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| [Gazetteer/RFC] Mars |
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Posted by: M Fnord - 10-20-2007, 08:36 PM - Forum: Fenspace
- Replies (19)
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Working on rewriting the Mars stub. Forgive the wiki markup. Still very much a WIP. Suggestions, comments etc. welcome.
{{ gazetteer:places:mars.jpg?285 |Mars, photographed by the Mars Global Surveyor (courtesy NASA)}}
^ Mars ^^
^ Orbit | 227,940,000 km from primary (mean) |
^ Diameter | 6,794.4 km (equatorial) |
^ Surface Gravity | 0.33G |
^ Year | 686.98 days |
^ Day | 24.62 hours |
^ Mean temp. | 210K (-63C) |
^ Atmosphere | .010 atm (CO2 95%, N2 3%, Ar 2%) |
^ Water/Ice Index | 0% |
^ Population (2013) | 250,000 |
^ Political Affiliation | [[gazetteer:government:conventions|Fenspace Convention] |
^ Government | Direct Democracy |
^ Capital | Helium |
^ Phobos ^^
^ Orbit | 9,378 km from parent (mean) |
^ Diameter | 27 x 21.6 x 18.8 km |
^ Surface Gravity | negligible |
^ Year | 7.75 hours |
^ Day | 0 hours |
^ Mean temp. | 40K (-233C) |
^ Atmosphere | none |
^ Water/Ice Index | 0% |
^ Population (2013) | 55,000 |
^ Political Affiliation | [[gazetteer:government:conventions|Fenspace Convention] |
^ Government | Direct Democracy |
^ Capital | Port Phobos |
====== Mars ======
Since our first close-up picture of Mars in 1965, spacecraft voyages to the Red Planet have revealed a world strangely familiar, yet different enough to challenge our perceptions of what makes a planet work. Every time we feel close to understanding Mars, new discoveries send us straight back to the drawing board to revise existing theories.
You'd think Mars would be easier to understand. Like Earth, Mars has polar ice caps and clouds in its atmosphere, seasonal weather patterns, volcanoes, canyons and other recognizable features. However, conditions on Mars vary wildly from what we know on our own planet.
Over the past three decades, spacecraft have shown us that Mars is rocky, cold, and sterile beneath its hazy, pink sky. We've discovered that today's Martian wasteland hints at a formerly volatile world where volcanoes once raged, meteors plowed deep craters, and flash floods rushed over the land. And Mars continues to throw out new enticements with each landing or orbital pass made by our spacecraft.
//(Text courtesy NASA's Mars Exploration Program homepage.)//
===== History =====
{{artðŸŽmars-large.gif?x200 |Unofficial Martian flag}}(blah history)
===== Places of Interest =====
As the most thoroughly explored place in Fenspace pre-wave, Mars has a number of native features that attract interest as well as the settled areas. Most people are familiar with the four giant volcanoes of the **Tharsis Mountains** and the rift valley of **Valles Marineris**. Also of interest is the **Cydonia** region, home of the infamous **[[Face on Mars]**.
Fen settlements are scattered all over the planet. The largest settlement on Mars is the **[[Utopia Planitia Shipyard]** facility in **Utopia Planitia**, not far from the //Viking 2// landing site. The shipyard was designed to be permanent, despite the fact that the terraforming project intends for Utopia to be underwater once the underground aquifers melt. How the [[gazetteer:factions:united federation of planets|Trekkies] intend to deal with this problem is as yet unknown.
The [[gazetteer:factions:pulpers|Pulper] city of **[[Helium]**, also the second-largest city on Mars, is located on the northern rim of Marineris near **Ophir Labes**. Helium is the most cosmopolitan of the Martian cities, partly because there aren't enough Pulpers to fill an entire city and partly because the Barsoomian subfaction pulled out all the stops in creating //the// ultimate fantasy Martian experience. Helium is a city composed of soaring towers and inhabited by fen who live the crystals-and-togas lifestyle.
**Airy-0 Crater** is host to the third-largest city on Mars, the unaligned town of **[[Port Robinson]**. Port Robinson is the largest fendane settlement outside of Earth cislunar orbit. Populated mainly by members and supporters of the [[www.marssociety.org/|Mars Society] who began migrating to Mars early, almost beating the Trekkies to the surface. Port Robinson is the center for "Martian unification," endlessly pestering the other settlements on uniting as a faction above and beyond their political origins. The town also happens to be the spiritual center of Fenspace, as the town square is built off of **[[St. Liebowitz's Cathedral]**.
