kintsugi IN SPACE

i know, i'm teasing, you're tiny. you are as big as one mango. can you even eat a whole mango by yourself. :3

but i'm serious about the orchard assistant posish. some of these trees have to be hand pollinated because we haven't terraformed the right environment for their pollinators -- for instance, wind pollination doesn't work so good when there's no weather. if you had a little power suit with pockets and extra feethands, and some wee helicopter bots to help you, i bet we could really increase yield.

 

yeah, i try to keep beneficial insects around to keep the pests down but there's only so much they can do. awesome, you're hired. *carefully shakes teeny winghand*

 

haha you're right, i thought we WERE on the psace kintsugi thread, three cheers for nyquil... imma move the posts over there. whoops.

edit: OMG I MOVED POSTS EN MASSE I'M THE BEST MOD

 

I am distracted by Worldbuilding June on my personal Tumblr, so I may be babbling less, but I was wondering about the landscape of Kintsugi.

It's a lunar landscape (because, after all, it is a moon), and a lunar landscape in the sense that it's like Luna, the Earth's moon, craters and such. Instead of Marias - the "seas" of the Moon we know, which were created by the upwelling of magma into the largest craters back when the moon was tectonically and volcanically active, the largest craters in the surface of Kintsugi uncover the smooth, ultrahard surface of a moon-wide surface left by the Kintsugi Builders, one textured with the occasional geometric city, a half-sunken one of which makes up a good deal of the new Kintsuigan settlement, and excavation is underway to hollow out some more of the buildings that are still buried.

The little town of Kintsugi is technically in a flat-bottomed crater, with shall0w-ish sides and about two-thirds of an ancient alien city sticking out of one of the hills, along with some actual buildings. Up on the surface, out of the crater, are the numerous bubbled farms that @jacktrash tends to, and beneath the surface are miles of tunnels tracing out a fractal pattern, complete with many cave-ins and dead ends suitable for the explorer with time and hopefully some sort of mapping system on their hands. The tunnels cover several levels, and span almost half a square mile, and there's a suggestion that they go even deeper into the moon, although many of the tunnels are choked with moonsand, moondust and other moon materials.

To get out of the crater, you can either climb up the sides (which are kinda Large Hill steep, if you want some low-grav, no-atmo hiking) or take the stairs some enterprising person cut into the lunar regolith. Some people are working on some shallower tunnels and/or an elevator. Requests for a catapult system have been shot down on the grounds that while gravity is lower than 1G, it's not quite low enough to make that landing safe. We know this. We have tested it on Snitch, and they bounced off one of the fields round the smaller craters with farms in, and had to be separated from the lunar lithosphere with a spatula and a pressure washer.

So, basically what you get is a central big, air-filled crater with Kintsugi at the bottom, and in a number of small nearby craters, a bunch of farms, each one in an air-field bubble. And even further out than that, the Great Wall of Nope, which is not suitable to keep air in (hence the smaller air fields) but is very suitable to keep enemies out through a combination of actual force and the Psychic Disapproval Field. Occasionally some bit of debris left behind by the ships that people use to get around hits the Wall, and is disintegrated in a shower of colourful sparks. Despite the general prettiness, it is NOT advised to ram the shield with anything. We need it to keep stuff out.

 

#I got very distracted from my own Worldbuilding June with this. #Whoopsie.

 

we do have a terraforming project going on, right? even if it'll be centuries from now, i love the idea of greening the barren desert.

 

I dunno, but I suspect Kintsuigmoon is big enough to hold an atmosphere, and there are a couple of moons with life on orbiting Plenet as well. Terraforming seems like a reasonable deal, plus there's all this farming going on to see what the moondirt does well with and what plants work well with the minerals and stuff.

Eventually, someone will cave and we'll have a whip-round for some proper terraforming equipment, but for now we're in the "planning and research". Plus, there are some interesting atmospheric generating engines in the Big Dumb Object that might make the job much easier once reverse-engineered.

 

i'm your dirt expert, tentacle bro. and i just might happen to have been collecting seeds, spores, and samples of various early-terraform plants, like lichens and algae. let's do this thing.

(iirc earth's moon could hold an atmosphere for several million years without noticeable thinning. it's just that's really short on a geologic timescale.)

 

That, and Kintsugi Moon has gravity only slightly lower than Earth's, and a size that's something like Venus, orbiting Plenet, which is the mass of a dozen Jupiters, so atmospheric retention is less of a problem.

Atmospheric acquisition, however, is a bit more complicated. It's probably where the reverse-engineered atmosphere generators come in, unless we find some sort of "easy terraform kit" lying around.

As for water, I'm sure we could dump some comets into the atmosphere, which would serve the dual purpose of heating it up!

 

gotta make sure you get their trajectory just right though, so they don't hit ground or explode. maybe seebs can be in charge of that. we are not sure what seebs is, but it seems to involve a significant orbital presence.