Experimental Battery System
- Template
- Artifact
- Status
- Canon
- Kind
- Technology
1. Summary
The experimental battery system is a highly advanced energy-storage infrastructure dedicated to security, maintenance, monitoring, and essential automated systems. It is one of Schwarzwald's three energy systems and is not intended to provide full operational power to the installation. Since the 1999 shutdown of the fusion reactor it has kept the base's robots, security and containment running and the reactor itself preserved.
2. Origin
Schwarzwald has three distinct sources of energy: the original conventional power, the nuclear fusion reactor, and the experimental battery system, the base's dedicated energy-storage infrastructure.
3. Nature and Properties
The battery system powers the systems that had to stay active after the reactor's shutdown: robotic maintenance and security, including surveillance, alarms and biological containment, and the automated maintenance that keeps the reactor preserved. In the deeper levels, lighting, computers and the elevators depend on the reactor instead and stay dark until it is restored.
3.1 The Fusion Reactor
The battery system allowed automated maintenance intelligence and specialized machinery to preserve the fusion reactor during its prolonged shutdown. The reactor's artificial intelligence and automated maintenance run on it.
3.2 D3
D3's surveillance network, its cameras and selected detection systems monitoring corridors and restricted areas, runs on the battery system, as do the artificial intelligence and automated maintenance that have preserved the fusion reactor since its 1999 shutdown. The rest of D3, its lighting included, stays dark until the reactor is restored.
See: Places › D3
3.3 D4 and D5
D4's robots and much of its machinery continue operating autonomously on the battery system. In D5, the robotic maintenance, security and containment systems have run on it since the 1999 shutdown, long after the personnel evacuation.
See: Places › D4
See: Places › D5
3.4 D6
In D6, the self-regenerative surfaces, combined with automated maintenance robots and the battery system that keeps them running, preserve the environment in an almost pristine condition. D6's robots and automated security never stopped; its lights and computers come back only once the reactor runs again.
See: Places › D6
3.5 Other Battery Systems
The Emergency Refuge Chambers possess their own independent battery-powered systems.
4. History and Custody
In March 1999 the experimental fusion reactor was shut down, too dangerous to leave running unattended. Robotic maintenance, security and containment continued on the experimental battery system, which also keeps the reactor preserved. It has carried those systems ever since, through more than two decades of abandonment.
5. Role in the Game
In D3, a camera running on the battery system can silently stop its normal movement and start tracking Edmund, and the American operators are then mobilized. Some of D3's doors also still run on it, as Edmund finds in the chapter.
6. Open Questions
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