Prime Base, Old vs New

[tsofian]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

There are trade offs, but there is still a clearly right answer. All of these different functions have different classification levels within the scope of the Project, and grouping them together effectively reduces the combined facility to the lowest classification level.

Prime Base must serve as the national command authority, operating at the highest possible classification level. What classification level are the aerial transport ops running out of the attached air base? How hard is it for someone to get access to those operations and get the chance to observe that something bigger is also happening there? And that goes for every single function. It's why the White House doesn't double as anything else. Every single unclassified or lower-classified person who can see your doors or your people endangers the operation, especially when the operation doesn't need to be public in the first place.

We do embed top secret facilities inside lower-classified facilities in the real world, but we do that because we cannot otherwise camouflage the traffic associated with the TS facility. But PB, at least the command authority, does not need any traffic. It's a hole in the ground in the desert. No one needs to come within a hundred miles of it for it to do 100% of its job, so why give anyone any reason to do so?



(1) Boltholes aren't that small.
(2) When you already have hundreds or thousands of facilities, the relative construction risk of one huge facility versus a dozen small-to-medium facilities as not significantly higher, and the operational risks are MUCH higher, not to mention the risk of catching an unlikely nuke.
(3) The Project must have some way of addressing pre-war discovery. Unless they have a 100% success rate in all construction and recruiting and purchasing and everything else, they will need a way to silence witnesses.


If that is the case, you group facilities at the same classification level. You combine a logistics base with a power facility with a hospital. You don't combine your command base and your transportation hub.



In canon, the planners built PB, a backup, and 10 regional bases, plus numerous other large facilities (Delta, for example). There is nothing to indicate that they were forced to do so, other than that the authors made a decision for which they included little or no support.

I'm pretty sure you and I would disagree on pretty much everything