Why build in the middle of .... Illinois?

[Blackwater Sniper]

Admittedly, I haven’t read all the books in a while so if the answer is obviously in front of my face I apologize.

Why was Chi-Town located in the middle of upper Illinois when there are much better locations within a hundred miles?

There’s Chicago itself: right on Lake Michigan, source of transportation to all other Great Lakes, next to Illinois River (which is a tributary of the Mississippi River), and somewhat of an infrastructure to rebuild though (like all cities). Or any city from Milwaukee, WI to Gary, IN.

The Quad Cities (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island and Moline) are to the west on the Mississippi River which would be a good waterway to the Gulf in the south.

Or Nashville, Memphis, Des Moines, Rockford, and on and on. Or gone to the Carolinas for better weather and crop growing seasons.

[Tiree]

I have a feeling that it is a personal decision of the writer. Like it was his birthplace. Or where his mother lived, or something like that. It holds some sort of personal meaning. The old adage, write what you know.

[Warshield73]

Admittedly, I haven’t read all the books in a while so if the answer is obviously in front of my face I apologize.

Why was Chi-Town located in the middle of upper Illinois when there are much better locations within a hundred miles?

There’s Chicago itself: right on Lake Michigan, source of transportation to all other Great Lakes, next to Illinois River (which is a tributary of the Mississippi River), and somewhat of an infrastructure to rebuild though (like all cities). Or any city from Milwaukee, WI to Gary, IN.

The Quad Cities (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island and Moline) are to the west on the Mississippi River which would be a good waterway to the Gulf in the south.

Or Nashville, Memphis, Des Moines, Rockford, and on and on. Or gone to the Carolinas for better weather and crop growing seasons.

The answer to all of these is magic. Chicago is a massive mess of random Rifts and nexus points and so are most of the places on your list. If you read the history of first NEMA and then the early CS it sounds to me like they gathered in a place that was reasonably safe and then a city was built out of it.

[Dustin Fireblade]

Admittedly, I haven’t read all the books in a while so if the answer is obviously in front of my face I apologize.

Why was Chi-Town located in the middle of upper Illinois when there are much better locations within a hundred miles?

There’s Chicago itself: right on Lake Michigan, source of transportation to all other Great Lakes, next to Illinois River (which is a tributary of the Mississippi River), and somewhat of an infrastructure to rebuild though (like all cities). Or any city from Milwaukee, WI to Gary, IN.

The Quad Cities (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island and Moline) are to the west on the Mississippi River which would be a good waterway to the Gulf in the south.

Or Nashville, Memphis, Des Moines, Rockford, and on and on. Or gone to the Carolinas for better weather and crop growing seasons.

Somewhat answered in Chaos Earth. The NEMA forces still had satellite coverage early on and it showed that while the rest of the country was going down, the Chicago area was holding it's own. Strange as Warshield73's reply is correct as well too though, so my personal belief is that they just wanted NEMA to go to Chicago rather than say Texas.

[Library Ogre]

I'd also note that it's a lot of farmland nearby. I'm not aware of it being given an actual location on a map, but your two big wants for a fortress city, early on, are going to be food and water; proximity to rivers and farmland are going to be a plus.

I would also not be surprised if there were an existing military base or something there. Stick it in Joliet, and you have an ammo plant; move it a bit northwest, and you have the Fermi laboratory. Or the Glenview Naval Air Station (now closed, but would've been open when Rifts was written)... close to Chicago, and as a training station, may have had a stock of power armor for training purposes.

[Warshield73]

Admittedly, I haven’t read all the books in a while so if the answer is obviously in front of my face I apologize.

Why was Chi-Town located in the middle of upper Illinois when there are much better locations within a hundred miles?

There’s Chicago itself: right on Lake Michigan, source of transportation to all other Great Lakes, next to Illinois River (which is a tributary of the Mississippi River), and somewhat of an infrastructure to rebuild though (like all cities). Or any city from Milwaukee, WI to Gary, IN.

The Quad Cities (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island and Moline) are to the west on the Mississippi River which would be a good waterway to the Gulf in the south.

