Setting:Nutopia/Locations/Oasis

Oasis

A Settlement in Motion

Formatting In Progress. Part of the Nutopia Project

What

Oasis, first and foremost, is a city of trade. Spreading the bounty of delvers into the faltering settlements in the desert in exchange for unfinished goods and materials to be broken down into still more wonders. The Oasis trainyards have lost some of the hustle and bustles of its hyper-automated heyday, but the vast warehouses teem with organic and mechanized alike, each one looking for a better score or a new buyer (or sucker).

Where

Sprawling in the low-built scrublands in the uncertain border between megacity and the encroaching desert, Oasis is the first sight of NewJ for many inlanders and the very last glimpse of home for those poor bastards who never make it back. This settlement crouches on and around the bones of the massive intermodal transportation systems, the first connection in the webs of roads and Mag-Lines rooting New J to the continent.

Why = hooks

Those looking for work in the city of motion will not have to search very far. Raider assaults on mag trains are common and deadly, so operators are often perfectly happy to hire on a well armed delver crew or several to work security if they’re expecting trouble. The proximity of Oasis to the Saharan Proving Grounds has also opened up an unexpected market. The S.P.G. are chock full of rare military technology, and much of it is still active. Big assault ‘bots can be found roaming along patrol paths long ago rendered pointless. This has led to an interesting phenomenon, what amounts to extremely dangerous big game hunting. Curious and cocky delvers who’ve struck it rich and have nothing better to do come to Oasis as a launching point for their demented high octane safaris and are often in the market for guides who know the area. Local delvers can make a tidy profit helping the big shots find and bag a rare ‘bot, and they often get a pick of some of the nice stuff they find along the way.

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original fluff/chaff beyond this point. needs formatting and picking.

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Orginal work by teka, n_f and others, some formatting(which is breaking, sorry) by quicksilver to get us to this point. teka 07/15/09(Wed)04:37 No.5166880

hmm.. a community-city on the outskirts of the ruined metropolis..

Oasis, City of Motion.

Sprawling in the low-built scrublands in the uncertain border between megacity and the encroaching desert, Oasis is the first sight of many inlanders. This settlement crouches on and around the bones of massive transportation systems, the first connection in the webs of roads and Mag-Lines rooting New J to the continent.

Oasis, first and foremost, is a city of trade. Spreading the bounty of delvers into the faltering settlements in the desert in exchange for unfinished goods and materials to be broken down into still more wonders. The Oasis trainyards have lost some of the hustle and bustles of its hyper-automated heyday, but the vast warehouses teem with organic and mechanized alike, each one looking for a better score or a new buyer (or sucker)

Need to move millions of units of expiring ammunition recovered from a newly breached Silo? You can find a soldier or representative willing to talk. Eager to trade recovered corporate databases and, rarest of all, hard copy information for the annoyingly simple necessities that your own tiny Delver town just cant make for itself? well.. Our man from the office will be glad to look over what your had in mind.

~*~ I dunno, just some thoughts. Based, funny enough, on the development of what I have heard called reef-towns in central/southern Texas. Simple, really, in their formation. A major shipping line, major rail line and various trucking concerns get together, bully the tiny local government of a barely existing town into giving tax breaks and the like, then settle down and build a major trans-shipment hub in the middle of nowhere, where land is cheap, instead of trying to force into current dockside properties. Container ships are offloaded directly onto double-stacked trains, all of the product moved out with minimal (expensive) handling and ran from a few miles to a few hundred miles away to be handled and processed, warehoused and reshipped. This creates a pinch-point in the roads and rails outside of real cities, a company town squatting next to vast warehouses and trucking depots. With populations getting ever-larger, hungrier and land-grabbing, I can only see this trend continuing. The industry-side term used is "Intermodal Facility", which still simply means big place with rail lines and airports and highways all pinched together to handle product moving in any direction. In the (grimdark) future of Nutopia I can only see this trend growing.

