[helbent4]

As a side note, I agree the Project is there to explicitly "aid in the reconstruction of the US after a nuclear war", as stated relatively early in the Intro to TM 1-1. The "US" (as opposed to America or North America) is a discrete socio-political-cultural entity, and is a much more narrow definition than merely "civilisation" in general or "humanity". After all, even the most pessimistic (but realistic real world) estimates predicted civilisation's eventual recovery after a nuclear war, even without the Project so in the strictest sense the Project is superfluous. Therefore it's logical to assume that the Project was formed to promote a certain kind of civilisation, one embodied by the pre-war United States of America.

Dockery mentioned the Phoenix team was primarily created in response to playtest groups that routinely went rogue. So being in-house troubleshooters was in response to a real problem. In my game, Phoenix also has a think-tank element, not just a hit-team. This think-tank would mainly be responsible for the "top level" thinking for the Project's strategic vision, but also send out Phoenix when necessary.

Originally Posted by natehale1971

You also have to remember that Bruce E. Morrow was extremely adamant against the building of Prime Base because he KNEW it was going to fail.

Nate,

You may as well say the president of the White Star line was extremely adamant against the building of the Titanic because they KNEW it would sink. Or anyone be against anything that, in hindsight, was not a good idea.

There is no indication whatsoever (I can find in Prime Base, at least) that Bruce was "extremely adamant" or even mildly opposed to building Prime Base. Just that he didn't want to be part of the staff (pg 10). On page 8 it says one rationale for building PB was that is was recognised such a facility was "essential". I could be missing something!

I think there are much better ways of explaining Prime and various seeming problems with time travel. Reasons why it seemed a "good" idea at the time, and no one even did what, to us, seems like an elementary risk-assessment of a central control point. (For the sake of argument I take it that the most obvious explanation is correct: Morrow is an Esper/PSI that can somehow travel through time. As well, I've decided not to entertain any BEM, Evil Genius-thinking, where he allows the war to happen/Prime to fail/etc. on purpose, or that he's not some kind of charlatan.)

Bear in mind, Morrow was a strong-willed individual with his own preconceptions. He was not perfect and he changed the timeline on the fly, more than once without knowing what the exact outcome would be. (If he did, he would not have needed to make more than one trip to check how the future was proceeding, and introduce radical fixes based on that trip.) Morrow gambled with the timeline, and lost because he found out the hard way he wasn't omniscient. Call it the Black Swan effect, the Butterfly effect, what have you.

Timeline A: The original future that Morrow visits. No Project, outcome assumed bad for the US.

For my own game, I assume this is because while the US abandoned Civil Defense the USSR never did, so the possible "end game" for this timeline might be Soviet global domination centuries after a preemptive nuclear war triggered in the last gasps of a failing Soviet Union. This future is certainly a horrifying prospect for a capitalist, not to mention patriot, like Morrow!. (The latter elements is purely my conjecture, of course, but fits into the core themes of TMP.)

Timeline B: Morrow begins the Morrow Project, which presumably alters the timeline by its very existence. Morrow again visits the future to see how things are progressing. Obviously something is deeply amiss in Timeline B's future, because he seriously disrupts causality by bringing significant future tech back to the past (1979) before it's invented.

By creating the Project in the past he does alter the future, but then again anyone with similar vision, willpower, drive and resources could still create the Project using the technology of the time (according to the game). Actually bringing significant technology from the future seriously violates causality and creates paradoxes that are not as easily reconciled. My own conjecture is the future he sees is even more bleak, with (say) a somehow deficient or hamstrung Project only succeeds rebuilding the US to a point where a stalemate is again reached, and a new Cold War is ignited leads to a WWIV where everyone (or almost everyone) dies and human civilsation is permanently extinguished (thus the Project is rebuilding "civilisation" in a wider context).

Morrow introduces this "impossible" future equipment as fixes to problems he sees with the Project. One "1987 Update" fix was the adoption of Fusion power. The rationale that was alluded to Dockery was that without it, in playtests onboard nuclear reactors seemed too dangerous and other games otherwise devolved into a "search for fuel" (a la T2K). So its reasonable to assume this takes place in Timeline B, too, for the same reason, among other changes (more on these in a minute).

Timeline C: The game timeline. Not only is the future timeline altered, it's been altered again specifically for the Project. More significantly, changes Morrow himself introduced now come into play, making the timeline far different from what he intended.

This was a roundabout way of saying that far from being horrified by the introduction of a central command node and outmaneuvered by the COT or others, Morrow himself could be unintentionally responsible for Prime's failure. If, in Timeline B, one of the problems Morrow is there to discover is that a decentralised Project somehow splits into competing factions or even falls apart into warring groups, a strongly centralising command and control would be a logical step. Further, any parallel attempts by Morrow at manipulating world events (like, peacefully ending the Cold War in 1989) could have somehow backfired, causing a far worse and/or different war than he was expecting.

Morrow is not omniscient. If he were, there would never be any need to change things again by introducing fixes in 1979. The a logical rationale for why fatal errors were introduced to the Project is these were the result of fixes introduced to "solve" problems that have yet to happen, as is more-or-less established to be Morrow's operating method in TM 1-1 in the introduction.

As to why Morrow didn't see the obvious flaw in a central command post that can be taken out to hamstring the Project, bear in mind had seen the future, and in the future where there's a Project (Timeline B) Prime was as safe as kittens. Further, as to why no underling pointed out this flaw, there is a real-life business phenomenon called the "reality distortion field" (RDF) or "Steve Jobs effect".

"The RDF is said to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bluster, exaggeration, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and makes them believe that the task at hand is possible."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

Now, Steve Jobs isn't even an Esper, he's just a baseline human, if not exactly ordinary. If he can do this without Esper abilities, so could Morrow (and not just to the COT). If you went to Morrow and said, "uh, sir, building a Prime Base like this is insanely risky for glaringly obvious reasons..." by the end of the meeting you'd probably end up gushing "...gee, I see it now, organising the entire Project around Prime Base like you say is not only the most logical way to do it, but I feel like an idiot for ever thinking otherwise!" If Morrow had some kind of low-level Esper ability he wasn't aware of that helped convince people even more on some subconscious level, it's scary to think what he could accomplish without meaning to.

So... Prime Base might not be a plot against Morrow. It could instead actually be his fault. Not because he's evil or stupid, but because he's human and subject to hubris and a belief in his own infallibility.

Tony