I just downloaded the digital elevation maps from http://gis.ess.washington.edu/uwmola/download/index.html but the resolution near Meltwater is not that great - the canyon hardly shows up. Still, might be useful for making some renderings of the general panorama. (The real thing is the HiRISE data, http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/dtm/ but they only exist for a few places since it has to be computed through an expensive computer vision method) One interesting thing I noticed that might be worth remembering: the floor of Niger Vallis is about a kilometre higher than the floor of Dao Vallis. The Cloudtop falls are actually impressive. Even more so since the low gravity makes the water move slowly - when it is windy it spreads out into broad veils. I assume the utility water for the orchards are sent down in pipes, while the falls are aesthetic and to maintain a swath of terraformed land. In the winter, the water in the falls turns to ice, producing a wall of ice that is nearly irresistible for climbers - and quite deadly. I like the HiRISE site, they even have a suggestion box for where else to image. Someone named polita has already suggested imaging the Meltwater valley: http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_013133_1445 (the top picture just shows a tiny part, click on the links) You can see that it is not that straight, but actually snakes a fair bit. This is likely a good start to draw street maps on! You can get some impressive dust and snow avalanches (or at least clouds) blowing down from the Dao and Niger valley edges when the winds are right. Here is a polar version: http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/HiBlog/2010/03/10/springtime-for-avalanches/ BTW, some places in Hellas look positively Lovecraftian: http://www.uahirise.org/ESP_016022_1420

Good jobs all around, so far. We need to compile this all in a PDF or something, update it once a month or so and put it up for download. Also, since children have been mentioned, I might as well add something along that vein... [b]The Sandman[/b] All children have bogeymen. Even children who can visualize an AR overlay of their rooms when they close their eyes, and see in so many spectrums as to make darkness a non-issue, will leap at noises. Their minds conjure fearful creations that could not possibly exist... Could they? The Sandman is one such bogeyman; a man made of ice, wrapped in a robe of Martian sand, who wears an antiquated breather mask. He is said to lurk in the deserts, engaging in all kinds of mischief and murder. Sometimes, he devours whole caravans in his cloak and sends them into terrible realms of nightmarish horror. At others, he is a mischievous prankster, who merely toys with prospectors by stretching out his icy limbs to incredible lengths to make them think he is an ice depost. Mostly, he just eats children. It all depends on who tells the story. Many children around Meltwater spoke of the Sandman, but far more now than they ever did before, since the tragic death of Chen Tao four years ago. Chen Tao was a young boy of the age of three, the son of a Layabout and a local woman, born in the old fashioned way. One day, when playing with friends near his father's camp, Chen wandered off on his own. His friends gave mixed accounts of what came next, but what is clear is that Chen walked of his own accord into a strong-flowing river. It is presumed he was dragged under or taken by a large piece of ice and carried down stream, where was caught in the intake of a small hydroelectric generator and dragged into its ice-crusher. When the boy's body was recovered, his cortical stack had been too badly damaged to recover anything but a vapor, and, being so young and from such a poor family, Chen had not yet received backup insurance. By far, the most disturbing part of the incident is the discovery in the aftermath. The last recorded thought in young Chen's mind was a single word, played over and over again in his calm voice. Sandman. Since that time, there has been an explosion of fear amongst many low-income residents of Meltwater. Though few dare voice it openly, many are fearful for their children's safety. They scoff at the notion that the death of Chen was anything more than an accident, but, at the same time, they secretly wonder just what led the child to walk into the dangerous waters. They calm themselves, suggesting he just walked off... And yet... Amongst the Layabouts, the Sandman has become a figure in art, used as a sort of folk demon. Paintings of a tall, lean figure with a breather mask for a face, a robe of sand, and long, crystalline arms has begun to grace the walls of Layabout caves, with varying degrees of artisanship throughout. Few take it seriously, but there are those who will avoid touching or walking near such an image, and there is already a small but growing collection of grainy, blurry XPs that claim to contain actual footage of the Sandman, as well as one rather low quality horror XP based around the legend.

