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I am preparing for a game set on an ice planet with a large permanent ice caps and an equatorial tundra zone. Low population density except around mining facilities and under a few domes near the spaceport. However there is a breathable atmosphere and a few hardy folks like away from the equatorial belts industrialised regions. So I started thinking about what life would be like in a place frozen several months of the year, however I need not guess but can ask.

I am particularly interested in very cold towns that are snowed in for extended periods. I am interested in logistics and supply, how people in isolated communities travel locally and communicate with each other, are buildings linked by street-tunnels or do people brave the extreme cold to do shopping.
Anyone able to help?

Depending on exactly what you're after, I'd suggest starting by watching something like Ice Road Truckers or Ice Pilots.

One of my wife's friends lived in Alaska for a few years. One of the big things she mentioned was that her car had to be retro-fitted with a heater to stop the coolant from freezing. When you park up at the shops or where-ever, the parking spaces apparently have power supplies that you can plug your car into to run the heater.

My wife is from SIberia. Southern Siberia, but it's still bloody cold in the winter (down to -30 celsius at times, but more usually between -15 and -20 for extended periods). I can confirm the car thing. You can't leave your car outside because the fluids will freeze so if you don't have a garage or even a shed to house it in you're going to struggle to keep your car intact through winter. My father-in-law had to give his car to his son to keep over winter as their flat didn't have a garage. It's not a problem if you're picking up supplies at the shop because the engine is already running and warm enough but you can't leave it for any length of time.

They tend to stockpile food that they grow themselves during the summer. Potatoes and various other root vegetables are popular and all houses in their village have storage for large amounts of meat and vegetables throughout the winter. One advantage of consistently low temperatures is you can keep food frozen without needing a freezer. There's a general self-sufficiency and stockpiling of fuel and basic essentials because you can't predict if the roads will remain open to deliver supplies to local shops. The shops tend to remain open, it's just a little hit-and-miss as to what they'll have in stock.

When it's really cold you'll find people just won't venture out much at all. -15 or -20 is OK for brief periods with the right clothes (and they all have the right clothes) but once you're at -30 you need to consider very seriously whether your journey is worth possibly dying over. There are no tunnels linking places - people just stay inside and wait it out. Except in the very, very coldest inhabited places on earth it's quite rare that the temperature is consistently too low to travel around town.

beast_gts wrote:
Depending on exactly what you're after, I'd suggest starting by watching something like Ice Road Truckers or Ice Pilots.

I will start with this thank you. I summise that isolated regions of backwater planets would have c20th century technology for the most part, with some individual advanced technologies, hence a focus on modern solutions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slipspace wrote:
My wife is from SIberia. Southern Siberia, but it's still bloody cold in the winter (down to -30 celsius at times, but more usually between -15 and -20 for extended periods). I can confirm the car thing. You can't leave your car outside because the fluids will freeze so if you don't have a garage or even a shed to house it in you're going to struggle to keep your car intact through winter. My father-in-law had to give his car to his son to keep over winter as their flat didn't have a garage. It's not a problem if you're picking up supplies at the shop because the engine is already running and warm enough but you can't leave it for any length of time.

They tend to stockpile food that they grow themselves during the summer. Potatoes and various other root vegetables are popular and all houses in their village have storage for large amounts of meat and vegetables throughout the winter. One advantage of consistently low temperatures is you can keep food frozen without needing a freezer. There's a general self-sufficiency and stockpiling of fuel and basic essentials because you can't predict if the roads will remain open to deliver supplies to local shops. The shops tend to remain open, it's just a little hit-and-miss as to what they'll have in stock.

When it's really cold you'll find people just won't venture out much at all. -15 or -20 is OK for brief periods with the right clothes (and they all have the right clothes) but once you're at -30 you need to consider very seriously whether your journey is worth possibly dying over. There are no tunnels linking places - people just stay inside and wait it out. Except in the very, very coldest inhabited places on earth it's quite rare that the temperature is consistently too low to travel around town.

Nice reply, and thank you to Crispy78 also.
So other than linking your car to a power supply you go shopping 'normally'.
The self sufficiency was assumed anyway.
Are tunnels a stupid idea for some reason, or are they just not worth investing in?

In Minnesota, the universities and some parts of the metropolitan centers are linked by tunnels or skyways so you never need to go outside. In places that are less populous it is not worth the money.

Edit: You also see very little building or construction in the winter time when it is cold, but when it is warm it is all done at a feverish pace day and night.

It is really hard to manipulate anything when wearing the big heavy mittens (often called Choppers) so highly dexterous work in the winter is difficult.

