Shipbucket

Thank you Blackbuck! I'm planning to get more in depth, in regards to the little details, than in the Salide and Denton AUs.

Thiel, i'm not exactly sure what you're saying. Can you explain it in more detail?

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Salide - Denton - The Interrealms

I am not very active on the forums anymore, but work is still being done on my AUs. Visit the Salidan Altiverse Page on the SB Wiki for more information. All current work is being done on Google Docs.
If anyone wishes for their nations to interact with the countries of the Salidan Altiverse, please send me a PM, after which we can further discuss through email.

I've also thought Kerguelen for AU but I could not figure out "finance logic" considering the quantity of ships I wanted
I like the idea of remote location of Kerquelen but it also gives you "no enemy" situation, unless you'll cook up something. So, I'm also looking forward what this AU brings. Don't forget that waters around Kerguelen are quite rough

Howdy Ethan,

I think Thiel may be referring to land area that is available for building housing and feeding the population. The Kerguelen and associated Islands you have given to NC-G are very difficult to populate as they are so far south. High winds (roaring forties) keep the islands at icy temperature levels, where crops and livestock let alone people do not survive well. I see you refer to glass houses for growing crops, but that would be a very expensive and land intensive operation. Also in the timespan you are working with, the frequent storms through the islands would still blow out the glass and kill the crops. Allied to those problems is to be able to raise the temperature of the land in those glass houses to be able to support crops. From looking/reading about the area, 20,000 people would need much more money spent on them to keep them alive than those people could produce working in primary industries.

The cost to make somewhere like the NC-G area habitable will be exorbitant. You will need to find a solid gold mountain and a mountain of diamonds to pay for keeping the colony alive.

I love AU's, gives you room to expand your skills and try something different, but they still have to be able to support a realistic land area and population to achieve the ability to have any sort of navy at all.

If your prince is rich enough. Get him to talk to Vicky and buy the South Island of New Zealand off her. That gives you an area about twice the size of Ireland to play with. (You could have battles with the English on the North Island - the Cook Strait being your English Channel)

I mean what do you need a rail road for? There isn't a spot worth living in that isn't accessible by water and the only industrial product that might be inland is coal, but the quality is really awful.
Heck, the only meaningful industries you could possibly support is fishing, wool production and whaling. There's no wood or metal on the island, without which you can't build anything beyond the most basic structures, so both will have to be imported at great expense from Australia, South Africa or Madagascar.
And then there's the question of how you feed that many people in a place where crops can't realistically grow, but Krakatoa already covered that.

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“Close” only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nuclear weapons.
That which does not kill me has made a grave tactical error

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Source Materiel is always welcome.

Problem with creation of AU's here (well, for any purpose, but let's concentrate on Shipbucket) is that there's a very limited amount of places on the map of the Earth where a new (and sizeable enough to justify lots of drawings ) country could be squeezed on the existing lands, an existing one could be sensibly altered, while adding fictional lands (completely leaving aside matters of geology etc.) brings its own challenges, not least when it comes to reasonable backstories.

Maybe an option would be if a number of SB-members active on AU field would jointly create from scratch a fictional Earth-ish map, that would allow a creation of scenarios less constrained by limitations inherent to "Real World" map?
I suppose that for practical purposes such endeavor would have to include sort of commonly agreed basic timeline (which, I guess, would have to roughly follow the "real" one) and some kind of understanding that certain AU's would in a way be a "stand-ins" for actual countries.

Just my 3 cents.

I'm going to try to knock several points out at one time.

The railroad is there out of necessity and era. It's the 1890s. Railroad is the mode of transportation. The other alternative is horses, but that would mean that horses would have to be brought from another land mass and not to mention, the food that they themselves need, as well as not being able to haul much resources compared to a railroad. The other reason is the roughness of the waters around the islands. That alone will make it difficult for ferry services and small cargo ships, so a railroad would work best.

If you're concerned about the the population that would be supported, look at Google Earth. There's plenty of flat spots around the island to support a population. Starting out, from immigration, the population will jump to about 100,000 people in the 1920s. By today's time, it will be around 500,000 people for all four island groups. Gotha alone today would be in the area of 130,000 people, with about 320,000 spread among the rest of Kerguelen and the other 50,000 on the other islands.

