Antarctic Space Nazis Across the Multiverse

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Icelander

This sounds like 500-1,000 years after the collapse, the barbarians living on the ruins will not retain many usable bronze artifacts, unless they are enchanted or at least preserved with mystical means.

Would that strike you as the most plausible answer?

My feeling is that yeah, 99% will probably be gone or reworked within a few (low single digits) centuries, and then after that, when wearing plate armour is no longer the custom and everyone knows that swords are iron, they are more likely to dump old bronze into the crucible or cut it up for jewellery and mounts than put it back to its original use. A good thing about bronze is that when you want something new, you just put some old things and a bit of tin into the crucible.

Roman period sites from northern Europe usually have plenty of bone spearheads and wooden-bossed shields, while a lot of the killing at LBA Tollense was done with wooden mallets.

Of course (just to pick one example) weapons hung up in a holy place out of the weather and stolen by brave/robbed by foreign heroes might come back into circulation much later ... but it is easier to turn 2500 year old ingots into the kind of thing your village blacksmith already makes than to repair a bronze helmet that nobody in five generations has made.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

My feeling is that yeah, 99% will probably be gone or reworked within a few (low single digits) centuries, and then after that, when wearing plate armour is no longer the custom and everyone knows that swords are iron, they are more likely to dump old bronze into the crucible or cut it up for jewellery and mounts than put it back to its original use. A good thing about bronze is that when you want something new, you just put some old things and a bit of tin into the crucible.

Roman period sites from northern Europe usually have plenty of bone spearheads and wooden-bossed shields, while a lot of the killing at LBA Tollense was done with wooden mallets.

Right. I think I'll have the barbarians among whom the Ahnenerbe are seeking Homer and Greek philosophers have an indigenous tradition of leatherworking, being both herdsmen and hunters. The local equivalents to Achilles and Odysseus would then be more likely to wear leather breastplates and furs than shining panoply and more likely to have axes, clubs and knives than elegant swords.

Spears are universal, of course, and shields don't absolutely require high levels of metallurgy. As cattle raiders and 'heroic' warriors, however, these barbarians are more likely to carry smaller shields than anything meant for formation fighting. And they'll use slings and throw rocks more than they'll shoot composite bows from chariots.

Hmmm... chariots? Totally a thing for some other early Iron Age peoples. How well is the terrain of what on Earth is Greece suited for them, if it's been fairly sparsely populated for the past millennia?

I've been to Crete and Athens and a lot of Crete isn't all that ideal for chariot warfare. I can't remember if the hills around Athens had intervening terrain that would promote chariots andI didn't visit any other parts of Greece.

Of course, chariots are a big investment and if the local horses were big and strong enough when the Fall happened, it would have been easier to ride than try to start rebuilding a chariot industry. Though quite likely the local horses weren't all that, at least not everywhere, otherwise there wouldn't have been chariot warfare among the Bronze Age polities before the Fall, there would just have been cavalry warfare.

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Of course (just to pick one example) weapons hung up in a holy place out of the weather and stolen by brave/robbed by foreign heroes might come back into circulation much later ... but it is easier to turn 2500 year old ingots into the kind of thing your village blacksmith already makes than to repair a bronze helmet that nobody in five generations has made.

Of course, being where and what they are, I reckon the 'barbarians' of what ought to be the Peloponnese and mainland Greece do have the small advantage of being rather more likely to be in possession of genuine magical artifacts looted from ruined palaces and Bronze Age tombs than people from cultures with different attitudes about the past.

As the barbarians the ASNs fondly imagine are the 'real Acheans/Myceneans/Hellenes' are an early Iron Age culture finally emerging out of centuries of unproductive Mad Max style roving gangs (who did retain some animal husbandry, at least those who prospered, and eventually took up farming again), they are perhaps more likely than most cultures to have been without taboos relating to respecting the dead of those who came before, as the codifiers of their culture would often have been looters of fallen cities.

Can you melt down old stuff made of bronze and make new axes, swords and helms, if you've developed crude smithing techniques from legends and experimentation, but have no access to new sources of tin, as you lack the international trade network of the ancestors?

Or are the tribes who are having some success at emerging from the long Dark Ages better off simply focusing on adopting the new blacksmithing that all the cool kids are into these days and not try to supplement their crude attempts at ironwork with AtE style recycling of old bronze into new stuff?

