Some unanswered questions.

[Mjarr]

- Why was Daniel able to simply piece an Orb back together with some adhesive (twice), when evidently Alexander could never do so himself with his own broken Orb?

My speculation is that piece(s) of the first orb were permanently lost once it broke down, compare it to IRL scenario where you are missing some screws from some object and you cannot assemble it correctly that way.

Alternatively since some of the events have occured months before the events of the game back then Alexander had no idea how to do it despite all his potential knowledge and caused him sort of tunnel vision when it came to thinking solutions, but just prior the game events start he might've figured it out or atleast experimented on something that gave positive results.