My suspension of disbelief got all stretched out and now it's ruined!
I just got google earth so of course the first thing I did was go to Seattle and see what things would look like acording to shadowrun cannon. Things look dumb.

Please open the linkhere, Renraku Ark 3d

I'm going to run the Renraku Shutdown soon and GE has this cool 3D building feature if you turn it on you get to see the buildings and also the terrain in 3d. You can also draw your own vector paths and shapes with some limited 3d right in the browser So I looked in the book and got the stats for the Arc.

I got the footprint from the map in the old Seattle Source book and the stats for hight 969 meters, from the same book. I've tried this a couple of different ways now and I always come up with the same thing, A monsterous building that you can see from space.

I think the ark is cool and "300 floors" is an interesting Idea but seriously I don't think the earth's crust would take the mass of a building this big.

The pic I uploaded is big and it's a .tiff I'll make a lower resolution jpeg and a couple of different views tomorrow.

What do you think?

Nice, but you got the shape wrong.
The SCIRE is not block-shaped but instead looks like a pyramid with the tip cut off - which drastically reduces volume and weight compared to block shape.

keep in mind that it's not just 300 stories plopped on the street. as i recall, it extends about 300 stories down into the earth, too. as for the earth's crust not being able to handle the weight, who knows. i'm no architectologist, but it seems to me that with 300 stories' worth of basementage, you could do a whole lot of weight distribution.

Seems to me that if a person is willing to accept troll physiology, move-by wire systems etc. a really big building would be a piece of cake. If I needed to, I would justify it with some bs babble about "carbon-torus construction," "breakthroughs in foamed aluminum," "real-time mass-adjusters" and so on until everyone's eyes glazed over, then shrug and say "It's the future, they've developed technology that we haven't thought of."

There's a couple of engineers who post on here sometimes. I hope one of them weighs in.

By the way, I did a similar sort of thing, but the old-fashioned pen and pencil way, and I used my home town to put things in perspective for my friends. Among other things, we figured that in rush hour, it would take over 45 minutes to drive past the Arc, and on a clear day, you could see it from the next city....

It's an arcology, the whole premise is that a city can be built inside a single enclosed space with no need for outside resources for any population up to some maximum occupancy.

If you don't like that, don't look up the Tokyo pyramid either.

How does the crust of the Earth support a mountain? I think the Arc is safe. And yes I know the mountain is still part of the crust. The crust is really thick, the load gets distributed, and the crust is supported underneath by some very high density stuff.

Yeah, I'm one of the engineers.

I think we are already building 500m+ high buildings that have a really smaller footprint.

From my small geological knowledge, the Earth Crust has nothing to do in handling the mass of the Arcology. It's the ground between the rock foundation ( what might be called the crust ) and the bottom of the Arcology that is important. You don't build something that huge on sand. ( usually you try to get some pillars anchored into the rock... but when it's not possible you make it so the building won't become the next Pisa Tower. )

Yes, your cube looks about right. The key part I think you're forgetting, though, is the equation for pressure: F/A. The gigantic base means it probably doesn't exert as much pressure as modern skyscrapers. Unfortunately, I'm having difficulty finding typical skyscraper bases, otherwise I'd be able to make a better statement here.

~J

Frank Lloyd Wright proposed a mile tall tower called The Illionois. See some info on wiki here.

Maybe an interesting thing to do would be to add a box for the theoretical Illinois next to your theoretical Arcology...

The design is architecturally feasible in general, if you do some handwaving and assume certain things about the structure. The devolpers didn't pull arcologies out of their butts. Some have actually been designed, although none have been built; the limitation is funding rather than physics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_City

Perhaps you would like to read this thread...

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...opic=9956&st=25


In a discussion quite similar to that, Nindaru posted this link, which displays his view on the ark, compared with canon images

http://rezcook.homeip.net/renraku.html


(Edited parts in italic.)

Hi, working on an 11 step design, looks alot better than the cube.

I have been aware of the Archology theory, IIRC an Italian came up with the idea sometime befor the turn of the 20th cent.

One of the coolest things is that ships can pull right inside from Eliot bay.

The idea isn't quite that old, but it was an Italian.

~J

Sorry this took me so long

If you're still interested look that this link:http://home.comcast.net/~hardwire001/Shado...RenrakuArc.html

Anyone recall the huge size of arcolgy's from Sim City 2000?

I think that possibly one of the other issues that makes that look way out of scale is that there will be other buildings in the 200+ story range making it look a lot less out of place in the skyline.

I'm working on puting more shadowrun buildings downtown. If anyone is interested I'll post them in google earth live or put some pics up on my webpage.

Did anyone have any trouble with the web page or opening the pics? That's the first thing I've ever done with itl.

if you use google earth clap your hands; seriously I'd like to know if anyone else uses GE and also if there is anything out there that does the same thing but better.

thanx

i've toyed with GE, mainly trying to find places in Korea where i was stationed. this is a good, interesting use for the program.

