From:	Steve.Garrard@********.co.za (Steve Garrard)
Subject:	The new SR4 map (Contains Spoilers!)
Date:	Fri, 19 Aug 2005 10:58:39 +0200

Phillip Gawlowski wrote:
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> Graht wrote:
> <snip>
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> > Or, it was a major fragging earthquake on a scale that would have
> > knocked down every building in California and neighboring states.
> > That's not an earthquake with an epicenter, it's a massive
> drop/slip
> > along 300+ miles of faultline. At first it sounds like a
> cool idea,
> > until you start to think about it and the actual results of
> that much
> > energy being released.
> >
> > I'm gonna go with option 1 and say that he map is "not to scale" ;)
>
> I have a theory for you all paranoids...
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> [Spoiler Header: Do not read on if you are a player and not
> familiar with Threats 1 or Bedrohliche Sechste Welt! I *mean* it!]
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> Okay, my 0.02Nuyen:
>
> Actually, I got the idea (partly) from a German Shadowrun-Mailinglist:
> It was/will be Winternight.
>
> They are collecting nuclear warheads, and nobody knows what
> they want with those. They are working on ways to enhance
> them. They hate the Matrix (It being from Loki, and all).
> They hit California (for whatever reasons) with their nuclear
> arsenal and a lot of people get the Beserk-BTL chips (don't
> know how they are called in English), and hit major Matrix
> nodes, crashing it completely, forcing a wireless approach
> this time (after optic fibre in the aftermath of '29).
>
> The nukes split off a part of california.

Yeah, see this is where is gets a little gray. I can understand the argument
that something like this adds excitement and diversity to the game world,
and if they can provide a VERY good SR-specific explanation (like magic
cleanly cut the land away from the continent somehow, and the "island" was
then teleported to its new location, simultaneously teleporting the water at
the new location to the old location, so as to nullify the secondary effects
of such an upheaval), then I would be more inclined to accept it.

However I also understand the flipside, which is the real-world laws
argument. Any explosion with enough power to split a continent, fault lines
or no, is gonna devastate everything for hundreds of miles and probably
affect plates the world over. Tsunamis the size of China would sweep the
oceans and flood thousands and thousands of square miles of coastline across
the globe. The entire climate would likely shift. And all this is assuming
you could actually generate enough channeled explosive force to accomplish
the split in the first place.

While some here would argue that none of this matters because it's a game, a
storytelling exercise in a fantastical world, I would argue that while I
agree with that premise up to a point, there is the ever-present "suspension
of disbelief" that Kori mentioned. This is a term often used in Hollywood
pertaining to action films and the like. There is only so far you can push
the envelope of what people are willing to accept, in spite of what they
know, before they're all gonna start walking out of the theater. Hollywood
has the advantage of special effects to further stretch this boundary
(Independence Day, for example...big floating spaceships are ridiculous, but
they looked kinda cool and blew s**t up and we forgave them because of the
eye candy).

But when you start asking people to believe that something has not only
caused California to split from the continent, but also that this was
achieved in such an isolated way as to leave most of the planet unharmed,
well...


Slayer

"Beware my wrath, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup."
- Unknown Dragon



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