Okay, the latest scheme being devised by some of my players is to take over a warehouse in the barrens (and the way our barrens are roleplayed, there's a lot of 'em) or similar large spot of territory and build a small little fortress. Naturally I use the precedent from "and so it came to pass:"

"Swarms of insect spirits terrorized the place, while various opportunists with heavy weapons christened themselves warlords and began consolidating power in different neighborhoods inside the Zone."

Looking at one website, I found this pricing for cinder blocks.

8"X16" cement block 1.15 each

So to build a section of wall eight feet by sixteen feet would cost 12 times that, or 13.8. Converting dollars to nuyen, its about 14 nuyen for the same amount of walling.

So what, then, would the cost for a full city block's worth of walling be? LOL besides a lot. In the tens of thousands, probably? Ask Jeeves says a city block is Engineers use a typical city block as 100,000 sq. ft. for calculation estimates.

So from the math I'm doing, to wall in 1/4th of a city block at 8 feet high is 138,000. Of course they'd probably only want to make the wall 4 feet high, and to include any rubble in the area (including any easily moved rubble, especially with trucks.) so the actual cost could be much less. At the same time, the average Costco is 136,273 square feet, according to one source I've read. That's a lot of friggin Costco!

Then comes actual buildings, which I could generally use the same formula for, only without any replacements for cinderblocks such as every scrap of stone in the area.

Now, how about the cost of wires for various things? I've already looked up (Yes, you may laugh) the cost of solar power and wind power and how they work. I'm also curious about the process of making an illegal matrix tap, how that works?

Any official answers would be great, but if that fails give me some unofficial!

The average cost to build a commercial building today, turn key, is about seventy dollars per square foot. Add inflation for sixty years and you can probably estimate construction costs at around ninety dollars per square foot.

Hope this helps...

Well this ain't no commercial building XD Its more a "You have a roof over your head, biotch" sort of deal. Though then again, the way most SR pricings are they seem to handle inflation via the conversion to Nuyen.

Quickly looking, I saw a handgun priced at 500, and another at 800. Ares predators are, what, 450 nuyen? So I wouldn't count on inflation crippling the plan

Inflation cannot possibly cripple the plan when nuyen has no direct, stated relation to the current dollar.

AThere's also labor to consider, where are they going to find a bunch of experienced bricklayers who will come work in the barrens? How will they move in several truckloads of building materials without have the materials or the truck stolen? What about the current occupants of the place? If it's in good enough shape to keep some of the rain off, someone probably lives there...

They are probably better off with a chain link fence, it's much cheaper... There's also whatever repair work the warehouse itself will need.

Depending on how much work you want to do as GM, you should come up with a few different base locations they can choose from, each with their own probelems and advantages. Just dumping a bunch of of money on a nebulous warehouse 'somewhere in the barrens' sounds a bit sterile.

You looked up the price of 1 cinder block.

Check the price per pallet, it should be significantly less. (unless there was a large minimum order)

Personally I wouldn’t worry about it. Look at the lifestyle rules in SSG, consider what they want apply some cowmen sense and quote a figer, the players can like it or lump it,

Edward

Also, be aware that if you make the price of cinder blocks too high, the players may be able to make more money stealing cinderblocks... What kind of construction material storage facility can stop an all singing, all dancing team of shadowrunners?

Also the block wall should be re-enforced with iron, otherwise the whole thing is likely to collapse when some yahoo runs their car (or troll) into it. Unless you have construction workers as players, who would be offended by the inaccuracy of it all, you are probably better off taking Frater Inominatus's suggesting and quoting them a price based on how big an area they want.

Yup, the cinderwall was just an example. And a bad one, we realized an hour into the concocting that we'd botched the math.

To get how much you need to cover a square foot, you just take the square root of the number. We = Stupid college students.

And yeah, cinderblocks don't do great against cars in single layers, but they do provide cover against bullets. Furthermore, its the barrens and I'm sure we can dredge up a few scabs at relatively cheap wages. Especially since we'd probably be able to offer them promises of a (somewhat) better living space than what they have after the project is complete.

Project? Warehouses are -huge-. Go into a Costco/BJ's/Best Buy/Target/Wallmart and you'll see what I mean. A small clinic, for example, could fit in with a lot of room to spare. Part of the room could be dedicated to a barracks, perhaps even a two-or-three story one, with minimal "lifestyle" payments for those who work on it from the getgo. While that'd raise costs, the group plans to go solar/wind powered (I've looked some stuff up, probably about 20,000 a building) with a few backup generators. Then just top it off with the PC's apartments and heavy corpse-looting (one of the PCs just fought a pair of street sams and made the gangers the opposition had hired carry the one dead man's corpse out, though the surviving troll was allowed a reprieve with a serious wound provided he owe a favor)

The hardest part of most construction (or so it seems to me, I may be wrong) is probably a basement, which a warehouse might not (in this case, won't) have. They'd have to dig into the old foundation, which is admittedly possible but time consuming. Then again the old foundation is probably not well founded anymore, and one might even strategically lay down plascrete-melting stuff. and chip the walls solid for all I care.

Tell me how out of the ballpark this sounds. Characters have some contacts who do professional electronic work, so the electrical systems are probably doable if expensive. They'd want to get hold of at least one good construction worker to oversee stuff (houses without insulation = suck). Running water is a big issue, but they could maybe just dig a big, big basin and close it, having rainwater run off the roof and into gutters, then pipes, then the central pump (sort of like a well).

Yeah fairly out of teh ballpark