Morrow Aviation Assets

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

I'm using equipment I'm familiar with. C-130's were prime movers of gear and are old dependable aircraft with an easy to maintain airframe. Blackhawks have a relatively good safety record and can pull plenty of gear and personnel around.

I agree with all of this.

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Huey's would be good too but I know nothing about there operations or repair. Just that there are plenty of them around. I mean if you look there everywhere.

Huey's are like buying cheap used cars - they're cheap and easy to find, but there's a reason they're so cheap to begin with and you really shouldn't plan on them lasting long. Heck, the newest ones are 30 years old! And the reason they are around is because they are being used for relatively gentle work by people with no better options - you can make an aircraft last a long time if you do that, but it's really just spreading the lifespan by injecting idleness. I don't know about you, but I expect ALL MPV's to be in near-constant use!

Originally Posted by stormlion1

The Little Birds are on my list because of there size and multi-purpose nature. They can act as gunships, transports, small scale supply, and medevac. And most importantly there small. They can be buried in a Bolthole and pulled out when needed. larger helicopters will require a full on hanger, something that in the original 5-year timeframe can be destroyed, damaged by weather or human disaster, or just to conspicuous.

Again, I don't understand this. Little Birds are NOT utility helicopters, for good reason - they aren't good multi-taskers! They are specialists that fill very specific roles as part of a massive collection of aircraft. And I think the bolthole/hanger divide is more than a little false - botlholes are for storage, hangers are for operation, and realistically all aircraft will require some level of access to both, and the most efficient approaches do not particularly limit the use of larger aircraft.

[Askold]

The way I see it, spare parts are going to be an issue with aircraft.

Assuming best case scenario where the Morrow teams can find intact factories (either built with stuff the Morrow project had hidden in bunkers or simply salvageable factories from before the war) aircraft parts still won't be priority number 1. Even worse if you have several types of aircraft and you would need highly specialized parts.

Worst case scenario where everything outside has been destroyed and the Morrow project has to do with the meager stuff they had in their facilities... Spare parts will run out soon. How long can you fly a helicopter without proper maintenance? Or even an airplane.

You can keep a car functional for years (although some spare parts will be required) and in that time you can: Recon the area, establish contact with the survivors, start educating the survivors (if they have lost knowledge of modern technology) and even rebuilding the society. Who knows, you could even manage to keep the cars in working condition until you can make more parts and fuel for them. (Though you might have to store the fancy fusion powered stuff for a while and switch back to bio-diesel until a few decades have passed.)

With aircraft... Well, you can achieve things that would otherwise be impossible but they will be nearly one-shot devices. "Do you have a battle where air-support is absolutely vital? Do you need to pick up someone/something from a location that cannot be accessed by foot? Yeah, we can do that. ...Once."

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Askold

Worst case scenario where everything outside has been destroyed and the Morrow project has to do with the meager stuff they had in their facilities... Spare parts will run out soon. How long can you fly a helicopter without proper maintenance? Or even an airplane.

Well, there are a few things going in the Project's favor here. First, fusion reactors are canonically reliable, and replace a lot of the heavy wear parts in aircraft - there are going to be fewer moving parts, and the ones that remain are not the ones most likely to fail. Second, the Project retains not only its own stores but also some manufacturing capacity - once the stores run out they should be able to keep a modest number of aircraft flying for years afterwards by building new parts.

Besides, air vehicles are just too useful to abandon entirely.

[stormlion1]

OK, lets look at the various Regions the Project is set up over. I will use my home region for this. The Northeast. which is Region Foxtrot. It compromises New Jersey, New York, Delaware, District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania,
Virginia and West Virginia. That's a lot of room to cover.
Now lets say we put the regional Command base in Upstate New York, it has two commercial Lear Jets, the 55's for simplicity's sake.. Left overs from when the Project was in its start up stages. Because the Council of Tomorrow had to get around right? They have Five Blackhawks for Security Sweeps, Supply Runs, and for use by the bases MARS Team. That's 4 crew for the two Lears and 10 pilots. The Crew Chiefs and Gunners are not counted. That's 14 pilots right there.

The Supply Hubs have a dozen C-130's with two pilots apiece and a loadmaster. That's 3 crew right there apiece. And these guys are going to be busy! That's 39 crew right there, 24 of whom are pilots. Now we have a dozen Blackhawks doing the midrange supply drops, reinforcements, and going places the C-130's can't. 24 Pilots and another dozen Crew Chiefs right there. Last we have the Little Birds Two Crew apiece. Another 24 Pilots.
Total Number of pilots: 38 and various crew chiefs and Loadmasters and Door Gunners all of whom can be cross trained personnel and have other jobs. Joe the Door Gunner can be Supply Base Security Joe who sits in the coffee room all day.
And they have to cover all of the Foxtrot Region. Now the guys down in Region Bravo have got to cover Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. They have the same amount of gear, pilots, etc. There going to have it somewhat easier but they still have to cover large swathes of ground. But if there is need aircraft and crews can be sent to help the Foxtrot Region when the Prime Base needs them too and there is some slack.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Now lets say we put the regional Command base in Upstate New York, it has two commercial Lear Jets, the 55's for simplicity's sake.. Left overs from when the Project was in its start up stages. Because the Council of Tomorrow had to get around right?

