Rethinking Operation Reset

[DigTw0Grav3s]

Perhaps tangential, but would fiat currency - particularly in a digital format - have any value after the exchange? The nuclear obliteration of most global industry would ensure that straight barter and enforceable I.O.U.s would be the only viable enconomics left, no?

If I'm trying to reload my own brass and hope that the harvest turns out this year, a bunch of binary values in some NYC vault don't have much value to me, do they?

Also, wouldn't most of the actual hard communications infrastructure be toast with or without the computers that run them? Satellite dishes would be toast, EMP effects would have used the power grid as a massive tuning fork, and the like.

[raketenjagdpanzer]

Originally Posted by DigTw0Grav3s

Perhaps tangential, but would fiat currency - particularly in a digital format - have any value after the exchange? The nuclear obliteration of most global industry would ensure that straight barter and enforceable I.O.U.s would be the only viable enconomics left, no?

If I'm trying to reload my own brass and hope that the harvest turns out this year, a bunch of binary values in some NYC vault don't have much value to me, do they?

Not for you (or me) but for governments and large businesses (and you better believe they'd want to get back in the business of industry and governance again PDQ...again, there'd be massive devaluation and currency would likely still have to trade on physical assets ("How much gold is in Fort Knox, did you say?"), but I would tend to think there'd be some EFT going on as quickly as reset got going again in a serious way.

Also, wouldn't most of the actual hard communications infrastructure be toast with or without the computers that run them? Satellite dishes would be toast, EMP effects would have used the power grid as a massive tuning fork, and the like.

It depends; again, the communication backbones (the military/government ones) the post-disaster internet were to rely on are fairly robust.

Of course if you're in a Grimdark mood you can take the "EMP was far worse than anyone imagined" line from one of the sourcebooks and say "Well, no it's not working at all any more" and then it's gone.

Lest anyone think I'm promoting a "USA Triumphs over all" theme, I'm talking about events happening over a decade or two; Reset is the linchpin here.

[oldschoolgm]

I agree with raketenjagdpanzer with regards to long term reasons for wanting such a device for having computers back up, but I still can't see a non-intel player character buying into the significance of that when they are out there trying to survive.

Having a more concrete short term goal for the information and device would offer the players a plot that could unfold for almost any length of time.

Also with regards to communications lines, I know the military had a significant communications backbone in the mid-90's though I am not sure as to the robustness of it so I'm not totally sure how much of it would have survived after 4+ years of war. On another note too, is the time diference between real world mid 90's to what was envisioned when the game was originally written in the early 80's. Cell phones were in fairly wide use in the mid-90's but there is no such thing in the game canon.

Time for me to go back to my books and see if there is more to say on the communications infrastructure that was assumed to be in place at the time of the start of the war.

[Webstral]

A little feedback on some of the ideas presented here:

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

One, either MilGov or CivGov can quickly process a census and then appoint a legitimate US Government instead of the rump government in Colorado Springs (you know, the one with multiple senators from the same district, fistfights and shootouts on the senate floor, etc.) That's the thing that's stopping MilGov from handing power back to the government: voting, election, establishment of a clear civilian government since the line of succession broke down and Continuance of Government took so long to restart.

That’s a very interesting idea. I’m going to think about this one for a while. Collating the data is a huge task, but I don’t believe the combining and analyzing part of the data is the real bottleneck. Getting people to go door-to-door (or whatever the post-Exchange equivalent will be) to collect reliable information is going to be the big challenge.

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Two, recovery of economic and financial records. NYC is still intact, and there are billions, possibly trillions, of dollars in electronic funds in downed computers there (and elsewhere in the country). Even factoring in massive deflation and currency devaluation, there's lots of money still in the US. Getting that money to trading partners without relying on a sketchy tramp steamer maybe getting gold bullion to France or Australia in six to eight months would be an enormous boon to the US recovery.

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Not for you (or me) but for governments and large businesses (and you better believe they'd want to get back in the business of industry and governance again PDQ...again, there'd be massive devaluation and currency would likely still have to trade on physical assets ("How much gold is in Fort Knox, did you say?"), but I would tend to think there'd be some EFT going on as quickly as reset got going again in a serious way.

The US is a generation away from electronic money playing any part in the economy, and I’m being generous by saying it’s a single generation away. The only thing worth less than a paper US dollar in 2000 is an electronic dollar. You can at least wipe your fourth point of contact with a $1 bill. In 2000/2001, the whole idea of currency has very little currency—at least in the US. In 1997, the dollar is backed purely by faith. After the Exchange, paper money not backed by something tangible and readily at hand, like food, fuel, or something else people want right away, isn’t going to be worth collecting except to start a fire. Electronic money will be worth even less than that. It’s hard to imagine that Milgov, with its multitude of very real and immediate challenges, is going to view the recovery of electronic funds from NYC as worthy of as much consideration as we have already given it.

As for big business, there isn’t any. All economic ventures of any size in the US are being conducted by one government or another or under the direct control of one government or another. I’d be willing to discuss whether large-scale ventures in Colorado involve some private entities larger than their counterparts spread across CONUS. But in 2001, the American economy is more a hybrid of feudalism and communism than anything capitalists would recognize.

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Three, management of disaster recovery resources. It's all well and good to say "We're going to send the 805th Military Police Combat Brigade to help reestablish a bridgehead in St. Louis and clean out bandits so locals can plant and rebuild and a major Mississippi crossing can be reconstructed" but what happens when after weeks of drive-brew-refuel-drive-brew-refuel you get there and there's literally nobody left, because due to famine or plague rumors the 1200 or so civilians fled? Now what? Real-time (or nearer-real-time) communications would ameliorate such situations.

Ham radio.

