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Old 05-03-2012, 07:26 PM   #15
Curmudgeon
 
Join Date: Sep 2011
Default Re: While waiting for GURPS Conspiracies . . .

Weeell, I might have missed a lot of headings, but right now, I suspect we're looking at different spreadsheets. When I click on your link at post #12, there are no headings marked rank.
Admittedly, my memory's pretty short these days but clicking just a couple of minutes ago and running the slider bars all the way over and all the way down, there are about eight titled rows and maybe as many titled columns and not every square in that 8 x 8 array has an entry.
As for assigning 200 man-hours for surveillance as a handwae, that works but it wasn't exactly what I had in mind when suggesting that you cost out some common tasks. Sorry, I should have been a lot clearer.
To use survellance of a person as an example, I was thinking about breaking it down more along these lines. I need one operative to shadow my subject, if on foot. If he's going to follow him for a lengthy period then I need to assign two or three operatives at a time to him, so they can trade off before they get noticed or I could assign a rough team of two that's meant to be noticed and shaken by the target and a smooth team of three to do the real surveillance once the target is in the clear. If I'm going to be using vehicular surveillance then I need to replace each man with a car plus driver and I'd really like to have a second person in the car to keep tabs on the subject so te driver can concentrate and react to traffic without losing track of the subject. My target is spending one man-hour for each hour of activity. To keep him under surveillance at any point is going to cost me ten man-hours [six for the smooth vehicular teams and four for the rough] for every man-hour the target expends while under vehicle surveillance and I need five vehicles. Therefore the cost of keeping a target under surveillance sixteen hours a day for a seven-day week is 140 man-days where a man-day is eight hours long. It would take twenty full time agents or ten full time agents supplemented by twenty members to do the job and if this is going to be a regular task, I need to buy five non-descript cars and set up an allowance for gas, maintenance and annual vehicle registration (license plates) and insurance and at least half of my agents and membership need to have driver's licences. The car budget as an annual approximation (not including initial purchase) could be taken as 10% of an annual income for each vehicle. So if the conspiracy has five cars of its own, its annual budget for agents and operations drops from 50 average incomes to 49.5 average incomes.
Am I overthinking what you want?
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