Prime base, forty years in the hole!

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by tsofian

So Bruce Morrow brought all the technological marvels back from the future? This is not canon. In canon he brings back fusion and laser technology and perhaps a few other things but that is it.

I do consider it canon, because the technologies you mentioned cannot exist in a vacuum. A handheld laser weapon requires tremendous advances in materials science, optical engineering, computing, etc. Fusion takes even more, as does the automed and the autonav and the universal antidote and all that other stuff. These technologies aren't "one brilliant step" from today's technology, they are thousands of steps in a dozen different fields, and that is not even accounting for the fact that manufacturing all this stuff likewise requires a tremendous amount of technological development. And having done all that, I don't see why they ONLY used it for these specific things.

Originally Posted by tsofian

The autonav and other key technologies certainly aren't 2020 technology. If the designs behind this stuff is available it will still need to be manufactured and 1980 industrial processes can't manufacture of lot of 2017 technology. Even 1980 cutting edge R & D set ups would be very hard pressed to build a 2017 computer. And if Morrow Industries is building 2020 production infrastructure in 1980 that will be likely to get noticed.

I think the autonav is a great example. 1980 manufacturing technology absolutely cannot manufacture 2020+ technology, but there is also no way to make something like the autonav without using 2020+ technology! You can't buy a non-GPS system today that can do what the autonav does, so what is the argument for making the autonav in 1980 using 1980 technology? The only way the autonav exists is if TMP spent the time to produce everything they need to build a 2020+ computer and gyros and power systems and everything else. Because otherwise the autonav is the size of a van and is pretty inaccurate, because that is what you can do in the 1980's with 1980's manufacturing technology.

Originally Posted by tsofian

The problem isn't with 1-3 edition, it comes in with 4th edition, where the war/ end of the world is long delayed. In 4th is Prime Base just unstaffed when the war doesn't happen? Are the folks there sent back into The World with new identities?

I agree that it is a problem, and it is an absurdly large one. They could have just rewritten the storyline so that BEM predicted the war in the 2020's, claiming that he got it wrong by 3 decades but the Project still went on seems pretty unlikely by my reckoning.