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Hollowship

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Hollowship

Kind: Interstellar passenger/colony vessel constructed by hollowing out a captured comet and pressurising the interior. Discovered/invented: Already in standard use by the events of Ch. 05 — A Dictionary. The Ertian Surgeon glosses them for the Empiral Archive as “a former comet, its insides scooped out, then turned into a habitable vessel. I trust we will find other, more elegant methods of traversing the heavens in the coming years” — i.e. late-empire, common, and regarded as inelegant by the narrator’s era. Based on: Comet raw materials + empire-forge manufacturing in Aerth space.

Summary

The late-empire bulk colonisation platform. A typical hollowship like the Vasily carries ~120,000 crew with only “a hundred or so” awake at any given time; the rest ride out the journey in longsleep. They are built “at the empire forge in Aerth space” and are capable enough that the narrator calls what Aerth builds “as close to magic as we’ve gotten yet” — hollowships have zero intrinsic gravity (comet-scale mass) but the onboard tech compensates for the practicalities of living aboard.

Routine TZ-slingshot manoeuvre

Hollowships routinely enter systems with Thorne–Żytkow stars to slingshot off the motherstar, saving “hundreds of years in journey duration.” The Galactic Human Empire uses this pattern as cover: the empire deliberately schedules hollowships through TZ-star systems in the hope of catching a recurrence of the TZ-exit artifact phenomenon. The Vasily’s transit through Orb Ertia was exactly this kind of experiment, and the Vasily Incident is its success — at the cost of the ship and its 120,000 sleepers.

Onboard tech seen on the Vasily

  • Field-emitter “airlocks” — particle-net atmosphere containment with no solid door. “I have heard stories of empire ships doing away with solid airlocks entirely and using only particle nets to contain the atmosphere within.”
  • Emergency field-bubbles — small localised oxygen pockets, seen (depleted) in the Vasily’s resuscitation centre.
  • Willtech propulsion for anyone aboard in a compatible suit — the boarder thinks forward and the suit’s “strange mechanism” agrees.
  • Dust-image displays throughout — enormous coloured holographic readouts on the bridge, smaller personal dust-images for navigation.
  • Longsleep chambers by the thousand, arranged up the walls of an imperfect interior sphere.
  • Laser-calligraphy engravings (the seventy-foot Vasily epitaph).

Effects / capabilities

  • Carries hundred-thousand-scale colonist/passenger payloads.
  • Compatible with TZ-slingshot acceleration for deep journeys.

Limitations / dangers

  • Structurally a comet. A few-foot-diameter object at 70% c goes straight through.
  • Longsleep means the vast majority of crew cannot react to an incident — they die in their chambers.
  • The narrator’s own aside (“I trust we will find other, more elegant methods”) flags that the empire regards hollowships as transitional.

Appearances

Open questions

  • How many hollowships are active at any given time? The story implies “many.”
  • Are they genuinely less elegant than Ribbondash voidships, or has Ribbondash fallen out of use for passenger transit by this late-empire date in favour of cheaper hollowships?
  • Who maintains them? Mid-journey the Vasily had ~100 awake crew — a skeleton crew for a ship the size of a hollowed comet.

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