How would a modern city manage after the Great Disruption?

[Koloth]

Well, after people starve the first year, yes.

Modern city populations are supported with modern farming techniques and machinery. And whenever this transition takes place, the local farmers would have planted for their normal expectations, will won't include the city people - you can't instantly add a couple of million new people into an area and expect there to be food available for them until at least the end of the next growing season.

In this scenario, in North America, you also have the issue that the areas currently planted with grain, and that are used for graxing livestock, are
1) Out of transport range of most city folks who don't have fuel infrastructure.
2) Are apt to be from a historical period in which that land was not being used for farming yet at all. Humans can't eat prairie grass.

Depends on what gets time transported. In the 1632 version, Grantville wasn't a large city and enough of the surrounding rural area came with to prevent initial food issues. Many US farmers have some amount of on site storage and many US towns started as farm product pickup sites for the railroads. A lot of those facilities still exist and could source food supplies. Now if you are taking just central Boston or London and dropping that into a medieval rural setting, food issues will happen quickly. The local police SWAT units might be pressured by city leaders to "Do Something" to obtain food supplies. Or if one came with, the local National Guard base might be looted for weapons and vehicles.

Lots of ways to do this. The starting scenario really determines how things play out. Plus how effective the newcomer leadership is in maintaining/keeping control of things while the issues are worked through.

In 1632, one of the early issues was medical supplies. Those on insulin or cancer treatments had to accept that their time remaining was suddenly much shorter. Many drugs can be made from local supplies but learning how and setting up the processes to make them may take more time then the ill folks have. Drugs may not be a priority if food and resisting invasion by the locals are pressing issues.

If things go really bad for the newcomers, it could turn into a version of an RPG module where the local adventuring party gets to explore the mostly deserted place of weird wonders.

 

[Umbran]

Now if you are taking just central Boston or London and dropping that into a medieval rural setting, food issues will happen quickly.

Well, the stated standard seems to be "300 mile radius".

If you pick NYC, you are getting the full population from Boston through to Washington DC, some 53 million people, and nary a wheat field to be found...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Eh, depending on what you have and the knowledge you have access to, you may be able to make basic penicillin.

Might not be limited to that, either depending on the specific moved chunk and what's in it, and what supplies they can get. Sulfas are not extremely complex to make, its a raw material question (and knowledge of course, but in a larger municipality, that information is bound to exist, even in non-digital format).

 

[jian]

Well, the stated standard seems to be "300 mile radius".

If you pick NYC, you are getting the full population from Boston through to Washington DC, some 53 million people, and nary a wheat field to be found...

In a later post I said 300 miles across, but yes, in some places you’re definitely getting several cities in the mix. As you and I noted, if you set the zone to cover most of England, well, that’s most of England, including London, Birmingham, Manchester, and Bristol. On an island that already imports the majority of its food, water, and electricity. If you want to narratively avoid vast loss of life it might be better to take the England of around 1500.

(A different question is what version of England is narratively most interesting - more or less any version of the British Empire or after is going to starve to death. Heck, several medieval versions are also going to starve due to disorganisation and mismanagement.)

 

[Koloth]

Well, the stated standard seems to be "300 mile radius".

If you pick NYC, you are getting the full population from Boston through to Washington DC, some 53 million people, and nary a wheat field to be found...

A 300 mile radius is a large area. Centered on NYC, you will get part of Lake Ontario, bits of Canada, SW part of Maine and even the NE part of West Virginia. There will be lots of rural and agricultural lands and infrastructure. Not to mention a fair amount of seafood ability. (An aside question is what happens to the semicircle of ocean that comes with? Does the destination suddenly have a large saltwater lake?) The area in total is probably a net food importer. How well it fares depends on how much of the modern infrastructure survives the trip. The electrical grid would almost certain fail after the jump but there are a fair number of generating plants in that 300 mile radius circle. Restoring the grid would be hard but probably doable. Important question is would the more rural areas share power or cut off the large cities to preserve power for themselves? Assuming that large an area would stay united across the whole is a large assumption. Would the folks that live by the Niagara Falls Generating Plant be willing to sacrifice much of that power to send to the hungry hordes in NYC or would they cut the lines and enjoy lots of fuel free electricity?

 

[Umbran]

A 300 mile radius is a large area. Centered on NYC, you will get part of Lake Ontario, bits of Canada, SW part of Maine and even the NE part of West Virginia. There will be lots of rural and agricultural lands and infrastructure.

And, compared to the size of the population, almost none of the staple starch farming that supplies calories for our diets - little wheat, rice, beans, corn, or potatoes. NYC cannot be fed without sources west of the Mississippi.

 

[jian]

Assuming world geography remains the same, and continental drift etc don’t apply, the sea stays where it is and is mosaicked much like the land. This will have a variety of effects depending on what was in that bit of sea at the time, such as 300 miles of oil pipeline or a very surprised Russian nuclear submarine from 1990.

“Looks like we picked the wrong week to defect, Captain.”

“Shertainly sheems that way, Comrade.”

 

[jian]

And since this is an elfgames forum, this is all before we start mixing genres into the situation. If I were to run this as a RPG campaign I'd be tempted to have the PCs start as superheroes in modern Vancouver (renamed to something more super-heroic like Tsunami City) before the Great Disruption happens. Maybe the Tang-Yuan Dynasty has cultivation magic and wuxia warriors. Or Suleyman's Caliphate is steampunk.