Sharing a common plot line that affects the entire U.S.?

[willc453]

Started writing a story called The Layover last year and currently trying to get a couple of chapters in per week, here. These are some of my basic plot threads/ideas:

1. It starts with Muslim religious fanatics putting aside their differences and decided killing Americans by driving airplanes into buildings, boats into U.S. Naval ships, etc. just isn't going to bring down "Satan", i.e., the U.S. Not all terrorists are stupid, for example look at Iran hacking into that U.S. Navy (?) drone last year and taking it over. And now they're suppose to be building a copy of it? And how much money did they maybe get for letting Russia or China look it over? And what kind of pay off did Pakistan get when they gave/sold the stealth helicopter we used to get into Bin Ladins compound? They smuggle a small nuclear bomb (1 kiloton or so) and set it off on the San Andreas fault line outside of L.A. How they got it into the country will be explained later in my story.....you're up to your own on how they did it in yours if you want to.

2. Earthquake fault lines line from Southern Calif. to Washington and from what I understand, even to Alaska. What kind of damage would be done by having "The Big One" happening and how would it affect the rest of the U.S.? Along with, of course, radioactive fallout being blown eastward?

3. Congress/Senate rush back to Washington to start passing massive aid bills, but are met by Muslim fanatics who blow themselves up to kill them. The White House is attacked by fanatics flying R/C airplanes loaded with high explosives and ball bearings, while others then attack Helo 1 which is carrying the President and his family to some place of safety.  

4. Terrorist planners having read One Second After, several nuke tipped missiles are fired from freighters outside (or inside) U.S. territorial waters, exploding over the U.S. to create a emp effect, effectively cutting off/destroying America from any/all electrical grid. Is this just a U.S. emp attack or world wide? Up to you.   

5. Rogue Mexican army units invade the U.S., along with thousands of Mexicans looking for loot. (This is one part of my plots/sub plots). For unknown reasons, the Mexican army vehicles weren't affected by the emp, reason to be given later in my story. Thousands of Mexican Americans rise up to claim California for Mexico, another plot/sub plot that I haven't touched.

6. Started writing my story in April 2013 and had these attacks start on the 4th of July, which last year, was a 4 day weekend. This year, it's a 3 day weekend. Where will you/your character(s) be and how will he/she/they react when all of this goes down? Don't know how many readers here are preppers or where they live, but maybe we could start a series of stories like The Layover: Houston, Texas, or The Layover: Los Angeles, or The Layover: Tampa, Florida, etc. Robert Aspirin had a series of books called Thieves World and he invited different authors to write stories about their character in a town he created. They were able to use/abuse other writers characters, with one exception: they couldn't kill the other writers character. Since this is a U.S. occurring effect, there's little possibility of our character(s) meeting/talking unless by ham radio. And how many of those would be working when the emp hit?

7. There are 17 gangs in Oregon and how about motorcycle gangs like Hells Angels? What are they doing during all of this? How many are there where you live?

8. I'm writing from a perspective of a diary entry and limit my character to do what I can do physically and what I know mentally. he's 60 years old, describes himself as an old, bald fat man. Has lost most of his hair/teeth and is 100 pounds over weight. My character is NOT the professor from Gilligans Island able to come up with all sorts of things. Or like McGyver. He is a prepper, but finds himself stuck with what he has with him when everything hits the fan and what he can find around him. He's not only trying to stay alive, but help others. What you do with your characters is up to you. Were they at their bol, adding to their supplies/fixing up the place or suddenly find themselves stuck at home with no running vehicle? Or if they do have one (or several), what do they face in trying to get to their bol? And reactions of their neighbors when they see this person/these people have a running vehicle?

Any questions? Any answers?

[kaijafon]

2 and 3 don't sound so bad.....


...bad kellie

actually I think a quake on the New Madrid fault would be worse since it would affect the crops and farmland. Heck set them BOTH off!!!

...bad kellie

#5 has already happened in real life, this country has already been over run by Mexicans; what would be a rare (and cool) twist is if all these immigrants actually WANTED the USA to STAY the same.... think about it...they get all kinds of freebies right now but if it is destroyed, there will be no more freebies....

all the bike riders here are mostly good ole rednecks. and very conservative..... so they'd be keeping order and the like...

now who we'd have a problem with are all the meth heads.... cause all of us who are sick and tired of them stealing everything not nailed down (and some things that are) would be kickin' their butts and putting them out of everyone's misery.

The second group that would be trouble would be all the welfare mom's and their deadbeat boyfriends.

