@Durin,
it's not edited yet. editing done.
Avernite Architecture
Everyone knows that Avernite buildings are built like they're meant to survive artillery barrages, bombing runs, and infantry assault, but that is so far from being a complete examination of the modern architectural styles of Avernite construction that it barely counts as a prelude.
Some cities and hives are built into the ground, others are built rising into the sky, some make use of great walls, others make use of hardened layers, some rely on maze-like construction, others on hidden sally ports, and still others on carefully plotted lines of fire and preplaced demolition and immolation charges aimed at ensuring any 'victory' is temporary. But none of this encompasses the peculiarieties of Avernite construction.
Something that immediately noticed upon entering certain neighborhoods in an Avernite Hive is that the groundcar accessways and tram lines for any given district level are on a lower floor than the pedestrian walkways, this is to facilitate both cross-city ease of movement, and community safety.
The aim is to give each block(with a block typically being built around a structural support) a 'moat', separating it from its neighboring blocks in the event that they are overrun.
Where it is necessary for vehicles to enter a block this is done by means of a lift or ramp.
Often this moat is topped with fencing, spikes, razor wire, explosive charges, or 'decorations' to prevent anyone scaling the wall of the moat from clearing the lip easily.
Though this design is occasionally impractical and is never more than one floor worth of moat, it is still occasionally useful where practical.
Pedestrian traffic between blocks is achieved by means of drawbridges, mostly positioned at the corners of the blocks and aiding the use of pedestrian walkways above and alongside the roads.
Though some districts place their pedestrian walkways in a separate grid pattern to the housing and transport divisions, with pedestrian walkways running through housing blocks, drawbridges positioned above straightaways of groundcar roads or train tracks, and pedestrian intersections positioned nearly at the centre of blocks. This design choice is intended to keep pedestrians away from the paths that large creatures rampaging through the hive might take, ensuring that pedestrians only approach groundcar paths at the drawbridges.
While this does come at the cost of removing an additional potential killzone area from around a block it really does help keep casualties down against intrusions from creatures too large to fit along pure pedrestrian pathways.
This architectural style is already under consideration for use should the government go ahead with colonizing Tarrascon.
Another unusual feature of Avernite constuction is its relatively large volume compared to off world hives. This is necessary to accommodate all of the kill zones. Superior ranged weapons and prepared firing positions mean little if your enemy can move through cover or lunge out from behind a corner and get you that way.
It is for this reason that most pedestrian and vehicle pathways tend to use gradual turns instead of sharp corners where practical.
When sharp turns are called for there will occasionally be a large cutout of the building at the corner, to prevent anything from using the corners to close distance, though this feature is often altered to allow for good cover positions at pedestrian walkway corners, occasionally this is setup to only provide cover from certain directions or these cutout corners are designed to contain fighting pits, like foxholes, but with murder holes positioned to drop into them from above should they be overrun.
The groundcar roads occasionally include tank scrapes, allowing armored vehicles of standard dimensions to go hull down a little bit off of the road, the cutout corners are a frequently preferred position for these fortifications.
Avernite construction goes to pains to funnel all traffic through paths that occasionally cross large open areas, presighted for fixed weapons to fill with fire. Some of these internal courtyards can reach impressive size, as they are kept clear to create internal firing lines for the longer ranged weapons in the Imperial Trust's arsenal.
These areas vary in defensive philosophy as much as they vary in aesthetic style.
Some are intended to draw an enemy in a little before opening fire, making use of fragile false fronts and sight obscuring rises and turns to make the size and number of weapons of the courtyard unclear to those just entering them, a few are intended to be occupied by defensive forces in bunkers or trenches to draw an enemy into attacking across prepared ground out of the illusion that they will be able to accomplish something, others are intended to create holdups to cover planned outflanking manoeuvres or retreat contingencies, some are designed to be defended from any angle, others only a few.
These constructs are found in a range of styles, a rare few are stark and bare, the industrial simplicity of the basic design present either due to newness or out of respect for local traditions or philosophy.
Most however, are decorated. Many include comprehensive works of painting or sculpture, murals and art. Some of these even add to the defensive value of these positions, with bright colors or optical illusions in art confusing the eye, more technological art incorporating lights or motions that could draw panicked attention or fire, and the martial and religious themes common to Avernite statuary being easy for a chaos cultist to mistake for a target under pressure.
Other open areas contain parks, allowing parents to introduce their children to plants in a context where the vegetation won't actively be trying to kill them, a decorative stream can be converted to a trench or a burning ditch easily enough by changing the settings on what the pumps are putting in or taking out.
