A new idea for a cover for Prime Base

[mcruff]

old missle silo

what about using an old missle silo front company buys one to turn into a trendy hotel type project hence the reason all the trucks moving in and out and then has financial issues slowing down work etc... . I have no idea about the logistics so probably wouldn't be feasible. Just throwing in my 2 cents.

Greg

[cosmicfish]

Have you been out West There are plenty of grain elevators in the middle of nowhere.

Yes, I have been out west, and yes, there are grain elevators... in farming territory. If the land is commercially viable for agriculture, then there are farmers, and towns, and lots of other stuff that you would prefer to keep away from your super-secret underground command base.

Plus why do you need to shut it down It can operate until the end of the world.

You don't have to... but the challenge, as you note later, is in camouflaging the traffic in and out of the base, and that is going to be really hard to do when you have substantially varying amounts of traffic. One way to address that is to just shut down the site once you are done with the bulk of the work... but that doesn't work for agricultural property because it is tied to the actual land. You can shut down a mine (mine's are always temporary) or a distribution center (just move it elsewhere), but farms don't stop, they only get replaced with higher-density usage. So shutting it down without putting in a shopping mall or real estate development would be unusual and suspicious.

And about your third comment https://www.steelcar.com/sites/defau...d-hopper_0.jpg

What's in this covered hopper car It could be anything!

"Operating at a gross rail load of 286,000 pounds, the above 5,431-cubic foot hopper car is equipped with a through centre sill, designed for transporting medium-density commodities covering a variety of agricultural products as well as chemicals and allied products."

Sure, but grain elevator rail operations generally happen in the open, and farmers usually take notice. You can put a lot of things in these railcars, but you can't discretely unload them. Additionally, I would note that you can't fit everything in those railcars and would have a hard time explaining why a helicopter, for example, is getting unloaded at a grain elevator. And farmers usually keep track of each other, in my experience - they are likely to note the unusual traffic and question why this set of farms is doing so much more traffic than their own.

[mmartin798]

Sure, but grain elevator rail operations generally happen in the open, and farmers usually take notice. You can put a lot of things in these railcars, but you can't discretely unload them. Additionally, I would note that you can't fit everything in those railcars and would have a hard time explaining why a helicopter, for example, is getting unloaded at a grain elevator. And farmers usually keep track of each other, in my experience - they are likely to note the unusual traffic and question why this set of farms is doing so much more traffic than their own.

I was going to overlook this, but you are correct. Despite the way the buildings look at a grain elevator or even a transfer station, the rail cars are loaded and unloaded in plain view of everyone, not inside a structure. This would make secrecy a problem.

[cosmicfish]

Both mines and ranches have serious problems.

Agreed!

A mine has a small entrance which doesn't allow a whole lot of traffic. It is very dangerous in and of itself. MSHA will be hard to fool. Unless its something like a strip mine you don't have a lot of volume going out at any given time and you never have volume going in. Empty haul trucks aren't covered, which means they will be hard to have filled with anything.

The mine entrance is no bigger problem than it is for any other venture; it isn't like grain elevators are famous for giant doors or anything. And the haul trucks or other traffic are less of an issue when you are out in the middle of nowhere instead of right in the middle of farmlands.

MSHA is a valid issue and may be the single best reason why a mine might not work, but grain elevators also get inspected, if less vigorously. Any Project site is likely to require some method of avoiding honest inspection, whether that is bribing the inspectors or having the inspections performed by Project personnel or some other method.

It's difficult to develop a cover story for a ranch that needs all the crap hauled to it that Prime Base does. It has to be thousands of truckloads of material, not to mention all the people. Food for however many people for 10 years or more is 2 kg/day/person so 2X3650X500 is over 3.5 million kilograms alone. That is 3500 truckloads all by itself.

The three or four "towers" each probably weigh ten thousand tons or so, meaning another 30 to 40 THOUSAND truckloads (if using a 1 tonne truck)

Even bigger trucks will still yield tens of thousands of truckloads of material. Let's be conservative and say that over the period of base construction 100,000 tons of materials must be brought into the site. So we can say that is 25,000 truckloads (if using a 4 ton truck). Check my math but that is around 7 trucks a day.

That is hard to explain going INTO a relatively small mine and basically impossible for a ranch.

Now the big ass railcars can each hold 50 or more tons, so only 2,000 railway cars.

Let's go with 100,000 tons, and consider 3 delivery options and three time periods:

1 ton truck load*: 100,000 loads, or 80/day for 5 years, 40/day**or 10 years, or 20/day for 20 years

15 ton semi truck load: 6700 loads, or 5/day for 5 years, 3/day for 10 years, or 1 per day for 20 years.

