FY1 Q2: Base Construction
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
The first step to life in the middle of the most godforsaken part of Africa, you decided with the annoying whirl of a mosquito over your desk, was to start assembling a base. Step one to a base? Water.
Looking at your cup of quinnine-laced beer, you amended that carefully. Good water. You already had a well that made… enough… and the aquifier here was fairly good, but that didn't mean more wasn't better. More importantly, though, it meant you'd be handling water filtration and sanitation that wasn't dumping a chlorine tablet in and waiting four hours. Speaking of which- sanitation. Cholera was a bitch and a half, and it was probably the nicest thing you could think of. You'd need to dump cash into a clinic to make sure your boys weren't coming down with every damn jungle disease known to man, or more likely every venereal disease too. You once saw an entire Palestinian rifle company laid low by three hookers with herpes and one with the clap (one of your better operations) and the same fate didn't need to happen here.
That meant you'd probably need to build, and more importantly staff, a brothel. On the plus side, a good brothel was a great way to get information and control the shakier troops, but they got damn expensive, and fast. Along with that came the standard other means of fleecing your men of their pay- restaurants, bars, the O-club, a Walmart, and probably a bookstore too.
Men needed houses and food, though, and while a tent and a Chinese MRE could fuffil these needs, it wouldn't keep them from dicking around every spare minute they weren't off innawoods or building something. Building some fairly simple trench houses, or zemlyanka as your Ruskie friends called 'em, that was just a matter of running the buldozer a few times and slapping a roof on top. Cool, dry, and surprisingly shell-resistant, they would work for ages- or until you needed to add internal plumbing. A mess hall was another must-have, since real food was the fastest way to enact loss prevention against people wigging out and deserting. About the only thing worse than a deserter was an embezzler, in your book.
Of course, that was all neccessities you'd just doodled out on your legal pad. Offensively, you'd need a the Holy Trinity of beating the shit out of people- a motor pool, an armory, and a drill field.
The motor pool was the most important, if only because a mobile force lived and died in it's trucks. The Toyota War had been a resounding example of what motivated, mobile, and most importantly intelligent people could do with a truck and an oxy welder, and Dad had an entire photo album on the shelf of his work with them. Shikas, Dushkas, Grad, Ma Deuce, Stingers, even old rocket pods- just weld it on a tripod, and slap that shit in the bed. Half a dozen of them could put the fear of Allah into a mess of Iraqi conscripts (even with the guns unloaded) and their effect on morale was incredible. Even if you weren't strapping them to the gills with guns, the simple fact was you could keep a kitchen in a milk crate in one quarter of a technical's bed, and haul sixty plus liters of water in one that was still armed.
Then there was the armory. White Christ, the armory. While most people thought the armory was just where hopes and dreams went to die, they actually served an important purpose in keeping weapons and munitions both safe and operable. A Hind was a manageable opponent when your company's Stinger missiles worked. When they didn't work- well, that's how you nearly bought the farm back in Israel. After that, every gun, missile, and bullet you ever worked with would have to go through an armory, and by God you'd make sure that armory was a good one. Between getting a professionally matinenced gun every time you hit the field, knowing your magazines weren't going to fall apart, and the fact that three round bursts weren't just full auto in disguise, they were worth every penny.
Last, but certainly not least, was the drill field. Technically it was more an outdoor gym, but calling it a drill field made people feel better when they were puking their guts out in the grass and trying not to die. By making sure you had a place to keep your units sharp, train new hires, and build new tactics, it was relatively easy to make sure your fighting units didn't fall apart.
After that, though, there was just the wish list. Grass stirp air field for CASEVAC and maybe air supply, armor motor pool for if you ever decided to waste money on APCs, artillery park for the guns too big to manpack, electronic warfare center for when you wanted to snoop on cell phones half the country away, combat engineer courses for sappers and whatnot… all things you wanted, but probably didn't need.
Shaking your head, you got back down to reality. Settling on building a mess hall and a barracks complex for about a company of men, you got the work orders filled out and stamped so your construction teams would get to work. You only had a company of construction engineers, though, so things would probably get done fairly slowly. Oh well- as long as you kept them working, they'd keep you with new construction.
(MECHANICS: Every quarter, your Engineering Company can build up to 2,000,000 dollars worth of buildings. If no work orders are put in, they will default to working on Infrastructure Construction or building Base Defenses.)
It was a few weeks later that you got to meet San Angeles in the flesh. After putting on your good field uniform (now updated with twin thunderbird lapel patches and a golden hat-pin) you met him and his men in the field.