Thank you kindly, glad you liked it! I'm sort of limited on time at the moment, got a news broadcast to do at 2, but when I get back, I'm thinking of detailing a Layabout hideout or a very disappointed synthmorph rights activist ("Damnit, stop being so tolerant!").

I have put a first version of the collection of our texts at http://www.aleph.se/EclipsePhase/Meltwater.pdf Feel free to suggest improvements and updates.

Helianthus Inc. Helianthus is a company making aquifer heating rods. Based in Meltwater it is one of the local success stories: as the terraforming operation has grown, so has demand. What started as a workshop with an industrial fabber now is half a dozen shiny factory buildings. Heating rods consist of a solar panel ("the flower") that efficiently absorbs sunlight and transports the heat down the "stem" using nanotube thermal conductors to the "root", a branched structure that dissipates the heat into the ice. The energy also maintains onboard sensors and in newer models self-repair and root extension. Typically the rods come as pluggable sections: drillers drill a hole down to the right depth and rod sections are inserted, with a "bud" inserted at the top. The bud unfolds into a lightweight and stiff solar panel, sends nanomachines down to connect the sections and and to begin building the roots. Once a rod is functional it can survive nearly indefinitely. The usual reason for failure is ground settling that breaks the rod or leaves it in an ice- or water-free cavity, or that a severe storm breaks the flower. Normally rods survive for decades. A forest of heating rods acts as a small mesh network. The onboard processors are not intended to do anything but monitor the rod and its environment, plus report back the state of the forest to the owner (and TTO, which insists on getting accurate readings from all rods - together they produce plenty of valuable data, and minimizes the risk of false water production claims). Helianthus was founded by the Shima family. After trying their hand on some terraforming work they decided that the real money was in selling better equipment. Grandfather Tokai began designing a cheap and sturdy heating rod that was easy to transport, taking into account the problems he and his friends had encountered in the planting work. The early rods became popular, and over time the family firm has expanded and developed more and more advanced rods. The current models are about as advanced as is viewed economical and acceptable (nobody likes the idea of self-reproducing or self-extending heating rods, except for some crazies in the Red Eden Foresight Division). The Shimas have good relations with everybody: the company is customer-oriented, happy to sell to small-scale operations (and in return it gets honest stories about how things work out in the desert) as well as giving reliable supplies to big firms like HAMC. When there is a tour for important visitors to Meltwater Helianthus is usually shown as a nice example of entrepreneurship. Grandfather Tokai is still occasionally helping design new models, but he has left most of the work to his daughters Hikari and Kiku. He is considering retiring, perhaps to join the Fumeikyo order of Buddhists at Mons Rin in the Coronae Montes. The rest of the family are loath to lose him, but he seems to be steadily drifting towards that decision. His son-in-law Minoru is the current CEO. He is seriously torn about the possibility of becoming patriarch of the family. Helianthus has another, unknown problem. Somebody hacked their servers a while back and introduced some secret code in the designs of the Soraya series of heating rods. It simply adds a few extra processors along the rod, turning it into a general purpose computer. Under the right conditions these can come online and link to a VPN. A forest of Soraya rods is a potential server farm. Exactly who and why is unclear. It might just be hackers setting up space for a petal server network or a deniable source of mesh attacks, it might be a terraforming company wanting to get the scoop on competitors, or it might be something far more sinister - distributed computations running across forests of heating rods in the high desert might be very hard to stop.

