Atlantis is big

[beccaelizabeth]

I started trying to design Atlantis in GURPS Spaceships. There's too much vague and too much superscience to do anything properly. I handwaved a lot of numbers and came up with a Size Modifier +18 ship with two sections of Habitat each containing 600,000 cabins. If you call the accommodation in Atlantis a Luxury Cabin then there's room for 300,000 people to live in one Habitat section, and the other can be all offices, labs, briefing rooms (1 cabin holds 10 people) and establishments (2 cabins holds 20 people), like restaurants and bars and shops and things. Also sick bay beds (1 cabin to 1 sick bay bed, 100+ beds make a hospital). And mini factories. And 1 cabin = 1 teleport projector, which is apparently what they use instead of lifts. Though I guess lifts would also need a cabin of space, on every floor in a straight line. I didn't see a rule for that. But however many transporters they need for the whole city, all of them take a cabin out of the Habitat.
Also my Atlantis had two Open Space sections, one all Farms producing sufficient food for the whole city, the other to be all kinds of anything, like auditoriums and zoos and pools and stuff. Each Open Space area holds 100 people and there's 5,000 areas on an SM+18 ship. Which is plenty more than enough to have all the people hang out in an Open Space at once. But it was that or call it all cargo. There's already a lot of room for cargo.

Exploring 300,000 bedrooms would take a bit of a while. Especially if you don't know how many of them are going to turn out to be labs.

But I stopped designing it because it's kind of no fun when its that big. You never could decide what's in all the rooms. It's more fun designing a village, because you can decide which building is the pub and which the blacksmith and all like that.

Of course Atlantis could be very much smaller or very much bigger than this. I only looked on wiki pages and some size comparison graphics, and nothing particularly precise appeared on them.

If you were building a flying city, how big would it be?

Comments

[aurorra.livejournal.com]

If it was fiction then I wouldn't be specific. No one person ever needs to explore all of a think to know it's there. You've probably not walked down half of the streets of Dereham but you know they are there and can guess what was in them.

If I was actually building a place then I'd start small and allow room for expansion. Depends on what the population's birthrate is and how many people want to live in space. Market forces control most things.

x

[beccaelizabeth]

I was thinking RPG, where there's either rails or a need to at least be able to sketch new areas in a hurry.

start small and build kind of doesn't work for a one way trip to colonise, like Atlantis. unless what you mostly bring with you is building and mining and refinery machines.

[aurorra.livejournal.com]

Taking a small population and a lot of building stuff is probably the way to go.

If you have a perfect and very comfortable ship, full of fussy people who like luxury and central heating, it's going to be much harder to get them to go and build on a new planet from scratch.

They'd just stay in the ship till it was full and then start with the horrible stuff. xx

[beccaelizabeth]

Atlantis is a Stargate spin off, so there are no ships to go places usually, the limit on a one way trip colonisation is how much you can fit through a ring of fixed width open for a maximum of 38 minutes. After they get there the flying city is the very nice luxury ship with central heating and air, but they have to leave because there's never enough power. Also, for science.