Here's the link for the July 13 NSS Space Forum on Instabase I mentioned in the episode :) It is free, hope to see you there. Blog link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/8716415258643/WN_ovcIpIO7SIahG-B5yaDoVg General Registration Link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ovcIpIO7SIahG-B5yaDoVg
Hello, could you make a video of what the military could look like from the smallest to the largest level? What would squads look like? Would humans even be needed in the future of war? Would there be only machines, AI, and robots as infantry, drones, vehicles, commanders, etc, while humans have no involvement?
Modern cruise ships aren't far off this, some even have permanent residents. If you've never seen one up close they are beyond gigantic. The Titanic looks like a dinghy next to a modern cruise ship. The currently under-construction Icon of the Seas is 1,200ft long, weights over 250,000 GT, and between passengers and crew can carry nearly 10,000 people. The smallest state capital is Montpelier, Vermont, and has only about 7,500 people.
That honestly sounds insane. I routinely see car transport ships, which look like an elongated skyscraper suddenly appeared nextdoor. But apparently, the ship you mention is even larger. No cruise ship or aircraft carrier I've ever seen in port here came close to these car transporters and I can't imagine anything that size
@@Stevie-J i totally understand, im from italy and we as a populace are a bit spoiled by the peace having allies in border provides, when we were financing our latest aircraft carrier the only reason it was done is because it can function as an hospital ship doing crisis, which is a good thing but it shouldnt be the reason we make our navy more sufficent. I dont agree with alot of things the us does but their military spending isnt one of them.
I seen a video of one the other day had like 6 restaurants 8 bars 10 pools basketball courts tennis courts water slides i think it had 2 movie theaters it had a place for plays literally everything you could think of it was crazy
I always find it impressive how you’ve managed to come out with new videos for so long and still you have something new to cover. The amount of material on this channel already is incredible!
@@isaacarthurSFIA- I watch whatever you put up, do like some more than others, but have *never* seen one that wasn't interesting to me. BTW, my voting on subject matter for future episodes is usually out of sync with the majority, but I figure you'll get around to everything eventually. ;-)
We had a town that was moved once, a little south of Lubbock Tx. The town was built about a mile east of the planned site. They put all the buildings on skids, and dragged the whole town to where it belonged. This is how Slide Tx got its name.
Mobile sea cities would be a good idea, one could simply move it to the optimum location for the time of year. This already happens to some extent in the sailing community.
One concern I'd have about large floating cities is different stress on different parts of the structure. It will need some sturdiness, but also a small ability to flex. The various videos of ships breaking in storms come to mind. So it can move under the Captain or committee's control, but it can also be moved by strong currents/waves
@@alphaclean3364There's a game called P.A.M.E.L.A which does basically exactly this with its floating cities. It was kinda abandoned, but it's really cool conceptually, and you can play to the end.
@@alphaclean3364 This is the correct answer, every single seastead is some family home, they all operate autonomously, and can diffuse or come together at will.
For those that go: "Wait, why is the Swedish town of Kiruna moving?" It is due to the mining operations that have spread underneath the city, making the ground unstable. There have been instances of local earthquakes occurring due to the unstable ground. Their solution was to move the city because the mining operations are MASSIVELY profitable, and they keep finding new veins and materials, the last one was the beginning of 2023 where they found what is labelled "Europe's biggest rare earth minerals deposits". They have the funding to move the entire town of 22k people and their houses which is wack.
@@Arrynek01 Well, mining law requires them to handle any fallout from their mining operations. So if you pollute a lake, it is the mining company's fault, and they have to fund the solution to it.
@@ManBearPigCreativeMeanwhile in the United States:: Small city caves in due to mining that was kept secret, 60% of the town is dead, but the shareholders were willing to take the risk.
The thing I contemplate most about cities is what is their purpose, every city on earth at first had a purpose. Natural resources nearby, strategic locations for defense/offense and in that regard there are many reasons for a mobile city. It should be important to note though there's also reasons to have smaller mobile structures like Labs, refineries or factories. Currently we have a rover on Mars doing tons of research. It's not too much of a stretch to have a rover lab filled with people there too. These could be rovers, subs, tanks or walkers easily depending on the environment as well. So if your sci fi needs a little extra cool one of those would be a neat thing to throw in without being too much of a stretch for your readers.
A game called Arknights have mobile Cities (Called nomadic cities in the game) Because of catastrophes, basically natural disasters but ten times worse (imagine hurricanes combined with meteor showers that drop skyscraper size rock, and said rocks can cause a incurable disease), they have to keep moving to avoid this cause a catastrophe could level an entire city
I like the idea that if the Americas were never discovered by anyone in the East and the Native Americans somehow “modernized”, they’d have a bunch of mobile cities due to how large the continents are and their very different concept of land ownership
I always liked the idea of walking buildings or cities using "strandbeest" legs to move around, particularly because they would be able to utilize fairly complicated motion without requiring a great deal of computational oversight, as a building walking around on something like spider legs might require. In theory they also wouldn't require a particularly complicated drive train for that motion, or could be driven by external forces like wind.
I liked this one and I feel compelled to add a notable example of The the moving cities of Arknights. Where they need to move so as to avoid calamities which in setting very from devastating blizzards to explosive fireballs raining from the sky. They have gained the ability to forecast these calamities like the weather and move the cities out of the way in a few hours time. I felt that this would have been a nice addition to your video, but even then great video as usual. //Edit:And now I realize it was already mentioned.
The city of Terminator in Kim Stanley Robinson's various books was always a neat mobile city. Always rolling around the horizon line of Mercury, keeping out of direct sunlight.
Some other examples are the "Ship Country" and the "Bothersome Country" from Kino's Journey, with Bothersome Country being a strangely close plot to Mortal Engines (I think the light novel story of it predates ME, even). What a shame what happened to the Mortal Engines movie though. Lots of other fun examples in games, like the Wandering Village, too. Thanks for covering this topic Isaac!
The mortal engines books are some of my favourite but damn that movie was bad, and they ended it in a way that contradicts the storyline of the other books
@@Rullstolsboken Shrike's story was saved by Stephen Lang actually reading the book imo. When they stuck to the plot the movie was great, but the mix ups and mischaracterizations was really to the detriment of it. 😔
The anime Chrome Shelled Regios, is all about mobile cities called Regios, that travel around on a ruined Earth looking for resources, fighting giant mutated insects, and competing with other mobile cities for said resources.
20:13 this reminds me of the nomadic fleet city in a anime called Gargantia. where it has a main ship but has multiple smaller ships that could change to different parts of the fleet.
One really cool concept is the tame megafauna that drags the city or even carries it on its back. One of the factions in Warhammer is composed of nomads that set their tents on giant beetles. (I mistook them for another nomadic faction in Endless Legend who uses more conventional beasts of burden.)
Xenoblade 2 is built upon the entire concept - after all, "megafauna" describes most Titans perfectly (though not all - some of them are small enough to be outright enemies to fight after they were weaponised, while simultaneously being on other, much larger Titans that *are* the landmasses of that game's world)
My favorites are great big spinning toroids, mile wide 10 miles in diameter I saw early renderings done in the 70's and I was like wow, this is how you build a city! Central waterway through the middle, with terraced homes, buildings, gardens, forests, built up embankments on both sides. It would be so unbelievably huge, you wouldn't even feel like you were in space, just in a normal city. If you could stick a fusion drive on them, do 1/2 speed of light, make into a generational ship to populate exoplanets within a couple hundred light years.
In a creative writing work of mine, I had a city upon a gigantic ship that functioned as the trade hub for most of the world since it was one of the few places where goods from nearly every civilization would accumulate. Super cool to see a vid on the topic from a completely different perspective, but still one of my more favorite genres. I always like to try and place science into it
Nice, I've been working on a setting on an oceanic planet where the capital is a floating city, partly for political reasons as none of the various island nations that made up the planet could agree on who should house the capital and partly as a means to avoid the regular large storms that sweep the planets surface.
