Community Driven Content
The moon, this place we call Luna, the massive cheese hanging on space for groundsiders, and home to thousands that are not afraid of the Dark. Luna was actually easier to colonize than open space. Gravity already existed and the technology to turn dry rock into soft land existed since the early 70s. With the use of fission-powered heat drills, it was relatively simple to fuse the silicate lunar soil into glass-like tunnels. Pockets of buried ice were mined for air and water, while plants were brought in to create a viable ecosystem.
a modular section of the Tycho mass-driver was soft-landed and reassembled, allowing raw materials to be catapulted into space to construct the Orbital Colony Crystal Palace. You can assume this didn’t happen overnight. The technology to colonize space was already in place in the early 90s, what was required was the will and international cooperation to apply what was already known, so the collapsing ecosystem and a degenerating society down on Earth provided this little push, because you’d be amazed what rats can do to escape a sinking ship.
Since the early 2000s, the European Space Agency and its allied nations have maintained permanent bases on Luna. The original bases were simple pressure domes and modified workshacks boosted by Orbital Transport Vehicles and was soft landed in sections. Over the last 50 years, these footholds have been expanded through the use of nuclear and solar powered laser-drills, which have created networks of tunnels under the surface. Water is provided through the mining of Lunar ice and is heavily recycled, while air comes from underground hydrophonic gardens.
There are two permanent cities on Luna, Tycho, and Copernicus, both controlled by the European Space Agency, like almost everything in space that has people living inside it. While the two Lunar cities are not exactly space stations, they fall into the category of space colonies. Both are constructed underground, they are an extensive maze of tunnels that converge into central park-like caverns, topped with geodesic pressure domes. Besides creating an open space for Lunar colonists, these open areas also provide most of the air and recycling capacities.
Living in Luna is like living in a giant anthill, tunnels and more tunnels, it sounds like a depressing prospect unless you have in mind cities on Earth swarming with boostergangs that can kill you just because you blinked in the most inappropriate direction, so their safety is quite appealing. And moon cities are not crushed by poverty, you won’t live the big life, but if you have some skills, you’ll always find a job to put a plate of food on the table.
Tycho is the biggest city on the moon, with a population of 18 thousand. The landing pads in the surface of the city are connected with the main city, a round anthill with the main control, atmosphere Plant and Administrative offices at the center. At one side, living quarters to house the technicians that work in the Factories, labs and scientific areas. There is also a small business district, although not as fancy as the one in Crystal Palace indeed, in the moon, the corpo presence is minimal and very seldom not related to the activities that take place inside Tycho. Unless they plant a camp outside the cities. To live and work there you need to get used to the gravity, or to the lack of it, as Luna hardly has a 20% of the gravity on Earth. The city is incredibly safe by Earth standards, as all the colonies controlled by the European Space Agency, the security on the moon bases is controlled by Interpol. So, you know, if you’re tired of the dirt of Earth, and of “living the American Dream” take a shuttle and ride to the moon, the best thing there: you won’t miss mega-corporations at all.