Father Lu Father Wei Lu is the local priest of the Meltwater Baptist Church, a conservative evangelical church. While the church is not the most popular religious group in town, thanks to father Lu it tends to be the loudest. Father Lu is an energetic preacher, often holding impromptu sermons whenever he finds listeners (willing or unwilling). He has made a point of trying to meet with as many town residents as possible, talking to them and if possible helping them. While he is viewed as a luddite busybody few doubt his sincerity. Besides preaching about the need to be born again in Christ, spread and respect the gospel, and avoid sinning, he is seriously concerned with technological sins: "Thanks to VR games every kid is now a murderer and rapist before ten years of age! What difference does it make if they are killing simulated people, when they are told that thanks to their stacks they are little else? If they are told it is fine to disrespect the simulated characters that are in practice indistinguishable from their real friends and parents, what does that tell them about how to treat real people? Sins are real even when they happen in virtual worlds!" Rather than focus on the big bioconservative issues he is concerned about how modern technology affects people's morality. Uploading, stacks and life extension do not disturb him that much ("If God wants to bring you home, He is going to succeed no matter what your backup insurance is!") It is rather the human immorality they allow. People treating their bodies like disposable containers or coveting their neighbour's body. Others are obsessed with living forever, saving money for future incarnations rather than helping other people in need. Infugees and indentured labour are treated with contempt and as a resource on par with robots despite being just as real humans as everybody else. Psychosurgery, drugs and therapy are used to fix mental problems and mere inconvenient thoughts rather than learning to control them through character, willpower and faith. Locals jokingly calls him the Jovian, and he has actually publicly defended the Republic. While he cannot condone their methods, at least they are aware of the corrosive effects of many technologies people elsewhere do not question. Originally born on Earth and active as a priest in Shanghai and San Francisco, he became an infugee during the Fall. He ended up working off indenture for Experia's religious broadcasting subdivision, something that fuelled his negative views of how modern society treats infomorphs and virtual people. He managed to get out of indenture fairly quickly thanks to help from Onesimus, a Christian charity helping to buy out indenture contracts of believers. After a few years in Valles New Shanghai he began to travel as an activist preacher. While the Consortium would never try to infringe on anybody's right of free speech, it has nothing against inoculating memetic resistance against contraproductive ideas. One reason father Lu left Valles was the subtle pressure he felt against his preaching, a pressure he believes is less intense in the more rural areas. Of course, out here he has to contend with the down-to-earth mentality of frontier people, the high degree of dependence on hightech support and rival preachers. But it is far less annoying than just being filtered out by the AR of people who actually need to hear the word. His estranged son from a previous marriage works as a middle manager troubleshooter for Isonautics Corporation up in orbit; they do not keep in touch. His current wife is in transport (working for the Floating World Project) and helps him run the church whenever she is in Meltwater. In Meltwater he has found the Sheriff to be a sometimes reliable ally; while they do not share the same religious views they both often agree with each other and find mutual support helpful. His main nemesis is Wild Bolchazy - after an unsolicited sermon received when suffering an epic hangover the areologist has gone out of his way to annoy or play pranks on the preacher. One of them, the Meltwater Xenodeist Society, seems to have taken a life on its own after Wild started it as a joke.

Jay Dugger wrote:

I'll start proof-reading the PDF as my time allows.

Thanks!

Quote:

I suggest moving the Mars Habitat Community Project to a wiki. That would ease editing. It might discourage participation relative to the forum thread, but I think the improvements in editing and organization would compensate. Recent versions of MediaWiki allow you to download articles in a variety of formats, including PDF, so that move would also permit easy downloads.

Might be tricky, critical mass-wise. We have enough interest here on the forum to keep it going, but if people need to remember to go over to a wiki somewhere else the effective number of contributors is going to be lower - and that might bring us under the critical mass of participants. So I would recommend not doing that.

Quote:

Pease add Meltwater to the Eclipse Phase Mars KML file.

Will do!

Quote:

Finally, has anyone got Actual Play reports for Meltwater?

Not yet, but one of my EP campaigns is dealing with rural Mars and will no doubt end up in Meltwater before the week is over...