The rails offer some interesting possibilities… I never read that novel, so I don’t know if it included this concept, but… The rails could be made from a temperature reactive material, so that the heating/cooling of the day/night cycles, could be the mechanism that propels the city around the planet.
@@bobinthewest8559if memory serves - and I might have the wrong story - that was the case in this story except no special materials required. The metal rails expanded in the heat and shrank when cold, like all metals, and the city was driven along by having a suitably massive wedge that was constantly being squeezed "out" of the heated daylight section.
I always imagined massive pyramid colonies that just land and start doing what's necessary. Massive green houses as the outer layer if you're near star (mostly looked cool in my head as a kid)
@@rwm1980 Well Stargate was a movie I rented back then. I just added an eternal expanding humanity and straight forward mass colonization. You drop hundreds of thousands down in good locations across a planet and within generations you're entrenched.
This definitely makes sense for lunar cities, excluding polar ones. Or at least the farming communities, with farmer's markets coming around every 4 weeks.
For land crawlers noise and vibration can be solved easily by going electric. And bumps can be solved by a Bose suspension. That's an active suspension that keeps the vehicle perfectly flat on any terrain at any speed, as long as the suspension travel is enough. It's even capable of jumping over small obstacles.
If homes are ever constructed robust enough to be routinely moved and if they were constructed airtight, they could be used in many different environments. Like your basement would be a ships hull that you bury when you're on land, but you could move to water, and also you could dock it in a rotating space marina, and possibly suspend it from a tether into the atmosphere all while maintaining an "up" direction
Buckminster Fuller had ideas for a floating city on the ocean that looked like a tetrahedron and another for one that floated in the sky that looked like a gigantic spherical balloon.
Arknights has moving Cities because of the Catastrophe (a sudden storm that drops giand crystals) heck even onepiece has done it really good (spoilers of course so watch out) with the kingdom sanji is from the Germa Kingdom where they are all mercenarys moving around the world selling their fighting force and then come together (rarely) to form the kingdom with their ships all puzzling together into one and then there also was the thriller bark ps. from the one piece wiki "comprised of platforms surrounded by railings, that are build on the shells of large snails resembling Den Den Mushi. Those snails are seemingly unaffected by the salty sea, and are strong enough to climb the Red Line."
In the mobile game Arknights, the world has many cataclysmic natural disasters that necessitates the worlds inhabitants to created "mobile cities", which allow them to pack up and move the entire city within 2 weeks if they predict one coming their way. I always wondered how practical they are in reality, albeit they are powered by the fictional resource of that universe. The bigger concern is of course, probably it sinking into the ground from it's sheer weight.
Carpenter here, just wanted to make an observation about when you were mentioning the "mobile homes" that you can untether from their original place and be moved somewhere else. This actually might present a big problem in practice even if it works in principle. When you build a home, you are building what is called an "envelope" which is the outer most layer of walls, the roof, the floors and so on, are all tied together so as to encompass any interior and partition walls and spaces, which may or may not be tied/connected directly to the envelope of the building but modern building practices actually do a good job at tying most pieces of a home to one another. The envelope of the building is often anchored to a concrete foundation rather than the floor, and foundation actually being part of that envelope. This means that technically all that is holding down most people's houses is the numerous anchor bolts that are placed all around the bottom plates of the envelope (so the outer walls plates, also including and interior structural walls but doesnt include partition walls necessarily) so you rarely have a house that has the foundation a continous part of the envelope isntead of simlpy being a structure that sits on top of the foundation and is anchored to its to prevent the sheer forces from moving the house horizontally but also from the wind and other potential forces that may want to bring the house off its foundation vertically in an upwards direction. This is most important during windstorms. The biggest issue it seems to me is how we would build a house that could have its foundation also attatched to the envelope and have it be safe to move from site to site, or you have the same foundation at multiple of your properties or destinations in mind for the home and then you can move it between them and just re anchor the bolts but there is a reason we always replace anchor bolts when we put on something new to the foundation. So if we were to fly a house from one place to another and re anchor the foundation the anchor bolts wouldnt hold as well as once you take the anchor bolts out from the spot they were in the bottom plate, the hole used to thread the bolt through on the bottom plate is made wider and wider unless you could manage to perfectly vertically lift the house each and everytime which still would risk damaging the holes use for the anchoring because of the shrinking of wood when it dries so once you remove the anchor bolts, often the bolts were stretching some boards forcing them to remain straight when all the grain is stressing them to bend. So once off the concrete the bottom plates might bend and you might not be able to restraighten it. Thats just my two cents though from building houses. Im sure you guys could think of some scientific solutions to the issues i outlined,
I have come back to your channel and wow you've come a long way with your speech Mr. Arthur. As someone who has struggled with a lisp my whole life its really quite inspiring! Im honestly very impressed. Nice work.
The end of the railroad track town supporting the men building the tracks, Hell on Wheels moved by railroad and spawned a few permanent towns such as Cheyenne Wyoming.
Fun fact: for the giant platform idea, this is basically what they did in Darling in the Franxx. In that world, earth had been destroyed by aliens, so the remnants of society had isolated themselves in domed cities on platforms, which now roam the landscape looking for resources. To keep things efficient, the majority of the populace is locked into a virtual reality, basically sleeping. It's neat, because I've heard both of those concepts mentioned in videos on the channel!
Another mobile city varient would be the main city of a nomadic group. I bet the Mongols had something like this, and the Indians have something for religious reasons during Kumbha Mela, where a city is built ground up every year to accommodate pilgrims. I could see space ships modified to fit together like puzzle pieces. Like a fleet of pirates or merchants who, in their long travels between points of interest, join their ships together to form a ring and generate artificial gravity. And each ship has its own facilities, but Mikey’s ship might have a restaurant and John makes up for Mikey’s space sacrifice by storing his produce, so on and so fourth. Pop up vendors almost, for the merchants. And some ships might be built specifically to form giant ring habitats, as a safety feature but also for as stated long voyages or community events, or periods of static living in a resource rich etc environment.
FASCINATING SUBJECT MAN!!! AS WELL, IT IS WONDERFUL TO HEAR A REAL HUMAN BEING, NARRATING VIDEOS, Thank YOU Brother human.😢 ❤ for NOT being or using A.I.
I have a setting for my tabletop games that's centered on a mobile city at sea- it runs on diesel and I thought it was bananas- good to know it's more realistic and plausible than I immagined! I'll give it sails as well
The idea of a massive mining crawler on a low grav moon or large-scale floating refining platform in the atmosphere of a venus or gas-giant planet are likely viable concepts. A true *city* in the sense we really think of them, with a population of 100k or more is vastly larger than these however, and I think problems like torsion on such an enormous structure would become very severe, with deformations in the terrain surface, swells in the ocean, or winds in the atmosphere twisting and warping your city like a pretzel until it comes apart. Even large modern bridges need to be very carefully engineered to avoid being annihilated by torsion and vibration. The one case where I see 'moving cities' eventually becoming a reality is with structures like Oneal colonies with thrusters that can reposition themselves in orbit, move between planets, or even embark on millennia long journeys between stars - quite possibly the only viable way for humans to travel between stars.
I can imagine this becoming something of a trend at a smaller scale. You could have a village or town sized community living in a jointly owned ship-habitat, with everything they needed to keep a town happy and fed aboard the vessel. The advantage of this would be that the town could periodically uproot itself to visit other locations in the solar system. Perhaps a few seasons on Mars, a year on the moon, then an extended trip to Enceladus or the mining hubs of the asteroid belt. I doubt these townships could return directly to earth, because they might not be capable of rentry and earth based launches. Though the inhabitants should be able to find a service to shuttle them to earth with the town docked in orbit.
In a way we already have predecessors for this with for instance sesonal and construction workers living in trailers. There are also so called "boat people" that can just move elsewhere when needed. I also want to point at the human faction in the game Starcraft for whom most of their structures are mobile.
Just finished a series featuring a series of mobile cathedrals slowly walking - just fast enough to keep the sun in the center of the sky... Less than 30 sec in and this will certainly be fun
Reminded me of Arknights' nomadic cities. That world is so ravaged by natural insanity that the idea of moving cities and people are much too ingrained in the culture itself to the point where hardly any cities with major Terran populations that needs to dodge Calamities (the name of these gigantic disasters, including falling meteors, extreme storms, etc) isn't nomadic by default. That world, while having "magic", is still dedicatedly realistic and elaborate, you do need to check it out!
