The Back up Prime

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I have a problem with this for a few reasons.

First, as an electrical engineer, if they can tap into the system well enough to disable the deadman switch (which properly would not even be networked to avoid this kind of cockup) then they can deliver a message so that when they woke up on time they get the message to lay low and look out for hostiles. Regardless, upon waking their first task would be to contact PB1, and the lack of a response would tell them 90% of what they need to know.

Second, it is just a huge gamble. How would they have any idea how long PB2 needs to slumber, and why would they take the risk that their estimate is accurate enough to justify the risk?

They cannot make any but the most pessimistic estimate. They know nothing about the group that attacked them except that they have nuclear weapons, very capable biowarfare scientists, and have absolutely no remorse in slaughtering civilians. They did not even state a reason.

Without the ability to gather any intelligence because everyone around you has less than 72 hours before dying of a man made plague, waking anyone else condemns them to the same. PB1 can’t risk anyone from TMP coming to their rescue for fear it dooms the entire Project. PB1 can’t even risk communicating to other assets for fear of giving away that the Base is not entirely dead and that other assets are out there waiting for a command signal to awaken.

Their course of action is to make every appearance that PB1 is dead. To convince the attackers, whoever they maybe, that PB1 is dead and there are no more TMP assets. Anywhere.

This is a mad gamble. I don’t see that PB1 had another choice.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Not the way I would do it but not unreasonable either. Go for it.

Most day to day stuff is going to be handled by a Regional base, PB1 or PB2 is going to coordinate and set priorities for efforts that affect regions where there is overlap or assets have to be shared such as generated electricity. PB1 and PB2 are likely to handle the MARS elements or control some directly to deal with hotspots so Combined Groups don’t spend their time and assets flying from one fight to another.

PBs are going to hold the reins on air assets greater than utility helicopters , such as Chinooks, Caribou, Hercules, and any converted civil craft like 727s or 747s. Regional bases and Combined Groups would have the Cayuse, Kiowa, and Iroquois (Huey) for medevac and scouting.

PBs are going to hold the reins on Artillery and medium or long range antiaircraft weapons. There isn’t going to be much of that in the Project and that needs to be firmly controlled.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

That is a great argument for having a factory somewhere, but not a great argument for collocating with PB2. It's like putting all the teams in a combined group all in one bolthole - the coordination advantage is offset by the massive risk of putting so much in one basket. Just look at how much of the Project's resources were lost with PB1, would you really compound your risk by doing that twice??

Where do you put it when you cannot with surety predict what will and what will not be around after a full nuclear exchange? How can you predict which region will be the best and most effective to begin a recovery operation? I am by no means advocating that PBs are the only manufacturing facility, only that PBs are the most general and rounded of manufacturing facilities. A PB is the hubs of the effort and Regional Bases (RBs) have been shown to be Command and Control, a Motor Pool, Living Quarters, and a Warehouse. A PB is a Generalist and I would expect a specialist factory such as paper mills, smelters, textile mills, etc exist; though this is conjecture and not supported by canon. For all we know there are absolutely zero factories outside of the Project with the assumption that with some help, some power, and gathering the right people, civilian factories could be restarted months after the War. Highly optimistic in my view point.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I guess I just don't see the advantage of spending freeze tubes and storage space on something that could be replicated with a couple of digital libraries, more useful Morrow personnel, and whoever could be scrounged from the survivors. This seems like a relatively low priority, and very long term. Personally, I would spend that space on more field teams. Maybe make sure that some of THEM are PhD's. Recruit from Alaska, they grow them rugged.

Those are nice, but nothing beats having someone explain a subject to you in bite size pieces to you. Another thing is those Project personnel are busy; and one can expect a certain level of attrition due to the dangers of the recovery effort. Who knows what you can expect from the survivors, nuclear fires and plague are not going to discriminate. This is a longer term and more a phase two approach to the recovery effort. Additionally, I like to throw scenarios like this at PCs…… Helpless, yet valuable, civilians to protect and assist; in this way I can steer a game back around to recovery and restoring civilization if it takes a too warlike path. NPCs are great for that.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Their course of action is to make every appearance that PB1 is dead. To convince the attackers, whoever they maybe, that PB1 is dead and there are no more TMP assets. Anywhere.

This is a mad gamble. I don’t see that PB1 had another choice.

