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A Monument to Man's Arrogance: Arizona to Virgin Earth

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I don't know, I'd think the Junkeers would have a heart attack if the Kaiser started collectivizing all the land and nationalizing religion :V
 
The more glimpses of this world we see, the creepier and more fascinating it gets. I love it!
 
What's the Navajo Nation up to? Their capital came along, as did about half of their population, and they're pretty well located in northern Arizona to avoid the worst of the chaos.
 
firefossil said:
Is this a map? If so it has no captions and is difficult to read, especially since it doesn't even have map borders. Well besides western bit separate from the rest, which is obviously the Enclave wannabees.
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@ScottishMongol posted an annotated version of the map in the AH map thread.
ScottishMongol said:
My home state of Arizona ISOTed to Virgin Earth.​

A Monument to Man's Arrogance

​

It was a close thing. Food supplies were being requisitioned, new agricultural lands were being scouted, preparations were made to move people out of the cities. However, the system was a house of cards, and the slightest amount of social unrest or infighting would destabilize the tenuous Emergency Government. Far-right militias tried to seize supply depots and carve their own way in the wilderness, the far-left came out against them, the military mutinied when asked to fire on civilians, and within the year the Emergency Government was being airlifted to the Pacific Coast while Phoenix burned behind them.

Now, everything from Prescott to the old Mexican border is a wind-scoured wasteland. Scavengers, cultists, and cannibals pick through the ruins, and every day is a struggle for survival. Outside the Dead Zone, the few pockets of stable government, hardened by the triage methods needed to ensure a viable population size, crack down even harder on what are less citizens and more subjects.

Raiders dart back and forth across the deserts, riding in battered, souped-up war rigs and clutching everything from improvised melee weapons to old military hardware. Hitting isolated settlements and retreating into the wastes, they grind down what few free pockets of civilization exist.

But it's been five years, and the oil is starting to run out.

1: "Legitimate" Arizona State Government-in-Exile - Commonly called "Those bastards who left us to die." The few refugees who made it on the last planes out of Sky Harbor wound up working the fields.

2: "The Northern Government" - Very little die-off north of the Mogollon Rim, but they told the Emergency Government to get bent about six months before everything went tits up. Plurality Native American, currently struggling to bring some of the western regions to heel.

3: Stubbornly independent ranchers.

4: Crapsacky FLDS theocracy, being on the North Rim means it's hard to establish permanent contact, and the government's agents often get "lost" on the way.

5: Bullhead City - The Arizona branch of the KKK had plans to turn the workers on the Fort Mojave Reservation into their serfs. They, and the Mexican migrant workers, disagreed. Strongly. Now a bit of a rowdy free city.

6: "Safford Government" - Enough people pulled through that they were able to break away from Flagstaff. It was a soft enough divorce that they were later able to work out a border treaty and send joint salvage parties into the Death Zone.

7: "Cochise Government" - "Encouraged" the migrant workers to try and resettle Mexico, if only to expand their agricultural base.

8: "Yuma Government" - A military dictatorship, has been massively expanding their agricultural base, fighting back against the nomads, and expanding the military to every aspect of life.

9: Some Tohono O'odham ranchers, nomads, survived by being just far out of the way.

10: The Dead Zones - Thirst. Sun-bleached bones. Ashes and dust.

11: Raider-controlled territories. Sick electric guitar riff.
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In spoiler tags as it might give away some info regarding future updates.
 
Looking through a list of biggest cities in Arizona, outside of Phoenix and cities which are part of the Phoenix metro area, the biggest are Tuscon (531k), Yuma (95k), and Flagstaff(72k). You already noted that the latter two survived and became two of the more vaguely functional nations, while Phoenix violently self-destructed due to its severe population to available food issues. What happened to Tuscon? Is it the Safford and Cochise governments you mention?
 
firefossil said:
Looking through a list of biggest cities in Arizona, outside of Phoenix and cities which are part of the Phoenix metro area, the biggest are Tuscon (531k), Yuma (95k), and Flagstaff(72k). You already noted that the latter two survived and became two of the more vaguely functional nations, while Phoenix violently self-destructed due to its severe population to available food issues. What happened to Tuscon? Is it the Safford and Cochise governments you mention?
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Tucson collapsed with Phoenix, too many people and too direct a route to Phoenix for overlapping waves of refugees. Stafford and Cochise are rural areas in the eastern part of the state that survived due to geographical isolation.
 