As someone who are on-and-off the game since its release, i would also recommend it, but at a distance. The setting is intriguing and unique, and the stories it have is fun at the very least, but its way of monetizing itself can be quite the turnoff.
@@sponge1234ify well it's a gacha game, and that's a fair critique though still have to applaud the setting, writing and the aesthetic that mostly carried its reputation. anecdotal experiences won't matter too much tho, it's better to let everyone experience the magic of *ohshiteveryonedying&fading* by themselves.
Was looking for arknights comments. The amount of detail about how mobile citys operate is great. In terra if you want to make a expand you have no choice but be mobile or a catastrophy will destroy everything. There is also taking a city and raming it full speed at another city making for a great set piece.
Spekaing of gacha games, Punishing Gray Raven has the "Eternal Engine" - basically a giant train with carriages 25 metres tall and wide and like 100+ long. The train has dozens, or even hundreds of those and it goes on big train tracks across Eurasia to avoid the virus hotspots. There is also the Nona Ouroborosa, which is a giant ship a few kilometres long that sails around the Pacific ocean. Fnally, there's "Atlantis", a big floating city, kind of like the Atlantis in the Star Gate franchise. It's situated somewhere in the Atlantic ocean and it can also dive to a dept of a few kilometres. It was used as a floating reserch base for some secret technologies.
This series made me remember the flying city of Panda La depicted in the old Tailspin cartoon, which took to the skies via giant hot air balloons to invade and conquer those that oppose them.
Dunno bout legged cities, but aerostat cities in Venus' atmo are (technically) within our reach, so i'm down for those. edit: on a second thought, a possible moving city would be a roller city. Two cylinders one inside the other with a gap. The gap would be filled with water to the point where the inner cylinder is buoyant. The inner cylinder has the living spaces, stacked on decks with either a central (fusion?) powered core that lights them all up in a stacked fashion or individual artificial suns for light (crops and mental health). It would be locked on a carrier bearing support that's also the outer cylinder's structure against collapse. The outer skin would have to have some sort of ablative surface to resist the damage as it rolls. Motion would be achieved by shifting the weight of the inner cylinder. Dunno about turning, perhaps the outer cylinder is in two halves, allowing for differential steering. It's ... doable, i see no structural issues, but the sheer cost of making it once more cuts it out of reach. Floating cities or Europa submarine cities that travel under the ice, always putting the moon between them and the planet... those seem more within our means.
Personally, my favorite example of this would be the Nomadic Cities from Arknights. Due to catastrophes and the oceans being haunted by an aquatic hive mind, nations had to resort to giant moving cities on threads. A feature I like about it is that each one can separate into different sections to better maneuver certain areas, and can even link up with other cities & settlements.
I'm gonna chime in and mention Arknights for a bit because a low-key major part of the worldbuilding involves the video's topic (and also becuase they were the first thing that came to mind when I saw the video). Ahem Long story short, the world of Terra has many of its civilizations live in mobile "Nomadic Cities" this is primarily due to avoid Catastrophes, that is to say crazy meteorological phenomena that is at least on par with natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Tohoku quake/tsunami or the recent wildfire epidemics in California and Canada. I also think it overlaps with the mining aspect the video discusses as these disasters leave behind as a byproduct Originium, which served as a fossil fuel analogue of sorts and powers most engendered things in Terra, including the aforementioned engineering behemoths. It also has a side effect in Oripathy, but that is prolly more relevant in a video covering sci-fi diseases. These cities seem to be able to break apart and combine if need be, separating or joining modules to become bigger (the latter evidenced in the Near Light event where not-Polish cities had joined together for their annual sporting competition). Not everyone lives in these cities, as some pockets of civilizations live in the barrenlands betwixt or in parts of Terra that were hereto untouched by Catastrophies (Kjerag and initially Siesta IIRC) A smaller but seemingly denser case within the same setting is the landship used as the headquarters of Arknights' protagonist faction, Rhodes Island. A phama corp (among other things) specializing in treated the aforementioned disease. The vessel is significantly smaller but can still hold a lot of personnel and patients. the Mansfield Break event also established the technology is used for a prison in not-'Murica
I'm a fan of places built on naturally buoyant terrain - like Sanctaphrax in Edge Chronicles Something about using propellers or rockets to keep something afloat has always seemed scary to me, what if there was a major malfunction? I love when someone thinks about this and writes about safety measures. It's probably why the Magnetrine disc from Simon Stalenhags's art is one of my favourite fictional propulsion method. They are basically spinning magnetic gyroscopes that are only usable in the upper Northern Hemisphere - and allowed huge vehicles to magnetically levitate. The art book "Tales from the Loop" explains that if there's ever a malfunction - the disks would naturally spin as the vehicle sinks through earths magnetic field and keep the descent to a few centimetres a week. I always wanted to see a settlement that floats on Magnetrine discs, but I don't think he ever drew something like that unfortunately.
In the Endless Story (Translation of "Die endlose geschichte" idk if it exists) there is a City on a lake, where everyone lives on boats and changes their neighbours periodically. This is not really a moving city, since the central structure, basically one large harbour, stays the same, but a shiftimg City. A City where places swap their positions.
I love the idea of giant train cities like Snowpiercer. The idea of upscaling it feels like it'd create a logistical and habitational nightmare, but a cool one. It could also solve some of the fuel issues, if it's run on superconductive rails kept superconductive by being on a super cold planet. FIY, superconductors can lock onto permanent magnets, levitating an object above them without needing any energy. Then you just need some ion or rocket engines to accelerate or decelerate, IF you ever need to.
Never clickbait. Isaac is the absolute best and we would all be so lucky if he ruled the world!! Trust this man, and he needs to be protected at all costs. Thank you for all you do, Isaac. You are a companion; your videos are comforting, informative, and so insightful. Cheers.
The best and greatest example of mobile cities is James Blish's novel "A Life For The Stars". In that book entire Earth cities use Clarke tech to lift themselves bodily and fly among the stars as migrant workers so to speak. NYC and Scranton, PA are prominently featured. A great read!
Im partial to the massive tree-ships in Hyperion, who's drive plumes looked like a huge root system. But then pretyy much every space vessel is a mobile city.
I'm one of those people who seem to be able to sleep "anywhere." Personally, it's not the noise or movement from the environment that wake me up, it's a change in the environment. If I fall asleep in a loud environment and it's suddenly quiet, a moving vehicle that comes to a stop, or a drastic temperature change will usually wake me enough to reevaluate my surroundings.
my favorite is the bubble city of Terminator on the surface of Mercury in the hard sci-fi novel 2313. Gigantic rails push the city within a habitable "terminator line" at the horizon of Mercury through the expansion and contraction of the tracks coming from the heat of the sun.
Doesn’t Lando have some giant centipede like city powered by a crap ton of AT-AT Walker legs on some mining planet in Dark Empire comics where it’s constantly moving along to stay out of the nearby sunlight? It’s a mining venture if I recall correctly since Thrawn steals a bunch of his drills, but it was just creeping along staying in the shade and running another impossible city like he does, but now maybe it’s not SO impossible ;)
Makes me think of Cannon in Eclipse Phase -- a Mercury settlement that is essentially a big mass driver on rails, circling the planet daily to stay out of the sun and link up with a variety of mining operations, with a swarm of vehicles heading out from it to collect the rich minerals of Mercury, bringing them back to the mass driver for delivery to customers.
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 Hmm, looking back at the rulebook (a short bit in Sunward for EP First Edition, if you want to go find it) I was apparently conflating the nomadic 'dirt sifters' (independent miners who travel in groups of vehicles that chase the terminator between mining sites on a harsh schedule optimized to avoid the most severe heat-cycling and temperature extremes that would at best reduce the service life of their equipment) with Cannon's larger operation, with the train staying on the night side of the planet, stopping at stationary (automated?) mining sites (some of which may use direct solar drilling with big lenses or mirrors to cut rock?) to collect the day's harvest and throw it into space, with Cannon's power itself generated by 'fields of solar arrays' along its track.
