In Jovian orbit there exists a gas mining installation of mind boggling scale and complexity. The Acadian Queen is a processing facility the size of a city and extends tendrils of spun nanocarbon and doped ceramic fifteen miles into Jupiter's upper atmosphere. Collected gas passes vast pumps an centrifuges separating out helium-3 in industrially useful quantities. Most of the facility is either fully automated or run via telepresence, but the maintenance needs of an installation this size requires personnel in the high hundreds. With those hundreds come dozens of ships of all sizes, including several like this one- the LM-3200 'Stork'.
Originally a Bayer-Blohm design from late in the last century, it has been built under license by all the major shipyards in a a very wide range of configurations. Here we see a fairly standard layout, consisting of a lifting crane offset to starboard and modular external machinery and equipment lockers fitted to the underside in three locations.
Currently it's sitting on an access elevator in one of the pressurized sections. It's unclear from the image what the nature of repairs being undertaken are. However, lack of protective gear on the worker in foreground suggest simple mechanical failure instead of one of the more insidious metaprion infestations.
Following the conclusion of the Second Barsoom War, the diffusion of alien technology into consumer goods accelerated exponentially. Martian technomancy was adapted to make grav-resist vehicles not only possible but practical as well.
Here we see the 1927 Calumet Sixty Special, one of the first generation of civilian grav cars to use the new Lileks-Janney Composite Drive. While most examples were built on Earth, it was also manufactured under license by Borgward at their New Dearborn facility on Telemachus.
This particular example was made famous by its use by the Butler Gang on their string of high-profile crimes across southern Italy. They were never brought to justice, despite the best efforts of law enforcement across all the Worlds and Parallels. It was speculated that unsafe performance modifications made to the Lileks-Janney Drive caused a quantum implosion event, but this is mere guesswork. Even now treasure hunters comb the depths of the Adriatic, looking for the lost fortune in black diamonds and Venusian paramercury.
Following the emergence of the Howarth Fusion Plant as a viable propulsion system in the early 22nd century, helium-3 mining on an industrial scale became economically viable. Vast mining complexes started dotting the Jovian skies, their collection heads extending miles down into the upper atmosphere. Extending up from this, vast cracking towers boiled and separated the constituent gases for reprocessing.
The construction of these mining complexes, when taken with shipyards of Mars and the terraforming of Europa constitutes the crowning wonders of the age. However, these wonders could never have been conceived of, let alone completed without a vast flotilla of vessels and equipment first constructed on the Moon, then Mars, then the freespace arcologies of the asteroid belt. For while humbler in scale, this ocean of anonymous vessels embodies the hidden wonders behind the greater wonder.
The Voland HVX-3001 is an good example of one of these 'lesser wonders'. It is a modular construction ship, consisting of a spun nanocarbon frame bearing drive, powerplant, and pressurized crew sections as well as fixtures which could accept a wide variety of equipment. The narrow width of the vessel is the result of dual requirements from both how they were stowed and for the occasional need to operate within the outer atmosphere of Jupiter itself. The construction manipulators fitted here are typical. The 3001 series contained a number of innovations, including one of the first modern antigravity suspensors as well as being one of the first civilian vessels to be designed from the bottom up with the Voynich-Harden Telepresence Rig in mind. While commonplace now these were once innovations that revolutionized not only microgravity construction, but the very nature of space travel itself.
The example seen here was built by Feng Long Heavy Industries in 2206 and served on the construction of the Acadian Queen complex, among others. She was retired after two decades of service when it was found that her nanocarbon frame had been significant weakened due to an infestation of self-replicating prions. She was subsequently sold for scrap and now serves as part of an orbital squatting community near Io.
I wish I'd found out about this site sooner. :)
