On Aug 14, 10:19 am, "thoms...@flash.net" <thoms...@flash.net> wrote:

I'm probably spending way too much time looking at Google Earth,
but...

Has anybody done a basic facilities analysis of Area 51 to see what
the working population is likely to be?

That is, ignore the hangars, the Secret Airplanes, the flying saucers
etc, and just ask how much people-related floor space there is there
for people purposes.

A resident population, or even one that just stays there for a few
days at a time, needs living areas, office areas, probably dining
halls, etc.  I'd guess that somewhere in the architect/facilities
design communities there are handbooks that provide guidance on how
much floorspace is needed for such things. If such exist, they might
be used in a back-engineering exercise by identifying living, office,
dining buildings at A51, measuring the square footage, and coming up
with a rough estimate of how many people the place looks designed to
support.

Has anybody done that?

I'm not sure you can do this kind of analysis without knowing the
details of what goes on in each building. [Designing on a computer
take X amount of floor space, machining metal takes up Y amount of
floor space, etc.] My initial thought was to study Edwards for a floor
space to person ratio, but then some of the Edwards work force is off
base. Now if you could find records that indicate how many people work
at EDW, then you could get a handle on this ratio. [You always need
some sort of baseline in order to do good analysis.]

For Groom Lake, you know the number of flights per day. But you don't
know how many people spend the week at the base, i.e. are the flights
full. You also don't know how many people are based at Groom.

I think this is an interesting idea, but I don't think you can do such
an analysis that would be meaningful.

I have done something along the lines of what you suggested:
<http://www.lazygranch.com/dod_bs.htm>
This just shows the changes in floor space at the known bases. [Looks
like I need to update that page. ;-) ] The problem is these reports
are not presented in a uniform manner from year to year, perhaps
deliberately. Then there is the problem that some of the places they
list don't exist, such as the Warm Springs Storage Site. I suspect
that is Basecamp, but who knows.  I suppose that could be a FOIA
request.