As an engineer, it's not the weight, but rather the inertial forces of trying to start, stop and the changing direction of that amount of mass exceeding our current material strength technologies.
Not only that, but there's topography to negotiate, i doubt that NASA crawlers can negotiate a hill, plus even if possible, how would it climb a hill... It would need to flex, or have dozens to hundreds of meters of suspension allowance so that all tracks along it's length would have traction Either way this would put a lot of stress on it's superstructure, more than i think it would handle. Not to mention the vibrations from the engines and the movement would mean that the city would be suffering a constant "earthquake" which would likely cause the whole thing to collapse in a few months if not weeks or days.
Every time the city stopped it would look like the Battlestar Galactica (new version) after its last jump thanks to all the deteriorating structural joints that incur damage as the vehicle traverses rough terrain and then steps on the brakes. Ripple ripple!
@@TheReaverKane When alone, the Nasa crawlers can handle hills of somewhat decent slopes. What they do is raise one end of it to counter the slope so the top remains perfectly level at all times. Naturally, it has a limit to how steep the hill can be, and this functionality would stop working if you tried to combine them together like this. You would need the entire base of the city to be what is adjusted according to the slope in order to keep everything level. And that would be a lot harder to engineer.
Hey Kyle the NASA engineers have said that they can make the crawler move faster but when moving hundreds of millions of dollars you need to be as careful as possible
Yeah, long, cylindrical thingies with narrow bases tend not to like having their lower parts whipped around at high speeds. They tend to fall down and go boom. (Thought that's the reason they were so slow, but didn't want to bet on my memory.)
@@kennuuthswansun3379 besides the novel series theres like artbooks and in universe guides to the major citys you can get. cant say if they have spoilers tho cause i dont own them
The high speeds at which these large cities move makes more sense when you consider the geology in play. At the scales we're talking the ground itself may as well be a liquid. If a large city weighing billions or trillions of tons were to stop moving for any length of time they would begin to sink thus rendering their wheels unusable in a short amount of time. The heavier the city the faster it would need to move to keep their wheels above the surface. Hard desert bedrock may be more "solid" of a surface but even rock acts like a fluid given enough stress. Cities in more waterlogged geology such as near coastlines would need to move so fast that they would be virtually water-skiing, or earth-skiing as the case may be, just to avoid sinking.
Or the reality of thing is the concept is pure non-sense... you couldn't have realistically giant cities moving on ground, plus seriously in case of a geological disaster they wouldn't make giant cities moving on ground, they'd make giant floating cities, its something already sorta conceptualized and could be viable, the entire concept of that story is pure rubbish.
@@topanteon I didn't saying Flying Cities, I said Floating, as in 'On Water'. A flying city would be significantly harder than a giant roving city on the ground, but a giant city floating on water would be significantly easier.
@@lydiahood7725 Ah, right, sorry, missunderstood. But isn't the case in the movie that there were loads of tsunamies? Would make floating cities a bit harder to sustain.
While moving, London would be experiencing constant hurricane force winds at 90 mph. It would be crazy to travel from building to building while the city is in motion.
They actualy solved that problem in the book with shielding and such, the exterior of the city was not somewhere you walked rather it was built with a hollow inside it for people to walk and move safely with viewing platforms so you could see the chases taking place
@@libertyprime4381 Very interesting! I'm sure the various buildings would also break up the wind forces along the surface by creating natural barriers to the wind's movement past the city. Though, that explanation still requires the proper engineering design of the buildings/structures on the moving city to withstand the various loads on the structures surface (which would be distributed to the foundation, etc.), i.e. the same calculations done on skyscrapers on steroids.
@@jacobthomas5435 Didn't know there was a book, and it has good reviews.... I'll read it later. Anyway, after "edge of tomorrow", didn't really bother to check it and, if the novel the anime is based on is based on this book, it's still not a comedy XD
I'm not sure if you were using it intentionally or not, but "the City of London" is actually a much smaller subset of the whole of London, London City may only be 2.9km², but the actual London is around 1,600km²
I remember watching a documentary about the super tanks that the Nazi were trying to make and the reason that they failed was that they would just dig themselves into the ground. I thought that there is a relatively low threshold for our ability to make something that can travel on track or wheels at speed. You have to go slow if at all or the ground will not support the weight above it.
Super tanks are a much better comparison. NASA transport platforms only have to go on perfectly flat roads, what happens when you try to go up a shallow slope or across a river
The German "big cats" had lower ground pressure than pretty much anything the allies had, and in the case of the Maus it had even less ground pressure than the "big cats" so they wouldn't have dug themselves into the ground any worse than lighter allied tanks. The real reason they failed was because of lack of resources and factories that built them being bombed.
That documentary was pretty bad then, ground pressure wasn't an issue, brigde allowance was and even then they were made with the assumption that they would just ford the rivers without them real problems was cost
It’s not that you have to go slow, the slowness was a result of the lack of power. I mean the biggest tank actually built was the Maus at 188 metric tons, of course it would be slow. And also the eastern front had a particular muddy terrain. Though it all depends on the weight distribution. The Eiffel tower weighs a little over 10,000 tons, but it’s fine because it’s spread over such a large area. It just needs to not be too much weight concentrated on one spot and then vehicles of that weight could exist
@@cogboyofmars1575 The Inquisition itself makes use of this fact against the Ork...why do you think they always push the Blood Angels to the front against them?
I like the fact that in the trailer 2 you can clearly see people just walking and doing their own thing on top of a giant moving machine that chase smaller moving machine at 90 MPH WITHOUT a windshield. Plus the chase happen in rough terrain and the machine have to do necessary manuver to catch it's prey.
It's even worse than that. His estimate was about half the actual speed. They said in an interview somewhere ( I think with Tested ), that the cities are moving at 300km/h which is a little over 180mph!
in the books, the first chase is described in great detail. it says: ""The town is called Salthook," boomed the voice of the announcer. "A mining platform of nine hundred inhabitants. She is currently moving at eighty miles per hour, heading due east, but the Guild of Navigators predicts London will catch her before sundown. There are sure to be many more towns awaiting us beyond the land-bridge; clear proof of just how wise our beloved Lord Mayor was when he decided to bring London east again..."" Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines, pg. 7
Yeah I thought of that and actually looked some stuff up and it looks like with certain cutting edge nuclear reactors you can produce the necessary energy with "only" about 2400 tons of extra weight. That would include 5 years worth of fuel.
That's what I thought as well. You have to power the city itself somehow, and you're likely not using coal. You don't have the space for solar or wind. Powering the city with a nuclear reactor makes sense. If you have a nuclear reactor sitting on the thing anyways, why in the world would you power the main engine with gasoline?
I wated to ask for possibke threat upon those nuclear reactor, what about earthquakes? Cities on wheels may be able to resist earthwuaketo some degrees, but i still prefer the idea of floating cities over the ocean
With the idea of the movie taking place in the future, nuclear fusion should've been the way to go in my opinion. This Jackson guy has come a long way on his career, btw #braindead.
You didn't distinguish between London (the Capital city of England) and "The City of London" which is not really a city but more of a district in London, the small areas and populations you are talking about are for the latter.
Hi Kyle! Taking this further, say we WERE able to get the cities moving 90 mph. With all the rough terrain, even at the size they are, wouldn't they basically shake apart? Is there a building material that would prevent them from crumbling? Would it be possible to have some kind of suspension/gimbal-type system that large that would be stable across the entire city of 'London'? Thanks! Heather (aka someone who knows very little about construction...)
Well look at newer cars with active suspension that you can just drive over really rough terrain without even disturbing the car by a single millimeter. If you were to take this to the next level I would think that you could maybe perhaps theoretically do it. But it would take a LOT of power and perhaps a really really good regenerative breaking (for the fall) system. And it would still require pretty flat terrain to work because of the insane size of a city
@@zamundaaa776 yeah, but theres limits to that id say. something the size of a city rumbling over rough terrain at these speeds would probably equal a continuous richter-scale earthquake. all that vibration energy would just straight up destroy it, id wager. not to mention if you ever hit a resonance frequency anywhere. oh boy.. talk about a 10 billion Kg bouncy castle on wheels ;D
As Zam pointed out there is suspension systems in place for car but to your other point. Building out on the west coast tend to be built with special metals and even in some cases suspension in the foundation to handle the movement and bending. Also wood is a great material for this too since it will bend well naturally if it remains damp. Either-way there is ways to build buildings to handle vibrations.
Certainly not if you just picked up a city as we have them now, made for a very significant part out of stone. Stone is very brittle and thus would not be able to absorb the shaking. If you did some really weird construction stuff you might be able to absorb the impacts of the bumpy road using steel, but it would still mean that you'll constantly be flung throughout your house.
London on tracks? Could anyone (eg. the English government) be organised enough to get it done? As someone who was born and lived their entire life in England, I'll say no. They can't even fix the roads.
As ridiculous as it would be, you could build a majority of the parts via 3D printing. Even now, 3DP is getting ready to move onto the stage of printing large objects (eventuallyany size of object) so long as you have the schematic. For example, the cost of building a rocket could decrease by as much as 80-90%.
Damn right. British government can't negotiate brexit. Let alone put London on wheels. We spend tens of billions on a train that gets you somewhere 12 minutes earlier
And what about the maintenance needed for the tracks? If they're moving that fast then the mechanical components would wear out eventually, what if one of the tracks gets completely damaged, how would they replace it?
@@omartirado1721 make a second track put it in front of the city cut it's current tracks and drive it on to the new ones before using steel cables to bull it up to the driving wheel and spin them till they reach the other side of the track where welders are lowered down on window cleaning platforms to put them together
Now for the REAL reason this couldn't work: If you can't get a city full of people to agree on how to drive their cars, you're not going to get a city full of people to agree on how to drive their city.
@@Jehty_ Woah, woah, woah. Slow down there. Yes, that could work. BUT we're talking about people with road rage. Controlling the masses via politics like Hitler, Trump, or any other authoritarian? That's possible. But trying to do that when everyone has road rage? This dictator better have god-level mind control powers.
@Neo Politan They have this thing called "plotium". It's a highly indestructible metal that could work as pretty much anything. Shock absorbers? Check. Being able to hold entire cities on wheels without the foundation breaking? Check
@@Jehty_ in the book there's a lord mayor who runs the city. He is an authoritarian, and the people in general don't seem to care about where they are going.
That's why many newer trucks are being given static noise for their reverse alert. One it doesn't travel far, letting you know it must be close, but it also is easier for the human hear to pinpoint the direction it is coming from
I know it's been mentioned before but I want a chance at appearing in the notes episode. "The City of London" is a tiny space inside London. It's 3km2 of financial offices and it exists as a separate municipality. This is mostly due to historical reasons but it's maintained now for tax reasons, (it's a big tax haven and laws inside it are controlled by the financial organisations that exist in there, it's horrifically dystopian.
He definitely doesn't think the entirety of London is 1 square mile lol, but if you google "city of London size" you'll get 2.9 km2 because google wants to confuse 90% of people who refer to "the greater London area" as the city of London
If one wants to use "The City of London" as a demographic benchmark, its 2011 population of 8,000 is irrelevant -- as noted above, it's currently a prestige central business district dominated by trans-national financial services companies. Something like its 1851 population of 130,000 (Wikipedia), with a no-zoning intermixture of residential and industrial, would be more applicable to a nomadic Traction City.
Just curious.. wouldn't a nuclear power plant placed inside the "city" produce enough energy to keep the city moving at a relatively fast pace? I know a 1GW facility produces 2.6x10^13 J/d in terms of energy, and I believe it would indeed fit and still leave enough room for habitation... though I admit, I'm no expert. Any idea? PS, been fan of your show for long time. Still as good now as when you didn't have your own channel. Hell. Better even.
Dunno about the technical limitations of it, but on the thematic/narrative side, there is something to be said for the grittier feel machinery running on petrol has. This is why I personally think a lot of technological concepts we have today were scrapped when designing the setting, it just fits the animalistic "dog eats dog" world better.
@@hkr667it would of been a much longer film if in Mad Max they had to stop and wait a week for their cars to recharge on old solar panels or a jerryrigged wind turbine
@@andresarancio6696 I thought the nuclear aspect would actually be better, as radioactive material is a hell of a lot easier to salvage than gasoline or diesel fuel if your means is by grinding the city up.
The tech was there and is still there, some remnants from the past survive and are used in the books some to greater effect then others (and some people also live very very long and sort of sad lives, but I don't think that was part of the first book, so this isn't really a spoiler) Damn, 100% need to go to the library and reread the entire series, it was good though the big change between book 2 and 3 was a bit jarring, I didn't remember them as the same series until I checked the wiki. (lots of things change over the series)
Really enjoyed this! I just recently read the book and I was surprised by how the trailer only showed maybe a chapter of the book. Not only that, it's not some "chosen one" trope fest and the main character isn't even Hester. It's Tom! I'm glad the trailers aren't giving away anything because I feel like most audiences will be really pleasantly taken aback by how things go, because the book didn't go the way I expected.