A couple of these courtyards get truly odd, like the ones with large pools or waterparks, a few with dispensation to keep Avernite plants inside of the hives, and that one with all the strings of lights.
There is a certain amount of outcry over people bringing Avernite plants inside of the Hive, much less into a high traffic area, but so far some of the more predictable species have been tolerated, and there are thousands of formal complaints over the room with the lights, as people constantly end up getting turned around and leaving by a different exit than they intended, but it has become a destination for tourists and researchers trying to figure out how it works so it's here to stay.
Avernite homes are themselves interesting, they tend to be heavily armored, designed as bunkers, and possessed of significant structural reinforcement.
You would think that it would be difficult to make a design that favors the squat and defensible attractive, but you are not entirely correct.
Nearly all of them are painted in patterns, with recurring structures of geometric shapes, stripes, leaf patterns, symbolism, and faux wood patterns sprayed on over top of the plate armor surfaced ceramicrete. Generally in understated tones of blue, green, brown, white, grey, beige, gold, and black, though with recent advancements in the field of Psykery silver metallic ornamentation is booming. Decorative crenelations are common, and ridge patterns that serve to disguise firing slit position are always popular.
Some buildings eschew the understated style and go with the brightest and most garish color scheme possible, in the hopes of getting the wildlife to assume that it is poisonous and avoid it, sometimes going so far as include expensive systems making the house more visible, like noisemakers, bright light displays, and holoprojectors, the rich who subscribe to this view might even have psychic artefacts, acquired from the Adeptus Astra Telepathica at great cost, with the goal of making their domaciles more noticeable and threatening to supernatural senses.
The government might be responsible for the fortifications, blast doors and internal bulkheads that Avernite living spaces are built around, but civilian contractors are responsible for fitting out the internals, and will tend to be the ones who put in the walls and finish the floors.
Professional outfitters that build armoured doors that are competitive with the governent ones are common, with some popular designs relying on two bit-over-quarter-cylinder doors meeting in the centre when closed, or vault style plug doors, to make it so that any force applied from the outside just pushes the doors harder together and into their frame, making them next to impossible to break for anything that can't crumple or melt adamantium.
Other options exist for those who can't afford the best, and there is a reasonable DIY culture for home defence. With public competitions offering prizes for making blast doors and other home defenses on a budget. Faux-stone Archways and fountains make good interior decoration, so long as the fountains remain easy to drain, sterilize, and clean out, and the stone or faux stone has been processed to remove any unwanted psykic influences, and some outfitting services offer modular layouts that can be changed around by the owner post purchase for defensibility or style.
Of concern to the populations of other planets in the Trust is the commonality of communal bathrooms on Avernus, not just the baths, but the toilets as well. This is for wildlife related reasons and cannot be helped, it is deeply unwise to ever be completly alone or cut off from others in a room.
After the War on Two Fronts and the invasion of Dis, a regiment of wealthier militiamen simply didn't reverse the modifications they had made to their homes when they knocked out the stairs and cut murder holes in the floors, and instead worked them into the design and became trend setters.
Nowadays most houses use rope ladders lowered from above rather than stairs, and have practically placed murder holes allowing those on higher levels to drop grenades or improvised hazards, either as part of the flooring pattern, or covered by furniture when not in use, though some are proponents of trapdoors covering both the ladder and murderholes.
This creates interesting social dynamics, while obviously the entrance level is for the reception, dining room, and possibly kitchen, and any levels below the entrance level are storage, there is the question of what level to put the dominant adults in an extended family grouping on and how to arrange the rest of the household.
Lower down allows them to better intercept wildlife attacking through the entryway before it can get to any dependents, while higher up allows the disciplinarian figure to preempt the problems caused by giving children the ability to seal them out of part of the house by failing to lower the ladders, and improves response time versus threats that teleport or phase in above the entrance level.
Some argue that computer controlled ladder winches coupled with low living positions help with both problems, avoiding being sealed out and allowing a person to winch themselves up. While others say that storing the ladder anywhere near the hole is dangerous and that these problems can be solved with an express shaft or sliding pole down from a high living position.
There isn't one solid answer, while it's generally agreed upon that the aged, experienced, and physically weak should be positioned on the second floor, out of immediate danger but close enough to the ground that it is not straining to come up and down, alongside the pantry, high enough to be salvaged in a siege, low enough to transport down easily.
