Municipal Darwinism comes your way (RAR!)

[Zor]

In this scenario one day you hear a distant rumbling and a vibration in the earth, you then get outside and notice that something is coming your way. Specifically this...

...the Huge mobile edifice that is known as London. Six Hundred meters tall, bristling with cannons and anti-aircraft rocket launchers and home to over a million tractionists, this machine had been transported in from another world along with three 150 meter tall Suburbs. Never the less, this massive traction city has no interest in blowing you or your home town up, why would it lay waste to a scrumptious static settlement like yours? What this massive Urbivore is going to do is eat it up for fuel and Raw Materials that will be procecessed in it's gut and integrate you and your fellow "static barbarians" into it's population as part of the natural ideology of Municipal Darwinism. The Mayor of London is quite happy with this development, as it has been deposited into a rich Hunting Ground as well as having the new MEDUSA system up and running, Praise the Thatcher.

The Traction City of London shall be upon your home in about half an hour's time.

What do you do?

Zor

DUPLICATE TOPICS MERGED -- LadyTevar

[Mr Bean]

Considering my local terrain I should be okay ninety foot terrain elevation changes are hell on tracks even silly wonder tanks like London here, and I'm in a rather Republican area of the Midwest so I'll should be able to have my pick of the firearms when some good for nothing Alt-history Englishmen comes to my doorsteps to take meh jerb and my liberty.

So I'm a possibly short lived rebel that's fun, of course gun ownership being what it is around here I'm looking at 20,000-30,000 able bodied army fellow citizens to join never mind once the military gets word.

[U.P. Cinnabar]

Pack up my shit, and move to London. I can only hope rents are cheap there. And, that, once in a while, they give me the keys to the city, and let me drive.

[Vendetta]

Considering my local terrain I should be okay ninety foot terrain elevation changes are hell on tracks even silly wonder tanks like London here

Those tracks are about a hundred metres tall. Ninety foot elevation changes would be like a modern tank crossing a low wall.



Anyway, it can eat Rotherham, nobody would miss it.

Then get bombed into inoperability because the only air attacks it is used to dealing with are from airships and kamikaze rocket bombs not supersonic aircraft.

[Mr Bean]

Considering my local terrain I should be okay ninety foot terrain elevation changes are hell on tracks even silly wonder tanks like London here

Those tracks are about a hundred metres tall. Ninety foot elevation changes would be like a modern tank crossing a low wall.

Here in northern Ohio go near any river country and you get This, basically iceberg retreat north+lots of stream means deep stream cut valleys in lots of places that are perfect ankle turning territory. It's not about the size change it's about the size variance. Sure we don't have much on places like West Virginia But big gap+ loose soil+big tracks means any such 30 story tall (That's what 100 meters) vehicle is going to be in for a bad time

This is 30 stories tall

Going into the valleys and ravines around here they will be in for a bad time when a hill slide pulls the track one way while the track wants to go the other, shear forcing alone will be fun dealing with.

[Batman]

I laugh at them as they topple over trying to negotiate a valley significantly narrower than their city's width (or watch them destroyed by the military if they start out sufficiently far away they don't have to enter our kind of terrain)

[Jub]

Good luck to the monstrosity, especially when it comes to eating the military installations near me. There are no less than 17 military points of interest near me and while some are stone ships, administrative buildings, and coast guard bases that abomination is going to eat shit and hard for daring to appear in a major city near so much military hardware.



If it were to instead appear near where I grew up, that's also not going to work. Mainly because while it may eat Kelowna and the reserve armory that's located there it's never going to leave. It probably can't cross Okanagan Lake (It's nearly a mile across at the bridge pictured below) and even if it could good luck getting past all the mountains.



Another view.



That second view captures Knox Mountain where the first image was taken from. I don't think there's a pass wide enough for London to fit through leading out of the area that doesn't involve fording a near mile wide lake that's an average depth of 76m with a bottom made of up to 750m of loose glacial and post-glacial sediment. Even if it could it would be slow going and allow for the military jets that would surely be dispatched to blast it back to the stone age.

[Tribble]

The Traction City of London shall be upon your home in about half an hour's time.

What do you do?

Half an hour's time? In Toronto???

The only way it's going to accomplish that feat is if it's dropped right in the middle of the city to begin with.

Hell I wouldn't even bother sending in the military if it had the misfortune of appearing outside the city during rush hour; it would choke on the sheer number of vehicles in its path long before it reached the city centre.

[Zaune]

I immediately conclude that somehow or other, this is all Starglider's fault. Not to mention a very good metaphor for this country's infrastructure spending priorities.

