Freelance Traveller - Multimedia Gallery - Neptune Station

Neptune Station: Undersea Research Facility, University, and Community

created by Michael Tumey

This was the featured article in the June 2015 issue. In order to keep page loading time and memory requirements reasonable, the article has been broken up into several pages. Even so, viewing these pages is not recommended on download links with speeds less than 1Mbps, and true broadband capability is strongly recommended.

Ancillary Domes: Southeast Connection

To the southeast of the main habitat dome lie two smaller dome structures, both containing sublevels beneath the domes. The Oceanography and Marine Biology Lab is detailed here.

Oceanography/Marine Biology Lab Dome

The southeastern small domed structure contains the oceanographic/marine biologic laboratories with the main lab and fish tank exhibits on the top floor within the dome. The first level beneath holds the Oceanographic Sciences level with the structures restrooms as well as systems for undersea cartography, seismic studies, current research, thermoclines, salinoclines and other oceanographic fields of study. The second level beneath houses cetacean/dolphin studies with both training and tagging facilities. The third level serves as a marine biologic hospital facility studying diseases and behavior sciences. The lowest level of this laboratory houses a high pressure, high water temperature tank for the study of deep sea, hot water “smokers” found in the deepest water to study the unique ecologies in such alien environments.

Marine Lab, Top Level: Main lab and fish exhibits

Marine Lab, Sublevel 1: Oceanographic Sciences

Marine Lab, Sublevel 2: Cetacean Studies and Training

Marine Lab, Sublevel 3: Marine Hospital and Behavioral Sciences

Marine Lab, Sublevel 4: Deep Sea “Smoker” Environment Studies

Editor’s Note: Neptune Station has been released commercially by the author as a set of maps for Virtual Tabletop systems such as Roll20, at $3.99 from DrivethruRPG. The commercial products are at higher resolution than the maps presented here.

Author’s Note: if you ignore the undersea aspects in the areas surrounding the main map, as well as finding an alternative to the moon pool, and oceanography dome, this facility could easily work as a planetary space station on an airless or exotic atmosphere environment, so it’s doesn’t solely have to serve as an undersea facility. This map can be more versatile than that.

The commercial versions of the mapped station are currently scaled at 1 inch = 10 feet. The large, main map measures 72×72 inches, so from edge to edge the area shown depicts 720 feet making the station an entire, compact undersea town and really quite extensive. This means rescaling it to 1 inch = 5 feet would rescale the dimensions to be 144×144 inches, meaning you would have to divide this map into 4 quarters to display on platforms like Roll20. At the 1 inch = 5 feet scale, even the sublevels and the main habitat level would be larger than 72×72, so a single full level couldn’t be displayed in its entirety on a Roll20 screen.