First, why would these be Morrow assets, and not part of the corporations that the CoT was drawn from? Second, to the best of my knowledge the CoT were not frozen with the Project (if at all) so why would the Project have their planes? Third, why would they all be the same, when each CoT member was likely to have different needs that they would need to justify to their corporations? Last, even if they were commandeered, how do you justify the supply chain and personnel, like fuel, jet parts, and turbine technicians?

Originally Posted by mmartin798

They have Five Blackhawks for Security Sweeps, Supply Runs, and for use by the bases MARS Team. That's 4 crew for the two Lears and 10 pilots. The Crew Chiefs and Gunners are not counted. That's 14 pilots right there.

Per region, are you going with the canonical ten regions?

Originally Posted by mmartin798

The Supply Hubs have a dozen C-130's with two pilots apiece and a loadmaster. That's 3 crew right there apiece. And these guys are going to be busy! That's 39 crew right there, 24 of whom are pilots. Now we have a dozen Blackhawks doing the midrange supply drops, reinforcements, and going places the C-130's can't. 24 Pilots and another dozen Crew Chiefs right there. Last we have the Little Birds Two Crew apiece. Another 24 Pilots.
Total Number of pilots: 38 and various crew chiefs and Loadmasters and Door Gunners all of whom can be cross trained personnel and have other jobs. Joe the Door Gunner can be Supply Base Security Joe who sits in the coffee room all day.

The only place I have seen that kind of ratio of aircraft to personnel is for experimental units where the expectation is that most days any given aircraft is under modification. Seriously, you have the expense of acquiring and supporting all those aircraft, and your best case scenario has 2/3 of them idle for lack of pilots? What happens when one or more of your pilots gets killed?

Ignoring all that, with ten regions, ignoring the Prime Base contingent, you have 520 pilots, 170 crew chiefs, an unknown number of non-flying technical and support staff, and 430 aircraft. In case you are wondering, that is about 1/13 of the USAF, an organization that has about 500,000 full-time personnel (and admittedly more duties than just operating aircraft, but that is their primary mission!). Heck, acquiring the aircraft alone is going to be well more than $10B, not counting parts, training, storage, or conversion!

How big do you see the Project as being, overall?

[stormlion1]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

First, why would these be Morrow assets, and not part of the corporations that the CoT was drawn from? Second, to the best of my knowledge the CoT were not frozen with the Project (if at all) so why would the Project have their planes? Third, why would they all be the same, when each CoT member was likely to have different needs that they would need to justify to their corporations? Last, even if they were commandeered, how do you justify the supply chain and personnel, like fuel, jet parts, and turbine technicians?


Per region, are you going with the canonical ten regions?


The only place I have seen that kind of ratio of aircraft to personnel is for experimental units where the expectation is that most days any given aircraft is under modification. Seriously, you have the expense of acquiring and supporting all those aircraft, and your best case scenario has 2/3 of them idle for lack of pilots? What happens when one or more of your pilots gets killed?

Ignoring all that, with ten regions, ignoring the Prime Base contingent, you have 520 pilots, 170 crew chiefs, an unknown number of non-flying technical and support staff, and 430 aircraft. In case you are wondering, that is about 1/13 of the USAF, an organization that has about 500,000 full-time personnel (and admittedly more duties than just operating aircraft, but that is their primary mission!). Heck, acquiring the aircraft alone is going to be well more than $10B, not counting parts, training, storage, or conversion!

How big do you see the Project as being, overall?

Yeah god I hate all these quotes and unqoutes. I see it as the aircraft had to be somewhere and I said for simplicitys sake. That's why all the Lears were the same. I needed an example and used one type of aircraft.

Yes, I am going with the canon regions.

World war 2 Airstrips were sometimes run like this. Particulary Marine Corp ones in the Pacific and far out on the supply chain Army ones. That's what I based it off of. And I actually asked a crew chief who was there to help hammer out details. As for more pilots and crews and all that. Local recruitment. Remember the plan was to wake up after 5 years. There should still be pilots and ground crews running around from civil aviation who can be recruited. Once the planes start flying the secrecy is over for the project.

