(the new Lower Decks episode has an orion ship with decorative spikes! but i just thought... what if... spike heat radiators... also they're cowards for not showing the TOS-Remaster/SNW Those Old Scientists style warp whirligigs with the spinning yellow lights.)
The "Good Afternoon," the Syndicate pirate ship operated by Slamtha Uzgoel and her Orion pirate crew. Lovingly repaired over the past hundred years by various engineers, it's a sort of ship of theseus of incompatible nonstandardized equipment and a classic whirligig-warp-drive.
you have to imagine it hissing and puffing and chuffing and wheeshing bc they never STANDARDIZED the fucking PLASMA MANIFOLDS so HALF THE ELECTROPLASMA PLUMBING is fucking WELD
there's no indication of this in canon but i absolutely terminally headcanon orion pirates as The Steampunk Ones
like, sigh, yes, some of the terminals are glass screens or whatever. but the GAUGES. there's so many GAUGES. Ry-Ry. hey. Ry'talla. do not touch that. it's an electroplasma gauge. it'll scald the skin right off your hand.
plasma boilers are great! you can run the flywheels and rotors off of plasma pressure and carry electroplasma current directly into the gas core verterium reactors! The earliest orion starships were nuclear pulse rockets with electric motors running the warp whirligigs, and the verterium reactors were powered by internal fission reactions. in order to have any amount of starting torque for the rotors, the radiators would be glowing yellow in seconds and you'd probably be generating an uneven warp field without the rotational smoothing effect... what a disaster
electroplasma boilers might seem archaic to us NOW, when the big families and corporations all have Cochrane-drives, but plasma boilers have an... almost... a life to them. they're living things, and they'll tell you what mood they're in much better than a cochrane reactor.
why would the lower rungs of the Syndicate, those orgs that only have one or two planets within their grasp, waste resources on building new shipyards with modern equipment, when orion megacorporations were building perfectly good interstellar battleships 300 years ago and the pieces of those perfectly good interstellar battleships are still lying around in various junkyards just waiting to be reassembled. I can not stress enough how big of a find a completely original plasma boiler and warp whirligig combo was. i mean thing is truly museum quality. We'll be taking that thank you very much.
