Why just drive up/over a normal street/highway section to get to our airport… when we can build a gigantic hollow “UFO” and drive through that?

 

Table of Contents:

  1. Size
  2. Command
  3. Flow of Traffic
  4. Acknowledging the Stepping Stones
  5. Concepts

 

Size:

With a diameter of 1/4 of a mile (the same diameter as an Inisfreean Dropship), this flying saucer shaped, all-lanes exit-ramp of the Civilian Aerospaceport houses the corkscrew-like spiral of the entire 16-lane GAH.  The only other places in Inisfree which have super-highway corkscrews are within the Uber Geode, the Uber Sphynx, and, of course, the smaller (fewer than all 16 lanes) GAH sections wrapping up and down around the largest of Sotu‘s skyscrapers and (in Sotu’s Under-concavity) ground-scrapers (stalactite-style buildings).  There are six disc-shaped landing-pads capable of supporting an airship of this size, but, like the C-5 on-ramp of this aerospaceport, this off-ramp, aerodynamic though it looks and is, will never fly.

*Originally the span of our entire normal highway (GAH), we soon realized we only needed a few lanes’ width, as it was only for exiting/outgoing traffic, not traffic going both ways, and as we didn’t need a median, shoulder, on/off ramp/s, or more than one lane for vehicles, plus one lane for our drivable 3-story houses.  In short, we only needed this stationary aircraft-like drive-through building to have an internal open width (around where the GAH goes/is/spirals) of ~50′; that’s enough room for 1 house-lane and 1 vehicle/cars-lane.

 

Command:

While the C-5 is almost solely for incoming land traffic to this aerospaceport, this giant ‘saucer’ is almost solely for outgoing land traffic. Like the C-5 entry-gate, this giant saucer has a cockpit which can observe and seal off its section of the GAH, forcing land traffic to take detours around the aerospaceport. Also like the C-5 entry-gate, this exit-gate remains closed and locked whenever no aerospace traffic is scheduled, for there is no reason to keep an unused section of the GAH open, accessible, and active in such a case, for no land traffic would be transporting anyone to or from the aerospaceport during that time.

 

Flow of Traffic:

Though the entire 16-lane width of the full-sized GAH fits within and passes through this giant saucer, typically only the 8-lane side for outbound traffic is utilized.  One of the most curious sights within Inisfree is that of seeing entire, 3-story houses traveling out from the lower-and-outbound ramp of this giant saucer, driving along on their extra-wide, reserved lanes of the GAH. Don’t want to take your car to the airport?  In Inisfree, you can take the whole house -with the car still in its garage; just drive your house there; to Inisfree’s equivalent of an airport, and walk out your front (or any) door, down its steps, and off to the check-in lanes and terminals.

At capacity in ~23000 A.D. and beyond, we’re projecting to have ~153,846,153 people coming to Inisfree each month; ~5,494,505/d; ~228,937/hr; ~3,815/minute; ~64/second.
3,815 people coming to our airport each minute in those later millennia means a need for ~95 of our ~40-person luxury buses/motor-coaches to be moving through this exit-structure that often; every minute; 2 every second.
Spread out across the 5-lanes-wide GAH corkscrew in here, with ICVs driving, assisted by each bus’s A.I. auto-driver, coordinated by the Grid Mind, that is manageable.
However, it takes a lot longer than 1-2 seconds to load each of those ~40-person luxury buses, so we’d have to have room for hundreds of them along the arrivals/pickups curb –and that curb is only ~1,500′ long; room for ~30 of our ~45′-long luxury buses.
30 of our luxury buses = room for 1,200 human-sized passengers (comfortable seating/dispersion inside each luxury bus). That leaves 2,615 of the 3,815 arriving people each minute who still need transportation from this civilian air/Spaceport of ours to their homes in Inisfree.
In other words, we will not be transporting by luxury bus all of those 3,815 people arriving each minute.
To make it further-manageable, we’ll have some of those people picked up by other, faster, more maneuverable vehicles.
Air traffic/lanes are very strictly reserved and limited in our city/realm, an effort to prevent congestion and eyesores –which lots of air/sky-traffic would certainly cause/be.
Assuming 2,615 arriving people need to exit our air/Spaceport each minute, spread out along our ~1,500′-long pickups-and-dropoffs curb, that would be ~2 people per foot; 2 people per foot per minute = 1 person per foot every 30 seconds, and that is manageable foot-traffic there.
Those people can walk between the parked/waiting/loading luxury buses to the other lanes of traffic here, getting in the much-faster-loading/moving smaller vehicles, such as personal vehicles (cars, etc.).
To help keep traffic here moving smoothly and safely, ICVs always take over, working in tandem with their respective vehicles’ auto-driver A.I., preventing all surprises and potential accidents.

~2,000,000 at capacity will call Cloud City II their home while visiting/in Inisfree; that’s .1% of 2B; .1% of their traffic to/from this air/Spaceport can be by small/personal/local air/hovercraft (and that can be any of the vehicles we’ve 3D-printed in Inisfree, as all of them come standard with built-in repulsines).
.1% of 3,815 is ~4 people; ~4 people every minute will be flown to or from this air/Spaceport of ours (to/from Cloud City II).

This exit-ramp gradually descends vehicle traffic down 27 stories (~264′) back to local ground-level outside the air/Spaceport.
(3 pixels underneath a 1pixel runway surface = the runway is 264′ above ground-level (~26.5 stories), the runway is 1 story thick (~10′), and the clearance beneath it for storing/parking civilian air/Spacecraft in Inisfree is ~254′.

Calculating the slope of the off-ramp through this mega-“UFO”:
For the mega-C5 on-ramp: 15 pixels away from start of dropoffs-curb, 4 pixels up from ground-level on map sideview = 4/15; ~.26; ~26% (rise over run).
This mega flying-saucer off-ramp: the corkscrew-shaped GAH-section in it adds more length; more ‘run’ = a different rise/run ratio; slope closer to ~13%?

 

Acknowledging the Stepping Stones:

Like the C-5 at the far-end of this aerospaceport, the giant flying saucer which completes this end of the aerospaceport was chosen as a titanic-sized, functional, statue-and-symbol; the C-5 represents the first form of successful, large-scale, airborne cargo transportation, while this classic UFO form represents the generation that followed.  With all of the makes, models, and versions of aircraft before, past, and in between, these formed the critical stepping stones that made the ‘stairway to heaven’ a reality for all.  Now, we have teleportation (available from every gate of every terminal in this aerospaceport, it is of note), but that is another story for another time…

 

Concepts:

video