This is the structure traffic drives in through in order to drop off or pick up passengers from the curbside terminals building doors of our city’s main airport.
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Table of Contents:
- Size
- Command
- Flow of Traffic
- Appearance / Inspiration
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Size:
The C-5 “Galaxy” cargo plane has a cargo space inside it which is 17.2′ wide. The scaled-up version of this aircraft serving as the all-lanes on-ramp up to the Civilian Aerospaceport‘s pick-up and drop-off area is large enough that the entire width of the GAH passes up into its ‘mouth’ and straight through it from nose to tail, giving its internal-space width a span of *462′; that’s nearly 27 times larger than its inspiration.
*Originally the span of our entire normal highway (GAH), we soon realized we only needed a few lanes’ width, as it was only for approaching/incoming 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 of ~50′; that’s enough room for 1 house-lane and 1 vehicle/cars-lane.
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Command:
The cockpit of this titanic airship (though it is anchored to the ground of Inisfree and will never fly) is more than 50 stories above ground level, and serves as the land-traffic control tower, capable of shutting down and blocking off the entire GAH section leading up into -much in the same ways that GAH sections within Sotu can be blocked off and re-routed. This capability is utilized whenever no air-traffic (now called aerospace-traffic or air-and-Space-traffic) is scheduled for long periods of time; if there are no airships (now called aerospaceships, aerospacecrafts, or repulsines) taking off or landing at this aerospaceport, then there is no reason to have its GAH section open for use. Thusly, even this civilian aerospaceport of Inisfree can be sealed off like a fortress.
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Flow of Traffic:
Though half of the GAH section (8 lanes) going up into this larger variant of the C-5 is, technically, for outbound traffic going the opposite direction, this almost never needs to happen, for 1) most traffic is largely automated, pausing only to drop off passengers at the check-in walkways just outside the terminals, and 2) whatever traffic still needs to be parked in this aerospaceport’s parking garage almost always (upon being retrieved) exits via the off-ramp of this aerospaceport; the traditional U.F.O.-shaped (or ‘flying saucer’ shaped) airship which the 16-lane GAH passes into and then down and out of on the opposite side from the C-5. So unless someone takes manual control of their vehicle and just feels like going in the opposite direction (up and in via the UFO-ramp, and out and down via the C-5 ramp), all Inisfreean vehicles will navigate to this aerospaceport via the 8 lanes of the GAH going up and into it via the C-5 ramp.
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/day; ~228,937/hour; ~3,815/minute; ~64/second.
- Since very few of them choose to stay here (making Inisfree their 2nd/new/final home, not just a vacation home or healing/resort pitstop/visit), that same number will need to leave at the same rate; ~3,815 every minute –forever.
- We’ll have ~30 of our luxury buses staged/staging along the dropoffs-and-pickups curb at all times, but those will only help us get ~1,200 people to this airport; 30 buses x 40 per bus (comfortable seating/spacing inside).
- That leaves ~2,615 people still needing to be dropped off here –each and every minute.
- For those, we’ll have smaller, more maneuverable vehicles, such as their personal ones (cars, trucks, etc.) drop them off, each vehicle slowing down to a halt in one of the other lanes running parallel with the dropoffs-curb, their ICV chauffeur and/or auto-driver A.I. taking over if needed.
- A lot of that traffic will be going in and out of the parking garage on the side of the local G.A.H. section opposite that curb, so there will still be enough space in most of the lanes for still-moving traffic to keep passing by the parked/paused vehicles.
- 2,615 people per minute, spread out along the ~1,500′-long curb = 2 people per foot per minute; 1 person per foot every 30 seconds; enough time/room for them to keep moving in/out of the check-ins hall/section.
- 2,615 people per minute, divided by ~4 people per personal vehicle (car, SUV, or truck, etc.) = ~654 of those personal vehicles passing by / pulling up / pausing nearby, per minute.
- 654 personal vehicles, each ~15-20′ long, means a need for ~13,080′ of G.A.H. drivable surfaces.
- The G.A.H. alongside this dropoffs-and-pickups area of our air/Spaceport is only ~1,500′ long; 9 lanes would be needed here to accommodate all those vehicles that may be arriving and pausing here every minute.
- The G.A.H. section here only has 2 lanes; 1 wide lane for our mobile-houses traffic, and 1 regular-width lane for our normal-vehicles traffic; some of the traffic will be directed or auto-driven into the parking garage instead of being allowed to pause/wait by the curb.
- However, the area allotted for this local section of the G.A.H. is wide enough for the normal/full span/width of our standard G.A.H. sections; there is plenty of room for traffic to drive around paused/parked cars/buses.
- It just has to merge back into the 5-lanes-wide 2-lanes traffic to exit; like in this on-ramp tunnel (this scaled-up version of a C-5 airplane), the exit-ramp tunnel at the far-end of this G.A.H. section also only has 1 wide lane for mobile-houses traffic, and 1 normal-width lane for normal-vehicles traffic.
- (Because of this, the mobile houses we have in our city are rarely allowed to be driven here during our later-millennia; they would cause too much congestion once our anticipated arriving/guest population gets above the ~billion-people mark.)
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~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 entry-ramp gradually ascends vehicle traffic up 27 stories (~264′) from local ground-level outside the air/Spaceport.
(3 pixels underneath a 1-pixel 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′.
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Calculating the slope of the on-ramp (GAH) through this mega-C5:
15 pixels away from start of dropoffs-curb, 4 pixels up from ground-level on map sideview = 4/15; ~.26; ~26% (rise over run)
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Appearance / Inspiration:
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