Cost of a Base

[tsofian]

This Page https://www.sara-tx.org/public-infor...past-projects/ has a lot of information on The San Antonio River flood diversion tunnel. At 3 miles long and over 24 feet in diameter this is a really good model for the manned bases with a frozen team I've been working on. This project cost over 110 million dollars. This is also about the smallest size for Prime Base, if the test campaign with three levels is used as a benchmark. Camp Century had around 2 miles of tunnels and 200 persons on staff, for another benchmark.

From this we can see that a Project with a dozen bases, perhaps including Prime and Alternative Prime would cost in the low billions of dollars, maybe 10 billion as a cap.

Project Azorian, which was the attempt to raise Soviet submarine K-129 cost about 800 million dollars (in 1970s dollars not 1990s dollars). It is around an order of magnitude less. From the sinking of K-129 in 1968 to the revealing of the story by Anderson in 1975 was around 6 years. Not only did the US media have information but the Soviets did as well, although their experts believed the salvage was either impossible or highly unlikely and they didn't act aggressively on that prospect.

I'm not sure what this says about budgets and costs and operational security but does at least give some figures for period projects.

[dragoon500ly]

I hate to say this, but to fully fund the Project, on any useful scale, then we are looking at trillions, just in R&D, equipment purchases and recruiting. Just thinking about the financial hoops that the CoT had to.jump through, makes my head hurt!

[cosmicfish]

I hate to say this, but to fully fund the Project, on any useful scale, then we are looking at trillions, just in R&D, equipment purchases and recruiting. Just thinking about the financial hoops that the CoT had to.jump through, makes my head hurt!

Agreed 1000%. Single-digit trillions would be my lowball estimate. I always assumed that BEM gave the CoT everything from general business guidance to specific stock tips to help finance this thing, and that "how long it will take to finance this" was even part of the decision on how far back he needed to go to get things started.

[tsofian]

Trillions

Here are the budgets for the entire United States Department of Defense between 1960 and 1989. This is in hundreds of billions of dollars. In 29 years this is around 10 trillion dollars. This funds EVERYTHING including the Vietnam War, R&D for hundreds if not thousands of projects, pay all the various uniformed service members, buy some aircraft carriers, thousands of high-performance aircraft and tens of thousands of helicopter. So the project, which might have 50,000 people and a few hundred or even thousand vehicles and weapons would send the same amount Why would the Project cost as much as the entire DoD budget over the same period

1960 344.3
1961 344.0
1962 363.4
1963 368.0
1964 364.4
1965 333.1
1966 356.2
1967 412.0
1968 $449.3
1969 438.1
1970 406.3
1971 370.6
1972 343.8
1973 313.3
1974 299.7
1975 293.3
1976 283.8
1977 286.2
1978 286.5
1979 $295.6
1980 303.4
1981 317.4
1982 339.4
1983 366.7
1984 381.7
1985 405.4
1986 426.6
1987 427.9
1988 426.4
1989 427.7

[dragoon500ly]

[QUOTE=tsofian;79988]Trillions

Here are the budgets for the entire United States Department of Defense between 1960 and 1989. This is in hundreds of billions of dollars. In 29 years this is around 10 trillion dollars. This funds EVERYTHING including the Vietnam War, R&D for hundreds if not thousands of projects, pay all the various uniformed service members, buy some aircraft carriers, thousands of high-performance aircraft and tens of thousands of helicopter. So the project, which might have 50,000 people and a few hundred or even thousand vehicles and weapons would send the same amount Why would the Project cost as much as the entire DoD budget over the same period /QUOTE]

I can only speak for my own little heresy...

I don't have a time traveling Bruce, so I attempt to base my version of the Project on what IMO are likely scenarios. I start with the CoT forming about the same time as the Soviet development of an atomic weapon, which provides the initial boost for the Project. With no time travel, they have to develop fusion power and cryo technology almost from scratch. Add additional medical research into the Projects various wonder drugs, the acquisition of property, equipment, vehicles, then toss in widespread construction of everything from supply caches all the way to Prime Base. The Project also requires satellites and rockets, even spread over thirty odd years, you are still talking about an obscene amount of money, so yes billions, and I'm comfortable with stating trillions.

[cosmicfish]

Since I am at my computer now and not on my phone, let me go into a little more detail.

You could do TMP cheaper... provided you cut out a lot of stuff. And I mean a LOT. Ultimately, the only technology genuinely NEEDED for the Project is cryogenics, but everything you cut out makes a near-impossible task even harder, and after a while it gets to the point where you are just tilting at windmills.

