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Podship A
typical podship consists of a drive section (here a conversion drive
unit), a computronium node containing virtual passengers,
and a shield unit (here a particle beam array) (click for larger image) |
The podship is a passenger ship created from the premise that the four most influential variables concerning a ship's speed from point A to point B is engine thrust, ship mass, particle shielding and crew survivability against high acceleration. Depending on its creator's tech level and wealth, the podship will usually possess the best available engine, often amat or conversion based, and particle shielding.
The real characteristics of the podship are its effort to lower ship mass and crew life support requirements to an absolute minimum. This is done by dispensing with a crew section altogether, and instead upload the passengers to a computronium section of minimal size (though in many podships this includes space for a virch environment). Podships are members of the larger class of Data-only ships; such ships may carry enough data to recreate entire cultures or the recipes to build a colony from scratch.
In the most simple podships, this is all there is. An engine and a particle shielding system with a computronium core attached. These are often automated, and require outside forces in the origin system to upload the passengers and in the destination system to download and potentially create new bodies for the passengers. This basic type of craft is commonly used for transporting AI and upload passengers who needed to go somewhere where a netlink isn't available. However many other designs are made over this simple minimum, like the Klarion Explorer Seedship.
A design named after the Pyrenian explorer Herren Klarion, the aicratic
council of Pyren of the MPA, offers
amongst other designs this ship to
resident explorer-tourists, malcontents and would-be Klarions, in
exchange for a modest amount of citizen purchase tokens. Though the
requirement of picotech components and a superturing intelligence
limits its use to hypertech polities, it has proved very popular
amongst explorers and emigrants for its speed, comfort and picotech
nanofabs, and has been copied by two dozen polities and traded to many
more.
The ship's main engine is a Green Mind-pattern picotech monopole fusion
drive with an Aron Tech-style amat containment module. Most ship's are
also able to deploy an Emple-Dokcetic-style
picotech drive sail for
back up engine in case the fuel runs low, and a Maynard fractal solar
sail in case of total loss of the active engines. The shielding
consists of an active nano-picotech/plasma combination in addition to
forward deployed passively shielded microdrones scanning the particle
density ahead to ensure an efficient use of the active shielding.
Attached to the engine with a buckytube cable of variable length is the
computronium core that contains the ship's turing systems, the
passenger uplifts and a rich variety of virch environments. The
standard template for the ship utilises a dedicated Lowal-Buddhistic
superturing to control the ship's navigation and piconano systems, with
another turing of appropriate toposophic level to the owner serving as
direct contact to rl and controller of the peripheral crew module
systems.
When in interplanetary mode the ship has a crew module, complete with
all modern luxuries, attached to the computronium core. Though the
exact contents of the module vary from ship to ship, all modules
contain one or more dis/assembler coffins.
When converting to interstellar mode, the passengers proceed to the
coffins, where they are uploaded to the computronium core, and their
bodies disassembled. Once the minds are safely uploaded, the crew
module is scavenged for energy and disconnected. The position and
vector of the module is noted, in case the ship should ever return to
the same system. If the ship isn't going to be coming back, the hab
module can be converted into reaction mass for the engine. The ship is
then ready to cross the gulf between the stars.
When entering a system, and ordered to return to interplanetary mode,
the ship first checks whether it has earlier left a crew module and
whether it is still there. If there is no crew module, it checks
whether the system allows free mining, or whether rights, or the
materials themselves must be purchased. If it has no option but to
purchase the materials, it will do so with the permission of its owner.
However, if allowed to mine the ship is capable of mining kuiper or
insystem belts, or given a minimum of starting mass, of jovian mining
and using its picotech convert these materials into the minerals it
needs to rebuild the crew module. Once the crew module has been
reattached or -created, the coffins create new bodies for the
passengers and the passenger's minds are downloaded.
