Habitat Construction Kit
The Habitat Construction Kit, sometimes called Settlement Construction Kit or Hab Kit, is a complete kit of technology that allows the construction of a fully featured, but small space habitat for up to 200 people with added fabrication and refinery module, or a planet based settlement for up to five thousand people, within a six months time frame.
The Hab Kit is about the size of a 20 foot inter modal shipping container and made up of three main components. One is a single workshop variant of the Darwin Open Source Fabricator, which has been modified with a limited AI system to support the construction, which allows to modify existing fabrication templates for a given environment. Then a asteroid mining resource extraction system, which can only be used in a micro-gravity environment, as it is based on the APIS type of resource extraction, capable of producing up to ten tonnes of feed stock per week.
Library of Alexandria¶
The final component is called 'The Library of Alexandria' and is a system of multiple redundant computer systems with storage for several million open source fabricator templates that can be used to produce everything from the smallest bolt to large complex computer systems, and the components needed for specialised fabricators and even fully FTL capable space craft. In addition, the database contains the collected knowledge of mankind, from factual to fictional information.
Energy is provided by a miniature fusion reactor that only needs to be fed with water, but can also be powered by solar cells.
As the Hab Kit can be used to build a copy of itself within two weeks from raw materials, they are generally cheap and easy to acquire and especially space settlements have several in stock for emergency purposes.
Space Habitat¶
Usually, the Hab Kit is used by independently minded groups or small space mining operations to create their own stations and as such a standardised space habitat has emerged since the creation of the first Hab Kit and been integrated into The Library of Alexandria.
The Space Habitat itself is based around a 150 m radius habitation drum with a width of fifty meters, spun up to 2 rotations per minute for a gravity level of 0.67 g. With two stories, this means a liveable area of about 100000 square meters. However, life support systems, control systems and other important systems reduce this usable area by 10000 square meters, while hydroponics, aquaponics, storage and some fabrication systems take up another 45000 square meters.
Most energy is supplied by a reactor that can supply three times the energy needed by the habitat. Micro-gravity storage, fabrication and other systems are build into a non-rotating hub section of the habitat that includes four space craft docking ports, as well as two ports that can be used to dock the habitat to a propulsion system, an asteroid docking system or additional Settlement Systems
Fabrication and Refinery Module¶
Like the Space Habitat itself, a standardised Fabrication and Refinery Module has emerged from the multiple settlements created with the Hab Kit. It is commonly called 'The Factory'.
This module integrates an APIS type resource extraction system that can produce up to a hundred tonnes of fabricator feed stock and volatiles per week. In addition, it can produce several dozen tonnes of carbonyls per week, allowing to use carbonyl casting processes for the fast fabrication of iron-nickel-cobalt alloy structures used for station or spacecraft construction. A small chemical factory and reactor allows the production of polymer feed stocks.
The fabricators can be specialised as needed and are generally of the industrial size, capable of fabricating systems of up to 45 foot intermodal container size. Of course there are many smaller fabricators that can be used at the same time, allowing a space habitat to be largely self sufficient from the raw materials of an asteroid.
Of course The Factory can be used to produce larger structures, such as larger resource extraction, fabricators, space craft and habitats.
Von Neumann¶
Sometimes, the Hab Kit is called a simple Von Neumann machine, as its a technological system capable of self replication. But there are discussions about this designations, as the Hab Kit is designed to be used by humans and not equipped with a guiding program that would allow it to reproduce independently.