Rockstar Games is famed for meticulous detail, but inquisitive explorers still uncover oversights and conspicuous flaws.
YouTuber Any Austin has returned with another investigative piece. This time he focused on Red Dead Redemption 2.
The creator wandered through the town of Rhodes and noticed wires linking every building to a power source and extending beyond the town. He followed one route and it led to a window of the Atlantic Electrical Company in the industrial quarter of Saint Denis, the region’s largest city. In doing so, two distinct towns appeared to be served by the same electricity provider.
Any Austin then wondered about the more remote settlements. To answer that, he undertook a wide-ranging study, spending weeks mapping the electrical lines throughout the world of RDR2.
He uncovered a crucial mistake made by Rockstar when designing the game’s power network. From a physical and engineering perspective, such a distribution system simply could not exist.
The wires that run alongside the railways in the game are actually telegraph lines, not power lines — they don’t transmit electrical power. In 1899, true long-distance transmission lines were almost nonexistent (with rare exceptions such as the Niagara Falls to Buffalo link).
When electricity is transmitted over long distances it suffers power loss. The usual remedy is to transmit at very high voltages, but that brings a new danger — the current can arc from the line to nearby objects, like a tree, and spark fires; for this reason transmission conductors are placed high on tall towers.
In short, sending power over long distances requires specialized equipment that simply wasn’t available in 1899 (and is likewise absent in the game).
Therefore, the idea that a single power station in Saint Denis could supply every settlement, including those located far from the source, is pure fiction — it wouldn’t have been feasible.
Source: iXBT.games