Okay, but for an entire city to be moving at 90mph over totally messed up, wartorn ground, wouldn't riding it just feel like a continuous earthquake, shaking buildings apart and throwing people off their feet (or off the side) until it's just one big pile of rubble? What kind of material could hold the cities together?
In the opening London catches Salthook, which is traveling at least 80MPH. The main difference is the ground, in the book it's a flat plain, whereas it's a jumble of rocks and cliffs in the trailer.
The material is called Plot-thium. a type of metal which Hollywood runs a monopoly on and uses it to make things happen in movies which normal steel wouldn't be capable of. Such as holding those cities together despite the vibrations.
Using that valuable piece of information, we may estimate that in 26 days of movement at between 1.6 kph and 4kph, the city would have rolled over between 998 km and 2.496 km.
As you speak of why big things look slow, I have a good example. In Pacific Rim, during the fight in Tokyo, Gypsy Danger uses a tanker to whack a Kaiju. The reason it doesn't swing it as fast as we would a bat or a sword is simply because inertia would tear the ship apart (or maybe even it's weight could send Gypsy Danger flying) before it even has a chance to connect.
@@rosssidebottom9352 Bruv, don't pick a fight with someone uninterested, aight? He used the City of London as a population database, meaning it would be fair to explain that London was built by Romans who wanted to steal the trade that the City of London was getting due to the wide Thames river.
@@venusianviking1733 They might be able to use salvaged prewar tech. In fact, they would probably have to. Either that, or they developed more efficient fuel and engines out of necessity.
Cause it's Steampunk, and this is not truly technologically advanced (compared the the prewar era) They had true immortality and Super weapons which tore the earth into the world it is seen in the movie. (though some of the survivors might have preferred death to the war) The books explain it well (the oil is actually made from shit the cities leave behind, literal and figurative shit it's an ecosystem of different types of cities and stuff)
The Master Tanker no. Just nooooooooo. Humanity wouldn’t have the tech or need for tanks. Why would they have a tank when it’ll just be eaten easily. Airships are far better. Also, the cities literally have guns on rails in books 3 and 4.
Correction, the numbers are ridiculous but not impossible. Also there would be a huge amount of weight added if you account for the need to make the city able to be moved and go over terrain, etc. Yo'd probably need a massive shock absorber for each of those 610 crawlers.
London has an area of 1,572 km^2. You’re thinking of an area within London called the city of London. It’s a dumb name but London is a whole lot bigger than what you said
I know, I used the "City of London" in my calcs. It's the same as using the metropolitan area of Los Angeles instead of Los Angeles, which is ginormous. -- kH
The London Metropolitan Area (or Greater London) is actually not the City of London, that goes to the small area within the former. That little area is REALLY special and is the one and only City of London. It is actually a somewhat interessting history and the election of the mayor of the City of London is totally bonkers. The great and awesome GCPGrey made two videos about this. Here is nr. 1.... ua-cam.com/video/LrObZ_HZZUc/v-deo.html
Exceptionally. Those NASA crawlers only ever travel on completely flat and solid ground. The city seems to travel cross country and has next to no ground clearance. It's not so much as driving around but dragging it's belly around. A slight incline, river or rock outcrop would stop the city in it's tracks, yes it's weight would liquify the ground under it, but it anything this makes the problem worse, as if they ever do slow down, or god forbid stop, they will never get started again.
@@speedy01247 that's the thing. It may weigh alot, but in terms of terrain, it's tiny, but at the same time large enough to get properly stuck in a valley (I doubt it could get up even a 10% incline without snapping it's spine) and since it's London it's driving around the UK, go north, lots of valleys, and terrain that may even subside/collapse if a few billion tons suddenly appeared on it, limestone isn't exactly the strongest material and the UK is full of the stuff.
Not only would it be possible to create a moving city according to your calculations, assuming all of the smaller cities were built the same way with several crawlers under each one of them, that would make it easy for the giant predatory city to reuse the materials from the cities it consumes. It wouldn't even have to build new wheels every time it expands, it would simply move the crawlers it ate to underneath the city and redistribute weight. That would be like if your dog ate all of the other dogs in your neighborhood then surgically attached the all of the legs of the dead dogs to it's own body and nervous system in order to support it's new weight. Okay, maybe there's a better analogy than that.
i think it was possible if they can make the city light and they have discover ironman arc reactor. But it dosnt really concern me though, what really bugging me is how the heck that red airship can carry 2 giant jet engine and even able to hovering in air.
The Russian Typhoon Nuclear Submarine houses two nuclear reactors, each individually capable of producing 190 MW of power. I think for a project of this scale, it would be more feasible to place 20 such power plants on the structure, in spite of the weight, so you could power the whole city, as well as the transportation, and not have to worry about refueling (At least for a VERY long time). Using any type of 'traditional fuel' would be rather inefficient and wasteful considering weight is an issue. As a side note, using the nuclear generators used on ships or submarines is more practical since they are optimized for weight and size in order to be practical power plants for ships. However, if you wanted only ONE power plant, and were willing to compromise size and weight to essentially haul around a city that was impractically large including it's own energy generation, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Arizona produces a whopping 3.8 GW of power at maximum capacity. It actually runs at around 3.3 GW, as 'generally' you don't run a thing at its maximum engineered specs, but it can probably safely manage the necessary 3.5 GW. Now, I've been 'assuming' that when we factored in the weight of the city, we also factored in the infrastructure that produced it's electricity in the first place. If not, you essentially have to double all this, because the actual energy consumption of London is around 4.5 GW. However, assuming that production is already contained within the original figure, then we have no issues at all.
Anything else that can be used to minimize the weight of the city would also be critical to achieving this successfully: fiber optic cabling, strong but lightweight alloys, lighter plastics, graphene, reduction in usage of stony material and ceramic, etc. etc.
@@jimmyjunk3093 It's very easy to engineer an essentially closed-loop system. Ya just hook your condensers up properly and there ya go. In fact, at the scale these big mothers are running on you could probably even have more power generation from running the river of recondensed water down through a turbine on it's way back to the primary holding tanks.
@@kairndreamer2885 Also got to take into account the 60minute war happened a fair bit into the future, they had nanites, brain-machine interfaces, weird "clockwork" reactors that seem to be the next best thing to a ZPM/or air fueled fusion reactor or something cause they never go out, they had sentient AIs, Orbital Doom Lasers of some description (And various other Doom Satellites as well), and of course whatever the hell killed everything and Fisted Mother Nature into Oblivion in just an hour. (If it wasn't actually just the Doom Lasers....)
4:03 Actually, given these cities "eat" each other for survival, I would expect the cities to move as fastly as technologically possible. We might even extrapolate to say these cities could technologically develop in ways similar to biological evolution. Perhaps a few decades later, we can see supersonic airborne cities, or cities covered in synthetic chromatophores to hide it from "predator" cities like London, or perhaps even cities mimicking my favorite self-defense mechanism in all of biology: that of the Spanish ribbed newt. This newt secretes poison before pushing its ribs through its skin, covering itself in toxic spikes of objectively awesome death. A smaller "prey" city like this could protect itself by creating its infrastructure in such a way that pieces of it can be launched into its "predator"'s fuel tank before exploding. This would "paralyze" the predator city and maybe even allow the smaller prey city to salvage materials from the larger predator before its immune system (its people) can mount a proper defense. I really would love to conduct the maths of all of this, but I have college finals to get studying for. One way or another, I'll see you in footnotes ;)
Another solution for the sort of tactical city-to-city combat would probably be the equivalent of modern naval warfare. The city could deploy small (in comparison) air ships that act to neutralize the surface defenses of the enemy just to then send boarding tanks to neutralize its engines so it is easier prey to catch.
@@andresarancio6696 That's actually a really good idea! One thing I will say is that sounds like a heck of a lot of effort to catch prey that's so much smaller than the predator city. In fact, the size ratio between predator and prey makes sense in the fact that a predator would need so much space for fuel, movement, and maintenance of itself and its people, that it suddenly doesn't have that much room for its eating system. If that's the case, though, why would prey cities not take every opportunity to make themselves bigger than the predator's mouth? In fact, why do smaller cities not band together and suddenly we have pack hunting? I am not watching this movie unless they have pack hunting cities nicknamed 'raptors'. That idea is that cool to me.
@@boswcheydoesart1314 That actually would make a lot of sense. The reason why there aren't that many giant predators and why pack hunting happens is exactly that. Of course one could argue the smaller cities could end up answering to a bigger city that has the infraestructure to process bigger prey (you would need a bigger "mouth" to devour them and turn them into resources), and in that process build a sort of "city hive" with the "Queen" being mostly sedentary while the pack hunters take down big cities and drag them into the queen's location. Aaaand soon we have a city ecosystem
This looked like a lot of fun to make and definitely watch ! Thank you and great job . By the way did you guys forget about super carriers and nuclear power engine's ? 😉
@Thomas Mitchell but what if you get one of those boats with electric engines, batterys and solar. Just chill on a lifelong fishing trip with a distiler making freshwater in the kitchen. Just float until you see some guy coming towards then just speed the hell out of there.
@@speedy01247 yeah buy electric motors, rechargeable batteries and solar dont require much repairs so a box of spare parts would do you much longer than nessescary, certainly longer than mobile cities on wheels and tracks could ever do. If you get out far enough away from other you can drop anchor and just stay floating for months with no threat from people anyways.
Makes you wonder how much effect something like wind resistance or incline would produce on the fuel consumption for cities that big, since I'm pretty sure that those NASA platforms roll on level ground.
@staris84 You fail to address his point. He doesn't question their ability, he wonders what the effect on fuel consumption is. And as far as I know, that is quite substantial.
These films are based on a book series in which it states London can go like 60mph or something. Also I remember reading them as a kid so I'm pretty excited for this film.
Berezniki + German Maus Tank = this abomination of theoretical science. Arcade mode would let it move, Realistic would cause the engine to burn out, Simulator would just have it as a scale model of the intended project.
Love the video. But you know- Air resistance terrain isn’t flat Turning Maintaining a machine like that Where do you get the fuel and electricity (there isn’t infinite fuel in the world) Other forces and lack of funds and material It would be much more practical to just have multiple small towns Count you imagine trying to write anything on that bumpy ride. Traction Sinking into the ground? Not to mention the winds you’d experience living there! So annyywwayys... like I said love the video
Yeah I'm drawing a blank here. If London were a giant CV. She could float away from the island.... Unless the built a botched ramp and jumped the channel.
Poor city planning for a vehicle that supposedly is going to be in combat. It would also make more sense to have lots of smaller "town" vehicles rather than a giant singular city vehicle, because physics.
(all book info)well it all started with one engineer who did it to get to the middle of Europe with London to be safe from rising seas wasn't made for combat just to move a bunch of people plus in the book London is like the whole of London all 200sqKM of it then other rich enough cities did it but countries didn't like it so a 60 minute war happened which blocked out the sun and fucked it all up bad so then you get to the book.
No no, most cities only have a few light AA guns for pirate airships. In the 4th book however, there is a war between the European traction cities and Asian static cities during which the Germans convert several cities into massive multi-mile tall mobile fortresses that act as an entire naval battlegroup on tracks.
This is my first "Because Science" video, and I really love how much effort you put into this, all the knowledge and compassion and how he presented it all. Great job!
How viable would a nuclear powered moving city thingy be? We have examples of nuclear reactor powered engines from pop-culture ( Fallout Franchise) If i a m not wrong. Nuclear Energy is much more efficient that conventional fuel and also would kinda solve the problem of effectively storing all this HUGE volume of petrol.
The thing is the fuel for nuclear fusion wouldn't be sustainable since uranium235 is rare and a pain to find unless they are using newer models like thorium engine it's possible but would be difficult to make a big enough one to power these citys
@@names1139 you mean *fission.* you only need uranium in fission powerplants. hydrogen bombs use a plutonium bomb to start the fusion reaction, BUT *fusion* would only need certain isotopes to fuse, in theory, if they could generate enough temperature and/or pressure, they could even run it on idk, oxigen, even though it'd take a lot of power to fuse oxigen, current fusion reactors use huge electromagnets to keep the plasma in place and huge lasers to heat the stuff up enough, but they still can't sustain it, the aim is to create a miniature star, essentially that'll be the fusion reactor. *NO* fission material is used. fission breaks atoms, fusion fuses, not the same mate.
@@MrPapamaci88 yeah but like you said fusion isn't sustainable and is really difficult to make sustainable so logically you would jump to fission which produces alot of power for potentially dangerous fuel waste and rare and radioactive
Gotta keep your guard up, the one time you don't you might manage to find something to hit. A drunk driver once hit the ONLY tree in the middle of a desert so, it's possible.
Nice concept, but it's the weight under it that's supposed to hold it up that wouldn't work. That much weight on a dirt ground would be a permanet residence. Imagine if it rains. ^_^
Ahhhhm Im pretty damn sure that London does not take up only 2,9km² .*Edit. The DISTRICT called "city of london" has 2.9km² The whole city of london has 1570 km².
Actually, by London he means the city, not greater London which has 1.572km2. It's up on brittanica now, litterally says the City of London, at the centre of greater London, is 2.9km2. I was actually curious as to whether he was correct or not and thought you may like to know. Edit: if you also just look up City of London, it will come up on wikipedia aswell, as London is generally used to talk about the larger area around it aswell now.