[Icelander]

Right, I was supposed to actually feature the Antarctic Space Nazis in my game, not just play with them and their worlds of high adventure, ancient mysteries, fallen empires, barbarian warlords, Scythian serpent priestesses, Dacian warrior societies of skinbound shapeshifters, Nazi werewolves, inhuman ice giants, fearsome fey monsters, giant insects, dinosaurs and dragons (not all on the same world, yet).

The next encounter between PCs and Antarctic Space Nazis will most likely take place in a re-imagining of HPL's Dreamlands, in a frozen version of Unknown Kadath / the nameless elder city 'At the Mountains of Madness', located on the highest reaches of the inaccessible Plateau of Leng in these Dreamlands' version of Antarctica.

At the dream analogue of the Pole of Cold, the ASNs have set up their own version of Vostok Station / Plateau Station, to guard the gate at the location and provide logistical support to the Parsifal-class scouting zeppelin Amfortas*, tasked with surveying the Dreamlands for the Neue Reich, prospecting for any valuables or resources and showing the swastika to the locals.

Foremost among the locals who matter diplomatically to the ASNs are the Men of Leng, who appear to have been 'convinced' of the benefits of vasselage, and whose Moon Beast masters are engaged in a ritualized game of diplomatic courtship with the ASNs which both sides absolutely believe will end in the forceful, if metaphorical, subjugation-through-penetration of the other side.

Even if there remain factions among the Men of Leng who do not accept a subservient role to Antarctic Space Nazi masters (likely), none of the Men of Leng travel so far into the frozen and arid interior of their plateau, for a number of cogent reasons having to do with the High Priest Not be Described and the Unnamable Things that dwell in Kadath itself.

The Amfortas is the only zeppelin in the Dreamlands (the ASNs have just four of the new Parsifal-class and their other airships capable of gate-travel are far less capable), but the ASNs seem also to be using the black galleys of the Men of Leng and perhaps other methods of travel to explore the Dreamlands, gradually working their way west, east and south.

The gate is obviously a strategic location, but there is no reason to expect any kind of military expedition by the 'civilized' TL1+1^, TL1+2^ or TL1+3^ polities of the Dreamlands against it, as it is far too inaccessible and protected, besides, by powerful taboos seemingly universally held. More of a threat are such things as shantak-birds, night-gaunts and ghouls, as all of these swarm somewhere in the vicinity of Kadath.

At the cliffs that lead to the first enscarpment of the Plateau of Leng are also the high-spired crystaline fastnesses of the hostile humanoid White Riders, who might be fey folk of a Winter Court, are skilled in war and wizardry, and ride blood-drinking ice spiders and flying vile beasts as they hunt the white-furred Mi-gö, apparently an even more bestial relative to the beast-men of Third Root Race familiar to the ASNs through their Aghartan allies in Svartálfrheim. So far, the White Riders have only warred with the Men of Leng at the inhabited edge of the Plateau of Leng, but no more dare to travel over the empty lands of the higher levels, over which the lamastery tower of the mysterious High Priest looms, than do the Men of Leng themselves.

Now, in light of what has been suggested about the society, resources and technology of the ASNs in Year 51, what would be the smallest garrison they could plausibly get away with and still provide a base for the Amfortas?**

And what ought to be the base defences and any heavy equipment possibly relevant to PCs who mean to enter the base as part of their Quest?***

Other thoughts?

*Size not completely established, but certainly no larger than a Zeppelin P Class, and powered with advanced Elemental Furnaces (TL5^) integrated into TL6-7 propulsion systems, which means slower speed than internal combustion engines, but also that no consumable fuel is required. Crew seems to be around 20-30 and possibly also a squad of airmobile Waffen-SS Jägers, airship armament fairly light, but includes at least one mounted 20mm AT rifle, one or two light autocannon and several machine guns, in addition to light infantry weapons.
**Mi-gö slaves with ST 25-35 to perform heavy lifting when the airship lands, obviously.
***Actually, the PCs just need to get past the ASNs to enter secret tunnels beneath the base that lead to the (hopefully metaphorical) Dragon / Monster at the End of the Dream, but there is every chance the PC way to do that will include a frontal assault on a fortified base, leading the Sky Pirates of the sky-schooner Rocinante.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

The next encounter between PCs and Antarctic Space Nazis will most likely take place in a version of HPL's Dreamlands, in a frozen version of Unknown Kadath / the nameless elder city 'At the Mountains of Madness', located on the highest reaches of the inaccessible Plateau of Leng in these Dreamlands' version of Antarctica.

