shut up and take my likeSince I have kind of reached a dead end with this for various reasons, this is the final version before i maybe try and redo this whole thing.
Map Thread XV
- Thread starter rvbomally
- Start date
- Status
Oh this is good.
Not much stuff gets past my weird "sci-fi must be as scientifically accurate as possible (within reason)" obsession, but this does it easily - very imaginative, and again, good work.
I have some minor notes
- the two provinces below the URN are actually part of it, though they appear to have aligned with/support Kuvira in Book 4 (or the 2 provinces were mislabeled in book 4)
Top is book 3, Bottom is book 4
- The province containing Zaofu is missing (its the lower "missing"/dark green province in the image)
I do believe you'll find that only 1 of those province should be part of the UNR, the westernmore one, while the eastern one is left out as it shouldI have some minor notes
- the two provinces below the URN are actually part of it, though they appear to have aligned with/support Kuvira in Book 4 (or the 2 provinces were mislabeled in book 4)
Top is book 3, Bottom is book 4
- The province containing Zaofu is missing (its the lower "missing"/dark green province in the image)
fashbasher
Banned
ASB cover of my Caribbean thread. At about the time of the catastrophe, a wormhole opens that allows the population of a (much more narrowly defined) Caribbean region to be cloned to a flipped Earth. The colors represent a very approximate ethnic/genetic distribution of the narrow Caribbean (that includes the vast mestizo heartlands of Colombia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, and Venezuela, uninteresting from a genetic or even climatic diversity standpoint): Whites are white, blacks are brown, part-blacks are silver, Amerindians are red, mestizos are pink, South Asians are purple, East/Southeast Asians are blue, and Middle Easterners are hunter green.
Everyone is aware of the cloning more or less and there is some continuing contact with Earth-1, but the world differs in ways to prevent its inhabitants from causing destruction:
1) Most firearms and most bombs don't work. This includes nukes.
2) Highly energy-dense technologies don't work. This includes most ships and almost all airplanes. Frequent refueling is necessary.
3) High-bandwidth telecommunications and data storage doesn't work. Phones do, and to some extent text can be stored and transmitted over a crude Internet, but the laws of physics here ban YouTube.
4) Because of something something quantum mechanics, reincarnation not only exists but most people are aware to some extent of their past two or three lives (think A Dog's Purpose). On the other hand, many medical technologies don't work either because they rely on either digital or radiation treatments or have a very high energy demand, so life expectancy is shorter. This has the unintended positive consequence of keeping governments and electorates young, so that social progress in some ways is faster even though it's generally more low-tech.
Last edited:
oh god... I have to delete those real quick...When you search "europe 1120 map" on google images and the first three images get you scratching your head til you realize they're from zalezsky's deviantart
William Adelin
Banned
Be a good friend, don't be a bad-map enabler
Not an insult to zakezsky though, his skills have skyrocketed since.I do honestly believe they're not that bad. It's not like they're the greatest maps I've ever seen, but they're good.Be a good friend, don't be a bad-map enabler
Continuing work on the Allied States of Lagellania in Chronicles of Hennodia [which I should really have a more universal name for.]
The new states are...
Alturas: A blue-collar mountain state that was once left-wing, but now is staunchly Freedom. Plenty of survivalists [not just right-wing ones...].
Aurora: A hub of technology, but also one of survivalists and weird New Age religions, this state nevertheless tends Progressive. Has a "State Territory" that has an apparently-dormant volcano in it.
Hamblen: A state known for its four Grand Divisions where actual government happens, this state splits its EVs up the same way. Overall quite Patriotic, but can go Freedom.
Lycoming: Once a part of Mexas, it split in the Civil War. Those days it is very, very dependent on coal, and thus is a Patriotic state.
Mexas: "Everything's bigger in Mexas", as the saying goes. A very proud state, it is consistently Freedom, despite Progressive hopes of demographic shifts.
Bienenstock: A land of Frisian-speaking Mormons with a history longer than OTL Mormons, it is a very libertarian state and the *Mormons prefer to keep to themselves in general. Known for gambling.
Keyapaha: A rural state, it's very, very conservative. Was once a hub of Populism, but is now a Patriotic/Freedom swing state. The Corn Cult holds sway here.
