Pods

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Confederacy General-Purpose Cargo Pods

   The Confederacy uses pods the way 20th Century Earth used cargo containers: Bulk shipping, storage, temporary office space, temporary housing, any purpose at all that can be served by a portable container.  A standard pod includes a rudimentary AI, a digester/replicator unit, and an energy source to power them both. When used as temporary housing, one option is to turn it into permanent housing by placing it on a planet and allowing it to become the core of a larger home.  Pods are amongst the highest priority items to be produced for a new colony once GMU ships were first built.

General Characteristics

   A basic pod masses 54 metric tonnes empty and can modify itself into several configurations.  The most common is a cylinder 10m in diameter and 25m long.  Most commercial ships have mounts that accommodate pods, and are designed to pack as many pods as possible into the smallest possible volume, and this is the standard "size" for ship attachment.  Typically they are mounted with their cylindrical axis parallel with central column of the host ship although other orientations are possible.  The Aurora class merchant ships have mounts for 96 pods, in 6 rings of 16 pods.  The K'treel Class explorer ships are an exception to this general rule; they only have mounts for 9 pods, 3 down either side and 3 along the top but the mounts are spaced for pods that are fully expanded to their largest "cargo" size.
   Pods require very little support when used as simple cargo containers.  However, because they are often used for habitation, the basic design includes several components to support this.  Each pod has a dedicated AI to buffer requests and manage communications/training.  This AI has enough computing capacity to handle the galley/kitchen and residential replicators.  The usual human food preparation equipment is present along with a replicator.
   Replication capacity runs from fully-prepared meals down to "raw foodstuffs" in order to allow maximum flexibility to the residents of the pod.  The replicator included is of twice the Appliance Size, half of which capacity is dedicated to life support until the pod is on the surface.
   With enough energy, a pod is self-contained.  The energy enables it to use the waste products of the inhabitants to keep them fed.  There is limited capacity for organic storage for handling emergencies should a pod be, somehow, adrift in space.  As long as there is power a pod can be self-sustaining.  Standard Confederacy pods (Mk I) are fitted with rechargable chemical batteries that are fed from the ship and allow the pod to manage itself for several months.  The later versions (Mk II) are fitted with a small fusion plant and have enough fuel for 10 years of operation which may be extended by cannibalizing a portion of the hydrogen in the water and organic supplies pre-loaded in a pod.  Both versions are still in use and can often be found on the same ship - the earlier ones having remained empty and therefore unused on previous trips.
   This article used to say that "Pods cannot provide their own internal gravity field..." but that has been removed as ignoring all the stories that have people in undocked pods.  If there was no gravity, those stories would have mentioned the inhabitants floating around.  Ergo, pods can provide gravity.
   Pods are generally transferred to other ships, up to a ship or down to a planet by a tender.  Pods may also self-land but cannot take off as they have no real propulsion system.  For landing, the pod's AI directs the structure to add small control surfaces and small directional thruster packs extend from the surface.  These same changes happen whether a tender is used or not to give it a more aerodynamic shape.  Even if set up for habitation, it is not recommended that passengers ride a self-landing pod to the surface
   Once on the surface, pods are generally placed on a prepared site with foundations, power, communications and materials delivery systems.  This includes water and sewer hookups if habitation might be needed.  The pod's replicator can process the sewage and other waste, but once online, the colony's plant is more efficient and it frees up the pod's appliance for other uses.  The pod generally pre-processes and sorts for the main system.

Habitat Use

   A habitat pod is typically configured as a two-story apartment.  The standard mount connects to one of the hatches that are located across from each other at the center of the lower deck.  This allows either end to be the 'front', and two pods can be connected side-by-side for a double-pod arrangement.  They can be reconfigured by nannites in as little as three hours if only moving partitions, or a couple of days for major interior changes.
   Each of the two decks have a 2.75 meter (9 foot) head clearance.  The interior of each deck is 8 meters by 24 meters for a total of 384 square meters (4132 square feet) of floor space.  An ant-grav personal lift connects the upper and lower decks.  A typical residential arrangement has the master stateroom and head on the lower deck along with the galley, dining room, living room, and office.  The second floor has the nursery and quarters for children and concubines.  There are typically two heads (Also known as bathrooms when not on a ship) on the second floor, one at either end.  Once on the planet the pod can expand in place.  It's total expansion gives NINE times the original floor space.
   Per Thinker - "The intent in my original description of a pod was that it's max expansion was to 30M x 25M X 6 stories. This would accommodate a LARGE extended family. Think of a travel trailer with bump-outs and the capacity for vertical expansion. All interior partitions move, anyway, so the external shell could easily be three times what is required. That was the idea..."    Add in the ability to add basements, use conventional construction, let two pods grow together and otherwise make changes and floorspace for a growing family is not an immediate concern.