Pretty much they'd rob someone once and that would be all she wrote for them....

The major corporate farmers would be gone.... all those fields and no way to farm them (if an EMP hit) and all the country folk would simply go in and harvest it all by hand for their own families. No way to save seed though cause it is all GMO's here abouts.

We have thousands of silo's around here in the Delta.... so I don't think those who'd want to work would go hungry. However, if the New Madrid fault went and it went BAD.... we could all be under water and none of us caring anymore about anything.

[papaof2]

I've been acquiring heirloom seeds of many types over the past few years, but the little fridge in the basement only has enough in it for a 1/8 to 1/4 acre garden. That would stretch the other foods we've put back, but only if the SHTF event occurred during growing season, potentially April through October here, depending on what you're growing (the last time I had a tomato plant in the raised bed, I got tomatoes through the first week of November). This year, we had frost into April, so not safe to put out any plants until mid-month. If the SHTF event occurred in September, I may have enough plastic and other supplies to set up a small greenhouse, but it wouldn't be big enough to produce much. If the event occurred in February or March, even a small greenhouse would allow getting a lot of seeds started for planting when things got warm enough. Anyway, I'm in a neighborhood with too many houses to be able to garden during the first year of an event. If the event occurred late in the year and we survived the winter, then the reduced population around us might allow us to have a decent garden that next year...

The neighbor next door is 80+ and has had multiple bypass surgery. The neighbor diagonally across from us has heart problems and had to take early retirement. I don't think either of them is up to the stress of an 1850-style winter, where you had the options of wood, coal (only if I can get it from the power plant quite a ways down the road), or being frozen. I'm no spring chicken, but with my wife's help we can probably manage - we'd just be heating much less of this house (using the existing fireplaces plus maybe use a little gasoline to run the 5KW generator to power the welder to make a stove out of empty propane tanks - you know that people will cook on their gas grills until the tanks are empty and most don't have a spare tank (we do - much better to have spent the $$ for an extra tank than to run out in the middle of cooking a pork loin). There are also two Coleman stoves (one from camping years ago, the other from FreeCycle) and several gallons of fuel. I also have a spare generator unit for the Coleman and a few other useful parts.

The next door neighbor has an in-ground swimming pool. I don't see it as drinking water initially (I'll filter rainwater for that) but it would work for washing clothes and watering the garden (maybe limited fire-fighting as I don't have a big enough pump to get water to more than his house or mine and then only garden hose size (3/4"), not the 2 1/2" lines the fire department can deploy. I'd run his downspouts out to the pool to keep it full and eventually consider the chemical level diluted enough to process it for drinking water.

If more than one major earthquake (8 or higher) hit the US, there'd likely be minimal help available. The New Madrid could take out many (most?) of the major bridges over the Mississippi River, meaning no road-based transportation for relief goods or people. That could also take out the liquid fuel pipelines (gasoline, diesel) and the natural gas pipelines that supply the northern part of the country - how far "northern" is would be determined by the southern-most damage done by the earthquake. No liquid fuels would quickly bring the diesel-engined coal trains to a stop, so any coal-powered electric plants would be looking at a fairly quick shutdown or a longer time of limited power availability: i.e., only make enough steam for 25% of capacity and only for a few hours each day. Houses with gas or oil-fired heating could manage that way (with wide swings from day to night) but electric heat probably wouldn't have the spare BTU's to warm the house enough in a couple of hours for it to be livable at night.. Even though there are working steam locomotives in this area, they're used for passenger excursions and I doubt that any of them are able to handle a string of 50+ hopper cars loaded with coal - these are small 'historic' engines, not the big, ugly workhorses that pulled the coal trains in the 1930's. A break from the New Madrid could also damage dams on the Tennessee and Ohio rivers and shut down some/all of the hydroelectric plants along both rivers. Losing the natural gas pipelines would shutdown the gas-fired electric plants. Some parts of the northern states (Pacific Northwest?) may get natural gas from Canada, but they probably can't supply the majority of the states north of the Mason-Dixon line. I think it's reasonable to predict that MANY people would be in the dark very soon after an 8 or higher break in the New Madrid fault - and they'd get cold very quickly in winter.

I'll think on your list of items and come back to this. It's a good "What if?" prep list maker as well as food for an author's thoughts (or perhaps several authors).

[kaijafon]

another thing I thought of.... I live right next to a train track which carries on the average, FOUR LONG trains a day full of coal. SO if something happened, there would be a fair chance that a full coal train would be VERY close to my house.

