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City Beneath the Sea (1971 TV movie)
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 9:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes indeed, an undersea city TV series would certainly have vehicles that come and go, as well the imaginative peripheral structures you suggested, like a massive floating platform on the surface that was tethered to the city and could submerge when rough seas made it necessary.





In fact, the floating platform could be constructed to stay partially submerge all the time, a "tip-of-the-iceberg" upper section where aircraft could land, weather permitting. The floating structure (a mini-city in it's own right) could pump air down to the city on the sea floor, and it could transmit electricity from solar cells and other power sources like windmills.





In addition to windmills, there are ways to use waves for the generation of electricity, too, and the floating platform would have devices built into it that turned passing waves, flowing currents, and tidal water movement into electricity.





As for the stories, they could involve a wealth of science-related dramas that were both entertaining and educational. That's what I'd want from a series like this.

During the first season of SeaQuest we saw Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute during the closing credits delivering a short message about how that episode's story related to real oceanographic research.

I loved those little endorsements to the show's efforts to use real science in it's science fiction stories.

After coming up with ideas I described above, found a YouTube video that ties in with this.

Behold, the Lily Pad City!




As for the aquatic vehicles the series would display, my vote goes to the SeaOrbiter, shown in this amazing video, which uses the same half-submerged, half-floating concept as the structure above the seafloor city.

If you're a fan of artist John Berkey's starships, you'll love the SeaOrbiter!







The video about the SeaOrbiter at the link below will convince you that a series about an undersea city and all the aspects I've describes would put those boring old space shows to shame . . .




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Krel
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PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 12:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud, in the first photo, it looks like the SeaOrbiter is mincing the poor little fishies. Laughing

I think that there should be a surface platform, with labs, shops, restaurants, a hotel and a promenade deck for people who need to come up and get a little sky. An airport could be on top, and docks for liners, and cargo ships on the bottom.

David.
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larryfoster
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PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 3:40 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pow wrote:
I still maintain that telling interesting,intelligent,sf stories beneath the earth's seas is a big challenge versus outer space as a setting.
Space offers all types of spatial phenomena to deal with that we can accept or,at least suspend our disbelief,in order to accept.


I agree with you on this point. Back in 1971 the date of this CBTS movie), I could still believe monsters could exist in the the Earth's sea depths. But not now. With our satellite radar mapping of our seas, and the many ships sonar mapping of them - for years now. That's why I opt for an 'alien planet' sci-fi (Lost In Space, Earth 2, Planet Of Dinosaurs, etc.) - no room left on Earth for monster adventure (imagination) now.

But then comes the next problem... to get to an alien planet requires a space voyage. Then no one wants to enjoy adventures & dangers of an alien planet. They all seem to want to stay in space for space battles (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.).

I should point out that I'm not a fan of this "City Beneath The Sea" movie. All future conflicts (drama) based on it would be between humans - no monsters. Boring! I wish I could point this out in a thread about humans 'stuck on a monster-filled alien planet', and exploring an abandoned 'alien' city in it's seas. But I know of no such movie/series work. Only Stargate Atlantis came close. But they quickly turned to conflict with 'humanoid' aliens (and space battles), as their prime antagonist to their survival. Again... no 'single-planet' human-survival against monsters. Especially the undersea types, that one would encounter by scuba and submarine adventures.
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Pow
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PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 11:52 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud, you absolutely nailed it with your terrific pix & comments.

These are the images that I've seen online. Who doesn't find Lily Pad City astonishing?

CBTS was fun back in '71 when it first premiered. However, there are more interesting ideas these days regarding such sf cities such as the ones you have shown.

That's why we need to update the concept from these ideas from simply having a city sit motionless at the bottom of the ocean.

These concepts give me hope that they could one day do a sf show about a city on & below the sea; a city that can also move!!!
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 3:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pow wrote:
These concepts give me hope that they could one day do a sf show about a city on & below the sea; a city that can also move!!!


Thanks, Pow. I saw those pictures and I just went wild with enjoyable ideas.

As for the idea of not "simply having a city sit motionless at the bottom of the ocean", it seems like you're trying to make the city do everything you want to happen in the series. I'd rather let the city do it's city thing on the sea floor . . . and let the futuristic subs do the moving. Very Happy





And if the city has be designed so it can rise up and start chugging around the ocean, we can't have stories in which it's threatened by something like a seaquake or a massive tanker that's sinking right above and might crash down on it.

