Here is a list of household goods that we need to complete a Livin' Luna environment for our sims to live in.

Living Room

1. Sofa

   We can't simulate the posture people have in 1/6th gravity, but we can at least simulate lunar materials in our Livin' Luna sofas and love seats. That means minimum padding, and use of glass and metal (and conservative use of leather) in the design of the furniture. When you only weigh 1/6th as much you do on Earth, your tushy will be happy with just enough padding to accommodate an accidental bump.

2. End Tables

   Aside from materials, the important design feature for end tables is to have a rim around them or clips that hold things in place. It would be very easy to bump into a lamp and knock it over in this low gravity.

Dining Room

1. Dining Table

   In the lower gravity of the moon, people will use chairs that give them a much more upright posture and tables will be taller, but there is no good way to simulate this in The Sims. We can, however, represent some other key features of a Livin' Luna dining room set.

   On Earth we depend on friction to keep things in place on the table. On Luna, though, we would either have to design tables that have a very high coefficient of friction between the tale and plate, or provide clips or recesses to keep from accidentally sending that nice steak dinner sailing across the room. There are a lot of ways one could design a table that keeps plates from sliding around, so let your imagination run loose and see what happens!

Kitchen

1. TBD

   TBD

Utility Room and Laundry

1. TBD

   TBD

Bed Room

1. High-comfort beds in a Livin' Luna style

   In Luna, if you can get horizontal, almost any bed will be more comfortable than the most most comfortable bed possible on Earth. This can be respresented in The Sims with beds that show a very thin mattress -- mostly to pad your elbows from banging into a hard surface rather than providing support -- with a very high comfort rating.

   When you only weigh 1/6th as much as you would on Earth, a comfort rating of less than 10 for any bed would require some justification.

2. Glass and Metal Side Tables

   The Lovely Leopard set is a terrific start, but folks in Luna City do appreciate a bit of variety in their lives! Stone-topped tables with metal legs will probably be quite popular.

3. Glass and Metal Dresser

   Variations with stone tops might be popular here, too. The important thing is not to use wood.

   In this low gravity, drawers and compartments with doors are better than shelves for storing things, so homes in Luna City will need a lot of cabinets.

Den

1. TBD

   TBD

Study

1. TBD

   TBD

Bath Room

1. High toilet with a raised tank

   The basic design for Earth toilets is workable on Luna, but we need to tweak it a little bit to accommodate the lower gravity. Remember those old-time toilets with the tank mounted way up on the wall? Toilets on the moon might look like that. Raising the water tank means more water pressure is avaiable at the bowl to flush the toilet.

   Also, the bowl needs to be deeper so stuff doesn't splash out. This could be shown in a toilet by having the walls go straight down to the floor instead of curving back under the bowl.

   A toilet in this shape could be any color or ceramic, metal, or stone, but of course no wood.

2. High-side sink

   In Luna City, the sinks would be deeper and the sides would curve inward a bit at the top, to control sloshing.

Garden

Plants generate oxygen while they absorb carbon dioxide and trace contaminant gasses. Lunar cities will have plants everywhere they can fit them.

1. Plants on shelves

   Instead of just one plant in a pot or on a table, imagine an open shelf filled with plants in in pots.

2. Orange tree in a stone pot

   Fruit and nut trees do triple duty -- they look great, they recycle oxygen, and they provide food. If the tree looked like it were planted in a bed of stone and gravel rather than soil, that would be even more Livin' Luna. Hydroponic gardening will probably be more common in the moon than soil gardening for centuries to come.

Swimming Pool

1. Swimming pool surface with some waves

   Because of the low gravity on the moon (about 1/6th that of Earth's surface), waves will be higher. One-foot-high waves on a swimming pool would not be uncommon.

2. Swimming pool surround with higher walls

   Limitations of The Sims might not make it possible to show this is a playable object, but swimming pools on the moon would have higher walls around them to keep the water from sloshing out due to the wave action.

Garage

1. Garage Building

   Imagine a good-sized pressurized building with an airlock, covered over with a few feeet of moon dust ("regolith") to protect it from radiation, meteroids, and thermal extremes. For a variation on a theme, imagine an unpressurized area with a blanket of regolith piled on top.

   Now, how can we simulate in The Sims?

2. Garage Door

   For the pressurized garage, the door would be a massively reinforced part of a pressure shell. For the unpressurized version, however, a simple door like we use on Earth would suffice, as long as it's not made of wood.

Building Materials

1. TBD

   TBD

Farm

1. Farm Equipment and Appurtenances

   A farm in the Luna City Cavern would look much like an Earth farm, except that fences and buildings would be made of metal rather than wood. Beyond that, though, a cow still a cow and a milking machine works the same way. Water towers would be six times taller to provide the same water pressure and a windmill would not make a lot of sense in the cavern.

   ( Of course, a windmill would make even less sense on the lunar surface! :)

2. Hydroponic Farm Equipment

   In a place where we have to grow our own dirt and can't afford to have a lot of biomass locked up in the soil, hydroponic farming is likely to be a very popular method for agriculture. In general that means plants are containerized, in everything from small pots to huge barges. Usually the plants are supported by rock and gravel and feed with a drip feeder carrying precisely determined nutrients.

   Don't confuse hydroponics with aeroponics. Aeroponics uses elaborate support systems for the plants and leaves their roots bare to be sprayed with the nutrient system. The amount of precision equipment and labor-intensive nature of aeroponics makes it less attractive for use on the moon even though it allows for enormous crop yields per acre of real estate.

Moonbus Artemis

1. Lunar Surface Tour Bus

   Art by Shane Pekney

   The image shows a pressurized tour bus designed for roving the lunar surface. Domestic cars might have a similar design. Design by Gregory Bennett. Rendering by Shane Pekney.

   
   Schematics: | Side View | Top View | End View |

2. Lunar Exploration Vehicle

   Design and rendering by Boris Rubanovich. Dincer Hepguler is working on a Sims object for this vehicle that you can use in your game.

   Here's Pasiphae standing next to the lunar exploration vehicle designed by Boris Rubanovich, getting it ready for a run in the Unlimited Heavyweight Class Moon Buggy Marathon.

   This vehicle shows a much more mature design than the Tour Bus, and some other important features. Note the aft-mounted airlock that doubles as a docking port, so that the vehicle can back up to a pressurized habitat and lock on. This design allows people to enter the vehicle without having to put on space suits or use elaborate pressurized tunnels.

Translunar Tram Line

1. The Tram

   Here's a schematic of the tram.

Personal Equipment

1. Personal flying equipment

   See Caddy's notes about flying equipment.

2. Space suits

   There's a space suit in the game -- an Apollo surface suit -- but it's a career skin that a character only wears when going to work or coming home from work as an astronaut. No helmet, either.