CS-2282-01 "Salvation" Colony Ship
1. About the Salvation Ships
Throughout the galaxy there exist relics from the far ancient past, ships and technologies that are remarkable in their simplicity and crudeness. At the same time there are examples of feats that are incomprehensibly fantastic. The Salvation ships are one such example.
2. History and Background
Born of the earliest ages of space exploration, when traveling between the stars took decades instead of days, the few surviving Salvation ships hint at a race from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. While most modern fleets are concerned with border defense and trade, in those days the focus was on exploration and sojourn.
Built to transport vast numbers of people, the colony ships ranged far throughout the universe, sometimes being lost with everyone aboard, sometimes making it safely to habitable worlds, and sometimes disappearing altogether. Despite this their makers forged ahead, and now life flourishes in this part of the universe, heedless of its origins.
3. Dimensions and Crew Complement
Organizations Using This Vessel: Unknown, likely defunct.
Type: Colony Ship
Class: Salvation
Designer: componentry found on surviving ships indicates no one group was responsible for their construction or design.
Manufacturer: unidentified planetary system
Production: estimates indicate as many as fifty ships were made at the very least.
Crew: 800 plus dedicated robotics
Maximum Capacity: 200,000
Appearance: What remains there are to be found suggest that the ships were built along a central axis corridor 90 meters wide, which supported modular sections arranged according to their function and number. These were attached by umbilical spokes both to the central corridor and to each other, creating a lattice like structure. They are all uniformly widest towards the center, with the exception of the drive section which supports the power plants, generators, and the thrusters themselves as well as the lightspeed engines.
Each modular section is roughly fifty meters wide by 120 meters long and thirty meters high.
Length: Stem to stern, approximately five kilometers
Width: 900 meters
Height: 900 meters
Decks: each module has six decks, and a dedicated resource area that varies from module to module.
Mass: 220,000,000 tons
4. Performance Statistics
Speed (STL): 0.2c; despite having immensely powerful engines, its mass makes it a very slow-moving object.
Speed (FTL): 2.1 lightyears per year
Speed (Aerial): Not built for atmospheric flight
Speed (Water): Not built for transoceanic operation
Range (Distance): 100,000ly
Range (Support): 100,000ly
Lifespan: Until it lands or is destroyed; approximations say a thousand years at the bare minimum.
Refit Cycle: The ships cannot be upgraded. However, if one could locate an intact colony ship and decipher its systems, it could be modified with modern equipment to a degree.
5. Inside the Salvation
Bridge: The command center is comparatively small, about 20 meters on a side and laden with stations that are for the most part for the benefit of monitoring conditions.
There are of course stations for navigation, environmental control, and other essential operations; these are manned only during course corrections and while the inhabitants are awake.
Crew Quarters: The crew is housed in and near the command module, as they perform the tasks of monitoring the passengers and growing food to be stored.
Suspended Animation Modules: Each module has six decks, with all available space being used for machinery. They are given over to suspended animation chambers, and are very spartan on the interior. Row after row of 3 meter tall tanks with sleeping occupants, banks of computers and monitors, and dedicated caretaker drones. The ceilings and floors are covered by a thick metal grating, through which can be seen the piping, compressors, heat exchangers, oxygenation tanks and other vital machinery. This is also how they are accessed, as the grating is built in removable 1-meter square sections.
Resource Modules, mineral conversion: Unlike the SusAn modules, these are very spacious, and contain equipment and machinery to convert raw ore into usable material. Rock smashers, blast furnaces, spectrometers, conveyors, mold injectors, and ingot presses are all located inside these modules, though it is common for a RM to be given over to a specific part of the conversion operation. They also have bays for the work pods.
Resource Modules, food production: Unremarkable in their construction, utilizing tried-and-true methods of deep-space food production. They are for all intents and purposes hydroponic farms and greenhouses, using recycled graywater for plant nutrition. They are used to grow high-protein and vitamin-rich foods, much of which is harvested for seed content for eventual farming on the colonized planet.
