CV-Hoffnungsschimmer — Mainframe

[Foxglove]

CV-Hoffnungsschimmer
Engineering Remote Access

Engineering Section

Initially only a private ship in the hands of a private individual, Ezrael Vertiga, the Hoffnungsschimmer had no need for further protection than the standard security equipment that came with the Corvo class. However, with his precarious relationship to the Core after leaving their ranks, it became apparent that the ship, albeit sturdy, was not going to withstand the assault of even two bombers, and given that the Hoffnungsschimmer is the home of both him, his fiance, and a couple of friends, this simply wouldn't do. The ship contained some of the most precious things in his life, not only speaking in terms of possessions. Whether as flaw or virtue, he cared too much for his infected fiance as that he could let her live on a ship that was big and easy to find. Spending a sinful amount of money, Ezrael procured a cloaking device from the modular Zoner installation orbiting Gran Canaria and had it painstakingly fitted onto the Corvo. Given its rather big hold, it was able to store enough fuel to allow the ship to turn invisible for approximately fifteen minutes, which he figured was better than nothing. While a state of the art device, fifteen minutes in space were not actually a lot, since in the uncharted systems of the Omegas and Omicrons, it often took longer than that to traverse sectors. It was a precaution, and little more, and Ezrael was aware of that. At first, it was unneeded, but with increasing pressure from both Auxesia and the Lane Hackers, who both suspected Ezrael to be hiding something, a certain kind of protectiveness, maybe even paranoia took hold of Ezrael. Evil people were encroaching upon them, and Ezrael would be sure to have something in store for them. Being fully aware that he could never fight them, being only one man and one battleship, the only option was to find a way to withhold the Hoffnungsschimmer from their view, as this was the only thing the prey could do when hounded by predators way stronger than them. Given that there was, however, no way to work the cloaking device into lasting longer, the answer would come from his infected fiance, Maren, who proposed to use the Nomad Power Cell that had fallen into Ezrael's hands by accident during a Nomad incursion into Manchester. The benefits of this were twofold: Firstly, it would deprive Ezrael of the means to use the power cell for anything else, since while it would power the Hoffnungsschimmer's systems, it couldn't be removed, and therefore not be used for anything that Maren could not account for. Secondly, she herself would be better protected as well, given that a degree of suspicion was cast upon her as well. The following day, a contraption was built to simply keep the power cell suspended within a vacuum, which was subsequently infused with Nomadic matter that Maren provided. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, the matter ate through the metal and appropriated it. As of now, it hardly looks like anything human-made anymore, as crystalline matter similar to, but not quite like, the hulls of Nomad ships started to organically grow from the infected device and spread through the engine section. Attempts were made to control the spread, though given that it ate directly through the material the ship was made of, everything short of cutting away the infected parts proved to be insufficient. While the infection currently seems to have stopped its advance through the ship's systems after taking over engines and cloaking device, it stands to reason that it will continue to spread once these systems have been sufficiently appropriated.

Sensor Array

Given the lacking combat capabilities of a Corvo, there needed to be some way to identify threats before they could get too close, and to this end, the usual sensor dish below the Corvo was significantly overhauled by APM tech while the vessel was with the Core, together with Ezrael. The biggest problem that the normal design faced were exorbitant energy consumption, while the hardware itself could actually bring far more to the table than it was allowed to due to this limitation. Streamlining the energy systems of and around the sensor dish, it was originally intended to fit an APM power core onto the vessel, but this plan was discarded once it became obvious that most other ship systems were simply too old to guarantee a flawless operation. At the end of the day, constructing a whole new vessel around the APM power core would have been easier than trying to make the current vessel fit around it. Some sort of compromise had to be made between the theoretical capabilities of the new APM hardware and the realistic limitation of the old hardware, and so, while theoretically just as powerful as a Mako's own scanning system, the Hoffnungsschimmer's age prevented the implementation from ever being used the way it was originally intended to.

PTE-19 Medium Scale Tri-Chamber Fusion Motor Mk I — Engine

Needing the necessary horsepower to propell a ship that was more than twice the size of a gunboat, the engineers at Lividia who initially constructed the vessel needed a way to create the necessary propulsion in order to make the ship actually viable in the harshness of space, lest it fall victim to the forces of nature, priates, or even more sinister elements within the Omegas and Omicrons. Thus, a compromise between price and performance was made. Given that Bretonia did not simply give away its propulsion systems for ship sizes of cruiser and upwards, something new would need to be created. Using three gunboat sized engines, the engineers of Lividia put the fusion chambers in series, effectively reducing the size needed for the fusion reactors and also reducing the amount of fuel that would be needed for the reaction by one third. While still a rather wasteful solution, it worked, supplying the vessel with enough power to be as agile as could be expected of its size. Still, given that it was a fusion engine, there needed to be some way to deal with the eventual residue that would be left over from the fusion process. While fusion is considered to be one of the most clean methods of generating energy, at least if compared to thorium-mox reactors that were commonly found on capital vessels, it still created an end product that needed to be gotten rid of: molten iron. While the reaction inside the fusion reactors is started with hydrogen fusions, the process is accelerated to continue with the heavier elements as well, up until iron is created, which becomes too heavy and needs to be expelled from the fusion reactor. This was solved by expelling the refuse within the exhaust flame of the engine, thus burning it and reducing it to plasma. With the Nomadic matter having eaten into the engine, this process has become more volatile, especially during cruise charge, where the different elements within the fusion reactor started leaking, spilling into space while being heated well beyond their boiling point. Miraculously, though, the engine still works, even though the cruise charge tends to make the ship tremble violently.