Dome City

One of the first true achievements of Mars settlement patterns is the Dome City - While earliest colonizations made into great canyons, roofing them over with much the same materials now used in Dome Cities - the idea is simple. Mars cannot be settled on the outdoors - it lacks the magnetic insulation Earth has against cosmic radiation, making any outdoors incursion a dangerous operation in the least.

Dome cities were the solution - representing a measure that allowed the creation of insulated bubbles of human-safe zones on an otherwise uninhabitable planet.

Instead of using rocks and metal to deflect cosmic radiation, most Dome Cities have a mesh of metamaterials woven into the geodesic platform over the city. Thin membrane of ultra-tough Scordite alloys and smart bots to regulate and repair small impacts and material weariness make the dome a superior solution to the cave-ins and relatively claustrophobic interior of mine-cities. Mostly it is lauded for the relative transparency. Dome cities have a weather, of sorts, at least light and dark shifts which the citizens can enjoy.

The high maintenance and complexity of dealing with an open environment often brings harsher, more strict rulings on ecologically harmful behaviors. Most Dome cities are licensed to corporations or even directly managed by them. With such cities often achieving "sub-sector" designation relatively quickly and making their electorate highly diverse.