Seed Modules: These are also suspended animation pods, but of a different sort. They are rudimentary medical facilities, for both the crew and passengers, as well as storage for genetic samples taken from the homeworld. These samples are, once a landing has been effected, injected into catalyst eggs and used to populate nonnative species on the colony world. In effect, Seed Modules serve as cloning facilities.
Central Spine: A network of computers, chambers, and storage rooms. This is the most durable part of the Salvation Ship, and also where the central computer is located, a veritable mother brain because the ship utilizes a true organic computer.
The launch bays are located in the central structure; additionally, the power plant and fuel cell arrays are kept here, where the majority of contiguous structure is located.
6. Ship Systems
Hull: Salvation ships have barely any armor to speak of; it is all titanium, ceramic and heat-resistant polymers.
Airlock System: The ships possess universally-adaptable airlocks as well as utilizing pressurized launch bays. It is capable of the latter through use of a primitive atmospheric containment system, which also hints at the very beginnings of energy shields, but at a level where such an advance is more or less impossible to make.
Escape Pods: In the event of an emergency each module is capable of acting as an independent support unit for several decades, seeing as the passengers will be in hibernation for most of the journey.
Environmental Systems: Oxygen monitoring, suspended animation readouts, radiation detectors, ventilation systems and water recycling plants. Biotoxin filtering is very basic and limited to pathogens known to the species which built the Salvation ships.
Suspended Animation Racks: The most advanced part of a Salvation ship. Since having a city's worth of people all moving about on a starship of any size is bound to cause supply problems, the racks keep the passengers in a state of hibernation, with periodic "thawing" to allow them to rebuild muscular strength and eyesight. It is possible for humanoids to remain in hibernation until awoken by an interloper; such is only a worst-case scenario however.
Fuel Cells: utterly unremarkable, they are simple ion-transfer batteries whose depletion results in plain water. They are used to provide electrical power and can be recharged quite easily.
Sensor and Computer Systems: Built before radically sophisticated starships, Salvations carry little besides radar, ladar, optical imaging and spectrographic imaging.
Command/Control System: Compared to the rest of the ship aside from the hibernation system and the main computer, the C/CS is a remarkably advanced piece of work. Although not a true AI it is capable of running the ship by itself for several years, and with the aid of the supply of robots of course.
Because of the complexities involved in running a ship that measures in the kilometers in size, it requires periodic maintainence. It is possible to allow the system to run indefinitely; however doing so is likely to allow instances of program instability to occur, data to fragment, and systems to break down.
Therefore the C/CS has a built in failsafe that will wake the crew every seven years for a two-week maintainence cycle. If necessary the crew can restore the system with one of many backups.
Main Computer: Deceased star pilots have their minds harvested and implanted into arcane cybernetic shells from where they are capable of tracking, through various methods, including but not limited to the C/CS, everything that goes on inside the Salvation Ship. They are conditioned against radical actions that may endanger themselves or their precious cargo, unless such an action is inescapable. Since the neural tissue is no longer acting on its own it can receive programming from an external source, and the vast number of interconnective circuits are used as an ultrapowerful supercomputer in place of rooms full of heavy and maintenance-intensive mainframes. Some semblance of their personality and memories remain, but in their altered state the harvested brains show little of this externally beyond a noticeable demeanor and behavior.
Magnetic Field Inducer: Because outfitting a kilometers-long starship with radiation shielding is next to impossible, instead the ship utilizes hundreds of giant directional electromagnets which induce an effect similar to that of a planetary field, but on a smaller scale. It can also repel missiles to some degree, as the field scrambles the guidance software beyond all usability, but a strike can still occur.
The field inducers are located at regular intervals, between modules at vital connection points to provide overlapping coverage. Externally they look like large domes indistinguishable from the radar domes dotting the colony ship's surface.
Main Reactor: The heart of a Salvation ship. It is a massive piece of equipment, a nuclear powerplant operating on recently-discovered (at time of construction) principles of cold fusion. The most efficient models of their time, they provide additional electric power to the systems throughout the vessels, and are directly responsible for the operation of the pulse lasers, magnetic field inducers, and lightspeed engines.
