Section E: The salvage buisness of Twilight 2000

To get into the vehicle salvage business, you first need to restore or set up a repair yard. While this is being done, a small party of characters can go out and search the countryside for wrecks. Burnt out hulls are a common find, but not particularly useful (though they are a source of scrap metal). The characters will need some way of transporting the wrecks back to the yard. All PC’s should have some personal transportation, but trucks, armored recovery vehicles, or even teams of  horses might get the job done. Local labor will be necessary, both as general labor and skilled help. Unskilled laborers will work for food and shelter, skilled workers will want some sort of wages.

Once some people have been assembled, the next task is to find a work space. This could be most easily done by taking over an abandoned repair yard, or capturing a working repair yard. Unfortunately, most of these yards were positioned during the war to service the front lines. As a result they may not be in the best location to trade with existing city-states or cantonments. The next best option is to find a good location, and capture or restore a factory or machine shop nearby, and expand it into a repair yard. Once the location is chosen, there are several important things which must be transported, or built on site. The first order of business is work space. Large buildings associated with a factory or warehouse will do, but will probably be in bad shape. Restoring them is a major (and Difficult) task  for civil engineers.

Task: Restore Large Building to service: DIF (CvE) 1-2 weeks time.
Requires 10-40 thousand dollars in materials, 5 carpenters/ assistants (min asset CvE:7), and 10 unskilled laborers. 10 sets of basic tools, 10 sets of excavation tools are a minimum. To get plumbing and electricity working is an average task of CvE, and Elc respectively.

The  job is made faster (or uses ½ of the required personal) with a set of power tools. Doubling the number of workers will also halve the required time. Without the skilled assistants, the time is doubled again (as the foreman has to do much of the work which would normally be portioned out). Nearby buildings can be salvaged to make up the materials cost, this requires two additional weeks per building being restored, and it wrecks two nearby structures. Once the main building is restored, several other buildings may be needed, depending on the size of the yard, and the availability of  support industries.

 Task: Make a new building DIF (CvE) 1week +1week/1000ft2 , 1 senior foreman (CvE:10),  4 bricklayers (CvE:6), 5 Carpenters (CvE:7), a plumber (CvE:9), and maybe an electrician (Elc:10), and 30 unskilled workers.

For either task, failure represents setbacks or cost overruns, while critical success represents innovative material usage, leading to shorter startup times. While this is going on, the rest of party can already be dragging wrecks back to the site, building up the inventory. The next thing to do is to lay out floorspace for various parts of the company. For small operations, this can be contained in a single building, but larger operations will want to have separate residences, offices, and storage warehouses. In any case consideration will have to be given to the following;

1/ Living space for residential workers (almost all will want residency). This includes a)barracks, b)kitchen and mess hall, c) rest rooms d) recreation rooms (bar), e) day care for workers children, f) a water tower, plumbing...

2/ Office space for; planning recovery operations, keeping maps of known wreck sites, drafting and keeping blueprints for vehicles and parts, keeping track of sales and trade agreements,  keeping inventory records, and general management.

3/ An armoury, maybe a guardhouse or two if protection is a potential problem (and it almost always is).

 4/ Shop floor space for working on vehicles, including assembly stations, tool cabinets, power generators, metal fabrication spaces, arc welders, and larger tools, and maybe an overhead crane.

 5/ Specialized spaces for associated industries (foundry/forge milling machines/ power tools)

 6/ Space for parts storage (Warehouse space and cabinets), and a place to put the wrecks to keep them out of the rain (tents, or a large warehouse space).

 When the repair yard has been planned out, and space allocated, some tools and equipment will be needed. Some items (such as a crane) can be salvaged fairly easily, others (Tracked Vehicle tools) will be more rare, and may have to be purchased from a city-state or merchant. To have a rudimentary yard, which can reassemble new vehicles from wrecks, and potentially jury rig small parts (such as mountings, brackets etc), a minimal number of equipment will be needed.

The Basic Repair Yard:
This example of a post-war repair yard illustrates the minimum necessary amount of equipment necessary to do basic salvaging.
 

-Crane/Hoist-- one or several 5T for moving engines, 10T for moving light vehicles, and 50-100T for moving tanks.   -Arc Welder  -Manual labor (3 people per vehicle being repaired)  -Basic toolkit (1/worker)  -Electrical repair toolkit (1/ 2vehicles)  -Electronic repair toolkit (needed for complex engines only)  -Wheeled/Tracked Vehicle tools (1/ 2vehicles)  -Supply of motor oil/ grease/ water/brake fluid.  -Fuel -whatever type vehicles require

 
With this kind of repair yard, parts from vehicles can be transferred to make a couple of working vehicles from a whole lot of dead ones. The number of vehicles which can be worked upon simultaniously is limited by tools and workers. The basic yard can probably handle two armored fighting vehicles simultaneously. Other vehicles can be easier, or much harder, compared to AFV’s. As a general rule of thumb, each worker can handle 3 maintenance value’s worth of vehicles. (Thus 3 workers could handle work on a MV:9 vehicle, the same crew working on a MV:18 vehicle would go twice as slow, or two MV:4 vehicles could be worked on simultaniously).
 
