Guidebook to Installations of the Jovian Confederation - Chapter 3

Chapter 3 of the Colony articles

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Overall Length: 38.13 km

Interior Radius: 1.80 km 

Exterior Shell Radius: 2.20 km 

Habitable Area: 271.30 square km 

Maximum Radius (to top of thermal radiators): 4.01 km 

Rotational Period: 85 seconds 

Operational Date: March 6, 2097 

Cylinder Number: 5 (designation assigned October 2134)

1: South District

2: Central District

3: North District

4: Sunline

5: North Polar Docks (axial)

6: South Polar Docks (counter-rotating)

7: Gee-level

8: Communications Towers x3

9: Thermal Radiators/Induction Arrays x3

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Alexandria II is one of the largest vivarium cylinders in existence. After the construction of Elysèe, size went out of fashion, but Alexandria II is very nearly as large as Elysèe. Surprisingly, this is not the greatest source of pride for the residents of this colony, rather it is the academic renown of the stations many educational and research institutions that is the hallmark of this station. The internal surface area supports no fewer than five universities and six other institutions. All this is accomplished in one of the worst space-utilization designs in vivarium history. 





The most obvious feature of any station following the Elysèe design model are the independent sections. Alexandria II has three, each of which is an entire colony in itself. When the early station designs were made, it was thought that vast reserves of machinery, and massive redundancy were the answer to the dangers and instabilities inherent in pioneering this new design. Later colonies would rely more strongly on smart engineering, not over-engineering. Still, when the construction of Alexandria II was approved in 2084, it seemed a shame to retool the factories that were already set up with the Elysèe model in mind.



Visitors are often told that Alexandria II is one of the greatest testaments to Jovian caution. Each redundant section is eight kilometers long, and over three and a half kilometers in diameter. The sheer volume of the design guarantees tolerance against atmosphere leakage, and a healthy, if occasionally unruly, internal weather system. Each section can technically be sealed off from the next, but only the most catastrophic breach could necessitate that. Standard doctrine calls for an open-atmosphere evacuation.



This design was also chosen to allow control over the internal environment. Much of the machinery between the sections is devoted to brute force solutions to humidity and temperature control. The ecosystems of all three sections have proven remarkably stable, but the excess of machinery can’t stop the occasional unscheduled rainstorm. Residents like to claim that this adds charm to the environment, but most complain about it when outsiders aren’t about to hear.



Alexandria II is home to 3.1 million people. This equates to a population density of 11,500 persons per square kilometer. For an Olympian colony this is bordering on cramped. Many residents blame the colony’s excessively redundant design, and there are always rumors about plans to build additional housing in some of the areas that experience almost a full gravity. These areas, located just beyond the endcaps of each section, already have cheap hotels and other housing for visitors who do not need, or can’t stand, a full one gee.



These sections have more than just engineering consequences, they have also created three distinct neighborhoods. These divisions have no political implications, but one does have to use mechanized transport to get from one to the next, so there is a certain degree of separation. Commuting is common, but people usually prefer to live in the same district as they work. Community leaders have constantly worked to suppress any sort of regionalism caused by these divisions. They have been largely successful as evidenced by the lack of familiar names for each district.



The North District is perhaps the best known, as it is home to Alexandria University, the first of the academic institutions that have made Alexandria II so deservedly famous. It is a large school, boasting 15,000 undergraduates, and 34,000 graduate students and faculty members. About seventy-five percent of the undergraduate population is from Olympus, twenty percent come from the Trojans, and another five percent are foreigners, mostly Mercurians and wealthy Venusians studying abroad for a year. The curriculum is notoriously difficult, consisting of a set of stringent requirements divided equally amongst the humanities and hard sciences.



