#1 could work with some support but once passed by a marauder you've lost 18 points of defense near the reactor.
#2 doesn't have any tactical worth because your base presumably is way back and once again loses 28 points of defense. No alien will bother with it and walk around the other way or jump over.
Base defense is exactly that, defense for a base not for some remote, easily surpassed corridor.
I figure outposts like that are good when humans do NOT camp. It'd act as sort of a "refill station" for energy weapons, and if the fighting is intense enough in the area and humans are always present, you can remove one stationary defense and add an armory. In fact, since armories are such important targets for aliens, they'd really want to take that one down too, so a player can't snag a ckit on his way out of his exploding base and try to rebuild. And any alien going past a defense like that that is well spaced from the main base (enough to not be part of it, but not far enough to leave much room to hide) is pretty much going to die within the confines of the extended "human territory", because they need to get past that defense, fight, and then get out past it too. The extra line makes it more difficult to calculate how much HP an alien needs to make a getaway, and forces them to be more cautious inside too.
This is assuming that there is no other way in or out, though. And this could only be a decent idea if you figure that there are enough defenses at the reactor. That is, build points need to be increased before human outposts become remotely cost effective. And the entire idea is silly if humans are just going to camp. An active human presence on the map makes outposts a half decent idea, actually.
Of course, that's why people say more build points is human biased. They could effectively extend their base beyond the small confines dictated by fewer bp, and the more ironclad and sizable a human base is, the less room aliens have to manuever. It's one thing to sacrifice coverage for size, but it's another to have both enough coverage at the reactor site AND more size, plus being able to afford more armories and more medpads which effectively gives humans a chance to remain active further from base for longer.
Hell, in the 52 man game that could ensue on the SST server, human outposts FAR from base could be effective if the humans are very seriously beating the aliens back. The only reason people dislike humans building forward outposts is because humans always seem to be the ones playing over-cautiously. And sure, if you're going to be unable to keep your forward outpost together because it's always being attacked as opposed to you attacking FROM it like it was designed to help you do, it isn't useful.
It takes a while to set up and makes you waste fighters for builders, though, and if you CAN set it up and keep it totally out of the fray (or taking minimal damage/repairing, which means you have a dedicated outpost builder, which is another man minus) while using its benefits, you were probably doing exceptionally well against the enemy and you didn't really need it anyway. But we ought to at least see if it'd work in a fair game before totally discrediting the idea. And, once again, only for very large battles, which at the moment aren't feasible. Trem was meant for 16-20 people, as Timbo said. But if people are bold enough to try many more player servers and are playing, say, Pulse, maybe human outposts can get a test drive.