One of the stories in "Gulliver's Travels" has the floating city of Laputa, done by hand-waving 'magnetic levitation' . The size of the kingdom they governed was limited by where the necessary magnetic ore was found underground. The ruling class lives in Laputa, they discourage rebellion by the ground-dwellers by "gently squashing them flat."
If a planet is light on one side for months at a time, then dark for months at the time it will be bad to live in total darkness for months so if they can move a city they can move it to the day side
Hey bud, I've enjoyed your content for a couple of years now. You do great work and your videos are always interesting and entertaining. Thank you for all the hard work and I look forward to your future projects.
Been working on a setting of a derelict megastructure, where 99% of its inhabitants have died, but the remaining cultures still have access to post-scarcity technology. Meaning they do not want for resources or trade, for the most part. But every civilization knows every other civilization possess advanced tech that could annihilate them. As they also have the tech to hide, this results in every civilization being isolationist, or being picked off by their more violent neighbors (Dark Forest scaled down). If you think your location has been compromised, then moving your entire civilizations location and going back into hiding is nice alternative to blowing up everyone you see.
I could see it being common on ring worlds were the terrain is usually flat. probably wouldn't be a city though but a collection of buildings each on their own platform.
One of the things I enjoy most about SFIA can be summed up as: Isaac: give me a topic. Viewers: here's something wildly fictional. Isaac: OK, here's a perfectly rational and technologically plausible means by which we can do that.
>Walking cities Barely begun to watch the video. The only close examples I cam remember are Macross series's ships, mainly the SDF-1 Macross with the city inside of the gigantic giant robot/ship.
And then there's the insanity that is the Great Spirit robot from the Bionicle franchise: a million foot tall robot that contains within it islands and cities populated by cybernetic species. It's both awesome and insane all at once.
I don't know about the USA, but it us not unusual for people to move houses from one section to another. It's not simple, but they slice the house up into sections that will fit on the roads put it on a truck and drive it to the new location. Then all the slices are put back together. Sometimes a piece of house falls of the truck and gets smashed to pieces.
The Anime / Manga / Light Novel series - Chrome Shelled Regios has a similar setup. In a Post Apocalyptic world, many people live in mobile cities that gradually move.
0:30 as a mortal engines fan I hate that the first thing people think about when hearing the name is the movie. The movie is a disgrace to the franchise
13:36 during my time in the military i found sleeping in an unimogue troop transport going 80-100 pretty normal... that being said, it took some time getting used to
One thing bothers me of sci-fi gigantic buildings and especially moving apparatus. They seem to forget that the heavier an entity is the weakest it becomes. Atomic cohesion does not get stronger and anything will collapse as a reaction to movement, much easier as they are bigger in size.
technically an O'neill cyclinder is a mobile country. so you've basically skipped a category until now. technically a gardener ship is a mobile planet. especially if you've sunk either into a sufficiently sized asteroid. technically an O'neill Cylinder could BECOME a gardener ship. also moving cities, I can't help but think of Howl's Moving Castle crawling over the land. and a mobile city could technically act as a seed ship. on the smaller scale, I love the adorable appearance of tiny homes, even though I have way too much to ever live in one. I think the guys who fell asleep in the tank were lulled by the vibration. stopping it would have woken them up if so. one of the pictures, the two standing in the grass near the tank reminds me of the Cranberry Bog biome in Fallout 76, where you can find several half sunk military vehicles and camps because of how uneven the ground was, as well as multiple massive AA missile turrets to take care of one of the more dangerous creatures in the game, the scorched beast. Imagine a tank to massive building sized mutated plague breathing dragon bats. I thought you might find that thought amusing.
Surprised you didn't mention the cruise ship coming in 2024: Royal Caribbean International's Icon of the Seas is set to launch as the world's largest cruise ship in early 2024, measuring 365 meters long and weighing approximately 250,800 tons. Room for about 10,000 passengers and crew...
One of my favourites has to be the ship in Wall-e. The political undertones are just subtle enough to fit into a pixar film, but scathing enough to make the late and infamous Ted polish-spelling-makes-my-brain-hurt proud.
Been a while since I viewed your channel. Mobile cities are interesting. They're majestic from an aesthetic point of view, and a kind of interesting concept, but there needs to be a practicality or a need for such a thing. And I think that's all I have to say.
Mobile cities would be great for an alt-history sci-fi series where a nomadic empire like the Mongols became the dominant political powers on Earth, and then slowly expanded across the universe
They have moved smallish buildings before but it's difficult - they're usually moved by taking apart and re-assembling at the new site. It has never existed IRL before so I think it has to be a sci-fi setting or a sci-fi element added to make the alternate history.
@@SuperFlamethrower… You’re talking about moving structures that were built as permanent. If mobility is part of the plan from the outset, you build your structures in a completely different way.
What is the sound of your city slowly breaking through a cloud layer on its way to higher altitude so it can bask in the sun? It sounds exactly like “Red Giant” by Stellardrone ❤️👍🏽👍🏽
Here's the link for the July 13 NSS Space Forum on Instabase I mentioned in the episode :) It is free, hope to see you there.
Blog link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/8716415258643/WN_ovcIpIO7SIahG-B5yaDoVg
General Registration Link - us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ovcIpIO7SIahG-B5yaDoVg
Hello, could you make a video of what the military could look like from the smallest to the largest level? What would squads look like?
Would humans even be needed in the future of war? Would there be only machines, AI, and robots as infantry, drones, vehicles, commanders, etc, while humans have no involvement?
Ergo Proxy🥷🏿
Modern cruise ships aren't far off this, some even have permanent residents. If you've never seen one up close they are beyond gigantic. The Titanic looks like a dinghy next to a modern cruise ship. The currently under-construction Icon of the Seas is 1,200ft long, weights over 250,000 GT, and between passengers and crew can carry nearly 10,000 people. The smallest state capital is Montpelier, Vermont, and has only about 7,500 people.
@@Stevie-Jaircraft carriers are fucking crazy.
That honestly sounds insane. I routinely see car transport ships, which look like an elongated skyscraper suddenly appeared nextdoor. But apparently, the ship you mention is even larger.
No cruise ship or aircraft carrier I've ever seen in port here came close to these car transporters and I can't imagine anything that size
@@Stevie-J i totally understand, im from italy and we as a populace are a bit spoiled by the peace having allies in border provides, when we were financing our latest aircraft carrier the only reason it was done is because it can function as an hospital ship doing crisis, which is a good thing but it shouldnt be the reason we make our navy more sufficent. I dont agree with alot of things the us does but their military spending isnt one of them.
I seen a video of one the other day had like 6 restaurants 8 bars 10 pools basketball courts tennis courts water slides i think it had 2 movie theaters it had a place for plays literally everything you could think of it was crazy
Just want to confirm this was not clickbait.
Thank you for subscribing to cat facts.
Cat fact one:
Your cat is planning to off you and claim the life insurance.
Isaac is always grounded. Unless it's Clark tech but that's in the name 😂
It is not
Thought it was a let's play
Homie dont play that🤣🤣
I always find it impressive how you’ve managed to come out with new videos for so long and still you have something new to cover. The amount of material on this channel already is incredible!
Yea. I'm not intrested in all of his videos, some topics just don't really intrest me, but thers still MANY MANY videos i can pick and enjoy
@@komiks42 I tihnk that's probably true for most of the audience, some are here mostly for FP vids, other AI or spacecol, etc :)
I'm in admiration of the depth of consideration in video and how consistent they are.
@@isaacarthurSFIAI've been following your channel for a bit. One day I plan on binge watching most of it
@@isaacarthurSFIA- I watch whatever you put up, do like some more than others, but have *never* seen one that wasn't interesting to me.
