Making Roads?

[slade2501]

Rifts Earth needs more roads. Even medieval peasants had rudimentary roads, and the Romans had some of the best roads in the world. If forests are commonplace Roads and trails would have to be made through them. Between the Rhino military bulldozer, the Roadhammer and the Pathmaker, to say nothing of giant robots it should be fairly easy to make and keep open even the most basic dirt road between settlements or towns. And necessary too. Not everyone can afford flight capable transport. Some simply have to cart it the old fashioned way with animals or wheeled vehicles, which simply cannot handle any kind of serious woodland terrain. How about literally blazing a trail with weapons fire? Baking the earth and atomizing the vegetation in a wide path. Do it on a rainy day and it won't even start a forest fire! Give it the old GM hand-wave and say Sure, that works. Cause why not? Real governments and militaries have done WAY dumber things.

And what about bridges? do we have rules for building bridges? I have been watching footage of WW2 soldiers from various armies building bridges with specialized vehicles or even natural materials and moving tanks across. The movement of any significant supplies requires roads of some kind. Yes Northern Gun has hover trains and such but even they require empty non-tree laden space to pass through or a bridge to cross in some circumstances. and what about the great Mississippi river? In some places its over a mile wide! How do we manage that both as players or as Gms?

[darthauthor]

Good Ideas.

I'd reward players for using skills like Engineer and caprentry.

Earth Warlock would be the king of this, especially if they summon an Earth elemental.

I'm sure there is a nature loving mage out there somewhere who can move trees around.

It reminds me of Afghanistan.
Their system of justice and health care changed when allied forces built roads that turned a 6 hour trip, one way, to the sheriff/doctor to 30 minutes or less.
Not hard to image that bad guys wouldn't like it if law enforcement could be in pursuit of them in under an hour.

[taalismn]

One of my earliest PaladinSteel creations was a large crawler that was a combination bulldozer/clear-cutter that used a reactor-powered array of plasma torches to melt the ground into a quick-cooling hard surface(extra material could be added if the local ground didn't lend itself to a good quality lava-pavement), then rolled over it to flatten and surface it. Road crews traveled about Greater New England laying down roads and the GNE's mercenary contract engineers could travel outside the GNE to make roads on demand(with the PCs being part of the road crew as engineers or security). The crawlers were part of teams that would build up roadbeds, build bridges, and cut through hillsides and mountains if necessary.
I've also created skills for landscaping and civil engineering, as well as a Civil Engineer specialist.

[glitterboy2098]

for animal drawn transport, hard packed dirt (probably just a worn in trail) works just fine for most of the year, if you live in a fairly wet area you might just use a corduroy road with whatever wood you have nearby to cut down on the issues of moving through mud.

motorized transport is where you need fancier materials. outside the borders of the major states, i'd imagine you might see Gravel or Macadam would be the most common, as they're fairly low maintenance but hold up well enough to motor vehicle traffic.

i doubt you would see much use of modern day style concrete or asphalt outside of major cities, as even without using MDC cement that would be a lot of logistical outlay and manpower-hours to make, lay, and maintain. so you'd mostly see them where a large wealthy group has strong control. outside of a few cases like the NGR, this would usually be in and around a city, with the bits outside of a city connecting its major nearby towns and outposts.

i would also imagine that cobblestone and brick have made a resurgence as the materials used for streets within larger towns and smaller cities. especially brick, as it would be easier to make and fire clay bricks than it would be to quarry proper cobblestones.

[taalismn]

Of course, with good roads, you'll want road patrols....because even if bandits don't show up, predators might recognize them for game trails...

[Grazzik]

My past thoughts on roads and travel:
https://www.palladium-megaverse.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=185524

A different discussion on roads:
https://www.palladium-megaverse.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=159867

I generally just use common sense to infer the state of roads based on geography, regional powers, industrial capacity and the needs of the story.

[ShadowLogan]

I think communities/states will have infrastructure in place (like roads) within their own territories. However the question then becomes who is building and maintaining the roads that inter-connect these (mostly) city-states? Look at the CS for a second, not all its member states are continuous, there are gaps between Chi-Town and FQ (when a member) or Ironheart (which doesn't directly boarder FQ or any other CS State) or Lonestar. While I would not be surprised to find road infrastructure w/n the various states boarders, if the CS where to us physical roads to connect each state, they would have to maintain said roads. Now the CS likely can do this, but what about other smaller powers? Roads will require maintenance and I don't see that going away, now some parts of NA might be "better" than others for roads (the joke here in SE-WI is we have two seasons: Winter and Road Construction) but you won't escape the need for maintenance IMHO.