As I recently wrote within a post regarding the EP11 discussion:
... Earth before the Bio Digital Plague was already a Type 2 Civilisation.
I cant believe that there was not originally already a massive Moon-Base, with a Shipyard and enough living quarters for a couple of million people in order to benefit from the low gravity for interstellar trade and star ship production. That would be an to obvious thing to have for a Type 2 Society with a Moon at their Home Planet.
Such ruins would have been of no logistical interest to Earth before the Jump drive and access to Fabricators, but with that there would be a good possibility to escape an eventual fallout on Earth by repairing it with debris floating around Sol.
Take Tycho, fill it up with multiple levels and you have a 84 km wide and 4.8 km deep Moon-Base.
At 3 meter hight per LVL that would be 1600 Floors.
With a Radius of 43.105 km it would be 1858 square meters.
In total a potential maximum living Area of 2 972 865 square meters.
Thats bigger then Argentina and a bit Smaller then India.
= almost enough space for a billion people.
Put a couple of salvaged shield generators in place and you would be also save from further bombardment. I think it would be a logical thing to have within the Frontiers Saga universe (in the long run). What do you think ?
The only problem is the nuclear waste dump on the other side. One stray static discharge could send the moon (and, with it, Moonbase Alpha) careening across the galaxy... oh, wait. Wrong series.
Even after the bombardment, it would be easier to feed, clothe, etc. someone on Earth than in space or the moon. Once the survivors get back on their feet, you can bet Luna is going to become a vital part of the Arsenal of Democracy (tm). In the meantime, maybe it can be 'reformed' like Haven, only better.
Hamsterman
Terraforming the moon will always be problematic, because there is no iron core to create a magnetic shield. The surface will be bombarded by energetic particles, making life difficult. The inhabitants will always live underground. I suppose some sort of shield generators could be rigged up, for local areas, but the inhabitants would live 98% of their lives under a couple meters of rock...
Having said that, I am pretty sure they could rig up something to gather sunlight to grow crops. Eventually they could become nearly self-sufficient, and with a scale sufficiently large (such as filling in Tycho) they should have sufficient reserves to last for a long time.
I thought there was already a base on the moon. In ep8 when the LRGA was taken out, it was noted that:
The other twelve missiles split off into six pairs, each finding their targets with precision. Power stations, mining facilities, fabrication plants, even housing and flight operations were all targeted.
If it was just a military installation, it was a rather big installation, especially considering that we were told that Earth had mining operation in the system, and such civilian operation would likely use luna as port of call.
A Tycho type Project could be a nice task between Season 1 and 2.
As a Fabrication Hanger for Capital ships.
Now that I think of it. What about Mars ?
There must be plenty of installations from before the Bio-Digital plague as well.
The problem with the moon is that it doesn't have enough mass - and thus, not enough gravity - to support and keep an atmoshpere. Since its core is also supposed to have cooled down enough so that there is no fluid rock anywhere anymore, getting a natural magnetic field set up is an impossibility.
Personally, I think that Venus is a much better target for terraforming. It's almost identical in size to Earth, and it's within the habitable zone of the system. All it would take is getting rid of the greenhouse gases on Venus, and the temperature should drop to tolerable levels. Heck, we could even start the process nowadays - all it would take is a thermophil bacterium or archaeon that's also able to reduce sulfuric acid - or one that knows photosynthesis. And, well, a lot of time. 😉
(from point of view of pre-Aurora/awareness of Aurora) The likely hood of anyone wanting to go into a facility on the moon that was left over from the BD plague is iffy, but fair enough, maybe they would vent the current atmosphere in the facilities and replaced the computers and wiring etc.Such facilities on the moon would degrade over time even with the close to space like atmosphere, I imagine that walls would still crumble, but It would make sense for the People of Earth to use those degraded facilities as a stepping stone to something new.
I think that the moon would be a great place to build out cap ships and be a base for solar system wide mining operations especially for peoples new to space and learning the ropes. But Earth is not new to space, it has the entire history & technology of a successful space traveling, multiple colony planet, civilization in they're data arch. they can skip steps and go to the preferred space station, leverage technologies to get to space cheaply. (If they can fly shuttles into orbit multiple times a day with only a refuel and quick maintenance check then they are pretty damn advanced. especially for a people without working shields) of course the jump drive makes the moon easier to access, but just as easily skipped over.