Aside from its college and academic graduate schools, the university also has three professional schools. Graduates of the Olympus Medical Academy are almost always highly sought after, and no other institution has better facilities and treatments for severe burns. The downside is the sixty percent drop-out rate. Equally illustrious is the Vale Law School that offers both praetorial and basic legal programs. The final school is the least known of the three. The Jovian School of Engineering has met with little success since it was founded in 2165. Rumors abound that this division will soon be abandoned. Much of North District’s economy revolves around the university and its related institutions. Of all the districts this is the most severely academic.



Central District is home to a variety of museums and the best boarding school in the Confederation. Suleiman’s Preparatory Academy has a two year course of study, and half the pampered sons and daughters of Olympus have suffered through it. Despite the unpleasantness, virtually all of them will point to those two years as the most character-forming of their lives. This district is also the seat of colony government, located in a modest three-story structure. The location is no accident, nor is it purely a concern of centralization. The location was specifically chosen to distance the center of power on the colony further from Alexandria University which, during decades past, has often been thought of as the de facto government. This impression is not as strong now, but if this is real, or just spin control, is not known.



South District is best known for the Kelmann Institute of Technology. While it and Vanguard Mountain’s VMIT are in a tight rivalry for best technical school, the geographical location of Kelmann gives it the edge in prestige. Hard on math and computer science, anyone who graduates from this school is automatically given respect. The school also has a special relationship with the JAF, and students often take a leave of absence to serve a year with the JAF in an engineering capacity. The JAF will often try to entice these participants to return following their graduation. Some programs even require credits from this program to graduate with honors. Kelmann graduates are known for having a near mystical skill in applying computational methods to problem solving.

The next thing that a casual observer would note about Alexandria II are the three large thermal arrays. Each is emblazoned with the name and number of the station in self-maintaining chromapaint. Unlike some other stations, Alexandria II has regulations prohibiting the use of chromapaint surfaces for advertisement. The interior surface of each radiator is laced with a conductive network that serves to tap power by induction from the Jovian magnetosphere. This array is located between the central and northern sections of the colony.

Alexandria II should not have three thermal radiators, it was designed and built with the usual complement of six. Unfortunately, during the initial spin-up of the station one of the struts between the central and south sections broke off. The cause has never been discovered, but it is believed that there must have been a severe manufacturing defect. With one radiator gone, the other two in that set were also jettisoned to maintain radial symmetry. The designers were faced with a dilemma. They could despin the colony and rebuild the radiators, possibly adding a year and a half to the construction, or they could stretch the capacity of the northern set, and accept that the colony would have to periodically vent volatiles to cool. Less serious, but also troubling was the fact that a single off-center set of induction field arrays could not be used for any sort of propulsion, the force would be unbalanced and spin the station. Instead Alexandria II must use even more volatiles for ion propulsion. While the engineering crews were loathe to accept that Alexandria II could never be a true closed system, the population crunch decided the issue. To this day this has never presented a problem for the colony.

Each radiator is connected to the colony by long struts. While mostly utilitarian, these are technically open facilities. Usually you will only find maintenance bots and a few fitness fanatics jogging about in the 1.2 gee areas, but youth gangs and other petty criminals are known to use its relative desertion to ill ends. More rarely some of the areas only trivially over a gee will be used for hosting weddings and other social occasions since the struts are one of the few places with windows.

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It is 2097, and Olympus is still coming to grips with its unasked independence from Earth. The PCs are members of a security entourage, or workers on the colony project when disaster strikes. The silent destruction of the radiator is a deadly threat, and while all hell is breaking loose, one of the players sees something suspicious. If he can convince his fellows to follow up and investigate they will uncover a conspiracy of radicals dedicated to adapting humanity for space. These criminals are trying to sabotage the vivarium projects. The PCs must then expose the group, and prevent the destruction of the next station to go online.

