We need to get more concrete details set down about the zone. I know one reason that I’ve been leery about writing more zone related stories is that there is too much up in the air right now. I think we have to make some decisions and stick with them.
Have we really decided on a final population size?
Where are the people living, the terminal, the parking garage, ramshackle huts, etc.?
Is the CC staying where it is, becoming more informal, or going under revision to a more militaristic format?
I think we need some reasonably solid answers to these and more questions like them before we can really start delving into the zone fully.
We can’t just leave huge structural issues like these up to a single writer to set in stone and then everyone else has to deal with it. I think we need a short discussion on each, then a vote or the admins need to step up and make a call.
59 responses to “Questions from K”
The population was set around 600. Originally, it was about 1800, then trimmed down. It could be re-adjusted later.
From the beginning, we envisioned the survivors living in the hotel, with the leftovers going to the terminals or other buildings.
I vote that the Corps stays as locals with crowbars defending their city. Even though it was cancelled because no one watched it, I think we should be like the folks in Jericho. Townsfolk, with a couple of military trained people, defending their town. They went to war with a neighboring town over farmlands. Then the new CSA military showed up and made the second season weaker than the first.
Also, would it be helpful to those that don’t live nearby the airport if we had a list of nearby businesses and landmarks? How many of you realize that Northern Lights shopping plaza backs into the airport, and a P&C right at the end of the main road into the airport? Route 11 has lots of establishments that might help in our stories, like Play It Again Sports. Is there anyone that has never been to the airport? I’m asking because I never flew until I was 20.
We all know where I stand on the subjects.
I am sorru for the wall I should have asked before I did something that big.
I think it should really be left up to Slater who is leading the battalions then the battalion leader decides who leads his squads and then the squad leader decides who is in his squads. This way if we have some guy who does not have hist shit right in the CC its the next ranking officers fault it happened.
I think the population should constantly be changed and posted like when a story adds or kills more people.
You dont pick and choose your people, you adapt and survive. weed out the weaklings.
Jared, we meant let’s set the groundrules so that we all follow the same guidelines. Don’t worry about the wall, we had talked about making it out of the cars before you wrote your story. We don’t want to have stories where I say we have only 600 people in the zone, and then Matt write about having 2000. We want all of the stories to follow the same basics about the survivors living conditions.
One of the original ideas was to have some sort of water collection/purification system, then K talked about digging a well. I grew up in a city, and could always just go to the sink for water. I didn’t know anything about digging a well. K posted about how to create a well, and it seems like it would be workable for the zoners.
We need to decide where the food is prepared, do you have to provide for yourself, or is it one big family dinner?
You don’t need to just answer the questions in the post, if you have some that should be addressed, post them here.
“weed out the weaklings” Does this mean that we should send all the children and elderly out of the zone?
I am not saying we pick and choose I am just saying that after a story is published with substantial damage to the population we make a post saying the new population. I want to do this becuase the death rate in my story is around 80 people.
You cannot kill that many people.
Ok I will change it I did write the story when I thought that over 1000 people were living there. Digging a well is a great Idea and would work, then after the well is made if anyone wants fresh water they just go out take it from the well and boil it.
Recycling would also help we could have volunteers take used bottles ant take the boiling water and put it in the bottles for storage. This would also be a start fopr real jobs.
After we have water then we can actually look to making farm land, it would take a while but there are seeds all over in any hardware store.
What do you guyas think.
Jared, please read through your posts before hitting send. Check for typos, and make sure that questions end in “?” otherwise it’s just a statement.
Sorry I am really tired and not paying attention my bad, at least this one is good.
Are the children and Elders in the corps? Then they arent even a factor are they.
In an attempt to create an answer that everyone will find unsatisfactory…
>Have we really decided on a final population size?
I started with 1800 in the early stages as a random but large number. It turned out to be too big. We lowered it to 600. In reality, the number is in between. There are a lot of deaths that first winter. People will leave to look for greener pastures. People will be lost to the Z’s.
We need a population big enough to absorb Meaker’s Maniacs and The Holey/Chesterfield/Squad 24/Hookmime types.
Meaker needs to realize that this isn’t the place to make pronouncements about how soft we civvies are. We get it. You’ll outlive us when it comes. But this will not become Sparta. This is America and CNY in particular.
Further, this is America with a C, not a K. Talk about killing ‘gooks’ or Muslim families will be deleted immediately. This is America, and the First Amendment applies to all religions. And we are the land of opportunity, not just for people whose families were here before 1850. We both love this country, but here, I pay for the hosting.
