Location Suggestion: Strategic National Stockpile (based on RL, with sources)

Game Talk The Drawing Board
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tl;dr - It’d be cool, end-game, RL-friendly, and super-rare. Sources, pictures, & videos below.

REAL LIFE INFO:

Background In America, there’s a program that’s been around since the 90s called the Strategic National Stockpile. It’s a giant stockpile of medical goods to rapidly respond to a health epidemic. There’s somewhere between 6 and 12 of them in the US; the exact number of warehouses and their locations is classified.

How They Look What is public is their size, their (rough) inventory, and their scale. Each one’s in a non-descript warehouse roughly the size of two Super WalMarts or 8 acres of land (Washington Post). The shelves are stacked up like an Ikea storeroom or Amazon warehouse, only filled with medical supplies. One section is refrigerated / frozen for medical supplies that require it (like insulin and botulism antitoxins). Another is caged off and locked behind iron bars - this is where the addictive substances, like painkillers, are stored (NPR). There are “rows and rows of ventilators” that are kept “in a constant state of readiness,” each one having electrical outlets so they can be charged and tested monthly.

How They’re Staffed & Secured Each one is guarded by a 24/7 security detail. The workforce inside is mainly standard labor, although some workers are required to wear HAZMAT suit in refrigerated areas. Doctors are present to verify the effectiveness of certain medications, as are specialized maintenance personnel for certain medical devices. Motion sensors trigger the lighting.

What’s In Them At the front entrance of each warehouse is a series of “12 Hour Push Packages,” which are 50 tons’ worth of medical supplies prepared to ship anywhere in America within 12 hours. Images of them & their (unclassified) inventory can be found at the FTP.cdc.gov link below. ChemPacks are also deployed from these warehouses; these are anti-nerve gas agents that contain atropine autoinjector and pralidoxime chloride autoinjector (2-PAM). Images and details on ChemPacks found at the CHEMM.nlm.nih.gov link below.

Beyond these, the public inventory is at about:

  • 50 million face masks
  • 100 million respirators
  • 45 million antiviral regimens

So each warehouse would have millions of the above, and, one can imagine, lots and lots of the interesting stuff.

INTERESTING DRUGS These warehouses store unique drugs that ONLY EXIST in SNS’s and nowhere else in the world. These drugs are unavailable to the public and meant to address biochemical warfare and epidemic concerns, like anthrax.

SHS IN CDDA

Why It’d be Cool This would be a very rare location, about as rare as a missile silo. Private contractors would run the security, so zombies similar to labs. This location would be challenging to take on at any stage without ranged weaponry; since it’s a giant warehouse, zombies would see a survivor easily, and both cover and escape routes would be sparse. Zombie technicians and guards would be common, with some normal ones and scientists thrown in there.

Bountiful Loot The bounty for looting it, however, would be large for players with illnesses or who are prone to injury. It’d have lots - and I mean lots - of royal jelly, among other lovely drugs. Chances are a character could find lots of anesthetic for CBM installation. If your character was ill, he or she could get better in here. Autodocs would be guaranteed. Bandages and antiseptic for life. But as a base, this place would be mediocre at best. It’d have lots of sturdy walls and few exits, sure, and furniture that could be dismantled, but not much else.

And secrets These locations are classified IRL. Who knows what else could be there? Let imaginations abound! I found it curious that these reporters didn’t mention basements at all, and it’d be a vastly different place if it turned into a VIP shelter, was nearly-emptied out as storage, stayed pristine, or was swarmed by civilians during the apocalypse…

As for mutagen… well, there are drugs only sold to the government, so who knows? What do you guys think would be in a SNS warehouse in the CDDA universe?

Links & More:

Video Footage Inside One: https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/7d9dd94e-38f4-11e8-af3c-2123715f78df

Simple Slides w/ Specific #s and Incidents: http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/~/media/Files/Activity%20Files/PublicHealth/Stockpile/2015-JUN-04/Presentations/5%20Logistics%20of%20the%20SNS.pdf

Journalist 1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/04/24/inside-the-secret-u-s-stockpile-meant-to-save-us-all-in-a-bioterror-attack/

List & Pictures of Unclassified Inventory in 12-Hour Push Pack: https://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/MCMTraining/Miscellaneous%20Resources%20and%20Documents/SNS_Push%20Package%20Catalogl_2-1-12.pdf

Journalist 2 (with 6 minute audio interview): https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/06/27/483069862/inside-a-secret-government-warehouse-prepped-for-health-catastrophes

List & Pictures of Inventory in Standard ChemPack: https://chemm.nlm.nih.gov/chempack.htm

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A novel concept with real life sources to back it up?
Be still my beating heart :heart_eyes:

For real tho, the articles you linked look like a good read.

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They’re good reads! They’re from the only two journalists who have received access to these SNS shelters, plus from the government itself. And they have pretty pictures.

What I find most fascinating is the mistique about the locations. While they’re giant medical warehouses, there’s a lot of potential unknowns in them… IE room for creativity from the location-maker. :slight_smile:

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Seems like a army + politician backup. General population would see only the barrel of a gun before the governing body and military would give out anything with only 6-12 locations. There are 350 million documented people on average in the USA. Excluding Mexico and Canada(which would migrate in a crisis; like our game). The general population would have to take a nose dive before these goods would be plausible at the numbers it could supply reasonably.