The reaction occurs through hydrogen fusion, material stored at temperatures sufficient to keep the hydrogen in a liquid state. The resultant deuterium is sent to auxiliary reactors which treat the deuterium as fissile material, breaking it down into the basic element where it is then supercooled and sent to the reserve tanks to await another round of fusion.
Weapons:
Pulse Laser: Crude but effective. They are purely defensive weapons, firing intense bursts of laser energy at threatening objects. They are incapable of penetrating shields, but anything else is likely to be obliterated after two or three strikes. To perform their task each laser has its own tracking and recognition equipment, capable of following any object larger than 15 meters within its sight range. The lasers are also linked to spectrographic, optical and radar equipment to determine trajectory, composition and speed, as well as size and rotational characteristics. All of this data is fed into computers which is analyzed for threat level; if deemed that an object is dangerous the computer will then calculate how much power is needed to destroy the object and act accordingly.
The computers use the optical sensors to verify what is not a naturally-occuring object; as they are not programmed to fire on constructed things such as other ships or space platforms, and a collision trajectory is still noted, the Salvation ship will broadcast a course correction to the other ship in hopes that they will listen and move out of the way.
Location: There are twenty laser emitters aligned along the dorsal and ventral spine structures. They provide sufficient coverage to annihilate astral debris.
Primary Purpose: Navigational hazard removal
Secondary Purpose: Ship-to-ship warfare
Damage: heavy; most unshielded objects will be vaporized after a few shots. The heat and energy transferred is sufficient to melt metal. Power output is estimated between 1,000 and 2,300 megajoules at very maximum.
Area of Effect: 10m circle; secondary area can be as large as five kilometers.
Range: 600,000km
Rate of Fire: 1 shot per laser per minute
Payload: infinite
7. Vehicle Complement
The Salvation class ships carry upwards of 1,000 personal mobility vehicles, mainly work pods used to repair damage and collect metals from viable asteroids.
1. About the Salvation Ships
Throughout the galaxy there exist relics from the far ancient past, ships and technologies that are remarkable in their simplicity and crudeness. At the same time there are examples of feats that are incomprehensibly fantastic. The Salvation ships are one such example.
2. History and Background
Born of the earliest ages of space exploration, when traveling between the stars took decades instead of days, the few surviving Salvation ships hint at a race from the farthest reaches of the galaxy. While most modern fleets are concerned with border defense and trade, in those days the focus was on exploration and sojourn.
Built to transport vast numbers of people, the colony ships ranged far throughout the universe, sometimes being lost with everyone aboard, sometimes making it safely to habitable worlds, and sometimes disappearing altogether. Despite this their makers forged ahead, and now life flourishes in this part of the universe, heedless of its origins.
3. Dimensions and Crew Complement
Organizations Using This Vessel: Unknown, likely defunct.
Type: Colony Ship
Class: Salvation
Designer: componentry found on surviving ships indicates no one group was responsible for their construction or design.
Manufacturer: unidentified planetary system
Production: estimates indicate as many as fifty ships were made at the very least.
Crew: 800 plus dedicated robotics
Maximum Capacity: 200,000
Appearance: What remains there are to be found suggest that the ships were built along a central axis corridor 90 meters wide, which supported modular sections arranged according to their function and number. These were attached by umbilical spokes both to the central corridor and to each other, creating a lattice like structure. They are all uniformly widest towards the center, with the exception of the drive section which supports the power plants, generators, and the thrusters themselves as well as the lightspeed engines.
Each modular section is roughly fifty meters wide by 120 meters long and thirty meters high.
Length: Stem to stern, approximately five kilometers
Width: 900 meters
Height: 900 meters
Decks: each module has six decks, and a dedicated resource area that varies from module to module.
Mass: 220,000,000 tons
4. Performance Statistics
Speed (STL): 0.2c; despite having immensely powerful engines, its mass makes it a very slow-moving object.
