Mega-Statistics

[sheridan]

Along the lines of How many Judges... thread and Current Population of Mega City One...? so if you don't like analysing made-up stuff then best to go to another thread...

In my prog slog blog I've recently come across some interesting*§ figures.

We're told a few times that citiblocks have at least 60,000 residents, though we're not given an upper limit and very rarely given the population of a given block.  The F. Loyd Mazny Complex was designed for 2,000,000 people†.  In the following figures I'm assuming the average amount of people in a 'block'‡ is 60,000.

Highest pre-War sector number: 555.
Average population per sector: 1,441,441
Blocks per sector: 24

Highest post-War sector number: 305.
Average population per sector: 1,311,475
Blocks per sector: 21


* if this is the kind of thing you find interesting, obviously
§ though possibly also inaccurate
† though we know how that turned out
‡ I'm also including con-apts and other large residential buildings as 'blocks'

[Colin YNWA]

This type of thing often creates a split in my noggin.

On one hand I find this stuff fascintating and love it. There's some fantastic stuff here Sheridan. On the other hand looking too closely can shatter some useful illusions.

I think it was Zen Arcade who started trying to pull together a map of Mega City One a while back and gave a similar breakdown. In doing that and relating size of blocks and population density of Mega City One to its supposed footprint the visual standard of Mega City One, towering blocks crammed together in a heaving mass of humanity gets a bit shaky!

[sheridan]

This type of thing often creates a split in my noggin.

On one hand I find this stuff fascintating and love it. There's some fantastic stuff here Sheridan. On the other hand looking too closely can shatter some useful illusions.

I think it was Zen Arcade who started trying to pull together a map of Mega City One a while back and gave a similar breakdown. In doing that and relating size of blocks and population density of Mega City One to its supposed footprint the visual standard of Mega City One, towering blocks crammed together in a heaving mass of humanity gets a bit shaky!

As well as coming across a feature in an annual for today's prog slog blog post (going live in a few minutes) I'm also considering running a JD RPG soon, and most of the four different versions of RPG start off with building a sector for the judges to be based in.  Which got me thinking to how many blocks there are in a sector, etc.  Despite including that link earlier, I'm only a page and a half in to re-reading the four page stats thread that Si started (about three more pages to read - I have my posts per page set right up).

[sheridan]

p.s. I think it's helpful to think of the industrial sectors - there's a panel in Bingo! I think, which has an unpopulated dust zone.  I think of this like the scene towards the end of Attack of the Clones where Dooku's shuttle flies over a low-population area of Coruscant.

[sheridan]

"Over eighteen million people were forced to live in mobile homes - mo-pads" (pre-Apoc, so this figure can probably be halved in 2103/4).

[IndigoPrime]

On one hand I find this stuff fascintating and love it. There's some fantastic stuff here Sheridan. On the other hand looking too closely can shatter some useful illusions.

I think it was Michael Carroll that talked about this on a podcast, noting that the original '800 million' population probably sounded like a big number, but didn't take into account the sheer scale of Mega City One, nor the density shown in the comics.

These days, MC1 maps tend to be like the one on this page, which have the city more or less encompassing New York to the coast, down to Virginia, and up through Pennsylvania. That's an area of about 360,000km², for a population of just 140 million people. Tokyo alone has a tenth of that in just 2,200km². If you took Tokyo's density and expanded it out to MC1's size, you'd have a couple of billion people—and yet Tokyo lacks the sheer scale of MC1.

Given that the original MC1 stretched all the way down to Florida, 800 million people in all that space wouldn't have remotely been a squeeze. And right now, 140 million in the existing city gives you a density of about 400 per km². That's about a tenth of modern-day Reading's density. If you've never been to Reading, think of basically any run-of-the-mill large modern UK town. Most of MC1 should be a ghost town, then—and should always have been so, even if you filled an awful lot of it with automation and industry.

Scale up the original city ×10 and things start working better, on the basis of what we see in the strip itself. Either that, or you can make the city much, much smaller—800 million packed into New York's metro area gives you something like 24,000 people per km², although even that is still only twice that place's existing density!

The above also acts as a lesson to racist and xenophobic idiots who keep claiming their country is full. Infrastructure and food/water provision are the main problems, not space. As has been noted elsewhere, if everyone in the entire world lived with a density akin to modern-day Manhattan's, the entire human race could live in New Zealand.