Not even paranoia to think this. First and foremost to any real crisis, would be to mitigate the immediate problem. Irregardless of the cost to the civilian population. I find it perversely amusing everyone thinks the power that be would care about you lol

…but still neat. Seriously. It is. But it would be a bit much for the game all in one location though.

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That’s why it’d be super-rare, about as rare as a nuclear silo! It’d be soooo much medical equipment in one place. Royal jelly in the double digits.

I wonder if these places IRL do secretly have shelters for the politicians & army in there. That’s a fascinating thought. They are classified IRL after all, so for all we know, there are secret shelters in there.

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There were a few locations outside of DC for politicians. The problem with them and why they closed them, was due to the fact that they could not get information fast enough to the parties that would go in time to then gather these people and ship them to the bunkers before all hell would break loose.

I remember viewing a few locations that were opened to the public. Kinda funny though that a few billion pissed away on moldy ass bunkers with nothing in them. Meh! xD

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At least some turned into nice tourist attractions? Like the one in the basement of the Greenbriar in West Virginia.

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Cannot remember. But some across the country are turned into homes. You can turn up a lot of content on youtube if you check. Really neat how some crazy people are gutting missile silos the gov sold lol

I would not want to live in one though. If I were to go nuts and build a bunker. I would place it no where on land at all. I would buy a boat and customize it for all manner of sea problems. At least I wouldn’t feel nuckin futs justifying it(or the cost) lol

Besides which. The only bunkers that would survive even a blast, would be something similar to norad and that only can handle 10 megatons. Since everything modern is normally 40+…welp…it turns into an easy bake oven.

Truly. The only option for a governing body that makes sense would be to trade DC for the Great Lakes and build floating cities and stations on the water. Which…would be a great stockpile location too(also coming back to the thread relevance).

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maybe when water travel is revamped, floating cities could be a thing? that’d be rad and fit the futuristic theme

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This is related to the video I posted in my thread about mega-bunkers. I think the real benefit of these is that they would make excellent quest fodder for NPC tribes.

I don’t really think having post scarcity for respirator masks and bandages would be too huge a deal by the time your able to secure this stuff.

A good way to keep the rewards from Messing up the dynamic of the game is that whatever NPC group takes it over has the time and manpower to manifest and inventory all that crap. The one glaring negative to looting something like that is that in real life, unless everything were very clearly labeled which I doubt, then you’d be digging around for days before locating your first bottle of penicillin (assuming you know the name of the antibiotic you’re looking for).

The way I see it is this would expand stocks of what that NPC group can sell you and it would permanently have a large rotating supply of high end medical gear, drugs. And maybe even CBMs/mutagens.

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I would like to amend this post from 2 months ago. Perhaps the National Strategic Stockpile would not have as many of the basics as we would think it had. Especially assuming the cataclysm made some people use up, say, face masks before the Event happened.

You know, just thinking aloud here… we still don’t know what all is in it, but it’s likely a whole bunch of anti-bioterrorist stuff.

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This is an intriguing idea and I’m all for adding new content. I don’t think these should be added in an intact and unlooted fashion, though. There was a lot of buildup towards the cataclysm, many large scale medical disasters that hit the general populace as well as a lot of military activity that would most likely have drained the stockpile to a large degree.
The fact that a lot of the resources were sent out could be a boon, however, since there’s a possibility of finding the shipments out in the world. I can imagine finding the remains of military convoy’s moving supplies to help combat or mitigate an outbreak from an ‘unknown’ disease or fight back the hordes of undead and interdimensional invaders flowing out from portal sites.
One point I’d like to bring up: I doubt there’d be ‘vast quantities’ of royal jelly stocked in these warehouses. Royal jelly is something new, one of the few beneficial side effects of the cataclysm. It would have only been available for a short time before everything went to hell and was likely to be an unknown curiosity still being researched in one of the many many labs set up to study the portals and the things that come out of them. In the event that its properties were known, it’s unlikely there would have been sufficient time to stockpile large quantities of a relatively new and rare drug, though I’m sure plans were in motion to do so.

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Ah, I hadn’t realized that tidbit of info! My Cataclysmic lore is not quite up there. Good to know!

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That works. I imagine you’d have as much on hand as mutagen and CBMs, so the rare item stocked in the NPC stores.

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I agree about mutagen scarcity equaling royal jelly scarcity, they’re both based on blob tech. The CBMs, on the other hand, seem to predate the blob, they’ve been around long enough for people to go to school for it and to have it integrated into the military and civilian life, too. You could expect to find full autodoc suites ready to mass install CBM’s in emergency workers and replacement soldiers. Perhaps even ‘reclaiming’ suites designed for harvesting CBM’s from the dead and resetting them for future use.

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Huh. That makes sense. Though, I’m not sure if a strategic medical cache would have combat CBMs. Maybe specifically leukocyte breeders and the like.

But your idea sparks something more interesting. Maybe this is one of the only reliable locations to find a mobile autodoc suite. I’m imagining an autodoc is like an Xray machine. Bulky, expensive, requires lots of power and fine tuned parts. Most autodocs would be built into hospitals or labs, but the strategic defense center would want something they can move to different locations. That could be your mcguffin for any quest here, considering NPC tribes would likely want something like this at their facility, and not to move into the strategic cache.

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that’s a great idea!