ScottishMongol said:
Tucson collapsed with Phoenix, too many people and too direct a route to Phoenix for overlapping waves of refugees. Stafford and Cochise are rural areas in the eastern part of the state that survived due to geographical isolation.
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In terms of numbers, how big of a die-off are we talking about? 2016/2017 Arizona has a population of around 6.9 million people. Based on the '1 acre for 1 person' rule and the mention that Arizona has around a million acres of farmland, Arizona could support around one-seventh of its pre-displacement population.

There has been some expansion (government-in-exile, Yuma government) but it doesn't seem like the area can support much more than 1 million people. If that's the case, that was a huge die-off, with 85% of the population dying.

That's...staggering. No wonder why everyone seems shell-shocked.

Even if I'm overestimating the amount of die-off, we still have an entire generation that saw at least 1 in 2 (I can't imagine any more than 50% of the population surviving) of their friends and family either die in the post-displacement collapse, or just simply starve to death.
 
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Was there any effort to relocate the population somewhere more hospitable? Even the Sacramento Valley or, if you can get that far, the Pacific Northwest is better than Arizona. >.>
 
Secretariat said:
Was there any effort to relocate the population somewhere more hospitable? Even the Sacramento Valley or, if you can get that far, the Pacific Northwest is better than Arizona. >.>
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Sadly sheer distance is the major factor, the resources expended to move that many people probably would've been too high a tally for the people making that decision. The best you'd get is dumping the surplus population in some uninhabited wilderness and hoping they lived.

There obviously was an attempt to move a lot of people with the airlift to Pacific Redoubt, and...well, they weren't exactly being altruists there, were they?
 
ScottishMongol said:
Sadly sheer distance is the major factor, the resources expended to move that many people probably would've been too high a tally for the people making that decision. The best you'd get is dumping the surplus population in some uninhabited wilderness and hoping they lived.

There obviously was an attempt to move a lot of people with the airlift to Pacific Redoubt, and...well, they weren't exactly being altruists there, were they?
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Plus, what with this being Virgin Earth, the infrastructure that lets us move things so quickly is... just gone.
 
ScottishMongol said:
Sadly sheer distance is the major factor, the resources expended to move that many people probably would've been too high a tally for the people making that decision. The best you'd get is dumping the surplus population in some uninhabited wilderness and hoping they lived.

There obviously was an attempt to move a lot of people with the airlift to Pacific Redoubt, and...well, they weren't exactly being altruists there, were they?
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Oh, yeah. It would absolutely be one-way trips -- "here, here's a motor pool of SUVs with a tank of gas each, you're probably going to die but it's better than certain death in Phoenix."
 
A lot of people tried running out to the wilds or the Rio Grande or whatever, I think. The problem is that there was so many people headed the same way that everyone was forced to "live off the land" and anyone that paused to set up any real logistics or otherwise prepare to go the distance would be trampled by the people behind them.
 
Zachanassian said:
Even if I'm overestimating the amount of die-off, we still have an entire generation that saw at least 1 in 2 (I can't imagine any more than 50% of the population surviving) of their friends and family either die in the post-displacement collapse, or just simply starve to death.
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Well due to the statistics of things, you probably have lots of families and communities in the Phoenix and Tuscon metro areas that died to the last man, but smaller communities, the stereotypical small town where most people never leave their whole lives, probably got off relatively unscathed. You might have a family that lost a member because they ran out of medication here, or because their child went off to the doomed big city there. Granted of course than the refugee raiders and military juntas start throwing their weight around and things get ugly even for them.