Makato: One of the few remaining staunch rural-left-wing states, it has been slowly but inevitably shifting towards Freedom, something the Progressives worry about.
Inoka: A land of crony corruption in the north circling its capital city, and in the south the corn cult dominates all. Not a very happy state, but still Progressive despite Freedom pushing hard against vote-stuffing.
Blemais: Corn fields everywhere, a corn statue in every town, weird-looking people stare at you all the time. And if you say anything against corn, leave before midnight. Or the Corn Cult will take revenge. Very Freedom.
Kiamichi: A depressing place to be, it's the only Native-Lagellian-majority state in the Alliance and was only admitted in 2006 when a government sympathetic to them finally got into power. Extremely poor, very Liberation.
Kalispell: Similar to Alturas, it's a state that was once a swing state, but now is strongly Freedom despite voting Progressive in the first presidential election.
As you can see, we've moved on from the more Progressive coastal states to those rural interior states which are more Freedom. The next step is finishing the hole and starting on the eastern half.
The new states are...
Alturas: A blue-collar mountain state that was once left-wing, but now is staunchly Freedom. Plenty of survivalists [not just right-wing ones...].
Aurora: A hub of technology, but also one of survivalists and weird New Age religions, this state nevertheless tends Progressive. Has a "State Territory" that has an apparently-dormant volcano in it.
Hamblen: A state known for its four Grand Divisions where actual government happens, this state splits its EVs up the same way. Overall quite Patriotic, but can go Freedom.
Lycoming: Once a part of Mexas, it split in the Civil War. Those days it is very, very dependent on coal, and thus is a Patriotic state.
Mexas: "Everything's bigger in Mexas", as the saying goes. A very proud state, it is consistently Freedom, despite Progressive hopes of demographic shifts.
Bienenstock: A land of Frisian-speaking Mormons with a history longer than OTL Mormons, it is a very libertarian state and the *Mormons prefer to keep to themselves in general. Known for gambling.
Keyapaha: A rural state, it's very, very conservative. Was once a hub of Populism, but is now a Patriotic/Freedom swing state. The Corn Cult holds sway here.
Makato: One of the few remaining staunch rural-left-wing states, it has been slowly but inevitably shifting towards Freedom, something the Progressives worry about.
Inoka: A land of crony corruption in the north circling its capital city, and in the south the corn cult dominates all. Not a very happy state, but still Progressive despite Freedom pushing hard against vote-stuffing.
Blemais: Corn fields everywhere, a corn statue in every town, weird-looking people stare at you all the time. And if you say anything against corn, leave before midnight. Or the Corn Cult will take revenge. Very Freedom.
Kiamichi: A depressing place to be, it's the only Native-Lagellian-majority state in the Alliance and was only admitted in 2006 when a government sympathetic to them finally got into power. Extremely poor, very Liberation.
Kalispell: Similar to Alturas, it's a state that was once a swing state, but now is strongly Freedom despite voting Progressive in the first presidential election.
As you can see, we've moved on from the more Progressive coastal states to those rural interior states which are more Freedom. The next step is finishing the hole and starting on the eastern half.
fashbasher
Banned
Guessing as to correspondences:
Wisconsin or West Virginia?
Colorado
Tennessee
West Virginia
Texas + Virginia
Utah + Nevada with maybe a bit of Michigan (Dutch/Frisian influence)
Nebraska or Kansas?
Minnesota or Iowa?
Illinois
A Dakota
Another Dakota
Montana?
Blemais is definitely Iowa. Honestly, the only differing Blemais and Iowa is that it doesn't sound like Blemais leads world research in Corn-based Technologies
Good try!
Alturas - Broadly, yeah, but it also serves as an Idaho-analogue.
Aurora - Yep!
Hamblen - Yep. That easy, huh?
Lycoming - Very much so, yeah.
Mexas - More Texas than Virginia, but you're on the money here.
Bienenstock - Pretty good guess, better than mine.
Keyapaha - More a merged analogue.
Makato - Politically it's more OTL Iowa, but it's actually a Dakotas analogue otherwise.
Inoka - Yep.
Blemais - Iowa, actually. I was playing up the whole "you gotta support ethanol to win Iowa" to a ridiculous degree.
Kiamichi - More an analogue for all reservations, and in a very, very broad sense, also Oklahoma.
