Prime Base Doors

[tsofian]

Earlier I posited that there are five types of entrances into Prime Base. This includes the construction entrance, an entrance for use after construction but before full activation, a number of escape exits, at least one sally port and main entrances for use during full activation.

Each of these is a different size, performs a different function, is hidden and operated in different ways.

The escape exits are the easiest-These are tubes that lead to the surface. They are steel tubes a couple of feet in diameter and the top few hundred feet are cofferdammed with sand. On the surface is a counterweighted stone cap that blends in with the natural surface. They are entered from various parts of the base via outward opening armored doors, each of which has vision pistol ports. These will suffer over the decades. If their lid comes loose water will infiltrate down the tube and possible cause the bottom of the cofferdam to fail and release all the sand into the repository designed for it, leaving a hollow tube with a camouflage cap. If the tube is in an area hit hard by a blast wave the tube can be partly uncovered and perhaps crushed. Erosion may similarly leave a tube sticking out of the ground, which may or may not be visible through the vegetation. In any case the players may find these over the top of the base area. If they can dig through a couple of hundred feet of sand they face a 6 inch steel armored door.

The Sally Port exit(s) might be the next most simple. I designed these so that they are secret until opened, and then they are pretty much visible. The Sally Ports open from small garages which hold equipment that would be of value around the base just after they open up. The exterior wall is drilled from inside and is ready to have charges placed to break it open (and the rubble has an internal pit into which it can fall. If there has been enough erosion the drill holes might go all the way to the surface and water might be dripping into the sally port tunnel. This might be a CLUE!

The construction entrance is a former mine entrance, one designed for heavy equipment, however you do this when construction is complete the ceiling gets dropped and so much for any worries there.

The sneaky pete entrance is down a 2500 foot fairly horizontal gallery. It ends in a cave in, behind which is a steel door. To one side of the cave in is a side gallery which appears to be flooded. the pool does go all the way to the ceiling. The gallery goes around the blockage and into a lined tunnel.

The final entrance is the one for the main operation, and I'm still gonna stick with it being partly dug but either a tunnel boring machine or a bunch of pre-drilled holes ready for explosives.

[tsofian]

Sorry for the original "stream of consciousness" post.

In the original module there is basically only a single way to get into the base. If the players don't find it they are screwed. In this revision there are several possible ways to get in.

Traditional Entrance
There is the "traditional" entrance used between the time the base is finished and when the main entrance gets uncorked. This entrance goes through the decon facility. It doesn't have to be very big, because no heavy equipment will use it. It does have to be able to be kept secret, both before and after the war starts. Between the end of the construction period and the time the bombs fall people will go in and out of the base, how can this be kept hidden? I've made a couple of suggestions, but ymmv. No matter how you "cover" this entrance I'm putting it at the end of half a mile of horizontal hard rock mine gallery. The gallery has several side tunnels, one of which appears to end in an underground lake. The main gallery ends at the face, where digging ended when the mine was closed.

The underground lake can either be swum through, with scuba equipment to be safe, or without for risk takers, and that comes up in a tunnel that bypasses the face and enters a modern tunnel leading to the decon facility. The face is designed to be removed at some point. The underground lake can also be drained in about half an hour with pumps, or the deeper part of the gallery can be flooded to a higher level. This gives the PD an option. The underground lake could be an insignificant puddle or it might be twenty feet deep and a couple of hundred feet up the mine gallery. It depends upon how tough you want to make things for the players.

In any case after the two tunnels join there is a steel security door. Beyond that is another few hundred feet of tunnel leading to the security post, the decon facility and the triage area. I added a small garage to the triage area. This includes a couple of bobcats for tunnel maintenance, some motorcycles and ATVs for recon (all standard prewar manufacture to attract the minimum amount of attention) and some electrical carts set up as passenger vehicles or ambulances to haul folks around the tunnels as needed

Emergency Exits
The various emergency exits offer a number of failure modes that may give access into the base without going through the decon facility, since these were one way out only routes.

Sally Ports
The one or two "sally ports" can have enough surface erosion to expose the pre-drilled holes designed to accept explosive charges to blast. Characters might notice these perfectly round holes and that any water that goes in drips out the far end. There may even be some strange whistling sound coming from them as the wind passes over them. A really kind PD might have had the Base open a sally port during the time they were building their little social experiment. In that case there would have been a desperate attempt to conceal and seal this entrance. I would say a lot of explosives would be involved, some to drop the entrance and some in the tunnel from the sally port back into the base itself.

The sally ports themselves have a small garage with a group of ready use vehicles that were to be kept in operational condition through the long wait. These include a bulldozer. some recon vehicles and such. The idea is that these sally groups can scout around the base area.

The two ways characters will not be able to use are the original construction entrance, which was a huge mine gallery, as that was sealed with a massive cave in, and the main operational entrance, which is still at least 100 feet shy of getting to the surface.

This gives players several ways in, and gives the base some additional capabilities.

A Note of Doors
All tunnels are closed by a heavy steel door, which is gas tight. All entrances are covered with cameras and microphones. There are obvious and concealed ones. There is also at least one microphone. All doors open outwards, so any attempts to battery them will be less effective. The frames of the doors connect directly to a steel throat which effectively prevents blasting around the door and bypassing it to get into the tunnel behind it. It is easier to blast the door than the structure around it. All these doors have vision and weapon ports as well as a chute through which grenades can be ejected into the tunnel. All of these ports are gas tight. These doors are more than a foot thick and are similar to those found at Cheyenne Mountain.

In the emergency exits these doors are a few inches thick and have vision and pistol ports, and a grenade chute. These are also gas tight.

[tsofian]

The Emergency Exit doors do not have card readers and can only be opened from inside. To break through them will require violence, a LOT of violence.

The rest of the Prime Base external doors can be opened with Morrow Project ID cards, but there are some twists. A Prime Base card may open a door, but only if the card holder has been given "external access" in the system. This is done by Base Operations through base Security. It means the person will be outside the base and will need to get back in.

All Regional Command Teams have an "ALL ACCESS" (AA) card(s) that allow field team personnel to make access to a base. If the base is in the Command Teams Area of Operations (AOO) the AA card and a single MPID is needed. If the base is outside the AOO then the number of additional MPID cards required depends upon the size of the base. Caches require 2 cards and the AA, Area bases require 3 MPID, Regional bases 4 and Prime Base 5 MPID and the AA.

When Prime Base went down ALL Prime Base IDs were collected and ALL external access for them was withdrawn.