ColonyPod Hatches – Austin Bunton Designs

There are four giant diagonal circular structures visible high on the slope of the central mountain.

–

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Dimensions & Layout
General Features
Safety Features
Special Features
Novels Excerpt
Locations: Four Near the Avalanche Wall
Design Details
Open: Big Holes in the Alpine/Slope Canopy
Closed: Concepts
2022 Update: Scale-model in Minecraft

Introduction:

These are the giant, horizontal gates which cover the slanted, cylindrical tunnels allowing the town-sized, mound-like, Inisfreean Spaceships (which are abbreviated as CPs) to fly down into, and up out of, their cavernous, miles-deep, housing hangar in the core of Inisfree’s central mountain.

–

Dimensions & Layout:

Each of Inisfree’s four ColonyPod Hatches (“CP Hatches”) is more than three quarters of a mile in diameter, allowing just enough airspace for one CP to hover down or up through. These four hatches are arranged radially around the top of Inisfree’s central mountain, at even intervals, each one being just a few hundred feet away from the Avalanche Wall‘s outer face.

–

General Features:

The doors are designed so that they actually get stronger when closed, not when open and in their wall/rim slots,
and their eight wedge-shaped sections’ edges magnetically attracted each other, making it easier for them to stay level and close evenly together -perfectly- the farther out they extend from their rim slots.

While the ‘sky-dome’ around/masking Inisfree can keep out even nuclear explosions and red-giant / supernovae energies, and even though these hatches cover up easy-access/exit routes/passages for the very-powerful ColonyPod spaceships inside, they are still paired with powerful forcefields which can turn on in an instant, blocking as much as a comet strike or anti-matter bomb blast. In short, it is not easy to get through these ‘doors’. They only open for ColonyPod pilot-training traffic, too.

–

Safety Features:

Anytime one of these CP Hatches is about to open or close, or is in the process of opening or closing, its edge/border will be staffed/patrolled by Inisfreean police-girls. This is to ensure anyone hiking/observing nearby stays at a safe distance, never falling in/over. There is also a waist-level and well-marked safety-wall several dozen feet beyond the edge/opening of each CP Hatch.

As of 2021, an invisible semi-permeable forcefield-like membrane was also added to turn on anytime one of these hatches opens; it is a barrier spanning the plane of the open hatch, and it is just strong enough to stop a human-sized person from falling through, but intentionally not strong enough to prevent a ColonyPod from flying up/out or down/in through one of these hatches to the diagonal cylindrical shaft below. These barriers are not like a trampoline or bubble, though; a ColonyPod passing through one of them does not break their continuity, stopping them from working entirely; if a person gets too near the edge and tumbles over, even if a ColonyPod is hovering up/out or down/in at the same time, these barriers will still catch/bounce/repel them. In cases where someone falls onto this barrier when no ColonyPod is passing through, they will simply slide down at a safe speed to the lower curve of the rim of the open hatch they fell to.

–

Special Features:

Each CP Hatch dilates open a bit like a camera lens or the iris of an eyeball would, and when the wedge-like sections of one of these hatches contract to seal back together, a sigil is formed by their meeting. Those sigils are as follow:

CP Hatch 1: Lucifer; an angel whose name means ‘the Light Bringer’
CP Hatch 2: Naberius; an angel, and the most valiant Marquis of Hell, also known as Cerberus, and one of Odin’s two crows (one of his shape-shifter forms)
CP Hatch 3: Inisfree, as represented in an elliptical, simplified glyph similar in appearance to Morse code; capital city of the whole Universe
CP Hatch 4: Azarel (also Auzdein‘s symbol; the pictograph of his name), who is a high-ranking arch-angel and commander of many legions of their kind

and, as of 2023 October, they light up at night with this color:

–

Novels Excerpt:

By now, Lucifera had surely noticed the one outcropping high above the other apartment buildings, with a small town of its own buildings resting prominently out across its flat top, and many waterfalls smoothly roaring over three of its four sides. Auz didn’t give any spoilers as to what it was or looked like up there, but seemed to have the ghost of a smile about her wondering as she looked up at it. He just sat with her and finished his dessert.

Once lunch was finished off, he showed her the nearest of the four vast, circular, horizontal ‘doors’ keeping the big flight tunnels down into the heart of Inisfree’s central mountain safely shut. These doors were called ColonyPod Hatches; ‘hatch’ was the military term for ‘door’, and the airships that flew down into or up and out of them were the ColonyPods, named that way because they looked like big UFOs (or pods) that could create colonies wherever they landed. The ColonyPod the two of them had walked up to the edge of was, like the other three, three-quarters of a mile across. A railing, signage, an internal safety-net border, and patrolling Inisfreeans ensured no one lost their way and fell in.

It was fairly difficult to notice and read at their on-the-ground angle, so Auz pointed out that each of the ColonyPod Hatches had an angelic-script symbol painted across it. Three of the hatches were marked with the sigil for one of three great angels, and the fourth hatch, in similar sigil form, had the symbol for Inisfree. The marking on the hatch they were standing at the edge of, she would likely then be able to make out, was the symbol for her; Lucifer(a).

–

Locations: Four Near the Avalanche Wall