Headscratchers / Black Mesa

• The whole Black Mesa ARG (Alternate Reality Game) is just confusing. It's been going on for years, and nobody's solved it yet. However, a few Black Mesa Source members are trying to solve it here. http://forums.blackmesasource.com/index.php/Thread/13735-ARG-The-Pizza-Code-Mystery/
• Vocal Dissonance: Why did they give The Stanley Parable narrator's voice to an old man scientist model? It sounds very odd to hear such a smooth voice coming out of the body of a wrinkly old man.
• Still a mystery since 1998: What were the HECU thinking when they laser tripmined that warehouse up?
  • They probably just figured it was something not even Freeman can get through, as even moving a box slightly makes the whole place explode. It's probably the hardest pre-Xen puzzle in the game.
• How come the Gargantua can No-Sell even the Gluon Gun which emits friggin' sub-nuclear particles but gets utterly destroyed by plain old electricity?
• If the Lambda team can teleport supply canisters to any location in Xen, including Nihilanth's chamber, why don't they just send Gordon straight to Nihilanth, instead of having him trek miles upon miles through alien landscapes, wilds and giant factories?
  • Perhaps they managed to calibrate the aid packages to appear near Gordon's HEV suit's tracking signature somehow. The previous landing teams had started out where Gordon ends up as well, from which I infer that they stuck with the (relatively) safe anchoring point when teleporting a person. Non-mad scientists would be more willing to gamble with inanimate objects than their co-workers when using prototype interstellar (inter-dimensional?) teleportation technology.
• Weird question but why did they change the sound of the Xen healing pools? No exaggeration, the sound in the original game is. my favorite video game sound effect ever.
• Something that applies to the original game but also counts to a lesser extent here: why do the marines have so much better AI in general than the aliens? I get that some aliens are basically just animals (e.g headcrabs, bullsquids) and that the Vortigaunts are Slave Mooks and not much for combat, but I would think the alien grunts would at least be as smart as the marines, tactics wise (they are explicitly made for fighting, after all.)
  • Nihilanth was building a slave army and part of that was juicing the hell out of the Vortigaunts to create grunts. But then creating super soldier that can think for themselves and know they're enslaved is generally a bad idea. As a result the Nihilanth deliberately stripped out some of their higher functions along with wiping out memories to ensure the Grunts wouldn't be intelligent enough for anything other then mindless slaughter. The Marines meanwhile are Earths finest trained to operate using their intelligence to the fullest along with their weaponry working in squads and overwhelming targets with brain and brawn.
• Another one that applies to the original: at the end of Surface Tension, you kill the Gargantua with the air strike machine, and then use it to destroy the radio tower and make bridge. Why is whoever is dropping the airstrikes just going along with it no matter how many bombs you drop, rather than suspecting Freeman is using it and bombing him? I guess it could be a Kill Sat (with no pilot) dropping the bombs rather than a plane, but I really don't know.
  • Since there were no planes in sight as the bomb drops, I'm gonna guess that is a mortar strike instead of an airstrike.
• What's all that technology and machinery doing in Xen? Be it lasers, those almost Earth-like elevators or other stuff. The original Xen was more organic, there were no right angles, everything was misshapen and the little technology present also seemed more like it was grown than actually built.
• Who could've built the elaborate device to teleport to Gonarch's lair and why?
  • The Nihilanth had it built as a trap in case someone actually made it to the portal at the end of "Xen"?