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Colony planners realized early on that broadband voice, data, and visual communications in near real-time were the only means of truly maintaining cultures larger than a single cylinder. As a result the communication capabilities of vivariums are taken extremely seriously. While most short range communications are performed using point-to-point lasers, the increasing cluttered nature of the Olympus cluster has caused a reversion to RF transmissions for messages of a lower priority. The advantage of these broadcasts, that they are not subject to interference from particulate matter and simple physical occlusion, is somewhat canceled out by the fact that RF transmissions are difficult to detect on a vivarium colony. Even antenna built into the station hull, outside of the rock shielding are still subject to distortion from the colony’s own powerful magnetic field generators. As a result Alexandria II’s communications towers stretch far from its hull. Only the thermal radiators extend farther. The towers mount RF reception and transmission equipment alike, as well as standard
Comm lasers. Certain channels are always reserved for JAF use. 

Every colony needs a docking facility. No matter how few people travel to and from it, supplies will always be imported and exported. Space docks are much like marine docks in that they are full of gruff and forever too busy workers and large cargo-handling mechanisms. Alexandria II has a docking system similar to most Elysèe-style colonies. The northern dock is a simple centerline dock with off-axis small ship egress ports. The southern dock is a counter-rotating ring, capable of docking ships of almost any size. Technically, there are also docking points on the surface of the cylinder, but these are single-use departure points only. Each houses a massive lifeboat which can separate from the cylinder with almost a thousand people aboard. These lifeboats are not widely publicized. In total they can evacuate less than three hundred thousand people, only a small portion of the colony’s population.

The north dock is by far the most used. This is where the colony admits most passengers, and almost all of its supplies. All regular inter-colony shuttle flights arrive and depart from these docks. Each port, be it main or auxiliary, has a pair of huge space doors. These are closed whenever a ship is not coming in, or going out, so they are rarely closed. The doors are
technically airtight, allowing the entire central docking bay to be pressurized. This is rarely done, as it is easier to tent and pressurize individual docking slips when the need arises.



The face of the dock also has four banks of supplemental thermal radiators, helping to make up for the missing trio of main thermal radiators. Beyond this simple facade lies a huge chamber. Incoming ships match rotation and enter the chamber through the bay doors. Once inside a docking frame is extended to them, attached, and withdrawn to a low-gee docking slip. The entire bay has about two hundred slips of varying sizes, capable of handling ships as large as one hundred and twenty meters. Usually, shuttles, OTVs, and Aquarius and Mule cargo vessels comprise most of the docked ships. Occasionally an Anopheles or luxury yacht can be seen. The former usually bearing some asteroidal oddity to bring to the researchers of the colony, and the latter usually belonging to spoiled students at a preparatory school.



Each dock then has three pairs of access tubes to the North District. One of these is a simple passenger monorail, which proceeds to the northern endcap and descends much like a ski lift or gondola, to the gee-level surface of the cylinder. The other access tube is much larger and more complicated. At heart it is also a monorail, though one dedicated to cargo transport. Instead of exiting the northern endcap, this track stays within the cap itself, going downwards beneath the surface of the habitable area of the colony. From here it can stop at any number of points which have access to the surface to unload cargo. Alternatively it can continue on to the other two segments.



The south polar docks are much more complicated. The main JAF presence is located in this end of the colony, and these docks feel that presence strongly. Initially, the traffic does not look to be different, but most of the vessels docking at this end have the fist and thunderbolts emblazoned on them, signifying government service. Technically civilian vessels can dock here, but most of the time the JAF asserts precedence. This is not out of arrogance, but out of simple logistics. Most of the JAF is not made of warships and exo-armors, but crew transfer shuttles, tankers, and other mundane classifications. Almost all colonies have some set of docks set aside for JAF use.



These docks must be capable of handling vessels of any size, and so they are external and counter-rotating. For this reason the mechanism of these docks includes the only major rotation collar on the colony. It is regarded as an extremely reliable design, and is spun down and refurbished once every five years. Even if it were to seize up, it would not be disastrous. Unlike the massive factory spines of more modern stations, the docks contain only a small fraction of the mass of the colony, and the disruption would be minor.

