83
votes
Accepted
How can Dwarves produce honey underground?
The dwarves can keep the bees in the caverns, but provide them with suitable exits.
You have your beekeepers on the upper levels of the cities. You'll need ventilation somehow to allow for your city ...
- 11.6k
66
votes
Accepted
Migrating Dungeon Monsters / Why do monsters not leave the dungeons?
Manna
One option is to make the stronger creatures deeply dependent on magic/manna and put a source at the bottom.
It seeps up through the dungeon.
The deeper you go the easier powerful magic ...
- 26.4k
64
votes
How can I make the supporting pillars of an underground city less obstructive?
Mirrors, greenery, sculpture and waterfalls.
You can’t hide these things. The best you can do is make them more easily ignored or more pleasant to look at.
Mirrors provide the illusion of space and ...
- 66.4k
54
votes
Biologically sound reason why underground dwelling Drow have dark skin?
Radiotrophic melanin.
Underground there is more ambient hard radiation. Radon gas is a prime example and a major source for radiation exposure in subterranean spaces. The Drow use this radiation to ...
- 305k
54
votes
Why don't adventurers (and monsters) suffocate in lower levels of dungeons?
Black Sun Core:
If we're talking monsters and adventurers, we're talking fantasy and magic. I've always ascribed to the core radiance theory in such worlds. The core of the planet generates a ...
- 64.1k
49
votes
Accepted
Could an underground civilisation deduce the size and shape of their planet?
Trivially
(It's not a complex problem, and they have access to sufficient information)
but not easily
(they need to do some serious engineering projects to get the data.)
Steps
conceptually figure ...
- 26.3k
44
votes
How can I make the supporting pillars of an underground city less obstructive?
Build skyscrapers around them
If you can't hide, camouflage. Turn the pillars into the city's skyline by building a unique looking skyscraper around each pillar.
- 40.4k
43
votes
How can Dwarves produce honey underground?
Use honeydew, either as intermediary or final product
Aphids feed on plant matter. When they are eating plant sap, they excrete honeydew, a sugary liquid. You could reasonably make an alcoholic ...
- 85.7k
43
votes
Without modern electronics, how could you determine your longitude, latitude, and altitude while lost deep underground?
Altitude (or depth) can be measured with a barometer.
Latitude is doable, but tricky. Two methods come to mind, but they require staying on one spot for rather a long time to make accurate ...
- 42.4k
40
votes
How could a planet have zero surface caves?
Solid is a relative thing
No caves in sand
No caves in water
No caves in magma
No (permanent) caves in ice sheet
No caves in soft soil
No caves in peat bogs
In short:
No caves in anything ...
- 118k
38
votes
Accepted
Cartoon vs Real Life Bores?---(Pointy vs Flat kind)
Is there a physics or engineering(which i presume) reason why we use
this big flat bore instead of the pointy one?
A minimum area cutting surface is best in hard rock; so disk beats cone.
If ...
- 7,252
38
votes
How do dwarves defend their City-under-the-Mountain from a dragon?
From my experience with dwarf fortress, what you want to do is trap the dragon and use it as a source of FUN. Basically trap it and use it to terrorize prisoners and bad dwarfs.
Lava
The funnest ...
- 15.3k
38
votes
How can I make the supporting pillars of an underground city less obstructive?
Catenary arches
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/1c/82/bd/1c82bdf9a6060f96566a9c00c2349ddf.jpg
The catenary arch is the strongest arch. It has been used to hold up ceilings for centuries. Substitute ...
- 305k
36
votes
Why don't adventurers (and monsters) suffocate in lower levels of dungeons?
Sad But True...
RPGs in general have long perpetrated the image of wealthy loot to be had for the taking in the world's understructure, D&D has historically been the worst of the perpetrators! ...
- 40.9k
34
votes
Cartoon vs Real Life Bores?---(Pointy vs Flat kind)
Is there a physics or engineering(which i presume) reason why we use this big flat bore instead of the pointy one?
Yes. A bore is essentially a really big drill bit. As such, the shape of the bit is ...
