Hell’s Gate; Logistics, equipment etc.

[Xiraxis]

Hi there...

I´m putting this topic on, because I would like to start a discussion featuring ideas and deductions, that deals thoroughly with the operations and actions of RDA ESC 01 as well as other people on the world of Pandora. Everything included in one topic.

I´m aware, that some technical, logistical and social ideas were mentioned in other topics, but would like to create a compendium regarding all these structures using our imagination and knowledge, without which this couldn´t happen. The topic will cover all the issues, from the basic principles of functional colony, logistics and technical issues, appearance of diffirent decks of HABMOBs and other sections, to the behavior of diffirent classes of workers, including health care, free time, administration and comunication.

Lets start then:

1) According to the Survival guide, all the electrical energy on earth is produced by annihilation of matter and antimatter, from which we can deduce, that the same applies for the Hell´s Gate. My question is: what amount of antimatter is sufficient enough for the whole colony. One gram, two, maybe even more? Do they resupply the antimatter with every new arrival of ISVs, or do they have their own generators? (and how the mankind even optains the antimatter, that is another logical question).

2) Again refering to the Survival guide, there is (or was) functional factory, which produced the weapons for SecOps and supplied spare parts for the vehicular fleet. I´m interested in the origin of their sources. I´ve never seen any mines, other than the one on Unobtanium (Unm), but making these components requires relatively broad variety of materials. Do they import the materials from Earth? Is it practical?

3) In the movie, games and books we´re seeing wide array of machines, and I want to know on what fuels ´em. According to many factors I doubt they´re fueled by fossil fuels (mainly because petroleum will be rare by the time of the 22. century, unless RDA finds the oilfields directly on Pandora). So are they fueled by hydrogen, or some other fuel?



I thank everybody who participates in advance. I´ll be watching and updating this topic regularly, and will be glad if you´ll post some questions or theories on your own.

I thank you very much and looking forward on cooperation.

[Imperius Dictatio]

1. I found the Antimatter deal pretty stupid. Do you have any idea how much energy goes into making Anti-Matter? Instead of using the insane amounts of energy that goes into AM production they could have simply plugged themselves into whatever energy source they'd been using for making the AM and solved the whole movies energy issue. AM is only good for Space Travel,Weapons and oddly enough medical scanning tech.

2.Possible. It's likely that they have smaller mines they tap into. Either that or they get materials for the Unobtanium mines that happen to be leftover. From what I can tell the only stuff they'd have to import from earth would be the really technical stuff.

3. Batteries more then likely. Unobtanium is a room temp super conductor. Of course aircraft may use gas or something.

[SnowRider]

1) The only way that they could make antimatter work as an energy source is by using the Unobtanium in some way to make the process (i.e., energy) used in manufacturing the antimatter much, much more efficient. Otherwise, it is just as the other poster said, there's way too much energy needed to manufacture and store antimatter for it to be viable as an energy source.

So, they must use Unobtanium in some way to cut down on those costs.

Now as far as the Hell's Gate colony is concerned, they wouldn't need very much antimatter to run it, but they'd need a constant source and/or resupply of antimatter otherwise they'd run out of what they have really, really quickly.

As for both the colony and Earth, there are probably other energy sources (e.g., deuterium and/or nuclear fusion) that they can use, but those probably don't provide as much bang for the buck as the matter-antimatter energy source.

2) My guess is they import some of the stuff they need from Earth and manufacture the rest on site at the Hell's Gate factory. That would be much more efficient (every kilogram you don't have to ship from Earth to Pandora is one less kilogram you need to expend energy on to get from Earth to Pandora) but the down side is that the stuff they do manufacture on Pandora is probably fairly basic (i.e., rugged and simple) and not quite up to the quality that you would find in a factory or manufacturing plant on Earth.

3) Either hydrogen or some combination of fuel cells and fusion (if the process of nuclear fusion could be miniaturized to the scale of a Samson or AMP suit. Recall that when the Colonel fires up his AMP suit for the first time, you can clearly see blue flames/exhaust emerging from the back of the suit. This suggests a fuel cell of some sort for that particular application, but there may be others.

I too am curious about this subject and I wonder if we'll be seeing more of the logistics of operating and maintaining Hell's Gate as a plot point and/or a point of discussion in the sequel(s).

Time will tell.