In the winter, when it is really cold sound carries really well.

If it is winter, it is often also dark or dimly lit. The lack of sunshine can play tricks on people psychologically, especially when coupled with isolation.

Regarding underground tunnels in the modern era, it would really depend on how "valuable" the location is, how "permanent", and how "populous" it is.

I'm in South-West Ontario, roughly between Detroit and New York but on the Canadian side. We have universities and colleges with enclosed transfers between buildings, either above or below ground, sometimes.

Factories and the like often have enclosed transfers so that forklifts and such don't need to go out in the rain / snow.

As for small towns? Not that I've ever noticed, even when venturing further North. Places like Sudbury (Last "major" town in Northern Ontario) deal with heavy snowfalls with plows... sometimes it takes a couple days to clear but you just wait. Put your feet up, you aren't going anywhere.

4-wheel drive vehicles with substantial ground clearance are common. Trucks, SUV's are common. You don't see too many "mini" sedans or the like. Snowmobiles are also popular, kind of like a "grocery-getter" small vehicle in Southern Ontario. Hook up a trailer, scoot into town, get what you need, haul it back to your home.

People tend to be help-your-neighbour types, in my experience. The saying "Tall fences make good neighbours" except "Large distances make good neighbours" in their case. Small-town gossip might get around, but everyone's far enough apart that you can live on your own terms, and everyone else can pound sand if they don't like it. If a disaster strikes, we're all in it together. Strong individuals make a strong community. Not so much a united group, but an often disparate group that unites to face large challenges.

… I love Northern living. Hope to retire there someday.

For a more 40k focus, have a read of books with Valhallans in them (such as the Ciaphas Cain ones).

There's also a bit in one of the Cain books where he (or his Inquisitor friend) says most Imperial settlements have tunnels underneath them as they've been building in the same place for thousands of years so everything is on top of what went before.

Nice replies:

How do people do for dairy, is it all imported or are hardy goats kept etc.

Is 'bushmeat' a big thing?

I can say that milk is more expensive in Northern Ontario, and that there is less Dairy production there as there's less "nice" weather to have the cows in the field.

That said, land is cheap up there, so while farming has a shorter season, you can generally have a larger property. Makes for a more intense season, but you can typically make "more" due to larger area.

Bushmeat, in the sense of Deer, Moose, and other large critters, is quite common. So is having a large freezer to put them in. For the cost of an average rifle, and a handful of rounds, you can hunt a whole cow's worth of meat in a weekend, if you know where to go. Do that a couple times a year and you've got meat for the year. Given the cost of even half-a-cow in Southern Ontario, it would pay for itself within 3 or 4 hunts, even counting time spent away.

I'm fortunate that in the Fall, I have an opportunity to head North to close my Mom and Uncle's cottage with them. While I'm there, I try to go for a walkabout to hunt grouse. They're damned hard to find. Their camo matches fall woodland so well I've nearly stepped on them before... but they're about the size of a small chicken and if you can get 4 it's a good size meal for the family. Much tastier than chicken, too, and so simple to clean that if they were bigger they probably would have been domesticated instead of chicken.

 Orlanth wrote:

Are tunnels a stupid idea for some reason, or are they just not worth investing in?

I would expect dealing with permafrost is the problem. Hard as rock to try and dig through, but if it thaws out it'll collapse like any other tunnel dug through mud. So tunnels are a pain to dig and have to be kept frozen to use.

Agreed for reality purposes... but for 40k? I could see underground tunnels, especially if Orks or Eldar raiders are an issue.

But yes, frozen ground is too hard for modern era machinery to dig in unless it's specifically designed to. For example, the local aggregate companies in Southern Ontario shut down around -10 C. Their loaders just can't dig into the frozen piles. Far enough North, they're likely designed to work that kind of environment but those machines are several times more expensive than a typical loader for my environment.

 Vulcan wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:

Are tunnels a stupid idea for some reason, or are they just not worth investing in?

I would expect dealing with permafrost is the problem. Hard as rock to try and dig through

We had some preventative work done on our septic tank a few years back in the summertime to add a riser collar to it. Prior to that, you had to dig about 8 inches down to access it, and the guy commented that if he ever had to do it in winter*, we'd need a backhoe and it would be very expensive.

*Iowa winters are apparently as severe and sometimes worse as southern Siberia, from what I read in this thread. Today I learned. A year or so ago it was so cold out they had us working from home for a few days as there was a concern of frostbite within a few minutes on exposed skin.