Yeah I'm not sure where he got that number... though if you're stacking buildings on top of each other a kilometer high you can get closer to the right area but probably still pretty far.
@@12thmocha11 I think they should have mentioned that "city of london" is a district of the city london. And not the actual city: london. The district called "city of London" of the city: London is 2,9km². The city: London is 1500km² and the metropolitan area of London has 8300km²
@@abisz007007Actually, City of London is a City, not a district. The thing is, it's inside of London. But both of them have different mayors, different City Halls, different police and different laws
@@abisz007007 I mean either way, the number he uses is correct. So I dont mind, I mean, like, what is considered a city would never be able to move, and every city I've been to has districts, so using the London district/borough is fine with me
But, what about instead of asking how it could be done, what about asking if it *SHOULD* be done. Would it even be feasible to do something like this in the event of the war from the Mortal Engine series, such as, what are the logistics of procuring the food, water, and resources required to run the cities?
@@magnatorra5325 I see your counter-argument and raise you this: But where first does that food come from, as the amount of land required to farm, especially for most meats and fruits/vegetables, it appears that no space is even allocated in the cities, much less could the several square kilometers be sufficient for the amount of food consumed by the rough amount of land required per person (The current global average acres per person with modern techniques, which they aren't exactly shown using, require about .5 acres of cropland, or 1.5 to include rangeland)? How do they procure sufficient amounts of drinking water (And water for other necessities such as the previously mentioned farming) as via rainwater it would not provide enough for the purposes of a complex city, much less for the fact that design elements facilitating the collection of rainwater appear to be completely lacking in all depictions of cities. The average rainfall of 601 mm in the London Area (Over a year) couldn't support it. Should a traction city need fuel, what fuels do they use, are they the same hydrocarbons of today, despite the books taking place thousands of years from now? If so, where is the fuel (Gasoline, Diesel, etc.) refined as it only has a shelf-life of less than a year, and that is with modern chemical additives to prevent the breakdown of it. The necessary fuel requirements of these cities is absolutely ginormous and would require and exceptional amount of supply logistics to run, with modern computers and global trade and high tech manufacturing markets and modern petrol refineries. Meanwhile, life appears to be somewhere comparable to the very early to mid pre-industrial era. What if new parts or items must be manufactured in the event that they cannot be procured from other cities, do there then exist factories and mining operations to support them? Although the cost to build it may not seem grand, the cost to operate with even remote efficiency is astronomical, and not just monetarily wise, but also with resource and human requirements, as well as the necessary education and training to run these cities (And I don't think we will get to see what a public school looks like in the movie either to show what generations are tough so that they may push ever-forward on the Hunting Grounds)? To discuss the point of Municipal Darwinism, one must first also realize the very much over-looked aspects of the necessary supply chain for traction cities which of course would make the stories not nearly as exciting for an audience. I still would not call it evolution though, as rather the idea of Darwinism is that it is survival of the more fit, and that ones must adapt to survive. People continue to adapt today, but it is by no means evolutionary. The books are post-apocalyptic fantasy, and show in some of their more ludicrous old-tech weapons, humanity's degeneracy into using traction cities as though they were still hunter-gathers (But also cannibals in a sense of requiring themselves to feed on the cities of others), and the overall lack of progression to a more organized society structured around the redevelopment of lucrative, sought-out, and/or necessary markets and parts of the economy and redevelopment of technologies such as heavier-than-air flight, telecommunications, medicines, etc. Oh, and I haven't even begone to ask about the fact that devouring other cities would require: a) Populations of devoured cities to be absorbed (But obviously the cities can't exactly grow larger like a stationary one could), which would also require ever increasing resources that are already scarce; b) Populations would be exterminated whole-sale. If a), then there would obviously be serious issues involving dissent among recently "consumed" peoples, possibly with the intent and plans to overthrow their devour-er and take over the city. If you solution for dissent is b), obviously more issues would then arise. In both instances, the very mechanism of the survival of traction cities would be in a way its own poison, as attempts to devour other cities for the resources as you described to also include a potentially hostile populous (Who also need the resources), there is little to no room for growth as the amount of land available was predetermined at the creation of the traction city (So obviously even natural population increases would lead to issues), but also if b) is the case, than there is also the potential for inbreeding as little outside genetic diversity is added.
@@GLitchesHaxandBadAudio as for the food, water, and fuel thing, litertally everything is recycled. heck, by londons end they are even trying to make granola out of feces! this may not actualy work but its the in book explanation
4:25 apparently 10 times as fast as that. The tip of London is in 8 frames, and thus takes roughly 9 frames to get across. At 24 fps, that is .375 seconds. Assuming Kyle has a shoulder width of about 70 cm, and realising he takes up about 60% of the width of the screen (20/12, in my frame), the screen is 1.16 m wide in reality. 1.16/.375 = 3.11 m/s, not nearly the speed calculated. (I do understand that the real velocity would not have been feasible as London would have been in only one frame and you wouldn't see it move; it would just flash for a fraction of a second.) Other possibility is to scale up the frame to the relative speed of the city of London. In one frame (4:25:17, I believe) you see that the entire city almost fits exactly in one frame. Just to get an idea of the order of magnitude we'll assume the frame is as wide as the city is long: 2500 m. (That would mean Kyle's shoulders - bulky as he is - are 1500 m wide. Do you even lift, bro?) It still passes those 2500 m in .375 seconds, so it's velocity is 2500/.375=6.67 km/s, or mach 19.4. To be travelling at the correct speed on this scale, it would be in frame for 2500/35 = 71 seconds.
@@AspLode Not even the city would literally tear itself apart because of the atmosphere around it. Any destruction would come from the falling pieces at high velocities.
19,000 litres for gasoline times 610 NASA Crawlers... That's like 32,452,000$ worth of gasoline (if you take a gas-price of 2,80$ per litre) for just getting you 64 kilometers further until you have to refuel ALL of the NASA Crawlers! Lets hope they got some good solar panels on the roofs, because i'm not paying that gasbill every 64 kilometers!
It's not a new concept. Anime has been doing it for years. The best example I can think of is in Robot Carnival. What gets me is how the buildings would stand up to the movement. They'd almost have to be built on the structure from scratch and built in a way to compensate for the movement of the city because every time the city moves it would be like an earthquake.
Read the book by Philip Reeve. Pretty good read. Also, note that in the world-changing war, humanity had progressed quite a bit farther than we're at now. Oh, and there may be a couple sequels, and even technical prequels, depending on how many of these movies they make. Oh and...Shaw is supposed to be uglier. Like Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Thank you, I'm so glad someone else agrees with me. Hester has a really messed up face, but that puts all the more emotion and force behind it when Tom falls in love with her. Plus, TOM IS ALSO A MAIN CHARACTER, WHY DID YOU FORGET ABOUT HIM KYLE?
Nah that's nothing, in the books they have even bigger German traction cities converted for battle, so imagine a city about twice the size of London in the trailer, but covered in armor heavier than a WW2 battleship carried with a massive amount of cannons that would put the 16inchers of an Iowa class to shame. Or how about the armies of undying cyborgs that said battle cities fight. They send millions of troops into the frontlines Soviet Russia style, then when they die take the corpse and convert it into a killing machine to go out and die over and over again.
@@samueltitone5683 It's sci fi, people just tend to completely ignore the lore from the books... This is happening in the future, when at some point there was a 60 minute war in which humanity kinda destroyed itself and had to go mobile to survive. In that war they used the Stalkers, those cyborg warriors, tesla guns and orher super advanced shit. Most of the technology got lost, but engineers of London managed to get some old Stalker pieces and revived some people with the "old tech" (which was of course old only for them). I'm more and morw worried for this movie as nobody knows the books, which contain essential info the movie most likely won't, and this will be auch a huge flop because of this :(
I have a few to mention as well... Wind Resistance. Metal Fatigue. Surface Tension. Hydrogen Fuel. Nuclear Power. Impossible Maintenance. Supercarrier Cities. Science Fantasy... ...And Rick Astley.
You could use more crude forms of petroleum based fuel, or the contrary, more processed forms of petroleum based fuel, to produce more energy per gallon of fuel. Even now we have diesel, gasoline, and actually different forms of gasoline, such as nitrogen enriched gasoline, which is supposed to be more efficient. You could also supplement it with wind turbines, solar panels, and actually, nuclear reactors. In fact, at that point, you probably wouldn't even need fuel. Those carriers also move very slow, not because they can't move faster, but because if they do, the load could tip over, but that doesn't seem like a problem for the city, which seems to be much more securely built. . Btw, Kyle, (please bare with me, I know you probably are tired of this, but the important thing is the last sentence which is a question) this has been bothering me for years. How did the doors pin the lightsaber in The Phantom Menace? If ut really us plasma instead of something else melting through the doors, wouldn't the doors basically go through? We also see this in Clone Wars, when Ventrice stabs her lightsabers into a wall to decelerate her fall, and even as far back as the original triology, so much when Luke strijes objects with a lightsaber, as when he strikes Darth Vader before Darth Vader cuts his hand, and even in The Last Jedi, before Luke cuts Darth Vader's hand, the lightsaber is stopped by metal pipes, even though when he cuts Darth Vader's hand, the lightsaber cuts the pipes too. Could all this mean that it is actually not the plasma cutting through objects, but a very durable and telescoped solid, and if so, is there a solid in real life that could do the same or something similar, and would magnetic fields be used to keep the plasma surrounding said solid?
for your comment on green energy for the traction cities, the 60 minute war reset humanity to the industrial age, so only fossil fuel can be synthiezed :D. However, spoiler, nuclear weapons are reviewed at the end of the movie, so nuclear would not be that much of a stretch.
It's worth noting that nuclear power isn't some kind of "pulling electrickery out of nothing" space-magic, and does in fact consume fuel. So even if you had electric engines that were being powered by a nuclear reactor, the engines "not consuming fuel" wouldn't negate the fact that you need fuel to keep them running. Because the reactor itself consumed nuclear reaction materials. What kind of materials you need will depend on whether you're using fission or fusion reactions (or both), and that will also determine the kinds of by-products you're going to have to find uses for - or discard. Which means you're potentially building a city that leaves giant radioactive dumps along its path, or potentially even a constain radioactive trail behind it like a nuclear snail.
@@justinthompson6364 Well, yeah, if we assume you're running a normal-scale nuclear-powered vehicle that's traveling for a few months at a time before returning home for refueling. But when you're talking about providing power for a city *AND* for a large enough vehicle base to carry the entire city on its back at a decent speed, then you're going to need a steady supply - OR to be traveling between sources of fuel... or targeting other cities and taking theirs.
I've heard of a similar concept being used to create colonies on Mercury. A city (which would be much smaller because it's just a colony and much much less heavy because gravity) placed on the border of sunlight could use solar panels on the hot side to get power and living happens on the cool side to avoid people dying
Ross Cleghorn, magic... Ok but for real. Not a scientist, but I can tell you right now we don't have any form of technology that can do that. That wouldn't be sooo prohibitively dangerous. Looking at the devices of flight that I'm aware of, none of them have the capacity to be scaled up to such a degree.
Dustgold, yeah balloons were my conclusion as well. Certainly in that it wouldn't really be hard to scale up, but then I remember the Hindenburg and I realize I wouldn't want to trust my life to something like that. A hot air type would be relatively safer, but I don't think it would be efficient to keep them heated enough to float on such a large scale.
The interesting thing is I dont remember whether in the books what the cities were powered by. I think its pretty diverse and a variety of methods depending. But its like thousands of years in a distopian sort of future with cyber men, so like...yeah.
Yeah that would be my guess, no way Solar would produce enough energy to be used and I don't think they're making gasoline for the cities so Nuclear would make the most sense imo
Dear Kyle, would a high yield thermonuclear bomb or a thermoberic device sanitize a plague infected area like in resident evil or the crazies? I really think it would be effective.
staris84 covered the blast radius part, but also consider this: Does lethal radiation exposure kill something that's already dead? Probably not, I think.
The use of a high yield thermonuclear bomb or thermoberic device would incinerate or pulverize anything, the blast wave alone would crush any structure. The added radiation would kill close to 99% of anything else from the fallout to high power x-ray and neutron bombardment.
I guess you could carpet-bomb the area with nukes, but that's a whoooole lotta nukes. Fat Man had a fireball radius of 100m² and an air blast radius of 360m². That 360m² isn't guaranteed death for a living human, let alone a zombie. Again, if we're talking about a virus that reanimates flesh, radiation fallout will probably have no effect, and as @staris84 said, could make it far worse.
According to a video made by Nerdiest on that channel, he is Thor's younger brother because Odin in that video said "...and this is Kyle trying to pick up his big brother's(Thor's) hammer." so there you go. (The video is called 'Kyle's Dad Is Odin' or something like that.)
There is an old Sci-Fi novel about a city built on rail tracks, that had to constantly move West. Teams of engineers had to survey the land ahead, construct the route, and relocate the rails from the rear to the front. I forget the reason that was given for this necessity, but it made for a story.