[ScottWashburn]

As noted above, anti-matter is not an energy SOURCE. We can make anti-matter today in tiny amounts but it takes huge amounts of energy to produce. And even if you assume some super-efficient method of making it in the future, you still cannot get any more energy out of it than you put into it. The Laws of Thermodynamics are without pity :) Anti-matter is an incredible means of STORING energy and is ideal for powering a starship. Trying to use it for anything else would be riduclously expensive and also horribly dangerous. Using it to power a combat vehicle would be like putting an enormous bomb in the midst of your own troops with a "Kill Us!" sign on it.

But I, too, am very interested in the logistics of Hell's Gate. I deal with this quite a bit in my fan fiction "Aftermath". Due to the expense of shipping things from Earth to Alpha Centauri it would make sense to make the base as self-sufficient as possible. It certainly makes no sense to ship gasoline or other fossil fuels to Pandora to run the helicopters and mining equipment. In the movie we do see some sort of faintly smokey exhausts coming out of the vehicles so they are definitely burning something. I would guess some sort of bio-fuel. There is probably a fuel plant at Hell's Gate that uses some genetically engineered bacteria to turn Pandoran plants into fuel. We're experimenting with stuff like that on Earth right now so it is certainly possible.

More later.

[ScottWashburn]

Okay, it's later :)

As noted in my last post, I think there must be a fuel plant on Pandora to provide fuel for all those helicopters, bulldozers, digging machines and AMP suits. Fuel would be used in large amounts and shipping it in bulk from Earth would make no sense. But what about ammunition? Bullets and missiles for all those gunships. One of those Scorpion gunships carries over 200 missiles. Are they produced on Pandora or shipped from Earth? I'm guessing that they are shipped from Earth. As expensive as that might seem, I think it would still be cheaper than shipping the multiple factories needed to produce them to Pandora. At least for the missiles. Ammunition for the guns might be a possibility since they are relatively simple items. But the missiles have dozens of different components, each of which would have to be produced and then assembled. Shipping the factories needed for all that from Earth might be more than the RDA big-wigs would be willing to do. After all, they aren't on Pandora to fight a war. They would want to avoid conflict as much as possible. In a case like this there's just no profit from a war. So, I'm betting that all the heavy ordnance is shipped from Earth. This means that unless there is an enormous stockpile of it at Hell's Gate (unlikely) then even if Quartich had won the battle he might have found himself in serious trouble if the Na'vi weren't demoralized by the destruction of the Tree of Souls (It might make them really angry instead). If they had the will to pursue a long-term conflict, and resupply for Quaritch is six years away, they might possible be able to just wear out the Sky People.

[Imperius Dictatio]

I remember hearing somewhere that the Hells Gate Facility has several autofactories to churn out a lot of their gear.

[ScottWashburn]

Of course that's the unknown factor: what is production technology in 2154? If you can build versatile, adaptable factories that can produce almost anything you can supply it with the specs and raw materials for then that changes everything.

[SnowRider]

My guess is the Hell's Gate facility is designed to be as self-sufficient as possible, as many others here have suggested.

However, it can't be completely self-sufficient. It's at the end of a long supply chain back to Earth. The one thing, the one weakness Hell's Gate has is people and that is probably the primary purpose of the supply chain: getting fresh, new people to Hell's Gate and returning to Earth with Unobtanium and people who are rotating back to Earth at the end of their tours at Hell's Gate.

Without people to run the factories, maintain the equipment, keep everything running, etc. Hell's Gate falls apart pretty quickly.

I am quite certain that its designers intended for Hell's Gate to be able to keep itself up and running in case something happens to the ISV train to and from Earth, but I don't think it can keep itself going indefinitely. If it has a full complement of people staffing it, sure it could maintain itself for a while, possibly for years, though I doubt it.

And at the end of the movie, there are supposedly only a few scientists and technicians left behind after all the other humans leave Pandora.

Granted, their energy needs, the demand on supplies, how much resources they will consume, etc. will be much, much smaller with only a few people, but it is my belief that sooner or later, Hell's Gate will start to fall apart.

Max, Norm, and the others will have to deal with equipment breakdowns, critical machinery and systems wearing out and needing to be replaced, system failures, etc. the cumulative effect of which will keep getting bigger and bigger until sooner or later (probably sooner) the whole thing falls apart.

What do they do then? They are marooned on a world humans were never intended to live on without a great deal of technology to keep them sustained and alive and when that technology starts to break down, they're screwed.