Kallispell - Yep!
No problem
Um i think i tried but i lacked a accurate qbam of the mountains to follow accurate enough and i figured since its american states i could get away with slight irrationality haha I also made an effort to take to a slight extreme the concept of making states of *equal* sizes
yeah i have quite a few actually
*ignore Guatemala and the other central american states i decided not to go that direction later on
I made another map. This one’s more SF and speculative.
Europa basemap courtesy of @Serafim.
Deep Night
The limpet cities clung to the slowly-shifting ice, their floodlights the only illumination this world had ever known. A hundred kilometers down, mining outposts and automated foundries huddled around smoking vents like the tubeworms of silent Earth. In the bowels of Novivostok, a computer decided the current period of artificial light now signified morning rather than midnight, and a new day began for the last holdout of humanity.
--
The first visitors to Europa (excluding any chance panspermia events in the distant past) came in 2075, as the crew of the Vitus Bering, a joint Russo-American scientific expedition sent to survey the system and scout locations for a future permanent outpost. While the surface was bathed in radiation from the van Allen Belts of Jupiter, the icy crust could provide excellent shielding, and ‘lakes’ of liquid water and deposits of usable minerals were scattered through the ductile lower layers. This was to say nothing of the vast, lightless sea under the ice, and whatever strange organisms might be lurking there. Previous unmanned expeditions had managed to penetrate into the crust and find evidence of biological activity, but none had yet reached the seafloor or found anything larger or more complex than a lamprey.
Orbital mechanics and Earthly concerns prevented any human return until 2099, when the first mid-crust habitat was settled, having been prepared by robotic pathfinders dropped through the 2080s. Mars had a growing colonial presence, and the resources of the Asteroid Belt were beginning to be exploited. Europa, it was hoped, would be the gate to the middle Solar System, opening up the Jovian and Saturnian systems for intensive research and economic development, and a stepping-stone to exploration of the Solar System’s outer reaches. The first settlement, simply dubbed ‘Basecamp’, crept deeper and deeper through the crust over the years, expanding into new galleries and hollows in the ice, and encountering pocket ecosystems of isolated organisms as it went. Each of these had been cut off by icequake or rift at some point, and had evolved in divergent directions, to the fascination of resident scientists.
Expansion and colonization continued apace through the 2100s, and in 2112, Basecamp reached the sea, and began to grow out along the bottom of the icecap, and down into the gloom. Fueled by Earthly capital, Martian industry, and Belt resources, the 2110s through the 2130s were a golden age for Europa, and in 2124 humble Basecamp was formally rechristened Novyy Vostok, after the Antarctic research station that had been the model for so much of early space exploration. It was soon joined by other stations that had made it through the ice, and by 2130 100,000 people called Europa home. New advances in material engineering had allowed probes to survive the immense pressure to reach the seafloor and discover hydrothermal vent communities as rich as those on Earth, and deposits of valuable metals and minerals around them. Soon these deposits could be harvested, and the burgeoning cities could rely less on imports to sustain themselves. Already native industry could supply some building materials and simple consumer goods, and homegrown food fulfilled 30% of the moon’s needs, and these numbers were only expected to grow.
By 2141, however, the shine had begun to fade. The Jovian system was no longer the frontier it had once been, and Europa was increasingly relegated to a scientific curiosity and a stopover point on the way to Titan, Enceladus, and the wild space of the Kuiper Belt. The corporate colonies on Ganymede could afford to poach the best scientific and engineering talent in the Jovian system, and the boomtowns of the helium-3 industry around Saturn drew fortune-seekers and ambitious young people. Europa’s population grew slowly through the rest of the 22nd century, while expansion of infrastructure on the seafloor continued. Occasional flurries of colonists would arrive following some new discovery, but the routine of Europan life slowly settled into mundane normalcy. The eleven city-states of Europa had carved out a niche, and found themselves comfortable in it.
