Global Peak (Part 11.0 up 05/29/09).

[Pelranius]

Rather depressing, reminds me of the Taiping Rebellion and the Russian Civil War.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Out of curiousity, have they considered making nuclear tanks. Shep had some skinny on a proposed plan in the sixties or fifties to build them.

Zor

Not enough resources.

[Adrian Laguna]

The main goal in skipping ahead was so that in a couple more mosts (six at most) I could finish up the Civil War and move on from it--I felt I'd rather gotten bogged down in it.

Perhaps, but that update was disappointingly short and undetailed.

Could we at least get a map to go with it? Something this one of Operation Bagration would be really awesome, but I would settle for a line depicting the front and arrows showing the advance vectors of each army.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

The main goal in skipping ahead was so that in a couple more mosts (six at most) I could finish up the Civil War and move on from it--I felt I'd rather gotten bogged down in it.

Perhaps, but that update was disappointingly short and undetailed.

Could we at least get a map to go with it? Something this one of Operation Bagration would be really awesome, but I would settle for a line depicting the front and arrows showing the advance vectors of each army.

It's just mostly a teaser.

[Adrian Laguna]

It's just mostly a teaser.

Okay, my disappointment is lifting.

A small criticism though, while the amount of AFVs seems about right for such a grand assault, I think the manpower is a bit short, unless there are an unmentioned few hundred thousand veterans complimenting the million conscripts. The less than 4-to-1 artillery to tank ratio also seems a tad lacking.

BTW - I fixed the link in my previous post.

[Battlehymn Republic]

Nice and pulpy as always.

[Pelranius]

I wonder if it would be more cost effective to use ballistic missile barrages instead of actual Backfires to hit the enemy?

The ballistic missiles/large caliber rocket artillery would probably have accuracy issues, but they can provide a lot of saturation fire at once opposed to the Backfires.

[Alferd Packer]

I wonder if it would be more cost effective to use ballistic missile barrages instead of actual Backfires to hit the enemy?

The ballistic missiles/large caliber rocket artillery would probably have accuracy issues, but they can provide a lot of saturation fire at once opposed to the Backfires.

I believe the existence of 2030s-era laser-based missile-defense systems precludes their usage entirely, as ballistic missles can be shot out of the sky reliably.

I'm surprised that nuclear terrorism isn't in more widespread usage. Load a warhead up in a medium-duty truck, obtain whatever credentials you need to get into enemy territory, drive it reasonably close to your target, and watch the fireworks.

[Pelranius]

I wonder if it would be more cost effective to use ballistic missile barrages instead of actual Backfires to hit the enemy?

The ballistic missiles/large caliber rocket artillery would probably have accuracy issues, but they can provide a lot of saturation fire at once opposed to the Backfires.

I believe the existence of 2030s-era laser-based missile-defense systems precludes their usage entirely, as ballistic missles can be shot out of the sky reliably.

I'm surprised that nuclear terrorism isn't in more widespread usage. Load a warhead up in a medium-duty truck, obtain whatever credentials you need to get into enemy territory, drive it reasonably close to your target, and watch the fireworks.

If laser missile defence systems are THAT effective, then why bother with bombers?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I wonder if it would be more cost effective to use ballistic missile barrages instead of actual Backfires to hit the enemy?

The ballistic missiles/large caliber rocket artillery would probably have accuracy issues, but they can provide a lot of saturation fire at once opposed to the Backfires.

I believe the existence of 2030s-era laser-based missile-defense systems precludes their usage entirely, as ballistic missles can be shot out of the sky reliably.

I'm surprised that nuclear terrorism isn't in more widespread usage. Load a warhead up in a medium-duty truck, obtain whatever credentials you need to get into enemy territory, drive it reasonably close to your target, and watch the fireworks.

If laser missile defence systems are THAT effective, then why bother with bombers?

Because nobody has the money for enough lasers due to the crash, and there's no energy to build more of them. So they're a limited resource. The air attacks are forcing that resource to be shifted to one sector of the front so that another sector can be hit by base-bleed shells enmasse, which the lasers won't have the range to engage then.

