The Moon

Some Basic Moon Facts

Paradise Lua is located at the North Pole of the Moon, where the constant sunlight and Paradise Lua's vast solar farms work together to power the Moon colony. While the plex panels protecting the solar panels from meteorite strikes need to be replaced frequently, the solar farms are extremely effective and produce more than enough power for Paradise Lua's many operations.

Paradise Lua involves itself quite aggressively in lunar raking and mining, as rare Earth metals like gold, cobalt, iron, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium and tungsten are plentiful in the asteroids constantly striking the Moon's surface.

Oxygen and water mined from the lunar soil are vital to the continued operation of the facility.

Paradise Lua itself is located in a large, deep crater, initially made by detonating a large hydrogen bomb on the surface. The crater is covered by an enormous, well-armored cap, kilometers long. Each of the craters is covered by enormous, well-armored caps, and the bulk of Paradise Lua is located beneath these caps.

Some parts of Paradise Lua are encased in fully-pressurized domes, giving a sense of "outside", inside. Other parts are just pressurized buildings.

Area

The Circumference of Paradise Lua is about 40km long, the Radius about 6km.

Paradise Lua's Rings

Paradise Lua is divided into four rings:

  • Joyeuse Division - The outermost ring, the ports, the police, the military-industrial complex - and, of course, The Daybreak Institute.
  • Krater Valley - Most common people live in Krater, it's where the apartment blocks are.
  • Florin Division - The financial district, parliament. Government and management.
  • Nadir Division - The innermost ring and center to the deep mine at the center of Paradise Lua.

Arrival at Paradise Lua

Trade and commercial transit between Paradise Lua and Earth are slow, and fairly rare.

Players will arrive at Airlock, Docks & EVAs in the Joyeuse Division.

Time Keeps on Ticking

The Moon enjoys an (almost) 15 Earth-day "day" and an almost 15 Earth-day "night" cycle, with a full Moon day taking a moon-th. Er-month.

The Moon orbits the Sun along with the Earth, so a Moon year and an Earth year are the same year, and the Moon's days are the Earth's months. So, May 5th on the Moon is "about 16% of the way through the fifth Moon-day of the year." I hate moon-days.

Being as Moon-days take 1 Earth month each, and Paradise Lua is located in a place with constant sunlight, they are not terribly useful for human circadian rhythms. Also: the surface of the moon comes with constant bombardment of dangerous cosmic radiation, so the windows are not left open. Instead, Paradise Lua has its own day/night cycle enforced with artificial lights, synchronized with their original home base in Las Vegas, Nevada (Pacific Standard Time).

Timekeeping on Paradise Lua is almost all done in 24-hour time: "we'll meet at 18-hundred" is the common parlance.

A day on Paradise Lua looks like:

  • 0-8:00: Night
  • 6:00-8:00: Dawn
  • 8:00-18:00: Day
  • 20:00-22:00: Evening
  • 22:00-24:00: Night

At Night, lights are generally turned most of the way out in most public places, with just enough soft, recessed light to navigate safely.

During Dawn and Evening, lights are slowly cranked up to full power, and during the Day, all of the lights are turned on.

In some areas, like the Heavy Industrial Zone, light is simply left on full, all the time: many of the factories there simply run 100% of the time with rotating shifts.

In some areas, like the Overflow Slums, lights are left on low, all the time. Why waste electricty on the impoverished? A lot of people in Overflow work graveyard shifts in the HIZ, anyways, and appreciate that they can go to sleep at any hour.

Going Outside Will Kill You

The tl;dr of this is that "going on to the moon without an EVA suit is a very bad idea and will cause your player characters to die very quickly".

Depressurization without an EVA Suit is bad. Unlike what you might have seen in science fiction media, though, it will not cause the players' blood to boil or their faces to explode. Human tissue is strong enough to keep the air that's in - in. Surface liquid will boil off, though, which is bad. It's not great for the eyes.

Nope, mooned humans just die for the regular reason that humans without access to air die: they suffocate.

  • Rapid depressurization creates a Minor Injury: Blinded after 30 seconds.
  • No air creates a Critical Injury ("suffocation") every 30 seconds.
  • Okay, so: let's imagine you have a source of air. Managing the pressure of that air in such a way as not to die is a subject of more than a little detail. Modeling that in detail is going to be frustrating, so let's short form it:
  • If players have a way to manage pressurized air, the next problem is severe radiation, which will give them the Major Injory: Disease ("radiation poisoning") after 1 hour.
  • Temperature is the next problem. Good news/bad news: even though the temperature is very dangerous, there's not a lot of medium to do stuff with the players' heat: the moon's exosphere has basically no pressure, so even though the temperatures are wild (-120°C, +120°C), the players' temperature will shift relatively slowly. However, in the sunlight, players will slowly roast (nowhere for solar heat to go), and outside of it, players will slowly freeze. After 6 hours of uninterrupted light or dark, give players a Critical Injury ("thermal problems").

