Clarke Station is located just slightly on the Jupiter side of the L1 lagrange point between Jupiter and Europa, causing a slight but noticible amount of tension on the Tether.
The station was built as a set of modules, which have become something like neighborhoods.
Modules listed from the surface of Europa up.
-Surface Station (aka "The Crawler")
This building moves along the surface of Europa's ice sheet, and pierces through it, maintaining the connection between the station and the planet, pumping liquid water up from the planet to be converted into fuel and air, and providing a place for mining crews to head for the core to mine for mineral resources.
-The Tether
The tether connects the Surface Station with the rest of Clarke Station. Has a pipeline at the center, and an elevator around the outside that ferries material and people between the two stations.
-The Tether Anchor
The place that the Tether connects to Clarke Station. The elevator boarding platform is somewhat analogous to a train station, and is the hub of the transit network that serves the lower part of the station.
-Worker Residential Facilities A, B, and C
These large, semi-building-like structures are located around the Tether Anchor and the Leonov District. Rotation produces gravity in the Residential Facilities; the upper floors have something less than 1g, the lowest floors something slightly more. Coloquial names for the facilities are Smyslov(A), Halvorsen(B), and Micheals(C).
-Industrial Module (AKA the Leonov District)
This drum-shaped module houses the mass processing, refining, and electrolysis facilities of the station. Here, water from the planet is made into breathable oxygen and hydrogen fuel for ships, and minerals from the core are refined into material resources. Also home for what passes for an underground on the station, together with the markets in Smyslov.
-Floyd Tower
Floyd Tower runs up the middle of the station, connecting the Leonov District and Chandra Heights, and is home to the offices of the Daedalus Aerospace Corporation, the organization that owns Clarke Station. The Tower is the only place on the station where gravity is provided exclusively by gravity plating; 'down' in the tower is actually down toward Europa. The DAC technically runs the entirety of Clarke Station, but since misrule might result in outright rebellion, it would be more accurate to say that the Company governs the station.
-The Solar Conduit
The Conduit runs along one side of Floyd Tower, and transfers energy from the solar array at the top of the station to the industrial section below. Also, the surface of the conduit converts some of that energy into bright enough light to maintain the plants of the green modules.
-The Green Modules (AKA Bowman Gardens and Poole Wood)
Bowman Gardens and Poole Wood form two halves of a ring that rotates around the Solar Conduit. Within these sections, trees and other plants grow and produce oxygen for the whole station. Poole Wood contains mostly trees, a small forest in the station. Bowman gardens bares more resemblence to a green city or suburb. The University of Europa is located in Bowman Gardens, as is the Caduceus Center, the largest off-Earth hospital.
-Chandra Heights
The Heights is the rich district of the station. A solid disk extending out from the hub of the station, the interior of Chandra Heights resembles a high-rise downtown, with large towers extending up toward the hub of the section. Most of the gravity in Chandra Heights is centrifugal, but gravity plating is in use to equalize gravity to 1g throughout the module. The highest rents are along the outsides of the disc, where windows out give views on the rest of the station, Europa, and Jupiter.
-The Port District
At the top of the station, this is where ships come to dock with the station. The Port has a variety of docking areas, and can accomidate just about any size ship currently built, from little 12-jump courier ships all the way up to 1-jump superships like the Empress of the Stars. This section of the station is also where the station's solar array connects, branching off in three arms to collect solar energy to power the station.
The station operates on a 24-hour day, unlike Jupiter or Europa, and the lights in the "outdoor" areas of the station are dimmed and brightened in accordance with this. In addition, the Green Modules rotate around the station once every 24 hours, so they're lit by the Solar Conduit in a way that simulates the day/night cycle of Earth.
4.26.2009
Phenotype Universe 1 - The Jump Drive
Perhaps the most influential technology of the 21st Century, the Samson-type Jump Drive has finally allowed people to traverse the gulfs between the planets in days, rather than years. Like most of the most important inventions in history, it was discovered at least partially by accident.
Experimental physicist Gregory Samson had been attempting to create a device to predictably punch wormholes in the fabric of space. So far, all his device seemed to do was make its own internal clock run extremely fast. However, when a transformer several blocks away from his office was hit by a truck and unloaded several gigajoules of current into his device, it and the table it rested on vanished, appearing in a pub several miles down the road, much to the surprise of those enjoying their afternoon pints.
While a pretty deep knowledge of physics is needed to understand why the jump drive works, understanding how it operates is fairly simple; when you drop a large amount of electrical energy into the drive over a very short (less than 1 second) period of time, the drive disappears in one location and appears somewhere in the direction the drive was pointed at a distance proportional to the power used, along with anything it's particularly well-attached to. Through extensive testing, it is known that the jump always takes exactly 121 minutes, no matter the distance travelled.