Except that the very thing you are proposing to do is communicate with the one other Morrow facility that the enemy must not find, and doing it while the enemy is at your gate and presumably monitoring your communications. In order to stop the automatic wakeup of PB2 they would need to establish a communications link that was very directional and/or very powerful, hack into a system that has absolutely no reason to be accessible by computer anyway (like hacking into a light switch), and gamble that the completely arbitrary wake up time they just picked is better than the completely arbitrary wake up time that already exists, all at the risk of screwing things up. and killing the Project.

You're dying. You are at best leaving suggestions for the people who are going to take over the Project after you are dead. If you are going to do that, why not just send them an after action report and let them make their own decisions when they wake?

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Where do you put it when you cannot with surety predict what will and what will not be around after a full nuclear exchange?

I am not disputing the need for Morrow production facilities, rather I am espousing the mathematical advantage in dispersing them as much as possible. To simplify, assume that 20% of the surface of the country was going to be destroyed in the war, and that you are randomly placing assets into facilities. If you place all your assets in one facility then you have an 80% chance of getting through without losses but a 20% chance of losing everything. The more you spread your assets out the lower the standard deviation becomes and the closer you get to losing 20% of your assets and having 80% survive - not great, but worthwhile when you absolutely cannot accept a total loss. It is the same basic reason why infantry squads don't cluster together in one tight group when under fire, the reason why Navy battlegroups are spread so far apart that the ships are often over the horizon from each other.

This lends to one-man boltholes if taken to that extreme, but it is counteracted somewhat by the fact that the standard deviation has dropped enough at the team level that going lower than that doesn't help that much. In addition, there are risks and inefficiencies in being spread out and since your real metric is not survivability but rather total post-war effectiveness (which includes survivability AND efficiency) there are going to be larger facilities because some facilities are much more efficient if they are larger.

So I agree with the need for general factories and perhaps a few specialized plants, but unless there is some significant need for asset A and asset B to share a facility it makes more mathematical sense to split them into separate facilities so that one nuke doesn't take out both.

Oh, as another point, remember that adding capabilities to PB1 or PB2 also increases their exposure. Manufacturing facilities have trucks coming in and out, medical facilities add patients, etc, etc. Every person or signal that comes into a base increases the odds that it will be detected and makes it that much easier to destroy, so why add signals and people that are not necessary to the core function?

PB1 was not taken out until it began caring for refugees, something that should have been farmed out to a nearby Recon team rather than risk exposing headquarters. The nuke was gotten to the base because they set up recovery efforts in their front yard. Command and control are different functions than recovery, and if they had taken the basic steps of spreading these different functions out Krell would probably have never even spent the nuke for lack of a worthwhile target.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Those are nice, but nothing beats having someone explain a subject to you in bite size pieces to you. Another thing is those Project personnel are busy; and one can expect a certain level of attrition due to the dangers of the recovery effort. Who knows what you can expect from the survivors, nuclear fires and plague are not going to discriminate. This is a longer term and more a phase two approach to the recovery effort.

And you are asset starved with no guarantee of getting to phase two if you are spending survival resources on such. If your Project personnel are too busy to teach or dying too often, why not spend those tubes on guys who can teach AND fight so that the rest of your personnel aren't so busy and more likely to survive? If phase one is unsuccessful, phase two doesn't really matter!

And incidentally, this is the reason why Morrow personnel were all supposed to be college graduates - retaining knowledge and teaching it is a core mission of the entire Project, exactly what they are supposed to shift over to when survival and priority reconstruction become less time consuming.

Originally Posted by ArmySGT.

Additionally, I like to throw scenarios like this at PCs…… Helpless, yet valuable, civilians to protect and assist; in this way I can steer a game back around to recovery and restoring civilization if it takes a too warlike path. NPCs are great for that.

Sure, but the game is already filthy with helpless NPC's, and many of them are valuable. Most Morrow base personnel fit the bill already, as do a great many non-Morrow personnel. The world cannot be entirely composed of heroes and villains, it must be dominated in numbers by the mundane.

By the way, if I wanted helpless but valuable Morrow personnel for this reason, I would use a hospital - medical staff are important at all stages, rarely combat effective (besides the medics in the field), and notably a part of that recovery and restoration mission. An agriculture or construction support base would be good too, and none of them need to be collocated, just vulnerable and near enough by to be reachable.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Except that the very thing you are proposing to do is communicate with the one other Morrow facility that the enemy must not find, and doing it while the enemy is at your gate and presumably monitoring your communications. In order to stop the automatic wakeup of PB2 they would need to establish a communications link that was very directional and/or very powerful, hack into a system that has absolutely no reason to be accessible by computer anyway (like hacking into a light switch), and gamble that the completely arbitrary wake up time they just picked is better than the completely arbitrary wake up time that already exists, all at the risk of screwing things up. and killing the Project.