(Here is a hypercorp, meltwater branch and a person with secrets) Colonial Biotechnologies (Hypercorp) Major Industries: Biomorph Brokerage, Biotech, Genetics Major Stations: Olympus (Mars) Colonial Biotechnologies (CB) is a chain of quality morph storages cum morph brokerages cum medical clinics which also licenses several high-quality morph lines. If you want an artist to upgrade your face, update your implants, morph storage or an entirely new morph, discreetly and at reasonable price, CB offers just what you need at reasonable pricing ("Bit more expensive. Much better quality."). CB was spun off Skinaesthesia in rather acrimonious circumstances when minority stockholders disagreed with Skinaesthesia's policies. After failure of their bid, they liquidated their share, founding Colonial Biotechnologies as a rival. The Acrimoniousness between corporations culminated in a (barely) failed assasination attempt against CB CEO, after which the Oversight stepped in and brokered a deal which prevented an all-out corporate war. Nevertheless, the business rivalry remains strong and despite common history there is very little cooperation between the hypercorps. CB morph designs have reputation for quality. CB is especially famous for it's lines of martian biomorphs (rusters, alpiners, etc.) which do not requiring GSP therapy and are known for their rugged endurance. They are also notorious for offering several "barely legal" Argonaut Open Source morph lines and making profit thereof by providing bioengineering expertise, clone tank capacity, etc. in classic Open Source business model. CB has seen moderate success in it's short history and archieved one of the "least bad" hypercorp reputations among Barsoomian Movement due to their stance regarding planned obsolescence and indentures. CB indenture plans are liberal, do not add surcharges or extra time and CB management is usually quite willing to let an indenture to continue as an employee after his time is complete. %%%% Colonial Biotechnologies - Meltwater Branch Local CB branch is the "snootiest" morph brokerage and medical clinic in Meltwater; Skinaesthesia or even Skinthetic do not have true branch offices and probably won't in future, as CB has large enough edge as a pre-estabilished operator to make competition uneconomical as long as CB branch keeps it's act together. The Physical facilities of Meltwater branch consist of a single shop in the more fashionable parts of CloudTop. CB operates mostly on appointment basis (easily obtained via mesh), but they do maintain AI receptionist. The Current manager of the Meltwater branch of CB is Clarissa Bonds, who was appointed by CB's senior management from outside; everyone believes this to be a nepotistic sinecure for an old pre-fall friend to CEO Alandra. However, after few months everyone was impressed by her talent: She may have been a nepotistic appointment, but even her worst critics acknowledge she has talent. The Current personnel of Meltwater branch aside Clarissa consists of three biotechnicians running the morph tank arrays and four medical technicians running the Healing Vats. Design artists, etc. are consulted via telepresence. %%%% Clarissa Bonds (aka. Alandra Sands) HAMC CEO Yoichi Suetsugi believes to be the richest person in Meltwater. He is mistaken. Born to wealthy Chinese-American parents, Alandra Sands survived the Fall unlike her parents by the virtue of being on student-exchange program in Olympus when the Fall happened. Her parents and family were confirmed killed in the earlier exchanges and their backups were corrupted during attempt to beam them to Luna. Thus, at tender age of 19 terran years Alandra became a heiress personally owning 11% of Skinaesthetic. She also had about the best education money could combined with long-term psychosurgical therapy to boost intelligence and creativity. After grieving her parents for two months she got a job as a supervisor at Skinaesthesia design labs. Eight years of booming business saw her designing several morph lines that made her rich beyond dreams of avarice. However, her uneasiness regarding Skinaesthetic's corporate policies had only deepened, culminating in a failed bid to stop using Planned Obsolescence genetic sequences. Note that this was more of engineer's irritation on selling deliberately crippled product than anything empathic; before her arrival at Meltwater she had very little contact with lower classes. After losing that particular fight she liquidated her Skinaesthetic stock and struck it out on her own, founding CB as a competitor. However, Skinaesthesia management neither forgave nor forgot the slights. Alandra was assasinated in AF9 in a bid that barely failed to reach her backups. The Hit team crowned the bungle by leaving enough evidence to solidly implicate Skinaesthetic. Oversight, in order to avoid a destructive corporate war, brokered a peace treaty with blame being assigned to an "over-enthusiastic" marketing executive who "exceeded his authority". Said exec got 65 years in storage, dozen underling got sentences varying between 5 and 40 years, Skinaesthesia paid small reparations and both sides swore to stay out of each others' way. Nevertheless, Alandra decided that it would probably be better to go underground for a while as emotions cooled down. She activated a persona of "family friend recently recovered from infugee dead storage" and stepped into the role while a decoy faked (and continues to fake) her curtailed social life while Alandra herself handles the real management remotely via quantum-encrypted satellite-relayed laser link between CB HQ and her mansion. At Meltwater Ms. Bonds is a semi-regular sight at local upper-class social circuit, such as it is. However, her real interest and hobby which lifted her from the funk of depression originating from her assasination and surrounding cynical political maneuvers are her regular "slumming" trips around Meltwater while wearing an attractive but nondescript ruster sleeve. As "Alanis Grey", she haunts local watering holes and low-to-middle class social scene while playing the role of amateur anthropologist to the hilt, soaking up the local atmosphere while listening to people's opinions, worries, griefs and joys. Almost without noticing she is starting to generate positive rep as a razor-sharp intellect willing to talk and debate about nearly any subject, be it politics, economics, terraforming or TITANs. She naturally has a discreet but extremely capable security team backing her. At least two would-be robbers have ended up tasered from behind, wondering WTF happened when they woke up in Sheriff's lockup. Ms. Bonds lives in a nice mansion at the edge of the "good part" of CloudTop. It is a rather typical example of upper-middle to lower-upper class martian mansion with smartmatter interiors, about dozen servitors, cornucopia machinery, etc. The Mansion also houses her security detail (contracted from Medusan Shield), research lab (fully equipped and located in basement), barely-legal server farm and a miniature fission reactor to power everything.

