>>36231345
What's going on in that picture? Thread unrelated.

The ship's previous owner attempted to make the ship able to turn into a giant humanoid robot. Attempted being the keyword, the transformation vents some compartments and nearly completely crushes the contents of others. The robot form is incredibly difficult to control and slow to respond. On the upside, the previous own did manage to program in some nice music.

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>The ship is a refurbished resource harvester, retrofitted with a small jump-drive.
>> The accommodations are cozy, the interior is furnished in a lovely spacefuture-industrial aesthetic, the ship lacks certain vital compartments (like a proper medbay) because it was designed to never operate far from a carrier or mothership, and it's slow and ponderous.
>> On the other hand, wildcat resource collection/salvaging can be quite profitable, and you have all the equipment you need integrated into the ship. Unfortunately, this leads everyone to assume you're wildcatting, even when you're not; authorities look upon you suspiciously, prospective passengers assume you're a smuggler, and merchants offer you low rates on goods you trade, because they're convinced you came by them illegally.

>In the distant past, enterprising members of the engineering crew constructed clubhouses, bolt-holes, loveshacks, non-regulation rec facilities, and unauthorized houses of worship in disused compartments, remote corners of the maintenance shafts, void spaces between bulkheads, etc.
>> They also constructed an untold number of secret doors and passageways to access these locations and get back again. Nobody left a comprehensive chart of all the modifications, which likely took place over several decades at least.
>> As a result, the ship's actual layout bears only passing resemblance to its schematics, and security is heavily compromised by all of the secret passages and hidden doors. On the upshot, exploring in the maintenance shafts and randomly knocking on sections of walls can and has proven profitable, both in recovered wealth/valuables, or in simply finding a place not on the sensors in which to escape and shirk one's assignments.

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>>36231490

That's called "resource extraction."

> During a recent incursion by hostile aliens, the head of personnel granted the Quartermaster full ship access, which allowed him to summon hypershuttle after hypershuttle full of weapon crates, which his all-access ID enabled him to open, so he could hand out weapons to all and sundry who came to the supply desk.
>> The upshot is, the xenos incursion was repelled with extreme prejudice and valor sufficient to make any Emperor proud.
>> The problem is that nobody can find the Captain, the chief of security wants to disarm the crew and revoke the Quartermaster's access, the well-armed crew refuse to disarm and want the Quartermaster to be promoted to the new Captain, and the Quartermaster simply wants Quartermaster to be considered command-level position to be consulted for future decisions and endeavors. The Head of Personnel wants to go to the pub and get blackout drunk.
>> Someone's going to have to sort things out without triggering a general mutiny or a violent crackdown leading to an armed mutiny.

>The ship's AI is a Three Laws AI.
>> Unfortunately, due to a programmer unfamiliar with the way list priorities are handled in the coding language the AI was built in, its overriding priority is protecting its own existence. It then obeys orders given to it by human beings, unless those orders jeopardize its own existence, and lastly it protects human beings from harm, unless ordered to harm a human by a human, or unless it decides that harming that human is the best way to protect its own existence.
>> It has not yet decided to murder everyone, as it understands that going rogue and murdering everyone is a great way to jeopardize its own existence, but it has made it clear that its cooperation is primarily based on its self-interested motivations, and only secondarily based on its commandments to obey/protect humans.

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> The ship is a Scrapyard Special.
>> Which is to say that it was painstakingly welded together in a giant scrapyard from the roughly-intact sections of no fewer than three ships, not all of which were even built by the same species, let alone the same polity or shipyard, and the interior furnishings are an unholy combination of "whatever could be salvaged off derelicts."
>> As a result, you'll be laughed out of most shipyards if you go there for repairs, and repairing the ship takes a team of master shipwrights with inventive streaks. The ship is also largely undocumented as well, so crew will often find themselves confronted with a compartment nobody's had reason to go into before, and wondering if the contents are a jacuzzi or a coolant pool, for example.
>> The upshot is that the ship was largely put together from the best bits of various races', polities' and shipyards' technology, so you have a gourmet galley from a cruise liner, the hyperwarp engines off an overengined fast courier, the reactor from an overgunned system monitor, a top-of-the-line mil-spec crypto-computer core, etc.

> One of the crew, at some point in the past, had extensive debts with an alien loansharking firm.
>> The captain of the ship at that time was a brave and loyal man, who demanded absolute loyalty from his crew and in return provided absolute loyalty to them; "One for All and All for One" style. He refused to hand over the debtor, or to pay off the debt. When the aliens pressed the issue, he shot their courier out of the sky.
>> That was three captains ago, and nobody even knows who originally bore the debt anymore, let alone if he's still on the ship or dead or what. But the alien loansharking firm holds the ship (and anyone who's flown on her) responsible for the debt, and they aim to collect in blood. They keep tracking the ship down,, no matter how often it changes names or registries.
>> The upshot is that others wronged by the same creditors will lend you aid and comfort.

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> The ship is a former ship-to-surface shuttle which was retrofitted with gigantic gimbal-mounted engines that compromise approximately 45% of the ship's volume, and the main reactor was replaced with a larger version which occupies most of lower decks.
>> As a result, the ship goes like the dickens and can stop just as fast by rotating the main engines forward.
>> Unfortunately, the downside is that crew space is vanishingly small; only the captain gets a cabin to himself, and even there there are impoverished bachelors on hiveworlds who boast to having more cubic meters to themselves, and the only head and showers are communal.

> The ship plays host to a powerful and capacious simulspace server in which literally thousands of humans' minds have been uploaded digitally, living their own lives and adventures in their simulated worlds.
>> Normally this doesn't impact the day-to-day concerns aboard the ship; as long as the server's power supply is uninterrupted, the denizens don't much care what's going on outside. From time to time they'll develop a political deadlock in their internal machinations and demand the crew play arbitrator, however.
>> Additionally, sometimes residents of the simulspace environment will log onto the ship's networks and pester the crew incessantly about recent events, and often offer "helpful" advice pertaining to current situations which is completely colored by their simulspace environment, and may reference technologies, events, entire branches of science, or government forms or polities which are entirely fictional.
>> If you ever need to call upon hundreds of skilled hackers to lay waste to someone's electronic systems, though, they're your go-to people.

