Climate Control System
I love the city life, no respirator, no sun, just a nice river, nice bars and nice weather all year round.
A Climate Control System, often abbreviated to CCS, is a group of structures designed to generate articifial micro-climates. These were initially found dotting the urban landscape of many cities on Asteria, but the technology has since spread to other planets. The system is composed of three major components: the Climate Control Towers (CCT), who provide a source of clean and controlled air, the Climate Containment Barriers (CCB), who contain the artificial atmosphere and recycles the surrounding air to feed the control towers, and finally, the Orbital Radiation Shields (ORS), who aborb and deflect harmful solar radiation away from the protected location.
The first of such system was built for the capital city of New Calypso in 277. Covering the entire the city with one primary tower and six secondary towers, the system was a huge success that resulted in a much easier life for the workers and engineers of the Asterian Restoration Initiative. The system was later expanded to the surrounding suburbs with additional towers and a new containment barrier, while the radiation shield was expanded to cover a wider area. To this day, most Asterian cities with more than 50 000 inhabitants are fully protected by their Climate Control Systems, and only a handful are partially protected or unprotected.
Technology
Discovered:
274
Major Users:
Vestan Federation
Usage
The Climate Control System technology is primarily used to maintain a livable or more comfortable climate in a given area, generally a city or town. The Orbital Radiation Shields are placed in geosynchronous orbit over their target to maintain a constant protection against solar radiation, while the Climate Control Towers releases a constant flow of Old Earth-like processed air, forming a bubble of clean air for citizens to breath in. Finally, the Climate Containment Barriers contain the artificial climate bubble in the city while serving as air intakes for the control towers. The whole system can only work at full potential in areas with atmospheres as dense that the target atmosphere, but can also be implemented as a wide area air purification system,
in which case only the control towers are required. If the Climate Control System is implemented in areas with lower of higher atmospheric densities, the towers will attempt to contain the loss of pressure through extreme wind speeds, forbidding the use of aircrafts above the protected area.
History
The idea of artificially controlled climates and environments is not new. Even in the Solar Age of Old Earth, such ideas were the basics of the Martian terraforming program. After the Scarcity War and the discovery of Auriga, however, the need for such methods disappeared, seemingly for good. It wouldn't be until 169 that such ideas resurfaced after some accidents occurred during the colonization of Asteria. The first attempts were relatively simple and consisted in building glass and polymer domes over the protected location to seal the targeted atmosphere inside. While these solutions worked for small scale applications, applying the same method to an entire city was a significant engineering challenge.
The idea to replace a physical dome with an air bubble started to appear in the 250s, and the first designs starter to appear in the late 260s. The first contruction project began in early 275 to protect the city of New Calypso from the contaminated atmosphere. After two years of construction, the CCS proved to be extremely effective, and the technology was rapidly adopted by other cities around the world. As the years go by, the Asterian Restoration Initiative came to an end, and the CCS technology continued to evolved and grow in capacity. The undergroud air purifiers bellow the control towers became more powerful and efficient, while the towers themselves could project an atmosphere to wider areas.
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