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Description
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Intro
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This here is some concept art for what the average, “working class” IPVs (interplanetary vehicles) are like in Overheaven, circa 2285. The “Angel of Io” is a Vestian-flagged cargo and passenger vessel crewed by Belters and known to make various deliveries between Vesta and Luna. “Little 13” is a smaller ship, hailing from Mars, which transports a very special kind of cargo between Mars and Jupiter - drives containing intellectual properties and other information-based products, which aren’t very valuable if they’re transmitted for anyone with the proper tech to decrypt and bootleg, and are best transported on small, fast and discrete vessels. And then we have a “space truck”, the “Elbie Myarz”, a very utilitarian bulk freighter, also hailing from the Belt, specifically from Mr. Spock (an actual asteroid, 2309 Mr. Spock, discovered August 16, 1971). Lastly, we have two S2TO IPVs, the “Vega” and the “Rotkäppchen”. The former doesn’t really have a backstory offhand, but the Rotkäppchen is crewed by Neudresdeners, descendents of East German colonists living on Venus.

This is mostly to give an idea of the tech level for the average spacer in the late 23rd century, though even the pricier ships have the same basic traits as what you see here. And if it seems “archaic” that starships 300 years from now would still look like 20th century NASA concepts, consider how long sails and masts were the norm for maritime travel. What works, works.

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Angel of Io
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•So, for starters, Star Trek/Star Wars-level artificial gravity is not present in Overheaven; most of the Angel is micrograv (zero-gravity), with two rotating cgrav (centrifugal gravity) sections. Artigrav systems utilizing mild handwavium in the form of “Heim-Podkletnov fields” (HPF) and are reserved for the bridge of the ship (more on that in a bit), due to the sheer amount of energy these high-end systems require.

•There is no FTL in Overheaven. Period. The Angel is still rather fast, however - able to reach Mars from Earth in as little as two and a half weeks. Earth to Jupiter is about a month and some change. Earth to Pluto takes a year and some change.

•The cgrav habitat wheel has two levels, with a medical bay, showers, a cafeteria, lounge/common areas, cryopods, gym, storage units, workshops and living quarters for crew and passengers. Moreso passengers than crew. By rotating, it generates the equivalent of 1g of gravity via cgrav spinning. As per the illustration, the centrifugal forces mean that “down” is away from the wheel’s hub. To get into the wheel, there are two “spokes”, one with a ladder for personnel to climb down, feet-first, and a small elevator for cargo. Climbing down the ladder from micrograv to cgrav takes some getting used to. Even though you don’t have weight at first, you have to act as though you do, or else you’ll slip when you get heavier. If you lose your grip, there’s (usually) a cushion at the other end of the ladder waiting to catch you. As for the elevator, it’s a much wider spoke than the one with the ladder, and has various straps for securing cargo. Loading the damn thing is another skill that spacers need to learn, as they have to get floating cargo onto a moving platform and strap it down.

•The lounge includes a Yesli 6000 virspace console, which supports most eighth- through eleventh-generation small-scale virspaces. All you do is lie on a couch, insert a wired jack into the interface plug implanted into the back of your neck, and toggle the AR interface to start the simulation; a main menu will appear in your visual cortex, and you can manipulate this synthetic hallucination with your finger. As your body enters REM sleep, you will be “transported” to a virtual world just as subjectively “real” as the one you already take for granted. Beyond simply a show for your eyes and ears, you will taste, touch and _smell_ things in virspace. Virspace servers are popular for IPV crews, since spacer jobs often consist of doing nothing for hours or even days on end. So to alleviate boredom, they take a break to slay dragons and stuff like that. D&D in the future is regarded the same as chess - an ancient game of great prestige.

•While some crew members aboard the Angel are volari (micrograv-adapted humans), most are not, and need to spend and average of six hours in the habitat ring or bridge per day, which, in space, is just an arbitrary period of 24 hours, indicated by the dimming of the ship lighting from white to red. Time spent in the hab wheel is to avoid the effects of long-term micrograv exposure. Like deteriorating vision; volari all have cyborg eyes, since they go blind by age four due to the micrograv detaching their pupils. Or loss of bone density; volari genetics limit the length their bones grow, while increasing the density (supplemented by calcium-rich volari cuisine), to compensate for micrograv and prevent their bodies from getting long and fragile (the downside is that volari born and raised inside of gravity wells grow up to be stocky dwarfs).

•The crew of the Angel fluctuates over time, since many spacers only join crews for short stints rather than long-term commitments, or join crews as a way of paying their way to some far-off destination that happens to be where the ship is heading. Typically, the crew numbers around fifteen, sometimes only seven, or as many as twenty, with the minimum required crew for running the vessel being as low as five.

•The cargo wheel is supposed to be used for storing micrograv-sensitive cargo. The crew of the Angel has converted one of the lobes into an impromptu lab for brewing moonshine from machine oil. Also, illicit narcotics.

•There are no windows on the Angel, since these are structural weaknesses for the ship, and given the number of things in space that could blind you, it makes more sense to just have a shit-ton of cameras on the outside of your ship, and use screens to see outside instead. It’s the 23rd century, after all, so the HD screens of the future likely look more crisp and real than a window would.