I like how there has been no mention of Venus in the books so far, so it could easily be the case that some "Thermophil bacterium or archaeon" or genesis device was introduced to Venus during the fall of the core that has had 1000 years to work its magic. Maybe there is a civilization that survived the BD Plague buried under the surface of Venus that hasn't realized that the earth is still alive for some reason / just doesn't want to be in contact with a possibly infectious people. There was a colony on Mars. We know that from the Fall of the Core. We do not know if that Colony survived in some way, if that colony had the ability to survive the massive loss of technology that surely would be required to sustain life on a not originally habitable planet. How cool would it be to know that there were other people in the same system as Earth and we haven't heard of them before!!!
I would think that there would me space stations around the two gas giants of Sol, for the collection of gasses to fuel the space faring vessels of the Pre-Fall era, I imagine most of those were de-orbited on infection. Every comm satellite would need to be burned too. I do not know if we lost every ship but I do know that none would want to stick around with no hope of resupply in Sol. I can imagine multiple shuttles being attached to hastily assembled extra hard points on the hulls of super haulers as lifeboats to ferry additional people out of the system or just to carry the extra shuttles, (why waste a perfectly good shuttle) It would be cool to see what happened to the ships that cut they're communications equipment to stop them from being infected, how they dealt with no standard communications in a universe where death came with a phonecall or text message or email or by passing someone infected in the street... I suspect that there are many more people in cryo pods out there, maybe not the healthiest of people now, but not everyone had access to a colony ship & shuttles.
I would actually like to have the crews of the alliance explore some of the seven wonders of the world, wonders like
* The floating islands (large floating cities built with antigravity technology to deal with a renewed spike in local population, until the BD plague dropped them in the northeast of china)
* The Underwater glass cities of Dubai (following on from artificial Islands, Dubai built out cities in sturdy underwater domes that survived the plague but the cities themselves while sealed for the later stages of the plague still became infected by they're own hackers looking for news of the outside world)
* The Ice Hotel (A Large Hotel like structure built inside one of the Glaciers in Greenland /after the technology was built to rebuild them following the years of global warming)
* The Great Wall of Europe (Sections of the Wall built to keep back the rising tides again during the years of Global warming / only sections remain, some collapsed when the walls breached in 2186, other sections dismantled to re-purpose the steel and other raw materials they were made of.
I don't know what else to add...
Short take on the moon base/venus/mars etc.
If the base(s) had their computer systems shut down/wipes, and their atmosphere dumped, the structures realistically could have withstood a great deal. With nothing to support wear and tear, anything short of a direct strike from asteroid, comet etc they would /could still be at least there.
THeir computers would be worthless as they were wiped and shut down, so all internal aspects would need to be inspected upgraded and or replaced but a base on the moon could still be there...(think Racoon City type base)
Very nice theory crafting Four Islands.
- Like your sightseeing Idea
= The Idea about Venus
- The space stations and com satellite stations around Gas Giants.
Yes. Agree that now with the Jump drive you could skip above and beyond the moon. For a pre Jump drive civilisation it would though, as you said, make sense to build capital ships there. Once something is already built, it is likely easier to upgrade than to build from scratch.
Who knows, maybe a secret base at the dark side of the Moon ;#)
Make the secret base for construction etc on a planetoid around a brown dwarf that is not too far from earth. These are half way between a Jupiter and a small star. They do provide light so a year is short and there should be a "habital" zone too. Finding these is often hard so finding a base near one ... Before you can attack it, you have to FIND it and space is really really big. The volume of a sphere to pluto is 149986 au^3 (astronomical units cubed). For 20 light years, about 33510.3 ly^3 (cubic light years). That is a big volume to look for a nearly invisible brown dwarf.
I'm sure that a civilisation that transits space at warp is very careful to map out the routes between stars, and takes the time to see if every other gratitywell they detect is explored and probed. I'm sure that a civilisation that is trying to take over the galaxy is dropping sensor probes and relay drones to detect and report activity in area's that could be of interest including dark worlds between systems... (If they are not then for shame, and yes the BV01 & 02 are out there!!!)
In saying that, space is big, and you can hide big things in it and have a reasonably high chance of them still being there when you get back. I would really hate to like / work on a dark world / moon orbiting a brown dwarf. Somehow living inside a moon sounds easier...?