[Pelranius]

Because nobody has the money for enough lasers due to the crash, and there's no energy to build more of them. So they're a limited resource. The air attacks are forcing that resource to be shifted to one sector of the front so that another sector can be hit by base-bleed shells enmasse, which the lasers won't have the range to engage then.

That makes sense. But couldn't the FSU jury rig some old fighters with remote control systems and free fall bombs (or just rig them into unmanned missiles, like what the Chinese are doing with all their old MiGs) and use them to distract the lasers? Or has the American technological base REALLY fallen apart that much?

[XaLEv]

In regards to the various advanced technologies from before things got really bad, how much did high temperature superconductor power lines come into use, and how common are they now?

[Mayabird]

Well, the story is pretty much defunct now, and I've been sitting on this little thing for a while, but I wanted to post it and Marina said okay.


November 2071
Somewhere along the Chattahoochee River
Free State of Georgia


“Coffee, you stupid Alabaman mule, don’t drink the water!”

The water was pretty foul down at this stretch of the river, full of raw sewage, human and animal shit, industrial waste, and the Good Lord knew what else. The eroded mud flowing downstream covered some of it, though. Enough to fool a mule, sometimes.

“Yeah, I know you’re thirsty. Hotter than Hell here.” The water seller wiped away the sweat on his forehead as he set up his hand pump. He stood on the dried muck of what had once been river-bed, and what was now just more baked dirt like everything else around the ever narrowing stream. People said that God was holding back the rains because of Georgia’s sins. He’d been holding back the rain for a long time, except for the occasional deluge from a hurricane remnant that came blasting through in the summer (those were always bad days for his business).

Of course, God must REALLY hate Alabama, because sometimes the Hooch dried up entirely somewhere along the border. He got Coffee from some farmers who’d lived downstream and couldn’t get water for their crops anymore. They were moaning about Atlanta and the upstream irrigation taking all the water. And complained about the water seller taking water too, even though he paid the guy who owned the land there for getting the water. He’d told them that if Alabama wanted the water so much, they should pay the folks in Atlanta for the water. There wasn’t nothing God wouldn’t let money fix.

And besides, all the preachers and the politicians were saying that the Rapture was fixin’ to come any day now, and they’d all get to be rich in Heaven soon enough and not have to worry about any of this. He grunted. They’d been saying that for a while. The water seller stopped for a moment to catch his breath, then finished his pumping. “But ‘til that happens, there’s money to make here on Earth, huh, Coffee?” The mule snorted and swished his tail, as if shooing off flies. “Eh, shut up and pull the cart.”

This old stretch of abandoned highway was still pretty smooth, so it was a good place to let the junk in the water tank settle a bit. The water seller had a favorite spot he’d always stop at to scoop out the toxic mud at the bottom, right before the bumpy, eroded stretch between the highway and the toll road. The roadside there was caked in dried sludge; it was nearly knee-high in a few places, looking like one of the giant fire ant mounds that dotted the scrubby yellow and brown pine savanna, but more colorful. Coffee munched on the wiry grasses there while the water seller lightened the load on the cart. He sometimes amused himself by seeing if anything had passed by down the road since the day before. Maybe a cow’s hoofprint, a bare footprint, a torn up stretch where a wagon had gone through. One of the older hoofprints looked something like a deer’s today. A little something in the back of the water seller’s mind noted that he hadn’t seen or heard about any deer recently. “You reckon deer migrate?” he said, offhandedly towards Coffee. He almost could’ve sworn the mule rolled his eyes before returning to the grasses.

The water seller led his mule and navigated the water cart through the bumpy stretch to the toll road, but since the tollbooths were at Deacon’s Town, and he was heading there anyway, he didn’t have to pay. The toll road was relatively well maintained, even had a few guards patrolling it sometimes to scare off bandits, but that was because the Deacon owned it, just like the town, which he’d bought a few years back and renamed for himself.