On June 9th, 2240, contact with Earth abruptly ceased. No declarations of war were broadcast, no cries for help sent out, no explanations for the sudden lack of communication were given. Mars deployed an emergency expedition to Earth to assess the growing crisis, and on July 11th, Mars too went quiet. The middle and outer Solar System erupted into panic. 99% of humanity was suddenly unaccounted-for, and the survivors were cut off and on their own. The many small settlements in the Belt and outer planets had always had far more people than their station gardens could completely feed (as their economies were largely based on export of raw materials), and their panicked residents fled for the perceived safety of the more established societies when cut off from Earth and Martian shipments. Ceres, largest and wealthiest of the Belt communities, imposed martial law to support a harsh lockdown following the initial surge of refugees, until overcrowding and excessive burdens on its sanitation systems led to outbreaks of cholera and tuberculosis, devastating its population. The survivors slowly dwindled as their station’s machinery broke down beyond their ability to repair, until the last transmission came in 2262. Heavily dependent on Mars and Ceres pre-catastrophe, the remaining Belt stations winked out one by one over the years, as their systems failed and their denizens died or fled.
It was hoped that Ganymede, second-largest (after Europa) of the human settlements in the Jovian system, could be an island of stability and share the burden with its neighbors through the crisis, but it too did not survive. Its population, long chafing under increasingly authoritarian corporate rule and now swelled by refugees from in-system, erupted into riots and later running battles in its cramped streets following the imposition of unequal rationing and rumors of hoarding by elites. Access to oxygen and drinkable water became the primary weapons in the expanding Ganymedian civil war, and large sections of its cities were rendered uninhabitable. The civil war reached its peak in 2243 with the dropping of an 11km Trojan on the surface, directly above the administrative center of the largest city. While the hated General Operations Board was obliterated (along with 250,000 other people), the resulting moonquakes reverberated through the icy crust, destroying most of the settlements and cities embedded within it. The few survivors of Ganymede’s civil war found themselves buried alive and unable to communicate with the rest of the Solar System, and Europa could spare no resources to help them. One by one their limited oxygen and food stores ran out, and the isolated holdouts perished in their caves of ice.
On the day the Earth was lost, Europa was home to 2.8 million souls. When the Martian expedition failed and the Belt societies began to crumble, refugees flooded in. Within a year, the population had boomed to almost 5 million, and the moon’s infrastructure, already near its limit pre-catastrophe, could not handle the influx. When combined with the sudden lack of imports from further in-system, a humanitarian disaster unfolded. Diminishing food stocks were brutally rationed, and refugees from the Belt and even some of the outer Jovian satellites began to be turned away. Existing air scrubbers and oxygenation stacks were utterly inadequate, and fuel refineries had to be jury-rigged to produce breathable oxygen from local water instead of LOx propellant. Worse still, Europa had never entirely become industrially self-sufficient, and much of its advanced mining, metallurgical, and life-support systems were reliant on sophisticated components imported from in-system. Authorities scrambled to bootstrap native industries to pick up the slack, but the sudden strain threatened to overwhelm even the combined efforts of the limpet cities, and many faced collapse. On the radiation-bathed surface of the icecap, some squatter communities attempted to scrape out a livable existence, but quickly succumbed.
Europan authorities had maintained contact with their counterparts on Titan and Enceladus, and these two societies were under even greater strain. Never even close to self-sufficient, having been largely a resource colony and hub for helium-3 mining on Saturn, Titan’s infrastructure quickly collapsed without outside trade, and its starving population fled for its icy neighbor. Enceladus hosted three small limpet cities like those on Europa, and had been quickly expanding in the pre-crisis boom years. Its ocean was much richer in complex life, and several species even showed some rudimentary intelligence, not unlike the cephalopods of Earth. Three million desperate Titanians swamped its life-support systems and contaminated its sea beyond recovery. Two years after the inner-system catastrophe, Enceladus too went dark.
It is unknown whatever became of the researchers and wildcat settlers in the outer Solar System, but save for a few haggard survivors burning hard in-system and a number of automated distress beacons, no signs of life were detected beyond Saturn. Europa was alone.
By 2245, the torrent of refugees had slowed to a trickle, but their numbers buckled the existing infrastructure. Resentment between native Europans and their fellow humans boiled over into riots and pogroms on numerous occasions, and outbreaks of disease in the crowded conditions were common. Equipment failures from overuse and rushed maintenance were happening with distressing frequency. The city-state of Thera was flooded in its bottom third after its lower docks were breached, killing 20,000 people and displacing half a million more. Suicide rates spiked in the immediate post-catastrophe years, especially after the fall of Enceladus seemed to portend a similar fate for Europa.
