Forum:Industrial Espionage and the Two Competing Facilities

I noticed that the two scientists posing for a picture with the Borealis are also in the picture of the Black Mesa Science Team with Isac Kliner. Also, Cave Johnson complains about how Black Mesa keeps stealing Aperture Science's technologies and developments. There's a pretty good hint that espionage was involved with technology transfer between the facilities.

Add in the notions that Aperture Science had a backpack-mounted portal gun back in the late 1950's (as made evident by the posters in the earliest chambers of Test Shaft 9), they had the first teleporter (wayward as it may have been), and they basically invented A.I. back in the 1980's, one can assume that Aperture Science was more technologically productive than Black Mesa; however Black Mesa continued to thrive by stealing ApSci's technologies and subsequently low-balling their grant requests compared to ApSci (as evident in the executive presentations in the original Portal) because ApSci did the hard work and Black Mesa just ran with it.

Furthermore, the Aperture Science High Energy Pellet *is* the same thing as the combine dark matter energy ball. Think about it: fire is fire, internal combustion is internal combustion, fission is fission... all these technologies were discovered by the predecessors of the OverWatch just as how humans discovered these technologies over time. It's just a matter of technological advancement, and Aperture Science was way ahead of the game for their time.