This was supposed to be later in my schedule but since HRogge wanted info about the spaceport, and he has posted a new CI fic, here is the next update, as a present.
I must say, this is getting huge... I started this thinking the entire city introduction woudl be about the same lenght then the current update. I had not mentioned it yet, because I though this would be smalled and with less details, but every character and company I mention, except those direcly involved with Genesis C&D, are Open Characters unless I say otherwise in the description. I plan to make wiki entires (well, probably stubs) for all of then. Eventually.
What looms outside: Sumugan Gate, Mummu Spaceport and the Towers of Ashur.
The Marduk dome is the first thing anyone notices when approaching the city; thirty kilometres across, its size fills the horizon.
This is the second (third if you count the scale model) of the Garasu diamond domes; but it had a different waving than its elder sibling in Kandor. Since Luna has days than last two full weeks, Oscar tried to make a darkened dome than would protect him from his sunlight weakness quirk. It failed, and the only apparent effect was the matt looks of the dome. Of course, Mardukans will proclaim than this effect was intentional and it looks far more elegant than the shiny dome of their northern rivals. Due to this small quirk, it cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye, as the dome fades with the lunar landscape at great distances.
Hidden under the dome is the massive array of life support systems for the crater habitat: Powerful lights and shades to create a 24 hour day, air filters and wind makers, heating, holographic emitters to create a a blue sky and clouds, and the weather system (not only rain sprinklers; a very unscientific survey reached the conclusion than a full 20% of all handwavium projects in the city will not get the initial activation unless there is a lightning storm outside, and most genetics projects will actually need a lightning bolt to hit the lab building)
The towers of Ashur, a massive wall with skyscraper sized towers, is actually the supports and foundation of the dome. It is fifty meters tall and thirty meters wide, while the towers are 75 meters tall.
Since the design of the dome supports sort of reminded Bernie a medieval wall, he went with the style and created a giant fortress, and covered the walls with huge pennants and prop weapons out of a speampunk opera (one whose writer had way too much absinthe).
And then the War started, and suddenly a “city wall” did not look like such a whimsy. All the weapon props were exchanged for waved weapon designs, and the towers were manned by a city militia and Great Justice. Great justice did install a few hardtech missile launchers and anti-aircraft artillery, but they were dismantled after the war; if it is at all possible, Oscar prefers to use waved (and so non-lethal) weapons instead of hardtech ones.
The wall has eleven towers, plus the twin towers in the main city gate (all of the towers have a city gate, but they are seldom used, and the Sumugan gate is the only one able to fit anything bigger than a truck). Each of the towers has an underground fusion power station -which feeds the city energy needs- and a control room for the environment system.
Besides that, most of the towers have remained empty since the war ended and there was no more need for defences. The city Watch uses the gate towers; and two of the towers have been ceded to the Convention and the Crystal Millennium: Tower V is the Great Justice base and armoury depot in Marduk, while tower III is a base for the SAM Search and Rescue.
All the shiny than the Marduk main dome lacks, the Sumugan dome brags about. Even a cursory glance can tell the the sparkling diamond surface, the chromed supports and the art deco decorations have a completely different design than the rest of the city. The reason is that once, the dome was named Garasu Prototype Alpha, and was the scale model for the then theoretical design of the Kandor dome, where the resistance and stress trials were carried on. A side effect of those trials is than the gravity generators can increase their output to a total of 10 g (this has never had a practical purpose since the trials ended, but the tourism guides keep mentioning it)
The Sumugan Gate dome is Marduk industrial district. This is the place were Genesis industries has most of its industrial capacity. You can also find many other smaller industries, from food canning to electronics.
The main companies in Sumugan are:
-Fuzhou Electronics: This company builds microchips and computer components; it does not build computers, and is a purely hard tech company: Fen all over the solar system will buy here the components for their handwave projects.
Chen Li was an industry mogul in the chinese city of Fuzhou, when he ended up in the losing side of some political intrigue, somehow mortally offending a high ranking official in the Ministry of State Security. He and his family left in the middle of the night for Taiwan, and, highly paranoid about MSS agents, left earth in the very first ship, which happened to be a tourist tour of Luna, with Marduk as first stop.
Most of his fortune was in Switzerland and the Cayman islands, so he had no much trouble in rebuilding his life. He was happy to discover than one of the Ghost Manors in the crater was a chinese palace, which he soon brought (and fortified; he is still paranoid), but still misses China. He is one of Fenspace's loudest voices against the communist government, and dreams to someday returning home to a democratic China. Mr Li's teenage granddaughter has adapted to fenspace like a fish to water, has joined the senshi, and plans to expand the family company to build waved computers once she graduates from Vesta Institute of Robotics (her newfound fenness is not brave enough to visit his grandmother in a senshi shirt. No one dares mess with Mrs. Li)
Section 9 does not watch Fuzhou Electronics, and the products they build, like a hawk, in case they are a deep MSS cover, because Section 9 does not exist, and it does not have an outpost in Nanmu district.