That seems like a hundred years ago because of corona, now.

Also read the first Eisenhorn book by Dan Abnett for how to 40kify a frozen world.

Where he ventures to a planet that has extreme climate shifts due to its orbit (it has a reallly looooooong "night" cycle when everything gets pretty much frozen over.
He meets up with Fischig and Bequin on this planet.

 Orlanth wrote:
Nice replies:

How do people do for dairy, is it all imported or are hardy goats kept etc.

Is 'bushmeat' a big thing?

Dairy is definitely going to be imported unless there is some sort of local fauna that is cold hardy and also gives milk. Raindeer are an example. The people who raise them do use their milk, along with the obvious meat and hide.

Hunting is definitely also going to be one of the most important things in an arctic environment. Given that you are making this entire planet a tundra planet, the vast majority of the population will have to engage in this type of subsistence living. Importing from off-world will happen, but they're going to be more inclined to use local sources of food. What food is imported would be cheap and easily stored non/minimally perishable foods OR expensive exotic foods for the elite. Given the perishability of meat, imports would probably be minimal, limited to expensive stuff for the elites. Grain like wheat or corn, and maybe also root vegetables like potatoes, would probably be the bulk of imports as you couldn't grow that on this planet but they'd also be relatively cheap and cost effective.

The locals would be very reliant on hunting for meat year round. Summer would add harvesting wild edible vegetation and fishing in local rivers.

Logistically speaking, somewhat ironically, land travel is more difficult in the summer because the ground thaws and becomes very wet. Tundra is basically a swamp during the summer. Long distance roads are only between major cities and only where the terrain is accommodating. You have to wait for the ground to freeze before you can easily travel via dog sled or any land machines like snowmobiles. So in the summer you are mostly limited to boats and aircraft.

Because of the difficulty in getting outside supplies in anywhere, this means everything that has to be imported is expensive. A small town or village will probably have a single store that sells everything. Imported food stuffs like flour, eggs, sugar. Construction supplies like Lumber, nails, tools. Large equipment like generators, snowmobiles, etc... Ammunition and weapons. And luxury goods like alcohol, perfume, etc... Most of which will be resupplied by either aircraft or boat down the river the town is most certainly built next to.

 Orlanth wrote:


Nice reply, and thank you to Crispy78 also.
So other than linking your car to a power supply you go shopping 'normally'.
The self sufficiency was assumed anyway.
Are tunnels a stupid idea for some reason, or are they just not worth investing in?

Tunnels just aren't worth the effort and kind of pointless in a civilian setting. If it's genuinely too cold to walk to the other side of the village you just don't (note that my wife's rural "village" has a population of about 15,000 - Russia's weird). It seems to me the biggest changes they make are ones of attitude. For someone who's always lived in or near a big city it's rare for things to ever get so bad we can't go anywhere for more than a day or two and people can get annoyed and freak out about that sort of thing. In places like Siberia the attitude is more pragmatic and they just sort of accept there may be stretches of time when you can't really go anywhere, either because it's really, really cold or the roads haven't been cleared yet.

In a more military setting I'd imagine tunnels would be the only reliable method of connecting vital structures in these sort of conditions.

Worth a look for the more military side:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Iceworm

Would researching the Inuit be a stretch? I’ll admit I don’t know as much about them as I probably should, but their nomadic method of living might be of interest.

If you’re looking for a small town (though it is technically a capital city), Yellowknife might help.

One thing I'd suggest is basing any real communities around geothermal sources (hot springs or geothermal taps). This can supply 'cheap' heating for living spaces and hydroponics that would allow a lot of self-sufficiency with little overall technology. It would, however, require a settlement to be densely populated as you can only transport hot water so far before it cools off. Good for 'community domes', not good for scattered settlements. Obviously 40k tech can bypass these kinds of problems but the Admech are truly stingy at times.

This is not for 40K but for a space opera similar to Traveller, more like cyberpunk in space.
However answers relevant to 40K are fair as a generic reply. I envisage that technological distribution is going to be very uneven, a theme Traveller used as its core. 40K also includes this to a degree too.
Present day technology is a useful standby, and from what I gather the tech in some isolated communities in Russia and maybe elsewhere in the far north is more similar to the 1950's than today.

 Orlanth wrote:

Present day technology is a useful standby, and from what I gather the tech in some isolated communities in Russia and maybe elsewhere in the far north is more similar to the 1950's than today.

