Orbital City Design

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Orbital Cities resemble the hustle and bustle port cities of Europe during the Georgian period. The cityscape looks like a hodge-podge of buildings erected upon the outer surface of a large sphere.

Engineering

At the center of each orbital city is the collapsed mass of a very large asteroid or small moon trapped in orbit around a planet. By building up a girded structure of high strength alloys around the sphere, the lower levels prevent objects on high levels from falling into the collapsed mass. But, the effect of gravity falls off quickly... so there are often no more than five or six stories of livable levels above the surface of the sphere and a few heavy, engineering, levels beneath it. Since gravity becomes appreciably more burdensome on human physiology, only wire-controlled machines sanctioned by the Order of Mercury can withstand the forces that exist around the core girding.

Cityscape

A few spires project up into the sky for special occasions of leisure in low gravity and most orbital cities have a number of elevators which rise to near zero-G conditions so that large starships can dock. Each orbital city employs a large number of manual laborers to handle all the tasks associated with maintaining it and requires a steady supply of food stuffs from the planet it orbits or merchant imports to support them.

In the immortal section of the city, or any Orbital Palace, it is common to find a lot of exotic plants which take advantage of the low gravity conditions to grow extremely tall. Since the low gravity and absence of atmospheric pressure puts little strain on the support structure of buildings, they have become immense caverns of glass upon the thin skeleton of gothic columns. In many cases, the most significant structural consideration is actually how to keep the glass from flying out and debris from inadvertently breaking a seal. Architects often utilize these weird conditions to house interior displays which cannot be done on a planet’s surface. There are extremely tall, slow moving waterfalls, pendulums that swing slowly across the ground and great chandeliers which seem to float in the air. Their imagination, and of course, funding from an immortal, is the only limit.

Most orbital cities lack significant public transportation and each building is usually responsible for its own sanitation, waste management and water supply. The city’s mayor (often appointed by an immortal) manages the air systems as a matter of public safety and his office makes a significant revenue off the sale of power to inhabitants. Since the sub-levels are mostly empty space, the city can generate a tremendous amount of power. Some of which is diverted to city defense cannons. Though most trade cities operate under the charter (and thus protection) of an immortal or planet-nation.

Construction Process

The majority of the mass and material of the terraformer vessels would fall down to the planet or moon in the seeds towers which it would then use to direct the genesis process. But, once the last seed tower departs, the remaining frame and shell of the terraformers would be repurposed (frequently to create orbital cities). Likewise, the seed towers would be used a building materials for the initial infrastructure associated with settlement and establishing the quantumnet.

By the time of the Plague, this process had been standardized well enough and grown to such a massive scale that there were thousands of terraformers sent to planets in the new world which continued their automated processes even though the records of their existence were lost. The various different corporations in the industry at that time also each had a different building style and produced terraformers with a variety of features depending upon what the developer wanted for the planet and the resulting orbital presence. There were subcontractors who performed the work of tethering asteroid and collapsing matter and installing the orbital cities or stations once the terraforming process was complete. In fact, a lot of the immortals that now live used to be employed in this industry.

Because the process was refined, there were few actual terraformers in Orion's Arm at the time of the Plague. Most had already been converted to orbital infrastructure. And, because the people who designed and run the manufacturing centers of the terraformers were killed during the plague, no terraformers have been made since. The Order of Mercury produced schematics for them based upon the ones in the process of being built, but since the manufacturing process (and the ship itself) was highly automated, everything was disassembled and used for parts for more orbital stations.

What this means is that nearly every settled planet has at least one orbital city or station... many have more and that nearly all of them have been located there since the plague. The scale of manufacturing and logistics required to build or transport objects of this size will not be possible until the period of Empires of Orion. So, only very small outposts have been built since then, typically found nearby asteroid fields since they used the asteroids as the gravity core and only had as much metal as they could transport there on their freight ships.