Even there there are disagreements, sometimes the elderly are at the top, sometimes the pantry and kitchen both are much higher up, and food is transported down by dumb waiter or rope.
This doesn't even begin to get into the argument about where to place the armoring station if your family has pooled enough money to own power armor.
Paintings and posters are both decorative and defensive. They allow homeowners to conceal firing slits and grenade holes from invaders on the same floor.
Many an enemy has taken cover near a poster, only to be surprised when a short fuse grenade falls behind them. Though this has stopped working against Avernite Chaos cultists after the trick became widely known. Many internal firing slits also include command activated traps, to prevent an unwelcome guest from taking advantage of them during a fight.
There is almost always an escape route somewhere in the design, but it is considered rude to ask about or offer information on unsolicited and not suitable for polite conversation. This means that home outfitters are heavily scrutinized by their customers for trustworthiness, a couple of the higher class services even offer special teams who are willing to undergo memory erasure after performing their duties, despite the police records of most professionally made escape routes.
Many new homeowners choose to handle their hidden safe rooms and escape routes in a DIY manner, even if they contact a service for everything else.
A number of buildings are aimed at housing a 'squad' of youths instead of an extended family grouping, generally these youths are living independently as they enter a phase of their life where they're looking to get out from under their parents thumbs and establish who they are as an individual. With these buildings filling a similar role the 'bachelor pad' other planetary cultures possess, and possessing their own defensive and stylistic considerations to take into account in design. Generally benefitting from the assumption that everyone within is a basically competent combatant.
Many Avernites have received authorization to patch into the outgoing feeds of the public surveillance system, or are getting feeds from personal systems. Hiring an off site professional service to keep track of your vid feeds, provide tactical command and control in home defence, and ensure you and your family are not under mental domination or missing a psykic illusion is becoming increasingly common.
Some electrical services allow community councils to pay to have their current redirected into traps, there's quite a few people who are willing to pay dearly for electrified floor and wall traps, more so for electrified fences, nets and wires, and where the voltage falls short that is what batteries are for.
The public lighting systems can be enhanced to blinding and skin scalding levels, or set to strobe, the announcement systems can be a terror to the unprepared, perhaps not actually sonic weapons, but able to deafen easily enough.
As an extension of this, some Avernites have been obsessing over trying to figure out how to adjust the automatic gravity on ships, being able to slam enemies into the floor and ceiling at two or three gravities over and over would be quite a defensive advantage.
Then there are the oddballs, there are an amazing array of traps that people will come up with when they're trying to go the extra mile to keep the wildlife out, look far enough and you'll see pit traps, spikes, cheval de fris, and all sorts of cheap Kinetic or Las weapons. It is amazing how many ways you can disguise razor wire: strings of colorful lights, patterned strands of colored foil, vines, and bushes(either living or more commonly plastic) are all in use.
The patterns of festive razor wire out when the holidays roll around can really be something to see. Those considering tourism to Avernus should consider timing their trip with the holidays to take in the sight.
The strings of electrified monofilament wire that tend to go up at just the right height to shred wings or the protruding heads of vehicle commanders or invading animal or small vehicle riders might be a bit much though. They are, after all, indoors, and unneeded in an antivehicle or anticavalry role outside of wartime.
Some areas have received dispensation to leave Militia minefields in place so long as they give external authorities the command codes, and up to date records of positioning. This is expensive, given the rate that the wildlife seems to set them off and the way that many pyromantic attackers will predetonate them, but can be worth it to reduce the frequency of wildlife breaches.
Even the road system is abnormal. Avernus has been an enthusiastic adopter of the STC for partially-automated vehicles. Not because of valuing additional crash safety features, or the convenience of a vehicle able to follow to vox road markers and keep a safe distance from their peers while the driver does something else, over the mutterings of the more conservative priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus, but because someone willing to tear out the safety features in the navigation computers can turn them into very effective car bombs and mass ramming craft, all without risking the drivers!
They just have to program in the path and hop out before placing a brick on the gas.
Roads might still be made of interlocking plates of elastic metal covered by synthi-asphalt like on any other Trust world, but on Avernus they all have military traffic lanes, even where a one lane road would be used elsewhere, have an unusually large number of tank scrapes laid out alongside and presighted for common cannon patterns, contain frequent metal plates covering service 'manholes' to allow access to the vox network that the ground car computers rely on for navigation, and the road design includes oddly positioned staightaways and a zig zagging, almost star like pattern near the primary defensive lines to clear space, both for the tanks and artillery, and for ramming and car bombs.
