General Information
Restaurant, VIP lounge, gaming hall, full theatre and separate ballroom, controlled natural radiation tanning salon, spa with pool and sauna, all part of the package provided by the Starset Orbital resort, designed to provide the guests of its 300 first class rooms with the relaxation experience of a lifetime. Granted, it was at the expense of a lifetime of work, but nothing good comes free.
At least, not unless you wait for something disastrously bad to happen to said good thing, and then pick up the something good as a forgotten derelict full of previously happy corpses.
Originally, the Starset resort was a minor, but quite upscale, privately owned business of the pre-apex Toriad empire. Employing advanced radiation shielding, it closely orbited a rather peculiar star. The star was known as Lys by certain people indigenous to the system (and generously employed as workers on the orbital) and worshiped as 'the burning eye of God' due to a remarkable anomaly in the star's convection fields that create a storm in the photosphere that would on occasion bear striking similarity to the pupil and iris of a great eye. More importantly, the physical interaction of the storm meant that it was a strikingly beautiful and unique phenomenon when looked at through the right radiation filters. One mistranslation of the native language to make 'burning' into 'warm' and 'warm' into 'welcoming' combined with a rumor about the healing powers of the unique radiation pulse pattern emitted by the storm, and the Starset resort opened to sell a unique healing experience from within spitting distance of the 'welcoming eye of God'. Business was lucrative, what records any of the present crew have bothered to look through strongly indicate that the resort generated an embarrassing amount of money for its owner, only slightly dragged down by perpetual bribes to ensure that no one was able to conclusively debunk their line about the 'healing radiation patterns' of Lys.
Disaster befell the station a little less than a century ago when, during a grand gala for the brass of the Toriad military, the auxiliary coolant system for the radiation shielding ruptured into the air purification system. Owing to the centralized nature of the system, and the remarkable efficiency with which it operated, this resorted in the guests and staff of the resort receiving lethal doses of toxic chemicals within half a minute. The cause of the event, as identified by Boris during repairs to the station, was definitely sabotage. A small explosive, capable of being made entirely from material already present on the station, but almost a thousand lives were lost when one includes both guests and staff. When one considers both the guest list for the gala and the bloody civil war that broke out and tore the Toriad empire asunder shortly after (and perhaps as a result of) the event, the sabotage was likely politically motivated. Of course, the last log entries of the station's owner, a particularly eccentric claw, also suggest that simple insanity might have been to blame. In the weeks prior to the incident, he made repeated reference to the station that he owned as a 'blasphemous mote upon the eye of God', a message which was repeated several times on the walls of his personal cabin in various creative materials.
Owing to the civil war that broke out shortly thereafter and the classification of the incident as an unknown chemical threat, the reclamation of the station slipped through the cracks of bureaucracy for years, eventually disappearing completely as the war-broken Toriad empire was assimilated into various other neighbors. Everyone who cared about the station enough to try to reclaim it was dead or desperately trying to forget the remnants of their broken past. So the station, still humming along without any crew to speak of, spun silently around Lys for decades. If someone had found her in that condition, it would have been a prize beyond prizes; a gleaming piece of advanced luxury tech only slight marred by being filled with poison gas. Regrettably, fate had a few more sledgehammers to take to the Starset Resort.
The first blow was a high-velocity meteorite shower, which, had there been any crew remaining to tell the ship that it was okay to bring the shields into high-power mode, would have been a trivial concern. Unfortunately, with a literal skeleton crew at the helm, the ship's simplistic routines were hardwired not to exert ANY additional resources that might effect the bottom line without express authorization from a living individual. This resulted in the Starset resort getting a LOT of new ventilation put in very quickly, and directly led to the second blow of the one-two punch that turned the Starset Resort into a derelict. The repeated impacts from the shower dropped the station into a substantially lower orbit. The radiation shielding kept the station from burning away under the furious nuclear light, but it wasn't enough to prevent the sun from gradually frying the station's electronics.
