Heliopause and the Flight of the Oumuamua

The Oumuamua started life five billion years ago as a hunk of interstellar dust and ice, coalescing in the same gravitational soup that birthed the Solar System. The cigar shaped hunk of ice and dust spent the next five gigayears orbiting the sun at a tremendous distance.

Capture

The Oumuamua was eventually captured and tractored into position above Saturn, and the distant Iapetus moon, where it was converted from a wandering asteroid into the Starship Oumuamua, the Traveler. The Anunnaki spent years on this project. Sitting in the distant shadow of the deep system giant, this construction was unseen and unnoticed. The construction of Oumuamua drove the expansion of the Iapetus base, as a central hub for it's resources.

Schematic

Length: 3.3 kilometers x 400 meters

The Oumuamua has a central spar running through the center that is the backbone of the ship, and the rest is liquid water contained inside the rocky-iron shell. Habitats and living space are found clustered along the backbone, and through the skin of the asteroid, making it functionally an aquatic O'Neil cylinder.

Displacement: estimate - 1.455 million tons

Decks:

the Hull is 3 decks thick, with an outer hull shielded against space, an inner hull shielded against the oceanic core, and a central deck between the two where the 'surface' crew works. The central spire has lateral housing running the length of the ship and isn't divided into decks, but rather into 300 meter sections with self contained bulkheads and safety systems. The drive section has 15 decks oriented towards the rear of the ship, with a liquid fueled hydrogen reactor driving four bulk ion drives. There are several 'towers' along the outer hull housing observations, communication, and recreational equipment. These are dry sections, but they have less protection against cosmic radiation, unlike the core spire. The main command center is located at the very center of the ship, but there are three auxilliary command centers, one in the very nose, one in the secondary tower on the dorsal side of the hull, and halfway between the main command center and the main engineering center.

Speed

Max power is 1 Gee acceleration, which it can sustain for a fairly long time. It's cruising speed is .5 Gee, which it maintains by rotating through firing three engines at a time, with a constantly rotating 4th engine offline for maintenance and service. Full power obviously requires all four engines operating. It has several clusters of maneuvering thrusters, and blast deflectors so that the main engines can be used to decelerate the craft.

Each bulk ion engine generates 365 million tons of thrust, making them the largest engines ever built.

Capacity:

Up to 250,000 passengers, and 140 million tons of cargo space, mostly used for storing refined deuterium for the engines, long duration stored goods like food and emergency supplies, and vast amounts of machinery and equipment

Crew:

Enlisted: 20,000

Officers: 4,000

Senior Administration: 500

Facilities:

Medical: extensive medical facilities including cloning, gene editing, and hibernation systems, all state of the art.

Industrial: a series of polyforges and automated factories that are able to produce everything the ship needs ranging from new ship components, to handheld electronics, autons to exotic weaponry. The industrial sectors have gas extractors for harvesting isotopes for power sources, and smelters for capturing asteroids and reducing them down to raw materials to build whatever the ship needs.

Food: combination of food dispensary complexes to incubator grown protein, and seacology farming systems. The large internal 'sea' is used for raising fast growing kelp, krill, and fish

Military: the forges can produce mecha, aerospace craft, and even entire warships, provided they are supplied with sufficient raw materials.

Communications: The ship has it's own dedicated CogNet system, with elements of an OmniNet giving the crew a demi-hive mind. This has powerful transmitters located in three towers along the hull to send signals back to terrestrial receivers, and it trails a 15 kilometer long antenna behind the ship to receive signals from Earth and other sources.

Mission

The Oumaumau was built with the purpose of leaving the solar system and eventually reaching another star system and setting up the first extra-solar colony. It was built to be self sufficient, and to have the resources and social structure needed to make the generational journey to another planet.

Mission Log

Exploration beyond the Deep System is much colder, and requires patience, the patience of saints and mountains. The distance from even Saturn to the orbit of Nepune, 28 AU, took months to cross. Smaller ships can do it much quicker, but we are building up delta v. That's what we call it now, not velocity or speed, Delta V. Once we pass it, then to the orbit of Pluto, and then however far it is to Sedna. That's our last nav point in the Solar system, and from there, we pass through the Oort cloud and beyond to Centaurus. At least that's the plan. We are still receiving solid signal from Earth, and the High Gain is working perfectly.

Mission Log

We've encountered very weak signals coming from Sedna, and we've sent encrypted missives back to the Foundation as it matches known classified patterns. We've been sent templates and instructions to manufacture several high speed interceptors to dash ahead of us and find out what is on Sedna. There aren't plans for another trans-solar attempt to be made in the near future and it could years, even decades before another ship comes out this way.

Mission Log

We've reached Sedna. It was a hard deceleration, and we burned a lot of fuel doing it, but we are in orbit now. The surface is beyond imagination, there are the ruins of dozens of cities on the surface. We've sent landers down and they are bringing back relics and artifacts like we've never imagined. We aren't far, technologically, from these ruins. We've started reverse engineering some of the first artifacts, and the plug into the archives like the Neam Octillio and the Eschaton treatise. The things we are finding are answering some of the long standing questions we've had with arcanotech.

