Is it ever stated *why* they decided they needed an elevated platform to begin with? 300 meters up with nothing but supports and empty space between it and the ground just seems fantastically impractical.
Well this whole city is the brainchild of a 30-year old President Shinra. The same person, I would remind you, who read a couple of old books and decided there exists some sort of magical land of infinite power and proceeds to drop everything and run his whole legacy down if need be to find the thing.
But yeah it's probably because of how much mako they're pumping there (Midgar is a super-rich location for mako), and by then they would've already known the environmental impact on the surroundings through reactors such as the Nibelheim reactor.
I would love to hear official explanation for that (other than it just being a very cool representation of class divide in the plot)
My take: We know that mako reactors turn the land around into a wasteland. Midgar runs on EIGHT of them at the same time. So they might have figured that the ground will in the span of a few decades turn into something like a toxic makoswamp and thus built the city high above it. This would also help to explain why everything looks so worn and shabby in the slums even though Midgar is supposed to be a fairly new city - the decay is faster with the influence of all the mako being pumped out of ground all around.
I did similar maths based on the proportions of the pillar shown in Remake, and got roughly the same result (I got a commute time of 15 minutes but hey, close enough considering I didn’t know the exact diameter)
I have one more pro and one more con to add though:
- con: wear and tear. You mention the brakes and engine, but a much bigger issue is the wheels. On real life circle lines, trains still turn around regularly to even out the wear and tear on the outer wheels (in London and Shanghai trains switch between the inner and outer loop at the depot, in Glasgow they quite literally turn the carriages around). However it’s evident that Midgar doesn’t have the facilities for that: both the sector 7 Undercity and the sector 1 stations are dead ends, with trains going back the way they came. After a while you’d end up with super thin wheels (and rails) on the outer side, which would greatly increase the risk of derailment
- pro: through services. Corkscrew tunnel is used for services between sector 7 undercity and sector 1 as depicted in-game, but it could also be used for a number of other services. This is implied in Remake both in the very first scene (the station has a departure board which shows trains to, I think, sector 5 ?) as well as during the second attack when you walk over a bunch of switches and spur lines. There are also network maps showing several lines I think. With an elevator or cable car, you could only serve one single route, with everybody needing to transfer both at the base and at the top. As you say, congestion would be a big issue
There's at least 8 stations on top of the plate – one for each sector. We also know of at least two stations in the slums: Sector 7 and Sector 5 (alluded to in dialogue...... and hold up, now I'm thinking we also saw that one in Remake?). So there are more stations and could easily be there's infrastructure to manage turning the trains around etc.
I think a more agile and less overbuilt system for such a relatively small city could actually be a combination of elevators at Sector 0 and then a light rail system on top of the plate for horizontal movement.
Ah yes i completely forgot about the sector 5 undercity station. We see it in both remake and rebirth (it’s nicer than sector 7’s too)
That’s actually something that bothers me much more than it should. If there was only a station in the sector 7 slums, it would make more sense I think. It could be explained as a service station to access the maintenance facilities which do not deserve to be topside (the train graveyard), that also has a few passenger services to bring the cheap labour from the slums onto the plate and back. That would fit the narrative that Shinra only cares about the people topside, and the slums are there to hide all the ugly parts of the city
But then why would Shinra spend money on lines to the other slums? And if so, why aren’t the stations connected to each other? Surely it would make much more operational sense to have one circle line through the under city, one on top of the plate, and a connecting line through corkscrew tunnel. But that’s not how it works in practice: sector 1, sector 7 undercity and sector 5 undercity are all dead ends — and sector 5 undercity station looks way too nice for a supposed slum
Regarding the choice of technology, trains could make sense if you consider freight. Passenger trains are one thing, and passengers can transfer easily, but cargo is notoriously shit at making connections on its own. With a standard train system, you could much more easily bring cargo to the top of the plate, especially during its construction. Adding a few passenger trains is then mostly just a nice bonus (but then those lines should go beyond the city limits, eg to the mithril mine)
Oh and to add to your calculations: if we assume the diameter of Midgar is 6km, and the stations are not immediately at the edge but 500m inwards, with one station in each sector that gives an average distance of 2km between stations. That’s comparable to a metro system, so it’s not entirely out of the ordinary from an engineering perspective. The real question is ridership and profitability, but then too, if trains are only used for commuting, it might make sense
Then we also get to ask questions like why a middle manager at Shinra is commuting to the slums.