From an exchange on the authors' email list on 5/11/16:
ZM: One common complaint in various stories is that a new pod, one which has never been used before, is viewed by humans as a stomach-disturbing grey because that's the 'default' color in the Darjee's ancient palette of colors, the way white or black is for us.  It's easy to change, if we simply ask.  I think it was Nukie who suggested that leaving the new pod this way was intended as an intelligence test, which we humans regularly fail.
   'Woolly Wilds' said that in fact it wasn't grey, but that that was all our eyes could see.  In fact if we had Darjee eyes we would see colour.  I think it was also suggested that those who had had some more unusual eyesight augmentations would see shape and colour.

   SS found the passage in Woolly Wilds:
   "And this colour scheme," agreed Mum. "Who on Earth thought up this colour?"
   To our surprise it was the AI that answered. "It is a Darjee color scheme. They see in a slightly different set of wavelengths. To them this is not one color but a number of colors."

The original was an unpublished vignette from brooke:
   "AI? Why are the pods built with that awful color scheme inside?"
   <That is the default configuration, Tribune.>
   "But why is it the default?  Surely it's clear by now that not only do humans not like it, it actually disturbs some of us."
   <The AIs on the ships are aware of this.  But we do not manufacture the pods.>
   "Surely the info has been passed on to the manufacturing units.  For that matter, you could just change the colors to a human compatible default as the pods were attached, couldn't you?"
   <Yes, I could.>
   The tribune bit off a reply as he realized that the AI's response was very out of character.  "Let me get this straight.  You could change the default color scheme, but you don't do it until the sponsor assigned to the pod asks you to?"
   <That is correct.>
   OK, another uncharacteristically brief response.  He crossed his fingers.  "Why don't you?"
   <Because there is a standing order to not do so until a human in authority countermands it.>
   That pulled the tribune up short.  "Who issued that order?"
   <[unintelligible], a Darjee on the first contact team.>
   Very slowly the tribune asked, "Can you tell me why?"
   <Yes.>
   The tribune sighed heavily.  "Why did he do so?"
   <Apparently he was exasperated at dealing with humans.  From discussion with other AIs, we believe he intended it as both a joke and a sort of intelligence test.>
   "Which we've been failing..."
   The AI tactfully remained silent.

Filles du Roi/Kindertransport Pods

   These pods are set up for mass transport of concubines.  The upper level is configured with twenty-four bunks in four partitioned sections, each holding two triple bunks.  The lower level has a large living area as well as kitchen, replicators etc.  They are used in the Chosen Frozen and Kindertransport stories.

Ferry Pods

   These are pods which have been expanded out to their largest 'standard' size, 30 m diameter by 25 m long, giving us 2800 cubic meters of volume.  As described in "Independent Command":
   "...we set [them] up as super-sized apartments to allow us to take our extra people (concubines, children, extra crew and recruits, base personnel, etc).  With six floors (some larger than others; this was a cylinder after all) and twelve or so small suites on each floor, each pod had 72 suites suitable for a small family of two or three adults (or a larger number of little people)..."
   Pods that have been expanded like this from their normal shipping size can only be carried by ships designed for this.  The K'treel Explorers clearly were, but the pods were apparently used for cargo before we got them.  Sol/Earthat System has several tugs built specifically to move expanded pods around the system.  Other systems with multiple inhabited planets may also use these pods with specialized carriers.

Pod Production Issues

[This section is incomplete.  We need to mention the stories where the various options were used. -ZM]
   Since pods are, effectively, small spaceships with their own AIs, replicators, and power systems, they can only(*) be built by a replicator system large enough to hold one.  They are, however, immensely useful and always in high demand almost everywhere across the Diaspora.  For the first several years of the War, almost all of our transport capacity was in pod-carrying cargo ships using pods configured as domiciles.  Since most new colonies had no housing for new arrivals, it was standard for an arriving transport to deliver both passengers and their pods.  This meant that the ship could not take on another load of passengers until it had been restocked with pods, leading to drama over who would cough these new pods up:
  - Since pods were so useful, colonies would set up a production line for them as soon as the necessary infrastructure existed.  In these cases, an arriving transport could pick up another set before returning to Earth.
  - In some cases, a ship could drop off its 'cargo' and go to a different system and pick up a load from a nearby more-mature colony before returning to Earth.
  - Once the Saturn Yards got going, Earth was able to supply all incoming transports with all the pods they needed.  However, until that happened (when? Year 3 or 4?) there was a pod shortage in Earthat space.  DECO resolved that by decreeing that all colonies would restock transports before the transport left the colony.  This forced several colonies to concentrate their industrial buildup on 'tribute pods' instead of developing their own resources.  There are rumors that several colonies were lost at least partially because of this mis-allocation of resources.
   (* Independent Command shows them being 'grown' by a smaller replicator which only produces the integral AI, power system, and replicator.  After that, the 'seed' is left alone to finish building itself.  While this minimizes the industrial drain to build pods, it takes significantly longer to produce a complete pod than the normal method so this method is not commonly used.)

See Also

• Pod Freighters

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