Or Nashville, Memphis, Des Moines, Rockford, and on and on. Or gone to the Carolinas for better weather and crop growing seasons.

Somewhat answered in Chaos Earth. The NEMA forces still had satellite coverage early on and it showed that while the rest of the country was going down, the Chicago area was holding it's own. Strange as Warshield73's reply is correct as well too though, so my personal belief is that they just wanted NEMA to go to Chicago rather than say Texas.

If you are talking about the narrative reasons for having Chitown in Illinois it is a nice central location so the CS could literally be in the middle of everything. No matter where you are going to or coming from in North America that you don't need to go through or find away around the CS.

I don't know if they planned Free Quebec's relationship with the NGR from the beginning but it's location makes a lot of sense as well.

I'd also note that it's a lot of farmland nearby. I'm not aware of it being given an actual location on a map, but your two big wants for a fortress city, early on, are going to be food and water; proximity to rivers and farmland are going to be a plus.

This is a good in universe reason for it to be there but I think we really need to look at the narrative reasons. You have to put Chitown somewhere and it needs to be bordered by Tolkeen, Lazlo, the Magic Zone, etc, etc. Putting it in the middle just makes sense so now you need to have some in universe logic and you really don't need much more then it has a lot less ley lines and nexus points then everywhere else.

I would also not be surprised if there were an existing military base or something there. Stick it in Joliet, and you have an ammo plant; move it a bit northwest, and you have the Fermi laboratory. Or the Glenview Naval Air Station (now closed, but would've been open when Rifts was written)... close to Chicago, and as a training station, may have had a stock of power armor for training purposes.

It's the US and unless our government changes substantially in the next 70 years you are always going to be military bases and arms manufacturers nearby.

[Library Ogre]

This is a good in universe reason for it to be there but I think we really need to look at the narrative reasons. You have to put Chitown somewhere and it needs to be bordered by Tolkeen, Lazlo, the Magic Zone, etc, etc. Putting it in the middle just makes sense so now you need to have some in universe logic and you really don't need much more then it has a lot less ley lines and nexus points then everywhere else.

My problem with this argument is that none of those are necessarily tied to places, either.

Why is Tolkeen where it is? Because it was also placed there. Lazlo? Placed wherever they actually put it. Magic Zone? Put there. Why is Chicago full of ley lines? Because they decided to put it there.

You could have located the Coalition pretty much anywhere, and arrayed its opponents and challenges around it.

[jaymz]

Pretty sure chitown was determined to be near Colfax IN.

Aside from that, yeah Chicago is a no man's land like madhaven but without the associated psychoses you'd get.

[Warshield73]

This is a good in universe reason for it to be there but I think we really need to look at the narrative reasons. You have to put Chitown somewhere and it needs to be bordered by Tolkeen, Lazlo, the Magic Zone, etc, etc. Putting it in the middle just makes sense so now you need to have some in universe logic and you really don't need much more then it has a lot less ley lines and nexus points then everywhere else.

My problem with this argument is that none of those are necessarily tied to places, either.

Why is Tolkeen where it is? Because it was also placed there. Lazlo? Placed wherever they actually put it. Magic Zone? Put there. Why is Chicago full of ley lines? Because they decided to put it there.

You could have located the Coalition pretty much anywhere, and arrayed its opponents and challenges around it.

Thank you, this is my point. It is a narrative decision that's all. Now geography does limit this to just a few areas because Atlantis has to be in the Atlantic, Ishpeming probably needs to be in Michigan, and you probably want to stay away from the west so you could have those great wide open spaces so ultimately you end up with somewhere in the Midwest so why not central Illinois.

[Orin J.]

the old rulebook mentions a large nuclear plant, which is probably a key part of their inital development.

[ITWastrel]

The Chaos Earth books give all the hints you need here. They had hundreds of thousands of survivors in the midwest, and the original population centers were destroyed or overrun. The NEMA forces had a choice, try to walk thousands of survivors through a monster-filled nuclear winter, or hunker down in the relatively peaceful northern Illinois. It wasn't a choice, just the simple math of how many would die if they tried to move.