In all fairness, you didn't expect a stellar-looking lot, but what you ended up with looked like they'd been scraped up off the tarmac after a class of paratroopers fucked up to the man. Each one was dressed in ratty cammies, carrying an equally filthy rifle, and all of them looked mildly malnutritioned from their experiences. For all that, though, there were all promised two hundred off them, every man jack with the same silly floppy hat and a black triangle stitched on their 'uniforms' in some place or another. San Angeles barely looked better than his men, but when you sat him down in your office and got to talking, the results were good.
After the disaster that was '86, you had to hand it to the man- he had excellent sales pitches and recruitment moves, although he was still a little junior to the concept of being a subcontractor. Fortunately, his secondhand American training kicked in fairly quickly, which meant he was willing to work fairly closely with you in order to get things done, and done well.
After about a week of in-country processing and intensive feeding, the majority of the Contras were back in shape to take up patrol duties. This rapidly went south when one of the units, sans translator, ran into a patrol of 'militia' from one of the local governor's out on tax collection. After a short and sharp fight, the militia had been scared off, and the Contras were bringing back their wounded. While their effective strength had been reduced somewhat, the fact of the matter was that most of it was drain through needing to lay support networks and train translators. The dozen-odd wounded were mostly put towards this, freeing up the reserves.
In other news, the grapevine had finally shaken out some results, and you had a couple of interesting warm bodies on call as specialists.
First up was Pierre LaCours, late of the Wild Geese after his discharge. Nominally an airmobile group, Pierre was a bombardier and fixed-wing flight specialist. He'd been in charge of the 'demilitarized' A-26 Invader flight until a particularly nasty bout of flak over Peru in '72 had forced him to ditch. After that and the resultant loss of both legs beneath the knee, he'd sidetracked into chemical warfare just in time to get involved with a private contractor launching Agent Orange drop missions over 'Nam. He had a dry sort of Spanish wit, and you'd met him several times back when you were between jobs on Crete.
The next person was an old friend of yours from Syria, Abdul Al-Jarhad. He'd been a man on the inside and counterintelligence asset par excellence, and his experience in organizing rifle regiments in the Syrian army for you to knock to pieces later meant he knew how to build up a tough, strong, and smart unit- and then put in fault lines to make it shatter as soon as someone started pouring on the artillery. Apparently, he'd been caught in some internecine round of infighting again, and had needed to relocate to Albania for a while to let the heat die down. Until then, he needed a job, and you were still hiring.
Finally, there was Dorrier Farbrach, an expatriate East German who had spent the last thirty years running guns under the Soviet's, and now German, governmental noses. Specializing in recovering Soviet stashes of old firearms from the Great Patriotic War, he'd made bank on a couple of Stasi caches before the Germans caught him at it. Right now he was in Silesia, and needed to liquidate his cargo before the Alanders figured out they were currently sitting on enough guns to arm every citizen in the islands twice over. Bringing him on would probably get you reduced rate on his stock, and more importantly mean you could get right of first refusal on anything else he found.
Time to start writing letters, then. You had things to do.
VOTES
Tactics Planning (CHOOSE ONE, Affects Q2)
[] Hire Mercenaries
-[] Write-in group from any Mercenary Dossier not yet hired.
[] Investigate Local Terrain
[] Develop Local Contacts
-You don't know anything, and you know you don't know anything. At least finding out who your neighbors are will help fix that.
[] Start Local Patrols
-You nearly got jumped by freaking tax collectors. Keeping a good, secured cordon around your base will keep that issue out.
Build Queue
[] Add to Build Queue: Select any building below, which will be added the queue. Up to 2,000,000 of buildings can be constructed in a single turn.
-[] Barracks: 50,000
-[] Mess Hall: 30,000
-[] Clinic, 20 beds: 80,000
--[] Clinic expansion, 40 beds: 120,000
-[] Shops: 20,000
-[] Brothel: 45,000
-[] Bar, 20 seats: 30,000
-[] Grill, 20 seats: 30,000
-[] Motor Pool: 100,000
--[] Motor Shop: 150,000
--[] Expanded Yard: 20,000
--[] Expanded Shop: 100,000
--[] Armor Shop: 200,000
-[] Armory: 100,000
--[] Explosives Shop: 50,000
--[] Heavy Weapons Shop: 80,000
--[] Tooling Shop: 40,000
--[] Build Shop: 90,000
-[] Drill Field: 5,000
--[] Gym: 20,000
--[] Range: 10,000
--[] Explosives Range: 15,000
--[] Shot House: 25,000
--[] Long Range: 10,000
--[] Crew Served Weapon Range: 10,000
-[] Artillery Park: 30,000
-[] Dirt Strip Field: 2,000,000
-[] Electronic Warfare Center: 1,500,000
-[] Engineer School: 1,000,000
Hire Specialists
[] Pierre LaCours
[] Abdul Al-Jahard
[] Dorrier Farbach
[] Decline to acquire a specialist.
