Craterhold Innovation Expo Park
The Craterhold Innovation Expo Park, often partially abbreviated as Cinex Park, is a large theme park, fair ground, and convention center located across the inflection layer from Craterhold, on Eastern A2.
Purpose / Function
While the Holdsmen's extremely lasseiz-faire attitudes make them less popular with more legalistic foreign powers, development houses the world over recognize that this same set of beliefs makes the people and their nation amenable to the pursuit of pure research - free of legal (and sometimes ethical) strictures - which would be impossible elsewhere.
Being isolated from Craterhold and the Coalition of Breakaway Colonies proper, Cinex Park serves as a location to test, debut, and market cutting-edge technologies with a degree of separation from the prying eyes of the Voxelian enemy's Bards-Recursant. Furthermore, as the park is also isolated from the populated regions of the Coalition by a protective buffer of the Manifold Sky itself, certain extremely dangerous experiments can be conducted while risking a minimum of collateral damage. Indeed, part of the excitement that guests experience when visiting Cinex Park is the belief that, at any moment, some unexpected event ripped straight from the pages of Squeaky Clean Adventures might occur.
Architecture
The park sits on roughly a square mile of open desert, situated over underground hot springs (associated with Eastern B) to make use of them for drinking water and geothermal power purposes. Troughs around the park, in addition to a central collection tower, turn the park into a giant solar thermal power station while also preventing direct landings. Visitors must land at the adjacent airfield or at one of several docking pylons around the park - or risk damage to their airships' gas envelopes or any optics aboard. The entire patch of land on which the park sits has been undermined with a network of bunkers, including bomb shelters, an agri-mine with advanced autonet management systems, a next-generation geothermal powerplant, and other park facilities. These underground bunkers are all available for visitor tours, as they are as much a part of the Cinex experience as the ever-changing expos taking place above.
At night, the central tower twinkles with tiny tritium lights, a boon from early radioactivity research conducted in Northern- Southern-adjacent cubes (i.e. in Tartagloam before it fell). Beneath the reflective glow of the central tower lies a huge pavilion surrounded with two rings of large exposition halls. These exposition halls are in the classical Craterhold style, featuring dense brick walls, external overhangs supported with sturdy arcades, and clay shingle roofs with shuttered ventilation steeples. The buildings are designed to passively keep the occupants cooler in the daytime and warmer and the evenings through thermal inertia, though the shutters on the steeples - and later HVAC retrofits to the buildings - can provide more fine control over the indoor environment if desired.
he pavilion and surrounding walkways feature a variety of vendor stalls for refreshments, souveniers, and early-access gadgets. Outdoor art displays themed after the technologies debuted at The Cinex in years prior are emplaced in and above this pavilion to add spice to the artificial skyline. Beyond the outermost ring of expo halls lay open lots with environment-hardened utility hookups. These lots, originally designed for expositions which requrire more space than an expo hall can affort, have since been half taken up with a rotating cast of rollercoasters.
Though the park itself is not a municipality in and of itself, it has all the amenities of a town for its small army of live-in staff. A Navigator's Guild hall provides travel agent services, while a MartMart box store provides trade goods. While the Guild is trusted to keep certain experimental technologies under wraps, no MartMart employees are allowed in the private expo halls or underground facilities. A small hotel, featuring a unique computerized valet and guest registration system, provides comfort for guests planning to spend multiple days on-site.
Tourism
Though gettting to the Craterhold Innovation Expo Park is somewhat more expensivem and logistically complex than a simple road trip to sites in allied territory, the Cinex remains a popular tourist destination for middle- and upper-class Coalition citizens interested in tech.
Admission to the park is a process which includes mailed correspondence and a visit to the Cinex administrative offices connected to the Navigator's Guild hall in the municipality of Craterhold. Potential visitors are vetted to a limited degree, with administrators permitted to deny tickets to any who appear to have larcenous intent or show disloyalty to Craterhold or the Coalition at large. However, if everything seems above-board (which is usually the case), administrators provide ticket packages including accomodations, Guild contract cards, and special park services (i.e. facilities tours).
The Cinex always offers group rates, corporate rates, and steep discounts for presenters. Visitors may interact with park services, vendors, and rides using Navigator's Guild Credits or park tokens purchased at the time of ticket purchase or at one of several kiosks located around the park. These vendor-based services are narrowly the biggest source of income for Cinex Park.
Alternative Names
Cinex Park, The Cinex
Type
Theme park / Entertainment complex
Parent Location
Characters in Location
Related Tradition (Primary)
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