Vessels of the Viaticus Dynasty

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The Aetherius Aeternus

Ship Description

Hull: Battlecruiser
Class: Overlord-class Imperial Battlecruiser
Dimensions: 5.3km long, 0.85 km abeam at fins approx.
Mass: 31 megatonnes, approx.
Crew: 100,000 crew, approx.
Accel: 2.4 gravities max sustainable acceleration

An Overlord-class battlecruiser of ancient design, the Aetherius Aeternus was the unshakeable bastion of Viaticus power for centuries. Helios Viaticus himself, first warrant-holder and the founder of the dynasty, commanded from the same bridge that you now stand on.
The first keel laid at the shipyards of Exaviar's World and the flagship of Viaticus Dynasty throughout the House's long history, the Aetherius Aeternus was the dominate naval presence in the subsector until its untimely disappearance two centuries ago. It has been said that this ship is a symbol of the world that spawned it, and that while it was under the charge of House Viaticus no harm would befall Exaviar's World.
A mighty battlecruiser, this vessel has seen conflict after conflict, often emerging nigh-unscathed while leaving behind the shattered hulks of pirates, xenos and traitors who would dare lay claim to the subsector. Never defeated in battle, and always appearing in the skies above Exaviar's World when the docks were threatened, it is the subject of countless myths and legends among the people who live in the great Hives below, many of whom see it as something akin to an Imperial Saint.

Its disappearance shattered the morale of the planet - the rapid decline of the fortunes of House Viaticus after seemed to be but a natural progression of this loss to many - although, in truth, the fortunes of the Dynasty had been dwindling for many decades before... the mission upon which it vanished was a desperate attempt to reverse the decline, in fact. Now that it has reappeared, the Aetherius Aeternus again appears in the skies above Exaviar's World, and a new generation dreams of being selected to crew it.

Ship Statistics

Name: Aetherius Aeternus
Class: Overlord-class Battlecruiser
Machine Spirit: Ancient and Wise
Past Histories: Wrested from a Space Hulk
Hull Integrity: 66/66
Crew Population: 100/100
Crew Morale: 99/99
Space: 69/78
Power: 68/90

Speed: 6
Maneuvering: +26
Detection: +20
Armour: 21, 25 (Prow)
Turret Rating: 2

Ship Objective Bonuses: +50 (Exploration, Military), +100 (Creed), +150 (Criminal, Trade)
Ship Notes: +5 to all Navigation and Piloting rolls, +10 to fire guns (+15 against planetary targets), +20 Intimidation against planetary targets, halve the duration of warp travel, roll twice for Warp Encounters every three days travel and take the lowest.

Ship Components

Components: Essential
Engine: Saturnine Class 4A "Ultra" Drive (+0 power, 14 space)
Warp Drive: Miloslav H-616.b Warp Drive (10 power, 12 space)
Geller Field: Standard Geller Field (1 power, 0 space)
Void Shields: Repulsor Shield Array (8 power, 1 space)
Bridge: Ship Master's Bridge (4 power, 3 space)
Life Sustainer: Vitae-Pattern Life Sustainer (5 power, 3 space)
Crew Quarters: Voidsmen Quarters (2 power, 4 space)
Augur Array: BG-15 Assault Scanners (5 power, 0 space)

Components: Weapons
Prow: Armored Prow (0 power, 4 space)
Dorsal: Bombardment Cannons (5 power, 5 space)
Port: Disruption Macrocannon Broadside x2 (12 power, 10 space)
Starboard: Disruption Macrocannon Broadside x2 (12 power, 10 space)

Components: Supplementary
Luxury Passenger Quarters (2 power, 1 space)
Trophy Room (1 power, 1 space)

Components: Archeotech
Teleportarium (1 power, 1 space)

Tour of the Vessel

Weapon Batteries

Blaze-Bringer

Statue, Plaza of the Triumphant

The only gun on the Aetherius Aeternum left unmolested by the extensive refurbishments after it mysteriously re-appeared, Blaze-Bringer is an ancient and beautiful device. The massive breech-loading cannon is staffed by almost eight thousand ratings, and for a good reason. The massive, thirty meter long warheads are pulled from the ship's munitions storage almost entirely unaided by machines. Sweating drag-gangs spend long minutes of backbreaking labour until at last the shell is loaded.
Commissioned by Agamemmnon Exaviar Viaticus, the cannon's breech is framed by two fifteen-meter tall statues of gilded adamantine. The left, arms outstretched, holds in its hands a planet of unknown contours, whilst the right statue holds a massive sword raised in an overhead blow. As such, the primary purpose of this gun has never been forgotten: To bring the flames of war to planets that offend the Lord-Captains of House Viaticus.

The Sparktakers
The four Disruptor-cannon broadsides installed on the behest of Lord-Captain Alexis stand out. It is always a jarring experience for lower-deck ratings freshly assigned to those batteries to replace the dead and injured, as the ancient and age-worn adamantium and ceramite of the Aetherius Aeternum suddenly give way to gleaming, unscarred metal. It is this air of near-alien newness that has already led to severe rivalries between the ratings assigned to the so-named Sparkbuster broadsides and those of the Blaze-Bringer Bombardment cannons, as the shared sentiment of the gunnery crews is that they, and their equipment, are superior to the ancient and moribund (so they claim) bombardment cannon and its attendants.

Signum Victoriae
The gigantic armored prow of the Aetherius Aeternum, installed after a lengthy debate between the Lord-Captain and his command crew. Replacing an old prow-mounted macrocannon battery, the new prow is a menacing thing: Painted in the silver-on-black color scheme of House Viaticus, nearly .75 megatonnes of adamantium have been fashioned into the face of a swooping Imperial Eagle, the twin heads sporting tremendous beaks, which serve as the actual breachers for ramming operations.

Bridge

Physical dimensions: 120 meters long, 60 meters wide, 50 meters high.
Physical description: Eight-tiered demipyramid.
Staff on duty, out of combat: 432, excluding backup Navigators and Astropaths.
Staff on duty, in combat: 552

The bridge's tiers are cut into three primary sections, the lower, central and upper bridge.

The lower bridge houses the gunnery coordination/cogitation crew, the Aetherics crew and the Mechanicum detachment responsible for the bridge.
Tier One, the largest of them all, belongs to Gunnery, and with good reasons: the extensive cogitator-network that gives the Aetherius Aeternus unparalleled accuracy in combat requires much space.
Tier Two belongs to the red-robed Adepts of the Machine-God, for similar reasons: They require much space to operate at peak efficiency.
Tier Three is the home to the Aetherics crew, also very space-intensive due to the four analysis-pits where eighty specialists labour to convert the sensor output into proper data.

The central bridge consists of tier four and five:
Tier Four houses the Lord-Captain's command throne and console, together with the command-level seats and consoles for all other tiers: Tier Four is truly the nexus of the bridge at which the Lord-Captain and his most trusted officers coordinate the work of the entire ship (ie. where the PCs are).
Tier Five is where the sixscore bridge armsmen and the armed underlings of the command crew are found, and it is from here that most shipboard security manners are directed.

The upper bridge consists of tiers six, seven and eight:
Tier Six is the nerve-centre of the Viaticus financial affairs, the undisputed domain of the ship's seneschals. The constant clatter of the sixteen massive remuneration-cogitators, the smell of ink and the scratching of autoquills on paper are a permanent reminder of this tier's importance.
Tier Seven houses the psychic amplifiers and linkers that are the domain of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, and it is a rare mundane that ventures onto this tier: the foreboding aura that surrounds it is strong indeed.
Tier Eight is the undisputed domain of the Navis Nobilite, offering six sleeping quarters, two dozen servitors and massive sealed and shielded doors beyond which no normal man may pass without an invitation of the Navigator Prime. Offering all the creature comforts necessary to keep the Navigators happy, Tier Eight is never opened during a warp-voyage, the Navigators working on a pre-determined rotation to ensure that none of them ever has to pilot the vessel dead-tired.

All tiers, save for the Eighth, are connected to each other by a set of six massive lifts, each capable of housing twenty people and, secretly, heavy remote-locks for the doors and poison-gas dispensers slaved directly to the captain's command console, in case hostile elements attempt to use these lifts.

Furthermore, two ornate stairways connect all eight tiers to each other, hewn from white granite and inlaid with mosaics of an unknown jet-black stone, depicting various Imperial saints.

The color scheme of the bridge is light, held mostly in white, gold and black reliefs, and as such requires regular and thorough cleaning, a duty undertaken by a Century of tenth-generation janitors (see also 'Bondsmen-families to House Viaticus, Vol XIV, Ch. 27').

All tiers save for the First and Eigth offer a railed balcony to gaze at the gigantic armourglass viewscreen, the gilded adamantine railing hiding a cunning mechanism that allows eight-inch thick adamantium sheets to rise between the railing struts to offer cover on demand in the unthinkable case that anything breaks through the fifty meters wide and thirty meters high viewscreen and attempts to gun down the bridge-crew.

Enginarium

Aquarium Trapeti
Here, in this vaulted room that smells of grease and incense, is where the sacred machine oil is made. In a large stone pool on a raised dais, the glistening substance sits, infinitesimal bubbles rising to the surface from deep below. Along the walls are troughs and tubes that are used to mix compounded metals with a base of purest promethium - the resulting substance is poured into the central pool regularly. Over the course of five and a half days, this mixture, made holy by the sacred machine oil remaining in the great vat, transforms into more of the necessary unguent, aided by the constant pulse of electricity through wires that criss-cross over the surface.

Luxury Quarters

The Plaza of the Triumphant
The capstone of the luxury guest (and officer) quarters is a great plaza, perhaps a quarter-kilometer in diameter. The vaulted roof stretches three stories and is covered with frescoes commissioned by generation after generation of Lord-Captain - often a record of past triumphs, with a sprinkling of illustrations of martyrs and Imperial Saints. Tended lawns are crossed by garden paths, and the borders of the plaza are marked by trees and plants from Holy Terra and from planets across the Imperium. The centerpiece is a golden statue, a dozen feet tall, of the Emperor Himself. Resplendent in His armour and crowned by a halo of light and a garland of leaves, He stares resolutely forward, His expression communicating his unmatched power and presence - truly a credit to the sculptor hired by the first master of the Aetherius Aeternus.

The Teleportarium

The Teleportarium Chamber
The AA's teleportarium is a large room a hundred feet on each side and three stories tall. At its center is the teleport pad, which is where outgoing personnel actually stand when to be transported on and off the ship. The actual machinery of the pad is warded by a 30cm block of transparent steel, which can be mechanically raised in order to conduct maintenance on the pad. At the sides of the room are the heavily armored bulges containing the remainder of the teleport machinery that cannot fit under the pad.

The teleportarium is overseen by a control station set into the walls of the teleportarium, through which the Electropriests responsible for overseeing the artifact's arcane workings watch the pad through windows of the same transparent steel that shields the pad machinery. Their consoles contain an interlink to the ship's bridge, allowing them to teleport to and from teleport homing beacons, as well as diverting some of the ship's auger capacity to perform independent scanning. Their consoles also control the defensive autoguns that line the room; heavy flamer and heavy bolter turrets blanket the pad area with multiple overlapping fields of fire, which is a wise precaution when one considers that the teleportarium is also used to "receive" quests teleported up from planetside.

There is only one entrance to the teleportarium; a wide corridor with multiple defensive bulkheads and autogun turrets, in case something escapes the teleportarium and tries to rampage aboard the ship. This layout also makes it easy for formed bodies of troops to march onto the teleport pad together.

The Crew Quarters

The Stacks
The vast, sprawling mass of hab-blocks that the crew of the Aetherius Aeternus are... surprisingly clean, a far cry from the grimy, dingy hive conditions most of the crewmen are used to. The younger ratings don't seem to mind, and have taken to personalizing their living space with mementoes from home, and not a few pets.

The older voidsmen note that the crew quarters were absolutely spotless despite the vessel having been abandoned for centuries. In fact, the rest of the blocks are scrupulously tidied as well. And there are rumors going on about how the waste simply... vanishes by itself, and of strange, tiny shapes scurrying about in the night-cycles, fleeing human contact as much as possible.

Still, they're better than pressed-crew qyarters, even if the luxury quarters alloted to the captain and the senior officers do induce some jealousy. All the same, the elder voidsmen have readily taken to Boris and his Squad organizing the blocks and floors into defense teams and scouting out the stairwells and floors for heavy weapons emplacements.

Vanguard of Justice

Ship Description

Hull: Merchant Raider
Class: Havoc-class Merchant Raider
Dimensions: 1.6km long, 0.4 km abeam at fins approx.
Mass: 6 megatonnes, approx.
Crew: 24,000 crew, approx.
Accel: 5 gravities max sustainable acceleration

Once a frigate of House Viaticus under the name Good Omens, captained by a loyal servant of the Dynasty, this ship turned pirate shortly after the disappearance of the Aetherius Aeternus. Rising to prominence as the leader of a band of pirates, this vessel terrorized the sub-sector for many years. Ambushed by the newly-regained flagship and captured in a daring boarding action by the new captain, Lord-Captain Alexis Nikolaos Viaticus, it is currently undergoing purification before being brought back into faithful service. All its former crew were killed due to their servitude to a captain willing to bind a daemon into himself to fight off the vessel's rightful owners.

Ship Statistics

Name: Vanguard of Justice
Class: Havoc-class Merchant Raider
Machine Spirit: A Nose For Trouble
Past Histories: Reliquary of Mars
Hull Integrity: 30/30
Crew Population: 100/100
Crew Morale: 100/100
Space: 40/40
Power: 45/45

Speed: 9
Maneuvering: +25
Detection: +15
Armour: 15
Turret Rating: 1

Ship Objective Bonuses: +50 (Criminal, Exploration, Trade)
Notes: None

Ship Components

Components: Essential
Engine: Modified Jovian Pattern Class 2 Drive (45 power generated, 6 space)
Warp Drive: Strelov 1 Warp Engine (10 power, 10 space)
Geller Field: Standard Geller Field (1 power, 0 space)
Void Shields: Single Void Shield Array (5 power, 1 space)
Bridge: Combat Bridge (1 power, 1 space)
Life Sustainer: Vitae-Pattern Life Sustainer (5 power, 3 space)
Crew Quarters: Pressed-crew Quarters (2 power, 1 space)
Augur Array: M-100 Auger Array (3 power, 0 space)

Components: Weapons
Prow: Titanforge Lance Weapon (9 power, 4 space)
Dorsal: Sunsear Laser Battery (6 power, 4 space)

Components: Supplementary
Compartmentalized Cargo Hold (2 power, 5 space)
Trophy Room (1 power, 1 space)
Drop Pod Launch Bays (1 power, 3 space)
Crew Reclamation Facility (1 power, 1 space)

Tour of the Vessel

The Underdecks

When the Vanguard of Justice was recaptured it was the epicenter of a major warp event which, needless to say, didn't do much to help the already excessive Hullghast population. Now entire lower decks of the ship are simply given over to chaos-tainted things. There are too many nooks and crannies to ever find them all, monsters inhabit the underdecks like rats in the walls.

Righteous Anger

Ship Description

Hull: Destroyer
Class: Iconoclast-class Destroyer
Dimensions: 1.3km long, 0.4 km abeam at fins approx.
Mass: 6.1 megatonnes, approx.
Crew: 16,500 crew, approx.
Accel: 7.2 gravities max sustainable acceleration

A destroyer found escorting the pirate vessel Good Omens, this vessel was caught in the same ambush and, while its crew were spared immediate death, it likewise is undergoing purification at the docks of Exaviar's World in case the chaos-taint of its leader-vessel's captain had spread.

Ship Statistics

Name: Righteous Anger
Class: Iconoclast-class Destroyer
Machine Spirit: Blasphemous Tendencies
Past Histories: Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
Hull Integrity: 28/28
Crew Population: 100/100
Crew Morale: 100/100
Space: 32/32
Power: 34/45

Speed: 10
Maneuvering: +25
Detection: +10
Armour: 14
Turret Rating: 1

Ship Objective Bonuses: +50 (Trade), +100 (Criminal)
Notes: Easy to Repair (When effecting long term repairs, this ship may repair an additional +2 Hull Integrity if the repairs succeed)

Ship Components

Components: Essential
Engine: Jovian Pattern Class 2 Drive (45 power generated, 10 space)
Warp Drive: Strelov 1 Warp Engine (10 power, 10 space)
Geller Field: Standard Geller Field (1 power, 0 space)
Void Shields: Single Void Shield Array (5 power, 1 space)
Bridge: Pirate Bridge (1 power, 1 space)
Life Sustainer: L-12.b Life Sustainer (3 power, 1 space)
Crew Quarters: Pirate Quarters (2 power, 2 space)
Augur Array: M-100 Auger Array (3 power, 0 space)

Components: Weapons
Dorsal: Macrocannon Battery (4 power, 2 space) x2

Components: Supplementary
Reaver Hold (1 power, 3 space)

Tour of the Vessel

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