I used Alcatraz as the site for their heavy duty long range ADA/suborbital defense systems. Along with a low altitude defense battery on the seaward side by the old coastal defense sites to take out sea skimmers.

Read Turtledoves "The Last Article" for some ideas about how totalitarians handle sabotage.

It's all well and good to talk about the myth of the valiant resistance, but it's a myth. The German garrison of Marseille, the second largest city in France, was a single infantry battalion and a company of Gestapo. The number of people who were members of the French resistance in 1941 and were still alive in 1945 was tiny. Not only because there were really not that many people who joined the resistance before June 6, 1944, but those who did tended to have really short careers that ended in a firing squad. Most people are not willing to have themselves and their family killed in order to make a gesture of defiance.

Totalitarian "Iron Fist" tactics work. They work well. As was shown in Tiananmen square when the protests against having to share dorms with "inferior" African students got out of hand and turned into a political reform movement. As shown by the fact that, 10 thousand executions later, Castro is still running Cuba and the Kim National Estate is still grinding along.

As Second Grozney showed, defending a built up area only favors the defender if the attacker cares about taking the city in one piece.


The various professional activists leading the riots at Kent State taunted the soldiers (among many other things) about how they had unloaded guns and encouraged the students via this. Well, it turned out that they were NOT carrying around unloaded guns. As was rather dramatically demonstrated a bit later. Fundamental misunderstandings about the reality of the situation occur by people who have figured out how close to the edge they can play it with one authority group works and attempt to translate it to another totally different group.

I think someone's being a little melodramatic, and taking a conversation about some in-game happenings a little too personally, all at the same time.

Their weapons program didn't need to be sabotaged. As Einstein and Oppenheimer both said after the war, if they had known how poorly the Nazi nuclear program was going, they never would've helped the Manhattan Project.

However, the NKGB was extremely thankful for Oppenheimer's assistance in their nuclear program. Saved them years.

Thanks Martin!

JIS could put both intelligence/interrogation complex and heavy weapons on the Rock. It's good for having very limited access, since Resistance can't sneakily walk up to it regardless of Infiltration or Shadowing skills; they need airborne or underwater or amazing (magical, earth spirit) tunnelling, and JIS presumably has seismic and acoustic sensors for the latter two. JIS probably schedules exactly one vehicular shuttle to/from Alcatraz per day, and it unloads and loads in an open, surveilled courtyard (at both ends of the run).

But the OP was SF *after* the Occupation.

If there are JIS AIs running secret, abandoned high-security installations left behind during Saito's exit, then they could perhaps not know the war is over, kinda like abandoned Imperial soldiers on Pacific islands after WWII.

The SF portions of the Matrix might have nasty elements; presumably Saito imposed something like the current "Great Firewall of China", and data bombs and JIS AI agents with black IC are the equivalent of post-war uncleared minefields.

So, the plot of Paranoia, then?

Awesome!

I can picture the scene: an unsuspecting team of metahuman runners land on the Rock to recover some files from the "offline" Matrix system. All of a sudden, the entire complex goes into total red alert mode, believing there to have been a breakout. Cue drone battles, commlink hacks and all manner of foolishness.