Land of Pictures 20

==Picture Commentary Continued PAGE 20 : ==
==YET EVEN More Truely Awesome Pictures ( the very best part of this Wiki )==
This looks awfully familiar. Yes, it was cloned for the AE locomotive design seen on a wall blueprint and in some concept drawings. Nostalgia is great - It means you can reuse other people's ideas and skill and talent for next to nothing.
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Delta, the original, may not have been OUR games 'Delta'. Eleanor could take any old stiff, shove it into a Big Daddy suit (It is amazing what the Little Sisters could move in those little red wagons), and apply the BD conditioning tapes and maybe some N-Gram recordings from the old BD Experiments, and using the Vita-Chamber to regenerate the corpse ( and probably using up ALOT of ADAM ).
How many masses of goop (failures) resulted until Eleanor 'got it right' -- We were never told ( at least you could reuse the BD suit once you cleaned the mess out of it, and the LS could slurp most of the ADAM up for the next try ).
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1936 streamlined diesel. AE trains looked a bit like this. Notice how wide it is though. The AE car design used in the game was a bit too narrow to hold sufficient people for a Public Transit system use.
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Looks like the power advance on a lathe or milling machine. Because Rapture couldn't support assembly line industry to create many/most of the things in Rapture ( They were brought from The Surface ), alot of things had to be repaired. That means often making replacement parts, which a machine this picture shows part of, would be done alot.
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The Common Bathysphere ( seen in the first 2 games ) was quite problematic from the point of view of basic reality and any real engineering. But who expects anything plausible from Sci-Fi GAMES, right ?
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Drop-forged wrench 'made in Rapture'. Drop-Forging is not the most complex manufacturing process, and with many dies, is fairly versatile for shaping hunks of metal. There would be lots of small businesses in Rapture, and even large businesses like the Atlantic Express Company ( with their substantial facilities ) would do outside work for other businesses.
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SteamPunky computer keyboard ( crafting is a big part of that hobby genre ). Such a thing in Rapture would be more like a Teletype keyboard ( an existing period technology using a mechanical/electric contact mechanism ... ) You cannot unjustifiably make it ALL new/advanced "IN Rapture" ( Rapture being a rather small microcosm society) simply with a "wave of the hand", as is done in some other games ).
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One of the Alternate Elizabeths had a more interesting life ...
Actually, Imagination like this would be important to the way the Rapture Reborn MMORPG ( or any similar MMORPG ) operated. Weird stuff can still be used for dreams, and multitudes of more appropriate created things would be used to fill the main game with interesting details.
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Nixie tubes ( numeric digit using neon glow effect from separate shaped wires for the 10 digit shapes - The missing part is all the circuitry to drive the tube pin inputs ).
Something like this would be advanced tech for Infinite BS's Columbia ( at least there's no need to be logical in a Bad Fantasy game like that one ). Gears and electrics cobbled together IS about all you got. But, as long as it looks like something, most Players won't know any better. Unfortunately they didn't do better with the game's Combat mechanics ( a critical part of the game you should not just cobble together ).
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Another part of the ADAM refining process or somesuch. ( Once a Little Sister vomited up the Raw ADAM, it had to be refined somehow ... ) No doubt better ways to do that were developed along with the Plasmids and Tonics.
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This is what happens when you largely CLONE game mechanics from other games and onto a different context, and then simplify them yet further. Too many limitations and randomization of 'Gear' then eliminated most player choices ( too many times when you got 'gear' inferior to what you already had, there wasn't even an 'upgrade' change ).
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[[Infinite BS}}'sSongbird could have been worse ... ( and on the early 'alienish' Bioshock concept designs THIS coulda been the equivalent of the later Security Flybots )
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The problem with using balloons to float things ( and hot air balloons in particular ) : The sizes of the structure required to contain the hot air versus the size of the load to be held up underneath it. A City sized load's structure might/should have some parts of it distributed upon the flotation/buoyancy volume to minimize the underload, and the massive tension-based structure it would hang from ( which itself would begin to weigh greatly as the size increased ). As with modern design, the load's structure would be minimized by having the lightest possible construction ( be airier than Columbia with its masses of pavement and brick ).
