 March 7, 2014 - 1:22pm |  The PGC Tower, Port Loren, Gran Quivera, Prengular System Its a twin to the "luxury appartment" tower and has an elevated walkway between the two. Both have underdround parking structures. The Endless Quest book "Captive Planet" states that one of the upper floors of the PGC tower has a com center with booths for making subspace calls. There is a monorail station depicted on the map which is likely named "PGC". likely that there is two floors dedicated to communications: one for subspace calls and the other manages all other communications and possibly has a mainframe computer/server there Couple questions: 1. how deep do the underground structures go? Pulling a number out of the air I'm guessing 3 levels of underground parking and a loading dock on the first level at least for PGC. I've seen one tall building in Boston with 4 or 5 levels of parking. 2. How high are the towers? I imagine that they are twins and the same height but what would be a good hieght 3. at what level should the connecting walkway be? Low, middle or high? Other considerations: the luxuray appartments are connected to PGC and built on the same property so I imagine that they do cater to PGC employees but perhaps not exclusively. Thus a delegate to the Council of Worlds might have an appartment here or a rich ship owner. No doubt the EVPs have penthouses for when they cant jet away to their villas. From doing catering deliveries to small buildings in Boston I can say that both buildings should have multiple elevators- a bank of elevators for normal usage and one to two service elevators (one is probably enough) its common, in this day and age for contractors and delivery personnel to sign in with a dock master or security in these types of buildings, be issued a pass that states what floor they may access and the elevator attendant on the service elevator delivers them to that floor and takes their pass from them with they go back down the elevator. in the Frontier the elevator attendant will be a level 3 robot. he is perhaps not a security robot but under normal circumstances is able to call for security. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 September 30, 2014 - 5:19am | A kilometer tall and only 50m wide? I wouldn't want to be within a kilometer of those in any wind... {EDIT} I see Terl and I are on the same page at the same time... |
September 30, 2014 - 5:50am | Perhaps the interconnecting walkways are intended as a stablizing factor? or these are the first building ever built with a superstructure made out of pure Federanium, which is a fantastically strong alloy but also very expensive. This, incidently, was at the heart of the Star Devil's operation on Volturnus- the two alloys that were being mined and stockpiled at the pirate slave city are the base for making Federanium. Because Federanium is so expensive and difficult to come by this explains why PGC was willing to deal with pirates: they were getting the alloys under market value and the towers required so much more than was available on the open market that the price was being driven up. In one sense the PGC towers were built on the blood of slaves imported to Volturnus by the Star Devil and worked to death in his mines. The corporation, of course, denies any direct knowledge of this but its a dirty little secret that they have paid plenty to Galactic Task Force spec ops to help cover up. EDIT: so perhaps we should limit the height some but we can also presume that the setting has had some engineering and technical advances that let them do some thing we can not do today, making some grand statements of PGC's power and prestige possible. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
September 30, 2014 - 6:38am | For reference the Empire State Building is about 300' in width and 1250 tall. The Sears Tower is 225 wide by 1400 tall, granted that is a 9 building design packed into a 3X3 grid with varying heights of the nine "sub-towers" that provide structural support for each other. The Chrysler Tower is 424 east-west/187 north-south by 898' tall. Heights are measured at the top floor and do not count rooftop antennae etc. The Chrysler Tower base is closest in dimensions to the PGC building (nearly a 2:1 ratio) and if you average those measurements you get about 300' and the height is roughly a 3:1 ratio to that average. By those ratios, the PGC building would be safe by 20th century construction standards at around 250 meters in height. Higher tech sci-fi construction techniques might double that to 500. But 1000 is really stretching it (no pun intended). |
 October 1, 2014 - 5:26pm | The current tallest building in the world is the 828 meter tall Burj Khalifa building in Duba. I did a bunch of research a few months ago when I was working on this and that is how I settled on 1000 meters as the height. I am expecting improved federation materials and methods. For one, they have air cranes. As for the thing swaying, I think we have that solved now. I have been to the top of Taipei 101 in Taiwan which is 509 meters on a similar small proportion foot print and it is still. I do make the sky bridges part of the structure to increase the foot print. What I don't like about the PGC twins after months of looking at them is that they lack character. They are just rods in the sky. They don't step or grow to their height like the hive towers. I have concidered that the top fifth is just facad with no floors and just structure thinning out to get the height above the hive towers. I changed the story height back before I made the post about the yazirian free climbing the towers in construction. The floor to floor height is now 4 m to accomodate yazirians. This gives up to 3 meters for living space and at least a meter for vents and plumbing. I like the angle about PGC secretly working with pirates to get enough fedranium to build the thing. But I hate tieing everything to the Volturnus adventures. The are getting a bit plot heavy. -iggy |
October 1, 2014 - 5:48pm | I like the angle about PGC secretly working with pirates to get enough fedranium to build the thing. But I hate tieing everything to the Volturnus adventures. The are getting a bit plot heavy. Well I'm fiddling with stuff in the Volturnus project so I suddenly make connections. Perhaps it is a bit plot heavy but I like PGC having a dirty little secret connected to their towers. As to their being ugly rods sticking into the sky I get that but like the bit about the vrusk being mifted about how it obstructs the view from their towers and ruins the carefully crafted light effects at sunset for parts of the year- the vrusk being into beauty planned their towers to gleam and reflect sunlight in a beautiful display at sundown. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
