FAQ and Things To Figure Out
In this article, I collect all sorts of random questions and answers about the Hummelverse that either aren't fleshed out enough to get their own article yet, don't really fit anywhere, or are just loose concepts yet that I need to think about more still. The topics are in no particular order, so you might wanna try Ctrl+F to search for anything you are interested in.
A lot of this is from my World Anvil Spotlight back in April 2018. Thanks everyone for asking questions and giving me more food for thought!
Are humans completely, surely extinct? No Survivors hiding anywhere?
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Surely there must been gov. contingency plans in the event of nukes, & not all towns could have been nuked (assuming that arsenals aren’t larger here.) Is it likely to assume humans could live in the Southern Hemisphere? They don’t really have many major military/strategic assets, so it may not be worth nuking.
What I figured out so far is that of course not everyone got nuked, but most economies/governments kinda collapsed when the major global powers suffered from the aftermath. I haven’t decided for sure if there was a nuclear winter of sorts, but there was a huge amount of sickness, crime, and starvation. It’s possible that some populations escaped the extinction.
In any case, if the humans do exist and decide to make a comeback, they would have a serious rivalry going on with the machines in terms of who rules the world. I don't think the big clans would simply give up their power.
Do they have different names for animals than humans did?
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Definitely! But since they care little for them for the most part, you can probably observe a lot of the "this is a strange dog" phenomenon. In the Tanking League story, Eohelm calls a cow "hoof-animal", noting that it's what the Northerners call it.
Do the tanks own "livestock", for example Pumas and the like?
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No, but some Goliaths (a small "tank" that is a mine) exist and they are basically like dogs.
How many tanks are there approximately?
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Hard to say. In the Known World alone, I suspect there'd be about 50 to 70 thousand. Probably more.
Why are most tanks in your stories/setting WW2 tanks? Isn't it set after the Cold War?
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The "cutoff" is in 1983, but the thing is: The technology regressed a lot. I imagine most of the advanced tanks were destroyed during the Great Machine War, so the "lesser" ones remained and since they were easier to build and maintain, became more common afterwards. For an Abrams for example, you need all this advanced tech and whatnot. Older tanks are more straightforward.
Do the tanks design new models every now and then?
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There are attempts to design new models and better parts. It's a bit of an arms race among the clans.
Do tank models still mean anything? Are tanks expected to stay "standardized"?
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Modifying oneself is in fact a major aspect of their lives. Contrary to my old art and my lazier pieces, you don’t see many vehicles that are on model, since they basically have themselves equipped with everything suitable they can get their little grabby robot arms on.
Aesthetics is sometimes a concern, but it’s not like in vanilla WoW where you choose something in matching colour over better equipment. Vehicles are addressed and classified into models, but that’s become more of a guideline in the last 80 years. You may call yourself a King Tiger if you look remotely similar to what they used to look like, although if you look more like what people would call a Sherman, you might get slapped in the turret.
Are there submarines?
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I gotta figure that out still ... rip. Although it's safe to assume that if there were nuclear submarines around after the Great War, they'd have a bad reputation. Everything nuclear was really shunned after the bombs.
What is politics like in Tank society? Are there different ideologies like humans had?
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I haven’t really explored that topic a lot yet, but I’d say there’s definitely political stuff going on.
It probably focuses mostly on geopolitics and power structures and is very localized.
Social policies probably revolve around the different types of vehicles and their interactions, with wildly different ideologies.
I imagine that environmental policy is a topic that gets basically no attention at all. Don’t have much time to think about polluting the nature when you struggle to make ends meet at all.
What lies beyond the Known World?
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Are there any other lands, clans, and overall machine life in other parts of the globe?
It’s basically just the rest of the world!
There’s some machines and civilization there, but they’re sorta isolated from the Known World by either living in REALLY sparsely inhabited areas or not having any means to regularly travel and interact with the others.
It’s also possible that maybe some of them have built cultures that have found a more comfortable way of living and don’t want the “savages” from the other lands to ruin that. Some suspect that humans still lurk out there, too ….
If there are modern Main Battle Tanks that are made in the 80s, are there also Jet Fighters?
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Maybe from as early as 1944 (F-80, Me-262) to as late as the 80s with current 4th Generation Jet Fighters (Su-27, F-15, Panavia Tornado,....)?
Basically I haven’t fully decided what the actual canon on these is, but I have a few thoughts:
I’m imagining that those planes would be a huge threat to everyone else. Also to each other!
In the Great Machine War, there were lots of them, obviously. It’s possible that like with the MBTs and modern tanks, most of them got destroyed during that war. (If not all of them.)
Of course there would be factories that produced them, possibly even after their extinction or near-extinction during the war.
So assuming those factories survived and kept producing modern planes, they would obviously dominate the air and like I mentioned above, cause the land vehicles great trouble as well.
There’d probably be two “camps”: The ones who try to control these planes and use their tremendous power. And the ones who think they must be eradicated to prevent them from becoming the ruling class.
I’m thinking that maybe the first camp overestimated their ability to control them, and that maybe the second camp won over as a result of the first camp realizing that their plan was backfiring. After all, those planes would be advanced, and definitely aware of their power.
Independently of that, I’d imagine that the second camp would have tried their best to destroy any modern plane factory they could find/reach. Which in turn, would have brought them the wrath of the planes.
Ultimately, this would most likely lead to the planes getting very fed up and wary of the other vehicles, possibly resulting in a serious conflict.
Of course there would also be planes that felt like (and were treated like) equals to the other vehicles and were loyal to them.
What could have followed would be a total clusterfuck of tanks vs planes vs planes vs tanks. It would be ugly.
As we can see from the current state of the Hummelverse world, that couldn’t have gone well for the planes.
So I’d say there’s two possible outcomes:
- The planes admitted defeat and are now living like the older plane models - as allies/subordinates of large clans. They’re rare.
- The (advanced) planes simply got killed, their factories destroyed. There are none left.
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