random fanfic musing

[ratcreature]

I've been wondering whether there was any Star Trek fic that somehow deals with the ongoing consequences of that apocalyptic phase Earth had before the utopian Federation in the Trek universe with the Eugenics Wars and WWIII and such. Not adventure stuff like some frozen Augment surfacing, but more slice-of-life fanfic in which the mundane longterm annoyances of living on top of former sites of industrialized warfare come up. Like the environmental damage or how the Earth citizens in former target and strategic places may on a semi-regular basis get their lives disrupted, because some uncleared weapon remnants resurface or the like.

I guess that with the improved Federation tech making cleaning up easier they probably have cleared much of that warfare legacy and pollution by the time the Trek series take place. OTOH from what I vaguely recall of the flashbacks we got over time to that era it's not out of the question that in hurried and chaotic rebuilding with first contact on top of it some duds somewhere in the ground that hadn't been exploded so far didn't seem like a priority. Or they just poured some concrete on the nuclear contaminated waste hoping for the best and that it won't be worse than the increased overall background radiation they are bound to have.

(This was brought on by some idle musing as yesterday evening there was once again some travel chaos and public transport disruption, because they had to evacuate an area, after they found some unexploded WWII bomb or other that had to be defused. Which is a fairly common occurrence here, especially when they are digging around in the harbor area. They usually have to evacuate five hundred meters around such a site, so that means a couple of thousand people living there have to be elsewhere for a few hours, and inevitably some train track is affected and closed, and a bunch of buses get disrupted and you get chain effects in the connected lines too.)

So have you ever read any Trek fic like that?

Comments

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any, but this is a splendid idea.

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I think such stories would work well for my worldbuilding kink.

[tassosss.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any either but I definitely like this idea too. In First Contact they are definitely still dealing with post-war.

[ratcreature]

I expect any cleanup after their wars would take a long time, even if they eventually have resources again. I mean, initially they would only take care of the most pressing things, and then the rest would be like a backlog to work through slowly (and only come to people's minds as an important thing to spend resources on whenever there is some unfortunate incident). And from what I recall they also had some chaos and spotty record keeping of that period, kind of dark age like, so they might not even necessarily know where things like weapons caches and problematic sites all were.

Like here you don't just have unexploded bombs but shortly before capitulation some German soldiers buried their own munitions to let these not fall into enemy hands, and thus sometimes people run into small caches of tank mines, grenades, mortars etc. in random drainage ditches and the like. And really unlucky run into rotting chemical weapons.

And even if the Federation have sophisticated instruments, the areas of potential problems might just be so numerous that fine-grained scanning and cleanup will drag on. Like here the authorities eventually got copies of the aerial photos the allies took and there you can spot sites of likely unexploded bombs because the craters look different and such, but they still have a huge backlog to go through.

And of course the rotting part makes disposal trickier over time with many weapons. For example WWII bombs that had a time delayed trigger (those were used mixed with regular ones to kill cleanup and rescue people and cause additional chaos) relied on a vial of acetone shattering and then eating through a cellulose barrier in a few hours, only when they landed upside down and for example the acetone went the wrong way so the barrier wasn't dissolved then. But of course after 75 years what's left of these contraptions is rather unstable and often can't be defused anymore but has to be exploded.