BTW, my voting on subject matter for future episodes is usually out of sync with the majority, but I figure you'll get around to everything eventually. ;-)
We had a town that was moved once, a little south of Lubbock Tx. The town was built about a mile east of the planned site. They put all the buildings on skids, and dragged the whole town to where it belonged. This is how Slide Tx got its name.
Slidell?
@OriginalDonutposse no, it is Slide, Texas.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide,_Texas
So residents would be 'Sliders'?
Lansing, Michigan.
Wheeling, West Virginia.
American gets Mobile (, Alabama).
This is the kind of messed up stuff that can only happen in flat areas.
Mobile sea cities would be a good idea, one could simply move it to the optimum location for the time of year. This already happens to some extent in the sailing community.
One concern I'd have about large floating cities is different stress on different parts of the structure. It will need some sturdiness, but also a small ability to flex. The various videos of ships breaking in storms come to mind.
So it can move under the Captain or committee's control, but it can also be moved by strong currents/waves
How about a mobile sea city made of many smaller vessels that can connect to one another via gangways and rope ladders and such.
@alphaclean3364 exactly and they could be together most of the time then separate if there was a storm predicted.
@@alphaclean3364There's a game called P.A.M.E.L.A which does basically exactly this with its floating cities. It was kinda abandoned, but it's really cool conceptually, and you can play to the end.
@@alphaclean3364 This is the correct answer, every single seastead is some family home, they all operate autonomously, and can diffuse or come together at will.
For those that go: "Wait, why is the Swedish town of Kiruna moving?"
It is due to the mining operations that have spread underneath the city, making the ground unstable. There have been instances of local earthquakes occurring due to the unstable ground. Their solution was to move the city because the mining operations are MASSIVELY profitable, and they keep finding new veins and materials, the last one was the beginning of 2023 where they found what is labelled "Europe's biggest rare earth minerals deposits". They have the funding to move the entire town of 22k people and their houses which is wack.
So the company running the mine is paying for the move?
That's... actually nice.
@@Arrynek01one of those weird cases where a corporation does the right thing. Must be some weird european thing
Thank you for explaining that.😊❤
@@Arrynek01 Well, mining law requires them to handle any fallout from their mining operations. So if you pollute a lake, it is the mining company's fault, and they have to fund the solution to it.
@@ManBearPigCreativeMeanwhile in the United States::
Small city caves in due to mining that was kept secret, 60% of the town is dead, but the shareholders were willing to take the risk.
The thing I contemplate most about cities is what is their purpose, every city on earth at first had a purpose. Natural resources nearby, strategic locations for defense/offense and in that regard there are many reasons for a mobile city. It should be important to note though there's also reasons to have smaller mobile structures like Labs, refineries or factories.
Currently we have a rover on Mars doing tons of research. It's not too much of a stretch to have a rover lab filled with people there too. These could be rovers, subs, tanks or walkers easily depending on the environment as well. So if your sci fi needs a little extra cool one of those would be a neat thing to throw in without being too much of a stretch for your readers.
A game called Arknights have mobile Cities (Called nomadic cities in the game)
Because of catastrophes, basically natural disasters but ten times worse (imagine hurricanes combined with meteor showers that drop skyscraper size rock, and said rocks can cause a incurable disease), they have to keep moving to avoid this cause a catastrophe could level an entire city
I like the idea that if the Americas were never discovered by anyone in the East and the Native Americans somehow “modernized”, they’d have a bunch of mobile cities due to how large the continents are and their very different concept of land ownership
Why seasonal weather extremes.
As far as i recall there is indeed a big Mobile tracked vehicle which serves as a Mobile laboratory
Crossroads?
I always liked the idea of walking buildings or cities using "strandbeest" legs to move around, particularly because they would be able to utilize fairly complicated motion without requiring a great deal of computational oversight, as a building walking around on something like spider legs might require. In theory they also wouldn't require a particularly complicated drive train for that motion, or could be driven by external forces like wind.
I liked this one and I feel compelled to add a notable example of The the moving cities of Arknights. Where they need to move so as to avoid calamities which in setting very from devastating blizzards to explosive fireballs raining from the sky. They have gained the ability to forecast these calamities like the weather and move the cities out of the way in a few hours time. I felt that this would have been a nice addition to your video, but even then great video as usual.
//Edit:And now I realize it was already mentioned.
The city of Terminator in Kim Stanley Robinson's various books was always a neat mobile city. Always rolling around the horizon line of Mercury, keeping out of direct sunlight.
Some other examples are the "Ship Country" and the "Bothersome Country" from Kino's Journey, with Bothersome Country being a strangely close plot to Mortal Engines (I think the light novel story of it predates ME, even). What a shame what happened to the Mortal Engines movie though. Lots of other fun examples in games, like the Wandering Village, too. Thanks for covering this topic Isaac!
The mortal engines books are some of my favourite but damn that movie was bad, and they ended it in a way that contradicts the storyline of the other books
@@Rullstolsboken Shrike's story was saved by Stephen Lang actually reading the book imo. When they stuck to the plot the movie was great, but the mix ups and mischaracterizations was really to the detriment of it. 😔
Laputa: Castle In The Sky?
The anime Chrome Shelled Regios, is all about mobile cities called Regios, that travel around on a ruined Earth looking for resources, fighting giant mutated insects, and competing with other mobile cities for said resources.
20:13 this reminds me of the nomadic fleet city in a anime called Gargantia. where it has a main ship but has multiple smaller ships that could change to different parts of the fleet.
One really cool concept is the tame megafauna that drags the city or even carries it on its back. One of the factions in Warhammer is composed of nomads that set their tents on giant beetles. (I mistook them for another nomadic faction in Endless Legend who uses more conventional beasts of burden.)
40k is always such a werid mix of neat and weird ideas :)
Xenoblade 2 is built upon the entire concept - after all, "megafauna" describes most Titans perfectly (though not all - some of them are small enough to be outright enemies to fight after they were weaponised, while simultaneously being on other, much larger Titans that *are* the landmasses of that game's world)
Play The Wandering Village. It's a city-building game where you build your settlement on top of a gigantic dinosaur-like creature.
My favorites are great big spinning toroids, mile wide 10 miles in diameter I saw early renderings done in the 70's and I was like wow, this is how you build a city! Central waterway through the middle, with terraced homes, buildings, gardens, forests, built up embankments on both sides. It would be so unbelievably huge, you wouldn't even feel like you were in space, just in a normal city. If you could stick a fusion drive on them, do 1/2 speed of light, make into a generational ship to populate exoplanets within a couple hundred light years.
In a creative writing work of mine, I had a city upon a gigantic ship that functioned as the trade hub for most of the world since it was one of the few places where goods from nearly every civilization would accumulate. Super cool to see a vid on the topic from a completely different perspective, but still one of my more favorite genres. I always like to try and place science into it
Nice, I've been working on a setting on an oceanic planet where the capital is a floating city, partly for political reasons as none of the various island nations that made up the planet could agree on who should house the capital and partly as a means to avoid the regular large storms that sweep the planets surface.
Wow that’s really cool
The first mobile city I always think of is Terminator on Mercury in the novel 2312. On rails going around the planet, such a cool idea.
Seriously. That's a gem right there.
The rails offer some interesting possibilities…
I never read that novel, so I don’t know if it included this concept, but…
The rails could be made from a temperature reactive material, so that the heating/cooling of the day/night cycles, could be the mechanism that propels the city around the planet.
@@bobinthewest8559if memory serves - and I might have the wrong story - that was the case in this story except no special materials required. The metal rails expanded in the heat and shrank when cold, like all metals, and the city was driven along by having a suitably massive wedge that was constantly being squeezed "out" of the heated daylight section.
@@bobinthewest8559 Exactly how it is in the story. That book is absolutely off the rails 😏
Terminator was in KSR's _Mars_ trilogy before it was in _2312_ .
I always imagined massive pyramid colonies that just land and start doing what's necessary. Massive green houses as the outer layer if you're near star (mostly looked cool in my head as a kid)
That's a good imagination😊
@@rwm1980 Well Stargate was a movie I rented back then. I just added an eternal expanding humanity and straight forward mass colonization. You drop hundreds of thousands down in good locations across a planet and within generations you're entrenched.