On the subject of proofreading... I corrected obvious misspelled words in-text, and I standardized on American variants. I also corrected obvious grammatical errors in-text. Less obvious errors, such as passive voice, run-on sentences, or long parenthetical phrases, I simply marked with comments. Those comments usually have suggested corrections in this format. [code] s/// [/code] E.g., [code] s/Thq quick browns fox/The quick brown fox/ [/code] I'll upload the proof-read version to Google Docs with broad sharing when opportunity allows. This will make the document widely available, permit export in a variety of formats, and most importantly, allow players in my campaign to research the settlement where lies

Jay Dugger wrote:

You can find a proof read, but not perfectly corrected, copy of the collected Meltwater PDF at the link below. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MG6h6jRnI1DqMfdP5C4TfCyNyTpZCAVPF10z...

Cool! I am a bit concerned about how to maintain a "master" copy for my site (I sadly used Word for that document) - if we can do something with the formatting so it can be exported into good-looking PDF I can use we could make the google document as the "master".

It would help me a great deal to know travel times by various methods to there from other Martian cities and settlements. I've a game session tomorrow with one player character leaving for Meltwater.

It would help me a great deal to know travel times by various methods to there from other Martian cities and settlements. I've a game session tomorrow with one player character leaving for Meltwater. How very strange. I didn't realize I'd forked three times. I should get those other alphas to do their fair share of the GM work.

Travel near Meltwater Meltwater, like many boomtowns, suffers from an under-developed infrastructure. Roads The main road to Meltwater, the Hellas 47, began as merely a designated path along the smooth Dao Vallis floor, suitable only for terrain vehicles. As the water started to occasionally flow down-vallis the path was repeatedly washed away and a paved road was added along the side of the Vallis, but it is still too narrow and slow (and tends to get damaged by the occasional landslide and flooding). If you meet a convoy of big trucks going the other way you will have to drive to the side and let them pass - bigger goes first is about the only rule along the 47. The road surveillance system is rather good but cannot do much except warn when there is a break and advice when to stop and wait for temporary repairs. It begins down at the Hellas 53 at Starck Junction, and then winds its way up along the vallis. There are a few stops, fuel and repair stations along the way, most notably at Big Bend, Apia and Confluence Gardens. Especially the section up along Broken Mesa has a bad reputation for frequent and unexpected flooding, as well as the side-valleys being a hideout for Uumakus. The 47 continues past Meltwater into the source basin below Mons Hadriacus, although the upper section is less developed and mainly the path for heavy HAMC equipment. The more chaotic vallis floor also makes it twist more. Meltwater really wants a proper highway, and HAMC, HDC and the mayor are doing their best to convince the infrastructure authorities to build it (and he real dream nobody dares hope for is of course a proper railway). If that happens there will be a lot more people around working the bot teams and analysts expect Meltwater to pick up the pace further - which is going to increase tensions between the union and corps even more. There is a small, unpaved road along the Niger Vallis (with a side-road to the ruins Waddell in Cue) meeting the 47 at Confluence Gardens. It is sometimes used when people do not want to be tracked during the approach to Meltwater - surveillance is nominal until one reaches the outskirts of town. There are a number of similar rough roads leading into the uplands around the area, most lacking names and having no official owner. Near Meltwater there is the North and South Mesa Roads, running on top of the mesa between Dao and Niger, meeting at Meltwater and sending down ramps into Dao and Niger. The North Mesa Road runs all the way to the Northern Basin development project, and thre is talk of extending it further. The South Mesa Road runs for about 50 kilometers until it ebbs out in the canyons of Niger Vallis, where it connects to the Niger Vallis road. Both roads are fairly well developed within 20 km of Meltwater, but then rapidly deteriorate. Especially the North has problems with occasional sinkholes. Flying The airspace around Meltwater is open and fairly unrestricted. There are safety restrictions and flyways near town, but the nearest controlled airspace is down in Hellas. Meltwater airfield is located north-east of the town on the mesa. It is a no frills airfield, with a group of protective domes and landing pads but little more. It can handle air cars and bigger aircraft, although the runway is short. The local weather is variable enough to force closing fairly often - dust storms blowing in from Hesperia are a regular occurrence especially in winter. Fabian Hamelin is the air guy. He runs most things at "his" airfield, using beta forks far more widely than is healthy. Still, there are few complaints about his enthusiastic management and friendly air traffic control.

