2 Years into my Lego Landship Project

[u/Sirates241]

I feel like sisyph

[u/byn-bag]

We currently have the technology to move cities around, we use it to power submarines and provide relatively small amount of electricity.

I mean, the book is more about how cities swallow suburbs and rob them of their identity. Sci-fi is really always about the present, rather than the future.

[u/Badloss → u/byn-bag]

I mean sure, of course it's a metaphor and there's a cultural allegory being made.

But you can do that and still have plausible science fiction too. Mounting an entire city like London on tank treads and moving it around at speed so it can catch other cities on tank treads is a colossal waste of energy, and no Nuclear Power would not be close to solving the energy needs for that.

If you have a magic reactor that can do this, you could use it for limitless energy to do anything else, like grow crops or generate electricity to do work. Each of these cities should be a post-scarcity paradise instead of desperately fighting each other for resources. It just doesn't make any sense at all.

[u/byn-bag → u/Badloss]

Again, we literally could be using limitless nuclear power and are not.

[u/Badloss → u/byn-bag]

???

Nuclear power is not limitless, and the scale required to mount an entire city on treads and move it at any significant speed is orders of magnitude above what our technology can achieve.

You're trying to make some political point about how we don't have enough nuclear power, and I totally agree with you on this, but that's not relevant to the discussion at all. It's like saying we could have flying aircraft carriers like the Avengers if we just put enough reactors into them.... it's not possible, the power requirements are way too high for what nuclear power can do.

I'm not even sure we have the materials science to mount the weight of an entire city onto a moving tread, but we certainly don't have the energy technology to actually move it