Bringing the heat with Soletta.
Heat. It’s a bit of a problem when it comes to creating new colonies and terraforming new worlds, you can’t have too much and you can’t have too little. Thankfully, scientists have created Soletta.
Soletta is a marvel of technological achievement. It allows previously uninhabitable worlds to become habitable, it can change the surfaces of whole worlds and can unlock the potential they may have. Thanks to advanced artificial intelligence and dynamic sensors, Soletta is able to manage and adjust to create the perfect temperature for life not only to exist, but thrive on previously alien worlds.
How does Soletta work?
Earth, our home world, happens to be in the perfect position for life to exist. A few fractions closer or further from the Sun and our planet would look very different. This, therefore, hugely impacts how we can terraform other planets in our solar. Take Venus for example, whilst it’s a prospect for terraforming, the surface temperature is vastly higher than that on Earth and therefore requires cooling. Somewhere like Mars, being further from the sun, requires the opposite.
Soletta works by either dampening or amplifying solar radiation to decrease or increase the energy coming from the Sun. If you were to stand on the surface of a newly terraformed world and looked up, Soletta would appear as a huge circular array of solar sail style mirrors. They are aligned to focus or deflect sunlight which may have been focused or just missed the planet.
The name of the satellite stems from science fiction, namely the works of Kim Stanley Robinson and the work Aurora. Soletta was built, in this instance, to aid the terraforming process on Mars at the start of the 22nd Century.
For a piece of technology this impressive, you can expect to part with a fair piece of capital. Soletta certainly doesn’t come cheap, in TerraGenesis you can expect to pay 50,000,000 credits but the freedom over temperature control that it allows is worth it.
Implementing Soletta
Reflecting vasts swathes of heat across a planet’s surface, or deflecting it, can have dramatic effects. Therefore, it is strongly suggested that you consider the impact that Soletta will have on your whole ecosystem and the colonists within it.
If you have a reasonably stable water supply but use Soletta to increase the planet’s temperature you can expect a fair percentage of that to be evaporated and the stock to be depleted. The same can be said for the opposite, cool the surface too much and the water supply will freeze at the planet’s extremities.
It’s worth considering the other buildings that raise or lower local temperature. Take for instance if you have an Aerostat Platform, it would first cause your temperature to drop, but once the gap between current and temperature becomes too big Soletta’s percentage change becomes stronger and rise the temperature, which narrows the gap and reduces Soletta effectiveness, in a negative feedback loop.