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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 3956051" data-attributes="member: 19675">I've actually toured mines in a few countries.Unless its a strip mine, a new mine, or some kind of material found close to the surface (like certain salt mines or the Royston Turquoise Mine) you can't simply walk into a mine and start working anymore- everything near the surface has played out.Most modern coal mines generally involve going down a vertical shaft via a generator-powered lift or in an angled powered rail system.  It has electrical lights.  They're deep enough that air needs to be pumped in, and often, water needs to be pumped out.  You'd have to build quite an array of alternative energy sources to power all those systems- you might be able to scour the county and come up with the neccessary stuff by cannibalizing all of the farms.  But that's assuming things like solar panels still produce viable amounts of power after being battered by ejecta, and that the windmills are still standing after the ELE.  (Yes, you can build an old-style windmill, but I honestly have ZERO idea how you'd get it to generate electricity...and if you're in someplace like Arizona or Kansas, you might not have the right lumber to build one of a size.)Currently, the two main reasons coal deposits are not economical to recover are depth and nature preservation efforts.  Again, not things you could just walk up into and start digging with a pick.Then, of course most operational mines would be in the hands of the world's subterranean races- if not before the ELE, then definitely after.Again, from where?  Like the saying goes, "There's no there there."Any deepwater port capable of handling a sub or aircraft carrier would be a primary target.  The city would be a meteoric crater (or cluster of several) surrounded by wasteland, and whatever metal is there would be deposited in a fine sedimentary layer over miles of countryside.Actually, yes.I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.  I've been to several of the junkyards & landfills in the area.  There's one in Lewisville near Coppell (where I live), and Lone Star Park at Grand Prairie is built over one* that was closed just before I moved here from Irving (just north of it).  Irving & Grapevine both have many huge scrapyards and auto salvage centers.  If you look at a D/FW map, you'd see that all of those areas are well within the "mega-city" formed by D/FW and their suburbs.When I lived in Robinson Barracks in Stuttgart, Germany, there was a smallish dump right on the base.Any of those places would be gone in the Illithid's strike.Like the island vs desert scenario, this is obviously something that would vary depending upon location.*Which raises the other point- you can't salvage from a landfill you don't know exists.  Lone Star Park is just one example of the trend to cover dumps with usable spaces, like baseball diamonds and parks...and most people don't even realize what they're walking on.Fair enough...but you still have to lube it, and most animal-derived oils burn after only a few minutes at the temps within an engine.Old, yes.  But still a pinnacle tech in the sense that you can only have engines after developing several interim technologies, like smelting of ores and refining fuels.  If you lack some of those techs, you may still be able to keep one running for a while, but eventually it will be unrepairable.Sure it would, at least temporarily.  Most major freeways would be cratered at least when they pass through population centers, and you'd have no working railways for the same reasons (before you point it out, the trains and rails are both VERY likely sources of refined metals that could be recycled).In a place like Texas, you'd still have a network of Farm to Market roads that would unite a lot of small towns, but even those would have significant damage- they also tie into the major highways entering the cities.Effectively, you'd be back to the frontier-eral transport- without trains!  And trains were the major (almost exclusive) mode of interstate commerce in that time.They'd have to be aware of the attack.Sure, the better Oracles (arcane and divine) would be raising the alarm, but how many people- even spellcasters- would believe warnings about octopus headed beings from the future ending the world by dropping rocks from beyond the sky......much less believing that anyone could drop enough rocks to level a city, much less the world......from beyond the sky......and octopus headed?  Who ever heard of such a thing......and, for that matter, who ever takes oracles literally, anyway?When was the last time you saw someone word their Contingency to avoid that kind of fate?Its Jor-El warning his fellow Kryptonians all over again.</blockquote>

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