What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

[tanksoldier]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Ok so 25% of planes have no pilots, but they still have 25% of their passenger compliment, so maybe if one of the remaining passengers is an amateur pilot or something... on the other hand, the air traffic control network goes down hard because 75% of all planes are simultaneously radioing in to report something really weird happening. Without good ATC, even a skilled newbie is not likely to land a major airliner safely.

Airliners won’t crash immediately, most will have their autopilots engaged and would fly until they ran out of gas. However....

There was a German pilot who locked his captain out of the cockpit when he went to the head, then crashed the plane. Captain couldn’t get back in due to the reinforcement now required on cockpit doors. Passengers aren’t getting into th cockpit of many airliners quickly.

If 25% of planes crashed right this instant, it'd be very, very bad, but I suspect that most people wouldn't know about it until it got on the news.

On average there are about 9,500 planes in the air with 1.2 million people on them. If 2,100 aircraft and 300,000 people fell out of the sky simultaneously you’d know... but it wouldn’t be dilmutanious. Aircraft on final approach might crash, small planes without autopilots might crash but most transport class aircraft are flown by the autopilot most of the time. They will crash over a period of hours as they run out of fuel. Some cabin crews or passengers will gain access to the cockpits when they realize something is wrong, like when 50% of the passengers vanish and the cockpit is unresponsive, but given the difficulties landing such an aircraft most will crash anyway.

Two pilots per plane for most transport class aircraft means 25% of such aircraft will experience loss of both pilots. Many smaller aircraft will have only one pilot. 50% of cars, trucks, school busses etc will experience driver loss....

[tanksoldier]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Missing pilots are not that big a problem. Modern autopilots are actually capable of landing a plane. The flight attendants would open the door with the override code (if possible),

Have you seen any keypads outside cockpit doors? They can only be unlocked from inside.

then follow ATC instructions to program the autopilot to land..

It’s not that straightforward. Some aircraft have autopilots that can land on some runways some of the time. If it was that easy autopilots would land every aircraft every time.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by TGLS

Of course, ATC might be swamped.

You're suddenly missing half your ATC as well. I suspect they'd suddenly be overloaded by about a factor of two, even if nothing else were going wrong (such as over 75% of flights all having emergencies to report, not just the 25% with no pilots).

For what it's worth, here's a 15-minute video where a modern commercial pilot talks an untrained person playing the part of a passenger through landing a jet (an A320 in this case) -- on a simulator, of course, but a professional simulator.

[Dustin]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Are there any character contexts that seem especially interesting? First responders?

First responders, definitely. Staff of a small TV or radio station or news program would be good. Small municipal government (which is sort of an extension of first responders, I suppose).

Operatives infiltrating or targeting a drug cartel (or terrorist group) might find they have a golden opportunity to do something dramatic during the confusion, if they can overcome their own.

Space station crew would be interesting.

[PTTG]

Second 1 is pretty quiet.
Second 2 features the clatter of a lot of material as everything people were carrying and wearing hits the ground. Also a lot of people saying "What."
Second 3 involves probably the first deaths as the leading edge of most time-critical disasters occur (there are probably very few situations going on globally where a single second of inattention causes an immediate explosion).
Seconds 4-10 are when the traffic accidents climb rapidly and peak. Some cars may drive on for tens of seconds, even multiple minutes, right?
The 4-10 second range is also the start of communication networks breaking down.

[TGLS]

Originally Posted by tanksoldier

Have you seen any keypads outside cockpit doors? They can only be unlocked from inside.



It’s not that straightforward. Some aircraft have autopilots that can land on some runways some of the time. If it was that easy autopilots would land every aircraft every time.

Andreas Prodromou was able to enter the cockpit of Helios Airway Flight 522 after the pilot and the co-pilot were incapacitated. This was in 2005, after airliner locks were instituted.

[Celjabba]

*As stated above, cars crashes will net the biggest immediate secondary death toll. Depending on the day/time, work and school bus crashing could increase the casualties a lot.
Quite a few trains and metros will crash too, most modern ones -should- stop by themselves safely.

