S-14

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S-14
s-14.jpg
Flag of S-14
Motto: "Coexistence is Life. No-Norm is Norm."
[1]
Region Venus
Capital Command Bridge (Alpha Hive)
Official Language(s) panNorm
Leader AdminCoordinator 67521 of the Blue Mother of Us All
Population 300,600,000,000kg biomass (3.5T Mini, 721M Red, 751M Blue, 400M Green)
Currency non-monistic system 
NS Sunset XML

"S-14" generally refers to the Coordinated panNorm Hives, which make up the sum total of the panNorm species; specifically, it refers to the massive 540 kilometer long generation ship that transported the panNorm from their homeworlds in the Greater Magellanic Cloud to the Sol system.

S-14 the Colony Ship

The panNorm colony ship gained the name S-14 when the QACF troop carrier Data Bus en route to Pluto carrying Security-2 robots to support peacekeeping operations in 010 identified a large gravity well three light-months out of the Solar System. Data Bus diverted to investigate with its rudimentary sensors and sent information back to the Triumvirate of Yut reporting contact with a large object of intelligent extrasolar origin. The Combined Services classified this object as "Contact S-14" and organized a mission to explore it.

Structure

External

s14dimensions.gif

The exterior of the S-14 colony ship "Alpha," with dimensions

The S-14 colony ship, designated Alpha, is a radially symmetrical spacecraft 540 kilometers long that consists of three main external sections: the forward spar, the habitation cylinder, and the aft spar. The 150 kilometer long forward spar is dominated by a massive ovoid-shaped blister which contains most of Alpha's dedicated navigational equipment, with a large cluster of various electromagnetic and tachyon communications equipment in an 'antennae farm' at the very fore. Docks for large ships are located in the 'neck' of the forward spar. This is where the Blue panNorm historically control because it contains most of Alpha's dedicated computer access and control systems in addition to navigation control. The habitation cylinder is 480 kilometers in diameter and 180 kilometers in width, and this contains most of Alpha's onboard 'ecology' as well as hangar bays, hydrogen scoops, and most of the machinery required to maintain life on Alpha. The 210 kilometer long aft spar contains Alpha's massive sublight fusion drive and because of this is the historic home of the Red panNorm.

Internal

s14internals.jpg

The interior of the S-14 colony ship "Alpha," grossly simplified

Internally, Alpha has several different, categorizable locations. The first, which makes up the greatest living volume of the ship, are the "Honeycombs," so called by outsiders because of its similarity to the hexagonal cells of honeybees. These are layers after layers of traditional ships' decking, their apparent gravity dependent on how far they are from Alpha's axis of rotation and ranging from 0 to 1.4-gravities. Honeycombs contain most of Alpha's residential and industrial areas. The second is the Ring Plain inside the habitation torus, a 1.4-gravity living and wildlife area that makes up a large part of Alpha's ecology. The third are the two Low-G Terraces, which provide additional wildlife area. The fourth and last is the Zero-G Core, which is a large empty tube several kilometers wide and hundreds of kilometers long around Alpha's axis of rotation. Here are where the zero-gravity forests bloom, where Alpha's hydroponic gardens thrive, and where the Spherical Sea regulates water circulation throughout the habitation cylinder. It also contains the primary computer core, a solid cylinder of computronium that runs the length of the Zero-G core and contains Alpha's central intelligence.

Technology

Alpha is an amalgation of technologies due to its fifteen million year mission. Large portions seem almost primitive, while others are highly advanced.

Propulsion

Alpha is centered around a massive Bussard ramjet capable of propelling the colony ship upwards of 0.025c or 7,500 kilometers per second (this was the highest speed recorded by Solar System sources; it is probable it exceeded this speed by a great margin sometime during its voyage). This ramjet can be shunted to six large vernier nozzles on the fore and aft spars for course correction and thus makes up the entirety of Alpha's maneuver propulsion. This system is now inactive that Alpha is in Venusian orbit.

Alpha also has four chemical rocket engine clusters around the equator of its habitation cylinder, the largest ever observed and the largest theoretically efficient. While not technically propulsive in nature, they impart spin to Alpha and thusly provide artificial gravity for the entire ship through centripetal force due to centrifugal acceleration.

The panNorm invented the Tesseract Jump Drive, commonly used by the Triumvirate of Yut for instantaneous faster than light travel. While it is theoretically possible for a very large TJD to be mounted on a vessel as massive as S-14, the power requirements are easily much larger than the colony ship could ever produce.

Defenses

S-14's defenses are all of a relatively low-Space Age technology level but massive in scope. It is dependent upon armed parasite ships for primary defense against aggressors.

