Living in prime base

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

I know that is why the Base fell, but creating a permanent Morrow colony would be even worse than a temporary aid station because it would be larger, permanent, constantly linked to the Base through heavy traffic, and utterly impossible to abandon. With so many people involved in the planning of the Project, I find it hard to believe that the idea of external settlement would be accepted as a realistic possibility.

In its operational phase, you will have air traffic from the runway and helipad already making the location fairly obvious once it become common place to ship out custom parts, bring in samples, etc. Once that happens, some surface structures would just start to make sense. It seems likely that eventually you will have a semi-permanent settlement on the surface at or very near Prime Base. The only real question is when.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by mmartin798

In its operational phase, you will have air traffic from the runway and helipad already making the location fairly obvious once it become common place to ship out custom parts, bring in samples, etc. Once that happens, some surface structures would just start to make sense. It seems likely that eventually you will have a semi-permanent settlement on the surface at or very near Prime Base. The only real question is when.

And my point is that those are all Project assets, people for whom risking their lives is part of the job description and whose loss is an unfortunate cost of doing business. You do not necessarily need a "safe zone" to have those assets exposed and in use, but you DO need one to have your civilians out. How long does it take to secure things adequately to take that risk? I would be surprised if there was a "good" situation where you really felt you could secure the area and assemble housing and overcome the other problems in less than a year or two. And security concerns are likely to drive that back a couple of years more. At the point where you are so free to operate openly, it probably makes more sense to move major operations out of Nevada anyway!

Heck, if I were designing Prime and Second Base, I would design Prime to be in charge for the first 2-5 years and design Second to take over once open operations were possible. Prime Base needs to be tremendously secret and secure to get to and through the first stages of the Project, getting through after that has very different design considerations!

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

And my point is that those are all Project assets, people for whom risking their lives is part of the job description and whose loss is an unfortunate cost of doing business. You do not necessarily need a "safe zone" to have those assets exposed and in use, but you DO need one to have your civilians out. How long does it take to secure things adequately to take that risk? I would be surprised if there was a "good" situation where you really felt you could secure the area and assemble housing and overcome the other problems in less than a year or two. And security concerns are likely to drive that back a couple of years more. At the point where you are so free to operate openly, it probably makes more sense to move major operations out of Nevada anyway!

Heck, if I were designing Prime and Second Base, I would design Prime to be in charge for the first 2-5 years and design Second to take over once open operations were possible. Prime Base needs to be tremendously secret and secure to get to and through the first stages of the Project, getting through after that has very different design considerations!

I do see where you are coming from and agree the security risk arising from being overrun by refugees, warlords and religious fanatics in the early years if Prime has a more or less permanent surface structure is great. A permanent settlement in the early years is problem. But we are talking about people with families and the desire to get back to a "normal" existence again. What policies were in place for this is the question. One that gets very murky.

The Counsel of Tomorrow was assembled by Bruce Morrow. He told them what he saw and must have had a way to reasonably prove he traveled time. Prime Base is part of the plan the CoT was working toward, but Bruce Morrow wanted no knowledge of its location. How much of the leadership adopted a similar viewpoint, assigning plans for Prime Bases location and construction to the equivalent of a Special Access Program. Only those in the SAP would know where Prime Base would be and what the operational protocols would be with no oversight and review except in a need to know situation. The members would most likely be engineers, psychologist and the workers building and planning for many years underground. Those with extensive military and security backgrounds would have been pressed into the role of instructors doing combat training for team members as they enter the Project and not available to be in the SAP. Security planning might get limited to operational security during construction. As such, the discussions mentioned in the Prime Base module that lead to building the settlement could have been discussed prior to the war and considered acceptable risks. This would seem to be supported by the lack of sound military planning during the failed rescue and the porous security perimeter that allowed insurgents to bring in two WMDs into the settlement.

Better planning could have been done, that is a given. The compartmentalized secrecy in the Project tends to work against coordination and sharing of limited resources.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by mmartin798

I do see where you are coming from and agree the security risk arising from being overrun by refugees, warlords and religious fanatics in the early years if Prime has a more or less permanent surface structure is great. A permanent settlement in the early years is problem. But we are talking about people with families and the desire to get back to a "normal" existence again. What policies were in place for this is the question. One that gets very murky.

But also one that should have been addressed in multiple ways before PB was even staffed. The staff at PB could not be the kind of people who seriously needed to get back to a "normal" existence any time soon, any more than the field teams could be the kind of people who wanted to lead ordinarily selfish lives without risk of violence. If they cannot find people able and willing to live underground for 5 years (rough estimate), and then enforce it, then they cannot have Prime Base!