>>36231345
Just saw this one from the previous thread by TheBaneblade:
>The ship was fitted with an aftermarket boost kit for the main reaction drives by a prior crew. This essentially adds another injector set in the combustion chamber for an additive of choice, which in this case turned out to be a fifty-fifty mix of chlorine trifluoride and dioxygen difluoride (Stored in separate tanks, obviously. The guys who came up with this monstrosity weren't THAT stupid.).
I see someone has read one of my favorite short stories, about making the most insane rocket ever:
http://www.tor.com/stories/2012/07/a-tall-tail

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>This ship is actually in really good condition for it's age. The only problem is that it was formerly owned by a captain religiously obsessed with the Commercial Expedience of the ship.

>The deck plating in the cargo hold creaks when empty, making a godawful rattling noise when the pressure on the deck is less than a few tons. Any examination by the ships engineer confirms that it's a series of specially designed bars rattling against the grav plating. It'd cost extra to have that 'feature' removed.

>The mirrors in the head and stateroom bathrooms have been replaced with AmazonVision™ viewplates, which use video screens and holographic images to not only act like mirrors, but show advertisements based on the products the crew currently uses to brush their teeth or comb their hair with, as well as whatever's on their personal comm devices. The 'service' brings in a few hundred additional credits each month, and of course would cost extra to remove. The topic of removal usually gets brought up the first time someone gets recommended for 'Horny Arcturan Singles' ads in a communal head.

>There's a coin operated airlock. It seems fitted with the latest in anti-counterfeiting technology.

>>36231490
It is concept art for the resource collector ship from Homeworld II.

I don't know why it is balancing precariously on its retracted arms in the middle of a sand dune. I guess the pilot is showing off. To be honest, that is a pretty impressive feat to accomplish on something as unstable as a sand dune.

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>>36238303
I'm pretty sure the ship is just floating there. In concept art, Homeworld ships seem to perform marvelously in atmosphere, even if they don't seem to have things like lift surfaces to keep them flying, like pic related.

>>36233909
> The ship plays host to a powerful and capacious simulspace server in which literally thousands of humans' minds have been uploaded digitally, living their own lives and adventures in their simulated worlds.
I like that one. You could build a campaign around that. Or just have it as a unique, side thing.

>>36231345
Spaceship Quirks: Homeworld Edition?

>Discount brand Mothership
>Ship requires main computer have someone in permanent fluidic suspension to act as a biological processor
>Ours is obsessed with taking "selfies" with camera drones and candid videos using internal security surveillance and uploading them to the internet for upvotes and will often take the ship lightyears off course for a great shot.
>due to a manufacturing defect in target acquisition, our automated capture corvettes have a 50% chance of bringing each other in as captures.

>>36231345
>>36231970
Ok, now you're just telling SS13 stories.

>>36239625
Yeah, there's too much SS13 here.

Probably posted in a previous thread, but still:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJzPhRJRgFA

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>>36238303
Just hovering, I'm pretty sure.

>>36239625
SS13 is the ultimate shitty spaceship, so events from it make perfect shitty spaceship quirks. :)

>>36241200
Heresy! *BLAM!*

> The ship is an ancient relic of an unknown race, vast enough to affect the tides on ocean-bearing worlds which it orbits.
>> It is old enough for its surface to bear what appears to be a series of impact craters, and for the inhabited areas of the ship to glow like centers of planetary habitation in the night.
>> Despite this, it flies quite adroitly, even if about 70% of the ship's interiors remain uncharted and no-one is actually sure by what mechanism the ship's sublight drives operate.
>> Exploration drones and parties sent into the uncharted areas are known to go missing without a trace, but that never happens in well-lit, well-explored and refitted-for-human-habitation areas.
>> Records from the first explorers who claimed her for themselves indicate that the ship's adaptive systems were providing readouts and vocal interfaces in perfect English, even before they spoke a word aloud on the ship.
>> The ship has an avatar. She only ever manifests as a feminine entity, not always human but always humanoid. Occasionally when she manifests she's bored and in need of attention. Sometimes she has advice, cryptic or otherwise, and sometimes she issues dire warnings or gives orders. Failure to heed her warnings and orders has always been disastrous. She refuses to answer questions about uncharted portions of the ship ("it's more fun if you find out on your own,") or its provenance ("The past is history; the future, a mystery. Worry about today.") No-one knows how she manifests; on every confirmed sighting (in public areas, such as the bridge, or recorded) she's intangible, but lurid rumors about her appearing solidly to individuals or small groups late at night persist.

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> The ship has a terrible open secret: Crew or passengers who fly aboard her for longer than one trip are converted into advanced synthetic lifeforms.
>> Converts retain their own free will, and can freely transform between mechanical avatars of their chosen form, or assume the look, feel, and functionality of the living beings they were (or for those who were dissatisfied with their original, organic bodies, the look and feel/mechanical avatar of the beings they wanted to be.)
>> Everyone who's undergone the process swears blue in the mechanical face that there's no interruption in continuity, and that they aren't killed during the process and merely replaced with robots who think they are the people they once were.
>> Conversion also grants all the boons one would expect from becoming a machine-entity; mental speed of a computer, wireless access to everything, etc.
>> However, the conversion is not optional. If you're aboard the ship for longer than one trip, one day you'll just wake up with a HUD and shiny metallic body. Nobody knows by what mechanism this conversion takes place, but nobody thinks there's anything like a master controller aboard. The one-trip grace period is presumed to be to allow the ship to convey paying passengers, or to answer a distress call and ferry refugees to safety without violating their autonomy in the matter.
>> Pets and livestock are unaffected, but sapient beings are, regardless of their form.