-Lunar Motors: Lunar motors builds cars -but only the skeleton. As the number of fen than personalize their 'waved vehicles increased, Gabriel Johnson saw a possible opening. He will sell a hard tech, working vehicle, but one then only is a chassis and engine; he will also sell body parts for the enterprising fen to handwave their own spacecar.
The company started buying old cars form scrapyards and second hand stores, and eventually started building their own, though they still need to import some components form Japan.
-Moires: This is one of the companies than use the services of Lunar Motors. Owned by three enthusiastic girls, they will buy the structure and then build a car around it. They offer both handwaved and clean vehicles.
Given their factions (two senshi and a pulper) the cars tend to the classical luxury, but the girls get bored with a single style and occasionally create cars of all kinds, from fairy tale carriages to Star Wars.
-Monti Industries: This is one example of several Belter companies grown in Marduk during the War. Each of those companies are owned by a group of belter miners, and usually use the raw materials than their owners mine in the Belt, and forge industrial parts and small machinery.
-Skuld Ice Cream: Living in dangerous space habitats means you often have to live with basic necessities. Fen, as as rule, tend to think that thinks like ice cream, fizzy drinks, doughnuts and pizza are basic necessities.
Taking advantage of the food convoys from Peru to Marduk, Skuld helped a peruvian farmers cooperative to 'wave several of their milk and began selling ice cream all over the solar system.
-Goldskin's Slip: Another company of Belter origin, this is more prosaic: the biggest distillery on the city. It sells whiskey, and Balor's Best Firewater, which brags to be have the highest alcoholic content in Luna (several of the small belter distilleries in Ningal beg to differ, and no one in Marduk dares to make the same claim against actual Belt spirits)
-Genesis: Obviously, the giant in Marduk. Genesis has facilities both inside and outside the dome, and is an industrial complex by itself. Except for the genetics research (done in the Ziggurat labs) most of Genesis activity is done here: Construction droid assembly lines, massive smelters, material technology investigation, engine construction, massive warehouses for raw and finished products, and anything else the company needs.
Mummu Spaceport is a few kilometres west of the city. While it has far less passenger traffic than the great spaceports in Port Luna and Kandor, its size is massive, due to the heavy cargo if processes. Every week it sees hundreds of raw metals than come form the belt to feed the voracious smelters in the city, and hundreds of tons of finished products leave the city. The city does not only get belter metals; countless convoys of food come every from Ganymede and Huarocondo Spaceport (in Peru), and distilled gases and carbon from Jupiter, among other materials.
Due to all that traffic, it was designed to hold the biggest cargo sea transport available in Earth, and then some: It has parking space for any current spaceship able to land in a planetary surface, and a couple only theoretical designs.
Genesis Shipyards: These shipyards are located between the spaceport and Genesis' smelters outside the Sumugan dome. Originally they were an average sized shipyards, used to build genesis ships and for a repair service for the spaceport. As most of the Marduk facilities, it was overbuild, planning for the future, so more than half of the shipyard remained empty
With the war needs, and the sudden availability of a horde of belters experiences in space construction, the shipyards increased to its maximum capacity, and then expanded even more. This was a major repairs shipyard for Great Justice during the war, and it built the Ariete class ships.
Just two weeks before the battle for Boskone Prime started, the last expansion was finished, and it has sparked an outstanding number of conspiracy theories (outstanding even coming from Marduk, the fenspace Queen of Conspiracy Theories). It is a standard drydock, with otherwise unremarkable cranes and scaffoldings. Except for the minor detail than it is one kilometre across; while it was being build, the main Genesis engine factory stopped production, moved the human workers to nearby facilities, and began some undisclosed project.
When the war ended, all work in the new drydock stopped, and several huge crates left the closed factory and were taken away in a GJ transport .
What kind of ship was going to be built in Dock 51 (since there are only about two dozen docks, this number choice sparked its own conspiracies), and exactly what was inside those crates, has been a matter of spirited debate ever since: Vykos will only answer with a “no comment” when asked, and Great Justice claims than “it does not comment on ship designs)
P.D: Robkelk, ECSNorway, would you mind if I put a few Stellvia and Greenwood warehouses or holging enterprises in Sumugan Gate? They probably will only get a mention or two at best,but it would show than the city is not just a private playground...
