Logistics. Logistics. Logistics.
Seriously before the Vics can get to Utah they have to get to Utah. And if the Mormons don't want them coming, well, there's quite a few really serious geographical obstacles in the way. Like huge deserts. In fact Utah is in one of those parts of the USA that I think would have been just left alone because no one can really get there to enforce anything.
Also even if you could get there it'd cost you more in fuel and resources to remove anything FROM Utah than it is worth.
Again logistics, logistics, logistics.Much easier to just rationalize them away as good retroculturists and ignore them. And Montana, and bits of Arizona, etc, etc.
I agree logistics is an issue. I mean, I can read a map.
But I assume the people IC are aware of this, and yet the NCR were willing to talk to Chicago about political plans that are code word classified in order to neutralize a nationstate on the far, far side of Utah.
Some of that is narrative convenience, of course.
I don't buy that. The first objection is the strongest, but California is poor, it's explicitly in their starting disadvantages. The idea that they can offer discounts is questionable. Not to mention if they did Victoria could go "so you can afford that level of discount" and let Russia know to force them to sell lower.
California is poor, yes, but it is still a nation-state in this fallen world. Population 40 million in 2018, which would make it the largest polity in North America, and almost 50% bigger than the next closest state. Probably more now, with Canadian/American refugees heading west and south, and Mexican refugees heading north for somewhere at least nominally stable.
Poor means very different things for a nation state than for an individual.
I don't think there is any doubt about whether they can afford it to buy back thousands of refugees at any sort of reasonable ransom.
Or that they'd make the effort; given how unpopular the peace treaty allegedly was, attempting to retrieve any survivors is the sort of thing that would get broadbased political support.
The question is whether the Vics would sell. Because ideological crazies.
Remember what I said about blacks and urban areas? A lot of those black New Yorkers live in the city of New York. Not all, but a lot.
Furthermore, upstate New York was the area the proto-Viks expanded into last, more or less. Again, refugees start running early, and it's a pretty safe bet that the Christian Marines were perfectly happy to see racial minorities engage in "voluntary self-deportation" and flee their territory.
Agreed. But all of North America was on fire. There were very few safe places to run to as an African American, since the fucking northeast of the US, whcih has been consistently liberal for close to a hundred years, just fell to Nazi cosplayers. And then Atlanta got nuked, after New Orleans already got destroyed.
And California is on the other side of the country.
I'm sorry. We've had people, particularly @uju32 , really play up the "oh god the demographics here will destroy Victoria" angle.
Uh huh.
It is by far more realistic that the Victorians will simply NOT ATTACK for several more years, during which time they will be able to handpick and train at least one more division of CMC fanatics out of the same kind of personnel they'd have normally used to form the regular army.
I'm honestly not sure if they will be able to recruit up a new division of CMC in less than a decade.
Soldiers, yes, no question. Very good ones even. Ones indoctrinated to commit atrocities, that they can pull off. But the requirements for the CMC include indoctrination to be used internally if necessary without hesitation.
That's a harder mark to meet in a non-tribal society.
As Godwinson said, forcibly demilitarized. On that note: UN? The UN has been dead for a while.
The NYPD is really big, given that it needs to cover a massive city all over Long Island, and it's the closest thing to a military that FCNY officially has. It's just...limited, rather strictly, by Victoria. Victoria never could deal with swallowing New York City, and less so now, but they know full well what kind of hell would rain down on their heads if they just sat by and let FCNY remilitarize.
QUESTION
What happened with New Jersey?
That's a significant chunk of valuable real estate right next to New York, and tied to the Big Apple by strong economic ties.
And three nuclear reactors producing somewhere around 3000MW in total.
I mean, New York jointly operates it's port with Newark, just across the river.
And pre-Collapse NJ has a significant agricultural sector that can pivot quite quickly from growing lettuce, bellpeppers and blueberries to potatoes and other staples, and a significant rail network for transport of food for sale.
Not to mention it's close enough to the NYC media market that Vic activity can't afford to be blatant, the way they are in the hinterlands.
Because I suspect that's where New York pulls most of it's staples from to supplement overseas imports, and there has to be significant New York investment there.
So how is thean ongoing tug of war of influence between the Vics and New Yorkers going?
With sudden retrenchment of Victorian pressure, New York is likely to simply swallow the place whole in the next couple years unless Victoria has some sort of entrenched client state there.
I'm not seeing what happened to the Netherlands or Belgium, with them being in the top 10 of food exporters making them not insignificant after the Collapse.
The European Union exists, so I suspect Belgium made it through the Collapse with minimal disruption.
Oh wow. Agriculture in the low countries would be shafted. Both have extremely resource intensive systems dependant on heavy fossil fuel inputs (for energy to process all the inputs, run all the farm machinery, transport inputs in, transport products out, import the food to actually feed the farmers since neither country produces enough calories to support their own populations, Haber process nitrogen fixation, synthesize herbicides and pesticides from) and phosphate rock from the Western Sahara.
Norway is a fossil fuel exporter, so that's more or less covered.
I suspect, without any GM input mind, that the low countries basically served as the stable center of Europe while everything and everyone else was basically losing their shit around them. If the WHO survived the UN's destruction and still exists, it's probably based out of Amsterdam.
Besides, IIRC, Netherlands very existence as a nation rests on the regular maintenance of the coastal dikes
About a third of the nation is below sea level, and they couldn't count on sea levels not rising further.
If they fell apart, a chunk of the nation falls into the sea.
That doesn't seem to have happened. So they maintained effective government.
Probably.
PS
RE Aluminium Scarcity for aircraft
The US had a massive number of passenger aircraft. How many thousands of tons of derelict Boeings and Airbuses are currently parked at major airport hubs like Chicago and Detroit after the domestic airlines that operated them crashed and burned with the fall of the United States?