October 1, 2014 - 10:08pm | The current tallest building in the world is the 828 meter tall Burj Khalifa building in Duba. And the base is 175 (and triangular at that..the most structurally sound shape), putting it at roughly 4:1 height vs width ratio...which is similar to that of the Empire State Building. I'm no engineeer, but I'm just not seeing how the proposed 12:1 ratio of the PGC Tower can be safe. Try stacking 12 milk crates and watch what happens... |
October 4, 2014 - 11:28am | I did not find the Kingdom Tower in my research last spring. Here is a planned 1000 meter building in Saudi Arabia that has started construction. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Tower The tower will be at least 1000 meters on a 1000 hectare base. 1000 hactares is 100 meters by 100 meters. This gives a 10:1 ratio. We are getting better at building taller. The article states that they were aiming for a 1.6 km but scaled back to 1km due to the geology of the area. I think we can still make the PGC towers 1 km as we can control the geology of Port Loren and use frontier tech such as fedranium and plastisteel. Here are things I think we need to augment the basic design presented so far with to make it more plausable. - Multiple butress/skybridges making the tower one building. - A deep and wide basement and foundation. - Geologically inactive bed rock at the planet surface for Port Loren. - Facade structure to the upper floors of the towers, 20 meter ceilings, reduced structural floor space, etc. I like the facade idea as it plays to the arogance of PGC to try to deceive the populace by hiding the tapering of the building inside a shell to cause the appearance of continuous useable space. -iggy |
October 4, 2014 - 3:24pm | Fair enough on the Kingdom Tower. I like the facade idea as it plays to the arogance of PGC to try to deceive the populace by hiding the tapering of the building inside a shell to cause the appearance of continuous useable space. If it's structurally reinforced on the inside --- i.e. less usable interior space --- keep in mind that the other tower is a residential building. You won't be selling extremely limited living space any time soon...more so when it has been billed as "luxury living". Also noteworthy is the proximity of a star port. If 9/11 has taught us anything, we don't want aircraft (or space craft for that matter) inadvertently smashing into tall structures. |
October 4, 2014 - 3:26pm | Which brings up another query...how tall is the Stellar Tower Hotel? I always envisioned that as being the tallest structure in Port Loren, based on the name alone. |
October 4, 2014 - 4:13pm | At the moment I only have the Stellar Tower Hotel at 165 meters. Nothing special about that, I just made the shapes and extruded them up to a visually pleasing height. I have only been seriously working on the PGC towers and the hive towers, and the hospital. I could grow it taller. I like the idea that the name Steller implies that it is a tall building. See the skyline shot above in the March 12th post from me. The more we expand the map of Port Loren the easier it will look on the eyes to have really tall buildings. Expanding the hospital and adding the hive towers was my first effort in expanding the map. Then I got to thinking about the star port you memtioned. I first searched the internet to see if anyone had detailed the star port and there is a map, this one.  Note North is on the right, this map is rotated. I like this layout and want to use it as a nod to the creator. However, I can't see any star port being located anywhere near a city. The Frontier worlds can definetly afford to use extra realestate and keep the actual launch pads of star ports isolated. Thus I see this map as the terminals for passangers to enter the port system. The actual boarding is done by secure monorail out to the launch pads. With this map that would have to happen underground as the creator has surounded the star port quite tightly. I've thought that there should be a small mountain ridge seperating the city from the launch pads. I have been trying to come up with a good geography to build Port Loren on the give the city a natural feel. I also think the city needs to be ocean side to truely hold the name Port. -iggy |
 October 4, 2014 - 4:29pm | I've never seen that map before. Where did you find it? Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
October 4, 2014 - 5:01pm | I saw that star port map shortly after posting. I image-googled "port loren map" and that was one of the hits. I aso found my old "warehouse district" map there as well (along with the Pit Stop), which joins to the right of the large map. |
October 4, 2014 - 5:49pm | The SF.us page for the Pit-Stop lists it as being in New Hope. -iggy |
October 5, 2014 - 1:53am | Yeah...there's an explanation for that. I initially penned that extension for the Port Loren map, but another game I was playing online the GM had a duplicate city map being used for Triad with different names on the buildings and he needed a "seedy side of town" so I ported that over to said game. I created the Pit Stop afterwards as one of the buildings he needed to complete the setting. |
October 5, 2014 - 8:08am | So the warehouse district is to the West or East of the Port Loren map? Directly attached or some distance further? -iggy |
October 5, 2014 - 11:45am | Another explaination you could use is that these are terminals for air shuttles to/from the actual launch pads or maybe even other parts of the planet. Maybe it is not ships but rather air buses. Just like in some airports around the world where the plane never actually comes up to the terminal but rather you deplane into busses that take you to the terminal. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
October 5, 2014 - 5:28pm | So the warehouse district is to the West or East of the Port Loren map? Directly attached or some distance further?
If the Star Port Expressway runs north, the Warehouse District is to the east. It shares the public library on the bottom/right of the Port Loren map with roughly a 100m gap in between, that's where the two streets join up. The idea was that the warehouses would be convenient to the Star Port for storage. |
October 6, 2014 - 3:57am | Since the Star port is off the map it can be any suitable distance from the central map. We dont actually have to map areas directly connected to the original Port Loren map but could map areas kilometers from it that PCs would simply hop the mono rail to reach those areas. For example we might map the seat of the UPF government and place it 2 km from downtown Port Loren. It would easily take up an area the size of the downtown PL map. Council or Worlds building Council of Species Building Sathar War Memorial Spirit of Peaceful Coexistance Memorial Library of the Frontier building Reflecting pool and park surrounding it. etc actually that sounds like a good collaborative project for our community. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
