How dark is the future of the Morrow Project

[kato13]

My biggest reason for needing to come up with a realistic failure scenario is that if I ever pulled my gaming group back together, they would ask questions and if they ever get to a point where they get answers (inside prime for example) I want the best possible answers.

Due to their real world jobs they have seen real world failures (one is a forensic accountant specializing in huge corporate bankruptcies). They will accept that failure can happen. However if their characters chose to give up everything for a project at a minimum I would expect they would have needed to have some confidence in the planners.

For example how did the project get Phoenix team to join if they could not handle basics concepts of redundancy? Phoenix are portrayed as pretty sharp dudes who would have not just accept "oh we have everything covered".

[cosmicfish]

Then the first question becomes "what reasonable steps would TMP have taken to wake everyone up?", and the next question becomes "how then can this be circumvented?"

On the first, I would expect a given team to be awoken under any of the following circumstances:

1) Wake-up call from Prime Base
2) 5-year timer runs out (timer can be remotely reset by anyone superior in chain of command)
3) Bolthole is compromised
4) If any of the capsules fail*, endangering the crew - this might just awaken the CO and/or medic(s).

I would also expect that members at any given command tier have sufficient knowledge to take command at the tier above in the occasion that this is necessary, but that there are safeguards to prevent a coup (we can discuss this issue later). I would likewise assume that teams have the ability to go back to sleep if they feel it necessary, like, for example, if the area was too radioactive.

As to the second, here is my first stab: Don't assume a screw up on the part of leadership, assume enemy action.

Shortly after the war, before they knew about Krell, Prime Base sent out a coded set of commands to all the teams and facilities - the timer reset code, followed by request for a reply indicating the status of each facility and the success of the reset. This was considered a necessary step to ensure that the system worked and to determine the status of the Project as needed for planning. Unfortunately, one of Krell's hackers got lucky** and captured and recorded the signal, not knowing what it was but recognizing any powerful post-war transmission as important. They were even able to establish a rough location of the transmitter off of the signal, leading them to the area of Prime Base.

During the attack on the base, that same hacker wanted to rebroadcast the signal to see if they could gain some situational understanding of its purpose. Taking advantage of Krell's control of the exterior, he found Prime Base's powerful transmitter and patched into the system, drawing on the base's own power and using it to broadcast the signal over and over again while he monitored the area for a response. His efforts wound up being for naught - the nuke was detonated shortly after, killing him and damaging his patched-in hardware, slowing his retransmit rate by a factor of 2^15. Instead of transmitting every 30 minutes, it was transmitting every 2 years, powered entirely off of the base's own power supply.

After the Krell attack, command tried to wake up the designated backup command location, knowing that if for some reason that failed, the timers would wake up the entire Project in a few years anyway. They failed because the nuke had not only damaged the hacker's timer but also the communication line between the base and the antenna. They attempted to repair the damage and resend, but all died before they could even make it to the site of the damage.

So the result winds up being much the same - the Project made no ridiculous mistakes, but the Project is still asleep thanks to a damaged transmitter hardwired to a fusion plant that resends the timer reset faster than the timer can wake anyone up. For the first century or so, the only teams being woken were due to exterior damage to the bolthole or deliberate actions by groups like Krell and the Kentucky Free State, either of which tended to lead to the destruction of the team. Capsule failure has started to be an issue in the last few decades, but not enough to wake up many teams. The big command facilities were better protected and none of them have experienced any survivable failures***, and prior to the PC team none of the handful of teams to survive their unplanned awakening were able to establish the kind of contact needed to awaken the Project. The bulk of the losses to the Project, besides Prime Base, happened in the war itself or due to predation.

*: Note that surviving the capsule is not guaranteed even if the capsule reports itself to be working perfectly - survival is dependent on the capsule AND the individual. The capsules themselves have many backup systems and an extremely low failure rate, even though some will not be revived from nominally functioning capsules.

**: Going with one of Pixar's admonishments to writers - using coincidence to get the protagonists INTO trouble is good writing, using it to get them OUT of trouble is bad writing.

***: So some might have gotten nuked, but none had a cave-in or capsule failure.

[kato13]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

**: Going with one of Pixar's admonishments to writers - using coincidence to get the protagonists INTO trouble is good writing, using it to get them OUT of trouble is bad writing.

Funny you mention this as PIXAR had their asses saved by coincidence during the work on Toy Story 2 by sheer luck.

The story goes that 3 or 4 compounding failures led 90% of the work on the movie being lost. One Major executive happened to be on maternity leave and bandwitdh not being as strong as it is now she had a backup brought to her house for review.

Once they realized that multiple failures in their main storage (which I look back on for inspiration how a well run company can just blow it sometimes) they sent for the unintentional offsite backup (wrapping the computer in blankets and buckling it in as it was now worth over 50 million dollars in potential lost effort).

[kato13]

The timer reset is very interesting and makes sense.

[stormlion1]

Timer failure right from the get go. Imagine that one of the Rich Five had been the manufacturer and set them all up to pass the bench test but fail after say four years and six months automatically.
That or the Timers actually do go off but some programming in the code actually doesn't wake the teams up because its looking for the wake up call and not a timer. A single line of code written wrong can doom everything. I've seen things like that happen where an update has actually derailed the entire program and no one knew it until a specific set of circumstances had passed.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by stormlion1

Timer failure right from the get go. Imagine that one of the Rich Five had been the manufacturer and set them all up to pass the bench test but fail after say four years and six months automatically.

I don't recall any evidence that the Rich Five were that able to influence the Project - can anyone tell me where it says that? Because it seems that if they were, the Project would be in dire, dire straits right from the get go, and the whole feel of the game becomes radically changed.

Originally Posted by stormlion1

That or the Timers actually do go off but some programming in the code actually doesn't wake the teams up because its looking for the wake up call and not a timer. A single line of code written wrong can doom everything. I've seen things like that happen where an update has actually derailed the entire program and no one knew it until a specific set of circumstances had passed.

I actually considered something like that, but I prefer a story that has conflict between strong sides over a story that has the home team just fumbling the ball.

[stormlion1]

Well the Rich Five had access to a lot of the same tech the Morrow Project had so there was some crossover, though probably more of the industrial espionage variety. Another option is Krell who was a member of the Project I believe. But honestly the home team fumbling the ball is the most believable of them all. It happens all the time.