Though to some degree, big things *do* move slowly. It takes time for electrical signals to travel from the brain to an extremity, so very large creatures couldn't move anywhere as quickly as smaller creatures. Though, this is different from *traveling* slowly, which he was discussing this time around.
It's probably _the_ most common misconception/misunderstanding. For example, there is a certain percentage of people, on these here internets, that do not believe the earth is rotating on its axis at 1600 km/hr. "Why aren't we flung off into space??" "We'd feel it moving, arrrggghhhhh!" You get the idea. We suck at comprehending the scale of the tiny and the massive because it isn't common sense. We also think of those speeds compared to us mere mortals. When you understand scale, it makes total sense and makes it all the more interesting. So, yeah, it won't be the last time it's explained either. ;) (And this isn't addressed to anyone in particular but just my experience in surfing the 'dumb' parts of UA-cam and watching people exclaim with sincerity that these things cannot possibly be true i.e. the earth spinning. It's sad.)
This is completely ignoring the problem of materials. If we, for example, took a crawler and doubled its size, its mass and thus the forces at work in it would increase by 2^3, i.e. 8, times. If we quadrupled its size, the mass and forces would increase by 4^3 = 64 times. Therefore the materials would have to be that much stronger unless perhaps we make parts that much thicker, which would also make them many times heavier, creating a viscious cycle. We could perhaps make this workable with graphene, but then it would be astronomically expensive.
@@Ninjaananas That was a hypothetical example to explain a principle. However, that principle still applies. London, as depicted in that movie, has roughly the same shape as a hatchback car, not the shape of a big flat board, which itself would have serious problems as soon as it reaches land that is not completely flat. Suppose that you make a version of that city as depicted in the movie, and you make it be the same size as a typical car. A lot of stuff would be really gigantic, e.g. the cross-sectional area of beams for the support structure, relative to the inhabitants, but in normal car terms, it would seem reasonable. If you decided to double the size, you then would make it 8 times heavier, so the stresses would be 8 times bigger, and the components would have to make up for that. If you made it a thousand times bigger (about the size of a small city), then the mass and stresses would be a billion times bigger, and it would be unfeasible. Strip-mining dump trucks have not gotten bigger than roughly 3 times the size of normal dump trucks because of that same materials problem; tire rubber strong enough for significantly bigger dump trucks does not exist. Similarly, insects can be extremely thin and still have no difficulty holding their own weights or taking big falls, but we have to be much thicker to hold our own weights, and we don't do as well taking falls because of the stresses caused by our masses. Scaling stuff up like that is problematic mainly because of that mass problem, and it is the real stumbling block for mobile cities like those from that movie.
@@nerdvision3587 @NerdVision Just remember: There are already inhabited structures today as tall as the London imagined in this movie. Yes, moving It would be the issue... You need to strengthen the material if it is used in a traditional way. When you change the design you can use the same material to resist much more... Structures are not only about materials properties but about geometry... Like the Eiffel Tower for example.
Of course you must take into account the incredibly deep lore within the book series over the course of everything, definitely helps make everything more understandable
Would the actual ground be able to support it? I've read there were plans in ww2 for a giant tank that was never made as roads would not support it. Considering cities are usually built on strengthened foundations wouldn't a moving city face the same obstacle on all but the densest land masses?
Yes the nazis had 2 different large tanks. One was called the maus and a couple where actually build think they where supposed to weigh 100 tons and then was the Ratte that was just a dream. With a naval turret on top. Just not doable though. Just think of the problems of crossing a river or how easy it would be to hit from a aerial attack..
you were assuming conventional fuel as a power source. would it be more practical to use hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear energy as a power source? hydrogen + air -> horsepower + water. water + nuclear fuel -> small, high-heat gen 4 nuclear reactors -> electrical energy + H2 + O2. H2 + air -> horsepower + water.... etc hydrogen fuel cell cars are already on the market and high heat gen 4 reactors are to be commercialized by 2030. This seems like a much more feasible recourse for this futuristic world. reply if anyone has questions. i may be able to rough out some power to weight efficiencies.
That would be great except that research into anything Nuclear--and even the word itself--are forbidden due to nuclear weapons having killed half of the people in the world during the Sixty Minutes' War. Covering the entire outside of the City with solar panels would probably be a better idea--you can get about two gigawatts constant power from the surface area estimated in the video for Traction London, which suggests that it could spend about four hours a day in motion just from solar power if it has the energy storage for it.
I read the actual Mortal Engines book series and I was expecting the calculated speed of the city to be very different from the speed in the book but it was actually exactly the speed that it said in the book so props to the movie creators who did the math for the cgi city
Keen for this movie. I loved the books and we haven't had a fresh cinematic fantasy franchise for a while. Just more Star Wars, Hobbit and Fantastic Beasts.
Too bad it will be a huge flop, because how will they convey all the info and lore from the books? They won't, that's how... I mean already Hester won't have the scarred face, like wtf.
Hollywood can't have a main character all flawed, she has to be beautiful but with like a tiny scar, honestly they might as well have just gotten rid of her dis-figuration entirely by how much they have gussied hester up.
I think 1 part that has been overlooked is the track width for the crawlers, for example the P.1000 ratte tank that Germany thought of during WWII was not even close to the mass of a city but people looking at the designs today think it might have had major issues sinking into terrain. Something the size of a city would need HUGE and very WIDE tracks in order to not simply sink.
As an engineer, it's not the weight, but rather the inertial forces of trying to start, stop and the changing direction of that amount of mass exceeding our current material strength technologies.
Good point! -- kH
Not only that, but there's topography to negotiate, i doubt that NASA crawlers can negotiate a hill, plus even if possible, how would it climb a hill... It would need to flex, or have dozens to hundreds of meters of suspension allowance so that all tracks along it's length would have traction Either way this would put a lot of stress on it's superstructure, more than i think it would handle. Not to mention the vibrations from the engines and the movement would mean that the city would be suffering a constant "earthquake" which would likely cause the whole thing to collapse in a few months if not weeks or days.
Every time the city stopped it would look like the Battlestar Galactica (new version) after its last jump thanks to all the deteriorating structural joints that incur damage as the vehicle traverses rough terrain and then steps on the brakes. Ripple ripple!
no
@@TheReaverKane When alone, the Nasa crawlers can handle hills of somewhat decent slopes. What they do is raise one end of it to counter the slope so the top remains perfectly level at all times. Naturally, it has a limit to how steep the hill can be, and this functionality would stop working if you tried to combine them together like this. You would need the entire base of the city to be what is adjusted according to the slope in order to keep everything level. And that would be a lot harder to engineer.
Tokyo Drift except this time Tokyo is literally drifting
Name Name lol nice meme
haha nice one :D
🤣 Your aving a Turkish mate
Name Name you stole this
@Kuromori Tokyo also probably sank under the rising sea levels, so good luck with that.
So the city goes at 90mph? That means whenever its moving there would be 90mph winds in the city which is worse than most hurricanes
Then imagine if it ever came to a full stop rather suddenly.
Its actually moving closer to 300kmh. The VFX supervisor was interviewed by Adam on Tested and said so. They animated the city at that speed
Hurricane María had winds of 175mph and my house still intact. (Concrete house, obviously)
Maybe, just maybe, they have windscreens
Kyle only took into account the trailer, and not the Mortal Engines book, where London captures the city going at a top speed of around 80kph
Hey Kyle the NASA engineers have said that they can make the crawler move faster but when moving hundreds of millions of dollars you need to be as careful as possible
This^ though by faster I don't think they mean anywhere near the speed of the cities in the movie. More like 10-15kph at most.
I remember them saying as much on an episode of Dirty Jobs. I've always wondered since what the top speed of a Crawler actually is?
According to the wiki: "maximum speed of 1.6 km/h (1 mph) loaded, or 3.2 km/h (2 mph) unloaded."
Yeah, long, cylindrical thingies with narrow bases tend not to like having their lower parts whipped around at high speeds. They tend to fall down and go boom. (Thought that's the reason they were so slow, but didn't want to bet on my memory.)
Buildings aren't ment to be moved around at high speeds either, just like rockets, the 1.6 km/h is a good estimate.
When you read in the book that there are cities bigger then London....
Saw the movie last night and it's awesome. What book should I start with?
@@joemiskowitz2669 the first one is called mortal engines. The books are written by Phillip Reeve
Oof
I legit just got to the chapter where they talk about the Panzer whatever and I’m trying really hard to get information without spoiling the book
@@kennuuthswansun3379 besides the novel series theres like artbooks and in universe guides to the major citys you can get. cant say if they have spoilers tho cause i dont own them
Time to build a small village on the shuttle transport crawler.
No
{makes villager sound}
@@calcaware (ok) in villager accent
Ember power ha...
@@calcaware HRMMH
The high speeds at which these large cities move makes more sense when you consider the geology in play. At the scales we're talking the ground itself may as well be a liquid. If a large city weighing billions or trillions of tons were to stop moving for any length of time they would begin to sink thus rendering their wheels unusable in a short amount of time. The heavier the city the faster it would need to move to keep their wheels above the surface. Hard desert bedrock may be more "solid" of a surface but even rock acts like a fluid given enough stress. Cities in more waterlogged geology such as near coastlines would need to move so fast that they would be virtually water-skiing, or earth-skiing as the case may be, just to avoid sinking.
Or the reality of thing is the concept is pure non-sense... you couldn't have realistically giant cities moving on ground, plus seriously in case of a geological disaster they wouldn't make giant cities moving on ground, they'd make giant floating cities, its something already sorta conceptualized and could be viable, the entire concept of that story is pure rubbish.
@@lydiahood7725 Frankly, I'd say it would be easier to make cities on wheels than it would be to make flying cities.
@@topanteon floating on water doesnt seem that far fetched
@@topanteon I didn't saying Flying Cities, I said Floating, as in 'On Water'. A flying city would be significantly harder than a giant roving city on the ground, but a giant city floating on water would be significantly easier.
@@lydiahood7725 Ah, right, sorry, missunderstood. But isn't the case in the movie that there were loads of tsunamies? Would make floating cities a bit harder to sustain.
While moving, London would be experiencing constant hurricane force winds at 90 mph. It would be crazy to travel from building to building while the city is in motion.
They actualy solved that problem in the book with shielding and such, the exterior of the city was not somewhere you walked rather it was built with a hollow inside it for people to walk and move safely with viewing platforms so you could see the chases taking place
@@libertyprime4381 Very interesting! I'm sure the various buildings would also break up the wind forces along the surface by creating natural barriers to the wind's movement past the city. Though, that explanation still requires the proper engineering design of the buildings/structures on the moving city to withstand the various loads on the structures surface (which would be distributed to the foundation, etc.), i.e. the same calculations done on skyscrapers on steroids.
@@laurelwelch6295 The whole concept of a moving city sounds like an engineer´s nightmare...
@@ateuedai860 I'm sure most of the population that was lost before these cities came into existence was from the engineers who had to work on them.
Never mind the wind, can you imagine the VIBRATION somethign that big moving that fast over offroad terrain would cause?
after they realise that the cities don't hold up, or when things settle down...
Mortal Engines 2 - Demolition Derby
Such a waste. Demolition derbies should exist only in the virual world.
i would like to washington crashing into moscva
The theory of putting a city on wheels, in my mind, has just gone from ridiculously stupid, to plausibly stupid.
But seriously, cool video 👍
Yeah, there is a lot of space for 'physically possible, but really would be really dumb to actually do'
I couldn't stop laughing when I saw the trailer. Is this a comedy?
@@casthedemon I saw the anime this was probably ripped from more than 10 years ago and, if it's anything like it, it's not a comedy.
@@indigetes mate the book came out before the anime.
@@jacobthomas5435 Didn't know there was a book, and it has good reviews.... I'll read it later. Anyway, after "edge of tomorrow", didn't really bother to check it and, if the novel the anime is based on is based on this book, it's still not a comedy XD
I'm not sure if you were using it intentionally or not, but "the City of London" is actually a much smaller subset of the whole of London, London City may only be 2.9km², but the actual London is around 1,600km²
I was wondering about that.
I think he was doing calculations for the city called London and not the separate autonomous City of London, but he used the wrong name.
Aedan Knight although like I said, the autonomous city of London has the area that's used in the video. The actually London is considerably bigger.
@@aedanmacgabrain7251 He's probably using City Of London (All referred as the square mile).. If he's not, then his calculation are way off!
I was just about to ask this. 2.9sqkm seemed like an insanely small estimate of the size of London.
I remember watching a documentary about the super tanks that the Nazi were trying to make and the reason that they failed was that they would just dig themselves into the ground. I thought that there is a relatively low threshold for our ability to make something that can travel on track or wheels at speed. You have to go slow if at all or the ground will not support the weight above it.
Super tanks are a much better comparison.
NASA transport platforms only have to go on perfectly flat roads, what happens when you try to go up a shallow slope or across a river
The German "big cats" had lower ground pressure than pretty much anything the allies had, and in the case of the Maus it had even less ground pressure than the "big cats" so they wouldn't have dug themselves into the ground any worse than lighter allied tanks.