Just to check, the PCs are projected into the Dreamlands, but the ASN have got there via their World Tree?

. . . guard the gate at the location and provide logistical support to the Parsifal-class scouting zeppelin Amfortas*, tasked with surveying the Dreamlands for the Neue Reich, prospecting for any valuables or resources and showing the swastika to the locals.
*Size not completely established, but certainly no larger than a Zeppelin P Class . . . Crew seems to be around 20-30 and possibly also a squad of airmobile Waffen-SS Jägers, airship armament fairly light, but includes at least one mounted 20mm AT rifle, one or two light autocannon and several machine guns, in addition to light infantry weapons.

It's going to need to be around as big as the P-class to carry all of that (30,000+ cubic metres), and that really implies that it's rigid, which rather implies a 20-metre diameter gate. Are they really building gates that big to worlds they're in the early stages of exploring? I was kind of expecting something more like a K-class blimp, at about 12,000 cubic metres, but you can deflate it, and so you don't need nearly such a big gate. That carries about ten men and a lot less weaponry.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Just to check, the PCs are projected into the Dreamlands, but the ASN have got there via their World Tree?

The PCs are unsure. After all, there are plenty of other elements not native to HPL's Dreamlands present and the working theory has been that these are generally memories or fantasies from Ms. Delvona's mind (of which these Dreamlands are merely a figment... they hope) or that they result from the ritual they used to enter Ms. Delvona's dreams, i.e. an invocation designed to cast the subjects as the Heroes of a fantasy Quest and the problem they aim to solve as some kind of Guardian or Monster. Thus, the world the PCs see is filtered through several conscious and unconscious minds.

The world they experience might well incorporate elements from the imagination and expectations of the theorist behind the ritual, Dr. Lapointe (PhD in English literature, specialist in Elizabethan and Jacobean dramaturgy, graduate of UT Austin and Oxford or was it Cambridge, super-geek with ecletic tastes in speculative fiction and both gamer and game-master of many RPG systems since the 80s), or the lead caster, Alice Talbot (b. 1994, younger generation of super-geek, graduate student of anthropology, expert in comparative folklore studies, major occult and esoteric lore nerd, encyclopedic knowledge of every kind of fantastic fiction, one of Dr. Lapointe's players), or from one or more of the other PCs, who all provided assistence and energy.

The absolute worst case scenario is that the Antarctic Space Nazis are not any kind of figment, metaphorical obstacle or representation of danger. The worst case is that when Ms. Delvona lost control of a powerful ritual and opened a gateway into the very core of her being, through which something cold, inexorable and alien is coming through from the very Outer Dark, that also somehow brought the Antarctic Space Nazis to the Dreamlands of her mind and retroactively created a backstory where they were intertwined with the heart of the icy corruption in her mind and soul...

So assume that.

Assume that from the perspective of the ASNs, they are there as part of an expedition through the World Tree into the Dreamlands, and that this is a mission of the highest importance to the Ahnenerbe, though strangely it seems that very few powerful runecasters or other occultists are all that willing to volunteer and the personnel allowed to know anything about this world are kept to the minimum practical.

Originally Posted by johndallman

It's going to need to be around as big as the P-class to carry all of that (30,000+ cubic metres), and that really implies that it's rigid, which rather implies a 20-metre diameter gate.

Indeed. Quite scary.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Are they really building gates that big to worlds they're in the early stages of exploring?

Not as a rule, no. They tend to discover gates that are 5-10' in diameter, send a small team through and enlarge them temporarily to allow exploration, generally no wider than sufffices to send a fairly advanced scouting blimp through, in a collapsed state. Only if the world is promising do they widen the gate further and send successively larger expeditions through, build an outpost around it, etc. A gate of this size is something they might create around a major settlement on Germania Hyperborea and Jötunheim, maybe a handful of other worlds they are extracting very valuable resources from.

This gate, however, was not built or created at all. That's not uncommon, as pathways to new worlds are generally found, not created, but it's certainly unusual to find one so big and so powerfully magical.The ASNs discovered it as a very large 30' diameter gate and as both ends were situated in Places of Power and of better than Normal Mana, enlarging it to temporarily allow Amfortas through was astonishgly easy.

Granted, the distance over the World Tree is far more than the ASNs have ever traveled before to reach a new world, which means that resupply of the expedition is not trivial (they're using weekly flights of cargo airships designed for the World Tree), but the limitation is assuredly not their ability to get through the gate.

