Of maps and logistics

 I’m continuing with the re-write of my novel set on an orbital shipyard this week, and one of the things I’ve needed to do is add detailed descriptions of how people get about the shipyard.

In the original manuscript I’d barely got beyond concept level for working out what the shipyard looked like.  I described it as a ‘huge multi-levelled metal snowflake’.  Which gave me a strong visual image, but told me nothing about how the yard worked.

So for this re-write I’ve decided to produce detailed maps of every part of the shipyard.  I started with the original information I’d always had.  The ‘yard has a central cylinder with three huge rings of differing sizes fixed to it.  In the original manuscript I hadn’t written a great deal about how characters get about the  ‘yard. In this re-write I kept in mind a modified version of Jeanette Ng’s logistics question.  “How far can they get in a day?” she asks.  Translated to my orbital shipyard, the question becomes “How long does it take a character to travel from the Core to Deep Space Ring?”

In my re-write, I follow my characters on their journeys around the place, and that forced me to work out the logistics.  People get from the Core to  one of the Rings by using transfer tubes, which double as the major support members connecting the Ring to the Core.

I asked myself questions like: if they take a transport pod, how many lanes of traffic go through each tube?  And who controls that traffic?  Because I already knew my story, I knew that my characters get stuck in a pod which suffers a guidance system failure in a transfer tube.  So I needed to know what the emergency protocols were for dealing with that.  How are people rescued from accidents?

I decided that workers would have to pay for pod transport, and for the more expensive Autoshuttle, pods which take people directly between one location and another on the outside of the shipyard.  

This led me on to deciding how many construction berths there were on each level.  I decided on twelve, which would give enough space between each berth for crewed workbugs and autonomous construction drones to work around each hull without colliding with each other.  

I also decided that workers would live on the same Ring that they worked on, to avoid paying transport costs getting to work.  That meant each ring needed to have condo accommodation for workers, and that workers would change apartments regularly.  

There is one way to get around for free: on foot.  Each Ring has six levels, and the elevators linking them are free.  You can walk along footways through the transfer tubes from one Ring to another, if you’re fit enough and don’t mind an hour’s journey time.  But thinking about elevators meant that I had to add hundreds of them to my shipyard.

The only way to keep all this information straight in my head was to draw maps of each level of each Ring. So I now have eighteen maps of the details of all the levels.  It’s taken me days to do, but at least now I know my logistics work.  

And now I’m off to re-write my first two chapters to match the new information.