Originally Posted by mmartin798

The Counsel of Tomorrow was assembled by Bruce Morrow. He told them what he saw and must have had a way to reasonably prove he traveled time. Prime Base is part of the plan the CoT was working toward, but Bruce Morrow wanted no knowledge of its location. How much of the leadership adopted a similar viewpoint, assigning plans for Prime Bases location and construction to the equivalent of a Special Access Program.

I've worked those kinds of programs, and while the details must necessarily be compartmented the overall philosophy and SOP's cannot. Otherwise you wind up with Thunderdome (tm). BEM is a bit of a special case because he is a time traveler, but the CoT had to have a few people shoulder-deep in planning Prime Base.

Originally Posted by mmartin798

Only those in the SAP would know where Prime Base would be and what the operational protocols would be with no oversight and review except in a need to know situation.

Without a general awareness of how PB operates, the entire rest of the Project cannot even really start. You can't set up comminications or command protocols, you cannot lay in appropriate supplies or plan distribution networks, etc. There is a reason that half the people authorized on special access programs don't show up for the meetings - they're in charge of related projects that need a certain amount of information in order for their own projects to work. Or they're in charge of integrating the SAP product into a cohesive force.

Originally Posted by mmartin798

The members would most likely be engineers, psychologist and the workers building and planning for many years underground. Those with extensive military and security backgrounds would have been pressed into the role of instructors doing combat training for team members as they enter the Project and not available to be in the SAP. Security planning might get limited to operational security during construction. As such, the discussions mentioned in the Prime Base module that lead to building the settlement could have been discussed prior to the war and considered acceptable risks. This would seem to be supported by the lack of sound military planning during the failed rescue and the porous security perimeter that allowed insurgents to bring in two WMDs into the settlement.

This plays into one of the basic problems with PB in particular, TMP* in general, and fiction in very general. TMP starts off with the idea that these very competent were recruited, given tremendous resources and the advantage of knowing the future, but them for narrative purposes suddenly turn incompetent when called upon to do the exact jobs they trained for! Yes, the description of the fall of PB demonstrates a tremendous lack of planning and there are a number of inexplicably poor decisions, but the problem with letting all that stand (much less using it as the inspiration for more bad planning and decisions!) is that you can't build off of stupid. At least, you can't build smart off of stupid.

These are supposed to be competent people, if they are going to make predictably bad decisions, there needs to be a good reason why it would happen, otherwise they weren't competent. And if they weren't competent, then the game starts to look like Paranoia.

Incidentally, I always thought that the planners should have sought out a good ballistic missile sub commander to run PB. Get someone who has already been trained for isolation and to manage a ridiculously huge responsibility, and then give them a decade of additional training and experience putting the Project together - they wouldn't bat an eye at doing what needed to be done even when it was what they didn't want to do.

[mmartin798]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

But also one that should have been addressed in multiple ways before PB was even staffed. The staff at PB could not be the kind of people who seriously needed to get back to a "normal" existence any time soon, any more than the field teams could be the kind of people who wanted to lead ordinarily selfish lives without risk of violence. If they cannot find people able and willing to live underground for 5 years (rough estimate), and then enforce it, then they cannot have Prime Base!



I've worked those kinds of programs, and while the details must necessarily be compartmented the overall philosophy and SOP's cannot. Otherwise you wind up with Thunderdome (tm). BEM is a bit of a special case because he is a time traveler, but the CoT had to have a few people shoulder-deep in planning Prime Base.




Without a general awareness of how PB operates, the entire rest of the Project cannot even really start. You can't set up comminications or command protocols, you cannot lay in appropriate supplies or plan distribution networks, etc. There is a reason that half the people authorized on special access programs don't show up for the meetings - they're in charge of related projects that need a certain amount of information in order for their own projects to work. Or they're in charge of integrating the SAP product into a cohesive force.


This plays into one of the basic problems with PB in particular, TMP* in general, and fiction in very general. TMP starts off with the idea that these very competent were recruited, given tremendous resources and the advantage of knowing the future, but them for narrative purposes suddenly turn incompetent when called upon to do the exact jobs they trained for! Yes, the description of the fall of PB demonstrates a tremendous lack of planning and there are a number of inexplicably poor decisions, but the problem with letting all that stand (much less using it as the inspiration for more bad planning and decisions!) is that you can't build off of stupid. At least, you can't build smart off of stupid.

These are supposed to be competent people, if they are going to make predictably bad decisions, there needs to be a good reason why it would happen, otherwise they weren't competent. And if they weren't competent, then the game starts to look like Paranoia.

Incidentally, I always thought that the planners should have sought out a good ballistic missile sub commander to run PB. Get someone who has already been trained for isolation and to manage a ridiculously huge responsibility, and then give them a decade of additional training and experience putting the Project together - they wouldn't bat an eye at doing what needed to be done even when it was what they didn't want to do.