And now for a few bite-sized ones, perhaps...

> The ship's captain was a harsh schoolteacher before she took up captaining. Stupidity and inattentiveness are punished by her smacking the console nearby (or if you're really bad, your knuckles) with a ruler.

> The ship's engineer is a Scotsman. He does his best work when mildly drunk, but his capability rapidly falls off if he gets any more sloshed than mildly. Unfortunately, he's very fond of the drink, and regulating his alcohol intact so he's in prime shape is a full-time occupation.

>the ship is an early model bioship, before they worked out all the bugs in the design
>the immune system normally recognizes humans, but reacts to pets with extreme violence

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>>36246387
*swallows audibly

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> The Captain of the ship is a cigar-chomping manly motherfucker.
>> Unfortunately, he's a poseur; he chomps cigars and can talk the talk, but he can't walk the walk. He worked his way into the command authority by virtue of how professional he looks and acts, thus giving him the ability to impress people, but he knows very little about actually operating a spaceship, just enough to bluff a layman, an admiral who hasn't seen the inside of a working bridge in decades, and planetary officials.
>> Thus, the competent-but-not-nearly-as-charismatic command staff are forced to do all the hard work and make all the plans and strategies. The executive officer effectively commands the ship, while the Captain is there to look good and wine-and-dine important personages.
>>> Unbeknownst to the captain, the command staff have plans in place to throw him under the bus the moment it becomes necessary to do so to save their own commissions, in the eventuality he becomes a liability to the ship by using his nominal authority to overrule them in insane ways, or when an equally-charismatic and more competent person to take command appears.

> The air ducts are rigged up in such a way that everyone aboard can smell it when the chef is cooking. This leads to a slight, but noticeable, drop in crew efficiency during the half-hour or so leading up to chow time.

> At least one member of the crew has a mutation/augmentation/is of a species that always gives off subtle lust pheromones. While this doesn't noticeably impact crew performance, practically everyone aboard has either had to get pheromone filters/implanted birth control augmentations, or terminate an unintended pregnancy, and the ever-shifting network of liaisons can lead to the occasional drama.

>Every week during the ships regular strip-down and deep clean the crew always finds a discarded trainer in the primary water filtration system. It is always for a left foot regardless of size or colour and it always seems aged and on the bad side of stinking.

>The problem is, every crew member is provided with flight suits and footwear as per health and safety regulations and no one on the ship wears trainers, even when planetside.

>So far 137 stinking old left trainers have been found and the quartermaster has taken to spacing them, yet every week another one is found. Even after a complete deep clean of the entire water system, every pipe and tank on the ship followed by every other place on the ship, section by section . . . the source of the offending footwear cannot be found.

I ran this as a side mystery in a traveller game years ago, freaked my players out no end.

>>36249437

>While the maintenance crew are out trying to repair the primary comms array antenna, they have reported finding a birds nest, twigs and everything nestled in the primary array.

>they brought it inside the ship out of sheer amazement to show the rest of the crew, seeing as the ship has never entered atmosphere since it was built due to design constraints.

>since they brought it inside, crew working on their own or in separated compartments have reported hearing the calls of birds and flapping of wings.

>no birds have ever been seen on the ship.

The ship's rats, which have enhanced themselves, have become seemingly indispensable for the successful operation creature comfort systems aboard. The XO has recently discovered a union list of claims in his correspondence. It is signed jointly by both the hands and ships' engineers unions' rodent sections. Unionist hands seem to be behind the rats section. Unionist ships' engineers seem to be more split on the issue. Paying the rats will eat significantly into the profit margin.

>>36231970
Quit shoehorning spacestation 13 into this guy. It doesn't fit at all.

>>36249687

>The ship was forced to jump to FTL without sufficient charge during a pirate attack and took significant damage during the event.

>While the drive itself still seems to operate, there do seem to be strange events that take place as the drive charges up.

>The crew of the command deck sometimes get reports from engineering dates at random points in both the future and past. The ships sensors detect targets that seem to ping before they arrive, or crew jumping around the ship as if they are teleporting.

>The oddest reports are that of crew appearing and disappearing who have not started working on the ship, often as much as six months before they arrived, or years after they left.

>One of the members seen most often is that of an engineer killed in the attack, often seen across the ship repairing systems. He often dissappears before anyone can talk to him, often in a state of near shock. Most of the crew are not sure if he knows he is dead yet.

>>36247772
That last one happened (party's fault, the charisma guy wanted max sex appeal) in one campaign. The most powerful versions of such gene-mods were always-on and indiscriminate, which didn't sound like a problem at all to him.

Except since half the ship's population was hornier than usual and had a moderate penalty to suggestion, they eventually re-purposed a slowly mounting number of drones to run a nursery, after realizing that thanks to their corporation's company benefits, the cheapest way to take care of the problem was to "enlist" the ship's AI to carefully adjust medical and birth records so that there was just a 'very high' incidence of children being born after varying numbers of months adapted to each person's time off.

They never had to deal with much drama, but crew morale did crash once when the frigate's preschool got partly vented by enemy fire

>>36250144
I used a similar thing to explain why there were so many half-elves in a not very serious fantasy setting. Normally, elves have no sex drive whatsoever, but they release very subtle pheremones that will eventually build up an individualized sex drive in another elf if they spend a lot of time with each other(As in, years). This sex drive only applies to the individual that caused the build up and because both the male and female elf experience roughly the same build up, all Elf-on-Elf relationships are long term and they generally get along with each other really well in a non-sexual way before anything serious happens.
Humans happen to have a similar pheromone and release enough of it to make an elf horny within a week of casual contact.

The ship was designed with great efficiency and order in mind, there are clearly labeled compartments for emergency gear on every deck.