•Because there are no windows, the Angel of Io has no stereotypical sci-fi command bridge. Instead, the command center is a spherical room placed deep inside the ship, which has energy-whore HPF systems (for reference, one of the ship’s two fusion reactors is there to power the engines and the rest of the ship’s systems, the other one is just for the HPF generators in one relatively small room) pulling everything towards its concave surface, because vanilla artificial gravity where the floors are flat like a hotel (looking at you, Enterprise, Millenium Falcon and Serenity), is boring. The command deck is loaded with computers, monitors, holographic displays and augmented reality overlays synched with implants inside the bodies of the crew. It’s a bit of a cyberpunk MC-Escher-looking scene; if your buddy on the other side of the room wants a smoke, you throw the cigarette up and they’ll catch it on the ceiling. There are six hallways leading to the bridge, which are lined with HPF generators of growing intensity, from 0g to 1g, and people are regularly walking into the bridge upside down.

•While most operations aboard the ship are handled and overseen by a human crew, the Angel also has an onboard turingrade AI, better known as a figurehead. The Angel’s figurehead, Io, might have the ship as her body (she also has a humanoid avatar which can appear via monitors, holos and AR), but figureheads are nothing if not loyal to their captains, less out of obligation or programming, than a sense of honor and personal integrity. While most of the time she basically acts as a personal assistant to the captain and crew, helps babysit passengers, and aids command in running the ship’s systems (and serves as the “face” of the ship when marketing its services), all of the ship’s automated processes are Io’s responsibility, and in the event of an emergency, she can control the entire vessel. Figureheads tend to come standard-issue to avoid the inescapable issue of space travel: anything with an engine can be potentially used as a WMD. In the event that the Angel gets stuck in a planet’s gravity well and starts to enter the atmosphere, for example, Io will prioritize evacuating every other sophont onboard and gladly go down with the ship, self-destructing in the upper atmosphere to prevent a potentially-disastrous impact on the surface. Figureheads are usually Three Laws-compliant.

•The micrograv areas of the ship are where most of the daily work is conducted. These areas are mostly covered with cargo netting, hand/foot holds, emergency breach patches, fire extinguishers and the occasional screen displaying the outside (you can toggle every window to change your view of what’s outside, but the default display will be whatever’s on the opposite side of the wall it’s on). In addition to learning how to climb ladders and load cargo lifts in zero gravity, space-cadets have to earn their “space legs” by mastering movement in micrograv. Overcoming drop sickness (freefall-induced nausea) and remembering to keep your effects and tools strapped and secured to your person are good starters, as is expanding your mastery of not only hand-eye coordination, but foot-eye as well. See, many spacers will do their micrograv work barefoot, since a boot would get in the way of you using your toes as an additional grasper, a skill that takes some practice, but can be invaluable. Through the magic of generations of genetic modification, volari normally have prehensile hand-like feet for this reason, in fact. Also, learn how to use grandals (“gravity sandals”); essentially just powerful magnets you strap to your soles, and are powered by betavoltaic (yes, atomic) batteries the size of soup cans, strapped to your ankles. Use them to cling to surfaces and walk on walls in micrograv. Won’t really keep your bones or organs safe from the effects of microgav on your body, but it might make certain tasks easier.

•For propulsion, the vessel has eighteen VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) engines. VASIMR engines are electrothermal thrusters, which use radio waves to ionize and heat an inert propellant (hydrogen being the most widespread), then a magnetic field to accelerate the resulting plasma, generating thrust. The Angel’s eighteen VASIMRs are powered by one of two aneutronic fusion reactors located at the rear of the ship. Meanwhile, in the front, we have twenty chemical RCS thrusters, which are used for maneuvering the vessel. When the *Angel* needs to brake and settle in orbit, or prep for docking with a station, it throttles RCS in one direction, to flip the whole ship backwards and then use the VASIMR thrusters to brake for final approach.

•The Angel’s twelve radiator wings are present to assist with cooling the VASIMR engines, as well as the rest of the heat that the ship generates, a genuine hazard in space.

•For conducting repairs on the ship’s exterior, the Angel has a simple spacecraft known as a “raft”. It looks like OTL’s International Space Station, but is packed with much more advanced technology, and isn’t intended to stay in place. This rudimentary spacecraft is all micrograv and has six small thrusters for maneuvering around. Rafts are modular craft, with no two ever really looking alike. This one here, lovingly nicknamed “Shitcan”, has seven modules. The largest is the airlock, with the rest mostly used for storing tools, handling onboard life-support, steering the thing or running life support; two of the modules each have two sets of robotic arms to assist work crews working outside in their eva suits. While not especially common, rafts are sometimes known to have figureheads onboard, and Shitcan is one such raft; manifesting as a helpful, if self-deprecating, anthropomorphic raccoon, named Scruta.

•Like all IPV’s, the Angel of Io is too big and awkward to enter a planet’s atmosphere and not die a fiery death. Therefore, the captain of the Angel has had the common sense to have at least one IAV (inter-atmospheric vehicle) as a shuttlecraft.