Active

Alpha's active defenses consist of a screen of [turrets] that fire pulsed lasers in the multimegawatt to gigawatt range. The pulse action allows them to vaporize small masses and can destroy even larger nickle-iron asteroids into chunks that can be further pared down until passive defenses can eliminate them. This makes them effective weapons against low-technology advesaries, but most Space Tech nations would not find them a threat except en masse, which Alpha certainly has.

Passive

Alpha's passive defenses consists of a massive electromagnetic screen which acts as a shield against both Wikipedia:Radiation radiation and micrometeorites, much like an extremely powerful version of Earth's Van Allen Belt. This can be considered a primitive energy shield.

Strategic

Alpha's only strategic armament is the Fist of Alpha, a fifty kilometer railgun which can fire a slug of metal massing up to two metric tons at up to 0.3c or 90,000 kilometers per second. This is a purely kinetic weapon with a maximum explosive yield of about 1.9 trillion metric tons of trinitrotoluene equivalent. As this is a extinction-level weapon, it is classified as a weapon of mass destruction. It has been fired in anger only at Mercury.

Computers

S-14's computers are entirely optronic and quite advanced, culminating in the centralized intelligence known as Alpha, who acts as the colony ship's "mind." In this way, Alpha the ship and Alpha the artificial intelligence are interchangable. It has been theorized that Alpha contains over 17 exabytes of information from its constant fifteen million year operation, and this is a conservative estimate. Even though this data is highly segmented so the intelligence can still operate, there are massive volumes of information stored that have been 'forgotten' by Alpha's central intelligence simply because even the allocation tables are huge. Both the panNorm and Menelmacar are working on retrieving and sorting this data.

History

PanNorm history is long and bloody, much like that of other species.

Launch, Decay, and Revelation

S-14 was launched by the True Norm from the Greater Magellanic Cloud to escape increasing radiation levels. True Norm history previous to Alpha's activation is unknown but theoretically stored somewhere in Alpha's volumes of memory; smaller volumes encoded in genetically engineered virii are in the progress of being decoded.

Alpha was one of six ships launched in the colonization effort, all acting as a group; the other five vessels were cannibalized to maintain Alpha. Alpha's repair logs indicate that the entire ship has been replaced well over a hundred times with cannibalized, fabricated, and refurbished parts.

The True Norm established a Prime Directive in order to maintain its genetic purity. Over time, it failed, and the True Norm diverged into the panNorm. The True Norm went extinct, and each of the panNorm races thought it was the True Norm bound by the Prime Directive. This lead to the Succession Wars, the longest extended period of organized violence ever recorded, lasting at least ten million years. The Succession Wars ranged from small-scale brush warfare and resource raids to limited nuclear warfare, all paused before Alpha was damaged beyond repair. The Wars raged and smouldered constantly over the entire volume of the vessel, ravaging one portion before moving to another while the first was being repaired. Inbetween war, disease, and famine, the population of S-14 dipped below ten percent of its launch crew well over a hundred times.

Upon approaching the Sol System, Alpha was discovered by Zero-One and hosted an expedition consisting of the Triumvirate of Yut and aligned nations such as Sakkra, Eniqcir, and Tahar Joblis. These explorers were able to prove to the panNorm using information in Alpha suppressed by the Blues that none of them were the True Norm and that all races would have to work together to survive. They averted a crisis where the panNorm planned to use the Fist of Alpha against Earth by the nation of Menelmacar providing the panNorm a permanent home on Venus. For the next four hundred years, Alpha spiraled in a multiple-pass deceleration maneuver while advance parties assisted in the terraformation of Venus before finally settling in orbit as an artificial moon.

Recent Events

The panNorm of S-14 have been branching out as of late, producing TJD-equipped armadas to defend itself and to meet mutual-defense obligations with Menelmacar. The extremely rational panNorm appear to be growing closer to the fantastic peoples of The Resurgent Dream in a mutual thirst for knowledge, and they have approached the Non-Democratic Alliance for diplomatic ties and possibly membership.

S-14 the Nation (Coordinated panNorm Hives)

The Coordinated panNorm Hives (CpNH) consist of two hives: Alpha, the colony ship S-14; and Beta, the colony on Venus.

Alpha

Alpha is as described above. Its population remains steady at one hundred million tons of biomass and acts as the capital of the CpNH, as much as an anarchosocialist society can have a capital. The aft spar is in the process of being disassembled as the primary fusion drive cannot break Sol's gravity well in any time period useful for an emergency and this material is being used to build new things and to trade with other nations.

Beta

Beta consists of mostly underground hives in the southern hemisphere of Venus and contains the other two hundred million tons of biomass. Beta has its own sets of queens for the panNorm and is coordinated by the LandCoordinator; it acts as the primary 'homeland' of the panNorm.

Culture, Society, and Government

These aspects of the CpNH are covered in the panNorm article.