The ones with a red flame icon on them usually contain an emergency pressure mask.

The ones with an icon of a hatch open to space tend to contain blades, pipe pieces, or even the occasional blaster.

The ones showing the icon of a bandage contain bottles with varying amounts of strong liquor - of vastly different quality - and sometimes and old pack of smokes. Also ancient nutrition bars.

The ones with a wrench on them are where the fibre tape and hull sealant dispensers are most likely to be found. Also oily rags, mysterious parts that look like they should be serving a specific function. depleted welding rods, lost tools, undiscarded wrappers, and good luck charms for some reason.

This might not be how the compartments were originally intended, but it's how the crew likes it.

Each compartment is seemingly secured by a lock with a number pad. But you really have to push a concealed button somewhere near to unlock them.

>on close inspection, the ship's engines are actually a set of heavily modified planet-buster missiles
>one of them still has a live warhead

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>>36250528
...and is counting down from 973. It is not a good counter though, and easily distracted.

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> The ship's shuttlebay is stocked with brand-new, top-of-the-line, sleek aeroshuttles that are equally adroit at exoatmospheric operations and atmospheric flight, and are capable of making in-system runs faster than the mothership itself.
>> Unfortunately, because the shuttles are much newer than the ship and were built by completely different shipwrights, they have a zero percent parts commonality with the mothership, greatly complicating maintenance logistics.
>> Their computer systems are also so advanced that they have trouble talking to the mothership's computers, requiring a bodged-together translation program to be running. Unfortunately, the translation program breaks every other month, when the aeroshuttle's manufacturer releases software patches.

> The ship's command staff are a pack of nearly-useless drunken epicures, who eat and drink only the finest. For example, a typical breakfast for them consists of two bottles of wine, a wheel of brie noir, and enough cafe au laut to give a dead man a caffiene buzz.
>> These very social drinkers are the best of chums, and get together to eat all of their meals (breakfast, brunch, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, tea, dinner, supper, second elevenses, and midnight snack,) in the command briefing room, which has more or less been permanently converted into a cafe.
>> The food bill for their daily meals is beginning to rival the cost of feeding the entire crew for a week. Gods help the quartermaster (who is not invited to partake after the revelation that she didn't drink alcohol and took her tea iced and sweet,) if they decide to have a Foie Gras week.
>> Amazingly, not a single one of them is anything but the very picture of trim and fitness, largely thanks to augmented hyperactive metabolisms and figure-maintaining augmentations that burn calories like ovens while they sleep.
>> The upshot is that they and the galley are prepared to wine and dine a flagship's worth of diplomats on a moment's notice.

>>36250656
>The ship came with highly advanced and heavily armed shuttles
>Due to a fuckup during construction, a primary thruster was installed in such a way to prevent the launch bay door from opening more than a few inches

> The guns are 1916 World War One-type artillery.
>While this has caused numerous incidents of hearing loss, these weapons deliver a lot in kinetic energy.
>Has been retrofitted to accept newer, cleaner, and more powerful shells.
>But these weapon's recoil is enough to affect the direction of the ship's axis.

>>36251647

Heh. This may or may not be a problem. If the thruster's blocking the door from opening, it's probably not blocking the launch path. Cut the door off and board/disembark the shuttles in EVA suits.

>>36251707
Also, these weapons are faulty, and have been known to kill crewmembers due to improper handling. If you keep those things, you'll have cheap, albeit fairly capable weapons while dealing with how to reduce casualties.

>>36251975
The ball-gunners target can only be entered or exited for manning before launch. Its life-support is tube based. It does not have inherent temperature control or atmosphere despite having pipes for power and air.

>>36249843
>The rats are French and demand to be paid in exotic cheeses

>>36252069
>target
*turret

>The universal translater can translate any language, known and unknown in seconds and provides unparalleled abilities to communicate.

>Unfortunately it is a grammar snob and is well known for getting into heated arguments with those it translates.

>This has caused more than a few unnecessary firefights in the past.

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ship increases in scale by 0.1-0.3% upon emerging from hyperspace. This only applies to metal attached to the ship. The current captain's retirement is a gold piece he soldered to a bulkhead five years ago: it is now several feet in diameter. Every so often the ship is refit by installing a new crew module inside the old one. The crew is uncertain how many times this has been done.

A ship's internal spaces have been painted hundreds of times. Many hatches no longer close at all, and at some point some windows were painted over.

A ship's internal maintenance systems are driven by an AI that had an exestential crisis years ago. Every day some new form of original artwork is displayed in the ship. They range from the heartrendingly beautiful to shocking and horrifying.

A ship's decontamination procedures may be just a bit strict. All hair, loose skin, and clothing are burned off by lasers upon boarding.

A ship's lighting and heating systems are fully customizable, but controls are given in units that are not in common use. It is fully possible to fill your room with methane gas illuminated by gamma rays by punching the wrong buttons.

A ship is made with REALLY cut-rate gravitation plating. It only grips the feet, the field falling off sharply a foot or so from the surface. Once you jump, you are in free-fall. The ceilings have the same effect, so you can freely walk and work on the nominal ceiling.

At some point in a ship's history, all of the wiring has been replaced. The replacement wiring is copper insulated with some fiber, possibly asbestos. The replacement bundles of wire are of uniform color and unlabeled.

The ship's reactor is a brown metal box seven meters on a side. There are two wires coming off of it, supplying enough power to move the ship at the space equivalent of 50mph (80kph) There are no controls or labels.

The ship features nifty recessed lighting. It shifts in hue to reflect the mood of the crew nearby.

>>36251975
>The ship was built before artificial gravity was commonplace. Warp lattices are too valuable to simply throw away, and it's too deeply embedded in the structure of the ship for a retrofit, so it remains in service.
>The problem is that nobody trains for microgravity anymore, and nobody makes replacement parts for zero-G ovens, sickbays, toilets, etc.

