TerrisH said:
Welcome back, unto the Glory of Galactic Civilization!
Back to Galatic civilization you say? (raises eyebrow) We are quite happy in our own glory thank you very much, but your offer of trade is of course interesting.
And now; a story in which Dis describes alot of ships. (With minimal technobabble

)
Fade to black...
____________________
The hull armour of the Cruiser was dark and dull, mottled with grey and purple, abraded and cold. The derelict fleet had been found nestled in the trailing Lagrange point of the outermost planet of the system like fossilised flies in amber. Despite the distance of over 5*10^3 light-seconds from the primary (11 of the old Dominions SAU
1) the harsh radiation of the sun had ravaged the outer layers over the centauries. Hence the scabrous purple where once all had been a bright black surface; glistening with sentience.
Pilot Harpence knew this from the diagrams and renderings Academician Neins had been giving out at the crew briefings; the Old Dominion armour, in addition to the as yet unlocated shield generators, were layer after layer of hard carbon and metals, interspaced with resilient soft layers and reservoirs of nanotech repair materials. Fully three metres thick in places, it was a heck of a lot of mass to pull around, but the protection offered could probably stand up to the entirety of the home defence fleet. As his broomstick smoothly jetted over to the aft rent where most of the science team were buzzing away, he mused over the differences between the Cruiser and the much smaller vessel holding station a good distance off.
The Cruiser was a rough cone, bulky and massive to his skyjack eyes, measuring half a kilometre along the axis and about half that across the base. The thick armour was smooth despite its degraded state and cut into hundreds of facets instead of a clean circle, giving the whole ship something of the look of a flint arrowhead same purpose but with fifty centuries of technological development behind it. Hundreds of low domes blistered the surface when you got in closer, ranging from one to six metres in diameter, the armour covering these was much thinner according to the sensors, but no attempt had been made to breach them. If the tales of the Old Dominion were to be believed, nearly all of them would reveal some sort of weapon system, possibly unstable weapons systems. The few that were open, all 1.3 metres in diameter, revealed empty launching racks, highly radioactive empty racks; obviously some weapon deemed too valuable or dangerous to leave behind when the ships were abandoned. At the rim of the cone more blisters perched, plus a hugely thick band of gleaming exotic metals, undimmed by time but peppered my micrometeorite impact. The scientists thought this was the ships FTL drive, but puzzled over its configuration since the Gideon equations forced a baroque hexagonal array on the Tumbleweed and her sister ships for interacting with the starlanes. The flat base of the behemoth was very unlike the smooth slopes; more weapons blisters, huge docking ports and access bays, the blunt spikes of the fabled reactionless drive, the huge nozzles of backup reaction drives, and trailing comm arrays, all combined into a dense forest of equipment. All this tied together into a cohesive whole, a bold trumpet call wrought in metal and carbon; this ship class would be the first wave of a system assault as it transited down from the starlane, a sharp sacrificial thrust into the enemies defences with its massively armoured front while it dumps fighters and spy satellites from its rear to support the heavier warships and carriers that would follow. Its glorious death would buy them time to set up undisturbed. They did not yet know its name, which troubled Harpence on some spiritual level, for the name plate had been degraded general ablation of the hull and they had not been able to connect with its command core or net. That was another unsettling thing; the processing devices in the ship, while of an advanced nature, were few and far between to the sensibilities of a people who threaded everything with sentience.
Looking back at the Tumbleweed with his magnification on full, the Skyjack ship resembled a filigreed ornament in comparison to the broad warrior. With the morphable tendrils set to maximum extension she could reach the volume encompassed by the Cruiser, but with only one thirtieth of the mass; a spider web next to a flint. Right now the extensions were set to only half the maximum reach, and the ship had a roughly spherical shape whilst at rest. Not only did she not have metres of armour, she currently lacked even a solid outer hull; the metallic beams of the structural skeleton opening to hard vacuum! At times a mobile layer of memory plastic and energy can be extended between the ship and the universe, but that just go in the way of access, and even when it was deployed the crew preferred to keep it translucent. Within the clutch of the structural skeleton were held dozens of baubles illuminated in many colours; the various modules for living quarters, labs, machine shops and stores, in addition to hundreds to smaller machines wrapped into the skeletons fabric. Towards the rear were the eight dark cylinders of the reaction drives, quiescent for now as station keeping was performed by thousands of tiny ion squirt thrusters on the outer spars. The Gideon drive array, normally held in a protective embrace amidships, was currently extended on a scaffold a hundred metres out from the ships main concentrations of components like a multicoloured snowflake forty metres in diameter. The twisted hexagonal struts of the array hurt the eyes somehow, like an optical illusion, flicking between states. Right now the bustling activity of the ship would interfere with the delicate fields as they performed their task without the somehow different space of the starlane they could not translate mass to FTL, but small packets of information were being exchanged with the Conclave as the newest data on the Cruisers rolled in. Tumbleweed represented a completely different philosophy to the Cruiser, that was a machine, a weapon where the crew were just more components, abet ones of flesh, this was a explorer, a workshop, a home as flexible as her crews imagination.
Maybe the Cruiser doesnt have a name Harpence thought to himself and his exoself, Names imply a hope for the future
[Names also help distinguish units from other units] his exoself butted in
[it is most probable that the Cruiser had some sort of name/designation/call sign]
Shut up and let me philosophise damn it!
[:Rolls eyes:]
As he curled around the lip of the Cruiser and headed for the rent in the base where the science time were try to access the ships systems, the wound being what had seemingly crippled the ships FTL array cutting the exotic components in half, he thought about what the science team had discovered about the wound. It was radioactive, with a signature identical to that found in the empty weapons blisters the ship had been crippled by another Dominion ship, maybe even of the same class. A troubling omen indeed he decided.
With that thought he aligned his sensors on the area of space that held the other ship, the one that had emerged into the system nigh simultaneously with theirs, the Skyjacks had picked up the scrambled and untranslatable lightspeed signals of other human civilizations on their own climb back into space, but to be confronted with the reality of it was certainly a shock. Whilst waiting on a response from the System Conclave the Captain had merely exchanged greeting protocols with the alien humans. His suit and broomstick sensors couldnt pick up the distant ship of course but he called up the image the ships long range sensors had shown. Whilst we are musing on design philosophies he thought lets take a look at this.
The Trinity ship was certainly brightly coloured, though not
exactly beautiful. Its complexity fell somewhere between the highly fractal ethereal struts of the
Tumbleweed and the blunt cone of the Cruiser. The hull was short relative to its width, and two large main engines pointed to the rear, it was composed of large closely fitted armour plates that curved round the ships bulges. Two blisters flared out to the sides, containing what was speculated to be reaction mass tanks, attitude thrusters, and two large objects, possibly telescoping legs or grapplers mounted on one large 'V' housing. The belly of the craft bulged down around the cargo bay. A large antenna sat on top of the craft scanning Tumbleweed as she scanned it, and projections peeked out between the armour plates more sensors or possibly weapons? A final blister at the front of the craft gave it a distinctly and slightly ominous cyclopean look. It was a tricky thing to read workman like and solid at slightly more than Tumbleweeds mass but several times smaller, its builders seemed pragmatic and cautious, belayed by the exuberance of colour.
2
Of course it was a silly thing to try and guess psychology from a ship; you never know what butterflies might have teeth as his mother used to say
3, but still he wondered, and worried.
Notes
1)Standard Astronomical Unit (based on Old Earths distance from sol)
2)Can TerrisH or Gelion say what ship class Im describing here? sans TerrisH bright colours of course

3) Knowledge of Old Earth animals has been muddled by time
