Perimeter Parks & Augmented Animal Habitats
Large portions of the ESCI Revelation's Sphere Section are left up to what might be somewhat facetiously called 'nature.' These patches are spoken of by the colonists as the "Perimeter Parks" or simply "the Parks."
Geography
50ft wide terraces abut almost directly to the fore and aft sun windows, creating space for grass, shrubbery, and a few short trees. Long strips of land come down from these terraces, following the curvature of the sphere, until they join at either sides of the Equatorial River. These long appendages of the Parks, along with the river, subdivide the Sphere Section into twelve districts, each of which is a cultural microcosm of one of the twelve Great Clans of the Cobalt Protectorate. Grasses and vines are allowed to spill over the sides of the terraces, providing visual interest for those looking on from lower terraces, while the decorated faux brick walls that 'support' the terraces provide footholds for vines and mosses climbing upwards.
Seams along along the vertical edges of the terraces and limbs provide mooring points for the almost perfectly transparent damage control membranes that bound and protect the Sphere Section's inhabited spaces from depressurization in the event of collision with relativistic micrometeors. These seams blend in with the gap between the flora above and below, as well as some clever arrangement of the faux brick facades, to further disguise the membrane attachment points. There are resealable access curtains between adjacent membranes along common footpaths; animals which reside in the Parks had been raised aboard the Revelation for long enough before the mission to understand where these openings may be found so that they can be used for 'natural' animal traffic.
Ecosystem
The Parks provide a reservoir for several plant and animal species brought along in an effort to create a robust, diverse closed ecology. These include a wide variety of bugs and a few space-adapted species of birds. Importantly, the Parks provide habitats for the colony's various Augmented Animal, with miniature self-contained housing modules tucked into the hollows of the area in a sort of miniaturized verison of the residential GPMs in which the human, Lepidosian, and platformed HLAI crew reside.
Ecosystem Cycles
Despite the appearance of nature, the Parks (and all 'outdoors' spaces for that matter) aboard the Revelation are not perfectly stable ecosystems. The Department of Life Sciences keeps a close watch over doings in the Perimeter Parks for signs of systems collapse, disease spread, population imbalances, or deleterious human activities. As a part of the closed ecological life support system of the Revelation, serious tampering with, or destruction of, Park assets is subject to criminal prosecution and punishment.
Tourism
The Parks are an important life support supplement in a less-considered aspect: they provide a sense of 'outdoorsiness' to the Revelation's otherwise fully enclosed and artifical environment. In other words, they are place where colonists can go to relax and reconnect with nature, an important safeguard against cabin fever and its more deadly variant, igeshenk.
Alternative Name(s)
The Parks
Owning Organization
Comments