Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798
Smallpox is transmitted by airborne droplets from respiration and from contact with phlegm. This makes face to face contact within 6' the most common vector. Contaminated clothing and bedding is another vector.
|
Here is what I found from the CDC: (emphasis mine)
Transmission
Generally, direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact is required to spread smallpox from one person to another. Smallpox also can be spread through direct contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as bedding or clothing. Rarely, smallpox has been spread by virus carried in the air in enclosed settings such as buildings, buses, and trains. Humans are the only natural hosts of variola. Smallpox is not known to be transmitted by insects or animals.
http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/smallpox...ease-facts.asp
The "direct and fairly prolonged" makes it seem like it is not enough to have someone breathe on you once, and if that is the case it is going to take a while to spread.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mmartin798
As for the rest of your reply, I got lost is you are talking about canon or the proposed changes.
|
Both. I am saying that the canon fall of PB has always bugged me and that the proposed changes bug me for some of the same reasons:
there should have been survivors, and they or else automatic safeguards should have revived the Project.
If I was rewriting Prime Base (or anything else in TMP), I would want or need to satisfy at least the following criteria:
- Prime Base must serve as the national headquarters for a reasonably distributed Project.
- Prime Base must remain reasonably intact.
- Everyone in PB must be either frozen indefinitely (for good reason!) or dead.
- All of the activation processes for the field teams and facilities must be have been stopped.
- The technology and science used to explain the fall of PB should be as consistent as possible with both the real world and the range of fictional discoveries and advancements available to the Project.
- The fall/delay of the Project should not be primarily due to incompetence on the part of the Project leadership or membership, but rather due to a combination of enemy action.
- "Luck", both good and bad, should be minimized.
- The circumstances of the fall of PB should not logically create undesirable or insurmountable problems for teams or the Project down the road.
The last few are problematic: Bioweapons capable of taking down PB so thoroughly would have tremendous consequences to the game and the game world. The 3ed PB ascribed ridiculously bad planning to the designers of the Project and to the Prime Base staff - there should have been a variety of fail safes to cover the loss or compromise of Prime Base and any back up, such that the "Great Deception" should have been just wiping the databases and letting the fail safes take over. Significant penetration of the Project by Krell agents should have far-reaching implications that would destroy the sleeping Project. Etc.