Plan 311: Building a Dream (Part 1)

Part 2 | Part 3

Plan 311, the construction of New Aqua City in Aludra, remains the single most ambitious construction project ever undertaken.

Early History

The story of Plan 311 begins during the era of the Industrial Revolution on the Continent. While in Chira steel-framed buildings had already existed for about seventy years, on the Continent it was a Basran engineer, Grigori Doros, who first wrote on the idea of using a fireproofed iron frame and deep foundations to support a prodigiously tall building. His illustrator sister Erika assisted in his first presentation to the Duke and Dutchess, Towers of the Future, her paintings showing a vision of Tauberg dominated by great neoclassical towers "wherein the great magnitude of future citizens make their homes (and) business be conduct'd," estimating the future city's population at over ten times the number at the time.

The first true Continental skyscrapers were built at roughly the same time in Messirah in Garam (Crown Messirah, 372ft), Vermillion City in Etrusea (Johansson Building, 277ft) and Tauberg in Basram (Aldren Tower, 300ft), all three making various claims to be the first and claiming the others to be shorter and / or mismeasured*. Crown Messirah was perhaps the most ambitious of the three, benefitting greatly from the cooperation of the nearby al-Hassan integrated steel mill, the supervisor of which threw out the original plans for a riveted iron frame and instead insisted on attempting to use only arc-welded steel, a method that had never even been attempted before. This resulted in the plan being reworked from a rather unremarkable 150ft rectangle to the slender and graceful tower that still stands in Messirah today.

The Empress at the time, the legendary Fiol dio Alud, thought that such structures would ruin the carefully-managed unity of form of the buildings in Alurna. Knowing that simply forbidding tall buildings would make her country seem regressive, she had the Alurna Central Planning Authority draw up a draft proposal for a high-rise development that, she believed, would be impossible to actually construct**.

The plan required the simultaneous raising of no less than three hundred and eleven skyscrapers and all of their supporting industry and services, with no more than six months between the completion of the first tower and the last. The required number of residents of the new city would also have been impossible to achieve with the technology of the time, since averaged out it would require every single residential structure to be at least as tall as the Johansson Building.

311 is a holy number in Aludra, though precisely why has been lost to time: many folk etymologies exist, with one of the most enduring being that there were 311 steps from the door of the original Grand Temple to the altar.

A little over a generation later, everything had changed.

Operation Quadrant

The groundwork for Aludra's "industrial miracle" had been laid by Shri dio Alud throughout her reign with authorisations for many projects considered radical at the time, and was nurtured by her older and younger daughters, Fiol and Keira. By her granddaughter Lana dio Alud's time, Aludra was one of the most powerful nations on the Continent, with first-rate armed forces and an immense industrial base.

By this point, Old Aqua City on the west side of the Vamar river was a sprawling blight on the beautiful city beside it, primarily composed of run-down apartment complexes built to deal with the housing crisis during the industrial revolution and a series of long-abandoned brick industrial buildings and warehouses of little historical value. Several plans to redevelop Old Aqua City's abandoned docklands to take pressure off the increasingly congested container yards on the east side had been considered over the years, but nothing had come of them.

The area was officially abandoned, effectively a tiny state run by a surprisingly effective coalition of organised crime syndicates and community leaders, which had kept the city supplied with basic amenities from the government in Alurna. In recent years, the antiquated infrastructure had led to numerous utility failures including a major gas explosion and fire that is often credited as being the last straw for Old Aqua City: the narrow, dilapidated and confusing streets seriously delayed the deployment of fire trucks from Alurna and led to the destruction of the area's only functional hospital. The only positive was an increase in Old Aqua City's goodwill towards the Empress, who acted quickly to prevent deaths at the hospital by ordering the deployment of transport helicopters from carriers docked across the river.

Old Aqua City's unofficial representatives helped to draw up a draft plan to empty it; the Empress accepted a deal under which the population would be granted citizenship with no charges bought to those who had come to Aludra illegally, and all would be guaranteed homes and preferential selection for employment in the new city. Empress Lana even added a promise of noble titles for the community leaders to ensure they maintained their status and influence in the new city.

