PHAEDRA, The PCA’s Floating Capital City
The Planet Celsius, homeworld of the Praetorian Curiate Assembly, has scorchingly hot days and wet, cold nights, each forty earth-days long. Most of the planet’s population lives in towns and cities which are largely underground, the inhabitants only venturing out during the long dawn and twilight. The planet rotates so slowly, however, that an average speed of only 25kph can keep anything capable of it in a sweet spot of equitable climate and either perpetual sunrise or sunset.The floating city of Phaedra, administrative capital of the P.C.A., sits upon twelve primary ships and hundreds of smaller ones and sails across the oceans of Celsius with the sunset forever in its face and the wind always at its back. The largest ships are a kilometer and a half long and each displaces over 2 million tons. Each of ten of these can hold up to 50,000 permanent inhabitants, along with 3,000 office and shop units and 2,500 hotel rooms along with parks, entertainment facilities, and a small airport.There is a city starport on yet another vessel while the Ducal Palace itself occupies the twelfth and always most central of these huge ships and is fitted with homes and workplaces, barracks and hangars, palatial chambers and a weapons fit to shame an Imperial Majestic-class starship. Around the twelve core vessels sail myriads of smaller ones, from the size of bulk tankers all the way down to shanty houseboats for a single family. The entire vast fleet is served by ferry-boats and airships. All told, the population of Phaedra totals 800,000 or more.
Each of the core ships is a marvel of Imperial design and engineering, of course. Sitting on a trimaran hull form, a fluted and sculpted, city-block sized, forty-five storey superstructure rises into the sky. Skydomes and terraces line every storey. Greenery lines every terrace and the whole is done in Imperial white, tinted by the reds and oranges of the perpetual sunset.Beneath the surface, sea-farming facilities and submersible docks cram the space between the three deep keel-fins. Smaller, but still large, vessels hold heavy industry, floating farms, food processing units and the residential blocks of poorer inhabitants or Imperial slaves, while some rich individuals maintain their own floating mansions in the city. Around all of this sails a huge number of smaller ships; shanty living for the very poor, individual fishing vessels and much more. While, over time, the shape of the fleet is always shifting; like tends to sail with like and so there are recognisable ‘districts’ just like a city on dry land.
Most of the inhabitants of Celsius are used to living with a day-night cycle which is totally unlike the one humanity evolved in, thus the “Nayan” unit of time used there, roughly equivalent to an earth-day long. The curious feeling of always living in perpetual sunset or sunrise experienced by the inhabitants of the floating cities creates an even stronger feeling of strangeness, what the locals call “pelik”. Habitation areas tend to control lights and window polarisation to give the semblance of a day-night cycle, in an attempt to head off the most extreme forms of pelik, which can lead to insomnia, delusions and madness, but the working areas are staffed all the time by rotating shifts from those habitations.