((Yes, there is only one ship))
((TBH, there really aren't many states that can possibly buy this from you. There are a few old imperial cruisers about, but those are late imperial cruisers, from well into the decline phase. Less capable originally and usually worn down after centuries of service. This baby is from the height of power.))
After the parade of insane riches, the AI rooms seem relatively mundane. Multiple backups, synthetic automation systems, massive computation potential, and a wide range of tactical simulatiors and parallel processing systems. In general, you will be able to operate this ship at a reasonable level of skill without it being properly crewed, as well as provide direction for hundreds of networked ships in-system. There are also a number of deployable nodes, so you can operate probes and miners and such in different systems, should you leave a pod-deployed node behind for FTL communications. There is one major problem. One, it's an old navy system, and connecting units to the ship network requires certain cyptographic encoder/decoders. And for security purposes, you do not have the schematics or the keys for building them. You can't add new ships to the system except by disassembling old ships, or using the limited supply of extras. It's also very large scale, so trying to modernize it will be complicated, to say the least... if you even want to. There are many years of subroutines and notes for using it, as the various crews have expanded its capabilities over their terms of service.. should you manage to dredge through the huge pile of complicated programming-related files.
The ship's machine shop takes up a few hundred square meters nearer the stern, along with tool rooms and damage control rooms spread throughout the ship. It's a gleaming mass of carefully polished walls and equipment with the capacity to manufacture basically any part on the ship from raw materials. Well.. most parts. On a ship of this vintage, there are some components that require molecule-scale manufacturing technology, which is lost technology among lost technology. Some of the major manufacturing tools here are on that scale. Still, for damage control purposes there's a complete database of substitution parts which can do the job, but with a slight loss of ability, more than enough to keep the ship in the fight or in the field for many, many years between refits. It's also capable of churning out the munitions and crew resources necessary, with a full built-in database of a truly ridiculous amount of consumer, and in some cases, luxury goods. The databases for the bombs and other exotic combat arms are in dedicated systems near the weapons magazines, but should you want anything other than that, from ten thousand Old Imperial handheld pulse lasers to a gold-plated space yacht to make millionaires jealous, you can make it here should you manage to fit in the resources. On a second pass, you find the in-hull refining system, for fuel manufacturing. Slow, but you can fill your tanks from any rich planetary nebula, or in a pinch, many gas giants. Then fly away while the catalysts do their thing, keeping you topped up for months.
The ships has two main sensory systems. The combat sensors, which are a large network of pods, and can be used deployed or tethered to the ship. It's comprehensive. Gravity sensors, exotic particle sensors, chromium variability detectors (these are fantastic at picking up shields), and a wide range of common telescopic and spectrographic devices. These don't do you much good unless they're deployed, and when deployed they fill the space around you with a fairly insane amount of emissions, so.. well.. stealth isn't what you expect from a ship of this size, but then there's being a giant unstealthy battleship and then there's turning on the disco ball floodlights.
Then there's the in-hull passive sensors. Passive telescopes, passive particle detectors, radar pickups, and a few things that you don't recognize. Some digging reveals that the old empire apparently figured out jump drive prediction, so you get a minute or two of warning should anything inside your zone be jumping in from outsystem. You don't have any idea how that even works.. it's supposed to be impossible. But you guess the Old Empire had a few tricks up their sleeves.
The pod system is somewhat of a relief, it's almost conventional. Hypermagnetic relays for attaching hundreds of limpets, dedicated spaces for folding and unfolding the solid and force projections to create your very own swarm of tethered cargo pods. And the large scale tractors required for playing Space Tetris and rearranging the hundreds of them. Looks like overall capacity is about half the mass of the ship, so a few hundred thousand tons. Similar to the munitions sector, there are some specialized manufacturing devices here for making more pods, as well as armed devices.. more sensors, remote missiles, stationary probes, mines, and bombs.
The jump drive system is another one of those fancy jobs. You have a seven-node system, three of which are in-hull and required for keeping the ship together. Or, well, one of them can do it, but you have two spares, each one with its own backup generator, bare-bones navigation system, and one shot exotic store for getting the ship the hell out of dodge, even if it's taken massive damage. They're also hooked up to the proper navigation tables, capable of plotting a route across half the galaxy. Except, of course, the maps are terribly out of date. The system is capable of taking updates, and the format has not changed due to the absolute necessity of compatible mapping systems, but you, sadly, can't use this ancient near-perfect galactic navigation database.
The four outer nodes are for coordinating fleet jumps. You can bring four more ships along with you into a jump, arriving in formation at the same time. Or nearly the same time.. it looks like you can do a limited delay on things, giving you a minute or so to clear the space before the duckings arrive, or the reverse. They also have the power capacity to simply not care about the receiving ships. If you want to conduct Grand Theft Freighter, you can just fly next to a ship (or small station), hit the button, and bam, they're coming along with you no questions asked.
Last and not least are the three-layered particle/energy shields. An outer field for mass deflections and neutralization, and two inner fields for stopping particles and energy beams. As well as, thanks to the fancy hull, a final edge-of-armour field allowing for energy distribution around single points, reducing the risk of a single catastrophic hit. You can understand how it works, with a few thousand projectors inside the hull, but these operate on a scale nobody is familiar with. Raising and lowering them is easy, but beyond that don't expect anything fancy. Do expect enough power to deflect dozens of hits before the projectors need to be replaced and recharged.. and there's fully automated systems capable of handling the load, as well as shield rooms for repairing and recharging them in bulk.
((I'll have a statsheet up for the ship with the next update, but I'll give you a few days to discuss plans and goals as well as ask setting-related questions.))
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Topic: You are the crew of a Remnant Battleship. (Read 4231 times)