The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
Following the invention of the steam core and automatons, the British Empire with its vast resources became the most industrialised and scientifically advanced nation before the Great Frost occurred.
One of the only nations with the resources and wealth to build multiple generator towers. It sought to survive the Great Frost by first sending expeditions south, which was met with disaster, and then north into the frigid resource rich arctic. The Northern Expeditions, the construction of multiple generator towers, land dreadnoughts and the loss of southern portions of the British Empire brought the United Kingdom to the point of bankruptcy with even the Crown having to sell royal artifacts in order to finance the crumbling apparatus of state as the Frost began to claim the British Isles.
The last act of the United Kingdom, before its assumed fall in 1888, was to send as many of its citizens north into the Arctic to find the generator towers that had been built by royal engineers. Their goal was to outlast the Great Frost within the Frostlands and to establish vaults to preserve cultural artifacts to be hopefully recovered by the survivors of the Great Frost.
The United Kingdom’s Response to the Great Frost
The Great Frost began in the Summer of 1886 and although the British Empire was humanity’s best chance of facing and surviving the oncoming New Ice Age, which would see the Frostlands consume Europe and even London itself, its initial response was a combination of political inaction and scientific investigation.
Even as crops failed and snow fell in the height of summer there were forces within the House of Commons and the House of Lords which refused to acknowledge the severity of the oncoming crisis which would see the world consumed by ice, squandering what precious time the United Kingdom had to respond to the disaster.[1] It was only when the evidence began to pile in the form of snowdrifts which swallowed the streets of London, and those fled to the southern territories of the British Empire, did they accept the reality of the Great Frost and stop stonewalling efforts to confront the Great Frost.
The United Kingdom, as the centre of the world’s ‘Post-Babbage’ Industrial Revolution, stood the best chance of surviving the Great Frost and rebuilding the world in the wake of it.
They funded the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to send expeditions across what remained of the empire and the world to gather much flora as they could in the form of seeds and sapling to be preserved in ‘Arks’ in the far north of the Arctic. They hoped to restore greenery to the world whenever the Great Frost was to end.
The Arctic was scoured for locations in which heat generator towers could be built by the Royal Society of Engineers for colonies or Cities to be built around. Their goal was to save a portion of the United Kingdom’s population and through them the human race from the Great Frost.
Enormous Ships designed to break through the rapidly freezing seas and hulking marvels called Land Dreadnoughts were rapidly designed and built to ferry people to the Generators which would hopefully have been built by the time they reached them. Their last hope was to be able to survive the Great Frost and eventually reclaim their world from the frost.
- ↑ Frostpunk Loading Screen