The real reason they failed was because of lack of resources and factories that built them being bombed.
You need to revisit the concept behind tracks, why use tracks or catapillars on heavy machines.
That documentary was pretty bad then, ground pressure wasn't an issue, brigde allowance was and even then they were made with the assumption that they would just ford the rivers without them
real problems was cost
It’s not that you have to go slow, the slowness was a result of the lack of power. I mean the biggest tank actually built was the Maus at 188 metric tons, of course it would be slow.
And also the eastern front had a particular muddy terrain. Though it all depends on the weight distribution. The Eiffel tower weighs a little over 10,000 tons, but it’s fine because it’s spread over such a large area. It just needs to not be too much weight concentrated on one spot and then vehicles of that weight could exist
Howls moving castle did it.
Because magic 😏
*before it was cool
That was on legs, not wheels.
@@FlyingDominion which makes it even more impressive if you do the math
Utena did it
That scale relative to speed illusion is why certain crawling insects look ridiculously fast, even though you could outrun them with a brisk walk.
The city would make one turn and crush half of the crawlers by leaning to one side
ah yes the big tilt. tragic affair that was
If you painted it red it would go faster. RED ONES GO FASTER, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT!!!
Paint some flames on London, that's how we get from 1 miles per hour to the speeds in the movie.
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHH!!!
That sound like tech heresy... The Inquisition would like to ask you some questions.
Comunism?
@@cogboyofmars1575 The Inquisition itself makes use of this fact against the Ork...why do you think they always push the Blood Angels to the front against them?
I like the fact that in the trailer 2 you can clearly see people just walking and doing their own thing on top of a giant moving machine that chase smaller moving machine at 90 MPH WITHOUT a windshield. Plus the chase happen in rough terrain and the machine have to do necessary manuver to catch it's prey.
Well the manoeuvre part can probably be countered by tilting the city when it turns by its suspension. Kinda like trains, but better.
It's even worse than that. His estimate was about half the actual speed. They said in an interview somewhere ( I think with Tested ), that the cities are moving at 300km/h which is a little over 180mph!
@@zemerick Ah shieeettt... those people would be seriously disoriented.
@@zemerick Cleaning up vomit would be the most lucrative trade on one of those cities. People would be talking about the Sanitation-Industrial Complex
in the books, the first chase is described in great detail. it says: ""The town is called Salthook," boomed the voice of the announcer. "A mining platform of nine hundred inhabitants. She is currently moving at eighty miles per hour, heading due east, but the Guild of Navigators predicts London will catch her before sundown. There are sure to be many more towns awaiting us beyond the land-bridge; clear proof of just how wise our beloved Lord Mayor was when he decided to bring London east again..."" Philip Reeve, Mortal Engines, pg. 7
WHY DON'T WE TAKE BIKINI BOTTOM, AND PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!!!
BabBahhaha
PUUUSSHHH!!!!
This comment deserves more likes
@@barbatosrex1087 Thanks man
Phiin Blade yyyeeeeeessssss 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂😅😅😅😅😆😆😆😆😁😁😄😄😃😃🤣🤣
Well it isn't what I always wanted to know (not always), but i is very interesting. Couldn't you use nuclear energy instead of fuel?
Yeah I thought of that and actually looked some stuff up and it looks like with certain cutting edge nuclear reactors you can produce the necessary energy with "only" about 2400 tons of extra weight. That would include 5 years worth of fuel.
Yes. Please Kyle. It would be ridiculous to try and run one of those cities on gas, nuclear power is the way to go.
That's what I thought as well. You have to power the city itself somehow, and you're likely not using coal. You don't have the space for solar or wind. Powering the city with a nuclear reactor makes sense. If you have a nuclear reactor sitting on the thing anyways, why in the world would you power the main engine with gasoline?
I wated to ask for possibke threat upon those nuclear reactor, what about earthquakes? Cities on wheels may be able to resist earthwuaketo some degrees, but i still prefer the idea of floating cities over the ocean
With the idea of the movie taking place in the future, nuclear fusion should've been the way to go in my opinion. This Jackson guy has come a long way on his career, btw #braindead.
You didn't distinguish between London (the Capital city of England) and "The City of London" which is not really a city but more of a district in London, the small areas and populations you are talking about are for the latter.
Sounds exactly like growing up in the Greater Houston Area but not inside the City of Houston.
But what if it was the city of London in Canada 🤔
Yeah, no shit. London, England has a population > 8 million. That's quite a few 747's........not one.
*rip suspension*
Gpp-75 OOF
That just makes me think land vehicles are stupid.
Exactly what i thought. Or else it would be a MEGA SUSPENSION
**laughs in Tiger 2 transmission**
Ohh just like german engineering
Hi Kyle! Taking this further, say we WERE able to get the cities moving 90 mph. With all the rough terrain, even at the size they are, wouldn't they basically shake apart? Is there a building material that would prevent them from crumbling? Would it be possible to have some kind of suspension/gimbal-type system that large that would be stable across the entire city of 'London'?
Thanks!
Heather (aka someone who knows very little about construction...)
Well look at newer cars with active suspension that you can just drive over really rough terrain without even disturbing the car by a single millimeter. If you were to take this to the next level I would think that you could maybe perhaps theoretically do it. But it would take a LOT of power and perhaps a really really good regenerative breaking (for the fall) system.
And it would still require pretty flat terrain to work because of the insane size of a city
This conversation is definitely footnotes worthy. Lol
@@zamundaaa776 yeah, but theres limits to that id say. something the size of a city rumbling over rough terrain at these speeds would probably equal a continuous richter-scale earthquake. all that vibration energy would just straight up destroy it, id wager. not to mention if you ever hit a resonance frequency anywhere. oh boy.. talk about a 10 billion Kg bouncy castle on wheels ;D
As Zam pointed out there is suspension systems in place for car but to your other point. Building out on the west coast tend to be built with special metals and even in some cases suspension in the foundation to handle the movement and bending. Also wood is a great material for this too since it will bend well naturally if it remains damp. Either-way there is ways to build buildings to handle vibrations.
Certainly not if you just picked up a city as we have them now, made for a very significant part out of stone. Stone is very brittle and thus would not be able to absorb the shaking. If you did some really weird construction stuff you might be able to absorb the impacts of the bumpy road using steel, but it would still mean that you'll constantly be flung throughout your house.
London on tracks? Could anyone (eg. the English government) be organised enough to get it done?
As someone who was born and lived their entire life in England, I'll say no. They can't even fix the roads.
It’s in the future and only one person did it. Read the books
As ridiculous as it would be, you could build a majority of the parts via 3D printing. Even now, 3DP is getting ready to move onto the stage of printing large objects (eventuallyany size of object) so long as you have the schematic. For example, the cost of building a rocket could decrease by as much as 80-90%.
your profile pic is nasty
Imagine the potholes
Damn right. British government can't negotiate brexit. Let alone put London on wheels.
We spend tens of billions on a train that gets you somewhere 12 minutes earlier
4:18
That sounds about right -
In the books it was around 70mph
Imagine you're driving London and you see a small hill in your path
And there's no way for you to turn out of the way in time because your a giant city on wheels.
Or you moving city being turned into ash.
The book was good.
it would destroy the hill...
And what about the maintenance needed for the tracks? If they're moving that fast then the mechanical components would wear out eventually, what if one of the tracks gets completely damaged, how would they replace it?
@@omartirado1721 make a second track put it in front of the city cut it's current tracks and drive it on to the new ones before using steel cables to bull it up to the driving wheel and spin them till they reach the other side of the track where welders are lowered down on window cleaning platforms to put them together
Now for the REAL reason this couldn't work: If you can't get a city full of people to agree on how to drive their cars, you're not going to get a city full of people to agree on how to drive their city.
What you need is dictatorship.
And as far as I can tell by the trailer London is governed by a dictator.
@@Jehty_ Woah, woah, woah. Slow down there. Yes, that could work. BUT we're talking about people with road rage. Controlling the masses via politics like Hitler, Trump, or any other authoritarian? That's possible. But trying to do that when everyone has road rage? This dictator better have god-level mind control powers.
Imagine the amount of back-seat driving there would be.
@Politics discussion, stfu please.
@Neo Politan They have this thing called "plotium". It's a highly indestructible metal that could work as pretty much anything. Shock absorbers? Check. Being able to hold entire cities on wheels without the foundation breaking? Check
@@Jehty_ in the book there's a lord mayor who runs the city. He is an authoritarian, and the people in general don't seem to care about where they are going.
I always see him as Thor.
L'Oréal Thor
Thor's smaller brother.
Everytime there was a backing up truck sound, i swear it sounded like it was coming from outside.
That's why many newer trucks are being given static noise for their reverse alert. One it doesn't travel far, letting you know it must be close, but it also is easier for the human hear to pinpoint the direction it is coming from
I know it's been mentioned before but I want a chance at appearing in the notes episode. "The City of London" is a tiny space inside London. It's 3km2 of financial offices and it exists as a separate municipality. This is mostly due to historical reasons but it's maintained now for tax reasons, (it's a big tax haven and laws inside it are controlled by the financial organisations that exist in there, it's horrifically dystopian.
Yeah, the City of London isn't London. How can he think London is 2.9 km2? That's retarded.
He definitely doesn't think the entirety of London is 1 square mile lol, but if you google "city of London size" you'll get 2.9 km2 because google wants to confuse 90% of people who refer to "the greater London area" as the city of London
If one wants to use "The City of London" as a demographic benchmark, its 2011 population of 8,000 is irrelevant -- as noted above, it's currently a prestige central business district dominated by trans-national financial services companies. Something like its 1851 population of 130,000 (Wikipedia), with a no-zoning intermixture of residential and industrial, would be more applicable to a nomadic Traction City.
We built this *[mortal engine]* on rock n' roll
How long have you been waiting to fit "Peter Jack-sonuvagun" into a video?
I was VERY surprised they let me say that -- kH
Senpai noticed me 😶
@@becausescience Should make a tee shirt with that on it. (and wear it when you do epic storyline BS (because science, not you know)
Just curious.. wouldn't a nuclear power plant placed inside the "city" produce enough energy to keep the city moving at a relatively fast pace? I know a 1GW facility produces 2.6x10^13 J/d in terms of energy, and I believe it would indeed fit and still leave enough room for habitation... though I admit, I'm no expert. Any idea?
PS, been fan of your show for long time. Still as good now as when you didn't have your own channel. Hell. Better even.
Dunno about the technical limitations of it, but on the thematic/narrative side, there is something to be said for the grittier feel machinery running on petrol has. This is why I personally think a lot of technological concepts we have today were scrapped when designing the setting, it just fits the animalistic "dog eats dog" world better.
@@andresarancio6696 Agreed. Mad Max wouldn't have the same appeal with Teslas either.
@@hkr667it would of been a much longer film if in Mad Max they had to stop and wait a week for their cars to recharge on old solar panels or a jerryrigged wind turbine
@@andresarancio6696 I thought the nuclear aspect would actually be better, as radioactive material is a hell of a lot easier to salvage than gasoline or diesel fuel if your means is by grinding the city up.
The tech was there and is still there, some remnants from the past survive and are used in the books some to greater effect then others (and some people also live very very long and sort of sad lives, but I don't think that was part of the first book, so this isn't really a spoiler) Damn, 100% need to go to the library and reread the entire series, it was good though the big change between book 2 and 3 was a bit jarring, I didn't remember them as the same series until I checked the wiki. (lots of things change over the series)
Really enjoyed this! I just recently read the book and I was surprised by how the trailer only showed maybe a chapter of the book. Not only that, it's not some "chosen one" trope fest and the main character isn't even Hester. It's Tom! I'm glad the trailers aren't giving away anything because I feel like most audiences will be really pleasantly taken aback by how things go, because the book didn't go the way I expected.
Okay, but for an entire city to be moving at 90mph over totally messed up, wartorn ground, wouldn't riding it just feel like a continuous earthquake, shaking buildings apart and throwing people off their feet (or off the side) until it's just one big pile of rubble? What kind of material could hold the cities together?
Yea, that's a thing added in the movie that the books didn't have. Likely because most people don't want to watch a 2 mph chase scene.
In the opening London catches Salthook, which is traveling at least 80MPH. The main difference is the ground, in the book it's a flat plain, whereas it's a jumble of rocks and cliffs in the trailer.
great suspension.
The material is called Plot-thium. a type of metal which Hollywood runs a monopoly on and uses it to make things happen in movies which normal steel wouldn't be capable of. Such as holding those cities together despite the vibrations.
@@alexbard4437 that explains it👌😂
The NASA crawler can go faster than 1mph they just don't. The speedo goes up to 4 if I remember correctly. Thanks Dirty Jobs.
Using that valuable piece of information, we may estimate that in 26 days of movement at between 1.6 kph and 4kph, the city would have rolled over between 998 km and 2.496 km.
That would be a mind numbingly long war.
The NASA crawler was geared down because the rockets they move are very unstable standing on their tails until launched.
Sure, but that’s without the shuttle and rockets on top.
@@pierrebilley276 I think you mean 998 m and 2.496 km
"Jack!!! where'd you go????"