Deacon’s Town had its own well for water, but it was expensive, and the lowliest laborers, the ones without any property at all, couldn’t afford it without getting themselves indentured. And so, in proper capitalist fashion, the water seller came to provide the unmet need. Sure, it wasn’t as clean as the town’s well water, because he didn’t bother with boiling it or filtering it or anything, but that was what he liked to call “keeping overhead low.” And everyone knew he had the cheapest water in town.

Just before the tin walls of Deacon’s Town sat the scrap dealer’s place, and it was there, as always at his rented patch of dirt, he set up shop. The scrap dealer stood by his converted wood-burning truck, haggling with three men, brothers probably from the looks of them, who had a pull-cart full of scavenged metal odds and ends. By the time the water seller had Coffee tied up and his water tank ready, the dealer had talked the men down to a price he liked, and handed them a stack of town script. And the water seller was ready to offer them some cheap water.

He did a brisk business, as always, filling the battered old water jugs of the barely-making-ends-meet. Hardly more than beggars, the lot of ‘em, he thought, the way they haggle like Jews. But there weren’t any real beggars in Deacon’s Town. The Deacon had freeloaders shot. Rumor had it he then sold the bodies to the more unsavory food outlets in the town. The water seller didn’t know if it was true or not, but he avoided all “pork” for that reason.

The water seller was down to the last soupy dregs at the bottom of the tank when Tom Lang, one of his old regulars, arrived.

“You damn bastard!”

“Hey, watch yer mouth,” the scrap dealer hollered. “What’d the Deacon think?”

But Lang didn’t care. “Your water made my family sick!”

“Ain’t my water once ya buy it,” the water seller said, as he counted his money.

“You know damn well what I mean! My wife an’ kids got the cholera because of your shit-water!”

“Then go buy some medicine. Ain’t my fault anyway. You coulda bought water from somebody else or not drunk my water.”

“I ain’t got no money and you know it! That’s why I had to buy your shit-water.”

A crowd was gathering around, attracted by the noise. People who had come to town for trading, laborers looking for work to pay their tithes and feed their families now that the scanty harvests were brought in, various bored townsfolk. Not much happened out there, and they always wanted to see when something did. The water seller always had a good nose for opportunity, and he smelled a golden one.

“So what are you sayin’, Tom? You sayin’ I should take my hard-earned money, the sweat of my own brow, to fix your problem? That sounds like godless commie FedGov talk to me!”

“Now you wait a-”

“No, YOU listen here, Tom. In this state, we have the freedom to keep what we have, to keep what we earn, the products of our own labor. It’s why we seceded both times, because the Fed tries to take everything from us. All them peoples in the FedGov are slaves, workin’ everday for rations, but we are Free Men, able to receive God’s blessings for our work.”

“Amen!” someone in the crowd yelled.

“You shouldn’t be allowed to just let people get sick and die because you don’t care!”

“More commie talk. ‘Shouldn’t be allowed’ says him. He wants to slap regulations on us, like in the old days.” The water seller was turning towards the crowd, like a preacher during a sermon. “Regulations! Health regulations! Environmental regulations! That’s what got us here in the first place, all these rules to keep us from enjoying God’s gifts to us. If there hadn’t been all them regulations, the corporations and businesses coulda kept drilling for oil and we’d still be drivin’ all over the place. People like you kept us from drillin’!”

Lang grinned wickedly, like he’d caught the water seller in a trap. “That ain’t why the oil ran out. It’s cause Jesus took the oil away because we was letting the fags run around free. Nothin’ to do with regulations!”

The crowd was getting really worked up. They were watching a real political and theological debate (not that there was any difference between the two). And now it looked like Tom Lang had the upper hand.

The water seller thought quickly, to get the crowd back on his side. “Yeah? Ever heard of them Anti dis-crim-in-a-tion regulations?” He drew out the words, to show off his learning. It was a fancy thing to know such big words, since public schooling had been abolished a while back. Lang’s generation was the first to feel the effects. “That was the tool of the Devil, regulations! They had all these rules and laws up to keep us from killing the gays. As if government’s there to tell businesses what to do, instead of being there to maintain God’s law! And ‘cause we followed the Devil instead of Jesus, Jesus took the oil away.”