Also, when I say trillions, I am speaking in 2018 currency - I have not accounted for inflation.

There are three major contributing factors that I see as leading to the cost of the Project:

1) Technological advancement. BEM brings back prototypes of advanced technologies, but that is really little more than a sales gimmick. Someone still needs to invent them and develop them, because time travel doesn't allow for knowledge to come from nowhere. And then you have to invent all the supporting technologies (and there are a LOT) that support all those inventions.

Take the portable laser weapon described in 3ed. Right now, state of the art laser technology would cost me a cool million for a laser that is the right size, but is nowhere near powerful enough to serve as a weapon. Then I would need to add the environmental controls (so that it doesn't melt itself) and a battery pack that would make state of the art modern batteries and capacitors look like something that came out of a pyramid. Heck, we had to tear a small satellite apart because the launch got delayed by a year and we knew that our batteries would have degraded too much in that short amount of time to be viable for the mission duration. And those were expensive, expensive batteries.

Or fusion power. We have already spent many, many billions on fusion power and are not within a century of what TMP needs. Forget about the fusion packs for a moment and consider just the one type of fusion reactor the Project most needs - a unit sized for vehicles with enough power to operate the vehicle and its subsystems, with enough fuel for at least a couple of years. That requires incredible work to first develop the impossible and then develop the advanced materials and techniques required to miniaturize them all.

Add to that the cost of developing all of the tools needed to make all this stuff, because that often gets disregarded. I could make a truly amazing laser right now... if someone would only invent a way to manufacture optical antenna arrays at lambda/2 spacing, and ways to efficiently produce the kind of precision optics. Tooling get surprisingly expensive.

And while people often think that they can use civilian costs for comparison, you really can't. You're buying for an effort that cannot afford for equipment to fail, because it might not be replaceable and someone might die when it breaks. It needs to last a looooooong time on the shelf and work perfectly when you need it. It needs to operate with minimal maintenance and parts, in conditions where you can expect ash, and radioactivity, and combat conditions. This stuff is expensive.

2) The size of the Project. 50,000 people in the Project If we go with the assumption that 40,000 of those are in field teams, and that there are an average of 8 people per team, that is 5,000 field teams. Each one needs their own bolthole, 6 unique caches, and at least 1 vehicle (preferably two, given the dispersion of the Project). Each bolthole has a fusion reactor, as does each vehicle, so that is 10,000+ compact fusion reactors, 35,000 excavations, and 5,000+ large, militarized vehicles that need to be acquired and modified.

By the way, do you know how many of those vehicles currently exist Acquiring thousands of militarized vehicles is not something you do off the surplus market, because there aren't that many surplus vehicles available! The ones that ARE available are often being sold because they are near the end of their useful lives - not something you want to buy and then expect to use every day for the next 20 years!

You also need to identify, recruit, and train at least 50,000 people to a degree that will probably be on par with special operations training costs of ~$250k each - that's $12.5B ignoring the recruiting costs. You need to pay them at least until they "die", along with the untold thousands who will work for the Project without ever seeing the inside of a bolthole.

You need more than a hundreds thousand firearms, plus ammunition and accessories. 50,000 CBR kits. How many Science One vehicle are out there, and how much do THEY cost

The scale is daunting.

3) The secrecy. This serves as a cost multiplier for everything out there. Buying a hundred V-150's and getting them discretely into boltholes is going to be stupid hard. It is going to take bribes, and misdirection, and evading massive government organizations specifically looking for this kind of skullduggery. Doing all that research is going to require building your own labs and finding scientists not only willing to do the work but also willing to keep it all secret (no publishing). Ordinary security for a classified project adds significantly to the cost of the program, and TMP needs the kind of security that would make the Manhatten Project look like an open air forum. It would be like doing the Manhatten Project, a hundred times larger, as Americans, in Berlin.

Going to the example in your original post, a 3 mile tunnel 24' in diameter... What is the cost of doing THAT in secret The cost of mineral rights, the cost of evading mining inspectors, the cost of covering up the purpose of the dig, the cost of disposing of the 7 million cf of dirt and rock, the cost of discreetly turning a tunnel into a bomb shelter, the cost of loading all the vehicles and equipment, etc

So yes, I'll stick with trillions. Scale things drastically back, get rid of every single bit of non-existing technology possible, and you could do it cheaper. But your chances of success, heck, your chances of getting to the war without being discovered and dismantled, get lower with every dollar. And at some point, TMP turns into a pipe dream, a bunch of survivalists with a pie-in-the-sky goal that could never be accomplished in their lifetimes.

