Saeder-Krupp Globaler Luftraumhafen
Written by: Coupe
Far as I know there's no concrete definition for when a city becomes a full-sized sprawl, but one sure sign is when a megacorp takes interest in renovating major transit hubs. After all, if you're gonna get cosy with a city you don't want your workers to be going in and out through barrens-controlled roads, right? Well, at least Lowfyr doesn't, and he's made that pretty clear when Saeder-Krupp went ahead and put a couple of hundred-million(!) NuYen into turning the old Raleigh-Durham International Airport into the latest and most high-tech airport - sorry, 'Air-Space Port' - in the northern CAS, one runway and terminal at a time. The part-airport, part-warehouse and part-hotel monstrosity that became the finished product was almost like the arcologies that it competed with in dominating Raleigh's skyline with, acting as one of the megacorp's primary infrastructural centers in the country.No doubt SK would turn the airport into an arcology if they could, but completely overtaking and owning one of the most important transport-hubs in NC would be bad publicity, so they're content with having a more decentralized presence in the city.
They did however use the pull from refurbishing the airport to give themselves priority on intra-city flights to and from their other corporate properties. You hardly see SK employees out on the street anymore, 'cause they all just take a VTOL to work and back...The Luftraumhafen's also home to SK's latest prototype in sub-orbital/semiballistic launch, the Lorentz-Assisted Launch Aperature, nicknamed 'Gungnir' by the guys who built it, and get this: It's a plane-railgun, that pulls vehicles along by an axial-mounted rail along a runway-length ramp to give it a huge launch-speed that you wouldn't usually get on runways that size. It's pretty whizz, but it also means that even by the standards of airports security is some of the absolute tightest you'll ever see, so don't go thinking you'll get a free ride on it any time soon, chummer.
Purpose / Function
For the most part, the Luftraumhafen is... welll, an airport. Planes take off and land on the tarmac, there's a main terminal for organising passengers with its own hotel-complex built on-top (complete with drones waking you up for your flight), and there's facilities for the storing and maintenence of aircraft. There's also a couple of large warehouses on one end of the tarmac, where SK saves some scratch in freight-storage and handling, much to the recorded chargrin of Kurabokko Metahuman Technologies.
Alterations
I'll keep it real with you: The only thing left of the old airport is the front facade. Everything else has been rebuild from the ground up one section at a time to meet the demands of the sixth-world: More and longer runways, expanded customer space and temporary-housing, state-of-the-art aircraft maintenence bays, even a few new basement levels underneath the tarmac to make maintaining Gungnir easier.
Architecture
Gotta hand it to Lofwyr, he knew what Raleigh's tastes were gonna be when he had this thing comissioned: It's art-deco all the way through, from the main terminal to the hangars, even the runways have been given some tastful geometric trims so you're shielded from any eyesores until you leave the airport entirely. It kind of clashes with the original aesthetics of the old airport, whose front entrance remains garishly standing in spite of the rest of the building being rebuilt from the ground up to accomodate all the new stuff.
History
Everyone knows SK's been fighting with Ares over who gets Raleigh-Durham for years, probably decades, but they've always been at a stalemade for the simple reason that Raleigh's City-Council just refused to admit the airport was in desperate need of renovation, right up until the jacked-up tarmac on the main runway ripped up the front landing-gear of a landing passenger-jet and led to a baggage-handler getting fed into a jet turbine.
Hats off to the one guy recording the whole thing on a JoePro in spite of the plane scraping along the runway around them, and to him being sick enough to upload it to a gore-site before stepping off.Once that happened and Raleigh admitted their airport needed a facelift and were willing to hand it to a corp to help pay for it, the two megas doubled up their turf-war. For a while, it was looking like Raleigh-Durham was gonna fall into the hands of Ares-Space who were talking big about building an arcology in the county, but then SK slamdunked the fight by offering to pay for the renovations out of their own pocket. Needless to say, City-Council signed them up before the weekend was over.
So why'd SK play hardball, all of a sudden?
At the time, word was just getting out of one of SK's subsidiaries leaving a bunch of workers behind in Forestville when it started to turn into the Concrete Forest we all know and habitually avoid. It was an expensive PR project as much as it was snatching up some prime infrastructure, but the goodwill they got from building the airport back up got fragged when the afformented subsidiary (Bouygues, if you wanna know) tried to fix their mistakes and accidentally caused the Hell-Rain incident.Construction began immediately, since SK had been sitting on ideas for years, but the actual construction was outright glacial: Keeping planes coming in and out was important for SK and Raleigh, so a lot of the renovation was done in stages, refurbishing one part of the airport at a time while the others remained in some state of operation. It ended up being a really awkward and clumsy affair, with pilots always second-guessing which runways were safe to land on, utilities constantly being interrupted and the occasional passenger wandering into a construction-zone and getting yelled at by tired Germans. Things actually looked like they were gonna stop entirely in '76, when the bigwigs at SK decided the brand new runway was gonna be pulled out and replaced with a magnetic launch-slingshot pet-project. The workers were understandably miffed at their hard work being undone, and it took a few months for work to pick back up after some 'third-party insurgents' (read: shadowrunners) managed to infiltrate and throw a few wrenches into the in-progress Gungnir, forcing SK to concede a little compensation to the overworked builders before the labour continued. Finally, in 2078 and four years behind schedule, the Airport finally re-opened in full, and they celebrated with the inaugural launch of their plane-launching railgun thing, making commercial flight just a little more futuristic and giving dozens of Raleigh's biggest names a hard concussion. Hey, nothing's perfect right out the gate right?
Alternative Names
Raleigh–Durham International Airport, SK Air-Space Port
Type
Airport
Parent Location
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