Portal 2

What about all the human test subjects who are in suspended animation there?

Besides, Aperture is probably worth a ton of money. There's a lot of stuff there that could be sold or melted down.

edited 8th Apr '14 11:44:04 AM by Nintendork64

While there may be additional vaults packed with test subjects, GLaDOS only found the one, and she self-admittedly killed all of them according to the DLC.

Still, Aperture is so huge that there could be millions of people in cold storage, silently awaiting release. Never mind the question of how all of them got there without the disappearances being noticed.

edited 8th Apr '14 11:45:18 AM by Fighteer

Aperture is HUGE, we're talking miles upon miles of chambers all collapsing at once, not to mention all the times chambers are lit by daylight. Chell is within spiting distance of the surface for the entire first third of the game, hell if memory serves even Her Chamber was open to the sky. Oh! AND we have a clear shot to the moon in the climax, Aperture isn't really that deep at all.

A lot of that is clearly artistic license, given how long the elevator ride is to the surface. Aperture makes heavy use of Chaos Architecture; there is literally no way to tell from the game exactly how far up or down you are at any given point in time.

Who's to say that Glados didn't migrate Her Chamber that far down while you were unconscious? Like you said, Chaos Architecture. And if that was the case the facility blowing either at the beginning of the game or when Wheatley was in control would have been close to the surface and insanely catastrophic to the state of Michigan.

edited 8th Apr '14 11:51:50 AM by odafangirl

As with many things, it depends on the size of the detonation and exactly how far beneath the surface the reactor is. There's also the minor science problem that fission reactors don't explode — they can't; they aren't designed to be able to. At worst you end up with a blazing hot puddle of lethally radioactive slag that works its way down until it reaches something too solid to melt through, and then it just sits there for a few hundred years.

Sure, you'd poison the hell out of the ecosystem but in an abandoned salt mine there's not enough of that to matter.

A fission reactor that can actually explode in a sizable fashion is called a bomb, and is useless at powering things.

A fusion reactor could theoretically explode, but Aperture's reactor is pretty clearly a fission design by the details we can see.

edited 8th Apr '14 12:04:03 PM by Fighteer

What details do we see? Honestly curious here.

It's in the Halflife Universe. The odds of there even BEING a state of Michigan, or much more than isolated farming villages plagued by Hunters and those multi-eyed hound thingies I don't remember the name of are pretty iffy.

Considering we don't get much modern world building in the game, I don't think the consequences of it blowing up are anything Valve would consider worth discussing.

Aside from, you know, killing Chell an all.

We hear references by the automated announcer to "core temperatures", which could apply to either fusion or fission reactors, but if you carefully read the phony "Blue Screen of Death" displays in the final chapter, you'll see it displaying information on the status of "FISSREACT001" or something like that.

Further, "venting containment gasses" is only something that can be done in a fission reactor; fusion reactors don't have radioactive byproducts (or not very many, anyway).

As for the placement in the Half Life universe, the Portal series is very much a Gaiden Game; it borrows from that 'verse but occupies a completely different setting, so the chances of a direct crossover (absent whatever they do with the Borealis in the mythical Half-Life 3) are nil.

Chell emerges in a cultivated wheat field, with the following inexorable conclusions:

• There's still someone around to grow crops.
• Earth's water level, which was drained by the Combine, is viable enough to permit agriculture.

edited 8th Apr '14 12:59:34 PM by Fighteer

Cool stuff! Ok, I'm willing to buy that the reactor meltdown by itself probably wouldn't have exploded much, but what about everything around it? The gels, the turrets, the cubes, and all the materials used to make those things? That sounds like a lot of stuff that could explode pretty spectacularly if exposed to that level of heat.

Chell has the Portal gun and most explosions in games and movies take time to work their way through buildings. There's no reason to think she doesn't have a fighting chance to escape.

There are order-of-magnitude differences between a nuclear detonation and conventional chemical explosives, no matter how powerful. No conceivable conventional explosive could even make a dent in something as big as the Aperture facility — aside from doing enough structural damage to collapse it into the ground. There are fundamental physical limitations on how big a conventional explosion can become before it destroys its fuel source.

Then again, the portal gun seems to incorporate a miniaturized black hole, which is technology so far beyond even fusion that all bets are off. Nobody seems concerned about the thing sucking a hundred-mile wide hole out of the Earth if it gets dropped too hard, though.

All that said, by the standards of the larger Half Life 'verse, fission technology is old hat. The Combine use what appear to be fusion reactors like they are no big deal, and the Black Mesa staff have been developing quantum tunneling teleportation devices that share certain principles with Combine tech, albeit being apparently easier to use and requiring less power.

The universe runs on Schizo Tech.

Edit: Also, while Outrun the Fireball is hopefully becoming a Discredited Trope, the idea of outrunning a nuclear blast is utterly ludicrous. It would propagate through the facility in microseconds.

edited 8th Apr '14 12:24:37 PM by Fighteer

So lets assume a Schizo Tech explosion could take out the facility for simplicity's sake, huh?

edited 8th Apr '14 12:57:00 PM by odafangirl

Clearly that's what we are meant to believe: Bellisario's Maxim applies in full force. But don't try to explain it, or you run afoul of the fact that it's scientific baloney.

Outrunningthe Fireball isn't falling out of fashion. And we're talking about a fictional universe using technology that outclasses our own by leaps and bounds. Who knows what could happen?

Of course not. There's a cooling fan for the black hole. It's perfectly safe.

So, in the future, they will invent nuclear fission reactors that detonate with the blast velocity of conventional gasoline fires? That's three scientific absurdities for the price of one! Also, I said hopefully with respect to Outrun the Fireball becoming discredited.

That kind of thing is one of the main reasons I love this franchise so much.

edited 8th Apr '14 2:04:37 PM by Fighteer

And if something does go wrong with the black hole (which it won't), the portal gun comes with the Event Horizon Estimation Wheel, which you can use to precisely determine an estimated minimum safe stopping distance.

I don't think Wheatley is ever fighting to destroy the factory. He states several times in the final battle that he'll stop the factory from exploding when he's done with you.

Since re employing G La DOS is the better idea here, he's against it. Since Aprature crumbling is a bad idea, it starts happening. Weather he is aware of the fact he's making these bad ideas is debatable since he is a really bad compulsive liar.

Fission reactors CAN'T detonate, as was already said. They leak, nothing more. Explosions and energy generation run counter to each other in these application.

But this is fiction. God knows it's not hard enough scifi to actually count. It's black comedy.

I was including "can't detonate" as one of the scientific absurdities. The second is that it would behave like a conventional explosion and the third is that conventional explosions have the blast speed of a gasoline vapor fireball and can therefore be run away from.

edited 8th Apr '14 7:50:11 PM by Fighteer

This is Aperture we're talking about. If anyone can make something that is scientifically unable to explode like that... explode like that, its them.

Aperture Science: When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Combustible Lemon-ades.

I love Cave Johnson so much. Despite him being a Comedic Sociopath, I was sad when he died.

EDIT: ...hypothetically speaking, the cooling fan for the black hole is taking air out of our atmosphere and shunting it into a black hole. The portal gun is kind of apocalyptic just by existing, even if the black hole remains perfectly stable forever.

edited 9th Apr '14 9:18:41 AM by TobiasDrake

Perhaps the fan has a way to take the background radiation emanating from the black hole and convert it into cooling energy?

...shut up, it's Aperture, they probably made it work by accident.