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Post by Attero Dominatus on Mar 31, 2010 18:46:37 GMT -5
I just did a caveman headtilt "hheeeeehhh??" lol. That is interesting. It is. All you would have to do is separate the methane from the water (this happens automatically as water pressure gets lower near the surface) and then compress or liquefy the methane to use as fuel.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Mar 31, 2010 18:57:40 GMT -5
The ship was large enough that the up and down motion of the sea did not seem to upset Phil Jordan’s stomach as the smaller boats always did. The ship was converted from a petroleum-hauling “supertanker” to a ship that mines the ocean floor for Methane Hydrate. MH existed in larger quantities than oil and ounce for ounce carried much more energy than natural gas.
The Pacific Fleet boasted two-dozen such vessels and the Atlantic Fleet fielded eighteen of them plus some smaller research ships. The importance of Methane Hydrate could not be overstated because the flow of oil from the Middle East had ended with the nuclear war. The war had been short but death toll had been higher than probably all previous wars combined.
Radiation levels around the world would take decades to return anywhere near normal background levels. Parts of the Middle East would likely take centuries to ever be habitable again. Entire major cities of the world had vanished in flashes of light, major parts of the history of the world gone.
The crazy Ayatollah had actually done it; he actually launched a nuke at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Did he really think the war would be over? Did he really think there would not be a response? Israeli submarines had been deployed and they soon learned the horrible truth, their homeland was destroyed. In response they each launched a dozen of their own nuclear warheads at major Islamic cities.
The jewish sailors had all cried, mourned and then made a pact that they would their duty. They would take as much of the Islamic world with them as they could.
Damascus and Tehran were just the first and hardest hit. The Israeli response continued on and on throughout the next several days. Cairo was smashed; the Suez Canal became a radioactive mess. The movement of ships through that major artery was over.
The largest and most important cities of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and others were obliterated. Baghdad was sent back to the dust.
The entire world had been in shock. The news updates had encouraged some countries to give up on nuclear weapons altogether. The image of radiation burns from “survivors” in outlying regions and the masses of refugees dominated television coverage for months. The oil from all of those countries was found to be tainted with radioactivity, the levels were unacceptable.
The United States and other countries went on a crash course drilling for oil and natural gas in their own countries where-ever it was possible. It soon became clear that something else was needed and a small company with a ship had proven it feasible to get MH from the ocean floor, if you could find it. Bounties were offered to companies that found it and collected it.
The world economies had crashed hard but hopes actually looked up until China struck out and invaded Taiwan, Russia invaded Georgia, Pakistan and India battled over Kashmir in a hot war and every other petty conflict became a military confrontation.
The problem is that the governments of the world were welfare states and the money had run out, there was nothing left to tax. There was no income to tax: there was no revenue to put into welfare programs. Cities erupted into riots, food production dwindled, starvation hit hard in Western Europe and North America, along with the rest of the world.
The United States was not much different than other places these days: it was now made up of hundreds of sovereign “countries”. Some of them were large while others were as small as personal estates. They all had one common enemy, the federal government. The federal government had little to no power left but it was always trying to reassert its power and authority.
The only parts of the country that gave any credence to the federal government were what used to be called the “northeast corridor”. In actual fact those socialist republics were attempting to use the heritage of the country against it, trying to use patriotism to spread their socialist slavery across North America. You could hear their radio broadcasts trying to appeal to “Americans” in pushing the idea of reunifying the country under the control of Washington DC. Everyone with a brain knew DC was nothing but their fanciest propaganda toy.
Phil Jordan checked his handheld readout to the screens on the ship, the metric tonnage of Methane Hydrate was well within parameters. Soon it would be time to fly to another such ship and run his inspections. Even his 2-seat aircraft used MH as a fuel, its engine was simple with no moving parts and it was as sleek as a fish. Its 3,000 mile range allowed it to fly almost anywhere in the Pacific, it could be refueled from the MH on the collecting vessels.
If the collection of MH dropped, it might encourage the Socialist States of America to use its military power to gain territory. Already some of the border republics were worried enough to make peace overtures and move heavy military units away from the border, so as not to lose them to the SSA in the first minutes of any attack.
((Just a rough idea of a beginning to get the backstory in there))
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Post by Floyd Looney on Mar 31, 2010 19:08:20 GMT -5
For now I am giving it the title "The Mandate"
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Mar 31, 2010 19:10:20 GMT -5
That is a very good idea!