It should probably be noted that Kadath Base needs to feed any garrison and technicians they have at the base, in addition to supplying Amfortas, from the limited supplies it's receiving, as there is not sufficient food that they can profitably gather or produce on the Plateau of Leng. Any hypothetical military-diplomatic missions to the Men of Leng or any additional units of ASN explorers using the black galleys to explore are being fed and supplied from native sources, however, requiring only occasional supply drops of higher technology they cannot replace locally, primarily ammunition.

In fact, Amfortas probably supplements its food supplies on long journeys through levies from the Men of Leng, at least whenever it is near enough to a black galley that can dock with it and transfer food supplies. As soon as they arrange joint bases with the Men of Leng in enough locations, Kadath Base will only have to handle the logistics of ammo and replacing parts and other manufactured goods. They're not quite there yet, however.

Originally Posted by johndallman

I was kind of expecting something more like a K-class blimp, at about 12,000 cubic metres, but you can deflate it, and so you don't need nearly such a big gate. That carries about ten men and a lot less weaponry.

That does inded sound like a more usual ASN scouting airship for new worlds, with the Parsifal-class usually only being used on worlds where the ASNs know they want to build significant outposts on and really want explored in force.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

. . . enlarging it to temporarily allow Amfortas through was astonishgly easy.

But the Neue Reich are not the sort who worry about the implications of things being too easy, and the possible connections between the World Tree and the Sefirot are not something they consider.

Originally Posted by Icelander

Now, in light of what has been suggested about the society, resources and technology of the ASNs in Year 51, what would be the smallest garrison they could plausibly get away with and still provide a base for the Amfortas?**
**Mi-gö slaves with ST 25-35 to perform heavy lifting when the airship lands, obviously.

And what ought to be the base defences and any heavy equipment possibly relevant to PCs who mean to enter the base as part of their Quest?

The base itself: A base commander and his deputy, a couple of administrative staff, a doctor and a couple of medical staff, a couple of men to look after all the stores and equipment, two maintenance staff for the heating, lighting and so on, two cooks.

Troops: A platoon of Waffen-SS, one squad of which is on the airship.

Airship base: Somebody in charge of the airship facilities, a weather specialist, several assorted mechanics and armourers, the Mi-Go handlers.

Politics: The political/magical resident officers working on the Men of Leng, with one junior officer learning the trade, and their administrator/clerk.

Defences will depend on the physical situation of the base.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

But the Neue Reich are not the sort who worry about the implications of things being too easy, and the possible connections between the World Tree and the Sefirot are not something they consider.

Well, while 'Jewish thaumatology' is obviously stigmatized in ASN society, note that few other societies in history would have included a section of antropologists, historians, linguists, philologists and other scholars devoted to Semitic studies among the number of 50,000 original colonists.

While the average Antarctic Space Nazi may be painfully ignorant about other cultures, perhaps worst of all Jewish people, it's not because no one among the settlers had any knowledge about Semitic languages or Jewish history, religion and culture. Among the occult and esoteric academics of the Ahnenerbe, there have been from the beginning very learned experts on Semitic languages, ad well as at least several scholars who are well versed in most everything written on Jewish religion and culture, explicitly including Qabala, the Sephirot and other mysticism.

It's just that such scholars are generally neither influential in ASN society, nor necessarily very good scientists, for all their learning, as the kind of people who'll simultaneously devote their lives to scholarly understanding of a culture and work within a structure dedicated to the absolute destruction of that culture and any people who share it - well, might not be quite sane.

And in a world where the very existence of that exact culture is debatable and no amount of ranting is very likely to be successfully at stirring up any deep-felt prejudice against people that clearly have no impact on ASN fortunes (and no one ever meets or even hears news about), it's plausible that few among the younger generations cared overly much about Jewish studies. So any possible Ahnenerbe occultist, of adventuring age in the Year 51 and who has studied medieval Jewish mysticism, is likely to be quite an odd duck indeed.

Originally Posted by johndallman

The base itself: A base commander and his deputy, a couple of administrative staff, a doctor and a couple of medical staff, a couple of men to look after all the stores and equipment, two maintenance staff for the heating, lighting and so on, two cooks.

Troops: A platoon of Waffen-SS, one squad of which is on the airship.