Besides, making it mobile means it can't be too big and complex, comprised of multiple domes -- which looks sooooo cool!





And we need a good reason to put a city down there under all that water and all that crushing pressure -- like making it a massive mining operation with extensive tunnels below the city, as well as oil and natural gas extraction.

Picture huge docking ports for submarines that are loaded with crude oil and various ores.

This is the kind of sci-fi series I want -- not a monster-of-the-week freak show. I want to see the challenges of a future world, with the drama being provided by the fact-based problems that must be solved, using intelligence and courage in a brave new frontier beneath the sea.

The thing Hollywood is unwilling to do is take the known facts and the speculations by the finest scientific minds, and then employ writers who can spin stories from the exciting possibilities.

That's what I tried to do when I wrote this.





What we usually get instead is stuff like this. Sure it looks great -- but where's the science in this alleged science fiction?





PS: The site below says the SeaOrbiter's construction can be followed on a daily basis. This isn't science fiction, guys. It's science fact.
Very Happy
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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 9:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
And we need a good reason to put a city down there under all that water and all that crushing pressure -- like making it a massive mining operation with extensive tunnels below the city, as well as oil and natural gas extraction.

Now there's a self-solving premise. They start fracking under the city, which causes seaquakes and tsunamis. Drama on demand!
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Pow
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PostPosted: Thu May 07, 2015 2:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes Bud,I guess I do envision a fantastic TV show where a city on the seas could do everything. It just seems so exciting as opposed to a city that never moves.

Within this premise a moving city could visit other cities,scientific outposts,etc, on top of & beneath the oceans;ones that remain stationary. A domed one would be wonderful & yes,they do look terrific.

I still have to assert that creating intriguing plots each week would be a major challenge for even the most talented writers.
That's assuming such a show would avoid the pitfalls of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea & Seaquest DSV where you had the leads running up against werewolves,mummies,black holes,& leprachans!
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Thu May 07, 2015 5:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pow wrote:
I still have to assert that creating intriguing plots each week would be a major challenge for even the most talented writers.

That's assuming such a show would avoid the pitfalls of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea & Seaquest DSV where you had the leads running up against werewolves, mummies, black holes, & leprechauns!

Good writers (like those who did the Star Trek series) would have no problem thinking of many great story ideas for this series. Bad writers (like those who did VttBotS) would think undersea leprechauns were extremely clever.

Bad writers don't do any better with series about space travel than they do with any other kind.

And as for a movable city, are you suggesting that the slow, ponderous movements of a gigantic city creeping along -- taking weeks to get from point A to B -- would be more interesting than a futuristic submarine slicing through the depths . . . or deploying it's hydroplanes to rip across the surface of the ocean at 100 knots per hour?

Such a slow moving city would be about as dull as that unfortunate sci-fi series that tried to turn Earth's moon into a spaceship. To paraphrase an old saying, "Moons are nice places to visit and nice places to live -- but when I get ready to go somewhere I don't want to have to take the damn thing with me!" Shocked

My vision for this series has a sprawling, spectacular aquatroplis that spreads out for miles on the sea floor . . . and up the sides of mountains . . . and down the face of undersea cliffs!

Think Big and Beautiful, sir — not slow and limited in size.

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Pow
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PostPosted: Fri May 08, 2015 9:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Firstly,Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea did have some decent script writers, Bud. You can especially see this in a number of episodes from season one.

The problem was,according to the writers,Irwin Allen himself.

He controlled his series with an iron grip & nothing occurred without his approval. Nothing.

Whenever the writers presented scripts that tackled topical issues Allen vetoed them. His shows were"running, jumping shows,"& he wanted little else. Scientific accuracy,character development,plots with deep meaning were the exactly what Allen did not want.

Depending upon the size of a floating city why do you automatically relegate it to "slow & ponderous?"
Can not the sf aspect of such a concept create a form of engineering & power systems that would allow such a city some speed?

We need not be city-bound with such a premise. This city would indeed have submarine,surface vessels, & flying ships that could precede the city in some cases.

However,we can debate this topic until the sea cows come home. I don't believe there are many(any?)sf projects for either film or television that will have the setting be oceans;earthly or alien.

