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Walking Cities

Mobile cities, often independently sophont

Walking City
Image from Steve Bowers
Danny-le-Ville, a walking city on Hardy who has become something of a celebrity

Several worlds have some or many mobile cities, which take a wide variety of forms.

Scrub Slugs

One common design is the scrub slug, which 'float' on a layer of specialised utility fog, which is sometimes disguised with optical phased array technology to appear invisible. Scrub slugs were originally developed as military ground vehicles.

Scrubslug
Image from Steve Bowers
Scrub slug on Zhang Qian

Gigerant Travelling City

This large metropolis has a base of utility sand, but does not use it to walk; instead the city moves by building new structures at the leading edge, and dismantling them at the rear.


Gigerant Travelling City
Image from Steve Bowers

Walking Platforms

Another common design is the 'platform-with-legs'. These are particularly associated with worlds like Hardy, where earthquake tremors are quite common.

Stilt-city
Image from Steve Bowers
Walking city avoiding a tsunami wave on Hardy

Mega-Mecha

Some walking cities assume animal-like or humanoid forms; these are currently grouped in the category Mega-Mecha, after the large forms found on Triskadephilia.
MegaMecha Arcology
Image from Steve Bowers
Very large walking arcology on Gordelpus

Toposophic Level

Many, but not all, of these large mobile metropolises are independently sophont, or at least very competent if not self-aware. Most fall into the category Modosophont, usually at high su-vec level. Some are low transapient entities, while a very few are S:2.

 
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Appears in Topics
InfrastructureMegascale EngineeringSapient Structures
Surface Transport
 
Development Notes
Text by Steve Bowers
Initially published on 20 February 2014.

 
 
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