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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Friday, November 24, 2006

Super-gigantic mining machines 

Many players' all-time favorite PARANOIA mission is "Me and My Shadow Mark 4" from Acute PARANOIA (1985), reprinted in the hardcover collection PARANOIA Flashbacks. (Say it with me: "Something falls off.") That mission, you'll recall, assigns the hapless Troubleshooters to guard a humongous cybertank. The inspiration for the Mark 4 tank was certainly Steve Jackson's Ogre boardgames, and the Keith Laumer "Bolo" stories that inspired Ogre.

In actuality, the largest vehicles in the world are all mining machines. Canadian blogger Avi Abrams has posted a breathtaking series of stupendously large mining vehicles. Another post concentrates on one particular beast, the Krupp mining company's bone-chilling Bagger 288 -- a Warhammer-sized chainsaw that once absent-mindedly chewed up a bulldozer. You just know Alpha Complex has 30 or 40 of these monsters ripping out new tunnels for the underground city. Wish Paul Baldowski had known about these things when he was writing The Underplex....

I hope someday some loyal and industrious citizen may Photoshop some of these photos to create a real-life Mark 4 cybertank.
Posted by: Allen Varney / 12:35 PM

Comments:
In the link provided the author speculates about seeing such an excavator crawling through the field right up to your house. I actually saw one of these beauties standing right next to the freeway and had really problems keeping on track while passing it. Wonder how many accidents happended that day with drivers staring up and forgetting about surviving the traffic on the autobahn.
By the way Krupp Industrietechnik was the manufacturer - not the operating mining company which was Rheinbraun (now part of RWE Power AG).
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : November 26, 2006 10:15 AM
 
Reminds me of Killdozer.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : December 02, 2006 9:51 AM
 
To quote a certain car add: "It scares the *bleep* out of me."

That being said, I've noticed an interesting disconnect between my vision of Alpha Complex and the creators'. I've always seen the setting of Paranoia as cramped corridors, enclosed highway tunnels, and endless office buildings stacked on top of each other. Any sort of space beyond an auditorium just never really entered into it, let alone enough room to fit something like the Mark 4 or one of those monstrosities. Perhaps a single room in some strange R&D lab, but all the rooms and corridors necessary to let something like that actually move about the Complex? Uh-uh.

Maybe it's just my inborn claustrophobia, but until I read "Me and My Shadow Mark 4", I never considered empty spaces of more then 10 cubic feet a major feature of Alpha Complex. Always makes me wonder just how different Alpha Complex becomes depending on who's reading about it.
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : December 06, 2006 7:35 PM
 
It seems to me that the Alpha Complex is very different depending upon who the DM is. I have the same (mild) claustrophobia, and I envisioned it to be the same way. Maybe the complex really depends upon what we, ourselves, are unnerved by?
# posted by Anonymous Anonymous : December 07, 2006 11:48 PM
 
Indeed, that is the essential first realization on the path to PARANOIA wisdom: Alpha Complex is not a place but a state of mind.
# posted by Blogger Allen Varney : December 08, 2006 12:29 AM
 
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