I found it pretty easy, to be honest.
Of course I did. I have watched let’s plays where the player breezes through it like nothing. My jumping skills just suck, and continued to do so after dozens of practice ones. I saved my keyboard, mouse and hair from my rage by noclipping to the elevator.
Though I doubt many people would miss this part of ST if it was radically changed/omitted altogether. The tripmine puzzle is in the top 3 of my list of things HL1/BM could have done without.
I’m just going to say here that I’m remaking one of the missing sections of Surface Tension as part of my own little personal project. The level in question which basically got completely omitted from Surface Tension in Black Mesa from the original HL1 was C2A5F, and I feel it was an essential part of the chapter because it featured 3 or 4 occasions where you bear witness to the HECU getting flattened by the Xen Aliens in fights.
About 1/4 of the way through the mission C2A5F in HL1 you reach the scene with the vent shooting, where you drop down into a garage and proceed through the rest of the level. The End of C2A5F leads into C2A5G, which starts in a car park with the Gargantua chase. Black Mesa basically cut off of C2A5F and merged the vent drop with the Garg Chase.
Forget About Freeman in Black Mesa doesn’t strike the same chord as it did in HL1 - it doesn’t make much sense without C2A5F I feel, as it is during that section you realise the HECU are really taking some heavy losses.
I am an experienced Source mapper and I may or may not release my final product to the general community when it’s done. That all depends on how easy it is to get it working with the campaign as is, and how good I feel it is. I have only mapped for CS: Source and GO so this is a learning process for me too. I will have no trouble at all with creating pretty looking geometry, lighting and landscape - my issue will be with the AI and scripted sequences.
If anyone has any suggestions for things about C2A5F from HL1 which I could change, fire away. I hope that sometime in the future it may be able to fill the void left in Surface Tension by the mapper sadly leaving halfway through.
I have 2 questions for the devs as well, if they happen to be perusing this thread at some point.
Will cut sections from Surface Tension/On A Rail be re-added to Black Mesa in future updates (alongside Xen?/Greenlight update?) If not, I am going to work on them myself just as a little community/personal project. I will anyway, but I’d still like to know.
In Black Mesa, there actually is a tentacle entity in the middle of the first minefield on Surface Tension, near where it is on the original. At least that’s how it is on my decompiled .vmf. Is this a decompile error, or is there something wrong with the versions you shipped with Black Mesa, because there definitely isn’t a tentacle in game. I remember hearing the devs comment they had a program which cut down on file sizes by removing unnecessary entity (this is why vox doesn’t exist in BM), does that have something to do with why the tentacle doesn’t appear?
I’ve taken the liberty to repost your questions in the Got a Question? thread 
[COLOR=‘Red’]Nicely done. Thank you.
the lack of invisible mines is going to be a big letdown for me. The tentacles i will be able to live without, but I really did enjoy shooting at the damn things to try to figure out where they all were. having them visible is just going to make me wonder what the point is.
Well, I had problems with this very last jump into the lift. I did touch lasers anyway even with crouch jumping. However, this is not the problem at the moment. The problem is, I did a very stupid thing. I shoot the big box in the elevator instead of crashing it with the crowbar. And I did not switch back to crowbar after that. I was doing a lot of quick saves. And somehow, immediately after each game reload my character started to shoot automatically. Finally, the character ended up shooting trip mines by itself after each reload. Moreover, this auto-suicidal game saves have overwritten all my other saves in the Surface Tension. Ahrrr! I have a question. Does anyone have an idea if there is a way to disable shooting from the console? I don’t feel like replaying the Surface Tension from scratch.
Many thanks in advance!
Remember: no shooting in the trip mine room!
OK, replayed. In the last stage, in trip mine room, when activating the elevator with the box, there is no need to brake the box. Instead, you can jump down and push the box so that it would not touch the trip mine laser when the elevator goes up. This box may be used to jump into the elevator that goes down.
Agreed. During my first playthrough i was able to navigate through this section without saving…and before the music even stopped playing.
IMO, the hardest thing about surface tension (BM in general) is HECU’s reaction time and accuracy.
Surface Tension is a great example of the BAD HECU AI.
Especially when in the canals and climbing a ladder, just Gordon’s fart is enough for the whole squad to react faster than an instant and shoot his ponytail.
It’s wallhack+aimbot+guns shoot even before a trigger is pulled 
, it appears to could of have been possible only if they had an extra pair of eyes in the back of their heads (tracking devices in HEV suit isn’t an excuse good enough)
Another one in this chapter is this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvwza3M8iXk&t=26m49s
They magically know about Gordon and shoot right as any body-part of his sticks out just slightly.
Completed surface tension and I do miss xenian part, one with bunch of grunts and spawning vorts, witch was supposed to come after dealing with infinite soldier apache and tank and end with entering area with Gargantua. I liked this part a lot on original, because those grunts were fun and interesting to fight with, unlike those triggerhappy soldiers.
The only real disappointment for me was the missing end part of surface tension. I don’t know why you guys think that cutting it was a good idea, but I’m glad FAMGUY1 plans on rectifying it. He has my support.