[cosmicfish]

Also, I would suggest approaching this from the other direction - not "what will this cost" so much as "what can we afford" Figure out how much money the Project could discretely steer, and then spend it. Because TMP requires every penny you can possibly throw at it and then a whole lot more.

General Dynamics is currently making ~$30B in revenues, ~$6B in profits a year. If the Project were to pull $1B a year out of it by redirecting engineering efforts, running extra units off production lines, straight-up cooking the books, it could probably be concealed. Heck, $3B a year might be possible. And that might be just one CEO on the CoT.

The global stock market has huge success stories that someone who travelled in time could leverage. How much could the Project have made by investing early in Facebook, or Google, or Amazon Divide those investments between enough parties and there is nothing to track.

How much can be made off of knowing where oil reserves are located, or when hurricanes will occur, or what movies are going to be blockbusters, or what numbers will win the PowerBall and what states allow you to claim anonymously

Seriously, the biggest challenge of the finance wing of the Project is not going to be getting the money, it's going to be laundering it. And done correctly, considering the nature of the Project, that should not unmanageable.

[RandyT0001]

So money is not the problem. Recruiting, training and freezing the correct people that the Project could rely on 99.99% of the personnel would, and this is a primary value the Project looks for during recruitment, would follow the tenants of the project. Personal integrity is the key.

[cosmicfish]

Agreed. For a 50,000 person active Project, people and secrecy are the problems, not money. A project that make thousands of vehicular fusion reactors and tens of thousands of freeze tubes has money to spend on pouring concrete.

[tsofian]

50,000 people over a 29 year period is less than 2,000 people a year. There are about 5,000 colleges and universities in the USA. There were almost 6 million students. Even if only this population is used as a pool (which it is not) that means if a graduate from only half the college and university graduating classes is selected each year they will meet quota.


Every year in the USA hundreds of thousands of people are reported missing. Most of them are found but this still means that plenty of people disappear every year, plenty to cover 2,000 MP volunteers.

Let's look at a similar organization-Peace Corps
The Peace Corps has had 230,000 Americans involved and their current numbers look like this
Current number of Volunteers and trainees: 7,376
Gender: 63% female, 37% male
Marital status: 98% single, 2% married
Minorities: 32% of Volunteers (excludes non-responders)
Average age: 28
Volunteers over age 50: 6%

So they average about 4,000 people per year.

Its a question of selection. How do you determine who to enroll that will be a good fit for the project and keep its secrets until they are frozen. Once they are frozen they aren't a security risk any longer. The CIA and FBI both recruit and train a larger number of people than the Project. In addition the uniformed services also recruit folks who have special trust placed in them. Yes a tiny fraction of these people turn or just blab, but an amazingly small fraction do that.

[cosmicfish]

I don't think anyone is saying there aren't enough recruits to fill quotas, we are just saying that getting them will be difficult. I know there is gold and oil and diamonds out there in the world, that doesn't mean I can take a shovel into my backyard and make millions.

Morrow candidates need to be in good health, physically fit, intelligent, educated, and, most importantly, willing to abandon t everyone and everything they know to be cryogenically frozen, instead of reporting the crazy people with the guns and tanks to the government. That will take time and effort to find, and that means money. Not the biggest chunk of the money, but still a substantial amount.

[Desert Mariner]

If you use a SSBI clearance investigation as a baseline, you're looking at $4400 per person in 2011 dollars. I'd double that to account for the psych evals needed.

[cosmicfish]

If you use a SSBI clearance investigation as a baseline, you're looking at $4400 per person in 2011 dollars. I'd double that to account for the psych evals needed.

My employer had the total rate at $30k for the investigation, but much of that cost is borne by the government. And that is just the investigation, not counting recruiting costs. In practice, TMP would be much more expensive.

[tsofian]

My employer had the total rate at $30k for the investigation, but much of that cost is borne by the government. And that is just the investigation, not counting recruiting costs. In practice, TMP would be much more expensive.

The cost of such things has risen considerable, not counting inflation. There is so much more data available on a person now, so many more things to check. in the period from 1960-1990 a security clearance didn't have to check credit scores, on line sources, social media. In addition people tended to be less mobile and do less job hopping, which makes a background check a lot simpler.