Not every ship having business with the colony needs, or would be allowed to dock. Most cargo ships simply dock with a nearby cargo handling yard. Once there the cargo is off-loaded, the cargo waits for an OTV to pick it up along with the cargo of other ships. The owner of the yard usually buys the delivery contract from the vessel in question and consolidates the shipments. Managing to run a yard profitably is one of the most difficult business challenges in the Confederation. It is unsurprising that these cargo yards are often corrupt, owing their success to a special relationship with a colony dockmaster or some similar underhanded deal. This technique allows for a much greater flow of cargo and a manageable flow of cargo ships. (Cargo yards will be profiled in greater detail in Chapter 7.)

Alexandria II was the first colony to be born under the charter system. Construction was announced in 2083, as a wave of revulsion for the destruction wrought on Earth passed over the Jovians. 
Countless images of the destruction of cultural treasures were broadcast throughout the system, and the largest interest group to apply for the charter was the Jovian Historical Preservation Society. 
So it was that Alexandria II was created, looking backwards and inwards. 
The first government of Alexandria II set up a number of tax breaks, and some outright grants for museums and universities, setting it down the path to becoming the intellectual powerhouse of the Confederation.

Refugees from Earth were paid exorbitant sums of money for some of the seemingly mundane items they brought with them. 
Alexandria II would assure that Earth could not be forgotten. No government since then has had reason to regret this initial policy. Premium higher education is a lucrative business in Jovian society. Museums are a constant tourist draw, and even modest docking and secondary tax rates give the colony more than enough credits to maintain its budget.

While deeply respected throughout the Confederation, the rest of Olympus looks on Alexandria II as being something of an old, tired place. 
There are party schools on the colony, but the fact is it is still known for its somber institutions. 
Even the residents have come to share this feeling.  The students come and go, but those who stay are a slow-moving, unexcitable bunch.



Even in academic circles there is a feeling that the environment has lost something of its vigor, that the schools are not so competitive, and that the museums are no longer as daring. 
Others may demean these concerns as if the modern Alexandria II were being compared to some mythical golden age, but even they can’t deny that the sensation, true or not, is present. 
To combat this many of the local institutions have begun revitalization programs. 
They hire more of their own students to stay on, offer more competitive scholarships, and slowly but surely they exert civic pressure, replacing quiet community bars with louder, soundproofed ones. 
If these changes will be for the better is something that only time can tell.

One of the things that can not be said of Alexandria II, is that it has strayed from its charter. 
Even today its museums remain one of the largest concentrations of Earthly cultural treasures in the system. Experts from all of the settlements come to study and appreciate these wonders. At the end of the twenty-second century some had worried that it had lost its reason for being. The last thirty years have proven these critics wrong. The colony thrives, proving that even the return of Earth has not diminished the need, nor the desire, to both preserve and explore. This has been aided in no small part by the fact that CEGA showed little regard for cultural treasures until it resumed contact with the settlements. So much was lost that the archivists and curators of Alexandria II were at once aghast and reaffirmed in their mission. Politically, this is the ideal that shall always inform the governmental mind of the station.



For these reasons and others, Alexandria II is an anomaly in the Olympus state assembly. Even after the Battle of Elysèe its representatives have continued to vote against increased military spending. No other Olympian colony supports this position, but it has been a half-century since the Agora convened without a representative native to Alexandria II, and such representatives are usually aligned with the Trojan states. This has won the colony many friends in the outlying territories, and in part explains why so many students are willing to take the long trip on the Hanson Circuit to attend classes. Still, the people and politicians of Alexandria II are not unaware of the irony of their situation. It is out of their love of Earth that they wish to avoid war, yet most of them blame CEGA for much of the needless destruction. If there were some way that they could support their hawkish brethren without thinking of the damage it would wreak upon the object of their affections, they surely would.