Food production will be in greenhouses for most all crops, but remember that the Kerguelen cabbage grows naturally on the islands. I imagine that will become the staple food item of the country. With the green houses themselves, the wind is always coming from the west (and also remember that it won't always be windy. I've heard accounts of sailors visiting Kerguelen island and it not being windy for several days), so the west side can be fortified at the expense of losing that much glass area.

I chose the islands because they're isolated, and nobody wanted them. Plus, it's an extremely small AU, so I can be more in depth with it. I don't want some large land mass. I want a population that's about 500,000 today.

There is coal, and it will be used. Even the lowest grade of coal is better than wood, so with short trains and converted wood burning locomotives, it can be done.

Building materials can be sourced from the basalt and quaternary deposits, which would make bricks and gravel, etc etc. Other materials, sure, they would need to be imported.

Power production, the key to keeping any nation afloat, can be done with the crazy amounts of wind and geothermal. This means that NCG can host power consuming industries, such as smelting. It's probably important to mention that some of the rock formations contain aluminium and magnesium. A little bit of a long shot, but still worth the idea. I mean, look at Iceland! They got the same idea!

So, I guess I'll admit that there's a little bit of tweaking, but I'm looking at this optimistically. The wind isn't an issue, the waves aren't an issue, it's just the economy and the food growing, at least in my eyes. It does also help that I have another AU that's willing to support NCG, and that would be Denton.

-Ethan

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Salide - Denton - The Interrealms

I am not very active on the forums anymore, but work is still being done on my AUs. Visit the Salidan Altiverse Page on the SB Wiki for more information. All current work is being done on Google Docs.
If anyone wishes for their nations to interact with the countries of the Salidan Altiverse, please send me a PM, after which we can further discuss through email.

Would anybody feel like starting such a 'game', I just tend to get bored of my attempts at AUs as its hard to balance them having a few people to balance with would be much better...

Good luck with your AU (but 500,000 people puts you in only a very few gunboat/OPV territory and this is shipbucket )

For industrialised nations with reasonable access to the required raw materials. Your location and available resources pretty much disqualifies you on both counts. Fish and wool are your only realistic exports and since the Grand Banks fisheries is still a thing and the UK has all kinds of preferential deals with Australia and New Zealand there really isn't much reason for shippers to endanger their ships and increase their insurance premiums by trying to find a small rock in the middle of some of the roughest waters in the world.
As for necessity. I just don't see it. There's no call for mass transportation, you have no large amounts of industrial goods you need to move around. The few people who do need to move about will have to hike it (Good luck keeping horses alive down there) or wait for the weather to clear enough to sail.

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“Close” only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nuclear weapons.
That which does not kill me has made a grave tactical error

Worklist

Source Materiel is always welcome.

@Eswube: Forgot to respond to you in my previous posting. That's a good idea, and I'm game. I'd really be interested if all of ya'll that have AUs wanted to get together and figure something out.

@JSB: Agreed, that's why I'm doing it! As much as I've thought about the military, I'm looking at a seaplane tender in WWII, possibly a converted seaplane cruiser, and maybe 2-3 small sloops, along with several PT boats, as well as support craft. Modern day will be much smaller, with likely 3 large patrol craft, some support craft, and that's it. NCG will not take place in WWII, preferring to stay neutral. It will still trade with Denton, and may even trade with NSWE (still working on figuring out this arrangement), which is on the Axis side.

@Thiel:
The railroad does not need to only transport goods. They can transport people. Plus, with the most space in Gotha, that's where a lot of the farmland greenhouses would be. So it's likely that the food would be shipped. To me it's just damn foolish to rely on a boat that a railroad could get done much more reliably, without issues from waves, snow, rain, sleet, wind. More importantly is the presence of giant kelp that blocks wide areas of navigation that can make it impossible to reaches some areas. (Look at this map to see what I'm talking about. It's the blue crow's feet symbol). And exactly, I'm using the railroad to replace horses and draft animals because it doesn't make sense for them to be down there in the first place.
It's worth mentioning that Gotha is basically the only port that would be able to take the ships. It'll have the capacity, it'll have the calm waters, and it'll be easy to get into. Everything from there is shipped out to the other islands. That's also the reason breakwaters will be constructed on the Crozet islands and Amsterdam and St. Paul, is to make a safe haven for ships away from the waves and wind.