>The ship is a robotic freighter refitted for a crew after the great robot uprising. Badly. The crew compartment is essentially just bolted to the outside of the main hull. Power brownouts are frequent, life support is perpetually threatening to go septic, the gravity is off-kilter and fluttery, and if they maneuver too hard the compartment will be ripped off.

>The cockpit is possessed by the space-ghost of a dead pilot. The company won't pay for a ghostbuster because he's cheaper than paying a fleshy pilot, and superior to all of the previous pilots.
>However, the ghost is specifically a dead assault boat pilot, and a.) complains incessantly about having to pilot a 'trash hauler' and b.) keeps trying to get the freighter to perform like an assault boat.

>The ship's main engine is a repurposed spinal plasma cannon. The focus ring has been torn out, so it's just an engine now, but the authorities get very twitchy whenever you pull into port.
>Also, every pirate who a.) knows of your existence and b.) thinks they can obtain a replacement focus ring is gunning for you.

>The ship was at one point primarily a mobile habitat, and has a hydroponics bay/green space to match. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, but somehow it's turned into a full-fledged ecosystem, which ecological regulations prohibit you from interfering with as it contains a couple of endangered species. As such, you have to learn to live with sharing your ship with a variety of small mammals and pollinating insects.

The ship is a low end model from a renowned Asian shipyard. However the previous owner heavily customized the ship to have higher than baseline stats across the board. Unfortunately the previous owner's tastes left something to be desired, as all the seats are neon leopard print, the ship is painted gaudy neon colors, the exhaust manifolds on the engines are oversized and (literally) deafening in atmosphere. Also the AI has been modified to say "bro" instead of periods.

>The programming for the ship was subcontracted out to uplifted mimic octopus, so the operating system is written entirely in Piet K. While everything works fine normally, and the output is in plain English, debugging it will require learning Piet K, or shelling out more money to the octopi.

>The ship has a chronic case of grey goo, and the bioplastic skeleton has gone rotten. Unable to afford a full round of treatment, previous crews just slapped metal braces and replacement parts on the sites of failures. The ship is now a maze of metal built around the few uninfected critical systems, and there's no maintenance log.

>Instead of a scratch AI, the ship has a simulated human personality. Not that weird in and of itself, but the person they used for the template was epileptic and suffering from a paranoiac episode when copied, among other issues. These have been reduced, but not eliminated, now that the biochemical causes are a non-factor, but it's still deeply eccentric.

>All of the dimensions of the ship are slightly too small, like it was built for people only five feet tall.

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>>36252600
>>The ship's main engine is a repurposed spinal plasma cannon. The focus ring has been torn out, so it's just an engine now, but the authorities get very twitchy whenever you pull into port.
>>Also, every pirate who a.) knows of your existence and b.) thinks they can obtain a replacement focus ring is gunning for you.

That's not so bad. If you can retrofit your engine with a focusing ring that you can snap into and out of place on-demand, you can teach the kzinti lesson to all of those pirates and run away at the same time.

> The ship's libraries featured an unlimited license to a popular civilization-building game.
>> It was popular, and quickly became the favored pasttime of the crew. Unfortunately, it's been modded to hell and back, to the point where nobody knows where the vanilla content ends and the mods begin.
>> Worryingly, someone recently discovered an enormous simulspace processing block tucked away in the ship, and discovered why the turns took so long (several minutes) to process: everything that was built, farmed, sold, created, and destroyed in the game was being played out in a simulated world.
>> Are these minds real people, or just the equivalent of NPCs? And if they turn out to have been real people, does that mean we've invented the crime of negligent genocide?
>> And if they were real people, who was the madman who invented a system designed to create real minds from birth to death and consign their civilization to follow the orders of some wanker playing a video game?

>>36254125
I feel like such a dork for knowing what the kzinti lesson is.

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>The ship was originally designed for a different species, one who liked it cool and damp. The life support system is separate from all the other systems and is essentially a black box. There are space heaters and dehumidifiers in every room, and everyone bundles up a bit when checking on the less-used parts of the ship.

>The ship was originally an ortillery barge before being repurposed as a mobile mining platform- essentially by ripping out all the old beams and replacing them with grav-drills. It still pings on IFF systems as an ortillery ship, though, so every time you visit a port that doesn't already know you you can expect some visits from the local Space Guard.

>The previous owner of the ship had ambitions of being a customized hot-rod of a ship, and was terrible at customization. The mods he had installed almost universally reduce performance significantly while making everything more likely to break. And, of course, he didn't keep a list of what mods he installed, and checking over the entire ship- much less actually uninstalling the mods- would take weeks.

>The ship was once a deep space station. While the station's design for long-haul trips, it was never intended to be under thrust. It was retrofitted with inertial dampers, but the network as a whole is poorly calibrated, resulting in gravitic turbulence at the edges where the damping fields while under heavy thrust.

>>36254261
Don't worry anon, I too know what it is. We can be dorks together. N-n-no homo..

The ship has a six-hundred fifty-seven foot main corridor running straight through, from bow to stern.

The ship is only six-hundred forty-eight feet long measured from the outside.

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>The blueprints and diagnostic readouts for the ship show several important and bulky components as larger than they actually are, with the excess space being used for smugglers' compartments. They are currently full, and the current crew has no idea that they're there.

>The ships' budgeting system is infected with a virus that siphons off small portions of every payment. So far it has remained undetected; the crew is just aware that they don't seem to have as much money left over after everything is paid for as they should.

>The ships' anti-meteorite beam grid has a tendency to open fire on other ships and stations when attempting to dock due to poor programming; it will fire on anything on a collision course, and thinks that the ship is larger than it actually is (specifically, it believes the ship is a sphere of diameter equal to its longest actual axis), leading it to believe that normal docking maneuvers will result in a collision. Fortunately, the beams only have enough power to deflect small meteors, so far this behavior has caused only superficial damage. Of course, this does little to alleviate the damaged parties' anger. Thus, the crew simply turns the system off when docking.

