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(FSI) Vertigo Exploration Corvette

Far Suns Initiative


-<- FSIS Vertigo ->-

Exploration / Escort Corvette


The Vertigo is a small exploration corvette, one of hundreds of more or less similar ships built during the Great Migration to serve as scouts and survey vessels as well as escorts for the Migrant Fleet.

Approximately 75 meters in length (measured perpendicular to the orientation of thrust), the ship is quite small and lacks a refinery, however extensive cargo facilities allow for the setup of an ad hoc base containing all facilities necessary for a complete ore refining and production line. These “forward operating bases” were set up in many different shapes and sizes all along the path of the Migrant Fleet by the crews of exploration vessels. To this extent the Vertigo features a merge connection and projector that could facilitate the construction of such a station in deep space.

Thanks to a hydrogen / atmospheric propulsion system the Vertigo can make planetfall and even execute a takeoff from all sorts of foreign worlds. This is paramount to the ship’s exploratory goal and the Migrant Fleet as a whole, as it allows the ships to find possible “Eden Worlds” that are deemed suitable for terraforming and subsequent settlement. The drawback of this form of propulsion is the fuel consumption that necessitates either refueling with the Fleet or finding a suitable place to harvest the ice via manual labor, which is a tedious and time-consuming endeavor. The system does however grant an unparalleled acceleration to the small ship, allowing it to outrun most adversaries with ease.

Internally, accommodation is spartan and laid out for a crew of one or two persons. A medical bay and a cryo chamber are carried, as well as two control stations, one parallel to the vector of thrust and one perpendicular to it, intended for use in a planetary gravity field. Like all Migrant Fleet vessels the ship is arranged for so-called “thrust gravity” and carries a standard Terradyne gravity emulation device to facilitate movement in zero-g environments.

The ship carries a single standard Terradyne Mark 1jump drive capable of traversing a distance of up to 2000 kilometers in a single jump. The system operates utilizing basic Singer waveform manipulation applied to gravitational waves generated by MSEs (Massive Stellar Events) to generate a gravity spike that catapults the vessel through a wormhole.

For defensive purposes the Vertigo is armed with four small-caliber TDHI-426 automated defense turrets primarily for anti-personnel and anti-missile purposes as well as two TDHI Mark 21 gatling turrets, one on each side of the vessel. Their position at the widest beam of the ship gives them excellent fields of vision and allows the Vertigo to fend off attacks from most angles with ease.

“The Far Suns Initiative was founded on a prayer and a vision: A prayer to help us find new homes for our kind, to help humanity recover from being driven off their home world by providing a thousand new ones, and a vision of an interstellar humanity, valiant explorers heading out into the unknown, pushing the envelope of known space ever further outwards. The FSI exploration corvettes are a manifest to this vision. It is through the hard work of these vessels’ crews that we shall find our Eden among the stars.” –Prof. Dr. Jones Maradana, during a speech to commemorate the destruction of the FSIS Horizon

Author's Comment: Some time ago I experimented with vertical ships, but it never really worked out due to a lack of internal space, so I decided to drop the project. However, when the sci-fi show "The Expanse" introduced thrust gravity to the big screen, I spent quite some time wondering about how to optimize the design to be more efficient. The solution is simple: Instead of "flying skyscrapers" like in The Expanse, you make the ship short and wide to accomodate fewer decks on more surface. This makes the ship more space-saving and allows easier reconstruction in Space Engineers.