Forums of the Megaverse®

Has Fort Knocks been mentioned in RIFTS?
If so could some one tell me what book it is in?, that would be great.
Thank you.

Snow Hawk wrote:Has Fort Knocks been mentioned in RIFTS?

AFAIK, It is mentioned as a ruin. But I can't remember where it is mentioned. Maybe in the Federation of Magic book?

I figure every dragon with a map and a history book has gone over that area already with a fine-toothed metallurgical scanner.

I can't resist this one: it's KNOX, with an X.

Braden Campbell wrote:I can't resist this one: it's KNOX, with an X.

I had assumed the spelling was purposeful like an inside joke or something.

--flatline

Well I was station at Knox in my younger years, I to must put in my 2 cents in.

2 cents

All the gold has been transfer to the lands new owners.

I created an adventure where aliens took over Fort Knox.. They are a gold hungry race called the Gnoxx. They have a base of operations there. What adventurer could resisit all those Gold Credits?
I looked up Fort Knox on the internet and I could not find much on what it looks like so I had to make alot of it up.

Tirisilex wrote:I created an adventure where aliens took over Fort Knox.. They are a gold hungry race called the Gnoxx. They have a base of operations there. What adventurer could resisit all those Gold Credits?
I looked up Fort Knox on the internet and I could not find much on what it looks like so I had to make alot of it up.

Did you realy expect to find floor plans to the US gold reserve on line?
By the way there is more on fort knox than just the building that holds the gold.

Blue_Lion wrote:

Tirisilex wrote:I created an adventure where aliens took over Fort Knox.. They are a gold hungry race called the Gnoxx. They have a base of operations there. What adventurer could resisit all those Gold Credits?
I looked up Fort Knox on the internet and I could not find much on what it looks like so I had to make alot of it up.

Did you realy expect to find floor plans to the US gold reserve on line?
By the way there is more on fort knox than just the building that holds the gold.

By the time of the Cataclysm I think it wasn't storing much if any gold anyway, although the note on Fort Knox I vaguely remember seeing was short it sounded more like it was being used to store things like military secrets (and probably some gold still) and had a number of Glitter Boys as guards (and likely on-site repair facilities for them).

Nightmask wrote:

Blue_Lion wrote:

Tirisilex wrote:I created an adventure where aliens took over Fort Knox.. They are a gold hungry race called the Gnoxx. They have a base of operations there. What adventurer could resisit all those Gold Credits?
I looked up Fort Knox on the internet and I could not find much on what it looks like so I had to make alot of it up.

Did you realy expect to find floor plans to the US gold reserve on line?
By the way there is more on fort knox than just the building that holds the gold.

By the time of the Cataclysm I think it wasn't storing much if any gold anyway, although the note on Fort Knox I vaguely remember seeing was short it sounded more like it was being used to store things like military secrets (and probably some gold still) and had a number of Glitter Boys as guards (and likely on-site repair facilities for them).

The fedreal gold depository on Ft Knoxs now stores more than gold. I do not think they took the gold out just added more stuff to it. But it is so well known for gold that it would have been raided looted many times. So unless it still has active guards it is likly picked clean.

Fun appearances of Fort Knox in popular culture:
Goldfinger...and aside possibly from the public street gates, you can safely assume that everything else in that movie was absolute fiction as far as layout.


Also, from the same era: City Beneath the Sea....we BRIEFLY see an image of a Las Vegas-style neon sign spelling out 'Fort Knox', next to a Saturn V-style rocket///is is presumably because the U.S. government is transferring its gold reserves via suborbital rocket, along with a new substance, a dangerously reactive power metal that is most effectively contained by, what else, gold....

Acutaly in the late 90s early 2000 there was a documentry on it.

Blue_Lion wrote:

Nightmask wrote:

Blue_Lion wrote:

Tirisilex wrote:I created an adventure where aliens took over Fort Knox.. They are a gold hungry race called the Gnoxx. They have a base of operations there. What adventurer could resisit all those Gold Credits?
I looked up Fort Knox on the internet and I could not find much on what it looks like so I had to make alot of it up.

Did you realy expect to find floor plans to the US gold reserve on line?
By the way there is more on fort knox than just the building that holds the gold.

By the time of the Cataclysm I think it wasn't storing much if any gold anyway, although the note on Fort Knox I vaguely remember seeing was short it sounded more like it was being used to store things like military secrets (and probably some gold still) and had a number of Glitter Boys as guards (and likely on-site repair facilities for them).