Through it all, however, humanity endured. Many of the refugees from Ganymede and the outer system were talented scientists and engineers, and the Europan collective Emergency Government was unafraid to conscript them and any other experts it deemed necessary into a number of crash projects to jump-start the moon’s industries and achieve true self-sufficiency before existing resources ran out. Seafloor mining operations were widely expanded and geothermal wells sunk to provide power for automated foundries and factories, themselves hastily constructed to make up for formerly imported goods. While rationing never ended, new varieties of crops were developed to increase yields in the cramped station gardens, and the decision was made to engineer edible fauna from Earth genetic samples for aquaculture. While the risk of disrupting the Europan ecosystem was great, native fauna were inedibly alien, and the danger of starvation and malnutrition now was deemed greater than excessive contamination a century from now. Though these measures were undertaken with heroic effort, they were not enough to save everyone, and by 2260 the moon’s population had dropped to 3.1 million from starvation, disease, and societal breakdown. Ruined Thera was finally abandoned, and the Emergency Government adopted measures to maintain order that would have been considered cause for revolution pre-catastrophe, but with the clear danger of total societal collapse, and the likely extinction of humanity that would have ensued, few found the will to protest.
--
Two hundred years later, Europa still stands on a knife edge. Its 3.8 million inhabitants are carefully shepherded by the now-established pan-Europan state, and every resource must still be stringently rationed to ensure enough for all, in the unending struggle for simple day-to-day survival. Everything that can be recycled is recycled, every machine is repaired and maintained long past its expected replacement, every birth must be approved, and every death is merely an adjustment to that cycle’s ration. Humanity has been cast once more into an inhuman abyss, and if it must abandon a bit of itself to survive, then that is a bargain it will make without hesitation.
Yet, bit by bit Europa is beginning to open up again. Birth quotas have been slowly increasing over the last few years, assembly restrictions are being relaxed, and the first expeditions back to the other Jovian satellites are planned. Io’s automated mines are considered a top priority for salvage, while the ruins of Ganymede may one day be rebuilt and reopened for settlement (rumors of blind cannibals haunting the ice grottoes notwithstanding). While no signals have been returned from the Belt since Ceres went quiet, some on Europa hold out hope for another survivor community in one of the millions of small bodies not accounted for in the chaotic early years of the post-catastrophe world. There is hope also for the Saturnian system, that some of the infrastructure there may be salvageable, and that new colonies may one day be established to relieve the pressure on the home satellite.
Earth and Mars however, remain quiet and crypt-dark. Each is still there, a point of light in the black Europan sky, but no signals are ever detected, and even simple spectrograph readings give bizarre and inconsistent results. Not even visual-band telescopes can properly resolve the homeworlds through electronic circuits, and unmanned probes can pass no further sunward than Eros before their sensors are overloaded with strange and nightmarish readings and contact ceases. Not even the most radical members of the colonization factions would advocate venturing with human-piloted craft into the inner Solar System past the Belt, and risk snuffing out humanity just as it is beginning to recover. If that means that no human will walk under an open sky again, then so be it. The survivors of Europa will make their own skies of ice and steel as lovely as lost, silent Earth’s, and the baleful red eye of Jupiter will watch over them if the distant Sun will not.
- Hosting 900,000 souls, Novivostok is the largest city on Europa and, as the seat of the Executive Council, is the de facto capital of the Pan-Europan League. As the oldest city on Europa, it also holds substantial cultural significance, and its accent and dialect are the moon-wide prestige standard.
- The regular circuit from seafloor foundries to urban docking spires and back creates tremendous metal fatigue in the hulls of the freight submarines, necessitating human-supervised maintenance facilities around each major hydrothermal vent complex. The enormous pressure at these depths severely limits the size of habitat that can be constructed, but many of the basic tasks can be automated, minimizing the number of crew needed for each station. The mining and smelting works and the geothermal stacks which power the complexes are fully robotic, but breakdowns are not unheard-of, and repairing them is one of the most dangerous tasks on Europa.
- The dialect of Europska (the standard language of the moon and the descendant of the original Solar System-wide Anglo-Russian creole) spoken in Peary has acquired a number of Hindi loanwords due to its substantial Enceladan-descended minority, whose ancestors were the few who escaped the colony during its collapse. It is the second-largest of the limpet cities, and supports the largest intact surface facilities.
