How large would something like this castle have to be?

It houses 200,000 people. Each person gets an individual room that is furnished with a bed for one person, a sofa, a medium-sized television, a coffee table, and a bathroom with a shower and one of those portable toilet things. (So basically, it has about that much space.) All of these rooms are essentially next to each other and outside them are very long hallways. Elevators are also common here.

199,500 people have to fit well enough(as in, they can walk elsewhere without much trouble) in a cafeteria sort of room.

There are 500 chefs in the kitchen, along with gigantic pots for mass-cooking. Also, the sheer amount of food supply needs to be stored somewhere.

The underground dungeon is capable of keeping 50,000 people in prison.

There is an armory that stores rifles for potentially 199,997 people, which also stores tanks and aircraft(about the size of this)

There is also a modern furnace which is used for melting steel along with a machine that makes ammunition.

Outside, there are dozens of gatling guns for defense.

I'm not exactly asking for a precise size here, but lets compare it to say...the size of Mt. Fuji.

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.

I figure that you could cram all the stuff you mentioned for one person's room into a 15x10 foot space pretty easily. 15x10x8 (feet tall) x200000 (population) = 240 million cubic feet. It sounds like a lot, but if you stretched it into a tower the height of Mt. Fuji it would only be 150 feet to a side, or the size of half a football field. If you made it into a cubic box, it would be only 620 feet to a side; many of Tokyo and NYC's buildings are much taller. Let's add 400 feet of height for the ground floor cafeteria and room for hallways/maintenance rooms/kitchens/offices, as well as the 150 feet downwards for storing 50000 more people. The furnaces and gatling guns wouldn't take up much space, and the planes and tanks would be stored in hangars as opposed to in vertical towers.

Blah blah blah anyway for the main stuff you'd have a tower about 1000x600x600 feet, with another block 150x600x600 underground. Basically the base would be the size of a football stadium, and it would be slightly shorter than the Empire State Building. Hangars/armories could take up as much ground space as you need (or you could just have people keep their rifles in their rooms for easy access), but it wouldn't need to be anywhere near Mt. Fuji-sized.

10 x15 for each individual room sounds about right.

But R Labs, you've forgotten to add in the actual structure; the thickness of the walls floors and vent spaces. The interior walls could be as little as four inches thick and still be actual walls, (or 1 inch thick, if you want them to be nothing more than cubicle dividers (even at 1 inch, the dividers would still add five feet to the size of the building and) but there would need to be a lattice of weight-bearing interior walls that would probably be more like six inches to a foot thick. You also need room for plumbing (the waste pipes for a bank of rooms 77 tall is going to need to be more than 4 or 6 inches in diameter) and air vents.

Also 77 floors tall is out of the "walk everywhere" range and into "Lots of banks of elevators (and their associated mechanicals rooms").

You also didn't factor in the hallways or stairwells.

Double the footprint you estimated, at least.

edited 18th Jan '11 2:51:38 PM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Hallways would have to be roughly three feet for most to walk comfortably.

For a reference of how big a castle can get, Windsor Castle is a really good reference to the scale of things. It covers roughly 13 acres and houses about five-hundred, but that's because modern times don't require castles anymore and its actual capacity would be much more because it has 13,000 rooms  ^*

. And there are many, many larger castles than Windsor—it's just the largest one still inhabited.

edited 23rd Jan '11 12:25:53 PM by Sharysa

That,my friend would be a big castle. The Keep alone would be huge.

Yeah, that's a good point. At least double the size makes sense, though it still won't be anywhere near the size of Mt. Fuji unless everyone had their own personal mansion within the castle walls or something.

What I'm wondering is, where'd all the stone you'd need for a constuction this size come from?

The owner of the castle hired dwarves to construct it for him and it took only a year]]. But there used to be a mountain where the castle is now.

Always touching and looking. Piss off.

It's actually made of more steel and wood than it is stone.

Also, magic.

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.

Also, I noticed a bit of odd calculations, so here we go:

If the chefs don't actually live there, that's nearly 400 people per chef. Even with magic, there would be a very slim margin for error—one slip-up means, potentially, five hundred people need to skip a meal. It's REALLY important to know if the chefs are part of the permanent population, because factoring that in you'd have around 40 people per chef—much more do-able.

That's actually really easy—find out how big an aircraft hangar is, and multiply it by how many airplanes need to be stored. Add in how big the tanks are, and the rest is actually very compact; most of the guns would be on the walls or in boxes. By the way, modern guns need to be stored separately (as in, separate rooms) from their ammunition due to safety concerns. I'd advise you add a specially reinforced area/room for that, because I don't want to know what the ammunition for 200,000 guns would do if, say, a cord shorts out and a few of the sparks get lucky.

edited 23rd Jan '11 11:24:26 AM by Sharysa

They do actually live there.

I'm not exactly sure why them living there would help much in that sort of problem though.

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.

If they don't live in the castle, the chances of one or more not making it to work any given day goes way up — any number of things could keep them from getting there — broke-down vehicle, blocked roads (think snow or heavy rain), things like that. If they do live in the building, only illness is a factor, since outside conditions won't keep them from getting from their apartment to the kitchens.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

... Didn't I just explain it? If the chefs aren't part of the permanent population, they'd have to cook for 400 PEOPLE EACH—in addition to what Madrugada said about transportation and the potential for one chef not showing up, there is a ludicrously small margin for error. If just two or three chefs can't make it, then you've got over twelve-hundred skipping a meal. And since this is the army, where people are working extremely hard, skipping a meal is NOT GOOD.

