Muir Forest Ship

Description

The Muir Tree Ship is the work of a cult variously called 'The Muir', 'Templars', 'Greenies' or 'Treehuggers' who fled crowded Earth during the Neo-Victorian era. They were masters of biology but not of engineering. They wanted to green the skies but were limited at first to standard engines and drives.

They captured asteroids and ice moons in the belts of the outer system and used genetically engineered "trees" to form space habitats. Their domes were placed within the green area, lit by fusion mini-suns and watered by melted ice.

Their enemies drove them off or tried to capture these valuable new habitats. They jumped to Aldeberan and found the Erg creatures. These were energy binders that could cloak the Muir Tree Ships in fields equal to 3000 point shields.

The model of Muir Tree Ship shown here is made using an C-type asteroid rich in carbonaceous chondrites. To this an ice moon is attached using organic plastic fibres. A long tritanium/diamond spine is grown along the major axis until it is longer than the planned forest height. Fusion systems are placed at the far end of the spine. Electrical power is sent back down the spine for heating and to feed the Erg creatures. Then the GM "tree" is grown using the liberated materials. This is phototropic and grows with programmed angles. It begins to fill the space round the spine lit by fusion light.

Unlike the larger Muir Orbital Forest the Tree Ship can move. Warp speed is low but hyperdrive and jump technologies allow them to travel far. Some have even been sighted in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

Natural enemies include Klingons (who loot), Robots (yukkk, green stuff, ukky) and IMT (of course). The Braphat scarcely notice them and the Feds go all warm and cuddly when they see them, usually putting a big bar-code on the side for wildlife tracking projects. The Arborians worship them. The Peeps tend to break bits off and eat them and the Borg try to incorporate them.

Boarding is tricky due to the large crew, the Erg shield, the array of small weapons and PD mounted on the domes and the large softspot. These valuable ships are widely coveted, easy to kill and hard to own."

Previous Idea History

A super-agro-ship. Very Green, very lush. Problem is the need for gardners. The Creators (blessed be their names) did not really believe in AI so millions of sentient beings are swept up (colonists, humanoids, all but Chups really) whenever a "Muir Forest Ship" sweeps within X lyrs of a system. They are teleported into the vast passenger list.

You *can* get some of them back. You have to attack and board successfully. Depending on how well this does the attacking ship gets passengers shifted over to it. The Muir does not have offensive large or super weapons but many small and PD weapons, a very good shield and self repairing armour and hull. Semi-indestructible but not godlike. It cannot be captured though. There is no bridge nor controls. Guidance is by distributed dumb hive minds within the forest. It does not use conventional engines, Erg energy beings from Aldebaran move it and also provide the big shield. So it does not have supplies, fuel, metals, ord or repair units (as such) in board.

If you reduce the hull, etc to zero points it will break up and remain as wreckage in space. Guilty old you.

Some Muir Forest ships even have sentient Zepplin creatures in the biospheres. Most have interesting winged creatures. A few have hippies and Greenpeace swampies stowed away. These latter sometimes paint their logos on the side.

Natural enemies include Klingons (who board and 'recover' folk on sight), Robots (yukkk, green stuff, ukky), IMT (of course) and (strangely) the Arborians who feel that their franchise is being trod on. The Braphat scarcely notice them and the Feds go all warm and cuddly when they see them, usually putting a big bar-code on the side for wildlife tracking projects. The Peeps tend to break bits off and eat them and the Borg try (and fail) to incorporate them (too strange, also the USB-6 interfaces fail to connect).

It looks somewhat like the domed ship in that crappy film with bearded loser, his two robots and a go-cart.

Not sure about the Arborian reaction? Anything Green is _Green_ I suspect? I could imagine that they might be mesmerised by such a thing? Waste effort/resources in protecting it maybe? They just can't help themselves "Ooooh! It's so greeeeeeen. The Greeen-ness! Oooooh! My kecks! " *thunk*

(Later..)
This one should just charge round. Say it hypes (fast) to a random co-ord and then travels at a few 10s of ly/turn looking for gardeners. Then goes bored or cautions and hypes out again. A bit like the Streib in B5.

The Muir Forest requires many quantities to be ZERO. Hooray. And passenger space to be essentially unlimited. Cheers! So the "spooils" are carried around as in a big carousel with special coded properties and some factors quantified by engine and shield numbers and hull hit points (like D&D).

<GREG>....- < ??? >
This idea sounds hard to implement with the existing code. something that is important to remember, as of right now, it is hard to have ships or object behave on their own. Guidance is normally required by a player. No granted, Tim is currently working on an AI, but we do not know the scope of that effort. Perhaps once that is done, we can talk about it further.

It also occurs to me about the Muir:

1) it must orbit worlds to work. The dust-off stuff works from orbit. The AI must look for promising worlds within 400 lyr and then go there and suck.
The AI must also set BUN(beam up neut-fuel), BUR(repair) & BUO(ord) and somehow these must work from the planet (or even player bases!). Note that with the grav well / mines about that it will get dropped to normal space sometimes and crawl at 20 to the next target world.

2) This is very desireable to capture, especially for IMT. Even as wreckage, maybe it can be very much lighter?? (ETFE foils like Eden). So I have upped softspot (use the force Luke...hit the exhaust...) to 50%, just for now.
Also crew must be high. (HG should be carried?) Just imagine one appear over your HW. Either it nicks your people and natives and you are stuffed or you capture it and you have a free space station with free food and stuff on board...

Muir re-done as lightweight ship of spars and foils. It is *vast* but not much more massive than a Fed battleship. It could even go lower...

Minor stats tweaked.