How in the FUCK are these allowed on the roads? I saw one go by me with my own two eyes and it was the BIGGEST thing on a regular old road I’ve ever seen, hands down.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
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        1 year ago

        I like the aesthetic but I think that’s a bit too much gore for me these days. Looks like fun ,though.

        There’s an alternate history book where one day in 1998 all electronic technology, combustion engines, firearms, and similar technology just stops working for no obvious reasons. Once things stabilize a little one of the factions of survivors equips all their longbow troops with bicycles so they can maneuver quickly where the roads are good, and load their gear on the bicycles to make it easier to transport if they have to go through rougher terrain. The whole book is basically “If the apocalypse happens you’re going to want to be friends with medievalist nerds”.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
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      91 year ago

      The ideal apocalypse war car is a stripped down, optimized 1977 Volksvagen diesel Rabbit converted to run on Bio-Diesel, the official hydrocarbon of the post-apocalypse. Capable of 40+mpg in it’s stock configuration, and I’m sure you could push that higher by stripping out extra weight and tuning the engine for efficiency.

      • FlakesBongler [they/them]
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        81 year ago

        Zooming across the wastelands, fighting monsters and saving the innocent

        Leaving my mark and the smell of french fries everywhere I go

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
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          1 year ago

          I have a sketch-book somewhere that was entirely based on “if you had a car after “the apocalypse” what would you actually want?” and it’s all shit like really stripped down hybrid cars with hyper-miler mods, covered in solar panels to power the electric motors to crawl along at a walking pace on sunny days so you wouldn’t use any fuel. I think some of them were sail-cars. Stripped down to be as light as possible so on a day where the wind was high enough you could rig up a big lanteen sail, put the wheels in neutral, and slowly sail down the highway. Others were rigged up so you could have draft animals pull the vehicle, then if you needed to go fast for some reason you could remove the yoke and switch over to using the engine. A couple of them were RVs for flatbed trucks that were basically mobile solar power facilities, just big arrays of solar cells charging batteries for other vehicles.

          of course none of this would work long term because high energy capacity batterys are high tech and require rare earth metals and stuff.

          dry land sailing is a really cool way to go fast and die young

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind-powered_vehicle

          Ooh, that’s cool. There are vehicles that use wind turbines to directly drive the wheels, and you can turn the turbine in to the wind to get power even if you’re going directly against the wind. I hadn’t seen though before.

          Where’s my apocalypse movie with this sweet machine?

          https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Blackbird_image.png

          Holy shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit apparently there used to be wind-powered rail cars in a few places? I am 100% here for solarpunk wind-sailing trains!

          • The word punk has any interesting etymology. It started life as a 16th century term for sex worker. Over time it came to mean any criminal or ne’er do well. Punk music got its name from its origins amongst hooligans and anarchists. That’s why the cyberpunk genre got punk appended to it. They were cyber-criminals. Lately when I hear steampunk or biopunk or whatever I wonder where the crime is? Its about an aesthetic more than anything else, kinda like punk music became, heh. But as a hexbear whose mere existence is criminal I have little doubt you’d manage some illegality with your solar trains.