Super Setting: The Occidental Ultrapolis

[Sojobo]

This is a setting thread for my Smörgåsbord Supers M&M3e PBP game. Players of the game and worthy lurkers, feel free to post and discuss setting elements for the Occidental Ultrapolis, a mega-region that comprises pretty much all the interesting bits - real and fictional - of the West Coast of the United States, from Seattle all the way down to San Diego.

Posts/topics that have been approved and considered "officially canon" will be linked below, with a Canon label somewhere at the top; all other topics are considered "under discussion".

Canon Subjects:

Cities
Crescent City: City of Spires (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showpost.php?p=15279704&postcount=14) - ripleycat

[Sojobo]

A placeholder post in the unlikely situation I run out of space in the OP.

[Emperor Ing]

Random thought: Having run out of vertical real-estate to build its infrastructure, businesses and land-developers have begun the process of developing both structures that dig underground as well as creating so-called Heavenscrapers, enormous towers miles tall, and thick enough in diameter to enclose a whole town. So tall are they that residents who live in the upper levels have their own time-zones (though generally the difference isn't more than a few minutes.) Due to ease of access as a result of subterranean construction, geothermal power is ubiquitous, and a few prototype Nuclear Fusion plants supply what remains of the city's power demand. Other power sources exist like fossil fuel, nuclear fusion, wind, and solar, but it's supplemental and statistically insignificant.

Food demand is met by the widespread use of vertical farms, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming) the majority of which are privately owned by large agricultural firms whom have managed to turn them profitable. The remaining are usually owned by family farms or a number of them.

[Sojobo]

Oops sorry, I think there is a tonal misunderstanding. By "ultrapolis" I don't mean like a cyberpunk futuristic city, I was just coming up with a bigger term than "megalopolis," which is simply an urbanized region that comprises multiple cities and their suburbs. Like how the Northeast Megalopolis is Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington,DC, and that clearly isn't one gigantic continuous city.

Basically take the modern day West Coast and all its major cities, plus all the fictional cities we'll be dropping in there as well, and fill in most of the "empty" space between them with suburbs.

Edit: Though I like the idea of a Heavenscraper. Maybe there is a city thats fairly futuristic in its urban planning, and is basically one of these super arcologies?

[ripleycat]

Oops sorry, I think there is a tonal misunderstanding. By "ultrapolis" I don't mean like a cyberpunk futuristic city, I was just coming up with a bigger term than "megalopolis," which is simply an urbanized region that comprises multiple cities and their suburbs. Like how the Northeast Megalopolis is Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington,DC, and that clearly isn't one gigantic continuous city.

Basically take the modern day West Coast and all its major cities, plus all the fictional cities we'll be dropping in there as well, and fill in most of the "empty" space between them with suburbs.

Edit: Though I like the idea of a Heavenscraper. Maybe there is a city thats fairly futuristic in its urban planning, and is basically one of these super arcologies?

Hmm. Well, there's a pretty big gap in between Sacramento and Portland. Maybe there's a large city on the far northern California coast? In among the redwoods, have it be very green (technologically speaking), all about building vertically, minimizing the spatial footprint of the city as much as possible?

[Emperor Ing]

Most of what I mentioned isn't even that futuristic, and we've been using Geothermal power for years. I was just thinking that if we're gonna have a city that stretches from San Diego to Seattle somebody, somewhere, I think, would have wanted to build unusually massive skyscrapers.

[Sojobo]

I disagree with that reasoning - with all that space, there wouldn't be a need for too much urban verticalization.

HOWEVER, I want a gigantic Heavenscraper, geothermally powered and nuclear powered, symbol of man's technological hubris, in this setting because the idea is just too awesome, and also because I want to threaten it with a gigantic interdimensional kaiju.

Also, a minimal footprint city in the redwoods sounds fantastic too.

[Emperor Ing]

I disagree with that reasoning - with all that space, there wouldn't be a need for too much urban verticalization.

If that is so then I would question why even have a country-sized city. Verticalization is the very reason cities are built in the first place.

[SuperCracker]

I was under the impression that this isn't one super duper mega city, but rather a region that we're guarding. It helps to have variety, so that not every adventure is a mega-urban one.

EDIT: Just my argument against extreme verticalization everywhere.

[Sojobo]

Yup, its a region, not one big city. The Northeast Megalopolis isn't one big city - there are little towns and stretches of natural areas all over the place. So the Occidental Ultrapolis is, like I said, the modern day West Coast - plus all the stuff you guys would want to pepper in. The idea is to promote variety.

[Emperor Ing]

Yeah I was kinda under the impression the entire West Coast became one giant city. And knowing California, Oregon, and Washington State like I do, that'll never happen :smalltongue:

Still, Heavenscrapers! **** yeah! :smallbiggrin:

[Grinner]

Outsider's opinion: A massive city the size of California sounds really really cool. You're playing a superhero game anyway, so it's not like absolute verisimilitude is a priority.

[RossN]

While a country sized city could be fun I also want scope for rural and even wilderness plots ("So that explains all those Bigfoot sightings...") so I'm happy to leave things more as is.