[tsofian]

[

1) Technological advancement. BEM brings back prototypes of advanced technologies, but that is really little more than a sales gimmick. Someone still needs to invent them and develop them, because time travel doesn't allow for knowledge to come from nowhere. And then you have to invent all the supporting technologies (and there are a LOT) that support all those inventions.

Take the portable laser weapon described in 3ed. Right now, state of the art laser technology would cost me a cool million for a laser that is the right size, but is nowhere near powerful enough to serve as a weapon. Then I would need to add the environmental controls (so that it doesn't melt itself) and a battery pack that would make state of the art modern batteries and capacitors look like something that came out of a pyramid. Heck, we had to tear a small satellite apart because the launch got delayed by a year and we knew that our batteries would have degraded too much in that short amount of time to be viable for the mission duration. And those were expensive, expensive batteries.

Or fusion power. We have already spent many, many billions on fusion power and are not within a century of what TMP needs. Forget about the fusion packs for a moment and consider just the one type of fusion reactor the Project most needs - a unit sized for vehicles with enough power to operate the vehicle and its subsystems, with enough fuel for at least a couple of years. That requires incredible work to first develop the impossible and then develop the advanced materials and techniques required to miniaturize them all.

Add to that the cost of developing all of the tools needed to make all this stuff, because that often gets disregarded. I could make a truly amazing laser right now... if someone would only invent a way to manufacture optical antenna arrays at lambda/2 spacing, and ways to efficiently produce the kind of precision optics. Tooling get surprisingly expensive.

And while people often think that they can use civilian costs for comparison, you really can't. You're buying for an effort that cannot afford for equipment to fail, because it might not be replaceable and someone might die when it breaks. It needs to last a looooooong time on the shelf and work perfectly when you need it. It needs to operate with minimal maintenance and parts, in conditions where you can expect ash, and radioactivity, and combat conditions. This stuff is expensive.

2) The size of the Project. 50,000 people in the Project If we go with the assumption that 40,000 of those are in field teams, and that there are an average of 8 people per team, that is 5,000 field teams. Each one needs their own bolthole, 6 unique caches, and at least 1 vehicle (preferably two, given the dispersion of the Project). Each bolthole has a fusion reactor, as does each vehicle, so that is 10,000+ compact fusion reactors, 35,000 excavations, and 5,000+ large, militarized vehicles that need to be acquired and modified.
[/QUOTE]

You make a lot of assumptions that I don't see as being the only path forward. If Bruce is smart he will bring back tech items that can be made with the manufacturing technology of the 1960s-1970s. For a person with the genius of Bruce it would be obvious that bringing back anything that requires a huge investment in new technology or exotic tooling is going to increase costs and reduce security.

I look at it this way. A 16 year old kid can turn smoke detectors into a functioning neutron gun in a shed in his mom's back yard using nothing but simple tools. It cost Billions of dollars to run the Manhattan Project, but once the basic principals and materials were discovered the investment has been made and the science and technology may possibly be produced more easily, more cheaply and on a different scale.

If I was Bruce I'd either have items specifically designed in the future for construction in a series of war surplus factories in 1965 or at least ensure that all the really hard R&D had been done. For all we know a fusion reactor could cost no more than a jet engine, or even no more than a high end Color TV set.

As for land purchases. If this was my project I'd buy up land right off the go. Land won't get any cheaper. Any surplus can probably be sold at a profit. A bolt hole will be expensive to build and fairly large but a cache is about the size of a basement for a standard house, or even smaller. Until they get loaded up they are just concrete boxes in the ground. There are huge numbers of such things serving dozens of purposes all across the civilized world. No one really notices them.


If the project bought up a lot of form military land no one is even going to wonder about concrete boxes in the ground, unless they find a bolt hole. In fact buying up former military property during this period makes a huge amount of sense. Here is a site that has a list of abandoned airfields, many of which are ex military from WW2. http://www.airfields-freeman.com/

I'd have to ask folks from CAMP (Council on America's Military Past http://campjamp.org/ -which used to stand for Council of Abandoned Military Posts) for a good list.

Advantages
Many in the middle of no place
Often are already fenced and secure locations
May have bunkers that can be converted into caches or bolt holes
Digging can be explained as removing UXO, waste, or demolishing bunkers and other structures
Cheap
If areas can be marked as impact areas they can be easily restricted
located all over the place, in every state

If digging takes place before the EPA is created in 1970 there will be no restrictions. A lot of these bases don't even get looked at, if they have been yet, until the last 25 years, so well after the war in classic.

This won't solve all the land issues and the issues around building infrastructure but it can help out a lot.