Below are attached several crude designs that were drawn and produced in the early days of New Ponyville. All notes appear to have been penned by Dr. Hooves, the head engineer of the city.
The Cookhouse
Ms. Amethyst Star initially proposed that we have a bill system to distribute our Raw Food to groups of tents positioned around the Generator for them to cook for themselves. While I do agree that's how it may have been done before the Frost, with ponies cooking their own meals, I believe I side with the Captain's idea of establishing a centralized mess area for ponies to come and eat. We cannot waste our citizen's time with cooking their own meals when every minute of coal mining, transportation, and construction could mean the difference between life and death. We also have no self-regulating economy (eg: Currency, businesses, etc.) to naturally dictate the flow of food, and biases may come up in manually assigning food staples.
The most logical idea, that even the strong-headed Amethyst agreed with, was to establish a large mess hall, capable of seating at least 150 ponies at a time. An attached kitchen will cook massive amounts of stew, large preparation counters will chop vegetables and mince meat according to the Food Additives law. One of our volunteer Overseers will be appointed to ensure that food is prepared to exact mathematical standards, so that we do not waste a single scrap. Any leftovers from the preparation process, or if any of our residents happen to not eat their entire meal (which I doubt), will be taken to the composting bins at the Hothouses.
The Beacon
Initially, we all believed the Generator would be tall enough to be seen from miles around. However, that has turned out to not be so. This is not from a lack of enormity on the Generator's part, but rather that we were not briefed on how deep the valley it is resting in is. This, combined with the undependability of our compasses and the constant lack of a clear view of the night sky, means that sending any of our ponies out of the City is a sure death sentence due to their inability to navigate back
I devised a system by which we could elevate a lighthouse-like beacon higher than the valley walls. A hot air balloon will elevate a lightweight wooden frame in which an electric motor and a gyro will be mounted. Using two enchanted lenses from the fronts of the surviving Steam Lorries, the Beacon will begin to spin and shine a light that will be able to pierce ice particles in the air. Around the balloon itself will be a steel scaffold, where a group of pegasi can fly up and monitor the horizon for incoming weather fronts, as well as receive Navy-formatted Mares Code light signals from scouting expeditions.
Unfortunately, it will be extremely cold up on top of the Beacon. Not only is it above the wind shears of the valley, and far away from the warmth of the Generator, but there is no way I can find to heat it safely. My initial design had the weatherwatch platform next to the burner that kept the balloon alight, but no matter the configuration, I feared that proximity to the burner would be more likely to set watchmares on fire than warm them.
There is no attached blueprint with the following note, as it appears the Tents had no standardized design.
Tents
In lieu of the resources or time to plan and construct properly insulated buildings for our citizens to sleep in, we have instead elected to simply pitching tents to stop snow from falling on our ponies while they sleep, as well as give them some relative privacy. The wooden frames do require a bit of assembly, especially since these tents are meant to stand up for more than just a few days. We were given miles of canvas with our expedition, so the canvas to cover the tent frames is a non-problem unless we wish to house over a thousand in mere tents.
According to Ms. Amethyst's calculations, each tent should sleep about three ponies and their children, as well as provide a place for them to keep their belongings. I've tried to make these specifications as compact as possible, and in the end we just agreed to squeeze tents wherever we could in a general rectangular or sometimes square shape.
Hothouse
Two things everypony needs to survive: Water and Food.
Water is well covered in our city. The Source below our Generator provides plentiful water, even if it's polluted by toxic minerals. Although, through the process of turning the water into steam in the Core, most of these toxicants are filtered off and eventually ejected by the Core through an ingenious outflow system. The dry steam, after coursing through our city, comes back to a large cistern buried next to the Stockpiles as lukewarm water. Some of this we will take and reheat in the Bath House, but the rest is good for consumption by the regular pony. We do recycle some of the water in this cistern back into the Generator, but by the Captain's orders we always keep a certain level of reserve water to fight any fires that may occur.
