Another quality presentation, well done sir.
: What's really interesting, however, is that Leela didn't warn us about this
: crusher room. She told us about the chip slots (aside from the one , of
: course) and about the shield recharge in the 'Access Control Room', but
: not about the crusher room. A mistake on her part? You'll note that it's
: been, at most, an hour since the EMP blast that wiped out a lot of the
: Marathon 's circuitry. Thus, it may be the case that she didn't notice the
: crusher thing-a-majig. Still, it seemed she was doing a pretty good job of
: locating all the important stuff, so that wouldn't make much sense, now
: would it? Now, you might be tempted to say 'It was done for gameplay
: purposes, to make sure the player had to work to get past the puzzle.' But
: come on, this the Marathon story we're talking about here; nothing just
: happens without some possible explanation.
"Many an engineer have lost their sanity and life in misunderstanding the fundamentals of the Marathon's design. She's a ship only in regards to her function; in hard reality she's more like a sculpture shaped by hundreds of thousands of hands and minds over seven decades. There never was a singular, comprehensive design to the Marathon, more like a schizophrenic overlay of plans built one on top of another, rebuilt, closed off, repurposed, and hastily connected for any number of reasons, some practical, some political, some budgetary, and often with consistency being thrown to the wayside.
"The result of this is a ship that, while masterfully ran, is full of oddities and inconsistencies, many of which can be and have been deadly. Case in point was the 2506 Mess Hall Tragedy in which a reactor coolant storage chamber had been converted into a cafeteria only four years pre-launch. A pressure overload, duct malfunction, and a programming glitch conspired to flood the mess with lava on lasagna Thursday, killing 148 crew and family. There are switches built high onto walls where mezzanines were planned but never built. Only 98.4% of the platform actuators installed in the Marathon have ever been accounted for, meaning there are possibly thousands of surfaces onboard capable of rising and lowering, but the inventories for these have been long lost to history. Add to this doors that open to sheer drops, gale force winds that can rise unexpectedly in service corridors, centuries-old booby traps lain by Martian insurrectionists, and all those dangers still undiscovered and the Marathon becomes a very dangerous place for the unsuspecting engineer.
"The AI's have been invaluable in identifying the many design discrepancies but even they become frustrated from time to time when the ship's capabilities don't correspond in the way the Marathon tells them they should. Durandal reports that automated systems draw 2.1% more energy than he can account for, and Tycho from time to time detects surges and power draws from the reactors that he is similarly at a loss to explain."
-Marathon Master Engineer Professor Orion McCray, excerpt from "Marathon Engineering Essentials", 10.4.2649
: Eventually, we'll find ourselves in a large room containing some Compilers
: and MADDs. Interestingly, these MADDs are active even though we haven't
: replaced the Automatic Defense Circuitry yet. This has always been a
: puzzle, but I have a theory: maybe there's some way of manually activating
: an MADD on location, and these MADDs have been activated by the Security
: forces of the Marathon to assist in repelling the invasion.
Heh, I guess I never even noticed that about the MADDs. I think your theory is the most logical and likely.