In usual practice, a drive is connected to a power source, typically a large bank of capacitors. The ship is pointed in the direction of its destination, and the capacitors are charged to full and then unloaded all at once into the drive of the ship. The ship vanishes from its present position and reappears 121 minutes later several light-minutes away. The crew then re-orients the ship, recharges the capacitors either from solar cells or small neuclear reactors or batteries, and jumps again, and the process is repeated until their destination is within a few light-seconds, at which point more conventional thrust is used to guide the ship into dock.
Obviously, the more capacitors a ship can hold, the further it can go, especially because the drive seems not to care how much mass it drags with it, so bigger ships tend also to be faster, though there are exceptions in the form of smaller courier ships packed full of power but with space for little else. Since Clarke Station on Europa was one of the first stations to be established outside of the Earth-Luna system, the jump capability of ships is often referred to in the number of jumps, on average, it takes a ship to travel from Earth to Clarke Station. The smallest of ships, the kind that might be owned by (very rich) individuals might range from eighteen- to twelve-jumpers. Bigger cargo and mass transport ships tend to be more like five- or three-jumpers. The Empress of the Skies, a giant cargo and passenger transport (and the ship that all of the heroes will be travelling on in the first session) is the first ship that is a guaranteed one-jumper, and is one of the largest vehicles ever built. The Empress has, so far, made two hundred and sixteen successfull trips to Europa and back, and has never suffered so much as a navigational malfunction.
There are some people that are opposed to the widespread use of Samson-type jump technology. Because of the slingshot-like nature of the drive, no ship has ever been lost in drive space, but the ships aren't immune to damage while in transit, and a very few have come out full of corpses after their life support systems failed, or as tangled balls of metal after their conventional drives malfunctioned and exploded. Ships continue to become ever-safer, but enough accidents have been broadcast and televised to make some believe that the technology simply isn't safe. There is also at least one church that claims to have learned that the drive space is Hell, and that demons gave us the technology to lure us there to steal our souls. Needless to say, this is not a widely held belief.
Experimental physicist Gregory Samson had been attempting to create a device to predictably punch wormholes in the fabric of space. So far, all his device seemed to do was make its own internal clock run extremely fast. However, when a transformer several blocks away from his office was hit by a truck and unloaded several gigajoules of current into his device, it and the table it rested on vanished, appearing in a pub several miles down the road, much to the surprise of those enjoying their afternoon pints.
While a pretty deep knowledge of physics is needed to understand why the jump drive works, understanding how it operates is fairly simple; when you drop a large amount of electrical energy into the drive over a very short (less than 1 second) period of time, the drive disappears in one location and appears somewhere in the direction the drive was pointed at a distance proportional to the power used, along with anything it's particularly well-attached to. Through extensive testing, it is known that the jump always takes exactly 121 minutes, no matter the distance travelled.
In usual practice, a drive is connected to a power source, typically a large bank of capacitors. The ship is pointed in the direction of its destination, and the capacitors are charged to full and then unloaded all at once into the drive of the ship. The ship vanishes from its present position and reappears 121 minutes later several light-minutes away. The crew then re-orients the ship, recharges the capacitors either from solar cells or small neuclear reactors or batteries, and jumps again, and the process is repeated until their destination is within a few light-seconds, at which point more conventional thrust is used to guide the ship into dock.
Obviously, the more capacitors a ship can hold, the further it can go, especially because the drive seems not to care how much mass it drags with it, so bigger ships tend also to be faster, though there are exceptions in the form of smaller courier ships packed full of power but with space for little else. Since Clarke Station on Europa was one of the first stations to be established outside of the Earth-Luna system, the jump capability of ships is often referred to in the number of jumps, on average, it takes a ship to travel from Earth to Clarke Station. The smallest of ships, the kind that might be owned by (very rich) individuals might range from eighteen- to twelve-jumpers. Bigger cargo and mass transport ships tend to be more like five- or three-jumpers. The Empress of the Skies, a giant cargo and passenger transport (and the ship that all of the heroes will be travelling on in the first session) is the first ship that is a guaranteed one-jumper, and is one of the largest vehicles ever built. The Empress has, so far, made two hundred and sixteen successfull trips to Europa and back, and has never suffered so much as a navigational malfunction.
There are some people that are opposed to the widespread use of Samson-type jump technology. Because of the slingshot-like nature of the drive, no ship has ever been lost in drive space, but the ships aren't immune to damage while in transit, and a very few have come out full of corpses after their life support systems failed, or as tangled balls of metal after their conventional drives malfunctioned and exploded. Ships continue to become ever-safer, but enough accidents have been broadcast and televised to make some believe that the technology simply isn't safe. There is also at least one church that claims to have learned that the drive space is Hell, and that demons gave us the technology to lure us there to steal our souls. Needless to say, this is not a widely held belief.
First Post - Welcome
Welcome, all, to the blog for Phenotype. I'll be posting setting information here, as well as between game scenes. Like I said before, we can do downtime posts if everyone wants to, and I'd like you all to, but they're not necessary.
The first setting post will go up in the next couple of days.
The first setting post will go up in the next couple of days.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)