Emergency Log

We've found survivors in incredibly deep hibernation in a vault under the surface. It will take time to bring them back, but they look almost human, and they are still alive. There is no telling who they are, and why they are here. We are taking precautions, there is some concern that Sedna might have been either a remote prison or a scientific research station, so we are taking all precautions.

Mission Log

We've managed to bring two of the Sednans out of hibernation, and communications are difficult, and their health is poor. The long time they've been down is apparently much longer than the equipment was designed for. We've turned one of the isolated terminals over to the female Sednan and they are working out a translation program, we are hopeful.

Mission Log

Our guests have introduced themselves to us as 'Shadow of a Luminous Body' and Nalurag, She who walks in the Pyre. They have been surprisingly honest, and have admitted that they are both criminals and among the worst by their society. They are tight lipped out their society, and it is apparent that this is a factor of personal distress and not duplicity.

Mission Restructure

After a multi-way meeting between the Sednans, Thoth, and the Foundation heads, our mission has been restructured. Our destination is no longer the Centaurus star cluster, but instead several lost Sednan/Imbrian vaults and caches that are located in the Oort Cloud. Our guests will navigate us to them, and in exchange they will be treated as honored guests. There is some dissent, as much of the crew was expecting to be space colonists, not archaeologists looking for ruins left on stable orbit ice rocks. The Oumuamua is to be reconfigured to reverse engineer the Imbrian devices we find, and to function as the farthest flung scientific research facility man has ever made.

This has caused more discontent among the crew as there are increasingly vocal factions who oppose the Sednans and their Imbrian history, calling it a convenient fiction. Others are concerned that instead of explorers and pioneers they've been lied to and this is a Project Infinity redux. This has seen several crew members accidentally kill themselves in an attempt to 'kick' themselves out of a simulation. There is no simulation, we are really an ungodly distance from Earth with 10,000 year old proto-humans on board, with the new mission of being alien artifact collectors.

The Purge

There was a Foundation ordered purge. Dissidents were to be placed into hibernation indefinitely, and those who resisted and fought back were to be executed. Those in hibernation were to be linked into a Sednan research dream tank and used as additional problem solving and processing power for the ship's computer. Between being spaced and hibernation, we've lost almost a quarter of the crew. The majority picked hibernation, not knowing they were going to be put into simulations. Less than a tenth of the dissidents were thrown out airlocks.

There was a push, a push to just euthanize the dissidents, and reclaim their biomass. This was widely opposed as there was a weird notion that their dissent might be biologically contagious. Paranoia is high among the crew, and the violence of space death quickly quelled many agitators.

The Heliopause

The Heliopause is the edge of the sun's influence, where its solar wind meets the galactic medium, and is absorbed into it. The original mission would have the Oumuamua cross this threshold and explore that medium beyond the sun. The new path of the ship would send it arcing through the outer Oort cloud, to find dwarf planets and large asteroids that were in long term stable orbits. These, according to the recollections of the Sednans, were the archives and vaults in inequity of the Imbrians, but that care should be taken, because the things that were locked away were not buried without due consideration.

There was a good deal of distrust, but the mission continued on in good faith. The Sednans admitted that they had never seen an Imbrian spaceship, and to them, just being on the Oumuamua was an incredible novelty.

The Revolution and Rebirth

The mission profile of the Oumuamua was long, generations and decades. The ship followed it's course, and found some archives, and the ruins of others. They found horrors, encountered strange things out on the edge of the Sun's influence and looked into the abyss, far from Earth, and it changed them. The ship continued to broadcast it's findings back to Earth and the Foundation, but just as there was a schism on the ship, there was a power struggle on Earth.

The Anunnaki rose and one of the things they seized was the Oumuamua and it's operational control. This was considered a minor issue, as the ship had launched long enough ago that the people manning the stations hadn't been born when the ship was launched. The information it returned was so obscure and strange that it was just being filed away in the Traveler archive, which itself was relocated to Iapetus. The alienist cabal of the Anunnaki assumed command of the mission, and they had experience with Imbrian technology, and started applying the Oumuamua's data archive, and started reverse engineering that information to enhance their understanding of arcanotechnology.

On the Oumuamua, a new super generation was ordered, and work started on gestating a new generation for the ship. This crew was bioengineered with cutting edge biotech, and was functionally a new branch of humanity. These new humans would be better prepared to handle the rigors of space life, and to be better equipped to use arcanotech.

Operation Nemesis

The handlers on Iapetus began sending a false news stream to the Oumuamua, one that indicated degenerating conditions on Earth, outbreaks of disease and conflict, and that the Anunnaki and the Foundation represented the last best hope of humanity, and that the Oumuamua was the ace up the sleeve. Iapetus sent schematics for aerospace fighters, advanced mecha, prototype designs for small warships, and bleeding edge weapons.

The plan was simple. When the time was right, the Oumuamua, a flying space fortress flanked by it's escort of light warships, could re-enter the solar system on a high parabolic course and arrive as an incredible strike force.

By the Anunnaki plan, once the Federation fleet assets were dealt with (Operation Armistice) the Anunnaki military assets and sympathizers would be reinforced/greeting by the arrival of the Oumuamua super-men and their hypertech forces. The Anunnaki usurped a long term scientific mission and turned it into a military invasion force.