Kickassia

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Spacecraft Registry
L5 Station Kickassia
Spacecraft Characteristics
Width120m + privacy porches
Height490m
Drive RatingStation-keeping only
Flag of RecordFenspace Convention
Registry NumberL5-X
PurposePrivate residence
Other Crew25 people (estimated)
Operational StatusActive
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Kickassia is a private home. For one or more incredibly rich Fenspace residents. One really big problem. Who are they?

With a little effort you can map the main financial flows in Fenspace. This at least shows roughly where the wealth is coming from and where it is going. Really big concentration of wealth, like 'kajillionaires' will have big impacts on these flows. You should know roughly who, and where such people get their wealth.

There is another possibly. It's all a hoax. Someone with a lot of waved mylar, a flair for the dramatic, and a few imaginative friends, could put on quite a show. They could launch the 'core' of a space habitat, then outfit it, say at an L5 location. This could be mostly a shell with some farm bio domes, and a few people living there, using the place as an art project. Coming and going in limos which are cheap cars with waved mylar over-shells. Tinted windows, of course.

One rumour is that the residents are members of the Supers faction, who thought ahead, and are really enthusiastic about maintaining their Secret Identities.

Is this true? No doubt somebody knows. But, if they do, they've kept very quiet.

History

Kickassia's core launched Saturday 1st November 2008.

The outfitting of Kickassia was done behind large construction screens, made of mylar film waved-up to act as solar photo-voltaic collectors, which had the dual purpose of providing construction security, and a source of energy to use in the construction.

The actual station completion was Thursday 4th July 2009, and was a remarkably quiet affair.

Layout

The basic design separates the different levels, so that you can come and go without disturbing those in the rest of the place. It should be noted that this station slowly rotates on its central axis, but this seems decorative.

If you imagine each layer to be a stubby cylinder, like a coin, with the whole station being a stack of these coins. The top and bottom coins are normally inaccessible maintenance layers, and the coins are stacked so heads and tails are in contact. There is a thin maintenance layer between each pair of tails, and gravity is in the direction towards the tails, i.e. looked at from the outside it reverses for each coin. Instead of the middle layer is a thin maintenance layer. There is a cylindrical hole punched through all the coins in the centre, and covering the top and bottom of the stack of coins is a bio dome hemisphere.

B H-x-T T-1-H H-2-T T-3-H H-4-T T-y-H H-5-T T-6-H H-7-T T-8-H H-z-T B

B = bio dome
x = maintenance
1 =
2 =
3 =
4 =
y = maintenance
5 =
6 =
7 =
8 =
z = maintenance
B = bio dome

The layers are all cylinders 100m in internal diameter, and that is also the diameter of the two bio domes. The maintenance layers are 10m thick internal height, and the living layers are 30m thick. Surrounding the outer walls is a 10m thick layer of waved aerogel and there is a similar 10m filling between each layer.

Ignoring the bio domes the station is 390m high, with them 490m. The width is 120m. The central maintenance cylinder which penetrates through all the layers is 10m in external diameter.

The eight individual living layers can be subdivided or arranged in any way that the occupant desires; all permanent surfaces will provide excellent anchorage. It is preferred that attaching stuff to the ceiling is minimised. The layers are not designed to be water-filled (or vacuum); quite a bit of work and externally-supplied water would be needed to do this. A natural-looking woodland area, gardens, or things like swimming pools would be quite feasible.

Electrical power, network access, ventilation, water and sewage removal is available almost anywhere from the floor or central pillar. Regular heat removal points are also available. The central pillar can provide as much light, in any pattern, or be holo-graphically disguised to look like any surface, desired. Breezes are feasible.

The ceiling can display any day-night pattern desired, with seasons, including a false sun and moon. Even something like the surface of water, lit by a day-night pattern, as seen from above or below. Crowd scenes or extreme detail are not really feasible, unless these are relayed from elsewhere in the living area (for things like mirror tricks). External walls can be arranged to have virtual windows, which come with flash protection. Holo screens can be installed and configured to hide the external walls with surroundings and scenes which match the ceiling. Nothing like a 'Star Trek' holo suite is possible as standard.

There can be local areas of dynamically reduced gravity between 0.1 and 1G; by special order more elaborate gravity arrangements are possible, between -1G and 1G, in any direction, but these will be static.

Note that the informational network is purely local to a living area. Secure provision can be made for a media feed or to contact Earth or other places in Cislunar Space. There is no FTL communications as standard. This network cannot be connected to that in another living space, except by an external relay or something like FTL communications. There will never be any connections to the networks that maintain the local environment; there is shielding, not just an air gap.

Entrance to a living area is via an external door surrounded by a privacy porch; there are three evenly spaced around the circumference of each living area. It is configurable which of these are in use and how large the doors are; possibilities range from a 2m square air lock, through a 3m square vehicle air lock, to a vehicle door 20m square (into a garage with one or more internal air locks). A smaller door set into a larger one, or beside a large one less than the maximum size, is quite possible. It is strongly recommended that at least two doors at different locations are usable, even if one is an emergency door.

The maintenance levels have a regular set of 1m diameter doors, spaced about every 10m.

Power Systems

It is unclear what the power system used by the station is, but it would seem ultimately to derive from Sol, The Sun. There are no visible emminations, or connections to somewhere else which acts as a power source. Blocking direct sunlight from reaching the station affects the plants in the bio domes, but nothing else – lights could be rigged for these, if needed.

Maintenance

Robot squirrels (Secret Squirrels) run all the infrastructure, plant and harvest the bio domes, and run around through squirrel-sized tunnels. These only speak in squeaks and chitters, though they clearly understand English, and for some reason Klingon. Squirrels hatch from the nuts of special bio-metallic trees (the She-Tree and the He-Tree) hidden in the secret depths of the station.

The squirrels have access to indefinite means of storing food. While they'll rearrange your living area and provide infrastructure, as well as fresh food, they'll not cook or clean for you. The squirrels are fiercely protective of the secrecy of the various residents of the station. The security specialist squirrels wear intimidating dark glasses...

Squirrels stop functioning and self-destruct if someone takes one away from the station, though they if possible they communicate (via encrypted radio frequencies) who's responsible.

It is suspected that the entire infrastructure is bio-metallic, and this is the result of some quirk or over-ambitious design. It seems to lack any 'user maintainable' parts. There is not believed to be any central intelligence, though the squirrels obviously cooperate (via encrypted radio frequencies).

Stealth Tunnels

These are open-ended tubes, big enough to fit a limo into. They absorb almost all incident radiation, and have an efficient stealth speed drive, and a pretty stupid robot pilot.

Their job is to be summoned by a particular set of frequencies, which slowly changes, in a rotating pattern, and they then engulf any vehicle up to limo size. The vehicle is then flown out of the plane of the ecliptic, randomly 'up' or 'down', and left there. Or, if it's already well above (or below) the plane, to near Kickassia, then released.

The tube then returns to the upper atmosphere of Earth and dumps all the stored heat it has accumulated from absorption and running its drive, as well as from the vehicle carried. Then it recharges from the anti-protons trapped in the Earth's magnetic field.

So, you have a way of getting your limo to and from Kickassia, without being trailed by those pesky reporters.

There are at least six of these tubes, and maybe as many as a dozen.