[ripleycat]

Crescent City: City of Spires

Canon

http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k218/ripleycat/redwoods_by_SansCosm_zps7bbeb8b1.jpg
http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k218/ripleycat/c00cbd53b7e33d11d7053775ae3b2239-d4qcrtd_zpsf0a26d82.jpg

So, this is Crescent City (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crescent_City,_California) (The link, not the picture up there. That's Hong Kong.) It's about as far north as you can get and still be in California. It's been settled since the 1850's. Around 7-8,000 people live there today. It's never been a particularly large city. But here's the thing; there's no reason it couldn't have been. It's in a popular place for tourism, has a great harbor, and it's a hub for fishing and lumber. Big cities have grown up from much less.

So in a world a bit different from this one, Crescent City, "The Redwood Gate to the Golden State," is a couple of magnitudes larger than the real one. Somewhere around 900,000 people call it home. It's a tourist hotspot and a trade hub, and has a bit of a chip on its shoulder about being compared to Emerald City and San Francisco. It has a bunch of historical landmarks, good and bad neighborhoods, a traditionally terrible MLB franchise, all the things you'd expect from a big city. It's the Pacific Northwest, so it rains a lot. Pretty standard stuff.

So, all is well, except... (and I stole this from the real world, because when you get a golden opportunity for natural disasters you take it) the topography of the seafloor around Crescent City has the effect of focusing tsunamis. The city's been hit by 31 of them since the 1930's. Most didn't do much, they were small, as these things go.

But... in 1964, a 9.2 magnitude earthquake (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Friday_Earthquake) struck Alaska. It was the second most powerful earthquake in recorded history. It produced a tsunami, which traveled down the coast, striking Crescent City several hours later. It hit the city in several waves, the last of which was over 20 feet tall. It killed 12 people, destroyed nearly 300 buildings and 1000 vehicles, demolished the fishing fleet, flooded 60 blocks of town and totally destroyed 30 of them.

And that was the real world, in a city of less than 10,000 people. So let's take a second to imagine the scale of the destruction when that tsunami strikes our fictional Crescent City, with 100 times the population and all the buildup that implies. It was one of the worst disasters in history, rivaling events like the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Thousands died, and huge portions of the city were utterly destroyed. The outlying, low-lying areas suffered the worst, many of them completely submerged by the wall of water that swept through.

When thoughts finally turned from recovery to rebuilding, the city fathers of Crescent City looked upward. They pulled back from the vulnerable flat areas, focusing more on what passed for high ground. Huge skyscrapers, secure and deeply anchored, were the new building of choice. If Crescent City were struck again, its citizens would be able to climb above the water, ride it out like the trees of the forests around them did.

So from this new direction comes Crescent City's reputation as the "City of Spires." Like New York in the '20s and '30s, there are races to build ever higher. This being the Northern California Coast, there's a lot of emphasis on green tech, building with materials that try to keep the environment intact. Vertical farms become popular, with the city growing much more of its own food than other comparable metropolises. The tsunamis continue to come, a fact of life. A bad one hits in 2005, and yet another in 2011, caused by the earthquake in Japan. In both cases, the city fares much better than it did in 1964. They're kind of a macabre punchline in CC, like LA and SF are with earthquakes. After both of the recent disasters, truly massive building projects were unveiled. Buildings rising a mile into the sky, colossal engineering feats, more arcology than skyscraper.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c5/Dubai_City_Tower.jpg

The Hewitt Building is the first of these megastructures to be completed. made of six outer buildings around a central core, It has space for more than 75,000 residents as well as offices for corporate tenants, and is a hair over 5,000 feet tall, making it easily the tallest structure in the world, at least for now. Builders in Crescent City and elsewhere around the world have already set their sights on bypassing the Hewitt. Hieronymus King, CEO of Majestic Industries and the moving force behind the equally massive Kingdom Towers, a pair of linked heavenscrapers, has vowed that his project will take the "world's tallest" record for itself when construction wraps up next year.

[Sojobo]

I'm in love with this City of Spires. I'm willing to stamp it Canon; ripleycat, you're basically the curator of Crescent City's entry if people want to suggest additions, edits, etc. For clarity, could you put a bolded title, something like Crescent City: City of Spires or something at the top, and a Canon label below it or whatevs?

If people want to start referencing Crescent City, they can link its post.

[ripleycat]

Done and done. Thanks, boss. :smallwink:

[fireinthedust]

(lots of west coast love, gotta blend in and not push too hard that I'm from the eastern seaboard and know nothing about the west coast save that everything is solar powered, lots of earth quakes, pot is really legal, and oddly that one time I went to vancouver I had to pay seven dollars(!!!) for a white hot chocolate from a major chain ergo everything is expensive... play it cool, skybolt, gotta fly casual)

Hmmm, sounds good.

Thing is, if we're doing a whole coast we may lose focus on developing one area (ie: how Gotham and Metropolis are fairly well known with neighbourhoods). We'll need one place where, y'know, stuff happens. Sure, New York exploding is bad, but you know it's really bad when Darkseid is attacking the Daily Planet in Metropolis. That's home.

We could use landmarks: statue of liberty, daily planet building, arkham asylum, that sort of thing. Places that mean something to us.


Also: The Skytower is a mega building. It houses Skytech, and the top floors are Skybolt's personal playground. Other floors are used by the firm for various activities (R&D, but also office work) and the entire building is powered by a clean-burning super engine. Skybolt's work wasn't the first in the field, but it's genius stuff, and really set the standard for future development.

[fireinthedust]

I have a city where I put my comics. I call it Tomorrow City. If we're doing the coastal piece, I'd like Skybolt to be based there. It was founded by futurists looking to build their own city. It's got a history of super science weirdness, nuclear everything, and giant apes, robots, rocket packs and brain-monsters.