Illinois has a lot of things going for it, btw. We have farmland, yes, but also coal, natural gas, and rich mineral wealth. Illinois has mild weather, no earthquakes, hurricanes, or seasonal fires, and supports abundant natural wildlife that makes hunting easier. Illinois also supports a large industrial manufacturing industry. The remains of these factories would make amazing salvage for a struggling new city. Our food manufacturing abilities are also top notch, did you know 85% of all packaged pumpkin on earth comes from Morton, IL? We also invented McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Twinkies, and the ice cream sundae. You're welcome.

217 Represent!

[Blackwater Sniper]

the old rulebook mentions a large nuclear plant, which is probably a key part of their inital development.

There are actually three in that general vicinity, Braidwood, Byron and QCNPS, all currently owned by Exelon.

I used to work at QCNPS.

[Orin J.]

the old rulebook mentions a large nuclear plant, which is probably a key part of their inital development.

There are actually three in that general vicinity, Braidwood, Byron and QCNPS, all currently owned by Exelon.

I used to work at QCNPS.

sounds like a great place to establish a stronghold, then.

[Blackwater Sniper]

The Chaos Earth books give all the hints you need here. They had hundreds of thousands of survivors in the midwest, and the original population centers were destroyed or overrun. The NEMA forces had a choice, try to walk thousands of survivors through a monster-filled nuclear winter, or hunker down in the relatively peaceful northern Illinois. It wasn't a choice, just the simple math of how many would die if they tried to move.

Illinois has a lot of things going for it, btw. We have farmland, yes, but also coal, natural gas, and rich mineral wealth. Illinois has mild weather, no earthquakes, hurricanes, or seasonal fires, and supports abundant natural wildlife that makes hunting easier. Illinois also supports a large industrial manufacturing industry. The remains of these factories would make amazing salvage for a struggling new city. Our food manufacturing abilities are also top notch, did you know 85% of all packaged pumpkin on earth comes from Morton, IL? We also invented McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Twinkies, and the ice cream sundae. You're welcome.

217 Represent!

Thanks for the info on NEMA and post-Cataclysm.

Illinois does have a lot going for it: Case (Peoria), John Deere (Moline), Armalite, Les Baer, Rock River Arms, Springfield Armory, and more gun manufacturers. Chicago has the corner on healthcare: Abbott labs, Baxter, Bax Alta, Cardinal Health, Takeda, Hospira, and Walgreens. Those are just the ones I can think of.

[ITWastrel]

Don't forget the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana. They have a world class engineering program, they're home to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and plan to start building their new nuclear reactor in 2021.

One can assume they will continue to be engineering leaders, their roboticists and AI programmers working on cutting edge awesomeness right up until the fall of man.
Post-apocalypse, I assume the supercomputing artificial intelligences with nuclear powered, exquisitely engineered bodies will all come from downstate. The robot overlords will wear the orange and blue, and I welcome them.

[kaid]

Admittedly, I haven’t read all the books in a while so if the answer is obviously in front of my face I apologize.

Why was Chi-Town located in the middle of upper Illinois when there are much better locations within a hundred miles?

There’s Chicago itself: right on Lake Michigan, source of transportation to all other Great Lakes, next to Illinois River (which is a tributary of the Mississippi River), and somewhat of an infrastructure to rebuild though (like all cities). Or any city from Milwaukee, WI to Gary, IN.

The Quad Cities (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island and Moline) are to the west on the Mississippi River which would be a good waterway to the Gulf in the south.

Or Nashville, Memphis, Des Moines, Rockford, and on and on. Or gone to the Carolinas for better weather and crop growing seasons.

Chicago itself was and still is a huge nexus of rift activity this is one of the main reasons old chicago was abandond. Basically most of the reasons fall to in the dark ages it is where they had surviving population and materials/facilities to work with to old a defensive area.

[Axelmania]

there are much better locations within a hundred miles

better today?

or better 3 centuries from now after an apocalypse which spreads ley lines everywhere and pockets of demonic monsters in certain locales?