The evacuation, Operation Quadrant, began shortly afterwards. The Army moved some 53,000 civilians to housing set up on the runways of the never-completed Aqua City Airport, and set up a cordon around the site to ensure the buildings were not re-occupied prior to demolition. It soon became clear that the seven incredibly thorough sweeps of the city by the Army were less about checking for remaining citizens (all of whom were found in the first sweep) and more about using Old Aqua City as a massive urban combat training range while it was still standing. The final "sweeps" actually demolished a substantial part of Midtown with artillery, battleship and tank cannon fire following the clearance of all remaining personal effects from these buildings, as part of a program to evaluate the effects of gunfire on real buildings. In particular, the two Aludran battleships that took part in the operation, ANV Mirage and ANV Empress Kiera, singled out the Shaw Building, a notoriously hideous experiment in reinforced concrete, due to its bunker-like qualities.

Experience gathered during this exercise was incorporated into the Advanced Gun System project and the overall operation was instrumental in the development of the Broadsword IFV, Mantis heavy attack helicopter (the first helicopter to mount a hard-kill active defence system) and the Black Swan main battle tank. Testing included the bulky prototype of Lindstrom Optics' Smallarm Reflex Sight, which was prioritised for further research and adopted four years later, and the data gathered also led to the first iteration of the endlessly-delayed Aludran Future Soldier program.

New Aqua City

With ordnance clearing and the remaining demolitions in progress initial plans for modest stone housing, in line with the redevelopment of Alurna's faltering slaughterhouse district half a century earlier following the advent of refrigeration, were quickly displaced by the resurrection of a far grander plan.

Historically Aludra's two most powerful noble families short of the Alud themselves, the steelmakers of the Ruhm dynasty and the gargantuan construction consortium of House Emera, have never seen eye to eye, but the marriage of Dominque sen Emera and Sahar sen Ruhm led to a period of cooperation between the two. Plan 311 fascinated the head of House Emera at the time, Lady Estelle, who felt that it would ensure the prosperity of both her family and Aludra as a whole to see it to completion.

With several major Aludran cities experiencing problems housing their populations without extensive and destructive redevelopment, the proposition of building an entire new city won support from several other major noble families who felt it was an elegant solution to the issue. Drawing further support largely proceeded by the classic method of getting Alun to do things they do not want to, this being suggesting it is fine if they think it is too difficult.

The first step had already been done; the unique mindset of Alun had been studied centuries earlier to determine the best way to run a sailing ship, and the engineering of functional social groups had long been a key part of Aludran military training***. Architects were advised by naval designers from the Karim family, with the aim being for residential buildings to accommodate communities rather than disconnected groups of people. To Alun, a building accommodating a group of people who do not particularly know one another is almost as bizarre as it is for bipedal bees; all of the buildings designed for Aqua City reflect this, with the individual kitchens and washrooms very small and only intended for occasional use over the communal dining areas and baths. A group of residents in each building would be the staff of that building, with their accommodation paid for by the remainder: it was assumed the residents would be able to work this out among themselves.

Lady Estelle felt the original plan, which only consisted of skyscrapers and support buildings, would be unpleasant to actually live in. The new preliminary plan included a large number of smaller residential complexes and setbacks in the residential towers to give them communal areas on the lower floors. Among other things, this would mean entire buildings could be assigned to particularly large family units, replicating Aludra's much-loved and very Proper "Household" polyamorous family unit.

Attention was paid to Etrusean efforts to make towers suitable for Alcacians, but their method, using insertable modular floor trays to divide single-floor apartments in half, was felt to result in floorplans that were too generic. Instead, every apartment was designed with a 20-foot reception area and the rest of the rooms on two floors so other-species families could receive Alcacian friends in their homes, and a set number of dedicated Alcacian homes were built based on estimates of arrivals and population growth. There were far more than would immediately be needed, but this was accounted for as they were designed to be converted into indoor gardens or storage areas if they were not being used for habitation.

A long contest led to the selection of three hundred and eleven final designs for the core towers, which were then placed in a preliminary plan and reworked to relate to one another and the smaller buildings that would surround them. Most were in Aludra's favoured art deco and neoclassical styles, with some incorporating elements of Basran gothic forms, particularly those close to the new city's three main temples.