[Jub]

It occurs to me that these things will be slow and maintenance heavy. Tracked vehicles aren't meant for speed or long-distance driving on their tracks. How the fuck do you even tension those tracks let alone replace on or fix a thrown track? How fast to those parts wear out from simple heat and friction? What does this beast use for fuel?

Odds are it has to stop as often as a WW1 tank which is every few hours or less and when it does it's easy to stop it from starting again.

[Vendetta]

It occurs to me that these things will be slow and maintenance heavy.

Maintainance heavy yes (legions of slaves), slow no. They can make 80MPH at for at least short periods.

They use other cities for fuel. That's why it's called Municipal Darwinism. Stronger cities literally eat weaker ones, breaking up their raw materials and enslaving their population. The reactors are some kind of future tech.

The series is set in a fairly distant postapocalyptic future where at least four major catastrophic societal collapses happened before the era of the Traction Cities, starting with the Sixty Minute War that reduced most of America to radioactive glass, boiled off enough of the seas that the North Sea is a mud flat now and blasted half the Himalayas away. MEDUSA, mentioned in the OP, Spoiler

is a leftover weapon from the Sixty Minute War and is essentially a city destroying superlaser. There are other nasty things lying around like Stalkers, basically cyborg zombie soldiers and some working orbital doom cannons.

[Jub]

It occurs to me that these things will be slow and maintenance heavy.

Maintainance heavy yes (legions of slaves), slow no. They can make 80MPH at for at least short periods.

They use other cities for fuel. That's why it's called Municipal Darwinism. Stronger cities literally eat weaker ones, breaking up their raw materials and enslaving their population. The reactors are some kind of future tech.

The series is set in a fairly distant postapocalyptic future where at least four major catastrophic societal collapses happened before the era of the Traction Cities, starting with the Sixty Minute War that reduced most of America to radioactive glass, boiled off enough of the seas that the North Sea is a mud flat now and blasted half the Himalayas away. MEDUSA, mentioned in the OP, Spoiler

is a leftover weapon from the Sixty Minute War and is essentially a city destroying superlaser. There are other nasty things lying around like Stalkers, basically cyborg zombie soldiers and some working orbital doom cannons.

I guess they're magic then. There's zero way anything that large could move that quickly without wearing out important parts or throwing a track and if you do throw that track you're fucked. There's going to be very little they could do to get that track back on besides hoping they can drive off any part of the track that's under them, cutting the pins out one by one, and essentially rebuilding the track in front of the city. If anybody though changing tracks on the Maus was going to be a pain don't look at this thing.

[Zor]

They use other cities for fuel. That's why it's called Municipal Darwinism. Stronger cities literally eat weaker ones, breaking up their raw materials and enslaving their population. The reactors are some kind of future tech.

London does not enslave the populations of its prey unlike cities like Arcangel, rather it intergrates them into its population.

Zor

[Vendetta]

They use other cities for fuel. That's why it's called Municipal Darwinism. Stronger cities literally eat weaker ones, breaking up their raw materials and enslaving their population. The reactors are some kind of future tech.

London does not enslave the populations of its prey unlike cities like Arcangel, rather it intergrates them into its population.

Zor

Basically a technicality for the convict labourers in the Gut though.

I guess they're magic then. There's zero way anything that large could move that quickly without wearing out important parts or throwing a track and if you do throw that track you're fucked. There's going to be very little they could do to get that track back on besides hoping they can drive off any part of the track that's under them, cutting the pins out one by one, and essentially rebuilding the track in front of the city. If anybody though changing tracks on the Maus was going to be a pain don't look at this thing.

Given that it doesn't happen and isn't considered a major risk in the books, we have to assume that whatever incredible technologies allow them to make six hundred metre tall cities drive at 80MPH also allow them to make tracks that stay on.

It's basic suspension of disbelief when dealing with fiction in this sort of scenario, you assume that the tech works as presented in the fiction.

[bilateralrope]

I'm in New Zealand. Can London even cross the Cook Strait, let alone reach Australia ?

starting with the Sixty Minute War that reduced most of America to radioactive glass, boiled off enough of the seas that the North Sea is a mud flat now and blasted half the Himalayas away.

So they exist in a world that has been largely flattened enough for these cities to operate. What's the roughest terrain these cities have been able to navigate in the books ?

[LadyTevar]

The Traction City of London shall be upon your home in about half an hour's time.

What do you do?

