Sim-Cities

[LemnOc]

While many colony worlds are sketchy, a few are earthlike and have been settled for more than a century. Meanwhile, Twilight was several centuries ago and, even then, not much evidence its devastation was total on long-occupied population centers. And even those areas utterly ruined by Twilight present opportunities to rebuild and rethink anew.

Point is, there are a lot of cities in 2300AD, and some quite new and ultramodern. Into this, I’d classify all the French cities on the Core worlds, as well as BC-4 and Joi. If NYC can spring up in a little over 200 years, these other places might present something similar.

Yet the official sourcebooks concentrate on pestilential pus bowls like Libreville, without much to say about the long-established gleaming ultramoderns. What's it like to adventure there?

Trawling around, there seems to be a deficit in Traveller, in general, detailing ultra-high-end futuristic cities with maps, cityscapes, etc.

I found a couple of THS resources on crafting ultra-modern cities, but I’m wondering if others can cite good resources and sourcebooks on this. It’s a pretty big challenge, credibly laying out these cities for players, and I’m looking for help.

 

[rgrove0172]

Just google images for a start ("cities of the future" worked well) ... lots of good inspiration to get you thinking, and provide snap shots for players!

 

[rgrove0172]

Let me add there is a noticeable lack of content on spacestations in the rules and sourcebooks as well. One has to imagine that orbital instalations for purposes of commerce, industry and spacecraft service would be commonplace, and are mentioned here and there as being present, but there isnt much at all on how they appear, function, or are designed.

Yes, there are two or three pages in the MT2300 book but its hardly a thorough commentary.

 

[shaunhilburn]

Yet the official sourcebooks concentrate on pestilential pus bowls like Libreville, without much to say about the long-established gleaming ultramoderns. What's it like to adventure there?

For the height of buildings, the sky is no longer the limit in 2300 with the advent of beanstalk technology. Skyscrapers can be any height.

Another striking difference between now & then is the ubiquity of zeppelins.
Apparently airships have finally realized their potential, and city skies would be dotted with them, somewhat like the early 1930s pre-Hindenburg. You can sometimes catch a glimpse of them in old newsreels and films from that era. It would look something a scene from Traveller, with grav vehicles congesting the airspace of a high-tech metropolis. Not just zeppelins, but VTOL tilt-rotor as well.

The rules also mention subterranean "tube" systems that allow commutes of 150 km or more.

Finally, "smart" highways and self-driving cars. This is a goldmine of potential government abuse, and a dream come true for police-state bureaucrats. It was the topic of an old thread on the Yahoo list, but I can't find the link.

 

[elbmc1969]

For the height of buildings, the sky is no longer the limit in 2300 with the advent of beanstalk technology. Skyscrapers can be any height.

Can We Please Stop Drawing Trees on Top of Skyscrapers?
The scientific reasons why the latest architectural drawing fad is fantasy. http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...the_architectural_drawing_fad_is_fantasy.html

 

[SpaceBadger]

Yes, there are two or three pages in the MT2300 book but its hardly a thorough commentary.

What is this MT2300 you have mentioned several times?

As to the original post, I have never really gone along with the idea of NYC and other major cities "springing back" from Twilight in only 300 years. Maybe new cities w the same name built nearby, or "ring cities" built around the ruins, but if a big city got nuked in Twilight I expect the ground to still be pretty unhealthy for more than 300 years.

 

[rgrove0172]

IM referring to the new Mongoose Traveller version of 2300AD. I may have gotten the abbreviation wrong. Ive only recently become aware there are some accepted rules to such things.

 

[shaunhilburn]

As to the original post, I have never really gone along with the idea of NYC and other major cities "springing back" from Twilight in only 300 years. Maybe new cities w the same name built nearby, or "ring cities" built around the ruins, but if a big city got nuked in Twilight I expect the ground to still be pretty unhealthy for more than 300 years.

The site of a nuclear airburst is safe to visit for short periods almost immediately. Some weeks after the blast, the radiation from fallout subsides, and the site is safe for longer stays. It becomes safer as months and years go by.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabited today. Granted they were hit with atomic devices that would be considered small by today's standards.

Bikini atoll was the site of the Castle Bravo shot, a 15 megaton thermonuclear surface burst, yet today is considered safe to walk around on. Divers go there to explore the nuked shipwrecks. Food grown on the islands is considered unsafe to eat in large quantities, and the reason the islanders can't or won't return there. www.bikiniatoll.com claims the atoll is an alluring tropical vacation destination.

 

[epicenter00]

I found a couple of THS resources on crafting ultra-modern cities, but I’m wondering if others can cite good resources and sourcebooks on this. It’s a pretty big challenge, credibly laying out these cities for players, and I’m looking for help.

This is an interesting question, because it's a hobby of mine. I run a lot of sci-fi type campaigns, so I need this sort of thing. There's ways to find research on this material, unfortunately it's a really broad topic and a personal pet peeve of mine*.

My observation is that trying to create functional cityscapes is actually an exercise in GM self-entertainment, which is a fun hobby for me when I'm not running games, but when I'm running a game I need to generate material quickly. I've personally come up with my own step-by-step guidelines.

My biggest one is:

Imagery trumps "reality." - One of the best places to do research is just to browse images on the net (try a search for "future cityspaces" for instance). Pictures really are worth a thousand words so choose them well and use as many as you can find. You can actually just go browsing for images on the net form your image. These images do not have to be "practical" technology at all. They just have to fit the feeling you want to convey. I almost always find my images first then let the images speak to me and fill in the blanks like "how do these people get to work?" or "what do they do for fun?" or "how do they dress?" For instance, a semi-urban area where there's a lot of solar panels on top of homes, windmills in the distance on bluffs of green grass gives a sense that the people there are interested in eco-friendly technology - you can argue actual merits of windmills or terrestrial solar power's actual practicality but the imagery is unmistakable.





