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Old 01-09-2017, 08:05 AM
cosmicfish cosmicfish is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian View Post
This may be the real reason why Prime Base failed. The Project was caught between two schools of thought. There were some places where the rigid command structure of the traditional military would work best and other points were a "board room" style would be more effective. The issue became how to interface and switch between these two forms of control.
For the life of me I've never understood why the reason Prime Base falls always has to be the incompetence of the planners. Resurrecting the Project was always going to be a monumental feat and it turned out to be operating in the face of overt, skilled opposition in the form of Krell. There is no reason for the base to come down by incompetence, and I think that incompetence reflects poorly on the characters. And what you are talking about is incompetence. These issues have not been new for centuries, and there are entire schools of thought about how to address them, and the entire job of the Council of Tomorrow would realistically be to find people capable of making those decisions and delegate the task to them.

Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian View Post
So when the refugees show up on the Prime Base doorstep...
I have to echo @RandyT0001 here, the refugee thing bugged me even back when I was a kid reading Prime Base. Why were people traipsing across the Nevada desert? How did they even make it that far? How did they happen to come across the base in the middle of so much nothing? Why did the base commander ever risk his headquarters, responsible for saving millions, to save a few hundred when the defense of that headquarters had been made such a priority? Why did he even have the resources on hand to do it in the first place?

Quote:
Originally Posted by tsofian View Post
Being Americans (for the most part) they demanded a voice in the decision and the situation became a subject put to the vote of the Prime Base population. They made a group decision, it turned out to be a really bad one, but it was done by vote. It makes perfect sense to me that the people who would be selected by the Project would take the data they had and make the decision they did.
It boggles my mind that in that situation it would become a "group decision". Discipline and trust in each others' expertise had to be a key part of selection and training, and no competent director would turn over the decision to their subordinates - they are there to make these exact decisions, after all.
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