That should have been it for the resort. The odds that there would be a man or woman insane enough to stare into the sun for scrap, have the tolerance for radiation needed to board the derelict and not die in minutes, and be able to repair enough of the station's thrust capability to bring it back into a safe orbit were astronomically low. Yet, fortunately, Boris did find the station, and he was a crazy enough sonofabitch to repair and gradually upgrade the derelict into something that is at once a terrifying abomination and the only place he and five other call home.
Ship Vitals
General
In general, the ship is a disastrous scrapheap of cobbled technology and jerry-rigged repairs that defies the fabric of reality every moment it doesn't explode. Most of the ship is still uninhabited and sealed off, principally due to damages from the meteorite storm or long term irradiation from its stint sundiving. Approximately 26% of the ship's volume is actually utilized, but much of the remainder is in the staff quarters and the bulk of the passenger decks. The ship can creak or groan for no reason, the desiccated bodies of former guests and crew are found on nearly any occasion when a new room is opened, and there's been more than one case of unexplained noises in the walls or in sealed sections of the ship, but despite all of this, the Starset has served well as a home and mobile base of operations for her mercenary crew.
Importantly, the Starset is not as bad as she looks, and while nothing is 100% reliable, she's got more than one ace up her sleeve. Despite her damage, the refitted station is very close to apex level technology in some areas. The radiation absorbing armor and energy shielding is incredibly advanced, and while it was never designed to go into battle, a few minor modifications mean that she can shrug off a direct hit from a prime-tech battleship's heavy combat lasers. Granted, kinetic kill weapons will still tear through the non-reinforced sections of her civilian issue hull like a rail slug through aluminum foil. The original design, before Boris went at it, didn't actually utilize a reactor, and was capable of deriving all needed energy from the sun she orbited. While her current incarnation isn't quite that green, she requires shockingly little added power in a cruising state, and can go completely dark for extended periods of time without compromising habitability. Internally, the areas of the ship that didn't have to be completely overhauled due to damage are some of the nicest you'll find on any mercy ship. The air is pleasantly scented, the halls are self-cleaning, and the five-star restaurant is largely pristine. The tech, while a bit finicky, still works for the most part. Concealed gravity plating is used liberally internally, with a selectivity much higher than is typically possible with prime technology. Originally, the ship was designed so that a fin could simply glide around in his or her own skin, without need of a walker- meaning that the ship can selectively decrease gravity for individuals. Of course, with a bit of modication, it can also increase it to approximately 2.8 Gs for selected individuals.
The unavoidable flipside of the ship is that there aren't many spare parts for her just floating around. If a chunk of grav plating burns out and it can't be fixed, it's nearly impossible to replace with something as nice as the original. It is, for obvious reasons, not able to dock with other stations, and (for equally obvious reasons) cannot land nor take off from a planet. Her sublight capabilities have been greatly upgraded from her days as a resort, but she still handles like you strapped thrusters on a bistro, and she does not have the heavy-weight inertial dampeners built into her structure to handle maneuvering stress well.
Mobility and Power
Originally, the Starset was designed to only have enough sublight to lower and raise its orbital position. Extensive modifications have fixed that, granting her operational flight capabilities. The original design lacked a reactor, drawing all necessary energy from Lys' radiation, but the current one has had one... installed. The back half of a Toriad carrier, one of the innumerable casualties of the civil war that destroyed them, has been unceremoniously grafted into the bottom of the station. The mil-spec reactor and bore drive aren't perfect, but they're operable and capable of generating an aperture large enough to fit all of Starset through. Long range jumps can be finicky thanks to the somewhat schizophrenic nature of the Starset's computer systems and power grid, but are quite possible if you're willing to exert a little patience and be okay with a slightly larger than average margin of error on accuracy.
Defenses
Defensively, the Starset is study in extremes, both high and low. Her native high level radiation shielding means that she can power through high power energy barrages without so much as getting warm, but her civilian manufacture means that non-reinforced hull sections can be damaged by almost anything. Her energy shields are soft shields, designed to slow and turn aside passing objects instead of obliterating them on impact. In low power mode they're effective at protecting the station from most debris, and in high power mode they're an effective deterrent to most incident hazards, but still offer only a limited protection against actual weapons of war.