50 ton railcar load: 2000 loads, or 1.6/day for 5 years, 0.8/day for 10 years, or 0.4/day for 20 years. Assuming a 50 car train, that would be 1 train per month for years, 1 per 2 months for 10 years, or 1 per 4 months for 20 years.

I think what this demonstrates more than anything else that a large base is going to be hard to conceal with a small business. It really sells me on the idea that a minimally-regulated business that expects high total traffic with little or no "civilian" traffic or exposure would be ideal... and that sounds like a shipping or distribution hub, not a mine or ranch or grain elevator.

It also drives home the challenges in concealing a large base, and gives more incentive for distributing those assets as much as possible.


*: Terrible choice, too many things are too large or heavy for this option.
**: Assuming 250 days per year (i.e., weekens off)

[tsofian]

Yes, I have been out west, and yes, there are grain elevators... in farming territory. If the land is commercially viable for agriculture, then there are farmers, and towns, and lots of other stuff that you would prefer to keep away from your super-secret underground command base.

There were at least three on I-70 past Grand Junction and you can't call that farmland at all


You don't have to... but the challenge, as you note later, is in camouflaging the traffic in and out of the base, and that is going to be really hard to do when you have substantially varying amounts of traffic. One way to address that is to just shut down the site once you are done with the bulk of the work... but that doesn't work for agricultural property because it is tied to the actual land. You can shut down a mine (mine's are always temporary) or a distribution center (just move it elsewhere), but farms don't stop, they only get replaced with higher-density usage. So shutting it down without putting in a shopping mall or real estate development would be unusual and suspicious.

No grain elevator every went out of business I have seen a lot of abandoned grain elevators on my travels

Sure, but grain elevator rail operations generally happen in the open, and farmers usually take notice. You can put a lot of things in these railcars, but you can't discretely unload them. Additionally, I would note that you can't fit everything in those railcars and would have a hard time explaining why a helicopter, for example, is getting unloaded at a grain elevator. And farmers usually keep track of each other, in my experience - they are likely to note the unusual traffic and question why this set of farms is doing so much more traffic than their own.

They do "generally happen in the open but there are a lot that have covered bays. I did a quick search of images and found plenty of them. Heck they could be part of a small repair facility attached to the grain elevator. There is absolutely nothing strange about a repair shop having doors that close, especially in crazy hot summers and awful winters.

[tsofian]

An even easier solution is that the elevator is owned by one o Morrow Industries shadow companies and is surrounded by experimental low water farms. Now you have a reason for an elevator to be there. You have no "nosey farmers" to be looking about. You can have the elevator and the farms staffed with MP folks. You can have the town be basically a company town. You can now put it anyplace where land is cheap and available and someone wants to make the desert bloom.

When the experiemtn fails or the grants dry up you close the mill, the town dies and you are left with just another ghost town in the old west

[cosmicfish]

If you desperately want Prime Base to be accessed by a grain elevator, you can do so. It feels incredibly forced to me.

Sure, you can cover the grain elevator loading bay. You can fake a farm. I still think this stuff draws attention and risks exposure, for the reasons previously mentioned and more. Your farm has to be large enough that the substantial quantity of goods coming in can be disguised in the reasonable traffic of the farm, and that means a big farm. You have to have a reason to cover the unloading area, not at all common in the Midwest or Nevada*, and a reason for all those rail cars to go through there. You can make it an experimental farm but then you have to justify the expense and defy the interest it would reasonably attract. You could make it a whole company town, but that has a TON of risks associated with it, including letting a bunch of other people in on the secret who otherwise have no reason to be (because if they had a reason to know about the Project, they would be working on Project necessities and not running an experimental low water farm in the desert).

In short, I think there are less risky options out there, AND those options also address other needs for the Project - a mine** handles the excavation of the base, a distribution center helps with the large volume of supplies being shipped by the Project, etc. This, to me, looks the Project getting into a whole new, unnecessary, otherwise unneeded field of endeavor for no real reason.

And please don't think I am trying to be mean or unusually critical - this is how critical I always am, and your grain elevator idea already shows more thought and logic than the canonical "under a ranch" idea. But I don't think it works unless there are other unmentioned factors, like drastically scaling back the size of the base.


*: Not an expert, but I've spent time in backcountry Nevada and Midwest farm country.

**: A mine is probably *as* risky. The mine risks exposure by a small number of government people, the farm risks exposure by a larger number of ordinary people.

[rcaf_777]

Another Idea

Why not use an underground storage unit as a front company, the Company Iron Mountian has something like 1400 storage units around the US. Now granted they are all not like the Iron Mountain Storage Facility Boyers PA but it does have a large fleet of vehicles and a lot of warehousing. And the site of heavy excavating equipment at mine they could be explained as expanding the business. Heck some of this companies client could be other front companies.

