Actually, I’ve just found out that your’re too late
Looks like a tinfoil hat will be needed for your Antarctic adventures.
Careful where you build–from what I’ve seen, you can’t stick a shovel into the ice/ground down there without hitting an ancient buried spaceship.
Also:
Deserted Pacific Island – unusually beautiful femme fatale wears bikini and lounges on beach.
Antarctica – femme fatale is of unknown beauty on account of she’s wearing 10 layers of clothes under her parka.
On the other hand, all the secret agents sent to foil your nefarious plans would be the ones who lost the draw – those with less seniority, bumblers who had pissed off the boss, etc. The top guys who would volunteer to parachute onto a Pacific island hideaway with an unusually beautiful femme fatale lounging on the beach would run from flying a Cessna onto Antarctica.
Well, y’know, if I’m building a bevawatt laser to bounce death rays off the moon or something, I’m sure I can build a lovely sun room for my femme fatale to strike fetching poses in.
Governmental interference will not be an issue, so long as you’re not terribly obvious, or right near or on any established bases or supply routes. Sure, they’ll send in the paratrooper commandoes once the Super Spy Guy sneaks in and broadcasts your location, but in the meantime, any good map will provide lots of ideas as to where you could build an isolated base.
I’d think the primary problems would be:
(a) Supply. You’re going to need to get a hell of a lot of stuff up there, and unless you feel like building your own entire city and infrastructure up there, and taking your own sweet time doing it, the idea of mining, refining, and manufacturing everything on-site is even less feasible for you than for General Electric or Exxon.
(b) Recruitment. You’re going to need an army of technicians for the death ray project, probably some nuclear engineers (depending on your power supply and suchlike), at least one femme fatale of international-class beauty and skill, and an army of thugs that Super Spy Guy will have to beat up on the way in, for purposes of stealing one of your stylish uniforms and getting a key-card, at least.
Dr. No simply obtained an army of underpaid workers, relocated them permanently to his island base, and made them live there for the next twenty years; he saved money this way by not bothering to provide them with raises, and controlling the economy inside his island base. Note, however, that this situation was chronicled in the fifties, which means Dr. No started at some point in the 1930s; trying to do this THESE days could be tricky… and durned if I can think of any other way you’re going to get several hundred people – many of whom are degreed professionals, in demand in their given fields – to stay squirreled up in your Ice Station Zero for however many years the Beefaroni Laser project is going to take…
A villain as fiendishly diabolical as you shouldn’t worry about international opinion. Build your lair and threaten to melt the ice–and flood the world’s cities–with your 1920s-style iceberg ray.
Well, it worked fine for Adrian Veidt and Peter Devore. But shouldn’t you be at Seitch Tabr?
Feh, that was just fiction. I’d be more concerned about the Hotheaded Naked Ice Borers.
Build underground.
This solves a lot of problems.
[ol]
[li]Protection from the cold[/li][li]Access to geothermal energy sources[/li][li]Access to minerals[/li][li]Concealment from satellite observation[/li][li]Highly defensible[/li][/ol]
Any attack on you will be very iffy. There are no precedents for land or air warfare on Antarctica. The climate is far harsher than Siberia. Could Carrier-based aircraft operate there? Could tanks? Arctic-specific vehicles can, but tanks are not arctic-specific vehicles. The only real choice is Infantry. And if you have some fixed-position heavy weapons, they won’t live to get into rifle range.
I recommend autofire grenade launchers & 88mm Cannon, a la WW2 Germany.
If you build underground (really under-ice) would you be able to reflect your death ray off the moon to incinerate the United Nations’ Building in New York?
Fact: The Nazis actually explored Antarctica and claimed land there. Some conspiracy theorists (read: complete nuts) believe the Nazis were building underground bases to construct aircraft similar in shape to flying saucers.
If you are planning on building an underground base in Antarctica, you may have some competition.
You know, it just occured to me . . .
Why not build a huge base underwater, like the Gungans? I mean, you’d have 76% of the world’s real estate to take your choice of, natural mineral resources beyond your wildest dreams, and if you tapped into the US Navy underwater Sonar net (like any good Evil Scientist or Madman would), you’d have an unobservable base with near impenetrable defenses.
Just think about it, my man . . . Being underwater has it’s definite advantages.
Tripler
. . . but then again, I may be all wet behind the ears.
Problem with underwater lairs near Antarctica is, by the time you’re dep enough to avoid the scraping effects of icebergs, you’re deep enough that you can put your underwater base anywhere in the oceans. Antarctica then has no advantage and you might as well relocate to more equatorial seas. (They won’t be any warmer at depth, just more convenient to get to.)
I prefer the hollowed-out-mountain approach. You could recruit your labour force from the underemployed in northern cities, and have relatively few problems acclimatising them, because they’re already used to working in and hanging out at the mall.
There have been a number of popular accounts of underground lairs. The joint British/Japanese expeditiuon to take the Blofeldt lair on Matsushima in the mid 1960s was successfully dramatised as a spy movie, for instance. From these we may get some sense of what is involved in a lair.
It would seem that a lair with significant operations activites would be at least as complex as a moderate-size corporate headquarters. The executive would require a significant support staff, plus the techinical facilites for whatever operations are on site. A lair dedicated only to command and control would seem to be simpler, but then you run into communications problems, especially in remote areas such as Antarctica.
Do you actually want to hide your lair?
Extreme efforts were taken to hind the Blofeldt lair, but its location was ultimately betrayed by its supply missions: ships were unloaded somewhere in mid-voyage and rode higher in the water. Other corroborating evidence helped to narrow down the possible locations where such unloading took place. This shows one of the problems of a lair with significant operations activites: unless you can somehow create a self-sufficient economy within the lair, resupply missions will be necessary.
It would probably be more practical to ‘piggyback’ one’s Antarctican lair activities as innoucous ‘research’ activities accompanying existing expectitions. Only your inner circle need know the true purpose of your activites. This would seem to point towards a smaller command-and-control lair as well.
re: underwater bases
The John Wyndham book The Kraken Wakes features mankind battling against an enemy which does not appear to be FROM the ocean but clearly considered it an extremely sensible place to fight from. The nations do end up pretty stuck for options after a while, particularly after polar ice becomes involved.
'S a great book.
You could probably save a great deal of money by just adding onto the ruins at the Mountains of Madness, provided you don’t mind losing the occasional worker to bouts of insanity and random Shoggoth attacks.
I, for one, salute our new, frozen overlords.
Actually, not true. There’s still a sector unclaimed by any government. (Here’s a map of territorial claims in Antarctica.) Conversely, the British, Argentinian, and Chilean claims in the Antarctic Peninsula area overlap. Also, as previously mentioned, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R./Russia never recognized any of the territorial claims in the Antarctic, and by treaty all of them are in abeyance.
Didn’t NPR have a piece about a movie theater being planned for antarctica? You want to locate close enough to that to provide your minions with R&R.
The logistics of an Antarctic stronghold are daunting.
Personally I preferred to move into the abandoned tunnels under great metropolitan centers. It is simple to tap into the power and communications grid, and there is an unlimited number of disenfranchised workers to form the core of your Legions of Terror.
The old Pneumatic system beneath Manhatten provides access to a surprising number of centers of influence. With a small investment in waterproofing and a supply of hijacked electronics you could, dare I say it… Rule the World!!!
Sealand, although unique, is extremely small. If you were to create your own free-floating soverign evil lair, it would have to be much larger than Sealand, which I imagine would raise more than one eyebrow in the international community.
Why build when you can just buy?