[kaid]

there are much better locations within a hundred miles

better today?

or better 3 centuries from now after an apocalypse which spreads ley lines everywhere and pockets of demonic monsters in certain locales?

Also I think people overestimate how far you can move a large population through now demon infested hell storms random dimensional anomalies and various other rift crazy stuff. Holding a place in northern IL makes sense as you have decent access to the great lakes and the mississippi good farmland and natural resources and its close so you don't have to try to herd scared civilians across an apocalypse. They were not going for perfect they were going for good enough. Clearly there were some nema facilities in the area and enough manufacturing resources + good amount of population + ability to feed them off the resources in the area + good access to fresh water.

[Library Ogre]

The real answer: The land is flat, therefore easy to put a big city on.

[ITWastrel]

The real answer: The land is flat, therefore easy to put a big city on.

You would be so surprised how much easier that makes things. I often wonder, going through the mountainous states, why did these people choose to live on the sides of these hills? Do they just like to do things the hard way?

[Warshield73]

The real answer: The land is flat, therefore easy to put a big city on.

You would be so surprised how much easier that makes things. I often wonder, going through the mountainous states, why did these people choose to live on the sides of these hills? Do they just like to do things the hard way?

Building on hillsides you think is tough. I live in a city that is just a dredged up swamp and for some reason they put the billion dollar medical center in the lowest area possible just to make sure that it floods every time.

Coming from Illinois I can tell you it is way easier to build there than in most places.

[guardiandashi]

The real answer: The land is flat, therefore easy to put a big city on.

You would be so surprised how much easier that makes things. I often wonder, going through the mountainous states, why did these people choose to live on the sides of these hills? Do they just like to do things the hard way?

Building on hillsides you think is tough. I live in a city that is just a dredged up swamp and for some reason they put the billion dollar medical center in the lowest area possible just to make sure that it floods every time.

Coming from Illinois I can tell you it is way easier to build there than in most places.

the advantage of mountains or large hills, is that depending on local geology it is a lot more likely to find solid, and stable ground for your footings and foundations as opposed to someplace like new orleans which is literally built on a flood plane (river delta) silt, and reclaimed swamp that is even today slowly sinking as the "land" gets squished out from under the city

[Killer Cyborg]

Admittedly, I haven’t read all the books in a while so if the answer is obviously in front of my face I apologize.

Why was Chi-Town located in the middle of upper Illinois when there are much better locations within a hundred miles?

There’s Chicago itself: right on Lake Michigan, source of transportation to all other Great Lakes, next to Illinois River (which is a tributary of the Mississippi River), and somewhat of an infrastructure to rebuild though (like all cities). Or any city from Milwaukee, WI to Gary, IN.

The Quad Cities (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island and Moline) are to the west on the Mississippi River which would be a good waterway to the Gulf in the south.

Or Nashville, Memphis, Des Moines, Rockford, and on and on. Or gone to the Carolinas for better weather and crop growing seasons.

The answer to all of these is magic. Chicago is a massive mess of random Rifts and nexus points and so are most of the places on your list. If you read the history of first NEMA and then the early CS it sounds to me like they gathered in a place that was reasonably safe and then a city was built out of it.

Pretty much.
You don't travel cross-country through demon-infested wilderness with millions or hundreds of thousands of people, looking for someplace perfect; you hunker down in the best nearest spot, fortify, and try to survive.

[Killer Cyborg]

The Chaos Earth books give all the hints you need here. They had hundreds of thousands of survivors in the midwest, and the original population centers were destroyed or overrun. The NEMA forces had a choice, try to walk thousands of survivors through a monster-filled nuclear winter, or hunker down in the relatively peaceful northern Illinois. It wasn't a choice, just the simple math of how many would die if they tried to move.