I never meant to imply that everything is compartmentalized to the extent nothing is shared. Communication protocols and the like would be shared. But there is a great deal that would not be shared by competent people that does not in and of itself mean they became incompetent. Politics and decisions about what is need to know can happen that result in really bad results. In retrospect, it can be seen as they made some bad calls and can set up procedures to address them. But that still does not mean that the best plan by the best minds does not have a hidden flaw.

Many examples of this exist with and without overt secrecy. Computer operating systems, with their millions of lines of code, have flaws. This does not mean that the army of programmers are incompetent, just that they do not have the time to audit all the code for unforeseen interactions that lead to vulnerabilities that can be exploited. For an example of policies that involve secrecy, you need not look any further back in time than the failure of the FBI and CIA to share intel marked as need to know information that, if they had, could have radically changed the events of 9/11.

Prime Base shares both of these issues. It is a huge project and, according to game canon, the location and many operational details are the biggest secret in the Project. Some rational decisions that might have been made include limiting security in Prime Base under the assumption that they can just active a number of MARS teams on demand. The fact that the Prime Base commander did not do this does not immediately make them incompetent either. It could just be hubris and when the situation grew too large, medical was reporting a disease that they could not identify that was killing them. Is the competent decision then to call in MARS teams that could become infected or try to institute a quarantine with people on hand already exposed?

Ultimately we have to remember this is a game that tells stories. If there are a couple deus ex machina that are used to get things going, so be it.

[Project_Sardonicus]

This is a fascinating subject and proof for my thoughts that a proper Morrow campaign would either be dark or ridiculous.

Look at this way lets see Prime Base has 500 staff, about standard for a far more modest UK ROTA bunker. They don't work for the government or even the military they work for a shady, illegal corporate body.

So they're going to sit nice and safe underground with lights and food and clean water etc etc Maybe even a couple of game stations whilst the world goes to hell around them? If you read books on NORAD and similar institutions there were severe doubts from the commanders that a significant percentage of crews would turn up or even fulfill their duties.

Their families, friends and pets are reduced to radioactive ash or eating each other? What kind of person wouldn't hop in an armoured vehicle or chopper and round up their family and bring them to safety? Not just on day one but on every day of the 5 years the project would be operating just observing?

So for my campaign a few ideas kick in

1 The Prime Base overwatch staff are primairly made up of loners. People with no families, subjects of bitter divorces who never want to see their families again. The kind of people who wouldn't crack the door open for any reason.

2 No kids and preferably no sex at all. This is a 5 year submarine mission any stress from relationship conflicts will cause problems, not to mention any kids and it gets crowded fast. So contraceptive injections compulsory.

3 The crew can't really be trusted so all weapons are locked away, all communications outwards are blocked and the doors are time locked.

4 Maybe a couple of human therapists. But mostly everyone has to do a couple of hours a week on a computerised cognitive behaviour program that attaches to the powerful AI actually running the base. This AI on a day by day basis decides access to key systems, what drugs staff are on (anti anxiety depressives), whether someone needs to go into cold storage and perhaps if a crew member is to dangerous to even live.

Like I say the project is absolutely not an accountable government body.

This creates an atmosphere where by the time the 5 years are up not only the Primebase crew most likely a pale skinned, race of drug addicted morlocks. But they're the polar opposite of the Recon teams they'll be waking up.

You can almost see how Krell becomes an inevitability.

[ArmySGT.]

Originally Posted by Project_Sardonicus

T
So for my campaign a few ideas kick in

1 The Prime Base overwatch staff are primairly made up of loners. People with no families, subjects of bitter divorces who never want to see their families again. The kind of people who wouldn't crack the door open for any reason.

2 No kids and preferably no sex at all. This is a 5 year submarine mission any stress from relationship conflicts will cause problems, not to mention any kids and it gets crowded fast. So contraceptive injections compulsory.

3 The crew can't really be trusted so all weapons are locked away, all communications outwards are blocked and the doors are time locked.

4 Maybe a couple of human therapists. But mostly everyone has to do a couple of hours a week on a computerised cognitive behaviour program that attaches to the powerful AI actually running the base. This AI on a day by day basis decides access to key systems, what drugs staff are on (anti anxiety depressives), whether someone needs to go into cold storage and perhaps if a crew member is to dangerous to even live.

Like I say the project is absolutely not an accountable government body.

This creates an atmosphere where by the time the 5 years are up not only the Primebase crew most likely a pale skinned, race of drug addicted morlocks. But they're the polar opposite of the Recon teams they'll be waking up.

You can almost see how Krell becomes an inevitability.

or this creates "Paranoia" the RPG........ which is one of my favorites BTW.