Southeast of Helium in **Argyre Planitia** is the [[gazetteer:factions:galactic republic|Warsie] outpost of **[[Mos Eisley]**. Mos Eisley exists mostly as a way for the Republic to keep an official presence on Mars. However, the town does provide a good stop-off point for scientists working in the southern hemisphere, terraformers and other Martian nomads.
The enigmatic **[[Castle Heterodyne]**, home base for a Pulper splinter group known as the [[gazetteer:factions:Foglios], exists in an undisclosed location somewhere in the southern hemisphere. Most people figure the castle is located in the highlands around **Hellas Planitia**. Others contend that Castle Heterodyne lurks near the polar ice cap. A handful of conspiracy theorists have suggested that the castle is //mobile//, moving randomly from point to point across the surface.
In orbit, most of the action is at **[[Port Phobos]**. Port Phobos began as a freight waystation for material headed to Helium and Port Robinson, but rapidly mutated into the single largest port facility in Fenspace, outstripping //[[ships:Stellvia]// and [[gazetteer:places:venus:Crystal Tokyo] in terms of cargo and passengers moved. This rapid growth has turned Port Phobos into a free-floating version of Manhattan, with almost as high a population density. The internal habitat is slowly hollowing out the entire moon, using the mined material to build ever more elaborate networks of docks and skyscrapers on the outer surface.
The other major station in Martian orbit is **[[ships:Starbase 1]**, the first fen space station (built by te Trekkies in late 2007) and moved to its current location in areosynchronous orbit over Utopia Planitia Yards' meridian when the surface facility was built. Starbase 1 is the heart of the Martian shipbuilding industry and the heart of the Federation Starfleet, meaning that hundreds of ships in various stages of completion are gathered around the station at any given point.
Also in orbit is the headquarters of the [[gazetteer:companies:Mars Terraforming Project], located on Deimos. The terraforming base is much less populated than Port Phobos, but has almost the same inhabitable volume. Most of this volume is used by the terraformers to run test farms, growing plants in Martian soil and mid-terraforming atmospheric conditions.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery
FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information
"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"
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| Something that occurred to me... |
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Posted by: Sirrocco - 10-17-2007, 07:52 PM - Forum: Fenspace
- Replies (5)
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One of the funny things about Handwavium as a potential environmental disaster is that it grows. You add (mostly) organic material to handwavium, you get more handwavium. There's no particularly established way to turn handwavium into not-handwavium. The really scary thing about handwavium - the thing that I'm sure has the environmentalists terrified - is that if you flush enough of it down the toilet, you're pretty likely to wind up with a strain that runs on sewage. Shortly after that, you'll get a colony of the stuff that isn't possible to get rid of without *extreme* measures, and shortly after *that*, you'll see almost every critter that lives down there sprouting a biomod. Handwavium pollution is potentially very scary indeed - and since it can only be created, not destroyed, the degenerate endstate is with every lifeform on the planet sporting a biomod, and everything on the planet being modified to one degree or another, along with a sea or two of the goop itself.
Given that the original investment might well have been a small spore-bearing pod or something, that would be a *remarkably* efficient way to xenoform a world. A plausible theory for the Overfan, no?
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| "Top Brit Wit" poll results |
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Posted by: robkelk - 10-16-2007, 12:52 AM - Forum: General Chatter
- Replies (2)
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No, I didn't know about the poll, either.
Apparently, Oscar Wilde has been voted the top Brit wit by viewers of a TV station I've never heard of before.
(Edit: Never mind that the top two "Brits" were Irish. After all, the pollsters didn't.)
The Register article linked above lists the top ten from the poll, with at least one quote from each. I especially like the Noel Coward line they chose...
-Rob Kelk
"Read Or Die: not so much a title as a way of life." - Justin Palmer, 6 June 2007
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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| Portal |
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Posted by: HoagieOfDoom - 10-15-2007, 08:38 AM - Forum: General Chatter
- Replies (20)
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Greatest. Puzzle game. Ever. SO much freaking fun and its more amazing than a lot of the games that have come out recently despite being less than three hours along. It's got humor and style in spades and an epic as all hell ending. Highly recommended to anyone.
"After the training, cake and grief counseling will be offered."*********
Touched By His Noodly Appendage
www.venganza.org
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