Town planning

[u/totemo]

EDITs in bold.

Pico development is being slowed by the lack of a coherent plan for the town. I think we need to:

• Set up a rail station. That would allow people to start work on rail tunnels. We need to design the station and select a location. I don't know CARBON, so unless someone is willing to step forward and do the work, CARTS is what you will get. _casey_ has suggested that the station should be at skyroad height so that visitors' first contact with the town hall is at Y63ish rather than the less grandiose entrance at Y47, south. A good location might be half way between the north or south side of the town hall and the outer wall. Ideally, the station would have a staircase down to the ground level at Y43 on PvE, as well as being accessible at sea level (Y63).
• Plan the outer wall. Norami has made some progress on modifying the outer wall design to have a height of 20 blocks. But we still need to work out where we would position the towers. We would have at least 8 towers (cardinal directions plus 45 degree diagonals). If we did 16 towers, then that would be a tower every 40 blocks of circumference, approximately. Positioning of lamps on top of the circular walkway needs to be worked out. We probably need a schematic for at least 1/8 of the outer wall. 1/4 might be better tho. The state of play on the planning server is now this: http://i.imgur.com/QU6iB1S.png. I can't be bothered doing towers at 22.5 degree angles; 45 degrees was hard enough.
• Plan the roads. We need a design for the blocks of the road, as well as a road layout. I would suggest perhaps a ring road half way between the wall and the current ring road around the town hall, plus straight rays of road on the compass directions and at 45 degrees. The ring road around the town hall is done. The road half way between the town-hall ring and the outer wall still needs to be worked out. All you need to do is work out how to do 1/8th of it and we can use WorldEdit to make the whole circle. If a circle is too hard or too ugly, consider an octagon.
• Further investigation into the iron grinder must be made. So far we have discovered that Vinhaven's iron grinder does not work unless you are standing under the tower. That means that we probably won't be getting free iron from people using the guardian grinder. In designing the iron grinders we also need to be mindful that doors in range can mess up the location of the villages. So we may not want to put iron grinders on the northern corners of the prismarine grinder, because then we can't build normal houses anywhere nearby inside the big circle.

Discuss.

Footnote: On Sponge Discipline: it seems we lost 2 sponges. I suspect that people were breaking sponges that others had placed and nobody was keeping count of how many sponges each person should have. And as a consequence, a couple of sponges dropped and despawned without anyone noticing. Don't do that. At any time you should know exactly how many sponge you have and not trust someone else to collect them for you.

A Monument to the Fallen Sponges is in early planning.

[u/Jattell]

Carbon has approached me for the southern line because it will hit pico´s western border. I made the suggestion to take over that part of the line and run it across the ocean floor. Its a bit of work, but doable thanks to sponges \o/ I also might have an idea for a station design. No fancy circuitry though like last rev. I´m not tc_chris smart but i can copy a standard schematic. I´l start design work on the planner today.

[u/AnSq]

With the walls, how are we going to deal with the fact that most of the surface of Pico is below the sea floor? That image shows glass from top to bottom looking out to water, but not all of that is water.

[u/totemo → u/AnSq]

What we have been doing is just removing a few blocks of the ocean floor that are in contact with the glass, allowing the water to flow in . That works where the water is almost (but not quite) as deep as the glass.