Even with magic, the remaining chefs would still have to take up the slack for the others.

However, since they ARE actual residents, the numbers are down to 40 people per chef (including themselves)—difficult and/or tedious, but not as ludicrous as 400 per chef. One person can cook for forty people in about an hour or two, depending on the type of food.

edited 24th Jan '11 1:03:45 PM by Sharysa

Huh? I'm not following your math. 500 cooks, cooking for 199,500 people (the cooks are not included in that number) = 399 people each. 500 cooks, cooking for 199,000 people (the same 199,500 people only now the cooks not counted) = 398 people. To drop the number of people each cook is cooking for to 40, you have to increase the number of cooks to 5000.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Yeah I was wondering why them being there would mean that it lowers to 40.

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.

For comparison:

• The Pentagon has a staff of 26,000.
• The World Trade Center complex housed 50,000 workers and 200,000 visitors per day.
• Sky City 1000 would house 36,000 apartment dwellers and 100,000 office workers.
• Reno has a permanent population of 200,000 and an international airport
• Pyramid City could hold 750,000.
• X-Seed 4000, which would be roughly the same size as Mt. Fuji, could house 1 million people comfortably.
• Ultima tower would also house 1,000,000.

Aircraft and refineries take up a lot of space in part because you need things like runways, so I'd say the three - sky city structure might fit the bill.

edited 24th Jan '11 8:48:30 PM by FrodoGoofballCoTV

Oh, fuck. My calculator must be stupid, because I did that exact same equation and my result was what I posted earlier. *has worked it out on paper since her previous post*

edited 25th Jan '11 2:02:00 PM by Sharysa

My guess is that you accidentally dropped a zero when you entered 199,500; 19,950 divided by 500 is also roughly 40.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

@Ed: Sounds cool, let me raise a few practical questions at this point.

• tech level: Okay, to house 200,000 people in the same structure comfortably (by house, I mean they all live there as a primary residence) would be a neat trick using modern building materials and techniques. How much are you willing to Handwave using magic as an excuse? Personally, suspension of disbelief would be broken unless at least some of the mechanics were explained.
• construction: I may have missed this, but is this an above-ground castle or a series of caves? I caught wood and steel as the primary building materials; Thank you for skipping the "hewn from the living rock" cliche, but do realize that you'd bankrupt a small country mining that much iron, or decimate a large forest for that much timber. (Fun note: from logging to finished product, 30-50% of wood does not make it through the process. the rest is sawdust, branches, trimmings and waste.)
• Quality of living: Does everyone live equally well, or is there a vast disconnect between one class of people in this structure and another? Housing 200k people would be easier if the vast majority of them lived in crude conditions.

All I can think of at the moment. That said, I like the idea and wouldn't mind hearing more about it. I build things for a living, you see, and like strange-ass construction in my novels.

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

The iron isn't mined. It's ripped out from below that. Like whichever part of the Earth that contains the most iron.

Magic hand waves:

In order to reduce the need for plumbing, water magic is used and the stuff is constantly recycled and purified.

In order to reduce the needs of electricity, giant fireballs(that are contained) are used for cooking instead.

The iron from the mantle wasn't gained by normal means, I can tell you that.

General construction of the thing was mostly done through the use of things like teleportation and fire magic for melting steel into the shape they want it at and stuff.

Other than that not much happens.

edited 25th Jan '11 2:50:12 PM by Edmania

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.

@Ed: figured you'd gloss over the plumbing details, and with good reason; as I said above doing this with straight tech would be a neat trick today. Might want to go into some detail about how the fire/water/air are harnessed; would make for some cool reading.

Next questions:

• food. Where does it come from? Is it produced internally or grown externally?
• purpose: Just what is this huge castle for? is it a military base, a city or a hidden facility dedicated to some obscure purpose (religion, magical research, etc.)?

If I were to write some of the strange things that come under my eyes they would not be believed. ~Cora M. Strayer~

Yep, most likely did. Hence why I usually work math out on paper.

Re: Previous post
It's been mentioned a couple times that they need space for tanks, ammunition, and aircraft, so it's pretty obviously a military base.

edited 25th Jan '11 3:26:53 PM by Sharysa

Food is gained from external sources. The castle is on a giant mountain (some of it are tunnels inside, but that place is mainly a jail area), and IIRC food doesn't grow so well on mountains. I guess there's animals to hunt and stuff but that's probably nowhere near enough to feed that many people for any decent amount of time.

The purpose is as a military base and a giant church.

Oh also,

Not everyone lives equally well there, most people in it are only fed one meal a day (which doesn't taste all that great either), people that the leader in the castle particularly likes live in a high-class room and are properly fed, while nearly everyone else live in lower-middle class rooms. The leader's child and spouse live in a room where you would expect royalty to sleep in, though.

edited 25th Jan '11 5:34:31 PM by Edmania

If people learned from their mistakes, there wouldn't be this thing called bad habits.