The Sky Road
Titan
The Sky Road
The only moon with an atmosphere, and the only world besides Earth with seas — but the seas are liquid methane, and the rock is water ice. Rivers have cut canyons down to the seas; along the equator lie dunes of dark organic sand. The pale crust on the shores is evaporite: break it for benzene co-crystal; baked in a furnace it becomes polymer sheet — skin for hulls and for the Titan Wings. With them a person flies here: the air is four times denser than on Earth, and the gravity is a seventh. Methane rain falls in slow heavy drops. Saturn is a pale ghost in the haze. In the northern sea of Kraken there is an island with a tower.
gravity0.14 gairnone — wear a suitorbit9.583 AU
- Moon of Saturn
- Day: 16 Earth days
- Dense air and seas of methane
Views
Creatures
Structures
Dragonfly
A rotorcraft the size of a car: on Titan the air is so dense and the gravity so weak that flying is easier than walking. It hopped from dune to dune, drilling the sand, until one rotor came off.
Huygens Probe
Huygens came down here on a parachute on January 14, 2005, and talked for seventy-two minutes from the surface: the farthest landing ever made. It saw rounded pebbles of ice in a dry river bed, under an orange sky.
The Kraken's Beacon
A tower on an island in the Kraken Sea. Its steps are two blocks high — cut for somebody taller — and at the top a lantern throws a beam that three mirrors must carry around it. On the ground at its foot, fourteen lines run out of one point, each of its own length: a map, if you know what the lines count.
Ores
Weather
- Methane Rain. The only rain beyond Earth. In the weak gravity and dense air the drops are the size of a fingernail and fall as slowly as snow; the haze closes in and the light dims.
Events
- Methane Flash Flood. A downpour fills the hollows with methane. Get out before the surge; when a pool boils away, co-crystal waits on its bed
- Run of the Dune Serpents. Serpents race under the dunes toward footsteps. Stand still and they lose you; dodge the funnel, and the breach throws up stardust