How I rationalize "instant-cleanup"

[Alitorious]

I know this has been mentioned from time-to-time. Immediately after you finish a mission ammo is replenished, and loot is 'immediately' back at base for research and selling. Apparantly there's this lightspeed cleanup crew which restocks your Skyranger and disassembles the UFO to take it back to base before the Skyranger gets there. You can research it, sell it, transfer it, use it as material for manufacturing, etc, but how does the base get the stuff so fast?

Kinda unrealistic, neh?

 

Until I realized something: Maybe X-COM has really good accountants and quartermasters and that. Everything is actually queued up, and maybe takes days between processes. All you're seeing are the records, and actual movement and research and stuff goes behind the scene.

 

Here's how I imagine it:

The troops take a quick (and accurate ) inventory of the battlefield before they leave, and send this report to base. Storage space is allocated immediately for the items. Meanwhile, it could take days or hours for the cleanup crew to arrive and actually ship everything back to base.

Because all the stuff is on the books, you can sell it right away. In reality, it might take days for the item to get out to the buyer and the money to 'physically' reside in X-COM's balance account. It doesn't matter, because the accountants take care of that right away. You get money on credit, and space is freed up in storage. It's all in the books, and in a few weeks everything works out exactly as planned.

 

Research is also kinda virtual. You're able to start research from battlefield reports and similar alien devices in storage. You're able to sell the item, but the item itself just goes from storage into the science labs. The scientists will give it up once they're done with it. For all intents and purposes, though, the item's happily in the hands of the buyer. They've got a guarantee and insurance that the scientists will put the artifact back together good as new.

 

 

So, that's how I see it. No magical clean-up-fairies. No scanning the artefact into the computers for the scientists. Just really good book-keeping.

 

Of course, things are kinda funy when your base is assaulted right after a mission, and the items are magically there for the soldiers to use. Uh...?

 

(Now, why don't those darn accountants factor in dirt-reclamation maintenance in their books. )

[Gimli]

Would you believe I thought of the same excuse? I didn't give it as much thought, but I noticed the instant available items, so I thought: "What's the difference? They'll be there anyway."

 

My latest problem was how would the communication work? Now obviously your soldiers can't speak, because they make sound. Yet they have to communicate with the base and teammates. So I thought of this little device that resembles one of those cloths that doctors put on their mouth. Basically, the only way to hear the sound is through an ear phone, which picks up the sound coming from the mic inside the device I mentioned. The reason is simply that the device nullifies the sound on the outside, so it's not heard.

 

Also, for all of you wondering why your soldiers don't lose parts of their bodies... that can be solved as well. Last year (or was it the one before) some scientists (Australia or NZ I believe) have done some genetic engineering on mice, which allowed the mice to regrow organs, and in fact, they were able to regrow every organ except for the brain (naturally). So taking into account the war time, and that X-COM already had some technologies in the beginning, it is not a far fetch that this could have been done 1998/1999. The only problem is, it's not visible in the battlefield.

 

I'll point out that this isn't really important, I make these excuses merely to amuse myself.

[Skonar]

Oh come ON!

 

Clearly the game is actually an attempt to cash in on the war effort, made underbudget and on a short schedule with absolutely no fact checking. Those wiley programmers of 2010 really can't make a decent game, can they? Well, it's a good thing that it fell into an interdimensional time portal, because apparently X-Com managed to avoid any nasty cover-breaking events like letting the aliens get at a city for a terror attack.

 

I just wonder if the war is truly over already without us hearing anything about it. Maybe they haven't shut down X-Com yet, maybe there's still a chance to enlist!