Making Roads?

[slade2501]

Rifts Earth needs more roads. Even medieval peasants had rudimentary roads, and the Romans had some of the best roads in the world. If forests are commonplace Roads and trails would have to be made through them. Between the Rhino military bulldozer, the Roadhammer and the Pathmaker, to say nothing of giant robots it should be fairly easy to make and keep open even the most basic dirt road between settlements or towns. And necessary too. Not everyone can afford flight capable transport. Some simply have to cart it the old fashioned way with animals or wheeled vehicles, which simply cannot handle any kind of serious woodland terrain. How about literally blazing a trail with weapons fire? Baking the earth and atomizing the vegetation in a wide path. Do it on a rainy day and it won't even start a forest fire! Give it the old GM hand-wave and say Sure, that works. Cause why not? Real governments and militaries have done WAY dumber things.

And what about bridges? do we have rules for building bridges? I have been watching footage of WW2 soldiers from various armies building bridges with specialized vehicles or even natural materials and moving tanks across. The movement of any significant supplies requires roads of some kind. Yes Northern Gun has hover trains and such but even they require empty non-tree laden space to pass through or a bridge to cross in some circumstances. and what about the great Mississippi river? In some places its over a mile wide! How do we manage that both as players or as Gms?

[darthauthor]

Good Ideas.

I'd reward players for using skills like Engineer and caprentry.

Earth Warlock would be the king of this, especially if they summon an Earth elemental.

I'm sure there is a nature loving mage out there somewhere who can move trees around.

It reminds me of Afghanistan.
Their system of justice and health care changed when allied forces built roads that turned a 6 hour trip, one way, to the sheriff/doctor to 30 minutes or less.
Not hard to image that bad guys wouldn't like it if law enforcement could be in pursuit of them in under an hour.

[taalismn]

One of my earliest PaladinSteel creations was a large crawler that was a combination bulldozer/clear-cutter that used a reactor-powered array of plasma torches to melt the ground into a quick-cooling hard surface(extra material could be added if the local ground didn't lend itself to a good quality lava-pavement), then rolled over it to flatten and surface it. Road crews traveled about Greater New England laying down roads and the GNE's mercenary contract engineers could travel outside the GNE to make roads on demand(with the PCs being part of the road crew as engineers or security). The crawlers were part of teams that would build up roadbeds, build bridges, and cut through hillsides and mountains if necessary.
I've also created skills for landscaping and civil engineering, as well as a Civil Engineer specialist.

[glitterboy2098]

for animal drawn transport, hard packed dirt (probably just a worn in trail) works just fine for most of the year, if you live in a fairly wet area you might just use a corduroy road with whatever wood you have nearby to cut down on the issues of moving through mud.

motorized transport is where you need fancier materials. outside the borders of the major states, i'd imagine you might see Gravel or Macadam would be the most common, as they're fairly low maintenance but hold up well enough to motor vehicle traffic.

i doubt you would see much use of modern day style concrete or asphalt outside of major cities, as even without using MDC cement that would be a lot of logistical outlay and manpower-hours to make, lay, and maintain. so you'd mostly see them where a large wealthy group has strong control. outside of a few cases like the NGR, this would usually be in and around a city, with the bits outside of a city connecting its major nearby towns and outposts.

i would also imagine that cobblestone and brick have made a resurgence as the materials used for streets within larger towns and smaller cities. especially brick, as it would be easier to make and fire clay bricks than it would be to quarry proper cobblestones.

[taalismn]

Of course, with good roads, you'll want road patrols....because even if bandits don't show up, predators might recognize them for game trails...

[Grazzik]

My past thoughts on roads and travel:
https://www.palladium-megaverse.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=185524

A different discussion on roads:
https://www.palladium-megaverse.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=159867

I generally just use common sense to infer the state of roads based on geography, regional powers, industrial capacity and the needs of the story.

[ShadowLogan]

I think communities/states will have infrastructure in place (like roads) within their own territories. However the question then becomes who is building and maintaining the roads that inter-connect these (mostly) city-states? Look at the CS for a second, not all its member states are continuous, there are gaps between Chi-Town and FQ (when a member) or Ironheart (which doesn't directly boarder FQ or any other CS State) or Lonestar. While I would not be surprised to find road infrastructure w/n the various states boarders, if the CS where to us physical roads to connect each state, they would have to maintain said roads. Now the CS likely can do this, but what about other smaller powers? Roads will require maintenance and I don't see that going away, now some parts of NA might be "better" than others for roads (the joke here in SE-WI is we have two seasons: Winter and Road Construction) but you won't escape the need for maintenance IMHO.