•The shuttlecraft in question is a 2245-model Peregrine - a mid-sized IAV produced by Serrano Interstellar, of Luna. Nicknamed “Lucy!”, the Peregrine is built to navigate low and high orbit, and to enter and fly within atmospheres. Entering an atmosphere for a Peregrine is as easy as falling and not dying, but because of size considerations, Lucy!’s NERVA NTRs (nuclear-thermal rockets) are insufficient for leaving Earth, Venus or Mars’ gravity wells on their own. So upon landing on a planetary surface, Lucy!’s crew have to rent strap-on boosters from the local spaceport, mount them on the Peregrine’s hardpoints, use them to reach the upper atmosphere, fire its dual NERVAs and hit orbit; the boosters then detach and use their remaining fuel to fly themselves back to the spaceport and land themselves. Lucy! also has her own figurehead, Lu, whose avatar changes from slutty half-naked woman to slutty half-naked man (or a mix of the two), depending on who Lu is talking to.

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Little 13
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•To start with, Little 13 is powered by six heavy NERVA thrusters (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). A NERVA engine is a fission propulsion system which uses plutonium fuel rods to heat hydrogen coolant and expel it as reaction mass. To avoid the nuclear reaction in each engine flaring out of control due to neutron flux from its neighbor engines, solid-lead neutron isolation shields are placed between each engine. Advances in materials science allow for clustered modern NTRs to have built-in neutron shielding and not require these sorts of shields, suggesting that these engines were purchased and mounted out of the bargain bin. These engines are bimodal, meaning they serve not only as propulsion systems, but also the primary power plant for the craft. A benefit, since it means the six reactors don’t need to be spun up every time a burn is needed.

•Little 13 has no artigrav systems, because it lacks the infrastructure onboard to power such a thing. The command bridge aboard this ship is closer to the norm for most ships, actually, in that it’s completely in micrograv.

•Little 13 is much faster than Angel of Io - less mass to push, more raw power for pushing; where the *Angel* takes two and a half weeks to reach Mars from Earth, Little 13 only needs a week and a half. When firing its NERVAs at maximum velocity, “down” becomes the direction in which the rocket is firing. This means the ship is designed with micrograv, cgrav and thrustgrav all in mind. (Admittedly, I unintentionally ended up handwaving the Angel’s hab-wheel to not entirely obey the laws of physics when the ship accelerates, so consider this me correcting myself). When the ship is cruising without thrust, everything is micrograv. The central hallway running through the ship’s “stem” is a series of rooms with collapsible stairs and rope ladders next to the open doors. When under full acceleration, the partitions between these rooms become floors, and the ladders and stairs are unfolded to allow for movement up and down the ship. You may have noticed that Little 13 has three rotating hab-mods. These are built on gimbals, and when the ship is accelerating, they are folded down, because “down” is in the direction of the matter getting expelled from the rockets. When the ship stops accelerating and starts cruising (a fuel-saving measure), the modules unfold and begin rotating. Don’t worry, there’s no terrifying three-way ladder-propeller of doom on this ship. In my head, it’s a bit like those crawl-tunnels at a McDonald’s playpen - you grab onto one of three ladders that lead into three of these tubes, and climb your way, feet-first, into the hab module. Yeah, it’s weird. You get used to it. When under acceleration, it’s way easier to get into the folded habitat modules, since you can just walk through a door between the main shaft and the hab-mods.

•While most energy for the ship comes from its bi-modal NERVA NTRs, there are also four medium-sized fission reactors kept onboard as backups. They’re also handy for bartering or pawning if you’re broke. The reactors are modular in nature, and can be ejected from the ship in the event of an emergency. If both reactors in a given module go red, then the whole module can be ejected as well.

•To regulate the heat, we have two large radiator wings, and like with the Angel, we have RCS thrusters to adjust the craft’s position in space. Sidenote: I dunno why fictional spaceships shy away from radiators. They’re like wings or sails. And they’re not just fun - they keep everyone on your ship from being cooked alive from accumulated waste heat. Hey, I didn’t write the laws of thermodynamics.

•If Angel of Io is roughly equivalent to a barque, Little 13’s size makes it the IPV equivalent to a sloop. The crew of Little 13 is currently five veterans and their neko (Homo nekomimi). This is about as many people as is needed to run a ship of this size: you have a commanding officer, pilot, copilot, navigator, engineer, and someone to cook and clean. Little 13 does have an onboard figurehead, known simply as “Thirteen”. Abiding by her programming, Thirteen assists the crew with running the ship’s systems, though seems to enjoy playing with the neko much more, what with it being the only other girl on the ship (Thirteen has no biological sex, obviously, but I guess it really is the thought that counts; neither of the women on this ship are human, so it’s not bad luck according to sailor logic), and has remodeled her avatar to reflect the neko’s feline features.

•Like Angel of Io, Little 13 is unable to land on a planet’s surface. The crew doesn’t have to go down to surfaces very often, but in space, it’s always better to have something and not need it, than to need it and not have it. So, they keep a Super Suncat on standby. The Super Suncat is a larger version of the classic Suncat S2TO (Single-Stage-To-Orbit) IAV. Unlike the Peregrine, the Super Suncat is able to leave a Earth-level gravity well, without additional stages. But man is it a much bumpier ride than the Peregrine. One pilot, six passenger seats, room for 450 kilograms of cargo, and a proportionately-massive NTR.

