The habitats were constructed when the majority of funding and innovation was provided by a country that used the imperial measurement system (miles, feet, etc.); therefore, measurements in the now standard metric system are not exact.
As designed and constructed, each habitat was a cylinder with identical dimensions. Its inhabitable space was 5 miles (8.05 kilometers) in both height and diameter. Within that space, 14 separate sections were constructed, each of which could form a self-contained biosphere if necessary.
Each section was approximately 566 kilometers tall and consisted of 33 floors, each with its designation and use. Livable floors were the floors the majority of the residents lived, worked and enjoyed themselves on, with storage and industrial floors taking up the rest of the space. While some floors had a height of 100 feet / 30.5 meters, the vast majority were 50 feet / 15.24 meters.
There were elevators in each, which moved passengers and freight between the floors within a section. Travel between sections was accomplished with lift cars arranged along the outermost wall. These cars moved people rapidly through the populated sections, stopping only at three floors per section.
Goods were moved between sections with the platform lift, a circular platform in the middle of the habitat that moved between sections, only stopping on warehouse and industrial floors. This platform was enclosed by a cylinder on the livable floors that, through cameras and curved video screens, masked itself by displaying the view from the opposite side, allowing residents to ‟see through” the cylinder.
Elevators were available in each section in a circular area surrounding the platform lift and on the wall opposite the lifts in what was commonly known as the travel corridor.
The habitats were self-sustaining, drawing on some of the lessons of the failed Biosphere 2 experiment of the early 1990s (pre-catastrophe). https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/biosphere-2-what-really-happened.
The habitats were governed by one simple rule: everything had to be biodegradable or recyclable. The only way to truly be self-sustaining was to handle waste as reverently as those basics needed to survive. The Foundation engineers worked for many years to create the technology necessary to achieve these goals, self-sustaining across centuries.