Scoured flat by wind? Interesting. All of the soil is volcanic in origin, most of it basaltic, with traces of pluton, trachyte, and rhyolite in areas. Volcanic rock is high in nutrients (even though the last eruption on the island was a far while back), and with the right preparation, should be able to grow crops with ease. The only reason there are not any crops or trees there is because they have not been introduced (I mean, there is the Kerguelen cabbage, which is a cabbage and it is edible). If plants had been introduced from other parts of the world, then it's not unlikely that they would have grown there. Trees would have grown there as well, although they would probably be severely flagged from the wind unless they were planted in low wind areas.

Well, first off, I don't need green houses for every single crop. There are plenty of crops that are hardy enough to handle the mild range of the cooler temperatures, which could be grown with ease in sheltered areas, like in Gotha. For more exotic plants, like grains and stuff, sure I need a greenhouse. But, the population can be sustained for a while on seafood and broccoli cabbage, spinach, carrots, etc. Plus, there's reindeer to eat! Agreed, materials need to come from Denton. That's going to cost some money, fair enough. The heat comes from conventional sources (burning biomass, the algae and other shrubbery around Kerguelen), but can also come from animals themselves, such as chickens, by placing their pen/coop inside the greenhouse.

The distance between Gotha and Saarbrucken in Denton is only in the range of 1,700 miles. Denton will still be receiving lots of immigrants from Europe up until 1910. While Denton will be going through it's transformation into a highly industrialized society, there's still some unemployment as jobs won't be created as quickly as people are coming in. When NCG is formed, Denton will naturally assist the new country (as they are the closest), and NCG's rapid transformation and works projects will attract unemployed laborers from Denton. They won't get paid much, but they'll get a home, they'll have a job, and they'll have food.

The only reason I suspect that it hasn't been successful in the past is probably due to the isolation. Why would you extract low-grade coal and ship it somewhere? But to someone who lives there, it's the best thing you can do, as there are no trees for wood burning and as far as it's concerned, no oil (yet possibly). It is the only option for them, otherwise they'll go bankrupt trying to buy the coal elsewhere or be forced to burn grass and lichens.

What makes you say that? Where does anything say that interior walls have to be made of stick framing? You can use stone/bricks for foundation, exterior walls, interior walls, and even the roof (you have to rely on gravity, but look at the cathedrals of old). Actually, I can see circular and semi circular buildings being made, with a dome roof on top.
Concerning timber, Kerguelen does not have any trees, however, since there are low wind areas, trees could be planted in soil that's been prepped, with the sole purpose of extracting them when they get big enough. I'm still doing research in this area, but it should be very possible. Just need to find a tree that is hardy in cold weather, grows straight and true (although this is easily done by planting the trees close together, forcing them straight upwards), and yields good lumber. Of course, the disadvantage is the time needed to grow enough to yield enough lumber, but there's drawback to everything.

You said it right there: "And a fairly substantial amount of economic support from Denmark." That's the role that Denton plays in this scenario (all of my AUs are linked somehow ) until NCG can grow a reasonable sustainable economy. And as said before, NCG is only about 1700 miles from Saarbrucken, so the distance is not so much an issue at this point.

Sound good?

_________________
Salide - Denton - The Interrealms

I am not very active on the forums anymore, but work is still being done on my AUs. Visit the Salidan Altiverse Page on the SB Wiki for more information. All current work is being done on Google Docs.
If anyone wishes for their nations to interact with the countries of the Salidan Altiverse, please send me a PM, after which we can further discuss through email.

@Ezgo394, JSB
Don't tell me You're "a game" into creating such map, as I'm not (meaning: no longer) planning to start a SB AU, so I'm not a game in this context. It's just something that should be discussed between actually interested parties, meaning: those who have some AU's running.