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Elbie Myarz
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•The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the Elbie Myarz lacks any rotating hab-mod. This is because the crew of the Myarz is made up entirely of volari, who don’t need gravity to function.

•Bi-modal NTR provides both power and propulsion for the craft.

•Crew quarters are in the two shafts adjacent to the main, central shaft. The Myarz’s crew of ten rest in sleeping bags attached to the walls, alongside various bits of cargo held in place with netting; the crew of the Myarz also often sleep next to machinery, no different from how submarine crews of old would sleep next to armed torpedos, due to the tiny budget for living space.

•The command bridge is midway across the main shaft, and is in the form of eight chairs and workstations attached to the walls. A holographic display of the front of the ship gives the illusion of a “classical” command deck. The back of this hologram, facing towards the front of the ship, says “BRIDGE”, and more or less acts as a curtain separating the command center from the rest of the ship. An additional holo-curtain provides an additional screen and completes the illusion of the bridge being a room.

‧Cargo is stored externally, in 24 very large modules, each with 64 smaller cargo containers inside of them, for a total of 1,536 cargo containers. Each cargo container has a capacity of around ten metric tons, giving the ship the capability to move as much as 15,360 metric tons of bulk cargo on one voyage.

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Vega and Rotkäppchen
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•These are tailsitter S2TO IPV’s. S2TOs are distinguished from the other IPVs in this image, in that they are capable of entering, landing, launching and leaving from a planet’s atmosphere *and* crossing interplanetary distances.

•S2TO’s are the oldest class of IPV, dating to the 1970’s with the American Ares missions to Mars and the Soviet Venera and Niobe missions to Venus. Larger, voidborne IPVs with rotating cgrav sections were first constructed in Earth orbit beginning in the early 1990’s, but S2TO’s remained the most common way to move between planets until the mid-2000’s.

•Despite their versatility, S2TO’s lost favor to voidcraft IPVs for a few very simple reasons. As you can see, the S2TO’s shown here are both much smaller than the voidcraft, because unlike a voidcraft, an S2TO has to obey the tyranny of the rocket equation; you need a lot of thrust to push through an atmosphere and escape a planet’s gravity well (in other words, reach escape velocity); the bigger your rocket, the more thrust, but the more fuel you need; the more fuel you carry, the more thrust you need; oh, and the rocket also has to push its own weight up into orbit. The balance struck in carrying a powerplant big enough to push into orbit (and land), as well as cross interplanetary distances, means that the size of these ships, and the payloads they’re able to haul are limited. Voidcraft are able to mount bigger and more powerful engines, carry bigger payloads, and have shorter travel times. In the heyday of S2TO IPVs, Mars Express colony ships in the 1980’s took 100-150 days to reach the Red Planet from Earth. Modern S2TO IPVs are able to make this journey in “only” 50 days, but voidcraft are able to do it in 17.5 days, at the slowest. Finally, the effects of zero gravity on the human body made the lack of cgrav on S2TO IPVs undesirable. S2TO IPVs remain in service today, but in a diminished capacity.

•Anyway, enough of that history lesson. Both of these ships use high-thrust bi-modal NTR’s as their main propulsion systems. For simple blast-offs into orbit, all one needs is the integral drive and its onboard fuel supply, but for interplanetary voyages, rental boosters are used to get them most or all of the way into orbit, so that fuel can be saved crossing between planets; as any spacer will tell you, “once you’re in orbit, you’re half-way to *anywhere”*.

•Landing for an S2TO is as simple as using RCS thrusters to flip the ship and use the main thrusters to slow the vessel’s descent via retropulsion.

•The command bridge for both of these vessels is a small cockpit near the top of the ship. The windows are not for the cockpit, but to allow natural light in when the ship is in flight - an artifact of a previous era and a vestigial trait of S2TOs. The pressurized habdecks of these ships allow for individual passenger cabins (40 for the Vega, potentially 120 for the Rotkäppchen), large common areas, central storage, a galley, and a solar flare shelter (flare-shielding is common on voidborne spacecraft, but S2TO’s have to budget their weight). While S2TO’s are micrograv for most of their voyages, they’re under thrustgrav when leaving the atmosphere and when accelerating through space, and both of the S2TO’s here have an abundance of straps and harnesses for passengers to secure themselves in the event of thrustgrav.

•While the two S2TOs shown here, Vega and Rotkäppchen are both shown with landing gear planted on solid ground, there are also amphibian S2TOs, which take off and land on water. These are common on worlds with lots of surface water, like Earth, Venus, Neith, Mars, Ganymede, Callisto and Triton, and tend to be much larger than their terrestrial cousins.

•While the Vega doesn’t have a figurehead, the Rotkäppchen actually does have a built-in AI. Named “Rotkäppchen-chan”, her likeness is lovingly presented on the hull of the ship, advertising the ship’s services as a passenger and cargo transport for trips between Venus and Mercury.

