A Cultural Guide to Fenspace: Crystal Tokyo

[robkelk]

I do like what you're doing here, and the approach you're taking to it...

Someone said there wasn't a tether anchoring the city to the surface, but the wiki says there is. If the tether is there, are there any facilities at the base of it?

The wiki is not 100% consistent, despite our best efforts. I'm the someone who said there wasn't a tether, but I could be mistaken... If there is a tether, it would have to be made of something that can stand up to the heat and corrosive atmosphere at the lower altitudes of Venus, which would be difficult even with handwavium.

If there is a tether, there's definitely no infrastructure down there - if there was and there was an accident, everybody down there would die.

Edit: Perhaps there's a "dangly bit" like the one on the Cloud City of Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back, that everybody calls a tether...?

And does anyone have any idea how much the terraforming project is tied into the cities? I realize most of it's probably automated, but I don't know how many people are tied into it. For that matter, how is the terraforming being done? I can see on the wiki that the Crystal cities are organized into clusters, but how close are they together?

The Crystal Cities exist for the Venus Terraforming Project. Crystal Osaka used to be the main bio-lab, before it was destroyed; Crystal Kyoto has taken over that role (giving up some of the space it was dedicating to being the local vacation spot). Crystal Titusville turns atmospheric hydrocarbons into fuels, polymers, and other things. Crystal Paris and Crystal Hiroshima are primarily spacedocks, with Paris being the drydock and Hiroshima being the naval base. Crystal Tokyo is the administrative center - as the first of the Crystal Cities, it also has basic equipment to perform all of the functions that the other cities specialize in.

Each cluster is one-third of the way around the planet from each of the other two clusters, give or take a few degrees of longitude - they drift according to the needs of the VTP. (I suppose there would have to be communications satellites midway between each cluster, so they could stay in touch without horizon effects interfering with the radio signals.)

Also, where does the food come from? Is it all imported, or is one of the Crystal cities a farm too?

There would have to be a farm somewhere in the Crystal Cities - there are too many people spending money on too many other things for them to bring in all of their food from elsewhere. (Crystal Sapporo already has a brewery; it could also have farms that produce the wheat, barley, hops, and malt for the brewery, along with other foods. We still haven't discussed what's at Crystal Moscow, Crystal Venice, and Crystal Rio - one of those could also be a good candidate for the home of some of the farms.)
--
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