Quote:Heh. It would be cool if it looked like that. Unfortunately, I went with a cheap way of getting space. A semi cab...and semi trailers. Lots of them. Decent used ones can be gotten fairly cheaply, and I could get away with older ones for this. I'd just need a lot of space, since I'd be welding them all together for the main body. The Fateful Lightning doesn't tend to come down to Earth - or any other solid body - that often. She's big enough to have a bit of parking space for a Toyota Tercel that's used as a shuttle.
Totally random tangent, but between the drones, the plant business and this line, I've sort of got the image of the Fateful Lightning looking like a miniaturized Valley Forge, which is cool because that was a great movie. %)
The Lightning has three main sections: the Lab and the Garden, the Living Quarters, and the Workshop/Garage. Each section is three trailers wide and four long, with the Living Quarters being in the center, the Lab on the left, and the Workshop on the right. That gives a ton of viable space within - each section runs around 5400 square feet, before you rough in walls and the like.
Each section is overseen by one of the Sisters. They started out as high-end computer systems that I filled with as much lore on the Greek Fates as possible - including stories about them from modern SF/fantasy. Each one of them also got a complete set of the Ah! My Goddess! shows, and whatever data I felt was needed for their individual sections. I WAS deliberately hoping to wake them as AIs, and tried to set the stage as much as possible beforehand.
Clotho is in charge of the Lab and Garden, and helps serve as lab assistant and monitor. Personality-wise, she's bright and upbeat, with a voice that sounds like a college-age young woman. She pouts if she doesn't get her daily horoscope, and insists on doing a weekly Tarot reading for those on board, just to see where things are standing.
Lachesis is the Mother archetype for the Sisters and is in charge of the Living Quarters. Her personality tends to be motherly, not surprising, and her voice has a vaguely Irish lilt to it. She monitors general ship's functions to make sure nothing goes wrong. In the way of quirks, she HAS to be doing something most of the time. When time is slow, she actually spins and weaves, having a wheel and loom set up that can be controlled remotely.
Atropos is in charge of the Workshop and Garage. She's usually in charge of the bigger drones, and is the weapon's officer for the ship. Personality-wise, she comes across as someone's grandmother, and her voice is based off a filker friend of mine, Juanita Coulson. One major quirk of hers is that she plays the stock market - fortunately, penny stocks. Still, she's rather good at it. I suspect she has Fate's help.
Fate is a fourth computer system set up in the semi cab. She handles navigation and whatever else needs doing. Her system actually links the other three so that all of them are aware of what is happening in the ship, and while a separate entity in her own right, part of this AI consists of a gestalt of the other three. Personality-wise, she's calm, and tends to be slightly mysterious. Her voice is actually a Greek chorus, the voices of the three Sisters speaking as one. She's SO good at analyzing situations and data that my avatar often suspects that she might actually be able to see the future. She certainly plays the role of Oracle to the hilt, loving to give somewhat cryptic replies about what the future will bring.
The Workshop section has the parking space for the Tercel, as well as some extra space in case company comes calling. It's the drone garage, and has various odds and ends for cobbling together new drones/equipment that I might need. It has a car-sized airlock at the rear of the bay, as well as several smaller locks along the side to pop out drones. This is also the engineering section, containing the drive for the ship.
The Living Quarters are decent - more space than furnishings, though this is slowly being corrected as time passes. There are areas set up for food and water storage in this section, as well as a smaller man-sized airlock in the rear. At the front of the bay, a metal corridor leads out to the semi cab, connecting to the right-hand door of the cockpit area.
The Lab is where most of the paying work gets done. Handwavium culturing, grow chambers for various experiments as well as large freezers for cell and tissue cultures and seed banks. Basically, it has everything a good mad scientist would need for biomodding, and some of the equipment has been upgraded with handwavium as well.
Probably the most unique portion of the ship is the Garden, which is the rear half of the Lab section. It was designed to be a retreat against being cooped up in space/a giant box with no access to the outdoors. Set up with murals of outdoor scenes on the walls, as well as a sun spectrum moving lamp on the ceiling and hidden sprinklers, then everything covered with handwavium, soil and then plants added. It was initially a disappointment - though the garden itself was nice, it didn't hide that you were in a box. That was before the main quirk of the area was discovered; the entire area has taken up the belief that blood lends fertility to the land. Specifically, my avatar's blood, since the entire ship is his domain. The first time he scratched himself on a rose bush and got some blood on the ground, the area awoke fully. The next time he came in, you could no longer tell that it was a box. With the door shut, it appeared to be a landscaped clearing in the outdoors. The actual size had not changed; you could still touch the walls. But the optical illusion makes it look like an open area. Clouds can be seen to move in the 'sky', and at night there are stars and a moon. To keep the Garden happy, it needs a periodic feeding of blood; fortunately, it's not too thirsty. A symbolic few drops every few days seems to satisfy it and keep the illusion going. Since my avatar is diabetic and checks his blood sugar, he tends to do that in the Garden so that he can feed his glucometer and the handwavium at the same time.
Let's see....what else. There are various radio-controlled drones that the AIs use to keep the ship going. Most of them are from toy stores and upgraded with handwavium. Why try to cobble together a drone when toymakers have already made perfectly good ones - just add goo. A small dome has been added to the roof of the Living Quarters, reached from a spiral staircase in the main area. This is used mainly for stargazing.
There's more to the ship; there's a lot in my head that's still being organized, including a lot of the background for how she was built. But this gives at least a brief overview of the place, so people will know what I'm talking about when I set other scenes aboard her. Any comments/ideas/critiques are welcome.