But it was, wasn’t it? The Cyberdyne building certainly was.
The SKYNET mainframe is supposed to be at SAC-NORAD headquarters…inside Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado (?)
Yeah, but the technology making Skynet possible was created in the Cyberdyne building in LA.
However…
Skynet cannot just send a bomb back, because if the first T-800 doesn’t go back, its chip will not be recovered from the hydraulic press and Miles Bennett Dyson will be incapable of replicating it. Ergo: no Skynet. So the first T-800 has to go back and be destroyed, or Skynet will never exist.
What’s that I said about predestination?
if i were Skynet i’ll send as many robot queens as possible each into different times that would be equipped to rebuild Skynet… :evilgrin:
that would be chaos, but better than extinction…
We knew Skynet hadn’t been stopped at the end of T2 because John Connor still existed; because his father, Kyle Reese, had only met his mother after being sent back by the time machine designed and built by Skynet, his existence is also dependent on Skynet. The question is if the first T-800 was programmed to destroy itself in a certain place at a certain time so as to put the chip in the hands of Skynet’s creators - because if it wasn’t, Skynet’s existence is just as dependent on John Connor’s as his is on it.
Yeah, this is part of the Big Flaw with the two Terminator movies. The first one presupposes predestination, the second one presupposes lack of it (history is changed since Miles Bennett Dyson dies).
No point I guess except fun, which is the only reason I posted that little factoid in the first place. 
I hadn’t really thought about the fact that the terminator killed Sara’s mom–and that Sara never dealt with this death in the movies (or did she?)–until I read this thread.
See, my biggest gripe with T2 is that once Arnold takes his liquid-steel bath holding the T1 arm at the end, John Conner should cease to exist and all the stuff leading up to that moment should never have happened. They should’ve ended the movie with Sarah Conner back in her apartment with her (no longer dead) roommate, talking about going out to a nightclub or something.
Yeah, but then John Connor isn’t born, and Skynet wins because the humans are almost wiped out, except Connor sends Reese back in time again, so…
Reese: I’m just a soldier. I don’t know Tech stuff.
It’s the grandfather paradox all over again, and Niven’s claim that time-travel universes are unstable. As I long ago remarked on the grandfather paradox, in an old sig line:
“Of course,” said my grandfather, pulling a gun from his belt as he stepped from the Time Machine," There’s no paradox if I shoot you!"
Eh, it all depends on how you look at time, no? In many storylines (including a few Terminator ones), time travels in waves, so that if you screw up something in the past, everything in the future from that point on becomes the past, yet the past at that point remains unchanged (get it?).
In other words, everything that happened before T2 would still have happened because it’s now part of the past, and therefore untouched by the future. The Terminator Sarah destroyed is no longer “in the loop,” and thus, it’s existance wouldn’t be canceled out by changing the future of Skynet. Kinda like in Timecop how when a person goes back in time and changes their own history, they still have the memories of their old past, even though their life has now taken and entirely different route (instead of his wife dying ten years ago and him living alone in an apartment, he returns to a time where he’s been married, lives in a house, and has a son…yet he remembers all those cold lonely nights as a widow).
Sure, doesn’t make sense. I prefer the Back to the Future explaination that any influence in the past that may change the events of the time machine would result in the destruction of the universe. Makes me hope some alien race out there knows not to screw with their own past before I get laid.
Of course, the H-bomb is just an example. Arnie coulda toted a phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range or whatever he wanted, just stuffed into the chest cavity of a handy corpse.
There is just one flaw in my masterplan. Since sending Arnholt back in time was the last throw of the dice for the bad guys, they might not have had time to eviscerate nearby bodies and stuff them full of weaponry
But since the arm has been destroyed, and the Cyberdyne building has been destroyed, and all of the scientist’s files are destroyed, Skynet never comes into existence.
They couldn’t have sent a bomb, but they could have put a ray gun (or a “plasma pulse rifle in ze fohty vatt range”) inside the Terminator’s belly in the first movie, and saved a lot of fooling around with less effective weapons.
And don’t give me any crapola about how complex machinery can’t go thru the vortex. The Terminator is complex machinery, and he went thru just fine. And there was plenty of room inside him - just give him a pot gut.
Regards,
Shodan
Ok. We know Dyson and Cyberdyne were already doing research. They have a start time in approx. 1986 and work on their gizmos for fourty years. Their life’s work.
In 2026, a fully-functioning Skynet nukes the world and leads to war with the humans that are left, led by a guy named John Connor. He is the son of Sarah Connor and some guy she met in the mid 80s.
Skynet sends back a T-800 to kill her before John is born and the humans send back kick-ass Reese to protect her.
Sarah falls in live with Reese and never meets the would-be father of John, but she still likes the name and John is still born but by a different father.
Meanwhile, after the first T-800 is destroyed but leaves the arm and CPU. These are found by Cyberdyne and the advanced technology pushes Dyson’s research ahead by leaps and bounds, so Skynet is build decades earlier than it should have been.
Still, Skynet freaks out, nukes the world and tries to kill Sarah Connor before John is born.
Same results.
Someone probably did go back in time and screwed up something, then the girl vanished, and you were left there with your pants down wondering what was going on. I’ve been there! 
Ya know, this takes a whole different tack if you posit the existence of multiple timelines. Is there only one time, or do they branch out in quantum necessity?
Because if they branch (or are parallel), you can have the Terminators from one timeline go back to another timeline.
Just curious. If you were talking about Skynet sending a bomb back, why did you make the cryptic comment “the rest of us are saved?”. Why would Skynet want to save us? Dyson was responsible for Skynet’s existence, and I believe he lived in L.A., so destroying L.A. would mean Skynet never existed. It wouldn’t matter if the rest of the world lived.
So how did Skynet go from being a computer in a mountain base to being somehow able to control robot factories?
Oh, I don’t know - maybe when SAC-NORAD commissioned their artificially intelligent strategic defence supercomputer, they remembered to have a modem installed?
so after the USA got nuked, there were enough working phone lines to allow Skynet to reprogram surviving car assembly plants to automatically produce killer robots?