Coalition Base Defenses

[Killer Cyborg]

Thing is, if the pre-Rifts world had been like the pre-War world of Fallout, I could see it. But it really wasn't. Despite escalating tensions worldwide, they weren't expecting a worldwide war or actual end of the world scenario. There wasn't any Vault-Tec or whatever looking to preserve stuff in special vaults. They were, in fact, in the midst of a technological revolution and lots of their old stuff was getting trashed because it wasn't just obsolete, it was utterly, hilariously, [b]useless in the face of the new technology[/b]. Not worth keeping around except maybe a few bits for museums.

The bolded part seems like just your own random opinion, not something based on what the books tell us.
Like I said, tons the old stuff could well have made its way to the civilian market.
There's nothing in canon saying that MDC was common enough for trillions of dollars of old military equipment to just be scrapped, and there's nothing saying what happened to it.
Sure, you're NOT going to send SDC tanks up against Glitter Boys, or even against a decent number of MD-equipped footsoldiers.
But there ARE other things that happen in the world than Armored Combat.
SDC tanks would still work fine for riots, dealing with SDC-equipped threats, dealing with low-end MD threats, parades, target practice, surplus to trade/sell to other less-well-equipped nations/powers, hauling gear, toys for rich people, civilian home-defense, and any number of other things
Same with the rest of the gear.
SDC is still the norm in Rifts Earth, and there's nothing indicating that the entire planet just up and threw away all SDC stuff to be instantly replaced with MDC stuff the moment the Golden Age hit.

As far as ships go? Especially museum ships? They'd be rotted away by the sea within fifty years. The various battleship museums often have parts of their hulls so decayed that a regular dude could literally punch a hole in it with a bare fist. The Iowas might still be in decent shape, but all the older ones are in need of varying levels of serious maintenance.

Gee.
I guess I should have said something like in my earlier post along the lines of...
The Golden Age had a LOT of super-advanced technology, and it wouldn't be all that tough to come up with ways for stuff to have survived.
For example:
-Maintenance nanites designed to keep museum pieces and such (including ships, perhaps) in decent shape by stopping rust and corrosion as soon as it starts. Maybe these things eventually died, but effectively cut the Effects Of Time down by 1/2 to 1/4 or less.
-Survivor communities would likely have sought out anything useful they could get their hands on, and even SDC stuff (especially HIGH SDC stuff like massive ships) could become part of the community, or the community might form up around it, maintaining the equipment as best they could for x amount of years, decades, or centuries, before the community dies out or moves on. So again, the net affect might be closer to stuff being left alone for decades rather than centuries.
-There could be all kinds of highly-preserving paints, shellacs, laminates, oils, plastics, spray-foam, etc. that were easily affordable/available in the Golden Age, and especially with sea craft I could see the military switching to that kind of stuff instead of normal paint at some point, simply to drastically reduce maintenance.

An out of service nuclear ship is always scrapped. There's no other way to decommission the reactor. Except in some of the oldest nuclear subs. That's why CVN-65 couldn't be a museum ship.

Cool.
But maybe a society that had nuclear power sources the size of a briefcase might have found another way to handle things.
For all we know, they had a ray gun that would just turn off old-school nuclear reactors with a single ZAP, or any number of other weird tech ways of handling things.
Again, you're talking about a society that has such super high-technology that a lot of it just seems like nonsense to our modern minds, but you're assuming that they could only ever do things the same ways you know about in today's world.
I don't think that's a warranted assumption.

[MadGreenSon]

Gee.
I guess I should have said something like in my earlier post along the lines of...
The Golden Age had a LOT of super-advanced technology, and it wouldn't be all that tough to come up with ways for stuff to have survived.
For example:
-Maintenance nanites designed to keep museum pieces and such (including ships, perhaps) in decent shape by stopping rust and corrosion as soon as it starts. Maybe these things eventually died, but effectively cut the Effects Of Time down by 1/2 to 1/4 or less.
-Survivor communities would likely have sought out anything useful they could get their hands on, and even SDC stuff (especially HIGH SDC stuff like massive ships) could become part of the community, or the community might form up around it, maintaining the equipment as best they could for x amount of years, decades, or centuries, before the community dies out or moves on. So again, the net affect might be closer to stuff being left alone for decades rather than centuries.
-There could be all kinds of highly-preserving paints, shellacs, laminates, oils, plastics, spray-foam, etc. that were easily affordable/available in the Golden Age, and especially with sea craft I could see the military switching to that kind of stuff instead of normal paint at some point, simply to drastically reduce maintenance.

