What the FUCK were they actually experimenting for at Black Mesa? What was Freeman supposed to be doing that day?
What the FUCK were they actually experimenting for at Black Mesa? What was Freeman supposed to be doing that day?
Nathan Nguyen
Camden Foster
DARG
Camden White
Antimass spectrometer. Like mass spectroscopy, but for exotic Xen samples.
James Carter
Black Mesa overall was a massive research house working on everything from rocket propulsion technology, to industrial robotics, to advanced weapons research. The main bread and butter at the time of the incident however was teleportation..
Gordon Freeman's thesis was that basically certain crystalline structures held the properties that THEORETICALLY in certain conditions when bombared with science shit, would cause the crystalline structure to "resonate" which would create acess to alternate dimensions and allow the manipulation of physical space, i.e the key to teleporation. This thesis was what got him hired to Black Mesa. As of his thesis, these crystalline structures didn't actually exist and were only theoretical (he was a theoretical physicist) but Black Mesa had already accessed alternate dimensions via Xen and got it hands on Xen crystals which in fact held some of these properties, the more pure the crystal the stronger these properties.
Gordon was basically working in Anomalous Materials, which meant that they recieved classified materials and did experiments that previously only existed in theoretical physics. Suitably, they had the unique "Anti-Mass Spectrometer", a device that specifically tests and analyzes anomalous non-real materials that Black Mesa had acquired. The test on the day of the incident was intended to use the Anti-Mass Spectrometer, which would basically test an impossible object that would take other equipment decades within less than an hour. The crystal material was entirely pure, which meant that it stood to be a huge key to their research if everything went to plan.
However, on the day there was a combination of a coincidental facility wide system crash, the spectrometer being pushed well beyond the safe limits of what it was meant to do (105% compared to its safety limit of 90%) due to administrative pressure and an untested and unprecedented unstable anomalous material.
Henry Rogers
Penis enlargement experiment.
Hunter James
Quality post.
I'd also like to clarify if black mesa already had access to Xen prior to the Unforseen Consequences.
The sample is seemingly delivered by g-man, but you find plenty of dead hev-clad people in xen. Perhaps they were teleported in but perished, unable to come back?
Charles Perez
The most high level classified areas of Black Mesa already had limited contact with Xen and were bringing back artifacts and samples. That's where the crystals and other "anomalous materials" were coming from. They even had been studying the large sea shark thing for a week before the incident and lied to the research team stating it had been taken from the challenger deep.
Effectively the Lambda Labs and their ilk were getting Xen artifacts and lying to the lower classified branches that studied them that they were taken from supernatural or exotic parts of the Earth. Total speculation but for example Gordon could have been under the impression that a previous crystal sample was taken from some deposit in a volcanic mine on some Pacific island or some shit.
G-Man just provided the most pure crystal sample to the team, and helped grease the gears that led to the administrator (Breen) putting massive pressure on the Sector C team to push the spectrometer beyond safs procedure.
Jeremiah Howard
Black Mesa, at the time of Half-Life 1, probably very recently discovered how to teleport people into Xen. There's barely any human infrastructure. They were probably sending scientists in HEV suits to random points in Xen so they can chart it, and get some hands-on research.
Most of the scientists probably died to alien wildlife, falling from great heights, or simply just getting lost.
Andrew Carter
>The most high level classified areas of Black Mesa already had limited contact with Xen and were bringing back artifacts and samples. That's where the crystals and other "anomalous materials" were coming from. They even had been studying the large sea shark thing for a week before the incident and lied to the research team stating it had been taken from the challenger deep.
They captured specimens of alien grunts too and in the final cinematic it is implied that the US military invaded Xen, which might have taken place even before the catastrophe.
Landon Parker
Based response. Thank you for putting in such effort, user.