Living in a Material World

The lunar regolith is rich in iron deposits, and one of Paradise Lua's earliest operational industries was a steel foundry. If you're not sure what an object on the moon is made out of: if it came from Earth, it's cheap, lightweight plastic. If it came from the Moon: it's probably made out of steel, painted with something to help it resist corrosion.

EVA Suits

If you go outside in an EVA Suit, most of the "Going Outside Will Kill You" problems are... handled.

EVA Suits manage air, temperature, block radiation, provide a water tank for hydration: but, an EVA suit only carries enough air and water to supply these functions for about 4 hours of Moon Adventure.

You might expect EVA suits to look like your traditional, bulky, 1960's Space Suit, but the design is actually quite different. First of all, the EVA Suits are an order of magnitude cheaper. Paradise Lua is significantly less concerned with human safety than NASA was (and technology has come quite a way), and as a result they have managed to produce suits that are much less bulky, cumbersome, and expensive.

One of the major differences in design is that, on the Moon, most threats - and by threats I mean "radiation" and "tiny, deadly rocks" - tend to come from above, so the bulk of the EVA suit's shielding is on top, provided by a flexible lead-lined reflective poncho and a solid wide-brimmed steel helmet. The weight of these things is less of a concern than you might think: they would weigh dozens of pounds on Earth, but on the Moon they just feel like a heavy coat and hat.

Air supply is provided via compressed tanks worn on a backpack, under the armored poncho. The backpack also holds a liter of potable water. Hanging off of the backpack is a cable connected to a little readout with air supply information. (To determine if your player can understand the readout, draw an Easy SCI check.)

The only part of the EVA suit that's pressurized is the helmet: it's sealed off at the chin, under the ear, and the rest of the suit is simply exposed to the elements.

Inside the poncho the suit itself is something similar to a neoprene wetsuit. The wetsuit is mostly not exposed to the elements, thanks to the poncho, so it mostly serves to compress and protect the body.

Past that, there are lightly armored gloves and boots (to protect the hands and feet from radiation damage). The gloves can be removed for brief periods if users need fine motor control.

Slim, hyper-absorbent, disposable adult diapers are provided alongside EVA suits. The broad guideline among EVA users is "hold it in unless things are critical, no deuces under any circumstances". Please do not go to extra trouble to model this for players.

EVA Vehicles

EVA Suits can also be paired up with EVA Vehicles, which can resupply some of the suit's supply with a larger, rolling tank. Vehicle-paired EVA adventures can go much longer than EVA Suit ones, with Moontrikes extending the trip's viability to 8 hours, and Moonvans to 24 hours (past which "sleep, bathroom, and hunger issues" start to get so pressing that while longer trips might be possible, they're unwise.) Trips longer than that require a fully pressurized, self-contained rolling Moontanker (of which only one has ever been built) which essentially provides a fully pressurized micro-moonbase on the go, with its own airlocks and EVA Suits.

Lifecycles of the Rich and Famous

About 500 people are required to maintain a genetically diverse breeding pool.

Paradise Lua keeps its population at around 1500 people, generally.

A Generation is 20 years long, and Paradise Lua is currently on its third Generation.

In order for a population to remain stable, enough people have to have children to offset the people who don't - because they're incapable, dead, or simply not interested.

In developed countries, this rate is about 2.1 children per woman. On Paradise Lua, this number is quite a bit higher, because the death rate is quite a bit higher: Paradise Lua's government targets 4 children per woman. That is a lot.

There are about 75 children per year.

In general, Paradise Lua would rather have too many new citizens rather than not enough, so there are generous incentives for citizens to be fruitful and multiply.

The death rate on Paradise Lua actually isn't high enough for that prodigious procreative pace to be fully necessary: but the idea is, it's easier to manage the death rate than it is to manage the birth rate, so Paradise Lua artificially inflates the death count in a handful of ways - dialing back health care, relaxing safety standards in the HIZ, keeping deaths inflated and the population of the base stable.

The Mortuactuaries who manage these numbers are instructed to keep their work extremely secret.