So... is the assumption then that the old, 70+ years out of date stuff was being preserved with the very highest tech stuff for... what reason? In enough numbers that you can make a business out of reselling it in bulk? Also, communities formed around the stuff GAW is selling? So are we thinking that they're displacing communities so they can sell off their houses?

You realize it's the equivalent of us today using the very best of our tech to preserve and maintain military tech from the year 1950 or before so that it will last as long as possible?

Especially since I'm pretty sure GAW is only there for the easy copy/paste of modern era stuff...

[Killer Cyborg]

Gee.
I guess I should have said something like in my earlier post along the lines of...
The Golden Age had a LOT of super-advanced technology, and it wouldn't be all that tough to come up with ways for stuff to have survived.
For example:
-Maintenance nanites designed to keep museum pieces and such (including ships, perhaps) in decent shape by stopping rust and corrosion as soon as it starts. Maybe these things eventually died, but effectively cut the Effects Of Time down by 1/2 to 1/4 or less.
-Survivor communities would likely have sought out anything useful they could get their hands on, and even SDC stuff (especially HIGH SDC stuff like massive ships) could become part of the community, or the community might form up around it, maintaining the equipment as best they could for x amount of years, decades, or centuries, before the community dies out or moves on. So again, the net affect might be closer to stuff being left alone for decades rather than centuries.
-There could be all kinds of highly-preserving paints, shellacs, laminates, oils, plastics, spray-foam, etc. that were easily affordable/available in the Golden Age, and especially with sea craft I could see the military switching to that kind of stuff instead of normal paint at some point, simply to drastically reduce maintenance.

So... is the assumption then that the old, 70+ years out of date stuff was being preserved with the very highest tech stuff for... what reason?

I didn't say "the very highest tech stuff."
That's you again.
"Higher tech than we have now" doesn't mean "the best and most expensive stuff in the Golden Age.

I really feel like you're not listening to what I'm actually saying here.

[MadGreenSon]

Gee.
I guess I should have said something like in my earlier post along the lines of...
The Golden Age had a LOT of super-advanced technology, and it wouldn't be all that tough to come up with ways for stuff to have survived.
For example:
-Maintenance nanites designed to keep museum pieces and such (including ships, perhaps) in decent shape by stopping rust and corrosion as soon as it starts. Maybe these things eventually died, but effectively cut the Effects Of Time down by 1/2 to 1/4 or less.
-Survivor communities would likely have sought out anything useful they could get their hands on, and even SDC stuff (especially HIGH SDC stuff like massive ships) could become part of the community, or the community might form up around it, maintaining the equipment as best they could for x amount of years, decades, or centuries, before the community dies out or moves on. So again, the net affect might be closer to stuff being left alone for decades rather than centuries.
-There could be all kinds of highly-preserving paints, shellacs, laminates, oils, plastics, spray-foam, etc. that were easily affordable/available in the Golden Age, and especially with sea craft I could see the military switching to that kind of stuff instead of normal paint at some point, simply to drastically reduce maintenance.

So... is the assumption then that the old, 70+ years out of date stuff was being preserved with the very highest tech stuff for... what reason?

I didn't say "the very highest tech stuff."
That's you again.
"Higher tech than we have now" doesn't mean "the best and most expensive stuff in the Golden Age.

I really feel like you're not listening to what I'm actually saying here.

Mostly it feels like you're trying to win a No-Prize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_No-Prize

[Killer Cyborg]

Mostly it feels like you're trying to win a No-Prize.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvel_No-Prize

Kinda?

What it comes down to for me with Rifts is that there are TONS of places where we can choose to have the setting make some kind of sense, or we can choose to have the setting make NO sense, then complain about it.
Most of the time, I'd rather think about how the end results we see might have semi-reasonably come about, rather than to think about all the ways that they might NOT have come about.

Life is chock full of things that make no sense in a vacuum, BUT make a lot of sense when you know the details.
So I lean more toward assuming that Rifts is like that, than toward assuming it's not.

Some of the stuff, like giant humanoid robots, you just kinda gotta shrug and accept.
But other stuff you can figure out some fairly plausible explanations for, and in doing so you can make the setting richer and deeper rather than poorer.

Which IS a lot like the No Prize, something I was always a fan of back when I was big into comic books.
It seems more productive to me to use our imaginations to support the stories and settings we love, than to tear them down.