If I were to buy a coal/wood stove, I'd have to hide it in my shed since NOT ONE home insurance here in AR (at least that I can find) will insure a house with stove heat anymore.

[kaijafon]

oh I also have many heirloom seeds. It's hard to grow a garden here because I also live by the farms and they spray their crap and it floats over and kills the blooms on everything. I have gotten about 11 green beans so far. They were tasty.

I am so craving burpless cuc's right now.... but so far, just flowers ....

[mnn2300]

Jun 10, 2014 10:46:52 GMT -6 kaijafon said:

I have gotten about 11 green beans so far. They were tasty.

Boy, I got more than that in a 'burb of Dallas.
My cukes are still in the flowering state also as are my watermelons and cantaloupes
Got some tomatoes (small and green still), Lots of apples on my two tree's (also small and green)and 1 orange (also small and green) on the tree we have out spring and summer and roll into the garage in the fall/winter (its in a very large pot with a set of wheels)

[mnn2300]

That's definitely a story idea, actually sounds kind of what happened in my 'Powers Out" story, except the EMP happened before the San Andreas fault went off (due to a nuke - there was a large nuclear exchange including Dallas being hit which some of the characters had just left)and my people never heard anything about the East Coast (they were in Texas)

[kaijafon]

Jun 10, 2014 12:19:26 GMT -6 mnn2300 said:

Jun 10, 2014 10:46:52 GMT -6 kaijafon said:

I have gotten about 11 green beans so far. They were tasty.

Boy, I got more than that in a 'burb of Dallas.
My cukes are still in the flowering state also as are my watermelons and cantaloupes
Got some tomatoes (small and green still), Lots of apples on my two tree's (also small and green)and 1 orange (also small and green) on the tree we have out spring and summer and roll into the garage in the fall/winter (its in a very large pot with a set of wheels)

rub it in why doncha! lol!

[willc453]

Don't think many people have heard of the New Madrid fault and it took me a bit to remember a little bit about it. Wasn't that the one that went off in the 1800's, with the Mississippi river actually flowing UPSTREAM and causing thousands of deaths/major damage? As to bikers, remember, it's the 1 percenters who are remembered/talked about in newspapers, tv, etc. Hells Angels, Diablos, etc. Most of the bikes on the road now are computerized and would be fried along with cars, etc. Asked that same question at SB and to a penpal who rides a bike all the time and that's the answer they gave me.

As to the illegal Mexicans and others, I think they'd be in a really bad world of hurt. How many of them DON'T speak English and just what kind of jobs are they doing right now? Manual labor, working in some factory (now not working in my story), maid service at some hotel/motel....all the jobs that require little or no training/knowledge. And at one time, Mom commented how there were something like 10-15(?!) of them living in a 2 bedroom apartment in her complex. A lot of them are sending money back home (Mexico)to support their families there. If they're living in Mississippi (for example), can you imagine the hardship they'd have in trying to get back? And how many of these kids of theirs are gang bangers? Could there be a race war if something like this happened? And no, I haven't even started touching on that subject in my story.

Remember, my story starts in July and right now, I'm only up to August and look at the stuff that Andy's been thru/dealing with from the chapters posted at SB and here. And then there are the kids whose parents are missing or maybe the father was at work when things hit the fan. And orphanages....what happened to those kids?

As to the wood burning locomotives, they can't take the loads modern locomotives can, but the could take half a dozen cars, maybe more in hauling freight, food, etc.

[kaijafon]

yes the New Madrid fault is the one that went off in 1812 and made the Mississippi River run backwards. There still is a lake somewhere in TN that was made back then so I hear. I actually live ON this fault and it runs from just south of MI all the way to the gulf... so if it goes, it goes big! we have three or four little earthquakes from it several times a year which is cool with me cause they keep the big one away (supposedly )

I lived in some apartments back in the late 90's and there were a couple apartments that had 10 to 12 Mexicans living in them. The landlord told them since these were one bedroom apts that only four people could live in one (like mom, dad, 2 kids)

What really ticked ME off was that these would go and work at the farms and make $10/hour, even the kids in cash and then DHS would come and sign them up for free foodstamps and medical care. I told the DHS lady why these Mexicans who made over $1000 a WEEK qualified for these services but my family of five living on $800 a MONTH did not AND WE were citizens and THEY were NOT.

She ran away from me. lol!

