Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
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. |
I understand a lot of what you are saying and here are some comments.
Prime Base was, in canon, defeated by:
Their own over confidence and humanity (setting up the colony)
I can absolutely see the PB leadership deciding that things aren't so bad and that they HAVE to do something to help people. This might have even been the result of a psychological crisis within the base personnel. They had sat through the war and heard the pitiful cries for help over the radio. They had watched billions of people die without being able to lift a finger to help them. Now they see a very small number of people about to die right at their doorstep. The war is over. Conditions have begun to stabilize, certainly Prime Base has enough resources to at least help these few people. The base leadership may well have put this to a vote. The Project isn't a dictatorship. People who are desperate can make poor choices and with the information at hand this might not even have been a poor choice. I can see intelligent well meaning people being pushed to extremes when hearing that there are survivors in the immediate area.
Ignorance of Krell
I always felt that the Project had no idea Krell existed. To tell the truth I have never been convinced that Krell was a former TMP member. He could have been someone else entirely that stumbled onto the Project. In any case if Morrow had no idea that Krell and his minions are out there hunting them in particular they can't protect themselves from an unknown threat.
Technological limitations (particularly in classic TMP)
Detecting biological weapons is really hard, even today. I was a BIDS squad leader and here is some information on biodetection capabilities
https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/190747-b.pdf. Crap the feds spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Biowatch and came up with exactly squat