Yes its expensive. But so is everything else the Project is buying. In comparison to the armor, vehicles, weapons, training, and facilitys the aviation assets are a good chunk of change. But not insurmountable. especially if some of the CoT run those firms that make the aircraft.

As for the size of the project, well to have any affect on the future it would have to be large. And if its large to have a impact it will need a air mobility assets. Maybe this is way to large. But also note I said they would be hugely busy. In many ways its not large enough to take all the work that's coming to it.

It might actually be easier for the project not to invest in aircraft but in spare parts and electronics and putting crews in cryosleep. Then after five years waking up and moving on grounded aircraft and refitting them. At which point you take what you can get. The Project might end up with refitted news helicopters used as transports and 737's as supply planes and the Bush Planes doing all the light work.

[nuke11]

How is an aircraft converted to fusion? We have a decent idea as to how a ground vehicle (and by extension boats/ships) can be done, but what is needed for an airplane?

We have space and weight restrictions as well as power to weight ratios that would need to be somewhat maintained for the power plant.

[Askold]

Originally Posted by nuke11

How is an aircraft converted to fusion? We have a decent idea as to how a ground vehicle (and by extension boats/ships) can be done, but what is needed for an airplane?

We have space and weight restrictions as well as power to weight ratios that would need to be somewhat maintained for the power plant.

If you are talking about converting an existing plane into being fusion powered, the weight distribution would be a bigger issue than the weight limit. There simply might not be any place to set up the fusion plant that wouldn't also take up cargo/passenger space. At least with smaller planes. (I know a few things about electric cars and have been involved with converting one petrol powered car into an electric car and even then the weight distribution, was an issue and we actually had to sacrifice the back seats and the trunk in order to find a place where we could physically fit the batteries AND keep the weight distribution from getting messed up too much. It was a school project. Not quite the same as airplanes, I assume that with planes this will be even harder. With a large cargoplane this might not be such an issue, just like converting an electric bus is SO much easier than a smaller car.)

What you can do instead is design a plane that is powered by fusion, by starting from zero. (Kinda like the "joke" about how the A-10 Warthog started from "we have this huge gun, how can we make it fly" rather than "we have this plane, what are we going to arm it with?")

And I still think that there isn't enough justification for jet planes. The only scenarios where rotor planes and helicopters aren't enough are so unlikely that they won't be worth all the trouble.

Meanwhile, Zeppelin's could have a place in Morrow project...

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by nuke11

How is an aircraft converted to fusion? We have a decent idea as to how a ground vehicle (and by extension boats/ships) can be done, but what is needed for an airplane?

We have space and weight restrictions as well as power to weight ratios that would need to be somewhat maintained for the power plant.

We do not know enough about Project fusion reactors to say. I don't immediately see a reason why not.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Yeah god I hate all these quotes and unqoutes.

Sorry.

Originally Posted by stormlion1

I see it as the aircraft had to be somewhere and I said for simplicitys sake. That's why all the Lears were the same. I needed an example and used one type of aircraft.

My point is that whether you are scrounging or simply pulling from diverse sources you lose the possibility of getting the same models. You won't have ten Lears, you'll have 3 different Lears and 4 different Gulfstreams and 2 Bombardiers and one CoT who could only convince his company to do a share of a Cessna!

Originally Posted by stormlion1

World war 2 Airstrips were sometimes run like this. Particulary Marine Corp ones in the Pacific and far out on the supply chain Army ones. That's what I based it off of. And I actually asked a crew chief who was there to help hammer out details.

Different circumstances, different time, different needs. No one does this anymore, and for good reason.

Originally Posted by stormlion1

As for more pilots and crews and all that. Local recruitment. Remember the plan was to wake up after 5 years. There should still be pilots and ground crews running around from civil aviation who can be recruited. Once the planes start flying the secrecy is over for the project.

The secrecy is over, but you think you have a realistic chance of salvaging useful pilots 5 years post-war? Ignoring that they will likely die at a much higher rate than other occupations (what with being militarily desirable and also engaged in a dangerous occupation), how many will be willing or even desirable to work in the Project in these kinds of aircraft? There are only about 30,000 helicopter pilots in the US anyway, the handful that survive are likely to be hard to get!

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Yes its expensive. But so is everything else the Project is buying. In comparison to the armor, vehicles, weapons, training, and facilitys the aviation assets are a good chunk of change. But not insurmountable. especially if some of the CoT run those firms that make the aircraft.

My point is that this is money that can be used on other things, like boots on the ground. You need aircraft, absolutely, but you do not need an Air Force.

