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| The Valiant; background and info on the Valiant | |
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| Topic Started: Dec 29 2008, 11:28 AM (118 Views) | |
| Captain Jack Harkness | Dec 29 2008, 11:28 AM Post #1 |
Director, Torchwood-Three
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The Valiant The grandest military machine to come out of the United Kingdom in a generation. A leap of technological genius the like not seen since Einstein. The final word in international peacekeeping. A slaughterhouse. A deathtrap. An enigma. All these phrases have been applied to the Valiant over the last year. The Valiant Project began nearly eighteen years ago, as the brainchild of then Ministry Defense researcher Harold Saxon. His enthusiasm, genius and ability to sway the most conservative of minds both moved the project forward – despite sheer technological advances necessary – and advanced his own career. As Defense Minister, it was the major project of his career and it was one of the cornerstones of his appeal to security and defense when he ran for Prime Minister. The idea of a flying fortress is far from new but the technological barriers seemed insurmountable except in the minds of science fiction fanatics. Until Harold Saxon and his invention of the low pressure maglev engines that are the heart of the Valiant’s ability to fly, despite its massive size. With the problems of lift solved, many of the other issues fell swiftly into place. Through clever maneuvering on the part of the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Office, the United Nations contracted the construction of the Valiant, which was to be the flagship for a new peacekeeping policy to bring peace and justice to the world. The Valiant is nearly five miles in length, able to handle commercial jet aircraft, military jets, helicopters and normally requires a crew of five-hundred and twenty at full function, not including any marines or guests. Intended to be a fully functional flying military base and airport, it can – in theory – even handle low space orbit and land one of the American style space shuttles. It has a full array of both conventional and advanced weaponry, including a smaller version of the device used to destroy the Sycorax invasion. There is enough room on the craft to host nearly an entire army (in rather close quarters); it was intended to be at the forefront of the worlds worst military catastrophes, capable of providing supplies, medical aid, military support and transport for UN peacekeeping efforts. For all the money spent – billions and billions of Euros – and effort and hope, the Valiant has never performed as expected. Problems The Valiant works, no one denies that but what people are beginning to wonder is … what was it really designed to do? The great craft was Saxon’s brainchild from beginning to end; he invented the engines that make it able to fly (including, somehow, in oxygen free space), the complicated near intelligent computer system that is the nervous system and brain of the ship and seemed to have had his hand in everything from the janitorial schedules to the placement of the escape pods to the supplies found in the medical bays. Often, his touch was nothing more than an idea to further efficiency, or a suggestion on the best sub-contractor to use for a particular project but as his insanity was finally revealed, the seeds of that madness seem to have infected everything he touched. There are sections of the computer that remain locked down to this day, despite the best efforts of a dozen different international teams (except one, to the frustration of Science Council), while final construction documents are suggesting disturbing oversights. Due to the temporal paradox the Valiant weathered, most of the highly specialized crew needed to staff it are suffering a variety of physical and mental symptoms. The Valiant is on a skeleton rotation and UNIT replacements are being trained as quickly as possible but at any time at least half the crew on the Valiant are survivors of the Year that Never Was. The Year that Never Was Happened for the Valiant. Everything from supply use to records, news broadcasts (both sent and received), deaths, wear and tear on equipment (and people) show the scars of a year long, earth shattering battle. For all that the Valiant is technically only six months on duty, its systems and infrastructure show a year of hard, violent use. Everything on the Valiant, all the records, all the evidence are under top secret control while several specialty teams (again, except for one) study the Valiant and the people who were on it. Images of the Earth’s destruction, Saxon’s increasingly bizarre speeches, and the destruction – again and again – of struggling rebels sicken the researchers assigned to analyze the data. More than a few find records of their own paradoxical destiny and learn the measure of their own courage or cowardice; slaughtered rebels, terrified and brutalized prisoners or civilians, sickening sycophants in Saxon’s regime or brutal enforcers of it. Anyone who participates in the Valiant project clings fiercely to the belief that it ‘never happened’. Only fragments of the Year exist in the ‘real’ world; Saxon’s assassination of the American President, the first few appearances of the Toclofane, his murder by his wife – which seemed to follow only minutes after he killed the President. Members of all secret organizations – the American Area 51, the French Equippe, the Chinese and Russians have personnel on the Valiant, except for Brittan’s Torchwood. Decimated at the Battle of Canary Wharf, the current Director has refused all requests – and demands – for aid, much to the displeasure of the Science Council, the Queen and the quiet sub-governmental bodies that work with him. The currency, and gratitude, the Director gained by being one of the participants in the Year is running swiftly running out. Edited by Captain Jack Harkness, Dec 29 2008, 12:05 PM.