"Crap i fell out of london!!"
As you speak of why big things look slow, I have a good example. In Pacific Rim, during the fight in Tokyo, Gypsy Danger uses a tanker to whack a Kaiju. The reason it doesn't swing it as fast as we would a bat or a sword is simply because inertia would tear the ship apart (or maybe even it's weight could send Gypsy Danger flying) before it even has a chance to connect.
But can the cities drift?
Tokyo for sure.
Mortal Engines: Tokyo Drift... XD
Deja Vu...
Eurobeat intensifies
😂👌
OMG I loved Mortal Engines as a book, and now I found out they're making a movie!!! thank-you!
Kyle, I just think it's fair to say The City of London and London are two separate cities in real life. Don't think you said anything about it.
Because it's so unimpressive
@@rosssidebottom9352 I thought it was because science.
I was wondering if this would be brought up
@@Elipus22 science doesn't explain greed
@@rosssidebottom9352 Bruv, don't pick a fight with someone uninterested, aight? He used the City of London as a population database, meaning it would be fair to explain that London was built by Romans who wanted to steal the trade that the City of London was getting due to the wide Thames river.
Why are we assuming a technologically advanced civilization would be running on gasoline and not nuclear power or thorium?
I wasn't, just using the fuel that the crawlers do. -- kH
Technology is pretty stagnant in the Mortal Engines world, they don't even know how to use DVDs and make Heavier-than-air vehicles
@@venusianviking1733 They might be able to use salvaged prewar tech. In fact, they would probably have to. Either that, or they developed more efficient fuel and engines out of necessity.
Cause it's Steampunk, and this is not truly technologically advanced (compared the the prewar era) They had true immortality and Super weapons which tore the earth into the world it is seen in the movie. (though some of the survivors might have preferred death to the war) The books explain it well (the oil is actually made from shit the cities leave behind, literal and figurative shit it's an ecosystem of different types of cities and stuff)
Had to look it up. I had no idea there were like 10 styles of steampunk...
How did he not once mention an aircraft carrier - a literal moving city...
Because it's not on wheels? Or tracks? Or land?
Also aircraft carrier is only 300m long. Containing 3,000 ish people.
This thing was almost 100 times the size.
Would be cool if the P1000 Ratte was in the movie
The Master Tanker no. Just nooooooooo. Humanity wouldn’t have the tech or need for tanks. Why would they have a tank when it’ll just be eaten easily. Airships are far better. Also, the cities literally have guns on rails in books 3 and 4.
10:45 Only 26 days? They're going to need some more fuel and resources. Bettter take it from some smaller cities!.
For fossil fuel it would be HUGE. It can be perfectly viable for a nuclear powered vehicle.
Correction, the numbers are ridiculous but not impossible. Also there would be a huge amount of weight added if you account for the need to make the city able to be moved and go over terrain, etc. Yo'd probably need a massive shock absorber for each of those 610 crawlers.
all science works on the improbable not the impossible.
What about building the city over a massive bed of shock absorbers over the movers?
Ok, someone get Elon Musk in on this...
But he is already Tracer.
Oh what? The meme is dead? Well fuck.
Nyet
The last guy that would be able to build something like this.
@@BlueOvals24 I promise you I'm the one
London has an area of 1,572 km^2. You’re thinking of an area within London called the city of London. It’s a dumb name but London is a whole lot bigger than what you said
I know, I used the "City of London" in my calcs. It's the same as using the metropolitan area of Los Angeles instead of Los Angeles, which is ginormous. -- kH
The London Metropolitan Area (or Greater London) is actually not the City of London, that goes to the small area within the former. That little area is REALLY special and is the one and only City of London.
It is actually a somewhat interessting history and the election of the mayor of the City of London is totally bonkers. The great and awesome GCPGrey made two videos about this. Here is nr. 1.... ua-cam.com/video/LrObZ_HZZUc/v-deo.html
Because Science sure. Plus the video would have been much shorter with those big numbers.
“No. Because science!”
The ground wouldn't be flat, so I think you gotta have a lot of energy going into destroing all the stuff coming up, too
@staris84 might be, but I think it still would be a bumpy ride.
Exceptionally. Those NASA crawlers only ever travel on completely flat and solid ground. The city seems to travel cross country and has next to no ground clearance. It's not so much as driving around but dragging it's belly around. A slight incline, river or rock outcrop would stop the city in it's tracks, yes it's weight would liquify the ground under it, but it anything this makes the problem worse, as if they ever do slow down, or god forbid stop, they will never get started again.
well it can easily crush most hills and the ground has been crushed for centuries by the cities.
@@speedy01247 that's the thing. It may weigh alot, but in terms of terrain, it's tiny, but at the same time large enough to get properly stuck in a valley (I doubt it could get up even a 10% incline without snapping it's spine) and since it's London it's driving around the UK, go north, lots of valleys, and terrain that may even subside/collapse if a few billion tons suddenly appeared on it, limestone isn't exactly the strongest material and the UK is full of the stuff.
i could have never imagined a series i loved years ago could become a movie adaptation
Mortal Engines...
Im sorry but that sounds like a Steamgame
Inventing Eagle book series
I agree lol
It does, but the book series is one of the best there is. Would highly recommend reading it.
Would totally play a game based on Mortal Engines' world though. Building your city, eating other cities, good stuff
Kind of XD
Not only would it be possible to create a moving city according to your calculations, assuming all of the smaller cities were built the same way with several crawlers under each one of them, that would make it easy for the giant predatory city to reuse the materials from the cities it consumes. It wouldn't even have to build new wheels every time it expands, it would simply move the crawlers it ate to underneath the city and redistribute weight.
That would be like if your dog ate all of the other dogs in your neighborhood then surgically attached the all of the legs of the dead dogs to it's own body and nervous system in order to support it's new weight. Okay, maybe there's a better analogy than that.
My dog does that...
That is the reason why they are classed as a predator city.
Municipal Darwinism is a hell of a drug.
i think it was possible if they can make the city light and they have discover ironman arc reactor. But it dosnt really concern me though, what really bugging me is how the heck that red airship can carry 2 giant jet engine and even able to hovering in air.
The Russian Typhoon Nuclear Submarine houses two nuclear reactors, each individually capable of producing 190 MW of power. I think for a project of this scale, it would be more feasible to place 20 such power plants on the structure, in spite of the weight, so you could power the whole city, as well as the transportation, and not have to worry about refueling (At least for a VERY long time).
Using any type of 'traditional fuel' would be rather inefficient and wasteful considering weight is an issue.
As a side note, using the nuclear generators used on ships or submarines is more practical since they are optimized for weight and size in order to be practical power plants for ships. However, if you wanted only ONE power plant, and were willing to compromise size and weight to essentially haul around a city that was impractically large including it's own energy generation, the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Plant in Arizona produces a whopping 3.8 GW of power at maximum capacity. It actually runs at around 3.3 GW, as 'generally' you don't run a thing at its maximum engineered specs, but it can probably safely manage the necessary 3.5 GW.
Now, I've been 'assuming' that when we factored in the weight of the city, we also factored in the infrastructure that produced it's electricity in the first place. If not, you essentially have to double all this, because the actual energy consumption of London is around 4.5 GW. However, assuming that production is already contained within the original figure, then we have no issues at all.
Anything else that can be used to minimize the weight of the city would also be critical to achieving this successfully: fiber optic cabling, strong but lightweight alloys, lighter plastics, graphene, reduction in usage of stony material and ceramic, etc. etc.
Yeah but what about all the water you would need...
@@jimmyjunk3093 It's very easy to engineer an essentially closed-loop system. Ya just hook your condensers up properly and there ya go. In fact, at the scale these big mothers are running on you could probably even have more power generation from running the river of recondensed water down through a turbine on it's way back to the primary holding tanks.
@@kairndreamer2885 Also got to take into account the 60minute war happened a fair bit into the future, they had nanites, brain-machine interfaces, weird "clockwork" reactors that seem to be the next best thing to a ZPM/or air fueled fusion reactor or something cause they never go out, they had sentient AIs, Orbital Doom Lasers of some description (And various other Doom Satellites as well), and of course whatever the hell killed everything and Fisted Mother Nature into Oblivion in just an hour. (If it wasn't actually just the Doom Lasers....)
@@monkeymonk666 There you go! Fusion! Screw nuclear fission.
4:03 Actually, given these cities "eat" each other for survival, I would expect the cities to move as fastly as technologically possible. We might even extrapolate to say these cities could technologically develop in ways similar to biological evolution. Perhaps a few decades later, we can see supersonic airborne cities, or cities covered in synthetic chromatophores to hide it from "predator" cities like London, or perhaps even cities mimicking my favorite self-defense mechanism in all of biology: that of the Spanish ribbed newt. This newt secretes poison before pushing its ribs through its skin, covering itself in toxic spikes of objectively awesome death. A smaller "prey" city like this could protect itself by creating its infrastructure in such a way that pieces of it can be launched into its "predator"'s fuel tank before exploding. This would "paralyze" the predator city and maybe even allow the smaller prey city to salvage materials from the larger predator before its immune system (its people) can mount a proper defense.
I really would love to conduct the maths of all of this, but I have college finals to get studying for. One way or another, I'll see you in footnotes ;)
Another solution for the sort of tactical city-to-city combat would probably be the equivalent of modern naval warfare. The city could deploy small (in comparison) air ships that act to neutralize the surface defenses of the enemy just to then send boarding tanks to neutralize its engines so it is easier prey to catch.
@@andresarancio6696 That's actually a really good idea! One thing I will say is that sounds like a heck of a lot of effort to catch prey that's so much smaller than the predator city. In fact, the size ratio between predator and prey makes sense in the fact that a predator would need so much space for fuel, movement, and maintenance of itself and its people, that it suddenly doesn't have that much room for its eating system. If that's the case, though, why would prey cities not take every opportunity to make themselves bigger than the predator's mouth? In fact, why do smaller cities not band together and suddenly we have pack hunting?
I am not watching this movie unless they have pack hunting cities nicknamed 'raptors'. That idea is that cool to me.
An evolutionary arms race playing out in architecture! -- kH
@@boswcheydoesart1314 That actually would make a lot of sense. The reason why there aren't that many giant predators and why pack hunting happens is exactly that. Of course one could argue the smaller cities could end up answering to a bigger city that has the infraestructure to process bigger prey (you would need a bigger "mouth" to devour them and turn them into resources), and in that process build a sort of "city hive" with the "Queen" being mostly sedentary while the pack hunters take down big cities and drag them into the queen's location.
Aaaand soon we have a city ecosystem
@@andresarancio6696 Seriously this is hands down the best conversation I have ever had online!
This looked like a lot of fun to make and definitely watch ! Thank you and great job . By the way did you guys forget about super carriers and nuclear power engine's ? 😉
Is there still oceans in this setting ? If yes, I guess It would be more easy to build a bunch of ships.
There's still some water around, yes. Some of the cities float.
Isn't that part of the concept of Girls Und Panzer?
@Thomas Mitchell but what if you get one of those boats with electric engines, batterys and solar. Just chill on a lifelong fishing trip with a distiler making freshwater in the kitchen. Just float until you see some guy coming towards then just speed the hell out of there.
@@leonbyrne1927 till you run out of resources to actually stay functioning
@@speedy01247 yeah buy electric motors, rechargeable batteries and solar dont require much repairs so a box of spare parts would do you much longer than nessescary, certainly longer than mobile cities on wheels and tracks could ever do. If you get out far enough away from other you can drop anchor and just stay floating for months with no threat from people anyways.
Makes you wonder how much effect something like wind resistance or incline would produce on the fuel consumption for cities that big, since I'm pretty sure that those NASA platforms roll on level ground.
@staris84 You fail to address his point. He doesn't question their ability, he wonders what the effect on fuel consumption is. And as far as I know, that is quite substantial.
I asked the same question. Wind resistance would become important for fuel when moving fast.
How to put city on wheels
Step 1. get wheels
Step 2. get a city
Step 3. ....
Step 5. *pROfiT*
These films are based on a book series in which it states London can go like 60mph or something.
Also I remember reading them as a kid so I'm pretty excited for this film.
If this was Warthunder, Russian cities would have bias power.
Berezniki + German Maus Tank = this abomination of theoretical science.
Arcade mode would let it move, Realistic would cause the engine to burn out, Simulator would just have it as a scale model of the intended project.
if this was war thunder, all russian cities would be driven by thousands of KV-2s.
Lol true
People are still playing that shit game? Impressive... I thought all the moderation abuse would have 3/4 of the population banned by now.
Your in for a hell of a ride when we get to the russian battlecity arkangel in the sequel
Love the video. But you know-
Air resistance
terrain isn’t flat
Turning
Maintaining a machine like that
Where do you get the fuel and electricity (there isn’t infinite fuel in the world)
Other forces and lack of funds and material
It would be much more practical to just have multiple small towns
Count you imagine trying to write anything on that bumpy ride.
Traction
Sinking into the ground?
Not to mention the winds you’d experience living there!
So annyywwayys... like I said love the video
Christ, that thing can devour an entire hill. Why go over it if you can go trough it?
