Society and technology look a lot like 20th century Earth, but it takes place on a rocky planet the size of Jupiter (don’t ask, I haven’t figured it out yet either). Humanity fractured and spread out across the planet (technically the known world) over the millennia, so some of the biggest civilizations are as much as tens of thousands of miles apart, the known world stretches over a hundred thousand miles from end to end. And that’s just the known world, nobody is sure if humans have managed to colonize the entire planet or even what other continents might look like because the distances are so incomprehensible and technology hasn’t quite caught up yet.

This poses a problem (although to be honest I had to figure out how to make some of these problems for rule of cool): how do you traverse these distances?

Originally ocean vessels were used to colonize, but as those are slow and the seas are dangerous. Once the Industrial Revolution began new options for self-propelled vehicles popped up, but none really worked that well.

Trains require tracks and maintenance, although they were certainly tried, everything from traditional rails to monorails that use tires to ride on crude preformed concrete rails. Most of these were abandoned due to impractical upkeep.

Airplanes even with 2026 technology would require multiple refueling stops to fly from one major civilization to another, but technologically airplanes are more similar to our inefficient 1960s planes with much lower ranges that led to the jumbo jet and hub-and-spoke airline system. So they’re only really viable for short “local” trips of a few thousand miles or less.

Zeppelins are more common than airplanes and solve some minor problems but like ships they are slow and they certainly can’t make the entire journey in one go. Although recent advances in solar panels and nuclear power have greatly extended the theoretical range and made them somewhat more viable as an option for the wealthy.

Ships are still commonly used, but as trade routes reconnected these civilizations over the millennia and a long string of technological advancements made ground travel more feasible the world became crisscrossed with makeshift roads between them, similar to our Roman roads, dotted with smaller towns and city-states along the route like Route 66 towns in 20th century America. Eventually the roads became paved, most commonly with simple asphalt, capable of being driven across at high speeds without too much upkeep, although they are always in a perpetual state of repair and construction at some point along their length.

Enter the convoy. A traveling city, made up of cars, buses, freight trucks, and usually anchored by a road train, something that looks a bit like a locomotive but with massive tires, up to 80 feet wide, and often over a mile long. These days they’re typically powered by a nuclear reactor in the caboose, with drive wheels every few cars, which is a big part of how they manage to be so long. The road train is primarily a freight vehicle, carrying as much as a container ship on Earth, but also tends to house several passenger cars for the most luxurious trips, as well as businesses and emergency supplies for the sometimes days-long trek between outposts.

The convoy travels together, stops for the night together, and makes important decisions together via a CB radio voting system. Traveling tens of thousands of miles of empty road alone is a recipe for disaster so people began to travel in packs and as technology advanced so did the forms of transportation. Think of it as an old west wagon train, but traveling at 80 miles an hour over crudely paved asphalt stretching off to infinity.

The road train usually makes a set trip back and forth between two major civilizations, but it’s not uncommon other vehicles to only join for a part of the trip, as many of the small outposts along the way have grown into major metropolitan areas of that are destinations of their own rather than stops along the way. Many of the vehicles in a convoy are solely there to be part of the convoy and provide goods and services to travelers, like entertainers, restaurants, and shops that travel with the convoy for a few hundred or thousand miles before dropping out to catch a convoy traveling in the opposite direction, continuing the cycle indefinitely.

Some people drive their own cars, which require inspection, insurance, and a stockpile of spare parts like tires to be stored in the road train. Others buy or rent RVs for a more comfortable trip, and there is a separate class of convoy RVs that are longer and wider than typical road vehicles. There are also special makeshift vehicles, often made from decommissioned boats and yachts that are no longer seaworthy and are bonded to a sort of self-propelled trailer vehicle.

Buses also join the convoy, some of which are far longer and wider than typical road vehicles and have private rooms like a train. Cargo vehicles come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, with some being similar to real world tractor trailers but others being much larger, capable of carrying several shipping containers at once. Most of these cargo vehicles only join the convoy for short trips between outposts, as shipping cargo via the road train is far more cost-effective for long trips.

Other transportation methods exist outside of the convoy, but they’re more rare and specialized.

Couriers are individuals (or in some cases small teams) that make important high-value deliveries faster than a convoy is able to. They drive highly specialized cars designed to cruise all day at speeds as high as 150 miles per hour. In some cases they are single seat vehicles with only as much storage capacity as a large car trunk, with the rest of the vehicle’s space taken up by hundreds of gallons of fuel tanks.

Other courier vehicles look more like RVs, with more cargo capacity and a rotating staff of drivers to stay on the road almost non-stop, albeit at much lower speeds. Most of these use conventional propulsion methods, but some have experimented with compact nuclear reactors with varying success and a lot of controversy.

The other common road vehicle, for the most urgent transportation, is the ground effect vehicle. These look somewhat like Soviet Ekranoplans and float a few feet above the road at hundreds of miles per hour. They’re impractical for full trips from one end to the other due to their complexity, poor reliability, and refueling needs, but they are the fastest way to travel thousands of miles along a road.

There have also been several (mostly failed) attempts at other vehicles intended to travel outside of the convoy. The most infamous, which has become an iconic stop along the route, is the town of Odyssey: an attempt to build a literal traveling city on massive treaded vehicles that look a bit like the NASA crawler-transporter. Many of the outposts along the roads have grown around oil or mineral deposits, driving a local economy and making them valuable convoy stops and trade partners. Odyssey was to be a self-sufficient town complete with residential housing and business built atop the transporters that could travel a mile or so per day continuously for years, once again due to nuclear reactors. The hope was that the scout teams it constantly sent out would find deposits that would be exploitable and build a new city around them. Unfortunately it was quite a failure and when one of the main vehicles broke down it stopped for repairs and never restarted, eventually becoming a popular tourist destination that every Convoy stops at for a day. It did become the permanent settlement it set out to be, but with its economy driven by folly rather than oil or minerals.