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Engineering
Short pages on how it works, each with the key numbers and where they come from.
Each page takes 2 to 3 minutes to read, ends with a table of its key numbers, and links back to the place in the tour where the idea appears.
Building for 94 K and 1.5 bar
Titan's air pushes in on a Kraken Shore building harder than the room's air pushes out, so the town is built like a stone arch, not a balloon.
Electric propulsion
The inter-moon tug pushes with 85 newtons for 120 days and carries 100 tonnes from Titan's orbit to Enceladus.
Enceladus plumes and the ocean
Enceladus sprays its ocean into space at about 400 m/s from the south pole, faster than the 239 m/s needed to leave the moon.
Fusion propulsion and helium-3
The Long Passage burns about 370 kg of fusion fuel on a crossing, and throws nearly 4,000 tonnes of hydrogen out of her magnetic nozzle to do it.
Getting around the Saturn system
Every leg of the Saturn network is flown by the engine whose exhaust speed matches the speed change the leg needs.
Kraken Mare and Titan's seas
Kraken Mare is a sea of liquid hydrocarbon at least 400,000 km² across, and Kraken Shore stands on the one coast where Cassini measured how deep it is.
Methalox from Titan
The ascent vehicle lifts off at 109 tonnes on 14 tonnes of methane from the sea and 50 tonnes of oxygen from the ice.
Nuclear-thermal rockets
The Gateway shuttle runs 929 MW of reactor heat through liquid methane from Kraken Mare and throws the hot gas out of its nozzle.
Planetary protection
Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty requires explorers to avoid harmful contamination of other worlds, and the Enceladus station keeps to it by never touching the ocean.
Reactors and heat on Titan
Two small modular reactors give Kraken Shore its electricity and its heat, because the Sun at Saturn is about a hundred times fainter than at Earth.
Saturn's rings
On the reference date the Sun stands 13.35 degrees above the ring plane, and the rings show their lit north face.
Spin gravity and counter-rotation
The Long Passage turns her habitat drums once every 20 seconds, and the floor presses on your feet with 0.56 times your Earth weight.
Titan's atmosphere and flight
Titan's air is 4.4 times denser than Earth's and its gravity is 0.138 g, so an 8-tonne rotorcraft hovers on 39.4 kW where Earth would demand 1,616 kW.
Water, oxygen and electrolysis
Kraken Shore mines Titan's ice and splits it into the oxygen people breathe and the hydrogen the fusion transports throw out of their nozzles.