Speed (FTL): 2.1 lightyears per year
Speed (Aerial): Not built for atmospheric flight
Speed (Water): Not built for transoceanic operation
Range (Distance): 100,000ly
Range (Support): 100,000ly
Lifespan: Until it lands or is destroyed; approximations say a thousand years at the bare minimum.
Refit Cycle: The ships cannot be upgraded. However, if one could locate an intact colony ship and decipher its systems, it could be modified with modern equipment to a degree.
5. Inside the Salvation
Bridge: The command center is comparatively small, about 20 meters on a side and laden with stations that are for the most part for the benefit of monitoring conditions.
There are of course stations for navigation, environmental control, and other essential operations; these are manned only during course corrections and while the inhabitants are awake.
Crew Quarters: The crew is housed in and near the command module, as they perform the tasks of monitoring the passengers and growing food to be stored.
Suspended Animation Modules: Each module has six decks, with all available space being used for machinery. They are given over to suspended animation chambers, and are very spartan on the interior. Row after row of 3 meter tall tanks with sleeping occupants, banks of computers and monitors, and dedicated caretaker drones. The ceilings and floors are covered by a thick metal grating, through which can be seen the piping, compressors, heat exchangers, oxygenation tanks and other vital machinery. This is also how they are accessed, as the grating is built in removable 1-meter square sections.
Resource Modules, mineral conversion: Unlike the SusAn modules, these are very spacious, and contain equipment and machinery to convert raw ore into usable material. Rock smashers, blast furnaces, spectrometers, conveyors, mold injectors, and ingot presses are all located inside these modules, though it is common for a RM to be given over to a specific part of the conversion operation. They also have bays for the work pods.
Resource Modules, food production: Unremarkable in their construction, utilizing tried-and-true methods of deep-space food production. They are for all intents and purposes hydroponic farms and greenhouses, using recycled graywater for plant nutrition. They are used to grow high-protein and vitamin-rich foods, much of which is harvested for seed content for eventual farming on the colonized planet.
Seed Modules: These are also suspended animation pods, but of a different sort. They are rudimentary medical facilities, for both the crew and passengers, as well as storage for genetic samples taken from the homeworld. These samples are, once a landing has been effected, injected into catalyst eggs and used to populate nonnative species on the colony world. In effect, Seed Modules serve as cloning facilities.
Central Spine: A network of computers, chambers, and storage rooms. This is the most durable part of the Salvation Ship, and also where the central computer is located, a veritable mother brain because the ship utilizes a true organic computer.
The launch bays are located in the central structure; additionally, the power plant and fuel cell arrays are kept here, where the majority of contiguous structure is located.
6. Ship Systems
Hull: Salvation ships have barely any armor to speak of; it is all titanium, ceramic and heat-resistant polymers.
Airlock System: The ships possess universally-adaptable airlocks as well as utilizing pressurized launch bays. It is capable of the latter through use of a primitive atmospheric containment system, which also hints at the very beginnings of energy shields, but at a level where such an advance is more or less impossible to make.
Escape Pods: In the event of an emergency each module is capable of acting as an independent support unit for several decades, seeing as the passengers will be in hibernation for most of the journey.
Environmental Systems: Oxygen monitoring, suspended animation readouts, radiation detectors, ventilation systems and water recycling plants. Biotoxin filtering is very basic and limited to pathogens known to the species which built the Salvation ships.
Suspended Animation Racks: The most advanced part of a Salvation ship. Since having a city's worth of people all moving about on a starship of any size is bound to cause supply problems, the racks keep the passengers in a state of hibernation, with periodic "thawing" to allow them to rebuild muscular strength and eyesight. It is possible for humanoids to remain in hibernation until awoken by an interloper; such is only a worst-case scenario however.
Fuel Cells: utterly unremarkable, they are simple ion-transfer batteries whose depletion results in plain water. They are used to provide electrical power and can be recharged quite easily.
Sensor and Computer Systems: Built before radically sophisticated starships, Salvations carry little besides radar, ladar, optical imaging and spectrographic imaging.