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1931 scheme to project into (multiple) remote rooms using a theater projector ( still might have some stuff like this in Rapture because TV resolution sucks as compared to film's AND THIS can be in color too ).
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More period real world land-based heavy artillery, well capable of blowing Columbia out of the air and sending it crashing to its doom against the hard hard ground ( an allegory for the failure of most delusions ... )
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What happens when you have an archaic-looking 'Hand Canon' high-power pistol like this ? ( Having no "stock" means your wrist gets all the recoil force on firing ). SO exactly how powerful could this thing really be to even be useable ( maybe not the first time something in the world got misnamed ) ?
Big heavy long barrel likewise makes it bothersome to hold it up to fire straight one-handed.
Well 'Hand Cannon' sounded good though ( to the game makers ), and really THAT was the only real consideration.
The M1911 Colt .45 was designed for ITS stopping power.  Everything else in the game seems to be so easily Copied just by looking through 'Tears', so WHY NOT HAVE THAT very excellent REAL weapon ??
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Maybe if you could use it (have used it) to fire grappling hooks ?   Fire it into someone and yank them off a ledge ?   Fire into a 'Gondola'/'Barge' and go swinging like Spiderman ?  ( This IS a '3D' game world after all ... )
Oops too much programming for a feature like that, too much freedom to bypass the usual maze/cow-path obstacles...
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More and more it seems these Tears were really just delusional scenes, fabricated by a mind massively-affected by hallucinogens ( Yes, "its all a dream" is a far simpler way to explain the fantasy things you saw ).
Better that than wondering what the writers were smoking ... AND how much the scrambled incoherent ideas subtracted from making the game play better.
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Parking lot is needed for those 'Bathyspheres' (particularly if they want some semblance of being used like 'automobiles'). Now if they had some small wheels underneath, they (all 28 tons) might be set down and trundle away to be parked ( a track maybe with Rack & Cog propulsion ????). Now you could also have all those Cliche 'parking lot' scenes - 'Deep Throat' giving Ryan's agent the scoop on Fontaines Smuggling, or the poop proving Atlas was Fontaine, An assassin trying to run someone over, or a body in the trunk ... or the plot twist that Fontaine was Ryans Father ( Oops, thats only for a dream sequence ... )
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One of Ryan's plans was to bribe these Cat Splicers with Tuna (what else) to Hunt Atlas.
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Mascot of Carnegie's floating City. A bit more aesthetic than that "Pigeon in a Gimp Suit" which Columbia had. A meeting between them resulted in the inevitable outcome of an Eagle meeting a Pigeon ( The "Songbirds" discarded and destroyed bones and remains plummeted earthwards, and not worth preserving in Carnegie's museum ).
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Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), who was a friend of Nikola Tesla, had disappeared in a burst of light in Tesla's high-voltage laboratory in 1910 ( When the Earth's Aethersphere was disturbed by Halley's Comet ). He thus ALSO became a Quantum Dimensional God. On learning of the time-meddling and cross-dimensional atrocities committed by the Luteces and their protégés/catspaws Booker and Elizabeth, he set forth to obliterate them from their very existence throughout the entire multiverse.
(Now THAT is good fiction story writing ...)
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A real world Art Deco (or is it more Art Nouveau ?) building decoration. Probably could find some use in some toiletry product advertisement ... (or somesuch). IT would have made a more interesting 'Boys of Silence' -- a contrary name since the sound from that terrible horn could stun or even kill at 100 yards. The white 'quantum' orbs glowing blue meant it could float about while it pursued Booker and Elizabeth halfway across Columbia ( a TRUE Nemesis instead of that "Pigeon in a Gimpsuit" ).