Here any illegal can walk into DHS and say "you cannot ask me if I am illegal. I want food stamps and medical" and they have to give it to them. I tried to sign up for just food stamps when I was out of work for a YEAR and did not qualify. Did not qualify for unemployment either.

that social justice sure ain't working for me!

<stepping off soap box>

lol

[papaof2]

That was Reelfoot Lake. I lived in Memphis for a number of years and never felt a tremor. The one time there was a very noticable one, I was driving south into Mississippi and the road was so bad I didn't know about the shaking until someone asked me if I had felt the tremor. You might guess that the roads weren't in the best of shape;-)

At one point there was some discussion about going back to steam trains if diesel fuel were in short supply. China used steam freight trains until some point in 2005. There's a youtube video of two engines pulling a long line of boxcars and the like. Steam freight kept the coal-fired power plants in the US supplied with coal up until about the 1950's, so some of the big steam engines from that period could handle a portion of today's train freight. Steam engines are much higher maintenance than diesel-electrics, with the diesels giving 2 or 3 times the yearly milage the steam engines could manage. If it's a SHTF scenario with fewer people and less freight, then smaller trains with lighter loads would likely be the standard and steam could be used - assuming that enough people could be found to teach the "how" of running a steam train...

Sent from my IdeaTabA2109A using proboards

[freebirde]

If you wanted to do more damage with a single nuke, set it off under ground in the Yellowstone Caldera.

In the book "8.1" they use a small nuke in a deep mine to prevent the second and third waves of earthquakes in a modern day Reelfoot type eartquakes. I don't know if they still have it, but they use to have an earthquake simulator at the Reelfoot State park headquaters. If you want to know more about Reelfoot, here is their website. tnstateparks.com/parks/about/reelfoot-lake

P.S. Thirty years ago this fall my wife and I had our honeymoon there.

[millwright]

The last of the BIG steam locomotives had power equal to the diesel/electric ones but they were maintenance hogs, too much labor to keep them running.

[papaof2]

Jun 10, 2014 10:46:52 GMT -6 kaijafon said:

oh I also have many heirloom seeds. It's hard to grow a garden here because I also live by the farms and they spray their crap and it floats over and kills the blooms on everything. I have gotten about 11 green beans so far. They were tasty.

I am so craving burpless cuc's right now.... but so far, just flowers ....

Build an outside "furnace" and use solar power to drive the blower that pumps warm air into the house. Some metal duct above that wood/coal stove would heat up quickly if it's in a small space (metal sheds don't burn) and you have almost instant forced-air wood/coal heat.

[feralferret]

That was a long 9 1/2 year pause in the thread.

Union Pacific Big Boy has since been restored. One of the most powerful steam locomotives used in the US.

[papaof2]

I have a few pictures of the "big" steam engines (none with specs :-( and some look in the ballpark of 100 feet long.

[feralferret]

Big Boy No. 4014

Twenty-five Big Boys were built exclusively for Union Pacific Railroad, the first of which was delivered in 1941. The locomotives were 132 feet long and weighed 1.2 million pounds. Because of their great length, the frames of the Big Boys were "hinged," or articulated, to allow them to negotiate curves. They had a 4-8-8-4 wheel arrangement, which meant they had four wheels on the leading set of "pilot" wheels which guided the engine, eight drivers, another set of eight drivers, and four wheels following which supported the rear of the locomotive. The massive engines normally operated between Ogden, Utah, and Cheyenne, Wyo.

There are seven Big Boys on public display in various cities around the country. They can be found in St. Louis, Missouri; Dallas, Texas; Omaha, Nebraska; Denver, Colorado; Scranton, Pennsylvania; Green Bay, Wisconsin; and Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Big Boy No. 4014 was delivered to Union Pacific in December 1941. The locomotive was retired in December 1961, having traveled 1,031,205 miles in its 20 years in service. Union Pacific reacquired No. 4014 from the RailGiants Museum in Pomona, California, in 2013, and relocated it back to Cheyenne to begin a multi-year restoration process. It returned to service in May 2019 to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad's Completion.