Description
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Intro
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This here is some concept art for what the average, “working class” IPVs (interplanetary vehicles) are like in Overheaven, circa 2285. The “Angel of Io” is a Vestian-flagged cargo and passenger vessel crewed by Belters and known to make various deliveries between Vesta and Luna. “Little 13” is a smaller ship, hailing from Mars, which transports a very special kind of cargo between Mars and Jupiter - drives containing intellectual properties and other information-based products, which aren’t very valuable if they’re transmitted for anyone with the proper tech to decrypt and bootleg, and are best transported on small, fast and discrete vessels. And then we have a “space truck”, the “Elbie Myarz”, a very utilitarian bulk freighter, also hailing from the Belt, specifically from Mr. Spock (an actual asteroid, 2309 Mr. Spock, discovered August 16, 1971). Lastly, we have two S2TO IPVs, the “Vega” and the “Rotkäppchen”. The former doesn’t really have a backstory offhand, but the Rotkäppchen is crewed by Neudresdeners, descendents of East German colonists living on Venus.

This is mostly to give an idea of the tech level for the average spacer in the late 23rd century, though even the pricier ships have the same basic traits as what you see here. And if it seems “archaic” that starships 300 years from now would still look like 20th century NASA concepts, consider how long sails and masts were the norm for maritime travel. What works, works.

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Angel of Io
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•So, for starters, Star Trek/Star Wars-level artificial gravity is not present in Overheaven; most of the Angel is micrograv (zero-gravity), with two rotating cgrav (centrifugal gravity) sections. Artigrav systems utilizing mild handwavium in the form of “Heim-Podkletnov fields” (HPF) and are reserved for the bridge of the ship (more on that in a bit), due to the sheer amount of energy these high-end systems require.

•There is no FTL in Overheaven. Period. The Angel is still rather fast, however - able to reach Mars from Earth in as little as two and a half weeks. Earth to Jupiter is about a month and some change. Earth to Pluto takes a year and some change.

•The cgrav habitat wheel has two levels, with a medical bay, showers, a cafeteria, lounge/common areas, cryopods, gym, storage units, workshops and living quarters for crew and passengers. Moreso passengers than crew. By rotating, it generates the equivalent of 1g of gravity via cgrav spinning. As per the illustration, the centrifugal forces mean that “down” is away from the wheel’s hub. To get into the wheel, there are two “spokes”, one with a ladder for personnel to climb down, feet-first, and a small elevator for cargo. Climbing down the ladder from micrograv to cgrav takes some getting used to. Even though you don’t have weight at first, you have to act as though you do, or else you’ll slip when you get heavier. If you lose your grip, there’s (usually) a cushion at the other end of the ladder waiting to catch you. As for the elevator, it’s a much wider spoke than the one with the ladder, and has various straps for securing cargo. Loading the damn thing is another skill that spacers need to learn, as they have to get floating cargo onto a moving platform and strap it down.

•The lounge includes a Yesli 6000 virspace console, which supports most eighth- through eleventh-generation small-scale virspaces. All you do is lie on a couch, insert a wired jack into the interface plug implanted into the back of your neck, and toggle the AR interface to start the simulation; a main menu will appear in your visual cortex, and you can manipulate this synthetic hallucination with your finger. As your body enters REM sleep, you will be “transported” to a virtual world just as subjectively “real” as the one you already take for granted. Beyond simply a show for your eyes and ears, you will taste, touch and _smell_ things in virspace. Virspace servers are popular for IPV crews, since spacer jobs often consist of doing nothing for hours or even days on end. So to alleviate boredom, they take a break to slay dragons and stuff like that. D&D in the future is regarded the same as chess - an ancient game of great prestige.

•While some crew members aboard the Angel are volari (micrograv-adapted humans), most are not, and need to spend and average of six hours in the habitat ring or bridge per day, which, in space, is just an arbitrary period of 24 hours, indicated by the dimming of the ship lighting from white to red. Time spent in the hab wheel is to avoid the effects of long-term micrograv exposure. Like deteriorating vision; volari all have cyborg eyes, since they go blind by age four due to the micrograv detaching their pupils. Or loss of bone density; volari genetics limit the length their bones grow, while increasing the density (supplemented by calcium-rich volari cuisine), to compensate for micrograv and prevent their bodies from getting long and fragile (the downside is that volari born and raised inside of gravity wells grow up to be stocky dwarfs).

•The crew of the Angel fluctuates over time, since many spacers only join crews for short stints rather than long-term commitments, or join crews as a way of paying their way to some far-off destination that happens to be where the ship is heading. Typically, the crew numbers around fifteen, sometimes only seven, or as many as twenty, with the minimum required crew for running the vessel being as low as five.

•The cargo wheel is supposed to be used for storing micrograv-sensitive cargo. The crew of the Angel has converted one of the lobes into an impromptu lab for brewing moonshine from machine oil. Also, illicit narcotics.

•There are no windows on the Angel, since these are structural weaknesses for the ship, and given the number of things in space that could blind you, it makes more sense to just have a shit-ton of cameras on the outside of your ship, and use screens to see outside instead. It’s the 23rd century, after all, so the HD screens of the future likely look more crisp and real than a window would.

