An alternative concept, partly from pondering on the Titanic and what happened shortly after it sank and why, since the city’s fall seems conceptually rather similar.
On the surface, it fell because bad guys attacked, blew holes in the walls and messed with the ventilation systems. But disasters are rarely that simple. There're decisions that mitigate or worsen the consequences, some of these made years before the attack began. What seems like a valid decision to cancel an evacuation with hindsight is disastrous. While for the people making the decision, based on the information they had, it was exactly the right thing to do.
A chain of decisions, of actions and reactions over the space of years leaves Crystal Osaka just Seconds from Disaster...
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
On the surface, it fell because bad guys attacked, blew holes in the walls and messed with the ventilation systems. But disasters are rarely that simple. There're decisions that mitigate or worsen the consequences, some of these made years before the attack began. What seems like a valid decision to cancel an evacuation with hindsight is disastrous. While for the people making the decision, based on the information they had, it was exactly the right thing to do.
Quote:In the years since, the events surrounding the fall of Crystal Osaka acquired their own mythology. The story was told and retold and grew into something it never was. It took on its own life as a rallying cry for Great Justice. The city grew into an invincible fortress that had been felled by malignancy from without and incompetence from within. It gave people the heroes they wanted and put faces to the villains they needed to blame while the city itself remained pure and perfect.
It suits the myth to believe that the city was doomed from the first moment. It makes the heroes shine all the brighter as we have them come dashing in out of the cold void of space into knowing danger and a desperate struggle against time. It blackens the villains who could have destroyed something so pure, for something so pure could only be destroyed by the evils of men.
Nobody wants to believe that the city could’ve fallen for any other reason.
What many people forget is, the city was buoyant for hours afterwards. The city’s engineers had time to conduct a full structural analysis and concluded that, despite the serious damage to the city, it wasn’t going to fall. In the growing mythology after the event, they were cast alongside those who refused to believe that the Titanic could sink.
And yet, subsequent analysis have shown that, even with a compromised ventilation system and with the damage to the buoyancy cells, the city should have remained afloat. The city did remain afloat for nearly eighteen hours; long enough for the evacuation order to be rescinded and for the city’s residents to begin to return. The punctured sections had reached equilibrium and the City’s list had stabilised at three degrees South.
Those involved in making this decision were villified in the mythology that grew up as being dangerously reckless. And realising the error of their ways, they went down with the city trying to save the lives of the people they had carelessly doomed.
It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see how wrong they were, however. It is a common mistake of popular history to assume that people at the time knew everything that we know now. With the information presented to them, the city’s council made the correct decisions. A fact quietly brushed under the carpet of history is that quite a few people complained about the evacuation orders lasting for so long.
Many of the heroes of Osaka are forgotten in the Fennish clamour for idols, for shining archetypes of fiction. People remember the Grey Knights fighting against the virus in the computer and lionise them as saints. It’s become almost taboo to discuss the city’s ordinary damage control teams who ran from sector to sector manually operating failed valves in a desperate attempt to keep the city afloat for as long as possible. They trimmed the sinking city using hand radios and legwork, keeping it from capsizing right up until the concourse imploded.
This is a tragedy of its own sort. Ordinary people who gave everything just doing their jobs get nothing but a line for their name on a memorial obelisk.
The city should never have fallen, this is easily demonstrated with the proper analysis tools. We know from the surviving logs that the damaged cells had been isolated both automatically, and using the manual valve system. The system was properly designed to account for a malicious failure in the controlling computer. Even before the Boskone War began the possibility of the ventilation control system being compromised by an attacker had both been discussed and planned for extensively.
The fact remains however, that Crystal Osaka is a tangled mass of wreckage on the surface of Venus.
And so it comes to us to figure out why the city really fell, to understand what really happened in those final hours. Because without understanding, we may be doomed to repeat these events all over again.
----
The City’s own logs show that, six hours before the final collapse a damage control team was dispatched to compartment A-24, neighbouring the damaged sectors. This was nothing more than a routine survey of the damaged sectors.
After five minutes the team leader called into to report a slight smell of leaking gas, but concluded that it was just lingering remnants after the isolation doors had shut. Moments later all contact with the group was lost as a series of explosiosn ripped through sectors A-24 coreward to A-18 and up onto B-level. With the isolation doors open in the thus-far undamaged sections, there was nothing to stop the inrushing atmosphere..
Only now with twenty percent of the city potentially open to the Venusian atmosphere,did the fall truly became inevitable. Gas started flooding in through the remains of the ventilation system.
It was widely held that this must have been some form of booby trap left behind; a last dastardly gasp of the defeated villain
-----
The truth is, there was no explosion. While the wreckage shows signs of damage by some sort of high energy pressure wave tearing through the corridors, ripping isolation doors from their mounts and blowing open the ventilation system, no explosive residue was ever found.
The City fell because of a single failed bulkhead. Specifically, the bulkhead between A-25 and A-26. It may have been damaged in the firefight, or have been defective from design. Without recovering the remains of the door the truth will never be known.
One one side of the door was the Venusian atmosphere at high pressure. On the other, one single standard atmosphere. The bulkhead was already under immense stress before the city settled at its new equilibrium altitude. Once it failed, that pressure differential would have been like a bomb going off inside the corridor.
All that mass of gas in the damaged compartments behind would immediately have rushed forward through the opening, tearing the door from its mounts and likely instantly killed the damage control team. It would have rushed down the corridor beyond where it would have met the isolation door for A-24. The gas hits the door, but by now tons of pressurised atmosphere are moving at high speed down this corridor.
All this gas has it’s own inertia. For a few brief moments the pressure on the intact A-24 door spikes far beyond it’s design rating. The door fails, blowing open and allowing this gas to continue to the next door, then the next in a daisy chain of failures. It only stops because of a low mass flow rate through the initial breach, causing the pressure in the whole system to drop as the gas expands. Door A-18 holds.
These same pressure waves blast through the ventilation system, tearing isolation valves apart before bursting out into unprotected sectors of the city.
With the automatic systems failed and nobody now able to reach the venting sectors to activate the manual valves, Crystal Osaka had six hours to live.
A chain of decisions, of actions and reactions over the space of years leaves Crystal Osaka just Seconds from Disaster...
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