Me: *click on the vid to see if it have any clickbait
Issac: “There are no clickbait titles on this show.”
Me: *Understood, have a nice day 😎
This definitely makes sense for lunar cities, excluding polar ones. Or at least the farming communities, with farmer's markets coming around every 4 weeks.
For land crawlers noise and vibration can be solved easily by going electric. And bumps can be solved by a Bose suspension. That's an active suspension that keeps the vehicle perfectly flat on any terrain at any speed, as long as the suspension travel is enough. It's even capable of jumping over small obstacles.
I’ve been creating mobile cities since 1990. I just love this! I never thought I’d see the day when this would even become a topic. Thanks!
If homes are ever constructed robust enough to be routinely moved and if they were constructed airtight, they could be used in many different environments. Like your basement would be a ships hull that you bury when you're on land, but you could move to water, and also you could dock it in a rotating space marina, and possibly suspend it from a tether into the atmosphere all while maintaining an "up" direction
The only ones that would be practical would be either a large cluster of ocean vehicles on a constant move or a space station on the move.
Buckminster Fuller had ideas for a floating city on the ocean that looked like a tetrahedron and another for one that floated in the sky that looked like a gigantic spherical balloon.
As a big time fan both of the channel and of Mortal Engines, I've been waiting on this one for a long, long time...
happy Arthursday!
Arknights has moving Cities because of the Catastrophe (a sudden storm that drops giand crystals) heck even onepiece has done it really good (spoilers of course so watch out) with the kingdom sanji is from the Germa Kingdom where they are all mercenarys moving around the world selling their fighting force and then come together (rarely) to form the kingdom with their ships all puzzling together into one and then there also was the thriller bark ps. from the one piece wiki "comprised of platforms surrounded by railings, that are build on the shells of large snails resembling Den Den Mushi. Those snails are seemingly unaffected by the salty sea, and are strong enough to climb the Red Line."
The first rule of warfare: If your city is about to be attacked, get out of the way.
Love the idea of a residence that you can un-tether, call for "the movers", and have in place in another state/country in a few hours!
oh yes Mortal Engines, the book ... i remember the first time reading it, that awe feeling, amazing concepts
I'm happy to hear someone else felt that too.
In the mobile game Arknights, the world has many cataclysmic natural disasters that necessitates the worlds inhabitants to created "mobile cities", which allow them to pack up and move the entire city within 2 weeks if they predict one coming their way. I always wondered how practical they are in reality, albeit they are powered by the fictional resource of that universe. The bigger concern is of course, probably it sinking into the ground from it's sheer weight.
The city is separated into district sized plates which each has its own engines
Carpenter here, just wanted to make an observation about when you were mentioning the "mobile homes" that you can untether from their original place and be moved somewhere else. This actually might present a big problem in practice even if it works in principle.
When you build a home, you are building what is called an "envelope" which is the outer most layer of walls, the roof, the floors and so on, are all tied together so as to encompass any interior and partition walls and spaces, which may or may not be tied/connected directly to the envelope of the building but modern building practices actually do a good job at tying most pieces of a home to one another.
The envelope of the building is often anchored to a concrete foundation rather than the floor, and foundation actually being part of that envelope. This means that technically all that is holding down most people's houses is the numerous anchor bolts that are placed all around the bottom plates of the envelope (so the outer walls plates, also including and interior structural walls but doesnt include partition walls necessarily) so you rarely have a house that has the foundation a continous part of the envelope isntead of simlpy being a structure that sits on top of the foundation and is anchored to its to prevent the sheer forces from moving the house horizontally but also from the wind and other potential forces that may want to bring the house off its foundation vertically in an upwards direction. This is most important during windstorms.
The biggest issue it seems to me is how we would build a house that could have its foundation also attatched to the envelope and have it be safe to move from site to site, or you have the same foundation at multiple of your properties or destinations in mind for the home and then you can move it between them and just re anchor the bolts but there is a reason we always replace anchor bolts when we put on something new to the foundation. So if we were to fly a house from one place to another and re anchor the foundation the anchor bolts wouldnt hold as well as once you take the anchor bolts out from the spot they were in the bottom plate, the hole used to thread the bolt through on the bottom plate is made wider and wider unless you could manage to perfectly vertically lift the house each and everytime which still would risk damaging the holes use for the anchoring because of the shrinking of wood when it dries so once you remove the anchor bolts, often the bolts were stretching some boards forcing them to remain straight when all the grain is stressing them to bend. So once off the concrete the bottom plates might bend and you might not be able to restraighten it.
Thats just my two cents though from building houses. Im sure you guys could think of some scientific solutions to the issues i outlined,
I once calculated the speed of moon rotation at some latitudes and realized a pretty slow rover could always be under the sun (and thus powered)
I have come back to your channel and wow you've come a long way with your speech Mr. Arthur. As someone who has struggled with a lisp my whole life its really quite inspiring! Im honestly very impressed. Nice work.
The end of the railroad track town supporting the men building the tracks, Hell on Wheels moved by railroad and spawned a few permanent towns such as Cheyenne Wyoming.
Fun fact: for the giant platform idea, this is basically what they did in Darling in the Franxx. In that world, earth had been destroyed by aliens, so the remnants of society had isolated themselves in domed cities on platforms, which now roam the landscape looking for resources. To keep things efficient, the majority of the populace is locked into a virtual reality, basically sleeping. It's neat, because I've heard both of those concepts mentioned in videos on the channel!
Another mobile city varient would be the main city of a nomadic group.
I bet the Mongols had something like this, and the Indians have something for religious reasons during Kumbha Mela, where a city is built ground up every year to accommodate pilgrims.
I could see space ships modified to fit together like puzzle pieces. Like a fleet of pirates or merchants who, in their long travels between points of interest, join their ships together to form a ring and generate artificial gravity. And each ship has its own facilities, but Mikey’s ship might have a restaurant and John makes up for Mikey’s space sacrifice by storing his produce, so on and so fourth. Pop up vendors almost, for the merchants.
And some ships might be built specifically to form giant ring habitats, as a safety feature but also for as stated long voyages or community events, or periods of static living in a resource rich etc environment.
FASCINATING SUBJECT MAN!!! AS WELL, IT IS WONDERFUL TO HEAR A REAL HUMAN BEING, NARRATING VIDEOS, Thank YOU Brother human.😢 ❤
for NOT being or using A.I.
I have a setting for my tabletop games that's centered on a mobile city at sea- it runs on diesel and I thought it was bananas- good to know it's more realistic and plausible than I immagined! I'll give it sails as well
The idea of a massive mining crawler on a low grav moon or large-scale floating refining platform in the atmosphere of a venus or gas-giant planet are likely viable concepts. A true *city* in the sense we really think of them, with a population of 100k or more is vastly larger than these however, and I think problems like torsion on such an enormous structure would become very severe, with deformations in the terrain surface, swells in the ocean, or winds in the atmosphere twisting and warping your city like a pretzel until it comes apart. Even large modern bridges need to be very carefully engineered to avoid being annihilated by torsion and vibration.
The one case where I see 'moving cities' eventually becoming a reality is with structures like Oneal colonies with thrusters that can reposition themselves in orbit, move between planets, or even embark on millennia long journeys between stars - quite possibly the only viable way for humans to travel between stars.
I can imagine this becoming something of a trend at a smaller scale. You could have a village or town sized community living in a jointly owned ship-habitat, with everything they needed to keep a town happy and fed aboard the vessel.
The advantage of this would be that the town could periodically uproot itself to visit other locations in the solar system.
Perhaps a few seasons on Mars, a year on the moon, then an extended trip to Enceladus or the mining hubs of the asteroid belt.
I doubt these townships could return directly to earth, because they might not be capable of rentry and earth based launches.
Though the inhabitants should be able to find a service to shuttle them to earth with the town docked in orbit.
In a way we already have predecessors for this with for instance sesonal and construction workers living in trailers. There are also so called "boat people" that can just move elsewhere when needed. I also want to point at the human faction in the game Starcraft for whom most of their structures are mobile.