Kinda, yes. I think the key thing people are looking for is reliability, with the additional caveat that in isolated, rural communities people don't have as much money as those in the cities. So you have some old bits of tech that were built to last and will probably keep on going forever at this point. Everything from cookers to freezers and even furniture and tools are usually on the older side. The idea seems to be you only replace it if it needs replacing, you don't tend to buy something new just because whatever you currently have is old. Tools are a good example: my father in law has hammers and saws that are older than him because he's never needed a new one.

Another important thing to consider is (at least with todays tech) that batteries do not work well at all, they discharge much faster in use, loose charge when not in use and risk failing if allowed to freeze

so tech intended to run outside is far more likely to used direct power generation of some sort

Sounds like a fun game . It's amazing to me how certain communities in Alaska and similar places just get cut off for large parts of the year... people have to be so much more self sufficient. It's a really good idea to research that for reference (wish I had some knowledge to add myself, but I've only visited the more habitable parts)

food is also important to consider, chances are shipping food in is gonna be too expensive, so chances are the local food (thats not meat) will be hydroponicly grown and local vegitation that is hardy eneugh to actually grow, things like mosses etc

For your absolute farthest outposts, I'd recommend the documentary https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1093824/ Encounters at the End of the World.

It's about Antarctica, so it is a strictly transient community, more of a research station than a town. But Herzog really digs into the motivation of the people who would want to endure those conditions, and choose that sort of life.

Some observations from living in Alaska.
At extreme cold temps-30 to -50 Fahrenheit physics takes a holiday. Aircraft style collision lights on school buses. All the moisture from engine exhausts freeze creating ice fog. Intersections white out when everyone steps on the gas and visibility drops to about 3-6 feet. School bus exhausts systems are run to the top, to help prevent the ice fog from forming at car level with all the starting and stopping plus the collision light to help prevent the buses from being rendered. A vehicle will have an oil pan heater, engine block heater, transmission heater and a battery blanket/heater. You keep your car plugged in or running. Going to the movies or hockey game you might just leave the car running. If not someone who did can give you a jump start. Some vehicles will have special ports to hook up heaters to that will blow warm air through the engine compartment. Maybe in the woods you just build a fire under the vehicle and hope the whole thing doesn't go up in flames. Rubber and plastic may just freeze and break. Contact frost bite. Touch metal and get instant frost bite, looks and feels like a burn. Engines will fail. Gaskets will fail. Electric systems will fail. I have found abandoned snowmobiles in the middle of nowhere in the summer that started right up, but had failed in the deep cold. People who intend to work out doors will usually stage work area or even living areas at cold temperatures. I used to keep my room about 40-60 degrees above the outside temp. That ment sometimes it was below the freezing point in my room. I did keep the bathroom in the balmy 70's. Darkness, or at least dim light seem to go with the extreme cold regions and seasonal affective disorder (SAD) can be an issue along with nutritional deficiencies caused by a lack of sunshine. Going for a drive to the market becomes an instant life threatening emergency if you break down or get stuck. Survival gear is a must at all times. Everything takes longer. People who have lived in those environments for generations will always have more efficient coping strategies than those who use techniques to overcome the environment. For example underground tunnels. Locals may make undersnow tunnels but the underground tunnels are associated with large building projects such as University's or Military bases. UA Fairbanks and Ft Wainwright both had tunnels although I'm not sure how often the UAF ones got used and Ft Wainwrights were closed for safety.

Slipspace wrote:
My wife is from SIberia. Southern Siberia, but it's still bloody cold in the winter (down to -30 celsius at times, but more usually between -15 and -20 for extended periods). I can confirm the car thing. You can't leave your car outside because the fluids will freeze so if you don't have a garage or even a shed to house it in you're going to struggle to keep your car intact through winter. My father-in-law had to give his car to his son to keep over winter as their flat didn't have a garage. It's not a problem if you're picking up supplies at the shop because the engine is already running and warm enough but you can't leave it for any length of time.

For a while I used to visit Norilsk (in not in winter, of course) which is a relatively big town (almost 200K) with one of the most brutal climates in Siberia.

They don't have roads going anywhere but the mines and everything is brought in by air or by boat on a big river port that eventually gets to the Arctic ocean. The city is covered in snow for 8-9 months and children have to get daily doses of UV lamps to have enough D vitamin. Most days have snowstorms and even in summer it's very rainy and drab.

My colleagues there told me that they those people without a garage (i.e., most) would just leave the car running for something like 3 months during the worst of the winter, because the car would never restart if it ever got cold.

To the OP do a bit of research on Norilsk, it's the closest to a post-apocalyptic nuclear winter community you'll get in the real world.