•Because there are no windows, the Angel of Io has no stereotypical sci-fi command bridge. Instead, the command center is a spherical room placed deep inside the ship, which has energy-whore HPF systems (for reference, one of the ship’s two fusion reactors is there to power the engines and the rest of the ship’s systems, the other one is just for the HPF generators in one relatively small room) pulling everything towards its concave surface, because vanilla artificial gravity where the floors are flat like a hotel (looking at you, Enterprise, Millenium Falcon and Serenity), is boring. The command deck is loaded with computers, monitors, holographic displays and augmented reality overlays synched with implants inside the bodies of the crew. It’s a bit of a cyberpunk MC-Escher-looking scene; if your buddy on the other side of the room wants a smoke, you throw the cigarette up and they’ll catch it on the ceiling. There are six hallways leading to the bridge, which are lined with HPF generators of growing intensity, from 0g to 1g, and people are regularly walking into the bridge upside down.

•While most operations aboard the ship are handled and overseen by a human crew, the Angel also has an onboard turingrade AI, better known as a figurehead. The Angel’s figurehead, Io, might have the ship as her body (she also has a humanoid avatar which can appear via monitors, holos and AR), but figureheads are nothing if not loyal to their captains, less out of obligation or programming, than a sense of honor and personal integrity. While most of the time she basically acts as a personal assistant to the captain and crew, helps babysit passengers, and aids command in running the ship’s systems (and serves as the “face” of the ship when marketing its services), all of the ship’s automated processes are Io’s responsibility, and in the event of an emergency, she can control the entire vessel. Figureheads tend to come standard-issue to avoid the inescapable issue of space travel: anything with an engine can be potentially used as a WMD. In the event that the Angel gets stuck in a planet’s gravity well and starts to enter the atmosphere, for example, Io will prioritize evacuating every other sophont onboard and gladly go down with the ship, self-destructing in the upper atmosphere to prevent a potentially-disastrous impact on the surface. Figureheads are usually Three Laws-compliant.

•The micrograv areas of the ship are where most of the daily work is conducted. These areas are mostly covered with cargo netting, hand/foot holds, emergency breach patches, fire extinguishers and the occasional screen displaying the outside (you can toggle every window to change your view of what’s outside, but the default display will be whatever’s on the opposite side of the wall it’s on). In addition to learning how to climb ladders and load cargo lifts in zero gravity, space-cadets have to earn their “space legs” by mastering movement in micrograv. Overcoming drop sickness (freefall-induced nausea) and remembering to keep your effects and tools strapped and secured to your person are good starters, as is expanding your mastery of not only hand-eye coordination, but foot-eye as well. See, many spacers will do their micrograv work barefoot, since a boot would get in the way of you using your toes as an additional grasper, a skill that takes some practice, but can be invaluable. Through the magic of generations of genetic modification, volari normally have prehensile hand-like feet for this reason, in fact. Also, learn how to use grandals (“gravity sandals”); essentially just powerful magnets you strap to your soles, and are powered by betavoltaic (yes, atomic) batteries the size of soup cans, strapped to your ankles. Use them to cling to surfaces and walk on walls in micrograv. Won’t really keep your bones or organs safe from the effects of microgav on your body, but it might make certain tasks easier.

•For propulsion, the vessel has eighteen VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket) engines. VASIMR engines are electrothermal thrusters, which use radio waves to ionize and heat an inert propellant (hydrogen being the most widespread), then a magnetic field to accelerate the resulting plasma, generating thrust. The Angel’s eighteen VASIMRs are powered by one of two aneutronic fusion reactors located at the rear of the ship. Meanwhile, in the front, we have twenty chemical RCS thrusters, which are used for maneuvering the vessel. When the *Angel* needs to brake and settle in orbit, or prep for docking with a station, it throttles RCS in one direction, to flip the whole ship backwards and then use the VASIMR thrusters to brake for final approach.

•The Angel’s twelve radiator wings are present to assist with cooling the VASIMR engines, as well as the rest of the heat that the ship generates, a genuine hazard in space.

•For conducting repairs on the ship’s exterior, the Angel has a simple spacecraft known as a “raft”. It looks like OTL’s International Space Station, but is packed with much more advanced technology, and isn’t intended to stay in place. This rudimentary spacecraft is all micrograv and has six small thrusters for maneuvering around. Rafts are modular craft, with no two ever really looking alike. This one here, lovingly nicknamed “Shitcan”, has seven modules. The largest is the airlock, with the rest mostly used for storing tools, handling onboard life-support, steering the thing or running life support; two of the modules each have two sets of robotic arms to assist work crews working outside in their eva suits. While not especially common, rafts are sometimes known to have figureheads onboard, and Shitcan is one such raft; manifesting as a helpful, if self-deprecating, anthropomorphic raccoon, named Scruta.

•Like all IPV’s, the Angel of Io is too big and awkward to enter a planet’s atmosphere and not die a fiery death. Therefore, the captain of the Angel has had the common sense to have at least one IAV (inter-atmospheric vehicle) as a shuttlecraft.

