Quote:
Originally Posted by cosmicfish
But also one that should have been addressed in multiple ways before PB was even staffed. The staff at PB could not be the kind of people who seriously needed to get back to a "normal" existence any time soon, any more than the field teams could be the kind of people who wanted to lead ordinarily selfish lives without risk of violence. If they cannot find people able and willing to live underground for 5 years (rough estimate), and then enforce it, then they cannot have Prime Base!
I've worked those kinds of programs, and while the details must necessarily be compartmented the overall philosophy and SOP's cannot. Otherwise you wind up with Thunderdome (tm). BEM is a bit of a special case because he is a time traveler, but the CoT had to have a few people shoulder-deep in planning Prime Base.
Without a general awareness of how PB operates, the entire rest of the Project cannot even really start. You can't set up comminications or command protocols, you cannot lay in appropriate supplies or plan distribution networks, etc. There is a reason that half the people authorized on special access programs don't show up for the meetings - they're in charge of related projects that need a certain amount of information in order for their own projects to work. Or they're in charge of integrating the SAP product into a cohesive force.
This plays into one of the basic problems with PB in particular, TMP* in general, and fiction in very general. TMP starts off with the idea that these very competent were recruited, given tremendous resources and the advantage of knowing the future, but them for narrative purposes suddenly turn incompetent when called upon to do the exact jobs they trained for! Yes, the description of the fall of PB demonstrates a tremendous lack of planning and there are a number of inexplicably poor decisions, but the problem with letting all that stand (much less using it as the inspiration for more bad planning and decisions!) is that you can't build off of stupid. At least, you can't build smart off of stupid.
These are supposed to be competent people, if they are going to make predictably bad decisions, there needs to be a good reason why it would happen, otherwise they weren't competent. And if they weren't competent, then the game starts to look like Paranoia.
Incidentally, I always thought that the planners should have sought out a good ballistic missile sub commander to run PB. Get someone who has already been trained for isolation and to manage a ridiculously huge responsibility, and then give them a decade of additional training and experience putting the Project together - they wouldn't bat an eye at doing what needed to be done even when it was what they didn't want to do.
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I never meant to imply that everything is compartmentalized to the extent nothing is shared. Communication protocols and the like would be shared. But there is a great deal that would not be shared by competent people that does not in and of itself mean they became incompetent. Politics and decisions about what is need to know can happen that result in really bad results. In retrospect, it can be seen as they made some bad calls and can set up procedures to address them. But that still does not mean that the best plan by the best minds does not have a hidden flaw.
Many examples of this exist with and without overt secrecy. Computer operating systems, with their millions of lines of code, have flaws. This does not mean that the army of programmers are incompetent, just that they do not have the time to audit all the code for unforeseen interactions that lead to vulnerabilities that can be exploited. For an example of policies that involve secrecy, you need not look any further back in time than the failure of the FBI and CIA to share intel marked as need to know information that, if they had, could have radically changed the events of 9/11.
Prime Base shares both of these issues. It is a huge project and, according to game canon, the location and many operational details are the biggest secret in the Project. Some rational decisions that might have been made include limiting security in Prime Base under the assumption that they can just active a number of MARS teams on demand. The fact that the Prime Base commander did not do this does not immediately make them incompetent either. It could just be hubris and when the situation grew too large, medical was reporting a disease that they could not identify that was killing them. Is the competent decision then to call in MARS teams that could become infected or try to institute a quarantine with people on hand already exposed?
Ultimately we have to remember this is a game that tells stories. If there are a couple deus ex machina that are used to get things going, so be it.