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This is probably something like what was seen at Sinclair's Sewage Treatment facility ( removal of 'large' refuse for separate processing ). A great deal of valuable material could be recovered ( Sinclair had a knack for finding niche business opportunities after all ). Fertilizer for Rapture's MANY farms, and Methane (fuel gas) production would be two nice opportunities here, as well as charging for the waste removal service .
(( "Profit coming and Profit going" is not something to label as capitalistic evil like some dim modern day Politically Correct game writers might contend )).
Audio Diary found there : MacGurke - "Shit stinks whether you are on the Surface or in Rapture - You either get used to it or you quit."
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In 1893, Westinghouse and Tesla, using 160000 lightbulbs and polyphase AC ( powered by 12 1,OOO-horsepower generators ), lit up the Exposition's - "CITY OF LIGHT". Tesla had a large display including phosphorescent lighting ( a precursor to fluorescent lamps ) powered without wires by high-frequency magnetic fields. ( Note- he was also the one person capable of making a "Death Ray" to knock Columbia out of the sky - which HE DID in INFINITE universes. )
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Locomotive build 1905 (this is the World changing). From what we are shown in Columbia, that place is mentally a technological backwater ( BTW, in the Real World, at the game's time even that of the BUILDING of Columbia, the very thought of 'horses' was backward/old-fashioned ).
Just like the social ideas (1893-1912) which were rapidly changing in America (( Something Kennyboy doesn't bother to mention when he's Dis'n America, by showing that pre-civil war mentality of Columbia's occupants, and making believe THAT is the times 'evil' America. Utter Twaddle. ))
No big deal ? Except they ( Kennyboy and so many devs ) touted their game as being socially 'relevant', and showing 'evils' of THE time, which IS as Fantasy-like as their 'Quantum' pseudo-science and that faux-Christianity they also peddled.
But, but, but, It got people to think !!! Oh really ??? I'm sure they were 'thinking' alot as they bloodily sliced the head off NPCs with that Skyhook thing. (( Twaddle, and Damned Twaddle, Kennyboy. ))
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This kind of Art Deco grillwork in-game can be done as a fairly simply texture overlay ( Technically easy, artistically the hard part, though lots of real world examples are out there to clone ). Lots of opportunities for unique ones in the MMORPG.
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Lots of good artists out there. ( Not sure what the Tiger is all about ... )
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Cleaned up ...
Unfortunate ornate (a bit too Art Nouveau) side panels (Art Deco STREAMLINING would be REMOVING details like this). Repeated use of the same side panel Assets no doubt saved the artist some effort, but is atypical for something designed for low water resistance ( many times worse than for AIR, which the original "Streamlining" was all about ). Plain/Clean sides would have been better, and also have less fancy surface to be cleaned constantly ( decades earlier, Labor Savings was already a BIG issue for any REAL kind of Public Transit - and a big part of the Game WAS that in Rapture things HAD to be practical ... No Free Lunch or Welfare or tax money to be wasted on Fripperies ).
So again, the issue of the designer/artist not really understanding that 'look' which was supposedly THEMATIC for the game.
( Note -- that same sliding door used for that ridiculously huge operator's cockpit -- wasting space from the passenger compartment. Simply duplicated when it should have been a more custom asset (smaller) for what was a Primary PROP for BS2. BUT then, humungus Delta wasn't supposed to be seen squeezing into what in real life is a rather small compartment -- Limitations of that crude/distorted decade-old gaming interface. )
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The 'stepped-in' pattern/shape of skyscrapers in many cities is to allow more sun to reach the ground ( instead of cities of tightly-packed tall buildings becoming dark canyons ... ordinances were passed ). But in Rapture, the decreasing upward profile would also help lessen the water current forces that push against building sides and work against the foundation's anchorage ( there's more leverage the higher up you go ). Unfortunately many of the game Skyboxes show many extremely thin tall buildings (over and over) which if anything would exaggerate that problem ( besides being impractical because of the building's interior shrinking versus the very thick walls required to keep the deep water pressure out ).
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