[Funt Solo]

It's fairly clear that we've educated ourselves on population density statistics (with the advantage of the Internet) a lot more than whoever initially came up the number 800 million.

I saw an interview with John Wagner the other day where he said the entire idea of the Judge system (fifteen years to train a super-cop) was unworkable compared to the original idea whereby there were Judges but supported by a normal police force.

House of cards, innit?

[sheridan]

It's fairly clear that we've educated ourselves on population density statistics (with the advantage of the Internet) a lot more than whoever initially came up the number 800 million.

I saw an interview with John Wagner the other day where he said the entire idea of the Judge system (fifteen years to train a super-cop) was unworkable compared to the original idea whereby there were Judges but supported by a normal police force.

House of cards, innit?

I preferred the days where the judges did the cool stuff and then handed over to people in hover-vans with 'police' written on them when it came time to do the paperwork.  I think Judge Dredd preferred those days too, largely due to the paperwork.

[Funt Solo]

Talking of paperwork, did Quimby from Acc-Div really do fifteen years training?

---

The other oddity about the first MC-1 maps are also linked to the boggling scale - it's not as if the region blacked out is just flat in real life - it contains all sorts of biomes and mountainous regions. Huge swathes of it would have no Undercity, but it's as if the Undercity is always there.

Maybe it's time for a reboot, where all the script droids have to do a course on realistic population density figures for mega-cities. Mind you, Dredd (the strip from the 2012 movie in the meg) has kind of done that in a narrative way - it's far less futuristic and much more near-future.

[sheridan]

Talking of paperwork, did Quimby from Acc-Div really do fifteen years training?

---

The other oddity about the first MC-1 maps are also linked to the boggling scale - it's not as if the region blacked out is just flat in real life - it contains all sorts of biomes and mountainous regions. Huge swathes of it would have no Undercity, but it's as if the Undercity is always there.

I have seen one map which shows the Appalachian Chain's place in Mega-City One - the problem with skimming through the four different editions of RPG in the last few months is I can't remember where I saw the map!

[Robert Frazer]

Yeah, as a veteran of Warhammer 40,000 and the cheerful nonsense of that setting's total departure from consistent or realistic scale, I've learned to try not to pay too much attention to sci-fi statistics. The number has sufficient zeros for you to convincingly hand-wave that it's "eh, kinda big" and that goes for Mega-City One too!

[IndigoPrime]

I suspect part of this stems from people's general inability to understand large statistics. Hence £350m a week being such a winner in 2016, despite it being, for an economy the size of the UK's, a drop in the ocean. Humans just aren't good at scale. So if 2000 AD had launched with MC1 having a pupation of eight billion, readers might have considered that ludicrous, even if it wouldn't have resulted in a very packed city, given the size of the buildings.

[TordelBack]

There are bigger conceptual problems with Dredd's world than population density and training regimes*. In putatively rebooting and rationalizing things down to realistic-future-cop-drama levels what do you do about Satan, Santa and singalongs, not to mention Dracula, Jigsaw Disease, Henry Ford and Sidney De'ath?**

I'd argue that outright implausible silliness is at the absurd heart of Dredd, and what makes the strip truly unique in a monotonous sea of grim. You can't really put it on a hard-SF footing without turning it into something else. See also: Star Wars.




*Although when you think about it total schooling to qualify as an accountant or any profession really is over 15 years most places - just maybe not fulltime boarding and indoctrination from 5.
** I was going to add moving Mount Rushmore, but shifting that elsewhere doesn't seem quite so off-the-table as once it was.

[sheridan]

There are bigger conceptual problems with Dredd's world than population density and training regimes*. In putatively rebooting and rationalizing things down to realistic-future-cop-drama levels what do you do about Satan, Santa and singalongs, not to mention Dracula, Jigsaw Disease, Henry Ford and Sidney De'ath?**

Which Satan?  The one that Dredd fought and put in Iso-Block 666, or the space-travelling one that Anderson fought?

[sheridan]

I have seen one map which shows the Appalachian Chain's place in Mega-City One - the problem with skimming through the four different editions of RPG in the last few months is I can't remember where I saw the map!

Found it!  It's the most recent Cursed Earth sourcebook for the WOiN RPG.