K needs to realize that killing Z’s isn’t swatting flies. I take your side in the debate: it is janitors and paycheck processors who are doing the swinging. It has to be: look at the population of the County. I understand you’re going for understatement with the Boy Scouts thing, but it may cause some misunderstanding. With these statements, you are taking the diametrically opposed position from Meaker. The truth lies between you.
Rob, Meaker has probably heard your criticism about rounding out a character even if he can’t acknowledge it. Give it time. He’s learning. We all are.
We are all looking for the perfect stories and perfect characters. We must be able to encourage, acknowledge, and incorporate constructive criticism. But whether or not we agree with each other, we are stuck with each other inside a fence with a seven-mile perimeter.
>Where are the people living, the terminal, the parking garage, ramshackle huts, etc.?
I did some research on this one, but not enough. Chris & I estimated about 100 rooms in the hotel, which would sleep 200. (We rounded low. I know.) There’d be 200 more in each of the two Concourses. Those people would probably move outside on the not 10-28 Runway. (Can’t remember its designation.) We had talked about hotwiring RVs and parking them, but the trip from the Thruway-690 junction would be too far.
There is also the Cargo terminal to the west and the 174th air wing to the south, but I don’t know their layout like I do inside Hancock, so I’ve left them empty.
I took a lot of pictures of the garage. I think that people are there only as a last resort. While it is highly defensible, it would be too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. The concrete would make living there unsuitable and the open walls would bring the wind in. The only way the garage would work is with a collection of RVs from the highway. In this world, a mobile home would be a palace.
>Is the CC staying where it is, becoming more informal, or going under revision to a more militaristic format?
Let’s keep it at the same 320 (80*4 per squad) with everyone else in the Zone getting some basic and refresher drill with hand weapons once per month. More than one-quarter of the zone (Driscoll, Johnson, Krezner, Clipboard) are not suited for going outside the fence and may grumble, but even they know the importance in case of all-out attack. The remaining one-quarter is a reserve (Greg’s replacement, Schick, JJ, and so on.)
Brooks sets the assignments, Slater and Clipboard see to it that they are carried out. Refusing an assignment means a one-way ticket out the gate, but this isn’t really worth pursuing.
Squads will have to work on their own management. We’ve seen that Slater won’t tolerate people going behind a squad leader’s back. The squad leaders will have to use whatever means are available to them to motivate (Nielsen’s hero status, Schick’s sleaziness, Chesterfield’s age). Some squads may not even have designated leaders. They get on fine without insignia.
Yes they are they are still important to the zone they are our elders and our future, it is up to the children if the zone survives and it is up to the elders to teach to young wipersnappers like you. Everything does not revolve around the military, and CC is not a military organization it is a ragtag band of people who can get up in the morning and killsomething that was once human.
John, remember the words of the guy who sold us Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld:
You go to war with the army you’ve got, not with the army you want.
What you got here is a bunch of bus drivers.
This will help me a lot, actually. Thanks for bringing this up, K. I don’t really have much an idea of what Syracuse looks like. I’ve never been to the airport, nor do I care to (I hate heights). Something that tells of nearby features would help me greatly, or perhaps some pictures. From the beginning I’ve had a hard time grasping the workings of Zyracuse.
It hink around 800 people would be fine in the airport, how does that say around 800 people give or take around 20.
I think someone should look forward to building a well or the zone will not live much longer. Also I have out in thy stories that everyone has a place on the floor in the Zone with a little pathway in the middle to walk from area to area. In this little space would be whatever they are sleeping on and personal pssetions.
Tyler, if you look at my comment in the story Choices, you can see a Quicktime interactive view of the airport from the tower.
Jared, please, please, please check your spelling before hitting send.
Sorry again no more I will check every one now I am sorry again.
6:59–Jared, the posted population was shot down for two good reasons. We are writing at different times between the Panic and Liberation. This isn’t a scenario where we start at the beginning and see the numbers go up and down. The Wall is early, but other stories are late. K also pointed out it was too close to Galactica, which is exactly where I took the idea from. It was early on when I wrote it and I hadn’t brainstormed very hard.
7:21–Meaker, Zack is taking care of weeding out the weaklings. No person in the Zone should cheer when we lose one to the other side. I apologize in advance if that’s not what you meant.
7:51–Tyler, check out the Google Maps feature by hitting the map link at the top of the page. There’s also a slide show of some photos (all bad) on the artwork page.