* Bear with me because it dovetails into an observation I've made about RPGs in general and Traveller in particular that's bugged me for near-on twenty years. Traveller's art has been so sparse and so bad there's joke threads about how poor Traveller's art is. 2300 inherited a lot of Traveller's attitudes I suspect. Not all "sci-fi" games are like this. Obviously the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Firefly games have rich imagery to draw on. But if you look at like the various Warhammer 40,000 RPGs or Mutant Chronicles (if you can find the RPG book) those games show you don't need to based on a tv or movie series to have rich imagery; regardless of how I feel about those universes, I can get a pretty good image of things look like in those games. I think it boils down to art is expensive so a lot of RPGs skimp on it, which is really shooting RPGs in the foot. Regardless we don't have a good image for what the future of these games really looks like so we have to essentially crib it from other sources.

 

[LemnOc]

As to the original post, I have never really gone along with the idea of NYC and other major cities "springing back" from Twilight in only 300 years. Maybe new cities w the same name built nearby, or "ring cities" built around the ruins, but if a big city got nuked in Twilight I expect the ground to still be pretty unhealthy for more than 300 years.

I no longer have my old T:2000 stuff, but the 2300 stuff is fairly ambiguous as to the cause and extent of the harms and damage caused by Twilight. For sure, Colin’s revision leaves this pretty ambiguous and open to individual interpretation.

I don’t recall (and that means I could be mistaken) that places like Paris, London and NYC were utterly nuked into oblivion (or that they were unambiguously nuked at all, memory) and suffered instead catastrophes of a more conventional kind.

At any rate, I prefer to think the iconic metro megaliths are still standing.

--

PS: Amen, epicenter00

 

[LemnOc]

For the height of buildings, the sky is no longer the limit in 2300 with the advent of beanstalk technology. Skyscrapers can be any height.

True. But... based on much of what we understand about the 2300 setting, I wonder how common skyscrapers will be in the far future. Even today, a lot of the newer ones feel like vanity projects, and may likely be considered relics of an age of transportation constraints and energy limits. Dinosaurs.

The low populations versus considerable land area of most of the outer colonies suggests that a 7-story building would be uncommon, which leaves us with the Core worlds, BC-4 and Joi. The latter I would imagine to be show-off set pieces, much as Paris and Washington, DC, were highly designed (redesigned, in the case of Paris) cities reflecting/showcasing the sensibilities of the Age of Enlightenment. New, modern; not necessarily tall... as Paris and DC are not tall.

In the other arms, I don’t see the Manchurians much going for architectural opulence* in their colonies, and the American worlds are a bit sketchy to accommodate tall, slender elegance.

But maybe I’m missing something, and YT2300UMMV.

* ADD: Beta Hydri and Syulahm might be the exceptions.

 

[epicenter00]

Even today, a lot of the newer ones feel like vanity projects, and may likely be considered relics of an age of transportation constraints and energy limits. Dinosaurs.

I sort of wonder about this, tbh. In the United States, there's certainly a view that cities are bad, that people are bad, and therefore we should utilize cars and drive in from the suburbs and e-commute and so on. I wonder how much of this is really a more palatable version of "white flight". Such attitudes may exist in Europe as well; I'm not sure, I don't really have much experience with the varying attitudes of people in various European countries.

However, overwhelmingly sociologists point that the direction of humanity is going is to concentrate in cities unless there's some enormous reason that outstrips that, usually land for farming. Even in the United States, people still generally crowd around cities. Lots of small towns are pretty much depopulated. Even devastating effects of things like the Black Plague in Europe didn't make Europeans spread out where the effects of transmitted diseases would have been reduced. It made them huddle even closer together.

In the 2300 future, I am really not sure how good of an excuse "the Twilight War made cities unpalatable" works to spread people out. There's little other reason to spread out; hardly anyone seems to farm in the Core (I honestly wonder if anyone would even farm in the Frontier, despite how it is presented in 2300), there'd be even more concentration in cities, which would drive land prices up, making land a premium and so on.

True. But... based on much of what we understand about the 2300 setting, I wonder how common skyscrapers will be in the far future.

Skyscrapers are the future's version of palaces essentially. I'd imagine you'd find a lot of older ones put up around 2100 as humanity dug its way out of the Twilight War and economies were finally getting moving again. They'd be that period's version of Romanesque architecture, showing the triumph of humanity over adversity. If you have megacorporations, you'll have skyscrapers as well, especially if they're near each other in some 'downtown' area; they'd compete with each other to show who's the most awesome. If they're in that paranoid megacorporate low-level espionage/warfare (I'm not sure if you're going for that chic) they'd certainly crowd into skyscrapers, where physical security is easier and nobody is going to knock down a skyscraper because that's just a little too brutal.

That said, I could see around 2150 or so, some new trend gets people to spread out at least a bit. More efficient and responsive mass transit systems, especially if combined with decent station-to-home systems could definitely get people to spread out a bit.

Then skyscrapers would return in full force again once France announces it's going to build the Beta Canum Beanstalk. Tall is good again. Even as competing governments cast doubts on the "practicality" of the Beanstalk, comparing it to this or that French project that was an expensive failure (never observing that France being rich and powerful can afford stuff like that without blinking an eye), the French PR machine has fired up people, making the a new Wonder of the [o]World[/o] Known Universe. These later skyscrapers are vanity projects as well; a lot of them are probably combination tower/skyscraper where the designer wants to build tall, then tries to find various justifications for building that tall. You'd probably see a lot of towers which might be 200 levels tall, but the middle 100 levels might not actually be much of anything; the bottom 50 levels and the top 50 levels are what are used. The middle area might be used for power co-generation.