- 2,742
34
votes
How can Dwarves produce honey underground?
Honey Mines
from The Lost Honey Mines of Texas
These caves are filled with millenia worth of the bee's endeavors, as far back and as far down as you dare to explore. Dwarven honey miners brave the ...
- 305k
34
votes
What effect do caves have on music played in them?
I once had a neighbour living on the apartment (kinda like a cave but more open) right below mine who would throw parties and play the most horrible music between midnight and 3 or 4 AM on weekends. I ...
- 142k
32
votes
Could an underground civilisation deduce the size and shape of their planet?
As an underground civilization, we can assume that they have an elaborate system of seismographs. It helps, after all, to know when the ceiling is about to come down on your head.
With knowledge about ...
- 421
30
votes
Accepted
How do you build an underground city that "cuts through" a mountain range?
A few centuries
By the middle ages, miners were quite good. They employed technology that was advanced for the time to solve major problems like flooding, ventilation, and removing spoil. If you're ...
- 10.5k
30
votes
Accepted
A huge asteroid is going to hit. How many people can the world put into (mostly) self-sufficient homes in 6 months time?
Food is a (the?) major limitation
In six months there needs to be 5-10 years worth of long-life food put aside. Let's take the low figure of 5 years as a less impossible target. Assuming that there ...
- 29.1k
27
votes
Without modern electronics, how could you determine your longitude, latitude, and altitude while lost deep underground?
People on the surface or at established underground settlements could set up "thumpers" which are massive weights that are raised and then dropped great heights according to a predetermined time ...
- 23.8k
26
votes
Accepted
What could cause a city to be buried underground but still remain relatively intact?
Have you heard of Pompeii?
Pompeii was covered by volcanic ashes. It was covered so well in the ash, that not only the town was left almost completely intact, but also people were covered by it and ...
- 16.9k
25
votes
Migrating Dungeon Monsters / Why do monsters not leave the dungeons?
First, just as executives tend to seek out the top floors of a building the the most powerful of entities likewise seem to gravitate to the lower, less accessible regions of a dungeon. Perhaps they ...
- 361
23
votes
How do you build an underground city that "cuts through" a mountain range?
Base it on a qanat.
Qanats are deep tunnels bored into mountains to convey water down to dry lowlands. They are built using ancient Persian tech which impressed the Romans when they showed up. 14th ...
- 305k
23
votes
Accepted
How deep underground could a city plausably be?
I was going to do this as comments, but there's enough here to warrant its own answer.
No more than 12 km.
At this point, the rock becomes plastic, with the other rock around it squeezing into the ...
- 17.3k
23
votes
Accepted
Is it possible for an artesian basin to go underneath a shallow sea while still being freswater?
In support of what you're looking for...
On a clear September day in 2015, after 10 years of working to get funding, my colleague Kerry Key and I stepped aboard the R/V Langseth, a research ship ...
- 128k
22
votes
Accepted
Surface is 500F (260 C), but we have thorium reactors, diggers and heat pumps so human life continues underground. Possible? Or slow-roast?
There is no reason not to live above-ground in well-insulated and cooled buildings. As far as the infrastructure goes, that's clearly much simpler. The reason it's not crazy is that the effect of ...
- 2,274
22
votes
How would an underground society measure time?
Water clocks
The most natural way to develop a measurement of time is by a natural phenomenon that divides the passing of non-quantized time1 into quantized time. As someone who has spent a fair ...
- 20.2k
22
votes
Accepted
Is it possible with modern-day technology to expand an already built bunker further below without the risk of collapsing the entire bunker?
People expand downwards all the time
People build tunnels out of prisons, expand mines downwards, build deeper basements. You can dig down and reinforce the tunnels. So long as the tunnels are ...
- 41.6k
21
votes
How can Dwarves produce honey underground?
I would like to suggest a fourth possibility in addition to the three in the original question, that the Dwarves are advanced technologically enough to have artificial lighting. Some people may think ...
- 30.7k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible