Design a Hazardrous Environment Station/Outpost/Base

[Illuminatus Primus]

I think the last time this scenario was proposed, I suggested a simple vivisection lab: the critters you bring there are already dead so you don't have to worry about security. If you're worried about infectious agents, have the actual autopsy work carried out by remote drones operated from a separate control room in which the scientists can monitor everything. Nothing gets out of the sealed chamber except for data and if the isolation chamber's integrity is somehow compromised or is about to be, a white-phophorus or fuel-air charge can carry out a quick sterilisation even if you lose some machinery in the process. It can be replaced. If you can have this facility off-Earth, do so: either a bunker on the far side of the moon or an L5 station and again, the samples are kept in one segment of the facility and the scientists and engineers running things are in a totally separate segment of the facility.

Really, why make this more complicated than it has to be?

Nitpick: vivisection means the subject is alive.

[Rye]

Okay, you are in charge of TriOptimum/OCP/Weyland-Yutani/Walmart/Halliburton, and you have been given a contract to either:

A.) Study incredibly dangerous alien species/study incredibly dangerous alien technology/study incredibly dangerous research.

If I'm experimenting with teleporters that may open a gateway to hell, I may as well go the whole hog and move stuff to Mars. Have a space station in orbit that the various resources/people are sent to from Earth that delegates the resources being ferried to the surface via parachute. Said station will have copious nuke missiles aboard in case the failsafes on the planet fail. Hell, why not, it can have lasers too that it can use on any evil xenos/zombies/other crawling across the landscape, or errant vessels trying to escape the atmosphere without clearance.

The facility itself would be two buildings, power partially generated by wind turbines, the rest by nuclear. The dangerous lab would be as automated as it would be feasible to do, with repairs and the like done by people in hard suits from the observation lab.

The only way people from the planet can get home is by getting on a low orbit craft that's then picked up by a larger craft that can take them to a midway station to get checked out before being let the whole way home.

[PeZook]

Procedures are they key, I think.

For example, if you have transportation available, even periodically, it must be designed in such a way so as to be unusable by a single person or creature.

Second: house the personell away from the actual work lab.

Third: clear hierarchy. Somebody has to be in command, and he needs to be competent. He will also have a deputy, and the deputy will have someone tasked for taking control of the station.

Fourth: training. All personell will be trained and regularly drilled in emergency procedures. No deviation will be tolerated - it's better to fire a brilliant researcher who just can't be arsed to clean his suit properly every day, than to risk an outbreak.

Fifth: location. Earth orbit or the Moon would suffice. Double points for Moon orbit with failsafe one-use retro jets to drop the station into the surface.

Sixth: perimeter. External weapons which can be used to destroy the place on a moment's notice. Not connected to the station in any way, using separate comms protocols, etc.

Seventh: air ducts too small to crawl through. Also, loaded with sensors. Also, floodable with nerve gas. And there would be spinning razor-sharp blades inside. And some non-spinning razor blades. And broken glass...

Okay, they should just be too small to crawl through

Eighth: Don't hire mercenaries led by a maverick to do your security. They suck.

Ninth: Leveraging Company authority in order to bring a deadly alien to Earth would be punishable with summary disintegration.

Tenth: Any live alien brought into the facility is implanted with a killswitch, if feasible. The killswitch is activated in the absence of a certain, specified radio signal. Preferrably, it's emitted by something that shuts down when damaged even slightly, or when a scientist is killed.

[Pu-239]

I'd have an experimentation platform orbiting a gas giant surrounded with weapons platforms to destroy it (as well as defend against unwanted intruders), as well as a self-destruct device. These will trigger if any containment breach occurs.

Researchers will be on a different platform some safe distance away (perhaps a gas giant). Robots to do the actual experimentation, as scientists are valuable personnel and should not be risked, connected with the researcher's platform with a laser datalink (avoids enemy tapping into link).

There should be weapons platform to defend /destroy the researcher's platform as well, in case we have some weird funky psychic thing going on that manages to infect the researchers over the datalink.

Anything shipped into the experimentation platform will be done via expendable ships that are deorbited into the gas giant and self destructed after use, and nothing is shipped out, unless it is to be disposed of by deorbiting.

The weak point is collecting specimens for study and safely transporting them to the experimentation platform. Potential sabotage may also be a problem- it may be prudent to hide the platform in one of the gas giant's rings and disguise it as an asteroid.

[Pu-239]

EDIT: That should be "Researchers will be on a different platform some safe distance away. "

External weapons platforms should be controlled by the researchers, with overrides possible by the military.

[Starglider]

I'm not sure how you're going to find any researchers willing to work on these 'we will vaporise you at the first sign of anything suspiscous' platforms. Or for that matter a company prepared to spend vast amounts of money building one only to have it go up in smoke the first time something serious goes wrong. Consider a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant; a big expensive industrial installation, with lots of remote manipulators, contamination detectors etc. All of these that have ever been put into operation have had a few internal incidents a year and a significant external spill every few years (at best). Depending on where you set the hair trigger, the 'oh yeah we'll give it twelve independent self destruct devices and surround it with weapons platforms' proposals would vaporise such a plant many times over in its first decade. It isn't worth building one at all if it's most likely going to blow up before producing enough useful data to justify its cost.

[Pu-239]

As for employment, sure, don't tell them about it. For a space station, the trigger should be pretty high (the creatures aren't going anywhere until they breach the hull (I'm assuming they can survive in vacuum), so we'll just blow up the station when there's a hull breach and pressure drops. There is that weird psychic contamination problem (depending on the rules of your sci-fi), but that should be even less likely due to the seperation between the experiment and the researchers (And a laser datalink can be cut off fairly easily since it's directional). Crazy/zombiefied/infested/etc scientists can't do much either on a space station, so the trigger before vaping them should be fairly high too.


The weapons platforms do serve a dual purpose of killing snooping enemy factions.

[frogcurry]

Cue a malfunction in the scientists air supply system, which causes them to hail the nearby security station and ask for help. Your overly cautious security AI assumes that they are compromised and vapes them.

I think we need less paranoid, less 'perfect' security systems, without sacrificing too much of the security benefit. And more cost effective.

[Duckie]

Just make it so that nothing is allowed to leave without outside clearance. The scientists can still ask for help if needed, and they can leave if the company allows it.

Use all these redundant security systems and AIs to merely trigger a light to light up. The light is naturally about 1 AU away. Also, it severs all links with the main body after activating.

When the company comes by, if the light's on, they carefully, carefully try to figure out what's going on, unless it's something like psychic mind-enslavers or the Traveller TNE Virus, in which case you just nuke it from orbit and then nuke the debris into smaller debris.

[note: Light does not have to be an actual light bulb, just some kind of signal.]

[Duckie]

Ghetto Edit- And by "nothing's allowed to leave" I mean the defense platforms open fire.

That kind of precaution doesn't seem excessive. After all, why would the scientists ever need to escape a self-sufficient space station.

Also, make sure the space station has bulkheads and can cauterize/triage damaged sections. Basically, if something goes wrong the lab jettisons itself into the sun, and the scientists who are in a totally separate space station operating by telemetry go "Oops" and wait for Weyland-Yutani to replace it.

[Big Orange]

The research station does not need to vanish in a mushroom cloud unless the security breach or laboratory emergency is completely untenable, with most of the staff dead and vital R&D equipment destroyed. If the danger is sealed away safely inside one research station and security can contain/neutralize it, then there is no need to trigger the napalm stockpile/H-bomb/blackhole imploder.