Luna Rose

loosely (not following the rules) based upon this tweet (just the first one, not the whole thread) that someone posted in a discord server. https://mobile.twitter.com/SixFeetZen/status/1547621439099940865

“Exercise: Write descriptions for 10 swords (it can be 10 of anything, but 'swords' is for ease of explanation).”

I like space ships better than swords, so here goes:

1: It's a small vessel, not even as large as a porta-potty. You fit so snugly that it's almost more like you're wearing the craft than standing inside of it. It has a cluster of hundreds of tiny one-shot thrusters. This will be difficult.

2: In a battlefield littered with frustums and cylinders, the cube stands out. Its internal latticework absorbs impact forces and high-gee acceleration equally, and its nuclear energies can be directed through any of the six nozzles to move in any direction. Such a massive construct ought not be so maneuverable as this, and it manages to evade the missiles long enough to vaporize them with its lasers.

3: Less than paper-thin but a few kilometers across, the sail is incredibly fragile. It was only as big as it is in order to deliver its crucial payload--digital copies of the people who built it--to a distant star system asap, but this is an awfully dusty part of space to have to bore through, and the holes and pits are starting to reduce the power transmission from the homestar.

4: It's an incredibly long vessel, fanning out at the end like a trumpet. A toroidal structure rims the trumpet's end. Multicolored cargo containers are stacked oddly in its middle. The gleaming white front of the ship contains a multitude of windows. As the tumbling spin of the vessel comes to a halt, the toroid begins to glow a dull red, and the sky distorts behind the ship.

5: As weird as this clunky, heavily modular ship looks, with its glowing red cylindrical modules lashed together with cross-struts, and a healthy gap separating it from its propulsion bus, the thermal cameras show it as even stranger: its engine and propellant tanks are cool, and most of the power seems to be funneled towards the payload. Ultraviolet light would reveal the transparent windows. That answered that--the satellites spotted around sun-baked Vulcan weren't natural after all

6: The ship surrendered, baring its flag: the emission spectrum of 50% hydrogen, 10% xenon, and 40% argon. The "neon" lights flashed on, and spectroscopes on the enemy ships finally identified the nation of origin.

7: "What you're talking about," said Flying Stones, "is like, some sort of bomb." "Not at all," Practical Leaf said, "they're a sort of shaped charge meant to deliver tungsten vapor into a pusher-plate." "The energies you'd have to release... it's too dangerous. It could ignite the atmosphere." "The asteroid is going to do a hell of a lot worse to us if we can't redirect it, fast."

8: Like that paleoreactor in Gabon, the planet's naturally high stores of Verterium Cortenide and Dilithium crystals, combined with antiproton flux from its Flare-Star sun, causes it to exhibit a 10 millicochrane warp field. Hence, as it rotates, it appears to orbit around an invisible point. But it would only be a matter of time before its inhabitants learned to shape the warp field, and then they would make the entire world their starship.

9: The satellite didn't look much more advanced than Voyager, or perhaps New Horizons, but no nation took credit for it and no one could understand the glyphs on its hull. It dutifully continued transmitting its telemetry even as Atlantis recovered it. I bet they wish they'd attached a wide-angle camera on this thing. We brought it back to JPL and examined it, allowing it to continue transmitting. We pointed its camera--a three-mirror-anastigmat telescope not unlike RALPH--at a distant field, and set up a display there to teach them language in morse code. It wasn't long before they made a formal first contact, spelling out S.O.S., and providing orbital elements of an object in the Kuiper Belt.

10: She wasn't especially graceful--she lacked either the aerodynamic lines of a spaceplane or the blocky consistency of a warship. She was covered in gold, red, and silver multilayer insulation, instrument booms stuck out from her at all angles, and she had only one window, a small cupola towards her front (if you could even discern a front from a side from a back!). She happily lowered her orbit to get a better read on the Radio-Plasma Waves from Giant's atmosphere and magnetic field, and her cryotanks bubbled with anticipation as the first up-close scans of Giant's cloud decks came in through SSTV. She had the best job in the galaxy, and she didn't let her crew forget it for a minute.