- The lineae of Europa’s surface are similar to the mid-oceanic ridges and subduction trenches of Earth, and so are centers of icequake activity. As a result, the city of Cadmus is heavily reinforced against this danger, and is more spread out across the bottom of the ice as opposed to reaching down into the ocean.
- Amundsen’s location in a stable section of the ice roughly equidistant from several other cities makes it an ideal transport hub, particularly for industrial goods from Shackleton. While surface magrail transportation was experimented with pre-catastrophe, it proved infeasible to fully implement due to tracks being constantly severed in frequent small icequakes and the difficult-to-cross lineae and regions of chaos terrain. When triaging existing projects during the post-catastrophe years, the Emergency Government chose to abandon the idea and focus on submarine transportation, and maintain (at substantial cost) a small fleet of suborbital craft for ultra-high-priority movement between surface docks.
- Situated in and under the Arran Chaos, parts of the city of Somov reach several mid-crust ‘lakes’ of liquid water separate from the great ocean. These ‘lakes’ host several of the most pristine pocket ecosystems left on Europa.
- Some time after its founding, the city of Shackleton was discovered to sit directly over a major hydrothermal complex. As a result, the Emergency Government prioritized it during the crash industrialization program post-catastrophe, and through the present day its factories and subyards are the largest and most sophisticated on Europa, making it critical to the moon’s continued survival.
- In Europska, ‘thera’ has become a word for a goal just out of reach, always demanding just a bit more effort than can be spared to attain it. Several attempts have been made to reclaim the city over the years, and while some progress has been made pumping out the upper levels, the cost of fully reopening it is simply too great for the Executive Council to stomach right now. [I just realized this one's sort of hard to find, it's in the south-central chaotic region, due west and a bit north of note 7]
- Cook is situated near a convergence of several mid-ocean and seafloor-level currents, generating a rich upwelling of nutrients. This convergence supports a large aquaculture operation around the city, and its engineered krill and algae make up a large proportion of the moon’s total food supply. Food produced via aquaculture is supplemented in the limpet cities with locally-managed hydroponic agriculture, engineered yeast, and small amounts of vat-cultured meat.
Hope you guys like this one, I rather enjoyed doing the writeup.
Very interesting a few thoughts, I suspect the bottom will also be home to methane "seas" and "lakes" which will be the base for their own unique ecosystems. I also suspect that the Europans will pretty much be replacing the native biosphere with a Terran one.
Also future humanity will be interesting, they will have lived in low gravity environment for generation, at the same time they will have been lived under a evolutionary pressure which favored low calorie diet. I suspect that while they're still the same species as us, they will have selected for traits which make a return to heavier gravity worlds impossible. I think they will smaller than us even with the lower gravity and much fragiler. Their technology will be advanced but likely it have been selected toward simplicity, using common elements, easy to repair and easy to build.
When they finally leave their icy world behind I suspect they will explore outward, setting new stronghold up on other icy moon, ensuring they're self sufficient, and slowly exploring outward into the Ort Cloud, colonizing icy dwarf planet there. Humanity will become a species dwelling in the void between the stars and in the outer reaches of alien solar systems, avoiding the hot and heavy inner planets everywhere.
This is a really good point: people basically live in 0 gravity, or very close to it.
Not that bad, the gravity they dwell in aren't microgravity, but the together with the selective pressure, they will pretty fast grow distinct from old humanity. Of course there's some benefit the 0,13 Gravity will mean that it far easier to make rotating wheel gravity on spaceships, space stations and hollowed out asteroids. This together with their low energy use, and their advanced but simplified technology, means that humanity are perfect placed to a slow expansion into the Galaxy. I imagine that if the setting are a somewhat pulp universe with other non-horror alien races, humanity will grow into this weird race, which lives where other races don't and which you can run into everywhere, but Which in general avoid much dealing with other races, but are also left alone outside some trade, as they have little other wants.
CannedTech
Banned
Since I have kind of reached a dead end with this for various reasons, this is the final version before i maybe try and redo this whole thing.
DAMN SON that's good shit.
Also hey, I still gotta get those redone Ganymede and Callisto maps out, that'll be something to add to the dealie later.
- Status