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Post by Floyd Looney on Mar 31, 2010 19:19:27 GMT -5
I think it could shape up to be a pretty good story. I have to make sure the main characters aren't too similar. A farmer who is a member of the Reserve Air Guard is definitely one of them, I think I want that aircraft in the story for sure. They would likely be unmanned aircraft on both sides, but with smaller populations some types of technology would be less advanced than today. I'll have to think about that one.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Mar 31, 2010 21:26:13 GMT -5
There will always be situations where manned vehicles are needed. Unmanned vehicles are vulnerable to thinks like hacking and the limitations of computer technology (a computer cannot learn) and moral decisions obviously require a human.
And then yes, there is the correlation between population and technology. Especially after a total war or nuclear war where some technologies are 'lost' (though not necessarily forgotten).
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 1, 2010 12:09:05 GMT -5
Just the technology level needed to make affordable aluminum foil is pretty astounding. The things that would be lost to history in such a scenario includes a lot of conviences. I could very well see many people not having electricity in their homes while aircraft we would consider very advance today are mass produced. In my story idea the first 2 years after the Great Fall were the worst, large numbers die of starvation or even exposure in the winter.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 1, 2010 12:12:25 GMT -5
The MH is refined to methane right there on the ship, this allowed them to keep storage only for the product that would actually be used. MH was not the only source of fuel. The free lands were using every source of fuel they could get their hands on. Many vehicles still used gasoline refined from oil pumped out of the ground and from platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. There were some power plants that were still burning coal but all of the nuclear power plants had long since been shut down.
In fact much of the population did without much power at all, burning tree limbs for cooking fires. The movement of goods was limited and people were forced to grow their own food whenever possible. This often meant using a cow, mule or horse to pull a plow.
The population, in fact, had plummeted around the world. It seems as if much of the world had been living on the welfare of others. Now that there was no ‘others’ they had no ability to take care of themselves. There were months of riots and pitched battles across the country, it had taken less than a week for stores, shops and warehouses to be picked clean by looters.
Then those looters turned on each other.
There was a very lean first winter, bodies piled up where there was no-one to burn them. Nobody had the energy to do the job.
There was nothing to burn them with either. Entire forests and parks had been stripped, the animals hunted to near extinction. The humans followed them, those that could not find a way to leave to a “better” area.
Those who had lived in more rural areas found that canned goods were among the best currency and when those spoiled after a couple of years something would take their place.
Assuming you could defend whatever stash of food you had, those with families would do better and those who were too old to take care of themselves often made the best victims.
Those that survived the first two years of this managed to see some semblance of civilization return. Rudimentary electric service was restored, some water service restored to towns and even some wireless communications. The town center saw farmers setting up shop to sell their goods, no longer worrying about regulations and taxation.
They found that this was precious to them. There was peace and food and everyone agreed it would have to be defended. From whoever and whatever might threaten what they were doing they came together and created their own leagues. These were not “government” as it had been known. The survivors had rejected the notion that some omnipotent organization far away would run their lives better than they could.
Tony barely remembered the Great Fall or what had existed before, but he did remember being hungry. He did remember when there was nothing to eat but they had to dig and scrape at the ground whether there was energy or not. Now everything was better, there were hundreds of jars of preserved food in the pantry. Mom and his sisters were always busy managing their food supply, throwing out anything rotten and scheduling the oldest preserves to be eaten first.
Tony was happy to milk the cow and collect the eggs from the chicken coop; he never wanted to be hungry like that again. Dad had said the lean years so early might have stunted his growth but he wasn’t worried, he wasn’t ever planning to be hungry again.
He checked the bulletin board in the kitchen, it looked like the radishes, turnips, lettuce and tomatoes would need some care today. In fact the radishes should be ready to harvest, he always thought radishes were a good part of a salad or as a side for beans. Breakfast was often leftovers from dinner along with milk and eggs but Tony didn’t mind. His oldest brother and sister were always whining about the things they “use to” have, Tony always felt sorry for them.
Years after Dad had gone to the meeting in the city to help declare the Free Republic of Texas with its capitol in Tyler they had first gotten hooked up to the electric grid. They would listen to the radio some evenings and the newscasts explained that factories were coming online and that the ability to defend their liberty was the only purpose of their government.
Soon Dad had built a large barn in the far back part of the farm, on a concrete foundation after some work crews had dug a big hole. Tony had seen very few powered machines in his life and these big yellow tractors were marvelous to him. They didn’t need another barn, Tony knew, so what was going on?