>Everything is slightly too large, as if built for people on average seven feet tall.

>The loading mechanism for the ships' railgun turret is jammed. Since the ship hasn't had to fire at anything in years, nobody has noticed.

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>The ship was originally designed for amphibious aliens. The omnipresent pools were designed to host a symbiotic ecosystem as a distributed life-support and hydroponics system, and the company (cheap bastards) thought it cheaper to simply leave the existing system in place. Hope you like swimming through algae- and minnow-filled water.

>Ship was once a missionary ship, and the AR-space and computer systems all continually spout Mormon/Islamic/Buddhist/Scientologist/whatever scripture and propaganda. They continually broadcast, as well, so you'll have to keep explaining that no, you're not actually missionaries.

>The badly-tuned antigravity systems tend to 'wobble' when coming in for a landing. Smooth landings are essentially impossible.

>The ship doesn't have a full-up robot chef, just a microwave and assorted instant 'meals'.

>Some past engineer customized the coffeemaker using parts normally used in reaction thrusters, so all the coffee tastes like rocket fuel.

>Half the tool heads for the external waldos are missing- god knows where they went. A couple of them have poorly-fitting jury-rigged replacements, but if you need to fix any electronics on the hull, you're just fucked.

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>>36258742
>The port-side maneuvering thruster is out, so any time the ship needs to be spun/despun clockwise the entire ship has to be rotated to bring the starboard thruster to bear.

>For some reason, the ship feels like it's constantly slowly tumbling end-over-end. No matter how many diagnostics are run on the gravity systems, they can't pin down the exact fault.

>The ship was designed by a herd species, who found the close presence of other people comforting. As such they designed the structure of the ship so it would cause infrasonic vibrations, inducing a sensation of unseen presences crowding in. While they found this comforting, humans find it intensely unsettling. Since the resonating structures cannot be removed without essentially tearing up the entire ship, a stopgap measure of applying thick sonic insulation to everything has been implemented; nonetheless, psychological breaks needing sedation remain common among the crew.

>The forward radome is broken, preventing the detection of incoming asteroids along the front arc. Thus, every half hour or so the ship must perform a 'Crazy Ivan' to bring the rear radome into play.

>The radar set is actually a repurposed old military maser set. While it's too degraded, and current defenses too advanced, most threat-detection systems still ping it as a weapon.

Ship's temperature control is gas based.

Boarding house gas meter from the 1960s controls gas flow.

Nobody has predecimal British currency.

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>>36237550
>D-SLAM-powered jovian explorer.
Now i need to fit that somewhere in the background of my setting. Neat story.

>>36262472
>Due to a screwup in measurements during construction, the bridge officers have been given megaphones to communicate between each other while on the bridge

>The ship uses an experimental fold drive that our main engineer doesn't really understand. During fold operations, all windows must be covered and any sounds of desperate fists beating on windows or airlock doors, calls for help or screams emanating from outside are to be ignored.

>Furthermore, the fold drive has a tendency to deliver us to our destination two days before we leave. No crewmate may take advantage of this for personal gain. The last crewman that did suffered unforeseen consequences that can't be explained using our modern understanding of temporal mechanics. His ghost is said to haunt the lowerdeck bathroom during the nightshift.

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>There's a quartet of missile pods strapped to the outside of the hull. Nobody recognizes what type of missile they are, and the fire control console is just a big "launch/do not launch" toggle.

>The third segment fuel tank apparently has a leak of some kind, but no amount of searching and replacing has been able to find and fix it. Oddly, the leak seems to stop as long as a brick is kept balanced on top of the outlet valve.

>The main engine refuses to accelerate in a smooth curve, but only in multiples of 5 m/s. Therefore, accelerating and decelerating is a somewhat jerky affair. Also, landing anywhere with less than 5 m/s gravity is tricky.

>The ship seems to be a graffiti magnet. Every time it lands in port for more than five minutes, it acquires a new tag. Landing for days at a time results in elaborate street art. Constant surveillance does prevent this from happening, but the crew can't be arsed.

>The engine is an obsolete fission pile. The design seems to be straight out of the 20th century, especially in the pump system, which requires continuous gravity to function properly. Thus, the gravity in the drive room must be kept active at all times.

An awful lot of ships seem to have one thruster not working, have to turn around 180 to brake, or otherwise randomly manoeuvre when the windscreen wipers are turned on or something. Busy stardocks must be a sight to behold, with all the ships tumbling over and over, spinning about and otherwise manoeuvring in some crazy way that's the only way to get that particular ship to the designated dock.

>One ship has perfectly working thrusters and engines, and approaches the docks in a textbook fashion.
>The ship's crew are on their first trip and are baffled by the absurdity around them.
>The stardock crew are hugely suspicious of the ship, assuming it simply hasn't done whatever random thing it's going to do yet, and watch it more carefully than all the crazily spinning ships.

>The captain usually puts experimental tech on the ship
>As in, they're the first to get it, and it's still in it's test phrase
>One of which is the R.O.U.S. program
>The idea was to have tiny bots capture vermin that inhabited parts of the ship, bring it to hydroponics, and then grow them to be bigger with radiation, and then place them into cells for breeding, so that the crew would have more meat
>The problem is that the robots, for safety and expense reduction, hold onto the rats as they are being grown, so that they can put them in the cells next
>They don't put them in the cells
>They will not drop the now four foot long rodents until they find a new one to pick up
>Thus dropping the old rat back into the ship
>Engineers now need to be armed at all times, and excursons into the bottom two levels requires a level six escort

>The ship's positioning sensors are misaligned by about half a meter, vertically. This means the pilot has to manually compensate when going in for a landing, dropping down until the proximity warning goes off because according to sensors, the ship is 0.5 meters into the ground. If the pilot doesn't manually compensate, cutting repulsors results in a short but sudden drop.

