Starship pilot whose ship may or may not have started life as three different ships, a hab block, and an agro-mech. Give or take.
When you say "star ship" to some bumpkin down a gravity well, they picture something sleek and lux, usually some kind of naval vessel they've seen a propaganda reel or on a poster, occasionally some vessel from a holo-drama. But the thing theyre imagining, it's one thing. It was born one thing. It stays one thing until it gets turned into space dust by something else. That's not what a spacer pictures when they hear "star ship" cause we space folks, we know better.
A ship can be born one thing but it won't stay that asteroid impacts, pirate raids, the simple wear and tear of FTL travel. It weighs down on a vessel and things break. They fall off. They melt down. And when you live in space and on star ships and stations, you don't just get to leave when these things happen. You have to find a fix or else everyone turns to ash in a plasma discharge or gets sucked out into hard void while trying to take a piss.
Take The Porphyrogennete for example. She's what a spacer pictures when they think "star ship" seen from afar she's a slightly irregular hunk of metal trending toward the rectangular but not quite there. She isn't sleek, she's blunt. She doesn't look like she was designed by anyone. That's cause she was "designed" by about 12 generations of spacers over the course of 3 centuries.
Most of her front section comes from the original Porphyrogennete which was a troop transport of some kind. She has 10 decks in that section and most of that is now given over to hydroponics as well as waste, water, and air recycling and purification. The outer hull is a craggy mess of patch plates and such, so you can't really make out the shape it's supposed to be.
Her mid section is the most interesting one. An irregular, hexagonal structure with struts jutting out of it at odd angles. This section used to be a habit block for a space station and it was built to rotate to create gravity. We get our gravity from graviton confusers so we don't need any of that centrifugal shit. This is where the bridge is, though it's not a standard bridge. It's a refitted factory harvester that never made to whatever agri-world it was bound for. Most of its processing equipment has been dismantled but you can see a pristine auto-shucker in the telemetry room. I'm told it even works. Anyway the bride sits like a fat metal brick in in between two of the spires and it's from here that I guide our lovely lady through the stars. Those spires are supposed to be habit expansions, high class living quarters. We use them for cargo storage since they're easy to expose to vacuum. Everyone lives in the main hab block and it's a nice little place, basically it's own little town with squat hab units lining each surface of the hexagon. Im told by new sailors and passengers that getting used to the gravity in there is difficult since each face has discrete confusers but I'm pretty used to it.
The back section of the ship is probably the most interesting from a spacers point of view. The big rear engines come off a genuine generation ship. Granted we have 12 engines where those thing had about 60, so we don't have nearly the thrust, but they're still powerful enough to bulldoze through astronomic unit after astronomic unit at near light. They're powered by a fusion power plant that, according to my gran, came out of a scrapped Battleship. Thing is, there ain't no way this little cargo hauler had the cash to buy something like that fair and square. But seeing as it was my gran's gran's generation that got the damn thing, I doubt I'll ever know the truth of how they got it. Anyway, as far as power goes, that plant is more than sufficient for a vessel our size which is why we get to indulge in the crowning jewel our lovely lady. Her FTL drive.
See most FTL vessels have a bare minimum drive for their mass cause their power plants can't handle anything else. This means they have to make short hops in and out of FTL which slows them down. Our FTL is for a vessel thrice The Porphyrogennete's mass and our power plant was for a Battleship well above that mass. So we can theoretically pull several months of FTL where most vessels our size can pull about 3 days. Now for safety reasons we've never been in FTL longer than 3 weeks but thats a huge advantage when you're working the big shipping lanes and want to beat other cargo haulers to market on high demand goods. Or need to outrun some pirates. Or the local naval picket. It's the pride and joy of our crew and our lady that FTL.
If you go on any other spacer vessel you'll hear similar stories. This bit came from that place and this from another. Bits of scrap, scuttled vessels, dead stations. A star ship, a real star ship, is a tapestry. That's why you'll hear spacers talk shit on corporate traders and their "virgin" vessels. Those big mass haulers that move a moon's worth of ice or ore at a time. Those ships are usually new from factory, one thing instead of several. Theyre hauling ore that will make their replacements when they inevitably burn out their power plants in a century. And then they get scuttled into a scrap yard or left to float in the nearest shoal zone and Spacers come in plasma cutters and loaders and tugs and we make them part of real star ships, weaving them into the tapestry that carries us across the stars.
