Atlantis Project

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Revision as of 17:11, 9 April 2006

The Atlantis Project was an endeavour initialised in the latter half of the twenty-fourth century, based around the possibility of creating a large, artificial, land mass on Earth roughly the size of Great Britain, specifically in the centre of the Atlantic Ocean.

History

In 2367, Louis Belmont was the director of the project's preliminary phases, and was instrumental in bringing it before government officials. In the summer of that year, Belmont asked his friend Jean Luc Picard to resign from Starfleet and help him with the project, though the Starfleet Captain ultimately declined the offer. Later in the year, the project was refused funding for the first time, in light of opposition to the creation of an artificial land-mass on the Earth's surface, effectively "changing the definition of [the planet]."

Belmont brought the project forth once again in 2369, proposing that the new landmass be created in the South Pacific, but with Humanity celebrating the five hundredth anniversary of Armstrong's landing on the moon, the project was overlooked in favour of Lunar ideas, and once again refused funding.

Belmont passed away in 2378, leaving the Atlantis project in the hands of his estate, run by his daughter, Sophie Belmont who celebrated her 54th birthday in 2403. Sophie Belmont had planned to take the research of the Atlantis Project to Ferenginar in 2384, where overcrowding on the main continents was leading to population control problems for the government. Her plans were interrupted by the Borg War however, and the project quickly took a backseat in the business dealings of the quadrant, now focused almost solely around the combat.

Current Status

In the summer of 2401, an initial proposal to the Federation Council for funding, brought forth by Councillor Glav who was a friend to Belmont, requested funding to investigate the feasibility of the Atlantis Project on Earth in the twenty-fifth century. Eager to solve their population overcrowding worries, the Council passed the bill authorising the transfer of funds to the project. In early 2404, Belmont is expected to provide a full report on the status and feasibility of the project. Starfleet 2i.c. Admiral Tom Paris was optimistic about the Project's goals.

Towards the end of providing this report, a small floating station was constructed in the Atlantic as the base of operational testing for the project. It currently employs just under forty scientists and fifty support staff.

The Facility

The layout of the facility is circular, with rooms being built up around the perimeter, overlooking a large open yard with a transparent floor, centered around the facility's main reactor, the equivelant of a small starship's matter/anti-matter intermix chamber, but with a distinctive red glow in comparison to the Starfleet blue standard. On the South roof, there is a solitary landing pad accessible by turbolift, stairs and access ladders. It is marked with a circled H, despite the absence of any such design or the original plans.

The facility is 140 ft tall at its heighest point (the shuttlepad), but the main deck of the yard is only 60 ft above the ocean surface. Buildings are both white and silver in appearance - the result of an uneasy design trade-off between functionality and aesthetics. There are numerous outcropping structures along the lower edges of the facility to aid with experiment control, making the entire structure look like a strange hybrid of a stadium and an old oil rig.