Mariana Trench Alteration
JimmyLander
Bulgaria Join Date: 2016-06-15 Member: 218623Members
Bulgaria Join Date: 2016-06-15 Member: 218623Members
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For how difficult it is to get to the world's basement, it sure ain't worth the trip.
Could find the occasional dead whale, or James Cameron. But there's really nothing there.
Ah, I get you now. I thought you meant a literal representation.
Well, there's Deep Grand Reef and the Crag biome...those are sparse and pretty creepy. Plenty dark, that's for sure. But there's something to be said for "magnificent desolation."
I'm not saying it's not a good idea, but it'd be a tough sell. A lot of people are already complaining that parts of the game (or even the whole thing) feel "too empty," so a biome whose whole design principle is emptiness...not sure how many bites you'd be getting on that bait.
that was the greatest summary of anything I've ever read
Koosh
Koosh is purply and sorta light, but those eels are annoying
That's actually genius. They should make the edges of the map an actual biome. And it should be a dark, rocky and extremely steep slope into a dark abyss.
Kraken was taking a nap and couldn't invite us in for tea that day. Shame really.
To be fair, for the amount of time we've spent down there we really don't know too much do we? If watching the Nautilus crew has taught me anything its that you never know whats going to pop up next down on the sea floor.
We haven't spent a lot of manned time in the Marianas, no, but we've done extensive sonar surveys and, more recently, ROV scouting. Not a ton, mind, but if there were anything really out of line, we would've at least had a hint. From a geology standpoint, the trench is amazing, a real roadmap of the ancient Earth. But for just about everybody else...biiiig quantities of meh. It's just too inhospitable an environment.
Shallower deep ocean (which isn't really an oxymoron) can truly be amazing. @Ralij, if you haven't done so already, check out "whale falls." In short, when a whale dies, it sinks. The carcass on the bottom becomes its own ecosystem which thrives for over a decade. Amid a whole lot of dead seafloor (the benthic plains), you have this vibrant collection of life all dedicated to breaking down this dead whale. It's astounding, really.
Monterey also did an impromptu study in their marine sanctuary. One of their surveys found a shipping container that had somehow ended up sunk at the bottom of the Sanctuary. It's not uncommon; thousands upon thousands of shipping containers are lost at sea every year, washed off containerships. But rather than remove this one, Monterey decided to use it as a study point to see how marine life interacted with a sunken container. (With so many out there, it was a valid question.) It shocked everyone. Here's a metal box with anticorrosion paint which should make it a freaking poison plate, but instead it has turned into this funky almost-but-not-quite reef.
You can also look up recent dive photos of the ex-ORISKANY, the aircraft carrier that was sunk to be an artificial reef. (Fun fact: its last job was appearing in the Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come). The ex-HOYT VANDENBERG is another large military ship turned reef that has some fantastic dive photography because of its satellite tracking dishes. (Interestingly, it also had a final job in film; it was the Russian "research ship" in the 1999 turkey Virus.)
Taken together, though, all of this is meant to illustrate that deep ocean can be a very lively - and strange - place. Trenches are generally just too dang deep for life to find anything but a toehold...and an iffy one at that.
the lost river is more of a cave, the Marianas Trench is more like a canyon,
currently the zone that comes the closest to resembling the trench is bloodkelp zone 1 (i think)
if their was such a zone it would have to go so deep you and your vehicles would be unable to reach to bottom without taking fatal damage and the most you could do is explore the walls
Alterra technology will surely be able to handle it