Ahriman Station · 4:32am Aug 23rd, 2022
I was feeling very bored and in the mood to experiment, so I fired up Inkscape and vectored Ahriman Station.
The source image is an SVG, so the exported images can be any size. I can zoom way in on these 80-meter Vigilance-class patrol boats and re-export it at any arbitrary DPI.
The Confederate Security Force are the Cleomanni Confederacy's state-sanctioned militia, wholly made up of mercenaries. Their administrative branch hires various private military contractors who are made to conform to a universal set of standards. CSF contracts are considered relatively low-risk, hence they only offer moderate pay. Common CSF duties include anti-piracy, anti-smuggler, and counterinsurgency work, as well as garrisoning colonies that are not under immediate threat from enemy action. Prior to the Equestrian Liberation Front's nuclear attack on Confederate forces near Pur Sang Peak, the ELF were not considered a serious threat. The Confederacy were primarily concerned about treasure hunters attempting to salvage and carry off great big armfuls of illegal Equestrian roguetech left over after the war, or terrorists trying to break into the Empire's abandoned stockpiles of nerve gas and other WMDs.
Ahriman Station is a type of prefabricated ring habitat known as a PSB, or Patrol Support Base. The habitat rings of these stations are approximately a kilometer in diameter, which puts them on the lower end for a station; typical orbital hangars, shipyards, and capital ship docks can be many tens of kilometers across. This type of station is typically used as an anti-piracy outpost due to their arrays of long-range sensors and their ability to support dozens of patrol boats, however, they have also been repurposed as trade stations and laboratory outposts. Ahriman Station began life as a combination of the latter two refits, but with further modifications to enable the cargo conveyor monorail system to handle prisoners.
CSF patrol boats tend to be under-armed "persistence vessels", or PVs. These craft possess forward-firing particle beam cannons, like a standard Vigilance-class vessel, but they lack the standard Navy model's anti-capital torpedo launchers and anti-fighter turrets. They do, however, possess two pairs of retractable dorsal and ventral manipulator arms, which can be used to grapple with disabled pirate ships and assist in boarding, rescue and recover disabled friendly ships or their escape pods, or wield a variety of manipulator-held weapons.
One of the most common manipulator-held weapons is the 203mm Inline Cannon, a lightweight, multi-shot, stacked-projectile recoilless gun with a titanium liner and carbon fiber over-wrap. These guns come pre-loaded from the factory, are completely disposable, and are discarded into space when empty, along with their waste heat. Because Inline Cannons have a counter-recoil venturi to direct some propellant gases rearward, they impart no torque on the vessel, and therefore can be fired in any orientation or from otherwise fragile mounts, like the multi-axis manipulators of a humble 80-meter Confederate patrol boat.
The muon-catalyzed fusion thrusters on most Confederate (and Equestrian) ships have both high thrust and an extremely high exhaust velocity, with a specific impulse somewhere in the area of 1.2 million seconds. Most smaller patrol boats and corvettes can accelerate at up to 10 g for brief periods, or 5 g for extended burns (if the crew can tolerate it). With enough fuel for a delta-V measured in the hundreds of thousands of meters per second, it is trivial for these ships to tour an entire star system in a matter of weeks or months by simply charting hyperbolic burns directly at planets and other objects of interest.
Vigilance-class Patrol Boats are not intended to enter a planetary atmosphere under any circumstances. Only specialized dropships and landers can do that. Should one attempt to enter atmo, the most likely event is that they will experience the complete mid-air disintegration of their vessel long before they reach the ground. However, there are occasional reports of these exceptionally sturdy craft surviving entry and crash-landing on planets with atmospheres.
Cool :)
The first version of this blog post was goofed up because the title originally contained special characters, so I reposted it and deleted the old one.
Amazing job on the station design