The water seller had visions of himself becoming an usher at church, an important man doing important things on the Sabbath, not just being bored by the enforced monotony. If he pulled this off right, and word got around… So he continued, “But THANK GOD for Governor Horsley! Thank God He gave our governor the courage an’ wisdom to break away and show them Feds and Frenchies and Faggots the path of the righteous, so we can keep our right to freedom and property! Thank God!”

People in the crowd began to take up the cheer. “Thank God for Governor Horsley!” Soon, everyone was joining in, if nothing else, for fear of not pleasing the Deacon, who was said to be a close friend of the governor. Some people got more caught up in the moment and went wild, cheering and hollering, “Amen!” and “Praise Jesus!” with a few old timey rebel yells for good measure. The water seller imagined himself in a suit at church and smirked at Lang who stood in silent anger.

“You…you don’t care at all,” Lang said in disgust. His face tightened. “My boys…” From nowhere, he pulled out a large, dangerous hunting knife. “You pigfucker, I’m gonna kill you!” He charged.

The water seller drew the gun he always kept on his belt (as was his God-given right) and fired six shots into Lang’s chest. The crowd scattered from the noise, trying to escape before the guards arrived. Lang was dead before he hit the ground

The water seller was packing up when two of the Deacon’s bodyguards, who also doubled as the town police, came by to investigate. One of them, the deputy, kicked at the corpse, which lay on a dark stain on the ground where the thirsty Georgia clay had already drunk his blood. The other, wearing a sheriff’s star, went to the water seller. “So what happened? The Deacon, he wants to know.”

“Guy tried to take my property,” the water seller replied.

The sheriff grunted. “A thief in broad daylight, right by town.” He glared at the water seller. “You’d best keep yer mouth shut ‘bout this. Our boss don’t want no nasty rumors spreading and ruining business.”

“Ah course not. The Deacon’s gotta protect his interests. And so do I, if I wanna keep selling my water here.”

“Then we got an understandin’. Jimmy, let’s go,” he said to the other bodyguard, and they went back into town. They left Lang’s body lying on the ground. It wasn’t any of their business what happened to it, and somebody’d move it eventually.

The seller paid the scrap dealer the next day’s rent as usual, and pulled Coffee over to the gully coming out of Deacon’s Town, the town’s open sewer. He got the cart in position and dumped out the last contents of the water tank into the ditch. The thick, congealing dregs mixed with the human waste and stinking garbage that was slowly making its way down the slope to the green, scummy cesspit a ways from the town.

It’d been a good day for the water seller. He’d gotten a good price for his water, enough for some meals, a generous tithe, and even tobacco if they had any, and got a few town tokens along with the script. Those were valuable. He could exchange those for hard currency, real Georgia gold, and with gold, he could get a horse. Breeding animals – that’s where the money was. Horses for getting around, and mules for farming. A horse for every man and a mule for every farm – that’d require a lot of breeding. And he was just the man to do it, the water seller thought. There was plenty of opportunity for an ambitious man like him.

Some of the remaining water seeped out of the muck in the gully and make a silvery trail as it flowed. Coffee turned his head towards it but the water seller smacked him. “Stupid animal! How many times I gotta tell ya not to drink that stuff?” He pulled Coffee away. “Come on. I’ll get you some good water now,” he said, as he led the mule and cart into town.

[Crayz9000]

Wow. Just wow. Then again, having passed through Alabama, the water situation there today is pretty ridiculous and that's not too far-fetched.

For what it's worth, you can throw me in, I'm more or less in the same boat as Darth Fanboy (Southern California, in the northern extreme of LA County). John Hanson will do, and my college major was computer science (was thinking about switching to double in mechanical and computer engineering). Otherwise I'm generally an all-around skeptic and hacker in the MIT sense.

[CmdrWilkens]

Yay the universe isn't completely dead

Damnit now I'm seriously tempted to go back and finish the next part of the little bit I was writing up.

[Mr. Coffee]

Oh, shit... Now I'm a mule in a post-apocalyptic deep south? Maya, why you hatin'...

But yeah, that sounds like the south if some of the idiots I've met around here had any say. Good read.

