Arcology Housing
From Acw
An Arcology Housing is a massive undertaking, and involves the construction of a massive spherical shell that completely encompasses an entire lunar body. This shell becomes an airtight housing that allows the introduction of an atmosphere onto bodies too small to hold one with their own gravity, and thus unsuitable for terraforming.
Pioneered by the British, they were a short-lived fad due to the fact that even with a shell of this size, the moons could not be made self-sustaining, and ultimately the impossible task of armouring such a massive structure makes the moon below more vulnerable to orbital attack, in the same way a pressurised spacecraft is more vulnerable than a de-pressurised one.
Phobos
"Housing, Lunar, Arcology, Mark I (Phobos)"
Deimos
"Housing, Lunar, Arcology, Mark II (Deimos)"
Luna
Other Applications
Other structures similar to Arcology Housings have been attempted in various other places around the galaxy since Luna, despite the structures begin proven weak, inefficient and prohibitively expensive.
Arminius
Almost accidental project designed by the chief engineer of the Seevogel.
Tolstoy
The short-run Kursk-class factory ships deployed by Russia to Chimera were originally designed to be used to construct Arcology Housings on New Ukraine's two moons. Halfway through the program, the Tolstoy ship was re-tasked to instead mass-produce smaller-scale habitats similar to those originally built on Luna. The concept was thought to promote a much cheaper solution, and one that was both disposable and less vulnerable to attack. The result was successful in its aims - the modular units were simple to produce, tailor to specific uses and install, but overall the colony on the moon was unsustainable without incredible injections of resources from the planet below.
Tolstoy's base was expected to be a mining operation, while Dostoyevsky's a base for terraforming engineers. When Tolstoy was discovered to have less material wealth than first suspected, the Dostoyevsky ship was shelved, and eventually sold to the The Dostoyevsky Committee. In the end, confronted by the mammoth maintenance expenses of the Tolstoy base, but not bound to maintain it by the sheer cost of building it (as the British and Germans were), the Soviets abandoned the moon except for a skeleton staff in the mid-2200s.
Dostoyevsky
The Dostoyevsky Committee's original plan for their newly-acquired colony was to follow the original soviet plan, and adhere to the same strategy as was executed on Tolstoy. Always ambitious, the committee decided to embark upon what the major powers had thought of as an impossible venture - terraforming a planetary body known to be too small to hold the required atmosphere.
It is hard to imagine one of the major powers dedicating resources to what is so obviously a doomed endeavour. However, the settlers on Dostoyevsky, trying to make a new start and with nowhere else to call home, were willing to try anything to make their new home more habitable.