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Apr 1, 2010 16:47:33 GMT -5
That is a good intro. I especially the description of how most of the death would be the result of starvation and inability of most people to exist without processed foods bought at a store.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 1, 2010 16:53:22 GMT -5
Oh yeah, the first couple of weeks and then the first winter are going to be the huge killers, followed by the diseases that can no longer be killed. Imagine all the people on kidney dialysis, they won't last 2 weeks probably.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Apr 1, 2010 16:54:10 GMT -5
Just the technology level needed to make affordable aluminum foil is pretty astounding. Yes indeed it is. Huge blocks of Aluminum get rolled down until it is a foil less than a millimeter thick. That needs a large factory of workers to run, and so does running the smelter that refines Aluminum from Bauxite ore, and Aluminum smelters need a lot of electricity to run their furnaces and that power needs to come from power stations, also run by entire crews of people. A power station needs either steam or water turbines and those have to be made in factories capable of precision manufacture and, and are milled from machines made in other factories. It is amazing how many steps there are for the manufacture of even the simplest item we take for granted.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 1, 2010 16:57:50 GMT -5
Yes it is amazing. Thinking about how this could ever rebuilt after a massive catastrophe is daunting. I think we will be without aluminum foil for a good while.
Did you see that Defiant6 left a post in the Storyboard section to his story Reunion?
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Post by Floyd Looney on Apr 1, 2010 17:11:34 GMT -5
The people who do survive would have to get use to living without electricity and even later possibly a very limited amount of it. They will never be able to take anything like infrastructure for granted or assume "the government" will be there for them. Even when things start to "get back to normal" years later there will be very little of the advanced medicines and health care and people will still be dying of diseases and problems thought eradicated.
Schools will be gone for a while and then they'll be teaching the basics to kids under 12 and thats probably as far as they'll be able to go for a while.
In my story idea, or narrative, the only thing the "government" if it can be called that, is designed to do is to protect them from foreign threats like the Socialist States of America and their puppet the resurrected "federal government". To this end everyone lends a hand, everyone is part of the "militia" and plays a part. Most of them, of course, would be called up when needed as foot soldiers but there will specialized troops as well, for artillery, armor and air forces.
All this is my idle speculation at this point I guess.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Apr 1, 2010 17:13:28 GMT -5
Have you ever watched Life After People? A car would become unusable after just a few years of inactivity and being left out in the weather.
A hydroelectric power station would continue running for up to six months after being abandoned.
A thermal power station (coal, natural gas, nuclear) would shut down just hours after being abandoned due to safety measures built into the system and would take several days to restart (and that is if it is still intact enough to run).
Wood frame buildings would fall apart in less than a decade (just look at some abandoned neighborhoods in Detroit and New Orleans even today).
If that stuff was intact, getting them up and running again would be tough.
It took several decades for Hiroshima and Nagasaki to get rebuilt because the contamination had to die down, and the weapons used on them are firecrackers compared to the 100kt-1200kt nuclear weapons existing today.
Atomic blasts alone do a lot of damage, but not nearly as much as the firestorms set off by the nuke flash and secondary sources (busted gas lines), so the damage from a nuclear war would be much more wide spread than most people would think.
Radioactive fallout would contaminate soil for decades, meaning the only places where you could grow crops would be upwind from the blast.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Apr 1, 2010 17:21:05 GMT -5
The people who do survive would have to get use to living without electricity and even later possibly a very limited amount of it. They will never be able to take anything like infrastructure for granted or assume "the government" will be there for them. Even when things start to "get back to normal" years later there will be very little of the advanced medicines and health care and people will still be dying of diseases and problems thought eradicated. Schools will be gone for a while and then they'll be teaching the basics to kids under 12 and thats probably as far as they'll be able to go for a while. In my story idea, or narrative, the only thing the "government" if it can be called that, is designed to do is to protect them from foreign threats like the Socialist States of America and their puppet the resurrected "federal government". To this end everyone lends a hand, everyone is part of the "militia" and plays a part. Most of them, of course, would be called up when needed as foot soldiers but there will specialized troops as well, for artillery, armor and air forces. All this is my idle speculation at this point I guess. That is a very good idea. I suggest having the people in your story commit themselves to avoiding any centralized infrastructure. If the government can control your water supply and sewage service, they can starve you and infect you.
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