Vital Statistics
Tender Type: 14-wheeled
Water Capacity: 25,000 gallons
Fuel: Coal**
56,000 lbs.
Gauge of Track: 4 ft. 8-1/2 in.
Cylinder: Diameter: 23 3/4 in.
Stroke: 32 in.
Driving Wheel Diameter: 68 in.
Boiler: Outside Diameter: 106 9/16 in.
Pressure: 300 lbs.
Fire Box: Length: 235 1/32 in.
Width: 96 3/16 in.
Tubes: 2-1/4 in. Diameter: 75 x 22 ft. 0 in.
4 in. Diameter: 184
Wheel Base: Driving: 47 ft. 3 in.
Engine: 72 ft. 5 1/2 in.
Engine & Tender: 132 ft. 9 7/8 in.
Weight in Working Order,
Pounds: Leading: 97,000
Driving: 540,000
Trailing: 125,000
Engine: 762,000
Tender: 427,500
Evaporating Surfaces,
Square Feet: Tubes: 967
Flues: 4,218
Fire Box: 593
Circulators: 111
Total: 5,889
Superheating Surface,
Square Feet: 2,466
Grate Area: 150
Maximum Tractive Power: 135,375 lbs.
Factor of Adhesion: 4.00
**Original configuration. Now converted to No. 5 Oil

[feralferret]

Typical standard freight diesel electric locomotive specs:

ES44ACi specifications at a glance

7FDL 16 Cylinders, HPCR Engine, 4500 GHP/ 4400THP @ 1050 rpm
AC propulsion System w/ one inverter per axle and Dynamic Brake up to Zero KPH
GE CCA Control System /Central Diagnostics System / Individual TM isolation
Electronic Air Brake System
Starting/Continuous Tractive Effort: (STE) 90,718 kgf, (CTE) 75,300 kgf (165660 lbs)
Dynamic Braking Effort (DBE): 53,070 kgf (peak)
Axle loading/ arrangement: 32,5 mt, C-C
Fuel capacity: 17,980 liters usable
Gauge: 1.435 – 1.60 meters

165,660 lbs VS 135,375 lbs for Big Boy.  1.224 times as much as Big Boy.

[papaof2]

You need some serious power to get it moving ;-)
Just the water load is over 200,000lbs.

The diesel engines do have the advantage of being synced together for whatever level of power is needed (or braking, if headed downhill) - assuming they tell the engineer on the downhill run if not all the diesels can do dynamic braking. Major wreck in CA in the 1980s/90s(?) because about half the engines could NOT do dynamic braking - and some of the freight cars were much more heavily loaded than the manifests showed. That train was a disaster going somewhere to happen as soon as it left the yard...

[papaof2]

When you get the correct bits of technology together in the proper manner, the results can greatly exceed the highest the previous technology could do. The two-cycle GE diesel engine in the first diesel-electric locomotives was a very efficient diesel with lots of "get up and go" at low RPM and smooth power control over its RPM range. It's a classic design and probably thousands have been built of it and its children and grandchildren.

Sort of like the paper clip - I would like to hold the patent and get royalties of $0.001 per paper clip sold. That's $10 per million paper clips sold. Per this article:
www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/americans-buy-11-billion-paper-clips-year/338575/
Americans alone buy 11,000,000,000 paper clips per year. That would be $110,000 in royalties just in the US. That sounds like a nice bit of side income ;-)

[feralferret]

The San Bernardino train disaster (sometimes known as the Duffy Street incident), was a combination of two separate but related incidents that occurred in San Bernardino, California, United States: a runaway train derailment on May 12, 1989; and the subsequent failure on May 25, 1989, of the Calnev Pipeline, a petroleum pipeline adjacent to the tracks which was damaged by earth-moving equipment during the crash cleanup.

Clerks in Mojave had miscalculated the weight of the train, while the engineer and crew at the head end were unaware that one of the rear helper engines had inoperative dynamic brakes. Hence there was not enough dynamic braking force available to maintain control of train speed during the descent. When the helper engineer realized that the train speed was not being adequately controlled, he made an emergency brake application, which deactivated dynamic braking, resulting in a runaway condition. The train reached a speed of about 110 miles per hour (180 km/h) before jumping the tracks on an elevated curve that had a posted speed limit of 35 miles per hour (56 km/h) next to Duffy Street, sending the head-end locomotives and several cars off the high railroad bed and into houses on the street below, completely demolishing them.

[feralferret]

EPA emissions regulations have forced the locomotive manufacturers to all go to 4 stroke diesel engines. The old 2 stroke locomotive engines were solid as a rock.

My last employer was Wabtec.  The facility where I worked rebuilt the valve trains for the 2 stroke engines, among many other things.  Talk about big rocker arms!

[papaof2]

I've seen a lot of big engines on "How It's Made" (Discovery Channel) and things on the Smithsonian Channel. How It's Made had the rebuild of a mine truck engines (they come in sizes up to 2400HP or so) and the construction of a Panamax cargo ship showed the engine with a door in each cylinder below the piston for maintenance / inspection access. The newest and biggest container ship ("Europa") uses a 2 stroke diesel engine but the greenies only hold sway over land travel and they need the things that come by ship too badly to try to curtail those operations. I can hear their response to Joe Burden: "You do something that stupid and we won't fund your election campaign".