•The shuttlecraft in question is a 2245-model Peregrine - a mid-sized IAV produced by Serrano Interstellar, of Luna. Nicknamed “Lucy!”, the Peregrine is built to navigate low and high orbit, and to enter and fly within atmospheres. Entering an atmosphere for a Peregrine is as easy as falling and not dying, but because of size considerations, Lucy!’s NERVA NTRs (nuclear-thermal rockets) are insufficient for leaving Earth, Venus or Mars’ gravity wells on their own. So upon landing on a planetary surface, Lucy!’s crew have to rent strap-on boosters from the local spaceport, mount them on the Peregrine’s hardpoints, use them to reach the upper atmosphere, fire its dual NERVAs and hit orbit; the boosters then detach and use their remaining fuel to fly themselves back to the spaceport and land themselves. Lucy! also has her own figurehead, Lu, whose avatar changes from slutty half-naked woman to slutty half-naked man (or a mix of the two), depending on who Lu is talking to.

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Little 13
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•To start with, Little 13 is powered by six heavy NERVA thrusters (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). A NERVA engine is a fission propulsion system which uses plutonium fuel rods to heat hydrogen coolant and expel it as reaction mass. To avoid the nuclear reaction in each engine flaring out of control due to neutron flux from its neighbor engines, solid-lead neutron isolation shields are placed between each engine. Advances in materials science allow for clustered modern NTRs to have built-in neutron shielding and not require these sorts of shields, suggesting that these engines were purchased and mounted out of the bargain bin. These engines are bimodal, meaning they serve not only as propulsion systems, but also the primary power plant for the craft. A benefit, since it means the six reactors don’t need to be spun up every time a burn is needed.

•Little 13 has no artigrav systems, because it lacks the infrastructure onboard to power such a thing. The command bridge aboard this ship is closer to the norm for most ships, actually, in that it’s completely in micrograv.

•Little 13 is much faster than Angel of Io - less mass to push, more raw power for pushing; where the *Angel* takes two and a half weeks to reach Mars from Earth, Little 13 only needs a week and a half. When firing its NERVAs at maximum velocity, “down” becomes the direction in which the rocket is firing. This means the ship is designed with micrograv, cgrav and thrustgrav all in mind. (Admittedly, I unintentionally ended up handwaving the Angel’s hab-wheel to not entirely obey the laws of physics when the ship accelerates, so consider this me correcting myself). When the ship is cruising without thrust, everything is micrograv. The central hallway running through the ship’s “stem” is a series of rooms with collapsible stairs and rope ladders next to the open doors. When under full acceleration, the partitions between these rooms become floors, and the ladders and stairs are unfolded to allow for movement up and down the ship. You may have noticed that Little 13 has three rotating hab-mods. These are built on gimbals, and when the ship is accelerating, they are folded down, because “down” is in the direction of the matter getting expelled from the rockets. When the ship stops accelerating and starts cruising (a fuel-saving measure), the modules unfold and begin rotating. Don’t worry, there’s no terrifying three-way ladder-propeller of doom on this ship. In my head, it’s a bit like those crawl-tunnels at a McDonald’s playpen - you grab onto one of three ladders that lead into three of these tubes, and climb your way, feet-first, into the hab module. Yeah, it’s weird. You get used to it. When under acceleration, it’s way easier to get into the folded habitat modules, since you can just walk through a door between the main shaft and the hab-mods.

•While most energy for the ship comes from its bi-modal NERVA NTRs, there are also four medium-sized fission reactors kept onboard as backups. They’re also handy for bartering or pawning if you’re broke. The reactors are modular in nature, and can be ejected from the ship in the event of an emergency. If both reactors in a given module go red, then the whole module can be ejected as well.

•To regulate the heat, we have two large radiator wings, and like with the Angel, we have RCS thrusters to adjust the craft’s position in space. Sidenote: I dunno why fictional spaceships shy away from radiators. They’re like wings or sails. And they’re not just fun - they keep everyone on your ship from being cooked alive from accumulated waste heat. Hey, I didn’t write the laws of thermodynamics.

•If Angel of Io is roughly equivalent to a barque, Little 13’s size makes it the IPV equivalent to a sloop. The crew of Little 13 is currently five veterans and their neko (Homo nekomimi). This is about as many people as is needed to run a ship of this size: you have a commanding officer, pilot, copilot, navigator, engineer, and someone to cook and clean. Little 13 does have an onboard figurehead, known simply as “Thirteen”. Abiding by her programming, Thirteen assists the crew with running the ship’s systems, though seems to enjoy playing with the neko much more, what with it being the only other girl on the ship (Thirteen has no biological sex, obviously, but I guess it really is the thought that counts; neither of the women on this ship are human, so it’s not bad luck according to sailor logic), and has remodeled her avatar to reflect the neko’s feline features.

•Like Angel of Io, Little 13 is unable to land on a planet’s surface. The crew doesn’t have to go down to surfaces very often, but in space, it’s always better to have something and not need it, than to need it and not have it. So, they keep a Super Suncat on standby. The Super Suncat is a larger version of the classic Suncat S2TO (Single-Stage-To-Orbit) IAV. Unlike the Peregrine, the Super Suncat is able to leave a Earth-level gravity well, without additional stages. But man is it a much bumpier ride than the Peregrine. One pilot, six passenger seats, room for 450 kilograms of cargo, and a proportionately-massive NTR.