Originally Posted by stormlion1

It might actually be easier for the project not to invest in aircraft but in spare parts and electronics and putting crews in cryosleep. Then after five years waking up and moving on grounded aircraft and refitting them. At which point you take what you can get. The Project might end up with refitted news helicopters used as transports and 737's as supply planes and the Bush Planes doing all the light work.

That is tremendously risky, but I figure your odds at finding salvageable aircraft is probably about the same as finding worthwhile crews, so I would suggest the Project plan on providing a functional minimum and anything else that can be found is a bonus.

[nuke11]

Here's a few questions; If you are converting all of these to some sort of fusion, how do you keep the players flying in the general vicinity of the expected game? As a PD you better have the entire continent fleshed out as the players are going to get the bright idea that hay they are fusion I can fly this all day. And this is where the Prime Base module lost me, a fusion power C-130 is a really bad idea.

Then how do you convert these to fusion in the first place? Also what did the project do before the 1987 attempted fusion refit? All of the infrastructure to be abandoned that support the pre-fusion project?

The 1987 date and the 1989 expected war date are hard targets that are known. How much time does it take to go from a plan to a working fusion engine that firstly fits in a vehicle and then has to be modified and made light enough to fit into an airframe. There is some 2 years before the drop dead date and there is a lot of equipment that needs to be re-worked and de-deployed throughout the entire project.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by nuke11

If you are converting all of these to some sort of fusion, how do you keep the players flying in the general vicinity of the expected game?

Ideally, by not introducing aircraft to the characters prior to Prime Base. Seriously, they should be pretty high-level assets, not something the team can just have. And by the time the team has restored the Project they will either have nationwide issues to deal with (if they are in charge) or else will be subservient to some other group (like Phoenix) that controls the aircraft.

Originally Posted by nuke11

And this is where the Prime Base module lost me, a fusion power C-130 is a really bad idea.

I think it's a really good idea. As I said before, aircraft are too useful for the Project to not have any.

Originally Posted by nuke11

Then how do you convert these to fusion in the first place? Also what did the project do before the 1987 attempted fusion refit? All of the infrastructure to be abandoned that support the pre-fusion project?

Answer that for the rest of the Morrow vehicle fleet! Seriously, if they can do it for all the V-150's or Strykers or whatever vehicles are being used then they can do it for some helicopters and a few planes as well.

Originally Posted by nuke11

The 1987 date and the 1989 expected war date are hard targets that are known. How much time does it take to go from a plan to a working fusion engine that firstly fits in a vehicle and then has to be modified and made light enough to fit into an airframe. There is some 2 years before the drop dead date and there is a lot of equipment that needs to be re-worked and de-deployed throughout the entire project.

Yeah, well, the back story was never really well thought through...

[nuke11]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Answer that for the rest of the Morrow vehicle fleet! Seriously, if they can do it for all the V-150's or Strykers or whatever vehicles are being used then they can do it for some helicopters and a few planes as well.

Yeah, well, the back story was never really well thought through...

I have talked with all of the original designers and writers of TMP and Kevin came up with the idea of fusion powered vehicles, so the game wouldn't turn into a Mad Max Road Warrior search for gasoline game. The idea of fusion was to unshackle the players from a constant search for fuel, that's it. The rest of the premise evolved out of the fusion power premise. The glaring holes where never filled in as there was no need to, as anything pre-fusion was glossed over or ignored completely.

So anyone that read the game and played it, the first thing that was changed was the war date. Most increased the date to allow more time for the fusion switch over or to add the new weapons coming out in the 80's and 90's. My group we changed the date to one in the mid 1990's and then a last change to the year 2000.

For either series of games 1st/2nd/3rd or 4th edition the 1987 and 1989 dates are all that are common and are fixed in time.

As to how the project converted from petroleum to fusion is for another thread, but from the 1st/2nd/3rd editions we start sometime in the late 60's to 1987 and the 4th edition we start sometime in the mid 70's to 1987 as well.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by nuke11

I have talked with all of the original designers and writers of TMP and Kevin came up with the idea of fusion powered vehicles, so the game wouldn't turn into a Mad Max Road Warrior search for gasoline game. The idea of fusion was to unshackle the players from a constant search for fuel, that's it. The rest of the premise evolved out of the fusion power premise. The glaring holes where never filled in as there was no need to, as anything pre-fusion was glossed over or ignored completely.

My point was simply that the problem with the introduction with fusion does not really apply preferentially to one type of vehicle or another - if you can gloss over ignore the way the Project created a fusion ground fleet, then gloss over or ignore that they were able to do so for aircraft as well. And if you have an alternate explanation, then use that alternate explanation for aircraft as well.

Personally, I think that there are better ways to handle the backstory that would lead to a better foundation for the game... but who doesn't? Regardless, as you suggested, anything not related to aircraft should really be in another thread.