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Four, manufacturing. Even in the 80s and 90s there was a lot of computer controlled manufacturing in the US. I could buy, for $2500 in 1990, a computer-controlled milling machine that would run off of my PC and produce some pretty amazing tolerances - it was sold as a geek toy! Most computer controlled machinery and so forth runs on incredibly low-level hardware. Imagine getting just one or two auto parts factory lines working again and loading in other 3d models and so forth, so now you can make parts for water pumps, hospital equipment, refinery parts, and so on. Same thing goes for drug manufacturing: being able to precision control environments for producing more exotic drugs will help greatly.

Yes, yes, yes! A thousand times yes! The labor picture in 2001 begs for automation. Ironically, while the cost of labor has dropped to the bottom of the well, there are severe shortages of it. Subsistence agriculture practiced by people who didn’t even garden before the war is going to consume anywhere from half to 90% of the labor in any given locale. Automating tasks that might otherwise consume the time of a skilled machinist would be a godsend to everyone—especially the Colorado cantonment, where economies of scale are more practicable than almost anywhere else in the country.

By the way, this dovetails into my argument for manufacturing a standardized assault rifle in Colorado. Assembly lines with a degree of automation will be far more efficient users of labor than decentralized gunsmithing. I’ll get back to that thread one of these days.

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Five, communications. I mentioned in another thread that DARPA/ARPAnet was designed to survive a nuclear war, and it would. It would be particularly healthy after a low-level exchange as outlined in Twilight:2000. However, computers to use the infrastructure are going to be rare. Getting extant systems working again will be key - and you need nothing more powerful than a computer that can run a VT52 terminal emulation program and some kind of IP stack and support some kind of networking (RJ11, Token Ring, RS232, IEE488, and on and on) hardware. A Commodore VIC-20 can do it. An Imsai 8080 with a terminal and keyboard can do it. Likewise, what if NASA or better still NOAA could communicate with satellites again? Hurricanes ravaging the southeast without warning would cease to be a huge problem. Tie that back into a working ARPANet and now you've got the problem under control.

I support this.

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Direct military applications of getting computers working again is of course a high priority too. Imagine an M577 actually becoming a command track again rather than a big air-conditioned personnel carrier. What if electronics that required computer tests to maintain (radar sets, computer controlled rangefinders, etc.) and consequently hadn't been working or working properly for 2-3 years could now operate again?

This, too—although I’m doubtful about the priority of getting tactical ground-based radar to work again.

Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer

Finally, something I didn't touch on in the other thread but I will here: working computers are a sign of recovery. Imagine, you go down to register yourself and your family at a relocation zone. You walk into a half-destroyed building, everything's lit with kerosene lanterns, the clerk writes your name down in pencil on a yellow pad, slips an ultra-worn out piece of carbon paper between two pages and has you fill out your ration chit...very depressing. My god, you think, this is...this is 1890s...we're never coming back from this...Same scene, but there's power, and they've got a kaypro luggable. Your info grinds out on a dot-matrix printer, is saved to floppy disk, the clerk tells you if you need another copy of the chit, come see him, he can print another out. That says "things are getting better" or "things aren't that bad". It gives people hope.

In my mind, this aspect is second only to the advantages of automating manufacturing. Morale in post-Exchange America is in desperate need of a boost. I like the description above very much.

Inventory management would be greatly facilitated by computers, just as it is today. By the end of 1998, SAMAD is starting to tackle the salvage situation. This, by the way, is one of the larger private ventures in SAMAD and thus Arizona. There are at least a quarter million passenger cars in southeastern Arizona just waiting to yield their spare parts. Then there are the commercial trucks and all manner of military vehicles. Then there are all of the various machines. Agriculture in SAMAD is highly labor intensive. Salvage operations are going to have to make do with very limited manpower. At the same time, manufacturing is going to have huge demands on limited manpower and materials. Computerized inventories can go a long way towards economizing new production by helping keep track of the salvaged and available spare parts and potential substitutes throughout SAMAD.

[Adm.Lee]

I agree that an espionage spirit seems to inhabit the FCoK module, enhanced by the Reset pieces. IMO, that's because one needs something interesting to do in the city, or else it just becomes another place to shoot up.

For me, it points to something that a very small party (1-3 players) might be able to handle. Guerrilla warfare in small quantities doesn't go very far.

Having said that, just about every (not very small) party I've brought to Krakow shucked the plans ASAP, and spent their energy hunting down the traitorous Cutler before getting on the boat north.

[oldschoolgm]

I've played through FCoK 3 times, and every time the RESET option has been ignored, dropped or glossed over. That is why I feel it needs more relevancy. For my games I will probably go with something like what is outlined above, though I'm enjoying hearing what everyone has to say. I've never played with a group that really got into the whole spy/intel element of this game so Operation RESET has seemed like a lame duck to me.

I do wonder though what it would look like if a good group of players really got into the cloak and dagger feel of Operation RESET in Krakow?

[TrailerParkJawa]

The US Dollar is a fiat currency. It and all other paper assets would go to zero within months, weeks, or even days of the nuclear exchange. Recovering digital money in 2000 or later would not be a workable solution. There is no Federal Reserve, no federal govt to enforce fiat money, no corporations, and most important no faith.

Something else to think about is the banking system is fractional reserve. So the money in accounts is collateral against all the loans the bank has made. Everyone is going to default after TDM thus all the banks are insolvents and the money supply goes poof!


Otherwise I like the ideas put forth by rakenjagdpanzer.

As to the original poster I remember thinking Operation Reset was pretty cool. Course I didn't know anything about computers aside from playing games on my Commodore 64. Now of course we know that computers could likely be hobbled together from parts.

As for Krakow the one game I remember running I think the players skipped it.