abrahamsen.fyi

Tunnel

One button. When a mountain is inconvenient, you go through it. All the way through, ideally.

Tunnel —
Distance —
km/h —
Clearance —
Elevation —
Logged —
Cage —

How to inspect a tunnel
  • One button — hold Space, ↑, or the mouse to climb. Let go and you sink. That is the entire control scheme.
  • The cage — the drone flies in one, as real tunnel-inspection drones do. A glancing knock bounces it off and costs some cage; a head-on hit, or the last of the cage, ends the run.
  • A Norwegian road tunnel: a road, and a roof seven metres over it. The tunnel is drawn as an engineer draws one, stretched upright, so the gradients look steeper than they drive.
  • The traffic in your lane does sixty, and you do ninety, so you come up behind it. Go over it. A lorry is four metres tall and takes a while to get past.
  • The fittings — jet fans about a metre down from the roof, lane signals and speed limits five metres up. Go under them, or between them and the traffic. A fan’s throw pushes you down; the faint wedge beside it shows where.
  • The other lane is only scenery, but an oncoming lorry or bus shoves the air: up as it comes, down as it goes.
  • Under the sea, the tunnel goes down at up to ten per cent, past the pumps at the bottom, and up again. In winter, icicles hang in the mouths and ice grows on the road under them.
  • Old single-lane tunnels are bare rock, five and a bit metres high, and lit badly or not at all: the headlight is what you have. The oncoming traffic is in your lane, so go over it; the lorries wait in the passing places.
  • The light — yellow and bright through the entrance zone, white and dimmer inside. Sometimes the power is out for a stretch, with every fourth lamp on the emergency supply.
  • The approach road is on autopilot. You take over at the mouth, so have a thumb ready.
  • A tunnel has an end. Fly in from the road, through the mountain, and out the other side. It gets busier and faster on the way.
  • Log the damage. Faults are marked with a ring: cracks, leaks, loose slabs and rusty bolts in the roof, bare foam (three points; it burns), ice, dead lamps, and missing reflectors low on the wall. Pass close enough and they are logged, with a ping. Getting close to the damage means getting close to the lining, which is what the cage is for.
  • Today’s tunnel is a real one, the same for everyone today, with its real name, road, length and gradient, and the first attempt is the one that counts. Copy the result and bother someone with it. Now and then it is Spiralen, in Drammen, six and a half turns up the inside of a hill; and now and then it is on fire.
  • Things going on — a fire: the tunnel closed, a lorry burning, and smoke under the roof that cooks the cage, so go low. Night works: our lane coned off, lifts and a washer in it, and a convoy led through the other lane behind a pilot car. A roundabout in the rock, with traffic coming round across your lane. Two tubes: one way, and green doors to the other.
  • Endless has no exit: every 800 metres a new tunnel, blue-lit caverns to keep you awake, and the names hold up for a while. After a few kilometres the road authority stops pretending, and so does the tunnel.
  • Every route has a number, and its link goes straight back to that exact tunnel. Your best on each one is remembered, in your browser only.
  • The real tunnels come from NVDB, Statens vegvesen’s road database, under the Norwegian Licence for Open Government Data. They are in the game, so it still talks to nobody.
  • F or the corner button takes the tunnel full screen, and F or Esc brings it back.