Spoilers Off applies to all Headscratchers pages since these are questions that remain after finishing a work. All spoilers are unmarked.
- How recent/developed is Project SPECTRA? Kale and Roquefort describe it's use as plans to be 'accelerated' over the course of the plot, particularly after Mimosa's defeat. However, SPECTRA as completed is critical to the plot of the game, given Kale needed it to force his mother to hand over control of the company... Which 'itself' only happened because of Project Armstrong getting kickstarted, SPECTRA explicitly requiring Vandelay's Armstrong tech to be operable. Consequently, with Kale requiring SPECTRA to be functional at least for controlling Roxanne long-term, he's had SPECTRA since the start of his ownership of the company... For what is apparently several years. He also describes it as needing a 'wireless test' on Chai while the gang is caged in the harmonic barrier... But Roxanne already seems to be wirelessly controlled. If it's a firmware thing, shouldn't it be standard on all Armstrong products by default and active like Roxanne's is? Why does it need a plug and direct command as Peppermint shows early on, while Kale could functionally shut Chai off in the endgame with a 'wireless' command? The mind control plot in general kind of falls apart if Kale could have just ordered Chai to shut down at any time, and even if it wasn't online yet (despite working for Roxanne at the time,) why not plug Chai into SPECTRA control while he's captured and locked up in security? There's suspension of disbelief for a story to happen, and then there's apparent holes in the plot as to what the stakes actually are.
- Kale could've always tricked Roxanne into having Project Armstrong tech implanted into her (possibly her chest device, though it's never mentioned as a prosthethic or anything), as his underground office might've been around even before he took over the company. In any way, he seems to have remote control of the SPECTRA tower even after his wireless hand addition (which, at least for its "test run", needs to be directly fired at Chai) is broken, so it's possible he has another way to activate devices since he's mostly robotic anyway. Kale also mentioned that he wanted to personally throw Chai in the incinerator after his capture, so his plan was just plain killing him until the defeat of the other bosses forced his hand. As for not just putting it into products in the first place, the secret challenge room has Vlogs showing how he decides on one "perfect" plan and just shuts out any possibility of external factors (or worse, feedback); so when he decided it was a genius move of his to make SPECTRA activate through Project Armstrong, there was no changing it.
- It's also possible that the version of SPECTRA used to take control of Roxanne was a trial run/proof-of-concept; a purpose-made variant designed specifically for her, to be directly controlled, both to prove the concept could work, and to get Kale into a position to actually use it. Adapting that technology to work on more than just one person would be considerably harder, and is likely why it took as long as it did to actually finish and start getting ready to deploy it. Presumably, the firmware component of this for the Armstrong tech was finished shortly before the events of the game, hence the timing on Project Armstrong being launched, but the firmware can't do much by itself. You'd still need a separate control system; Peppermint was able to take direct control of Chai with a physical connection fairly easily, but doing it wirelessly, not to mention coordinating thousands if not millions of individuals, is an entirely different beast. More than likely, this aspect of SPECTRA is what was still unfinished up until the conclusion.