Honestly I didn't know what to expect. I've read about the 100 meter building, I've seen the B&W picture in the sourcebook. I kind of dissmissed the stuff about chaneling sunlight through the building to light the neighborhood to the west. I was just surprised at scale of the thing when I did the GE mockup.

I live in a small city, our down town core in SLC is less then a quarter mile square. I come from a small town, have no idea what those people downtown do. The population of the finished Arc is about 100,000 you could, in terms of land space fit our whole down town core inside the Arc. Again I have no concept of what that many people could be doing. That many people working and living in one building for one company makes me feel... Sick is the only word that comes to mind. I just don't understand.

Started working with Google's Sketchup to get some better looking models. I'm working on the Fuchi towers, Mitsuhama complex, Aztechnology compound, and a new and improved Arc with landing pads and stuff.

Check back in this thread over the next several weeks for updates and post if you can think of details and requests that need to be included

Are there any other cannon buildings in the seattle skyline over 350 meters?

Right now I have the talles Fuchi tower at 650 and one of Mitsuhama's at 400

I'm guessing the Aztech pyramid would rank up there.

to add to what hyzmarca said, an arcology basically is a small town--or, more accurately, a neighborhood in a big city. as for what all those people do, a lot of them simply support everyone else. more people means more fast-food restaurants, more drugstores, more shopping malls, more everything. you can't walk two blocks in Pittsburgh without passing a Subway, it's ridiculous. it takes me five minutes to stroll from one Wendy's to the next.

I can understand where OneTrikPony is coming from. I'm from a small town, 'bout a thousand people. Without first-hand experience, it's hard to imagine such infrastructure. I remember when I moved into the city, and realized that I could walk all day without stepping on soil. There's a network of tunnels and skywalks here that still kinda fascinates me.

Trying to imagine large-scale things that you haven't seen can be really difficult. When I first went to Hawai'i I was surprised that you can't see the other islands on the horizon. But when I get visitors here, they are a little shocked that you can drive for six hours through a forest from one town to the next.

It helps to remember that buildings like the arc are mostly made of air. Hollow, that is. Think of it like those giant ships, aircraft carriers and the like. They still float. Strength of construction is one thing, but what's really important is the ratio of strength to weight.

One real problem with arcolog design is light transmission. An interesting fact of designing large buildings is that only the area that can be sunlit is considered habitable. All the rest of the interior of the building is religated to elevators, bathrooms, utilities and the like. You see, artificial lighting drives people crazy. It's simple and true. Apparently it's not the quality of the light (you could make a light bulb that gave off the same exact light as the sun) but the random variance of the light, the way sunlight isn't constant, that does it. As far as I know, no one has tried simulating this aspect, but there it is. So a building is only inhabitable as far as reasonable light levels transmit into it. A good estimation of that is twice as far in as the floor to ceiling height.

as you can see, this would result in a lot of unihabitable space in the renraku ark, unless they discovered something. I'm working on the theory that the arc had a program that simulated weather's effects on the artificial lighting in public areas, or they had some handwaving opaque light transmitting material like how they said it doesn't cast half the city in shadow.

That's… I think you're putting some of that rather strongly. Researchers have done, among other things, studies that involved keeping people in zero-natural-light environments (for biological clock experiments) for months on end, and no craziness has ensued. That said, natural light is certainly considered desirable.

~J

Yes, I am prone to exageration.

replace "crazy" in the above post with "really unhappy" then. And crazyness may not have ensued in every test subject of the experiments you mentioned, but I've been lead to beleive it did happen to some.
From our standpoint, even if 90% of the population could handle it, the 10% of the population that can't is too great of a liability.
Regardless of long or short term effects on a person's sanity, the productivity of employees in areas that lack natural light falls so drastically that even corporations have to care about providing nice places to work.

They have some special material in the Arc that transmits natural light not only into it but also through it so "it doesn't cast half the city in shadow".

EDIT- They also have an indoor park on every residental floor.

Also, keep in mind the number of workers who won't be processing anything coming through their optic nerve anyway.

~J

re: natural light, there are mood disorders which are treated with natural light, or at least with very expensive lamps which simulate natural light. without an hour or so of certain types of UV rays, some people are more prone to depression.

as for artificial lighting, even if it were true that it drives people crazy/unhappy, it's not like people who live in an arcology are stuck in one area, never able to see the outside world. even if they never leave the building, simply going shopping is likely to take them past a few windows.

Lots of workplaces nowadays have no natural light. People would need regular doses, sure, but they could get them at home or in the parks or whatever. That'd greatly cut down on the amount of work needed to do the light-piping thing. Put all your hospitals, factories and other places that are often windowless anyway in the core areas, and residential stuff on the perimeters and whatnot.