Thankfully, the Toriad empire specialized in rapid fighter deployment, and the Bore engine that's been bolted on is capable of simultaneously generating multiple small, short range, semi-stable bores. Defensively, this means that if the targeting computer can predict where a projectile, or stream of projectiles is going to be, it can open an aperture in space ahead of the projectile before it reaches the ship and simplify the destination calculation by only caring that the exit of the bore isn't pointed at the ship anymore. The upside of this approach is that the energy of the incoming projectile has no bearing on whether it can be redirected or not, but the consequence is that the ship's equally unreliable Bore drive and computer systems will be heavily taxed during an engagement, and interdiction technology of sufficient strength can interfere with or even disable the ability to shield the ship.
Offense
Regrettably, finding extant offensive tech to match up with Toriad computer systems proved harder than upgrading her engines and defenses. The energy shield part of her radiation defenses was not designed for combat, and thus stops outgoing radiation as effectively as incoming radiation, making directed energy weapons largely pointless to install. Without native weapons systems, or hardpoints to install such systems, most of the offensive might of the vessel is projected through her advanced electronic warfare suite, banks of plug-and-play missile batteries, and improvised bomb racks. The ability to generate short range bores, useful defensively to redirect incoming fire, serves equally well to put bombs and missiles in surprising places very rapidly.
Principally, the Starset is not an offensive vessel and ill suited to a direct conflict. That isn't to say that she can't hold her own, but she's going to complain the entire time. Typically, she only works to bide time while crew can take things into their own hands using the Sled.
Ship Facilities
The Ballroom (Biolabs, medical, research, and things generally relegated to Sadish)
The ballroom, though damaged extensively, has been repaired and refitted into the ship's lab. Its expansive space has been partitioned to keep a general separation between the area where people get treated for injuries and where potentially dangerous artifacts are being poked. This is principally Sadish's area, housing most of her displays and research, but the scientific equipment is also used by Kesari, and Scarlet naturally works in the medical area alongside Sadish when needed.
The research area, principally designed and maintained by the Fin, also serves as a sort of ship's trophy room and eclectic museum. A variety of unusual objects are contained in cases and shelves. The value of some, perhaps many, of the objects is dubious, but that's really not something you want to bring up unless you want a few hours of instructional lecture from Sadish about how each one has unique value.
The Five-Star Restaurant (Ship's mess, Scarlet's territory)
One of the few rooms that went pretty much untouched by the downfall of the station. Capable of seating several hundred people at once, the room was filled to the brim with desiccated corpses when Boris first found it. Small cleaning robots kept the bodies from rotting into goo and staining everything, but there's only so much advanced cleaning technology can do when more than two hundred people suddenly die on the floor. That said, once the bodies were removed, the restaurant itself is entirely serviceable. The kitchens, likewise, are replete, with a stock needed to serve hundreds of patrons kept in stasis. It says something to the sheer volume of people the Starset resort once serviced that its current occupants haven't had to buy food for themselves since taking command.
The Laundry Room (Ship's brig, Khate's prisoners)
The laundry rooms of the ship aren't up to the same standards as the rest of the ship in terms of style, but they were never meant to be seen by anyone except for the indigenous peoples used as labor. While a subsection of the massive facility is used for its intended purpose, most of it has been converted into heavy cell blocks by Khate. This has several notable advantages over using empty suites. The first is that they convey a nice prison-y feel that makes for much better entertainment. Second, the original resort never wanted its patrons to see or hear the laborers, so there's a LOT of sound proofing to stop the screaming from echoing throughout the rest of the ship. Third, you can force the prisoners to do your laundry without the bother of escorting them across half the ship.
The Hangar (Still a hangar, has Aubrey's bird and the Sled)
The Starset has an internal hangar bay which was once filled with the ships of various patrons, pricey galactic tours, and sightseeing shuttles. The meteorites turned most of those vessels into worthless scrap, and the overhaul to the hangar is a continual process. It's a good day when the airlock cycles properly on the first try. Still, it's the only good way to get on and off the station/ship, and it's home to the two main craft that its current occupants possess.