Outer space is the leader...as usual.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Fri May 08, 2015 3:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Pow wrote:
We can debate this topic until the sea cows come home. I don't believe there are many (any?) sf projects for either film or television that will have the setting be oceans; earthly or alien.

Outer space is the leader...as usual.

Ah, I see. There's where we differ, sir. I embrace the challenge of turning the science fact into science fiction -- and I have a wealth of ideas for ocean-based stories set on this world (and others) that would be just as exciting as anything that could happen in space.

I'm saying this as someone who already has one published sci-fi novel set in space under his belt and another one in the works! If you want a story with exciting adventures in space, read mine. Very Happy

But I'm still puzzled as to why you're so set on having a city that isn't really a city -- it's just a big clumsy, non-streamlined submarine.


Pow wrote:
Depending upon the size of a floating city why do you automatically relegate it to "slow & ponderous?"

Sure, if you make the city small enough and shape it just right, it would go faster that if if was bigger and shaped more like a city than a submarine. But hell's bells, what's the point? If you want to go somewhere, why hook up your trailer home to the car and toe the whole house to your destination?

Leave the house at home, and just take the car!

Ditto for the underwater city. If the city is stationary, you can make it as big as you want (no need to make it smaller so it won't be slow and ponderous) -- and then use fast, streamlined vehicles to do the traveling.

That way, the whole population isn't forced to go to the same place. In fact, nobody has to go anywhere if they don't want to. And everybody that does want to visit some other location can pick their own destination -- and get there much quicker than any moving city could take them.

Let's approach this from a purely practical standpoint. What advantage to the mobile city's population would there be in having it move around?

In fact, what's the purpose of the city the first place? Why was it built? What does a mobile city do that a stationary city can't -- other than move around?

As I mentioned earlier, a stationary city could be the location of undersea mining operations, or a carefully chosen sight to study ocean currents and marine life migrations. Or it could be placed in a mid-ocean location that served the same purpose as airline "hubs", like Atlanta -- a place for submarine traffic to stop off at while en route to other global destinations..

If it's an international facility, it would placed in a location that was mutually agreed on by the nations involved.

The purpose of the city and the challenges faced by the people who live and work there are what would drive the stories we tell about it. If the purpose of the city is just to provide a very inefficient mode of travel to it's population, I can easily understand why you don't think exciting stories could be told about it.

I challenge you, sir, to defend the moving city idea with good reasons that justify all the limits on size and shape that moving it around would require, while giving up all the advantages that rooting it soundly and permanently on the ocean floor would provide.

Sell me on the idea, Pow. Why is a moving city more interesting than a stationary one that interacts constantly with the rest of the world through more exciting and efficient modes of travel?

I really don't get it.

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 01, 2016 11:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

__________________________________

Enjoy the trailer for this fun TV movie!


__________________________________

_______ CITY BENEATH THE SEA (1971 - trailer


_________

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PostPosted: Thu Aug 11, 2016 12:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Irwin Allen's shows typically started strong and descended into silliness and gimmickry. I see nothing about "City" to indicate it would have been otherwise.

Fortunately, the butchering job done to the 4' Gemini XII model was undone.

RESTORING THE GEMINI 12

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 11, 2016 11:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

What a remarkable video, Maurice! I really enjoyed it.

I'm so glad that there are people like those shown in the video who have both the talent and the dedication to preserve important elements of beloved shows like Lost in Space.

Thanks for sharing the link, Maurice. Very Happy

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PostPosted: Wed Mar 08, 2017 11:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
I challenge you, sir, to defend the moving city idea with good reasons that justify all the limits on size and shape that moving it around would require, while giving up all the advantages that rooting it soundly and permanently on the ocean floor would provide.

Sell me on the idea, Pow. Why is a moving city more interesting than a stationary one that interacts constantly with the rest of the world through more exciting and efficient modes of travel?

I really don't get it.

In partial answer to that, I recommend the book "The Inverted World" by Christopher Priest. It's the story of a terrestrial (not aquatic) city that is constantly on the move. Adaptions of many of the book's concepts could easily be applied to an undersea city. The city doesn't move just because some of the people want to go elsewhere. It moves because it MUST keep moving or perish, for reasons given in the book.

