Valhalla
(Copied straight from .XML 'backup' file, needs formatting and corrections. ZM User (talk) 20:15, 22 April 2024 (PDT))
Valhalla Class Colony Transport ("Cube Ship")
The "Cube Ships" were first mentioned in Thinking Horndog's story "Surprise, Surprise":
"The first cube ship rolled off the assembly line in orbit around Nova Terra at the end of Year Five; it was a giant cattle car, capable of evacuating and processing 250,000 people. It was all rooms and corridors and hallways and dining facilities and briefing areas -- and mounted six field-bubble generators capable of collecting a facility a quarter of a mile in cubic volume and toting it for a month, then setting it on a new planet. Transit time was cut to a week; crews were Fleet Auxiliaries, and the kind of trouble to be expected from a mixed mess made regular pickups simple by comparison -- but it helped cut down on the eugenics angle, and it allowed us to extract critical facilities."
The 'cubes' are very large colony transports capable of holding 250,000 passengers and several thousand crew. Cube ships do not use pods; rather passengers are assigned to staterooms which the AI can configure for various family sizes.
They were intended to transport large numbers of colonists to colonies prepared for rapid growth. However, in actual use they became problematic as very few colonies were prepared to absorb a quarter of a million people all at once. Some cubes became, of necessity, mobile colonies in their own right for varying periods until they could find a place to unload their cargos.
The first couple built also were true 'cubes' in that they had six rectangular sides that each supported the Confederacy version of an industrial-strength bulldozer. It could go anywhere on Earth's surface, pick up a volume that was more than 1200 feet across (and, presumably, high), hold it together _including_ air pressure, keep it safely attached to the ship while the ship delivered it, and then deposit it on a colony's prepared site. It hasn't been established why, but apparently this was only used a few times and we don't think that the later 'cubes' had these systems installed. The later ships may not have even been cubical in shape.
Authors can use cubes either way, since no one has specified this. However, it has been theorized that the humans immediately saw the military applications (use as a troopship's landing craft, etc) and the AIs disabled them after a couple of uses.
(ZM analysis, not canon: Why the F*&% would a colony build such a thing, that early? I assume that Nova Roma was tired of being at the end of the long transport pipeline and resolved to fix the problem. Once they got the first one in service, naturally, DECO would use it to send a quarter-million people to Nova Roma. NR diverted their shipbuilding to other types, as they damned well didn't need TWO of them doing that. We assume that 2 or 3 more early ones -the ones that were already partially built- came from Nova Roma, while the rest were built at the Saturn Yards in Earthat space. According to THE Harem Tales 4 We Gotta Get Outta This Place!, about a decade later Nova Roma dusted those plans off and built one more at the request of the Tu'ull.)
The first group had apartments for 3000 crew, plus 32,000 reconfigurable apartments for passengers. After the first delivery fiasco it was recognized that some of these 'quick-turnaround round trips' were going to last years. The crews were authorized to list the ship itself as their home station and take their families with them. With the statistical 'standard' of 3.85 concubines and 3.85 dependents per sponsor, a 'standard' full loadout for the eight first-flight Cube Ships held 3000 crew plus 11,550 each of concubines and children for a total of 26,100 permanent inhabitants, while carrying as passengers 32,000 sponsors and 123,200 each of concubines and children for a grand total of 304,500 people on board.
Hull Listing
- APL001 - Valhalla (Class Ship)
- APL002 - Mount Olympus (*)
- APL003 - Nirvana
- APL004 - Happy Hunting Ground
- APL005 - Adiri
- APL006 - Dilmun
- APL007 - Quivira
- APL008 - Xanadu
- APL009 - Aaru (**)
- APL010 - Aztlan
- APL011 - Belet
- APL012 - Ching-tu
- APL013 - Fensal
- APL014 - Mezzoramia
- APL015 - Senkyo
- APL016 - Shangri-La
- APL017 - Sukhavati
- APL018 - The Good Ship Lollipop ("Lolly") - built in Nova Roma ~Year 14, has Tu'ull AI
(* APL002 Mount Olympus was appropriated by DECO while still under construction for use as a single self-contained office and residence complex and was commissioned as CNS Unity.)
(** APL009 Aaru was the lead ship of the second generation of Cube Ships, with slightly different internal organization and much better facilities for long-term support of a full passenger load.)
See Also
Story Usage
A textal analysis of the story repository, current as of 2018 and performed on 2019-09-06 identified the following usage counts for Valhalla:
- Einstein 3 Life on the Moon and an Early Departure by Smiley Smith 7 instances.
- Fly By by akarge 3 instances.
- Joacim & L'ielit Anthology by Benjin 6 instances.
- Moving Forward by Zipper D Dude 7 instances.
- Prodigious Collection by Tomken 27 instances.
- The Academy by Thinking Horndog 41 instances.
- The Flight to Einstein by Smiley Smith 4 instances.
- Wanda's Voyage by Benjin 11 instances.
(Someday this will be a navigation template. It will provide a bar across the bottom of each article with useful navigation links. Until then, this is just a placeholder to get rid of all the red "broken link" indicators. -ZM User (talk) 10:00, 3 May 2024 (PDT))