The first is the Sled, a large flying brick. Technically, it's a hybrid boarding pod and orbital drop pad, the only surviving one left on the carrier Boris scrapped for the engine. Essentially, you point it at something, turn the engines on, and exit the vehicle after it has come to a complete stop. It's been modified to be able to carry a cargo pod, and the Toriad were concerned enough about re-usability that it can actually break atmo if you're patient. Very patient. It can, with some piloting, also make landings that don't involve crashing, which most ports appreciate a great deal. That said, there are no gentle landings in the sled.
The second is Aubrey's bird. A hybrid design between a light fighter and a suit of power armor, it's styled to look like a bird in flight, and the articulation allows it a similar freedom of motion. It can only carry one passenger (very uncomfortably), isn't heavily armed or armored, but it's fast, light, and designed to mesh with Aubrey's implants. It's also one of the very few things on board the Starset that doesn't look like a Frankenstein of engineering.
The Command Center (Electronic Warfare, Sensors, and Advertising, Kesari's stuff)
The command center of the Starset was designed so that a few professional staff members could monitoring most everything aboard the ship. While it was spared the bulk of the damage from the meteorite shower, the stint in high radiation has made all of the systems a bit... off. The station's owner believed that people should be serviced by other people, and thus never invested in a ship's AI, instead utilizing an expert system to handle the menial details. The expert system remains, but is occasionally plagued by what can only be termed as nervous breakdowns. Designed to take no action that increases operating costs unless strictly informed otherwise, the fact that the station's current dramatic value depreciation is a direct result of its inaction seems to weigh on it heavily. Periodically, when no one else is making a query and the processing cycles are available, it will be seen to run various complex calculations completely unbidden. Querying the computer will always return that these are routine diagnostics.
Schizophrenic computers aside, the command center was remarkably east to convert to a sensor post and electronic warfare suite due to its remarkably advanced advertising software. Keyed to lock on to inbound jump signatures at a significant distance, the original systems were designed to then bombard the target with pamphlets, videos, printouts, and promotional media for the Starset resort. It took surprisingly little tweaking to alter the systems used to break through near-apex level adblocking software and re-purpose them to punch through most prime-tech military grade encryption. The hard part is convincing the computer to send something other than outdated advertisements. The sensors, likewise, are adept at picking up on the tiniest speck that indicates the presence of a life form that could theoretically have advertising thrown at it.
The Theater
The theater has been largely restored to functionality, and with the actual gaming areas of the ship still unclaimed and likely stupefyingly radioactive, it serves as the recreation hall and briefing area. Aside from being used to view the vast library of entertainment that Khate has aggregated over her time on board (most of the original material from the Starset was corrupted by radiation), the theater is the only good place to view large scale 3d scans and review mission data as a group. Plus there's popcorn.
The Spa
Given the owner's regrettable decision to employ living staff, there's not a lot of opportunity to indulge in the personalized massages and grooming that the Starset once had to offer, but there is still an operational sauna, a sunbathing deck with adjustable radiation controls to either use synthetic rays or to modulate the shielding to filter in natural rays. Of course, that means stripping your clothes off and trusting the Starset's computer to give you a tanning level of radiation instead of crisping you by accident. The pool still holds water, and the filtration system has kept it refreshing all these years, though its a little bit icky when you think of all the bodies the crew had to pull out after they got to reclaiming this section.
The Suites
The suites, the thirty or so that have been made usable again, serve a variety of purposes. Cargo holds, armory rooms, practice areas, personal projects, and, of course, private quarters have all been made up in these opulent quarters. The private quarters, made from the larger and more opulent rooms that didn't need too much repair, have their own private bathroom, sitting area, and grav-bed. Again, none of this was designed for combat or maneuvering, so there are no sleeping restraints to prevent crew members from being forcibly ejected from bed and into a wall during sudden acceleration.
Any questions about your ship or things you'd like to have had your characters change?
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Topic: Small Mercies (OOC) | Mercenary Menageries in Space (6/[6]) [WARNING: TEXT] (Read 108848 times)