Okay, so a major part of my Big Bads plan involves him stealing a city destroying nuke from a military base. Thing is, he only has a small guerilla force at his disposal. He does manipulate a group of magic users into stealing it for him, but I want help portraying the bases defences realisticaly.
Spoiler Read: US Nuclear Weapon Safety and Control Try: Google (Obviously) The more research you do, and the more you understand how these bases are operated, the better you'll be able to portray them. Not sure what else to say.
I have a little background in a similar field and I will give some tips: Any compound will have a vehicle barrier to prevent ramming. Barbed wire for outer fencing. Possible lookout towers. Obviously 24/7 armed guardians random patrols with both sidearm and rifle. (Civilian installations like Nuclear Power will carry AR-15's while Government security will use M16's) Motion sensors and thermal cameras. Also don't forget that any high security facility will have two or more central monitoring rooms. In case one goes down. Oh and the local FAA station will track any aircraft. Good luck breaking in!
Thanks a lot for the help. Now the first thing the intruders will do is cut of the power to the base, so what I want to know is, what backups or procedures do these kind of bases have in case of loss of power
Hey, you might want to look into attacks on "nuclear" military bases in the past, such as recent raids and drills in Pakistan. I wish I could give a better link to start with, but I got a little lazy. Also if you want to portray the military as an ultra-powerful entity then you might look into scalar weapons, such as the H.A.A.R.P. facility. If the defenses include electromagnetic weapons and acoustic weapons, I think it would be a fair match for magic users.
Those kinds of places have backups for the backups. You might be able to realistically get one person into the facility, and that'd be difficult as heck to pull off, but more then likely a team would be captured without some sort of inside help. The security around anywhere that holds weapons like that are astronomical. Then you run into the issue of making a weapon, which could be dropped to the bottom of the sea (which has happened in a B52 crash years ago over the Atlantic) and they are inert and won't go BOOM. There's a lot of items you will need to research to pull it off, and don't forget any snipers will have infrared scopes to spot intruders also. As a sci fi writer, who deals with a lot of black ops, I can tell you the real thing, in countries like that USA/Britain/France, etc etc (not as much in other countries like Russia and the Middle East) are under such a level of security it would be almost, if not a real one, a suicide mission to try to get it. Prime example: Back in 1998-99 they still moved missiles, and material by train. They ran one through where I live when I was at the Amtrak station in town. They had a passenger train (which diesel on each end) darkened down sitting and waiting. It slowly left, and less then five minutes later came a freight train on the next track, with different company's power, and a consist full of radiation placarded cards. There were troop cars on that train also, and as it passed, I and everyone else on the patio had a nice red laser light on the chest as each troop car in the train passed by. The passenger train had a full compliment of troops aboard also. So, even when transporting items, the security is very high. Ya got your work cut out for you.
Kate is correct, all power systems will have redundancy. Honestly, your best bet is the most original, because it works. Get a mole inside. Get someone inside with high enough clearance to be able to move the peices around like a chess board. Secondly, the drawings... Every complex will have 100% up-to-date drawings of the electrical, security and physical systems in these complexes. (In the US they have to in order to comply with Nuclear Regulatory Commission.) These drawings will be locked in a safe somewhere, but it would be easy to extort an engineer to get you copies. Then at least you would have a working knowledge of all the systems in the facility. ...and I use the word 'easy' very lightly. Also, I would use the fact that incidents are rare against them. Cause an initial incident in point A and the whole place will be so surprised that something actually happened, you'll have better chances doing nefarious things at point B. J. J.
Okay everyone, thanks for the help. Now, a few more things. Based on everything you guys have said, it looks like getting that bomb will be VERY dangerous. I think I can have them pull it off, but they'll take massive casualties. Which is exactly what the villain wants. Rather than steal the nuke himself, he manipulates his two biggest rivals into trying to steal it for him, which means they'll be to busy to stop his real plan, of opening a gate between two worlds and regaining his original power. That means one of two things will happen. A) One of his rivals steals the nuke, but will be utterly devasted in the attack, allowing the villain to easily swoop in and take it from them after he's finished opening the portal. (Just because he's using the nuke as a distraction doesn't mean he won't take advantage of it.) B) his Rivals fail to steal the nuke and are all wiped out. He still gets the portal opened, and he just took care of his competition. Either way, he wins. Now, the guys stealing the nuke will probably try to turn invisible, is there any technology that would allow the soldiers to counter this?
Well, ultrasonic motion detectors won't care if the target doesn't reflect light. And the defenders could listen for the invisible assault team bumping into walls. If you are neither absorbing nor reflecting light, you are blind - light is passing through your eyes without interacting with them. If the invisibility is "faked", i.e. a form of high tech camouflage, there will be imperfections that can be detected, especially from differing angles.
Massive casualties is putting it lightly. In a real-life situation in the US, it'd probably be a suicide mission. However, if it's someone who doesn't care if they die or not, then it's quite possible. Your probable best move, in my opinion for knowing people in the black ops game, is get one person in, then work from there. One-or two-max, can do quite a bit of damage to security infrastructure and cause lots of problems. Then you can get the weapon. Or..or..this might be the easier action, snag 'em while they're on the road, or rails, being transported. While security is tight, by the nature of transporting something, the security could...could...be lighter.
The alert pad (where armed and fueled bombers were kept on five-minutes' standby) at the Air Force base where I served had a ten-yard-wide strip of raked sand outside the fenced-off area.
Why not buy it from people who have it? Why break into an American base or anything like that, when you can buy it from someone who got it in the soviet union? When the soviet union fell, you had all of these nations with stockpiles in them that nobody really guarded in any serious manner. At least, that's what I hear, from TV shows and Rainbow Six video games... So get your supervillain to buy this stuff from some shady scumbag who went through these soviet nations in the 90s and got his hand on everything he could get, while some drunk guards were looking the other way in return for cash.
Assuming they turn invisible magically, there's the old trick of spilling paint on them to reveal them. If the guards knew there were invisible intruders, they would probably set up motion detectors and then use automatic rifles to fire blindly in the general location of the motion detected.
Otherwise, I would recommend taking a historical fiction/alternate history approach to it. A lot of alternate history sci fi has stories like these.
Hi, Knowing nothing about breaking into military bases to steal nukes (but I'd have to say that anyway!) In every movie, e.g. Broken Arrow aren't the damn things security coded so that they can't be fired? Also still on Broken Arrow, why bother with a base. Find them in transport, security's got to be a damned sight less. Just shoot the plane down. Cheers, Greg.
at most parts or fuel show up. part of the issue is that weapons are rarely intact. we don't ship them intact. remember a few years ago we accidently sent parts to Taiwan? if you want louse nukes or materials, start looking in the ocean. the US has lost 11 in the ocean. two of them would be intact as they where on a submarine. also both sides lost nuclear subs during the cold war and latter. i think the last one was 2000.
