Considering a Horizontal Elevator

[Core Room]

"So, the problem was that the dungeon's sphere of influence has grown so vast that getting about takes too long. Not that I ever go out, mind you."

"You don't happen to have nine lives, do you? And since Named monsters revive after death, I have a feeling there may be something of the sort with the Dungeon Master too. Like, you won't die unless the Core is smashed, or some such."

"I've no intention of testing it."

"Now, as for means of transport: cars can't be maintained, so they'd turn into industrial waste in short order. Trains are out before that, since there isn't even any way to obtain them. That was the gist, wasn't it."

"Isn't there a railway-museum dungeon or a rolling-stock depot dungeon lying around somewhere?"

"There is not. In this vicinity there exist no sea, no railways, and no shrines."

Marie declared it flatly, eyeing the map of Saitama Prefecture. Of course this isn't the Saitama world, so the positions don't correspond exactly, but the likeliest spot would be near this dungeon, and if there were none there, then there are none at all, presumably.

"The sea may not exist in this world to begin with. At any rate, transport, you were saying."

"On that matter, the Knight Commander put forward a proposal: could we not use the tier-group elevator for horizontal movement?"

"The tier-group elevator, is it."

"What an ordinary dungeon would call a 'transfer circle.' In a large-scale dungeon the difference in elevation reaches several kilometers, and the stairs become an absurd number, so it's needed to collect emotions and life force from adventurers efficiently. To send a weakened adventurer back up to the surface for another attempt another day, to dispatch a strong adventurer to the depths, or to 'dispose of' an inconvenient adventurer."

"Walking up from the surface to Tier-Group 3 would be far too reckless."

"In this dungeon, too, the tier-groups are connected by stairs, but it would be no mere mountain climb."

"At the edge of the sphere of influence, it's quite a distance."

"At present the farthest point is Biwabashi, just short of Iruma. We'll set up a checkpoint, but won't levy a toll. The distance is sixty-two kilometers, so by elevator it would take less than an hour."

"Surprisingly quick."

"The tier-group elevator itself is, in its mechanism, a linear-motor elevator, so unlike the ordinary cable elevators within each tier-group, it allows continuous operation and the coupling of express and local service, that is, running several 'cars' in a single shaft. For that reason it isn't affected by the intermediate floors. Still, as it is an elevator after all, it isn't suited to mass transport, and its energy efficiency is inferior, too."

Because linear-motor elevators are costly, even in the other world they aren't used except in truly enormous buildings or structures of unusual shape.

"So its carrying capacity is low."

"As for carrying capacity, a railway moves thirty to sixty thousand people an hour, a bus five thousand an hour, a car a thousand an hour (per lane), but a transfer circle, with one boarding platform running at intervals of about thirty seconds, comes to roughly four hundred and eighty people an hour if an adventuring party averages four. Each 'car' itself can hold ten or fifteen, mind you."

"Even so, that's not all that many."

"This dungeon currently has four hundred eighty-two tier-groups, three thousand five hundred twenty floors, and a total floor area of six million four hundred thousand square meters. It can easily house a hundred thousand people, so we'd need a carrying capacity of roughly ten thousand people in five minutes, a thousand in thirty seconds. Which is to say, the first floor, the north side of Tier-Group 4, will eventually need something like a hundred elevator platforms."

"And could the horizontal elevator later be converted into a train, say?"

"The specifications are completely different, so it would be quicker to tear it down and rebuild. An elevator is the optimal choice for the vertical direction, though even so, at kilometer-scale heights like this dungeon's, it has considerable problems… For the horizontal direction, over tens of kilometers, it can't really be called a good choice."

"In that case, would it still be better to summon the library's official cars to the number of our Named monsters, give up on maintenance, and treat them as disposable?"

"Once the numbers grow, the loss from treating cars as disposable can no longer be ignored, but if it's only dungeon monsters using them, that way is the more 'profitable.' Treating them as throwaways is morally questionable, I'd say. Also, the tier-group elevator, being a function of the dungeon itself, can't be destroyed easily, but an official car is treated as equipment, so there's a risk of it being wrecked in an attack or the like."

"If we're to use cars, we'd have to widen the highways and build proper roads for them, too."

"No. If we're going to introduce them in earnest, I think we may as well build an elevated road from the very start. We'll need expressways eventually, so make it a provisional two lanes at first, and once we can maintain automobiles, expand it into a proper expressway. Let me look into which is better."