The USS Constitution is The Federation vessel Captain Shack, Dr Morphologis and Cmdr. W4sted meet each other on during a mission to test a new 'Duality Drive' prototype. The ship crashed on 27/7/2077 due to the duality drive failing and sending them an interstellar distance from Earth. The Operations Officer Valefor and Alteran have been most likely lost with the ship, and the final pieces of the vessel are scattered across the surface of Planet Bob
The ship was originally created under contract by TwitchENS Industries under the name PAX. Designed for interplanetary exploration, it never was designed to experience gravity, despite being equipped with hydrogen thrusters.The contract also stated that the ship was only designed to enter atmosphere once, upon crashing, it was toast.
Design Features[]
Designed for long distance space travel, provisions and life support provided for maintaining a 7 person crew. The ship itself had little in the way of offensive weaponry beyond basic anti-meteorite defenses. The design also featured the ability to house small craft or cargo in a forward cargo bay as well as a smaller side-mounted bay. These bays were also ideal for storing long range recon drones such as the R-5 unit.
As part of the overall reconstruction for the Duality Drive experiment, the refit made other modifications, such as the addition of escape pods and an extensive engineering suite rework.
The ship had hydrogen and ion thrusters, but was unable to support its weight in atmosphere.
At the time of its destruction, the ship was at least 10 years old with "hundreds of thousands" of AUs on her odometer. This is a little above middle age for interplanetary spacefaring vessels of this time due to stress exerted on the ship by the thrusters and the microscopic collisions of tonnes of dust and rock in space bombarding the exterior of the ship at all times.
Destruction[]
After employing the new Duality Drive, the Constitution arrived within the gravity field of the planet Bob, suffering from extensive system failures, hull breaches, life support damage, and radiation leaks. Even as the crew raced to assess the situation, the amount of damage continued to grow after a blowout. With little hope for recovery, the call for abandon ship went out.
Playback of recovered recordings indicate that the Constitution suffered two further explosive events - the first appeared to be centered in about halfway between the command deck and engineering, possibly due to power conduits rupturing in the area. This severed the forward section of the hull, including the forward hangar bay and bridge section. This was followed mere seconds later by what appears to be explosive release of the ship's starboard hydrogen tanks or possibly the Duality Drive itself, which severed remaining aft end of the vehicle between the engineering and mid-deck areas of the ship. Additional wreckage was blasted loose but most of it burned up on re-entry.
The only three surviving portions of the ship were the ones blasted free by the explosions. The command section, with Captain Shack still onboard, was able to make a somewhat controlled landing with emergency systems, while the remaining sections sustained and uncontrolled re-entry and crashed; these sections would be discovered by other Survivors and appropriated for resources.
Nightmare Constitution[]
In Episode 9 of the Morphologis Storyline, a "Nightmare Constitution" appears in one of Morph's nightmares. It first appears to be like the usual Constitution, except without the captain's chair. After a few seconds in the bridge, the whole ship, except the bridge, disappears.
Extra Notes[]
The Constitution as seen in the series is a modified version of the PAX by TwitchENS Industries; the unmodified version is available for download from the Steam Workshop. The engineering section of the ship was gutted and rebuilt to make room for the spinning reactor assembly and two escape pods were added just off one of the main halls. As a result of these modifications and the renaming of the ship, TwitchENS Industries has put the Survivors on notice that they are to return the ship and potentially face severe penalties.
It should also be noted that the Constitution does not have three refineries, assemblers and medical bays; these were modifications made in order to give the Survivors the required equipment to make survival a plausible option.