They might possibly regret kicking most of the humans off Pandora, because a lot of those people were there to keep everything up and running and without them, things will fall apart.

I would not want to be in Norm, Max, and the others' shoes when that day comes.

[Imperius Dictatio]

We never saw any of the Techs left behind.
Only the Science team.

So yeah, I've been saying this for a while.
They're all screwed.

[ScottWashburn]

Snow Rider makes some good points. I deal with quite a bit of that in my "Aftermath" fan fiction as well. Aftermath Chapter 1, an Avatar fanfic - FanFiction.Net (http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5792082/1/Aftermath)

[SnowRider]

Another thought occurs to me.

The only way for Max, Norm, etc. to survive for a long time on Pandora if/when the infrastructure of Hell's Gate starts falling apart would be for them to in essence, "go native" and downsize their standard of living as much as is possible.

[ScottWashburn]

Considering the hasty evacuation of Hell's Gate by the humans, there is probably quite a bit of unobtainium lying around. Max and the other humans who stayed behind could probably buy pretty much anything they needed if the humans in orbit were willing to deal with them.

[SnowRider]

More than likely, yes. But that is a very big if.

It would mostly depend upon how desperate the humans in orbit are to turn around and go home.

I mean, can you imagine what it would be like to come out of cryo and find out that the Na'vi have booted the humans off Pandora?

You've spent almost six years in cryo, you come out, and find out you have to turn right around and head home?

That would suck dead dog farts.

[ftxey Keye'ung]

The power source for Hells-Gate was never mentioned on screen or elsewhere in the movie due to obvious reasons of keeping the pace and story going.

To add my two cents worth:

The Swan's and the mining vehicles would most likely be powered by hydrogen fuel cells or battery. ie: they recharge and are fixed to quadrants of the planet for certain amounts of time in designated areas for a few weeks perhaps before returning for a re-charge/re-fuel and overhaul to remove any build up of dirt, transmission wear and as we saw, the sporadic attacks by the natives.

As for the material resources, they would probably have to bring some with them to begin with and then mine the rest from the planet at source, they also have a massive stencil machine that carves the components from the raw or alloyed materials.

They would also have a recycling plant that melted down the old machines or damaged machines and then re-use them to build more.

The technology of the humans in the movie is pretty standard and could just as easily be today, with the addition of Unobtanium they could have giant flying mining equipment and vehicles such as the mag-lev trains on Earth using a series of overhead lines leading from the mines to Hell's-Gate....although they did seem to use roads on Pandora for the mines.

[Imperius Dictatio]

Except for the fact that none of the humans who remained on the planet are Techies or Engineers as they all seem to be Scientists with Soft Fields. (Anthropology for example.) nor are their a lot of them to begin with.
And their in the frigging jungle....I'll give Hell's Gate maybe two or three years rops before the place is a wreck.
Though it should only take a year for the power systems and air circulators to break down.

[ScottWashburn]

Long-term survival would definitely be a problem for the remaining humans. One thing they do have operating in their favor is that there are a handful of them (10? 20?) living in a base meant for a couple of thousand. If they shut down everything except one small section they could then move to a new section when an old section fell apart to the point they couldn't fix it. Hopefully the RDA was smart enough not to have everything powered from a single generator or all the air coming from a single recycler. With multiple redundancy built in it might be possible to keep the place going for many years. And it would seem that the equipment is amazingly reliable. Consider the shack at Site 26: It could be left unattended, reoccupied, partly dismantled, carried somewhere and set up again and keep running with little or no maintenance.

[ftxey Keye'ung]

RDA...and good old human ingenuity = Efficient modular buildings that are easily constructed and can be re-designed for multiple uses...the one thing we're good at...for the most part.

[Imperius Dictatio]

Still it's a doomed effort.
Machines break down if theirs no one their to maintain them or fix them up.
Not to mention their in a jungle which if left unattended will creep onto the base and breaking stuff apart or covering it in a layer of choking vines and creepers and clogging up machinery.

It also doesnt take much to start wreaking the place up.
The building itself HAS to be airtight and maintaining that is going to be a pain.
Becuase if theirs even a small hole or leak you'll be slowly letting in a dangerous toxin that you cant smell or taste.

Even if they shut areas of the base down it's only prolonging the fact that in a very short time they will all die.