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05/10/08(Sat)00:42 No.1698219>>1698119 In the GRIMDARK future, ships are built by autistic cyborgs using 15,000 technology that they don't understand. The ships themselves are cobbled together ore freighters with drive sections which are copies of jet bike engines scaled up a million times, with energy mining drills placed along the sides in a 17th century man'o'war design. Once the functional parts of the ship are built, twice the original mass is added in useless decorations and bling. Once the finishing touches like a giant skull or 1km high eagle statue made out of solid gold are added. Techpriests spend a thousand years praying at every component, switch, and light fixture.
No ship uses the same design or component. Not even within each ship. There's no guaranty that a switch or lever will be interchangeable with the controls in an other room of the same ship. The general layout of the ship can be best described as "mazelike", with endless deadend corridors. Entire sections of the ships can be inaccessible except through teleportation.
Command and control is questionable at best. It's considered a lucky command to have a central bridge, as many ships have one or as many as a hundred bridges each with it's own command staff giving conflicting orders. Other ships have no bridge and simply become space hulks on their maiden voyage. Intership communication is best handled via courier missions and shuttles, as it is unlikely that the bridge (or bridges), fire control or engineering have the radio communication systems built within the same century. Traveling the maze like corridors is ill advised for bands of canibals and bandits roam the halls. |