Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
There are trade offs, but there is still a clearly right answer.
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That depends upon your beginning conditions. The resources and such of the project are never clearly stated in canon. Its operating parameters are foggy, at best. If we all start from the same set of conditions, then there "might" be one right answer. There might not be.
I doubt that if everyone on these threads stated their beginning parameters they would be close to anyone else's. They would also be so complex as to take months to put into writing. You know things I don't (never having been much of a commo guy) and I would like to think I know things you don't.
Everything is a tradeoff, everything. Not everything is a zero sum game though. Sometimes you can get a win/win, or get a solution that is considerably better on many factors than other solutions. One thing we don't know, especially in classic, is what information Morrow had. I've always felt that there are an infinite number of Morrow game Universes, Timeline just wrote about the one they thought was most interesting in which to game. There are some where the war NEVER happens (the characters wake up in a utopia!). There are some where all of humanity is wiped out. There are a rainbow of ones in between. In some the Mission goes exactly as planned. In others it is even worse than the game universe. In 4th edition there is a comment that a rumor exists that perhaps Morrow knew the project would fail in the 3-5 year time frame and sabotaged the wakeup himself.
It may well be that Morrow was able to look through a wide range of these timelines and noted that in a vast majority having a Prime as indicated in the canon was often more successful than having a large number of smaller bases. One thing I'm certain of is that in all universes Morrow Project planners ran a huge number of simulations and based a lot of their decisions on the results. We don't know the basic information of those sims. It is possible that such gaming led the planners to choose the route in canon.
YMMV. Everyone's project is different. I may not have all the answers but I do know that there is almost never one perfect solution for a puzzle as complex as setting up MP. Look at the Apollo Program. There were so many ways to skin that cat. The way NASA chose worked, but other paths could have been as, or even more, successful!
Heck the location of Prime Base might have been down to luck. Perhaps the Morrow Project diggers hit an unexpectedly huge series of caverns and decided to put a number of functions in them because it was cheaper, easier, quicker and more secure during the construction phase than building at multiple sites. Perhaps they suddenly had to put all their eggs in one basket because they had the hole open and were afraid the war would start before they could get any other bases built. There are a lot of valid reason why this could have happened in this particular timeline.