At first it was simple practicality. They had a light cruiser suspended in the web of support girders that used to be the superstructure of the gigantic domes. Cutting away or clearing the mess had been the only way to retrieve that damaged but functional ship, and cruisers were valuable, even old ones.
Most of Ranma's ships had very old birth dates.
To do the work on that tangled mass crewmen had to labor there, and the superstructure of the city itself and its drives and what most would call a functioning starship was completely intact. The antiquated safety machinery hadn't activated in time to seal in the air, but when the build crews got there it was easier to set droids to clearing out the bodies and refill the air than it was to do the long, laborous work in spacesuits with long trips back to zones of sately and comfort. A five minute break now and again to clear minor suit problems, take the helmet off and eat a real snack or two worked wonders for making a vac job more bearable.
Once the core of the herdship was pressurized it was automatic to check for leaks, and that turned into a full life support systems check clearing up the problems. With power on to run life support it seemed foolish not to have power to scanners and other ship necessities so they could warn the work crews about possible debris showers, or move out of the way to negate the risk.
One team of workers, on their break, resealed a dome that had been damaged by only a single hole, and there was certainly enough transparasteel lying about. The cut and weld job had been easy. Two more domes had been restored as kind of a competition, but the rest were shattered beyond casual repair. Still, half the domes were sealed and functional, the ship core was always pretty close to intact, at that point some off-duty suit workers took up gardening and from there it was pretty obvious they weren't going to tear up the herdship for scrap.
Almost by accident the city-ship became a fleet hobby.
They were Alderaanian engineers, which meant spots of beauty were as important to them as function. There was some beauty to be found in Ranma's refitted warships, but the heart and soul of an Alderaanian called out for massive beauty on a breathtaking scale.
The first issue was safety. Two work teams competed in making overdomes fitted so they could enclose the entire garden side of the city more solidly and sturdily than the thin domes that had failed so easily. One made a single sheet of massive clear crystal thick and strong enough to deflect light cruiser impacts in the future, the other built a transparasteel dome of interlocking plates that could be replaced when damaged.
A vote of the work crews said the crystal was thicker, stronger and tougher so should be installed. But the proponents of the transparasteel held out that theirs could be maintained and repaired against ordinary starship damage that would gradually pucker the crystal with thousands of micrometeor hits and turn the glassy surface opaque over time. But they lost the vote. So they went ahead and installed their dome on the underside of the city. Once things had gone that far, both sides decided the other had a point and installed another dome of the other type, the crystal ones fitted inside the transparant steel, enclosing the whole herdship in a double clamshell that left only a band around the horizontal plane free to direct access of the ship.
The upper dome area remained gardens, but after a couple failed attempts to create an independant plane of gravity so the under dome could also be 'upright' and gardened, the crews decided that it wasn't going to work and simply flooded it, giving themselves a lake.
All this time other workers had been refitting the city interiors and by this point the herdship was the most comfortable place in the whole fleet. Leaves taken for recreation planetside declined as the wild, unsettled world had limited beauty and the engineers were finding their relaxation time far better spent on the resorts the herdship was rapidly forming.
Then someone got the idea to use edible plant species and the popularity of the resort ship soared. Ship food, by necessity, has to survive long trips in difficult conditions and the best they could do with long term techniques did not compare to the flavor or texture of fresh food. Once the idea came to use the herdship as a floating food garden, the workers went ecstatic on their little competitions to combine beauty and loveliness with food growth.
But loveliness, even to Alderaan technitions, did not occlude function, and the type of mass they had added to the garden ship had rendered the already lumbering scow practically immobile. Seeing as how they might have to move the Deepdock refitting fleet at any time to avoid detection, they might lose their garden - and they were becoming very attached to it, spending nearly as much time working on it for fun off duty as they were rebuilding the cruisers on normal work shifts.
So a design contest was held, the best elements combined, and the result debugged in an unofficial contest where each bug found and fixed got a small reward of extra leave. Some of the better engineers got a couple weeks off out of it, and crews got to work on their new hobby-ship, refitting it into a very nice design. A resort and luxury craft, not a warship, but that was what the crews wanted of it.
Deepdock officers are no more immune to the lures of good food than the work crews, and time was scheduled to move the partitions enough to give the garden ship a complete work over. Or so it was planned. The project didn't have first place in line.
Interestingly enough, their acquisition officers visiting the various scrap yards found six more damaged and abandoned herdships and brought them home where more design contests were held and the work of the fleet's hobby went on.
See other episodes by Lionheart
(Posted Fri, 09 Apr 2004 01:17)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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