*Starvation and riots will kill a lot of people in the short term.
securing supplies line and maintaining order would be in order.

*So will wild fires. Any big city or forest fire starting right after the event will likely have a few hours to grew before authorities recover enough to mount a coordinated answer. Local firefighter and inhabitants may need to rally.

*Refineries and major chemical factories are time bomb too, unless properly secured. Perhaps nuclear power plant, but those should have safeties on, redundant crew, and will be the focus of surviving authorities fast.

20-25% of the planes crashing - spectacular but not really relevant, and poor adventure hook for a group of players: at most 1 pilot and one ATC involved in saving one.

*Ships : a supertanker or mega-container ship will have a crew of 20 ?, half of them at best able to operate the ship... a single supertanker with no bridge crew will soon become a major disaster.
Rescuing one could be an adventure.

*Passengers on a cruise ship may also be a nice adventure start.
The passengers would have to seize power, secure the ship, keep order, arrange for food distribution, plan a future for hundreds of peoples, either abandon ship or arrange for fuel and food... rescuing a passing supertanker, gathering a small fleet of fishing ships around and "setting sails" for the promised land... (sorry, wrong TV show).

*Schools : As (E) said : about 25 children for each adults... A kindergarden or primary school can easily have hundreds of children needing help and care.

*Then, you have all the peoples in a remote place (Antarctica, Jungle, ...) or needing to escape from an enclosed one (shuttle train under the channel, coal or salt mine, either active or used for tourism) for example.

*The crew of a "survivor" reality show suddenly cut for real from civilization may be an interesting twist !

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Celjabba

a single supertanker with no bridge crew will soon become a major disaster

As with all the airliner crashes, it'd make for big evening news if we still had news programs. But it's even more irrelevant on the scale of the overall disaster. The planet's not actually going to care about one oil spill, even a big one. 3500 million people that might have been concerned are dead. That's the new definition of "major disaster". The other 3500 million have more urgent things to worry about than the local wetlands and shore life.

Good adventure seed, though, if you can arrange for the PCs to have a need for a lot of oil. (Or nothing better to do, harder to pull off immediately after the event while the ship is still under way -- unless they are the remaining crew or at least directly associated with the shipping line.)

It's also possible that supertanker is carrying refined products, so they can have bunker fuel for their cruise ship or diesel for generators or gasoline for their roving fleet of semis, or just for their town -- which might promptly get beseiged by greedy neighbors. ("Give me your ship, the oil, the gasoline, and I'll spare your lives. Just walk away and we'll give you a safe passageway in the wastelands. Just walk away...) Saving the ship might give them some valuables for trade to help restart an AtE rebuilding style campaign.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by PTTG

Seconds 4-10 are when the traffic accidents climb rapidly and peak.

And therefore this is when urban roads become jammed with wrecks and abandoned cars.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

And therefore this is when urban roads become jammed with wrecks and abandoned cars.

I think that's exaggerated for most roads. If every car on a road stopped right where it is now (and if everybody vanished most of them would crash at least partly off the road), most of roads would still be passible tomorrow. You'd have to go a bit slow to weave around the stopped vehicles, but they don't occupy such a large fraction of the road surface it's impossible. Sure anywhere there was a traffic jam at the time might be difficult, but that's a smallish fraction of the world's major highways at any given time. And in truth clearing them off enough to get essential stuff through is not that difficult if all you need to do is push the wrecks out of the way - I suspect most city snowplows can move a wreck, certainly there's lots of construction equipment around that can.

The fact is, if people were emotionless robots, half the population vanishing would be a fairly short term glitch. A couple days of rescheduling and everybody cleaning up their immediate vicinity and you're back to something like normal, maybe couple weeks for everybody to readjusted their orders and production levels for the ripples to die out in the economy. It's that non-emotionless panic (and grief) that are going to bite you hardest.