Destructionator XIII wrote: How did Hellgate Alpha staying open work in their favor? Earth->Hell opened portals are pretty iffy too; they can be used to escape earth, but you could have just as well made the escape portals opened up from the hell side too. Neither of those are required by the basic premise and seem to exist only to give tanks an easy road into hell. Without them, a large scale invasion of hell might have been impossible, and it might have looked a lot different. (Perhaps more like Pantheocide?) I'll give you credit of course on the creative use of the portals on both side. That's cool, running with the rules. I'm just questioning the reasoning behind making the rules the way they are in the first place.
We have to go almost back to the start about this since portal science is so fundamental. The way my thought train went was this. The daemons can't just materialize like a Star Trek transporter, it's not compatible with any science I can think of. That pushes us to a portal. Now, all the old mythology talks of daemon armies etc and old legends are full of mention of cities being besieged by monstrous daemons. So we are definately looking at a massive force. That will need a huge portal to get it through (it would take a long, long time to transit a million-daemon army one at a time. So, sending daemon armies to earth would have to use lareg portals. But, if opening such portals was easy from the Earth side, we'd have noticed the science by now. So they have to be very difficult to open from the Earth side. Given this is Bronze age on teh daemon side, the portals have to be relatively easy to open from the Hell side. Then, I got the picture of a sort of "energy flow" down the Dimensions from Universe Three to Universe Two to Universe One and so on. It was easy to open portals going with the flow, but very hard to open portals against it. So, we acheived the object of having portals that were very easy to open from hellside and very hard to open from Earthside. So far so good (and you see what I mean about rigging things in the Daemons favor). Then, I thought about it some more and I got the picture of a saloon door in the "flow". That led me to think that opening a door from Earthside isn't just hard, keeping it open is very hard because the energy flow tends to close it (and that led to teh chain of thought that keeping a portal open from earthside causes the sensitive doing it great pain. Also, by implication, once a portal is opened from Hellside, keeping it open is easy. That's great as well, still favoring daemons you see. Then I thought some more about it and I realized that portals would be variable in size from tiny ones just big enough to let one daemon through to the huge ones used for Abigor's Army. Then, I thought back to the door and realized that the bigger the door, the more it would be affected by the "energy flow". I realized that this would mean that the humans would not only be restricted in the duration of the portals they could open, they would not be able to open big ones either. Still favoring daemons. Then I realized that if the portal was big enough, the daemons wouldn't be able to close it. And that thought concluded the basic development of portal science as backstory.
Note that portal science still heavily favors the daemons - or rather now operating from Hellside. Operating from Hell means the portals can be bigger and more stable and much more easily opened. They are harder to close which is why humans size their just big enough to take one armored vehicle at a time unless they want the portal to be permanent. Closing down a permanent portal has to be done by exploding an EBU-5 Hellside, it doesn't work exploded Earthside.
Making the hell -> earth huge portal remain open unattended. This doesn't seem to have benefited the demons: if the rules were changed, they could have opened a portal temporarily, marched through it, and closed it behind them.
It allowed them to do their volcano attacks (not plausible with easily-closed portals) and was implicit in teh basic concept. Arguably, if they had closed their portal, they would have been trapped on Earth
Instead, it remained open forever, allowing the counterattack to take place.
It didn't allow it, it eased it. Humans could have eventually found a way of punching in, especially if the daemonic army tried to form portals to escape rather than retreating to one. To be really nasty, the war could have ended with humans simply forming portals and pushing multi-megaton nukes in until Hell was fried. Capturing a portal forced thew ar to a conventional land battle. By the way, notice that portal capture was an important part of the Great Celestial War and teh other skirmishes.
Making Earth -> Hell portals possible. While this makes it easier for demons to make their own escape paths (if they are capable of it without machines anyway, I don't recall), the main purpose it seemed to serve was to make inserting troops and supplies into Hell easier for the humans.
It would be very hard to think of a reason why transit one way should be easy, the other way impossible. I bent things far enough giving daemons the easy portal-forming job and humans a hard job.