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| Captain Jack Harkness | Jan 2 2009, 05:54 PM Post #2 |
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Director, Torchwood-Three
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| Captain Jack Harkness | Feb 11 2009, 10:39 AM Post #3 |
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Director, Torchwood-Three
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This is a rough organization of the Valiant. Use the plans above for reference. Treat the landing strips and helipads as ‘ground level’. Towards the top of the plan view (the one looking down at the Valiant from ‘above’), or the ‘back’ of the Valiant, you can see a conning tower-like structure. This holds the bridge, the main communications hub (you can see the sensor array and so on in the elevation view), the big board room like area where the Master kept the Doctor, a lot of meeting rooms, the main monitoring station for the engineering systems and so on. It’s a critical function area; however most of the functions are duplicated elsewhere in the ship. There are also several overview rooms – big glass walled rooms that allow people to look over the Valiant, one of them is being used as a cafeteria/rec room now. In the white area that surrounds the tower on the plan view, from ground level to three stories down is the where the high level officers and guests and etc worked, and their quarters. There are guest rooms and state rooms, meeting rooms and a fancy cafeteria that looks more like an expensive restaurant than anything else. On the lowest level (three stories below ground) is the medical area – essentially a good sized hospital with an emphasis on trauma care. Due to the extremely low staff, everyone on the Valiant is being housed in this area and the fourth story down for the low-level crew. Basically, if you’re not doing anything with the engines, the high security areas or so on, you’re spending most of your time in the three stories below ‘ground’, under and around the main tower. The Torchwood team is being housed on level two in mid-level officer’s quarters. Martha is also on this level. There is a mix of civilian specialty teams like the Equippe, an American team from Area 51, a UN investigative team working on the assassination and so on. Most of the rest of the Valiant is taken up with the systems necessary to keep it aloft; the fourth floor down, aside form the small crew area near the tower, is almost entirely maintenance related to the (supposed but not actually present any longer) jets and aircraft that were supposed to be assigned to the Valiant. This means that now, there are a lot of empty hangers, silent work bays and deserted hallways. Level five below ground was supposed to be crew and military quarters, plus supplies. It’s mostly empty. Level five also contains the main weapon control rooms; a suite of rooms where tactical information and orders were processed, an overview of weapon readiness was maintained and so on. It’s one of the sealed rooms as no one is interested in the weapon systems right now. The computer system for the Valiant was supposed to be a distributed network, highly redundant for safety. It’s not, as far as anyone can tell. No one has found the main hub yet and the logic and programming system that the computer runs on is not human in structure or concept, making it almost impossible, once you get past the false interfaces, to understand how it works. A lot of it seems to function on a weird system of kind of overlapping logorhythyms with intersecting variables resulting in a near AI capacity. The system has been turns as off as anyone can manage. The supposed main computer access is on level five and its’ there where a lot of people are working to try and figure out how the system works – or at least find it. This area is highly secure, right now, and several civilian and UN teams are working here. At all four ‘corners’ of the Valiant, plus two areas on the long sides, are the Valiant’s massive engines. They go from ‘ground’ level all the way down to level eight (there are only six below ground levels for the rest of the ship but the engines are bigger than the rest of it). They are not single ‘engines’ but clusters of magnetic resonance rockets – one of Saxon’s genius designs and not entirely understood. They create massive intake and downdraft like regular fuel rockets but function in low orbit where the atmosphere would normally be too thin to support such a structure. You can see conventional weaponry (big guns) all around the edge of the Valiant. There is also a small scale duplicate of the sun glider weapon (the multi-beams that merge to create one large energy beam) used in London; along the underside of level six (level six is dedicated to storage and the sun glider weaponry. The Valiant could carry nuclear weapons (in fact it did, and they are now ‘missing’ to the general uproar of the world-wide nuclear community) but doesn’t now. |
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2:47 AM Nov 27