A web search will turn up lots of commentaries and discussions about the HUGO nominated book. The Wikipedia summation is at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_World
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Thu Mar 09, 2017 6:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

I have to confess, the summary of that novel is confusing as heck, but I understand that such a complex premise would be very difficult to summarize. Wikipedia's "critical response" section makes it clear that the novel is very highly regarded, so I certainly won't judge the novel by the shortcomings of a summary that undoubted did its best to describe the concept.

If I understood the summary, the strange moving mini-city on railroad tracks had to move constantly because reality was being distorted, and the city was being pulled towards a disastrous situation.

But I don't quite see how this relates to the concept of a moving undersea city. There seems to be no reason for an underwater city to constantly (or even periodically) shift its location.

Actually, an undersea city wouldn't necessarily have to be permanently affixed to the ocean floor. In fact, I actually prefer the idea that it be anchored to the floor by long cables so its depth could vary from a few thousand feet right up to zero, floating on the surface! Very Happy

I can see clear advantages to that — but not to making it capable of chugging around like a bloated riverboat!

The reason the anchoring cables would be needed, of course, is to counteract the force of the ocean currents that would constantly try to carry the city along with them if it wasn't anchored. Expending energy by using a propulsion system to counteract that movement would be wasteful — especially in the view of the fact that those same ocean currents could be used to create energy for the city, using underwater turbines similar to these!






With that in mind, the best location for the city would be smack in the middle of a very strong ocean current, anchored by the cables to the sea floor.

Ironically, this is the reverse of an undersea city which expends vast amounts of energy to move around for questionable reasons. The "tethered undersea city" I described remains in one spot and lets the ocean move past it, generating energy from the moving seawater which flows past turbines that aren't actually anchored to the ocean floor like the ones shown above.

These turbines would instead be positioned behind the city, "downstream", generating electricity and transmitting it through the same cables that attached them to the aquatic metropolis.

Two propellers back-to-back which turned in opposite directions would prevent the generators being twisted by the torque while the propellers rotated and created the power.






While describing the city in the above paragraph, I wondered where the most powerful ocean current in the word was located. I Googled the question and found this remarkable fact.
________________________________

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest current system in the world oceans and the only ocean current linking all major oceans: the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.
________________________________

The map below shows two very interesting things about ACC.

(1) The current is roughly circular, traveling around Antarctica like an aquatic merry-go-round, and —

(2) the current is funneled through the gap between the southern tip of South American and the NW tip of Antarctica. That's a distance of only 600 miles, and this prevents the ACC from wandering too far from the midway point of those two land masses.






That's important to my concept of an undersea city powered by ocean currents — which tend to shift quite a bit. For example, the ocean current that drives El Nino can meander north and south by thousands of miles!

But the ACC doesn't do this throughout most of its course, and least of all in the area bounded by South America and Antarctica. And since this just happens to be "the strongest current system in the world oceans", it's the perfect location for the tethered undersea city I described!

But wait! There's more good news! Very Happy

The ACC is about 15,000 miles long, and it intersects with the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. The Wikipedia article says, "The ACC has been known to sailors for centuries; it greatly speeds up any travel from west to east" because of the clockwise direction of the current. That means submarines can use the current to get a boost in speed when traveling from the west coast of South America to Africa, or from Africa to Australia.

But wait! There's still more!

If the ACC is a good location for one tethered undersea city, why not several of them? I placed markers in the map below to indicate the four best places for tethered undersea cities, based on various considerations.






The one nearest South America is only 300 miles from the southern tip of that continent and the NW coast of Antarctica, and it's located above an undersea plateau, which reduces the required length of the tether cables the undersea city will need. That's a real advantage.

The next one (moving clockwise) is about halfway between the southern tip of South American and the southern tip of Africa. It too is located directly above a mountain range that reduces the ocean depth beneath the city, and therefore the length of the tether cables it will need.

The third one is also positioned atop an undersea mountain range, and it's located halfway between Antarctica and Australia.

The four "tethered undersea cities" on my map would be accessible to both high-speed submarines and surface vessels from all three major oceans because of the location of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current.

Also consider that regular transportation between the cities would be accelerated by the ACC (clockwise, at least) for both submarines and surface vessels! The ACC would be like the highway "loops" which encircle many American cities like Atlanta and Charlotte.








I think this idea is really exciting, and I'd love to see it happen in the decades to come.

Meanwhile, a movie based on this would be more fun than mud wrestling with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders!




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