Altered Nova said:
The fact that she was their only link to the map and that Kylo Ren had taken a personal interest in her should have been enough to qualify Rey for VIP prisoner status, at least until Kylo actually *got* the map out of her head. Plus they already lost one prisoner just days earlier partly because he had only had one guard, so they really should have learned from that mistake. There was no good excuse to only have one trooper watching her, that was pure incompetence.
Also why weren't they able to find her after she escaped? Doesn't their futuristic sci-fi military base have anything as basic as simple security cameras? Or door locks? Seriously, all of the heroes were able to sneak into and through that base way too easily. Real world military bases have better security systems than the First Order does.
Eh. Two different situations in two different places. She was a young woman who was basically chained down to a slab, that normally doesn't require much of a guard. It wasn't like they just left her sitting unsecured on a bench with one guy standing there staring at her. She was secured and there was no reason to believe she had anything remotely resembling a means of escape.
Poe didn't just get up and walk out on his own. He had inside help from a defector who was fresh from training. It's likely that the guy guarding Rey was anything but a newbie fresh out of training camp. He was probably a veteran with a record of service and loyalty.
I also think you're vastly overestimating the security measures on the average military base. They don't have security cameras in every hallway or the staff to monitor such a system if they did have such measures. I spent a few years in the Army and I've been in a few high security areas, they are mostly patrolled by guards on foot, and while there are security cameras in strategic locations, they very rarely cover the entire ground, and if they do aren't close enough to identify every person walking through. Security feeds are mostly for monitoring after the fact to ID who was there after something occurs and aren't really preventative measures in most cases.
Security IDs, patrols, and checkpoints are far more relied upon for base security than a monitoring system. They are a security enhancement at best and their usefulness is vastly overstated in film in that kind of security capacity. I've been the guy patrolling the halls or sitting at a checkpoint next to a phone or radio.
Yes, you can have guards watching feeds for at the moment security, but that is generally limited in effectiveness. One person can only monitor so many feeds, so you don't ideally rely on this as security outside of very specific highly secure areas, despite what many movies show. You do want cameras there, don't get me wrong, but they are investigative tools more than active security measures.
Cameras are effective as a deterrent by way of identifying in most cases. A criminal might not trespass, rob, or steal in front of a camera because it identifies them to authorities. They don't work very well as security against those who don't care if they are identified after the fact.
Put simply, getting in is the hard part. Once you're in, getting around unnoticed isn't that hard. That's not to say it's easy or that you don't have to be careful, just that it's far from impossible.
Rey avoided traffic areas in the movie and was climbing around the base where she could. She was climbing around maintenance shafts and not slinking through hallways. This is a feasible means of avoiding security in a place like that. She had been scavenging Imperial ships on Jakku, and likely knew her way around the kind of engineering used to make the base on a basic level. It's pretty clear it was at least based on old Imperial engineering and was likely similar enough she didn't have that much trouble navigating through it.
Han had Fin with him, who knew the base well enough to know what security would be in place and probably how to bypass it. He likely knew what areas were patrolled, where security monitoring systems were, and had help from a notorious smuggler and former member of the Rebellion who knew Imperial protocols and security measures, a faction of experienced resistance militia members, and plot armor.
Incidentally, sanitation is actually a good way to learn this stuff in reality. It's probably the lowest level job that grants the most access to the largest area of a base with high security. That access is limited, but it would be a good way to learn what sort of measures are in place and where things are in general.