Illinois has a lot of things going for it, btw. We have farmland, yes, but also coal, natural gas, and rich mineral wealth. Illinois has mild weather, no earthquakes, hurricanes, or seasonal fires, and supports abundant natural wildlife that makes hunting easier. Illinois also supports a large industrial manufacturing industry. The remains of these factories would make amazing salvage for a struggling new city. Our food manufacturing abilities are also top notch, did you know 85% of all packaged pumpkin on earth comes from Morton, IL? We also invented McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Twinkies, and the ice cream sundae. You're welcome.

217 Represent!

618 here to add some further specifics from a post I made years back:

Rifts 140
The Coalition State of Chi-Town encompasses Northern Illinois and all of Iowa. The Iowa section is 70% farmland and 30% livestock, pigs and cattle. Tiny farm communities can be found every 50 miles or so.
The Iowa section explains how some of their food necessities are met- they have an entire US State dedicated to food production.
But notice the other part, about how the state encompasses Northern Illinois.
Illinois has a number of natural resources, coal being one of them, including significant deposits in Northern Illinois.
Does the CS use coal?
Probably for something. They might use it to supplement their nuclear power sources, not caring about the high sulfur content of the coal. Or they might extract the sulfur to use for other stuff, or they might turn the coal into high-carbon compounds and/or plastics.
There's a LOT of coal in Illinois:
"Illinois' recoverable reserves of coal are larger than those of any state east of the Mississippi River and the third largest in the country, behind only Montana and Wyoming. About 200 billion tons of coal are estimated to lie underground in the state."
And there's a heck of a lot that you can do with coal.

Also, northern Illinois has lead, and Illinois in general has industrial sand quarries or pits, limestone and dolomite stone quarries and underground mines, clay pits, peat pits, and tripoli quarries.
Not to mention quite a bit of timber, farmland, and other resources.

So in northern Illinois alone, even assuming that for some reason there isn't ANY CS mining in the entire state of Iowa, they have a very strong source of coal for power, oil, plastics, and carbon products, as well as stone and timber for construction, and clay for ceramics.
Since the three main MDC materials we see are metal, ceramics, and plastics, that gives them a strong potential supply for 2 out of 3.

[kaid]

Also close access to the Mississippi and various rivers running to that and ones running to lake Michigan mean if the hell storms stop you are close to natural transportation hubs. If you look at the CS they pretty much sprung up around the great lakes and the mississippi river.

Useful in the short term and then if you are hoping the hell storm rift nonsense calms down it gives you solid access to a large chunk of the country in the future if you can control the mississippi.

[Library Ogre]

Building on hillsides you think is tough. I live in a city that is just a dredged up swamp and for some reason they put the billion dollar medical center in the lowest area possible just to make sure that it floods every time.

Coming from Illinois I can tell you it is way easier to build there than in most places.

I call Houston "Swamp Castle"... there's a reason why the story of Houstown involved a lot of flooding, and a new seawall at Beltway 8.

[Captain_Nibbz]

The real answer: The land is flat, therefore easy to put a big city on.

You would be so surprised how much easier that makes things. I often wonder, going through the mountainous states, why did these people choose to live on the sides of these hills? Do they just like to do things the hard way?

Building on hillsides you think is tough. I live in a city that is just a dredged up swamp and for some reason they put the billion dollar medical center in the lowest area possible just to make sure that it floods every time.

Coming from Illinois I can tell you it is way easier to build there than in most places.

the advantage of mountains or large hills, is that depending on local geology it is a lot more likely to find solid, and stable ground for your footings and foundations as opposed to someplace like new orleans which is literally built on a flood plane (river delta) silt, and reclaimed swamp that is even today slowly sinking as the "land" gets squished out from under the city

Also keeps all those pesky "lowlanders" out of our hair as they just get confused and leave

[Warshield73]

Building on hillsides you think is tough. I live in a city that is just a dredged up swamp and for some reason they put the billion dollar medical center in the lowest area possible just to make sure that it floods every time.

Coming from Illinois I can tell you it is way easier to build there than in most places.

I call Houston "Swamp Castle"... there's a reason why the story of Houstown involved a lot of flooding, and a new seawall at Beltway 8.