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Elbie Myarz
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•The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that the Elbie Myarz lacks any rotating hab-mod. This is because the crew of the Myarz is made up entirely of volari, who don’t need gravity to function.

•Bi-modal NTR provides both power and propulsion for the craft.

•Crew quarters are in the two shafts adjacent to the main, central shaft. The Myarz’s crew of ten rest in sleeping bags attached to the walls, alongside various bits of cargo held in place with netting; the crew of the Myarz also often sleep next to machinery, no different from how submarine crews of old would sleep next to armed torpedos, due to the tiny budget for living space.

•The command bridge is midway across the main shaft, and is in the form of eight chairs and workstations attached to the walls. A holographic display of the front of the ship gives the illusion of a “classical” command deck. The back of this hologram, facing towards the front of the ship, says “BRIDGE”, and more or less acts as a curtain separating the command center from the rest of the ship. An additional holo-curtain provides an additional screen and completes the illusion of the bridge being a room.

‧Cargo is stored externally, in 24 very large modules, each with 64 smaller cargo containers inside of them, for a total of 1,536 cargo containers. Each cargo container has a capacity of around ten metric tons, giving the ship the capability to move as much as 15,360 metric tons of bulk cargo on one voyage.

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Vega and Rotkäppchen
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•These are tailsitter S2TO IPV’s. S2TOs are distinguished from the other IPVs in this image, in that they are capable of entering, landing, launching and leaving from a planet’s atmosphere *and* crossing interplanetary distances.

•S2TO’s are the oldest class of IPV, dating to the 1970’s with the American Ares missions to Mars and the Soviet Venera and Niobe missions to Venus. Larger, voidborne IPVs with rotating cgrav sections were first constructed in Earth orbit beginning in the early 1990’s, but S2TO’s remained the most common way to move between planets until the mid-2000’s.

•Despite their versatility, S2TO’s lost favor to voidcraft IPVs for a few very simple reasons. As you can see, the S2TO’s shown here are both much smaller than the voidcraft, because unlike a voidcraft, an S2TO has to obey the tyranny of the rocket equation; you need a lot of thrust to push through an atmosphere and escape a planet’s gravity well (in other words, reach escape velocity); the bigger your rocket, the more thrust, but the more fuel you need; the more fuel you carry, the more thrust you need; oh, and the rocket also has to push its own weight up into orbit. The balance struck in carrying a powerplant big enough to push into orbit (and land), as well as cross interplanetary distances, means that the size of these ships, and the payloads they’re able to haul are limited. Voidcraft are able to mount bigger and more powerful engines, carry bigger payloads, and have shorter travel times. In the heyday of S2TO IPVs, Mars Express colony ships in the 1980’s took 100-150 days to reach the Red Planet from Earth. Modern S2TO IPVs are able to make this journey in “only” 50 days, but voidcraft are able to do it in 17.5 days, at the slowest. Finally, the effects of zero gravity on the human body made the lack of cgrav on S2TO IPVs undesirable. S2TO IPVs remain in service today, but in a diminished capacity.

•Anyway, enough of that history lesson. Both of these ships use high-thrust bi-modal NTR’s as their main propulsion systems. For simple blast-offs into orbit, all one needs is the integral drive and its onboard fuel supply, but for interplanetary voyages, rental boosters are used to get them most or all of the way into orbit, so that fuel can be saved crossing between planets; as any spacer will tell you, “once you’re in orbit, you’re half-way to *anywhere”*.

•Landing for an S2TO is as simple as using RCS thrusters to flip the ship and use the main thrusters to slow the vessel’s descent via retropulsion.

•The command bridge for both of these vessels is a small cockpit near the top of the ship. The windows are not for the cockpit, but to allow natural light in when the ship is in flight - an artifact of a previous era and a vestigial trait of S2TOs. The pressurized habdecks of these ships allow for individual passenger cabins (40 for the Vega, potentially 120 for the Rotkäppchen), large common areas, central storage, a galley, and a solar flare shelter (flare-shielding is common on voidborne spacecraft, but S2TO’s have to budget their weight). While S2TO’s are micrograv for most of their voyages, they’re under thrustgrav when leaving the atmosphere and when accelerating through space, and both of the S2TO’s here have an abundance of straps and harnesses for passengers to secure themselves in the event of thrustgrav.

•While the two S2TOs shown here, Vega and Rotkäppchen are both shown with landing gear planted on solid ground, there are also amphibian S2TOs, which take off and land on water. These are common on worlds with lots of surface water, like Earth, Venus, Neith, Mars, Ganymede, Callisto and Triton, and tend to be much larger than their terrestrial cousins.

•While the Vega doesn’t have a figurehead, the Rotkäppchen actually does have a built-in AI. Named “Rotkäppchen-chan”, her likeness is lovingly presented on the hull of the ship, advertising the ship’s services as a passenger and cargo transport for trips between Venus and Mercury.