I must say, this is getting huge... I started this thinking the entire city introduction woudl be about the same lenght then the current update. I had not mentioned it yet, because I though this would be smalled and with less details, but every character and company I mention, except those direcly involved with Genesis C&D, are Open Characters unless I say otherwise in the description. I plan to make wiki entires (well, probably stubs) for all of then. Eventually.
What looms outside: Sumugan Gate, Mummu Spaceport and the Towers of Ashur.
The Marduk dome is the first thing anyone notices when approaching the city; thirty kilometres across, its size fills the horizon.
This is the second (third if you count the scale model) of the Garasu diamond domes; but it had a different waving than its elder sibling in Kandor. Since Luna has days than last two full weeks, Oscar tried to make a darkened dome than would protect him from his sunlight weakness quirk. It failed, and the only apparent effect was the matt looks of the dome. Of course, Mardukans will proclaim than this effect was intentional and it looks far more elegant than the shiny dome of their northern rivals. Due to this small quirk, it cannot be seen from Earth with the naked eye, as the dome fades with the lunar landscape at great distances.
Hidden under the dome is the massive array of life support systems for the crater habitat: Powerful lights and shades to create a 24 hour day, air filters and wind makers, heating, holographic emitters to create a a blue sky and clouds, and the weather system (not only rain sprinklers; a very unscientific survey reached the conclusion than a full 20% of all handwavium projects in the city will not get the initial activation unless there is a lightning storm outside, and most genetics projects will actually need a lightning bolt to hit the lab building)
The towers of Ashur, a massive wall with skyscraper sized towers, is actually the supports and foundation of the dome. It is fifty meters tall and thirty meters wide, while the towers are 75 meters tall.
Since the design of the dome supports sort of reminded Bernie a medieval wall, he went with the style and created a giant fortress, and covered the walls with huge pennants and prop weapons out of a speampunk opera (one whose writer had way too much absinthe).
And then the War started, and suddenly a “city wall” did not look like such a whimsy. All the weapon props were exchanged for waved weapon designs, and the towers were manned by a city militia and Great Justice. Great justice did install a few hardtech missile launchers and anti-aircraft artillery, but they were dismantled after the war; if it is at all possible, Oscar prefers to use waved (and so non-lethal) weapons instead of hardtech ones.
The wall has eleven towers, plus the twin towers in the main city gate (all of the towers have a city gate, but they are seldom used, and the Sumugan gate is the only one able to fit anything bigger than a truck). Each of the towers has an underground fusion power station -which feeds the city energy needs- and a control room for the environment system.
Besides that, most of the towers have remained empty since the war ended and there was no more need for defences. The city Watch uses the gate towers; and two of the towers have been ceded to the Convention and the Crystal Millennium: Tower V is the Great Justice base and armoury depot in Marduk, while tower III is a base for the SAM Search and Rescue.
All the shiny than the Marduk main dome lacks, the Sumugan dome brags about. Even a cursory glance can tell the the sparkling diamond surface, the chromed supports and the art deco decorations have a completely different design than the rest of the city. The reason is that once, the dome was named Garasu Prototype Alpha, and was the scale model for the then theoretical design of the Kandor dome, where the resistance and stress trials were carried on. A side effect of those trials is than the gravity generators can increase their output to a total of 10 g (this has never had a practical purpose since the trials ended, but the tourism guides keep mentioning it)
The Sumugan Gate dome is Marduk industrial district. This is the place were Genesis industries has most of its industrial capacity. You can also find many other smaller industries, from food canning to electronics.
The main companies in Sumugan are:
-Fuzhou Electronics: This company builds microchips and computer components; it does not build computers, and is a purely hard tech company: Fen all over the solar system will buy here the components for their handwave projects.
Chen Li was an industry mogul in the chinese city of Fuzhou, when he ended up in the losing side of some political intrigue, somehow mortally offending a high ranking official in the Ministry of State Security. He and his family left in the middle of the night for Taiwan, and, highly paranoid about MSS agents, left earth in the very first ship, which happened to be a tourist tour of Luna, with Marduk as first stop.
Most of his fortune was in Switzerland and the Cayman islands, so he had no much trouble in rebuilding his life. He was happy to discover than one of the Ghost Manors in the crater was a chinese palace, which he soon brought (and fortified; he is still paranoid), but still misses China. He is one of Fenspace's loudest voices against the communist government, and dreams to someday returning home to a democratic China. Mr Li's teenage granddaughter has adapted to fenspace like a fish to water, has joined the senshi, and plans to expand the family company to build waved computers once she graduates from Vesta Institute of Robotics (her newfound fenness is not brave enough to visit his grandmother in a senshi shirt. No one dares mess with Mrs. Li)
Section 9 does not watch Fuzhou Electronics, and the products they build, like a hawk, in case they are a deep MSS cover, because Section 9 does not exist, and it does not have an outpost in Nanmu district.