I love your map. I think I saw it before but it makes a lot of sense. I always said that Houstown was basically north of I-10 and west of Highway 6 because I liked having the ruins of the city partially underwater near the kingdom.

You also went the opposite direction that I did with Houston. I said that it was the "Detroit" of the late 21st century. After oil and gas collapsed and with the effects of global climate change and a succession of massive hurricanes the city of Houston started to shrink with abandoned semi flooded areas neighborhoods south of 610. My version of Earth before the Golden Age and in the new Cold War was WAY darker then what the most recent Chaos Earth books have.

[Library Ogre]

I love your map. I think I saw it before but it makes a lot of sense. I always said that Houstown was basically north of I-10 and west of Highway 6 because I liked having the ruins of the city partially underwater near the kingdom.

I mean, pretty much everything south of 610 is a rice paddy, and Hermann Park is a bayou-jungle, but I figured that, no matter what, they'd make sure the Medical Center stayed dry.

[drewkitty ~..~]

the science reason for building in the middle of a geologically stable plate...a lot fewer earthquakes.

[Warshield73]

I love your map. I think I saw it before but it makes a lot of sense. I always said that Houstown was basically north of I-10 and west of Highway 6 because I liked having the ruins of the city partially underwater near the kingdom.

I mean, pretty much everything south of 610 is a rice paddy, and Hermann Park is a bayou-jungle, but I figured that, no matter what, they'd make sure the Medical Center stayed dry.

I would agree with you but they can barely keep it dry now. At a certain point you have to figure that the cost of constantly rebuilding a massive medical complex in a swamp will have to get prohibitively expensive. Then again I thought we would have hit that point between tax day floods and Harvey so I'm probably wrong.

the science reason for building in the middle of a geologically stable plate...a lot fewer earthquakes.

Yeah really the only problem there is tornados and well MDC materials, even in limited/partial use, will mitigate that nicely.

[Library Ogre]

I mean, pretty much everything south of 610 is a rice paddy, and Hermann Park is a bayou-jungle, but I figured that, no matter what, they'd make sure the Medical Center stayed dry.

I would agree with you but they can barely keep it dry now. At a certain point you have to figure that the cost of constantly rebuilding a massive medical complex in a swamp will have to get prohibitively expensive. Then again I thought we would have hit that point between tax day floods and Harvey so I'm probably wrong.

So long as they can drown Meyerland...

[Warshield73]

I mean, pretty much everything south of 610 is a rice paddy, and Hermann Park is a bayou-jungle, but I figured that, no matter what, they'd make sure the Medical Center stayed dry.

I would agree with you but they can barely keep it dry now. At a certain point you have to figure that the cost of constantly rebuilding a massive medical complex in a swamp will have to get prohibitively expensive. Then again I thought we would have hit that point between tax day floods and Harvey so I'm probably wrong.

So long as they can drown Meyerland...

My first apartment was in Meyerland and it flooded twice in three years which I thought was bad until 2016 when that area flooded three times in one year so lucky I moved.

[Library Ogre]

My first apartment was in Meyerland and it flooded twice in three years which I thought was bad until 2016 when that area flooded three times in one year so lucky I moved.

First wife and I lived Fondren and Braeswood area, so I know it well. And then I worked at the Stella Link Library, and 13 loved to show that area any time it flooded.

[Warshield73]

My first apartment was in Meyerland and it flooded twice in three years which I thought was bad until 2016 when that area flooded three times in one year so lucky I moved.

First wife and I lived Fondren and Braeswood area, so I know it well. And then I worked at the Stella Link Library, and 13 loved to show that area any time it flooded.

I always knew that I moved to a dredged out swamp but what I didn't realize until about 10 years ago was how epically incompetently bad it was dredged out.

[Blue_Lion]

I assume Chitown was build on an old prewar military facility with MDC construction capabilities.
North America is likely to have them all over as part of the build up for a war and to have decentralized ability to rearm.
I also imagine it was not like the masses that formed it had the ability to go where ever they wanted quickly in the new age.
People likely rebuilt near where they where and not traveling to the best place in NA.
(Pluss I think it has a connection to the writers.)