Zor

Laugh my ass off as it tries to climb the mountains.
Now, I'll admit it would do a number on the Shenandoah Valley and the Kanawha River Valley. It might be able to run along the Interstates, but it'd be breaking every bridge it overruns, and several of them could become 'tank-traps' if London had to backtrack, especially when it hits the 9% and 11% grades on a couple of them. Gods help it if it tries to cross the mile-long New River Gorge Bridge ... the bridge isn't wide enough for the double track, and is over 900ft deep.
Fuck, there's spots on the Interstates it couldn't make it through, because the road cuts are too narrow. Then there's the tunnels that were built just because the mountain was too steep to go over.

Yeah... I'd be in no danger

[Vendetta]

starting with the Sixty Minute War that reduced most of America to radioactive glass, boiled off enough of the seas that the North Sea is a mud flat now and blasted half the Himalayas away.

So they exist in a world that has been largely flattened enough for these cities to operate. What's the roughest terrain these cities have been able to navigate in the books ?

They range all over Europe and northern Asia. They can't cross mountain ranges but can do most hills (though they've largely been strip mined away by the time of the books), so the Caucasus and remaining Himalayas plus giant fuck off siege walls keep them out of southern Asia and Africa, which are the domain of static cities.

[bilateralrope]

When you say "most hills", how big a hill are you talking here ?

Do they have any defenses against someone leaving a large bomb lying around for the city to take inside, then setting the bomb off ?

[Vendetta]

When you say "most hills", how big a hill are you talking here ?

Do they have any defenses against someone leaving a large bomb lying around for the city to take inside, then setting the bomb off ?

Basically everything from the west coasts of England to the east coast of Russia is navigable and has been ground down and churned up over centuries (Southern Europe, the Northern coast of Africa, and the Middle East were smashed into the sea in the Sixty Minute War).

[Zixinus]

Grab everything valuable, get in the car and drive to whatever end of the country we can go to that is as far away as this thing is before it gets blasted to hell and back by NATO (and possibly the Hungarian military). And hope that there might be a home to come back to after they're done.

Hungary is essentially a giant valley surrounded by the Carpatian mountains with only minor hills and no real obstacles for this thing.

[Elheru Aran]

When you say "most hills", how big a hill are you talking here ?

Do they have any defenses against someone leaving a large bomb lying around for the city to take inside, then setting the bomb off ?

Basically everything from the west coasts of England to the east coast of Russia is navigable and has been ground down and churned up over centuries (Southern Europe, the Northern coast of Africa, and the Middle East were smashed into the sea in the Sixty Minute War).

Are the Americas not a factor in this universe, then?

[madd0ct0r]

When you say "most hills", how big a hill are you talking here ?

Do they have any defenses against someone leaving a large bomb lying around for the city to take inside, then setting the bomb off ?

Basically everything from the west coasts of England to the east coast of Russia is navigable and has been ground down and churned up over centuries (Southern Europe, the Northern coast of Africa, and the Middle East were smashed into the sea in the Sixty Minute War).

Are the Americas not a factor in this universe, then?

Not really no. There's some amhibious cities that skirt the american coast/crawl the cie sheet - the land itself is mostly radioactive glass, and a flying city that may pass over it perhaps There have been four seperate civilisation ending events before the books start - there's a huge amount of magitech and ancient weapon systems and waste heaps around, and barely a dozen million people outside the Anti-Traction Leauge.

[Zixinus]

What IS the tech level of this thing anyway? Does it have tech above our own? Considering you mentioning radioactive wastes, there are nukes in the setting so the real question is:

Can our military turn this monstrosity into slag?

[Tribble]

What IS the tech level of this thing anyway? Does it have tech above our own? Considering you mentioning radioactive wastes, there are nukes in the setting so the real question is:

Can our military turn this monstrosity into slag?

Well I doubt being hit by a nuclear weapon would be healthy for it.

How much conventional weapons fire would this thing be able to take? We still have plenty of nasty non-nuclear weapons around.

Also, is it capable of tracking stealth aircraft? If not they'd be able to attack it more or less with impunity and eventually pound it into the ground (or go nuclear if absolutely necessary).

[Zor]

Basically everything from the west coasts of England to the east coast of Russia is navigable and has been ground down and churned up over centuries (Southern Europe, the Northern coast of Africa, and the Middle East were smashed into the sea in the Sixty Minute War).

Are the Americas not a factor in this universe, then?

Not really no. There's some amhibious cities that skirt the american coast/crawl the cie sheet - the land itself is mostly radioactive glass, and a flying city that may pass over it perhaps There have been four seperate civilisation ending events before the books start - there's a huge amount of magitech and ancient weapon systems and waste heaps around, and barely a dozen million people outside the Anti-Traction Leauge.

Well South America has it's own set of Traction Cities rolling about it.

Zor