Tectonic Anvil | |
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Wonder in Beyond Earth | |
Cost | 1800 |
Maintenance | None |
Requires | 5 Geothermal Metamaterials |
Specialist slots | None |
Effect | +5 Diplomatic Capital +5 from Canyon |
Notes | None |
The Tectonic Anvil is a land only wonder that requires a Canyon within 2 tiles of the city. It will permanently tie up 5 Geothermal resources. The canyon production bonus only applies to the city in which it is built.
Quote[]
"I am told that the planet's core is hot, dense, and explosive, and I am reminded of our Parliament." - Élodie, Remarques
History[]
It is curious that no human eyes have ever seen the working faces of the Tectonic Anvil. We know roughly the region it occupies (approximately 1500 cubic hectares, within a few hectares precision), and we can readily observe the material it produces as it streams up through the conduits, but its exact size and operation are invisible to its operators.
The Tectonic Anvil was created out of a need to extract higher quantities of rare and heavy materials (ironically including floatstone) out of the deepest layer of the planet's crust. As surface deposits were increasingly scarce or politically difficult to access, materials engineers and applied geologists looked at renewing mining methods pioneered on Earth prior to the Seeding - drilling deep into the crust to extract the mineral wealth therein. On Earth, this process had been hampered by the relative age of the planet, the degraded state of the regolith, and relatively high energy costs. With a younger planet possessing a less fragmented crust and cheaper energy, the process of deep extraction was a somewhat simpler proposition.
The first step was to mine the cavernous conduits which reach deep to the brittle-ductile layer of the crust. Then an army of robotic workers, ranging in size from the gargantuan loadhaulers to self-assembling carbon-nano-crystal fragmenters were sent down to complete work on an array of foundries, smelters, and transport arrays that dwarf any other similar surface facility. The drones continually mine and sort, smelt and ship, and the facility vents waste heat into the canyon network nearby as a steady flow of exotic metals and alloys come to the surface to meet the needs of industry.
The deep facility produces material that cannot be replicated outside of the intense heat and pressure of the deep crust. In particular, it is renowned for its ultrapure nickel-iron alloys, ductile firaxite compounds, and frangible floatstone. Countless proprietary forging and smelting methods have been developed there, and ongoing research into primary geology and material sciences are made possible because of the facility. There is even a burgeoning field of analytical geosciences that uses the mining outputs of the Anvil as its major dataset.
And all of this works ceaselessly, without a great deal of human intervention. A small group of human controllers work and live in shifts, kilometers below the surface. From a suite of control rooms they are responsible for observing the Anvil's operation and monitoring the reports from machines working even deeper below them. These engineers have developed a robust mythology for the Tectonic Anvil, evoking such Old Earth spirits as dwarves, norn, muspellsmegir, and trow, which they facetiously claim are the actual, unseen workers of the Anvil.
Images[]
Civilization: Beyond Earth Wonders |
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Wonders |
Abyssal Mirror • Ansible • Archimedes Lever • Armasail • Benthic Auger • Bytegeist • Crawler • Cynosure • Daedalus Ladder • Deep Memory • Drone Sphere • Ectogenesis Pod • Euphotic Strand • Faraday Gyre • Gene Vault • Guo Pu Yaolan • Holon Chamber • Human Hive • Markov Eclipse • Mass Driver • Master Control • Memetwork • Nanothermite • New Terran Myth • Panopticon • Precog Project • Promethean • Quantum Computer • Resurrection Device • Stellar Codex • Tectonic Anvil • The Akkorokamui • Xenodrome • Xenomalleum • Xenonova |
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Emancipation Gate • Exodus Gate • Mind Flower • Transcendental Equation • Decode Signal • Beacon |
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