Command/Control System: Compared to the rest of the ship aside from the hibernation system and the main computer, the C/CS is a remarkably advanced piece of work. Although not a true AI it is capable of running the ship by itself for several years, and with the aid of the supply of robots of course.
Because of the complexities involved in running a ship that measures in the kilometers in size, it requires periodic maintainence. It is possible to allow the system to run indefinitely; however doing so is likely to allow instances of program instability to occur, data to fragment, and systems to break down.
Therefore the C/CS has a built in failsafe that will wake the crew every seven years for a two-week maintainence cycle. If necessary the crew can restore the system with one of many backups.
Main Computer: Deceased star pilots have their minds harvested and implanted into arcane cybernetic shells from where they are capable of tracking, through various methods, including but not limited to the C/CS, everything that goes on inside the Salvation Ship. They are conditioned against radical actions that may endanger themselves or their precious cargo, unless such an action is inescapable. Since the neural tissue is no longer acting on its own it can receive programming from an external source, and the vast number of interconnective circuits are used as an ultrapowerful supercomputer in place of rooms full of heavy and maintenance-intensive mainframes. Some semblance of their personality and memories remain, but in their altered state the harvested brains show little of this externally beyond a noticeable demeanor and behavior.
Magnetic Field Inducer: Because outfitting a kilometers-long starship with radiation shielding is next to impossible, instead the ship utilizes hundreds of giant directional electromagnets which induce an effect similar to that of a planetary field, but on a smaller scale. It can also repel missiles to some degree, as the field scrambles the guidance software beyond all usability, but a strike can still occur.
The field inducers are located at regular intervals, between modules at vital connection points to provide overlapping coverage. Externally they look like large domes indistinguishable from the radar domes dotting the colony ship's surface.
Main Reactor: The heart of a Salvation ship. It is a massive piece of equipment, a nuclear powerplant operating on recently-discovered (at time of construction) principles of cold fusion. The most efficient models of their time, they provide additional electric power to the systems throughout the vessels, and are directly responsible for the operation of the pulse lasers, magnetic field inducers, and lightspeed engines.
The reaction occurs through hydrogen fusion, material stored at temperatures sufficient to keep the hydrogen in a liquid state. The resultant deuterium is sent to auxiliary reactors which treat the deuterium as fissile material, breaking it down into the basic element where it is then supercooled and sent to the reserve tanks to await another round of fusion.
Weapons:
Pulse Laser: Crude but effective. They are purely defensive weapons, firing intense bursts of laser energy at threatening objects. They are incapable of penetrating shields, but anything else is likely to be obliterated after two or three strikes. To perform their task each laser has its own tracking and recognition equipment, capable of following any object larger than 15 meters within its sight range. The lasers are also linked to spectrographic, optical and radar equipment to determine trajectory, composition and speed, as well as size and rotational characteristics. All of this data is fed into computers which is analyzed for threat level; if deemed that an object is dangerous the computer will then calculate how much power is needed to destroy the object and act accordingly.
The computers use the optical sensors to verify what is not a naturally-occuring object; as they are not programmed to fire on constructed things such as other ships or space platforms, and a collision trajectory is still noted, the Salvation ship will broadcast a course correction to the other ship in hopes that they will listen and move out of the way.
Location: There are twenty laser emitters aligned along the dorsal and ventral spine structures. They provide sufficient coverage to annihilate astral debris.
Primary Purpose: Navigational hazard removal
Secondary Purpose: Ship-to-ship warfare
Damage: heavy; most unshielded objects will be vaporized after a few shots. The heat and energy transferred is sufficient to melt metal. Power output is estimated between 1,000 and 2,300 megajoules at very maximum.
Area of Effect: 10m circle; secondary area can be as large as five kilometers.
Range: 600,000km
Rate of Fire: 1 shot per laser per minute
Payload: infinite
7. Vehicle Complement
The Salvation class ships carry upwards of 1,000 personal mobility vehicles, mainly work pods used to repair damage and collect metals from viable asteroids.