An Australian Morrow Project

[StainlessSteelCynic]

This is a more workable situation I think, particularly with the idea of refugees coming in from Indo-Pacific nations swamping the country and helping to deplete any resources available.
In terms of the road trains in Australia, it's common to see two trailers being hauled, these seem to be the most common images in the media. However some trucking companies regularly haul three and four trailers and it is not unusual to see some trucks hauling five trailers and sometimes more.

This is pretty normal because the rail network isn't viable in the more remote regions of Australia. Road transport is the only way and to achieve decent income, economy of scale means hauling many more trailers than would be seen in the more developed parts of the country. So in short, we have a precedent already for long road trains so it won't be much of a leap to having them in an Aussie version of the Project.

[mmartin798]

I have seen pictures of the triples and and quads from Australia. Quite impressive looking. Though given the need for road trains in Australia, the project there would likely have many teams equipped to either maintain or replace existing road infrastructure. Probably with a large number of graders, rollers. compactors, scrapers and loaders. They could either have a concrete plant to make a sealed roadway or just a crusher to convert broken concrete into material for making gravel road or, if they have the tar available, a chip and seal roadway. Growing up I remember the summers spent at my grandparents cabin. There is a quarry nearby and there were hundreds of loaded doubles running along the chip and seal road every month. The road withstood it well with relatively modest maintenance.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Typically , they'll use a lot less road working equipment. The vast majority of roads in the outback are unpaved because it's simply too expensive to seal them and then maintain them. They scrape the road out of the gravel and then level it every few years with a scraper and that's about it.

Australia has an average population density as of late 2018 of 3.3 people per square kilometre. In some outback areas, that density can drop to as little as 0.02 people per square km. We have a number of towns in outback areas revolving around primary industry and the distance between those towns can be hundreds of kilometres from each other so basically, it's just too damned expensive to maintain those "roads" as anything more than wide gravel tracks.

Only specific roads (e.g. state or national highways) are sealed and maintained however they generally travel from one major city to another (or major regional town) and if some smaller towns along the way happen to be nearby, they can claim the benefits of a sealed road as well. Everywhere else gets gravel tracks.

Any Project team will have to be far more self-sufficient than teams in North America or Europe because of the lack of population here. When you're 500 kilometres away from the nearest town with a doctor, you have to manage any medical emergency yourself. When you're 200 kilometres away from the nearest service station, you have to carry plenty of spares, not just fuel but tyres, fanbelts, radiator hoses, tools and more importantly, water, plenty of water (unless you know the area, you aren't going to find anywhere with water until you hit the next town - unless you're lucky and happen to be travelling near a river).
And so on and so on.

I think in this regard, a Project set up for Australia could probably focus more on re-establishing trade/transport and connecting societies with each other rather than spending major effort in rebuilding towns etc. etc. Most of those outback towns are going to be too remote to be worth destroying if we're talking a war type cataclysm and they're too spread out for major spread of disease, earthquake, meteor strike, fire or flooding to damage all of them beyond rebuilding. It needs to be a catastrophe of apocalyptic scale to smash all those spreadout towns to a point where they cannot do something to help themselves.

[mmartin798]

I agree that in the arid outback, the need for equipment to make and create roads is minimal. Unimproved roads would hold up pretty well. But in the north coast of the Northern Territory, New South Wales, and parts of Queensland where they get significant rainfall, you would want an improved all-weather road, like a gravel road. These would require a bit more equipment than just a dozen graders to make and maintain, especially if there is significant truck traffic.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Yeah they definitely want paved roads in some of those places, but in many areas they have to do without. During the wet season there's often a lot of flooding that makes the roads unpassable regardless of being sealed or not.
In some places in the far north it's not uncommon to see roads closed due to the wet seasons.
The Western Australian, Northern Territory and Queensland governments regularly post info on road hazards and what roads are okay to use because of this.
Haha, I call them roads when in fact they're dirt or gravel tracks.
We have just over half a million kilometres out of 900,000 km that are unpaved. However the government has been trying to convert the most important rural/outback unpaved roads to paved for the last few decades.

Having said all that, the quickest way to get communities back in touch with each other is via trade and for trade in Australian, you need roads. So yes I can see your point. Having the Project re-establishing roads is probably the quickest way to get that trade back in operation.