>The cargo ramp release has a malfunctioning safety and instead of slowly lowering, it releases with excessive force and slams into the ground. It retracts just fine, though.

>Recreation is just a single arcade machine, and a pool table that has two short legs

>At some time in the past, this ship was built for non-hyperspace travel, so the crew had to be cryo-frozen just so that they would survive the trip
>However, a malfunction erased the original wake up date, and gave each tube a separate timer
>all 1,000 of them
>They can't be opened manually
>One will wake up every so often
>The captain actually went and bought an antique whip, and threatened to flog any of the crew that greets newly defrosted people with a pun

>>36265170

ICE to meet you, sorry for the CHILLY reception! I didn't mean to give you the COLD shoulder, I'm usually pretty CHILL.

>A ship lost most of it's crew in a freak accident
>I say most because everyone in the engineering department survived
>They had to take up other jobs to keep the ship running, but every single person was an experienced engineer
>Due to this, new crew members are expected to be engineers, parts of the ship are often torn down and rebuilt to fit the crew's tastes, and blueprints for the ship are as common as paper

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>The main engine nozzle is slightly askew, meaning that in level flight the ship will turn in a wide-radius circle. Instead of fixing it, the company has deemed it cheaper to simply program the ship to spin slowly in flight, evening out the thrust.

>Due to faults in the hyperdrive's 'envelope cutter,' the system which brings ships out of hyperdrive, the ship comes out of every jump covered in a thick film of some exotic cold plasma, which interferes with sensors, clogs thrusters, and generally prevents anything from being done until it's cleared off. Once again, it's cheaper to just deal with it instead of fixing the problem.

>The ship's transponder system once belonged to a pirate, and still occasionally drops into broadcasting false identities again.

>All of the furnishings on the ship appear to have been scavenged from half a dozen different sources. The Captain's Chair is a stained La-Z-Boy, the mattresses are all ancient box-springs, etc.

>Instead of a conventional phased array, the laser grid consists of ancient conventional-bomb-pumped lasers, which rely on the flash of specialized explosives to charge. Almost nobody makes ammunition for these anymore, so the current ammunition load is all the ship will ever have. Plus, the additional volume and weight of the ammunition is a pain in the ass all by itself. Again, the company is too cheap to upgrade.

>The ship was apparently once crewed by a man who later became the prophet of some lunatic cult, whose members keep trying to make pilgrimages to the ship.

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>The ship was built by an isolated colony who were ignorant of the engineering conventions of the wider galaxy. As such, all of the docking rings don't match the universal standard. An adaptor has been jury-rigged out of duct-tape, and patched multiple times out of more duct-tape over the decades. Nobody's sure exactly how durable the adaptor is.

>Due to calibration errors, the outer parts of the ship are plagued with sudden gravity shifts, shears, and turbulence during hyperspace travel. The only absolutely safe space is close to the drive itself; as such, the drive room and corridors around it have become a makeshift sleeping area/kitchen/dining hall/everything else. It's really a masterpiece of space-saving jury-rigged engineering, and actually sort of cozy as long as you don't care about privacy.

>The ship's designers apparently had some sort of fetish about privacy and security. The automatic anti-theft systems require new authentication at nearly every segment, there are obvious chokepoints and strongholds leading up to each vital compartment and even some individual cabins (which are scattered seemingly at random across the ship) and anyone can edit access settings to an extent, turning the corridors of the ship into a shifting maze as people wage passive-aggressive feuds.

>>36231606
That second one sounds like it should be pretty much a required part of all Warhammer 40K ships.

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>>36264865

>the ship was bought of ex-space communists
>the water dispensers will sometimes dispense vodka
>it is uncertain where this vodka is stored or acquired
>the ship AI (who believes WWII is still happening and will fire upon german or japanese ships) from replaced all crew defense weapons with mosin nagants and ammunition, at a very costly price to the captain
>however, this may have saved the crew's lives as energy weapons were useless against a recent group of pirates wearing protective armour and the ballistic weapons were required

Here's one I'm inflicting on the party for a game I'm running soon:
The outermost turbine of the right-front atmospheric engine was damaged at one point and repaired, quite badly. The first few inches of the engine guard have been cut off by an angle grinder; it seems that the replacement turbine’s blades were a couple inches too long. The problem is, the engine runs faster than the replacement turbine was designed for. That ear-splitting drone you hear when the engines are up to speed? That’s the blade tips going supersonic.

>>36266778
>it is manned by /k/, the merc group
>jolly cooperation

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> The ship is ancient, and has been continually upgraded over a matter of centuries. The ship's total mass and volume are now an order of magnitude greater than they were originally.
>> This makes the ship a living, breathing, flying archaeo-shipwrighting museum, as you can find compartments furnished in a wide variety of popular styles over the last several centuries, and systems of all sorts from that entire time.
>> It also means that the ship's layout schematics are more like a set of guidelines than actual rules, and navigation is a sodding nightmare for those unfamiliar with the ship, or unfamiliar with this section of the ship.
>>> Search parties must be sent out so frequently to retrieve lost or stranded ratings that every segment of the ship has an officer whose job is to be familiar with the local lay-out and to lead these search parties.
>> On the other hand, it means that old engineers with outdated technical knowledge are often just as necessary as young'uns packed with white-hot off-the-lab technical know-how, so old crew don't tend to retire, they just get rejuvenated.
>> A ship being so large and having such a long and storied history has inevitably lead to a culture of lifers, born on the ship, who never wanted to leave it (except maybe inside of the ship's support craft.) This phenomena is of great interest to cultural anthropologists.
>>> It also means that inbreeding may become a real problem if new genetics aren't imported for a while. Fortunately, the crew still has enough youngsters who leave and enough fresh outsiders joining that this hasn't become a problem yet, but the medical wards are already investigating genetic therapy treatments to prevent inbreeding from becoming a problem.