Food, however, is much more scarce in our situation. The recently signed law allowing us to add heavily processed meat into our meals can only go so far, considering new age recipes still need an 80 percent herbivorous content. The ground is way too hard to plant here naturally, and earth pony scientists who studied plant growth in the Arctic before the Frost observed growth stunting due to a lack of some natural magical property in the soil. They did devise a solution to this stunting via an arcanomechanical matrice, but to distribute this matrice and soften the soil: we need a dedicated Steam Core.
My first designs of the Hothouse have the singular goal of warming up as much ground as possible to allow for plant growing, as well as shielding that portion of ground from snow and wind. I am afraid that even with the best I can do with a single steam cores, and even multiple steam cores in multiple Hothouses working in tandem, AND with the meat additives... we will still be constantly short on food.
I can see maybe employing some old emergency ground enchantments that old Earth Ponies used in times of hardship to grow unhealthy but more bushy crops... but for that we'd need more Steam Cores to distribute the enchanted steam...
What we have will have to do, I suppose.
Coal Depot
The Generator requires a lot of Coal to function. It does not require an intimate knowledge of steam-powered machinery to know this.
So, to feed this insatiable machine, we are stockpiling massive amounts of Coal, and carting full bins of Coal to the furnace inlets every 30 minutes. However, it is a well known fact that coal, exposed to the open air, can cause terrible illness and disease to those handling it and living nearby. To counteract this, we have dedicated one of the stockpile buildings specifically for storing coal, although as we continue we will definitely require additional coal stockpiles to provide a better buffer.
Large wooden carts are wheeled up next to this coal stockpile, where a specially designed hatch opens and funnels the slanted stockpile room down into an awaiting cart. Then, a single pony tows this cart to the Generator bins and dumps them in. For each bin, we require 3 cartloads of Coal every 30 minutes. We currently have 3 bins. Bless the ponies who do the backbreaking labor to tow those loads to the bins to keep us alive, and pray to Celestia I may eventually find a way to automate this process.
Bath House
Hygiene is an absolute necessity in our new city. Ever since we left Manehatten, we've resorted to bucket baths and dumping our waste out the back of our Dreadnought and then our Lorries. Not only is this an extremely depressing way to live, but it's also rather unhealthy. We've no way to remove harmful germs and wash ourselves clean, and we need a way to dispose of manure without a sewage system.
The Bath House has been designed as both a latrine and a place for our unwashed masses to get clean. The Bath House consists of two portions: A large bathing area, and a secondary block of lavatories.
The bathing area has six tubs, with half divided laterally on each side of the room. Half of the tubs are for males, and half are for females. We take water from the purified cisterns the Generator outflows into and reheat them using a furnace mounted at the back of the bath house building. A circulator system keeps fresh water flowing in, and polluted water flowing out. Polluted water is inserted back into the Generator to be turned into steam and purified. We employ charcoal cleaning products as a crude soap. Currently, we just recycle charcoal from various wood fires around the city, however for a constant supply of charcoal in the future we may need to create a dedicated Charcoal Kiln. Each bathing tub can hold about 10 ponies, meaning the Bath House can service, ideally, 30 males and 30 females at a time. That means to clean our current population, we will need about 4 different "shifts" of hygiene breaks for our workers.
The latrines might be distasteful to the faint of heart among us, yet it's the best we can afford currently. The latrines are split into two rooms, one for males and one for females. Each one is identical, with rows of seats suspended above a shared trough that will collect waste and prevent it from leaking down and polluting our water table. No privacy can be afforded for those taking a bathroom break here, but it's just something we'll need to get used to. A filter separates excrement from urine, with solids being added to our composting piles at Hothouses to fertilize the soil. Urine will be fed into the Generator, where pollutants in the water will be filtered out just like the minerals in the Source water. A simple washbasin and charcoal soap is allowed for ponies to wash their hooves on the way out.
We yet are to figure out a solution to cleaning clothing items, as that will be an increasingly pertinent issue as wearing heavy clothing becomes more and more normalized in our new culture.