[Coalition]

If I didn't know any better, I'd say you read Terry Pratchett, and made a few changes to C.M.O.T Dibbler.

Very nicely done, good effect with the people as well.

[Mayabird]

Oh, shit... Now I'm a mule in a post-apocalyptic deep south? Maya, why you hatin'...

But yeah, that sounds like the south if some of the idiots I've met around here had any say. Good read.

Not hatin'. Coffee was just a good name for a mule and mules probably have a better life expectancy than the humans. I remembered this line from The Grapes of Wrath about how people take care of horses even when they're not needed at the moment, but if there's no work for the humans they're just turned out and left to fend for themselves, even if they can't.


Thanks everybody.

[CypherLH]

Nice! I'm wondering if there even is a FedGov around any more at this point - or if its just a boogie monster than old timers in the "Free States" refer to in order to scare children and the ignorant.

Sounds like things have seriously gone downhill, even compared to where they were in 2048.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Nice! I'm wondering if there even is a FedGov around any more at this point - or if its just a boogie monster than old timers in the "Free States" refer to in order to scare children and the ignorant.

Sounds like things have seriously gone downhill, even compared to where they were in 2048.

The FedGov won the war, then fragmented into various factions. Catherine Tang became warlord of the west anyway and ended up, afterwards, aiding a military insurrection in the east against the remaining FedGov while the Quebecois took their toys and ran. A democratic government was ultimately restored in the wake of this. The FedGov had never intended to re-annex the Old Confederacy and a few related states and simply ignored them, except when responding to border raids and so on, with the two functional industrial countries being the Free State of Quebec and the FedGov regime consisting of all of Canada from Ontario and west, while the Quebec Free State holds Quebec and Canada to the east of Quebec (the Maritimes); the FedGov regime also consisting of all of America except for the Old Confederacy, Oklahoma, and Kansas. This short story by Mayabird shows the ultimate fate of the Free States Union...

[Guardsman Bass]

So, the FedGov actually got back to democracy after this? That's pretty impressive, considering the degree of Stalinism they were drifting towards. Assuming they survive the climate change once all the dust settles, they might just make it.

What about the Quebecois? Are they still an authoritarian state?

Sucks to be a Free-Stater. Aside from the occasional bits of technology and machinery left (like the modified truck), it sounds like they're at best at a 19th century level of technology (with better guns and no railroads mentioned), and possibly worse.

[Alferd Packer]

Ah, it's so delightfully morbid. I love it.

I imagine that, by 2100 or so, a reasonably prosperous group of states would've emerged from that which was Canada and northern half of US--after all, there would still remain resources enough to support the necessarily reduced postwar population. I could see a groundbreaking documentary on the remnants of FSU; people living in stupefying ignorance and poverty, tropical diseases running rampant all the way up to North Carolina, a theocratic stranglehold on the population--but there still remains the bitter hatred against the evil North, made more remarkable by the fact that no one from the FSU has been in FedGov territory in more than a quarter century. The hatred and mistrust is simply part of the new orthodoxy.

A great vignette would be a look at an engineer in the FSU, desparately trying to keep failing infrastructure going. It could be an ancient power plant, sewage treatment system, or whatever you might like. Not only would he or she struggle against a lack of spare parts and an increasingly hostile and superstitious local government, but he'd be growing older by the day, and slowly, with dawning horror, he'd realize that no one was intelligent or educated enough to succeed him. It'd be a story in the tradition of "The Marching Morons," or even the film "Idiocracy."

[Guardsman Bass]

A great vignette would be a look at an engineer in the FSU, desparately trying to keep failing infrastructure going. It could be an ancient power plant, sewage treatment system, or whatever you might like. Not only would he or she struggle against a lack of spare parts and an increasingly hostile and superstitious local government, but he'd be growing older by the day, and slowly, with dawning horror, he'd realize that no one was intelligent or educated enough to succeed him. It'd be a story in the tradition of "The Marching Morons," or even the film "Idiocracy."

There's definitely hints at something like that - witness the fact that it was apparently impressive that the water-seller could pronounce big words, since the public education system had been abolished a long time ago.

