Sotu Shuttles

If you need a taxi downtown, look for one of these.

 

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Table of Contents:

  1. The Shuttles
  2. The Stations
  3. The Routes
  4. Additional Notes
  5. History
  6. Exterior (Images Begin)
  7. Interior Concepts

 

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The Shuttles

Like their Dulles (ground-based) counterparts, these mass-transit vehicles have a white exterior, large windows, and a spacious interior furnished with luxury furniture and classy light fixtures.  Their flight paths are set, with Inisfreeans (ICVs) at the wheel as manual backup options.  You can board them for free at any of their landing pads or docking garages throughout the ground-level and sky-high areas of Sotu.

  • ~17.125′ “long” (deep)
  • ~6.616′ wide
  • ~6′ tall
  • seats 4 (1 ICV as the driver, + 3 passengers)*

Like all vehicles in our realm, they have a 5-point harness, not a regular 1-strap or 2-strap seatbelt.

*Since these, like all Inisfreean craft/vessels (ICs), use repulsines, weight gets cancelled out, at least from an external-gravity perspective, so it is fine to load up twice as many passengers; each of these hover-shuttles can transport 6 human-sized people at a time, though only 3 of them will have a seat.  Most people don’t mind sitting on their floors.  Whenever a pet (kajira) is brought with a passenger, she sits on the floor by the seat her Master/owner is using (unless the Master wishes her to sit on his/her lap).

 

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The Stations:

Shuttle stations in Inisfree (like our bus stations) are palatial; they are spotlessly clean, well furnished, and even have framed paintings hanging on the walls.  Chandeliers, not can-lights (lightbulbs in metal cylinders cheaply set up into ceiling holes), are what illuminate these facilities.  Marble floors and countertops, fancy stone fountains, and inlaid gems complement and complete these facilities.  There are no tickets issued or needed; just ask any of the Inisfreean attendants for information, and you’ll be on your way.  (And any of those Inisfreean girls will be happy to accompany you on your entire journey through the station, shuttle flights, and beyond; they are your hostesses, remember?  Not sexless minimum-wage workers.)

Each station’s ‘garage’ / hangar-bay / landing-pad measures:

  • ~25′ “long” (deep)
  • ~20′ wide
  • ~10′ tall

*As of 2022, there are now Hover-shuttle Stations both above and below the downtown’s ground-level; there are near-ceiling Hover-shuttle Stations in the Under-concavity.

 

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The Routes:

Sotu shuttles keep to their hemispheres; those above the surface fly passengers along set routes between all the skyscrapers.  Those below the surface (down in the Under-dome section of this inner city) fly passengers along set routes mirroring those above, getting people to and from each of the ground-scrapers there.  To go from surface to subsurface; Sotu to Under-dome, take a POV or luxury motor-coach along the GAH route inside the one skyscraper which has an opening between these two hemispheres.

 

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Additional Notes

Yes, of course you can have sex in the stations, on the shuttles, and right along the shoulders of the GAH here.  This is Inisfree, after all.

Normally (used/kept) only downtown, these can also be used like our sightseeing helicopters for spiral-flightpath ~hour-long aerial tours of our cities.

 

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History:

Sotu was designed to be able to house ~15,000,000 of the expected ~154,000,000 monthly residents/guests at capacity in 23,000 A.D. (~10% of Inisfree’s guests-and-residents population).  NYC has a ratio of ~1 taxi for every 619 of its residents, and Tokyo’s ratio is comparable.  We have been 3D-printing more of these taxis as needed, month by month, keeping close to those cities’ ratios.

  1. 2013:  ~300,000 (including the 144,000 Raptured) residents and guests, ~23,000 in Inisfree each month, thus ~2,300 downtown, thus a need for ~5 of these hovering shuttles/taxis (which might seem too few, but most people in Inisfree have their own vehicles, and many of them can fly telekinetically or with wings; few taxis/shuttles are needed for our people)
  2. 2014:  ~600,000 residents and guests city-wide; ~46,000/month; ~4,600 downtown; ~9 hover-shuttles
  3. 2015:  ~1,000,000 residents and guests; ~77,000/month; ~7,700 downtown; ~15 hover-shuttles in service for them this year
  4. 2100:  ~5,000,000; ~385,000/month; ~38,500 downtown; ~77 hover-shuttles (and since Sotu is ~4 cubic miles of space, if you count its streets, airspace, and the Under-concavity, that’s ~19 of these ‘taxis’ of ours per cubic mile)
  5. 3000:  ~90,000,000; ~7,000,000/month; ~700,000 downtown; ~1,400 hover-shuttles (~350/cubic mile downtown, ~1 to 2 every story/level)
  6. 23000:  ~2,000,000,000; ~154,000,000/month; ~15,400,000 downtown; ~30,800 hover-shuttles (which might seem congested all these millennia in the future, but it comes out to ~7,700 hover-shuttles per cubic-mile of our downtown area (volume), and ~14 to 15 of them on every story/level outside there, which is just the right amount when we are at capacity in these distant years ahead)

With that many hover-shuttles, High King Auz decided to only ‘christen’ a small percentage of them, always the first few, followed by only whichever ones he was using while taking some of his ‘office bunnies’ on lunch or alley fuck-dates, or when he was flying some of his wives and girlfriends to or from their offices, pent-houses, or other homes downtown, etc..

 

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Exterior:

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Interior Concepts:

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