Can also see a place like my proposed Oasis becoming a center for the people who, in the end, are tasked with making sure things actually get where they are going.. soo.. maybe a little armed convoy/roadtrain action breaking past Raider barricades.. after all, the people who Survive are going to need someplace to come home to, and spend their danger-pay at. so elements of grungy port-city without being near water? <Teka 11:56, 12 August 2009 (UTC)

OASIS HOOKS Nutopia Flufffag 07/15/09(Wed)16:31 No.5169789 Those looking for work in the city of motion will not have to search very far. Raider assaults on mag trains are common and deadly, so operators are often perfectly happy to hire on a well armed delver crew or several to work security if they’re expecting trouble. The proximity of Oasis to the Saharan Proving Grounds has also opened up an unexpected market. The S.P.G. are chock full of rare military technology, and much of it is still active. Big assault ‘bots can be found roaming along patrol paths long ago rendered pointless. This has led to an interesting phenomenon, what amounts to extremely dangerous big game hunting. Curious and cocky delvers who’ve struck it rich and have nothing better to do come to Oasis as a launching point for their demented high octane safaris and are often in the market for guides who know the area. Local delvers can make a tidy profit helping the big shots find and bag a rare ‘bot, and they often get a pick of some of the nice stuff they find along the way.

    * the stuff I mentioned looking for in the wiki proper <Nutopia Flufffag 12:38, 12 August 2009 (UTC):

Delvers and guns from all over the continent eventually pass through the tangled roads and lev lines at some point in their careers. Oasis is the northern tip of the triumvirate of NewJ’s major settlements, and thusly is the first most see of the massive southern megacity. Oasis’ largest feature is the Anansi Hub, the massive routing and loading station from which all roads and levs entering the city sprout or terminate.

The hustle and bustle of Oasis leads to a naturally brisk and somewhat unruly settlement. The unruliness can at times escalate to violence, but the powers that be in Oasis know that running gun battles are not good for commerce. Telling to people to check their arms at the gates is a little unrealistic for a settlement that has a burgeoning arms trade, so instead the merchants have formed the Anansi Defenders. Wishing to keep fatalities to a minimum and hoping not to damage merchandise or prospective customers Anansi men typically carry a wide variety on non-lethal armaments. Any delver worth his salt can find work with these black clad soldiers keeping the peace with a break open gas launcher in one hand and a stun prod in the other.

A massive trunk of lev lines three layers deep shoots north arrow straight from Anansi, gleaming in the African sun. These raised silver lanes are the Mainline that cuts Africa in half, terminating at Tunisia, where it becomes the Pillars of Heraclese, the truly awesome shining span crossing the whole of the Mediterranean, crossing Europe towards Brusselsphere.

Making the trip from Oasis to Brusselsphere can be an adventure all its own. The three decks of the mainline are comprised of the lower two freight lines and the upper “Sun Line” passenger route. Leaving from Oasis passengers will first be greeted by the jungles of the Congo, speeding through the canopy while guards keep a watchful eye out for some of the nastier bioforms. Once they’ve broken clear of the jungle there’s usually little to worry about save for the occasional raider blockade, but when the reach the Saharan Proving Grounds things get a little more interesting. Here the trains will typically meet up with a CAP patrol of VTOL craft from junkyard who will escort them to Tunisia and the Pillars. Should such support be unavailable then it is up to the guards and passengers to defend the train from raiders and ‘bots who have broken free of the restraints that kept the line safe in the past. Reaching the Pillars the trains begin the quiet and frankly beautiful crossing into Europe’s blasted cities. Crossing the large crater that was once the Sicilian space port and into Italy proper the line skirts the edge of Vatican lands (attacks from this quarter are very rare, but not entirely unheard of) through the huge factory plains of Germany and on into the routing stations at Brusselsphere. From here passengers and goods can find passage to England, or down through towards Spain and the coastal African/European Gibraltar Line, and from there they can find air or sea travel to North America. One can even, if they for some reason wished to expose themselves to that benighted place, take the lonely line that arcs towards the Russian Resource Zone and ultimately to Novaya Sibir.