I guess one part we differ on is the location of the “Deadman switch”. I think it is integrally linked to the PB1 facilities…. Enough systems go offline, power, environmental, communications; and PB1 has a redundant single purpose transmitter that says we are dead. PB2 like a bolt hole is otherwise waiting for a wake up signal.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

You're dying. You are at best leaving suggestions for the people who are going to take over the Project after you are dead. If you are going to do that, why not just send them an after action report and let them make their own decisions when they wake?

I am saying nothing was sent at all. Absolutely nothing is know about an enemy that has and uses nuclear weapons and biowarfare plagues. To assume the do not have just a sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities wouldn’t help matters. The Project Command Staff at PB1 decided dying in place and doing their best to convince this enemy that all of the Project is dead too was their best option. The decide to delay the wake up and hope that a mass recall message in a few years gets the Project going. Hopefully, without the same fate as PB1 from an unknown , aggressive, and extremely well equipped attacker.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I am not disputing the need for Morrow production facilities, rather I am espousing the mathematical advantage in dispersing them as much as possible. To simplify, assume that 20% of the surface of the country was going to be destroyed in the war, and that you are randomly placing assets into facilities. If you place all your assets in one facility then you have an 80% chance of getting through without losses but a 20% chance of losing everything. The more you spread your assets out the lower the standard deviation becomes and the closer you get to losing 20% of your assets and having 80% survive - not great, but worthwhile when you absolutely cannot accept a total loss. It is the same basic reason why infantry squads don't cluster together in one tight group when under fire, the reason why Navy battlegroups are spread so far apart that the ships are often over the horizon from each other.

Meh, poh –tay-toe, poh-tah-toh…. I am saying I think that PB1 and PB2 should have full and general production capabilities and others with specialized, more efficient, and with higher outputs exist in areas closest to raw materials.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

This lends to one-man boltholes if taken to that extreme, but it is counteracted somewhat by the fact that the standard deviation has dropped enough at the team level that going lower than that doesn't help that much. In addition, there are risks and inefficiencies in being spread out and since your real metric is not survivability but rather total post-war effectiveness (which includes survivability AND efficiency) there are going to be larger facilities because some facilities are much more efficient if they are larger.

Again I believe in a man power poor, and resource rich Project. So I think some overly optimistic and zealous civil engineers with immense budgets built some outrageously survivable shelters.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

So I agree with the need for general factories and perhaps a few specialized plants, but unless there is some significant need for asset A and asset B to share a facility it makes more mathematical sense to split them into separate facilities so that one nuke doesn't take out both.

There are some plant operators and production managers that would love time to go over that mathematician with a baseball bat.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Oh, as another point, remember that adding capabilities to PB1 or PB2 also increases their exposure. Manufacturing facilities have trucks coming in and out, medical facilities add patients, etc, etc. Every person or signal that comes into a base increases the odds that it will be detected and makes it that much easier to destroy, so why add signals and people that are not necessary to the core function?

Once the Project is open and teams are in the field for the intended mission I would believe 99% of the deception falls away.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

PB1 was not taken out until it began caring for refugees, something that should have been farmed out to a nearby Recon team rather than risk exposing headquarters. The nuke was gotten to the base because they set up recovery efforts in their front yard. Command and control are different functions than recovery, and if they had taken the basic steps of spreading these different functions out Krell would probably have never even spent the nuke for lack of a worthwhile target.

Illogical but, that is the plot……

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

And you are asset starved with no guarantee of getting to phase two if you are spending survival resources on such. If your Project personnel are too busy to teach or dying too often, why not spend those tubes on guys who can teach AND fight so that the rest of your personnel aren't so busy and more likely to survive? If phase one is unsuccessful, phase two doesn't really matter!

I don’t feel the Project is asset poor. Man power poor because people with the skill sets for this kind of work plus the personal background and mental strength to quit their lives, become dead to friends and family, and go into a tomb to come out into living hell…….. rare isn’t even actually descriptive enough for this person who must only exist in fiction writing.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

And incidentally, this is the reason why Morrow personnel were all supposed to be college graduates - retaining knowledge and teaching it is a core mission of the entire Project, exactly what they are supposed to shift over to when survival and priority reconstruction become less time consuming.