One other question - I wonder as to what degree capitalism returned to the FedGov after its re-democratization. I could easily see it picking up a kind of cross between corporatism and socialism, with the "commanding heights" of the economy (the major industries) being quasi-state enterprises, with some degree of free enterprise on the smaller level.

I asked the question because, assuming that it did, I think business elements in the FedGov would eventually start exploiting the poor-ass labor force and good remaining land areas in the South and Free States, possibly through proxies. After all, while they may be heavily superstitious and unfit for a technological society, they could still be put to work as plantation laborers.

In any case, I don't suppose we could get a short story from the FedGov position in 2071?

[Mayabird]

The FSU is more like a loose alliance or confederation than actual nation, and the conditions vary depending on the state and location therein. Virginia is probably the best well off of all of them. Louisiana has basically collapsed on everything but paper due to a combination of factors from sea rise refugees to inordinate amount of funds going to hunt down heretics and battles against raiders. Cities tend to suck less than rural areas, although in famine conditions they are sometimes worse off since people in the countryside can forage for food. In georgia, Atlanta still has high technology and its elite (cronies of Governor Neal Horsley IV such as the Deacon) live very well indeed; they golf on perfectly manicured courses and buy the best medical care in the world while the rivers dry up. Their libertarian theocracy (yes, that's what it is - the church and state are one; it doesn't collect taxes but you had better pay your tithes and are strongly encouraged to pay more than the Biblically mandated 10%) has worked quite well to keep them rich, fat, and completely in control. You can do whatever you want, so long as you have the money and the church says it's okay. The church says whatever they do is okay, since they are the church, and they have all the money.

I based some of the ideas in here on what's happened in North Korea. For instance, the modified truck was from an interview with a defector, who said that the only farm trucks still working in the countryside are ones that had been modified to burn wood. Some of it was based on the actual conditions of the 19th century South, like the deer going extinct (seriously, much of the edible wildlife was hunted to extinction everywhere except a few remote areas like in the mountains).

There's definitely hints at something like that - witness the fact that it was apparently impressive that the water-seller could pronounce big words, since the public education system had been abolished a long time ago.

Wanna know how it works in georgia? There's no public education, as that's something the parents are supposed to take care of instead of the state blahdeeblahdeeblah Jesus said somethingsomething. But children are still required to get a religious education of sorts, so all the masses ever get is Sunday school. They memorize Bible verses and official ideology, some of which are taken way out of context, some of which only exist in the Free States Revised Bible, and many of which don't actually exist at all. The preachers are sometimes barely more literate than the people themselves, who often learn only how to scribble something vaguely close to their signatures for church documents and nothing else. There are tutors and private schools where people like the to-be water seller can actually learn how to read and so on, but again, you need the cash for that and most people don't.

I thought of a lot of little details for this story. I had to cut and keep out a lot so the story wouldn't get any more expository and dense than it already is.

Ah, it's so delightfully morbid. I love it.

Why thank you.

A great vignette would be a look at an engineer in the FSU, desparately trying to keep failing infrastructure going. It could be an ancient power plant, sewage treatment system, or whatever you might like. Not only would he or she struggle against a lack of spare parts and an increasingly hostile and superstitious local government, but he'd be growing older by the day, and slowly, with dawning horror, he'd realize that no one was intelligent or educated enough to succeed him. It'd be a story in the tradition of "The Marching Morons," or even the film "Idiocracy."

Or, ironically enough, Atlas Shrugged, as it was about the slow collapse of civilization in that fashion. Rand actually did a good job of portraying how things gradually came apart as one thing after another couldn't be replaced or repaired and no intelligent or educated people replaced the ones who died or disappeared or whatever. This is something that is rarely appreciated since the other 95% of the book was total, utter shit.

[Pelranius]

It's good to see the FedGov pick itself up. I was afraid the whole thing was just going to disintegrate into a situation like that in Earth 2100 with just a bunch of petty statelets and warlords squabbling over the last supercomputer or whatever (though frankly I thought it was much more likely that some dictator would come to power after New York got flooded and the Caspian Flu).

What's the rest of the world like in 2071?