[Devjannz]

I recently started running a game where roads are a factor. I decided that many "roads" and "trails" in North America (and other places) are most likely remnants of the old highway systems for those areas. Most are probably over grown and have very little actual substance left from what they once were (the occasional stretch of broken, cracked asphalt or concrete) but would still be a good means to figure out routes between places that were once connected by the highway system. For me as a GM, this translates into me being able to use Google Maps to figure out a route between places and then tailor it to what I want/need. Things like overpasses and bridges are most likely gone or may have been rebuilt with older/newer materials to accommodate travel.

If you want a good idea of what it might be like, check out Roads in Mongolia. There have a road network of almost 13,000 km but only 2300 km of paved road, 1500 km of gravel, 1400 km of improved earth surface and the rest are just dirt roads (about 7000 km).

[Library Ogre]

I wonder if there are any pre-Rifts MDC highways around? Like, can I cruise up 35 from San Antonio to Los Alamos?

I mean, Roman roads weren't MDC, just solid engineering, and those were in use for centuries.

[!REAPER!]

I have M.D.C. train tracks / mono lines as well as super highways from the golden age still around. I can't recall which books spoke about it but I thought there was information about the creation of M.D.C. and it being first used for structures & large bulk like things? I am sorry I can't recall at this time.
It always annoyed me when the books showed all these great ground vehicles and my players never used them as the original books always stressed you having to abandon them when you went a short way. I don't blame them. That is why I decided early on that there would be a way to keep your vehicles. It makes sense to me that during the golden age they would make the transferal of essential goods via roads / rail a priority. Gotta have your Green Eggos and Spam . And supposedly it wasn't that costly for M.D.C. concrete type material. Like I said earlier, I remember reading about it in the books although I can't remember if it was RIFTS, The Rifter, or Chaos Earth.
Apologies for not having the page / book info. Maybe I can find it later although I might not be able to post about it for a while. Too many things taking priority at the moment.

[slade2501]

I always felt that SOME vestige of old roads would survive even after centuries. For sure the over passes would be toast but the ground roads would survive, especially if they were originally paved with M.D.C. materials. I mean, for every military artifact/equipment our players have dug up or stumbled across I would like to think that a flat road would survive as well.

[Killer Cyborg]

Probably a wide-beam plasma device pointed at the ground could cook the ground down into something at least gravel-like.

[glitterboy2098]

I always felt that SOME vestige of old roads would survive even after centuries. For sure the over passes would be toast but the ground roads would survive, especially if they were originally paved with M.D.C. materials. I mean, for every military artifact/equipment our players have dug up or stumbled across I would like to think that a flat road would survive as well.

seems unlikely. between the ashfalls of the cataclysm and 300 years of sedimentary build up, i'd imagine most pre-rifts roads would be covered in several inches, if not feet of soil. and likely plenty of grass, brush, or even trees. and in places where the landscape doesn't see much sedimentary deposition, it tends to be due to the fact that erosion takes the soil away faster than it can deposit.. which means that the substrate said roads would be lying on would literally wear away from underneath it over 300 years. resulting in a collapse (and then burial as sediment eroded from higher up covers the cracked and jumbled ruins of the old road)

most pre-rifts finds tend to be similar. they're being dug out of bunkers and ruins that had been buried by time, and the pre-rifts structures that remain above the surface tend to be either the upper parts of really big things like skyscrapers, Dams, etc.. or are part of somewhere that is being actively maintained by local inhabitants.

[slade2501]

your thinking its like that tome cruise movie Oblivion?

[glitterboy2098]

Mostly I'm going by IRL archeology.
When roads survive, they do so because there is some organization that is maintaining them. Otherwise nature ensures they get eroded away, or covered over and overgrown. Even Roman roads, often held up as examples of long lived 'abandoned' toads only survived because they were not abandoned.. they were being kept maintained, cleaned, and cleared by the communities along them, and/or the various kingdoms that controlled that land. Because those roads were still in heavy use, usually as the main routes for trade and travel. We've found roman roads that fell out of use when the western empire fell, ones running to Manors and forts that were abandoned, that sort of thing. And those all had to be dug up from under several feet of soil. And that was just from time.. add in the ashfalls, lava flows, and other geological events of the great cataclysm and a lot of those would starting several inches if not several feet deep even before regular sedimentation began.