Secretariat said:
Oh, yeah. It would absolutely be one-way trips -- "here, here's a motor pool of SUVs with a tank of gas each, you're probably going to die but it's better than certain death in Phoenix."
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I imagine that there are a handful of people who did just that, and some of the might even survive to become crazy pseudo-barbarian survivalists that the post Arizonan nations will eventually stumble across as they expand outward.
 
firefossil said:
Well due to the statistics of things, you probably have lots of families and communities in the Phoenix and Tuscon metro areas that died to the last man, but smaller communities, the stereotypical small town where most people never leave their whole lives, probably got off relatively unscathed. You might have a family that lost a member because they ran out of medication here, or because their child went off to the doomed big city there. Granted of course than the refugee raiders and military juntas start throwing their weight around and things get ugly even for them.
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Of course, the two main areas that have been profiled so far are the State Government in Exile and the Yuma government, which are disproportionately made up of refugees from the Dead Zone. So, more Exilers or Yumans will know someone who didn't make it compared to someone from Flagstaff, presumably.
 
Zachanassian said:
Of course, the two main areas that have been profiled so far are the State Government in Exile and the Yuma government, which are disproportionately made up of refugees from the Dead Zone. So, more Exilers or Yumans will know someone who didn't make it compared to someone from Flagstaff, presumably.
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Except the Exilers explicitly brought their families with them, and only brought random refugees towards the end, where even then it probably involved family units a lot of the time.
 
Something that seemed to fit, given inspiration from this afternoon. Obviously, as fan content, feel free to disregard.

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RUMOR CONTROL: THE LOST CITY

Rumors persist of convoys of refugees fleeing Phoenix in its last days, who managed to survive and re-establish civilization deep in the wilderness. In some versions, the refugees stumble upon caches of weapons or Old World technology; in others, they are simply exceedingly lucky. These rumors are FALSE.

The two regions where the Lost City is most commonly said to be located are incapable of supporting large populations. The number of calories theoretically available to Gulf of Mexico or Columbia River fishing communities are not enough to support populations of any size, even setting aside the resulting micro-nutrient deficiencies any theoretical population would bear. Furthermore, the idea that a frontier community could be sustained, even past the first winter, by a "passenger pigeon harvest" is not in any way scientifically credible.

If you believe you are in possession of evidence to the contrary, immediately bring all documentation to your local public affairs office for review.
 
Secretariat said:
Something that seemed to fit, given inspiration from this afternoon. Obviously, as fan content, feel free to disregard.

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RUMOR CONTROL: THE LOST CITY

Rumors persist of convoys of refugees fleeing Phoenix in its last days, who managed to survive and re-establish civilization deep in the wilderness. In some versions, the refugees stumble upon caches of weapons or Old World technology; in others, they are simply exceedingly lucky. These rumors are FALSE.

The two regions where the Lost City is most commonly said to be located are incapable of supporting large populations. The number of calories theoretically available to Gulf of Mexico or Columbia River fishing communities are not enough to support populations of any size, even setting aside the resulting micro-nutrient deficiencies any theoretical population would bear. Furthermore, the idea that a frontier community could be sustained, even past the first winter, by a "passenger pigeon harvest" is not in any way scientifically credible.

If you believe you are in possession of evidence to the contrary, immediately bring all documentation to your local public affairs office for review.
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Sounds like something you'd hear over the radio in Yuma territory or the Northern Government.

Approved!
 
Secretariat said:
Something that seemed to fit, given inspiration from this afternoon. Obviously, as fan content, feel free to disregard.

----

RUMOR CONTROL: THE LOST CITY

Rumors persist of convoys of refugees fleeing Phoenix in its last days, who managed to survive and re-establish civilization deep in the wilderness. In some versions, the refugees stumble upon caches of weapons or Old World technology; in others, they are simply exceedingly lucky. These rumors are FALSE.

The two regions where the Lost City is most commonly said to be located are incapable of supporting large populations. The number of calories theoretically available to Gulf of Mexico or Columbia River fishing communities are not enough to support populations of any size, even setting aside the resulting micro-nutrient deficiencies any theoretical population would bear. Furthermore, the idea that a frontier community could be sustained, even past the first winter, by a "passenger pigeon harvest" is not in any way scientifically credible.

If you believe you are in possession of evidence to the contrary, immediately bring all documentation to your local public affairs office for review.
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Who would have thought that fact-checking could sound so Orwellian?
 
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