QUOTE (Ogrebear @ Nov 17 2008, 01:20 PM)

Just a question for the details of a characters background.
The Source books suggest that Redmond when to hell very quickly after the Great Crash of 2029... what I wanted to ask was how fast a zone like that, which is currently quite rich could turn into a no-go Barrens as presented in the books?
A slow disintegration as the money/rich leave but taking time to collapse? The poor arrive slowly and over time as its clear the zone is empting.
A quick fall as the rich grab what they can and charge away from a zone full of dead tech and fallen dreams as a rise of the poor streams in?
How long would it take a rich American city/zone/suburb to descend into chaos?
Also can anyone suggest any good picture sources for the Redmond Barrens please!
According to New Seattle, Redmond's major industry was computers and when the Crash of 2029 hit, this industry was wiped out overnight. 80% of businesses collapsed and the local government failed to cope. The richest few escaped and the rest fell to rioting and lawlessness. Abandoned homes, offices and apartment buildings drew refugees from other parts of Seattle which exacerbated the exodus of the well to do, accelerating the cycle of abandonment. According to New Seattle, this turned Redmond into a ghost town of criminals, refugees and transients.
Now that's all the canon stuff. As to realism? Not going to comment, but if you want to be convinced by it. picture a small city of 500,000 people of which 80% of earners suddenly become unemployed. And remember that due to the Crash, there would have been a lot of financial turmoil of savings and shares anyway. And even if there hadn't been, the common US citizen is a creature of debt (try getting on in life without getting some these days). So you have a severe shock accompanied by desperation. You may know the old quote about civilisation being two meals away from barbarism. What would you do if you suddenly couldn't feed your family anymore? Now you might think that a widespread computer crash would be a good thing for those in the IT business. Well for some it probably was. But again, if you want to consider how it might not be, recall that this wasn't just any crash. It was a crash that for the most part, people weren't able to fix. Those computers just wouldn't uncorrupt, back-ups were already infected. It took a team of government geniuses with experimental technology to defeat the almost living thing that was the virus. And it killed some of them!
So that's kind of the background to the Redmond barrens. At least they didn't have a volcano erupt on them.

Hope that helps,
Khadim.