The crown jewel of the new Aqua City would be the Monarch Towers, two graceful 1,883-foot postmodernist spires joined by a high bridge. The design was something of an oddity since it was not of Aludran origin, rather being the work of Zahra al-Murad, a Garam-born gazelle, as her gift to her new nation.

While the preliminary details of what building would go where resulted in a skyline that the Empress found aesthetically Proper, she was concerned that the concept paintings looked more like a military base than a city. Further, she felt that no Aludran city-planner would be able to organise such a massive undertaking; her country preferred slow and sympathetic additions to cities, and Aludran planners were mostly chosen for their understanding of local history and Appropriate sense of composition, not for the ability to build an entire new city from scratch. Asking foreigners from the Continent would be seen as giving up, and so that too was unacceptable.

At a meeting of the noble families already sponsoring the project, Giselle sen Kais, the young scion of the family of ancient stoneworkers by that point responsible for almost all Aludran concrete manufacturing plants, stood up and made a suggestion that left the whole room silent in contemplation. "Wouldn't the Mirrai know how to do this?"

Mirrai Connection

Mirrai at the time was at the height of their industrial Renaissance, fuelled by the discovery of methods to prevent their species from suffering serious poisoning while working with chemicals which for the first time allowed the Mirrai workforce to directly assist in processes like refining and welding which they had previously relied on other species for. Mirrai society was well known for its great scholars and love of the sciences, and combining this with large-scale production rather than small workshops over the course of a hundred years had transformed them into a first-rate industrial power with major supply contracts to most nations on the Continent. Their imports of steel from Aludra meant the Ruhm family already had contacts they could speak with.

At the time, the pride of Mirrai was the completion of their first above-ground city, Rasoon. The was an immense achievement for the Mirrai, aquatic amphibians with the most difficult set of living requirements of any sentient species. Their eyes are very sensitive and direct sunlight is blinding to them, and they require near-100% humidity, a fairly narrow temperature range and regular immersion in water since even as adults they cannot regulate their body moisture; their hatchlings are for a time fully aquatic. In addition their semi-permeable colonian eggs require very specific symbiotic bacteria and nutrients to form correctly, and the bacteria in particular do not occur anywhere but Mirrai itself.

Because of this Mirrai civilisation had largely been restricted to multi-tiered underground cities built by expanding cave complexes, but Mirrai was running out of suitable locations for such cities, and from this emerged a bold plan to construct one on the surface, using a vast nuclear-powered pump tower to endlessly raise, filter and pour water onto the buildings below.

The Rasoon Fountain Canopy, half a mile high and two miles across, was the largest single structure ever constructed**** and even by the Fourth Battle of Kythen Ocean was only exceeded by other Fountain Canopies and the Chiran mobile shipyard Null, which did not officially exist*****. Moreover, Rasoon was at the time the only example of a successful project to build an entire city from scratch.

*In actuality, the largest building at the time was Century Tower in Chira, at 1,355ft with the tip of the spire 1,590ft.
**In spite of this, plans were filed to build a 210-foot experimental Leviship mooring tower in Alurna during this period, but scrapped when the eight thousand ton Etrusean Air Destroyer Bastion attempted to moor at Mercia Tower in Basram with a strong tailwind and pushed the tower over, killing five ground crew. From this it was determined that a wrought iron tower was simply not structurally strong enough for mooring a Leviship, and most such towers were either scrapped or used exclusively for rigid-frame airships only a tiny fraction of a Leviship's mass. Aludra never operated any dirigible airships since two successive Empresses (Fiol and her mother Shri) viewed them as impractical and dangerous, and so all plans for mooring towers were cancelled as they would be unsuited for use by any vessel in the military or civilian aerial fleet.
***Like their four-legged cat cousins, shouting orders at Alun simply ensures they will do anything other than what you're shouting.
****Garam initially disputed this due to a mistranslation of what was actually being claimed, since the al-Hassan integrated steel mill complex has a much larger footprint than the Rasoon Fountain Canopy but is not a single structure.
*****The name Null is inferred from the vessel's communications using a blank field for the sender ID, which is interpreted as <NULL> by decoding software. The most common name used by the Chiran fleet translates as "unknown hardware" since the warning "ALERT: UNKNOWN HARDWARE HAS CONNECTED" is logged any time a ship shares telemetry with it.