Along the way, I got a Wabco (Westinghouse Air Brake Company) VHF handie-talkie for ham use (probably a boneyard special or payment from a place I did some CB repair for (I had a First Class Radiotelephone License for many years and you only needed a Second Class for commercial two-way radio or CB.)

I was one of the first in the area to have a synthesized 2 meter handie-talkie. A ham in Atlanta designed a DIY synthesizer kit that covered the upper 2MHz of the 2 meter band and that kit would fit in the Motorola HT of the time (there was an optional thicker back for radio add-ons or using the high capacity batteries). I later sold/traded that HT after I bought an ICOM IC2-AT 2 meter HT (still have that radio). The ham that eventually wound up with the synthesized Motorola HT sent paper mail asking for details on the synthesizer and praising my soldering when I put the kit together. Nice to hear the praise but I wanted the synthesizer to hold up as well as the HT would to drops and bangs because I carried it everywhere.

I was once given a box of dirty radio pieces and told "If there's anything you can make work, it's yours." The box contained pieces of two Motorola Motrac trunk-mount VHF mobile radios from a vehicle that had gone into a lake - but no "heads" (the under-dash-mount control unit). I spent a lot of time cleaning things: scraping mud out of tuning cavities, using a toothbrush to clean circuit boards, etc, etc, etc, etc (the bare Motrac's were going for several hundred $$ used). I built my own control unit with a speaker, mic jack, 2600Hz rotary pulse dial, TouchTone dial from a Princess phone and a dual-frequency modification for the unit I planned to keep. The radios were single frequency but I used a spare wire in the cable to the trunk mount unit to operate a relay to be able to switch to a second frequency.

Yes, I've always been a scrounge and a shadetree mechanic ;-)

[feralferret]

"Yes, I've always been a scrounge and a shadetree mechanic ;-)"

No shame there.


Wabtec uses other manufacturer's radios as the guts of their radios these days.  Mostly Kenwood.  If you open the case, you see an interface board and the third party radio.

The Kenwood TK-790 VHF radios I have were from the radio modems that they built.  Test units and leftovers when they changed the model radio they used after Kenwood discontinued the TK-790 radios.  Good solid rigs.  They didn't need microphones and just threw them away in the recycling.  Same with mounting brackets.  I salvaged and sold quite a few for about three years.  Made some nice money for feeding my radio and computer habits.

[papaof2]

Nice to find ways for your habits to be self-financing ;-)

Early on in the life of the IC2-AT HT, I designed a circuit board that allowed you to charge any of the ICOM nicad batteries with the wall wart charger the radio came with. Had a hundred or so boards made up, put them in a baggie with a one page instruction sheet and all the other parts and sold them in the boneyard at every hamfest I attended. $5 to be able to charge any/all your spare batteries apparently was reasonable for a lot of people ;-) The PCB was basically a modified copy of the battery mount & connector on the HT - the PCB slid into the metal mount that held the battery to the radio and you could change the current limiting resistor depending on which battery pack you were charging. I probably still have one or two of those kits in a box of other ICOM parts.

Still have the IC-22 mobile rig I used back then - that was on a slide-out rack on the side of the driveshaft tunnel and went into the spare tire well on the little Mazda station wagon when parked. Yes, there was an antenna. Yes, there was a place for a radio. No, you couldn't see a radio or even a good place to hide one when the vehicle was locked. I did have to chain the small hip-roof toolbox in a rear footwell to discourage theft after the first time a side window was broken out to take the toolbox - daytime, downtown Atlanta, open parking lot - also had the tags stolen from there when working second shift. The toolbox later proved to have been a good thing to do when the wagon was T-boned and our younger daughter was sitting in the back seat. The sturdy and VERY full toolbox kept the floor (and the door on that side) from collapsing inward when that side was hit. I did have to pry the toolbox out when I went to the junkyard to collect personal items from the totaled vehicle.

When I started using an HT as my mobile rig full time, I added an amplifier (~30 watts) so I could hit all the repeaters the IC2-AT could hear on the mobile antenna (5/8 wave vertical on the roof). If I were to again get active with mobile radio, I'd probably be using a Baofeng UV5R with one of the amplifiers I built and a dual-band mag mount antenna on the roof.