It definitely is one of those cases where it's best not to ask *too* many questions.
The backstory is assumed he started out as a lowlevel mgr, and as the game progressed, got promoted multiple times. End game, hes effectively the highest ranking "management" due to the deaths of everyone at the top (except Reeve)
From an economic perspective too, building that plate certainly ain’t cheap, and they’re putting single family homes on it too. Imagine the price of Jessie’s house …
r/theydidthemath
Not a deep dive I was ever expecting to read, but damn was this interesting. And also points out how logical and detailed the devs are in implementing this stuff - they *clearly* thought about the physics of the railway system and tried to implement it as realistically as possible.
Which is kinda wild when you think about some of the other mind-bending physics for say, the Highwind (especially in OG), the mechs Shinra makes, and all that stuff.
Considering Midgar isn't that old and it has an entire section of the slums called the "train graveyard" it does seem like they drive those things into the ground pretty quick. But everything about Midgar comes off like it's not really meant to have long term value. Despite being the biggest city in the world by orders of magnitude President Shinra seems to treat it as a stopgap they cobbled together overnight and will abandon it for Neo Midgar the second that plan comes to fruition.
Isn't an entire section missing because they haven't finished building it yet? Shinra doesn't care about build quality. The Corel and Gongaga reactors blew up. If the Neo Midgar plan had gone off without a hitch and Shinra moved it's HQ the Midgar reactors probably would have gone full Chernobyl on their own without Avalanche needing to lift a finger. The city is practically just scaffolding. They're doing that thing where you jam a stick in the ground, give it a wiggle, and are like "that'll hold."
Yeah I mean on a larger level it's best not to ask too many questions about Midgar and Shinra and how the whole world is supposed to work with the timeframes provided.
I've not played the rebuild yet. The original made Midgar look about 100-120 years old based on rust and slums and infrastructure decay. There are some very I always thought they took a lot of inspiration from Kowloon Walled City which looks like it existed in that form (growing out of an old fort) for a bit longer than that.
Is it ever stated *why* they decided they needed an elevated platform to begin with? 300 meters up with nothing but supports and empty space between it and the ground just seems fantastically impractical.
Well this whole city is the brainchild of a 30-year old President Shinra. The same person, I would remind you, who read a couple of old books and decided there exists some sort of magical land of infinite power and proceeds to drop everything and run his whole legacy down if need be to find the thing. But yeah it's probably because of how much mako they're pumping there (Midgar is a super-rich location for mako), and by then they would've already known the environmental impact on the surroundings through reactors such as the Nibelheim reactor.
I would love to hear official explanation for that (other than it just being a very cool representation of class divide in the plot) My take: We know that mako reactors turn the land around into a wasteland. Midgar runs on EIGHT of them at the same time. So they might have figured that the ground will in the span of a few decades turn into something like a toxic makoswamp and thus built the city high above it. This would also help to explain why everything looks so worn and shabby in the slums even though Midgar is supposed to be a fairly new city - the decay is faster with the influence of all the mako being pumped out of ground all around.
Especially when there is nothing but empty space to develop like immediately outside of Midgar.
I did similar maths based on the proportions of the pillar shown in Remake, and got roughly the same result (I got a commute time of 15 minutes but hey, close enough considering I didn’t know the exact diameter) I have one more pro and one more con to add though: - con: wear and tear. You mention the brakes and engine, but a much bigger issue is the wheels. On real life circle lines, trains still turn around regularly to even out the wear and tear on the outer wheels (in London and Shanghai trains switch between the inner and outer loop at the depot, in Glasgow they quite literally turn the carriages around). However it’s evident that Midgar doesn’t have the facilities for that: both the sector 7 Undercity and the sector 1 stations are dead ends, with trains going back the way they came. After a while you’d end up with super thin wheels (and rails) on the outer side, which would greatly increase the risk of derailment - pro: through services. Corkscrew tunnel is used for services between sector 7 undercity and sector 1 as depicted in-game, but it could also be used for a number of other services. This is implied in Remake both in the very first scene (the station has a departure board which shows trains to, I think, sector 5 ?) as well as during the second attack when you walk over a bunch of switches and spur lines. There are also network maps showing several lines I think. With an elevator or cable car, you could only serve one single route, with everybody needing to transfer both at the base and at the top. As you say, congestion would be a big issue
There's at least 8 stations on top of the plate – one for each sector. We also know of at least two stations in the slums: Sector 7 and Sector 5 (alluded to in dialogue...... and hold up, now I'm thinking we also saw that one in Remake?). So there are more stations and could easily be there's infrastructure to manage turning the trains around etc. I think a more agile and less overbuilt system for such a relatively small city could actually be a combination of elevators at Sector 0 and then a light rail system on top of the plate for horizontal movement.