Those degrees and knowledge supports their recovery mission and ensures competence and capability. That also ensures that they have something post reconstruction to fallback on. These people are going to be used up, burnt out, and it could be years, a decade before they get above the village level and phase two can begin. These academics will awaken fresh, as if the 20th century was yesterday, and their knowledge or skills sharp. Someone very skilled and very competent at teaching a skill set is probably to old and not physically up to the reconstruction effort. That is ok, their contribution is going to end the coming Dark Ages.

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Sure, but the game is already filthy with helpless NPC's, and many of them are valuable. Most Morrow base personnel fit the bill already, as do a great many non-Morrow personnel. The world cannot be entirely composed of heroes and villains, it must be dominated in numbers by the mundane.

I know! Fun isn’t it! I love post-apoc games!

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

By the way, if I wanted helpless but valuable Morrow personnel for this reason, I would use a hospital - medical staff are important at all stages, rarely combat effective (besides the medics in the field), and notably a part of that recovery and restoration mission. An agriculture or construction support base would be good too, and none of them need to be collocated, just vulnerable and near enough by to be reachable.

These have been done and are in canon already in “Falllback!” and “Final Watch”. Looking for some other ideas besides the ones found in the modules already. Ag base, supply base unmanned, commo base manned, commo unmanned, hospital, city scale power plant.

[mikeo80]

I played one game in which there was a backup to Prime. It was located in south east Kansas, the entrance was disguised as a corn silo.

The PB2 we encountered was un-manned. It was physically the same size as the PB of canon. There were automatic weapons at the entrance.

The PB2 we found had all of the supplies, workshops, etc. We found it by good luck.

As I recall what happened, our team received a distress call from a Frozen Watch team. Their bolt hole had had a catastrophic failure, most of the members got out. (Some did not.) Of course, they have no vehicles, or backpacks. Some had side arms only. The TL was able to grab a portable radio system. *I do not have my 3rd or 4th gen rule book at hand. I do not know or remember the exact nomenclature.*

The TL went to the top of a near by hill to broadcast for help. Our RO heard them, and we vectored to them.

What we learned was that the FW leader was "An ace in the hole". A member of Morrow Command with high enough rank to know where PB2 was. She was placed in with the FW as a fail-safe. She was NOT field command, so she slotted into our unit as a VERY useful information source.

Once we got IN to PB2, something happened that scared the snot out of us. As best our team medic could figure, post hypnotic suggestions. Some of the FW were designed as part of the backups to the operators of PB2.

It was JUST enough to get PB2 up and running. Enough to find others who were qualified to work in PB.

When the game ended, our little Recon Team was running patrol about 50 klicks from PB. Kind of a tripwire if something bad came our way. But we had a home. We now knew what had happened. We were The Morrow Project again.

BTW, in OUR PB, there was NO PHOENIX TEAM!!!!! (I really do NOT like Phoenix!!! Just saying.)

Game was a LOT of fun. It lasted about 1 1/2 years game time.

my $0.02

Mike

[tsofian]

Looking at the maps I really can't see a better location for Prime Base. Northern Maine might work, or the northern part of Wisconsin and the UP of Michigan, but other then the general northern Nevada, southern Idaho and south eastern Oregon that is really the only parts of the country that won't get either totally plastered with nukes or covered with fallout, or overrun with refugees.

For the "frozen" bases only the nuke parts matter. So long as the bases aren't discovered being covered with fallout or stampeded over by hordes or refugees (so long as they don't stick around and build a city over your head) won't matter much

It does indicate that the back up base is probably in the northern tier of States.

Of course in a universe where ELF arrays are still active in Wisconsin and Michigan that rules those areas out, since they will get hammered.

I am thinking Maine.

[mmartin798]

For such a key story element, they sure get their stories mixed up about Prime Base and the Backup Prime. For instance, 3rd edition says the Backup Prime staff is all in "cold storage". 4th edition states that Backup Prime is smaller, with relatively few frozen specialist in addition to the "awake team".

So 3rd edition, with Backup being frozen you can make a case for it not activating the Project in a timely manner. But in 4th edition, Backup Prime has staffers awake. No reason they can't be in radio silence with Prime Base broadcasting updated after the bombs fall to keep them current. But that would mean they would be aware of any problem at Prime Base and could start working up contingency plans.

There has to be some version of the story we agree to about the fall of Prime and the normal operational status of Backup Prime. Otherwise it is just a lot easier to just say, "There was a problem and the wake signals never got sent" with no attempt to explain it.