Looking at your cup of quinnine-laced beer, you amended that carefully. Good water. You already had a well that made… enough… and the aquifier here was fairly good, but that didn't mean more wasn't better. More importantly, though, it meant you'd be handling water filtration and sanitation that wasn't dumping a chlorine tablet in and waiting four hours. Speaking of which- sanitation. Cholera was a bitch and a half, and it was probably the nicest thing you could think of. You'd need to dump cash into a clinic to make sure your boys weren't coming down with every damn jungle disease known to man, or more likely every venereal disease too. You once saw an entire Palestinian rifle company laid low by three hookers with herpes and one with the clap (one of your better operations) and the same fate didn't need to happen here.
That meant you'd probably need to build, and more importantly staff, a brothel. On the plus side, a good brothel was a great way to get information and control the shakier troops, but they got damn expensive, and fast. Along with that came the standard other means of fleecing your men of their pay- restaurants, bars, the O-club, a Walmart, and probably a bookstore too.
Men needed houses and food, though, and while a tent and a Chinese MRE could fuffil these needs, it wouldn't keep them from dicking around every spare minute they weren't off innawoods or building something. Building some fairly simple trench houses, or zemlyanka as your Ruskie friends called 'em, that was just a matter of running the buldozer a few times and slapping a roof on top. Cool, dry, and surprisingly shell-resistant, they would work for ages- or until you needed to add internal plumbing. A mess hall was another must-have, since real food was the fastest way to enact loss prevention against people wigging out and deserting. About the only thing worse than a deserter was an embezzler, in your book.
Of course, that was all neccessities you'd just doodled out on your legal pad. Offensively, you'd need a the Holy Trinity of beating the shit out of people- a motor pool, an armory, and a drill field.
The motor pool was the most important, if only because a mobile force lived and died in it's trucks. The Toyota War had been a resounding example of what motivated, mobile, and most importantly intelligent people could do with a truck and an oxy welder, and Dad had an entire photo album on the shelf of his work with them. Shikas, Dushkas, Grad, Ma Deuce, Stingers, even old rocket pods- just weld it on a tripod, and slap that shit in the bed. Half a dozen of them could put the fear of Allah into a mess of Iraqi conscripts (even with the guns unloaded) and their effect on morale was incredible. Even if you weren't strapping them to the gills with guns, the simple fact was you could keep a kitchen in a milk crate in one quarter of a technical's bed, and haul sixty plus liters of water in one that was still armed.
Then there was the armory. White Christ, the armory. While most people thought the armory was just where hopes and dreams went to die, they actually served an important purpose in keeping weapons and munitions both safe and operable. A Hind was a manageable opponent when your company's Stinger missiles worked. When they didn't work- well, that's how you nearly bought the farm back in Israel. After that, every gun, missile, and bullet you ever worked with would have to go through an armory, and by God you'd make sure that armory was a good one. Between getting a professionally matinenced gun every time you hit the field, knowing your magazines weren't going to fall apart, and the fact that three round bursts weren't just full auto in disguise, they were worth every penny.
Last, but certainly not least, was the drill field. Technically it was more an outdoor gym, but calling it a drill field made people feel better when they were puking their guts out in the grass and trying not to die. By making sure you had a place to keep your units sharp, train new hires, and build new tactics, it was relatively easy to make sure your fighting units didn't fall apart.
After that, though, there was just the wish list. Grass stirp air field for CASEVAC and maybe air supply, armor motor pool for if you ever decided to waste money on APCs, artillery park for the guns too big to manpack, electronic warfare center for when you wanted to snoop on cell phones half the country away, combat engineer courses for sappers and whatnot… all things you wanted, but probably didn't need.
Shaking your head, you got back down to reality. Settling on building a mess hall and a barracks complex for about a company of men, you got the work orders filled out and stamped so your construction teams would get to work. You only had a company of construction engineers, though, so things would probably get done fairly slowly. Oh well- as long as you kept them working, they'd keep you with new construction.
(MECHANICS: Every quarter, your Engineering Company can build up to 2,000,000 dollars worth of buildings. If no work orders are put in, they will default to working on Infrastructure Construction or building Base Defenses.)
It was a few weeks later that you got to meet San Angeles in the flesh. After putting on your good field uniform (now updated with twin thunderbird lapel patches and a golden hat-pin) you met him and his men in the field.
In all fairness, you didn't expect a stellar-looking lot, but what you ended up with looked like they'd been scraped up off the tarmac after a class of paratroopers fucked up to the man. Each one was dressed in ratty cammies, carrying an equally filthy rifle, and all of them looked mildly malnutritioned from their experiences. For all that, though, there were all promised two hundred off them, every man jack with the same silly floppy hat and a black triangle stitched on their 'uniforms' in some place or another. San Angeles barely looked better than his men, but when you sat him down in your office and got to talking, the results were good.
