Again, I’m sorry if this was posted before, if so, let me know, and I’ll head over there…
I thought of something, while watching GB2 recently… presumably, when they captured the Scolari Bros, the CU wasn’t yet fixed. So, how long did it take? Was there a period that they just had a bunch of full traps laying around until the CU was up and running again? And if so, were they in danger of running out of empty traps? Or, was the CU fixed after the 1st movie and before they were shut down for good? (Assuming that it took a while for the legal issues to catch up with them and close them down…)
Since they were sitting on a bunch of money from all the spectral activity caused by Gozer, I thought they pretty much blew most of it on building the Mark 2 Containment Unit. Ray and Egon probably worked night and day on it, so I’d say weeks to months.
It would make sense that the firehouse and CU were fixed – at least partially – before they went out of business. It’s logically the first thing they would do after recovering from the Gozer encounter. Also, the lawsuits that eventually put them into ruin would not take place overnight.
Isn’t the containment unit the same tech as a proton pack just modified to form a literal grid around the holding cell? That’s why space is such a growing concern in the first film because they didn’t anticipate the capacity issues they were experiencing when they designed their initial unit. The amount of time to rebuild a basic, functioning emergency holding facility could have been within a week. Think of the viewing ECUs they have in the video game. Not for long term storage but for the presumably weakened ghosts they were catching in the wave after Gozer. It’d do in a pinch until they could complete the larger, permanent holding facility in the basement. Also, the “explosion” was just a ball of psychokinetic energy-- there was nothing explosive about it. All of the original equipment is probably damaged but repairable, especially with the engineering skills of Stantz and Spengler and their (at that point) fat checkbooks.
While the RGB design for the containment unit is more visually appealing I never liked the etherworld quality to the interior of the holding cell-- while it’d make sense that certain entities could warp their landscapes to be what they want, the space in the basement of the firehouse is ultimately just too small. Now, as for the massive New Jersey based containment field in Aykroyd’s Hellbent drafts-- that would make sense. A massive ecto containment refinery with decades worth of trapped souls, would probably be hell.
So, again, to answer your question-- They were probably back in business after a week. Probably not at the firehall but seeing as they were lauded as world heroes I would imagine they were probably allowed a special post to continue to operate their (especially so at that point) important services.
Considering the force of the escaping PK Energy was enough to literally blow the roof off the firehouse, I’d say that its safe to assume the massive concussive force of that much energy being released from the grid was enough to blow the ECU apart – You can witness bricks being blown out of the wall during the initial shutdown. Not to mention the fact that all of those ghosts being confined in such a tiny space finally having some elbow room would be rightly ■■■■■■ off at being locked up and may have ripped the ECU apart for lulz.
But who am I to say – I’m just the newbie who’s seen Ghostbusters more than 10,000 times