The fedreal gold depository on Ft Knoxs now stores more than gold. I do not think they took the gold out just added more stuff to it. But it is so well known for gold that it would have been raided looted many times. So unless it still has active guards it is likly picked clean.

Now see there's a major flaw in that argument: WHY would people be wasting time raiding Fort Knox for the gold after the Cataclysm? Remember that gold is absolutely worthless after that point, can't even use it for kindling or toilet paper like cash money, no one has any reason at all other than perhaps an insane obsession with gold to even try and recover it for themselves. While many people have heard of it nearly none have any idea of where it exactly is either and they've a lot more to worry about post-Cataclysm than stocking up on gold bars. The guards for the place also don't have any particular reason to abandon it either since it's a heavily fortified location that's actually a good place to stay and defend rather than venturing out into the unknown. Outside of an overwhelming attack or something like treachery there's a good chance if the place wasn't wiped out due to a dimensional anomaly that there could be descendents of the original guards living there and protecting it.

Gold is actually a great conductor and really useful in electronics. So any tech society would want it. I also assume that it has applications in magic, like PFRPG wards. Alcemists might need it too.

If I remember correctly (I might be WAY off), but I thought Fort Knox was the HQ of Golden Age Weaponsmiths, mentioned in Mercenaries.

Edit: My bad, it's in Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. But I nwould imagine that they probably would have raided Fort Knox, as it's always been a tank training base

J_cobbers wrote:Gold is actually a great conductor and really useful in electronics. So any tech society would want it. I also assume that it has applications in magic, like PFRPG wards. Alcemists might need it too.

Except that after the collapse of civilization manufacturing uses for gold were effectively non-existent due to the destroyed infrastructure and there's a lot of loose copper and aluminum left around from the now defunct power grid that's a lot easier to get at (and plenty more silver around that would be a better choice for a conductor: a significant chunk of the Federal Silver Reserve was used during WWII for the research accelerators at Los Alamos as the copper was needed for the war effort). It's also not that important to tech societies that you'd be trying to find a lost reserve of gold even if you had vague maps of where it might be (since you'd have to survive the threats to it and back and have the means of transporting an extremely heavy metal in bulk).

There's also enough 'loose' gold left around from jewelry and personal ownership of gold that mages needing gold wouldn't have to go around trying to find a 'fabled fortress of gold' to meet their needs. Fort Knox would meet the needs of thousands of such mages for centuries given how much it would likely have.

Hmmm, this suddenly makes me wonder about all those implications regarding mages and having to use a certain price amount of some material to do a magical effect. It effectively means that the more expensive something is the less you need of it for the spell to function, with the spell's requirements inexplicably linked to a set market value instead of set amount of material.

wyrmraker wrote:If I remember correctly (I might be WAY off), but I thought Fort Knox was the HQ of Golden Age Weaponsmiths, mentioned in Mercenaries.

Edit: My bad, it's in Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. But I nwould imagine that they probably would have raided Fort Knox, as it's always been a tank training base

The moved the tankers to Benning.

Nightmask wrote:

J_cobbers wrote:Gold is actually a great conductor and really useful in electronics. So any tech society would want it. I also assume that it has applications in magic, like PFRPG wards. Alcemists might need it too.

Except that after the collapse of civilization manufacturing uses for gold were effectively non-existent due to the destroyed infrastructure and there's a lot of loose copper and aluminum left around from the now defunct power grid that's a lot easier to get at (and plenty more silver around that would be a better choice for a conductor: a significant chunk of the Federal Silver Reserve was used during WWII for the research accelerators at Los Alamos as the copper was needed for the war effort). It's also not that important to tech societies that you'd be trying to find a lost reserve of gold even if you had vague maps of where it might be (since you'd have to survive the threats to it and back and have the means of transporting an extremely heavy metal in bulk).

There's also enough 'loose' gold left around from jewelry and personal ownership of gold that mages needing gold wouldn't have to go around trying to find a 'fabled fortress of gold' to meet their needs. Fort Knox would meet the needs of thousands of such mages for centuries given how much it would likely have.

Hmmm, this suddenly makes me wonder about all those implications regarding mages and having to use a certain price amount of some material to do a magical effect. It effectively means that the more expensive something is the less you need of it for the spell to function, with the spell's requirements inexplicably linked to a set market value instead of set amount of material.