Just a thought

[mmartin798]

I will grant you that building or expanding a secure underground data center/secure document storage center could easily justify the moving of a great deal of electronics, power systems, HVAC and the like. The only problem is that for the cover to work, it has to be reasonably close to the users of the services, which puts it close to a population center and possible nuclear strike. You might justify a data center in the desert, but clients want/need ready access to physical documents and most likely do not want or cannot have a 5-6 hour delay for travel time.

[Gelrir]

Heh, you don't have to be a *suxcessful* document storage facilty.

• Iron Mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_(company) ... they still own several old mines now used for records storage.
• The LDS Granite Mountain Records Vault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granit..._Records_Vault
• The Church of Scientology has several underground vaults. Here's a video of one under construction: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=TxovieJi_PU ... a higher level of secrecy about land ownership and contractor security would be needed for the Project.

Many more: https://www.google.com/searchei=dOJ8....0.PqeW_lmb6FM

--
Michael B.

[mmartin798]

Heh, you don't have to be a *suxcessful* document storage facilty.

• Iron Mountain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_(company) ... they still own several old mines now used for records storage.
• The LDS Granite Mountain Records Vault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granit..._Records_Vault
• The Church of Scientology has several underground vaults. Here's a video of one under construction: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=TxovieJi_PU ... a higher level of secrecy about land ownership and contractor security would be needed for the Project.

Many more: https://www.google.com/searchei=dOJ8....0.PqeW_lmb6FM

--
Michael B.

You are correct, being successful is not a requirement, but some level of success is needed to warrant continuing traffic. Many of the storage sites you mention are close to major population centers and nuke targets in 4th edition. All three of Iron Mountains facilities are really close. The LDS Vault is arguably safe, though fallout could be an issue. The Scientology center is a winner for your argument. The best example may be one hidden in the Google search you share. Underground Vaults & Storage in Hutchinson KS may be the best. Salt is still mined there, construction of new shafts where freezing an aquifer was needed, as well as the multiple contractors during that shaft construction all can give cover to a base. The only issue is one of mine safety inspectors, but as mentioned before these could be CoT plants in those positions that overlook the base construction areas.

[rcaf_777]

You are correct, being successful is not a requirement, but some level of success is needed to warrant continuing traffic. Many of the storage sites you mention are close to major population centers and nuke targets in 4th edition. All three of Iron Mountains facilities are really close. The LDS Vault is arguably safe, though fallout could be an issue. The Scientology center is a winner for your argument. The best example may be one hidden in the Google search you share. Underground Vaults & Storage in Hutchinson KS may be the best. Salt is still mined there, construction of new shafts where freezing an aquifer was needed, as well as the multiple contractors during that shaft construction all can give cover to a base. The only issue is one of mine safety inspectors, but as mentioned before these could be CoT plants in those positions that overlook the base construction areas.

The Company and easily have many of the Morrow Industries as clients nor it could have separate site (IE hey business is growing so we are building another mine shaft.) Also you need to remember that when Iron mountain start is was a company and protected documents from a Nuclear war so it sites were away from the major centers and underground. The Company also got US Government Contacts for this service

[tsofian]

The Company and easily have many of the Morrow Industries as clients nor it could have separate site (IE hey business is growing so we are building another mine shaft.) Also you need to remember that when Iron mountain start is was a company and protected documents from a Nuclear war so it sites were away from the major centers and underground. The Company also got US Government Contacts for this service

The problem comes in that if it is well known to be full of things the US Government wants to survive a nuclear war it becomes a nuclear target at some point

[knightofrubus]

How do you guys usually hide Boltholes I'm tempted to say that the project used a lot of private holdings such as housing developments to get them set up under cover. As for Prime Base its been bugging me how you could hide it in this day and age. The best option really would be something like a mine especially if its out west.

[dragoon500ly]

How do you guys usually hide Boltholes I'm tempted to say that the project used a lot of private holdings such as housing developments to get them set up under cover. As for Prime Base its been bugging me how you could hide it in this day and age. The best option really would be something like a mine especially if its out west.

Boltholes can be hidden in private property, under new construction storage units is an old favorite of mine, that new Wally World/Targeted/Cheapco store could have an extra buried under the corner, industrial parks, the list can be endless.

As for Prime, you can take risk of a mine, or any of the great ideas already presented, but you have to figure out just how you will disguise the amount of traffic that will be coming in. An argument can be made that Prime is far too large for its Command & Coordination mission...I feel that this really will depend on the size of a Project, that you as the PD feel comfortable with.