JumpShip of the Month: Bright Star Auto Scout
It's another month, and time for another JumpShip of the Month article. This is one I've been both eager and dreading doing for a while, but it's the next one in chronological order, so here we go.
The
Bright Star is an odd duck, one introduced to us in Experimental Technical Readout: Boondoggles. And "boondoggle", perhaps, is the right word for the
Bright Star...though maybe not.
The Terran Hegemony was, in the early 26th Century, still looking to explore, but were concerned about risking human life doing it. So, they went to Ulsop Robotics, a company specializing in...well, robotics.
Why Ulsop? Because they came through for the Hegemony before, designing and building the Eagle-Eye 12 targeting and tracking system and Ulsop AI Surveillance Computer, both of which were used by the Vincent class corvette. Yeah, think on that for a moment. Hopefully no one named their
Vincent's computer "Hal"". Or "Glados". Or "Skynet".
So, going back to Ulsop for a more extensive system for their new scout JumpShip made sense. The end result of Ulsop's efforts were a 60,000 ton automated standard core JumpShip, one that admittedly looked more like an ultra-compact WarShip, that used the Smart Robotic Control System instead of a human crew. It's important to note that this is not a brilliant AI - it's about on par with the Black Wasp and Voidseeker aerospace fighters, or the later Word of Blake drones, and clearly below the level of the later SDS drone AIs.
Unlike the
Liberty or
Merchant classes, the
Bright Star did not bother with docking collars for DropShips, instead settling for two small craft to be used by human maintenance crews, but without the ARTS-type gear, the
Bright Star would presumably have issues handling robotic small craft on its own. This may, however, be where the three-tons of drone carrier control systems and 13 tons of communications equipment comes in - there's not really anything else aboard it could be used for, and it may be an early attempt at being able to run its own robotic small craft for replenishment, or to take a closer look at interesting objects.
The
Bright Star also featured a single lifeboat (with its handy solar sail) for emergency use, should anyone who happened to be aboard need to abandon ship. Even this, though, served double-duty, also serving as a handy emergency data dump capsule should the poor
Bright Star decide it was in dire straights, allowing at least its data to survive and eventually be recovered, even if it decided it couldn't.
OK, then, we've got a relatively small automated JumpShip with a couple of small craft bays, mainly for humans visiting the ship. The purported purpose of the
Bright Star was to go off, explore, map star systems, note anything that humans may find of interest later, and log the data for eventual review by humans back in the Terran Hegemony. How good was it at this job?
Let's start with the most important part: sensors. After all, as a JumpShip, it's not going to spend a lot of time flying around a star system, so it's sitting at a jump point using its sensors to see what there is to see. Fortunately, the
Bright Star came equipped with a large naval comm-scanner suite. This system triples the sensor range compared to standard JumpShips, which is none too shabby. Should it see something interesting enough to jump to a pirate point for a closer look, the large NCSS also functions as a hyper-spectral imager with a 2000 km range.
So, OK, it could see pretty well. It also had a 150-ton fuel capacity, enough for 153.53 days of 0.1 G burn-time. This, actually, may have been enough for the five-year mission that the Terran Hegemony wanted to send the
Bright Star on - you don't need to do a full burn every day, after all. Armor, at 6/4/4/4, was light, but better than a lot of other JumpShips, and more than enough to handle most small debris the ship might encounter. A cargo capacity of 123.5 tons isn't horrible for a DropShip this size, and leaves room for spare parts that the
Bright Star's automated repair systems may need for standard maintenance. If it could indeed carry an early automated small craft for replenishment of fuel or external repairs, that could extend its mission time further.
Everything, then, would seem to be not too shabby with the
Bright Star, except for one small detail: it didn't work. Ulsop talked the Terran Hegemony into a smaller, 10-system mission for its first time out, rather than the five-year mission the Hegemony wanted to start with. Unfortunately, it still didn't work: instead of jumping where it was supposed to, the Bright Star immediately went off the mission plan, jumping through a series of inhabited systems, until it got to New Samarkand, with even HPGs and command circuits unable to get Ulsop ahead of the ship before it departed New Samarkand and entered the history books as a lost ship.
But was it really lost?
It occurs to me that the automated nature, small size, and excellent sensors also presents another use for the
Bright Star: a spy ship. The
Bright Star had a good set of eyes. It doesn't risk human lives, meaning you can send it on riskier missions than a
Bug Eye or
Tracker. Its small size and lack of docking collars gives it a small signature, complicating detection, and it certainly seems to be able to be locked down well enough to keep out unwanted parties.
Could the Terran Hegemony have intended to have used the
Bright Star as a spy ship in the first place, with its public, showy "malfunction" simply serving as a smoke screen? Maybe. After all, it's not like Ulsop Robotics went under after this particular "boondoggle". In fact, they later got the contract to develop the AIs for the SDS system, including its crowning achievement, the M-5
Caspar series.
That there were rumored sightings of the
Bright Star is also another good sign. After all, you'd probably expect it to show up from time to time if it was out there spying on the Hegemony's neighbors, and if it ever did get definitively pinned down, you can disavow knowledge by simply pointing out that it obviously malfunctioned.
So, how do you use a
Bright Star in your game? Actually, you've got a few options here.
The obvious one, of course, would be to have it be a prize that one group or another are trying to claim, and willing to turn guns on their competitors to claim it first. Another one that keeps it on the tabletop is to use that naval comm scanner suite for that improved sensor range and +1 to initiative, making it a weird kind of command and control platform. With two small craft bays, you can even throw in an assault small craft or two to protect it.
In effect, the
Bright Star is very similar to another JumpShip of near identical size: the
Explorer. In exchange for cutting the cargo and small craft capacity in half, you gain full automation and a powerful sensor suite.
That, of course, opens up all kinds of weird options for an AToW game, with a bunch of plucky, slightly mad explorers with a DropShuttle and landing craft, using this relic they found to explore parts unknown...or maybe just to get back to settled space after their original JumpShip broke down. With 123.5 tons of cargo, you could even make room for a handful of steerage quarters using salvaged life support gear from your original ride, overriding the internal systems after either hacking them, or using ancient records you and your fellow lostech prospectors found in the ruins of Ulsop Robotics.
In short, then, the
Bright Star Auto Scout is only truly a boondoggle if you want it to be. Contrary to expectations for an extremely small JumpShip with no docking collars, the unique history and nature of the
Bright Star and its powerful large NCSS give the
Bright Star far more of an edge on a tabletop than you might otherwise expect, opening up a variety of possibilities for your game.
Master Unit List page on the Bright Star