Demonseed Elite wrote:

Arenamontanus, I made my best guesses on where those locations were based on your material. I was going to add the Broken Mesa region, but I wasn't sure where that is located.

Looks good! Yes, you got the locations right. I imagined Broken Mesa to be close to the system of side valleys near the Dao Vallis marker.

Hey guys, I was wondering two things ... First, has anyone claimed this area yet? http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg205/tachistarfire/TestingRangeandDe... I don't really need all of it, just, say, half of that side valley and maybe a quarter of the desert included in the polygon ... Also, would you have any problems with having a [i]small[/i] (and secretly Barsoomian sympathetic) part of the martian military industrial complex, in the form of a vehicle/weapons/miltech R&D facility, in that area? Most of the design and testing would be in simulspace, of course, but after that, well, you still have to drive it until it breaks, and test the firepower under field conditions ... I just ask because I have already committed to developing the corp in question ... And it's going to be on Mars ... And I've already established in the text that the CEO hates big cities and is down with B ... And a town of 30,000 nearby would take care of a large portion of the infrastructure question ... And if they can maybe puts some extra hard to notice "storage space" in those cliff, to store some, well, call it "miscellaneous surplus inventory" that might be useful to the Barsoomians in the future if there were to be any, uh, "unpleasantness" with the PC and it's stooges ... And it might be a good way for the area to get the railroad out that way with the corp defraying some of the costs, since, you know, they'll need raw materials ... And maybe a branch off of the tracks could go over a rail bridge on the river there to reach into Meltwater ... Yeah, he's totally expecting a revolution/civil war. The corp is going to go into The Eye, in fact a subsidiary has already made an appearance there in the first issue and I was thinking of putting the corp HQ/labs in that valley, and the driving course and firing range in that desert there. It'll all be on the up and up, except for the surplus inventory ... and maybe a few designs that never get publicized, or sold to anyone. If not, that's fine, I can put it elsewhere. I just wanted to see if any of you who have contributed to the area had any objections or thought it was unfeasible or just didn't fit.

Oops, sorry. Meltwater is here, in yellow. Yes, I'm asking for a bit of a big space. http://i249.photobucket.com/albums/gg205/tachistarfire/TestingRangeandDe...

Sounds fine to me. Actually, in the early stages of the writing we were mentioning explosives manufacturing to supply HAMC, so this might be quite suitable. They might not be the first company making octanitrocubane nanoplastique in the neighbourhood, but establishing it here makes economic and practic sense. Also, putting it across the canyon makes it nicely safe if something goes wrong. Meltwater is not that keen on explosives going off too close to town. That valley might have been one of the first prospected, and all aquifers have now been mined out. Which incidentally produces some nice underground spaces...