Airship base: Somebody in charge of the airship facilities, a weather specialist, several assorted mechanics and armourers, the Mi-Go handlers.

Politics: The political/magical resident officers working on the Men of Leng, with one junior officer learning the trade, and their administrator/clerk.

Sounds fair enough. Might even throw in some units of the SS-Sturmkampfgruppe Totenkopf. They can stay outside, don't require imported food and will be excellent security, what with their heat vision and mystical ability to sense the living (and, despite very limited independent cogitation, somehow manage to clearly hate the living).

Originally Posted by johndallman

Defences will depend on the physical situation of the base.

Well, beside noting that it's effectively in the mostly abandoned city of Kadath, I hadn't really decided. I'm open to any ideas, noting that the eerie city of Kadath might have been mostly abandoned millions of years ago, seems strangely resistant to weathering or any deliberate damage, and still has some very strange inhabitants, most of whom, however, seem mostly content to avoid the exact part of Kadath where the gate happened to be located (on high ground, somewhere, the highest level part of the city, which itself is on the highest level segment of the Plateau of Leng).

I should probably note that while powerful winds blow through the mountains around Kadath, making flight there risky and challenging, the Unknown City itself experiences much less wind. Indeed, one might even speculate that Kadath is somehow the source of the worst of the winds. The few hundred meters around the black pillar and the ASN base are really quite quiet, in terms of wind, with any storms or strong winds usually fading as they get close to it. It is, however, horribly cold, even without the wind cooling that you'd feel in the surrounding mountains, being pretty consistently −80 °C (−112 °F) or colder, which means that the base needs to be almost as climate-controled as a Nazi Moonbase.

There's thick ice under Kadath Base, leading to a subterranean icy lake, with a complex series of ice tunnels and tunnels through the strange stone of the city around it being linked in many ways. The icy lake is so deep it may be at sea level or even lower, which would make the ice under the base 3,500 meters thick or more. Not the entire base is built on ice, just the part that is directly under the gate (which is about 100' in the air, centered on a strange dark pillar that rises from the ice). The base is likely a building of unearthly black stone built by whatever elder things wrought Kadath millions of years ago, with additions to make it safe from the freezing cold and livable for humans.

There are ghouls in the tunnels below, but early encounters between TL0 ghouls and TL6-7 Kadavergehorsam stormtroopers of the SS-Sturmkampfgruppe Totenkopf did not end well for the ghouls, despite them being used to darkness and close quarters being in their favour. Nor do the ghouls find the smell of the stormtroopers very appetizing.

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Hmmm... chariots? Totally a thing for some other early Iron Age peoples. How well is the terrain of what on Earth is Greece suited for them, if it's been fairly sparsely populated for the past millennia?

It's not well suited. FWIW the old roads the Myceneans cut into the mountain sides for their chariots can still be followed, and some of the stone bridges and simple culverts they made are still there. These obviously took quite a bit of work to make - they were cut into the rock in many places.

I'm reasonably sure that the Myceneans had chariots because "that's what everyone does", and the numbers I recall from the citadel records show they were for the elite and were not going to support massed chariot armies in the style of Asia Minor. IMO their armies would've looked more like a medieval one, but with chariots instead of knights on heavy horses - a fairly small 'cavalry' arm of nobles and near-nobles, and a much bigger body of foot that would've been more important than in an Egyptian, etc. army.

In 'dark ages' Greece they become 'battle taxis' for the nobles and heroes - see Homer.

Of course, being where and what they are, I reckon the 'barbarians' of what ought to be the Peloponnese and mainland Greece do have the small advantage of being rather more likely to be in possession of genuine magical artifacts looted from ruined palaces and Bronze Age tombs than people from cultures with different attitudes about the past.

It occurs to me that not only will old artefact that weren't magical be held in high esteem because so many surviving ones were magical, but surviving for centuries in a magical environment make cause an item to absorb mana and become magical even if it wasn't to start with. Aside from anything else, it's clearly lucky.

As the barbarians the ASNs fondly imagine are the 'real Acheans/Myceneans/Hellenes' are an early Iron Age culture finally emerging out of centuries of unproductive Mad Max style roving gangs (who did retain some animal husbandry, at least those who prospered, and eventually took up farming again), they are perhaps more likely than most cultures to have been without taboos relating to respecting the dead of those who came before, as the codifiers of their culture would often have been looters of fallen cities.

Sounds like these guys are the 'invaders' once assumed to have been the cause of Mycenean Greece's 'fall'.

