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Weather

PostPosted: Wed Aug 15, 2012 7:04 am
by Rob Lang
So far I've left weather as something grey and foreboding. The UK gets all sorts of mad weather because of the gulf stream. What do you imagine for the weather in D&B? Have I missed a blog post? I found a reference:


Re: Weather

PostPosted: Wed Aug 15, 2012 9:19 am
by Chainsaw Aardvark
I've tried to keep the ideas about weather to very broad strokes for two reasons - I'm not a climatologist, and I don't want to turn the game into a screed about global warming and climate change. (We should already know that is a bad thing.) The "Free City of Tesla" represents futurists who believe in building arcos because we can, and for everyone else, the altered weather and international situation forced them to.

The background does presume that some of the more dire predictions about peak oil and changing weather patterns take place. Arcologies, electric cars, and nano-vac are all bandages on the wounds caused by the disruptions these things would cause. Things might have gotten better after about ten years of these forced programs and five years of almost no industry at all - but it will likely be decades for weather to return to early twentieth century standards (provided it can do so at all - once again, not a scientist).

If I ever develop detailed rules for hacking the SPHERE augmented reality system, the prequel to D&B would be a fairly standard cyber-punk setting. There is a major underclass/refugee problem as people flee flooding, hurricanes and drought which feeds the kind of dim view of human nature we see in these stories - if that person won't or can't work, there are thousands of desperate people to replace him. The government is more or less forcing people to work on the EDGE/Arco projects (Both in the WPA sense of make work employment, and to centralize resources). Drone technology lets people conduct wars with little oversight - no soldiers coming home in coffins undercuts some of the outrage over our children dying in a foreign country.

Utopian futurists ideas have been around for a very long time, but economics and tragedy have never conspired to a point where such great upheavals become practical. In 1894 King Gillette - the man who literally and figuratively changed the face of capitalism by popularizing the disposable razor - wrote a book called "". It proposes creating a socialist society by moving the entire population of the United States to a giant city in New York state that derives all the electricity it needs from hydro-electric dams placed across Niagara Falls. Of course, with land remaining cheap, food plentiful, and the difficulty of relocating populations massive - this and most visions like it never came to pass, and without some great impetuous - never will. I used global warming as the impetuous to get to the tech state I wanted - and then added the reanimates to smash it down.

There is at least one theory that says our activities will eventually alter the gulf stream - destroying the pattern of fishing around the UK, and dramatically dropping the temperature of Europe. Ice Age, Aliens, and Zombies aren't usually things placed together - but with the Russian Navy already behaving as pseudo-vikings that might be kind of interesting. Add in various NATO and national militaries - the zombie survival challenge is keeping warm and collecting fuel, not hunting for bullets...

In short, the weather is bad enough that we have needed to alter the very fabric of a society - and you really should put on a sweater and take an umbrella with you. (Oh, and I may need to post this on the blog Thursday after a bit of editing)

Re: Weather

PostPosted: Thu Oct 25, 2012 1:11 am
by Playalways
what do you mean? :?: