Transportation in Lauz
Lauz is a world that begs to be explored. Endless archipelagos, pristine oceans, and cloud formations that change every day cover the entire planet. A day in which a ship is not boarded (either in space, water or air), symbolizes a day in which the landscape is wasted. For the people of Lauz, the pride of having such a beautiful planet is based on the constant appreciation of the environment.
The design philosophy of ships feeds on biomimicry, elegance, and efficiency. Whether it is delivering cargo to a station, going fishing or through the clouds, the purpose of these engineering feats is to make reality the universal dream of flight.
Chasing The Clouds
At any given point in time, more than half of the planet’s surface is covered by clouds. Covered by shallow blankets, dark storms, and thin veils, the cloudy nature of Lauz and the fascinating dynamics of its atmosphere cannot be overstated. In our quest to understand the complexity of the sphere, observing the clouds and their insides gives us the tools to understand Lauz’s ever changing weather patterns.
The Signature of Our World
If you ask any meteorologist the defining feature of our planet, they will answer with one word: chaos. The only predictable thing in Lauz is its unpredictability. Modelling its atmosphere is still an ongoing task that requires high levels of specialization, discipline, imagination, and curiosity for the environment. Meteorology combines geography, physics, oceanography, and more abstract subjects like computer science and mathematics, into beautiful formulations that allow us to build climate models that are constantly evolving and growing in complexity.
These models, although beautiful, are useless without data. That’s the job of the hurricane hunters, the cloud chasers. Not only these specialized aircraft provide the scientists with valuable data of the vital signs our planet, they fulfill the human spirit’s desire for exploration, wonder, and extreme environments. We are naturally attracted to the clouds, so much that a specialized branch of meteorology emerged from it: Nimbography.
Hurricane hunters
Hurricanes are one of the most extreme weather events in Lauz. Around the tropical belt, a massive exchange of energy that eclipses our most powerful power plants occurs between the warm tropical waters and the surrounding air, transforming solar energy into extreme winds that exceed 200 km/h.
Monitoring, measuring and observing these extreme events helps us prepare for incoming storms, predict future ones, and solve a small piece of Lauz’s natural puzzle, a puzzle that has intrigued humanity for generations.
Specialized aircraft have been developed to safely explore these storm systems, such as the Pelicano Flying Laboratory, capable of carrying up to 20 scientists on a single mission through a hurricane. Equipped with state of the art sensors, computers and cameras, it gives meteorologists a close but safe glimpse into the eye of the storm.
Solar Swarm
Sometimes simple but constant monitoring is required, specially where land and ocean meet, to alert coastal populations of incoming storms. The Golondrina solar glider is equipped with a small but powerful set of sensors that constantly relay their measurements to a ground station supercomputer, that combines the information received by hundreds of gliders to form a real time coastal monitoring mesh.