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The PCs witness a curious meeting between a shady looking character, and the well known chief of staff of Jonathan Dawkins, a member of the Agora. Later that day the PCs suspicions will be aroused when the chief-of-staff publicly resigns, and accuses his boss of conspiring with CEGA! If the PCs go looking for the mysterious man, they will find nothing but a lot of dead ends. However, if they approach the chief-of-staff he will eventually break down, appearing to guiltily disclose the name of his contact. When the PCs follow this lead they will encounter a Principii member operating on Alexandria II. The chief-of-staff will not recant his accusations, and the only way the PCs can clear Dawkins name is to apprehend the Principii operative. If they fail Dawkins will resign and a more hawkish interim representative installed.

Player Characters should feel free to choose either side in this conflict. If they choose the Principii thought, it should be made very clear that they are entering an illegal underworld. A series of adventures could arise out of their attempts to extricate themselves from this predicament.

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Of the five NPCs below, four are major players on the Alexandrian political and social scenes. The fifth is not, and is included primarily as a social encounter, or for possible use as a recurring NPC assistant to the Player Characters. Gamemasters should feel free to make up Silhouette statistics to suit their specific use of the characters, or simply assign them to the closest archetype.

Age: 44

Height:165 cm

Weight: 65 kilos

Hair: Red



Samantha Nakomura has always wanted to sit in the Agora. She can dream of nothing more fulfilling than that one act. She has served her home colony for almost twenty years in various civic roles, and she has only her honor to show for it. Rebuffed by George O’Murphy when she ran for the Olympus state assembly, she now knows she will never advance beyond her current post. She has never learned the art of appearing useful, and will often subsume her own ego to better serve her electorate. This has garnered her no praise, only a grudgingly comfortable acceptance amongst the Alexandrian press and people who regularly poke fun at her apparent dullness. What few seem to notice is how very effective she
is. Politically she is strong on law and order, from criminal punishment right down to zoning regulations. Those who know her personally also can tell that she is an anti-CEGA hawk. The electorate could care less, since that view has never impacted her job duties.

Age: 67

Height: 185cm

Weight: 120 kilos

Hair: Grey



George Murphy is a fiery orator on the floor of the state assembly. What has always puzzled his colleagues is that he has little to be fiery about. His views are mundane, aside from the traditional Alexandrian pacifism he is almost never at odds with the majority. Yet whatever the topic is, Murphy puts the full force of his public speaking into it. Not once has he faltered or
wavered in this.



Murphy is somewhat less intimidating in person. He seems the sort to crush his friends in bear hugs, but in fact he is quite reserved and quiet. He is never found at a public event without his wife Eileen, who is known to be much livelier at the parties than he. The couple has three children, none of whom have pursued a political career. One is raising a family, and the other two are currently in the JAF.



He has served in the assembly since 2208, and has just won re-election to a new term. It is widely expected that he will continue to deliver excellent speeches on mundane topics for years to come.

Age: 37

Height: 172cm

Weight: 70 kilos

Hair: Black



Maria Tulley-Ortez’ hyphenated last name has been in the family for three generations since it was immortalized by Captain Benjamin Tulley-Ortez, who set numerous deep space endurance records and was the first human to set foot on a Kuiper Belt Object. This is still a rare distinction, and one she is not above bringing up. She often claims an interest in repeating the feat herself someday. By saving up her modest income she has purchased a fifty-percent share in a small prospecting operation. It is her hope that this investment will someday pay off, allowing her to purchase a deep-space vessel of her own.

Her job is more administrative than it is technical, and her training never prepared her for human relations. Whenever possible she will bury herself in technical details, preferably hydrology. After putting in twelve hour days she has been known to spend another eight hours in legendary parties. She enjoys discovering new bars where no one knows that she can drink anyone under the table. Also unbeknownst to her victims are her semi-legal implants, which accelerate the metabolization of alcohol. Ostensibly she has them because as a colony decision-maker she must be sober, or nearly so, at all times. The reality is that she just has far too much fun watching exo-jocks and unsuspecting college students make fools of themselves.



She is unhappy in her current position and is entertaining a number of other job offers. Her staff, and even close friends remain oblivious to both her discomfort and her ongoing job search.