Each mechanic can guide a number of unskilled laborers equal to his skill value. Fine work (Electrical, computer, machinist, etc) will also need a skilled worker, and a number of laborers ( numbering maximaly up to skill level of expert). Once the available work pool has been formed, it must be assigned specific tasks, and the expert worker must roll against skill (difficulty determined by task) to determine success. Critical success in any task can mean one of two things, 1/ that the work is of exceptional quality, or 2/ that the work was completed in record time. It must be stated at the outset wether time or quality are desired goals.

Activities of a functioning repair yard
There are three basic types of repair that a yard can attempt, refitting/ replacing lost or broken parts, jurry rigging parts, or fabricating parts. Parts are not generic “spares”, but refer to components of specific systems defined in Wreck Generation Table (Subsection 2). Each system has a difficult level assigned to it for each type of repair attempt.

1/ Refitting/ Replacing

This is the easiest and most common task of repair yards. Cannibalizing existing vehicles for parts to make another one work ranges from Average to Difficult, assuming such wrecks are available. The wear value of the particular component can be recorded separatly from the rest of the vehicle. (In an advanced but cumbersome version, all components should have a wear value). Refitting can be performed in any basic repair yard.

2/ Jurry rigging

When parts of an otherwise working system are broken or missing, they can sometimes be temporarily fixed ( mountings can be spot welded in place, components can be held in place with wooden shims, etc). This always increases the wear value of the system by 1, and doubles breakdown chances. All breakdowns from the vehicle will be 90% likely to be the jurry-rigged systems. Jurry rigging requires 1 unit of scrap metal parts, and the use of an arc-welder and/or a cutting torch.

3/ Fabrication

This is what really should be done for any real repair of a vehicle. However, since fabrication of new parts is extreemly industrialy intensive, only small parts can be manufactured in a reasonable amount of time. As the factory gets larger, a foundry may be added, along with milling machines, and a metalworking shop. On the small scale, 10-50 workers will be employed, and larger parts can be synthesized. Fabrication requires a minimum of a small foundry (Consuming 20kg coal per day), and a machinist shop (drill press, lathe, etc). Work can be done in soft metals, but begin with a WV=5, and quickly break down. Hard metal works requires a large foundry (consuming 100kg coal per day).

Larger and more advanced repair yards.

In addition, the repair yard will have to locate or establish several associated industries if it wants to expand it’s capacity. Such industries would include:
 

1/ Power generation (for milling machines, arc welders, grinders, etc)  2/ Plumbing and water tower (necessary for drop forging)  3/ Foundry (smelts scrap copper/lead... or even steel into usable stock)  4/ Fuel generation (stills for alcohol, pumps for oil?)  5/ Agriculture (to feed workers on site, and supply stills)  6/ Service industry (to upkeep workers and staff)  7/ Munitions generation (might as well sell vehicles with a full load of ammo)

A sales service will also be needed to contact the various forming governments in order to draw up contracts. Mercenary companies can sell to warlords in exchange for gold, more self-concious operations will tend to support benevolent governments, and take trade of materials and supplies as well as hard currency (gold). Keep in mind that there are no guarentees, Sales staff will have to be cautious of who they approach, and how trusting they should be.
 

Restoring wrecks into service

Time Involved:

Minor damage requires a number of man-days equal to the maintenance value to replace or jurry rig, twice that to fix, and 4 times that to fabricate. Major damage requires double the amount of time as minor damage, and cannot usually be fixed by fabrication.

Parts Involved:

Wrecks are divided into four categories, based on why they were abandoned.

 1/ Intact- The crew was killed by a shell penetrating the cabin, or was abandoned in a panic. All of the parts are in working order (except for a small hole in the armor). Roll 1-4 random systems affected by minor damage

 2/ Broken down- Either due to wear, or accident, the Vehicle has suffered a critical mishap, and broken down. This could be simple (a thrown track) or serious (a seized engine), but only one component is badly damaged. One critical system (engine, suspension, transmission, chassis) has been Major Damaged, 1-6 random systems have suffered minor damage.

 3/ Explosion- As a result of a penetrating round, the ammunition store exploded, damaging most of the internal components and killing the crew. Many systems (including storage, gun, traverse, electronics, etc) are destroyed. Roll 1-6 systems Major damage, 1-6 minor.

 4/ Fire- The main fuel store caught on fire, burning the vehicle into a empty shell. The only undamaged component is the Hull, and even that is only useful for scrap metal. No systems function, but 1-10XMaint value of scrap parts can be extracted. This is a task (Mec:Avg, 1 manhour per Maint value).