What about high-definition wallscreens showing real-time images of outdoors? That'd probably offset some of the psychological problems.

Maybe. Depends on the nature of the problem.
If there's some need inside us to simply know that we're outside and connected to nature, then yeah, the placebo won't work. But if it's just that your visual brain gets stressed when the lights aren't variable enough, then the screens would help.
I'd have to know more about the studies that were mentioned.

I certainly don't prefer natural light. I sought an overnight schedule and I like the winter best because I leave for work when it's dark, I get off work when it's dark, and I sleep when it's light out.

For the next 3 months, give or take, I'll see unimpeded natural light (that is, not through closed binds, drawn drapes, or a combination of the two) very, very rarely. And I don't miss it.

Of course, I am reputedly odd, and I doubt you could find an entire archology's worth of people like me easily.

=============

As for what everyone actually does, there's no reason why all but large-sized manufacturing can't be done in the SCIRE. I work a tele-services job -- I answer the phone. I doesn't matter if I'm in India, I can do that for the USA (oh, wait, they do...). Similarly, accounting doesn't have to be done on-site, when all the data you work with is stored on computer. There are two primary industries (those that bring in external money, as opposed to a secondary industry that recycles money in the community, like a fast food place) right there that could very easily be done from anywhere, so why not SCIRE?

As mentioned earlier, some things are much cheaper per unit if you can do alot of it. Utilities are certainly one of them. They usually have Large fixed costs that slowly increase with area served, and relativly small costs per unit delivered.

Actually the concept of an Arch. is VERY macro. Not cities, communities. And contrary to popular belief, not self sustaining, more like self supporting. Ansari's ideas of community, and in an even larger scale, civilization are far more important to the concepts of his design then building a 1m max occp. super structure.
Natural light would be, btw, a major point of design, mostly by good layout of use areas, and applications of light wells. Never mind the long term cost saving of natural light, and never mind the moral boost a window out gives.
Which is why, after looking at the SCIRE, I got a bit of a chuckle on how, badly it would have been designed. I have to give the writers props for what they did though, as its a monumental task to even layout a basic use framework for 1k people.

On a side note, the man is a GOD when it comes to social physiology and organic design. I had the good fortune to attend a lecture (wow, I sound old suddenly) by him and the things he said about how people move, and work-ways and the importance of centralization in design where just mind expanding. *end awe struck rant*

I'm more worried about the HUGE FLOATING CAMERA.

And one study that I can recall at the moment involved lighted visors that simulated different levels of natural light, and it involved productivity and mood studies. Sorry, no linkage, it was a while ago.

Your thinking of SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Hmmm. That sounds interesting, but I'm almost certain that it was straight up study of the effects of lighting on productivity, and the mood stuff was only looked at as it contributed to productivity. IIRC, shortly after the study concluded, the "moon visor" or whatever the heck they called it came out and looked like it might become a fad...and never did.

SAD is the one about "depressed in winter, happy in summer", right? I never understood that. It's 35F here, and I'm giddy.

edit: Oh, and dang it, I keep forgetting to mention..

Thanks OneTrik for the GE images. Those are cool, and now you've gotten me interested in laying out the SR world. Now if I only had time...

Its actually more prevalent the farther north you go. Less sun per day. And please note that the 'sun lamps' used in SAD therapy are not normal incandescent lights, they generate a fairly specific spectrum of color to simulate natural light.

Come on mfb, you must have had some sort of circumstance where you went with out seeing the sun for a few days. It sure as hell made me grumpy(-er then normal).

I've done it. No ill effects. By contrast, though, I've got some 1000 watt metal halide lamps in my basement back home for the hydroponic peppers I grow, and spending any amount of time in there when they're on makes me feel like it should be a bright summer day somewhere in the 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM range—it can be pleasant at times to just go stand in there for a few minutes.

I'm not aware of any special frequency distribution for SAD lamps, just an unusual brightness.

~J

I'm usually a night owl, and sometime can go weeks at a time without seeing sunlight. Doesn't bother me either way.

There are plenty of people not affected by SAD, but enough who are to make it valid.
I work in mental health, and depression related incidences peak in December. (It's 1647 right now, and the sun has just set.) I think that episodes of mania peak in the summer, but I don't have numbers on that.

Well, December also has that whole "holiday season" thing going against it.

~J

Like I said, it may be that 95% of people would be fine under those circumstances. It's just that you can't tell until you put the person in the circumstance, and a 5% chance that a work environment will drive someone batty enough to cause problems is an unnacceptable risk.

It's also been shown in several tests that increasing natural light increases employee productivity, expressed happyness, and company loyalty. Students in schools with more natural light get better grades. These are studies and not experiments, so causation is just a guess. but I'm a little hard pressed to think of a mechanism whereby good grades increase the natural light in a school.