In the first triad of 1159, a final plan was accepted for the vessel that would follow the path indicated by the Guidestone. What had delayed the project for so long was simply that no one, neither astronomers nor religious leaders, could say for certain what had driven us to Kharak, and so none could say what an expedition would encounter. It was finally decided to build a vessel that was capable of doing everything, including establishing a new colony deep coreward. Known simply as the Mothership, this vessel would be part carrier, part survey ship, part factory complex and, most importantly of all, the temporary home for millions of our people frozen in cryogenic sleep. It would have to be able to deal with the great unknown reaches of the galaxy, and whatever discoveries or threats they would contain. It would be the greatest construction project in our history, driven by the disturbing thought that whatever had brought us here had obviously been too much for us at the height of our technology. Ministers from every clan abandoned their cloistered, competitive policies and pooled their every resource to develop stratagems and designs, and then allocated them to the various industrial hubs throughout the polar zones. In the meantime, clans that had been trailing the cutting edge in technology and production turned their efforts completely over to agricultural work, feeding those clans who had ceased to feed themselves.

In such a huge vessel dedicated to so many tasks, it is necessary to devote entire areas towards fulfilling each part of the ship's mandate.

The Mothership is designed to be a mobile construction yard on par with the original orbital facilities which created the mega-vessel in the first place. The automated manufacturing bay is capable of high-speed production of vessels from tiny Scouts to larger ships that are yet to be designed. Various parallel production tracks allow for dozens of larger components to be cast and assembled at the same time, thus radically reducing the time needed to build larger vessels. Ships components are based on modular technologies, many of the same ones being used across various hull designs, thus saving time and allowing for faster simultaneous construction. The foundry floor is capable of using multiple construction tracks to simultaneously build a fleet of scouts, assemble a squadron of corvettes, and create enough ordinance for both sets of new ships. A large hanger provides docking sleeves for a huge array of vessels to be serviced - or the same sleeves can simply be used as berths should the Mothership need to enter hyperspace with a large fleet of auxiliary ships.

None of this would be possible without the immense quantity of raw materials brought in by the resource-gathering vessels. Built around the model of the original cutting ships, which were used to break down raw materials for the initial construction of the Scaffold and the Mothership, the resource-gatherers are designed to reduce and scoop up a variety of space material, ranging from solid planetoids to gas nebulae. The gatherers then return to the Mothership and transfer the contents of their holds for processing through a Phased Disassembler Array. While this PDA is smaller and quite a bit more efficient than the orbital array used to supply the Scaffold, it works on the identical principal of arrayed fusion torches. It will reduce any material to its component elements, while a Magneto-Hydrodynamic Shunt Field sorts the vaporized elements according to atomic weight and carries them to the storage shells. The massive honeycomb of storage shells, (almost 3 cubic kilometers of storage space) lies just under the surface of 65% of the Mothership's hull. This allows for quick access and venting, in the event of a jam or storage cell rupture, as well as providing a final layer of armor, in case the ship suffers from a catastrophic impact or weapon strike.

The Mothership has two modes of travel. The first is based on conventional fusion drive technology, and is basically a series of large fusion reactors designed to vent high-energy plasma through an opening in a shaped magnetic bottle. They provide a slow but steady 1G acceleration at maximum output. Maneuvering jets are fed plasma from the main exhaust through a series of conduits, and this allows a portion of the main thrust to be diverted to maneuvering.

The full implications of the Mothership's hyperdrive is not completely understood, but it is the system that makes this voyage possible. Toward the lower aft portion of the ship lies the large shielded area containing the Hyperspace Module. This is a direct copy of the one found under the sands of Khar-Toba, but expanded 12-fold to accommodate a vessel of the Mothership's mass. Even though the effect has been tested extensively through ships fitted with test modules of various sizes, our control and understanding of the effect is somewhat limited. This has resulted in a need for massive energy to induce the wavefront, prohibiting its use on any vessel too small to carry at least 3 industrial fusion plants.

There is another drawback to our limited understanding of hyperspace. We can only induce a linear tunnel effect of massive proportions, with relatively crude control of distance. The module is projected to have a range of 2500 light years for a single waveform event, and in order to trigger the drive we must charge the module with all the energy required for such a stunning distance. Should we wish to travel a more appropriate and cautious distance, we must crudely halt the wave effect by discharging the module's energy, and dropping back into normal space-time.

Fleet Intelligence
It is the job of Fleet Intelligence to analyze incoming data from probes, observation equipment and sensors. Centered just below the main bridge is a large spherical chamber containing work/com stations, with data shunts centered around a full holographic projection pit. When the Mothership is underway, this pit will be manned permanently by shift teams composed of the best scientists, diplomats, linguists and tactical officers, all specially selected not only for their knowledge, but their adaptability. Fleet Intelligence has access to not only the Mothership's sensor arrays, but to the Fleet Archives as well. Whatever the Mothership should encounter in deep space, Fleet Intelligence will interpret the data and give as accurate an analysis as the situation permits, offering tentative conclusions and tactical recommendations.