Can you melt down old stuff made of bronze and make new axes, swords and helms, if you've developed crude smithing techniques from legends and experimentation, but have no access to new sources of tin, as you lack the international trade network of the ancestors?

Yes, though if you're using random bit of bronze the resulting alloy is unlikely to be well suited to swords, or to fine tools. It should be okay for helmets, and it'd be fine for axes.

Or are the tribes who are having some success at emerging from the long Dark Ages better off simply focusing on adopting the new blacksmithing that all the cool kids are into these days and not try to supplement their crude attempts at ironwork with AtE style recycling of old bronze into new stuff?

You can forge bronze in a similar way to iron, you just don't heat-treat it the same (no quenching, not that quenching, etc. works on iron and low-carbon steel).

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Well, beside noting that it's effectively in the mostly abandoned city of Kadath, I hadn't really decided. I'm open to any ideas, noting that the eerie city of Kadath might have been mostly abandoned millions of years ago, seems strangely resistant to weathering or any deliberate damage . . .

I should probably note that while powerful winds blow through the mountains around Kadath, making flight there risky and challenging, the Unknown City itself experiences much less wind. Indeed, one might even speculate that Kadath is somehow the source of the worst of the winds. The few hundred meters around the black pillar and the ASN base are really quite quiet, in terms of wind, with any storms or strong winds usually fading as they get close to it. It is, however, horribly cold, even without the wind cooling that you'd feel in the surrounding mountains, being pretty consistently −80 °C (−112 °F) or colder, which means that the base needs to be almost as climate-controled as a Nazi Moonbase.

Given the small number of people involved, I'd suspect that they'd pick a large building with a tower on the top where they can build an airship mooring mast. They'd live on the upper floors, and fill the lower ones with traps and mines. However, the extreme cold will be horribly expensive in terms of heating fuel, so they will put up with some wind (preferring one that is steady) to get a site that isn't so unnaturally cold. Does that make sense?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Given the small number of people involved, I'd suspect that they'd pick a large building with a tower on the top where they can build an airship mooring mast. They'd live on the upper floors, and fill the lower ones with traps and mines. However, the extreme cold will be horribly expensive in terms of heating fuel, so they will put up with some wind (preferring one that is steady) to get a site that isn't so unnaturally cold. Does that make sense?

Unfortunately for the Antarctic Space Nazis, that specific extra cold site is the one they are supposed to be guarding. They've received specific, if irrational, orders from the Ahnenerbe occultists who seem to be behind this mission to maintain a presence around the dark pillar of the gate at all times. The expedition staff are willing to interpret 'presence' to mean 'within range to stop anyone who tries to approach it', which allows them to be based in a nearby building, but it would have to be one that was still within the terribly cold zone.

That being said, they'd really have to travel hundreds of meters or even several kilometers from the gate just to get to somewhere on average 5-10° C warmer and Kadath isn't exactly a garden spot anyway. The daily mean temperature there is around -70 C°. It's stuck in a permanent polar night. It's not a place anyone should ever want to visit, let alone settle on, and the ASNs assigned to the work are probably about as happy with their leadership as their grandfathers were at Stalingrad. If that.

As regards the heating costs, however, that doesn't call for fuel, just really expensive capital costs, thanks to Elemental Furnaces. And for some inexplicable reason, this is a mission that someone in the senior leadership considers worth expending the operating costs of several SS Junkers' rich estates for years on, aside from assigning one of the four most prestigious and advanced scouting zeppelins of the whole fleet to it, but are not willing to send a larger work force and greater numbers of supply trips, to make it possible to build a decent base.

The ASNs therefore have a number of small Elemental Furnaces (both a couple of initial TL5^ models and then a some older TL4^ models they got sent when their complaints about cold got real loud) that are good for power and heating that keep the base functioning, even if there is always less heating than they'd really prefer.

They also have fairly good insulation, using the same magical enhancements as the airships use for Sealed fabric and they received a fair bit of building materials using cargo airships during the preparation of the base, so it's as snug as the technological base and infrastructure of the ASNs could reasonably make it. The base also includes some rune-crafted items and alchemical materials that make it more practical, as the Ahnenerbe experts were far more willing to send expensive stuff there than they were to come live there themselves.

How high does the airship mooring mast have to be?

They do have that strange black stone pillar, which even has sort of steps on one side of it and could easily support external structures that could be used as more comfortable stairs.