After the disaster that was '86, you had to hand it to the man- he had excellent sales pitches and recruitment moves, although he was still a little junior to the concept of being a subcontractor. Fortunately, his secondhand American training kicked in fairly quickly, which meant he was willing to work fairly closely with you in order to get things done, and done well.
After about a week of in-country processing and intensive feeding, the majority of the Contras were back in shape to take up patrol duties. This rapidly went south when one of the units, sans translator, ran into a patrol of 'militia' from one of the local governor's out on tax collection. After a short and sharp fight, the militia had been scared off, and the Contras were bringing back their wounded. While their effective strength had been reduced somewhat, the fact of the matter was that most of it was drain through needing to lay support networks and train translators. The dozen-odd wounded were mostly put towards this, freeing up the reserves.
In other news, the grapevine had finally shaken out some results, and you had a couple of interesting warm bodies on call as specialists.
First up was Pierre LaCours, late of the Wild Geese after his discharge. Nominally an airmobile group, Pierre was a bombardier and fixed-wing flight specialist. He'd been in charge of the 'demilitarized' A-26 Invader flight until a particularly nasty bout of flak over Peru in '72 had forced him to ditch. After that and the resultant loss of both legs beneath the knee, he'd sidetracked into chemical warfare just in time to get involved with a private contractor launching Agent Orange drop missions over 'Nam. He had a dry sort of Spanish wit, and you'd met him several times back when you were between jobs on Crete.
The next person was an old friend of yours from Syria, Abdul Al-Jarhad. He'd been a man on the inside and counterintelligence asset par excellence, and his experience in organizing rifle regiments in the Syrian army for you to knock to pieces later meant he knew how to build up a tough, strong, and smart unit- and then put in fault lines to make it shatter as soon as someone started pouring on the artillery. Apparently, he'd been caught in some internecine round of infighting again, and had needed to relocate to Albania for a while to let the heat die down. Until then, he needed a job, and you were still hiring.
Finally, there was Dorrier Farbrach, an expatriate East German who had spent the last thirty years running guns under the Soviet's, and now German, governmental noses. Specializing in recovering Soviet stashes of old firearms from the Great Patriotic War, he'd made bank on a couple of Stasi caches before the Germans caught him at it. Right now he was in Silesia, and needed to liquidate his cargo before the Alanders figured out they were currently sitting on enough guns to arm every citizen in the islands twice over. Bringing him on would probably get you reduced rate on his stock, and more importantly mean you could get right of first refusal on anything else he found.
Time to start writing letters, then. You had things to do.
VOTES
Tactics Planning (CHOOSE ONE, Affects Q2)
[] Hire Mercenaries
-[] Write-in group from any Mercenary Dossier not yet hired.
[] Investigate Local Terrain
[] Develop Local Contacts
-You don't know anything, and you know you don't know anything. At least finding out who your neighbors are will help fix that.
[] Start Local Patrols
-You nearly got jumped by freaking tax collectors. Keeping a good, secured cordon around your base will keep that issue out.
Build Queue
[] Add to Build Queue: Select any building below, which will be added the queue. Up to 2,000,000 of buildings can be constructed in a single turn.
-[] Barracks: 50,000
-[] Mess Hall: 30,000
-[] Clinic, 20 beds: 80,000
--[] Clinic expansion, 40 beds: 120,000
-[] Shops: 20,000
-[] Brothel: 45,000
-[] Bar, 20 seats: 30,000
-[] Grill, 20 seats: 30,000
-[] Motor Pool: 100,000
--[] Motor Shop: 150,000
--[] Expanded Yard: 20,000
--[] Expanded Shop: 100,000
--[] Armor Shop: 200,000
-[] Armory: 100,000
--[] Explosives Shop: 50,000
--[] Heavy Weapons Shop: 80,000
--[] Tooling Shop: 40,000
--[] Build Shop: 90,000
-[] Drill Field: 5,000
--[] Gym: 20,000
--[] Range: 10,000
--[] Explosives Range: 15,000
--[] Shot House: 25,000
--[] Long Range: 10,000
--[] Crew Served Weapon Range: 10,000
-[] Artillery Park: 30,000
-[] Dirt Strip Field: 2,000,000
-[] Electronic Warfare Center: 1,500,000
-[] Engineer School: 1,000,000
Hire Specialists
[] Pierre LaCours
[] Abdul Al-Jahard
[] Dorrier Farbach
[] Decline to acquire a specialist.
Last edited:
