holy crap, coolest scenario ever...definitely doing some fiction about this this weekend. This whole situation happened without any planning on my part:
100+ years game here, a 2 year project I began at the outset of graduate school.
My fleets are in their third generation now, but there are some second generation ships around from before the advent of the fusion age....the oldest one being the *name withheld* survey cruiser (the name is the coolest part). These ships have plasma engines, I kept them around mostly to do surveys of peaceful alliance space, tracking down stray jump points and conducting comprehensive surveys of backwater systems....they've lived past their glory years.
Between UN Space and the territory of the aloof Sculptor Star Empire, there lies a black hole, designated Cthulhu. It's class III, so I never bothered to survey it. War has always been a looming possibility with the Sculptor, and black holes are really cool, so it seemed like a good idea to eventually survey it...I recently decided to send two of these survey cruisers to scout the black hole for possible hidden entrances into the heartland of the Sculptor empire. This was a tedious assignment, but both ships were in good condition, and moved at 5000 kps, a good enough clip that there was no chance of an accident.
...there was an accident. On their way home from the survey (I kid you not, they completed the survey and began moving home) one ship, the ship the class was named for, had a terrible accident...one of the plasma engines flared out. Simultaneously, its companion ship suffered a failure of its primary sensor suite. The odds of this happening, with two ships with a maintenance life of just over 1 year, is very low. I'm interpreting this as a catastrophic failure...the plasma engine
exploded and shorted out the sensors of the relatively nearby companion ship, likely by billowing plasma over a 10,000 kilometer area.
Now there were enough maintenance supplies to fix everything just fine, of course, but we never appreciate how damn heroic this is: the event horizon of a collapsed star less than 10 light-minutes away....engines flaring plasma wildlely into space, transformers exploding, spacewalk crews scrambling to shut everything down, patch everything up, and restart everything again, before the ship falls onto a trajectory that will bring it close enough to the black hole to get wrenched into spaghetti....
So, a heroic repair in deep space, 10 light minutes away from the raging core of a collapsed star.
And the name of the survey cruiser? Well, they're named for explorers, the companion ship, the second in the production line, was called the
ArmstrongThe first...why the
Shackleton of course. Shackleton Class Survey ships were the most famous ships during the second era of exploration.
So the Shackleton endures a disaster, and a total crew survival, very similar to the one shackleton went through.
But this time....IN SPAAAAAAACCCCCEEEEEEEE
