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

Wednesday, June 06, 2007

Oh, Those Wacky Commies 

High Programmer Varney finds the strangest things. The article, Bigger is Begger: Seven Insane Soviet Projects, describes such projects as a whole city constructed in five years, the world's largest H-Bomb and the Caspian Sea Monster.

Some is chillingly familiar to any PARANOIA player. 'Later a book of propaganda detailing the biographies of "heroic" workers and engineers, intended for distribution in capitalist countries, had to be recalled because in the downtime Stalin had ordered all the main characters shot.' (A instance of Friend Computer based on Uncle Joe could be a horrible antagonist for a Straight game.)

My personal favourite of the projects is the proposed new Parliament building:
'Designed by Vladimir Tatlin (1885 - 1953) in 1920, the Monument to the Third International [wiki] was a gigantic spiraling iron structure intended to house the new Soviet government. Taller than the Eiffel Tower (and the yet-to-be-constructed Empire State Building) at more than 1,300 feet, this curving, funnel-shaped structure was meant to encase three successively smaller assembly areas rotating on industrial bearings at different speeds, faster or slower according to their importance.

Rotating once a year in the lowest level was a giant cube for delegates attending the Communist International from all over the world. A smaller pyramid, rotating once a month above it, would house the Communist Party’s executives. The third level - a sphere rotating once daily - would house communications technology to spread propaganda, including a telegraph office, radio station, and movie screen. Unfortunately the giant structure would have required more iron than the entire Soviet Union produced in a year, and was never built.
Posted by: Gareth Hanrahan / 6:38 AM

Comments:
Actually, I think I might use the rotating part in a game.

Only in reverse, the higher the clearance, the slower it goes.

Red-Level people get thrown around like they're in a battle on the Enterprsie.

Orange-Level will suffer motion sickness. ;-)
# posted by Blogger Ray : June 09, 2007 8:09 PM
 
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