My stone age pile of junk won’t load it. As embarrassing it is to admit…I have dial-up still. I use family’s/friend’s computers for things like that and the audio Mouthwash story. Unfortunatley, I don’t get many opportunities to use machines other than my own.
What should we do about water, and how does my bottle idea sound?
There was talk before of lining the roof of the garage with buckets to collect rain. There was talk of a giant water tank to hold drinking water. We need something, you don’t want to have to boil it and then wait for it to cool every time you want a drink.
The boiling is for the stored water, it would be more for like public drinking water. Besides you should boil water from the ground especially from a well because of the viruses in it.
The water idea is Rob’s to give up.
He started it, but Chris and I had some problems. I don’t remember what they were now. Water’s a problem, no doubt. I think we left it on the back burner because of the impossibility of choosing between Onondaga Lake, Ley Creek, contaminated airport ground water, or going to Oneida…
The airport water could be boiled which would make it fresh clean water.
Rain water collection is a good idea, but buckets aren’t practical, not enough surface area. If it is going to be done we should use tarps to catch rain water over a large area and then funnel and collect it.
Soil works as an excellent filtration system. You can make your own piss into pure h2o if it passes through a few feet of sediment. The well must be covered at all times and no foreign organic objects should be permitted to fall in. We don’t need decaying animals in our drinking water. As long as there is strict discipline regarding well usage I don’t see a problem.
Boiling water isn’t feasible for 600 plus people. The amount of fuel required is astronomical and it could only be done in small batches. We could only use wood for such a task and its not possible to get a wood fire hot enough to boil a large quantity of water (I’m talkin a couple dozen gallons here).
Dave, I think the issue I had was that I had no idea as to how to make a well. I thought it would be really tough.
Jared, what do you mean “airport water”? Do you mean from the sinks? They won’t work.
i like the well idea, but I still do recomend boiling just as a precaution, besides that I like the well we could also do both though. We still need storage I am still with my bottling idea we could also use and tanker trucks left around wash them out and store water in them.
By airport water i mean the water that runs natrually through the ground,i am not that dumb pretty close though.
For a well we just need to dig a hole it would be easier then the wall, we could have our kids help they like digging.
I am just joking.
Too complicated, Jared. And see my earlier post you can’t possibly boil enough water for 600 plus people everyday. And if you could it would just be wasteful.
I just wasn’t sure what you meant.
I say the boiled stuff would be like an emergency water system just in case it does not rain, this way we have pre-boiled fesh water.
The work of building a well would be best done by some kind of construction equipment. I’m sure a backhoe could be found in post panic CNY and we don’t need to clear the roads because the thing can just push its way through.
But if we are dead set against the backhoe idea its still doable it will just require a lot of back breaking labor.
Let’s go get a backhoe.
The rain water would supplement the well water. Well water is clean. The only thing that it touches is sediment and that just filters out more bad stuff. Above ground standing or slow moving water is dangerous, a subterranean source is the best source we could hope for.
I am with you on that, besides everyone just got done building a wall with a makeshitft pully system so I think that the fact we are using heavy constructian equipment would be nice.
Ok, but if we do somehow get near a lake break out the boilers.
We’re near Onondaga Lake. I’d rather deal with zombies than drink boiled Onondaga Lake water.
I think the results of that water would be worse than Solanum.
The water situation would be done at the same time as the wall. If not, the workers would be really thirsty.
Why boiling would kill everything.
Well at least heavy boiling would do the trick on onadoaga.
Do you know about Onondaga Lake?
That lake is one of the most polluted in the world. There are so many heavy metals and nasty chemicals in that lake that drinking the water for a week would probably kill you.
Yea you are right it would have to be done with the wall to prevent dehydration, but then again if we do not even have the water to fuel a group of workers how are we supplying everyone right now. I think the water should be done before the wall.
I don’t think it would take that long. They warn fisherman not to eat what they catch there. And what they catch usually has a few extra eyes, and 2 mouths.
Yea screw onadoga it is a lost cause, let us stick to rain and ground water.
i just noticed this, we have been talking about issues since 2:20 p.m. yesterday and s around 100 comments.
We also when we get water need to imediately look into long term food.
Jared, look at the writing guidelines section on food. It’s been talked about before. Let us know if you have any suggestions to add.
Hardware store have seeds, seeds keep for a very long time, if we get water then we can plant crops. This is more long term though because we will not see results untill next year.
I am done for tonight.