Accept gold is used as a curancy in rifts so it was likly searched for like kings tuts grave, and the location of it is on a road map, just a bit a fort to search but easly doable. As well it was a location of a mojor US military base so would have been raided as well for posible MDC gear. There is to many reason that people would look for and find it. All you need a atlas forthe use and you can find it on the map.

Blue_Lion wrote:

Nightmask wrote:

J_cobbers wrote:Gold is actually a great conductor and really useful in electronics. So any tech society would want it. I also assume that it has applications in magic, like PFRPG wards. Alcemists might need it too.

Except that after the collapse of civilization manufacturing uses for gold were effectively non-existent due to the destroyed infrastructure and there's a lot of loose copper and aluminum left around from the now defunct power grid that's a lot easier to get at (and plenty more silver around that would be a better choice for a conductor: a significant chunk of the Federal Silver Reserve was used during WWII for the research accelerators at Los Alamos as the copper was needed for the war effort). It's also not that important to tech societies that you'd be trying to find a lost reserve of gold even if you had vague maps of where it might be (since you'd have to survive the threats to it and back and have the means of transporting an extremely heavy metal in bulk).

There's also enough 'loose' gold left around from jewelry and personal ownership of gold that mages needing gold wouldn't have to go around trying to find a 'fabled fortress of gold' to meet their needs. Fort Knox would meet the needs of thousands of such mages for centuries given how much it would likely have.

Hmmm, this suddenly makes me wonder about all those implications regarding mages and having to use a certain price amount of some material to do a magical effect. It effectively means that the more expensive something is the less you need of it for the spell to function, with the spell's requirements inexplicably linked to a set market value instead of set amount of material.

Accept gold is used as a curancy in rifts so it was likly searched for like kings tuts grave, and the location of it is on a road map, just a bit a fort to search but easly doable. As well it was a location of a mojor US military base so would have been raided as well for posible MDC gear. There is to many reason that people would look for and find it. All you need a atlas forthe use and you can find it on the map.

I haven't seen anything where there's a gold currency in Rifts, and if finding places like Fort Knox were as easy as a Pre-Rifts road map there wouldn't be any lost military bases because they'd just about all end up showing up on maps somewhere. Certainly in your example there it's not going to be any more easily found than Tut's tomb was. Remember that the geography of Rifts Earth has changed, Pre-Rifts maps AREN'T that reliable, and Fort Knox is not going to be something lots of people are going to be treating as such a given to go hunt. It's not something all that in mind for people.

Yes for your average GAMER it's a common thing in mind to go hunt for and raid in RPG that use Earth any time after it was created but from a practical standpoint the place would pretty much go completely from human memory after the Cataclysm outside of those that may or may not actually still live there and some Rogue Scholars and Scientists who'd learned of it from old Pre-Rifts books. You aren't going to have hordes of people from all over the country having detailed information about it or reason to even want to try and find it (seriously, you think people are going to try traveling hundreds or thousands of miles for piles of gold bars across unknown and dangerous terrain threatened by a vast range of threats?).

Some of the NPC on the books have X amount of creidits in gold. Other times they may say X ammount of presious minerals.

This may be do to people holding on to the belife that gold is vaible threw the cataclysim and D-bees from worlds that use gold curancy such as PF.

I see it as likly beeing well picked threw because of the record of it as a major source of X and Y. Most major Pre rifts military instaltions have been acounted for already in the books. The hiden ones or minor ones are the ones people can still find.

A pre rifts map will give you a clue of wear to start looking more than people have with lots of other lost treasuers.

Blue_Lion wrote:Some of the NPC on the books have X amount of creidits in gold. Other times they may say X ammount of presious minerals.

This may be do to people holding on to the belife that gold is vaible threw the cataclysim and D-bees from worlds that use gold curancy such as PF.

I see it as likly beeing well picked threw because of the record of it as a major source of X and Y. Most major Pre rifts military instaltions have been acounted for already in the books. The hiden ones or minor ones are the ones people can still find.

A pre rifts map will give you a clue of wear to start looking more than people have with lots of other lost treasuers.

I'd think its more the use as a conductor and in magic item construction it would sell though. In some rifts book there is likely a guy who can make gold out of lead (or some other metal) and it would be practically identical. Save possibly as TW or magic item usefulness which artificial gold may not work so well. and that part is why real gold and silver may not so much a lost commodity.