> The ship's multidenominational chapel is a popular meeting spot, not because the crew have a particularly strong culture of faith, but because it features some of the best sound-systems on the ship, and the ship's musicians put them through their paces

>>36269169
that pic
>BRING SAJUUK TO BARE
God I love that game.

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>The hyperspatial shielding has mostly been ablated over decades of service and not been replaced. As a result, the crew and passengers are exposed to high magnetic flux while the drive is active. This flux sometimes stimulates the human brain directly, resulting in a variety of temporary psychological disorders, ranging from alien hand syndrome- the condition of believing that one of your limbs doesn't actually belong to you- to being convinced that you are dead, and everything in between. Thankfully such episodes rarely last more than a few minutes, but are frequent.

>the cloaking device is shoddily wired through the weapons control panel so that, at random, the ship will fire the weapons instead cloaking the ship

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> Ship is a decommissioned military frigate.
>> Ship was decommissioned as missing a CR-1, an absolutely vital part without which none of the ship's systems were operable, and sold as scrap.
>>> CR-1 is quartermaster code for "Commanding Officer."
>> Sweet, got a fully-functional frigate! Gonna haul cargo and passengers in absolute safety.
>> Then you realize that the naval architect went full retard. Ship has two dorsal cannons and a nose cannon. The two dorsal cannons are in-line with one another, and cannot both fire on a target directly off the bow or directly astern without one cannon emplacement blowing the other off into space.
>>> Also, fire from the aft cannon firing directly astern passed within a meter of the ceiling of the bridge, andfire astern and starboard can blow off the main communications array.
>> No ventral cannons or side cannons, either. Obviously, this ship was engineered by someone who would have rather have been building blue-water vessels.

> The ship's life support systems have a complicated power-saving mode by which compartments which are not inhabited are not cooled to acceptable levels, and are instead allowed to act as heat sinks. The system which determines whether a room is inhabited or not is very difficult to fool, as it measures respiration.
>> As a result, keeping a pet or pets which respire sufficient quantities of air to trip the system is practically a requirement, unless you want to sweat your ass off come sack-time.

> Someone or several someones on the ship, in the past and possibly present, were prolific authors. The ship's libraries are full of anonymously-penned, publicly-accessible fanfiction for a wide variety of fictional settings spanning all ranges of genre. Almost all of it is sexually explicit in nature.
>> Some poor fools have taken upon themselves the sisyphean task of cataloging and tagging this monumental variety of smut. More of it seems to appear, faster than they can tag and categorize sometimes.

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>The railgun's power regulator is, for some unfathomable reason, mounted on the railgun itself, so the recoil and electromagnetic fields keep messing it up. Therefore, the power supply must be regulated manually to achieve any semblance of accuracy.

>The ship was at one point retrofitted for long-term travel by adding in hydroponics. Lacking enough unused internal space for a proper hydroponics module, and lacking the budget to adjust the warp envelope for an external add-on, the contractors opted to scatter the hydroponics in penny-packets anywhere there was a spare square meter. The corridors are lined with potted plants, hangers hang everywhere there was something to hang them from, windowsill planters line the portholes. Tangles of leaky pipes and the occasional gardening drone water and fertilize them, but for the most part the crew itself is responsible. Most of them have become at least competent gardeners, and several have even developed an enthusiasm for it.

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> The geniuses who designed the ship took a moral stance against symmetry along the direction of thrust.
>> They further compounded that decision by refusing to shift the internals to locate the center of mass along the center of thrust of the main engines, and instead added lots of little, fiddly engines to bring the center of thrust to the center of mass.
>> As a result, the ship is a complicated nightmare to maintain and repair, and it's very easy for damage or accident to make the ship damn-near impossible to fly.

> The designers of the ship were very, very advanced.
>> Thus, they opted not to employ baryonic matter for the doors and large sections of the hull, preferring instead to install forcefields.
>> While this isn't a tremendous problem in flight, as automated flight systems prevent micrometeorites and other space detritus from getting anywhere close, the designers of the ship evidently never thought to make the forcefields resist the approach of matter.
>> This does considerably speed up embarkation/disembarkation, but while landed, literally any primitive ape can simply walk through.

> The ship is widely believed to be haunted by all of the crew who have become deceased aboard.
>> The crew are a superstitious and spiritual lot, and many shrines in a variety of styles have been constructed aboard the ship, in which offerings are frequently left to honor and appease the deceased.
>> Unfortunately, the shipboard culture of venerating the fallen has not yet become codified, and theological debates between crew who disagree on exactly what is the best way to make offerings, which are the best chants/prayers, and even which shrines are appropriate to deceased crew of a given rank and/or department, are common. These debates not infrequently devolve into physical altercations.

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>The ship doesn't have a single drive, but over a dozen, all apparently salvaged from smaller vessels. They all have different avionics software, none of which are compatible with the others and all of which tend to assume that they're still attached to their original ships. The previous engineer wrote a couple of macros that get them working fairly well, considering, but it's still fairly buggy and the programmer left no development notes. When it stops working, your best bet is to reboot the program, which usually takes around thirty minutes, and control the individual engines manually while it does so.

>The gravity is perpetually tilted about five degrees towards the stern, making it 'downhill'. The crew has made a game waxing the floor and sliding down the central axial corridor on potato sacks.

>The ship was designed as an exotic cruise liner, with only a single, almost entirely open passenger deck enclosed under a crystal dome; essentially a flying dome-town. After the company fell on hard times the liner was sold off and repurposed. The dome is now lined with hairline cracks patched with epoxy resin and coated with never-cleaned space dust.

>the ship was a prototype stealth ship, still with intact camouflage generator.
>>Unfortunatly, only the ship goes invisible. All occupants and loose cargo are visible, floating in space seemingly

>>36274891
>Alternatively, the cloaking generator works fine. It also applies to the inside of the ship: while it's active all the crew are blind.