Just finished a series featuring a series of mobile cathedrals slowly walking - just fast enough to keep the sun in the center of the sky...
Less than 30 sec in and this will certainly be fun
to keep the sun in a certain place on equator you need to move at 1667.924 km at hour. those cathedrals are NOT slow at all
I did the math considering that ''slow'' cathedrals are on equator they are ''walking'' at 463 meters a second which is more than mach one
Reminded me of Arknights' nomadic cities. That world is so ravaged by natural insanity that the idea of moving cities and people are much too ingrained in the culture itself to the point where hardly any cities with major Terran populations that needs to dodge Calamities (the name of these gigantic disasters, including falling meteors, extreme storms, etc) isn't nomadic by default. That world, while having "magic", is still dedicatedly realistic and elaborate, you do need to check it out!
As someone who are on-and-off the game since its release, i would also recommend it, but at a distance. The setting is intriguing and unique, and the stories it have is fun at the very least, but its way of monetizing itself can be quite the turnoff.
@@sponge1234ify well it's a gacha game, and that's a fair critique though still have to applaud the setting, writing and the aesthetic that mostly carried its reputation. anecdotal experiences won't matter too much tho, it's better to let everyone experience the magic of *ohshiteveryonedying&fading* by themselves.
Was looking for arknights comments. The amount of detail about how mobile citys operate is great. In terra if you want to make a expand you have no choice but be mobile or a catastrophy will destroy everything. There is also taking a city and raming it full speed at another city making for a great set piece.
Spekaing of gacha games, Punishing Gray Raven has the "Eternal Engine" - basically a giant train with carriages 25 metres tall and wide and like 100+ long. The train has dozens, or even hundreds of those and it goes on big train tracks across Eurasia to avoid the virus hotspots. There is also the Nona Ouroborosa, which is a giant ship a few kilometres long that sails around the Pacific ocean.
Fnally, there's "Atlantis", a big floating city, kind of like the Atlantis in the Star Gate franchise. It's situated somewhere in the Atlantic ocean and it can also dive to a dept of a few kilometres. It was used as a floating reserch base for some secret technologies.
Arknights is why i clicked on this video lol
This series made me remember the flying city of Panda La depicted in the old Tailspin cartoon, which took to the skies via giant hot air balloons to invade and conquer those that oppose them.
Issac, you have one of the most incredible brains I've encountered, and I've known some real smart people. Thank you for sharing.
Dunno bout legged cities, but aerostat cities in Venus' atmo are (technically) within our reach, so i'm down for those.
edit: on a second thought, a possible moving city would be a roller city. Two cylinders one inside the other with a gap. The gap would be filled with water to the point where the inner cylinder is buoyant. The inner cylinder has the living spaces, stacked on decks with either a central (fusion?) powered core that lights them all up in a stacked fashion or individual artificial suns for light (crops and mental health). It would be locked on a carrier bearing support that's also the outer cylinder's structure against collapse. The outer skin would have to have some sort of ablative surface to resist the damage as it rolls. Motion would be achieved by shifting the weight of the inner cylinder. Dunno about turning, perhaps the outer cylinder is in two halves, allowing for differential steering.
It's ... doable, i see no structural issues, but the sheer cost of making it once more cuts it out of reach. Floating cities or Europa submarine cities that travel under the ice, always putting the moon between them and the planet... those seem more within our means.
ain't nobody going there bro we all saw Europa Report
If you're gonna do that, why not just go the whole hog and make it a sphere instead of a wheel? Then it can turn in any direction.
Barotrauma™ (Submarines are cool.)
Everyone talks about walkable cities, but only Issac talks about cities that walk.
Personally, my favorite example of this would be the Nomadic Cities from Arknights. Due to catastrophes and the oceans being haunted by an aquatic hive mind, nations had to resort to giant moving cities on threads. A feature I like about it is that each one can separate into different sections to better maneuver certain areas, and can even link up with other cities & settlements.
I'm gonna chime in and mention Arknights for a bit because a low-key major part of the worldbuilding involves the video's topic (and also becuase they were the first thing that came to mind when I saw the video). Ahem
Long story short, the world of Terra has many of its civilizations live in mobile "Nomadic Cities" this is primarily due to avoid Catastrophes, that is to say crazy meteorological phenomena that is at least on par with natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Tohoku quake/tsunami or the recent wildfire epidemics in California and Canada.
I also think it overlaps with the mining aspect the video discusses as these disasters leave behind as a byproduct Originium, which served as a fossil fuel analogue of sorts and powers most engendered things in Terra, including the aforementioned engineering behemoths. It also has a side effect in Oripathy, but that is prolly more relevant in a video covering sci-fi diseases.
These cities seem to be able to break apart and combine if need be, separating or joining modules to become bigger (the latter evidenced in the Near Light event where not-Polish cities had joined together for their annual sporting competition). Not everyone lives in these cities, as some pockets of civilizations live in the barrenlands betwixt or in parts of Terra that were hereto untouched by Catastrophies (Kjerag and initially Siesta IIRC)
A smaller but seemingly denser case within the same setting is the landship used as the headquarters of Arknights' protagonist faction, Rhodes Island. A phama corp (among other things) specializing in treated the aforementioned disease. The vessel is significantly smaller but can still hold a lot of personnel and patients. the Mansfield Break event also established the technology is used for a prison in not-'Murica
In either " Saturn's Brood" or " Neptune's Children", a mobile city on Mercury rode on rails....
I'm a fan of places built on naturally buoyant terrain - like Sanctaphrax in Edge Chronicles
Something about using propellers or rockets to keep something afloat has always seemed scary to me, what if there was a major malfunction?
I love when someone thinks about this and writes about safety measures.
It's probably why the Magnetrine disc from Simon Stalenhags's art is one of my favourite fictional propulsion method. They are basically spinning magnetic gyroscopes that are only usable in the upper Northern Hemisphere - and allowed huge vehicles to magnetically levitate. The art book "Tales from the Loop" explains that if there's ever a malfunction - the disks would naturally spin as the vehicle sinks through earths magnetic field and keep the descent to a few centimetres a week.
I always wanted to see a settlement that floats on Magnetrine discs, but I don't think he ever drew something like that unfortunately.
If it wasn't already truly brilliant content, I'd have subscribed just for the anti-clickbait policy.
In the Endless Story (Translation of "Die endlose geschichte" idk if it exists) there is a City on a lake, where everyone lives on boats and changes their neighbours periodically. This is not really a moving city, since the central structure, basically one large harbour, stays the same, but a shiftimg City. A City where places swap their positions.
I love the idea of giant train cities like Snowpiercer. The idea of upscaling it feels like it'd create a logistical and habitational nightmare, but a cool one. It could also solve some of the fuel issues, if it's run on superconductive rails kept superconductive by being on a super cold planet. FIY, superconductors can lock onto permanent magnets, levitating an object above them without needing any energy.
Then you just need some ion or rocket engines to accelerate or decelerate, IF you ever need to.
Never clickbait. Isaac is the absolute best and we would all be so lucky if he ruled the world!! Trust this man, and he needs to be protected at all costs. Thank you for all you do, Isaac. You are a companion; your videos are comforting, informative, and so insightful. Cheers.
The best and greatest example of mobile cities is James Blish's novel "A Life For The Stars". In that book entire Earth cities use Clarke tech to lift themselves bodily and fly among the stars as migrant workers so to speak. NYC and Scranton, PA are prominently featured. A great read!
Im partial to the massive tree-ships in Hyperion, who's drive plumes looked like a huge root system. But then pretyy much every space vessel is a mobile city.
@@stevenhetzel6483 Those where cool. Great book. I'm partial to the alien mothership from Close Encounters.
I'm one of those people who seem to be able to sleep "anywhere." Personally, it's not the noise or movement from the environment that wake me up, it's a change in the environment. If I fall asleep in a loud environment and it's suddenly quiet, a moving vehicle that comes to a stop, or a drastic temperature change will usually wake me enough to reevaluate my surroundings.
my favorite is the bubble city of Terminator on the surface of Mercury in the hard sci-fi novel 2313. Gigantic rails push the city within a habitable "terminator line" at the horizon of Mercury through the expansion and contraction of the tracks coming from the heat of the sun.
