, probably six inches to three feet in any way I run this scenario.

Already this means mass death by silicosis and not a single functioning air breathing motor anywhere.

[ArmySGT.]

Who has their 4th Edition handy?

What is the mass, velocity, and descent angle of the meteor impacts in the Pacific ocean in 4th edition?

I would like to plug them into this to calculate the Tsunami effects on the U.S. West Coast.

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

[Project_Sardonicus]

Defnitley the idea that this was the Sovs as mentioned back in the rule book seemed a disapointment.

I always thought collectivisiation and group think would rather suit TEOTWAWKI.

And teams would be bumping into succesful collective farms with red stars, comissars and agitprop films.

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Who has their 4th Edition handy?

What is the mass, velocity, and descent angle of the meteor impacts in the Pacific ocean in 4th edition?

I would like to plug them into this to calculate the Tsunami effects on the U.S. West Coast.

http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/

Sadly they do not provide information that specific. All we know about 2016 E3 is that is was over 5km in diameter and the resulting impact was 10 million megaton. The location is "northern Pacific". I use Impact! at http://www.purdue.edu/impactearth/ for my calculation. If we assume it was dense rock, a 45° impact at 35 km/s with water depth of 3000m results in a 28.7 million megaton impact. So our asteroid is either less dense or slower. For the sake of simplicity, we will assume that it is dense rock since in the documentary Armageddon it was difficult to drill. Using all the same parameters for everything else and setting velocity to 20km/s gives energy of 9.38 million megatons. One more time at 21 km/s gives 10.3 million megatons. Close enough.

The effects from this impact are significant. The first effect is a thermal wave causing massive third degree burns and lighting most light wood on fire. Next comes the 9.1 earthquake. This is followed by a rain of ejecta that will end up about 38 ft deep with average particle size of 14 inches. Then come the arblast, providing a peak 570 psi overpressure. Finally the tsunami arrives, with a height between 975 and 1950m. Being this close to the impact pretty much makes this portion of the west coast a dead zone.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by mmartin798

The effects from this impact are significant. The first effect is a thermal wave causing massive third degree burns and lighting most light wood on fire. Next comes the 9.1 earthquake. This is followed by a rain of ejecta that will end up about 38 ft deep with average particle size of 14 inches. Then come the arblast, providing a peak 570 psi overpressure. Finally the tsunami arrives, with a height between 975 and 1950m. Being this close to the impact pretty much makes this portion of the west coast a dead zone.

My reasoning why Lonestar and Final Watch can't be made into 4th edition. The coastlines are just destroyed. In the case of Lonestar, the tsunami will have swept inland for hundreds of miles.

[nuke11]

Here are the details of the asteroid used in the 4th edition (this information was cut). I received this from Robert back in November 2013.

5km diameter asteroid (density 3 g/cc) striking the mid-Pacific Ocean (water depth 4km) at 17 km per second at 45 degrees angle of incidence.

Impact energy: about 10 million megatons equivalent.
Blast: 1psi radius 2,800km
Full thickness burn radius 850km
Earthquake: magnitude 9.4 with epicentre impact point. Damage present in an
area about the size of the United States - this just makes the seas more
violent around the impact area in this case.
Firestorms: upper atmospheric heating due to re-entry of ejecta over the
first few hours. This acts like an oven for up to 4 hours. Peak surface
temperatures in the worst affected areas are up to 200 degrees C (392 F).
Some self-shielding from cloud formations moderate the effect in some
regions. This occurs over half the earth.
Tsunamis: Waves of 10-20m push up to 30km inland along every coastline on
the Pacific Ocean up to 10 hours after impact (propagation speed
600-900km/h).
* Effects of several months duration:
- Darkness for first month due to atmospheric dust loading - photosynthesis
is impossible in worst affected regions (most of the world). It gets
*cold* - Last Glacial Maximum levels (5C - 9F drop in global average
temperatures in the first 2 weeks).
- Recovery of optical transparency over next 6 months
- Local cooling due to atmospheric soot loading (fires) - washout leads to
acid rain.
Acid rain aggravated by nitrogen oxides produced in impact.
* Effects of several years duration:
- Ozone reduction from NOx reaching stratosphere - global declines and
worsening of known 'ozone holes'.
- Cooling due to persistent stratospheric dust loading and sulphate
injection analogous to volcanos.
This maintains the initial depressed temperatures generated from injected
dust.
- Acid rain as sulphate and dust is cleared
* Effects of several decades duration:- Warming from stratospheric injection of water and carbon dioxide from the
impact event. This may be limited by high-altitude clouds increasing albedo.
All this is absolutely catastrophic - but it's not the Chicxulub impact
(~100 million megatons) which caused global acidification of the oceans -
the impact site was rich in sulphur containing minerals - in addition to all
the above effects at greater intensity and duration. Which appears to be the
'no land creature bigger than 10kg survives' level.

[.45cultist]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

My reasoning why Lonestar and Final Watch can't be made into 4th edition. The coastlines are just destroyed. In the case of Lonestar, the tsunami will have swept inland for hundreds of miles.

I drop the whole meteorite thing, Bruce Morrow's tampering couldn't have pulled that off. I use an imperfect pandemic leading to nuke war.