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Lighthugger The aurora of heaven

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Lighthugger
Lighthuggers are spacecraft that travel at just below the speed of light, taking months or years to accelerate to their cruising speed. Although capable of extremely powerful bursts of acceleration, when in transit between stellar systems lighthuggers typically sustain an acceleration of 1 g which would enable them to reach 99% of the speed of light in about 1 earth year.

Generally 3–4 km long, they use Conjoiner drives for propulsion, and are also coated with a thick caul of ice that protects against minor impacts at relativistic velocities and acts as armour against the attacks of other ships. The great size of the lighthuggers enables them to carry vast numbers of passengers and huge amounts of cargo. At the end of Redemption Ark this is demonstrated by Ana Khouri and Triumvir Ilia Volyova as they load approximately 160,000 of the almost 200,000 on the world Resurgam onto the Nostalgia for Infinity.

Lighthuggers are also described as having a limited repair and redesign capability in the novels. They are capable of moving rooms or machinery around within their hulls, or stripping material from one point to repair another. At least some are also equipped with "manufactories", which can build a considerable range of devices, given the relevant specifications (the full extent of their capabilities is unknown as they are only ever used in the novels to produce weapons). These ships were also quite powerful, by the standards of most science-fiction. Their small, point-defence weapons (ostensibly defensive in nature) were capable of drilling a 200 kilometre crater in a planet and disrupting weather formations in a fashion similar to a large geological event, such as an asteroid impact or volcanic eruption.

Most lighthuggers are owned or ruled by their crew of Ultranauts, who, because of their long stretches in reefersleep and constant hopping from one star system to another are mostly divorced from baseline humanity. They are characterized by extreme modifications, often in the form of replacement or mechanical limbs or even holes right through them (as seen in Chasm City).

By the end of the sequence, there exists a fleet of lighthuggers that have been upgraded or built from scratch by the Conjoined and other elements fighting the Inhibitors. These ships are far more advanced than the average lighthugger, and are equipped with stealthed drives that do not emit in any detectable spectrum, "cryo-arithmetic engines" which cool the hull to make it nearly indistinguishable — in thermal terms — from empty space, inertia suppression machinery that allows extremely fast acceleration and deceleration, and extremely heavy armaments, including hypometric weaponry.

 :iconcolourbrand: Colourbrand


Lighthugger (My Version) by Colourbrand
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