I am actually stationed at Fort Knox and the gold reseve building is viewable from the Highway surrounded by several layers of fences and open feilds. Heck the Post golf course is right on the boarder of the outer fence line. That being said they don't exactly give tours and Im pretty sure anyone trying to break in is gonna get shot before they get anywhere nclose to the front doors.

In the case of athe Rifts apocalypse it wouldn't be hard for anyone to find the reserve, but getting in the bulding and whatever vault it there may be another issue. I would think by the time shot hit the fan the building and vaults inside would be hardend with mdc materials and automated defenses with its own backup power system.

So no it is not mentioned anywhere that you guys know of, that rocks now I can do what I want.
I think that there's a good chance that it has not been found yet. I mean no one new where Area 51 was until the black market found it and that is well known also like someone said earlier a lot of the RIFTS land scape has changed drastically.

Thank you all who responded and sorry my spelling sucks.

I am pretty sure that Fort Knox and any other location 'similar' has already been raided. You might find some cool adventure there, but in theory (well RMB theory) all the places have been raided or irradiated to the point that it's kind of pointless to go there.

Now that's where a Rogue Scholar would come in, and his knowledge might be useful to provide that 'back room' or 'secret vault' that may still be untouched.

Gold is still a commodity, and sells for something like 1000 UC per ounce (again RMB had a price list). Gold is still used in circuitry, and thus a commodity for High Tech societies, same with Platinum and Palladium.

There is an episode of Future Weapons that takes place there because it is apparently one of the places the Army tests experimental tanks...

I was unaware the the Armor Center had moved from Fort Knox in 2010. But the base itself would have most likely been raided long ago for it's equipment.
As for the bullion repository, I would actually think that it would be a prime target for Stormspire's TW manufacturing facilities. K'Zaa isn't going to let free operating materials just sit there, and he would definitely do his research. Given the location of Fort Knox, it wouldn't surprise me that, if it hasn't already been cleaned out, any party wanting to plunder it's riches might be in for hefty competition.

That could make a fantastic adventure hook.

argos wrote:I believe aftermath states fort hard knox =P is empty. Bigger question: Is there gold still in Madhaven under the rubble or in the surrounding water. New york city has (had in Rifts) the largest concentration of refined gold in the world. Ready to tempt sanity for a treasure that would make a dragon jealous?

Well if your a crazy you've probably done something far more stupid for a pack of Nekko Wafer...so yeah some will have tried.

argos wrote:I believe aftermath states fort hard knox =P is empty. Bigger question: Is there gold still in Madhaven under the rubble or in the surrounding water. New york city has (had in Rifts) the largest concentration of refined gold in the world. Ready to tempt sanity for a treasure that would make a dragon jealous?

Assuming they know about it, I would expect the Knights of the White Rose to harvest the gold depositories in NYC. With the abilities of a Gateway Knight, TW armor, and a little Astral Projection it would be a pretty straightforward way to finance their mercenary operations. Not that I see them taking more than a fraction of what is there, but they've got the best chance of anybody of getting gold out of there.

mobuttu wrote:

Snow Hawk wrote:Has Fort Knocks been mentioned in RIFTS?

AFAIK, It is mentioned as a ruin. But I can't remember where it is mentioned. Maybe in the Federation of Magic book?

Got it! Check out the brief note about fort knox at WB16 FoM p. 35. Basically an ancient ruin completely plundered and a hunting ground for monsters and bandits.

Take a look at his geographical position in this NA map.

mobuttu wrote:

mobuttu wrote:

Snow Hawk wrote:Has Fort Knocks been mentioned in RIFTS?

AFAIK, It is mentioned as a ruin. But I can't remember where it is mentioned. Maybe in the Federation of Magic book?

Got it! Check out the brief note about fort knox at WB16 FoM p. 35. Basically an ancient ruin completely plundered and a hunting ground for monsters and bandits.

Take a look at his geographical position in this NA map.

Impressive map

Dear gods, that is pretty damn amazing, thank you for sharing that mobuttu.


Daniel Stoker

taalismn wrote:Impressive map

Daniel Stoker wrote:Dear gods, that is pretty damn amazing, thank you for sharing that mobuttu.

Glad you like it!

Blue_Lion wrote:Acutaly in the late 90s early 2000 there was a documentry on it.

Just saw this on the guide the other day. Info didn't give a year it was produced.