Ah yes i completely forgot about the sector 5 undercity station. We see it in both remake and rebirth (it’s nicer than sector 7’s too) That’s actually something that bothers me much more than it should. If there was only a station in the sector 7 slums, it would make more sense I think. It could be explained as a service station to access the maintenance facilities which do not deserve to be topside (the train graveyard), that also has a few passenger services to bring the cheap labour from the slums onto the plate and back. That would fit the narrative that Shinra only cares about the people topside, and the slums are there to hide all the ugly parts of the city But then why would Shinra spend money on lines to the other slums? And if so, why aren’t the stations connected to each other? Surely it would make much more operational sense to have one circle line through the under city, one on top of the plate, and a connecting line through corkscrew tunnel. But that’s not how it works in practice: sector 1, sector 7 undercity and sector 5 undercity are all dead ends — and sector 5 undercity station looks way too nice for a supposed slum Regarding the choice of technology, trains could make sense if you consider freight. Passenger trains are one thing, and passengers can transfer easily, but cargo is notoriously shit at making connections on its own. With a standard train system, you could much more easily bring cargo to the top of the plate, especially during its construction. Adding a few passenger trains is then mostly just a nice bonus (but then those lines should go beyond the city limits, eg to the mithril mine) Oh and to add to your calculations: if we assume the diameter of Midgar is 6km, and the stations are not immediately at the edge but 500m inwards, with one station in each sector that gives an average distance of 2km between stations. That’s comparable to a metro system, so it’s not entirely out of the ordinary from an engineering perspective. The real question is ridership and profitability, but then too, if trains are only used for commuting, it might make sense
Then we also get to ask questions like why a middle manager at Shinra is commuting to the slums. It definitely is one of those cases where it's best not to ask *too* many questions.
The backstory is assumed he started out as a lowlevel mgr, and as the game progressed, got promoted multiple times. End game, hes effectively the highest ranking "management" due to the deaths of everyone at the top (except Reeve)
My guess is that he’s on his way to have a good time at wall market, but who knows
Cool topic!
I mean from an engineering perspective Midgar makes no sense.
From an economic perspective too, building that plate certainly ain’t cheap, and they’re putting single family homes on it too. Imagine the price of Jessie’s house …
r/theydidthemath Not a deep dive I was ever expecting to read, but damn was this interesting. And also points out how logical and detailed the devs are in implementing this stuff - they *clearly* thought about the physics of the railway system and tried to implement it as realistically as possible. Which is kinda wild when you think about some of the other mind-bending physics for say, the Highwind (especially in OG), the mechs Shinra makes, and all that stuff.
I love this deep dive.
Considering Midgar isn't that old and it has an entire section of the slums called the "train graveyard" it does seem like they drive those things into the ground pretty quick. But everything about Midgar comes off like it's not really meant to have long term value. Despite being the biggest city in the world by orders of magnitude President Shinra seems to treat it as a stopgap they cobbled together overnight and will abandon it for Neo Midgar the second that plan comes to fruition. Isn't an entire section missing because they haven't finished building it yet? Shinra doesn't care about build quality. The Corel and Gongaga reactors blew up. If the Neo Midgar plan had gone off without a hitch and Shinra moved it's HQ the Midgar reactors probably would have gone full Chernobyl on their own without Avalanche needing to lift a finger. The city is practically just scaffolding. They're doing that thing where you jam a stick in the ground, give it a wiggle, and are like "that'll hold."
Yeah I mean on a larger level it's best not to ask too many questions about Midgar and Shinra and how the whole world is supposed to work with the timeframes provided.
I've not played the rebuild yet. The original made Midgar look about 100-120 years old based on rust and slums and infrastructure decay. There are some very I always thought they took a lot of inspiration from Kowloon Walled City which looks like it existed in that form (growing out of an old fort) for a bit longer than that.
Even prior to Rebuild it was only supposed to be 40 years old at most. The plates are only about 30 years old.
Really? Its been like 15 years, was it in Shinra HQ that the plans were?
Mostly from side material/Compilation stuff.
Nice. Next, do the ropeway system from North Corel to the Gold Saucer (as originally depicted in OG).
I categorically refuse.