Age: 83

Height: 152 cm

Weight: 45 kilos

Hair: White



As a profession economist is almost unheard of. Lenora Rebrov, a diminutive academic, did not let this stop her when she made herself famous by publishing her paper ‘Positive Sum Production and the Inner System.’ Ever since then it has been the centerpiece, some would say the manifesto, for prosperity through autonomous production and charity through imperialism. She is one of the intellectual parents of the movement given form by the Principii. Despite this she was never contacted by them or aware of their activities. In her duties as Dean of Alexandria University, she is known for being honest and trustworthy. She still teaches one class, invariably a freshman lecture in basic economics. It is thought that it is only her presence that gives any interest to the economics program at all.

Emerson Corman was once told that his lineage could be traced back directly to film director Roger Corman. He was young, impressionable, and took it very much to heart. The young Emerson read up on the director, studied his films, and idolized them. Among his most prized possessions is an actual 16 millimeter film projector. Unfortunately he has never had the occasion or room to use it.

After completing college, Corman spent about a year trying to persuade various graduate schools to create a film program. None were interested, and in time Corman returned that disinterest. Eventually he settled in to stay on Alexandria II, the community he was most familiar with from his college years. He found steady employment working as a gunnery assistant for the JAF administered Department of Near Space Security. Now he destroys wayward wrenches while daydreaming of recreating the old Roger Corman classics.

Commuter monorails are the backbone of Alexandria II’s public transportation. Almost the entire workforce uses at least one daily. The network is designed to be fast, flexible, and high capacity. It will deliver a person to a point no farther than a half kilometer from where they want to go. No fixture of daily life on Alexandria II is more constant or more common than the humble monorail car.

Each car is designed for optimal occupancy by sixteen people, though more can be handled if people stand. The interior is a mix of charcoal gray rubberized flooring, and a rich forest green for the seating and walls. The center aisle is wide, and balloons outward near the front where there is an additional space for people who like to stand and observe the view. No monorail car has been involved in a fatal accident since the modern system was developed in the early twenty-second century. As a result there are no seatbelts, and people are not afraid to stand. Acceleration is gentle and smooth, ramping up to roughly 150 kph along straight-aways.

The first design imperative of the Alexandrian transport system was flexibility, and that is the primary reason behind the small size of the individual commuter car. Upon boarding the car each passenger selects a destination. This information is shared with the entire transportation network, allowing optimal routing. At any one time there are hundreds of these cars operating on the colony. There are no set routes, a single car may serve every part of the colony of the course of a seventy-two hour deployment. After those seventy-two hours the car is recalled to a central maintenance area for an eight hour checkout and refurbishment. It is then returned to the operating pool.

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The monorail car will often be a background set for any colony based campaign. When it is used like this it will often be enough for the players simply to know what it does for them, where it takes them and how fast. 
The cunning Game master will use this very mundane appearance to mask his true intentions. A monorail is as good a place as any for trouble to catch up with the Player Characters, and once onboard a hurtling monorail the action will have to be resolved once and for all! This complication can add to the tension of the scene, or make for even more cinematic stunts.

On the other hand it will not always be the PCs who get in trouble on the car. They can also be called in to help others who are in danger there. Perhaps a monorail’s control system has been hacked, and the car refuses to come to a stop, circling the colony again and again. A group of exo-suited police would be hard pressed to pull off this rescue without some quick thinking and steely nerves. Leaving action sets behind, the monorail still provides numerous opportunities as an intrigue setting. Covert meetings, secret exchanges, all of these things can occur in an almost deserted car streaking across the colony floor. Imaginative Gamemasters will almost certainly be able to think of applications to their own campaign.

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Astronomical texture maps courtesy:



C. Thomas' Planetary Maps

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/postgrad/thomasc1/render/maps.htm



David Seal's Maps of the Solar System

http://maps.jpl.nasa.gov/



Bjorn Jonsson's Homepage

http://www.mmedia.is/~bjj/