[mmartin798]

So to get a feel for what the Australian Project might prepare for, we should look at what they would likely expect.

The nuclear exchange between China and the US would likely force surviving naval units from both sides most likely south, as Vietnam and Korea would probably suffered heavy damage as well to ports capable of large deep sea ships.This would put highly trained and armed men in places like the Philippines and Indonesia. There would also be some military and refugee movement into Malaysia. This may also displace some refugees into the Java Islands.

Much would seem to stabilize for a short time, until the resource pressure on the smaller island causes another wave of refugee movement. A good portion of this would be through the archipelago toward the larger island of Papua New Guinea. It is likely that from here, refugees may finally make their way to Australia by making the relatively short route to Queensland, or even island hopping the same route.

I would suspect some organized pirate activity, and a possible beach head, from elements that arise from the displaced navies on the more temperate northern shores of Western Australia, Northern Territory and possible getting close to Queensland. There may be some activity around Perth, if for no other reason than to try and find pre-war technology in decent condition for use, repair or parts.

At about the 25 year mark, Australia would see refugees encroaching natives in the northern coastal Queensland area; pirates looking for resources and labor; the outback areas adapting relatively quickly to the new norm and wanting to keep it that way; Australian agriculture being affected by the shorter, cooler and dryer growing seasons being unable to realistically sustaining the external pressures for crops and still serving the native Australian survivors. Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales would become rather resource abundant, and therefor an attractor for the bands of refugees.

That's my first, relatively simplistic look at what will happen. The Project will have to fill in the blanks to keep stability and restoration in this climate.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Any refugee group (regardless of origin) with some intelligent leadership, that wants to make landfall on Australia is going to go somewhere near known towns/cities. Any group that doesn't is going to run out of water very quickly.
With the exception of Queensland, most of the top end of Australia has very few permanent water sources of useful size (and some of these are a distance inland).
The majority of rivers and lakes seen on maps of Australia in the inland areas or near desert regions are dry and may only (and temporarily) see water during the wet season.
Worst of these are the salt lakes, quite literally dry lake beds where evaporation has left mineral salts leached out of the soil, deposited on the surface. Any water found in these salt lakes is going to be useless for consumption unless it can be distilled first.

It could be argued that during the wet season getting water won't be so much of a problem because flooding often occurs and there's water in abundance over vast tracts of the landscape. However it's typically muddy surface water that's only there because the soil cannot absorb any more water. This also means it's temporary and obviously cannot be relied upon for any length of time.
The dry season will require good arid climate survival skills because fresh water is incredibly scare along the coast.

The reason for mentioning this is because I think it gives two specific opportunities for the GM and one general consideration for the Project as a whole: -

The first is that any settlement the Project encounters in these regions can have widely different ethnic compositions than expected for Australia. Some refugees will assimilate but some might want to establish their own enclaves within surviving communities. When the Project finally gets activated and then encounters these communities, they might find quite varied social situations (e.g. a town divided along "originals' and 'newcomers" lines even though, from an outsiders perspective, the same people/community, but cultural traditions can hang on long after the original need for them has died so this could cause some interesting frictions within a community).

The second is the opportunity to find interesting salvage along the coastline from where some of the refugee groups came ashore and attempted to establish themselves but due to a lack of food and fresh water, ultimately succumbed to the environment.
There could be the remains of old ships that were beached to provide some sort of shelter or protection. Rust/corrosion from saltwater will obviously have taken it's toll on anything on the beach but if a refugee group moved a short distance off the beach they may have set up shelters and so on including salvaging items from the ships (e.g. workshop tools/machines, medical equipment, lengths of wire/tubing or even doors, hatches and portholes).

As for the general consideration; like many armies around the world, it's going to be incredibly useful for the Project to have units concerned with finding and purifying water. Whether that be building wells, small dams and so on, locating new sources of water or cleaning existing water sources for consumption, I think this should be a big factor in the design of any Project for Australia. It could prove to be a good player element if the players aren't so interested in gameplay that revolves around combat.

As a side note, the Aboriginal peoples used a few techniques that were latter used by early settlers in some regions. One such idea was using thin slices/wedges of rock as walls on top of large flattish sections of rock. Whenever it rained, these walls would channel any water running off the rocks into a reservoir of some sort. There's a number of these setups still in existence in parts of Western Australia (and they still work) although I have only seen them myself in the Goldfields region.