Beautiful and difficult places for beautiful and difficult people :D

[yvannairie]

There's a bit in the Exodus novel, concerning Vos and Tarn after they sided with the Decepticons. Shockwave, who is originally from Tarn, is given stewardship of the city and sets to weeding out Autobot sympathisers in a city that has always been pretty comfortably in Megatron's pocket. Soon after this, Shockwave pulled favours with the air command in Vos -- a nominally neutral city that still mostly sided with the Decepticons -- and had his own city shelled, which he then turned around and blamed on Autobot sympathisers and Iaconian spies in Vos. Shockwave then proceeded to take control of Vos by feigning a counter attack from Tarn.

Anecdotes like that have always made me interested in the importance of Vos in the larger scheme of Cybertron's politics. It's portrayed across the board as more autonomous than several other regions, probably owing to having a vastly different culture from more mixed regions due to the high density of fliers and the presence of Vos Air Command and its general reign over Cybertron's airspace since no other regulatory body for fliers seems to exist.

It's pretty impossible to tell how the logistics infrastructure of Cybertron was set up -- ground vehicles can only go so fast, fliers have only so-and-so much range, different cargo has different processing time requirements even when not dealing with perishables (a lot of electronics are both temperature- and air pressure sensitive, for example) -- but safe to say that if there was any degree of aerial transportation, a city like Vos could probably sustain itself just off managing that even without being one of the biggest military powers. Despite its location, possibly even despite it's population -- a city like Vos could hold considerable sway over the economics of the entire planet. (And from all I've read, being energy self-sufficient would probably help with that.)

It's also a city that easily captured my imagination, the more I started thinking about it. Even assuming a significant portion of the population was VTOL capable (and with seekers and their acrobatics, helis, lighter cargo planes and non-shuttle spacecraft, I can see that being the case), you'd still need space for partial VTOL and heavy cargo, could potentially get off the ground fine, but trying to land without room for breaking is a terrible idea. If the city had a civillian sector, you'd need space for logistics infrastructure -- check points, toll stations, handling, storage. Even if the actual "city" could be built vertically, to support multiple different flight corridoors at different heights and speeds, you'd still be looking at a city that sprawls out into its environment with airfields pointing incrementally in different directions, at different spacings from each other so that the winds created by low-flying aircraft wouldn't interfere with the operation of other low-flying aircraft.

And there's something about that, and about how seekers are generally understood to be hierarchical and pretty quarrelsome, that strikes me as being somehow self-similar with a city that needs to accommodate lots of different sort of flying thing. The closer you get to the center, the higher the city would go -- but those who get to fly high are also those who get to fly fast, so there isn't so much "space" up there for many people at once. The lower you go, the slower you go, and there's more space and it's safer to maybe risk hitting the same air lane with someone else because both of you can now dodge in time, and then below that, you'd have the sprawling acreage facilitating it all, with all the people who don't get to fly at all but are desperately needed to keep everything running.

Even assuming that flying isn't a gamebreaking military advantage with the generally much better sensory capabilities of mecha, I think just the environment required to sustain a large population of them would necessarily create an environment that feeds into that hierarchical thinking, right? On the ground, everyone is constantly in each other's way, so it's important to know what you're doing next or otherwise you'll be causing problems and potentially putting others in danger, and as soon as you take off, it's even more important because those who fly fast might literally not have the time to avoid your. A lot of air coordination is making sure ahead of time that nobody is where they aren't supposed to be, because when the accidents start happening, at the speeds and heights they happen at, they'll always have dramatic consequences.

And honestly, at that point you're running into the concept of Vosian autonomy from a different angle entirely. You need a tight set of rules to keep everyone in line for their own safety, and you can't have people come mess with that very easily because that would mean everyone else would now need to adapt to that messing. So it's adapt or die, which feeds back into a hierarchical structure that places much higher weight on the internal power structure than external pressures, helped along with fliers needing to have certain amount of presence of mind to not be constant dangers to each other in the air.

(This kind of self-similarity and circling back to its material roots is something I really enjoy about TF meta and worlbuilding. A lot of social metaphors become very literal and grounded, a lot of materialist ideas appear as if from whole cloth if you keep prodding at the assumptions you're presented with.)