Why only put London on wheels, when England is my City?
I thought England was a country?.
@@watchulla areslashwoosh
I’m assuming Jake Paul is the ruler, and that his arch nemisis, Logan, is the prey.
California is my city.
Yeah I'm drawing a blank here. If London were a giant CV. She could float away from the island.... Unless the built a botched ramp and jumped the channel.
Poor city planning for a vehicle that supposedly is going to be in combat. It would also make more sense to have lots of smaller "town" vehicles rather than a giant singular city vehicle, because physics.
And geography
(all book info)well it all started with one engineer who did it to get to the middle of Europe with London to be safe from rising seas wasn't made for combat just to move a bunch of people plus in the book London is like the whole of London all 200sqKM of it then other rich enough cities did it but countries didn't like it so a 60 minute war happened which blocked out the sun and fucked it all up bad so then you get to the book.
No no, most cities only have a few light AA guns for pirate airships. In the 4th book however, there is a war between the European traction cities and Asian static cities during which the Germans convert several cities into massive multi-mile tall mobile fortresses that act as an entire naval battlegroup on tracks.
This is my first "Because Science" video, and I really love how much effort you put into this, all the knowledge and compassion and how he presented it all. Great job!
How viable would a nuclear powered moving city thingy be? We have examples of nuclear reactor powered engines from pop-culture ( Fallout Franchise)
If i a m not wrong. Nuclear Energy is much more efficient that conventional fuel and also would kinda solve the problem of effectively storing all this HUGE volume of petrol.
It would work far far better, but what would be cool about that, this is steampunk, not cleanpunk.
Μανώλης Γεωργόπουλος Would New York City pass the test?
The thing is the fuel for nuclear fusion wouldn't be sustainable since uranium235 is rare and a pain to find unless they are using newer models like thorium engine it's possible but would be difficult to make a big enough one to power these citys
@@names1139 you mean *fission.* you only need uranium in fission powerplants. hydrogen bombs use a plutonium bomb to start the fusion reaction, BUT *fusion* would only need certain isotopes to fuse, in theory, if they could generate enough temperature and/or pressure, they could even run it on idk, oxigen, even though it'd take a lot of power to fuse oxigen, current fusion reactors use huge electromagnets to keep the plasma in place and huge lasers to heat the stuff up enough, but they still can't sustain it, the aim is to create a miniature star, essentially that'll be the fusion reactor. *NO* fission material is used.
fission breaks atoms, fusion fuses, not the same mate.
@@MrPapamaci88 yeah but like you said fusion isn't sustainable and is really difficult to make sustainable so logically you would jump to fission which produces alot of power for potentially dangerous fuel waste and rare and radioactive
Why do you beep when backing up? Is there something to collide with in the void?
Gotta keep your guard up, the one time you don't you might manage to find something to hit.
A drunk driver once hit the ONLY tree in the middle of a desert so, it's possible.
@@onyxguardian1756 xD that drunk driver be drunken so bad to hit the only tree
Nice concept, but it's the weight under it that's supposed to hold it up that wouldn't work. That much weight on a dirt ground would be a permanet residence. Imagine if it rains. ^_^
The problem isn't weight, but pressure. If you distribute the weight enough, thus, exerting less pressure, the soil can handle it.
reminds me of the communities living on naval carriers in girls und panzer
"girls und panzer"?
anime bout girls driving tanks for school sport or somethin
Ah, I see you are a man of culture as well
Or Crome shelled regios
Indeed yeah, there is a certain similarity here (even if its just 'put a city on an incredibly large vessel).
Ahhhhm Im pretty damn sure that London does not take up only 2,9km² .*Edit. The DISTRICT called "city of london" has 2.9km² The whole city of london has 1570 km².
Actually, by London he means the city, not greater London which has 1.572km2. It's up on brittanica now, litterally says the City of London, at the centre of greater London, is 2.9km2. I was actually curious as to whether he was correct or not and thought you may like to know. Edit: if you also just look up City of London, it will come up on wikipedia aswell, as London is generally used to talk about the larger area around it aswell now.
Yeah I'm not sure where he got that number... though if you're stacking buildings on top of each other a kilometer high you can get closer to the right area but probably still pretty far.
@@12thmocha11 I think they should have mentioned that "city of london" is a district of the city london. And not the actual city: london. The district called "city of London" of the city: London is 2,9km². The city: London is 1500km² and the metropolitan area of London has 8300km²
@@abisz007007Actually, City of London is a City, not a district. The thing is, it's inside of London. But both of them have different mayors, different City Halls, different police and different laws
@@abisz007007 I mean either way, the number he uses is correct. So I dont mind, I mean, like, what is considered a city would never be able to move, and every city I've been to has districts, so using the London district/borough is fine with me
While I Was Watching Mortal Engine I Realised How Many Starwars References
But, what about instead of asking how it could be done, what about asking if it *SHOULD* be done. Would it even be feasible to do something like this in the event of the war from the Mortal Engine series, such as, what are the logistics of procuring the food, water, and resources required to run the cities?
duh,, farms rain and harvesting other cities. its called municiple darwanism. think of it as evolution but for cities
@@magnatorra5325 I see your counter-argument and raise you this:
But where first does that food come from, as the amount of land required to farm, especially for most meats and fruits/vegetables, it appears that no space is even allocated in the cities, much less could the several square kilometers be sufficient for the amount of food consumed by the rough amount of land required per person (The current global average acres per person with modern techniques, which they aren't exactly shown using, require about .5 acres of cropland, or 1.5 to include rangeland)?
How do they procure sufficient amounts of drinking water (And water for other necessities such as the previously mentioned farming) as via rainwater it would not provide enough for the purposes of a complex city, much less for the fact that design elements facilitating the collection of rainwater appear to be completely lacking in all depictions of cities. The average rainfall of 601 mm in the London Area (Over a year) couldn't support it.
Should a traction city need fuel, what fuels do they use, are they the same hydrocarbons of today, despite the books taking place thousands of years from now? If so, where is the fuel (Gasoline, Diesel, etc.) refined as it only has a shelf-life of less than a year, and that is with modern chemical additives to prevent the breakdown of it. The necessary fuel requirements of these cities is absolutely ginormous and would require and exceptional amount of supply logistics to run, with modern computers and global trade and high tech manufacturing markets and modern petrol refineries. Meanwhile, life appears to be somewhere comparable to the very early to mid pre-industrial era.
What if new parts or items must be manufactured in the event that they cannot be procured from other cities, do there then exist factories and mining operations to support them?
Although the cost to build it may not seem grand, the cost to operate with even remote efficiency is astronomical, and not just monetarily wise, but also with resource and human requirements, as well as the necessary education and training to run these cities (And I don't think we will get to see what a public school looks like in the movie either to show what generations are tough so that they may push ever-forward on the Hunting Grounds)?
To discuss the point of Municipal Darwinism, one must first also realize the very much over-looked aspects of the necessary supply chain for traction cities which of course would make the stories not nearly as exciting for an audience. I still would not call it evolution though, as rather the idea of Darwinism is that it is survival of the more fit, and that ones must adapt to survive. People continue to adapt today, but it is by no means evolutionary.
The books are post-apocalyptic fantasy, and show in some of their more ludicrous old-tech weapons, humanity's degeneracy into using traction cities as though they were still hunter-gathers (But also cannibals in a sense of requiring themselves to feed on the cities of others), and the overall lack of progression to a more organized society structured around the redevelopment of lucrative, sought-out, and/or necessary markets and parts of the economy and redevelopment of technologies such as heavier-than-air flight, telecommunications, medicines, etc.
Oh, and I haven't even begone to ask about the fact that devouring other cities would require: a) Populations of devoured cities to be absorbed (But obviously the cities can't exactly grow larger like a stationary one could), which would also require ever increasing resources that are already scarce; b) Populations would be exterminated whole-sale.
If a), then there would obviously be serious issues involving dissent among recently "consumed" peoples, possibly with the intent and plans to overthrow their devour-er and take over the city.
If you solution for dissent is b), obviously more issues would then arise.
In both instances, the very mechanism of the survival of traction cities would be in a way its own poison, as attempts to devour other cities for the resources as you described to also include a potentially hostile populous (Who also need the resources), there is little to no room for growth as the amount of land available was predetermined at the creation of the traction city (So obviously even natural population increases would lead to issues), but also if b) is the case, than there is also the potential for inbreeding as little outside genetic diversity is added.
@@GLitchesHaxandBadAudio as for the food, water, and fuel thing, litertally everything is recycled. heck, by londons end they are even trying to make granola out of feces! this may not actualy work but its the in book explanation
@Eli Myers You bet it is.
GLitches, Hax and Bad Audio thank you for taking the time. The movies concept was ridiculous
This was actually quite interesting, can’t wait to see this movie 👍🏻👍🏻🙂🙂
I love me some Hugo Weaving -- kH
Sience is so interesting with your videos! I'm really excited of the mortal engine movie!!
4:25 apparently 10 times as fast as that.
The tip of London is in 8 frames, and thus takes roughly 9 frames to get across. At 24 fps, that is .375 seconds.
Assuming Kyle has a shoulder width of about 70 cm, and realising he takes up about 60% of the width of the screen (20/12, in my frame), the screen is 1.16 m wide in reality.
1.16/.375 = 3.11 m/s, not nearly the speed calculated.
(I do understand that the real velocity would not have been feasible as London would have been in only one frame and you wouldn't see it move; it would just flash for a fraction of a second.)
Other possibility is to scale up the frame to the relative speed of the city of London.
In one frame (4:25:17, I believe) you see that the entire city almost fits exactly in one frame. Just to get an idea of the order of magnitude we'll assume the frame is as wide as the city is long: 2500 m. (That would mean Kyle's shoulders - bulky as he is - are 1500 m wide. Do you even lift, bro?)
It still passes those 2500 m in .375 seconds, so it's velocity is 2500/.375=6.67 km/s, or mach 19.4.
To be travelling at the correct speed on this scale, it would be in frame for 2500/35 = 71 seconds.
8 billion kg moving at mach 19.4 is basically an extinction event on wheels.
@@AspLode Not even the city would literally tear itself apart because of the atmosphere around it. Any destruction would come from the falling pieces at high velocities.
19,000 litres for gasoline times 610 NASA Crawlers... That's like 32,452,000$ worth of gasoline (if you take a gas-price of 2,80$ per litre) for just getting you 64 kilometers further until you have to refuel ALL of the NASA Crawlers! Lets hope they got some good solar panels on the roofs, because i'm not paying that gasbill every 64 kilometers!
You would not use gasoline or any liquid fuel. It would be some form of Nuclear power, fusion or fission, to produce steam.
@@DocWolph but as of right now, the NASA Crawler uses gasoline!
use American prices, 2.20$ per gallon (3.79 liters) its much cheaper (and what I paid last time I got gas)
I took the average gas price of all the states in the US :P
It's not a new concept. Anime has been doing it for years. The best example I can think of is in Robot Carnival. What gets me is how the buildings would stand up to the movement. They'd almost have to be built on the structure from scratch and built in a way to compensate for the movement of the city because every time the city moves it would be like an earthquake.
Read the book by Philip Reeve. Pretty good read. Also, note that in the world-changing war, humanity had progressed quite a bit farther than we're at now. Oh, and there may be a couple sequels, and even technical prequels, depending on how many of these movies they make. Oh and...Shaw is supposed to be uglier. Like Hunchback of Notre Dame.
This is so long I'm not sure if you are speaking Anglish.
Hester is pretty normal except her face, which is effed up, had lost an eye and has a bad scar going up-down
Sounds like a series of shifty YA novels.
@@daftbence And no nose, you forgot she doesn't have a nose.
Thank you, I'm so glad someone else agrees with me. Hester has a really messed up face, but that puts all the more emotion and force behind it when Tom falls in love with her. Plus, TOM IS ALSO A MAIN CHARACTER, WHY DID YOU FORGET ABOUT HIM KYLE?
When a movie makes an absolute mockery of science but pays you to make a video about how it doesn't.
Ey, most sci-fi movies are kinda out of this world.
Even the Avenger is kinda mocking science.
Nah that's nothing, in the books they have even bigger German traction cities converted for battle, so imagine a city about twice the size of London in the trailer, but covered in armor heavier than a WW2 battleship carried with a massive amount of cannons that would put the 16inchers of an Iowa class to shame. Or how about the armies of undying cyborgs that said battle cities fight. They send millions of troops into the frontlines Soviet Russia style, then when they die take the corpse and convert it into a killing machine to go out and die over and over again.
I think it’s obviously a fantasy story, not sci-fi.
@@battleoid2411 Tbh not twice the size of London in the trailer as in the books they say London is a 1000 feet high.
@@samueltitone5683 It's sci fi, people just tend to completely ignore the lore from the books... This is happening in the future, when at some point there was a 60 minute war in which humanity kinda destroyed itself and had to go mobile to survive. In that war they used the Stalkers, those cyborg warriors, tesla guns and orher super advanced shit. Most of the technology got lost, but engineers of London managed to get some old Stalker pieces and revived some people with the "old tech" (which was of course old only for them). I'm more and morw worried for this movie as nobody knows the books, which contain essential info the movie most likely won't, and this will be auch a huge flop because of this :(
i remember reading the book to this and being so interested in the concept of these massive, moving cities and the society that surrounded it
Two words: shock absorbers
Or lack thereof
Or suspension
I have a few to mention as well...