Doesn’t Lando have some giant centipede like city powered by a crap ton of AT-AT Walker legs on some mining planet in Dark Empire comics where it’s constantly moving along to stay out of the nearby sunlight? It’s a mining venture if I recall correctly since Thrawn steals a bunch of his drills, but it was just creeping along staying in the shade and running another impossible city like he does, but now maybe it’s not SO impossible ;)
The Shimizu Corp has been planning an submersible city for years. It will be interesting to see if they pull it off.
Makes me think of Cannon in Eclipse Phase -- a Mercury settlement that is essentially a big mass driver on rails, circling the planet daily to stay out of the sun and link up with a variety of mining operations, with a swarm of vehicles heading out from it to collect the rich minerals of Mercury, bringing them back to the mass driver for delivery to customers.
Do the vehicles stay out 'over day' and meet the city the next night?
@@jengleheimerschmitt7941 Hmm, looking back at the rulebook (a short bit in Sunward for EP First Edition, if you want to go find it) I was apparently conflating the nomadic 'dirt sifters' (independent miners who travel in groups of vehicles that chase the terminator between mining sites on a harsh schedule optimized to avoid the most severe heat-cycling and temperature extremes that would at best reduce the service life of their equipment) with Cannon's larger operation, with the train staying on the night side of the planet, stopping at stationary (automated?) mining sites (some of which may use direct solar drilling with big lenses or mirrors to cut rock?) to collect the day's harvest and throw it into space, with Cannon's power itself generated by 'fields of solar arrays' along its track.
One of the stories in "Gulliver's Travels" has the floating city of Laputa, done by hand-waving 'magnetic levitation' . The size of the kingdom they governed was limited by where the necessary magnetic ore was found underground. The ruling class lives in Laputa, they discourage rebellion by the ground-dwellers by "gently squashing them flat."
If a planet is light on one side for months at a time, then dark for months at the time it will be bad to live in total darkness for months so if they can move a city they can move it to the day side
You need Originium tech if you want to make it practical.
Welcome back… dokter-lynx
Hey bud, I've enjoyed your content for a couple of years now. You do great work and your videos are always interesting and entertaining. Thank you for all the hard work and I look forward to your future projects.
1st human landing on mars: "Before I step on to the surface of Mars, I need to tell you this trip was sponsored by Raid, shadow legends."
You never disappoint, keep up the good work.
Thanks!
Been working on a setting of a derelict megastructure, where 99% of its inhabitants have died, but the remaining cultures still have access to post-scarcity technology. Meaning they do not want for resources or trade, for the most part. But every civilization knows every other civilization possess advanced tech that could annihilate them. As they also have the tech to hide, this results in every civilization being isolationist, or being picked off by their more violent neighbors (Dark Forest scaled down). If you think your location has been compromised, then moving your entire civilizations location and going back into hiding is nice alternative to blowing up everyone you see.
Really loved Alastair Reynolds' version of this in Absolution Gap
I could see it being common on ring worlds were the terrain is usually flat. probably wouldn't be a city though but a collection of buildings each on their own platform.
following the twilight strip on an exoplanet might be an important reason for city mobility to avoid freezing or frying
I think the first example of a good reason to move a city I read was in Dave Duncan's "West of January"
Always a pleasure to watch these!
One of the things I enjoy most about SFIA can be summed up as:
Isaac: give me a topic.
Viewers: here's something wildly fictional.
Isaac: OK, here's a perfectly rational and technologically plausible means by which we can do that.
The Mortal Engines book series by Phillip Reeve is a great exploration of this concept. The movie is a bit rubbish but books are well worth reading
So good! I'm reading the fever crumb trilogy next
"Cities on the go.
Because there are
no clickbait titles on this show"
kind of rhymes😎
>Walking cities
Barely begun to watch the video. The only close examples I cam remember are Macross series's ships, mainly the SDF-1 Macross with the city inside of the gigantic giant robot/ship.
And then there's the insanity that is the Great Spirit robot from the Bionicle franchise: a million foot tall robot that contains within it islands and cities populated by cybernetic species. It's both awesome and insane all at once.
I don't know about the USA, but it us not unusual for people to move houses from one section to another. It's not simple, but they slice the house up into sections that will fit on the roads put it on a truck and drive it to the new location. Then all the slices are put back together. Sometimes a piece of house falls of the truck and gets smashed to pieces.
The Anime / Manga / Light Novel series - Chrome Shelled Regios has a similar setup.
In a Post Apocalyptic world, many people live in mobile cities that gradually move.
We already have cruise ships and oil rigs. Also the shifting base in Antarctica.
Balamb garden, aka, a floating University, designed for tight manovering over tricky terrain, hover travel and equipped with weapon systems.
0:30 as a mortal engines fan I hate that the first thing people think about when hearing the name is the movie. The movie is a disgrace to the franchise
It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.
13:36 during my time in the military i found sleeping in an unimogue troop transport going 80-100 pretty normal... that being said, it took some time getting used to
Great episode, like always.. thought provoking as well
I run a D&D campaign, and recently sent the adventurers to a tent-town held aloft by giant kites
One thing bothers me of sci-fi gigantic buildings and especially moving apparatus. They seem to forget that the heavier an entity is the weakest it becomes. Atomic cohesion does not get stronger and anything will collapse as a reaction to movement, much easier as they are bigger in size.
US Navy's Aricraft carriers is the closest thing in fact they each have their own postal code
i remember your first videos, now you have improved a lot on the sound and speech, keep going 💪
technically an O'neill cyclinder is a mobile country. so you've basically skipped a category until now. technically a gardener ship is a mobile planet. especially if you've sunk either into a sufficiently sized asteroid. technically an O'neill Cylinder could BECOME a gardener ship. also moving cities, I can't help but think of Howl's Moving Castle crawling over the land. and a mobile city could technically act as a seed ship.
on the smaller scale, I love the adorable appearance of tiny homes, even though I have way too much to ever live in one.
I think the guys who fell asleep in the tank were lulled by the vibration. stopping it would have woken them up if so.
one of the pictures, the two standing in the grass near the tank reminds me of the Cranberry Bog biome in Fallout 76, where you can find several half sunk military vehicles and camps because of how uneven the ground was, as well as multiple massive AA missile turrets to take care of one of the more dangerous creatures in the game, the scorched beast. Imagine a tank to massive building sized mutated plague breathing dragon bats. I thought you might find that thought amusing.
Surprised you didn't mention the cruise ship coming in 2024: Royal Caribbean International's Icon of the Seas is set to launch as the world's largest cruise ship in early 2024, measuring 365 meters long and weighing approximately 250,800 tons. Room for about 10,000 passengers and crew...
One of my favourites has to be the ship in Wall-e. The political undertones are just subtle enough to fit into a pixar film, but scathing enough to make the late and infamous Ted polish-spelling-makes-my-brain-hurt proud.
Your video popped in my recommended. I love your voice.
Been a while since I viewed your channel. Mobile cities are interesting. They're majestic from an aesthetic point of view, and a kind of interesting concept, but there needs to be a practicality or a need for such a thing. And I think that's all I have to say.
Mobile cities would be great for an alt-history sci-fi series where a nomadic empire like the Mongols became the dominant political powers on Earth, and then slowly expanded across the universe
*cough* Mortal Engines *cough*
They have moved smallish buildings before but it's difficult - they're usually moved by taking apart and re-assembling at the new site.
It has never existed IRL before so I think it has to be a sci-fi setting or a sci-fi element added to make the alternate history.
@@SuperFlamethrower…
You’re talking about moving structures that were built as permanent.
If mobility is part of the plan from the outset, you build your structures in a completely different way.
The ore/coal excavators can often be moved at least in some way. So larger than the ore trucks?
What is the sound of your city slowly breaking through a cloud layer on its way to higher altitude so it can bask in the sun? It sounds exactly like “Red Giant” by Stellardrone ❤️👍🏽👍🏽