-Lunar Motors: Lunar motors builds cars -but only the skeleton. As the number of fen than personalize their 'waved vehicles increased, Gabriel Johnson saw a possible opening. He will sell a hard tech, working vehicle, but one then only is a chassis and engine; he will also sell body parts for the enterprising fen to handwave their own spacecar.
The company started buying old cars form scrapyards and second hand stores, and eventually started building their own, though they still need to import some components form Japan.
-Moires: This is one of the companies than use the services of Lunar Motors. Owned by three enthusiastic girls, they will buy the structure and then build a car around it. They offer both handwaved and clean vehicles.
Given their factions (two senshi and a pulper) the cars tend to the classical luxury, but the girls get bored with a single style and occasionally create cars of all kinds, from fairy tale carriages to Star Wars.
-Monti Industries: This is one example of several Belter companies grown in Marduk during the War. Each of those companies are owned by a group of belter miners, and usually use the raw materials than their owners mine in the Belt, and forge industrial parts and small machinery.
-Skuld Ice Cream: Living in dangerous space habitats means you often have to live with basic necessities. Fen, as as rule, tend to think that thinks like ice cream, fizzy drinks, doughnuts and pizza are basic necessities.
Taking advantage of the food convoys from Peru to Marduk, Skuld helped a peruvian farmers cooperative to 'wave several of their milk and began selling ice cream all over the solar system.
-Goldskin's Slip: Another company of Belter origin, this is more prosaic: the biggest distillery on the city. It sells whiskey, and Balor's Best Firewater, which brags to be have the highest alcoholic content in Luna (several of the small belter distilleries in Ningal beg to differ, and no one in Marduk dares to make the same claim against actual Belt spirits)
-Genesis: Obviously, the giant in Marduk. Genesis has facilities both inside and outside the dome, and is an industrial complex by itself. Except for the genetics research (done in the Ziggurat labs) most of Genesis activity is done here: Construction droid assembly lines, massive smelters, material technology investigation, engine construction, massive warehouses for raw and finished products, and anything else the company needs.
Mummu Spaceport is a few kilometres west of the city. While it has far less passenger traffic than the great spaceports in Port Luna and Kandor, its size is massive, due to the heavy cargo if processes. Every week it sees hundreds of raw metals than come form the belt to feed the voracious smelters in the city, and hundreds of tons of finished products leave the city. The city does not only get belter metals; countless convoys of food come every from Ganymede and Huarocondo Spaceport (in Peru), and distilled gases and carbon from Jupiter, among other materials.
Due to all that traffic, it was designed to hold the biggest cargo sea transport available in Earth, and then some: It has parking space for any current spaceship able to land in a planetary surface, and a couple only theoretical designs.
Genesis Shipyards: These shipyards are located between the spaceport and Genesis' smelters outside the Sumugan dome. Originally they were an average sized shipyards, used to build genesis ships and for a repair service for the spaceport. As most of the Marduk facilities, it was overbuild, planning for the future, so more than half of the shipyard remained empty
With the war needs, and the sudden availability of a horde of belters experiences in space construction, the shipyards increased to its maximum capacity, and then expanded even more. This was a major repairs shipyard for Great Justice during the war, and it built the Ariete class ships.
Just two weeks before the battle for Boskone Prime started, the last expansion was finished, and it has sparked an outstanding number of conspiracy theories (outstanding even coming from Marduk, the fenspace Queen of Conspiracy Theories). It is a standard drydock, with otherwise unremarkable cranes and scaffoldings. Except for the minor detail than it is one kilometre across; while it was being build, the main Genesis engine factory stopped production, moved the human workers to nearby facilities, and began some undisclosed project.
When the war ended, all work in the new drydock stopped, and several huge crates left the closed factory and were taken away in a GJ transport .
What kind of ship was going to be built in Dock 51 (since there are only about two dozen docks, this number choice sparked its own conspiracies), and exactly what was inside those crates, has been a matter of spirited debate ever since: Vykos will only answer with a “no comment” when asked, and Great Justice claims than “it does not comment on ship designs)
P.D: Robkelk, ECSNorway, would you mind if I put a few Stellvia and Greenwood warehouses or holging enterprises in Sumugan Gate? They probably will only get a mention or two at best,but it would show than the city is not just a private playground...