Wind Resistance.
Metal Fatigue.
Surface Tension.
Hydrogen Fuel.
Nuclear Power.
Impossible Maintenance.
Supercarrier Cities.
Science Fantasy...
...And Rick Astley.
You could use more crude forms of petroleum based fuel, or the contrary, more processed forms of petroleum based fuel, to produce more energy per gallon of fuel. Even now we have diesel, gasoline, and actually different forms of gasoline, such as nitrogen enriched gasoline, which is supposed to be more efficient. You could also supplement it with wind turbines, solar panels, and actually, nuclear reactors. In fact, at that point, you probably wouldn't even need fuel. Those carriers also move very slow, not because they can't move faster, but because if they do, the load could tip over, but that doesn't seem like a problem for the city, which seems to be much more securely built.
.
Btw, Kyle, (please bare with me, I know you probably are tired of this, but the important thing is the last sentence which is a question) this has been bothering me for years. How did the doors pin the lightsaber in The Phantom Menace? If ut really us plasma instead of something else melting through the doors, wouldn't the doors basically go through? We also see this in Clone Wars, when Ventrice stabs her lightsabers into a wall to decelerate her fall, and even as far back as the original triology, so much when Luke strijes objects with a lightsaber, as when he strikes Darth Vader before Darth Vader cuts his hand, and even in The Last Jedi, before Luke cuts Darth Vader's hand, the lightsaber is stopped by metal pipes, even though when he cuts Darth Vader's hand, the lightsaber cuts the pipes too. Could all this mean that it is actually not the plasma cutting through objects, but a very durable and telescoped solid, and if so, is there a solid in real life that could do the same or something similar, and would magnetic fields be used to keep the plasma surrounding said solid?
for your comment on green energy for the traction cities, the 60 minute war reset humanity to the industrial age, so only fossil fuel can be synthiezed :D. However, spoiler, nuclear weapons are reviewed at the end of the movie, so nuclear would not be that much of a stretch.
It's worth noting that nuclear power isn't some kind of "pulling electrickery out of nothing" space-magic, and does in fact consume fuel. So even if you had electric engines that were being powered by a nuclear reactor, the engines "not consuming fuel" wouldn't negate the fact that you need fuel to keep them running. Because the reactor itself consumed nuclear reaction materials. What kind of materials you need will depend on whether you're using fission or fusion reactions (or both), and that will also determine the kinds of by-products you're going to have to find uses for - or discard. Which means you're potentially building a city that leaves giant radioactive dumps along its path, or potentially even a constain radioactive trail behind it like a nuclear snail.
@@a-blivvy-yus Nuclear power does require fuel, true, but you're unlikely to run out in any reasonable amount of time.
@@justinthompson6364 Well, yeah, if we assume you're running a normal-scale nuclear-powered vehicle that's traveling for a few months at a time before returning home for refueling. But when you're talking about providing power for a city *AND* for a large enough vehicle base to carry the entire city on its back at a decent speed, then you're going to need a steady supply - OR to be traveling between sources of fuel... or targeting other cities and taking theirs.
I've heard of a similar concept being used to create colonies on Mercury. A city (which would be much smaller because it's just a colony and much much less heavy because gravity) placed on the border of sunlight could use solar panels on the hot side to get power and living happens on the cool side to avoid people dying
What would it take to make a flying city?
Pretty sure Bioshock Infinite explained this.
Quantum *somethingsomething*
Ross Cleghorn, magic... Ok but for real. Not a scientist, but I can tell you right now we don't have any form of technology that can do that. That wouldn't be sooo prohibitively dangerous. Looking at the devices of flight that I'm aware of, none of them have the capacity to be scaled up to such a degree.
big wings, much wow
There is a flying city in the book but it is more of a massive air balloon.
Dustgold, yeah balloons were my conclusion as well. Certainly in that it wouldn't really be hard to scale up, but then I remember the Hindenburg and I realize I wouldn't want to trust my life to something like that. A hot air type would be relatively safer, but I don't think it would be efficient to keep them heated enough to float on such a large scale.
How about nuclear power? It's not ideal but it might work better that liquid fuel.
The interesting thing is I dont remember whether in the books what the cities were powered by. I think its pretty diverse and a variety of methods depending. But its like thousands of years in a distopian sort of future with cyber men, so like...yeah.
Yeah that would be my guess, no way Solar would produce enough energy to be used and I don't think they're making gasoline for the cities so Nuclear would make the most sense imo
@@outrageous-alex they where powered by coal
As I was watching this the main thing that occurred to me was wouldn’t moving towns and cities cost more energy than a static one
Dear Kyle, would a high yield thermonuclear bomb or a thermoberic device sanitize a plague infected area like in resident evil or the crazies? I really think it would be effective.
staris84 covered the blast radius part, but also consider this: Does lethal radiation exposure kill something that's already dead? Probably not, I think.
The use of a high yield thermonuclear bomb or thermoberic device would incinerate or pulverize anything, the blast wave alone would crush any structure. The added radiation would kill close to 99% of anything else from the fallout to high power x-ray and neutron bombardment.
I guess you could carpet-bomb the area with nukes, but that's a whoooole lotta nukes. Fat Man had a fireball radius of 100m² and an air blast radius of 360m². That 360m² isn't guaranteed death for a living human, let alone a zombie. Again, if we're talking about a virus that reanimates flesh, radiation fallout will probably have no effect, and as @staris84 said, could make it far worse.
@@RocketDragons Those zombies aren't dead, though, just pathogen infected.
Mark Langridge And really stupid
Make them fly an then we have star destroyers
that's Airhaven, a flying city in Mortal Engines. Read the book man, it's 4x better than the movie
You: Why would you want to put a city on wheels?
Me, an intellectual:
To make it easier to take the city and *push* it somewhere else.
1 inch per gallon ... but I would have the biggest ride on the road , :-) sign me up HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
This ride is so big it has its own roads
With smaller rides :)
In the book, there’s an even larger city that “dies” when it runs out of fuel. An apex predator that couldn’t find enough prey.
You look like Thor's little cousin 😂😂
ever since i found this show ive called him science thor
He could be rly hot if he cut that hair and be a bit less nerdy :)
@@dicktrolington416 LMAO. He gao
@@bagochips1208 gao as fuk :)
According to a video made by Nerdiest on that channel, he is Thor's younger brother because Odin in that video said "...and this is Kyle trying to pick up his big brother's(Thor's) hammer." so there you go.
(The video is called 'Kyle's Dad Is Odin' or something like that.)
There is an old Sci-Fi novel about a city built on rail tracks, that had to constantly move West. Teams of engineers had to survey the land ahead, construct the route, and relocate the rails from the rear to the front. I forget the reason that was given for this necessity, but it made for a story.
Kyle, how many times have you explained why big things look slow..?
A couple of times, and I still think he forgets the most important factor though, the square-cube law!
Though to some degree, big things *do* move slowly. It takes time for electrical signals to travel from the brain to an extremity, so very large creatures couldn't move anywhere as quickly as smaller creatures. Though, this is different from *traveling* slowly, which he was discussing this time around.
People keep asking! -- kH
It's probably _the_ most common misconception/misunderstanding. For example, there is a certain percentage of people, on these here internets, that do not believe the earth is rotating on its axis at 1600 km/hr. "Why aren't we flung off into space??" "We'd feel it moving, arrrggghhhhh!" You get the idea.
We suck at comprehending the scale of the tiny and the massive because it isn't common sense. We also think of those speeds compared to us mere mortals.
When you understand scale, it makes total sense and makes it all the more interesting. So, yeah, it won't be the last time it's explained either. ;)
(And this isn't addressed to anyone in particular but just my experience in surfing the 'dumb' parts of UA-cam and watching people exclaim with sincerity that these things cannot possibly be true i.e. the earth spinning. It's sad.)
This is completely ignoring the problem of materials. If we, for example, took a crawler and doubled its size, its mass and thus the forces at work in it would increase by 2^3, i.e. 8, times. If we quadrupled its size, the mass and forces would increase by 4^3 = 64 times. Therefore the materials would have to be that much stronger unless perhaps we make parts that much thicker, which would also make them many times heavier, creating a viscious cycle. We could perhaps make this workable with graphene, but then it would be astronomically expensive.
He didn't double their size. He just took more of them.
@@Ninjaananas That was a hypothetical example to explain a principle. However, that principle still applies. London, as depicted in that movie, has roughly the same shape as a hatchback car, not the shape of a big flat board, which itself would have serious problems as soon as it reaches land that is not completely flat. Suppose that you make a version of that city as depicted in the movie, and you make it be the same size as a typical car. A lot of stuff would be really gigantic, e.g. the cross-sectional area of beams for the support structure, relative to the inhabitants, but in normal car terms, it would seem reasonable. If you decided to double the size, you then would make it 8 times heavier, so the stresses would be 8 times bigger, and the components would have to make up for that. If you made it a thousand times bigger (about the size of a small city), then the mass and stresses would be a billion times bigger, and it would be unfeasible. Strip-mining dump trucks have not gotten bigger than roughly 3 times the size of normal dump trucks because of that same materials problem; tire rubber strong enough for significantly bigger dump trucks does not exist. Similarly, insects can be extremely thin and still have no difficulty holding their own weights or taking big falls, but we have to be much thicker to hold our own weights, and we don't do as well taking falls because of the stresses caused by our masses. Scaling stuff up like that is problematic mainly because of that mass problem, and it is the real stumbling block for mobile cities like those from that movie.
What if we use trusses instead of beams and colums working under shear and moments? Haha. Just kidding.
@@fernando5silva We could also swap out very heavy construction materials like steel with lighter ones such as toothpicks.
@@nerdvision3587 @NerdVision Just remember: There are already inhabited structures today as tall as the London imagined in this movie. Yes, moving It would be the issue... You need to strengthen the material if it is used in a traditional way. When you change the design you can use the same material to resist much more... Structures are not only about materials properties but about geometry... Like the Eiffel Tower for example.
Of course you must take into account the incredibly deep lore within the book series over the course of everything, definitely helps make everything more understandable
Would the actual ground be able to support it? I've read there were plans in ww2 for a giant tank that was never made as roads would not support it. Considering cities are usually built on strengthened foundations wouldn't a moving city face the same obstacle on all but the densest land masses?
Yes the nazis had 2 different large tanks. One was called the maus and a couple where actually build think they where supposed to weigh 100 tons and then was the Ratte that was just a dream. With a naval turret on top. Just not doable though. Just think of the problems of crossing a river or how easy it would be to hit from a aerial attack..
@@Mike-zl4km that's the one I was thinking of but was to lazy to google it haha
Really really big wheels. spreads to load out.
@@kaspernbs still think there would be a breaking point with the amount of weight in this case
Yes and in the book they cover that by not being able to go to certain areas due to the ground conditions.
you were assuming conventional fuel as a power source. would it be more practical to use hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear energy as a power source? hydrogen + air -> horsepower + water. water + nuclear fuel -> small, high-heat gen 4 nuclear reactors -> electrical energy + H2 + O2. H2 + air -> horsepower + water.... etc
hydrogen fuel cell cars are already on the market and high heat gen 4 reactors are to be commercialized by 2030. This seems like a much more feasible recourse for this futuristic world.
reply if anyone has questions. i may be able to rough out some power to weight efficiencies.
That would be great except that research into anything Nuclear--and even the word itself--are forbidden due to nuclear weapons having killed half of the people in the world during the Sixty Minutes' War. Covering the entire outside of the City with solar panels would probably be a better idea--you can get about two gigawatts constant power from the surface area estimated in the video for Traction London, which suggests that it could spend about four hours a day in motion just from solar power if it has the energy storage for it.
@@sailordolly lol u right.
I read the actual Mortal Engines book series and I was expecting the calculated speed of the city to be very different from the speed in the book but it was actually exactly the speed that it said in the book so props to the movie creators who did the math for the cgi city
Just saying...
England is my city
Keen for this movie. I loved the books and we haven't had a fresh cinematic fantasy franchise for a while. Just more Star Wars, Hobbit and Fantastic Beasts.
Too bad it will be a huge flop, because how will they convey all the info and lore from the books? They won't, that's how... I mean already Hester won't have the scarred face, like wtf.
ive been wanting this since i first read the books nine years ago
Hollywood can't have a main character all flawed, she has to be beautiful but with like a tiny scar, honestly they might as well have just gotten rid of her dis-figuration entirely by how much they have gussied hester up.
I think 1 part that has been overlooked is the track width for the crawlers, for example the P.1000 ratte tank that Germany thought of during WWII was not even close to the mass of a city but people looking at the designs today think it might have had major issues sinking into terrain. Something the size of a city would need HUGE and very WIDE tracks in order to not simply sink.
how mortal engines put there city on a wheels?
*THEY HAVE MORTAL ENGINES*